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April 30, 2008
Report of the NYS Comm. on Local Government Efficiency & Competitiveness: Regional Jails & Managing Prisoner Populations
21st Century Local Government
Report of the NYS Commission on Local Government Efficiency and
Competitiveness
April 2008
EXCERPT
Regional Jails and Managing Inmate Populations
Oversight of county jails is provided by the State Commission of Correction(SCOC), which has the mission of providing for a safe, stable, and humane correctional system. This oversight, while necessary to ensure proper treatment of prisoners, has led to conflicts with counties. Many counties facing jail projects believe their capacity needs were overestimated by SCOC. Under current leadership, SCOC has made its view clear that allowing
counties to transfer inmates for non-emergency purposes over extended
periods is not appropriate and would discourage counties from constructing jails that meet long-term correctional needs.
[RECOMMENDATION] To ensure adequate care of inmates in a cost-effective manner, provide the State Commission of Correction (SCOC) with the authority and obligation to facilitate transfer of inmates between county jails.
[SIDEBAR]
Ulster County has spent $100 million on a new jail, and
meanwhile Dutchess County is planning a 300-bed addition
at roughly $70 million. We have the room and the staff in
our jail to take on inmates from our sister county across the river and solve both our problems, but we're not allowed to take a regional
approach that would benefitthe taxpayers of both
counties.
- Michael Hein, Ulster County Administrator
[END OF SIDEBAR]
SCOC's regulatory role is to oversee proper treatment of prisoners, and this has traditionally been done only on a county-by-county basis. Were the law changed to provide SCOC with the authority and obligation to help coordinate sentenced inmate transfers, and to approach jail population management on a regional basis, many efficiencies could be achieved.
Changes to other provisions of law would also need to be made, as the
"substitute jail order" (SJO) process used to transfer inmates from one county jail to another under approval by SCOC was originally intended to allow for handling relocation of prisoners on an emergency basis. SCOC believes that an SJO is a temporary fix to overcrowding and cannot be utilized long-term or indefinitely, which limits the ability of counties to manage their jail population.
Expanded use of inter-county transfers could reduce the number of beds that a county must provide. For example, Dutchess and Sullivan Counties do not have adequate facilities and must board inmates out to distant jails. Both could minimize the cost of necessary improvements if they were allowed to more routinely board out their inmates to nearby Ulster County. This would help Ulster, which has an inmate population of 250 in a new jail built for 426, by offsetting facility and staffing costs.
[RECOMMENDATION]] Allow multiple counties to jointly provide for care and housing of their inmates in a regional jail instead of requiring each to maintain a jail.
While two or more counties can establish a shared jail facility under
general statutes allowing for joint activities, the County Law requires that "each county shall continue to maintain a county jail as prescribed by law" and there are other technical problems that hinder cooperative approaches.
Regional jails, both in general and for special populations, should be
encouraged. While there is currently no general multi-county jail (previous attempts to form one have been unsuccessful), there are specialized facilities such as the regional juvenile detention facility operated by four Capital District counties for the past decade (Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga and Schenectady). This model could also be used for other types of inmate populations, such as those needing alcohol rehabilitation or mental health services.
[RECOMMENDATION] Eliminate all mandated classifications in county jails, except male/female and minor/adult, to allow facility administrators to separate inmates based on the threat they present to safety and security.
Generally, state law requires separation of males/females and minors/adults. For example, if a county has a 16-bed wing with 5 female inmates in that wing, it may not fill the other 11 beds with male inmates. SCOC may also require that a jail separate civil from criminal inmates and pre-trial detainees from sentenced inmates. Thus, minor, male, pre-trial detainees would have to be segregated from minor, male, sentenced inmates without regard to an inmate's criminal history. Most correctional experts agree that each inmate should be evaluated and housed based on his or her particular
criminal history, background, and prior incarceration record. Using these criteria inmates can be separated based on safety and security concerns, with those of similar risk housed together. Additionally, with fewer required separations, counties will be able to manage their jail populations more effectively.
[RECOMMENDATION] Clarify statutory provisions to indicate that the State Commission of Correction (SCOC) shall have authority to approve jail plans and specifications based upon current population capacity needs and not projected higher future needs.
SCOC has broad discretion to ensure a safe and humane environment for
inmates and staff in prisons and jails. In the 1990s, SCOC began
aggressively addressing overcrowded conditions, and counties responded by expanding existing facilities or constructing new ones. Since 1995, over 30 counties have built more than 6,000 new jail beds. The number of beds a county must build has been based on SCOC's prediction of future inmate population. Some counties believe their capacity needs were overstated by SCOC, while others planned for larger facilities to generate revenue by boarding in inmates from other jurisdictions.
[SIDEBAR]
Examples of Pending Jail Projects
Dutchess County is planning a 300-bed addition at roughly $70
million.
Sullivan County's temporary solution will cost $73 million (a
longer-term solution is estimated to cost $105 million) for a county
with 75,000 residents.
Steuben County is adding 96 beds at a cost of $13 million.
Rensselaer County's jail expansion is estimated to cost
$50 million.
Suffolk County is building a 904- bed jail at a cost of $163 million.
[END OF SIDEBAR]
Several counties are currently dealing with the prospect of building a new jail that complies with number of beds that SCOC requires. Other counties are seeking to reduce their correctional needs through alternatives to incarceration. For example, beginning in 1998 Tompkins County began adding over $500,000 to their annual budget for alternative programs as a way of forestalling an expansion of their facility. The county scaled back its expansion plans after the jail population dropped due to the alternative programs. Since overcrowding persisted, SCOC insisted that a 160-bed facility be built instead of the 104-bed facility proposed by the county. The county and SCOC are currently at an impasse, with SCOC insisting that the larger facility be built, and Tompkins County taking no action. SCOC has removed the county's variances for double-bunking and has threatened to
reorder the county's jail classification system to further reduce its
capacity, which would force more inmates to be boarded out. Facility size determinations should factor in the availability of special facilities, the capacity of jails in nearby counties, and use of alternatives to incarceration programs.
[RECOMMENDATION] Move toward a single statewide jail system, managed by the Department of Corrections, which would be phased in pursuant to a long-range plan.
Statewide corrections systems exist in other states, although generally not states as large as New York. In late 2007, the Governor of Maine outlined a plan to consolidate state prisons and county jails to address chronic overcrowding, double digit growth in costs, and a lack of necessary services. The plan calls for the closure of four county jails and the creation of at least one specialty facility to treat prisoners with mental health problems.
We recognize that moving to a statewide system of jails is a dramatic
departure from current practice that would require detailed study and a long-term implementation plan. We believe, however, that a statewide system could create many efficiencies and improvements. The current approach, involving prescriptive regulatory oversight of each county jail as a discrete entity simply isn't efficient, and the best long-term solution is simply to manage the system more broadly. This could occur in interim steps, with early actions such as providing treatment in state-run facilities for county inmates with special needs.
http://www.nyslocalgov.org/pdf/LGEC_Final_Report.pdf
Posted by lois at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)
Anti-Drug Task Force Funding Leads to Police Corruption and Destruction of Lives
Huffington Post
Anthony Papa
Anti-Drug Task Force Funding Leads to Police Corruption and Destruction of Lives
Posted April 29, 2008
In early March, a federally-funded narcotics task force struggling to increase its fiscal support carried out a crime sweep in 41 states. The sweep resulted in 4,200 arrests, with police seizing large amounts of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine. Why a massive raid? Was it the aim of the task force to eliminate street narcotics in the name of a drug-free society? Nope. The cops were merely trying to protect their bottom line.
The operation, called the "Byrne Blitz," was carried out, mostly, to show the importance of the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant Program. Byrne grants fund more than 4,000 police officers and prosecutors that support 750 drug enforcement task forces in 50 states. Fifty-six Attorneys-General joined twelve law enforcement groups, including the Fraternal Order of Police, to lead the charge for increased funding and gather support on Capitol Hill.The program's funds were drastically reduced by Congress in 2008 to $170 million--more than two-thirds of its 2007 funding and significantly lower than its 2002 budget of nearly $900 million.
The Byrne grant program has its critics, including the White House whose officials were quoted in the New York Times as saying that the program has not demonstrated results. I agree with the White House. In fact, I would take it a step further -- the Byrne program should not be funded at all. Dozens of major scandals exist, showing the pitfalls of the program that has clearly wasted billions of dollars and perpetuated racial disparities, police corruption, and civil rights abuses.
The most notorious example occurred in 1999 in Tulia, TX. Residents of this sleepy Texas town felt a mini version of a "Byrne Blitz" when 46 people were scooped up and arrested in a sting operation funded by the Byrne program. Tom Coleman, an undercover cop, conducted an 18-month, racially motivated sting that eventually earned him the "Outstanding Lawman of the Year" award from the Attorney General of Texas. The drug bust incarcerated almost 15 percent of the black population in Tulia, sentencing them to a total of 750 years in prison. Coleman was eventually discredited and found guilty of perjury. He was sentenced to 10 years probation. Thirty five of those arrested by Coleman were pardoned in 2003 by Texas Gov. Rick Perry and a $5 million settlement from an eventual civil suit was awarded to those arrested in the Texas sting.
In 2002, a report issued by the ACLU of Texas named 17 scandals involving Byrne-funded, anti-drug forces in Texas. The tainted cases were rife with instances of falsifying government records, fabricating evidence and other abuses of power. Recent scandals in other states include the misuse of millions of dollars in federal grant money in Kentucky and Massachusetts, and false convictions based on police perjury in Missouri. The list goes on with additional abuses in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin.
The Byrne grant program has been criticized for wasting tax dollars and failing to reduce crime. Several leading conservative groups, such as the American Conservative Union and Citizens Against Government Waste, have called on Congress to completely eliminate the Byrne program because it has been proven to be an ineffective and inefficient use of resources.
The original intent of the Byrne program was to provide financial support to state and local governments to make communities safe and improve criminal justice systems. This surely is not the case, based on its history of corruption and the destruction of human lives. In this struggling economy, misguided policies from the federal government need to be eliminated, not supported.
Anthony Papa is author of 15 To Life: How I Painted my Way to Freedom, and a communications specialist for Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org).
/www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-papa/anti-drug-task-force-fund_b_99219.html
Posted by lois at 06:53 PM | Comments (0)
TX: Prisons go begging for guards
Prisons go begging for guards
04/30/2008
Lisa Sandberg
San Antonio Express-News
AUSTIN — The Neal prison in Amarillo has so few guards working these days that Dorothy Barfoot, a correctional officer, often finds herself working alone in a dorm with 80 to 100 male felons.
Sometimes, she gets so scared that her knees shake.
“Usually, there should be two (additional correctional officers), at least,” the 13-year veteran said.
But the prison can’t find enough people to do the job of guarding inmates — in Amarillo or virtually anywhere else.
The Texas prison system is short more than 4,300 guards; with 17 percent of its full-time security positions unfilled. Nearly one in five of the state’s 106 prisons operates with less than 75 percent of its correctional guards.
Guard shortage
Currently, 16 of Texas' 106 state prisons operate with at least one in four correctional jobs unfilled. Systemwide, the shortage is about one in six.
Far-flung Fort Stockton, the worst-staffed unit, operates with 59 percent of its correctional officers. Barfoot’s lockup in Amarillo operates with 76 percent of its allotted guard positions.
The prison system has 34 percent fewer guards today than when seven Texas inmates pulled off a brazen escape at the Connally Uni t in South Texas in 2000 — when everyone acknowledged the system was in crisis — even though its inmate population has grown 5 percent since then, to 153,000.
Testifying before a legislative hearing last month, Texas Prison Board Chairman Brad Livingston called the guard shortage critical.
To deal with the shortage, the prison board March 27 approved a 10 percent emergency raise for all new employees — bringing starting salaries to $25,000 a year — and $1,500 signing bonuses for those taking jobs at the hardest-to-staff units.
The raises were an attempt to address the fact that Texas prison guards earned the second-lowest guard salaries in the nation, according to the union that represents many state correctional officers, AFSCME-CEC7. The yearly turnover rate for first-year correctional staff is 43 percent.
The signing bonuses were a recognition that staffing shortages are as much about geography as about pay. Texas prisons were built in some of the most out-of-the-way areas of the state.
Thirteen of the 15 prisons with the most severe guard shortages are in towns with fewer than 15,000 people. Nine of those places have lost, not gained, residents since 2000, according to population figures.
Consider the Dalhart Unit, a 1,300-bed facility that operates with 31 percent of its correctional staff unfilled, and is located in a remote Panhandle town of the same name with 7,000 residents.
Marty Turner, a field representative with the union AFSCME-CEC7 in the region that includes Dalhart, said the prison always is short-staffed because it has a tiny work force to draw from.
“There’s no help,” he said.
Skyrocketing gas prices have made it difficult to lure people to commute from distant towns, he said. A shortage of affordable housing keeps them away.
“Things are absolutely the worst I’ve seen ’em, and I’ve been (working in and around the prisons) since 1990,” Turner said.
Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat who heads the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice, said he blamed the staffing problems squarely on decisions made during the massive prison building boom of the 1990s to put most of the units in far-flung locations.
“The state built most of its prisons in all the wrong places,” he said. “They used prisons for economic development. The rural counties would give you the land and throw in other incentives. It might have looked like a bargain but we’re paying a huge price for it.”
Allan Polunsky served on the prison board between 1987 and 2000, when the prison population jumped from 49,000 inmates to 147,000. In an interview last month, Polunsky said he generally was opposed to building prisons in rural areas — but his board colleagues, and the rural lawmakers who wielded power back then, favored it.
“There certainly was political persuasion that came into place,” Polunsky said.
He noted rural communities often lobbied as hard to bring prisons into their communities as metropolitan areas lobbied to keep them out.
The state built most of its correctional facilities for youths in remote places, too, and now faces chronic staffing shortages at many of those units. Whitmire champions closing the Texas Youth Commission altogether and moving its 2,800 juvenile offenders back to the mostly urban communities from which they come.
Whitmire said he has heard no talk of relocating the 106 prisons that house 153,000 adult inmates across the state.
“We have no choice,” he said of those facilities. “We’re stuck with them.”
Union leaders say the recent raises for newly hired guards may do nothing to ease the shortage because the fix largely ignores seasoned officers.
“They’ve created a big problem with the veterans. They’re raising cane. They’ve been the backbone of this agency,” said Brian Olsen, who heads the correctional officers union.
Meanwhile, officials in the most understaffed units have resorted to confining inmates in their pods for long stretches at a time, depriving them of work assignments and outdoor recreation.
Last fall, because of the staffing shortage, officials at the Dalhart Unit closed an entire 300-bed dorm. Michelle Lyons, a prison spokeswoman, said there were no plans to reopen it.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA.043008.1A.prisons.b2d64659.html
Posted by lois at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)
April 29, 2008
In France, Prisons Filled With Muslims
In France, Prisons Filled With Muslims
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 29, 2008; A01
SEQUEDIN, France -- Samia El Alaoui Talibi walks her beat in a cream-colored head scarf and an ink-black robe with sunset-orange piping, an outfit she picked up at a yard sale.
After passing a bulletproof window, El Alaoui Talibi trudges through half a dozen heavy, locked doors to reach the Muslim faithful to whom she ministers in the women's cellblock of the Lille-Sequedin Detention Center in far northern France.
It took her years to earn this access, said El Alaoui Talibi, one of only four Muslim holy women allowed to work in French prisons. "Everyone has the same prejudices and negative image of Muslims and Islam," said Moroccan-born El Alaoui Talibi, 47, the mother of seven children. "When some guards see you, they see an Arab; they see you the same as if you were a prisoner."
This prison is majority Muslim -- as is virtually every house of incarceration in France. About 60 to 70 percent of all inmates in the country's prison system are Muslim, according to Muslim leaders, sociologists and researchers, though Muslims make up only about 12 percent of the country's population.
On a continent where immigrants and the children of immigrants are disproportionately represented in almost every prison system, the French figures are the most marked, according to researchers, criminologists and Muslim leaders.
"The high percentage of Muslims in prisons is a direct consequence of the failure of the integration of minorities in France," said Moussa Khedimellah, a sociologist who has spent several years conducting research on Muslims in the French penal system.
In Britain, 11 percent of prisoners are Muslim in contrast to about 3 percent of all inhabitants, according to the Justice Ministry. Research by the Open Society Institute, an advocacy organization, shows that in the Netherlands 20 percent of adult prisoners and 26 percent of all juvenile offenders are Muslim; the country is about 5.5 percent Muslim. In Belgium, Muslims from Morocco and Turkey make up at least 16 percent of the prison population, compared with 2 percent of the general populace, the research found.
Sociologists and Muslim leaders say the French prison system reflects the deep social and ethnic divides roiling France and its European neighbors as immigrants and a new generation of their children alter the demographic and cultural landscape of the continent.
French prison officials blame the high numbers on the poverty of people who have moved here from North African and other Islamic countries in recent decades. "Many immigrants arrive in France in difficult financial situations, which make delinquency more frequent," said Jeanne Sautière, director of integration and religious groups for the French prison system. "The most important thing is to say there is no correlation between Islam and delinquency."
But Muslim leaders, sociologists and human rights activists argue that more than in most other European countries, government social policies in France have served to isolate Muslims in impoverished suburbs that have high unemployment, inferior schools and substandard housing. This has helped create a generation of French-born children with little hope of social advancement and even less respect for French authority.
"The question of discrimination and justice is one of the key political questions of our society, and still, it is not given much importance," said Sebastian Roche, who has studied judicial discrimination as research director for the French National Center for Scientific Research. "We can't blame a state if its companies discriminate; however, we can blame the state if its justice system and its police discriminate."
As a matter of policy, the French government does not collect data on race, religion or ethnicity on its citizens in any capacity, making it difficult to obtain precise figures on the makeup of prison populations. But demographers, sociologists and Muslim leaders have compiled generally accepted estimates showing Muslim inmate populations nationwide averaging between 60 and 70 percent.
The figures fluctuate from region to region: They are higher in areas with large concentrations of Muslims, including suburban Paris, Marseille in the south and Lille in the north.
Inside the prisons, El Alaoui Talibi and her husband, Hassan -- a rare husband-wife Islamic clerical team -- are struggling to win for Muslim prisoners the same religious rights accorded to their minority-Christian counterparts. Hassan is an imam. Samia has received religious training and can counsel the faithful, but under Islamic practices she cannot become an imam. The prison system has only 100 Muslim clerics for the country's 200 prisons, compared with about 480 Catholic, 250 Protestant and 50 Jewish chaplains, even though Muslim inmates vastly outnumber prisoners of all other religions. "It is true that we haven't attained full equality among religions in prisons yet," said Sautière, the national prison official. "It is a matter of time."
In recent years, the French government's primary concern with its Muslim inmate population has been political. French national security officials warned prison authorities in 2005 that they should work to prevent radical Muslims from inciting fellow prisoners. A year later, the French Senate approved a bill giving the country's national intelligence agency broad authority to monitor Muslim inmates as part of counterterrorism efforts.
Prison authorities began allowing carefully vetted moderate imams into prisons in hopes of "balancing the radical elements," said Aurélie Leclerq, 33, director of the Lille-Sequedin Detention Center.
Hassan El Alaoui Talibi, 52, who moved to France from Morocco as a student, is the national head of France's prison imams and typical of the kind of moderate Muslim figure the French government seeks for its prison system.
El Alaoui Talibi delivers his Friday sermons with carefully chosen words, he says. He avoids politics and other subjects that might seem remotely inflammatory. He sticks to counseling convicted drug dealers, murderers and illegal immigrants in matters of faith and respect.
But not all the Muslims at Lille-Sequedin share those moderate views. Last year a disgruntled inmate blared a taped religious sermon into the prison courtyard. Prison officials deemed its message inflammatory and sent the prisoner to solitary confinement.
El Alaoui Talibi described years of struggle to win even modest concessions from prison directors. He recalled the first prison visit he made, a decade ago: He was forced to wait an hour and a half to meet with inmates. "If I hadn't been patient, I would have left," said the soft-spoken former high school teacher who became a prison imam after seeing so many of his students get in trouble with the law for petty offenses and end up hard-core criminals after prison stints.
Today, working in France's newest prison -- the sprawling, three-year-old Lille-Sequedin center -- the El Alaoui Talibis say they are more accepted than some Muslim colleagues at other prisons. Prison officials rejected requests by The Washington Post to visit some of the system's older, more troubled prisons.
On a recent Friday, Hassan El Alaoui Talibi, a man with soulful eyes and a beard with the first hints of gray, made his way with a reporter through the men's wings, collecting prisoners' notes from mailboxes shared with Catholic and Protestant chaplains. At one point, several new inmates returning from sports practice surrounded him, requesting personal visits. He scribbled their names and cell numbers on a scrap of paper.
Many of the Muslim inmates in this prison just west of Lille are the children and grandchildren of immigrants who were brought to the northern region decades ago to work in its coal mines.
El Alaoui Talibi moved on to a small room overlooking a tiny garden courtyard and tugged at prayer mats stacked in a closet beside a rough-hewn wooden cross. Every other Friday, he transforms the room into a mosque for some of the male Muslim faithful of the prison. One of his most frequent sermon topics is food.
"He tells us not to throw away prison food just because it isn't halal," or compliant with Islamic dietary law, said a 33-year-old former civil servant, a man of Algerian descent who attends the twice-monthly prayer meetings. French prison rules prohibit journalists from identifying inmates by name or disclosing their crimes.
The refusal of prison officials to provide halal food, particularly meat products, is one of the biggest complaints of Muslim inmates across France and has occasionally led to cellblock protests.
For many years, prisons have allowed Muslim prisoners to forgo pork products -- and statistics tracking prisoners who refuse pork is an accurate barometer of the Muslim population in a prison, according to researchers. But cutting out pork is a long way from the full halal regimen. Only recently, did the prisons stop using pork grease to cook vegetables and other dishes.
"If you want to comply with your religion, you don't have a choice -- you have to become vegetarian," said the convicted civil servant, a compact man who works in the prison library. "We have access to a prison store with two halal products: halal sausage and a can of ravioli."
Prison officials say it is too expensive to provide halal meals. "We'd like to buy fresh meat, but we can't," said Leclerq, whose prison office is decorated with plush bears.
Muslim inmates said they sense other religious snubs. Christians are allowed packages containing gifts and special treats from their families at Christmas, but Muslims do not receive the same privilege for the Ramadan holy days. "We're careful not to call them Christmas packages because Muslims would ask for Ramadan packages," Leclerq said. "We call them end-of-the-year packages. We can't use a religious term or some people get tense."
Hassan El Alaoui Talibi said the French prison system has made progress since he began his ministry a decade ago. Last year the government set guidelines for all prisons to follow on religious practices, rather than allowing directors to arbitrarily set their own rules.
Prison imams met with Justice Minister Rachida Dati last month with a list of continuing requests, including more imams and training for prison guards to help them better understand religious differences.
A 31-year-old woman of Algerian descent with a youthful face and black, wavy hair tied carelessly in a ponytail welcomed Samia El Alaoui Talibi on a recent morning with double kisses on the cheeks.
"Arriving here was a nightmare," said the woman, one of about 150 female inmates. "I was crying, I couldn't believe I was here.
"Then I saw this woman wearing a head scarf," she said, smiling toward Samia. "I could tell she was here to help me. I call her my angel."
Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/28/AR2008042802560_pf.html
Posted by lois at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)
Jesse Boyar---Long-time fighter for prisoners
Below is an obituary notice for Jesse Boyar, long-time fighter for prisoners and against the prison system. Jesse's son Patrick spent many many years in the Corcoran SHU but last week Jesse told me that he was relieved that Patrick, who is doing 25-life on a 3rd strike of petty theft with a prior, was transferred to Pleasant Valley State Prison and was doing much better. Jesse was active in FACTS and Extend a Hand for Justice in Bakersfield. For years, Jesse would picket outside Corcoran wearing his VFW cap and sash, greeting visitors to the prison and recruiting them to the work.
****************************************************************
Our Comrade, Jesse Boyar passed away today, but be sure, the brother was not on his knees!! Jesse was a fighter without any intention of laying down.
He came to L.A. for an April 16th action in front of the Governor's office less than two weeks ago with a van load of members from Bakersfield FACTS . At that time he told me that he tho't he was a goner a few days earlier but all I saw was the same feisty man who wouldn't back up from a fight. Like our brother Leon, who left us in 2006, Jesse is the promise of that better, more just society we are fighting so hard to build. I can see them now strategizing our future!!
We've lost a friend, a warrior, a role model and a father whose fight for his son Patrick will be carried on by all Striker families, all prisoner families, all who understand that people are not born to be caged. We will miss you, brother Jesse.
geri silva
FACTS Education Fund
Families to Amend California's Three Strikes
Posted by lois at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)
LA: Youth prison abuse alleged
Youth prison abuse alleged
* By SANDY DAVIS
* Advocate staff writer
* Published: Apr 19, 2008 - Page: 1A
A state senator said Friday he will submit legislation next week to close Jetson Center for Youth by June 30, 2009.
“Louisiana was once notorious for having the most brutal facilities in the country,” Sen. Donald Cravins Jr. said at a rally on the steps of the State Capitol. “Some legislators had the fortitude to try and stop that, but here we are five years later without much progress.”
The Opelousas Democrat said the legislation he plans to introduce would not only close Jetson, an 850-acre boys juvenile prison near Baker, but also give the Juvenile Justice Implementation Commission more power to make sure reforms take place.
The commission was formed during the Blanco administration to oversee reforms in the juvenile justice system.
The Advocate reported this week that promised reforms of the state’s three secure care facilities for boys have never happened.
The reforms were approved in the Juvenile Justice Act of 2003 and promised among other things the building of regional care facilities housing small groups of boys. Not one of those facilities has been built.
Instead, boys who violate laws are often sent by judges to one of the state’s juvenile prisons, including Jetson, Swanson (in Monroe) and Bridge City centers for youth, where the teenagers often end up spending years for minor crimes.
Teenage inmates at Jetson have said brutality has returned and they are beaten by guards and by other inmates and that sexual assaults are not uncommon.
Cravins, a member of the commission, which met Friday, told members he visited Jetson on Thursday and came away with concerns.
“There was no hope in the youths’ eyes; just hopelessness,” he said.
Cravins said some teenagers at Jetson told him they had been beaten while there. He did not say whether they identified their attackers.
A Lake Charles mother also told the commission her son was attacked at Jetson on Thursday.
“Two boys jumped my son and tried to rape him,” Kathleen Qualls said. “He had to fight them and no one came to rescue him. Our kids are supposed to be safe there.”
Commission members also listened to testimony from the head of the state Office of Youth Development, which oversees the three state juvenile prisons.
Richard Thompson, appointed youth development chief in February, told the commission he also has concerns about Jetson.
“Jetson may be better used as something else (besides a secure care facility),” Thompson said. “I want you to understand, I share some of your concerns about Jetson.”
Thompson earlier told The Advocate that Jetson has recently been “out of control.”
Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who is chairman of the commission, asked Thompson to investigate the allegations at Jetson and prepare a report for the commission in two weeks.
“We have no tolerance for kids being abused. I want the kids safe,” Landrieu said after the meeting. “If we have to, we will close Jetson and build something else where the kids are safe.”
Landrieu admitted that reforms have not taken place in the secure care facilities, but did say other parts of the juvenile system have moved forward.
“We are off track now,” he said. “But we can get back on and move forward.
Landrieu also said he is waiting for the Jindal administration to publicly support the reform programs.
“I’m hopeful the governor will articulate how committed he is to juvenile reforms,” Landrieu said. “When the governor says something is a priority, then money becomes available and it gets done.”
Thompson said youth development office plans to build about 10 to 12 regional secure care facilities for boys.
“We’re committed to doing that. We are committed to reforms,” Thompson said. “We hope in the next four years to have adequate regional facilities in place.”
Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Kitty Kimball, a commission member, said all of the problems in the juvenile justice system should not be borne solely by youth development office.
“Our judges and district attorneys have a tremendous amount of work ahead of them,” she said.
She was critical of judges who hand down long sentences for minor crimes.
“I am going to ask my court to appoint three retired judges to look at particular cases to discuss with other judges that something (a sentence) might not be appropriate,” Kimball said.
Kimball was also critical of the number of employees at Jetson, particularly guards, who are taking “leave time.”
“The number of employees at Jetson on leave is unusually large,” she said.
Thompson told her that was true.
“There are too many people taking advantage of that program,” he said. “We’re trying to do something about that.”
Several dozen members of Family and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, including the mothers of Andy Naccio and Eric LaSalle, attended the meeting.
Naccio died recently after inhaling from an aerosol can in a welding class at Jetson. LaSalle was featured in an article Thursday in The Advocate about his experiences during the nearly four years he was imprisoned at Jetson.
“I’ve listened to a lot of rhetoric today,” Grace Bauer, a community organizer for FFLIC, told the commission and then she pointed to the back of the room where a large group of mothers of imprisoned teens were sitting.
“There’s your human toll,” she said. “While everyone here is trying to coordinate their schedules and not offend everyone, we should be worried about them.”
Bauer said she went with Cravins on Thursday to tour Jetson — where her son was incarcerated seven years ago.
“Nothing has changed out there,” she said. “It even smells the same.”
After the commission meeting, the mothers, members of FFLIC and the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, a nonprofit advocacy organization, held a rally on the Capitol steps.
“Downsize and regionalize,” the mothers chanted. “Close Jetson down.”
Posted by lois at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)
CT: Major Crime Bill OK'd By House
Major Crime Bill OK'd By House
By Ted Mann, The Day
Published on 4/26/2008 in Home »State »State News
Hartford - The House of Representatives approved the legislature's major crime bill Friday, doubling and tripling sentencing requirements for repeat violent criminals and dedicating nearly $10 million for improvements to the justice system.
Passage of the bill, over Republican attempts to amend it and an appeal by a small band of dissenting Democrats to scrap it altogether, marks the second time in four months that legislators have tried to increase penalties on a small swath of the state's most violent and incorrigible criminals.
The House overwhelmingly approved the bill, 128-12, with mostly urban and minority lawmakers in opposition.
A spokesman for Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell said the governor had not committed to a position on the bill, saying she would wait to review the law once it reaches her desk.
The crime bill adapts the recommendations of prosecutors, judges and others on the“front lines” of the criminal justice system into workable improvements in the existing law, said Rep. Michael P. Lawlor, D-East Haven, the co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, in an interview before debate began.
”After nine months of deliberation, finally we have come up with a version of three-strikes that is tough and will actually work,” Lawlor said moments later, during debate on the House floor.
But what exactly constitutes a“three-strikes” law has been a central issue of dispute.
Republicans charged that neither the state's existing sentencing guidelines for“persistent felony offenders” - those convicted more than once of one of 21 of the most serious charges, including manslaughter, arson, home invasion and sexual assault - nor the Democratic improvements were sufficiently harsh on those receiving a third conviction.
A Republican amendment that would have issued an automatic penalty of life in prison without possibility of parole was rejected, but by a relatively narrow margin of 63-77, with 21 Democrats joining the minority.
A sentencing judge“should not be able to commit a third strike himself and jeopardize our future safety,” said Rep. Al Adinolfi, R-Cheshire.“The public should not have to be confronted with a fourth strike.”
But Lawlor was able to secure an acknowledgment from Republicans during debate that even their proposal would not have automatically banished such a third-time criminal to prison for life, since the law could have no effect on the ability of prosecutors to offer plea bargains, which could lessen sentences.
Meanwhile, Rep. Ernest Hewett, D-New London, and other urban lawmakers denounced the bill, which Hewett called“a feel-good bill” that would do nothing to help direct those most likely to wind up in Connecticut prisons - young, minority men - away from the path of crime in the first place.
”If this bill had money in it for education, intervention, after-school, I would support it tomorrow,” Hewett said.“But it has nothing.”
The funding to provide greater resources for probation and treatment of nonviolent offenders would be cold comfort, he added, since declining revenues are now throwing the state's ability to pay into question.
”There's no money,” Hewett said.
http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=99b99343-452d-4a11-940b-514d0b63a5dc
Posted by lois at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 28, 2008
IA: $130 Bond for IA State Penitentiary
From The Hawk Eye Newspaper
House votes for prison funding
Other infrastructure needs also addressed.
By CHRISTINIA CRIPPES
With House passage of the state's infrastructure bill Friday night, southeast Iowa is one step closer to getting a new prison in Fort Madison.
The Iowa House narrowly voted to approve the measure, which gives the state the ability to bond $130 million for the Iowa State Penitentiary building. The bill passed with 52 votes in favor of it and 43 against.
While Rep. Christopher Rants, R-Sioux City, said he expected discussion on whether the new prison facility should be built in Fort Madison, no representative introduced such an amendment.
Rants, however, did propose an amendment that would not bond for the new facility -- which would obligate the state until 2027 -- but rather adopt a pay-as-you-go method. The amendment failed 43-50.
Southeast Iowa's Republicans supported the failed measure, and ultimately voted against the appropriations bills for myriad reasons.
"I still say that if they didn't raid this infrastructure fund for handling all the stuff the general fund should pay for, we could pay for this prison," said Rep. Dave Heaton, R-Mount Pleasant.
He said the prison is estimated to cost $130 million, but by bonding for it, the total cost will be nearly double that amount. Heaton said just because he supported the amendment and vetoed the overall bill does not mean he is against building a new prison in Fort Madison.
"I had to vote against the bill because of the way they were spending money," Heaton said. "I felt what I had to say on the floor on my advocating to build this prison in Fort Madison.... There's just too much money for other things than what it's intending to do."
Rep. Tom Sands, R-Columbus Junction, also voted against the overall bill in part because of the non-infrastructure related items that get added into the bill.
"Both parties have done it," Sands said. "Collectively, as a body, we need to be more disciplined and say this fund is for infrastructure and not pork-barreling projects."
Sands said he also voted against the bill because it changed wording on how money will be allocated for county fairs. He said small counties like the ones he represents will lose out on one-third of its funding because it cannot compete with larger counties for that pool of money.
During the floor debate, Rep. Dennis Cohoon, D-Burlington, who managed the bill, said there are a number of legitimate reasons for notwithstanding language that can lead to earmarked projects like $80,000 for the Kimball Organ project. Among those, Cohoon listed funding for property acquisition, design projects and project managers.
Much of the debate centered on whether the state typically bonds for major infrastructure projects. Cohoon and Rep. Phil Wise, D-Keokuk, said most major projects are bonded for, while many others argued the state has used cash since developing an infrastructure fund using gambling revenue.
"When it comes to large capital expenditures, ... my view is we have always used this type of funding mechanism for these type of projects," Wise said during the floor debate.
Rep. J. Scott Raecker, R-Urbandale, said during the debate the state's spending is the reason it doesn't have the ability to use cash.
Sands said during the debate, though, the prison project cost is 2 percent of the state's general fund budget, so the Legislature should be able to afford it.
"When you've got the ability to pay cash, why would you put it on the credit card and pay double? It doesn't make sense," Heaton said during the floor debate.
Cohoon said the $130 million project constitutes half of the prison infrastructure budget.
http://www.thehawkeye.com/Story/riif-house-042608
Posted by lois at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
April 27, 2008
"Buried Alive: Solitary Confinement in Arizona's Prisons and Jails"
"Buried Alive: Solitary Confinement in Arizona's Prisons and Jails" by Caroline Isaacs and Mathew Lowen. AFSC Arizona
The report is the first attempt to catalog the use and impacts of solitary confinement for adults and juveniles in the Arizona Department of Corrections, the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections and the Maricopa County Fourth Avenue Jail. The report is part of the national AFSC StopMax Campaign
http://www.afsc.org/az/documents/buried-alive.pdf
Posted by lois at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)
PA: more prisons in planned
Even if the bills in Pennsylvania get signed into law and all of the policies are implemented, the state is likely not looking at closing any prisons but may have to build only two rather than three new ones, Beard said.
"It's important that we move ahead with a couple of prisons," Beard said. "Even if we zero-out growth, we are still over capacity, and we need to take care of the overcrowding."
Apr. 21, 2008
Philadelphia Inquirer
Prison bills aim to ease Pa.'s burden
By Amy Worden
Inquirer Staff Writer
VERMONTVILLE, N.Y. - Over the last quarter-century, residents of this remote Adirondack Mountains community, who at first reluctantly accepted a state prison in their midst, came to depend on it.
It provided jobs and, with the inmate population, brawn for needed services.
Then in January, residents were stunned to learn that Gov. Eliot Spitzer - as part of a cost-saving strategy - was planning to close the minimum-security facility, Camp Gabriels, and three others next year.
A new approach to treating nonviolent offenders - along with declining crime rates - had driven the inmate population down by nearly 50 percent in minimum-security facilities, and it was no longer feasible to operate half-empty prisons, officials said.
Gov. Rendell could only wish that Pennsylvania had that problem.
A month after Spitzer's announcement, Rendell presented lawmakers with a starkly different picture. With the state's prison population skyrocketing, he said in his annual budget address, a spending increase was necessary, in large part because of rising prison costs.
His warning came at a time when several states, led by New York, are beginning to move away from mandatory sentencing for nonviolent drug and property crimes and toward alternative sentencing and expanded drug and mental-health treatment along with the implementation of early release for good behavior.
In Pennsylvania, officials have explored the same alternatives as costs take up more of the state budget and prison populations explode, driven in large part by rising numbers of repeat offenders.
Since 1990, inmates in the state's 26 prisons have doubled from 22,000 to more than 44,000. In the same period, costs spiraled from $407 million in 1990 to $1.4 billion in 2006-07.
Facing an 11,000-bed shortfall by 2011, the Department of Corrections said it would have to build more prisons.
"What I told the legislators is that if we don't do anything, we will have to build three new prisons by 2012," Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard said.
The picture in Pennsylvania mirrors that in many other states. A recent study by the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1 in 100 American adults is now behind bars. And last year, the 50 states spent a total of $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, up from nearly $11 billion in 1987.
Now Pennsylvania is working to implement elements of what some officials call "the New York model."
"There are 10 to 15 years' worth of studies showing just locking up drug offenders or those who commit property crimes doesn't work," Beard said. "Confinement alone, without addressing problems, is not an effective way of dealing with people."
A package of four bills modeled in part on the New York laws and supported by Rendell cleared the state House this month and heads to the Senate, where it has leadership support.
"This is a huge step forward for reinventing our criminal-justice system," said House Speaker Dennis O'Brien (R., Phila.), sponsor of one of the bills, who has fought for prison reform for five years.
O'Brien's bill would require those convicted of serious crimes to serve sentences in state prison to relieve overcrowding in county jails and would add incentives for nonviolent offenders, including drug and alcohol treatment and literacy and job training, to curb recidivism.
Other bills would increase supervision for probation and parole and give more flexibility to relocate seriously ill inmates to medical-care facilities.
As testament to its widespread support, the prison-reform package has the backing of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association and the Pennsylvania Prison Society, which are often on opposing sides of criminal-justice issues.
Experts say the New York prisoner decline stems from a combination of factors, among them lower crime rates, but also a philosophical shift taking place within the corrections system and the legislature.
Two decades ago, high-profile crimes by parolees as well as the crack epidemic helped usher in zero-tolerance policies on drug crimes in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
But the result was an explosion in prison growth and no real evidence that long-term incarceration was working.
"Getting tough on criminals is getting tough on taxpayers, and we are not seeing the benefits in public safety," said Adam Gelb, director of Pew's Public Safety Performance Project.
The new approaches, studies show, help reduce the chance of an offender's committing another crime.
"They may get out sooner than they used to, but it's not 'get out of jail free,' " said Brian Fischer, commissioner of New York's Department of Corrections. "They are released earlier but under strict supervision."
Fischer went on to say he thinks that the carrot-and-stick approach works and that "nonviolent offenders profit from a short term in prison."
There is no evidence yet of a lower number of repeat offenders, but neither has there been an increase, Fischer said.
The people in the communities around Camp Gabriels, situated in a picturesque Victorian-era sanitarium, were gearing up for a protest in March when they got an unexpected reprieve with Spitzer's resignation.
The day before a scheduled rally at the Capitol, they learned that the new governor, David A. Paterson, had restored the funding for Camp Gabriels and the other prisons through at least March 2009.
"One thousand people showed up anyway," said Richard Gonyea, a retired corrections officer whose wife, Joy, is a nurse at Camp Gabriels. "It was supposed to be a protest rally. It ended up being more of a pep rally."
The prison provides a $40 million annual economic boost in an area with an aging population and few major businesses. Its inmates build playgrounds, fight fires and clear trails.
The State of New York may have shelved plans to close prisons for now, but the agency could reconsider its options after the March 2009 budget, Fischer said.
"Our population has decreased to a point of reassignment and realignment," Fischer said. "We need to look at how to manage the system."
Even if the bills in Pennsylvania get signed into law and all of the policies are implemented, the state is likely not looking at closing any prisons but may have to build only two rather than three new ones, Beard said.
"It's important that we move ahead with a couple of prisons," Beard said. "Even if we zero-out growth, we are still over capacity, and we need to take care of the overcrowding."
Posted on Mon, Apr. 21, 2008
Prison bills aim to ease Pa.'s burden
By Amy Worden
Inquirer Staff Writer
VERMONTVILLE, N.Y. - Over the last quarter-century, residents of this remote Adirondack Mountains community, who at first reluctantly accepted a state prison in their midst, came to depend on it.
It provided jobs and, with the inmate population, brawn for needed services.
Then in January, residents were stunned to learn that Gov. Eliot Spitzer - as part of a cost-saving strategy - was planning to close the minimum-security facility, Camp Gabriels, and three others next year.
A new approach to treating nonviolent offenders - along with declining crime rates - had driven the inmate population down by nearly 50 percent in minimum-security facilities, and it was no longer feasible to operate half-empty prisons, officials said.
Gov. Rendell could only wish that Pennsylvania had that problem.
A month after Spitzer's announcement, Rendell presented lawmakers with a starkly different picture. With the state's prison population skyrocketing, he said in his annual budget address, a spending increase was necessary, in large part because of rising prison costs.
His warning came at a time when several states, led by New York, are beginning to move away from mandatory sentencing for nonviolent drug and property crimes and toward alternative sentencing and expanded drug and mental-health treatment along with the implementation of early release for good behavior.
In Pennsylvania, officials have explored the same alternatives as costs take up more of the state budget and prison populations explode, driven in large part by rising numbers of repeat offenders.
Since 1990, inmates in the state's 26 prisons have doubled from 22,000 to more than 44,000. In the same period, costs spiraled from $407 million in 1990 to $1.4 billion in 2006-07.
Facing an 11,000-bed shortfall by 2011, the Department of Corrections said it would have to build more prisons.
"What I told the legislators is that if we don't do anything, we will have to build three new prisons by 2012," Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard said.
The picture in Pennsylvania mirrors that in many other states. A recent study by the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1 in 100 American adults is now behind bars. And last year, the 50 states spent a total of $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, up from nearly $11 billion in 1987.
Now Pennsylvania is working to implement elements of what some officials call "the New York model."
"There are 10 to 15 years' worth of studies showing just locking up drug offenders or those who commit property crimes doesn't work," Beard said. "Confinement alone, without addressing problems, is not an effective way of dealing with people."
A package of four bills modeled in part on the New York laws and supported by Rendell cleared the state House this month and heads to the Senate, where it has leadership support.
"This is a huge step forward for reinventing our criminal-justice system," said House Speaker Dennis O'Brien (R., Phila.), sponsor of one of the bills, who has fought for prison reform for five years.
O'Brien's bill would require those convicted of serious crimes to serve sentences in state prison to relieve overcrowding in county jails and would add incentives for nonviolent offenders, including drug and alcohol treatment and literacy and job training, to curb recidivism.
Other bills would increase supervision for probation and parole and give more flexibility to relocate seriously ill inmates to medical-care facilities.
As testament to its widespread support, the prison-reform package has the backing of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association and the Pennsylvania Prison Society, which are often on opposing sides of criminal-justice issues.
Experts say the New York prisoner decline stems from a combination of factors, among them lower crime rates, but also a philosophical shift taking place within the corrections system and the legislature.
Two decades ago, high-profile crimes by parolees as well as the crack epidemic helped usher in zero-tolerance policies on drug crimes in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
But the result was an explosion in prison growth and no real evidence that long-term incarceration was working.
"Getting tough on criminals is getting tough on taxpayers, and we are not seeing the benefits in public safety," said Adam Gelb, director of Pew's Public Safety Performance Project.
The new approaches, studies show, help reduce the chance of an offender's committing another crime.
"They may get out sooner than they used to, but it's not 'get out of jail free,' " said Brian Fischer, commissioner of New York's Department of Corrections. "They are released earlier but under strict supervision."
Fischer went on to say he thinks that the carrot-and-stick approach works and that "nonviolent offenders profit from a short term in prison."
There is no evidence yet of a lower number of repeat offenders, but neither has there been an increase, Fischer said.
The people in the communities around Camp Gabriels, situated in a picturesque Victorian-era sanitarium, were gearing up for a protest in March when they got an unexpected reprieve with Spitzer's resignation.
The day before a scheduled rally at the Capitol, they learned that the new governor, David A. Paterson, had restored the funding for Camp Gabriels and the other prisons through at least March 2009.
"One thousand people showed up anyway," said Richard Gonyea, a retired corrections officer whose wife, Joy, is a nurse at Camp Gabriels. "It was supposed to be a protest rally. It ended up being more of a pep rally."
The prison provides a $40 million annual economic boost in an area with an aging population and few major businesses. Its inmates build playgrounds, fight fires and clear trails.
The State of New York may have shelved plans to close prisons for now, but the agency could reconsider its options after the March 2009 budget, Fischer said.
"Our population has decreased to a point of reassignment and realignment," Fischer said. "We need to look at how to manage the system."
Even if the bills in Pennsylvania get signed into law and all of the policies are implemented, the state is likely not looking at closing any prisons but may have to build only two rather than three new ones, Beard said.
"It's important that we move ahead with a couple of prisons," Beard said. "Even if we zero-out growth, we are still over capacity, and we need to take care of the overcrowding."
Posted by lois at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)
Seeking Employment for Ex-Cons in Newark
April 27, 2008
Seeking Employment for Ex-Cons in Newark
By ANDREW JACOBS
NY Times
NEWARK — Over the past two years, Peter Santos has hired 40 ex-convicts to help him build and renovate apartments here; 36 did not last, many of them doing unacceptably sloppy work or simply disappearing after a few weeks — or a few days — on the job.
One worker, Ronald O’Reilly, 41, had spent more than half his life in prison, for burglary, drug sales and weapons possession, when Mr. Santos last summer gave him not just a job but a cheap apartment and the furnishings to make the place feel like home. He even paid to repair Mr. O’Reilly’s neglected teeth. “I gave him my all,” Mr. Santos said. “I really thought Ron would be different.”
But within five months, Mr. O’Reilly had rekindled his love affair with crack cocaine, said Mr. Santos and others who knew him. He stopped coming to work, ceased paying his $500 monthly rent, and by the time he was evicted, had not only sold off the contents of the apartment, but also the items in an adjacent storage space that belonged to his erstwhile patron, they said. He was arrested soon after and charged with sexual assault.
The situation epitomizes the way Newark’s two leading problems, crime and unemployment, are intertwined with the huge number of ex-convicts in the city. Some 2,300 men and women pour into the city from prison each year, and 65 percent are rearrested within five years. One in six adult residents of the city has a criminal record.
With Newark’s unemployment rate stubbornly stuck at twice the state average of 4.9 percent — and criminal history and lack of education leaving many chronically unemployable — Mayor Cory A. Booker has tried to make prisoner re-entry a signature issue, aware that his twin promises of safety and economic vitality depend on it. He is part of a growing national movement of local and state politicians trying to tackle the problem; earlier this month, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, allocating $165 million annually to their efforts. “Up until now, the focus has been putting ex-offenders back in jail,” complained Fred Davie, president of Public/Private Ventures, a nonprofit group based in Philadelphia that has created prisoner rehabilitation programs in 15 cities and advised the Booker administration. “We need a national approach to what has become a national crisis.”
Even with crime at historic lows, the number of people behind bars in the country is 2.3 million, its highest level ever, according to the Pew Center on the States; last year, there were 7 million people in jail or prison, on probation or on parole.
Most of the prisoner re-entry programs around the country are too new to have been evaluated independently, though the Manpower Development Research Corporation in New York is midway through a three-year study of employment and recidivism among 2,000 male ex-convicts in Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Chicago.
Here in Newark, Mayor Booker has recruited 50 local companies to hire ex-convicts screened by the city’s workforce-development agency, rewarding them with tax breaks, and persuaded 300 lawyers who had volunteered on his campaign to donate their services to felons facing legal obstacles to employment. He is selling city land at a discount to developers willing to employ former prisoners on their construction sites.
But many of Mr. Booker’s initiatives have been stymied. He created a new post at City Hall dedicated to re-entry, but its first two occupants did not work out. He has lobbied legislators to take down some of the barriers ex-offenders face — like rules preventing those with criminal records from working at the Port of Newark — but many are loath to appear soft on crime. A threadbare municipal budget upended the idea of providing sanitation jobs to parolees.
“We’re making progress but it’s like running on the beach,” the mayor said in a recent interview.
Mr. Booker is invariably approached on Newark streets by young men with tattooed arms, newly released from prison and desperate for work. He explains that City Hall is not hiring and then, after assessing the person’s seriousness, whips out his cellphone and dials Kirsten Giardi at Goodwill Industries.
Ms. Giardi tells the job seeker to show up the next day at Newark’s main train station to catch a van ride to Goodwill, which has a three-year federal grant of $1.8 million to run a job-training center for former prisoners that provides résumé advice, work clothes and training in speaking grammatically correct English. But nearly half of the men never show, Ms. Giardi said, and half of those who do disappear once she informs them that it will be three weeks of preparation before they are sent on an interview.
“A lot of these guys want the easy way out,” she explained. “We can give them everything — hold their hand, give them a job and a place to live — but something has to click in their head. I don’t think anyone has figured out what that magic switch is.”
Of the 415 felons who have come through the program since it started in 2006, 245 have found work. Many, like Murray McNair, have been through two, three, even four jobs.
Mr. McNair, 22, the son of a drug dealer, approached Mayor Booker on the street last summer after the most recent in a string of jail stints for narcotics sales and said, “I’m done running the streets.”
But he quit the first job Ms. Giardi found him — at a refrigerated warehouse that provides food to the airlines — after a few days because, he said, he could not stand the cold. He was fired from the next, as a shelf stocker at Stop & Shop, for goofing around. Then he stopped going to Goodwill.
Until last month, when Mr. McNair showed up looking for another chance. At a Goodwill mentoring session, Mr. McNair listened as a silver-haired grandfather talked tearfully about missing family milestones because he was always in jail.
“I’ve never been to a graduation, never been to nothing,” said the man, Stanley Carter. “I don’t want to end up dying in prison. I don’t want to be killed in the street and be memorialized by some balloons on the sidewalk. I want to be remembered as the old man who turned his life around.”
That night, Mr. McNair returned to the crowded apartment he shares with his pregnant girlfriend, his sister and her two children, and announced that he had found a $9-an-hour job at a warehouse in Perth Amboy. It was 20 miles — two buses and a taxi ride — away.
“I know it’s going to be tough,” he said. “But I can’t be thinking about myself anymore.”
Even the most focused and well-financed efforts run uphill. Parolees with drug convictions do not qualify for federal tuition grants and outstanding traffic fines prevent many from obtaining the driver’s licenses that would give them access to jobs beyond the city’s public transportation system. And because child support payments and court fees accrue while they are behind bars, the paychecks of newly employed offenders are sometimes heavily garnisheed.
Newark’s Nicholson Foundation, which has allocated $9 million for employment training and mentoring programs, runs a program called Opportunity Reconnect, in which parolees can apply for food stamps, housing assistance and mental health counseling in a student union-like setting at Essex Community College.
“The last thing a returning ex-offender needs is to have to chase down a dozen different services to remedy their problems,” said Stefan Pryor, Newark’s deputy mayor for economic development. “If we can produce a light at the end of the tunnel, more individuals will successfully navigate that tunnel.”
Donald Shauger, who owns a property maintenance business, is one of the local employers Mr. Booker successfully recruited to the cause, agreeing to fill a quarter of his 140 positions with parolees. He said that the three he recently hired come to work early and stay long after their shifts end, concluding, “When you give someone a second chance, they truly work hard.”
Rich Liebler, who owns a car dealership in nearby Hillside, N.J., is a veteran in the cause, having run a Newark mechanics training school largely for ex-convicts with felony records since 1996. Of the 50 students per year, Mr. Liebler said, about 30 usually complete the yearlong program, which is financed by nonprofit groups, the Ford Motor Company and Pell grants. He said that 90 percent of the graduates find jobs and stay out of jail, though the program has not been independently studied.
It takes at least a year, Mr. Liebler said, to “deprogram” the felons. Most have never owned an alarm clock — months can pass before they show up for class on time — and few can name a family member with a regular job. “We treat them as if they were in a cult,” he said. “We have to reverse the thought process they’ve grown up into.”
Mr. Santos, the local developer, did not give up after Mr. O’Reilly shirked his job and stole his property. Instead, he gave another ex-convict, Rahman Parker, the keys to the apartment. He has promised, too, to replace the stolen furnishings.
Mr. Parker, a recovering addict who most recently served five months in the county jail for possession of heroin, is 35, a quiet man with big hands, and has been doing demolition work, painting and carpentry for Mr. Santos for the last year and a half. Mr. Santos says he will help Mr. Parker fix his teeth, just as he did for Mr. O’Reilly.
“I think Rahman will be different,” Mr. Santos said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/nyregion/27excons.html?_r=1&sq=Newark&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=2&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2008
CA: The state will search its database for relatives of unidentified suspects in hopes of developing leads.
California takes lead on crime-fighting techniques
The state will search its database for relatives of unidentified suspects in hopes of developing leads. Critics voice privacy concerns.
By Maura Dolan and Jason Felch,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
April 26, 2008
California will adopt the most aggressive approach in the nation to a controversial crime-fighting technique that uses DNA to try to identify elusive criminals through their relatives, state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown announced Friday.
Employing what is known as familial or "partial match" searching, the policy is aimed at identifying a suspect through DNA collected at a crime scene by looking for potential relatives in the state's genetic database of about a million felons. Once a relative is identified, police can use that person as a lead to trace the suspect.
The new plan makes California a leader in such searches, which several states permit but do not vigorously pursue. Colorado has recently begun to examine its database for relatives of unknown criminals as part of a research project.
Brown said the new approach was justified by violent crime plaguing the state. He emphasized that it would be used only when all other leads had been exhausted.
"We have 2,000 murders a year in California -- that is 10,000 since the Iraq war started -- and that is a lot of killing," Brown said. "When you see it and see the victims and have to go to funerals, it is pretty serious stuff."
But Tania Simoncelli, science advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union, called Brown's decision a disappointment and said the organization is exploring its legality. The group has not decided whether to challenge the policy in court.
"The fact that my brother committed a crime doesn't mean I should have to give up my privacy," she said.
At a recent FBI conference on familial searching, Jeffrey Rosen, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, warned: "I can guarantee if familial searching proceeds, it will create a political firestorm."
The policy, which takes effect immediately, is designed to work like this: The state's crime lab will tell police about DNA profiles that come up during routine searches of California's offender database and closely resemble, but do not match, the DNA left at a crime scene. (Previously, the state refused to tell police about these partial matches.)
The lab will then perform calculations and tests to determine the likelihood of a biological relationship between the person found in the database and the unknown offender believed to have left DNA at the crime scene.
When such partial matches do not surface or fail to produce a lead, a more customized familial search can be done in which computer software scans the database proactively for possible relatives. The software measures the chance of two people being related based on the rarity of the markers they share.
California appears to be the first state in the nation to use this second technique as a matter of policy. Drafted with the heavy involvement of lawyers, the new policy requires a series of meetings with police and prosecutors to ensure that the relative's name is vital to the investigation and that all other leads have been exhausted.
Once a relative has been identified, police can interview him or construct a family tree based on existing records. If a suspect is identified, police can obtain a warrant for his DNA, or even gather it surreptiously from an abandoned drink or cigarette butt. The suspect's DNA sample would then be compared to the crime scene sample and possibly used as evidence.
"The people of California will know that we are using the database to try to solve as many crimes as we can, unlike virtually every other state in the country," said retired Alameda County Dist. Atty. Rockne P. Harmon, who consulted with the state on the policy.
Civil libertarians oppose using DNA databases to search for relatives of unknown offenders, saying it puts family members under "genetic surveillance" for crimes they did not commit. For now, all the people in the state's database are convicted offenders, but the state plans to expand the database next year to include arrestees, heightening concerns over privacy.
Critics say familial searching could expose sensitive and secret genetic relationships. A son, for example, could learn that his father was not his biological parent. DNA databases also reflect the racial and ethnic biases of the justice system, exposing minority communities to more surveillance than others, critics maintain.
FBI officials in charge of the national database network have also expressed concerns, making them unlikely allies of civil libertarians on familial searching. They urge a cautious approach, worrying that the courts will balk at this type of sleuthing. No law specifically authorizes it, and some legal scholars consider it unconstitutional because they say it amounts to an unreasonable search.
Brown called such objections hypothetical. The policy forbids the release of the names of relatives until genetic tests and analysis convince the state that the person is indeed a relative.
"It is still not going to be a fail-safe system, and we are going to make mistakes," said Simoncelli, the ACLU science advisor. "We are opening the door to using the database in such a fundamentally different way than the purpose for which it was established."
No one knows how well the state's plan will work. Harmon said he was absolutely convinced that it would provide at least some new leads for police.
Lance Gima, the state's top forensic scientist, agreed. But he conceded that the search for relatives would be a longshot because many unrelated people share genetic markers. He said he hoped the state's decision would spur technology to improve the accuracy of such searches.
Britain has done familial searching for years, using more sophisticated software. With a 10% to 14% rate of identifying perpetrators, Britain's searches have had limited but dramatic results, cracking some sensational crimes.
A serial rapist whose DNA was not in Britain's national database was caught because he was genetically similar to his sister, whose DNA was taken after a drunk-driving arrest. The so-called shoe rapist had a fetish for stiletto heels. When police captured him, they discovered scores of high heels he had stolen from his victims.
Police in the U.S. have used genetic relationships to help catch criminals in a different way, and on a much smaller scale.
After Kansas police zeroed in on the serial killer who dubbed himself BTK -- initials for bind, torture, kill -- they obtained a court order for the pap smear of his daughter. Without her knowledge, police performed a DNA analysis of the specimen, obtained from a medical laboratory.
The genetic similarities indicated they had the right man, Dennis Radar.
Posted by lois at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)
Boston Globe Op-Ed:Fixing our criminal sentencing system
Fixing our criminal sentencing system
Boston Globe
By David W. White Jr. | April 26, 2008
David W. White Jr. is president of the Massachusetts Bar Association.
A NUMBER of news stories this spring have shown us that the criminal sentencing system is out of line - both in Massachusetts and in the nation as a whole. The United States has not just the highest rate of incarceration in the world, but also one-fourth of all of the prisoners in the world.
What has led us to this? And what is it about our priorities that has us spending more on incarceration than higher education?
In Massachusetts, we have over 25,000 inmates serving time in county jails or state prisons. Governor Deval Patrick's proposed 2009 budget seeks $1.4 billion for the sheriffs' departments and the Department of Correction. This money is primarily for incarceration. The same budget proposes $963 million for higher education.
The prisons and jails are seriously overcrowded, not just with convicts but also with hundreds of additional pre-trial detainees who either cannot make bail or are being held without bail pending their trials. A federal lawsuit has forced one county sheriff, in Worcester, to choose which inmates will be released before their sentences are completed. Some detainees are left in local lock-ups because of space shortages.
Incarceration rates increased dramatically when the "War on Drugs" was launched in the 1980s. In Massachusetts and elsewhere, strict mandatory minimum sentences were enacted for drug dealing. One of those sentences, for selling any type or quantity of drug within 1,000 feet of a school, annually sends more than 300 people to jail for a mandatory minimum of two years.
These convictions are usually known as status crimes. The offenders in question generally weren't dealing drugs to children; rather, they were selling in dense urban areas where a school is rarely more than 1,000 feet away. The application of the school zone offense may vary widely from county to county.
When you look across the vast spectrum of crimes committed each year, so many of them can be traced back to drug and alcohol abuse and addiction. This is no secret, nor is the fact that more than 20 years of get-tough policies have not made a difference in drug-related crimes.
Two other factors are relevant. At the front end of the trial process, the courts are cluttered with the smallest of crimes, such as disturbing the peace or passing a bad check. Because these crimes carry the threat of incarceration, if the defendant is indigent the court must appoint a lawyer at taxpayer expense. If treated instead as civil infractions, with only the risk of fines, the dockets could be cleared, and the legal help could be reserved for more serious matters.
Bigger problems lie at the back end of whatever sentences are imposed. Massachusetts must find a better way to deal with ex-prisoners returning to society. Most released prisoners lack job skills, education, family support, money and, most importantly, supervision. Recidivism is more than likely. A high percentage of Massachusetts inmates complete their sentences by "wrapping up" - or serving out their time - and therefore have absolutely no supervision by a probation department or the Parole Board upon their release. With supervision, however, the likelihood of reoffense drops by one-third.
So what can we do this year, while the budget and the laws are still being written, and before our legislators recess for a season of campaigning?
This is a simple, cost-saving, and effective wish list:
Eliminate mandatory minimums for drug crimes to allow for parole eligibility.
Ensure meaningful post-incarceration supervision through parole or probation.
Resist calls for new mandatory minimum sentences that tie the hands of prosecutors, judges, and corrections officials.
Support policies that provide and promote drug treatment instead of incarceration.
Fully fund prison programs for treatment of mental illness, substance abuse, and training.
None of these ideas suggest that we should be soft on crime. Rather, they represent measures that are smart on crime in ways that Massachusetts can afford - and will be more effective in reducing future crime than the status quo.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/04/26/fixing_our_criminal_sentencing_system?mode=PF
Posted by lois at 11:31 PM | Comments (0)
Guantánamo: Detainees’ Mental Health Is Latest Legal Battle
April 26, 2008
Detainees’ Mental Health Is Latest Legal Battle
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
NY Times Page 1
Next month, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once a driver for Osama bin Laden, could become the first detainee to be tried for war crimes in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By now, he should be busily working on his defense.
But his lawyers say he cannot. They say Mr. Hamdan has essentially been driven crazy by solitary confinement in an 8-foot-by-12-foot cell where he spends at least 22 hours a day, goes to the bathroom and eats all his meals. His defense team says he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo “boil his mind.”
“He will shout at us,” said his military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. Brian L. Mizer. “He will bang his fists on the table.”
His lawyers have asked a military judge to stop his case until Mr. Hamdan is placed in less restrictive conditions at Guantánamo, saying he cannot get a fair trial if he cannot focus on defending himself. The judge is to hear arguments as soon as Monday on whether he has the power to consider the claim.
Critics have long asserted that Guantánamo’s climate-controlled isolation is a breeding ground for madness. But turning that into a legal claim marks a new stage for the military commissions at Guantánamo. As military prosecutors push to get trials under way, they are being met with challenges not just to the charges, but to Guantánamo itself.
Pentagon officials say that Guantánamo holds dangerous men humanely and that there is no unusual quantity of mental illness there. Guantánamo, a military spokeswoman said, does not have solitary confinement, only “single-occupancy cells.”
In response to questions, Cmdr. Pauline A. Storum, the spokeswoman for Guantánamo, asserted that detainees were much healthier psychologically than the population in American prisons. Commander Storum said about 10 percent could be found mentally ill, compared, she said with data showing that more than half of inmates in American correctional institutions had mental health problems.
With their filings, Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers are setting the stage for similar challenges to the procedures of Guantánamo in some 80 expected war crimes cases, lawyers for other detainees say. “The issue of mistreatment of prisoners, the miserable lives they live in these cells, will come up in every case,” said Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer for 35 detainees.
The case of Salim Hamdan is already a landmark because the Supreme Court used an earlier case against him to strike down the Bush administration’s first military commission system in 2006. But that case, like most of the legal battles over Guantánamo, did not affect conditions there.
Detainees lawyers argue that the effects of intense isolation have gradually turned the prison camp into something of a highly fortified mental ward. Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers say his place as one of the best-known detainees has not spared him.
In more than six years of detention, Mr. Hamdan has had two phone calls to his family and no visits. He has been disciplined, legal filings say, for having a Snickers bar that was given to him by his lawyers and for possessing too many socks.
“Conditions are asphalt, excrement and worse,” he wrote his lawyers in February. “Why, why, why?”
At Guantánamo, there are no family visits, no televisions and no radios. A new policy will for the first time permit one telephone call a year.
In the cells where Mr. Hamdan and more than 200 of Guantánamo’s 280 detainees are held, communication with other detainees is generally by shouting through the slit in the door used for the delivery of meals. Mail is late and often censored, lawyers say.
Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States, said Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is an expert on American prison conditions.
The military prosecutors declined to comment on the claims about Mr. Hamdan’s condition. As is common at Guantánamo, their legal filings were not made public before the scheduled court date. But defense filings released by Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers recited some prosecution arguments.
The prosecutors argued that the way that Mr. Hamdan was being held did not constitute solitary confinement in part because “detainees can communicate through the walls.” They said that Mr. Hamdan had denied having mental problems and that he was no model detainee, spitting at guards, threatening assault and throwing urine.
Speaking generally, Commander Storum said, detainees are enemy combatants held safely. “We are holding the right people,” she added, “in the right place, for the right reasons, and doing it the right way.”
Prosecutors have said Mr. Hamdan, now about 39, helped Mr. bin Laden elude capture after the 2001 terror attacks. He is charged with transporting weapons for Al Qaeda and being a bin Laden bodyguard and driver.
In recent weeks, his case has drawn wide notice because the defense asserted that senior Pentagon officials exerted improper influence over military prosecutors and pressed cases for political reasons. Hearings on that issue, also scheduled for next week, may expose the internal workings of the military commissions. The former chief Guantánamo prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis, who has become a critic of the way the war crimes system is run, is slated to testify for Mr. Hamdan.
But the claim about Mr. Hamdan’s mental health could expose the workings of Guantánamo. According to military statistics, three-quarters of the detainees have been held recently in two “camps” that look much like American prisons. Camp 5 and Camp 6, heavily guarded concrete buildings, hold men who have yet to face trial. Behind a heavy door, each cell has a handful of sanctioned items including a cup and a Koran.
Officials concede that the daily two hours of recreation in a chain-link pen is sometimes offered in the dark. From inside their cells, detainees cannot see the outdoors. From the exercise pens they sometimes can see only a sliver of sky.
Michael E. Mone Jr., a Boston lawyer, visited a client last month in Camp 5, where Mr. Hamdan is held. Mr. Mone said his client, an Uzbek detainee, asked why he could not be held in a place where he could see the sun.
This winter, lawyers for Abdulghappar Turkistani, a detainee in Camp 6, received a letter describing life there. “Losing any contact with anyone,” he wrote, “also being forbidden from the natural sunlight, natural air, being surrounded with a metal box all around is not suitable for a human being.”
Reporters are not permitted to interview detainees, and some international groups, like Amnesty International, have been denied access to detainees.
In leaked reports in 2004 investigators for the International Committee of the Red Cross, who do see detainees, said their treatment, including solitary confinement, amounted to torture. But the Red Cross usually keeps its conclusions private.
As a result, much of what is known about current conditions at Guantánamo comes from lawyers, who visit regularly under tight restrictions. Many describe the men as depressed or delusional. Some, they say, show obvious signs of what some of them call Guantánamo psychosis.
Four detainees are believed to have committed suicide in 2006 and 2007, but the military has never released the official details.
Some of the men are increasingly paranoid and some are losing touch with reality, said Rebecca P. Dick, a Washington lawyer who visited two Afghan detainees in March. “One client said, ‘I’m talking to the ceiling now,’ ” Ms. Dick recalled.
Six detainees, according to military officials, are now on hunger strikes. They are fed liquid nutrition through tubes inserted in their nostrils daily.
Mr. Stafford Smith said one of his clients, a hunger striker, was fixated on a mathematical formula that he believed proves that he will be the next to die.
Another detainee, Mr. Stafford Smith said, has smeared feces on his cell walls. “When I asked him why he was doing it, he told me he had no idea,” Mr. Stafford Smith said.
Last month a lawyer for nine detainees who are members of China’s Uighur ethnic minority told a Congressional committee that one of them, Huzaifa Parhat, said that life at Guantánamo was like having already died. The lawyer, P. Sabin Willett, said Mr. Parhat asked the lawyers to pass on a message. He told them to tell his wife to remarry.
Military officials often dismiss such descriptions as accounts by gullible lawyers manipulated by terrorists trained to make false claims of mistreatment.
Detainees’ lawyers say the military methodically understates the mental illness at Guantánamo for public relations reasons.
In military commission proceedings in recent weeks, there have been hints that some of the men facing charges may be deteriorating psychologically.
A military lawyer for a Sudanese detainee said her client appeared frantic and asked that he be evaluated.
When a judge asked a Saudi detainee the name of a lawyer, the detainee’s answer was: “I have been here for six years. Thank God I can even still remember the names of my own family.”
But Mr. Hamdan’s case is the first in the current system to try to air fully the claim that Guantánamo is warping the minds of the men held there.
Commander Mizer said Mr. Hamdan talked unendingly about his desire to moved to Camp 4, the only place at Guantánamo where detainees are permitted to live communally. Camp 4 is believed to house 50 or fewer detainees who officials classify as highly compliant. Mr. Hamdan blames his lawyers for failing to get him out of Camp 5, Commander Mizer said, and will talk only about that. “He refuses to talk about his case,” he said.
The trial is now set to begin on May 28. But twice in recent months, Commander Mizer said, Mr. Hamdan has said he was dismissing Commander Mizer from the case. “He said, ‘I don’t ever want to see you again,’ ” Commander Mizer said.
There is only one subject, he said, that Mr. Hamdan discusses: Getting out of his cell in Camp 5 at Guantánamo Bay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/washington/26gitmo.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2008
CA: Can Technology Fix California Prison Health Care?
Can Technology Fix California Prison Health Care?
http://www.cio.com/special/california_prison_IT
3 part article
– Kim S. Nash, CIO
April 11, 2008
Four years ago at San Quentin, the 156-year-old prison where the state of California keeps some of its most dangerous criminals, doctors saw an inmate for high blood pressure, diabetes and renal failure. The inmate got two drugs that, according to court documents, made his kidney problems worse. His blood pressure climbed so high his eyes bled. Yet a year passed before prison medical staff referred the inmate to a kidney specialist at a local hospital. He never got to go—the records are unclear about why—and he died three months later.
If only, as on the outside, there had been a database to alert prison doctors of drug interactions. If only there had been software to schedule appointments. If only there had been basic Internet access, e-mail and electronic data about patients, so that prison medical staff could share information.
That patient might have lived.
More than 170,000 inmates crowd California's 33 state prisons. That's about as many people as live in Tempe, Ariz., and it's more than double the number the prisons were built to hold. Inside those bars, one inmate dies every six to seven days because of "deplorable" medical care, according to U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson. In 2001, 10 inmates at nine prisons, including San Quentin, accused the state of violating the Eighth Amendment with medicine that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. In 2002, Henderson agreed with the inmates, pronouncing California's prison healthcare system unconstitutional.
The state settled the case, agreeing to fix the problems. But by mid-2005, after six days of hearings, Henderson concluded the state had made no progress. He seized control, appointing a receiver—a federal overseer—to hire new people, change processes and install basic information technology found even in small rural hospitals in the United States. The aim of the receivership (officially the California Prison Health Care Receivership) isn't to offer criminals state-of-the-art health care. It's to do no harm.
An "unconscionable degree of suffering and death is sure to continue if the system is not dramatically overhauled," he wrote, explaining his decision. The decision and other court material relay story after story of how inmates didn't get the right medications on time. Or they didn't see specialists when they should have. Or they were treated by incompetent doctors whose personnel records didn't document their failings. Or no one knew the inmate was sick because his medical record was wrong. Or lost.
Today, after three more years, the system still falls short of constitutional standards. Some improvements have been made—nurses added, some doctors replaced; some software installed to, for example, track pharmaceuticals at some prisons. But there's a lot to overcome.
Typewriters and Dot-Matrix Printers
For years, in some cases, for decades, several prisons lacked working phones for the medical staff. Others relied on antique Brother typewriters to fill in forms and leaky, lightless trailers in which to store them. Prison employees soaked printer ribbons in ink by hand because the dot-matrix printers were so old that manufacturers no longer made replacement parts. While the prison healthcare budget had grown from $556 million in 2000 to $1.6 billion last year, most of the money went to staff and medical supplies, not to infrastructure or technology that could have made operations more efficient. "Data management, which is essential to managing a large healthcare system safely and efficiently, is practically nonexistent," Henderson wrote. "This makes even mediocre medical care impossible."
For technology managers at California prisons, the federal takeover opens a rare opportunity. When an organization runs so little technology, networking a few PCs to provide e-mail makes you a hero, says Dan Marshall, staff information systems analyst at San Quentin. Marshall manages much of the prison's IT.
In many ways, the prison healthcare overhaul looks like any big IT project. Corporate CIOs will recognize some of the obstacles: uncertain funding, skeptical users, having to please separate groups of people often at odds with each other, keeping projects afloat when the boss gets fired. "It's all there, only more dramatically in the prison system," says John Hummel, who was CIO for the receivership from 2006 until he resigned in early February to return to his former employer, Perot Systems.
But in other ways, the project stands apart. How do you set up a wide-area network among buildings made of stone walls three feet thick and reinforced with steel? When it's time to install a telecom switch, can you get the OK to schedule armed corrections officers to guard your tools from thieving, violent prisoners? And the ethics debate never ends. Wrestling with the moral dimensions of installing systems to help a rapist get his dermatitis cream isn't typical CIO fare. You get a green field on which to make your IT mark—for a constituency many would rather forget about, and some say deserve to die.
How Nurses Process Prisoners
In the hills north of San Francisco's famous Golden Gate Bridge stands the infamous San Quentin State Prison. A 27-year-old Johnny Cash, though never locked up there, visited to sing about injustice. Today, Scott Peterson, convicted in 2004 of killing his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn baby, is there awaiting execution. San Quentin holds 5,400 murderers, rapists, violent felons, parole violators, drug criminals and many, many three-strikes offenders.
The prison is also one of five intake centers for inmates entering, or returning to, the California system. The average state inmate is a 36-year-old male who reads at the seventh-grade level and is sentenced to just under four years.
Before they get housing assignments, prisoners must be screened for medical, dental and mental health issues. The results determine where they serve their time. Someone with a respiratory illness, for example, shouldn't go to Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, where the local valley fever lung infection routinely sickens hundreds of inmates and staff.
All day at San Quentin, white buses pull in and out of a secured parking area overlooking the cool, blue bay waters. Cuffed and chained, inmates in denim outfits file out. Guards lead them to the Reception and Release Center, a cramped wood structure near the recreation yard.
One recent breezy morning, Director of Nursing Tonya Church, who manages the prison's 126-member nursing staff, ducks inside the center.
What happens to inmates' medical records as they transfer between prisons.
Dozens of prisoners stand in barred or glassed-in holding cells or sit on folding chairs. Staff in scrubs examine inmates while corrections officers keep watch. There's little room to move. Every few minutes a nurse barks an inmate's last name, a call to step up.
Church raises her voice to be heard above the noise and explains what goes on.
Her nurses perform eye, ear and tuberculosis tests. They take blood to identify conditions such as diabetes and hepatitis. They record a brief medical history—such aspects as allergies, handicaps, communicable diseases—and do a physical exam. A doctor sees newcomers to assess serious problems, prescribe drugs or do a psychiatric evaluation. "We try to average about 75 inmates a day," she says.
Change Happens Slowly
Intake happens in this one building, and just one aspect of the process so far is computerized: blood-test results. Outside firms Quest Diagnostics and Foundation Laboratories set up Web portals through which healthcare workers can view and download lab results.
The rest of the process is still recorded on paper, mostly folders containing four-part forms with check boxes to describe a patient: diabetic, heart disease, orthopedic problems and so on. Even so, Church says, thanks to the receivership there have been big improvements. The prison got money to construct this bigger building; crowded as the new space is, it now includes private exam rooms and networked PCs to view those lab results and print chart labels.
Before the receivership, there was no room for doctors to work in the existing intake center, just nurses and technicians. Mental health and dental exam rooms were in other buildings. To complete a screening, prisoners had to be escorted by corrections officers to different clinics around San Quentin's 440 acres. Medical forms often got misplaced along the way. Sometimes there weren't enough guards scheduled, Church says, so inmates would have to wait, on occasion, for several days. Administrators would have to assign temporary housing to inmates who hadn't been fully screened. Usually they stayed in the general population. Sometimes that caused problems.
For example, unless an inmate came with a known history of mental problems or was acting erratic on arrival, a psychiatric evaluation waited, she says, sometimes endangering, in particular, first-time inmates with suicidal tendencies.
Throughout California state prisons, 30 prisoners killed themselves in 2007 and an estimated 480 tried. With mental health screens now happening at San Quentin the day an inmate arrives, staff can spot potential suicides sooner, Church says: "If he's never been to prison before and there are any suicidal tendencies, those usually show up sooner rather than later," she says. "So now we identify those risk factors on day one, instead of day four or five, after he's hanging."
California's Prison Inmates
While Church likes the changes at San Quentin so far, she has worked there 14 years and looks, tough-minded, at what else needs to be done. "Each institute has its own obstacles to overcome," she says, noting that because of San Quentin's age there are lots of low ceilings in buildings not wired for many electrical outlets, as well as asbestos and lead paint issues. "A lot of people feel they've stepped back in time when they come to work here."
# Total: 173,312
# Death row: 669
# Lifers: 30,048
# Average age: 36
# Average reading level: 7th grade
# Average sentence: 47 months
# Recidivism rate: 70%
Part 2: Managing IT at San Quentin
– Kim S. Nash, CIO
April 01, 2008
Dan Marshall, a staff information systems analyst at California's San Quentin State Prison, doesn't mind working around the physical obstacles to installing technology at a prison dedicated when Abraham Lincoln was president. He's happy to be putting in technology there at all.
Walking through a dim cement passageway connecting San Quentin's cafeteria on one end and the Treatment and Triage Area at the other, Marshall cheerfully points out IT impediments.
"You can see from the size of this place putting technology infrastructure in here is not easy," he says, sweeping his arm to indicate the surrounding complex of I-beams, razor wire and stone buildings pocked up and down by chipped paint. It's not only the size and sprawl of the facility that presents challenges. "If it was your typical office building, we'd be dealing with drywall. Because it's prison"—here Marshall laughs—"they're much more into stone and steel."
How his feelings about his job have changed since IT improvements began.
Marshall is installing new technology at San Quentin as part of a court-ordered overhaul of California's prison health care system. In 2001, 10 inmates at nine prisons, including San Quentin, accused the state of violating the Eighth Amendment with medicine that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. In 2002, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson agreed with the inmates, pronouncing California's prison healthcare system unconstitutional.
The state settled the case, agreeing to fix the problems. But by mid-2005, Henderson concluded the state had made no progress. Inside the prisons, one inmate dies every six to seven days. Henderson appointed a receiver—a federal overseer—to hire new people, change processes and install basic information technology found even in small rural hospitals in the United States. The aim of the receivership (officially the California Prison Health Care Receivership) isn't to offer criminals state-of-the -art health care. It's to do no harm.
Safety Comes First
To deliver even basic medical care, doctors and nurses at San Quentin needed a network. Marshall opted for wireless networks using Nortel gear. His office, underneath the warden's office, now serves as the communications room, with cabling and servers inside. He's set up clusters of virtualized Dell servers, running VMware with an EMC SAN, to control the wireless infrastructure as well as for print and file serving.
While scouting for places to put wireless access points Marshall remembered that runs of fiber optic cable had been installed but never turned on. Four years ago, the state had installed fiber in most prison buildings but the project lost funding before the needed switches and hubs could be bought, according to John Hummel, former CIO with the receivership (he resigned in February). "Dan had this beautiful spiral, all truncated and ready to go," he says.
Now clinics, offices and some corrections officers' stations throughout San Quentin have access to either a wired or wireless computer network, Marshall adds.
Engineers from Nortel, a state subcontractor, came to help Marshall and the four other IT analysts at San Quentin install the wireless equipment. But it was no easy visit. To get an outside vendor on prison grounds involves background checks, vehicle searches and, usually at overtime rates, special assignment of guards to protect the people working on the project.
"You have to think: Are you putting yourself in a position that if something were to happen that you have no help?" He casually steps aside to let pass a guard gripping the triceps of a man in handcuffs and the white jumpsuit of someone in protective custody. Although Marshall himself has not been attacked by an inmate, 121 members of the San Quentin staff were assaulted by inmates in 2006, the most recent data available. In other words, once every three days an inmate, sometimes armed with a homemade weapon, attacked an employee there—one of the highest assault rates among the 33 prisons statewide.
Marshall has worked at San Quentin for 14 years—his first seven in nursing, the last in IT. Before the receivership, he'd begun to stagnate. He still felt dedicated to serving people who need help, he says, and helping the medical staff do their important work. But maintaining 120 standalone Windows NT 4.0 and XP PCs held little appeal. He wanted to use new technologies that would change the working conditions for the doctors and nurses. That wasn't happening at San Quentin, so he was hunting for a new job.
Then Judge Henderson took over. Marshall met the receiver, Bob Sillen, and his new boss, Hummel. Sillen is a former executive director of the Santa Clara Valley Health and Hospital System with 40 years in healthcare administration. After touring San Quentin to see for himself conditions he later described as "appalling," Sillen decided to focus there first. (See Sillen's San Quentin Project Outline).
"It is the oldest, most decrepit and most notorious prison in California. As such, it is a perfect laboratory for reform," he said in one of his many letters to staff and inmates during his 21 months on the job (Sillen was fired in January).
Hummel, meanwhile, was astounded, and excited at the opportunity to transform the IT backwater of the entire prison health system. He was a senior manager at outsourcer Perot Systems and before that, CIO at Sutter Health, a network of hospitals and doctors' offices in California, for nine years. Early in his career, he had worked with doctors in poor countries, helping set up hospitals and data management.
"Walking into San Quentin and watching water come dripping down out of the showers of death row and having to hold a plastic tarp over the doctor so he could treat a patient was beyond anything I'd seen in any third-world country," he says. "I was ashamed."
Prison Healthcare and Public Health
Inmates in California's overcrowded prisons must be screened and monitored for tuberculosis, syphilis and other communicable diseases. However, that job is nearly impossible, federal courts have found, with 5,000 inmates transferring between prisons each month and minimal, if any, technology for managing their medical records.
The prisons are also unable to provide consistent treatment for inmates with chronic diseases such as asthma, diabetes and seizure disorders. In 2006, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in California prisons because of overcrowding, saying in part that prisoners faced "increased, substantial risk for transmission of infectious diseases." So, too, does the public, when inmates are released.
Such passion touched Marshall. So did the prospect of the receivership freeing up funds for technology. He decided not to quit. In fact, he says, he started thinking, How long will it take for me to change San Quentin's culture to make IT important?
A New Culture for IT
Yet making IT important is not as straightforward as it sounds, according to Hummel. When he started as CIO of the receivership in 2006, Hummel says, he had to learn to live with one cultural truth: The warden is boss. Judge Henderson may have invested the receivership with the authority to administer, manage and operate the prison healthcare system, Hummel says, but the warden runs his or her prison. Keeping custody of inmates is the warden's number-one job; everything else is secondary.
Hummel made sure to visit as many prisons as he could throughout his tenure, to discuss "very real concerns of theirs" about technology projects. During the wireless installation at San Quentin, he recalls, one of his and Marshall's tasks was "simply proving to the warden and corrections officers that this was not going to stop their walkie-talkies from working," he says, "or that a gang member sitting in a car a mile and a half away couldn't possibly steal that signal."
Marshall, meanwhile, tries to use his nursing background to bridge the cultural gap between San Quentin's medical and IT staffs. Take the process of dispensing medications to inmates.
Each morning and evening, nurses wheel carts loaded with specific drug doses to cell blocks where inmates live. They walk up and down rows of cells. If their patients are housed in the gym—a "temporary" measure the state took more than a decade ago to accommodate overcrowding—nurses look for inmates, who are assigned bottom or top bunks in rows of beds crammed into the room.
Marshall did this drill many times as a nurse and says that often, nurses can't find all their patients on first rounds. An inmate might be at a clinic or at work. Or maybe gone from the prison altogether. More than 500 inmates transfer in and out of San Quentin each week. Statewide, weekly transfers number 5,000. There's a 24-hour lag between when an inmate changes prisons and when the master housing roster database gets updated.
"I would come back with a deficit of hundreds of inmates I couldn't find," Marshall recalls.
The nurse would then typically return to the pharmacy or the medical records room hoping to find updates to the housing roster application, an Oracle database running on a Hewlett-Packard MPE server and accessed via a dumb terminal. With any fresh information then available, the nurse would head back out.
"It could take most of a day," he says. Knowing this, Marshall and Tonya Church, San Quentin's director of nursing, discussed how to improve that process last year. Once the wireless network was in, Marshall was able to set up PCs in satellite clinics and housing units around the campus to access the roster database. "There were two places to look up this information previously," he says. "Now there are 250."
Beyond IT Basics
Meanwhile, there is not yet any electronic way to thoroughly track the medications San Quentin prescribes, orders, receives, dispenses and discards—or how much it all costs. To do all that, the prison is due to switch on pharmacy management software by Maxor next month (Maxor's GuardianRx is used by healthcare networks of comparable size, such as Denver Health, which cares for about 160,000 uninsured patients in Colorado).
The goal in California is to better manage the 21,000 prescriptions prison doctors write each month by monitoring, for example, how many get administered properly and how much medication gets wasted or stolen. Analysis of pharmacy billing at Pleasant Valley State Prison, which has already installed Maxor, resulted in the arraignment in December of two contract pharmacists who did work at the prison, on charges they had embezzled $1 million from the state. Police searched the pharmacists' homes and found 30,000 prescription drugs, some bearing prison labels.
But even when the Maxor application is fully rolled out at all 33 prisons, none of them will be able to share data with each other, at least not for a few years. That feature would be useful when, say, inmates transfer between institutions. Instead of doctors at the receiving prison having to write fresh prescriptions for a new inmate, existing prescriptions would follow the inmate to his new location. "Less wasted medicine," explains Church, "and more continuity of care."
However, that won't happen until later phases of the Maxor project, not yet committed to time lines, she says. IT time lines generally are uncertain right now, as Sillen and Hummel are no longer with the receivership.
Part 3: Prison Healthcare Reform on Probation
Prison Healthcare Reform on Probation
– Kim S. Nash, CIO
April 11, 2008
In January, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson fired Bob Sillen, the federal receiver who had been appointed to fix California's prison healthcare system. Henderson praised Sillen's reconnaissance and understanding of the scope of the problem but criticized him for not moving quickly enough.
Learn more about using technology to fix California prison health care.
In 2001, 10 inmates at nine prisons, including San Quentin, accused the state of violating the Eighth Amendment with medicine that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. In 2002, Henderson agreed with the inmates, pronouncing California's prison healthcare system unconstitutional.
More than 170,000 inmates crowd California's 33 state prisons. That's about as many people as live in Tempe, Ariz., and it's more than double the number the prisons were built to hold. Inside those bars, one inmate dies every six to seven days because of "deplorable" medical care, according to Henderson. The state settled the case, agreeing to fix the problems. But by mid-2005, after six days of hearings, Henderson concluded the state had made no progress.
Henderson seized control, appointing Sillen to hire new people, change processes and install basic information technology found even in small rural hospitals in the United States. The aim of the receivership (officially the California Prison Health Care Receivership) isn't to offer criminals state-of-the -art health care. It's to do no harm.
In a "Plan of Action" he filed in November, Sillen outlined 22 objectives, from building more physical buildings at various prison sites to piloting a new grievance investigation procedure to installing systemwide IT. Though he devised milestones for each objective at intervals six months to three years out, Sillen didn't envision returning the prison medical system to state control for a decade.
Furthermore, Henderson noted, the receivership "must work more closely at this stage with all stakeholders." While Judge Henderson gave the receiver wide powers to make change and hand the state the bill, the money must be appropriated by state lawmakers. Right now, the state is running a $14.5 billion deficit that halted budget talks between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the legislature for two months last summer Sillen is known to be prickly and confrontational—a style unlikely to persuade state legislators and Schwarzenegger, among others, to come together to support expensive prison overhaul projects. (More from Governor Schwarzenegger on Prison Overcrowding and Parole Proposals). Sillen could not be reached for comment.
A CIO in Charge
Replacing Sillen is Clark Kelso, the former CIO of the state. Kelso, who is also an attorney with a degree in philosophy, has a reputation for collaborating and brokering peace between different groups. He has worked in all three branches of California state government, including a tricky job turning around the state Department of Insurance after a corruption scandal in 2000.
"The reason you have to have the receivership is because the state wasn't able to do it on its own," Kelso notes. "California is in the midst of a very serious budget crisis. No question that there are going to be some tough discussions ahead. I approach those as opportunities for dispute resolution. I'm not going to look for conflict."
Then in February, John Hummel, the receivership CIO, quit. He says the move is unrelated to Kelso's arrival. Hummel returned to Perot Systems as a chief technology officer.
In an interview the day before he resigned, Hummel talked about how his wife, his daughter and his neighbor objected to his work. "People in my own life would come along and say, What are you thinking?" he says. "My wife screamed at me about inmates getting free care."
Why prison inmates are entitled to adequate health care.
However, he says he left not because of any philosophical quandary but, in part, to work with advanced technologies. As to the ethics, Hummel says he was always clear about what he was doing.
"You do not judge people. You treat them. Period."
Kelso says he admires Hummel. "He has an extraordinary capacity and understanding of what good healthcare IT systems look like," Kelso says. Hummel's leaving "is a great loss for the receivership."
Dan Marshall, staff information systems analyst at San Quentin State Prison, manages much of the prison's IT. He has yet to meet Kelso, who spent his first several weeks on the job in the state capital reorganizing the receivership. Kelso let go 10 of the highest-paid people who worked for Sillen, including the CFO and the director of communications, but no one from IT. And while Sillen paid himself $775,000 for less than two years' work, Kelso put his own salary at $224,000.
Marshall knows that some IT plans made by Hummel and Sillen are iffy now. They envisioned the healthcare system running its own network separate from that of the overall department of corrections. But Kelso released a new strategic plan in March that includes aggressive technology deadlines. (See Kelso's Strategic Plan). Kelso is also considering whether running one network for both medical and corrections applications would be faster and cheaper. "The vision of the new people may be different," Marshall allows. "But it'll all go forward." He's confident.
So far he hasn't been told to stop any projects.
An Enterprise on Probation
California citizens consistently vote tough on crime-mandated minimum sentences, three-strikes laws and strict punishment for probation violations. Still, broken-down prisons are just as consistently underfunded and understaffed, state and federal analyses show. And the state overall remains intermittently paralyzed by budget crisis after budget crisis, going on two decades.
About the California Department of Corrections
* Highest-ranking executive: Secretary James Tilton
* IT executive: Joseph Panora, assistant secretary, enterprise information services
The Prisons
* Number of prisons: 33
* Designed capacity: 82,936 inmates
* Population over designed capacity: 194%
* 2007 budget: $8.75 billion
* Staff: 57,641
* Oldest prison: San Quentin, a multiple-security facility built in 1852. Includes the state's only death row. Population exceeds designed capacity by 174%.
* Newest prison: Kern Valley State Prison, a maximum-security facility opened in 2005. Population exceeds designed capacity by 200%.
The receivership has progressed at the prisons where the state had, or could, not. Incompetent doctors, some exposed as unlicensed or under disciplinary action, have been fired. The way care occurs has gotten better; San Quentin's intake process is one example. New construction, with plans for more, is under way at many prisons. Some software, hardware and networks have been upgraded, or in some cases installed for the first time, in various institutions.
The receivership has spent more than $20 million so far, according to a report in February from the state Office of the Inspector General, with about $8.7 million of it going to IT, systemwide, and construction at San Quentin specifically. Maxor has been paid $2.8 million so far, the report says.
But still health care in prisons throughout California "remains below constitutional standards," Henderson wrote when he removed Sillen.
Other courts have noticed. One San Francisco Superior Court judge recently ruled that a jewel thief with Crohn's disease didn't have to go to state prison. He could instead start his 12-year sentence in county jail. The judge, Hummel says, "felt that within 12 years, it was a reasonable thing in treating Crohn's disease that the inmate would die by medical neglect." An appeals court overruled the decision, acknowledging the poor healthcare system but saying one cannot conclude "that all persons with serious medical problems...will in fact receive constitutionally inadequate medical care." A lawyer for the thief told a San Francisco newspaper he plans to appeal.
Meanwhile, the tally of what Henderson calls "needless" death has not dropped. Sixty-six inmates died of preventable or possibly preventable causes in 2006, the latest year for which statistics are available, according to a federal audit. Death row is safer: Just 14 people have been executed in the past 28 years.
© 2008 CXO Media Inc.
Posted by lois at 03:20 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2008
NY Times: American Exception: Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
April 23, 2008
American Exception
Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
By ADAM LIPTAK, Page 1
NY Times
Good maps and graphs at the URL for this article.
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)
San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.
The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)
The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.
The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.
There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.
Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.
Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.
It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.
“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”
No more.
“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”
Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”
Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”
The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)
The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.
“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”
Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.
But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.
People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.
Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.
Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.
Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them “are among the most serious and violent offenders.”
Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.
Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.
Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.
Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.
“Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year in “Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.”
“It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,” Mr. Tonry wrote. “Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.”
The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a role.
“America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility,” Mr. Whitman of Yale wrote. “That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years.”
French-speaking countries, by contrast, have “comparatively mild penal policies,” Mr. Tonry wrote.
Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.
“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)
Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America’s exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.
“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.
From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.
“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”
Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”
There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”
Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.
Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.
Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2008
What if 5.3 Million More Americans Could Vote?
What if 5.3 Million More Americans Could Vote?
By Erika Wood, AlterNet
Posted on April 21, 2008, Printed on April 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82457/
This is a big year for American democracy. Hundreds of thousands of new voters are not only registering, but are actually showing up at the polls. States whose primary races have never counted before are suddenly the center of attention. Voters in Wyoming, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Kentucky, who have long gone ignored during primary season, finally find themselves with a voice and a vote. This year they matter.
Despite this, our democracy still falls far short of its promise to be a government that truly represents the will of its citizens. Across the country there are 5.3 million Americans who are denied the right to vote because of a felony conviction in their past. Nearly 4 million of these people are not in prison; they live, work, pay taxes, and raise families in our communities, but remain disenfranchised for years, often for decades, and sometimes for life.
States vary widely on when they restore voting rights to former prisoners. Maine and Vermont do not disenfranchise people with convictions; even prisoners may vote there. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia disenfranchise people only while they are incarcerated; five states disenfranchise those who are incarcerated or on parole, but allow people on probation to vote; 20 states disenfranchise people in prison, on parole, and on probation; and 10 states permanently disenfranchise some categories of people who have completed their correctional supervision. Kentucky and Virginia are the last two remaining states that permanently disenfranchise all people with felony convictions, unless they apply for and receive individual, discretionary clemency from the governor.
Jim Crow Roots
To fully appreciate how these laws compromise our democracy, it is important to understand their deep roots in the troubled history of American race relations. In the late 1800s these laws spread as part of a larger backlash against the adoption of the Reconstruction Amendments -- the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution -- which ended slavery, granted equal citizenship to freed slaves, and prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
Over time, Southern Democrats sought to solidify their hold on the region by modifying voting laws in ways that would exclude African-Americans from the polls. Despite their newfound eligibility to vote, many freed slaves remained effectively disenfranchised.
Violence and intimidation were rampant. The legal barriers employed -- including literacy tests, residency requirements, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes -- while race-neutral on their face, were intentional barriers to African-American voting.
Felony disenfranchisement laws were a key part of this effort. Between 1865 and 1900, 18 states adopted laws restricting the voting rights of criminal offenders. By 1900, 38 states had some type of felon voting restriction, most of which disenfranchised convicted felons until they received a pardon. At the same time, states expanded the criminal codes to punish offenses that they believed targeted freedmen, including vagrancy, petty larceny, miscegenation, bigamy, and receiving stolen goods. Aggressive arrest and conviction efforts followed, motivated by the practice of "convict leasing," whereby former slaves were convicted of crimes and then leased out to work the very plantations and factories from which they had ostensibly been freed. Thus targeted criminalization and felony disenfranchisement combined to produce both practical re-enslavement and the legal loss of voting rights, usually for life, which effectively suppressed the political power of African Americans for decades.
The disproportionate impact of felony disenfranchisement laws on people of color continues to this day. Nationwide, 13 percent of African-American men have lost the right to vote, a rate that is seven times the national average. In eight states, more than 15 percent of African-Americans cannot vote due to a felony conviction, and four of those states -- Arizona, Iowa, Kentucky, and Nebraska -- disenfranchise more than 20 percent of their African-American voting-age population.
These statistics mirror stark racial disparities in the criminal justice system. A recent study by the Pew Center on the States revealed that 1 in 100 Americans is now behind bars. That figure is startling enough, but the study also reports that 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 is in prison.
The Ripple Effect of Disenfranchisement
Felony disenfranchisement laws do not only impact those who lose their voting rights. Entire communities lose their political capital when their citizens cannot vote. Denying the vote to one person has a ripple effect, dramatically decreasing the political power of urban and minority communities.
Evidence suggests that disenfranchising the head of a household can discourage his or her entire family from civic participation. Many people's first experience with voting or political engagement comes through their parents -- by joining them at a town meeting, attending a school board hearing, or accompanying them into the voting booth. A parent can provide critical "how-to's" of voting, including such basics as how to register and where to vote. In fact, of the various factors included in the study, the parent's political participation had the greatest effect on the child's initial decision to vote.
Andres Idarraga, who recently had his right to vote restored by a recent change to Rhode Island's law, explained, "coming from a family in which voting had rarely, if ever, been discussed, this was a new beginning."
Throughout the country, minority communities have lost political influence thanks to felony disenfranchisement laws. In the last 25 years, as incarceration rates skyrocketed and African-Americans were sent to prison at a rate seven times that of whites, the political power of minority communities has been decimated. It's a simple equation: communities with high rates of people with felony convictions have fewer votes to cast. Consequently, all residents of these communities, not just those with convictions, lose their political influence.
What's more, even when people with felony convictions are eligible to vote, they are often de facto disenfranchised due to bureaucratic barriers. In 2003, Alabama could not process more than 80 percent of applications within statutory time limits, and completely failed to respond to dozens of applications. And in New York, Brennan Center surveys have repeatedly uncovered widespread confusion and misinformation among elections officials. In 2005, one third of local election boards mistakenly advised that people could not vote while on probation, and many illegally required unnecessary documentation before allowing people to register.
Dispelling Disenfranchisement Myths, Restoring Democracy
Fortunately, there are signs of progress. Advocates, policy-makers, and some unusual allies have made great strides towards restoring voting rights, and have built significant national momentum towards building a more just and inclusive democracy.
Critics of voting restoration argue that disenfranchisement is an appropriate punishment for breaking the law. But in fact, many in law enforcement have come to believe that felony disenfranchisement laws do more harm than good. The American Probation and Parole Association recently released a resolution calling for restoration of voting rights upon completion of prison, finding that "disenfranchisement laws work against the successful reentry of offenders." Many realize that, in terms of public safety, bringing people into the political process makes them stakeholders, helping to steer former offenders away from future crimes. As one Kentucky prosecutor wrote, "Voting shows a commitment to the future of the community." Branding people as political outsiders by barring them from the polls disrupts reentry into the community and does not do anything to keep people from re-offending. There is absolutely no credible evidence showing that continuing to disenfranchise people after release from prison serves any legitimate law enforcement purpose. Disenfranchisement has nothing to do with being "tough on crime."
Since 1997, 16 states have reformed their laws to expand the franchise or ease voting rights restoration procedures. Recent reforms include an executive order signed by then-Governor Tom Vilsack in Iowa which restored voting rights to 80,000 Iowa citizens on Independence Day, 2005. On Election Day 2006, Rhode Island voters were the first in the country to approve a state constitutional amendment authorizing automatic restoration of voting rights to people as soon as they are released from prison. The Rhode Island Department of Corrections became a voter registration agency, and now every individual is handed a voter registration form on the day they leave prison. In April 2007, Florida Governor Charlie Crist issued new clemency rules ending that state's policy of permanent disenfranchisement for all felony offenders. Also in April 2007, Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley signed a law streamlining the state's complicated restoration system by automatically restoring voting rights upon completion of sentence.
This law also eliminated the requirement that people in Maryland pay off any court-imposed fees and fines before being able to register to vote.
And just last month, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear eliminated some of the burdensome requirements his predecessor imposed on people trying to get their voting rights restored. People with felony convictions are disenfranchised for life in Kentucky and can only regain their right to vote by receiving clemency from the governor.
Beshear's predecessor had required all applicants to provide three character references and write an essay explaining why they should get their right to vote back. While Kentucky still has a long way to go, Beshear's executive action was certainly an important step.
Still, millions of U.S. citizens continue to be denied the right to vote. This year, Congress has decided to address the issue on a national level. Senator Russ Feingold and Representative John Conyers will soon introduce the Democracy Restoration Act, a bill that seeks to restore voting rights in federal elections to all Americans who have been released from prison and are living in the community. In February, Senator Feingold, joined by former Republican Congressman and Bush I cabinet member, Jack Kemp, wrote, "once the criminal justice system has determined that [people] are ready to return to the community, they should receive the rights and responsibilities that come with that status, and should not continue to be relegated to second-class citizenship."
The energy and optimism spreading across our country this election season is palpable. But our democracy stands for nothing if not the fundamental tenet that each citizen is entitled to one vote, and each vote counts the same regardless of who casts it. The promise of our democracy will never be realized if 4 million Americans remain disenfranchised. It is time to end this last blanket barrier to the ballot box.
Erika Wood is Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law where she directs the Right to Vote project. Her most recent publication is "Restoring the Right to Vote."
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/82457/
Posted by lois at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)
Remembering Reproductive Rights for Prisoners
AlterNet
Remembering Reproductive Rights for Prisoners
By Pamela Merritt, RH Reality Check
Posted on April 3, 2008, Printed on April 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/81166/
The recent news that the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that incarcerated women have a constitutional right to access abortion services caught my attention. It highlights the issue of reproductive rights for incarcerated women and reminds us that women are the fastest growing part of America's prison population.
2,319,258 people are incarcerated in America. The staggering reality is that 1 in 100 adults are in prison. A Pew Center on the States report found that, although men are still ten times more likely to be in jail, the numbers of incarcerated women are growing at a faster pace. Among women ages 35-39 years old, one in 265 are incarcerated. The racial break-down in that age group shows that one in 355 are white women, one in 297 are Hispanic women and one in 100 are black women.
Within these numbers are mothers, sisters, daughters and friends all facing the variety of reproductive health issues any woman "on the outside" may face. The only difference is that they face them while incarcerated with prison policies being weighed against their reproductive rights.
In her article Women in Prison, Pam Adams explores the work of psychologist Susan George, who studied the impact of incarceration on Illinois families. The article points out that the number of Illinois women incarcerated has nearly tripled in a decade, with many of those arrested as a result of incidents related to drug addiction and poverty, and with histories of sexual abuse and physical abuse. Many women had parents who were incarcerated and children of incarcerated parents are five times more likely to go to jail.
Mentor programs like Amachi Pittsburgh attempt to break the cycle of multi-generation incarceration. Amachi, modeled after Big Brothers Big Sisters with a target of children ages 4 to 18, is a faith-based program that partners with local churches to match at risk children with mentors; the goal being to break the cycle where the children of incarcerated adults become incarcerated adults themselves. Though the mentor programs have seen success, communities and families are still paying the price for America's reluctance to fight the war on poverty, reform drug policies and support risk reduction programs with the same passion shown the building of new prisons.
Among the women arrested for drug related offenses, drug addicted pregnant women are also targeted for incarceration based on drug use during pregnancy. In 2007 I was privileged to blog the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) Summit and hear the stories of women who have faced incarceration for using drugs during pregnancy. NAPW "seeks to protect the rights and human dignity of all women, particularly pregnant and parenting women and those who are most vulnerable including low income women, women of color, and drug-using women." Through their work NAPW gives a voice to women who are targeted for arrest and prosecution because of addiction and shines a light on the need for sane drug policies, affordable and quality healthcare and treatment options for pregnant women.
Women who continue their pregnancies behind bars face the challenge of poor nutrition, stress and the prospect of parenting from prison. Amie Newman's article Pregnant Behind Bars: The Prison Doula Project highlighted the work of The Birth Attendants who provide doulas to assist pregnant inmates. The doulas provide physical, emotional and psychological support before, during and after the birth of the baby. The article points out that some women are shackled during childbirth and that there are few resources available for keeping mother and child together after birth.
As activists we are constantly challenged to look beyond our world and connect studies with reality and policy to communities. One challenge before us is to vigilantly defend the reproductive rights of incarcerated women who remain vulnerable to the denial of access to abortion services. We are also challenged to include youth at risk due to the incarceration of a parent in our struggle. These young people need us to be mentors, participate in community programs and continue to demand the empowerment of comprehensive sex education.
Our struggle for reproductive freedom is key to the social justice movement and it must include the women within the one in 100 adults incarcerated in America.
Pamela Merritt is a staff writer for RH Reality Check, a contributor to the Shakespeare's Sister blog, and a featured contributor on National Public Radio’s (NPR) “Tell Me More” with Michel Martin. Her work has been published in the Chicago Sun-Times, on Salon.com and featured in Salon.com's Broadsheet. Pamela serves as PAC Chair for PROMO (Missouri’s Statewide LGBT Equality Rights Group), is a mentor through Big Sisters and teaches various classes at several shelters in St. Louis, Missouri. She also writes and maintains her personal blog.
© 2008 RH Reality Check All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/81166/
Posted by lois at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)
FL: Drug Treatment A Sensible Approach
South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com
Drug treatment a sensible approach
April 20, 2008
By Mark Fontaine
As legislators wrestle with strategies to solve Florida's budget crisis, it is prudent that the state's limited resources be spent wisely. One of the smart investments the state has supported is community-based drug treatment for offenders on the verge of prison admission and drug treatment in prison for inmates on their way back into the community.
According to the Department of Corrections, 65 percent of the 100,000 inmates in prison and 59.7 percent of the 153,000 offenders on probation have a substance abuse problem and need treatment. The state has contracted with community substance abuse providers for 14 years with positive results, the data showing that prisoners who received institutional treatment returned to prison at a lower rate than those who didn't receive treatment. The success rate is even greater for probationers who received community-based treatment outside of prison.
Drug treatment is not a soft-on-crime approach, but rather a smart-on-crime approach. There is significant research showing that offender drug treatment works, and is one of a variety of strategies that have been used across the nation to flatten the intake of new inmates. Data from the Florida Department of Corrections validates that drug treatment is a cost-effective intervention for offenders as it reduces prison admissions and recidivism.
Another smart approach is the cost-savings benefit of substance abuse treatment. Already, this potential savings was compromised when, in November, 309 community substance abuse offender beds and 525 institutional drug treatment slots were eliminated. For $9,400, a probationer with a substance abuse problem was provided drug treatment, random urinalysis, job placement and supervision. By cutting the beds, the same offender who now goes to prison will cost taxpayers $45,000.
These numbers demonstrate that substance abuse treatment, either community-based or within an institution, is a smart, long-term investment for the state of Florida.
Next year alone, the state of Florida has committed $715 million dollars for the construction of new prisons and to open beds that are already constructed. Within the next five years, it is anticipated that there will be a 30 percent increase of new prisoners entering the state corrections system. The cost to build the 17 new prisons needed to house those inmates will total $1.7 billion. Considering the enormous fiscal impact over the next five years, shouldn't we be seeking cost-savings methods now?
In the next two weeks, legislators will decide whether to eliminate or continue these treatment programs, which amounts to only 1.4 percent of the total Department of Corrections budget. Lawmakers have the duty to spend state resources wisely. As funds diminish, strategic business thinking demands new and innovative approaches to investing.
Drug treatment for offenders is one approach to long-term savings in the midst of a year in budget crisis. Not only will it save money, it also has the additional benefit of saving lives.
Mark P. Fontaine is executive director of the Florida Alcohol and Drug Abuse Association.
sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/sfl-forum20drugabusesbapr20,0,3285331.story
Copyright © 2008, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Posted by lois at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)
OK: $300 million bond package for prison "infrastructure"
Sun April 20, 2008
Keeping up the world behind bars
By Julie Bisbee
Staff Writer, The Oklahoman
Many of Oklahoma's prisons are filling up and need improvements. As facilities age, they need costly repairs that the state Corrections Department might not be able to afford without a cash infusion from the Legislature.
There are nearly 25,000 people in the Corrections Department system. The state has the highest per capita rate of women in jail, and the third-highest per capita rate of men in jail.
The number of people involved in the state's prison system is projected to grow in the next few years, according to a recent third-party audit of the state's correctional system. In Oklahoma, people with felonies go on to the state prison system.
In other states, people serving short sentences for felonies often are held in jails at the county level, said Justin Jones, director of the state Corrections Department.
Outsourcing inmates
The growing number of prisoners also means the state needs more maximum-security prison beds, Jones said.
To meet that need, the state is looking to privately run prisons, Jones said. The state could pay anywhere from $62 to $65 a day to house a maximum security inmate in a private prison. About 28 percent of the Oklahoma's prison population is housed in private prisons in-state, Jones said.
There is also a need for lower- security space, Jones said. The state is working to address that need and is using inmate labor to turn old kitchens and old storage into living spaces for inmates.
"We've decided to put our destiny into our own hands,” Jones said.
The department that employs about 4,700 people is also asking state legislators to sign off on a $300 million bond package that would help update facilities systemwide.
"We have a decaying infrastructure that needs major investments,” Jones said. "We need to update kitchens, add new boilers, or new heating and air, those kinds of things.”
http://newsok.com/article/3229371/1208614457
Posted by lois at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)
RI: Debtor's Prison
go to reinvestinjustice.org to learn more and see video testimony of people that have in debtor's prison in RI
Skipped debt hearings put 2,500 in ACI
Providence Journal, Tuesday, April 22, 2008
BY EDWARD FITZPATRICK
PROVIDENCE — Nearly 2,500 people were sent to the state prison last year because they failed to appear at hearings regarding court debts, such as fines and court costs.
With Rhode Island facing a big budget deficit and a swelling prison population, that highlights the need to give judges clearer guidelines for waiving court debts and determining if people have the ability to pay, according to a new report by the Rhode Island Family Life Center, a Providence nonprofit group that advocates for and supports people who are leaving prison.
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"While debtors' prisons are thought to be a thing of the past, they still exist in Rhode Island," Family Life Center Executive Director Sol Rodriguez said. "People with criminal records who are trying to get their lives together need support, not a system which throws them back in jail for having trouble paying court fees."
The report found people were sent to the Adult Correctional Institutions 2,446 times in 2007 for missing "ability to pay" hearings, spending an average of three days and two nights behind bars. While most were released after a few days, "several hundred a year spend a week or more just for court debt," the report said.
"Overall, there is a haste to incarcerate individuals for court debt in the state which causes unnecessary, damaging jail time, is an inefficient use of state finances, and disrupts people's lives," the report said. "Incarceration for court debt interrupts medical and rehabilitation treatment, causes individuals to be fired from employment, disrupts families and disrupts housing situations."
The report urges passage of bills introduced by Rep. J. Patrick O'Neill, D-Pawtucket, and Sen. Harold M. Metts, D-Providence. House Bill 8093 and Senate Bill 2234 call for holding hearings within 48 hours to gauge a person's ability to pay, using a financial assessment form and spelling out the types of government assistance that constitute evidence of a limited ability to pay.
The report also recommends using a variety of collection methods before sending people to prison and slashing the warrant fee from $125 to $25 for people brought into court on a warrant.
"One of the most effective ways to avoid this problem is to create a more reasonable system of court fees," Family Life Center policy researcher Nick Horton said. "Rhode Island far and away has higher fees than other New England states. That's the source of this cycle of debt."
Horton said most people do pay the fees and fines imposed by courts, but "for people who can't pay, there needs to be a more concerted effort to waive fines and fees rather than to continue trying to wring blood from a stone."
Overall, 66 percent of the people jailed in connection with court debt were either first-time offenders or had showed up three consecutive times for prior ability-to-pay hearings, the report said. "This contradicts the notion that judges only use incarceration on people that are serially delinquent," the report said.
So what would be the incentive to pay fines and court fees if judges began waiving them with greater frequency? "The idea is that judges consider the person's ability to pay and payment history, and in cases where it's clear the person is unable to pay, judges would eliminate or reduce fines," Horton replied. "So it's not as if they are being wiped out across the board. And if there is an ability to pay, they will still be expected to pay, but they won't be incarcerated unnecessarily. There is still incentive to pay because the fines could increase, and ultimately they could still end up in jail."
The report focuses in part on District Court in Providence, saying that court processes the most cases in the state and deals with the majority of people who owe court debts.
When asked to respond to the report and the legislation, Chief District Court Judge Albert E. DeRobbio said people aren't being locked up because they didn't pay court costs; rather, they're being incarcerated for short periods for failing to obey court orders to appear in court, he said.
"What are we supposed to do? Have a new set of rules that you don't enforce?" DeRobbio asked. "We'd lose all kinds of credibility if we just said, 'OK, ignore it. They didn't show up. We hope they show up next time.' "
District Court judges "don't deprive people of their freedom for no reason at all or failure to pay," DeRobbio said. "Judges of this court are very conscientious about deprivation of liberties, especially about an ability to pay."
As for provisions in the bills, DeRobbio said that if the proposal is "to have an immediate hearing on an ability to pay, you better get about 10 more judges because it's going to take time to fill out the forms and check the background of finances and expenses. If you do that in every case and do it right away, you'll need special calendars and special judges."
DeRobbio noted the state already knocks $150 off a person's court fees and fines for every day they spend in prison in connection with such court debt.
The report said that since that credit jumped to $150 per day in 2006, the number of people held at the ACI in connection with court debt has decreased — going from an average of 24 people a day to an average 18 a day.
But Horton said, "There has to be a better way" because under the current system, the state is losing money twice: by paying an estimated $95 per day to hold a person at the ACI's Intake Service Center and by reducing court debt by $150 per day.
The report — available at riflc.org/pagetool/reports/CourtDebt.pdf — said its recommendations would "decrease the number of unnecessary and costly incarcerations, reduce the burden of fines on the indigent, and lower the prison population."
Rhode Island's prison population reached an all-time high of 4,000 last year, and state officials have been weighing proposals to trim it to avoid reaching a court-imposed population cap and to save money. The state is facing a projected $384-million budget deficit in the coming fiscal year. And the prison population, which typically increases in the spring and summer, stood at 3,851 on Friday, spokeswoman Tracey Z. Poole said.
"Our state can no longer afford to unnecessarily incarcerate people for court debt," Horton said. "There simply isn't room at the prison."
The report said that if all those jailed in connection with court debt had been released within 48 hours last year, the state would have saved about $200,000 and lowered its awaiting-trial population by about 13 people per day.
Poole said the Department of Corrections has taken no position on the proposed legislation. "Anything that has the effect of reducing commitments will affect the population, but how that translates into cost savings is more complicated," she said. "These people are here for very short periods of time, and they are coming and going. So we're not going to be able to shut down a unit. You have to have a critical mass in order to close down a unit, which would result in significant cost savings."
When asked for reaction, courts spokesman Craig N. Berke said, "There is a process currently in place to assess a defendant's ability to pay, but it's entirely within the legislature's prerogative to amend that process."
Assistant public defender Michael A. DiLauro, who is listed as an adviser on the report, said, "How much money does it cost to attempt to collect money from people by incarcerating them and how much is realized from it? That's a conversation we need to have. We know what the answer is: these people can't pay, so they stay in jail 7, 10, 14 days, and how much does that cost? There's no way you can tell me this is an efficient, businesslike, common-sense way of doing things."
DiLauro said the bills do not mandate that judges waive court debts. "It doesn't bind the judge's hand," he said. "It just says that's a factor."
DiLauro said it makes sense to use a financial assessment form to gauge a person's ability to pay fines and court costs. "It's a comprehensive, standardized way of doing things," he said.
Posted by lois at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2008
KS: Actor tries to bring culture to inmates in Lansing prison’s mental health unit
Sunday, Apr 20, 2008
Actor tries to bring culture to inmates in Lansing prison’s mental health unit
By ROBERT TRUSSELL
The Kansas City Star
It’s another bone-chilling Tuesday afternoon.
Sheets of snow sweep across I-70 as Heidi Stubblefield makes the weekly drive to the Lansing Correctional Institute, the biggest prison in Kansas. It looks like she’s driving into a blizzard.
“Unfortunately, the people I teach don’t get snow days,” Stubblefield deadpans as she motors west.
Stubblefield, 29, is one of the best young actors in Kansas City. She’s energetic and serious, with a quirky sense of humor and hair that occasionally changes colors. Today she’s blond.
Once a week she has to hold her own with a handful of inmates in Lansing’s mental health unit.
They struggle with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and other problems. Some of them have spent huge chunks of their lives in institutions of one kind or another. At times Stubblefield feels like she’s herding cats.
“I have a really interesting thing for them to do today and I’m not 100 percent certain they’re gonna go for it,” Stubblefield says. “They’re criminals. They’re not fools.”
Stubblefield works for Arts in Prison, a Kansas City, Kan. nonprofit that sponsors classes in prisons and youth facilities. Arts in Prison is best known for the East Hill Singers, a male choir made up of inmates, former convicts and members of the community. In addition to the choir and other music classes, Arts in Prison sponsors visual art and creative writing taught by volunteers.
Last year the group hired herStubblefield to develop new programs. The prison music therapist envisioned a performance that blended music and theater and turned to Stubblefield for help. Theater enhances language skills. Theater requires teamwork. When these inmates get out — and they all likely will — exposure to the arts will equip them to interact with people in a positive way.
Or so the thinking goes.
“The goal is that they don’t end up back in Lansing,” Stubblefield says. “It’s all about empathy.”
Stubblefield began with a class of eight inmates in October. She lost one to the “the hole” (officially called the Segregation Unit) because of disciplinary problems. Another was released. Some just stopped coming. By February she was down to four with a collective criminal history that includes burglary, forgery and, in every case, sex crimes.
This snowy afternoon Stubblefield makes her way through series of security checks, picks up her electronic “panic button,” heads down a frozen sidewalk adjacent to the yard and enters the maximum security building.
She signs in, heads upstairs and asks a guard to unlock one final door. At last she’s in her classroom, which is generic as it gets: fluorescent lights, long tables topped with fake wood veneer, folding chairs and chalkboards. Written on one board are guidelines for getting along:
Show respect to each other by
No interrupting
No sidetalk
No put downs
No swearing Then the guys show up. A little after 1 p.m., the prisoners start coming in.
Michael McKinnis, 28, walks with a side-to-side swing, his shoulders pumping up and down as though he’s trying to keep his balance on a rocking surface. When he laughs he barks. On the outside he has three children by three different mothers. He’s in prison for indecent liberties with a 15-year-old.
Kenneth Groat shuffles, dragging his feet like a teenager told to clean up his room. He’s 23 but looks like an overgrown 10-year-old in his oversized blue prison denims. He carries a half smile that can morph into a sneer and speaks with a high tenor. He grew up in Chicago but came to Kansas to live with relatives. When he was 19 he was arrested in McPherson for having sex with a minor.
Severo James Sanchez, 25 moves silently, anonymously, his face largely concealed by a beard and mustache, hair hanging to mid-chest and a stocking cap pulled to his eyebrows. His voice is low and relaxed., never loud. Sanchez was a burglar. He began breaking into schools and businesses because there was little else to do in Scott City, his hometown. He says he enjoyed the challenge of beating an alarm system.
Jerry Noblitt is 28. He moves gracefully and talks quickly. He has a sandpaper voice and an easy laugh. Unlike the others, he wears a yellow jumpsuit — part of his punishment for disobeying a direct order. He’s in a bad mood because he just got word that his favorite aunt was brain dead after an overdose of methadone and PCP. He’s in for forgery.
Today’s session begins with writing exercises. Stubblefield distributes pencil and paper.
“I love writing stories,” Groat says to no one in particular. “I love poetry, stories, all that stuff. I love makin’ stuff up.”
First Stubblefield has them write without forethought, scribbling the first thing that comes to mind. Later she has them rewrite nursery rhymes to be sad or happy.
With a straight face McKinnis says: “Can I ask a question? How the hell can a cow jump over the moon?”
Somebody cracks a blonde joke and Stubblefield makes them rewrite that to be tragic. Stubblefield puts up with lots of blonde jokes from these guys.
Later she has them write haikus.
“I’ll be here till Christmas tryin’ to write haikus,” McKinnis says.
McKinnis knows how he feels about writing. He hates it.
“Thank goodness,” he says when Stubblefield tells them the writing exercises are over. He pushes his pencil away to arm’s length.
Stubblefield’s plan is this: She wants to try an exercise from the Theatre of the Oppressed, a style developed by Brazilian Augusto Boal partially in response to repressive regimes in Latin America.
One of Boal’s concepts was that the audience knows as much as the actors and should help create theater.
“Have you ever felt oppressed?” Stubblefield asks her inmates.
To her quiet amazement, theythese four men serving prison sentences aren’t sure what the word means. She explains it: People are telling you what to do, limiting your movement, keeping you down.
“Oh, like a juvenile detention center?” says Noblitt.
Stubblefield wants them to do some “people sculpting.” One inmate will place the others in a physical arrangement that somehow suggests a narrative or shows us a picture of oppression.
Groat is selected to be the sculptor. He tells McKinnis to sit at one end of a long table at one end of the classroom. Then he tells Sanchez to sit at the opposite end of the table. Then he sits in a chair facing “the audience.” How, Stubblefield asks, does that illustrate oppression?
“They ain’t got no food and they’re sittin’ there with their plates in front of them,” Groat explains.
A moment later he articulates what’s already on his face: “I’m confused.”
Stubblefield decides to go with the narrative. She tells them to improvise monologues but say them silently to themselves for several minutes.
“Now I want it to come out of your mouth,” she says.
Sanchez and McKinnis begin blurting their “dialogue” — “I’m hungry,” “I ain’t got no food,” “I’m gonna starve,” “We’re gonna die,” “Where we gonna find food at?”
McKinnon looks at Groat and says: “You called us up and said come on over but there ain’t no food.”
After two more exercises the 90 minutes are up and Stubblefield is back on the highway.
“I’m trying to guide them through telling a story if we can figure out what story to tell,” she says as she heads south on K-7. “At the end of the day they have to make something inherently theatrical and if they succeed I think they’ll feel pretty cool about themselves.”
Now Stubblefield has to prepare for her other job. In a few hours she’ll be in lingerie running in and out of doors on the stage of the New Theatre in a comedy about a politician with hanky-panky on his mind. * * * A week later Jerry Noblitt stays late after theater class and says he turned 18 in the Wyandotte County Jail after he was busted in a group home for having sex with a younger kid.
Noblitt has been in Lansing since 2005 and expects to get out in six months. He plans to go back to his hometown of Coffeyville to live with his mother. He never finished high school because he went through so many group and foster homes.
Noblitt never thought much about theater until he got into this class.
“At first it was just a sign-up-to-get-out-of-my-cell thing. Then I fell in love with the group.”
Now he’s toying with the notion of being an actor.
“I’ve always been wanting to go to Kansas City and see the theaters and stuff,” he says. “I’ve been telling everybody that. And I’ve even told my mom — that when I get off parole I was gonna try to do something like that. I also want to get into cosmetology.”
Noblitt says he suffers from “severe” depression and takes three kinds of medication. And, he says, he has a “gender disorder.” “I believe that I’m a female on the inside,” he says. “I know I’m a male but I believe I’m a female. And I’m bipolar.”
Severo Sanchez has been in prison since 2004. He hopes to be out by November.
Unlike Noblitt, Sanchez has stage experience. In high school he played the male lead in “Romeo and Juliet” and a coach driver in “Cinderella.”
These days he’s more interested in drawing and painting. But he likes Stubblefield’s class. He says he’s learning social skills.
“It gives an outlet for expression,” he says. “It relieves our anger in a positive way and helps us with depression and stuff like that.”
Sanchez says that in childhood he suffered from depression. Now he takes no medication, but he wants to stay in the mental health unit. He doesn’t want to mix with the general prison population.
“Too much drama,” he says.
* * * Some actors wait tables to supplement their acting income. Some are nannies. Some do office temp work. Some are fortunate enough to work in theater writing press releases or building sets. They need the money to supplement their meager acting income.
Stubblefield is different. She’s lucky. Her “day job” allows her to use her theater training to make a difference in the world. Or at least try.to make the attempt.
Stubblefield grew up in Kansas City, Kan. She was trained as clown in the European tradition at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater in California.
“Out of Order,” the comedy about the naughty senator, opened at the New Theatre in November, a month after she began teaching the Lansing classes. For more than two months her weekly routine broke down this way:
On Tuesday and Wednesday mornings she taughtwould teach at-risk teens at the Alternative Resource Center in Kansas City and performed shows at the New Theatre Tuesday night, Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening.
On Thursday and Friday mornings she taughtwould teach teens at the Langford House, a residential facility in Lee’s Summit, and performed each night. Then she performedwould perform a Saturday-night show (and sometimes a Saturday matinee) and two shows on Sunday. On Monday, the traditional day off for actors, she caughtwould catch up at the Arts in Prison office. Then the cycle startedwould start all over again.
She got hooked on “Lockdown,” the MSNBC documentary series about maximum security prisons, but her packed schedule doesn’t allow much downtime. “This is just how I function,” she says. “If I stop, I’ll fall apart. The momentum keeps me going.”
* * *
McKinnis has news when he arrives for class. “We was in lockdown for three days,” he tells Stubblefield. “We had a fight in chow. Big old fight.”
Stubblefield’s goal today is a different kind of drama. She distributes one of William Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies to the guys and begins going through it, line by line, word by word, helping them to find meaning in 400-year-old verse. She tells them to take turns reading. Noblitt kicks it off.
“To be or not to be, that is the question,” Noblitt reads, uncertain of the correct phrasing. “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them . . .”
They go through it once, then twice, stumbling at times on the unfamiliar words.
About midway through the soliloquy Stubblefield stops them.
“I like it,” Noblitt says.
“Ok, good,” she says. “Why do you like it?
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because it gives you more vocabulary . . .”
Stubblefield wants to know what they think it means.
“What are we talking about?” she asks. “What do you think’s happening here?”
“Suicide?” Noblitt hazards.
“You’re right! But why do you think so?”
“I don’t know. I’m just guessing.”
Noblitt says he figured it was about suicide when he stumbled over the phrase “mortal coil,” even though he didn’t know what it meant.
“It sounds like you’re killing yourself or something,” he says.
She has them start again, from the top.
`“Does anybody know what that first line means?” she says.
“It’s like a poem,” McKinnis says.
“Anybody have an idea? If you could put it in plain talk?”
“Nope,” says McKinnis.
“Maybe it’s sayin’ that you’re tryin’ too hard to be something maybe,” Noblitt suggests. McKinnis stares at his sheet.
“Did you make this up?” he asks Stubblefield.
“Naw, this is ‘Hamlet,’ man,” Groat says. “This is Shakespeare.”
Gradually they grasp the sense of it: the choice of ending life, which will end torment but the good things, too.
“You ain’t got no more pain,” Groat observes.
“No more sufferin’,” McKinnis says.
Noblitt adds: “You don’t feel nothin’ when you’re dead — do you?”
Stubblefield gets the guys on their feet. She wants to begin hammering out the beginnings of a performance. She assigns words from the soliloquy to each inmate.
She begins arranging the guys like mannequins. One sits in a chair looking forward. Another has to walk in a pattern that requires him to step around the man in the chair. At one point McKinnis and Sanchez have to walk in diagonal crossing patterns muttering their lines, each one a fragment of Shakespeare’s famous speech.
“Can I just mumble and pretend I’m saying it?” Sanchez asks.
“No! This is serious.”
Stubblefield has them run through the routine once again, making adjustments here and there. She wants them to remember their blocking so they can work on it in the coming weeks.
“Unfortunately,” says Sanchez, “I don’t think I can forget it.”
Stubblefield wants to keep going.
“OK, let’s add another layer,” she says.
Somebody groans.
“I reserve the right to say ‘one more time’ as many times as I want to,” Stubblefield says.
* * * Kenny Groat and Michael McKinnis play chess almost every day. Groat says he suffers from a “depression disorder.” His sentence began in 2003 and he’s got five years to go. He was convicted of aggravated criminal sodomy with a child younger than 14.
Groat writes songs. But he doesn’t play an instrument. He makes the songs up in his head.
“Every song I’ve done so far, I’ve been told they’re good enough to be country hits,” he says. “You know, I could possibly get a singing career, whatever.”
When he gets out he wants to go back to school to study “broadcasting or something.” He’s taken two English classes in Lansing. He wants to earn an associate’s degree.
McKinnis is from Winfield. He says he’s bipolar. In high school he did sports, not theater. On the first day of Stubblefield’s class he was nervous.
“Oh, man. I didn’t know what to say to her,” he says. “I didn’t know if she was gonna be nice to us, mean to us.”
McKinnis says his mother gave him up for adoption but he grew up in foster homes. He misses his children.
McKinnis lived with a woman, the mother of one of his kids, for two years before he was arrested.
“When I got locked up I told her to go on with her life,” he says. “Don’t wait on me.” * * *
It’s another Tuesday afternoon. Stubblefield is working hard but the guys aren’t into it.
“Can I just sit here and watch today?” McKinnis asks. “I got a tooth pulled.”
Stubblefield tries to teach the guys acting techniques. She shows them physical performance techniques. She plows ahead, determined to make something out her “To be or not to be” performance.
“We’re trying to create a rhythm, not only with our words but with our movements, with the shapes that we make in the relationship to each other,” she says.
The guys follow Stubblefield’s instructions but they don’t understand the words. They don’t understand the performance. They don’t know what to do when Stubblefield asks them to create characters for themselves or to decide where all of this is taking place.
“Will you stop looking at your hair?” she says to Noblitt at one point. “You can look at your hair at 2:30.”
She wants them to understand what acting is — that it’s making a connection, finding “that invisible thing happening between people.”
She walks them through the blocking of their performance, trying to get them to think beyond their words and actions.
“OK, we’re gonna start from the beginning,” she says.
“Oh, man,” says Groat.
The work continues. Noblitt reads his part of the soliloquy. He pronounces the words correctly. But something’s missing.
“Do you have any idea what you’re saying?” Stubblefield asks. “I’m just curious.”
Hours later Stubblefield makes a phone call to express her frustration. Never, she says, had she seen them act so immature. The performance she has in mind may never materialize.
“I just wanted to create something pretty and contemplative,” she says, sounding a bit wistful.
* * * It’s a long winter. February bleeds into March, March into April. Trees begin sprouting blossoms but most days are cold. The wind still bites.
Somebody erases “no” from the guidelines for getting along on the chalk board; now the message reads “show respect by interruption, sidetalk, put downs, swearing.” Tired of the blond jokes, Stubblefield dyes her hair auburn. Noblitt gets in trouble, first for fighting, then for engaging in a “lewd act.” He misses a few weeks of class.
By early April she’s finished up her programs with at-risk teens in Kansas City and Lee’s Summit. On April 8 she taught her last class at Lansing before a month-long break. Now she’s in rehearsals for a comedy at the American Heartland Theatre. She plays a chamber maid.
When she goes back to Lansing the class will be opened up to more inmates. Once again she’ll try to instill something from classical theater into their heads. She wants to show them they can go on a journey.
“That was always my first idea and I refuse to let it die,” she says.
http://www.kansascity.com/782/v-print/story/580752.html
Posted by lois at 09:05 PM | Comments (0)
Lawsuits test crackdown on sex criminals
Friday, April 18, 2008
Lawsuits test crackdown on sex criminals
By John Gramlich, Stateline.org Staff Writer
A death-penalty case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court this week marks the latest constitutional challenge to an ongoing, nationwide crackdown on sex criminals.
From California to North Carolina, a flood of litigation has accompanied an expansion in the scope and severity of penalties imposed by local, state and federal lawmakers on those who commit sex crimes.
Penalties for molesters and other sex criminals have toughened considerably in recent years and now include execution in at least five states, chemical castration in eight states and the use of technology to monitor offenders’ every move in more than half the states.
In some instances, punitive measures are limited only by lawmakers’ imaginations. In Louisiana, for example, a proposal being debated this legislative session would forbid offenders from wearing masks on Halloween or Mardi Gras. In New Jersey, a new state law prevents molesters and others from surfing the Internet unless it is for work-related purposes; Florida and Nevada have similar laws.
The recent legal challenges take aim at laws that sex criminals say violate constitutional guarantees, including privacy, due process and protection from cruel and unusual punishment. Supporters of the laws say they are necessary to protect children from predators who are capable of committing brutal crimes.
One such brutal crime, the rape of a young child, is at the center of a closely watched case from Louisiana argued April 16 at the nation’s highest court. The justices heard an appeal from a 44-year-old inmate who claims it is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual for the state to execute him for raping his then-8-year-old stepdaughter a decade ago.
Lawyers for the inmate, Patrick Kennedy, say the death penalty for child rapists is cruel and unusual, in part because only four other states (Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas) allow it, while similar laws in Florida and Georgia may be invalid after court or legislative action. They stress that only Louisiana actually has sentenced child rapists to death, and only in two cases, and that the Supreme Court already has struck down the death penalty for those who rape adults.
“Evolving standards of decency,” however, should allow for the execution of such criminals, lawyers for Louisiana counter, noting that child rapists are universally acknowledged as being among the worst of the worst.
Attorneys general from nine states (Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and Washington) filed a brief supporting Louisiana’s side in the case. Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt (R), who has pushed for the death penalty for child rapists, joined legislators from his state in a separate brief supporting Louisiana.
Despite the attention drawn by the Louisiana case, the ultimate punishment is far from the only punishment that sex criminals are challenging as excessive.
In Georgia and Ohio, sex criminals have successfully challenged residency restrictions that forbid them from living within 1,000 feet of schools or other common gathering places for children. California’s highest court also is considering whether to strike down zoning laws that could make huge swaths of the state off-limits to offenders.
In Missouri’s Supreme Court, a convicted sex offender is challenging aspects of the state’s practice of “civil confinement,” which has allowed him to be held indefinitely in a treatment program for a crime he committed in 1983 and for which he finished serving time years ago. More than 20 states allow civil confinement after it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in separate decisions in 1997 and 2002.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, meanwhile, is preparing to hear arguments on the constitutionality of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, a wide-reaching federal law that requires all states to dramatically toughen penalties for sex criminals by July of next year, or risk losing funding from a congressional grant program. A trial judge ruled against parts of the law last year.
A broad spectrum of critics — including civil-rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch, law enforcers, prosecuting attorneys and even some victims’ assistance groups — has criticized some of the recent local, state and federal laws aimed at sex criminals.
Many say the laws are more about political opportunism than public safety. Elected officials recognize that they can appeal to voters by piling up penalties on a widely detested criminal population that has few advocates willing to stand up for its rights, critics say.
“It’s still an easy, no-lose-politically situation,” said Corey Rayburn Yung, a professor at John Marshall Law School in Chicago and author of a blog, Sex Crimes, that reports on trends in sex-offender legislation.
But politicians who support the measures say they are simply reflecting the will of their constituents, who want to crack down on sex criminals.
“Most people who talked with me about it said they would have been rougher (on sex criminals),” Georgia state Rep. Amos Amerson (R) said of the state’s residency restrictions.
Amerson recently voted to revise and reinstate restrictions that the Georgia Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional last November. The revisions now are on the desk of Gov. Sonny Perdue (R), who has until May 15 to sign them into law. Opponents have predicted a new round of litigation if Perdue approves the restrictions.
In Iowa, where a law preventing sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools and other gathering places is considered among the toughest in the nation, the state supreme court twice has upheld the statute.
But a coalition of groups, including sheriffs and county attorneys, has lobbied the Legislature to repeal the measure, claiming it wastes public resources trying to track molesters who are essentially made homeless because of the rules. In a sign of the political difficulty of that lobbying effort, however, opponents of the residency restrictions have decided to wait until next year to ask legislators to reconsider.
“This is an election year, and so we have consciously backed off it,” said Corwin Ritchie, executive director of the Iowa County Attorneys Association. Ritchie said the issue was “held hostage to politics.”
Meanwhile, the federal Adam Walsh Act is likely to face more litigation than any other statute because of its breadth. The law requires some juvenile offenders as young as 14 to be included in online registries and retroactively applies new registration requirements to offenders who have been out of prison for years.
Sarah Tofte, a Human Rights Watch researcher who has studied sex-offender laws and advocates for a comprehensive approach that focuses on treatment, said she thinks it is unlikely that lawmakers will back away from tough new laws — despite the mounting legal challenges.
She noted that the federal Second Chance Act signed by President Bush this month — which eases convicts’ re-entry into society by focusing on rehabilitation — does not apply to sex offenders, who are viewed by the public and by legislators as immutable, lifelong criminals.
“I think it’s going to be quite a while until we let sex offenders be treated like other ex-offenders,” Tofte said.
http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=302066
Posted by lois at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)
Department of Justice FY 2009 Budget Request
Department of Justice FY 2009 Budget Request
President's Request Supports Increase for Department's National Security Efforts
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/02-04-2008/0004749082&EDATE=
WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey today announced that the President's fiscal year 2009 budget proposal for the Department of Justice is $22.7 billion. The FY 2009 budget request includes a 6 percent increase over the FY 2008 enacted budget for the Department's law enforcement and prosecution programs, including $492.7 million to improve the Department's counterterrorism and intelligence capabilities.
"The Department of Justice's mission is multi-faceted: It ranges from investigating and prosecuting terrorists, online predators and drug kingpins, to fighting corporate fraud, to protecting the government's interest in a wide range of litigation," said Attorney General Mukasey. "The fiscal year 2009 budget supports our mission and includes targetedenhancements to ensure the nation's security and to bolster our law enforcement efforts along the Southwest Border."
Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Department has significantly strengthened its efforts to enhance our national security and protect our homeland, and the FY 2009 budget reflects those priorities. Key priorities and requested FY 2009 program increases are as follows:
-- Protecting the American People by Preventing Terrorist Acts: $492.7 million
-- Fighting Criminal Activity on the U.S. Southwest Border $100.0 million
-- Supporting Essential Federal Detention and Incarceration Programs $67.1 million
In addition, the FY 2009 budget includes a total program level of over $1 billion for state and local law enforcement assistance.
PROTECTING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BY PREVENTING TERRORIST ACTS
The Department's top priority remains the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of terrorist activities against U.S. citizens and interests. The FY 2009 President's Budget requests $492.7 million in investments to improve the nation's counterterrorism investigative capabilities to identify, track, and dismantle terrorist cells operating in the United States and overseas, and to fortify the nation's intelligence analysis capabilities.
The FY 2009 President's Budget bolsters the national security functions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with $7.1 billion in total resources, including $447.4 million in investments that will support FBI's intelligence and counterterrorism programs, improve surveillance capabilities, bolster weapons of mass destruction response, and protect the security of the nation's cyber systems. In addition, this budget provides $84 million in total resources for the National Security Division, which will strengthen its ability to support intelligence operations to combat terrorism and other threats to national security. The following summarizes the key program changes, for preventing and combating terrorism and improving intelligence:
Federal Bureau of Investigation
-- Operations: $235.5 million to identify and analyze national security and criminal threats and to develop and execute operational strategies, including resources for national security investigations; enhancement of the weapons of mass destruction, cyber and Render Safe missions; computer intrusion investigative support; and foreign intelligence collection and operations.
-- Surveillance: $88.5 million to support a surveillance technology capability to meet operational requirements, including resources for physical and electronic surveillance and collection processing exploitation, analysis, and reporting.
-- Infrastructure: $28.4 million to ensure a safe and appropriate work environment and updated technology, including resources for central records management, field facility infrastructure, and IT disaster recovery.
-- Leveraging Technology: $36.1 million to enable an enhanced capability for providing services to FBI's partners, including resources for analytical support and applied technologies in DNA, communication capabilities and forensic analysis.
-- Partnerships: $5.7 million to promote an established and productive network of partnerships at all levels, including resources for the expansion of the Legal Attache and Fusion Center programs.
-- Workforce: $43.4 million to provide a professional workforce that possesses the critical skills, competencies, and training required to perform the FBI's mission, including resources for security and background adjudications, and human intelligence (HUMINT) and other training initiatives. Further, resources are redirected to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the centralized oversight and execution of the Intelligence Community's Worklife Program.
-- Academy Construction: $9.8 million in support of the FBI Academy, including construction contract management services and architectural-engineering services for upcoming projects and a new substation to handle increased electrical power loads.
Integrated Wireless Network
-- Integrated Wireless Network: $43.9 million for law enforcement wireless communications, which is vital to national security and to the life and safety of our law enforcement officers. The 9/11 Commission identified the inability of first responders to communicate with each other and recommended that this issue be addressed. These resources will employ a multi-pronged approach to providing tactical wireless communications capabilities for law enforcement personnel across the country. This approach provides for: $19.0 million to replace outdated legacy equipment with narrowband compliant technology for the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), and the Alcohol
Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF); and $24.9 million to implement the Integrated Wireless Network (IWN) in the Washington, D.C. area. The Department intends to implement IWN on a nationwide basis over a multi-year time frame.
Office of the Inspector General (OIG)
-- Oversight: $1.2 million to enable the OIG to assist the Department in ensuring that its counterterrorism funds are used effectively. With these resources, the OIG will continue to examine issues such as the FBI's use of national security letters and USA Patriot Act Section 215 orders to obtain business records and its progress in hiring, training, and retaining intelligence analysts.
FIGHTING CRIMINAL ACTIVITY ON THE U.S. SOUTHWEST BORDER
The Southwest Border is the principal arrival zone for most illicit drugs smuggled into the United States, as well as the predominant staging area for the subsequent distribution of drugs throughout the country. The Southwest Border also poses significant challenges for enforcing the nation's laws against illegal immigration, including human smuggling. In addition, the threat of terrorism looms large wherever criminals regularly exploit gaps in homeland security. Given the magnitude of the threat, it is imperative that the Department add resources to better disrupt the organizations responsible for the movement of illicit drugs, proceeds, and weapons across the Southwest Border and to bring their leaders to justice. To address this ever-growing threat, the Department proposes $100.0 million in new resources to create the Southwest Border Enforcement Initiative to strategically focus the Department's law enforcement and prosecutorial efforts on the U.S. Southwest Border to combat violent crime, gun smuggling, illicit drug trafficking, and illegal immigration. Specific increases include:
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)
-- Firearms Industry Regulation: $948,000 to enhance ATF's ability to inspect and investigate the firearms industry to strengthen oversight in the region and implement a focused inspection program to identify purchasers, traffickers and non-compliant licensees that may be sources of illegally trafficked firearms used by violent criminals.
Criminal Division
-- Reducing Gang Violence: $289,000 to work in tandem with the DOJ Gang Targeting, Enforcement, and Coordination Center's enforcement efforts to combat ever-increasing gang threats facing the nation along the Southwest Border.
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
-- Foreign-deployed Advisory and Support Team (FAST) Expansion: $7.0 million to establish two additional teams to assist DEA's host nation counterparts in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, where drugs flowing to the United States are produced or transited. These teams will provide the expertise, equipment, and personnel to augment DEA country offices targeting the most significant violators, Priority Organization Targets and Consolidated Priority Organization Targets (CPOTs).
-- Strategic Drug Flow Enforcement Operations: $2.0 million to conduct an additional Operational All Inclusive (OAI) deployment each year in the western hemisphere. OAI is DEA's primary large-scale and successful Drug Flow Attack enforcement operation in the source, transit, and arrival zones. This operational funding provides for travel, aviation support, intelligence collection, and host nation support.
-- Tactical Aircraft Section: $8.9 million to purchase, operate, and maintain one new Bell 412 twin-engine helicopter to support interdiction operations in the transit zone, including FAST deployments, and address air, maritime, and land drug trafficking threats.
-- Southwest Border Staffing: $2.6 million and 16 positions to prevent the flow of drugs across the Southwest Border.
Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)
-- Information Technology: $10 million for EOIR, including $8.3 million for a Digital Audio Recording System to be provided to immigration courts nationwide to improve the audio quality in the immigration courts; and $1.7 million for the Immigration Review Information Exchange System, through which EOIR will share mission-critical information with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the DOJ's Civil
Division.
Interagency Crime and Drug Enforcement (ICDE)
-- Vehicle Identification Initiative: $2.8 million to support communications costs associated with the Vehicle Identification Initiative, an effort to gather valuable law enforcement intelligence regarding Mexico-based Consolidated Priority Organization Targets and affiliated
"Gatekeeper" organizations involved in bulk cash smuggling. Also included is $500,000 to provide sufficient IT infrastructure for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) Fusion Center to process and develop the data collected.
-- Fugitive Apprehension Initiative: $1.7 million and six Deputy U.S. Marshals to increase USMS's capability to apprehend OCDETF fugitives both domestically and in foreign countries, particularly those fugitives linked to South America and Mexico-based drug trafficking organizations.
-- Drug Prosecution: $5.1 million to support prosecution activities against significant drug trafficking organizations and money laundering organizations responsible for transporting, importing, manufacturing or distributing drugs and smuggling illicit proceeds across the U.S./Mexico Border.
Office of the Federal Detention Trustee (OFDT)
-- Detainee Housing and Transportation: $37.6 million to accommodate an anticipated increase in the number of detainees housed in non-federal facilities. These resources will be utilized to fund the costs associated with prisoner detention, care and transportation of detainees along the Southwest Border.
U.S. Attorneys
-- Southwest Border Prosecution: $8.4 million and 83 positions (50 attorneys) to support additional prosecutorial efforts along the Southwest Border. Additional Assistant U.S. Attorneys and paralegals are needed to respond to cross-border criminal activities and the increases in immigration cases resulting from the substantial increases in Border Patrol agents and the U.S. Government's overall effort to gain operational control of the border.
U.S. Marshals Service (USMS)
-- Prisoner Security and Transportation: $12.7 million and 73 positions (52 Deputy U.S. Marshals) to manage the increasing workload along the Southwest Border. As the number of illegal immigrants entering America has risen, the USMS has experienced substantial prisoner and fugitive workload growth along the Southwest Border. This funding will allow the USMS to meet its responsibilities for protecting and securing federal detainees before, during, and after their judicial proceedings.
SUPPORTING ESSENTIAL FEDERAL DETENTION AND INCARCERATION PROGRAMS
As a result of successful law enforcement policies targeting terrorism, violent crime, and drug crimes, the number of criminal suspects appearing in federal court continues to grow as does the number of individuals ordered detained and ultimately incarcerated. The FY 2009 President's Budget request provides significant resources needed to increase capacity for the detention and incarceration of those accused or convicted of violent crimes. During FY 2007, the nation's federal prison population rose approximately 4 percent to 200,020, and it is projected to exceed over 213,000 by the end of FY 2009. The request provides $67.1 million in additional resources for the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to manage this growth, including funds for additional contract beds.
The FY 2009 request addresses BOP's responsibility to protect society by confining offenders in the controlled environments of prisons and community-based facilities that are safe, humane, cost-efficient, and appropriately secure, and that provide work and other self-improvement opportunities to assist offenders in becoming law-abiding citizens. Specific increases include:
Bureau of Prisons (BOP)
-- Contract Confinement: $50 million to add prisoner space (4,000 beds) in contract facilities to house low-security inmates for six months in FY 2009. Using contract beds for the confinement of low-security inmates provides a flexible approach to manage this population.
-- Institution Population Adjustment: $17.1 million for costs of the increasing inmate population above the number of newly activating beds. Resources will enable the BOP to meet the marginal costs of providing security, food, medical care, clothing, utilities, unit management, education, records and maintenance associated with the population increase.
STATE AND LOCAL ASSISTANCE
The Department's portion of the President's FY 2009 budget contains over $1 billion in discretionary grant assistance to state, local and tribal governments. The budget request also eliminates all earmarks from state and local grant programs; the FY 2008 Department of Justice appropriations act included over 1,500 earmarks totaling over $675 million.
Included in the FY 2009 budget request is funding for the creation of four new, competitive grant programs. These programs will provide states, localities and tribes with considerable flexibility to address the most pressing problems facing communities today: violent crime, domestic violence, and crimes against children. The four grant categories and their amounts are:
-- Violent Crime Reduction Partnership Initiatives: $200 million to help communities suffering from high rates of violent crime to address this problem by forming and developing effective multi-jurisdictional law enforcement partnerships between local, state, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies.
-- Byrne Public Safety and Protection (Byrne) Program: $200 million to assist state, local, and tribal governments with their highest-priority concerns, such as violent and drug-related crime and presidential priorities, such as DNA backlog reduction and offender re-entry programs.
-- Child Safety and Juvenile Justice Program: $185 million to consolidate existing juvenile justice and exploited children programs, and to assist state, local and tribal governments in addressing multiple child safety and juvenile justice needs: reduce incidents of child exploitation and abuse, including those facilitated by the use of computers and the Internet.
-- Violence Against Women Grants Program: $280 million to consolidate all the Violence Against Women programs into one new flexible, competitive grant program, creating a new structure that can help state, local and tribal governments address multiple domestic violence needs.
Posted by lois at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2008
Outrageous but TRUE!: CA- Some women have their teeth pulled to be able to reunite with their children
A painful choice for moms in prison
SOME HAVE TEETH PULLED TO LIVE WITH KIDS
By Edwin Garcia
Mercury News Sacramento Bureau
Article Launched: 04/18/2008 01:30:41 AM PDT
SACRAMENTO - Sarina Borg had a tough choice to make.
She could wait for months, maybe more than a year, to have her rotting teeth repaired by a dentist. Or she could get them pulled to be reunited with her baby daughter.
In California women's prisons, dozens if not hundreds of inmates like Borg are faced with the same wrenching decision: To gain access to a host of vocational-training and drug-rehabilitation programs for non-violent offenders - including a course that teaches them parenting skills while living with their children in special housing - they must be cleared of any pre-existing health problems.
Just one badly damaged tooth will block them from entering a program.
"It's unconscionable," said Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, who has proposed legislation to shorten the waiting list for women wanting to get their teeth fixed by a prison dentist, a measure that passed its first committee hearing last week.
"We have women who are getting 16 and 18 out of 34 teeth pulled, and that really destroys their future job prospects," Lieber said. "We have to change the situation."
She introduced AB 2877 after learning that a court settlement agreement, which calls for vastly improved dental care in all state prisons over the next three years, had left the three women's institutions near the bottom of the implementation schedule.
Relatively few inmates qualify for the program that allows mothers to serve their
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sentences with their infants because of the strict dental-clearance and other reasons, such as a requirement that the prisoners retain legal custody of their children.
So when the opportunity to enroll was presented to Borg, 31, who is from Daly City, it didn't take long to make her decision: "I said hurry up and pull it," Borg recalled of her meeting with a prison dentist, "I want to be with my baby."
She ended up having four teeth removed to earn her the coveted transfer to a minimum-security, dormitory-like prison in Oakland, the East Bay Community Recovery Project. There, she could bond with her 3-month-old daughter, Kamaleia, and learn how to become a better mother, in a setting that costs less to taxpayers than a traditional prison. Borg is expected to serve the remainder of her two-year, eight-month sentence for robbery at the program.
Officials with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation say the dental and health clearances are necessary because the specialized programs are based at smaller community prisons and don't have dentists or doctors on site. Thousands of men also must pass the same screening to get into specialized programs scattered across California.
"We don't want to send offenders out to these facilities and have major dental issues or medical conditions that would put them at risk," said Wendy Still, who oversees the state's three mother-infant community prisons, which house 71 women.
About 900 women are enrolled in all of the specialized programs, which cost the state as little as $90 a day per inmate, Still said, a taxpayer bargain compared with the $121 daily tab of a traditional prison bed.
But as helpful as the programs may be in preparing women for life after prison - and as useful as they are at reducing California's notoriously high recidivism rate - they also have a major downside on the personal lives of the inmates.
Mothers who undergo extractions to live with their children in the community prisons, and who learn job skills there, have difficulty finding work upon their release because employers would rather not hire someone whose mouth has more gaps than teeth.
"It's probably almost as big a deal as having a criminal record," said Allyson West, director of the California Reentry Program, which prepares inmates for their release from San Quentin. "They're going to be pigeonholed because of their appearance."
Inmates with missing teeth also suffer from low self-esteem.
"I'm still young and now I have no teeth down there, you know what I mean?" said Borg, who doesn't smile as often as she used to; she's missing three bottom teeth on the right side of her mouth. She also finds it hard to chew. "Being a woman, I just feel degraded, really bad."
Prison dental clinics don't typically offer dentures, implants or other cosmetic work.
Another inmate in the Oakland program, 31-year-old Michelle Filby, is self-conscious about a gap on the top row of her mouth, and other missing teeth, which she hopes to fix after her release, assuming she lands a good job.
Still, she has no regrets. "I'd rather lose a tooth than not have my baby, so to me it was worth it," Filby said. "But it would have been nice to maybe get a root canal or fillings."
Rachel Roth, an independent scholar and national expert on the health issues of women in prison, said the dental-clearance policy "just shows how desperate women are to get out of the big prisons and be with their children that they would allow themselves to be treated in such an inhumane way."
Prison statistics don't track how many women with severely damaged teeth, often caused by methamphetamine use and poor hygiene, have requested extractions to get into the programs.
About 9,000 teeth are pulled each year in California's three female institutions, according to prison system records. More than 12,000 women are housed in those prisons.
It's also difficult to determine how California's dental-clearance policy compares with the rest of the country, because not all states have similar women's housing programs; some institutions run nurseries within large prisons where health services are readily available.
Advocates for female inmates who are familiar with prison policies nationwide say California's dental-clearance requirement seems rare.
"That's extraordinary," said Tamar Kraft-Stolar, a director with the Correctional Association of New York, a non-profit agency with authority to inspect that state's prisons. "I've not heard of anything like that."
http://origin.mercurynews.com/news/ci_8969528?nclick_check=1
Posted by lois at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)
Iowa Governor Signs Nation's First Racial Impact Sentencing Bill
Less than one year after a national report found Iowa prisons and jails maintain the highest rate of racial disparity in the nation, Governor Chet Culver yesterday signed legislation requiring examination of the racial and ethnic impact of all new sentencing laws prior to passage.
Passage of the Minority Impact Statement Bill provides a means for legislators to anticipate any unwarranted disparities and enables them to consider alternative policies to accomplish the goals of legislation without causing undue negative effects on public safety. High rates of incarceration among people of color signal a failure to address social and economic problems within communities and can indicate bias within the justice system. The consequences for communities are disproportionate rates of voter disenfranchisement, unemployment, and disassociation among its citizens.
Representative Wayne Ford (D- Des Moines) authored the legislation, House File 2393, which garnered broad bipartisan support when passed by Iowa's House and Senate. In a statement he said, "I believe that we need to be tough on crime, but we must also make sure that our laws are fair and equitable."
In July, The Sentencing Project released its report, Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity, which found that Iowa incarcerates blacks at a rate 13 times that of whites, more than double the national average. Iowa is the first state to pass legislation examining the racial and ethnic impact of new criminal justice policies. Bills to enact minority impact statements are also pending in Connecticut and Illinois. Last year, Oregon was the first state to introduce similar legislation. For more information, visit the Governor's Web site.
--The Sentencing Project
Posted by lois at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)
Oregon: State Diminishes 'More Liberal than Most'
Oregon: State Diminishes 'More Liberal than Most'
In March, a law was passed further disenfranchising Oregon residents. Thousands of individuals in Oregon's county jails are now ineligible to vote due to a new provision of House Bill 3638. Oregon law does not allow those incarcerated individuals to vote, but does restore voting rights to those on probation. "Previously, it was just individuals in the Department of Corrections" who couldn't vote, said Brenda Bayes, the deputy director of the state Elections Division in a Statesman Journal article . "This bill in the 2008 legislative session expanded that to also include felons in the custody of county jails. You can still register to vote, you just can't vote while you're incarcerated." According to the article, 35,000 formerly incarcerated individuals and probationers are allowed to vote, in addition to about 600 psychiatric and forensic patients at Oregon State Hospital who were charged with felony offenses.
From the Sentencing Project
Posted by lois at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)
watch this! what's going on at 3 am in the morning for some women
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP-TxJBNako
Posted by lois at 03:51 PM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2008
Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Execution
April 16, 2008
Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Execution
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NY Times
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the most common method of lethal injection executions, likely clearing the way to resume executions that have been on hold for nearly 7 months.
The justices, by a 7-2 vote, turned back a constitutional challenge to the procedures in place in Kentucky, which uses three drugs to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates. Similar methods are used by roughly three dozen states.
''We ... agree that petitioners have not carried their burden of showing that the risk of pain from maladministration of a concededly humane lethal injection protocol, and the failure to adopt untried and untested alternatives, constitute cruel and unusual punishment,'' Chief Justice John Roberts said in an opinion that garnered only three votes. Four other justices, however, agreed with the outcome.
Roberts' opinion did leave open subsequent challenges to lethal injection practices if a state refused to adopt an alternative method that significantly reduced the risk of severe pain.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented.
Executions have been on hold since September, when the court agreed to hear the Kentucky case. There was no immediate indication when they would resume, but prosecutors in several states said they would seek new execution dates if the court ruled favorably in the Kentucky case.
Forty-two people were executed last year among more than 3,300 people on death row across the country. Another roughly two dozen executions did not go forward because of the Supreme Court's review, death penalty opponents said.
The argument against the three-drug protocol is that if the initial anesthetic does not take hold, the other two drugs can cause excruciating pain. One of those drugs, a paralytic, would render the prisoner unable to express his discomfort.
The case before the court came from Kentucky, where two death row inmates did not ask to be spared execution or death by injection. Instead, they wanted the court to order a switch to a single drug, a barbiturate, that causes no pain and can be given in a large enough dose to cause death.
At the very least, they said, the state should be required to impose tighter controls on the three-drug process to ensure that the anesthetic is given properly.
Roberts said the one-drug method, frequently used in animal euthanasia, ''has problems of its own, and has never been tried by a single state.''
Kentucky has had only one execution by lethal injection and it did not present any obvious problems, both sides in the case agreed.
But executions elsewhere, in Florida and Ohio, took much longer than usual, with strong indications that the prisoners suffered severe pain in the process. Workers had trouble inserting the IV lines that are used to deliver the drugs.
Roberts said ''a condemned prisoner cannot successfully challenge a state's method of execution merely by showing a slightly or marginally safer alternative.''
Ginsburg, in her dissent, said her colleagues should have asked Kentucky courts to consider whether the state includes adequate safeguards to ensure a prisoner is unconscious and thus unlikely to suffer severe pain.
Justice John Paul Stevens, while agreeing with the outcome, said the court's decision would not end the debate over lethal injection. ''I am now convinced that this case will generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol, and specifically about the justification for the use of the paralytic agent, pancuronium bromide, but also about the justification for the death penalty itself,'' Stevens said.
Stevens suggested that states could spare themselves legal costs and delays in executions by eliminating the use of the paralytic.
Ty Alper, a death penalty opponent and associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, said he expects challenges to lethal injections will continue in several states.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Lethal-Injection.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=login&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not
Two Separate Societies: One in Prison, One Not
By Marie Gottschalk
Tuesday, April 15, 2008; A15
Forty years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded in its landmark study of the causes of racial disturbances in the United States in the 1960s: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal." Today we are still moving toward two societies: one incarcerated and one not. The Pew Center on the States released a study in February showing that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison. According to the Justice Department, 7 million people -- or one in every 32 adults -- are either incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision.
These figures understate the disproportionate impact that this bold and unprecedented social experiment has had on certain groups in U.S. society. Today one in nine young black men is behind bars. African Americans now comprise more than half of all prisoners, up from a third three decades ago.
Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) held a remarkable set of hearings last October on mass incarceration in the United States. In his opening statement, Webb noted that "the United States has embarked on one of the largest public policy experiments in our history, yet this experiment remains shockingly absent from public debate."
The leading presidential candidates have not identified mass imprisonment as a central issue, even though it is arguably the country's top civil rights concern. Many of today's crime control policies fundamentally impede the economic, political and social advancement of the most disadvantaged blacks and members of other minority groups. Prison leaves them less likely to find gainful employment, vote, participate in other civic activities and maintain ties with their families and communities.
Congress recognized some of these barriers recently when, after years of delay, it approved and sent to the White House the Second Chance Act, which President Bush signed into law last week. This legislation seeks to ease the reentry of prisoners into society by providing modest increases in support for mentoring programs, drug treatment, job training and education.
Bruce Western of Harvard soberly concludes in his landmark book "Punishment and Inequality in America" that mass imprisonment has erased many of the "gains to African American citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement." Sen. Barack Obama glancingly made some similar points in an address at Howard University last September. But he generally has not focused on the perils of mass incarceration. Neither has Sen. Hillary Clinton, though the $4 billion anti-crime package she unveiled last week did call for elimination of the federal mandatory five-year sentence for minor crack cocaine violations. As for Sen. John McCain, civil rights and criminal justice policy are not among the 15 issues the Republican nominee highlights on his Web site. But America's space program did make the top 15.
At the hearings last fall, Webb underscored a basic truth sidelined in most discussions of crime and punishment: The explosion of the prison population wasn't driven so much by an increase in crime as by the way we chose to respond to crime. Even former president Bill Clinton, whose administration was an accomplice in the largest prison buildup in U.S. history, conceded in a keynote address at a University of Pennsylvania symposium in February commemorating the Kerner anniversary: "Most of the people who went to prison should have been let out a long time ago."
A change of heart by Bill Clinton and other public figures will not be enough to reverse the prison boom. In rare instances, public officials have been moved by strong personal beliefs to empty their prisons. During his brief tenure as Britain's home secretary early in the 20th century, Winston Churchill expressed deep skepticism about what could be achieved through incarceration, and he began releasing prisoners. Political leadership has been critical for major reductions in incarceration in other countries. But in many cases, the public and experts on criminal justice had to push politicians to begin emptying their prisons and jails.
It is a national disgrace that the U.S. incarceration rate is five to 12 times that of other industrialized countries as well as being the highest in the world. As Churchill once said, "The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilization of any country."
Marie Gottschalk, an associate political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of " The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/14/AR2008041402
451.html?hpid=opinionsbox1>
Posted by lois at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
April 14, 2008
Clinton Crime Agenda Ignores Proven Methods for Reducing Crime
Clinton Crime Agenda Ignores Proven Methods for Reducing Crime
Advocates say plan will increase incarceration rates and negatively impact the poor and minorities
Monday, April 14, 2008
Washington, D.C.--The Justice Policy Institute (JPI) announced today that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's anti-crime package ignores critical research that finds that investments in employment, education, housing and treatment for those who need it is the most effective and fiscally-responsible way to improve public safety. Research shows that Clinton's proposal to revive former President Clinton's COPS initiative, which called for investments in policing, would increase prison populations, and may have a negative impact on the nation's poor and minorities, without significantly reducing crime. The Clinton Administration's "tough on crime" policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Advocates say re-implementing this agenda would be a return to bad policies.
"The first COPS was found to be costly and ineffective in reducing crime rates and COPS 2.0 is not an improved version of the first one," says JPI executive director Sheila Bedi. "COPS was only successful in filling our prisons and jails with people who research shows can be better served with treatment, evidence-based practices, and community-based alternatives that also promote public safety."
According to research, adding police to the streets is not the most effective method for reducing crime. Delaware received $19.6 million in COPS grants and during that same time, the number of violent crimes increased 35.9 percent. In contrast, Oklahoma City, which did not receive any COPS grants, decreased its police force by 16 percent and during that same period saw a dramatic 32.5 percent decrease in the number of violent crimes reported.
Furthermore, advocates say law enforcement professionals don't support policing as being the most effective method of reducing crime. In a 2002 poll, 71.1 percent of surveyed chief of police, sheriffs and prosecutors agreed that providing more educational and after-school programs would make the greatest impact in reducing youth crime and violence. Only 14.9 percent said that hiring more police would have the greatest impact.
"We've tried to win the war on gangs with law enforcement alone, but we have little to show for it," says National Black Police Association Executive Director Ronald Hampton. "Rather than engaging in endless battles, we need to target the problem behavior that hurts communities. We should support the kinds of prevention and proven programs that we already know reduce violence and crime."
Research supports investments in communities as a more cost effective and beneficial way of reducing crime. Research shows that when there is a reduction in crimes rates, it coincides with increased employment. When more people have jobs, fewer crimes are committed. A study by the Heritage Foundation found that "For every 1 percent increase in civilian labor force participation, violent crime is expected to decrease by 8.8 incidents per 100,000" people.
"Not only does the Clinton crime plan lack innovation and forward thinking, it ignores all we know about crime prevention. When people are employed, violent crime decreases," says Lisa Kung, Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights. "One in every one hundred Americans is incarcerated. It is clear that Clinton intends to continue a legacy of policies that will keep Americans paying for more police, more prisons and more punitive measures."
Advocates also believe that Clinton's opposition to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's decision to make retroactive the changes to sentencing for the thousands of people who had received disproportionately long sentences for crack-cocaine, most of whom are African American, is concerning. Nationwide, from 1995 to 2004, drug abuse violations were the only crime that saw an increase in arrests following the COPS grant. However, a report by JPI release last year, found that while African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, African Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses mainly due to disparate policing practices, disparate treatment before the courts, mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws, and differences in the availability of drug treatment for African Americans.
According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, "it would be a cruel injustice to base the crack cocaine reduction on an assessment that these people have suffered under an unjust structure and then deny the benefit of the amendment to the very people whose experiences led the Commission to lower the sentences in the first place."
"If any of the candidates really wants to do something about crime, then they should invest in policies that increase employment, educational attainment and treatment for people who need it," says Bedi. "These are proven approaches that reduce crime and recidivism--evidence-based practices, which have undergone rigorous experimental inquiry, and have been shown to have proven public safety benefits."
Posted by lois at 09:12 PM | Comments (0)
NY: Youth prison to stay open study to take 3 years
Legislation approved Wednesday directs that a study compare the effectiveness of residential vs. community-based treatment for juveniles — the latter, a new approach recommended in former Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer’s executive order carrying out a plan to close Great Valley and several other juvenile treatment facilities in 2009.
The study will take three years, with an interim report delivered to Albany in 2009.
By Kathy Kellogg
CATTARAUGUS CORRESPONDENT
Updated: 04/10/08 2:45 PM
GREAT VALLEY — The Great Valley Youth Residential Center will not be closed or converted to a limited secure youth detention facility but will continue temporarily as a nonsecure foster facility to house about 25 youths.
State Sen. Catharine Young, R-Olean, managed to secure funds in the state budget to study the facility’s future and announced the development Wednesday.
Legislation approved Wednesday directs that a study compare the effectiveness of residential vs. community-based treatment for juveniles — the latter, a new approach recommended in former Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer’s executive order carrying out a plan to close Great Valley and several other juvenile treatment facilities in 2009.
The study will take three years, with an interim report delivered to Albany in 2009. Young promised to convene a task force of community leaders if the study makes an alternative recommendation.
The possibility of Great Valley’s closing triggered a push in February by the Cattaraugus County Legislature, employees, residents and town officials to keep the facility open. County legislators backed converting it to a limited secure facility as a stopgap measure.
Opponents of the closing have listed several economic reasons why the facility should remain open. The annual payroll is about $1.4 million — it is one of the area’s largest employers — and an estimated $400,000 is spent annually on local services. The state has invested about $1.2 million in infrastructure upgrades in recent years.
Many local residents argued that a local facility should be available to treat the area’s youth, instead of somewhere else in the state. A similar foster-care facility for juveniles is operating in Limestone, and they are the only treatment centers in Western New York.
“After carefully reviewing data supplied by the state Office of Children and Family Services, and listening to the community, we decided the best solution is to keep the center the way it is for now,” said Young, who is also a member of the Human Services Conference Committee.
She called for evidence before changes are made and demanded to see that the new juvenile justice system and proposed treatments will work and that recidivism rates will improve.
Great Valley Supervisor Dan Brown said the move will keep money and jobs in the community.
http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/otherwny/story/319859.html
Posted by lois at 01:10 PM | Comments (0)
More mentally ill end up in jails
More mentally ill end up in jails
By Susan Abram, Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 04/14/2008 06:34:00 AM PDT
SHERMAN OAKS - The number of psychiatric beds in public hospitals has fallen dramatically across California and the nation - with the Golden State now dedicating just 17 beds for mentally ill patients for every 100,000 residents, according to a newly released report.
While the ratio in California mirrors the national average, it represents a sharp drop over the past five decades - from 340 beds per 100,000 people nationwide in 1955, according to the report by the national nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center.
"The results of this report are dire and the failure to provide care for the most seriously mentally ill individuals is disgraceful," said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Arlington, Va.-based center that advocates for treatment of the mentally ill.
"Our communities are paying a high price for our failure to treat those with severe and persistent mental illness, and those not receiving treatment are suffering severely."
Researchers with the center are urging at least 12,200 beds be added across California, nearly double the 6,285 beds that were counted in 2005.
In Los Angeles County, health officials said 140 beds are spread throughout the public hospital system and there are another 222 beds at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk. County officials also note more beds are available in private hospitals, nursing homes and group homes.
But the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department say they've become a de facto safety net for mental health services because there is no room at the hospitals.
At the county's Twin Towers jails, 1,000 beds are filled nearly every night by psychiatric patients - more than in any mental institution west of the Mississippi, according to the LAPD.
And of the nearly 20,000 inmates in the county's jail system, about 60 percent suffer from mental illnesses, according to a recent report by the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute.
Meanwhile, incidents involving the mentally ill have surfaced on L.A.'s streets. In one case last year, the mother of a mentally disturbed 23-year-old who was shot by police after he ran over a pedestrian said that hours before he was killed, she pleaded with the LAPD to apprehend her son.
Luis Salinas, who battled mental illness, had been taken to a mental facility weeks before, where he had been evaluated and released 48 hours later. Doctors there said he was suffering from a brief psychotic disorder.
Emergency rooms also are scrambling to meet the needs.
"We have acute and chronic demand for what we call the `5150' patient - or those who are hospitalized without their consent," said Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Southern California Hospital Association. "These patients are very hard to find beds for and are clogging up hospital emergency rooms."
Fueling the issue, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an overdue state budget last summer that included slashing $55 million for housing the homeless mentally ill.
"There has been no word or movement on the issue (of more beds) from anyone in the state," Lott said.
Medicare rates also affect behavioral health units at private community hospitals that rely on the government reimbursements.
On Friday, Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks closed its 16-bed mental health unit for seniors because of declining reimbursements, according to published reports.
The average cost to hospitals to treat those with severe mental illness is about $800 a day, Lott said. But for homeless or Medicare patients, hospitals receive $475 from the state and the county. Without that money, many of the units have been shuttered, he said.
The decline in the number of beds for mentally ill patients also comes amid an overhaul of state mental institutions - stand-alone facilities that started closing during the Reagan administration.
"Over the last decade, we have cut many beds from state hospitals as we've developed more in community settings," said Dr. Roderick Shaner, medical director for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.
"The bottom line is we need every kind of service but we can't use models of a half-century ago."
The solution falls on community hospitals and organizations that can likely secure federal funding for more beds - something state hospitals are unable to do, Shaner said.
"I think that in the longer term, we are developing new resources ... that will allow us to support the people in the community," Shaner said. "However, there is a problem with getting access to emergency psychiatric hospitalization in the short run."
Jonathan Stanley, deputy executive director for the Treatment Advocacy Center, said that while attitudes and treatment toward the mentally ill have improved, the bed shortage means hospitals are slashing the amount of time for treatment.
"I think the average stay in a psychiatric hospital now is seven days to help them get stabilized with their meds," Stanley said. "But the problem is they are not staying long enough and they are still systematic when they leave. They end up coming back or going to jail."
Some San Fernando Valley facilities are trying to buck the trend, especially for the elderly with mental health issues, including depression and early signs of dementia.
Sherman Oaks Hospital is hoping to add 19 beds for those 55 years and older with mental health issues.
The hospital had shut down its behavioral health unit - which served those who were involuntarily admitted - in 2006 because it never reached capacity.
The new facility is for voluntary patients and aimed at treating seniors with a full spectrum of mental illness.
Experts said the need could be great, as 79 million baby boomers are aging and some might have received inconsistent treatment in their youth, resulting in what could be a wave of mental health needs.
"We're looking at the backlash of the Reagan movement. These people were in their 20s and 30s and are now in their geriatric situations," said Tricia Devon, director of psychiatric services at Sherman Oaks Hospital. "We need to find a different way to treat patients. There's too many people in the streets."
The Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda also has opened a 10-bed behavioral unit.
"We saw there was a need for this, with our own residents here at the home," said Gay Howard, who heads the unit. "A lot of these patients were identified for behavioral therapy, but they didn't want to leave because this is their home."
For more news and observations about crime in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, check out Mean Streets, the Daily News' crime blog.
The average amount of stay in the new unit is about 10 days, Howard said, and treatment includes activities and therapy.
"We are dealing with people who come from an era where they didn't talk about their problems," she said. As a result "they don't receive the proper diagnosis and no one then knows they are depressed.
"We want to tell them it's OK to ask for help."
Posted by lois at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2008
Citizens twice as likely to land in NJ prisons as legal, illegal immigrants
Citizens twice as likely to land in NJ prisons as legal, illegal immigrants
by Brian Donohue/The Star-Ledger
Saturday April 12, 2008, 9:33 PM
U.S. citizens are twice as likely to land in New Jersey's prisons as legal and illegal immigrants, according to new data that counter some of the most widely perceived notions about the link between immigration and crime.
Non-U.S. citizens make up 10 percent of the state's overall population, but just 5 percent of the 22,623 inmates in prison as of July 2007, according to an analysis of New Jersey Department of Corrections and U.S. Census data by The Star-Ledger.
As part of the federal government's attempt to fix an immigration system that has allowed deportable criminals to go back on the streets, federal agents started scouring the inmate rolls of New Jersey's state prisons last year.
The goal was to identify criminal aliens so they could be deported once they finished their sentences. That effort yielded another dividend: the first-ever snapshot of the non-U.S. citizen population in New Jersey's state prisons.
The statistics fall directly in line with several other new studies by sociologists that consistently have found the immigrant incarceration rates equal or lower to that of U.S. citizens. The findings contradict one long-held conception about immigrants and crime.
The New Jersey statistics also come to light at a significant juncture, as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security seeks to give local police departments a greater role in enforcing immigration laws in New Jersey and across the country.
"I first got into this because I heard all these terrible complaints that immigrants were a big part of the crime problem," said Anne Morrison Piehl, an economics professor at Rutgers University who has researched incarceration rates among immigrants in California.
"When you look at incarceration rates, you find immigrants much less likely than the native born to be incarcerated," Piehl added. "Once you control for the fact that immigrants are generally younger and less educated, then the data you find is even more surprising."
Advocates of tougher enforcement say the numbers do nothing to lessen the need to crack down on immigrants who commit crimes, including using local police to do it.
"I don't want anyone to think the illegal immigrant population in general causes any more crime than the legal population," said Morristown Mayor Donald Cresitello, who has applied to a federal program to deputize the town's police officers as immigration agents. "That's not my position and statistics show that. But we already have enough of our own criminals and we don't have to invite criminals in."
MYTH OR REALITY?
ÂImmigrant advocates say the numbers are proof that the "illegal immigrant crime wave" touted by anti-immigration groups on television and the internet is more myth than reality.
Several high-profile crimes committed by illegal immigrants, including the slaying of four college students in a Newark schoolyard last August, have fueled such misperceptions, they added.
"It's popular fiction -- and the important word is fiction," said Shai Goldstein, Executive Director of the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network. "It has no foundation in reality as do most of the anti-immigrant arguments which are based on either misperceptions or outright bigotry and sometimes both."
Under tougher immigration laws passed by Congress in 1996, any immigrant, legal or illegal, who is convicted of an aggravated felony may be deported when his or her criminal sentence is completed.
But for years, understaffed federal immigration agencies could not keep up and that pushed many deportable criminals back onto the streets after they got out of jail or prison.
While there is still work to be done in the state's county jails, ICE officials say their efforts to fix the problem in state prisons have been more successful.
From July 2002 to July 2007, the number of state inmates subject to immigration detainers, or holds, more than doubled, from 570 to 1,195, according to data from the New Jersey Department of Corrections.
Detainers, essentially notices that an inmate is not to be released without being turned over to ICE, are issued for both illegal immigrants and legal immigrants who may be stripped of their legal status because of their crimes.
"We've got a handle on the state prisons," said Scott Weber, Newark district director of ICE's Office of Detention and Removal. "I'd be surprised if we were missing people."
Despite the debate over what the data means, it provides the first snapshot of the criminal alien population in New Jersey's 14 state prisons.
Many of them have rap sheets that vividly illustrate the huge holes in the system that allowed criminal aliens to avoid deportation despite repeat arrests and convictions. Still, in almost all categories of crime, they are less likely to be imprisoned than their U.S.-born counterparts.
They account for 86, or 5 percent, of the 1,670 murder charges against state inmates; 27, or seven percent, of the 360 aggravated sexual assaults; and three percent of all drug-related charges. Since many inmates are charged with more than one crime, the number of total convictions exceeds the inmate total.
Non-U.S. citizens account for 11 percent of all sexual assault convictions -- one of the only crimes for which they were equally, or slightly more likely, to be imprisoned than U.S. citizens.
Researchers say the New Jersey statistics fall squarely in line with numerous studies performed in recent years.
A study released earlier this year by Washington-based nonprofit Immigration Policy Center found that U.S.-born men ages 18 to 39 are five times more likely to be incarcerated than are their foreign-born peers.
And, while the number of illegal immigrants in the country doubled between 1994 and 2005, violent crime declined by nearly 35 percent and property crimes by 26 percent over the same period.
Piehl, the Rutgers professor, cited several theories behind the statistics.
The process of immigration, which requires motivation and personal sacrifice, she said, may self-select types of people who are less likely to commit crimes. Once they get here, the harsher penalties immigrants face, namely deportation, also prevents lawbreaking.
Immigration critics say the data paints only part of the picture of the relation between immigration, especially illegal immigration, and crime.
Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C, called the New Jersey stats "good news" but cautioned they paint an incomplete picture.
He cited U.S. Border Patrol statistics showing that 15 percent of the illegal border crossers it apprehends have criminal records. He also noted studies that show incarceration rates rise sharply among the children of immigrants.
"There seems to be this silly notion among politicians and researchers that if the incarceration rate is proportional, then that settles the debate," Camarota said. "It isn't just a question of proportionality, it's a question of outrage that people who should not even be in the country and could have been weeded out for previous crimes are here at all."
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/04/citizens_twice_as_likely_to_la.html
Posted by lois at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2008
NY: Less Crime: No Reason to Shut Prisons
April 12, 2008
About New York
Less Crime: No Reason to Shut Prisons
By JIM DWYER
For nearly a decade, one of New York City’s major exports — criminals — has been in decline, a result of less crime. In the alternative universe of state government, this is the textbook definition of catastrophe. A steady supply of criminals is the foundation of the economy of large swaths of New York State, which has 70 prisons that employ about 20,000 people as correction officers.
The prisons are also a source of political power to upstate Republicans because the inmates are counted as permanent residents when legislative districts are drawn — even though they cannot vote and their actual homes may be hundreds of miles away.
In January, the State Department of Correctional Services said that because the state had 9,000 fewer inmates than it did in 1999, it would close four prisons that had space for 1,346. Another agency said the state should close five mostly unused juvenile facilities because even empty beds cost $140,000 to $200,000 each to maintain with staff and other services.
These proposals drew roars across vast reaches of New York. Two weeks ago, the state’s leading Republicans led a rally of prison guards on the steps of the Capitol. It amounted to a declaration of their confidence that evil would endure, a faith in human weakness that is perhaps warranted and inarguably useful.
“What happens the next time — and there will be a next time — we have a crack epidemic?” asked Senator Michael F. Nozzolio of Seneca Falls, who is chairman of a committee that oversees crime and prisons, according to The Adirondack Daily Enterprise. “They’ll be double-bunked, they’ll be stuffed into the medians, and we’ll have another prison riot on our hands.”
Senator Nozzolio was joined on the steps by the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno. The guards chanted his name. He did not let them down.
This week, the Legislature and the governor agreed to keep the four unneeded prisons open at a cost of $33.5 million next year. If they are kept open much beyond that, they will need $30 million in capital repairs to keep them in shape, according to the corrections department.
The Legislature did agree to shut four of the five juvenile facilities, but kept open one, Great Valley, which is about 350 miles west of New York City. It is less than half full, but the state senator from the district, Catharine M. Young, was on the budget committee. (Pyramid in the Bronx, a sixth juvenile institution that the state wanted to close on the grounds that the facilities were inadequate, was also kept open.)
The state went on a great surge of prison building during the 1980s and 1990s, continuing even after the rate of violent crime had crested. During the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki, the penalties for certain nonviolent crimes — especially those involving drugs — were eased.
“With the reforms, there are fewer nonviolent inmates, and a greater percentage of violent inmates among those that remain,” said Erik Kriss, a spokesman for the corrections department. “That was an intentional policy under Governor Pataki.”
Since 1999, the state says, the number of prisoners has declined by 13 percent, to 62,500 from 71,600. Three governors in a row — Mr. Pataki, Eliot Spitzer and, now, David A. Paterson — tried to close adult prisons. The minimum- and medium-security prisons were simply not being used as much.
Even so, prisons in New York are like military bases in other parts of the country, and closing them is just as difficult. In prison towns, schools, churches and Little Leagues all depend on the families that have built their livelihoods on the prison economy. Year after year, the prisons survived during the legislative budget negotiations, which are always conducted under information blackouts.
Last year, Governor Spitzer proposed that the Legislature set up a commission to study which prisons were needed, to make plans to help the communities where they would be closed and then to openly vote for an entire package. The Legislature declined. The question of prison closings returned to the back room.
“It’s really a jobs programs for economically depressed upstate communities,” said Robert Gangi, the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit organization that has oversight responsibilities for the prisons. “But it’s a jobs program that has a direct negative effect on people’s lives. It’s not like the manufacturer of widgets. It’s based on the warehousing of human beings that has very negative effects.”
Senator Bruno said that the decline in crime was a result of criminals being locked up — and others argue that should crime rise anew, all the prison cells will be needed once again. The state said it has an ample reserve of emergency beds in case there is a sharp increase.
For now, with tax revenues in decline and every agency being ordered to cut its budget, the prison machinery rolls on — less crime or not.
The peace dividend has been postponed until further notice.
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/nyregion/12about.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref
=nyregion&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 02:47 PM | Comments (0)
AL: 1,400-bed federal prison near Aliceville gets agency OK
1,400-bed federal prison near Aliceville gets agency OK
Associated Press
Updating 4:54 p.m.
WASHINGTON — Construction could begin this summer or fall on a 1,400-inmate federal prison near Aliceville in rural west Alabama that is expected to employ more than 300 people.
After completing environmental impact studies, the federal Bureau of Prisons gave final approval to move forward with the $200 million project last week.
Local officials say the prison - to be built about two miles north of Aliceville - will provide a major economic boost for Pickens County and the surrounding Black Belt communities. The project gained momentum several years ago when Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican from nearby Tuscaloosa, won federal funding.
The prison is expected to house some 1,400 federal prisoners, a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman said. Plans call for about 1,150 beds in a medium-security complex and another 250 beds in a minimum-security work camp.
As long as land acquisition goes well, the bureau anticipates signing design and construction contracts this summer, the spokeswoman said. Construction would start shortly thereafter and is expected to take several years.
Alan Harper, Aliceville's director of economic development, said Thursday the prison is the most significant economic development project in the Black Belt in 100 years. He credits Shelby with making it happen.
"We have Sen. Shelby to thank for saving our area," said Harper, who also is a Democratic state representative. "These 350 jobs are going to be a lifesaver."
The lockup would be the third federal prison in Alabama, with others at Talladega and Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery.
http://www.annistonstar.com/breaking/2008/as-wireupdate-0410-0-8d10q5115.htm
Posted by lois at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)
California prison czar seeks $7 billion more for inmate health care
State Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, said the new request "seems startling," especially when combined with the expenditures under AB 900.
"They haven't given us a plan on how they plan to spend the $7.4 billion," Ducheny said. "Why would we want to double that and still not have a plan?"
"It will be an interesting hearing Monday," Ducheny added.
California prison czar seeks $7 billion more for inmate health care
By Andy Furillo - afurillo@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Saturday, April 12, 2008
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A10
California's prison medical czar and the governor's administration announced Friday they are asking the Legislature to approve $7 billion to improve prison medical care.
The proposal would pay for 10,500 health care beds and other facilities for inmate patients.
It comes less than a year after the Legislature approved and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a $7.9 billion measure to build space for 46,100 prison and jail beds, a package that included $1.14 billion for medical and mental health beds.
As the state faces a chronic budget deficit of at least $8 billion for the fiscal year that begins July 1, paying off both prison bond packages would cost taxpayers more than $1.2 billion a year over the next quarter-century.
"This issue is not an elective," said Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer. "It is a directive. We are under a federal court order to bring the level of health care in our correctional system up to a constitutionally acceptable standard after years and years of under-investment. So in a sense, we are having to catch up for years where this was not adequately financed."
Administration officials and the prison medical care receiver, J. Clark Kelso, are scheduled to appear before a Senate budget subcommittee Monday to answer questions about the new funding request and how it squares with funding provided last year under Assembly Bill 900.
Kelso, who is operating under the authority of U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson, declined to forecast how he would react if the Legislature refuses to provide the money. Under the terms of his receivership, he could ask the judge to waive state procedures and order the funding on his own.
"I'll just play that as it goes," Kelso told reporters.
The new proposal seeks $6 billion in lease revenue bonds to build seven long-term chronic care facilities - not "hospitals," Kelso said - at existing prisons. They would provide space for 10,500 inmates.
His plan has not yet outlined specific locations for the facilities, but property adjacent to Sacramento County's two Folsom prisons was previously listed as a likely site.
Another $900 million in bond funds and $100 million in general fund revenues would pay to upgrade medical facilities at the state's 33 prisons.
Lease revenue bonds accounted for $7.4 billion of the funding contained in last year's AB 900 plan.
State Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, said the new request "seems startling," especially when combined with the expenditures under AB 900.
"They haven't given us a plan on how they plan to spend the $7.4 billion," Ducheny said. "Why would we want to double that and still not have a plan?"
"It will be an interesting hearing Monday," Ducheny added.
Administration officials have embraced for nearly two years the idea of using health care beds to help fix the state's prison overcrowding problem, where the vast majority of the state's 170,000 prisoners are living in 33 prisons crowded to nearly twice their designed capacity.
Expansion of prison health facilities also has long been proposed as a remedy for resolving the federal class-action cases pending in Sacramento and San Francisco. Judges in both cases found the system's mental and medical care to be constitutionally inadequate.
Plaintiffs' attorneys in the two class actions have since filed motions charging that overcrowding contributes to the constitutional shortcomings.
The motions are pending before a three-judge federal court that is considering imposing a prison population cap.
Michael Bien, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the mental health case, said there is "a serious, long-term need" to get the beds online.
"In terms of ending these cases, it's a necessary element to get these beds built," Bien said of the proposal by the administration and the receiver.
In providing details on the long-term care centers, Kelso said that 75 percent of the beds would be provided in open-dorm "sheltered living" settings and the other 25 percent will be of assisted-living and licensed nursing home quality.
Maximum- and medium-security inmates now living in single-bed prison cells would fill nearly 5,000 of the health care beds.
Kelso said their transfers should free up the equivalent of 7,500 beds through double-celling and thereby help reduce the overcrowding problem.
Kelso also said the new beds could be "repurposed" to house healthy prisoners if the system's medical needs wane.
He said that he has already retained one construction company to provide cost estimates and that he is looking for a "second opinion" on that subject. He said he intends to establish a "construction advisory Cabinet."
"My goal here is to do this as cost effectively as possible, not just spend the full amount that has been authorized," Kelso said.
Construction would begin in January and run through July 2013 if the Legislature approves, according to Kelso.
Posted by lois at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)
From Welfare Shift in ’96, a Reminder for Clinton
From Welfare Shift in ’96, a Reminder for Clinton
By PETER S. GOODMAN
New York Times, April 11, 2008
In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Despite howls of protest from some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance.
As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton supported her husband’s decision, drawing the wrath of old friends from her days as an advocate for poor children. Some accused the Clintons of throwing vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes as Mr. Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.
Despite the criticism and anxiety from the left, the legislation came to be viewed as one of Mr. Clinton’s signature achievements. It won broad bipartisan praise, with some Democrats relieved that it took a politically difficult issue off the table for them, and many liberals came to accept if not embrace it.
Mrs. Clinton’s opponent in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, said in an interview that the welfare overhaul had been greatly beneficial in eliminating a divisive force in American politics.
Mrs. Clinton, now a senator from New York, rarely mentions the issue as she battles for the nomination, despite the emphasis she has placed on her experience in her husband’s White House.
But now the issue is back, pulled to the fore by an economy turning down more sharply than at any other time since the welfare changes were imposed. With low-income people especially threatened by a weakening labor market, some advocates for poor families are raising concerns about the adequacy of the remaining social safety net. Mrs. Clinton is now calling for the establishment of a cabinet-level position to fight poverty.
As social welfare policy returns to the political debate, it is providing a window into the ways in which Mrs. Clinton has navigated the legacy of her husband’s administration and the ideological crosscurrents of her party.
In an interview, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that “people who are more vulnerable” were going to suffer more than others as the economy turned down. But she put the blame squarely on the Bush administration and the Republicans who controlled Congress until last year. Mrs. Clinton said they blocked her efforts, and those of other Democrats, to buttress the safety net with increased financing for health insurance for impoverished children, child care for poor working mothers, and food stamps.
Mrs. Clinton expressed no misgivings about the 1996 legislation, saying that it was a needed — and enormously successful — first step toward making poor families self-sufficient.
“Welfare should have been a temporary way station for people who needed immediate assistance,” she said. “It should not be considered an anti-poverty program. It simply did not work.”
During the presidential campaign, she has faced little challenge on the issue, in large part because Mr. Obama has supported the 1996 law. “Before welfare reform, you had, in the minds of most Americans, a stark separation between the deserving working poor and the undeserving welfare poor,” Mr. Obama said in an interview. “What welfare reform did was desegregate those two groups. Now, everybody was poor, and everybody had to work.”
Mr. Obama called the resulting law “an imperfect reform.” Like Mrs. Clinton, he called for an expansion of government-provided health care, child care and job training to assist women making the transition from welfare to work — programs he says he helped expand in Illinois as a state senator.
Asked if he would have vetoed the 1996 law, Mr. Obama said, “I won’t second guess President Clinton for signing.”
Among some advocates for the poor, the growing prospect of a severe recession and evidence of backsliding from the initial successes of the policy shift have crystallized fresh concern. Many remain upset that Mrs. Clinton, once seemingly a stalwart member of their camp, supported a law that they contend left many people at risk.
“If there is no national controversy about welfare reform, we paid an awfully high price,” said Peter Edelman, a law professor at Georgetown University who has known Mrs. Clinton since her college days, and who quit his post as assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest after Mr. Clinton signed the measure.
“They don’t acknowledge the number of people who were hurt,” Mr. Edelman said. “It’s just not in their lens. It was predictably bad public policy.”
Forcing families to rely on work instead of government money went well from 1996 to 2000, when the economy was booming and paychecks were plentiful, economists say. Since then, however, job creation has slowed and poverty has risen. The current downturn could be the first serious test of how well the changes brought about by the 1996 law hold up under sharp economic stress.
“We should have enormous concern about the lack of a fully functioning safety net for families with children,” said Mark H. Greenberg, director of the Poverty and Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.
In many ways, Mrs. Clinton has sought to moderate her liberal image since leaving the White House. But on welfare, she has faced the opposite problem: accusations from some liberals that she sold out their principles for a politically calculated centrism.
On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton is largely focused on the middle class. Since the departure from the Democratic race of John Edwards, who had made poverty a centerpiece of his campaign, there has been little debate about social welfare policy. But in promising on Friday to establish a cabinet-rank poverty-fighting position if she is elected, Mrs. Clinton reintroduced the topic and the question of her record.
In the interview, conducted last month, Mrs. Clinton said she had followed through on her promise to address what she viewed as shortcomings in the welfare law after being elected to the Senate in 2000. She said she had pressed for legislation that would have increased financing for child care for poor mothers by up to $11 billion, seeking to expand food stamps, and allowing welfare recipients to draw cash aid while attending school.
Those provisions were blocked by the Republican leadership.
“We’ve had to mostly spend our time since President Bush came in to office preventing bad things from happening,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Many welfare advocates dispute Mrs. Clinton’s characterization. Since entering the Senate, they say, she has shown a predilection for compromise at the expense of the poor.
When the overhaul bill came up for reauthorization, Sandra Chapin, a former welfare recipient affiliated with a coalition called Welfare Made a Difference, lobbied Congress to allow more women to attend college while they received aid. Mrs. Clinton “wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” Ms. Chapin said.
Ms. Chapin, now program director of the Consumer Federation of California, posted an e-mail message to a discussion board in February accusing Mrs. Clinton of having “had a hand in devaluing motherwork in this country, and no doubt sending thousands of children and their families deeper into poverty.”
In the interview, and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton said she had serious misgivings about some of the changes proposed to the welfare system as the issue percolated through Washington in the mid-1990s.
Her husband had taken office with a pledge to dismantle the old system. He embraced time limits for cash aid and allowing states to largely decide for themselves how to spend the money. He set out to expand job training, access to health care, child care and food stamps.
When the Republicans took over Congress after the 1994 elections, making Newt Gingrich the House speaker, they seized the initiative. Twice, they passed bills seeking to impose time limits on welfare benefits while cutting other aid. Twice, Mr. Clinton vetoed the bills, with the encouragement of Mrs. Clinton.
In August 1996, three months before Election Day, Congress sent the White House a third bill. This one imposed time limits on cash benefits and barred most legal immigrants from receiving welfare. But it maintained guarantees for Medicaid and food stamps and increased financing for child care. This time, Mr. Clinton signed.
“I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes,” Mrs. Clinton wrote in her memoir.
Mrs. Clinton remained troubled by parts of the bill, she wrote in her memoir, particularly the provision barring welfare for legal immigrants. But “pragmatic politics” had to be considered. “If he vetoed welfare reform a third time,” she wrote, “Bill would be handing the Republicans a potential political windfall.”
Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of Children’s Defense Fund, an activist group that had given Mrs. Clinton her first job, blasted the Clintons as betraying the poor, opening a rift that Mrs. Clinton called “sad and painful.” Mrs. Edelman’s husband, Peter, quit his administration post.
In the years that followed, the number of those on welfare rolls plummeted by more than 60 percent. A study last year by the Congressional Budget Office found that from 1991 to 2005, poor families with children saw their inflation-adjusted incomes climb by 35 percent, as employment climbed.
In recent years, however, low-skilled women have struggled. The percentage of poor single mothers neither working nor drawing cash assistance surged from under 20 percent before the welfare overhaul to more than 30 percent in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service. During the same period, the number of children in poverty rose to 12.8 million from 11.6 million, according to census data.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/us/politics/11welfare.html?_r=1&sq=Welfare%20Reform&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=1&adxnnlx=1207973026-aRYTJ6%20bU8ZfPbK3OKQNqA&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)
VT: Lawmakers' prison plans causing anxiety around Vermont
Times Argus
Lawmakers' prison plans causing anxiety around Vermont
April 11, 2008
By Daniel Barlow Vermont Press Bureau
MONTPELIER If you ask Windsor Town Manager Mike Farrell about the massive prison reorganization plan moving through the Statehouse, he'll tell you he only knows only what he has read in the local newspaper.
Farrell said he has not heard from any state officials regarding the plan to transform the town's Southeast State Correctional facility into an all-male work camp for inmates. And that has got him worried.
"The selectboard really needs to be kept in the loop about this," Farrell said Thursday. "We need to know which direction the state is heading in this. But we haven't heard from them at all."
As lawmakers continue working on a plan to cut prison costs by restructuring several facilities in Waterbury, Windsor and St. Albans (a bill doing so has passed the Vermont Senate and is now in the House), local leaders are concerned that there has been a lack of communication.
Rep. Donna Sweeney, D-Windsor, said she began hearing concerns this week from representatives of her town over the corrections plan. Part of the breakdown in communication may be because the changes are being pushed by the Legislature and many details will still be in flux until it finally passes both chambers and is signed into law, she explained.
"I think Corrections are caught between a rock and a hard place," Sweeney said. "But once we are all on the same page, it will get better. I think the level of communication between the state and the towns on this will soon improve."
That's the assessment given Thursday by Corrections Commissioner Robert Hofmann. Because the plans are still being worked on and can change greatly from proposal to passage, he said he has held off from feeding the towns specific details that could end up being different one day later.
He added that the department has been in contact with the towns involved, including reaching out to law enforcement officials in Windsor.
"The challenge that I have right now is that the Senate has one opinion of how this should work, but the House could easily come to another opinion," Hofmann said. "I try to be consistent and everything is in flux right now."
The most severe change under the reorganization plan would be the closing of the Dale Correctional Facility in Waterbury. Under the plan approved by the Senate, the female inmates there would be moved to the St. Albans prison, which would be renovated into a women's-only facility.
Waterbury Town Manager William Shepeluk said there has been some communication between the state and his office recently, but said he has several outstanding concerns about the deal, which could see Dale closed as early as January 2009.
Some of his concerns center on the financial impact to the town. He said the state pays the town $24,000 annually for the prison and mental health beds there, which could cause some money headaches once the prison beds are reduced from the equation.
He's also worried what will happen to the families of the more than 40 workers at Dale, many of whom live in the Waterbury area, once the facility is closed.
But Shepeluk said his main concern is what to do with the prisoners arrested by local police. Waterbury Police have used Dale to hold arrested individuals overnight until their arraignment, but the closing of the facility means longer trips for local cops to drop off the suspects.
"We would probably have to bring them to South Burlington or St. Johnsbury, so that is a much longer trip," he said. "And there are usually two officers who transport people, so that is two less officers out there on the road."
City officials in St. Albans have similar concerns. Mayor Martin Manahan said several officials traveled to Montpelier earlier this week to vent their frustration at the lack of communication between the municipality and the state.
"We had to reach out," he said.
St. Albans also uses the prison to hold suspects overnight before arraignment. If that facility is transitioned to a women's facility, local police will have to drive them to Chittenden County taking two more officers off the streets and requiring the city to call in two more to fill those slots as the others travel.
"We're reaching out to our delegation in Montpelier," Manahan said. "From what I understand this proposal is a done deal, but it is very frustrating to see the state pass these costs over to the taxpayers."
http://www.timesargus.com
Posted by lois at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2008
Restoring Financial Aid to People with Drug Convictions
From the NAACP: RESTORING FINANCIAL AID TO MINOR DRUG OFFENDERS
On behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), our nation’s oldest, largest and most widely-recognized grassroots civil rights organization, I strongly urge you to support a repeal of current law that says that if you need some financial help in order to go to college, one drug conviction can make you temporarily ineligible, and multiple convictions may lead to a permanent bar on receiving aid. Specifically, I hope that you will use the opportunity of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act to overturn this ill-conceived and detrimental provision.
While the goal of this law, to ensure that drug dealers do not set up shop on our nations college campuses with federal backing, was laudable, the result is in fact racially and economically discriminatory and adversely impacts tens of thousands of lower-income young adults. In fact, as a result of this law, more than 200 thousand young men and women, a disproportionate number of whom are racial and ethnic minorities and the vast majority of whom come from families with total annual incomes of less than $30,000, though they’ve paid their debt to society, are being unfairly and unnecessarily denied access to a higher education, the only sure way to end the cycle of drug addiction, crime, violence poverty and incarceration. Instead of affecting major drug dealers, the group this law was intended to affect, this provision has in-fact primarily impacted students convicted of minor possession and nonviolent related offenses.
The current law has affected African American and Hispanic American youth in devastatingly disproportionate numbers. According to reports from the US Department of Justice and the US Department of Health and Human Services, people of color commit drug offenses at a rate proportional to our percentage of the US population, over 25% for African Americans and Hispanic Americans combined. Yet almost 75% of the people charged in this nation with a drug offense are either Hispanic or African American.
To predicate educational assistance on laws of dubious racial integrity is not only un-American, but it continues to condemn individuals, as well as families and whole communities, to a life of hopelessness and despair. By denying individuals access to higher education, and basing it on laws that are carried out in such a racially disparate manner, the United States Congress has made it even more difficult for the most vulnerable of Americans to ever have a real chance.
Please do all that you can to see that this misguided and overly punitive law is repealed during the HEA reauthorization. Only a full and complete repeal of the penalty would address all of our concerns regarding the importance of access to college for people struggling to keep their lives on the right track. We therefore urge the conferees to include language fully repealing 20 U.S.C. 1091(r) in the Higher Education Act reauthorization bill.
Posted by lois at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)
MD: Maryland: 17 Corrections Officers Fired
April 10, 2008
National Briefing | Mid-Atlantic
Maryland: 17 Corrections Officers Fired
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The state prison agency fired eight more correctional officers on Tuesday, bringing the number to 17 in an investigation into accusations of brutality against inmates at two western Maryland institutions. The latest firings occurred at the medium-security Roxbury Correctional Institution near Hagerstown, where nine officers were fired Friday. All were terminated amid accusations of excessive force during the weekend of March 8, the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services said. Meanwhile, internal and criminal investigations continue at the maximum-security North Branch Correctional Institution near Cumberland. Eight officers there were placed on paid administrative leave on March 27 amid accusations that as many as seven inmates were abused after they were transferred from Roxbury on March 6.
Posted by lois at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)
3,417 people convicted of crack cocaine have their sentences reduced
As many crack convicts are freed early, will crime rise?
Of the 19,500 drug offenders eligible over the next 30 years to apply for early release, 3,417 have had their sentences reduced as of Monday.
By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
April 9, 2008 edition
New York - In an effort to eliminate a legal inequity – one that has hit African-Americans especially hard – federal judges have begun reducing the sentences of thousands of crack-cocaine offenders.
Some police groups and prosecutors, as well as US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, assert that in trying to right a historic wrong, violent criminals are headed en masse back to the streets.
So far, indications are that this is not the case because the release process has safeguards built in. Statistics from the US Sentencing Commission, as well as interviews with federal public defenders and criminal-justice experts, indicate that federal prisoners who are to be released early are predominantly nonviolent and have good conduct records while in prison. Of the 19,500 drug offenders eligible over the next 30 years to apply for early release, 3,417 have had their sentences reduced as of Monday. Of the 1,500 inmates eligible for immediate release, dozens so far have been let go in the past month.
"There has been no release of a flood of violent criminals," says Michael Nachmanoff, federal public defender for the Eastern District of Virginia. "The people who are being released ... overwhelmingly had cases where there was no violence whatsoever and who were given unduly harsh sentences. And now, their sentences are being reduced by a modest amount."
Critics worry the crime rate, which has already ticked upward, will continue to increase as more prisoners apply for a sentence reduction. The Justice Department, for example, has pointed out that according to the Sentencing Commission's own analysis, nearly 80 percent of the 19,500 who would be eligible for early release had prior criminal records. Of the 1,500 eligible for immediate release, about one-quarter carried a weapon or were with someone who carried a weapon when they were arrested.
"This tells us those who are eligible for early release are very likely to commit another crime," Attorney General Mukasey told the Fraternal Order of Police earlier this year.
The sentence reductions came about because last spring the Sentencing Commission reduced the 100-to-1 crack-cocaine ratio in the guidelines. That ratio was created by a 1986 law that deemed a person convicted of possessing five grams of crack cocaine serve the same mandatory minimum sentence as someone who was caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine.
The result: Crack-cocaine offenders serve sentences up to eight times longer than those sentenced for powder cocaine. Because crack is more often used in minority neighborhoods, African-Americans account for 80 percent of those serving time for crack offenses.
Back in 1986, the 100-to-1 ratio was thought reasonable because crack was believed to be far more addictive and prone to provoking violence. Since then, scientific studies have concluded that crack cocaine and powder cocaine affect the individual the same way and are equally harmful.
In 1995, the Sentencing Commission determined that the violence associated with crack had more to do with the way it was sold on volatile street corners, rather than any inherent difference between crack and powder cocaine. It then recommended to Congress that the mandatory minimum sentences for the two types of cocaine be equalized. But Congress rejected the recommendation. In 1997 and again in 2002, the commission recommended the disparity at least be reduced from 100-to-1 to 5-to-1. Both times Congress refused.
Last spring, the commission voted again to reduce the disparity. This time, Congress did not actively oppose the change, and it went into effect this past fall.
In December, the commission then voted to make the reduction retroactive. That made the 19,500 federal prisoners currently serving crack sentences eligible for early release. The potential average sentence reduction would be a little more than two years.
The Justice Department urged Congress to again override the Sentencing Commission. It warned that retroactivity would add to an increase in crime.
But Congress allowed the commission's decision to stand. In part, that's because a commission analysis of federal crack-cocaine offenders also determined that 90 percent of their cases did not involve violence. Of those 1,500 who would be available for immediate release, the commission said, only 1 percent were deemed "career criminals" and 6 percent "supervisors" of drug rings.
In addition, the commission also required that inmates eligible for a reduced sentence apply to a federal judge. And the US attorney in every district can oppose any sentence reduction if he or she deems the inmate is too dangerous for early release.
"It seems like Mukasey is stoking the flames of fear, and I don't understand why," says Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, which advocates sentencing reform. "All of these people are only eligible for release. They're not guaranteed release. It's up to Mukasey's US attorneys to argue against their release, if they think they're going to go out and wreak havoc."
Mukasey's office says he stands by his earlier comments.
But many criminal-justice experts say the reduction in the disparity is long overdue.
"I would agree, like most people, that the original legislation that created the disparate sentences for crack versus powder was ill conceived," says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. "And therefore changes now to remedy mistakes of the past make sense."
The revised guidelines have been structured well, criminal-justice experts say, in that the decision about reducing an inmate's sentence rests with a federal judge.
"In the cases where the retroactive application of the guideline is pretty clear cut, we are getting agreement from the US attorney's office," says Miriam Conrad, federal public defender for Massachusetts and New Hampshire. "There are some cases in which the legal issues are somewhat more complex, and those are ones that it may take a little bit longer to sort out."
Still, some law-enforcement officials remain skeptical. The Fraternal Order of Police credits the tough mandatory minimum sentences with helping to bring about the reduction in crime in the 1990s. If crack-cocaine disparity is unfair, the organization says, then it would be better to increase the penalties for powder cocaine to the level of crack sentences.
"We believe that letting these people out, their presence on the street, will further harden that trend upward in the crime rate," says James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police.
Professor Fox agrees that there is concern about releasing a large number of crack-cocaine offenders, particularly because many of those eligible for early release now are from a generation that struggled with high levels of criminality in the '80s and early '90s. But they all will be released eventually, he notes.
"Under the logic that we shouldn't let them out because they may reoffend, well, that's true today, may be true tomorrow, and a decade from now," he says. "We have not done much in the meantime to ensure there's positive change when people are in prison."
Murky case: twins ask for release
The change in the sentencing guidelines, while a legal technicality, does have a significant impact on individuals' lives. Karen Garrison, a Washington, D.C., mother, has fought for 10 years to have the guidelines changed because she feels her twin sons were unjustly convicted under the 1986 law.
Just a month after graduating from Howard University in Washington with degrees in political science, Lawrence and Lamont Garrison were convicted of dealing crack cocaine. They had been named as conspirators by a man accused of running an automobile body shop to hide a significant crack-cocaine distribution network in Maryland, according to a summary of court records. Other conspirators he named also implicated the Garrisons, saying they saw them receive large quantities of crack cocaine from the dealer.
When police searched the Garrisons' home, belongings, and bank accounts, they did not find any drugs or indications of large cash infusions. Indeed, both had significant debts from college. But police did find phone records that indicated the twins were in regular contact with the dealer at the auto body shop. The Garrisons said that was because they were fixing up an old car at the time, a hobby of theirs. They insisted they were innocent, refused to cooperate, and went to trial.
"They believed in the system. They said, 'Mommy, don't worry, when we go to court, they'll see we're not drug dealers,' " Ms. Garrison says. " 'They'll see that we were at school, that we don't do those things.' "
Nonetheless, both were convicted. Lawrence was given 15-1/2 years and Lamont 19-1/2 years, because he was also convicted of perjury, according to a summary of the Garrisons' case. That summary showed that the dealer who accused them cooperated with prosecutors and was sentenced to three years.
"If you can't find any drugs or any guns or money and they're taking the word of an informant and not really checking out his story, a lot of people who are innocent are going to end up in jail like my sons," Ms. Garrison says.
Whatever the truth of the matter, each brother has served more than 10 years now. During that time, they taught other inmates high-school equivalency and legal writing classes, and neither has had any problems, according to their mother.
Both have applied for a reduction in their sentences.
If approved by the federal judge, Lawrence could be home sometime this year. Lamont could have his sentence reduced by almost four years and be home in 2012.
Find this article at:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0409/p01s04-usju.html
Posted by lois at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)
April 09, 2008
A life of honor, one day at a time
April 09, 2008
COLUMN ONE
A life of honor, one day at a time
By Susan Brink, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 9, 2008
It happened again at a Taco Bell. The old way of thinking, the criminal voice, wouldn't shut up inside the head of Ken Layton.
Yeah, take out that punk kid, beat the crap out of him, show that pimply faced idiot he ain't nothin' and you're still Folsom Kenny Layton.
He was standing in line at the fast-food joint, behind an overwhelmed woman with an unruly child. She was complaining about her order, and the kid behind the counter kept putting her down. "He was rude," Layton said. "Sarcastic."
Layton, 64, had been out of prison for 20 years. And yet the old thinking was back, a twisted moral code that he wrote in childhood, refined over decades behind bars and enforced throughout early adulthood, no matter who got hurt.
These are the words Layton had planned to say, before the old thinking took over: "Hey, kid, you're in customer service and you're being rude to a customer. If you keep that up, you're not going to make it." Firm. Wise. Helpful. But criminal thinking swept in, rewrote the script and instead he said, "You're a punk, and if you don't like it, I'll meet you in the parking lot."
Folsom Kenny got his taco order and tossed the food in the trash before pounding open the door.
His wife, Carlie, hungry for tacos but seeing no fast-food bag, watched him from their car. "He kind of tilted his head and put on a gangster walk," she said. He didn't smile and wave like he always did; just wordlessly got in, slammed the car door and cut off a driver as he peeled out of the parking lot.
For many ex-cons, this is the kind of moment that can precede a crime and, ultimately, a return to prison. A 2002 Justice Department study that tracked prisoners released in 15 states found two-thirds of them were rearrested within three years for a felony or serious misdemeanor. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, in a 2006 report, tracked inmates for two years after their release and found a recidivism rate of 38% after one year. After two years, 51% of released California prisoners were back behind bars.
Layton knows why: prison thinking, convict thinking, criminal thinking.
In his case, it was still there, decades after his last crime. But as he drove down the street with his wife, Layton adjusted. Within a few blocks, he'd found a way to stifle Folsom Kenny.
Layton's ability to defuse his anger is a rare skill for an ex-con, but it doesn't have to be. Experts think helping criminals understand how their thought processes are connected to the crimes they commit is more than just a touchy-feely exercise. It can reduce recidivism.
Layton's struggle, chronicled in his own contemporaneous writings and later recollections, is a case study in how the criminal mind works -- and how with guidance, practice and will it can change.
Layton's story, like the stories of many criminals, begins with a litany of gut-wrenching stuff from a deplorable childhood -- raped by his brother, sexually molested and humiliated by his mother, beatings, fights, running away from home. By seventh grade he was sniffing glue, by eighth grade he was stealing cars, and by the age of 14 he was locked up in the juvenile detention center in East Los Angeles.
"I always knew I was a coward at heart," he said, and recalled what he believed to be the core of his criminal thinking:
Ain't nobody going to do that to me again. You think you're going to hurt me. Hah! I'm going to show you something. I'm going to show you some violence you don't want to see. Ain't nobody going to do that again.
It was, he said, a front that concealed other thoughts:
I'm scared. All the time. I talk my way out of fights. I run from them if nobody's looking. If somebody starts peepin' my hold card, I gotta get them away. They gotta know this other guy, this tough guy, not the coward I really am. I know I'm nothin'. Can't let anyone else see it. I've got to learn how to be tough.
Until he reached juvenile detention, he said, he had some vague sense of right and wrong. In fact, he kept a tally, a written list of what he did that was wrong, what he was ashamed of: stealing from his mother, running from a fight.
In juvenile detention, he crumpled the tally, threw it out and never kept a list again. By then, he said, he had decided he was going to be a criminal. His moral code flipped from worrying about right and wrong to consciously and consistently choosing wrong.
[Expletive] that list. I'm just going to do the wrong thing every time. Then I don't have to keep no list. I'll make a new set of rules. I'll be the baddest convict the Laytons ever knew. The whole world is sick and nuts. They want to try to get over on me. Uh uh. I'm gonna get over on them.
Do unto others before they do unto you -- that was his new rule.
When he was released from detention, he continued stealing and fighting. He was about 20 when he switched from knives to guns. He hooked up with a robbery ring and worked his way up from convenience stores to supermarkets and pharmacies. His robberies landed him in San Quentin, Soledad and Folsom prisons for all but a few months of his adult life.
In one robbery, his getaway driver freaked and was gone by the time Layton ran from a supermarket. So he dashed into a house whose owner tried to stop him. He shot and wounded the homeowner, and as the guy fell his wife, seeing her bleeding husband, collapsed with what Layton later found out was a stroke.
He remembers blaming the victim.
What the hell is he doing, running after me. Can't he see I'm the one with the gun? What's wrong with him? He's getting in my way. Don't he know who I am? BANG.
His final crime was a drug store robbery in Oregon. His car broke down during his escape. He hitched a ride with a couple of kids who, after they dropped him at a bus station, called the police to report that he had a gun and appeared nervous.
The cops were waiting at the bus station in San Francisco when Layton got off the Greyhound. None of it wiped the scowl off his face.
But he was stifling a sigh of relief, he said. I'm goin' home, the home I know, where I know the rules and what to do and how to do it.
He rode through the gates of the Oregon State Penitentiary, believing it safer than any prison he had known. This is gonna be a breeze.I'm in heaven. Dope and handball. They sleep in the [expletive] yard! You could never sleep in the yard at Folsom.
By the time he arrived at the Oregon prison in 1977, Layton was 34, 6 feet 2, a tattooed and muscled 200-pounder who wore shades and a navy stocking cap pulled to his eyebrows. Larry Roach, then administrative assistant to the warden, said Layton made the top three on his "most dangerous inmate" list. "He was the fiercest man I had ever seen," Roach said.
Roach started talking to Layton, debating really, about the values of a law-abiding life versus a convict life. Layton argued the virtues of the convict code, the freedom of living without regard to rules, the integrity of not snitching, of loyalty to fellow convicts who also kept the code.
Roach countered that the freedom to come and go is worth the price of following society's rules. "At the end of the day, you go to bed when someone tells you to. You wake up when you're told," he recalled saying. "I go home. I can have a beer, have sex with my wife. Who's free?"
It was an argument that went nowhere for years. Roach still has a treatise Layton wrote in 1980. In it, he compared two classes of prisoner: the lowly inmate, living without a moral compass, and the exalted convict, living according to a strict code.
"Consider the inmate. He is a prisoner who cooperates with prison officials, for personal gain will cooperate with any authority. He is a coward. In prison, he will snitch on, step on and generally disrespect [other prisoners] at every opportunity, as long as protection is sure and swift. . . .
"The title 'convict' is earned. The convict, by his own choice, lives outside society's social structure. He has chosen to adhere to the social structure commonly known as the 'convict code.' It's never been written up. It's a code of survival as an independent person. He knows with cool certainty that no authority nor any man can break him. The convict is, and will be, the top of the line in his world, as long as he adheres to his chosen code of ethics. He will, till his last breath, be a man of integrity, and in his heart, he will be free."
Roach began to see the distorted integrity in Layton's values. "He was studiously adherent to 'the code.' It's not our code, but in their world it's morality," Roach said.
Layton thought he found backing for the code in philosophy and religious writings. He read Viktor Frankl, who wrote: "Everything can be taken from a man but . . . the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." Layton took that to mean The Man couldn't mess with the integrity of his convict code.
And when he read "A Course in Miracles," a kind of New Age spiritual text, it too reinforced his criminal values.
Look at me. I'm the Special Son of God, don't you know.
Then Layton got sick. He had systemic vasculitis, an inflammation of all the blood vessels in his body, a consequence of Hepatitis B infection. The inflammation was attacking all his of organs, and he was slipping away. Roach moved him to the Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in Portland.
The doctors there, using immunosuppressive drugs, restored his health. He was in shape to return to prison, but he had lost the strength and speed he had always counted on to keep safe. He said to Roach, "I can't do this anymore."
Roach asked him what he wanted, and both remember his response: "I want to be an honorable man, but I don't know how."
He was ripe for change. Roach helped him get admitted to the prison system's correctional treatment program at Oregon State Hospital near the prison.
The director was Jack Bush.
"We teach people how to be objective observers of their own thoughts," said Bush, who now consults with a similar treatment program in Vermont's prisons.
On his first day of treatment, Feb. 28, 1985, Layton was asked to write down ways in which he had hurt people. It was a long list. And as he left the room, he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror. He held eye contact with his reflection, recognizing who he was.
"I walked out of that little room. I seen the mirror. I said, 'It's you that does this [expletive]. It ain't your mother; it ain't your father. It's you.' When I saw the mirror, I realized I always blamed everybody else. But it was me, a nobody, who cut a swath through the world and didn't give a [expletive] about anybody. I shot people; I humiliated people," he said.
Layton was challenged to see the connections between his thoughts (I want that car) and his actions (car theft). Then, Bush said, the program challenges prisoners to examine the attitudes behind the thoughts, and to imagine alternative attitudes.
The goal, Bush said, is to turn an antisocial moral code into an acceptable moral code.
Prisoners are told to "pay attention to your thinking, pay attention to the connection between thinking and action," Bush said.
And then they're told to try an attitude adjustment. A criminal's attitude, for example, could well be: No one respects me; therefore, I respect no one. Bush has seen that change to " 'I can respect them, even if they don't respect me.' That's coming out of the mouths of serious felons," Bush said.
Layton was ahead of the game before he got to the treatment program, Bush said, because he had already named his goal: "I want to be an honorable man."
In everyday interactions at the program, he followed the rules. One was to report other inmates in the program if he saw them breaking the rules. "When I was in the program, reporting a crime meant that if I seen a fellow patient doing something wrong, I was supposed to take it to group," he said. "But when I was a convict, the rule was you don't tell."
Once, in a walk around the grounds outside the program, another patient talked to a woman through a window in one of the female units -- a rule violation. "I said, 'Man, I'm going to have to take this to group.' And I did. It was one of the hardest things I ever done. It was breaking a lifelong code."
I ain't no snitch fought mightily with I am a responsible citizen, and the latter won out.
He kept journals during the three years of his treatment. He kept writing down his thoughts for a few years after his release in 1988. And when Bush moved to Vermont, Layton continued to write to him, and later e-mail him, especially when his thoughts started slipping dangerously close to criminal thinking.
Soon after he got out he went to a Wal-Mart, and a clerk gave him $10 too much in change. He returned it.
Practice, practice. I'm a citizen.
The process had taken hold.
He met Carlie at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. She was the clean and sober single mother of a 5-year-old, and he was a clean and sober ex-con. They played softball on the same team, went out for coffee, played golf and took short trips with her son, Skip. Within a year they were married, and Layton jumped at the chance to be a stepparent. "God sent me Skip, and I lightened the load for Carlie," he said. "I had to be an example for him, and it built my self-esteem."
Carlie sees her husband's criminal past as a chapter written by a man she has never known. "He always felt safe to me," she said. "He has this calmness about him."
Layton appears able to recreate how he thought for the first 40 years of his life and compare it with what goes on within his gray matter today. Like an alcoholic or an addict who doesn't drink or shoot up, a criminal who doesn't commit crimes faces a one-day-at-a-time challenge with no letup.
A cornerstone of the treatment program Layton went through is that, regardless of individual facts of terrible childhoods and despicable circumstances, there are no excuses for breaking the law.
When the stress of work -- he counsels juvenile offenders -- gets heavy, or his boss gets too demanding, he's in danger of falling back, he said. That's what triggered the Taco Bell outburst, and shortly afterward he talked with his wife, with his boss, to ease the stress.
He owns his own home, drives a decent car, has a new motorcycle and has paid taxes long enough to collect Social Security. (He prefers not to reveal his present location to prevent any grief from people from his past.)
How can this possibly be me after the first 40 years of my life?
At a seafood restaurant, the three old friends, Layton, Roach and Bush -- law-abiding citizens all -- gathered for dinner. Everyone except Layton studied the menu and made standard, middle-class small talk. They discussed the entree they might order, talked about dishes they'd eaten in other restaurants in other cities, and appeared in no hurry for the food to arrive.
Layton knows that he never will be quite like them, so easy with life.
He still wages internal mental bouts against criminal thoughts. "If I see an armored car and think about robbing it, I look away," he said. "I've planned robberies in my head, but I didn't do them.
"I still feel like I'm falling short, but I want to be the best person I can be."
Posted by lois at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)
Barack Obama Speech "A More Perfect Union"
Remarks of Senator Barack Obama
"A More Perfect Union"
Constitution Center, March 18, 2008
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."
Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.
This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.
Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.
This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.
And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.
I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way
But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."
That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances - for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives - by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.
Ironically, this quintessentially American - and yes, conservative - notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright's sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.
The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.
In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.
There is one story in particularly that I'd like to leave you with today - a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King's birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.
There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.
And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.
Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother's problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn't. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.
Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."
"I'm here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.
But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.
Posted by lois at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)
April 08, 2008
CA: Closing of Youth Prison to Be Replaced by Prison for Adults?
"There are now three options on the table for the 156-acre property: a 1,000-bed state prison for male inmates older than 50, a re-entry prison for up to 200 prisoners close to parole and a 100-inmate fire camp."
"Meetings will not be open to the public because the group is an advisory body, not a decision-making one."
_________________________________________________
Posted on Tue, Apr. 08, 2008
Youth Correctional Facility
Local officials will have say on future of closing boys school An advisory team of 11 that will vet the options for the property¹s future will include leaders from Paso Robles and county
By Leah Etling
A group of 11 local officials has been asked to help the state plan how to best use the Paso Robles property that houses a soon-to-close juvenile justice facility.
El Paso de Robles Youth Correctional Facility will close in July after more than 50 years of housing young offenders. The buildings and land on Airport Road will be reused, possibly for multiple projects for the state corrections department and Cal Fire.
There are now three options on the table for the 156-acre property: a 1,000-bed state prison for male inmates older than 50, a re-entry prison for up to 200 prisoners close to parole and a 100-inmate fire camp.
The future of the property is of interest countywide because of its potential effect on jobs, the local economy and quality of life.
The state is preparing a master plan for the Airport Road site that will include each of the three proposals, officials said Monday afternoon in an exclusive interview with The Tribune. They also provided new details about how the reuse process will work.
The master plan, with all three options considered, would go through standard state environmental review required for all major development.
But first, it will be vetted by the El Paso de Robles repurposing planning team. The team will include two members of the Paso Robles City Council, as well as the city¹s police chief, city manager, planning director and public works director.
Representing San Luis Obispo County will be 1st District Supervisor Harry Ovitt, Sheriff Pat Hedges and Chief Probation Of ficer Kim Barrett.
There will also be a representative of the Paso Robles business community and someone from the Paso Robles Municipal Airport.
The councilmen, business leader and airport official have not yet been named.
The group will meet twice a month beginning April 17.
Meetings will not be open to the public because the group is an advisory body, not a decision-making one.
³We want to show our commitment to long-term planning for the facility,² said Bob Sleppy, the corrections department¹s deputy director of environmental services.
Officials are concerned that the public is confused about the three proposals considered for the property.
Two plans, the 1,000-inmate prison and the 100-inmate fire camp, could use existing buildings. A proposed re-entry prison would be constructed from the ground up.
If the Paso Robles site is selected for a re-entry prison, an announcement would happen May 8. Officials said for the first time Monday that the reentry prison could house not only offenders who would be paroled to San Luis Obispo County, but prisoners who would be released to San Benito County as well.
The total number of inmates would not exceed 200, they said.
If that plan moves forward, the Paso Robles City Council would have to approve the reentry plan by passing a resolution within 90 days of May 8.
Representatives of Caltrans (because of the boys school¹s proximity to Highway 46), Cal Fire and the San Benito County Sheriff¹s Department will be invited to participate on the advisory panel as needed.
At two meetings to be held April 28 and 29, the public will be able to see for the first time sketches of what changes could be made at the boys school. Preliminary plans for guard towers, fencing, lighting and other changes to accommodate the prison and fire camp will be presented, officials said. There will be plans for the proposed re-entry facility as well.
The time and place for those meetings has not been determined.
The juvenile justice facility is closing because of state budget cuts and declining ward populations. There are 79 wards now at the site, which is able to hold up to 1,000.
Employees affected by the closure will have individual meetings with personnel specialists during the first week of June to talk about transfer options, said David E. Bacigalupo, facility superintendent at El Paso de Robles.
The school will hold its last graduation ceremony Friday for 17 wards who have completed their high school diplomas or GEDs.
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/story/326317.html
Posted by lois at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2008
CT: Hard Work on Crime
courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-prisons.artapr06,0,3254256.story
Hartford Courant
Hard Work On Crime
April 6, 2008
Just a day after the horrific home invasion and murder of Mary Ellen Welsh in New Britain last Sunday, Gov. M. Jodi Rell was calling for a "three-strikes" law. This was not leadership, it was posturing. It was a sound-bite solution to a vastly more complex problem.
By later in the week, Mrs. Rell and some legislative leaders broadened the discussion to such things as the rehabilitative capacity of prisons, GPS tracking and inmate re-entry. That's more like it.
Virtually everyone agrees that violent, predatory offenders need to be segregated from society for long periods of time. Mostly, they are. If the suspect in the New Britain killing, Leslie Williams, is found guilty, he will cease to be a public safety problem.
But 95 percent of inmates are eventually released from prison. To give them what they need to make it, and to monitor them for possible reversion to crime, is the real challenge for public safety.
A report earlier this year from the Pew Center on the States revealed that a record 2.3 million Americans — about 1 in 99 adults — are behind bars. Connecticut's 18 prisons and jails are home to nearly 20,000 inmates, also a record.
This is despite pioneering efforts by the state to develop alternatives to incarceration, and a heavy emphasis by Department of Correction Commissioner Theresa Lantz on re-entry programs to prepare inmates for release.
There are gaps in these programs. Transitional services for inmates getting out of prison are available to only about half of those being discharged. By one estimate, the state is short 500 treatment beds for inmates with mental illness or drug addiction.
As a result, prisons have become de facto mental institutions. Nearly 4,000 of the inmates in Connecticut's prisons have been diagnosed with mental illness. Despite the Correction Department's efforts to deal with the problem, mentally ill people are often preyed upon in prison, or act out and are put in near-solitary conditions. Many come out worse than they went in. This is shameful.
Another group, nearly 3,000 inmates, are serving sentences for the sale or possession of illegal drugs. Many of these are addicts, and it becomes more difficult to see the point of sending them to prison.
There is often no housing for sex offenders on probation, so they end up in homeless shelters, where they are hard to monitor. Mr. Williams, the New Britain suspect and a sex offender, had been staying at a shelter.
State leaders made appropriate changes in the penal code in January, following the Cheshire killings last year. Now they should focus on treatment and transitional services, which lower recidivism rates, state studies show.
The state must also invest in programs that will keep people from going to jail in the first place. About 70 percent of inmates have no high school diploma or GED, and about 80 percent report substance abuse problems. Many come from chaotic homes.
We need more programs in teen pregnancy prevention, preschool education and care for the children of inmates. The nonprofit Alliance for Excellent Education estimates that Connecticut could save $63 million in crime-related costs if the male high school graduation rate was increased by just 5 percent.
These programs will be expensive, but what we're doing now is expensive. The projected operating budget for the state Department of Correction and its 7,000 employees next year is $668 million. Add the cost of courts, police, drug and mental health counselors, social workers and others, and the cost of the current system approaches $1 billion a year.
The Pew report identified Connecticut as one of five states spending more on prisons than state colleges. Three strikes on us.
Copyright © 2008, The Hartford Courant
Posted by lois at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
April 05, 2008
Supermax lockups adjust to decreasing demand
Supermax lockups adjust to decreasing demand
By JULIE CARR SMYTH AP Statehouse Correspondent
Published on Saturday Apr 05, 2008
Kunta Kenyatta struggles to describe the 33 months he spent in the tight four walls of a super-maximum security cell at the Ohio State Penitentiary.
"It's extreme isolation, sensory deprivation. It's hard to explain really," said Kenyatta, 39, out since 2001.
Supermax prisons _ where inmates spend roughly 23 hours a day locked in soundproofed cells _ were trendy when Ohio cut the ribbon on its angular, steel-bedecked penitentiary April 9, 1998.
A decade later, the winds favoring ultrasecure incarceration have shifted.
Virginia and Wisconsin downgraded supermax prisons to maximum security in 2002. Virginia made the change at its notorious Wallens Ridge State Prison just four years after the facility was built.
A large portion of the population of Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, another supermax prison, was converted to less restrictive maximum security status last year. Ohio now also houses death row and lower security inmates at its penitentiary.
The scenario has been repeated across the country, where early legal challenges prompted states to remove most mentally ill prisoners from supermax units and states recognized quickly that the prisons were expensive to operate and difficult to staff.
"In a nutshell, it just became clear that they were not working," said David Fathi, director of U.S. programs at Human Rights Watch. "They were more trouble and expense than they were worth."
Supermax prisons were built to house inmates convicted of serious crimes who caused trouble in prison, including gang activity, subversive behavior or violence against staff. Ohio's went up after the deadly 1993 Lucasville prison uprising.
Dave Johnson, the penitentiary's first warden, recalls a kind of super-maximum space race among state corrections departments at the time, each wanting their facility to be the first, the biggest or the best. The first inmates arrived at Ohio's prison in May 1998.
"I got a call one morning and the man on the other end said, 'I don't know you but I already hate you,'" Johnson recalled. "It was the warden from the Illinois Supermax, and we had gotten our accreditation before he did."
Johnson said the Supermax was viewed as much safer than the Lucasville prison.
"Philosophically, the big thing that we wanted to avoid was an atmosphere of retaliation, where inmates would do something, staff would retaliate, then inmates would retaliate, then things would spiral downhill," he said. "It started out right away (at the Supermax) where staff would be safe, so they wouldn't be fearful of inmates, wouldn't dread coming to work, and it was a very positive, upbeat environment."
In Maryland, prisons had also become deadly, said Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Its Supermax was built in the wake of two prison guard murders, one in a prison a touring judge labeled "the innermost circle of hell."
At the peak of the supermax craze in 2000, more than 30 states were operating one or more supermax prisons, holding an estimated 20,000 prisoners, according to a National Institute of Corrections study and research by Human Rights Watch. By 2006, the number of prisoners held in supermax custody had fallen to 2,378 in 10 states, according to statistics from the American Correctional Association.
Ohio's Supermax provides a prime example. Only 53 of 553 inmates are held in the extreme isolation.
The cell of a supermax inmate measures 89.7 square feet, enough room for a ledge for his cot, a small desk and stool, a set of three small bookshelves (one used for the TV), and a toilet and sink. Inmates are allotted a 15-minute shower and one hour for exercise each weekday. Meals and most routine medical care take place in the cell. All visits with outsiders are non-contact.
On a recent day, some inmates released for their hour reprieve from isolation were dashing end-to-end in a cellblock, some were doing vigorous pull-ups, push-ups and knee bends, while others were just talking.
"Just to endure the conditions takes a very strong person or else a person who can retreat into a very narrow place," said Alice Lynd, part of a husband-wife attorney team from Niles that has fought Ohio's Supermax in court. "You lose any interest in staying alive. There's no ability to concentrate, you don't get normal feedback."
With the prisons' popularity waning, states also found that there were not enough ultra-bad inmates to justify all the glistening new ultra-high security cells _ conceived, Fathi says, "not by corrections professionals, but by politicians trying to look tougher on crime than the next person."
Walter Dickey, a former Wisconsin prisons chief who served as court monitor in a challenge to the state's former Supermax, the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility, said the excess capacity remains a problem.
"Because there's a bed shortage overall in most prison systems, there's pressure to use supermax beds because they're the only empty beds in the systems," said Dickey, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
"That was an issue with our state's Supermax, and one that most corrections departments need to look in the eye. And it's not easy to look it in the eye because it's not easy to know what to do."
Virginia's Wallens Ridge is now nearly full _ housing 1,150 maximum-security inmates in 1,200 available beds. By contrast, 795 of the 1,200 beds available at the state's remaining Supermax, Red Onion, are in use, said Virginia Department of Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor.
Corrections professionals were also divided over how extensively to use supermax, something that state law generally leaves up to their discretion. Ohio's penitentiary created two tiers of security for its supermax inmates after the Lynds' litigation had begun _ allowing the better behaved ones slightly more mobility and more access to perks such as library books and commissary items.
"I look at 10 years ago and we had one purpose: to protect and serve, to take the worst of the worst," said Marcus Hill, a member of the prison's program staff. "Now you can tell how far we've come. We ask the inmate, 'What are your needs?' Before, we gave them their needs."
Kenyatta, sentenced to 30 years for robbery and attempted murder, said the "worst of the worst" label stings.
"They say these are the worst people, that they couldn't get along in society," said Kenyatta, who now chairs the prisoner advocacy group CURE-Ohio. "Well, I'm out here in society and I'm very successful. I have my own business, a lot of charitable causes and everything."
Despite the prisons' evolution, Dickey doesn't believe the Supermax will disappear.
"We wanted to make them as good as we could. There were some people who wanted to make them as bad as possible in hopes they would be shut down," he said.
"But I think there's the potential now to have the best of both worlds, to have those who straight out do bad things be segregated but not to have it be so onerous on the people who are in there."
http://www.ohio.com/news/ap?articleID=478064&c=y
Posted by lois at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)
NY Times: 81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on Wrong Track
April 4, 2008
81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on Wrong Track
By DAVID LEONHARDT and MARJORIE CONNELLY
Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.
In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.
Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.
A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.
The dissatisfaction is especially striking because public opinion usually hits its low point only in the months and years after an economic downturn, not at the beginning of one. Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.
Only 21 percent of respondents said the overall economy was in good condition, the lowest such number since late 1992, when the recession that began in the summer of 1990 had already been over for more than a year. In the latest poll, two in three people said they believed the economy was in recession today.
The unhappiness presents clear risks for Republicans in this year’s elections, given the continued unpopularity of President Bush. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they approved of the job he was doing, a number that has barely changed since last summer. But Democrats, who have controlled the House and Senate since last year, also face the risk that unhappy voters will punish Congressional incumbents.
Mr. Bush and leaders of both parties on Capitol Hill have moved in recent weeks to react to the economic slowdown, first by passing a stimulus bill that will send checks of up to $1,200 to many couples this spring. They are now negotiating over proposals to overhaul financial regulations, blunt the effects of a likely wave of home foreclosures and otherwise respond to the real estate slump and related crisis on Wall Street.
The poll found that Americans blame government officials for the crisis more than banks or home buyers and other borrowers. Forty percent of respondents said regulators were mostly to blame, while 28 percent named lenders and 14 percent named borrowers.
In assessing possible responses to the mortgage crisis, Americans displayed a populist streak, favoring help for individuals but not for financial institutions. A clear majority said they did not want the government to lend a hand to banks, even if the measures would help limit the depth of a recession.
“What I learned from economics is that the market is not always going to be a happy place,” Sandi Heller, who works at the University of Colorado and is also studying for a master’s degree in business there, said in a follow-up interview. If the government steps in to help out, said Ms. Heller, 43, it could encourage banks to take more foolish risks.
“There are a million and one better ways for the government to spend that money,” she said.
Respondents were considerably more open to government help for home owners at risk of foreclosure. Fifty-three percent said they believed the government should help those whose interest rates were rising, while 41 percent said they opposed such a move.
The nationwide telephone survey of 1,368 adults was conducted from March 28 to April 2. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
When the presidential campaign began last year, the war in Iraq and terrorism easily topped Americans’ list of concerns. Almost 30 percent of people in a December poll said that one of those issues was the country’s most pressing problem. About half as many named the economy or jobs.
But the issues have switched places in just a few months’ time. In the latest poll, 17 percent named terrorism or the war, while 37 percent named the economy or the job market. When looking at the current state of their own finances, Americans remain relatively sanguine. More than 70 percent said their financial situation was fairly good or very good, a number that has dropped only modestly since 2006.
Yet many say they are merely managing to stay in place, rather than get ahead. This view is consistent with the income statistics of the past five years, which suggest that median household income has still not returned to the inflation-adjusted peak it hit in 1999. Since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s, there has never been an extended economic expansion that ended without setting a new record for household income.
Economists cite a variety of factors for the sluggish income growth, including technology and globalization, and it clearly seems to have made Americans anxious about the future. Fewer than half of parents — 46 percent — said they expected their children to enjoy a better standard of living than they themselves do, down from 56 percent in 2005.
Respondents were more pessimistic when asked in general terms about the next generation, with only a third saying it would live better than people do today. (Polls usually find people more upbeat about their personal situation than about the state of society, but the gap is now larger than usual.)
Charles Parrish, a 56-year-old retired fireman in Evans, Ga., who now works a maintenance job for the local school system, said he was worried the country was not preparing children for the high-technology economy of the future. Instead, the government passed a stimulus package that simply sends checks to taxpayers and worsens the deficit in the process.
“Who’s going to pay back the money?” Mr. Parrish, an independent, said. “We are. They are giving me money, except I’m going to have to pay interest on it.”
Democrats have asserted recently that the lack of wage growth has made people more open to government intervention in the economy than in the past, and the poll found mixed results on this score.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they would support raising taxes on households making more than $250,000 to pay for tax cuts or government programs for people making less than that amount. Only 38 percent called it a bad idea. Both Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidates, have made proposals along these lines.
More broadly, 43 percent of those surveyed said they would prefer a larger government that provided more services, which is tied for the highest such number since The Times and CBS News began asking the question in 1991. But an identical 43 percent said they wanted a smaller government that provided fewer services.
And although both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have blamed trade with other countries for some of the economy’s problems, Americans say they continue to favor trade — if not quite as strongly as in the past. Fifty-eight percent called it good for the economy; 32 percent called it bad, up from 17 percent in 1996.
At the same time, 68 percent said they favored trade restrictions to protect domestic industries, instead of allowing unrestrained trade. In early 1996, 55 percent favored such restrictions.
Dalia Sussman and Marina Stefan contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/us/04poll.html?ei=5070&en=cc15d692319ccb0f&ex=1208059200&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1207404014-ZjR7jiMQ5+mXbvCt+xvMUw
Posted by lois at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2008
FL: Florida's Process To Restore Suffrage Illustrates Haze
Felons' Voting Requests Pile Up
Florida's Process To Restore Suffrage Illustrates Haze
By GARY FIELDS
March 31, 2008
Wall Street Journal
MIAMI -- Republican Gov. Charlie Crist went against his party a year ago and made it easier for felons to regain their voting rights. The process has been slow, however -- stirring controversy in a state expected to be closely fought in this fall's elections.
Florida's clemency board has restored voting rights to nearly 75,000 residents. But nearly 96,000 requests are pending, according to information through March 20. Activists say there might be an additional 400,000 people who have been rejected without explanation, making it impossible for them to be reinstated.
[silent minority]
The fate of these votes is especially sensitive in Florida, where George W. Bush claimed the presidency by a mere 537 votes in 2000. But similar tensions are playing out across the country, with 5.3 million U.S. citizens unable to vote because of felony convictions -- including four million people who are no longer in prison, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
Maine and Vermont are the only states that allow felons to vote while incarcerated. Thirteen others and the District of Columbia allow inmates to regain the right to vote after their release, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington advocacy group. Other states limit voting based on factors including the severity of a crime, the completion of probation and the payment of fines.
Restoring the rights of all five million felons who can't vote is complicated by this patchwork system, said University of Florida political scientist Richard Scher, who noted, "There is no uniformity."
The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in Tennessee contending that the state's rules amount to a poll tax, a reference to the illegal restrictions imposed during the 1960s. The state requires felons to pay outstanding fines and child support before restoring their votes, something the two advocacy groups say penalizes the poor.
Richard Gooden of Alabama lost his right to vote in 2000 after a drunken-driving conviction. The secretary of state said Mr. Gooden had to appeal through the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles because the felony was considered a crime of "moral turpitude." The board refused his application, saying his crime didn't disqualify him from voting. The stalemate between the two agencies left him unable to register.
The 66-year-old was turned away from the polls in the 1960s when he couldn't recite the Alabama State Constitution by heart, part of a test designed to keep African-Americans from voting. This time, the state's Supreme Court restored his vote.
"You can be in a place where you're eligible to vote but not know you're eligible because of the complexities and disinformation," said Mr. Gooden's lawyer, Ryan Haygood, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
In Florida, churches are hosting rights-restoration sessions. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, a group of 40 organizations, is planning a daylong rally for April 1 in Tallahassee. The state's clemency board is trying to reach out to as many people as possible to tell them of the changes. It held 17 hearings across the state and is preparing a leafleting campaign in convenience stores, churches and other well-traveled areas.
Inside the fellowship hall of the Greater Bethel AME Church in the Overtown area of Miami, more than 100 residents with criminal records listened to representatives from the state attorney and public defender offices explain how felons can register.
[Ricky McGowan]
Those with more-serious crimes worked their way to the table staffed by the ACLU and University of Miami School of Law students. Ricky McGowan, 41 years old, spoke animatedly to one of the students while others lined up, waiting for a free chair. Mr. McGowan, a landscaper, has never voted. He lost his voting rights before he registered because at 18 he was convicted of conspiracy to commit armed robbery. He asked about the process and explained that he is worried an arrest for littering a year ago will further complicate his application.
"I done things I'm not proud of, and I'm different now; I'm a man," he said outside the hall. "But I can't go back and change what I did." Mr. McGowan said he doubts his rights will be restored in time. If he can, he will vote for Sen. Barack Obama. "I like Hillary; Hillary is all right, but Barack, Barack is something different," he said.
The change in Florida was controversial from the start. Mr. Crist's initial proposal was opposed by two Republicans who were members of the executive clemency board, Attorney General Bill McCollum and Secretary of Agriculture Charles Bronson. Mr. Crist revamped the idea, limiting the scope to nonviolent offenders, and Mr. Bronson signed on. To qualify, those felons must have completed their prison term, probation and parole, if applicable, and made any payments the court orders, including child support.
Mr. McCollum, with the backing of law-enforcement organizations, continued to oppose the measure, noting that authorities already had the power to restore voting rights on a case-by-case basis.
A spokeswoman for the attorney general said he has accepted the changes and now is focusing on better preparing inmates for their release.
The new process is simpler than the old method, but some want it to be faster still. It is "unnecessarily complicated, unnecessarily bureaucratic and unnecessarily slow," said Muslima Lewis, director of ACLU Florida's Racial Justice Project.
Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative legal advocacy group, said the old system could have been improved, but the new system goes too far. Each case should be reviewed, he said. "To assume someone has turned over a new leaf because they've walked out of prison doesn't make sense."
Good map from The Sentencing Project at this URL and at www.sentencingproject.org
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120692447687975721-EN6zQhkYtRXw4iHF9EneXxh3YKM_20080429.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top/
Posted by lois at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2008
HI/AZ: Audit of CCA AZ Prisoner Imprisoning1,800 Hawaiians
"The bill for an audit is advancing after recent Mainland media reports cited a former CCA manager who said he was required to produce misleading reports about incidents in CCA prisons. Time magazine interviewed former CCA senior quality assurance manager Ronald T. Jones, who said CCA General Counsel Gus Puryear IV ordered staff to classify sometimes violent incidents such as inmate disturbances or escapes as if they were less serious events to make the company performance appear to be better than it was.
Jones alleged more detailed reports about the prison incidents were prepared for internal CCA use, and were not released to clients. CCA denied the allegations, which Time published as Puryear is being considered for a post as a federal judge."
Honolulu Advertiser- Thursday, April 3, 2008
Audit of Arizona prison advances
Bill tentatively passed to review facility that houses 1,800 Islanders
By Kevin Dayton
State lawmakers have tentatively approved a bill to audit a privately run Arizona prison that holds more than 1,800 Hawai'i convicts.
House Finance Chairman Marcus Oshiro said state Auditor Marion Higa likely would need to contract with a Mainland auditing firm to conduct the performance audit of Saguaro Correctional Center, a new 1,896-bed prison in Eloy, Ariz., that houses only male prisoners from Hawai'i.
The audit is expected to cost $150,000 or more, but Oshiro said it will be "money well spent" to scrutinize the Saguaro operation and the state contract with Corrections Corporation of America.
Hawai'i pays CCA more than $50 million a year to house more than 2,000 male and female convicts from Hawai'i in private prisons in Arizona and Kentucky.
Hawai'i first began sending prisoners to the Mainland in 1995 as a temporary measure to relieve in-state prison overcrowding. About half of the state's prison population is now held in out-of-state facilities.
According to Senate Bill 2342, "there has never been an audit of the private Mainland prisons that Hawai'i has contracted with to house the state's inmates, despite the fact that deaths and serious injuries have occurred at several of the contract prisons on the Mainland."
Oshiro said, "I think it's prudent to spend some monies for the audit and review to make sure that we're getting the best services for our money." The bill goes to the full House for a floor vote, and if approved will be sent to a House-Senate conference committee to iron out differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill.
The Senate proposed auditing both Saguaro and the Otter Creek Correctional Center in Kentucky, where about 175 Hawai'i inmates are being held. However, Oshiro said supporters of the bill told him the Saguaro audit was more important because more inmates are there, so the audit of Otter Creek was dropped from the House draft of the bill.
Clayton Frank, director of the state Department of Public Safety, has opposed the bill because state prison officials already conduct quarterly audits of the Mainland prisons that check up on programs, food service, medical service and security, among other areas.
"The department already has the expertise in place and is currently providing a thorough and ongoing auditing process to ensure contract compliance is being met," the department said in a written statement Monday. For situations that require immediate attention, "we have dispatched appropriate senior staff and Internal Affairs investigators to the facilities," the statement said.
The bill for an audit is advancing after recent Mainland media reports cited a former CCA manager who said he was required to produce misleading reports about incidents in CCA prisons.
Time magazine interviewed former CCA senior quality assurance manager Ronald T. Jones, who said CCA General Counsel Gus Puryear IV ordered staff to classify sometimes violent incidents such as inmate disturbances or escapes as if they were less serious events to make the company performance appear to be better than it was.
Jones alleged more detailed reports about the prison incidents were prepared for internal CCA use, and were not released to clients. CCA denied the allegations, which Time published as Puryear is being considered for a post as a federal judge.
Oshiro said he is aware of those reports.
"There's questions being raised right now, given what you read about nationally about the CCA organization maybe having two sets of books, and I think it causes some concerns, especially since we don't get to observe and watch or communicate with our inmates being that they are way out there in the Mainland," Oshiro said.
The statement Monday from Department of Public Safety noted that the department "does not solely rely on CCA reports or internal audits. As the customer, we feel it's not only our right, but also our responsibility to Hawai'i offenders housed in CCA facilities, to send our own staff to the Arizona and Kentucky facilities."
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080403/NEWS03/804030350/1007/LOCALNEWSFRONT
Posted by lois at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)
TX: Halfway house solution: Build them at prisons
Halfway house solution: Build them at prisons
Chronic shortage of beds, continuing protests spark interest in alternative locations
By Mike Ward
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Facing a critical shortage of halfway houses and community protests that have killed new sites by the dozens, legislative leaders Wednesday proposed a new tack: Build them on prison land in urban areas.
Then, they suggested, the protests might quiet and hundreds of additional, much-needed beds might be able to open — and give Texas more than just seven halfway houses statewide, fewer than in smaller states.
"Almost nobody wants a halfway house full of convicted felons in their neighborhood, so we almost never get a new one," said Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. "The waiting lists get longer and longer . . . But the fact is, we need additional beds and they need to go someplace."
At a Capitol hearing, committee members expressed shock that two-thirds of the new halfway house beds they funded last year — 200 of the 300 beds — will be in El Paso because there were no alternative sites.
Discussion shifted to the possibility of building new halfway houses on the grounds of existing prisons, especially in and around Houston. That area accounts for about a quarter of all prison commitments in Texas.
The state now has halfway houses in Beaumont, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, El Paso and Austin — in a lockup near Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and the county-run Correctional Complex in Del Valle. El Paso has two.
Those halfway houses hold 1,400 parole-bound felons.
San Antonio is the largest Texas city without one.
State Sen. Kel Seliger, an Amarillo Republican, recalled that intense community protests have derailed plans for a halfway house there.
"We don't want to abridge local control, local decisions, but there's an argument to be made that an existing prison might be a good place to locate them — especially in urban areas," Seliger said.
In the past 20 years, halfway houses have been a controversial aspect of Texas' prison system, with protests killing every new location aside from one in El Paso that officials said is in a former jail in an industrial area.
Whitmire said there are too few halfway house beds, meaning some convicts must stay in prison for months until a halfway house bed opens up. Then most convicts cannot transition out of prison in their hometown or home county, he said.
Whitmire and other senators advocated a study. Prison officials, while publicly noncommittal, agreed more halfway houses sites are needed. Michelle Lyons, the system's spokeswoman, said the state currently is 255 beds short — down from 500 last year.
"What we are doing now makes no sense," Whitmire told the committee. "Locating them on existing (prison) units makes a lot of sense."
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/03/0403halfway.html
Posted by lois at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)
NM: A Grim Tradition, and a Long Struggle to End It
April 2, 2008
A Grim Tradition, and a Long Struggle to End It
By ERIK ECKHOLM
ESPAÑOLA, N.M. — Eric Lucero has been addicted to heroin for three decades and says he has known at least 100 people in this pastoral county who died from overdoses, some in his presence.
But Mr. Lucero has recently become a popular — and, he would argue, safer — injection buddy. Seven times, he says, he has revived companions by using an anti-overdose drug, Narcan, which the state now hands out to addicts and their relatives as part of its effort to reduce the toll of one of the country’s most pervasive epidemics of narcotics use.
Mr. Lucero, 48, said, “People know I’m good at saving them.”
Rio Arriba County, just north of Santa Fe, is a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape of juniper-dotted desert and mountain valleys populated mostly by Hispanics who proudly trace their lineage to settlers of the 1600s — and who, a decade ago, discovered that their county had the nation’s highest per capita rate of deaths from overdoses. Hundreds of families are struggling to live with a multigenerational plague of narcotics; Mr. Lucero’s own son is addicted.
Federal data released in March showed that the county ranked first in drug fatalities for 2001 to 2005, with a death rate of 42.5 per 100,000, compared with a national average of 7.3.
Heroin use in the county jumped in the 1970s, as world production soared and some Vietnam veterans returned as addicts. It zoomed in popularity in the 1980s and ’90s, abetted, surprisingly, by the tradition of close-knit extended families. “We start our addiction getting high with our uncles, then we turn on our own nephews,” said Manuel Anaya, who was an addict for 26 years and now runs a drug counseling program for Hoy, the county’s largest treatment group.
Intensified law enforcement and a flurry of new treatment programs have failed to stem the use of narcotics here. So New Mexico has adopted the country’s most sweeping effort at “harm reduction,” a strategy to eradicate disease, suffering and death among addicts that includes exchanging used needles for clean ones and dispensing Narcan. Last year, the state adopted the country’s only law limiting the ability of the police to arrest users who call 911 to save an overdosing companion.
There has been no evidence yet of a decline in addictions, perhaps because of a scarcity of treatment facilities. And the seemingly contradictory impulses to stamp out drug use and safeguard addicts can lead to difficult situations for relatives.
In Cordova, a valley hamlet with peach and apricot orchards, Dolores S. emerged from her adobe house to greet the state’s needle-exchange van. A nonuser who lives with seven relatives, four of whom are addicts, she said trading hundreds of used syringes each week for fresh ones “makes me uncomfortable.”
Her face tightened as she admitted to giving money for heroin to her addicted son, slouched nearby, who is in his 20s. “I’d rather give him money than see him panhandle or steal,” said the woman, who does housework for a living and spoke on the condition that her last name not be used, to protect her family. “A lot of mothers here are in the same situation.”
Needle exchanges and Narcan distribution are opposed by federal officials, who say they amount to endorsing addiction. Bertha K. Madras, a deputy director at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, has said that Narcan, the trade name for naloxone, should be administered only by medical professionals and that it could make addicts feel safer and less likely to seek care.
But Bernard Lieving, director of the harm reduction program at the New Mexico Department of Health, said, “These programs have just the opposite result.” Mr. Lieving said studies elsewhere had shown that needle exchanges greatly increased the chances that users would enter recovery programs.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “it’s very difficult to get people into residential treatment immediately, right when they express interest, because there aren’t enough beds in the state.” But field workers provide counseling, acupuncture therapy and social services to addicts who say they are ready, which Mr. Lieving called important first steps.
Addicts remain a small minority of the population, and drug use remains largely hidden behind the closed doors of trailers and small metal-roofed homes. But nearly everyone here seems to have friends or relatives who died from drug use or are addicted to cheap Mexican heroin, cocaine, prescription painkillers or, increasingly, combinations of the above, often mixed with heavy alcohol use.
Peggy Ulibarri, a state health official who distributes Narcan in Rio Arriba County, said clients had told her of using the antidote hundreds of times. Without Narcan, Ms. Ulibarri and others say, the number of deaths would certainly be higher. Instead, recorded deaths have been steady, around 20 a year in a county of 41,000. Meanwhile, the health department trades about 12,000 clean syringes for used ones in the county each week.
Dealers are arrested, but users found with syringes now flash a card showing enrollment in the needle exchange program and are often let go.
Proximo Martinez, 35, of Chimayo, counts 38 drug-related deaths in his extended family, including his brother and sister, and is a vocal crusader against drug abuse. Yet he recently collected syringes from the van — sterile needles to protect his brother-in-law and other relatives — as well as kits with a new form of Narcan that is sprayed in the nose rather than injected.
Mr. Martinez said he had administered Narcan about 20 times. “But some can’t be revived,” he said. “People have died in my house.”
Many in the fight against drugs, including Ben Tafoya, the director of Hoy, believe the heavy use of drugs and alcohol is rooted in a shared sense of loss, starting when the United States refused to recognize many Spanish land grants in the mid-19th century and building more recently as struggling families, accustomed to farming and ranching, became dispirited as they had to sell land.
An obvious factor is poverty — more than one in five residents is below the federal poverty line and far more are just above it. Yet many working-class people are users, too.
The family role is sometimes a sad reversal of expectations. “Addiction can become a source of bonding between parents and their children,” said Angela Garcia, an anthropologist who was born in Rio Arriba County and studied drug use here.
The Rev. Julio Gonzalez, the pastor at the Holy Family Roman Catholic parish in Chimayo since 2001, said he had buried overdose victims “of all ages, including people you’d think were pillars of the community.”
“It’s not just the youth, it’s all generations here,” Father Gonzalez said.
James Garcia, who is now clean, used and sold heroin and cocaine in Española until 11 months ago and said he had encountered at least a dozen families in which grandparents, parents and children all injected drugs, with some working and others selling drugs or stealing to sustain habits that can cost $40 to $100 or more each day.
Lawrence N., an Española man in his early 50s, said he had been addicted to heroin, pills and cocaine since 1970, including during 18 years in prison.
The man, who would not allow his surname to be used, is disappointed that his two sons, in their 20s, use heroin, too. “I had them deliver to me in jail,” he said. “Maybe that had something to do with it.”
Dr. Fernando Bayardo, director of the Española Hospital emergency room, called overdoses “only a small fraction of the deaths and disease caused by substance abuse,” which include liver disease and blood infections as well as car accidents, marked by omnipresent roadside crosses bedecked with plastic flowers. The county has been spared a major epidemic of AIDS, but testing in drug clinics indicates that a majority of needle users here are infected with hepatitis C.
The county built a residence that now houses about 25 patients and has a program to counsel youths at high risk, said Lauren Reichelt, the county’s director of Health and Human Services. But there is no county center for medically supervised detoxification, and the wait list for the one in Albuquerque is long.
The most successful treatment, used on 75 patients at the community health clinic, is the opiate replacement bupenorphrine, which can be dispensed at doctors’ offices and is rapidly catching on around the country despite costing up to $450 a month.
In the backyard of the house he shares with his elderly, ailing mother, Mr. Lucero, the 30-year addict, raises chickens and pigeons, saying, “This is what keeps me sane.”
He survived five overdoses, he said, turning apologetically to his mother. “She would find me in the yard with a needle in my arm, all purple, or lying on the floor in the kitchen.”
He has been more careful, or luckier, in the last several years. But just in case, his mother took a quick lesson in Narcan administration the other day. She and her son watch over each other, she said. Every night, before going to bed, she checks to make sure he is breathing.
//www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/us/02overdose.html?sq=New%20Mexico&st=nyt&adxnnl=1&scp=4&adxnnlx=1207228905-1DZculkQ/mY1WhMR/5pR0g&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2008
TX: Harris County Jail filled beyond capacity
April 1, 2008, 9:48PM- Houston Chronicle
Harris County Jail filled beyond capacity
As state panel inspects, advocacy group cites trends
The Harris County Jail is overpopulated by about 1,000 inmates:
• Capacity: 9,372
• Inmate population Tuesday: 10,400
The Harris County Jail held about 10,400 inmates — 1,000 beyond its capacity — Tuesday, the same day the Texas Commission on Jail Standards carried out its annual inspection of the lockup.
The figures appear in line with the conclusions of a national advocacy group that issued a report Tuesday decrying the growing number of inmates in U.S. jails and the effect it has on communities.
According to a Justice Policy Institute study, the number of people in American jails nearly has doubled since 1990 as the facilities detain more drug offenders, mentally ill and criminals sentenced to prisons.
The same trends have contributed to crowding in the Harris County Jail, leading it to be cited several times by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.
The Justice Policy Institute report focused on the nation's most populous counties and covered the decade from 1996 to 2006. According to the report, Harris County, the third-largest, incarcerated the fourth-highest number of inmates, 9,400, in 2006. That represented a 23 percent increase over 1996, when the county jail population was more than 7,700. That increase was the 12th biggest among the nation's most populous counties, the report said.
The total capacity of the Harris County Jail, divided among four facilities, is 9,372, the sheriff's department Web site states.
From 2004 through 2006 the Texas Commission on Jail Standards found the county out of compliance with a state-mandated staffing ratio of one guard for every 48 prisoners. The commission decided the jail was in compliance last May after county officials spent millions to beef up staff by expanding overtime and hiring more guards.
Mentally ill inmates
The county also contracted to send 600 inmates to a Louisiana prison last year at a cost of more than $9 million a year to stay in compliance.
The results of Tuesday's state inspection were unknown.
Of particular concern to county officials is the number of mentally ill inmates in the jail, a number than has dramatically increased during the last two decades.
"There probably is no other place in Texas that holds so many," Dick Raycraft, county budget and management services director, said of the jail.
About 15 percent to 20 percent of the county inmates are prescribed psychotropic medication to treat mental health conditions, said Chief Deputy Mike Smith, who oversees jail operations.
"They are a more problematic inmate," he said. "They require more services. They can be a threat to themselves and a threat to others."
New facility voted down
The number of homeless in the county jail also is increasing, Smith said. "We are probably becoming the biggest homeless shelter in the state," he said.
Voters in the county last year defeated a bond that would have paid to build a $245 million, 2,500-bed jail in the downtown jail complex.
It would have included a vast area for health care and mental health care, officials said. It also would have included a larger, improved intake center where incoming detainees would be evaluated and placed in appropriate settings if they were found to be mentally ill.
In June, the Commissioners Court will consider whether to ask voters to approve a bond for a smaller jail than the one rejected last November, Raycraft said.
Detention costs in the county continue to rise. Two years ago, the county spent $154 million on detention, Raycraft said.
This year, it will spend $192 million, a 24 percent increase. The costs will continue to rise if the county builds more jails and hires the guards needed to operate them.
bill.murphy@chron.com
Posted by lois at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)
April 01, 2008
JPI: New report: Jail populations exploding; massive growth devastating local communities
Justice Policy Institute: New report: Jail populations exploding; massive growth devastating local communities
http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=73
Jails bulging with people with mental illnesses, the homeless and people detained for immigration offenses; costing counties billions
Washington, D.C.—Communities are bearing the cost of a massive explosion in the jail population which has nearly doubled in less than two decades, according to a new report released today by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI). The research found that jails are now warehousing more people--who have not been found guilty of any crime--for longer periods of time than ever before. The research shows that in part due to the rising costs of bail, people arrested today are much more likely to serve jail time before trial than they would have been twenty years ago, even though crime rates are nearly at the lowest levels in thirty years.
“Crime rates are down, but you’re more likely to serve time in jail today than you would have been twenty years ago,” said the report’s co-author Amanda Petteruti. “Jail bonds have skyrocketed, so that means if you’re poor, you do time. People are being punished before they’re found guilty—justice is undermined.”
The report, Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies, found jail population growth (22 percent), is having serious consequences for communities that are now paying tens of billions yearly to sustain jails. Jails are filled with people with drug addictions, the homeless and people charged with immigration offenses. The report concludes that jails have become the “new asylums,” with six out of 10 people in jail living with a mental illness.
The impact of increased jail imprisonment is not borne equally by all members of a community. New data reveal that Latinos are most likely to have to pay bail, have the highest bail amounts, are least likely to be able to pay and, by far, the least likely to be released prior to trial. African Americans are nearly five times as likely to be incarcerated in jails as whites and almost three times as likely as Latinos. Further exacerbating jail crowding problems is the increase in the number of people being held in jails for immigration violations—up 500 percent in the last decade.
In 2004, local governments spent a staggering $97 billion on criminal justice, including police, the courts and jails. Over $19 billion of county money went to financing jails alone. By way of comparison, during the same time period, local governments spent just $8.7 billion on libraries and only $28 billion on higher education.
“These counties just cannot afford to invest the bulk of their local public safety budget in jails, and we are beginning to see why--the more a community relies on jails, the less it has to invest in education, employment and proven public safety strategies,” says Nastassia Walsh, co-author of the report.
Research shows that places that increased their jail populations did not necessarily see a drop in violent crimes. Falling jail incarceration rates are associated with declining violent crime rates in some of the country’s largest counties and cities, like New York City.
“The investment in building more jail beds is not making communities safer,” says Derrick Johnson, NAACP National Board member. “Instead these investments serve only to unfairly target communities of color and waste taxpayer dollars.”
The report recommends that communities take action to reduce their jail populations and increase public safety by:
• Improving release procedures for pretrial and sentenced populations. Implementing pretrial release programs that release people from jail before trial can help alleviate jail populations. Reforming bail guidelines would allow a greater number of people to post bail, leaving space open in jails for people who may pose a greater threat to public safety.
• Developing and implementing alternatives to incarceration. Alternatives such as community-based corrections would permit people to be removed from the jail, allowing them to continue to work, stay with their families, and be part of the community, while under supervision.
• Re-examining policies that lock up individuals for nonviolent crimes. Reducing the number of people in jail for nonviolent offenses leaves resources and space available for people who may need to be detained for a public safety reason.
• Diverting people with mental health and drug treatment needs to the public health system and community-based treatment. People who suffer from mental health or substance abuse problems are better served by receiving treatment in their community. Treatment is more cost-effective than incarceration and promotes a positive public safety agenda.
• Diverting spending on jail construction to agencies that work on community supervision and make community supervision effective. Reallocating funding to probation services will allow people to be placed in appropriate treatment or other social services and is a less costly investment in public safety.
• Providing more funding for front-end services such as education, employment, and housing. Research has shown that education, employment, drug treatment, health care, and the availability of affordable housing coincide with lower crime rate.
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The Justice Policy Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank dedicated to ending society’s reliance on incarceration and promoting effective and just solutions to social problems. For more information, visit www.justicepolicy.org.
Posted by lois at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)