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November 30, 2007

CDC and Campaign for Youth Justice Reports: Adult System Worsens Juvenile Recidivism

Adult System Worsens Juvenile Recidivism, Report Says
By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 30, 2007

Youths tried as adults and housed in adult prisons commit more crimes, often more violent ones, than minors who remain in the juvenile justice system, a panel of experts appointed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a new report.

Longer sentences and the transfer of juvenile offenders to the adult system gained traction in the 1980s and 1990s as youth crime increased. The trend raised fears in statehouses and in Congress about young predators, and laws to push more juvenile offenders into the adult system flourished.

Those laws have not deterred other youths from committing crimes, nor have they rehabilitated the youths sentenced under them, said Robert L. Johnson, dean of the New Jersey Medical School, a member of the Task Force on Community Preventive Services, which was assembled by the CDC.

"Not only does it not deter youth crime, it actually makes them more violent," Johnson said. "It may salve our desire to punish. But don't get that confused with rehabilitation. Don't make the mistake of believing that punishment will help anything."

The panel's findings were based on a review of six studies across the nation that examined the effect of juvenile transfers to the adult system. Those studies followed youths for periods ranging from 18 months to six years. One of them found that in Florida, after stronger juvenile justice laws were enacted in 1990 and 1994, youths sent to the adult system had 34 percent more felony rearrest than those retained as juveniles. The youths had equivalent criminal records. The panel of experts examined not only the findings but also the methodology to ensure that offenses were the same.

Early this month, the Campaign for Youth Justice, a Washington-based advocacy organization, reported that, on an average day, 7,500 people 18 or younger are being held in adult jails and prisons. It said that youths detained in adult jails are more likely to become victims of sexual abuse or to commit suicide than those detained in the juvenile system.

The two reports come as the Senate prepares next week to consider reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act which, in part, calls for youths in adult jails to be housed separately -- something that does not always occur. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Prosecutors and victims advocates have long challenged the effectiveness of the juvenile justice system, which they say is often unprepared to deal with even nonviolent offenders.

Shay Bilchik, a former prosecutor in Florida, said he once thought the same way: that transferring youths who had reoffended to the adult courts was better. Now, he says, there is mounting evidence that such policies do not help youths or make communities safer.

"You couldn't ask for any worse results," said Bilchik, director of the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. "We're getting faster recidivism for more serious crimes."

Most law on this issue is made at the state level, and there is much disparity in the treatment of juvenile offenders. Some youths are automatically considered adults, no matter the crime, at 17. Others have a hearing before a juvenile judge. Some jurisdictions, including the District, allow for 16- and 17-year-olds accused of crimes such as rape or murder to be sent directly to the adult system.

Here is the link to the Campaign for Youth Justice Report
http://www.campaignforyouthjustice.org/Downloads/NationalReportsArticles/CFYJ-Jailing_Juveniles_Report_2007-11-15.pdf

The CDC Task Force Report is available online at: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/rr/rr5609.pdf.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/29/AR2007112901936.html

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

CO: DOC expands program of using prisoners to pick farmers crops

11/30/07 DOC agrees to provide more inmate farm workers

By PETER ROPER
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

A pilot program to use inmates from the Department of Corrections as farm workers opened a new chapter Thursday when DOC officials said they would expand the program to assist five additional farms in Pueblo County.

At a meeting organized by state Rep. Dorothy Butcher, D-Pueblo, state prison officials called last summer's pilot program a great success and agreed to provide work crews to five additional farmers who attended the meeting.

Steve Smith, the acting director of DOC's Correctional Industries, said the additional farm crews would be male inmates, but the department would organize new crews to help the farmers who attended Thursday's meeting at the Pueblo Chamber of Commerce.

"Frankly, we were concerned there would be an even bigger turnout with even larger number of farms wanting work crews," Smith said.

He said the program would benefit from slower expansion. "It takes us 13 or 14 hours of work to provide you a work crew for an eight-hour day," Smith said.

Even so, Karl Spiecker, DOC's chief financial officer, said the department considered last summer's program to be a huge success for the state, as well as for farmers. At the peak of the season, the DOC provided five work crews of 15 female inmates to work on Pueblo County farms. The women inmates were needed to harvest watermelons, squash, onions, pumpkins and other crops.

The farmers who came to Thursday's meeting said they would need crews starting in April and running through next January. The reason is that few migrant workers came to the region this summer as result of stricter immigration controls, leaving farmers, in some cases, wondering how to harvest their crops. Butcher said state lawmakers would help the DOC expand the program as much as possible.

"The alternative is to plow under $4.1 million in vegetables, so I'm sure we'll be able to work something out," she told Smith in a half-joking tone that still carried the message that the Legislature would have the final word over the program.

Deputy Director Lou Archuleta explained to the farmers that additional crews would have to come from male inmates, but the DOC would screen them for suitability. No sex offenders would be used and inmates nearing the end of their sentences would be given a priority.

He said any farmer wanting to participate in the program would have to take an eight-hour instruction class on how to deal with inmate workers.

Several farmers who used the women crews last summer said there were no problems with the crews except for turnover - inmates who decided they didn't like the work, requiring the farmers to frequently retrain new workers.

"But that happens anyway, even with migrant workers," Butcher acknowledged.

http://www.chieftain.com/metro/1196434909/1

Posted by lois at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)

TX: The Power of Drug Courts. Drug courts can keep addicts in treatment and out of jail — if judges let them

The Power of Drug Courts
Drug courts can keep addicts in treatment and out of jail — if judges let them
Dave Mann | November 30, 2007 | Features
TX Observer
For nearly 20 years, Joel Bennett shuttled drug addicts through courtrooms. He dutifully sent them off to prison, first as a prosecutor and later as a state district judge in Austin, though he knew he was accomplishing little. Incarceration wouldn't puncture their addiction. They would use again. Predictably, case files bearing familiar names would pile again on his desk. A sense of futility hung over the exercise. "What I saw was the same people returning to the system over and over again. And their children coming into the system," Bennett says. "No one talked about breaking the cycle of crime." Bennett recognized, as an ever-growing number of judges do, that to keep drug offenders from landing back in prison, he had to help addicts free themselves from the fog of substance abuse.

Bennett and Leon Grizzard are the two judges who oversee Travis County's drug diversion court. They steer addicts into a court-supervised treatment program instead of prison. In the past decade, drug courts like the one in Travis County have successfully handled nonviolent defendants with drug and alcohol addictions—if success is defined as increasing public safety at the least cost to the taxpayer. People who complete drug-court programs rarely tumble back into substance abuse. According to four drug-court judges surveyed, about 10 percent of program graduates commit new crimes—a recidivism rate roughly one-fifth that of traditional probation routines. That means drug courts can ease the strain on overcrowded prisons and save taxpayer money. A study of the Dallas drug court by Southern Methodist University showed that every government dollar spent on diversion courts saved taxpayers more than $9.

Though criminal justice reform groups have advocated drug courts for years, Texas until recently lagged behind the rest of the country. There are more than 1,200 drug courts nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. At one time, tiny Delaware had more drug courts than the Lone Star State. But Texas' bulging prison system is forcing Texas to catch up. Drug courts in Texas have ballooned from three in 2002 to 35 in 2007. The movement has sprung organically from the bottom up: Judges, prosecutors, counselors, and county officials have volunteered to create the programs in their jurisdictions. "Anyone who hears this becomes an advocate for it," says Ana Yáñez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. "It's been a domino effect."

More drug courts are on the way. Last spring, the Texas Legislature passed a bill requiring all counties with populations exceeding 200,000 to institute a drug court. The bill is expected to divert more than 2,300 addicts away from prisons during the next few years. In late October, Gov. Rick Perry awarded $4.4 million in state grants to drug courts, a much-needed boost in funding.

But as drug courts become more widespread, it appears that—like the narcotics they were created to fight—the courts can be abused. State and federal governments have instituted few regulations and set up no oversight. Judges have wide latitude to decide people's fates. In the hands of the right judges, the drug court model performs marvelously. Other judges appear to have trouble reconciling their punitive role with this new therapeutic one. The U.S. Department of Justice designed a set of guidelines and best practices—but they're the criminal justice equivalent of blueprints without building codes. The guidelines suggest that judges receive ongoing training and partner with treatment programs and community groups.

Because drug courts grow mostly from the local level, there is little standardization. Texas law broadly defines a drug court, but places hardly any restrictions on what judges can do. There is no oversight specifically for the drug courts. A recent case in Houston demonstrates the potential risks behind the courts' expansion. Judge K. Michael Mayes of Montgomery County is facing a federal lawsuit by a defendant who claims his treatment in Mayes' drug court was arbitrary and violated his rights to due process.

"The issue is following best practices," Yáñez-Correa says. In 2005, the group worked successfully with legislators to add to the budget bill some loosely standardized requirements for drug courts. Ostensibly, if a program takes state money, it's required to follow the Justice Department's broad guidelines for drug courts, including a recommendation that defense attorneys be present at all hearings. "We've taken the first step to make sure there is an expansion of the drug courts," she says. "Now, as the program increases, those who haven't tried it before need technical assistance from judges who are doing it right."

On a Wednesday night in early November, recovering addicts streamed into a drab courtroom in downtown Austin for their regular drug court session. The court, the second-oldest in Texas, has been in operation since 1993. Seated in the audience was a young, diverse crowd: white, black, and Latino; rich and poor; businessmen; college students; and manual laborers. Judge Bennett took the bench. On this night, the first order of business was a graduation. Each drug court is different—localities design their own programs and decide who can be admitted to them—but the foundations are the same. Prosecutors or judges refer nonviolent addicts or alcoholics to drug courts, which oversee treatment. Judges, along with teams of probation officers, attorneys, counselors, and family members, monitor each addict's progress. On average, it takes 22 months for defendants to complete the Austin program's three phases, after which their charges will be dismissed and, in some cases, expunged. If graduates remain clean, it can be as if they were never arrested.

The bailiff called a name, and a young black man with braided hair in a red button-down shirt, tie, and black pants rose and walked before Bennett. (Drug courts are confidential, and the Observer was allowed to witness the proceedings on the condition that participants' names wouldn't be printed.) "I know you've thought a lot about what you wanted to say," Bennett said. "Now I want you to address the group." The young man turned to face a roomful of fellow recovering addicts. His feet poked at the carpet. He clasped his hands behind his back.

"These people are really here to help you," he said. "I used to see it as a burden. Now I see it as a blessing." He looked sheepishly at Bennett. "Is that enough?" he whispered.

"No, that's not enough," Bennett bellowed. The audience laughed. The young man stumbled on for another minute, describing the stubbornness of his addiction, until Bennett smiled. "OK, I'm proud of you. Let's give him a hand. He's done a great job." Everyone applauded. The young man walked through the courtroom's double doors and, perhaps, into a life clear of addiction—or so Bennett hopes. Though drug courts offer a way to avoid prison time, the programs can be demanding: several counseling sessions a week, community service, weekly random drug tests, support group meetings, and frequent appearances before the judge are common. If a defendant stumbles, the judge can send them to jail for several days. If someone drops out, they likely will end up in prison.

Bennett questioned defendants in various stages of the program. They stood alone, directly in front of the bench, like kids before the teacher's desk. Drug court sessions are part probation hearing and part counseling session. The jagged edge of law enforcement blends with the encouragement of 12-step recovery programs. The result is addicts standing before judges, prosecutors, and probation officers—people who normally try to put them away—to divulge the most intimate and important details of their lives. During visits to hearings in several Texas cities, the Observer witnessed a woman ask a judge for help with a divorce, and another who inquired if having a child would impact her recovery. Several participants asked for help finding jobs.

"You're studying for your GED? How's that going?" Bennett asked one man in a striped shirt. Another wanted permission to travel to Houston to see his family for Thanksgiving, which Bennett grudgingly approved as long as the man kept up his community service. The random drug tests don't halt for the holidays, either.

Next, Bennett brought forward a short, white youth who, despite several stints of rigorous inpatient drug treatment, had just tested positive for marijuana on his first urine sample in the program. "It's like you haven't learned anything," Bennett yelled at him. "Each time you use, you're going to jail. I've done that before." As the kid slinked away, the judge eased back into a warmer tone: "Let's give him a hand to encourage him." Everyone clapped.

In Corpus Christi, District Judge Sandra Watts has run the drug court for nearly four years. Her intimate, Tuesday-night court sessions have become known as "Tuesdays with Sandra." She says, "I'm a different judge on Tuesday nights than I am during the day. There is a different philosophy when you're running a drug court. There is a rapport being developed between the participants and the judge. I know a lot about their lives."

In the last 10 years, District Judge John Creuzot has molded Dallas County's drug court into one of the most extensive and successful diversion programs in the state. (Watts referred to him as the drug court "granddaddy.") In Dallas, addicts receive a clinical assessment when they enter the program to determine the kind of treatment they need, including mental health assistance. Many drug courts attempt to treat the root of the defendant's addiction. But with the ability to refer addicts to a wider range of treatment facilities, Dallas may have the model program. The essential element that such courts must share, Creuzot says, is that treatment cannot work unless a judge connects with an addict.

"The point is to get as far in [to people's lives] as you can, and to get to know them," he says. "It's a different mind-set. You have to be engaged in who they are ... what their strengths and weaknesses are. Not everyone wants to do that.

"You have to develop trust between them and you. They have to trust that you're making decisions in their best interests, because they're not accustomed to that in the criminal justice system. Nobody is, really. They have to get to know you and trust you and the decisions you're making on their behalf."

Violating the rules of a program might land some participants in jail for the weekend to set them straight. But Austin's Judge Bennett says it's important not to punish too severely. "I'm not trying to break them down," he says. "I'm trying to build them back up. I want them to feel better about themselves."

Paul Burns never considered himself an addict, though he concedes he drank too often. At 46, Burns lives near Conroe, a growing exurb north of Houston, with his wife and four kids. He operates a small oil company—it has eight wells—along with several other small businesses.

His trouble with drug court began last April. Burns—already on probation for a minor drug possession charge—submitted a urine sample that tested positive for alcohol, a violation of his probation. Judge Mayes of Montgomery County's 410th District Court gave Burns a choice: Enter Mayes' drug court treatment program, or the judge would revoke Burns' probation and send him to prison for several years. Burns didn't see that as much of a choice. He joined Mayes' Substance Abuse Program. In addition to counseling and support group sessions, offenders in the program must submit to several random urine tests each month. On July 5, Burns was called in for a random drug test. His sample tested negative for drugs and alcohol, according to court records, but the sample was labeled "dilute," which means, essentially, it was watered down. (Addicts sometimes try to dilute their urine to mask evidence of drug use.) Under Mayes' strict policies, anyone submitting a diluted urine sample is immediately hauled off to jail, without a hearing to explain themselves to the judge.

Burns contends he's been sober for eight months. He says he skipped breakfast on the morning of his urine test and drank several cups of coffee, which diluted his urine. He was shocked it landed him in jail.

Burns remained there for 44 days, until late August. Five others in Mayes' program have been jailed in recent months because of a diluted urine sample, according to court records. Burns also claims that Mayes barred him from contacting his family during his stint in the county lockup.

His lawsuit, filed in federal court, contends that his jailing without an opportunity to challenge his detention or go before a judge violated his constitutional right to due process. Normally, judges have wide discretion in handling offenders on probation. But Randall Kallinen, a Houston civil rights attorney who's representing Burns, argues that probation requirements can't violate someone's civil rights. "There's nothing in the Code of Criminal Procedure that says you can't give an African American two extra years in prison because he's an African American. That's not written down anywhere, but everyone knows federal law won't allow it. It's a civil rights violation."

Mayes has refused to comment on the suit. He didn't return two calls from the Observer seeking comment. But when the Observer visited Mayes' court in early November—before the lawsuit was filed—the judge argued that his policies helped free offenders from their addictions. Mayes' program does boast a record of success. Of the 41 people who have graduated from his program, he says not a single one has committed another drug offense. Several offenders in the drug court that morning sobbed and effusively thanked Mayes for helping them fight addiction and stay out of jail.

"The immediate sanction, immediate consequence is huge. Everyone in the program knows it," Mayes says. "Probation officers know in this court that if somebody has a [urine test] that looks like it's diluted or maybe it's a positive, they don't file motions and wait for me to sign something. They immediately type up a one-page sheet—order of arrest—and we sign.

"Here's my philosophy: You're on probation. I don't have to prove you're dirty; you have to prove to me you're clean. You know why that's so fair? This is what I tell them: Let's say you apply for a job, you're going to have to prove to them you're clean, sober, doing well. So when you get out in the real world, you can handle the real heat. So that's why we have the immediate consequence. I just decide how long I'm going to put them in jail. There's always a consequence, and it's always immediate. Otherwise, it just doesn't have any impact." Numerous law enforcement sources around the state say that dilute urine samples may—emphasis on may—indicate drug use or suspicious activity. Toxicologists say it is possible for addicts to mask drug use by diluting their urine, either by drinking a lot of water or taking pills that purportedly dilute urine enough to pass the test.

Other judges find Mayes' methods overly harsh. All the other drug court judges interviewed for this story said they never jail an offender for dilute urine alone, simply because dilute urine has many causes, including overhydration. A dilute sample will lead to tighter scrutiny—more random drug screening, careful attention to the person's performance—to watch for signs they may be relapsing. In most drug courts, an offender must fail at least two drug tests to spend even a weekend in jail.

For Mayes, a dilute sample is a violation, period. His drug court program forbids dilute urine for any reason. He said he would jail offenders in his program for dilute urine even if they actually were clean.

"Some people, let's say, drink a lot of water—it's a legitimate dilute. [I] still don't care," Mayes says. "A lot of guys say, well, I work out in the sun, I drink a lot of water. I say too bad. ... But here's what Auggie [program counselor Agustin Gutierrez] tells them: You can avoid that—vitamins, multivitamins. Pregnant women, there's some kind of vitamin he gives them. In other words, if you're clean, you can keep yourself healthy enough so you won't have a dilute problem."

Judge Creuzot in Dallas finds Mayes' approach exceedingly harsh. "We just don't throw people in jail," he says. In fact, long jail stints can be self-defeating—Creuzot says most research shows that jail terms longer than about five days for drug court offenders can be harmful—isolating someone who needs support.

Judge Watts pointed out that defense attorneys are present at all her drug court hearings to guard offenders' rights to due process. In fact, drug court guidelines issued by the Department of Justice stipulate that defense attorneys be present at all hearings. No defense counsel was present when the Observer witnessed a session in Mayes' court on November 6.

Still, the judges interviewed for this story said lawmakers shouldn't place any restrictions on drug courts. "Judges and the community should decide what works best for that community," Bennett says.

Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, who helps refer cases to Bennett's court, put it this way: "You can't make the list [of restrictions] long enough for a half-wit judge. A wise judge doesn't need a list."

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

OK: Myth of "Crack Baby" still must be challenged

Effect of drugs challenged
November 15, 2007 By Jeff Raymond
NewsOK.com
Deepening research shows babies who are exposed to cocaine or methamphetamine in the womb fare similarly to other babies as they age.

Moreover, terms such as "crack baby” and "meth baby” are pejorative and not based in scientific research, said scientists, physicians and social workers who spoke at the "Women, Pregnancy and Drug Use: Medical Facts, Practical Responses and the Well-Being of Children and Families” seminar Wednesday afternoon at the Presbyterian Health Foundation Conference Center.

Barry Lester, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics who heads the Brown University Center for Study of Children at Risk, worked to debunk the notion that prenatal exposure to cocaine and meth is extremely damaging to babies.
Two studies Lester has contributed to, including one ongoing in Tulsa, show minor differences between babies born to cocaine- and methamphetamine-using mothers and those born to mothers who don't use the drugs.

Born earlier, lighter
Lester said long-term research showed babies exposed to cocaine and meth in the womb were born slightly earlier and weighed slightly less than babies born to clean mothers.
Drug-exposed babies had slightly higher rates of referrals to special education classes and slightly higher rates of behavioral problems, he said. However, problems seldom were found in more than 5 percent of children studied.
Should a person try to spot drug-exposed babies in a nursery, they wouldn't stand out, he said.
"By and large these are term babies,” he said, meaning the infants were born largely on time at an appropriate weight.
The "crack baby” scare of the 1980s and, more recently, fears of "meth babies” were based on "insufficient and inaccurate information” that caused society to overreact and split families, he said.
In the 1990s, children nationally in foster care reached 500,000, an all-time high that panelists attributed to tough-on-drugs policies.
Speakers said prosecution of pregnant women for drug abuse deterred them from seeking drug treatment and prenatal care, and negatively affected their children.
Dr. Eli Reshef, an obstetrician-gynecologist and assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, compared prosecution of pregnant drug abusers to punishing obese mothers and those who smoke.
"A smoker has more risk of harming the baby than someone who uses meth,” he said.
Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmonson, Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma and 10 others sponsored the seminar.
In 2006, 3,000 pregnant women were in need of substance abuse treatment, according to the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy.
Fifteen to 20 percent of pregnancies end in loss, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and nearly 1 million U.S. women suffer miscarriages annually.

Posted by lois at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2007

CT: More stringent surveillance of people on parole, protests, etc.

Editorial and two articles: protests on parole ban & more stringent surveillance of people on parole.
An on-line registry of ALL parolees, probationers and probation violation warrants?

courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-crimeplannov27,0,7208336.story
Tougher Crime Laws Coming- November 27, 2007
Granted, the comprehensive bill to reform Connecticut's criminal justice system that was unveiled recently by the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee has a few kinks in it that must be ironed out. But a variation of the plan should in the end have little trouble winning bipartisan support.

The measure attempts to rectify many of the systemic failures identified by Democrats and Republicans in the wake of the horrific slayings of a Cheshire mother and her two daughters by a pair of parolees in July.

Expect the legislature to debate the bill and 13 related proposals over the coming weeks for a final vote on the plan at a special session in January.

Lawmakers agree almost unilaterally that electronic communication among all criminal justice agencies needs a major upgrade to allow for instant access to police reports, pre-sentence investigations, sentencing transcripts and prison, parole and probation files.

Had a pre-sentencing report reached the parole board in a timely fashion, as already required by law, one suspect in the killings might not have been released.

Among other proposals that deserve to pass easily are using global positioning technology to track parolees; an online listing of current parolees, probationers and probation violation warrants; and hiring a staff psychologist to help the Board of Pardons and Parole identify potentially violent offenders.

Legislators are further urged to approve a provision that elevates home invasion — first- and second-degree burglary — to a violent felony carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a minimum mandatory sentence of five years.

The more difficult provisions in the bill relate to adjusting the flow of prisoners into and out of the correction system so that truly dangerous criminals are not released prematurely.

They include reconciling six different proposals to toughen the state's "three strikes" law (which puts third-time violent felony offenders away for life) without overcrowding the prisons.

Other sensitive issues to be debated are the dimensions, cost and potential sites for two proposed new prisons, one of which would be reserved for inmates with mental health problems, and the degree to which nonviolent offenders can be released.

Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, D-East Haven, who is co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee with Sen. Andrew J. McDonald, D-Stamford, says that what will emerge when the full legislature takes up the crime package in January is a more punitive criminal justice system that will exceed the spending cap.

We trust that lawmakers will strike a reasonable balance among punishment, fairness and public safety.
Copyright © 2007, The Hartford Courant
Protest against parole ban

by Chief Capitol Correspondent Mark Davis
Posted Nov. 26, 2007
5:55 PM
New Haven (WTNH) _ The state's prison population has ballooned since Governor Rell banned parole for violent offenders and tonight the families of those who have been denied parole protested outside the New Haven Correctional Center.
The governor's parole ban was a response to the deadly home invasion in Cheshire, allegedly committed by two, non-violent career criminals.
"Hundreds, maybe thousands are being punished for the actions of a few people. Just two people," said Shelton Tucker of New Haven.
In addition to the family members of inmates, activists like Barbara Fair from the group Coalition Against the Ban, protesting outside the Whalley Avenue prison.
"The message is end the parole ban and look into these conditions that are in these prisons," Fair said.
Governor Rell says the severe overcrowded conditions will be relieved as soon as the state starts paroling non-violent offenders. The problem is that many of those individuals also need other forms of community services, like help with a drug problem or a mental illness. Because the state also lacks space in halfway houses, letting out non-violent offenders may pose a problem as well.
"We need to step up to the plate, fight back against this growing prison problem and do something about the parole ban because we already have a problem with prison overcrowding. This parole ban just exemplifies this problem," Fair said.
State lawmakers will be discussing a plan tomorrow to build two new prisons, a halfway house and community treatment facilities. The price tag for the new facilities is an estimated half a billion dollars.
Crowded jails, ban on parole protested
Community members urge overturning of Rell’s parole suspension
Lea Yu
Staff Reporter, Yale Daily News
Published Tuesday, November 27, 2007
As the light of street lamps illuminated a swirl of mist and drizzle, more than 65 protestors rallied Monday evening in front of the Whalley Avenue jail, demanding that the state provide its citizens with “books, not bars.”
Community members and activist groups, joining together in protest of state legislation that would spend $260 million for two new prisons, called on Governor M. Jodi Rell to rescind her temporary ban on parole for violent offenders. Critics have charged that since being implemented in September, the ban has led to a swell in prison populations in Connecticut, which has exacerbated overcrowding and resulted in unsanitary conditions and increased violence among inmates.
But state Department of Corrections officers interviewed said state jails provide clean and adequate resources and have not witnessed increased violence in the wake of the ban.
Legislators on the state Judiciary Committee have said they will debate 15 bills relating to parole and prison reform at the state capitol today. A special session will convene in January to pass the legislation.
Rell enacted the ban after the July murder of a woman and her two daughters in Cheshire at the hands of two criminals who were out on parole. Rell will lift the ban once the legislature reforms the parole process, state Department of Corrections external affairs director Brian Garnett said.
But ralliers said the proposed new-prison legislation — which would classify home invasion as a persistent dangerous felony and strengthen the state’s “three strikes” law — is inadequate and detrimental to public safety. The ban should be lifted immediately, rather than in January when legislation passes, so that inmates who would otherwise be free on parole are not detained unjustly, they said.
“I’m concerned that a tiny fraction of the bill is dedicated toward rehabilitating people when they’re coming out of prison in comparison to the amount of money that’s going to be spent on building two new prisons,” said Megan Fountain ’07, an organizer with Unidad Latina en Acción, which is a nonprofit in Fair Haven. “Prisons are overcrowded, and what we need are solutions to integrate people into society, not create more beds.”
According to a Nov. 16 article in the New Haven Independent, inmates at the Whalley jailhouse have recently reported finding maggots in the showerheads and being forced to walk around in dirty, stained linen.
Garnett said the DOC is cognizant of the state’s overcrowded jails, but the increased inmate populations have not resulted in a decline in sanitation and safety.
Contrary to what was reported in the Independent, he said, Whalley jailhouse inmates have access to laundry machines, and those sleeping on cots in the gym do not fight over one bathroom but have access to 16 urinals and toilets.
Although Garnett said the DOC does not keep a record of prison capacities because state jails cannot deny criminals who are sent to them, state Rep. State Rep. Mike Lawlor said Connecticut prisons can hold about 17,500 prisoners.
As of yesterday, Garnett counted 19,630 inmates in Connecticut jails — over 1,000 of whom were added since Rell announced the ban, Lawlor said.
“Despite the fact the system is crowded, our performance measures — and we define those as assaults on staff, inmates, use of force by our staff — those measures all remain at historically low levels,” he said. “No one is sleeping in dirty linen, and no one’s fighting over toilets.”
Lawlor, who co-sponsored prison reform legislation with his judiciary committee co-chair State Sen. Andrew McDonald, said the committee today will openly debate numerous alternatives to new jail facilities, such as the expansion of existing jailhouses and shorter incarceration penalties for nonviolent offenders.
A permanent elimination of parole would lead to massive and dangerous overcrowding, he said, but the temporary parole ban is necessary for the sake of comprehensively reforming the parole process.
Connecticut’s jails are already crowded to the point of posing a safety hazard, Lawlor said, but until the state builds more facilities, the rehabilitative programs that critics have been calling for will be nonexistent, since Corrections officers must first deal with inmates who are sleeping on the floors of counseling rooms and school rooms.
“I don’t want [more jails] either, but it’s not a question of what people want — it’s a question of what people need, and what you need is enough facilities for the inmates you have,” Lawlor said.
Among the 15 initiatives the legislature will consider Tuesday are six different “three strikes” proposals, the creation of an electronic criminal-justice database, the enhancement of nurse training and recruitment and the application of GPS technology to the monitoring of criminals on parole.
The Coalition Against the Parole Ban organized Monday’s event, which was endorsed by People Against Injustice, Youth Rights Media, Unidad Latina en Accion, A.N.S.W.E.R. CT, Connecticut Center for a New Economy and Yale’s Undergraduate Organizing Committee.

Posted by lois at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Activists push civil fines for pot

Activists push civil fines for pot

Daily Hampshire Gazette, November 27, 2007

BOSTON (AP) - Activists pushing a ballot question to decriminalize possession of an ounce or less of marijuana say it will save the state millions of dollars in law enforcement costs and spare thousands of state residents from arrest.

Instead of facing a criminal record, those caught with a small amount of marijuana for personal use would instead pay a civil fine of $100 - much like a traffic ticket.

Backers say they've already collected 105,000 signatures, far more than the 67,000 required to get the question on the 2008 ballot. Those signatures have to be delive the secretary of state's office next week.

They said the tide of public opinion is on their side. They point to more than two dozen nonbinding referendum questions placed on local ballots in Massachusetts in the past six years. In each, a majority of voters supported the idea of decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana.

About a dozen states have already adopted similar laws.

"The public is definitely in favor of this," said Whitney Taylor of the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy. "The science and the voters are ahead of the politicians."

Surprisingly, some of the toughest criticism of the proposed ballot question is coming from other activist groups also pushing for the decriminalization of marijuana.

They point to a portion of the proposed ballot question that would define possession of marijuana to include finding traces of the drug "in the urine, blood, saliva, sweat, hair, fingernails, toe nails or other tissue or fluid of the human body."

"It uses the drug laws to identify marijuana smokers, not who are impaired, but who might have smoked in the past six weeks or so," Keith Stroup, founder of NORML, a national nonprofit group advocating for the easing of marijuana laws.

"If it makes it to the ballot, a lot of people who would be strong supporters of decriminalizing marijuana may not be able to support this fatally flawed language," said Stroup, who was arrested for smoking a marijuana cigarette at a rally on Boston Common.

Longtime marijuana activist Steven Epstein, of the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, said the group hasn't decided if it will support the question.

He said under the question, a person who smoked marijuana in a location where it is legal could be fined weeks later after returning to Massachusetts.

He pointed to another potential glitch in the ballot question, which equates an ounce of marijuana with an ounce of tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient of the marijuana - essentially a much more concentrated version of the drug.

"It won't kill anybody and should probably be legal too, but will the voters of Massachusetts support it?" said Epstein, who said he hasn't decided whether he will vote in favor of the question if it reaches the ballot.

Other critics say they oppose decriminalizing any amount of marijuana, saying it could send a signal to children that smoking pot is no big deal.

Michael Mather, a retired police officer and head of the anti-drug education group DARE-Massachusetts, says easing the marijuana laws is a bad idea. "It's not the right thing to do to our youth. Our youth needs to be strong and not have these drugs inside of them," he said.

He also said marijuana could act as a so-called "gateway drug" to other, more harmful drugs.

"I'm not saying that everyone who smokes pot will do heroin, but almost everyone who does heroin didn't start out with heroin," he said.

Marijuana activists dismiss the gateway argument.

"It's like saying every one who rides a bicycle goes on to ride a motorcycle," Taylor said.

The ballot question isn't the only effort under way to ease the state's drug laws.

A bill working its way through the Statehouse would also decriminalize possession of an ounce or less of the drug, but set a higher fine of $250.

The bill has already received a public hearing, but won't come up for debate and a possible vote until next year.

Asked if he would support the bill, Gov. Deval Patrick said Monday he was focused on other priorities.

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=69051&CSAuthResp=119
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6dWKUUdi%2FX7ese98zw%3D%3D&CSUserId=8254&CSGroupId=5

Posted by lois at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

MA: State jails said overcrowded, often unsafe

State jails said overcrowded, often unsafe
Daily Hampshire Gazette November 27, 2007
BY TONI SCOTT AND AMY RAFFERTY

The jail at the top of the Middlesex County Courthouse has been ordered shut down because of asbestos issues. The jail was built in 1971 to hold 160 inmates. It now houses 372,

Each day in Massachusetts, prisoners, correctional officers, judges and lawyers find themselves in state facilities that are old, overcrowded and, sometimes, deteriorating and unsafe.

Bristol County's Ash Street Jail in New Bedford is the oldest operating jail in America. Built in 1828, it has been the subject of lawsuits challenging conditions in the largely windowless lockup. The jail's cells lack automatic door locks: in the case of a fire, a correctional officer must unlock each door.

The Middlesex County jail, located at the top of the Cambridge courthouse, was ordered shut in 2005 because of asbestos. Inmates remain in the jail because there are few other places to hold them.

Funding for emergency repairs at the state's 110 courthouses is running low. Court officials say they need at least $30 million to fix problems at many of the older facilities. They say hundreds of millions will be needed in the long term.

Gov. Deval Patrick has pledged $143 million to the commonwealth's corrections department from a proposed billion-dollar bond bill. The money would include $500,000 for a yearlong study of jails and courthouses. But needs created by the state's surging prisoner population may overwhelm those funds.

Worcester County Jail has been beset with financial, staffing and population problems for years. Today, a jail designed for 822 inmates holds 1,569 who sleep in rows of bunk beds laid out in the jail's gymnasium.

The jail is under an order from a federal judge to reduce the number of inmates by 300 next month.

The Middlesex County jail, built in 1971 to house 160 inmates, houses 372. Another 186 inmates of the county are locked away in other facilities across the state.

The jail in Plymouth County has a capacity of 1,140. In recent months, its population has hovered around 1,640.

Counties aren't alone when it comes to overcrowded facilities. Of the 23 facilities under the state Department of Corrections, only three were operating at or below their capacity rate for the months of June to September.

A recent report found the DOC is operating at 142 percent of its design capacity. There are 11,136 inmates in state facilities that have a combined capacity of 7,802. Concord Correctional Facility is 228 percent of its capacity; the Framingham Awaiting Trial Unit operates at 350 percent capacity.

Although overcrowding is not an issue at the Ash Street jail in New Bedford, conditions there are a harbinger for the future as other county and state facilities age.

Peter Costanza, an attorney with Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, said the building is too old to continue functioning as a jail.

"It's very primitive," Costanza said. "It was built for the standards of the time, which is almost 200 years ago. There's no natural lighting. It's like a dungeon."

At the time of a 1998 lawsuit, the jail held 205 inmates, but only a percentage of the 200 cells were in use due to disrepair. Some cells housed three people, with prisoners sleeping on mattresses or hard shells on the floor.

"They were in there like sardines," Costanza said. "It wasn't healthy or safe."

Although a state court judge ruled the jail could only house one prisoner per cell, he did not close the jail or require it to install automatic door locks.

Costanza concedes that the conditions at Ash Street have improved, but he is quick to point out that they still aren't where they should be.

"The courts and sheriff have made the conditions better, but they're never going to make them good. It's just less extreme," Costanza said.

But Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson doesn't see the need to build a new facility.

"We meet the basic requirements and it seems to me that we're in good shape," Hodgson said. "We shouldn't have the taxpayers pick up a tremendous cost to improve a facility that should be a secondary priority."

Toni Scott and Amy Rafferty report for the Gazette from the Boston University Statehouse Program.

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=69121&CSAuthResp=1196174640530059%3AkupF26ki3cyU8g%3D

Posted by lois at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2007

Orange Co. CA: Editorial: Too many of us in prisons. Prison overcrowding reflects tougher sentencing, often for victimless offenses, not more crime

Monday, November 26, 2007
Editorial: Too many of us in prisons
Prison overcrowding reflects tougher sentencing, often for victimless offenses, not more crime
An Orange County Register editorial

It was more than a year ago that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looked at the 175,000 prisoners crammed into a state prison system built for half as many and proclaimed a state of emergency.

So far, this emergency has been addressed largely in terms of prison "supply" – more beds. As we have argued before in these pages, a truly comprehensive solution for California's prison overcrowding must focus also on reducing prison "demand": reducing the number of criminals by reforming sentences for those lawbreakers who don't threaten public safety. But lest our readers think these suggestions are unique, a research institute that works closely with corrections departments around the country conducted an analysis of the nation as a whole, and it found both the same problem and the same necessary solution.

California's jails hold one of every 200 Californians, at an annual cost to taxpayers that rivals that of the state's university system. But as the report issued last week by the JFA Institute demonstrates, this follows the pattern of the nation as a whole, which now warehouses 2.2 million prisoners at a cost of $100 billion a year: a tenfold increase from three decades ago. JFA Institute, based in Washington, D.C., works with various levels of government and philanthropic agencies to evaluate criminal-justice policies and design research-based policy solutions ( www.JFA-associates.com).

Who are these 2.2 million people? Among them are Elisa Kelly and George Robinson, sentenced to 27 months in prison for hosting a drinking party for their son's nine friends in their own home. There's Jessica Hall, sentenced to 24 months for throwing a cup of McDonald's coffee at a car that cut her off. And then there are the hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned for nonviolent drug crimes.

As these examples suggest, and the JFA report demonstrates with statistical evidence, the primary reason for overcrowded prisons is not an explosion of crime, but an explosion of prison sentences. Not only are these sentences many times the length of those for equivalent crimes in other industrialized nations, they are "significantly longer than they were in earlier periods in our penal history." The result is greater expense for less effect, as is testified by rates of recidivism and crime alike.

The JFA Institute argues that its recommendations would save the U.S. taxpayer $20 billion a year and, eventually, reduce prison rolls by half. Certainly, they represent the real reforms that California and America as a whole need: reducing sentences, eliminating the use of prison for parole violators, reducing parole and probation supervision periods and, most importantly, decriminalizing victimless crimes, particularly those related to drug use and abuse.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/prison-jfa-sentences-1928993-reducing-institute#

Posted by lois at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)

New Book: Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration

Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration
Paul Wright & Tara Herivel
This is the third and latest book in a series of Prison Legal News anthologies that examines the reality of mass imprisonment in America.
Locking up 2.3 million people isn¹t cheap. Each year federal, state, and local governments spend over $185 billion annually in tax dollars to ensure that one out of every 137 Americans is imprisoned. Prison Profiteers looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, guard unions, medical corporations, and other industries and individuals that benefit from this country¹s experiment with mass imprisonment. It lets us follow the money from public to private hands and exposes how monies formerly designated for the public good are diverted to prisons and their maintenance. Find out where your tax dollars are going as you help to bankroll the biggest prison machine the world has ever seen.

Contributors include: Judy Greene on private prison giants Geo
(formerlyWackenhut) and CCA; Anne-Marie Cusac on who sells electronic weapons to prison guards; Wil S. Hylton on the largest prison health care provider; Ian Urbina on how prison labor supports the military; Kirsten Levingston on the privatization of public defense; Jennifer Gonnerman on the costs to neighborhoods from which prisoners are removed; Kevin Pranis on the banks and brokerage houses that finance prison building; and Silja Talvi on the American Correctional Association as a tax-funded lobbyist for professional prison bureaucracies; Tara Herivel on juvenile prisons; Gary Hunter and Peter Wagner on the census and counting prisoners; David Reutter on Florida's prison industries; Alex Friedmann on the private prisoner transportation industry; Paul Von Zielbauer on the sordid history of Prison Health Services in New York; Steven Jackson on the prison telephone industry; Samantha Shapiro on religious groups being paid to run prisons and Clayton Mosher, Gregory Hooks and Peter Wood on the myth and reality of building rural prisons.

This is an exclusive paperback printing made just for Prison Legal News.
Price: $19.95
Order at this link: https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/104_ProductDetails.aspx

Posted by lois at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

Vermonters help ease life on the outside

Vermonters help ease life on the outside
Towns trying to keep ex-cons on right path

By Jenna Russell, Globe Staff | November 24, 2007

BARRE, Vt. - Vermont corrections officials are trying a radical new strategy to reintegrate the state's worst offenders into society: Team them up with groups of students, parents, businesspeople, and retirees in the towns they return to after prison, and let these surrogate families and friends show them how they can fit in again.

Modeling their efforts on a successful Canadian program, towns across Vermont are matching felons who have served time in prison for sexually abusing children, beating up family members, dealing drugs, and other offenses with artists, barbers, lawyers, teachers, and retirees. The volunteers help the returning offenders find jobs and apartments, give them rides and advice, and socialize with them. The idea, which is backed by studies of the Canadian program, is that former inmates who feel connected to the places where they live are less likely to break laws again.

The Vermont Department of Corrections is one of the first in the United States to embrace the approach, using a three-year $2 million federal grant it received in 2003, said Derek Miodownik, the grant manager.

Support teams, called "circles of support and accountability," meet weekly to check on former prisoners in Newport, St. Johnsbury, Barre, Montpelier, and Brattleboro. Each offender works with a small team of volunteers, who begin meeting with the offender before he or she leaves prison. The teams are supervised by local community justice centers, state-funded agencies that work with crime victims and offenders. Paid coordinators, who are employed by the centers, lead the groups and help make sure offenders stay on track. The offenders have been released from prison under state supervision; all have counselors or probation officers who also keep tabs on them.

To make them feel part of the team, the volunteers refer to the offenders as "core members." The teams discuss the effects of the crimes the offenders committed on their victims and the community.

Eric Horowitz, 45, of Brattleboro, said he would probably be back in prison if not for his four team members. They have taken him bowling, to restaurants, and on walks, said Horowitz, who served six years for lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor and aggravated domestic assault.

When he saw that the members of his team did not condemn him, "it was a great surprise to me," he said. He said the group has boosted his self-esteem and taught him an important lesson: "When you do something to society, it loses trust in you, and you have to rebuild that trust."

The fate of the Vermont project is uncertain. The federal grant funding will run out at the end of the year, and legislation that would provide more money remains tied up in Congress, said Miodownik. The grant money pays the salaries of the group coordinators.

For now, Vermont has set up 23 trained support teams in five towns and cities. Most of the offenders have returned to the towns where they lived and committed their crimes.

The new initiative has attracted volunteers such as Howard and Elinor Yahm, 64-year-old retired psychotherapists who moved to Vermont almost a year ago from New York. They said they have grown close to the young man their team is trying to help, a 20-year-old who recently served 18 months in prison for possession of child pornography.

Asked about his progress, the Yahms said proudly that the young man is doing "terrifically," thriving in the job they helped him find as manager of a deli and dating a new girlfriend.

"The more successful he is, the more protected the community is," said another volunteer, Jeannie MacLeod of Barre.

A trained mediator and the mother of a young son, MacLeod, 40, is on a team that is helping another former convict, a man who served nine months for assaulting a family member.

MacLeod said she volunteered because she knew the family of her offender. But she quickly found herself riveted by the drama of helping another person struggle through the adversity of returning from prison.

Wilson said recruiting volunteers has been the toughest task facing the program in Canada. In Barre, a blue-collar city of 9,000 people, project leaders said recruitment took off, driven by word of mouth, after Katherine Paterson, the local author of the bestselling children's novel "Bridge To Terabithia," decided to volunteer. About 30 volunteers now serve on nine support teams.

Colorado and a handful of other states are also setting up volunteer teams, and there are other signs that the model may be gaining momentum. Canadian psychologist Robin Wilson, a leading proponent, was in Boston last week to explain how the program works in Canada to clergy members, legislators, and social workers.

Getting residents involved in the lives of felons improves public safety, says Wilson and other proponents. The volunteers become invested in the successful reintegration of the former inmates and serve as role models who help steer their charges away from activities that could lead to crime. In an interview, Wilson said former prisoners fare better under the Canadian approach than when they are shunned in their communities.

"We have to get our heads around the idea that most of them are going to come back to the same places they left," he said. "We can't put them on an island somewhere."

Between 150 and 200 of the circles are operating in Canada, where they serve mostly sex offenders. Another 40 to 50 are in place in the United Kingdom, Wilson said.

A Canadian study compared 60 convicted sex offenders who were deemed most likely to reoffend but who had the help of support teams with 60 felons convicted of similar crimes who lacked such support. The study, conducted by Wilson in 2005, found that the returning felons without support teams were about three times more likely to commit new sex crimes than those with support teams, and more than twice as likely to commit any violent crime within four to five years of their release from prison.

Vermont corrections officials say it is too soon to judge the outcome of the program, which started teaming volunteers with felons in 2005, but they are encouraged: Of the 23 offenders currently participating in the project, some of whom have been in the program for more than a year, only two have been charged with new offenses. One of those two was convicted of providing alcohol to a minor, a lesser crime than his original drug offense, said Miodownik, the grant administrator.

Nationwide, about two-thirds of the people released from prison were arrested for another serious crime within three years of their release, according to a 1994 government study.

The effort in Vermont has drawn little criticism, but some supporters of crime victims say the state should make sure that their needs receive equal attention.

"We hope this is helpful in preventing future victims," said Sharon Davis, special projects coordinator for the Vermont Center for Crime Victims Services. "But on the other side, we should also worry about what we're doing in the longer term for victims."

At a dinner for members of the nine support teams in Barre church basement this month, Howard and Elinor Yahm looked on, smiling, as their young charge dashed back and forth in a Red Sox T-shirt, delivering steaming bowls of squash and potatoes from the kitchen to the table. The former prisoner, who asked that his name not be published, said he hopes one day to be a chef and own a restaurant.

In and out of the criminal justice system for years, the young man said a lot of people have tried to help him, but his group members are different.

"They're not paid to help," he said. "They do it of their own free will."

http://www.boston.com/news/local/vermont/articles/2007/11/24/vermonters_help_ease_life_on_the_outside?mode=PF

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

November 25, 2007

OH: MANDATORY SENTENCING- Politicians ask packed prisons to take more

MANDATORY SENTENCING
Politicians ask packed prisons to take more
Sunday, November 25, 2007 3:23 AM
By Jim Siegel
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

The same week that Ohio's prison population roared past 50,000 for the first time in history, the Ohio Senate approved mandated prison time for soliciting sex from minors and increased the penalty for inducing panic at a school.

A month earlier, the Senate approved major penalty increases for cocaine-related offenses -- even as Terry Collins, the man who oversees an Ohio prison system that is at 133 percent capacity, argued that his cells were stuffed with low-level drug offenders who would fare better elsewhere.

Politicians like to appear tough on crime, even in the face of criticism that their efforts can be short-sighted and counterproductive.

Since January, Ohio lawmakers have introduced at least 42 bills that increase criminal penalties, expand penalties to new offenses, mandate prison time or create new crimes.

"I do have concerns about the number of pending legislation that will have an impact on our already crowded prison system," Collins said, noting that it costs Ohio taxpayers about $25,000 per year to house an inmate.

But it's a trend unlikely to reverse soon. No one loses an election for being too tough on crime. And longtime observers say that as the public grew increasingly aware of such offenses as child sex abuse, identity theft and repeat drunken driving, lawmakers grew more eager to ratchet up punishments.

During the past two-year legislative session (2005 through 2006), 16 bills enhancing criminal penalties were enacted. At least 20 punishment-boosting measures became law in the 2003-04 session. Four such bills have made it into law so far this year.

Meanwhile, Ohio has a record number of inmates and has spent $800 million building 23 prisons since 1987.

So be it, say some lawmakers.

"We don't create criminals," said Sen. Timothy J. Grendell, R-Chesterland, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. "It is a basic function of state government that we protect law-abiding citizens from those who are lawbreakers. I hope we do not … fail to perform that duty simply because we have more criminals today than we did yesterday."

Rep. Jim Hughes, a Columbus Republican and former assistant county prosecutor, said stronger punishments increase deterrents and keep criminals away from the vulnerable.

Hughes said he proposed tougher penalties for identity theft against seniors when he heard stories of the elderly losing their savings to swindlers. As the child sex offender problem grew, or at least gained publicity, he and others have proposed more prison time.

"The issue is apparently that these people aren't getting the message that we're serious about protecting our children," he said.

But Sen. Dale Miller, D-Cleveland, said his colleagues are pushing a short-sighted agenda by increasing penalties.

"I particularly have concerns about bills that are named after somebody," he said. "One terrible thing happens, and granted it's a terrible thing, but then the legislator wants to increase the penalty. We are gradually ending up with a patchwork of penalties that aren't consistent with each other."

Miller was the only senator this month to vote against Senate Bill 183, which mandates jail time of six months to two years for importuning, the crime of soliciting sex from a minor. Those who bust the bad guys -- troopers, police and sheriffs -- support the measure. But those who put them away -- county prosecutors and judges -- oppose the bill.

John E. Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, said mandating prison sentences for fourth- and fifth-degree felonies pushes more cases to trial where, in cases of importuning, children may have to testify in open court.

"That doesn't mean some of these people shouldn't go to jail," Murphy said. "But in some of these cases, where you're dealing with a 14- or 15-year-old victim, we question whether we ought to have mandatory penalties."

It's a battle Murphy has fought many times.

When a bill to increase penalties is introduced, he said he "fairly often" finds himself thinking the current law is already adequate. On numerous occasions, he has talked down fervent lawmakers who want to hit criminals with a sledgehammer when a ball-peen would do.

As lawmakers increase penalties for low-level felonies, or turn more misdemeanors into felonies, it consumes time for prosecutors, clogs the court system and reduces plea-bargain options, Murphy said.

"That's becoming a big problem," he said. "But we are not opposed to mandatory penalties for higher-level offenses."

Murphy said prosecutors strongly support a proposed "three strikes" measure that would allow judges to double the sentences of offenders convicted of their third violent first- or second-degree felony.

Meanwhile, Collins is looking for some relief from the overcrowding. Alternatives such as halfway houses and intensive probation are available for low-level felons, he said, but they're full, too.

His department is studying the feasibility of re-opening the Lima Correctional Institution, but Collins said more cells haven't been a long-term solution in the past.

"I think we've found we're worse off today," he said. "I'm not the brightest guy in the world, but that tells me there needs to be some other solution for us to look at."
http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2007/11/25/MorePrison.ART_ART_11-25-07_A1_8E8I8DS.html?sid=101

Posted by lois at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)

Immigrant Workers Caught in Net Cast for Gangs

November 25, 2007
Immigrant Workers Caught in Net Cast for Gangs
By NINA BERNSTEIN

GREENPORT, N.Y. — It was still dark the morning of Sept. 27 when armed federal immigration agents, guided by local police officers, swept into this village on the East End of Long Island. Within hours, as the team rousted sleeping families, 11 men were added to a running government tally of arrests made in Operation Community Shield, a two-year-old national program singling out violent gang members for deportation.

“Violent foreign-born gang members and their associates have more than worn out their welcome,” Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said at an October news conference announcing the arrests of 1,313 people in the operation over the summer and fall nationwide. “And to them I have one message: Good riddance.”

But, to the dismay of many of Greenport’s 2,500 residents, the raid here did not match her words.

Only one of the 11 men taken away that morning was suspected of a gang affiliation, according to the Southold Town police, who patrol Greenport and played the crucial role of identifying targets for the operation.

The 10 others, while accused of immigration violations, were not gang associates and had no criminal records.

Instead, they were known as good workers and family men. When they suddenly vanished into the far-flung immigration detention system, six of their employers hired lawyers to try to find and free them. Some went further, like Dan and Tina Finne, who agreed to take care of the 3-year-old American-born daughter of a Guatemalan carpenter who was swept up in the raid, if her mother was detained, too.

“This is un-American,” said Ms. Finne, 41, a Greenport native, echoing other citizens who condemned the home raids in public meetings and letters to The Suffolk Times, a weekly newspaper. “We need to do something about immigration, but not this.”

Greenport’s experience with Operation Community Shield sheds light on the inner workings of an antigang crackdown that has brought immigration raids to private homes across the country. The crackdown relies heavily on local police forces to identify suspects, often based on loosely defined or subjective criteria.

But the raid in Greenport also underscores the potential for backlash from local residents and officials when results conflict with expectations.

As the details of the Sept. 27 raid spread through this village, where about 17 percent of residents are Hispanic, some citizens began to protest the very premise of the operation — and the participation of local officers.

David Nyce, Greenport’s mayor, said, “The whole gang issue is something to keep the white majority scared about the Latino population, and to come in and bust as many people as they want.”

“I spoke to the police chief,” he added, “and I said, ‘This is going to set you back a lot.’ ”

Elsewhere in Suffolk County, many welcomed the sweep. The Suffolk County police, who patrol towns in the western part of the county, had only praise for the operation.

‘Collateral Arrests’

But the county executive and the county police commissioner in neighboring Nassau County disagreed. They said that the vast majority of those arrested in their county were not gang associates, and that residents and police alike had been endangered by what they called the agents’ “cowboy mentality,” including armed raids on the wrong homes.

Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement dismiss such criticism. They say that the operation was properly conducted and methodically planned, based on intelligence provided by the local police departments themselves. “Collateral arrests” of illegal immigrants who are not gang suspects are always appropriate to the agency’s mission, they said.

“We’re not here stomping all over anybody’s rights,” said Peter J. Smith, the special agent in charge of the Long Island operation, which led to the roundup of 186 men. “We’ve got immigration powers.”

One of the things that clearly unsettled residents of Greenport was that the immigrants were arrested in their homes, without warrants, an immigration enforcement tactic that has been used more and more since 2005.

By law, immigration agents without judicial warrants may enter homes only with the consent of the residents. They may not use racial or ethnic profiling to single people out. But they have broad authority to detain anyone they encounter if they have grounds for suspicion that the person is not in the country legally. The legality of recent home raids has been challenged in federal court in New York and elsewhere.

Case law on the constitutional limits of immigration powers in home raids is still unsettled, said Prof. Daniel Kanstroom, a legal historian of deportation at Boston College. For decades, such raids were rare, in part because the idea of home as an inviolable space has been enshrined by the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. “We are now in the midst of a major resurgence” in home raids, Professor Kanstroom said.

The operation in Greenport began a month before the raid, with a phone call from Agent Smith to the Southold Town police, said Detective Sgt. John Sinning. The federal agency was planning an antigang sweep on Long Island, and he was asked if he had names of gang members who might also be deportable immigrants.

Like many police departments, the Southold force keeps a database of young men suspected of gang ties, in many cases because of their clothes, their tattoos or the company they keep.

Planning the Raids

Since there is no legal definition of criminal street gang membership, officers have tremendous discretion in deciding whom to classify as a gang associate, notes Jennifer Chacon, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has written critically about Operation Community Shield.

In Greenport, Detective Sinning, 43, took the lead. He speaks no Spanish, but after years of regional meetings on the topic, he said, he knows the signs of gang participation.

“I gave them 15 or 16 names that we had as gang members or gang associates,” he said. “They ran them through their systems and came back with four, late the night before the raid.”

Detective Sinning said he suspected that two of the four, Salvadore Salazar-Orellana and Carlos Enrique Campos, were already in custody on assault and robbery charges. But he plugged all four names into a general database, and came up with six or seven home addresses roughly associated with the names he had been given.

The next day, accompanied by two uniformed officers, he guided the federal agents to those addresses.

In the end, only one of the men they were seeking was found: Pedro Rodriguez, a 19-year-old Greenport High School graduate who was facing his first criminal indictment, for assault. He had been released on bail to his mother’s house, protesting innocence.

The fourth man sought by the team was José Fuentes, an 18-year-old with no criminal record, who had been designated a gang associate by a Southold officer, Detective Sinning said. But at each address they were told he had moved or had never lived there.

One address on the list turned out to be the home of a Greenport firefighter, James Berry, who lives across the street from the mayor. Mr. Berry, 48, an American citizen, said a dozen armed agents and officers were on his lawn. “I thought they were going to kick the door in,” he recalled. But when he opened the door with a curse, an agent said, “I think we have the wrong address.”

Detective Sinning said agents also left an address where the residents who opened their door did not appear to be Hispanic. But at several other houses on the detective’s list, Latino residents answered the door, and the agents gained entry. They searched the premises, demanded immigration papers, and arrested any man who could not produce the right documents. Women and children were left behind.

At one house where the agents were looking for Mr. Fuentes, they arrested three men who had been asleep in separate bedrooms when an aunt opened the door. Two were cousins from El Salvador, Marvin Lopez, 21, a packer of baby vegetables at Satur Farm in Cutchogue, and Omar Lopez, 25, a Shelter Island landscaper, who had been asleep with his fiancée and infant son. The third man, Valentin Rudy Escobar Montenegro, a Guatemalan carpenter, also was with his wife and baby.

At an apartment mistakenly linked to Mr. Campos, one of the men who were in jail, the agents instead arrested Israel Salazar, 54, a full-time gardener for a retired couple in nearby Orient.

At Mr. Rodriguez’s home, agents handcuffed him in the basement bedroom he shared with his American fiancée, who was pregnant. Then they took six other men in the house: Mr. Rodriguez’s cousin, Arturo, 17; Walter Tzun, the Guatemalan carpenter who worked for Mr. Finne; and — from a separate apartment upstairs — four Guatemalan landscapers who had worked for the same Shelter Island company for five years.

For the first six to eight days, the Lopez cousins and Mr. Salazar were held incommunicado, without access to counsel, at the maximum-security Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Muslim immigrants considered terror suspects were held after 9/11.

Moving From Jail to Jail

Eberhard Müller, the former executive chef of Lutèce, who runs Satur Farms with his wife, hired a lawyer to find Marvin Lopez, the vegetable packer. Two weeks after the raid, the lawyer found him: he had been sent in shackles from Brooklyn to a detention center in Rhode Island, and on to a New Jersey jail.

Mr. Tzun was sent through two county jails to a federal detention center in York, Pa. But even as his boss was driving to York to hire a Pennsylvania lawyer to seek bond, Mr. Tzun was being flown to a privately run prison in rural New Mexico.

Until recently, men like these, with no criminal record or outstanding deportation orders, would have been released pending a deportation hearing. But none of those arrested in the September sweep in New York were released by the New York field office. The whereabouts of four of the men — the Guatemalan landscapers — could not be learned.

Still, several of the others eventually managed to return to Greenport, and some are fighting to stay. Mr. Salazar, after three weeks behind bars, was released from the jail in Hudson County, N.J., on $10,000 bond paid by Charlotte Gemmel and Maureen Sanders, the retirees who employed him as a gardener. Marvin Lopez is also out on $10,000 bond, posted by the owners of Satur Farms. Both are applying for asylum.

Omar Lopez hopes to do so, too, based on his fear of violent gangs in El Salvador. For now, though, he worries what will happen to his fiancée, Yanci, and son, Kevin, if he is deported.

“I cry here inside prison, just thinking about Yanci,” he said recently from jail in Monmouth County, N.J.

Mr. Tzun, who overstayed a visa in 2000, was released on $10,000 bond on Nov. 6 after he agreed to leave for Guatemala by Dec. 15. He has returned to say goodbye to his daughter, Sarah, and her mother, Amanda Rodriguez, with whom he had lived for six years. Mr. Tzun considered himself the stepfather of Ms. Rodriguez’s three other children, including Pedro Rodriguez, who was on the original target list. Pedro Rodriguez said he was persuaded in detention to sign deportation papers — as were his cousin Arturo and Mr. Montenegro. Mr. Rodriguez, who was 12 when his mother brought him to the United States, was deported to Mexico in late October.

But that deportation left unresolved the misdemeanor assault case that Detective Sinning had brought against him in August — to the frustration of both the detective and the defendant.

The detective wanted a grand jury to indict Mr. Rodriguez for a gang-related felony in the case. The defendant wanted to clear his name, and had asked to testify and to bring alibi witnesses to a grand jury.

Mr. Rodriguez’s criminal defense lawyer, Luis A. Pagan, said he was startled to learn that Detective Sinning had given Mr. Rodriguez’s name to immigration agents as a target while the case was pending.

“That’s scary,” Mr. Pagan said. “They’re not even giving this guy the right to defend himself.”

The misdemeanor charge remains on the defendant’s record, but because he was deported before he could be heard by the grand jury, prosecutors say they can no longer pursue a felony indictment. That matters, the detective said, because he expects Mr. Rodriguez to eventually make his way back to Greenport, where he has family and a child on the way.

Detective Sinning said he stood ready to help immigration agents again. But he added, “In this case, the one system is working against the other system.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/nyregion/25raid.html?pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

The Geography of Hate

The important part of this is the huge map which you can view by going to this URL. The graphic, above, shows some of the reported sightings of nooses in the past two years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25potok.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
November 25, 2007
Op-Chart, NY Times
The Geography of Hate
By MARK POTOK, LUKE VISCONTI, BARBARA FRANKEL and NIGEL HOLMES

FROM the 1880s to the 1960s, at least 4,700 men and women were lynched in this country. The noose remains a terrifying symbol, and continues to be used by racists to intimidate African-Americans (who made up more than 70 percent of lynching victims).

In the past decade or so, only about a dozen noose incidents a year came to the attention of civil rights groups. But since the huge Sept. 20 rally in Jena, La., where tens of thousands protested what they saw as racism in the prosecution of six black youths known as the “Jena 6,” this country has seen a rash of as many as 50 to 60 noose incidents. Last Tuesday, for example, a city employee in Slidell, La., was fired after being accused of hanging a noose at a job site a few days earlier.

These incidents are worrying, but even more so is the social reality they reflect. The level of hate crimes in the United States is astoundingly high — more than 190,000 incidents per year, according to a 2005 Department of Justice study.

And the number of hate groups, according to the annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has shot up 40 percent in recent years, from 602 groups in 2000 to 844 in 2006.

It seems that the September rally in Jena — much as it was seen by many civil rights activists as the beginning of a new social movement — signaled not a renewed march toward racial and social justice, but a surprisingly broad and deep white backlash against the gains of black America.

Mark Potok is the director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Luke Visconti is the co-founder and Barbara Frankel is the executive editor of the magazine DiversityInc. Nigel Holmes is a graphic designer.

Posted by lois at 01:44 PM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2007

Trying to Break Cycle of Prison at Street Level

"The Fifth Ward, an east Houston neighborhood, has one of the city’s highest concentrations of former prisoners. At least 125 state parolees resettled in the neighborhood in 2006, according to the mapping studies. Their prison terms cost Texas $9 million."

November 23, 2007
Trying to Break Cycle of Prison at Street Level
By SOLOMON MOORE
NY Times, Page 1

HOUSTON — Corey Taylor, a convicted drug dealer, recently got out of prison and moved into his grandmother’s house in Sunnyside, a south central Houston neighborhood of small, tidy yards.

During his first days home, Mr. Taylor, 26, got a sharp reminder of the neighborhood’s chronic problems.

“Out of 10 of my partners, only one is doing anything different,” he said, referring to his former drug-dealing companions. “I have some friends I haven’t seen for 10 years because either I was locked up or they were locked up.”

Last year, 32,585 prisoners were released on state parole in Texas, and many of them returned to neighborhoods where they live among thousands of other parolees and probationers.

Sunnyside is one of 10 neighborhoods in Houston that together accounted for 15 percent of the city’s population, yet received half of the 6,283 prisoners released in Houston in 2005, according to the Justice Mapping Center, a criminal justice research group.

The group, which is based in Brooklyn, has done work for the Texas Legislature that helped lead to a $217 million expansion of rehabilitation services.

Neighborhoods like Sunnyside can be found in virtually every big city in the nation. Even as violent crime statistics trend downward, incarceration rates throughout the country remain at a historic high of 750 per 100,000 residents. Each year about 650,000 prisoners are released on parole, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Mapping studies in neighborhoods as distant as the Phoenix suburb of South Mountain and the Newhallville area of New Haven show incarceration rates far higher than the national rate.

The parolees are almost always coming back to areas where support systems, like schools and public assistance programs, receive less money and attention than incarceration does, the studies show. In an effort to break the cycle, Texas this fall began its expansion of services for former inmates, including job training classes, drug treatment programs and psychological counseling.

The approach, based in part on legislative presentations by the Justice Mapping Center, is a sharp departure from the state’s longtime criminal justice focus on retribution.

The shift is intended to save the state money by slowing the revolving door between state prisons and neighborhoods like Sunnyside. The parolees released last year cost the state $100 million over the course of their prison terms; the 85 who returned to Sunnyside, population 21,000, accounted for almost $8 million of that, according to data by the mapping group.

“It’s not uncommon for children of criminal justice system clients to themselves go into the criminal justice system,” said State Senator John H. Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee.

“Certain lower socioeconomic areas produce clients for the criminal justice system in a way that is analogous to the way that the welfare system created a cycle of first- and second- and third-generation welfare recipients.”

Despite declining crime and lower arrest rates, Texas’s adult prison expenditures have grown to $2.8 billion a year, tripled since 1990. Decades of tough-on-crime legislation and low parole rates have quadrupled the state prison population since 1985.

The prisons are about 4,000 inmates beyond their legal capacity, according to prison officials.

A variety of groups, including the Council of State Governments and the Open Society Institute, are investigating the economic cost of communities with high rates of prison admissions and releases and the effectiveness of incarceration policies.

Eric Cadora, a founder of the Justice Mapping Center, said high incarceration rates hinder government efforts to turn around troubled neighborhoods by taking people out of the work force, compelling families to rely on government assistance and scaring away investment.

The Fifth Ward, an east Houston neighborhood, has one of the city’s highest concentrations of former prisoners. At least 125 state parolees resettled in the neighborhood in 2006, according to the mapping studies. Their prison terms cost Texas $9 million.

Mark Wright, 31, stood outside a house in the Fifth Ward recently selling drugs just weeks after completing a prison term for drug possession. Altogether, Mr. Wright said he had served 10 years for four drug-related convictions and one parole violation.

“I was bred into this life,” said Mr. Wright, who said he still made his living selling drugs. “It’s survival of the fittest out here.”

Mr. Wright said that “damn near 99 percent” of his friends had served prison terms, mostly for drug possession, including his younger brother, who is currently in prison.

“Half these dudes dropped out of junior high,” he said, pointing to several friends standing with him sipping from plastic foam cups of “Purple Drank,” a brain-battering draft of prescription-strength codeine cough syrup cut with soda. “Some of them dropped out of elementary school. All they got is this hustle. They got no backup.”

In east Houston, another of the city’s troubled neighborhoods, Marilyn Gambrell, the founder of No More Victims Inc., a support group for students at M. B. Smiley High School with incarcerated parents, said that more than half of the 1,250 students there have relatives in prison or who have done time in the past. Ms. Gambrell is a former parole officer who supervised many of the parents.

Each day, several dozen of the teenagers gather in a carpeted classroom with plush sofas and cushioned chairs to talk about what it is like to have a family member in jail or prison.

During a recent discussion, drugs, violence and poverty were running themes. One boy said he had accompanied his stepfather on drug runs, and most of the students said they themselves had already had run-ins with the police.

Tangenea Miller, 20, is considered a graduate of the support group. She works as a corrections officer at a Houston lock-up. “I see a lot of people there from my old neighborhood,” Ms. Miller said.

The situations described in the high school sessions were front and center one recent day in the Houston neighborhood of Kashmere Gardens. Weeds curled out of broken windows and open doorways in abandoned homes. Mounds of trash sat in empty lots flooded with stagnant water.

Young men, most of them unemployed, stood in front of shotgun houses sipping Purple Drank. Others dealt dope in front of strip-malls and on side streets in broad daylight. The Justice Mapping Center estimates that Texas taxpayers spent $10 million to incarcerate the 117 state prison inmates who were paroled to Kashmere Gardens last year.

Al Jarreau Davis, 26, was released back to Kashmere Gardens five months ago after serving less than a year in state jail for drug possession. It was his second jail term. Mr. Davis and his older brother, Bay Davis, also a recently released drug offender, support themselves by selling marijuana and crack cocaine.

A third Davis brother was shot to death a year ago during an argument after a traffic accident.

“There ain’t no jobs out here for someone like me,” said Al Jarreau Davis. Both brothers said they fully expected to be arrested again, or worse.

“I’m probably going to stay out on the street until somebody murders me,” said Bay Davis, matter-of-factly.

And new parolees keep coming. Every few weeks, several dozen inmates assemble in the chapel of the state prison in Huntsville on the eve of their release for a two-hour orientation program by Christian outreach workers. The prisoners are offered phone lists of clinics, churches, shelters and drug treatment programs. Then they file out of the chapel and back to their cells for one more night of restless confinement.

It is a shoestring program and most inmates do not participate, said the Rev. Emmett Solomon, a prison minister who leads the classes. “Most of what they get to prepare them for their release, they get right here,” Mr. Solomon said. “But it’s probably too little, too late.”

Mr. Taylor, the Sunnyside drug dealer, was in a recent class. He left for the bus station the next morning, with about 40 other men, wearing tattered, unfashionable donated clothes and carrying their possessions in mesh bags.

As Mr. Taylor got off the bus in Houston later in the afternoon, a passing stranger who called himself Ice welcomed him home.

“Hey man, I know how it is,” he told Mr. Taylor. “I just got out, too.”
Map at this URL http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/us/23mapping.html?pagewanted=all

Posted by lois at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2007

Georgia Justices Overturn a Curb on Sex Offenders

November 22, 2007
Georgia Justices Overturn a Curb on Sex Offenders
By BRENDA GOODMAN
NY Times

ATLANTA, Nov. 21 — The Georgia Supreme Court unanimously struck down a state law Wednesday that limited where registered sex offenders could live, ruling that the statute was so restrictive it unconstitutionally deprived the offenders of their property rights.

The law, described when it was adopted in 2006 as the nation’s toughest restriction on sex offenders, prohibited them from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches or any other place that children might congregate, including more than 150,000 school bus stops in the state. The ban applied even when a school, a church or the like opened in an area where an offender was already living.

“Under the terms of that statute, it is apparent that there is no place in Georgia where a registered sex offender can live without being continually at risk of being ejected,” said the seven-member court’s opinion, written by Presiding Justice Carol W. Hunstein.

The court ruled that the statute violated Fifth Amendment protections against the public taking of private property without compensation.

The law “looms over every location” that registered sex offenders might choose to call home, with the potential to force them from their residence any time “some third party chooses to establish any of the long list of places and facilities encompassed within the residency restriction,” Justice Hunstein wrote.

The law was challenged by Anthony E. Mann, 44, of Hampton, Ga., who pleaded no contest in 2002 to a North Carolina charge of taking indecent liberties with a child. “It just didn’t even pass the smell test,” said Stephen Bailey Wallace, the lawyer who represented Mr. Mann before the justices. “It’s terribly myopic.”

State Representative Jerry Keen, a Republican who sponsored the legislation, said the court had superseded the will of both the legislative and executive branches of Georgia’s government. Mr. Keen vowed to redraft the law and reintroduce it when the legislature, formally the General Assembly, next meets in January.

“In the meantime, convicted felony sex offenders will be allowed to live next door to day care centers, school bus stops or anywhere else they choose,” Mr. Keen said in a statement.

But courts around the nation have begun to show their discomfort with new state laws that impose such residency restrictions, which in some cases are so broad they have forced sex offenders to become homeless when they cannot find an address that meets the legal requirements.

Wednesday’s ruling applies only to the residency restrictions of Georgia’s law. A separate lawsuit has challenged parts of the law that bar sex offenders from working or loitering in places where children gather.

Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer for the Southern Center for Human Rights, the civil rights group that brought the second suit, said Wednesday’s decision was the beginning of the end of a poorly conceived statute.

“It’s a law that’s impossible to comply with and impossible to enforce,” Ms. Geraghty said. “And it does nothing to protect kids, because it forces sex offenders to go underground.”

Mr. Mann said in a telephone interview that the court’s decision brought great relief.

“You live kind of every day wondering if the sheriff’s office is going to come out and tell you that you have three days to move,” Mr. Mann said. “It’s happened to me twice.”

Mr. Mann said he had challenged the law to protect his family, but also because he had felt he was being unfairly punished for the sake of political pandering.

“Politicians love to do the popular thing, and sex offenders are the popular thing,” he said. “I think this will challenge them to rewrite that law, and this time I think they need to ask the experts what to do.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/us/22offender.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1195743994-AafQ0TIl6YnVtgYeoMnTdA

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

November 20, 2007

“Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population”

http://www.jfa-associates.com/publications/srs/UnlockingAmerica.pdf
“Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population”
The JFA Institute, November 2007. Includes “Crime Rates and Incarceration”, “Three Key Myths About Crime and Incarceration”, “Decarceration, Cost Savings and Public Safety.”
A very interesting report.

Posted by lois at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)

Editorial NY Times: Raising Children Behind Bars

November 20, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
Raising Children Behind Bars

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 created a far-sighted partnership between the federal government and the states that agreed to remake often barbaric juvenile justice systems in exchange for federal aid. Unfortunately, those gains have been steadily rolled back since the 1990s when states began sending ever larger numbers of juveniles to adult jails — where they face a high risk of being battered, raped or pushed to suicide. The act is due to be reauthorized this year, and Congress needs to use that opportunity to reverse this destructive trend.

As incredible as it seems, many states regard a child as young as 10 as competent to stand trial in juvenile court. More than 40 states regard children as young as 14 as “of age” and old enough to stand trial in adult court. The scope of the problem is laid out in a new report entitled Jailing Juveniles from the Campaign for Youth Justice, an advocacy group based in Washington. Statistics are notoriously hard to get, but perhaps as many as 150,000 young people under the age of 18 are incarcerated in adult jails in any given year.

As many as half of the young people who are transferred to the adult system are never convicted as adults. Many are never convicted at all. By the time the process has run its course, however, one in five of these young people will have spent more than six months in adult jails.

Some jails try to protect young inmates by placing them in isolation, where they are locked in small cells for 23 hours a day. This worsens mental disorders. The study says that young people are 36 times more likely to commit suicide in an adult jail than in a juvenile facility. Young people who survive adult jail too often return home as damaged and dangerous people. Studies show that they are far more likely to commit violent crimes — and to end up back inside — than those who are handled through the juvenile courts.

The rush to criminalize children has set the country on a dangerous path. Congress must now reshape the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act so that it provides the states with the money and the expertise they need to develop more enlightened juvenile justice policies. For starters, it should rewrite the law to prohibit the confinement of children in adult jails.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/opinion/20tue3.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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

"Watch and Release " by Jeremy Travis

November 18, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor, NY Times
Watch and Release
By JEREMY TRAVIS

THE news media have a penchant for reliving major events on significant anniversaries. So it came as no surprise this year that we were bombarded with 30-year-old memories of the summer of 1977, when the Bronx was burning, the Son of Sam was on the loose and a blackout led to days of widespread looting.

Before the 1977 nostalgia passes, we should recall another series of frightening events from that year that hold lessons for today. In the space of a month, four New York State prisoners assigned to temporary release programs escaped. Three committed horrific crimes. In the uproar that followed, New York clamped down on these programs, leaving a policy legacy that still hamstrings our ability to reduce crime.

The first to escape was Salvador Agron, the “Cape Man.” As a 16-year-old gang leader, wearing a black cape, Agron stabbed three teenagers, two of whom died. After his death sentence was commuted to life, Agron became eligible for parole, was admitted to an education release program and attended classes at New Paltz State College. On April 16, 1977, eight months before his parole date, nearly 18 years after his arrest, he absconded. Two weeks later, he was apprehended in Phoenix.

Three weeks after Agron disappeared, Richard Gantz, on a two-day pass from a Manhattan work-release center, abducted and raped a 19-year-old college student. A few days later, Harry Elmore received a one-day pass from the same center and murdered 45-year-old Ethel Loney. About a week later, Jerry Williams, on furlough from another work-release center, was arrested for the rape of a 20-year-old nurse.

Headlines in New York reflected the public’s outrage. “State Prisoners in Escapist Mood.” “Rape Rap Hits Third Con on Release.” Within a month, Benjamin Ward, the state commissioner for correctional services, was on the hot seat before the State Senate’s Crime and Corrections Committee. He marshaled persuasive evidence to support the early-release programs: Only 114 of the 3,053 participants had absconded, for a remarkably low failure rate of 3.7 percent. Prisoners released directly committed crimes at higher rates than those released through transitional programs. Because participants earned nearly $1 million in wages, paid taxes and saved money to smooth their transition home, the programs were cost-effective.

These arguments did not stand a chance in the summer of 1977. On July 15, the Legislature approved sweeping changes in the state’s temporary release policies. Eligibility was limited to those prisoners with serious medical problems or relatives near death. Prisoners convicted of violent crimes or sexual assault could participate only if the corrections commissioner approved. By December, the number of participants was cut in half.

In the summer of 1977, New Yorkers lost sight of two realities of prisoner re-entry. First, except those who die in prison, all prisoners, including those who are highly dangerous, ultimately come home.

Second, the immediate post-release period poses the highest risk of failure. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, two-thirds of returning prisoners are rearrested within three years, but almost half those arrests occur within the first six months. When New York clamped down on temporary releases, it curtailed those programs that provide support when failure rates are highest.

Today, New York’s re-entry policies still reflect the political calculations of 1977. Only nine of the state’s 70 correctional facilities offer temporary release programs. Fewer than four percent of state inmates participate. No one is enrolled in an educational release program.

New York could simply restore eligibility for temporary release programs, but this reform would miss the mark. Instead, we should seek significant reductions in the rearrest rates of everyone leaving prison, not just those assigned to special programs.

Moreover, we should shift support and supervision resources to the front end of the re-entry period. In addition to transitional work and education programs, we should invest in halfway houses, residential and outpatient drug treatment and family mediation services.

In doing so, the state should also make safety planning a priority. We should secure protection orders for victims fearful of a repeat attack. Police and parole officers should work together to prevent retaliatory violence when a gang member leaves prison.

The state should also finance organizations of formerly incarcerated community residents to guide newly released prisoners along the path to reintegration. In short, we should align resources with risk, and invest in proven interventions that reduce new arrests during this critical transition period.

Meeting this goal is even harder today than 30 years ago. New York’s prison population has more than tripled. This year, more than 25,000 men and women will be released from our prisons. No network of re-entry programs provides a guarantee against horrific crimes. But, with a focus on results, we can reduce crime by helping these men and women return home safely.

Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, is the author of “But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Re-entry.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/nyregionopinions/18CItravis.html

Posted by lois at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council

November 20, 2007
Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council
By ADAM NOSSITER
NY Times

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 19 — In one of the clearest signs yet of Hurricane Katrina’s lasting demographic impact, the City Council is about to have a white majority for the first time in over two decades, pointing up again the storm’s displacement of thousands of residents, mostly black.

In local elections on Saturday, a veteran white politician, Jacquelyn B. Clarkson, defeated an African-American candidate, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, by 53 percent to 47 percent, in a contest for an at-large Council seat decided largely along racial lines. In addition, substantially more whites than blacks appear to have voted. Ms. Clarkson will become the fourth white member on the seven-member Council.

The total number of votes cast in the election — 52,614 — was sharply down from 113,000 in the election for mayor in May 2006. The low number called into question recent optimistic estimates that the city’s population had attained as much as two-thirds of its prestorm level, which was about 450,000.

In the 2006 election, many of those displaced by the hurricane voted absentee or drove into New Orleans to cast ballots. That vote from elsewhere appears to have been largely absent on Saturday, over two years after the storm.

“I think many people have moved on,” said Gregory C. Rigamer, a local demographic analyst whose work has been widely cited here. “When you look at this, you have to think the lower voter turnout would indicate that some people who previously cast votes from afar have lost interest.”

Since the mid-1980s, black politicians have held virtually all of the reins of power in a city where interest groups are sharply factionalized along racial lines and blacks were once two-thirds of the population. Saturday’s vote indicated a transition is in the making, perhaps similar to the one that occurred at the end of the segregation era here.

White candidates made other gains on Saturday, taking two New Orleans seats in the Louisiana Legislature long held by blacks, and a state court judgeship that had also been occupied by a black judge.

Voting was largely along racial lines. The apparently greater number of votes cast by whites — 29,700, compared with 22,900 black votes, according to an analysis by Mr. Rigamer — makes uncertain widely quoted estimates that blacks, despite a disproportionate population loss, are still substantially in the majority here.

The weekend election appeared to confirm what many had predicted immediately after the storm in 2005: New Orleans became almost overnight a smaller, whiter city with a much reduced black majority. And the results suggested that the election for mayor last year, where voting percentages were closer to pre- Katrina norms, might have been something of a fluke.

“Either blacks have really decided not to come back, in numbers, or they just voted by not voting,” said Cheron Brylski, a veteran political consultant here. “I’m really amazed at the number who just didn’t show up, knowing what was at stake.”

“I think this is the new normal,” she added. “We have to accept the fact that this is who is here, and this is who is back.”

The results on Saturday were greeted with gloom in black political circles.

“It is somewhat disheartening,” said Bill Rouselle, a veteran African-American consultant here. “It’s an indication that a lot of people have given up hope. A lot of people feel abandoned.”

Though not as highly publicized as the mayor’s race last year, the race for one of two at-large seats on the seven-member Council was nonetheless closely watched in New Orleans. The event that prompted the contest — the resignation of a popular black councilman who pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge — shocked the city as few events in public life here have, appearing as confirmation that a miasma of corruption still held sway in New Orleans.

Virtually none of the post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction projects planned by the city have gotten off the ground. Racial divisions on the Council have been sharp, and confrontations with Mayor C. Ray Nagin are frequent, though usually fruitless.

Ms. Brylski, the consultant, suggested that this might change under the newly constituted Council. “I do think the power shifts to the City Council,” she said, “and it’s incumbent on them to do something.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/us/nationalspecial/20orleans.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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

November 19, 2007

CO: The Poisoned Pen of Fort Lyon Prison

The Poisoned Pen of Fort Lyon Prison
Bought by the state for a dollar, Fort Lyon is rich in history, asbestos, sick inmates — and trouble.
By Alan Prendergast
Published: November 15, 2007

History Lesson #1

In 1829, William Bent headed west to join his older brother in the fur business. William was twenty years old, the son of a Missouri supreme court justice — and, like his brother Charlie, who would one day be the first governor of the New Mexico Territory, he soon fell in love with the lawless vastness that would become southern Colorado.

After he hid two Cheyenne from their archenemy, the Comanches, William became a trusted friend of the Cheyenne nation. Their chief, Black Kettle, called him Little White Man. At 26, Bent married a Cheyenne woman; after her death, he married her sister. He built a log stockade not far from what is now Pueblo and then, using laborers from Mexico, a sturdier adobe fort on the eastern plains, a haven for travelers along the Santa Fe Trail.

For several years, Bent's Fort hummed with trade. Wagon trains, Indians, soldiers and buffalo hunters all came to do business with Bent and his partner, Ceran St. Vrain. But as the pace of settlement increased, relations with the local tribes deteriorated — and so did commerce. In 1849, St. Vrain offered to sell the fort to the Army.

The offer came a decade too early. Within a few years, the Colorado gold rush would bring thousands of whites to the territory and increasing trouble with the Indians. There would be great need for an Army post along this stretch of the Santa Fe Trail — and great grief over actions staged from the new fort that would be built there. But in 1849 the government didn't see any reason to buy Bent's Fort. Some officials believed they could take over the place for nothing after the owners, bedeviled by hostile tribes, finally gave it up as a bad deal.

But Bent refused to give the Army his creation. Instead, he placed kegs of gunpowder along the adobe walls and blew up the whole shebang.

The Far Side of the Dollar

On November 15, 2001, a century and a half after Bent destroyed his fort, a group of federal, state and Bent County bureaucrats gathered less than twenty miles away, on the handsome 556-acre campus of Fort Lyon. The site had been an Army post, then a Navy sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, then a psychiatric hospital, then a chronic-care center operated by the Veterans Administration. Now, for the princely sum of one dollar, the feds were about to turn over Fort Lyon to the State of Colorado, which planned to transform the property into a special prison for elderly and mentally ill inmates.

Some observers described the transfer ceremony as "bittersweet," but any sweetness was hard to find. Then-governor Bill Owens sought an upbeat note, declaring that the Fort Lyon Correctional Facility "will make Colorado a safer place" and would be "a lot cheaper than building a prison from the ground up." A few old-timers in the crowd cracked wise about the kind of society that would turn a hospital for military vets into a rest home for geriatric felons. Locals wondered glumly if the job opportunities offered by a new prison, many of which would be filled by longtime Department of Corrections employees, could begin to make up for the lost federal jobs.

In its heyday, Fort Lyon had been a sprawling town unto itself, populated by more than a thousand patients. It had an Olympic swimming pool, a miniature golf course, tennis courts and an array of living quarters and other buildings dating back to the 1860s. But in recent years, the VA had directed its patients to more readily accessible centers and turned Fort Lyon into a nursing home and outpatient clinic; at the time of its closure, it had only 56 beds occupied, with a staff of fewer than 200.

The DOC's plans for the place were ambitious, to say the least. The department didn't have any use for the pool, the golf course or many of the 102 buildings on the campus, but some workers could live in former officers' quarters, and a few hospital buildings around the parade ground would accommodate a mix of inmates. According to the plan presented to the state legislature, the prison would soon house 500 medium-security prisoners — 50 percent of them able-bodied, the rest made up in equal parts of the physically infirm and mentally ill. There would be 300 employees, almost half of whom would be medical, nursing or mental-health professionals. Eventually, the place could be home to a thousand of the state's 20,000 prisoners, with a thriving correctional-industries operation and a special program for mentally ill prisoners who are also battling substance abuse. Best of all, by using inmate labor to accomplish many of the needed renovations, officials estimated that Fort Lyon could be converted to a prison for a mere $13 million, with another $18 million a year in operating costs.

"The modifications that are planned for the Fort Lyon facility are very limited and will primarily improve security," one briefing document explained, then added a quick cautionary note: "We may discover problems, or situations may develop over the next few years that require funding beyond the operating budget to resolve."

Six years later, situations have indeed developed at Fort Lyon. The place now has more than 500 inmates, but fewer than a hundred are the "special medical needs" prisoners who were supposed to go there. Fort Lyon has inmates with moderate mental illness, but none of the "high psychiatric needs" cases originally planned for. Like the VA, the DOC has had trouble attracting qualified medical personnel to the area and has only half of the nursing staff originally projected. The prison has had six wardens in six years. Maintenance costs for the aging facility have been significantly higher than expected, and the daily operating cost per inmate has made Fort Lyon one of the five most expensive of the state's 27 prisons.

Yet Fort Lyon's greatest problem was already lurking there when the state took it over. Instead of making Colorado a safer place and protecting sick prisoners, the move may have exposed them and staff to a range of environmental hazards. Many of these hazards, such as lead paint, were known at the time of the transfer, but the most serious — asbestos contamination in almost all of the buildings and even in the air — has turned out to be much more extensive than anticipated. In the past year, cost estimates for asbestos abatement at Fort Lyon have jumped from $6 million to $10 million — and that doesn't include the cost of dealing with asbestos-tainted soil, which officials hope to manage by spreading a little road base, growing more vegetation and not disturbing the stuff.

In the summer of 2006, a team of asbestos inspectors from Gobbell Hays, a private environmental consulting firm, collected hundreds of samples from Fort Lyon's buildings and soils. The team found "moderate to significant amounts" of asbestos-containing materials in most of the buildings, including widespread use of asbestos in steam-pipe insulation, wall plaster, baseboard and floor-tile adhesives and some ceiling and roofing materials. They also identified numerous hot spots in the dirt where buildings had been demolished decades earlier. The records of these demolitions were sketchy or non-existent, the consultants discovered, and many of the most contaminated zones weren't even tested in previous assessments of the site.

One of the worst areas was an ancient building called the Dairy Barn, which was being used by prison maintenance crews to store spare parts and equipment. For months, several inmates and staffers had crawled all over that barn, storing excess plumbing and HVAC materials and fetching parts, unaware that half a century ago the building had been used as a "hammer mill," where insulation from old pipes had been stripped off and reused. The place was crawling with asbestos fibers, Gobbell Hays found. The barn was quickly sealed, at a cost of $18,000 (not counting the loss of the inventory inside), and the outside premises micro-vacuumed.

One prisoner, who asked that his name not be used out of concerns about retaliation, followed a Gobbell Hays employee named Jose Montoya during the inspection. "He took samples of floor tiles, insulation, paint chips, ceiling tiles," the inmate remembers. "He told me he saw asbestos in the boiler room, mechanical rooms, and in the dirt outside the buildings." The inmate was stunned that no one had brought this up before, since the prison had already been operating for four years. He'd been at Fort Lyon since early 2003 and had done maintenance work in mechanical rooms, above drop ceilings and behind walls, in places where he saw stickers warning against the use of drills because of asbestos.

A few months ago, this inmate, along with 206 other former Fort Lyon maintenance workers, was ordered to report for chest X-rays. The doctor who examined the X-rays told him he had "severe abnormalities" in both lungs, he says, and ordered a CAT scan. The doctor who did the scan told him he was fine and probably had a cold. But the inmate worries it might be something worse — even though asbestos-related diseases, including lung cancer and mesothelioma, don't typically show up for fifteen years or more.

"Until last year, inmates doing maintenance were not prevented from entering any and all areas of Fort Lyon," he says. "I was not given any training or protective gear. The few inmates who did protest the working conditions were transferred out to other facilities."

Last year, the DOC finally hired an asbestos coordinator: Jose Montoya, the Gobbell Hays employee the inmate had followed.

But Phil DeFelice, the physical plant manager for Fort Lyon for the past three years, says that no prisoners have ever worked on asbestos abatement projects at the prison. "The inmates don't do any work that has to do with asbestos at all," he says. "It's all done by staff."

However, DeFelice and other officials acknowledge that there have been situations, including the Dairy Barn fiasco, in which inmates or staff were accidentally exposed to asbestos. Several have been documented by state health inspectors investigating inmate complaints. The DOC administrators insist that these incidents are isolated and have been blown out of proportion; the procedures they've put in place since the Gobbell Hays inspection, they say, are more than adequate to prevent further exposures. But sealing off or removing the asbestos, a project that falls outside the prison's operational budget, is being done in incremental stages as funding becomes available and may take twenty years or more. And some prisoners who are knowledgeable about asbestos abatement claim the documented incidents are only the tip of a costly, pervasive problem at Fort Lyon that the DOC failed to adequately address in its eagerness to ship prisoners there.

"The first thing they're going to do is say that we're felons and we lie," says Jerry Bachota, a prisoner with a background in construction who spent two years at Fort Lyon. "But there's a reason the feds gave up this property for a buck."

History Lesson #2

In 1853 William Bent built a new fort several miles east of the old one. The location, not far from present-day Lamar, struck the Army as a good area in which to erect its own fort, a sandstone compound that could offer protection to travelers between Kansas and Santa Fe.

The construction of Fort Wise, named after Henry Wise, the fancy-pants, well-connected governor of Virginia, began in 1860. Soldiers called the place Fort Fauntleroy. The name was changed to Fort Lyon the following year, after the War Between the States made Wise a secessionist and claimed the life of Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon.

Troop strength at Fort Lyon dwindled during the Civil War, as many of its soldiers were sent elsewhere. But the holdouts did see some action against the Indians, including one of the most notable atrocities of the period. In 1864, Colonel John M. Chivington came to Fort Lyon to commandeer additional forces to aid his regiment of hard-drinking irregulars. With the blessing of his close personal friend, territorial governor John Evans, Chivington was on a mission to suppress troublesome Indian factions who were defying a treaty that had been signed at the fort in 1861. The Treaty of Fort Wise ceded vast stretches of land to the whites that had been guaranteed to the Plains tribes only a few years earlier.

The morning after his visit to Fort Lyon, Chivington staged a dawn attack on a peaceful, largely unarmed village of Cheyenne and Arapaho. Most of the village's adult males were out hunting. Although some soldiers refused to fire, Chivington's bunch slaughtered and mutilated hundreds of women, children and elders. Trophies from the raid, including scalps and genitalia, were displayed in saloons in Denver. Public revulsion f