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August 31, 2007

Sex offenders---Costs Mount to Support Sex Offender Laws

Sex offenders
Costs mount to support sex offender laws
Aug 30, 2007 @ 09:34 AM
By LAUREN FITZPATRICK
GateHouse News Service

Laurie Peterson was surprised to find her husband's photo suddenly appear on the New Hampshire online sex offender registry last fall, thanks to a new addition to the law.

But not as surprised as her neighbors when they realized their property values would drop once Michael Peterson’s registry information, from a night of casual party sex as a 19-year-old with a younger teenaged girl, hit the Internet.

“They’re concerned that if they move, they won’t be able to sell their properties for the full value,” Peterson said of her next-door neighbors who plan to sell. “And there’s also a concern – is there a duty to tell a prospective home buyer?”

A tangible connection between home prices and registered sex offenders exists, according to a Columbia University study done in North Carolina. It’s one of the subtler ways that strictly regulating offenders costs ordinary Americans.

Other costs also add up: maintaining registry information, enforcing residence restrictions, litigating for or against strict residence laws. Tighter restrictions on where all these offenders can work, live and loiter aren’t cheap, since offenders require a lot of surveillance. And 34 states post every adult convicted of a sex crime on their Internet registry, adding to the bill for taxpayers.

The Adam Walsh Act of 2006 created a national registry and ranked offenders, which added a $47 million federal request to the taxpayers’ 2007 tally. The U.S. Marshals Service also has requested an additional $7.8 million and 54 more employees (43 of them deputy marshals) to track down sex offenders who drop off the registry, according to the budget for 2008.

So as the number of offenders on the registry rises – it has already surpassed 600,000 in 2007 compared with about 330,000 in 2000 – so will the price tag of keeping tabs on every single one.

Regulating offenders like Mike Peterson, who pose no further risk, is a waste of time and money, Laurie Peterson said. When the couple moved into their home almost five years ago, they explained his conviction to neighbors, most of whom allow their children to play with the Peterson brood. Peterson keeps her husband’s police reports in her kitchen to share in case anyone wonders about the details.

Massachusetts earmarked nearly $4 million in 2007 for the Sex Offender Registry Board, which ranks and regulates some 8,000 sex offenders in the state. Illinois spends more than half million dollars a year, according to the 2006 and 2007 state budgets. New York has budgeted $1 million to maintain its sex offender management department, and another million to set up a GPS pilot program in Monroe, Suffolk and Rensselaer counties.

Twice a year, for example, a fat envelope arrives in Laurie Peterson’s mailbox containing her husband's registration papers and a $9.31 stamp. With New Hampshire’s registry reporting 3,677 offenders in June 2007, that’s more than $68,000 in postage alone for offenders to check in with police.

“If the police were to actively enforce these things, there would be more costs,” said Corey Rayburn Yung, a professor at John Marshall law school in Chicago who runs the Sex Crimes blog (http://sexcrimes.typepad.com).

Pennsylvania State Police dedicate 11 people to track convicted sex offenders and to ensure their information posted on the registry is up to snuff.

More than 20 states now track certain offenders using GPS devices to make sure they’re not going places they shouldn’t. Six of those states require the ankle bracelet for life. The average cost is about $10 per offender per day, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation estimated. GPS will cost that state $88.4 million a year to supervise and monitor its offenders, according to the corrections department.

“These costs would grow to about $100 million annually after 10 years, with costs continuing to increase significantly in subsequent years,” the corrections department reported. “Because the measure does not specify whether the state or local governments would be responsible for monitoring sex offenders who have been discharged from state parole supervision, it is unclear whether local governments would bear some of these long-term costs.”

Massachusetts and Illinois use GPS for their most dangerous predators on parole and supervision. The Illinois system is supposed to alert police if the person enters any restricted zone.

And the Florida Department of Corrections anticipates it’ll have to monitor almost 13,000 offenders for about 20 years – at a $46 million cost per year. Ohio, Georgia and Oklahoma also make offenders pay for their own GPS monitoring, provided they are able to do so. Realistically, the taxpayers foot the bill, Yung said.

“The way the legislature ends up doing it – offenders have to pay for their own monitoring,” Yung said. “But given the financial status of most offenders, most won’t afford it.”

Offenders have fired back against tightening residence laws by suing, with help from the ACLU and Southern Center for Human Rights. All over the country, offenders have fought to stay in the homes they moved into before the new residence laws kicked in.

A group of nine Georgia offenders, among them men and women convicted as teens, sued the state attorney general in 2006, claiming the law allows them no way to prove they no longer pose a risk to anyone. Georgia’s residence ban, considered one of the strictest in the country because it includes bus stops, prevented the offenders from finding homes – and threatened to kick elderly and sickly offenders out of nursing homes.

In Oklahoma, a John Doe sold his house twice when told both times he was too close to a school and violated the state’s 2,000-foot safety ring around schools and educational institutions. Only after consulting registry staff did he finally find an approved place to live. But months later, Oklahoma City Police Department told him their “new and improved” measuring techniques put his new place once again too close to a school.

Doe settled his 2006 lawsuit later the same year and was allowed to remain without fear of criminal charges.

But a lawsuit over Iowa’s 2,000-foot residence law dragged on for years through three courts, with the state’s highest court saying that residence laws are not further punishment. The state ACLU tried to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case, but it has not been accepted.

The more offenders whose profiles are posted online, the more home prices that will drop, according to a 2006 Columbia University study. The study, which was done in North Carolina, showed that the value of homes within a tenth of a mile area around a registered sex offender’s house falls by an average of 4 percent – about $5,500. Houses outside that circle show no price decline, according to the report, which measured the timing and location of offender move-ins in making its calculations.

“Our estimates suggest that homeowners who live extremely close to a sex offender and sell their homes lose between $4,500 and $5,500, relative to the amount they would have received if the offender did not move in,” the report said. “Each offender thus causes an average loss to local homeowners of $156,912. Countywide (in Mecklenburg County), the 373 offenders known to live in private residences depress property values by an estimated $59.5 million.”

And a 2003 look at Montgomery County, Ohio, found a 17 percent drop in housing prices within a tenth of a mile from a sex offender’s house, and other changes in price in the circle up to a third of a mile away.

But all that’s cheaper than keeping offenders locked up, according to the Justice Department’s Center on Sex Offender Management.

Treating a released sex offender ranges between $5,000 and $15,000 per offender per year, according to the center. And because offenders who’ve gone through good therapy reoffend at lower rates than those merely imprisoned, mental health treatment eliminates the need to pay for investigation, prosecution, incarceration and other victim services, according to the center.

Keeping a person behind bars costs taxpayers about $22,000 a year, the center said, and that price tag doesn’t even include any therapy.

Copyright © 2007 GateHouse Media, Inc. Some Rights Reserved.
Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license,except where noted.
http://www.townonline.com/utica/sexoffenders/x676316819

Posted by lois at 09:24 PM | Comments (0)

ME: Baldacci details jail takeover plan

"The governor's plan would consolidate 15 county jail systems and the state corrections system into a statewide system managed by the Department of Corrections.He said a new system would eliminate the need to build new jail and prison facilities in the near future.According to the administration, local property taxes to support county jails amounted to $66 million in 2006 and an estimated $71.2 million in 2007. The administration also jail operations could cost $148 million by 2013 and $184 million by 2015. The governor's plan envisions closing four jails, in the counties of Oxford, Franklin, Piscataquis and Waldo, and one or two special programs providing prisoners with mental health treatment."While constraining costs and relieving the pressure on property taxpayers is a high priority, our plan will also lead to better outcomes for prisoners," Baldacci said in his statement."

http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070830/NEWS0104/70830035
>

Thursday, August 30, 2007
Baldacci details jail takeover plan

By FRANCIS X. QUINN
Associated Press Writer

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) _ Gov. John Baldacci outlined in a written statement Thursday how he would like to see the state take over the county jail network, asserting that "our current system is intolerable" and that annual savings from such a move could grow from $10 million in the first year to nearly $38 million over time.

"We must act," Baldacci said in his statement. "The state prison system and a number of counties with older facilities don't have enough room to house inmates while other counties have beds left empty."

In explaining the rationale behind the plan, Baldacci administration finance chief Rebecca Wyke said the proposal relies on efficiencies to lower operating costs and avoid construction expenses.

The administration statement said the current county assessment for jails would be frozen and the state would take over responsibility for future growth in costs.

As details were being released, some lawmakers expressed positive interest in the concept.

"Based on what little I know, I would say that it makes sense," said Republican Sen. Karl Turner of Cumberland, a ranking minority member of the Appropriations Committee.

There was also skepticism.

"There's something to be said for streamlining the system and designating specific facilities for specific uses and cutting back on transportation costs," said Democratic Rep. Janet Mills of Farmington, another Appropriations panelist.

"But I don't think we'd see the savings overall that they're projecting," she added, saying there would likely be limits on how much personnel costs could be reduced.

Baldacci has been talking with legislative leaders about the jail takeover idea and has suggested that it might be desirable to take up the matter in a special legislative session this year rather than wait for the next regular session to begin in January.

On that score, Turner was doubtful and Mills was dismissive.

Turner said there would need to be "a lot more work done than what I've seen so far."

Said Mills of a special session devoted to such a complicated issue: "A waste of our time."

The governor's plan would consolidate 15 county jail systems and the state corrections system into a statewide system managed by the Department of Corrections.

He said a new system would eliminate the need to build new jail and prison facilities in the near future.

According to the administration, local property taxes to support county jails amounted to $66 million in 2006 and an estimated $71.2 million in 2007. The administration also jail operations could cost $148 million by 2013 and $184 million by 2015.

The governor's plan envisions closing four jails, in the counties of Oxford, Franklin, Piscataquis and Waldo, and one or two special programs providing prisoners with mental health treatment.

"While constraining costs and relieving the pressure on property taxpayers is a high priority, our plan will also lead to better outcomes for prisoners," Baldacci said in his statement.

The administration pointed to statewide corrections systems in Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Vermont.

"This isn't new ground. Other places have been very successful with similar initiatives, and Maine can be too," Baldacci said.

Currently, four counties and the state are considering new construction for next year, the administration said.

State officials say that over the last three years, the cost for counties to operate jails has increased by about 12 percent per year, while the cost to operate the state prison system has increased by about 6 percent per year.

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

LA: Federal Magistrate Finds 30 Segregation of Angola 3 Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Magistrate finds lock down for Angola 3 cruel
Inmates kept in isolation for 30 years

By PENNY BROWN
Advocate staff writer, Baton Rouge
Published: Aug 28, 2007

A federal magistrate has found once again that three inmates who remained in lockdown at Louisiana State Penitentiary for more than three decades could be victims of cruel and unusual punishment.

U.S Magistrate Docia Dalby for a second time refused to recommend throwing out a lawsuit filed by two inmates and a former inmate known as the Angola 3.

She made a similar finding in 2005, and that ruling continues forward after it was adopted by a judge.

In a 50-page report earlier this month, Dalby concluded that prison authorities should have known that “being housed in isolation in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day for over three decades results in serious deprivations of basic human needs.”

Chief U.S. District Judge Ralph Tyson will look to Dalby’s findings in making a ruling on whether the case will continue toward trial.

The report comes in a 7-year-old case brought by former imprisoned Black Panther Party activist Robert King Wilkerson and still-imprisoned activists Herman “Hooks” Wallace and Albert Woodfox. The trio insist they have been political prisoners at Angola because they have been continuously confined in the lockdown unit for decades.

Wilkerson was freed in 2001 after his 1973 conviction of murdering a fellow inmate was overturned and he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of conspiracy to commit murder. Woodfox and Wallace are serving life sentences after being convicted in the 1972 slaying of Angola correctional officer Brent Miller during a riot.

All three were put in the lockdown unit in 1972. Woodfox and Wallace remain there.

Inmates in the unit get one hour a day to shower and walk alone along the tier on which his cell is located. Three times a week, the inmates can choose to spend that time exercising alone in a fenced yard, if weather permits. There are restrictions on personal property, reading materials, access to legal resources, work and visitation rights.

Prison authorities contend the three posed a serious security risk. But the Angola 3 have argued they haven’t been in trouble in decades. They blame their extended confinement in the lockdown unit for numerous health ailments, including diabetes, hypertension and insomnia.

In her report, Dalby noted lockdown conditions themselves may pass constitutional scrutiny if imposed for a short period of time, but not for three decades.

“With each passing day its effects are exponentially increased, just as surely as a single drop of water repeated endlessly will eventually bore through the hardest of stones,” Dalby writes. “By 1999, these plaintiffs had been in extended lockdown more than anyone in Angola’s history, and more than any other living prisoner in the entire United States, according to plaintiffs’ evidence.”

Dalby also concluded that it appears prison authorities had no legitimate reason for keeping the men isolated for such a long period.

“These men, now in their 60s, do not, and have not for some time, presented a threat to the ‘safety, security and good order of the facility,’” Dalby writes.

She notes that officials cite only the “original reason for lockdown” as the reason the three inmates remained — even though the prison changed its own policy in 1996 to eliminate that as justification for prolonged confinement.

The magistrate suggests a jury could find prison authorities were deliberately indifferent to the plight of the men. However, she recommends dismissing Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary Richard Stalder from the case.

“A reasonable official at (the prison) would have realized in 1999 that an inmate’s being held in extended lockdown for 27 years constitutes a sufficiently serious deprivation of basic human needs to trigger the protections of the Eighth Amendment,” Dalby writes.

“Not only (have the courts) consistently noted the severity and terrible deprivation associated with such confinement, it has long been the subject of research, and even of television and movies,” she writes. “It is also a matter of common sense that three decades of extreme isolation and enforced inactivity in a space smaller than a typical walk-in closet present the antithesis of what is necessary to meet basic human needs.”

Lawyers on both sides of the case have yet to respond to Dalby’s recommendations. Tyson will make a final ruling after considering their pleadings. http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/suburban/9412521.html?showAll=y&c=y

For more information see: http://www.angola3.org/

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

August 30, 2007

Denver Univ. law students win prisoner byline rights

DU law students win prisoner byline rights
The three represented an inmate punished for writing an article. A district judge says the Federal Bureau of Prisons must allow it.
By Felisa Cardona
Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Launched: 08/10/2007

Three University of Denver law students who represented a federal prisoner fighting for the right to publish articles from prison won their case against the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger ruled that the prison byline regulations prohibiting prisoners from writing stories for the news media violated the First Amendment rights of prisoners and the press.

D

DU law professor Laura Lee Rovner, who oversaw the students' work, could not be reached Thursday evening for comment about the ruling. Donald Bounds, Jack Hobaugh and Michelle Young worked on the case for a year.

They represented Mark Jordan, a prisoner at Supermax, the ultra-high-security prison in Florence where many of the nation's most notorious are held, including Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

Jordan was convicted of bank robbery, and in 1999 he stabbed an inmate to death at the adjacent U.S. Penitentiary in Florence. He is scheduled to serve another 41 years behind bars.

Jordan had published several stories on prison life in Off!, a New York publication.

He was punished by prison officials in 2001 for publishing under a byline.

Krieger's ruling is not exclusive to Jordan. It says that the Federal Bureau of Prisons may not punish any inmate who decides to publish under a byline.

The government argued that inmates who act as reporters or publish under a byline could rise to undue prominence within the inmate population, thereby becoming a security risk. Also, the government was concerned that inmates could make a business out of it.

"No historical evidence that any inmate's publications in the news media created such security problems were presented," Krieger wrote in her ruling.

The judge also noted that punishment for the violation was inconsistent and said that Kaczynski had written articles under bylines without disciplinary action being taken against him.

"The Court finds that the evidence is insufficient to correlate a bylined publication in the news media with the danger of an inmate conducting a business," the judge wrote. "To the extent that there is a risk, the existing regulation prohibiting inmates from conducting a business is an easy and effective alternative to the regulation at issue."

ttp://www.denverpost.com//ci_6587810?IADID=Search-www.denverpost.com-www.denverpost.com

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

MD: Keeping Hagerstown as a "former Prisoner Free-Zone

This statement by the Hagerstown mayor is chilling by itself but one wonders what kind of public message Gov O'Malley is sending via his apparently politically-driven policy response and apparent public silence on the mayor's declaration of Hagerstown as a 'former prisoner-free zone'... ________________________________________________________________

"The bottom line is this," Mayor Bruchey wrote. "If you weren't a resident of Hagerstown or Washing ton County before your incarceration, we definitely don't want you as one when you are released."

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-prisons0829,0,4109181.story

Baltimore Sun

State to change policy on prisoners' release
New plan addresses concerns by moving inmates to facilities closer to home before discharge

By Greg Garland | Sun reporter
9:36 PM EDT, August 29, 2007

Reacting to concerns of elected officials in Western Maryland, the O'Malley administration announced Wednesday that it is changing the way inmates are released from state prisons.

Most inmates in the rural prisons in Western Maryland and on the Eastern Shore are from the Baltimore-Washington metro area. When an inmate's sentence ends, he is given $50 in cash and dropped off at a bus station.

Under the new policy, corrections officials say, inmates will be transported to a prison in Baltimore or one closer to their home community a day or so before discharge.

Releasing an inmate to a more familiar environment, closer to family members, makes good sense from a policy standpoint, said Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

"It is sound correctional practice to let inmates out where they are most likely not to re-offend," Vernarelli said.

Maryland Public Safety Secretary Gary D. Maynard discussed the policy change at a meeting of the Ha gerstown-Washington County Chamber of Commerce Wednesday.

"I'm enormously pleased about it," said Hagerstown Mayor Robert E. Bruchey II. "I think it addresses one of the major concerns we've had."

Bruchey and other community leaders had been pushing for the change, contending that some inmates remain in Western Maryland after their release and drive up crime rates.

But a study done by the department found only eight of the 622 inmates from other areas who were released from prisons near Hagerstown and Cumberland between January and June of this year remained in the area. The five prisons in those two communities house about 9,000 inmates.

Six of the eight were working in jobs that they started before their release, and the other two have family in the area, corrections officials said.

The state's inmate release policies have nevertheless been a continuing controversy in Hagerstown.

The Herald-Mail of Hagerstown recently published an opinion piece by the mayor, in which he responded to a letter to the editor an inmate had written on the issue of prisoner releases in Hagerstown.

"The bottom line is this," Mayor Bruchey wrote. "If you weren't a resident of Hagerstown or Washing ton County before your incarceration, we definitely don't want you as one when you are released." Gov. Martin O'Malley said in a statement that releasing inmates closer to their homes and to where they have access to re-entry programs and services "can help ensure that these individuals become full, productive members of our community."

greg.garland@baltsun.com

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

MI: Strengthen parole guidelines to safely cut state prison costs

Free Press
Detroit, MI

Editorials
IN OUR OPINION
Strengthen parole guidelines to safely cut state prison costs
August 29, 2007

State legislators are considering important changes to the guidelines that help determine who goes to prison and who doesn't.

However, to safely control Michigan's $1.9-billion prison system, the state also must do a better job of deciding who among the incarcerated should be let out.

Michigan needs more accountability from the 10-member Parole Board on how it uses the guidelines it's required by law to follow. Too often, these guidelines, based on a statistical assessment of the prisoner's risk of reoffending, appear to be ignored. A bill introduced by state Rep. Paul Condino, D-Southfield, would provide some needed oversight.

The bill would enable inmates to appeal parole denials in court if they were evaluated as a low risk to reoffend, and it would require the department to record their interviews. Condino's bill also would apply board guidelines to the more than 800 lifers in Michigan who are eligible for parole. Currently, there is no way to enforce parole guidelines. A statistical assessment -- including prior record, prison conduct and age -- scores an inmate's probability for release. However, MDOC records obtained by the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending show that the board last year released only 53% of those inmates who scored a low risk to reoffend. In 1996, it released 81% of such inmates, said CAPPS Executive Director Barbara Levine.

Altogether, roughly 16,000 inmates -- nearly one-third of the prison population -- are eligible for release. That's double the rate of the early 1990s.

To be sure, there are good reasons -- such as poor prison-conduct records -- for keeping inmates beyond their minimum sentences. But the large number of parole-eligible inmates in Michigan raises questions about whether some prisoners -- perhaps thousands -- are held longer than necessary. Parole Board decisions have contributed mightily to large increases in Michigan's prison population -- and to the enormous costs of running the system.

In recent years, the Parole Board, under the leadership of John Rubitschun, its former chairman and now an MDOC deputy director, has done a better job of reviewing certain cases. But the parole process in Michigan needs more safeguards -- and accountability.

Condino's bill is good step toward getting it.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070829/OPINION01/708290355
/1069

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

MA: In Our Opinion: Second chance in Amherst

Editorial: Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA
News and information for Thursday, August 30, 2007

In Our Opinion: Second chance in Amherst

The Amherst Regional School District has taken some criticism for its decision to hire Talib Sadiq as a middle school counselor. The critics have focused on the fact that Sadiq was in prison for 3½ years for an armed robbery in 1993. He paid for his crime, and he has taken constructive steps to get his life back on track.

His hiring represents something of a gamble for the schools and for Sadiq. The spotlight is him and the scrutiny in this first year will no doubt be intense.

Sadiq is not an unknown quantity, despite the efforts of a few to question his suitability for the job. He has the necessary education, as well as an impressive list of references - including his former professors at the University of Massachusetts - who are willing to vouch for him, and he has already spent one year interning as a counselor in the middle school under the tutelage of former counselor Barry Brooks, who retired this year.

Here are the particulars of Sadiq's background:

In December 1993, Sadiq, known at that time by his birth name, Vincent E. Bias, was arrested after robbing a bank in Springfield with a loaded handgun. He served 31/2 years in prison on a five- to seven-year sentence. Prior to his arrest, Sadiq, a graduate of Amherst Regional High School, had served in the Army in the Persian Gulf during the first Iraq war.

After his release from prison, Sadiq worked to turn his life around. He changed his name - partly, he says, because of his conversion to Islam, but also because of a desire to separate himself from the person he used to be. He then attended UMass, where he earned his B.A. in communications and his M.A. in education, with an emphasis on school counseling. He is now married, with three children, and coaches youth football in Amherst. By any definition, Sadiq has become a productive member of the Amherst community.

Those who have seen him with young people speak highly of his skills in working with students. Those who have watched him coach a youth football team for the past three years also sing his praises as a positive role model.

Some have questioned whether the interviewing and hiring process was flawed, or whether the district was entirely forthcoming about Sadiq's background. There are complaints that only one member of the interview committee was aware of Sadiq's criminal record.

From what is known of the search process, the educational credentials and experience of the seven candidates interviewed for the position were very similar. The interview committee's task is to assess the skills of candidates and determine their ability to do the job based solely on qualifications. Criminal background checks are not required until a job is offered to a candidate. Superintendent Jere Hochman took the interview committee's recommendations, which have been described as glowing, and, based on all other information, made the hiring decision. That's his job, and he's clear about taking responsibility for it.

The school's principal, Fran Ziperstein, also fully supports the hiring. Ziperstein observed Sadiq during his internship and liked what she saw. In our opinion, the process was followed and it worked.

While there have been local cases of people with questionable backgrounds slipping onto the public payroll without adequate background checks - which no doubt accounts for the heightened sensitivity - that is not the case with Sadiq. He has made no effort to hide his background, nor does he make any excuses for it; rather, he believes that students might be able to learn a lesson from the mistakes he made.

The hiring is now clouded by the state Department of Education's decision to deny Sadiq the necessary state certification. They refuse to state the reason. Sadiq has appealed, and Hochman says he will work to get the certification question settled. Meanwhile, this week Sadiq has joined his colleagues at the middle school in preparing for the new school year.

Was Talib Sadiq the best-qualified candidate? That's always a judgment call. He certainly has the necessary qualifications, and his track record of working with young people says a lot. In the end, the test of any hiring decision is performance, and what parents should expect is that Sadiq will be evaluated by the standards Amherst has set for its counselors.

The district plans to hold events to give parents and new students a chance to meet the faculty. Parents should take advantage of that opportunity, and give Sadiq a chance to speak for himself. It will be up to him to demonstrate how he can make a positive contribution at the Amherst Regional Middle School.

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=56275&CSAuthResp=1188482352053798%3AMzQ7Uu7QCFoyWQ%3D%3D%3ACSUserId%7CCSGroupId%3Asuccess%3AyG7P05%2F3%2FcmnruPRxjx3hg%3D%3D&CSUserId=&CSGroupId

Posted by lois at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2007

PA: All-time high for Philadelphia prisons

Ralph B. Taylor, a Temple University criminologist, said more focus must be put on the after care of inmates so they don't become repeat inhabitants of city prisons. "The real trick is to get people to think of post-prison care as part of their public-safety dollars," Taylor said."

Philadelphia Inquirer
All-time high for Phila. inmates
City prisons now house 9,123, much more than they were meant to hold.

By Robert Moran
Inquirer Staff Writer

Philadelphia's prisons are choking on a record number of inmates.

On Aug. 6, the prison population hit 9,123, an all-time high that is more than double the average of 4,000 inmates held in the late 1980s.

It also exceeds by about 1,600 the number of inmates the city's six detention centers were designed to hold.

As a result, the prison system has been pushed to its limits. Cells designed for two inmates now house three. Shortages of correction officers trigger frequent lockdowns - keeping inmates in their cells 23 hours a day.

Lorenzo North, president of the correction officers' union, said the bulging prison population and lack of officers was a recipe for increased inmate assaults on officers and one another - and for potential riots.

"Locked down in a cell, three to a cell, no air-conditioning - how do you think they're going to feel?" North said.

City Solicitor Romulo L. Diaz Jr. said the city was taking various measures, including hiring more correction officers, to alleviate the problem.

He said Philadelphia, as part of a long-term strategy, needs to consider building another prison.

The increase in prison population comes at a time when the city has had a spike in fatal violence. Experts say, however, that the rising inmate count has more to do with a long-term crackdown on drug offenders in the city and tougher prison sentences.

Some small relief may be on the way. State legislation has been devised to reduce overcrowding across Pennsylvania, and part of the change could send at least 700 Philadelphia inmates to state facilities.

Seeking answers to the overcrowding problem, the city commissioned Temple University researchers led by John S. Goldkamp to conduct a yearlong study of the prison system.

The Goldkamp report, issued in November, found that more than half the population were pretrial inmates who could not make bail. "This subpopulation may rank as the most productive area for review and development of population-reduction strategies," according to the report.

University of Pennsylvania law professor David Rudovsky, who has repeatedly taken the city to court over prison conditions, agreed. "On any given day, there are several hundred people you could probably release," he said.

The Goldkamp report also pointed out that 88 percent of inmates serving sentences were nonviolent offenders, mostly doing time for drug convictions. "When the role of drug offenders and nonviolent offenders is so pronounced, there is a sizable pool of offenders who could potentially be candidates for alternative sentencing options not now employed," the report said.

Diaz said the city was looking at alternatives to incarceration, including increased electronic monitoring and daily outpatient drug-treatment programs.

To make room for more inmates in Philadelphia, the city pays facilities outside Philadelphia to house inmates.

The Goldkamp report said 475 inmates were held in other jurisdictions in late 2005. Diaz could not provide a current count, but said the city had increased its outside capacity and would continue to do so.

As a result, in part, the actual population in city-run prisons changed little from last year, Diaz said. On Aug. 13, 2006, the city population was 8,647. On the same date this year, the population was 8,614 - a slight drop.

Those numbers, however, proved to be a strain on the system last summer, when the city began packing inmates in police and prison holding cells with no beds or toilets and no access to showers and medical care.

In response, Rudovsky sued on behalf of 11 inmates, and on Jan. 25, U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick ordered an end to the "unconstitutional conditions" that he witnessed firsthand during tours of the city prisons.

Those conditions have been alleviated, both sides agreed, and Diaz said, "We believe that we're fully in compliance with these constitutional protections."

In contrast to Philadelphia, New York City has dramatically reduced its city jail population while pursuing aggressive policing that has led to historic reductions in crime.

Michael P. Jacobson ran those New York jails when the inmate population began to fall because of management practices. In the early 1990s, New York's jail population peaked at nearly 23,000. Now it is down to around 14,000.

Reflecting New York's success, Jacobson said any city with jail overcrowding problems needs to analyze the efficiency of its criminal justice system. Reducing the time inmates stay in jail, even by a few days, can make a great difference, he said.

"Are there ways to speed up the time to get cases disposed?" he asked, pointing to, as examples, how many times court cases are continued and how quickly plea bargains are achieved.

"It's clear you can get both reduced crime and reduced prison population," said Jacobson, now director of the Vera Institute for Justice, a nonprofit think tank in New York.

Continual lockdowns and triple-celling, he said, is "not the way you want to run a system."

A study released last year by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit based in Washington, showed that of the 106,849 people who were incarcerated in Philadelphia prisons from 1996 to 2003, half of them - 53,621 - had been jailed and released an average of 3.5 times during that period.

Ralph B. Taylor, a Temple University criminologist, said more focus must be put on the after care of inmates so they don't become repeat inhabitants of city prisons.

"The real trick is to get people to think of post-prison care as part of their public-safety dollars," Taylor said.

That money should go to preventing recidivism, not building another prison, Taylor said.

But if the city decides it needs a new prison, Diaz said, any such facility would be years away.

"In the meantime, we have to manage our population efficiently," he said.

Read the Temple University report on the city's prison at http://go.philly.com/prisonreport
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/20070827_All-time_high_for_Phila__inmat
es.html

Posted by lois at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

MA: License denied: DOE rejects Sadiq; Amherst school's choice files appeal

'He's the one we selected,' Hochman said.
License denied: DOE rejects Sadiq; Amherst school's choice files appeal
BY BOB DUNN STAFF WRITER
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Friday August 24, 2007

Page 1

AMHERST - Talib Sadiq, the controversial choice to take over as Amherst Regional Middle School's seventh-grade guidance counselor, has had his application for state certification denied, according to the Massachusetts Department of Education.

According to the department, Sadiq has filed an appeal of that decision, but no determination has been made yet on his request. Teachers, teacher specialists, professional support personnel and administrators must be licensed to work in the public schools of Massachusetts, the DOE states. Sadiq was hired by the Amherst Regional Public Schools to replace longtime middle school guidance counselor Barry Brooks, who retired at the end of last school year. Sadiq's hiring came under scrutiny when the Gazette reported that he served jail time for armed robbery after he held up a bank in Springfield with a loaded 9 mm handgun in 1993. When he committed that crime, he was known by his birth name, Vincent Bias. Since his arrest, Sadiq converted to Islam, changed his name, completed the necessary coursework to become a guidance counselor and served a one-year internship under Brooks' tutelage at the middle school.

Sadiq could not be reached for comment.

Heidi Guarino, spokeswoman for the DOE, said she could not divulge the reason for Sadiq's denial for confidentiality reasons. She said that a decision to reject an application for certification can be made for any number of reasons, and each application is handled on a case-by-case basis. According to the DOE's Criminal Offender Record Information policy, a criminal record will not automatically disqualify an applicant for a license. Amherst Superintendent Jere Hochman said by telephone Thursday that he had not received official notification from the Department of Education about Sadiq's application process but expected word soon. Hochman said the school will do whatever it can to install Sadiq as counselor. Hochman wrote in a recent email to the Gazette that the school will 'exhaust the avenues we can take to have someone we wish to employ in place.' According to the DOE, the Amherst school district can apply for a one-year waiver on behalf of a candidate whose certification is not complete. Waivers may be renewed, but a candidate who is employed under a one-year waiver must demonstrate 'continuous progress' toward completion of certification for the waiver to be renewed. Those waivers are reviewed and accepted on a case-by-case basis as well, Guarino said. Despite the delay in a decision on certification, Hochman said Sadiq will assume his duties as scheduled Aug. 27. The Gazette also received a flurry of comments from readers, reflecting a mix of views, after news reports revealed that all but one of the members of committee that interviewed Sadiq were unaware of his criminal record before interviewing him.

Hochman wrote the Gazette that Sadiq's record was not shared with the committee so that they could make a decision based solely on his skills and qualifications. Hochman was unsure what course of action the school district would take if Sadiq loses his appeal and is deemed unfit to work in a public school. 'We'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it,' Hochman said. Hochman and middle school Principal Fran Ziperstein have both said that Sadiq was the top candidate out of a large field of applicants. 'He's the one we selected,' Hochman said.

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=55677&CSAuthResp=1187961964364474%3AqFA3DHN9Lo6pdw%3D%3D%3ACSUserId%7CCSGroupId%3Asuccess%3A3e5TEM%2BBdYKeqSRyIz1t%2Bg%3D%3D&CSUserId=&CSGroupId=

Posted by lois at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)

School Does the Right Thing By Hiring Someone with a Previous Conviction

Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA
Sadiq has earned the right to work as school counselor

To the editor:

Your Aug. 18 front-page headline "Most of ARMS hiring committee didn't know of counselor's criminal history" creates a mistaken impression that something was amiss in what the hiring committee was told.

In fact, if one reads on Superintendent Jere Hochman states that, as a matter of routine, Criminal Offender Record information (CORI) checks are not conducted until after a candidate has been offered a position. This is completely within the guidelines of the Department of Education.

The ARMS hiring policy is also reflected in the Public Safety Act of 2007-2008 which would strengthen anti-discrimination protections for people with criminal records. The bill supported by our Hampshire County legislators, would make it illegal to refuse a person a job simply because he or she has a CORI.

I concur with Alberto Morales that everyone deserves a second chance, but unlike him I believe that the second chance should include the opportunity for meaningful work based on the experience and credentials of the job seeker. Talib Sadiq's education and training qualify him for the position for which he was hired. I hope that if the Gazette continues to cover this story, the thoughts include those of some of the many people who support the decision of the Amherst Regional Middle School and the School Committee. They have done the right thing in hiring Mr. Sadiq.

Lois Ahrens

Northampton

Posted by lois at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2007

SC: Report criticizes management of S.C. prisons

Posted on Sat, Aug. 25, 2007
Exclusive: Report criticizes management of S.C. prisons
Committee’s staff raises concerns about safety, operations, personnel issues, misuse of resources
By CLIF LeBLANC
cleblanc@thestate.com

A road map to a legislative investigation of state prisons alleges the public, prisoners and employees are either at risk or being mistreated.

The staff of a committee examining complaints of mismanagement has compiled a 12-page, preliminary report in preparation for a committee meeting Monday.

The report, obtained by The State, covers five broad areas of concern in what is described as a politically charged Corrections Department. It highlights about 45 incidents or examples. The report states the complaints are based on first-hand accounts but should not be considered findings of fact.

Some key complaints are:

• Prison safety — ranging from escapes and other security lapses to covering up a sexual assault of an employee by a convicted rapist for election-campaign reasons

• Questionable operations —abusive treatment of inmates, which includes use of a stun gun on a prisoner in a restraint chair. Prisoner surgeries for broken jaws are increasing, the report states.

• Misuse of resources — inmate labor and agency equipment were spent on a hunting and fishing reserve at a Sumter County prison. In addition, the report states the agency has done business with a tree-clearing company owned by a convicted felon who has personal ties to a prison employee.

Questions also are raised about prisons director Jon Ozmint’s selection of an inmate housekeeper and whether he gave her special treatment.

• Personnel issues — a hostile work environment that uses arbitrary procedures to punish detractors and requires lie detectors to track leaks and alters employment test scores for some applicants.

Ozmint challenged the report as “tired, recycled complaints raised by disgruntled employees,” and questioned the fairness of the committee staff. Senate staffers talked to anyone, “who might have some dirt on us,” yet have not given the agency a chance to respond, he said.

Ozmint said the report “found no major problems that are valid. No mismanagement. No corruption that we had failed to uncover.”

The report is intended as a starting point for the eight-member panel, which will select the issues it will examine more closely through sworn testimony or audits.

Committee chairman Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, declined to respond to the report, saying it was intended only for the panel’s use. He said the staff on Monday would provide details not contained in the report. Fair would not elaborate.

The document was compiled after numerous interviews with prison workers, former employees, inmates and their relatives, as well as the public. They came forward voluntarily, though many feared retaliation from the agency, the report states.

Their complaints — presented privately to a staff of two legislative lawyers and a former senior prison official — have not been substantiated by the committee.

PRISON SECURITY

Rules intended to keep prisons safe have been ignored, compromised or broken under Ozmint’s administration, according to the preliminary report.

Violations of generally accepted prison practices resulted in:

• A female employee being taken hostage and repeatedly assaulted by a convicted rapist Nov. 3 at Ridgeland Correctional Institution in Jasper County.

After the rape, prison leaders did not immediately intervene as procedures require, the report states. It said they hoped to contain the tense situation out of concern it “could have a negative impact on the gubernatorial election.”

Five days later, Gov. Mark Sanford became the second governor in 28 years elected to a consecutive term. The Corrections Department is a Cabinet agency that answers directly to the chief executive.

Authorities handled the standoff “in accordance with best practices,” Ozmint said in a nine-page written response to the newspaper.

He said the governor’s office was notified a hostage had been taken and when the situation was resolved. “We will not dignify a baseless lie with any further response.”

Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer called the allegations of political considerations “both irresponsible and disgusting.”

Committee member Sen. Jake Knotts, R-Lexington, questioned why the convicted rapist was at a medium-security prison in the first place.

Rapist Lloyd Isaac was a maximum-security risk and had been moved to Ridgeland, a medium-security prison. Isaac was moved to serve as an informant for an agency investigator, the senator wrote in a Feb. 22 letter to Ozmint.

Isaac is awaiting trial in February on charges of kidnapping, hostage-taking and rape in that incident, prosecutor Duffie Stone said. If convicted, Isaac would be sentenced to life without parole, Stone said.

• Two inmates escaped in December 2003 from Ridgeland after telling agency leaders — in writing — they would do so.

It was the tandem’s second escape within weeks from the same prison. Normal procedures are to place escaped inmates in a more restrictive prison, the report states.

Ozmint did not respond to the newspaper’s questions about that complaint.

The report cites three other escapes, two of which occurred from Columbia’s Broad River Correctional Institution after guards lost track of prisoners. The most recent was this month by a murderer and a burglar after a supervisor failed to count prisoners correctly. Both were captured.

Ozmint said those were “mistakes made in selected instances.” Overall, escapes are down dramatically. Figures he released show there were 17 escapes last fiscal year, half the rate in 2003.

• During an August 2005 parole hearing at Lee Correctional Institution, a major provided a violent criminal a six-inch knife that had been seized as contraband. The major directed the prisoner to pull it on two women correctional officers, the report states.

Providing a weapon to an inmate is a felony punishable by up to 10 years. The major was neither disciplined nor charged, the report states.

Ozmint said in a March 1 letter to Knotts the prisoner did not threaten the women. The episode was an exercise to show they were negligent in their search procedures, Ozmint wrote. The women missed the shank when they patted down the inmate.

“It was a great idea, except for the use of the actual shank” Ozmint wrote.

Such exercises usually occur in classrooms and do not involve the use of inmates, the report notes.

The women said the episode was intimidation by the major for filing a sexual harassment complaint against him, the report states.

Other security issues mentioned include missing guns and keys inside prisons, and an inmate in a maximum-security prison having a drawing showing all internal and external access points with which inmates might not be familiar.

PRISONER TREATMENT

Several inmates or their relatives reported assaults while prisoners were handcuffed.

Corrections employees also reported abuse. They say there is an increase in the number of broken jaws and medical treatment. The report offers no details.

Ozmint said the complaints are false. “There has been no increase in allegations or confirmed instances of excessive force complaints.”

He said stun guns are not authorized in prisons.

Earlier this year, an inmate was awarded $600,000 from a lawsuit alleging beatings. It is being appealed, Ozmint said.

Prisoners also complained they have been denied food for breaking grooming and talking rules.

Ozmint has said a federal court upheld a similar practice in Wisconsin. But other courts have ruled against it.

WASTED RESOURCES

Prison facilities at the Wateree Correctional Institution near the rural Sumter County town of Rembert have been upgraded using inmate labor and agency materials and equipment, the report states.

Other details alleged include:

• A staff house has been converted into “a guest cottage.” A boat shed and fishing pier were built.

• About 30 deer stands constructed at Trenton and MacDougall correctional institutions were shipped to Wateree.

• A cattle-hauling vehicle was repainted, had chairs installed and got a new roof to convert it for use in dove hunting.

Agency administrators invite guests to hunt or fish.

The report contains no figures on the cost of the improvements.

Ozmint, who has complained for years the Legislature does not provide enough money to run prisons adequately, called the allegations false and reckless.

“No residence at Wateree ... has been renovated as described. We will gladly show you every residence.”

In another complaint, a tree-cutting company owned by an inmate was hired for at least three jobs, despite notification to agency administrators.

“Allegedly, there was a personal relationship between a staff member and the inmate,” the report states.

The company was the lowest bidder, and state law requires the agency to accept the low bid in all contracts, he said.

Ozmint said he banned the company from doing business with the prisons as soon as he learned of the connection with the inmate.

Other concerns listed include use of prison computers to view sexually explicit images and complaints of misuse of agency vehicles.

OZMINT’S HOUSEKEEPER

Dianne Graddick, convicted of murder in Aiken County two decades ago, works for the Ozmint family as a housekeeper. Ozmint calls her a model prisoner and a woman of Christian character.

She was one of several inmates recommended to work in the house by wardens, Ozmint said.

Ozmint changed Graddick’s security rating to allow her to work at his house and live in a nearby prison that has no fences. Ozmint said he made the change for convenience of her daily transports to the house, which is on prison property.

A maximum-security prison is nearby, but moving inmates from there is more restricted.

Graddick works at the 4,500-square-foot house weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Ozmint said. She earns $18.25 every two weeks.

Guards do not routinely patrol the house while Graddick works.

Ozmint said he has the authority to override any agency policy.

“If anybody else wants to ... take the director’s job and live surrounded by eight prisons and 6,500 inmates ... then they should be welcome to chose the inmate of their choice to work in their home around their wife and children,” Ozmint said.

Laws grant the department head “exclusive management and control of the prison system.” But statutes do not say explicitly the director may override any rule.

Committee chairman Fair and committee member Sen. Phil Leventis, D-Sumter, question Ozmint’s choice.

“It certainly raises concerns ... about his decision-making,” said Leventis, a longtime critic of Ozmint. “It seems like (Graddick’s selection) would have created a special class of inmates who have special dispensation from the director. There’s not anyone else that could tidy up around his house?”

HOSTILE WORKPLACE

Hirings, promotions and firings have become tools to target critics and reward favorites, the report states.

Employment test scores and inmate and vehicle-use records are altered, often “to cover mistakes.”

The scores are adjusted to hire favorites over more qualified candidates, the report states.

Several staffers complained about the use of lie-detectors to determine who is sharing information with whom, even when a criminal investigation is not under way.

Ozmint called the complaints “intentionally misleading and ... false in all respects.”

The agency uses lie detectors appropriately within the law and policy, and will continue to do so, he said.

Reach LeBlanc at (803) 771-8664.

IF YOU GO

A Senate committee examining complaints of mismanagement in the state prison system is meeting to review a preliminary report by its staff.

When: 1 p.m., Monday

Where: Room 209 of the Gressette office building on the State House grounds

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

" JUSTICE FOR ALL" : How We Can Reduce Crime: Awareness & Feed the Homeless Day

" JUSTICE FOR ALL"
How We Can Reduce Crime
AWARENESS & FEED THE HOMELESS DAY
SATURDAY OCTOBER 20th, 2007
12 NOON - 4PM
MONROE PARK
1848 Moore Street (Belvidere/Main/Franklin)(Near VCU)
RICHMOND VIRGINIA 23220

Stop the Warehousing - Instead - Prisoner Education/Rehabilitation
Youth at-Risk Prevention Programs - Prison Reform - RIHD Prisoner Dictionaries Drive

Fair & Equal Housing, Employment for Ex-offenders & Homeless
Save Lives - Saving Families - Saving Communities -

Restoration of Rights & Voter Registration
***************

Come One - Come All
It's Free
Bring the Youth, the Entire Family, Friends, Neighbors, Communities
All are Welcome - Meet & Greet - You'll amongst Friends
Leave feeling Inspired & Empowered
An Event inspired by the People and for the People
Special Radio, TV and many other Guest Speakers
Various Musical Groups & other Entertainment

Prison Awareness Reading Play "Count" (show-time 1pm)
Resource & Informational Tables/Booths
Petition Signature Drives - 2008 Voter Registration Drive

Prisoner Artistic Works "4" Sale Fundraiser

FREE FOOD PACKAGES FOR OUR HOMELESSand MUCH MORE

--always do a little and a little at a time eventually makes a "BIG" difference --Barbara Cage

We are asking everyone to donate one (1) can food good to feed the homeless, which a high percentage are ex-offenders. To donate contact persons below
Additional Information Contact:
Sean: VaPrisonJustice@riseup.net
Ms. K: InMateResource@aol.com

Posted by lois at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2007

Increase in inmates opens door to private prisons

Note: There are two graphics at the article's web site.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fi-prisons24aug24,0,368937.story?coll=la-tot-topstories&track=ntothtml
Los Angeles Times
Increase in inmates opens door to private prisons
California officials want to ease crowding and cut costs. Owners of the facilities foresee growth.
By Marc Lifsher
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 24, 2007

FLORENCE, ARIZ — . -- Mark Childress knows prisons -- from the inside.

Though only 36 years old, he's done stretches in 10 state lockups, including some of the toughest around. And now California has locked him up again -- this time in Arizona.

Childress is a part of a first wave of about 700 male convicts that California has shipped to privately owned and operated prisons in Arizona, Tennessee and Mississippi. "I feel good, like I could do another 10 years," he said, half-jokingly.

The nation's big private prison companies like it too. Having long lusted after a share of California's 173,000-inmate population, they now foresee a steady stream of business.

Depending on the outcome of legal challenges, California could be "one of the longtime drivers of growth for the private prison industry," industry analyst Kevin Campbell said.

Until December, the state had not put a medium- or maximum-security prisoner in a private lockup since 1852, when it replaced a private prison ship in San Francisco Bay with California's first public prison, San Quentin.

Private companies say they can build secure prisons faster and cheaper than state governments and are not saddled with the high salaries and pension costs paid by public agencies.

Critics counter that states that use private prisons get what they pay for: Guards are poorly paid and trained, and private prisons experience more escapes and more disciplinary problems than state-run institutions, they contend. And the state is sending away its better-behaved prisoners, they say, making California prisons even more dangerous.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the Justice Department, said in a 2001 study that limited research showed that "privately operated prisons function as well as publicly operated prisons." Management problems usually are caused by poorly drafted contracts and poor oversight of private operators by states, the study said.

The public-private dilemma is hitting California head-on -- with corporate America battling the prison guard establishment.

The search to find more room for California prisoners -- and pressure from federal judges -- led to a $7.4-billion plan proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and approved by lawmakers in April. It gave the private prison companies the opening they've long sought.

For decades, these companies attempted to win contracts to house convicts in privately owned or leased in-state prisons, only to see their efforts thwarted by the wealthy, politically influential California prison guards union.

Nashville-based Corrections Corp. of America, the industry leader, even built a 2,300-bed, maximum-security prison as a speculative investment in Kern County in the mid-1990s. The state balked, and the facility now holds federal prisoners.

Now, California has signed a contract with Corrections Corp. to house as many as 4,000 prisoners at a per-prisoner price of $63 a day. That compares with the average of $123 a day that the state estimates it costs to keep an inmate in one of California's 33 prisons.

Opposition to private prisons from the 30,000-member California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., other state employees organizations and prison watchdog groups remains potent. They sued in Sacramento Superior Court to halt the transfers and won. But the judge put her ruling on hold pending an appeal in February.

"I'm dubious that it's a good idea for the state to embrace" private prisons, said Steve Fama, an attorney with the nonprofit inmate advocacy group Prison Law Office near San Quentin. Prisons are "a core state function," he said.

The governor should control the prison population by releasing nonviolent offenders and reducing parole revocations, not by building more prisons and sending inmates to other states, Fama said.

California is one of at least 30 states that have turned to the private prison industry for help after realizing that they couldn't build enough prisons to keep pace with a flood of new inmates as lawmakers passed ever-tougher sentencing laws.

Over the last decade, the number of inmate beds in private prisons has jumped sixfold to about 112,000 in mid-2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Most of the growth was at three major operators -- Corrections Corp., Boca Raton, Fla.-based Geo Group and Houston-based Cornell Cos.

"We think we can play a significant role in a solution to the problem" in California, said Tony Grande, Corrections Corp.'s vice president for state government relations. So far, California has sent 317 prisoners to Arizona, 312 to Mississippi and 80 to Tennessee.

Prison industry analysts, impressed with the growing demand for private prison beds, are upbeat. The stocks of the three big companies have shown solid growth this year. "We remain bullish," said Jeffrey T. Kessler, a Lehman Bros. equity researcher in a recent report.

Nowhere is the growth of the private prison industry more in evidence than in Florence in the Sonoran Desert. The town is a sort of prison-industrial complex that hosts 11 Arizona state prisons, a federal immigration detention center and four private lockups. It is home to 8,000 residents and about 17,000 inmates.

At the 2,200-bed Florence Correctional Center, Childress shares a cell with one inmate. Childress says he's far more comfortable in Arizona than he was when he bunked in a gym packed with more than 100 men at a California prison in a remote part of northeastern California.

Unlike most California prisons, the Florence facility is air-conditioned to handle the Arizona heat. But the Arizona prison is no country club, says Childress, California inmate No. P-24277. He and other California inmates, waiting for lunch in an austere cellblock day room, complained about the food at Florence and the lack of enough outdoor-exercise time.

Childress says he feels safer in the Arizona prison than he did in California, where racially segregated gangs often rule the exercise yards and guards watch inmates with automatic rifles at the ready.

"We're not around too much danger. Most people here are trying to get away from that," he said.

Corrections Corp. says its prisons are clean, safe and secure. But the company acknowledges that its prisons are not immune from occasional assaults, disturbances and violence.

"Safety and security is the obvious No. 1 priority for CCA," spokeswoman Louise Grant said. "We have a very strong record that compares very favorably with our public counterparts."

Government reports show that Corrections Corp. has had fewer escapes, suicides and homicides than comparable public prisons, she said.

In Florence, Corrections Corp.'s facility radiates little of the watch-your-back tension among inmates that permeates massive California prisons.

"It's less tense, and it's quiet," said Francisco Barrios, 37, of Burbank, doing five years for illegal discharge of a firearm. "The people who came here want to do their time and go home."

California is not shipping out prisoners wholesale. The state sends only medium-security and some minimum-security inmates out of state. Maximum-security prisoners, including those on death row, and others with mental illness or serious health problems are ineligible. Inmates at women's prisons, which are not as crowded as male institutions, are not sent out of state.

Bill Sessa, a spokesman with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, says there's no evidence that the transfers have made California prisons more dangerous. Inmates to be transferred must meet legal and security criteria and "are being matched to the security level of institutions available to us," he said.

Corrections officials say they want to ease crowding, at least temporarily, and avoid the possibility that federal judges might put a limit on convict populations and force the governor to release felons before their sentences are completed.

Turning to private prisons is "not a policy of choice," Sessa said. "It's a policy of circumstances."

But California prison guard unions, with many members making more than $100,000 a year with overtime pay, aren't eager to give up any jobs to their less well-paid colleagues at the private prisons.

Private prisons are "making a fortune off of people's misery," said Ryan Sherman, a spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. "It's dungeons for dollars."

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

Posted by lois at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

The Nation: Locked Up in New Orleans

It's not so far from the way things were more than a century ago. Antebellum city records refer to what is now the Orleans Parish Prison as the Workhouse. In addition to those arrested for crime, the jail was a repository for slaves whose masters chose to lease them to the Workhouse. The same archives also reveal that African-Americans were committed to the Workhouse for "claiming to be free": In the space where the master's name was usually recorded, these inmates were referred to as "so-called free." After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, African-Americans arrested in New Orleans for black-code crimes like vagrancy and unemployment were taken to the parish Workhouse. During Reconstruction, the incarcerated former slaves provided a critical pool of forced labor for railroad companies, agriculture and industry. In its first regular session post-Katrina, the state legislature amended a law regulating parish jail labor in order to grant immunity to prison authorities "for injuries or damages caused or suffered by prisoners participating in any work program during incarceration at parish jail facilities." When I asked a legislative staffer about the origins of the post-Katrina amendment, she said, "I believe it was because there was a labor shortage."

The Nation

Locked Up in New Orleans

by ROBIN TEMPLETON

[from the September 10, 2007 issue]

"I never got paid," Dewitt Solomon tells me. Nine months before the levees broke, Solomon had a minimum-wage job busing tables and washing dishes at Messina's, a popular New Orleans tourist restaurant. But instead of paying him directly, Messina's gave Solomon's paychecks to the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office. Solomon, who was serving time in the Orleans Parish Prison--the eighth largest penal institution in the country and the largest correctional facility in Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina--was enrolled in the sheriff's work-release program.

"
The prison was supposed to give him his wages, minus the $500 a month it deducted for room and board, the day it returned to Solomon his freedom. Solomon says that the sheriff still owes him $1,500.

Sitting at the kitchen table at his home in New Orleans's West Bank, Solomon and I are feeding bottles to his twin sons. The babies weighed less than two pounds at birth. Now, at 13 months, they're startlingly small but chugging away at the formula like they're in a race to catch up. Solomon's 5-year-old daughter is prancing around the room with a Dora the Explorer coloring book. She has proclaimed that the cartoon heroine is her twin sister. The resemblance is, actually, striking.

Solomon says he tried for months to recoup his lost earnings and never got a call back from the sheriff's office. He gave up after floodwater washed away his only proof, the pay stubs he'd saved from the restaurant.

Solomon sounds more resigned than bitter. "It's not that I couldn't still use the money," he says. "I'm just glad I got in and out before it got any worse." Solomon describes how his brother-in-law was arrested on trespassing charges when he went to check on storm damage to his father's home. His cousin was also arrested for a nonviolent crime weeks ago, and no one in the family has been able to make contact or even determine where he's being held.

New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate of any major US city--double the national rate. Louisiana also locks up more people in local jails than any state due in part to state laws, unheard of in other parts of the country, that paralyze due process.

District attorneys have sixty days from the time of arrest in a felony case and forty-five days in a misdemeanor case to decide whether to press charges and typically use the full statutory time limit. From there, it takes an average of three months for detainees to get a court date. It can take up to three years to get to trial. According to a recent study by the Vera Institute of Justice, 41 percent of those entering the Orleans Parish Prison would qualify to be released on their own recognizance. Instead, the city opts to lock people up if they can't post bail, which is true of three-quarters of the jail's detainees.

While it was bad before the storm, "now the system is only working to pick people up," says Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley. "It's a vacuum, sucking poor people in and keeping them in. Being arrested now equals being sent to prison."

Nearly a year after Katrina, the city's backlog of cases reached at least 6,000. Judge Arthur Hunter of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court declared that "it is a pathetic and shameful state of affairs the criminal justice system finds itself in" and said that he would mark the one-year anniversary of the storm by beginning to release poor defendants.

But just as Hunter was declaring a constitutional state of emergency last summer, New Orleans was hit by a devastating crime wave. With half its former population, the city saw its crime rate escalate back to pre-Katrina levels. By the time it was gearing up for its second post-Katrina Mardi Gras celebration, national media were pronouncing New Orleans the murder capital of the United States.

Under the headline "Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing in New Orleans," the New York Times reported in February that a "uniquely poisoned set of circumstances" was fueling the violence, including the destruction of the city's only crime lab, friction between police and prosecutors, community distrust and fear of the police, uncooperative or vanished witnesses and "murderers' brutalized childhoods." The majority of victims and suspects have been young African-American men--many teenagers--caught up in a drug trade that was reinvigorated, reorganized and made more lethal amid turf wars in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The crime crisis is part and parcel of a wider social crisis. Two years after the storm, only one-third of the childcare centers and 45 percent of the public schools in Orleans Parish have reopened. Mental health services for residents suffering from depression, drug addiction or post-traumatic stress disorder are practically nonexistent. The city's Housing Authority has slated thousands of units of public housing for demolition, the majority of which were not damaged by the storm.

Bill Quigley has represented hundreds of families fighting to reclaim their homes and possessions from the Housing Authority. "One of the reasons they say they don't want to reopen public housing is that they don't want to let crime back into the city," Quigley explains. "But crime is already back in.

The truth is that there are a lot of young people here without their families. The families don't have housing. So kids are coming back on their own, without their aunts and their mothers and their grandparents. Neighborhoods are breaking down because we don't have the families back. We don't have a lot of the churches. We don't have the infrastructure in poor communities that we had before.

"Some of us in the city think it's a bigger crime to keep thousands of families out of their apartments than to sell drugs," he notes. "But law enforcement doesn't see it that way."

Indeed, city officials responded to the crime wave with a troop surge. The city's police department is nearly staffed back up to its pre-Katrina size and budgeted all the way back up. Local law enforcement has been joined by sixty state troopers and 300 National Guard troops in Humvees and military uniforms--they've christened themselves "Task Force Gator"--at a cost to the state of $35 million.

Police have been making a record number of arrests, now averaging over 1,300 a week. But as the crime problem persists, they don't seem to be getting the bad guys. According to recent exit interviews with detainees leaving the parish jail, conducted by the local criminal justice reform organization Safe Streets/Strong Communities, 80 percent were being held for nonviolent offenses, mostly on low-level drug or alcohol charges. "The city is plagued by violent crime, residents who will never be charged with a crime spend weeks in jail," the Vera Institute recently reported, "and some serious offenders are released with no charges."

Ursula Price, Safe Streets's outreach and investigations coordinator, describes the case of a woman in the jail "who had called 911 about a domestic violence incident. Instead of trying to help her, the police ran her name and ended up arresting her on an outstanding traffic violation."

Safe Streets provides first responders to the city's incarcerated. The group has racked up huge phone bills accepting collect calls from the Orleans Parish Prison and the diaspora of correctional facilities to which arrestees were scattered in the wake of the storm. Some callers just want to know why they're there--it can take days for police, whom one criminal defense lawyer described as "functionally illiterate," to complete a report. Others wonder how long they might be in, whether they have a court date, how they can get legal support or how they can contact their family or boss.

Callers from Orleans Parish Prison also report dungeonlike conditions: twenty-five people held in cells built for ten, so many people sleeping in one area that you can't even see the floor, no fresh or conditioned air, overflowing toilets, inconsistent electricity and iffy plumbing. The prison has yet to regain the accreditation it lost in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when hundreds of inmates were abandoned in fetid floodwaters in what local writer and criminal defense attorney Billy Sothern described as "the biggest prison crisis since Attica" [see "Left to Die," January 2, 2006].

This summer Glenn Thomas, the 29-year-old son of Rosetta James, a member of Safe Streets/Strong Communities, died in Orleans Parish Prison. James didn't learn of her son's death from the sheriff's office, she says, but by word of
mouth: "One of the inmates was able to call his mother and tell her that Glenn had died, and she came and found me. I said, 'Nobody tell me nothing. I'm going to the jail.'" When she got there, the morning of July 4, James was told that her son, who had no known medical problems, had died the night before at 11 pm of "natural causes," and that she could call back in another month for the official report.

Thomas died waiting for his day in court. On May 19, 2004, he was arrested for simple drug possession. He was slated to appear in court about a year later, on August 31, 2005, when the city was uninhabitable. Nonetheless, a warrant was issued for his arrest for failing to appear. In October 2006, Thomas was arrested and detained in the Orleans Parish Prison. His new court date, the one he didn't live to see, was set for August 2007.

Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman's public information officer, Renee Lapeyrolerie, said they couldn't provide details about Thomas's death but said, "Well, in his criminal history he had a lot of drug arrests. Those things can be linked to health problems."

"This is the third death there's been in there this year," says Safe Streets co-director Norris Henderson. "It's all the same story. The jail says they don't know why any of these people died. Anything wrong that happens in his facilities the sheriff blames on the inmates or on not having enough money," Henderson says. "But you really can't blame Glenn for his own death, and you can't blame it on the money, because he's got that."

As mandated by a 35-year-old consent decree intended to remedy abusive conditions in the jail, the city pays the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office a per diem amount for each local inmate, plus $3.2 million annually to provide medical services. In his 2007 budget request to the City Council, Gusman asked for an additional $5 million for medical services, a request that was granted.

Henderson is solemn when asked what it will take to get public officials to pay attention to the crisis. "It's not like I want a Rodney King situation where people burn the city down, because we don't have much of a city left to burn. But we need to do something, a sit-down, a walkout, something. It's getting to the point where we need some drama."

Dana Kaplan of the Center for Constitutional Rights summarizes the essential problem facing reformers. "Right now Gusman's funding is tied to the number of the people in the jail. How are we going to get money for schools and services and jobs programs with so much money tied up in the jail?"

Gusman's recent budget requests make it clear that he is banking on crime. His 2007 "budget request for these payments is based on our expected City inmate population," the sheriff wrote to the City Council. "The inmate population is driven primarily by the number of arrests made by the Police Department. Since the storm, the arrest rate has consistently increased in an attempt to stem the rising crime rate." In his 2005 request, Gusman explained that the depopulation of the jail in the immediate wake of Katrina represented a "90 percent reduction in revenue, but our fixed costs remain high."

Gusman has never publicly said that his aim is to build Orleans Parish Prison, which can now accommodate 2,500 inmates, back up to its former size, which was 8,000 before Katrina. But in written testimony to the US House of Representatives in April 2007, he listed as chief among his critical needs "the restoration of our four largest jail facilities." This, Gusman wrote, "would increase our capacity (an additional 4,100 beds) to hold some of New Orleans [sic] most violent and repeat offenders."

In other words, "build them and fill them," says Henderson, "and we know who'll be filling them."

Henderson and other local advocates formed Safe Streets/ Strong Communities in the wake of Katrina, in the words of their founding statement, "to demand that elected officials address the root causes of our decades-long public safety crisis, cease blaming the victims, and stop investing time and money on tactics that have never worked.... Many of our children have been given nothing to reach for except guns and little to own and be proud of but their street corners."

While Safe Streets has scored some recent victories--helping win the appointment of a new Indigent Defender Board and funding to launch the Office of the Independent Monitor to oversee police policies and practices, for instance--the real challenge for activists is the fight to reallocate public resources, out of law and order and into community recovery.

But to Sheriff Gusman, these are one and the same; he has made sure that the city's path to recovery will be paved by his inmates--literally. Since Katrina, Gusman has used his Community Service Program and Neighborhood Response Team to deliver cheap labor for reconstruction projects. His office's website features photos of inmates in orange jumpers and sweatshirts emblazoned with Sheriff Gusman Community Service Program next to road signs announcing, Project Clean-Up. Inmates Working.

It's not so far from the way things were more than a century ago. Antebellum city records refer to what is now the Orleans Parish Prison as the Workhouse. In addition to those arrested for crime, the jail was a repository for slaves whose masters chose to lease them to the Workhouse. The same archives also reveal that African-Americans were committed to the Workhouse for "claiming to be free": In the space where the master's name was usually recorded, these inmates were referred to as "so-called free." After the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, African-Americans arrested in New Orleans for black-code crimes like vagrancy and unemployment were taken to the parish Workhouse. During Reconstruction, the incarcerated former slaves provided a critical pool of forced labor for railroad companies, agriculture and industry.

In its first regular session post-Katrina, the state legislature amended a law regulating parish jail labor in order to grant immunity to prison authorities "for injuries or damages caused or suffered by prisoners participating in any work program during incarceration at parish jail facilities." When I asked a legislative staffer about the origins of the post-Katrina amendment, she said, "I believe it was because there was a labor shortage."

Lieut. Eric Donnelly, director of the sheriff's work-release program, the one that Dewitt Solomon took part in before the storm, told a local business paper that the program played a vital role in restarting the city's economic engine. "As soon as the hurricane ended and we got a new phone, it was ringing off the hook from employers saying they needed their inmates," Donnelly said. "So as soon as we were getting them back in we had [employers] coming to pick them up themselves. That's how much they rely on this program."

But, as Solomon says, "you shouldn't have to go to jail to get a job."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/templeton

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

Study Relates Racial Discrimination with Alcohol and Other Drug Use

Study Relates Racial Discrimination with Alcohol and Other Drug Use August 23, 2007

People who say they are victims of racial discrimination are more likely to use alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, researchers say.

UPI reported Aug. 20 that researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of California at San Francisco and Harvard University collaborated on a study that found that 89 percent of African-Americans reported being victims of discrimination, compared to 38 percent of white Americans.

Alcohol, tobacco and other drugs use was higher among those reporting discrimination regardless of their race. Black victims of discrimination tended to be more educated and wealthier, while whites reporting discrimination tended to be less educated and poorer.

"It is possible that use of a recreational drug helps to cope with life stress resulting from perceived unfair treatment because of one's race/ethnicity," study leader Luisa Borrell of the Mailman School of Public Health.

http://www.jointogether.org/news/research/summaries/2007/study-relates-racial.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=33861362

Posted by lois at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2007

Those on parole have paid their debts

Here’s an excellent Op-Ed by Kim Carter, founder and executive director of Time for Change Foundation

Those on parole have paid their debts
by Kim Carter
San Bernardino County Sun 08/22/2007

When is enough enough? How would you like it if after you paid your bill, debt collectors continued to call you three and four times a day?

What if you honestly answered the question, "Have you ever lied?" and then you were condemned to being called a liar for the rest of your life?

For those of you who consider yourselves perfect and have never fallen short in the eyesight of God, what are you still doing on earth, angels?

People on parole have paid their debts to society. They are human beings on parole - not "parolees."

People on parole have served their time in prison to pay their debts. They paid. When will the punishment stop?

Instead of counting how many people are on parole in this city, the question should be: What is wrong with a city that produces so many people on parole?

Let's take the housing issue first.

Conditional-use permits have become political devices, and thus far any social service agency that has tried to create housing for people coming home from prison has been turned down.

For people with arrest histories, the housing authority has a 10-year waiting period just to apply for low income housing.

Other property owners - who also require background checks as well as a verified income of three times the monthly rent - do not rent to people with arrest histories.

So let's see, where are these people supposed to live? Not your problem, right? Not in your city, right?

And then some foolish taxpayers are going to spend $46,000 a year to house that same person in prison when he doesn't check in with his parole agent.

Ask yourselves, if you slept up under the bridge all night or behind a Dumpster, would you wake up in the morning to rush and see a parole agent who doesn't have any food vouchers, bus tickets or a warm blanket for you?

People on parole cannot vote, which makes them easy targets, sitting ducks for political abuse, particularly for politicians who are lacking credibility and must grandstand on the backs of the defenseless.

Second, employment: Why don't "these people" get a job? Besides residents' and employers' prejudice against the formerly incarcerated, they are systematically denied occupational licenses such as barbering, cosmetology and landscaping. This further perpetuates the problems with re-entry and their inability to secure the basic human necessities.

At this point, employers are screening people based on their application acknowledging past criminal history, without ever having interviewed the potential employee. If people coming home from prison cannot get a living-wage job, participate in our tax base, pay back child support and become financially responsible for their children, then guess what? Oops, there go those foolish taxpayers again - jail instead of jobs.

Unfortunately, our legal system is not color-blind, nor is it equitable and just. Those who have financial means are able to pay for their version of justice, while those who are dependent upon a public system, that is dependent upon a government, well, you know the story about dependents, right?

When you are dependent, you have lost your independence and fall at the mercy of others' time, talent and treasure.

I speak as a person who has been off parole for 15 years, as a stakeholder in this city, a property owner in this city and a long-standing community activist.

I want you to think about this: When former Sheriff Floyd Tidwell was convicted of stealing over 500 guns from the sheriff's department, none of which has been returned, he was excused from going to prison to "pay his debt to society," and there wasn't a public outcry.

There were no NIMBYs on duty in his neighborhood, and somehow no one thought to send in the troops to track down all of the guns that kill people.

When Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, was recently convicted of all those federal charges and sentenced to prison, he too was excused from "paying his debt to society."

And now we have Mary, 23, mother of two children, convicted of writing bad checks in the amount of $623 - and sentenced to three years in prison.

The judge said, "There is no excuse," as Mary pleaded that there was no one to take care of her children.

So Mary went to "pay her debt to society" at a cost of $142,000.

Her children went into the system at a cost of $385,000.

And who paid for this? Oops, there go those foolish taxpayers again.

Now rumor has it that infamous celebrity Martha Stewart might be coming to San Bernardino, and that she's thinking of doing something really, really big. But I don't think the fact she was once on parole has ever been a problem for her. Do you?

After all, she is Martha Stewart, not "a parolee."

Kim Carter is founder and executive director of Time for Change Foundation.

http://www.sbsun.com/search/ci_6682924?source=email

Posted by lois at 06:40 PM | Comments (0)

Governors of LA, PA, WA, IL: "Better models for juvenile justice"

"Now, in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Models for Change initiative, we are working to further improve juvenile justice policy and practice across the country. However, these efforts could be at risk if public opinion becomes unnecessarily inflamed again."

Christian Science Monitor: Opinion

Better models for juvenile justice
By Rod R. Blagojevich, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, Edward G. Rendell and Chris Gregoire Wed Aug 22, 2007

Springfield, Ill.; Baton Rouge, La.; Harrisburg, Pa.; and Olympia, Wash. -

Amid news stories that raise the specter of increasing juvenile crime, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that crime rates overall, particularly for violent crimes, are still near 30-year lows. The cries of alarm are reminiscent of those heard in the early 1990s, when a rise in violent juvenile crime and myths of superpredators helped transform a system that had been focused on individualized treatment and rehabilitation for nearly a century into one that was increasingly harsh and punitive.

The impact of these policies began to hit home. Thousands of adolescents, locked up during a critical period of development, returned to their communities without the skills or support to lead productive lives. A disproportionately large number of them were young minorities. The cost of "get tough" policies was measured not only in escalating budgets of prisons and detention centers and rising recidivism rates, but also in reduced public safety and the loss of human potential.

Over the past decade, groundbreaking research on adolescent development and on what works to help young people steer clear of crime has brought about more rational and effective policies. Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Washington were among the first to incorporate this new knowledge in reshaping our juvenile justice systems.

Now, in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Models for Change initiative, we are working to further improve juvenile justice policy and practice across the country. However, these efforts could be at risk if public opinion becomes unnecessarily inflamed again.

Illinois launched the nation's first juvenile justice system more than a century ago. But, like many other states in the 1990s, it turned away from its historic rehabilitative mission, transferring a growing number of youths to adult court. The result was a sharp rise in recidivism rates and a growing racial disparity in incarceration rates.

Illinois is now renewing its commitment to juvenile justice by enacting a new law to separate the juvenile and adult systems to better protect young people. Redeploy Illinois, a model demonstration in four counties, provides incentives to place nonviolent juvenile offenders in community-based programs. As a result of this program, Illinois has reduced commitments of nonviolent juveniles by 44 percent at its pilot sites since 2004.

In the 1990s, Louisiana had the highest juvenile incarceration rate in the nation and some of the worst juvenile prisons. A lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice spurred major reforms, including the closing of a large juvenile correction facility. Louisiana also separated juvenile from adult corrections, first by executive order and then by statute.

In less than a decade, the state has reduced the number of incarcerated youths by more than 70 percent while also lowering crime rates. Now Louisiana is developing alternatives to the court system that will hold youths accountable while engaging their families and communities.

Pennsylvania has long had fiscal incentives to encourage community-based programs. The state introduced "balanced and restorative justice," an individualized approach that considers the goals of accountability, community protection, and youth development at the same time. Pennsylvania is now establishing high-quality aftercare programs to help young offenders acquire life skills and become productive citizens. It is also one of the first states to mandate that counties report race and ethnicity data at key points in case processing, a critical step in reducing disparities.

Washington has a long history of using research to inform juvenile justice policy-making. Ongoing evaluation of its programs and services has demonstrated which ones effectively reduce juvenile crime and recidivism.

Now the state is expanding these evidence-based programs throughout the state to reach youths before they become deeply involved in the juvenile justice system. The state's functional family therapy program has reduced recidivism rates by 38 percent and saved taxpayers $10.69 for every $1 invested.

Change under way in our states and others appears to be the beginning of a new wave of reform. Juvenile justice is returning to its founding principles of protection, treatment, and rehabilitation, while embracing the equally important principles of accountability and public safety.

These reforms are firmly rooted in scientific research, ongoing assessment, and continuing evolution in policy and practice. We hope that other states will join us. With every state that participates in these efforts, our knowledge increases and, with it, the prospects for success.

€ Rod R. Blagojevich is the governor of Illinois. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco is the governor of Louisiana. Edward G. Rendell is the governor of Pennsylvania, and Chris Gregoire is the governor of Washington.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070822/cm_csm/ygovernors

Posted by lois at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies

New York Times
August 23, 2007
Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose acclaimed short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84 and lived most of her life in Manhattan before moving to Vermont in 1988. .
Her husband, Robert Nichols, told the Associated Press that she had battled breast cancer. The agency did not say whether her death was directly connected to that illness.

Ms. Paley's output was modest, just 45 stories in three volumes: "The Little Disturbances of Man" (Doubleday, 1959); "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); and "Later the Same Day" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985). But she attracted a devoted following and was widely praised by critics for her pitch-perfect dialogue, which managed to be surgically spare and unimaginably rich at the same time.
Her "Collected Stories," published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York's first official state author.
Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women - mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers - in all their dailyness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud's men had loved and left behind.
To read Ms. Paley's fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, its hairpin rhetorical reversals and its capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg be read aloud.
Some critics found Ms. Paley's stories short on plot, and in fact much of what happens is that nothing much happens. Affairs begin, babies are born, affairs end. Mothers gather in the park. But that was exactly the point. In Ms. Paley's best stories, the language is so immediate, the characters so authentic, that they are propelled by an inherent urgency - the kind that makes readers ask, "And then what happened?"
Open Ms. Paley's first collection, "The Little Disturbances of Man," to the first story, "Goodbye and Good Luck":
"I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn't no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don't be surprised - change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don't notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary's ear for thirty years. Who's listening? Papa's in the shop. You and Seymour, thinking about yourself. So she waits in a spotless kitchen for a kind word and thinks - poor Rosie.
"Poor Rosie! If there was more life in my little sister, she would know my heart is a regular college of feelings and there is such information between my corset and me that her whole married life is a kindergarten."
Hooked.
For Ms. Paley's immigrant Jews, the push and pull of assimilation is everywhere. Parents live in the East Bronx or Coney Island; their grown children flee to Greenwich Village. A family agonizes over its lively daughter's starring role in her school's Christmas pageant.
Later stories were even darker. Women are raped; children died of drug overdoses. Threading through the books are familiar characters, in particular Faith Darwin, the subject of many of Ms. Paley's finest stories, grown older and world-wearier.
Though Ms. Paley's work also rings with Irish and Italian and black voices, it was for the language of her childhood, a heady blend of Yiddish, Russian and English, that she was best known. Reviewers sometimes called her prose postmodern, but all of it - even the death-defying, almost surreal turns of logic that were a stylistic hallmark - was already present in Yiddish oral tradition. For instance:
A man meets a friend on the street.
"So, how's by you?" the friend asks.
"Ach," the man replies. "My wife left me; the children don't call; business is bad. With life so terrible, better not to have been born."
"Yes," his friend says. "But how many are so lucky? Not one in ten thousand."
Grace Goodside was born in the Bronx on Dec. 11, 1922. (The family changed its name from Gutseit on coming to the United States.) Her parents, Isaac and the former Manya Ridnyik, were Ukrainian Jewish Socialists who had been exiled by Czar Nicholas II - Isaac to Siberia, Manya to Germany. In 1906, they were able to leave for New York, where Isaac became a doctor. They had a son and a daughter, and, approaching middle age, a third child, Grace.
Her childhood was noisy and warm. There were stories and singing and good strong tea. Always, there was argument. The Communists hollered at the Socialists, the Socialists hollered at the Zionists, and everybody hollered at the anarchists.
Ms. Paley studied for a year at Hunter College before marrying Jess Paley, a film cameraman, at 19; the marriage ended in divorce in 1972. Hoping to be a poet (she studied briefly with Auden at the New School), she wrote only verse until she was in her 30's. But little by little, the narrative speech of the old neighborhood - here, that of young Shirley Abramowitz in "The Loudest Voice" - began to assert itself:
"There is a certain place where dumb-waiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother's mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home. My voice is the loudest.
"There, my own mother is still as full of breathing as me and the grocer stands up to speak to her. 'Mrs. Abramowitz,' he says, 'people should not be afraid of their children.'
" 'Ah, Mr. Bialik,' my mother replies, 'if you say to her or her father "Ssh," they say, "In the grave it will be quiet." ' "
A self-described "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist," Ms. Paley was a lifelong advocate of liberal social causes. During Vietnam, she was jailed several times for antiwar protests; in later years, she lobbied for women's rights, against nuclear proliferation and, most recently, against the war in Iraq. For decades, she was a familiar presence on lower Sixth Avenue, near her Greenwich Village home, smiling broadly, gum cracking, leaflets in hand.
Ms. Paley, who taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence and the City College of New York, was also a past vice president of the PEN American Center.
Some critics have called Ms. Paley's work uneven, but what they really seemed to mean is that it was too even: similar people in similar situations in similar places. But the stories that worked - and many did - were so blindingly satisfying that the lesser ones scarcely mattered. In her best work, Ms. Paley collapsed entire worlds into a few perfect paragraphs, as in the opening of "Wants," from "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute":
"I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
"Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
"He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
"I said, O.K. I don't argue when there's real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
"The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
"My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the librarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.
"That's possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began."

Her other books include a collection of essays, "Just As I Thought" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), and three volumes of poetry, "Leaning Forward" (Granite Press, 1985); "New and Collected Poems" (Tilbury Press, 1991); and "Long Walks and Intimate Talks" (Feminist Press, 1991). A film, "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," based on three stories in the collection and adapted by John Sayles and Susan Rice, was released in 1983.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1978, Ms. Paley put her finger on the grass-roots sensibility that informed her work.
"I'm not writing a history of famous people," she explained. "I am interested in a history of everyday life."

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


--

Posted by lois at 03:04 PM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2007

2 New York prisoners sue to get their banned religious books back

International Herald Tribune
2 New York prisoners sue to get their banned religious books back

The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 22, 2007

NEW YORK: Two New York inmates challenging a ban on some religious books in chapel libraries at U.S. prisons are trying to take the fight nationwide, asking that their lawsuit be given class action status so it can benefit thousands of others behind bars.

Moshe Milstein, an Orthodox Jew, and John J. Okon, a Protestant, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court on Tuesday. They withdrew a similar lawsuit two months ago after a judge said they needed to register complaints with the prison system first.

The men accused the government of the "indiscriminate dismantling of religious libraries" at federal prisons nationwide.

Prison libraries limited the number of books for each religion to between 100 and 150 under new rules created after a 2004 U.S. Department of Justice review of how prisons choose Muslim religious services providers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Feldman said.

Feldman said the study was done out of a concern that prisons "had been radicalized by inmates who were practicing or espousing various extreme forms of religion, specifically Islam, which exposed security risks to the prisons and beyond the prisons to the public at large."

The lawsuit says hundreds and perhaps thousands of religious books and media used by inmates have been banned and removed from prisons across the United States since February without any effort to learn if they are inflammatory or extremist.

"This purge is an unnecessary, unconstitutional and unlawful restriction of the ability of federal inmates nationwide to practice and learn about their religion and has substantially burdened their ability to exercise their religion," the lawsuit says.

Among the books banned at their prison were "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, and "The Purpose-Driven Life" by the Rev. Rick Warren, the lawsuit said.

The Muslim portion of the chapel library has been reduced to the Quran and two other titles after the removal of prayer books, prayer guides and the Hadith, the most important source for Muslim practice and faith after the Quran, the lawsuit says.

A spokeswoman for government attorneys had no comment Wednesday.

The men's lawsuit did not say why they were in prison, but it said Milstein is scheduled to be released Aug. 28.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/22/america/NA-GEN-US-Prison-Book-Ban.php

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

Electronic anklet has potential for prison system

Mangold said the data collected during his weekend test will help show state legislators what the device can do.He expects to travel with Tidwell to Cheyenne to discuss what changes to state law might need to be made to allow for its use. Mangold said the device may be a way to help ease prison crowding, address a shortage of jailers and save the state money on working with low-risk offenders, all while helping get parolees back to work. "We need to try something else," he said. "Building new prisons doesn't work."

Billings (MT) Gazette

8/21/07

Electronic anklet has potential for prison system, Mangold says.
By RUFFIN PREVOST Gazette Wyoming Bureau

CODY - Elected officials can sometimes be hard to find, but Powell Mayor Scott Mangold could be located with a few keystrokes on a computer over the weekend, as a network of satellites tracked his every move.

Mangold strapped on an electronic monitoring anklet Thursday and wore it until Sunday morning to test a system being marketed by Freedom Fighters, a Wyoming company seeking to sell the gear to law enforcement.

Powell Police Chief Tim Feathers wrote in a memo to Mangold that he sees potential advantages in using the device as a possible alternative to incarceration for certain nonviolent, first-time offenders.

Mangold said he thinks it could save taxpayers money at a time when hundreds of the state's prisoners are housed out of state, and finding qualified jailers can be difficult when competing with high oil and gas wages.

"Prison is a place for repeat, violent offenders, but this offers an alternative," said Boone Tidwell of Freedom Fighters, who will be pitching the device to Wyoming sheriffs and prison managers.

Tidwell, a retired sheriff's detective and former bail bondsman, is marketing the device in Wyoming for manufacturer SecureAlert, a Utah company that also monitors offenders wearing the anklets.

Equipped with a global positioning unit and a cell phone, the TrackerPal is a little larger than a pack of cigarettes, uses detachable, rechargeable battery packs, and is attached with a custom tool.

Police can use the TrackerPal's cell phone to speak with offenders.

Tidwell said the device differs from older electronic monitoring anklets, which allowed offenders to stay within a few yards of a fixed base station, typically located in their homes.

With the latest generation of equipment, probation or parole officers can set up an exclusion zone where the wearer is not allowed, such as a school or park, in the case of a registered sex offender.

Or, they may be allowed only at home, work and the road between the two places, he said.

Future versions of the device available by early next year will be able to take readings from the wearer's skin and detect drug or alcohol use, Tidwell said.

"This would help a lot of the 'meth moms' that we're giving those massive jail sentences of 10 or 15 years to," Mangold said.

"You could attach one of these to them after they've completed a treatment program and get them back to their families and into the work force. If it detects meth, they go back to jail," he said.

Because offenders would wear the anklets instead of being locked up, they would be volunteering for the program, and could be required to help pay for some or all of its costs, he said.

Tidwell figured the anklets would cost around $15 to $25 per day, including monitoring, which could be done by local law enforcement or through SecureAlert.

"When you consider we're shipping hundreds of prisoners out of the state to be housed at a cost of $60 per day, this could mean a savings of several millions of dollars a year," he said.

Mangold said the device was set up to alert if he traveled more than about three miles from Powell, and it vibrated and issued a recorded warning as he drove to the Powell Municipal Airport Saturday, about nine miles away.

A dispatcher from the monitoring company called the anklet's cell phone to warn Mangold that he was outside his allowed area, he said.

"It's a little startling when your ankle starts to vibrate," he said. "It's even weirder talking to your ankle and hearing someone talk back."

Mangold said the anklet took a little getting used to at first, including while he was sleeping.

He decided to take it off before going waterskiing on Bighorn Lake, where a reporter coincidentally spotted Mangold without the anklet.

Tidwell said the device is waterproof and can be worn in the shower and briefly immersed in up to about 9 feet of water.

Mangold said the data collected during his weekend test will help show state legislators what the device can do.

He expects to travel with Tidwell to Cheyenne to discuss what changes to state law might need to be made to allow for its use.

Mangold said the device may be a way to help ease prison crowding, address a shortage of jailers and save the state money on working with low-risk offenders, all while helping get parolees back to work.

"We need to try something else," he said. "Building new prisons doesn't work."
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/08/21/news/wyoming/18-anklet.tx
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Posted by lois at 01:32 PM | Comments (0)

Isotopes Used to Track Origins of Marijuana

Isotopes Used to Track Origins of Marijuana
August 21, 2007

News Summary

The Marijuana Signature Project at the University of Utah is using stable isotopes as a means of tracking the geographic origin of seized marijuana, research that could improve targeting of law-enforcement resources, the New York Times reported Aug. 21.

Funded by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, researcher Jason B. West is part of a new movement of using stable isotopes for forensic purposes. "Stable isotopes are a signature on plant materials and things that are derived from plants," said West. "Using them, you can get information about where something grew and its growth environment."

Most marijuana used in the U.S. is grown here, although supplies also come from Canada and Mexico. California, Hawaii, Kentucky, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington account for most of the domestic marijuana supply. ONDCP hopes that West's work not only will help pinpoint the origins of the drug but also whether it is grown indoors or outdoors.

"Plants maintain the fingerprint of the climate and the environmental conditions," said Gene Kelly, professor of soil science at Colorado State University. "Theoretically, high-elevation pot plants should have one sort of signature, coastal California plants another."

West's research already has revealed that most marijuana seized in San Diego comes from elsewhere, not grown locally as previously assumed. "There's considerable movement from multiple sources," said ONDCP chief scientist David Murray. "And it ends up that multiple streams of marijuana were present in a single location being offered for sale."

http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2007/isotopes-used-to-track.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=33841891

Posted by lois at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

Springfield MA: Statistics: Violent crime down

Statistics: Violent crime down
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
By PETER GOONAN
pgoonan@repub.com

SPRINGFIELD - Violent crime was down 14 percent during the first six months of 2007 compared with the same period last year, another sign that crime strategies are paying off, Police Commissioner Edward A. Flynn said yesterday.

Flynn released the statistics yesterday at police headquarters, comparing the first six months of 2007, ending June 30, with the first six months of 2006.

The statistics show that crime overall is down 7 percent, compared with the same period last year.

The latest statistics follow decreases in violent crime in Springfield already reported in 2006, compared with statistics in 2005.

"Our ambition is to keep building on these positive results," Flynn said. "I recognize that numbers alone are never going to affect people's perceptions of safety. It has taken Springfield a long time to get where it is, and fear is an issue separate and distinct from our crime data."

The department recognizes its obligation "to reduce crime, to reduce disorder and to reduce the level of fear," Flynn said.

Violent crime, down 14 percent during the first half of 2007, consists of cases of murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, in line with the FBI's unified crime reporting system, officials said.

Flynn said he is particularly encouraged by double-digit percentage decreases in aggravated assault and gun assault.

"Why that is significant for Springfield is that much of our reputation is driven by our reputation for gun-related violent crime," Flynn said. "As we have said for the last year and a half, our goal is to disrupt that cycle of violence through intelligent planning and intelligent deployment relying on good data analysis, and that appears to be bearing some fruit."

The decline in crime is "tangible proof that our community-based, problem-oriented data-driven strategy is working," Flynn said.

In addition, Flynn continued to state that people are far less likely to be victims of violent crime if they do not deal drugs, do not join gangs and are law-abiding citizens.

Some crime categories increased. There were 11 homicides the first six months of 2007, as compared with nine during the first half of 2006. Four of the 2007 homicides were domestic-related, a high rate that cannot be curbed by police deployment, Flynn said.

There were significant decreases in rapes and car thefts, he said.

There was a slight increase in burglary, cause for concern, and a slight decrease in larceny in the first half of 2007 statistics, Flynn said.

Strategies that are helping reduce numbers include "removing the anonymity of street criminals, deploying based on data, not emotion, and providing officers with appropriate resources," Flynn said.

The latest crime statistics were released immediately after Flynn and other Police Department officials met with the City Council Public Health and Safety Committee to discuss crime statistic trends in contrast to public perceptions.

Committee Chairman Domenic J. Sarno, who is a candidate for mayor, said he hears many expressions of fear about crime despite the positive trend in statistics.

Flynn and Sgt. Peter Albano, who heads the Crime Analysis Unit, said the statistics are closely monitored and accurate. Past problems with crime statistics reporting have been corrected, with the FBI giving the department a high ranking for its methodology, Albano said.

http://www.masslive.com/republican/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-2/118768714718780.xml&coll=1

Posted by lois at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

August 21, 2007

Cornell To Reopen Federal Hector Garza Treatment Center for Youth

Cornell Announces Plan to Reopen Hector Garza Treatment Center
Raises Guidance for the Second Half of 2007

Last Update: 9:01 AM ET Aug 20, 2007
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid=2585BA056A6F4D5EB792D7BE300962D1&siteid=nbs

HOUSTON, Aug 20, 2007 (PrimeNewswire via COMTEX) -- Cornell Companies, Inc. announced plans today to reopen its Hector Garza Residential Treatment Center ("Hector Garza") facility in San Antonio, Texas effective August 27th. As part of the Company's Abraxas Youth and Family Services Division, the Hector Garza facility, closed since October 2005, will reopen initially to serve the needs of a Federal customer. James E. Hyman, Cornell's Chairman & CEO said, "We are delighted to reopen the Hector Garza facility as it brings us one step closer to our goal of asset maximization across our portfolio. We look forward to steady growth at this facility as we continue to meet the needs of youth service customers in Texas and regionally."

The Hector Garza facility, once opened, will operate as a residential treatment facility treating clients in a staff secure setting. The facility has a total capacity for 122 residents. Program licensure has already been obtained from the Texas Department of Family Protective Services (TDFPS). As a result of start up expenses largely offsetting revenues from the initial contract for 25 clients, the reopening is expected to be earnings neutral for the third quarter and to increase earnings by $0.01 per diluted share for the fourth quarter of 2007. Consequently, management now expects fourth quarter 2007 earnings to range from $0.36 to $0.39 per diluted share and full year earnings to range from $0.79 to $0.85 per diluted share.

Statements regarding the reopening of the Hector Garza Treatment Center, including without limitation timing, occupancy levels and financial impact, as well as any other statements that are not historical facts, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws that involve certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions. These include but are not limited to Cornell's ability to perform according to its current expectations, changes in supply and demand, actions by governmental agencies and other third parties, and other factors detailed in the company's most recent Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available free of charge on the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those indicated.

About Cornell Companies

Cornell Companies, Inc. ( www.cornellcompanies.com) is a leading private provider of corrections, treatment and educational services outsourced by federal, state and local governmental agencies. Cornell provides a diversified portfolio of services for adults and juveniles, including incarceration and detention, transition from incarceration, drug and alcohol treatment programs, behavioral rehabilitation and treatment, and grades 3-12 alternative education in an environment of dignity and respect, emphasizing community safety and rehabilitation in support of public policy. The Company has 75 facilities in 15 states and the District of Columbia with a total service capacity of 17,452.

The Cornell Companies, Inc. logo is available at http://www.primezone.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=1468
This news release was distributed by PrimeNewswire, www.primenewswire.com

SOURCE: Cornell Companies, Inc.
Cornell Companies, Inc.
Investor Relations
Martin Spanski, Manager
(713) 623-0790

Posted by lois at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)

CT: Calif. ‘3-strikes’ law could be state model

Calif. ‘3-strikes’ law could be state model
Phil Helsel, New Haven Register Staff

A district attorney from California who believes strongly in the effectiveness of the "three strikes and you’re out" law said if Connecticut were to adopt a similar measure the state should model at least part of it on California’s law.

"The court should have the discretion to rein in a prosecutor who may overreach; there has to be checks and balances," said San Mateo County District Attorney James P. Fox., who has been district attorney for 25 years.

At first the law gave judges no leeway in imposing a 25-years-to-life sentence, but the California Supreme Court ruled in 1996 judges should be able to waive a third strike in "the furtherance of justice," which means those defendants would be treated as second strikers.

Connecticut Senate Republicans began calling for minimum mandatory sentences for repeat offenders days after paroled burglars Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes allegedly broke into the Sorghum Mill Drive home of Dr. William Petit Jr., and killed his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17.

A California-style three-strikes law would not have applied to Komisarjevsky or Hayes. Komisarjevsky had no record when he was caught for a string of burglaries and Hayes committed mainly low-rent car break-ins.

Republican senators say they are considering writing a law in Connecticut that would have guaranteed both life sentences.

Fox said Monday that he "misunderstood" Komisarjevsky’s criminal past when he last week said the serial burglar would have likely been given 25 years to life under that state’s law.

Len Fasano, R-North Haven, who is state Senate minority leader pro tempore, said Monday the Senate Republicans remain committed to a "three-strikes" law here, though neither Komisarjevsky nor Hayes would have been eligible under the California system.

Fasano said the issue would require "brief discussion," but a law could be written so that suspects with no criminal history could rack up all three strikes at one time for a burglary spree, like Komisarjevsky.

"That’s something we’re going to have to look into," Fasano said. "It could lose the word ‘prior’ and say that if you plead to three crimes and are convicted, you could get 25-to-life. We could absolutely write a law that would have gotten Komisarjevsky."
Fox said of his state’s system, "Absolutely it works. When I was first elected, we had three full-time prosecutors devoted to career criminal prosecution. Two years ago I eliminated the last of those positions, because we just aren’t seeing repeat offenders."

While Fox said he’s noticed a difference and the law allows prosecutors to keep the most dangerous felons off the streets, a 2005 report by that state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office found the law appears to have had little effect on preventing violent crime.

There was no noticeable difference in the decrease of violent crime rates between counties that prosecute "third strikers" more vigorously, than others where the law is used far less, the report says.

As of December 2004, 7,574 people had been given 25-to-life sentences under California’s three-strikes law; the report says about 43 percent of those got a third strike for a violent offense, 31 percent for property crimes such as burglary, 17 percent for a drug-related offenses, and 9 percent for weapon possession.

But what has drawn some of the most outrage at California’s law is a provision a researcher said "no one was even thinking about when the law was passed": It allows those already convicted for theft to accrue a third strike on another theft charge, no matter how small.

"If you did a musical comedy about California at the time (the law was passed) it would have been called ‘Anything Goes,’" said University of California at Berkeley law professor Franklin E. Zimring, who studied crime rates before and after the law was passed. "The only general mantra was that punishments should go up; it’s nuts."

The way it works is that if someone were previously convicted of petty theft, a prosecutor could elevate what would ordinarily be a misdemeanor charge to a felony; any felony can qualify for a third strike. If someone were convicted only of violent crimes in the past and gets picked up for shoplifting, the charge stays a misdemeanor.

"That means if I had two murder (convictions) and I steal a pack of gum, that’s a misdemeanor," Zimring said. "If I had two burglaries, it would be a felony and I would qualify for a third strike — that’s utterly nuts."

Leonardo Andrade, already convicted of three counts of burglary, petty theft and transporting marijuana, was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison for stealing five videotapes in 1995 in Montclair, Calif. Gary Ewing, a repeat felon whose prior convictions include burglary and robbery, is serving 25-to-life for shoplifting three golf clubs from an El Segundo, Calif., pro shop in 2000.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld both sentences in 2003, in a 5-4 vote.

Connecticut passed what was dubbed a "three strikes and you may be out" law in 1994 that gives judges power to sentence persistent dangerous offenders to life in prison on a third offense, but it is rarely used. It allows double sentences for a felon on a second conviction.

According to state Department of Correction records, there are 28 people serving prison terms under Connecticut’s repeat offender laws; of those, 21 were convicted of violent crimes such as murder and armed robbery, or burglary. Three are serving sentences greater than 60 years.

But infrequent enforcement of the law is more a product of the pretrial system than unwillingness of prosecutors to pursue it, prosecutors say. Most often it is used as a threat to induce someone to plead guilty.

The majority of criminal cases are settled in a plea agreement, after closed-door meetings between defense attorneys, prosecutors and judges. During pretrial conferences, judges review criminal records and tell both sides how much time they think a defendant should serve.

"When a judge tells you, ‘I think it’s worth five years (in prison), suspended after three and five years probation,’ why would we then go and file for a persistent offender?" said State’s Attorney Kevin Lawlor, who prosecutes serious felony cases in the Milford Judicial District. "Ultimately, sentencing is up to the court."

More often, the state’s persistent felony offender law is used in case a career criminal is convicted of a lesser charge at trial.

Michael Armfield, now 40, was acquitted of first-degree sexual assault in 2004, but a jury convicted him of a second-degree charge.

But Armfield, who had been convicted of raping a college student and trying to rape a North Carolina woman in the past, was sentenced to 24 years in prison for a charge ordinarily punishable by up to 10, using the persistent offender law.

The legislature’s Judiciary Committee will begin holding hearings on justice system reforms Sept. 11; Democrats have refused calls for a special legislative session.

But already some Democratic leaders, such as state House Speaker James A. Amann of Milford, said some Republican requests, such as classifying burglaries into occupied homes as a violent crime that would require convicts to serve at least 85 percent of their time, is something both sides can agree on.

Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield, said he believes a three-strikes law here is a matter of time, and he’s not troubled by stories of a man serving up to a life sentence in California for stealing golf clubs.

"I’d rather have that occur than another Cheshire," McKinney said. "I think at the end of the day, the legislature is pretty responsive to the demands of the people. This is something that the people of Connecticut are not going to let go."

http://www.nhregister.com/site/printerFriendly.cfm?brd=1281&dept_id=31007&newsid=18729647
©New Haven Register 2007

Posted by lois at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Prison Guards to Find Illegal Immigrants

Prison guards to find illegal alien cons
By Casey Ross
Boston Herald Reporter
Tuesday, August 21, 2007 - Updated: 04:08 AM EST

Gov. Deval Patrick is moving to expedite the deportation of hundreds of criminal aliens in state custody under a freshly inked deal that empowers correction officers to enforce federal immigration laws.
The terms of the new deal took effect yesterday as 10 state correction officers began training that will allow them to initiate deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants who currently can only be removed by federal officers.
“This helps the Department of Correction identify criminal aliens so that they won’t slip through the cracks and get back out on the street,” said Mary Beth Heffernan, an undersecretary of public safety in the Patrick administration. “The point is to make the process more streamlined.”
The pact, which was signed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that enforces immigration laws, was conceived by Patrick as a substitute for a more aggressive policy initiated by former Gov. Mitt Romney.
Romney had sought to deputize state troopers who would be empowered to arrest illegal aliens during the course of investigations and begin deportation proceedings. That plan, which was halted by Patrick, was applauded by conservatives but harshly criticized by immigrant advocates, who said it would prevent immigrants from cooperating with police.
Under Patrick’s plan, the state would only be empowered to initiate deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants who are first convicted of other crimes. The deal entails posting five correction officers in the Framingham and Concord prisons to identify illegal immigrants and begin efforts to remove them from the country.

http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=1018205

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

TX: Private Prisons: License to Ill

Private Prisons: License to Ill
August 20th, 2007
Texas Observer Blog

Everybody on the outside loves a good mystery. This one comes to us from Del Rio, home of the Val Verde Correctional Facility, a private detention center run by the Florida-based Geo Group. It seems detainees at the 875-bed lockup have been getting sick and dying from what the San Antonio Express-News dubbed a “mysterious illness.” [Cue creepy Twilight Zone theme.] So far two inmates have died and two more have been hospitalized. More people, including guards, are rumored to have fallen ill. Three of the men were undocumented immigrants from Honduras and Mexico.

The men showed symptoms of erratic behavioral changes followed by incontinence and dehydration, reported the Express-News. Geo Group officials and the Texas Department of State Health Services haven’t figured out what befell the men, so they’ve called in the big guns from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate. The CDC team has not provided any answers publicly, but have promised a statement soon.

The criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast wonders if the Unsolved Mystery could be tuberculosis, a jailhouse scourge. State health officials haven’t ruled that possibility out. “I can’t tell you it isn’t tuberculosis,” Dr. Sandra Guerra-Cantu, an official with state health services told the Del Rio News Herald. “The presence of tuberculosis is almost expected in any correctional facility.”

That equivocation doesn’t sit well with Grits.

Because of its method of transmission, prisons and jails are a prime breeding ground for TB. But for exactly those reasons health officials should be scurrying to prevent it. If TB was the cause of not one but two inmate deaths in Del Rio, that’s a much bigger deal than Guerra-Cantu makes it out to be.

Incidentally, at another Geo-run detention camp in Tacoma, Washington 300 immigrant detainees recently became sick, possibly from food poisoning. But officials aren’t sure and are calling that incident a “mystery” as well.

But what’s not a mystery is that like many for-profit prison operators, Geo Group’s track record in Texas does not inspire confidence in its ability to prevent or manage problems. (The company owns and/or operates 18 “corrections” facilities in the state.) Geo’s corporate rap sheet is longer than that of its inmates. Two high-profile lawsuits have highlighted conditions at the Val Verde prison, which holds detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, and also county inmates. A 2006 suit brought by the Texas Civil Rights Project blamed Geo for the death of 23-year-old LeTisha Tapia, who hung herself in 2003 after allegedly being raped and beaten. The suit was settled for $200,000 earlier this year. As part of the settlement, an independent monitor was appointed to oversee the facility.

A discrimination lawsuit, filed in 2005 by a former guard who is African American, alleged that a jail supervisor had a fondness for KKK paraphernalia, which he kept in his office. Last year, in Willacy County, a jury returned a $47.5 million verdict to the family of a man who was beaten to death by other inmates, finding that Geo Group (then called Wackenhut) were negligent in the man’s death. In July, MSNBC reported on an inmate suicide, linked to squalid conditions, in a Geo-run lockup in Spur. A top Idaho prison authority investigating the Spur jail, where Idaho had sent a surplus of its offenders, declared it the worst facility he had ever seen and “beyond repair.”

But the steady drumbeat of scandal has done little to harm the company’s bottom line. Geo’s second-quarter profits are up 96 percent and the stock has made analysts’ “buy” lists. The CEO of Geo, George Zoley, told analysts recently that they typically squeeze a 25-30 percent profit margin out of each prisoner in the facilities they own, such as Val Verde. That brings to mind a troubling, if entirely unoriginal, thought: what if the unbelievable profit margins are the product of running an inhumanely bare-bones operation?
by Forrest Wilder

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007
http://www.texasobserver.org/blog/?p=554

Posted by lois at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2007

Padilla Case Offers New Model of Terrorism Trial

August 18, 2007
News Analysis
Padilla Case Offers New Model of Terrorism Trial
By ADAM LIPTAK

There were two perfectly predictable schools of thought being expressed after the conviction of Jose Padilla on Thursday on terrorism-related charges. Supporters of the Bush administration said the conviction justified the more than three years Mr. Padilla spent in military detention before his criminal prosecution, while the administration’s opponents said the verdict proved that the criminal justice system should have handled the case in the first place.

But the real innovation in Mr. Padilla’s case, some legal experts said yesterday, was more subtle than those dueling talking points suggested. The Justice Department’s strategy in the trial itself, using a seldom-tested conspiracy law and relatively thin evidence, cemented a new prosecutorial model in terrorism cases.

The central charge against Mr. Padilla was that he conspired to murder, maim and kidnap people in a foreign country. The charge is a serious one, and it can carry a life sentence. But prosecutors needed to prove very little by way of concrete conduct to obtain a conviction under the law.

“There is no need to show any particular violent crime,” said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University and the author of a recent law review article on conspiracy charges in terrorism prosecutions. “You don’t have to specify the particular means used to carry out the crime.”

Indeed, the strongest piece of evidence in Mr. Padilla’s case was what prosecutors said was an application form Mr. Padilla filled out to attend a training camp run by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2000.

“It is a pretty big leap between a mere indication of desire to attend a camp and a crystallized desire to kill, maim and kidnap,” said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University who has also written on conspiracy charges in terrorism prosecutions.

The conspiracy charge against Mr. Padilla, Professor Margulies continued, “is highly amorphous, and it basically allows someone to be found guilty for something that is one step away from a thought crime.”

Prosecutors have long loved conspiracy charges in all kinds of cases. Judge Learned Hand, widely thought to be the greatest American judge never to sit on the Supreme Court, called conspiracy “that darling of the modern prosecutor’s nursery” in a classic 1925 decision. More recently, Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, now the chief judge of the federal appeals court in Chicago, lamented that “prosecutors seem to have conspiracy on their word processors as Count I.”

But recent terrorism prosecutions are doing more than using an old tool with new aggressiveness, legal experts said. They are also using it for a new purpose: preventive detention.

Before allowing Mr. Padilla to be tried in the federal courts, the administration justified holding him as an enemy combatant in part by saying he would be dangerous if let go. Criminal prosecutions, by contrast, are almost always focused on conduct already committed.

But the sharp split between military detention and criminal prosecution starts to blur as conspiracy charges are added to the mix.

That is because conspiracies aim at the future. A successful conspiracy prosecution looks both backward, to punish the crime of conspiring, and forward, to stop dangerous people from completing their plans. The weaker the evidence of conspiracy is, the more such a prosecution can look like a request for judicially sanctioned preventive detentions.

In opinion articles and academic commentary, lawyers and law professors across the political spectrum have been arguing in recent months about whether the criminal law should be supplemented by legislation authorizing preventive detention. The Padilla verdict suggests that something similar may have already been achieved in the courts.

There was a second justification for Mr. Padilla’s prolonged military detention. In a sworn statement in 2003, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, then the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told a federal judge in New York that Mr. Padilla should be interrogated without access to a lawyer.

“It is critical to minimize external influences on the interrogation process,” Admiral Jacoby wrote. “Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool.”

That sort of intensive and isolated interrogation, which Mr. Padilla lawyers have said caused him lasting psychiatric problems, could not have been accomplished in the criminal justice system, where the Constitution guarantees legal representation and other due process protections.

But Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in her controlling opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the 2004 Supreme Court decision that endorsed the detention of at least some enemy combatants to prevent their return to the battlefield, rejected interrogation as a rationale for detention.

That same year, the Supreme Court ruled on a procedural question in the Padilla case but did not discuss whether his detention was proper. Just before the Supreme Court was to decide whether to hear his case again, the administration moved him to the criminal justice system.

If Thursday’s verdict is upheld, the administration may thus have achieved the last in a series of practical victories. It held and interrogated Mr. Padilla without interference from the courts, and now it has convicted him of a crime that could put him away for life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/18/us/nationalspecial3/18legal.html?ex=1188100800&en=ae497bcb24efa37d&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Posted by lois at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2007

TIME Magazine: NY Mandatory Sentencing: Stalled Reform

TIME Magazine

Mandatory Sentencing: Stalled Reform
Friday, Aug. 17, 2007 By MADISON GRAY/NEW YORK

The most painful thing to Cheri O'Donaghue about her son's incarceration on drug charges is not the imprisonment itself, but that he is serving the sentence that should go to a narcotics kingpin when all he committed, she says, was the crime of a small-time pusher. Her son Ashley was found guilty of delivering cocaine to two college students in upstate New York in 2003. He was sentenced to seven to 21 years in prison, a penalty mandated by New York's controversial Rockefeller Drug Laws. Ashley is among about 14,000 people sent to New York prisons under the Rockefeller laws, in force since 1973, which impose harsh mandatory minimum terms on even first time offenders ‹ meaning they could get the same sentence as a person convicted of second degree murder.

O'Donaghue once had hope for a positive change in her son's situation. That was because there was a movement to change the Rockefeller laws. The momentum behind that reform, however, has now stagnated as prosecutors and legislators fear that changes in the law are being used as loopholes to free drug lords. With no light at the end of the tunnel, she and other activists fighting for a repeal feel the laws may never change and many of the state's imprisoned ‹ her son included ‹ continue to languish in jail. "The movement is definitely stalled, and we're trying to gain some momentum again, but it's very hard," said O'Donaghue. "I never would have dreamed in the beginning of this that it would have taken this long to get Ashley out."

Right now, the only hope for a change is a prison sentencing reform committee set up by Gov. Eliot Spitzer that has only recently begun to hold preliminary meetings and whose final report is not expected until early 2008. The activists remain committed in their cause, but for now can only deal with the frustration of having a loved one jailed under what they feel are unfair rules. Critics say that the law ignores major drug dealers and only imprisons minor players in the drug trade. For this reason, they argue, it incarcerates a disproportionate number of minorities. Indeed, since the laws were enacted, more than 90% of those sentenced have been black or Latino, according to the group Real Reform New York.

Over the last decade, activists, ex-convicts, families, politicians and even celebrities have become increasingly vocal about the laws. Reforms to the sentencing structure were enacted with the 2004 Drug Law Reform Act, which allows for reduced retroactive sentencing, and at first seemed to bring the laws closer to repeal. But they have only applied to about 1,000 people and only 350 have been released, says Anthony Papa, an official with the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group committed to changing the nation's drug laws. The reforms, he says, were not enough because the change applies to too few of the people currently serving time.

"In my view as an activist who experienced the law, this was sort of a buy off to satisfy people who have been fighting for years," said Papa, who himself was sentenced to 15 years to life after selling cocaine to undercover cops, but granted clemency by then-Gov. George Pataki in 1997. "People saw it was watered-down reform because it really destroyed the movement, because now legislators have a tool they can use to say 'we have a law now, lets move on. said Papa .

Instead of new legislation, Gov. Spitzer's seven-member commission will conduct reviews of the state's toughest sentencing practices, under which the Rockefeller laws fall. But it is unlikely to bring about a full repeal of the laws, leaving O'Donaghue to wonder if a change will ever come. "These things keep carrying over and you just wonder when it's all going to be done," O'Donaghue asked. "When we get the final report? After the next legislative session?"

Activists like O'Donaghue and Papa, argue the stiffest penalties should be reserved for major narcotics traffickers, not small handlers. But the reason they have gained little in their fight is that some state legislators believe the changes in the law were enough and that many of those who have already been released are really major drug traffickers who should still be imprisoned, and further reform could prove dangerous.

"We did the reform and as a result, we provided for discretion and reductions in sentencing," said State Sen. George Winner, who explained that the changes that already resulted in loopholes for people who once controlled major drug operations. "I am not in favor of further weakening the drug law sentencing provisions. I agree that the drug kingpins should have the stiffest penalties, but some of them are using the reforms to their advantage and getting out. As a result of these things, I think we should go slow about it."

Bridget Brennan, a special narcotics prosecutor in New York City has the same fear as Winner that violent offenders and drug kingpins are beginning to win reduced sentences. "There was a mythology about who is serving these sentences," said Brennan, who was a homicide prosecutor during the height of the city's crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. "It was the image of a woman forced to be a drug courier. But when we looked at those applying to change their sentences, there were only two women: one who supervised the shipment of 155 kilos of cocaine and the other had more than a pound of cocaine in her apartment."

"There is no statute to address the narcotics trafficker who we commonly see in New York City," she said. "As a homicide prosecutor, 60% of my cases came from drug sales. I don't want to see this city again the way it was." Until they win a change in sentencing guidelines, activists hope to win support for their cause simply by spreading the word. They hope a planned wide release of a documentary entitled Lockdown USA, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006, will help restart a push for reform. "The problem is that they are using a prison cell to address what should be public health issue," says Gabriel Sayegh, a project director at the Drug Policy Alliance. "This isn't the criminal justice system we're supposed to have in this country."

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1653862,00.html>

Posted by lois at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)

OK: Faith programs offered to relieve prison overcrowding

Faith programs offered to relieve prison overcrowding

By TIM TALLEY
Associated Press
Sapulpa Daily Herald (OK)
McLOUD, Okla. (AP) — Rebecca Stidman never expected her conviction for armed robbery to become a faith-building experience.
But the same criminal justice system that sent Stidman to the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center for five years is encouraging her to turn to God to avoid making the same mistake again.
“Being here and sitting still, I’ve had time to learn my God better,” said Stidman, 35, of Tulsa, one of about 100 women inmates enrolled in Mabel Bassett’s faith-based prison program.

“I’ve learned that you can have a relationship with God.”
The one-year motivational course is among a growing list of alternative and diversionary criminal justice programs designed to either direct offenders away from costly prison stays through specialized drug and mental health courts or change the behavior of inmates — changes that can lead to less misconduct in prison, fewer repeat offenders and lower prison costs.
“That’s what we’re all about — changing criminal thinking,” said Millicent Newton-Embry, warden at Mabel Bassett.
Since a robbery conviction four years ago, Mabel Bassett inmate Jimmie Jones said she has struggled to cope with her anger. “Personal issues that I didn’t want to accept,” said Jones, 34, of McAlester, who is enrolled in the faith-based program.
Jones said her anger used to boil over into fights with other inmates at the women’s prison. Participation in the prison’s faith program has helped her become calmer.
“Before this program I wanted to change but I had no direction,” Jones said. “I’ve learned that it’s all right to be angry. You’ve just got to control it. You’ve got to find a way to channel.
“You’ve got to want to change. It’s got to be in you to want to do better.”
———
Their gray prison uniforms blend well with the heavy gray-painted metal doors that confine the women of Mabel Bassett in their cells.
But the rock star-like reception the women gave to one of their own who serenaded them with a booming falsetto voice seemed foreign to the prison environment and more like an American Idol competition.
“I just can’t give up now,” the inmate sang as dozens of others rose from their work tables and joined in.
“I’ve come too far from where I started from,” they sang. “Nobody told me that the road would be easy.”
The song culminated a session of the prison’s character-based program in which inmates learn to identify 49 traits of good character — traits like compassion, forgiveness, justice and self-control — and practice mastering them.
John Carruthers, a prison case manager who coordinates the program, said the prison has experienced a dramatic decrease in reports of misconduct among the program’s participants.
“It reinforces values and gives an individual a different understanding of morals, character traits,” Carruthers said. “Over here we’ve had a dramatic turnaround.”
Patricia Rucker, 37, of Muskogee, serving a life-with-parole sentence for murder, is one of about 100 women enrolled in the program.
“This character program has changed me,” Rucker said. “You’ve got to want to want it. I need change in my life.”
Dana Barker, 31, of McAlester, serving life without parole for first-degree murder, said the program had made a difference in how she responds to adversity behind bars.
“It makes a difference in how I look at myself,” Barker said.
The program, tailored for long-term inmates, helps change the culture of prison inmates by reducing violence and tension, especially in young inmates who have just been admitted to the prison system.
“Make it a better place,” Barker said. “In society those things wouldn’t be acceptable. Why should they be acceptable here?
“I think this program may help calm some of those younger people down.”
———
The parallel programs were launched at Mabel Bassett on March 1. Similar programs for men are under way at the Oklahoma State Reformatory at Granite, a medium security prison, and are planned for the Dick Connor Correctional Center in Hominy.
Earlier this year, Gov. Brad Henry signed legislation that encourages faith-based and volunteer groups to take a stronger role in rehabilitating Oklahoma inmates. The proposal, a priority of Republican legislative leaders, was an extension of President Bush’s initiative for faith-based government services.
The current programs are planned and conducted by Department of Corrections staff workers and financed by DOC operating funds. But $100,000 in state funds will be appropriated to faith-based initiatives under this year’s legislation.
In addition, a policy council composed of lawmakers, prosecutors, crime victims and former inmates will review prison re-entry policies for inmates about to leave prison and suggest improvements.
Critics of the legislation have said it may violate the constitutional separation between church and state and give faith-based groups some of lawmakers’ oversight authority over the state Department of Corrections.
Last year, a federal judge ruled that a Bible-based prison program at a prison in Iowa violated the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause by using state funds to promote Christianity to inmates. Oklahoma’s faith-based program is based on a variety of religious teachings but does not focus on a specific religion, officials said.
The new programs were inspired by similar faith- and character-building programs in other states that have reduced recidivism and helped control inmate populations. Inmates in Florida who participate in religious services are 28 percent less likely to re-offend, said the Rev. Leo Brown Jr., chaplain and volunteer coordinator for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
Currently, more than 3,000 volunteers, many of them from churches and other faith-based groups, provide as many as 100 religious services and faith-based programs to inmates each month, Brown said. Volunteers also offer substance abuse, marriage and family skills programs that have had an impact on prisoner conduct.
“Their behavior is changing. Their attitudes are changing,” Brown said.
Similar results have been experienced in surrounding states. Nine faith-based programs are operated in six states — including Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas — by Prison Fellowship Ministries. The organization was founded in 1976 by Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to President Richard Nixon who served seven months in a federal prison after pleading guilty to a Watergate-related charge.
“We have found it to be very effective,” said Mark Earley, former attorney general of Virginia and president of PFM. The group’s prison programs, called InnerChange Freedom Initiative, are based on Christian principles and privately funded, Earley said. Inmates participate in the program for up to 24 months prior to release and up to 12 months after they leave prison.release.
Inmate participants who graduated from the program had a 17 percent recidivism rate for arrests and 8 percent for re-incarceration after two years, Earley said.
“There’s a growing awareness for the need of these across the country,” he said.
———
Over the past decade, Oklahoma has become a national leader in its support of specialized courts that offer alternatives to incarceration, according to judicial and substance abuse officials.
Drug courts offer therapeutic alternatives to incarceration for drug and alcohol offenders and judicial sanctions if treatment requirements are not met. They have operated in Oklahoma for more than a decade.
Since state funding for drug courts was substantially expanded in 2005, the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment estimates that drug courts have slowed the expansion of Oklahoma’s prison population by over 2,300 inmates — the number of additional admissions had drug court participants gone to prison.
However, the state’s inmate population has continued to rise.
Last month, there were 25,160 state inmates in public and private prisons — an increase of more than 1,000 inmates from the previous year, the Department of Corrections said. Criminal justice officials have warned that an additional 900 inmates are expected to enter the state’s penal system in 2008.
Currently, 37 drug courts serve 51 Oklahoma counties. The Legislature has appropriated $19.5 million for operational costs and the courts can accommodate up to 4,000 drug and alcohol offenders.
Diverting the offenders from prison saves money, said Terri White, commission of the state agency. It costs the state $5,000 a year to treat an offender in drug court but $16,000 a year to incarcerate an offender in a state prisons
“It’s much more effective than incarceration, that’s what the data shows,” White said. After four years, 54.3 percent of offenders released from prison and 38 percent of offenders who successfully completed a standard probation program were re-arrested. But only 23.5 percent of drug court graduates were re-arrested over the same time period.
The state also operates 14 mental health courts, which bring the judicial and mental health treatment communities together to care for offenders with mental health issues. Similar to drug courts, the specialized courts are designed to help people get mental health treatment, manage their lives and stay out of jail.
Mentally ill inmates are one of the fastest growing inmate populations in state prisons, according to prison Director Justin Jones.
“We’re seeing the exact same results as drug court,” White said. “When they finally receive the help they need, the success rate is as good or better than treatment of any other disease.
“The effectiveness of those choices have made a huge difference.”

Copyright © 1999-2006 cnhi, inc.
http://www.sapulpadailyherald.com/local/local_story_230112258.html

Posted by lois at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)

CT: Neighbors of Home Invasion Victims Demand Stricter Repeat-Offender Laws

2 articles below

August 16, 2007
Neighbors of Home Invasion Victims Demand Stricter Repeat-Offender Laws
By CHRISTINE STUART

CHESHIRE, Conn., Aug. 15 — Cheshire residents, angered by revelations that the men suspected of killing three members of a prominent family in a home invasion robbery last month had been paroled after convictions for burglary, rallied in a town park on Wednesday to demand stricter laws to keep repeat offenders behind bars.

“I don’t think it’s asking too much to protect those you love by helping this never happen again,” said Jessica Ryan, who circulated an online petition calling for stricter laws.

Marilyn Bartoli, who helped organize the rally at Bartlem Park, said, “I’m not telling lawmakers how to do their job, but what we have is not working.”

The rally, which drew about 300 people, was held in response to the July 23 killings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, who along with Ms. Hawke-Petit’s husband, Dr. William A. Petit Jr., 50, had been held hostage in their home for seven hours.

The authorities have said that Ms. Hawke-Petit was strangled and she and the girls doused with gasoline before the house was set on fire. Dr. Petit was beaten but managed to escape, and he and other members of his family attended the rally.

The two men arrested, Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, of Cheshire, and Steven J. Hayes, 44, of Winsted, have long records for burglary and a history of recidivism, yet records show they were not treated as serious offenders by the criminal justice system.

Several speakers at the rally called for a stronger repeat-offender law in Connecticut, similar to California’s “three strikes” law, which is considered among the most severe in the nation. The California law calls for an automatic 25-year-to-life sentence for the third felony conviction of an offender whose previous convictions were for violent or serious felonies.

Under Connecticut’s persistent serious felony offender law, a prosecutor can seek an increased sentence if the offender has been convicted and incarcerated for one previous felony.

But State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, an East Haven Democrat who is co-chairman of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Tuesday that even a law as tough as California’s would not have kept the two suspects in the Cheshire case behind bars.

He pointed out that Mr. Komisarjevsky had just one previous felony conviction despite his arrests in a rash of residential nighttime burglaries, and that in Mr. Hayes’s case, a prosecutor had not taken the opportunity to seek a longer sentence for a subsequent conviction.

According to State Department of Correction records, only 28 people are in prison or jail under the current persistent-offender law, which was enacted in 1994. Connecticut’s total prison population has been approximately 19,000 for the past eight to nine months, a department spokesman said.

A search of the Correction Department database shows that the crimes of the 28 offenders vary greatly, from murder to violation of probation. Similarly, their sentences show a wide range, from 80 years to six months.

Only one of the 28 offenders is considered a “dangerous persistent felony offender.” He was sentenced in 2002 to 13 years for third-degree burglary.

Mr. Hayes, who has been in and out of the prison system for two decades, began serving a five-year sentence for breaking into a car in 2003. He had served three years and was out on parole last fall when he failed a drug test at a halfway house and was sent back to prison to serve seven more months. By May, he was out on parole again.

The prosecutor involved in Mr. Hayes’s 2003 conviction chose not to seek a longer sentence, Mr. Lawlor said, but even if Mr. Hayes had committed his crimes in California, they would not have triggered the automatic 25-years-to-life sentence because they are not considered violent or serious felonies in that state.

Bruce Carlson, a board member of Survivors of Homicide, a Connecticut-based organization of families who have lost a loved one to murder, said on Tuesday that the courts had “very wide discretionary powers over when to apply the enhanced stiff sentences to repeat offenders.” He said the current process “is much too loose.”

Connecticut’s victim advocate, James Papillo, said these failings made it important for Connecticut to adopt the Petit Home Invasion Act, a proposal he made last week that would classify a home invasion as a serious felony offense. “It was designed to be very tough on repeat offenders,” Mr. Papillo said.

Mr. Papillo said the reclassification, in addition to a tougher persistent-offender law, would begin to solve some of the problems.

Mr. Lawlor said the legislature’s Judiciary Committee would begin looking at “three strike” models from other states, including California, on Sept. 11.

In an e-mail message on Wednesday, Mr. Lawlor said the committee would receive a briefing from state criminal justice officials about its current sentencing and re-entry process. He said it would also gather information about the costs of programs in other states and would hear about possible sites for new prison facilities.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2007/08/13/conn_to_tra
ck_200_paroled_burglars/

Conn. to track 200 paroled burglars

August 13, 2007

HARTFORD -- More than 200 paroled burglars in Connecticut will be fitted with global tracking devices as part of the state's response to last month's horrific home invasion in Cheshire that claimed the life of a woman and her two daughters.

The state is expected to spend about $40,000 a month for the GPS tracking, one of several changes to the parole system ordered by Governor M. Jodi Rell after Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and daughters Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17, were found dead in their home on July 23.

Paroled burglars Joshua Komisarjevsky, 27, and Steven Hayes, 44, were caught fleeing from the burning house, and face charges including capital felony, which could carry the death sentence.

On Aug. 2, the state Department of Correction began fitting all parolees out on first- and second-degree burglary convictions with radio frequency electronic monitoring devices, said Stacy Smith, a department spokeswoman. By the end of September, those will be upgraded to the more expensive GPS devices, she said.

The electronic monitors notify authorities when a parolee leaves a designated area, but the GPS systems will allow the state to find out exactly where they have been, Smith said.

There are 210 people convicted of first- or second-degree burglary currently "released into the community" at halfway houses, transitional housing, or on parole, Smith said.

Smith said it would be impossible to gauge how much money the increased monitoring will cost in the long term, because the number of offenders on parole fluctuates as more are paroled and others complete their terms. Using the current figures, once all parolees are monitored using GPS devices, the cost would be $456,067 per year.

Judges sometimes order convicts to pay for the cost of their monitoring once released on parole or probation, but Smith said the state is paying the tab to monitor the paroled burglars.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted by lois at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)

San Quentin: A Prisoner With a Paintbrush, a Legacy at Risk

View the murals here:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/08/17/arts/20070819_HALL_FEATURE.html

August 19, 2007
Art, NY Times 8-19-07
A Prisoner With a Paintbrush, a Legacy at Risk
By CHRISTOPHER HALL

San Quentin, Calif.

BEHIND the 150-year-old granite walls of San Quentin State Prison lies a brutal world of physical confinement and mind-numbing monotony, a place where violence constantly threatens. It is not a place where you expect to find beauty, and perhaps this best explains the dumbfounded reaction of a first-time visitor to the prison’s cavernous dining hall, where six epic murals — each measuring roughly 12 feet high by 100 feet long — depict a populist vision of California history.

V

Remarkably powerful and almost unknown to the outside world, the sepia-tone murals were created more than 50 years ago by a young Mexican-American prisoner who, after serving four years for possession of heroin, went on to a successful career as an artist. Painted mostly in a style that recalls Diego Rivera or Works Progress Administration murals from the 1930s, they almost certainly would have been protected long ago with a landmark designation if they were in a building to which the public had access. But hidden away in an overcrowded and decaying prison whose own fate is up in the air, the murals face an uncertain future.

The murals’ creator, Alfredo Santos, was 24 when he arrived at San Quentin in 1951 in the back of an ambulance. “I had a bum leg from an infection,” Mr. Santos, 80, said by telephone from San Diego, where he now lives on Social Security. “They put me in the convalescent wing, and the prison doc told me, ‘Keep quiet, kid, and I’ll let you stay here.’ ”

Mr. Santos, who had taken high school art classes until he was expelled from 10th grade for striking a teacher, remained in convalescent cells his entire prison stay. At first he read books voraciously, he said, and drew portraits of other inmates and, from photographs, their families. “I got paid a lot of cigarettes,” he recalled, referring to the standard currency behind bars. “But I also got to really focus on art. San Quentin is where I became an artist.”

In 1953, two years after he was locked up, Mr. Santos submitted the winning sketch in a competition among the inmates to paint a mural on one side of a dining hall partition. After inexplicably being denied the use of other colors, he began to apply thinned, raw sienna oil paint directly to plaster. Before long the warden ordered Mr. Santos to paint all three double-sided walls in the dining area.

For two years he worked at night in the company of guards and two other inmates, who helped with the scaffold. “Sometimes I painted for a couple of hours, and sometimes I kept at it until sunrise,” he said. “They let me go at my own pace.”

The murals chronicle not only California’s history, but also the evolution of Mr. Santos’s style. The first scenes, including an Indian village and the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, are rendered in the listless fashion of a 1950s textbook illustration, with isolated vignettes surrounded by areas of blank wall. “At the beginning I wanted to be conservative, to please the prison officials,” he said.

But soon vignettes crowd the walls, playing like a crazy newsreel of random images; at one point a covered wagon rumbles westward not far from where an owlish Groucho Marx peeps over a movie screen. Unifying compositional elements — the World War II bomber that dominates the fourth mural, for example — lend a W.P.A.-era monumentality.

The fifth mural, with its oil well gushing from a huge human arm and its gargantuan hog carcasses dangling from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, feels far more hallucinatory and dreamlike. Interspersed with the grand images are small, humorous scenes, like a man with binoculars gazing at a high-rise window where a woman is undressing and a burly World War II inductee (the portrait of a much-hated prison guard) wincing as a doctor gives him a shot.

The sixth and final mural, whose style might be best described as Expressionism meets Saturday morning cartoons, depicts rodeos, fairs, football games and other public events. It fairly explodes with comical, hatchet-faced characters, from flamenco dancers at a mission fiesta to fans thronging a Hollywood premiere. “That mural is 100 percent original,” Mr. Santos said. “I wanted to give the guys something to laugh at, but I can tell you that I worked real fast on it, since my parole date was coming up. I didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to keep me.”

Eduardo Pineda, a longtime community muralist, is the director of education for the Museum of the African Diaspora in nearby San Francisco and has visited the murals. “What Santos does with space and perspective is very sophisticated,” he said. “The murals are highly cinematic, with powerful narration.”

Though for decades the murals remained in excellent condition, they now are defaced in places by prisoner graffiti. “San Quentin used to be populated exclusively by long-term inmates, and respect for the murals was part of the older prison culture,” said Lt. Eric Messick, San Quentin’s public information officer. “But around 1988 we also became a reception center for newly sentenced inmates, and most of them are younger guys who just don’t have the connection with the murals. That’s when the tagging started.”

Steve Emerick, who runs the prison’s Arts in Corrections program, said that the inmates themselves could do the required restoration if they were trained or supervised by an expert. “But that requires funding we simply don’t have,” he said. Restorations were carried out in the late 1960s, when a clear protective coating was applied, and again in the 1990s.

A greater threat to the murals may be the continuing tug of war over closing all or part of San Quentin. Established in 1852, it is California’s oldest and possibly most dilapidated prison, and its 432 prime waterfront acres are coveted by developers and local governments. A 2003 preliminary redevelopment study called for preserving the murals but without indicating how or where. A current bill in the California Assembly would prohibit construction of a proposed new death row at San Quentin until the state studies moving the execution chamber elsewhere.

After his parole in 1955, Mr. Santos worked at Disneyland as a caricaturist and then opened a studio and gallery in San Diego, his hometown. But after pleading guilty to possession of marijuana, he fled to Mexico, where he owned a succession of galleries in Guadalajara, Mexico City and Acapulco. Returning to the United States in 1967, he painted, made sculptures of carved wood and found objects and ran a popular gallery and bohemian gathering spot in the Catskills village of Fleischmanns, N.Y. (An exhibition of his work is on display there through Aug. 31 at the Art et cetera gallery.) More than 20 years ago, after a divorce and a heart attack, he moved back to San Diego.

Though his San Quentin murals are among the most significant works of Mr. Santos’s career, for years even close friends knew nothing of them. “I never bragged about the murals because I was too embarrassed to tell people I’d been to prison as a young man,” he said.

In 2003 he returned to San Quentin to see the murals for the first time in nearly a half century. “Someone put a shiny varnish on them that I didn’t like,” he recalled, “but it made me happy to look at them again and to think about all the guys who might have enjoyed them over the
years.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/arts/design/19hall.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)

"Aiming to Protect and Serve" Control Industry Booming

Aiming To Protect And Serve
August 17, 2007: 08:05 PM EST

Aug. 17, 2007 (Investor's Business Daily delivered by Newstex) --

Terror plots, airport security breaches and identify theft have become familiar fears in today's post-9/11 world.

And if that weren't worrisome enough, ongoing threats of violent crimes, home invasions and carjackings are keeping consumers and businesses on edge.

That's proved a boon for companies in IBD's security and safety stock group, which as of Friday ranked No. 38 among IBD's 197 industry segments .

As the Iraq War drives sales of military protective gear, ordinary crime is fueling demand for products such as Taser devices, surveillance systems, vehicle recovery systems and scanning systems.

"The aftermath of 9/11 has created a continuing and accelerating backdrop for revenue in the security companies, whether they be military related or homeland security related or ultimately commercially related," said analyst Jeffrey Kessler of Lehman Bros.

1. Business

The group comprises a disparate lot of companies. But they share a similar goal: to protect lives and property.

Take Taser International (NASDAQ:TASR) TASR. It caters to law enforcement and the military with its namesake "less-than-lethal weapons."

The Taser uses proprietary technology to stun dangerous subjects with a jolt of electricity. It's a safer alternative to other uses of force, such as firing a gun.

Police departments see an 80% reduction in officer injuries when they roll out Tasers, says Eric Wold, an analyst at Merriman Curhan Ford. And officers don't have to put their lives at risk.

In the U.S., 11,500 of the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies are using or testing Taser technology, says Tom Smith, Taser's chairman and co-founder.

"For someone approving a budget for a police department we can show them a return on investment," he said.

Officers using a Taser are injured less often, he says, cutting on paid leave. And the use of Tasers reduces the chances officers will have to wrestle down people they're arresting, curtailing excessive force claims.

Another company in the group is Corrections Corp. of America (NYSE:CXW) CXW, which builds and manages prisons and detention centers.

Most of Correction Corp.'s revenue comes from facilities it owns. CEO John Ferguson says that most of its rivals manage government-owned facilities.

The key to CCA's business is to maintain confidence in the quality of its service, says Ferguson. As a private prison operator, CCA is required to keep nearby communities safe. At the same time it has to provide quality medical care, food service and education to inmates.

"We can provide the services for less money than our customers do," Ferguson said. Those customers are 20 state governments and federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service.

The company's biggest value is its ability to provide prisoner space on an as-needed basis, Ferguson says. Governments have a hard time planning and building prisons.

American Medical Alert AMAC provides home health-monitoring systems to the elderly, disabled and chronically ill. Its portfolio includes personal emergency response systems and electronic medication reminders.

It also operates health care communications centers that serve as 24-hour access points for patients.

Its business is driven by subscriptions from older or ill people who want to remain independent, says Frederic Siegel, the firm's executive vice president.

The upshot: savings on medical costs. More than 8 million people with chronic diseases absorb two-thirds of all health care spending.

"When you have adverse risks, these devices allow health care providers to intervene before an episode occurs," Siegel said. "The driver is cost savings."

Increased nurse productivity and early intervention to medical emergencies ultimately reduce hospital admissions and length of stay.

Name Of The Game: The safety and security business hinges on strong ties with customers. Products and services must work as promised. Customer trust is key.

2. Market

U.S. demand for private contracted security services will grow 4.3% a year to $48 billion in 2010, according to a report by analyst Jennifer Mapes of the Freedonia Group, a market research firm. This tally includes alarm monitoring, armored transport and correctional facilities management.

She sees correctional facilities management revenue rising to $2.7 billion by 2010, more than double the $1.2 billion posted in 2000.

Top players in the private prison operators segment include CCA, GEO Group GEO and Cornell Companies (NYSE:CRN) CRN. The four major private correctional facility management firms collectively have about 156,000 beds, or spaces for prisoners, says CCA's Ferguson. CCA, with roughly 72,500 beds, has about half of that total.

In the armored transport market, Brink's BCO is the world's No. 1 player.

Taser's only rival is stun products maker Stinger Systems. "The world is (Taser's) oyster right now," said analyst Wold.

Taser has proved the value of its product to law enforcement agencies and is now seeing an acceleration in orders, he says. He figures about 20% of police and correctional officers in the U.S. carry a Taser. Overseas, the figure is less than 5%. So there's a lot of opportunity worldwide, he says.

The security market is fragmented and consolidating, says analyst Kessler. British Aerospace and defense company BAE Systems in July bought Armor Holdings, which makes military vehicles, vehicle armor systems and safety gear. Armor is the leader in armored vehicles, Kessler says.

3. Climate

Private prison operators are benefiting from overcrowding and soaring occupancy rates at state and federal facilities.

At the end of 2005 there were about 2.2 million prisoners in state, federal and local jails, says Kevin Campbell, an analyst with Avondale Partners. That figure is expected to grow about 2% annually over the next five years.

States haven't built new prisons since 2001 and the federal government is reluctant to spend money on new facilities. State prisons are at about 14% above planned capacity, and federal prisons are about 34% above, Campbell says.

States have to decide whether they want to make new prisons or outsource to private operators.

"The opportunity for these (private prison operators) is to develop new beds," he said. "The demand should continue to outstrip the supply."

It takes private prison operators about 12 to 15 months to build a new facility, he says. It usually takes states twice as long.

The outlook is similarly bright for Taser, according to Wold, of Merriman Curhan Ford.

"You're seeing more departments embrace the product and see it's a necessary piece of equipment," he said.

While the company has faced lawsuits filed on behalf of people who've died or been hurt being stunned with the device, Taser has won all of them so far, says Smith, the firm's chairman.

"We haven't lost because the science is there," he said. Still, it has settled several suits filed by police officers who say the device injured them.

4. Technology

The big three private prison operators will likely use a new monitoring technology in their newer facilities, says analyst Campbell.

This involves using cameras to monitor inmates from a centralized command center. Instead of having guards patrolling every cell block, a prison may have a few guards on rolling patrol and cameras monitoring from afar.

Taser is betting on the consumer markets for growth. In July, it debuted the Taser C2. The device, which comes in a variety of colors, has a 15-foot range.

It also unveiled the Taser Shockwave for military use. It's a modular system that can be upgraded as needed. Units can be stacked side by side, vertically or in a daisy chain formation. They can also be mounted on vehicles.

5. Outlook

The sector should benefit from the sharp focus on safety and security on the part of government, corporations and consumers.

Upside: People always want to feel safe. Despite falling crime rates, consumers are worried about crime and overburdened public safety officials, according to the Freedonia Group's Mapes.

"These perceptions, as well as the perceived risk of nontraditional threats like computer-based, and other white-collar crimes and terrorism present significant opportunities for private security firms," she wrote in a report.

Privatization of some public safety operations should also fuel gains. The ongoing outsourcing of in-house security functions will continue to be a factor, she adds.

For prison operators, short supply of prison space should continue to fuel demand.

Risks: Government funding for security could tighten.

One potential issue for private prison operators is mounting concern that some are skimping on inmate health care, Campbell says.

For Taser, there's continued controversy over the devices, including lawsuits from police officers and cities that have used the device. Wider consumer usage raises the risks of more legal hassles.

Newstex ID: IBD-0001-18980384

Originally published in the August 17, 2007 version of Investor's Business Daily.

Copyright (c) 2007, Investor's Business Daily, Inc. All rights reserved. This article is protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of Investor's Business Daily, Inc. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.
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Posted by lois at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)

View from Cuba: Human Rights: Under Bush, the United States holds a record number of citizens

Granma International
Havana. August 17, 2007

HUMAN RIGHTS
Under Bush, the United States holds a record number of citizens

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD — Special for Granma International—

UNDER Bush, the United States, the country that most utilizes the human rights issue for propaganda purposes, currently maintains more than 7 million of its own citizens in its prison system, both state and federal, without including citizens held in city or county jails.

This truly chilling fact was announced by Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, which neighbors New York. He affirmed that parallel to the Iraq disaster, the United States is facing a domestic catastrophe of gigantic proportions.

In an extensive analysis on his city’s situation, written with a sincerity that is unusual among U.S. politicians and published in the newspaper The Star-Ledger, Mayor Booker said, moreover, that every day, more guns and more technology are appearing; more cameras scanning the streets, while more is spent on prisons, penitentiaries and juvenile facilities.

The way that the country has chosen to deal with crime is taking the nation away from its most noble ideals and creating an outcome that totally contradicts what the country is supposed to be, the mayor said, alluding mostly to the failure of the so-called war on drugs.

“In the land of the free, we lock up a greater percentage of our population than any nation. The U.S. prison population has increased 91 percent in the past 15 years,” he wrote, noting the exorbitant number if citizens who are, one way or another, under control of the legal system.

The costs are, of course, out of proportion. The city of Newark alone spends one quarter of its budget on the police, courts and prisons, Booker revealed.

One out of every three African Americans between the ages of 20 and 30 live under some form of prison supervision, he noted, adding that while only 14 percent of New Jersey’s population is Black, more than 60 percent of its prison population is.

The United States is the “worst” country in the world with respect to recidivism, Booker said.

“After spending billions incarcerating people, we release them only to see one in every two ex-offenders return in three years.

“Ex-offenders are ineligible for numerous public assistance programs. They are stripped of their driving privileges, which might allow them to get to work; even if their driving privileges have not been revoked, they cannot obtain a commercial driver's license.”

LARGE INCREASE SINCE 2000

The most recent report by the U.S. Justice Department’s statistics office showed that the prison population has shot up since 2000.

Bush’s government maintains 2.24 million people locked up, the highest rate in the world both in prison population and in per capita imprisonment, according to The Star Ledger.

In New Jersey 81 percent of those incarcerated are black or Latino.

State spending to imprison its citizens has grown three times more than the budget for higher education. The U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has further frightening information.

The Justice Department is headed by Alberto Gonzales, the advisor to Bush who is in charge of justifying the torture of people held in the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo prisons.

The following figures give an idea of the seriousness of the veritable human crisis underway in the United States:

• 3,524 prisoners condemned to the death penalty (1,372 are Black) are awaiting the death penalty in 36 state and federal prisons; in comparison, in 1980, there were 692.

• 53 individuals have been executed in 2006, double that of 1980.

• A total of 4,580 prisoners have died behind bars, both in federal and other prisons.

• In indigenous areas, 68 prisons hold more than 2,000 people

• African-Americans are three times more likely to end up in a prison that Hispanics, and five times more likely than people designated “white.”

• More than 140,000 veterans of the U.S. armed forces are serving sentences in federal or state prisons; 57 percent are imprisoned for violent crimes.

• More than 2,000 cases of sexual aggression are confirmed every year, more than 40% involving prison personnel.

And the list could be much longer.

Of course, the George W. Bush government, very ready to attack other nations on the question of human rights, is keeping quiet about such a catastrophic situation in international forums where, nevertheless, it does not lose any opportunity to “demonize” those who oppose its imperialist policies.

With the complicity of the big-business media that deliberately omits those realities about a nation where every day, in the name of the so-called war on terrorism, laws are enacted that are gradually taking away citizens’ rights.
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2007/agosto/vier17/33preso.html

Posted by lois at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2007

Prison and Homeland Security Business Is Booming

2 articles below

"The sector should benefit from the sharp focus on safety and security on the part of government, corporations and consumers. Upside: People always want to feel safe. Despite falling crime rates, consumers are worried about crime and overburdened public safety officials, according to the Freedonia Group's Mapes. "These perceptions, as well as the perceived risk of nontraditional threats like computer-based, and other white-collar crimes and terrorism present significant opportunities for private security firms," she wrote in a report."

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/IBD-0001-18980384.htm>

Aiming To Protect And Serve

August 17, 2007

Aug. 17, 2007 (Investor's Business Daily delivered by Newstex) --

Terror plots, airport security breaches and identify theft have become familiar fears in today's post-9/11 world.

And if that weren't worrisome enough, ongoing threats of violent crimes, home invasions and carjackings are keeping consumers and businesses on edge.

That's proved a boon for companies in IBD's security and safety stock group, which as of Friday ranked No. 38 among IBD's 197 industry segments .

As the Iraq War drives sales of military protective gear, ordinary crime is fueling demand for products such as Taser devices, surveillance systems, vehicle recovery systems and scanning systems.

"The aftermath of 9/11 has created a continuing and accelerating backdrop for revenue in the security companies, whether they be military related or homeland security related or ultimately commercially related," said analyst Jeffrey Kessler of Lehman Bros.

1. Business

The group comprises a disparate lot of companies. But they share a similar
goal: to protect lives and property.

Take Taser International (NASDAQ:TASR) TASR. It caters to law enforcement and the military with its namesake "less-than-lethal weapons."

The Taser uses proprietary technology to stun dangerous subjects with a jolt of electricity. It's a safer alternative to other uses of force, such as firing a gun.

Police departments see an 80% reduction in officer injuries when they roll out Tasers, says Eric Wold, an analyst at Merriman Curhan Ford. And officers don't have to put their lives at risk.

In the U.S., 11,500 of the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies are using or testing Taser technology, says Tom Smith, Taser's chairman and co-founder.

"For someone approving a budget for a police department we can show them a return on investment," he said.

Officers using a Taser are injured less often, he says, cutting on paid leave. And the use of Tasers reduces the chances officers will have to wrestle down people they're arresting, curtailing excessive force claims.

Another company in the group is Corrections Corp. of America (NYSE:CXW) CXW, which builds and manages prisons and detention centers.

Most of Correction Corp.'s revenue comes from facilities it owns. CEO John Ferguson says that most of its rivals manage government-owned facilities.

The key to CCA's business is to maintain confidence in the quality of its service, says Ferguson. As a private prison operator, CCA is required to keep nearby communities safe. At the same time it has to provide quality medical care, food service and education to inmates.

"We can provide the services for less money than our customers do," Ferguson said. Those customers are 20 state governments and federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service.

The company's biggest value is its ability to provide prisoner space on an as-needed basis, Ferguson says. Governments have a hard time planning and building prisons.

American Medical Alert AMAC provides home health-monitoring systems to the elderly, disabled and chronically ill. Its portfolio includes personal emergency response systems and electronic medication reminders.

It also operates health care communications centers that serve as 24-hour access points for patients.

Its business is driven by subscriptions from older or ill people who want to remain independent, says Frederic Siegel, the firm's executive vice president.

The upshot: savings on medical costs. More than 8 million people with chronic diseases absorb two-thirds of all health care spending.

"When you have adverse risks, these devices allow health care providers to intervene before an episode occurs," Siegel said. "The driver is cost savings."

Increased nurse productivity and early intervention to medical emergencies ultimately reduce hospital admissions and length of stay.

Name Of The Game: The safety and security business hinges on strong ties with customers. Products and services must work as promised. Customer trust is key.

2. Market

U.S. demand for private contracted security services will grow 4.3% a year to $48 billion in 2010, according to a report by analyst Jennifer Mapes of the Freedonia Group, a market research firm. This tally includes alarm monitoring, armored transport and correctional facilities management.

She sees correctional facilities management revenue rising to $2.7 billion by 2010, more than double the $1.2 billion posted in 2000.

Top players in the private prison operators segment include CCA, GEO Group GEO and Cornell Companies (NYSE:CRN) CRN. The four major private correctional facility management firms collectively have about 156,000 beds, or spaces for prisoners, says CCA's Ferguson. CCA, with roughly 72,500 beds, has about half of that total.

In the armored transport market, Brink's BCO is the world's No. 1 player.

Taser's only rival is stun products maker Stinger Systems. "The world is
(Taser's) oyster right now," said analyst Wold.

Taser has proved the value of its product to law enforcement agencies and is now seeing an acceleration in orders, he says. He figures about 20% of police and correctional officers in the U.S. carry a Taser. Overseas, the figure is less than 5%. So there's a lot of opportunity worldwide, he says.

The security market is fragmented and consolidating, says analyst Kessler. British Aerospace and defense company BAE Systems in July bought Armor Holdings, which makes military vehicles, vehicle armor systems and safety gear. Armor is the leader in armored vehicles, Kessler says.

3. Climate

Private prison operators are benefiting from overcrowding and soaring occupancy rates at state and federal facilities.

At the end of 2005 there were about 2.2 million prisoners in state, federal and local jails, says Kevin Campbell, an analyst with Avondale Partners. That figure is expected to grow about 2% annually over the next five years.

States haven't built new prisons since 2001 and the federal government is reluctant to spend money on new facilities. State prisons are at about 14% above planned capacity, and federal prisons are about 34% above, Campbell says.

States have to decide whether they want to make new prisons or outsource to private operators.

"The opportunity for these (private prison operators) is to develop new beds," he said. "The demand should continue to outstrip the supply."

It takes private prison operators about 12 to 15 months to build a new facility, he says. It usually takes states twice as long.

The outlook is similarly bright for Taser, according to Wold, of Merriman Curhan Ford.

"You're seeing more departments embrace the product and see it's a necessary piece of equipment," he said.

While the company has faced lawsuits filed on behalf of people who've died or been hurt being stunned with the device, Taser has won all of them so far, says Smith, the firm's chairman.

"We haven't lost because the science is there," he said. Still, it has settled several suits filed by police officers who say the device injured them.

4. Technology

The big three private prison operators will likely use a new monitoring technology in their newer facilities, says analyst Campbell.

This involves using cameras to monitor inmates from a centralized command center. Instead of having guards patrolling every cell block, a prison may have a few guards on rolling patrol and cameras monitoring from afar.

Taser is betting on the consumer markets for growth. In July, it debuted the Taser C2. The device, which comes in a variety of colors, has a 15-foot range.

It also unveiled the Taser Shockwave for military use. It's a modular system that can be upgraded as needed. Units can be stacked side by side, vertically or in a daisy chain formation. They can also be mounted on vehicles.

5. Outlook

The sector should benefit from the sharp focus on safety and security on the part of government, corporations and consumers.

Upside: People always want to feel safe. Despite falling crime rates, consumers are worried about crime and overburdened public safety officials, according to the Freedonia Group's Mapes.

"These perceptions, as well as the perceived risk of nontraditional threats like computer-based, and other white-collar crimes and terrorism present significant opportunities for private security firms," she wrote in a report.

Privatization of some public safety operations should also fuel gains. The ongoing outsourcing of in-house security functions will continue to be a factor, she adds.

For prison operators, short supply of prison space should continue to fuel demand.

Risks: Government funding for security could tighten.

One potential issue for private prison operators is mounting concern that some are skimping on inmate health care, Campbell says.

For Taser, there's continued controversy over the devices, including lawsuits from police officers and cities that have used the device. Wider consumer usage raises the risks of more legal hassles.

Newstex ID: IBD-0001-18980384
Originally published in the August 17, 2007 version of Investor's Business Daily.

"During the past quarter the Company has commenced marketing its product and service to the pre-trial and bail bond market through one of its distributors. "This opportunity has blossomed as some of the largest bail bond companies in the United States have embraced the TrackerPAL service," stated James Dalton, President of RemoteMDx. "Our sales force and distribution network that has been built over the past 12 months has given the Company the base from which it can continue to grow and progress in meeting the needs of the criminal justice market."

http://www.sys-con.com/read/416678.htm

RemoteMDx Announces Third Quarter Results
By: Marketwire .
Aug. 15, 2007

SANDY, UT -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 08/15/07 -- RemoteMDx (OTCBB: RMDX) reported operating revenue of $3,118,947 for the quarter ended June 30, 2007, a 13 fold increase compared to $237,496 for the same period last year. Revenues increased by nearly 90% from the previous quarter ending March 31, 2007. The primary reason for the increase was the introduction and market acceptance of the Company's TrackerPAL product and service that was introduced to the criminal justice market late in 2006. The Company also reported a $5,336,000 loss (with a major portion being non-cash) for the quarter ended June 30, 2007 compared to a $11,688,000 loss (with a major portion being non-cash) for the June 30, 2006 quarter one year ago. In addition, the loss was reduced by $1,918,000 from the previous quarter ended March 31, 2007.

RemoteMDx's product and service continue to grow and become established in the criminal justice system. It has a broad base of agencies that utilize the Company's service and products. There are in excess of 8,000 units that have either been sold or leased pursuant to the Company's monitoring service. During the past quarter the Company has commenced marketing its product and service to the pre-trial and bail bond market through one of its distributors. "This opportunity has blossomed as some of the largest bail bond companies in the United States have embraced the TrackerPAL service," stated James Dalton, President of RemoteMDx. "Our sales force and distribution network that has been built over the past 12 months has given the Company the base from which it can continue to grow and progress in meeting the needs of the criminal justice market."

About RemoteMDx

Through its SecureAlert subsidiary, RemoteMDx offers a unique personal security service combining two-way communications, patented wireless location technology and affordable real-time 24/7 mobile monitoring to assist law enforcement in protecting neighborhoods from predators and to provide peace of mind for families with elderly loved ones who live alone or far away. More information is available on the Company's website, www.remotemdx.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act, including future growth and earnings opportunities of the Company. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including the Company's ability to retain and to promptly satisfy current backorders and other economic, competitive, governmental, technological, regulatory, manufacturing and marketing risks associated with the Company's business and financial plans. The contents of this release should be considered in conjunction with the risk factors, warnings, and cautionary statements that are contained in the Company's most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SecureAlert, TrackerPAL and Offender Monitoring Center are trademarks of SecureAlert. RemoteMDx is a trademark of RemoteMDx, Inc.

Posted by lois at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2007

NC: Education and Awareness to Reinstated Voters in the Works

From The Sentencing Project. August 17, 2007
North Carolina: Education and Awareness to Reinstated Voters in the Works
The state passed HB1743, an election reform bill which will require the State Board of Elections, the Department of Corrections, and the Administrative Office of the Courts to provide written notice to formerly incarcerated persons informing them of their right to vote upon completion of sentence and provide them with a voter registration form. The bill, which will "jointly develop and implement educational programs and procedures for persons to apply to register to vote at the time they are restored to citizenship" awaits the governor's signature.

Posted by lois at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)

WA: State's system for restoring voter rights unfair, unwieldy

Guest columnist
State's system for restoring voter rights unfair, unwieldy
Seattle Times, August 14, 2007
By Kathleen Taylor
Special to The Times

Consider two people who are convicted of felonies. Both go to prison and serve their time. But one is able to vote upon release from custody, while the other will not be able to vote for many years after release, perhaps ever.

What makes the difference — seriousness of the offense? Length of sentence? Personal history?

In Washington, the answer is "none of the above." The person with more money is far more likely to regain the right to vote. This is because of a state law — recently upheld by the Washington Supreme Court — under which the right to vote will be restored only after payment of all court costs and other related financial obligations. And that includes interest, which accrues at 12 percent per year.

In practice, this means a wealthy citizen may be able to vote again almost immediately; a citizen who cannot afford to pay the financial portions of the sentence right away may wait many years, maybe forever, to vote again.

The system for restoring voting rights isn't just unfair. It is so complex and confusing that it causes major problems at election times. Election officials find it devilishly complicated to figure out who still owes money on a sentence. The Department of Corrections stops keeping records after persons have completed their terms of custody. Payments are made to a network of county court clerks; they each have their own accounting systems that were never designed to interface with voter-registration rolls.

As a result, state and local officials often are uncertain exactly who is eligible to vote. In short, this is a broken system.

The effects of the law are widespread, affecting tens of thousands of citizens. The vast majority of people convicted of crimes in Washington are poor when they enter prison, and even poorer when they leave. Once out, it can be difficult for them to find decent-paying jobs. Overall, only a small portion of the people convicted of felonies in Washington are ever able to vote again after they have served their time.

The loss of voting rights hits racial minorities especially hard. Felony disenfranchisement affects 3.6 percent of the state's total voting-age population, but 10.6 percent of the Latino population and 17.2 percent of the African-American population.

As a matter of principle, a democratic society should never condition the right to vote on a person's wealth. Poll taxes have been justly outlawed. And, we normally do not use the right to vote as a method of debt collection. People with unpaid parking tickets also owe money to the state, but they are not disenfranchised.

Many states have a more-sensible, streamlined system. Our Northwest neighbors, Oregon and Montana, automatically restore the right to vote at the end of the term of imprisonment. A simple, clear rule based on whether a person is currently incarcerated would have eliminated some of the confusion we saw in the 2004 elections. Anyone not in prison who is otherwise eligible may register to vote. Any other system requires election officials to become bogged down in a maze of paperwork, subject to mistakes and second-guessing.

The current system also places a barrier to rehabilitation of people who have served their time. At least two recent studies have shown that people who vote after their release from prison are far less likely to commit future crimes than those who do not. As a matter of public safety, the state should encourage full political participation.

Fortunately, the Legislature can fix this broken system. No constitutional amendment is required. In 2007, Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles, D-Seattle, and Rep. Jeannie Darneille, D-Tacoma, sponsored automatic-restoration bills. The Secretary of State's Office and the Department of Corrections supported the legislation. So did a wide array of organizations, including the League of Women Voters, the Washington State Labor Council, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, and the Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs.

Though the legislation did not pass this year, it will be up for consideration again in 2008.

Gov. Christine Gregoire has observed that Washington's current re-enfranchisement system creates "a virtual debtor's prison." It doesn't have to be that way. We should join the states that automatically restore voting rights once people have finished their prison sentences. And, we shouldn't wait to act until after the next major election.

Kathleen Taylor is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_id=2003834803&zsection_id=268883724&slug=kathleentaylor14&date=20070814

Posted by lois at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2007

Ark. prisons defend commissions charged on inmate phone calls

Ark. prisons defend commissions charged on inmate phone calls

By ANDREW DeMILLO

LITTLE ROCK - Prison officials defended the roughly $2.5 million in commissions they receive on the cost of collect telephone calls Thursday, as advocates criticized the fees as an additional tax on prisoners' families.

The officials told a legislative panel Thursday that the 45 percent commission charged on the inmate calls are necessary to pay for prison programs, and warned lawmakers that they would have to seek additional state money if the fees were cut.

"If we had not had the telephone funds in the last two years, we would have been in a world of trouble," David Guntharp, director of the Department of Community Correction, told the Legislative Council's charitable, penal and correctional institutions committee.

Guntharp said most of the $347,000 his department received through the fee during the fiscal year that ended June 31 went toward food purchases for community correction center inmates.

Correction Director Larry Norris told lawmakers that the $2.1 million that state prisons received during the same period went toward inmate assistance, general operations, security equipment and long-term needs for the 14,000-inmate prison system.

Earlier this year, prison officials cut the cost of collect calls for inmates by $2, reducing the cost of a 15-minute collect call to $4.80 from $6.60.

Prison officials also reduced the commission the state receives from the calls from 51 percent to 45 percent, following complaints from lawmakers and advocacy groups.

Those groups, however, told lawmakers Thursday that the commission is still too high and complained of poor service from the company contracting with the state to provide the collect call service.

Jennifer Hicks, a member of the Arkansas Coalition for the Bill of Rights for Children of Incarcerated Parents, said the fees tacked on to the calls punish family members of prisoners.

Hicks called the commission an "uncodified tax" that masks the true cost of running Arkansas' prison system.

"If we need an extra $2.5 million in the budget to make sure that there are enough fences and to make sure the kitchens are well equipped to meet standards, then we need to put that in the general revenue," Hicks said. "The state needs to know and be aware of what we're really spending."

Deena Carrow, who has a son in state prison, complained of poor service by the company providing the collect call service _ Global Tel Link _ and said she has had trouble receiving itemized statements from the firm. Carrow also complained about additional fees tacked on when she pays for the service in advance using a credit card.

Rick Ferguson, an account executive with the company, said the additional fees are charged by credit card companies. Ferguson said the company hopes to begin a new system in September where inmates can buy telephone time using money from their commissary account.

Norris said the higher cost for the collect calls is needed partly because of the security procedures uses to monitor inmate phone calls and questioned why other Arkansans should pay for the programs.

"I have a problem as a taxpayer who doesn't have someone locked up paying more taxes to ... do the things we're able to do with this," Norris said.

A member of the panel said he was concerned about the way state prisons were funding programs using the additional fees.

"To come in the back door to finance our prison is the wrong way to do it," said Sen. Kim Hendren, R-Gravette.

A service of the Associated Press(AP)
http://www.pbcommercial.com/articles/2007/08/16/ap-state-ar/d8r2cq500.prt

Posted by lois at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

Correctional Authorities Reported More Than 6,000 Allegations of Sexual Violence in Prisons and Jails During 2006

Correctional Authorities Reported More Than 6,000 Allegations of Sexual Violence in Prisons and Jails During 2006

One in Six Were Confirmed After an Investigation
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Federal, state and local correctional authorities reported an estimated 6,528 allegations of sexual violence involving incarcerated men and women during 2006, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. It was the equivalent of 2.9 allegations per 1,000 inmates in prisons, jails, and other adult correctional facilities during 2006.
An estimated 47 percent of the allegations involved sexual violence between inmates -- 34 percent were nonconsensual sexual acts, such as rape and forcible sodomy; 13 percent were abusive sexual contacts, such as unwanted touching or grabbing with the intention to sexually exploit.

C
More than half of the allegations involved staff -- 36 percent involved staff sexual misconduct, defined as any act of a sexual nature directed toward an inmate, either consensual or nonconsensual; 17 percent involved sexual harassment by staff, including repeated comments or demeaning references of a sexual nature to an inmate.
Correctional authorities substantiated an estimated 967 incidents of sexual violence, which was 17 percent of allegations with completed
investigations. Authorities were unable to substantiate 55 percent of the allegations. Another 29 percent of the allegations were determined not to
have occurred.
Physical force or threat of force was involved in more than half of inmate-on-inmate substantiated incidents. The sexual violence occurred in the victim's cell or living area in two-thirds of the incidents. Itoccurred in a common area, such as a shower or dayroom, in 17 percent of
the incidents.
Victims received physical injuries in 20 percent of substantiated
incidents of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence. Almost four in five victims received some type of medical follow-up, including an examination, rape kit, HIV/STD test or counseling.
Forty percent of the victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence were placed in protective custody or administrative segregation; 16 percent were transferred to another facility; and 13 percent were placed in a medical
unit.
The perpetrators were arrested or referred for prosecution in less than half of the inmate-on-inmate incidents, and placed in solitary confinement in more than three-quarters of the incidents.
More than half of incidents of staff sexual misconduct and harassment with inmates appeared to be willing. One-third involved staff sexual harassment, indecent exposure and unwanted touching. Fewer than 10 percentof the incidents involved staff physical force, abuse of power or pressure.
In state and federal prisons, 65 percent of the victims of staff
misconduct were male and 58 percent of the perpetrators were female. In local jails, 80 percent of the victims were female and 79 percent of the perpetrators were male.
Most substantiated incidents of staff sexual misconduct and harassment involved correctional officers (75 percent). About 10 percent of the incidents involved contract employees or vendors. Three-quarters of the perpetrators of staff misconduct were discharged and 56 percent were arrested or referred for prosecution.
The report is a part of the data collections required under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (Public Law 108-79). Its publication is
mandated by the act and is prepared annually. Data on sexual violence asreported by the juvenile justice authorities will be published later this
year.
As a part of BJS's implementation strategy, surveys of victims will beconducted in 2007 and 2008 in the following collections:
The National Inmate Survey, based on victim self-reports of sexual
violence in 148 prisons and 302 jails, is under way. Rankings of prison facilities are expected in November 2007. Data collection in jails will continue through December 2007.
The National Survey of Youths in Custody, based on victim self-reports of sexual violence from youth, will be implemented in a sample of 208 state- operated facilities and 48 large nonstate-operated facilities in
early 2008.
The National Survey of Sexual Assault Reported by Former Inmates, avictim self-report survey of former state inmates under active supervision,is expected to occur in 285 parole offices (with up to 16,500 interviews)
in late 2007.
The report, Sexual Violence Reported by Correctional Authorities 2006 (NCJ-218914), was written by BJS statisticians Allen J. Beck and Paige M. Harrison and BJS policy analyst Devon B. Adams. Following publication it can be found at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/svrca06.htm.
For additional information about the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
please visit the BJS Web site at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs.
The Office of Justice Programs (OJP), headed by Assistant Attorney
General Regina B. Schofield, provides federal leadership in developing the nation's capacity to prevent and control crime, administer justice and assist victims. OJP has five component bureaus: the Bureau of Justice Assistance; the Bureau of Justice Statistics; the National Institute of Justice; the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention; and the
Office for Victims of Crime. Additionally, OJP has two program offices: theCommunity Capacity Development Office, which incorporates the Weed and Seed strategy, and the Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering and Tracking (SMART) Office. More information can be found at
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov.

Posted by lois at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

August 15, 2007

Why Did Crime Fall in NYC: Did the "broken windows" stragegy drive crime down?"

“There remains “a hard-core group of people that are disconnected socially, marginalized, out of work, out of school” that continues to engage in drug-dealing and violent gun play, he said, but far more people have had their anger diluted by “the consumer society.”

(On a side note, he added that the diminution in anger is both good and bad. “They’re not committing crimes, but they’re not tackling these social conditions that have to be remedied,” he said.)”

August 13, 2007, 2:10 pm
Why Did Crime Fall in New York City?

By Sewell Chan

Did the “broken windows” strategy and CompStat drive down crime in New York City in the 1990s?

Both strategies are indelibly linked to former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his first police commissioner, William J. Bratton.

Social scientists and criminologists have endlessly debated the extent to which effective policing was truly responsible for the drop in crime, compared with other factors like the higher incarceration rate, improved economic conditions, the lessening of the crack cocaine epidemic, a relative reduction in the numbers of 16- to 24-year-olds and even the abortion rate.

A new round of the debate took place this morning in Manhattan, during the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The meeting, which continues through Tuesday, drew some 6,100 sociologists this year from around the world.

Among the three experts who gave presentations, the consensus seemed to be that effective policing matters – but not nearly as much as Mr. Giuliani and other city officials (including his successor Michael R. Bloomberg) have claimed.

First, some context. The broken windows theory, pioneered by George L. Kelling and often lumped together with the notion of zero-tolerance policing, holds that aggressive enforcement against minor quality-of-life crimes, like loitering and fare-beating, deters further petty crime and ultimately drives down major crime. Compstat is the computerized system Mr. Bratton and one of his top deputies, Jack Maple, devised to keep track of crime problems and hold police commanders accountable for addressing the most crime-prone areas.

Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, spoke first. His research is heavy on statistical analysis, but his general point seemed to be that the correlation between a surge in misdemeanor arrests in the 1990s (one measurement of tougher policing) could not be used to explain the the drop in homicide (a major example of crime reduction) once variations among different neighborhoods are taken into account.

“The story is complicated,” he said. “Clearly, the relation between policing, disorder and crime is cloudy.” A combination of socioeconomic changes and changes in the “physical order” of the city’s neighborhoods probably drove the decrease in homicides in the 1990s, although tougher policing and the drop in cocaine use also played some role, he said.

Andrew Karmen, a sociologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of “New York Murder Mystery: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s” (New York University Press, 2000), spoke next.

Mr. Karmen was more decisive in his presentation, focusing on the role that Compstat has played in driving down crime in New York. He noted that Mr. Giuliani had promised to implement Compstat-like programs across the federal government if elected president.

Mr. Karmen noted that many police departments across the country and even overseas “have adopted a Compstat approach to their daily operations” and added, “A virtual cottage industry has developed as former N.Y.P.D. officials have been hired as consultants to set up Compstat in other departments.” The strategy was seen as so effective, Mr. Karmen noted, that in 1996 Time Magazine called the N.Y.P.D. the “Lourdes of policing.”

A 2001 survey found that more than one-third of nation’s 515 largest police departments had implemented Compstat in some form.

However, Mr. Karmen said, the results in cities that have adopted the Compstat model have been mixed: Philadelphia is “in the grip of a murder wave,” Seattle’s homicide decline “has flattened out,” and the New Orleans police remains as ineffective as it was before Hurricane Katrina. The same dismal trend, he said, goes for Minneapolis, Louisville, Boston and Baltimore.

Mr. Karmen said that it can be hard to evaluate Compstat for a key reason. If crime rates go down, its proponents credit the program. If crime doesn’t go down, the program’s proponents say the program’s six core elements – a clear mission, internal accountability, geographical organization of operational command, organizational flexibility, a reliance on data and innovative problem-solving tactics – were not faithfully followed. Mr. Karmen said he did not rule out the latter explanation: “Implementing Compstat could be a matter of degree, and some departments just don’t get it.”

Yet, he said, “None of the other cities have experienced anything like New York’s remarkable improvement in public safety.” So either those other cities all failed to follow Compstat fully, or Compstat, he said, “is not the entire reason why crime went down.”
Michael P. Jacobson, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice, who was probation and correction commissioner in the Giuliani administration, was the final speaker.

Mr. Jacobson discussed a remarkable phenomenon: Far more arrests took place than in the early 1990s, and yet the number of New Yorkers in jail or in prison has declined.

Before the Giuliani era, he said, about half the people arrested for low-level offenses would get a desk-appearance ticket ordering them to go to court. The proportion now is about 10 percent.

“Essentially, everyone who’s arrested in New York City, in the parlance of city criminal justice lingo, goes through ‘the system,’” Mr. Jacobson noted. “Most everyone who’s arrested spends, on average, 24 hours in some kind of lockup before they see an arraignment judge.”

Even a short period in a holding cell can be enough to deter further law-breaking, he said:

For a lot of people who go through the system repeatedly, going through the system one more time is probably not a life-altering experience. But if you’ve never gone through the system, even 24 hours – that’s a shocking period of punishment. It’s debasing, it’s difficult. You’re probably in a fairly gross police lockup. You probably have no toilet paper. You’re given a baloney sandwich, and the baloney is green.

The city’s jails now hold about 13,000 to 14,000 people, down from roughly 23,000 in 1993.

“There are tons more people coming in, but they stay for far shorter periods of time, which drives down the need for jailbeds in New York City,” Mr. Jacobson said.

The same pattern holds for the prison system, he said. The city used to send about 20,000 inmates each year to the state prison system; the number now is about 8,000.

During the question-and-answer session that followed the presentations, Mr. Karmen was more explicit about what he saw as the reasons for the crime decline.

“Street crime is a distorted form of social protest,” he said. “It comes out of anger, hostility to the system, to the man, to the rules, to the conditions of life that are so harsh. Frankly, I don’t see young people – including young minority males – being so angry any more.”

There remains “a hard-core group of people that are disconnected socially, marginalized, out of work, out of school” that continues to engage in drug-dealing and violent gun play, he said, but far more people have had their anger diluted by “the consumer society.”

(On a side note, he added that the diminution in anger is both good and bad. “They’re not committing crimes, but they’re not tackling these social conditions that have to be remedied,” he said.)

Mr. Jacobson said that “a general consensus” seems to have emerged that effective policing in New York has made some difference – even though “the statistical effects, if they are there at all, are small.”

Joyce Purnick of The Times, who attended the meeting, asked the panelists why the most serious crimes in New York, including homicides, have continued to decline even though crime levels have been moving upward in other cities.

“ In scholarly circles, that’s like it happened yesterday,” Mr. Jacobson said, adding, “It’s a mystery.”

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/why-did-crime-fall-in-new-york-city/

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

CA: Editiorial: Lease revenue' prison bonds: Will court close a loophole that adds debt without accountability?

Orange County Register
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Today's editorial: 'Lease revenue' prison bonds
Will court close a loophole that adds debt without accountability?

An Orange County Register Editorial

The state budget stands stalemated over $700 million. The difference is being hailed as the price of a balanced budget, but however the stalemate is resolved, the budget will remain unbalanced in one, crucial respect. Thanks to the borrow-and-spend financing of Gov. Schwarzenegger, the taxpayers will be stuck paying for spending of years past, coughing up more than 10 times that $700 million figure every single year for the foreseeable future. Worse yet, despite a constitutional guarantee that debt exceeding $300,000 go before the voters, new and significant debt is being approved without voters' consent.

The constitutional loophole is called a "lease-revenue bond." >From a taxpayer's perspective, it's similar to the "general obligation" bonds that voters perennially approve: Bonds are sold, and the debt is serviced by taxpayers over the coming decades.

The salient differences are that payments on general obligation bonds are direct (appearing as their own line-item in the budget) and ironclad (backed up by the "full faith and credit" of the state's taxpayers), while lease-revenue bond payments are dispersed among government entities that pay them off through "leases," and are not so guaranteed. Since the lack of guarantee makes them riskier for investors, they typically cost taxpayers about 10 percent to 15 percent more than general obligation bonds in interest payments over the bonds' lifetimes. But the differences that make lease-revenue bonds riskier and more costly have been used, paradoxically, to justify circumventing voter approval. Why would a more costly bond be easier to pass?

A lawsuit filed last week will challenge precisely this practice, taking on a $7.9 billion bond measure for new prison beds and rehab programs, rushed through the Legislature in May. At the time of its passing, we lamented not only the bill's exorbitant cost, but its underlying method: a Band-Aid fix eschewing real changes like sentencing reform or embracing private prisons. The dubious bill would have been a hard swallow for the taxpayers who will shell out $600 million a year via the state general fund for the next 25 years to support it, but thanks to the use of lease-revenue bonds, voters didn't have to be consulted. The injunction filed Aug. 8 by Taxpayers for Improving Public Safety would rectify that, condemning the bill's bond financing scheme as unconstitutional.

The legal precedent may or may not stand on the side of the moral principle, but the latter, at least, is clear. Payment by incurring any kind of bond debt always costs more than appropriating funds in the present - about 20 percent more, adjusted for inflation - and for longer - repayment is spread across decades. Issuing bonds may still be justified, when the benefits of swift action exceed the financial costs, but that judgment should be made by the voters, who bear the costs. If the interpretation of Article XIV, Section I of the state constitution stands with this guiding moral principle, the loophole will be closed, and the voters will be allowed to judge. If not, we can only continue to admonish our borrow-and-spend government for balancing the budget by putting us in debt to our children.
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/bonds-taxpayers-voters-1808421-bond-budget

Posted by lois at 06:02 PM | Comments (0)

Time Magazine: "De-Criminalizing Mental Illness"

"When it comes to mental health care in the U.S., Leifman says, history is repeating itself. During the 1800s, long before state-run agencies existed to treat mental illness, families would simply drop their loved ones off at jails or prisons, where their conditions remained untreated. Then came state-run hospitals that Leifman refers to as "horror houses" given that patients were usually either neglected or abused ‹ experiments involving drugs and electroshock therapy inspired movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and finally drew the public's attention to the civil rights abuses of people with mental illness. There appeared a glimmer of hope in 1963, when President Kennedy, in what would be his last public bill-signing, authorized $3 billion to create the first national network of mental health facilities. But after Kennedy's assassination, the country turned its focus to Vietnam and not one penny went into the project."

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1651002,00.html

Time Magazine

De-Criminalizing Mental Illness
Wednesday, Aug. 08, 2007 By M.J. STEPHEY

"Psycho." "Freak." "Jason from the horror movie." These are the answers that psychologist Habsi Kaba gets from Miami police officers when asked to describe people with mental illness. Such stereotypes are surprisingly common, says Kaba, and not just within law enforcement. But these misconceptions are especially dangerous when they're held by police, who are often forced to make split-second, life-or-death decisions about mentally ill suspects. "The worst thing you can have is power and lack of knowledge," Kaba says.

Just ask Mike, 31, who knows firsthand. Mike suffers from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression. Since the age of 17, the Los Angeles native has been repeatedly arrested during psychosis for nuisance crimes like disturbing the peace, only to serve his time, fall off his medication and get arrested again. On three separate occasions, his hallucinations were so severe he tried to commit suicide by provoking the police to shoot him. Though he is receiving treatment, rising health care costs and declining federal help mean Mike will likely end up in jail again.

L.A. Police Lieutenant Richard Wall told Mike's story to members of the House Judiciary Committee in March, in support of the 2007 Second Chance Act, which aims to reduce recidivism, in part with better mental health treatment for prisoners returning to society. Prisons, Wall testified, have become the nation's "de facto" mental health care provider. According to the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are currently 1.25 million inmates like Mike, with debilitating disorders ranging from schizophrenia to post-traumatic stress disorder, abandoned in the U.S. prison system instead of receiving treatment in hospitals.

"If you think health care in America is bad, you should look at mental health care," says Florida state judge and criminal mental health expert Steve Leifman. More Americans receive mental health treatment in prisons and jails than hospitals or treatment centers. In fact, the country's largest psychiatric facility isn't even a hospital, it's a prison ‹ New York City's Rikers Island, which holds an estimated 3,000 mentally ill inmates at any given time. Fifty years ago, the U.S. had nearly 600,000 state hospital beds for people suffering from mental illness. Today, because of federal and state funding cuts, that number has dwindled to 40,000. When the government began closing state-run hospitals in the 1980s, people suffering from mental illness had nowhere to go. Without proper treatment and care, many ended up in the last place anyone wants to be.

"The one institution that can never say no to anybody is jail," Leifman says. "And what's worse, now we've given [the mentally ill] a criminal record."

Most police officers aren't trained to deal with people suffering from severe mental illness. But because they are the first to respond to calls involving psychiatric crises, police are in a unique position to fix the crippled system. That effort is now under way, thanks to Crisis Intervention Teams (CIT), which are being adopted by a growing number of police departments across the country. The concept was pioneered by the Memphis Police Department in 1988 after an officer was shot and killed by a person suffering from schizophrenic hallucinations. Working with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and two local universities, Memphis police trained and organized a unit of officers specifically to deal with people in psychosis ‹ a mental state commonly suffered by patients with severe mental illness in which their thoughts don't match up with reality.

In these cases, normal police procedures often increase the chances of violence, confusion and even death. So, police officers are taught to approach psychotic suspects in a different way: by speaking softly, rather than shouting commands, repeating phrases, holding hands palms-up instead of holding a gun or badge, and wearing plainclothes instead of uniforms. These actions may seem minor, says Kaba, who is the CIT training coordinator for the Miami Police Department, but they go a long way in breaking down the barriers ‹ psychological and otherwise ‹ that often exist between the mentally ill and police.

The ultimate purpose of the CIT program is perhaps empathy. Using a device called Virtual Hallucinations, officers can begin to understand what it's like to be in the grip of a severe and untreated mental illness. Made by the pharmaceutical company Janssen, the rig and headphones simulate the disturbing and disorienting environment of a psychotic episode. After using the rig, Lt. Wall of the LAPD says he was struck by the idea of being exposed to such chaos all the time. "It's just a scary thing," Wall says, "I can do it and walk away from it." Those with serious mental illness, however, cannot.

Community members like John Kowal, 54, work with CITs to provide officers with a more intimate knowledge and understanding of psychosis. Kowal, who suffers from bipolar disorder and alcoholism, has been working with Miami's Police Department and inmates as a "peer specialist." His duties range from consultant to mediator to companion. "I can bond with [mentally ill inmates]. I can say, 'Hey, I was in jail. I take medicine. It's worth it,'" Kowal says. "I don't go by a book. I'm like a friend."

Likewise, the program challenges stereotypes of law enforcement officers as trigger-happy bullies. "Just like police don't understand people with mental illness, we don't understand them," Kaba says. "They're social workers, they're brothers and sisters, they're priests. They play every role out there."

Some officers initially dismissed the CIT program as run-of-the-mill sensitivity training or extreme political correctness, but Cindy Schwartz, director of Florida's Eleventh Judicial Circuit Criminal Mental Health Project, says those same officers now marvel at the program's success. The CIT model has received numerous awards from nationally recognized mental health organizations, law enforcement agencies, and humanitarian groups for treating mental illness as a disease, not a crime. Such change cannot come too soon.

Last December, the Advocacy Center for Persons with Disabilities filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Florida, alleging that it was violating the civil rights of hundreds of mentally ill convicts and inmates awaiting trial by leaving them jailed and without treatment. "We reached a crisis point," says Leifman, the Florida judge, of the state's inability to address mental illness. "We have hundreds of defendants languishing in jail." It got so bad that two mentally ill inmates in a Pensacola, Fla., jail died after being brutally subdued by guards. And in Clearwater, Fla., a schizophrenic inmate gouged out his eye after waiting weeks for a hospital bed.

In June, New York legislators passed a bill outlawing solitary confinement for mentally ill inmates after a study found that such isolation ‹ to which mentally ill prisoners are often subjected ‹ worsened psychiatric symptoms and often led to self-mutilation or suicide attempts.

When it comes to mental health care in the U.S., Leifman says, history is repeating itself. During the 1800s, long before state-run agencies existed to treat mental illness, families would simply drop their loved ones off at jails or prisons, where their conditions remained untreated. Then came state-run hospitals that Leifman refers to as "horror houses" given that patients were usually either neglected or abused ‹ experiments involving drugs and electroshock therapy inspired movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and finally drew the public's attention to the civil rights abuses of people with mental illness. There appeared a glimmer of hope in 1963, when President Kennedy, in what would be his last public bill-signing, authorized $3 billion to create the first national network of mental health facilities. But after Kennedy's assassination, the country turned its focus to Vietnam and not one penny went into the project.

"It's the one area in civil rights that we've gone backwards on," says Leifman, noting that nearly half of the nine floors in Miami-Dade's County Jail are mental health wards, even though the building is "more like a warehouse than a facility." He decries the conditions that these inmates face, including vermin-infested, decrepit buildings that lack adequate ventilation, lighting and water supplies. Leifman also laments the amount of taxpayer dollars used to fund such an inadequate system. Florida taxpayers spend $100,000 each day to house the mentally ill in prison; moreover, studies show that people with mental illness stay in jail eight times longer than other inmates, at seven times the cost.

"We can't really build our way out of the problem. It's not just about state hospital beds or jails," Leifman says. "We need to really take a hard look at how we're dealing with the problem overall

Posted by lois at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2007

Former Director of MI DOC: Behind bars, no one gets rehabilitated; costs unsustainable

Published August 12, 2007
Robert Brown Jr. of Lansing was director of the Michigan Department of Corrections, 1984-1991.
Brown: Prevention, not prisons, best serves public safety
Behind bars, no one gets rehabilitated; costs unsustainable

The current debate over prison spending misses a fundamental point. Crime prevention is the best protection for public safety!

Prevention includes pre- and post-natal care, early childhood education, after-school programs, mental health and substance abuse treatment.

Michigan's corrections budget is $2 billion because our prisoner count has grown to 51,000. To significantly reduce spending, we must reduce the prisoner population. And concerns that sentencing fewer people to prison and releasing more on
parole would threaten public safety give prisons too much credit.

The impact of prisons on crime rates is debatable. In 1984, Michigan prisons held fewer than 15,000 people. Our incarceration rate was 158 per 100,000 citizens and our violent crime rate was 760 per 100,000. By 1992, the incarceration rate had climbed to 408 and the population was nearly 39,000. However, the crime rate actually increased to 770.

Offenders are sent to prison as punishment and to be segregated from the community. Prisons are not designed to "rehabilitate." Making education, vocational training and treatment available to prisoners is important, but such programs can be delivered much less expensively in the community.

Consider these facts:

Many people who repeatedly commit property or public order offenses have substance abuse or mental health problems - or simply lack the skills to find employment. More punishment will not enable them to function as law-abiding citizens. Addressing their problems before they offend is a much better investment.

Sixty percent of annual prison commitments are probation or parole violators.

To reduce these numbers, the Michigan Department of Corrections is moving away from sheer surveillance of people under community supervision. It is marshalling community resources through the Michigan Prisoner ReEntry Initiative to improve parolees' chances of success.

Many prisoners serving long sentences for crimes against people are in prison for the first time and are unlikely to re-offend. They receive no credit for good behavior and are often denied parole. We must demand just punishment and keep in mind research confirms that more time served has no impact on recidivism. Inappropriately, we have made prison stays longer and longer.

Imprisoning fewer people who commit property crimes and other non-assaultive offenses will not threaten public safety. Nor will paroling more people who have finished their minimum terms.

Of people paroled in Michigan in 2000, 16.3 percent were returned to prison for new crimes. Only 2.8 percent were convicted of crimes against persons. Of the 11,000 people paroled in 2003, 70 percent had not returned to prison within two years for any reason.

If we really care about crime prevention, we will stop paying for more prisons than we need. We will invest instead in the universities that make our state great, the services that vulnerable citizens need badly and, above all, the children we can keep from becoming the next generation of prisoners.

http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070812/OPINION02/708120497/1085/opinion

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

August 13, 2007

Justice Can Be Unequal In Reservation Crimes. On Tribal Land, Tragiic Arson Leads to a Life Sentence

Wall Street Journal
FEDERAL CASE
On Tribal Land, Tragic Arson Leads to a Life Sentence
Justice Can Be Unequal In Reservation Crimes

By GARY FIELDS

August 13, 2007; Page A1

LODGE POLE, Mont. -- In 2005, Bobbi Jo Wing and her husband were convicted of helping burn down a ramshackle house on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. At the time the fire started, the couple say they didn't know that Ms. Wing's 15-year-old cousin was asleep in a back bedroom. The girl's badly charred body was later found, after the house collapsed, in what had once been the basement.

Because Ms. Wing, 27 years old, and her husband are both members of a Native American tribe, they were tried in federal court. Since the arson caused a death, both were charged with felony murder, which automatically turned into a first-degree murder charge and a mandatory life sentence. Ms. Wing is now at a Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif. Her husband is serving life in a Colorado prison. There is no parole in the federal system.

But if the crime had taken place off the reservation, just five miles to the east or southwest, the case would have gone to a local prosecutor. The likely state charge -- deliberate homicide -- carries a penalty as low as 10 years, with the chance of parole after as little as 2 1/2 years, according to the local state prosecutor and the state attorney general's office.

Indian tribes once had control over the dispensation of justice on reservations. But federal laws -- some passed a century apart -- have whittled away that authority, and, critics say, helped create a legal system that's often separate and unequal.

In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Dakota Territory court had no jurisdiction in a case in which a member of the Lakota nation killed a fellow member on tribal land. The decision overturned a death sentence and effectively gave exclusive jurisdiction for crimes to tribes. Congress, uncomfortable with the decision, passed the Major Crimes Act in 1885, taking away the tribes' authority to prosecute murder, manslaughter, rape, assault with intent to kill, arson, burglary and larceny. That meant serious crimes committed by Indians on reservations could be prosecuted only by the federal government.

Because the tribes don't have jurisdiction for serious crimes committed on their lands, outcomes of cases can be uneven. In some cases, the federal government doesn't have the resources to prosecute such crimes, allowing criminals to slip through gaps. But Native Americans who do end up being prosecuted face a federal system that has become tougher in recent years.

Since the 1980s, Congress has been toughening federal penalties by adding mandatory minimum sentences -- which are often more severe than those handed out by states. Coupled with that was the abolishment of parole in the federal system. As a result, American Indians, especially the million or so living on tribal land, can face harsher punishments than non-Indians for what are effectively local crimes, say tribal officials and legal experts.

Utah Federal District Court Judge Paul Cassells, a former federal prosecutor, says the federal sentencing guidelines were designed with a different set of criminals in mind, such as multiple, violent offenders. And yet, "we give everyone the same sentence, even when we know, and everyone in the courtroom knows, it's not the right thing to do."

Rescue Attempt

In Blaine County, Mont., where the fire took place, prosecutor Donald Ranstrom says he would have weighed the fact that the death was unintentional and that the defendants were involved in a rescue attempt. All three options available to him were less severe than the punishment the couple received. Whatever the sentence, the couple would have been eligible under state law for parole after serving one quarter of it.

The federal "guidelines and statutory requirements are very restrictive," says Mr. Ranstrom. "It's a train wreck anyway you look at it."

There are 3,470 American Indians serving time in the federal prison system. That's more, proportionately, than any other racial group. According to census and Bureau of Prisons data, tribal members living on reservations are incarcerated at a rate of more than 249 per 100,000 residents. The next group is African-Americans, who are imprisoned at a rate of 198 per 100,000.

The rate of incarceration only partially tells the story, according to a 2003 study commissioned by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a federal agency that creates the guidelines federal judges use in sentencing. It showed that Indian offenses amount to less than 5% of the overall federal caseload, but constitute a significant portion of the violent crime in federal court. "Over 80% of manslaughter cases and over 60% of sexual abuse cases arise from Indian jurisdiction and nearly half of all the murders and assaults arise from Indian jurisdiction," said the report.

Fort Belknap Reservation, like many reservations here, is far from any major population centers. Great Falls, the closest, is 160 miles away. The communities on the reservation are spread over 1,200 square miles, making them even more isolated. Lodge Pole is one of the larger ones, situated in the Little Rocky Mountain chain, where farming and ranching are the primary occupations.

Two years ago, Ms. Wing, who is about 5 feet tall with long, black hair, was attending Fort Belknap College in a health program. She says she wanted to do research for the tribe on a contaminated-water problem. She also worked with teens on the reservation, supervising those who were considered by the tribal court to be at risk for drugs and delinquency.

Before it burned, the house she lived in was a small, wood-frame structure with three bedrooms, a basement and a carport. It had neither plumbing nor a well. Water had to be hauled in, in five-gallon jugs and blue water bottles, from about a mile away. Residents had to use an outhouse.

April 9, 2005, began as a big party to celebrate multiple birthdays around that time. Cousins, friends, siblings, aunts and uncles -- all tribe members
-- gathered at the decrepit wood-frame house. Ms. Wing was the primary guest of honor. It was a Saturday and her 25th birthday was the following week.

Angel Lynn Denny, Ms. Wing's second-cousin, was there too. She left at one point and went home to call her parents, who were at a basketball tournament with her younger siblings.

"We told her she had to leave because there was drinking," says Ms. Wing's husband, Kenneth Arcand, 23, in a phone interview from the federal prison in Colorado where he is serving his sentence. There was beer and whisky. Some participants left and went to local bars before returning, Mr. Arcand and Ms. Wing say.

The alcohol brought out simmering animosities over a central question: Who owned the house? The land had been in the family for generations, evidenced by a vacant, one-room log cabin that had belonged to Ms. Wing's great-grandfather. But the house itself was claimed by two branches of the
family: that of Ms. Wing's father and that of her uncle. A fistfight broke out.

Two years later, no one is sure who started the fight or who came up with the idea to burn the house. What the participants do agree on is that most were drunk.

The fire that caused the most damage began in the living room, according to court documents. The party-goers evacuated and were standing outside the house when a young teen began crying, says Ms. Wing. Ms. Wing says her cousin Angel had returned to the house unnoticed and had been asleep in a back room.

Overcome by Smoke

Several people, including Mr. Arcand, tried to go back inside but were turned away by the heat and smoke, according to court testimony. "I ran through the back door and tried to get into the house but the flames were already climbing up the wall," he recalls. The crowd formed a human pyramid to boost would-be rescuers through the bedroom window. One of the rescuers thought he found the girl, but was overcome by the smoke and couldn't pull her out, according to court testimony.

After the body was discovered, tribal police, realizing the crime was out of their jurisdiction, called the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During questioning, the couple confessed to setting the fire, but later recanted. They were released on their own recognizance, and later received instructions through the mail on when to report to court.

At the time, prosecutors were operating under instructions from Attorney General John Ashcroft to pursue the severest possible charges in all cases. The federal district of Montana followed the instructions: In 2006, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, defendants there received sentences nearly double the national average.

Mr. Arcand recalls thinking that he and his wife would be found not guilty, because concluding that they had set out to purposely kill the young woman "was wrong."

It took the jury in Great Falls less than four hours to convict them.

As he sentenced Ms. Wing, federal district Judge Sam Haddon noted that a state court would have handed down a more lenient sentence. But he
continued: "My personal preference -- what I would do as an individual if not constrained by the law -- is, itself, in the view of the court, irrelevant." He said the court was "obliged to impose a sentence of life imprisonment."

During their subsequent appeal, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions. One judge on the three-judge panel, Richard Clifton, while upholding the convictions, wrote "separately to express my dismay at the consequences of the result we reach."

Judge Clifton continued: "It is appropriate that the defendants be seriously punished for what they did, but these life sentences do not square with my concept of justice." He expressed hope that the executive branch might intervene to reduce the sentence.

Anthony Gallagher, the federal public defender who defended Ms. Wing, says a clemency request for a pardon or commutation is his last option. The Supreme Court decided in June not to take the case.

Recently, Congress has begun discussing changing the way jurisdiction is decided on tribal land. A committee with the Federal Bar Association has taken up the cause of pushing for changes, as well as the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Sitting in a conference room at the women's prison outside Oakland, Calif., Ms. Wing wiped away tears as she talked about her cousin, acknowledging how the incident has torn apart the tribe and her family. She says she has come to terms with the possibility she won't see her home or husband again.

Ms. Wing was offered a plea bargain that would have given her 30 years, but she wanted to go to trial. "We knew we would face life, but I wanted the truth to be known, that there was no malice and we didn't know she was there," she says.

She and Mr. Arcand once worked at the Tastee Bite Café in Chinook. Ms. Wing was a waitress. He had worked his way up from dishwasher to cook.

In letters written on their behalf before they were sentenced, the owners of the cafe, Karen and Frank LaTray, said they sometimes left the couple in charge. "I trusted them to operate the business in these occasions and also trusted them with the money. I knew every penny would be in the till and accounted for until I returned," Ms. LaTray said in court papers.

Now Ms. Wing reports for work at 6:20 a.m. at the prison's garment factory, which produces parachutes for the military and blankets used in disaster relief. There she works on a computer and helps develop cost estimates for the products the prison produces. Remembering the battle for the house, which led to her cousin's death, is painful, she says. "It was just greed."

Asking for Forgiveness

Ms. Wing has written to her cousin's immediate family asking forgiveness, but says they haven't responded.

"My life is nothing compared to Angel's," Ms. Wing says. "Nothing can ever replace her life. I do pray I get a second chance, but I know God has a plan," she says. "I'm not saying he'll take me out of here, but I know he has a plan."

The spot where Angel died is marked by a 6-foot white cross. Friends and family have left a softball and a pink, portable cassette player at its base, symbols of the teen's love of music, dance and sports. A small herd of horses graze at the site of the burned structure, and the outhouse is barely visible through the tall grass.

Less than a mile away, there is a sweat lodge, resembling a cloth-covered igloo, behind an uncle's home, heated by granite rocks in a pit. Several times, Ms. Wing's parents have gone there to sweat moral and physical impurities out of their system in preparation for a three-day fast and a sun dance, where they have prayed for the incarcerated couple and Ms. Wing's deceased cousin.

Angel's father, Bruce Denny, 50, sitting in the family living room that has become a shrine to the teen, says the incident has forever changed his family. At first, he refused to believe she was dead. "I was in shock. I went blank there. I'm still inside myself," he says. "Her high-school class just graduated. I couldn't go to the ceremony, I just couldn't."

Mr. Denny says he hasn't thought about whether the life sentences are just. "I just went with what the system said the punishment should be," he says. "We live by a system and whatever the system gives, that's what I go with."

Write to Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com

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

Moe Fishman Dies at 92; Fought in Lincoln Brigade

August 12, 2007
Moe Fishman Dies at 92; Fought in Lincoln Brigade
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Moe Fishman, who as a 21-year-old from Astoria, Queens, fought Fascists in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was severely wounded, then led veterans of that unit in fighting efforts to brand them as Communist subversives, died on Aug. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Peter Carroll, chief of the board of governors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

Mr. Carroll said that about 40 of about 3,000 American veterans of the Spanish Civil War volunteers are living. It had been the job of Mr. Fishman, as executive secretary-treasurer of the veterans, to announce deaths.

At times he was almost alone in keeping the group going, Mr. Carroll said, particularly during the long, ultimately successful legal battle to remove the group’s subversive label. Mr. Fishman put out a newsletter, kept scrupulous books, ran the office daily and spoke widely.

In an interview with Esquire magazine in 1962, he said: “I’m the organization. If there’s something to decide, I talk it over with the guys and then decide what I’m going to do. Cockeyed, but that’s the way it is.”

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 after Gen. Francisco Franco set out to overthrow the newly elected leftist government. Americans soon volunteered to fight Franco in what came to be called the Lincoln Brigade.

It was actually a battalion. Officially, Americans joined it or the Washington Battalion. The two American battalions, which informally have come to be known as the Lincoln Brigade, joined with four other battalions of volunteers from other countries to form the XV International Brigade.

In 1937, Mr. Fishman was a high-school dropout working in a laundry and driving a truck. He was also a member of the Young Communist League, having joined partly to meet like-minded young women at dances the organization sponsored, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004.

He also liked how the Communists responded when a family behind on the rent was evicted and thrown on the streets with its furniture. He told The Times that party members would use an ax or hammer to break the lock on the door and put the family back in.

Many believe that at least half of the volunteers for the Lincoln Brigade were Communists, but Mr. Fishman’s reasons for joining were more complex, he told The Times in 1969.

“Why did I go?” he said. “That’s hard to say. That’s a key question. I was active in trade union work. I wanted to travel. I belonged to the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A., and we were very anti-Fascist, much opposed to Hitler, Franco.”

He was born Moses Fishman on Sept. 28, 1915, and grew up in Astoria. On the day he was to depart for Spain, he left for work at the usual time to deceive his parents. Halfway down the stairs, he realized he had forgotten his toothbrush, returned for it and broke it in half so it would fit in his pocket. (It was the only thing he brought back from Spain, he told The Hartford Courant in 2000.)Mr. Fishman called his parents when he got off the subway near the dock, and they cried when he told them his plans. His mother had never seen his father cry. He himself was unafraid. “When you’re 21, there’s no bullet meant for you,” he told The Times in 2000.

On July 5, 1937, during the Brunete offensive west of Madrid, a sniper hit Mr. Fishman’s thigh, leaving 32 pieces of bone and metal. He spent a year in Spanish hospitals, and a pin was put into his leg. At one point the leg became infected, he told The Courant. He was then in and out of hospitals in the United States for two years.

During World War II, Mr. Fishman was in the merchant marine. Afterward, he and other Lincoln veterans became involved in aiding refugees from Franco’s Spain. President Harry S. Truman’s attorney general labeled the veterans group subversive. In 1950, when such organizations had to register with the government, the entire executive committee of the Lincoln Brigade veterans resigned. Mr. Fishman stepped in to become secretary-treasurer.

After a federal court removed the subversive label in the 1970s, Mr. Fishman wrote a colleague that the change might not be good. He wryly suggested doing something subversive so as not to appear irrelevant to rebellious youth. (Mr. Fishman later dropped his party membership, Mr. Carroll said.)

Mr. Fishman is survived by his partner, Georgia Wever, of Manhattan, and his sisters Lilly Litsky, of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Pearl Fishman, of Yonkers.

He never tired of a lively demonstration. But he came to prefer sitting in a folding chair, as he did in 2004, when he hailed protesters at the Republican National Convention in Manhattan. When they saw his Lincoln Brigade banner, they applauded back. In an interview with The Villager, a neighborhood newspaper, he said, “They come up — these young girls — they want you to take a picture with them and they kiss you.”

Other late-life adjustments were harder. In 2001, an article in The Economist recounted how he stumbled over the word “globalization” at a protest against globalization. “It was so much easier to say when we called it imperialism,” he was reported to have said.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/nyregion/12fishman.html

Posted by lois at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, Rights Pioneer, Dies

August 13, 2007
Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, Rights Pioneer, Dies
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, whose defiance of white supremacy while traveling through the Upper South in the summer of 1944 led to a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated seating on interstate bus lines, died Friday in Hayes, Va. She was 90.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said her granddaughter Janine Bacquie.

Irene Morgan’s fight against segregation took place a decade before the modern civil rights movement changed America. Taken up by the N.A.A.C.P. and argued before the Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall, later the court’s first black justice, it proved a forerunner to Rosa Parks’s storied refusal to yield her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala.

Mrs. Morgan, a worker in a plant that made World War II bombers and the mother of two small children, was returning to her home in Baltimore aboard a Greyhound bus in July 1944 after a visit to her mother in Gloucester County, Va.

When the bus grew crowded, the driver told her to give her seat to a white person. Mrs. Morgan refused, and when a sheriff’s deputy tried to take her off the bus in Saluda, Va., she resisted.

“He put his hand on me to arrest me, so I took my foot and kicked him,” she recalled in “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!” a 1995 public television documentary. “He was blue and purple and turned all colors. I started to bite him, but he looked dirty, so I couldn’t bite him. So all I could do was claw and tear his clothes.”

Mrs. Morgan was arrested and pleaded guilty the next October to resisting arrest, paying a $100 fine. But she refused to pay a $10 fine for violating a Virginia law requiring segregated seating in public transportation.

She appealed, and the N.A.A.C.P., seeking a test case over segregated interstate transport, represented her.

“She was young, attractive, articulate and, judging by her poised performance in Saluda, strong enough to withstand the pressures of a high-profile legal battle,” Raymond Arsenault wrote in his book “Freedom Riders.”

When Virginia’s highest court ruled against Mrs. Morgan, the N.A.A.C.P. appealed to the Supreme Court. Mr. Marshall and his fellow N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, William Hastie, argued that segregation aboard interstate buses — Mrs. Morgan’s bus was traveling from Virginia to Maryland — represented an unconstitutional burden on the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce and that it threatened free movement across state lines.

The N.A.A.C.P. brief in Morgan v. Virginia stated that “we are just emerging from a war in which all of the people of the United States were joined in a death struggle against the apostles of racism.”

On June 3, 1946, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 1 in favor of Mrs. Morgan. Justice Stanley F. Reed wrote that “seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single uniform rule to promote and protect national travel.”

But the Southern states disregarded the ruling. In 1947, an interracial group led by Bayard Rustin, who helped organize the March on Washington two decades later, staged bus rides through the Upper South testing compliance.

Rustin and two other riders were arrested in North Carolina and served three weeks on a brutal prison farm. In 1961, Freedom Riders rode buses through the South to protest segregation and were met with violence in Alabama that stunned the nation.

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, who was born and reared in Baltimore, lived on Long Island and ran a child-care center in Queens with her second husband, Stanley Kirkaldy. At age 68 she received a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University, and five years later she obtained a master’s degree in urban studies at Queens College.

She is survived by her daughter, Brenda Morgan Bacquie of Hayes, and her son, Sherwood Morgan Jr., of Dover, Del., from her marriage to Sherwood Morgan Sr., who died in 1948; her sisters Justine Walker, of Baltimore, and James Ethel Laforest, of Upper Marlboro, Md.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Stanley Kirkaldy died in November.

In 2000, Gloucester County, where Irene Morgan got on that bus six decades earlier, and where she lived in her final years, honored her on its 350th anniversary.

A year later, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal. “When Irene Morgan boarded a bus for Baltimore in the summer of 1944,” the citation read, “she took the first step on a journey that would change America forever.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/us/13kirkaldy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=obituaries&pagewanted=print

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

OK:Prisons Running Out of Options

Published on 8/11/2007
Prisons running out of options

By The Associated Press

Department of Corrections Director Justin Jones shuns giving his opinion on laws that have filled state prisons to overflowing, but he is not shy about saying the system is in crisis.

Jones said officials have fewer options than ever to deal with overcrowding and he continues to advocate new prison construction and renovation to address the issue, while urging caution about a large increase in the use of private prisons.

He also theorized that Oklahoma's high rate of incarceration ‹ No. 4 in the country ‹ is tied, in some measure, to the state having "a very weak" county government structure, where money is not available for diversion programs as is the case in some states that send fewer people to prisons.

Is low recidivism good?

He said Oklahoma has a relatively low recidivism rate compared to other states but finds it interesting that a researcher told him that was not necessarily a good thing, quoting the expert as saying "what that indicates to me is you are incarcerating a lot of low-risk people.² Critics of the state's criminal justice system long have cited statistics showing the vast majority of Oklahoma's inmates are in for nonviolent offenses and argued many of those offenders should be diverted to less costly forms of punishment.

Strong reservations

Jones wouldn't criticize laws that have contributed to overcrowding, such as repeal of early-release programs, requiring many convicts to serve 85 percent of terms and expanding the list of felony crimes.

But he expressed strong reservations about going too far in using private prison beds to solve the overcrowding dilemma, and he said drug courts should be used more for repeat offenders to divert them from prisons. Many first-time offenders now in drug courts would not be prison bound anyway, he said.

Jones said district attorneys and judges make good use of diversion programs.

Private prisons are part of the solution to managing the inmate population, he said, but "you have to be careful in that regard. You wouldn't want to run a business where you have only one supplier.²

His concern is that the state could become too dependent on private prisons and be in trouble if they pull out, for one reason or another, leaving perhaps 2,000 prisoners with no where to go.

Expanding system

He said private prisons generally do not want to deal with maximum security inmates. Besides building a new medium security prison, Jones wants to upgrade the Oklahoma State Penitentiary to handle growth in maximum security inmates.

The Legislature rejected his request for expanding the prison system. Henry presented the Legislature with a list of bond proposals in his executive budget that included an item for prison expansion. But he did not actively push the plan.

"Their job is to make policy decisions based upon that data and research," he said. "I don't take it personally if they decline. They treat me very well, even if they don't respond or create legislation to allow me to build."
http://newsok.com/article/3104181

Posted by lois at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)

TN: Older inmates an increasing problem for prisons

"The Tennessee Department of Correction maintains the DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville and also has created a "geriatric ward" at the Wayne County Boot Camp in Clifton, according to Ms. Ray. But the commissioner said she believes more solutions will have to be created -- perhaps to the extent of building entire prisons exclusively designed for assisted living. State officials have been in communication with Kentucky officials, who have expressed interest in building a long-term care facility for several neighboring states to share, Ms. Ray said."

Older inmates an increasing problem for prisons
Chattanooga Times Free Press
Monday, August 13, 2007
By Lauren Gregory
Staff Writer

The elderly prison population is growing at all levels, causing increased medical expenses and space issues for corrections officials.

"It's a serious issue right now. There could be a point in time when it would be a crushing burden." Tennessee Department of Correction Deputy Commissioner Gayle Ray said.

She said aging baby boomers and enhanced sentences in recent years have contributed to a nationwide problem.

As a result, medical care becomes a significant expense, according to Ms. Ray, who recalled two elderly inmates who last year racked up $1 million in medical bills apiece -- a significant portion of the $67 million budgeted for the medical needs of the entire system, which as of last month housed 19,296 adults, she said.

Hamilton County Jail Chief Jim Hart said aging prisoners in custody draw more resources.

"They may be on a special diet," he said. "Some may have to be in diapers. ... They may need special accommodations if they can't get up on the second bunk."

Ms. Ray noted that many older inmates require wheelchairs, walkers or other mobility devices and sometimes even assisted living.

"There are few people over the age of 50 who commit crimes," Ms. Ray said, making older first-time offenders a small percentage of the prison population.

The group of aged prisoners as a whole is significant and becomes a significant drain at all levels of the corrections system, she said.

It is hard to quantify exactly how much the older population affects overall health care expenses, however, as older inmates are not automatically lumped into one group, Chief Hart said. Each inmate -- regardless of his or her age
-- is evaluated individually for placement, he said, with both physical and mental needs taken into account.

The Hamilton County Jail does not maintain a separate housing area for the elderly but does have a special needs unit where those inmates sometimes are placed if extra medical care is needed, he said.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons also does not segregate by age, according to spokesman Michael Truman.

"Ordinarily, elderly inmates are designated to the general population of prisoners at federal correctional institutions," Mr. Truman wrote in an e-mail. "Unless there are special circumstances, none of which ordinarily are related to age, all inmates have the opportunity to be involved in the widest variety of correctional programs."

Corrections Corporation of America officials had considered creating an over-40 dormitory at the Silverdale Workhouse, according to spokeswoman Christina Young, "but because our (inmate) count is so high, it's impossible for us to do that," she said. "With the jail populations through the roof right now, it's extremely difficult to keep these people separate."

Corrections officials strive to do so to whatever extent possible, however, according to Ms. Ray.

"Mainly, it's for (the older inmates') own protection," she said. "Anyone who is weaker in a prison environment needs a little bit of extra protection. ... It's just a better environment for that particular group."

The Tennessee Department of Correction maintains the DeBerry Special Needs Facility in Nashville and also has created a "geriatric ward" at the Wayne County Boot Camp in Clifton, according to Ms. Ray.

But the commissioner said she believes more solutions will have to be created -- perhaps to the extent of building entire prisons exclusively designed for assisted living.

State officials have been in communication with Kentucky officials, who have expressed interest in building a long-term care facility for several neighboring states to share, Ms. Ray said.

Though Tennessee does not have a sentence review committee to determine whether older inmates need to remain in prison once they become infirm, elderly people housed in state prisons can apply for medical furlough in their last six months of life, she said.

Ms. Ray said she hopes policy makers one day will take hold of the idea that alternatives to prison could be considered for the old and weak.

"I think most people don't think about this," she said. "It's a lot of money to spend on people who are no longer able to hurt anybody."

E-mail Lauren Gregory at lgregory@timesfreepress.com

TENNESSEE'S OLDEST INMATES
These are the oldest people now incarcerated by the Tennessee Department of
Correction:

* Joseph Veres, 88, Wayne County Boot Camp, Clifton

Convicted in Putnam County of two counts of aggravated rape and one count of aggravated sexual battery. Sentence effective in 1984; ends in 2022.

* Roy R. Rogers, 88, DeBerry Special Needs Facility, Nashville

Convicted in Anderson County of three counts of rape of a child, two counts of aggravated sexual battery and one count of aggravated rape. Sentence effective in 1994; ends in 2009.

* Clarence Mcquiston, 87, DeBerry Special Needs Facility, Nashville

Convicted in Montgomery County of one count of sexual battery, two counts of attempt to commit sexual battery and one count of aggravated sexual battery. Sentence ends in 2012.

* James Allen, 86, DeBerry Special Needs Facility, Nashville

Convicted in Weakley County of one count of aggravated sexual battery and one count of attempted aggravated sexual battery. Sentence ends in 2009.

* William Stout, 84, Morgan County Correctional Complex, Wartburg

Convicted in Loudon County of one count of sexual battery. Sentence ends in 2008.
http://www.timesfreepress.com/absolutenm/templates/local.aspx?articleid=1964
4&zoneid=77

Source: Tennessee Department of Corrections

Posted by lois at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)

MI: Out-of-control prison spending is the real injustice

Bay City Times

- Our View is the editorial opinion of The Bay City Times, as determined by the newspaper's editorial board, which includes the editorial page editor, the editor and the publisher.

Out-of-control prison spending is the real injustice
Sunday, August 12, 2007

With one of every 200 residents in prison, Michigan has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the nation - twice that of Iowa, for example, and 40 percent higher than that of
seven other Great Lakes states.

Michigan will spend $1.9 billion this year operating 49 prisons and camps. That's $4.9 million per day - more than we spend for K-16 education and libraries combined.

That flies in the face of public priorities. In a 2004 poll, Michiganders ranked corrections lowest among spending priorities, listing education, juvenile-offender programs and treatment for the mentally ill as preferred fronts in the fight against crime.

Indeed, a boom in the state prison industry hasn't reduced crime rates.

Since 1984, the state's prison population has climbed from under 15,000 to 51,215, while the portion of the state's corrections budget grew from 5 percent to more than 20 percent of the general fund. A third of state employees - 17,000 - work in corrections.

Yet our crime rate is 25 percent higher than the average of neighboring states.

Our corrections need correction.

The prisoner explosion has a variety of causes: Sentencing guidelines that take away discretion from judges; a parole board loath to free potential killers; the state's refusal to offer early release for ''good behavior'' as 48 other states do.

Wrestling with an $800 million budget deficit, Gov. Jennifer Granholm wants to shave $100 million from the DOC. She's endorsed a plan to reform sentences and reclassify 140 felonies to misdemeanors.

Law-enforcement officials skewered the plan, claiming it would crowd overstuffed jails. But Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan said the revisions would have moved just 83 prisoners to county lockups last year.

We're paying the price for incarceration whether in state or county cells, and it's time to pinch our penal pennies for maximum return.

While violent criminals must be kept off the street, imprisoning nonviolent offenders is unnecessary in light of a host of cheaper, more effective options.

Sixty-eight percent of Michigan's prisoners are in for violent crimes, 23 percent for non-drug-related, non-violent crimes, and 9 percent for drugs.

Rather than costing us $32,000 per year in prison, that third of the prisoners could serve ''house arrest'' for about $2,000 each, or be admitted to rehabilitation programs proven to reduce re-arrest rates. Some could perform community service to pay their debts to society.

We must embrace a concept of justice that focuses on restitution and rehabilitation rather than hard time as we come to grips with our economic realities.

Robert Brown, Jr., who directed Michigan prisons from 1984 to 1992, said it
best:

''We need to reserve prison space for criminals we're afraid of and use more conducive and less costly alternatives to rehabilitate offenders we are simply mad at.''

Because 95 percent of folks in prison eventually get out.

And then they come home.

- Our View is the editorial opinion of The Bay City Times, as determined by the newspaper's editorial board, which includes the editorial page editor, the editor and the publisher.
http://www.mlive.com/columns/bctimes/index.ssf?/base/news-1/1186913711194050
.xml&coll=4>

Posted by lois at 08:51 PM | Comments (0)

August 12, 2007

LA: Pollock hopes to beat odds, thrive as a prison town

Huling said that a recent study comparing towns that host prisons with towns that don't showed that "prison towns" have a more difficult time reducing poverty than "non-prison towns."

The Town Talk
Alexandria, LA

Pollock hopes to beat odds, thrive as a prison town
By Karina Donica

POLLOCK -- A new prison may not be the most welcomed venture by a community, but in the town of Pollock, a federal penitentiary is challenging that common perception as it is bringing much more than lawbreakers.

It is helping build the economy, town officials say.

The U.S. Penitentiary in Pollock, a sleepy town about 15 miles from Alexandria in Grant Parish, not only is generating about 400 jobs, it is bringing the most significant infrastructure improvement of the past 20 years, officials said.

The federal government had struggled to find a place to build the prison and faced a negative response in other areas, but Pollock officials welcomed the prison, and eight years later the penal complex has become "the engine of the economy," said Pollock Mayor Jerome Scott and Councilwoman Faye M. Mayeaux.

"There was a lot of negativity -- people were scared of a prison," but in retrospect, it was the best economic decision, Scott said.

A new water and sewer system, highway improvements, a new police station and a new community center are some of the benefits from the larger tax base as a result of the prison, Scott said.

The Pollock penitentiary, which houses about 1,579 inmates, is one of an increasing number of prisons settling in rural communities across America, bailing out economies in decline.

But for some, including Tracy Huling, a nationally renowned independent consultant who has done research on the criminal justice system and rural development, relying on a prison for economic growth could be dangerous.

While there is a short-term economic gain, over the long term the impact could be devastating socially and economically, said Huling, who has researched the issue for about 20 years.

Huling said that a recent study comparing towns that host prisons with towns that don't showed that "prison towns" have a more difficult time reducing poverty than "non-prison towns."

Over time, the population in prison towns declines, which eventually could keep such businesses as retailers from coming.

Huling, whose statistical research can be found at www.prisonersofthecensus.org, said it's an unfortunate trend of rural towns in America.

For the community of Pollock, though, not hosting the prison was the same as denying the town a fresh start, town officials say. The prison is a stepping stone for the Pollock community to clear a major hurdle in its history, said Scott, who is a retired educator.

The turning point was the Mayeaux administration, credited with using the town's scarce resources wisely, Scott said.

"When Gene (former Pollock Mayor Gene Mayeaux) became mayor in 1995, the town was on the verge of bankruptcy and the state was fixing to come in," Scott said, adding the town had no money because of mismanagement.

But in the midst of its uncertain future, the town pulled together and worked countless hours to bring its finances from the red into the black, Scott said.

That laid the foundation for future administrations to focus their efforts on new opportunities.

When the prison opened in 1999, it brought needed money to the town. Along with the prison came a grant that helped replace the aging water and sewer system with a new, $6.5 million system to serve the prison and the town.

"The water and sewer systems were dilapidated. We only had a small sewer pond, and there were boil advisories sometimes weekly" to purify the water, Scott said.

Today, the efficient water and sewer system allows Pollock to have some of the lowest water and sewer rates in Louisiana, according to a 2007 Pan American Engineers comparison of 64 communities with similar consumption.

Before, the town had one police car bought from salvage, no community center- and in short -- no tools for town employees to do their work, said Faye M. Mayeaux, whose family -- including the former mayor, her husband -- has a long history with the town.

Mayeaux said it has been a lot of hard work, but she believes officials now can spend their energies keeping the town stable, while focusing on other things.

Some of the latest developments are a new police station (which opened July 2006) a new community center, several beautification projects and renovated parks. The town also has increased family events, including an Easter egg hunt, Fourth of July fireworks celebration and Christmas in the park.

"We have come a long, long way. I'd say we have the best of everything now," Scott said.

http://www.thetowntalk.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070808/NEWS01/708080
325/1002/NEWS17

Posted by lois at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)

Western MA: Letter to the Editor in Support of Work Opportunities for People With Criminal Records

News and information for Saturday, August 11, 2007
Letter to the editor published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette
Put the focus on rehabilitation, not punishment

To the editor:

I would like to respond to the Aug. 2 Gazette article about Talib Sadiq, the newly hired guidance counselor at Amherst Regional Middle School. In my opinion, the Amherst School Department ought to be commended for conducting such a thoughtful, thorough hiring process and for having the courage to pick Talib Sadiq. Although he has a criminal history stemming from a bank robbery in 1993, prior to that he was in the armed forces in Desert Storm, and since then he has reportedly transformed his life.

As a social worker at the VA in Northampton, I have the privilege of knowing many veterans who have committed crimes and who are working to turn their lives around. Especially with a criminal history of any kind, which is documented in the CORI reports that are mandated by most employers and many housing agencies, even veterans (and non-veterans) who have made great strides toward self-improvement often have almost insurmountable obstacles to getting decent employment and housing.

Sometimes people make poor decisions which can have huge and unintended consequences. Yes, some are career criminals with sociopathic tendencies. However, most frequently these mistakes are made in the midst of extreme situational stress, mental health issues, substance abuse, dire economic straits, or a combination of these factors. Many make great efforts to return to a normal life. Unfortunately our culture emphasizes punishment over rehabilitation.

As a society we all win when those who have committed crimes can be reintegrated as full and worthy individuals. Mr. Sadiq will now be in a unique position to model and pave the way for others. For those who have made mistakes that ended in a criminal conviction Mr. Sadiq shows that patience, perseverance hard work and honesty can yield results.

Carmen Junno
Florence

Posted by lois at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2007

CA: Remaking Prisons: Now’s our chance to design a system that actually works

Remaking Prisons
Now’s our chance to design a system that actually works
August 9, 2007
~ By MINDY FARABEE ~
LA City Beat

Federal judges Thelton Henderson of San Francisco and Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento lost patience with California’s out-of-control penal system last month, and set in motion what could turn out to be a revolutionary rethinking of the way the state punishes lawbreakers.

They ordered the creation of a three-judge panel to bypass the political whims and pressures of Sacramento lawmakers and produce their own study on how to tame an ever-burgeoning prison population. The top solution being considered is whether to cap the population, and what steps, including home detention and drug-prevention programs, could be used to reduce the number of people behind bars.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has filed an appeal of what amounts to a judicial takeover of at least part of the management of the state prison system. He claims the state is well on its way to ameliorating the crisis without intervention. The governor cites his transferring thousands of prisoners out of state and a $7.4 billion plan to build new prisons as evidence of his good deeds. Critics dismiss his plan to send inmates to Mississippi, Tennessee, or Arizona and his prison construction plan, outlined in Assembly Bill 900, as proof of just how off-kilter our approach to law and order has become.

“What’s criminal about [AB] 900 is that there was supposed to be sentencing reform attached to it, but the reform part got cut off,” says Dave Fratello, co-author of Proposition 36, the initiative approved by voters in 2000 that called for drug treatment instead of incarceration for first- and second-time, non-violent drug-possession offenders. “It shows how spineless our political system is … there’s only one right answer on criminal justice.”

For three decades, that answer has been a keep-getting-tougher approach that keeps digging us in deeper. Since sentence enhancements became a dominant feature of our judicial landscape in the late-’70s, prison capacity has tripled; during the same period, tougher sentencing laws have caused the prison population to mushroom by more than 800 percent. In the last 30 years, Sacramento has issued some 1,000 bills lengthening jail terms. There are now 173,000 inmates in spaces designed for 100,000.

What all this means, critics say, is that perhaps the federal court’s new panel actually gives California a golden, if embarrassing, opportunity to rethink some seriously flawed policies. Just as some urban planning experts are warning that we’ll have to choke on our own traffic jams before we’ll wean ourselves from auto-dependence, so some governmental analysts are arguing that mandatory prison population caps are the only measures severe enough to shock the system into re-evaluating the entrenched sentencing requirements clogging the system.

To say our state’s prisons are grossly, unconscionably filled beyond capacity is akin to noting that the Pope is Catholic. Some 17,000 inmates are currently not housed in cells at all, but are warehoused in formerly communal spaces like recreation rooms, gyms, and hallways, adding insult to injury as overcrowding pushes out rehabilitation programs along with any semblance of a civilized existence. For years, politicians have called these arrangements an embarrassment, yet still they exist. And that’s ironic, according to Fratello. If the state ceased sending minor drug offenders to do hard time, 10,000 inmates could be freed immediately. But that’s only “if we’re willing to be really forward thinking and smart, which there’s no evidence anyone wants to be,” he says.

As it is, in a 2006 report, the Justice Policy Institute determined that Proposition 36 kept 14,000 potential inmates out of the prison system, and accomplished that on a skimpy budget. A UCLA study said the program needs an infusion of $100 million to be considered optimal funding. Currently, due to extraordinary budget pressures, Prop. 36’s measly $120 million funding could be in jeopardy when the state Senate reconvenes later this month, Fratello says, despite the fact that the state typically pays more than $30,000 to house one inmate for one year. “It’s a sickness in the system that we have to scrape and claw for minimal funding for treatment that changes people’s lives and ends people’s criminal careers, when by contrast it’s so easy to throw money at a solution as long as it locks people up,” Fratello says.

Perhaps voters have a right to wonder what all that taxpayer funding is buying them. “Keep in mind that mass imprisonment is no guarantee of safety,” says UC-Berkeley law professor Jonathan Simon. “California experienced significant declines in violent crime during the 1990s while it was locking up record numbers of offenders, but our decline was no better than most states that did not incarcerate at nearly the same rate, and some relatively low incarcerating states, especially New York, did significantly better. Indeed Canada, which has very low incarceration rates compared to California, did just as well.”

Who exactly are we locking up? “There’s a lady in prison now for stealing baby formula for her infant,” says Donna Warren, a spokesperson for Families Against California’s Three Strikes. “Kelly Turner is doing 25 years for writing a bad $500 check to Nordstroms … . There are 4,438 people now doing life for non-violent crimes.”

Fratello estimates that overall, half of our current prison population is considered non-violent. According to Simon, 2005 demographics show that a third of the inmates are locked up for non-violent property crimes, drug charges, or a range of other mostly public order offenses.

“It’s reasonable to suppose that many of these offenders could be handled in the community without setting off a wave of feared crimes,” says Simon, who also co-directs the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice and is the author of the recent book, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. But beyond those who have yet to commit a violent crime, Simon adds that there’s a great deal of criminological research suggesting that almost all offenders – including those who commit serious and violent crimes – are not likely to commit a crime after age 45 or so. These studies have shown that even persistent offenders give up the habit after middle age. “In 2005, more than 36,000 prisoners were 45 or over,” Simon says. “Most of them probably pose little risk if released.”

As for why our legislators can’t keep their hands off the sentencing button, Simon has a theory. “I believe the main explanation lies in the perverse incentives of term limits.” These limits, he says, have created a system demanding legislators make their mark quickly in order to hop from the Assembly to the Senate and on to statewide offices. To do that, a legislator must sponsor a lot of legislation that actually gets enacted, and sentence enhancement bills don’t have very many influential interests to oppose them, while health care and education reform or economic policy changes invariably draw oodles of powerful opposition. Furthermore, term limits offer the added bonus of ensuring that “legislators are not around long enough to get blamed for big structural problems like the prison crises,” Simon adds, meaning it’s going to take more than term- limits reform to effectively eliminate the incentives for tough-on crime legislation, but it wouldn’t be a bad start.

Until then, “Our best hope to achieve more dramatic gains is a charismatic governor willing to build a state wide consensus behind a different approach,” Simon continues. “Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is constitutionally barred from being president and probably doesn’t want to go the U.S. Senate is our best chance in decades. Stay posted.”

For the moment, however, not everyone is as optimistic about Schwarzenegger’s leadership. This spring, the Northern California-based Critical Resistance, an organization protesting what they see as California’s over-reliance on using prisons to treat social ills, says they headed up to Sacramento and handed out copies of their pamphlet 50 Ways to Reduce the Number of People in Prison, but to little avail.

“Our point is, there’s a myriad of ways to reduce the prison population tomorrow,” says Rose Braz, a Critical Resistance campaign director. “We just don’t have the political will. When Schwarzenegger first got into office, he said some really promising things … but very, very quickly that changed and now Schwarzenegger is showing no leadership on this issue and we see things are only getting worse.”

Meanwhile, even the federal judges themselves singled out Schwarzenegger’s AB 900 in particular for criticism, as an idea that could only exacerbate the difficulties of managing the state’s already unwieldy system.

“It’s the largest prison expansion plan in the history of the world,” opines Braz.

Currently, the prison system consumes $10 billion a year overseeing 173,000 inmates. AB 900 is a bond measure borrowing $7.7 billion more to construct 53,000 beds, many of which would come online in 18 to 24 months. That’s too long to wait to achieve dicey results at best, according to Braz. “The federal judges flatly said building will only make the problem larger,” she says. “AB 900 is not a prescription for change, and thanks to 900, we’ll soon be spending more on our prison system than our educational system, despite poll after poll after poll showing that voters don’t support funding prison expansion.”

In fact, in past years, voters here have done more than that; they’ve actively voted down bond measures earmarked for prison construction. In light of these past failures, Braz says the state legislature essentially pushed AB 900 through a loophole.

“When California voters rejected prison construction bonds, the legislature created a fiction,” she says. According to Braz, California’s two methods for approving debt separate out general obligation and lease-revenue bonds – the former must be approved by the public, the latter don’t because they’re typically earmarked for projects like toll bridges, which eventually pay for themselves. “The legislature said, ‘Let’s say prisons are revenue generators, because the department of public works will build them and lease them to the department of corrections,”’ Braz says. “It’s not simple to explain what they’re up to, but the simple way to say it is: the voters have a right to approve debt.” And another calculation getting left out of the equation, she says – paying back AB 900’s $7.7 billion debt is likely to jump to $15 billion once all is said and done. “It violates the letter and the spirit of the constitution,” she says.

Indeed, this all might be much simpler if we just let some inmates walk out of prison. State Sen. Gloria Romero, a Los Angeles Democrat, is hoping that the governor signs her bill calling for a study of which inmates could be released before finishing their sentences.

08-09-07
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=5961&IssueNum=218

Posted by lois at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

Country in Distress: The Upside Down Flag

Country in Distress: The Upside Down Flag
Posted August 9, 2007 | 07:12 PM (EST)
Anthony Papa

I am an American. I used to be a proud one. This was before a realization that hit me hard concerning the casualties of a dirty war. I am not talking about the war in Iraq. I am talking about the other war -- the war on drugs. Every day, we see news stories that expose the realities of drug use in America. From celebrities to politicians to athletes and even ordinary people purchasing cold medication, the drug war looms large.

Recently, I was invited to show my art at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The venue was right up my alley. The two-day conference brought together art, music, film and spoken-word performances centered on the theme, "A New Criminology for the 21st century." I decided to create an art installation called, "The Drug War."
The art installation was a multimedia presentation of the most compelling drug war issues in the news. Its use of visual narratives reminds us of the war on drugs that ravages our communities. The installation began to take form, steeped in a motif of an upside down American flag, which signifies the universal concept of the state of distress during war. Several irate people stopped me to ask if I had permission from the administration to "disgrace" the American flag. I told them all I had a constitutional right to voice my opinion.
About two hours later a security team approached me. The leader of the team said "Mr. Papa, you must immediately take down the upside-down flags. I have been getting complaints from faculty and students saying that you are disgracing the flag." I looked at her and pointed out that I was doing nothing wrong. My art was not disrespecting "old glory" because I displayed the upside-down flag for the right reasons. According to the flag code section 36, U.S.C. chapter 10, I was correct in my intentions of stating a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property. She looked at me with indifference while the four men stood behind her standing in a military stance meant to intimidate me.
I immediately explained my position. I told her about the 500,000 Americans who were behind bars because of the war on drugs, and how this war ravages communities and destroys lives, all in the name of a drug-free society. I explained how billions of dollars are spent by the government to stop someone from putting substances in their bodies.
I looked at her and then the guards while pointing at the flags and said "I will not take the flags down."
The head of security huddled with her crew while several sympathetic professors came to my aid. A meeting took place and it was agreed that they had to take this to a higher authority. I was asked to stop building my art installation while we waited for a verdict from the president of the university. During that time, I had a flash back to 12 years ago when something similar occurred in a maximum security prison in New York when I was doing a 15-years-to-life sentence for passing an envelope containing four ounces of cocaine in return for $500. My art was confiscated by the prison guards, who told me I could not send out paintings to the free world that depicted the atrocity of imprisonment.
My mind snapped back to the present moment when one of the security guards tapped me on the shoulder. He said that a decision was made and I was allowed to display the upside down flags. I shook his hand and turned to the American flags and thought about the greatness of our Constitution, which guarantees the freedom to express our opinions, even if it meant turning the flag on its head to make a point.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-papa/country-in-distress-the-_b_59865.html

Posted by lois at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)

Homeland Security to Increase Funding for Detention Beds, Border Security, Visa Restrictions

"The Administration Will Further Increase Funding for Detention Beds So There are Places to Detain 31,500 Illegal Aliens Until They Can Be Returned. "
"The new test will emphasize fundamental concepts of American democracy, basic U.S. history, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It will inculcate the basic values we share as Americans, and encourage civDHS Fact Sheet: Improving Border Security and Immigration Within Existing Law
http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1186757867585.shtm

Release Date: August 10, 2007

Today, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez Announced a Series of Reforms the Administration Will Pursue to Address Border Security and Immigration Challenges. The following reforms represent steps the Administration can take within the boundaries of existing law to secure our borders more effectively, improve interior and worksite enforcement, streamline existing guest worker programs, improve the current immigration system, and help new immigrants assimilate into American culture.ic knowledge and patriotism among prospective citizens. "

Border Security

1. The Administration Will Continue to Strengthen Security at the Border with Additional Personnel and Infrastructure. We are committed to implementing the following border security measures by December 31, 2008:
18,300 Border Patrol agents
370 miles of fencing
300 miles of vehicle barriers
105 camera and radar towers
Three additional UAVs

We will also work to ensure that 1,700 more Border Patrol Agents and an additional UAV are added in 2009.

2. The Administration will Maintain the Policy of "Catch and Return" for Illegal Aliens Apprehended at the Border. For years, limited detention space forced the release of many illegal border crossers from nations other than Mexico with nothing more than a Notice to Appear for a hearing before an immigration judge. Many aliens ignored these notices and instead blended into U.S. society. The Administration has ended this practice and instituted a policy of "catch and return," ensuring that all removable aliens caught trying to cross the border illegally are held until they can be removed.
The Administration Will Further Increase Funding for Detention Beds So There are Places to Detain 31,500 Illegal Aliens Until They Can Be Returned.
The Administration Will Also Press Recalcitrant Countries to Work with the United States to Repatriate Citizens Who Are in the United States Illegally.

3. The Departments of State and Homeland Security Will Strengthen Legal Efforts to Keep International Gang Members out of the United States. Gangs are at the root of many U.S. crime problems today, and many of the most dangerous gangs draw significant membership from abroad. The Federal government already denies visas to known members of certain gangs from China, the former Soviet Union, and El Salvador. Today, the President is directing the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to expand this list of dangerous organized gangs from other nations and to ensure that members of those gangs are barred from entry into the United States.

4. The Administration Will Expand Exit Requirements So Persons Who Overstay Limited-Duration Visits To The United States Can Be Identified.
By The End Of 2008, The US-VISIT Exit Requirement Will Be Underway At All U.S. Airports And Seaports. The Department of Homeland Security will continue to explore effective and cost-efficient means of establishing biometric exit requirements at land border crossings.
The Administration Will Establish A New Land-Border Exit System For Guest Workers, Starting On A Pilot Basis. This will help ensure that temporary workers in the country now follow the mandate to leave when their work authorization expires.

5. The Administration Will Require All Travelers To Our Ports Of Entry To Use Passports Or Other Similar Secure Documents. Since January 2007, air travelers have been required to carry a passport for entry into the United States. Because of passport processing backlogs, a temporary accommodation has been made for U.S. citizens traveling in the Western Hemisphere, which will be phased out. Starting January 31, 2008, DHS will phase in a requirement for passports or other secure documents for sea and land ports of entry.

6. Beginning This Fall, The Secretary Of Homeland Security Will Deliver Regular "State Of The Border" Reports. These reports will keep the American people informed of the Federal Government's progress in securing the border and hold the Administration accountable for continuing improvement.

Interior Enforcement

7. The Administration Is Training Hundreds Of State And Local Law Enforcement Officers To Address Illegal Immigration In Their Communities. The Administration is maintaining the 287(g) program and expanding other measures that help State and local law officials. These measures include a broad array of enforcement tools, such as formal task forces, greater use of the ICE Law Enforcement Support Center, delegated border search and seizure authority under Title 19, and enhanced partnerships to address location-specific threats, such as gangs.

8. By This Fall, U.S. Immigration And Customs Enforcement Teams Devoted To Removing Fugitive Aliens Will Have Been Quintupled In Less Than Three Years. There were 15 seven-member Fugitive Operations Teams in 2005. As of this week there are 68; there will be 75 by the end of September.

9. The Justice Department Will Initiate Regulatory Action To Close The "Voluntary Departure" Loophole Manipulated By Many Illegal Immigrants. Illegal immigrants who settle their cases by agreeing to voluntarily depart sometimes then gain extra time inside the United States by filing a procedural motion to reopen the case. New regulations will clarify that filing such a motion will terminate the voluntary departure status and make the alien subject to the order of removal. They will also set a presumptive $3,000 civil penalty for failing to comply with a voluntary departure agreement.

Worksite Enforcement

10. Today, The Department Of Homeland Security Issued A "No-Match" Regulation That Will Help Employers Ensure Their Workers Are Legal And Help The Government Identify And Crack Down On Employers Who Knowingly Hire Illegal Workers. In cases in which an employer has a significant number of employees with inaccurate personal identity information, the Social Security Administration will send the employer a "No-Match" letter. The regulation clarifies that employers may be held liable if they ignore the "No Match" problems by failing to take specified steps within 90 days of receiving the letter.

11. In The Coming Months, The Administration Will Publish A Regulation That Will Reduce The Number Of Documents That Employers Must Accept To Confirm The Identity And Work Eligibility Of Their Employees. Presently, no fewer than 29 categories of documents can be used to establish identity and work eligibility. Employers have little capacity to verify the authenticity of these documents, and the sheer quantity of accepted documents is an invitation to fraud. This regulation will reduce unlawful employment by weeding out insecure documents now used often for identity fraud.

12. As A Civil Counterpart To The Administration's Strategy Of Using Criminal Investigations To Deter Illegal Employment, The Department Of Homeland Security Will Raise The Civil Fines Imposed On Employers Who Knowingly Hire Illegal Immigrants By Approximately 25 Percent. Efforts to secure the border will fail unless the "magnet" that attracts illegals is turned off. Unfortunately, the fines for relying on illegal workers are so modest that some companies treat them as little more than a cost of doing business. DHS will use existing authority to update civil fines for inflation in order to boost fines by about 25 percent, as much as is allowed under current law.

13. The Administration Will Continue To Expand Criminal Investigations Against Employers Who Knowingly Hire Large Numbers Of Illegal Aliens. Arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for criminal violations have increased from 24 in FY 1999 to a record 716 in FY 2006. There have been 742 criminal arrests since the beginning of FY 2007 (through July 31), and there is anecdotal evidence that companies are taking notice and adjusting their business practices to follow the law.

14. The Administration Will Commence a Rulemaking Process To Require All Federal Contractors And Vendors To Use E-Verify, The Federal Electronic Employment Verification System, To Ensure That Their Employees Are Authorized To Work In The United States. The Federal government ought to lead by example. As there are more than 200,000 companies doing Federal business, this will significantly expand use of E-Verify, and make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to obtain jobs through fraud.

15. The Administration Will Help States Make Greater Use Of E-Verify. Some States already mandate the use of E-Verify by some or all of their hiring agencies, and other States are considering similar requirements. The Administration will assist such efforts through outreach and offers of technical assistance.

16. The Administration Will Bolster E-Verify By Expanding The Data Sources It Can Check. This will make it easier to catch individuals who commit identity theft. New sources of data will include cross-checks of visa and passport information.

17. The Administration Will Seek Voluntary State Partners Willing To Share Their Department Of Motor Vehicles Photos And Records With E-Verify. Agreements to allow E Verify access to the repository of photographs in state DMV databases will help prevent illegal immigrants from using fraudulent driver’s licenses to obtain employment. Such agreements will also lay the groundwork for further expansion of the electronic employment eligibility verification system.

Streamlining Existing Guest-Worker Programs

18. The Department Of Labor (DOL) Will Reform The H-2A Agricultural Seasonal Worker Program. No sector of the American economy requires a legal flow of foreign workers more than agriculture, which has begun to experience severe labor shortages as our Southern border has tightened. The President has therefore directed DOL to review the regulations implementing the H-2A program and to institute changes that will provide farmers with an orderly and timely flow of legal workers, while protecting the rights of laborers.

19. The Department Of Labor Will Issue Regulations Streamlining The H-2B Program For Non-Agricultural Seasonal Workers. Because businesses in seasonal industries such as landscaping and hospitality frequently have a difficult time locating temporary workers, the H-2B program has proven quite popular. Some employers report significant processing delays, however. DOL's proposed rule will speed processing by moving from a government-certified system to an employer-attestation system akin to the PERM system that has reduced backlogs in other areas.

20. The Department Of Homeland Security Will Extend The Visa Term For Professional Workers From Canada And Mexico To Attract More Of These Talented Workers To The United States. The United States must compete for foreign professional workers, and those who elect to lend their talents to the U.S. economy should be welcomed with open arms, not given a bureaucratic runaround. Yet the roughly 65,000 workers who enter the United States each year on the TN visa must go to the trouble of renewing their visa every year. This regulation will extend the TN visa duration to three years – the same term as other popular professional visas.

21. The Department Of Homeland Security And The Department Of Labor Will Study And Report On Potential Administrative Reforms To Visa Programs For Highly Skilled Workers.

Improving Existing Immigration

22. The Administration Will Reform And Expedite Background Checks For Immigration. Current mechanisms for conducting immigration background checks are backed up, slowing processing times and endangering national security. The Administration is investing substantial new funds to address the backlog, and the FBI and USCIS are working together on a variety of projects designed to streamline existing processes so as to reduce waiting times without sacrificing security.

23. The President Is Directing The Department Of Homeland Security And The Social Security Administration To Study The Technical And Recordkeeping Reforms Necessary To Guarantee That Illegal Aliens Do Not Earn Credit In Our Social Security System For Illegal Work. Currently, aliens who make Social Security payments while working here legally can continue to accrue credits even if they overstay their visa. Improved data-sharing can lay the foundation for eventual Congressional action to eliminate this practice (which proved an obstacle to comprehensive reform). The relevant agencies are ordered to report to the President with a detailed plan for eliminating the problem.

Assimilation

24. The Office Of Citizenship Will Announce A Revised Naturalization Test In September 2007. The new test will emphasize fundamental concepts of American democracy, basic U.S. history, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It will inculcate the basic values we share as Americans, and encourage civic knowledge and patriotism among prospective citizens.
The New Standardized Test Will Ensure Fairness By Eliminating Current Wide Variations In The Quality Of Testing Between Regional Offices.

25. The Office Of Citizenship Will Provide Additional Training For Volunteers And Adult Educators Who Lead Immigrants Through The Naturalization Process. In October 2007, the Office of Citizenship will introduce a web-based training program that covers U.S. government, civics education, and the naturalization process. To complement these online materials, USCIS will convene eight regional training conferences, beginning in October 2007, to improve the ability of citizenship instructors and volunteers to teach American history, civics, and the naturalization process to immigrant students. An on-line training module will also be available by the end of the year.

26. The Department Of Education Will Launch A Free, Web-Based Portal To Help Immigrants Learn English, And Expand This Model Over Time. Knowledge of English is the most important component of assimilation. An investment in tools to help new Americans learn English will be repaid many times over in the contributions these immigrants make to our political discourse, economy, and society.

Posted by lois at 06:02 PM | Comments (0)

LA: Federal Grand Jury Accueses Sheriff, Wife and Sister of Making $500,000 on Jail Phone Services

The Town Talk
Alexandria, LA
Feds accuse Avoyelles sheriff, wife and sister of pocketing phone profits

By Abbey Brown

MARKSVILLE -- Longtime Avoyelles Parish Sheriff Bill Belt has been indicted, along with his wife and sister, by a federal grand jury and charged with illegally pocketing profits from telephone services provided at the parish jails.

The indictments were handed down last week in Shreveport through the Alexandria division of the federal court but were sealed until Wednesday.

Belt and his wife, Tracy Bryant Belt, 37, both of Marksville, were charged with eight counts each of mail fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. Bill Belt's sister, Julie Ann Bernard, 50, also of Marksville, was charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud, making a false statement to the FBI and obstruction of justice, according to the Western District of Louisiana U.S. Attorney's Office.

One count of forfeiture also was included in the indictment, meaning any property purchased with money from an alleged crime is subject to forfeiture, U.S. Attorney representative Vicky Chance said. "This indictment alleges that Sheriff Belt deprived the citizens of Avoyelles Parish of the honest and faithful services of their sheriff," U.S. Attorney Donald Washington said.

According to the indictment, the Belts were involved in a conspiracy "to promote and then cover up the receipt of some of the profits from the operation of phone services provided at Avoyelles Parish jails."

The Belts are accused of reaping more than $500,000 in profits, said Washington, who indicated that the sheriff has been under investigation for at least the past five years, if not longer. Washington said he did not expect any additional indictments to come out of the investigation.

Michael Small, Bill Belt's attorney since late 2005, said he and Belt are "extremely disappointed that this indictment came down but frankly not greatly surprised."

Small said in a statement that he has maintained frequent contact with the federal prosecutor assigned to the case and has met with him and the FBI a number of times. He said he has responded fully to all questions asked, providing what he is convinced are "perfectly legitimate explanations for their various inquiries."

"All the explanations clearly demonstrated that Bill and Tracy Belt have conducted their several business entities in a perfectly legitimate and legal manner and have violated no laws in the course of their various business activities," Small said in the release. "Unfortunately, I always sensed that our earnest and truthful representations fell on deaf ears."

The allegations that the Belts profited financially from the operation of the phone services provided by the jails, Small said, are "based almost entirely on statements from a disgruntled vendor." He said he and the Belts are convinced that any fair-minded jury will find those statements to be totally unreliable and unfounded.

Courtney Tassin of Hessmer said she was shocked to hear of the sheriff's indictment.

"I'd have never thought that he'd have done something that would be like this," she said. "It makes me wonder if he's been truthful all along."

Although the announcement of the indictment is far from a conviction, Tassin said the indictment alone may cast a shadow over the Sheriff's Office and its operations. She said she is hopeful Bill Belt's case will be handled fairly, "just like any old person's."

Bernard's charges stem from her alleged interference with the investigation, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. She obstructed the federal grand jury and FBI investigation by lying -- saying she had "minimal involvement" with a company called Cajun Callers and no memory of signing checks on its behalf when she had been issuing checks for the company for more than a year and a half, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Calls placed Wednesday to the phone number listed for Cajun Callers in Cottonport went unanswered.

The Belts could face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,00 fine on each mail fraud charge and a maximum sentence of five years' imprisonment and $250,000 fine for the conspiracy charge.

Bernard's maximum jail time under the three counts she is facing totals 20 years and a fine as high as $750,000.

Small, who is representing just Bill Belt, said he and his client are looking forward to "aggressively preparing for the trial" and is confident all charged will be found innocent of any wrongdoing.

None of the three will be arrested but instead summoned to appear in court for their first appearance. Small said he expected that first appearance to be at the end of this month, although a date hasn't been set.

Tracy Belt is being represented by Michael Reese Davis out of Baton Rogue, and defense council for Bernard hasn't been finalized, Small said.

Bill Belt and other Sheriff's Office employees referred comments to Small.

Belt, who has been sheriff since 1980, is not running for re-election this year. Signs and bumper stickers proclaiming "Bill Belt for Senate" could be spotted throughout the parish, although record of his official announcement for candidacy couldn't be found.

Small would not comment on the campaign. Candidates for office are required to qualify between Sept. 4 and Sept. 6.

Background

According to an October 1995 article in The Town Talk, both Bill Belt and former 12th Judicial District Judge Michael Johnson had royalty arrangements with Miami-based Peoples Telephone Co. for pay phones at prisons and jails around the state. Belt was listed as president of Southern Louisiana Communications, a warehouser of other long-distance carriers, and was listed as director at Central Louisiana Communications Inc.

Both of those firms had the same address -- 117 E. Ogden St., Marksville -- as did Johnson's Cajun Callers. Both Johnson and Belt told The Town Talk then that there was "no connection" between their companies.

Johnson signed an agreement to lease his pay phones in Avoyelles Parish jails to Belt, as sheriff, in the late 1980s. Johnson was Belt's attorney at the time, according to the article.

Out of the arrangement, the Sheriff's Office, as a public body, received 5 percent of the net revenue. At that time, Belt "guesstimated" that the Sheriff's office received about $40,000 a year in pay phone revenue.

The Public Service Commission cited Peoples Telephone Co. in 1994 for overcharging customers by $107,695 for long-distance service.

Johnson was re-elected as district judge with 57 percent of the vote in spite of controversy raised during the election about his connection to the prison phones, according to a 1996 Town Talk article. But on Nov. 25, 1996, he was removed from office for what the Supreme Court called "persistent misconduct."

Johnson was sworn into office in December after requesting a rehearing with the Supreme Court, where he vowed to sell his and his wife's interests in the phone company before his new term began on Jan. 1, 1997.

Johnson, who in a 1997 Town Talk article claimed he "has not been charged with a crime, much less convicted of one," said the ruling applied only to his first term that expired Dec. 31. A new election was held the following term to fill his seat after he was removed again.

Johnson died in 2002.

http://www.thetowntalk.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007708090329

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

Western MA: Jail for Women Opening on Sept. 13

"Murphy said most of the female inmates have been convicted of nonviolent offenses, such as drugs and prostitution. About 85 percent arrive at jail with some level of addiction."
And the solution............

Chicopee jail opening soon
Friday, August 10, 2007
By HOLLY ANGELO
hangelo@repub.com

CHICOPEE - A Sept. 13 dedication is planned for the $26.1 million Western Massachusetts Regional Women's Correctional Center on Center Street.

Following the dedication, between 190 and 195 inmates will be transferred to the jail at the end of September or early October, Patricia A. Murphy, the superintendent of the facility, said yesterday.

The jail was originally slated to open in early June, but a snag in the delivery and installation of the electronic security system delayed the opening. The system is being installed and tested, Murphy said.

"We'll be close to capacity when we transfer over," Murphy said. "We're thrilled about it because it's really going to offer an opportunity for elbow room. The facility in Ludlow is really overcrowded."

The 210-bed facility, operated by the Hampden County Sheriff's Department, will hold female inmates from Hampden, Hampshire, Berkshire and Franklin counties who are sentenced to terms of 2½ years or less. There will be 46 beds set aside for minimum-security inmates and 164 beds for medium-security inmates.

Since medium-security inmates require a higher level of security, they must wear uniforms and can only go outside the facility for appointments such as court dates if they're escorted. Minimum-security inmates have access to the community, whether it's to attend a job or perform community service, and wear street clothes.

"There will be a lot of focus on substance abuse treatment and family work," Murphy said. "Our focus will be on re-entry."

Murphy said most of the female inmates have been convicted of nonviolent offenses, such as drugs and prostitution. About 85 percent arrive at jail with some level of addiction.

Training of the 134 staff members is scheduled to be completed next week. Two weeks before the jail opens, staff will complete another two weeks of training regarding their individual posts. Of the 134, 68 are correctional officers and nine are correctional supervisors. There are also food services, health services, maintenance, processing, human services, clinical, information systems technology and administrative staff.

Mayor Michael D. Bissonnette said he believes the jail will be an asset to the city.

Not only did the city receive $1.34 million from the state for the land on which the jail was built, it will also receive $10,000 for every bed at the facility. In addition, Bissonnette said the city will benefit from the more than 100 employees who commute to the jail every day. "It's spurring more interest (in development) from the Springfield line to Chicopee Center," Bissonnette said.

http://www.masslive.com/chicopeeholyoke/republican/index.ssf?/base/news-10/1186733173204360.xml&coll=1

©2007 The Republican

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

Stars and Bars

The Nation
posted August 9, 2007 (August 27, 2007 issue)
Stars and Bars
Daniel Lazare

How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they're not for "people like us" (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class?

Questions like these are unavoidable in the face of America's homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and "supermax" tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the advanced industrial world. The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth and some five to twelve times that of Britain, France and other Western European countries or Japan. With 5 percent of the world's population, the United States has close to a quarter of the world's prisoners, which, curiously enough, is the same as its annual contribution to global warming. With 2.2 million people behind bars and another 5 million on probation or parole, it has approximately 3.2 percent of the adult population under some form of criminal-justice supervision, which is to say one person in thirty-two. For African-Americans, the numbers are even more astonishing. By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight. While conservatives have spent the past three or four decades bemoaning the growth of single-parent families, there is a very simple reason some 1.5 million American children are fatherless or (less often) motherless: Their parents are locked up. Because they are confined for the most part in distant rural prisons, moreover, only about one child in five gets to visit them as often as once a month.

What's that you say? Who cares whether a bunch of "rapists, murderers, robbers, and even terrorists and spies," as Republican Senator Mitch McConnell once characterized America's prison population, get to see their kids? In fact, surprisingly few denizens of the American gulag have been sent away for violent crimes. In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5 percent were for murder. Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession (the modern equivalent of rum-running or getting caught with a bottle of bathtub gin) accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32 percent. If the incarceration rate continues to rise and violent crime continues to drop, we can expect the nonviolent sector of the prison population to expand accordingly. A normal society might lighten up in such circumstances. After all, if violence is under control, isn't it time to come up with a more humane way of dealing with a dwindling number of miscreants? But America is not a normal country and only grows more punitive.

It has also been extremely reluctant to face up to the cancer in its midst. Several of the leading Democratic candidates, for example, have recently come out against the infamous 100-to-1 ratio that subjects someone carrying ten grams of crack to the same penalty as someone caught with a kilo of powdered cocaine. Senator Joe Biden has actually introduced legislation to eliminate the disparity--without, however, acknowledging his role as a leading drug warrior back in the 1980s, when he sponsored the bill that set it in stone in the first place. At a recent forum at Howard University, Hillary Clinton promised to "deal" with the disparity as well, although it would have been nice if she had done so back in the '90s, when, during the first Clinton Administration, the prison population was soaring by some 50 percent. Although he is not running this time around, Jesse Jackson recently castigated Dems for their hesitancy in addressing "failed, wasteful, and unfair drug policies" that have sent "so many young African-Americans" to jail. Yet Jackson forgot to mention his own drug-war past when, as a leading hardliner, he specifically called for "stiffer prison sentences" for black drug users and "wartime consequences" for smugglers. "Since the flow of drugs into the US is an act of terrorism, antiterrorist policies must be applied," he declared in a 1989 interview, a textbook example of how the antidrug rhetoric of the late twentieth century helped pave the way for the "global war on terror" of the early twenty-first.

In other words, cowardice and hypocrisy abound. Fortunately, a small number of academics and at least one journalist have begun training an eye on America's growing prison crisis. Since there is more than enough injustice to go around, each has zeroed in on different aspects of the phenomenon--on the political and economic consequences of stigmatizing so many young people for life, on the racial consequences of disproportionately punishing young black males and on the sheer moral horror of needlessly locking away real, live human beings in supermax prisons that are little more than high-tech dungeons. Their findings, to make a long story short, are that the damage cannot be reduced to a simple matter of so many person-years of lost time. To the contrary, the effects promise to multiply for years to come. In American Furies Sasha Abramsky, a Sacramento-based journalist and longtime Nation contributor, convincingly argues that the best way to understand US prison policies is to think of them as a GI Bill in reverse. Just as the original GI Bill laid the basis for a major social advance by making college available to millions of veterans, mass incarceration is laying the basis for an enormous social regression by stigmatizing and brutalizing millions of young people and "de-skilling" them by removing them from the workforce. America will be feeling the effects for generations.

Bruce Western, a Princeton sociologist, offers the best overview. He notes in his new study, Punishment and Inequality in America, that mass imprisonment is actually a novel development. For much of the twentieth century, the US incarceration rate held steady at around 100 per 100,000, which would put it in the same ballpark as Western Europe today. But after a slight dip following the liberal reforms of the 1960s, the curve reversed direction in the mid-'70s and then rose more steeply in the '80s and '90s. Considering that Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Austria succeeded in reducing or holding their incarceration rates steady during this period, the US pattern was highly exceptional. But so are US crime rates. Between 1980 and 1991, US homicides hovered at between 7.9 and 10.2 per 100,000, as much as ten times the European average. (The rate has since fallen to around 5.7.) Combined with the crack wave that also exploded in the 1980s, the result was a deepening sense of panic that peaked in mid-1986 with the death of basketball star Len Bias from a cocaine overdose. Although there was no evidence that crack had anything to do with Bias's death--police found only powdered cocaine in his car--the incident somehow confirmed crack as the new devil substance, "the most addictive drug known to man," in the words of Newsweek, and a threat comparable to the "medieval plagues," in the considered opinion of U.S. News and World Report (which would have meant that the country was facing an imminent population loss of up to 33 percent). Within a matter of months, Joe Biden had helped shepherd through to victory the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, an unusually horrendous piece of legislation that etched in stone the 100-to-1 penalty ratio for crack.

Still, it is always interesting to consider which deaths fill people with horror and which ones don't. The year before Bias's death not only saw 19,000 homicides in the United States but nearly 46,000 highway fatalities too, and yet Congress somehow refrained from criminalizing motor vehicles. Crack's status as the drug du jour of a certain class of inner-city blacks should have been the giveaway. What had Congress in a tizzy was not cocaine consumption so much as black cocaine consumption, which is why the subsequent repression was bound to be far harder on African-Americans than on whites. Although there is no evidence that blacks use drugs more than whites and indeed some evidence that they use them less, Western notes that black users are now twice as likely to be arrested for drugs and, once arrested, more likely to go to prison or jail. None of this is necessarily racist, at least not in the crudely explicit way we associate with men in white sheets. The reason the police concentrate their efforts in black inner-city neighborhoods, Western notes, is that users congregate there in large numbers, and buying, selling and using tend to take place in public. (It's harder to make arrests behind the closed doors of some suburban
McMansion.) If a judge is more inclined to send a poor black defendant to prison, similarly, it is not necessarily because he or she enjoys punishing someone with dark skin but because the judge, according to Western, may "see poor defendants as having fewer prospects and social supports, thus as having less potential for rehabilitation." If your weeping parents can afford to send you to private rehab, you're excused. If not, it's off to the state pen.

Racial and class biases are thus built into the very structure of the drug war. Western is particularly effective on the economic consequences of such grossly disproportionate policies. The standard account of American economic development since the 1970s, told and retold in countless undergraduate classrooms, is that economic deregulation and growth have done much to narrow the once-yawning wage gap between white and black workers. To quote the New York Times: "Unemployment rates among blacks and Hispanic people...are at or near record lows. Joblessness among high school dropouts has fallen to about half the rate in 1992. And wages for the lowest paid are rising faster than inflation for the first time in decades." A rising tide lifts all boats, whereas all that labor-market rigidity has done for "Old Europe" is to saddle it with persistently high levels of unemployment, an alienated underclass and riots in the banlieues. But as Punishment and Inequality in America points out, if US economic policies look good, it is only because the country's enormous prison population is not factored into the equation. If workers behind bars are counted, then it quickly becomes apparent "that young black men have experienced virtually no real economic gains on young whites" and that the real black unemployment rate is up to 20 percent greater than official statistics indicate. Rather than freeing up the markets, Western writes, the United States has "adopted policies that massively and coercively regulated the poor." Where the Danes provide their unemployed with up to 80 percent of their previous salary and the Germans provide them with 60 percent, America has deregulated the rich while throwing a growing portion of its working class in jail.

In Marked, Devah Pager, who also teaches sociology at Princeton, uses a simple technique to show how mass incarceration has undone the small amount of racial progress achieved in the 1960s and '70s. Working with two pairs of male college students in Milwaukee, one white and the other black, she drilled them on how to present themselves and answer questions. Then, arming them with phony résumés, she sent them out to apply for entry-level jobs. The résumés were identical in all respects but one. Where one member of each team had nothing indicating a criminal record, the other's résumé showed an eighteen-month sentence for drugs. To help insure that the results were uniform, the résumés were then rotated back and forth among the testers.

The results? The white applicant with a prison record was half as likely to be called back for a second interview as the white applicant without. But the black applicant without a criminal record was no more likely to be called back than the white applicant with a record, while the black applicant with a record was two-thirds less likely to be called back than the black applicant without. The black applicant with a record therefore wound up doubly penalized--as a black man and as an ex-con. With the chances of a call-back reduced to just 5 percent, the overall effect, Pager writes, was "almost total exclusion from this labor market." Considering that there are as many as 12 million ex-felons in the United States, a major portion of them black, the result has been to create a huge pool of the semi-permanently unemployed where one might otherwise not exist. This is not to disprove sociologist William Julius Wilson, whose study The Declining Significance of Race caused an uproar when it was published in 1978. Wilson may have been
right: The significance of race may well have been declining by the late '70s. But thanks to a government policy of mass stigmatization, it has come roaring back.

This is not only bad news for those arrested but bad news for those who have to foot the bill for their incarceration and for dealing with the social problems that labor-market exclusion on this scale helps generate. But there are other costs too. In Locked Out, Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, professors of sociology at Northwestern and the University of Minnesota, respectively, point out that only two states, Maine and Vermont, permit felons to vote while incarcerated, that most limit felons' voting rights after they complete their terms and that, even if not legally disenfranchised, some 600,000 jail inmates and pretrial detainees are effectively prevented from voting as well. All told, this means that 6 million Americans were unable to vote on election day in 2004. This is not peanuts. Nationwide, one black man in seven has been disenfranchised as a consequence, while in Florida, the state with the most sweeping disenfranchisement laws, the number of those prevented from voting now exceeds 1.1 million.

From a right-wing perspective, this is nothing short of brilliant. After all, what could be better than disenfranchising an unfriendly racial group while persuading the rest of the nation that the group deserves it because its ranks are filled with violent criminals? Since felons and ex-felons tend to be poor and members of oppressed racial minorities, they tend to vote Democratic. Even though the poor are less likely to vote than those higher up on the socioeconomic ladder, Manza and Uggen say there is little doubt that, had the disenfranchisement laws not existed in Florida in November 2000, the extra votes would have provided Al Gore with a margin of victory so comfortable that not even the Republican state legislature could have taken it away. If the ranks of prison inmates and hence of disenfranchised ex-inmates had not multiplied since the '70s, much of the wind would also have been taken out of the sails of the great GOP offensive. Americans have not gone right, in other words. Rather, by taking control of the criminal-justice issue, the right wing has winnowed down the electorate so as to artificially boost the power of the conservative minority.

But how did the right gain control of this all-important issue in the first place? This is the problem that Marie Gottschalk, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, wrestles with in The Prison and the Gallows, an eccentric but compelling study of mass incarceration's ideological origins. While taking aim at the usual right-wing villains, The Prison and the Gallows also goes after various liberals and radicals who, inadvertently or not, also contributed to the construction of "the carceral state." Bill Clinton, for example, not only embraced the drug war and capital punishment--he interrupted his 1992 presidential campaign to fly back to Arkansas and sign the death warrant for a mentally disabled prisoner named Rickey Ray Rector--but also endorsed what Gottschalk calls "a virulently punitive victims' rights movement," going so far as to call for a constitutional amendment in 1996 as "the only way to give victims equal and due consideration."

This was important because the victims' rights movement represented an effort to inject a dose of vengeance into the judicial process and thereby blur the distinction between the private interest of the victim and the public's interest in maintaining order and justice. In Europe, reformers were also concerned with victims' rights. But "extending a hand to victims was seen from the start as primarily an extension of the welfare state," Gottschalk observes, whereas in America, where welfare is a dirty word, it was seen as a way of steering criminal justice in a more punitive direction.

Gottschalk's assault on '70s feminism is sure to raise the most eyebrows. She argues that the women's movement helped facilitate the carceral state by promoting a punitive approach to sexual violence that was unmitigated by any larger political considerations. This single-minded focus led to what The Prison and the Gallows describes as unsavory coalitions with tough-on-crime types. In the State of Washington, women's groups successfully marketed rape reform as a law-and-order issue so that, when the measure finally passed in 1975, it was "in part by riding on the coattails of a new death penalty statute."

In California a new rape shield became known as the Robbins Rape Evidence Law, in honor of one of its legislative sponsors, a conservative Republican named Alan Robbins. In pressing for limits on the cross-examination of alleged rape victims, feminists "generally did not consider what effect such measures would have on a defendant's right to due process," Gottschalk adds, even though due process at the time was under assault from a growing war on crime. More radical elements, meanwhile, strayed into outright vigilantism. In Berkeley, antirape activists picketed an accused rapist's home. In East Lansing in 1973, they "reportedly scrawled Rapist on a suspect's car, spray-painted the word across a front porch and made warning telephone calls late at night." In Los Angeles, a self-styled "antirape squad" vowed to shave rapists' heads, cover them with dye and then photograph them for posters reading, This Man Rapes Women. A feminist publication called Aegis ran a notorious cover showing a gun with the warning, "You can't rape a .38; we will defend ourselves."

The National Rifle Association was no doubt delighted. Gottschalk contends that such activists wound up "profoundly co-opted," since "by framing the rape issue around 'horror stories,' they fed into the victims' movement's compelling image of a society held hostage to a growing number of depraved, marauding criminals." She notes that feminists threw themselves into the battle for the Violence Against Women Act, which passed in 1994 as part of an omnibus anticrime bill that "allocated nearly $10 billion for new prison construction, expanded the death penalty to cover more than fifty federal crimes, and added a 'three strikes and you're out' provision mandating life imprisonment for federal offenders convicted of three violent offenses." Yet feminists' involvement was relatively modest two years later when a few liberals tried to rally opposition to Clinton's plan to abolish Aid to Families With Dependent Children, which heavily benefited poor women. Like their nineteenth-century forebears, who advocated bringing back the whipping post to deal with wife beaters, late-twentieth-century feminists got more excited about punishment than defending the welfare state.

Gottschalk is more than a bit brave in pointing this out. Still, her choice of historical examples to explain the growth of an increasingly vindictive national mood seems incomplete. As much damage as radical feminists may have done in undermining due process, they seem less important than certain ant-drug activists--in particular, certain black Democratic antidrug activists--whose efforts ran on parallel tracks. This means not just Jesse Jackson, who backed vigilante-style antidrug patrols by the Nation of Islam ("As long as this type of solution is within the law, it should be encouraged") but also Congressman Charles Rangel, the Manhattan Democrat who, as head of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse, spent much of the '80s baiting Reagan for being soft on drugs. "I haven't seen a national drug policy since Nixon was in office," Rangel lamented at one point. "So far, the Administration hasn't given it any priority." This is as clear a case of an ostensible liberal cheering on the forces of right-wing reaction as one could hope to find. US prisons are not bulging with rapists and wife beaters, but they are filled with drug offenders, some 458,000 as of 2000, which makes the brief space that Gottschalk allots to the drug war somewhat hard to fathom. It's like discussing Al Capone without mentioning Prohibition.

Sasha Abramsky is less interested in the ideological currents that helped pave the way for mass incarceration, although in American Furies he does spotlight the fascinating role played by a Berkeley-educated sociologist named Robert Martinson, who, after several years investigating the cornucopia of rehabilitation programs offered at the time by the New York State prison system, summed up his findings in a sensational 1974 article titled "What Works?" His answer: nothing. Martinson's frustration is understandable to anyone who has ever suffered through an encounter group. Yet his conclusions, published in the neoconservative journal Public Interest, were grossly one-sided: While many programs do not work, some clearly have a positive effect.

In short order, Martinson's article became the bible of the vengeance-and-punishment set, which seized on it as proof that rehabilitation was a lost cause and that the only purpose of prison was to penalize wrongdoers. Once this ideological impediment was removed, the criminal-justice system slid downhill with remarkable speed. If punishment was good, then more punishment was better. In short order, Massachusetts Governor William Weld was declaring that life in prison should be "akin to a walk through hell," while right-wing Senator Phil Gramm was promising "to string barbed wire on every military base in America" to contain all the criminals he wanted to round up. In Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, a colorful local character named Joe Arpaio got himself re-elected sheriff time and again by parading his inmates about on chain gangs, dressing the men among them in fluorescent pink underwear and serving prisoners food that, as he cheerfully admits, costs less than what he gives to his cats and dogs. "Voters like it everywhere," Abramsky quotes Arpaio as saying of such policies. "I'm on thousands of talk shows. I never get a negative. I get letters from all over the world--and I answer every one. They say, 'Come up here and be our sheriff.'" What makes this all the more repellent is that the people subjected to such humiliation and abuse are rarely killers or rapists but alcoholics, vagrants and other small fry doing time for such misdemeanors as possession and shoplifting.

Amazing how much damage a single article can do, eh? Yet when a conscience-stricken Martinson published a mea culpa in the Hofstra Law Review five years later ("contrary to my previous position, some treatment programs do have an appreciable effect on recidivism"), the media yawned. No big shots interviewed him on TV, and no politicians called to solicit his views. No one wanted to hear that rehabilitation programs work, only that they don't. Beset by personal troubles, professional setbacks and perhaps the realization of how grievously he had allowed himself to be misused, Martinson committed suicide by throwing himself out of a ninth-floor Manhattan apartment in 1980. American Furies provides us with a vivid account of the horrors that have followed--the low-level pot dealers and shoplifters sentenced to life in prison in California, Oklahoma, Alabama and other states where various "three strikes" or other habitual-offender laws pertain; the supermax prisoners condemned to spend twenty-three hours a day in barren concrete cells the size of walk-in closets; the epidemics of suicide and self-mutilation; and the stubbornly high levels of violence between and among prisoners and guards--which law-and-order advocates seize upon as reason to build yet more supermax facilities. US prison policy is like a computer program that is designed to spit out the same answers no matter what data are fed into it: Arrest more people, put more of them in prison, build more cells to accommodate them.

Where will it end? As Martinson's story shows, American mass incarceration is not what social scientists call "evidence based." It is not a policy designed to achieve certain practical, utilitarian ends that can then be weighed and evaluated from time to time to determine if it is performing as intended. Rather, it is a moral policy whose purpose is to satisfy certain passions that have grown more and more brutal over the years. The important thing about moralism of this sort is that it is its own justification. For true believers, it is something that everyone should endorse regardless of the consequences. As right-wing political scientist James Q. Wilson once remarked, "Drug use is wrong because it is immoral," a comment that not only sums up the tautological nature of US drug policies but also shows how they are structured to render irrelevant questions about wasted dollars and blighted lives. Moralism of this sort is neither rational nor democratic, and the fact that it has triumphed so completely is an indication of how deeply the United States has sunk into authoritarianism since the 1980s. With the prison population continuing to rise at a 2.7 percent annual clip, there is no reason to think there will be a turnaround soon. Indeed, Gottschalk writes that mass incarceration is so taken for granted nowadays that "it seems almost unimaginable that the country will veer off in a new direction and begin to empty and board up its prisons." Still, she ends on a quasi-optimistic note by quoting Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen to the effect that "major repressive systems have succeeded in looking extremely stable almost until the day they have collapsed." Indeed, repression is itself often a sign of instability bubbling up from below. This is not much to pin one's hopes on, but it will have to do.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/lazare

Posted by lois at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

From Two Broken Lives to One New Beginning

August 9, 2007
From Two Broken Lives to One New Beginning
By IAN URBINA

BALTIMORE, Aug. 2 — Donnie Andrews was a stickup man with a .44 Magnum who robbed drug dealers and was sentenced to life in prison for murdering one of them.

Fran Boyd was a heroin addict who shoplifted to get from fix to fix, passing her stupors in the shooting gallery and stash house that once was her middle-class home.

Their separate stories of decline into drugs and violence are nationally known: Mr. Andrews was the inspiration for the character Omar Little, a ruthless thug who stalks dealers on the HBO series “The Wire.” Ms. Boyd was the protagonist of “The Corner,” an HBO miniseries that chronicled her fall into addiction.

But the story of their shared redemption is less widely known. On Aug. 11, they are getting married after a lengthy courtship that was as much about turning their lives around as it was about finding each other. Over a decade in the making, their union is a source of inspiration for the grittier parts of West Baltimore, where few people who end up on the corner using and selling drugs manage to break free, and even fewer return to make a difference.

“Donnie and Fran are a street version of Cinderella and Prince Charming, but when they fell in love they didn’t have any magical dust in their eyes,” said the Rev. Frank M. Reid III, pastor of the Bethel A.M.E. Church here, who will perform the ceremony. “They also show us something about salvation, since now they’re using their skills from the corner to pull other people through.”

When Mr. Andrews and Ms. Boyd met more than 10 years ago, each was a prisoner — although only one was behind bars — and each began helping the other get free. Ms. Boyd, 50, has been clean for more than 10 years, in large measure, she says, because Mr. Andrews, 53, saw her through the worst times, using all he earned in the prison factory to make daily calls to her. When another man was living with her, when she was too high to make sense, when she screamed at him to stop calling, he called anyway, all the while gently nudging her to get her life back.

“Yeah, she put on a routine, being all tough,” said Mr. Andrews, his 6-foot-1, 230-pound frame enveloping the 5-foot-4 Ms. Boyd in a bear hug. “But who was home every single day waiting by that phone at 4 p.m.?”

The first time they saw photos of each other was two years into their relationship. “By that time, it was too late for us,” said Ms. Boyd, who was introduced to Mr. Andrews over the phone by the police officer who arrested him.

Ms. Boyd spends her days now walking her old haunts, persuading addicts to go into rehab and working with a local hospital’s H.I.V. prevention program, when she is not home raising the three nephews and nieces she rescued from their troubled home.

“I don’t have many heroes left,” said David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun who co-wrote “The Corner” and created “The Wire.” “Woody Guthrie and Fran, I guess — and I’m not so sure about Woody.”

Mr. Andrews has come a long way, too. Though he still runs with gang members, these days it is as an antigang outreach worker for the Bethel A.M.E. Church. He served 17 years in prison and was released in 2005 after Ms. Boyd and many of the people responsible for putting him behind bars convinced a judge that he had been rehabilitated.

In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Mr. Andrews was known for his drug dealing and daring robberies. But in September 1986 he did something he had not done before. To pay for his worsening heroin habit, he took a job from one drug dealer to kill another, and things did not go as planned.

“My gun jammed,” Mr. Andrews said. “So the guy was lying on the ground, and it gave him a chance to look me in the eye, and he said, ‘Why?’ ”

Nonetheless, he went through with the killing. But he said he could not get the man’s image, the sound of his voice and that question out of his mind. The guilt and shame were too much, he said, and months later he went to the police, turning himself in to Edward Burns, a Baltimore homicide detective who later became Mr. Simon’s writing partner.

In 1987, Mr. Andrews was sentenced to life in prison.

When Mr. Simon met Ms. Boyd in 1992 while working on a book, she was a 90-pound skeleton with bags under her eyes.

“When you’re in the drug scene, all your worst nevers come true,” Ms. Boyd said, describing things she had never thought she would do: stealing from her family, swapping sex for drugs and watching her son De’Andre McCullough start using and dealing at age 15. As Mr. Burns and Mr. Simon were finishing research for their book, also titled “The Corner,” Mr. Burns one day got to bantering with Ms. Boyd: “You think you know it all?” Ms. Boyd recounted him saying. “Well, I got someone for you.”

Mr. Andrews, who was already counseling drug addicts in prison, began calling Ms. Boyd.

“She’s smart, and I knew she could get herself straight,” Mr. Andrews said, “so I kept pushing and then I got hooked on her.”

At the same time, Mr. Andrews began leveraging his ties to the street to help Ms. Boyd’s son escape the world of drug dealing. After a morning of selling drugs on the corner, Mr. McCullough said, he would sometimes return home to find the phone ringing.

“Donnie would be like: ‘I heard you pushing blue tops today and homeboy grabbed your stash a couple hours ago,’ ” he said, alluding to the blue-topped plastic vials that crack used to be sold in. “He knew everything that was going on.”

Mr. McCullough now does odd jobs, working in security and producing aspiring rap artists.

Mr. Andrews was also using his street knowledge inside the prison, starting an antigang workshop, mentoring “young knuckleheads” the prison unit manager sent his way and advising law enforcement officers on gang issues.

As a reporter, Mr. Simon began calling Mr. Andrews in prison regularly to get the background story on each day’s crime news.

For Ms. Boyd, it was fits and starts. She went into rehab but slipped back into her old ways not long after Mr. Simon and Mr. Burns finished their manuscript in 1995. But Mr. Andrews, Mr. Burns and Mr. Simon would not leave her alone, she said, and in late 1996 she stopped using once and for all and began doing antidrug outreach soon after.

Aside from the birth of her grandson, Ms. Boyd said she was also motivated to turn her life around by a sense of mission to get Mr. Andrews out of prison.

Starting in 1998, Ms. Boyd, Mr. Simon and Mr. Burns began lobbying for Mr. Andrews and in subsequent years attended his parole hearings. Even Charles P. Scheeler, the lead federal prosecutor who won Mr. Andrews’s conviction, eventually championed his release after watching his transformation in prison.

“Donnie is a complete anomaly: he’s a convicted murderer who turned himself into a decent human being,” Mr. Scheeler said.

In the book about Ms. Boyd’s life on the street, the authors say two axioms ruled the corner: “Get the blast,” or the high, and “Never say never.”

Although they both still work the corner, she and Mr. Andrews have left the first axiom behind, but they know better than to forget the second.

“No, it’s not a happy-ending story,” Ms. Boyd said, “because we’re just getting started.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/09/us/09baltimore.html?ex=1187409600&en=e9d8de8c2c8efb67&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

August 09, 2007

Pregnant woman dies at ICE detention center in El Paso

Pregnant woman dies at ICE detention center in El Paso

Associated Press

EL PASO — A pregnant woman in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement died after complaining of leg pain and losing consciousness, the agency said.

Rosa Contreras Dominguez, 38, was taken to an El Paso medical center Tuesday night when nurses noticed she was losing consciousness, said Leticia Zamarripa, a spokeswoman for the agency. She died about 3 1/2 hours after first complaining about pain behind her left knee, Zamarripa said.

Dominguez, a legal U.S. resident, arrived at the ICE detention center on Aug. 1 to begin deportation proceedings stemming from her conviction for importing 65 pounds of marijuana into the country, Zamarripa said.

Dominguez, who had already served an 18-month sentence in federal prison for the drug conviction, was given a medical exam when she arrived at the detention center and received constant medical attention for her pregnancy, Zamarripa said. Dominguez was taking prenatal medication.

"It's unfortunate, but as you can see, she was given proper medical attention when she requested it as well as when she was under observation," Zamarripa said.

Lizbeth Morales, Dominguez's niece, said Dominguez had been complaining about the pain in her leg since she was first detained. The family expected to receive an autopsy report today, Morales said.

The family feels that Dominguez, the mother of five children, didn't receive proper medical treatment while in custody, Morales said.

"They're still human beings, and they should be treated fairly," Morales said.

Posted by lois at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2007

Center for National Security Studies: Analysis of FISA Bill

Executive Summary of Grave Concerns about the FISA bill, S. 1927
*This is CNSS’ analysis of the bill before it was signed into law on August 5, 2008
Center for National Security Studies

The Center for National Security Studies strongly opposes the administration’s FISA bill, S. 1927, because it would permit the National Security Agency to acquire and analyze all international communications of Americans, without any meaningful judicial oversight. The administration legislation would allow the NSA warrantless access to virtually all international communications of Americans with anyone outside the US, so long as the government declared that the surveillance was directed at people, which includes foreigners and citizens, reasonably believed to be located outside the US, a definition that covers billions of people.

The administration rejected all reasonable efforts to require that such surveillance be focused on foreigners, be directed at terrorist targets or be limited to protecting against international terrorism. They also rejected efforts to include meaningful court review of the rights of individual Americans’ swept in or even an independent audit of the affect on the privacy of Americans.

This legislation would sunset or expire in six months. However, the sunset has an exception that would allow any directives by Attorney General Gonzales and Director of National Intelligence McConnell that commandeer access to US telephone and internet companies to remain in effect until their expiration (which is likely to be until the end of the administration since the directives can be issued for up to one year, so could be issued to last for the next six months and then reissued on the eve of the sunset, in January 2008, to remain in effect until this administration is finally over in January 2009).

Detailed Analysis

The administration approach would allow the NSA warrantless access to virtually all international communications of Americans with anyone outside the US, so long as the government declared that the surveillance was directed at anyone reasonably believed to be overseas.

* This would be the effect of Sec. 105A which puts outside the definition of electronic surveillance “surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States.”

* It would authorize surveillance much broader than that described by the President in the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” – communications between an overseas target and someone in the U.S. where one person is suspected Al Qaeda. Instead, the NSA could collect the communications of billions of people overseas and seize millions of international communications of Americans every day for the foreseeable future.

* This approach would also permit the warrantless surveillance of countless Americans traveling, working or fighting in the armed services abroad under the carve-out for directing surveillance against individuals abroad. The bill provides no judicial oversight of such interceptions.

There is no requirement that the surveillance be directed at suspected terrorists.

* For all these millions of American communications, there would be no requirement that the American even be suspected of any contact with or connection to al Qaeda or any other terrorists.

* Indeed, there is not even any requirement that even the overseas targets have any connection with al Qaeda or with any suspected terrorist or group. The administration approach is not about targeting, particular foreign terrorists, and the purpose of the surveillance that would be authorized under the bill is to gather "foreign intelligence" generally, not just intelligence about terrorism.

The administration approach would allow massive surveillance of Americans with no meaningful judicial oversight or individualized probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

* No judicial order would be required for before the acquisition of calls to or from Americans, which is required under current law to protect the privacy of Americans’ international communications from be acquired from US phone and internet companies here.

* This would be accomplished by carving out surveillance scooping up communications of anyone overseas (and any Americans they talk to) from the protections in FISA against acquiring such communications here in the US. It would allow the NSA to bypass the warrant requirements of FISA intended to guarantee the Fourth Amendment rights of American residents.

* The administration refused all reasonable proposals to ensure that the courts are involved to protect the rights of Americans to the privacy of their international calls. By refusing any proposal that required even after the fact court review to protect Fourth Amendment rights, the administration undermined its manufactured claims that legislation was truly needed for security. If changes to the law were truly essential for our security, it would be unreasonable to refuse such changes because they include meaningful and independent checks by the courts to protect Americans’ rights.

The administration’s legislation does not provide the adequate and independent review required by the Fourth Amendment’s checks.

* The administration's proposal to require approval by the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence, is not an adequate substitute for independent judicial review of surveillance that would invade the privacy of millions of Americans. It is only too clear that the Executive Branch cannot police itself, as the Founders recognized in providing for separated and independent powers.

* The administration may claim there is judicial review, but this section is merely window dressing. Four months after passage, the FISA court would be asked to review the government’s procedures for determining that its surveillance is directed at persons overseas. Even if the court thought the government’s procedures were not sufficient, it could not stop the program unless it found the government’s approach was “clearly erroneous,” an exceedingly difficult standard for reversal. And even then the program would continue unless the Supreme Court decided against the government under that very high standard.

This is not a "new" proposal, predicated on a disagreement with the courts.

* While administration allies have just leaked information about a secret court ruling that they claim necessitates this change, every draft FISA proposal by the administration and its allies since early 2006, well before any court ruling, would have given the NSA a blank check to access Americans’ international communications.

* If the FISA court has expressed concerns about NSA surveillance being legal or constitutional, those concerns ought to be publicly disclosed, rather than brushed aside by an effort to simply cut out the court’s role.

The administration’s approach would allow the executive to conduct such surveillance with virtually no oversight whatsoever.

The bill contains no meaningful reporting requirements to the FISA court concerning even the number of Americans, here or abroad, who would be monitored under these new surveillance authorities. The administration does not want any other branch of government or the American people to know the true scope and effect of their monitoring of innocent Americans.

* The administration's proposed reporting to Congress is a sham. The administration would only report to the Congress if an agency or agent exceeded the exceptionally broad power the bill would grant to acquire all international calls and e-mails of Americans. It would require no reporting on how many calls and individuals were surveilled. The administration refused all efforts to get an independent audit on the effect on Americans.

The administration has not demonstrated that the bill would benefit intelligence or the men and women in the intelligence community.

* This so-called modernization proposal would make the needles in the haystack even harder to find by opening the floodgates on monitoring virtually all calls or e-mails to or from Americans involving any foreign terminal, without warrants.

* The men and women in our intelligence community deserve better than this. They deserve clear rules subject to genuine checks that honor the American people they are working tirelessly to protect.

The Six-Month Sunset Has an Exception to Allow Such Warrantless Access until the End of the Bush Administration

* This legislation would sunset or expire in six months. However, the sunset has an exception that would allow any directives by Attorney General Gonzales and Director of National Intelligence McConnell that commandeer access to US telephone and internet companies to remain in effect until their expiration.

* The directives are likely to last until the end of the administration even though the legislation would sunset if Congress does not renew it, because the directives can be issued for up to one year, and so could be issued to last for the next six months and then reissued on the eve of the sunset, in January 2008, to remain in effect until this administration is finally over in January 2009.

* This cleverly written sunset will give the Bush Administration legal license to engage in wide-ranging surveillance of all international communications of Americans, not just for six months but for the rest of this president and vice president’s term in office.

http://www.cnss.org/CNSS%20Views%20on%20S1927.htm

Posted by lois at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)

CT: More prisons & new mandatory sentencing

"We may have to build more prisons. There is no question about that," said Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, D-East Haven, co-chairman of the legislature's Judiciary Committee."

"To be sure, every citizen must understand that major changes, whether in longer sentences or more monitoring, comes with a price tag. A big one. Potentially hundreds of millions of tax dollars," House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford, said.The last major prison expansion in the late 1980s and early 1990s cost $1 billion, and taxpayers are still paying off the state bonds that financed the construction projects. The state built a dozen new prisons and made renovations to 13 others. The expansion increased the number of prison beds by 50 percent. Yet, prison overcrowding remains an issue today."

Republican-American
Waterbury, CT
Monday, August 6, 2007

As anti-crime pressure mounts, costs will too
Getting tough comes with hefty price tag

BY PAUL HUGHES REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

HARTFORD - The attack on a Cheshire doctor and the killing of his family is inspiring tough talk about mandatory sentencing, locking up criminals longer and tightening parole. But getting tough on crime can carry a high cost.

Demands for fast action reverberate throughout a restive Connecticut still reeling from last month's shocking home invasion and triple murder.

While people still mourn the dead and seethe over crime, there has been little discussion of the costs and consequences of getting tougher on crime and criminals.

Yet, the price tag and the implications are considerable.

To cite one example, it would cost more than $10 million a year to use satellite tracking to monitor the whereabouts of more than 2,500 parolees in the state today.

"To be sure, every citizen must understand that major changes, whether in longer sentences or more monitoring, comes with a price tag. A big one. Potentially hundreds of millions of tax dollars," House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford, said.

The last major prison expansion in the late 1980s and early 1990s cost $1 billion, and taxpayers are still paying off the state bonds that financed the construction projects.

The state built a dozen new prisons and made renovations to 13 others. The expansion increased the number of prison beds by 50 percent. Yet, prison overcrowding remains an issue today.

The accused killers in the Cheshire home invasion are convicted burglars who had been released on parole earlier this year.

Authorities say Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, of Cheshire, and Steven Hayes, 44, of Winsted, beat Dr. William Petit Jr. senseless and murdered his wife and two daughters after breaking into the family's home in the early morning hours of July 23.

If convicted, the two suspects face the death penalty or life imprisonment without parole. Either way, neither man will leave prison alive.

It costs $66,000 a year to maintain an inmate on death row, according to the legislature's budget office.

Supporters of the death penalty say execution would save the state the expense of keeping Komisarjevsky and Hayes in prison until they die of natural causes.

Many people in Cheshire feel that way, said Rep. Alfred C. Adinolfi, R-Cheshire, a neighbor of the Petit family.

The cost of defending the two suspects will be carried by the state.

Public defenders represented Komisarjevsky and Hayes during their initial court appearances.

The Public Defender Commission spends about $2 million a year to defend death penalty cases, including $800,000 for special public defenders and expert witnesses.

The commission says the increasing number of death penalty cases is raising costs significantly.

Since the Cheshire murders, there have been demands to expand mandatory sentencing, treat career and violent criminals more harshly, further restrict parole eligibility and increase supervision of parolees

There are costs and consequences for such crackdowns and policy shifts.

The state legislature adopted new sentencing laws and abolished parole in 1981. By the decade's end, the prison population had doubled, staffing levels had tripled and the Department of Correction's budget had quadrupled.

In the 1990s, the legislature re-instituted parole and embarked on a prison expansion program. Lawmakers also toughened criminal laws.

If prison sentences are now made longer, and more inmates serve more time in prison, they have to be housed somewhere. The state now has 19,000 prison beds.

"We may have to build more prisons. There is no question about that," said Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, D-East Haven, co-chairman of the legislature's Judiciary Committee.

New and expanded prisons will need more staff. The Department of Correction has a workforce of nearly 7,000 and a payroll of more than $400 million today.

Prison staffing is also an issue. Overtime cost the department an estimated $10 million more than budgeted for the 2007 fiscal year that ended June 30. Overtime was $61 million for 2006.

The state is spending more than $1.5 billion on prisons this year. This represents 8.7 percent of the $17.5 billion budget for the current fiscal year.

"We already spend more money on prisons than we do on colleges in this state," Lawlor said.

Today, the average cost of incarceration is $41,600 a year, according to the legislature's budget office. This figure includes fringe benefits for Department of Correction employees.

Both parties in the legislature are talking about expanding mandatory sentencing and imposing harsher sentences for burglars, repeat offenders and violent criminals.

Accused criminals must be prosecuted, defended and judged. Then, there are appeals and habeas corpus petitions.

If sentencing and parole changes are made, additional prosecutors, public defenders and judges may be needed, as well as more clerks, bail commissioners, investigators, victim advocates and so on.

The Public Defender Commission employs close to 200 attorneys.

There are more than 250 state's attorneys prosecuting cases in Connecticut courtrooms today, said Mark Dupuis, spokesman for Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane.

The salary for a starting prosecutor and public defender is $51,053, according to the legislature's budget office. Fringe benefits bring the cost to close to $64,000.

There are nearly 200 authorized judgeships. A Superior Court judge makes $146,780 a year. The Judicial Department's overall budget is $521.1 million

There also could be a need to build and expand courthouses. The state is spending approximately $69 million to build a new courthouse in Torrington.
http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2007/08/05/news/275805.txt>

Posted by lois at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)

CT: More extreme reaction: Change Parole Rules - And Monitor Those Released

"To protect citizens and to ensure against another Cheshire redux, we now need to use electronic ankle bracelets on all released felons during their entire parole period and on career criminals during fixed time periods beyond parole."
Hartford Courant
OP ED

Change Parole Rules - And Monitor Those Released
Arthur L. Spada
August 6, 2007

The Petit family tragedy is a metaphor for the pivotal failure of the Connecticut criminal justice system. Interlocking failures culminated in a night of terror orchestrated by recently paroled Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky. The use of electronic ankle bracelets would have prevented this carnage.

The federal government and many of our sister states now embrace the use of attached ankle bracelets for all released felons. Connecticut needs to adopt a similar program. To do otherwise endangers innocents.

The state's prisons have become revolving doors for career criminals. The great wash of criminals cannot be tried because of the state's anachronistic, time-consuming, protracted voir dire requirement. Voir dire is a procedure by which prospective jurors are questioned. In Connecticut, they are questioned individually rather than in a group. Neither the federal government nor any of our sister states employ Connecticut's individual voir dire selection for juries.

This results in an abnormally high rate of plea bargaining and an abysmally low rate of trials. Every defendant in a plea-bargained disposition negotiates his own sentence. The result? Excessively short sentences for serious crimes.

Hayes, harnessed with a conviction record of 20 robberies and six larcenies, had plea-bargained for a five-year sentence to a charge of burglary. Hayes served two years and was paroled administratively, without benefit of a public hearing; nor were his victims notified. This miscue was legitimized by the recent enactment of Public Act 04-234.

This law must be repealed or seriously amended. Its unabashed purpose is "to reduce by 20 percent the number of inmates jailed due to technical violations of probation or parole." The message to parolees is no re-incarceration unless you repeatedly violate your conditions of parole or commit a serious crime.

But Public Act 04-234 causes additional harm to our citizenry. Except for a handful of heinous crimes, sentenced inmates are now eligible for administrative parole almost immediately. A staff clerk reviews a file without notifying the victims and then submits a recommendation - but there is no public record of the reason for the recommendation.

There is even more harm contained in the law: Inmates can be transferred to halfway houses 18 months before their release date. The Department of Correction can release inmates charged with a misdemeanor and Class D felons who cannot make bail. (This raises a serious separation of powers issue because bail-setting is a judicial function.) The Correction Department can release inmates for work or educational purposes to a community or private residence. The commissioner can issue renewable 30-day furloughs. Drug-dependent sellers can twice enter a treatment program in lieu of prosecution or jail.

The most contemptible provision of Public Act 04-234 is the shift of
responsibility: It places the onus on the parole board to show why it should not grant parole rather than putting the burden on the prisoner to prove why he should be released: "The Board must give specific reasons why the person and public would not benefit from the person's parole while transitioning to the community."

This new standard is a stark affront to the law-abiding citizens of our state.

Connecticut's prisons must accommodate the influx of 5,000 prisoners annually. Because the prison population is at near-maximum, that means 5,000 inmates must be transferred or paroled to the community. The political resistance to building new prisons or placing inmates in out-of-state prisons mandates the use of electronic ankle bracelets.

These bracelets are electronically connected to global positioning satellites. The satellite can continuously transmit digital radio signals pinpointing the parolee's location. Currently, 268 sex offenders are electronically monitored by the state's parole division.

To protect citizens and to ensure against another Cheshire redux, we now need to use electronic ankle bracelets on all released felons during their entire parole period and on career criminals during fixed time periods beyond parole.

Ironically, the GPS solution would save taxpayers money, although saving lives and property, not saving dollars, would be the reason to use ankle bracelets. Inmates cost an average $30,000 per year; the GPS system costs an average $4,650 per year. The GPS can help parole officers enforce curfews and keep parolees within circumscribed boundaries.

The repeal of Public Act 04-234, the removal of voir dire in criminal cases and the use of electronic ankle bracelets for all paroled and career criminals will usher a new day of domestic tranquility. Such changes would burnish the images of the Cheshire innocents. ________

Arthur L. Spada, a former Superior Court judge, was state commissioner of public safety in the Rowland administration.
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-spada0806.artaug06,0,5123545.story>

Posted by lois at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)

States Use Data and Research to Reduce Recidivism

August 06, 2007
States Use Data and Research to Reduce Recidivism
Capitol Comments

Three years ago, nearly two-thirds of people admitted to Kansas prisons violated the conditions of their parole or probation supervision. If nothing was done, said Roger Werholtz, the state’s secretary of corrections, Kansas faced spending $500 million to build new prisons over the next 10 years.

Speaking Friday before a session of the National Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, Werholtz described how his state was able to reduce supervision revocation rates.

“We can control growth,” he said. “We won’t stop it but we can manage it more intelligently.”Werholz was one of four participants in a panel discussion on skyrocketing prison costs.

Working with CSG’s Justice Center and the Pew Center, Kansas developed the data used to convince a bipartisan coalition that reforms were needed.

Werholz said research shows that intervention and treatment had to focus on the most dangerous prisoners, those at a higher risk of returning. In the past, he said, intervention efforts focused on low-risk prisoners.

“Those at low risk will likely succeed without intervention,” he said.

Other changes involved more local and county involvement in providing treatment facilities and a shift in how prisoners are treated. Instead of the cookie-cutter approach previously used, released prisoners are given more individual intervention based on their needs such as housing, mental illness and health issues.

The result, said Werholtz, is that the rate of recidivism in Kansas has been cut in half in the past three years. It also reduced by $80 million the capital expenditures the state will need for new prisons.

The Kansas experience, and a similar success story in Nebraska, outlined by Brashear, demonstrates some of the work the Public Performance Project, working with partners such as CSG’s Justice Center, is doing nationwide.

Gelb described how the Public Safety Performance Project wants to help states search for better results from the sentencing and correction systems.

Using data-driven, evidence-based research, the project is working with Kansas, Nebraska and nine other states to find the policy choices that will increase public safety and deliver a better return on investment of corrections dollars.

Thompson urged the reporters and editors to ask policymakers in their states these questions:

* Why is their prison population is growing?
* What services do prisoners get?
* Why are prisoners going back to prison?

He said it is unlikely that many state officials know the answers, which is why data collection is the first step needed to take in efforts to control prison costs.

http://capitalcomments.typepad.com/capital_comments/2007/08/states-use-data.html

Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2007

Homelessness Could Mean Life in Prison for Offender

August 3, 2007, NY Times
Homelessness Could Mean Life in Prison for Offender
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, Aug. 2 — A sex offender who was unable to register his address with state officials because he was homeless is facing life in prison for violating a new registry law that politicians in Georgia have hailed as the nation’s toughest.

The offender, Larry W. Moore Jr. of Augusta, was convicted in North Carolina in 1994 of indecent liberty with a child, a felony. This week he was convicted for the second time of violating a requirement that he register. Under the new law, a second violation carries an automatic life sentence.

“We have suggested that it is cruel and unusual punishment as it relates to the facts of this case,” said Sam B. Sibley Jr., the state public defender in Augusta, whose office represents Mr. Moore and is planning an appeal on his behalf.

The law requires offenders to register their address and forbids them to live or work within 1,000 feet of not only schools and day care centers but also churches, swimming pools and school bus stops. It expanded the definition of a sex offender and raised penalties for violating registry requirements.

Homelessness is not an acceptable excuse. “One of the requirements when you become a sex offender is you have to have an address,” said Sgt. Ray Hardin of the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office in Augusta.

Sergeant Hardin said enforcement of the law required a dedicated investigator, a global positioning system and, each time an offender moves, hours of paperwork. At least 15 sex offenders have been arrested because of homelessness since the law took effect in July 2006, according to documents gathered through pretrial proceedings in a lawsuit brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The suit argues that the law leaves offenders virtually nowhere to live. Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer with the human rights center, said she had scoured the state for homeless shelters that would accept male sex offenders and could find only one, which was full. A document from the Sex Offender Administration of the Georgia Department of Corrections, provided to a reporter by Ms. Geraghty, lists what it calls “offenders arrested for being homeless.”

Georgia’s law is not the only one that has made it hard for offenders to maintain legal residences. In Florida, the state authorized five offenders to live under a bridge in Miami after they were unable to find suitable housing that they could afford. In Iowa, a victims’ group found that offenders tried to comply with the registry law by offering addresses like “rest area mile marker 149” or “RV in old Kmart parking lot.” Critics of residency restrictions say they drive offenders underground and have little effect on the number of sex crimes.

As a tough-on-crime measure, the Georgia law was enacted easily, with supporters saying it would force sex offenders to leave the state. “Every sex offender in Georgia will now serve time in jail, and every sex offender in Georgia will be monitored after their release,” said the House majority leader, Jerry Keen, the bill’s Republican sponsor.

But the law’s opponents have called it too harsh in its penalties, too broad in its restrictions and too rigid, allowing no exceptions even when a day care center or a church opens within 1,000 feet of an offender’s pre-existing residence. One offender, Anthony Mann, was told he had to leave his house and the barbecue restaurant he owned when day care centers opened too close to both locations, according to a second lawsuit.

In the case of the 40-year-old Mr. Moore, the first registry violation occurred in 2005, when the penalties were much less severe. After spending time in jail awaiting disposition of the case, he pleaded guilty to missing a deadline to re-register and was sentenced to two years’ probation.

Records show that in March 2006, the month he got out of jail, he registered twice, according to officials at the public defender’s office. He registered again in April and June, and twice in July, when the new law took effect. He was left with only two places in Augusta, both hotels, that met the law’s requirements.

Mr. Moore, who worked at Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, could not afford the hotels for long, his lawyers say. An investigator at the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office told the court that when he checked several months later, Mr. Moore had moved out.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/us/03homeless.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

MD: Prison Chief Wants to Find More Work For Prisoners

Friday, Aug. 3, 2007
Have prisoners, will travel
Correction chief wants inmates to help communities, clean up the environment
by Margie Hyslop

TOWSON — Maryland Public Safety and Correction Secretary Gary D. Maynard wants to increase the number of convicted men and women working outside and inside prisons.

‘‘I’m looking for projects,” he said, explaining that he wants to hear from local governments and community groups with work and no one to do it.

‘‘I’d rather look at it and turn it down than never hear about it,” Maynard said.

‘‘I think inmates can play a part in making that a better place. ... We’ve got plenty of people doing time, wanting to pay back for their crime, why not hook them up to a long-term project that may take 15 years.”

State prison labor would add to, not take away from, work already done by inmates from local jails by doing long-term cleanup or construction jobs that could then be maintained by local labor, he said.

Maynard hopes to double the outside projects that state inmates do ‘‘in a couple of years” and triple or quadruple it as soon the budget allows.

Because the state budget does not set aside money to underwrite such inmate work projects, the department has to pull resources from other agencies and programs to do the job, Maynard said.

‘‘I’ve made an offer to anybody I can talk to about the Chesapeake Bay. People want to clean it up,” Maynard said. ‘‘I’m asking people, ‘OK, what do you need?’

‘‘Tell me what you need to clean it up and I’ll do it. But nobody’s told me yet.”

At least one lawmaker says Maynard has a good idea.

‘‘I think he’s trying to be creative — it’s got some potential,” said Del. Charles E. Barkley (D-Dist. 39) of Germantown, chairman of the House Appropriations public safety subcommittee.

Maynard’s department has already offered to send some of the 9,000 inmates from prisons in Hagerstown and Cumberland to work on the C&O Canal trail, just 15 minutes from their cells. So far, Maynard said, the superintendent of the federal park hasn’t responded to the offer.

Inspiration for the plan comes partly from opportunities Maynard saw in two projects in Baltimore city. One was at Tate and Chesapeake streets, where inmates cleaned up an illegal dump strewn with tires, propane bottles and an abandoned construction trailer. The other was in the Barclay district, about a mile and a half north of downtown, where a community coalition is working on turning around a neighborhood where trees grow out of abandoned row houses and dead trees sit in street planters.

The coalition asked if the correction department knew inmates’ home neighborhoods so it could help those from Barclay make a smooth and productive transition home after they are released from jail.

Maynard offered to send a crew of former Barclay residents, but the union representing correctional officers is wary, saying that state prisons still lack enough officers to keep people safe inside.

‘‘Will the corrections department have enough officers supervising the prisoners to keep the public safe?” said Shannon Gilson, a spokeswoman for AFSCME, which represents the correctional officers, before adding, ‘‘We know the administration takes the matter seriously.”

‘‘We wouldn’t undertake any project until we had enough officers to make it safe,” said department spokesman Mark Vernarelli. Reducing idleness should help reduce tension and violence in the prisons and make them safer, he said.

Maynard also said he would like to ‘‘plant a million trees,” but needs someone to ask for the workers to do it.

The department’s Maryland Correctional Enterprises provide ‘‘excellent” training and placement, Maynard said, and he wants to double or triple the 1,600 inmates working for the concern, which runs a meat-processing plant and apple orchard and manufactures uniforms, license plates and furniture (and refurbishes it) for the state.

But employing as many as 3,400 more inmates would require more money.

In the past, profits from the prison industries have been taken and used for educational programs, Maynard said.

‘‘That’s a good use of it, but it has stifled the growth of the prison industries,” said Maynard, who wants to put the money into building more factories and putting more inmates to work.

‘‘People that come to prison don’t have a skill,” Maynard said. ‘‘They pick up a skill in prison. They get employable while they’re in prison. When they get out [they’re] way less likely to come back.”

And fewer recidivists could mean lighter work for the department’s Division of Parole and Probation, which supervise 67,000 men and women.

Copyright 2007 Post-Newsweek Media, Inc./Gazette.Net

Posted by lois at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2007

MI: Mackinac Center for Public Policy: Budget Hawks Should Think Outside the Bars

Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Posted: Aug. 2, 2007
Budget Hawks Should Think Outside the Bars

By Kenneth M. Braun

Debating Michigan’s economic and budget woes, Gov. Jennifer Granholm is a leader of a faction that generally believes a tax increase is preferable to spending cuts. While it is tempting to think in stereotypes — that Republicans provide the counterweight to "tax and spenders" — the truth is more complicated. Thinking "outside the box" is critical to cutting the cost of government, because old thinking preserves old spending. Last week, Republicans got stuck in the box when they dug in their heels against a potentially genuine spending reform for state prisons proposed by the Democratic governor.

Thinking outside the box on prisons can require thinking "outside the bars" — sustaining public safety while locking up fewer people. Michigan needs such thinking. The Citizens Research Council of Michigan reports an annual cost per inmate of $30,000. Data from the Michigan Senate Fiscal Agency shows the state’s incarceration rate at nearly 22 percent higher than the national average. Even more striking, the CRC estimates that Michigan’s incarceration rate is 40 percent higher than the average of other Great Lakes states, costing taxpayers an additional $500 million per year.

Could Michigan still deter violence while locking up fewer prisoners? As the CRC report put it, "The relationship between the higher incarceration rate and crime rates is not apparent." At best, the relationship seems quite ambiguous. Illinois has an incarceration rate nearly 40 percent lower than Michigan, yet recent FBI crime reports show the rate of both violent crime and property crime in Illinois to be almost identical to Michigan. Michigan’s violent crime rate was 17.6 percent higher than the national average, but crimes against property — nonviolent crimes — were nearly 10 percent lower than the average.

What is not ambiguous is the need to cut state spending. To that end, Gov. Granholm’s Department of Corrections has recommended changes in sentencing for about 230 crimes. This would reduce the inmate population and net $92 million in savings next year. The critical component is reducing the time for those convicted of nonviolent offenses. At least 44 percent of the inmates taken in by the state in 2006 were for non-violent crimes. That’s 4,868 crooks in very costly cages — at taxpayer expense — usually because they are dishonest or careless, but not because they are violent predators. These reforms assume that nonviolent crooks should still pay for their crimes, but that it’s unwise to also make the taxpayer keep paying for their crimes. A spokesman for the DOC summed it up: "Do we want these people in prison because we’re mad at them or because we fear them?"

Unfortunately, many Republicans are not thinking outside the bars and have denounced the DOC recommendations. One of the reforms is a change in sentencing for those who manufacture and use fake IDs. State Attorney General Mike Cox argued against this by releasing a document with an ID photo of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammad Atta, gratuitously conflating a massive act of violence with a crime commonly committed by those facilitating fraud or underage drinking.

Responses from GOP legislators also were discouraging. Despite incarceration rates that may be costing taxpayers as much as half a billion dollars too much each year, Republican State Rep. John Proos greeted news of the reform proposal by saying: "I’ve not seen that there is a case to be made for significant changes in our sentencing guidelines." State Sen. Alan Cropsey, the chairman of a committee that must approve the reforms if they are to be enacted, stated that he would allow no such thing to happen.

Senate Republicans have their own plan for prison budgets. They would privatize prison services such as medical care and transportation. As with the DOC’s sentencing recommendations, privatization could save a substantial amount of money without damaging public safety. Looking into the privatization of entire prisons in other states, the Mackinac Center has estimated that privatizing just a fraction of this state’s prisons could annually save $192 million.

This is just a fraction of the billions of dollars in sensible spending and outside-the-box thinking that the Mackinac Center has suggested as a way to trim the size of the state and negate the need for an economically punishing tax hike. Privatization can generate real budget savings, but no more so than cutting out extra costs like excessive incarceration. Taxpayers deserve real sentencing reform. Republicans should help the governor make it happen if they are serious about saving money.

#####

Kenneth M. Braun is a policy analyst specializing in fiscal and budgetary issues for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are properly cited.
http://www.mackinac.org/print.aspx?ID=8845

Posted by lois at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

Editorial: Prison work crews are well worth state expense

Prisoners get $2.50 a day!

Editorial
Free Press
Detroit

Prison work crews are well worth state expense
August 3, 2007

A shortsighted cut in the use of work crews from state prisons will cost communities throughout Michigan millions of dollars. The crews perform necessary jobs for local governments and nonprofit agencies, such as mowing grass, painting, shoveling snow, planting flowers, digging graves, cleaning up state parks and removing brush.
August 3, 2007

A shortsighted cut in the use of work crews from state prisons will cost communities throughout Michigan millions of dollars. The crews perform necessary jobs for local governments and nonprofit agencies, such as mowing grass, painting, shoveling snow, planting flowers, digging graves, cleaning up state parks and removing brush.

The work gets done on the cheap. Contracting agencies pay the state $15 a day for each worker -- $2.50 of which goes to the inmate.

MDOC is halting the work crews effective Aug. 17 as part of a plan to cut $92 million in spending. But this move saves just $6 million -- chump change in the department's nearly $2-billion budget.

Even in a budget crisis, keeping this program alive is a no-brainer. Legislators should restore prison work crew funding for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

If they don't, dozens of communities that relied on the 208 canceled crews will lose. So will the Department of Corrections and the 2,000 minimum-security inmates who did the work.

The program reduced prison idleness and taught skills, responsibility and a work ethic to inmates who were close to their release dates. Scrapping the program runs counter to the goals of the state's much touted prisoner re-entry program.

For some inmates, a work crew was their first job and a chance to contribute to society. Agencies around the state report that inmates did excellent work. Now, some of the jobs simply won't get done. Hikers and others enjoying outdoor recreation will see the difference.

The small help these cuts would give the Department of Corrections are far outweighed by the damage done to municipalities and nonprofit agencies. Legislators and the governor ought to see the bigger picture.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070803/OPINION01/708030333
/1068/OPINION

Posted by lois at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)

IL: State to review drug 'safe zones'

Chicago Tribune
State to review drug 'safe zones'
By Megan Twohey | Tribune staff reporter
August 3, 2007

State legislators moved Thursday to review drug-free "safe zone" laws after a Tribune article detailed the disproportionate effects of drug laws on offenders of different races.

A bill approved by a 53-45 vote in the General Assembly would create a Legislative Task Force on Drug Free Zones to study state laws on safe zones and recommend whether they should be amended. The legislation, which now goes to the Senate, would require the task force to report to the governor and state lawmakers by November.

Also on Thursday, Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr. called on Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan and members of Congress to hold hearings on the racial discrepancies in drug law enforcement and punishment.

"Madigan should take the lead," Jackson said at a news conference at Rainbow/PUSH headquarters. He called for the elimination of "safe zone" laws, which increase penalties for drug sales near schools, churches and other public places and blanket many densely populated minority neighborhoods.

"Now that the information is there to act on, we need a remedy," Jackson said.

Blacks make up 13 percent of the nation's illicit drug users, but they constitute 32 percent of those arrested for drug violations and 53 percent of those incarcerated in state prisons for drug crimes, according to federal data.

In Illinois, an estimated 14 percent of drug users are black, but 65 percent of those arrested for drug offenses are black. Sixty-six percent of inmates who are in Illinois prisons for drug offenses are black.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-jacksonaug03,1,5685586.story?ct
rack=2&cset=true

Posted by lois at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2007

MI: Will Counties Pay for Change in Sentencing Classifications

Adrian Daily Telegram - Adrian,MI,USA
Editorial
Wednesday, August 1, 2007 9:26 AM EDT
Will counties take fall for criminal changes?

At issue: A state plan to reclassify many felony crimes to save money.

Our view: Handling more crimes as misdemeanors will mainly just shift state costs to counties, while making punishment less of a deterrent.

A plan by Gov. Jennifer Granholm to reduce 142 felonies to misdemeanors and cut sentences for 58 other felonies is proposed as one way to help balance the state budget.

More likely, the plan will amount to little more than a heist of prison funds by shifting inmate costs to counties, and it should be rejected by legislators.

We agree some felonies deserve downgrading, and it's also clear that the region's poorest state can no longer afford to operate the region's largest prison system. Spending $2 billion a year on state prisons hardly fits anyones idea of "small government." Spending an eye-opening $31,000 a year per prisoner, however, indicates poor management.

Instead of addressing management, a package of bills planned by House Judiciary Chairman Paul Condino, D-Southgate, will prioritize state savings at the cost of public safety. For example, a criminal would be able to steal up to $5,000 (the current limit is $1,000) and only be charged with a misdemeanor. That punishment is neither deterrence nor retribution. Fleeing and eluding police in a high-speed chase would be only a misdemeanor, as would possessing up to two pounds of marijuana. Not all such offenders necessarily deserve prison time, but some do. Limiting the options judges and prosecutors have will severely restrict their ability to make the punishment fit the crime.

Also, when state lawmakers make local jail sentences the maximum punishment, they need to give local governments extra funding to pay for it. Fewer felony offenses will mean the current prison population of 51,000 will shrink, but will lawmakers pass the funding along to counties? Lately, state officials covering up overspending have mugged local governments with one funding grab (liquor tax proceeds) after another (revenue sharing cuts). State promises these days inspire little confidence.

The probable outcome will be that more felons will be dumped into the laps of counties. Counties, unable to properly house them, will be forced to give many an early out on their already-shorter misdemeanor sentences to clear jail space. State officials ‹ who gave up the responsibility but not all of the money ‹ will have washed their hands, and local officials will take the fall.

Protecting citizens' physical safety is the first priority of government ‹ ahead of welfare, transportation and even education. State officials must not make justice a servant of their budget crisis, nor pass the costs to local governments.

http://www.lenconnect.com/articles/2007/08/01/news/news08.txt>

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

Guilt by Association

Guilt by association
Jeff Adachi, SF Chronicle
Thursday, August 2, 2007

San Francisco has begun to employ a controversial crime-fighting tool known as civil gang injunctions. Injunctions bar persons identified as gang members by law enforcement from engaging in restricted activities in specified areas. In light of the violence that the city is experiencing, proponents argue that these restrictions on civil liberties are reasonable. But one critical question has yet to be answered: Will the injunctions reduce gangs and gang violence in San Francisco?

According to a recent report issued by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, injunctions do not work. The authors of the 108-page report compared gang suppression efforts in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and found that heavy-handed law enforcement tactics, including civil gang injunctions, are not only ineffective in stopping gangs or gang violence, but make the problem worse. The report concludes that there is "no evidence that gang enforcement strategies achieved meaningful reductions in violence" and that gang injunctions merely displace criminal activity into neighboring areas. Los Angeles has 33 gang injunctions in place and, according to the report, is a glaring example of a failed war on gangs.

Over the past 20 years, Los Angeles has used gang injunctions, special gang task forces, gang databases and increased prison sentences to combat gangs and gang violence. The result: Los Angeles has six times as many gangs as it did 20 years ago and twice the number of gang members. With nearly 72 active gangs and 40,000 active gang members, Los Angeles is the gang capital of the world. In contrast, New York City relies on community policing and gang intervention programs that provide jobs, counseling and prevention activities. Gang crime and violence there has dropped dramatically. Instead of trying to eliminate gangs, New York's approach focuses on reducing gang violence. Before calling New York "soft" on crime, consider the following statistic: in 2005, the Los Angeles Police Department reported 11,402 gang-related crimes; the New York Police Department reported 520. The report found that gang injunctions make the process of leaving a gang more difficult because injunctions target former gang members after their gang membership has ended.

To test this, I met with a dozen people who have been named in San Francisco's gang injunction. I learned that some have been crime-free for years, working at full-time jobs and volunteering in anti-gang programs. One person who police claimed was covered with gang tattoos had his tattoos removed three years ago and was no longer involved in a gang. Several people named in the injunction are brothers, including two who work together at a small business. Ironically, these two brothers would be barred from working together, being outside past 10 p.m., and could face jail time for associating with each other in public or wearing the color red. Because there is no right to a lawyer in civil court, an individual named as a gang member who cannot afford a lawyer has little choice except to submit to the injunction.

The gang injunction is permanent, meaning that the person will carry the label of "gang member" for life. There is no procedure for removing one's name from the injunction and no mechanism to hold police accountable for errors. Because these records are public, the alleged "gang member" may lose his job, as did two people named in the Bayview-Hunters Point injunction. If gang injunctions are not the solution, then what is? The report again cites New York in finding "ample proof that science-based social service interventions can curb" gang violence. The report found that an infusion of youth centers, after school programs and sports activities operate to offset the familial-like security that gangs provide, and that employment, job training and living wages are needed to lure youth away from the temptations of illegal street enterprise.

Ultimately, programs that provide alternatives to gang life with measurable outcomes are needed to address the roots of gangs and violence. Our city is at a crossroads in deciding how to reduce violence in our neighborhoods. While gang injunctions may temporarily placate public concerns about gangs and violence, there is no empirical evidence to demonstrate their success. Designing effective prevention and intervention programs take time, resources and planning. However, unless we pay attention to what has and hasn't worked, San Francisco will follow the failed footsteps of Los Angeles instead of winning the war on gangs.

Jeff Adachi is San Francisco's public defender.

The Justice Policy Report, "Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies," is available at www.sfpublicdefender.org. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/02/EDC2RB8AB1.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle

Posted by lois at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

NY Times Op-Ed: The Presence of Malice

August 2, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Presence of Malice
By RICHARD MORAN

South Hadley, Mass.

LAST week, Judge Nancy Gertner of the Federal District Court in Boston awarded more than $100 million to four men whom the F.B.I. framed for the 1965 murder of Edward Deegan, a local gangster. It was compensation for the 30 years the men spent behind bars while agents withheld evidence that would have cleared them and put the real killer — a valuable F.B.I. informant, by the name of Vincent Flemmi — in prison.

Most coverage of the story described it as a bizarre exception in the history of law enforcement. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior by those whose sworn duty it is to uphold the law is all too common. In state courts, where most death sentences are handed down, it occurs regularly.

My recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel. (There were four cases in which a determination could not be made one way or another.)

Yet too often this behavior is not singled out and identified for what it is. When a prosecutor puts a witness on the stand whom he knows to be lying, or fails to turn over evidence favorable to the defense, or when a police officer manufactures or destroys evidence to further the likelihood of a conviction, then it is deceptive to term these conscious violations of the law — all of which I found in my research — as merely mistakes or errors.

Mistakes are good-faith errors — like taking the wrong exit off the highway, or dialing the wrong telephone number. There is no malice behind them. However, when officers of the court conspire to convict a defendant of first-degree murder and send him to death row, they are doing much more than making an innocent mistake or error. They are breaking the law.

Perhaps this explains why, even when a manifestly innocent man is about to be executed, a prosecutor can be dead set against reopening an old case. Since so many wrongful convictions result from official malicious behavior, prosecutors, policemen, witnesses or even jurors and judges could themselves face jail time for breaking the law in obtaining an unlawful conviction.

Strangely, our misunderstanding of the real cause underlying most wrongful convictions is compounded by the very people who work to uncover them. Although the term “wrongfully convicted” is technically correct, it also has the potential to be misleading. It leads to the false impression that most inmates ended up on death row because of good-faith mistakes or errors committed by an imperfect criminal justice system — not by malicious or unlawful behavior.

For this reason, we need to re-frame the argument and shift our language. If a death sentence is overturned because of malicious behavior, we should call it for what it is: an unlawful conviction, not a wrongful one.

In the interest of fairness, it is important to note that those who are exonerated are not necessarily innocent of the crimes that sent them to death row. They have simply had their death sentences set aside because of errors that led to convictions, usually involving the intentional violation of their constitutional right to a fair and impartial trial. Very seldom does the court go the next step and actually declare them innocent.

In addition, some of these unlawful convictions resulted from criminal justice officials trying to do the right thing. (A police officer, say, plants evidence on a defendant he is convinced is guilty, fearing that the defendant will escape punishment otherwise.) In cases like these, officers or prosecutors have been known to “frame a guilty man.”

The malicious or even well-intentioned manipulation of murder cases by prosecutors and the police underscores why it’s important to discard, once and for all, the nonsense that so-called wrongful convictions can be eliminated by introducing better forensic science into the courtroom.

Even if we limit death sentences to cases in which there is “conclusive scientific evidence” of guilt, as Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate and former governor of Massachusetts has proposed, we will still not eliminate the problem of wrongful convictions. The best trained and most honest forensic scientists can only examine the evidence presented to them; they cannot be expected to determine if that evidence has been planted, switched or withheld from the defense.

The cause of malicious unlawful convictions doesn’t rest solely in the imperfect workings of our criminal justice system — if it did we might be able to remedy most of it. A crucial part of the problem rests in the hearts and souls of those whose job it is to uphold the law. That’s why even the most careful strictures on death penalty cases could fail to prevent the execution of innocent people — and why we would do well to be more vigilant and specific in articulating the causes for overturning an unlawful conviction.

Richard Moran is a professor of sociology and criminology at Mount Holyoke College.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/opinion/02moran.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

CA: Addicted to prisons.An inmate cap would force Sacramento find solutions to social problems other than throwing people behind bars.

From the Los Angeles Times
Addicted to prisons
An inmate cap would force Sacramento find solutions to social problems other than throwing people behind bars.
By Jonathan Simon

August 1, 2007

On July 23, two U.S. District Court judges ordered the convening of a three-judge panel to consider releasing prisoners from California's alarmingly overcrowded state prison system. The judges' move raises the possibility that a specific cap on the state's prison population will come into place within the next few weeks or months. Californians should welcome such a cap, not because it would solve the problems caused by our state's overuse of imprisonment but because it is likely to compel our paralyzed political branches to approach imprisonment more responsibly.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other political leaders disagree. They suggest that any such cap would put dangerous criminals back on the streets. They prefer to rely on recent legislation that would build more prisons and place more beds in existing prisons to reduce overcrowding. Yet their own projections suggest that any significant reductions in overcrowding, especially at the state's highest-security prisons, are years away.

The claim that a cap would place dangerous criminals on the streets raises the very question our politicians need to address: Who really needs to be in prison to keep the rest of us safe? The nearly 180,000 prisoners in California state prisons include thousands of inmates over 65 and tens of thousands who are there for parole violations that did not involve a new criminal offense. Many others are serving extended terms for property and drug crimes based on the state's three-strikes law and other sentencing-enhancement measures adopted during nearly three decades of unrestrained politicization of punishment in California.

Today, California imprisons its residents at more than four times the level it did in 1980. Criminologists differ over whether this increase has helped reduce serious crime, or by how much, but virtually no qualified observer believes that the current readiness to use prison is the best way to protect Californians.

The massive prison system also strains our state's ability to fund proven strategies for reducing crime, such as community policing, drug treatment and long-term care for the mentally ill. Other pressing problems in education and healthcare will never be addressed as long as our imprisonment habit continues unabated.

Even if we ignore these other state needs, prison construction alone cannot produce the safe and humane conditions behind bars that the U.S. Constitution requires. We have built more than 30 prisons since 1980, but our inmate population is nearly twice the design capacity of those prisons. Our correctional officer force is dangerously understaffed, creating real risks of violence to inmates and officers. This is happening despite overall reductions in crime in recent years. Our laws are simply too indiscriminate about who gets sent to prison and for how long.

The real problem lies not in our prisons but in our Legislature and our courthouses. Since the determinate sentencing law, which created fixed prison terms, came into effect in 1977, legislators have found that the easiest bills to get passed and signed are measures that lengthen prison sentences. The resulting laws give prosecutors extraordinary power to send local offenders to state prison without accountability for the costs of the resulting overcrowding.

To his considerable credit, Schwarzenegger has done more than any governor in recent decades to acknowledge and address this chronic structural problem. The governor is on target with his frank criticism of the existing strategy of "warehousing" offenders who only come back to their communities more dangerous, and his sense that we should keep more offenders at the local level in jails and reentry facilities is consistent with what criminologists have long believed.

But these moves do not stem the immediate emergency or address the long-term problem. Schwarzenegger has begun to show the way and has pandered to voter fears far less then his recent predecessors, but he should go further. The prospect of federal court-ordered prisoner release pushes the state to make the administrative decisions necessary to bring down the prison population. The governor should order the early release of nonviolent parole violators and require parole officials to review whether community-based measures can address the risks posed by future technical violators. Special legislation to allow early release of nonviolent offenders who are within a few months of completing their sentences also should be considered.

Even these measures will not be enough to free the state from its chronic overuse of prison. To do this, the governor must come before the people and speak the truth about our penal code with his trademark frankness. These are laws written by and for "girlie men." We must learn to address serious social problems, like drug addiction, homelessness and threatening gang behavior, without indiscriminate recourse to prison. The governor should appoint a sentencing commission staffed with independent experts on crime and law enforcement to overhaul sentencing laws, with a mandate to reduce our reliance on prisons.

Some offenders pose a real danger of violence that requires the total preventive control of imprisonment. Others have committed such serious crimes that the harsh punishment of prison is called for. But as a state, we have stopped asking who does and does not belong in these categories. The prison cap is not the answer, but the impending threat of a cap is the only incentive that can break the paralysis in Sacramento that has packed our prison system and hobbled our ability to build a better future for Californians.

Jonathan Simon, a professor of law and associate dean at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall, is the author of "Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-simon1aug01,0,2537886.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Posted by lois at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Making his second chance count: Amherst school counselor overcomes criminal past to offer unique perspective

This is (unfortunately) completely extraordinary. It means that despite extremely punitive MA laws, employers...even school districts...can do the right thing!

Making his second chance count: Amherst school counselor overcomes criminal past to offer unique perspective
BY BOB DUNN STAFF WRITER
Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, MA)
August 2, 2007

AMHERST - The new guidance counselor at Amherst Regional Middle School, Talib Sadiq, is a 1988 graduate of Amherst's high school.

He's also been a soldier, fighting in Desert Storm, the first Iraq war.

He was also a bank robber. In December 1993, Sadiq, who was known then by his birth name, Vincent E. Bias, was arrested after robbing a BayBank branch in Springfield with a loaded 9mm handgun. He was sentenced to five to seven years in prison for armed robbery, assault with a dangerous weapon and assault and battery on a police officer.

Over the next 14 years, Sadiq converted to Islam, changed his name, earned college degrees and turned his life around, he and his employers at the regional school say.

Sadiq says he has left Vincent Bias and his crime far behind, and he is ready to make a full-time contribution to the school and the town where he lives. He begins his new job on Aug. 27.

Amherst-Pelham Superintendent Jere Hochman said the decision to hire Sadiq shows that the system works.

'If you make a mistake, you pay your dues and learn lessons and hopefully grow and make a commitment to help others afterwards,' Hochman said.

Hochman said that he understands that people might react negatively to hearing that the new middle school guidance counselor served jail time, but hopes that people reserve judgment.

'I think that all of who Talib is and all of his life experience has informed who he is and the work he does,' said Fran Ziperstein, principal of the middle school. 'I think he'll do wonderful work with kids and he'll be an important member of our team.'

New name, new life

Sadiq changed his name in January 2001, partly for religious reasons, he said, and partly to distance himself from the person he feels he used to be. Sadiq said he began studying Islam while in prison and that his new name holds special significance.

'Talib' means 'a seeker and a student' and 'Sadiq' means 'one who is true to their word,' Sadiq said.

'My life has evolved a lot over the years,' he said. He said he wanted people to get to know him first and not judge him solely on a bad decision made when he was 23.

Sadiq said that it was a combination of anger and naivete that led him to take a gun into that bank in 1993.

He was fresh out of the Army, having done a combat tour in the Persian Gulf. Sadiq was living in Conway, looking for work, while falling behind on his rent and become more and more frustrated.

'All of us go through moments where we get angry or irrational,' Sadiq said. 'My moment got the best of me.'

Sadiq served three years and eight months of his sentence in various state prisons and houses of correction throughout Massachusetts. Sadiq said that he was moved to different prisons because that's simply the system works and because of the work he had done to rehabilitate himself.

'When you're making progress, you get moved to less and less restrictive environments,' Sadiq said.

Time spent behind bars was transformative, he said.

'It definitely gave me time to reflect on decisions I made and gave me time to prepare for my future,' he said. 'It helped me to appreciate the circumstances of my life. Once I knew (prison) wasn't the end for me, I could concentrate on moving forward.'

Part of that 'moving forward' involved completing his education, getting married and starting a family.

Sadiq earned his B.A. in communications from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2002 and received his M.A. in education, concentrating on school counseling, from UMass in May 2006. He is the married father of three children and coaches youth football for Amherst Leisure Services.

Sadiq is now working on a certificate of advanced graduate studies through the UMass Division of Continuing Education, hoping it will provide him with the credentials to become a principal or special education director some day.

Interned at school

Sadiq had completed a one-year internship at the middle school, working under the tutelage of Barry Brooks, who retired from the position of guidance counselor at the end of last school year.

Sadiq said that, before he began his internship at the middle school, he and his professors from UMass met with Hochman, Ziperstein and Co-principal Michael Hayes.

Sadiq said that everyone involved was made aware of his past during that meeting.

Sadiq and his professors convinced Hochman that he had turned his life around and deserved as much consideration as anyone else.

'We all have regrets, some larger than others,' Sadiq said. 'I have to prove myself worthy of this position.'

When the opening for full-time guidance counselor became available, Sadiq said he went through the standard application process after seeing the job posted on a Web site that specializes in academic job listings.

Sadiq said that he was told there were many candidates who had applied for the position. Hochman said he didn't know the exact number of candidates but said the field was 'pretty big.'

Sadiq said that, once he became a finalist, he was interviewed by a committee made up of Ziperstein, Hayes, school psychologist Denise Green, one faculty member and one parent.

Good with students

Ziperstein, the principal, said that during his internship, she got to see Sadiq interact with the students and his co-workers.

'What I saw was someone who approached kids with a calm, gentle style,' Ziperstein said, 'somebody who is very serious about his work.'

Ziperstein and Hochman said that Sadiq was the top candidate out of the pool.

Parent's questions

One concerned parent has sent a series of emails to Hochman, past and current members of the School Committee and Mark's Meadow Principal Nick Yaffe.

The parent aired concerns about the decision to hire Sadiq in spite of his criminal record; choosing him over likely equally qualified candidates without such criminal records; the lack of transparency in the hiring process; and the decision not disclose information about Sadiq's record to parents before hiring him.

Hochman replied in an email and assured the parent that Sadiq was very open about his past through the internship process and that one of the back-to-school issues that will need to be sorted out before the opening of the new year will be how to introduce Sadiq to the ARMS parents and to share any relevant information about his background.

'We believe we hired someone who can work well with students in their middle school years. Yes, someone with a 'history' that is bad, but a 'story' that is (about) one paying his dues and changing,' Hochman wrote.

'I have great confidence in the judgment of Superintendent Hochman,' wrote former School Committee member and current Select Board member Alisa Brewer, in an email reply to the parent. 'He's OK with this and I'm OK with this.'

'I hope folks will stop and really think about this,' Hochman said. '(The robbery) was 14 years ago, (Sadiq) has had a major, life-changing experience and has done a lot of soul searching, he's established in the community and he's gone back to school and worked very hard to succeed.'

'Maybe this is a good example of the way things are supposed to work,' Hochman said.

Bob Dunn can be reached at rdunn@gazettenet.com.

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

August 01, 2007

CT: Knee Jerk Response to Murders In CT: "Tough on Crime" More parole r estrictions, changes to 3 Strikes

3 articles below
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http://www.nhregister.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18650006&BRD=1281&PAG=461&dept_id=31007&rfi=6

New Haven Register

Rell orders beefed up parole restrictions
Gregory B. Hladky, Capitol Bureau Chief
08/01/2007

-HARTFORD ‹ Gov. M. Jodi Rell Tuesday ordered tough new state parole restrictions for offenders convicted of the kinds of burglaries committed by the two parolees charged with killing three people in Cheshire

The order will require 38 current and future burglary parolees to wear electronic bracelets and be subject to unannounced nighttime checks at their homes, and daytime checks at their places of work.

Rell said she will also ask the General Assembly to pass legislation to classify burglaries committed at nighttime or at an occupied residence as violent crimes, a move that would require anyone convicted of such offenses to serve at least 85 percent of their sentence.

Under current law, inmates convicted on burglary charges are usually required to serve 50 percent of their sentences before becoming eligible for parole.

Rell "believes absolutely that we should take (this issue) up immediately" in the General Assembly's current special session, said the governor's chief spokesman, Chris Cooper.

Cooper said Rell would only support legislative action in a special session if lawmakers can consider the matter "in a deliberative way" with full public hearings to allow law enforcement experts and the public to offer their opinions. "The governor doesn't want to make changes just out of reaction," Cooper said.

The General Assembly is conducting a special legislative session devoted to finishing work on a state bond package for the next two years. The legislature's leadership could effectively expand the scope of that special session to include Rell's proposal and that of GOP lawmakers who want to toughen state laws regarding repeat offenders.

However, the top leaders of the legislature's Democratic majority said Tuesday they have asked the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee to review the state parole process and make recommendations for reform in time for the 2008 session.

"We should be thorough in our examination, and the work of those who review our parole and corrections system should be taken up by the legislature when their recommendations are complete later this year or in the next regular session," said the state Senate's top Democratic leader, Donald E. Williams Jr. of Brooklyn.

Rell last week appointed a task force to review sentencing and parole issues arising out of the Cheshire killings.

Burglary parolees Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, and Steven Hayes, 44, have been charged with capital felonies for allegedly invading the home of Dr. William Petit Jr. and killing his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and their two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. Dr. Petit also was savagely beaten in the July 23 attack.

Parole officials have said they didn't have all the police reports and court sentencing information they should have received before the two men were released on parole in May. Some lawmakers also have questioned why the two men weren't originally charged as serious repeat offenders, which would have kept them in prison longer.

"Burglary has long been considered a general nonviolent offense," Rell said in a statement. "But those who commit these crimes at night or when a home is occupied are far more likely to encounter a homeowner ‹ meaning the chances of violence are increased exponentially."

"These offenders warrant a much higher level of scrutiny before parole and much closer monitoring after release," Rell said.

The governor said that she has immediately ordered anyone convicted of second-degree burglary to get a full hearing by the Board of Pardon and Parole. Hayes and Komisarjevsky were released after less formal administrative reviews.

Also, state officials said they are taking steps to ensure that all relevant police and court records of convicted individuals will be made available to the parole board, as is required by law.

Gregory B. Hladky can be contacted at ghladky@nhregister.com or (860) 524-0719.

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New Haven Register
Changes in '3 strikes law' urged in General Assembly
Luther Turmelle, North Bureau Chief
08/01/2007

Republican legislative leaders are calling for a special session of the General Assembly to toughen penalties for repeat offenders, including changes to the state's "three strikes"

Tuesday's request for a special session by Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield, comes as an online petition started by a Cheshire woman regarding the law has garnered about 4,600 signatures in less than a week.

Interest in toughening criminal penalties for repeat offenders rose in the wake of last week's home invasion in Cheshire that ended in the deaths of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, and the beating of Dr. William A. Petit Jr.

Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, with extensive criminal records, have been charged with six capital felonies each, which could bring the death penalty.

"The Petit home invasion and murders exposed Connecticut's poor record when it comes to keeping career criminals locked up," McKinney said. "In fact, we're learning that under existing Connecticut law, dangerous criminals are routinely granted early parole, even after committing the same unconscionable crimes over and over again. We need to fix the system now."

Whether a special session will be called will be determined by the leaders of the legislature's Democratic majority: Senate President Pro Tem Donald E. Williams Jr. of Brooklyn and House Speaker James A. Amann of Milford.

Amann said that while he appreciates the concerns that McKinney and other Republican leaders have, "We can't just jump and be reactionary; we have to be deliberate."

To that end, Amann said he is meeting today with officials from the state Department of Correction, the parole board and others to determine why the suspects were paroled.

"We certainly want to find out what went wrong, what factors there were," Amann said.

Robert Farr, chairman of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, said last week parole officials did not have all the police reports and judicial sentencing statements on the two suspects before paroling Komisarjevsky and Hayes earlier this year.

State Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, will join today's meeting in his role as House chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Lawlor said the idea that creating additional or tougher laws will make Connecticut residents safer is misguided.

"It's a little fraudulent to say if we have more laws it won't happen again," Lawlor said. "Under the laws that we already have on the books, these guys could have been sentenced to 100 years (before the home-invasion incident).

"Prosecutors could have put these guys away for a very long time and they didn't; putting another option out there doesn't mean they're going to use it."

Among the reforms Senate Republicans want to consider is a new three strikes law that would impose a mandatory sentence of 25 years to life on the most serious repeat criminals.

Hayes' record dates to 1980, according to information presented in court. He has nearly three dozen convictions on charges including larceny, burglary, passing bad checks, possession of marijuana and theft of a handgun.

Komisarjevsky has 18 burglary and larceny convictions dating from to 2002.

The proposal is being advocated by state Sen. Sam Caligiuri, R-Waterbury, whose district includes Cheshire. He said Connecticut's three strikes law is permissive because it allows for longer sentences when a court finds that "extended incarceration will best serve the public interest."

"When it is obvious, as it is today, that the laws we have do not work, then we have a moral obligation to act quickly to correct that situation," he said.

Lawlor contends that creating a new three strikes law would overwhelm the courts and prison system.

But state Sen. Leonard Fasano, R-North Haven, said nothing "should stand in the way of keeping Connecticut residents safe," even if it means adding to or building prisons.

"We're not going to let criminals out just because we don't have bed space," Fasano said. "Clearly, there was a breakdown in communications in this case, but I don't want to sit here and figure out where the holes are in the system. The easiest way to dam the dike is to put a brick wall up."

Republican lawmakers cited overwhelming public interest in changing the law as their reason for seeking a special session.

And the online petition launched July 25, go petition.com, is an example of the groundswell of support for changes in the laws. The petition was started two days after the Petits were killed, and by Tuesday afternoon about 100 people an hour were adding their names to it.

The Web site lists Jessica Ryan of Cheshire as the author of the petition.

Luther Turmelle can be reached at lturmelle@nhregister.com or 789-5706.

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meaug01,0,2567228.story

After home invasion, tougher rules for paroled burglars Associated Press August 1, 2007

MIDDLETOWN, Conn. - Burglars convicted of breaking into occupied homes will get random visits from parole officers under a new policy announced Tuesday by Gov. M. Jodi Rell in the wake of a deadly Cheshire home invasion.

That crime, which left a mother and her two daughters dead, could also prompt lawmakers to order longer mandatory sentences for offenders who break into homes at night or while residents are inside.

Rell said she also will ask the General Assembly to reclassify such offenses as violent crimes, meaning offenders must serve at least 85 percent of their sentences before parole is a possibility.

State officials said one suspect in the Cheshire burglary, killings and arson, Joshua Komisarjevsky of Cheshire, served nearly 60 percent of his sentence for a string of nighttime burglaries. The other, Steven Hayes of Winsted, served 80 percent of his sentence on burglary charges.

Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, co-chairman of the legislature's Judiciary Committee said he supports reclassifying second-degree burglary. But he said the state Board of Pardons and Parole has the ability now to forgo granting parole until someone serves at least 85 percent of their sentence.

"This does not need to wait for the legislature to come in," Lawlor said. "This can be done today, administratively."

Starting immediately, Rell said, parole officers will make random, unannounced checks to the homes and workplaces of 38 state residents who are currently on parole for committing nighttime burglaries or breaking into occupied homes. They will also be subject to increased electronic monitoring.

Both suspects in the Cheshire case had lengthy arrest records that included a string of burglaries, but they had been classified as nonviolent offenders because they did not hurt anyone during the crimes. Komisarjevsky, 26, and Hayes, 44, remained jailed on $15 million bond each.

Prosecutors said they will seek the death penalty against the two, who are charged with several counts of capital felony, sexual assault, kidnapping, assault, burglary, robbery, arson, larceny and risk of injury to children.

Authorities say Komisarjevsky and Hayes broke into the Petit home in Cheshire early July 23, held the family hostage for several hours, then forced 48-year-old Jennifer Hawke-Petit to withdraw money at a local bank.

Suspicious bank employees notified police, who caught the suspects as they tried to flee after allegedly setting the house on fire.

Hawke-Petit was strangled and her daughters, 17-year-old Hayley and 11-year-old Michaela, died of smoke inhalation, according to autopsy results and police. The lone survivor, Dr. William Petit Jr., was badly beaten but managed to escape.

State officials have since asked why both men were deemed nonviolent when Hayes had previous firearms convictions and Komisarjevsky had purchased night-vision goggles so he could burglarize occupied houses at night.

When Komisarjevsky was last sentenced in 2002, prosecutor Ronald Dearstyne referred to him at a hearing as "a dangerous person who poses a danger to the people of Connecticut," according to a written transcript.

That year, Komisarjevsky told authorities that he wore latex gloves and carried a kit that included the night vision equipment and knives to cut through screens. But he insisted he did not want to run into the homeowners.

"I always avoided contact with people," Komisarjevsky told police.

William Gerace, the suspect's attorney in 2002, acknowledged that breaking into a house at nighttime "is a bizarre and erratic thing to do." But he said his client had a history of psychological and drug abuse problems.

In the court transcript, Dearstyne stressed the emotional toll the crime takes on victims. Many of the homeowners that Komisarjevsky burglarized between July 2001 and February 2002, installed alarm systems because they feared another break-in.

"If we can't go home at night and feel safe in our home and then go to bed at night and sleep in our own home and feel safe, then where can we feel safe, Judge," Dearstyne asked at a Dec. 20, 2002 sentencing hearing.

"And that's the end net result of what this defendant did to those people, not so much what he took from them financially, it's what he took from them emotionally," he added.

Some lawmakers say they want a special General Assembly session to address the issue of parole and whether Connecticut needs a tougher so-called "three strikes" law, which typically require 25-year-to-life sentences for repeat serious offenders.

"I think what we learned from this tragedy is right now, our law is not tight enough and there is the possibility of release for certain crimes that should not allow release," said state Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield.

The legislature's Democratic leaders have called on the co-chairmen of the Judiciary Committee to review the Petit case and make recommendations for possible legislation in the 2008 session.

Other issues that might be reviewed include: whether people are being released early to ease prison overcrowding; whether certain cases should go to trial rather than being resolved with plea bargains; and whether special circumstances in nonviolent crimes should raise concerns about the perpetrators' potential for future violence.

"There's too much plea bargaining," Lawlor said. "In cases like this, when you could take cases to trial and see the special circumstances, you could lock them up for a lot longer."

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Associated Press Writer Susan Haigh in Hartford contributed to this report.

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