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October 31, 2007

Law on Young Offenders Causes Rhode Island Furor

October 30, 2007
Law on Young Offenders Causes Rhode Island Furor
By KATIE ZEZIMA, NY Times

It was conceived as a way to save money in the face of a $450 million deficit in Rhode Island’s current budget: making 17-year-olds adults in the eyes of the law, shifting their cases to criminal from juvenile court and putting offenders in the state prison rather than the youth correctional center.

The measure, which took effect July 1 and was expected to save $3.6 million a year, has ignited a firestorm, with children’s groups, the state public defender and others calling it bad policy that in any event is not a money-saver.

“It’s a gross failure of responsibility,” said the state’s attorney general, Patrick C. Lynch. “It’s not saving money. It’s creating enormous questions and problems in the system, never mind ruining lives” of young offenders who are left with criminal records.

Responding to the concerns, the legislature plans to take up a measure today that would essentially repeal the law. The bill is expected to pass, though Gov. Donald L. Carcieri, whose administration came up with the proposal to lower the age from 18, has not said whether he will veto it. Jeff Neal, a spokesman for the governor, a second-term Republican, said last night that Mr. Carcieri had not yet seen the legislation.

The proposal to treat 17-year-olds as adults for criminal-justice purposes was the subject of a legislative hearing in March, where Attorney General Lynch, a Democrat whose office is elective, and others came out strongly against it. Opponents took little action after that, as many thought it would be killed in the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature.

But it survived, and before long it became apparent that the new law could well cost money rather than save it.

The State Department of Children, Youth and Families, which had proposed the idea, had assumed that 17-year-olds would be held among the general prison population, where incarceration costs $39,000 an inmate per year, 60 percent less than the $98,000 in the juvenile-offender system.

But A. T. Wall II, director of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, decided that for the sake of the young inmates’ protection, they would be held in maximum security, where the annual per-inmate cost is $104,000.

As of last week, 46 17-year-olds had been held at the state prison since July 1, all in maximum security, said Tracey Z. Poole, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections.

Mr. Neal, the governor’s spokesman, said the policy might nonetheless still save money, though not as much as expected. The reason, unspoken by Mr. Neal but confirmed by experts, is that relatively insignificant offenses committed by 17-year-olds are bringing dismissal by judges, the effect being savings in the court and corrections systems alike.

“When there are really trivial offenses in the criminal system, they get ignored,” said Patrick Griffin, a senior research associate at the National Center for Juvenile Justice, in Pittsburgh.

Beyond the fiscal issue are those involving public-records law, privacy and even bail. Seventeen-year-olds are not legally authorized to sign a contract in Rhode Island, and as a result cannot sign a bail form or a plea agreement without a parent present.

“How do you plea a kid, or how do you post bail, when you’re not old enough to contract?” said John J. Hardiman, the state’s public defender.

The new law also now makes the records of 17-year-olds public, unlike all juvenile records in the state, which are sealed.

Attorney General Lynch believes the law unnecessary because he could previously elevate juvenile cases to the adult level if the suspect had committed prior offenses or the crime was particularly violent. He said he believed the measure was destroying the lives of young nonviolent offenders, as drug convictions make it harder to find jobs and housing and cause students to be ineligible for federal aid.

“This isn’t about the murderers, rapists, robbers — they could all be waived,” Mr. Lynch said. “This is about if there’s one joint in a car with four kids and it’s not lit. Those charges aren’t what they used to be. The world has changed for 17-year-olds in Rhode Island.”

Ten other states try people under 18 as adults, said Mr. Griffin, the juvenile justice researcher. But in Illinois and Wisconsin, there is a push to raise it back, he said. And Connecticut, which currently tries 16-year-olds as adults, is already set to raise the age to 18 as of 2010.

In Rhode Island, Mr. Hardiman, the public defender, said judges’ concerns about the new law had caused many cases to be resolved before they even reach court.

“They’re exercising discretion,” Mr. Hardiman said of the judges, “and I applaud them in trying to protect young people when the current sanctions are for someone much more mature than a 17-year-old kid.”

Dennys George, 17, of Providence, agrees. He was arrested in early July on drug possession charges and spent three days in the state prison. The offense was his first, and he was sentenced to nothing more than five years’ probation. Still, he now has a record.

“This is not helping young kids,” he said. “It’s going to affect them for the rest of his or her life. It’s affecting me. I haven’t gotten a job. I’m almost 18, and this is just the beginning.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/30juvenile.html
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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

WA: Monroe prison gets 'green' certification. Expansion for 200 men cost $39.5 million

Great, just what we need $39.5 million for ....a "green prison"......"criminals in solitary confinement at Monroe Correctional Complex will be using low-energy lights to read by and collected rainwater to flush their toilets."

Monroe prison gets 'green' certification
Expansion for 200 men cost $39.5 million
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Seattle Post Intelligencer
By CLAUDIA ROWE
P-I REPORTER

MONROE -- The state's largest prison, which houses 2,500 men, is about to expand still further, adding hundreds of beds for its worst-behaved inmates. Yet as they lie in their 12-by-8-foot cells, gazing up through narrow windows at a tiny slice of sky, the criminals in solitary confinement at Monroe Correctional Complex will be using low-energy lights to read by and collected rainwater to flush their toilets.

Theirs is the first prison unit in the state to be certified as "green" by the U.S. Green Building Council, and officials at the Department of Corrections believe it may be the first such cellblock in the nation. It cost $39.5 million to build and will hold 200 men.

The effort to build more environmentally friendly prisons dovetails with an ambitious, $500 million campaign to expand inmate space around the state.

New units are in the works at Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in Franklin County; the state penitentiary in Walla Walla; Larch Corrections Center in Clark County; Cedar Creek Corrections Center in Thurston County; Airway Heights Corrections Center near Spokane; and Mission Creek, the women's prison near Belfair.

By 2009, when the construction is scheduled for completion, Washington will be able to house 3,500 more offenders. Even so, Corrections officials predict a 4,000-bed shortfall within 10 years.

"We don't think you can outbuild the inmate population," said Mike Kenney, assistant deputy of prison departments. "It's kind of a 'Field of Dreams' syndrome."

The real solution, he said, is a comparatively inexpensive $25 million re-entry program, aimed at curtailing recidivism so released inmates do not return.

"The whole purpose of re-entry is to turn back the tide so we don't keep building new prisons," Kenney said. "We don't believe that building is a long-term solution."

To advocates of reform, however, the skewed numbers -- $25 million for re-entry programs, versus $500 million for new bed space -- make plain the official priorities at Corrections.

"They do these little piecemeal things," said Ari Kohn, who speaks frequently with legislators about the need for improved education and transitional housing programs. "It's ridiculous, and it comes out of cowardice. All of these legislators are just scared to death at being labeled soft on crime."

Ken Quinn, superintendent at Monroe and a longtime associate of Corrections Secretary Harold Clarke, acknowledged that violent crime rates have been leveling off. But when offenders arrive at prison, they come with ever-longer sentences.

"They're younger, more violent and doing more time," Quinn said. "So we've had this need for more space."

Relatives of inmates at Monroe insist that overcrowding at the complex 45 minutes from Seattle has led to fights and several inmate deaths.
.
But energy-efficient prisons, mandated by the Legislature, are more costly to build. The overhaul at Coyote Ridge, in which every component has been designed for a "green" rating, will add 2,048 beds and carries a $254 million price tag.

"It costs a little bit more to build," said David Jansen, who oversees capital programs at Corrections. "But over the life of the building it ends up costing less" to heat and maintain.

Paddy Hescock, facilities manager at Monroe, is a believer.

"There's a payback," he said. "It might be 50 or 60 years down the road, but with non-sustainable buildings, you have no payback at all."

Hescock gets his guidelines from the Green Building Council.

But inmates at Monroe have not been shy about offering their own ideas for saving water and electricity, some of them quite ingenious, he said.

Energy efficiency is particularly urgent at Corrections, which must keep lights on 24 hours a day in many prisons. To keep costs down, the department has taken an unusually proactive approach.

"The Department of Corrections," spokesman Chad Lewis said, "is now probably one of the greenest agencies in the state."

© 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/337439_greenprison31.html

Posted by lois at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2007

Bail turns jails into debtors' prisons

News and information for Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, MA)
The high cost of bail turns jails into debtors' prisons

To the editor: "Price Tags on Freedom," an article that appeared in Gazette Weekend (Oct. 27-28) overlooked a very significant aspect of bail, one that has a major impact on poor people and people of color in the Valley. When people are too poor to make bail, they are locked up. This fuels the need for new and bigger jails.

Today, approximately half the women held at the new Hampden County jail in Chicopee are incarcerated because they are too poor to make bail of $200 to $500. Inability to make bail transforms jail into a contemporary debtors' prison. Poor women who are arrested can and are held pre-trial for months. Most of the time, they will be homeless and without income upon release, further destabilizing their lives and placing the well-being of their children in serious jeopardy.

Almost 85 percent of all women at the Hampden County Correctional Center, pre-trial and sentenced, are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. It costs $3,600 to incarcerate a woman for one month, and the average stay is longer.

There are successful pre-trial and bail reforms happening throughout the country, but not in Hampden County. Otherwise, the new $26 million jail for women would have been unnecessary. If the commonwealth wants to save money, Sheriff Michael Ashe will not get his wish to build 56 additional cells before the paint is dry at the new women's jail.

Holding women and men who are too poor to make bail results in devastating consequences: more jail building, greater impoverishment of the poor, and continued criminalization of addiction and mental illness.

Lois Ahrens

Posted by lois at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2007

GA: Genarlow Wilson rejoices over his release. Genarlow Wilson rejoices over his release.

October 27, 2007
Genarlow Wilson rejoices over his release
Georgia Supreme Court rules his sentence was cruel and unusual

By TAMMY JOYNER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/26/07

FORSYTH, Ga. — Two prison guards escorted him from the Burruss Correctional Training Center here. Wilson shook their hands, broke into a wide grin, hugged his mother, Juannessa Bennett, and then picked up his little sister, Jiaya, 9, and held her.

Just hours earlier, the Georgia Supreme Court had ordered his release, calling his 10-year prison sentence "cruel and unusual punishment" under the state and federal constitutions.

With his mother and attorney by his side, Wilson told reporters he harbored no bitterness and still believes in the justice system — especially now that he's been freed.

"I was waiting to see it for myself before I took anyone else's word for it," Wilson, now 21, said of his release. "It felt unreal just to sign the papers to actually let me know I was leaving."

Wilson's four-year legal odyssey has inflamed racial tensions in Georgia while capturing the nation's attention.

Black civil rights leaders alleged race and class have been at play in the case, which sparked protest marches and demonstrations in Douglasville, where Wilson was prosecuted. Douglas County prosecutors, meanwhile, have vehemently denied race played a role, noting all the defendants and victims in the case are black.

The case stems from a drug- and alcohol-fueled New Year's Eve party Wilson attended at a Douglasville hotel in 2003. Wilson was charged with raping a 17-year-old girl at the party, but was acquitted. He was ultimately found guilty of felony aggravated child molestation for receiving oral sex from the 15-year-old girl, a crime that carried a minimum 10-year prison sentence under state law at the time.

Four other male youths at the party pleaded guilty to child molestation of the 15-year-old and sexual battery of the 17-year-old. A fifth pleaded guilty to false imprisonment. Their party was captured on a profanity-laden and sexually graphic video filmed by one of the male youths.

Since Wilson's conviction, the former Republican state lawmaker who authored the state Child Protection Act in 1995 has repeatedly insisted it was never his intent to lock up teenagers involved in consensual sex acts. Last year, the Legislature changed the law to make similar acts a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 12 months in prison.

The Supreme Court noted that legal change in the 48-page opinion it issued in Wilson's case Friday morning: "For the law to punish Wilson as it would an adult, with the extraordinarily harsh punishment of ten years in prison without the possibility of probation or parole, appears to be grossly disproportionate to his crime," wrote Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, who sided with the majority in the court's 4-3 decision in favor of freeing Wilson.

In ruling Friday, the Supreme Court upheld the June 11 decision of Monroe County Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson, who ordered Wilson freed from prison. Judge Wilson, no relation to Genarlow Wilson, also ordered his felony conviction reduced to a misdemeanor. But the Supreme Court said the judge erred in resentencing Wilson "for a misdemeanor crime that didn't exist when the conduct in question occurred." The court said Judge Wilson should instead set aside Wilson's sentence altogether. Judge Wilson did not respond to a message left at his office Friday.

Veda Cannon, the mother of the 15-year-old girl in Wilson's case, declined to comment. But in an interview in June, Cannon said Wilson should never have been criminally charged and imprisoned for receiving oral sex from her daughter. Cannon said the sex between her daughter, Wilson and the four other teens was consensual and regrets she didn't ask prosecutors not to charge them. Critics have pointed out, however, that the age of consent in Georgia is 16.

Cannon's daughter, now 19, has declined requests for interviews about the case. She graduated from high school before joining the Navy to pursue a career in nursing, her mother said. She has a 2-year-old son, Cannon said.

Douglas County District Attorney David McDade, whose office prosecuted Wilson, issued a statement Friday, saying "while I respectfully may disagree with the court's decision, I also must respect their authority as the final arbiter in this case."

Attorney General Thurbert Baker, who had appealed Judge Wilson's decision to the Supreme Court, also issued a statement Friday.

"I hope the court's decision will also put an end to this issue as a matter of contention in the hearts and minds of concerned Georgians and others across the country who have taken such a strong interest in this case," read the statement.

Back at the prison, Wilson was asked if he had apologized to the girls from the party. He responded: "No. From Day One, I said — not just me — but all of us, we made decisions that I felt could have been better. But I felt like we have all learned from that experience. All we can do is move forward. You can't step back."

Before this incident, Wilson had never been in trouble with the law and was an A and B student at Douglas County High School, where he played football, ran track and served as homecoming king. Wilson said he now plans to go to college and major in sociology.

A reporter asked him where the welcome-home party was going to be. Wilson paused, then said: "There is not going to be any more parties for a while."

Everybody laughed.
Poll results as of 10-29-07
DO YOU AGREE?
Do you agree with the state Supreme Court decision ordering Genarlow Wilson's release?
Yes 95.54% 17163
No 4.46% 802
Staff Writers Jim Galloway and Bill Rankin contributed to this report.
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2007/10/26/genarlow_1026.html

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

October 26, 2007

RI: Real Impacts: the actual results of RI's new law that charges 17 year olds as adults

Family Life Center report--Real Impacts: the actual results of RI's new law that charges 17 year olds as adults

The Family Life Center's new report "Real Impacts: the actual results of RI's new law that charges 17-year-olds as adults" documents what has happened since July, 2007 when the RI legislature adopted this new policy. The report found that the new policy is not only more costly, it unduly punishes juveniles, particularly juveniles from disadvantaged backgrounds and from communities of color. In fact, 17-year-olds of color are 28 times more likely to end up in adult prison than white 17-year-olds. The report recommends that the new long be reversed as soon as possible and that the records of those already affected be retroactively undone.

the report can be downloaded at http://www.riflc.org/index.php?name=reports

Posted by lois at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2007

MA: Unintended casualties aplenty in drug war

"Most inmates lack a high school diploma, have substance abuse problems and have few, if any, job skills. Yet education, training and treatment programs have been slashed. The budget for such programs is roughly 3 percent of the entire prison budget."
(That is 3% of one billion dollars a year---Lois)

Unintended casualties aplenty in drug war
By David W. White Jr. | Wednesday, October 24, 2007 Op-Ed

Prison populations now total more than 11,000, compared to about 2,500 in 1990.

Since long before Richard Nixon coined the phrase “War on Drugs,” our country experienced a sharp increase in the penalties associated with illegal drug possession, distribution and trafficking. In Massachusetts, as in many states, more than a dozen minimum mandatory sentences were added to the books.

The demand for “truth in sentencing” was answered by a series of laws enhancing or restricting parole eligibility in 1980s and 1990s. But in the political shuffle, sentencing guidelines were unfortunately left on the sidelines.

Prison populations have more than quadrupled since 1990, now totaling more than 11,000, compared to approximately 2,500 in 1990. All Massachusetts prisons and jail facilities are overcrowded. The cost of running these systems is nearing $1 billion annually.

Are we getting much bang for our buck? The answer is a resounding “No.” Crimes of possession have not been reduced by the threat of longer sentences. Without effective parole, an increasing number of prisoners are being released from medium and maximum security prisons, unsupervised, uneducated and untrained. Recidivism rates are more than 50 percent in the three years following prisoner release.

The failure of the corrections system to reduce recidivism is a guarantee that there will be a continuing stream of victims.

The failures in the corrections system can, in large part, be traced to a few misguided policies. First, education and training programs do not meet the needs of prisoners. Most inmates lack a high school diploma, have substance abuse problems and have few, if any, job skills. Yet education, training and treatment programs have been slashed. The budget for such programs is roughly 3 percent of the entire prison budget. As a result, General Education Development (GED) diploma completion rates are down and waiting lists for the few existing treatment programs grow.

The concept of rehabilitation in our state prisons has all but been abandoned, which presents more opportunities for the negative effects of idle prisoners to build, heightening the threat to other prisoners and prison guards alike.

3Second, mandatory minimum sentences prevent inmates from having any parole, and from entering training opportunities or re-integration programs. Other sentences, with only slight differences between the minimum and the maximum (for example, a sentence of 10 years to 10 years and one day) diminish or eliminate any opportunity for parole. Mandatory minimums should be revisited to create sentences that preserve parole as a means for a successful transition from prison back to society.

The poster child for the need for mandatory minimum sentencing reform is the school zone offense, which mandates a two-year sentence for the sale of even the smallest quantity of drugs within 1,000 feet of a school, or in the proximity of a church, park or day care center. The vast majority of convictions for school zone offenses are unrelated to schools or the students who attend them.

In urban areas, almost all of the city can be considered a school zone. Therefore, the law has a disparate impact on urban areas and on minorities. If someone sells drugs in Lynn, he or she goes to jail, while the same offense in the suburbs may result in probation.

Now is the time to advocate for meaningful reform, especially given the Legislature’s current appetite for change.

However, such action will be incomplete if we fail to restore meaningful programs to the prisons, including education, job training and treatment for addiction and mental illness. To ensure a more harmonious transition from the cell block to society, we need to expand and improve our existing parole system.

Meaningful reforms will ensure improvements to only better society. These include reducing crime, restoring families and communities and cost savings to taxpayers. Our citizens deserve nothing less.

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1040062

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

October 23, 2007

IN THESE TIMES-"Prison Breakdown. Overcrowding has pushed California's prison system to the brink" by Sasha Abramsky

IN THESE TIMES
Prison Breakdown
Overcrowding has pushed California's prison system to the brink

By Sasha Abramsky October 22, 2007

Halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco is Solano Correctional Facility, nestled against a series of rolling hills, on the outskirts of the small city of Vacaville.

From the prison's guard towers, the view is fairly beautiful: a Mediterranean-type vista of sun-browned grass and squat trees covering green hills, underneath the endlessly deep California sky. But from the windows of the dorms and cellblocks where the inmates live, all they can see is a slender patch of sky.

Inside some of the housing units at Solano, inmates take showers in rooms open to the entire dorm--including guards, both male and female. As naked men soap themselves off, other inmates go about their business in front of them. Hundreds of men share a handful of toilets, as well as the mildew-and-mold-infested open shower area. "There's maybe 10 operable toilets for 200 guys. You come back from chow in the morning, you stand in line 10-to-20 minutes to use the toilet," says 47-year-old Michael Donoho, a heavily tattooed repeat offender (drugs, robbery, spousal abuse).

Meanwhile, two one-time gyms--that in better days hosted boxing rings for prisoners--have served as "temporary" dorms since the mid-'90s. Today they house more than 200 inmates apiece. Prisoners are stacked on row after row of triple bunks, with three feet of floor space separating one bunk frame from another. Nobody expects the gyms to return to their intended function anytime soon.

Safety is also an issue. The top bunks in the gyms are well over five feet off the ground and have no railings around them. It is, according to prisoners, fairly common for slumbering third-tier inmates to roll off their narrow metal beds onto the hard floor during the night.

But the sounds of sleeping men falling aren't the only noises heard after dark. During the long hours of the night, two correctional officers walk the floor and one more stands watch on a raised tier with a gun at the ready. Prisoner representatives from every race sit awake, perched atop their bunks, grimly scanning the walkways in case a rival from another race-based gang decides to launch a small-hours attack.

In the summer, large industrial-scale fans never stop whirring, and when the voices cease in the hours between lights-out at 10 p.m. and the 3 a.m. wake-up for inmate culinary workers, their whir eats its way into the mind. Add in all of the other sounds of a large, security-based institution, and you have the ingredients for mental chaos.

"The whole time I've been locked up, I've never gotten more than three hours of good, solid sleep," says a 46-year-old inmate who is serving a six-year sentence on methamphetamine charges. "Alarms going off, guys running around, cops yelling. It's been a real eye-opening experience."

When Solano opened in 1984, it was intended to hold 2,610 inmates. Twelve years later, five dormitory buildings were added to the original structure, boosting the prison's capacity by a thousand inmates. No additional buildings have been added in the past 11 years, yet the sprawling, gray concrete and razor-wire institution now holds 6,111 prisoners.

On paper, Solano has some of the best vocational training programs of any prison in California, with a metal shop that makes snowplow blades for the California Department of Transportation and a lens shop that manufactures almost all spectacle lenses for Medi-Cal--the state's more expansive version of Medicaid--and Medicare recipients statewide. The facility also routinely places soon-to-be-paroled workers in free-world jobs, such as in lens labs and opticians' offices, around the state. But on any given day, Solano has thousands of idle inmates because there aren't enough jobs, education slots and drug addiction treatment spots available for the surplus prisoners.

"We do the best with the resources and staff that we have," says Public Information Officer Lt. Tim Wamble, as he sits in his tidy second-floor office, its window overlooking one of the guard towers. "There's no way you can have 6,111 jobs or seats in classrooms. The rest go on waiting lists. Which means they're hanging out in the yard till something opens up for them."

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California's experiment in wholesale incarceration is one of the great policy failures of our times. Thirty years ago, California had 12 prisons and fewer than 30,000 prisoners. Today, after a generation of "tough-on-crime" legislation pushed through the legislature and the initiative process--from three-strikes-and-you're-out to draconian anti-drug and anti-gang legislation--the state has close to 175,000 inmates living in 34 prisons. That means almost one in every 200 California residents is now a prisoner of the state. (And these numbers don't even include the tens of thousands more prisoners in county jails.) The annual cost to taxpayers is about $10 billion per year, just shy of the amount the state annually puts into its vaunted public university system. If current spending trends continue, California will soon be spending more on prisons than on universities.

Despite the massive funding, scandals have rocked the prison system since the '90s. At the Corcoran Supermax, guards organized "gladiatorial combats" between rival gang members on the prison yard and would end the fights by shooting the antagonists apart with rubber bullets. Faced with criminal investigations and a media outcry, correctional administrators promised top-to-bottom reform. They failed to deliver.

The state's youth authority has also been beset by scandals, with videos surfacing that show gangs of officers severely beating juvenile detainees. Large numbers of teens have been held in lockdown conditions that make it impossible for them to attend school. Not too many years ago, close to 10,000 teenagers and young adults under the age of 25 were held in these state-run, youth authority institutions, which were supposed to emphasize education and intensive rehabilitation. In practice, they have become little more than warehouses for young people whom the state has given up on. Today, these institutions hold only 2,500 teenagers and young adults, and current plans envision scaling the number to 1,500. Increasingly, as courts have lost confidence in the state system, juvenile offenders are instead being channeled into juvenile halls run by counties.

What's more, in the past decade, the state signed deeply unpopular sweetheart contracts with the politically powerful prison officers' trade union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA). (The base salary for a long-time CCPOA member is now $73,000, and with overtime, many officers earn more than $100,000 a year.)

Perhaps most damning, by the early years of the century, California had a return-to-prison rate for parolees near 70 percent, which was worse than any other state. By contrast, as of December 2006, Florida's return-to-prison rate was 53 percent, New York's was 56 percent and Texas' was 25 percent, according to data collected by the Center for Evidence-Based Corrections at the University of California at Irvine.

In response, two years ago Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger brought in new directors to run the system. He also hired a management consultant team, led by Cal State Northridge Professor Alan Glassman, to reform the way the various correctional bureaucracies functioned and to restore public confidence in their workings. At the same time, the state relaunched a multimillion-dollar research arm of the correctional system. Researchers, led by Professor Joan Petersilia from the University of California at Irvine's School of Social Ecology, had a mandate to study what sorts of programming most positively benefited prisoners.

Such a body had existed in the past and had been seen as being on the cutting edge of American criminology, with its strong emphasis on identifying and promoting rehabilitation strategies tailored to the individual. But it was scrapped during the heyday of tough-on-crime legislation in the '80s. Symbolically, as a part of this tilt back toward programming, in 2005, the state changed the name of the prison system from the Department of Corrections to the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

But, one by one, the system's new reformers, led by Youth and Adult Correctional Authority Director Rod Hickman and Corrections and Rehabilitation Director Jeannie Woodford, resigned, disillusioned with the receding possibility for change. And the system's reputation headed further south, a reality publicly acknowledged by officials from Schwarzenegger to the chair of the state senate public safety committee to prison reform attorneys to Keith Jimenez, president of the CCPOA.

Facing at least the possibility of the entire prison system being placed under court control because of chronic overcrowding, panicked state politicians--urged on by Schwarzenegger--this year approved a $7.3 billion emergency measure, known as AB 900, to expand the system by a mammoth 53,000 beds.

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Over three decades, the combination of political demagoguery and public fear has had a toxic effect on California's criminal justice system. A prime example is the Three Strikes law that passed in 1994 after the high-profile murder of 12-year-old Polly Klass by a violent repeat offender named Richard Allen Davis. Politicians promised the law would ensure that violent predators, rather than petty criminals, would be taken off the streets for at least 25 years. That's not how it has played out.

Many studies have shown that huge numbers of offenders are convicted of nonviolent, often drug-related third strikes, and that these cases are clogging up both the courts and the prisons. In 2004, the ACLU found that 65 percent of three-strikers had been convicted of nonviolent third offenses, and that 10 times as many Californians have "struck out" for drug possession than for second-degree murder. Close to half of those who have struck out are African American. Yet over several years, California's elected officials have been unable to agree on how to reform the law.

"There's no strategy behind the incarceration," says attorney Sara Norman of the Bay Area-based prisoner-rights group, the Prison Law Office. Her colleague Don Specter goes further. The state, he says, is all-too-quick to incarcerate, but is "unwilling to pay for the humane treatment" of those it locks up for years and even decades at a stretch.

While more and more dollars are being devoted to corrections, the amount of money available per inmate for programming (such as education, drug treatment, vocational training, mental health care and so on) has declined as a percentage of the total cost of incarceration. In June, the state senate subcommittee in charge of overseeing the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's budget reported that a mere 5 percent of the $43,000 California spends on each inmate each year currently goes toward rehabilitation programs.

To understand what has gone wrong, one has to go back more than 30 years and examine a generation's worth of flawed criminal justice policy-making at both the state and federal levels. It's what freelance journalist and one-time editor of the Boulder Weekly Joel Dyer once pungently termed a "perpetual prisoner machine."

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The growth in California's carceral infrastructure is in keeping with changes that kicked in nationally during the '70s--a few years before California abandoned its liberal criminal justice policies--and that continue to the present day, resulting in a five-fold increase in the number of prisoners nationally. On any given day, about 2.2 million Americans are either in jail or in prison, with approximately two-thirds of these inmates in state and federal prisons. The remaining one-third is in county jails. This has created a $100 billion a year incarceration industry.

The War on Drugs explains much of the explosion, sending huge numbers of men and women, a disproportionate number of them poor blacks and Latinos, into state and federal prisons. The sentences handed out to drug offenders often exceed those served by rapists and other violent offenders.

Meanwhile, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, under the banner of "reform," has left hundreds of thousands of people without adequate access to medications, counseling and effective support networks. Many of them have subsequently spiraled into the criminal justice system. In California, about one in five inmates is seriously mentally ill. The state is struggling to provide comprehensive treatment to these inmates without bankrupting the entire correctional system.

"By the time somebody gets to prison, we're already a thousand steps behind," says state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat, who has pushed several major reforms in recent years designed to build up community mental health networks and also strengthen mental health care for the state's tens of thousands of mentally ill prisoners. "The point is, how are we going to keep people out of these prisons? You don't make up for years of neglect in one or two or three years."

Movement away from indeterminate sentencing--a process originally supported by both the left and right--has generally resulted in more people serving longer sentences. So, too, did curtailment of parole and the passage of "truth in sentencing" laws that made prisoners serve almost all of their sentences before being eligible to go up before the parole board--both reforms popular with the newly powerful "victims rights" movement in the '90s.

Yet California's prison system is peculiarly dysfunctional. A half century ago, under Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown, the state was known for having one of the most progressive prison systems in the country, one that emphasized rehabilitation, drug treatment, education and alternatives to incarceration. Some of its prisons even boasted world-class libraries behind their imposing walls. That trend held through Ronald Reagan's years in Sacramento (1966-1974), and stayed good as recently as the gubernatorial tenure of Pat Brown's son, Jerry, in the late '70s. But today, after the disastrously "tough" consecutive gubernatorial tenures of George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis from 1983 to 2003, the system is a byword for failure.

In January, the Little Hoover Commission, a major Sacramento-based think tank, issued a report that declared the system to be "in a tailspin that threatens public safety and raises the risk of fiscal disaster." Almost all of the system's correctional institutions are operating way over capacity, with some, like Solano, at near double capacity for about a decade now, according to the report.

Because Solano is a medium security institution, housing level II and level III inmates, prison administrators have the option of simply cramming more and more bodies into open spaces, a "luxury" not available to wardens in charge of higher security facilities. For example, at high security sites, such as the supermaxes of Pelican Bay, located in Crescent City, in the far north of the state, and the Central Valley's Corcoran prison, prisoners must be locked up in individual cells and allowed out for, at most, one hour per day.

California's solution? Build still more prison beds--and hope these beds end up solving the existing overcrowding problem, rather than simply becoming an excuse to incarcerate evermore offenders.

At the heart of AB 900, the bill Schwarzenegger signed into law this year to tackle the overcrowding crisis, is a $7.3 billion bond act that will be used to build housing for more than 50,000 new beds. In a departure from recent spending priorities, many thousands of these beds will be specifically reserved for rehabilitation units, drug treatment centers and mental health sites within correctional settings. The legislation also seeks emergency short-term responses to address overcrowding, including allowing the state to ship 8,000 prisoners to privately run facilities in Arizona and Mississippi.

Some critics have lambasted the legislation as paving the way for the biggest single prison-building spree in U.S. history, but its supporters argue it represents a new dawn for the troubled system. Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, says that after decades of inertia, the department finally has a plan, "and we should be given time to make the plan work." Defending the combination of building plans and rehabilitation ambitions, he explains that "before you can have rehabilitation programs, you've got to have places for them."

The truth lies somewhere in between these two arguments. Given the number of people being sentenced to prison in California, more beds are certainly needed. The question is: Might it not have been a wiser strategy, albeit a more politically risky one, to create a Sentencing Commission? In the wake of the post-2001 fiscal crises experienced at the state level, several states have used such commissions to reexamine many of the mandatory sentencing laws put in place since the '70s, in order to lower the numbers coming into prison and to shrink the prisoner population. AB 900 sidesteps this more in-depth, systemic, approach to criminal justice reform, instead focusing on delivering more services within prison settings.

And here's the rub: Even assuming AB 900 works in the long run, it's increasingly likely that the courts won't be willing to wait that long. In June, two federal judges for the eastern district of California, Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton, held hearings in a packed, wood-paneled, 16th floor courtroom in Sacramento's Federal Building. They discussed how prison overcrowding was making it impossible to deliver constitutionally acceptable levels of medical and mental health care to prisoners. Over the past several years, the judges had presided over two separate cases, one on the provision of mental health services inside prisons and another looking at the general quality of health care services behind bars. With plaintiffs in both cases now arguing that chronic overcrowding is making it impossible for court-ordered improvements to be implemented, Henderson and Karlton decided to pool their resources and hold one set of hearings on the issue.

"There are no rehabilitative programs," Karlton noted testily. "Part of the problem is this is a fantasy. They barely have the ability to house people. Where are you going to find the space to meaningfully rehabilitate people?"

Don Specter, from the Prison Law Office, argued the situation is now so dire that only a court-imposed population cap on the prison system can nudge the state toward effective changes. He calls overcrowding "a crisis of constitutional dimensions that is dangerous for prisoners, unsafe for staff and a threat to the public." Specter and his colleagues urged the two judges to form a three-judge panel that would hear arguments and decide whether to force the state to rollback its prison population. To the amazement of many observers, they received an amicus brief from the prison workers' trade union, CCPOA.

The prison system, the CCPOA now argues, is in near-terminal crisis, with wardens unable to fill vacancies for several thousand guards' jobs, despite the high salaries offered correctional officers. The association asserts that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is massively failing in its newly rediscovered mission to rehabilitate incarcerated offenders. It is, according to the union, a tinderbox ready to explode, with union members at risk of being attacked by inmates because of poor prison conditions.

While some of the CCPOA rhetoric is gamesmanship--the union responding to political intransigence on the prison issue and to its stunning loss of ground in contract negotiations in the years since Gray Davis lost office--not all its criticisms are just for strategic effect.

"AB 900 was a farce, a scam perpetuated against California's people," says union spokesperson Ryan Sherman, over lunch at Chops, one of Sacramento's favorite hangouts for lobbyists. "It was designed to hoodwink the federal government that they were finally taking action to end the crisis. It's not real. It's not reform. It's prison construction."

According to Sherman, corrections spending in California has doubled in the past four years and corrections itself hasn't gotten better. "We shouldn't be spending so much locking up more and more people. Other things impact our members, not just in prison but in the community. Better schools. Better roads. A lot of things are important," he says.

In the end, Henderson and Karlton agreed to create a three-judge panel that will decide whether to impose a population cap on the state's prison system. It will start hearing arguments sometime this fall. And the panel may begin imposing a population cap as early as 2008.

Absent rapid and wholesale release of inmates--which even proponents accept is hardly an ideal solution to California's woes--ongoing overcrowding means that many prisoners will spend years in settings like Solano. And, in a throwback to pre-modern prison conditions, all sorts of criminals are mixed together in these latter-day communal dungeons. "You might have a guy in here doing 16 months for a DUI and a guy doing 10 years for robbery," Lt. Wamble acknowledges.

Not surprisingly, in addition to being petri dishes of criminality, the gym dorms in Solano and elsewhere are breeding grounds for disease. In the past few years, chicken pox epidemics have broken out, one gym had to be locked down to contain a spreading tuberculosis contagion, gastroenteritis has run rampant, inmates regularly report devastating flu outbreaks and staph infection is commonplace.

"I got sick, like a flu, when I first got in here," recalls 22-year-old Ramon Wilson, who is serving five years on a drug conviction. "I couldn't get out of bed I was so weak. Nauseated. Couldn't eat." He continues, "I've seen spider bites. Mice. Rats running around. Mice will get inside the lockers and eat the food. There's people on hot meds--psych meds--who can flip out any second. The C.O.s [corrections officers], some give us respect, others play games like we're little children."

The correctional system's ability to provide constitutionally mandated levels of health care has been successfully challenged in a series of lawsuits. And the mental health system is in such shambles that it has been removed from state control and is now being run by a federal special master.

-------------------------
California's story is in many ways akin to what took place in almost every state in America since the '80s. A nationwide lunge to the right, politically and culturally, has resulted in a dismantling of rehabilitation programs, a vast growth in the penal infrastructure and an increased emphasis on locking more people up for ever-more-petty offenses; putting in place ever-harsher conditions, such as secure housing units and supermax prisons; and an unprecedented transferring of the mentally ill, the drug addicted and the undereducated poor into the criminal justice system.

But while these trends are national in scope, California's size and its tough-on-crime mentality have produced a prison system that is unique both in its scale and, increasingly, in its sheer dysfunction and utter failure to rehabilitate.

"California basically started warehousing people in the early '80s and that's when things started going to hell," Dale Richter of the prison-reform group Friends Committee on Legislation in California argues. "California's correctional system hasn't had a defined mission for quite some years."

Today, California stands on the threshold of a new era. Unless the state's residents send strong signals to their elected officials that enough's enough when it comes to prison-building, it will only be a matter of time before more state dollars go into locking up its citizens than providing its young people with a public university education.

In many ways, California remains a place of dreams, the pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow. But its criminal justice policies have, at the very least, put a dent in the optimism. California's gold rush to mass incarceration reflects priorities gone awry to a spectacular degree. It has taken three decades to get this far off track. Let's hope it doesn't take that long to put the state's criminal justice system back on a fairer, saner footing.

Sasha Abramsky is the author, most recently, of American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment.

This article is permanently archived at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/3377/

Posted by lois at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)

Greening ghettoes

Greening ghettoes
October 23, 2007
The New Republic PLANK

This morning the Center for American Progress hosted a forum devoted to "Green Collar Jobs," in service of a hybrid message on race, class, and the environment. Van Jones, an environmental activist and CAP's newest fellow, reported for his first day of work fresh on the heels of Thomas Friedman's kingmaking op-ed in last week's NYT. Jones, who deserves extra credit for his post-Katrina civil rights advocacy with the Color of Change, spotlighted his longstanding work with the environment in Oakland, CA, giving "the powerpoint presentation Al Gore would give--if he were black."

Jones' key message was about repackaging the discourse on the environment to reflect on-the ground realities of race and class. These factors, perhaps more than any other, govern access to green-friendly technologies and sustainable development strategies. In case we weren't convinced, the blindingly accomplished Majora Carter--another heavy hitter in the black green movement--opened her speech with a query: The US is five percent of the global population and 25 percent of...what? The crowd guessed basic green benchmarks like carbon emissions and greenhouse gases, but the answer was an attention-grabber--it's the US contribution to global incarceration, buoyed chiefly by the jailing of American minorities.

Carter, whose work in the south Bronx has began in the 1990s, lives in a neighborhood pummeled with 100 percent of the Bronx's waste (40 percent of the city's), and some 60,000 trucks churning through the borough weekly. Green space is at a premium. She is currently wrangling with the city for jurisdiction over a site that will either be a public park or a new, 2000-bed prison facility. Exacerbating the jail problem, public health issues like asthma, learning disabilities, and a lack of public culture have all been attributed to environmentally negligent policies in the poorest, brownest parts of New York City.

The further ghettoization of places like the Bronx and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Chicago's Brown Belt into "regional sacrifice zones"--which support hyperconsumption without environmental protections in return--is a shameful trend the whole nation should work to reverse. Jones and Carter are first brokering a new deal with black and brown America--in the language of civil rights, promising equal protection from the worst of industrialization, paired with equal access to the best of greening America.

Job creation is a key prong of their plans. Because money and power are coming to the growing green economy--and who will get it? Jones strenuously advocates for giving a competitive advantage to people of color living in resource-poor communities, who "didn't have a place in the carbon-based economy" and should therefore be first in line as the new order asserts itself. Sadhu Johnston, another panelist and the Chief Environmental Officer of the City of Chicago (a refreshing revision of the CEO title) touted city training in home weatherizing, green retrofitting of city vehicles and just plain gardening, following the model established by Jones' Green Jobs Corps in Oakland and Carter's Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training in New York.

It is incredibly smart of them to pair "the work that most needs doing with those who most need work." Johnston advocated a system of carrot-giving to companies interested in city contracts, and the organizers on-site aimed to promote real grassroots education inside the greening ghetto. Their concerted hustle to win over both minority groups and major companies is for good reason: Besides minority mistrust of the segregated green movement, there is a real fear of backlash from those who view environmental initiatives as a regressive tax on the poor, or a wasted investment in the same.

But all told, their ideas are extraordinarily refreshing. With any luck the rhetorical divorce between naturally interfacing American problems will soon end. As Jones put it in closing the panel, "We aren't fighting." The whole entourage of government officials, activists and developers marched off to a DC City Council meeting, where their message will presumably translate well. Hats off to the whole crew.

--Dayo Olopade
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2007/10/22/greening-ghettoes.aspx

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

CA: ang control funds sought. Initiative aiming for '08 ballot calls for stiffer gun penalties.

Key provisions of the initiative would add a 10-year prison term on some convicted felons who carry guns in public. It would make accomplices to gun crimes eligible for enhanced penalties under the already-existing "10-20-Life" law. It also would elevate methamphetamine sentences and force gang members to register with the police.

Gang control funds sought
Initiative aiming for '08 ballot calls for stiffer gun penalties.
By Andy Furillo - afurillo@sacbee.com
Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Another anti-crime initiative is about to hit the streets on its way to the California ballot, this time targeting street gangs and setting aside nearly $1 billion for local law enforcement to fight them.

State Sen. George Runner and his wife, Assemblywoman Sharon Runner, both R-Lancaster, submitted the initiative Monday to the attorney general's office for review. They're hoping to qualify the measure for the November 2008 ballot."It's time to solve the gang problem," Sen. Runner said at a press conference outside the downtown Sacramento County courthouse. "It's time to send a message to gang members and street thugs that Californians have had it and their violent crimes and lawless ways must end."

Key provisions of the initiative would add a 10-year prison term on some convicted felons who carry guns in public. It would make accomplices to gun crimes eligible for enhanced penalties under the already-existing "10-20-Life" law. It also would elevate methamphetamine sentences and force gang members to register with the police.

The measure would add an estimated $300 million in new general fund spending for local police and other law enforcement programs and guarantee that at least another $600 million in state money would be spent on local law enforcement each year.

The Safe Neighborhoods Act, as the measure is called, was hailed by its supporters as being in the same league as the 1994 "three-strikes" initiative for repeat felons and last year's Jessica's Law that took aim at sex offenders. Critics blasted the gang measure as another proposal that will mostly serve to put further pressure on a massively overcrowded prison system without delivering a commensurate dose of public safety.

"It's another example of why California needs meaningful sentencing reform, and why it needs to be placed into an independent sentencing commission as has been called for by every independent political body that has examined this for the past 20 years, including a commission headed by (former Republican Gov.) George Deukmejian," said Dan Macallair, executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. "This doesn't make anybody safer."

Runner said that the initiative is partially a reaction to many of its provisions having been shot down in the Senate Public Safety Committee, headed by Democratic Sen. Gloria Romero of Los Angeles. She responded by issuing a statement questioning Republicans for pushing the measure, carrying a price tag into the hundreds of millions, barely weeks after they held up the state budget for having too much spending. She also called the measure "politics as usual."

"We all want to reduce gang crime in California," Romero said. "But simply throwing more money at this very serious problem is something California can't afford." On the financial side, the initiative would provide $250 million for Global Positioning System devices for gang members and other assorted local law enforcement projects. It also contains proposed annual increases of $6 million more for community policing projects, $6 million for juvenile crime prevention, $15 million for "public safety education," $10 million for victims programs and $10 million more in reward money.

It also seeks to remove the Board of Parole Hearings from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and streamline the civil injunction process when it comes to gang members. Sacramento County Sheriff John McGinness said one of the most important components in the initiative is its guarantee of a "sustainable" level of funding every year to local law enforcement.
Joining the Runners in rolling out the initiative Monday was Mike Reynolds, the author the three-strikes law that in 1994 imposed life sentences on repeat serious and violent felons.

"The initiative that we are submitting today is without question the toughest, hardest-hitting initiative this state has seen since three strikes," said Reynolds, who campaigned for the tough sentencing law after his daughter was murdered in Fresno. "If three strikes taught us anything, it taught us that when you get tough, you get results."Bill Bean Sr., whose son, a Sacramento police officer, was slain in the line of duty by a parolee in 1999, said Bill Jr. would still be alive today if the firearm provisions in the Runners' initiative had been on the books back then.

"The one who murdered my son was caught several times with a firearm in his possession," Bean Sr. said. "But it was always plea-bargained away because the penalty wasn't strong enough ... . Had these regulations been in place ... he wouldn't have been able to murder my son."

WHAT IT WOULD DO
Key provisions of the proposed ballot measure:

• Add a 10-year prison term on some convicted felons who carry guns in public

• Make accomplices to gun crimes eligible for enhanced penalties under the already-existing "10-20-Life" law

• Elevate methamphetamine sentences and force gang members to register with the police

http://www.sacbee.com/capolitics/story/448189.html

Posted by lois at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)

California Prison Inmates to Help Fight Fires

ct-22-2007
California Prison Inmates to Help Fight Fires
Gov. Schwarzenegger Directs CDCR to Utilize Inmate Fire Crews in Response to Major Wildfires.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today directed inmate firefighters and staff from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to deploy across Southern California to work hand-in-hand with state and local firefighters.

As of today, more than 2,300 CDCR inmates and more than 170 custody staff have joined firefighters from city and county fire departments and state agencies as part of a major coordinated effort to battle the widespread wildfires in Southern California.
“These crews provide critical support to the state’s firefighting response, going where bulldozers and heavy equipment cannot go,” said Governor Schwarzenegger. “Inmate firefighters and CDCR staff at our institutions are an integral piece of the state’s disaster response team. Fire camp crews are being activated and deployed as rapidly as possible.

“Firefighters are continuing to work around the clock to contain the Southern California fires and I want to extend my thanks for their bravery and dedication.”

In addition to inmate fire crews, strike teams made up of CDCR fire captains, staff and fire engines have been deployed from fire departments at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, California Correctional Center in Susanville, Mule Creek State Prison in Ione and the Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe. Additional inmate firefighting crews and the staff who supervise them are currently being mobilized.

Governor Schwarzenegger has led a coordinated state effort to make all resources through the state available to fight the fires in Southern California and has directed the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (OES) and the California National Guard (CNG) to activate additional personnel and make more fire and rescue resources available.

Earlier today, the Governor directed the CNG to make 1,500 guardsmen available to support the firefighting efforts. The Governor also requested four CNG helicopters through OES. The four aircraft are currently on stand-by at Mather Air Field (1 Firehawk) and Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base (3 UH-60 Blackhawks). The UH-60 Blackhawk and the Firehawk are capable of fire suppression missions as well as personnel transport in and out of dangerous and hard to reach locations.

Governor Schwarzenegger last night proclaimed a State of Emergency in the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Ventura due to more than eleven major wildfires to make more resources available to fight the fires.

The CDCR fire crews are part of the Conservation Camp Program established in 1946. There are 42 adult and two Division of Juvenile Justice conservation camps in California. CDCR jointly manages 39 adult and juvenile camps with CAL FIRE and five adult camps with the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

More than 4,400 offenders participate in the program, which has approximately 200 fire crews. The crews respond to all types of emergencies, including wildfires, floods, search and rescue operations and earthquakes. They also work on conservation and community service projects on public land throughout the year when not fighting fires.

Only minimum-custody inmates participate in the Conservation Camp Program. They must be physically fit and have no history of violent crime including kidnapping, sex offenses, arson or escape. Juvenile offenders earn their way into camp placement and must be free of major rule infractions.
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/october222007/inmate_firefighters_102207.php

Posted by lois at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Boston Globe Editorial: Common Sense on Sentencing

The Boston Globe
GLOBE EDITORIAL
Common sense on sentencing
October 23, 2007

THE ROUGHLY $45,000 spent to lock up a prisoner in Massachusetts for a year is money well spent when it provides social defense against violent offenders who destroy families and destabilize neighborhoods. But such an expense starts to look suspect in cases involving nonviolent drug offenders, especially when recidivism rates are running so high among prisoners who receive inadequate vocational or educational training.

The Massachusetts Bar Association hopes to call attention to such ineffective or unjust sentencing today at a State House symposium. David White, president of the bar association, is urging lawmakers to revise the state's mandatory minimum sentences, especially for drug crimes. Of special concern is the ill-conceived law that mandates a two-year sentence for anyone convicted of drug distribution near a school or park. The effects of such laws fall disproportionately on minorities living in cities, where school zones and public parks are so numerous as to encompass almost every place.

The symposium offers a welcome opportunity to reconsider the effects of such blunt laws. But it still feels like the state is revisiting an old controversy that ought to have been resolved by now. In the mid-1990s, a commission of judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys spent two years of research and debate creating a balanced set of sentencing guidelines. In what appeared to be a sensible compromise, the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission stiffened sentences for violent crimes but gave judges leeway to depart from mandatory minimum sentences in nonviolent drug cases. Alternative sanctions, such as electronic bracelet monitoring, could replace prison time for minor offenses. But the Legislature never gave the sentencing reform bill serious consideration.

Today's symposium could suffer from the fact that no district attorney will be on the panel. A vigorous debate on sentencing reform is impossible without the DAs, who are among the state's fiercest protectors of mandatory minimum drug sentences. Still, there are signs of flexibility even among hard-line prosecutors. Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe, for example, says he can't imagine fellow DAs agreeing to the elimination of mandatory drug sentences. But O'Keefe could envision changes to the controversial law on school zones. This would be a good place to start. About one third of the roughly 1,000 people who received mandatory drug sentences in 2006 fell under the sloppy school zone policy that provides little or no actual protection to students.

The state's district attorneys association and bar association worked well together recently to update the state's drunk driving laws. They should do the same to bring Massachusetts drug laws into the modern era.
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2007/10/23/common_sense_on_sentencing/

Posted by lois at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)

NY: PUNCTUATING THE SENTENCE: PRISON TERMS RE-EXAMINED

PUNCTUATING THE SENTENCE:
PRISON TERMS RE-EXAMINED
Felons on furlough, Rockefeller drug laws, and other thorny issues are considered by a state commission. > By Jarrett Murphy

City Limits WEEKLY #610
October 22, 2007
The future of a pair of provocative criminal justice issues – parole for felons, and New York state's strict drug laws – remains in the air, as a commission proposing sweeping prison sentencing changes announced it was split on two fundamental issues.

A report released last week by the Commission on Sentencing Reform opened the door for a pitched debate as the panel heads toward public hearings on the first comprehensive revision of the New York Penal Law in more than three decades. The Commission recommended effectively ending parole for most crimes, but three of the 11 commissioners did not support that view. And because commission members were unable to reach consensus on whether mandatory minimum prison sentences are appropriate for drug offenders, the panel largely put off discussion over whether to amend the Rockefeller drug laws.

Gov. Spitzer launched the commission in March to wrestle with issues that have been in the spotlight for years. From former governor George Pataki in 1995 to mayoral candidate Mark Green in 2001, politicians have called for severely restricting or ending parole. And opponents of the Rockefeller laws—named for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and widely considered too severe—have been demanding reform for years.

The state's last comprehensive revision of the Penal Law was in 1967; in the years since, the criminal statutes have evolved into an unwieldy web of convoluted and sometimes contradictory language. For example, there are no fewer than 11 different provisions for sentencing repeat offenders. Besides making it hard for victims, defendants and even lawyers to know what the law means, the dense language can deliver perverse results: A law passed in 2005 to punish crimes against police officers can actually treat a first offender more harshly than a recidivist.

One quirk of the Penal Law is that it calls for determinate sentences for some crimes and indeterminate sentences for others. A determinate sentence is for a fixed amount of time in prison, such as 10 years. An indeterminate sentence is a range, such as five to 15 years. Inmates serving indeterminate sentences are eligible for parole once they've served the minimum. Until they reach the release date linked to their maximum sentence, the State Parole Board decides when they get out. That decision can come anytime during a period spanning years or even decades.

The commission thinks that uncertainty is a problem. "Everyone, including the defendant and the victim, is left to guess when the defendant will be released," reads the commission's report, which calls for New York to switch to an almost totally determinate sentencing structure. While parole officers still would supervise inmates released early for good behavior, the State Board of Parole would no longer have a say in when most felons get out. (The only exceptions would be for top felonies like second-degree murder, for which people can be sentenced to terms such as 25 years to life.) The commission is still considering changes to the lengths of prison sentences to complement the proposed move to determinate sentencing.

George Alexander, chairman of the Board of Parole and a member of the sentencing commission, thinks the move is a mistake. The chance for early release is a major incentive for prisoners to participate in rehabilitative programs, he says. "Simply put, if an inmate’s programming bears little or no relation to his or her release, what motivation is there to have them participate in programs?" Alexander writes in a dissent to the commission's report. Two other commission members also dissented but are not identified.

Disagreement among the commissioners was apparently even wider when it came to the Rockefeller Laws, measures signed by then-Gov. Rockefeller in 1973 that imposed mandatory prison sentences for possessing or selling as little as a few ounces of drugs. Reforms later in the 1970s and earlier this decade relaxed the laws somewhat, but defendants still face certain imprisonment if convicted of a first-time, Class B drug felony like possessing any amount of drugs "with intent to sell."

Critics say the laws are unduly harsh, ignore the value of drug treatment and result in the incarceration of thousands of mostly black and Hispanic defendants. They also say the laws do little to target drug kingpins. "Most prisoners serving sentences for drug crimes are people who possess drugs for their own use, low level sellers, or couriers," says a report by the Drug Policy Alliance.

But prosecutors defend the Rockefeller laws, linking them to today's lower crime rate. Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson testified before the commission that while the voices crying for drug law reform speak loudly, his office hears from people in tough neighborhoods complaining about drug dealers. "The amount of violence that is around drug sales cannot be minimized," Johnson said. Prosecutors also claimed that the tough Rockefeller laws help them convince low-level dealers to identify their suppliers.

The panel was divided about what, if anything, to do about the drug laws, so it deferred a decision, saying it wants to study the issue further. "The Commission was unable to complete its review of these issues and fully debate the merits of the various arguments for and against additional drug law reform," its report reads, adding: "It will be challenging to reconcile these opposing views." The commission did recommend improving drug treatment options and allowing judges to waive mandatory minimums in cases where the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney all agree on an alternative sentence—but that effectively gives DAs veto power over whether someone can avoid prison.

After 34 years of experience with the Rockefeller laws, critics don't believe more study is what's needed. In a statement, New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman chided the commission for failing to address the "racial bias and inefficiency caused by the Rockefeller Drug Laws," adding, "It is disappointing that, after nine months of work, the commission is silent about this clear blight to our justice system."

Some critics are especially disturbed by the prospect of state law shifting to determinate sentences while still requiring mandatory minimums. "Mandatory sentencing takes discretion away from the judges. Determinate sentencing takes discretion away from the Parole Board," says Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York. "You have created this one-size-fits-all system for administering justice."

In other proposals, the commission recommended expanding the list of crimes where victims are entitled to weigh in on sentencing, better targeting of prison programs to individual inmates, and the use of alternative sanctions for parole violators who are returned to state prisons for breaking parole rules—but not for committing a new crime.

No firm timetable is set for the commission's final report, although it's not likely to be complete before winter's end, according to the State Division of Criminal Justice Services, whose commissioner, Denise O'Donnell, served as chair. Other members are state leaders in criminal justice and court administration, lawyers and elected officials. Public hearings are planned for New York City and elsewhere (see below). Gangi says, however, that the commission is too beholden to prosecutors to push real reform. "The lesson for us as advocates of drug law repeal is to no longer focus our efforts on the commission, but to focus our efforts on the governor and the legislative leaders," he says.

Striking a different note is Richard Koehler, a former three-star NYPD chief who was the city's correction commissioner during the 1980s when crime was rampant. Now a labor lawyer, Koehler says the decline in crime is an argument against tinkering with any aspect of the state's sentencing guidelines. "Everything they're looking at—whether it's crime, whether it's recidivism—is working," he says. "They forgot how bad it was."

- Jarrett Murphy

Public hearings on the sentencing commission's recommendations are scheduled for Tuesday, November 13, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the New York City Bar Association, 42 W. 44th Street, Manhattan. Written testimony can be submitted no later than one week after the hearing dates to Patricia.Greco@dcjs.state.ny.us. http://www.citylimits.org/content/articles/viewarticle.cfm?article_id=3426&content_type=1&media_type=4

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

October 22, 2007

MA: Gov. Patrick Says CORI Reform Needed Instantly

Patrick says CORI reform needed instantly
10/22/2007 BOSTON (AP) - Governor Deval Patrick says now is the time to reform the state Criminal Offender Record Information system.
Patrick says the effort could fail if the Legislature puts off action until next year. Critics say the "CORI" system prevents people from getting a second chance after they've served prison or probation terms, and even after being cleared of criminal charges.
Employers can search CORI records to weed out job applicants.
Patrick says a key unresolved issue is what limits should be placed on public and employer access to CORI records. The governor wants resolution this year. He says lawmakers will be unwilling to tackle the issue during an election cycle in 2008.

Posted by lois at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Democracy Now: Jena 6 Hearing in Congress and Herman Wallace of the Angola 3 Interviewed on Democracy Now

"Jena Is All Over This Country": Rev. Al Sharpton, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Rep. Keith Ellison Question Federal Response to the Jailing of the Jena Six

Monday, October 22nd, 2007, Democracy Now

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/22/1416207 you can listen and/or watch by going to this URL

The House Judiciary Committee held a heated hearing Tuesday on the case of the Jena Six. Democratic lawmakers and community activists lambasted federal officials for not intervening despite the hanging of nooses on the schoolyard tree and District Attorney Reed Walters's initial charges of second-degree attempted murder against the six African American teenagers.

_____

And now we turn to the ongoing fight for justice in Jena, Louisiana. The House Judiciary Committee held a heated hearing Tuesday on the case of the Jena Six. Democratic lawmakers and community activists lambasted federal officials for not intervening despite the hanging of nooses on the schoolyard tree and District Attorney Reed Walters's initial charges of second-degree attempted murder against the six African American teenagers. Reed Walters was invited to the hearing but did not attend.

Many spoke of a worsening climate of overt racism citing the recent spate of noose-hanging incidents well beyond Jena. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said that "Racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is not unique to any one place, but is found in cities and towns north and south throughout our nation."

This is an excerpt of civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton's testimony Tuesday.

* Rev. Al Sharpton

Donald Washington is the US Attorney for Louisiana's Western district. He visited Jena last year and concluded that the hanging of the nooses was not a hate crime. I want to play an excerpt of Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, questioning Washington.

* Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX)

US Attorney for Western Louisiana Donald Washington came under fire Tuesday for not deeming the noose-hanging in Jena hate crime. Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota sharply questioned Washington at Tuesday's hearing. During the questioning Ellison also turns to Reverend Brian Moran from the Antioch Baptist Church in Jena, Louisiana.

* Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN)

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree also testified about race relations in Jena and beyond in Tuesday's hearing. This is an excerpt of what he said.

* Charles Ogletree, Harvard Law School Professor

_____

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to the ongoing fight for justice in Jena, Louisiana. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing last Tuesday on the case of the Jena Six. Democratic lawmakers, community activists lambasted federal officials for not intervening, despite the hanging of nooses on the schoolyard tree and District Attorney Reed Walters's initial charges of second-degree attempted murder against the six African American teenagers for a schoolyard fight. Reed Walters was invited to the hearing but didn't attend.

Many spoke of a worsening climate of overt racism, citing the recent spate of noose-hanging incidents well beyond Jena. House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers said, "Racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is not unique to any one place, but is found in cities and towns north and south throughout our nation."

This is an excerpt of civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton's testimony last Tuesday.

REV. AL SHARPTON: What I would beseech this committee to look into the fact that Jena is all over this country. It's hangman nooses at Columbia University in New York. It's even a hangman noose at the site of 9/11. It's in North Carolina. It's in California. All kinds of reports.

And what has been most troubling is the silence of the federal government in the face of this. Now, this is bipartisan. In the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower sent the federal government into Little Rock. John Kennedy sent in the federal government, and the Justice Department was involved. So did Lyndon Johnson. What has happened in Jena and what has happened all over this country, we have not heard one federal response. It is almost like the national government is not in the country while we're watching nooses on the news every night, while we're watching hate crimes. And if we can't appeal to the federal government, where can we go?

It has been rationalized by those in Jena, some, that these nooses was a prank. A prank to who? Grandchildren of people who saw their grandparents hang on nooses? If there is a prank, if there is a joke, the joke is, if we can represent to the world that we're the land of the free and the home of the brave, but we can't protect youngsters in Jena, Louisiana, and we can't stop people from hanging nooses, and our federal government, after fifty years of bipartisan tradition of protecting people from states' rights, has now decided it can no longer protect people from states that decide they can prosecute some sixteen-year-olds, if they're black, as adults, but can't process other sixteen-year-olds if they're white, same age, but they qualify as juveniles.

Do we want harmony? Absolutely. Do we want the races to come together? Absolutely. But you cannot achieve racial justice by getting a premature racial quiet. There's a difference between "peace" and "quiet," Mr. Chairman. "Quiet" means shut up and allow a two-tier justice system to continue to exist. "Justice" means, we must have an even playing field. And the Justice Department, at the behest of this committee, needs to step into Jena and the Jenas of this country and establish that the federal government is still in charge, and the states did not win the Civil War.

AMY GOODMAN: That's the Reverend Al Sharpton testifying before Congress. Donald Washington is the US attorney for Louisiana's Western District. He visited Jena last year, concluding the hanging of the nooses was not a hate crime. This is Congressmember Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, questioning Washington.

REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE: September 2006, three nooses were found hanging, and the principal said, "Let's expel them." They were then -- the students were suspended. Then, in the fall, we had a series of fights between black and white students. In late November, arsonists set fire to the school's building. A white student beats up a black student who shows up at an all-white party. And my understanding is that a shotgun was pulled by a white man on three black students at a convenience store. Let me ask the chairman to put into the record, the US attorney: nooses, beating at Jena High, not related; nooses, incidents evoke segregation. Right now I'm going to ask you -- and I'd like the people that are called to answer this question --

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Without objection, this will be introduced into the record.

REP. SHEILA JACKSON LEE: I thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank you. You stated on the record that nooses equal hate crimes. I'm asking you now, first of all, to go back to Jena, Louisiana, in the symbolic position that you hold, one, because you merited appointment, but you are the first black Western District US attorney, and I'm asking you to go back, and I'm asking you to find a way to release Mychal Bell and the Jena Six.

My question that goes down the road: I want to know why, in the course of meetings of local district attorneys, why you didn't engage with Mr. Reed Walters, who may be subject to prosecutorial abuse, and confer with him and say, "Mr. Walters, this is not the way to handle this case. I can see disparate treatment by white students being suspended back in school and by Mr. Bell being still in jail on an offense that he served ten months for, ten months, and therefore, the judge, the juvenile judge, could have said, 'Time served,' and he could have been released." I want you to tell me why you didn't engage with the DA, and I want you to tell me what you're going to do now.

Reverend, I'd like you to tell me what -- how they treated us when they came there. And, Dr. Ogletree, please tell me what federal action, legally and legislatively, that we can have.

Mr. Washington, tell me why you did not intervene, not by way of the legal system, but the consultation that the US attorneys have with the local district attorneys. Why didn't you intervene? These broken lives could have been prevented if you had taken the symbolic responsibility that you have, being the first African American appointed to the Western District. I don't know what else to say. I am outraged! And that's why my voice is going up like this. Literally outraged!

AMY GOODMAN: Minnesota Congressmember Keith Ellison sharply questioned Washington at Tuesday's hearing. During the questioning, Ellison also turns to Reverend Brian Moran from the Antioch Baptist Church in Jena, Louisiana.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: In the course of this -- my time on this committee, we have dealt with eight US attorneys who were fired because they did not slavishly obey the dictates of the Bush Justice Department. And we had some people who got promoted, benefits accrued to them, because they did do what the Justice Department wanted them to do under Gonzales and Bush. You still have a job, don't you?

DONALD WASHINGTON: Yes, sir.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: And I almost fell off my chair when you invoked the name of Martin Luther King to say that you are somehow the culmination of his work. Sir, I would expect you to quit in protest, based on that -- based on your inability to use your discretionary latitude to charge these noose hangers. That's what I would expect of somebody who is truly in fidelity with that great legacy of Martin Luther King.

Let me say that, you know, Jena Six is obviously the occasion that we're here, but, you know, for those folks who are not from Jena, you know and I know that we're outraged because we all have some Jena Sixes. We got some Minnesota Jena Sixes. You know, the fact is, is that nationally, according to the testimony of Professor Ogletree, black students are 2.6 times more likely to be suspended than white students. Overall, the numbers of students being suspended each year increased due to tough zero-tolerance policies. But that's just school discipline. The fact is, juvenile justice data mirrored disparities in the school. 2003, African American youth were detained at a rate of four to five times higher than that of their white counterparts.

Aside from the issue of the civil rights decision and the hate crimes stuff, what about black youth and Latino youth in the criminal justice system and the over-incarceration of black people? We live in a country that incarcerates more than two million people. Don't we have a system that is essentially using the legal -- the criminal justice system to do what the Jim Crow system did in the past? Isn't this just an extension?

But I just wanted to just go back to this eight US attorneys thing, because this has taken up a lot of time here. And one of the things that always concerned me is not just the eight who were fired because they wouldn't do
-- because they wouldn't bring fake voting rights cases, but the people who stayed and kept their jobs. These people are the ones who I'm truly concerned about. And I guess, you know, one of the things that I would like to know is, Mr. Washington, have you prosecuted other juveniles in your tenure as US attorney? Have you prosecuted other juveniles?

DONALD WASHINGTON: No.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: You've never -- because, let me tell you, I've defended juveniles in federal court.

DONALD WASHINGTON: Yeah, well, I don't --

REP. KEITH ELLISON: No, let me tell you, sir, I've been -- I spent sixteen years as a criminal defense attorney, and I've tried over a hundred cases to a jury, and I've defended juveniles in federal court. So you can't tell me that the federal government doesn't prosecute -- you prosecute them for having five grams of crack cocaine.

DONALD WASHINGTON: Well --

REP. KEITH ELLISON: You told me -- no, you put them in jail for that. You know, we have incarcerated generations over your drug war. And I say it's yours, because you will not step away from an unfair system. And, you know, but what about the selective justice? You're telling me you have never prosecuted a juvenile. We're going to find out. Is that your statement under
-- is that your statement before Congress?

DONALD WASHINGTON: In my district. And you are asking me, I guess, about the Department of Justice, and I cannot speak to whether or when or how we prosecuted juveniles --

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Right. Well, let me just say this, Mr. Washington. You know, you've been on record saying that you believe that the noose hangers didn't commit a crime, and now you're saying today that they did. I'm glad to see that, and I want to give you credit for that. Have you changed your mind? Does that explain your change in testimony?

DONALD WASHINGTON: I don't believe so, sir.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Have you come to see the light? Is that why you're saying that it's a crime today?

DONALD WASHINGTON: I don't think I've changed my testimony.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Well, you changed your statement; do you agree with that?

DONALD WASHINGTON: I don't think so.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: OK, well, I guess the reverend seems to have another alternative -- another viewpoint. Reverend Moran, do you have another thing you'd like to share on that?

REV. BRIAN MORAN: Well, I think a gun on school property is a federal offense, is it not?

REP. KEITH ELLISON: I think that it certainly could be. What about that case about the guy having a gun pointed at --

REV. BRIAN MORAN: Justin Barker, the one that was accused of being jumped on at the school.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Had a gun at school?

REV. BRIAN MORAN: Yeah, he had a gun -- a loaded gun.

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Did he get prosecuted by a US attorney? Oh.

REV. AL SHARPTON: Or by the local district attorney.

REV. BRIAN MORAN: Nobody

REP. KEITH ELLISON: Or by nobody.

REV. BRIAN MORAN: Nobody

REP. KEITH ELLISON: You know, if you claim to be a beneficiary of the work of Martin Luther King, you've got to stand on that. You can't just -- it's not a matter of career advancement. Martin Luther King did not do his work so you could get a Lexus and a nice house. It's not just a matter of your own career advancement and buying consumer items. It is fidelity to a set of ideas.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Keith Ellison, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the Congress member, as we turn now to Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree, who also testified about race relations in Jena and beyond at the hearing. This is an excerpt of what he said.

CHARLES OGLETREE: There is a sign over the courthouse in Florida that has a useful epithet. It says the court is where the injured flock for justice. And it reminds me of how the people in Jena today are wondering: where do they go? Where can they find a sense of justice? Where can they be treated not better, not differently, but just fairly?

This incident that we have been talking about is a microcosm of a larger set of incidents that have occurred in Jena. And yet, what occurred in Jena in 2006 is not isolated. It's not different than what happened to Genarlow Wilson in Georgia or what's happened in West Virginia, at the University of Maryland, and Hempstead, New York, at Columbia University. And the irony is that just a year ago I wrote a book with Professor Austin Sarat called From the Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America, looking back at the history of these incidents with the idea that, thank god, we're not there anymore. And it's ironic that one year after this book is published, looking at issues of lynching --

AMY GOODMAN: That was Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on the Jena Six.

AND..on the same show, an interview with Anita Roddick, who died a month ago and was a dedicated supporter of freedom for the Angola 3. Robert King Wilkerson, one of the 3, will speak at her memorial service in Westminster Abby tomorrow, October 23.

------------------

A memorial will be held in London on Tuesday to remember the life of Dame Anita Roddick, the environmental campaigner and pioneer in cruelty-free beauty projects. We air a 2001 interview she did with Canadian filmmaker Mark Achbar during production of the documentary "The Corporation." Also, imprisoned Black Panther activist Herman Wallace remembers Anita Roddick's work to help free the Angola 3.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/22/1415259

AMY GOODMAN: Anita Roddick, interviewed by filmmaker Mark Achbar for his documentary The Corporation. The interview was done in Seattle in 2001. Anita Roddick died last month. She would have been sixty-five tomorrow. Her husband is holding a rally in her honor in Britain tomorrow.

One issue particularly close to Anita Roddick's heart was the case of the prisoners known as the Angola 3. This is the case of three Black Panther Party activists held in solitary confinement for over three decades in Angola, Louisiana's state prison built on the site of a former slave plantation. Gordon Roddick told reporters last week he plans to continue his wife's work and hopes to help free two of the still-imprisoned Angola 3: Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox.

Herman Wallace paid tribute to Anita Roddick in a conversation with independent filmmaker Angad Bhalla last Saturday.

HERMAN WALLACE: As a result of Anita Roddick's hard work -- and I can't say enough about Anita. She was more than a proponent for me; she was family. I mean, when she was doing her work and even making [inaudible]. She was here visiting with me and Albert, with Albert and I. And this reporter [inaudible] was looking all over for her and didn't know where she was. But she was in such of a hurry, you know, in order to take and raise the consciousness of the people, you know, around the interests that's happening with the Angola 3. And right now, I think the Angola 3 is in a much better position than what we were prior to Anita's involvement, you know? Even Amnesty International, you know, has gotten deeply involved here as a result of her Anita's insight.

AMY GOODMAN: Herman Wallace has spent thirty-five years in solitary confinement in Angola. Over the past six years, he has been exchanging letters with a young architect, Jackie Sumell, who has designed his dream house, based on his letters. The project is on display at the Artist's Space in New York and is dedicated to Anita Roddick. The actual house is expected to be built in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, where Wallace's sister's home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

This is how Herman Wallace explained the significance of this house and Anita Roddick's work.

HERMAN WALLACE: What's so important about this particular house is that it represents Albert, King and all the sisters and brothers who have suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of a racist system of injustice whose primary objective is to maintain us as a voiceless class. You know, so that's what this house represents. That's what it means to me. And I don't look at it as a [inaudible], you know, just for Herman Wallace, but it speaks out for so many other political prisoners, you know, that are locked up -- Mumia, you know, and all of these brothers and sisters, man, that are
-- and particularly those that are innocent in the prisons. So -- and we're going to reach out to them.

And that's what Anita was trying to do. That's why she was in such of a hurry, you know? She was not just a supporter of Albert and my freedom, you know? We became family [inaudible], you know? She knew her time among us was short, and in spite of her wealth, she suffered emotionally, you know, believing that she was not doing enough in raising the consciousness of the injustice, you know, being done to Albert and I. Every country she stepped foot on, you know, she spoke of the persecution and torture Albert and I continue to endure, not only within the state -- this state's only maximum-security penitentiary, but within a solitary cage inside of this penitentiary. Man, this woman was in a hurry. You hear me? I love her so much, you know?

AMY GOODMAN: Herman Wallace, speaking from behind bars in Angola, Louisiana, about the late Anita Roddick, who was fighting for his freedom.

Posted by lois at 08:06 PM | Comments (0)

Children In Prison: Locked-up forever

Children In Prison: Locked-up forever
October 19, 2007
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
It seems that our child criminals are the worst in the world. Why else would the U.S. be the only country in the United Nations that voted against abolishing life imprisonment (without parole) for children and teens?

It can't be argued that we have the most effective, rehabilitative prison system. If anything, the opposite holds true, especially when compared with progressive European prison systems, which aren't without their flaws and seem to operate in less violent societies.
According to a new report produced by the Equal Justice Initiative (a non-profit group dedicated to helping prisoners denied fair treatment by the system), American prisons are home to 73 inmates locked up for life for crimes they committed when they were 13 or 14. Bump that age limit up three years and we have 2,225 prisoners locked up for the rest of their lives for crimes they committed when they were 17 or younger.
These crimes aren't minor -- and the nature of our violent culture is an entirely different story -- but some of the children confess under duress or, worse yet, are developmentally disabled. They languish in lockdown, without hope.
But are they proof that these children can't be rehabilitated, that they can't benefit from help and that they are beyond redemption?
Worse yet, the report indicates that few of these cases are ever reviewed and that the majority of these children don't have any legal representation.
Article 10 of The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states, in part, "Accused juvenile persons shall be separated from adults and brought as speedily as possible for adjudication," and, "The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation. Juvenile offenders shall be segregated from adults and be accorded treatment appropriate to their age and legal status."
EJI isn't calling for these offenders simply to be released. What they're calling for -- and in the name of all that is civilized, we agree -- is that these cases be reviewed and sentences reconsidered. After all, chances are that children who commit serious crimes have themselves been victims or at the very least, witnesses to similar horrors.
A society that gives up on its youngest has run out of ideas and given up all hope. Reforming our system of dealing with juvenile offenders would prove that we are not such a culture.
© 1998-2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
http://eji.org/eji/files/20071017cruelandunusual.pdf report at this URL

Posted by lois at 07:57 PM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2007

AL: 300 women tranferred back to AL from private prison in Louisiana

300 inmates return to Alabama prisons
Friday, October 19, 2007
By BOB LOWRY
(AL) Huntsville Times
Move back home saves families trip, state $10 million

MONTGOMERY - More than 300 female inmates who had been moved to a Louisiana private prison in 2003 because of overcrowding at the Tutwiler Prison for Women are back in Alabama.

Prison Commissioner Richard Allen said Thursday the transfer is the latest move to return all Alabama inmates being held in out-of-state private prisons.

The women had been held at the J.B. Evans Correctional Facility in Newellton, La. The prison is operated by LCS Correctional Services, which also owns the Perry County Detention Center in Uniontown.

The 328 inmates who returned to Alabama by three chartered buses Tuesday and Wednesday will be housed at the newly renovated Montgomery Women's Facility, formerly the Montgomery Pre-Release Center for men.

"We are very pleased to have all of our female inmates back at home," Allen said. "Transferring this many inmates without incident required a massive logistical undertaking."

The facility is on the grounds of Kilby Correctional Facility in Mount Meigs. But Brian Corbet, prisons spokesman, said the facility will not be a part of Kilby.

"It will be a completely separate facility that just happens to be on the same property," he said.

To accommodate the newly returned prisoners, additional showers and toilets were added, with renovations to accommodate medical and mental health services, along with new lighting and a new perimeter security system.

The renovation cost about $55,000.

Allen said the move is expected to save about $10 million annually.

Corbet said 141 male inmates remain at the J.B. Evans prison in Louisiana, while 136 are at the private Perry County prison.

The families of inmates who have been held out of state have long complained about having to drive long distances for visits.

Jacklin Mitchell, serving a 15-year sentence for forgery from Limestone County, had been at the Louisiana prison only since June 12, but she said she was glad to be back in Alabama.

"I'm just overjoyed ... grateful to be back in Alabama," she said. "I like structure. There was no structure in Louisiana. Here we know how it's going to be run."

The prison system was forced to move inmates to out-of-state private prisons in 2003 because of a growing backlog in county jails and a lawsuit brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights over conditions at Tutwiler.

Allen said the prison system has complied with the federal court order by keeping Tutwiler's population at 700 inmates or below.

To eliminate a budget shortage of more than $30 million, the prison system plans to return all inmates from out-of-state facilities in March, Allen said.

http://www.al.com/news/huntsvilletimes/index.ssf?/base/news/1192785572124460.xml&coll=1

Posted by lois at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2007

IA: African Americans Seek Action on Disparate Prison Rates

"But to many in the audience, the study was nothing new. Disparate incarceration rates in adults and juveniles have been documented in Iowa for 25 years. Like Linley, many who spoke at the forum said they wanted action. Still, many in the mostly black audience disagreed about what action was most necessary."
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071012/NEWS/710120
396/-1/NEWS04
Des Moines Register
Blacks seek action on prison rates

At a Des Moines forum, participants agree that the issue generates talk, but a solid plan is needed.

By LEE ROOD, REGISTER STAFF WRITER
October 12, 2007

Jacque Linley walked out of Thursday night's forum a frustrated woman.

A grandmother and Des Moines School District employee, Linley showed up looking for solutions to one of Iowa's longtime problems: an unusually high disproportion of blacks in prison.

What the Des Moines woman heard from among the nearly 100 people in attendance was all too familiar: debate, venting and lots of well-intended discussion.

"They've done enough talking," Linley said, heading to her car before the forum's end. "They need to get an action plan in place - tomorrow. You may start with only two or three things, but at least it's a start."

Thursday night's meeting at Corinthian Baptist Church in downtown Des Moines was the second organized by state and local agencies in the wake of a new study showing Iowa's rate of black incarceration compared with that for whites is greater than all states. The study, from the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project, found the state's black incarceration rate is six times that of whites - the worst such disproportion in the country.

But to many in the audience, the study was nothing new. Disparate incarceration rates in adults and juveniles have been documented in Iowa for 25 years.

Like Linley, many who spoke at the forum said they wanted action. Still, many in the mostly black audience disagreed about what action was most necessary.

Black leaders say they are coming up with an action plan - after one more yet-to-be-scheduled forum but in time for this year's legislative session.

In the meantime, here's what some panel members and attendees said:

David Goodson, a longtime activist on the issue from Waterloo, said the state needs urgently to expand community-based correctional services for nonviolent offenders.

Goodson said there's no question the justice system is racist. Previous studies have shown minorities receive disparate treatment, from the setting of their bail to pre-trial release to sentencing to the length of time served.

Nonviolent offenders, particularly drug offenders, he said, deserve access to services, jobs and a chance to change.

Iowa Corrections Director John Baldwin said one of the best hopes of the future is addressing front-end problems. "By the time people work their way through the system, it's almost too late," he said.

However, Baldwin said, research shows that a distinct difference does exist in how minorities convicted of certain crimes are treated by the corrections system. "So if you are looking for ideas, that may be a place to start."

Perhaps the most controversial speaker was Polk County Judge Odell McGhee, a longtime prosecutor and judge who can be seen on public-access television in Des Moines presiding over truancy court.

McGhee placed responsibility flatly at the feet of the black community, saying its families and its churches had failed the young. "I know that's harsh, and I wish I could lay blame somewhere else, but I don't think I can," he said.

McGhee upset many in the audience - but also received wide applause - when he insisted that far too many black families had lost control of their children.

He urged parents to set and stick to rules, provide discipline, make sure their children have goals and support their kids' accomplishments.

"It would be nice if we let out more nonviolent offenders," he conceded. "But in this jurisdiction on average, you've committed a lot of crimes to get to prison."

____________ http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071017/OPINION01/7
10170341/1035/OPINION

OP ED

Black incarceration rate raises fundamental question: How to fix it? Michael Judge

October 17, 2007

In the early 1990s, not long before he died of cancer, I spent a day with the African-American "prison poet" Etheridge Knight. I was in college and had volunteered to drive him from his reading here on the campus of the University of Iowa to the Iowa State campus in Ames. The readings were, quite simply, beautiful - and brought both audiences to tears.

But it was something Etheridge said between poems at the Ames reading that stayed with me for years. "After being released from prison in 1968," he told the crowd, "I entered the bigger prison of society." He didn't say this with any semblance of self pity, but as a simple statement of fact.

Etheridge's words came to mind this summer when the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based criminal-justice watchdog, found that blacks in Iowa are imprisoned at 13.6 times the rate of whites, the widest disparity in the nation. In fact, according to the Sentencing Project study, which used data from the U.S. Department of Justice, blacks in Iowa are imprisoned at a rate more than double the national average.

Iowa, of course, is not alone in locking up African-Americans at an alarming rate. Nationwide, a black person is 5.6 times more likely to be incarcerated than a white person, more than 10 times more likely if arrested in Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota and, of course, Iowa.

This, some Iowans assure me, is because many of the blacks arrested here are from out of state and have come here to engage in criminal activity - deal drugs, form gangs, etc. This, in turn, pushes up the rate of black incarceration in the state.

Question attitude of presumed guilt

Many Iowans are not inclined to believe that racial profiling, or the fact that Iowa has but a handful of black judges, might be contributing to the problem. They begin with a presumption of guilt: Blacks arrested in Iowa are simply more likely to be guilty of felonious behavior, thus the higher rate of incarceration.

Maybe so. But what we should be asking ourselves as Iowans - and Americans: Why is this so and how can we fix it?

And that's exactly what Iowa's leaders, however belatedly, are doing. Back in 2001, a task force appointed by then Gov. Tom Vilsack reported that black inmates occupied 24 percent of Iowa prison beds even though blacks comprised just over 2 percent of the state's total population. After taking office last year, Gov. Chet Culver assigned a committee to act on the 2001 report.

Just recently, the Culver committee released a number of recommendations aimed at lowering the incarceration rate for black Iowans. Together, they total $9.7 million in budget requests to bolster early-childhood education, community-based corrections programs, drug-prevention programs and job and re-entry training for former inmates.

If approved, some but not enough of this money would go toward better community mental-heath education and treatment. According to a study by the U.S. Justice Department last year, 56 percent of state prisoners, 45 percent of federal prisoners and 64 percent of local jail inmates suffer from mental illnesses. Sadly, there are now more mentally ill people behind bars in America than in mental hospitals. And since minority populations are less likely to receive proper mental-health care, they end up behind bars in higher numbers.

Provide adequate legal representation

Here in Iowa, as in other states, inadequate legal representation may also be contributing to the problem. An African-American attorney who practices family law in Iowa tells me the public defendant's office is generally overworked and often doesn't have time to take all the cases it should to trial. This reduces the public defendant's leverage to plea bargain and generally gives the county prosecutor the upper hand.

"If the prosecutor knows the PD [public defendant] is not likely to go to trial, they can charge defendants with the maximum crime and have greater confidence that the charges will stick," the attorney explained. "This, in turn, leads to greater prison terms or jail time."

Other factors that contribute to higher incarceration for blacks in Iowa and across the nation are mandatory and determinate sentencing initiatives, especially for drug offenses. This could be remedied by not only providing greater resources for drug prevention and treatment but by returning sentencing powers to the discretion of judges. As the Sentencing Project recommends in its study, "Policymakers should follow the lead of legislatures in states such as Louisiana, Mississippi and Delaware and revisit the wisdom of mandatory minimum sentencing."

Confront violence, breakdown of family

Finally, black leaders need to address the problems of violence, drug abuse and the breakdown of the family within their own communities. Shelby Steele has written persuasively of post-civil-rights-era black leaders trading individual responsibility for the group association of victimization. As Steele writes in his influential book, "The Content of Our Character": "Hard work, education, individual initiative, stable family life, property ownership - these have always been the means by which ethnic groups have moved ahead in America. Regardless of past or present victimization, these 'laws' of advancement apply absolutely to black Americans also."

There's no denying that blacks in all walks of life have made great strides since the inception of the civil-rights movement and indeed since Etheridge Knight was released from prison. Still, with African-Americans continuing to fill our prisons in hugely disproportionate numbers, it's worth asking our civil-rights leaders, our law-enforcement officials, our state and national representatives, and ourselves, the same question another black poet, Langston Hughes, asked in 1951:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

...Or does it explode?

MICHAEL JUDGE of Iowa City is a freelance journalist, contributing editor at The Far Eastern Economic Review and a fifth-generation Iowan.

Posted by lois at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)

N.C. leads in immigrant crackdown

News Observer
Raleigh, NC
N.C. leads in immigrant crackdown
Local law enforcement agencies are hastening to join a federal program that lets them check the status of those they jail

Kristin Collins, Staff Writer

North Carolina is becoming a national leader in rooting out illegal immigrants in its local jails.

The state has largely avoided controversial municipal ordinances that crack down on illegal immigrants, their employers and their landlords. But many sheriffs and police chiefs are eager to enforce immigration law, federal officials say.

Eighteen law enforcement agencies in North Carolina, more than any other state, have asked to join a program that would allow them to check the immigration status of those they arrest and jail. Sheriff's offices in Wake, Durham and Johnston counties are among those that have applied.

Four more sheriff's offices are already enrolled in the program, and their efforts led to the deportation of thousands of immigrants in the past year.

The program allows law enforcement agencies to use a federal database to check the immigration status of every foreign person they arrest -- whether for reckless driving or selling drugs -- and start deportation of those in the United States illegally. Select officers from the agencies that enroll get about a month of training from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The program costs local agencies nothing but staff time, and the federal government pays for each night that immigration detainees spend in local jails.

"We've had tremendous interest," said Richard Rocha, a spokesman for the federal immigration agency, known as ICE. "North Carolina leads the country."

The interest has been so overwhelming that ICE created a task force this week to figure out how best to use North Carolina sheriffs and police departments in the fight against illegal immigration.

Mecklenburg Sheriff Jim Pendergraph, who in 2006 was the first in North Carolina to partner with ICE, has become a sort of folk hero to other sheriffs in the state. He says Mecklenburg County helped ICE deport more than 3,000 people last year.

"We're trying to rid the state of illegal alien criminals," Pendergraph said Wednesday. "The citizens, quite frankly, are demanding that we get involved because the federal government just can't handle it by themselves anymore."

Pendergraph became so well known for the effort that he landed a job with ICE. In December, he will leave his job as sheriff to begin helping ICE coordinate more extensively with local law enforcement agencies across the country.

Other sheriffs want to follow his lead, and the N.C. Sheriff's Association says it will spend a $1.5 million grant from the state to help offices sign up for the ICE program in the next two years. Two full-time staffers will help sheriff's offices fill out paperwork and craft agreements with ICE, and grant money will pay the local agencies for the time their officers spend in ICE training.

Prison system, too

The state prison system is also joining the effort. Prison officials have begun reporting all foreign-born prisoners to ICE officers, who check their immigration status. The officers now make weekly visits to state prisons, said Mary Lu Rogers, who oversees the ICE program for the state Division of Prisons.

Rogers said the division struck a deal with ICE because "we had concerns that we might have been releasing inmates to the community who should be deported." ICE has started deportation proceedings on about 57 prisoners a month since the program started, up from an average of 46 a month before ICE made regular visits, she said.

Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who has traveled across the state meeting with sheriffs, said North Carolina is on the path to creating a national model in which every illegal immigrant who commits a crime is deported.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/immigration/story/740803.html

Posted by lois at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2007

Time: What's Wrong With Florida's Prisons?

Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007
What's Wrong With Florida's Prisons?
By Tim Padgett/Miami
Time Magazine

An uneasy sense of dèjá vu swept over Florida last week after an all-white jury acquitted seven juvenile boot camp guards and a nurse charged with aggravated manslaughter in the death of a black teen last year.

The shocking verdict came down despite a half hour of videotape that showed the guards hitting and kicking the 14-year-old, Martin Lee Anderson, and holding their hands over his mouth for as long as five minutes at a time, while the nurse stood by and watched. The jury seemed persuaded by the first and widely discredited autopsy report that blamed the boy's death on a sickle-cell condition, even though a second autopsy ordered by the state had ruled Anderson died from suffocation (the Justice Department has since announced it will investigate whether federal civil rights violations charges should be brought in the case). "It's wrong!" Anderson's mother, Gina Jones, shouted as she stormed out of the Panama City courtroom after the verdict was read. The Anderson decision was reminiscent of another bewildering verdict five years ago, when three Florida state prison guards charged with stomping 36-year-old inmate Frank Valdes to death in his cell in 1999 were acquitted — even though the guards' boot prints were found all over his back.

Both verdicts were vivid reminders of what critics call the rot of Florida's corrections culture. Despite its Sunshine State image, Florida's prisons and juvenile detention centers are often associated with the more troubled corrections systems of its Deep South neighbors. While no one is asking Florida to coddle its prisoners, adult or juvenile, many fear it has yet to break its dark habit of coddling abusive guards and other officials watching over those prisoners.

The state is facing lawsuits alleging that its prisons subject too many inmates, including the mentally ill, to a prisoner "warehousing" culture of unlawfully extreme isolation and deprivation, usually with little or no rehabilitation efforts to prevent recidivism. Other suits decry what one calls excessive as well as "malicious and sadistic" use of pepper spray and other chemicals to keep mentally ill prisoners under control. In many cases the sprays have burned off inmates' skin, according to the suit. "Florida prisons still need to end this kind of outrageous conduct," says Randall Berg, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute in Miami, which is participating in a suit filed against the state's current Corrections head, James McDonough, along with other department officials.

Neither McDonough nor other Florida corrections officials will discuss the suits, since they're still pending. But the state in the past has insisted that pepper spray is one of the more benign means of controlling violent and mentally ill prisoners — and Florida is hardly the only state that uses such chemical agents to handle unruly inmates. But beyond the pepper spray issue, groups like Berg's acknowledge that McDonough, an MIT grad and former Army colonel, has begun long-overdue reforms to tackle corruption and other abuses. "We're changing the culture of the Department," McDonough insists. "There had been an attitude that [the prison system] was a culture apart from the rest of the state government. Not anymore."

That attitude led to quite a few excesses. Ten years ago, when a malfunctioning electric chair caused a prisoner's leather mask to burst into flames during his execution, Florida's Democratic Attorney General Robert Butterworth joked that the problems with "Old Sparky" — the chair's nickname — were actually a good deterrent to murder. Things didn't improve much after then Governor Jeb Bush and the Republicans took power in Tallahassee in 1999, especially at the Department of Juvenile Justice. In June of 2003, Omar Paisley, 17, an inmate at a juvenile detention center in Miami that was filled 135% beyond capacity, died when nurses ignored his pleas for help after his appendix burst. The nurses were later charged with manslaughter and third-degree murder, to which they have pleaded not guilty, and their trials are pending. Prosecutors at the trial of Valdes — who was awaiting execution for murdering a Palm Beach County corrections officer in 1987 — contended that one of the reasons he was beaten was the letters he'd begun writing to the media about abuses at Florida State Prison under its then warden, James Crosby. That made it all the more surprising when Bush appointed Crosby secretary of the state's Corrections Department in 2003. Then last year Crosby was convicted after a sweeping federal probe of corruption inside the state's prisons — and he's now serving eight years in prison himself.

As Crosby's successor, McDonough surely knows he has to work overtime to regain credibility for his department. With that in mind, he has made prisoner rehabilitation more of a priority, channeling renewed effort and funding toward prison education, substance abuse counseling, vocational training and daily life-management skills. "I think Florida is actually out in front now compared to a lot of state prison systems," says McDonough, who believes his rehab emphasis will cut the state's recidivism rate by more than 10 percentage points by the start of the next decade.

That would be welcome in a state whose 92,000 inmates amount to the nation's third largest prison population. Over the past two decades, Florida has in many ways led a national get-tough-on-crime wave that has reduced some crime rates but has also given the U.S. the world's highest incarceration rate. Bush had championed the often rough boot camps for juvenile delinquents; but after Anderson's death, Florida's conservative legislature voted to abolish them. And it's beginning to listen to McDonough's argument that lowering recidivism will save the state the hundreds of millions of dollars it's spending these days on new prisons.

* Find this article at:
* http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1672366,00.html

Posted by lois at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2007

CA: Gov. Schwarzenegger turns a blind eye to injustice with veto of three modest bills.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Editorial: Injustice before inconvenience
Gov. Schwarzenegger turns a blind eye to injustice with veto of three modest bills.
An Orange County Register editorial

It's a sad day in California when it's too controversial to sign a trio of bills that make minor tweaks in the law to make it less likely that people will be wrongfully convicted of serious crimes. Everyone wants serious criminals to be locked up for a long time, but it's hard for us to understand the unwillingness of the government to take every possible precaution to ensure that only guilty people are convicted.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave in to his worst political instincts and vetoed three bills that were advanced by a state Senate-created organization called the Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice. Noting that a number of innocent people have served long prison terms for crimes they did not commit, the commission was charged with proposing reforms that deal with specific problems. The bills were quite modest, yet the governor vetoed them and offered only the weakest explanation in his accompanying veto message.

The first legislation was Senate Bill 511, which would have required the recording of entire police interrogations of suspects. Some police departments already take this wise precaution, which protects not only defendants from being coerced into giving confessions but also protects police agencies. If a defendant claims he was coerced into admitting guilt, then the agency merely provides a tape showing that wasn't true. It also protects against selective editing of a confession. The genesis of this proposal was the confession of one innocent man after 17 hours of intense interrogations. The governor claimed that the measure would put "unnecessary restrictions on police investigators."

The second was SB756, which would create a task force to come up with voluntary guidelines for police lineups. Any proposals coming from that commission would still need to go back to the Legislature for approval, yet the governor bizarrely claimed that the bill went "too far." He again referenced the need for police agencies to be able to adopt their own policies without restriction. One case supporters point to involved a man who was wrongfully convicted after police used "suggestive" identification techniques with a suspect.

The third was SB609, which would have required that testimony from jailhouse informants be corroborated by other evidence. The commission pointed to a man who spent eight years in jail based on unreliable testimony by a prisoner. This seems like a basic measure, given that jailhouse informants have every reason to lie given that the authorities give them leniency in exchange for their testimony. The governor claimed that there are plenty of existing safeguards.

Given the cases publicized by the commission, there apparently are not sufficient safeguards. The governor's veto statements show a disturbing concern solely for any inconvenience to the government agencies and no obvious concern to the injustice inflicted on those wrongfully convicted. Like Gov. Gray Davis before him, Gov. Schwarzenegger has apparently decided that he's more willing to allow injustices to take place than to stand up to the state's law enforcement unions. This is too bad in a state once known for its concern about civil liberties

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

CA: Governor Wins Round 1 on 7.4 Billion Prison Bond Package

Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Guv Wins Round 1 On Prison Bonds
A Sacramento judge has sided with Governor Schwarzenegger in a case that questioned the constitutionality of this year's $7.4 billion prison bond package.

Superior Court Judge Loren McMaster has ruled that the bonds to be sold under AB 900 do not appear to violate the state constitution, and that they are -- in fact -- "lease revenue bonds." That's a kind of bonds that are supposed to be paid back with lease (or rent) from the structures that were built, and the kind of bonds authorized under the new law.

But a group known as Taxpayers for Improving Public Safety took the Schwarzenegger administration to court this summer, arguing that there was no way someone could claim that a new prison counts as a facility that will produce lease or rental revenue.

In a new six page opinion, Judge McMaster writes that "the [state] General Fund is not pledged as security for the bonds." And therefore, he says, the constitution's requirement of a vote by the people... which only pertains to bonds that are paid off by the General Fund... does not apply.

Matt Gray, a spokesman for the taxpayers group, says they will appeal the ruling. And he argues that the plaintiffs are actually pleased to move the case to another court... where he says they will prove that the debt payments for the bonds are, in fact, going to be reliant on the General Fund.

However, even if the AB 900 bonds are sold there will still be questions remain about whether AB 900 constitutes enough "reform" for the panel of three federal judges who could unilaterally order major changes... even prisoner releases... to end the overcrowding in California's prisons.

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

CA: Fresno Prison on Temporary Hold: Expansions at four other sites are still on track despite fear of more valley fever cases.

Fresno prison plan on hold
Expansions at four other sites are still on track despite fear of more valley fever cases.

By Andy Furillo - Bee Capitol Bureau
Published 12:00 am PDT Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A3 http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/436393.html
California corrections officials have "temporarily deferred" a plan to add beds to a Fresno County prison where at least 12 inmates have died of valley fever since 2004.

While the state is holding off on a construction program at Pleasant Valley State Prison, the corrections agency still intends to go ahead with expansion plans at four institutions in Kern County where three other inmates have died of the disease during the same time span.

The temporary scrapping of the program at Pleasant Valley was welcomed by Jesse Garcia, a Fresno man whose 37-year-old son, Javier, a former inmate at the prison, died Friday of valley fever meningitis." I'm glad to hear they are going to stop it," Garcia said. "It's a horrible thing to have to see."

Although the number of valley fever deaths at the four Kern County prisons doesn't compare to Pleasant Valley's, its rate of civilian infection is the highest in the state, according to the Department of Health Services.

"Kern County is generally considered to be ground zero for valley fever in California," said health department spokesman Ken August.

The deferral of construction at Pleasant Valley is part of a significant modification to the infill portion of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's $7.9 billion plan to solve the state's inmate overcrowding crisis by adding 53,000 new beds.
"Infrastructure capacity issues" and a failure to get the Legislature to approve a "design-build" construction process that would have speeded up the building effort has resulted in a five-month delay for the expansion program, said Deborah Hysen, the prison agency's chief deputy secretary in charge of facilities, planning and construction.

Initially, prison officials had hoped to obtain permission in July from the State Public Works Board to move forward. Hysen said the agency is now planning to go to the board in December.

The expansion plans at existing prisons are a key component of the Assembly Bill 900 plan approved by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in the spring. The original plan called for initially adding 12,000 beds at 10 prisons, eventually growing to 16,000. But assessments of the 10 sites turned up significant issues that have held up the program, Hysen said.

At Pleasant Valley, the issue was valley fever.

Local public health officials, prison doctors and academic experts had recommended in a report commissioned by federal medical care receiver Robert Sillen that the state refrain from prison building in the southern San Joaquin Valley, especially at Pleasant Valley. More than 900 cases of the disease have been reported at the one prison in the past four years.

Hysen said the report prompted the state to hold off on the infill plan at Pleasant Valley. "We've just deferred it because we think until such time as we have a really good plan, we want to make sure, we want to be responsive to the report," Hysen said.

Construction of a state mental health hospital next door to the prison coincided with the valley fever outbreak at the prison, and the experts feared the building program would stir up more spores rom the soil and result in additional infections.

A spokeswoman for the receiver's office, set up by U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson last year to take charge of medical
care in the state's 33 prisons, also welcomed the decision to defer construction at the prison.

"We're pleased they're taking it very seriously and that the department is planning to take actions that keep inmates and staff health in mind," spokeswoman Rachael Kagan said Tuesday.

Five of the 12 inmate deaths at Pleasant Valley were reported by the Kern County coroner's office, in data compiled by The Bee. Fresno County reported four more. Kagan said the receiver's office found at least two valley fever fatalities there last year. Garcia's death last week brought the number to at least 12.

"I'd rather it be shut down, not the prison itself, but as far as adding on to it," Jesse Garcia said in an interview. "Every time they disturb the ground, it's going to happen."

Dr. Edward Moreno, the public health officer of Fresno County, said that if "construction were to continue" at Pleasant Valley, "it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that we could continue to see more cases" of valley fever at the prison.

"It's really up to the legislators to decide, but they really need to take this into consideration," Moreno said. "It sounds like CDCR is
taking this into consideration."

Kagan said that covering the soil and reducing dust can put a damper on the spread of valley fever spores.
But Dr. Michael MacLean, the public health officer in adjacent Kings County, where at least three inmates at two prisons have died of died of valley fever in the past three years, said "we really don't know an effective way" to mitigate the spread of infections.

"Until that question is answered, it really is foolish to put more beds in (more critical) areas," MacLean said. "We have good evidence that prisoners are being adversely affected by this disease, disproportionately."

ABOUT THE WRITER:

The Bee's Andy Furillo can be reached at (916) 321-1141 or afurillo@ sacbee.com.

Posted by lois at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)

VA: Panel Rejects Detention Center for Illegal Immigrants. Wants more Jails Instead

October 17, 2007
Panel Rejects Detention Center for Illegal Immigrants
By IAN URBINA

RICHMOND, Va., Oct. 16 — A Virginia state panel on Tuesday rejected a controversial proposal to create the country’s first state-run facility where illegal immigrants arrested for certain crimes could be held until federal officials deport them or while awaiting trial.

Instead, the panel recommended that the state provide additional money so local officials could build more jail space to house immigrants awaiting deportation. It also called on local jail officials to check the immigration status of all inmates and deny bail to most illegal immigrants who committed crimes.

In recent years, Virginia has become a testing ground for some of the strictest policies in the nation to curb illegal immigration.

This week, officials in Prince William County, Va., were weighing proposals to deny county services to illegal immigrants and to direct the police to jail those immigrants who could not show documentation proving they were in the United States legally.

This year, state lawmakers submitted a proposal to fine employers who hired illegal immigrants $10,000 and to revoke the business licenses of anyone in the state convicted of hiring illegal immigrants. In 2003, the state was the first to pass a measure making it a crime to give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses.

“Residents of our state are really frustrated when an illegal alien commits a crime and that person is let go after serving time, and we’re trying to correct that problem,” said State Senator Ken Stolle, Republican of Virginia Beach, who is chairman of the panel that acted on Tuesday, the Illegal Immigration Task Force of the State Crime Commission. “These measures are not targeting all immigrants, just those who commit crimes.”

In Virginia, local jail officials keep only about 25 percent of the money that federal immigration officials pay per bed for illegal immigrants waiting to be deported, with the rest going to the state. The panel called for that amount to be increased to 100 percent and to increase the amount the state provided to counties to build new facilities. This extra revenue would enable local jail officials to add jail beds for illegal immigrants and eliminate the need for a centralized facility.

But immigration advocates say they worry that toughening immigration enforcement would have a chilling effect on crime victims and witnesses who may be in the country illegally, and they questioned whether increasing the amount of money available to county officials would create a financial incentive to round up people who are suspected of being illegal immigrants.

“Even without any new measures, this chilling effect is a problem,” said Jeanne L. Smoot, director of public policy for Tahirih Justice Center, an advocacy group in Falls Church, Va., for battered women, adding that women were more than twice as likely not to report violence against them if they were illegal immigrants.

The proposals in Virginia are further indications of how state and local officials are getting ahead of the federal government on the immigration issue and sometimes pushing measures that federal officials are unwilling or unable to support for legal, logistical or financial reasons.

Illegal immigrants who are arrested are currently placed in local jails, federal facilities or private prisons, and once they finish their sentences, those convicted of nonviolent offenses are often released because federal immigration officials say they lack the resources to detain them.

Last year, the state police in Virginia notified federal immigration officials of about 12,000 illegal immigrants in their jails. But the federal officials only picked up about 690, according to state officials.

State Delegate David B. Albo, Republican of Fairfax County, who is co-chairman of the state immigration task force, said that Virginia had an estimated 300,000 illegal immigrants.

Hope Amezquita, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, testified before the task force that the proposal to deny bail to virtually all illegal immigrants accused of committing crimes might be unconstitutional.

It would create a whole class of people who are exempted from due process, Ms. Amezquita said, adding that the Constitution guaranteed that each criminal defendant, regardless of status, get an individualized review of their case.

Before the panel’s recommendations can be adopted, the Crime Commission, the General Assembly and the governor must act on them.

Critics say the proposals are being driven by politics in a year when all 140 seats of the General Assembly are up for election.

“In Washington, here in the state Capitol, and even here in this building, illegal immigration is a debating exercise,” William Campenni, 67, a retired engineer, said at the task force hearing. “In towns like my Herndon, it is a drive-by shooting, a D.U.I. fatality, a drug turf battle, a serial killing sniper, a deteriorating neighborhood.”

Mr. Campenni added that though he had never been a victim of crime at the hands of an illegal immigrant, his wife was afraid to go to areas of their town that she used to visit regularly.

Mr. Albo said that illegal immigrants who committed violent crimes or felonies usually received sentences of more than a year, which gave federal immigration officials enough time to process their deportation. But illegal immigrants convicted of lesser charges, like drunken driving or domestic violence, often are released on bond and never return for their court date, or serve just days or weeks and are released.

The panel wants to hold most illegal immigrants and only release them on bail if lawyers can prove they are not a flight risk.

Asked why he had abandoned his idea of creating a centralized facility, Mr. Stolle said that countless people had told him the idea sounded too much like “a concentration camp” for immigrants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/us/17prison.html?ei=5070&en=311a76c503ba296d&ex=1193284800&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

In Connecticut Prisons, a System Long on People, Short on Space

October 17, 2007, NY Times
In Connecticut Prisons, a System Long on People, Short on Space
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN and CHRISTINE STUART

SOMERS, Conn., Oct. 16 — Cubicles built for four are crammed with eight inmates, and enclosed areas known as dollhouses where inmates once played cards and wrote letters now hold 14 bunk beds. The corridors are lined with more beds.

Each large room at the Willard-Cybulski Correctional Institution once had 50 beds and now has 118. The dual prison, one part in Enfield and the other in Somers, is part of a system so overcrowded that it tests the state’s resolve to get tough on criminals.

Correction officers who work at this dormitory-style, minimum security prison say the cramped conditions give them little room to maneuver and little hope of keeping small problems from turning into big ones.

“As you can see, they really have no place to go,” Clint White, a longtime correction officer, told a group of lawmakers and reporters who were touring the prison on Tuesday.

The arrest in July of two parolees in the grisly murders of a mother and her two daughters in Cheshire, followed closely by a carjacking involving a parolee, touched off a wave of official responses that were intended to address flaws in the criminal justice system, but that also made crowded prisons even more crowded.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell ordered the Department of Correction to temporarily stop granting parole to violent offenders, a class that now includes home burglars. “Security comes first,” the governor said in a Sept. 21 statement.

In addition, prosecutors are holding out for stiffer plea bargains, and judges are imposing longer sentences.

Ms. Rell has promised a top-to-bottom review of the state’s criminal justice system, but in recent weeks, as policy makers have been discussing the issue, pressure has been building.

The union that represents two-thirds of the 7,000 employees at the Department of Correction said Monday that its members counted 821 temporary beds — they resemble plastic toboggans with mattresses — in use in 11 of the state’s 18 prisons one night last week.

“My members believe we’re already at a crisis population,” said Jon Pepe, president of a correction officers union. “We’re only managing them because the population is letting us manage them.”

At Willard-Cybulski, the din makes it hard for anyone inclined to read to concentrate, and guards report having to break up fights over the use of toilets and showers, when weaker inmates often lose out. “Just those last 10 people they added in here made a difference,” said Brian Cronin of Colchester, who is serving 30 months for drug possession.

Mr. Cronin said that he was approved for release in August, but that his release was delayed after the Cheshire slayings.

Amid this crackdown, there have been protests from some Democratic legislators.

State Representative Toni E. Walker of New Haven said that halting parole removes inmates’ incentive to cooperate, and “you take away their hope.”

One of the quandaries for lawmakers is the Department of Correction’s refusal to disclose precisely how many prison beds it has these days. Correction Commissioner Theresa C. Lantz spent several hours deflecting questions at a Joint Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month.

“There is no set number,” Ms. Lantz insisted. “We accommodate whatever the population is.”

But Representative Gerald M. Fox III, a Democrat of Stamford, persisted. “I’m just trying to figure out when we start to worry,” he said.

“Every day, we manage the population so you don’t have to worry,” she replied.

Some lawmakers said they understood Ms. Lantz’s reluctance to supply a specific number since it would make it easier for advocacy groups and others to sue the state on the ground that the conditions are too harsh.

A study prepared in 2000 by a nonpartisan legislative committee put the number of beds at 17,600.

According to figures compiled by the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Research, the state was housing 18,869 inmates just before the slayings in Cheshire, which touched off the crackdown, and had 19,194 in confinement on Sept. 21, the day the governor suspended parole for violent offenders.

As of Tuesday, the state had 19,655 inmates, according to the Department of Correction. “This is the highest the population has ever been, and it’s grown by 800 in three months,” said Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat from East Haven who is co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

In late 1999, when John G. Rowland was governor, the state started sending 500 prisoners at a time to Virginia to save money and relieve congestion, but that experiment was criticized by the inmates’ families and stopped soon after Ms. Rell became governor.

Recent measures aimed at relieving congestion and reducing recidivism have fared better, like electronic monitoring and granting “transitional release” to those near the end of their sentences.

Still, union officials say that the current crunch is far worse than in years past.

“We have to do something to get the tension out of here,” State Senator John A. Kissel, a Republican from Enfield, said at the end of Tuesday’s tour. “I don’t think the correctional officers are making unreasonable requests.”

graphs at this URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/nyregion/17prisons.html?ref=nyregion

Posted by lois at 04:24 PM | Comments (0)

Vernon Bellecourt, Who Protested the Use of Indian Mascots, for example the Cleveland Indians (!) Dies at 75

October 17, 2007
Vernon Bellecourt, Who Protested the Use of Indian Mascots, Dies at 75
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Vernon Bellecourt, an Ojibwa Indian who waged a long campaign for native rights, most visible in battling the use of Indian nicknames by sports teams, died Oct. 13 in Minneapolis. He was 75.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his sister-in-law, Peggy Bellecourt, said.

Mr. Bellecourt (pronounced BELL-kort) first gained notice in 1972 as a principal spokesman for the American Indian Movement when the group organized a cross-country caravan to Washington, where members occupied the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He later worked to gain international recognition for Indian nations and their treaties, partly by meeting with controversial foreign figures like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader who died in 2004.

But it was as president of the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media that Mr. Bellecourt achieved his greatest visibility. When teams with names like the Indians, the Redskins or the Chiefs appeared in high-profile contests, he was often there to protest.

He was arrested twice for burning an effigy of the Cleveland Indians’ mascot, Chief Wahoo, and protested the Washington Redskins at the Super Bowl.

Mr. Bellecourt said Indian nicknames for sports teams perpetuated stereotypes, making it easier to forget the real identities, problems and demands of Native Americans.

The argument gained traction. In 2001, the United States Commission on Civil Rights criticized the use of Indian images and nicknames by non-Indian schools, calling them “insensitive in light of the long history of forced assimilation that American Indian people have endured in this country.”

With many other forces in play, how much Mr. Bellecourt’s campaign has influenced colleges and universities to abandon Indian mascots is hard to gauge. But in recent years, more than a half dozen have done so, including the University of Illinois this year. In 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association barred Indian mascots during postseason tournaments. A few newspapers have quit using Indian-related nicknames.

Professional sports teams have been more resistant, although Mr. Bellecourt applauded in 1996 when Syracuse’s Class AAA baseball team became the Skychiefs after 62 years of being the Chiefs. What Bellecourt called his “big four” targets — the Washington Redskins, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves — have not budged.

Bellecourt was born WaBun-Inini, meaning Man of Dawn in Ojibwa, on Oct. 17, 1931, on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota. His father was disabled by mustard gas in World War I, and his mother raised 12 children on government benefits in a home with no running water or electricity.

Mr. Bellecourt dropped out of parochial school after the eighth grade and worked at odd jobs. He was convicted of robbing a bar in St. Paul and sent to prison at 19. (The state expunged the conviction from his record in 1979, The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported.)

In prison, he learned how to be a barber, then went to beauty school after his release. He soon owned two beauty parlors in the Minneapolis area and thought he was on his way to being a millionaire, he told The Star Tribune in 1999. He moved to Denver and sold real estate.

A sense that he was losing his heritage combined with an admiration for his brother Clyde, a founder of A.I.M. in the late 1960s, led Mr. Bellecourt to help start an A.I.M chapter in Denver. He was soon involved as a spokesman and negotiator in the 1972 Washington demonstration, known as the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan. The next year, he played a small part in the 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

In 1974, Bellecourt helped organize an international conference of native peoples under United Nations auspices to proclaim their rights. After Leonard Peltier was convicted for killing two F.B.I. agents during a shootout at Pine Ridge in 1975, Mr. Bellecourt became a leader in the campaign to free him.

Mr. Bellecourt’s first trip to see a foreign leader was in 1989 when he met with Col. Qaddafi, whom he described as a “very warm, sensitive human being,” and later visited at least a half dozen more times. In August 2007, he traveled to Venezuela to meet with President Hugo Chávez about getting free or cheap heating oil for Indian reservations.

Mr. Bellecourt is survived by his wife, Carol Ann Bellecourt, from whom he was separated; his companion, Janice Denny; six children; and seven grandchildren.

Mr. Bellecourt never stopped repeating that Indians were people, not mascots. At a playoff game in 1993 between the Minnesota Vikings and the Redskins, he declared, “We don’t like your chicken feathers, your paint, your cheap Hollywood chants.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/sports/17bellecourt.html?ref=obituaries&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

Lifers as Teenagers, Now Seeking Second Chance

October 17, 2007
Lifers as Teenagers, Now Seeking Second Chance
By ADAM LIPTAK, NY Times Page 1
American Exception
Without Parole

This is the first in an occasional series of articles that will examine commonplace aspects of the American justice system that are actually unique in the world.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.

Indeed, the United States stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison. According to a new report, there are 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.

Mary Nalls, an 81-year-old retired social worker here, has some thoughts about the matter. Her granddaughter Ashley Jones was 14 when she helped her boyfriend kill her grandfather and aunt — Mrs. Nalls’s husband and daughter — by stabbing and shooting them and then setting them on fire. Ms. Jones also tried to kill her 10-year-old sister.

Mrs. Nalls, who was badly injured in the rampage, showed a visitor to her home a white scar on her forehead, a reminder of the burns that put her into a coma for 30 days. She had also been shot in the shoulder and stabbed in the chest.

“I forgot,” she said later. “They stabbed me in the jaw, too.”

But Mrs. Nalls thinks her granddaughter, now 22, deserves the possibility of a second chance.

“I believe that she should have gotten 15 or 20 years,” Mrs. Nalls said. “If children are under age, sometimes they’re not responsible for what they do.”

The group that plans to release the report on Oct. 17, the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Ala., is one of several human rights organizations that say states should be required to review sentences of juvenile offenders as the decades go by, looking for cases where parole might be warranted.

But prosecutors and victims’ rights groups say there are crimes so terrible and people so dangerous that only life sentences without the possibility of release are a fit moral and practical response.

“I don’t think every 14-year-old who killed someone deserves life without parole,” said Laura Poston, who prosecuted Ms. Jones. “But Ashley planned to kill four people. I don’t think there is a conscience in Ashley, and I certainly think she is a threat to do something similar.”

Specialists in comparative law acknowledge that there have been occasions when young murderers who would have served life terms in the United States were released from prison in Europe and went on to kill again. But comparing legal systems is difficult, in part because the United States is a more violent society and in part because many other nations imprison relatively few people and often only for repeat violent offenses.

“I know of no systematic studies of comparative recidivism rates,” said James Q. Whitman, who teaches comparative criminal law at Yale. “I believe there are recidivism problems in countries like Germany and France, since those are countries that ordinarily incarcerate only dangerous offenders, but at some point they let them out and bad things can happen.”

The differences in the two approaches, legal experts said, are rooted in politics and culture. The European systems emphasize rehabilitation, while the American one stresses individual responsibility and punishment.

Corrections professionals and criminologists here and abroad tend to agree that violent crime is usually a young person’s activity, suggesting that eventual parole could be considered in most cases. But the American legal system is more responsive to popular concerns about crime and attitudes about punishment, while justice systems abroad tend to be administered by career civil servants rather than elected legislators, prosecutors and judges.

In its sentencing of juveniles, as in many other areas, the legal system in the United States goes it alone. American law is, by international standards, a series of innovations and exceptions. From the central role played by juries in civil cases to the election of judges to punitive damages to the disproportionate number of people in prison, the United States is an island in the sea of international law.

And the very issue of whether American judges should ever take account of foreign law is hotly disputed. At the hearings on their Supreme Court nominations, both John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they thought it a mistake to consider foreign law in constitutional cases.

But the international consensus against life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders may nonetheless help Ms. Jones. In about a dozen cases recently filed around the country on behalf of 13- and 14-year-olds sentenced to life in prison, lawyers for the inmates relied on a 2005 Supreme Court decision that banned the execution of people who committed crimes when they were younger than 18.

That decision, Roper v. Simmons, was based in part on international law. Noting that the United States was the only nation in the world to sanction the juvenile death penalty, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said it was appropriate to look to “the laws of other countries and to international authorities as instructive” in interpreting the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

He added that teenagers were different from older criminals — less mature, more susceptible to peer pressure and more likely to change for the better. Those findings, lawyers for the juvenile lifers say, should apply to their clients, too.

“Thirteen- and 14-year-old children should not be condemned to death in prison because there is always hope for a child,” said Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which represents Ms. Jones and several other juvenile lifers.

The 2005 death penalty ruling applied to 72 death-row inmates, almost precisely the same number as the 73 prisoners serving life without parole for crimes committed at 13 or 14.

The Supreme Court did not abolish the juvenile death penalty in a single stroke. The 2005 decision followed one in 1988 that held the death penalty unconstitutional for those who had committed crimes under 16.

The new lawsuits, filed in Alabama, California, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Wisconsin, seek to follow a similar progression.

“We’re not demanding that all these kids be released tomorrow,” Mr. Stevenson said. “I’m not even prepared to say that all of them will get to the point where they should be released. We’re asking for some review.”

In defending American policy in this area in 2006, the State Department told the United Nations that sentencing is usually a matter of state law. “As a general matter,” the department added, juvenile offenders serving life-without-parole terms “were hardened criminals who had committed gravely serious crimes.”

Human rights groups have disputed that. According to a 2005 report from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, 59 percent of the more than 2,200 prisoners serving life without parole for crimes they committed at 17 or younger had never been convicted of a previous crime. And 26 percent were in for felony murder, meaning they participated in a crime that led to a murder but did not themselves kill anyone.

The new report focuses on the youngest offenders, locating 73 juvenile lifers in 19 states who were 13 and 14 when they committed their crimes. Pennsylvania has the most, with 19, and Florida is next, with 15. In those states and Illinois, Nebraska, North Carolina and Washington, 13-year-olds have been sentenced to die in prison.

In most of the cases, the sentences were mandatory, an automatic consequence of a murder conviction after being tried as an adult.

A federal judge here will soon rule on Ms. Jones’s challenge to her sentence. Ms. Poston, who prosecuted her, said Ms. Jones was beyond redemption.

“Between the ages of 2 and 3, you develop a conscience,” Ms. Poston said. “She never got the voice that says, ‘This is bad, Ashley.’ ”

“It was a blood bath in there,” Ms. Poston said of the night of the murders here, in 1999. “Ashley Jones is not the poster child for the argument that life without parole is too long.”

In a telephone interview from the Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Ala., Ms. Jones said she did not recognize the girl who committed her crimes. According to court filings, her mother was a drug addict and her stepfather had sexually molested her. “Everybody I loved, everybody I trusted, I was betrayed by,” Ms. Jones said.

“I’m very remorseful about what happened,” she said. “I should be punished. I don’t feel like I should spend the rest of my life in prison.”

Mrs. Nalls, her grandmother, had been married for 53 years when she and her husband, Deroy Nalls, agreed to take Ashley in. She was “a problem child,” and Mr. Nalls was a tough man who took a dislike to Ashley’s boyfriend, Geramie Hart. Mr. Hart, who was 16 at the time of the murders, is also serving a life term. Mrs. Nalls said he deserved a shot at parole someday as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/us/17teenage.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin (Map at this URL)

Posted by lois at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2007

Troubles Mount Within Texas Youth Detention Agency

“They get paid about the same as a Wal-Mart employee for a dangerous job that most people don’t want to do,” said Scott Henson, founder of Grits for Breakfast, a criminal justice blog. “So they have had to reach deeper and deeper into the bottom of the barrel.”

October 16, 2007
Troubles Mount Within Texas Youth Detention Agency
By SOLOMON MOORE, NY Times

AUSTIN, Tex. — Juvenile detainees as young as 13 years old slept on filthy mats in dormitories with broken, overflowing toilets and feces smeared on the walls. Denied outside recreation for weeks at a time, they ate bug-infested food, did school work that consisted of little more than crossword puzzles and defecated in bags.

After months of glowing state reports, the squalid conditions were disclosed on Oct. 1 by state inspectors at the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center in Bronte. They are another sign of the deep disarray of the Texas Youth Commission, the nation’s second-largest, after Florida’s, and most troubled juvenile corrections agency.

The agency already faces state and federal investigations into accusations of sexual abuse by juvenile corrections officers. In March, the commission’s board of directors resigned under pressure, and many other top officials have been ousted. After a review by an expert panel, more than 200 inmates were released from some of the state’s 13 residential confinement centers because their sentences had been improperly extended.

There are also reports of endemic violence at some centers. At least 11,000 youth-on-youth assaults occur every year, according to state figures, and in the last 12 months there were 14,000 assaults on staff members.

State officials say chronic job vacancy rates and critical employee turnover are at the root of many of the system’s problems. Employee terminations since September 2006 have far outpaced recruitment. The agency has hired 870 juvenile corrections officers since September 2006 to October 2007. In that period 1,241 officers left their positions, or about half the juvenile corrections officers.

One-third of the departing officers were fired for poor performance, falsification of applications or inappropriate conduct, including physical abuse of detainees.

In August, the acting director of the agency, Dimitria D. Pope, the fourth person to run it since February, was confident enough about the system’s progress that she assured politicians that the abuse of juveniles had been “98 percent” eliminated.

The new Coke County disclosures seem to have shaken Ms. Pope’s optimism.

“I don’t know how deep the problems really are in terms of the corruption in the organization,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Pope has transferred the 197 offenders in Bronte to other institutions, fired seven monitoring officials and canceled an $8 million contract with the GEO Corporation, the prison company in Boca Raton, Fla., that managed the center. The state has also opened a criminal investigation and a review of the adult prisons run by GEO.

GEO executives said in a news release that they had “provided quality detention services at the center for 13 years” and announced plans to market it to local and federal agencies.

The agency’s 13 institutions are often hundreds of miles from metropolitan areas, and salaries starting around $23,000 have hindered recruiting staff members, say corrections officials and juvenile justice experts.

“They get paid about the same as a Wal-Mart employee for a dangerous job that most people don’t want to do,” said Scott Henson, founder of Grits for Breakfast, a criminal justice blog. “So they have had to reach deeper and deeper into the bottom of the barrel.”

State auditors found that on average there was one corrections officer for every 24 juveniles, double the nationally accepted standard. Corrections officials say that with so few guards it is impossible to monitor youths adequately and defuse dangerous situations.

“Insufficiently paid staff, not enough staff — these are fairly common problems throughout the nation,” said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, Calif. “But the breakdown in Texas is more dramatic than any other place I’ve seen.”

The violence in the agency’s institutions has led to soaring injury rates, with more than 700 officers filing claims since September 2006, a higher proportion than at Texas’ adult prisons.

Detainees also suffer injuries. In 2007, Texas public hospitals said that 60 youths had sustained broken bones, many because of improper force by corrections officers. The commission tracked 11,881 uses of force from September 2006 to September 2007, including pepper spray and grappling holds.

Natalie Jordan, a juvenile corrections officer, is a 27-year veteran of the agency and the mother of a 15-year-old serving 12 months for burglary at the Crockett State School in East Texas.

Since he was committed, Ms. Jordan’s son has been in more fights than she can recount. In one fight, a corrections officer dislocated her son’s shoulder while trying to hold him. In another, she said, an officer broke up a fight by blasting her son in the face with pepper spray.

Don Sorgman said his 17-year-old stepson had repeatedly been assaulted by other offenders since he was committed in February for stealing from a snack machine.

Mr. Sorgman learned about the assaults from his son and from a profanity-laced letter sent to him by self-proclaimed gang members who bragged that they had physically dominated the boy. Mr. Sorgman said his son had also been pepper sprayed by guards at least twice.

“He’s a different person than he was,” Mr. Sorgman said, recalling his impressions after a recent visit with his stepson. “The hardships he has been put through has definitely hardened him, changed him, and not for the better.”

The use of pepper spray became a new source of contention for the agency in August, when Ms. Pope issued a memorandum expanding its use. Ms. Pope argued that juvenile corrections officers needed help controlling their short-staffed units and that pepper spray was safer than physically restraining disruptive or violent young people.

Despite a court settlement in September that halted the expansion policy in lieu of public hearings on the question, incidents of using pepper spray have spiked. The agency reported 652 such events from September 2006 to August 2007, a fourfold increase over the previous 12 months.

“I know a lot of people who have broken arms and ankles while trying to hold these kids,” said Tony Cox, a corrections officer at the Ron Jackson State Juvenile Correctional Complex in Brownwood. “That’s why I’m a strong believer in using pepper spray before actually grabbing a kid.”

In September, a state task force charged with recommending reforms to the agency said the debate between supporters of physical restraints and pepper spray presented “a false choice.”

“The challenge,” it said, was for the agency “to find ways to decrease all uses of force through an emphasis on other methods.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/us/16juvenile.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

October 15, 2007

NYC: Study Finds Disparities in Subprime Mortgages by Race

October 15, 2007
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
NY Times

Study Finds Disparities in Mortgages by Race
Home buyers in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods in New York City were more likely to get their mortgages last year from a subprime lender than home buyers in white neighborhoods with similar income levels, according to a new analysis of home loan data by researchers at New York University.

The analysis, by N.Y.U.’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, illustrates stark racial differences between the New York City neighborhoods where subprime mortgages — which can come with higher interest rates, fees and penalties — were common and those where they were rare. The 10 neighborhoods with the highest rates of mortgages from subprime lenders had black and Hispanic majorities, and the 10 areas with the lowest rates were mainly non-Hispanic white.

The analysis showed that even when median income levels were comparable, home buyers in minority neighborhoods were more likely to get a loan from a subprime lender.

In Jamaica, Queens, for example, where the majority is black and the median household income was $45,000 in 2005, 46 percent of the mortgages were issued by lenders who specialize in subprime loans, the second highest rate in the city. In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which had a median income of $50,000 and is mostly white, the rate was among the lowest in the city, with 3.6 percent of home loans coming from subprime lenders.

The analysis provides only a limited picture of subprime borrowing in New York City. The data does not include details on borrowers’ assets, down payments or debt loads, all key factors in mortgage lending. And comparing neighborhoods is inexact; the typical borrower in one may differ from a typical borrower in another.

Jay Brinkmann, an economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association, said there was not enough information in the Furman Center analysis and other studies on the issue to draw conclusions about whether subprime lenders were discriminating against minority home buyers. One of the crucial missing pieces is the credit histories of individual borrowers, he said.

But the Furman Center study, a summary of which is being released today, still raises questions about the role of race in lending practices. A separate analysis of mortgage data by The New York Times shows that even at higher income levels, black borrowers in New York City were far more likely than white borrowers with similar incomes and mortgage amounts to receive a subprime loan.

“It’s almost as if subprime lenders put a circle around neighborhoods of color and say, ‘This is where we're going to do our thing,’” said Robert Stroup, a lawyer and the director of the economic justice program at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc.

The New York State Division of Human Rights is investigating whether subprime lenders have been engaging in discriminatory practices by singling out minority communities.

The Furman Center analysis is based on 2006 data that lenders disclosed under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.

The study focused on mortgages issued by lenders identified by federal housing officials as subprime specialists in 2005. The list is made up of 210 companies, including major mortgage lenders like HSBC Mortgage Services and CitiFinancial, the consumer finance unit of Citigroup. But some lenders not included in the list may issue subprime loans, and not every loan made by the specialized lenders is subprime.

Even so, housing and civil rights advocates said the findings highlight lending patterns that have long troubled them.

They say minority communities whose financing needs were starved decades ago because of redlining — banks’ refusal to offer loans or other services in minority areas — are now singled out for high-cost, high-risk mortgages in a kind of reverse redlining.

Any loan that carried an interest rate more than 3 percentage points above the prevailing rate for long-term Treasury bonds was considered a subprime mortgage. In 2006, Treasury rates ranged from 4.5 to 5.3 percent. Prime mortgage interest rates averaged 6.1 to 6.8 percent, according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation.

Subprime loans are typically made to borrowers with credit histories that the mortgage industry considers less than prime. They can carry higher interest rates than traditional loans or adjustable rates that can make the mortgage difficult to repay once the interest rate resets. They can also carry higher fees and prepayment penalties and thus are at a high risk for foreclosure.

Kumiki Gibson, the commissioner of the State Division of Human Rights, acknowledged last week that her agency was investigating subprime lenders, but she said she could not discuss the details. “There was enough data to compel us to look into this,” Ms. Gibson said.

She said a variety of lending practices and patterns could be considered unlawful discrimination, like a mortgage broker who works only in certain neighborhoods or who offers white borrowers better rates than similarly qualified black or Hispanic customers. Many mortgages are handled by brokers who work as a liaison between borrowers and lenders and earn a fee

The N.A.A.C.P. filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles this year against 12 mortgage lenders. The lawsuit accuses the companies of steering black borrowers into subprime loans.

An analysis by The Times of the 2006 data that lenders disclosed under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act shows that in New York City, the rate of subprime lending is far higher for minorities than for whites even at higher income levels. For example, 24 percent of non-Hispanic white borrowers earning $125,000 to $150,000 took out a subprime mortgage in 2006, compared with 52 percent of Hispanics and 63 percent of non-Hispanic blacks in the same income range.

For borrowers earning $150,000 to $250,000, the rate of subprime loans was 20 percent for whites, 50 percent for Hispanics and 62 percent for blacks. That analysis looked at all mortgages reported to the federal government, not just those issued by companies identified as subprime lenders.

The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development also analyzed the federal mortgage data and found that last year, 58.5 percent of home loans to non-Hispanic black borrowers were high cost, compared to 15.9 percent for non-Hispanic whites. The percentage of loans to Hispanics that were high cost was 45.5.

Subprime lending, which has grown at a rapid pace in recent years, has made it possible for many New Yorkers with modest incomes and poor credit histories to buy homes. At the same time, those loans have brought some borrowers to the brink of financial ruin or cost them their homes.

Some economists and analysts said examining subprime lending by geography and race could be misleading because of the many variables not represented in the data, including the lack of banking services in some minority communities and historical differences in wealth and income among racial and ethnic groups.

“There certainly is a disgraceful element here, but how big it is, we don’t know,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, who looked at a portion of the Furman Center analysis. “Is it a few rogue lenders, or is it an extensive problem that requires a regulatory response? We don’t know yet.”

The Furman Center’s findings appear to echo recent studies from a number of local and national housing and fair-lending organizations that found racial disparities in subprime lending, high-cost mortgages and foreclosures.

A study by the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research group based in North Carolina, examined 50,000 subprime loans nationwide and found that blacks and Hispanics were 30 percent more likely than whites to be charged higher interest rates, even among borrowers with similar credit ratings. A report released in March by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and other groups found that in New York, blacks were five times and Hispanics almost four times more likely to pay higher interest rates for home loans than whites.

“There’s no question that if you live in a predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhood you’re going to be paying more for your mortgage,” said Sarah Ludwig, executive director of the nonprofit Advocacy Project, which is based in New York.

The Furman Center analysis showed that subprime lending remained widespread in New York. Last year, 19.8 percent of home purchase loans in the city were from subprime lenders, a higher percentage than in San Francisco (8.4 percent), Boston (14.2 percent) and Chicago (15.9 percent). Los Angeles had a rate higher than New York’s, at 25 percent.

New York City’s subprime lending rate decreased by 3 percentage points between 2005 and 2006, but the rate was far higher than it was in 2002, when only 7 percent of loans were subprime, according to the Furman Center.

None of the predominantly white neighborhoods in the Furman Center analysis had a lending rate from subprime companies higher than the overall city rate of 19.8 percent, while numerous black and Hispanic areas did.

In the Middle Village and Ridgewood sections of Queens, both of which have white majorities and had a median income of $47,820 in 2005, 16.7 percent of the loans were issued by subprime lenders. In the Sheepshead Bay and Gravesend areas of Brooklyn, which also are mostly white and had a median income of $40,000, 10.8 percent of the mortgages were from subprime companies. Majority black and Hispanic neighborhoods with median incomes of $40,000 to $50,000 had far higher rates, including East Flatbush, where 44 percent of the loans were from subprime companies, and Queens Village (34.6 percent).

Ford Fessenden contributed reporting
Graphic at this URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/nyregion/15subprime.html?em&ex=1192593600&en=608a506e2d53dc4c&ei=5087%0A

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

NY: This time, real reform

"The 2004 and 2005 reforms affected several hundred A1 and A2 offenders. By contrast, there are 13,900 prisoners now serving time in New York for drug offenses. According to the Correctional Association of New York, a watchdog organization, it has cost taxpayers $1.5 billion to build the prison space needed to house these inmates, and $510 million a year to keep them locked up. A saner policy would be to explore alternatives to incarceration, especially programs that help addicts caught up in the drug trade."

Times Union, Albany, NY
Editorial
This time, real reform

Monday, October 15, 2007

Three years ago, when the Legislature approved the first major reform of the Draconian 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws, critics warned that drug offenders would soon be roaming the streets in record numbers. But it didn't turn out that way. Despite the 2004 reform, which abolished life sentences for the highest-level drug crimes, known as A1, and a subsequent reform in 2005 that gave Class A2 offenders an opportunity to appeal their sentences, law and order was not threatened. To the contrary, the number of people sent to prison for drug offenses actually went up -- to 6,039 last year from 5,657 in 2004.

The reform measures provide further evidence that the Rockefeller Drug Laws should be repealed. They have never served the purpose envisioned by the late Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who believed the fear of a mandatory life sentence would deter anyone from being caught with drugs on his or her person. Instead, drug crime soared, as pushers used so-called mules, usually desperate youngsters, to act as couriers.

Now comes an opportunity for the Spitzer administration to build on the modest reforms of 2004 and 2005 by supporting the repeal of the Rockefeller statutes. This month, the New York State Commission on Sentencing Reform, established by the governor's executive order, will release its review of the state's sentencing practices and alternatives to incarceration. It is the perfect time to urge repeal.

The 2004 and 2005 reforms affected several hundred A1 and A2 offenders. By contrast, there are 13,900 prisoners now serving time in New York for drug offenses. According to the Correctional Association of New York, a watchdog organization, it has cost taxpayers $1.5 billion to build the prison space needed to house these inmates, and $510 million a year to keep them locked up. A saner policy would be to explore alternatives to incarceration, especially programs that help addicts caught up in the drug trade.

Regrettably, judges have no discretion under the Rockefeller Drug Laws to fit the sentence to the crime. That means judges have no choice but to impose harsh punishments on many defendants who are more victims of the drug trade than perpetrators, such as mules.

Just as regrettably, the Legislature has backed away from repeal, largely because of opposition from some district attorneys throughout the state who want to keep the Rockefeller Drug Laws as a club to exact plea bargains from suspects.

But justice should not come at the end of a club. Prosecutors need to do the hard work of building sound cases against the accused, rather than taking the easy way out by using the Rockefeller Drug Laws to frighten a defendant into a plea.

Justice should be based on the severity of the offense, as weighed against extenuating circumstances. That's the job of a judge, not rigid laws that are miscarriages of justice themselves.

THE ISSUE: A state panel will review sentencing policies.
THE STAKES: The group has an opportunity to address repeal of drug laws.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=629795&category=OPINI
ON&newsdate=10/15/2007>

Posted by lois at 09:52 PM | Comments (0)

Kansas takes giant strides to reduce recidivism

Kansas takes giant strides to reduce recidivism
October 14, 2007
Neil Peirce (Syndicated columnist)

Who'd ever thought it? America's most imaginative prisoner re-entry program isn't flourishing in some left-leaning coastal city, but rather in solid "heart of America" Wichita, Kan.

And the program, with immense promise to start reducing burgeoning prison populations, is being pushed by as odd a political couple as you'll ever find –– Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, chair of the Democratic Governors Association, and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., Christian conservative leader and now presidential candidate.

Brownback, a sponsor of the federal Second Chance Act to stimulate state re-entry programs, startled a group of elected officials and community residents in Wichita by saying: "I want to see recidivism in this nation cut in half in the next five years, and I want it to start in Kansas."

Sebelius, her state corrections director and other Cabinet officials have taken up the cause, sponsoring efforts to help inmates get off the familiar treadmill of arrest, incarceration, release, then repeated arrest and yet more prison time. More eligible prisoners are receiving, on their release, needed mental health and drug counseling, training on how to apply for a job, and tips on finding housing.

But beyond state officials, other actors are spurring the Kansas reform effort.

Eric Cadora and Tony Fabelo of the New York-based Justice Mapping Center came to Kansas with maps showing that the vast majority of Kansas prison admissions –– and prisoner re-entries –– occur in a narrowly defined set of economically blighted, overwhelmingly minority neighborhoods in the state's major cities.

The most dramatic problem neighborhood: a bleak ribbon of territory just northeast of downtown Wichita, which had been a poor but thriving African-American area in the 1950s and '60s but then declined sharply. Significantly, the maps showed the neighborhood isn't just a hot spot of prison admissions; it's also off the charts in dilapidated housing, disastrous school scores, levels of foster care and welfare spending.

People "get" such maps, says Cadora, who coined the term "million-dollar block" –– a single census block where government is spending at least $1 million a year to incarcerate people. The most obvious conclusion: that government agencies need to get their act together, break down their organizational "silos" and figure out how to help the ex-prisoners and their families start stabilizing their lives.

Sebelius and the legislative leaders, noting that Kansas' prison population had risen 25 percent in a decade, with projections of another 25 percent rise, turned to the Council of State Governments' Justice Center. The expanded prisons, the Kansans said, will cost $500 million to build and operate. We can't afford that. What can we do?

Michael Thompson, the center's director, honed in on Kansas' problem: Two of every three prisoners, he found, had been on parole, probation or community supervision. Some were being recommitted for a new crime, but close to 90 percent for some parole or probation violation. They tested positive for drugs, they hadn't gotten a job, they failed to pay child support, or they failed to show up for an appointment with their case officer.

Indeed, says Thompson, "The state was abetting a vicious circle –– cutting training or drug treatment programs in prison to find funds to add more prison beds, accelerating recidivism back to prison."

Kansas officials are at work reforming that system statewide, aided by Thompson and his colleagues and foundations ranging from JEHT to Soros to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

And now there's another breakthrough experiment brewing for Wichita's most troubled blocks. With a clear need for quality affordable housing, Richard Baron of McCormack Baron Salazar –– America's premier developer of mixed-income housing areas in troubled cities –– was called in.

Baron told local officials that scattered housing units wouldn't achieve enough –– you need a master planned neighborhood, with housing and improved schools, parks and other facilities, an environment in which ex-prisoners can blend in, receive services they need and have a chance for success. Officials were skeptical at first, but they visited Baron's highly successful St. Louis projects and came back convinced.

Not yet officially confirmed, the Baron project would also seek participation of Wichita State University, which is directly beside the neighborhood. Some major Wichita employers are showing more willingness to hire the former prisoners. America's first remade inner city neighborhood that welcomes and assists, rather than jettisoning people who've done prison time, may well emerge.

Peirce is a syndicated columnist who writes about urban issues. Send e-mail to nrp@citistates.com.
dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-op_peirce_1014oct14,0,5940895.story
Copyright © 2007, Newport News, Va., Daily Press

Posted by lois at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2007

VA: Counties at odds over costs for regional inmates

This article provides an interesting window on the kinds of considerations that come up locally around the financial aspects of jails. Also, the breakdown in elements making up the per head per day cost of incarceration to the county/taxpayers is interesting: actual operational costs vs. debt service (on bonds paying for the jail's construction). Even in this county where apparently the state paid for half of the construction costs, the debt-service portion is nearly as expensive as the operations cost. ____________________________________________________________

"Tankard presented budget information for the regional jail showing that operational costs for 100 inmates as a daily average is $31.93 per day while debt service cost is $27.40 per day -- totalling $59.33. "As you can see, if we're not charging $60 per inmate, we're losing money," he said."

Counties at odds over costs for regional inmates
BY TAD WAYNE TABORN
October 13, 2007
Delmar Times (Salisbury, MD)

EASTVILLE -- Northampton County would need to charge Accomack about $60 per day per inmate at the Eastern Shore Regional Jail to cover incarceration costs there, officials said this week.

The amount, which includes costs of operation and debt service, is far more than the $20 per day approved by the jail board for Accomack at a recent meeting.

The rate is $50 daily for other Virginia localities. A rate for federal inmates has not been determined.

The difference in Northampton's actual cost and Accomack's proposed fee is a startling wrinkle involving another issue in which the two counties struggle for an agreeable, regional approach to a common problem.

An agreement allows Accomack five beds at no charge -- the beds allowed Northampton massive state aid in construction by making it a regional facility.

"Perhaps given this information, Accomack will be more sympathetic," said Supervisor Andrew Barbour at a Northampton County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday.

Accomack already is housing 15 prisoners at the regional facility, Accomack County Sheriff Robert Crockett reported last month.

Crockett, a jail board member, made the motion for the low jail incarceration rate for Accomack. It passed 4-3, with Crockett, Supervisor Reneta Major, Assistant County Administrator Linda Martin Warner and Northampton Supervisor Larry Trala voting in favor.

Northampton Administrator Katie Nunez and Supervisors Richard Tankard and Jack White voted against. Northampton Sheriff Jack Robbins is a non-voting member.

Northampton has been considering instituting fees for the other inmates.

Crockett balked, however, saying in a September meeting that Accomack never had charged Northampton to incarcerate its inmates back when Northampton was having jail problems.

In a letter last Saturday, Northampton Supervisor Richard Tankard took exception, saying that it was always known that Accomack would pay for inmates beyond those five.

Northampton supervisors invited Sheriff Jack Robbins to attend a work session later this month to address the matter.

Tankard presented budget information for the regional jail showing that operational costs for 100 inmates as a daily average is $31.93 per day while debt service cost is $27.40 per day -- totaling $59.33.

"As you can see, if we're not charging $60 per inmate, we're losing money," he said.

Barbour proposed that the sheriff's office be asked to explain "why Northampton County taxpayers should pay for housing Accomack prisoners at a reduced rate."

"We were told we would recoup costs -- this idea has just gone out the window, which is insane," Barbour said.

Crockett told the Accomack County Board of Supervisors last month that building an addition to the regional jail to take care of a growing Accomack inmate population will cost about $8 million, with half that cost reimbursed by the state. It would house up to 100 Accomack inmates.

http://www.delmarvanow.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007710130302

Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

Parolees proving doubters wrong?

Parolees proving doubters wrong?
Release of 2 convicted killers led to sacking of parole board in 2002

Sunday, Oct 14, 2007 - 12:09 AM Updated: 06:13 AM

By FRANK GREEN
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER (VA)
The release of inmates Joseph N. Martin and Floyd R. Honesty six years ago so angered former Govs. Jim Gilmore and Mark R. Warner that the repercussions continue.

The Virginia Parole Board -- dubbed the "no parole board" by inmates -- was sacked by newly elected Warner after it freed two convicted killers just before Christmas 2001.

That board is long gone.

Martin and Honesty, however, are still on parole, thus far affirming the decision to free them.

"I just pretty much go on about my way living a normal life," said Martin, now married, a homeowner and the office manager of a Richmond-area law firm. He added, "I'd prefer to be off parole, because it's like a heavy boulder over your head."

One of the dumped Parole Board members, Charles Waddell, a former state senator, does not like what happened, but he understands it.

"From a political standpoint I can't argue with what [Warner] did, asking for the resignation of the entire Parole Board," he said.

However, Waddell said, "we felt both these individuals would do well, which has proven to be the case. . . . I think we did the right thing and I have not lost a day's sleep over that in the past six years."

But some Parole-Board decisions have been failures, a handful so spectacularly tragic they grabbed the attention of elected officials with great effect on public policy.

Just months after James Albert Steele III was paroled with a good prison record in 1990, he murdered a Richmond preacher who befriended him. The slaying helped elect George Allen governor and end parole in Virginia.

Honesty, 53, on parole in Fairfax, declined to comment for this story. Martin, 57, agreed to an interview, interested in assisting the deserving among the roughly 9,000 Virginia inmates still eligible for parole.

"I don't want to create so much controversy or confusion . . . about me that it detracts" from the larger issue of parole, he said.

In 1979, an Arlington jury sentenced Martin, an insurance agent, to life in prison after convicting him of the slayings of a client and his fiancée as part of a scheme to collect on a policy.

Helen F. Fahey, later elected Arlington commonwealth's attorney, helped prosecute him. She declined to comment last week on Martin or his parole.

However, in December 2001, after Martin was released, she told The Washington Post, she was "absolutely appalled" that Parole Board members who had doubts about Martin's guilt had not consulted prosecutors.

Warner, too, was upset. Two months later he appointed Fahey chairwoman of a new Parole Board, a position she still holds.

Warner also cut the board from five full-time members to three full-time and two part-time positions.

Among other things, Warner and Gilmore accused the old board of not properly notifying local authorities before the releases. Waddell said a fax problem delayed notification of Arlington prosecutors until after Martin was released.

Otherwise, he said, all proper procedures were followed. Waddell contends that Gilmore and Warner were reacting to criticism from local prosecutors and feared a stiff political price if the parolees committed new crimes.

Waddell conceded, however, that to an extent Fahey was right -- he was impressed by claims Martin was innocent.

"We're not supposed to retry a case. But there was some doubt in our minds on whether Martin was actually guilty or not." However, he insists, "that's beside the point -- he had an outstanding record inside of prison. He has done extremely well."

Linda Pitman, then vice chairwoman of the board, said she was swayed only by Martin and Honesty's prison records.

"I actually am just thrilled that they are both doing well," Pitman said last week. "I want only the best for both of them."

Pitman was appointed by Allen, who wanted a strong victims' voice on the board. She was raped in 1989.

Martin served 22 years in prison. He was repeatedly turned down for parole but then granted it in a 4-1 board vote. He was released Dec. 21, 2001.

Martin got married last year and helps care for his 93-year-old mother. He works for Richmond lawyer Brent Jackson, who said he has known Martin for decades.

"He's a very good employee," said Jackson, who believes Martin is innocent of the murders.

Martin said it has not been difficult to stay out of trouble. He has a car, friends, family and other support that many parolees lack. Also, he said, he does not have a substance-abuse problem. He tries to help others on parole, he said.

There are people in prison who belong there and shouldn't be paroled, he said. But there are others who, "if given an opportunity, could do every bit as good as I've done and probably better," he added.

"I'm a very fortunate guy," Martin said. "I just want to live the rest of my life, whatever's left of it, out here and not in there."
Contact Frank Green at (804) 649-6340 or fgreen@timesdispatch.com.

Posted by lois at 06:10 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Senators question monitoring of privately run prisons

Senators question monitoring of privately run prisons
Senators seek answers in wake of TYC's Coke County closure
Saturday, October 13, 2007

By EMILY RAMSHAW / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Senators demanded Friday to know who's monitoring the state's privately operated prisons, and questioned whether Texas should be using outside contractors for any of their corrections facilities.

Their concerns followed the Texas Youth Commission's sudden closure this month of the privately run Coke County Juvenile Justice Center – a nearly 200-inmate facility in West Texas where top TYC administrators say they found atrocious conditions – and revelations that the officials charged with overseeing that facility weren't doing their jobs.

Three of the four TYC monitors fired over the Coke County conditions had formerly worked for GEO Group Inc., the Florida-based company that operated the youth prison, a Dallas Morning News investigation has found. GEO, which still operates more than a dozen adult facilities in Texas, has been accused of providing poor health care and failing to protect inmates from abuse in states across the country.

"If that can happen in the TYC, the next question would be, what about the other agencies that confine individuals?" said Sen. John Whitmire, the Houston Democrat who called Friday's Senate Criminal Justice Committee meeting after GEO played down conditions at the youth prison and sent its lobbyists to persuade legislators to reinstate its contract. "Who's monitoring the monitors?"

GEO officials could not be reached Friday to comment on their contracts with other adult facilities in Texas. But in a letter delivered to TYC Acting Executive Director Dimitria Pope early this week, GEO Chairman and CEO George Zoley said his company now accepts the decision to close the Coke County facility.

On Friday, Ms. Pope told lawmakers her agency missed the crisis at Coke County because of an "incestuous" relationship between TYC monitors and employees at the facility. And she said problems were only reported at a regional level, never making it up to headquarters. Those personnel and structural issues are being rectified, she said, by performing more intensive audits and bolstering the agency's conflict of interest policies.

Her solutions weren't enough for Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen, who said he has serious concerns about the state continuing to use private providers at all. Mr. Hinojosa said he has little faith that state agencies are properly vetting their contractors, when a "simple Internet search" should've made GEO a poor choice.

"The private sector, their goal is to make a profit. They're going to cut corners, going to cut services," Mr. Hinojosa said. "In light of the many complaints and lawsuits filed nationwide, maybe at some point we need to reconsider whether we should privatize ... instead of us taking the responsibility."

The Coke County closure came abruptly, at a time lawmakers believed they'd resolved the worst of the TYC's problems. The youth corrections agency underwent a major overhaul this spring after a months-long physical and sexual abuse scandal – one uncovered by The News and the Texas Observer.

But GEO's troubles aren't limited to the TYC, including inmate deaths at facilities in Val Verde, Willacy and Dickens counties.

Shirley Noble, mother of Scot Noble Payne, the Dickens County inmate who slashed his throat this year, testified Friday. She strained to get out words Friday as she told the committee the story of her son's emotional downslide and suicide. The family is filing a lawsuit against GEO.

"He was moving from bad to worse. ... There was no end to the degradation," Ms. Noble said, describing her son's accounts of feces and blood-covered blankets and pillows, and floors and walls covered in wet mold. "He wrote incredibly long and detailed letters to me ... his only way to find freedom from the horror he was experiencing."

Ron Rodriguez, an attorney representing the families in the Dickens and Willacy County cases, said these cases prove the problems at the Coke County facility are not isolated.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/DN-prisons_13tex.ART.State.Edition1.42763cf.html#

Posted by lois at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2007

Faith-Based Prison Programs Flourish

Faith-Based Prison Programs Flourish

By DAVID CRARY – October 12, 2007

RICHMOND, Texas (AP) — Killer-turned-artist Manny Hernandez on the prison where he's finishing an eight-year term: "It's a blessing to be here."

Fellow murderer and inmate Raymond Hall likens it to heaven.

"I love this place," says their warden, Cynthia Tilley. "It's so calm."

They're praising the Carol Vance Unit, founded in 1997 on the outskirts of Houston. It's the oldest of a rapidly growing number of faith-based prison facilities across the nation.

Even as they proliferate, fueled by the fervor of devout volunteers, these programs are often criticized. Evidence that they reduce recidivism is inconclusive, and skeptics question whether the prevailing evangelical tone of the units discriminates against inmates who don't share their conservative Christian outlook.

However, evidence is strong that violence and trouble-making drop sharply in these programs, and they often are the only vibrant rehabilitation option at a time when taxpayer-funded alternatives have been cut back.

Inmates at Vance offer another compelling argument. Unlike many of America's 2 million prisoners, they feel they are treated with respect. They have hope.

"A bunch of cats in prison, they never had anyone show them love — even their mother and father," said Anzetta Smith, who served 18 years for attempted murder before graduating from Vance this year. "You get in the program, and everybody shows you love."

Impressed by the Vance operation, Texas officials have opened a dozen faith-based dorms elsewhere in the state, accommodating some 1,300 inmates. At one dorm, at the maximum-security Allred prison near Wichita Falls, infractions by the inmates dropped more than 90 percent once they entered the program.

At Vance, a minimum-security prison, fights among inmates are rare, said Tommie Dorsett, a former parole officer who has directed the unit's Christian-based InnerChange Freedom Initiative since its inception.

He could recall only one incident in those 10 years when a correctional officer used force. "And that officer overreacted," Dorsett said.

Security at Vance is the state's responsibility. But the intensive, daylong programming is entirely in the hands of InnerChange, a project of the Prison Fellowship ministry founded by Chuck Colson, the former Nixon aide imprisoned because of the Watergate scandal.

Vance and eight other InnerChange programs in Kansas, Minnesota, Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa operate on the strength of Prison Fellowship's private financial resources and legions of volunteers.

In Florida, by contrast, the Department of Corrections has taken a more direct role, transforming three prisons — two for men, one for women — into "faith and character-based institutions" which it runs itself. The department says inmates at the three prisons committed 30 percent fewer infractions than comparable inmates elsewhere. A state task force recommended creating five more faith-based facilities.

The InnerChange program at Vance is open, on a voluntary basis, to men with less than two years left on their sentences. Sex offenders and inmates with bad disciplinary records are excluded. The days are filled with spiritual and academic classes, community meetings and work duties.

Bibles are a common sight on the bedside tables in the inmates' cubicles. Religious paintings, including eye-catching works by self-taught Manny Hernandez, decorate the walls.

Tilley, the warden, said the security staff is asked to treat the inmates politely. The atmosphere can be a pleasant shock to men arriving from tougher prisons.

"In my other prison, on a daily basis there was rape, drugs," said Raymond Hall, who was convicted at 16 of murder and hopes to complete his 15-year sentence in early 2009. "When you come to Carol Vance, it's like a load is lifted. It's like heaven."

Hall had just completed a class where readings included Bible passages and pastor Rick Warren's best-seller, "The Purpose Driven Life."

The instructor, Doug Jeffrey, urged the men to focus on using their resources — family, faith, education — to plan for succeeding when they go free.

"When you got accepted for this program, maybe that was the first time you realized God has a plan for you," Jeffrey said. "You guys are a chosen nation. You go out from prison with a different mind-set from guys not in this program."

Each inmate is assigned a volunteer mentor who provides counseling before and after release, assisting with job hunting and housing. Outgoing inmates are feted at a graduation ceremony, then leave the prison with their mentor — a sharp contrast to most Texas inmates, who exit with no assistance beyond $50 and directions to the bus station.

Florida's program also welcomes help from a wide range of volunteers, mostly but not exclusively from Christian organizations. Among them is Allison DeFoor, a former sheriff and judge who volunteers at the Lawtey prison near Jacksonville.

"It didn't feel like any prison I'd been to in my life," DeFoor said. "It felt more like a college."

However, the department's chaplaincy director, Alex Taylor, sees possible problems ahead if well-motivated inmates are concentrated in a few facilities.

"These type of inmates have a calming effect — they help maintain good work levels and good behavior," Taylor said. "If we put them all in one institution, it could have a bad effect on the bad guys elsewhere."

Elizabeth Alexander, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, has qualms about whether the faith-based programs are fair to non-Christian inmates but hesitates to criticize them because they fill a void. Two decades of tough-on-crime policies have sharply reduced the number of rehabilitative prison programs, she said, and volunteer-driven religious initiatives offer states a low-cost way to meet some of the demand.

In all, at least 10 states now have faith-based prison dorms. The Corrections Corporation of America, which operates private prisons, has separate "faith pods" housing about 1,660 inmates at 24 prisons in 13 states.

"The inmates have far fewer discipline issues," said CCA's John Lanz.

While disciplinary trends have been easy to track, it's been harder to compile data proving that faith-based programs succeed at their core mission — reducing recidivism.

Nationally, federal experts estimate that two-thirds of inmates released from state prisons are re-arrested for serious offenses within three years, and 52 percent go back behind bars. Proponents of faith-based programs insist they can achieve lower rates. But supportive data remains scarce, and some skeptics say the programs "cherry-pick" motivated inmates who would be less likely to re-offend under any circumstances.

Only about 10 percent of the inmates released from Florida's faith-based prisons have been reincarcerated. But an independent study last year also found very low recidivism among Florida inmates with similar characteristics who didn't go through the faith program.

Similarly, proponents of the InnerChange program at Vance have touted a 2003 study asserting that only 8 percent of its graduates returned to prison. But critics belittled that finding, saying it measured recidivism only for inmates who completed the program and got jobs, not for the larger number who dropped out and had a high recidivism rate.

"It's not that these programs are a bad idea," said Dan Mears, a Florida State University criminologist. "But there's no good evidence that they work."

To some graduates, like Anzetta Smith, their own positive experience is evidence enough.

He now works for a tent manufacturer and dates a nurse who shares his newly deepened faith.

"There's a team of support that's willing to help with any problem you have," said Smith, 47, after a weekly self-help meeting in Houston. "Our chances of staying out are way better because of it."

Leaders of InnerChange and other faith-based programs say they don't tolerate coercive proselytizing and welcome inmates of all faiths, as well as nonbelievers.

At Vance, the inmates include Quan Pham, 28, a Buddhist whose family came from Vietnam to Texas when he was 2. He's now in eighth year of a 10-year sentence for aggravated robbery committed while he was attending the University of Houston.

Pham said he was comfortable with the volunteers who teach Christian principles at Vance.

"They say, 'Try it, you might like it,' but they don't try to impose it on you," he said. "They don't expect anything from you except to participate."

However, the InnerChange program in Iowa is the target of a lawsuit filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which contends that state funds were used for religious indoctrination. It alleges that cooperative inmates received preferential treatment, while some Roman Catholic inmates — not embracing the evangelical approach — were denigrated.

A federal judge agreed with Americans United. He ordered the program be shut down, and said InnerChange must reimburse its $1.5 million payment from the state. The case could have ramifications for faith-based programs nationwide. It's now under appeal, and the program has been allowed to continue temporarily using only private funds, as is the policy at Vance and other InnerChange programs.

Alex Luchenitser, an Americans United attorney, said his group's primary concern is equal treatment of all inmates, regardless of their faith or lack of one.

"Legally, it's not relevant whether these programs are effective or not," he said.

InnerChange officials have repudiated the anti-Catholic attitudes recounted during the Iowa trial and insist they welcome a diversity of inmates.

Nonetheless, participation by Muslim and Catholic inmates in some of the programs has been modest. At Vance, only 16 of the more than 270 inmates are Catholic — far from the overall 20 percent that Catholics constitute throughout the Texas prison system.

Sam Dunning, a deacon overseeing Catholic social-justice programs in Houston, suggested that InnerChange's evangelical flavor could unsettle Catholic inmates even if they encountered no overt pressure.

"For us to go to Bible study, to hymn sings — that's not complete," Dunning said. "We need the Mass, we need a priest present."

Prison Fellowship's president, former Virginia attorney general Mark Earley, said any move to curtail evangelicals' volunteer work in prisons would undermine the prospects for greater nationwide emphasis on rehabilitation.

"If you excluded faith-based groups, you're excluding the largest number of people willing to be involved," he said. "There's not a whole lot of other people lining up at the prison doors."

Lloyd Knapp, a retired corporate executive who volunteers at Vance, is among those who pitches in.

As a mentor, Knapp, 76, tries to keep in touch with his proteges after their release. At the prison, he counsels inmates who come into a tiny office to share their troubles.

"Some just need someone to listen," Knapp said. "I'm not telling them how to live their life. Everything in life God has given them, and it's up to them how to use it." On the Net:

* InnerChange: http://www.ifiprison.org

Posted by lois at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2007

FL: Jury Takes 90 Minutes to Acquit Nurse, Guards in Boot Camp Death of a 14 Year Old Boy

Guards, Nurse Acquitted In Boot Camp Death
PANAMA CITY, Fla., Oct. 12, 2007

(CBS/AP) Eight former boot camp workers were acquitted of manslaughter Friday in the death of a 14-year-old boy who was videotaped being punched and kicked. The scene sparked outrage and changes in the juvenile system, but jurors took just 90 minutes to decide it was not a crime.

Anger over the verdict was obvious outside the courtroom, where bystanders screamed "murderer" at former guard Henry Dickens has described his relief at the verdict.

Martin Lee Anderson died a day after being hit and kicked by Dickens and six other guards as a nurse watched, a 30-minute confrontation that drew protests in the state capital and spelled the end of Florida's system of juvenile boot camps.

"I am truly, truly sorry this happened. Myself, I love kids," said Dickens, 60. He added that Anderson "wasn't beaten. Those techniques were taught to us and used for a purpose."

The defendants testified that they followed the rules at a get-tough facility where young offenders often feigned illness to avoid exercise. Their attorneys said that Anderson died not from rough treatment, but from a previously undiagnosed blood disorder.

The boy's mother, Gina Jones, stormed out of the courtroom. "I cannot see my son no more. Everybody see their family members. It's wrong," she said, distraught.

"You kill a dog, you go to jail," said her lawyer, Benjamin Crump. "You kill a little black boy and nothing happens." He spoke outside
court, which is across the street from the now-closed Bay County boot camp.

Anderson's family repeatedly sat through the painful video as it played during testimony. They had long sought a trial, claiming local officials tried to cover up the case. The conservative Florida Panhandle county is surrounded by military bases, and residents are known for their respect for law and order.

The guards, who are white, black and Asian, stood quietly as the judge read the verdicts. The all-white jury was escorted away from the courthouse and did not comment.

Special prosecutor Mark Ober said in a statement he was "extremely disappointed," but added, "In spite of these verdicts, Martin Lee Anderson did not die in vain. This case brought needed attention and reform to our juvenile justice system."

The defendants would have faced up to 30 years in prison had they been convicted of aggravated manslaughter of a child. The jury also decided against convicting them of lesser charges, including child neglect and culpable negligence.

However, the state trial may not be the end of the case.

The techniques used by the guards, and all the evidence, are now being reviewed by the Department of Justice, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann. Federal prosecutors will determine if there were any civil rights violations.

The Justice Department in Washington issued a statement Friday saying the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorney for Northern Florida will review all the evidence in the boot camp case, including state trial transcripts.

Defense attorneys called such a case unlikely.

"With a 90-minute verdict after a three-week trial (in the state case), it would be the same result," said attorney Bob Sombathy, wh represents ex-guard Patrick Garrett.

Aside from hitting Anderson, the guards dragged him around the military-style camp's exercise yard and forced him to inhale ammonia capsules in what they said was an attempt to revive him. The nurse stood by watching.

Defense attorneys argued that the guards properly handled what they thought was a juvenile offender faking illness to avoid exercising on his first day in the camp. He was brought there for violating probation for stealing his grandmother's car and trespassing at a school.

The defense said Anderson's death was unavoidable because he had undiagnosed sickle cell trait, a usually harmless blood disorder that can hinder blood cells' ability to carry oxygen during physical stress.

Prosecutors said the eight defendants neglected the boy by neglecting his medical needs after he collapsed while running laps. They said the defendants suffocated Anderson by covering his mouth and forcing him to inhale ammonia.

"You may not hear anything coming out of that video sound-wise, but that video is screaming to you in a loud, clear voice — it is telling you that these defendants killed Martin Lee Anderson," prosecutor Scott Harmon said in his closing argument.

Anderson died Jan. 6, 2006, when he was taken off life support, a day after the altercation. The case quickly grew and shook up the state's boot camp and law enforcement system amid the boy's family alleging a cover-up.

An initial autopsy by Dr. Charles Siebert, the medical examiner for Bay County, found Anderson died of natural causes from sickle cell trait. A second autopsy was ordered and another doctor concluded that the guards suffocated Anderson through their repeated use of ammonia capsules and by covering his mouth.

"I am feeling a little vindicated. People got to see a lot more than what's been publicized in the media," said Siebert, who was widely
criticized for his autopsy. He said he was going to celebrate with some of the guards.

Anderson's death led to the resignation of Florida Department of Law Enforcement chief Guy Tunnell, who established the camp when he was Bay County sheriff.

Then-Gov. Jeb Bush had been a strong supporter of the juvenile boot camps, but after Anderson's death he backed the Legislature's move to shut down the system and put more money into a less militaristic program.

The Legislature agreed to pay Anderson's family $5 million earlier this year to settle civil claims.

© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/12/national/main3361441.shtml? Source=RSSattr=U.S._3361441

Posted by lois at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

Detroit Free Press Editorial: Business plan helps prisoners and prisons

Business plan helps prisoners and prisons
Detroit Free Press Editorial

October 11, 2007

Michigan legislators haven't done much lately that's worth bragging about, but they have gotten some things right. Among them was recent approval of a bill signed into law last week by Gov. Jennifer Granholm that will enable the state to employ more of the state's 50,000 prison inmates without using tax dollars.

Lost in the chaotic action of recent weeks on the state budget, the new law will allow state prisoners to make clothing for general sale, most likely dress shirts and khakis, as long as the products don't compete with a Michigan business. The Michigan Department of Corrections should develop a business plan and start production as quickly as possible. Prison factories already make uniforms for correctional officers and some police agencies, so the machinery is in place.

Advertisement
Up to now, prison factories, called Michigan State Industries, could sell products only to government agencies and nonprofits. The industries employ 1,000 inmates, who earn up to 90 cents an hour -- top wages for prisoners. Besides clothing, prison industries also make license plates, office furniture and cleaning supplies, but the new law applies to clothing only.

Sen. Jason Allen, R-Traverse City, introduced the bill. Allen, who owns a men's clothing store, was inspired by Oregon's successful Prison Blues program.

Michigan State Industries is self-supporting through a revolving fund. The Department of Corrections, facing another $100 million in cuts, offers too few education, vocational and work programs. Expanding prison industries is a good way to keep more inmates busy, teach job skills and a work ethic, and provide a little money for inmates and their families -- at no cost to taxpayers.

That's a deal legislators couldn't afford to pass up.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071011/OPINION01/710110354/1069

Posted by lois at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)

SC:: In single day, church plants 24,000 Purpose Driven books in S.C. prisons

In single day, church plants 24,000 Purpose Driven books in S.C. prisons

By Hannah Elliott

Published: October 11, 2007, Associated Baptist Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. (ABP) -- Giving Rick Warren’s best-selling The Purpose Driven Life to prisoners is nothing new for church volunteers.

In fact, O.J. Simpson reportedly received a copy of the inspirational book from ministers at Clark County Detention Center in Las Vegas, where he recently was incarcerated on armed robbery charges.

But St. Andrews Baptist Church in Columbia, S.C., is distributing the book on a much broader scale than most groups. On Sept. 25, church members gave a copy of The Purpose Driven Life to every prisoner in the South Carolina Department of Corrections. They gave away some 24,000 copies.

Greg Barr, pastor of St. Andrews, came up with the idea after his involvement with a 30-year-old bible study group at a prison in Columbia. They had studied another of Warren’s books, 40 Days of Purpose, together and wanted to expand it.

And expand it they did. In a single day, prison workers and Baptist volunteers transported thousands of books to the state’s 29 prisons.

“It was a surprise for some of our folks because in a lot of the prisons, they were expecting that we’d set up tables at the chapel and let inmates come to us, but it wasn’t like that,” Barr said. “They just sent us out to the dorms. It wasn’t a real sterile deal -- you were out there just interacting with the guys.”

Barr’s pet project had plenty of inside help. Leaders at the congregation Warren pastors, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., sold the church special prison-tailored versions of the books for $1 a copy. South Carolina corrections officials, who normally limit the number of books inmates can have at a given time, agreed to waive the limit for 30 days so that Warren’s book wouldn’t count against it.

On the outside, volunteers from the two local Baptist associations and the South Carolina Baptist Convention worked with Prison Fellowship and Changing the Way, a group that helps ex-offenders readjust to life outside of prison. The groups have trained their volunteers to teach Bible studies based on the book, with the hope that prisoners will return to their cell blocks and lead additional studies there.

The connection between the Purpose Driven books and Prison Fellowship goes back some years. They’re both tied in with the Celebrate Recovery program, founded by a Saddleback member in 1991 and now in 3,500 prisons worldwide.

The goal is to help men and women avoid becoming repeat offenders. In New Mexico, less than 10 percent of the people who went through the Celebrate Recovery program were back in jail a year later, according to a news release from Saddleback Church. The average recidivism rate for those not involved in Celebrate Recovery is between 65 and 75 percent after one year, according to Saddleback reports.

A former inmate who works for Changing the Way Ministries, Chris Batson, said he cared deeply about the book-delivery project because it impacted him so personally.

“While I was incarcerated, I was given a copy of The Purpose Driven Life, and it changed my life by reminding me that God had not given up on me, and that he still had a plan for my life,” he said.

Walter Andrews, a member at St. Andrews, said the experience even affected his prayer life -- now he can “put faces to the needs that are there” on his list, he said.

“I must say I had mixed emotions about visiting the prison, especially after I realized we would actually go into the dorms and interact with the inmates,” he said. “It turned out to be a very positive experience for me.”

It’s a project that will continue, if Barr has anything to do with it. His church has purchased 35,000 books so far, and his next plan is to send thousands of them to the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice and other county jails.

He’s hoping the effort will “trigger something” in surrounding states, he said.

“I’m hoping people in other states will see this and think, ‘That’s not very hard. I can do that,’” he said. “I’m hoping that someone in Kentucky will hear about it or someone in Arkansas will see this and say, ‘Our church can do that.’”

Barr said he knows of several inmates who have already responded positively to the book, and he anticipates “hearing some great stories in the days ahead.”

Simpson, for one, had ample time to digest Warren’s message. Before his release on bail last month, he spent several days in a 98-square-foot cell under isolation for 20 hours a day -- plenty of time to get some reading in.

http://www.abpnews.com/2796.article

Posted by lois at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Springfield Republican Editorial: Sentencing guidelines and drug disparities

Sentencing guidelines and drug disparities
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Springfield Republican Editorial

When a criminal defendant in a crack cocaine case appears in court, the judge is looking at someone who has gotten himself involved with a dangerous, debilitating and highly addictive drug.

When a criminal defendant in a powder cocaine case appears in court, the judge is looking at someone who has gotten himself involved with a dangerous, debilitating and highly addictive drug.

But there are differences. In the first case, someone convicted of possessing just 5 grams of crack cocaine could end up in jail for five years. But it would take 100 times that amount of cocaine in its powder form to result in the same five-year sentence.

And in the first example, the defendant is likely to be poor and black. Not so in example No. 2.

But there is another similarity in both cases: The judge cannot use his discretion. He is forced instead to rely on federal guidelines and to impose minimum mandatory sentences.

Legislation on Capitol Hill and cases before the U.S. Supreme Court may soon be changing all of that. Two cases that were argued before the high court last week seek to make sense of laws that restrict federal judges from using their discretion in handing down sentences. And Congress may soon be taking up a bill that would stop treating possession of crack and powder cocaine in such different ways.

Both changes are long overdue.

The crack laws were imposed in the 1980s, when the hysteria over the scourge that was ravaging inner cities had reached such heights that something had to be done. At least that was the common wisdom. But the passage of time has shown that much of the legislating was done in haste. Over time, crack cocaine began to seem a lot like cocaine in its powder form - which it is.

Congress must restore a bit of balance, ridding the law of the wild disparity in how the two similar drugs are treated by the law. And the Supreme Court should give judges back the authority to do what they do best - use their judgment and discretion.

Posted by lois at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Cheap Trick: Cash-strapped state legislators are finally considering relaxing mandatory drug sentences.

Cheap trick
Cash-strapped state legislators are finally considering relaxing mandatory drug sentences. Will budget woes succeed where appeals to justice have failed?
BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI

AFTER MORE THAN a decade of tough-on-crime policies — fueled by 13 years of Republican administrations committed to re-introducing prisoners to the joys of lethal injection — the law-and-order atmosphere at the Massachusetts State House has begun to dissipate. A case in point: two bills recently filed on Beacon Hill that take aim at the state’s draconian mandatory-minimum-sentence drug laws.

The first measure, known as Senate Bill 167, would make drug offenders who have already served two-thirds of mandatory-minimum sentences eligible for parole — something that they currently cannot seek, unlike rapists, armed robbers, and child molesters, who are not subject to mandatory minimums. Sponsored by State Senator Cynthia Creem (D-Newton), Senate Bill 167 constitutes a kind of baby step toward reform. The proposal does not repeal mandatory minimums for drug convictions. Nor does it offer a get-out-of-jail-free card for the thousands of drug offenders who’re now languishing in the state’s 22 correctional facilities. It simply tries to ease the impact of these sentences for those who’ve done substantial time.

Senate Bill 167 also dovetails with a much larger reform effort that would moderate the mandatory-sentencing drug laws. That bill, known as House Bill 3302, would institute a comprehensive set of sentencing guidelines for all the state’s 1922 statutory crimes. Under the guidelines, judges would be allowed to depart from the rigid penalties dictated by the mandatory-sentencing drug laws and instead sentence addicts to treatment and intense supervision. The bill, sponsored by State Representative David Linsky (D-Natick), mirrors legislation first drafted seven years ago by the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission, a state agency dedicated to overhauling the criminal-justice system — legislation that has died at the State House every single session since.

But in these tough fiscal times, such sentencing reforms are gaining ground. Senate Bill 167, in fact, has extra appeal. According to the Sentencing Commission, approximately 2000 prisoners are currently serving mandatory minimums — out of close to 20,000 county and state prisoners. Of those, 650 people would be eligible for parole immediately if Senate Bill 167 were to pass. The commission estimates that up to 325 of these drug offenders would receive parole in the first wave. Given that it costs $36,000 per year to house one prisoner, the measure could save as much as $11.7 million almost instantly. These savings were highlighted at a packed, 100-strong May 21 hearing on the two bills before the legislature’s Joint Committee on Criminal Justice — which is expected to recommend the bills in upcoming weeks. Numerous organizations, including the Sentencing Commission, the Supreme Judicial Court, and local and state bar associations, spoke in favor of the proposed legislation. Those who attended the hearing say committee members repeatedly questioned the cost of the current drug policies. Even the state’s district attorneys, who’ve consistently opposed loosening mandatory minimums, seemed willing to compromise. Although the district attorneys reject Senate Bill 167 and House Bill 3302, they have expressed a willingness to modify certain mandatory minimums.

For those who back sentencing reform, the state’s ballooning budget crisis has opened a window of opportunity. Advocates who’ve long criticized the mandatory-drug-sentencing policies are seizing on the existing climate as a chance to change hearts and minds among fiscal conservatives and unlikely political allies. As Lynn Holbein, a member of the local chapter of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), puts it, "Today, there’s opportunity in the midst of our budget crisis. Politicians who were unwilling to make these decisions based on what’s right may do so based on money." After all, she aptly points out, "Money has a way of causing introspection."

THERE’S NO doubt that the state’s mandatory-minimum-sentence drug laws need revamping. As it stands, Massachusetts’s mandatory sentences for drug convictions rank among the harshest in the nation. Trafficking in as little as 14 grams of cocaine — an amount equal in volume to 14 packets of sweetener — gets you three years behind bars. If you’re convicted of selling those 14 grams near school property, you get another two years. If you’re convicted of possessing those 14 grams with intent to sell to minors, it’s an additional three years on top of that. And all this happens automatically.

This rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to criminal justice — an approach that shifts discretion from judges to prosecutors, who choose what charges to pursue in the first place — has long come under fire. These laws lump disparate behaviors and people into neat categories, with no room for common sense. As a result, people who deserve less severe penalties are left languishing in jail cells for decades. People who had never broken the law before. People who had unwittingly dated a drug dealer. People whose habits put them at the wrong place at the wrong time. In Massachusetts, first-time, nonviolent drug offenders routinely spend more time behind bars than rapists and child molesters. Says Martin Rosenthal, of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (MACDL), who’s pushed to repeal mandatory minimums for drug convictions since 1990, "Nobody likes to talk about the huge injustices. The poor drug mules and petty dealers who go away for 10, 15, and 20 years."

Count Charles Ginsberg among the lot. A Web-page designer from Arlington, Ginsberg, 53, spent most of the 1990s locked up in a tiny cell in a Georgia penitentiary, serving a 10-year mandatory sentence for conspiring to sell marijuana. Because the "conspiracy" in question extended beyond Massachusetts, Ginsberg, a Winthrop native, was sentenced under federal mandatory-minimum laws, which, unlike the state’s, allow offenders to earn "good time" for early release. After nearly nine years and the successful completion of a drug-treatment program, he managed to shave six months from his prison term. Nevertheless, Ginsberg considers his punishment "out of whack" with his crime.

It’s not as if he didn’t sell pot. Indeed, he readily admits he became the pot dealer of choice for customers in and around Winthrop. "But I was a small fish in a big tank," he says. At the time of his November 1991 arrest — when a buyer who’d been charged with conspiracy to sell gave him up — Ginsberg had been in trouble with police only once, when, at 19, he was arrested for possessing pot. He had never owned or fired a gun. Two years before his arrest, he had stopped selling marijuana at all. And so, he says, "I didn’t deserve 10 years. If you’re a small fry and you don’t hurt anyone, I see no reason to go to prison that long."

Ginsberg’s time behind the wall provided him with firsthand lessons on the failed results of mandatory minimums — not just the injustices of their severity, but also the racial disparities they deepen. More than 80 percent of people convicted under Massachusetts’s mandatory-sentencing drug laws are minorities, according to the Sentencing Commission. And the same holds true at the federal level — even though blacks and Latinos consume drugs at the same rate as whites. Ginsberg recalls meeting black and Latino men who’d done, as he puts it, "a lot less than me," yet faced much stricter penalties. Some were teenagers who had run with the wrong crowd, gotten caught with an ounce of crack, and been sentenced to 20 years. Others smoked joints inside their homes in cities, like Boston, where entire neighborhoods fall within a school zone. The experience left him convinced of the need for reform. He adds, "I feel a duty to speak out with whatever breath I have in me."

So does Nancy Brown, who heads the New England chapter of FAMM. Brown got involved in FAMM back in 1991, when her son, then 20, was charged with conspiracy to transport a controlled substance across state lines. When she heard her son, who had followed the Grateful Dead, was facing a 10-year mandatory, "I was floored," she says. "I thought, ‘Oh, my God. He must have killed someone.’" On the contrary, her son, whose name Brown asked the Phoenix not to publish, had sent an envelope containing several tabs of LSD through the mail to a friend. To this day, the sentence — which her son served in various penitentiaries until his 1999 early release for good behavior — strikes Brown as extreme. She explains, "My son used illegal substances and should pay the consequences." Yet for a young college student who’d never been in trouble, she adds, "the sentence did not fit his crime."

It’s a message that Brown and FAMM advocates have tried to send to Massachusetts legislators for years now. Ever since 1996, when the Sentencing Commission composed its set of comprehensive sentencing guidelines, advocates have fought to ease mandatory drug sentences — to no avail. When it comes to these sentences, the commission’s recommendation seems nothing if not modest: it would simply give judges discretion to sentence drug offenders to less than the mandated minimum. By having to provide written reasons for the departure, judges would be held accountable. And prosecutors could appeal such decisions at any time.BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI
photo
MICHAEL CUTLER heads the Drug Policy Forum of Massachusetts, a pro-drug-reform group. He says Beacon Hill's legislative law-and-order culture needs to wake up to fiscal reality.

photo
CYNTHIA CREEM, a state senator from Newton, wants to see drug defenders behind bars made eligible for parole. 'The budget crisis means that these bills can appeal to a broader base of people.

Despite these safeguards, the law-and-order brigade has sounded off against the commission’s guidelines in every legislative session since 1996. Legislators and prosecutors have criticized the measure as too soft — principally because it eliminates mandatory minimums for drug convictions. Last legislative session, however, reformers came closer than ever to success. In October 2001, the Criminal Justice Committee reported favorably on a tinkered version of the commission’s guidelines, one that would have allowed for some deviation from mandatory sentences for drug convictions. The bill specified "six mitigating circumstances" under which a judge could veer from the mandated minimums — if, for instance, a defendant has little or no prior record, is a minor player in the offense, and didn’t cause grave injury or death. Later that month, then–House minority leader Francis Marini led the effort to tighten the guidelines with an amendment that would have ratcheted up punishment for 30 crimes, from weapons possession to child molestation, but that would have left the drug-sentencing-reform measures intact. The House passed the amended bill (currently filed as House Bill 2749) on a voice vote — only to watch it die in the Senate.

Maybe it’s a coincidence that legislators seemed more open to flexible sentencing for drug offenders during the last legislative session, just as the state’s escalating fiscal crisis began to take hold. But then, maybe it’s not. As legislators grapple with a projected budget deficit of $3 billion and counting, Beacon Hill’s law-and-order culture has begun to give way to financial realities. According to Michael Cutler, a Boston attorney who heads the Drug Policy Forum of Massachusetts, a pro-drug-reform group, the problem for advocates has always come down to money. Legislators, he notes, "have had plenty of money to persecute drug users and to pay for schools and all the other services." They’ve never had to make a choice — until today. Now, no one at the State House can deny that a dollar more for prison cells equals a dollar less for classrooms, human services, and health care. Those who don’t fit the mold of what Cutler calls "the true moral crusader" can acknowledge the failures of the mandatory-sentencing drug laws without fear of attracting the weak-on-crime label. "At some point," Cutler observes, "morality falls victim to cost. Legislators can no longer afford to be moral."

Lawmakers who’ve pushed for reform agree. More and more these days, Linsky, the Natick representative, sees his colleagues "starting to scrutinize the costs of our criminal-justice system." As a result, he says, "We’re asking questions about whether or not these mandatory sentences serve the public purpose." For those eager to stop the hemorrhage of red ink, the new guidelines and parole measures offer new incentive. Adds Senator Creem, "The budget crisis means that these bills can appeal to a broader base of people. Even past opponents of reform may see a way to support" these bills.

THE MASSACHUSETTS legislature is not alone. Desperate to avert projected budget deficits, legislatures in states across the nation have begun to curtail corrections spending by moderating tough sentencing laws. As many as 20 states have loosened mandatory minimums for drug convictions since 2001, when states first began to encounter huge revenue shortfalls. So pervasive is the state-government fiscal crisis that similar sentencing reforms have unfolded even in places that pride themselves on getting tough, such as Ohio, Louisiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

By far, the most dramatic effort has occurred in Michigan, which boasted the harshest mandatory-sentencing drug laws in the US. The state has become notorious for its "650 Lifer Law," which sentenced even first-time offenders caught with over 650 grams of cocaine or heroin to life in prison without parole — the same term meted out to a first-degree murderer. Criminal-justice experts and advocates had been lobbying to ease the strict drug penalties for six years. But it wasn’t until last December, when lawmakers began slashing expenditures to make up for a $500 million shortfall, that the campaign gained momentum. On December 27, then–Michigan governor John Engler, a conservative Republican, signed into law a bill repealing the state’s mandatory sentences and replacing them with flexible guidelines similar to those proposed in Massachusetts — a step that’s already reduced the number of first-time offenders going to jail. Not only did the effort enjoy across-the-board support from politicians, but it was trumpeted even by long-time opponents like the Prosecuting Attorneys Association. The turnaround isn’t surprising, given that the elimination of mandatory drug minimums in Michigan has saved the state an estimated $41 million in 2003 alone.

To be sure, money isn’t the sole factor fueling this trend. Criminal-justice issues in general have become less politicized than in, say, the mid 1990s, when politicians and the public ate up measures like three-strikes-you’re-out mandatory sentences and prisoner chain gangs. Michael Mauer, of the Washington, DC–based advocacy group the Sentencing Project, explains that the "level of tension and emotion" surrounding these issues is lower today partly because of the reduced crime rate, which, despite a recent slight rise, plummeted during the 1990s. Part of the shift in attitudes, too, has to do with the success of such incarceration-alternative programs as the nation’s 800 drug courts, which divert first-time, nonviolent drug offenders into drug-treatment programs rather than jail. But even so, Mauer views money as the main force behind the reforms. "There’s no question that the fiscal crisis is driving these efforts," he says. "Legislators have got to balance their budgets, so they see these get-tough policies come with an expensive price tag."

This isn’t necessarily unusual. According to Jack Levin, who directs Northeastern University’s Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, changes in criminal-justice policy often result from economic necessity. While reaction to extraordinary events can drive such changes — when Somerville resident Eddie O’Brien stabbed his best friend’s mother 98 times in 1996, for instance, his case became the exemplar for trying juveniles as adults, now a favored criminal-justice policy — fiscal concerns can exert similar pressure. Levin points to the trend of de-institutionalizing the mentally ill during the 1970s, a time of comparable financial turmoil. Back then, the state adopted a policy of emptying out the institutions and integrating the mentally ill back into the community, where they’d receive services. Community-based mental-health care was touted as humanitarian reform. But, Levin says, "the real reason for this policy shift was to cut costs at the expense of mentally ill people who needed services." In the same way, he adds, "the underlying motivation for relaxing mandatory minimums has an economic basis."

For many, this economic impetus says something troubling about how we determine our criminal-justice policy. Experts like Mauer find it "sad commentary" that money has become the catalyst for drug-sentencing reform. "For years," he says, "legislators have overlooked all the evidence about the injustices, racial disparities, and inefficiencies of this system. Only when cost becomes an issue do we see this rising concern." Levin, too, thinks the latest trend shows how politicians and the public have "an infinite capacity to rationalize criminal-justice policy based on money." He then echoes the sentiment among many advocates when he concludes: "It’s not a very pretty picture whether you agree with the outcome or not. But, at least in this case, it’s positive. We’re doing the right thing for the wrong reason."

HERE IN Massachusetts, of course, it remains to be seen whether the pain of incessant budget cuts will cause lawmakers to rethink the state’s mandatory-sentencing drug laws. Although the May 21 hearing brought out scores of supporters for the parole and sentencing-guidelines measures, it also attracted opponents — namely, the district attorneys. Hampden County prosecutor William Bennett testified at the hearing on behalf of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association. He told the Phoenix that the DAs reject Creem’s bill because it wouldn’t "maintain the integrity of mandatory sentences." Rather than parole drug offenders, he and his colleagues propose placing them on supervised work release. That way, they would be able to reintegrate into society by working outside the prison walls while still serving out their sentences. The DAs also oppose Linsky’s proposed sentencing-guidelines measure. But they’ve made a nod toward compromise by embracing the last session’s House Bill 2749, which does call for some deviation from the mandatory-sentencing drug laws. Explains Bennett, "There is merit in considering exceptions to the mandatories in certain circumstances," particularly as they relate to school zones.

And so, for the most part, the prosecutors aren’t too keen on easing the mandatory-sentencing drug laws. Bennett even implies that the state has no need for full reform because it doesn’t have mandatory sentences for drug possession, as other states do. Only 1.8 percent of the state’s drug convictions involve a mandatory sentence, he says, explaining that DAs turn to mandatory minimums only to prosecute "aggravating factors," such as large quantities, repeat offenders, and sales to minors. Claims Bennett, "We have a much different set-up than other states do."

As the Criminal Justice Committee weighs the opposition and support for sentencing reform in upcoming months, all advocates can do is wait and hope. No doubt, many reformers feel saddened that budget woes — as opposed to concerns about justice and fairness — are moving their agenda forward. As Ginsberg bluntly puts it, "I think it’s sickening that once the money gets tight legislators are willing to listen." Then again, even he can see the silver lining in the current financial clouds. If money causes state legislators to re-examine and reduce mandatory minimums for drug convictions, so be it. To look at it another way, advocates say, it’s sadder still that Massachusetts has remained behind while other states enact their sentencing reforms. And saddest of all, that legislators here are debating only partial reforms, despite the fact that mandatory minimums have proven a failed and costly experiment.
http://72.166.46.24/boston/news_features/other_stories/multipage/documents/02931078.htm
Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi@phx.com

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

October 11, 2007

VA: Mentally ill shift from care to jails

Mentally ill shift from care to jails
There are more behind bars in Virginia than are in mental wards Wednesday, Oct 10, 2007

By BILL MCKELWAY
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

Almost four decades after Virginia began emptying the mental wards of its state hospitals, jails across Virginia now house more people with mental illness than state and private hospitals combined. Of the 6,350 mentally ill people in hospitals or jails on a single day two years ago, 60 percent were in jails. And 43 percent of jails responding to a state commission's query said regional mental-health agencies do not provide mental-health services.

In 1936, only one person with mental illness was in jail for every six in state hospitals. In 2005, that ratio had gone to five people in jail for every two in a hospital. Those are among the statistics compiled in a 200-page report released yesterday by the General Assembly's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. The study found that the number of available psychiatric beds in Virginia is generally adequate.

But the report said clear data on services, needs and disabilities are lacking, hospitals are losing millions of dollars in caring for the mentally ill and in vast areas of Virginia nearby hospital beds for the mentally ill don't exist. Virginia has 40 cities and 95 counties. Seven of the state's localities have more than half the roughly 1,500 psychiatrists in the state. Forty-seven localities have none; 87 localities don't have a child psychiatrist. The sobering analysis yesterday left legislators with few questions and state mental-health officials with few answers as evidence continues to mount about the state's system of mental-health care.

Most of the issues have been festering for years and have been brought to the forefront by the mass killings at Virginia Tech in April by mentally ill student Seung-Hui Cho. A half-dozen studies and legislative committees have been meeting, from a commission set up by the chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court to legislative committees in the state Senate and the House of Delegates.

After yesterday's JLARC meeting, speakers lined up at a House committee meeting telling stories of a broken system of care, unfunded needs and imbalances in resources across the state. The JLARC report offered an examination of a small element of mental-health care in a document that was part textbook, part call for action.

It quoted with telling relevance the comments in 1841 of then-Virginia Gov. Thomas W. Gilmer, who called it regrettable that so many of the state's "unfortunate class" were not in institutions but are "confined in jails." That was almost a century after the founding of Eastern State Hospital, the first in the country built for the mentally ill. Hospital care accounts for only a fraction of the needs of the state's estimated 400,000 seriously mentally ill adults and children. Since 1962, the average daily number of mentally ill adults in state hospitals has dropped 87 percent, from 11,532 to 1,452.

But JLARC found that the number of licensed psychiatric hospital beds at nonprofit and for-profit hospitals has fallen since 1991 by almost 800 beds, a 31 percent decrease. Although the number of beds statewide is adequate by state Department of Health standards, the beds tend to be concentrated in certain geographic areas.

In 2005, 38 licensed hospitals, other than the eight state hospitals, provided inpatient psychiatric services. But none of the five freestanding, profitable psychiatric hospitals existed west of Richmond. The report found that licensed hospitals reported unreimbursed costs of $25 million from providing inpatient psychiatric services in 2005 and an additional $45 million in unmet costs from providing emergency department services.

Medicaid reimbursement rates are dropping, hospitals certified to set aside a specific number of psychiatric beds are able to unilaterally redesignate the beds for other uses and criminal patients are increasingly occupying state hospital beds once reserved for mentally ill people who were civilly committed. As patients streamed over the decades from state institutions to receive community-based care, local governments and hospitals were expected to take up the slack.

But the report found vast disparities in the quality of care from one jurisdiction to another and a failure by state agencies and local mental-health agencies to follow state laws mandating how patients are to be assessed and singled out for care. JLARC found that a decade-old state law requiring public hearings and regulations to set payment rates for temporary detentions has never been implemented. The rates are set unilaterally by the state Department of Medical Assistance Services.

Nor have state laws enacted 25 years ago been followed that require regulations for pre-screening procedures for patients entering state hospitals. As a result, some state hospitals have simply declined to admit some groups of patients who once received care. Those people include patients with dementia, substance-abuse problems and traumatic brain-injuries, according to JLARC. The report also raises questions about agreements among partnerships of regional mental-health agencies that show differences in care and in the use of state money; nor are the partnerships and their duties spelled out in state law.

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com.

Posted by lois at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

IA: Legislators tour crowded women's prison

"It is unbelievable how fast that population is growing," she said.
She added she is concerned that many of these women have suffered from some form of abuse "for a long, long time." She said prison issues should be explored as societal problems starting in early childhood."

Mitchellville prison facts

Average daily population in 2007 budget year — 609

Design capacity — 443

Average inmate age — 34

Average sentence — 14 years

Number of inmates with life sentences — 32

Most common crime — Drug offenses

Average reading level — 10th grade

Average daily cost per offender — $74.97

Source: Iowa Department of Corrections

Legislators tour crowded women's prison
Committee studies consultant's proposal to add space in Mitchellville.
By WILLIAM PETROSKI
REGISTER STAFF WRITER

October 11, 2007

Mitchellville, Ia. — Iowa legislators shook their heads Wednesday after touring the state women's prison, where 636 female convicts are living in facilities designed to hold 443.

Lawmakers found as many as six women living in a 10-foot by 14-foot room with bunk beds. In one aging housing unit, 88 women share two showers and two bathtubs and crowding forces the women to iron clothes in a hallway.

There's no infirmary at the prison, nor is there a psychiatric hospital unit, although 60 percent of female offenders in Iowa have had a diagnosis of mental illness. Because many of the housing units weren't constructed for disabled people, ambulance crews face major problems hauling inmates down flights of stairs when medical emergencies happen.

Supervising the inmates in such crowded conditions is "awful" for correctional officers, Deputy Warden Patti Wachtendorf said. Many of the buildings at Mitchellville are not only antiquated but also built in a manner that doesn't easily permit officers to observe prisoners who may be getting into trouble, she said.

State-hired prison consultants told lawmakers Wednesday that the situation must change at the Mitchellville prison. Key legislators who head an interim study committee said they agreed the Iowa Legislature should favorably consider the consultant's recommendations when it convenes in January.

"Some of these infrastructure needs are serious," said state Rep. Todd Taylor, D-Cedar Rapids, who is the committee's co-chairman. "We are going to have to tear down some buildings and construct some new buildings."

State Sen. Eugene Fraise, D-Fort Madison, a committee co-chairman, said he supports a $47 million plan proposed by the Durrant Group, a consulting company, to consolidate the state's entire population of female prisoners at Mitchellville.

New space would be built for as many as 600 inmates. Old buildings would be modernized to provide a new health services unit while offering opportunities for gender-specific programs for the women, many of whom come backgrounds of abuse and drug addiction.

"There is definitely a need," Fraise said. "We're going to have to spend some money."

The committee did not make formal recommendations Wednesday.

Those decisions could also include a proposal to construct a maximum-security prison in Fort Madison, along with improvements at Mitchellville and elsewhere in Iowa's corrections system.

Decisions could be made at a Nov. 14 meeting in Des Moines.

Iowa now has 775 women in its prison system, and the women's prison population has been growing almost twice as fast as the population of male inmates. One factor has been an increasing number of women sent to prison in recent years for drug convictions, many involving methamphetamine.

State criminal justice researchers project Iowa's female inmate population will increase to about 988 inmates by midyear 2016 if current trends continue. Iowa ranks 38th nationally in overall incarceration rates, but is 28th in incarceration of women.

In a discussion prior to the Mitchellville prison tour, state Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, D-Ames, who is the only woman on the 10-member interim committee, said she was troubled by the dramatic increase in female inmates in Iowa.

"It is unbelievable how fast that population is growing," she said.

She added she is concerned that many of these women have suffered from some form of abuse "for a long, long time." She said prison issues should be explored as societal problems starting in early childhood.

State Rep. Wayne Ford, D-Des Moines, had similar concerns, saying he wants to ensure that treatment and education programs are improved if more money is spent on prison construction.

The Iowa Board of Corrections has recommended construction of an 800-bed maximum-security prison at Fort Madison, while closing the penitentiary's existing maximum-security unit.

The proposal assumes continued operation of medium- and minimum-custody units that now operate as part of the penitentiary complex.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007710110392

Posted by lois at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

Northampton, MA: A peace march meant to make King proud

A peace march meant to make King proud
BY LAURIE LOISEL STAFF WRITER
Daily Hampshire Gazette, October 11, 2007

NORTHAMPTON - Like a lot of kids, Wyatt Marshall didn't have an easy time learning to read. But last year, in fourth grade, he picked up a book about Martin Luther King, and something clicked.

His teachers and parents knew a good thing when they saw one, so they kept giving him book after book about King, Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement.

"That's how he learned to read," said his mother, Kitty Marshall. "The subject was so interesting to him."

By the time Wyatt was entering fifth grade (this year) at the Solomon Schechter Day School of the Pioneer Valley on Prospect Street, according to his mother, he had taken the lessons of Martin Luther King to heart.

"I wanted to make him proud," said Wyatt, a soft-spoken 10-year-old who wears his hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Kitty talked with him about what that might be, and he settled on some sort of march. When she asked him what the cause would be, he knew right away.

"He said, 'well, peace, of course,'" Kitty Marshall said. "He just got so tired, we all get tired, of listening to the news, I guess."

Wyatt put it this way: "I just feel it," he said. "I just really want to have peace."

Hard work for a good cause

So Wyatt got busy planning the march in September, first getting a permit (easier said than done), and then making fliers and distributing them around town.

He left them at schools and in stores, including some where shopkeepers agreed to put them in every customer's bag. He told kids on his soccer team, and others at school.

In the end, about 40 children ("and their grown-ups," said Kitty Marshall) turned out for the march up and down the sidewalks on Main Street Saturday. The Marshall family considered that a resounding success.

"He got a lot of people behind him, I think because he did it himself," said Kitty.

Wyatt, who walked holding a banner that read "Kid's March for Peace," said his only regret was that they didn't end up singing John Lennon's "Imagine" on the steps of City Hall, as he'd hoped. But there's always next year, because he said he wants to organize it again.

No doubt, King would be proud.

Laurie Loisel can be reached at lloisel@gazettenet.com.

Posted by lois at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)

TX: Mother of man who committed suicide while in GEO prison to testify in TX legislature

Oct. 10, 2007, Houston Chronicle
Inmate's mother to speak against private Texas prisons

By JOHN MILLER Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

BOISE, Idaho — The mother of an Idaho inmate who killed himself in a private Texas prison on March 4 plans to urge Texas lawmakers to stop accepting out-of-state prisoners at their for-profit lockups.

Shirley Noble said she expects to speak Friday to the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee. She filed a $500,000 negligence claim against Idaho in August in Scot Noble Payne's death. Since 2005, Idaho has moved more than 500 inmates to Texas and Oklahoma to relieve overcrowding at home; Noble says the practice keeps prisoners like her son from family contact needed to rehabilitate them for their eventual return to freedom.

She also blames Idaho and The GEO Group, Inc. — the Florida-based private prison company that runs the Dickens County prison in Spur, Texas, where her son slashed his throat — for neglecting to monitor deteriorating conditions that Idaho officials now concede may have contributed to his suicide. Payne, 43, a convicted sex offender, was kept alone for months in a cell with a constantly wet floor, bloodstained sheets and smelly towels.

"It's what I have found out about GEO, the filth, and people being taken away from their families," Shirley Noble told The Associated Press about her reasons for testifying. "They can't afford the fares to go visit. They can't afford the excess telephone bills."

After Payne's death, Idaho Department of Correction officials investigated and called Dickens the worst prison they'd ever seen. The state has until early November to respond to Noble's claim. She said she'll sue if Idaho doesn't settle.

Separately, she said she's working with a Laredo, Texas-based lawyer, Ron Rodriguez. In 2006, he won a $47.5 million verdict against Wackenhut Corrections Corp., which became GEO, on claims it destroyed evidence in an inmate's beating death.

Texas state Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat who chairs the Criminal Justice Committee, called Friday's hearing just as scrutiny of GEO in his state is intensifying. Texas closed the 200-bed Coke County Juvenile Center, run by GEO, and canceled the state contract for the facility last week over shortcomings such as dirty bed sheets, feces-smeared cells and insects in the food — despite the presence of state monitors.

According to a Texas state report, the company downplayed the conditions there; afterward, its lobbyists tried to pressure legislators to reinstate its contract.

"I look forward to reports, good or bad, on how well out-of-state inmates are being monitored," Whitmire told the AP on Wednesday. "Just because they are from out-of-state doesn't reduce the responsibility of the state of Texas to run safe facilities. If corporations and the communities they're in partnership with are not going to do it properly, they ought to be out of the business."

GEO spokesman Pablo Paez didn't immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

Since Payne's death at Dickens, Idaho Department of Correction Director Brent Reinke has revamped his agency's monitoring of out-of-state prisoners.

But he missed a September deadline to send 56 prisoners who remain at Dickens to another GEO prison near the Texas-Mexico border, amid unresolved contract differences. Reinke said he still hopes to transfer them later this fall.

Idaho is expected to have nearly 10,000 prisoners by 2012, up from 7,300 now. A consultant this year said the state must spend $1 billion on new prisons over the next decade. So far, the Legislature has approved funding for 648 new beds, including 400 at a proposed drug-treatment prison. There are also separate plans for nearly 700 more beds, including about 400 south of Boise and 300 at a proposed prison for mentally ill inmates.

In addition, Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter favors a proposal in which private companies such as GEO or Tennessee-based Correction Corp. of America could build and run a new Idaho prison with space for as many as 2,500 inmates — including inmates sent here from other states to bolster the companies' profits.

Still, lawmakers and Otter differ over how much control Idaho should cede over its inmates to private industry, setting up a debate that could dominate the 2008 Legislature.

"We're setting the stage for a policy discussion between the governor and the Legislature for which of those options they want DOC to pursue," Reinke told the AP.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5204502.html

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

Western MA: Sadiq licensed: State DOE certifies Amherst guidance counselor for job

Sadiq licensed: State DOE certifies Amherst guidance counselor for job
BY MARY CAREY STAFF WRITER
Daily Hampshire Gazette, Page 1, October 11, 2007

AMHERST - The Department of Education has granted a license to Amherst Regional Middle School guidance counselor Talib Sadiq, whose past criminal record had raised concern in some quarters.
Amherst Schools Superintendent Jere Hochman said he was happy with the results.
Hochman had said he would pursue every avenue to retain Sadiq, who was hired this year after working as an intern for a year under the mentorship of longtime guidance counselor Barry Brooks, who recently retired.
'I am pleased that the state certification process was more than a paper review,' Hochman said in an email Wednesday.
'The certification process gave Mr. Sadiq the opportunity to meet with state officials and allowed them to really get to know him,' Hochman said. ' I am sure the state officials learned a lot about who Mr. Sadiq is from that meeting, from their meeting with others who attended, and from the supporting letters and character references they received.'
Hochman and state Rep. Ellen Story were among eight or so supporters of Sadiq who vouched for his character at an appeals hearing at the Department of Education in Malden last month.
The DOE had earlier denied Sadiq's application for the license that teachers, teacher specialists, professional support personnel and administrators are required to have, but would not disclose the reason, citing confidentiality guidelines.
Story, who said she has known Sadiq since he was in the seventh grade, said his academic credentials had not been in question but that the DOE wanted assurances about his moral character.
An Amherst native, Sadiq converted to Islam and changed his name from Vincent Bias after serving jail time for armed robbery, convicted of holding up a bank in Springfield with a loaded 9 mm handgun in 1993.
He has since completed college, gotten a master's degree, married and started a family. He has also coached children sports in Leisure Services and Supplemental Education programs in Amherst.
Some parents questioned why Sadiq was chosen from among an applicant pool of 20, despite his criminal record. Others have praised him, saying he has an even temperament and has demonstrated that he works well with children.
If you go to this extremely long URL you can comment on the article, which I encourage you to do!

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=62222&CSAuthResp=1192113704552024%3A15J483LnPAJDDA%3D%3D%3ACSUserId%7CCSGroupId%3Asuccess%3A7imHnTa9884UlJKXLTnyQQ%3D%3D&CSUserId=8254&CSGroupId=5

Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

October 09, 2007

Once Behind Bars, Now Behind the Lens, With His Freedom at Risk

October 9, 2007
Once Behind Bars, Now Behind the Lens, With His Freedom at Risk By COLIN MOYNIHAN, NY Times

One chilly night in March 1990, Jason Nicholas, then 19, stood on a desolate street in Mount Vernon, just north of the Bronx, and fired a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun at Paul Delano, a young man with whom he said he had had a simmering feud.

Mr. Nicholas said he thought Mr. Delano was grabbing for a weapon. The shotgun blast killed Mr. Delano, and a year later a jury in Westchester County convicted Mr. Nicholas of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 6 1/3 to 19 years in state prison.

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After nearly 13 years behind bars, Mr. Nicholas was paroled, and he soon earned a bachelor's degree. He worked as a researcher for the lawyer Ron Kuby and then last fall began working as a freelance news photographer in New York City. Life outside prison was not easy, but Mr. Nicholas had achieved a measure of stability.

But two recent arrests on relatively minor charges while he was on assignment for The New York Post could unravel all that and end up sending him back to prison. "Every moment is precious," Mr. Nicholas, 37, said as he contemplated the possibility of prison.

Like many other parolees, Mr. Nicholas has had difficulty finding work. But he said he had immediately relished the raffish life of a tabloid news photographer. He worked his way into taking pictures for a big-city newspaper through perseverance and luck, he said, and in the process found a part of the world where he felt comfortable.

Equipped with police scanners and street smarts, photojournalists for the city's tabloid newspapers race to the site of breaking news, vying to document the lives, deaths, scandals and successes that punctuate life in New York. Friction between photographers and police officers is not uncommon as chaotic scenes unfold in public locations.

On Sept. 3, Mr. Nicholas was among reporters and photographers who headed to Chelsea after word came that a pipe bomb had detonated in front of an acting studio owned by Michael Imperioli, a member of the cast of "The Sopranos."

Mr. Nicholas was arrested on a charge of obstructing governmental administration, a misdemeanor, when he snapped pictures using a flash after an officer told him not to, the police and witnesses said. His press credentials issued by the Police Department were suspended, and both of his Nikon cameras were taken as evidence.

Mr. Nicholas said he believed he was being unfairly banished from the scene. The police said he disregarded orders that were issued to all the journalists there.

Paul J. Browne, the department's chief spokesman, said Mr. Nicholas was instructed not to use his camera because the bomb squad feared that an undiscovered bomb might be nearby and that a flash could trigger another explosion.

"The immediate concern was a secondary device," he said, adding, "There have been a number of incidences where he hasn't complied with directions."

Mr. Nicholas said that he had not heard any safety warnings and that he planned to fight the misdemeanor charge. For the moment, he is working without press credentials and is using a borrowed camera.

Todd Maisel, the vice president of the New York Press Photographers Association, said he disagreed with the decision by the police to take Mr. Nicholas's cameras, saying it seemed excessive. But Mr. Maisel, a longtime news photographer for The Daily News, also criticized Mr. Nicholas for yelling and swearing after his arrest. "He has a responsibility to maintain decorum," Mr. Maisel said.

Three days after the arrest in Chelsea, Mr. Nicholas was arrested for trespassing and given a desk appearance ticket after being on the roof of a building in the Bronx where he was photographing officers responding to an episode in which plainclothes transit officers shot and killed a man who had attacked them on a subway platform at 176th Street.

Mr. Browne said that Mr. Nicholas was on the roof of a building on Davidson Avenue where the landlord has signed an affidavit allowing the police to arrest trespassers without receiving specific complaints.

Mr. Nicholas said he had been invited into the building by residents and did not think he had broken any law.

The charges against Mr. Nicholas carry relatively light penalties. People convicted of obstructing governmental administration can be sentenced to up to a year in jail. Those found guilty of the form of trespassing Mr. Nicholas has been accused of can be jailed for up to 15 days.

But because Mr. Nicholas is on parole, the arrests could have deeper repercussions. If he is found guilty of either offense, he could be sent to prison to serve the remaining six years of his sentence in the 1990 shooting. Mark E. Johnson, a spokesman for the State Parole Division, said that he could not comment on Mr. Nicholas, but that parole decisions were made on a case-by-case basis.

"Anytime someone is convicted of a crime, it could be a violation of parole that would send them to jail," he said. "In such cases, we look at a person's whole record while on parole."

While pondering his future, Mr. Nicholas points to the years since he was sent to jail as evidence of rehabilitation. In prison he advised inmates on the law and organized a prisoner advocacy group, he said. He also said that he earned a two-year degree, then after his parole, went to New York University, graduating in the spring of 2006 with a humanities degree.

His first published news photograph, of a highway crash, appeared last fall in a small newspaper in upstate New York. Eventually he began working regularly for The Post.

"It is a privilege to photograph this city," Mr. Nicholas said. "If Homer were alive today recording the deeds of men, he'd be a photojournalist."

James McGrath, who runs a photo agency called Atlas Press, said he had been working with Mr. Nicholas for about eight months. "I don't think anybody works harder," he said of Mr. Nicholas. "He has a drive to do something with his life." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/nyregion/09photog.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pa
gewanted=print

Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2007

NY: Rikers Island: City to Pay Damages for Strip Searches

October 5, 2007
City to Pay Damages for Strip Searches
By ALAN FEUER, NY Times

The city’s Department of Correction conceded yesterday that tens of thousands of nonviolent inmates taken to Rikers Island on misdemeanor charges had been wrongly strip-searched in violation of a 2002 court settlement, and were entitled to payment for damages.

As many as 150,000 such inmates have been searched at Rikers Island since 2002, lawyers for the inmates said. As part of a settlement agreement reached in Federal District Court in Manhattan yesterday, the Correction Department said it would immediately cease all strip-searches of inmates awaiting trial on misdemeanor charges at the jail.

The agreement forestalled a trial that was to have begun this week on a federal lawsuit brought by several former inmates who had challenged the searches. It was the third time since 2001 that the city admitted errors in the way it performed strip-searches.

Lawyers for the inmates said correction officials ignored a federal appeals court ruling and a prior settlement in the case.

“This is a milestone agreement,” said Richard D. Emery, the lead lawyer for the inmates. “I believe the city will now change the vile culture in the prisons of degrading and humiliating people by strip-searching them.”

Before July 2002, all inmates at Rikers Island were forced to undergo strip-searches when they first entered the jail. Often in groups of 10 or 12, they were made to stand naked and have their armpits, mouths, ears, noses, navels, genital areas and anal cavities searched by correction officers, according to papers filed in the case.

The policy was kept in place despite a United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling in 2001 that strip-searches of misdemeanor suspects were illegal, unless officials suspected that they were carrying contraband. (Inmates accused of felonies are still permitted to be strip-searched at the jail.)

Following that ruling, the Giuliani administration agreed to pay up to $50 million to settle a lawsuit filed on behalf of tens of thousands of people who were illegally strip-searched after being arrested for minor offenses, many of which occurred during the city’s crackdown on quality of life violations. Those searches occurred before suspects were arraigned in various courthouses around the city.

In 2002, under an agreement reached between the city and a separate set of plaintiffs, officials at the jail were to have given inmates disposable paper gowns to wear during searches in order to give them a modicum of privacy. The city also agreed to pay $750 to each misdemeanor inmate who was strip-searched once and $1,000 to those who had been strip-searched twice.

In 2005, Mr. Emery and his law partners intervened in the case, maintaining that the sum paid to each inmate was much too low and that the first agreement did not cover enough detainees. In the course of his investigation, Mr. Emery said, he discovered that, despite the appellate ruling and the first agreement, misdemeanor inmates were still being strip-searched at the jail.

In fact, he charged in his papers that department officials “repeatedly resorted to lying to cover up deliberate indifference to the continued practice of humiliating detainees by forcing them to strip naked in groups.”

At the same, he said that Martin F. Horn, the commissioner of correction, had acted in “good faith” during the most recent negotiations. “It was a paradigm for a public servant dealing with what has been an intractable problem,” Mr. Emery said.

Stephen J. Morello, a deputy commissioner of correction, said the department had “a policy in place which met the law and insured that strip-searches would not be conducted on new admissions misdemeanor detainees; however, we lacked procedures needed to guarantee that the policy was consistently followed.

“We regret that,” Mr. Morello added, “and we have already begun to implement new procedures to ensure that we comply with the law.”

Had the case gone to trial, Mr. Emery planned to submit a deposition from Mark Cranston, a deputy chief in the department, who testified that even though a new policy banning strip-searches had been promulgated in July 2002, he was not sure that it was actually implemented.

“I can only speak to the promulgation of the policy and not the implementation,” Chief Cranston said, according to a transcript of the deposition, “because it’s not in my purview to make sure that policies and procedures are complied with at the facility level.”

Mr. Emery also said he discovered that only 46,000 gowns had been ordered from July 2002 to August 2007, even though some 150,000 inmates who needed the gowns were admitted to Rikers Island in those years. In a separate deposition, the plaintiffs’ lawyers asked Chief Valerie Oliver, another correction official, if she believed that the department was complying with the strip-search ban. According to a transcript of the deposition, Chief Oliver said no.

Under yesterday’s agreement, the city said it would post signs at Rikers Island telling misdemeanor detainees they do not have to submit to strip-searches, Mr. Emery said. The signs will include a toll-free number for an independent monitor of the strip-search policy to be named by the court.

In the next few months, the plaintiffs and the city plan to negotiate the amount of damages to pay thousands of inmates wrongly strip-searched. The damages will be overseen by the case’s presiding judge, Gerard E. Lynch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/nyregion/05strip.html?pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

VA: Lost Behind Bars: Richmond City Jail: The Mentally Ill

LOST BEHIND BARS
RICHMOND CITY JAIL: The mentally ill
Sunday, Oct 07, 2007
SPECIAL PROJECT: Richmond City Jail, December 2006

By DAVID RESS
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

During the last two years, a Times-Dispatch reporter and photographer have regularly spent time in a jail that Sheriff C.T. Woody calls a dumping ground for the mentally ill. He says he can't keep up. The jail estimates that a quarter of the 1,500 inmates are mentally ill.

Fewer than half get medications. As it struggles with soaring medical expenses, the jail recently cut the number of prescriptions it distributes, and Woody ended a contract for a consulting psychiatrist. He asked the medical director, a geriatrics specialist, to take over. About 18 percent of inmates in the Richmond region had a diagnosis of mental illness, a 2005 state survey found, so the city jail's challenges -- bigger numbers, not enough beds, few programs -- are even more acute.

Besides trying to keep them safe, clean and fed, there's not much deputies say they can do for the mentally ill. "They get worse here," Woody said. "They don't get better."

At the back of the Richmond City Jail's A wing, Shane F. sits naked in a strip cell. Just him, concrete walls, a hole in the floor where a toilet would go, except this cell is for people who could try to drown themselves in a toilet. He is standing by the bars, crying. Saying he wants to die. Gnawing at his wrist, trying to open a vein.

The deputy watching the five strip cells worries the distraught man will soon draw blood. He watches, ready to radio for a nurse to come and bandage the inmate if needed.

Mental-health care in jail is this:
# A deputy walks past the strip cells every 15 minutes, on suicide watch. # A twice-a-day pill line rolls though. Nurses from the jail clinic trundle their cart past the cellblocks and inmates may, or may not, line up for their medications. # Inmates -- sometimes -- make sure the mentally ill are fed and bathed. Sometimes they steal from them.

Roughly a quarter -- maybe 350 to 400 -- of the 1,500 men and women in the jail are ill enough to need psychiatric medication. Only about 120 get it. An additional 50 could, but they refuse. Deputies can't make them.

The rest just do time.

The jail, which has run over budget on medical expenses for years, has stopped using some of the newer and costlier medications its consulting psychiatrist formerly prescribed. The jail's medical director, a geriatrics specialist who now prescribes medications, says cost isn't the issue. He says the old medicines are effective.

If inmates are not too ill -- if they seem to manage to keep fed, stay relatively clean and not get beaten up too obviously -- they'll spend time in one of the big cages that were designed for 50 but can hold as many as 150 inmates, with dozens sleeping on the floor.

For about 20 men who jail officials fear would be beaten up in the main cages, there's a quiet space in the back of the jail's school tier. The students and inmate-tutors in the school program, with ill grace, clean up when the disturbed go to the bathroom in the aisles between the beds.

Some men and women stay in some of the roughly 50 single-bed cells where the jail houses inmates who are sick or need to be put in solitary.

For up to five of the most troubled men, there are the strip cells.

. .
Leon Anderson is slumped on the concrete floor, huddled in his blanket, back pressed against the rear wall of his cell. There's no bed. He has blocked the drain in the floor that is a strip-cell toilet. The air is thick with the fetid, musty smell of a man who hasn't washed in days.

Calm for now.

But a few minutes later, something snaps. He explodes. When his yells bring a deputy scrambling, Anderson throws filth from the drain at him. A radio call brings a team of 10 deputies and officers to subdue him. They fire a tear-gas cartridge into his cell, but even the acrid gas won't quiet Anderson. He bellows a gospel song, yells that the deputies don't scare him -- even as they wrestle him out of the cell, into handcuffs and then into a shower down the corridor to clean the filth off him. No one can beat him down, Anderson says a few days later. No one can make him take medications. In fact, no one can make anyone in jail, no matter how ill, take medication.

No one runs a therapy group, a psychosocial education class. There's little counseling, mainly what inmates offer one another.

They don't offer much.

"Hey, Irv!" inmate Sherod Jones calls. "Dingle-dangle." David Irving flops out of his bed in the back of the school tier, the space reserved for the mentally ill. Standing in the narrow space between bunk beds, he lifts his arms over his head, does a few shuffle-steps and a hip wiggle. "Hey Irv," Jones calls. "Coffee."

A broad grin cracks Irving's face. The marionette dance stops, and he lopes over to the table where Jones and a couple of other inmates from the front of the tier are skipping class. The table is supposed to be set aside for the tier's mentally ill to use -- for what, no one quite knows. Irving, voice badly slurred, grinning broadly, tells a complicated story about a man and woman at the place he had worked who thought he stole money. He didn't, he mutters when Jones asks. Court records show he's here for trespassing and possession of drugs. He was arrested two months ago and is awaiting trial. His next hearing is more than six months away. "I had a girlfriend, I had a girl," he says, when another inmate teases. "I had a girlfriend when I was 29, 32, 38, 35." A pause. "I'm 44." Where does he live when he's not in jail? A boardinghouse, he says. Then, shouts. Grins: "Larry's place, Larry's place. Ha ha ha."

. . .

Patty Brooks had been screaming and singing for most of the past three days, down on the ground floor of A wing, when deputies called the crisis line at the Richmond Behavioral Health Authority, the city's mental-health agency. The social worker made it out at about 4 in the afternoon, shift-change time. It wouldn't take long to fill in the standard assessment form -- Brooks was agitated, delusional. It should have made note of her February arrest on a charge of malicious wounding, since she was due for a preliminary court hearing the next day, as well as a half-dozen assault, property-damage and drug-possession arrests over the past few years. The social worker agreed with jail medical staff that Brooks met the test for a trip to Central State Hospital near Petersburg, the state mental hospital. They believed she was at imminent risk of killing herself or hurting someone else. Imminent, in their eyes, means within the next 48 hours.

Although it's not an official part of the process, RBHA checked in with Central State's admissions staff to see if it felt Brooks belonged there. The psychiatrist on duty said he was pretty sure she did and would expect to see her there in the morning. By the next morning, Central State's admission's director called back to ask where Brooks was. By noon, she was on her way. But when she arrived, there was no paperwork authorizing her stay. Somewhere between RBHA and the jail and Central State, no one checked to be sure a magistrate saw the assessment to issue the detention order. Everyone thought someone else was doing that.

. . .

A3R, a line of 12 single-man cells, shadowy on all but the sunniest days, is where inmates deemed mentally unfit to stand trial wait. Most are there on misdemeanors -- drunk in public or trespassing. Something in their manner led a district court judge to order the state to restore them to competency. That's the legal term that means you are well enough to understand your charges and can help your lawyer defend yourself. In one cell, a young man has wrapped himself, shroudlike, in his gray blanket. His legs twitch, uncontrollably, endlessly. In the next cell, an older, balding man mutters an endless stream of curses on kings and communists.

Next to him, a silent man, gray-haired with a neat gray goatee, perches sideways, motionless, on his metal toilet. He is staring at the rusted metal shelf where a mattress should go -- if the deputies weren't afraid he'd rip up yet another one and maybe try to hang himself. He spends much of the day staring like that, said jail psychologist Bill Rhoades. The man has been like that for weeks now.

Normally in Virginia, it is up to a mental hospital to restore people arrested for a crime. But Central State's decadelong effort to close units -- to save money and improve care -- sometimes means beds aren't available right away.Those reductions have freed funds that, among other things, pay for a team of mental-health workers to visit the jail, where part of their work is to help restore inmates. Someone is usually at the jail several times a week. But unlike Central State, the jail can't force inmates to take medications, Rhoades said. It often isn't until they've waited a few months and a bed comes free at Central State that they get the medications that restore a bit of reality.

By the time that happens and they arrive in court, they'll have spent enough time waiting in jail that their sentence will amount to time already spent behind bars. Often, they are back in jail within a month or two, Rhoades said. "This is the one place that can't say no," he said.

. The first time he attempted to end his life, a few months ago, Gordon Salmon tried hanging himself. A month or so later, he took a razor to both wrists -- most of the dozen purple scars didn't go deep, but he needed nine stitches to close the big one on his left arm, six for the one just across his right wrist and five staples for another on his forearm.

"I don't like hurting people," he says. "I'd rather hurt myself." He's 27, in jail because he stopped going to the probation office last year to check in after a 2003 cocaine-possession charge. Salmon doesn't talk much about the dark feelings, the waves of depression that have overwhelmed him since he saw his best friend die eight years ago. Mostly, there's no one to talk to. Most of the mentally ill inmates he lives with in the rear of the jail's school tier spend their days huddled in bed, blankets pulled over their heads.

They spend the nights wandering -- other inmates complain about waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a mentally ill inmate looming over them and about the messes of feces and urine they may leave on the floor.Salmon tries to open up a little to the man who sleeps a foot and a half away from his bed. And to the tall, soft-spoken concrete contractor who tutors Spanish-speaking inmates in English in the front of the school tier.The nurses who pass out his lithium at the daily pill line don't pay much attention -- they don't see how he palms the pills, which he detests because they make him sleepy, and throws them out. Mostly, jail is long and empty hours. Hours without an end.

Epilogue

A Times-Dispatch series on the city jail last year brought calls for change and a vow from Mayor L. Douglas Wilder to build a new jail. Wilder and Sheriff C.T. Woody said it's time to think about whether everyone who goes to jail, including the hundreds of mentally ill people there, really needs to be behind bars.

The city is looking at joining with other localities and possibly the federal government to build a new facility. So far, though, a half-year after Wilder's commitment, no firm plan is in place. Meanwhile, the jail still averages 1,500 men and women in a space designed for 882. And some of them don't even know where they are.

Solutions?
Here are some approaches Richmond jail and mental-health officials think could make a difference: More hospital beds: "We've lost hundreds of beds in the area. . . . Where do you think those people went?" says the jail's medical director, Dr. Stanley Furman. More community care: There are waiting lists for many basic services, such as a regular check-in with a social worker or case manager. New points of access: Steering a just-arrested small-time offender to a treatment program, or offering mental-health services in lieu of jail after conviction, could be a way to reach the mentally ill. Support in daily life: Housing and job programs for people whose illness or disability means they can't cope with day-to-day challenges might help keep them out of trouble with the law.
Tolerance: Many mentally ill people are in jail on misdemeanor charges because they acted in alarming ways but did not harm others. In Richmond, police officers often are able to stop that behavior at the time without arrest and jailing.

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Posted October 08, 2007 @ 08:54 AM by JustCause
This truly a moving piece. Artisitically, it is beautiful and invoking. Content-wise it reveals a true area of our society - local and abroad - that needs addressing. To bring it to light in such a power demeanor brings across the weight of such an issue.

Posted October 07, 2007 @ 08:03 PM by Anonymous
This is so sad. What is the saying "Any society,nation is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members-the last,the least and the littest"(Cardinal Roger Mahony).

Posted October 07, 2007 @ 06:09 PM by unionman
Folks, it's not just Richmond that has this problem. Prisons and jails all across the Comonwealth and the United States have a substantial number of seriously mentally ill tying up bed space and receiving mediocre treatment. It's my understanding that the largest mental health facility in the U.S. is the LA county jail. How we treat the least of us tells much about this country. We should all be ashamed.

Posted October 07, 2007 @ 04:29 PM by Anonymous II
This was really a very sad and depressing article to read. I have no answers, but I pray to merciful God that I am never arrested in Richmond for anything.

Posted October 07, 2007 @ 02:59 PM by Anonymous
After spending time in several psychiatric units around Richmond (am a student), I have gained much insight to many mental illnesses, one of which is the level at which they can communicate if they have received therapy/medication & counseling/groups. I have to say I don't think jail is any place for the mentally ill, especially if there is no group therapy or structured activity for them. This is not something they asked for. I invite anyone willing & able to help these individuals to do so.

Posted October 07, 2007 @ 02:51 PM by tip of the iceberg
Kudos to RTD for the frank reporting. And praise for Sheriff Woody pushing against impossible odds. Jail in Richmond for the mentally ill is no better than an 18th century madhouse. SHAME on us all for allowing such horrors to exist in 21st century Richmond. We wouldn't dream of not providing insulin to a diabetic inmate. But the city 'can't afford' the medications for THESE sick inmates? The stigma of mental illness is florishing in Richmond. What are we going to do about ??

Posted October 07, 2007 @ 02:22 PM by Anonymous
This is rediculous. Keep stories like this in the headlines.

Posted October 07, 2007 @ 12:48 PM by Anonymous
What year are we living in?? What the hell is the mayor doing? It seems like he has plenty of time to kick out the school board but the citizens of the city "his city" lay in their own fecal matter while trying to kill themselves. If he can not take care of his own people he needs to be kicked out of office. Let him stay a night or two at the jail and see if he does something about it. And what about the people who have to work there? This is madness!

http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2007-10-07-0134.html

Posted by lois at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)

"Repaying Debts" A policy guide to lessen the huge debt people leaving prison and jail face

JUSTICE CENTER GUIDE CALLS FOR POLICY CHANGES TO INCREASE CHILD SUPPORT AND VICTIM RESTITUTION PAYMENTS BY PEOPLE RELEASED FROM PRISONS AND JAILS

The Council of State Governments Justice Center issued a publication today on why victims and children of people released from prisons and jails often do not receive the restitution and support they are owed. Repaying Debts is a first-of-its-kind comprehensive guide, supported by the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Assistance that details how policymakers can increase financial accountability among people leaving correctional facilities, improve rates of child support collection and victim restitution, and make individuals' transition from prisons and jails to the community safe and successful.

People released from prisons and jails typically must make payments to a host of agencies, including probation departments, courts, attorney generals' offices, and child support enforcement offices. While coordinated collections efforts among these agencies could increase rates of repayment to victims, families, and criminal justice agencies, there is rarely a single agency tracking all of an individual's court-ordered debts and facilitating payment.

In addition to child support, an average of $178 million per state in court costs, fines, fees and restitution has gone uncollected. Failure to pay--even by those trying in good faith to repay debts--may even result in individuals' reincarceration, during which time those owed money are not being paid and taxpayers are footing the bill for their corrections costs.

The report recommends very specific strategies to improve how people released from prisons and jails meet their court-ordered financial obligations. It also provides examples from states that have successfully implemented some aspect of these strategies, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.

The report and a summary of its findings and recommendations can be downloaded at http://justicecenter.csg.org/media/press_releases/.

Posted by lois at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2007

TX: Legislator Launches Probe Against GEO's Youth Prisons

Oct. 5, 2007, 9:15AM
Houston legislator launches probe of prison contractor
Legislator cites Geo's 'terrible job' at youth lockup that state closed

By POLLY ROSS HUGHES and CLAY ROBISON

AUSTIN — A Houston lawmaker is launching a broad investigation into a private prison contractor after the state closed one of its youth facilities this week, citing filth, poor safety and health violations.

Democratic Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, cited the "terrible job" Geo Group Inc. did running the West Texas youth lockup and said Thursday he plans to review adult corrections contracts the state has with the company.

Boca Raton, Fla.-based Geo Group, which runs eight adult lockups in Texas, was sued by the Texas Civil Rights Project in 2006 in connection with an alleged rape and suicide of a woman at the Val Verde County Jail.

The suit alleged jail guards working for the company have allowed male and female inmates to have sex with each other. The suit was settled earlier this year with a nondisclosure agreement.

Geo spokesman Pablo Paez did not return phone calls seeking comment, but earlier stated the company had provided quality services at the TYC facility.

On Monday the Texas Youth Commission shuttered the doors of its Coke County Juvenile Justice Center, run by Geo, and moved nearly 200 young offenders to other TYC facilities.

"When we saw what a terrible job they were doing at Coke County, TYC had the ability to shut it down and move their youth," Whitmire said. As for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, he wondered, "When we find a failure to properly run a facility, what do they do?"

Geo operates four prisons, two shorter term lockups and a halfway house for the adult prison system. Prison spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said the agency hasn't had any "significant ongoing operational issues."

Whitmire said he found evidence that a 90-day lockup in Houston run by Geo was out of compliance in 139 of 395 areas in a recent inspection.

Lyons said Whitmire is referring to a 2006 audit, and all problems cited have now been cleared up.

Geo also supervises state prisoners in leased space in the Jefferson and Newton county jails.

TYC spokesman Jim Hurley said the agency's inspector general has opened a criminal investigation into the conditions at the Coke County juvenile facility.

Seven TYC employees have been fired, including several who were responsible for on-site monitoring of the Coke facility.

This was the only contract Geo had with the Youth Commission. But the agency has contracts with several other providers for various programs throughout the state, including foster homes and a program to teach parenting skills to delinquents who are pregnant.

Hurley said all those will be reviewed as a precaution.

"We are initiating an immediate onsite review of all our contract care programs," he said.

All the other state school lockups are operated directly by TYC staff.

TYC ombudsman Will Harrell, whose independent office was created by the Legislature earlier this year as part of the TYC reforms, praised the agency's leadership for its response to the problems in Coke County.

"They reacted with as much haste and decisiveness as anyone could have expected," he said.

Harrell, following a recent visit to the Coke facility, prepared a report citing feces-smeared cells, dirty bedsheets, insects found in food and some inmates being placed in solitary confinement for as long as five weeks.

"I usually leave these facilities sad," he said. "I left that one mad."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5189719.html

Posted by lois at 12:36 PM | Comments (0)

RI: Save kids, communities and money by closing Training School

The psychologists’ letter included this quote from a report called “Youth Violence” (2000), by the U.S. Surgeon General’s office: “Residential programs, interventions that take place in psychiatric or correctional institutions ... show little promise of reducing subsequent crime and violence in delinquent youths. While some residential programs appear to have positive effects on youths as long as they remain in the institutional setting, research demonstrates consistently that these effects diminish once young people leave.”

In other words, juvenile correction facilities do not turn kids’ lives around.

And no one holds these facilities accountable for their notoriously poor performance. We just pour good money after bad.

Save kids, communities and money by closing Training School

Sunday, October 7, 2007, Providence Journal

In the summer, Rhode Island’s General Assembly decided to save money by shifting the 17-year-olds from the Training School, at $98,000 per offender per year, to the Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI), at $39,000. Apparently, in their minds, the state’s acute budget crisis justified this barbarian idea. (Incredibly, they somehow failed to realize that the ACI puts juveniles in a high-security facility, at $104,000 per year.)

While the Assembly debated the decision, Paul Block, Ph.D., and Mark Dumas, Ph.D., the principals at Psychological Centers, a Rhode Island mental health service, sent a letter to the House Finance Committee outlining a far better solution than the ACI. Their program, Multisystemic Therapy (MST), guarantees a much lower rate of recidivism than the Training School’s, at a cost of $15,000 to $36,000 per year. Florida and Washington State have already saved buckets of money with this program.

Even if you don’t care about turning around the lives of troubled ruffians, surely as a taxpayer, you care about the costs to incarcerate them. High recidivism drives up future costs of prison and social services.

The psychologists’ letter included this quote from a report called “Youth Violence” (2000), by the U.S. Surgeon General’s office: “Residential programs, interventions that take place in psychiatric or correctional institutions ... show little promise of reducing subsequent crime and violence in delinquent youths. While some residential programs appear to have positive effects on youths as long as they remain in the institutional setting, research demonstrates consistently that these effects diminish once young people leave.”

In other words, juvenile correction facilities do not turn kids’ lives around.

And no one holds these facilities accountable for their notoriously poor performance. We just pour good money after bad.

Mind you, everyone agrees that chronically violent kids need to be locked away. Rhode Island laws already remand kids to the adult system for certain heinous crimes, including murder, and allow judges to waive threatening kids into the adult system. But there’s only a handful of such sociopaths; here we’re talking about garden variety delinquents.

Last winter, a small group studied the effectiveness of the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), which runs the Rhode Island Training School. In its April report, authors Thomas Hogg, Stephen McAllister and Lee Grossi — Grossi is now the interim head of the office that oversees DCYF — noted that the new Training School building just now being completed will have fewer beds, require more staff, and be even more expensive than the old one ($98,000).

They write, “The addition of 21 new employees [65 new staff were originally requested], at a time when services are being radically diminished, to staff new facilities to house children and youth that may not need traditional incarceration ... at an annual cost approaching $140,000 per child, makes no sense at all.”

Ya think?

Still, the General Assembly ignored the proposal from Psychological Centers. It also ignored the other two agencies that have a long-standing history of taking adjudicated kids, also with far better recidivism rates than the Training School.

Child and Family Services of Newport County runs community-based programs statewide, among which is “The Network.” Very troubled kids usually enter the Network in an intensive residential facility. These kids cannot be maintained in their homes and probably never will go back. Some were sentenced to the Network instead of the Training School. As behavior improves, the children “step down” to less intensive services along a “continuum of care,” until they learn to live independently, safely and cooperatively in their own communities. The most expensive kids in this program, the ones in secure residential care, cost us $70,000 per year — still a bargain compared with the Training School. Peter DiBarri, the program’s director, reports that in the seven years of operation, only a handful of kids have done anything so egregious that they land back in the Training School.

The Network can take another 100 kids.

Also standing ready is Tides Family Services. Brother Michael Reis is famous locally for his commitment to wayward, truant and adjudicated youth. Tides runs Ocean Tides, a residential facility in Narragansett that was the first in the state to take adjudicated kids. As children graduate from the residential facility out into the community, Tides’ outreach-and-tracking program sends community workers into their homes to work with them, their families and the schools.

So Rhode Island already has excellent options for turning around the lives of wayward and deviant youth. DCYF needs to turn to them instead of the Training School.

Hopefully, Rhode Island’s budget crisis will be the cattle prod that goads us into dismantling our ineffective youth prison. There are kinder and far more promising practices we could use instead.

Which will, to boot, save tons of money.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.

http://www.projo.com/education/content/se_educationwatch7_10-07-07_2K7C51U.214349f.html#

Posted by lois at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

What if our prison system wasn't just a reflection of society - but a force that shaped it?

Christopher Shea: Sentenced for life

What if our prison system wasn't just a reflection of society - but a force that shaped it?

09:07 AM CDT on Sunday, October 7, 2007, Dallas Morning News

What if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed? And what if, instead of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multibillion-dollar project steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American mainstream?

That's how America should think about its growing prison system, some leading social scientists are saying, in research that suggests prisons have a far deeper impact on the nation than simply punishing criminals.

Fueled by the war on drugs, "three strike" laws and mandatory minimum sentences, America's prisons and jails now house some 2.2 million inmates – roughly seven times the figure of the early 1970s. And Americans are investing vast resources to keep the system running: The cost to maintain American correctional institutions is some $60 billion a year.

For years sociologists saw prisons – with their disproportionately poor, black and uneducated populations – partly as mirrors of the social and economic disparities that cleave American life. Now, however, a new crop of books and articles are looking at the penal system not just as a reflection of society but as a force that shapes it.

In this view, the system takes men with limited education and job skills and stigmatizes them in a way that makes it hard for them to find jobs, slashes their wages when they do find them and brands them as bad future spouses. The effects of imprisonment ripple out from prisoners, breaking up families and further impoverishing neighborhoods, creating the conditions for more crime down the road. Prisons have grown into potent "engines of inequality," in the words of sociologist Bruce Western. The penal system, he and other scholars suggest, actively widens the gap between the poor – especially poor black men – and everyone else.

"This is a historic transformation of the character of American society," says Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist who has begun to write on this topic. "We are managing the losers by confinement."

The shift isn't just academic. In national politics, concern about the people who actually go to prison has been drowned out by tough-on-crime rhetoric, but today the issue is getting a hearing from some politicians, and not just hard-left liberals. On Oct. 4, Congress's Joint Economic Committee heard testimony from Dr. Western, Dr. Loury, and others on the economic and social costs of the prison boom; the session was chaired by Jim Webb, the gruff, moderate Democratic senator from Virginia. Cities including Boston and San Francisco are changing their hiring practices to destigmatize prisoners, and there is detectable momentum in Congress toward reducing the extraordinarily harsh minimum sentences for possession of crack cocaine, which disproportionately affect poor black Americans.

The issue has arrived on the public agenda in part because of the work done by a handful of leading sociologists. Dr. Western's 2006 book Punishment and Inequality in America is a key work in this new scholarly movement. Devah Pager, a Princeton sociologist, has been making headlines since her dissertation, completed in 2002 at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated how a criminal record – even for nonviolent drug offenses – made it nearly impossible for black ex-convicts in Milwaukee to land a job. This month, a book based on that work, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration, appears in bookstores. And sociologist Lawrence Bobo has been investigating how the growing black prison population is eroding African-Americans' confidence in the rule of law.

For years, the penal system was a marginal topic among sociologists, catching the interest chiefly of professors with an interest in hard-core criminology. But in the past decade, discussion of incarceration has moved to the center of the field, in the work of respected scholars at top institutions who are interested in a broad understanding of American inequality.

"My sense of it is just that the sheer mass, the weight of the reality of what's happening, has sunk in," says Dr. Loury.

With black men in their early 30s more likely to have been in prison than to have graduated from college, and with 700,000 ex-prisoners re-entering society each year, the trends cannot be ignored. The current U.S. rate of some 750 prisoners per 100,000 citizens is several times higher than rates in Europe – higher, even, than the rates in formerly repressive states like Russia or South Africa.

In Punishment and Inequality in America, Dr. Western documented the degree to which poor black communities across America live in a penitentiary shadow. Of black males born in the late 1960s who did not attend college, 30 percent have served time in prison, he pointed out. For high-school dropouts, the figure is a startling 59 percent. "I don't think the really deep penetration of the criminal justice system into poor and minority communities has been fully understood by people outside these communities," he says.

Mass incarceration, Dr. Western argues, also renders invisible a substantial portion of American poverty. At the height of the tech boom in 2000, he points out, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts weren't working. Government statistics, however, said the unemployment level of this group was 33 percent, because government surveys exclude prisoners.

At the root of prison's broader social impact lies its lingering effect on individual lives. In an ideal penal system, prisoners might exit the system having paid their debt to society and be more or less restored to their previous status as free men and women. But Dr. Pager's book demonstrates just how detached from reality that view is. She had four college students, two black and two white, pose as applicants for low-level jobs in Milwaukee (excluding jobs where a criminal record would have disqualified them).

They used résumés that were nearly identical – high school degrees, steady progress from entry-level work to a supervisory position – except that in some cases the applicant had a drug conviction in his past (possession with intent to distribute) for which he served an 18-month sentence and then behaved perfectly on parole.

In surveys conducted by Dr. Pager, 62 percent of Milwaukee employers said they'd consider hiring an applicant with a nonviolent drug offense in his past. But in her field study, she found that her black applicants with criminal records were asked for an interview a mere 5 percent of the time. That compared with 14 percent for the black applicants without a criminal record. Meanwhile, the white applicants with a record were called back 17 percent of the time, compared with 34 percent for the white men lacking the blotch on their résumé. "Two strikes" – blackness and a record – "and you're out" is how Dr. Pager summarizes her findings. (She has replicated this study in New York City, with similar results.)

Job prospects for black ex-prisoners in Milwaukee may be even worse in the future, Dr. Pager argues in Marked, because while the vast majority of job growth is in the suburbs, the gap between employers' receptiveness to black and white ex-convicts is even wider there.

Dr. Western explores the same set of post-prison issues on a broader statistical canvas. He found that whites, Hispanics and blacks all face a hit in their wages of about a third, relative to their peers, when they emerge from prison and also work fewer weeks per year. Their peers will see significant raises from ages 25 to 35, but the ex-prisoners won't, widening the gap. Former prisoners, too, are far less likely ever to marry, but no less likely to have kids, meaning that prisons contribute to the epidemic of female-headed, single-parent households.

Sociologists and a few politicians are not the only ones aware of these trends, argues Lawrence Bobo. Black Americans interpret them as evidence of stark racism, according to surveys he's done. Seventy-nine percent of white Americans, for example, think drug laws are enforced fairly, compared with 34 percent of black Americans.

Policymakers are slowly beginning to reckon with some aspects of these developments. In 2004, President Bush, in his State of the Union address, acknowledged some of the challenges caused by mass incarceration, Dr. Pager points out, describing the hundreds of thousands exiting prisons annually as a "group of Americans in need of help." And this year liberals like Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and conservatives like Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., have co-sponsored the so-called Second Chance Act. It would provide $192 million for drug counseling, family counseling, housing and mentorship for ex-offenders to assist their re-entry into their communities. And a handful of cities no longer ask applicants for city jobs whether they have a criminal record, although their backgrounds can still be checked later.

To these ideas, Dr. Pager would add a policy modeled on how we treat debtors: After a certain amount of time, records of most convictions, especially for nonviolent offenses, would be expunged. Stigma would have a deadline. And Dr. Western advocates ending mandatory minimum sentences for drug conviction.

In a campaign year, the prison issue is a tough one – such arguments don't have the easy pull on voters that "tough on crime" policies do. Yet with Congress calling prison experts to testify about their research, "I do sense there is a public conversation beginning," Dr. Western says.

Christopher Shea is a freelance writer in Boston. His e-mail address is critical faculties@verizon.net.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-shea_07edi.ART.State.Edition1.427d51f.html#

Posted by lois at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

MA; New Prison for Women Likely As Many Are Denied Training and Rehabilitation

New lockup likely as population soars; many inmates denied training, rehab
By Laura Crimaldi | Sunday, October 7, 2007 |
The state’s major prison for women is overflowing with inmates, and correction officials are scrambling to find beds, cover soaring medical costs and provide training and detox for cons before they are set loose.

MCI-Framingham is “bursting at the seams,” said Mary Beth Heffernan, undersecretary for Criminal Justice at the Executive Office of Public Safety, which runs prisons. “They don’t get the programming that these women need.”

Women’s prison crisis costing state millions

The number of inmates has risen by 11 percent since 2003, from 970 to 1080, and a top public safety official says a costly new facility for women is all but inevitable.

In the same four-year period, the budget for Framingham - the state’s principal prison for women - rose by 17 percent, from $26.9 million in 2003 to $31.4 million in 2007. Longer prison terms and crowded county jails account for the high capacity - nearly double what the site is intended for.

During a recent tour, female inmates were seen living six to a room in modular units, sharing tiny bathrooms. In another modular unit, about 68 women live in a large room furnished with bunk beds. Quarters there are so tight that arguments erupt over such trivial issues as personal hygiene, snoring and gossip, DOC officials said.

“If the county prisoners returned to the counties, the inmate population would be 215,” said Superintendent Lynn Bissonnette, who started her career at MCI-Framingham as a correction officer. If that were to happen, “we could do wonderful things” toward rehabilitation, she said.

In the first three months of 2007, there was an average daily population of 231 inmates awaiting trial, which is 361 percent of the design capacity for pretrial prisoners of 64 beds, according to a quarterly DOC overcrowding report.

The inmate population at the 452-capacity prison has swelled so dramatically because it is the repository for pretrial and sentenced female offenders from Worcester, Middlesex, Essex, Plymouth and Norfolk counties, where there are no facilities for women.

Last month, 67 percent of the 699 women at the prison were either serving a county sentence or awaiting trial, the DOC said.

Inmates also are showing up with severe medical and mental health problems and more serious detox needs, prison officials said. Costs related to housing pretrial detainees, medical and pharmaceutical services and utilities are the top reasons for budget increases, a DOC spokeswoman said.

Given the overcrowding, programs offered by the prison to prepare women for release carry long waiting lists.

“I think we could have a major impact on our women’s lives if we had them longer,” said Bissonnette. “But we don’t want to incarcerate people just so they can get programming.”

There are 42 women who want to enroll in a new cosmetology training course, which has slots for 12 inmates, she said. There are 109 women on the wait list for First Step, a 35-day substance-abuse program. The Correctional Recovery Academy, an eight-month substance-abuse and recidivism program, has a wait list of 53.

Last week the state Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance launched its search for a consulting firm with correction expertise to get a $1.5 million contract to conduct a master plan with the DOC and sheriffs, said DCAMM deputy director Kevin Flanigan.

The team is expected to be named by December. The process, which will take a year, will consider the maintenance and capacity needs, operational and capital costs and plans for demolition and new construction at county and state facilities, Flanigan said.

“I am hoping and the governor and this administration is hoping that conducting a master plan for correctional facilities will yield a result that we need an eastern Massachusetts women’s facility,” said Mary Beth Heffernan.

The opening of the 210-bed Western Massachusetts Regional Women’s Correctional Center in Chicopee last month has no impact on overcrowding in Framingham because the $26.1 million facility is housing women from an existing site in Ludlow.

Leslie Walker, executive director of the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, opposes building more prisons and jails.

“We can’t build our way out of this. It’s too expensive and the recidivism rate is too high,” she said. “If prisons worked there’d be a better argument. They do not. They warehouse people for a few years except for those lucky enough to receive training and education. The rest are delivered back to society in much worse shape than when they come in.”

Of the 738 female inmates released by the DOC in 2002, 42 percent were reincarcerated within three years, according to DOC spokeswoman Diane Wiffin.

“They just become tinderboxes. There is such a high level of mental illness at Framingham compared to other facilities it’s a whole other dimension. It’s a very needy population of inmates. There’s just not enough help to get it done,” said Steve Kenneway, president of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union. “They need to build more female prisons in Massachusetts.”

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1036493

Posted by lois at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2007

Editorial, NY Times: "Out of Prison and Deep in Debt"

October 6, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
Out of Prison and Deep in Debt

With the nation’s incarcerated population at 2.1 million and growing — and corrections costs topping $60 billion a year — states are rightly looking for ways to keep people from coming back to prison once they get out. Programs that help ex-offenders find jobs, housing, mental health care and drug treatment are part of the solution. States must also end the Dickensian practice of saddling ex-offenders with crushing debt that they can never hope to pay off and that drives many of them right back to prison.

The scope of the ex-offender debt problem is outlined in a new study commissioned by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance and produced by the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center. The study, “Repaying Debts,” describes cases of newly released inmates who have been greeted with as much as $25,000 in debt the moment they step outside the prison gate. That’s a lot to owe for most people, but it can be insurmountable for ex-offenders who often have no assets and whose poor educations and criminal records prevent them from landing well-paying jobs.

Often, the lion’s share of the debt is composed of child support obligations that continue to mount while the imprisoned parent is earning no money. The problem does not stop there. The corrections system buries inmates in fines, fees and surcharges that can amount to $10,000 or more. According to the Justice Center study, for example, a person convicted of drunken driving in New York can be charged a restitution fee of $1,000, a probation fee of $1,800 and 11 other fees and charges that range from $20 to nearly $2,200.

In some jurisdictions, inmates are also billed for the DNA testing that proves their guilt or innocence, for drug testing and even for the drug treatment they are supposed to receive as a condition of parole. These fees are often used to run the courts, the sheriffs’ offices or other parts of the corrections system.

A former inmate living at or even below the poverty level can be dunned by four or five departments at once — and can be required to surrender 100 percent of his or her earnings. People caught in this impossible predicament are less likely to seek regular employment, making them even more susceptible to criminal relapse.

The Justice Center report recommends several important reforms. First, the states should make one agency responsible for collecting all debts from ex-offenders. That agency can then set payment priorities. The report also recommends that payments to the state for fines and fees be capped at 20 percent of income, except when the former inmate has sufficient assets to pay more. And in cases where the custodial parent agrees, the report urges states to consider modifying child support orders while the noncustodial parent is in prison. Once that parent is released, child support should be paid first.

The states should also develop incentives, including certificates of good conduct and waivers of fines, for ex-offenders who make good-faith efforts to make their payments. Where appropriate, they should be permitted to work off some of the debt through community service. Beyond that, elected officials who worry about recidivism need to understand that bleeding ex-offenders financially is a sure recipe for landing them back in jail.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06sat1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2007

Jackson, MI: Prison likely to close but town can become something other than a "prison town"

"Next comes the adjustment for prison workers and for the Jackson economy. For employees, there's some solace in that many are staying in Jackson at nearby facilities. Others will drive to Adrian or Coldwater. That's certainly a major inconvenience and, given $3-a-gallon gas prices, an expense. The silver lining is that they won't have to hunt for a paycheck."

"There's little to suggest Jackson will lose another prison even with the state's financial problems, yet there's a good reminder here in this area's need to look to new industries. In the long run, employers like Foote Health System; prospects like the Northpointe Town Center and Armory Arts project; and a more-vibrant downtown will more than offset the 343 positions that will be lost at the prison. Will this remain a "prison town"? Yes, but there's much more to this community than that."

Courts step aside on prison closing
Posted by Jackson Citizen Patriot October 02, 2007 09:27AM
Categories: Editorial
The following is the Jackson Citizen Patriot's editorial for October 2, 2007

The most telling part of last week's legal ruling that hastens the closing of a Jackson prison was the reaction. Prison guards and their union representatives were resigned to defeat and seemingly relieved the time had come. The Southern Michigan Correctional Facility will shut its doors, likely in a few weeks.

The entire Jackson area should be saddened when that happens, but the inevitable closing at least ends the painful uncertainty for 300-plus employees and their families.

Nearly eight months have passed since state officials said they'd shut down this facility. In that time, federal courts effectively took over the prison's fate and treated prison employees like rag dolls.

The Southern Michigan prison for years has drawn significant attention from the legal system, and that's a reason why it's closing. Former U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen took on the issue of inmates' medical care in a case that spanned two decades, often ruling that state corrections officials needed to do more and more. It got to the point that the state looked at this facility first when the time came to save millions in prison costs. And there's no arguing that state government needed to cut its spending.

We don't blame Enslen for forcing the prison to close, yet the impact of his involvement has become clearer since he stepped away from the case in July. Enslen's successor approved the state's plan to move more than 600 chronically sick prisoners (which Enslen opposed), and an appeals court did nothing to overturn that ruling.

The prison closing, which for a time this summer looked mired in legal wrangling, suddenly is moving ahead. The only change to that scenario would be another appeal from inmates' attorneys or a change of heart from the new judge.

Next comes the adjustment for prison workers and for the Jackson economy. For employees, there's some solace in that many are staying in Jackson at nearby facilities. Others will drive to Adrian or Coldwater. That's certainly a major inconvenience and, given $3-a-gallon gas prices, an expense. The silver lining is that they won't have to hunt for a paycheck.

As for the community, we hope the loss of jobs won't hurt the local economy much. It's cheering to see that in Blackman Township, manufacturers TAC and Advance Turning & Manufacturing are looking to add 36 jobs.

There's little to suggest Jackson will lose another prison even with the state's financial problems, yet there's a good reminder here in this area's need to look to new industries. In the long run, employers like Foote Health System; prospects like the Northpointe Town Center and Armory Arts project; and a more-vibrant downtown will more than offset the 343 positions that will be lost at the prison. Will this remain a "prison town"? Yes, but there's much more to this community than that.

Our sympathies go to the prison employees, most of whom soon will start new jobs within the corrections system. We wish the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility wasn't picked to close, but that action will save taxpayers' money.

And the courts, finally, appear ready to let that happen on its own.
http://blog.mlive.com/citpat_opinion/2007/10/courts_step_aside_on_prison_cl.
html

Posted by lois at 05:55 PM | Comments (0)

Poetry Contest

Poetry Contest...
The contest is for prisoners, ex-prisoners, family members or friends of someone in prison, any prison guards, prison volunteer, or prison worker. We are looking for poetry that describes an event, the feelings and/or the life of being involved in prison.

First Place is $250.00, Second Place: $100.00, and Third Place: $75.00.

If you would like more information about this contest please log on at: www.shotcallerpress.com And, click on the Poetry link.

If you have any further questions please feel free to contact me.
Theresa M. Huggins
CEO, Shot Caller Press, LLC
theresa@shotcallerpress.com

Posted by lois at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)

October 03, 2007

"The House That Herman Built" opens Oct. 11th at Artist's Space in NYC

The House That Herman Built opens in the Campari Project Gallery, Artist's Space, October 10th from 5-7:30, the show will run until the the middle of December. Included in the installation is the CAD video, several drawings by Herman and Jackie, a life-sized recreation of Herman's current cell, the working blueprints by Urbanist Scott Gustafson, a timeline documenting Herman and Jackie's lives designed by Maria Hinds. and they are launching the second printing of the book, The House That Herman Built*. October 10th officially kicks off the fundraising campaign to build Herman's House in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Artist's Space has been kind enough to fly Miss Vikkie, Herman's sister up for the opening, so please come support her, and a film crew will be present- so wear your finest threads:). The exhibition is dedicated to the loving memory of Dame Anita Roddick, and to the fight for justice in Jena Louisiana.

Artist's Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10012

More information is available at www.HermansHouse.org www.artistsspace.org

For the West Coasters, currently the CAD video of Hermans House is also being screened in Palo Alto, at the " A Model Building" exhibition, Palo Alto Center for the Arts, 1313 Newell Road.

Posted by lois at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)

October 02, 2007

Youth Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education Act (Youth PROMISE Act): Two Different Approaches to Gang Wars

For Immediate Release: October 2, 2007

Congressional Hearings: New Approach Invests in Prevention, Not Policing or Prison

Research: more police, prison, punishment increases racial disparities and worsens gang problems

Washington, D.C. –At the hearings, Congress will hear about two very different approaches to dealing with youth and gang violence­one that offers more of the same failed suppression tactics, and one that offers the “PROMISE” of prevention.

Congressman Robert Scott (D-VA), chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee will hold hearings today, entitled “Gang Crime Prevention and the Need to Foster Innovative Solutions at the Federal Level?” The hearing will be at 1 p.m., in room 2141 of The Rayburn House Office Building

The subject of the hearing will be the Youth Prison Reduction through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education Act (Youth PROMISE Act) introduced by Congressman Robert Scott (D-VA). The bill is an evidence-based method proven to reduce youth violence and delinquency, and would direct resources towards communities facing an increased risk of crime and gang activity in order to enable those communities to begin to address significant unmet neighborhood needs. The Youth Promise Act contains nearly no “gang suppression” policies or funding.

In contrast, experts say S 456, introduced by Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California), is fundamentally flawed with an emphasis on punishment and incarceration rather than prevention and early intervention. Additionally, advocates say that the bill has well documented problems of racial and ethnic disparities causing greater incarceration and severity of sanctions for youth of color in the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

“Senator Feinstein’s bill replicates the failures of the policies of Los Angeles and Chicago, and seeks to nationalize this approach in federal legislation,” says Kevin Pranis, co-author of Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies, a report issued by the Justice Policy Institute in July.

JPI says specific parts of Feinstein’s Gang Abatement and Prevention Act are particularly worrisome including:

• Definitions of “Gang” and “Gang Crime” so broad, and so vague that it will dramatically increase unwarranted federal prosecution of young people. S 456 a defines a gang formal or informal group, organization, or association of five or more individuals, each of whom has committed at least one gang crime; and who collectively commit three or more gang crimes. Research has shown that the vast majority of adolescent crimes occur in groups and that this “group context” is the most significant trait of offending during the adolescent years. The definitions contained in S 456 could apply to young people who have nothing to do with the serious gang violence that some communities endure.

• Gangs Database that Labels Young People of Color as Gang Members. S 456 would create a National Gang Activity Database, which in combination with the overbroad definitions of a gang, may lead to racial profiling. In Los Angeles, which employs a gangs database, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office found that close to half of black males between the ages of 21 and 24 had been entered into LA county’s gang database, even though no one could credibly argue that all of these young men were current gang members.

• Life without Parole for Youth. This legislation calls for significantly enhanced penalties, including life without parole sentences, which are inappropriate for youth, and contraindicated by widely accepted scientific research in the field of adolescent brain development. Research on adolescent brain development reveals, as the Supreme Court has acknowledged, there are fundamental differences between adults and adolescents, and the “culpability or blameworthiness” for an adolescent’s crimes are “diminished, to a substantial degree, by reason of youth or immaturity.”

Gang Wars points to Los Angeles and Chicago as examples of the tragic failure of the most popular suppression approaches to gangs. Despite decades of aggressive gang enforcement – including mass arrests and surveillance, huge gang databases, and increased prison sentences for gang crimes – gang violence continues at unacceptable rates. Despite this failed track record, policymakers nationwide risk following blindly in Los Angeles’ and Chicago’s troubled footsteps.

“Decades of harsh police suppression tactics in Los Angeles have proved counterproductive,” says Judith Greene, co-author of Gang Wars. “Not only has the City lost its ‘war’ on gang crime – the number of gang members has actually doubled. It’s time for new strategies: making a real commitment to provide community youth programs, improving the quality of public education, increasing social supports for struggling families, and revitalizing the impoverished neighborhoods where unmet needs breed gang violence.”

New York City, by contrast, did not embrace the aggressive tactics chosen elsewhere when gang crime was on the rise, and has experienced far less gang violence. When gang violence became a serious problem, the city established a system of well-trained street-workers and gang intervention programs, grounded in effective social work practices and independent of law enforcement. Gang experts conclude that the city’s serious problem with street gang violence had largely faded away by the 1980s. Crime is at an historic low in New York.

To see the hearing online, go to http://judiciary.house.gov/

Posted by lois at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)

Zero Tolerance - it's the American way

"The unhappiest consequence of Zero Tolerance, however, may be the rise of Generation ZT, children born beginning in the Reagan/Bush '80s, now the sacrificial lambs of Zero Tolerance and, paradoxically, as they have entered the workforce, its most loyal servants."

San Francisco Chronicle

Zero Tolerance - it's the American way
Richard Rapaport
Sunday, September 30, 2007

Does it feel like nobody listens anymore? That everyone is tuned into their own channel? That people in your daily life are working from some secret script designed to degrade and disenfranchise you? Welcome to ZT America. ZT, or Zero Tolerance, is the mind-set and rationale used these days to justify actions ranging from the expulsion of elementary school students for bringing alcohol-based mouthwash to school, to the sentencing of a Virginia mother to two years in prison for serving beer to her 16-year-old son and his classmates at a party.

Zero Tolerance has been invoked against a kaleidoscope of recent allegedly anti-social behaviors: Republican colleagues of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig clawed each other raw to declare Zero Tolerance for his alleged misdeeds in the men's room at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Zero Tolerance was on the faces of University of Florida police as they Tasered student Andrew Meyer during a speech by John Kerry. Meyer's imbecilic behavior, in fact, illustrated his own Zero Tolerance for the time and opinions of others.

ZT is in the American political bloodstream. After Hurricane Katrina, President Bush declared Zero Tolerance for looters. Trying to defuse the crisis in California prisons, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounced Zero Tolerance for "gang-related codes of silence." Mothers Against Drunk Driving avows to-the-death Zero Tolerance for underage drinking. The Defense Department proclaims ZT for sexual harassment.

Zero Tolerance has become a featured player in the American judicial pageant. Its tenets justify draconian overcharging and Methuselah-like jail terms. Zero Tolerance has helped transform American justice into an incarceration machine largely free from human interference or humane inference. ZT justice absolves officials from accusations of weakness on crime, while jailing people in record numbers. According to a recent Justice Department report, the United States now has the world's largest prison population and highest rate of incarceration, with 1 in 32 American adults enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

Like water hyacinth, the pestiferous houseplant invading Southern lakes and streams, Zero Tolerance is taking over the national fishpond, choking out once-treasured values like compassion, discretion and inventiveness. Over the past four decades, Zero Tolerance has metastasized from drug enforcement, to policing, into the court system, the public schools and now, perhaps worst of all, into the American social mainstream.

The institutionalization of Zero Tolerance policies signals the triumph of a bureaucratic mind-set more obstinately retrograde than the once-derided French or German models. I mean, have you been at the counter inside a Barnes & Noble, in line at the Century 20 ticket kiosk, or checking into a doctor's office, and asked for a slight bending of the house rules? Not this time, chump.

Nor does it take a genius to explain why Zero Tolerance is transforming America into "The Land Mercy Forgot." Zero Tolerance is, after all, the logical and syntactical equivalent of Total Intolerance. How unfortunate that there was no warning that we toiled under a system that has sanctioned total intolerance across the breadth of national life.

Originally culled from the engineering lexicon, Zero Tolerance first saw light in 1971, a PR slogan promulgated by New York public health officials who failed to detect tainted baby food in an upstate processing plant. In 1973, as Watergate's noose tightened, Nixon Justice Department officials appropriated Zero Tolerance as a tough-on-crime anodyne. In the early 1980s, the Navy adopted Zero Tolerance to add puissance to a purge of seagoing potheads. From there, it entered civilian drug enforcement and then spilled over into the general justice system, prospering as that ZT subspecies, Zero Tolerance for Crime, periodically trotted out to induce voters into backing law-and-order candidates.

In ZT America, God save the judge finding redemptive qualities in law-breakers. Creampuff sentencing is the Zero Tolerance equivalent of the scarlet "S," for Soft on Crime. Today, "victim's rights" organizations are twitching to replace "activist judges" with those favoring sentences that would have made Saddam Hussein blush. Having created a courtroom forum for victims and families, television now brings us a daily parade of the unmerciful, tasteless and overwrought, without seemingly a thought to the fading of John Adams' epochal instruction for "a nation of laws and not of men."

Discretion, once a tool of intelligent policing, has given way to drawn guns, takedowns and automatic arrest. Does anyone remember a time when a local cop might simply drive a tipsy taxpayer home? Not if MADD has anything to say about it. Zero Tolerance enforcement also sponsors a growing culture of entrapment that encourages the setups and stings that vacuum into the already full-to-bursting criminal justice system not the truly dangerous, but rather the merely stupid and weak.

The unhappiest consequence of Zero Tolerance, however, may be the rise of Generation ZT, children born beginning in the Reagan/Bush '80s, now the sacrificial lambs of Zero Tolerance and, paradoxically, as they have entered the workforce, its most loyal servants.

For these children of ZT, physiology is destiny: They are pudgy, raised indoors during the '90s Polly Klaas child-snatching hysteria. They are myopic, recipients of too much homework assigned too early. They walk hunched, from bulging book bags hefted after administrators sealed school lockers as potential drug magazines. Forbidden to explore local woods and instead accessories to parent-supervised play dates, they have little taste for solitude.

They are, however, anything but stupid. Beset on all sides, Generation ZT learned that a jesting lunchroom threat, a comb that looks like a switchblade, or a stick of caffeinated Jolt gum offered to a classmate could terminate Ivy League aspirations.

How much easier, then, to stifle the impulse to toilet-paper the assistant principal's car, or challenge the history teacher's lame Civil War interpretation. These days, however, any perceived act of resistance might bring the local police SWAT team charging through school's corridors. How much more practical to play it sly, pass through class without being the stuck-out nail pounded in by the hammer of Zero Tolerance. Yet, how sad to trim youthful sails to the winds of ZT at the age when gaudy mistakes are best made, the status quo mocked and hell generally raised.

Generation ZT has done few of those things. Having learned to love the subjugating rules required for success in the un-brave new world of Zero Tolerance, you can bet that their ascension up the American socio-economic ladder will mean an increasingly intolerant ZT eye cast on the often-unruly lives of the rest of us.

Richard Rapaport attempts to practice zero intolerance from his Bay Area home. E-mail him at jrap@aol.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/30/IN8OSEKD6.DTL

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

Iowa could be leader in reforming prison system

Iowa could be leader in reforming prison system
By Art Neu
October 2, 2007
Your Sept. 21 editorial ("Be Wary of Lanuching Prison-Building Spree") while interesting, missed the most important point.

In the budget asking by the Iowa Department of Corrections is a request for minimum-security and residential beds. This is important because we have a backlog of 405 offenders in prison waiting for residential beds outside the prisons. If you include those on parole or in federal prisons, the number increases to 916. The budget request approved by the DOC board would increase the number of community-based-correction beds by 250 to 275 new beds.

At the end of August 2007, Iowa had 347 female offenders' beds classified as minimum-security. Yet 742 female offenders were in the women's prisons in Mitchellville and Mount Pleasant. Mitchellville is the most overcrowded of our nine prisons, but many more of these women could exist in a minimum-security or residential setting. Thus, the need for more beds outside the walls is obvious.

There is no question that we should improve treatment in the prisons for the mentally ill and those with alcohol and drug needs. However, a prison is not the best setting for treatment.

As of Dec. 31, 2006, there were 3,535, mentally-ill inmates in our prisons. The total prison population is slightly more than 8,600 people. A significant number also have substance-abuse problems, though some, undoubtedly, are mentally-ill inmates who self-medicated with alcohol or drugs.

Most inmates come from our urban areas. Therefore, the Iowa Department of Corrections' proposed expansion of residential facilities would be built in the community-based corrections facilities near large cities. The department also proposes that a minimum-security facility be built outside the wall at Mitchellville, which would significantly reduce the overcrowding.

The recommendation for a new maximum-security prison at Fort Madison is not unreasonable. On the contrary, the incredibly bad living conditions inside the walls at Fort Madison are, in my judgment, inhumane. The prison is so antiquated that pouring money into it to try to rehabilitate it is foolish. A new prison would be designed to improve security and provide a decent environment for the inmates.

People should keep in mind that many of the inmates in Fort Madison will eventually be released, and a case could be made that they will come out worse than they went in given the environment there. This is not to take anything away from the staff at Fort Madison. They do a good job under very difficult circumstances.

What the Register and interested citizens should truly be concerned about is the position, taken by some, that we should build a new prison at Fort Madison and then keep the old one operational, since department officials believe the increase in the prison population will be so great as to justify two maximum-security institutions.

The Durrant study of our prisons concluded that it would be more expensive to rehabilitate the existing prison at Fort Madison than to build a new maximum-security facility there. I believe that putting large sums of money into the existing prison is akin to dumping money down a sinkhole.

We can reduce our prison population by repealing a number of the mandatory-minimum sentences. I would prefer some inconsistency in sentences by judges rather than a "one-sentence-fits-all" mentality inherent in mandatory-minimum sentences. Such action would have to be bipartisan because elected officials who support the repeal of these laws are vulnerable to the charge of being "weak on crime."

Because of Iowa's relatively small population and relatively small prison population, we could be a leader in penal reform. The 8,600 in our nine prisons and the 26,000-plus in community-based corrections facilities are low numbers compared to most other states. The community-based corrections facilities have diverted many people away from the prisons, and there is a strong need for additional residential facilities near large cities.

ART NEU is former lieutenant governor and a member of the Iowa Board of Corrections.
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071002/OPINION03/710020362/1035/OPINION

Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

AL: Montgomery Advertiser : Sentencing guidelines hold potential

October 2, 2007

Editorial
Montgomery Advertiser
Sentencing guidelines hold potential

Alabamians have been hearing for years about the severe overcrowding of the state's prison system, an ongoing problem that has multiple components, few of which have been satisfactorily addressed. The result is a prison population that exceeds 29,000 inmates in a system with facilities designed for less than half that many.

There is a more encouraging bit of news about the problem, however. The sentencing guidelines adopted by the Legislature last year show some real potential for curbing the growth in the prison population.

The standards have been in place for a year now, and the Alabama Sentencing Commission reports that judges are using them in 86 percent of cases. The guidelines are voluntary, but judges generally have been supportive of them.

And well they should. Judges know better than anyone that the law sometimes creates overly harsh sentences, that "tough on crime" measures often have implications that legislators fail to see -- or choose to ignore.

Overly broad sentencing ranges create the prospect of glaringly inequitable sentences for similar offenses. That undermines confidence in the fundamental fairness of the judicial system.

Narrowing the sentencing ranges for drug crimes and reducing the sentences for property crimes are sensible steps that all judges should be willing to implement. This also brings sentencing in closer relation to the actual time likely to be served, which enhances the credibility of the courts.

Over time, the sentencing guidelines will help reduce the overcrowding in the prison system through more reasonable limits on the length of sentences. Those whose offenses merit their incarceration will serve sentences more commensurate with their crimes. Sentences will be more consistent across the state, thanks to the narrower sentencing ranges.

All of this, of course, depends on judges using the guidelines. That is why the 86 percent usage rate in the first year is so encouraging. The Sentencing Commission projected a decline in the prison population in four years if judges used the guidelines in 75 percent of cases.

A 100 percent usage rate is the goal -- and a worthy one -- but even if the rate is somewhat lower, the benefits will be substantial.

This is precisely the kind of thoughtful, pragmatic approach that is required to deal with the prison overcrowding problem. For decades, Alabama politicians have thrived on seemingly tough anti-crime measures, which often have proven tough on the taxpayers. Any attempt to move away from a lock-em-up mentality was derided as "coddling" or "soft on crime."

That shortsighted thinking is slowly being replaced by more sensible approaches. Even so, it took several years to get the sentencing guidelines through the Legislature.

Alabama cannot build enough prisons for a 29,000-inmate population. Even if it could, that would be a dubious use of resources.

A far wiser course is to pursue policies that send to prison the violent offender who needs to be there, but not the nonviolent property offender -- in particular the drug addict, for whom supervised treatment is infinitely more sensible than incarceration. Sentencing guidelines can and should be a major part of that effort.

The judges who are using them are to be commended. Those who aren't should reconsider their position.

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071002/OPINION01/710010331/1012/OPINION

Posted by lois at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)

MD prisons have highest % of AIDS cases nation-wide followed by CT, DE and NY

" Connecticut, Delaware and New York state had the second-highest percentage of inmates living with AIDS, with 1.1% each, the report found (Baltimore Sun, 9/29)."

Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Across The Nation

Maryland Prisons Have Highest Percentage of AIDS Cases Nationwide, DOJ Report Says

Prisons in Maryland have the highest percentage of inmates living with AIDS nationwide, according to a study by the Department of Justice, the Baltimore Sun reports. The study is based on statistics from 41 states at the end of 2005.

The study found that AIDS cases among inmates in Maryland prisons increased from 204 in 2004 to 408 in 2005 and that 1.8% of inmates in Maryland are living with AIDS. Although the number of inmates living with AIDS increased, the study found a decrease in the number of HIV-positive inmates from 988 in 2003 to 792 in 2004 and 671 in 2005 (Garland, Baltimore Sun, 9/29). The number of HIV-positive inmates nationwide and the number of AIDS cases decreased in 2005, the report found (Lamothe, Annapolis Capital, 9/29).

Mark Vernarelli, a spokesperson for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said that prison officials "have not had a chance to examine the report" and that state officials could not explain the increase in AIDS cases during the one-year period. Vernarelli added that the prison system in August spent $850,000 on HIV/AIDS-related medications for inmates.

According to Vernarelli, many of the HIV-positive inmates contracted the virus through injection drug use (Baltimore Sun, 9/29). Richard Rosenblatt, assistant secretary for DPSCS, said a "high rate of HIV should be expected" in Maryland prisons because of the high number of injection drug users in the Baltimore area. According to CDC, the Baltimore area in 2005 had the second-highest rate of AIDS nationwide, with 40.4 cases per 100,000 people (Annapolis Capital, 9/29).

Connecticut, Delaware and New York state had the second-highest percentage of inmates living with AIDS, with 1.1% each, the report found (Baltimore Sun, 9/29).

Online The report is available online.at this URL
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/print_report.cfm?DR_ID=47908&dr_cat=1

Posted by lois at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

PA must tackle crowded prisons

Posted on Tue, Oct. 2, 2007
Philadelphia Inquirer

Pa. must tackle crowded prisons
The governor has proposed a package of changes. Lawmakers need to support it.

By William DiMascio

State and local prisons in Pennsylvania are so crowded that we are at a tipping point. Our only options appear to be committing hundreds of millions of tax dollars to add institutional capacity or changing our sentencing patterns. Either way, Gov. Rendell must confront a public traditionally resistant to paying taxes for prisons or a legislature unwilling to do an ything that might be perceived as being soft on crime.

Since the 1980s, Pennsylvania and other states have experienced a dramatic spike in the prison census, spurred primarily by a crackdown on illegal drug use. The commonwealth opened new prisons and helped counties to replace old ones. Just as quickly, lawmakers adopted longer sentences and gave judges little discretion to shorten them, and later administrations curtailed parole releases. It was like pouring one gallon of water into a bathtub and letting out one ounce.

Philadelphia jails are overflowing, with more than 9,000 men and women in confinement, many housed three to a cell and locked down for 23 hours a day. State institutions also are at 110 percent of capacity with almost 46,000 prisoners. Anticipating the worst, the Department of Corrections has plans to build new prisons, reactivate a mothballed one, and expand others.

Rendell is proposing a package of changes that make a lot of sense. Among the proposals is one that would move all county inmates whose sentences are from two to five years into state facilities. These individuals are technically state prisoners anyway, because their sentences exceed two years, but they have been permitted by the judges in their cases to serve their time in the nearby county jails.

The downside to serving five years in the county system is that local prisons and jails are generally not well equipped to hold people for that long: they lack programming and counseling capacities, spend less on staff training, and are geared toward more rapid turnover.

Making room for these 2,500 or so county prisoners could be accomplished, according to Jeffrey Beard, state secretary of corrections, by implementing a "recidivism-reduction program." That's a fancy name for one of the governor's other initiatives.

This program would permit early release on parole of certain nonviolent offenders in exchange for their active participation in rehabilitative programming. In this way, these nonviolent offenders would minimize their exposure to the hardening effect of prisons, occupy expensive cell space for less time, and get therapeutic interventions designed to help them avoid re-offending.

The Department of Corrections' most recent study of recidivism showed that 46 percent of parolees return to prison within three years either for violating conditions of their release or committing new crimes. This is a major source of admissions to the state system.

For the first time in years, the governor is shunning the "bring-it-on" response. What he is proposing is a win-win approach, a way of addressing a persistent problem responsibly.

Legislators concerned about their reputations for being tough on crime need to give some thought to being perceived as smart on crime. It truly is time to face the music and, well, dance.

William DiMascio is executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society (www.prisonsociety.org).

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/pa/20071002_Pa__must_tackle_crowded_prisons.html

Posted by lois at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)

Analyst Raises Price Targets for Corrections Corp. and GEO Group Due to High Demand October

Ahead of the Bell: Prison Operators
Analyst Raises Price Targets for Corrections Corp. and GEO Group Due to High Demand October 01, 2007: 09:01 AM EST

NEW YORK (Associated Press) - A Lehman Brothers analyst raised his price target on private prison operators Corrections Corp. of America and GEO Group Inc. Monday, saying those two companies will benefit the most from strong demand.

Jeff Kessler rates both stocks "Overweight." He raised his price target on Corrections Corp. shares to $34 from $31.50. He expects GEO Group stock to rise to $36 per share, from a previous target of $33.

Kessler's price target on Corrections Corp. implies the stock will rise 29.9 percent over the next year, while his target on GEO suggests 21.6 percent growth.

"As we have stated over the last few years, the potential for growth in the private prison industry is substantial," he said.

Demand for private prisons is greater than supply, Kessler wrote in a client note, and Corrections Corp. and GEO Group are in the best position to take advantage of that demand. Corrections Corp. is in particularly good shape, he said, because it will add about 11,000 beds in the next 18 to 24 months.

"With increased confidence in what we believe should be a continuation in increased bed capacity, higher occupancy levels, and better margins over the next two years, we are maintaining our 'Overweight' rating on Corrections Corp. - the leader in the private prison industry," he said.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/apwire/D8S0F0281.htm

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

CT: Prisons commissioner downplays lawmakers' crowding concerns

Newsday.com
Prisons commissioner downplays lawmakers' crowding concerns
By SUSAN HAIGH, Associated Press Writer
October 1, 2007

HARTFORD, Conn.

State prison officials tried to assure legislators Monday that they don't need more staff, new prisons or additional funding to handle the influx of inmates from the governor's decision to temporarily halt parole for violent offenders.

"We can manage this," said Brian Murphy, deputy commissioner of operations for the Department of Correction. "No matter how many inmates we have, we're going to manage them safely and securely."

Such promises surprised some Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who fear Connecticut's prisons are already too crowded and can't handle additional prisoners. DOC Commissioner Theresa Lantz acknowledged there are currently about 300 portable beds set up on gym floors, but said there's still additional room available for more inmates.

"Is there ever a limit as to how many prisoners you can fit into a building?" asked Rep. Gerald Fox, D-Stamford, vice chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

"As of right now, we have enough space," said Lantz, who repeatedly referred to the number of prison beds as "fluid." Nearly 230 new beds for inmates are currently being added to the prison system.

The corrections department reported 18,892 inmates in Connecticut on July 1. But since the July 23 killings of a Cheshire mother and her two daughters, the population has jumped by approximately 430 prisoners, partly because of changes to parole standards. The two suspects in the killings were parolees.

While Lantz said she could not provide a maximum capacity for Connecticut's prisons, Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he believes they were originally designed to handle only 17,000 inmates. He has expressed fears that more crowding could prompt the federal courts to get involved and possibly order a mass release.

Lawmakers called Monday's emergency hearing after learning of Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell's order to suspend parole for all violent offenders until reforms of the parole process are completed. State officials have been scrutinizing the system in the wake of the Cheshire murders. Rell's order, however, came after news that another parolee was accused of committing a carjacking.

Lawlor said he supports Rell's decision, but called for the meeting so lawmakers could learn more about how she planned to handle the consequences of suspending parole. Rell declined the committee's invitation to speak.

Lantz said she does not know how long parole will be suspended for violent offenders. The legislature is working on a package of reforms in the wake of the Cheshire murders, but the governor's task force considering similar issues isn't expected to make recommendations until December.

In the meantime, Lantz said DOC is reviewing the records of low-level inmates to determine whether any should be recommended for halfway houses or other forms of community supervision in an effort to free prison beds for violent criminals. Also, she said prison officials are taking a look at inmates, with both violent and nonviolent records, on a case-by-case basis, to see if they might be suitable for another community release program.

A spokesman for the governor said last week that Rell expects enough space will be freed up in the prisons to handle any influx of serious offenders from the parole suspensions. Also, Rell said there are no plans to build more prisons.

Lantz tried to clarify statements she made during an earlier legislative hearing on Sept. 11, where she suggested lawmakers consider building a new 1,200-bed facility for inmates with mental health needs. Lantz again took some Democrats by surprise when she explained she was not requesting funds for such a facility or even saying one was needed. Lantz said she only mentioned it as something lawmakers might consider in the future.

"I never asked for those things," she said. "We are managing our medical and our mental health issues as we speak."

Copyright © 2007, The Associated Press

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

October 01, 2007

CT: Cheshire slayings change tone on justice reform

"It's almost like members are bending over backward to join the throng of punitive measures," said Jon Schoenhorn, a task force member and president of the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. "It violates the entire purpose of why this task force was created."

Cheshire slayings change tone on justice reform
By Zach Lowe
Staff Writer

Published September 30 2007

July's home invasion and triple murder in Cheshire has shifted the focus of the state's sentencing task force, a group many members hoped would recommend drug law reforms and other changes.

"We've really been derailed because of the Cheshire case," said Thomas Ullmann, a public defender in New Haven who is among the 54 listed members of the task force created in 2006. "The agendas have almost entirely been made up of issues related to Cheshire."

Ullmann and several other members suggested the task force may be missing a chance to make long-term changes in the justice system.

Others said the group will continue to discuss issues such as mandatory minimum drug sentences and racial disparity in sentencing even as it deals with parole system gaps exposed by the Cheshire case.

"We have to show the public we understand that we must reduce the chances that something like Cheshire could happen again," said Robert Farr, task force chairman and head of the state's Board of Pardon and Paroles. "We can do that and still make other changes."

The group began meeting in May, two months before two parolees broke into a Cheshire home and killed a woman and her two daughters.

The task force started by having members answer questions about what sentence they would give a defendant in different scenarios.

The results surprised some members. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges and academics gave similar answers. Farr called it "a magical moment in Connecticut's criminal justice history."

The task force divided into four subcommittees that would discuss alternatives to incarceration, sentencing structure, the racial imbalance in prisons and how to classify some drug offenses and other crimes that carry a broad range of possible sentences.

Then, on July 23, two burglars on parole, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, allegedly killed Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11.

Legislators called for a review of the parole system, and it has since been learned that the parole board did not have access to sentencing transcripts and other documents when it released Komisarjevsky and Hayes.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell created her own task force to investigate the parole system. Last week, she banned parole for all violent offenders.

The sentencing task force changed its focus at the same time. It studied tougher burglary laws and looked at the impact a tougher "three strikes and you're out" law would have on prison overcrowding.

"It's almost like members are bending over backward to join the throng of punitive measures," said Jon Schoenhorn, a task force member and president of the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. "It violates the entire purpose of why this task force was created."

Other members said they noticed the shift.

"Prison overcrowding and alternatives to incarceration were getting more attention before," Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane said. "Since Cheshire, obviously the need to protect the public has been brought to the forefront."

Some members say the task force should lend its voice to the Cheshire debate so the state does not make any rash changes.

"I think it's incumbent upon us to respond," said Andrew Clark, a group member and the administrator of the Institute for the Study of Crime & Justice at Central Connecticut State University. "We have to ask tough questions and come up with real solutions."

Clark and other members said the task force could return to other issues in the future.

"I think it's too early to draw any conclusions about the impact of the Cheshire event," said David Shepack, state's attorney for the Litchfield Judicial District. "Obviously, it's been a topic of conversation, but I don't think one can turn around and say it has changed the work of the task force or what the ultimate results will be."

A case such as Cheshire can make policy-makers "a little less willing to think outside the box," said Barbara Tombs, a senior fellow at the New York City-based Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit agency that researches criminal justice issues.

Tombs has been advising the task force and says it could suggest major changes and deal with fallout from the Cheshire case.

"With something so high profile, you have to shift priorities," Tombs said. "But that doesn't mean the whole issue of reform takes a secondary seat."

http://www.norwalkadvocate.com/news/local/scn-sa-nor.sentencing3sep30,0,7301
269.story?track=rss>

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Justice Policy Institute Brief: Increased employment and wages are associated with positive public safety outcomes.

Latest Brief in a Series of Policy Briefs on Public Safety: Increased employment and wages are associated with positive public safety outcomes.

The Justice Policy Institute today launches the second in a series of research briefs that examine the impact of positive social investments on public safety. "Employment, Wages and Public Safety," one of four briefs, finds that increased employment rates and wages are associated with public safety benefits. The release of this brief
corresponds with concerns about U.S. job losses and the small uptick in the national crime rate.

Key findings from "Employment, Wages and Public Safety" include:

Increased employment is associated with positive public safety outcomes. Researchers have found that from 1992 to 1997, a time when the unemployment rate dropped 33 percent, "slightly more than 40 percent of the decline [in overall property crime rate] can be attributed to the decline in unemployment."

Increased wages are also associated with public safety benefits. Researchers have found that a 10 percent increase in wages would reduce the number of hours young men spent participating in criminal activity by 1.4 percent.

States that had higher levels of employment also had crime rates lower than the national average. Eight of the 10 states that had lower unemployment rates in the United States also had violent crime rates that were lower than the national average. In comparison, half of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates had higher violent crime rates than the national average in 2005.

The risks of incarceration, higher violent crime rates, high unemployment rates and low wages are concentrated among communities of color. Communities of color and African Americans, specifically, experience more unemployment and lower average wages than their white counterparts. At the same time, communities of color are more likely to experience higher rates of violence than are white communities,
and African Americans are more likely to be incarcerated than are whites.

A previous brief examined the impact of investments in education on public safety outcomes. Upcoming briefs will examine the intersection of policies on housing and drug treatment with safety and crime rates. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To read the complete brief, see other materials on crime and public safety, or learn more about the Justice Policy Institute, visit: www.justicepolicy.org

Posted by lois at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)

UK: 15 women’s jails to be shut, with offenders offered detox and help

From The (London) Times
October 1, 2007
15 women’s jails to be shut, with offenders offered detox and help Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

Fifteen women’s jails in England and Wales would close and be replaced with small custodial units in the biggest prison shake-up under consideration by the Justice Ministry.

The plan also involves sweeping changes to the current classification of jails, including the development of a federal system holding only high-risk offenders with other criminals in so-called community prisons, The Times has learnt.

Many short-term prisoners would be held in open community prisons rather than in closed jails, which would offer them detoxification treatment and help with resettlement in the community.

The proposals also recommend that remand prisoners be held within dedicated units in community jails, where they would be managed separately from other inmates.

The outline for the biggest restructuring of the jail system in decades is part of a review of prisons being conducted by Lord Carter of Coles for the ministry.

His findings, expected to be published within the next few weeks, are part of the Government’s attempts to get a grip on the prison numbers crisis. But last night prison governors and a criminal justice think-tank said attempts to restructure the prison system were doomed to fail without an easing of population pressure and an input of extra cash.

Charles Bushell, general secretary of the Prison Governors’ Association, said: “These are interesting and innovative plans. Unfortunately at the moment the Prison Service is struggling simply to contain the ever-growing numbers who are sent to prison.

“At a time when every place is at a premium, it is difficult to see how such an ambitious programme can be brought into place and it will require considerable additional resources.”

Enver Solomon, deputy director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London, said: “Any proposed reconfiguration of the prison estate is effectively meaningless while the prison service is in a state of crisis dealing with constant overcrowding. What is needed is a radical review of the sentencing framework.”

The proposals are contained in an interim report prepared by the National Offender Management Service for a workshop held last week on the Carter Review. Under the plans the 15 women’s jails would be replaced by smaller units run as family units holding up to about 20 women. Only women jailed for long periods would be in the unit.

The document does not say what would happen to the existing women’s prisons but some, such as Holloway in North London, could be sold for housing, while others could hold men.

The paper, seen by The Times, outlines a reshaping of the existing system into federal and community prisons rather than the current four-tier top-security, training, local and open categories of jails. It also calls for criminals held in the new-style community prisons to be segregated on the basis of their risk of harm to the public and how close they are to the end of their sentences.

“The very small percentage of prisoners assessed as posing high risk of serious harm to the public to be placed in a dedicated ‘federal’ estate, the rest placed in closed or open community prisons,” the document said.

This proposal suggests that the existing high-security prison system would be slimmed down. It would also end the current practice where some top-security jails hold both high-risk offenders and less dangerous criminals. The report added: “Local community prisons to become urban resettlement prisons whilst other closed establishments focus on risk reduction, including for indeterminate sentenced offenders.”

Short sentence prisoners, who are not a risk to the public, and those coming towards the end of long jail terms would be put in “open community prisons”, which would provide detoxification facilities. It proposes that women are held in smaller local units as recommended in a review published this year.

There are presently 4,408 women in jail, including 923 on remand, 504 serving less than six months, 206 six to twelve months, 1,147 more than four years and 311 indeterminate sentences. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2563489.ece

Posted by lois at 06:02 PM | Comments (0)

Oregon prisons get new model Taser stun guns

Oregon prisons get new model Taser stun guns
9/30/2007, 9:00 a.m. PT
The Associated Press

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — High-tech Tasers equipped with digital cameras are being distributed to prison guards to help control an inmate population that has reached about 13,500.

But inmates and civil rights activists say they are concerned the Tasers could be used to punish inmates, including mentally ill prisoners.

Nearly 100 corrections officers across the state are being trained on how and when to use the shock-inducing weapons, intended to help prevent injuries to both guards and inmates.

"The officers are able to quickly subdue the (inmate) versus wrestling with him for some time," said Paula Allen, Department of Corrections chief of security.

Under proposed department rules, approval for Taser use would have to come from a supervising officer in charge, along with the prison superintendent. Trained officers and commanders will make judgment calls on when to employ the weapons, Allen said.

"I can't give you a number for how often were going to use it," she said. "In our world, there are a lot of different variables. There are probably 1,000 different scenarios you could run through."

But more than 70 people, including inmates, civil rights activists and other concerned citizens, recently filed written objections in response to the proposed rule changes that govern prison use of Tasers and other shock devices.

"Prisons already have plenty of means to control inmates, and this is an unnecessary, deadly and expensive weapon," wrote Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Eugene.

Taser shocks, if administered to mentally ill convicts, would amount to cruel and unusual punishment, Regan added.

"There are greater percentages of mentally ill people in Oregon prisons than ever before," she wrote. "The use of the Taser will not only be ineffective, but clearly results in cruel and unusual punishment for those with diminished capacities to respond appropriately."

The Rev. Sarah-Andrea Morrigan of the Church of Divine Heart in Portland said Tasers are considered torture devices by some countries, which have banned them.

"In spite of Taser being billed in this proposed rule change as a security or control device, it is clear to anyone that it is used as a means of corporal punishment, in a manner similar to how the Republic of Singapore makes use of rattan canes as a way of judicial punishment for crimes," she wrote.

Corrections Director Max Williams, however, defended the new Tasers in a recent letter responding to a critic.

"When used properly, medical experts have concluded that Taser technology is among the most effective and safest use-of-force interventions available to law enforcement and corrections officers to halt violent situations that pose a safety risk to an inmate and the officer," the prison chief wrote.

The new Taser replaces an obsolete model that collected dust in recent years. In all, the prison system will purchase 20 to 30 Tasers at a cost of $814.95 each, plus $399.95 for the camera system, for a total price tag of $1,214.90.

Tasers won't be carried by corrections officers who work with the general prison population, where inmates vastly outnumber officers, officials said.

"It's not something that will be deployed on a correctional officer at work in a housing unit or a recreation yard," Allen said. "It's going to be locked and secured in an arsenal until the need arises for one."

___ http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-21/1191168597225130.xml&storylist=orlocal
Information from: Statesman Journal, http://www.statesmanjournal.com

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Posted by lois at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)

Exoneration Using DNA Brings Change in Legal System

October 1, 2007
Exoneration Using DNA Brings Change in Legal System
By SOLOMON MOORE, NY Times

State lawmakers across the country are adopting broad changes to criminal justice procedures as a response to the exoneration of more than 200 convicts through the use of DNA evidence.

All but eight states now give inmates varying degrees of access to DNA evidence that might not have been available at the time of their convictions. Many states are also overhauling the way witnesses identify suspects, crime labs handle evidence and informants are used.

At least six states have created commissions to expedite cases of those wrongfully convicted or to consider changes to criminal justice procedures. One of them, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, will hold a hearing this month on remedies for people who have been wrongfully convicted.

Laws in several states, including Illinois, New Jersey and North Carolina, have bipartisan backing, with many Democrats supportive on civil rights grounds and Republicans generally hoping that tighter procedures will lead to fewer challenges of convictions.

“Technology has made a big difference,” said Margaret Berger, a DNA legal expert who is on a National Academy of Sciences panel that is looking into the changing needs of forensic scientists. “We see that there are new techniques for ascertaining the truth.”

Maryland, North Carolina, Vermont and West Virginia passed legislation this year to create tougher standards for the identification of suspects by witnesses, one of the most trouble-ridden procedures.

Nationwide, misidentification by witnesses led to wrongful convictions in 75 percent of the 207 instances in which prisoners have been exonerated over the last decade, according to the Innocence Project, a group in New York that investigates wrongful convictions.

Legislatures considered 25 witness identification bills in 17 states this year, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers reported. Five states approved bills, while five states defeated them. Bills are pending in seven states.

“It’s become clear that eyewitnesses are fallible,” said Lt. Kenneth A. Patenaude, a police commander in Northampton, Mass., who is an expert on witness identification techniques.

Two states, Vermont and Maryland, passed laws this year to improve crime lab oversight to eliminate errors and omissions. Maryland recently passed a law that will hold its crime labs to the same standards as clinical labs, a much more rigorous requirement. Other legislative changes to crime lab oversight are pending in 21 states, including New York.

More than 500 local and state jurisdictions, including Alaska, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia have adopted polices that require the recording of interrogations to help prevent false confessions, according to the Innocence Project.

The California Legislature also passed a bill this year that requires informant testimony to be corroborated before it can be heard by a jury. Critics say such testimony can be unreliable, especially when it is offered by convicts or suspects in return for leniency. The bill awaits approval by the governor.

Advocates of efforts to use DNA to exonerate those wrongfully convicted say the changes in the state laws are welcome and long overdue.

“The legislative reform movement as a result of these DNA exonerations is probably the single greatest criminal justice reform effort in the last 40 years,” said Peter J. Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project.

But some law enforcement officials oppose some of the changes, saying they create legal minefields for the police and prosecutors. Any deviation from the new standards, no matter how minor, could be taken up by defense lawyers in an appeal, the critics say.

The California State Sheriffs’ Association is fighting two bills there that would mandate electronic recording of interrogations and corroboration of informant testimony. The bills have been passed by the Legislature and are awaiting final approval by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.

“Simply put, these two bills create loopholes for defendants to get an edge in court on technicalities,” according to a letter from the sheriffs’ organization to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice. The association also opposed a state bill that would create guidelines for suspect lineups.

Even some proponents of the new standards balk at making them state law, insisting they are better dealt with by local law enforcement agencies.

“I’m not fond of legislation,” said Lieutenant Patenaude, the Massachusetts police commander. “I’ve been asked to review bills in several states, and I haven’t seen one that mirrors the best practices that we’ve put out here. I’d like to see police agencies mold the procedures instead of legislatures or courts.”

Studies of wrongful convictions suggest that there are thousands more innocent people in jails and prisons. The Innocence Project, the nation’s most prominent organization devoted to proving wrongful convictions, is pursuing 250 cases and at any given time is reviewing 6,000 to 10,000 additional cases for legal action. Approximately 1 percent of those cases will be accepted, and half of those accepted cases are closed because evidence has been lost or destroyed.

Other smaller efforts to overturn wrongful convictions also receive thousands of letters from inmates.

In a 2005 study, a University of Michigan Law School professor, Samuel R. Gross, estimated that 340 prisoners sentenced from 1989 to 2003 had been exonerated. Of those, 205 were convicted of murder and 121 of rape. Half of the wrongful murder convictions and 88 percent of the wrongful rape convictions included false eyewitness identification, the study found.

DNA evidence was used to exonerate 144 of those inmates.

In a 2007 study, Professor Gross analyzed 3,792 death sentences imposed from 1973 to 1989 and found that 86 death row inmates, or 2.3 percent, had been exonerated through 2004

Professor Gross said the total number of innocent prisoners was likely to be far higher. In his view, well-documented wrongful convictions in capital cases provided a window on systemic problems, with even larger numbers of convictions for less serious and less publicized convictions.

“Of the 340 exonerations I looked at” in the 2005 study, Professor Gross said, “96 percent are for rape and murder.” He added: “Does that mean nobody was wrongfully convicted for drug possession, or drunk driving or burglary? Chances are there are many, many more false convictions for lesser crimes.” The most recent prisoner to be exonerated by DNA evidence was Dwayne Allen Dail, who served 18 years in North Carolina for a false conviction of child rape. Prosecutors had used the victim’s identification of Mr. Dail and hair found at the crime scene to convict him. Years later, after repeated inquires from defense lawyers, the police found a box of additional evidence in the case that contained the victim’s semen-stained nightgown. DNA analysis ruled out Mr. Dail and implicated another man. Mr. Dail was released from prison in August.

The proposed laws on witness identification are intended to reduce cases like Mr. Dail’s by requiring things like sequential photo lineups of suspects, in which police officers show witnesses photographs of one suspect at a time. Studies have shown that witnesses tend to compare photos when they are shown them simultaneously, a tendency that can lead to errors.

The legislation would also create “double blind” systems so that the police officers administering the photo lineups are unaware of the suspects’ identities in order to avoid influencing witnesses.

The North Carolina legislature adopted both lineup procedures this year.

Crimes labs are also getting additional scrutiny in some states.

William E. Marbaker, president of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors, an independent accreditation body, said the group had accredited more than 300 crime labs. But some law enforcement agencies are finding that even more oversight is needed.

A two-year review of the Houston Police Department’s crime lab called into question more than 600 cases. The review was initiated after a court found in 2005 that faulty forensic evidence led to the conviction of George Rodriguez in 1987 for kidnapping and assaulting a child. Mr. Rodriguez served 17 years of a 60-year sentence before his release two years ago.

Houston crime lab officials erroneously concluded that hair found at the crime scene belonged to Mr. Rodriguez. The crime lab also failed to rule out Mr. Rodriguez as a suspect after finding that semen collected from the scene matched that of another man.

Eight states — Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming — do not have laws that give inmates access to DNA evidence.

Advocacy groups, including the Innocence Project, said they intend to lobby for the passage of access laws in those states during the next legislative session.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/us/01exonerate.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

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