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May 29, 2008

Bush's Faulty Prescription For Mexican Drug Violence

Bush's Faulty Prescription For Mexican Drug Violence
May 25, 2008
By Neal Peirce

Only lightly noted on this side of the border, our neighbor Mexico is engulfed in bloody, violent combat with and between death-dealing drug cartels.

In a stunning reversal for President Felipe Calderon's crusade to subdue the drug trade and its perpetrators, Edgar Gomez, the national police chief and lead anti-cartel crusader, was assassinated this month outside his Mexico City home. "This could have a snowball effect, even leading to the risk of ungovernability," Mexico City sociologist Luis Astorga told The Washington Post.

Yet it's hardly unique. More than 20,000 Mexican troops and federal police are struggling against the private armies of rival drug lords. Literally hundreds of officials and police have been murdered in the struggle -- about 6,000 in the last 2 1/2 years, far beyond U.S. casualty counts in Iraq. Further drenching the country in blood, mass executions and even beheadings have been reported.

Talk about a national security issue for the United States! We share a 2,000-mile border with Mexico; it's our second-largest trade partner, especially huge in agriculture. Millions of families are related across the border; thousands of Mexicans regularly cross over for work. Yet cartel murders of police are commonplace, and 30 percent of police in Baja California alone are estimated to be on a drug cartel payroll.

There's a U.S. response before Congress right now. It's President Bush's request for a so-called Merida Initiative -- a $1.4 billion, three-year program to undergird the Mexican government's anti-drug efforts with helicopters and other military equipment, training for Mexican police forces, plus phone-tapping, mail-inspection and Web-surveillance programs.

But there's substantial congressional skepticism about aid that could flow to the notoriously unaccountable, often corrupt, Mexican military and police forces. And then the tough, basic question: Realistically, how much could U.S. aid of roughly $500 million a year do to stem the gargantuan illegal drug trade that now flows across the Mexican border -- about $23 billion a year by U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates?

And is the problem really Mexico -- or our demand for drugs?

There are three much smarter steps that a rational United States would take.

First, face up to where the Mexican cartels get their weapons of death. Virtually all, including pistols, grenades, high-powered ammunition and assault weapons such as the AK-47, are smuggled from U.S. territory, across the border into Mexico, where the gangster elements pay premium prices for them.

The weapons are often purchased legally at gun shows in Arizona and other states where loopholes permit criminals to buy guns without background checks. Then, corrupted Mexican customs officials wink an eye at the smuggling.

Our obvious answer: Seal all gun show sales loopholes, requiring checks on every purchaser. And reinstate the U.S. ban on assault gun purchases that Congress, under gun lobby pressure (and with Bush administration acquiescence), let expire in 2004.

A second smart move: Reduce demand for drugs on the U.S. side through treatment for addicted individuals. Consider cocaine alone. The RAND Corporation, in a study for the U.S. Army and White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, found that dollar for dollar, drug treatment is 10 times more effective at reducing its use than drug interdiction.

Our big mistake: Making Mexico the villain when it's really the victim. And it's "a familiar game," notes Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance:

"U.S. leaders blame another country for our failure to reduce drug misuse here at home. That country escalates its war against drugs but asks the U.S. to pick up part of the tab. Aid is given, but it ends up having no effect on the availability of drugs in the United States. Politicians in Washington point their fingers again, and the cycle continues."

Indeed, patterns of the international narcotics trade show that whenever some source of production or smuggling route gets clamped down, drug production and drug-trafficking gangs quickly regroup elsewhere.

Third and most basic of all: recognize that while prohibition of socially disallowed drugs can increase their cost, it can never halt demand. Why? Desire for mind-altering substances (opiates, alcohol, whatever) is virtually built into the human psyche.

Americans might recall the counsel of the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who learned the immense dangers of repressing demand as he watched America's misadventure into alcohol prohibition, and how it triggered the Al Capone-era wave of gang wars:

"Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials. ... Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and nonusers alike."

So now comes the Merida Initiative -- fueling the drug wars, foisting the consequences of our misguided prohibition onto an already beleaguered neighbor. Will we never learn?

http://postwritersgroup.com/archives/peir080525.htm

Posted by lois at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

CA: California Senate Rejects Plan To Construct New Prison Medical Facilities

May 28, 2008
California Senate Rejects Plan To Construct New Prison Medical Facilities
California Health Line

On Tuesday, the California Senate rejected a bill (SB 1665) that would have provided nearly $7 billion to reform the medical facilities and mental health services for state prisoners, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The Senate's rejection of the bill raises the possibility of U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ordering the state to use money from the general fund to pay for the new construction, rather than issue bonds to fund the project (Rothfeld, Los Angeles Times, 5/28).

Henderson seized control of the state prison health care system after finding that the quality of health care fell below constitutional standards.

H.D. Palmer, spokesperson for the Department of Finance, said using general fund money to pay for the project could harm other services as the state struggles with a $15.2 billion budget deficit (Thompson, AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/27).

Plan Details

J. Clark Kelso, the court-appointed receiver for the prison health care system, requested $7 billion to construct up to seven facilities with 10,000 beds for inmates with long-term medical and mental health problems. The plan also would renovate clinics at 33 of the state's prisons.

Kelso aims to begin construction next year.

The proposal would authorize borrowing the funds through a type of bond that does not need voter approval and would be repaid over 25 years, with average annual interest payments of $527 million, according to a Senate analysis.

Sen. Michael Machado (D-Linden) authored the bill to enact Kelso's plan (Los Angeles Times, 5/28).

Republican Opposition

Senate Republicans objected to the bill's cost and said it had not been coordinated with other plans that could potentially affect the prisons, including a proposal to settle a federal court case dealing with prison overcrowding.

The vote on the bill was 22-14, five votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to advance the measure to the Assembly (AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/27).

Machado said he would request another vote on the bill on Thursday.

Kelso said he remained optimistic that Senate Republicans would change their minds by Thursday. He said he would ask Henderson to order the state to spend the funds only as a last resort (Los Angeles Times, 5/28).

If the bill is rejected a second time, Kelso said he would ask Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) to allocate $100 million in the budget for the upcoming fiscal year for design and engineering work on the proposed health care facilities (AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/27).

Reaction

In a statement, the governor's office said "the receiver's plan is necessary to bringing our prisons' health care up to constitutional levels, as required by the federal courts. We're confident that the Legislature understands the need to improve our prison health care system and do it in a financially responsible way" (Los Angeles Times, 5/28).

Sen. Dave Cox (R-Fair Oaks) said he thought some Republicans could change their mind by Thursday if they were able to coordinate the receiver's plan with a proposed lawsuit settlement and last year's prison spending measure, which provided $7.4 billion to add 53,000 state and county prison beds (Los Angeles Times, 5/28).

Senate President Pro Tempore Don Perata (D-Oakland) said, "We have no choice but to pay ... You don't really get an opportunity to fool around with a federal court judge" (AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/27).

http://www.californiahealthline.org/articles/2008/5/28/California-Senate-Rej
ects-Plan-To-Construct-New-Prison-Medical-Facilities.aspx?topicID=47

Posted by lois at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)

PA: ”We can retain our freedom on the outside because of the people that are locked up in here”

”We can retain our freedom on the outside because of the people that are locked up in here,” said Commissioner Chairman Brian Smith. “That fight for freedom doesn’t stop in our armies,” he said, but includes judges, juries, public defenders, corrections officers and others. ”That’s why our prison was so important.”

Ribbon-cutting signals opening of the new facility
Mary Baldwin 22.MAY.08
The Weekly Almanac, Honesdale, PA

In his invocation at the ribbon-cutting for the new Wayne County Correctional Facility in Texas Township on Friday morning, the Rev. Edward Finn prayed for those who will be incarcerated there.

”Help them make positive decisions about their future,” he said.

Father Finn, senior priest at St. John the Evangelist Parish, Honesdale, was among those who were involved in the early stages of planning for the new facility, said Wayne County Commissioner Tony Herzog, who helped guide the county through a legal morass during the planning stages for the jail. Father Finn was “a very early advocate” of a “respectful place” where prisoners could meet with their attorneys and visitors or attend educational programs, Mr. Herzog said.

The commissioner also recognized the late county Chief Clerk Reg Wayman, current Chief Clerk Vicky Lamberton, and members of the committee that conducted a needs assessment for a new jail including former President Judge Robert J. Conway, Sheriff Charles Morelli and former Commissioner Mark Graziadio.

The old jail, Mr. Herzog said, “is not only costing the county money, but is not a proper way to conduct the county’s business.” The current jail on Court Street has no facilities for female prisoners so they have to be boarded in other counties at considerable expense to Wayne County.

He noted that the county was able to secure a $1 million state grant to offset the cost of the new jail. “That saved the taxpayers a lot of money,” Mr. Herzog said.

Mr. Herzog also commended the county’s correctional officers for “an outstanding job,” as well as the community for its “wonderful support.”

”We can retain our freedom on the outside because of the people that are locked up in here,” said Commissioner Chairman Brian Smith. “That fight for freedom doesn’t stop in our armies,” he said, but includes judges, juries, public defenders, corrections officers and others.

”That’s why our prison was so important.”

Commissioner Wendell Kay commented that the county was dedicating itself not only to a building on Friday but “to the safety and security of our community” as well as to “the true rehabilitation” of those who will be incarcerated there.

During the ceremony, Honesdale High School junior Sarah Tamburelli sang the national anthem and Sheriff Morelli cut a ribbon to officially open the jail as about 100 people watched.
http://www.theweeklyalmanac.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=&mad=&sdetail=9343&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1020&hn=weeklyalmanac&he=.com

Posted by lois at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)

May 27, 2008

3 letters to the NY Times on Second Chance Act

To the Editor:
Financing of the Second Chance Act will support useful services to support the transition from prison to community. But these services must also be accompanied by removal of conflicting and counterproductive policies that stand in the way of community reintegration.
For example, while New York State allocated $3.1 million to assist re-entry efforts this year, the same budget projects an estimated $40 million in revenues from fees and surcharges imposed on people convicted of crimes, 80 percent of whom are indigent.
This crushing debt will leave releasees unable to acquire employment and housing, reverting to a life of crime that jeopardizes the community safety.
If New York is truly committed to public safety and reintegration, it must stop using financial penalties that undermine the intent of legislation like the Second Chance Act.
Marsha Weissman
Executive Director
Center for Community Alternatives
New York, May 22, 2008

May 27, 2008
Letters
Helping Prisoners Re-enter Society

To the Editor:
Re “A Second Chance” (editorial, May 20):
Most re-entry efforts focus on prison inmates, yet about nine million people cycle annually through our country’s jails. This is roughly 10 times the number who leave prisons.
Jail inmates generally return to their communities after short incarcerations, bringing with them a higher incidence of communicable diseases and mental health conditions than exists in the general population.
Left untreated, these problems add to society’s health burden, emergency room costs and municipal budgets. They also increase the likelihood that inmates will commit new offenses and return to jail again, at public expense.
Jails are required to provide health care to inmates. This mandate creates an opportunity to support re-entry efforts. By linking inmates with community-based doctors, whom they can continue seeing after release, jails can stabilize inmates’ health and help improve the health and safety of the community.
The Second Chance Act is a welcome step. We can do more to support jail inmates by remembering that they are part of our communities and by providing them with community-based health care during incarceration.
Keith Barton
South Londonderry, Vt., May 20, 2008
The writer, a physician, is medical director of Community Oriented Correctional Health Services in Oakland, CA

•
To the Editor:
Your editorial prompts me to note several aspects of New York’s second-chance philosophy.
As The Times has noted, four upstate prisons are being kept open, fully staffed, costing taxpayers $33 million a year, during tough fiscal times and when the prison population is down by 8,000 people over the last decade. That money could be better used for re-entry programs, lessening recidivism, bolstering the upstate economy, and a real battle against crime.
We would never staff a school without students or a hospital without patients. Let’s use criminal justice resources to reduce crime.

Glenn E. Martin
Associate Vice President of Policy and Advocacy
The Fortune Society
Long Island City, Queens, May 21, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/opinion/l27jails.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: Thirty-Five Years of Rockefeller ‘Justice’

May 27, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Thirty-Five Years of Rockefeller ‘Justice’

Enacted in 1973, New York’s Rockefeller drug laws penalized some first-time drug offenders more severely than murderers. Named for Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor at the time, the laws tied the hands of judges and mandated lengthy sentences for young offenders who often deserved a second chance. The laws, which were supposed to ensnare “kingpins,” have filled the prisons with drug addicts who would have been better dealt with through treatment programs. They also undermined faith in the fairness of the justice system by singling out poor and minority offenders while exempting wealthy ones.

New York has made incremental changes in laws in recent years but has failed to restore judicial discretion. A sentencing commission appointed by Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor, pretty much ducked the issue in an interim report issued last fall. But criminal justice advocates have higher hopes for Mr. Spitzer’s successor, David Paterson, who spoke out vigorously for Rockefeller reform as a state senator. He was arrested while demonstrating against the laws in 2002.

If Governor Paterson is looking for motivation to take on this issue, he can find it in a recent report from The Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit group that monitors prison conditions. According to the report, New York is currently paying $500 million a year to house its drug offenders. The costs are rising as more people go to prison for minor, nonviolent drug offenses.

The law often metes out long prison terms to addicts, petty dealers or people only peripherally involved in the trade. Indeed, 4 in 10 drug offenders in the state’s prisons were locked up for possession as opposed to selling. These are hardly kingpins. In fact, nearly half the drug offenders in the state’s prisons were convicted of the lowest level crimes.

Many of these people are clearly addicts who would benefit from treatment. But the mandatory sentencing guidelines limit the courts’ ability to choose the treatment option. It is long past time for New York to overturn these laws and to return judicial discretion. Governor Paterson, who can cite chapter and verse on this issue, should to take the lead in this important fight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/opinion/27tue3.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2008

UK: Muslim gangs 'are taking control of prison'

Muslim gangs 'are taking control of prison'

* Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
* The Observer,
* Sunday May 25 2008

Prison officers at one of Britain's maximum security jails are losing control to Muslim gangs, according to a confidential report obtained by The Observer. An internal review of Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire warns that staff believe a 'serious incident is imminent' as several wings become dominated by Muslim prisoners.

The report, written by the Prison Service's Directorate of High Security, says there is an 'ongoing theme of fear and instability' among staff at Whitemoor, where just under a third of the 500 prisoners are Muslim.

It claims: 'There was much talk around the establishment about "the Muslims". Some staff perceived the situation at Whitemoor had resulted in Muslim prisoners becoming more of a gang than a religious group. The sheer numbers, coupled with a lack of awareness among staff, appeared to be engendering fear and handing control to the prisoners.' The situation has become so acute that white prisoners are routinely warned about the Muslim gangs by staff on arrival.

The report says that apprehension about Muslim prisoners has potentially damaging consequences and is in danger of 'leading to hostility and Islamophobia'. It serves to highlight the growing concern about extremist activity in the UK's jails. The Home Office is concerned that young male prisoners are being radicalised by Muslim gangs and that the prison system is becoming a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda sympathisers. Similar problems have been experienced at Belmarsh prison in London and Frankland in Durham. A number of high-profile al-Qaeda sympathisers at Frankland have been moved as a result of increased tensions within the jail.

Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said she was alarmed at the report's findings. 'The difficulties of running a high-security prison such as Whitemoor cannot be underestimated, but much of what this internal report uncovers is extremely disturbing,' she said. 'It is vital that the problems uncovered at Whitemoor are addressed as a matter of urgency.'

The report was commissioned partly as a response to the deaths of five prisoners at the jail within 12 months. Muslim prisoner support groups have also complained that Muslims are suffering harassment from staff. Recently a number of Whitemoor staff have been suspended on unrelated corruption charges.

The tense stand-off between staff and prisoners is causing problems, the report warns. 'Staff appeared reluctant to challenge inappropriate behaviour, in particular among BME [black and ethnic minority] prisoners for fear of doing the wrong thing,' the report states. 'This was leading to a general feeling of a lack of control and shifting the power dynamic towards prisoners.' It adds: 'A wing itself felt particularly unstable with a general lack of confidence among staff.'

The emergence of gang culture in Whitemoor has alarmed some prisoners. The team that compiled the report found that over the Christmas period the segregation unit was full as inmates sought refuge from the gangs over debt problems and drugs.

Henry Bellingham, the Conservatives' shadow justice minister, who has raised concerns about the running of Whitemoor in parliament, said he welcomed the report. 'However, I'm very concerned about some of the findings,' he added. 'They point to a systematic breakdown in the chain of command. It's in everyone's interests that these problems are sorted out soon. Whitemoor holds some of the most dangerous prisoners in the country.'

In recent months the Prison Service has unveiled a series of initiatives to combat extremism in the UK's jails through the supervision and monitoring of imams and better training for staff. 'It is vital that prison staff are equipped with the knowledge and skills to ensure they have the confidence to identify and challenge behaviour that is of concern,' said a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice. 'A programme of work is planned at Whitemoor to increase mutual understanding between staff and prisoners, including a development day for staff on the Muslim faith, focus groups in which staff and ethnic minority prisoners will discuss prison community issues, and diversity events.

'The prison will continue to work closely with the Prison Service's Extremism Unit and the police to monitor and assess issues around extremism, and work will be undertaken to examine the management of gangs and terrorist prisoners within the prison.'
About this article
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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday May 25 2008 on p1 of the News section. It was last updated at 00:03 on May 25 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/may/25/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime/print
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Posted by lois at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

297 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push

May 24, 2008
297 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push
By JULIA PRESTON
NY Times

WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.”

Claude Arnold, a special agent in charge of investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said it showed that federal officials were “committed to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws in the workplace to maintain the integrity of the immigration system.”

The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.

The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.

The hearings took place on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, in mobile trailers and in a dance hall modified with black curtains, beginning at 8 a.m. and continuing several nights until 10. On Wednesday alone, 94 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced, the most sentences in a single day in this northern Iowa district, according to Robert L. Phelps, the clerk of court.

Mr. Arnold, the immigration agent, said the criticism of the proceedings was “the usual spate of false allegations and baseless rumors.”

The large number of criminal cases was remarkable because immigration violations generally fall under civil statutes. Until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.

“To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely unprecedented,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who was formerly a senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. “It’s the reliance on criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action that takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the criminalization of immigration law.”

Defense lawyers, who were appointed by the court, said most of the immigrants were ready to accept the plea deals because of the hard bargain driven by the prosecutors.

If the immigrants did not plead guilty, Mr. Dummermuth said he would try them on felony identity theft charges that carry a mandatory two-year minimum jail sentence. In many cases, court documents show, the immigrants were working under real Social Security numbers or immigration visas, known as green cards, that belonged to other people.

All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.

“My family is worried in Guatemala,” one defendant, Erick Tajtaj, entreated the federal district judge who sentenced him, Mark W. Bennett. “I ask that you deport us as soon as possible, that you do us that kindness so we can be together again with our families.”

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.

Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific accusations but that the company was cooperating with the government.

Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of Agriprocessors, announced Friday that he had begun a search to replace his son Sholom as the chief executive of the company. Agriprocessors is the country’s largest producer of kosher meat, sold under brands like Aaron’s Best. The plant is in Postville, a farmland town about 70 miles northeast of Waterloo. Normally it employs about 800 workers, and in recent years the majority of them have come from rural Guatemala.

Since 2004, the plant has faced repeated sanctions for environmental and worker safety violations. It was the focus of a 2006 exposé in The Jewish Daily Forward and a commission of inquiry that year by Conservative Jewish leaders.

In Postville, workers from the plant, still feeling aftershocks from the raid, said conditions there were often harsh. In interviews, they said they were often required to work overtime and night shifts, sometimes up to 14 hours a day, but were not consistently paid for the overtime.

“We knew what time we would start work but we did not know what time we would finish,” said Élida, 29, a Guatemalan who was arrested in the raid and then released to care for her two children. She asked that her last name not be published because she is in this country illegally.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan girl, who asked to be identified only as G.O. because she is illegal and a minor and was not involved in the raid, said she had been working the night shift plucking chickens. “When you start, you can’t stay awake,” she said. “But after a while you get used to it.”

The workers said that supervisors and managers were well aware that the immigrants were working under false documents.

Defense lawyers, who each agreed to represent as many as 30 immigrants, said they were satisfied that they had sufficient time to question them and prepare their cases. But some lawyers said they were troubled by the severity of the charges.

At one sentencing hearing, David Nadler, a defense lawyer, said he was “honored to represent such good and brave people,” saying the immigrants’ only purpose had been to provide for their families in Guatemala.

“I want the court to know that these people are the kings of family values,” Mr. Nadler said.

Judge Bennett appeared moved by Mr. Nadler’s remarks. “I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families,” Judge Bennett told the immigrants. “Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law.”

After the hearing, Mr. Nadler said the plea agreements were the best deal available for his clients. But he was dismayed that prosecutors had denied them probation and insisted the immigrants serve prison time and agree to a rarely used judicial order for immediate deportation upon their release, signing away their rights to go to immigration court.

“That’s not the defense of justice,” Mr. Nadler said. “That’s just politics.”

Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 21 Guatemalans, said he was certain they all understood their options and rights. Mainly they wanted to get home to Guatemala as quickly as possible, he said.

“The government is not bashful about the fact that they are trying to send a message,” Mr. Clausen said, “that if you get caught working illegally here you will pay a criminal penalty.”

Robert Rigg, a Drake University law professor who is president of the Iowa Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said his group was not consulted when prosecutors and court officials began to make plans, starting in December, for the mass proceedings.

“You really are force feeding the system just to churn these people out,” Mr. Rigg said.

Kathleen Campbell Walker, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that intricate issues could arise in some cases, for example where immigrants had children and spouses who were legal residents or United States citizens. Those issues “could not be even cursorily addressed in the time frame being forced upon these individuals and their overburdened counsel.”

Linda R. Reade, the chief judge who approved the emergency court setup, said she was confident there had been no rush to justice. In an interview, Judge Reade said prosecutors had organized the immigrants’ detention to make it easy for their lawyers to meet with them. The prosecutors, she said, “have tried to be fair in their charging.”

The immigration lawyers, Judge Reade said, “do not understand the federal criminal process as it relates to immigration charges.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24immig.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)

VA: Voting rights elusive for people with felony convictions

Voting rights elusive for ex-felons
Virginia joins Kentucky with harsh reinstatement laws
by : Scott Weaver
In the coming summer months, when Virginia Organizing Project (VOP) organizer Harold Folley knocks on doors and talks to folks about the 2008 elections, inevitably some will tell him that they aren’t able to vote. And just maybe, Folley will lean in and pry a bit, stick his nose in their business, and discover that a felony conviction, even decades old, has taken away someone’s civil rights.

The Sentencing Project, a national organization that works on criminal justice issues, estimates that 5.3 million Americans—one in 41 adults—have lost their voting rights because of a felony conviction. And while each state has its own laws regarding the restoration of a felon’s civil rights, Virginia has one of the harshest sets of laws that make restoring your civil rights after a felony conviction a slog through a bureaucratic wasteland.

Civil rights include the right to vote, hold public office, serve on a jury and serve as a notary public. They do not include the right to possess a firearm.

Virginia has one of the nation’s harshest policies for felons who wish to regain the rights to vote, serve on a jury and hold public office.

“We encourage people all we can,” says Sheri Iachetta, Charlottesville’s general registrar. “But that’s about all we can do. It’s a really daunting procedure.”

Virginia and Kentucky are the only two states that do not automatically restore convicted felons’ civil rights. Most states restore these rights upon the completion of a prison sentence, probation or parole. In Virginia, felons convicted of a nonviolent offense must wait three years after completing all court obligations—sentencing, fines and probation—then file an application for the restoration of rights to the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

If your conviction is for a violent offense —or a drug manufacturing or distribution offense—the process is much more difficult.

The nonviolent offender’s application is two pages. The violent application is 12. Iachetta calls the violent felony forms cumbersome. “They’re horrible,” she says.

After waiting five years after all court obligations, a person convicted of a violent felony must obtain a burdensome collection of paperwork: a letter from your most recent probation or parole officer, copies of your pre- or post-sentence report, certified copies of every order of conviction and sentencing orders, three letters of reference and, to top it off, a personal letter to the Governor explaining your convictions and how your life has changed.

Iachetta says that roughly half of the people she sees who start the process don’t complete it.

“There’s got to be an easier way,” says Iachetta. “I don’t know at this point what it is. The process can be streamlined. That being said, until it happens, we’ve got to deal with what we’ve got.”

Folley says that VOP will have 50 interns canvassing the state this summer, hoping to knock on 300,000 doors. Each will have restoration applications with them for anyone unable to vote because of a felony, violent or nonviolent. “We’ll have all the information for them that they’ll need.”

And if they are in Charlottesville, chances are they will be directed to Iachetta. Folley says her office has been extremely helpful to people navigating the state labyrinth of civil rights restoration.

Applicants drop by to use the phone, making the long-distance call to Richmond to check on applications that sometimes seem to go nowhere as the October 6 deadline to register to vote in the 2008 elections grows nearer. The Virginia League of Women Voters is also making restoration of civil rights one of its priority issues.

Iachetta says a six-month wait is typical.

“I’m seeing it a little longer than six months,” she says, “but I also know that there are a lot of people going through this process.”
http://c-ville.com/index.php?cat=141404064431134&ShowArticle_ID=11431905083135948

Posted by lois at 10:11 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Youth lockup doesn't work and isn't fair

"...why Latino youths are five times more likely, and African American youths eight times more likely, than Caucasian youths to be confined in a detention or correctional facility?"

Friday, May 23, 2008
Youth lockup doesn’t work and isn’t fair
Clive McFarlane
Worcester Telegram

According to an American Civil Liberties Union report released last week titled “Locking up our Children,” Massachusetts is detaining 5,000 to 6,000 youths in secure facilities each year, many of whom do not appear to be high-risk.

Last year, for example, 78 percent of the young people were charged with misdemeanors or low-level felonies, and more than 80 percent of them were eventually released back into their communities after spending an average of 25 days in lockup awaiting arraignment.

Not only is the Massachusetts youth detention rate far greater than that of many other states, but minority youths are bearing the brunt of the state’s pretrial detentions.

Minority youths account for approximately 20 percent of the state’s juvenile population, but nearly 60 percent of the young people securely detained after arraignment and before their innocence or guilt is ascertained.

The Worcester County division of the state’s juvenile court system is the leader in the high detention rates of young people.

In 2006, the Worcester County division detained 815, or 46 percent, of the 1,772 people 17 years old and younger who were the subject of delinquency complaints.

In comparison, although a greater number of young people were the subject of delinquency reports in Suffolk County (1,953), Essex County (1,848) and Middlesex County (1,809), smaller percentages, 42, 31 and 28 percent respectively, were detained in those three counties.

The statistics are crystal clear, but the reasons for them are not.

Is race, for example, a factor for why Latino youths are five times more likely, and African American youths eight times more likely, than Caucasian youths to be confined in a detention or correctional facility?

“We cannot say for certain, because we do not currently have a system in place to analyze the data and to identify more accurately what the problem points are,” said Amy Reichbach, racial justice advocate with the ACLU of Massachusetts.

The Worcester district attorney’s office, however, seems to have a clue.

“We believe justice is colorblind in Worcester County,” said Timothy Connolly, spokesman for the DA’s office.

It is not that I don’t believe Mr. Connolly’s “colorblind assertion,” but I would have been a lot more assured if someone in the office had at least read the report.

No one had at the time I spoke with Mr. Connolly yesterday.

Of course, as it was pointed out to me, many of the numbers cited by the ACLU were compiled from 2006 and thus predate the current district attorney’s administration.

Talk about washing your hands.

In the DA’s defense, however, an argument can be made that just as the schools have done, the courts are shouldering a greater share of the burden of looking out for many young people.

The ACLU report, for example, points out that justices detain children who are not at high risk of flight or danger to their community because they believe detention to be in the children’s best interest.

“Some use detention as a ‘wake-up call’ or rehabilitative tool to frighten children who have yet to be convicted of any wrongdoing into obeying the law,” the report said.

“In addition, almost all justices detain youth who they believe cannot return home safely. They do so because they have no other place to house these children.”

But “far from assisting youth in dealing with the issues that may have gotten them into trouble, secure detention is one of the most accurate predictors of future criminal behavior and other problems,” Ms. Reichbach said.

“This approach is failing both youth and our communities.”

Worcester public school officials are involved with a federal initiative to provide alternatives to juvenile detention.

It is one of several community solutions being recommended by the ACLU.

Of course, courts and community efforts are all second-best solutions.

The best solution would be for these young people to have stable homes and responsible parents to go home to, and unfortunately many do not.
http://www.telegram.com/article/20080523/COLUMN44/805230664&SearchID=73318542911635

Posted by lois at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Leaving Hard Time Behind. Foundations lead effort to change juvenile-justice sytems

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

From the issue dated May 15, 2008

Leaving Hard Time Behind
Foundations lead effort to change juvenile-justice systems

By Caroline Preston

When Emily Tow Jackson first started talking to leaders of local youth organizations in the late 1990s
about supporting their efforts to improve the Connecticut juvenile-justice system, many were skeptical that a grant maker wanted to get involved.

"They thought a foundation wouldn't be interested," says Ms. Jackson, executive director of the Tow Foundation, in Wilton, Conn. "They could get people to fund programs for elementary-school kids, or for SAT-prep classes, but there wasn't much history of foundations funding those really down-and-dirty issues."

But over the past eight years, the Tow Foundation and its grantees have won a string of victories in their efforts to persuade the state that sending kids to prison is not necessarily the best way to reduce crime.

The fund helped convince state legislators to design a plan to improve the two agencies that oversee the juvenile-justice system, and last year, along with the Campaign for Youth Justice, in Washington, and other allies, it won approval of legislation that raises to 18 the age at which children in Connecticut are automatically tried as adults.

The foundation now supports programs to reduce the number of children who are sent before judges because of misdemeanors they commit in schools, among many other projects.

$100-Million Effort

Those successes are part of a growing effort by grant makers to find new ways to help young people who get in trouble with the law. In recent years, a handful of local and national grant makers, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Eckerd Family Foundation, have produced research and financed model efforts that emphasize rehabilitation, rather than harsh punishment.

Preliminary successes from those projects prompted the MacArthur foundation, in Chicago, to allocate $100-million through 2012 to efforts to overhaul the juvenile-justice system in four states and examine how mental-health problems, racial injustice, and poverty can increase a young person's chances of ending up in prison.

Meanwhile, the Open Society Institute, in New York, and other grant makers are trying to end life-without-parole sentences for people under the age of 18, following a 2005 Supreme Court decision that struck down the death penalty for juveniles.

And the Annie E. Casey Foundation, in Baltimore, continues to expand a program it pioneered in 1992 to reduce the number of children who are detained.

"I'm not prone to optimism, but it may be the case that we're poised to demonstrate really fundamental change in juvenile justice in ways that we haven't seen in a hundred years," says Bart Lubow, who leads the Casey foundation's program for troubled youngsters.

Other grant makers are taking note. The number of foundations that receive information on juvenile-justice issues through the Youth Transition Funders Group, a network of grant makers focused on youth issues, has grown to 37, three times as many as in 2003.

Deborah Leff, president of the Public Welfare Foundation, in Washington, said she decided in 2007 to make criminal and juvenile justice one of three key causes the foundation supports because she was heartened by the success of advocacy efforts like the one last year in Connecticut.

"When you're a mid-sized foundation, you look for opportunities where an injection of funds can make a difference," she says. "Our grantees saw enormous opportunities for change."

Challenging Cause

Compared with many causes, however, the number of foundations that make grants to juvenile-justice groups is still relatively small. Grant makers provided about $191-million for crime, justice, and legal issues in 2006, according to the Foundation Center, only a portion of which went to juveniles. (That money includes not just efforts to change the judicial system but also programs to improve public safety, among many other causes.)

Some foundation leaders say that the complexities of juvenile-justice grant making may dissuade others from stepping in. The cause requires foundations to work closely with governments, which can be challenging as political views of officeholders change. What's more, juvenile offenders rarely pull at people's heart strings.

"This isn't a population that people have a lot of sympathy for," says Robert Crane, president of the JEHT Foundation, in New York. "If you have a choice between funding a program in a school for underserved kids who are working really hard to succeed in their lives and funding criminal-justice work, justice work is a hard sell."

Yet advocates say that the urgency of juvenile-justice work was laid bare in February with the publication of a study by the Pew Center on the States. The report found that the United States imprisons more people than any other country, with 1.6 million people, or 1 in 100 American adults, serving time behind bars. Many nonprofit and foundation leaders say the failures of juvenile facilities have contributed to those high incarceration rates among adults.

"As a country, we believe that the practice of imprisonment, and the threat of imprisonment, deters crime," says Mr. Lubow. "And yet we're the country with the most people locked up and the highest crime rates."

The MacArthur foundation, in particular, has been key to supporting research that undermines the notion that hard time reduces juvenile crime.

The Chicago grant maker started supporting juvenile-justice research in 1996, the same year that John DiIulio (then a Princeton University professor), along with other criminologists, published a book predicting that bands of hardened young "superpredators" would drastically increase the levels of youth violence in the United States. Such warnings prompted a wave of legislation that made it easier to prosecute adolescents as adults.

Those measures led MacArthur to spend $12.6-million on research documenting how young people's brains are less developed than those of adults and how serving time in adult prisons doesn't reduce young people's risk of committing future crimes. In fact, one study found that youths who were punished through the juvenile system were about 60-percent less likely to commit another crime than those who went before adult courts.

Advocates have relied on that research to persuade policy makers and citizens nationwide of the disadvantages of prosecuting young people as adults. The Supreme Court cited the MacArthur-supported research, for example, in its decision three years ago to strike down the death penalty for juveniles.

To build on that research, the MacArthur foundation created a new program, known as Models for Change, that will help four states — Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Washington — use the research to make changes in their juvenile-justice systems.

The foundation works with a broad array of individuals, including charity leaders, prosecutors, legal advocates, and people in all three branches of government, to build a program that can sustain changes in political administrations and shifting public opinion.

The foundation will also support efforts to design and put in place new policies in 12 additional states that seek to reduce racial inequality, ensure that young people with mental-health problems receive the services they need, and improve legal representation for impoverished youths. Black youths are arrested at twice the rate of white youths nationwide, while an estimated 25 percent of juveniles in the justice system have serious mental-health conditions.

Dropping Crime Rates

Meanwhile, the Annie E. Casey Foundation is building on the success of a program it began in 1992 to help counties, cities, and states decrease the number of young people who are detained. The Baltimore fund works with government officials to show them how alternatives to detention can keep children who aren't a threat to public safety out of the penal system.

The program also provides government officials with tools to evaluate how racism might play a role in sentencing. It helps them improve the conditions in which young people serve out detention and provide home care and other alternatives to prison time.

The Casey foundation has some encouraging statistics to back up the program's success. Youth crime has dropped by 47 percent in places that have adopted its approach, while the number of juveniles behind bars has decreased by 55 percent. Today, approximately 95 jurisdictions in 25 states have embraced the approach known as the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative.

It has also won support from other grant makers. In 2005, the JEHT Foundation gave $2.5-million to help expand the program. (Mr. Lubow estimates that the Casey foundation has spent $50-million over the past 15 years on the program.)

Grants to states adopting the initiative, meanwhile, range from $50,000 to $200,000. But the biggest challenge, says Mr. Lubow, has proved not to be money but a lack of determination on the part of policy makers and citizens.

Some of the efforts Casey has supported "have failed for want of administrative acumen or political will, but not for lack of resources," he says. Mr. Lubow cites the example of New York City, which adopted the Casey foundation's model under Mayor David Dinkins's administration in 1992. But the foundation had trouble garnering support for its agenda under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and ended its funding a few years after he took office.

Indeed, that is a major challenge for all foundations seeking to improve treatment of juvenile offenders. Political winds shift and allies may get voted out of office.

"At the end of the day, change will only occur if you get the political powers that be to understand the value in changing," says Mr. Crane, of the JEHT Foundation. "You can't create a private justice system. You're stuck with the system you have."

Even so, some grant makers have managed to change how government acts. For instance, the Tow Foundation makes a deliberate effort to test promising programs and then asks states to step in and finance them. It was able to phase out support for dance and music classes to inmates at the Bridgeport Juvenile Detention Center, for example, when the government stepped in and paid for the program's expansion to all of the state's detention centers.

Spreading an Idea

The Casey and JEHT funds have also supported efforts to improve correctional facilities based on an approach pioneered in Missouri. Their grants have helped the Missouri Youth Services Institute, a nonprofit group founded in 2005, spread Missouri's techniques — which emphasize smaller facilities and a more cooperative relationship between youths and staff members — in places such as Santa Clara County, Calif., and Washington.

Family foundations, such as the Eckerd Family Foundation, in Tampa, Fla., and the Tow Foundation, have been key to producing change on the state level.

Last year, the Eckerd Family Foundation persuaded Florida legislators to create a committee that drew up recommendations to improve the juvenile-justice system. The foundation gave $100,000 to pay for consultants, travel, and other expenses, an unusually large grant for the foundation and one of the first it made to aid a government entity.

Marie Osborne, chief of the juvenile division of Florida's Miami Dade Public Defenders Office, says that her experience working with the Eckerd Family Foundation showed that grant makers can provide a nonpartisan voice of reason, persuading policy makers to pass legislation based on evidence, not on the political climate.

"They're independent of whether this is the get-smart-on-crime year or the get-tough-on-crime year or the rehabilitation year," she says. "They can say, 'This is the science of what works for what type of children at what stage of their development, and this is the cost.' That is so sobering, and so necessary."

No-Parole Problem

As foundations look to the future, some are mobilizing around an effort to end life-without-parole sentences for juveniles.

More than 2,225 adolescents under the age of 18 have been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Seventy-three of them were 13 or 14 when they committed the crime for which they're in prison, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, in Montgomery, Ala.

In February, the Open Society Institute held a meeting of foundations and nonprofit groups concerned about the issue.

"It's a way to bring fresh thinking to a problem and to make connections between funders and advocates," says Nancy Chang, a program officer at the New York foundation."There's a large group of excellent advocates working in this area, but there's a need for some coordination and additional funding to push these state campaigns."

Mr. Lubow, of the Casey foundation, says progress nonprofit leaders have made in rolling back punitive state laws, combined with the success of many counties and cities in reducing the number of youths they imprison, has left him convinced that private dollars can have a big impact.

But, he says, the challenge remains of translating a collection of small successes into nationwide, systemic change.

"There are places that have broken their addiction to incarceration," he says. "But as a country, we still believe that the path to public safety is paved with punishment."

Posted by lois at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2008

OH: Federal Jugde Approves Plan to Overhaul Prisons for Youth

Overhaul of state's juvenile prisons approved
Wednesday, May 21, 2008 8:40 PM
By ALAYNA DEMARTINI
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The state's overcrowded, understaffed and violent juvenile prisons are about to be overhauled.

A federal judge approved a plan yesterday to improve the medical care, mental-health care and education of young felons and to better train prison employees to subdue their charges without violence.

The policy has been, “Hit first, ask questions later,” said Fred Cohen, a consultant who evaluated the prison system last year, exposing a host of serious problems.

“This is not going to go away overnight.”

The 89-page proposal resulted from a series of lawsuits child-advocacy lawyers filed against the Ohio juvenile-prison system. The plan went into effect yesterday and includes deadlines for the changes.

O
In federal court yesterday, Lisa Ward held up a picture of her son and described how he has suffered a series of injuries since he arrived in prison in January.

An 18-year-old inmate sexually assaulted her son in prison when he was 12, she said.

Guards trying to restrain the boy bashed his head on the ground, causing a concussion, Ward said. In another incident, she said, “One of the guards punched him over his heart. He had a bruise, and they call that restraint.”

Nicholas Seefong, an inmate in the Circleville juvenile prison, pointed out in court that the state needs to quickly improve how it houses the inmates.

Young felons in the juvenile prison often are beat up, Seefong said, because they are housed with more-violent inmates.

Inmates fear retaliation if they report that a staff member assaulted them, he said, and even when they do report it, little is done.

Cohen has blasted the juvenile prisons' policy of placing severely misbehaving youths in solitary confinement for extended periods. He called it “unconstitutional'' and said it should be immediately stopped.

Cohen is part of a team of professionals that will continue to monitor and assist the system in making the required changes.

The U.S. Department of Justice also will be watching. It filed a lawsuit last week against the state's juvenile-prison system and Gov. Ted Strickland.

It agreed to drop the suit after the state agreed to keep the justice department in the loop on the agency's progress.

The state's eight juvenile prisons have 1,527 inmates ranging from 11 to 20 years old. It costs the state about $80,000 a year for each juvenile inmate.

The new plan is estimated to add $20 million to $30 million annually to the system's budget of $293 million.

The state has agreed to pay the legal fees of the lawyers who sued the state on behalf of juvenile inmates. The fees are expected to total about $220,000, said Al Gerhardstein, a Cincinnati lawyer involved in the suit.

“It isn't easy to change large organizations,” Tom Stickrath, director of Ohio's juvenile-prison system said as he left court yesterday. “I have found it to be challenging, perhaps more challenging than I had expected.”
http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/05/21/JUVI_PRISONS.html?sid=101

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

May 21, 2008

CA: Under California prison plan, local authorities would help some prisoners turn their lives around

NEWS ANALYSIS
Under California prison plan, local authorities would help some criminals turn their lives around
Proposed legal settlement would require communities to come up with alternatives to incarceration for offenders convicted of new crimes or found to have violated their parole.
By Michael Rothfeld
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 21, 2008

SACRAMENTO -- - The proposed settlement of a state prison overcrowding lawsuit would require a major shift in the way Californians view prisons, one that would demand that local communities see themselves as stakeholders.

The draft agreement in federal court, details of which were released Monday, would divert from state prison tens of thousands of offenders convicted of new crimes or found to have violated their parole. They would be watched over in their home communities by local probation or state parole agents.

But that would require local government to expand programs to treat those offenders or to create alternatives to incarceration, and allow new facilities in their backyards.

In recent decades, state lawmakers and initiatives supported by voters went the opposite way, building more prisons in remote areas and stiffening penalties that increased the number of people housed in them.

"Most of what is envisioned here involves much more community collaboration than has ever happened in California," said Joan Petersilia, a criminologist at UC Irvine. "For this to work, California citizens will have to step up in a way they never have before."

The parties in the court case, which is now before a three-judge federal panel, are reviewing the settlement proposed by two court-appointed mediators. The proposal was based on negotiations involving state officials, lawyers for inmates, Republican state lawmakers and local law enforcement officials across the state. The parties have until next week to accept or reject it.

Under the deal, the state would have until the end of 2011 to reduce the state prison population by a number to be agreed upon in consultation with experts. If the case should proceed to trial instead, the three-judge panel would determine whether to cap the state prison population and order a release of inmates.

The underpinning of the proposed settlement is a greater focus in state prisons on the most serious criminals, while giving less risky offenders the tools and opportunities they need to turn their lives around in their own communities.

That idea has been discussed by many experts in California for decades, and it has been tried in fits and starts. Four decades ago, the state began giving counties funding for juvenile offenders who were kept locally, but the money eventually dried up. In 1994, state lawmakers approved a similar mechanism for "community corrections," but it was barely funded.

Experts and some state and local officials said Tuesday that the amount of funding the state would allocate to local governments, which has not been determined, would be key to the plan. Criminals could be given treatment or other alternatives to state prison such as electronic home monitoring or short stints in county jails. Many jails, such as those in Los Angeles County, are already packed.

"I think some places will be more able to do this than others," said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a nonprofit group in Oakland. "We need to increase the capacity of probation and the sheriffs to manage people at the local level. Otherwise we're just pushing people around from one bucket to another."

Lance Corcoran, a spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., the state prison guards' union, said that relying on localities might be premature, when many rural areas, such as Fresno or Butte counties, don't have the kinds of programs that are available in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And he questioned whether they would work.

"The notion that 58 counties can do it better, I think, is misguided," Corcoran said. "And I think there may be an impact on public safety."

But state Sen. Michael Machado (D-Linden), who presides over the corrections portion of the state budget, said the plan shows "tremendous progress" by offering concrete steps to alleviate the crisis in the state prisons. He said communities will have to deal with those criminals at some point, anyway.

"So the question comes back, do you want to have somebody to meet them there at the bus depot and put them in a program?" he asked. "Or do you want them to walk two blocks and get their fix?"

Riverside County Dist. Atty. Rod Pacheco, who is a party to the court case, said he agreed with the notion of rehabilitation, but his main concern is with what the state will provide: "Where's the beef? Where's the resources, the staff, the money?. . . . They need to spell that out and they need to agree to it. Otherwise it's just a promise, and promises don't rehabilitate criminals."

There is also the question of whether communities would accept offenders who might not serve time in state prison. Pacheco said he might not object to a settlement that allows those who violate parole to receive alternatives to prison, but he would not approve if those convicted of new crimes were able to avoid prison.

Under the draft settlement, those who would serve less than a year in prison would be diverted to local punishment or community programs. Pacheco said many of those have been convicted of multiple felonies.

"Those guys are bad," he said. "They need to be housed away from us, and they need to be sent to state prison and segregated."

State Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), who chairs the Senate's Public Safety Committee, said she was encouraged by the proposed settlement, but she also wondered what kind of cooperation local communities would offer.

In her district, she said, there has been controversy as Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has attempted to reopen the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, once a county jail.

"We've seen in other parts of the state, 'Oh yeah, get 'em out of prison, but not in my backyard,' " Romero said. "The devil is in the details."

Petersilia said that one option is opening so-called day reporting centers, where offenders go every day during working hours for education and to look for jobs.

There are two in California, but some communities have refused to allow them.

California Court of Appeal Justice Peter Siggins, one of the mediators in the negotiations, called it "a process of education" for local residents and officials.

"The people we're talking about are people that are going back into their communities every day," he said. "The question is, how do you make it safer to go back into their communities every day?"
michael.rothfeld@latimes.com
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times

Posted by lois at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Another example of how the DOC creates obstacles for people wanting to work with prisoners

Another example of the obstacles created by the MA DOC in preventing people from going into MA prisons and jails.

May 19, 2008
Society of the Incarcerated: Acknowledging the Voices of America's Ever-Increasing Prison Population
by Anna Clark
- USA -
Who talks about prisoners these days? Certainly not the US presidential candidates or most others up for election in 2008, unless it’s in tangential “get tough on crime” rhetoric. In the media, quality coverage such as Jeff Gerritt’s Pulitzer-nominated series on medical care in Michigan prisons, which appeared last year in The Detroit Free Press, is overshadowed by courtroom dramas and legal thrillers. MSNBC has built something of a franchise in its “To Catch a Predator” series, which lures people to a Dateline set, humiliates them by reading their chat room transcripts with someone they thought was underage, and then calls on a police crew to rather unnecessarily tackle them in an arrest sequence right out of a summer blockbuster.

Authentic communication from and about prisoners exists, but it’s relegated to a niche market outside of most print and online news sources, of influential political blogs, of the catalogues of big publishers, and of the speeches of election year candidates. Presumably, its minimal share of attention is justified because decision makers think their audiences don’t care much about prisons and the people in them.

•
It’s an odd assumption in the face of the prison industrial complex’s monstrous growth. We incarcerate 500% more people today than we did thirty years ago. The United States is home to a mere five percent of the world’s total population, and 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population: 2.3 million people, most of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. And that number doesn’t include those living under the thumb of the criminal justice system: probationers, parolees and those on tethers, the electronic monitoring devices worn by people on house arrest.

This makes the vacuum of nuanced coverage of prisons and prisoners in the media and by the candidates all the more baffling.

The dissonance between the prison industrial complex’s growth and the de facto denial of how it affects all of us struck me last year when I wanted to facilitate a writing workshop in a medium-security men’s prison in Massachusetts. I’d been doing similar work in Michigan prisons and detention centers through the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), beginning my freshman year at the University of Michigan. I was drawn in because I love writing, because I love working with people, and here was a place where they came together. At the same time, I wanted to venture toward the places where I’d been told, in a thousand ways, I shouldn’t want to be. So many of my family members were appalled when I began. I was too young, too female, too inexperienced.

Workshops became a constant in my life; not only those that I facilitated, but others that were also part of PCAP. It was hard. It was hilarious. It made me a better writer. I loved it so much that I took on more leadership helping to initiate a project that supports incarcerated writers and artists; assisting with the annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners; organizing prison-related events in Ann Arbor; serving as a discussion facilitator for a university class that wrestled with prisons; attending performances in and outside of prison walls; returning artwork to an incarcerated man’s mother who lived near where I grew up; and exchanging letters for two years with a writer who was locked up in northern Michigan—too far for the PCAP arm to reach.

After moving to Boston I looked for ways to get back inside. Though PEN New England, a prison writing program, I thought I’d found a way in.

At the orientation for new volunteers, two representatives of the prison gushed about how much they valued folks coming. In Michigan, the prisons I worked in were high security, and at this lower level facility outside Boston, I was excited at what seemed to be an uncommon openness to creative spaces. What, you mean a corrections officer won’t need to be in the room with us? We have it to ourselves? We can freely bring most materials in and out of our workshops?

Visions of an unusually strong workshop floated in my head. More than just a fun couple of hours a week, I’ve experienced these workshops as profound spaces of transformation and empowerment. They aren’t to be taken lightly.

The prison’s representatives gave a moving testament to how much they valued volunteers who were themselves formerly incarcerated. There was a nod to role-modeling.

The volunteers were then informed that a condition of our coming inside to facilitate workshops was that we were not to have any contact with anyone who is or had been incarcerated in a prison or jail, in any state, ever.

The reps made a big point of this. They told a story about one of the best volunteers they ever had, a Native woman who led extraordinary spiritual ceremonies that resonated with a great deal of the inmates. It came out that she was married to a man incarcerated in Indiana.

“We had to let her go,” said one of the representatives. “It was such a shame.”

I was startled by the contradiction in the prison’s policy: the very folks they encouraged to volunteer—former prisoners—were not people other volunteers were permitted to know. While I might fathom that this prison’s policy was intended as a security measure, the shear breadth of it—not knowing anyone who’d been incarcerated in any prison or jail ever—seems to leave common sense aside.

With the prison industrial complex growing as feverishly as it is, with our nation’s economic interests increasingly bound up with keeping more and more people behind bars for longer and longer periods of time, no one will be untouched. We will all know someone (or many people) who has been put in a cell. It is inevitable.

I know many. I’m related to some, built friendships with others, and still others have been my colleagues. Many I know in Michigan, a few in Indiana, others in Massachusetts. For the few years I lived in Boston, I lived and worked in a community called Haley House, where I interacted daily with poor men, many of whom had been in and out of the criminal justice system. I move within progressive circles where my friends and allies practice civil disobedience, allowing themselves to be arrested to protest the prison in Guantánamo Bay, the war in Iraq, or the military base in Ft. Benning, GA, that trains its students in torture techniques.

I wasn’t willing to deny these relationships. I told the prison’s representatives about them at the orientation. I also testified to having experience in prisons, offered to supply letters of recommendation that could account for my work, and was pleased to have PEN New England back me up in my request to move forward as a volunteer.

I was told the final decision would be put to a particular lieutenant. After eight months, after the writing workshop’s cycle had begun and ended, after constant phone calls and emails, no decision was ever offered. The prison was spared the scrutiny of a yes or no answer by waiting me out.

While I’ll admit to my disappointment with this prison, I don’t offer up the story to vent. It’s more pertinent to understand that those 2.3 million men and women and children in prison are real people. While they are disproportionately people of color and poor—hardly the demographic given center stage in media and electoral campaigns—they are connected to other people in a thousand ways. We bear profound responsibility for the prison industrial complex we’ve built.

We must notice. Human lives are at stake.

There is already a movement that challenges the prison industrial complex and acts from the belief that it’s real people inside those walls, and that real families are affected. The movement also acknowledges that victims of crimes are real people too, whose experiences deserve understanding, not media caricature or political exploitation.

Consider the Prison Creative Arts Project, a collaborative organization that facilitates writing, art, drama, and music workshops in prisons, detention centers and urban schools throughout Michigan. It’s produced 13 annual exhibitions of art by Michigan prisoners at the University of Michigan, facilitates one-on-one arts training with people who are incarcerated and supports artists who are released from prison by connecting them with working artists in the communities they return to.

Consider The Sentencing Project, a national organization that documents the disturbing trends in the prison industrial complex while agitating for viable alternatives to incarceration and current sentencing law.

Consider PEN America’s Prison Writing Program, which has provided mentoring, workshops, readings and publication to incarcerated writers since 1971.

Consider the Women’s Prison Association, which advocates for women with histories in the criminal justice system. It particularly supports a woman’s need for housing, employment and health care when she returns to her community.

Consider Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, which challenges the death penalty through constant interaction with citizens, media and policy makers. Since 1976, MVFR has contended that legal executions lead to yet another family losing a loved one to violence, while capital trials absorb dollars that would be better put to victim services and law enforcement.

Most of all, consider yourself—and your own stake, intentional or not, in a system that will continually and quietly shape the direction of our country unless we agitate for an alternative.

About the Author
Anna Clark is a freelance journalist and fiction writer living in Detroit, MI. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Utne Reader, Women's eNews, Bitch Magazine, Writers' Journal, RH Reality Check, and other publications. She maintains the literary and social justice website, Isak.
http://thewip.net/contributors/2008/05/society_of_the_incarcerated_ac.html

Posted by lois at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)

The rights of detainees

Editorial: Daily Hampshire Gazette
Northampton, MA
The rights of detainees
05/21/2008

The Franklin County Jail has been sued by a man who says he was strip-searched twice before his court arraignment after being arrested for allegedly failing to pay excise taxes.

While both sides are due their day in court, one issue is not in dispute: Prior to the construction of a new Franklin County jail, the sheriff routinely conducted strip-searches of all detainees, except for those in protective custody.

The case is remarkably similar to a class-action suit that was filed against the Hampshire County sheriff for pre-trial strip-searches; the Hampshire sheriff eventually agreed to a $205,000 settlement last year to resolve the case.

In both cases, the sheriffs should have taken the extra step of separating those awaiting trial from the rest of their detainees, which would have eliminated the need for across-the-board strip-searches.

The Franklin County suit involves a Sunderland man, Gregory Garvey, who re-established residency in Massachusetts after his home in Mississippi was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Garvey was involved in a car accident in Whately on Nov. 29, 2006, at which time he was told by an officer that his license had been suspended for failure to pay excise taxes several years earlier when he previously lived in the state, according to the lawsuit.

Garvey said he paid the excise taxes but, on Jan. 30, 2007, Sunderland police arrested him on a default warrant for failing to appear in Greenfield District Court on a charge of operating with a suspended license. He was held in the Franklin jail pending his appearance in court the next morning; Garvey said he was strip-searched twice while in custody.

Garvey's case is being handled by Howard Friedman, the Boston attorney who also represented the plaintiff in the suit filed against the Hampshire County jail over improper strip-searches. In that case, Charles V. Ryan IV - the son of a former Springfield mayor - was strip-searched while awaiting a court appearance after he was arrested for allegedly violating an abuse-prevention order. The charge was subsequently dropped after the witness refused to testify against Ryan.

That incident occurred before Hampshire County opened a regional lockup facility, which has separate accommodations for those awaiting a court hearing.

In both cases, the sheriffs have argued that their older, cramped jails justified the strip-search policies. While we appreciate how difficult it can be to arrange the funding for adequate police facilities, their excuse does not pass constitutional muster. As in the Hampshire case, it may well turn out that it would have been a lot less expensive for the Franklin County sheriff to have provided separate accommodations. These cases provide necessary reminders that jails cannot skimp on basic rights no matter how short they are on funding.

Posted by lois at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)

Makeshift Space for Inmates as Prisons Exceed Capacity

May 20, 2008
Makeshift Space for Inmates as Prisons Exceed Capacity
By JENNIFER 8. LEE

New York’s federal prisons are letting inmates sleep in areas not originally designed for inmate beds — like television rooms — because of overcrowding in excess of 50 percent, according to correspondence with the Federal Bureau of Prisons released on Monday by Senator Charles E. Schumer.

According to Harley G. Lappin, the director of the bureau, more than 5,700 inmates were in New York federal prisons on an average day in the 2007 fiscal year, far above the recommended population of 3,600.

Each of New York’s four federal prisons is at least 50 percent over capacity, with the federal prison in Ray Brook at a high of 61.2 percent over.

The prisons in Ray Brook, in Essex County, and Otisville, in Orange County, are the two federal institutions in New York State now housing inmates in areas not designed for sleeping, Mr. Lappin said. That information came in response to questions by Mr. Schumer’s office.

A spokesman for Mr. Schumer, Josh Vlasto, said that a representative for Mr. Schumer visited Otisville, met with the warden and saw the overcrowding and short staffing firsthand. That, Mr. Vlasto said, prompted Mr. Schumer to ask for the report.

Systemwide, federal prisons are operating at 37 percent above capacity, according to the bureau. But that average disguises a large range: from a low of 10 percent over capacity in minimum-security prisons to a high of 49 percent in high-security institutions. The other two categories are low-security prisons, which are 33 percent over capacity, and medium-security prisons, which are at 47 percent over capacity.

But New York State prisons are strained in large part because federal prisons make an effort to keep prisoners close to their home communities.

The prison population, both state and federal, has been steadily increasing since the early 1980s, partly because of the length of sentences, which for comparable low-level crimes are more severe than they are in European nations.

New York ranks fourth among states in the size of the total prison population, behind California, Texas and Florida.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/nyregion/20prisons.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 08:46 AM | Comments (0)

MA; Supreme Judicial Court allows use of statistical evidence of racial profiling

SJC allows use of statistical evidence of racial profiling
By DENISE LAVOIE Associated Press
05/21/2008
Daily Hampshire Gazette

BOSTON - Drivers who are stopped by police and suspect racial profiling can use statistical information to make their case, and if they prove it, evidence seized during the stop should be thrown out, the state's highest court ruled Tuesday.

The Supreme Judicial Court said that defendants can compare the racial composition of people stopped by police along a certain stretch of road with the racial composition of all the people who use the road.

If the statistics show "impermissible discrimination" based on race, then the burden shifts to prosecutors to show that the traffic stop was not motivated by race, the court ruled.

Defense attorneys hailed the ruling as an important step for minorities who have long believed they are stopped by police because of their skin color, not a traffic violation.

"The court is saying that if the real reason for the stop was race ... then that is selective enforcement (of the law), and you can't enforce traffic laws based on race," said Murray Kohn, a staff attorney for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state's public defender agency.

The ruling came in the case of Andres Lora, who was a passenger in a car that was stopped by state police on Interstate 290 in Auburn on Dec. 20, 2001.

The driver was not operating erratically, but had committed a traffic violation by driving in the left lane when there was no traffic in the center or right lanes.

After a state trooper stopped the car and returned to his cruiser to run a check on the driver, he saw Lora step out of the car. When he went to tell Lora to get back into the car, he saw a small bag on the driver's side floor containing cocaine.

Lora was charged with cocaine trafficking, but later filed a motion to throw out the cocaine as evidence, arguing that the traffic stop was unconstitutional because the trooper initiated the stop based on his dark skin.

Lora's lawyer introduced statistics showing the trooper had a history of disproportionately stopping and citing nonwhite motorists for motor vehicle violations. A Superior Court judge found that the statistical evidence created an "inference of purposeful discrimination," and agreed to suppress the cocaine found in the car.

The SJC overturned the lower court's ruling, finding that the statistical evidence presented by Lora wasn't enough to rebut the state's claim that the trooper had acted in good faith and without intending to discriminate. The court found that Lora's statistics - which compared the racial makeup of drivers who were stopped along a stretch of I-290 with the racial makeup of the town of Auburn - were unreliable and not accepted within the scientific community.

But the SJC concluded that legitimate statistical evidence demonstrating disparate treatment based on race can be offered by defendants.
http://www.dailyhampshiregazette.com/storytmp.cfm?id_no=93850&CSAuthResp=1211373414019965%3ArNJDHLy4X6PyGw%3D%3D%3ACSUserId%7CCSGroupId%3Asuccess%3AwrfS6ujA%2FEGnG50KoWQBcw%3D%3D&CSUserId=8254&CSGroupId=5

Posted by lois at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2008

Panel OKs closure of Louisiana youth prison

Panel OKs closure of Louisiana youth prison

May 20, 2008
BATON ROUGE (AP) — Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration is supporting a plan to shut down a state juvenile prison near Louisiana’s capital city and send its teenage inmates to facilities better equipped to educate them.

A Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday approved a bill that would close the Jetson Center for Youth, in rural East Baton Rouge Parish, by June 2009.

The prison has long been the focus of criticism because of violence and inadequate educational and job training capabilities. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Don Cravins Jr., said the lockup “looks like a 1949 prison” with its decaying buildings, cell blocks and razor wire.

Richard Thompson, Jindal’s juvenile justice chief, said his Office of Youth Development would gradually reduce the number of youths locked up at Jetson, probably beginning this summer. He planned to offer more details at a Friday meeting of the Juvenile Justice Implementation Commission, which oversees the shift from prison-like facilities to smaller ones more focused on education.

As of Tuesday, 202 youths were held at Jetson.

It was not clear what Jetson’s buildings, including an up-to-date medical center, would be used for if it ceased to be a juvenile lockup. Thompson said it might be turned over to the state’s adult corrections division, as happened to another former juvenile prison in Tallulah when it closed in 2004.

“There is no plan to just close it down, lock it up and let the roof fall in,” Thompson said.

Thompson said the most dangerous prisoners at Jetson would be transferred to a similar facility in Monroe, which under Cravins’ bill would become Louisiana’s only high-security prison for juvenile convicts.

“Under no conditions are we going to sacrifice public safety to follow through on these reforms,” Thompson said.

The measure would also change OYD’s name to the Office of Juvenile Justice, which Thompson said is the name used by most other states.

The bill by Cravins, D-Opelousas, moves to the full Senate.
http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080520/NEWS01/80520022

Posted by lois at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2008

Afghanistan: U.S. Military to Build 6-10 prisons each the size of football fields

January 7, 2008, NY Times
Foiling U.S. Plan, Prison Expands in Afghanistan
By TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration struggles for a way to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a similar effort to scale down a larger and more secretive American detention center in Afghanistan has been beset by political, legal and security problems, officials say.

The American detention center, established at the Bagram military base as a temporary screening site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is now teeming with some 630 prisoners — more than twice the 275 being held at Guantánamo.

The administration has spent nearly three years and more than $30 million on a plan to transfer Afghan prisoners held by the United States to a refurbished high-security detention center run by the Afghan military outside Kabul.

But almost a year after the Afghan detention center opened, American officials say it can accommodate only about half the prisoners they once planned to put there. As a result, the makeshift American site at Bagram will probably continue to operate with hundreds of detainees for the foreseeable future, the officials said.

Meanwhile, the treatment of some prisoners on the Bagram base has prompted a strong complaint to the Pentagon from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group allowed in the detention center.

In a confidential memorandum last summer, the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram, two American officials said. The Red Cross said the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions, one of the officials said.

The senior Pentagon official for detention policy, Sandra L. Hodgkinson, would not discuss the complaint, citing the confidentiality of communications with the Red Cross. She said that the organization had access to “all Department of Defense detainees” in Afghanistan, after they were formally registered, and that the military “makes every effort to register detainees as soon as practicable after capture, normally within two weeks.

“In some cases, due to a variety of logistical and operational circumstances, it may take longer,” Ms. Hodgkinson added.

The obstacles American officials have faced in their plan to “transition out” of the Bagram detention center underscore the complexity of their challenges in dealing with prisoners overseas. Yet even as Bagram has expanded over the last three years, it has received a fraction of the attention that policy makers, Congress and human rights groups have devoted to Guantánamo.

“The problem at Bagram hasn’t gone away,” said Tina M. Foster, a New York human rights lawyer who has filed federal lawsuits on behalf of the detainees at Bagram. “The government has just done a better job of keeping it secret.”

The rising number of detainees at Bagram — up from barely 100 in early 2004 and about 500 early last year — has been driven primarily by the deepening war in Afghanistan. American officials said that all but about 30 of those prisoners are Afghans, most of them Taliban fighters captured in raids or on the battlefield.

But the surging detainee population also reflects a series of unforeseen problems in the United States’ effort to turn over prisoners to the Afghan government.

In a confidential diplomatic agreement in August 2005, a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times, the Bush administration said it would transfer the detainees if the Kabul government gave written assurances that it would treat the detainees humanely and abide by elaborate security conditions. As part of the accord, the United States said it would finance the rebuilding of an Afghan prison block and help equip and train an Afghan guard force.

Yet even before the construction began in early 2006, the creation of the new Afghan National Detention Center was complicated by turf battles among Afghan government ministries, some of which resisted the American strategy, officials of both countries said.

A push by some Defense Department officials to have Kabul authorize the indefinite military detention of “enemy combatants” — adopting a legal framework like that of Guantánamo — foundered in 2006 when aides to President Hamid Karzai persuaded him not to sign a decree that had been written with American help.

Then, last May, the transfer plan was disrupted again when the two American servicemen overseeing the project were shot to death by a man suspected of being a Taliban militant who had infiltrated the guard force.

The Pentagon initially reported only that the two Americans, Col. James W. Harrison Jr. and Master Sgt. Wilberto Sabalu Jr., were killed May 6 by “small-arms fire.” But American officials said the Afghan guard had opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle as two vehicles carrying senior officers waited to pass through the prison gate. The killings forced more than a month of further vetting of the Afghan guards and the dismissal of almost two dozen trained recruits, Pentagon officials said.

A Spartan Site of Metal Pens

The Bagram Theater Internment Facility, as it is called, has held prisoners captured as far away as Central Africa and Southeast Asia, many of whom were sent on to Guantánamo. Since the flow of detainees to Cuba was largely shut off in September 2004, the Bagram detention center has become primarily a repository for more dangerous prisoners captured in Afghanistan.

Despite some expansion and renovation, the detention center remains a crude place where most prisoners are fenced into large metal pens, military officers and former detainees have said.

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, on an American-controlled military base 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers. Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said.

The treatment of prisoners at Bagram has generally improved in recent years, human rights groups and former detainees say, particularly since two Afghan detainees died there in December 2002 after being beaten by their American captors. Two American officials familiar with the Red Cross complaint that was forwarded to the Pentagon over the summer described it as a notable exception.

A Red Cross spokesman in Washington, Simon Schorno, said the organization would not comment on its discussions with the Defense Department. But in remarks about the organization’s work in Afghanistan, its director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, emphasized on Dec. 13 that “not all places of detention and detainees” are made available to the group’s inspectors.

“The fact that the I.C.R.C. does not publicize its findings does not indicate satisfaction with the conditions of any given detention place,” he said on the group’s Web site.

The two United States officials, who insisted on anonymity because of the confidentiality of Red Cross communications, suggested that the organization had been more forceful in private. They said the group had complained that detainees in the isolation area were sometimes subjected to harsh interrogations and were not reported to Red Cross inspectors until after they were moved into the main Bagram detention center and formally registered — after being held incommunicado for as long as several months.

One former Bush administration official said the Pentagon told Congressional leaders in September 2006 that a small number of prisoners held by Special Operations forces might not be registered within the 14-day period cited in a Defense Department directive issued that month. The exceptions were to be “approved at the highest levels,” the former official said.

Discounting Complaints

Bush administration officials have at times discounted complaints about the crowding and harsh conditions at Bagram by saying the detention center was never meant to be permanent and that its prisoners would soon be turned over to Afghanistan.

Hundreds of Bagram detainees have been released outright as part of an Afghan national reconciliation program. But by early 2006, internal Defense Department statistics showed that the average internment at Bagram was 14.5 months, and one Pentagon official said that figure had since risen.

After a White House agreement by President Bush and Mr. Karzai in May 2005, the plan to transfer the prisoners was drawn up by administration officials and outlined in an exchange of confidential diplomatic notes that August.

The two-page Washington note — the first document to become public showing the terms that Washington has sought from other governments for the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo and Bagram — asks the Kabul administration to share any intelligence information from the prisoners, “utilize all methods appropriate and permissible under Afghan law to surveil or monitor their activities following any release,” and “confiscate or deny passports and take measures to prevent each national from traveling outside Afghanistan.”

At the time, some Bush administration officials predicted that transfers from Bagram could begin within six months. Col. Manuel Supervielle, who worked on legal aspects of the transfers as the senior United States military lawyer in Afghanistan, recalled that officials in Washington expected the primary difficulty to be the rebuilding of a cellblock at Afghanistan’s decrepit Pul-i-Charkhi prison to meet international standards of humane treatment.

“We’ve got a bunch of guys we want to hand over to the Afghans,” Colonel Supervielle said, recalling the prevailing view. “Build a jail and hand them over.”

But complications emerged at almost every turn.

Afghan officials rejected pressure from Washington to adopt a detention system modeled on the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” legal framework, American officials said. Some Defense Department officials even urged the Afghan military to set up military commissions like those at Guantánamo, the officials said.

Officials of both countries said the defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, was reluctant to take responsibility for the new detention center as the Pentagon wanted, fearing he would be besieged by tribal leaders trying to secure the release of captives. The minister of justice, Sarwar Danish, opposed sharing his control over prisons, the officials said.

American officials finally brokered an agreement between the ministries, internal documents show. But that did not resolve more basic questions about the legal basis under which Afghanistan would hold the detainees.

For nearly a year, American military officials and diplomats worked with the Afghan government to draft a plan for how it would detain and prosecute all prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Colonel Supervielle, who had helped set up legal operations at Guantánamo, said the effort in Afghanistan was in some ways more complex. “You weren’t dealing just with a U.S. interagency process,” he said. “It involved the interagency process, bilateral relations with Afghanistan, the military coalition and other international interests.”

The draft law was finally delivered to Mr. Karzai in August 2006. Despite American entreaties, he decided not to sign it after opposition from senior aides, officials said.

The construction of a new detention center at Pul-i-Charkhi also proved more complicated than United States officials had anticipated.

A New Project Is Flawed

When Afghan contractors broke ground on the $20 million project in 2006, United States officials estimated that the center would hold as many as 670 prisoners. But as the military police colonel overseeing the project toured the site with Afghan and Red Cross officials, they pointed to a significant flaw. In other parts of Pul-i-Charkhi, men were crammed as many as eight to a cell, and used toilets down the hall. To improve security and hygiene, the Americans equipped each two-man cell in the new block with its own toilet.

But because the cultural modesty of Afghan men would make them uncomfortable sharing an open toilet, it was subsequently decided that the prisoners should be held individually, two former officials involved in the project said. That immediately reduced the optimal capacity of the main prison to about 330 detainees, they said, although a Pentagon spokeswoman said its “maximum capacity” was 628 prisoners.

The training of Afghan military personnel to guard and administer the new prison has posed other challenges. After initially budgeting $6 million for guard training, the Defense Department decided it would need about $18 million for training and “mentoring” of guards over three years, officials said.

A first group of 12 Bagram detainees was moved into the Pul-i-Charkhi prison on April 3. Over the next nine months, that number rose to 157 prisoners, including 32 from Guantánamo, official statistics show. Afghan officials decided to release 12 of those detainees soon after their transfer.

American officials said the modest flow had been dictated mainly by the Afghan military, which has wanted to make sure its guards could handle the new arrivals. But some United States officials say they have also had to reassess the Afghans’ ability to hold more dangerous detainees. They said the detention center at Bagram would probably continue to hold hundreds of prisoners indefinitely. “The idea is that over time, some of our detainees at Bagram — especially those at the lower end of the threat scale — will be passed on to Afghanistan,” one senior military official said last year. “But not all. Bagram will remain an intelligence asset and a screening area.”

Ms. Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, acknowledged that the military was holding more detainees at Bagram than it had anticipated two years ago and that the Pentagon had no plan to assist the Afghans with further prison-building. But, she added, “A final decision on the higher-threat detainees has not yet been made.”

And even now, the legal basis under which prisoners are being held at the Afghan detention center remains unclear. Another Defense Department official, who insisted on anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue, said the detentions had been authorized “in a note from the attorney general stating that he recognizes that they have the legal authority under the law of war to hold enemy combatants as security threats if they choose to do so.”

Afghan officials said they were still expecting virtually all of the Afghan prisoners held by the United States — with the possible exception of a few especially dangerous detainees at Guantánamo — to be handed over to them.

A spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, Gen. Zaher Azimi, said, “What is agreed is that all the detainees should be transferred.”

Kirk Semple, Carlotta Gall and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul.

Correction: January 12, 2008

Because of an editing error, a front-page article on Monday about the American detention center at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan omitted a reporting credit. Kirk Semple, Carlotta Gall and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed from Kabul.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/world/asia/07bagram.html?_r=1&sq=Bagram%20Air%20force%20Base&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2008

Meet Gus Puryear: Bush's Latest Villainous Nominee for a Lifetime Judgeship

Meet Gus Puryear: Bush's Latest Villainous Nominee for a Lifetime Judgeship
By Silja J.A. Talvi, AlterNet
Posted on May 5, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/84388/

Editor's Note: In 2004, Estelle Richardson's lifeless and battered body was found on the floor of a Corrections Corp. of America prison cell. Four years later, that unsolved homicide has come back to haunt Republican stalwart "Gus" Puryear, the nation's top private prison litigator and Bush nominee for U.S. District Court. This is Part I of an AlterNet exclusive, two-part investigative feature by Silja J.A. Talvi.

Part 1: Mr. Puryear, meet Ms. Richardson

It's hard to say what Estelle Ann Richardson would have thought if she would have had the chance to meet the man who authorized a hefty settlement check for her children.

Maybe she would have noticed that he moved in the world like someone who was used to things going his way, that he had a lot of money, or that he looked a lot younger and more relaxed than most of his corporate peers. It's hard to say, because she never had the chance to be introduced to the harmless-enough looking man possessed of a rather ostentatious name: Gustavus Adolphus Puryear IV.

The 39-year-old lawyer, awaiting a lifetime appointment as a judge in U.S. District Court, prefers to be called "Gus."

By all accounts, Gus is a charismatic, outgoing guy who likes to spend time with his family. He volunteers as a deacon in the Presbyterian Church and serves as a board member of the Exchange Club of Nashville, Tenn., where one of his responsibilities is to organize the annual Antiques and Garden Show. From a corporate standpoint, Puryear has excelled in his job as general counsel for Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), the nation's largest and most influential private prison company. Under his direction, CCA's in-house attorneys work with a stable of contracted law firms to handle corporate legal matters of all kinds, not the least of which are the hundreds of claims and lawsuits filed against the company at any given time. A smart, enthusiastic GOP stalwart, Puryear is the kind of guy the party wants around. It doesn't hurt that he's also very, very rich: Between his bank account, assets and unexercised CCA shares, he's worth about $13 million, give or take a few thousand.

On the other hand, Richardson, a low-income, African American mother of two, moved through a world quite removed from that of the upper-echelon neighborhoods, schools and workplaces that afford Puryear his comfort zone. It's unlikely that the two would have ever met under even the most random of circumstances. The exclusive, members-only Belle Meade Country Club to which Puryear belongs, for instance, wouldn't have been the kind of place Richardson would have set foot in, particularly considering that African Americans weren't even allowed to join until 1994. (To this day, the only black member lives out of state. To boot, none of the women who have been admitted to the club, called "lady members," hold voting privileges.)

Belle Meade country clubbers probably raised a glass to toast Puryear when President Bush nominated him to sit on the federal bench in the Middle District of Tennessee. Yet, instead of breezing through what should have been an easy, perfunctory hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this past February, Puryear was confronted with a series of uncomfortable questions about his legal and professional qualifications for the bench.

Nothing about Puryear's hobnobbing, rapid ascent to the status of a GOP darling suggested the emergence of an ad-hoc, grassroots movement to derail his nomination, much less the methodical persistence of a former CCA prisoner-turned-jailhouse lawyer hell bent on exposing the judicial candidate's affiliations, biases, and lack of courtroom experience. What Richardson's story has to do with all of this isn't obvious on the face of it, but the connection between the two has bubbled to the surface amidst a strange series of post-nomination twists and turns that no one, including Puryear, could have seen coming.

A mysterious homicide

On July 5, 2004, Richardson's lifeless, 34-year-old body was found slumped on the floor of an isolation cell in a Corrections Corp. of America (CCA)-operated detention facility in Nashville. An autopsy revealed that she died as a result of massive blunt force injuries to the head, resulting in a cracked skull. Richardson also had four broken ribs and serious internal organ injuries. Dr. Bruce Levy, Tennessee's chief medical examiner, ruled that Richardson's death was a homicide. His autopsy revealed a set of injuries that were consistent with a "deceleration injury," meaning that her head and body slammed simultaneously toward a hard surface, such as a wall or a floor.

In an interview with the Tennessean in September 2004, Dr. Levy emphasized that Richardson's injuries could not have been the result of a fall or suicide. Richardson, as he pointed out, was in a highly restricted segregation unit, which allowed no freedom of movement outside of her small, one-woman cell, much less contact with other prisoners. "It's a restricted area," he said. "There's a limit to what you can do. If she had fallen from a high window or if she had been hit by a car, I would expect to see these types of injuries."

Richardson was murdered in the notoriously overcrowded and understaffed CCA-run Metro Detention Facility (MDF). Previously known as the Metro Davidson County Detention Facility, MDF serves as a multipurpose role as a pretrial detention facility, a jail for misdemeanant offenders and, under a $17 million annual contract with the Tennessee Department of Corrections (TDOC), a medium-security prison for convicted felons serving one- to six-year sentences. Overseeing the entire operation is Sheriff Daron Hall, a former prison administrator for a CCA-run prison in Brisbane, Australia.

While Richardson was locked up at MDF, the prison still held men and women alike in grossly overcrowded conditions. (A few months after her death, women were moved into a separate facility.) Two years before Richardson's death, a 12-year period of federal court supervision related to overcrowding had finally been lifted, but it would have been hard for anyone to argue that conditions had improved to any meaningful extent. Operated by CCA since 1992, MDF was designed to accommodate fewer than 900 people. MDF's population now surpasses 1,300 inmates.

Chronic overcrowding and understaffing in private or public detention facilities has inevitable consequences, ranging from the spread of contagious diseases to an increase in sexual and physical violence. At MDF, in just a three-and-a-half year period (2000-2004), ten prisoners died in custody. Eight of those were deemed "natural" deaths, although specific details on these kinds of incidents are difficult to suss out, especially because the TDOC does not collect any incident reports or statistics from MDF. The state prison system uses the strange rationale that these inmates are housed in a county jail run by an outside contractor and are therefore not subject to the same kind of reporting requirements.

With 70,000 juveniles and adults in its custody in 65 detention facilities nationwide, CCA contracts with all three federal corrections agencies, nearly half of all states, and more than a dozen municipalities. Representing the fifth-largest prison system in the country, CCA is the nation's largest private prison corporation and, as such, the publicly traded company is directly accountable to its shareholders, not to taxpaying citizens. Although the company is expected to comply with federal and state laws, and provide contract-specific reports to governmental agencies, there can be long delays before an agency (much less the public) receives word of in-detention suicides, violence, disease epidemics, employee sexual harassment complaints -- even prison escapes and riots.

In March, a former CCA employee, Ronald Jones, went public with his assertion that Puryear directly told him and other staff in the quality assurance department to create two audit reports relating to serious incidents at their detention facilities, such as riots, escapes and "unnatural" deaths. According to Jones, one of the audit reports was intended for clients, board members and shareholders, while the other was kept secret as an internal company document. CCA responded by calling his assertions inaccurate and those of an employee bent on retaliation for a pending termination: "If our interest was in under-reporting or not finding quality issues, we simply would not have created this department or its programs in the first place," CCA spokesperson Louise Grant told the Tennessean.

Richardson's death occurred in 2004, one year before Puryear subsumed quality assurance under the legal department and instituted the policy. As such, Richardson's murder might have generated little media interest were it not for the fact that she died during three weeks in solitary confinement, and was allowed out of her cell only one hour a day for either closely supervised "recreation" time or a brief opportunity to bathe in a caged shower under guard supervision.

In search of a better life

In 1999, Richardson headed down to Tennessee with her young children in tow. Diane Buie, her older sister, says that Richardson had grown tired of stagnating in her hometown. Although she had skills as both a medical technician and an interior decorator, Richardson was struggling financially, working a dead-end job as a telemarketer. She had decided to go after the necessary training to become a surgical assistant, Buie explained, because she wanted to provide a better life for her children.

The interstate move in 1999 didn't prove to be a fortuitous one. Richardson missed her sister and mother back home, and she was having real trouble making ends meet. Somewhere along the way, Richardson fell in with a crowd of small-scale hustlers who sold prescription drugs on the black market. At first, she helped out with obtaining the drugs sold to habitual pill poppers. Later, she started to sample the goods and developed a habit of her own, resulting in a March 2002 arrest when she tried to acquire painkillers with a forged prescription. Her children were with her at the pharmacy, and so in addition to charges of illegal drug possession, forgery and theft, the D.A.'s office added a charge of attempted child neglect.

Richardson pled guilty in September 2002 and was handed a suspended six-year sentence, as long as she complied with the terms of her parole. Like so many others struggling in the grip of both addiction and poverty, Richardson tried to hold everything together for a while, but eventually fell back into drug use. In November 2003, she failed urine analysis by testing positive for marijuana and cocaine; her probation officer issued an arrest warrant when Richardson didn't turn herself in. Busted for food stamp fraud in March 2004, Richardson was sent to MDF as a pretrial detainee. It wasn't until April 23, 2004, that a judge decided to revoke her probation and sentence her to a two-year prison term.

Buie was in regular contact with her younger sister by phone. She says that they were able to keep each other strong by focusing on Richardson's post-release plan of returning to Michigan to be reunited with her children, who had since moved back to Lansing. "I was going to help her find a nice place and buy new furniture for her," Buie explains.

It was going to be the end of a bad chapter in Richardson's life and the beginning of a new day.

Unbeknownst to Buie, Richardson hadn't been at MDF for long before CCA staff identified her as a "special needs" inmate. According to information that CCA shared with the press after a $60 million lawsuit was filed on behalf of Richardson's minor children, Richardson had gotten into three fights since she had been imprisoned, and that she required psychotropic medication. To be more specific, CCA noted that she had been classified "mentally deficient and psychologically impaired," something that the company's legal defense team, directed by Puryear, would later make a point of great emphasis. While CCA spokespersons seemed to have no problem letting out the information about Richardson's special classification and her need for medication, they claimed the imperative to protect the confidentiality of medical records as the reason why they couldn't provide more detail about what kind of care Richardson actually received and when, if at all, a mental disorder had been diagnosed.

Whether Richardson was actually mentally ill or "deficient" cannot be conclusively established. Some family members seemed eager to allow the lawsuit against CCA to highlight this alleged mental deficiency as an indication of her vulnerability. Buie and her mother, Estella, reject it altogether, and see it as yet another attempt by CCA to point the finger at Richardson's allegedly erratic behavior instead of the violence inflicted by their prison guards. To boot, Richardson's probation officer said that she had never seen evidence of any kind of mental deficiency.

On the other hand, it is quite possible that Richardson had developed psychological problems that weren't as obvious until she got to prison. Understandably, the experience of being separated from her children, trying to recover from drug addiction without any kind of treatment incarceration, and being in prison for the first time in her life, would compromise her mental health.

Whatever the underlying factors, CCA staff made the decision to put her in a segregated, "lockdown" area of the prison reserved for the ill-defined "special needs" population, and/or for those who had been deemed too disruptive for the general population.

The last days

What we are able to piece together about these last few weeks of Richardson's life are the products of a police and prosecutor's investigation, copies of MDF/CCA prison logs in evidence, the public statements of one prison guard, in-detention videotape of physically violent encounters, and sworn affidavits from four women who were also locked up in administrative segregation.

Together, they point toward a brutal end to Richardson's life. As the plaintiffs in Vilella v. CCA asserted: "CCA employees routinely and systematically unconstitutionally used excessive force and caused injuries to Estelle Richardson." Most significantly, the evidence gathered by the plaintiff's investigation reveal circumstances leading to her death radically different from the explanations that Puryear has tried to put forth:

* On April 26, 2004, a CCA guard pepper-sprayed Richardson while she was in the "shower cage" of the segregation unit, something captured by the automatic video cameras mounted throughout the unit, according to the lawsuit. (Buie attests to the existence of the videotape, which was entered into evidence and cited in the lawsuit. She still possesses transcripts of this and later altercations.) The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, David Randolph Smith, notes in the Second Amended Complaint to Vilella v. CCA that Richardson that had been pepper-sprayed for not "putting on her pants following the shower quickly enough to suit the officer." Richardson was then cuffed and placed in leg irons, placed face down on the floor. During the incident, one or more officers put their body weight on Richardson's back.

* On or about June 27, 2004, guards notified medical personnel that Richardson had "blood on her head." The nurse who examined her in the early morning hours of June 28 noted that Richardson had "blood oozing from [left] ear," gave her Tylenol, and made an urgent doctor's referral for an appointment later that day. There is no record she was subsequently seen by a physician.

* On June 29, 2004, CCA Capt. Hambrick recorded Richardson's pleas for medical attention in the unit log: "Can you get the nurse down here? I am hurting, and if you don't get the nurse down here, I am going to die." Other prisoners in the isolation unit later attested to Richardson's attempts to stop constant, untreated ear bleeding with sanitary napkins or tampons. Hambrick reported that she notified medical personnel. There is no record of a follow-up examination by a nurse or physician. According to the complaint, these observed injuries were "the result of the use of excessive force by [unidentified CCA guards]" and a physician's order on July 2 was ignored. When CCA was asked to validate whether Richardson was seen (or not), the company cited the need to protect medical confidentiality.

* On July 2, 2004, four prisoners in the segregation unit offered similar accounts of another incident in Shower Cage 3. According to their affidavits, CCA guard Shirley Foster assaulted Richardson with "excessive force." Richardson screamed, and there was "blood all over the shower cage," said prisoner Cameron James. Another noted that the guard pushed Richardson so hard that she fell and "busted her mouth." One prisoner, who kept her own daily calendar, had written an entry that day: "Foster slamed [sic] Estelle in shower Fri."

From that point forward, there are numerous and consistent prisoner accounts of Richardson's blood stains on her sheets, of nonstop bleeding from her ear, and of disregard by prison guards for her well-being. It is particularly notable that these prisoners were willing to come forward and provide affidavits despite their fears of retaliation. Indeed, it is possible, although not provable, that retaliation did take place, after all. This past January, 36-year-old Gerald Townsend died from internal bleeding at the MDF after Ronnie Sullivan, 22, attacked him for an unknown reason. Townsend was serving a sentence for nonviolent burglary and vehicle theft, while Sullivan had been convicted for an aggravated assault. As it turned out, Gerald was the brother of Judy Townsend, one of the four women who were willing to sign affidavits regarding the assault on Richardson.

Then, on July 4, 2004, Richardson was to have her last, physical encounter with CCA guards. According to information gathered from the guards and prisoners in the unit, Senior Officer Keith Andre Hendricks told Richardson to get her "nasty ass up and clean [your] room," referring to bloodied sanitary napkins and other debris in her cell. When she did not respond, he ente