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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 Me