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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