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March 31, 2008

MA: Senate Bill # 884: mandatory minimum reform for people convicted of first time drug offenses

Senate bill # 884 allows non-violent first-time drug-offenders who have mandatory minimum sentences to be considered for parole after serving 2/3 of their sentence. It is now in the Massachusetts House of Representatives Judiciary Committee awaiting referral for passage by the legislature.

This will remedy an injustice caused by the current mandatory minimum sentencing law, which takes away the consideration of mitigating circumstances a judge might normally consider.

I would greatly appreciate your help in supporting this bill as I believe that it will enable persons who have shown a sincere effort to reform themselves in prison to get a second chance at a life once broken but now restored.

Please call your State Representative and Senator and tell them you favor Senate Bill 884 be taken out of committee and be referred favorably to be enacted by the legislature.

Posted by lois at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

NY: A Saturday Night Deal Means 4 Adult Prisons Stay Open

"By late Sunday, deals were in place to resolve some of the most difficult issues that have vexed all three parties for weeks. According to officials who had been briefed on the talks, tentative agreements were reached to provide $1.8 billion in additional aid to schools across the state, of which $400 million would go to schools in New York City. Raises for state judges and legislators were not part of the deal, but an additional tax on cigarettes was. And the four prisons upstate that Eliot Spitzer proposed closing when he introduced his budget in January would remain open, the officials said."

March 31, 2008
Hope in Albany for Passing Budget on Time
By JEREMY W. PETERS
NY Times

ALBANY — Legislative leaders and the Paterson administration said Sunday night that it was possible they could complete the state budget close to Monday’s midnight deadline, a task that seemed all but unattainable just hours earlier.

At the same time, the equally complicated and contentious plan to charge drivers a fee to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan inched closer to being voted on by the City Council and the State Legislature.

A budget passed by the Legislature and delivered to Gov. David A. Paterson’s desk near the deadline would be a significant victory for the new governor, who has had less than three weeks to broker a budget deal. It would be all the more welcome to Mr. Paterson and his administration considering he has spent much of his time in office so far deflecting embarrassing questions about his personal life.

The agreement came as quickly as it did partly because the state is confronting an unforgiving economic outlook, and there are few spare dollars to spread around. During the talks on Sunday, Mr. Paterson likened the state’s financial situation to that of a family with a maxed-out credit card, telling the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Sliver “we are over the limit,” according to one person who sat in on the discussions.

They were short on specifics, but Mr. Paterson, Mr. Bruno and Mr. Silver emerged from the governor’s office suite in the Capitol on Sunday evening and said they had agreed to keep spending growth for the fiscal year that begins on April 1 limited to about 4.4 percent more than the current budget.

That would leave the state with a total spending plan of $124 billion.

“We will start passing bills tomorrow in pursuit of meeting the deadline at midnight tomorrow,” said Mr. Paterson, a Democrat. “You’re always racing against the clock in budget negotiations, but this time we’re racing together against the clock.”

Mr. Bruno, a Republican, who said hours earlier that the budget negotiations were proving to be very challenging, sounded confident as he stood with Mr. Paterson. “We’re there,” he said.

By late Sunday, deals were in place to resolve some of the most difficult issues that have vexed all three parties for weeks. According to officials who had been briefed on the talks, tentative agreements were reached to provide $1.8 billion in additional aid to schools across the state, of which $400 million would go to schools in New York City.

Raises for state judges and legislators were not part of the deal, but an additional tax on cigarettes was. And the four prisons upstate that Eliot Spitzer proposed closing when he introduced his budget in January would remain open, the officials said.

Adding another layer of complexity to the tense budget discussions, the Republican Senate majority introduced amendments to a bill that would put in place Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge drivers to enter parts of Manhattan. The amendments addressed concerns that legislators have voiced about the plan — known as the congestion pricing plan — and appear to have improved its chances of passing the Legislature.

“It’s now more viable than it’s ever been,” said one senior official closely involved in the budget deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because negotiations were continuing.

The amendments to the Senate congestion pricing bill would, among other things, ensure that New Yorkers who are eligible for the low income tax credit be reimbursed for congestion pricing fees, and commit the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to contribute $1 billion over the next five years to the capital plan of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. In exchange for the $1 billion contribution, drivers crossing into Manhattan from New Jersey would pay the standard $8 toll and not an additional congestion fee.

The City Council is expected to vote on the plan in the next few days. Approval from the Council would pave the way for the Legislature to act.

The Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, issued a statement on Sunday that hinted a vote could come any day. “I am increasingly optimistic that these developments will help make it easier for members of the Council to seize this important moment,” she said.

Still, the fate of the congestion pricing plan is uncertain in the Legislature. Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Democrat from Westchester, blasted the Senate amendments, saying the plan “remains an unfair regressive tax on the middle-income people from the outer boroughs.” He added: “The mayor’s plan doesn’t have the votes, and this won’t get them.”

In Albany on Sunday night, budget negotiators still had some major obstacles to overcome even as budget bills were being drafted and readied for the printer.

Some independent budget analysts questioned the wisdom of spending nearly double the rate of inflation, especially when many economists believe the country is already in a recession.

“They’ve tightened their belts some, but it hasn’t been nearly enough,” said Elizabeth Lynam, deputy research director of the Citizens Budget Commission.

The speed with which Mr. Paterson and legislative leaders reached agreement on Sunday was the type of policy achievement that the Paterson administration and members of both parties in Albany were hoping they could deliver.

“This has been a very rocky time,” said Assemblyman Jeffrion L. Aubry, a Democrat from Queens. “I think the confidence that people have in us as an institution could use the reinforcement of an on-time budget.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/nyregion/31budget.html

Posted by lois at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Parole ---"Truth in Numbers"

By contrast, 1.6 percent of A1 felons who were paroled from 1999 through 2003 were returned to prison for committing a crime within three years. And something else changed has well -- the number of violent felons paroled increased from 12 percent in 2006 to 18 percent in 2007. That makes the zero recidivism rate even more remarkable.

Times Union
Albany, NY
Editorial
First published: Monday, March 31, 2008

Truth in numbers

Were New Yorkers put at risk when parole rates for violent offenders increased under former Gov. Eliot Spitzer? Until last week, the answer was still a cause for debate. Republican critics insisted that Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat, was placing the public in peril as more and more offenders were released back into society, where they might well return to their criminal ways.

At the time, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno was accusing Mr. Spitzer of being soft on crime, and demanding that a list of inmates and the dates they would be eligible for parole be posted on the Web site of the state Division of Parole. He also made this outrageous accusation: "This administration's philosophy seems to be very soft on criminals and they're doing everything and anything they can to get prisoners who have committed murders out of prison."

But supporters noted, correctly, that that parole decisions, far from representing a shift in policy under Mr. Spitzer, were being made by parole boards whose members were largely appointed by Mr. Spitzer's Republican predecessor, George Pataki.

Now the debate has been settled, or at least it should be. According to an Associated Press report reprinted in this newspaper last week, not one of the 456 violent felons paroled in the last four years is now back in prison for committing another crime after returning to society.

Not one.

Perhaps now Mr. Bruno will think twice about legislation he introduced back in February that would make it more difficult for violent felons to be granted parole.

If not, then he should consider these statistics. The 456 violent felons paroled from 2004 through 2007 are categorized as A1, meaning they were serving time for crimes such as murder, attempted murder, kidnapping and arson in the first degree.

By contrast, 1.6 percent of A1 felons who were paroled from 1999 through 2003 were returned to prison for committing a crime within three years. And something else changed has well -- the number of violent felons paroled increased from 12 percent in 2006 to 18 percent in 2007. That makes the zero recidivism rate even more remarkable.

Mr. Bruno has his reasons for making parole an issue, of course. Most state prisons are situated in upstate communities, where they add jobs to the local economy and where the inmates are counted as residents of Senate districts largely held by Republicans. If the census declines, Republicans could lose seats in the Legislature. That is one reason why Senate Republicans had opposed Mr. Spitzer's proposal to close several upstate prisons, and why they continue to protect their turf as they negotiate a final budget with Mr. Spitzer's successor, David Paterson. But the Republicans are wrong -- wrong on the numbers and wrong on the reasons for keeping prisons full.

THE ISSUE: No felons who were recently paroled have returned to crime. THE STAKES: Republicans should stop stirring false fears.

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=676387&category=OPINI
ON&newsdate=3/31/2008

Posted by lois at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)

1980: Olympic Village First and Prison Second

This is a really great article on anti-prison organizing...don't forget to click on the link in this article so you can see the poster made by Stop the Olympic Prison.

Some lesson on protest from the 1980 Olympics

Michael A. Kroll

Monday, March 31, 2008

The hoopla in San Francisco surrounding the forthcoming Olympic torch runner and the promised demonstrations focused on China's human rights abuses reminded me of an earlier Olympic protest against human rights abuses - except those abuses were far closer to home.

In 1980, the Winter Olympics were held in Lake Placid, N.Y. As the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) contemplated housing the large number of athletes, they went to Congress asking for federal money to build temporary quarters. Congress responded that the federal government was not in the business of providing public money for private enterprises, and advised that if the committee could suggest a permanent public after-use, then the money might be forthcoming.

In record time - working closely with the Federal Bureau of Prisons - the USOC came up with their suggested "public" after-use: a new federal prison. Without the congressional oversight that had always been required for such a massive project, Congress appropriated the money, borrowed a blueprint from an existing federal prison complex, clear-cut a large swath of forest between Lake Placid and Saranac Lake, and construction began.

At that time, I coordinated a project from Washington, D.C. ,called the National Moratorium on Prison Construction. Along with affiliate groups, we launched a campaign to focus attention on the inhumanity of using U.S. tax dollars to pay for a temporary "Olympic Village" - complete with discothèque, movie theater, fancy food services and many other amenities - for the 1,100, mostly white, European athletes, which later would become a permanent prison complex of young, mostly black and Latino men from the urban centers of New York City and Philadelphia.

We called our campaign Stop The Olympic Prison (S.T.O.P.), and we designed a poster showing a black arm thrust through the Olympic rings under the slogan, Stop The Olympic Prison ( www.docspopuli.org/articles/STOP/STOP.html ).

Soon, we received a letter from the USOC threatening to sue us for copyright infringement. Instead, we sued the USOC for an "anticipatory breach" of our First Amendment rights. Just before the Games began, a federal judge ruled in our favor, noting that there was little likelihood of anyone confusing our poster with the corporate goals of the Olympic Committee.

But then came the Olympic torch run through the streets of Washington and onto the steps of the U.S. Capitol. On the morning of that Senate-sponsored welcoming ceremony (to which the public had been invited), I arrived with a banner: "Olympic Torch = Freedom, Olympic Prison = Slavery." I stood at the back of the crowd so as not to obstruct anyone's view, and raised the banner.

Soon, a Capitol Hill Police captain approached and inquired if I had a permit to demonstrate. I answered that I did not, but asked if the many others in the crowd with signs welcoming the torch runner had permits. The captain told me they did not, but that my sign was "not in the spirit of the ceremony," and ordered me to put it down.

I replied that I believed the First Amendment protected my speech, and that if he arrested me, I would sue. Again, he ordered me to relinquish the banner. Again, I refused. Two other officers then arrested me. I was released some hours after the ceremony ended, and the charges were dropped. I sued.

While our campaign to Stop The Olympic Prison was unsuccessful (today, more than 1,200 young men are incarcerated there), my lawsuit succeeded. The result may be instructive both for those contemplating how they might express their opposition to the upcoming Olympic Games in China, and for the government that hopes to impose "time, place and manner" restrictions on such demonstrations. In a word, what my case determined is that where there is "no obstruction of pedestrian or vehicular traffic" by a single demonstrator (who does) "not threaten or provoke violence," there is no right to impose the kinds of restrictions allowed on larger, organized gatherings.

San Francisco officials might also want to consider this from the court's decision: "Freedom of expression would not truly exist if the right could be exercised only in an area that a benevolent government has provided as a safe haven for crackpots." (That would be me...) "(W)e do not confine the permissible exercise of First Amendment rights to a telephone booth or the four corners of a pamphlet..."

A word to the wise...

New America Media contributor Michael A. Kroll is the founding director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/31/EDOIVSD68.DTL
This article appeared on page B - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Posted by lois at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2008

OR: PRISONTOWN MYTH- The promise of prosperity hasn't come true for Oregon's rural communities

APRIL 2008: RURAL DEVELOPMENT
PRISONTOWN MYTH
The promise of prosperity hasn't come true for Oregon's rural communities
OregonBusiness.com

By Ben Jacklet

The facility sits on a sweeping expanse of land so remote that it is difficult to determine the nature of its business without moving closer to investigate. Only then do the details come into focus: sniper towers, a firing range and spirals of razor wire extending into the horizon.

This is the Snake River Correctional Institution, Oregon’s largest prison, home to 3,000 inmates. Watching over these inmates, feeding them and caring for them, are 872 state employees, 1,000 if you count the contract jobs, putting the Snake River Correctional Institution even with the Ore-Ida plant, where the Tater Tot was invented, as the largest employer in Malheur County.

Down in the center of Ontario, population 12,000, there is no sign of the prison. But its economic presence is palpable, even at the coffee shop owned by one of its biggest former critics. Todd Heinz, who owns Making Tracks Cyclery and three Jolts & Juice coffee shops, led an unsuccessful recall effort to oust the local officials responsible for turning Ontario into a prison town in 1991. Today he is having coffee with two of his best customers, both 27-year veterans of the corrections industry, and his views on the prison have changed profoundly.

“There were a lot of opponents when it was being built, me being one of them,” says Heinz. “But it’s a huge part of our economy. If you were to pull that prison out of here now the impact would be disastrous.”

Support for the prison is nearly unanimous within Ontario’s business community. The prison brought jobs that did not exist previously: stable, relatively high-wage positions with full benefits. Local people doubled their salaries. New residents moved in with money to spend. The hospital got new patients and the community college grew. Business picked up at the taco stand, the tire repair shop and the hardware store as healthy state salaries worked their way through the local economy.

Ontario is not alone. Since 1985, Oregon has expanded its prison system from three institutions based in Salem to 14 prisons scattered throughout the state, many of which were built in economically depressed, remote cities such as Ontario, where land is inexpensive and jobs are welcome. From Lakeview to Umatilla to Madras, business leaders praise their new prisons as stabilizing tools of development.

It is hard to find a business owner in Ontario or Umatilla who questions the wisdom of having a prison as the city’s largest employer. In Umatilla, where the president of the Chamber of Commerce works at the Two Rivers Correctional Institution, local business owners, such as Cathy Putnam of Carlson Drug, can’t find anything negative to say about the prison that dominates the local economy. “You have people with jobs that are spending their money,” she says. “I don’t see a downside.”

But travel a few blocks away from Ontario’s downtown, and you will find abject poverty: dilapidated shanties, rusted-out cars and trailers parked amid towering piles of old tires and garbage. Before the prison opened in 1991, Malheur County was one of the poorest counties in Oregon. Today it is the poorest, with 21% of the county’s residents living in poverty.

The prison brought jobs, but it did not bring prosperity.

OREGON EXPANDED ITS PRISON system dramatically during the 1990s, partly because of national trends toward stricter sentencing and partly because of the state’s defining tough-on-crime law, Measure 11, which passed in 1994 and established mandatory minimum sentences for violent criminals. Since 1990, Oregon has built seven correctional facilities and more than tripled the budget of the Department of Corrections (DOC). Oregon already spends a larger percentage of its general fund on prisons than any other state, and that expense could grow as voters this fall consider stiffer new sentencing laws that could again swell the prison population.

During the prison boom of the 1990s, the DOC was able to overcome local resistance by touting the economic benefits to municipalities struggling to recover from the downfall of Oregon’s natural resources economy. For those communities, a prison where the median wage is $3,849 per month is seen as a prize rather than a burden.

But recent research shows that prisons are not effective tools of rural economic development. A phalanx of researchers from the University of Colorado at Denver, Pennsylvania State University, Washington State University, Ohio State University and the Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization The Sentencing Group analyzed data from across rural America and concluded that prisons do not significantly improve employment rates, poverty rates or median incomes. No studies have focused solely on Oregon, but based on economic statistics from Umatilla and Malheur counties, the Oregon counties that rely most heavily on prisons, these conclusions hold true there as well.

The national studies cite a number of problems with using prisons to boost economies. First, prisons do not pay local taxes. Second, they rarely if ever purchase goods and services locally, and while they sometimes try to hire locally, they do not always succeed because of union requirements that promotions must be based on seniority. Third, prison employees tend not to live near their place of employment, preferring to settle in outlying areas and commute. For example, 62% of the employees from the Ontario prison don’t live in Oregon but next door in Idaho, where property taxes and home prices are lower.

Finally, prisons supply inmate laborers at low or no cost, taking jobs away from the local community.

In addition to those specific shortcomings, there is the broader notion of “opportunity costs,” the cost of pursuing one choice rather than another. The idea is that operating large prisons in small, remote towns requires so much accommodation that it crowds out other opportunities that might lead to clusters of related, competing businesses propelling each other to innovate and expand. In other words, there is nothing entrepreneurial about a prison economy.

Academic researchers aren’t the only ones re-evaluating the economic promise of prison expansion. Max Williams, director of the Oregon Department of Corrections who was appointed by Gov. Ted Kulongoski in January 2004, says it is a misnomer to think of prisons as an engine of economic development.
“We are not a profit center,” says Williams. “We are a cost center. We’re taking tax dollars that could be spent on a whole variety of things, and we’re spending them on prisons.”

This is a significant reversal for the DOC, which promoted prisons as catalysts of development during the prison-building frenzy of the past 20 years. Williams says he would prefer to spend less money on prisons and more on “evidence-based” solutions to crime. But the DOC’s steps toward reining in spending on prisons are jeopardized by the looming prospect of two prison initiatives on the ballot in November.

Both initiatives would increase spending on corrections. The more expensive measure, backed by Republican activist Kevin Mannix, would set up mandatory prison sentences for first-time property and drug criminals, adding a projected 4,000-6,000 inmates to Oregon’s prison system at an annual cost of $128 million to $200 million. There currently are 13,500 inmates in the state. Legislators reacted to that imposing price tag by cobbling together an alternative measure that would focus on punishing repeat offenders and expanding drug treatment programs. Their less-expensive alternative would still add about 1,400 new inmates at a cost of $52 million annually.

If both initiatives pass, the one that receives the most votes will become law. If history repeats itself, the odds are with Mannix. More than 150,000 Oregonians signed the petition to put Mannix’s measure on the ballot, and the state’s voters have a history of embracing tough anti-crime measures.

It’s unclear exactly how the state would house the flood of prisoners that would accompany the Mannix initiative, but the DOC would have to move quickly to make room; new prisoners could start pouring into the system next March. The DOC owns undeveloped property in White City, outside of Medford, and has preliminary plans to build a 2,000-bed prison in Junction City. But the department’s construction plans were based on forecasts that did not consider the thousands of extra inmates that would result from harsher sentencing laws.

THE OREGON STATE PENITENTIARY was built in Portland in 1851 and relocated to Salem in 1866, where it remained the state’s only major prison for 100 years. Other facilities were built to supplement the penitentiary’s mission, but with the exception of a forest work camp in Tillamook, Oregon’s prisons were confined to Salem until 1985, when the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution opened in Pendleton.

Then came the great expansion: the Powder River Correctional Facility was completed 350 miles east of Salem in Baker City in 1989, followed by a barrage of prisons named after bodies of water rather than towns: Mill Creek, Columbia River, Shutter Creek, Snake River, Two Rivers, Coffee Creek and Warner Creek. With the opening of the Deer Ridge Correctional Institution in Madras last October, Oregon’s prison industry has grown to 14 facilities, 13,500 inmates, nearly 5,000 jobs and a DOC budget of $1.26 billion. The state now spends more on prisons than on higher education.

As the new prisons were built, wages in rural Oregon stagnated. So it’s not surprising that rural communities have embraced prisons and the jobs they bring. “There’s not a lot of industry knocking at your door in these rural areas,” says Oregon Employment Department regional economist Dallas Fridley, who tracks North Central Oregon. “Given the isolated nature of some of these communities, there may not be that many options for development beyond a prison.”

State economic development specialists were intimately involved in DOC’s selection process. A brochure sent by the DOC to Madras residents in 2002 prior to the construction of the Deer Creek prison promoted jobs, training and business opportunities. The DOC commissioned economic impact studies to win over local officials with promises of jobs and economic development. But it has not studied whether those promises have been kept.

Employment and income numbers indicate that Oregon’s massive investment in prison expansion has brought local gains that are modest at best. The rural counties that gambled biggest on large prisons after the passage of Measure 11, Malheur and Umatilla, have continued to struggle. In Malheur County, non-farming jobs have increased slightly since the completion of the Snake River prison, but wages have been sluggish. Malheur County has the state’s highest poverty rate, its lowest median income, and is 31st out of 36 Oregon counties in earnings per job.

The situation also looks grim in Umatilla, where the main street through downtown features boarded-up storefronts, vacant lots, run-down $25-a-night motels and sprawling trailer lots in varying stages of decay. In Umatilla County, state jobs grew after the Two Rivers prison opened in 2000, but private sector jobs fell and wages have held flat. The 430 employees of the Two Rivers Correctional Institution, by far the largest employer in the City of Umatilla, spend money locally, but the prison does not. Of the $56.6 million that DOC spent to purchase goods and services for its prisons in 2007, only $29,928, or .05%, went to Umatilla businesses.

Local purchasing figures are only slightly higher in Ontario, an agricultural center for potatoes and onions. Mark Nooth, superintendent for the Snake River prison, explains that the facility’s hands are tied when it comes to supporting local business.

“We’re too big,” Nooth says. “We serve 9,000 meals a day. Local businesses can do a portion of it, but we need someone who can handle the whole thing.”

Statewide, just 42.5% of the goods and services used in prisons are purchased from Oregon companies.

Then there is the matter of prison labor. In 1994, the same year Oregon voters passed Measure 11, they also approved Measure 17, which requires inmates to work a 40-hour week. As a result, Oregon prisoners work inside and outside of their facilities, cleaning parks, sorting mail, printing business cards, building cabins and making telemarketing calls for private companies, including Timeline Industries and National Marketing Solutions.

At the Eastern Oregon Correctional Facility in Pendleton, inmates produce the Prison Blues brand of jeans for the Array Corporation, a division of Portland-based Yoshida Group. In Ontario, minimum-security inmates sort potatoes bound for the Ore-Ida factory and spruce up the Four Rivers Cultural Center, the location of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. In Umatilla inmate crews work at the Finley Butte Landfill and unload rail cars for CRL, a subsidiary of the Denver-headquartered Broe Group.

Larry Clucas, Umatilla’s city manager, frequently hires inmate crews. “Yeah, they’re jobs that might have been taken away from somebody,” he says, “but realistically they probably wouldn’t have gotten done.”

That may be true for menial tasks, but prisoners also fill jobs that might otherwise provide meaningful income. In Umatilla and Ontario prison laborers helped expand the prison to make room for more inmates, a project that might otherwise have been filled by well-paid construction workers working for an Oregon contractor.

DOC director Williams emphasizes that Oregon Corrections Enterprises, which oversees prison work programs, studies each contract to make sure jobs are not being taken from the community. He also points out that, while prisons do not pay taxes, they do pay a negotiated portion of the costs to expand utilities, which often enables municipalities to do needed upgrades to sewage systems and other infrastructure. But the most important asset the DOC brings to communities where the prisons are built, Williams argues, is the employees.

“We’ve been able to win communities over by the way we run our facilities and the people we hire,” he says.

PRISON EMPLOYEES MAKE good money, especially in comparison to what other jobs pay in Ontario and Umatilla. Rather than just scrambling to pay the bills, there are some prison workers with entrepreneurial leanings and discipline who are able to save enough capital to go into business for themselves.

Ron Rouse worked for the Ontario prison for 17 years, starting at $1,500 per month and working his way up through step increases and promotions to nearly $6,000 per month, enough to support a family of five children, a nephew, plus a “kid from the neighborhood who came to stay with us and never left.”

Rouse and his wife, Sandra, worked two jobs for two years and poured their savings into building a Gandolfo’s Deli franchise in Ontario to serve the lunch crowd from the prison, as well as shoppers who cross from Idaho to Oregon to avoid paying sales tax. They plan to open seven sandwich shops over the next seven years.

Rouse says the entrepreneurial spirit is not unusual among his friends from the prison. Other prison employees raise cattle, run service companies and invest in rental properties. “There’s so much talent to pull from the prison, and it brings so many new things into the community, it’s just phenomenal,” says Rouse.

Tony Shaver is another example. He was one of the first 75 people hired to work at Snake River, doubling his salary. That was in 1991, when it was a small minimum-security facility. Since then the prison has vastly expanded, and Shaver has increased his earnings in sync, enabling him to buy six rental houses as well as his own house in New Plymouth, Idaho.

After 16 years on the job, Shaver bought a local business in the north end of town, TRS Plumbing. “I always had ideas, but I never had the means,” he says. “The prison gave me the means.”

But business is slow, Shaver admits. “I went from earning $4,200 a month to no income,” he says. “It’s a good thing my wife works.”

Unfortunately, Shaver’s business is located on the opposite side of town from a Home Depot that is better positioned to snag shoppers flowing in from Idaho. In that regard, Shaver may be a victim of the same prison economy that allowed him to start his business. Studies show that the tendency of prison employees to make good money and drive great distances to work has not escaped the attention of big-box retailers, which have followed new prisons into rural America, often to the detriment of locally owned businesses.

FOR EVERY REMOTE TOWN in Oregon that got a prison during the 1990s, there is another that did not. One municipality that tried to bring in a prison several times only to lose out to Ontario and Umatilla was Boardman, in Morrow County. In 1989, when the DOC was trying to locate the prison that eventually was built in Ontario, Morrow County’s unemployment rate was 16.5%, the highest in Oregon.

“Our economy was in tough shape,” recalls Gary Neal, general manager of the Port of Morrow. “We thought it might be a good fit to create some good-paying jobs. But folks didn’t want a prison. We heard that loud and clear. At the time I was disappointed. But I just went on and looked for the next opportunity.”

Rather than floundering after failing to attract a prison, Morrow County’s economy has steadily improved, particularly at the sprawling industrial properties of the Port of Morrow, which is now Oregon’s second-largest port. Two gas-fired power plants run cooperatively by Portland General Electric and Avista pump out power. Two major factories broke ground last fall: a Pacific Ethanol plant that is Oregon’s first fuel refinery and a joint venture involving R.D. Offutt and the Japanese food company Calbee to make potato snacks for Japanese consumers. Portland-based Greenwood Resources is spending $35 million on a new sawmill and a dry kiln to produce sustainably harvested timber. The Tillamook County Creamery Association has invested $100 million in Morrow County and will soon have the capacity to make twice as much cheese here as in Tillamook County. There are two parcels of land leased out to speculating biofuel companies, a staging area for wind turbines and a proposed NASCAR track that could draw thousands of racing fans. It adds up to about 1,000 new jobs on port property created since Boardman lost out to Ontario for a prison.

It is impossible to know whether the lack of a prison helped spur the diversification of the Port of Morrow. Furthermore, it would be a stretch to describe Boardman — population 3,500 — as a boomtown, with just two real estate companies, one grocery store and a median home price of about $100,000. But jobs are being created in Boardman and clusters are forming in the specialty food and renewable energy sectors. Private employment grew by 27% from 2000 to 2006. During that same period, neighboring Umatilla County, home to two large prisons, lost 1,460 jobs in the private sector.

In 1989, Umatilla County had a higher median household income than Morrow County, $23,207 to $22,944. By 2005, Morrow County’s median income had jumped to $43,776, well ahead of Umatilla County’s median of $39,003.

The income numbers are far lower in Malheur County, which beat out Boardman in the contest to host Oregon’s largest prison. Local leaders in Ontario say they do not regret welcoming the prison and the stable jobs it brought. But they acknowledge that the prison did not solve the ingrained problems that stem from the downfall in agricultural jobs and generational poverty.

With that in mind, they are freeing up agricultural land for development, hoping to attract new businesses — preferably a large employer that pays as well as the prison, but one that is different from the prison. They nearly succeeded in 2003, when Gov. Kulongoski traveled to Ontario to announce the impending arrival of an innovative biorefinery to be built by Treasure Valley Renewable Resources. But the deal fell through before construction began, and Ontario’s search for new jobs continues.

“We’ve got huge parcels of land, we’ve got tax benefits, and we’ve got people who are looking for work,” says Jim Jensen, a former president of the Malheur Bell phone company and the director of Malheur County Economic Development Department. “We need to attract new companies to the area so we can raise the bar.”

After 17 years of living with the prison, Ontario is left looking beyond the facility to find the answer to its economic troubles. As Oregon considers pouring even more money into prisons, turning more rural communities into prison towns, the question remains: Is it worth it?

For map of prisons in Oregon and links to papers sited go http://www.oregonbusiness.com/.docs/action/detail/rid/32114/pg/10002

OREGON PRISONS
BY THE NUMBERS
1 Number of Oregon Prisons, 1851–1951

14 Number of Oregon Prisons, 2008

10.9% Percent of Oregon general fund spent on incarceration

2.6% Percent of Alabama general fund spent on incarceration

$1.06 Dollars spent on incarceration for every dollar spent for higher education, Oregon

$0.16 Dollars spent on incarceration for every dollar spent for higher education, Minnesota

90% Earnings per job in rural Oregon in 1969, as percent of national average

70% Earnings per job in rural Oregon in 2001, as percent of national average

$3,849 Median monthly wage, Oregon Department of Corrections

$4.79 million Monthly payroll, Snake River Correctional Institution, Malheur County

19.3% Malheur County Poverty Rate, 1989 (pre-prison)

21.3% Malheur County Poverty Rate, 2006 (post-prison)

23,303 Umatilla County private sector jobs, 1999 (pre-prison)

21,697 Umatilla County private sector jobs, 2006 (post-prison)

Sources: Oregon Department of Corrections, Pew’s Center on the States, U.S. Census Bureau, Oregon Employment Department, OSU Rural Studies Program

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

Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65

March 31, 2008
Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
NY Times

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.

He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.

Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie “The Killing Fields.”The film, directed by Roland Joffé, portrayed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news.

A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.

But despite frantic effort, Mr. Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.

Mr. Schanberg returned to the United States and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia. He accepted it on behalf of Mr. Dith as well.

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith, on Oct. 3, 1979, escaped over the Thai border. Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.

Mr. Dith moved to New York and in 1980 became a photographer for The Times, where he was noted for his imaginative pictures of city scenes and news events. In one, he turned the camera on mourners rather than the coffin to snatch an evocative moment at the funeral of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, a rabbi murdered in 1990.

Outside The Times, Mr. Dith spoke out about the Cambodian genocide, appearing before students, senior citizens and other groups. “I’m a one-person crusade,” he said.

Dith Pran was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a provincial town near the ancient temples at Angkor Wat. His father was a public-works official.

Having learned French at school and taught himself English, Mr. Dith was hired as a translator for the United States Military Assistance Command. When Cambodia severed ties with the United States in 1965, he worked with a British film crew, then as a hotel receptionist.

In the early 1970s, as unrest in neighboring Vietnam spread and Cambodia slipped into civil war, the Khmer Rouge grew more formidable. Tourism ended. Mr. Dith interpreted for foreign journalists. When working for Mr. Schanberg, he taught himself to take pictures.

When the Khmer Rouge won control in 1975, Mr. Dith became part of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from the cities and the suppression of the educated classes with the goal of recreating Cambodia as an agricultural nation.

To avoid summary execution, Mr. Dith hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant.

Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.

In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.

The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared that they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine.

He had an emotional reunion with his wife, Ser Moeun Dith, and four children in San Francisco. Though he and his wife later divorced, she was by his bedside in his last weeks, bringing him rice noodles.

Mr. Dith was either separated or divorced from his second wife, Kim DePaul, Mr. Schanberg said.

Mr. Dith is survived by his companion, Bette Parslow; his daughter, Hemkarey; his sons, Titony, Titonath and Titonel; a sister, Samproeuth; six grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.

Ms. DePaul now runs the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, which spreads word about the Cambodian genocide. At his death, Mr. Dith was working to establish another, still-unnamed organization to help Cambodia. In 1997, he published a book of essays by Cambodians who had witnessed the years of terror as children.

Dr. Ngor, the physician turned actor who had himself survived the killing fields, had joined with Mr. Dith in their fight for justice. He was shot to death in 1996 in Los Angeles by a teenage gang member.

“It seems like I lost one hand,” Mr. Dith said of Dr. Ngor’s death.

Mr. Dith nonetheless pushed ahead in his campaign against genocide everywhere.

“One time is too many,” he said in an interview in his last weeks, expressing hope that others would continue his work. “If they can do that for me,” he said, “my spirit will be happy.”

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

March 28, 2008

Virginia's prison gravy train

Virginia's prison gravy train

Roanoke Times, March 28, 2008
By Ronald Fraser
Fraser has a Ph.D. and writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization.

In Virginia's booming prison economy there are winners and losers. Inmates face financial ruin and state taxpayers lose too -- about$29,000 per year, per inmate. Prison entrepreneurs, for whom each inmate is a government subsidized business opportunity, are the big winners.

Growing nationally by 3.4 percent a year for the past 10 years, federal, state and local prisons hold 2.3 million inmates -- one half of whom are nonviolent and small-time drug law offenders. In 2006, prison populations went up in 41 states, including an increase of 1,344 inmates in Virginia. From 2000 to 2005 the state's prison population has grown at a steady 3.2 percent per year.

Virginia's annual taxpayer contribution for state prisons and local jails, $1.7 billion in 2005 and rising, keeps the prison market hot. Here is how that money is used to exploit the losers and enrich the winners.

Public jobs

Of the 720,000 state and local corrections employees in the U.S. in 2005, 21,570 worked in Virginia guarding 57,444 inmates. That means for every three new inmates locked up in Virginia, one new corrections job follows. That is good news for job seekers but bad news for the three inmates who actually create each new job.

Private profiteers

A new book by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright titled "Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration" tells how the prison gravy train actually works. In addition to supplying food, clothing and medical care, private companies profit in other, less visible, ways. Here we learn from a University of Michigan professor how telephone companies and prisons charge extra high rates for collect calls from inmates.

Once MCI, Sprint and others began competing with the Baby Bells and AT&T, end-user rates for collect calls from prisons went up, not down, as was the case in the nonprison market. Exclusive phone service agreements went to firms offering price-gouging rates and large payments to operators of prisons. In the 1990s, 90 percent of the correctional systems nationwide received a percentage of these telephone profits and, by 2000, the share going to the prisons ranged from 44 percent in California to 60 percent in New York.

Prisoners, of all people in the country, have the greatest need to rely on collect calls, especially to stay in touch with their families. What excuse is there for price-gouging these families, many of whom are already suffering the loss of a breadwinner?

More than 1,579 prisoners in Virginia, and nationally more than 85,000 inmates, are held in private, for-profit facilities. To sell their services in state capitals, we learn in another chapter that "Corporations with a stake in the expansion of private prisons invested $3.3 million in candidates for state office and state political parties in 44 states over the 2002-04 election cycle."

On top of that, these companies support the American Legislative Exchange Council, an influential behind-the-scenes interest group working with state legislators to pass tougher sentencing laws that will increase prison populations.

Cheap labor

While U.S. laws prohibit importing products made by prisoners in other countries, Gordon Lafer, a University of Oregon professor, reports that about 80,000 U.S. inmates work in 30 states where laws permit private firms to use convict labor. In Ohio, for example, a Honda supplier pays prison workers $2 per hour. These private firms do not pay for vacations, sick leave or overtime and workers can be dropped at will.

Liberty for sale

According to a recent New York Times article, bail bondsmen occupy a unique, for-profit niche in the American justice system. In all states except Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon and Wisconsin, to avoid going directly to jail an accused person must pay a bondsman a nonrefundable fee -- often 10 percent of the bond -- even if he or she appears for all court proceedings. In some states the bondsman is even permitted to hunt down and capture a client who fails to appear in court, breaking into homes without a warrant if necessary.

What can be done to end this tax-subsidized prison gravy train? First, the laws and policies made in Richmond must stop filling state prisons with nonviolent drug users who should be in drug treatment facilities, not prisons. Second, lawmakers must stop passing ever-longer, one-size-fits-all mandatory minimum sentences that only tie the hands of courtroom judges and needlessly fill our prisons.

Until then, prison profiteers will continue to exploit both Virginia inmates and its citizens in whose name the state prisons are built and operated.

http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/156157

Posted by lois at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2008

NY Times Editorial: NY Legislature Should Close 6 Residential Detention Centers for Juveniles

New York Times
Editorial
New Day, Line by Budget Line
Published: March 27, 2008

Moving beyond the steamy executive headlines, the New York Statehouse had better show taxpayers something more promising than business as usual as it tackles the deficit-threatened state budget. One quick test, buried in the fine print, would strike a blow for both juvenile justice and budget savings by shutting six of the state's 31 residential detention centers for juveniles.

Studies show such centers ‹ which warehouse largely nonviolent offenders far from their families ‹ are counterproductive and prohibitively costly. Center alumni have higher rates of recidivism compared with those placed in alternative programs in their home communities.

What should be a budgetary no-brainer, however, is already being undermined by the Senate Republicans. In an obvious move to protect upstate jobs for local constituents, they are insisting on keeping open three of the expendable and virtually unused centers. One of the centers the Senate would spare would be staffed even though there are no youths residing there in its 24 slots. Each empty bed costs taxpayers more than $140,000 annually to maintain. A second has 25 beds and three residents, while the third has 11 children for its 25 beds.

The millions that would be wasted in this proposed shell game present a small but revealing indicator of whether Gov. David Paterson can live up to his inaugural promise to end the turf struggles and get something better from government.

There are far larger budget fights looming, dollarwise. But here is a worthy chance for Governor Paterson to show business as usual will not always trump justice and economic sense in a supposedly chastened Albany.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/opinion/27thu4.html

Posted by lois at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)

ID: Lawmakers won't consider plan for $190 million 1,500 cage prison

Times-News
3/27/08
ID lawmakers get late-session sticker shock, nix $190M prison
By JOHN MILLER

BOISE, Idaho - State lawmakers have told Department of Correction leaders it's too late in the session for them to even consider a proposal for a new 1,500-bed prison that would cost the state more than $190 million.

Brent Reinke, the head of the state prison agency, had been meeting with House and Senate leaders since last week but says the plan is now finished, at least for this year. He had a bill drafted, but it never got a hearing.

Lawmakers told him selling 30-year bonds to finance a new prison south of Boise was too expensive an item to consider quickly in the waning days of the session. Now, Reinke says he'll refine his proposal over the summer and may present a new plan to the 2009 Legislature, as part of his solution to house a growing Idaho prison population.

"Neither the House nor Senate leadership is interested in hearing this," Reinke told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "Mostly it's sticker shock. They said, 'Let's talk about it next year.' "

The result of delaying the matter another year is more Idaho inmates will stay out of state longer, he said.

His agency is in charge of 7,400 inmates, but lacks sufficient capacity to house them all. As a result, 500 have been shipped to private prisons in Texas and Oklahoma, with another 240 more expected to leave Idaho by July.

One reason the prison discussion was delayed was that Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter originally insisted a new facility be accompanied by legislation allowing it to be a privately built, privately owned and privately operated prison. Companies such as The GEO Group Inc. and Corrections Corp. of America had lobbied legislators furiously for just such a plan, spending more than $40,000 on campaign contributions.

But lawmakers balked, saying such an arrangement would give up too much control over an important state institution. Finally, Otter agreed a new facility would be owned by the state but run by a private company, mirroring the Idaho Correctional Center south of Boise that's operated by Corrections Corp. of America.

Rep. Margaret Henbest, D-Boise, said lawmakers decided Otter had come to them with the prison proposal too late for it to receive full consideration.

"It's a big decision," Henbest said. "It's not one of those last-minute decisions."

Another obstacle to the new prison is the Legislature's newfound interest in substance abuse treatment programs, rather than building new prisons.

Otter and lawmakers are engaged in a veto fight over $16.8 million in drug treatment funding. The Senate overrode Otter's veto Wednesday, but the House is still considering accepting a compromise.

Idaho lawmakers already have approved 1,288 new prison beds during the 2008 session, split among a secure mental health facility, new drug treatment prisons and a 324-bed expansion at the Idaho Correctional Center. With the proposed new 1,500-bed prison, the new facilities together would cost about $106 million annually to operate.

"I don't know where $106 million a year is going to come from," said Rep. Maxine Bell, R-Jerome and co-chairwoman of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee. "It seems to me the most effective solution is to try and keep those folks in treatment."

http://www.magicvalley.com/articles/2008/03/27/ap-state-id/d8vlfr480.txt

Posted by lois at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

'Angola 2' Leave Solitary Cells in La. After 36 Years....changing cells is not enough!

Listen to the story....
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89140779

'Angola 2' Leave Solitary Cells in La. After 36 Years
by Laura Sullivan
Morning Edition, March 27, 2008 • Two former Black Panthers imprisoned in Louisiana are out of solitary confinement for the first time since the 1970s. State corrections officials say Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were moved into a "maximum security dormitory" earlier this week. Louisiana prison officials once said the men, known as the Angola 2, would never be moved.
Nick Trenticosta, lawyer for Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, two of the "Angola Three," issued the following statement in response to Louisiana State
Penitentiary's decision to move his clients from solitary confinement to a separate dormitory:

"Herman and Albert need to be released from prison because they are innocent: they were framed for a murder they did not commit.

"After thirty-six years of solitary confinement, recent media scrutiny, a press conference by Louisiana House Judiciary Committee Chairman Cedric Richmond, and a visit by
U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers have caused the Angola prison authorities to panic and move the two men into new quarters without informing them or their lawyers about the terms of their new situation at the prison.

"We will redouble our efforts to gain justice and therefore freedom for Wallace and Woodfox. Changing their cells is not enough."

Posted by lois at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

NY: None of hundreds of people convicted of violent felonies who were released returned to prison

Out, on good behavior: Paroling violent felons is a controversial practice, but none of the hundreds released in the last 4 years has had to return to prison

By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press Writer
Adirondack Daily Enterprise

Posted on: Monday, March 24, 2008

ALBANY — Caught in a political crossfire over the release of violent felons, New York parole officials report that none of the 456 violent felons paroled in the last four years was sent back to prison for committing a new crime.

Parole for murderers and other violent felons flared into a political issue recently after their release rates increased under former Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer. The controversy is unlikely to fade away under Gov. David Paterson, with Republican critics still pressing for changes. When asked by a reporter, Paterson called the violent felon release rates ‘‘a serious concern.’’

The issue centers on parole of so-called A1 felons — those convicted of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping or arson in the first degree. Republicans called the higher release rates under Spitzer alarming. Administration officials countered that parole boards, still dominated by members appointed by Republican George Pataki, must by law consider not only the applicant’s crime, but his prison record and prior criminal record.

‘‘We’re very sensitive in terms of who we are releasing,’’ said Division of Parole Chairman George Alexander. ‘‘But we’re bound by law to consider certain factors.’’

Alexander said boards are making safe decisions and his agency released parole data as evidence. The return rate for violent felons committing a crime within three years was 1.6 percent from 1999 through 2003. Division records show none of the 456 A1 felons released from 2004 through 2007 were returned to prison for a new crime, including the 440 murderers and attempted murderers in that group.

Those figures do not include parolees sent back to prison in that time for technical violations, such as failing drug tests. And the no-return run does not include violent felons paroled before 2004 who committed a crime in that period. For instance, a murderer paroled in 1994 was imprisoned in December 2006 for burglary.

Although their crimes are among the most heinous, paroled murderers are statistically unlikely to commit a new crime. State prison officials studying inmates released between 1985 and 2002 found 3 percent of murderers were returned to prison for new crimes after three years. Return rates for some others, such as those convicted of grand larceny, were above 20 percent.

Why are so-called recidivism rates for killers so low? Criminologists note that many killers act impulsively in a fight or during an act of passion — as opposed to ‘‘career’’ criminals who rob or sell drugs as a vocation. Also, murderers usually are not released until they are at least middle-aged, and older people are less likely to break the law, according to Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan, co-director of the Center for Crime, Community and Law.

‘‘When you’re 23 years behind the walls, you have a lot of time to think about what you’re doing and change your life around,’’ said Jay Pobliner, who was paroled in 2002 after serving decades in prison and then on work release for killing his wife in 1968. Pobliner, 67, proudly talked about being a lieutenant in his local volunteer fire department and becoming certified last year as an emergency medical technician.

‘‘I like to think of myself as that I did a criminal act,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m not a criminal.’’

But Republican state Sen. Michael Nozzolio said focusing on low recidivism rates misses the point. He said allowing violent criminals out early undercuts New York’s ‘‘zero tolerance’’ for those crimes and chips away at respect for the law.

‘‘My constituents are not going to take comfort in the fact that when ax murderers get out of jail through their early release process that they’re statistically less likely to commit another crime. That’s not the issue,’’ said Nozzolio, chairman of the state Senate’s criminal justice committee. ‘‘The issue is: Why are we letting violent felons out of jail early in the first place?’’

Nozzolio said he has the same concerns with Paterson as he did with Spitzer in office. A bill backed by Senate Republicans would require unanimous votes by three-member boards before felons convicted of violent crimes can be paroled.

Politicians know that despite low recidivism rates for killers, it only takes one to create a political disaster. The most infamous case involved Willie Horton, the convicted murderer who raped a woman and beat her boyfriend while on a weekend furlough in Massachusetts. The case dogged former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis during his unsuccessful 1988 presidential campaign.

Liz Gaynes of the Osborne Association, a criminal justice advocacy group, argued that violent felon releases are more a political issue than a public safety issue, given the low recidivism rates.

She said it’s impossible for a politician to say: ‘‘Yes. I favor the release of violent, vicious dangerous people,’’ particularly in an election year in which Democrats want to wrest control of the state Senate from Republicans. On the other hand, she suggested politicians seeking to keep inmates in jail longer might be concerned about proposed prison closures in their upstate districts amid decreasing inmate counts.

‘‘They clearly do not endanger public safety,’’ Gaynes said of paroled violent felons. ‘‘What they endanger is the necessity of keeping all the upstate prisons open forever.’’

http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/articles.asp?articleID=10977

Posted by lois at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)

NY: The Juveniles Are Gone, Yet the Jails Remain

March 26, 2008
About New York
The Juveniles Are Gone, Yet the Jails Remain
By JIM DWYER

The public pays about $500 a night for each of the 25 beds in the Auburn Residential Center — a place for teenagers who have gotten into lower-grade trouble with the law, a junior-varsity jail. For the last two weeks, the beds in Auburn have been empty. And state officials expect them to remain empty, permanently.

But even with no one under the sheets, each bed will continue to cost as much as $200,000 a year, the officials say.

Auburn, near Syracuse, is one of three state facilities for teenagers that are becoming high-priced ghost jails. Brace Residential Center, in Delaware County, with 25 beds, has just two teenagers staying there, watched over by a staff of 24; Great Valley in Cattaraugus County has 10 young people and a staff of 24. Soon, Brace and Great Valley, like Auburn, will no longer have teenagers staying there.

Yet if the State Senate has its way, all three will remain open until at least January 2010.

“I believe the number of juveniles was deliberately reduced this year and the kids sent elsewhere” to justify closing Great Valley, said State Senator Catharine M. Young, a Republican from Cattaraugus County, which is in the western part of the state, near the borders of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Senate has passed a resolution that requires Great Valley and the others to remain open.

Nearly all politicians fight to keep jobs in their districts. Prisons, jails and juvenile facilities have been a source of political and economic power to upstate areas that have little other industry. Most of the inmates came from the five boroughs and the metropolitan area.

In the battle over the ghost jails, though, the fight is not simply about the local economy, but also about a system of juvenile corrections that has been in a quiet state of collapse for nearly a decade, particularly for teenagers who are not in trouble for serious offenses.

New York City has found better, cheaper ways to move teenagers onto safer ground, said Ronald E. Richter, the city’s family services coordinator.

For offenders whose home lives are filled with problems, the city now provides intense programs for the entire family, buttressing the role of adults in the lives of the teenagers. Last year, about 275 teenagers and their families were sent into these programs rather than the state juvenile system.

So instead of sending the teenagers off to state facilities that cost $140,000 to $200,000 a year per person, the city is spending about $17,000 a year, Mr. Richter said. And while the state’s juvenile recidivism rate is 80 percent, the city program had a rate of about 35 percent in its first year, he said.

Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the state’s Office of Children and Family Services, which administers the juvenile centers, says straightening out teenagers who have committed minor offenses is a job better done in community-based systems. The juvenile centers, she said, should be reserved for “young people who are a danger to themselves and their communities.”

“For most of the kids, we don’t need these facilities, and we don’t need to be shipping them hundreds of miles away from their families,” she said. “That money can be reinvested in programs that work better for these young people.”

The prison economy is a central feature of New York’s political economy. The state Public Employees Federation, which represents some of the employees in the juvenile centers, has bought advertisements in small newspapers in towns near the centers, arguing that the state is jumping the gun.

“We think it’s premature,” said Darcy Wells, spokeswoman for the union. “The police say that juvenile arrests are up by 8 percent in New York City.”

Ms. Carrión said that there would be plenty of space if serious juvenile crime rose sharply. “Even after I close the facilities, I will have 20 to 30 percent excess capacity, so I have the flexibility in the system,” she said.

Senator Young said that the community-based programs like the one in New York needed to be studied before the existing system was shut down. The current data, she said, is not adequate.

Ms. Carrión says there is no need to wait: The current juvenile system catapults needy youngsters far from the families they will eventually return to, with no changes in the households that they left.

“Almost all of the kids are black and brown,” she said. “This is the alternative boarding school system for children of color. We can do better than this.”

Posted by lois at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

GA: Jail and Prison Cells ncrease as beds in psychiatric hospitals decline

"The chief justice's task force noted that in the past 20 years, Georgia jails have added 23,000 beds and prisons have added 35,000, while the number of psychiatric hospital beds has declined."

Atlanta Journal Constitution
Mentally ill strain state jails with $70M services

By ANDY MILLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 03/26/08

Fifteen percent of the inmates in Georgia's county jails have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness and receive medication for that condition, according to a task force created by Georgia's Supreme Court chief justice. In addition, 15.5 percent of those in state prisons have similar diagnoses.

The disproportionate number of people with mental illness in the state's jails and prisons is the result of a lack of community mental health services, the task force said.

In comparison, 5 percent of all Georgians have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, which include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression.

Mentally ill people often become trapped in the criminal justice system instead of getting needed treatment, task force leaders Tuesday told a state commission studying reforms of the mental health system.

Most of the county jail inmates with mental illness also are addicted to drugs, the task force said.

The annual cost of mental health services in Georgia jails and prisons is $70 million, according to the report of the task force, chaired by Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears.

"It's an enormous drain on resources in regard to jails and the court system,'' said Judge Winston Bethel of DeKalb County Magistrate Court.

The chief justice's task force noted that in the past 20 years, Georgia jails have added 23,000 beds and prisons have added 35,000, while the number of psychiatric hospital beds has declined.

Criminal defendants with mental illness often face a long wait before transferring to forensic units of state mental hospitals for evaluation, the task force report added.

If community services are fully funded ‹ such as hiring case managers to check on mental health patients' medication ‹ ''it will reduce our caseloads,'' Judge John Allen of Chattahoochee Circuit Superior Court said. "We can keep some of these people out of jail.''

Georgia is one of seven states selected for a federal grant to study mental illness in the criminal justice system. The resulting task force began meeting last summer. The 73-member group includes judges, consumer advocates, law enforcement officials and officials in Gov. Sonny Perdue's administration.

"Large numbers of people with mental illness repeatedly make their way into our courtrooms, our jails and our prisons,'' Sears said recently in public remarks. "Mental illness is not a crime. But these citizens too often fall through the cracks of our social safety net. When they do, they enter a vicious cycle of arrest, prosecution, incarceration, release and re-offense.''

The mental health commission listened to the task force presentation mostly without comment.

The panel was created by Perdue after a series of articles last year in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Georgia's state-run mental hospitals were chronically overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed, leading to widespread medical errors and other problems.

The newspaper reported that at least 115 state hospital patients died under suspicious circumstances from 2002 through 2006. As many as 21 more questionable deaths occurred during 2007, the newspaper reported in December. In addition, dozens of substantiated cases of physical or sexual abuse of patients were reported. The articles have led to an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Justice Department.

The task force's recommendations include making sure people with mental illness have proper medication; providing housing for mentally ill people who are homeless; and starting a program of special case managers who would help link newly jailed offenders to community services.

The Department of Human Resources, which runs the public mental health system, said the task force's report was not surprising. Spending for community services in Georgia has historically lagged, but that funding has increased in recent years, said Gwen Skinner, head of the division for mental health services.

Perdue's original budget for next year would continue that growth, she said.

Several areas in Georgia have started mental health courts to divert some mentally ill offenders into treatment. Superior Court Judge Stephen Goss of Dougherty County, who runs a mental health court and is a Perdue commission member, said, "Jails have become de facto treatment centers.''

In addition, Georgia Hospital Association members told the commission that gaps in community services also have led increasing numbers of mental health patients to seek care in emergency rooms across the state. Lack of available beds in the state-run mental hospitals cause long delays in patients being transferred from ERs, the GHA members said. They called for the creation of a single state agency to oversee all spending and services for mental health, developmental disabilities and substance abuse.

Perdue recently formed a commission to reform DHR, singling out mental health as one area that needs improvement.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2008/03/25/mental_0326.html

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

IL: Families fight closing of Stateville Prison

"Built north of Joliet in 1925, Stateville is home to 3,280 prisoners and is the closest state correctional facility to Chicago and its growing suburbs. Rather than spend an estimated $100 million to refurbish Stateville to the level of other maximum-security prisons, Blagojevich wants to close the section that houses the most violent criminals and ship them to more secure rural prisons hours away. While the closing could mean the loss of hundreds of jobs at Stateville‹and deal a financial hit to the communities around it‹state officials acknowledge the blow to families could have the most far-reaching effect."

Chicago Tribune
Families fight Stateville plan
Inmate transfers may cut ties to relatives

By Joel Hood | Tribune reporter
March 25, 2008

Seven days a week, the families gather in the small visitor's center outside the immense stone walls of the Stateville Correctional Center. They come in groups or one by one‹mothers, fathers, sons and daughters‹leaving one world and entering another.

Their reunions with inmates can last up to two hours, just once a week. While that's not much time, families say it's enough for talk and reflection, for the occasional smile and laugh.

So when plans surfaced last month to close the maximum-security wing of Stateville, relocating up to 1,600 inmates all over Illinois, the impact hit hard in this network of families.

"I'm honestly afraid we'll lose my brother if we can't see him and talk with him face to face," said Paula Carballido, 25, of Waukegan, whose 21-year-old brother, Juan, is four years into a 35-year murder sentence. "We don't want him to disconnect, to break off from the family."

Some of the families have begun writing letters and speaking to lawmakers at budget forums, such as one held Tuesday at Kennedy-King College on the South Side. They are organizing a bus trip to Springfield, where legislators must vote on Gov. Rod Blagojevich's budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. In the process, the families are casting light on their crucial but often overlooked contribution to the care and rehabilitation of prisoners.

There is a public safety element to the debate. Studies by the Washington, D.C.-based Vera Institute of Justice and elsewhere have shown inmates who had regular contact with family and friends while incarcerated were less likely to commit crimes once they were released. While family involvement does not guarantee a prisoner will stay on the right side of the law upon re-entering society, experts say there is perhaps no greater indicator of future success.

"The impact of separation is very significant," said Malcolm Young, executive director of the non-profit John Howard Association of Illinois, an inmate advocacy group. "In a lot of instances we're talking about children [of inmates]. And no matter what people say about the people who commit these crimes and go to jail, it's not the children's fault. They shouldn't be punished."

Built north of Joliet in 1925, Stateville is home to 3,280 prisoners and is the closest state correctional facility to Chicago and its growing suburbs. Rather than spend an estimated $100 million to refurbish Stateville to the level of other maximum-security prisons, Blagojevich wants to close the section that houses the most violent criminals and ship them to more secure rural prisons hours away.

While the closing could mean the loss of hundreds of jobs at Stateville‹and deal a financial hit to the communities around it‹state officials acknowledge the blow to families could have the most far-reaching effect.

"We understand families are a very important part of an inmate's success when they go out. That's part of what makes this so tough," said Department of Corrections spokesman Derek Schnapp. "But the No. 1 issue for us is safety and security."

On a recent rainy weekday, two dozen people crowded the one-room waiting area inside Stateville's visitor center. Carballido came with her younger sister Lucy, who was just 13 when Juan began his sentence. Now when she visits him, the older brother lovingly grills her about her friends and how she's spending her time out of school.

"He tells me not to hang out with certain kinds of people," Lucy Carballido said.

Similarly, Cicero resident Pearlie White frequently comes to Stateville to visit the father of her 17-year-old son. The man, Steve Robinson, has been serving a life sentence, but White often brings her son so the two can have some kind of a relationship. Despite his incarceration, Robinson is a "father figure" for her son and teenage daughter, she said.

"They would not have a man in their lives if not for [Robinson]," White said. "It might not be the best situation, but it's all we've got."

White, who travels the 30 miles between Cicero and Stateville by bus, said she wouldn't be able to visit Robinson if he transfers to a prison farther away. "The only contact we'd all have is over the phone. And that's just not the same," she said. "They can't close this place."

Schnapp said proximity to family is factored into where inmates are assigned. But it's not the deciding factor, he said, and inmates are often shipped from one prison to another to improve safety, alleviate crowding or for other reasons. If Stateville closes, some prisoners will be sent to the maximum-security wing of the next closest facility in Pontiac, 100 miles from Chicago. But others could be transferred to Thomson, which is 150 miles away from Chicago; to Menard, 350 miles away; or Tamms, 363 miles away.

Young, whose John Howard Association officially supports the closing, called the family element a "wrenching issue."

"These are families who typically don't have a lot of means to begin with," said Young, who is encouraging the state to work out cheaper bus and train fares for families visiting rural prisons.

For Paula Carballido and her family, the concern is not only that Juan remains free of the drug use and gang activity that is so common in prison life, but that he has a support system in place when he is released.

"He's in there for a long time, but not for life," Paula Carballido said. "He's going to come out eventually. When he does, I think everybody should want him to have the best chance he can."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-stateville_26mar26,1,2153695.st
ory

Posted by lois at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)

Adelanto CA: Home to two prisons. "In Adelanto, a low ebb for a high desert town"

In Adelanto, a low ebb for a high desert town
Alleged drowning of dozens of kittens by the animal control chief is only the latest in a litany of scandals to plague the town.

By David Kelly, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 26, 2008

Adelanto may mean "progress" in Spanish, but many say this scruffy high desert community -- founded in 1915 by the inventor of the Hotpoint Electric Iron -- is perpetually stuck in a quagmire of corruption and scandal.

Recent accusations of animal cruelty against Kevin Murphy, head of the city's animal control department, have once again fueled notions of a Wild West town operating on the fringes of the law.

Murphy, 36, was charged last week with drowning more than 50 kittens in cages over a four-month period last year. He faces six years in prison if convicted and has been placed on paid leave pending his May 19 arraignment. Fellow animal control officer Patrick Cornell is also on leave but hasn't been charged.

"I have a hunch they were newborn kittens, not cats picked up on the street," former Mayor Mary Scarpa said, quickly adding: "Not that it makes it OK, of course."

Scarpa, 81, is part of Adelanto's old guard. She was mayor in 1997 and knows Murphy personally.

"We haven't had as many problems as the newspapers say we do," she said, relaxing at the town's senior center recently. "We are a growing city, and that sent some people over the edge. I think it's a very unfair charge to say the town is corrupt."

Perhaps. But the town's past is, to say the least, checkered.

Jim Nehmens and his wife were arrested last year and charged with embezzling $20,000 from the local Little League fireworks sale. Nehmens, a former Little League president, denies the charges and has kept his post as Adelanto's mayor after being released on bail.

"It's still just allegations. He hasn't been through the system yet," City Manager James Hart said. "It has nothing to do with the city. Adelanto has no problem with the mayor. Not once, not once since he was charged has a member of the public asked him to step down."

Hart said the city's growth has brought in those who appreciate "good government." "I tell people we have entered a new era," he said.

Nehmens did not respond to numerous calls seeking comment.

He's not the first local official to get into trouble.

Tom Thornburg was appointed mayor in 1994 despite having served a year in prison on federal drug smuggling charges.

Former Police Chief Philip Genaway was sentenced to four years in prison in 1997 for stealing $10,000 from the department's canine unit. Two other officers were jailed for beating a handcuffed suspect and forcing another to lick his blood from the floor. Another officer was convicted of child molestation.

In 1996, the mayor and two council members were recalled after promoting a gold-mining operation in town that would have used deadly cyanide in the leaching process. Cuban-born Zoila Meyer, a City Council member, resigned last year because she wasn't an American citizen. She pleaded no contest to voter fraud.

When Tristan Pelayes became mayor in 2000, he said several council members pulled him into a room and told him that although he was the mayor, they ran the town.

"I was highly offended by that," said Pelayes, a lawyer and former San Bernardino County sheriff's deputy. "I thought at first it was a normal city, but then I realized I got a corrupt council and a corrupt Police Department. Once I began learning more about the town, I was amazed. The first thing I did was disband the Police Department."

It was an ugly fight, and Pelayes said he was targeted with death threats and recall petitions. One police officer, he said, tailed him around town.

Scarpa opposed getting rid of the police.

"I think our old police force did an adequate job," she said. "We didn't have any problems. Well, we had some problems, but not many."

Pelayes said the problems were legion.

"The police used excessive force. They lost drugs. Money was missing," he said. "They would take people's cars and use them for their personal use. You name it and they did it."

Pelayes finally persuaded enough council members to replace the force with San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies. He worked to bring in Adelanto's first supermarket and helped change its motto from "A Film Friendly City" to "City of Unlimited Possibilities."

Pelayes left the job in 2003 with a sense of accomplishment. His replacement, Jim Nehmens, was later indicted -- and now Murphy has been charged with killing kittens.

"For every one step forward, there seems to be five steps back," said Pelayes, an attorney in Riverside.

Hart, the city manager, knows the allegations against Murphy are bad for Adelanto's image -- so bad that he's hired an outside public relations firm to cushion the fallout. But he said he is focused on the future.

"We have a whole new population . . . and the City Council wants to move forward. If these latest charges turn out to be true, then I can't allow that to stop our progress," he said. "We are focusing on economic development. There are 7,000 households in town and one supermarket. The city sees the need to change, and we are focusing on long-term priorities."

Since 2000, Adelanto has grown from about 18,000 residents to more than 27,000. It is home to two prisons, in addition to one at the former George Air Force Base nearby. Housing tracts spread across the flat desert off U.S. 395. Older parts of the city have decayed, with boarded-up homes lining dirt roads.

As Los Angeles residents flock here for cheaper housing, crime has accompanied growth. Local law enforcement now contends with street gangs, methamphetamine abuse and a rash of copper wire thefts.

According to statistics from the Sheriff's Department, Adelanto saw homicides rise by 150%, burglaries by 50% and aggravated assaults by 28% between 2006 and 2007. Total crime rose 8%.

"We used to have crime here 10 years ago but not as much as today," said Irmeline Gomez, who runs a 99 Cents store. "A lot of the people who come in are on welfare and they ask if they can have two things for 99 cents, or they get mad if we charge tax and the price is over 99 cents."

Longtime residents acknowledge the town's problems but say they love it too much to consider leaving.

No one has lived here longer than Charlie Hattendorf, 87, who arrived at age 3 from Pine Bluff, Ark. Back then, he said, Adelanto was full of peach and apple trees. "We used to be surrounded by desert out here and now we are surrounded by houses," he said, waiting for lunch at the senior center just off 395.

Frank Snoddy, 85, and his wife, Kay, 81, moved to Adelanto from Pomona.

"It was the cheapest piece of ground we could find," he said. "We used to drive down 395 and see maybe one or two cars, and it's now bumper-to-bumper. I joined the citizens' patrol. They told us, 'You know the gangs are coming up here,' and we had to be prepared for that and, sure enough, they came."

Former City Councilman John Snyder said Adelanto has been experiencing growing pains.

"This town was founded by E.H. Richardson, the inventor of the Hotpoint Iron," he said. "He came out here for his health and bought the land. There were pears and grapes, and then came the chicken ranches. The pace of development picked up, but we still have 300 miles of unpaved road and a lot of open space."

He denied Adelanto has a checkered past. "And I do not want to comment on the current mayor," he said resolutely.

Kay Snoddy smiled. "My friends ask me, 'What kind of town are you running up there?' " she said.

Local bingo caller Julius Giorgi, 85, watched mischievously from another table. He likes to answer most questions with a sharp "Who the hell knows?," but when it came to City Hall he had a snappy reply. "They're all crooks," he exclaimed. "And they all should be thrown into jail!"
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-adelanto26mar26,0,4963705,full.story

Posted by lois at 08:58 AM | Comments (0)

Private Prisons Share Prices Rise

Sector Snap: Private Prisons Rise
Private Prison Operators Rise in Afternoon Trading; Analysts Expect Strong Year for Geo Group
March 24, 2008
NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Shares of for-profit prison operators are rising after analysts reacted positively to meetings with Geo Group management.

Banc of America analyst T.C. Robillard said Geo Group Inc. expects to win contracts for more than 10,000 new beds in 2008, and said that tighter state budgets won't hurt prison operators. He wrote that the company is benefiting from strong demand and he believes it will reach his profit forecasts.

Avondale Partners analyst Kevin Campbell said the Boca Raton, Fla., company has several opportunities to surpass his expectations this year.

The broader markets climbed Monday, with the Dow Jones industrial average rising more than 200 points.

Geo Group shares rose $1.42, or 5.3 percent, to $28.25 in afternoon trading.

Shares of Houston-based Cornell Cos. Inc. added 69 cents, or 3.3 percent, to $21.63.

Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections Corp. of America gained 39 cents to $27.63.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/apwire/a402ec81326958416a3700e0
e37a8e0b.htm

Posted by lois at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2008

How low can you go? Alabama sheriffs may pocket leftover food money of $1.75 a day after feeding inmates at county jails.

Alabama attorney general rules that Alabama sheriffs may pocket leftover food money of $1.75 a day after feeding inmates at county jails.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008
KIM CHANDLER
News staff writer

MONTGOMERY - Alabama sheriffs may pocket leftover food money after feeding inmates at the county jails, the Alabama attorney general has ruled.

The opinion issued March 17 offered guidance on the controversial practice of sheriff's keeping whatever is left over from the $1.75 a day per inmate the state pays sheriffs to provide food in the jails.

The director of the Alabama Sheriffs Association praised the opinion and said it gives sheriffs incentive to wisely manage jail grocery costs.

"The code is very explicit, the excess belongs to the sheriff," said Bobby Timmons, executive director of the Alabama Sheriffs Association.

Some county officials have argued the surplus money should not be the personal income of the sheriff.

"Our disagreement with the attorney general is, if there's a surplus, it ought to be used for law enforcement purposes and not be put into the personal income of the sheriff," said Buddy Sharpless, executive director of the Association of County Commissions of Alabama.

The opinion cited a section of state law that states fees collected by the sheriff shall be paid into the county's general fund, "excluding the allowances and amounts received for feeding prisoners, which the various sheriffs of the various counties shall be entitled to keep and retain."

The phrase "keep and retain" has been interpreted in other fee-for-service situations to mean that "the officials retain the fee as personal income," the opinion read.

The Etowah County Commission and the city of Gadsden requested the opinion, asking, among other questions, if the sheriff could keep the surplus funds as personal income and if it was proper for the sheriff not to pay sales tax on food purchases for the jail.

Timmons said the extra income to the sheriff could be zero dollars because of rising grocery costs, or it could be tens of thousands of dollars in a year when the sheriff is able to find good deals.

"You can't just give them an apple and two crackers. You got to give them a nourishing balanced meal," Timmons said.

County commissions can direct the surplus funds to be deposited into the county general fund, but only if the county takes over the responsibility of feeding prisoners, according to the attorney general's office.

E-mail: kchandler@bhamnews.com
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/120643830716840.xml&coll=2

Posted by lois at 01:15 PM | Comments (0)

Supermax Subscriptions at Tamms Supermax

Hello all,
Two weeks ago, Supermax Subscriptions sent a mailing asking every man incarcerated at Tamms C-Max unit if they would like to receive magazine subscriptions: free gifts from people with surplus airline award miles that they'd like to exchange for gift subscriptions. Tamms C-Max is a no contact, permanent solitary confinement prison in Southern Illinois. The men have been there for years on end — many for ten years. They have no communal activity, no phone calls, no programs, no education, no work, no librarian, and virtually no reading.
Already, over ten percent of the population has replied to our mailing. The magazine requests are pouring in and we have men who would like to receive everything from Newsweek to the Wall Street Journal to Horse Illustrated. Clearly the need for reading materials is dire and we are excited to start the process of helping these guys out.
Here's where you come in.
1) If you have award miles on Delta or American Airlines, please contact us at:
supermax@temporaryservices.org
Tell us how many miles you would like to donate. The minimum number needed for the least expensive subscription is 400 miles.

2) We will then send you the name, inmate number and address of a prisoner(s), along with his/their subscription requests.

3) You can then log in to your award miles account, find the page that lets you give a gift subscription, fill in the prisoner's information and send them the magazine(s) they've requested. Note that the prisoner will not see your personal information or even who gave them the subscription unless you send them a postal letter. The gift subscription interface can only send the gift recipient an email note, and prisoners at Tamms do not have access to the internet.

4) After you send a gift subscription to a prisoner, PLEASE email us and tell us the name of the prisoner(s) and the magazine(s) you sent. At this point we will note that they have been taken care of to avoid people sending out duplicate subscriptions.

Thank you for your interest and possible participation! If anything is unclear, please don't hesitate to ask!

all the best,

Supermax Subscriptions
[Tamms Poetry Committee, Sarah Ross, Temporary Services (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, Marc Fischer)]
More about Supermax Subscriptions: http://www.temporaryservices.org/supsub.html

More about activism against Tamms: http://www.YearTen.org/

Major article about abuses at Tamms on Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/story/80440/

Posted by lois at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2008

The Sentencing Project guide to 2008 Presidential Candidates' Platforms on Criminal Justice

The Sentencing Project guide to 2008 Presidential Candidates' Platforms on Criminal Justice. This guide provides information on a range of key criminal justice issues, including sentencing policy, reentry, felony disenfranchisement, and the death penalty.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/tmp/File/PresidentialCandidatesPlatforms.pdf

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

FL: Proposed funding cuts to successful drug treatment programs may leave thousands untreated

"Proposed cuts at the corrections department -- which could total almost $30 million -- would eliminate all substance-abuse treatment for prison inmates and those on probation, said Gretl Plessinger, an agency spokeswoman. The drug treatment cuts would be the deepest in agency history. At DCF, administrators have included an $11 million cut to programs that provide treatment services to parents at risk of losing their children. And the juvenile justice agency is eliminating a youth drug court in Alachua County among other possible trims."

Miami Herald

DRUG TREATMENT
Budget cuts put drug addict's lifelines on the line

Proposed funding cuts to successful drug treatment programs may leave thousands untreated

Posted on Mon, Mar. 24, 2008

BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER
cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com

A year ago, Esther Guzman wanted her crack pipe more than her kids. In her heart, she hoped to come clean for her children's sake, but her cocaine addiction lured her to the rock.

Guzman got high just minutes before she grabbed a cab on March 14, 2007, to appear before a judge who would decide if she could get her four children back. A day earlier the state had taken her kids, ages 5 to 13, into foster care because she had neglected them for months.

On Friday, Guzman walked with dozens of other moms in a ''graduation'' ceremony from The Village drug treatment center in Miami, and left the residential complex to begin a new life -- with her children. Fighting tears, she said she will never return to the center -- except to encourage other drug-addicted moms.

Other mothers struggling with addiction might not get that opportunity. Faced with as much as $9 billion in state revenue shortfalls, Florida lawmakers are considering at least $40 million in cuts to drug treatment centers throughout Florida. The Village's program may be forced to shutter.

''Let us all pray to a power greater than ourselves that this doesn't happen,'' Janet Nichols, a Village program administrator, told the graduates during Friday's commencement.

More than two in three adults who serve time in Florida prisons are battling a drug problem. And almost all of the parents entering the state's child welfare system risk losing their children forever because their addictions are more powerful than their desire to protect their children.

As lawmakers grapple with one of the worst budget crises in state history, administrators at the Department of Corrections, the Department of Children & Families and the Department of Juvenile Justice are considering deep spending cuts. The result would be to lock out tens of thousands of Floridians from treatment programs.

DEEPEST CUTS

Proposed cuts at the corrections department -- which could total almost $30 million -- would eliminate all substance-abuse treatment for prison inmates and those on probation, said Gretl Plessinger, an agency spokeswoman. The drug treatment cuts would be the deepest in agency history.

At DCF, administrators have included an $11 million cut to programs that provide treatment services to parents at risk of losing their children. And the juvenile justice agency is eliminating a youth drug court in Alachua County among other possible trims.

The consequences, both agency administrators and advocates say, could be
staggering: Prison administrators predict an increase in crime.

''This would literally wipe out drug treatment both in the community and in prison,'' said Pam Denmark, a DOC deputy assistant secretary. ``We don't want to lose [the programs]. We know that they work.''

Said Broward Circuit Judge Marcia Beach, who oversees Drug Court in Fort
Lauderdale: ``This is going to be pretty severe. Without addiction treatment, we better be ready to build more jails and prisons. This is turning the clock back.''

Another possible consequence: Thousands of children already in foster care may be unable to return to their parents, and some will have to be adopted by substitute families, advocates say. Other children likely would enter state care for the first time, and remain there.

''This is a nightmare,'' said Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jeri B. Cohen, who presides over a drug court for parents accused of abusing or neglecting their children, and refers hundreds of parents every year into drug treatment in an effort to improve their parenting skills. ``This will cause a flood of parents into court, and it will cause more children to enter care.''

The Department of Corrections now operates 20 substance-abuse treatment programs in 19 prisons across the state, with a total of 1,755 beds. Last year, DOC administrators eliminated 525 treatment beds.

In budget year 2007, 6,771 Florida inmates participated in a treatment program. Almost 70 percent of the inmates completed the program successfully.

DOC pays for another 9,680 outpatient slots outside prison through contracts with private-treatment programs, and 31,724 Floridians were treated by the providers in budget year 2007. About 58 percent of the patients successfully completed the outpatient treatment, DOC records show.

In all, DOC was asked to identify $214.7 million in cuts to the agency's $2 billion annual spending plan, said Plessinger.

DOC Secretary Walter McNeil, at a legislative session last week, told lawmakers that eliminating addiction treatment, as well as other proposed trims, would ``compromise public safety.''

TREATMENT IMPACT

In the long run, advocates say, offering drug treatment is more cost effective than allowing addictions to persist. The Florida Alcohol and Drug Abuse Association, an industry group, estimates it costs, on average, $9,450 to treat an addict for seven months -- considerably less than the $44,377 it costs to house the addict in prison for 1,004 days -- the average sentence.

''We don't want these cuts at all,'' Plessinger said. ``We believe drug treatment lowers recidivism; we have numbers that say it does. Not only does it cost less, but people don't come back to prison after treatment, and you have fewer victims.''

At DCF, eliminating the residential programs for parents would provide about $11 million in federal public assistance dollars that could pay for other services that currently deplete scarce state general revenue dollars. Like prison administrators, DCF officials are strongly opposed to the trims -- though they acknowledge they may have no choice.

''It is a major threat,'' said Bill Janes, the state drug czar and DCF's assistant secretary for substance abuse and mental health. ``We are doing everything we can to keep this money there.''

''If we lose this money now,'' Janes said, ``it would devastate our efforts to keep these families together.''

Recent studies show the vast majority of families entering state care crumble under the weight of a drug addiction. The first three weeks in January, for example, DCF Miami administrator Alan Abramowitz tracked about 128 children sheltered by the state. All but 33 of the kids allegedly were being raised by a drug-abusing parent, records show.

Guzman, 30, said she refused to pick up the phone at midnight on March 13, 2007, even though she knew DCF was calling to tell her she had lost her children. A teacher had called the state's abuse hot line to report one of her children appeared unkempt and unhealthy, Guzman said.

`I FELT BAD FOR MY KIDS'

``I had feelings of despair, and I was angry with myself. I felt bad for my kids. I was disappointed and disgraced.''

But not enough to put down the crack pipe. Guzman got wasted only minutes before she left for court the next day -- and promptly admitted it to her judge, Cohen. She also said she wanted treatment, and wanted her children back. Three weeks later, clean and sober, Guzman got her children back, but Cohen required Guzman to continue months of treatment to avoid a relapse. The children were allowed to remain with Guzman at The Village.

Now, Guzman is in a GED program, earning money as a waitress, and raising her children.

''These are families with kids,'' Guzman said of her peers. ``Maybe the parents made choices, but the kids had nothing to do with it. The children didn't have a choice. It's a sickness.''

And, without the treatment?

''I would not be here,'' said Guzman, who had been a foster child herself. ``I don't know if I'd even be on this earth. My kids definitely would not be here with mom. They would be wondering where their mommy is, like I did.''

http://www.miamiherald.com/top_stories/story/467783.html

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

Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons

Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons
By Jessica Pupovac, AlterNet
Posted on March 24, 2008

Imagine living in an 8-by-12 prison cell, in solitary confinement, for eight years straight. Your entire world consists of a dank, cinder block room with a narrow window only three inches high, opening up to an outdoor cement cage, cynically dubbed, "the yard." If you're lucky, you spend one hour, five days a week in that outdoor cage, where you gaze up through a wire mesh roof and hope for a glimpse of the sun. If you talk back to the guards or act out in any way, you might only venture outside one precious hour per week.

You go eight years without shaking a hand or experiencing any physical human contact. The prison guards bark orders and touch you only while wearing leather gloves, and then it's only to put you in full cuffs and shackles before escorting you to the cold showers, where they watch your every move.

You cannot make phone calls to your friends or family and must "earn" two visits per month, which inevitably take place through a Plexiglass wall. You are kept in full shackles the entire time you visit with your wife and children, and have to strain to hear their voices through speakers that record your every word. With no religious or educational programs to break up the time or elevate your thoughts, it's a daily struggle to keep your mind from unraveling.

This is how Reginald Akeem Berry describes his time in Tamms Correctional Facility, a "Supermax" state prison in southern Illinois, where he was held from March 1998 until July 2006. He now works to draw attention to conditions inside Tamms, where 261 inmates continue to be held in extreme isolation.

Once exclusively employed as a short-term punishment for particularly violent jailhouse infractions, today, 44 states hold "supermax" facilities, or "control units," designed specifically to hold large numbers of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. A concept that spread like wildfire in the 1990s, today an estimated 20,000 prisoners live in these modern-day dungeons, judged to be "unmanageable" by prison officials and moved from other penitentiaries to the nearest supermax.

Life in supermax institutions is grueling. Inmates stay in their cells for at least 23 hours per day, and never so much as lay eyes on another prisoner. While many live under these conditions for five years, others continue, uncertain of how to earn their way out, for ten, 15, or even 20 years.

The effects of such extended periods of isolation on prisoners' physical and mental health, their chances of meaningful rehabilitation, and, ultimately, on the communities to which they will eventually return are coming under increasing fire, from lawyers, human rights advocates and the medical professionals who have treated them. Bolstered by growing concern over the U.S.' sanctioning of torture, and the effect that has on the country's international standing, their calls to action are gaining ground. In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons, calling it "extremely harsh." "The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to," they stated, "the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

"Sending someone to a supermax is punishment"

Defense attorney Jean Maclean Snyder, who has represented several Tamms prisoners, says the U.N. declaration is dead-on. "It is suspected that many [Tamms] prisoners have been sent there in retaliation for filing lawsuits about prison policies; because serious mental illnesses cause them to be disruptive; or simply because wardens at other prisons do not like them," she wrote in 2000, shortly after the original declaration was issued. Allan Mills of the Uptown People's Law Office in Chicago, IL thinks that the ambiguity surrounding how and why inmates are sent to supermax facilities constitutes a violation of due process. "Sending someone to a supermax is punishment," Mills told AlterNet, "and before someone gets punished, they have a right to a fair hearing." "Just like if you were to get a traffic ticket, you have a right to say 'I didn't do it' and bring witnesses, and the police would have to come and testify against you," he said. "The same should go for prisoners who are being subjected to this horrendous long-term confinement." Mills claims he has "tracked a pattern of prisoners being sent to Tamms because of them filing grievances or lawsuits and being jailhouse lawyers."

Assistant Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) Director Sergio Molina told AlterNet that, "Their behavior is their input," and although he claims the decision to transfer an inmate to Tamms is made on a "case-by-case basis," he wasn't able to expand further on the process.

Reginald Berry says he believes he was sent there for being "influential," among the general prison population. A former five-star leader of Chicago's infamous Vice Lords gang, he says he had the opportunity to turn in the "pistol" in a murder case, in return for a five-year sentence. However, he says, cooperating with the police against a fellow Vice Lord would have been "against the code," -- so instead he fought a first-degree murder charge in court and wound up with a 33-year jail sentence.

At first, life in Illinois state penitentiaries -- he was transferred to several over the years -- was manageable, since, in his words, "the animals were running the zoo." Through what he describes as a vast web of corruption and incompetence, "the guys who was the beast of the place were being rewarded by the warden," and were granted preferential job placements and access to coveted programs. "Might made right."

Following a series of prison riots and attacks on staff in the early 1990s (neither of which Berry had ever witnessed or been involved in) the Illinois General Assembly decided to construct the Tamms Closed Maximum Security Facility, or "CMAX." With a price tag of $72 million, Tamms CMAX opened its doors on March 10, 1998. The prison is capable of housing up to 500 of the department's "most disruptive, violent and problematic inmates," according to an IDOC brochure. IDOC also claims it costs approximately $60,000 per inmate per year to keep the facility running, a figure over three times higher than the per-inmate annual cost at other IDOC facilities.

Berry says that although he heard supermax rumors swirling throughout the jailhouse, he never imagined that he would end up in one. As he tells it, he hadn't been involved in a violent altercation for years. Nonetheless, "they came back and punished all the guys they had given fringe benefits to, and I had been one of those brothers." Days after the Tamms facility opened, ten police officers in full riot gear came to his cell and escorted him out. One of those guards offered him what would be his last cigarette for the next eight years, before putting him on an IDOC van and sending him off to Tamms.

"Many of these inmates have become psychotic"

The moment he arrived at Tamms, Berry says, he knew "it was a different world." All his belongings were immediately confiscated, right down to his underwear. He was then cavity searched before being escorted, in full shackles and leg irons, to his cell. "Imagine if you've been smoking 20 years," he says. "Overnight you can't smoke no more, overnight you can't talk to your kids no more." The coffee was gone. Work and educational programs were gone. Human interaction was out of reach. Guards barked orders and harassed him.

After about a month of sitting in his cell, he began to hear other inmates' mental health slipping. "You get these guys and they don't know how to acclimate so they start cutting themselves up," he recalled, adding that some would go so far as "taking a pen and sticking it all the way up into their penis," or even worse, attempting suicide.

One expert on the effects of solitary confinement, Dr. Terry Kupers, who consults prison agencies on mental health services, says it is not uncommon for "psychiatric symptoms [to] emerge in previously healthy prisoners … in this context of near-total isolation and idleness." Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Stuart Grassian concurs. In 2005 he told the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons that he had evaluated of "scores of inmates" who "psychiatrically deteriorated during the course of their confinement in solitary." "Many of these inmates," he said. "have become psychotic, and many have engaged in self-injurious and self-mutilatory behavior."

Annibal Santiago, who has been incarcerated at Tamms since 1998, describes how it feels from the inside: "The mentally ill prisoners drive the normal prisoners crazy by screaming, crying, yelling into the pod at all hours of the day and night for days non-stop, by banging on toilets, doors, walls, and/or by shaking or kicking the doors so hard that it sounds like rumbling thunder, flooding the wing with toilet water, and by throwing feces at other prisoners or inserting feces into the air vents so that the whole wing receives a dose of the smell for months." "The constant bombardment of unrelenting stress takes its toll like a flurry of well-placed punches on a tired boxer's head," he wrote in a survey compiled by Tamms Year Ten Campaign, and activist group working to shut down the facility.

The Innocent Victims

Berry says that when he was first sentenced, he told his wife, Denise, that he would understand if he had to let her go. "I told her, you didn't commit this crime, you had no part of it and I love you enough not to punish you with the hardships that's to come," he recounted. But she didn't. When he was transferred to Tamms, six hours south of Chicago, she moved the family to nearby Springfield so that they could visit as often as possible. Since the Illinois General Assembly approved funding for Tamms with IDOC's claim that it would serve as nothing more than a temporary, one-year-long "shock treatment" for problem inmates, Mrs. Berry thought it would be temporary move. However, two years later, when it became clear that IDOC had no intention of transferring Berry in the foreseeable future, the family moved back to Chicago. Denise says she wasn't prepared for how difficult it would be to see her husband deteriorate so rapidly at Tamms, after having spent ten years in the general prison population. It was particularly hard for his teenage son, who watched as his father grew emaciated from a meager diet and lack of exercise and saw dark circles form under his eyes from lack of sunlight. "What I had a problem with, being an inmate's wife," Denise says, "was how they degraded the inmates." She described her husband being shackled and forced to sit on a small cement stool for the duration of their visits. When officers would deny him a trip to the restroom, encouraging him to instead prematurely end their visit, she says it made her feel like an accomplice to his suffering.

Berry says one thing that kept him going was keeping his family at the forefront of his mind. It bothered him that Tamms prisoners were only allowed to keep 15 pictures in their cells. "Every time my wife sent me pictures, she'd send me sets of 24, and I'd say, 'ok, I got to decide right here which ones I want,' because if you get caught with more than that they can give you a ticket and send you back down to seg [disciplinary segregation, a unit in which inmates have only one shower and one yard visit per week]." Inmates remain in 'seg' for a minimum of 90 days and are not allowed visits for the duration. Once, says Berry, in what would be a devastating error, he tried to mail a picture to his son rather than throw it away. Because in the photo his son's hat was tilted to one side, the officers gave Berry a disciplinary ticket, allegedly for participating in gang-related activity. "My heart dropped to my knees," he says, "I told them, 'ya'll let this picture in here!'"

The violation earned him a ticket to "seg" for six months -- months that were tacked onto his sentence, which had been reduced for "good time." The decision meant that Berry's sentence would effectively be extended, forcing him to miss his youngest son's college graduation. "I was thinking, 'You missed the eighth grade graduation, you missed the high school graduation, you've got to make this college graduation," Berry recalls. According to Denise, prison officials told her that if she could get proof that the people in the picture -- Berry's brother, Michael, his oldest son, Reggie Jr, and Willie Ware Jr., his nephew -- were not affiliated with gangs, they would reconsider his punishment. "I had to obtain their birth certificates," she says. Denise went to 28th Ward Representative Anazette Collins's office, as did the three men, with their IDs. Their efforts proved futile. In the end, she says, "all this was compiled and sent to Tamms and they did nothing."

Berry's son, Joe, graduated in May of 2006. Berry got home four months later. "I missed my son's graduation," he said, "and it crushed me."

Long-Term Effects

A 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) report lists family ties as integral to rehabilitation and successful re-entry into the general community. However, for many Tamms inmates, the lack of phone access, a prohibitive visitation process, and the distance from Chicago, where two-thirds of Tamms inmates are from, makes it nearly impossible to maintain those ties. The scheduling and approval process at Tamms requires weeks of planning and multiple rounds of paperwork. If a visitor arrives late for their appointment, they are forced to begin the process all over again. With no public transportation near the site, the process become more than some people can handle -- or realistically afford.

The BoP also cites access to educational and vocational programs -- especially for minority populations -- as another key element in prisoner rehabilitation. Yet no such opportunities exist in supermax prisons, other than upper-level, self-guided study for the few inmates who have "earned" it.

According to a March 2008 study published in Prisons Journal, "the rapid expansion of the supermax has occurred despite no empirical evidence substantiating its effectiveness or value." Yet Tamms is just one portion of the billions of dollars that have been invested in supermax prisons. IDOC officials confirmed that they do not collect separate recidivism [or return] statistics for Tamms prisoners -- an alarming admission for prisoners, their families, and the broader community that many critics say points to a massive cover-up surrounding the human cost of supermax facilities.

As Paul Beachamp, a Tamms prisoner since 2002, puts it, "What happens when you lock up a dog in a cage for years at a time and constantly harass the dog and treat it bad while it's in the cage? Do you actually think that dog will act right once you let it out?" Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Corrections and Rehabilitation, issued a similar warning before a Senate hearing in 2006. "The experiences inmates have in prison -- whether violent or redemptive -- do not stay within prison walls, but spill over into the rest of society," he said. "Federal, state, and local governments must address the problems faced by their respective institutions and develop tangible and attainable solutions."

Meanwhile, a range of alternative responses have yet to be explored. A 2006 national survey of 601 prison wardens, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and administered by the Urban League, showed 62.5% of wardens agreeing or strongly agreeing that "staff training" would be an "effective alternative to supermax prisons." It was the number one choice selected in the survey. Other popular alternatives, in order of preference, were to "use segregation cells in each prison facility," "provide targeted rehabilitative services," and "provide opportunities for spiritual development."

Prison activists across the country are working to shed light on this. Enlisting the support of lawmakers and lawyers who share their concern over the treatment of supermax prisoners -- and the rationale behind it -- they are fighting for legal precedents that would bring more services to supermax prisons, grant prisoners more mobility and opportunity and, ultimately, shut the facilities down. The Tamms Year Ten Campaign is one such coalition; it recently persuaded the Illinois House of Representatives to hold a hearing, scheduled for April 28th, to consider arguments for and against the effectiveness and legality of Tamms.

Reginald Berry is part of that movement in Chicago, organized under the banner of the Tamms Ten Year campaign, which works to draw attention to the 88 prisoners who have been at Tamms since the day it opened its doors. Today, in addition to raising awareness of conditions inside supermax prisons, he's al