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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