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January 28, 2008

Toni Morrison Endorses Obama for President

Jan 28, 12:39 PM EST
Morrison Endorses Obama for President
By NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The woman who famously labeled Bill Clinton as the "first black president" is backing Barack Obama to be the second.

Author Toni Morrison said her endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate has little to do with Obama's race - he is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas - but rather his personal gifts.

Writing with the touch of a poet in a letter to the Illinois senator, Morrison explained why she chose Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton for her first public presidential endorsement.

Morrison, whose acclaimed novels usually concentrate on the lives of black women, said she has admired Clinton for years because of her knowledge and mastery of politics, but then dismissed that experience in favor of Obama's vision.

"In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates," Morrison wrote. "That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.

"Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace - that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom," Morrison wrote.

In 1998, Morrison wrote a column for the New Yorker magazine in which she wrote of Bill Clinton: "White skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

Obama responded to Morrison's endorsement with a written statement: "Toni Morrison has touched a nation with the grace and beauty of her words, and I was deeply moved and honored by the letter she wrote and the support she is giving our campaign."

Posted by lois at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2008

MA: Marijuana measures head to voters, Hill

Marijuana measures head to voters, Hill
Penalties for possession would be reduced
By Laura Crimaldi | Sunday, January 27, 2008 |

A showdown over whether to relax penalties for having small quantities of pot is advancing to Beacon Hill on two joint fronts as the state’s top prosecutors and anti-drug activists vow a fight in the latest marijuana slugfest.

The push to introduce a civil penalty system for pot possession is coming in the form of a ballot initiative almost entirely bankrolled by billionaire Democratic heavyweight George Soros and a Senate bill that has languished in the Legislature for years.

“The voters of Massachusetts are for this,” said Whitney A. Taylor, chairwoman of the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy, which is sponsoring the ballot effort to decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of pot.

Soros, a frequent contributor to marijuana legalization and decriminalization efforts nationwide, is the biggest contributor to the committee, according to records from the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance. The ballot campaign raised $429,000 in 2007, most of which came from a $400,000 donation that Soros made in June, records show.

“We’re opposed to it in any form because it’s just an inappropriate message to be sending, particularly to young people,” said Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe, who will lead an opposition effort as president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association.

Supporters of a civil penalty system say that criminal prosecution for minor amounts of grass wastes millions in law enforcement dollars, has minimal impact on drug use and creates a criminal record that could affect an offender’s housing, employment and borrowing opportunities for life.

Civil penalty opponents assert that lessening the consequences for pot possession sends the wrong message to young people, gives an advantage to drug dealers and poses a public health risk.

A conviction for marijuana possession comes with a maximum prison sentence of six months, fines up to $500 and up to a year’s loss of a driver’s license.

Several studies by a Harvard professor, Jeffrey A. Miron, whose work is partly funded by marijuana decriminalization backers, show prosecutions and jailings for small-scale pot cases cost the state about $130 million a year.

The ballot committee proposal would create a civil penalty system that includes a $100 fine, enrollment in a drug awareness program and parental notification for offenders under age 18. A similar bill sponsored by state Sen. Patricia D. Jehlen (D-Somerville) calls for a $250 civil fine.

The ballot committee cleared its first hurdle toward getting before voters in November last month by submitting more than 81,000 voter signatures to Secretary of State William Galvin, Taylor said. They needed to submit a minimum of 66,593 signatures.

Lawmakers now have until May 6 to act on the measure. If they don’t, another 11,099 voter signatures must be gathered by June 18 for the proposal to make the November ballot.

“Since the ’60s, this is something that I’ve paid attention to. The approach of the laws has been ever more draconian and that just defies common sense,” said attorney Thomas R. Kiley, who drafted the ballot proposal.

William Breault, chairman of the Main South Alliance for Public Safety in Worcester, said he will be writing to lawmakers and police chiefs to defeat the effort.

“It’s a bad idea,” Breault said. “It affects people from blue collar neighborhoods to places like Weston. It has ramifications. I don’t think we should send out the message that it’s acceptable.”

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1069232

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

NY: Plan to Close Prisons Stirs Anxiety in Towns That Depend on Them

“What we’ve seen in New York and other states is that one prison led to another prison and led to another prison, creating the notion that there’s no other economic development option than to build prisons to foster stability in rural areas,” said Tracy Huling, an independent consultant in New York who has done extensive research on the role of prisons."
January 27, 2008

Plan to Close Prisons Stirs Anxiety in Towns That Depend on Them
By FERNANDA SANTOS
NY Times

GABRIELS, N.Y. — After 17 years of marriage, Joy and Richard Gonyea managed to save enough to trade their trailer in November for a cozy prefabricated home with a room for each of their two children and a pool in the backyard. The home overlooks the pine trees on the edge of their two-acre property in rural Vermontville, eight miles from the secluded state prison where Mrs. Gonyea works.
s in rural economies.

“This home is all we’ve ever dreamed of,” said Mrs. Gonyea, 43, a registered nurse who runs the medical department at the prison, Camp Gabriels, a minimum-security facility in this minuscule hamlet in Franklin County, at the northern end of Adirondack Park.

“This,” she said, “is the place we always wanted to have for our kids.”

Then she began to cry.

On Jan. 11, the Spitzer administration announced plans to close Camp Gabriels, two other corrections camps and a medium-security prison, all of which have been operating below capacity since 1996 because of a decline in the number of nonviolent felons, the state’s corrections commissioner, Brian Fischer, said.

Closing those prisons, Mr. Fischer said, would save the state millions of dollars, free up money for the treatment of sex offenders and mentally ill inmates, and finance programs like anger management and vocational training, meant to prepare prisoners for their release.

But for Mrs. Gonyea, her neighbors and co-workers, the prospect of losing Camp Gabriels has stoked fear and doubt — about their future and about the future of their communities, which have come to depend on the prison over the years to survive.

As rural economies across the country crumbled in the 1980s and the population of prison inmates swelled, largely because of tougher drug laws, states pushed prison construction as an economic escape route of sorts. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, an average of four prisons were built each year in rural America; the rate quadrupled in the 1980s and reached 24 a year in the 1990s, according to the federal Agriculture Department’s economic research service.

The boom, experts say, provided employment, but it also fostered a cycle of dependency. Depressed rural communities came to rely on the prisons as a source of jobs, economic sustenance and services, with little effort devoted to attracting other viable businesses.

“What we’ve seen in New York and other states is that one prison led to another prison and led to another prison, creating the notion that there’s no other economic development option than to build prisons to foster stability in rural areas,” said Tracy Huling, an independent consultant in New York who has done extensive research on the role of prisons in rural economies.

None of the 584 workers at Camp Gabriels and the other prisons slated to close — Camp McGregor in Saratoga County, Camp Pharsalia in Chenango County and the Hudson Correctional Facility in Columbia County — are expected to lose their jobs; state and union officials have said the workers will be able to transfer to other prisons.

But when that will happen, where the new jobs will be or even whether there will be jobs for everyone, are bound to remain open questions for months to come.

The uncertainty has gnawed on residents here and in several other communities in this remote, challenging region where below-zero temperatures are the norm this time of year. The correction industry is big business in Franklin County, which has five state prisons and one federal prison in its 1,678 sparsely populated square miles. In the town of Brighton, which encompasses Gabriels and five other hamlets, the prison is perhaps the only place where someone with a high school diploma can earn a decent wage and benefits.

“There ain’t much else the local people could do for gainful employment,” said Peter Martin, 48, the town’s supervisor and a corrections officer at Camp Gabriels for 22 years.

The camp employs 136 people, including 85 corrections officers.

The reliance on Camp Gabriels extends well beyond jobs. Small businesses have staked their survival on the prison workers who patronize their stores. Local governments and charities, meanwhile, have come to depend on inmate work crews to clear snow from fire hydrants, maintain parks and hiking trails, mow the lawns at cemeteries and unload trucks at food pantries.

Every winter, the crews help build an ice palace in the nearby village of Saranac Lake, cutting thick blocks of ice that can weigh up to 700 pounds. The palace is the main attraction of the village’s Winter Carnival and attracts thousands to the area.

“All those services, when you put that into dollars, there’s no way we’d be able to hire people to perform them,” said Mary Ellen Keith, supervisor of the town of Franklin, which relies on the crews to cut overgrown brush from the sides of 67 miles of local roads, among other tasks. (Franklin is just south of Brighton and another of the 19 towns that make up Franklin County.)

Four of Mrs. Keith’s nine children work in state prisons, she said, including a son and a daughter at Camp Gabriels.

“Everyone around here either works in the prisons, or has a relative who works in the prisons, or knows someone who works in the prisons,” said Mrs. Keith, 78. “My kids were able to build their homes and raise their families here because of the prisons. If it weren’t for the prisons, they would have had to leave the area.”

Prisons are also a valuable political tool, because inmates are counted as local residents, allowing communities to receive more state and federal aid for emergency services. Mr. Martin said that he was not yet sure how the town of Brighton stood to lose if Camp Gabriels closed, but he added, “We’re concerned about losing any kind of aid here.”

Inmate-inclusive population counts are also used when drawing legislative and Congressional district lines.

Franklin County has struggled to find its economic footing. The terrain is carved by mountains, streams and lakes, with limited farmland. Much of it falls inside Adirondack Park, so development must abide by strict rules. Tourism is strong, but concentrated in a few areas. Winters are long and the wind so cold it seems to slice the skin, like tiny razor blades. The soil is frozen for most of the year; the growing season lasts from May through September, yielding potatoes and some grain crops, but little else.

In Gabriels, which has about 800 residents, including the prison’s 186 inmates, the closest thing to Main Street is a half-mile stretch of state highway, Route 86. It has two mini-markets, two farms, a general store, a cafe, a temporary post office (the permanent one burned last winter) and a few dozen homes. Camp Gabriels is set back from the highway, shrouded by tall pines.

The camp opened in 1982, in a building once occupied by a sanitarium. It has no fences; trees delimit its perimeter. At its peak, it held 336 inmates.

“There’s no doubt that closing prisons could bring short-term economic distress to some areas, but the question is, is that a justification for refusing to make changes? The answer should be no,” said Edmund J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a conservative group. “There should be other ways of improving the economic situation in upstate New York that doesn’t involve filling upstate New York with prisons.”

Gov. George E. Pataki tried to close prisons in New York each fiscal year from 2002 to 2006, but he faced intense pressure from upstate legislators and union leaders, who are already objecting to Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s proposal.

This is Mr. Spitzer’s first try to close prisons and, officials say, it is a necessary step to help the state bridge a projected $4.4 billion budget gap and adapt its corrections system to the number and types of inmates it now serves. The closings, scheduled for January 2009, would save the state more than $40 million in operating costs over the next two years and $30 million over five years in repair costs.

“This is as much a budget issue as it is a management issue,” Mr. Fischer, the corrections commissioner, said in an interview. “I’ve got a finite budget and I’ve got a finite work force, and I have to use them where my needs are, and that’s in the larger facilities.”

The number of inmates housed in the state’s maximum-security prisons increased by 18 percent from 1996 to 2007, while the inmate population in medium-security prisons declined by the same rate. During that period, the number of prisoners in minimum-security facilities — most convicted of larceny, burglary, minor drug possession and other nonviolent crimes — decreased by 47 percent, officials said.

Six months before closing Camp Gabriels and the other prisons, the state must detail what it plans to do with the emptied facilities. Mr. Fischer said that it was too early to tell what those plans would be, but that the state would consider public and private uses for the properties.

Union leaders and many Camp Gabriels workers said they would not give in easily, though. They organized a rally in Saranac Lake on Thursday and a letter-writing campaign, hoping to convince state legislators that the prison was worth saving.

“I told my wife we should hang in there,” said Mr. Gonyea, 44, who retired in 2005 after working for 23 years as a corrections officer, 17 of those at Camp Gabriels. “The anxiety, all this doubt, it’s killing us. But it’s not over yet.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/nyregion/27prison.html?ei=5070&en=177a187d81dcfe12&ex=1202101200&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

OK: Legislature seeks ways of fixing state’s deteriorating prisons

Legislature seeks ways of fixing state’s deteriorating prisons
Staff and wire reports
Enid, OK

— Inmates stretch their tattooed arms between the thick iron bars of their cell doors at Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s F Cell House, tilting small plastic mirrors they hold in their hands to get a glimpse of their neighbors and the correctional officers who patrol the maximum security cell block.
Chatter among the inmates gets louder when they spot warden’s as-sistant Terry Cren-shaw as he makes his way along a narrow walkway that divides two rows of inmate cells and gives prison staff their only clear view inside them.

“Crenshaw, we got no hot water up here,” one inmate shouts.
“When are we going to stop this madness?” another asks rhetorically.
It’s a walk Crenshaw and other correctional workers take daily at Oklahoma’s 100-year-old maximum-security prison. And it’s one that puts them in constant danger.
Unlike contemporary prisons where inmates are locked behind solid metal doors, inmates in the outdated F Cell House at McAlester, built in the 1930s, can reach through the bars of their cells, throw things at prison staffers and even attack them.
Problems like these are not unique to just OSP, though, said Rep. Mike Jackson, R-Enid. Jackson said there is a need for more money for more beds and better corrections facilities statewide.
“I think throughout the legislative session last year we did a lot of research addressing the Department of Corrections,” Jackson said.

‘Is it a crisis? Yes.’

Inadequate funding has prevented the Department of Corrections from updating facilities.
That is apparent is places like F Cell House, parts of which are deteriorating due to neglect.
“You’re looking at facilities that can’t necessarily be repaired. They have to be torn down and replaced,” Crenshaw said
But the prison — site of Oklahoma’s death row — is the only barrier between the public and the inmates housed inside.
“We pretty much secure Oklahoma’s orneriest inmates,” Crenshaw said. “This is a very dangerous institution. It’s very stressful.
“Is it a crisis? Yes.”
How to solve Oklahoma’s prison crisis is one of the toughest issues facing state lawmakers as they prepare to convene the 2008 Legislature Feb. 4. But how much can be accomplished before lawmakers adjourn in May and whether they have the political will to spend millions of tax dollars to improve state prisons remain unanswered.
“It’s taken years and years to get us in this situation. It’ll take time to get us out,” said Sen. Owen Laughlin, R-Woodward, Republican floor leader.
“We’re going to have to put some dollars into corrections. We have some facilities that are woefully inadequate and, in fact, dangerous.”

Public safety a priority

Laughlin and other lawmakers said public safety is the key issue in the upcoming prison debate. Underfunding and understaffing puts the public as well as correctional officers and inmates at risk.
“We have to equip them with the tools, the manpower they have to have to perform their mission,” said Rep. Rex Duncan, R-Sand Springs, chairman of House Judiciary and Public Safety Committee.
“The number one job of government has got to be keeping the thugs off the street,” Laughlin said.
Lawmakers said they will be guided by the findings of a comprehensive performance audit of state prisons made public earlier this month.
“Our leaders in the Department of Corrections have worked and are working with all parties involved to come up with a bipartisan solution,” Jackson said.
The audit said Oklahoma prisons are antiquated and underfunded. It recommended the Legislature immediately appropriate more than $25 million to secure 660 maximum-security cells at a private prison in Davis and hire additional correctional and pardon and parole officers.
In addition, the audit recommends a $30 million increase in the agency’s budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. The state prison budget this year is about $477 million, about 7 percent of the total state budget.

Age-old problems

Many of the problems auditors found in state prisons are abundant at Oklahoma State Penitentiary, built in part by inmate labor and opened in 1908.
In F Cell House, which houses 390 inmates, exposed metal sprinkler pipes crisscross the ceiling of a walkway that divides inmate cells — pipes that would become formidable weapons in an inmate’s hands.
The prison’s towering rotunda, which serves as a gateway to the cell house and other parts of the prison, is not air-conditioned, and prison staffers who work there must endure the heat of Oklahoma summers and the chill of its winters.
“There’s no heating. There’s no cooling,” Crenshaw said. And when it rains, guards put out “Wet Floor” signs in the rotunda because the roof leaks.
“I don’t think we’ve got a building that doesn’t leak,” he said.
Stress cracks stretch along the rotunda’s floor, which still bears remnants of asbestos tile removed years earlier.
Cells in the prison’s original East and West cell houses have not been used since a federal judge ordered them closed. But parts of the cell houses still are used for temporary inmate housing and as a pathway to a recreation yard. Above the pathway, layers of paint — some of it lead-based — peel from the cell house’s masonry ceiling.
Throughout the facility, reinforced glass panels and windows are cracked and shattered.
“Is this a security risk? Yes, it is,” Crenshaw said. “We don’t have funds to replace stuff like this.”

Looking for creative solutions

Oklahoma is 41st in the nation in the amount it spends to incarcerate inmates, the audit found. Auditors found no waste within the prison system and concluded it was cost-effective.
Duncan said he hopes to implement some of the audit’s 141 recommendations this year. Among them are taking the governor out of the parole process, a move the audit said would increase inmate releases and reduce Oklahoma’s prison population, which stood at 25,100 Jan. 22.
Jackson believes electronic monitoring devices for paroles might help reduce the overcrowding issue. He also said government leaders may want to look into more treatment options for drug abuse offenders and less prison terms.
“In the recidivism rate (of drug abuse offenders) there is shining example of things that work,” Jackson said speaking of treatment. “It is amazing what they have been able to accomplish.”
Jackson said one major concern he has about abuse offenders is what they might learn while in prison.
“We do not want to put minor offenders in with the main population,” he said. “This could further their criminal career.”

Parole factor

Auditors said Oklahoma parole rates are significantly lower than other states. Oklahoma is the only state in the nation in which the governor must sign off on every inmate parole request.
The audit predicted Oklahoma’s inmate population will rise to almost 29,000 by 2016 and said policies requiring certain felons to serve 85 percent of their sentences are driving the increase.
But lawmakers said there is no consensus in the Legislature for rolling back the 85 percent rule.
Since 1999, lawmakers have adopted sentencing policies that emphasize the so-called “deadly sins,” a list of 19 violent offenses that require those convicted of them to serve at least 85 percent of their sentence. The offenses include murder, rape and some forms of robbery, burglary, arson and child molestation.
“The public has a right to expect people sentenced to an 85 percent crime to actually serve that,” Duncan said.
Jackson said the house is in pre-session, and this week members will discuss DOCfunding.
“The DOC audit focuses on stellar progress and recognizes the things that worked,” Jackson said, “but, it is not an overall fix.”

Staff writer Tony Waggoner contributed to this Associated Press report.
http://www.enidnews.com/localnews/local_story_027005637.html

Copyright © 1999-2006 cnhi, inc.

Posted by lois at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2008

OH: Prisoners accuse prison of lying about asbestos

Inmates accuse prison officials of lying about asbestos
Tuesday Jan 22, 2008
Columbus Dispatch
A federal lawsuit filed by 33 inmates at a state prison accuses officials of lying about removing asbestos from the facility.

Lab tests on a powdery substance collected by the inmates at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution show the presence of the cancer-causing substance, said Jeffrey Donnellon, a Columbus lawyer who represents the inmates. Donnellon said he sent the samples to the lab.

The lawsuit, filed Jan. 4 in U.S. District Court on behalf of the inmates and four former inmates, accuses the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction of deliberate indifference to a known health risk.

The samples collected by inmates came from a dorm floor and from snipped pieces of insulation from steam pipes, Donnellon said.

"Many clients believe they have lung problems attributable to asbestos," Donnellon said

A message seeking comment was left Tuesday with a spokeswoman for the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. In a state inspection report of the facility filed in 2007, prison officials stated that the "last asbestos in a (prison) housing unit was removed ... two years ago."

The lawsuit also asks a judge to order an independent investigation and to close the prison if asbestos can't be safely or promptly removed.

The prison, about 45 miles south of Columbus, houses 2,850 inmates and has 587 staff members.

http://www.ohio.com/news/ap?articleID=351811&c=y

Posted by lois at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

ID: two articles about prison building: After two-year delay, ID Senate panel approves new drug prison

After two-year delay, ID Senate panel approves new drug prison

By JOHN MILLER
January 26, 2008 http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2008/01/25/ap-state-id/d8ud9rmo0.txt

BOISE, Idaho - Lawmakers voted Friday to kick-start a drug treatment
prison planned south of Boise that's been plagued by two years of
delays.

The Senate Judiciary and Rules Committee unanimously approved a lease-
purchase agreement in which Idaho will pay $50.4 million over 20
years to a Utah-based company to build the 400-bed facility. After
two decades, Idaho will own the building.

If the full Senate approves, the measure will go the House. If it
gets a final OK, the building should be completed in about 22 months
on land near existing state prison facilities, officials said.

The plan for a so-called Correctional Alternative Placement Program
facility was hatched in the 2006 Legislature, as lawmakers sought to
provide an alternative so those convicted of drug- and alcohol-
related crimes could avoid time in a traditional prison and get
treatment instead. Since then, however, it's been delayed by
ambiguity in the state's competitive bidding process that provoked
complaints from companies vying to build and run the facility.

That's finally been worked out. Late last year, Management & Training
Corp., based in Centerville, Utah, won the contract to build and
operate the prison. Now, lawmakers need to sign off on the details of
the lease-purchase pact.

"It's going to be a key component in slowing the flow" of drug
offenders into Idaho prisons, Department of Correction Director Brent
Reinke told the Senate panel. "I think we're going to see some
incredible returns on it."

This prison is just part of Reinke's agency's push to add beds to
manage a population of 7,400 offenders incarcerated largely due to
drug offenses in a prison system so crowded that it's sent 500
inmates to Texas and Oklahoma.

Separately, Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter this week began efforts to
convince lawmakers of the merits of his plan to let a private company
construct and own a new $250 million, 2,100-bed private prison.

Lawmakers last year had set aside about $4 million to run the new
drug prison, on the expectation it would be completed. Since it's
not, that money will revert to Idaho's general fund and lawmakers
will have to approve an additional appropriation in the 2009
Legislature for operation.

At the new drug prison, Management & Training Corp. plans to offer
programs to help addicted inmates re-enter society. Its operations
contract is for 10 years, but the state could renew for two five-year
periods, Reinke said.

Some senators were concerned that Idaho might be locked into
contracting with the Utah private prison company for the duration of
the 20 years it takes to complete the lease-purchase transaction.

"How do you address an inadequate operator that owns your building?"
asked Sen. Bart Davis, R-Idaho Falls.

Rod Leonard, who led the bidding development team for Idaho, said the
contract includes provisions for the state to cancel its relationship
at any time if there is failure to live up to state expectations.

Leonard said the state opted for the lease-purchase agreement,
instead of letting the Utah company own the facility, because it
allows for about $8.7 million worth of federal tax benefits over the
next 20 years. Management & Training has agreed to pass that benefit
on to Idaho in the form of reduced annual payments.

The facility will include 100 beds for offenders sentenced to drug-
or alcohol-treatment programs that must be completed in order for
them to avoid longer prison terms.

Other beds will be filled by offenders who run afoul of terms of
their parole or probation, but get sent to this facility for
treatment, in lieu of a judge returning them to one of Idaho's
penitentiaries.

"We're going to be using it for tuneups," Reinke said. "We'll run
them through it, get them tuned up."

Otter selling private prison plan; skeptics fear loss of control

By JOHN MILLER
Wednesday, January 23, 2008 http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2008/01/23/ap-state-id/d8ubujv80.txt

BOISE, Idaho - Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter Wednesday began selling a plan
to lawmakers to let prison companies own and operate for-profit
lockups in Idaho, arguing it's better for corporations to pay upfront
costs of housing a growing inmate population than it is for the state
to sell bonds for such projects, like it's done in the past.

Currently, Idaho law prevents corporations from building for-profit
prisons here.

For instance, although Corrections Corporation of America, based in
Tennessee, built the Idaho Correctional Center south of Boise in 2000
and now runs it, the state owns the facility.

Under Otter's proposal, companies could own their own facilities,
although only after the state issues a permit for a new facility.
Inmates from elsewhere could be brought here, but Idaho prisoners
would have priority and could "bump" inmates from other states to
make room for them.

And while sex offenders would likely be allowed, violent sexual
predators would be forbidden.

The Department of Correction predicts Idaho will have nearly 9,400
inmates in its system by 2012, up from about 7,400 now. The agency
has prison beds for just 6,300 inmates, so it's shipped about 500 to
Texas and Oklahoma, with others housed in county jails across Idaho.

Otter, a former businessman who touts free-market solutions, aims to
let firms like Corrections Corporation of America and Florida's The
GEO Group, build a $250 million, 2,100-bed prison, starting as soon
as possible. The companies are building tens of thousands of private
prison beds across America.

"The governor thinks there is a huge benefit to having a private
entity fund the construction of the facility and then operate the
facility," said David Hensley, Otter's staff attorney, adding Idaho
still owes $71 million in bond payments for its last prison. "The
governor is concerned taking on another $250 million in bond payments
is quite an undertaking."

Senate President Pro Tem Robert Geddes, R-Soda Springs, agreed Idaho
needs a new prison.

Still, the system where ownership has remained in state hands has
worked well, he said. If things change, Geddes raised concerns about
repeating problems in Texas, where one Idaho inmate killed himself in
March and where prisoners have been moved several times after alleged
abuse by guards.

"If you allow a private prison to develop...they're obviously looking
to maximize their profits," Geddes said. "Does that mean we're going
to become what we have utilized Texas for?"

In addition, members of the majority GOP are raising questions over
financial estimates Otter aides are using to tout cost advantages of
a privately owned prison.

In documents obtained by The Associated Press, officials estimated
that a state-owned prison built in 2012 would initially be more
expensive than a privately owned prison. But the state-owned option
would become cheaper by year 2019 due to projected rising payments
Idaho would have to make to a company to cover its costs of building
the privately owned prison, according to the documents.

But Otter and members of his administration were dissatisfied with
those figures, and demanded revisions.

New estimates emerged Tuesday, concluding this time that a privately
owned prison would actually be less expensive than a state-owned
prison until at least 2042. The big difference: The new estimates
assume a private company won't ever demand that Idaho increase its
annual payments to cover construction costs.

Hensley acknowledges there are no guarantees, but that Idaho could
request such a freeze in an eventual contract.

However, Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert and co-chairman of the Joint
Finance-Appropriations Committee, said it's unlikely an investor-
owned company like GEO or Corrections Corporation of America would be
satisfied with leaving payments to cover construction static for
decades.

"What the analysis fails to take into account are potential increases
in the cost of money over time," Cameron said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome and the other co-chairwoman of
the budget-writing panel, said allowing a private company to own such
a facility could leave Idaho without adequate control.

She cites an example in which Corrections Corporation of America
earlier this month asked Colorado to approve a 5 percent payment hike
in each of the next five years _ or else it would move Colorado
inmates out of one of its private prisons and bring in prisoners from
California. A Colorado prison spokeswoman confirmed to the AP such a
request had been made.

"We have a good relationship with Corrections Corporation of America
at the Idaho Correctional Center for the simple reason that we own
the facility," Bell said

Hensley countered Otter's legislation will include the appropriate
"sideboards" to avoid the situation Colorado now faces.

"We have the huge benefit that we can learn from lessons of Colorado
and other states," he said.

Both Corrections Corporation of America and GEO have hired lobbyists
in Idaho to push for Otter's changes.

In addition, the companies have given at least $40,000 in campaign
contributions to Idaho lawmakers in recent elections, including at
least $15,000 to Otter's 2006 gubernatorial race.

Few lawmakers have seen details of Otter's plan, but at least some
are warming to it.

"I tend to think there are very few things that government can
provide more efficiently than the private sector," said Rep. Mark
Snodgrass, R-Meridian.

Posted by lois at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

Sweden: A world of criminal justice a world away from this one. Killer Expelled From Swedish Med School

January 25, 2008
Killer Expelled From Swedish Med School
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York Times

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- A medical student convicted in a 1999 murder with neo-Nazi links has been expelled from Sweden's leading medical school in a case that sparked debate over whether a killer can become a doctor after having paid his debt to society.

The Karolinska institute, known for awarding the Nobel Prize in medicine, revoked Karl Svensson's admission to its prestigious medical program this week after an investigation into his background, the university president said Friday.

Svensson, 31, was admitted last fall after his application to the program was approved, President Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson told The Associated Press.

However, the university knew nothing about his dark past until getting two anonymous tips that Svensson's original identity was Hampus Hellekant, an alleged neo-Nazi sympathizer who had served seven years in prison for the murder of a labor union activist, Wallberg-Henriksson said.

He was convicted along with two other men in 2000 in the fatal shooting of a member of a far-left union, Bjorn Soderberg. Prosecutors said the killing was revenge for the Soderberg's public denouncement of a co-worker who belonged to a neo-Nazi organization.

''He had been enrolled for four months when this was revealed,'' she said.

The discovery put Karolinska in a difficult position because the legal framework is unclear on ''whether you should be able to receive a doctor's education with this type of background,'' she said.

In the end, Karolinska never had to address Svensson's criminal record because the background check found irregularities in the high school grades he submitted with his application, which was grounds to expel him.

The case triggered an emotional debate among faculty and students at the Karolinska institute. After local media started reporting on the case, Svensson told his 130 classmates about his background, Wallberg-Henriksson said.

''He said he was very interested in becoming a doctor and was determined to pursue the education and that he was not the same person today as he was then,'' she said.

''There was a lot of discussion. The course was divided in two camps. One camp thought he had paid for his crime, others felt uncomfortable,'' she said.

Karolinska students said that there had been mixed feelings about Svensson on campus.

''We talked about it when it emerged and it was in the paper,'' said Elin, 21, a biomedicine student who did not want her last name used because the topic was sensitive on campus.

''People felt it was strange that he should be allowed to become a doctor,'' she said. ''On the other hand, people change. Maybe he's become a better person.''

Wallberg-Henriksson said Svensson's only response to the expulsion was a letter to Karolinska in which he said he was dropping out of the program.

Svensson could not be reached for comment.

The National Agency for Services to Universities and University Colleges filed a police complaint in the case on Thursday. Stockholm police said Friday they had received the complaint and were likely to start a forgery investigation next week.

Education Minister Lars Leijonborg said in a statement on Friday that Svensson's case had prompted his ministry to ''discuss whether there is a need to change the regulations surrounding students who have committed crimes.''

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Sweden-Killer-Doctor.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Medical+School&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2008

CT: Major changes to criminal justice system proposed

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 2:25 PM EST
Major changes to criminal justice system proposed

The legislature's Democratic majority proposed a package of comprehensive changes to the criminal justice system in Connecticut today.

The crime bill is a response to last summer's triple homicide and home invasion in Cheshire. Lawmakers are meeting in special session today to consider the legislation.

After opening the special session, Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives and Senate have been in caucus since the late morning.

The Democratic legislation includes the following provisions:

Creates a new crime of home invasion.

Revises the burglary statute.

Reworks the persistent offender statute.

Reconfigures the Board of Pardons and Parole.

Expands the rights of crime victims and their immediate families.

Mandates secure video connections at state prisons for parole hearings.

Requires the court and prison systems provide 270 additional beds for diversionary and prison re-entry programs.

Commands the court and prison systems provide 24 beds in secured treatment centers for sex offenders.

Directs the court system to create an Internet registry for outstanding arrest warrants for violation of probation.

Requires the prison system to monitor 300 more inmates by global positioning satellite technology.

Makes juvenile court records available to Board of Pardons and Parole and the Department of Correction.

Requires the court system establish a statewide automated victim information and notification system.

Establishes a committee to propose incentives for municipalities to host transitional housing for released offenders.

Orders the court, prison and parole systems to devise how to assess the risks of offenders of re-offending.

Requires annual reporting to the legislature on developments in the criminal justice system.

Mandates the development of a centralized, integrated criminal justice tracking and information database.

Sets up a diversionary program for persons with psychiatric disabilities accused of crimes or motor vehicle violations.

Authorizes $19 million in transfers in the state's two-year, $36 billion budget to finance some initiatives.

http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2008/01/22/newsblog/doc479642c5353dc173185496
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Posted by lois at 05:07 PM | Comments (0)

Center for Public Integrity: Web Site Assembles U.S. Prewar Claims

January 23, 2008
Web Site Assembles U.S. Prewar Claims
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
NY Times

WASHINGTON — Students of how the Bush administration led the nation into the Iraq war can now go online to browse a comprehensive database of top officials’ statements before the invasion, connecting the dots between hundreds of claims, mostly discredited since then, linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda or warning that he possessed forbidden weapons.

The Center for Public Integrity, a research group that focuses on ethics in government and public policy, designed the new Web site to allow simple searches for specific phrases, such as “mushroom cloud” or “yellowcake uranium,” in transcripts and documents totaling some 380,000 words, including remarks by President Bush and most of his top advisers in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Warnings about the need to confront Iraq, by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and two White House press secretaries, among others, can be combed line by line, and reviewed alongside detailed critiques published after the fact by official panels, historians, journalists and independent experts.

There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war. Muckrakers may find browsing the site reminiscent of what Richard M. Nixon used to dismissively call “wallowing in Watergate.”

The database is online at www.publicintegrity.org.

Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the research center say their work has documented “at least 935 false statements” on hundreds of occasions, particularly that Iraq had unconventional weapons, links to Al Qaeda, or both.

The database shows how even after the invasion, when a consensus emerged that the prewar intelligence assessments were flawed, administration officials occasionally suggested that the weapons might still be found.

The officials have defended many of their prewar statements as having been based on the intelligence that was available at the time — although there is now evidence that some statements contradicted even the sketchy intelligence of the time.

President Bush said in 2005 that “much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong” but that “it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power.”

Posted by lois at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

MO: Federal Appeals Panel Rules that the State Must Provide Transportation to Prisoners Wanting Abortions

State prisons must transport inmates for abortions
Associated Press
ST. LOUIS, MO (2008-01-22) A federal appeals court panel rules today that the state of Missouri must provide transportation to abortion clinics for inmates who want to undergo the procedure.
The state in 2005 tried to end the practice of driving prisoners to clinics for elective abortions. An inmate at the prison in Vandalia filed a class-action suit.
A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a lower court ruling in favor of the inmate.
It isn't clear if the state will appeal. Calls seeking comment from Attorney General Jay Nixon and Governor Blunt were not returned. The ruling comes on the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe versus Wade decision, which established a nationwide right to abortion.

© Copyright 2008, KWMU

http://publicbroadcasting.net/kwmu/news.newsmain?action=printarticle&ARTICLE_ID=1215538

Posted by lois at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

Supreme Court Rules Against Muslim Prisoner

Court Rules Against Muslim Inmate
January 23, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Tuesday that a Muslim inmate cannot sue the government over the disappearance of the prisoner's copies of the Quran and a prayer rug.

In a 5-4 ruling, the justices said the federal law the inmate relied on prohibits lawsuits against federal corrections officers.

Abdus-Shahid M.S. Ali says the missing books and rug reflect widespread harassment against Muslim inmates in federal, state and local prisons stemming from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"Reports from all over the country have come in" on Muslims' religious property that "has been destroyed, confiscated, looted, lost, stolen or taken without cause," Ali said in the lawsuit he filed in federal court. Ali is serving a sentence of 20 years to life in prison for committing first-degree murder in the District of Columbia.

The issue in the case was whether federal prison guards are immune from suit under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

The law blocks lawsuits against the government over goods detained by customs and excise officers or "any other law enforcement officer." Two lower federal courts said Ali cannot sue because prison officials are law enforcement officers.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for a majority that cut across ideological grounds, agreed with the lower courts. The law "forecloses lawsuits against the United States for the unlawful detention of property by 'any,' not just 'some,' law enforcement officers," Thomas said. Tuesday's ruling was the first 5-4 split of the term, following a term in which the margin in 24 cases was a single vote.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia joined Thomas. The dissenters were Justices Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and John Paul Stevens.

"The seizure of property by an officer raises serious concerns for the liberty of our people and the act should not be read to permit appropriation of property without a remedy," Kennedy said.

Besides the two copies of the Quran and the prayer rug, Ali is missing stamps and other personal items worth $177 that he says never showed up after his transfer from a federal penitentiary in Atlanta to Big Sandy penitentiary at Inez, Ky., in 2003. He said the last time he saw the now-missing items was when he turned them over to a prison supervisor in Atlanta.

Muslim inmates have been subjected to "very hard times and bad treatment" at the hands of federal, state and local prison employees, Ali said in court papers.

It seems as though "the many prison employees think that they can hurt you best taking your personally owned property," Ali wrote.

He added that because he has "practiced his faith to the fullest" he has been subjected to prison officials repeatedly confiscating and destroying his legal and religious property.

Ali said he has been harassed for his religious beliefs "year after year" in both the District of Columbia Department of Corrections and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
The case is Ali v. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 06-9130.
On the Net:
* Supreme Court: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/

Posted by lois at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2008

Justice Policy Institute: The Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety Brief

Justice Policy Institute (JPI).
The Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety Brief: http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08_01_REP_DrugTx_AC-PS.pdf found that the sooner substance abuse is treated, the bigger the long-term cost savings and increases in public safety.
The policy brief found that:
Increases in admissions to substance abuse treatment are associated with reductions in crime rates.
Admissions to drug treatment increased 37.4 percent and federal spending on drug treatment increased 14.6 percent from 1995 to 2005. During the same period, violent crime fell 31.5 percent. In California, where Proposition 36 diverted thousands of people from prison and jail to treatment, violent crime fell at a rate that exceeded the national average.
In Maryland, where policymakers have been working to implement various approaches to diverting prison-bound people to treatment, the counties that relied on drug treatment were more likely to achieve significant crime rate reductions than those that relied on drug imprisonment.
Increased admissions to drug treatment are associated with reduced incarceration rates.
Substance abuse treatment prior to contact with the justice system yields public safety benefits early on.
Substance abuse treatment helps individuals transition successfully from the criminal justice system to the community. Community-based drug treatment programs reduce the chance that a person will become involved in the criminal justice system after release from prison.
Substance abuse treatment is more cost-effective than prison or other punitive measures. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP) found that community-based drug treatment is extremely beneficial in terms of cost, especially compared to prison. Every dollar spent on drug treatment in the community is estimated to return $18.52 in benefits to society in terms of reduced incarceration rates and associated crime costs to taxpayers.

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

New Haven: MLK Day commemorated with protests against parole ban and prison conditions and sentencing

City residents protest Rell’s parole ban
Battling bitter cold, more than 60 gather for vigil led by the People Against Injustice coalition
Aaron Bray
Yale Daily News: Staff Reporter
Published Tuesday, January 22, 2008

More than five dozen New Haven residents came together for a candlelight vigil Monday, invoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams as they called for a more humane criminal justice system.

“We are here to give hope to all those behind bars — to give voice to those who are invisible in our community,” shouted Barbara Fair, a member of the People Against Injustice coalition, which led the protest.

As Connecticut legislators hashed out compromises in Hartford ahead of today’s special session devoted to criminal justice reform, residents outside the Whalley Avenue jail protested Gov. Jodi Rell’s parole ban and some of her proposals to fix what most agree is a broken system.

Both the ban and the proposed reform were prompted by the triple murder of a mother and her two daughters last summer in Cheshire. Two men on parole have been charged with the crime.

While decrying the horror of the Cheshire killings — which took place in the suburbs — speakers asked why prior murders, in cities such as New Haven, had not prompted the same outrage and calls for reform. And they said they rejected two of Rell’s proposed solutions, which have also found vocal opposition among state Democrats.

One would mandate life imprisonment with parole possible after 30 years for anyone convicted of three violent felonies, a so-called “three-strikes” law. The other would make the invasion of an occupied home a violent felony, regardless of whether the perpetrator thought anyone was home.

Chris Cooper, a spokesman for Gov. Rell, said the governor’s set of 18 proposals, including the two over which there is contention, is a “very straightforward public safety issue.” He said there is no time table on the parole suspension and that Rell will lift it once she has confidence that reforms to protect the public have been put in place.

Cooper explained that the home invasion provision is necessary to ensure that every intruder does not simply claim to the prosecutor that he or she did not know anyone was home in order to avoid the tougher penalties. Among other things, Rell’s proposal also calls for minimum five-year terms for burglaries committed with a firearm or at night.

But speakers at last night’s vigil said the parole ban and the governor’s proposals only exacerbated an overcrowded prison system. Prison-guard unions in Connecticut have said they are severely understaffed, the Associated Press reports, though protestors noted with some irony that conditions are much worse for inmates than guards.

One speaker noted that a new inmate with tuberculosis was brought in by guards with masks and then promptly dumped in a crowded cell. Shelton Tucker, a member of the PAI coalition, told those gathered outside the correction center walls that he’d heard of maggots crawling out of drains in the bathrooms.

Vigil attendees argued that prison reform should focus on reducing the populations in prison, whose conditions many described as unconscionable — and not on building new ones.

But, added Tucker — who said he has spent time in prison — the community needs to do its part as well: “[Prison] cannot be seen as a rite of passage. We have to be better parents … [and] fight like hell to stay outside.”

Khalil Iskarous, also of PAI, explained how drug laws unfairly target primarily lower-income and minority populations, who tend to live in more densely populated areas.

He said laws imposing stricter penalties for drug possession within 1,500 feet of a school are effective everywhere within the New Haven city limits — except the Yale Bowl. Suburban residents, where the schools are spread further apart, do not need to worry about these laws, he said.

Representative Mike Lawlor (D-99), who has publicly recounted the poor and overcrowded prison conditions he has witnessed on tour at the Whalley Avenue jail, said the goal of the special session would be to find ways of taking nonviolent offenders out of the prison system.

“There’s a lot in [the proposed bills] on diversion, reentry and treatment. All of those things are certainly cheaper than prisons, and more effective, for some people, so we can focus prison resources on the dangerous ones,” Lawlor said. “Many convicts are mentally ill or homeless, so you can’t just push them out the door.”

Rell has asked that any proposals “carrying a price tag” be delayed until a Feb. 6 budget session, her spokesman said, and that tomorrow’s session focus solely on changes to the penal code, the Board of Pardons and Paroles and protesting victims’ rights.

But Lawlor disagrees: “We have to get these resources out there immediately.”

Still, he said, there is bipartisan consensus on at least 85 percent of the proposed changes.

Back outside the jail though, the concerns of the protestors, some of whom had friends or family inside, were closer to home and on a system they said had failed them. Some wondered aloud about the injustice they said they face each day: how the color of their skin makes them targets for drug or weapon searches, or how their children were in jail on minor drug charges even as Yale students receive a free pass.

In closing the hour-long vigil, many also asked why more people were not out on the frigid night with them. Like Dr. King’s efforts, they said, this must be a day-in and day-out struggle.

It is easy, some said, for clergy members and community supporters to take a stand from the comfortable and warm indoors.

“If our churches don’t get out here,” one protester asked, “why are we going in there?”
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/23046

Posted on Tue, Jan 22, 2008
Protesters rally outside Whalley Ave. jail
By Abram Katz, Register Staff

NEW HAVEN — About 50 protesters braved low temperatures Monday evening outside the New Haven Correctional Center on Whalley Avenue to denounce prison conditions, decry proposed stiffer criminal penalties, and invoke the name of Martin Luther King Jr. in a campaign to reduce crime in black neighborhoods.

Representatives of People Against Injustice, the Committee Against the Parole Ban, New Haven Family Alliance, and other groups, spoke through a megaphone, hoping that prisoners in the jail could hear them.

“What do we do when we’re under attack? Stand up and fight back!” the group erupted at several points in the hourlong candle-light vigil on Country Street, off Whalley Avenue.

Bundled up against the 24-degree cold, participants held candles shielded in paper cups. Only street lights illuminated the event.
Advertisement

Barbara Fair of People Against Injustice said, “We’re here to bring hope to people behind bars.” She criticized overcrowding in the jail, contending that 55 prisoners have to share a single toilet.

“It’s deplorable and inhumane. We’re here to give voice to the invisible. All of Martin Luther King’s dreams have not been fulfilled. Schools are still segregated. Housing is still segregated. The gains made in the 1960s have been lost. The reality is that this fight is for our children,” Feir said.

Nikki Brown, also of People Against Injustice, said recent revelations of allegedly criminal activity in the Police Department probably means that many people incarcerated in the jail have done nothing wrong.

Speakers did not minimize the break-in and homicides in Cheshire that spurred the three-strikes and no-parole bills in the General Assembly, but said city children are felled with little notice or response.

“Our babies are being killed on the street all of the time. The crime in Cheshire led to the ‘end of parole’ law,” Brown said.

Brown’s son, Shelton Tucker, said, “Martin Luther King’s dream was for justice and that has not been realized here. ‘Parole’ and ‘three strikes’ are horrible, horrible. We must fight, fight and keep fighting.”

Tucker said that if drugs and guns were eliminated from New Haven’s streets, so would most crime.

Brown said, “This is not about ‘one day.’ We’re not going to let Dr. King’s dream die.”

http://www.nhregister.com/WebApp/appmanager/JRC/BigDaily;jsessionid=MvJ5HVyLnhyvLzTG7Mp7rTfygJL7yjhTdwL8nsscq32LXnsv4625!1735560039?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pg_article&r21.pgpath=%2FNHR%2FHome&r21.content=%2FNHR%2FHome%2FTopStoryList_Story_1454188

Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2008

CT: Prisons adjust to increase in prisoners

Prisons adjust to increase in inmates
By Zach Lowe
Staff Writer

January 20, 2008

The state Department of Correction has taken prison officers off nonessential posts to guard the increased number of inmates without increasing overtime spending, according to officials and department records.

The adjustments came after the number of inmates in state prisons and jails jumped by nearly 1,000 after the summer crackdown on parole. The number of inmates rose to more than 19,800, prompting correction workers and advocates for inmate safety to complain about overcrowding.

The union complained that the overtime figures show the department has not responded to the crowding aggressively, but state officials said the prisons remain safe.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell ordered a halt on paroles for violent offenders after a July triple murder in Cheshire allegedly committed by two parolees.

The Department of Correction has dealt with the inmate increase without forcing more correction officers to work overtime, state records show.

Overtime spending ranged from $2 million to $2.7 million every two weeks in the four months after the Cheshire killings - the same range as in 2006, state figures show.

The department spent $54.9 million in overtime in 2006 and $55.1 million in 2007, records show.

Many state correction departments spend more on overtime when the inmate population surges, experts said. But state officials said they can adjust the assignments of prison guards to deal with an increase in prisoners.

"We do it all the time," department spokesman Brian Garnett said.

It has added 53 new posts in the state's 18 facilities since the Cheshire killings. The new posts are in dormitories, cell blocks and other priority areas crowded with prisoners, Garnett said.

To staff those posts, the department leaves less essential ones vacant on a day-to-day basis, he said. Those might include posts in a laundry room or school classrooms. Those programs, including educational lessons, are shut down for the day if no is guard present, Garnett said.

"Our facilities are adequately staffed to ensure they are safe," he said.

Luke Leone, president of Local 1565 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said all posts should be staffed regularly. He said the department also has pulled guards off so-called roving posts, which involve walking the facilities and being prepared to respond to any emergency.

"They are on a wing and a prayer hoping nothing serious happens," Leone said. "We are way understaffed."

"It just doesn't add up that inmate numbers go up and overtime goes down," he added.

Leone and Larry Dorman, a union spokesman, said the department should spend more on overtime when prisons are overcrowded.

"They are keeping the overtime figures low at the expense of proper staffing," Dorman said.

But Garnett said the department prefers not to force officers to work overtime, a practice common when local police departments find themselves short-staffed.

Forced overtime is not good for morale or safety, since officers get tired if they work 16 hours in a row, Garnett said.

Mandated overtime accounts for about 16 percent of the department's overtime spending, Garnett said. That figure has decreased in recent months, he said.

Leone said the department will assign officers to work only part of the night shift on overtime and send them home while inmates are sleeping.

Garnett would not comment on specific shift-by-shift staffing patterns.

Leone and Dorman said the state needs more officers.

The union pointed to a 2003 state report that recommended hiring 700 additional correction officers to staff state prisons. The state had 4,136 officers at the end of 2007, a tick up from the 4,115 working at the end of 2003 but about 200 more than the number of full-time officers in 2006, statistics show.

"We are very adept at handling the increase and decreases in our population," Garnett said.
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/local/scn-sa-doc1jan20,0,3013444.story?coll=stam-news-local-headlines
Copyright © 2008, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc.

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

CT: Lawmakers Tangle On Justice Reform Laws, Crowding In Jails Key Issues

Courant.com
Lawmakers Tangle On Justice Reform Laws, Crowding In Jails Key Issues

By CHRISTOPHER KEATING
Capitol Bureau Chief
January 21, 2008

As state legislators prepare for Tuesday's special session on criminal justice reforms, Republicans and Democrats are still battling over a "three strikes" law and struggling over how to create a new law against home invasions.

The two sides have been clashing despite a show of bipartisan unity two weeks ago as they stood together in a joint appearance with Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell to call for reforms in the aftermath of the triple slayings last summer in Cheshire.

House Speaker James Amann said the two sides had agreed on 95 percent of the items, and the Republicans interpreted that statement to mean that the other 5 percent was the "three strikes and you're out" proposal. Republicans have been calling for an automatic sentence of life imprisonment for any criminal who is convicted of three violent felonies, but some Democrats have rejected that concept as an overly simplistic solution that would take sentencing discretion away from judges.

Besides failing to agree on the details of a three strikes law, Republicans and Democrats also cannot agree on whether a strengthened law would lead to a minor or major increase in the state's prison population, which has been nearing all-time highs for months.

House Republican leader Lawrence Cafero of Norwalk said he wants to avoid a false impression that lawmakers agree on all aspects of the crime legislation.

"I've heard a lot of talk on the radio from Democrats that this was going to be a Kumbaya thing," Cafero said. "We're going to [offer] a three strikes amendment. It depends which one."

Cafero and Senate Republican leader John McKinney of Fairfield are both concerned about a loophole in a 34-page draft bill concerning the wording of the proposed home-invasion law. Currently, the invasion of an occupied home is not considered a violent crime, and lawmakers in both parties want to change that. The Republicans say a loophole in the draft bill would prevent prosecutors from pursuing a charge of home invasion if the criminal claimed that he did not know the house was occupied.

Derek Slap, a spokesman for Senate President Pro Tem Donald Williams, D-Brooklyn, said Williams agrees with Republicans that wording in the draft bill should be changed.

"The Senate president feels strongly that if you break into somebody's home, and they are home, it's home invasion," Slap said. "In addition, he doesn't have a problem with the governor's proposal that if you break into somebody's home at night — whether they are home or not — that's home invasion."

Concerning the disagreements over whether to enact a stronger "three strikes" law, Slap said that is "part of the negotiations."

Adam Liegeot, a spokesman for the governor, said Rell still supports the three strikes law and is "optimistic that an agreement can be reached" on the overall bill by Tuesday.

The review of criminal laws was prompted by the July 23 killings of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, during a break-in and arson at their home. Two longtime criminals who were out on parole at the time — Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky — were charged with six counts of capital felony in the homicides and could face the death penalty.

Wednesday will mark the six-month anniversary of the slayings, and some legislators have complained that the General Assembly has not moved quickly enough to enact new laws designed to prevent similar tragedies.

Rell called upon legislators to sharply limit their scope during the special session to strengthening criminal laws and then wait until after the regular session starts on Feb. 6 to tackle the many prison issues that require spending state money.

The draft bill on the response to the Cheshire tragedy calls for spending $6.2 million in the current fiscal year and $17.69 million during the fiscal year that begins in July. The money would cover a variety of items, including residential treatment centers for sex offenders, expanded global positioning system [GPS] monitoring of parolees, improved computers, and the creation of five full-time positions for the Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Crowded Conditions

As legislators prepare for the session, the state is facing an overflowing prison population that is near an all-time high. The state's 18 prisons and jails are filled to capacity overall, but conditions are worse at some facilities, according to the guards who patrol the prisons.

As of Friday, the state's prison population was 19,736 — up from about 5,400 in 1985, before the state built more than 10 new prisons.

As a backdrop for the Cheshire debate, a long-running issue between the Department of Correction and the unions representing correction officers continues over crowding in the prisons.

"We have over 800 inmates sleeping in unconventional areas — dorms, closets, bigger utility closets with three or four people sleeping on the floor," said David Testa, president of Local 387 of the correction officers' union. "We think 800 inmates sleeping on the floor is an emergency. ... The system we have presently isn't working."

Testa concedes that the union and prison officials often disagree about the statistics, but he added, "800 or 600 — it's still too many."

In the nomenclature of the Department of Correction, the inmates in "nontraditional housing" are considered as the "overflow" of prisoners who do not have traditional beds. To the union, that means criminals sleeping in plastic sleds on gymnasium floors and in converted closets.

Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the correction department, says the statements by the union are inaccurate.

"It's not true. No one sleeps on the floor," Garnett said. "They are in a temporary bed — a sled. No one is sleeping in a closet. No one is sleeping in the kitchen. It could be a gymnasium. It could be a chow hall."

By law, the state's 15 prisons and three county jails must accept all criminals who are sent by the state's judges. Though the situation in state prisons has gained more publicity in the aftermath of the Cheshire slayings, Garnett says it is not unusual for the prisons to be reaching overflow status.

"We are very adept at this. We've done it for years," Garnett said. "[The prisoners] remain safe. They remain secure. They remain humane."

As of Friday, Garnett said, the state had 19,940 fixed beds and 785 overflow beds — compared with an overflow figure by the union of about 1,000. A September order by Rell to suspend parole for violent criminals caused the state's prison population to increase, and more than 50 new staff members were authorized by the governor to deal with the overflow, officials said.

Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, an East Haven Democrat who is co-chairman of the legislature's influential judiciary committee, tells another story. He says there is only one sink for a group of 55 prisoners at the Whalley Avenue jail in New Haven. Inmates in that group use it to wash their hands and their clothes, Lawlor says.

The same 55 criminals, he says, regularly stand in line to use one toilet — in a jail that is sometimes hot and stifling with a powerful stench.

That was the scene Lawlor saw two months ago during a tour of the jail that houses prisoners who are awaiting trials on criminal charges ranging from shoplifting to murder. The restive inmates can be ornery, and the crowded conditions make matters worse, Lawlor says.

"Some are mentally ill," Lawlor said. "Some are HIV positive. Some have tuberculosis. Everybody's mad and angry. No privacy. No quiet."

The 55 inmates sleep on the gymnasium floor in plastic sleds resembling those used to carry injured hikers down a mountainside. The rows of sleds are lined up, almost touching each other, he said.

"That's what's going on," said Lawlor, an attorney and legislator for 22 years. "The sink is the size of a dinner plate. They wash their clothes in there."

Garnett said he was on the same tour as Lawlor and saw it differently. The inmates can always use the facilities in another section of the jail.

"Those guys in the gym do not have only one toilet and one urinal," Garnett said. "They are always provided access" to other areas.

Larry Dorman, a spokesman for AFSCME Council 4, which represents nearly 5,000 correction employees, said it isn't right that inmates are living in gymnasiums, closets and former office space.

"It's not how inmates should be housed," Dorman said. "It makes the situation more volatile. Something's got to give here. It's an unacceptable situation."

courant.com/news/custom/topnews/hc-cheshire0121.artjan21,0,255506.story?coll=hc_tab01_layout

Copyright © 2008, The Hartford Courant

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

January 20, 2008

NY Daily News: Errol Louis: Shame on prison-protecting pols

Shame on prison-protecting pols
NY Daily News Opinion: Errol Louis
Sunday, January 20th 2008

With startling clarity, an attempt by Gov. Spitzer to close unneeded prisons has laid bare the workings of New York's prison industrial complex and the fact that some people - and even whole communities - have a perverse financial stake in keeping penal institutions open and filled.

Where many of us see prisons as places of sadness and misery - and yes, justice - a handful of special interest groups and upstate politicians see them as a source of jobs and the extra political clout that comes from adding thousands of "residents" to an otherwise sparsely populated area.

Spitzer and his Correctional Services commissioner, Brian Fischer, are trying to save state money - an estimated $44 million over the next two years, plus another $30 million in construction and repair costs - by shutting down four medium- and minimum-security prisons.

The prisons aren't needed - many are half-empty - because New York's inmate count has dropped by 13% over the last eight years, from 71,600 in 1999 to less than 62,500 today.

That should be good news - a sign, perhaps, that years of investing billions of tax dollars in fighting crime, social programs and education have finally paid off, and some of that money can be spent on other critical needs.

But not everyone sees it that way.

On Thursday, a rally at Harrietstown Town Hall in Saranac Lake has been planned to demand that Spitzer come up with funding to stop the closing of Camp Gabriels, a minimum-security facility that Fischer says is half empty with 187 inmates.

"We hope to send a message to the governor and get the money put back in the budget," said Chris Hansen, whose title is "northern region business agent" for the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, which represents prison guards.

Jeff Leavitt, a member of the Brighton Town Council, told PressRepublican.com, a local news organization, that a study showed prison work crews put in 104,525 hours worth of "community service" cleaning and repairing upstate roads. That spared Brighton and other towns roughly $855,204 worth of minimum wages, according to Leavitt - roughly twice the $478,000 Brighton spends on its general and highway funds.

"And that's just labor," Leavitt said. "A lot of these jobs won't get done, because the towns can't afford to do it."

In another local perk, the prison's 187 inmates, counted as area residents, allow Brighton to get extra emergency-service money from state and federal sources. They also count for the purposes of drawing state and federal district lines. No, 187 people alone may not sound like that many people - but the numbers add up, so the prison is politically valuable.

This madness must end.

I'm terribly sad that Brighton might have to clean its own roads instead of having prisoners do the work for them.

I understand why upstate pols might enjoy the luxury of having a state-funded captive population of people who bring extra emergency funds but can't vote on how a nickel of it gets spent.

And I get why a prison union's business agent would fight to keep what amounts to make-work jobs at a mostly empty facility.

But none of that is a reason to keep a prison open.

This game has been going on for years. "We've got a little history on our side," Hansen told the Adirondack Enterprise newspaper. "We have successfully staved off the closing of correctional facilities in other areas of the state."

Enough. Downstate advocates of prison reentry - a policy of redirecting public resources to schools, housing, jobs and recreation programs instead of prison - need to get fired up and jump into this debate.

Above all, Spitzer and Fischer need to hold firm and make clear that the last thing upstate's ailing economy needs is a fiscally and morally bankrupt policy of keeping prisons open when they aren't needed.

elouis@nydailynews.com
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/01/20/2008-01-20_shame_on_prisonprotecting_pols.html

Posted by lois at 06:26 PM | Comments (0)

Texas prisons leave humanity in shackles

Texas prisons leave humanity in shackles
Austin American-Statesman
By The Editorial Board | Saturday, January 19, 2008,
It should be of great concern that inmates die in agony, their injuries ignored. But it isn’t.

Medical care in Texas prisons seems as much as ever to be an oxymoron. For many years, the medicine practiced behind prison walls too often has been afflicted by a lack of care.

There are many reasons for that - too little money, a shortage of professionals, decrepit equipment, an aging inmate population. These problems have plagued the sprawling Texas prison system for decades.

It appears that a widespread disregard for the inmates’ health and well-being permeates the prison system. Not in every prison and not with every inmate. But nearly 2,000 inmates died over a recent four-year span, the most in any state in the country - even California, with its larger prison population.

It should be of great concern across Texas that, as the American-Statesman’s Mike Ward has reported, prison inmates die in agony, their injuries ignored. Or hang themselves with guards watching and die because attempts at resuscitation were delayed. But it isn’t. In both of those cases reported by Ward, no one was punished.

Beyond the inmates and their families, too few people are outraged at the wanting medical care in Texas prisons. Because inmates are convicted criminals, and often unpleasant ones at that, sympathy is in short supply.

It should matter, though. We are distinguished as a people and as a state by the way we treat the least among us, including those who have broken the law.

Texas prison inmates are still human, and how we regard them determines the content of our character.

We ignore prisons and inmate care at our peril, both moral and physical. Those prisoners are fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters. We should care enough about them to guarantee decent treatment no matter what their crimes.

And the vast majority of them will walk among us again, will return to their hometowns and the big cities. Their attitudes will depend in no small part on how they were treated in prison.

When Texas contracted with two university medical schools to provide health care to prisoners, it was praised as an inexpensive way to provide quality care. But even under care of the University of Texas Medical Branch and Texas Tech University, inmate health care has been spotty, even dismal at times.

Some Texas lawmakers have shown concern because so many deaths could be signs of deeper troubles. And lawmakers want to avoid another court ruling that the prison system is unconstitutional. That could be cumbersome and costly.

State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice committee, has scheduled a committee hearing this week to examine prison health care. Shining a bright light on the problems that have surfaced could be the beginning of better health care. Punishing neglect helps avoid similar problems in the future.

In the end, though, proper medical care in state prisons is a matter of our own self-respect. Arizona Sen. John McCain, a former prisoner of war and now Republican presidential hopeful, said it best when discussing torture: It’s not about them, it’s about us.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/editorial/entries/2008/01/19/texas_prisons_leave_humanity_i.html

Posted by lois at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2008

NY: Town assesses impact of prison closure

Published January 18, 2008 12:01 pm - Brighton Town Council plans strategy to fight closure of Camp Gabriels or deal with fallout if it happens.

Town assesses impact of prison closure

By KIM SMITH DEDAM
Staff Writer

BRIGHTON — The Brighton Town Council held a special meeting Thursday night to get a grip on potential impacts should Camp Gabriels close next year.

The New York State Department of Corrections announced last week the minimum-security prison was one of four state facilities slated for shutdown in January 2009.

In addition to the total 131 local jobs either displaced or eliminated, Camp Gabriels provides a critical water supply for firefighters in the hamlet, councilors said.

Without it, the Fire Department would have to get water from a pond off Hull Road, about three miles away, said Councilor Steve Tucker.

The facility is also an integral part of the town’s disaster-response plan.

Camp Gabriels meeting hall, called the QWL, is the town’s official Red Cross emergency shelter.

“We set up a shelter in the (Camp Gabriels) gym during the (1998) Ice Storm,” said resident Keith Smith, a maintenance worker at the prison who attended the meeting.

“You could probably fit the whole town in there.”

Councilors drafted a resolution opposing closure of Camp Gabriels and slowly began to sort through what it might mean.

“What was the basis of their review?” asked Councilor Jeff Leavitt.

Brighton Supervisor Peter Martin Sr., who also works as a correction officer at the prison, recused himself from voting.

Martin said state lawmakers have begun asking DOCS for more information.

“The senator (Betty Little) doesn’t know. The bosses don’t know. They (the state) are not really telling us a whole lot,” he said.

In a phone call to DOCS in Albany, the Press-Republican was told there is no published study available to the public and that data driving the decision was generated in an internal review process.

DOCS said in a statement last week that closing the three minimum-security camps and one medium-security prison would allow them to save about $44 million in operating costs to offset the $91 million it will cost to create new programs for treatment of mentally ill inmates and incarcerated sex offenders mandated by the State Legislature.

DOCS also said the number of inmates at minimum-security prisons dropped 47 percent in the past decade.

Martin said the community should create an inventory to gauge what the larger impact closure would be on area businesses, including local fuel companies, food service, hospitals, contractors, the postal service, UPS, fire and rescue services and part-time teachers.

The 187 inmates are also considered residents of the town, adding population used to calculate emergency-service rates.

“It’s a big fallout for everybody,” Martin said.

Leavitt, who is also a member of the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival Committee, said that group tallied some approximate numbers Wednesday, counting 104,525 hours of community service done regionally by inmates in 2007 between January and the end of November.

They estimated the work crews spared towns roughly $855,204 worth of minimum wages.

“And that’s just labor,” Leavitt said. “A lot of these jobs won’t get done, because the towns can’t afford to do it.”

The total general and highway funds in Brighton were about half that at $478,000 last year.

Councilors decided to ask DOCS for a tour of the facility to take stock.

“If it (closure) does happen, what are we going to do?” said Councilor Sheila Delarm. “We should start putting wheels in motion. We may only have a year here.”

Martin said Saranac Lake Area Chamber of Commerce Director Sylvie Nelson had contacted him looking to form an economic redevelopment committee to help work toward solutions.

“But the property is state-owned until they tell us what they’re going to do with it.”

Delarm said the redevelopment process should parallel efforts at this point to keep the prison open.

In a first brainstorming session, councilors came up with several scenarios for reuse, including a veterans’ rehabilitation facility for disabled soldiers; an expansion site for Paul Smith’s College or Trudeau Institute; a campus for the Adirondack Leadership Program, which also has a wilderness base in nearby Onchiota; or DOCS programs for elderly inmates or shock-treatment programs.

Smith told the Town Council that members of the three unions involved in the closing met earlier this week to develop a plan to lobby DOCS to keep the prison open.

Unions created a Web site for public information at www.savegabriels.org and organized a rally to be held at 3 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 24, in the Harrietstown Town Hall.
http://www.pressrepublican.com/midday/local_story_018120138.html?start:int=0

Posted by lois at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

WVA: Senate leader wants to re-examine sentencing practices

“Prisons are meant to lock up people that pose a danger to society, not necessarily people that have done stupid things or made you mad.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Jeffrey Kessler

Senate leader wants to re-examine sentencing practices
By Mannix Porterfield
Register-Herald reporter

— CHARLESTON — As prisons near the saturation point and counties struggle to pay regional jail costs, lawmakers are having second thoughts about putting every kind of criminal behind bars.
Being tough on crime simply doesn’t hold the same appeal it did a few years ago, now that the chickens are coming home to roost in the form of rising costs, Senate Judiciary Chairman Jeffrey Kessler, D-Marshall, says.
As the 2008 session gets clicking in earnest, Kessler expects much time to be spent in his committee on sentencing.
Within the past six years, a finance panel learned, the prison population has gone up by one-third. By 2011, if the trend stays unchanged, the numbers will double.

“We really need to take a hard look at what we’re doing as a Legislature when we pass legislation that requires people to be incarcerated,” Kessler said as his committee began to chart its course for the session.
“I think it’s politically popular at times to just incarcerate people just because it makes you look tough on law and order. But at the end of the day, now, I think the public is starting to feel the effects of that, particularly at the county level, where they can’t afford to pay the regional jail fees.
“Prisons are busting at the seams, and we’re going to have to end up building a new prison at a quarter of a billion dollars or so to lock up people.”
Like others, Kessler wants to re-examine the sentencing of lawbreakers so that only the violent menaces to society are put away, not “everybody we get mad at who does something stupid and may do something harmful more to themselves many times than to society.”
“That doesn’t do anything to really keep us safer,” he said.
Kessler expects much attention to the manner in which people are committed to pulling time in prison and the crimes that send them there.
An alternative, one he favors, is the use of money and energy toward prevention of recidivism and rehabilitation of society’s miscreants.
“I think that’s probably a wiser choice of dollars,” he said.
“I’ve yet to see any studies over the last decade to indicate West Virginia has become a more violent state or a more dangerous state,” he said.
Had that been the case, he said, the prison population would be twice as large.
One area that has drawn the focus of lawmakers with regard to easing the crowded conditions in the penal system is the drunken driver.
“We’re going to be taking a look at what we can do to reduce some of the incarceration levels, rather than spend $50 a day keeping people locked up,” the chairman said.
“That money would be better spent by requiring mandatory participation in drug and alcohol treatment programs, Interlock-type programs.”
Even with this new approach, he reminded, DUI cases can still be prosecuted, but hopefully with a more positive outcome.
Kessler says it makes more sense to get the offender in a drug or alcohol treatment program, rather than merely stowing them away in a cell, only to learn at the end of the sentence the offender is addicted.
“All you’ve done is released a sober drunk,” he said. “And they’re right back to the same pattern.”
In recent years, he noted, the Legislature at times has looked into the sentencing system and fetched some meaningful data.
“But it’s like the wind goes out of the sails,” he said. “Something comes up and we pass legislation, and say, ‘we’re tough on crime again.’”
Kessler pointed to the brouhaha over the so-called “Logan’s Law,” one aimed at sexual predators and one that triggered a fight waged largely along partisan lines.
“The original version of that did nothing but double penalties for everyone across the board,” he said.
In reality, Kessler said, lawmakers should have zeroed in on early intervention with more money and time invested in protecting children from neglect and abuse, “rather than worrying about rounding up a bunch of bogeymen and throwing them in jail for the rest of their lives.”
“Statistics show there is a very, very minute subset of true and real sexual predators,” he said.
“Those folks, yes, we need to confine forever. But we don’t need to go out and build a new prison for a quarter of a billion dollars to put everybody in that may have streaked across a college campus.”
Kessler feels the new law is working in two special areas — the sexual registry and the task force in its strivings with prosecutors to prevent abuse and neglect of children.
Money could be the big motivator in reforming how West Virginia sends people to jail and prisons, he says.
After all, once the state and counties begin shopping around for new areas to tax so that offenders are kept within prisons and jails, the public could demand some change.
“Then we’ll probably see more of an outcry, ‘Hey, come to your senses, guys, we can’t afford to keep locking everybody up that may jaywalk.’
“Prisons are meant to lock up people that pose a danger to society, not necessarily people that have done stupid things or made you mad.”

http://www.register-herald.com/local/local_story_018212153.html

Posted by lois at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

Federal Court: Death Row Prisoners Can Challenge Ban On Death Row Interviews

Federal court: Inmate can challenge ban on death row interviews
By TOM COYNE, Associated Press Writer
Jan 18, 2008 at 4:50 PM EST

SOUTH BEND (AP) — A federal appeals court has ruled an inmate can challenge a Bureau of Prisons policy prohibiting death row inmates from giving face-to-face interviews with the media.

The policy was adopted seven years ago after Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh appeared on "60 Minutes." A three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled Tuesday that U.S. District Judge John Tinder in Indianapolis erred when he dismissed the 2004 lawsuit by David Hammer in a summary judgment in February 2006.

Edward Himmelfarb, who argued the case for the Justice Department, said Friday he had no comment on the decision. He also said no decision has been made on how the federal government will proceed in the case.

Chad Bell, Hammer's attorney, said his client is pleased.

"He's looking forward to press this case and show that this policy was enacted for unconstitutional purposes to suppress speech and to specifically silence inmates on death row," Bell said.

Hammer is an inmate at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. He was facing the death penalty in 1999 when he gave three face-to-face interviews to reporters. But subsequent requests for interviews were rejected by prison officials. His death sentence has since been vacated and is being appealed.

On April 12, 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced at a news conference about McVeigh's execution that the Bureau of Prisons instituted a new policy banning face-to-face interviews with death row convicts.

"As an American who cares about our culture, I want to restrict a mass murderer's access to a public podium," Ashcroft said.

The ban began 13 months after his interview with "60 Minutes" and two months before McVeigh was executed in June 2001.

A spokesman for then-Warden Harley Lappin said the policy changes were based on prison security and the desire to avoid "sensationalizing" executions. According to the court ruling, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., wrote to the Bureau of Prisons director following the McVeigh interview demanding that the bureau prohibit similar dialogues with death row inmates.

Hammer filed the lawsuit, alleging the policy violated his First Amendment and equal protection rights. He contended the security rational was a guise to cover up the real reason behind the ban — anger over the McVeigh interview.

The appeals judges ruled that a reasonable jury "could conclude that the media policy was implemented and is now enforced not because of safety concerns, but rather in response to public pressure to prevent death row inmates from voicing their views publicly."

Attorneys for the federal government have until the end of February to seek a rehearing before 7th Circuit Court. They could also appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court or allow the case to return to district court without seeking any further review.

Bell said if the case is returned to district court in Indianapolis his client could seek evidence from the federal government to back his claim and would have an attorney to help him. Hammer didn't have an attorney until the appeals court appointed him counsel a year ago, Bell said.

In 2005, a federal judge vacated Hammer's death sentence for killing his federal penitentiary cellmate in Allenwood, Pa. U.S. District Judge Malcolm Muir ruled that Hammer should have a new sentencing hearing because jurors were not given evidence that might have led them to conclude the strangling was accidental.

Hammer remains on death row while federal prosecutors appeal that decision. The Terre Haute prison is the only place in the nation housing federal death row inmates and the only place where they are executed.
http://www.wsbt.com/news/indiana/13903837.html

Posted by lois at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

San Quentin Journal: Prison Makes Way for Future, but Preserves Past

“The reliance on isolation continues in today’s “super-max” prisons, like the administrative maximum, or ADX, federal prison in Florence, Colo. “The technology is more advanced but the basic operating principles are pretty much the same,” said Prof. Craig W. Haney of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of “Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of Imprisonment” (American Psychological Association, 2006).”

“Should the dungeon at San Quentin ever be open to the public, even on a limited basis, it would have much to teach, said Ari Wohlfeiler, an organizer for Critical Resistance, an advocacy group that opposes prison expansion. The history of imprisonment in the U.S. has been marked by poor conditions, overcrowding and an endless cycle of construction, which continues to this day,” Mr. Wohlfeiler said. “It would be an ironic history lesson.”

January 18, 2008, NY Times
San Quentin Journal
Prison Makes Way for Future, but Preserves Past
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — The dank crypt for the living still wields emotional power, its peeling ocher walls and low vaulted ceilings suffused with chill and darkness.

With its oaken, iron-latticed door and two-foot-thick granite bricks, San Quentin’s dungeon looks so stereotypically medieval that it might have been dreamed up by one of Hollywood’s masters of the macabre. But as niches for wooden pegs that once secured chains and shackles attest, these gloomy catacombs bore witness to “an enormous amount of human history, pain, misery and atonement,” said Kevin Starr, the California historian.

As a federal court-ordered overhaul of California’s prison medical system begins, the storied prison overlooking San Francisco Bay is tearing down several outmoded buildings on the 432-acre property, including the original 1885 hospital built in the institutional Italianate style. A $146 million, state-of-the-art primary care health services complex will open in 2010.

Before demolition, state historians called in to survey the site discovered the significance of what had been a forgotten space used for storage. The space, a dungeon, was the original San Quentin and is believed to be the oldest surviving building constructed by the state.

The now-moldering cloister will be preserved because of its importance, while demolition proceeds above it. It was completed by prisoners in 1854, four years after statehood. “It was the state’s first public work, before the Capitol building, the roadways, the public colleges and universities,” Dr. Starr said. “Its preservation is not trivial. Like the catacombs in Rome, it’s where people suffered.”

Its history is indeed grim. Originally intended to house 45 inmates, it was built out of local rock and clay brick quarried by convicts living aboard the Waban, a prison ship anchored in San Francisco Bay.

More than 150 men were piled into the dungeon’s cells, which were sealed off with iron doors with a small slit known as a “Judas hole.” The men slept on vermin-infested straw matting. “Night buckets” for waste were left uncovered. Floggings with a rawhide strap were standard punishment, along with “shower baths” — a precursor of water-boarding — in which naked prisoners were tied to ladders and then sprayed in the face, chest and genitals with a high-pressure stream of cold water.

In 1869, a visiting physician, Alfred W. Taliaferro, wrote of the deplorable conditions: “men literally piled up on one another; this fills the room with animal heat and impure air.”

The dungeon eventually became a “hole” for solitary confinement, modeled on Pennsylvania’s Quaker-inspired system in which isolation was viewed as a path to reflection and penitence (thus the term “penitentiary”). In 1880, the last flogging was officially administered at San Quentin and 60 years later, the warden, Clinton Duffy, abolished the use of the dungeon altogether, removing the iron gates as a symbol of reform.

Federal historic preservation law requires surveying potentially historic structures on state or federally owned property and saving those deemed very significant. The Italianate facade of the 1885 hospital will be incorporated into the new medical facility. The dungeon, “a microcosm of how prisoners were treated,” in the words of Madeline R. Bowen, an architectural historian for the firm Jones & Stokes, had languished for years until it was unsealed so that historians could document it.

“There was nothing cleaned up about it,” said Gerald T. Takano, an architect who documented the dungeon for the Historic American Buildings Survey, part of the Department of the Interior. “You can still really sense how it was.”

Unlike Alcatraz, which has more than a million visitors a year, San Quentin is still an active prison where convicted killers like Scott Peterson wait out their death sentences in limbo, as the controversy over lethal injection continues. Sgt. Rudy Luna, administrative assistant to Warden Robert L. Ayers Jr., said future use of the dungeon would be determined once the building is finished and might include storage, public tours on a limited basis or “keeping it as is.”

Many of his co-workers are unaware of the dungeon’s history, Sergeant Luna added. “I think it should be preserved,” he said as he escorted a reporter around the prison yard, which retains its crenellated Gothic aura. “If you know history, then you won’t make the same mistakes.”

Although few survive intact, dungeons were a fixture of 19th-century prisons, said Norman Johnston, a professor emeritus at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania and the author of “Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture” (University of Illinois Press, 2000). The concept of solitary confinement, pioneered at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1829 and then repeated later in the “dark cells” of San Quentin’s dungeon, was developed as a more effective means of rehabilitation.

The reliance on isolation continues in today’s “super-max” prisons, like the administrative maximum, or ADX, federal prison in Florence, Colo. “The technology is more advanced but the basic operating principles are pretty much the same,” said Prof. Craig W. Haney of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of “Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of Imprisonment” (American Psychological Association, 2006).

There is evidence that public fascination with prisons is growing: Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, for instance, closed to prisoners in 1971, is now a major tourist attraction that draws 110,000 visitors at Halloween, when it is converted into a haunted house. The prison’s current “Winter Adventure tours” feature “an hour-long tour of the beautiful winter cellblocks with an expert guide and a cup of hot chocolate!” the Web site says.

“People want to know what’s behind the wall,” Professor Johnston said. “There’s a certain morbid curiosity about prisons, just as there is with automobile wrecks.”

In Boston, the historic Charles Street jail has been converted into a luxury hotel, the Liberty, complete with a restaurant called Clink, where tapas-style small plates are served amid the atmospheric original cell bars.

Should the dungeon at San Quentin ever be open to the public, even on a limited basis, it would have much to teach, said Ari Wohlfeiler, an organizer for Critical Resistance, an advocacy group that opposes prison expansion.

“The history of imprisonment in the U.S. has been marked by poor conditions, overcrowding and an endless cycle of construction, which continues to this day,” Mr. Wohlfeiler said. “It would be an ironic history lesson.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2008

CA: Releasing prisoners who fight fires at $1 an hour will hurt fire camps

Inmate release proposal could hurt fire camps
Published: January 16, 2008
Maggie Beck/Union Democrat

By ALISHA WYMAN

The Union Democrat

Wiping out a portion of the state's lowest-paid firefighting force is one impact prison officials fear if the state releases thousands of inmates under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget proposal.

The governor has suggested letting go 22,000 non-violent and low-level prison inmates with less than 20 months left on their sentence to help offset a state budget deficit.

"Those low-level, non-violent offenders are the inmates that we place in our fire camps," said Lt. Kevin Wise, an administrative assistant at Sierra Conservation Center.

The Jamestown-area prison trains inmates that staff 19 fire camps from central California to the Mexico border. Two of those camps include the Baseline camp near the prison and another in Vallecito.

The inmates are paid $1 an hour to fight fire, do fuel management projects and help with flood control.

"In my opinion, and in the opinion of the staff, it's the most valuable program that we operate," Wise said.

Last week, Schwarzenegger declared a fiscal emergency and introduced a proposal to address this year's $3.3 billion shortfall. He has called the Legislature to a special session to review his proposal, which includes 10 percent cuts to nearly all departments within the state's general fund.

If the inmate release is approved, it is unclear which inmates it would affect.

Sierra Conservation Center counselors would have to evaluate 1,500 low-level inmates at the prison to see if they meet a yet-undefined criteria. Those released would likely be ones incarcerated for crimes such as property offenses, narcotics and embezzlement.

It is also possible the counselors will be responsible for sorting through inmate files it trained at its 19 camps, about 22,000 prisoners, Wise said.

"We're hoping that the first ones to be released are the ones who aren't eligible to be in fire camp," he said.

Ineligible inmates include those with mental disabilities, or physical or medical issues.

Even if the inmates are taken from the mainstream population, it could still impact the prison, Wise said.

Inmate population determines staffing numbers. A reduction in inmates means a reduction in staff, he said.

This would be the most dramatic reduction in inmate population Wise can remember in his 23 years with the state department, he said. The release of such a large number of convicts could concern the public, both those with houses at risk from wildfire, and for public safety reasons.

"We're here to keep these inmates from the public as long as the courts have ordered them to be in prison," he said.

Tuolumne County Sheriff Jim Mele said a release would send a message to would-be criminals that they can get away with a light sentence.

But the proposal is not unlike the releases 58 California Sheriff's make every day due to jail overcrowding, he said.

"There has to be a punishment for the crime, and all we're doing is re-enforcing the fact that you can do crime and not have a punishment," he said.

Posted by lois at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)

WA: AT&T fined more than $300,000 for overcharging on prison calls

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
January 17, 2008
AT&T fined more than $300,000 for overcharging on prison calls

By RACHEL LA CORTE
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- AT&T has been fined more than $300,000 for overcharging families of prison inmates for collect phone calls from two Eastern Washington state prisons, the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission announced Thursday.

The phone company will also have to issue $67,295 in refunds to the families of the prisoners at Airway Heights Corrections Center in Spokane and the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

The commission identified 29,971 violations in phone-rate charges during a four-month period in 2005 at the two prisons.

One individual had 400 separate collect calls that were overcharged by $2,110, and 22 others were overcharged $500 each, according to commission spokeswoman Marilyn Meehan.

The majority of the overcharged calls ranged from 30 cents to $1, Meehan said.

"It was purely a functional error, a billing error," said AT&T spokesman Ted Wagnon. "As soon as we became aware of it, we corrected it."

There are approximately 1.6 million collect phone calls made from the state's prisons each year.

Richard Laxton of Seattle filed a complaint with the commission in August 2005, after finding discrepancies in two collect-phone call charges made from Airway Heights.

The commission investigated all calls made from March to June 2005. During that time, AT&T had a contract with the state to provide telephone service from state prisons. The company was required to file a price list with the commission, including charges made for collect calls from pay phones at the two Washington prisons.

AT&T billed Laxton $15.75 for a 20-minute call from the state institution but Zero Plus Dialing, a billing agent for AT&T, charged $22.22 for the same telephone call.

Zero Plus Dialing was charging a $3.95 connection fee plus 89 cents-a.m.inute and a 47-cent prison surcharge for the collect call made from a pay phone at the state prison, when it was in fact only allowed to charge $3.95 for the connection fee and 59 cents a minute for the phone call, according to AT&T's price list.

AT&T will begin issuing refunds as of Feb. 1.

People can contact AT&T at 1-800-826-9923 and ask for a reimbursement form from the company. Customers will have seven months to submit their claim to AT&T, from Feb. 1 to Aug. 31.

Wagnon said AT&T would be placing notices in several newspapers around the state and in the two prisons to inform people about the refunds.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6420ap_wa_overcharged_calls.html

Posted by lois at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2008

Milton Wolff, 92, Dies; Anti-Fascist Fighter

January 17, 2008
Milton Wolff, 92, Dies; Anti-Franco Leader
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Milton Wolff, the last commander of the American volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and the longtime commander of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died Monday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 92.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Peter N. Carroll, chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

At first a young Communist rabble-rouser on soapboxes in New York City, Mr. Wolff was wielding a machine gun in Spain by the time he was 21. By 22, he was the ninth commander of what is commonly called the Lincoln Brigade; four of his predecessors had been killed, four wounded; none now survive, the archives confirm.

Mr. Wolff found himself holding together the remnants of North American volunteers on a counteroffensive that moved across the Ebro River to the violent Hill 666 in the Sierra Pandols. It was a last gasp by foreign troops supporting the elected leftist government of Spain against the revolt led by Gen. Francisco Franco. The Americans soon left Spain; Madrid fell in March 1939, and the war was over.

While Mr. Wolff was in Spain, he became a friend of Ernest Hemingway, who served him his first glass of Scotch; Hemingway was in Spain as a reporter and wrote fiction about the conflict as well. Later, in a pamphlet issued when sculptures of the fighters were unveiled, he called Mr. Wolff “as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg.”

After the exhausted volunteers arrived in New York aboard the ocean liner Paris on Dec. 15, 1938, it was Mr. Wolff who laid a wreath outside the railing of Madison Square Park, kept out of the park for want of a permit.

Mr. Wolff never stopped defying authority. He helped lead the fight against United States support of Franco’s government and battled fiercely for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He even offered the services of the aging veterans of the Lincoln Brigade to the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, who declined them.

Mr. Wolff was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn on Oct. 7, 1915. He dropped out of high school and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program for unemployed youths. He was dropped when he protested what he considered the poor treatment of an injured friend, Mr. Carroll said.

He found a job in the garment district and joined the Young Communist League. When a leader called for volunteers to go to Spain, Mr. Wolff raised his hand. He considered himself a pacifist and planned to serve as a medic, but switched to a machine-gun company when his Washington battalion went into action at Brunete in July 1937.

The American volunteers were not actually members of a Lincoln Brigade, though that famous term was commonly used, even among veterans. Some, like Mr. Wolff, joined the Washington Battalion, others, the Lincoln Battalion. These battalions, and two others from other countries, made up the 15th International Brigade.

After the Washington Battalion suffered crushing casualties, it was merged into the Lincoln Battalion. More than 900 of the 3,000 American volunteers in these battalions were killed. It is believed that fewer than 40 are still living.

Mr. Wolff was fighting on the Aragon front in March 1938 and became commander when an artillery hit destroyed the battalion headquarters and killed several ranking officers. Then a captain, he led soldiers through perilous retreats and wandered behind enemy lines until they managed to swim across the Ebro.

One day, Robert Capa, the legendary photographer, snapped Mr. Wolff standing next to Hemingway. The photo appeared on the cover of The Forward, and for the first time his mother knew her son was in combat. He had told her he was working in a factory to free a Spanish loyalist for hazardous duty.

Mr. Wolff always said he first met Hemingway after stealing his mistress, something he told Salon in 1999 that Hemingway did not mind. Hemingway minded more when he found out that Mr. Wolff had no idea who he was. For his part, Mr. Wolff resented Hemingway’s description of villagers loyal to the Republic as having murdered fascists in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Mr. Wolff is survived by his daughter, Susan Wallis of Vermont; his son, Peter, of Connecticut; four grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Mr. Wolff said he was turned down for combat duty in World War II because of concerns about his leftist politics. He later fought successfully against the “subversive” label pinned on the Lincoln veterans for decades. He personally delivered 20 ambulances to the Nicaraguan government when the Reagan administration was supporting rebels against it.

One of his battles after the civil war was leading his veterans to urge the Brooklyn Dodgers to integrate. “The guys were all Dodgers fans,” he said. “It was a way to carry on the struggle.”

Posted by lois at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Bill limits solitary confinement. Spitzer expected to approve measure passed by Legislature removing mentally ill inmates from isolation

Bill limits solitary confinement
Spitzer expected to approve measure passed by Legislature removing mentally ill inmates from isolation

By RICK KARLIN, Capitol bureau
First published: Wednesday, January 16, 2008

ALBANY -- Lawmakers passed a long-debated measure Tuesday to remove mentally ill prison inmates from solitary confinement and at least one of the prime sponsors says he's confident Gov. Eliot Spitzer will sign it after negotiators resolved some lingering issues.

The measure passed on Tuesday would require that most inmates with serious mental illnesses be placed in treatment units rather than kept in Special Housing Units, or SHUs. Additionally, the Department of Correctional Services would have to conduct periodic mental health assessments of any inmates who are assigned to SHUs.

The bill's sponsors estimate 12 percent of the state's prison population, about 8,000 inmates, have serious mental illness.

The Senate passed a similar bill last year, but the legislation died in the Assembly after Spitzer expressed concerns about the measure as it was written and time ran out on negotiations.

This year's bill, however, is the result of negotiations that address the governor's concerns, said Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry, D-Queens, who has pushed for the measure along with Sen. Michael Nozzolio, R-Seneca Falls.

The compromises include a clause that allows use of a SHU if an inmate presents an "overarching security concern," Aubry said.

Spitzer spokeswoman Christine Anderson declined comment on the governor's plans, but Aubry said he was confident Spitzer will sign the measure.

Many elements of the bill would not take effect until two years after the state builds residential mental health units, but no later than July 1, 2011.

This year's budget includes more than $50 million for construction and $4 million for staffing in the Office of Mental Health and Department of Correctional Services. By 2010-11, $29 million will be added to the budget to implement the program, Spitzer spokesman Matt Anderson said.

Prison reform and mental health advocates say SHUs are cruel and have led to suicides. Some prison officials and correction officers have expressed concern about safety and the extra training they should have in order to deal with some mentally ill inmates. The issue has been before the Legislature for at least five years.

"Placing prisoners in solitary confinement has been an inhumane form of punishment for those already suffering with severe psychiatric disabilities," said Leah Gitter of Mental Health Alternatives to Solitary Confinement.

Gannett News Service contributed to this report.
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/storyprint.asp?StoryID=655570

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

VT: Spend less on prisons, more on treatment?

Spend less on prisons, more on treatment?
January 17, 2008
Rutland Herald
By DANIEL BARLOW Vermont Press Bureau

MONTPELIER — Senate lawmakers unveiled a plan Wednesday to cut spending on Vermont's corrections system by closing a Waterbury prison and focusing more efforts on treating nonviolent criminals in local communities.

Four Democratic leaders of the Vermont Senate said their plan to restru