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December 31, 2007

CA: Lifers seek court allies in fight with state for parole

Lifers seek court allies in fight with state for parole
Judges have overruled governor
By Andy Furillo
December 10, 2007

Frustrated by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his parole board, more California life-term prisoners are turning to the courts for another shot at freedom – and winning enough cases to put the state on edge.

In the past two years, at least seven convicts sentenced to life imprisonment have been freed on court-issued writs of habeas corpus, after the governor or his appointees on the Board of Parole Hearings had denied them release dates. About two dozen more have persuaded judges to order the governor or the board to review their decisions.

Those numbers pale compared with the thousands of lifers eligible for release dates whose parole applications have been rejected – 99.5 percent of them last year. But the state believes some judges are overstepping their authority, and the state attorney general's office has appealed three cases, which the state Supreme Court agreed to hear.

Senior Assistant Attorney General Julie Garland contends that in the past two years some lower courts have infringed on the executive authority of the governor and the board to decide which lifers get out and when, with the judges deciding on their own whether life-term inmates no longer are a danger to society and can be released.

"Some of these recent cases have opened the door, and attorneys might feel that by going to court, they might have another bite at the apple," Garland said.

At issue in the cases under appeal is the "standard of review" the state Supreme Court established in 2002 in the so-called Rosenkrantz case for lifers seeking parole. The dispute doesn't apply to the 3,500-plus prisoners sentenced to life without possibility of parole.

State law says the parole board "shall normally set" a release date for lifers who have a possibility of parole – more than 29,000 of whom are now behind bars – unless the "timing" or "gravity" of the current or past convictions "is such that consideration of the public safety requires a more lengthy period of incarceration."

The court's decision in the Rosenkrantz case set a precedent for lifers to seek judicial review of their parole decisions but restricted it to questioning whether there was "some evidence" to support the board or the governor's findings. It also established that the facts of the original crime were sufficient for a judge to make the call.

But in the case of convicted murderer Sandra Davis Lawrence, the 2nd District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles ruled earlier this year that the "ultimate test" of the law is whether the evidence could determine if the offender posed an unreasonable safety risk. The appellate panel ruled the evidence fell short and ordered Lawrence released. Her case is one of the three being appealed.

Garland characterized the courts' rulings on inmates' "suitability" for release as "a pretty big shift" from their established role of reviewing only the evidence on which the governor and the board based their decisions.

But law professor Michael Brennan, of the University of Southern California's Post-Conviction Justice Project and also one of Lawrence's lawyers, said the inmates filing writs have usually served more than 20 years, have compiled exemplary disciplinary records and are entitled by law to parole.

"They have done everything possible inside the institution to rehabilitate themselves," Brennan said. "They have secure parole plans. They have a place to go and live. They have plans on how they are going to support themselves."

Before Lawrence turned to the courts, she had served 25 years in prison on a first-degree murder conviction for shooting and stabbing her lover's wife to death. Now 60, she earned a master's degree in business administration while in prison. Court papers filed on her behalf described her as a model prisoner.

The parole board granted Lawrence a release date, but Schwarzenegger reversed the decision last year, saying the callousness of her crime suggested she still posed an unreasonable risk. The appellate court disagreed with the governor and ordered her released in May.

Posted by lois at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

Mexico City: Behind Prison Bars, Toddlers Serve Time With Mom

December 31, 2007
Mexico City Journal, NY Times
Behind Prison Bars, Toddlers Serve Time With Mom
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
MEXICO CITY — Beyond the high concrete walls and menacing guard towers of the Santa Martha Acatitla prison, past the barbed wire, past the iron gates, past the armed guards in black commando garb, sits a nursery school with brightly painted walls, piles of toys and a jungle gym.
Fifty-three children under the age of 6 live inside the prison with their mothers, who are serving sentences for crimes from drug dealing to kidnapping to homicide. Mothers dressed in prison blue, many with tattoos, carry babies on their hips around the exercise yard. Others lead toddlers and kindergartners by the hand, play with them in the dust or bounce them on their knees on prison benches.

Karina Rendón, a 23-year-old serving time for drug dealing, said her 2-year-old daughter thought of the 144-square-foot cell she shared with two other mothers and their children as home. “She doesn’t know it is a prison,” she said, smiling sadly. “She thinks it’s her house.”
While a prison may seem an unhealthy place for a child, in the early 1990s the Mexico City government decided it was better for children born in prison to stay with their mothers until they were 6 rather than to be turned over to relatives or foster parents. The children are allowed to leave on weekends and holidays to visit relatives.
A debate continues among Mexican academics over whether spending one’s early years in a jail causes mental problems later in life, but for the moment the law says babies must stay with their mothers. So the prison has a school with three teachers.
The warden, Margarita Malo, said the children had a calming effect on the rest of the inmates. The presence of children also inspires the mothers to learn skills or, in many cases, to kick drug habits that landed them in trouble in the first place.
And even though the prison is full of women capable of violence, the children usually walk safely among them, as if protected by an invisible shield. It is as though they tap the collective maternal instinct of the 1,680 women locked up here.
“The minors are highly respected by the population,” Ms. Malo said. “The fact we have children here creates a mind-set of solidarity. I have never seen aggression on the part of the inmates toward the children. Everyone acts as if they could be their children, and they don’t want anything to happen to them.”
Still, raising a child in prison presents a tough set of problems, mothers said in recent interviews. Those serving long sentences dread the day when they must be separated from their child because he or she has turned 6.
Others who lack financial help from relatives struggle to earn enough money in prison to care for a child. Several said they waged a constant struggle to keep their children from getting sick in the damp, drafty cells. They often have no money for the prescriptions the prison doctor gives them.
Yet, few want to give up their bright-eyed offspring to relatives on the outside. They say the children are like a breath of normal life inside the stuffy, deadening confines of the prison. “It’s beautiful,” said Victoria Jaramillo, as she held her 3-month-old daughter on her lap. “It keeps one busy.”
Ms. Jaramillo, who is 40, is serving a 20-year sentence on a drug-dealing conviction. She maintains that she was only ironing clothes in a house when the police burst in and discovered a cache of drugs. Whatever the truth, she faces the certainty that she will have to give up her daughter, Frida, in six years.
“The only thing that bothers me is I will have to lose her,” she said. Dressed in a pink fleece jumpsuit, the baby looked up at her mother with dark, innocent eyes.
A mother’s crime plays no role in the decision to let her keep a baby born in jail, the warden said. Cecilia Nava López, 25, has served two years of a 27 ½-year sentence after being convicted of causing her stepchild’s death, a charge she denies. She was pregnant with her fourth child when the death occurred, and she was incarcerated based on the testimony of the father of her children.
Ms. Nava López said it was hard to keep her spirits up, facing such a long sentence for a death she said was not her fault. But taking care of her son, Emmanuel, who is 20 months old, gives her life some meaning. “He motivates me to keep trying to improve myself,” she said.
Ms. Rendón, however, said she sometimes wished she could give her daughter to relatives to raise. No one gives her money, so she makes a living selling snacks to visitors. Her child is delicate and gets sick frequently with chest colds, she said. She said she considered the prison food unhealthy, so she buys food for the girl from a grocery store the prison allows to operate inside its walls.
“I think the best thing for my daughter would be for her to be outside with her grandmother,” Ms. Rendón said. “I have to take her to work with me.” She pauses. “But the truth is I need her. She is something very special.”
Cell doors clang open at 7 a.m. and the guards call the roll at 8 a.m. Most of the mothers live together on the bottom floor of Cellblock H. They take their children to the school at 8:30 a.m. and pick them up at 2:30 p.m. The children spend the rest of the day in their mothers’ cells or with their mothers in the exercise yards.
The school has barbed wire above a yellow sign reading Cendi, short for Centro de Desarrollo Infantil, the Center for Child Development. On a recent afternoon, the children and their mothers gathered for La Posada, a traditional Mexican Christmas celebration. They sang songs about Joseph and Mary’s search for a place to stay in Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus in a manger. Then the children broke a star-shaped piñata and scrambled after the candy. It was hard to believe that they were surrounded by prison walls.
Elsa Romero Martínez, a psychologist who runs the school, said the children showed no signs of overly aggressive behavior. There have been few reports of abuse, though one child, suffering bruises, was taken away from a cocaine-addicted mother two years ago.
The thorniest problem she and the teachers face is preparing the children and mothers for separations once the children reach 6. “We have to teach them to say goodbye to the mothers,” she said.
To show them that a wider world exists, the teachers try to take the children on field trips as often as possible. Their budget is limited and they rely on charity for the outings. They have managed only three this year — to a museum, an amusement park and a children’s theater.
Some of the mothers live in a state of limbo, because a third of the prisoners have yet to be convicted of a crime. Diana Merlos Espericueta, 24, was arrested in December 2004 on charges of being a member of a kidnapping ring. She maintains that she dated the gang leader, the father of her child, but knew nothing of his business dealings.
For three years, she has waited for a judge to decide her case. She gave birth to her daughter, Jaqueline, soon after being incarcerated and has watched her grow to become a sprightly toddler, not knowing what the future holds for them. She faces a long sentence, possibly 70 years, if convicted.
Watching her child play amid plastic balls at the prison’s school, she said she lived in a state of impotent fear. Sometimes, she said, she contemplates committing suicide if she is forced to spend the rest of her life in jail and to give up her child. “The confinement is very hard,” she said.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/world/americas/31mexico.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

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

December 30, 2007

Forgotten Step Toward Freedom: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

December 30, 2007, NY Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Forgotten Step Toward Freedom
By ERIC FONER

WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase (2003) and the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (2005). Looming on the horizon are the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (2009) and the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the Civil War (2011). But one significant milestone has gone strangely unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

This neglect stands in striking contrast to the many scholarly and public events in Britain that marked the 2007 bicentennial of that country’s banning of the slave trade. There were historical conferences, museum exhibits, even a high-budget film, “Amazing Grace,” about William Wilberforce, the leader of the parliamentary crusade that resulted in abolition.

What explains this divergence? Throughout the 1780s, the horrors of the Middle Passage were widely publicized on both sides of the Atlantic and by 1792 the British Parliament stood on the verge of banning the trade. But when war broke out with revolutionary France, the idea was shelved. Final prohibition came in 1807 and it proved a major step toward the abolition of slavery in the empire.

The British campaign against the African slave trade not only launched the modern concern for human rights as an international principle, but today offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character. It remains a historic chapter of which Britons of all origins can be proud.

In the United States, however, slavery not only survived the end of the African trade but embarked on an era of unprecedented expansion. Americans have had to look elsewhere for memories that ameliorate our racial discontents, which helps explain our recent focus on the 19th-century Underground Railroad as an example (widely commemorated and often exaggerated) of blacks and whites working together in a common cause.

Nonetheless, the abolition of the slave trade to the United States is well worth remembering. Only a small fraction (perhaps 5 percent) of the estimated 11 million Africans brought to the New World in the four centuries of the slave trade were destined for the area that became the United States. But in the Colonial era, Southern planters regularly purchased imported slaves, and merchants in New York and New England profited handsomely from the trade.

The American Revolution threw the slave trade and slavery itself into crisis. In the run-up to war, Congress banned the importation of slaves as part of a broader nonimportation policy. During the War of Independence, tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British lines. Many accompanied the British out of the country when peace arrived.

Inspired by the ideals of the Revolution, most of the newly independent American states banned the slave trade. But importation resumed to South Carolina and Georgia, which had been occupied by the British during the war and lost the largest number of slaves.

The slave trade was a major source of disagreement at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. South Carolina’s delegates were determined to protect slavery, and they had a powerful impact on the final document. They originated the three-fifths clause (giving the South extra representation in Congress by counting part of its slave population) and threatened disunion if the slave trade were banned, as other states demanded.

The result was a compromise barring Congress from prohibiting the importation of slaves until 1808. Some Anti-Federalists, as opponents of ratification were called, cited the slave trade clause as a reason why the Constitution should be rejected, claiming it brought shame upon the new nation.

The outbreak of the slave revolution in Haiti in the early 1790s sent shock waves of fear throughout the American South and led to new state laws barring the importation of slaves. But in 1803, as cotton cultivation spread, South Carolina reopened the trade. The Legislature of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory also allowed the importation of slaves. From 1803 to 1808, between 75,000 and 100,000 Africans entered the United States.

By this time, the international slave trade was widely recognized as a crime against humanity. In 1807, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad, to take effect the next New Year’s Day, the first date allowed by the Constitution.

For years thereafter, free African-Americans celebrated Jan. 1 as an alternative to July 4, when, in their view, patriotic orators hypocritically proclaimed the slave-owning United States a land of liberty.

It is easy to understand, however, why the trade’s abolition appears so anticlimactic. Banning American participation in the slave trade did not end the shipment of Africans to the Western Hemisphere. Some three million more slaves were brought to Brazil and Spanish America before the trade finally ended. With Southerners dominating the federal government for most of the period before the Civil War, enforcement was lax and the smuggling of slaves into the United States continued.

Those who hoped that ending American participation in the slave trade would weaken or destroy slavery were acutely disappointed. In the United States, unlike the West Indies, the slave population grew by natural increase. This was not because American owners were especially humane, but because most of the South lies outside the tropical environment where diseases like yellow fever and malaria exacted a huge toll on whites and blacks alike.

As slavery expanded into the Deep South, a flourishing internal slave trade replaced importation from Africa. Between 1808 and 1860, the economies of older states like Virginia came increasingly to rely on the sale of slaves to the cotton fields of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. But demand far outstripped supply, and the price of slaves rose inexorably, placing ownership outside the reach of poorer Southerners.

Let us imagine that the African slave trade had continued in a legal and open manner well into the 19th century. It is plausible to assume that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans would have been brought into the country.

This most likely would have resulted in the “democratization” of slavery as prices fell and more and more whites could afford to purchase slaves, along with a further increase in Southern political power thanks to the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. These were the very reasons advanced by South Carolina’s political leaders when they tried, unsuccessfully, to reopen the African slave trade in the 1850s.

More slaves would also have meant heightened fear of revolt and ever more stringent controls on the slave population. It would have reinforced Southerners’ demands to annex to the United States areas suitable for plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Central America. Had the importation of slaves continued unchecked, the United States could well have become the hemispheric slave-based empire of which many Southerners dreamed.

Jan. 1, 1808, is worth commemorating not only for what it directly accomplished, but for helping to save the United States from a history even more terrible than the Civil War that eventually rid our country of slavery.

Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30foner.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2007

Infection Hits a California Prison Hard

December 30, 2007
NY Times
Infection Hits a California Prison Hard
By JESSE McKINLEY

COALINGA, Calif. — When any of the 5,300 inmates at Pleasant Valley State Prison begin coughing and running a fever, doctors do not think flu, bronchitis or even the common cold.

They think valley fever; and, more often than they would like, they are right.

In the past three years, more than 900 inmates at the prison have contracted the fever, a fungal infection that has been both widespread and lethal.

At least a dozen inmates here in Central California have died from the disease, which is on the rise in other Western states, including Arizona, where the health department declared an epidemic after more than 5,500 cases were reported in 2006, including 33 deaths.

Endemic to parts of the Southwest, valley fever has been reported in recent years in a widening belt from South Texas to Northern California. The disease has infected archaeologists digging at the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and dogs that have inhaled the spores while sniffing for illegal drugs along the Mexican border.

In most cases, the infection starts in the lungs and is usually handled by the body without permanent damage. But serious complications can arise, including meningitis; and, at Pleasant Valley, the scope of the outbreak has left some inmates permanently disabled, confined to wheelchairs and interned in expensive long-term hospital stays.

About 80 prison employees have also contracted the fever, Pleasant Valley officials say, including a corrections officer who died of the disease in 2005.

What makes the disease all the more troubling is that its cause is literally underfoot: the spores that cause the infection reside in the region’s soil. When that soil is disturbed, something that happens regularly where houses are being built, crops are being sown and a steady wind churns, those spores are inhaled. The spores can also be kicked up by Mother Nature including earthquakes and dust storms.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re custody staff, it doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber or an electrician,” said James A. Yates, the warden at Pleasant Valley. “You breathe the same air as you walk around out there.”

The epidemic at the prison has led to a clash of priorities for a correctional system that is dealing with below average medical care and chronic overcrowding.

Last fall, heeding advice from local health officials and a federal receiver charged with improving the state’s prison medical care, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation delayed plans to add 600 new beds out of concern that the construction might stir up more spores.

Officials at the prison blame the construction of a state hospital nearby for causing a spike in valley fever. The construction was under way from 2001 to 2005, and valley fever hit its peak here in 2006, when the disease was diagnosed in 514 inmates.

This year, about 300 cases have been diagnosed among inmates at the prison, which sits along a highway lined with almond groves and signs advertising new “semi-custom homes.” Felix Igbinosa, the prison’s medical director, said “the No. 1 reason” was thought to be the soil disturbance from new construction.

The delayed expansion here was part of a $7.9 billion plan signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last summer to relieve overcrowding in the state’s prisons. Pleasant Valley was built in 1994 to house 2,000 inmates.

California reported more than 3,000 cases of valley fever in 2006, the most in a decade. Explanations for the spike have included increased residential development and changes in weather patterns that have resulted in increased blooms of the fungus.

Other prisons in the Central Valley of California have had increases in the number of fever cases in recent years, but in none has the rate of infection been higher than at Pleasant Valley, where about one inmate in 10 tested positive in 2006.

Even allowing for the nearby construction, experts say they do not know why the disease is so rampant here.

“Is the soil surrounding Pleasant Valley different?” asked Dr. Demosthenes Pappagianis of the University of California, Davis.

“There’s a lot we still need to know about it,” said Dr. Pappagianis, a professor of medical microbiology and immunology who has been studying valley fever for more than 50 years.

Early symptoms of the disease, which is clinically known as coccidioidomycosis, mimic the flu, with symptoms that include a cough, lethargy and a fever. Most of those who become infected recover with little or no treatment and are subsequently immune.

In about 2 percent to 3 percent of the cases, the disease spreads from the lungs and can attack the bones, liver, spleen and skin.

For the 11,000 non-inmate residents of Coalinga, about 200 miles southeast of San Francisco, the disease has been a fact of life for generations. “We just deal,” said Trish Hill, the city’s mayor. “You don’t do stupid things like go out on windy days or dig in the dirt.”

Inmates appear to be especially susceptible to the disease, in part because they come from areas all over the state and have not developed an immunity to the disease. California corrections officials are preparing new guidelines for prison design, including ventilation and landscaping.

“Prisons tend to have a lot of bare dirt, and that has some security benefit,” said Deborah Hysen, the corrections department’s deputy secretary of facility planning. “But in the case of valley fever, you want to really contain the soil.”

At Pleasant Valley, officials say the outbreak of valley fever places a burden on the institution, requiring guards to escort inmates to local hospitals, where stays can last months and result in medical and security costs of $1 million and more, said Dr. Igbinosa, the medical director.

The disease also affects inmate morale, doctors say.

Gilbert Galaviz was convicted of murder and is serving a sentence of 25 years to life. Mr. Galaviz had been at Pleasant Valley for a week or so when he started to feel sick. “I couldn’t breathe,” he said. “My chest starting hurting, I had pain all over like somebody beat me up, and I would sweat bad at night.”

The cause was valley fever. After six months, Mr. Galaviz is still weak, having lost 30 pounds, and is barely able to complete a lap in the prison yard. Earlier this month, he was attacked and his jaw broken.

“It wouldn’t have been like that if it hadn’t been for valley fever,” Mr. Galaviz said, his jaw still wired shut. “They wouldn’t have got me. It would have been the other way around.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/us/30inmates.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Spitzer puts clemency in cooler

Albany Times Union
Spitzer puts clemency in cooler
Advocates for inmates expected governor to show more compassion
By PAUL GRONDAHL, Staff writer

First published: Saturday, December 29, 2007

ALBANY -- Going against gubernatorial tradition and the practice of his predecessors, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has not granted any executive clemencies this holiday season.

That's prompted criticism from prisoner advocates, who said he missed an opportunity to improve his plummeting approval ratings by showing mercy and letting worthy inmates out of prison early after they've served many years behind bars.

"He's behaving like Ebenezer Scrooge," said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York State. "We expected mercy and a big heart from him, with so many prisoners awaiting clemency. It's very disappointing."

A total of 333 of the 63,500 inmates in the state prison system met the requirements this year to apply for executive clemency, also known as a commutation of sentence. That power was granted to the governor in the state constitution of 1777.

Spitzer did grant a pardon last week, to Frederick Lake, a Jamaican immigrant who spent six years in prison for robbery. Lake has lived in Brooklyn with his wife and sons since 1997, and Spitzer's pardon spared Lake from deportation.

By comparison, the three previous governors, each of whom served multiple terms, used the clemency power freely: Pataki, 32 times; Cuomo, 37 times; and Carey, 155 times.

Spitzer does not have a formal policy on the practice, said Jennifer Givner, a spokeswoman. "We carefully review clemency and pardon requests on a case-by-case basis," she said.

Anthony Papa is disappointed by Spitzer's dearth of clemencies and pardons. He was granted clemency on Dec. 23, 1996, by Pataki, who was cast as a law-and-order Republican after winning election with a call to reinstate the death penalty.

Papa, who's now a prisoner advocate, said the conventional wisdom was that Spitzer, a Democrat, would be a kinder, gentler governor on matters of crime and punishment.

"It totally floored me that Spitzer didn't show some compassion and give clemencies," said Papa, who served 12 years of his 15-to-life sentence for a drug conviction.

"Spitzer could be countering his downward spiral in the polls by showing some mercy with clemencies. Instead, he's playing it safe politically," said Papa, author of a memoir, "15 to Life." He's a communications specialist for the Drug Policy Alliance, a national group headquartered in New York that is working to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

The director of Prison Families of New York, based in Albany was also disappointed.

"The governor knows there are many cases that were overly sentenced and this is his opportunity to make a political statement," said Alison Coleman.

Exercising the power of executive clemency carries a political risk, especially for those with presidential aspirations, as Cuomo and governors of other states discovered.

"The use of the pardoning power of a governor of a state is constantly subject to severe criticism from many sources," Edward G. Griffin, counsel to Gov. Al Smith, wrote in 1928.

When Smith ran for president that year, he was attacked for his record number of clemencies in 1924: 92 pardons and 79 commutations of sentences.

Gangi said Spitzer's approach is particularly vexing to prison advocates who applauded his campaign platform of repealing the Rockefeller Drug Laws and reforming Pataki's harsh stance on parole.

"We applaud the governor for appointing progressive people to key criminal justice positions in his administration," Gangi said. "But that has not yet translated into his taking progressive positions, and I hope this doesn't signal that he's taking a hard-line stance on criminal justice issues."

There are other avenues for inmates; Cheri O'Donoghue tried several ways on behalf of her son, Ashley, 24, who was denied clemency by Spitzer after serving four years of a 7-to-21-year sentence on a cocaine sale conviction while he was a student at Hamilton College.

"It's a shame because I expected a whole lot more out of Governor Spitzer based on his inaugural speech about Day One," said O'Donoghue, of Manhattan, who volunteers as a prisoner advocate.

Her son applied and was accepted for a work-release program. He'll be transferred in February to a Manhattan facility that allows furloughs and other privileges as a reward for good behavior.

"Luckily, we didn't pin all our hopes on Governor Spitzer because he's not the savior that prison families expected after all those years of Pataki," she said. Grondahl can be reached at 454-5623 or by e-mail at pgrondahl@timesunion.com.

New York Daily News
The Daily Politics
Spitzer = Scrooge? (Updated)
By Elizabeth Benjamin
December 28, 2007

Drug law reform activists are furious at Gov. Eliot Spitzer for declining to grant any clemencies during his first year in office, saying that flies in the face of a promise his made during the 2006 campaign to “continue to support efforts to reform these laws.”

“This is a cold-heart, hard-line approach to sentencing issues that we hope does not reflect whatever posture he ultimately takes on the drug laws,” said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, an organization chartered by the Legislature to monitor conditions in the state’s prisons and issue reports on prison-related issues.

Gangi compared Spitzer to Ebenezer Scrooge before he’s visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley.”

That position that is shared by the George Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance, which issued a press release yesterday that included quotes from Anthony Papa, a drug-offender-turned-activist who was granted clemency by former Gov. George Pataki in 1996.

“I know first-hand how meaningful a holiday clemency can be,” Papa said. “For the last ten years, I’ve been a productive member of society instead of being locked in a cage for a first-time, nonviolent offense, costing taxpayers nearly half a million dollars. The governor, with one stroke of his pen, can allow others to have the same opportunity that I had.”

Spitzer did grant a single pardon this year to Frederick Lake, a Brooklyn man who faced deportation back to his native Jamaica due to his criminal record. The governor stressed that he had acted in this case in the interest of preventing Lake from being forced to return home - not because he believed Lake’s claim of innocence, thereby injecting himself into an immigration debate (which didn’t work so well the last time).

Unlike a pardon, which erases a conviction from the records, a clemency merely reduces an offender’s sentence. The Parole Board must sign off on clemencies, but historically it has rarely opposed a governor’s wishes.

According to Spitzer spokeman Errol Cockfield, who confirmed the governor does not intend to grant any clemencies this year, the Spitzer administration received some 333 clemency requests as of Nov. 1, 2007.

NOTE: That number is updated with information from the state Division of Parole, which is the entry point for these applications.

“We review each clemency application carefully and come to a decision on a case by case basis,” Cockfield said, noting that applicants must meet basic criteria such as having served a minimum of one year in prison and not already being eligible for parole.

Drug law advocates were particularly concerned about Spitzer’s failure to issue any clemencies because it comes on the heels of a preliminary report from his Commission on Sentencing Reform that included no drug law reform recommendations.

The governor could have “sent a message” by granting clememcy to one or more offenders serving time under the drug laws, Gangi said, but his decision not to, coupled with his virtual silence on the topic in general and the commission’s decision to bypass it, does not bode well for this issue in the future.

UPDATE2: The administration also helpfully provided some stats on clemencies past, which appear after the jump.

1990 1 1991 2 1992 2 1993 2 1994 4 1995 2 1996 7 1997 4 1998 0 1999 5 2000 5 2001 3 2002 4 2003 1 2004 0 2005 1 2006 0

The above are all commutation of sentence

2003 1 posthumous pardon (use of foul language in a public forum, given to comedian Lenny Bruce by former Gov. George Pataki).

The New York Times
A Lone Pardon This Year
By Anthony Papa
December 29, 2007

To the Editor:

Re “Spitzer Pardons Ex-Convict to Spare Him Deportation” (news article, Dec. 22):

Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s attempt to show compassion this holiday season fell way off the mark. Mr. Spitzer’s single pardon to an individual set free 10 years ago, coupled with the fact that he did not grant one clemency, was nothing more than a safe political move.

There are many nonviolent Rockefeller drug law offenders who have already served lengthy sentences but are stuck in prison because of a continuing political quagmire. Traditionally, these offenders have been granted clemency at Christmastime.

Former Gov. George Pataki, who was known for his toughness on crime, granted clemencies to 28 of them, including me. To give none of those offenders who applied for clemency a chance to be united with their families is a crying shame.

Anthony Papa
New York, Dec. 24, 2007
The writer is a communications specialist at the Drug Policy Alliance.

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

Not Progress! SC: Prisons hiring more women. Women hold 42% of SCDOC security jobs

Sat, Dec. 29, 2007
Prisons hiring more women
Female employees hold 42 percent of S.C. Department of Corrections’ security jobs
By ISHMAEL TATE

BREAKING STEREOTYPES

Since 2002, more and more women have been standing watch in South Carolina prisons.

In 2006, the S.C. Department of Corrections hired 501 women — 108 more than were hired in 2005. Except for 2004 when retention peaked, more women have been hired every year since 2002.

As of Dec. 1, 1,639 state prison jobs — or 42 percent of the Department of Corrections’ 3,894 security positions — were held by women, according to agency payroll records.

Female officers already outnumber their male counterparts at Stevenson Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison for men on Broad River Road in Columbia.

Elaine C. Robinson said people assume that’s because she is the warden — but she has another theory.

“The people who are applying and the people who are qualified are women,” she said.

Eight of 12 applicants for a recently advertised sergeant’s position were women, Robinson said, and she had to tell recruiters not to send any more female candidates because she needs a certain number of male officers.

Prison rules require that strip searches and shakedowns of prisoners’ cells are conducted by officers of the same gender as the prisoners involved.

CAREER TRACK

Female applicants are attracted to the benefits, pay incentives, shifts that allow them to spend time with their families and schedules that are planned out a year in advance, said Connie Riley, branch chief for recruiting and employment for the Corrections Department.

“Then, once they get their foot in the door, there is so much room for promotional growth,” she said.

Many of the prison system’s female wardens started as correctional officers, Riley said.

The women don’t fall into any one demographic — recent high school graduates, college educated, retired, single with children or married. They hear about jobs from ads, family or friends who already work in the system.

Interest in prison jobs depends on the area, Riley said. There are more female applicants in rural areas, where there are fewer job options — and fewer men.

Capt. Sharon Stukes began her career with Corrections in 1990. Her aunt worked at Goodman Correctional Institution, — now a minimum-security women’s prison but originally a prison for older inmates — that is part of the Broad River Road cluster, in the late 1980s.

“But I didn’t know it was going to be a career until two years later,” she said.

Stukes, who works at Stevenson, modeled herself after a no-nonsense Corrections captain she worked for early in her career.

“She sat me down and told me what I needed to do and what she saw in me,” she said.

SAME RULES

The rules for dealing with inmates are the same for male and female correctional officers.

Be firm. Be consistent. Be fair.

At the same time, there are some benefits to being a female officer in the prison system.

“The inmates seem to have more respect for female officers than they do for men,” said Sgt. LaTanya Taylor, who works at Stevenson.

“I have inmates who would be fussing and fighting with a male officer, but when they show out in front of me, they come and apologize.”

There are drawbacks to being a female Corrections officer.

Sometimes female officers want to nurture inmates, who in turn take their kindness for weakness, Robinson said. Other times, professional relationships cross the line.

“Sometimes young women, if they don’t know who they are when they come to us, they can get caught up” in inappropriate situations with inmates, Robinson said.

But young female officers also face some of the same challenges as their male counterparts.

Taylor majored in psychology in college, so when she started her career in 1995 at Women’s Correctional Institution — now Camille Griffin Graham Correctional Institution — a women’s maximum-security prison, she had some ideas about how things would work.

“I figured I would come here, I could straighten them out, and they wouldn’t come back.”

That didn’t turn out to be the case. Everyone in prison has a story, and Taylor learned not to get caught up in them.

Instead, she took stories home to her children about the young men and women whose poor choices in friends and activities earned them time in prison.

“I tell them everyone who smiles in your face is not your friend,” Taylor said.
http://www.thestate.com/local/v-print/story/269415.html

Posted by lois at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2007

Eureka!: Did an early 'green' law change way people act?

Eureka!: Did an early 'green' law change way people act?
BY KRISTIN PALPINI STAFF WRITER

12/28/2007, Daily Hamsphire Gazette
Northampton, MA

Drape a red cape around the Clean Air Act and stamp a big 'S' on its chest - the environmental policy of the 1970s may have done more to reduce violent crime than any other single crime fighter, according to new research by an Amherst College economics professor.

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes has found a link between the Clean Air Act policy which, among other things, banned the addition of lead to America's gasoline, and a drastic drop in violent crime.

"The big implication of this is the idea that environmental policy can serve as social policy," Reyes said. "We need to think about the large scale effect of environmental policies."

Reyes' journey to "out" lead as a criminal instigator began in the late 1990s, a time when criminologists and social scientists were pondering a surprising drop in violent crime.

According to FBI crime statistics, violent crime fell by 35 percent between 1993 and 2003, Reyes said. This drop followed a sharp increase in brutal behavior.

"With the increase in crime, everyone was predicting social collapse under the increasing burden of increasing crime," Reyes said. "When it (crime) started going down, it was just inconceivable. People had no idea what to make of it."

For answers, Reyes decided to look at lead, a potent neurotoxin that accumulates in soft tissues and bone over time, that had been banned from gasoline in the 1970s. It was curious to Reyes that this ban coincided with the reduction in crime just as children of the late 70s and early 80s were reaching adulthood.

In 1970, the average child had 18 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood.

Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is concerned about any child with 10 or more micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. In the 1990s the average child had about 3 micrograms, Reyes said.

Lead poisoning can affect nearly every system in the body without providing obvious symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead poisoning or long-term exposure can cause learning disabilities, behavioral problems and, at very high levels, seizures, coma and even death.

Before the Clean Air Act of the early 1970s, gasoline used in cars carried lead. Car fumes were the leading source of lead in the air, Reyes said.

"You had an entire population exposed, breathing it in," Reyes said.

The lead effect was particularly chilling on children, who are more susceptible to the harm of lead exposure because they are still developing neurologically.

Reyes compared the rise and fall of lead-exposure with violent crime rates, but with a 20-year lag. The delay was used to account for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early 1990s.

Reyes made her state-by-state comparisons using a model that considered 12 factors including local economy, poverty rates, higher education and number of prisons.

"When you reduce lead exposure by 10 percent in childhood then 20 years later those adults can expect their violent crime rate to be 7 to 8 percent lower," Reyes said.

"That scales up to a pretty big effect because it's such a big reduction in lead exposure."

In addition to reducing crime, Reyes also asserts that the decrease in lead exposure may have had an affect on the overall intelligence of the nation. On average, children who took IQ tests in the 1990s scored seven to 10 points better than children tested in the 1970s.

"The Clean Air Act is just an amazing public health policy success," Reyes said.

Reyes acknowledges there are some nay-sayers to her theory, but she contends time and more research will bolster her find.

"People will ask, "How can this be? We're not all committing violent crimes?'" Reyes said.

"But maybe the effects are not always as obvious as that. Maybe I'm a little more compulsive than I would have been if I had not been exposed to lead."

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=74097&CSAuthResp=1198895832756491%3AQwx7Jzbb22urGQ%3D%3D%3ACSUserId%7CCSGroupId%3Asuccess%3A7Br0Lc3ftyMnoplnmbVqqA%3D%3D&CSUserId=8254&CSGroupId=5

Posted by lois at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2007

Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors

Hopefully not only Disney comic books!

December 26, 2007, NY Times
Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Some parents and teachers regard comics, with their sentences jammed into bubbles and their low word-to-picture ratio, as part of the problem when it comes to low reading scores and the much-lamented decline in reading for pleasure. But a growing cadre of educators is looking to comics as part of the solution.
In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.

“It’s very much a teacher-led kind of movement in that teachers are looking for ways to engage their children, and they’re finding some of that in comic books,” said Michael Bitz, who founded the Comic Book Project as a graduate student and is now its director. “For kids who may be struggling and for kids who may be new to the English language, that visual sequence is a very powerful tool.”
The recent interest in comics as a literacy tool comes as graphic novels have cemented their status as sophisticated works of literature, and as teachers nationwide are struggling to boost reading scores. Proponents of comics in the classroom say that they can lure struggling readers who may be intimidated by pages crammed with text. They also say that comics, with their visual cues and panel-by-panel sequencing, are uniquely situated to reinforce key elements of literacy, like story structure and tone.
Still, skeptics fret that in the wrong hands, comics could become simply a vehicle for watering down lessons.

“If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool,” said Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University. “What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step.”
Lisa Von Drasek, the children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education, said that “not a semester goes by that not a parent or a teacher expresses a concern about a comic-format book that their child has taken out or is using for their reading time.” Usually, she said, the critics come around. “What we say is, ‘Whatever works.’”
Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland’s schools superintendent, said that years ago, she noticed teachers’ discomfort when their children were spotted with comics.

“They tried to justify it by saying to me, ‘Well, this student or this group of students, they hate reading, and we’re just trying everything,’” she said. “We’re trying to open the eyes of teachers and educators to this as a possibility, this as something that might really help children and is good education.”

In the 2005-6 school year, teachers at eight Maryland schools taught lessons based on old Disney cartoons as part of a Comics in the Classroom pilot program. Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, were commissioned to evaluate the program. They did not try to gauge how much students learned, but found that teachers and students had positive perceptions of the program.

“There were some teachers at first who thought: ‘Oh, my God, comics? What’s next?’” said Susan Sonnenschein, an associate professor of psychology at the university, who was one of the evaluators. “I think the teachers changed their impression.”
The state, working with Diamond Comic Distributors and Disney Publishing Worldwide, has since refined the curriculum and invited 200 teachers to take part on the condition that they provide additional feedback. It is also planning to introduce teachers to a new series of original comic books for early readers, to be released starting this spring by Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker, and her husband, Art Spiegelman, who revolutionized comics with his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus.”

Ms. Mouly said that she believed her books had “enormous” potential to turn children on to reading. She cited the experience of her own son, now 16, who learned to read through French comics like Astérix.“The one thing that retained my son’s interest night after night was the comics,” she said. “Whatever that light bulb is went on.”

At Public School 59 in the Bronx one recent afternoon, students clustered around tables, plotting out their own comic strips at one of the Comic Book Project’s after-school programs. At one table, Jamie Collazo’s and his friends’ faces lit up when asked about their favorite activity: video games like Ultimate Spider-Man, Super Smash Bros. and Wolverine’s Revenge.
“I’m a game freak,” exclaimed Jamie, 11, saying that this was “when you collect a lot of games and you can’t stop playing them.” Reading, he said, “is kind of boring to me.”

But there he was, brainstorming a tale of three powerful gods who land on Nerainis, a planet between Neptune and Uranus.
Gabriel Cid, 10, agreed that “reading is kind of boring,” but said comics were different. “Superheroes, comics, that’s when it gets interesting because you get to see all the cool stuff,” he said. “We get to do our own design, and we get to color whatever we want — create our own characters and stuff.” By the end of the hourlong session, there were comics about islands populated by Native Americans, and about aliens who communicated in Morse code. There were plenty of misspellings (“to be countind you,” one child wrote in lieu of “to be continued”), but there were also instances in which students asked one another how to spell words like “mysterious.”

Amid the sketching, coloring and debating over the best way to split four panels into eight, Dr. Bitz of the Comic Book Project saw glimmers of learning: children composing, revising and organizing their thoughts into linear narratives.
“Because it’s their story,” he said, “they want to make it right.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/education/26comics.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2007

CA: After 20 years in prison, Flozelle Woodmore encounters the joys and struggles of adjustment to life in the outside world.

FOLLOWING UP
HOME FOR CHRISTMAS
After 20 years in prison, Flozelle Woodmore encounters the joys and struggles of adjustment to life in the outside world.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Flozelle Woodmore wriggles a key into the lock on apartment 24 and peeks in, then opens the door wider.

She's had visitors.

They left a Christmas tree.

It wasn't any ordinary Christmas tree. It was a freshly cut, fully decorated and lighted, 8-foot tree that infused a pine scent and holiday aura into her sparse, one-bedroom apartment in the city of South Gate, about 15 minutes from her job in South Central Los Angeles.

Woodmore smiled.

"My first Christmas tree ... my very first," she exclaimed at one of the many niceties (like bath oils and artwork) and necessities (like canned food and an inflatable mattress) her two brothers have been delivering to the apartment.

Life is suddenly full of firsts for 39-year-old Flozelle Woodmore, who was released from prison in August after serving more than 20 years for the shooting death of her abusive boyfriend. First holiday season with relatives, including her 20-year-old daughter Johnisha (born in prison four days before Christmas 1987) and 2-year-old granddaughter, Janaya. First job. First apartment. First cell phone.

Most of all, it's her first chance to make good on a pledge she made to herself in 1992 soon after receiving word that her 33-year-old brother, Kenneth Jerome Hillis, a manager at Sears, had been killed in a drive-by shooting in a case of mistaken identity. Woodmore became determined to confront her demons, get out of prison and help young women avoid the pain she experienced from years of physical and emotional abuse.

Woodmore speaks softly and dispassionately about most aspects of her difficult past. But tears begin to well when she recalls the frustration of being locked up at the California Institute for Women in Corona while knowing that her mother had just lost her oldest son.

"It took my breath away to experience not being able to help my mother when she needed me the most," Woodmore said. "It was horrible."

It also was motivating. She began to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and helped start sessions for battered women. She earned her GED. She requested - and received - a transfer to the state women's prison in Chowchilla, which had superior vocational-training programs. She studied computer technology until the classes ended abruptly in 1996 for lack of funding.

Her mother died of a heart attack in 1998. To this day, Woodmore wonders about the stress her life put on her mother's.

"I do believe it played a role in my mother's death," Woodmore said. "It broke her heart."

Flozelle Woodmore first appeared before the state Parole Board in 2002. Board members were impressed with the depth of her remorse, the evidence of her rehabilitation and the detail of her plans for the future. They told her something they rarely say to an inmate they see for the first time: "Ms. Woodmore ... we find you suitable for parole."

"I collapsed," she recalled. "My knees were numb. Tears were streaming down my face."

But there was a caveat, and she knew it. A parole board's decision can be overturned by a governor. Gray Davis came into office in 1999 vowing never to let a convicted murderer out of prison on parole, regardless of extenuating circumstances. He did not make an exception for Flozelle Woodmore. He reversed the parole board's recommendation in 2002, and again in 2003.

The parole board continued to find Woodmore suitable for release in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, while acknowledging her favorable evaluations, overturned the board all three times.

Through the years, Flozelle Woodmore's case became something of a cause celebre among women's-rights groups across the nation, especially since she went into prison before a 1992 state law allowed the defense to enter evidence of "battered women's syndrome" as a mitigating factor during trial. Among the advocates for her release was the now-retired judge who sentenced her, Robert W. Armstrong. He assumed at the time that she would serve "much less" than 15 years. "Even though she pleaded to second degree, she served as much time as if she was convicted of first-degree murder," he said in an interview last spring.

Imprisoned and without Internet access, Woodmore had no idea that her name was becoming synonymous with a cause. She was stunned, after her release, when she Googled her name and learned that "so many people cared" about her fate. She did know that Ruth Dewson, owner of a stylish San Francisco hat shop, was working tirelessly to persuade politicians, clergy and others to address this injustice.

"It just shot everything to the moon as far as support coming in when Ruth got on the case," Woodmore said.

Not long after Woodmore met with the parole board for the sixth time, on March 13, 2007, Dewson appealed to this newspaper's editorial board to look into Woodmore's case. Our first editorial, "A prisoner of politics," was published on April 8.

Schwarzenegger did not announce his decision until Aug. 2, one week before the deadline for him to review the case. He let the parole board ruling stand. Flozelle Woodmore would be freed.

Woodmore was calm when she got the word. Her first call was to Dewson, who had provided counsel and encouragement in letters and phone calls.

"We both started screaming over the phone," Woodmore recalled. "For a long time, I was wondering: Is this real? Is this really happening? All I could do was drink coffee and stay awake all night."

Two days later, she was on the road to Southern California. Whether it was anxiety or the strange experience of riding in a moving vehicle, Woodmore got sick three times on the way to her new home, a transitional facility with seven other ex-inmates in Claremont.

Woodmore had a job lined up even before her release. Susan Burton had met Woodmore when they were both serving time in Corona. Released in 1996, Burton established the New Way of Life Re-entry Project in Los Angeles, which operates four sober living homes serving about 50 women a year who are making the transition from prison.

Burton, New Way's executive director, was certain that Woodmore would be a focused and dedicated worker if ever given the chance. Woodmore has not disappointed. Her main duties as an administrative assistant involve clerical duties: Answering letters and phone calls, and helping with the billing and filing. Equally valuable are Woodmore's informal counseling sessions with clients, Burton said.

An unexpected bonus was the level of technical skills Woodmore retained from her computer training at Chowchilla more than a decade ago.

"When the computers break down here, I usually have to call the IT guy - and Flozelle will get on the phone with him and troubleshoot it," said Burton. "That means it gets fixed in an hour instead of a day and a half or two days."

Claremont is about 35 miles from the New Way office on East 108th Street in Los Angeles. It's quite a trek in a region where public transportation is an afterthought. Woodmore rises about 4 a.m. each day to make sure she's on the 6:08 train to Los Angeles. She then catches the 7:30 a.m. bus from Union Station and usually arrives at her office by 8:30.

Woodmore's conditions of parole include a 10 p.m. curfew, but the rules of the Crossroads transitional facility are even stricter. She must return by 6 p.m.

Sometimes she gets a shortcut in the form of a ride to Union Station from her two aunts, her guardian angels, Shirley Curlin and Juanemia McClinton. They are determined to see that Flozelle Woodmore is not one of the many California inmates who are sent back to prison on a technical parole violation. For the aunts, it is a labor of love.

"Everybody is so happy she made it through all the disappointments ... after all the running around and all the letters sent to governors ... and knowing they didn't even look at them," Curlin said. "There were times we felt like giving up, but we knew we had to keep going."

Curlin was standing in the apartment that Woodmore's two brothers, one younger and one older, were in the process of preparing for her arrival in early February, when she is eligible to leave the transitional facility in Claremont. Her brother Alvenus Hillis, an artist, has made a wall hanging of mirrors and tiny lights that gives the illusion of a tunnel - tantalizing, ominous, different from each angle - to symbolize the end of a long journey.

Woodmore does not complain about her commute on the Metrolink train, either the length or the $200-a-month cost. Other passengers doze. Woodmore absorbs every detail: The cars in the streets, the cityscapes and hills, the rhythm of the train. Twenty years of suppressed sensory stimulation have a way of bringing the most out of life's most mundane routines.

Woodmore was asked what she missed most about the outside world while in prison. She said she yearned for everyday family dynamics, even the annoyances: Her mother badgering her in the morning, warning that she would be late for school; the constant commotion of her brothers running in and out of the house.

"How bad I wanted that to get on my nerves," Woodmore said. "I missed that. I really missed that."

Perhaps the most outrageous moment in Woodmore's final parole hearing came with the suggestion of Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney David Dahle that it would be a mistake to let Woodmore anywhere near her family. He apparently never looked into the eyes of Aunt Shirley or Aunt Jaunemia to see their willingness to invest as many hours and dollars as they can humanly muster to keep Woodmore on the straight and narrow. The deputy DA who spoke so callously of "a pattern of behavior imprinted, I believe, from generation to generation" never anticipated how Woodmore's two brothers - and relatives from across the country - would respond to her release.

"It's just like a whole nation has come together to help her," Curlin said. "We want to make sure none of these efforts are in vain."

Johanna Hoffmann, the Oakland-based attorney who successfully represented Woodmore before the parole board, said the family reunification has been "touching and inspiring" to observe - especially Woodmore's building of a relationship with her daughter and granddaughter after years of separation.

Woodmore's ultimate goal is to enroll in community college to become certified to counsel battered women. She particularly wants to help teens, to show them there is a way out of abusive relationships.

The women at the Crossroads transitional facility, in concert with students from Pomona College, recently made a play about Woodmore's story. It was titled "If Yes, Please Explain," in reference to the box about criminal history on employment applications.

They wanted Woodmore to play herself. She could not. It was, she said, "too difficult to relive what I want through."

As smoothly as the transition is going, Woodmore has at least one major piece of unfinished business. Her son Clifton Morrow Jr., also the son of the man she killed on Aug. 16, 1986, is incarcerated at Pelican Bay State Prison. Clifton was two years old on the night when his mother shot his father to death with a .357 magnum after she was choked and punched in the front yard. Young Clifton is now serving time for murder in a "supermax" prison with some of the state's hardest convicts. Woodmore hopes to pass some of her resolve onto her son. But for now, her parole travel restrictions preclude a trip to the prison near Crescent City.

"He needs to see me," she said, "and I need to see him."

Christmas is a time of great anticipation and equal anxiety. It's a chance to fulfill the dreams of a loved one - and all the pressure that comes with it. The commercial influences of society further up the ante. Flozelle Woodmore shakes her head in awe at the lengths to which her relatives are going to make this the perfect Christmas for her. They're constantly asking her what she wants.

"You don't have to get me a gift," she tells them. "I already have my Christmas gift."
Overcoming the odds

Until her release on Aug. 4, 2007 from the Central California Women's Facility, Flozelle Woodmore was one of the more than 27,000 state inmates who are serving life sentences with the possibility of parole. But for most inmates, the hope of release is illusory, even if they demonstrate deep remorse, compelling evidence of rehabilitation and solid vocational skills. One of the reasons so few inmates are freed is that the California Board of Parole Hearings is famously - and properly - judicious in deciding which inmates are fit for release. In most years, less than 5 percent of the "lifers" who appear before the board are recommended for release. Woodmore's case is remarkable in that the board recommended her release six straight times. But in the first five, she, like many inmates found suitable for release, ran into a roadblock at the governor's office.

-- In November 1988, California voters approved Proposition 89, which gave the governor the power to overturn a parole board decision. The measure, which won with 55 percent of the vote, was propelled by outrage over the 1983 release of murderer-rapist Archie Fain.

-- Gov. Pete Wilson, proudly law-and-order, allowed the release of only 68 "lifers" who were found suitable for release by the parole board.

-- Gov. Gray Davis came into office in 1999 vowing to essentially slam the door on parole requests for anyone convicted of murder - and he did. He allowed the release of just six of the hundreds of parole-board recommendations for release that reached his office.

-- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proved more willing than his predecessors to consider the evidence and conclusions presented by the parole board. He has allowed the release of 170 inmates - including Woodmore - from the 771 parole-board recommendations for release during his tenure.

See a video of Woodmore's new life at sfgate.com.

Our past editorials on this case include "A prisoner of politics," April 8 (sfgate.com/ZBWU), "Free Flozelle," July 15 (sfgate.com/ZBWT) and "Flozelle - free at last," Aug. 3 (sfgate.com/ZBWS).

Send comments to Editorial Page Editor John Diaz. E-mail: jdiaz@sfchronicle.com

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/24/ED43U1KBH.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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

December 24, 2007

UK: Private-sector role in super-prisons

"However Lord Carter, the Labour peer and prisons expert, is thought to have been persuaded by private- sector studies suggesting that the use of PFI to build three "super prisons" provides an advantage over the alternative of a network of smaller prisons, of economies of scale as well as a reduction in carbon footprints because of fewer transfers between jails."

Private-sector role in super-prisons
By Jimmy Burns
December 24 2007
Financial Times

Contracts for the UK's first "super-prison" are set to be awarded next year, in a move expected to underline Gordon Brown's commitment to the private finance initiative.

Fears for the future of PFI have been expressed by the Confederation of British Industry in recent months because of project cancellations or postponements that have occurred, including a significant shrinking in the market for PFI hospitals.

But with ministers promising an expanding role for the private sector in the new prisons programme, industry sources now say they are confident of significant PFI contracts being put out for tender in the sector during 2008.

While the contracts will include the provision of 600 new prison places at Belmarsh in south-east London and a further 600 at Maghull in Liverpool, the most significant building project will involve one of the so-called "Titan" prisons with a capacity for 2,500 inmates.

The first "super-prison" is expected to open by 2012, with two moredue to open two years later, as part of government plans to meet a forecast rise in the prison population from 81,000 at rpesent to 96,000 in 2014.

Jack Straw, justice secretary, this month said he had secured £1.2bn in extra funding to help boost the continuing prison building programme, which includes extensions of existing sites, conversions of abandoned army camps, and a new prison ship.

Prison reformers, the probation union Napo, and Ann Owers, chief inspector of prisons, have warned the government against diverting funding away from other necessary reforms in the criminal justice system such as improvements to community sentencing and mental health and drug rehabilitation support programmes.

However Lord Carter, the Labour peer and prisons expert, is thought to have been persuaded by private- sector studies suggesting that the use of PFI to build three "super prisons" provides an advantage over the alternative of a network of smaller prisons, of economies of scale as well as a reduction in carbon footprints because of fewer transfers between jails.

The pressure on the current prison system is underlined today by official figures showing that 85 of the 141 prisons in England and Wales are classified as overcrowded.

According to the figures compiled by the Prison Reform Trust charity, more than 150,000 children have a parent in prison.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/01045e3a-b1c3-11dc-9777-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Posted by lois at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2007

Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950: NY Times article and Hoover's Letter to Truman's Special Consultant and links to Intelligence Committee papers

Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950
By TIM WEINER, NY Times

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.

The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”

But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is expected to rule by next summer.

Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.

Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.

So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

The only modern precedent for Hoover’s plan was the Palmer Raids of 1920, named after the attorney general at the time. The raids, executed in large part by Hoover’s intelligence division, swept up thousands of people suspected of being communists and radicals.

Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.’s “security index” of suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946, Hoover sought the authority to detain Americans “who might be dangerous” if the United States went to war. In August 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the power to make a master list of such people.

Hoover’s July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney W. Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950, after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/washington/23habeas.htm

December 22, 2007
Hoover’s Letter to Truman’s Special Consultant

From the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Hoover) to the President's Special Consultant (Sidney Souers, former Director of Central Intelligence)

Washington, July 7, 1950

My Dear Admiral:

For some months representatives of the FBI and of the Department of Justice have been formulating a plan of action for an emergency situation wherein it would be necessary to apprehend and detain persons who are potentially dangerous to the internal security of the country. I thought you would be interested in a brief outline of the plan.

Action to Be Taken By the Department of Justice

The plan envisions four types of emergency situations: (1) attack upon the United States; (2) threatened invasion; (3) attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory; and (4) rebellion.

The plan contains a prepared document which should be referred to the President immediately upon the existence of one of the emergency situations for the President's signature. Briefly, this proclamation recites the existence of the emergency situation and that in order to immediately protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage the Attorney General is instructed to apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous to the internal security.

In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus for apprehensions made pursuant to it. The plan also contains a prepared joint resolution to be passed by Congress and an Executive Order for the President which too will validate the previous Presidential proclamation.

The next step in the plan is a prepared order from the Attorney General to the Director of the FBI to apprehend dangerous individuals, conduct necessary searches and seize contraband as defined in the plan. Together with the order to the Director of the FBI the Attorney General will forward a master warrant attached to a list of names of individuals which names have previously been furnished from time to time to the Attorney General by the FBI as being individuals who are potentially dangerous to the internal security.

It should be pointed out that the plan does not distinguish between aliens and citizens and both are included in its purview. If for some reason the full plan is not put into operation it has so been drawn that the section applicable only to alien enemies may be put into effect.

Action to Be Taken By the FBI

For a long period of time the FBI has been accumulating the names, identities and activities of individuals found to be potentially dangerous to the internal security through investigation. These names have been compiled in an index which index has been kept up to date. The names in this index are the ones that have been furnished to the Department of Justice and will be attached to the master warrant referred to above. This master warrant will, therefore, serve as legal authority for the FBI to cause the apprehension and detention of the individuals maintained in this index.

The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States. Immediately upon receipt of instructions and the master warrant from the Attorney General the various FBI Field Divisions will be instructed by expeditious means to cause the apprehension of the individuals within their various territories. Each FBI Field Division maintains an index of the individuals within its territory, which index is so arranged that it may be used for ready apprehension purposes. Upon apprehension the individuals will be delivered to the nearest jail for temporary detention and action by the Attorney General.

Detention and Subsequent Procedures

The permanent detention of these individuals will take place in regularly established Federal detention facilities. These facilities have been confidentially surveyed and the facilities have been found to be adequate in all areas except in the territory covered by the FBI's New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco Offices. In these three areas arrangements have been perfected with the National Military Establishment for the temporary and permanent detention in Military facilities of the individuals apprehended.

The plan calls for a statement of charges to be served on each detainee and a hearing be afforded the individual within a specified period. The Hearing Board will consist of three members to be appointed by the Attorney General composed of one Judge of the United States or State Court and two citizens. The hearing procedure will give the detainee an opportunity to know why he is being detained and permit him to introduce material in the nature of evidence in his own behalf. The hearing procedure will not be bound by the rules of evidence.

The Hearing Board may make one of three recommendations, that is; that the individual be detained, paroled or released. This action by the Board is subject to review by the Attorney General and the Attorney General's decision on the matter will be final except for appeal to the President.

The details of this plan as set forth in this communication have also been furnished on this date to Mr. James S. Lay, Jr., Executive Secretary, National Security Council.

With expressions of my highest esteem and best regards,
Sincerely yours,
J. Edgar Hoover

http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/96783.pdf documents of the Intelligence Committee

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

NY: Solitary confinement bill could get new life in 2008

Star Gazette
Elmira, NY
Solitary confinement bill could get new life in 2008
December 22, 2007

By Cara Matthews

ALBANY -- Lawmakers and the governor reached an agreement this year to prohibit solitary confinement for severely mentally ill state-prison inmates in most cases.

But the year will end almost certainly without its passage because the Assembly hasn't returned to vote on it.

Mental-health advocates said Friday they were still hoping the Assembly might come back this year.

They have been calling Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's office to ask for a vote. Otherwise, they would like it passed early next year.

"We're going to be ever vigilant because in Albany, it's not over 'til it's over," said Harvey Rosenthal, executive director of the New York Association for Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services.

The Assembly, Senate and Gov. Eliot Spitzer developed compromise legislation this summer because the first bill that passed faced an almost certain veto.

This year's Senate approval of the bill will still stand in 2008. The Assembly has not ruled out reconvening this year, but it appears unlikely.

The Mental Health Association of New York State had hoped to see passage this year, but, "Every indication we have is that they remain fully supportive, and when they come back early next year, hopefully we'll see a ... bill," said Glenn Liebman, head of the group.

The Assembly fully expects the bill to be passed and enacted, said Sisa Moyo, a spokeswoman for Silver, D-Manhattan. The governor is expected to sign the legislation.

If approved, the measure would require the state Department of Correctional Services to set up residential treatment units for inmates with serious psychiatric illnesses.

The inmates would be offered at least four hours of therapeutic programming and/or treatment out of their cell a day, five days a week. The original legislation would have banned solitary confinement -- also called the box.

Opponents of the box said isolation in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell and lack of treatment worsen psychiatric conditions and punish inmates for behaviors connected with their illnesses.

Serious mental illness affects about 12 percent of the prison population in the state, or some 8,000 inmates, according to the bill's sponsors.

Besides treating mentally ill inmates more humanely, the legislation would make prisons safer, sponsors have said.

Correction officers would get training on working with prisoners who have psychiatric disabilities.

The state Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities would monitor the program.

The governor was considering a veto of the first bill because it would be costly, the prisons would lose some discipline control measures and he believed an April settlement of a lawsuit filed on behalf of mentally ill inmates rendered legislation unnecessary.

The settlement with the state called for giving severely mentally ill inmates in the box at least two hours a day of out-of-cell treatment, developing residential programs for about 400 prisoners in this population and other changes.

To comply with the settlement, this year's budget includes more than $50 million for construction and $2 million each to the state Office of Mental Health and the Department of Correctional Services for staffing.

If the pending legislation passes, the budget will include an extra $12 million in 2008-09, $19 million in 2009-10 and $29 million in 2010-11, Spitzer spokesman Matt Anderson said.

Other provisions of the bill:

€Severely mentally ill inmates would be diverted or taken out of solitary if the term of the isolation could be more than 30 days.

€Inmates in the box who have minor mental illnesses or who don't need much intervention would be assessed by a clinician within 14 days.

The state would have 14 days to decide if a prisoner found to have severe mental illness should be removed from solitary.

€Prison officials could keep inmates in isolation if removing them could risk safety and security.

€Inmates with mental illness who remained in solitary would receive out-of-cell therapeutic care at least two hours a day, five days a week.

There would be a lag time for much of the bill of two years from when the first residential mental-health unit built by the prison system was completed, but no later than July 1, 2011.

http://www.stargazettenews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071222/NEWS01/71
2220324

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

Boston: Doubles start at $319 at the Liberty Hotel in the old Charles Street Jail

December 23, 2007, NY Times, Travel Section
Check In, Check Out
Boston: Liberty Hotel
By BETH GREENFIELD

THE BASICS

The completion of the Charles Street Jail in 1851 was a milestone of design, bringing the architect Gridley James Fox Bryant’s stately, rough-hewn granite style to the edge of the Charles River. The jail closed in 1990 and has been transformed into a luxury hotel after a $150 million restoration. The result preserved much of the original stone and brickwork while adding touches like Gothic-style chandeliers that tower over a lobby lounge. Many cell bars remain as well, cleverly backlighted by ever-changing shades of lavender and chartreuse. And while most of the 298 rooms are stacked in a new tower, 18 are in the original jail, connected by catwalk-like terraces that guards once patrolled.

THE LOCATION

Situated at the northern edge of Beacon Hill, overlooking the Charles River. It’s an easy walk to the Boston Common and the Back Bay neighborhood, and a stone’s throw from a subway station (Charles Street/Massachusetts General Hospital on the Red Line).

THE ROOM

Though I booked a basic king in the jail, my room was not yet ready when I arrived at 3:40 p.m. (for a 3 p.m. check-in). After being told that housekeeping was running behind, I waited in the lobby until 4:30, when I was upgraded to a “Breathtaking Jail” — room No. 432, which was, to my delight, a larger, corner version of what I’d reserved. It was cozy yet airy, with exposed-brick walls and floor-to-ceiling windows that offered river and city views. The modern furnishings included an off-white divan, black lacquered desk and dresser and an earthy merino throw at the foot of the plush white bed. A 32-inch flat-panel TV sat above the mini-bar, and an elegant vase was filled with flowers. Instead of the typical “Do not disturb” card, the doorknob sign read: “Solitary.” Cute.

THE BATHROOM

Spacious and well-equipped, including a large bathtub, glass-doored shower with excellent water pressure, plenty of towels, Molton Brown products, two luffas and a couple of silky, terry-cloth lined robes. A granite floor matched the overall design.

RESTAURANTS

Scampo, the hotel’s upscale Italian restaurant, is scheduled to open in March. But Clink, a cool and casual place with a lot of exposed brick and original cell bars, offered a delicious array of small plates, including artisanal cheeses served with grilled cranberry-pecan bread ($10 to $15). The same menu is also served at the atmospheric lobby bar, a clutch of red velvet banquettes and leather ottomans popular with post-work crowds in business attire. Later, the cocktail action moves to the Alibi bar, housed in the former drunk tank that now features real, blown-up mug shots of celebrities like Mick Jagger (who was spotted at Clink in September) and Lindsay Lohan.

AMENITIES

The gym is small, and there’s no spa. But the hotel offers Wi-Fi ($10.99 a day), local car service in rush hour at no extra charge and, starting sometime in 2008, remote airport baggage check-in screened by the Transportation Security Administration.

ROOM SERVICE

Breakfast, ordered at 10 a.m., arrived within a half hour, as promised. My huge, tasty Cheddar and asparagus frittata ($20) came with delicious potatoes and copious toast triangles.

THE BOTTOM LINE

It’s a well-done theme hotel that plays its schtick to perfection, making you feel like one privileged inmate. Doubles start at $319.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/travel/23checkin.html?ref=travel for photo.

Posted by lois at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

Taste, nutrition--and a tough crowd. Prisons must toe fine dietary line

Taste, nutrition--and a tough crowd
Prisons must toe fine dietary line

By Gerry Smith

Chicago Tribune staff reporter

December 23, 2007

They dine on chicken patties because drumsticks could be sharpened into deadly weapons. They eat fruit in moderation because leftovers could be fermented into "hooch."

And if they misbehave, their meal is blended into an unpleasant loaf that serves as a nutritional punishment.

Such feasts are fit for a felon, devised by correctional facilities to solve a complex culinary problem -- meeting nutritional guidelines with limited budgets. It's a delicate balance, trying to satisfy both dietitians and food critics prone to violent outbursts.

In the world of convict cuisine, even the dessert menu can trigger unrest.

"You have to be concerned about the Jell-O being runny," said Barbara Wakeen, a dietitian who created a menu this fall for the DuPage County Jail. "If an inmate is having a bad day, bad Jell-O could be what sets him off."

Providing 2,900 calories per day at 92 cents per meal, Wakeen devised a menu that met nutritional guidelines for a $1 million food service contract at the facility.

But the fare, which ranged from meatloaf and meatballs to Spanish rice and sloppy joes, also highlighted the evolution of inmate nutrition. Once little more than bread and water, prisoner plates now include calcium-enriched beverages that meet dietary requirements on a shoestring budget.

"In corrections, when you're trying to feed people and can't afford to give them 3 cups of milk a day, this is a way to accomplish it," said Wakeen, who has written menus for about 100 correctional facilities across the country since 1988.

Since the American Correctional Association created nutritional guidelines in the 1970s, prisoner meals have adhered to strict dietary standards. Jails and prisons have their own dietitians counting calories and sodium levels, as do contractors like Aramark, which provides food to facilities across Illinois.

But in serving meals that are both nutritious and inexpensive, "the real question is, can you do all that and still make it halfway palatable?" said Charles Fasano, a director at the John Howard Association, a Chicago-based prisoner-advocacy group.

The question underscores a common understanding among corrections officials -- that good food creates good inmates.

From 1900 to 1995, food sparked more than 40 of the 1,334 prison riots in the United States, including the country's deadliest uprising in 1971, when 43 people died at New York's Attica prison, said Gordon A. Crews, co-author of "A History of Correctional Violence."

Most food-related outbreaks involved prisoners being restricted from the commissary, he said. Few riots were over nutrition.

"Inmates didn't care about a balanced meal," he said. "They just didn't want maggots in it."

Still, to meet fiscal bottom lines, the Illinois Department of Corrections in recent years has called for prisons to serve less tuna or white chicken and more noodles, rice and pasta.

On holidays, however, facilities often try to lift prisoners' spirits by preparing special meals. On Christmas, inmates at the DuPage County jail will dine on roast beef with brown gravy, mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, chocolate milk and ice cream.

At the Lake County Jail, Christmas dinner portions will be larger than normal, "because inmates tend to get depressed on the holidays," said Deputy Chief Patrick Firman.

For inmates of other religions, officials make special accommodations. Most prisons serve frozen kosher meals to Jewish inmates and pork-free meals to Muslim inmates.

"In the past we had such a large population of Islamic inmates on no-pork diets that it just became easier to not serve pork at all," Firman said.

But other meats require other considerations. Most prisons serve chicken patties instead of boned chicken, which can be sharpened into a "shiv."

"It'd be a nightmare trying to get all those bones back from inmates," said Scott Wulff, chief of the DuPage County Corrections Bureau.

Such are the security concerns that complicate inmate nutrition. At a Michigan prison, spinach is off the menu because inmates might dry the vegetable and smoke it, Wakeen said.

At the Lake County jail, pepper is absent because prisoners could throw it in a guard's face. And the meat at the facility must be tender enough to cut with a spoon -- the only utensil inmates are allowed to use.

There are no leftovers. What inmates don't eat gets thrown away to avoid making food legal tender for card games, Firman said.

Meanwhile, officials keep a wary eye on fruit, which inmates often try to ferment into "hooch." But jails and prisons also are required to provide a set amount of fruit each day.

The problem is solved partly in the form of a nutrient-enriched beverage. At the DuPage County Jail, prisoners drink orange juice fortified with vitamin C as a substitute for one fruit serving, Wulff said.

Most inmate complaints are more likely to stem from lack of flavor, officials say, such as the monotony of sandwiches made with turkey baloney, turkey salami and turkey ham. In 1991, more than 2,000 inmates at the Cook County Jail refused to eat lunch in protest of what they contended was a lack of variety in their midday meal.

Now, according to standards for Illinois county jails, "the menu shall be diversified so as to avoid the monotony of a standardized diet."

And on occasion, food-service contractors score points with inmates by serving special treats. For years, inmates at the Cook County Jail were served Eli's pumpkin cheesecake, courtesy of Aramark.

But some facilities also use food as a form of punishment. For inmates who throw food or trays, the Lake County Jail serves what is called a "nutra loaf," in which a meal is blended and baked to create a bland log that meets dietary requirements.

Most jails don't allow visitors to bring food to inmates, but they do offer an alternative to the nutritional menus. The commissary -- which sells sodas, chips and sometimes Little Debbie oatmeal pies -- remains the only recourse for prisoners accustomed to junk food, Crews said.

"You've already got men and women on edge because they're locked up," Crews said. "They still have to have an outlet."

www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-jaildiet_bddec23,1,5625918.story
chicagotribune.com

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

OH: State prisons out of room

State prisons out of room
BY SHARON COOLIDGE |
Cincinnati Enquirer, December 22, 20907
LEBANON – Southwest Ohio’s two state prisons are crammed with inmates – each at nearly twice the number they were designed to hold.

And with the state prison population increasing – it passed 50,000 this year for the first time – prison officials, corrections officers and even the governor wonder how many more people the prison system can handle.

About 5,000 inmates are from Hamilton County, the second-most of any county. All but six of the state’s 32 prisons – including the two prisons in Warren County – are overcrowded .It is a great concern of mine for reasons involving safety and cost,” Gov. Ted Strickland said this month.Strickland should know. He is a native of Lucasville, and once worked as a psychologist at its Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, the site of the one of the longest and bloodiest prison riots in U.S. history.

Nine inmates and one corrections officer died in the 11-day riot in April 1993.
No one predicts another prison riot. But with Ohio’s prison population predicted to hit 70,000 in less than a decade, state officials say they need to figure out how to handle those numbers in a system built for 37,610.

The overcrowding is not just a problem for the convicts – killers and other violent criminals whose comfort is probably low on Ohioans’ priorities.

It matters because:

-- Corrections officers watch more inmates. In 2001, the state’s inmate-to-corrections officer ratio was 5.6 inmates to one officer. Today, it’s 6.6 to one.

-- Rehabilitation programs such as sex offender counseling, anger management and GED classes are stretched and have waiting lists. As a result, some convicts are released – sent home to all 88 counties – with the same problems they arrived with, and are more likely to reoffend. A 2003 study showed 10 percent of those released in 2001 headed to Cincinnati.

-- More crowding leads to more diseases – such as staph infections – and more fights, which can lead to the ultimate nightmare: a full-blown riot. Fights – and use of force by corrections officers – are climbing. Altercations involving four or more inmates climbed 17 percent from 2004 to 2006, going from 223 to 262.

Use of force – verbal or physical – by corrections officers climbed 14 percent, going from 3,660 to 4,190, according to the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction’s annual reports.

“We keep control essentially because the inmates let us keep control,” said Peter Wray, a spokesman for the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, a 36,000-member union that includes corrections officers.

“We’re trying to be proactive instead of reactive,” said Tim Shafer, president of the Corrections Assembly, a unit of OCSEA, with 10,108 prison union members. “So we don’t have to react to a situation like 1993 (riots) at Lucasville.”

‘We’re at the max’

Lebanon is a quaint town known for its historic charm, the Golden Lamb Inn and an annual apple festival.But just outside the city are two prisons: Lebanon Correctional Institution and Warren Correctional Institution. Last week, Warren’s inmate count had soared to 1,403, or 176 percent of its designed capacity. Less than a mile away, Lebanon Correctional Institution housed 2,487, or 182 percent of its designed capacity.

The Enquirer visited Warren Correctional Institution this month. Driving As one drives down Ohio 63, just past Traders World, both state prisons rise out of the barren landscape, set far off the road and ringed with fences and razor wire.
Inside, two men are crammed into tiny 75-square-foot cells designed for one. Outfitted with a bunk bed, dresser, toilet and sink, there’s just enough room for an inmate to turn around.

“The prison population is growing so fast, our concern is making sure we can accommodate all the growth,” Warden Wanza Jackson said. “Right now we’re at the max, really.”

Whatever the solutions, they won’t be easy or inexpensive, Ohio prison officials say.
Among the options:

-- Lima Correctional Institution, which was closed by Gov. Bob Taft in 2004 as a cost-cutting measure, could reopen.
-- Sentencing laws could be revamped. Sixty percent of the state’s convicts are held for a year or less, most on low-level felonies, according to prison officials.
Fewer prisoners mean less tax money spent. It costs about $70 a day to house an inmate. At 50,000, that’s $3.5 million a day. If the population climbs, as expected, to 70,000, that daily cost climbs to $4.9 million.

The Ohio Justice and Policy Center, a Cincinnati-based nonprofit agency that works for reforms in the Ohio justice system, is closely watching what’s being done about overcrowding, Executive Director David Singleton said. Singleton hopes to see changes in sentencing policies to help reduce the overcrowding. “I think at some point we may have to consider some litigation,” he said. “Obviously it’s not our first choice.” Singleton’s agency successfully sued the state to get increased medical care for inmates.

One reason for the rising population: politicians who continue to pass laws calling for mandatory or longer sentences. Ohio Prisons Director Terry Collins said changes should be targeted at nonviolent offenders. “I’m a firm believer that the state prison system is for those violent, predatory, assaultive individuals who preyed on members of our state, that need to be in the system, and many of them probably need never get out,” Collins said. “But if we’re going to have space for those, we’ve got to get rid of the nonviolent offenders.” Those offenders can be better served in the convicts’ hometowns in local jails, treatment facilities or in other programs, Collins said.

But county lock-ups aren’t necessarily the answer, especially in Hamilton County, where the jail is at capacity. A Hamilton County tax increase that would have generated millions to pay for a new jail and public safety programs – including jail beds and programs for juvenile offenders – failed in the November election.

http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071222/NEWS01/71222019

Posted by lois at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

CT: State's Prisons Are Overcrowded, But Officials Say Conditions Not Inhumane

State's Prisons Are Overcrowded, But Officials Say Conditions Not Inhumane

By Julie Wernau ,
Published on 12/22/2007
The Day
As of last week, 383 Connecticut inmates were sleeping in prison gymnasiums and dayrooms because no more can be put into prison housing areas.

As the legislature marches toward a special session and a review of the criminal justice system, the Department of Correction released statistics outlining the extent of the prisoner squeeze.

Members of the union that operates within the state's 11 prisons see it differently.

“These numbers are accurate numbers, but they're not all the numbers,” said Luke Leone, president of Local 1565 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Union members this week estimated the overflow of inmates at 800, saying inmates are sleeping in kitchens, closets and hallways, as well as traditional housing areas that have been stretched beyond their capacity.

The DOC has repeatedly stated that while some prisons are “crowded,” the overflow is not more than the system can handle.

“Our facilities and our staff are very adept at handling the increases and the decreases in our population,” Department of Correction spokesman Brian Garnett said. “We've done it for years, and we do it very well.”

Garnett said there have been no increases in the number of incidents since a recent surge in the number of inmates living in the state's prisons.

“There are many areas of a correctional facility which may be used for housing and are acceptable for housing inmates,” Joan M. Ellis, administrator for the DOC's Freedom of Information Office, wrote in response to The Day's request for overflow statistics.

Connecticut is the only state in the union that does not report a “capacity” in its prisons, due to a state law passed in 1995 that declared the number fluid, and therefore meaningless, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Other state prison systems report one or more capacity statistics: rated, operational or design.

An institution's rated capacity is the number of beds or inmates a regulatory body believes an institution should accommodate. Operational capacity is the number of inmates that can be accommodated based on a facility's staff, existing programs and services. And design capacity is the number of inmates that planners or architects intended for the facility.

According to the DOC's numbers, 83 inmates at Enfield Correctional Institution have access to four toilets, two sinks and two showers from the gymnasium where they sleep. At Garner Correctional Institution — the state's prison for inmates with mental illness — 48 inmates have access to two toilets, two sinks and 12 showers from the gymnasium where they are housed.

While inmates may access toilets from within their cells in a typical housing area, inmates living in makeshift housing must ask for a pass to use the bathroom, Leone said.

In practice, Leone said, most of those inmates have even less bathroom access than the numbers show.

“When you're in the gym, you're in the gym,” he said. “These guys can't just move freely.”

Renee Redman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, has asked that the DOC immediately rectify an overcrowding situation she has called inhumane and unconstitutional. She said this week that she does not believe that 83 inmates sharing four toilets to be “reasonable” access.

“We don't know what 'access' means,” Redman said.

Garnett said the DOC stands by the numbers it has provided.

“Our facilities are safe, they're secure, they're orderly and they're humane,” he said.

The DOC's statistics, Redman said, “confirm the types of things that we're hearing about, and in many ways raise more questions than they answer.”

The DOC has agreed to investigate Redman's claims — which she said were derived from dozens of letters from inmates — if she agrees to hand over the names and letters of those inmates who have complained.

The department last voluntarily reported capacity numbers of any kind in 2000, according to William Sabol, chief of the Corrections Statistics Unit for the Bureau of Justice Statistics. At the time, Sabol said, the DOC reported a rated capacity of 17,600 inmates and a design capacity of 16,869. Without a current statistic, he said, it is impossible to determine whether or not the prison population continues to grow at a faster rate than the prison's capacity.

In January, a task force appointed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell, of which Commissioner Teresa Lantz is a member, is expected to release the results of a top-to-bottom review of the criminal justice system in light of the recent triple slaying in Cheshire, allegedly at the hands of two men on parole. After the slaying in July, Rell announced a temporary ban on parole for violent offenders. Since then, the population of the prison system surged by approximately 600 inmates — to 19,600.

http://www.theday.com/re_print.aspx?re=f7ad9448-c0a4-4fa2-883b-6a4ce4e74656

Posted by lois at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2007

TX: UT Law School Clinic Asks Supreme Court to Hear Case of Youth Sentenced 30 years w/o parole for Offence Commited When He was 12.

Law School Clinic Asks U.S. Supreme Court To Hear Major Juvenile Justice Case

December 18, 2007

AUSTIN, Texas — The Supreme Court Clinic at The University of Texas School of Law filed Monday (Dec. 17) a certiorari petition with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to review the sentence of a South Carolina prisoner, Chris Pittman, who is serving a 30-year term without parole for an offense he committed when he was 12 years old.

No other inmate in the country is serving so severe a sentence for an offense committed at such a young age.

The cert petition asks the Supreme Court to address for the first time whether its reasoning in the 2005 Roper v. Simmons decision, which prohibited the death penalty for minors, also protects 12-year-old children who receive lengthy mandatory sentences without possibility of parole.

The Clinic argues that Pittman's sentence of 30 years without the possibility of parole is constitutionally excessive because the Simmons case said that "children are different" when it comes to sentencing. The Clinic is asking the Supreme Court to consider whether it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to impose such a severe sentence on a 12-year-old child, especially when the sentencing judge had no opportunity to take Pittman's youth into account as a mitigating factor.

In 2005, Pittman was convicted of murdering his paternal grandparents, with whom he lived. He had no prior juvenile record, though he had a sad history that included being abandoned by his mother. Shortly before his offense, Pittman was prescribed and began taking an adult dose of anti-depressants, to which he had a bad reaction. Such medications are often tied to violent outbursts. Despite these factors, the juvenile judge transferred Pittman to adult criminal court where he faced the tough mandatory sentences intended for adults. He received the shortest sentence possible in South Carolina for murder-30 years without the possibility of parole.

Law School Professor Michael Sturley, who directs the Supreme Court Clinic, called the case "high impact," and said that this case is a "perfect vehicle for the Supreme Court to recognize evolving standards of decency with regard to young children and to show that the Simmons case is not limited to the death penalty context." He also noted that "we don't treat 12-year-olds as adults for any other purpose-they can't vote, they can't drive, they can't even rent a movie at Blockbuster."

"Twelve-year-olds are developmentally different from adults, and their brains are still growing. We need to recognize that they are therefore less culpable than adults for their behavior, and that they are more amenable to treatment and rehabilitation. Of course they should be held accountable for their offenses, but they shouldn't be treated like adults for purposes of sentencing."

In working on this cert petition, the Supreme Court Clinic teamed with faculty and students at The University of Texas at Austin's Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs because of the important policy implications of this case. The group researched both legal arguments and national and international juvenile justice sentencing practices.

They found that what happened to Pittman could not have happened in 41 states, or, for that matter, in most other countries in the world. More than half the states prohibit transferring 12-year-olds to adult criminal court, and most of the rest either allow for some consideration of the diminished culpability of young children or would not impose such a long mandatory minimum sentence. Of those states where such long sentences for 12-year-olds are theoretically possible, no other state has sentenced a child as harshly as South Carolina did in Pittman's case.

"These national practices are evidence that there is a societal consensus against extreme sentencing when it comes to young children who commit serious crimes," said Michele Deitch, an attorney and criminal justice policy expert who teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs as well as at the Law School and who worked with her policy students on the cert petition. "Sadly, there are quite a few young murderers. But the vast majority of them remain in juvenile court where judges have options for ensuring that they get the treatment and programming they need while protecting public safety at the same time.
"Although there was a move in the mid-1990s to toughen up responses to juvenile crime, that trend seems to be reversing as policy-makers find that treating juveniles as adults is counter-productive."

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control, for example, analyzed the available scientific research and found that transferring juveniles to adult court increases violence and recidivism.

Law Professor Jordan Steiker, an expert on the Eighth Amendment and sentencing issues, and co-director of the Law School's Capital Punishment Center, also consulted on the petition.

Lanny Vickery, an Austin-based attorney and 1984 Law School graduate who helped handle Pittman's case in the South Carolina courts, brought the case to the Clinic and requested assistance in petitioning the High Court.

"This is an important case and we knew Chris would benefit from getting some of the top experts in the country working on it," he said. Vickery worked closely with the professors and students as they prepared their arguments.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide in March whether to hear the case.

The formal collaboration between the Law School Supreme Court Clinic and a team of public policy students is believed to be the first of its kind in the country.

"We simply could not have presented as strong a case without the policy research that was done by the LBJ students," Sturley said. "Their national and international research helped shape our legal arguments and helped us to understand how juvenile justice sentencing practices actually work."

Deitch described the collaboration as "enormously successful." She said, "The policy students learned a tremendous amount about the legal process and came to understand how to make their policy research legally relevant."

"UT Law and public policy students have shown that they are able to make serious contributions in the most sophisticated litigation in any court in the country," said Larry Sager, dean of the School of Law.

links to the case: http://www.utexas.edu/news/2007/12/18/law_supreme/

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

CA: Schwarzenegger proposes to release 22,000 prisoners

"In a system where spending is driven by population and labor costs, the proposal outlined Thursday would not cut any of the prison department's bond funding, including spending under Assembly Bill 900, the $7.9 billion prison package. Nor would it affect expenditures of the federal medical receiver, who is in charge of $1.5 billion of the corrections budget."

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/583707.html
Sacramento Bee

Big prisoner release plan
Schwarzenegger proposing to free 22,000 low-risk offenders early

By Andy Furillo
PST Friday, December 21, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A24

In what may be the largest early release of inmates in U.S. history, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration is proposing to open the prison gates next year for some 22,000 low-risk offenders.

According to details of a budget proposal made available to The Bee, the administration will ask the Legislature to authorize the release of certain non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex offenders who are in the final 20 months of their terms.

The proposal would cut the prison population by 22,159 inmates and save the cash-strapped state an estimated $256 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and more than $780 million through June 30, 2010. The proposal also calls for a reduction of more than 4,000 prison jobs, most of them involving correctional officers.

A gubernatorial spokesman said no final decisions had been made.

The administration, which is looking at across-the-board budget cuts to stem a budget deficit pegged as high as $14 billion, is looking for more savings by shifting lower-risk parolees into what officials describe as a "summary" parole system. Such a shift also would require legislative approval.

Under "summary" parole, offenders would remain on supervised release and would still be subject to searches by local law enforcement at any time, but they would not be returned to prison on technical violations. It would take a new crime prosecuted by local law enforcement officials to return an offender to prison.

A summary parole system t would save the state an estimated $98 million in the 2008-09 fiscal year and $329 million through 2009-10. The number of job cuts in the parole proposal would hit 1,660.

Gubernatorial spokesman Adam Mendelsohn declined to confirm the proposal outlined to The Bee but reaffirmed the administration's belief that all departments need to cut spending by 10 percent next year. The corrections budget is $9.9 billion.

Schwarzenegger "has not made any decisions" on where the cuts will take place, Mendelsohn said, including whether they will involve early release of inmates or staff layoffs.

"He has not made any final determination on what his January budget will look like, but there are many, many scenarios that have been presented to the governor, and he is working extremely hard to figure out how we manage this budget situation through cuts and reduced spending," Mendelsohn said.

In a system where spending is driven by population and labor costs, the proposal outlined Thursday would not cut any of the prison department's bond funding, including spending under Assembly Bill 900, the $7.9 billion prison package. Nor would it affect expenditures of the federal medical receiver, who is in charge of $1.5 billion of the corrections budget.

Spending for the Corrections Standards Authority and the Division of Juvenile Justice also would be excluded from the proposed cuts.

UC Berkeley law professor and corrections expert Franklin Zimring said that in raw numbers, "I don't know of any" other releases across the country that would match what Schwarzenegger's administration is proposing.

But he said the proposed 13 percent cut in the prison population ­ which stood at 172,079 as of Dec. 12 ­ would be on par with the results of changes in parole policy that Gov. Ronald Reagan imposed in the early 1970s.

"This could be an extraordinarily interesting experiment," Zimring said. "The nice thing about having a Republican governor do it is that I don't think there is going to be a firestorm."

"Let's see if it plays as a huge story," Zimring added.

Conservatives and victims-rights groups indicated Thursday that they will be stoking the fires of opposition to a plan they say poses a massive public safety threat.

Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, accused Schwarzenegger of "running with his tails between his legs" from the federal three-judge court that is considering legal motions to cap the state prison population.

Spitzer said the administration is "hell bent" on cutting the prison population, as demonstrated by recent decisions to press parole agents to discharge low-risk offenders if they stay clean for a year.

"You can guarantee that we'll be out and yelling against this," said Nina Salarno Ashford, an executive board member of Crime Victims United of California.

Spokesmen for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which represents the lion's share of employees who would be faced with layoffs, said the number of proposed staffing cuts resembles the union's figures on the number of vacancies throughout the department.

The CCPOA has sided with inmates-rights' lawyers on the motions to cap the prison population. But its leaders expressed fear Thursday that the releases could lead to a crime wave.

"It's very tragic," union spokesman Lance Corcoran said. "It's the exact opposite direction that the state needs to go."

The proposal drew a positive reaction from Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

He presented a study in Sacramento earlier this year saying that early release programs combined with community-based programs can result in lower crime rates.

"This seems to me to be a prudent proposal," Krisberg said. "It would be better if it were done in the context of comprehensive sentencing reform rather than in just an ad-hoc form that will go forward for a while.

"But there's no question that reducing the prison population will improve things and help the management of the system."

Schwarzenegger proposes to release 22,000 prisoners

By Andy Furillo
Thursday, December 20, 2007
http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/583424.html

In what may be the largest early release of inmates in United States history, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration is proposing to open the prison gates next year to some 22,000 low-risk offenders.

According to details of a budget proposal made available to The Bee, the administration will ask the Legislature to authorize the release of certain non-serious, non-violent, non-sex offenders who have less than 20 months to go on their terms.

The proposal would cut the prison population by 22,159 inmates and save the cash-strapped state $256 million in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and more than $780 million through June 30, 2010. Besides reducing the inmate population, the proposal also calls for a reduction in more than 4,000 prison jobs, most of which would involve correctional officers.

The administration, which is looking at across the board budget cuts to stem a budget deficit pegged as high as $14 billion, is looking for more savings in prison spending by shifting all lower-risk parolees into what officials are describing as a "summary" system. The shift also would require legislative approval.
Under "summary" parole, offenders would remain on supervised release and still be subject to searches by local law enforcement at any time, but they would not be returned to prison on a technical violation. It would take a new crime prosecuted by local law enforcement officials to return the offenders to prison.

A summary parole system would cut the daily average population of released offenders by 18,522 in the next fiscal year and result in a further prison population reduction of 6,249, according to the proposal. It would save the state $98 million in the 2008-09 fiscal year and $329 million through 2009-10. The number of job cuts in the parole proposal will hit 1,660.

Gubernatorial spokesman Adam Mendelsohn declined to confirm the proposal outlined to The Bee, but reaffirmed the administration's belief that all departments need to cut spending across the board by 10 percent next year. Schwarzenegger "has not made any decisions" on where the cuts will take place, Mendelsohn said, including whether they will involve the early release of inmates or staff cuts.

"He has not made any final determination on what his January budget will look like, but there are many, many scenarios that have been presented to the governor, and he is working extremely hard to figure out how we manage this budget situation through cuts and reduced spending," Mendelsohn.

The corrections budget proposal outlined Thursday would not cut any of the prison department's bond funding, including the recently enacted, $7.9 billion Assembly Bill 900 spending, nor would it affect the expenditures of the federal medical receiver, who is in charge of $1.5 billion of the agency's total portfolio. The Corrections Standards Authority and the Division of Juvenile Justice would also be excluded from the proposed cuts.

For a complete story, see Friday's Bee.

Posted by lois at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2007

MA: Fact Sheet from Criminal Justice Policy Coalition: HB 1313 An Act Relative to Confinement Conditions and Treatment of Prisoners with Mental Illness” and three articles from the Boston Globe on the crisis in prison suicides

FACT SHEET from the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition
House Bill 1313: “An Act Relative to Confinement Conditions and Treatment of Prisoners with Mental Illness”

Sponsors: Rep. Ruth Balser (D-Newton), House Chair, Joint Committee on Mental Health and Substance Abuse is lead sponsor. Co-sponsoring representatives at the time the bill was filed included Brownsberger, D’Amico, Fox, Jehlen, Kahn, L’Italien, Patrick, Petersen, Provost, Sciortino, Scibak, Smizik, Tucker.

Status: The bill was referred to the Judiciary Committee and a hearing on the bill was held on May 8, 2007. The bill has not yet been reported out.

Endorsing Organizations: The Criminal Justice Policy Coalition endorses H 1313, along with The Arc of Massachusetts, Center for Public Representation, Committee for Public Counsel Services, Disability Law Center, Health Care for All, Louis D. Brown Peace Institute, Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, National Alliance on Mental Illness of Massachusetts, and National Association of Social Workers-Massachusetts.

Summary of Bill: H. 1313 would amend section 39 of chapter 127 of the General Laws, which currently sets the procedure that a superintendent of a correctional institution must follow after moving a prisoner to a segregated unit. H. 1313 would establish residential treatment units (RTUs) at Department of Correction facilities for the purpose of providing both mental health treatment and rehabilitation services for prisoners. Under H. 1313, mental health professionals would be required to examine inmates for signs of major mental illness (including depression, schizophrenia, bipolar and cognitive disorders, as well as personality or anxiety disorders), mental retardation and brain trauma. The bill would ensure that prisoners with serious mental health disorders are not placed in segregation units, by requiring that professionals identify inmates who pose a serious risk to themselves or others and recommend their removal from the segregated units and transfer to the residential treatment units.

Key Goals of the Bill:

• Within 24 hours of being confined to a segregated unit, a prisoner would be assessed by a mental health professional, who would also review the prisoner’s mental health record. Any person placed in confinement would receive a confidential mental health evaluation at least every three days.
• Any segregated prisoner found to be suffering from any of several specific psychiatric conditions, forms of cognitive impairment or signs of substantial mental or emotional deterioration would be removed from segregation and transferred to a Residential Treatment Unit.
• The bill establishes mental health treatment programs inside correctional facilities, including RTUs and other programs that allow inmates to receive psychiatric services according to their needs.
• Prisoners removed from segregation for mental health reasons either would be returned to the general inmate population to receive clinical treatment. or would be moved to a residential facility. These units would be specifically designed to treat mentally ill prisoners.
• The bill would mandate special screening and training for all correctional staff (including guards) that would include education on mental illness, medication and side effects, and safe management of inmates with mental illness. Those working in RTUs would receive the most intensive training.

Background: It is estimated that 25% of all prisoners in Massachusetts are mentally ill, with 12-15% suffering from a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or psychosis. While current law requires that prisoners placed in segregation receive periodic medical and psychiatric examinations and receive necessary treatment, these mental health evaluations can be delayed, infrequent and inconsistent, leaving mentally ill prisoners to suffer in isolation and without treatment. Segregation can have a traumatic effect on the mentally ill, and can lead to complete breakdown and violent behavior, increasing the chance that they will harm others or themselves. In Massachusetts, 11 of the 16 suicides in DOC facilities over the past three years occurred in segregation. Segregating mentally ill prisoners perpetuates the cycle of violence, and can make those prisoners more dangerous when they re-enter society. While the DOC has created several RTUs (approximately, 100 beds), none of them take non-docile, mentally ill prisoners, and no such units exist in maximum security facilities. H. 1313 would guarantee adequate facilities so that all prisoners with serious mental illness would be treated in an RTU and not be held in segregation units.

Additional Facts:

• It is estimated that 16% (one in six) prisoners in the U.S. are mentally ill.

• In Massachusetts, it is estimated that 25% of all prisoners are mentally ill (up from 15% in 1998), with 12-15% suffering from a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or psychosis.

• Over 1,000 inmates in Massachusetts are currently being treated with anti-psychotic medication.

• 80% of the Massachusetts prison population suffers from a substance abuse problem.

• A broad group of professionals, including police, sheriffs, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, prison officials, human rights and anti-violence advocates, have stated publicly that our nation’s prisons are ill-equipped and ill-prepared to care for the mentally ill; particularly, in such large numbers.

• Inmates with mental illness are more likely to break the rules, and therefore, more likely to be sent to segregation more frequently.

• Solitary confinement worsens the condition of the mentally ill, increasing the chances that they will break more rules, harm themselves, other inmates or corrections staff, or need to be taken to a hospital for more intensive treatment.

• Many correctional officers in Massachusetts are not equipped to manage mentally ill prisoners, and receive limited mental health training.

• Massachusetts currently has only three residential treatment units (approximately 100 beds), none of which take non-docile, mentally ill prisoners. There are no RTUs in the state’s maximum security prisons, where the need is greatest.

• The Department of Correction’s highly successful RTU at Old Colony is rarely filled, due to unclear admittance criteria.

• Over the last three years, there have been 16 suicides in Massachusetts prisons. Eleven of those suicides occurred in segregation units.

• In the past decade, more than 3,200 Massachusetts inmates have attempted suicide while incarcerated—including 513 in 2006.

• Taxpayers spend $55 million per year on medical/mental health care for inmates in state prisons in Massachusetts.

• RTUs can save the cost of psychiatric hospitalization for prisoners whose conditions worsen while in segregation, as well as the emergency response costs incurred when these inmates cause harm to themselves in these units.

• Most inmates, including those who have mental health problems, will eventually be released from prison.

• RTUs can improve the public safety by providing psychiatric services that prepare inmates for re-entry rather than containing them in conditions that make them more violent when they return to society.

BREAKDOWN | THE PRISON SUICIDE CRISIS
A system strains, and inmates die

December 9, 2007

This story was reported by Globe Spotlight Team members Beth Healy, Michael Rezendes, Francie Latour, Jonathan Saltzman, and editor Thomas Farragher.

It was written by Healy.

First of three parts

His mother couldn't understand how he got the shoelaces.

After all, everyone knew Jarred Aranda was in danger. He had just tried to kill himself in jail.

Now, the handsome 27-year-old, with a to-do list in his pocket and a smile that hid his troubles, was being evaluated for mental illness at the state prison hospital in Bridgewater. He should have been safe there.

Locked up for stealing sneakers and violating probation, Aranda was deeply depressed. His mind was ravaged by crystal meth and other drugs his mother had begged him to quit. He'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and he was hearing voices.

But he told prison doctors he didn't want to die, and they believed him. Then they forgot about him.

No one from the prison clinical staff checked on him for 10 days. When a doctor finally did show up again, Aranda said he felt hopeless, and couldn't sleep. But the next day, he was allowed to walk into a shower, unattended, for 17 minutes. He had a set of shoelaces with him.

When an officer found him hanging from the shower door and sounded the "Code 99" alert last March, Aranda became the next in a series of 15 suicides in Massachusetts state prisons since early 2005. The deaths were coming at an alarming pace, roughly triple the rate in other states.

Last year alone, seven inmates killed themselves, and another's attempt left him brain dead; four have taken their lives so far this year.

Department of Correction officials say the suicides are random and unrelated. But a Globe Spotlight Team investigation of the deaths and detailed reconstruction of how they occurred found that they were far from random.

Most of the suicides came after careless errors and dangerous decisions by correction officials and the staff at UMass Correctional Health. And the trail of violence is far wider than the number of dead would indicate, as hundreds more inmates each year have wounded themselves or attempted suicide.

In fact, such incidents are soaring.

So common has it been to find a man with a makeshift noose around his neck that some correction officers have taken to carrying their own pocket tools to cut them down. The tally of suicide attempts and self-inflicted injuries - 513 last year and more than 3,200 over the past decade - tells a story of deepening mental illness and misery behind the walls of the state's prisons, despite repeated calls for better training of officers and safer cells for mentally troubled inmates.

The Globe found that background screens were botched as inmates arrived at prison. Medical and mental health records went missing or were never reviewed. Security rounds were skipped. Inmates in distress were punished for behavior that amounted to a cry for help, or at least a signal that greater precautions were needed.

"You're taking people who are vulnerable and can't cope in society," said Dr. Carl Fulwiler, a psychiatrist who consults to prisons and is an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School, "and putting them in the worst situation imaginable."

The Department of Correction guards the details of these events in secrecy, revealing little to the public, or even to the families of the suicide victims.

But internal investigative reports obtained from other prison sources by the Globe show that, in case after case, the suicides occurred at times when inmates were predictably at risk - within days or hours of arriving at prison, being sent to isolation, or withdrawing from drugs. Or, as with Jarred Aranda, in the tenuous period after a prior suicide attempt.

Aranda's grandfather was the first to get the call that he was dead. Then his mother.

"Who let him go in the shower alone?" Leslie Aranda would later ask tearfully. "I thought he was safe."

A system under strain

They are people whom society has, in many cases, written off.

Among the 15 suicides, almost all of them men, half were criminals convicted of murder or rape. Some were small-time thieves or drug dealers. A few hadn't been convicted of anything; they were in prison awaiting trial. The one woman was in only to detox.

Virtually all of them were troubled long before they were locked up, with mental health issues or drug abuse dating back to their youth. They and others like them increasingly are populating prisons in Massachusetts and across the country.

Today, one-quarter of the state's 11,000 prisoners are being treated for some kind of mental illness, up from 15 percent in 1998. It's a legacy, in part, of the elimination of many state mental institutions in the 1980s and half the state's detox beds in 2004. In June, there were 1,097 inmates taking antipsychotic medications, up from 595 in December 1998.

The suicides are just the most visible signs of a system under strain. State taxpayers spend $55 million a year on medical and mental health care for inmates in the state prisons, and nearly half a billion dollars for all prison costs. And while troubled inmates are dying and hundreds more are trying to die, most will serve their sentences and one day be released - often sicker than when they arrived.

"That's the danger of the larger prison culture we're creating," said Dr. Scott A. Allen, a former prison physician in Rhode Island and now co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University. "As a society now, we've taken mental health problems into this prison setting, and we're dealing with them in a punitive way."

The casualties are people like Andrew Armstrong, 22 and mentally ill, who hanged himself eight hours after being locked in an isolation cell for getting into a fight.

Or Nicole Davis, 24, who was found hanging after asking for medical help all night; she was depressed and detoxing, alone in her cell.

Or Nelson Rodriguez, 26 and mentally retarded, who killed himself in MCI-Cedar Junction's dungeon-like "10-Block" wing, despite warnings by the mental health staff that solitary confinement would likely harm him. New rules put in place after his death have proved far from foolproof: In July, a mentally ill man killed himself in 10-Block, prompting the US Marshals Service to investigate and to remove some federal detainees from the Walpole prison.

Case study in disaster

Anthony Garafolo is a case study in how a difficult situation can turn to disaster at the Department of Correction.

The 46-year-old Ludlow native, admitted to MCI-Shirley in June of 2006, had spent a third of his life behind bars, convicted time and again of stealing to support a drug habit. In one 1990 robbery, he took a bullet in the back that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

He was an angry man in prison, and often hard to handle.

Garafolo had been emotionally broken since being abused by a notorious priest at age 15. And he was depressed at the disability that left him using a wheelchair and made basic bodily functions a difficult chore. Over the years, he racked up a stack of disciplinary reports for breaking rules and verbally abusing prison staff. He had twice before tried to kill himself in prison, once while in isolation.

On June 19 last year, he was caught in a downward spiral that was steep and violent. It was 90 degrees outside the walls of the prison that day, and behind the thick, locked door of Garafolo's prison infirmary room, it felt even hotter.

A wound had reopened after a recent surgery - an ulcerated sore from sitting long hours in a wheelchair. He had a fever and kept asking for pain medication, records show. He couldn't reach the sink for water. He was filthy and needed to bathe, but the shower in the corner of his room wasn't wheelchair-accessible.

And he wasn't making his care any easier, angrily banging on his door, shouting and cursing at the staff.

No doubt, the recent change in his prison circumstances had also inflamed him. Garafolo had gone from an unshackled interlude at UMass Memorial Medical Center for surgery - a comparatively happy time with family visits and a birthday celebration - to a stopover in the locked-down wing of the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston, to the infirmary at Shirley.

And for reasons top department officials cannot explain, at Shirley he was being held in segregation - the prison regime for troublemakers - meaning he was in isolation for 23 hours a day with no basic privileges, no phone calls, no TV. And, it seemed to Garafolo, no air. Despite his pleas, the officers on duty would not unlock the food trap in his door, about the size of a large mail slot, according to his cell-block neighbor, Miguel Perez, who said he was allowed the small bit of ventilation.

When Garafolo's mother visited, she had to talk to him through a glass window - a punishment reserved for segregated prisoners.

"I couldn't touch him," said Lorraine J. Jaillet, who last saw her son three days before his death. "He was crying. I've never seen so many tears."

Virtually every safety measure that might have helped Garafolo in the last six days of his life failed, prison records show.

First, the booking officer at Shirley looked up Garafolo's suicide-attempt history but did not tell the mental health staff what he found. Second, his prison records didn't arrive with him that night, so the intake nurse never examined them. She relied on Garafolo to say if he had any mental health issues, and he said no.

Third, the medical staff failed to alert mental health clinicians that Garafolo had been prescribed psychiatric medication at the hospital. MCI-Shirley's mental health director, Merleen Mills, told department investigators she was away when Garafolo arrived and didn't know he was there until his fifth day. Records show that no one from her staff went to see him.

That was particularly troubling, given the dangerous confusion over Garafolo's segregation status. Reports filed by correction officers say he was being protected from inmate enemies. But that was not reflected in the official prison record. As a result, Garafolo was never seen by a mental health clinician, as required when an inmate is segregated, to ensure he can handle the psychic strains of isolation.

It seemed everyone knew Garafolo was in crisis except the jailers and medical staff charged with his care. His half-brother, Dennis, also incarcerated at Shirley at the time, heard Anthony was in trouble and managed to visit him briefly. A sympathetic officer unlocked the slot in the door, Dennis Garafolo recalled, so he could reach his arm through it. Anthony just held his hand and cried.

"The way I saw that room, it was like being in the hole," Dennis Garafolo said, using prison slang for isolation.

For the last 20 hours of his life, Anthony Garafolo lashed out at staff members and beat on his door. He threatened to harm the wife and children of a sergeant, and demanded to be sent to another prison. When Garafolo smashed his cell window, his neighbor, Perez, feared for him.

The commotion stretched into the early-morning hours, but no one called the mental health staff, records show. Not the captain who threatened Garafolo with four-point restraints. Not the nurses, who had to have him shackled to give him care. Not the officers who had him locked down in segregation.

At 5:56 a.m. on June 20, Garafolo was found hanging from a sheet tied to the shower knob - a long reach from his wheelchair.

A handwritten letter by his bed said: "I can't fight any longer. . . . I going crazy just being in here this long. Don't let this happen to nobody again."

To this day, Lorraine Jaillet insists her son did not kill himself and plans to sue the Department of Correction. Family and friends say Garafolo would not have ended his life without writing to his mother. A pastor who visited Garafolo several times, Paul Suckling of the United Church of God in Worcester, was stunned. "There was frustration, sometimes depression, but nothing close to suicide," Suckling said.

His brother Dennis said, "Either my brother was pushed to that, or he felt doomed."

Desperation in isolation

Emotional desperation is common among those in isolation. It makes even healthy people sick and has a disastrous effect on people with mental illness, according to psychiatrists familiar with the effects of solitary confinement.

"It leaves you alone with your own delusions," said Dr. Matthew P. Dumont, a Cambridge psychiatrist. "It is actually the stupidest and most dysfunctional thing to do to a mentally ill prisoner."

And yet it remains a common form of discipline. In October, there were 345 inmates segregated in Massachusetts prisons, not including those held in other isolated settings, like Garafolo's infirmary room. Nationally, there were 80,870 segregation beds in 2000, following a political push, begun in the mid-1990s, for harder time for convicts and more maximum security cells, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, a research group.

But the Spotlight investigation found that, even as the suicide rate climbed, the prison system continued to rely on this dangerous tool, saying it had no alternative for violent inmates. Nine of the Massachusetts's suicides since 2005 have involved inmates held in isolation.

Dr. Robert B. Diener, a psychiatrist and medical director at Bridgewater State Hospital, regularly sees men who have been in isolation at Walpole, kept in a 9-by-6-foot cell 23 hours a day. He said it is psychologically unhealthy for inmates to be confined that way for long periods.

"They're deprived of normal life experiences," he said. "They can become outrageous."

Even a short period of isolation can be too much for some. It was for Miguel Velasquez.

He was not a convict but rather a federal detainee awaiting trial on gun possession charges when he arrived at MCI-Cedar Junction, the maximum security facility in Walpole, just over a year ago. He had a history of mental illness for which he was being treated, and his behavior behind bars had been generally good.

But then in July he punched another inmate. The price for that would be steep: a trip to the infamous 10-Block isolation unit, home to some of the system's most difficult prisoners. Facing that prospect, Velasquez snapped, records show. He resisted a mandatory strip search, then angrily refused to put his clothes back on. And so he was shackled and marched naked down the hallway to a tiny, windowless cell, according to written reports of the incident.

An officer locked the door with bars, and then, as punishment, shut the outer, solid door as well. Velasquez, 33, was dead three hours later, having hanged himself with a piece of the shirt he wouldn't wear. He was the third inmate in two years to take his life behind a solid door in 10-Block.

The last hours of Velasquez's life were marked by two critical failures by prison and medical staff, the department's preliminary suicide report says.

The nurse who cleared Velasquez for isolation did not examine his mental health records, according to the report. Then, the officer who closed the solid door of his cell door did so without telling his commander or ensuring that mental health clinicians were notified, as department rules require.

His death alarmed Miriam Conrad, the lawyer in the federal defender's office who had represented Velasquez. "Pretrial detainees have a basic right, as well as a constitutional right, to be treated humanely," she said.

The US Marshals Service was paying the Department of Correction $90 a day for Velasquez's "housing, safekeeping, and subsistence." Yvonne Bonner, the acting US Marshal in Boston, said Velasquez's assignment to the state's bleakest prison was purely by chance.

"It's an old facility. It's a depressing site," Bonner said. But, she observed, "I would think being in segregation would be the safest place they could be."

When first contacted by the Globe, Bonner said her office had no plan to probe Velasquez's death beyond a cursory review of the Department of Correction's report. But after learning from the Globe of the errors reflected in prison documents, Bonner reopened the investigation. She said that no federal detainees would be placed at Cedar Junction until the investigation was completed. Several detainees with known mental health issues have since been moved to other prisons.

James R. Bender, the Department of Correction's deputy commissioner, said staff members who failed to follow protocol in the Velasquez case could be disciplined.

A man unraveling

Glen Bourgeois lasted four months in 10-Block.

He landed at Walpole in August 2006 after getting caught in a relationship with a female employee at Old Colony Correctional Center and for having a hacksaw and other contraband in his cell. At 44, he had served 21 years for his role in a murder during a robbery, and he had allegedly been planning to escape. Bourgeois had recently lost hope about his appeal attempts, according to a friend of his and correction officers, and was grappling with the life sentence ahead of him.

In letters to his brother, Bourgeois complained about the oppressive boredom of "the hole." He read books and newspapers, and wrote letters to a pen pal.

For the most part, Bourgeois didn't give correction officers trouble in his final months. But the preliminary prison report on his suicide describes a man falling apart.

Bourgeois complained of panic attacks soon after arriving at 10-Block, saying the noise made him want to bash his head against a wall. But when a clinician came to see him, he said he was "all set."

Twice Bourgeois refused orders to allow the solid door of his cell to be closed, once sticking his arm through the bars to block it. For that he was to receive further punishment: No radio until mid-December and no telephone calls until Jan. 21, 2007, a date he wouldn't live to see.

By October, Bourgeois had been suffering from migraine headaches for two months. He was prescribed Prozac for stress.

In November, Bourgeois went on a hunger strike, but records show he wasn't seen by mental health, as required. They did finally visit him on Nov. 16, for the 90-day mental status checkup required for all inmates in segregation.

On Dec. 27, Bourgeois was found hanging at 4:34 a.m. No one could see him do it because his solid door was closed. Prison officials say he asked for it to be shut, for quiet.

Bourgeois's brother, Michael Hook-DiMarino, was disturbed when he saw the text of his brother's suicide note, a note he said prison officials had told him did not exist. "Consider my sentence paid in full," it said. "I did the only thing I felt I could do to stop my headaches. I have plan this for almost a month, there was no one I could ask for help without being put in worse living conditions than I am in already."

With Bourgeois's death, Hook-DiMarino lost the last member of his immediate family. He said of his brother: "You have to pay for your crime. But you're still human."

A sentence without a crime

The warning signs are often obvious. But prison staff, hardened by what they consider inmates' manipulative behavior, can be blind to them.

Last December, Nicole Davis was sent for detox to MCI-Framingham, the state women's prison, for 30 days. She was not serving a sentence for a crime.

Her family had filed court papers to have Davis civilly committed, to help her shake the drugs she had been addicted to for years - and to head off the arrest warrants she was facing for several open theft cases, and for using a credit card her boyfriend had stolen.

Her parents had hoped to commit her to a private facility. And Davis's lawyer argued to send her to a New Bedford treatment center used by the state as an alternative to prison for women in detox. But Judge Robert G. Harbour at Taunton District Court felt she should be sent to a "secure facility."

"The judge told us she'd be safe at Framingham," said Nicole's mother, Rosamond.

But that was not to be. Judge Harbour told the Globe, "It's something that I'll never forget."

The detox regime was primitive. Coming down off heroin, the antianxiety drug Klonopin, and possibly other substances, Davis was locked in a room at night, with correction officers periodically watching her door. She told a mental health clinician that she had been depressed since the death of her baby boy, Nathan, in foster care seven months earlier.

She denied feeling suicidal, according to prison records. But her parents said they saw real distress on their visit Dec. 19, the day after Davis's 24th birthday. Davis begged them not to leave.

"She said, 'I want you to stay because if you don't stay, I have to go back up in the hole,' " her mother recalled. Davis hated to be alone, her father said.

That night, Davis was left alone in a spartan cement cell in the infirmary. She was kept there after alleging that a male officer had groped her. It was a claim the officials doubted, according to the investigative report of her death.

Around midnight, Robert and Rosamond Davis were awakened by police at their Norton home. They called MCI-Framingham, as directed, and soon heard prison Superintendent Lynn M. Bissonnette tell them their daughter had died in a "bizarre incident," Robert Davis recalls.

Throughout her last evening alive, Nicole Davis repeatedly asked for medical care, Dr. Philip DeChavez said in the department's suicide review. The staff checked on her but thought she was just seeking drugs or attention. At 10:29 p.m., an officer found her, sitting on the cell floor with a sheet around her neck.

Clinicians and staff members involved in Davis's suicide review mulled some fundamental questions. Might inmates undergoing drug or alcohol withdrawal be at risk to themselves once they're sober? Should they have a new mental health check-up after detoxing?

The panel members decided such assessments would not help. However, Bissonnette, the superintendent, did propose that women no longer be left alone. According to the report, she was concerned that heightened feelings of isolation could "result in an increase risk of self-harm."

"The women," Bissonnette told the Globe, "can't tolerate it."

At great risk

Sean Turner was another left to fight through detox on his own.

Turner was alone in a cell at MCI-Concord, withdrawing from daily intravenous heroin use without proper medical oversight on the day he took his life.

According to the Department of Correction's own procedures, Turner should not have been admitted to Concord at all on July 11, 2005. At that time, the old prison on Route 2 had no beds for inmates going through withdrawal. The department's review of Turner's suicide says, "MCI Concord does not have detox protocols in place and all detox patients are transferred to infirmary sites or the local hospital for care." But, it goes on to say, "Mr. Turner was released to population," meaning to an ordinary cell.

When Turner, 47, arrived at Concord that night - awaiting trial on motor vehicle and drug charges - he was experiencing nausea from withdrawal. A physician reviewed his intake report, and the nurse ordered detox medication, according to the department's reports. But she did not write a progress note or notify the on-call physician of the detox plan.

Over the next two days, Turner was quiet, according to inmates interviewed by the department. He sat alone in the chow hall, played dominoes, and went to the library, they said, but he was depressed and fearing a long prison term.

On the morning of July 13, Turner went to the medication line at 8 a.m., an inmate said, but was turned away. He took a shower about 10:30 a.m., went to lunch, and was seen lying on his bunk at 1:45 p.m. An inmate says he asked Turner for stamps at 2:10 p.m.

At 2:30 p.m., when most inmates were out in the yard and his cellmate was away at court, Turner was found hanging from a sheet attached to a wall vent. He'd had plenty of time to do it: Two correction officers on duty failed to make their scheduled hourly rounds that afternoon, according to department investigators' review of a prison videotape. The officers lied in the investigative interview, claiming they had made the rounds. They received 30-day suspensions.

"I just can't imagine that they would put anyone in his circumstance into a room and just leave them," Turner's mother, Dianne Hawkes, said of her eldest child, a smart student with a knack for mechanics, woodworking, and photography. "I think they were completely negligent."

Aside from the physical dangers, psychiatrists and prison officials say detoxing can bring on severe depression. For some inmates, it's the first time they've been sober in months or years, and they find themselves suddenly facing the reality of incarceration, said Karin T. Bergeron, superintendent at Bridgewater State Hospital.

"Many of these men are at great risk for suicidality," she said.

Falling through the cracks

That was certainly the case for Jarred Aranda. By the time he arrived at Bridgewater last spring, he'd been at the Bristol County jail in North Dartmouth for three months.

Aranda was in the midst of the longest stretch of sobriety he'd experienced in recent memory, he told a Bridgewater psychiatrist, and he was feeling poorly. He had all but forgotten the comforts of his youth: the house with the big lawn, the swimming pool, the dinners in his grandmother's kitchen. He hadn't wanted his mother or sister to see him at Bristol County, where he stole a correction officer's lunchbox and fought with him. He tried to hang himself with shoelaces, then cut his wrist with a plastic knife.

Days later he spent his first night at Bridgewater, alone in a treatment unit, but under frequent watch. The next day, he was removed from seclusion but kept under close observation. Two days later, he was sent to a less restrictive area.

That's when Aranda fell through the cracks. No one took responsibility for him for nearly two weeks, according to the department's records.

On his last full day alive, Aranda told a psychiatrist his depression was getting worse. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being worst), he felt like a seven or eight. The doctor prescribed Lithium and Seroquel for Aranda's bipolar symptoms and Wellbutrin for depression. It's unclear if Aranda took the medication; he had refused it since arriving at the hospital.

Just a few days before, Aranda's father and stepmother had visited him. They said he talked about the future, about changing his life. He didn't complain; he never wanted his family to worry.

But on the night of March 30, prison records show, Aranda took the laces out of his roommate's sneakers. And headed for the shower. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/12/09/a_system_strains_and_inmates_die/

BREAKDOWN | THE PRISON SUICIDE CRISIS
Left in uncertain hands, a haunted life ends tragically

December 10, 2007

Second of three parts

This story was reported by Globe Spotlight Team members Francie Latour, Michael Rezendes, Beth Healy, Jonathan Saltzman, and editor Thomas Farragher. It was written by Latour.

To the teen mother who struggled to raise him, he was slow, abnormal, and often out of control.

To the counselors who tried to steer him from trouble in Springfield, he was a child trapped in the body of a pudgy young man, the charmer who couldn't count the change in his own pocket.

And to prison clinicians who knew him behind bars, he was, above all, a "frequent flier," their code for inmates who require the constant attention of the mental health staff.

By the time Nelson Rodriguez walked through the heavy metal doors of state prison in 2004, convicted in a stabbing case, he had long since been diagnosed as mentally retarded and mentally ill - a man unable to grasp even the most basic concepts.

But as an inmate, the 26-year-old Rodriguez was routinely punished for acting out in ways he could not control. Time and again, his jailers used the same blunt tools - isolation and loss of basic privileges - to deal with him.

The discipline never improved his behavior; in fact, he got worse. It ran directly against warnings by prison clinicians. But it kept coming - for him as for many of the mentally ill who have overwhelmed the prison system.

During 18 months in state custody, the young man with the lazy eye and troubled mind spent a quarter of his time - about 145 days - in solitary confinement.

On Dec. 20, 2005, five days after his last transfer into the forbidding Walpole prison unit known as 10-Block, Rodriguez's isolation was pressed to the extreme. Officers shut an outer solid door over the bars of his cell and walked away.

Sometime in the next four hours, Rodriguez tied a strip of bed sheet to the metal cover around his cell's smoke detector. He wrapped the other end around his neck, and hanged himself.

When it comes to suicide behind bars, it is impossible to expect total prevention, state Department of Correction officials say. With some determined inmates, Associate Commissioner Veronica Madden said, "It seems that they really wanted to die."

But the death of Nelson Rodriguez in cell 49 is not that kind of story. Rather, his is the story of the kind of inmate now flooding the corrections system: the mentally ill for whom prison is increasingly the asylum of last resort. The Globe Spotlight team dwelled in depth on his short life and sorry end as a way to understand why men like Rodriguez wind up behind bars and why too many die there.

Rodriguez was a man-child with a hard-wired inability to learn at the mercy of a system where punishment and more punishment is often the only real response to inmates with little or no ability to control their behavior.

It is a practice that amounts, in some cases, to an invitation to give up on life.

"He is someone who definitely should not have been put in isolation because of his condition. There's no question about that," said Terry Kupers, a national specialist on mental illness in prisons, who reviewed Rodriguez's records. "Putting [mentally ill inmates] in segregation and then closing the solid door to their cell is like asking them to commit suicide."

Madden told the Globe that Rodriguez's suicide was a tragedy, for him, his family, and for her department.

"This was a deeply troubled young man presenting with a very complex set of circumstances in a very noncomplex system that we run," she said.

Madden also said that she had not known that Rodriguez was mentally retarded.

"We hear now that he was mentally retarded," she said. "I don't have any documentation on that. Did that come up in court? Where was that prior?"

In fact, court records and internal reports are peppered with references to Rodriguez's mental retardation. Those records include a 2006 suicide review in which Madden herself was an observer. They stretch back to Rodriguez's first contact with the Department of Correction in 2003, and among those who treated him it was anything but a secret.

"You could talk to him about skills and ways to cope and strategies, but he wouldn't retain it," said one of Rodriguez's former clinicians, who treated him for about a year and who asked not to be named because of department policies that forbid discussing inmates. "He didn't have the skills to say, 'If I'm good for three more days, I'll be out of [solitary confinement].' He just couldn't do that."

Instead, Rodriguez lashed out - and fell apart.

Yet he wasn't on the radar screen of the mental health staff as a high-risk inmate, according to one internal Correction Department review obtained by the Globe.

At Walpole, no one in charge seemed to know anything about a doctor's warning that placing Rodriguez in solitary confinement posed a serious danger to his mental state, and to his safety.

Instead, after he cut his arms and throat, he was sent to one of the most restricted and bleak holding units Walpole had to offer: 10-Block.

"He'd never make it there," Rodriguez's former clinician said of Rodriguez's transfer. "I mean, he didn't make it there, obviously."

A troubled child

When he was a little boy, Nelson Rodriguez was haunted by a monster. It tormented his dreams and lurked around corners.

At age 10, he told a psychologist that the monster would kill his friends, eat his mother, and throw him into water burning with fire. Naturally, he gave the monster a name: Freddy, as in Freddy Krueger, the horror movie serial killer.

If Rodriguez's fantasy world was horrific, his boyhood reality was filled with frustration and pain.

His IQ was well below normal. He had a seizure disorder, and tests strongly suggested some form of brain damage. As he approached his 11th birthday, he still wet his bed. And he had no friends. Instead, his peers taunted him mercilessly.

All the while, the mother he dreamed that Freddy would devour was at once the focus of all the boy's devotion, and his rage.

Mildred DeJesus, 18 years old when she gave birth to Rodriguez, couldn't handle her son's violent outbursts, or any of the burdens of raising a child who, in her words, "was not normal." After Rodriguez began exhibiting strange, hypersexual behavior - exposing himself and preying on his toddler stepbrothers - DeJesus grew desperate. Ultimately, she signed over custody of her son to the state.

To his relatives in Springfield, it was clear what had happened. In an interview, Rodriguez's aunt, his grandmother, and his youngest half-brother described young Nelson as a torment, even as they acknowledged that his disability and mental illness were to blame.

"You wanted to trust him," said Dezi Rodriguez, who at 20 has just begun to forgive the brother who once menaced him. "You wanted to give him a chance, but you couldn't."

When told that Rodriguez would speak of his mother with longing to almost anyone he would meet, all three looked up, stared, and fell silent. "Believe me," Mary DeJesus, Rodriguez's aunt, said finally of her sister, who died of AIDS in 1999. "She would try so hard to love that kid."

As Nelson grew into adolescence, little changed. Clinicians still saw traits bordering on psychosis. At 17, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for six weeks. He bounced erratically between foster families and group homes.

And in a system already awash with unwanted children who soon grow into unwanted teenagers, Rodriguez became his own worst enemy: He was just smart enough to know he did not want to be labeled "retarded," and just verbal enough to try to convince people that he wasn't.

Jim Nash, a Springfield-area advocate for the disabled, was one of several counselors who took Rodriguez in for short periods of time as a young adult. Rodriguez was 18 at the time, but, with his goofy grin and impossible naiveté, he struck Nash as more like his own two toddlers than as a young man.

"He was able to posture and hold himself and look like some regular dude walking down the street," Nash said. "But in reality, there was nothing below the surface. There was no good framework for how to face the world."

At a critical period, between the ages of 18 and 22, Rodriguez's posturing fooled many of those charged with determining his future. In 1999, clinicians and the courts deemed him competent to care for himself without a guardian.

To the frustration of advocates, Rodriguez was in a social services limbo. He was too old for DSS services and would not ordinarily be eligible for services from the Department of Mental Retardation until age 22, although local DMR caseworkers tried to intervene.

At the same time, no one could force him to accept help. That was key, because Rodriguez was fed up with services, rules, and restrictions.

Jason Nelson, a part-time counselor and Comcast worker who lives in Chicopee, was one of the last people to help Rodriguez, and one of the most determined. In the year he spent as Rodriguez's guardian, he faithfully drove him to his night job washing dishes at a local restaurant and coaxed him to take the medications Rodriguez hated.

But after a year of hostile, unexplained outbursts from Rodriguez, Jason Nelson found himself hitting the same brick wall Rodriguez's mother had reached years earlier.

"I was at my wit's end," he said. "I was emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted from it."

Rodriguez was spiraling. Between 1997 and 2002, he was in and out of coun ty jail on various misdemeanors - petty larceny, breaking and entering, property damage.

Inexorably, he was slipping into the growing ranks of the wandering mentally ill, whose outbursts and episodes eventually lead to arrest, prosecution, and prison.

A changing diagnosis

For years, Rodriguez had been fascinated by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Something about a cartoon team of mutant reptiles, isolated from society and trained as warriors, clearly spoke to him. And he obsessed over martial arts. One day in the early summer of 2003, while living at a Springfield homeless shelter, he began taking kung fu classes. Then he bought a sword at a local pawn shop.

The next day, Rodriguez used the sword to stab another homeless man in the stomach inside the shelter's bathroom. It's unclear how the conflict began, but, according to police and witnesses, the scene was bloody. The victim, 29-year-old Marcus Roberts, arrived at the hospital holding in his intestines with a towel.

Roberts recovered fully. But despite an unusually passionate appeal by a court-appointed lawyer, this would not be another misdemeanor for Rodriguez. "He wasn't crazy, but he was retarded," said David Burgess of Concord, who asked the judge to send his client to a county jail instead of prison. "He's not as culpable as I would be, or you would be, if we pulled a knife on somebody."

Still, even Burgess could not argue with the judge's bottom line: A person should be able to enter a shelter and not have to worry about being stabbed. The court sentenced Rodriguez to four to seven years.

He was now in the hands of a prison system that struggles to adequately treat or even track mentally ill prisoners and has little capacity to deal with the mentally retarded.

"We don't have enough expertise," said Dr. Kenneth L. Appelbaum, the former mental health director for the UMass Correctional Health, which served the prison population until this summer. "And we don't have the services that those people need in the system. It is, in my opinion, a significant unmet need."

In Rodriguez's case, it was worse than that.

An internal staff review of his death, obtained by the Globe, said clinicians focused far too much on whether Rodriguez was really mentally ill, instead of realizing the danger he posed to himself.

"Despite the fact that his entire mental health history was well documented within the medical record," the report said, "the mental health clinicians at MCI-Cedar Junction seemed to either underemphasize, or simply be unaware of, some of the more critical information contained within his record."

That record, one of distress and breakdown, began even before Rodriguez had been officially sentenced to serve state time.

In November 2003, while still awaiting trial in a county jail in Ludlow, he tried to hang himself, an incident that landed him at Bridgewater State Hospital, the prison system's facility for the mentally ill.

The doctor who evaluated him concluded that while Rodriguez was not profoundly mentally ill, he was a danger to himself. Using italics in her report to stress her point, she noted that clinical staff and correction officers should be aware of the "very real, very substantial" risk of self-harm.

By June 2004, and convicted of the crime, he was an inmate at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, the state's modern maximum-security facility in Shirley. There, his outbursts triggered escalating punishment. He broke his food tray, exposed himself, and repeatedly attacked officers. As a result, he was kept in isolation.

By October 2004, Rodriguez was back for further observation at Bridgewater, where, his relatives say, prison officials should have recognized the severity of his illness and kept him for treatment indefinitely. And for a moment, it looked like that might happen.

In a report correction officials themselves say was crucial, the doctor who evaluated Rodriguez, David W. Holtzen, found that Rodriguez was hallucinating, had thoughts of suicide, was suffering from major depression, and was losing his grip on reality. Holtzen not only wanted Rodriguez admitted, he also wanted a court order to force Rodriguez to take antipsychotic medications.

Then something changed.

About two weeks later, Holtzen evaluated Rodriguez again and deemed him no longer seriously mentally ill but rather "antisocial" and "bored." According to an internal review of Rodriguez's suicide, Holtzen changed his mind after members of Rodriguez's treatment team said they believed Rodriguez was improving.

But Bridgewater's own records show that Rodriguez was still deeply unwell. Shortly after the reevaluation, officers at Bridgewater reported he was punching the cell walls and acting out of control. Despite those warning signs, Rodriguez was back in prison 72 hours after the new diagnosis. And his disciplinary record worsened again.

Through representatives of UMass Correctional Health, Holtzen declined to comment about the change in diagnosis, citing privacy laws of patients. A UMass spokesman called Holtzen's assessment "reasoned."

Even though Holtzen's interpretation of Rodriguez's behavior had changed radically, the doctor did warn that if Rodriguez was placed in conditions akin to solitary confinement, his mental health would be in jeopardy.

"[Holtzen] clearly puts in the chart: Watch this guy, he's a serious suicide risk," said Terry Kupers, the national specialist on mental illness in prisons. "From that moment on, this is a person who should have been tracked."

Instead, the Department of Correction kept losing track of Nelson Rodriguez.

Off the radar screen

By the spring of 2005, Rodriguez began bracing himself for life inside the state's toughest prison: MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole.

The clinicians at Souza-Baranowski understood his problems and even found him likeable. But prison officials transferred him after finding themselves overwhelmed by his chronic misconduct.

His state of mind was clear in a letter he wrote to his grandmother, Elsie "Bita" Miranda, and his brother Lorenzo Rodriguez. Using almost no punctuation, he wrote: "I'm trying really hard to survive in jail. . . . My tears been rolling down my cheekbone like crazy. . . . Look I'm gonna be moving to another jail is called Walpole. . . . Pray for me please."

At Walpole, he quickly slipped off the radar screen. His name never appeared on the prison's risk list. And his lengthy mental health history did not catch the attention of the two people at Walpole most responsible for his mental health care: his assigned clinician and her boss, Erika Grandberg, MCI-Cedar Junction's mental health director.

Grandberg would later tell investigators that she knew nothing about the prior warnings that more isolation could hurt Rodriguez or should, at least, trigger more vigilant care. She also defended Rodriguez's absence from the risk list, saying, "At the time, he wasn't somebody who we considered high risk."

But in two months at Walpole, Rodriguez just couldn't follow the rules. He was cited for various outbursts.

Still reasoning like a child, Rodriguez tried to appeal the punishments in the only way he knew how. In November, a month before his suicide, he pleaded to have his television, telephone, and visitation privileges restored. "They don't understand that I'm mildly mentally retarded," records say he told a clinician. "I got a dangerous mind. I can cut myself, hang myself." But nothing came of the appeals.

Rodriguez was 19 months into his prison sentence. He was due for an update on his treatment plan, but the deadline came and went without one, according to the department's review. Rodriguez's clinician told investigators that she had updated it, but that the plan "was not in his chart and she does not know where it went."

In early December, Rodriguez cut his arms and throat, triggering an emergency medical call. He spit on responding officers and bit one of them, records show, and was shackled by his arms and legs. Two days later, he was put on a 15-minute interval watch - a clear sign that he was a high risk for suicide.

And then prison officials decided to send Rodriguez to 10-Block. The prospect led him to further unravel.

On Dec. 14, 2005, a prison psychiatrist discontinued two medications Rodriguez was taking - Remeron, an antidepressant, and Seroquel, an antipsychotic drug - while upping his dosage of a third drug, a mood stabilizer. Department records reviewed by the Globe provide no explanation for the adjustment. The very next day, Rodriguez entered Cell 49 in 10-Block, a foreboding 60-bed, two-story unit where inmates are confined to closet-size cells 23 hours a day.

His brief time in custody had been as volatile as any inmate's. But when Rodriguez underwent a routine assessment as 10-Block's newest guest, the clinician's words had the uneventful tone of a weather report. "Stable, no evidence of psychosis, delusions, or hallucinations. Monitor [patient] per Treatment Plan, [as needed]."

Five days later, officers sounded an alert - Code 99, inmate hanging. They entered Cell 49 and removed the ligature from around Rodriguez's neck. They carried his body down the tier to a landing on the second floor. Chest compressions were begun. An ambulance was called. A Walpole rescue team responded.

He was pronounced dead at 4:44 p.m.

Investigators would later conclude that there were 22 officers assigned to patrol 10-Block that day; 11 of them were responsible for the upper tiers that included Rodriguez's cell. But no one made the required half-hour checks on Rodriguez for four hours, even though the log book for that day contained entries indicating the proper rounds had been made.

And in its review of his suicide, officials seemed to struggle to explain how an inmate like Rodriguez - mentally retarded with a well-chronicled history of dangerous misconduct - could be described as an inmate "not on the radar screen."

The answer, they concluded, may lie in Cedar Junction's operating ethos.

"Due to the overall culture of the institution, mental health staff at MCI-Cedar Junction have a rather high threshold for how they assess and address an inmate's acting-out behaviors and overall mental health status," the confidential internal review concluded.

Conclusions like that ring hollow for people who still remember Rodriguez as the child trapped in a man's body, the inmate who could never learn the rules.

"He never had a chance to have a childhood," Jason Nelson, his former guardian, told state lawmakers three months after his death. "To place a man in a maximum-security prison that is not equipped or staffed to help or even understand the type of mental illness Nelson was plagued with is beyond my understanding."

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/12/10/left_in_uncertain_hands_a_haunted_life_ends_tragically?mode=PF

BREAKDOWN THE PRISON SUICIDE CRISIS
Guards, inmates a volatile dynamic

December 11, 2007

Last of three parts

This story was reported by Globe Spotlight Team members Jonathan Saltzman, Michael Rezendes, Beth Healy, Francie Latour, and editor Thomas Farragher.

It was written by Saltzman and Farragher.

On a damp Saturday last fall, Scott A. Flaherty collected a stack of papers and notebooks that chronicled his decade as a state correction officer and set them ablaze in a cemetery near his home in Randolph.

Flaherty had liked his first eight years at MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole, but his last two had turned hellish. He hoped the graveyard bonfire would exorcise memories of his work behind the walls of the state's toughest prison.

Especially his memory of what happened there one night in late 2000.

Shortly before 10 that November night, a deeply disruptive inmate lay shackled to a concrete slab in a cramped cell. As Sergeant Flaherty stood watch, a captain and three other officers swept in, the captain grabbing, as he went by, a foam cup that Flaherty had been using to catch tobacco juice and sunflower seeds.

Flaherty said he watched as the captain tilted the cup over the mouth of the prisoner. Sickened, he turned away. But he could hear the parting admonition to the 33-year-old inmate, Hakeem Obba: If you don't behave, my officers will pour [excrement] down your throat.

"Because I can do anything I want to you," Captain Ronald R. Picard told Obba, according to a four-page complaint Flaherty filed with supervisors.

Two months later, Obba hanged himself with elastic from his underpants and bed sheets.

Flaherty, now an investigator for the State Police in Bristol County, said it would be wrong to draw a straight line from the alleged abuse of Obba - which Picard was punished for, but denies - to his suicide. But the larger point was hard to miss: Some correction officers, he said, are unfit to deal with the mentally ill or deeply troubled inmates who are increasingly their charge. The result is an incendiary dynamic between inmates and officers, a climate ripe for abuse.

"The inmate was restrained. He had no way to defend himself," said Flaherty, 37, one of two officers who reported the incident. "It would be akin to a police officer raping somebody. There's no gray area there."

The treatment of Obba - who was in four-point restraints for nearly 40 hours over four days - is one of the most flagrant of the cases examined by the Globe of abuse of inmates whom prison officials or prisoner advocates say had acute mental problems.

But it is hardly an isolated example. A Spotlight Team investigation into a recent surge in prison suicides and suicide attempts found other cases in which correction officers, with scant training in how to handle the burgeoning number of mentally ill in prison, brutalized, mistreated, or neglected inmates.

Indeed, as prisons increasingly become the asylum of last resort for the mentally ill - with the closure of state hospitals and the deinstitutionalization of their residents - desperation, frustration, and violence are rising on both sides of the cell door.

About 50 times a month, according to department statistics, members of its staff are assaulted by inmates. And, at the same time, the correction department has disciplined scores of officers for assault and other misconduct involving inmates.

As the number of inmate suicides has soared to roughly three times the national rate, prison officials say correction officers deserve credit for saving dozens of inmates who attempt suicide. Still, it is not hard to find cases where officers abused mentally ill prisoners.

In a 2004 episode at MCI-Cedar Junction, a correction officer twice punched a handcuffed inmate in the head as the prisoner lay face-down on the floor, giving him a bloody eye. The incident was captured on videotape, and the state fired the correction officer. But a civil service panel reduced the punishment to a 90-day suspension, in part because the prison superintendent was merely demoted for using excessive force in an unrelated incident. The prison system is appealing the reduced punishment in the courts.

In September 2006, prison officials sustained a complaint by an inmate that correction officers at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center locked him in a shower cell overnight in 2004 and shoved feces and urine into the stall with a mop. The prisoner -who suffers from panic disorder, depression, and possible bipolar disorder, according to medical records - has cut his own Achilles tendon and repeatedly swallowed razor blades, batteries, and push pins.

"I understand that when people do bad things, they have to go and pay for them," said Amelia Bargoot, the sister of the inmate, Eric R. Bargoot, a convicted bank robber. "But there's a difference between torture and rehabilitation."

Well-trained correction officers are crucial for recognizing suicidal inmates and preventing many deaths, according to Lindsay M. Hayes, a national specialist in prison suicide prevention hired by the state in 2000 to study Bridgewater State Hospital. Because many suicides take place at night and on weekends, when mental health clinicians have gone home, correction officers are the only ones who can intervene.

However, when Hayes returned to the prisons late last year for a follow-up study, he found that the state had ignored his recommendation to increase suicide-prevention training for new officers from two and a half to eight hours. Prison officials said they have since complied.

Still, the volcanic cellblock dynamic scares relatives and friends of prisoners.

"Between mental illness and the fact that these people have committed crimes, they're going to throw them away," said Kathleen Connolly, who worries that her boyfriend and father of her two children, mentally ill inmate John Nowell, will never make it out of Walpole alive.

"We'll take his dead body out of there," she said. "He's not going to make it. He does not belong in there. Either someone is going to kill him or he's going to kill himself."

The DDU

The place where Hakeem Obba died and where John Nowell now lives, sits at the extreme end of the gone-to-seed Walpole complex, just minutes and a world away from Gillette Stadium, the gleaming home of the New England Patriots.

It is a walled-off, cinder block bunker where inmates are locked up 23 hours a day. From a glass-paneled, high-tech silo at its inner core, correction officers monitor the inmates' every move on video screens. Prisoners can leave their cells for an hour of exercise in cages that are the human equivalent of small, fenced-in dog runs.

Prison officials call the bunker the Departmental Disciplinary Unit, or DDU for short.

The solitary confinement inmates who live there have a nickname for it, too: the hole.

Its 124 cells are reserved for "the worst of the worst," inmates who earn their spot in the system's most secure unit by assaulting correction officers or other inmates, or by committing other serious misconduct. It is a place, some officers say, where inmates feel they have nothing to lose by lashing out, because there is no place worse to go.

Correction officers who spoke to the Globe under the condition of anonymity, citing department rules that restrict their ability to speak to the media without permission, said a thick emotional callous is a virtual job prerequisite.

"It's a survival tool," one officer said. "That's exactly what it is."

But the officers did not hesitate to confirm what many maximum-security prisoners in solitary confinement told the Globe: Sometimes, in anger and frustration, they taunt inmates who threaten to kill themselves, telling them: "Hang it up!"

"You can't help it, it just comes out," said one Walpole officer who guards prisoners in an isolation block. His message to inmates he feels are using threats of suicide to gain leverage? "You know what? Do it!"

Or, said a Cedar Junction colleague assigned to a segregation unit where some of the toughest cases are confined, frustrated officers will respond to a threat of imminent suicide this way: "I'll be back in 10 minutes. Twenty maybe."

The officers, three 20-year veterans from a medium-security facility in Bridgewater and two relative rookies who work at MCI-Cedar Junction, said they are easy scapegoats when something goes wrong. They said they have become marginalized by mental health clinicians who no longer listen to what they have to say. They do stressful work that, they said, almost nobody wants.

"Morale has never been this low," one veteran officer said in an interview. "I've never seen guys despise coming to work. . . . They treat you like you're a guard at a mall."

A good night at Walpole, they said, is when everyone on the cellblock is breathing when they walk in, and everyone is breathing when they walk out.

Given the frustrations and dangers the correction officers confront, there is little reservoir of empathy for inmates who arrive with or descend into psychosis.

"We do have a lot of frequent fliers who swallow nails, spikes, glass," said Steve Kenneway, president of the 5,000-member Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union. "If you leave a light bulb laying around, they'll eat that, too. I mean they will just put everything in their system and then they'll tell you because it's their way of manipulating where they're going to be housed. There are definitely some inmates who are crazy, and they need help. They need treatment."

But treatment is not the responsibility of Kenneway's union members. They are trained to maintain safety and security.

"Let's think about why the person's sitting in the cell for 23 hours a day locked down," he said. "Because he murdered somebody. Stabbed an officer. Did something so egregious inside the prison system that now he has to be locked away even from the inmate population. So I'm never going to sympathize with the inmate. That's not my job."

Lack of sympathy is one thing. Urging self-destruction is something else.

Prison officials said such conduct is not tolerated and would be met with swift discipline if substantiated. Staff members have been suspended for making "derogatory comments" to inmates, they said. But the department could not supply an instance in which action was taken against an officer for encouraging an inmate's suicide or expressing glee after a hanging.

Correction officials say they do want to know who posted a jubilant message on a website used by MCI-Cedar Junction officers after a former inmate was found dead of a drug overdose shortly after he left prison earlier this year.

"Released last Thursday and found dead in Somerville Saturday. Hooray!" the Aug. 14 anonymous message read.

Prison management has disciplined staff for a wide array of other offenses.

From January 2003 to June 2007, the prison system's Office of Investigative Services investigated 1,126 allegations of serious misconduct by employees, some of which remain open cases, department statistics show.

Most of the cases involved correction officers. The alleged offenses ranged from 73 assaults - on inmates, employees, and civilians - to 98 cases of sexual misconduct with inmates, female and male.

Prison investigators sustained 312 allegations, more than a quarter of the 1,126. Because of the gravity of the offenses, the vast majority of those cases then went to hearings before the commissioner, who has the authority to issue significant punishments, ranging from an unpaid suspension of more than a week to termination.

The prison system ultimately fired 112 correction officers from January 2003 to June 2007, according to department statistics. But correction officers often appeal firings to the state Civil Service Commission or arbitrators - and some win back their jobs.

Sometimes correction officers have been found to be neglectful rather than abusive.

In 2005, for example, prison investigators found that correction officers failed to make required checks on three inmates who killed themselves at prisons in Walpole, Concord, and Shirley. Two of the inmates were severely mentally ill, and the third was undergoing withdrawal from a heroin addiction.

In two of the deaths, officers said they had made required checks but were contradicted by prison videotapes.

One of the suicides was that of Andrew Armstrong, who was serving 15 years for assault with intent to murder after a home invasion, and who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had made two previous suicide attempts and was discharged from Bridgewater State Hospital four days before his death.

Before he hanged himself, he used a bar of soap to scrawl a message near the stainless steel mirror in his cell.

"Dust in the wind," it read.

'I'

Posted by lois at 04:47 PM | Comments (0)

An Idea Whose Time Should Be Past

December 20, 2007
Editorial, NY Times
An Idea Whose Time Should Be Past

The mandatory sentencing craze that began in the 1970s was a public-policy disaster. It drove up inmate populations and corrections costs and forced the states to choose between building prisons and building schools or funding medical care for the indigent. It filled the prisons to bursting with nonviolent drug offenders who would have been more cheaply and more appropriately dealt with through treatment. It tied the hands of judges and ruined countless young lives by mandating lengthy prison terms in cases where leniency was warranted. It undermined confidence in the fairness of the justice system by singling out poor and minority offenders while largely exempting the white and wealthy.

The Supreme Court recognized the flaws in this system last week when it ruled that federal judges were justified in handing out lower sentences for drug offenders than were laid out in federal sentencing guidelines. The United States Sentencing Commission, the independent body that sets those guidelines, has called for easing drug-crime sentences for some categories of offenders and for doing so retroactively. In addition, bills pending in Congress would rewrite federal drug statutes, making treatment more readily available and sentences fairer and more sensible.

Nowhere is repeal of mandatory-sentencing policies more urgently needed than in New York, which sparked an unfortunate national trend when it passed its draconian Rockefeller drug laws in the 1970s. Local prosecutors tend to love this law because it allows them to bypass judges and decide unilaterally who goes to jail and for how long.

But the general public is increasingly skeptical of a system that railroads young, first-time offenders straight to prison with no hope of treatment or reprieve. In an often-cited 2002 poll by The New York Times, for example, 79 percent of respondents favored changing the law to give judges control over sentencing. And 83 percent said that judges should be allowed to send low-level drug offenders to treatment instead of prison.

The State Legislature has tinkered at the margins of these horrific laws, but stopped short of restoring judicial discretions. The time is clearly right for that crucial next step. The Legislature needs to gear up for the change, and Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who has thus far tiptoed around the subject, needs to set the stage when he delivers his State of the State message early next month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/opinion/20thu4.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)

WA: Women Prisoners Allege Abuse at State Prisons

"Any sexual allegations between a staff member and an offender is illegal, and the notion of consensus doesn't have a place here. The power vested in the folks who wear the uniform, any relationship has to be viewed as coercive," said Eldon Vail, Interim Corrections Secretary.

Two articles below.

Tacoma, WA - Thursday, December 20, 2007

Female inmates allege abuse at state prisons

RICHARD ROESLER; The Spokesman-Review
Last updated: December 19th, 2007 12:21 PM (PST)
In the summer of 2004, a man named Don Baker allegedly bought a woman a bathing suit, took her to Dairy Queen and ended up with her at a Motel 6. Afterward, he sent her a note saying he hoped she’d never tire of his touch.

What’s so unusual about that? Just five days earlier, she’d been an inmate at a Spokane-area prison. And Don Baker was one of the guards, making the liaison a violation of departmental rules.

Hundreds of pages of prison investigative records reviewed by The Spokesman-Review detail allegations of sexual harassment or abuse by at least seven Spokane-area female prison inmates, virtually all of whom volunteered to take polygraphs. Two state correctional officers were fired as a result: Baker and Jeffrey Wayne Hill.

Additionally, four current or former female inmates filed a proposed class-action lawsuit this summer in Thurston County on behalf of a yet-unknown number of women allegedly abused by staffers behind bars.

At the state’s primary women’s prison near Gig Harbor, “it appears that the guards ... believe that this is kind of like a fishing pond,” said Brett Purtzer, a Tacoma attorney who’s representing several other female inmates claiming sexual misconduct.

Not true, prison officials say.

“Sexual misconduct by correctional staff is a crime in this state and will not be tolerated,” Department of Corrections spokesman Gary Larson said in a written statement.

THREE WOMEN'S PRISONS

Washington runs three women’s prisons. Near Gig Harbor, the Washington Corrections Center for Women — widely known by its former name, Purdy — can house up to 738 offenders. In Medical Lake, the Pine Lodge Corrections Center for Women is the second-largest, with up to 359 inmates. And southwest of Bremerton is Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women, with 80 women.

According to the Department of Corrections, from January 2005 through last June, there were 202 allegations of sexual misconduct totaling 218 people of both sexes in Washington’s prison system. Nearly half — 46 percent — involved staffers. Of those cases, 26 incidents were substantiated.

The agency couldn’t immediately say how many of those 26 cases involved women. But it said the cases involve only a tiny fraction of correctional staffers.

“The reprehensible actions of a few do not reflect the dedicated professional work performed every day by thousands of DOC employees who make the safety of fellow staff, offenders and the public their top priority,” said Larson’s statement.

It’s unclear how many cases of alleged sexual misconduct never get reported. Court documents and the department’s internal investigations include many references to women saying that they fear reprisals from staff or other inmates. In fact, all four women in the class action case so far are cited in court documents as Jane Doe.

JEFFREY WAYNE HILL

Jeffrey Wayne Hill, now 52, had been working as a correctional officer for seven years when a female prisoner said in September 2005 that she’d seen him adjusting his pants as he came out of a women’s bathroom with a 28-year-old inmate who was “looking flushed.”

That sparked a two-month investigation, in which fellow inmates said the woman wrote “love notes” to Hill, transferred to him in books. Another reported that the woman would leave the shower curtain open so Hill could watch, and that she once reached through the handcuff port of a cell door and grabbed Hill’s crotch.

“CO Hill just looked surprised and didn’t say anything,” the informant told the investigator, Steve Baxter. Confronted, the woman initially denied everything. Then she acknowledged that she and Hill had sex. A polygraph found that she “was not attempting deception.”

Another former inmate said she’d only kissed Hill while she was an inmate, but that the two became sexually involved after her release from Pine Lodge. She got pregnant as a result, she said, but miscarried. She said Hill repeatedly threatened to have her sent back to prison if she told anyone about the relationship.

Hill resigned last year, only to be charged with second-degree custodial misconduct and official misconduct. In April, he pleaded guilty to both charges, ending up with two years probation and a suspended one-year prison sentence. He did not respond to a message seeking comment for this story.

The woman who said she’d had sex with Hill inside the prison ended up filing a claim against the state, which paid her $45,000. Purtzer was her attorney.

Yes, some of the sex was consensual, Purtzer concedes.

“The problem is that there’s a criminal statute precluding sexual contact with inmates,” he said. “The guards have all the power out there. And for these women, freedom or privileges are a big deal.”

DON BAKER

Also in 2005, investigators heard that another correctional officer, Donald Rhodes Baker, now 52, “had directed numerous inappropriate comments towards female offenders” at Pine Lodge. Among them: He allegedly told one woman that he wanted to bite her.

A 33-year-old woman said that while an inmate, she and Baker made plans to meet once she was released. The day she got out, he offered to rent her a hotel room. She declined.

A day later — when he was scheduled to be working, according to department records — Baker showed up at her mother’s house south of Olympia. They went to a Motel 6, where she said they had sex. She turned over the letter he’d sent her afterward:

“Thank you for allowing me to love you in such a way,” it read, saying he hoped that next time they could spend the whole night together.

When questioned, Baker denied ever touching her. He admitted getting the room but said he was alone. The letter just expressed his feelings, he said, not his actions.

Pine Lodge superintendent Donna Cayer was unconvinced, noting that the woman passed a polygraph test and that the hotel receipt indicated that two people were in the room.

“Your explanations regarding what occurred with all of the offenders were that of someone trying to twist the facts in order to diminish the severity of the situations,” she wrote. “... Your breach of trust is irreparable.”

He was fired and now lives in Clallam Bay, Wash. He did not respond to a request for comment.

THE PURDY CASES

The allegations of the other women are similar. One woman says she was sexually assaulted by four correctional officers, including two who forced her to perform oral sex on them in supply closets, one who fondled her and one who had sex with her in a property room and guards’ office. One night, she said, a guard woke her in her cell and brought her to an office for sex.

Another said she was fondled by a guard, complained, and when an investigator concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to get the guard in trouble, tried to kill herself. Over the course of months, an officer “repeatedly engaged in oral sex and other sexual contact with Jane Doe 2 in a number of different locations, including the staff conference room, the break room, the janitor’s supply closet and the clothing closet in the treatment and evaluation center,” reads part of the 35-page lawsuit complaint.

The third was allegedly forced to perform oral sex, as well as have sex in the closet and in a staff break room.

The fourth woman says that her correctional officer gave her a book, fast food and money for months, then took her into a closet and kissed and fondled her.

The court papers refer to at least three other women who were allegedly fondled or made to perform oral sex. Several women reported that guards gave them gifts — candy, soda, razors, lotion, hair gel — or privileges if they would undress or masturbate as the guards watched.

CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT

There are large sections of the state prisons where video cameras cannot see, the women’s attorneys say. By allowing such “secluded locations” and failing to properly supervise correctional officers, the state has “created an environment in which sexual assaults have occurred and are likely to occur in the future,” the lawyers for the women say.

And when the women report such abuse, they say, correctional officials fail to properly investigate. The women are given polygraph examinations; the men typically aren’t. None of the cases mentioned in the lawsuit, the women’s attorneys allege, were reported to local law enforcement. Larson said correctional officials notify local law enforcement about sexual misconduct allegations by staff.

“By treating women who report sexual assaults as suspects rather than potential victims, the class defendants have created an environment in which sexual assaults will go unreported, making such assaults more likely to occur,” the lawyers wrote in the lawsuit. Attorneys for the women at Columbia Legal Services and the Public Interest Law Group declined to comment.

On behalf of several of the correctional officers, the state attorney general’s office denied virtually all the allegations. The state also says the statute of limitations has run out on the claims.

CHANGES NOW UNDER WAY

In the wake of the class-action suit, the state prison system has commissioned several investigations by outside experts to scrutinize correctional officials’ response to sexual misconduct complaints, as well as training, security and supervision.

The results will be made public soon, Larson said. But procedures are already being tightened, and more changes may be on the way. At the women’s prison near Gig Harbor, Larson said:

* The prison superintendent reviews incident reports, including sexual misconduct, daily.

* Some areas have been restricted, both from offenders and some staffers “to reduce the potential for people to have access to areas where some things might occur that shouldn’t."

* The prison is doing a “key audit” to ensure that all keys are accounted for and that people have the appropriate level of access within the facility.

* And, there’s stepped-up review of a hot line for reporting prison sexual abuse.

“Those are things that we’re already implementing as a result of our look at this situation,” Larson said.

Originally published: December 19th, 2007 12:21 PM (PST)
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/updates/v-printerfriendly/story/233790.html
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Sexual misconduct found in WA women's prisons

05:53 PM PST on Wednesday, December 19, 2007

By LINDA BRILL / KING 5 News

New security measures for women's prisons

PURDY, Wash. – A new report details allegations of sexual misconduct by guards against women prisoners in Washington State, leading to proposed new security measures at the state's women's prisons.

The allegations are that some male guards forced sex on female inmates in return for special treatment. Now, seven guards are on paid administrative leave.

The corrections officers are accused of making sexual statements to female inmates and demanding sex for favors.

So far, four female inmates are part of a civil suit against the male guards in the state, but many believe this is a pervasive problem in Washington's women's prisons.

"There is a charged atmosphere in the facilities that include verbal harassment, sexual intimidation, and of course, the allegations of sexual assault that we've brought," said Beth Colgan, attorney for the prisoners.

Now comes the results of three reports from consultants hired by the state after the lawsuit was filed in July.

The proposed measures to protect women prisoners include:

--Hire more female staff

--Install more security cameras

--Contract with the Washington State Patrol to investigate sexual allegations

"Any sexual allegations between a staff member and an offender is illegal, and the notion of consensus doesn't have a place here. The power vested in the folks who wear the uniform, any relationship has to be viewed as coercive," said Eldon Vail, Interim Corrections Secretary.

The allegations first surfaced two years ago, but the Department of Corrections is just now contacting law enforcement, asking them to investigate.
http://www.king5.com/localnews/stories/NW_121907WAB_womens_prison_harrassment_TP.3170b3e3.html#

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

December 19, 2007

New Orleans: "Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.”

“Blow after blow, in the name of progress. Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.”

December 19, 2007
Architecture, NY Times.

High Noon in New Orleans: The Bulldozers Are Ready
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Ever since it took over the public housing projects of New Orleans more than a decade ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been itching to tear them down.

Now, after years of lawsuits and delays, it looks as if the agency will finally get its Christmas wish. The New Orleans City Council is scheduled to vote on Thursday on whether to sign off on the demolitions of three projects. HUD already has its bulldozers in place, engines warm and ready to roll the next morning.

Arguing that the housing was barely livable before the flooding unleashed by Hurricane Katrina, federal officials have cast their decision as good social policy. They have sought to lump the projects together with the much-vilified inner-city projects of the 1960s.

But such thinking reflects a ruthless indifference to local realities. The projects in New Orleans have little to do with the sterile brick towers and alienating plazas that usually come to mind when we think of inner-city housing . Some rank among the best early examples of public housing built in the United States, both in design and in quality of construction.

On the contrary, it is the government’s tabula rasa approach that evokes the most brutal postwar urban-renewal strategies. Neighborhood history is deemed irrelevant; the vague notion of a “fresh start” is invoked to justify erasing entire communities.

This mentality also threatens other public buildings in New Orleans that can be considered 20th-century landmarks. If the government gets its way, a rich architectural legacy will be supplanted by private, mixed-income developments with pitched roofs and wood-frame construction, an ersatz vision of small-town America. That this could happen in a city that still largely lies in ruins is both sad and grotesque.

Scattered across the city, the housing complexes involve more than 4,500 units. HUD plans to complete the demolitions within the next six months.

Despite the rush to raze the complexes, none of the designs for new housing are complete. And federal officials did not give developers the option of preserving part of any of the complexes in plotting the new projects.

Few would argue for preserving every one of the projects as it exists today. The facades of a 1950s section of the B. W. Cooper housing complex, for example, are monotonously repetitive. Its claustrophobic lobbies are in sharp contrast to the more private, individual entrances found in some of the older apartments, and the overall quality of construction is low.

But the best of the projects, built as part of the New Deal’s progressive social agenda, feature many elements that are prized by mainstream urban planners today.

At the Lafitte housing complex, a matrix of pedestrian roads fuses the apartment blocks into the city’s street grid and the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood. Low-rise apartments and narrow front porches, set around what were once beautfully landscaped gardens, are intended to encourage a spirit of community.

The quality of the construction materials would also be unimaginable in public housing today: Their concrete structural frames, red-brick facades and pitched terra cotta roofs would seem at home on a university campus.

The problems facing these projects have more to do with misguided policy and the city’s complex racial history than with bad design. The deterioration can be attributed to the government’s decision decades ago to gut most of the public services that supported them.

In the last few months the public has been able to judge firsthand how hollow HUD’s argument for demolition is. Just a few miles from Lafitte, the developer Pres Kabacoff is completing a renovation of the five remaining two- and three-story apartment blocks at the St. Thomas housing project, a complex that was partly demolished before the storm. The apartments, which are similar in scale to Lafitte’s, were renovated at a cost of under $200 per square foot — roughly what new construction with lesser materials would have cost.

Their handsome brick facades, decorated with wrought-iron rails and terra cotta roofs, are a stark contrast to the generic suburban tract houses that surround them on all sides. (And they are likely to be far more durable in the next storm.)

The point is that HUD’s one-size-fits-all mentality fails to take into account the specific realities of each project. The agency refuses to make distinctions between the worst of the housing projects and those, like Lafitte, that could be at least partly salvaged. Nor will it acknowledge the trauma it causes by boarding up and then eradicating entire communities in a reeling city.

In an eerie echo of the slum clearance projects of the 1960s, government officials are once again denying that these projects and communities can be salvaged through a human, incremental approach to planning. For them, only demolition will do.

The difference between then and now is what will exist once the land is cleared. If the urban renewal projects of the 1960s replaced decaying historic neighborhoods with vast warehouses for the poor, HUD’s vision would yield saccharine, suburban-style houses. And the situation is likely to get worse. The government has identified some other historically important public buildings for demolition as part of its push for privatization. Charity Hospital, an Art Deco structure built downtown in the late 1930s, was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, and its fate is uncertain.

The Thomas Lafon Elementary School, a sleek Modernist structure from the 1950s, is destined for the wrecking ball. And there has been talk of tearing down the Andrew J. Bell Junior High School, an elegant French neo-Gothic building completed in the late 19th century.

Blow after blow, in the name of progress. Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/arts/design/19hous.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print
Katrina can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 07:23 PM | Comments (0)

OK: State supreme court rules counties are liable for care of people in jails

State supreme court rules counties are liable for inmates' care

The Associated Press
OKLAHOMA CITY ‹ Counties are liable for jail inmates' medical care, including conditions that existed before their arrests, the Oklahoma Supreme Court has ruled.

Justices voted 8-0 on Tuesday in favor of HCA Health Services of Oklahoma, the parent company of OU Medical Center. The hospital sued Oklahoma County commissioners and Sheriff John Whetsel over $2.2 million in medical payments for treating prisoners in the jail from February 2003 through September 2006.

The county's argument was that much of the expense was to treat conditions that predated the prisoners' arrests, Justice Marian Opala wrote in the court opinion.

"Obviously it is going to have a great economic impact not only on us but I'm sure the other 76 counties and may well bankrupt some of those smaller counties," Whetsel said.

Oklahoma County books 44,000 to 45,000 people into its jail a year, he said.

"We've got to look to the Legislature to fix this," said commission chairman Ray Vaughn.

Taxpayers will have to pick up the cost of the Oklahoma County case, but smaller counties could be hurt even more, Vaughn said.

The case went to the Supreme Court after Oklahoma County District Judge Vicki L. Robertson ruled the sheriff was liable for the cost of medical care provided to inmates, including treatment of pre-existing health conditions.

"This opinion determines the question of liability. All that will remain to be decided by Judge Robertson now is how much (is paid)," said Kieran D. Maye Jr., attorney for the medical center.

Oklahoma County is not the only place where the issue has ended up in court.

Donald Lepp, a Tulsa attorney who has filed such cases, said lawsuits have been filed in many northeastern Oklahoma counties.

State law identifies two parties from whom a provider may seek payment for medical treatment ‹ the inmate and the county, the opinion said.

http://ap.ardmoreite.com/pstories/state/ok/20071219/226808940.shtml
Information from: The Oklahoman, http://www.newsok.com

Posted by lois at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

Iowa and prison fellowship group seeks full 8th Circuit review

Iowa and prison fellowship group seeks full 8th Circuit review

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- The state of Iowa and lawyers for an evangelical Christian prison ministry program have asked the entire 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review a Dec. 3 ruling that said the state cannot fund the program because it violates the Constitution's separation of church and state.

InnerChange Freedom Initiative Inc., Prison Fellowship Ministries Inc. and the state of Iowa filed a petition Monday asking all 11 active judges in the 8th Circuit to review the ruling by a three-judge panel.

IFI, Prison Fellowship and the state of Iowa are concerned that two technical legal principles that were part of the 8th Circuit's ruling could have negative future implications for faith-based organizations if left unchallenged.

A three-member panel of the 8th Circuit Court, which included former United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, upheld U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt's June 2006 ruling that a Prison Fellowship Ministries program at the Newton Correctional Facility was unconstitutional if paid for with taxpayer dollars.

The program at Newton immerses inmates in evangelical Christianity. Inmates who complete the 18-month program also get help after they're released from prison.

Barry Lynn, executive director of the Washington-based advocacy group Americans United For Separation of Church and State, which brought the lawsuit challenging the program, predicted that the Dec. 3 ruling would have major implications for the Bush administration's policies of allowing public funding for faith-based groups to offer services to government institutions.

The group's legal director, Ayesha Khan, said the court's ruling presents faith-based groups some challenges.

"They're really trying to argue that they ought to be able to violate the constitution with impunity," she said.

The petition filed Monday asks the full court to vacate the panel's Dec. 3 ruling arguing that it did not appropriately apply two legal doctrines.

It contends that the court incorrectly found that there was no secular program offered to inmates as an alternative to IFI's faith-based program from 2004-2006, a period in which Iowa provided partial funding for the IFI program.

IFI, Prison Fellowship and the state contend that the state did offer secular rehabilitation programs to inmates that were alternatives to IFI.

The petition also claims the court incorrectly allowed taxpayers to challenge programs where no tax money was expected. It claims the prison program was funded by the Legislature in part with money from the Healthy Iowans Tobacco Trust, money paid by tobacco manufacturers as part of a settlement with the state and not taxpayer funds.

"And perhaps it should go without saying that taxpayer standing must be based on the expenditure of taxes. But here, the court permitted taxpayers to challenge contracts which did not rely upon taxes," the petition said.

Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley said in a statement that the technical legal challenges do not impact the nine IFI programs currently operating in six states because they're privately funded, but "we feel these are important legal issues for all faith-based organizations going forward."

"We think the appellate court didn't get the law right on these two points and that it's important, on principle, to ask the entire court to review them," he said.

IFI operates privately funded programs in Texas, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri, including three programs for women.

The program continues to operate at the Newton prison, located about 40 miles east of Des Moines, but with no state funding, said Fred Scaletta, a spokesman for the Iowa Department of Corrections.

http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2007/12/19/news/iowa/20e504384872e1
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On the Net:
InnerChange Freedom Initiative: http://www.ifiprison.org
Americans United for Separation of Church and State: http://www.au.org

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

NY: Jump Seen in City's Juvenile Detention Costs

http://www.nysun.com/article/68285
New York Sun

Jump Seen in City's Juvenile Detention Costs
By Staff Reporter of the Sun
December 19, 2007

A sharp rise in the city's spending on juvenile justice comes from a jump in costs to jail youth in recent years, a new report released yesterday by the Independent Budget Office said.

The city saw costs to keep young people in detention rise 40% since 2003, even as the number of juvenile delinquents placed in detention facilities has declined slightly, the report found. Researchers also found that three quarters of the spending on juvenile crime goes to detention costs for pre-trial detentions and prison facilities after youth are sentenced, compared to single-digit percentages spent on prosecution, probation supervision, and prevention programs.
ou can download the 13-page report here:

http://www.nysun.com/pics/68285.pdf or here: http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/

Posted by lois at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)

UK: Posturing and peddling myths, these prison enthusiasts are blind to history.

Posturing and peddling myths, these prison enthusiasts are blind to history.
The planned increase in jail capacity is a disastrous admission by Labour that it expects its social programmes to fail

Polly Toynbee
Friday December 7, 2007
The Guardian

History suggests law and order is the last refuge of a government in a hole. So we had a triple whammy this week of more prisons, tougher immigration rules, and 42-day detention without trial. A new sentencing commission may help cap prison numbers, and a points system for immigration might make sense, but the net intended effect was tough, tough, tough.

Remember the desperate dying Tory days and home secretary Michael Howard's ever-more senseless punishments? First his "prison works" policy sent prison numbers soaring: Home Office graphs show how judges follow politicians' punitive words. Howard's final act was to put US-style two-strikes-and-you're-out sentencing on to the statute book for Labour to implement. (In the US a man went to jail for stealing a slice of pizza.) Howard meant to test the limits of Jack Straw's "tough on crime" rhetoric. Would the shadow home secretary follow him? Yes, of course. He'd probably have brought back the birch if Howard had gone one step further. But talking to him at the time, just before the 1997 election, he would say to the likes of me, with a wink and nod, it would all be OK once Labour was in power: we're decent people at heart who will do the right thing. Wait and see, don't worry.

Ten years later, anyone with a shred of liberal fibre in their body has learned better the hard way. After 37 crime, justice and police bills, the prison population has risen by 20,500 to 81,500, and now the government is proudly planning - yes, deliberately - to imprison another 10,500. Here is Jack Straw proclaiming three new prefabricated titan superprisons. Titans! My, they sound tough. These new PFI prisons will cost another £2.7bn by 2014.

Consider the disastrous message here. This proclaims the government doesn't expect any of its social programmes to have any good impact on crime. On the contrary, things will get worse. The 10,500 extra young men imprisoned in 2014 will be Labour's children, arrived in school in 1997. Young offenders will have been born under Labour and yet more not fewer of them will "need" to be locked away than under the Tories.

So much for Labour's improving schools, extended school activities, expanded youth services, the Yips (youth inclusion programme) designed to catch children at risk before they offend, or a score of other acronyms from Labour's neighbourhood programmes. All wasted, all dust? Of course not - but we will lock up ever more young men anyway. Martin Narey, former prisons chief, now head of Barnardo's, points out: "Fewer young people are offending and their offences are diminishing, but if you build prisons you fill them up."

Listen to ministers complain that crime has fallen by 40%, including violent crime, yet voters refuse to believe it. But who is to blame for that? Of course people think crime must be rising when prisons are bursting as never before. Labour has pumped up fear of crime. Magistrates responded by doubling their custody rate, judges by increasing average sentences from six to 27 months.

As for the Brownites, I can't count the number of briefings and hand-wringing asides I have been treated to over the years, bewailing terrible Blairite law-and-order policies. They used to whisper that the chancellor refused more Home Office money to waste on the disgraceful rise in prison places, instead of prevention and remedy. Either the Brownites lied on this (and many other things), or they didn't really know their leader and simply invested in him their own hopes. If the latter, then they should rebel right now. Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary took us to Iraq, will always do his master's bidding. (If, incidentally, titan superprisons were meant to please Daily Mail readers, the story appeared on page 8 under the headline, "Never mind justice, now judges are told not to lock up criminals if the nation's prisons are full".)

This week historians, led by David Cannadine, launched a brilliant - but sobering - history and policy website (historyandpolicy.org), giving brief and pithy accounts of past social policies, their successes and failures. If politicians would only browse here, historians hope, they might learn from what has gone before and stop reinventing so many square wheels. They would boast less about "new" ideas and their own "successes" compared with the past.

Frankly, if ministers bothered to study their own departments' recent work it would be a good start. Visiting one minister the other day, just as he launched a vital new policy, neither he nor his special advisers had ever heard of a very expensive and highly successful pilot scheme his predecessor had just completed as he left. When government's own memory is goldfish short, what hope for deeper history?

Look at the website's paper, Historical myth-making in juvenile justice policy, by Abigail Wills. She exposes two contradictory myths: that there was a golden age of law and order; and that treatment of juveniles is now more enlightened. Blair launching Asbos talked of his father's day in the 30s and his own youth when "people behaved more respectfully to one another and we are trying to get back to that". It's bunk: think of teddy boys and razor gangs. We tolerate much less minor violence than we did, and we tolerate teenagers less.

As for "enlightened treatment", the paper finds it more severe now than at any time since the 1850s, locking up more young people for lesser offences. Approved schools and borstals belonged under local authorities, not in the prison system, and were no worse and maybe relatively better than our suicide-prone, overcrowded youth offender institutions: the head of the Youth Justice Board resigned recently in disgust, with 70% of its budget spent on imprisonment, leaving little for prevention or rehabilitation.

Only two years ago the Carlile inquiry gave shocking descriptions of "children kept for up to 14 days in a bleak dilapidated cell with only an old rusty metal frame bed for company". The age of criminal responsibility was only recently reduced to 10 years. "The punitive stance of the last 15 years is historically unusual," says Wills. She quotes every era's historical boasting both that they face worse youth crime and that they deal with it better than before. Labour tops the league for both myths.

David Cannadine is optimistic in calling for historical advisers in each department under a chief historical adviser to the government. Wise old memory might be a forbidding ghost at the political banquet: he might make odious comparisons with the radical bravery of Labour in 1945 or Lloyd George in 1906.

History itself reminds us why Labour politicians don't refer to history when it comes to law and order. They don't much care, in this game of positioning and posturing, of seeming not doing. Crime has fallen in an extraordinary way - not because of policy but probably because of the economy, since it has fallen across the west in countries that imprison many fewer than the UK, and in America that imprisons many more.

There is plentiful evidence of "what works" in preventing reoffending - and it's not more prison. But Labour has taken us backwards, feeding punitive sentiment instead of persuading by proving what works. Douglas Hurd cut the prison population in the higher-crime Thatcher era: Labour has hugely inflated it.

polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2223693,00.html

Posted by lois at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

Court Overturns Ban on Alcohol Use by Probationers

Court Overturns Ban on Alcohol Use by Probationers
December 18, 2007
Join Together

Probationers cannot be banned from alcohol use if their criminal offenses had nothing to do with drinking, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California has ruled.

The Los Angeles based Metropolitan News-Enterprise reported Dec. 17 that the appeals court ruled that U.S. District Judge David O. Carter abused his judicial discretion when he ordered probationer Marcus Brandon Betts not to drink as a condition of his supervised release from prison.

"Moderate consumption of alcohol does not rise to the dignity of our sacred liberties, such as freedom of speech, but the freedom to drink a beer while sitting in a recliner and watching a football game is nevertheless a liberty people have, and it is probably exercised by more people than the liberty to publish a political opinion," wrote appeals court judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld.

Betts was involved in a scam to artificially inflate TransUnion credit scores, and pled guilty to conspiracy. He was sentenced to three years probation. The appeals court ruled that Carter erred because he did not establish that banning alcohol consumption would contribute to Betts' rehabilitation, protect the public, or deter him from committing future crimes.

The district court and the local public defender's office have been locked in a dispute that led to Carter's probation conditions: the public defender has been advising clients not to answer probation officers' questions about alcohol or other drug use, so the court, in turn, has been ordering all defendants to undergo drug tests and abstain from alcohol use while on probation.

The appeals court negated that policy, however, saying that parole conditions must be based on "the nature and circumstances of the offense, and the history and characteristics of the defendant."

http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2007/court-overturns-ban-on.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=35170832

Posted by lois at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2007

Sentencing: Whittling Away, but Leaving a Gap

December 17, 2007
Sidebar
Whittling Away, but Leaving a Gap
By ADAM LIPTAK

There was an avalanche of sentencing news last week. The Supreme Court gave trial judges more power to show mercy, the United States Sentencing Commission gave almost 20,000 prisoners doing time on crack cocaine charges a good shot at early release, and even President Bush commuted a crack sentence.

The net effect: tinkering.

D

The United States justice system remains, by international standards at least, exceptionally punitive. And nothing that happened last week will change that.

Even the sentencing commission’s striking move on Tuesday, meant to address the wildly disproportionate punishments for crack and powder cocaine, will have only a minor impact. Unless Congress acts, many thousands of defendants will continue to face vastly different sentences for possessing and selling different types of the same thing.

Crack and powder cocaine are two forms of the same drug. But, under the old guidelines, a drug dealer selling crack cocaine was subject to the same sentence as one selling 100 times as much powder.

Street dealers selling crack got much longer sentences than the wholesalers who sold them the powder they used to make it. Eighty-five percent of people convicted of crack offenses are black.

After the recent amendments to the guidelines, the ratios vary from 80 to 1 to 25 to 1, and the average sentence for crack offenses dropped by about 15 months, to a little less than 9 years. On Tuesday, the commission made the changes retroactive. The final sentencing decisions will be up to federal judges, newly empowered to do as they wish.

But only to a point. Neither the commission nor judges can do anything about the mandatory minimum sentences that retain the same disparities. The sentences are required by a 1986 law, enacted when crack was new, terrifying and seemingly unstoppable. Only Congress can change it.

Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing who was until recently a federal trial judge, said the focus on the sentencing guidelines was in some ways a distraction.

“The mandatory minimums are so draconian,” he said. “I’m a believer in a good guidelines system. And I would much rather trade a much tougher guidelines system and get rid of mandatory minimums.”

The mandatory minimum sentence for crimes involving five grams of crack — a little more than a sugar packet — remains five years. For powder, the five-year mandatory sentence does not kick in until 500 grams, or more than a pound.

Fifty grams of crack equals a guaranteed 10 years. It takes five kilograms of powder to mandate the same sentence. Five kilos is a lot of cocaine.

Mere possession of a relatively small quantity of crack means a five-year sentence. Possessing five grams of powder cocaine usually results in probation, said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group.

Indeed, the maximum sentence for simple possession of any drug but crack, including powder cocaine and heroin, is one year.

There are several bills kicking around Congress meant to harmonize cocaine sentencing laws. But, perhaps perversely, the Supreme Court’s decisions last Monday may make Congressional action less likely. Letting judges have too much discretion does not sit well with some legislators, and that discretion can be controlled through mandatory minimums.

“It’s going to be more difficult to make the case for repeal of mandatory minimums across the board when judges are viewed as having too much discretion,” said Professor Cassell, who now teaches law at the University of Utah and works on behalf of crime victims.

It is hardly clear, moreover, that judges are itching to employ their new discretion even in the context of the guidelines. Many judges say that sentencing is the hardest part of the job. It wears on the soul.

“Somehow I felt it was wrong for one human being to have that much power over another,” Judge Alex Kozinski, now the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, wrote of the days before the guidelines were in force and judges had vast discretion. Writing in The Federal Sentencing Reporter in 1999, he said the experience was so traumatic as to feel like “almost an act of sacrilege.”

The guidelines were a sort of relief, Judge Kozinski said. They established relatively narrow ranges and “presumably take into account all those factors I don’t feel competent to weigh: punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, harm to society, contrition — they’re all engineered into the machine; all I have to do is wind the key.”

Last week’s most curious sentencing decision came from Mr. Bush, who commuted the sentence of Michael D. Short a few hours after the Supreme Court ruled. It was only the fifth commutation of his presidency, and the first involving crack cocaine.

Mr. Short had served 15 years for aiding a crack cocaine ring. Mr. Bush, without explanation, ordered him released in February, a little more than a year before he was to get out anyway.

Margaret Colgate Love, the pardon lawyer at the Justice Department for most of the 1990s, seemed eager to read a lot into the decision.

“The president’s personal intervention to cut short Short’s prison term sends a clear signal that he, too, is concerned about the excessive length of crack sentences,” Ms. Love said. The decision, she said, “puts him on the side of the courts and the angels, and in opposition to Congress and his own Justice Department.”

On the other hand, she conceded, maybe it was just a random act of kindness.

Online: Documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles: nytimes.com/adamliptak.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/us/17bar.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 09:30 PM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2007

Open Letter NAPW and local leaders organized and sent to the DA asking him to drop the first degree murder charges against Theresa Hernandez who suffered a stillbirth.

This letter and a forum on women, pregnancy and drug use and other community education actions were organized by National Advocates for Pregnant Women http://advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/blog/OKC_Forum_Flyer_110707.pdf

OPEN LETTER TO THE OKLAHOMA COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY

David Prater, Oklahoma County District Attorney
Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office
320 Robert S. Kerr Ste. 505
Oklahoma City, OK 73102

June 25, 2007

Dear Mr. Prater:

As medical, public health, and child welfare advocacy organizations and as physicians, health care professionals, medical ethicists, midwives, child-welfare advocates, public health advocates, researchers, and as members of the community, we are greatly concerned about the arrest and prosecution of Theresa Lee Hernandez for first degree murder based on the fact that she suffered a stillbirth at 32 weeks of pregnancy. This unprecedented charge is based on the highly questionable medical claim that the pregnancy loss can be attributed to Ms. Hernandez’ drug use during pregnancy.

While we do not in any way condone a person’s use of alcohol, cigarettes, or other drugs that might affect pregnancy outcome or a person’s ability to parent, our commitment to the care of pregnant women and their children, as well as the interests of society as a whole, requires us to speak out against dangerous and counterproductive measures such as the arrest of pregnant women and new mothers as murderers subject to life imprisonment.

As every leading medical organization to address this issue has concluded, including the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Nurse Midwives, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the March of Dimes, the problem of alcohol and drug use during pregnancy is a health issue best addressed through education and community-based treatment, not through the criminal justice system.

Drug dependency is a medical condition - not a crime. Pregnant women do not experience alcoholism and other drug dependencies because they want to harm their fetuses or because they don’t care about their children.

Like other chronic medical conditions, drug dependency can be controlled and overcome through medical treatment. Medical knowledge about addiction and dependency treatment demonstrates that the majority of dependent people do not, and cannot, simply stop their drug use as a result of threats of arrest or other negative consequences. In fact, threat-based approaches do not protect children. They have been shown to deter pregnant and parenting women not from using drugs, but from seeking prenatal care and drug and alcohol treatment.

Health risks to women, fetuses, and children whether from poverty, inadequate nutrition, exposure to alcohol, drugs, or other factors can be mitigated through prenatal care, counseling, and continued medical supervision. For this to be effective, however, the patient must trust her health care provider to safeguard her confidences and stand by her while she attempts to improve her health (even when those efforts are not always successful). Converting the physician’s exam room into an interrogation chamber and turning health care professionals into agents of law enforcement destroys this trust.

Unfortunately many women in Oklahoma find it difficult to obtain the help they need to overcome their alcohol and drug dependency problems. In fact, according to the federal government’s drug treatment facility locator there are no residential treatment programs designed to meet the needs of pregnant and parenting women – or even women in general -- within 100 miles of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Arresting people with drug related problems not only deters them from seeking help – it is likely to deter others from offering compassion and providing the resources necessary to develop and fund the kinds of treatment that we know can help pregnant women and their families.

Moreover, miscarriages and stillbirths are not an uncommon outcome of pregnancy. Between 1998 and 2002 women and families experienced more than 1,500 stillbirths in Oklahoma. Women who become pregnant should not risk criminal prosecutions for murder should they suffer such a loss. Medically, it is still in many instances impossible to identify the cause of a stillbirth. Subjecting a woman and her family to criminal investigation after experiencing such a loss undermines the provision of health care and the process of recovery for both women and their families.

We therefore ask you, in the interests of maternal, fetal, and child health to drop this dangerous and counter-productive prosecution.

Signed,

Organizations

Oklahoma State Medical Association
Oklahoma Nurses Association
Oklahoma Women’s Network
National Association of Social Workers, Oklahoma State Chapter
Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma
YWCA Oklahoma City
American Constitution Society, Oklahoma City University School of Law Chapter
American Public Health Association
American Society of Addiction Medicine
Academy on Violence and Abuse
American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence
American College of Nurse Midwives
Association of Reproductive Health Professionals
Association of Women Psychiatrists
Association of Women’s Health, Obstetrical & Neonatal Nurses
Center for Gender and Justice
Doctors of the World-USA
Group for Chronic Addiction Research
Hygeia Foundation for Perinatal Loss and Bereavement, Inc.
Institute for Health and Recovery
International Center for Advancement of Addiction Treatment
National Association of Nurse Practitioners in Women’s Health
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence
National Institute for Reproductive Health
National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health
National Perinatal Association
National Stillbirth Society
National Women’s Health Network
Our Bodies Ourselves
Society of General Internal Medicine
Unitarian Universalists For Addiction Education

Medical Experts, Researchers, and Medical Health Professionals

Elizabeth Armstrong, Ph.D., M.P.A, Department of Sociology and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, Faculty Associate at both the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing* (Princeton, NJ)
Darcy Baer, L.P.N., Lakeside Women’s Hospital* (Oklahoma City, OK)
Marylou Behnke, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Florida, Board Certified
Neonatologist, Medical Director of the Early Steps program* (an early intervention program for children from birth to three years of age) (Gainesville, FL)
Michael Berman, M.D., Clinical Professor of Obstetrics Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, Yale University School of Medicine,* President of Hygeia Foundation for Perinatal Loss and Bereavement Inc. (New Haven, CT)
Jeffrey Blustein, Ph.D, Professor of Bioethics, Montefiore Medical Center/ Wieler Division*
(New York, NY)
Linda H. Chaudron, M.D., M.S., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Pediatrics and OB/GYN, Co-
Director, Residency Psychiatry Program, Director, Strong Behavioral Healthcare for Women, University of Rochester Medical Center* (Rochester, NY)
Deborah Coady, M.D., Board Certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology, Fellow, New York
Academy of Medicine, and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology* (New York, NY)
Arnold Cohen, M.D., Chairman of Department of OB/GYN Albert Einstein Medical Center* (New York, NY)
Eugenia J. Cowden, R.N., Association of Women’s Health, Obstetrical and Neonatal Nurses (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma)
Virginia Delaney-Black, M.D., M.P.H., Professor of Pediatrics at Wayne State University* and
Associate Director of the Children’s Research Center of Michigan at Children’s Hospital of Michigan* (Detroit, MI)
Marilyn Escobedo, M.D. (Oklahoma City, OK)
Fonda Davis Eyler, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, University of
Florida College of Medicine, Licensed Developmental Psychologist, Director of Early Steps* (Gainesville, FL)
Deborah Frank, M.D., Professor of Pediatrics, Boston University School of Medicine,*
Boston University School of Public Health,* Director of the Failure to Thrive Program at the Boston Medical Center and Staff Physician in the Child Development Unit* (Boston, MA)
Leslie Hartley Gise, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii* (Maui, Hawaii)
Akhtar Hameed, M.D., OB/GYN (Oklahoma City, OK)
Judith Harris, Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner (A.R.N.P.), (Oklahoma City, OK)
Joanne Bryant Horn, M.P.H., J.D. (Midwest City, OK)
Jennifer A. Hunter, M.D., Fellow in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, (Oklahoma City, OK)
Brenda Johnston, R.N., B.S.N., Oklahoma City University Director of Student Health and Disability Services* (Oklahoma City, OK)
Lynda Kruse, M.S., R.N.C., Clinical Nurse Specialist (C.N.S.), (Oklahoma City, OK)
Howard Minkoff, M.D., Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Maimonides Medical Center,* Distinguished Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, State University of New York Health Science Center Brooklyn,* Member, Ethics Committee of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists* (Brooklyn, NY)
Robert G. Newman, M.D., President Emeritus of Continuum Health Partners, Inc.,* comprising four hospitals and with the largest chemical dependency treatment services of any health care system in the United States, Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health and Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine* (New York, NY)
Barbara L. Norton, Dr.P.H., Assistant Professor of Research Health Promotion Sciences, University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, College of Public Health* (Norman, OK)
Barbara O’Brien, R.N. (Norman, OK)
Mary Petermann, A.R.N.P. (Oklahoma City, OK)
Albert L. Pizzica, D.O., Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (Philadelphia, PA)
Apple Rice, M.D. (Oklahoma City, OK)
Ruth Rose-Jacobs, Sc.D., Professor of Pediatrics and a Research Scientist at the Boston University School of Medicine* (Boston, MA)
David Schneider, M.D., M.S.P.H., Immediate Past President and Board Chair of Academy on
Violence and Abuse Family Practice (San Antonio, TX)
Morton Skorodin, M.D., Internal Medicine (Stillwater, OK)
Lisa W. Smith, M.D., OB/GYN (Oklahoma City, OK)
Dana Stone, M.D., OB/GYN, Lakeside Women’s Hospital* (Oklahoma City, OK)
Vanessa L. Teichman, L.P.N. (Oklahoma City, OK)
Ri Teref-Ta, Certified Nurse Midwife (C.N.M.), Community Midwifery Services* (Norman, OK)
Kenneth G. Thompson, M.D. (Oklahoma City, OK)
Virginia L. Vaughan, M.D., OB/GYN (Oklahoma City, OK)
Frank Wilson III, M.D., OB/GYN, Medical Director Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma (Oklahoma City, OK)

Posted by lois at 05:07 PM | Comments (0)

December 16, 2007

Texas to Screen Evacuees It Buses

December 16, 2007, NY Times
Texas to Screen Evacuees It Buses
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

AUSTIN (AP) — Texans who board evacuation buses during hurricanes or other emergencies must now submit to criminal background checks, the state’s emergency management director said.

The policy is an effort to keep sex offenders and fugitives from boarding evacuation buses with children, the elderly and the disabled, Jack Colley, the chief of the state’s Division of Emergency Management, told The Houston Chronicle, which posted the article on its Web site Saturday.

Mr. Colley said that sex offenders or other criminals would be evacuated on different buses. “We’re not going to leave anyone,” he said.

The intent, he said, is to make sure that vulnerable residents are not victimized.

Mr. Colley also said that state officials would be able to segregate evacuees, even in the chaos of an emergency. “We’ll have procedures,” he said, “and we’re not going to advertise what they are.”

Under the plan, anyone who boards must provide a name. Officials can ask for photo identification, but it is not needed to board, Mr. Colley said.

Officials will check names against sex offender registries and other criminal databases, Mr. Colley said.

After Hurricane Katrina, about 1,700 parolees did not check in with the authorities in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/us/16texas.html

Posted by lois at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)

Henrietta Yurchenco, Pioneer Folklorist, Dies at 91

December 14, 2007
Henrietta Yurchenco, Pioneer Folklorist, Dies at 91
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Henrietta Yurchenco, whose quest to save living music from the past took her from the mountains of Guatemala and southern Mexico to a New York City radio station to the Jewish community of Morocco, died Monday in Manhattan. She was 91.

The cause was lung failure, her son, Peter, said.

Like a linguist nailing down a dying language, Ms. Yurchenco, an ethnomusicologist, recorded music from long ago that faced an unclear tomorrow. In an interview, Pete Seeger said she “went to places people didn’t believe she would be able to find.”

Among her thousands of recordings are ritual songs from North, South and Central American Indians, including peyote chants, and music celebrating everything from love to agriculture, found from Eastern Europe to the Caribbean to Appalachia to Spain.

Oscar Brand, the folk singer and radio personality, citing her work with Native Americans, said, “She went out of her way to discover the soft spots, the shining things you couldn’t see in the mists back in the mountains.”

Ms. Yurchenco was also a radio producer, announcer and interviewer. Beginning in the 30s, she broadcast only folk music, both traditional and modern, at a time when few knew it.

Woody Guthrie called her in 1939 or 1940 and asked if he could be on her live show. Bob Dylan, a little tongue-tied, did one of his early radio interviews with her in 1962. In an interview with NPR in 1999, she said she scoured union halls and immigrant groups to find genuine music.

Ethnomusicologists study music in varying ethnic contexts. Ms. Yurchenco began by tracking down 14 all-but-unknown Mexican and Guatemalan tribes, reaching them with little but a mule and 300 pounds of recording equipment. She eventually recorded 2,000 of their songs for the Library of Congress.

Later, she studied the music of the Sephardim, Jews who had been thrown out of Spain in the 15th century. She arrived in Morocco just as many Sephardim were preparing to move to the new state of Israel, and she seized a last chance to capture their ancient songs in the original context.

Ms. Yurchenco was intrigued by women’s roles in creating music and of the sexual politics involved in making it. Mr. Seeger said women may be the best music collectors, partly because many have the patience to appreciate a grandmother singing a 400-year-old ballad to a baby.

Ms. Yurchenco wrote several books, including a biography of Woody Guthrie. At least one book is still to be published: a study of the music of Morocco’s Sephardic women. She long taught at City College, lectured widely and fought fiercely for her leftist ideals.

Starting in 2005 and continuing almost until her death, Ms. Yurchenco invited like-minded friends to her apartment to sing songs against the Iraq war, often the same ones used against the Vietnam War. Some of their singing was broadcast on Internet radio.

Henrietta Weiss was born in New Haven on March 22, 1916. She told The Villager, a neighborhood newspaper in Manhattan, that her father was “a dreamer who started out in business and failed miserably.” She was a promising pianist who attended the Yale School of Music.

At Yale, she met Boris Yurchenco, an Argentine-born painter, at a meeting of the John Reed Club, named for the American writer who chronicled the Bolshevik Revolution. They were married in 1936, the year she was first arrested in a protest; she was demonstrating against a brass band from Mussolini’s Italy.

In 1939, her musical interests led her to WNYC, the public radio station then owned by New York City. She made friends with people like Burl Ives, the folk singer and Alan Lomax, a legendary music collector.

In 1941, she followed her husband on a trip to Mexico. An engineer from WNYC came along to record music, and she took over when he left. With financial support from groups like the American Philosophical Society, she repeatedly visited the area to record animal sacrifices, healing ceremonies and much else. Scorpions, both yellow and green, were a persistent problem.

Ms. Yurchenco and her husband divorced in 1955. In addition to her son, Peter, of Skillman, N.J., she is survived by two grandchildren.

Legend has it that Mr. Seeger and the Almanac Singers, an earlier name for the Weavers, wrote the song “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” in Ms. Yurchenco’s relatively quiet bathroom during a noisy party in her apartment. Mr. Seeger said that was not quite true, though he recalled her famous parties.

Mr. Seeger explained that Leadbelly, the great folk and blues artist, was in Ms. Yurchenco’s bathroom with the singer Sam Kennedy, who perched on the obvious as he sang “Drimmin Down,” a lament about a dead cow. (Leadbelly later livened up the beat and used the tune for his own cow song, “If It Wasn’t for Dicky.”)

Mr. Seeger liked the melody and added lyrics about wine.

February 11, 2007
Urban Studies | Singing Out
Yearning to Study War No More
By DAVID AUSTIN GURA

IF you had been standing outside apartment 12E in the white brick apartment building at West 22nd Street and Ninth Avenue in Chelsea on Thursday evening, you would have heard songs taking you back four decades, to a time when it almost seemed that by singing loudly enough, it might be possible to stop a war.

It is on Thursday evenings that Henrietta Yurchenco, a 90-year-old former City College professor and radio producer, collects a few of her students to sing the same protest songs she sang and taught 40 years ago. The war on their minds is a new one, but many of the songs they sing, like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Study War No More,” were the product of wars long past.

Ms. Yurchenco, who this evening was wearing a jewel-studded peace symbol around her neck, still believes in the beauty and power of folk music. And her former students, now in their 40s and 50s, find that same beauty and power in their teacher.

Ms. Yurchenco taught ethnomusicology at City College in the 1960s and ’70s, when another war divided the nation. She held singalongs then, and in 2005, she revived the tradition with friends and former students.

Her charges group themselves around the kitchen table, surrounded by trailing ivy and colorful animal sculptures from Mexico and Guatemala, two countries where she has traveled and recorded traditional music. Ms. Yurchenco runs the singalong like a seminar: distributing lyric sheets, commenting on the repertoire, fielding questions. Every evening has a theme. This evening, the theme was labor, and the lineup included such songs as “Dark as a Dungeon,” Merle Travis’s song about the perils of coal mining, and “The Banks Are Made of Marble,” popularized by Pete Seeger.

When Ms. Yurchenco taught courses on folk music and the blues, students flocked to her home for singalongs. She barely had enough space for everyone. These days, perhaps half a dozen singers show up, although other musicians drop in. Among the regulars is Bob Malenky, a self-described “red-diaper baby” raised on such labor movement staples as “Joe Hill” and “Union Maid.”

At this singalong, after a rendition of “Join the C.I.O.,” Ms. Yurchenco described a fight she had with the song’s author, Aunt Molly Jackson, a cantankerous, Kentucky-born labor activist and folksinger. The fight took place during a picnic in the 1940s at Bear Mountain State Park, attended by musical luminaries like Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Mr. Seeger. “She was a peppery dame,” Ms. Yurchenco said of Ms. Jackson. “You had to watch out for her.”

Although Ms. Yurchenco’s folk repertoire is vast, she prefers songs that couple easy tunes with provocative lyrics. “We don’t do any mediocre songs,” she said. “The melodies are good; the words are wonderful.” DAVID AUSTIN GURA

Posted by lois at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2007

Private Prison Accountability Act of 2007

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Hillary Signs On To Private Prison Accountability Act

December 10, 2007 -- Washington, DC ­ Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton today co-sponsored the Private Prison Information Act of 2007, legislation introduced by Senator Joe Lieberman to increase transparency and accountability at private prisons. The Private Prison Information Act of 2007 will help to prevent abuse and neglect at private prisons by requiring public disclosure of information about their operations.

"As the federal government continues to contract out the incarceration of federal prisoners, it is essential that there be public disclosure about the operation of these private prisons,² Senator Clinton said. " Right now, the public does not have the same right of access to information about private prisons as it has for federal prisons. There is a lack of accountability into how tax dollars are being spent, which can place the safety of correctional officers, surrounding communities, and prisoners at risk. This legislation will help to ensure that citizens and elected officials can properly assess the performance of private prisons and, if necessary, hold them accountable for misconduct.²

Currently, federal law does not require private prisons that house federal prisoners to disclose information to the public about the daily operation of their facilities, and many private prisons do not submit reports to the federal government. This legislation will require private prisons that house federal prisoners to provide the same information available to the public that federal prisons are required to provide under the Freedom of Information Act.

Approximately 27,000 federal criminal prisoners are serving time in private prison facilities. Additionally, more than 40,000 of the immigrants and asylum seekers that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains each year are held in private detention centers. Studies have shown that correctional officers at privately run prisons are paid less, receive less training, and experience higher turnover rates than those at prisons run by government agencies. These differences can lead to greater rates of assaults on staff, inmate on inmate assaults, and escape attempts.

The bill is supported by a broad coalition of associations representing correctional officers and law enforcement officers and public interest and advocacy groups, including Corrections USA; the Sheriff Officers Association of Nassau County, NY.; the Suffolk County Correctional Officers Association, N.Y.; the Westchester County Correctional Superior Officers Association, N.Y.; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE); Amnesty International USA, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

http://www.allamericanpatriots.com/48738700_senator-clinton-cosponsors-legis
lation-improve-transparency-and-accountability-private-pris

Posted by lois at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)

IL: Tiny Thomson still waiting for prison to pay off

Tiny Thomson still waiting for prison to pay off
Friday, December 14, 2007 5:07 PM CST
By Kurt Erickson

SPRINGFIELD -- Nearly 10 years ago, residents of the village of Thomson learned their tiny town in northwest Illinois could become a hot spot of development.

Instead, promises of economic growth spurred by the construction of a new state prison have turned into a political hot potato.

The $150 million prison remains mostly unused, sitting on 146 acres of sandy farmland north of the Quad-Cities. Instead of 1,600 maximum-security prisoners and more than 600 hundred workers, the prison is home to 140 minimum-security inmates and an estimated 72 guards and other staff members.

The failure to fully open the prison could play a role in two political races this winter.

State Rep. Mike Boland, D-East Moline, and state Sen. Mike Jacobs, D-East Moline, both face challenges in the Feb. 5 Democratic primary election.

Both incumbents have called on the governor and the Illinois Department of Corrections to earmark the $54 million that is needed to operate the prison at full capacity on an annual basis.

Jacobs has angered his colleagues elsewhere in the state by calling on the department to close an existing, older prison such as the maximum-security lock-up in Pontiac in order to free up funds to fully open Thomson.

For now, the governor’s office and the department say they have no plan to open the facility, which was announced in 1998 and completed in 2001.

Paul Rumler of Moline, who is challenging Jacobs in the upcoming primary for the 36th Senate District seat, said he wants to investigate whether the department could be restructured in order to find money to open Thomson.

“I think there must be a way to maximize our resources,” said Rumler, an economic development specialist in the Quad-Cities area.

Rumler said shutting down an existing prison is not the solution.

“That is too much of a political hot potato,” said Rumler.

Rumler said the lack of action on Thomson is an example of the ineffectiveness of state government this year.

“It just frustrates people,” said Rumler.

Jerry Lack of East Moline is challenging Boland in the 71st House District primary race.

As an aide to former U.S. Rep. Lane Evans, Lack worked unsuccessfully to get the federal government interested in using the empty prison. Officials, however, said the facility was located too far from Chicago to be of use, he said.

Lack said he has not ruled out the idea of closing one of the state’s old maximum-security prisons and move the inmates to Thomson.

But, Lack acknowledged that proposal has caused a firestorm in communities with older prisons.

If elected, Lack said he would like to see a review of all current prisons in order to determine if it makes economic sense to the state as a whole to close one of the older facilities.

For example, an older prison may not be as energy efficient as the Thomson prison.

“If it makes sense to close a prison, it should be investigated,” Lack said.

Like Rumler, Lack said people are frustrated with the state’s overall budget problems, which have kept lawmakers in a perpetual legislative session all year.

“The budget is a mess in the state,” said Lack.

Boland says he wants state to slowly begin opening up the maximum-security portion of the prison. The phased-in approach might eventually lead to the closure of one of the state’s older prisons, making it less painful for that community.

In particular, Boland said the Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet might be ripe for closure. Unlike smaller communities that host existing prisons, Boland said Joliet is a growing area where the closing of the prison wouldn’t be as noticeable on the local economy.

“It’d be my hope that we could start getting prisoners shifted from Stateville to Thomson,” said Boland.

But, in keeping with the delays that have kept Thomson from fully opening, Boland said his idea wouldn’t transform the Thomson prison overnight.

“It’s going to take a while,” Boland said.

Copyright © 2007, Pantagraph Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2007/12/14/news/doc4763090dc4352274137116.prt

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

MA: Springfield Republican: High court rulings on drugs hailed

High court rulings on drugs hailed
Saturday, December 15, 2007
By STEPHANIE BARRY
sbarry@repub.com

SPRINGFIELD - Area trial attorneys and a federal judge are applauding U.S. Supreme Court decisions allowing lighter sentences for some drug defendants.
But some say that only Congress can promote fair sentencing by repealing mandatory minimum penalties.
In upholding lighter sentences for two drug defendants who had appealed harsher penalties rendered by federal appeals courts, the Supreme Court decided on Monday that trial judges should have a freer reign in determining prison terms.

The language was particularly emphatic with respect to crimes involving crack cocaine, which brings much higher sentences than the powder form under federal sentencing laws.

"You're looking at a mandatory 10-year sentence when you have 50 grams (1.75 ounces) or more of a mixture of something that includes cocaine base," said criminal defense lawyer Vincent A. Bongiorni during a recent interview. "It would take 5 kilos (11 pounds) of powder cocaine to have the same sentence apply." He said he believes the only way to promote fairness in sentencing is to repeal mandatory minimum drug sentences imposed by Congress. "Otherwise, you're still going to have 18- and 20-year-old black kids facing 20 to 30 years in prison for a small amount of drugs," he said.

Crack has inarguably emerged as an inner-city drug, while powder cocaine is traditionally regarded as a drug to which whites gravitate. In its rulings on Monday, the Supreme Court acknowledged that statistics show 86 percent of defendants ensnared by the crack to powder cocaine ratio are black. The racial implications caused the high court to rule that judges have the discretion to diverge from federal guidelines that dictate crack cocaine sentences. The guidelines were established in the mid-1980s to promote uniformity in sentencing, and in response to the advent of the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged many urban centers.

But, many legal experts say the mandatory penalties have been no remedy. "Rigid guidelines and mandatory minimums have really been an incredible failure," said criminal defense lawyer David P. Hoose. "Arguments for lenience have moved into the back rooms of the courthouse ... where the prosecutor can trump the judge's view, and I really think that has been wrong-headed from the start."
A defendant convicted of possessing or distributing 50 grams (or a tennis ball-sized rock) is exposed to a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison, except in a small number of cases when a lawyer can ask for so-called "safety valve" relief.
Decades more can be added if the defendant has a criminal history; penalties can reach life imprisonment.

However, most defense lawyers feel that Monday's rulings are encouraging, if not a panacea. "This is a very big victory .... It's getting back to letting judges who are right there with the case have the discretion," said Linda J. Thompson, a criminal defense attorney and vocal critic of the federal sentencing structure.

She added that one of the two rulings tempered the federal appeals court's ability to easily overturn sentencing judges, a nuance that has been warmly received by U.S. District Court judges nationally. "There are more than 700 federal trial judges like me around the country; I can't imagine a single one who is not welcoming these decisions," said U.S. District Court Judge Michael A. Ponsor, who presides in Springfield. "They recognize the superior position of a trial judge in rendering sentences for defendants and greatly clarifies the appeals process."

Ponsor also noted the votes on each case - 7-2 - which placed liberal and conservative justices in agreement. "It's interesting that the decision is supported by the full political spectrum of the court," he said. The U.S. Sentencing Commission also voted this week to apply the rulings to 19,500 defendants already sentenced under the crack cocaine sentencing standards.
Some legal scholars say that, coupled with the so-called Booker ruling of two years ago that made sentencing guidelines advisory rather than mandatory, the rulings signal a national shift in philosophy. "It's a bit of a cultural moment ... a rethinking of certain types of harshness in sentencing," said Giovanna E. Shay, a professor at the Western New England Law School.

http://www.masslive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-2/1197708679242660.xml&coll=1
©2007 The Republican
© 2007 MassLive.com All Rights Reserved.

Posted by lois at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2007

WI: $38.2 milliion in overtime in one year for prisons

THU., DEC 13, 2007
Overtime costs at prisons increase
Associated Press
Madison, WI
The state paid $38.2 million in overtime for workers in the state prison system in the most recent fiscal year after the number of inmates rose instead of dropping slightly as expected, a newspaper reported.

With the extra work, 308 correctional officers earned more than $20,000 each in overtime, 26 more than doubled their earnings and 14 had six-figure salaries, including two who made more than $120,000 each, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 's analysis of state data.

The overtime cost saw a 27 percent rise to $36.3 million for the fiscal year ending in mid 2006. Then it rose to $38.2 million in the last fiscal year.

The prison population, meanwhile, rose by about 1,000 inmates from mid-2005 to mid-2007, instead of falling slightly as the Department of Corrections projected.

The Wisconsin State Journal reported in March 2006 that the number of inmates in state prisons rose more quickly than the number of guards between 2002 and 2005, leading to a 78 percent increase in overtime payments to corrections officers during that period.

In the state budget passed by the Legislature this fall, lawmakers included money for hiring 50 corrections officers, which is expected to reduce the overtime costs to $26.3 million this fiscal year.

While the new hires will raise payroll costs, the state should save $1.2 million compared to paying overtime that otherwise would be needed, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimates.

Susan Crawford, who was a top aide to Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch before leaving last week for a job in the state Department of Natural Resources, said the rise in overtime resulted from many factors, including more inmates and labor contracts that raised wages and provided officers with more days off.

She also noted the agency has had to deal with personnel cuts, such as the 39 corrections jobs eliminated by the Legislature in 2005.

"We have not always had a lot of success in getting additional hiring authority, " she said.

DOC spokesman John Dipko said the agency has acted to reduce overtime, including reviewing overtime use in advance, delaying any training that would be done on overtime and consolidating prisoner transports.

State Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, said he is skeptical of the department 's explanations.

"The answers they gave us didn 't seem to quite add up, " he said. "We feel there 's something else going on, but we haven 't been able to pinpoint it. It seems there 's something not quite right. Perhaps they need an audit. "

Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, suggested critical lawmakers should visit prisons and experience the conditions officers face. The staff shortage can result in officers working double eight-hour shifts while dealing with inmates who like to hassle prison personnel.

"If they think this is a circus or playground that people are going to work in (and) that this is a place with nice working conditions, come out and take a look, " Beil said.

Overtime, he said, is driven by a worker shortage.

The 50 new officers will help the situation, Beil said, but he would have liked to see twice as many authorized.

He defended those who work long hours, volunteering for lots of overtime, although he said the union does not encourage doing it.

"Is it healthy? I don 't think so, " Beil said. "Is it wrong? No. "

The starting pay for the officers is $29,591 a year.

A sergeant at the Fox Lake Correctional Institution earned a base salary of $52,213 last year and another $68,695 in overtime, for a total of $120,908.

An officer at the Columbia Correctional Institution also topped $120,000 in total earnings, and a sergeant there made more than $119,000.

The Wisconsin State Journal contributed to this story.
http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/index.php?ntid=262089&ntpid=3

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

Don't blame 'bad values' for the nation's racial gap

News and information for Friday, December 14, 2007
Published: Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA
Don't blame 'bad values' for the nation's racial gap

To the editor: As Rhonda Soto clearly writes (Gazette, Dec. 3), racism and classism are a potent combination. Together they can create obstacles that even Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey might not have been able to surmount. For example, as Ms. Soto states, blacks are slightly less likely than whites to use illegal drugs. However, when it comes to arrest, conviction and incarceration, the paths of whites and blacks divide. African-Americans constitute 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, African-Americans receive 55 percent of drug possession convictions, and African-Americans comprise 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug possession.

As a result, in Massachusetts, 89 percent of those serving mandatory minimums are people of color, while about 80 percent of the state's population is white. So let's stop blaming "bad values" and come to terms with the real root to this phenomenon: targeted policing, the hazards of "driving while black," and a "criminal injustice system" that must be remade so that all of us are treated equally.
Lois Ahrens
Northampton

Posted by lois at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2007

VT: DOC considering closing one prison and releasing some people convicted of non-violent offences

Does Sanity Reign in VT? Maybe....

Corrections looking to save $4M
Rutland (VT) Herald
December 13, 2007
By WILSON RING The Associated Press

MONTPELIER ‹ The Vermont Department of Corrections is considering closing one of the state's prisons and releasing some nonviolent offenders from state supervision as part of an effort to pare $4 million from next year's budget.

Those were two of the possibilities included in a message Corrections Commissioner Rob Hofmann sent to his staff Tuesday as he was delivering to state lawmakers a 150-page proposal to reduce the rate of growth of the Corrections budget.

Other budget-saving possibilities listed include making prisons more efficient, increasing work loads for prison staff, changing the way offenders are supervised in the community and expanding community treatment options.

"No one of these is a silver bullet and some are frankly counterproductive to the overall mission of the Department of Corrections and the system of criminal justice in Vermont," said the executive summary of the report.

In a message to his staff, Hofmann said the Legislature ordered the department last spring to put the brakes on the rate of growth in the Corrections budget.

"They were not actually requesting a reduction in the DOC budget, nor level-funding it, nor even restricting it to the average growth rate of other departments," Hofmann's message said. "They were essentially asking that we limit the budget increases to about double the growth of the overall General Fund.

"While this may seem reasonable on the surface, once you analyze the possible choices, the options are limited and difficult," he said.

The executive summary of the report called for a fundamental shift in the way Vermont deals with crime and the people who commit them.

"In the long run, the most effective way to reduce the demand for increased prison capacity is to increase the effectiveness of efforts at responding to crime and misbehavior in the community," the report said.

For years the Legislature has been funding steady increases in the budget of the Corrections Department, recently more than 10 percent a year. Between 2000 and 2007 the Corrections budget increased 74 percent, to $130 million.

Over the past two decades the number of people in custody in Vermont has almost tripled while the violent crime rate has stayed the same. The report detailed how courts are imposing tougher sentences for a variety of offenses, including drug crimes, driving under the influence of alcohol and domestic violence.

Vermont is already a national leader in finding alternative ways to deal with offenders, especially nonviolent first-time offenders.

"There are virtually no low re-offense risk, nonviolent offenders in prison," the report said.

The Legislature ordered the department to reduce incarceration costs by $4 million, with half of that to be reinvested in re-entry services. Lawmakers also recommended that the department reduce by 10 percent by the end of next June the number of inmates incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.

As of Wednesday, there were 1,621 people being held in Vermont prisons and another 518 being held out of state.

Some of the money saving suggestions in the report:

Closing one or more prisons.

Expanding existing facilities to increase efficiencies.

Refocusing a facility's mission.

Decrease, modify or eliminate supervision of lowest risk probationers.

Increase caseloads.

Increase use of alternate supervision strategies.

Maintain current staffing levels but add more offenders.

Lessen sanctions on selective nonviolent offenders.

Expand efforts with communities and treatment providers.
http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071213/NEWS04/712130387

Posted by lois at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)

Deep Divisions, Shared Destiny - A Poll of Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans on Race Relations

Deep Divisions, Shared Destiny - A Poll of Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans on Race Relations

New America Media, Poll, Posted: Dec 12, 2007

PDF of the entire report, summary, etc are at this URL
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=28501933d0e5c5344b21f9640dc13754

NEWS CONFERENCE WITH ETHNIC MEDIA AND CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS

Washington, D.C. – Sergio Bendixen, of Bendixen & Associates and Sandy Close, Executive Director of New America Media will be joined by Richard Rodriguez, Author, NAM Editor and TV Commentator at a press conference -- Wednesday, December 12, at 10:00am at The National Press Club - Zenger Room - 529 14th Street NW Washington, D.C.-- to release the results of the nation’s first multilingual poll, which examines how the nation’s largest ethnic groups feel towards each other, as well as their attitudes on key elements of American society.

Also joining in the press conference:

- Dereje Desta, Editor/Publisher, Zethiopia Newspaper
- Joshua Lee, Reporter, Korea Times

METHODOLOGY OF POLL

The poll of 1,105 African American, Asian American and Hispanic adults was conducted by telephone during the months of August and September 2007. The sample was designed to be representative of the adult population of the three major racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. Hispanic respondents were interviewed in English or Spanish, and Asian American respondents were interviewed in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese or Tagalog. RDD (Random Digit Dialing) methodology was employed in areas of the country that have significant (10 percent or more) African American, Asian American and Hispanic populations.

The study was designed and conducted by Bendixen & Associates, a public opinion research firm in Coral Gables, Florida. It was sponsored by New America Media. The poll was funded through the generous support of The Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, The James Irvine Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Open Society Institute, The San Francisco Foundation, The California Endowment and The California Wellness Foundation.

MAJOR FINDING

The nation’s first multilingual poll of Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans has uncovered serious tensions among these ethnic groups, including mistrust and significant stereotyping, but a majority of each group also said they should put aside differences and work together to better their communities.

The poll, which was released today during a news conference at the National Press Club, was sponsored by New America Media (NAM) and nine ethnic media outlets who are founding members of the organization.

“This extraordinary poll reveals some unflattering realities that exist in America today,” said Sandy Close, Executive Editor and Director of NAM, the nation’s first and largest collaboration of ethnic news media. “The sponsors of the poll strongly believe the best way to move forward is by identifying the problems and initiating a dialogue that can bring ethnic groups closer together in their fight for equality and against discrimination.”

Broadly, the poll of 1,105 African-American, Asian-American and Hispanic adults found that the predominantly immigrant populations - Hispanics and Asians - expressed far greater optimism about their lives in America, concluding that hard work is rewarded in this society. By contrast, more than 60% of the African Americans polled do not believe the American Dream works for them. Blacks also described themselves as more segregated from the rest of America than the other groups.

The poll found that friction between ethnic and racial groups, which at times has erupted into highly-publicized incidents around the country, is clearly rooted in the mistrust that the groups harbor towards each other, as well as the sentiment that other groups are mistreating them or are detrimental to their own future. For instance, 44% of Hispanics and 47% of Asians are “generally afraid of African Americans because they are responsible for most of the crime.” Meanwhile, 46% of Hispanics and 52% of African Americans believe “most Asian business owners do not treat them with respect.” And half of African Americans feel threatened by Latin American immigrants because “they are taking jobs, housing and political power away from the Black community.”

Moreover, the three groups seem more trusting of whites than of each other. The poll found that 61% of Hispanics, 54% of Asians and 47% of African Americans would rather do business with whites than members of the other two groups.

“The poll reaffirms that while race relations between ethnic groups and whites grab the headlines, there are also serious racial problems between minority groups in America,” said Sergio Bendixen, who is an expert on Hispanic and multilingual polling. “Blacks feel they are left out of the American Dream and are being displaced by newcomers, and each group buys into the negative stereotypes about the other two. What’s clear is the need to dissolve this friction. The poll results show that the overwhelming majority of ethnic Americans want that positive outcome.”

Specifically, the poll also found that:

* A majority of Hispanics and a significant percentage of Asians believe in the concept that every American has an equal opportunity to succeed. By contrast, the majority of Black respondents – 66 percent – disagreed with that notion.

* Blacks overwhelmingly believe the criminal justice system favors the rich and powerful; most Hispanics and an even larger majority of Asians disagree.

* A large majority of each group believes that they should put aside their differences and work together on issues affecting their communities; they also say the country would be better if more from all three groups were inpositions of authority at universities, businesses, media and government.

* All three groups are optimistic about the future. Strong majorities of each group believe that racial tensions will ease over the next 10 years.

Further, Ms. Close said the poll found “a shared appreciation” for each group’s cultural and political contributions. “Hispanics and Asians recognize that African Americans led the fight for civil rights and against discrimination, forging a better future for the other groups,” she said. “Asian Americans and African Americans say Hispanic culture has enriched the quality of their lives. African Americans and Hispanics perceive Asian Americans as role models when it comes to family and educational values.”

Poll respondents sent mixed messages to the ethnic media, which many depend on for news about their community. While criticizing the ethnic media’s coverage of race relations, particularly other groups outside their own community, all three groups maintained that the ethnic media must play a vital role by strengthening inter-group communication and helping to break negative stereotypes.

The ethnic media is embracing their challenge to do better. “The poll is part of our campaign to address mutual misunderstandings, of which there are many,” said Sok Jeong, editor of the Korea Times. “The poll is a call to action for ethnic media to expand coverage of our mutual communities and help our readers gain a better understanding of the other ethnic groups.”

Posted by lois at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

CA: State miscalculations could result in earlier prison releases. Up to 33,000 may have received insufficient credit for good behavior.

Los Angeles Times
State miscalculations could result in earlier prison releases
Up to 33,000 may have received insufficient credit for good behavior.

By Michael Rothfeld, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

December 13, 2007

SACRAMENTO -- Up to 33,000 prisoners in California may be entitled to release earlier than scheduled because the state has miscalculated their sentences, corrections officials said Wednesday.

For nearly two years, the overburdened state prison agency has failed to recalculate the sentences of those inmates despite a series of court rulings, including one by the California Supreme Court. The judges said the state applied the wrong formula when crediting certain inmates for good behavior behind bars.

Some inmates released in recent months almost certainly stayed longer in prison than they should have, said corrections officials, employees and advocates for prisoners. Some currently in prison most likely should be free, they said. But many whose sentences are too long are not scheduled to be released for months or years.

The inmates in question -- 19% of the state prison population -- are serving consecutive sentences for violent and nonviolent offenses. The sentencing errors range from a few days to several years.

Corrections officials say they have been unable to calculate the sentences properly because of staffing shortages and outdated computer systems that force analysts to do the complex work by hand.

Keeping prisoners institutionalized for too long wastes millions of dollars a year. A preliminary analysis of the problem in August by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation concluded that the longer sentences boost the state's already swollen prison population by 600 inmates a day, at a cost of nearly $26 million annually.

The state has about 173,000 prisoners and has undertaken the addition of 53,000 more beds because of overcrowding -- a situation that has helped erode the state's shaky finances.

"This is another function of the overcrowding crisis," said Don Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, a Bay Area group that represents inmates in court. "They have to handle the number of prisoners who are in the system. They can't meet their medical or mental health needs. Now it appears that there is some reason to believe that they can't even calculate their release dates correctly."

Specter said prisoners who are kept too long would have grounds to sue the corrections department.

Scott Kernan, the state's chief deputy secretary for adult prison operations, said the department hopes to hire 85 more analysts to begin working on the problem.

"We believe it's a problem," Kernan said. "We're taking it very seriously in a time of limited resources. . . . We have an obligation to go recalculate their sentences, and we're going to get the resources and we're going to do it."

Corrections officials said they plan to ask Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration next week for the additional personnel. The corrections department had been taking 15% off sentences for good behavior -- the standard for violent offenses -- even when part of the term was for a nonviolent crime. But in three decisions in 2005 and 2006, state appeals courts and the state Supreme Court agreed with prisoners that they should have received a 50% credit -- the standard for nonviolent crimes -- on the nonviolent portion of their sentences.

In the most recent case, decided Jan. 12, 2006, the 5th District state Court of Appeal sided with prisoner Breonne Tate, who argued that his release date should have been about 10 months earlier than the state calculated. The judges agreed, and he was paroled Aug. 27, 2006.

Tate had been convicted in Los Angeles County in 2001 of attempted robbery using a firearm, receiving a 4 1/2 -year sentence for a violent felony. In 2003, he received two more years after pleading guilty to possession of a weapon in prison, considered a nonviolent crime.

But after the 5th District decision, corrections officials decided they would not immediately recalculate the sentences of all those eligible, according to prison case records analysts and the labor leaders who represent them in the Service Employees International Union Local 1000. Instead, administrators instructed that only those prisoners who complained or obtained a court order would receive revised sentences, union officials said.

Kernan said he was not aware that such an instruction had been issued but added, "That would be a reasonable course of action," given the department's lack of resources. The union filed a lawsuit Wednesday in Superior Court in Sacramento against the corrections department, Secretary James Tilton and Schwarzenegger. It accuses them of violating state and federal law by failing to fix the errors. The union called for the hiring of hundreds more case-records analysts.

"The department chronically runs understaffed," Marc Bautista, a vice president of the union, said Wednesday. "It's just a lack of leadership."
In August, Tilton ordered a sampling of the 33,000 prisoners to determine the severity of the problem. The study indicated that although some release dates might be off by only a few days, correcting the sentences would reduce the inmate population by 600 a day.

Kernan said the agency initially requested 67 more analyst positions in the summer of 2006 so the new sentence calculations could be made. But they were denied by Schwarzenegger's budget officials. H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the Department of Finance, said the corrections agency was told to fill its existing vacancies first and given extra salary allotments.

Meanwhile, analysts say they are working hundreds of hours overtime. The state's 25-year-old computers cannot analyze the complex sentencing formulas created by a crazy-quilt of laws passed by the Legislature and by voters through the initiative process, and modified by the courts.

Toni Garcia, a case records analyst at Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, complained that the governor and the Legislature pass new laws spending billions on reforming the system when prison workers have to share desks and computers, and requests for staff are met with "red tape."

"They're going to build all these facilities to help reform," Garcia said. "It's all great. But we need to fix the system the way it is now."

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-prisons13dec13,1,5449051.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california

Posted by lois at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2007

NY Legislature should follow the lead of the Supreme Court and Reform Rockefeller Drug Laws

Times Union, Albany, NY
Editorial
A high court message

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

The U.S. Supreme Court has finally done what the state Legislature should have done years ago. It has given discretion back to federal trial judges in pronouncing drug sentences. If only the Legislature had had the wisdom to that years ago by repealing the Rockefeller Drug Laws. If only.

Monday's high court decision was aimed at federal mandatory minimum guidelines that often force federal judges to impose stiff sentences for drug offenders in general, but particularly so for offenses involving crack cocaine. One of the cases that went before the court involved a man arrested in Norfolk, Va., in 2004 with 56 grams of crack, 92 grams of powder cocaine and a gun. Under federal guidelines, the judge had to weigh the crack charge as a greater offense than possession of powder cocaine, which would have meant a sentence of 19 to 22 years in prison. By contrast, the man would have had to possess 5,000 grams of powder cocaine to merit such a harsh sentence. The judge, understandably, reduced the man's sentence to 15 years after considering his record of employment and service in the first Gulf War.

The government argued that the lenient sentence would encourage more drug crime. But the high court, in a 7-2 decision, wisely concluded that drug sentences should be reasonable and "sufficient, but not greater than necessary" to punish the offender and protect society from crime.

That should be the standard under the Rockefeller Drug Laws as well, but the harsh mandatory minimums, while softened somewhat in recent years, still leave judges with little choice but to sentence defendants to long prison terms even if the facts of their case cry out for leniency.

The Legislature, to its credit, adopted reforms in 2004 and 2005 that abolished mandatory life sentences for the highest level drug crimes, known as A1, and allowed Class A2 offenders to appeal their sentences. But those reforms affected only several hundred offenders, compared with the 13,900 prisoners now serving time in New York for drug offenses.

The saner policy would be to explore alternative sentencing for many of these offenders, especially programs to help addicts who fell victim to the drug trade. Yet the Legislature has been reluctant to go much beyond the reforms of 2004 and 2005, largely because of pressure from district attorneys who want to use the Rockefeller Drug Laws as a club to wrest plea bargains from suspects.

Regrettably, the Spitzer administration missed an opportunity last October to build on the reform momentum when the governor's Commission on Sentencing Reform issued its review of the state's sentencing practices last October. But now that the highest court in the land has supported judicial discretion in sentencing, there is added reason for the commission and the Legislature to call for judges to decide what is fair punishment, not rigid guidelines that so often are miscarriages of justice in their own right.

THE ISSUE: The Supreme Court allows judges to decide drug sentences.

THE STAKES: The Legislature has one less excuse for keeping the Rockefeller Drug Laws.
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=646504&category=OPINI
ON&newsdate=12/12/2007

Posted by lois at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2007

U.S. Sentencing Commission Votes Unanimously for Retroactivity on Crack Sentencing- 19,500 Federal Prisoners Affected

December 11, 2007
U.S. Panel Cuts Jail Time for Crimes Tied to Crack Cocaine
By DAVID STOUT, NY Times

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 — The United States Sentencing Commission voted unanimously today to lighten punishments retroactively for crimes related to crack cocaine, a decision that could affect some 19,500 federal inmates.

The decision, which was made over the objections of the Bush administration, takes effect on March 3, 2008, and it will not mean automatic release for those serving time. But it does open the door for them to apply for sentence adjustments and possible earlier release.

The commission previously had voted to recommend shorter prison sentences for crack cocaine offenders. Those guidelines went into effect on Nov. 1, but the commission postponed a vote on whether to make them retroactive.

The commission’s vote addressed what many analysts have come to see as a deeply unfair consequence of the decades-long war on drugs and the drug-sentencing laws adopted in the mid-1980s, when the fear of drug-induced street violence had a profound effect on public policy and personal behavior. A 2002 commission report noted that 85 percent of defendants convicted of crack offenses were black, a fact the commission warned was leading to a loss of confidence in the fairness of the justice system.

For a time, crack cocaine was thought to be far more dangerous than powdered cocaine, prompting lawmakers to make crack-related penalties much harsher. As a result, black defendants and their families were affected disproportionately, since crack is used predominantly by blacks and powdered cocaine by whites.

The Bush administration has opposed easing crack sentences retroactively, just as it earlier opposed retroactively lightening punishments for those committing crimes related to LSD or marijuana.

The sentencing commission earlier had said that applying its new guidelines retroactively could reduce the average sentence by about 27 months and that about 2,500 prisoners could be released within one year. The remaining eligible inmates could receive proportional reductions, depending on the length of their sentences, with most getting fewer than 24 months off, but some getting 49 months or more trimmed from their sentences.

“There’s a lot of people’s lives who are dependent on this,” said Julie Stewart, founder of a group that advocates easing what it sees as unduly harsh sentences for drug-related crimes.

Today’s action by the sentencing commission was not unexpected, in view of a pair of Supreme Court decisions handed down on Monday that reinforce the discretionary powers of federal district court judges in deciding what punishment to impose. One of those decisions practically invited judges to disagree with those guidelines that call for far longer sentences for crack-related offenses than for crimes associated with powdered cocaine.

The new guidelines to reduce the disparities between punishments for crack and those for powdered cocaine will reduce the average sentence for crack possession to 8 years 10 months from 10 years 1 month.

Congress sets federal criminal statutes and could have stopped the new guidelines from taking effect. But the lawmakers did not, and once they were in place it became the commission’s decision to apply them retroactively or not.

Erasing the differences between sentences for the different types of cocaine is only part of the solution to unjust punishment, said Ms. Stewart, founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. The real solution, she said, is to persuade Congress to abolish the mandatory minimums — that is, mandatory stays in prison — for certain crimes.

“Where we go from here is Capitol Hill,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/washington/11cnd-sentence.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)

U.S. Sentencing Commission Approves Retroactivity for Crack Sentences

From the Sentencing Project, December 11,2007
United States Sentencing Commission approves crack reform for federal prisoners

The day after the Supreme Court affirmed a judge's decision to sentence below the guideline range based on the unfairness of the crack cocaine sentencing disparity, the United States Sentencing Commission today voted unanimously to make retroactive its recent guideline amendment on crack cocaine offenses. The USSC's decision now makes an estimated 19,500 persons in prison eligible for a sentence reduction averaging more than two years. Releases are subject to judicial review and will be staggered over 30 years.

The Sentencing Project applauds the USSC for responding at this heightened time of public awareness about excessive penalties and disparate treatment within the justice system.

"The Commission's decision marks an important moment not only for the 19,500 people retroactivity will impact, but for the justice system as a whole," stated Marc Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project. "Today's action, combined with the Court's decision yesterday, restores a measure of rationality to federal sentencing while also addressing the unconscionable racial disparities that the war on drugs has produced."

The Sentencing Project estimates that once the sentencing change is fully implemented, there will be a reduction of up to $1 billion in prison costs. Because African Americans comprise more than 80% of those incarcerated for crack cocaine offenses, the sentencing reform will also help reduce racial disparity in federal prisons.

The Commission sets the advisory guideline range that federal judges use when sentencing defendants. In May the Commission recommended statutory reforms and proposed to Congress an amendment to decrease the guideline offense level for crack cocaine offenses. The amendment went unchallenged by Congress and went into effect on November 1st. The Commission's action today makes that guideline change retroactive to persons sentenced prior to November 1st.

The guideline changes do not affect the mandatory minimum penalties that apply to crack cocaine, which can only be addressed through Congressional action.

"Justice demands that Congress take the next step and eliminate the harsh mandatory minimums for low-level crack cocaine offenses," said Mauer.

The Commission's vote comes a day after the United States Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Kimbrough v. United States that a federal district judge's below-guideline sentencing decision based on the unfairness of the 100 to 1 quantity disparity between powder and crack cocaine was permissible. In June, Sen. Joseph Biden introduced the Drug Sentencing Reform and Kingpin Trafficking Act of 2007, legislation which would equalize the penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses. Biden's bill, S. 1711, aims to shift federal law enforcement's focus from street-level dealers towards high-level traffickers.

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

"Locked Out of Choice - Reproductive Rights Behind Bars"

"Locked Out of Choice - Reproductive Rights Behind Bars" co-edited by Rachel Roth, who also wrote one of the articles. Our correspondents look at some of the struggles incarcerated women face -- including sexual abuse, aging in prison, and pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering behind bars.

* What Do Prisons Have to Do with Reproductive Rights?, by Rachel Roth Rachel's article has excellent links embedded in it.

* Powerless in Prison: Sexual Abuse Against Incarcerated Women, by Nicole Summer

* Mothering as a Reproductive Right, by Malika Sadaa Saar

RH Reality Check http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/

Posted by lois at 03:05 PM | Comments (0)

Supreme Court Decision on Judicial Discretion: NY Times 2 articles: Analysis by Adam Liptak and the decison by Linda Greenhouse

December 11, 2007
News Analysis
Given the Latitude to Show Leniency, Judges May Not
By ADAM LIPTAK

It is one thing to have power, and another to use it.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court told federal trial judges that they had enormous discretion in sentencing criminal defendants, which will probably accelerate a mild trend toward more lenient sentencing. But if history is any guide, judges will continue to use their sentencing power relatively sparingly, specialists in sentencing law said.

The two decisions issued yesterday built on a 2005 decision that made the federal sentencing guidelines advisory rather than mandatory, which led to the modest trend toward leniency.

Now that the Supreme Court has again emphasized that federal trial judges have the discretion to move outside the guidelines, further departures are rather likely. But the size of that may not be huge, said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. “The really interesting question,” Professor Berman said, “is whether we get a more significant gravitation away from the guidelines.”

Frank O. Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, said much depended on the willingness of trial judges to use their new power.

“Now that the Supreme Court has said, ‘Do more if you want to,’” Professor Bowman said, “one would certainly expect that that this time the district courts are going to start to be more assertive, if they want to be.”

But, by temperament and training, judges like to apply clear rules, and the guidelines, which are nothing if not detailed and elaborate, are just that sort of mechanical road map. The impact of yesterday’s decisions may therefore be more modest than their language.

Indeed, this week’s sentencing decision most likely to have the broadest short-term impact is not on the Supreme Court’s docket.

On Tuesday, the United States Sentencing Commission is set to decide whether more than 19,000 federal prisoners convicted on charges involving crack cocaine should be eligible for re-sentencing based on amendments to the guidelines that became effective last month. The amendments reduced the disparity between sentences for crack and powder cocaine.

One of yesterday’s decisions, Kimbrough v. United States, concerned that disparity, and it said that judges may take account of its impact in their sentencing decisions. That point is not directly related to the decision facing the sentencing commission, but it may nonetheless have an impact.

“It gives more cover to the sentencing commission to go retroactive,” Professor Berman said of yesterday’s decisions.

If the changes are made retroactive by the commission, prisoners may submit legal motions for re-sentencing before trial judges, under the revised guidelines. And yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions may encourage those judges to treat those applications sympathetically.

According to an analysis of the offenders who would be eligible for re-sentencing, published by the commission in October, 94 percent are males, 86 percent are black and their average age is 35. The average sentence reduction under the revised guidelines would be 27 months, to about 10 years from almost 13 years.

At a hearing before the commission last month, the Justice Department opposed retroactivity.

“We are going to see an influx of the very people who are most likely to re-offend and are most likely to upset these fragile neighborhoods,” Gretchen C. F. Shappert, the United States attorney in Charlotte, N.C., told the commission.

“The impact of 19,500 defendants in the criminal justice system will be profound,” Ms. Shappert continued. “That is 25 percent of all defendants who were sentenced in federal court in 2006 and represents 10 percent of the entire criminal population” in federal prisons.

Whatever their impact on cocaine cases, yesterday’s decisions will probably accelerate a trend toward more leniency in sentencing. Putting aside more lenient sentences sought by the government, typically for cooperating witnesses, about 12 percent of sentences these days are below the range recommended by the guidelines. In 2004, the comparable number was 5.5 percent.

The decisions will also probably amplify emerging regional variations in sentencing. In the federal court in Brooklyn, for instance, about 30 percent of lenient sentences not sought by the government are below the guidelines range; the corresponding number in the eastern part of Louisiana is 5 percent.

“It’s absolutely clear that you are going to see even more regional variation than you see now,” Professor Bowman said.

The number of harsher sentences may increase as well. Since the 2005 decision, Professor Berman said, “we saw a doubling, but it was a doubling from a very low rate.” According to the sentencing commission, upward departures grew to 1.6 percent from 0.8 percent in recent years.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decisions only concerned the federal system, a relatively small part of the overall criminal justice system. But the concerns expressed by the justices are quite likely to have a broad impact.

“The system is interconnected and hydraulic enough,” Professor Berman said, “so that anything that happens in the bigger and in some sense badder federal criminal justice system will trickle down.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/us/11sentencing.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=washington&pagewanted=print

December 11, 2007
Justices Restore Judges’ Control Over Sentencing
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 — The Supreme Court on Monday restored federal judges to their traditional central role in criminal sentencing.

In two decisions, the court said federal district judges had broad discretion to impose what they think are reasonable sentences, even if federal guidelines call for different sentences.

One decision was particularly emphatic in saying judges are free to disagree with guidelines that call for much longer sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine than for crimes involving an equivalent amount of cocaine in powdered form.

Both cases, each decided by the same 7-to-2 alignment, chided federal appeals courts for failing to give district judges sufficient leeway. The appeals court had in each case overturned a sentence that was lower than that provided by the guidelines. The two dissenters were Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Taken together, the decisions reflected the remarkable trajectory the court has traveled in the seven years since it overturned a New Jersey hate-crime statute on the ground that the law gave judges an unconstitutional degree of authority to make the crucial factual determinations that added a hate-crime “enhancement” to an ordinary criminal sentence.

Along with their diminished function under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which set up the federal sentencing guidelines system, federal judges appeared to have been all but ejected from their role at the heart of criminal sentencing.

Judges still may not impose sentences above the range written into law by Congress or state legislatures. But the decision on Monday gives judges broad discretion to impose sentences higher or lower than the guidelines, which are not statutes and are issued by the United States Sentencing Commission.

The two decisions answered questions left hanging in 2005, when the court ruled in United States v. Booker that the federal sentencing guidelines could be constitutional only if “advisory” rather than mandatory. Appeals courts were to review sentences for “reasonableness,” the court said then. But the court did not say what it meant by either “advisory” or “reasonableness.”

Last June, in Rita v. United States, the court ruled that appeals courts could choose to presume that sentences within the guidelines range were reasonable, but that such a presumption was not binding. But that opinion was quite opaque and said relatively little about the trial judge’s role.

It is now clear that while judges should consult the guidelines, they are just one factor among others and do not carry any special weight. It is also clear that an appeals court must have a very good reason of its own to displace the trial judge’s judgment.

“The guidelines should be the starting point and the initial benchmark,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in one of the decisions on Monday, Gall v. United States, No. 06-7949.

But Justice Stevens went on to say that the guidelines were just one factor in the “individualized assessment” that a judge must make in every case. The judge “may not presume that the guidelines range is reasonable,” he said.

In that case, Brian M. Gall, who had briefly been involved in an Ecstasy distribution ring while a college student, received a sentence of three years’ probation rather than 30 to 36 months in prison called for by the guidelines.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, ruled that such an “extraordinary” variance from the guidelines range required an equivalently extraordinary justification.

That judgment was erroneous, Justice Stevens said, in failing to give “due deference” to the district judge’s “reasoned and reasonable decision.” He added that “if the sentence is outside the guidelines range, the court may not apply a presumption of unreasonableness.”

Nor, he continued, should a sentence be overturned just because the appeals court “might reasonably have concluded that a different sentence was appropriate.”

The defendant in the crack cocaine case, Derrick Kimbrough, received 15 years instead of 19 to 22 ½ for several cocaine and gun-related offenses. The sentence was the lowest possible, given the statutory mandatory minimum sentences.

The trial judge said the higher guidelines term would be inappropriate for Mr. Kimbrough, a Marine veteran of the Persian Gulf war with an honorable discharge. The judge also disagreed with the relative treatment of crack and powdered cocaine, a disparity that he said led to “disproportionate and unjust” results.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., overturned the sentence on the ground that it was “per se unreasonable” for a judge to depart from the guidelines “based on a disagreement with the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine offenses.”

The Supreme Court took the unusual step of reinstating the original lower sentences, rather than simply instructing the appeals courts to reconsider the cases under an appropriately deferential standard of review.

Prof. Douglas A. Berman of the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, an expert on sentencing, called the decisions a “stinging rebuke of circuit court micromanagement of district court discretion.”

The decision in the crack cocaine case, Kimbrough v. United States, No. 06-6330, was particularly pointed in this regard. In her majority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that ordinarily, “closer review may be in order” when a judge’s sentence is based on a policy disagreement with the guidelines.

But she went on to say that this higher level of appellate scrutiny should not apply to a sentence based on a district judge’s critique of the crack-powder disparity.

Justice Ginsburg’s opinion took account of an important policy development since the case was argued on Oct. 2. On Nov. 1, amended guidelines for crack cocaine that the United States Sentencing Commission had long advocated took effect when Congress, which had the power to block them, let the moment pass without acting.

Justice Ginsburg said that “this tacit acceptance” of the amendment by Congress “undermines the government’s position” that judges should not have discretion to depart from the guidelines themselves.

The amendments put into effect a relatively modest change that will reduce sentences for crack by about one-quarter, resulting in sentences that are two to five times longer than for equivalent amounts of powdered cocaine.

The commission was limited in what it could accomplish on its own. A 1986 federal law, enacted at the height of public concern about crack, incorporated a 100 to one ratio into mandatory minimum sentences — that is, the same sentence was imposed for a given amount of crack and 100 times that amount of powder.

The Sentencing Commission guidelines operated as an overlay on that statutory framework. But as the commission studied the impact, it grew concerned. A 2002 report noted that 85 percent of defendants convicted of crack offenses were black, a fact the commission warned was leading to a loss of confidence in the fairness of the system.

Bipartisan bills are pending in Congress to address the disparity. On Tuesday, the Sentencing Commission will vote on whether to make the Nov. 1 amendment retroactive to the 19,500 inmates imprisoned for crack offenses.

The court’s endorsement of judges’ discretion raised the prospect that higher sentences, not only lower ones, would now be upheld on appeal.

Current statistics indicate that defendants benefit the most when judges depart from the guidelines. Below-guidelines sentences have been given in 11.9 percent of cases, and above-guidelines sentences in 1.6 percent. Criminal defense lawyers regarded the decision on Monday as good news.

“The court has taken the handcuffs off and told judges that ‘you are free to apply your mind,’” said Graham Boyd, director of the Drug Law Reform Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/washington/11scotus.html?ei=5070&en=889c44bb66cff5d8&ex=1198040400&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)

PA: Cost of prisons must be cut back

12/08/2007
Cost of prisons must be cut back
Citizen's Voice
Wilkes Barre, PA
Pennsylvania’s prison population has been exploding for decades, making corrections one of the state’s growth industries.

Finally, the overwhelming cost to the government of the burgeoning inmate population is forcing the state government to look at the entire system, rather than facilities alone.

They are inspired by a report by Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard, who recently warned lawmakers that the state would have to construct one new prison a year, beginning in 2012, if more sensible measures are not enacted to ease the pressure. The cost — $200 million to $300 million to build a prison, and $50 million a year to operate it. Per inmate, the cost is nearly $30,000 a year.

Many sensible measures have been on the table for many years. It’s good not only for the state budget, but for the cause of justice, that the Legislature appears poised to act on some of those measures.

The most important change would be to increase the emphasis on drug treatment as an alternative to incarceration for many more qualified non-violent offenders, and to establish an early-release program for state prisoners who complete drug treatment while incarcerated. Drug treatment is far less expensive than imprisonment, and it is more effective in reducing recidivism, thus easing prison crowding well into the future.

A second measure would reserve county prison space for offenders sentenced to two or fewer years. State sentencing guidelines call for inmates with sentences longer than two years to be placed in state prisons. Yet, according to the Department of Corrections, about 2,500 prisoners in that category are in county prisons statewide.

Ideally, the growing cost of the prison system also will convince lawmakers that mandatory sentencing is the simplest, but not necessarily the most effective, means to fight crime. The proof is the exploding prison population itself, indicating that long minimums do not have the desired effect of deterring crime.

Instead, the Legislature should authorize greater discretion for local judges to craft sentences to the crimes. The objective should be not merely incarceration but, wherever possible, to provide defendants with a chance for redemption. It’s not only smart, but less expensive.

http://www.citizensvoice.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19096846&BRD=2259&PAG=461&dept_id=456222&rfi=6

Posted by lois at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)

Treat mentally ill lawbreakers

OpEdNews
December 8, 2007
TREAT MENTALLY ILL LAWBREAKERS

By Kenneth Briggs

As is often the case, legislatures and the Congress are hurrying to catch up to the practitioners. This time it’s the law trying to catch up to what’s going on in the courts concerning the mentally ill who are incarcerated. In state after state from Texas to Washington state to North Carolina to Florida to Connecticut the courts are taking action to reduce the number of mentally ill sent to jail and to prisons. Nation-wide about 20% of the population in jails and prisons are mentally Ill who have committed no violent crimes.

“The American Psychiatric Association [APA] applauds recent Congressional efforts to acknowledge and improve treatment for the large number of people with mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders who are currently incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons.”

According to a 2006 report by the United States Department of Justice [DOJ], entitled “Mental Health Problems of Prison and Jail Inmates” more than half the population incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails-including 56 percent of state prisoners, 45 percent of federal prisoners and 64 percent of local jail inmates-were found to have a mental illness. Many of these inmates suffer from treatable disorders such as major depression, bipolar disorder and substance abuse disorder.

On November 13, the U.S. House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 347 to 62, the Second Chance Act, legislation sponsored by Congressman Danny Davis [D-Ill.]. The legislation would provide transitional assistance to ex-offenders in an effort to reduce recidivism.

Additionally, the legislation would extend and provide a full continuum of care for treatment of substance abuse disorders. The legislation also seeks to improve mental health screening and treatment and provides grants for family treatment programs. In August, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee approved similar legislation, sponsored by Senator Joseph Biden Jr. [D-Del].

The Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Reauthorization and Improvement Act [H.R. 3992 and S.2304] aims to improve services for mentally ill prisoners by reauthorizing and boosting funding for a grant program that provides treatment for inmates and training for law enforcement officers who treat them. The House bill is sponsored by Representative Robert Scott [D-VA] and the Senate Bill is sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy [D-Mass] and Pete Domenici [R-NM]]. On November 7, the House Judiciary Committee passed H.R. 3992, which will now go to the full House for a vote. On November 5, the Senate introduced S. 2304.

When Florida’s Broward County officials a decade ago decided it was both unjust and outrageously expensive to steer nonviolent mentally ill defendants into jails and prisons, they got creative.

They began one of the nation’s first mental- health courts to divert people suffering from mental illness into treatment programs. It’s a plan similar to one that an advisory council on criminal justice and mental health hopes to see in place in the Tallahassee area soon.

“For years, many mentally ill Floridians without the means to obtain proper treatment have gotten into trouble and ended up in our county jails or state prisons. Until recently, lawmakers have looked the other way.

Some of Florida’s jails are little more than psychiatric warehouses offering unhappy doses of human misery. But that should change if the Legislature approves a smart and ambitious plan to help current inmates re-enter society and help other mentally sick people avoid ever darkening the prison doorway.”

On November 14, Chief Justice Fred Lewis of the Florida Supreme Court hosted an unprecedented forum among state leaders to unveil a plan to improve the state’s mental health system and to better coordinate services provided to people with mental illnesses, including those involved with the criminal justice system.

Governor Crist spoke at the event: ”We have a responsibility to support and care for the most vulnerable among us, and at the same time, ensure the safety of our communities while also being good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

Good luck to those who have to implement the plan, from one who helped develop such a plan in Oregon in the 1970s and was one of four who were responsible for its implementation. It wasn’t easy and it took a lot out of all four of us. Florida being somewhat larger and more complicated will be even more difficult. Again, good luck.

Source:

AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION, www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/89196.php

CONSENSUSPROJECT NEWSLETTER, December, 2007
TALLAHASSEE.DEMOCRAT, www.tallahassee.com November 19, 2007

THE TAMPA TRIBUNE, Treat Mentally Ill Lawbreakers Instead of Warehousing Them, November 20, 2007
Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_kenneth__071208_treat_mentally_ill_l.htm

Posted by lois at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)

MA: A system strains, and inmates die

A system strains, and inmates die
December 9, 2007, Boston Globe

This story was reported by Globe Spotlight Team members Beth Healy, Michael Rezendes, Francie Latour, Jonathan Saltzman, and editor Thomas Farragher.
Spotlight report: Prison suicides
It was written by Healy.
First of three parts

His mother couldn't understand how he got the shoelaces.

After all, everyone knew Jarred Aranda was in danger. He had just tried to kill himself in jail.

Now, the handsome 27-year-old, with a to-do list in his pocket and a smile that hid his troubles, was being evaluated for mental illness at the state prison hospital in Bridgewater. He should have been safe there.

Locked up for stealing sneakers and violating probation, Aranda was deeply depressed. His mind was ravaged by crystal meth and other drugs his mother had begged him to quit. He'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and he was hearing voices.

But he told prison doctors he didn't want to die, and they believed him. Then they forgot about him.

No one from the prison clinical staff checked on him for 10 days. When a doctor finally did show up again, Aranda said he felt hopeless, and couldn't sleep. But the next day, he was allowed to walk into a shower, unattended, for 17 minutes. He had a set of shoelaces with him.

When an officer found him hanging from the shower door and sounded the "Code 99" alert last March, Aranda became the next in a series of 15 suicides in Massachusetts state prisons since early 2005. The deaths were coming at an alarming pace, roughly triple the rate in other states.

Last year alone, seven inmates killed themselves, and another's attempt left him brain dead; four have taken their lives so far this year.

Department of Correction officials say the suicides are random and unrelated. But a Globe Spotlight Team investigation of the deaths and detailed reconstruction of how they occurred found that they were far from random.

Most of the suicides came after careless errors and dangerous decisions by correction officials and the staff at UMass Correctional Health. And the trail of violence is far wider than the number of dead would indicate, as hundreds more inmates each year have wounded themselves or attempted suicide.

In fact, such incidents are soaring.

So common has it been to find a man with a makeshift noose around his neck that some correction officers have taken to carrying their own pocket tools to cut them down. The tally of suicide attempts and self-inflicted injuries - 513 last year and more than 3,200 over the past decade - tells a story of deepening mental illness and misery behind the walls of the state's prisons, despite repeated calls for better training of officers and safer cells for mentally troubled inmates.

The Globe found that background screens were botched as inmates arrived at prison. Medical and mental health records went missing or were never reviewed. Security rounds were skipped. Inmates in distress were punished for behavior that amounted to a cry for help, or at least a signal that greater precautions were needed.

"You're taking people who are vulnerable and can't cope in society," said Dr. Carl Fulwiler, a psychiatrist who consults to prisons and is an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School, "and putting them in the worst situation imaginable."

The Department of Correction guards the details of these events in secrecy, revealing little to the public, or even to the families of the suicide victims.

But internal investigative reports obtained from other prison sources by the Globe show that, in case after case, the suicides occurred at times when inmates were predictably at risk - within days or hours of arriving at prison, being sent to isolation, or withdrawing from drugs. Or, as with Jarred Aranda, in the tenuous period after a prior suicide attempt.

Aranda's grandfather was the first to get the call that he was dead. Then his mother.

"Who let him go in the shower alone?" Leslie Aranda would later ask tearfully. "I thought he was safe."

A system under strain

They are people whom society has, in many cases, written off.

Among the 15 suicides, almost all of them men, half were criminals convicted of murder or rape. Some were small-time thieves or drug dealers. A few hadn't been convicted of anything; they were in prison awaiting trial. The one woman was in only to detox.

Virtually all of them were troubled long before they were locked up, with mental health issues or drug abuse dating back to their youth. They and others like them increasingly are populating prisons in Massachusetts and across the country.

Today, one-quarter of the state's 11,000 prisoners are being treated for some kind of mental illness, up from 15 percent in 1998. It's a legacy, in part, of the elimination of many state mental institutions in the 1980s and half the state's detox beds in 2004. In June, there were 1,097 inmates taking antipsychotic medications, up from 595 in December 1998.

The suicides are just the most visible signs of a system under strain. State taxpayers spend $55 million a year on medical and mental health care for inmates in the state prisons, and nearly half a billion dollars for all prison costs. And while troubled inmates are dying and hundreds more are trying to die, most will serve their sentences and one day be released - often sicker than when they arrived.

"That's the danger of the larger prison culture we're creating," said Dr. Scott A. Allen, a former prison physician in Rhode Island and now co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University. "As a society now, we've taken mental health problems into this prison setting, and we're dealing with them in a punitive way."

The casualties are people like Andrew Armstrong, 22 and mentally ill, who hanged himself eight hours after being locked in an isolation cell for getting into a fight.

Or Nicole Davis, 24, who was found hanging after asking for medical help all night; she was depressed and detoxing, alone in her cell.

Or Nelson Rodriguez, 26 and mentally retarded, who killed himself in MCI-Cedar Junction's dungeon-like "10-Block" wing, despite warnings by the mental health staff that solitary confinement would likely harm him. New rules put in place after his death have proved far from foolproof: In July, a mentally ill man killed himself in 10-Block, prompting the US Marshals Service to investigate and to remove some federal detainees from the Walpole prison.

Case study in disaster

Anthony Garafolo is a case study in how a difficult situation can turn to disaster at the Department of Correction.

The 46-year-old Ludlow native, admitted to MCI-Shirley in June of 2006, had spent a third of his life behind bars, convicted time and again of stealing to support a drug habit. In one 1990 robbery, he took a bullet in the back that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

He was an angry man in prison, and often hard to handle.

Garafolo had been emotionally broken since being abused by a notorious priest at age 15. And he was depressed at the disability that left him using a wheelchair and made basic bodily functions a difficult chore. Over the years, he racked up a stack of disciplinary reports for breaking rules and verbally abusing prison staff. He had twice before tried to kill himself in prison, once while in isolation.

On June 19 last year, he was caught in a downward spiral that was steep and violent. It was 90 degrees outside the walls of the prison that day, and behind the thick, locked door of Garafolo's prison infirmary room, it felt even hotter.

A wound had reopened after a recent surgery - an ulcerated sore from sitting long hours in a wheelchair. He had a fever and kept asking for pain medication, records show. He couldn't reach the sink for water. He was filthy and needed to bathe, but the shower in the corner of his room wasn't wheelchair-accessible.

And he wasn't making his care any easier, angrily banging on his door, shouting and cursing at the staff.

No doubt, the recent change in his prison circumstances had also inflamed him. Garafolo had gone from an unshackled interlude at UMass Memorial Medical Center for surgery - a comparatively happy time with family visits and a birthday celebration - to a stopover in the locked-down wing of the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston, to the infirmary at Shirley.

And for reasons top department officials cannot explain, at Shirley he was being held in segregation - the prison regime for troublemakers - meaning he was in isolation for 23 hours a day with no basic privileges, no phone calls, no TV. And, it seemed to Garafolo, no air. Despite his pleas, the officers on duty would not unlock the food trap in his door, about the size of a large mail slot, according to his cell-block neighbor, Miguel Perez, who said he was allowed the small bit of ventilation.

When Garafolo's mother visited, she had to talk to him through a glass window - a punishment reserved for segregated prisoners.

"I couldn't touch him," said Lorraine J. Jaillet, who last saw her son three days before his death. "He was crying. I've never seen so many tears."

Virtually every safety measure that might have helped Garafolo in the last six days of his life failed, prison records show.

First, the booking officer at Shirley looked up Garafolo's suicide-attempt history but did not tell the mental health staff what he found. Second, his prison records didn't arrive with him that night, so the intake nurse never examined them. She relied on Garafolo to say if he had any mental health issues, and he said no.

Third, the medical staff failed to alert mental health clinicians that Garafolo had been prescribed psychiatric medication at the hospital. MCI-Shirley's mental health director, Merleen Mills, told department investigators she was away when Garafolo arrived and didn't know he was there until his fifth day. Records show that no one from her staff went to see him.

That was particularly troubling, given the dangerous confusion over Garafolo's segregation status. Reports filed by correction officers say he was being protected from inmate enemies. But that was not reflected in the official prison record. As a result, Garafolo was never seen by a mental health clinician, as required when an inmate is segregated, to ensure he can handle the psychic strains of isolation.

It seemed everyone knew Garafolo was in crisis except the jailers and medical staff charged with his care. His half-brother, Dennis, also incarcerated at Shirley at the time, heard Anthony was in trouble and managed to visit him briefly. A sympathetic officer unlocked the slot in the door, Dennis Garafolo recalled, so he could reach his arm through it. Anthony just held his hand and cried.

"The way I saw that room, it was like being in the hole," Dennis Garafolo said, using prison slang for isolation.

For the last 20 hours of his life, Anthony Garafolo lashed out at staff members and beat on his door. He threatened to harm the wife and children of a sergeant, and demanded to be sent to another prison. When Garafolo smashed his cell window, his neighbor, Perez, feared for him.

The commotion stretched into the early-morning hours, but no one called the mental health staff, records show. Not the captain who threatened Garafolo with four-point restraints. Not the nurses, who had to have him shackled to give him care. Not the officers who had him locked down in segregation.

At 5:56 a.m. on June 20, Garafolo was found hanging from a sheet tied to the shower knob - a long reach from his wheelchair.

A handwritten letter by his bed said: "I can't fight any longer. . . . I going crazy just being in here this long. Don't let this happen to nobody again."

To this day, Lorraine Jaillet insists her son did not kill himself and plans to sue the Department of Correction. Family and friends say Garafolo would not have ended his life without writing to his mother. A pastor who visited Garafolo several times, Paul Suckling of the United Church of God in Worcester, was stunned. "There was frustration, sometimes depression, but nothing close to suicide," Suckling said.

His brother Dennis said, "Either my brother was pushed to that, or he felt doomed."

Desperation in isolation

Emotional desperation is common among those in isolation. It makes even healthy people sick and has a disastrous effect on people with mental illness, according to psychiatrists familiar with the effects of solitary confinement.

"It leaves you alone with your own delusions," said Dr. Matthew P. Dumont, a Cambridge psychiatrist. "It is actually the stupidest and most dysfunctional thing to do to a mentally ill prisoner."

And yet it remains a common form of discipline. In October, there were 345 inmates segregated in Massachusetts prisons, not including those held in other isolated settings, like Garafolo's infirmary room. Nationally, there were 80,870 segregation beds in 2000, following a political push, begun in the mid-1990s, for harder time for convicts and more maximum security cells, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, a research group.

But the Spotlight investigation found that, even as the suicide rate climbed, the prison system continued to rely on this dangerous tool, saying it had no alternative for violent inmates. Nine of the Massachusetts's suicides since 2005 have involved inmates held in isolation.

Dr. Robert B. Diener, a psychiatrist and medical director at Bridgewater State Hospital, regularly sees men who have been in isolation at Walpole, kept in a 9-by-6-foot cell 23 hours a day. He said it is psychologically unhealthy for inmates to be confined that way for long periods.

"They're deprived of normal life experiences," he said. "They can become outrageous."

Even a short period of isolation can be too much for some. It was for Miguel Velasquez.

He was not a convict but rather a federal detainee awaiting trial on gun possession charges when he arrived at MCI-Cedar Junction, the maximum security facility in Walpole, just over a year ago. He had a history of mental illness for which he was being treated, and his behavior behind bars had been generally good.

But then in July he punched another inmate. The price for that would be steep: a trip to the infamous 10-Block isolation unit, home to some of the system's most difficult prisoners. Facing that prospect, Velasquez snapped, records show. He resisted a mandatory strip search, then angrily refused to put his clothes back on. And so he was shackled and marched naked down the hallway to a tiny, windowless cell, according to written reports of the incident.

An officer locked the door with bars, and then, as punishment, shut the outer, solid door as well. Velasquez, 33, was dead three hours later, having hanged himself with a piece of the shirt he wouldn't wear. He was the third inmate in two years to take his life behind a solid door in 10-Block.

The last hours of Velasquez's life were marked by two critical failures by prison and medical staff, the department's preliminary suicide report says.

The nurse who cleared Velasquez for isolation did not examine his mental health records, according to the report. Then, the officer who closed the solid door of his cell door did so without telling his commander or ensuring that mental health clinicians were notified, as department rules require.

His death alarmed Miriam Conrad, the lawyer in the federal defender's office who had represented Velasquez. "Pretrial detainees have a basic right, as well as a constitutional right, to be treated humanely," she said.

The US Marshals Service was paying the Department of Correction $90 a day for Velasquez's "housing, safekeeping, and subsistence." Yvonne Bonner, the acting US Marshal in Boston, said Velasquez's assignment to the state's bleakest prison was purely by chance.

"It's an old facility. It's a depressing site," Bonner said. But, she observed, "I would think being in segregation would be the safest place they could be."

When first contacted by the Globe, Bonner said her office had no plan to probe Velasquez's death beyond a cursory review of the Department of Correction's report. But after learning from the Globe of the errors reflected in prison documents, Bonner reopened the investigation. She said that no federal detainees would be placed at Cedar Junction until the investigation was completed. Several detainees with known mental health issues have since been moved to other prisons.

James R. Bender, the Department of Correction's deputy commissioner, said staff members who failed to follow protocol in the Velasquez case could be disciplined.

A man unraveling

Glen Bourgeois lasted four months in 10-Block.

He landed at Walpole in August 2006 after getting caught in a relationship with a female employee at Old Colony Correctional Center and for having a hacksaw and other contraband in his cell. At 44, he had served 21 years for his role in a murder during a robbery, and he had allegedly been planning to escape. Bourgeois had recently lost hope about his appeal attempts, according to a friend of his and correction officers, and was grappling with the life sentence ahead of him.

In letters to his brother, Bourgeois complained about the oppressive boredom of "the hole." He read books and newspapers, and wrote letters to a pen pal.

For the most part, Bourgeois didn't give correction officers trouble in his final months. But the preliminary prison report on his suicide describes a man falling apart.

Bourgeois complained of panic attacks soon after arriving at 10-Block, saying the noise made him want to bash his head against a wall. But when a clinician came to see him, he said he was "all set."

Twice Bourgeois refused orders to allow the solid door of his cell to be closed, once sticking his arm through the bars to block it. For that he was to receive further punishment: No radio until mid-December and no telephone calls until Jan. 21, 2007, a date he wouldn't live to see.

By October, Bourgeois had been suffering from migraine headaches for two months. He was prescribed Prozac for stress.

In November, Bourgeois went on a hunger strike, but records show he wasn't seen by mental health, as required. They did finally visit him on Nov. 16, for the 90-day mental status checkup required for all inmates in segregation.

On Dec. 27, Bourgeois was found hanging at 4:34 a.m. No one could see him do it because his solid door was closed. Prison officials say he asked for it to be shut, for quiet.

Bourgeois's brother, Michael Hook-DiMarino, was disturbed when he saw the text of his brother's suicide note, a note he said prison officials had told him did not exist. "Consider my sentence paid in full," it said. "I did the only thing I felt I could do to stop my headaches. I have plan this for almost a month, there was no one I could ask for help without being put in worse living conditions than I am in already."

With Bourgeois's death, Hook-DiMarino lost the last member of his immediate family. He said of his brother: "You have to pay for your crime. But you're still human."

A sentence without a crime

The warning signs are often obvious. But prison staff, hardened by what they consider inmates' manipulative behavior, can be blind to them.

Last December, Nicole Davis was sent for detox to MCI-Framingham, the state women's prison, for 30 days. She was not serving a sentence for a crime.

Her family had filed court papers to have Davis civilly committed, to help her shake the drugs she had been addicted to for years - and to head off the arrest warrants she was facing for several open theft cases, and for using a credit card her boyfriend had stolen.

Her parents had hoped to commit her to a private facility. And Davis's lawyer argued to send her to a New Bedford treatment center used by the state as an alternative to prison for women in detox. But Judge Robert G. Harbour at Taunton District Court felt she should be sent to a "secure facility."

"The judge told us she'd be safe at Framingham," said Nicole's mother, Rosamond.

But that was not to be. Judge Harbour told the Globe, "It's something that I'll never forget."

The detox regime was primitive. Coming down off heroin, the antianxiety drug Klonopin, and possibly other substances, Davis was locked in a room at night, with correction officers periodically watching her door. She told a mental health clinician that she had been depressed since the death of her baby boy, Nathan, in foster care seven months earlier.

She denied feeling suicidal, according to prison records. But her parents said they saw real distress on their visit Dec. 19, the day after Davis's 24th birthday. Davis begged them not to leave.

"She said, 'I want you to stay because if you don't stay, I have to go back up in the hole,' " her mother recalled. Davis hated to be alone, her father said.

That night, Davis was left alone in a spartan cement cell in the infirmary. She was kept there after alleging that a male officer had groped her. It was a claim the officials doubted, according to the investigative report of her death.

Around midnight, Robert and Rosamond Davis were awakened by police at their Norton home. They called MCI-Framingham, as directed, and soon heard prison Superintendent Lynn M. Bissonnette tell them their daughter had died in a "bizarre incident," Robert Davis recalls.

Throughout her last evening alive, Nicole Davis repeatedly asked for medical care, Dr. Philip DeChavez said in the department's suicide review. The staff checked on her but thought she was just seeking drugs or attention. At 10:29 p.m., an officer found her, sitting on the cell floor with a sheet around her neck.

Clinicians and staff members involved in Davis's suicide review mulled some fundamental questions. Might inmates undergoing drug or alcohol withdrawal be at risk to themselves once they're sober? Should they have a new mental health check-up after detoxing?

The panel members decided such assessments would not help. However, Bissonnette, the superintendent, did propose that women no longer be left alone. According to the report, she was concerned that heightened feelings of isolation could "result in an increase risk of self-harm."

"The women," Bissonnette told the Globe, "can't tolerate it."

At great risk

Sean Turner was another left to fight through detox on his own.

Turner was alone in a cell at MCI-Concord, withdrawing from daily intravenous heroin use without proper medical oversight on the day he took his life.

According to the Department of Correction's own procedures, Turner should not have been admitted to Concord at all on July 11, 2005. At that time, the old prison on Route 2 had no beds for inmates going through withdrawal. The department's review of Turner's suicide says, "MCI Concord does not have detox protocols in place and all detox patients are transferred to infirmary sites or the local hospital for care." But, it goes on to say, "Mr. Turner was released to population," meaning to an ordinary cell.

When Turner, 47, arrived at Concord that night - awaiting trial on motor vehicle and drug charges - he was experiencing nausea from withdrawal. A physician reviewed his intake report, and the nurse ordered detox medication, according to the department's reports. But she did not write a progress note or notify the on-call physician of the detox plan.

Over the next two days, Turner was quiet, according to inmates interviewed by the department. He sat alone in the chow hall, played dominoes, and went to the library, they said, but he was depressed and fearing a long prison term.

On the morning of July 13, Turner went to the medication line at 8 a.m., an inmate said, but was turned away. He took a shower about 10:30 a.m., went to lunch, and was seen lying on his bunk at 1:45 p.m. An inmate says he asked Turner for stamps at 2:10 p.m.

At 2:30 p.m., when most inmates were out in the yard and his cellmate was away at court, Turner was found hanging from a sheet attached to a wall vent. He'd had plenty of time to do it: Two correction officers on duty failed to make their scheduled hourly rounds that afternoon, according to department investigators' review of a prison videotape. The officers lied in the investigative interview, claiming they had made the rounds. They received 30-day suspensions.

"I just can't imagine that they would put anyone in his circumstance into a room and just leave them," Turner's mother, Dianne Hawkes, said of her eldest child, a smart student with a knack for mechanics, woodworking, and photography. "I think they were completely negligent."

Aside from the physical dangers, psychiatrists and prison officials say detoxing can bring on severe depression. For some inmates, it's the first time they've been sober in months or years, and they find themselves suddenly facing the reality of incarceration, said Karin T. Bergeron, superintendent at Bridgewater State Hospital.

"Many of these men are at great risk for suicidality," she said.

Falling through the cracks

That was certainly the case for Jarred Aranda. By the time he arrived at Bridgewater last spring, he'd been at the Bristol County jail in North Dartmouth for three months.

Aranda was in the midst of the longest stretch of sobriety he'd experienced in recent memory, he told a Bridgewater psychiatrist, and he was feeling poorly. He had all but forgotten the comforts of his youth: the house with the big lawn, the swimming pool, the dinners in his grandmother's kitchen. He hadn't wanted his mother or sister to see him at Bristol County, where he stole a correction officer's lunchbox and fought with him. He tried to hang himself with shoelaces, then cut his wrist with a plastic knife.

Days later he spent his first night at Bridgewater, alone in a treatment unit, but under frequent watch. The next day, he was removed from seclusion but kept under close observation. Two days later, he was sent to a less restrictive area.

That's when Aranda fell through the cracks. No one took responsibility for him for nearly two weeks, according to the department's records.

On his last full day alive, Aranda told a psychiatrist his depression was getting worse. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being worst), he felt like a seven or eight. The doctor prescribed Lithium and Seroquel for Aranda's bipolar symptoms and Wellbutrin for depression. It's unclear if Aranda took the medication; he had refused it since arriving at the hospital.

Just a few days before, Aranda's father and stepmother had visited him. They said he talked about the future, about changing his life. He didn't complain; he never wanted his family to worry.

But on the night of March 30, prison records show, Aranda took the laces out of his roommate's sneakers. And headed for the shower.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/12/09/a_system_strains_and_inmates_die/?page=full

Posted by lois at 09:21 AM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2007

Bob Kohler, a veteran gay rights activist

December 10, 2007
On West Village Streets, Tears for a Gay Activist
By TRYMAINE LEE

Friends and colleagues of Bob Kohler, a veteran gay rights activist who died at 81 on Wednesday, took to the streets of the West Village last evening, celebrating the life of the man they called a hero, a griot and a legend of the gay community.

With candles and signs held high, and with pill bottles and ceramic pots filled with some of Mr. Kohler’s cremated remains, dozens of his friends and admirers marched through the streets, chanting to the beat of a drummer, stories of Mr. Kohler’s courage in more than six decades of activism spilling from their lips.

Some cried as they stepped down West 13th Street, Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street to Sheridan Square, ending up at the Hudson River piers, a refuge for many gay youths in the area.

“Till the very end he struggled for us, all of us,” said Jennifer Flynn, 36, a friend and member of a group of mostly lesbian activists who helped to care for Mr. Kohler as he battled cancer in his final days. “He could have lived a comfortable life somewhere. He could have ignored everyone.”

Mr. Kohler was on the front lines of the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, the brawl between gay men and police officers at a bar in the Village that is widely viewed as the start of the American gay rights movement.

He also fought in the Navy in World War II and was a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, among other gay rights groups. Friends said Mr. Kohler emerged from the Stonewall uprising a leader in a newly galvanized gay community and soon adopted a militant brand of activism.

“He always had a liberation impulse,” said Bill Dobbs, a friend for 15 years. “And he remained militant when most people were pushing buttons on remote controls, doing nothing.”

Mr. Kohler also fought for the rights of women and minorities, friends said, and had a following of young gay African-Americans and Latinos who looked up to him for his history of taking on causes beyond traditional gay issues.

“He was the epitome of an ally,” said Bran Fenner, 25, who as a high school student was a founder of Fierce, a group for gay youths of color. “He was able to tell us a history that had been denied to us.”

Well into his 70s, Mr. Kohler continued to be an organizer and activist. In 1999 he was one of the demonstrators seized in a mass arrest outside 1 Police Plaza after the killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant shot by the police 41 times.

“I do not equate my oppression with the oppression of blacks and Latinos,” Mr. Kohler told The Village Voice after his arrest. “You can’t. It is not the same struggle, but it is one struggle. And, if my being here as a longtime gay activist can influence other people in the gay community, it’s worth getting arrested.”

Sharlene Cooper, executive director of the New York City AIDS Housing Network, said Mr. Kohler helped her kick a nasty drug habit, cope with a diagnosis of AIDS and get her life back on track.

“As soon as you met Bob you loved him,” she said. “You wish you had 10 Bobs in your life.”

As the group marched down Christopher Street, stopping for a moment in front of the building that once housed the Loft, a clothing boutique Mr. Kohler owned, shopkeepers peered from their windows, and passers-by paused to watch the goings on.

“Whose street?” The crowd chanted. “Bob’s street.”

The group, escorted by a police van, stepped into a park by the piers. The sun had since set and the glow of half-melted candles dotted the circle that had formed around Ms. Cooper, who had called for a moment of silence.

After the bowed heads of many mourners lifted, Phillip Spinelli, a friend of Mr. Kohler’s for more than 40 years, did his best to wipe away the tears streaming down his cheeks.

“I have something to say,” Mr. Spinelli said, raising a pill bottle with some of Mr. Kohler’s remains in it. “He fought for our rights, our life,” he said. “God, help us.”

Then, tossing Mr. Kohler’s remains into the river, he yelled through his tears, “Have a nice swim, honey.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/nyregion/10kohler.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print

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

Supreme Court Says Crack Sentences Can Be Reduced

December 10, 2007
Supreme Court Says Crack Sentences Can Be Reduced
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Monday said judges may impose shorter prison terms for crack cocaine crimes, enhancing judicial discretion to reduce the disparity between sentences for crack and cocaine powder.

By a 7-2 vote, the court said that a 15-year sentence given to Derrick Kimbrough, a black veteran of the 1991 war with Iraq, was acceptable, even though federal sentencing guidelines called for Kimbrough to receive 19 to 22 years.

In a separate sentencing case that did not involve crack cocaine, the court also ruled in favor of judicial discretion to impose more lenient sentences than federal guidelines recommend.

The challenges to criminal sentences center on a judge's discretion to impose a shorter sentence than is called for in guidelines established by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, at Congress' direction. The guidelines were adopted in the mid-1980s to help produce uniform punishments for similar crimes.

The cases are the result of a decision three years ago in which the justices ruled that judges need not strictly follow the sentencing guidelines. Instead, appellate courts would review sentences for reasonableness, although the court has since struggled to define what it meant by that term.

Kimbrough's case did not present the justices with the ultimate question of the fairness of the disparity in crack and powder cocaine sentences. Congress wrote the harsher treatment for crack into a law that sets a mandatory minimum five-year prison sentence for trafficking in 5 grams of crack cocaine or 100 times as much cocaine powder. The law also sets maximum terms.

Seventy percent of crack defendants are given the mandatory prison terms.

Kimbrough is among the remaining 30 percent who, under the guidelines, get even more time in prison because they are convicted of trafficking in more than the amount of crack that triggers the minimum sentences.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, said, ''A reviewing court could not rationally conclude that it was an abuse of discretion'' to cut four years off the guidelines-recommended sentence for Kimbrough.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

The Sentencing Commission recently changed the guidelines to reduce the disparity in prison time for the two crimes. New guidelines took effect Nov. 1 after Congress took no action to overturn the change.

The commission is scheduled to vote Tuesday afternoon on the retroactive application of the crack cocaine guideline amendment that went into effect on Nov. 1. The commission has estimated 19,500 inmates could apply for sentence reductions under the proposal.

In the other case, the court, also by a 7-2 vote, upheld a sentence of probation for Brian Gall for his role in a conspiracy to sell 10,000 pills of ecstasy. U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt of Des Moines, Iowa, determined that Gall had voluntarily quit selling drugs several years before he was implicated, stopped drinking, graduated from college and built a successful business. The guidelines said Gall should have been sent to prison for 30 to 37 months.

The sentence was reasonable, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his majority opinion. Alito and Thomas again dissented.

Under the decisions in both cases, Alito said, ''Sentencing disparities will gradually increase.''

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, David Souter, Ginsburg and Stevens formed the majority in both cases.

The cases are Kimbrough v. U.S., 06-6330, and Gall v. U.S., 06-7949.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Crack-Cocaine.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

“Does it Pay to Invest In Jail Re-Entry Programs for Jail Inmates”

“Does it Pay to Invest In Jail Re-Entry Programs for Jail Inmates,” John Roman and Aaron Chalfin, Urban Institute Re-Entry Roundtable. June 2006. http://www.urban.org/projects/reentry-roundtable/upload/roman_chalfin.pdf

Cost benefit analysis for “re-entry” program in jails focusing on low cost programs in the Hampden County Jail (MA), high cost programs in Montgomery County MD, and contracted programs in Chicago. The paper includes statistical information on the increasing costs of jails from 1983 to 2003 (an increase of 600%) and 3 times the number of cells during the same period. They find that even a modest re-entry program in jails yields considerable benefits. Non-contracted re-entry services might be expected to return between $4.40 to $9.00 in social benefits for each $1 invested. And, if over time, re-entry programs persist, greater benefits will accrue.

This and other new research can be found at http://www.realcostofprisons.org/papers.html

Posted by lois at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

December 08, 2007

WI: Locking up violent cops is the right use of prisons

Locking up violent cops is the right use of prisons
By: Joel McNally:
12/08/2007 Capital Times, Madison, WI

The whole idea of incarceration was supposed to be to make our communities safer. So why is it that as we have massively increased incarceration in recent decades, our communities have become less safe?

Clearly, we have been locking up the wrong people.

An example of incarceration that could actually increase public safety came when Federal Judge Charles Clevert handed down near maximum prison terms to three fired Milwaukee police officers convicted in the beating and torture of Frank Jude Jr.

Clevert sentenced Jon Bartlett to 17 years in prison and Andrew Spengler and Daniel Masarik to 15 years each for severely beating Jude and abusing another African-American with a knife when the two made the mistake of showing up at a drunken house party of off-duty Milwaukee police officers.

The stiff federal sentences finally brought closure to a disgraceful episode in Milwaukee police history that exposed the city's racial divide even further when an all-white county jury acquitted all three officers involved in the 2004 beating.

Suddenly, we were thrown back decades to the 1960s when the U.S. Justice Department had to bring federal charges to exact some measure of justice after all-white local juries routinely acquitted white defendants accused of murdering or abusing African-Americans.

What made Clevert's sentences historic was that since the '60s, although lynchings are no longer openly tolerated by communities, other racial disparities within our criminal justice system have actually increased.

In Wisconsin, African-Americans, who are only 6 percent of the state's population, now account for nearly 50 percent of all prisoners.

When the white majority creates a justice system that is used overwhelmingly against minorities instead of members of the privileged majority, that's a pretty shaky use of the term "justice."

That's why substantial prison terms to those who have always believed they were above the law can act as a real deterrent. Suddenly, the rules have changed. Violent crimes will be treated as violent crimes, no matter who commits them.

Our criminal justice system previously was based on a strict class system. Members of the upper class were the judges. Members of the middle class sat on the juries. And members of the lower class got to be the defendants.

Until now, police officers have always been considered part of the protected middle class. If that has now changed, police officers will have to reconsider how they treat citizens, even African-American ones.

What next? Could it possibly be that police shootings will no longer be automatically ruled as justified in cases where citizens are unarmed and facing in the other direction?

Prison as prophesy

Prison doesn't really work very well as a deterrent when it becomes an inevitability based on race and economic circumstance. On the contrary, those who live in neighborhoods where every young male around them is being fast-tracked into prison can lose all hope of ever expecting to do anything else.

Some even begin preparing for incarceration by wearing prison fashions and adopting fierce personas as protection against anyone ever punking them out. Their basic accessory to strike fear in others becomes a gun.

That's how the lowest expectations of society become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Not only does incarceration fail to change that, but there is growing evidence that harsh prison terms actually increase violent crime in our communities.

After a long period of confinement with people even worse than themselves, the formerly incarcerated return to their old neighborhoods angrier and more dangerous than they were before.

With the stigma of having been in prison, they have fewer opportunities to ever find legitimate employment to support themselves. That's why tough-on-crime politicians are really making our communities less safe.

The real purpose of prisons should be to separate truly dangerous people from society. That is why it is absurd to fill them to overflowing with members of the lower class who are addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Members of the middle and upper classes who are addicted to drugs and alcohol have access to medical treatment and rehabilitation centers. If we ever achieve universal health care, the same option would be available to those in the lower class as well. Then, we could start shutting down some prisons.

But prisons will still be needed to isolate the truly dangerous from the rest of us. And it's hard to imagine anyone more truly dangerous than people we allow to openly use deadly weapons and physical force who feel that laws do not apply to them.

By removing Bartlett, Spengler and Masarik from the community for a long time, Clevert sent a shocking message that could change the culture within the Milwaukee Police Department:

Those prisons they built for other people now await police officers themselves if they commit violent crimes.

Joel McNally of Milwaukee writes a weekly column for The Capital Times.

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/261131

Posted by lois at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2007

OK: Consultants developing recommendations for state prison audit

Thu December 6, 2007
Consultants developing recommendations for state prison audit
By The Associated Press
OKLAHOMA CITY - Housing more nonviolent prison inmates in low-cost community work centers and moving inmates closer to medical facilities in population centers are among recommendations being considered for a comprehensive performance audit of Oklahoma's prison system.

State lawmakers who reviewed the audit's preliminary findings and recommendations said Thursday that the sweeping review, launched last summer by MGT of America, Inc., is expected to contain a variety of plans for reducing prison costs and better managing Oklahoma's more than 25,000 inmates.

"We think they have come up with a myriad of different ideas to achieve that," said House Speaker Pro Tem Gus Blackwell, R-Goodwell, former chairman of the House Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee. MGT, a Florida-based management research and consulting firm, is being paid $844,000 for the audit.

"The corrections audit was very wide in its scope," Blackwell said. "We need to refocus and do more in the areas where it's working well." The state's $477 million prison budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 is an increase of 4.7 percent from the previous year. The Board of Corrections is asking for an additional $90 million for 2008 and another $34.2 million to finish out the current year.

The state ranks 28th in the nation in population but is the nation's top incarcerator of women and its overall incarceration rate is fourth in the U.S., according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Recommendations being considered for the final audit report, to be made public by the end of December, include placing more inmates in community work centers, minimum-security facilities where nonviolent offenders are placed near the end of their sentences to help them transition back into society.

Blackwell said it costs about $10 a day to house an inmate in a work center but between $40 and $50 a day to house an inmate in a standard prison.

Another proposal would move inmates from prisons in remote areas of the state to locations closer to population centers and their abundant medical facilities, such as Oklahoma City and Tulsa, while reducing prison populations at prisons in outlying areas and changing the prisons' functions.

Blackwell said the idea would help reduce inmate medical costs, one of the largest expenses in the state prison budget, as well as the cost of transporting inmates from remote areas.

Prisons are located all over the state but few are near population centers.

"It's like someone took a handful of darts and through them at Oklahoma," Blackwell said. "I think everyone would agree with replacing some of these with more efficient locations."

The audit contains a variety of administrative proposals to halt the growth of Oklahoma's inmate population as well as ways to maximize the impact of alternatives to incarceration, including beefing up drug courts in Oklahoma City and Tulsa that have heavy case loads instead of expanding drug courts in rural areas.

"You're getting a lot better return on your dollar, so focus on those two," Blackwell said.

Rep. Rex Duncan, R-Sand Springs, chairman of the House Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, said the audit's recommendations will help build a consensus to implement ideas to make the corrections system more efficient.

"The big question that remains to be answered is what form will those changes take," Duncan said. "It's safe to say that some of the business recommendations will be met with strong support and in other cases with some political opposition."

Sen. Richard Lerblance, D-Hartshorne, former chairman of the Oklahoma Sentencing Commission, has proposed a $309.6 million, 25-year bond issue to add 1,568 maximum security beds at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and hundreds more beds at prisons across the state.

The cost of implementing the audit's recommendations are not yet known.

"I don't mind spending money, but I don't want to waste money," Blackwell said.

"The bottom line has got to be what's best for the state and the taxpayers," Duncan said.
http://newsok.com/article/3177951/1196988718

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

December 06, 2007

CT: Prisons, parole and punishment

New Canaan Advertiser
Dec 6, 2007
From the Crow's Nest: Prisons, parole and punishment

Connecticut’s penitentiary “alumnae” return to their alma maters with such alarming frequency and in such disheartening numbers that the State finally has become aware that something is seriously amiss in its criminal justice system.

Clearly, prisons are falling short of their “correctional” mission. Nor are they by themselves effective deterrents to crime. And parole boards, often under duress to free up space in overcrowded prisons, sometimes release people who should remain behind bars. At the same time, probation offices, critically understaffed and sometimes inadequately trained, are hard-pressed to keep close and proper tabs on convicts in what purports to be a “supervised release” system.

The point was driven violently home in July when two paroled convicts murdered a woman and her two daughters in Cheshire. While that may have been the most tragic example, it was by no means the only time probationers have turned back to crime.

All of which has led the State Legislature’s Judiciary Committee to tackle sweeping reforms. At hearings that began last week, no less than 15 far-reaching proposals were on the agenda.

The emphasis has been primarily on a “three strikes and you’re out” law, mandating life sentences without parole for repeat perpetrators of violent crimes. State Rep. William Tong of the 147th District offers an additional approach that would be extremely helpful. He wants to establish a database that would enable all law enforcement agencies to share information on offenders quickly and fully.

After the Cheshire murders, for instance, it was revealed that the parole board had been unaware that a judge in an earlier case had called one of the accused killers a “cold-blooded predator.” Would knowing that have dissuaded the board from granting him parole? Probably. Odds are against release of felons recognized as incorrigible and potentially violent.

Proposals such as Rep. Tong’s should not run into any opposition, but a Quinnipiac University poll shows little public support for a “three strikes” measure. Only 35 percent of the respondents agreed with its chief proponents who insist that it is needed. The remaining 65 percent did not necessarily oppose “three strikes” legislation, but most favored implementing it on a case-by-case basis rather than automatically for each offender.

Major sticking points include definition of violent crime and whether all three offenses need to be of a violent nature before a life sentence is imposed. In the meantime, the scope of violence is being broadened to include home invasions. That seems valid enough. A burglar entering a home when it is occupied sets the stage for potential bloodshed either by the burglar or by the occupant he may encounter.

Even there, however, the potential for violence can be mitigated by whether the intruder was unarmed. So there is need for discretion. That possible scenario illustrates how “three strikes” mandates and required minimum sentences effectively take a vital courtroom function out of the hands of judges who already are empowered to impose such sentences if they see fit. Ultimately, the legislature maintains final control anyway because it can confirm or reject the appointment of judges considered too lenient or too rigid.

Public safety and crime control are of prime importance, but the cost of keeping more criminals behind bars for longer stretches also figures prominently in the debate. The State’s Office of Fiscal Analysis estimates that 103 inmates would be sentenced to life terms annually under the “three strikes” law, as currently proposed in its most draconian form, at a cost of $4.3 million, snowballing to $225 million by 2057, plus construction of another $100 million prison every decade.

The legislature would do well to consider a more constructive investment — funding, training, equipping and staffing an efficient and leak-proof supervised release program that with the assistance of new technology would closely monitor all convicts paroled and on probation. Such a program would identify the incorrigible career criminals, the predators likely to be violent and those earnestly trying and needing help to stay out of trouble. Programs should include effective treatment of paroled convicts whose crimes are triggered by substance abuse. Terms of punishment then could be determined accordingly. To that end, it is probably time for a through review of the entire penal code.

Of course, the real solution seems idealistic. It lies in preventing crime through early intervention by close and constant interaction in the lives of youngsters by families, churches, community organizations and society in general. Would that really be too much to hope for?

http://www.acorn-online.com/news/publish/newcanaan-opinion/26067.shtml

Posted by lois at 11:42 PM | Comments (0)

Wall Street and Immigration: Financial Services Giants Have Profited from the Beginning

From today's DOJ report on incarceration growth rates....
Immigration detention facilities had the greatest growth rate last year. The number of people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities grew 43 percent, to 14,482 from 10,104.

Wall Street and Immigration: Financial Services Giants Have Profited from the Beginning

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi | December 4, 2007

Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)
americas.irc-online.org

Life began to get hard for most Americans beginning in the late 1990s due to increased family debt. During the same period, life got a lot harder for most Mexicans for the same reason. The same financial institutions created and profited from much of the family debt in both countries.

According to census reports, 70% of the government unauthorized immigrants in the United States are from Mexico. Most legally unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the United States are economic refugees from the 1995 devastation of Mexico's economy.

While it is popular among U.S. presidential candidates these days to blame Mexican corruption for our huge undocumented immigrant population, corruption in the United States played a far larger role in compelling millions of Mexicans to cross our southern border with or without legal authorization. U.S. corruption came in the form of politicians implementing and enforcing foreign policies that yielded unprecedented profits for their well-heeled campaign contributors in the financial services industry. They probably didn't break U.S. law to accomplish this, but they did force Mexico to break its own laws to implement their program.

Led by Wall Street heavies Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citi, Fidelity, Chase, and others, these finance industry leaders got Congress to permit financial institutions to increase family debt in the United States by enacting legislation friendly to mega-banks (financial holding companies) while thwarting consumer-friendly legislation. The same U.S.-based financial services leaders played a leading role in increasing family debt to unmanageable levels in Mexico in the mid to late 1990s through their influence of the U.S. Congress.
Creating Hardship in the U.S.A.

In the mid 90s, the U.S. financial services industry concentrated campaign contributions to New York Congressman Peter King, currently the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and adviser to the Giuliani campaign, and to other new majority Republican leaders on the House and Senate Banking Committees.1

These committees crafted successful legislation that enabled U.S.-based banking and finance giants, Bank of America, Citi Corp, Fidelity, Chase and a few others to acquire real estate, insurance, credit card, brokerage companies, and other banks as well.2 They also passed legislation that opened the way for banks to triple the charges on their customers' accounts and to raise interest rates on credit card balances without fear of legal limits on interest rate increases they could impose.3

Prior to this legislation, many states had placed limits on credit card interest rates. These state laws set a maximum number of percentage points above the Federal Reserve's prime rate as the limit that banks could charge credit card customers. The new federal legislation pushed through Congress by the banking and finance sector heavyweights preempted state laws covering credit cards resulting in the removal of all legal limits on credit card interest rates.4

Although Democrats Maxine Waters and Charles Schumer tried to curb banks from surreptitiously abusing customers through ATM use charges and other account fees, the Republican majority on a banking Congressional subcommittee killed their efforts. As a result, banks nationwide gained the go ahead to double charge customers for using each other's ATMs and to increase fees.5

The impact of increased charges on bank accounts and credit card balances made life harder for scores of millions of families throughout the United States. Family credit card debt in the United States rose 62.9% between 1989 and 2004.6 The situation has worsened to the point where the majority of middle-income families now carry unpaid credit card balances from month to month while low-income families spend more than 10% of their annual incomes on credit card debt.7
Profiting From Hardship in Mexico

On Dec. 22, 1994 the Mexican peso was devalued over 40%. This, coupled with an increase in the U.S. prime rate enacted by the U.S. Federal Reserve, rendered Mexico nearly bankrupt largely due to dollar-denominated bond debt to Wall Street banks.8

The U.S. government got the International Monetary Fund and Canada to give Mexico money to put together a bailout package to pay its creditors, most of which were Wall Street banks. The International Monetary Fund contracted Mexico's bailout loan to the U.S. Treasury Department.9 Acting in the interest of Wall Street creditors, Peter King got Congress to adopt legislation that imposed monthly oversight on the bailout implementation by the Banking Committee.10

To get the bailout money, Mexico was required to meet stipulations that violated its own Constitution, which limited foreign ownership of the banking industry to 5% and forbade home mortgage interest rates above 7%.11 The bailout package required that foreign banks get 49% of the banking market. Limits on interest rates for all loans were eliminated to pay off Citi, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America, JP Morgan, and the other foreign bond investors. Another stipulation on the bailout money required Mexico to put a cap on wages nationwide.12

Although it was a major Mexican bond creditor, JP Morgan became Mexico's financial adviser.13 An arrangement like this in the United States would have been seen as a blatantly illegal conflict of interest.
Impoverishing Mexican Families for Profit

Mexico's national bank was forced to raise the money to pay off the inflated bond debts to the foreign bond investors by dramatically increasing interest rates on the full spectrum of loans in Mexico.

Over the next two years interest rates on business and farm loans rose from an average of 11% to an average of 56%. Credit card debt interest rates went from 7% to 61%, interest rates on car loans went from 7% to 91%, and home loan interest rates rose from an average of 5% to 75%.14 In the same period the Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan, and HSBC acquired most of Mexico's banking market.15

The impact of 1995 loan interest rate increases was more than millions of people and thousands of businesses could handle. Thousands of farms and businesses, both large and small, went bankrupt. In 1995 alone over 12,000 of Mexico's businesses filed for bankruptcy, and as economic activity came to a standstill and demand was cut, orders were canceled and plants operated at less than minimum levels. Idle capacity in many branches of the manufacturing sector increased to 70%.16 It became impossible for millions of workers to support their families by earning paychecks in their own country. Unable to earn enough to support their families, millions of workers migrated to the United States to find family wage work.17

The Wall Street banks profited handsomely. In 1998 for example, after recouping and profiting from their short-term bond investments through direct and enabled payments from the bailout package, JP Morgan and Citi owned over $4.1 billion dollars and $1.9 billion dollars respectively worth of loans in Mexico. A few years later Citi became the owner of 23.2% of the Mexican loan market through its acquisition of Banamex.18 The banking and finance sector rewarded the Republican members of the banking committees in Congress with millions of dollars in campaign contributions.19
Juanita and Pablo, A Family Story20

Pablo and Juanita lived in a town in northern Mexico where they grew up and got married. They had two children. In 1993 they owned a house and two parcels of vacant land that they planned to give to their children to build their own homes on.

Pablo had a good job and 25 years seniority in a large successful company. Taking a cue from many friends and family who had enjoyed Juanita's cooking at social gatherings over the years, Pablo and Juanita decided to open a restaurant to bring in more income to finance sending their children to college. In 1994 they got a $100,000 peso (US$10,000) loan from a local bank to start Juanita's restaurant.

The restaurant was very successful. The food was excellent, which along with Juanita's warm personality, attracted a large crowd of happy regulars.

Although Pablo and Juanita made all their payments on time, their debt on the loan quadrupled in 1995 because of Mexico's new increased interest rates. The bank quintupled their monthly payment in 1996. Life was hard. But with all four members of the family working, they persevered. The final straw came in 1998 when Pablo's company downsized and he was forced into retirement. The family was now in danger of total financial ruin.

Organizations and friends rallied to their aid and raised enough money through donations to save the house in 2000. But the bank took their land and Juanita's restaurant.

Pablo's monthly pension check is $2000 pesos (US$200). Their son's monthly tuition cost, initially less than half of Pablo's pension check, is now $3,000.

So Juanita came to the United States where she works as a domestic worker without documents. She works 16 hours a day, six days a week taking care of a wealthy old woman for $250 a week. Juanita knows she is working at well below minimum wage, but she doesn't want to assert her right to minimum wage for fear of losing the job and being incarcerated and then deported.
Profiting From Hardship on Both Sides of the Border

Today one of the owners of the bank where Pablo and Juanita got their loan for the restaurant is Bank of America, which acquired 24.9% of Serfin, Mexico's third largest bank.21 Their son's student loan is owned by Citi, which acquired Mexico's largest bank, Banamex.22 The trend begun by the Mexican bond bailout implemented by the U.S. government at the behest of huge financial holding companies has led to a Mexico today in which over 80% of the banking market is owned by foreign banks and there is only one domestically owned nationwide bank.23 Profits from money wired home from family members who went to the United States to work is shifting to some of the same financial institutions that caused so many to flee the country in search of decent paying jobs.24

Meanwhile in the United States, credit card debt continues to raise the pressure on families struggling with soaring health care, higher education, and transportation costs. Wall Street financial institutions have expanded their reach into capitalizing the credit card market by acquiring department store, gasoline, airline, telephone, and other consumer credit cards.

Although credit cards bear the logo of Visa, MasterCard, or one of the other networks, they are actually issued by banks. The five leading U.S. bank credit card issuers are Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Capital One, and HSBC Bank.25 Four of these mega-banks collected billions of dollars in loan payments through Mexican banks they acquired between 1995 and 1998.26

JP Morgan Chase, which recently owned the largest chunk of the credit card market in the Untied States, also now owns the company in Mexico where Pablo worked for 25 years before he was forced to retire.
Profiting from Immigration Raids at Taxpayer Expense

Some of the same Wall Street heavies who profited from the Mexico bailout package began investing in three private prison companies a couple of years ago. This past January, the Bush administration gave contracts to Cornell, the Geo Group, and Corrections Corporation of America to build and run prisons for immigrants detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm or the Homeland Security Department.27

Financial services industry leaders, Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase are major shareholders in Cornell, while Fidelity is a major shareholder in the Geo Group, and Corrections Corporation of America.28 Corrections Corporation of America has reported spending over $1.3 million lobbying the federal government on matters involving prison privatization so far this year.

The market for private prison companies mushroomed when the Bush administration changed the charge for being picked up without your own Social Security number from a misdemeanor carrying a maximum of one year in jail to a Class B felony carrying a minimum of three years in prison.29

While all three financial services industry leaders have profited handsomely on their private prisons stock in the wake of subsequent immigration raids, incarcerations, and deportations,30 the human impact has been devastating for many.

At a time in which a Google search for "reporting illegal immigrants" yields 1,760,000 results, ICE agents from New York's Long Island to Portland, Oregon have seized Latinos from bus stops, light rail platforms, and even their homes with no more probable cause than their looks.31

The seized disappear without access to legal counsel and without the opportunity to contact family and friends. These unfortunate people who happened to be in the vicinity of ICE agents at the wrong time are incarcerated with dangerous criminals, and, if unable to prove legal status on the spot, are forced to sign away their legal rights and then deported. In the meantime, spouses, children, school teachers, and childcare providers are left to search for a parent who has disappeared without a trace.32

As these raids continue, facts and rumors spread a chilling fear through Latino communities across the country. This is occurring much to the ignorance of the general public.

As can be expected, the major media has turned much of its attention to the people who are or would be president of the United States. The single largest financial source of the campaigns for five of the six frontrunners for president in the two major parties is the financial services industry.33

This is a fact that the U.S. major media has missed or ignored, much in the same way it has ignored the role that the financial services industry is and has been playing in the issues surrounding immigration.

End Notes

1. Federal Elections Commission campaign contribution reports 1996-2000; Library of Congress Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Committee in the 104th, 105th and 106th Congress (1995-1998). For example, King and four fellow Republicans on this committee, Bob Ney, Bob Ehrlich, Edward Royce, and Jerry Weller, collectively received over $2.2 million in campaign contributions from the financial services industry.
2. In November 1999, Congress adopted the Financial Services Modernization Act which repealed the restrictions on banks affiliating with securities firms in existing banking law (Glass-Steagall Act) and created and authorized "financial holding companies" to engage in insurance and securities underwriting and agency activities, merchant banking, insurance company portfolio investment activities, and "activities that are 'complementary' to financial activities." Beginning in 1994 Congress had allowed the Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to grant exemptions to anti-trust and preemption provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act.
3. Riegle-Neal Amendments Act, June 1997.
4. Congressional Record, Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Committee in the 104 th and 105 th Congress (1995-98); amendments to Truth in Lending Act, the Bank Holding Company Act, and enacting the Financial Institutions Regulatory Relief Act.
5. Congressional Record, Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Committee in the 104 th Congress (1995-96).
6. "Pushing the Limit: Credit Card Debt Burdens American Families," By Christian E. Weller, Senior Economist, Center for American Progress.
7. "Borrowing to Make Ends Meet," Tamara Draut & Javier Silva, © September 2003 De-mos: A Network for Ideas and Action.
8. "How Investment Bankers Ruined Mexico: Wall Street Blues," Douglas W. Payne, New Republic, March 13, 1995; United States Congressional Record, 104th Congress; House Banking and Financial Services Committee: Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit sub-committee reports; United States Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve Bulletin. "The Transfer of Devaluation Risk from Foreign Investors to the Mexican Government Throughout 1994 Cost the Government Dear," Stephen Fidler and Ted Bardacke, The Financial Times Weekend Edition, Jan. 14-15, 1995. "The Devaluation: A Political Reflection," Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs, Castañeda, J. (1995), 94(590): 114-17. "Market Forces: Some Mutual Funds Wield Growing Clout in Developing Nations;" "As Investments Abroad Rise, Managers Take on Role Similar to Banks, IMF," Craig Torres and Thomas T. Vogel Jr., Wall Street Journal, (Eastern edition), New York, NY, June 14, 1994, p. A1. "Late Night Call to Mexico," Craig Torres and Thomas T. Vogel Jr., Wall Street Journal, (Eastern edition), New York, NY, June 14, 1994, p. A1. "Oops! Peso Forecasts Were Off the Money—Up Until the Crash, Lots of Analysts Gushed Over Mexico," E.S. Browning, Wall Street Journal, (Eastern edition), New York, NY, Jan. 6, 1995, p. A8.
9. According to the "Report to the Chairman, Committee on Banking and Financial Services, House of Representatives" by the United States General Accounting Office on February 23,1996, President Clinton announced a $40 billion loan bailout package for Mexico containing structural adjustment provisions on Jan. 12, 1995 which would be implemented and enforced by the Secretary of the Treasury, but he lacked adequate support in Congress for it. The same GAO report states that the Secretary of the Treasury entered into an agreement with the IMF on Jan. 31, 1995 for the U.S. Treasury Department and the IMF to jointly provide Mexico the same package and provisions that Clinton had proposed on Jan. 12. The IMF issued a press release on Feb. 1, 1995 announcing approval of the package. Clinton notified Congress of the deal on March 9, 1995 in a letter accompanied by a fact sheet on the package prepared by the Treasury Department. The fact sheet noted that Mexico had increased interest rates on short term bonds by 10 percentage points on Feb. 20, 1995. So the Wall Street investors not only recouped their losses on the short term bonds through the bailout, they made a 10% profit in addition.
10. United States Congressional Record, 104th Congress 1995-96; House Committee on Banking and Financial Services: Reports and Hearings on Bill Requesting the President to Submit Information to the House of Representatives Concerning Actions Taken Through the Exchange Stabilization Fund to Strengthen the Mexican Peso and Stabilize the Economy of Mexico" (King, NY).
11. "The Micro-Economic Impact of IMF Structural Adjustment Policies in Mexico," Alejandro Nadal, Center for Economic Studies, El Colegio de México, 2000.
12. "How Investment Bankers Ruined Mexico: Wall Street Blues," Douglas W. Payne, New Republic, March 13, 1995; "Mexico Uses $4 Billion from U.S. Bailout to Pay Investors Series: MEXICO IN CRISIS: Shoring up a shaky economy." One in an occasional series; [Home Edition], Mark Fineman. Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1995, p. 1.; "Mexico's Use of U.S. Loans Is Paying Off. First half of $20 billion credit line went to avoiding bond defaults. Peso has stabilized, but crisis is seen as far from over" Mark Fineman, Los Angeles Times, [Home Edition], July 7, 1995. ; "Mexico Unveils Program of Harsh Fiscal Medicine—Spending Will Be Slashed, Taxes Raised to Rein in Prices and Salvage Peso," Paul B. Carroll and Craig Torres, Wall Street Journal, (Eastern edition), New York, NY, March 10, 1995, p. A3; "U.S. unveils rescue plan for Mexico," Tim Torres, Wall Street Journal, (Eastern edition), New York, NY, Feb 22, 1995, p. A3; "U.S. Loans to Mexico Used Mostly to Pay Investors," Mark Fineman, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1995; IMF Staff Report, June 1995.
13. "Mexico's Debt-Restructuring Plan Stalls—Problems in Repackaging $2 Billion of 'Tesobonos' Add to Nation's Woes," Craig Torres, Wall Street Journal, (Eastern edition), New York, NY, Feb 5, 1995, p. A14.
14. "How Investment Bankers Ruined Mexico: Wall Street Blues," Douglas W. Payne, New Republic, March 13, 1995; "Mexico Uses $4 Billion from U.S. Bailout to Pay Investors Series: MEXICO IN CRISIS: Shoring up a shaky economy," One in an occasional series; [Home Edition], Mark Fineman, Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1995, p. 1; "Mexico's Use of U.S. Loans is Paying Off. First half of $20 billion credit line went to avoiding bond defaults. Peso has stabilized, but crisis is seen as far from over," Mark Fineman, Los Angeles Times, [Home Edition], July 7, 1995; "Mexico Unveils Program of Harsh Fiscal Medicine—Spending Will Be Slashed, Taxes Raised to Rein in Prices and Salvage Peso," Paul B. Carroll and Craig Torres, Wall Street Journal, (Eastern edition), New York, NY, March 10, 1995,p. A3. "U.S. unveils rescue plan for Mexico," Tim Torres, Wall Street Journal, (Eastern edition), New York, NY, Feb 22, 1995, p. A3; "U.S. Loans to Mexico Used Mostly to Pay Investors," Mark Fineman, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1995; IMF Staff Report, June 1995.
15. Foreign and Domestic Bank Participation in Emerging Markets: Lessons from Mexico and Argentina by Linda Goldberg, B. Gerard Dages, and Daniel Kinney; Revision: March 10, 2000.
16. "The Micro-Economic Impact of IMF Structural Adjustment Policies in Mexico," Alejandro Nadal, Center for Economic Studies, El Colegio de México, 2000.
17. Ibid.
18. Foreign and Domestic Bank Participation in Emerging Markets: Lessons from Mexico and Argentina by Linda Goldberg, B. Gerard Dages, and Daniel Kinney, Revision: March 10, 2000.
19. United States Federal Election Commission 1996, 1998, 2000 campaign contribution reports of U.S. Reps Peter King, Bob Ehrlich, Bob Ney, Edward Royce, and Jerry Weller.
20. This is a true story. I have changed the names of the family members at their request.
21. Wikipedia.org, Bloomberg.com.
22. Wikipedia.org, Bloomberg.com.
23. Banorte, which is supported by World Bank loans, owns about 4% of the banking market in Mexico, and is now the fourth largest bank in Texas.
24. "Remittance market draws major players; Banks, cards, credit unions enter the fray," Carolyn Said, San Francisco Chronicle; Sunday, July 16, 2006.
25. "For credit card issuers, there's plenty of room at the top," by Jeremy Simon, CreditCards.com, June 6, 2006.
26. Edgar database 10 Q filings, United States Securities and Exchange Commission; " Foreign and Domestic Bank Participation in Emerging Markets: Lessons from Mexico and Argentina," by Linda Goldberg, B. Gerard Dages, and Daniel Kinney; "U.S. Loans to Mexico Used Mostly to Pay Investors," Mark Fineman, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1995; "Mexican Meltdown: Nafta, Democracy, and the Peso," Maxwell A. Cameron, Cerlac Working Paper Series, January, 1996.
27. 1/18/07 Federal Bureau of Prisons announcement of contract awarded to Geo Group to incarcerate approximately 2,400 immigrants in Texas; 1/19/07 by the Federal Bureau of Prisons announcement of $119.6 million contract awarded to Corrections Corporation of America to incarcerate over 1,500 in Texas; 1/19/07 by the Federal Bureau of Prisons announcement of $268.8 million contract awarded to Cornell to incarcerate up to 3,500 in Texas.
28. Geo Group, Corrections Corporation of America, and Cornell shareholder information: Edgar database, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission 10 K, 10 Q filings.
29. "Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act," 2004, Library of Congress.
30. Yahoo Finance, share price histories of Geo Group, CXW, Cornell.
31. Interviews with Nadia Marin Molina, The Workplace Project, Hempstead, NY and Andrea Cano, Oregon Farm Worker Ministry 10/21/07-11/15/07.
32. Ibid.
33. As of the 9/30/07 Federal Elections Commission filings, the Financial Services industry is the top contributing sector to the campaigns of Rudy Giulani, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Barak Obama, and John McCain; and the second largest contributing sector to John Edwards (behind contributions by lawyers). Data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4792
Peter Cervantes-Gautschi is co-executive director of Enlace, an alliance of low wage worker organizations in the United States and Mexico, and analyst for the Americas Policy Program at www.americaspolicy.org. Feedback can be directed to americas(@)ciponline.org or through their website, www.enlaceintl.org.

Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

About one in every 31 adults in the United States was in prison, in jail or on supervised release at the end of last year reports DOJ

New York Times
Justice Dept. Numbers Show Prison Trends
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: December 6, 2007

About one in every 31 adults in the United States was in prison, in jail or on supervised release at the end of last year, the Department of Justice reported yesterday.
An estimated 2.38 million people were incarcerated in state and federal facilities, an increase of 2.8 percent over 2005, while a record 5 million people were on parole or probation, an increase of 1.8 percent. Immigration detention facilities had the greatest growth rate last year. The number of people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities grew 43 percent, to 14,482 from 10,104.
The data reflect deep racial disparities in the nation’s correctional institutions, with a record 905,600 African-American inmates in prisons and state and local jails. In several states, incarceration rates for blacks were more than 10 times the rate of whites. In Iowa, for example, blacks were imprisoned at 13.6 times the rate of whites, according to an analysis of the data by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group.
But the report concludes that nationally the percentage of black men in state and federal prison populations in 2006 fell to 38 percent, from 43 percent in 2000. The rates also declined for black women, while rates for white women increased.
Over all, the number of women in state and federal prisons, 112,498, was at a record high. The female jail and prison population has grown at double the rate for men since 1980; in 2006 it increased 4.5 percent, its fastest clip in five years.
The report suggests that state prison capacity has expanded at roughly the same rate as the prison population, with prisons operating at 98 percent to 114 percent of capacity, a slight improvement over 2005.
Still, many prison systems are accommodating record numbers of inmates by using facilities that were never meant to provide bed space. Arizona has for years held inmates in tent encampments on prison grounds. Hundreds of California prisoners sleep in three-tier bunk beds in gymnasiums or day rooms. Prisons throughout the nation have made meeting rooms for educational and treatment programs into cell space.
Private prisons have also been a growing option for crowded corrections departments. And local jails contracted with various government agencies to hold 77,987 more state and federal inmates last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/us/06prison.html

Posted by lois at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

CT: More Prisons Wrong Approach

Hartford Courant
More Prisons Wrong Approach
KHALIL ISKAROUS

December 5, 2007

Connecticut legislators met on Nov. 27 to consider 15 proposals on reforming the criminal justice system. Although these bills claim to reform the justice system, most of them propose a more extreme form of the existing system, which over-funds imprisonment and de-funds education, health care, welfare, basic human services and job training.

The most prominent of these bills, proposed by Rep. Michael P. Lawlor of East Haven and Sen. Andrew J. McDonald of Stamford, proposes to spend $260 million on two new prisons, which would cost $400 million in bonding over 20 years.

The same bill proposes to spend $1.77 million on counseling. This is a ratio of 100-1 of spending on prisons, as opposed to people. This is not a reform bill. It is a more extreme version of policies that have already destroyed tens of thousands of lives and families and decimated many communities.

To see the devastating effects of the already existing harsh prison laws in Connecticut, we need look no farther than our state capital.

Susan Storey, chief public defender of Connecticut, testified on Nov. 27 to the Judiciary Committee that "statistics show that one in six of Hartford's children has a parent or parents in prison and research shows that this single fact puts children at increased risk of entering the criminal justice system."

Each imprisoned generation, under our system of priorities, begets an even larger imprisoned generation. At some point in the past, one out of 10 children in Hartford had a parent in prison. Harsher sentencing laws were passed.

Now one out of six children in Hartford has a parent in prison. Based on the trends we see, harsher policies — more prisons, "three strikes" laws, mandatory minimum sentences and parole bans — will lead to a situation where one out of two children in Hartford will have a parent in prison. And soon the statisticians will start to count the number of children in Hartford with both parents in prison. Will this lead to greater safety? No.

Many of the proposals being considered by the Judiciary Committee include longer sentences, mandatory minimum sentences and reclassification of nonviolent crimes as being violent. But the problem is not that there aren't enough people in prison. It is that there are far too many people in prison.

The United States, the land of the free, already has 2.5 million people in prison, compared with China's 1.5 million. And the majority of the U.S. prisoners are nonviolent, imprisoned for long periods despite not posing a threat to others, or imprisoned for crimes that only are considered violent here. The result of all of this, of course, is less safety, not more safety.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell's ban on parole is another example of a harsh policy that leads to more, not less harm. In a study released last year from the Central Connecticut State University Criminology Department, it was determined that prisoners who re-enter society on parole are about half as likely to return to prison than those who complete their terms.

Common sense would lead to the expansion of parole services, not a ban on parole. But politicians are more interested in getting votes by sounding tough than actually solving problems.

We don't need more prisons, longer sentences, three strikes laws and bans on parole. We need funding for schools, jobs and rehabilitation for those re-entering society. And by funding, I mean real funding, not funding at the current rates, which has led to nonfunctional schools, declining wages and failed rehabilitation. Safety in our communities can only result from a focus on real services to communities, something we have not seen in many years.

Not a single proposal being considered by the Judiciary Committee reflects any imaginative thinking by lawmakers that is likely to actually increase our safety. Throw-away-the-key laws and a 100-1 ratio of funding on prisons vs. people will not lead to safety, but to more parents in prison, more community destruction, more crime and more incarceration.

Let's build schools, not prisons.

Khalil Iskarous of New Haven is a member of the Committee Against the Ban on Parole and Unidad Latina en Accion.
courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-iskarous1205.artdec05,0,6008847.story

Copyright © 2007, The Hartford Courant

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

MA: New prisons chief makes recidivism his top priority

"For too long the union has run the department," said Leslie Walker, head of the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, an advocacy group for prisoners.

Walker’s organization has filed a federal lawsuit against the state claiming poor treatment of prisoners with mental illnesses — in part leading to a high suicide rate behind bars. She said top brass in DOC also were averse to change.

"Mr. Clarke has his work cut out for him," she said. "There are a lot of people who have been there for a long time. They’re going to wait out Mr. Clarke."

New prisons chief makes recidivism his top priority
By Associated Press | Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Boston Herald

MILFORD - Massachusetts can lock the door behind the inmates housed in its prisons, but Harold Clarke says that more than 90 percent of the time the state can’t throw away the key.

So his top priority as the new chief of the Massachusetts prison system is to make sure the vast majority of inmates who are eventually released get the mental health and substance abuse counseling, education and job training programs they need to stay out of prison.

Some call that lenient, Clarke says it’s good sense.

"If they go back home having left environments that were just punitive, they’re going to take out their anger and rage on the citizens once they get back out into the community," he said.

Clarke, a 56-year-old who grew up in Panama and has run state prison systems in Nebraska and Washington state, says reducing recidivism is his top goal and the reason Gov. Deval Patrick hired him last month to take over Massachusetts’ prisons.

Clarke is one piece of Patrick’s vision to overhaul portions of the criminal justice system to emphasize rehabilitation and re-entry programs over policies of the 1990s, when then-Gov. William Weld boasted of reintroducing prisoners "to the joys of busting rocks."

Patrick, a former civil rights lawyer in the Clinton administration, advocates for reforms of mandatory minimum sentences and has filed legislation requiring post-release supervision and support for prisoners. He says half of the 20,000 inmates released from incarceration annually are back in jail within a year.

Clarke’s first few days in office came amid controversy over how the state prisons and courts system handled the release of Daniel Tavares Jr., who finished a 16-year manslaughter sentence for killing his mother this summer.

Prison officials tried to have him held on charges he assaulted two prison guards, most recently in 2006. But a Superior Court judge released him on personal recognizance, and now he’s accused of murdering a Washington state couple last month.

No one knows if Tavares could have benefited from additional re-entry programs.

But Clarke said even the worst criminals can be helped.

"Not speaking specifically about Tavares," he said, "I have seen in my experience many violent offenders who have committed heinous crimes that have left prisons and never returned, became law-abiding productive citizens."

The DOC has 10,000 inmates in 18 facilities — mostly prisons as well as a hospital and substance abuse center. It is a smaller operation than in Washington, where Clarke spent more than two years after working his whole career in the Nebraska prison system, rising from counselor to a 15-year stint as commissioner.

His Washington experience produced mixed results. Clarke helped develop a $30 million re-entry program that took effect this summer and is credited by many as a national model.

It requires each inmate to have a re-entry plan, ideally from the moment they are incarcerated. It authorizes two-year college degrees, financed by family, outsiders or loans. It also would link the ex-convicts with community services, coordinate tracking by the criminal justice system and impose stiffer penalties for repeat violations of probation.

Washington officials hope to reduce recidivism rates by 30 percent and avoid building new prisons.

But Clarke’s administration was criticized for releasing felons from overcrowded county jails before they served full sentences for violating their probation. And Washington’s Republicans have made public safety a campaign issue against Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire.

But Washington Sen. Mike Carrell, a Republican who authored the legislation that included Clarke’s reforms, credited him with pushing necessary changes.

"It’s not easy to come into a system that’s been going in one direction for a long time and change the rudder," he said. "I appreciate his support for what we did in the Legislature."

Former Massachusetts DOC commissioner Kathleen Dennehy also talked reform, but became bogged down in battles with the powerful Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union.

"For too long the union has run the department," said Leslie Walker, head of the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, an advocacy group for prisoners.

Walker’s organization has filed a federal lawsuit against the state claiming poor treatment of prisoners with mental illnesses — in part leading to a high suicide rate behind bars. She said top brass in DOC also were averse to change.

"Mr. Clarke has his work cut out for him," she said. "There are a lot of people who have been there for a long time. They’re going to wait out Mr. Clarke."

Steve Kenneway, president of the 3,800-member correctional officers’ union, said union members aren’t obstructionists. He said the Romney administration and Dennehy were too quick to discipline officers, leading to protracted legal battles.

Kenneway said he’s already met with Clarke, who is in his second week on the job, and was impressed with the new commissioner’s willingness to establish good lines of communication.

"He’s going to bring some new ideas and that’s what we need," he said.

Kenneway sounded a note of caution about rehab programs that are implemented without union input, but agreed that simply warehousing people until their sentences are up won’t work either.

Clarke noted there are some ongoing re-entry programs, but they are not widespread in the state.

"I got a clear message from the governor that he wanted to have a progressive correction system ... to take it to a place beyond where it’s at right now, and that’s what I like to do," he said.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/politics/view.bg?articleid=1049010

Posted by lois at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2007

Will federal drug sentencing reform backfire in states?

"Of the 13 states that dole out tougher penalties for crack offenses, Ohio may become the first to change its law to provide parity. The state Senate last month approved a bill that would equalize penalties for both forms of cocaine. Notably, however, the legislation would not reduce crack penalties; it would only increase those for powder cocaine. The bill now requires House approval."

Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Federal, state crack sentences draw scrutiny
By John Gramlich, Stateline.org Staff Writer A recent decision by Congress to relax federal penalties for those caught with crack cocaine has raised hopes among civil-rights groups and others that the move will inspire broader changes — including at the state level — to end what one activist called “legislated inequity” across the nation.
The federal government and 13 states mete out tougher punishments for those who possess and peddle crack cocaine than for those who are caught with the same illegal substance in its powder form. In Missouri, for example, a drug dealer who sells six grams of crack faces the same prison term under state law — at least 10 years behind bars — as someone who sells 75 times that amount, or 450 grams, of powder cocaine. No other state makes as sharp a criminal distinction between the two forms of the drug.

Disparities in the way state and federal laws treat crack and powder cocaine offenses have long prompted civil rights advocates — as well as many lawmakers, judges and attorneys — to call for more equitable punishments. Critics say the tougher penalties for crack unfairly target poor black people who live in inner-city areas and are more likely to use the drug, which is a cheaper and more addictive form of cocaine than powder.
Powder cocaine, in turn, is more commonly used by whites.
“The African-American community has been devastated and downgraded by that particular inequity, which was a legislated inequity,” Redditt Hudson, racial justice manager of the St. Louis branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said of Missouri’s statute and similar federal policies. “It has broken families. It has destroyed lives.”
Others, however, point to the fact that crack cocaine historically has proven more destructive than powder, and played a key role in a nationwide crime surge during the 1980s, when many of the strict state and federal laws were approved.
“It wasn’t just the drug itself. It was the correlating violence and weapons,” said Barbara Tombs, a senior fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice and a former state sentencing official in Minnesota and Kansas.
A decision by Congress that took effect last month reduced federal sentences for crack offenders by an average of 17 months — and has lent momentum to efforts to introduce more dramatic changes to both U.S. and state sentencing laws. The change, which was formally introduced by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, required congressional approval before taking effect.
The sentencing commission, a federal panel that sets sentencing guidelines for federal judges, now is considering making its new policy retroactive, which it can do without congressional approval and which would potentially reduce sentences for more than 19,000 federal inmates currently behind bars for crack offenses.
At the same time, members of Congress in both parties are using the attention surrounding the new sentencing guidelines to push a host of bills that would make fundamental changes to federal sentencing law, including eliminating what is known as the “100 to 1 ratio.” That ratio doles out the same minimum five-year prison term for those caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine and those caught with five grams of crack.
The U.S. Supreme Court also has entered the debate over crack sentences, taking up a case this term that questions whether federal judges have the discretion to depart from sentencing guidelines and issue lesser penalties if they choose.
Critics of tough crack penalties say the flurry of recent federal activity has put a spotlight on a debate that has raged for nearly two decades and could lead to policy changes in the states.
“Politically speaking, there’s renewed interest and a window of opportunity — which has never been this big — to reconsider the disparate penalties for crack and better prioritize who we put behind bars,” said Adam Gelb, project director of the Public Safety Performance Project, which advises states on criminal-justice policies. Like Stateline.org, the project is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Of the 13 states that dole out tougher penalties for crack offenses, Ohio may become the first to change its law to provide parity. The state Senate last month approved a bill that would equalize penalties for both forms of cocaine. Notably, however, the legislation would not reduce crack penalties; it would only increase those for powder cocaine. The bill now requires House approval.
Tombs, of the Vera Institute of Justice, said it is politically easier for lawmakers to raise penalties for powder cocaine than to reduce them for crack. “It’s hard for any legislator to reduce a penalty once they’ve made it effective,” she said.
Two other states — Connecticut and Iowa — also have changed penalties for crack and powder cocaine offenses in recent years, according to a report to Congress issued by the U.S. Sentencing Commission in May.
In 2005, Connecticut repealed a sentencing law that included a potential prison term of life behind bars for those caught selling as little as half a gram of crack — roughly the equivalent of half a packet of sugar substitute. The same penalty awaited those who sold 28.5 grams of powder. Connecticut lawmakers raised the quantity threshold for crack and lowered that of powder cocaine to balance the two crimes.
In Iowa, which previously used the same “100-to-1 ratio” employed by the federal government, lawmakers reduced the ratio to 10-to-1 in 2003. Unlike the federal government, however, the Hawkeye State uses the ratio only to determine maximum penalties, not mandatory minimums, for crack and powder offenses.
Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, said a key test of changing attitudes will come when the U.S. Sentencing Commission announces its decision on making its new sentencing guidelines retroactive — possibly in January.
Mauer said a decision in favor of retroactivity would provide a signal to state legislatures that some of their crack sentencing laws should be revisited.
“If it does go through, it will probably contribute to some of the momentum toward reform. Certainly it would raise some questions in the states as to whether they want to rethink their policies as well,” Mauer said. But, he cautioned, “It’s a little hard to know which direction they might go.”

Thirteen states punish crack cocaine offenses more severely than those involving powder
• Alabama
• Arizona
• California
• Iowa
• Maine
• Maryland
• Missouri
• New Hampshire
• North Dakota
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• South Carolina
• Virginia
Source: U.S. Sentencing Commission
http://www.stateline.org/live/printable/story?contentId=261864

Posted by lois at 06:23 PM | Comments (0)

December 04, 2007

American Exception: Murder Once Removed

December 4, 2007, NY Times
American Exception
Serving Life for Providing Car to Killers
By ADAM LIPTAK
American Exception
Murder, Once Removed

CRAWFORDVILLE, Fla. — Early in the morning of March 10, 2003, after a raucous party that lasted into the small hours, a groggy and hungover 20-year-old named Ryan Holle lent his Chevrolet Metro to a friend. That decision, prosecutors later said, was tantamount to murder.

The friend used the car to drive three men to the Pensacola home of a marijuana dealer, aiming to steal a safe. The burglary turned violent, and one of the men killed the dealer’s 18-year-old daughter by beating her head in with a shotgun he found in the home.

Mr. Holle was a mile and a half away, but that did not matter.

He was convicted of murder under a distinctively American legal doctrine that makes accomplices as liable as the actual killer for murders committed during felonies like burglaries, rapes and robberies.

Mr. Holle, who had given the police a series of statements in which he seemed to admit knowing about the burglary, was convicted of first-degree murder. He is serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole at the Wakulla Correctional Institution here, 20 miles southwest of Tallahassee.

A prosecutor explained the theory to the jury at Mr. Holle’s trial in Pensacola in 2004. “No car, no crime,” said the prosecutor, David Rimmer. “No car, no consequences. No car, no murder.”

Most scholars trace the doctrine, which is an aspect of the felony murder rule, to English common law, but Parliament abolished it in 1957. The felony murder rule, which has many variations, generally broadens murder liability for participants in violent felonies in two ways. An unintended killing during a felony is considered murder under the rule. So is, as Mr. Holle learned, a killing by an accomplice.

India and other common law countries have followed England in abolishing the doctrine. In 1990, the Canadian Supreme Court did away with felony murder liability for accomplices, saying it violated “the principle that punishment must be proportionate to the moral blameworthiness of the offender.” Countries outside the common law tradition agree. “The view in Europe,” said James Q. Whitman, a professor of comparative law at Yale, “is that we hold people responsible for their own acts and not the acts of others. ”But prosecutors and victims’ rights groups in the United States say that punishing accomplices as though they had been the actual killers is perfectly appropriate.“The felony murder rule serves important interests,” said Mr. Rimmer, the prosecutor in the Holle case, “because it holds all persons responsible for the actions of each other if they are all participating in the same crime.”

Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group, said “all perpetrators of the underlying felony, not just the one who pulls the trigger” should be held accountable for murder. “A person who has chosen to commit armed robbery, rape or kidnapping has chosen to do something with a strong possibility of causing the death of an innocent person,” Mr. Scheidegger said. “That choice makes it morally justified to convict the person of murder when that possibility happens.”

About 16 percent of homicides in 2006 occurred during felonies, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Statistics concerning how many of those killings led to the murder prosecutions of accomplices are not available, but legal experts say such prosecutions are relatively common in the more than 30 states that allow them. About 80 people have been sentenced to death in the last three decades for participating in a felony that led to a murder though they did not kill anyone.

Terry Snyder, whose daughter Jessica was the victim in Mr. Holle’s case, said Mr. Holle’s conduct was as blameworthy as that of the man who shattered her skull. “It never would have happened unless Ryan Holle had lent the car,” Mr. Snyder said. “It was as good as if he was there.”

Prosecutors sometimes also justify the doctrine on the ground that it deters murders. Criminals who know they will face harsh punishment if someone dies in the course of a felony, supporters of the felony murder rule say, may plan their crimes with more care, may leave deadly weapons at home and may decide not to commit the underlying felony at all.

But the evidence of a deterrent effect is thin. An unpublished analysis of F.B.I. crime data from 1970 to 1998 by Anup Malani, a law professor at the University of Chicago, found that the presence of the felony murder rule had a relatively small effect on criminal behavior, reducing the number of deaths during burglaries and car thefts slightly, not affecting deaths during rapes and, perversely, increasing the number of deaths during robberies. That last finding, the study said, “is hard to explain” and “warrants further exploration.”

The felony murder rule’s defenders acknowledge that it can be counterintuitive.

“It may not make any sense to you,” Mr. Rimmer, the prosecutor in Mr. Holle’s case, told the jury. “He has to be treated just as if he had done all the things the other four people did.” Prosecutors sought the death penalty for Charles Miller Jr., the man who actually killed Jessica Snyder, but he was sentenced to life without parole. So were the men who entered the Snyders’ home with him, Donnie Williams and Jermond Thomas. So was William Allen Jr., who drove the car. So was Mr. Holle. Mr. Holle had no criminal record. He had lent his car to Mr. Allen, a housemate, countless times before. “All he did was go say, ‘Use the car,’ ” Mr. Allen said of Mr. Holle in a pretrial deposition. “I mean, nobody really knew that girl was going to get killed. It was not in the plans to go kill somebody, you know.”

But Mr. Holle did testify that he had been told it might be necessary to “knock out” Jessica Snyder. Mr. Holle is 25 now, a tall, lean and lively man with a rueful sense of humor, alert brown eyes and an unusually deep voice. In a spare office at the prison here, he said that he had not taken the talk of a burglary seriously. “I honestly thought they were going to get food,” he said of the men who used his car, all of whom had attended the nightlong party at Mr. Holle’s house, as had Jessica Snyder. “When they actually mentioned what was going on, I thought it was a joke,” Mr. Holle added, referring to the plan to steal the Snyders’ safe. “I thought they were just playing around. I was just very naïve. Plus from being drinking that night, I just didn’t understand what was going on.”

Mr. Holle’s trial lawyer, Sharon K. Wilson, said the statements he had given to the police were the key to the case, given the felony murder rule.“ It’s just draconian,” Ms. Wilson said. “The worst thing he was guilty of was partying too much and not being discriminating enough in who he was partying with.” Mr. Holle’s trial took one day. “It was done, probably, by 5 o’clock,” Mr. Holle said. “That’s with the deliberations and the verdict and the sentence.”

Witnesses described the horror of the crime. Christine Snyder, for instance, recalled finding her daughter, her head bashed in and her teeth knocked out.“Then what did you do?” the prosecutor asked her.“ I went screaming out of the home saying they blew my baby’s face off,” Ms. Snyder said. The safe had belonged to Christine Snyder. The police found a pound of marijuana in it, and, after her daughter’s funeral, she was sentenced to three years in prison for possessing it.

Not every state’s version of the felony murder rule is as strict as Florida’s, and a few states, including Hawaii, Kentucky and Michigan, have abolished it entirely.“ The felony-murder rule completely ignores the concept of determination of guilt on the basis of individual misconduct,” the Michigan Supreme Court wrote in 1980. The vast majority of states retain it in various forms, but courts and officials have taken occasional steps to limit its harshest applications.

In August, for instance, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas commuted the death sentence of Kenneth Foster, the driver of a getaway car in a robbery spree that ended in a murder.

Mr. Holle was the only one of the five men charged with murdering Jessica Snyder who was offered a plea bargain, one that might have led to 10 years in prison.“ I did so because he was not as culpable as the others,” said Mr. Rimmer, the prosecutor. Mr. Holle, who rejected the deal, has spent some time thinking about the felony murder rule.“ The laws that they use to convict people are just — they have to revise them,” he said. “Just because I lent these guys my car, why should I be convicted the same as these people that actually went to the scene of the crime and actually committed the crime?” Mr. Rimmer sounded ambivalent on this point.
“Whether or not the felony murder rule can result in disproportionate justice is a matter of opinion,” Mr. Rimmer said. “The father of Jessica Snyder does not think so.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/us/04felony.html

Posted by lois at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

Justice Policy Institute: "The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties"

Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a new report which finds that 97 percent of the nation's large-population counties imprisoned African Americans at a higher rate than whites. The report documents racial disparities in the use of prison for drug offenses in 193 of the 198 counties that reported to government entities.
"The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties" is the first study to examine drug imprisonment rates at the county level. It is also the first study to document the disproportionate impact of drug imprisonment on African American communities at the county level.

Major findings of The Vortex include:

While tens of millions of people use illicit drugs, prison and policing responses to drug behavior have a concentrated impact on a subset of the population. In 2002, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, 1.5 million drug arrests, and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense. While African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, African Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses.
Of the 175,000 admitted to prison nationwide in 2002, over half were African American, despite the fact that African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the U.S. population.
There is no relationship between the rates at which people are sent to prison for drug offenses and the rates at which people use drugs in counties.
Higher county drug prison admission rates were associated with how much was spent on policing and the judicial system, higher poverty and unemployment rates, and the proportion of the county's population that is African American.
The full report and a very good interactive map of states and counties is at : http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=69

Posted by lois at 06:33 PM | Comments (0)

December 03, 2007

Federal Appeals Court Strikes Down Public Funding Of Evangelical Prison Program In Iowa

Federal Appeals Court Strikes Down Public Funding Of Evangelical Prison Program In Iowa
Monday, December 3, 2007
Americans United for Church and State

Americans United Praises Court Ruling That Upholds Separation Of Church And State

A federal appeals court today ruled that tax funding of an evangelical Christian rehabilitation program at an Iowa state prison violates the separation of church and state and must end.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that government support for the InnerChange Freedom Initiative at Newton Correctional Facility -- a program operated by Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries -- advances religious indoctrination at state expense. Americans United brought the litigation against InnerChange on behalf of inmates, their families and taxpayers.

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, hailed the ruling.

"This is an extremely important decision," said Lynn. "Government officials have no business paying for religious indoctrination and awarding special treatment and benefits to those willing to embrace one religious perspective.

"Government should not single out a particular religion for special treatment," Lynn continued. "You simply cannot give government funds to a religious group for its evangelism program."

Added AU Senior Litigation Counsel Alex J. Luchenitser, "This ruling is a major setback for the White House’s ‘Faith-Based Initiative.’ It reaffirms that the government must ensure that public funds are not used for religious instruction, and that the government must not aid programs that discriminate based on religion.”

Americans United presented evidence that inmates who took part in InnerChange were given better treatment and perks that were not available to others, including better housing and expedited access to classes required for parole. During its investigation of the program, AU discovered that InnerChange was saturated with evangelical Christianity and that staff members were frequently hostile to other faiths.

At trial, inmates testified that they were pressured to convert to evangelical Christianity, and that the beliefs of Roman Catholics and other faiths were ridiculed. The court record showed that non-Christians were frequently referred to as "unsaved," "lost," "pagan" and "sinful" by InnerChange staff. The program required staffers to abide by an evangelical statement of faith.

In a unanimous decision joined by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the appeals court upheld a lower court ruling issued on June 2, 2006, except that it reversed a portion of the lower court ruling that required InnerChange to return funds it received prior to June 2006. InnerChange will still need to return funds it received after the June 2006 ruling.

The decision states: "In the present case, plaintiffs demonstrated . . . that the InnerChange program resulted in inmate enrollment in a program dominated by Bible study, Christian classes, religious revivals, and church services."

The opinion concluded that the state’s “direct aid to InnerChange violated the Establishment clauses of the United States and Iowa Constitutions.”

Corrections officials in other states have considered adopting InnerChange. Lynn said today's ruling should bring those plans to a screeching halt.

The lead trial counsel in the case was Americans United’s Senior Litigation Counsel Luchenitser. The trial team also included AU Litigation Counsel Heather L. Weaver and Iowa constitutional law attorney Dean Stowers. Luchenitser also presented the oral argument to the appeals court on behalf of the plaintiffs.
http://www.au.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr012=e8ccdv1h32.app7b&abbr=pr&page=NewsArticle&id=9523&security=1002&news_iv_ctrl=1241

Posted by lois at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

Prosecuting kids as adults: some states ponder changes. Studies cast doubt on tough laws for kids

"The MacArthur Foundation said in a report to be released this month that about half the states are involved in juvenile justice reforms ‹ among them, taking more kids out of the adult system, providing more mental health and community based-services and improving conditions at detention centers. A national poll, commissioned by MacArthur and the Center for Children's Law and Policy and set for release at the same time, also found widespread public support for rehabilitating teens rather than locking them up. Most favored shifting some money states spend on incarcerating kids and using it for counseling, education and job training."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-01-tryingkids_N.htm

Prosecuting kids as adults: Some states ponder changes

STUDIES CAST DOUBT ON TOUGH LAWS FOR KIDS

Laws that send teen offenders to the adult justice system "do more harm than good" in reducing violent or other criminal behavior, according to a task force report reviewing studies conducted over two decades.

The group of public health experts, appointed by the federal Centers for Disease Control, said "transfer policies have generally resulted in increased arrests for subsequent crimes, including violent crime" among teens sent to the adult system, compared to those who remain in juvenile court.

The panel known as the Task Force on Community Preventive Services recommended against tougher transfer laws in a report published last week. The CDC evaluated nine studies for the group.

But the report also noted that the research didn't include the least or most violent cases, and that it was possible that transferring very serious offenders to adult court might be effective.

One study mentioned compared juvenile offenders in New York where anyone 16 or older is considered an adult, and even younger for violent crimes with kids in New Jersey, where the age cutoff is 18 and few teens are waived to the adult court.

The two groups of kids were studied over seven years during the 1980s and 1990s and those who were prosecuted as adults were 28% more likely to commit violent crimes, according to Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University. The research he led was conducted in separate decades with separate examples and the reached the same conclusion.

Fagan said the two groups were matched on several counts including age and prior crimes and incarceration and the higher rate was consistent, even when the New York kids didn't end up in prison.

A 1996 Florida study done by Donna Bishop, now a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and others found that juveniles transferred to adult court were more likely to commit more crimes, faster and at a higher rate than those who stayed in the juvenile system. The offenses were more serious. The kids were followed over six years.

Bishop also looked at a second group of kids during 1998-99 and found similar results.

Some experts argue these studies are flawed, that the two groups aren't equally matched odds are the kids tried as adults were more serious offenders even if they committed the same type of crime.

Howard Snyder, director of systems research at the National Center for Juvenile Justice, says some of these studies are "comparing apples to oranges. They went too far in concluding the adult system is bad. We don't have enough research to say that."

Two other studies released in 2006 (not among those reviewed by the CDC) discounted state laws passed between 1975 and 2003 making it easier to treat juvenile offenders as adults or giving prosecutors more discretion to do so. Generally, the studies said, they didn't deter kids from committing crimes.

‹ Associated Press

By Sharon Cohen, Associated Press

A generation after America decided to get tough on kids who commit crimes ‹ sometimes locking them up for life ‹ the tide may be turning.

States are rethinking and, in some cases, retooling juvenile sentencing laws. They're responding to new research on the adolescent brain, and studies that indicate teens sent to adult court end up worse off than those who are not: They get in trouble more often, they do it faster and the offenses are more serious.

"It's really the trifecta of bad criminal justice policy," says Shay Bilchik, a former Florida prosecutor who heads the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown University. "People didn't know that at the time the changes were made. Now we do, and we have to learn from it."

Juvenile crime is down, in contrast to the turbulent days of the 1990s when politicians vied to pass laws to get violent kids off the streets. Now, in calmer times, some champion community programs for young offenders to replace punitive measures they say went too far.

"The net was thrown too broadly," says Howard Snyder, director of systems research at the National Center for Juvenile Justice. "When you make these general laws ... a lot of people believe they made it too easy for kids to go into the adult system and it's not a good place to be."

Some states are reconsidering life without parole for teens. Some are focusing on raising the age of juvenile court jurisdiction, while others are exploring ways to offer kids a second chance, once they're locked up ‹ or even before.

"There has been a huge sea change ... it's across the country," says Laurie Garduque, program director at the MacArthur Foundation, which has worked extensively on juvenile justice reform. "It certainly helps that there has been a decline in juvenile crime and delinquency."

Not everyone, though, believes there's reason to roll back harsher penalties adopted in the 1990s.

"The laws that were changed were appropriate and necessary," says Minnesota prosecutor James Backstrom. "We need to focus on the protecting the public ‹ that's No. 1. Then we can address the needs of the juvenile offenders."

'Adult crime, adult time'

Each year about 200,000 defendants under 18 are sent directly or transferred to the adult system, known as criminal court, according to rough estimates.

Most end up there because of state laws that automatically define them as adults, due to their age or offense. Their ranks rose in the 1990s as juvenile crime soared and legislators responded; 48 states made it easier to transfer kids into criminal court, according to the juvenile justice center.

These changes gave prosecutors greater latitude (they could transfer kids without a judge's permission), lowered the age or expanded the list of crimes that would make it mandatory for a case to be tried there.

Some states also adopted blended sentences in which two sanctions can be imposed simultaneously; if the teen follows the terms of the juvenile sentence, the adult sentence is revoked.

The changes were ushered in to curb an explosion in violent crime ‹ the teen murder arrest rate doubled from 1987 to 1993 as the crack trade and guns flourished ‹ and to address mounting frustrations with the juvenile justice system.

A series of horrific crimes by kids rattled the nation:

In Michigan, a baby-faced sixth grader, Nathaniel Abraham, shot and killed a stranger who was leaving a convenience store. When he was arrested in his classroom, his face was painted for Halloween.

In Florida, Lionel Tate was 12 when he beat and stomped to death a playmate half his age.

In Chicago, two boys, then 10 and 11, dangled, then dropped 5-year-old Eric Morse to his death from a 14th-story vacant public housing apartment. His terrified brother raced down the stairs, hoping he could somehow catch Eric.

Some politicians began using the phrase "adult crime, adult time." There were predictions of even bleaker days ahead.

Some warned that by the end of the century, thousands of remorseless kids ‹ a new generation of "superpredators" ‹ would be committing murder, rape or robbery, joining gangs and dealing drugs.

"There was an organized effort to label kids and make people afraid of juveniles," Snyder says. "People were saying their mothers had smoked crack, their DNA had changed. ... they were no longer the same people. They tried to make it seem these kids are different from your kids and that you need to do something."

But the super-vicious breed of criminal never emerged. (The professor who coined the "superpredator" term later expressed regret.) Drug trafficking declined. An improved economy produced more jobs. And the rate of juvenile violent crime arrests plummeted 46% from 1994 to 2005, according to federal figures.

"When crime goes down, people have an opportunity to be more reflective than crisis-oriented and ask, 'Was this policy a good policy?"' Bilchik says.

Laws revisited

The MacArthur Foundation said in a report to be released this month that about half the states are involved in juvenile justice reforms ‹ among them, taking more kids out of the adult system, providing more mental health and community based-services and improving conditions at detention centers.

A national poll, commissioned by MacArthur and the Center for Children's Law and Policy and set for release at the same time, also found widespread public support for rehabilitating teens rather than locking them up. Most favored shifting some money states spend on incarcerating kids and using it for counseling, education and job training.

Some states have already begun to make changes.

€ In Colorado, Gov. Bill Ritter, a former district attorney, recently formed a juvenile clemency board to hear cases of kids convicted as adults. The head of the seven-member panel says it's an acknowledgment that teens are still developing and different from adults ‹ a point made in the 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed the death penalty for crimes committed as juveniles.

€ This was the second revision in Colorado. In 2006, a law replaced the juvenile life-without-parole sentence with the possibility of parole after 40 years.

€ In California and Michigan, life without parole for teens also is getting another look. This spring, a state Senate panel in California approved a plan offering the chance of freedom after 25 years. A package of bills that would ban the no-parole sentence for those under 18 and revamp the process allowing juveniles to be tried as adults awaits a hearing in Michigan.

€ In Connecticut, lawmakers recently raised the age of juveniles to 18 for most cases; the changes will be phased in by 2010. Prosecutors can still transfer felonies to adult court.

€ Legislator Michael Lawlor said 16- and 17-year-olds charged with misdemeanors such as shoplifting and vandalism were hindered when they applied for jobs or college. "This caused people to think ... should all of these cases be adult all the time?" he says. Those records are now sealed.

€ In Illinois, a proposal to move 17-year-olds charged with misdemeanors to juvenile court passed in the state Senate and is pending in the House.

€ In 2005, the state repealed the automatic transfer of kids to adult court for drug violations within 1,000 feet of public housing or schools. An advocacy group found virtually all the kids caught in this statewide law were minorities from Cook County; about two-thirds were first-time offenders ‹ a population, it argued, that could benefit from juvenile court.

€ In Wyoming, talks are underway to shed a system that routinely charges and jails juveniles as adults even for minor offenses such as underage drinking. One idea is to have judges, prosecutors and social workers evaluate first-time offenders and find treatment ‹ mostly, without sending them to jail.

Not all states are easing up.

Rhode Island headed in the opposite direction ‹ at least, temporarily. Last summer, the state passed a law to send 17-year-old criminal offenders to adult prisons in what was intended as a cost-cutting move. The measure, however, was repealed about four months later after some critics pointed out this plan probably would be more expensive.

And a North Carolina proposal to study whether the state should raise juvenile jurisdiction to age 18 stalled in a legislative committee this year.

It is a change that would have aided North Carolina attorney Deborrah Newton last year, when she fought to keep a 15-year-old boy out of adult court. He was charged with second-degree murder in the drug-related death of his 16-year-old friend, Erica Hicks.

Prosecutor Melanie Shekita argued the boy had supplied Erica with drugs, including Ecstasy. And, she says, when the girl collapsed at his house and a friend called 911, the boy hung up and later told the operator it was a prank.

Shekita says the boy's "reckless behavior," his juvenile drug history and the need to have "a red flag" on his permanent record were reason enough for him to be treated as an adult.

Newton painted a different portrait, of an insecure follower who wanted to "impress his peers, selling a dime bag of pot here and there to be popular. ... He was simply not mature enough to appreciate the consequences of his conduct," she says.

The boy was tried as a juvenile and found responsible for involuntary manslaughter. He eventually entered a residential treatment program. "This kid would not have survived an adult prison," Newton says. "The most fragile are preyed upon. It's simply not the place for a child."

It's an argument made by others who've studied kids prosecuted as adults.

"The juvenile correctional system is more rehabilitative or treatment-oriented," says Donna Bishop, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. "The adult system, for the most part is a warehouse where (kids) spend a great deal of time with older, more seasoned, more serious offenders, many of whom talk about becoming a better criminal."

Hard to 'make good'

Reginald Dwayne Betts knows firsthand. He spent more than eight years behind bars in Virginia for an armed carjacking. An honors student who had never been in trouble with the police, he says he expected he might be sent to a juvenile detention center or even receive a suspended sentence.

Instead, he was tried as an adult. When he was originally sentenced to 23 years, he says, he didn't know the difference between the terms "consecutive" and "concurrent."

Locked up at 16, Betts spent most of his time in adult prisons.

"Of course it makes a difference if you're 15, 16 or 17," he says. "You're not prepared to deal with it physically or emotionally. You're trying to deal with being away from home. You're trying to deal with the stress that comes with being in prison."

Violence was a constant presence. "I got used to stuff most people I see today would never have to get used to ‹ like somebody getting their head split open," Betts says. "You get numb to it. It's like, OK, somebody got stabbed."

Betts had serious problems at first. He wound up in isolation three times during his first 18 months. But he gradually retreated into books, taught himself Spanish, took a paralegal course, wrote and published poetry.

When he was released two years ago at age 24, he won a college scholarship, found work and started a book club for young boys. He's now engaged and has a book contract. He knows he is an exception: "People don't come out of prison and make good," he says.

In New York, Judge Michael Corriero is aware of those odds.

He presides over a special court in the adult system ‹ it's called the Manhattan Youth Part and is responsible for resolving the cases of 13- to 15-year-olds accused of serious crimes.

Corriero tries to steer as many kids as possible away from criminal court, a philosophy he has detailed in his book, Judging Children as Children.

"You take a 14-year-old and give him an adult sentence ... you're taking him out of the community at his most vulnerable time," he says. "His character is still malleable. Fourteen-, 15-year-old kids are supposed to be learning from their mistakes. They're becoming socialized.

"If you put them in an institution, what is that kid going to look like in 10 years?" he asks. "What special skills will he have? What empathy? What can we expect of kids that are taken away and criminalized before their time?"

Corriero says about 65% of the cases he handles are sent to mentoring, counseling or other alternative programs, mostly private. If the kids succeed, their records are sealed. The more hard-core teens are treated in the criminal courts.

Treatment programs are very expensive, but they pay off in the long run, declares Melissa Sickmund, senior research associate at the juvenile center. "If you do good in juvenile justice, you won't have adult criminals," she says.

'Perpetual punishment'

Though juvenile crime tends to evoke images of gangs and murder, violent teens are the exception.

Studies show they account for about 5% of all juvenile arrests. Drugs, burglary, theft and other property crimes are among the more common reasons teens are prosecuted in adult courts.

Most of these kids, though, don't end up in adult prison, according to the Campaign for Youth Justice. A study the group commissioned of 40 large court jurisdictions in the country looked at teen felony cases in 1998 and found between a third and a half had no conviction or were bounced back to juvenile court.

Many states have what is called "reverse waiver" provisions, meaning judges can send the case in the other direction.

But crossing the threshold into the adult world is damaging in itself, argues Liz Ryan, head of the group. About 7,500 juveniles are held in adult jails on any given day, she says, and that number probably reaches tens of thousands a year because of turnover.

Being in an adult jail, Ryan says, increases a kid's risk of sexual abuse and assault. Educational opportunities are limited. Even good intentions can go awry; teens who are separated for their safety can end up isolated in 23-hour lockdown.

And for those eventually convicted of serious crimes in adult court, the damage can be irreparable.

"A lot of people say, 'So what? They get a slap on the wrist,"' Ryan says. "Well, there is a consequence. We call it perpetual punishment. You have a felony record that follows you the rest of your life."

Ryan says that can affect college loans and admissions, voting and job prospects. "By cutting off opportunity, it increases the likelihood they'll be back in the justice system," she says.

Sheila Montgomery worries about her son, Zack. He recently was released after serving 27 months for being an accomplice in the robbery of an Oregon convenience store. He had originally received a 71Ž2-year term after falsely confessing to being the robber; he was re-sentenced after evidence revealed he wasn't.

Montgomery says her son, then 15, was struggling with bipolar disorder. He's now 17 and a student again, though his mother says the school was reluctant to accept him.

"He'll forever be a felon," Montgomery says. "He can't put the past behind him. It was hard for him to find work. A lot of people didn't want to see him."

Montgomery says her son deserved punishment and she has no problem with "a little bit of jail time," but probation and counseling would have served him better.

"I feel there are more economical ways to approach juveniles with treatment," she says.

But prosecutors say some kids are just too dangerous to be considered juveniles, where they could be released to walk the streets again by age 21.

If a criminal is likely to get out in three or four years and do more harm, "then I come down on the side of risking the damage that is done by sending someone to prison," says Gary Walker, a Michigan prosecutor who is active in juvenile issues.

"When they tell me placing a younger person in an adult setting is not necessarily for the betterment of the individual," Walker says, "my answer
is: 'Who thinks it is?"'

Minnesota prosecutor Backstrom didn't hesitate at all in prosecuting Matthew Niedere and Clayton Keister as adults in the murder of Niedere's parents.

The 17-year-olds, he says, carefully planned the crime: Niedere shot his father five times and his mother four times. Keister shot Patricia Niedere after she ran outside the family store, yelling for help, then returned and tried to save her dying husband.

Prosecution was one thing, punishment another.

"I had to make a very difficult decision whether to put these young men away for their natural lives, or give them a chance," Backstrom says.

He weighed several factors, including their lack of criminal record and brain research that shows the frontal lobe ‹ the part that regulates impulse control and aggression ‹ is still developing in the 20s.

Backstrom agreed to having the teens plead guilty to murder involving an armed robbery ‹ allowing for the possibility of parole in 30 years.

"As I told them at sentencing, they're going to have to show more remorse than they did when they pled guilty," he says. "If that's the case 30 years from now, then we'll give them a chance in society."

More than a decade ago, Backstrom had pressed Minnesota lawmakers to make it easier for prosecutors to take serious cases into adult court.

He was spurred by a case in which he wasn't allowed to try a 16-year-old for murder as an adult; the boy fatally shot an acquaintance point-blank in the head in a dispute over marijuana. He served less than 11Ž2 years in juvenile detention.

"That's not justice," the prosecutor says. "That's a joke. ... He should have gone to prison 15 or 20 years. That's what would have happened today."

Taking both paths

State Attorney Harry Shorstein of Jacksonville, Fla., has his own approach.

"I think I've created my own juvenile justice system," he says. "The secret is not choosing punishment vs. prevention, but using both."

In 16 years, Shorstein's office has transferred more than 2,600 juvenile cases to adult court. Almost all those found guilty go to jail for about a year, where they live separately from adults, attend school, meet with mentors and receive social services.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor buses in at-risk kids ‹ ages 9 to 11 ‹ so they can talk with a few teen inmates, seeing them in cuffs and chains, cut off from their families.

"All this is not to try to scare them but ... have them interact with the juveniles they looked up to because of their guns, money and cars," Shorstein says.

If imprisoned teens stay out of trouble while locked up, and for two years of probation, their record is erased.

"I believe crime is like gymnastics," he says. "It really is a young person's sport. If you incapacitate a 15- or 16-year-old for a year, you can prevent more crime than if you imprison a 22-year-old for life."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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More on "Unlocking America" New National Report on Sentencing Reform Should Be Applied to California Prisons

December 3, 2007.
New National Report on Sentencing Reform Should Be Applied to California Prisons
California Progress Report
By Barbara Owen
Professor, Department of Criminology, California State University-Fresno

Introduction

As California leads the nation in irrational prison policy, a new report calls for major reforms to reduce the prison population. Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America's Prison Population, is co-authored by nine leading criminology and penal experts from around the country and relies on a thorough review of recent research into crime and incarceration. Several of these authors have researched the California system which serves as a cautionary tale of political and policy missteps.

Under current sentencing policies, the state and federal prison populations will grow by another 192,000 prisoners over the next five years, according to the report. Such an increase will force the nation to spend an additional $27.5 billion in prison construction and operation costs over the five-year period, in addition to the $60 billion now spent annually on corrections. In California, the annual cost is quickly approaching $10 billion per year. Recent legislation has called for many more billions to be spent on prison construction.

This growth in imprisonment is largely due not to rising crime rates but to changes in sentencing policy that led to dramatic increases in the numbers of felony convictions. This resulted in more prison sentences and increasing the length of the prison stays themselves. The report cites extensive research suggesting there is little relationship between fluctuations in crime rates and incarceration rates. The study highlights that minorities are more likely to be imprisoned than whites, noting that incarceration rates for blacks and Latinos are six times higher than for whites. If incarceration rates were race neutral, prison populations would drop by half.

“The number of people incarcerated has skyrocketed over the past three decades and yet there is little if any scientific evidence of a causal relationship between crime rates and incarceration rates," said James Austin, president of the JFA Institute and report co-author. "A major reason for the rise in prison populations is longer prison terms. But there is no evidence that keeping people in prison longer makes us any safer. The report provides a practical roadmap for reducing prison populations and more effectively addressing crime by adopting sentencing policies that are now being used in a number of red and blue states."

The report finds that putting more people in prison is financially wasteful, disproportionately burdens the poor and minorities, and has limited impact on recidivism and crime rates. In response, it calls for reducing prison sentences and eliminating prison terms for people who violate the terms of their probation or parole without committing new crimes.

"People who break the law must be held accountable, but many of those currently incarcerated should receive alternative forms of punishment, and those who are sent to prison must spend a shorter period incarcerated before coming home to our communities," the report says.

Released by the JFA Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit organization focused on research-based solutions to criminal justice issues, the report also calls for decriminalizing the possession and sale of recreational drugs. The researchers say that widespread incarceration of people involved in the drug market has only fueled more violence and has not reduced the demand for drugs.

The authors of the report are convinced that the United States needs a different strategy for justice reform. Approximately 2.2 million people are now in jail or prison. The number serving sentences in state and federal prisons has grown from 196,000 in 1972 to more than 1.4 million today. An additional 750,000 people are in local jails awaiting trial or serving time for less-serious crimes. The number is growing and shows no signs of leveling off.

"Our criminal laws and criminal justice policies and practices exacerbate the crime problem, unnecessarily damage the lives of millions of people, and worsen living conditions in low-income neighborhoods of American cities," the report states.

The case of California

The situation in California mirrors these finding directly. Unlocking America is not the first report to call for substantial sentencing reform. For almost two decades, multiple reports have called for substantial reform of the prison system in California, and most suggest that sentencing reform is a critical first step. Beginning with the 1990 Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Population Management, the State of California has not lacked for recommendations for improving the irrational state of sentencing and prison policy. In 1992, The Senate Concurrent Resolution (SCR) 33 Commission on Female and Parolee Issues (1994) established to study issues affecting female inmates and parolees and found that policies designed for male offenders were often counterproductive when applied to women.

Most notably, the Little Hoover Commission has a long track record of drawing attention to these issues. In 1994, the report, Putting Violence Behind Bars: Redefining the Role of California’s Prisons called for a sentencing commission to revise the byzantine sentencing structure that serves no rational purpose. In 1998, the Little Hoover Commission again called for correctional reform in the report, Beyond Bars: Correctional Reforms to Lower Prison Costs and Reduce Crime. Five years later, the Commission described the need for more rational parole policies, and like Unlocking America, noted that the prison population was artificially inflated due to the unrealistic parole violation polices of the then California Depart of Corrections. More recently, the Little Hoover Communions turned its attention to the plight of women offenders. In 2004, Breaking the Barriers for Women on Parole described the problem of crime, violence and substance abuse among female offenders in the California corrections system. This report paralleled findings and recommendations made a decade earlier by the then-CDC investigations. The Little Hoover Commission found that addressing the challenges of female offenders and their re-entry into communities is a productive approach to being “smart on crime.” This year, the Little Hoover Commission examined the correctional crisis in California from a fiscal point of view (Solving California’s Corrections Crisis: Time is Running Out (2007).

Recommendations

Unlocking America calls for improving prison conditions by reducing overcrowding and expanding access to health care, academic and vocational programs for incarcerated people to help them succeed in life after prison and increase public health and safety. A final recommendation calls on states to ease the transition from prison to free society by lifting barriers to employment and restoring voting rights so that people coming out of prison can be productive members of the workforce and society.

The report's recommendations, if implemented nationally, would gradually and safely reduce the nation's prison and jail populations by half and generate annual savings of $20 billion, money that could be reinvested in more promising crime-prevention strategies.

For many prisoners now sent to prison, reducing time served would mean probation or a short jail sentence. For others it would mean less time spent in prison, as well as less time on parole.

Imprisonment can legitimately satisfy a social and personal need for retribution toward those who violate society’s laws. At the same time, excessive punishment can exacerbate social tensions and widen divisions. It can corrode a nation’s political culture, and obstruct efforts to deal constructively with social problems, including crime.

The following three key recommendations which have been adopted in various states would serve to reduce the prison population by over 50% without jeopardizing public safety.

I. REDUCE TIME SERVED IN PRISON

There is little if any correlation between length of stay in prison and the recidivism rate. Reducing time served means shortening probation periods and jail sentences for many people now being incarcerated for misdemeanors; for others, it would mean less time spent in prison, as well as less time on parole.

II. ELIMINATE THE USE OF PRISON FOR TECHNICAL VIOLATIONS OF PAROLE OR PROBATION

Today anywhere from 50-65 percent of the 650,000 prisoners admitted to state prison each year are men and women who have failed to comply with the terms of probation or parole. Of those who have failed probation or parole, about half are being sent to prison for what are known as technical violations – behavior one cannot be sentenced to prison for. Returning people to prison for violating parole or probation conditions is an example of a punishment not fitting the crime. These violations are not serious enough to justify incarceration for months or years. In addition, there is no evidence that incarcerating people for non-compliance with the terms of probation or parole prevents more serious crimes.

III. REDUCE THE LENGTH OF PAROLE AND PROBATION SUPERVISION PERIODS

Currently, people placed on probation and parole remain in this status for extended periods of time, often three years or more. There is little evidence that lengthy parole and probation terms decrease crime and there is new research indicating that parole supervision is largely ineffective with respect to reducing recidivism. A number of studies have found that individuals released with no parole supervision return to prison at a significantly lower rate than those released on parole and that there is no relationship between the time on supervision and parole success.

Conclusion

The solution to the crisis in California is not a mystery. Unlocking America is the latest report that outlines a rational approach to correctional reform in a clear and accessible way.

Instead of building prisons, we should increase funding to create stronger civil society institutions such as academic and technical education, job training, healthcare, affordable housing, or other social services that assist people in getting a foot in the door to a better life.

Mass incarceration is an ineffective and damaging way to deal with crime. A policy of decarceration would reduce the social costs of incarceration without loss of effectiveness in crime prevention, and free up a portion of the tens of billions of dollars now being wasted for reinvestment in the families and communities now devastated by crime and imprisonment.

Barbara Owen is among the nine co-authors of this report. She is a nationally-known expert in the areas of girls, women and crime, women-centered policy and women’s prison culture. A Professor of Criminology at California State University, Fresno, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 1984. She has written extensively on issues confronting women enmeshed in the justice system.

Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America's Prison Population, can be found at:http://www.jfa-associates.com/publications/srs/UnlockingAmerica.pdf

The report's authors are: James Austin, president, the JFA Institute; Todd Clear, professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Troy Duster, professor, New York University; David F. Greenberg, professor, New York University; John Irwin, professor emeritus, San Francisco State University; Candace McCoy, professor, City University of New York; Alan Mobley, assistant professor, San Diego State University; Barbara Owen, professor, California State University, Fresno; and Joshua Page, assistant professor, University of Minnesota.
http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2007/12/post_48.html

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Race and the nation's income gap

Race and the nation's income gap
By RHONDA SOTO

Op-ed. Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA 12/03/2007

African-Americans have broken two new barriers, according to a new report by the Pew Charitable Trust's Economic Mobility Project. Almost half the children of middle-class blacks have fallen into the lowest income bracket in the last 30 years, the first generation in a century to lose so much ground. And for the first time, a majority of African-Americans polled say that blacks are responsible for their own economic situations, and that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have become more different over the last generation.

Yeah, right, it's the values. Those middle-class African-Americans whose children are now in poverty - rotten parents, every one of them. While going out to work every day, they were obviously telling their children not to do the same. The black unemployment rate in October was double the white unemployment, 8.5 percent versus 4.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employers of all races, with their superior values, no doubt rejected those black pavement-pounders because they could see the poor work ethic a mile away. The quarter million drop in the number of U.S. jobs in October, and all the offshore outsourcing of the last decade, must be "a poor black values thing."

It was poor black values that led neighborhoods of color to be targeted by predatory lenders. It wasn't the secondary mortgage industry that started the current tsunami of foreclosures now evicting people, disproportionately black and Latino - it was the homeowners' bad values. Higher interest rates charged to borrowers of color with identical credit ratings are obviously payback for their poor behavior. And the mostly white executives who made millions off discriminatory sub-prime lending? They deserved that reward for their exemplary moral character.

The drop in unionization from 20 percent to 12 percent in the last 25 years wouldn't have happened, and the American labor force would not have lost 265,000 black union workers, if those workers' values had been better. The professional union-busting consulting firms who advised companies how to illegally fire pro-union workers - they're role models of the American work ethic.

Similarly, the mostly white members of Congress increased their own paychecks over $50,000 with multiple raises since 1990 while blocking an increase in the minimum wage for a record-breaking decade. And the mostly all-white billionaires on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans who are $290 billion richer than last year - they must have the finest values of all.

Prison sentences are longer for blacks and Latinos than whites convicted of the same crime because judges can just see the difference in moral fiber between defendants of different races. And of course employers and health insurance companies are not insuring 7.2 million black people - nearly 20 percent - because their moral failings have made them too sickly.

The re-segregation of schools, and the widening gap in class sizes and per-pupil spending between mostly white and mostly black schools? The rollback of affirmative action in higher education? All due to the character flaws of African-American students.

Are values really the explanation for the racial income gap? Or do we too often assume that the American dream of equal opportunity is a reality? Do we overlook growing structural obstacles that block the path of some more than others among us?

Employed African-Americans on average work more hours per week than employed white people. Blacks are slightly less likely than whites to use illegal drugs. They are more likely to be affiliated with a religious congregation. Poll after poll shows no difference between races in attitudes toward education, paid work, or expectations for children's advancement. Where are these famous bad values?

As a former teacher I know that some young people have self-destructive attitudes and behaviors. Far more young people have talent, ambition and a work ethic that go underutilized, especially working-class youth of color in this "have and have-nots" economy.

We as people of color are used to noticing racism and putting it into words. We're less accustomed to naming classism - but it's rampant among middle-class people of color. Is this what racial progress has come to: more middle-class blacks taking up the previously white sport of blaming the victim?

Rhonda Soto is the race/class intersections project coordinator at Class Action, a national nonprofit based in Hadley.

http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=69844&CSAuthResp=119
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December 01, 2007

Review: GOOD COURTS: THE CASE FOR PROBLEM-SOLVING JUSTICE

A very interesting article about the benefits and drawbacks of expanding the mission of the criminal justice system through the use of courts to solve social problems.

Vol. 16 No. 12 (December, 2006) pp.964-969
GOOD COURTS: THE CASE FOR PROBLEM-SOLVING JUSTICE, by Greg Berman and John Feinblatt. New York: The New Press, 2005. 256pp. Hardcover. $24.95 / £15.99 / $32.50 CAN. ISBN: 1565849736

Reviewed by Candace McCoy, City University of New York, Graduate Center and John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Email: cmccoy [at] jjay.cuny.edu.

It is not a court if you have to plead guilty to get there. Nevertheless, it might help solve problems. On the other hand, social problems never go away entirely, and “solving” them is probably a quixotic quest. So it seems that this book has an improbable premise, beginning with its title. Although the premise may be improbable, the existence of problem-solving courts is not. Thousands of local courthouses across the county now include various versions of problem-solving courts in their operations, the most common of which are drug courts. They are up and running and working hard to solve problems. However, as the mini-debate in this opening paragraph shows, their organizational rationales and political direction are still worrisome.

The authors, Greg Berman and John Feinblatt, do not find them worrisome. Berman and Feinblatt are “true believers” who have set out to describe, defend, and proselytize for this type of social-service program delivered in courtrooms. Their book is not one-sided, since they pay attention to criticisms of the new court model and defend the model carefully against those criticisms. Ultimately, the success of that defense depends on whether the reader is willing to accept the premise that the judicial branch is so broken that altering its mission – overtly stating that courts are in business to provide crime control, not due process – is acceptable. Berman and Feinblatt are cheerleaders for the new model, and the book is written in a punchy, straightforward style that argues forcefully for problem-solving, not revolving doors. Traditionalist readers will not be convinced, but that is not because the book lacks punch. It is because the problem-solving model itself is problematic.

The book does a good job in presenting an overview of the problem-solving court prototype that is probably familiar to most readers as the popular drug court model. A strength of this work is that it is not limited to drug courts, but explains the broader court technology that can be applied to a variety of social problems – here, petty crime and domestic violence – as well as drug use. Mental health courts, prisoner re-entry courts, gun courts, gang courts – there are examples of each of these functioning in various jurisdictions across the nation, and any of them could fit into the “problem-solving courts” prototype set out here. Berman and Feinblatt concentrate on courts that are currently operating in New York and for which there is a sufficient track record to report results. This is hardly surprising, as the Center for Court Innovation, which Berman directs, is the non-profit research and educational arm of the New York state court system’s problem-solving courts [*965] initiative. Under the energetic leadership of Chief Justice Judith Kaye, New York’s court system has embraced a technology that changes not only the roles of court professionals but the purpose of courts themselves. No longer directed only to determine guilt and sentence the guilty, criminal courts are expected also to tackle the social problems that get people into trouble with the law in the first place. The state has invested considerable effort to extend the model, not only of the federally-initiated drug court program, but the workings of Manhattan’s community court. Supporters of the Midtown Community Court claim that it significantly contributed to the successful clean up of Midtown and Times Square in the 1990s, which in turn opened the way for economic development that has produced the prodigiously tourist-friendly Times Square entertainment district.

In the face of such enthusiasm, especially when agreeing that traditional courts can do little to stop the courthouse “revolving door” or to improve the lives of people whose life circumstances send them there, it feels mean-spirited to remain skeptical. Nevertheless, the most fundamental issue remains unspoken: what governmental (or, increasingly, private) agency should be charged with the task of solving social problems, and what evidence do we have that courts should be that agency?

The answer this book gives is: courts should solve these social problems because no other agency is doing so, and now that problem-solving courts have been in operation for about a decade, we have evidence that they do work. Skeptics are not convinced about the “works” part. Moreover, skeptics reply that the agencies traditionally charged with dealing with these problems, such as mental health services, drug treatment programs, or family counseling centers, have been dismantled in the decidedly non-compassionate conservatism of the past three decades. The criminal justice system has been made to step into the vacuum, arresting and controlling ever-larger segments of the population through a program of mass incarceration. Now a part of the justice system that was traditionally more about justice than punishment – the courts – is being put to work in the coercive enterprise. Call them what you will, these “courts” are really corrections agencies, or at least probation offices. This is alarming to those social analysts who are concerned about the rise of the carceral state, especially when proponents of problem-solving courts claim they “work” better than social services because judges have coercive powers backed by the threat of incarceration for non-compliance. These concerns are not addressed in this book.

I suspect that Berman and Feinblatt would respond to these concerns by saying that, until social service agencies are fully funded and capable of addressing the problems of drug addiction, homelessness, prostitution, domestic violence, and neighborhood disorder, we should be thankful that courts are willing to take on the task. Furthermore, they might be dismayed at the conspiratorial sound of this criticism, replying that the people who work in problem-solving courts have hearts of gold and want to make a difference in [*966] people’s lives rather than subjecting them to useless petty punishments. The mission of problem-solving courts, they say, is not to adjudicate but rather to “change the behavior of offenders, enhance the safety of victims, and improve the quality of life in communities” (p.5). Fair enough. But the question still remains: why are judges doing this, and are they both distorting the traditional mission of courts as providers of due process and unwittingly becoming part of the larger movement towards wholesale social surveillance?

Insofar as they take account of this overarching question, Berman and Feinblatt offer an important political point: courts are broken, anyway. They are not fulfilling their traditional mission of providing due process, so we might as well adapt them to new missions. Chapter 1, “Justice in Crisis,” gives an overview of the current situation in which criminal courts are “crowded, chaotic and overwhelmed” at the misdemeanor level and completely dependent on guilty pleas at the felony level. Defendants cycle in and out and never internalize the lessons supposedly taught by criminal prosecution, and the underlying problems of drug addiction, domestic violence, or homelessness are never even remotely addressed. Probation departments are overburdened and cannot deliver any meaningful supervision in community sentences, resulting in high recidivism.

This book is not about helping courts change in order to pull themselves out of this mess. Problem-solving courts have given up on the traditional court model. The authors say that “we need to be honest about what really goes on in our courts” and move past it rather than back up and make it work. Thus, problem-solving courts assume that a defendant pleads guilty before coming into the court, the guilty plea having been worked out between the defender and prosecutor in a typical plea-bargaining session to which the entire court “team” may now contribute. The goal is not to challenge plea bargaining but to embrace it and use it creatively. In return for their guilty pleas, defendants gain the benefit of the program to which they are sentenced – drug treatment, anger management, community service and job counseling, depending on which problem the particular court is seeking to solve. But if they do not complete the programs successfully, the most serious sentence that could have been imposed will come back to hit them. In the case of drug courts and domestic violence courts, this usually means serious prison time. This coercive possibility is said to be at the heart of changing offenders’ behavior and forms part of the rationale for the idea that problem-solving courts will “work” better than traditional courts do.

There is no question that modern courts are in bad shape. The authors say that rising caseloads due to the drug war of the 1980s and 1990s, increased awareness and willingness to prosecute domestic violence, and the need for quality of life enforcement (otherwise known as “Fixing Broken Windows”), have added to the crisis (pp.24-25). Yet the solution they propose is not the only one possible, nor is it necessarily the wisest. Courts would not need to bear [*967] the burden of prosecuting the drug war, for instance, if legislative reform could remove the worst excesses of mandatory sentencing and simultaneously increase funding for in-community drug treatment without coercive penalties attached. And the notion that quality-of-life problems are best addressed by police and courts rather than mental health professionals and social workers is still hotly contested. The book does not mention such ideas.

Furthermore, the authors claim that the public has realized that modern courts are in bad shape, and that the resulting low public confidence justifies a fundamental change in how courts are organized and what their mission is. Quoting a survey by the National Center for State Courts, they say that “only 23% [of telephone respondents] expressed a great deal of trust in state courts” (p.28). They also refer to other studies making the same point. What the authors did not mention, though, is that other branches of government and other professions get even lower ratings. Legislators are reviled, and executive agencies are regarded as corrupt. If the courts are broken, so is government in general, and we might ask whether the best response is a return to first principles or devising a new model of government entirely. This book clearly opts for the latter approach, but the former is not even considered as an option.

The new model is set out very well. Chapter 2, “What Are Problem-Solving Courts?” and Chapter 3, a description of problem-solving courts in action in New York and Oregon, set out the common elements of problem-solving. These courts “do more than just process cases . . . [a]ll of the new judicial experiments are attempting to solve the kinds of cases where social, human, and legal problems intersect . . . to do more than just apply the law correctly. Problem-solving courts demand that everyone attached to the court broaden their scope to see the real-life consequences of courtroom decisions. And they insist that courts use data to make more informed decisions about where to target resources and how to craft effective sanctions. Those who practice problem-solving justice are committed to seeing each individual case in the context of the lives of victims, communities, and defendants” (pp.32-33). To do this, they will: 1) set the goal as improving public safety while also protecting rights, 2) make the most of judicial authority by having judges (rather than probation or parole officers) monitor defendants’ progress, 3) put problems in context of neighborhoods, not individuals, 4) form creative partnerships with private businesses and community stakeholders, and 5) rethink traditional roles of the courtroom workgroup.

The authors say that these “principles of problem-solving” have emerged “more or less” spontaneously (p.38), though they do credit the federal government under Clinton’s 1994 Crime Act with providing funding, technical assistance, and research for hundreds of drug courts, which began the movement. They claim that the problem-solving model evolved from alternative dispute resolution, which if true is somewhat troubling because ADR is used in civil cases as an alternative to court, and the outcome must be accepted by both parties. Problem-solving in criminal court is not really a voluntarily-chosen alternative when the defendant’s only ot