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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 entered the cell with Officer Joshua Shockman, with Officer Jeremy Neese observing.

According to the investigation, Hendricks pulled her off the cell bed and threw her to the ground. James, one of the prisoners, recalled that he kicked Richardson [while she was face down," with his knee in her back. Another prisoner in the unit, Ruby Champlin, swore that she heard Richardson's head hit the floor, before Hendricks sprayed her with mace. In her diary from that time, prisoner Tracey Alexander recorded that all three officers beat Richardson after she was maced.

Early the next morning, at 5:37 a.m., a call to 911 came in from MDF. A CCA supervisor alerted the 911 operator that a "female inmate was on the floor and needed medical assistance." Paramedics arrived and found her unresponsive at 6:00 a.m. Richardson was pronounced dead at Southern Hills Medical Center.

Police conducting the murder investigation shortly after Richardson's death asked to see the videotape footage, which would have been recorded by the constantly running video camera in the unit. According to the CCA guards, the video camera somehow malfunctioned during this incident. Upon examination, the police investigators noted that there appeared to be nothing wrong with the camera.

Two of the four CCA guards were working double shifts because of staffing shortages at MDF. Three of the four were young, relatively new employees: Schockman, 23; Wood, 26; and Ness, 24. Only Keith Andre Hendricks, 35, was a senior prison guard, with four years of experience. Neese had only been on the job for four months. Shockman, who shared a residence with Neese, had been on the job for a little over a year, coming to CCA from a background as a boxing instructor and club bouncer with extensive experience in various martial arts.

It is very unlikely that the three younger guards had been receiving sufficient training to help them understand (or manage) the psychological stressors of working in a lockdown unit, in which prisoners are likely to exhibit various states of distress, anger, and/or serious psychiatric problems. Even experienced correctional officers tend to avoid working in these prisons-within-a-prison, in these increasingly prevalent 23-hour lockdown units known as "Administrative Segregation," "Security Housing Units (SHU)," Intensive Management Units (IMU)," "Special Management Units (SMU)" or what MDF refers to as "Admin Max."

With little else to do but sit and stew in stripped-down cells for days, weeks, months (or even years on end), many prisoners begin to lose touch with reality altogether, which is only exacerbated by the absence of natural light, human touch, limited or nonexistent reading materials or phone privileges. Hallucination, paranoia, aggression, self-mutilation and suicidal ideation are among the more common by-products of this form of isolation, which Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Stuart Grassian first identified and entitled the "SHU syndrome" in the 1980s.

As such, it's entirely possible that Richardson was mad at the prison for putting her in a unit like this one, and it's also quite possible that her first experience dealing with this kind of deprivation-oriented punitive confinement led her to act disruptively. Based on the incident the day before she was found dead in her cell, it is just as likely that she could have been responding sluggishly or erratically. The latter scenario is even more likely in the wake of autopsy and toxicological reports that revealed Richardson had not only suffered severe physical trauma, but that she had died with extremely high doses of psychiatric medicines in her system. The levels of Paxil and Doxepin found in her body were extremely high, according to post-mortem toxicological analysis by a Vanderbilt University clinical pharmacist; Richardson would have likely been behaving abnormally.

There's also the possibility that Richardson could have incurred the wrath of these guards because she persisted in asking for help for pain and bleeding. No matter what, Richardson would have been very weak, which begs the question: Why would it take four healthy adult males to perform a forcible cell extraction with the use of a chemical agent?

By definition, cell extractions in jails and prisons are very physical: Armed with some kind of chemical agent, electrified or nonelectrified shields, riot gear, batons, and/or stun guns, any number of guards rush into a prisoner's cell to subdue him/her as quickly as possible, to get that person down to the ground, and to hogtie (or otherwise restrain) that person. According to most jail/prison guidelines, cell extractions are only to be committed as a matter of last resort (especially in relation to the safety of the individual or other prisoners and staff), usually with the presence of medical staff, and must be videotaped from start to finish.

The commonplace mandate for cell extractions to be videotaped isn't hard to deduce: People get hurt. Considering the force with which prisoners are taken down, injuries sustained by prisoners related to cell extractions are more common than not, whether in the form of lacerations, broken teeth or more serious bodily harm. Without videotaped evidence, prisoners can sue on grounds of cruel and unusual punishment for short-term injuries or permanent disabilities sustained.

Without videotaped evidence, it was the word of those four prisoners and the opinion of the state's top medical examiner, who conducted the autopsy that Richardson died as a result of one or more serious assaults inflicted by CCA guards -- the only people who could have possibly had physical contact with Richardson for nearly three weeks on end.

Handling the damage

It took one year and three months for the four male guards to be charged with reckless homicide. (The female guard was not charged.) During that time period, all four guards were on paid administrative leave. After they were arrested, each posted bail and were quickly released from custody. While the prosecution moved forward, the Richardson family filed the $60 million lawsuit against CCA for being responsible for her murder by failing to provide adequate training and supervision of its guards.

Under Puryear's direction, a bevy of outside lawyers was already hard at work so as to minimize the damage to CCA. Medical experts were brought in to challenge chief medical examiner Dr. Bruce Levy's original autopsy conclusions about the injuries indicating that she had been murdered, who reported that her fatal injuries were several days old and thus could have been self-inflicted or caused by earlier fights with prisoners. CCA's hired pathologist, Dr. William McCormick, went so far as to postulate that the "cause of the rib and liver injuries is almost certainly the resuscitative attempts made on Ms. Richardson."

In the process, Puryear and his legal team, while emphasizing their empathy for the family's "tragic loss" and their desire to comply with the investigation, alleged that her death could have been the result of earlier injuries sustained from fights with other prisoners, a seizure or a self-inflicted injury. "My understanding of the medical experts' opinions is that this raises the possibility that Ms. Richardson could have unintentionally struck her own head against an object or concrete floor (as in the case of a seizure or fall)," Puryear wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

CCA's interpretation of the injuries leading to Richardson's death and a lack of videotaped evidence, provided the necessary level of doubt to help Puryear lessen the PR and financial damage to CCA. Puryear's legal strategy worked. His timing was good: Not only had the medical findings cast doubt on the circumstances surrounding Richardson's death -- something that would making a court victory much harder to obtain -- but severe infighting between economically struggling family members had worn them down. Buie's mother lost custody of Richardson's children. As a result, they were shut out of the lawsuit, although the two of them had always been in the children's lives (and had assumed the primary responsibility of raising the kids when Richardson left for Tennessee), Buie and her mother aren't related to Richardson by blood; they were her mother and sister by adoption.

On February 22, 2006, Puryear personally represented CCA in the final mediation between the company and Richardson's family members. CCA settled with the plaintiffs for an undisclosed sum after plaintiffs dropped all civil actions against the four guards. Citing lack of definitive proof that the four guards caused her death, the Davidson County D.A.'s office dropped all charges against them, while acknowledging that she had, indeed, been killed. Richardson's murder remains unsolved to this day. A story like this isn't particularly unusual within the American prison system. It's not unusual for correctional employees accused of abuses behind prison walls to have charges dropped once enough time has passed -- that is, if charges got filed in the first place. It's certainly not unusual for public and private prison systems to settle lawsuits away from the public eye, reassured by the knowledge that strict nondisclosure clauses can keep aggrieved parties from speaking out.

It's not unusual that Richardson entered the CCA jail as a nonviolent offender with a drug problem, or that she was abused in the confines of an out-of-sight segregation unit. What is unusual is that a woman with so little power in her day-to-day life, particularly in the eyes of the people who arrested, sentenced, and imprisoned her, would heavily influence Puryear's hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this past February. Much of the reason why Richardson's murder popped back up to haunt Puryear's appointment as a federal court judge is attributable to a former CCA prisoner, Alex Friedmann. It can be said with a fair amount of certainty that Puryear couldn't possibly have seen Friedmann's agitation against his confirmation coming his way. And he certainly couldn't have expected that Estelle Richardson's unsolved murder didn't just go away with a few handshakes, a confidentiality agreement, and a $2 million settlement check.

Private Prison Litigator Gus Puryear's Rise to the Top
By Silja J.A. Talvi, AlterNet
Posted on May 6, 2008, Printed on May 17, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/84491/

Editor's Note: In 2004, Estelle Richardson's lifeless and battered body was found on the floor of a Corrections Corporation 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 II of an AlterNet exclusive, two-part investigative feature by Silja J.A. Talvi. (Read Part I here)

Part II: Moving On Up: Puryear, CCA, and the GOP

Until very recently, Puryear has enjoyed an easy climb up the political and corporate ladder. It hasn't hurt that the 39-year-old Republican Party loyalist has always kept the right company, starting with the day that he was born.

Puryear's paternal lineage is flush with old money tied, in particular, to the Southern banking industry. (It's a tradition that Puryear has carried on by joining the board of the Nashville Bank & Trust Company.) Born in Atlanta, Puryear attended an exclusive Christian private school, Westminster. After high school graduation in 1986, Puryear received a full academic scholarship to Emory University, and then to the University of North Carolina School of Law. In 1993, freshly equipped with his J.D., Puryear landed a plum assignment as law clerk to Judge Rhesa Hawkins Barksdale, Fifth U.S. District Court of Appeals. (Hawkins was appointed to the bench in 1990, by President George H.W. Bush.)

In an odd twist of fate, clerking for Judge Barksdale brought Puryear close to the lives of prisoners, at least insofar as their legal paperwork. In an October 2005 feature in GC South magazine, "No more get out of jail free," Puryear noted that one-third of all the cases they dealt with were pro se prisoner cases: "In fact, when I got out of law school, I was appointed to represent an inmate in a Section 1983 civil rights action, and we took it to a jury trial," he told writer Greg Land, adding dryly, "We lost."

Land made the apt observation that Puryear's district court experience was "fitting foreshadowing for the young lawyer who would eventually make 'no settlements' a key corporate goal at CCA."

That case was to end up as one of only five federal cases Puryear has ever personally handled as a practicing attorney, only one of which went to trial, in addition to one trial in Tennessee state court in the 1990s. This, despite Puryear's three years as an associate attorney at Farris, Warfield & Kanaday (now Stites & Harbison), a law firm to which his grandfather had longstanding ties. Perhaps Puryear had a sense all along that he was destined to use his legal mind for a different purpose, say, for the glory of the GOP and the size of his pocketbook.

Puryear made the leap to GOP employment very quickly, serving as counsel from 1997-1998 for a legal team assembled by former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN), as part of the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. The Committee was busy investigating a major campaign finance scandal; 22 people were eventually convicted for fraud or illegally funneling foreign money to the DNC's federal election coffers.

Puryear's work was duly noted. From 1998-2000, Puryear held the position of legislative director for Republican Senator Bill Frist, a former state deputy director for the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign. Frist, who served in Congress from 1995-2007, was also a Belle Meade Country Club member, although he (unlike Puryear) had the common sense to resign from the historically racially segregated organization before heading toward his political career.

Puryear's close friendship with beltway insider and Republican attorney/lobbyist powerhouse, Philip Perry, also yielded convenient connections to the Bush administration. When he was asked to help Perry's father-in-law prepare for high profile, televised debates, Puryear set about filling up the father-in-law's tricky brain with facts, statistics, zingers, and parrying tactics. The father-in-law and VP-to-be? Dick Cheney. The occasion? The 2000 and 2004 vice presidential debates.

Friends like these can come in handy when it comes time to search for nominees for a slate of empty federal court benches. With his connections to Frist, Thompson, Barksdale, Perry, and Cheney in place, Puryear has also had a knack for knowing when to write the requisite donation checks to GOP leaders: to date, he's donated at least $13,000 to state and federal Republican campaign committees since 2001, including $1,000 to Mitt Romney in 2007. When Puryear donates money, he seems to do so with a special patriotic flare: on September 11, 2003, he donated $2,000 to George W. Bush's re-election campaign to emphasize his loyalty to the War on Terrorism.

Puryear would hardly be the first person appointed to the bench despite overtly partisan political allegiances and/or paltry legal chops. There's really no question about either. Puryear's affiliation with the ultra-conservative echelons of the Republican Party has spanned the course of his entire career, and his connections in the party clearly run quite deep. Small surprise, then, when Sen. Frist rose to Puryear's defense in an April 13th opinion piece for The Tennessean about the mounting opposition to his confirmation. One could almost hear the tremolo in Frist's voice as he bemoaned his besieged former employee's plight: "The infusion of political posturing, fed by outside groups, into our nomination process means that nominees are sometimes subject to unfair attack …. The toll on nominees and their families cannot be underestimated. The confirmation process has become so brutal that people who want to serve the public no longer do so."

It's unlikely that Puryear's going to wilt away, no matter how vocal the opposition. After all, he's still got the right friends, wealth, and business connections. Most importantly, the people behind him have a lot at stake. If Puryear were to be confirmed, he would help cement a GOP/Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) stranglehold in the State of Tennessee. Most of these ducks are already in a row: both of Tennessee's U.S. Senate seats are controlled by CCA-supportive politicians, Republican Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker (both of whom have received tens in thousands in donations from CCA's PAC, as well as company employees and their spouses), and former Senator Frist is rumored to be running for governor in the next election cycle.

The House that CCA Built

It's worth taking an even closer look at the ties that have made CCA the corporate entity that it is. CCA's press materials tout the company's expansive network of detention centers (and its subsidiary prison transport company, TransCor America), as "prison privatization at its best." The company's top brass have all enjoyed illustrious careers in high-ranking positions as state legislative aides, lobbyists, and influential legislators.

Some CCA officials held cushy jobs in governor's offices, while others came to CCA from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the U.S. Marshals, or the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Chuck Kupferer, CCA's Senior Director of Federal Customer Relations for U.S. Marshals Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service, is a former L.A. cop who became a chief deputy in New Orleans, and then went onto be the chief inspector with the CIA's Counter Narcotics Center in Virginia. With annual earnings and compensation nearing $1.5 million, Richard Seiter is handsomely compensated as CCA's Chief Corrections Officer and Executive Vice President. Of all the major CCA figureheads, Seiter's background is the one most based in corrections. Seiter was formerly the Chief Operating Officer for Federal Prison Industries (also known as UNICOR, which is in the business of selling prisoner-made goods and services), as well as the warden of two federal prisons, and one-time director of the scandal-ridden Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections.

CCA board members are similarly loaded with connections to state and federal level offices and agencies, including Donna Alvarado, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the U.S. Department of Defense. Board member Anthony Grant was the Commissioner of Economic Community Development for Tennessee, while former Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), is perhaps best remembered as one of the Keating Five. (John McCain (R-AZ) was one of the lesser-implicated figures in the scandal.)

These days, CCA's financial horizon looks quite splendid, even if the conditions in which the company's "customers" are housed are far from it. With projected 2008 revenue of roughly $390 million, and 4,000-6,000 new beds in development, CCA can generally report good news back to its shareholders (NYSE: CXW) -- as it is anticipated to do in its May 6th, first-quarterly report. Although CCA is hardly the only player in the facility operating-and-owning aspect of the private corrections industry (e.g., GEO and Cornell Corrections), CCA is the undisputed leader of the pack. To be sure, corrections-related stocks are generally on the upswing because the demand for incarceration has far outstripped the ability of city, county, state, and particularly federal agencies to handle all of those shackled bodies. (Federal agencies already constitute over 40% of CCA's revenue base.) Between demand and the opportunity for profit, it's no wonder that private prison companies hold at least seven percent of the national prison population behind their walls.

In a recent article, "Lock in Some Dollars with Corrections Corporation of America," the stock advisory site, SeekingAlpha.com, makes no bones about the cold, hard facts: "Collectively, $44 billion was spent on corrections last year, a 127% increase over 1987 totals. In this same time period, spending on higher education increased at just 21% -- this is dire news to hear, we know, but we believe policies aiming to cut the massive amounts of dollars spent on corrections will take longer than expected. This means jail stocks will still be good investments over the next couple of years. The demographics at play suggest more crime is on its way, and no one's better positioned than CXW."

Never mind that overall crime rates haven't, actually, been going up, especially when it comes to serious and/or violent criminal offenses. Because CCA can't bank on actual crime statistics, they must rely to some extent on the culture of fear that feeds the American prison machine. When the Institute on Money in State Politics studied the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, they found that private prison companies, directors, executives and lobbyists gave no less than $3.3 million to candidates and state political parties across 44 states. In general, CCA and other private prison companies have favored giving money to states with the toughest sentencing laws, because those are the states that are most likely to generate the bodies for empty jail and prison beds. Those states are also the ones most likely to have passed "two-strikes" or "three-strikes" laws -- including CCA's home turf, Tennessee. And those laws, in turn, are based on cookie-cutter legislation pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose corporate and "Criminal Justice and Homeland Security Task Force" members have come from the ranks of CCA and other private prison companies.

It's a twisted game of prison-and-politics, and CCA certainly knows how to play it. According to disclosures filed with the Senate's public records office, CCA spent nearly $2.5 million in 2007 (down from $3.4 million in 2005) to lobby Congress and federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In particular, CCA sought to build support for immigration "reform" policies that would yield more arrests and deportations, and to build opposition against the Public Safety Act, which would outlaw private prisons, as well as the Private Prison Information Act, which would force private prisons to make public the same information that government-run detention facilities must provide.

In the meantime, CCA's PAC money keeps flowing, as well: in the past four months alone, the PAC has spent nearly $200,000, including $52,500 donated to federal candidates, of whom 80% are Republican.

But when Puryear was brought on board in 2001, CCA was saddled with debt, and company stock was in a tailspin. Puryear was hand picked by CCA President and Chief Executive Officer John Ferguson. Ferguson was determined to set the company on the right track. The former Commissioner of Finance for Tennessee, Ferguson was obviously up to the challenge -- actually, he exceeded expectations by leaps and bounds. Small wonder that his resulting financial reward has been of enormous magnitude. In FY 2007, Ferguson earned over $2.8 million in cash compensation, and holds over $28.5 million in unexercised stocks, by today's market value.

Puryear's position in the company therefore became one of utmost importance. His no-nonsense, "no-settlements" approach is still the right fit for a company besieged by lawsuits and scandals. As it was true then, it is now: CCA must do everything it can to prevent cases from going to trial because the accompanying press almost always negatively impacts stock prices, and jeopardizes the renewal or acquisition of local, state, and federal contracts. To keep shareholders (and company executives) happy, CCA needed to avoid coughing up too much money to settle even a small percentage of the hundreds of lawsuits biting at the heels of company at any given time. (In the interview with GC South magazine, Puryear offered that the number of claims and lawsuits facing CCA on any given day range from 700-1,000.) In another interview with Corporate Legal Times in 2004, Puryear quipped thusly: "Litigation is an outlet for inmates ... it's something they can do in their spare time."

Richardson, of course, had none of that spare time to speak of. But Puryear seemed to have handled her case, as most others, with the kind of diplomatic finesse upon which his reputation has been built.

Unlikely Friends and Foes

In the scope of things, Estelle Richardson's murder was hardly the biggest lawsuit or scandal that CCA ever faced. Indeed, if the Senate Judiciary Committee members had wanted to spotlight larger-scale scandals that took place during Puryear's tenure, they could have pointed to one of the biggest prison riots in recent memory, at the CCA-operated Crowley County Correctional Facility in Olney Springs, Colorado. On July 20, 2004, just days after a mass interstate transfer of nearly 200 prisoners from Washington State, and despite numerous signs of impending trouble (including lack of food and grossly inadequate medical staffing), prisoners staged a full-scale riot that brought the facility to its knees.

In the ensuing hours, all of the prison's living units but one were taken over, burned, and destroyed. Unbelievably, there were only 33 uniformed guards on duty when the riot broke out, although the prison population stood at 1,122 inmates. Most of the staff fled their stations, as a post-riot incident report revealed, while those that stayed were waiting on word from CCA headquarters. Ill-trained in emergency containment and medical response, munitions and chemical weapons usage, the prison was nearly burned to the ground by the time that the outside law enforcement agencies moved in to stop the situation from escalating even further. All totaled, 13 staff and prisoners were assaulted, not including the hundreds of prisoners who were gassed, beaten, shot, and made to lie in excrement in the post-riot "containment" situation.

Those prisoners injured and abused post-riot, who had not participated in the violence and havoc to begin with, sued CCA in 2005 and 2006. According to a Trial Lawyers for Public Justice press release, "the punishment of bystanders included forcing tightly bound inmates to urinate and defecate in their own clothing; dragging handcuffed inmates from their cells face down through water filled with glass shards, blood, and raw sewage; shooting inmates who were lying down, or sitting or walking with their hands up; using tear gas on plaintiffs who were locked in their cells or were prone at gunpoint, waiting to be cuffed; withholding drinking water and medications; denying shower privileges and clean clothes for more than a week; and forcing inmates to strip and parade naked in front of female guards who snapped pictures and videotaped inmates bathing without a shower curtain."

These extreme, Abu Ghraib-like circumstances, testified to by hundreds of prisoners, were not enough to gain remedy, something that Puryear's legal team would have had a hand in. The U.S. District Court dismissed the complaint for "failure to exhaust administrative remedies," a common ruling in federal courts after the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act.

The Senate Judiciary Committee could also have taken a look at conditions at the CCA-run T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas, where immigrant adults and children are imprisoned in a medium-security correctional setting, and how the company's legal department worked with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to mitigate the damage brought about by a (now settled) ACLU lawsuit on behalf of the detainees. Also of concern could have been how CCA's legal team dealt with the knowledge that one of their own guards, who raped a female detainee at that facility, went without prosecution despite ample evidence of the crime.

Puryear's nomination is opposed by a wide variety of organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild, AFSCME, Alliance for Justice, People for the American Way, and the Private Corrections Institute (PCI). In March, Women's Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education Fund president Gloria Allred issued her own statement against Puryear's confirmation, after it was revealed that he is a member of the Belle Meade Country Club. Puryear's nomination is supported, on the other hand, by the likes of Frist, Thompson, Corker and Alexander, as well as Thurgood Marshall, Jr., something touted by his allies as evidence of Puryear's non-racism. All of that would sound good indeed, were it not for the fact that Marshall, Jr., is actually on the board of CCA.

Why would the Senate Judiciary Committee focus on Richardson's case, then? The answer comes down to two words: Alex Friedmann. The organizer of the grassroots effort to derail Puryear's nomination for the U.S. District Court, Tennesseans Against Puryear, Friedmann is also a former CCA prisoner, a bonafide genius of a jailhouse lawyer, and vice president of PCI.

Friedmann speaks with a steady pace, in a nearly expressionless monotone, but the words he chooses are carefully placed and to the point: "People should be concerned about this nomination as a matter of justice," he explains. "We shouldn't make the mistake and think that U.S. District Court nominations are not something to be worked up about. In fact, these judges are among the most powerful in the country. They make serious, precedent-setting, and life-and-death decisions on a regular basis."

It was because of his efforts that the Senate Judiciary Committee first came across information about Richardson's case, and it was primarily because of his efforts that Puryear's relative lack of experience as a trial lawyer in any court system caught the committee's notice. (And then there is that pesky bit about Puryear's membership in the Belle Meade Country Club; Puryear can thank Friedmann for that, as well.)

Because of Friedmann's efforts, much of the opposition to Puryear's appointment has centered on the question of whether the top corporate lawyer could possibly be impartial enough to serve as a U.S. District Court judge in the same district where CCA headquarters are located. Hundreds of lawsuits related to CCA have been filed in that court, but Puryear insists that this would not be a problem: he has promised, in advance, that he would recuse himself from any such lawsuits for a period of five years.

Friedmann says that he didn't actually set out to highlight Richardson's case, because he didn't anticipate that the committee members would even bring their attention to it. Moreover, he didn't anticipate that Puryear would so blatantly downplay the very facts and circumstances related to Richardson's murder. Nor did he expect that the committee would fire off a series of challenges to Puryear's February testimony, or that Puryear would rally his defense troops in such a way that one of the primary attorneys who sued CCA on behalf of Richardson's family would wind up on his side.

After it became evident that Puryear's original testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee hadn't gone particularly well, a series of behind-the-scene moves appear to have been set into motion. That process seems to have accelerated after Dr. Bruce Levy, Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Tennessee, got wind of Puryear's assertions. Dr. Levy took particular exception to Puryear's suggestion that Richardson's broken ribs were quite possibly the result of CPR, and that it was also quite possible that she hadn't been murdered, after all. Because Dr. Levy had personally conducted the autopsy on Richardson, he took it upon himself to fire off an unusually opinionated letter. "The committee should be very concerned about a nominee for federal judge who is less than truthful when answering questions from the [committee]," he wrote on February 21, 2008, emphasizing that there was no question that Richardson had, indeed, been brutally beaten while still alive -- and that her injuries led directly to her death.

Then, in quick succession, these events transpired:

* On February 22, David Randolph Smith, lawyer for the Richardson family and Joseph Welborn, representing CCA, files a joint motion in U.S. District Court (Middle District of Tennessee) to unseal the transcript of the settlement hearing re: Richardson's minor children. The attorneys argue that the transcript would not violate the confidentiality component of the agreement because that portion didn't contain the actual terms of the settlement (or the monetary amount). Judge Campbell grants the motion, although none of the Richardson family members are notified that the action is taking place;

* That transcript, however, did make clear the actual dollar amount of CCA's gross settlement: $2 million dollars, of which 40% went to various plaintiffs' attorneys. Richardson family attorney Smith received $192,000;

* On February 25, Smith, freed from certain confidentiality concerns, sends an unexpected letter of support for Puryear to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the letter, he agrees that Richardson could have died for any number of reasons and that her death was not necessarily a murder at all;

* On February 26, James Sanders, a Tennessee attorney with Neal & Harwell, issues a three-page letter of support, praising Puryear's skills and talents. Also freed from confidentiality concerns, Sanders, who helped to represent CCA in the Richardson case, addresses her death specifically: "I can tell you that the facts, particularly the medical evidence, showed conclusively that Ms. Richardson's death was not caused by correctional officers extracting Ms. Richardson from a cell in short, there is no credible evidence to support Dr. Levy's homicide conclusion, other than the head injury and the death itself."

Ah, yes, just those bothersome little details. The head injury and the death itself.

In his written response to the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, Puryear tried to show his sympathetic side: "I regret that this uncertainty leaves a cloud over CCA; however, I know that the far greater tragedy is that the children of Estelle Richardson will likely never know exactly why their mother died."

But if Richardson herself could speak from her grave, she would be likely to say that the far greater tragedy is this: That a man like Puryear would have the sheer audacity to try to sweep her murder under the rug, yet again.

Silja J.A. Talvi is an investigative journalist and the author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press: 2007). Her work has already appeared in many book anthologies, including It's So You (Seal Press, 2007), Prison Nation (Routledge: 2005), Prison Profiteers (The New Press: 2008), and Body Outlaws (Seal Press: 2004). She is a senior editor at In These Times.

Posted by lois at 12:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2008

NC: Lawmakers laugh at prison reform

Few fixes for full prisons
Some inmates held at county jails. But an alternative is met with laughter

Dan Kane, Staff Writer
For North Carolina lawmakers, the response to the state's growing prison population over the past decade has been consistent -- build more prisons.

It is the most expensive option, with prisons costing tens of millions of dollars to build.

But when state Rep. Ronnie Sutton, a Pembroke Democrat, challenged his colleagues Thursday at a meeting of House and Senate budget committees to consider a different course, lawmakers burst out laughing.

Sutton suggested that lawmakers put more money into prevention instead of incarceration and asked, "Is there anyone who thinks that we are going to change our mode of operation?"

After the laughter died down, Demo-cratic Rep. Mickey Michaux of Durham suggested that Sutton had his answer.

Susan Katzenelson, executive director of the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, which tracks the prison population and develops proposals for dealing with it, has seen the same debate play out before.

North Carolina's prison population is expected to hit 40,000 inmates next year, according to estimates by the commission. State officials say growth in prison population is largely due to growth in the overall state population.

But the state already has more inmates than it can house. Prisons director Boyd Bennett said Thursday that he recently sent notice to county jails that they will have to hold recently convicted inmates until the state's latest prison opens in Columbus County in late summer.

Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison said he already has 10 inmates awaiting assignment to a state prison. With 1,250 inmates in the Wake County jail, Harrison frequently has to give inmates bedrolls to sleep on the floor because of a shortage of beds.

"Naturally, we want to keep them moving," Harrison said. "But we do understand."

In Durham, jailers were asked several weeks ago to stop sending most convicts to state prisons.

There is still room at the 736-bed jail. On Thursday morning, the population was 629.

"If it lasts the whole summer, it's going to be an issue," said Maj. Julian Couch, director of programs administration at the jail. "But we've done it before, and we're going to do it again."

The 1,500-bed prison in Columbus County -- the sixth and most recent to be authorized in the past seven years -- is just a temporary fix. Four years down the road, state officials estimate the prison system will be over capacity by more than 1,800 inmates.

Doug Holbrook, a fiscal analyst for the legislators, told lawmakers Thursday that they had a handful of options to address the problem: Spend up to $120 million to expand prison capacity, reduce criminal sentences to eliminate the need for 1,000 beds by 2013, or some combination of both. Gov. Mike Easley has proposed borrowing $63 million this year, without voter approval, to add a total of 1,500 beds at four state prisons.

Meanwhile, the Department of Correction's budget has grown to more than $1.2 billion, or six percent of the state's $20.7 billion budget.

But legislation to reduce criminal sentences has languished. Three bills that together could have provided the 1,000-bed reduction failed to get out of either chamber last year, making them technically dead for this session.

No lawmakers at Thursday's budget committee meeting expressed interest in such a step, though Rep. Annie Mobley, an Ahoskie Democrat, suggested they look at Texas' efforts to curb a growing prison population.

Texas and other states in recent years have expanded community monitoring programs and provided more help for inmates making the transition back to society, according to a recent report by the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

But on Thursday, North Carolina lawmakers instead asked about double bunking more inmates and seeing whether terminally ill inmates could be released. They also talked about the cost of delays in executing death row inmates.

Rep. Nelson Dollar, a Cary Republican, said the state needs more prison cells. "Here in Raleigh, we've had a dramatic increase just in the last year in property crimes," Dollar said. "I had a lengthy conversation with a police detective, and he told me basically what we have is a catch-and-release program because we have no prison deterrent."

The lack of prison space may end up frustrating efforts by some lawmakers to get tougher on crime. Holbrook said lawmakers have eight bills up for consideration that would add or expand criminal penalties and add an estimated 250 inmates to the prison population in the first year.

Senate leaders have balked in recent years on anti-gang legislation for that reason.

Lao Rubert, executive director of the Carolina Justice Policy Center, a Durham nonprofit group that advocates for effective and humane sentencing laws, said lawmakers have to do more than try to build their way out of the problem. She noted that instead of increasing money for prevention programs, lawmakers ordered an extensive review last year to determine if the programs justified the expense. The review supported the programs, and Easley has proposed restoring their $33 million in funding.

"There's a number of tools in the tool kit," she said, "and to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, we need to be looking at all of them."

(Staff writers Sarah Ovaska and Anne Blythe contributed to this report.)

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1074651.html

Posted by lois at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)

35 Years of Rockefeller Drug Laws, and Hope There Won’t Be 36

May 13, 2008
NYC
35 Years of Rockefeller Drug Laws, and Hope There Won’t Be 36
By CLYDE HABERMAN
NY Times

New York governors come and go (some more swiftly than others). State lawmakers tend to hang around longer, but most of them eventually move on as well. For true endurance, the statutes known as the Rockefeller-era drug laws are hard to beat. The same may be said about attempts to scrap those laws, which came into being in 1973, so long ago that disco was just beginning to be hot.

Nelson A. Rockefeller was governor then. Drug criminals had New York by the throat in one of the city’s periodic heart-of-darkness phases. Rockefeller wanted to show he could be tough as nails with dope dealers. The result was statutes that eternally bear his name in common idiom. Their essence was to send drug felons to prison for very long stretches, with sentences made mandatory and leniency rendered unacceptable even for first-time offenders.

The laws were amended in 2004 and 2005, to ease some of the most severe sentences. By then, they had been deemed overly harsh by most New Yorkers, save perhaps those with portraits of Torquemada on their walls. Occasional polls, like one for this newspaper in 2002, show that New Yorkers overwhelmingly would grant judges more of a free hand in sentencing. That includes a chance to send drug-addicted small fry into treatment rather than to prison.

We are now in a moment when the laws are being scrutinized again, in public hearings organized by a consortium of six New York State Assembly committees. A first round was held in Manhattan last Thursday, on the 35th anniversary of the laws’ signing by Rockefeller, and a second round is planned for Rochester on Thursday.

Judging from the remarks of Assembly members at last week’s session, they want major change, in particular to expand “judicial discretion” over the fate of convicted drug offenders. “We’re on the precipice of real Rockefeller law reform,” said Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, a Brooklyn Democrat. Mr. Lentol is among half a dozen lawmakers who were in the Legislature back in 1973. He voted against the laws then, and doesn’t like them any better now.

But it is far from clear what, if anything, lies beneath that precipice. The State Senate, dominated by Republicans, albeit with a weakened grip, has not been eager to join the Democratic-led Assembly in tossing the Rockefeller laws over the edge.

Indeed, positions have shifted little over the years.

Those who raise cries of “drop the Rock” say that mandatory sentences are mindless and unfair to nonviolent offenders, that they give too much power to prosecutors and not enough to neutral judges, that they steer too many low-level schnooks away from relatively inexpensive rehab that would serve them (and the state treasury) well, and that they are directed disproportionately hard toward African-Americans and Latinos.

A leading critic of the laws, the Correctional Association of New York, says that their effect is to give elected officials from 35 years ago, many of them dead, more power over today’s narcotics cases “than the judges who currently sit on the bench and hear all the evidence presented.”

In the same camp, you would probably find the present governor, David A. Paterson. He has not spoken up on the subject of late, but he got himself arrested in an anti-Rock protest six years ago, when he was a state senator.

On the other side are those, including many of the state’s district attorneys, who say that the threat of tough sentences is enough to induce some addicted drug violators to seek treatment. And don’t kid yourself, prosecutors say; street-corner dealers, even if not necessarily “drug kingpins,” are violence-breeding menaces. Neighborhoods, they say, are well rid of these lowlifes.

On the laws’ 35th anniversary, each side went to the hearing armed with anecdotes and statistics. A figure that stood out, though, was one that went unmentioned.

Bridget G. Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor for New York City, noted that in 1970 there were 1,146 homicides in the city. (Police records put the number at 1,117, but that’s not the point.) In 2007, that figure had been sliced to 496. The implication was that we could thank the Rockefeller laws for this marvelous result.

Unmentioned was another number: 2,245. That’s how many homicides the city recorded in 1990, our most blood-soaked year.

So for 17 years, starting with 1973, the murder rate grew and stayed implacably high, even with the Rockefeller laws. Then, over the next 18 years, the rate dropped sharply. The roller-coaster statistical ride is enough to make one wonder, at least in regard to murder, if the Rock really had anything to do with the numbers going up or down.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/nyregion/13nyc.html

Posted by lois at 09:45 PM | Comments (0)

MA: For women addicts, jail can replace treatment. Some sent for care must wait at prison

For women addicts, jail can replace treatment
Some sent for care must wait at prison

May 15, 2008
Boston Globe
This story was written by Globe correspondents Kelsey Abbruzzese, Brittany Peats, and Jordan Zappala.

Tina Wambolt knew she needed help battling her alcoholism. What she didn't need were strip searches and a cell in the Framingham women's prison.

Wambolt, 33, of Ashby, fell through a crack in the Massachusetts legal system, into a gap that routinely sends women with serious alcohol or substance abuse problems to the women's state prison when no beds are available in treatment facilities.

"They treat you awful, you feel physically violated, and it's just hell. I shouldn't have had to do that," Wambolt said. "I'm not a criminal."

Wambolt's ordeal last September was triggered by a Massachusetts law known as "Section 35," a civil statute under which a person can be involuntarily committed for up to 30 days if a judge rules that he or she poses a threat to himself, herself, or others.

Men who are civilly committed in Massachusetts are sent to a treatment facility on the grounds of MCI-Bridge water that is large enough to house 250 men, and has not resulted in space issues.

However, a chronic shortage of beds for women in the same circumstances means that some civilly committed women are sent to MCI-Framingham, the state's only women's prison.

During 2007, 14 women, including Wambolt, spent time behind bars during their civil commitments for no reason other than lack of space at a treatment center in New Bedford, the only center in Massachusetts dedicated to Section 35 civil commitments for women. Twenty-seven other civilly committed women were sent to MCI-Framingham last year for refusing treatment or other noncompliant behavior, according to the state Department of Public Health.

During the past five years, according to the state Department of Correction, more than 500 civilly committed women spent a few nights to a few weeks at the prison for reasons ranging from a shortage of treatment beds to behavioral issues. A breakdown was not available to determine how many were sent to the prison solely for lack of space.

Jim Kenney, program director at the New Bedford center, said he works closely with court clinicians, who advise judges on civil commitments, and does what he can through training and working with court officials to keep women from spending time in prison rather than at his facility, a gleaming, recently renovated section of an old mill complex off Interstate 195. Before the New Bedford center opened, women committed under Section 35 were sent to smaller facilities even more pressed for space. He pointed to figures showing that since the 84-bed center's opening in 2006, the number of civilly committed women sent to the prison has fallen sharply. From fiscal year 2006 to 2007, that number dropped by more than two-thirds.

But, as Wambolt's mother, Christina DaCruz, put it, "One is too many."

Watching a child's downfall

DaCruz began the civil commitment process when she went to Wambolt's home after her daughter was arrested for drunken driving. When DaCruz arrived, she said, the house reeked and her daughter had been drinking.

"She looked like someone walking in quicksand," DaCruz said. "This is my baby, my beautiful baby. To have seen her go so far down, I'm like, 'I can't stand this.' "

DaCruz said she had previously persuaded Wambolt to go to a 72-hour hospital detox, but her daughter had started drinking the day she was released. After Wambolt threatened suicide, DaCruz filed a civil commitment petition.

At Wambolt's hearing on Sept. 4 last year, the court clinician who examined her - Wambolt did not recall his name, and civil commitment records are sealed - told DaCruz that her daughter was committable, but would have to stay overnight at MCI-Framingham because there were no beds available in New Bedford.

DaCruz said the clinician told her not to worry, because her daughter would be moved the next day and kept away from the general population of convicts. With those reassurances, DaCruz went ahead with the commitment.

Wambolt recalls little of the hearing. "I remember being in court, but it was kind of a blur," she said. "I was kind of in shock."

Wambolt's husband, Brian, said he called MCI-Framingham every day from Sept. 5, the day after her hearing, until Sept. 8. That day, he said, a prison guard told him that his wife had been moved into the prison's general population.

Diane Wiffin, the state Department of Correction's director of public affairs, wrote in an e-mail that Wambolt was housed and treated in accordance with state law. In the same e-mail, prison Superintendent Lynn Bissonnette wrote that standard practice for women committed under Section 35 is to have them medically detoxed until cleared by a physician. Then they are housed in an area of the prison for women awaiting trial - not among convicted criminals - in a cell alone, or with another woman who has been civilly committed.

That made little difference to Wambolt. "It's like you see on TV. It's prison," she said.

Wambolt is 5 feet, 1 inch tall and weighs 110 pounds, with a pixie haircut and a nose piercing, and her mother and her husband worried for her safety. Wambolt said her cell was next to a woman accused of killing her baby. She added that two other women who were sent to MCI-Framingham for civil commitments spent time in solitary confinement.

"I was threatened to be beaten up," Wambolt recalled. "I was tired and you're stuck there and you swear you just become one of them."

MCI-Framingham's substance abuse program is available only to convicted criminals, so Wambolt and other women waiting to go to treatment centers found themselves in limbo. They received medicine to help them detox, but were ineligible for counseling or other addiction treatments that are available at the New Bedford center. Bissonnette wrote in the e-mail that civilly committed women are ineligible for the prison's treatment program so the prison can "transition them to a community setting as soon as possible."

Five days after the commitment hearing, DaCruz visited her daughter in prison.

"Of course I start crying," DaCruz said. "You have to fill out a paper about why you're there and the guard at the window read the paper and said, 'You know, it happens all the time. People send their family in for committals and they just get lost.' "

Wambolt finally reached the New Bedford treatment center on Sept. 10 - six days after her commitment hearing. DaCruz, who said she believes the transfer happened because of her frantic phone calls, said she was told by an official with the state Department of Public Health, which oversees the New Bedford center, that the center had not been aware of her daughter's existence until the phone calls.

Once she arrived at the New Bedford center, Wambolt said, she saw eight empty beds. Wambolt added that she had to spend more time in intensive detox because of the drugs given to her for medical detox at the prison.

Wambolt is not alone. A woman identified in state Department of Public Health documents as Debra P. entered MCI-Framingham as a civil commitment from the Cambridge District Court on July 18 last year. According to Department of Public Health records, she was sent to prison because there were no open beds in New Bedford. She spent 15 days at MCI-Framingham before being transferred to the center.

Trina P. did not even see the New Bedford facility. When she was committed on Sept. 27 last year, she, too, was sent to MCI-Framingham because of a lack of bed space. Department of Public Health records show she was released from the prison nearly a month later, on Oct. 24, when her commitment expired, having received none of the benefits offered at the New Bedford center.

Legislators hoping to stop civilly committed women from spending time in prison have fought a fruitless battle. Since at least 1989, Massachusetts lawmakers have proposed eliminating MCI-Framingham as a civil commitment option, which would require that women like Wambolt who face no criminal charges are sent to a treatment center. Other bills have sought to extend the time women spend in a treatment center under Section 35. But each year, these bills have failed to win passage and women like Wambolt end up behind bars.

"They haven't committed a crime," said Representative Kay Khan, a Newton Democrat who is the House sponsor of the bill. "Why should they be in a prison?"

Khan, who worked as a clinical psychiatric nurse specialist, said she hopes that the Patrick administration will support the bill and that the departments of Correction and Public Health will provide funding for added beds.

"People need to understand that these people come back out into our community and it really is a public safety issue," she said.

A kinder treatment

Wambolt said she was treated successfully at New Bedford. She said that other than her intensive detox, "It was heaven."

"Nobody strip-searched me, nobody's out there screaming at you, nobody's going to beat you up," she said. "Nobody's mean to you. They really do try to help."

At the center, intensive detox can last from three to seven days. The women sleep in barracks-style rooms with three other patients. There is no furniture except for four bolted-down twin beds. After detox, the women are moved to a Structured Outpatient Addiction Program. For the remainder of the 30-day treatment, they attend seven meetings daily, including lectures on after-care options, Kenney said.

Wambolt added that she is recovering, seeing addiction counselors, and working through an after-care program. Still, her mother bears guilt, and Wambolt bears resentment. As she put it, she was treated like a criminal rather than a woman suffering from a disease.

"I don't even know how the hell we got through that," she said.

Kelsey Abbruzzese, Brittany Peats, and Jordan Zappala are graduate journalism students at Boston University. They researched and wrote this story under the supervision of BU professors Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff, former members of the Globe Spotlight Team.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/05/15/for_women_addicts_jail_can_replace_treatment?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

New Tack on Straying Parolees Offers a Hand Instead of Cuffs

May 17, 2008
NY Times
New Tack on Straying Parolees Offers a Hand Instead of Cuffs
By ERIK ECKHOLM

WICHITA, Kan. — Since his release in January after serving time for a 2006 theft conviction, Lonnie Kemp has violated his parole conditions several times, getting drunk and kicked out of a halfway house and showing traces of marijuana in urine tests. If this were a few years ago, he almost certainly would be back in prison.

Similar parole violations after a previous theft conviction, in 1988, had repeatedly landed him back inside. In those days, parole was enforced with a spirit that officials recall, only half-jokingly, as “trail ’em, nail ’em, jail ’em,” overfilling the prisons but doing little to rehabilitate offenders.

Today, Kansas is a leader in a spreading national effort to make parole more effective and useful — to reduce violations and reincarcerations as it protects the public and seeks to help more offenders go straight. Mr. Kemp’s parole officer is keeping close tabs on him, but instead of sending him for a punitive stretch behind bars, he required Mr. Kemp to attend a substance-abuse program, made sure he had a stable home with a relative and helped him get a job with a construction company.

A similar transformation of the parole system has begun in several states including Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York and Texas. It has been prompted in part by financial concerns: more than one-third of all prison admissions are for parole violations, helping to drive an unsustainable surge in prison-building.

It has also been driven by evidence that conventional parole supervision is often a waste of resources. “If we sent him back to prison for 90 days, he’d have to start all over with his life again,” Kent Sisson, parole director for southern Kansas, said of Mr. Kemp. “Instead, he’s working, paying child support and getting a G.E.D.”

Mr. Kemp, 51, said: “Before, you didn’t want to have parole officers around, they’d send you back for almost anything. This time, I have positive people around me and I can call my parole officer any time.”

An influential study in 2005 by the Urban Institute concluded that parole supervision had little effect on the rate at which ex-prisoners were re-arrested.

“Parole is a system set up to find failure,” said Michael Jacobson, president of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York and a former chief of corrections and probation for the city. “If what you’re interested in is finding failure and putting people back in prison, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

“But it doesn’t work in terms of public safety or public spending,” said Mr. Jacobson, who praised Kansas as a pioneer in reforms.

As part of a get-tough spirit, a number of states in recent decades adopted mandatory sentences and ended the historic discretion of parole boards over release dates. Yet every state still has post-release supervision for most offenders, averaging three years with stiff conditions like not consuming alcohol, having urine tests, abiding by curfews, holding a job and meeting regularly with a parole officer.

The most widespread change is the use of risk assessments that help officials concentrate on those deemed most likely to commit new crimes. Those seen as low risk are only loosely supervised, perhaps even allowed to just send in status reports by mail.

“Half the offenders will do fine without any supervision,” Mr. Sisson said. “We’re trying to better understand who are the 50 percent most likely to commit more crimes, and how we can prevent that.”

The reformers are seeking a deeper change in attitude as well. “We’ve rewritten all our job descriptions,” said Roger Werholtz, the Kansas secretary of corrections. “The idea is to work with offenders to prevent them from violating their conditions of release, rather than just monitoring them to see if violations occur.”

In a sharp break with tradition, here and in some other states, parole agencies are hiring officers with backgrounds in social work rather than law enforcement. Parole officers are partnering with re-entry case workers who help prepare prisoners for society with group therapy and housing and job assistance. They start meeting prisoners well before their release, visit their families and may even drive them to a job interview.

“We now talk about reducing the barriers to success,” said Mr. Sisson, who works closely with the county re-entry director, Sally Frey.

In Kansas, parolees who threaten violence or openly defy the rules are still put back in prison, and those who commit new crimes are put on trial. But for those with lesser lapses, like Mr. Kemp, officials try to judge whether reincarceration will be useful and may rely instead on a combination of help, closer supervision and graduated sanctions.

Those seen as on the edge are required to report six evenings a week to a day reporting center, where they attend group therapy meetings designed to make them examine their motives and goals. They are often required to wear G.P.S. ankle bracelets that record their movements and flag violations, like not being home at curfew or, for a sex offender, going too near a school.

The changes, introduced over the last few years, are having measurable success, Mr. Werholtz said.

In Kansas in 2003, he said, an average of 203 parolees were returned to prison each month. By last year the number dropped to 103 a month. This could simply mean that those violating parole were left unpunished. But the number of convictions for new crimes by parolees has also declined; in the late 1990s, the number of people on parole with new convictions averaged 424 a year; in the last three years, it was down to 280 despite greater overall numbers under supervision.

“I think the data pretty well establish that not only are we keeping people out of prison at a better rate but that the amount of criminal activity they are inflicting on the public has also declined,” Mr. Werholtz said.

The state has also been able to put off costly prison construction plans, he said.

For inmates seen as high-risk, the re-entry team starts meeting them as early as 18 months before their release, often getting them into therapy groups and starting schooling or job training. The parole officers may join in about six months prior to release.

At the Winfield Correctional Facility, Mike Lentz, a parole officer who deals with gang-connected offenders, recently joined a re-entry case worker, Brianna Morphis, and a police liaison and a substance abuse specialist for Mr. Lentz’s first meeting with prisoners he would later supervise.

One of them, Raphael Frazier, 27, has about four months left to serve on a forgery conviction before starting parole. After being sent to prison in 1999 for aggravated robbery, Mr. Frazier was released on parole in 2003 but re-imprisoned in 2004 for three months for absconding, or failure to report.

In 2005 he was convicted on a new charge of forgery. This time he had more help, including group therapy and technical training in airplane building that should land him a good job with one of the aircraft companies clustered around Wichita.

“It makes it easier knowing that people are out to help you, instead of driving a stake in your back every time you turn around,” Mr. Frazier said. “I changed my attitude.”

Another innovation is accountability panels, which are groups of community volunteers, including former inmates, pastors and others who meet with newly released offenders to offer encouragement and meet them later to discuss problems or, ideally, congratulate them for completing parole. Panelists try to be encouraging and helpful.

Lorlei Sontag, 37, who has struggled with crack addiction, recently met her panel when she finally completed drug treatment after failed efforts. She told of going to the dentist and seeing a familiar crack house through the window.

“My stomach was doing flips, but I didn’t go,” she said. As the group applauded her progress, one panelist said she knew of a different dentist Ms. Sontag could see in a less tempting location.

At Wichita’s day reporting center, Shontell J., 31, described his three months wearing a G.P.S.-monitor ankle bracelet: “It’s irritating as hell, you can feel it’s always there.”

Convicted when he was 17 for aggravated battery, he spent twelve and a half years in prison and has a large scar on his cheek from a prison fight.

He started a roofing job while still in prison and has kept it for three years, and he has adopted his girlfriend’s two children.

But he has also had serious parole violations that put him under house arrest three times and then on daily reporting, with G.P.S. surveillance. Once he drove to Topeka, beyond the permitted 50-mile limit, and got caught when he was stopped for a traffic violation. He was arrested in a bar fight in another town and he failed a urine test.

Now, still reporting most days but no longer wearing the ankle bracelet, he said: “I tell myself a thousand times, I will not get into trouble.”

Mr. Kemp’s violations did not result in an ankle bracelet, but Mr. Lentz, his parole officer, said that in the past he still would have sent him back for a prison stay. In the new spirit, though, Mr. Lentz noted that “none of his actions are so heinous or hurtful to the community.”

Mr. Kemp works from 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. each day, assembling lumber for a company that makes trusses for houses. Initially he is making just $6.50 an hour — “not much, but it pays the bills,” he said — but he is in line for a permanent position and a raise.

“Things are going real smooth now,” he said.

He has one son who is 29 and another who is 14 and living with a relative.

“When I get myself together, I want my two boys to come live with me,” Mr. Kemp said. “I want to be a father.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17parole.html

Posted by lois at 09:21 PM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2008

Vicky Gunderson awarded prize for organizing on behalf of justice for youth

Published - Friday, May 16, 2008
Onalaska woman honored for justice work

The Campaign for Youth Justice and the National Juvenile Justice Network named Vicky Gunderson of Onalaska recipient of this year’s National Mother of Distinction Award.

This honor is presented each Mother’s Day to one or more mothers who have made an outstanding contribution toward reforming the juvenile justice system. Gunderson was nominated for the honor by the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families.

“We are proud of Vicky and her persistence in calling for juvenile justice reform,” said Liz Ryan, executive director of CFYJ. “There are too many kids locked up in adult facilities in Wisconsin and the rest of the United States. Through the work of Vicky and other dedicated advocates, we can make an impact across the country.”

At the age of 17, Vicky’s son Kirk was incarcerated as an adult in the La Crosse County jail. After nearly seven months there, he took his own life. Since losing her son, Gunderson has become a leading advocate in Wisconsin for keeping youth out of adult jails and prisons.

Gunderson has worked closely with the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families and other interested individuals and organizations to promote legislation that would return 17-year-olds in the state to the juvenile justice system. She has spoken at numerous conferences and other public events, and has written guest columns that have appeared in several newspapers. Her words, and those of her late son, were featured in the Campaign for Youth Justice’s recent report, Jailing Juveniles.

“We can only hope that by raising awareness of this issue, we can bring about changes that will spare other families the pain and devastation the Gunderson’s have experienced,” said Sarah Bryer, director of NJJN.

Vicky Gunderson was given a national honor last week for her work promoting juvenile justice reform.

An estimated 200,000 youth are tried, sentenced or incarcerated as adults every year across the United States. Most of the youths prosecuted in adult court are charged with nonviolent offenses and as many as half of the young people held in adult jails are returned to juvenile court or not convicted.

However, most of them will have spent at least one month in an adult jail, and one in five will, like Kirk, have spent more than six months in jail.

In Wisconsin, all 17-year-olds are treated as adults for any crime. Each year in Wisconsin nearly 30,000 17-year-olds are arrested, the vast majority of whom are accused of nonviolent crimes.

“Parents like Vicky help remind us that this issue is not just some abstract debate,” said Wendy Henderson, WCCF juvenile justice policy analyst. “Real families are being hurt by the current policy.”

Research shows that placing youths in the adult system decreases public safety and puts young people in danger. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, youths who are transferred from the juvenile court system to the adult criminal system are approximately 34 percent more likely than youth retained in the juvenile court system to be re-arrested for violent or other crime. They are 36 times more likely to commit suicide in an adult jail than in a juvenile detention facility.

For her work on the issue of youth incarcerated in adult jails and prisons, Gunderson received a plaque, a $100 gift certificate from Sue Kolve’s Salon & Day Spa and a one-night stay on the Plaza Club floor at the Radisson Hotel La Crosse. She was selected by nominations and recommendations from juvenile justice organizations across the country.
http://www.onalaskalife.com/articles/2008/05/16/news/06aamotheraward.txt

All stories copyright 2006 Onalaska Life and other attributed sources.

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

May 13, 2008

Schwarzenegger drops plan for early release of 22,000 inmates

Schwarzenegger drops plan for early release of 22,000 inmates
By Andy Furillo
May 13, 2008
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has dumped his plan to release about 22,000 lower-risk inmates from prison before they complete their terms, The Bee learned Monday.
The revised budget he will present on Wednesday will jettison the plan, which would have freed prisoners doing time for crimes such as drug possession and car theft who had less than 20 months to go on their terms.
The governor had sought the change as part of a 10 percent, across-the-board general fund budget cut to deal with a multibillion-dollar deficit.
His plan was unlikely, however, to win support in upcoming budget negotiations. Not a single legislator in the state had expressed support for the idea.
Press secretary Aaron McLear confirmed that Schwarzenegger will drop the early release plan but declined to comment further.
Assembly Public Safety Committee Chairman Jose Solorio, D-Santa Ana, welcomed its demise.

"I'm sure the governor realized that up and down the state, no one wants to see prisoners released early," Solorio said. "I was an early advocate for dropping that plan, and I'm glad that he's realizing people need to serve their time."
Critics of the state prison system had seen the early release proposal as a possible opening to a wholesale overhaul of California's approach to handling criminals.
Dan Macallair, the executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, expressed disappointment with the governor's decision to back away from early release.
"The correctional crisis in California cannot be solved through the normal political processes of Sacramento," Macallair said. "This is just another example of that. Nobody has the courage to do the right thing."
California's prisons are jammed to about twice their designed capacity. The overall prison population is a little more than 170,000.
In submitting the early release proposal in January, the governor's budget writers said it could have saved the state nearly $1.2 billion through the 2009-10 fiscal year.
On Monday, administration sources said the main factor in their decision to withdraw the idea is that the inmate population has been dropping on its own over the past year. They said the prison system is now housing 2,107 fewer inmates every day in the current budget year than the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had anticipated. The sources asked for anonymity because the revised budget has not yet been made public.
Fewer inmates coming in from the courts and fewer parolees returning to prison for violating the technical conditions of their releases from custody are accounting for the lower population numbers, the sources said.
Together, the result has been an estimated savings this year of $27.9 million, they said. Projections for next year indicate the potential for another $78.2 million in savings.
Along with early release, the administration had sought to achieve budget savings through what it called a "summary parole" plan.
Schwarzenegger intends to stick with that piece of his proposal. Offenders who violate their parole conditions but don't commit new crimes wouldn't be returned to prison under that plan. They would still be subject to warrantless searches by local law enforcement.
While the governor is planning to withdraw the early release plan, efforts to cap the prison population are still the subject of ongoing litigation in the federal courts.
"There's more than one way to skin a cat," said Don Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office in San Rafael. His firm is representing inmates in cases where the state's provision of medical and mental health care in the prisons has been found to be unconstitutional.

Copyright © The Sacramento Bee

Posted by lois at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2008

Regina McKnight -- Victory at Long Last!

Regina McKnight -- Victory at Long Last

On May 11, 2008 the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Regina McKnight did not have a fair trial when she was convicted in 2001 for homicide by child abuse. In 2001 Ms. McKnight became the first woman in South Carolina to be convicted of homicide by child abuse as a result of suffering an unintentional stillbirth.

Yesterday, after eight long years, a unanimous South Carolina Supreme Court finally reversed the twenty-year homicide conviction of Regina McKnight. The decision recognizes that the claim that cocaine is linked to stillbirths is based on "outdated" and inaccurate medical information.

Ms. McKnight was arrested in 1999, several months after she experienced a stillbirth at Conway Hospital. McKnight's conviction was based on the jury's acceptance of Junk Science -- the scientifically unsupported claim that her cocaine use caused the stillbirth. Ms. McKnight had no prior arrest history and even prosecutors agreed that she had no intention of harming the fetus or losing the pregnancy. Nevertheless, upon conviction she was given a twenty-year sentence, suspended to twelve years in prison with no chance for parole. Her sentence would have kept her imprisoned until 2010.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women has been working on Ms. McKnight's behalf for nearly a decade. One of NAPW's main commitments is to national and local organizing, mobilizing preeminent medical, public health and child welfare organizations and experts to speak out on behalf of pregnant women and the need to base policy on science not prejudice. From the beginning of Ms. McKnight's case, NAPW and our allies at the Drug Policy Alliance have worked with leading South Carolina and national organizations and experts to oppose the prosecution and conviction.

In the most recent round of litigation, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the Drug Policy Alliance, and South Carolina counsel Susan K. Dunn represented organizations including the South Carolina Medical Association, the South Carolina Nurses Association, the South Carolina Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors, and the South Carolina Coalition for Healthy Families in an amicus (friend of the court) brief. The amicus brief argued that women do not lose their right to a fair trial upon becoming pregnant and challenged the validity of the state's evidence claiming that cocaine use caused the stillbirth.

The medical and public health groups and experts also raised concerns about the consequences of South Carolina's policy of arresting pregnant women who experience drug problems. The amicus brief cited the fact that threatening pregnant women with jail time deters them from seeking prenatal care and other vital services, as has been the case in South Carolina since the Whitner ruling in 1997 that originally permitted prosecution of pregnant women under state child endangerment.

In 2002, NAPW, with attorney David Goldberg and numerous allies, challenged the constitutionality of using homicide statutes to prosecute women who experience stillbirths. On appeal, a bare majority of the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the new interpretation of the state's homicide law. The Court held that a pregnant woman who unintentionally heightens the risk of a stillbirth could be found guilty of "extreme indifference to human life" homicide. Under this decision a conviction for homicide is permitted on any evidence that a pregnant woman engaged in activity "public[ly] know[n]" to be "potentially fatal" to a fetus. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the decision.

Yesterday's ruling focused on the question of whether Ms. McKnight received a fair trial and concluded that Ms. McKnight's counsel was "ineffective in her preparation of McKnight's defense through expert testimony and cross-examination." The decision also indicated that the medical and scientific basis for the prosecution and that of other women in the state was based on outdated and inaccurate medical information.

The ruling addressed a petition filed on behalf of Ms. McKnight seeking judicial review to determine whether she was unlawfully imprisoned lawfully and should be released from custody. A successful petition must show that the court ordered the imprisonment based on a legal or factual error. Ms. McKnight's counsel argued that the factual error was accepting a causal link between McKnight's cocaine use and her stillbirth. The court held that the legal errors included not calling medical experts as witnesses who could refute that link, failing to investigate the medical evidence the state's witnesses relied on (and which was based on "outdated" scientific studies), failing to show the jury the autopsy report that indicated that an infection was the primary cause of the stillbirth, and failing to challenge the court's confusing and contradictory instructions to the jury of what "intent" Ms. McKnight had to have.

Our press release on the decision features two South Carolina leaders and NAPW allies:

"Significantly, the opinion acknowledges that current research simply does not support the assumption that prenatal exposure to cocaine results in harm to the fetus, and the opinion makes clear that it is certainly 'no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor," said Susan K. Dunn, South Carolina co-counsel for amicus. "This decision puts Solicitors [prosecutors] across the state on notice that they must actually prove that an illegal drug has risked or caused harm—not simply rely on prejudice and medical misinformation.

"Ms. McKnight is one of more than 500 women in South Carolina who experience stillbirths each year, and in many of those cases, medicine just can't determine the cause," said Brandi Parrish, coordinator of the South Carolina Coalition for Healthy Families and NAPW local ally. "It is a tragedy that Ms. McKnight has been in prison for nearly eight years for a crime she did not commit. Families in South Carolina are not helped by treating stillbirths as crimes and wasting hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to imprison innocent mothers."

In the post-conviction phase of the case, Ms. McKnight was directly represented by C. Rauch Wise of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina Foundation, Inc., and Matthew Hersh and Julie Carpenter of the law firm Jenner & Block for the DKT Liberty Project. NAPW is exceedingly grateful to the DKT Liberty Project for coming to us and offering their support, providing extraordinary legal talent, and having the commitment to continue the fight on behalf of Ms. McKnight.

What does Ms. McKnight have to say?

Rauch ("Rock") Wise went to the prison to give Ms. McKnight the good news in person. She was thrilled but somewhat in shock. As Rock was leaving, he asked her for a hug. She told him it was against prison rules. Rock asked for permission from the prison guard. Permission was not granted: Just one small denial that captures so much of the overall cruelty and injustice of this case.

By 5:00 p.m. though, the ruling was sinking in and Ms. McKnight was able to call collect from the prison. She said how happy she was, and that "It has been a very long road." She thanked everyone for sticking with her.

Unfortunately she will not be released immediately. The State has fifteen days to petition for reconsideration and then the State will decide whether to re-try her. Her counsel and allies are all working on ways to speed up her release and to find community support systems for her when that day comes.

What can you do?

The Charlotte Observer , the Myrtle Beach News and papers around the country are starting to report on Ms. McKnight's victory. How can you help right now? Please check out the news stories and post your own comment about why the decision is good, and prosecutions of pregnant women and new mothers are bad for mothers and babies.

http://www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2008

Cornell 1Q profit jumps nearly sevenfold

Cornell 1Q profit jumps nearly sevenfold

Associated Press
05.09.08, 1:50 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com - Cornell 1Q profit jumps nearly sevenfold – Forbes.com

HOUSTON - Cornell Cos., a provider of corrections and treatment services to federal and state agencies, said Friday that its first-quarter profit soared nearly sevenfold, with revenue rising mainly due to correctional center and prison projects.

For the quarter ended March 31, Cornell Companies earned $4.6 million, or 32 cents per share, compared with $664,000, or 5 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.

The company's revenue climbed 6 percent to $95.4 million from $89.6 million.

Cornell Companies said much of the growth resulted from the expansion of the Big Spring Correctional Center and the D. Ray James Prison in November and February, respectively.

The company also said its general and administrative expenses declined to $6.5 million from $8.4 million. Its operating expenses, excluding depreciation, edged up to $70.2 million from $69.6 million.

Cornell Companies shares declined 57 cents to $21.88 in afternoon trading.

Posted by lois at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2008

Comic book: Mexico draws dire picture for migrants

Mexico draws dire picture for migrants

The cover of a Mexican comic book aimed to deter illegal immigration says "Migrants: Only alive can you do something for your families."

By Chris Hawley and Sergio Solache, USA TODAY. April 21, 2008

MEXICO CITY — One migrant gets his legs sliced off by a train's wheels. Another is shot by bandits on the Arizona border. Others are beaten and robbed by crooked Mexican police.

In a new effort to dissuade people from crossing the border illegally, Mexico's top human-rights agency has published two comic books packed with tales about the horrors that migrants may face. The tone is very different from previous government publications that focused more on travel and safety tips.

One of the two Migrantes comics is aimed at Mexicans, while the other focuses on Central Americans traveling through Mexico on their way to the USA. The National Human Rights Commission began distributing 20,000 of them this month at migrant shelters and bus terminals.

"We could have made the stories a little softer, but the (commission) asked us to be very realistic," said Domingo Perea, editorial director of Comics and Visual Arts, the firm hired to produce the comic books. "That was the intention, to discourage people from migrating."

In the past, several Mexican states have published booklets with advice for migrants. And in 2004, the Mexican Foreign Ministry published a comic-style Guide for the Mexican Migrant that offered safety tips for those attempting to cross the border, information on their legal rights and advice for living unobtrusively in the USA. That booklet outraged U.S. immigration-control groups, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which said the comic style and frank advice trivialized U.S. immigration laws.

The new comics have a more depressing tone, Perea said. "We knew about that previous one, and both we and the Human Rights Commission felt it was too light," he said.

The commission has been accused of being cavalier about illegal immigration in the past. In 2006, it abruptly abandoned plans to distribute maps of the Arizona desert to migrants after U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff objected.

The National Human Rights Commission is funded by Mexico's federal government but operates independently. Its two Migrantes books are particularly harsh on Mexican authorities, portraying police and soldiers as corrupt.

In Issue No. 1 of Migrantes, a group of Mexicans is robbed by two Mexican police officers, abandoned by a smuggler and attacked by bandits on the Arizona-Mexico border. All the migrants turn back except one, who is seen dying in the desert on the last page.

Issue No. 2 follows a group of teenagers from Central America as they try to cross Mexico on their way to the USA. They are harassed by Mexican soldiers, beaten and robbed by Mexican police, kidnapped and beaten again by a machete-wielding gang, and then suffer extortion by another gang member. Two teens are killed by a train, and only one continues onward.

Perea said there are no immediate plans for more comic books.

Guillermo Alonso, a demographer at the College of the Northern Border, said the commission should be giving out travel information if it really wants to save lives, especially as the U.S.-Mexican border approaches its hottest season.

"I think the National Human Rights Commission is using the wrong strategy," Alonso said. "What the migrants need are maps or radio programs to tell them what the weather is like."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-04-21-mexico-comics_n.htm
Hawley is Latin America correspondent for USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic

Posted by lois at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

Racial Inequity and Drug Arrests

May 10, 2008
NY Times
Editorial
Racial Inequity and Drug Arrests

The United States prison system keeps marking shameful milestones. In late February, the Pew Center on the States released a report showing that more than 1 in 100 American adults are presently behind bars — an astonishingly high rate of incarceration notably skewed along racial lines. One in nine black men aged 20 to 34 are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

Now, two new reports, by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch, have turned a critical spotlight on law enforcement’s overwhelming focus on drug use in low-income urban areas. These reports show large disparities in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, despite roughly equal rates of illegal drug use.

Black men are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, according to one haunting statistic cited by Human Rights Watch. Those who are not imprisoned are often arrested for possession of small quantities of drugs and later released — in some cases with a permanent stain on their records that can make it difficult to get a job or start a young person on a path to future arrests.

Similar concerns are voiced by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which issued a separate study of the outsized number of misdemeanor marijuana arrests among people of color in New York City.

Between 1980 and 2003, drug arrests for African-Americans in the nation’s largest cities rose at three times the rate for whites, a disparity “not explained by corresponding changes in rates of drug use,” The Sentencing Project finds. In sum, a dubious anti-drug strategy spawned amid the deadly crack-related urban violence of the 1980s lives on, despite changed circumstances, the existence of cost-saving alternatives to prison for low-risk offenders or the distrust of the justice system sowed in minority communities.

Nationally, drug-related arrests continue to climb. In 2006, those arrests totaled 1.89 million, according to federal data, up from 1.85 million in 2005, and 581,000 in 1980. More than four-fifths of the arrests were for possession of banned drugs, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Underscoring law enforcement’s misguided priorities, fully 4 in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession. Those who favor continuing these policies have not met their burden of proving their efficacy in fighting crime. Nor have they have persuasively justified the yawning racial disparities.

All is not gloomy. Many states have begun expanding their use of drug treatment as an alternative to prison. New York’s historic crime drop has continued even as it has begun to reduce the number of nonviolent drug offenders in prison, attesting to the oft-murky relationship between incarceration and crime control. In December, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the federal sentencing guidelines to begin to lower the disparities between the sentences imposed for crack cocaine, which is more often used by blacks, and those imposed for the powder form of the drug.

The looming challenge, says Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is to have arrest and incarceration policies that are both effective for fighting crime and promoting racial justice and respect for the law. As the new findings attest, the nation has a long road to travel to attain that goal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/opinion/10sat1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)

In the Face of Great Loss, Embracing Innocence

May 10, 2008
About New York
In the Face of Great Loss, Embracing Innocence
By JIM DWYER

The woman was seated just two chairs away at the table, but the man had to speak over music that filled the room.

“Peggy,” he said.

For a minute, Peggy Sanders did not hear her name being called. She is 65 and was visiting New York this week for the first time from a small town in Oklahoma to attend a big benefit dinner.

M

As a young virtuoso played piano, Ms. Sanders swayed slightly in her chair.

“Peggy,” the man said.

She glanced up.

“Want to dance?” he asked.

She giggled, the way an aunt might at a rambunctious nephew who tries to coax her onto the dance floor at a wedding. But she did not take his question seriously. Of the 600 people at the dinner, no one else made a move to dance: The chair backs had just inches of clearance.

Even so, the man who asked the question, Dennis Fritz, needed no more encouragement. He edged around the table and took her hand. The floor may have been crowded, but the stage was wide open. He led her to the stairs. She climbed up, a crown of white hair over her smile. Mr. Fritz wore jeans and a sport coat.

She lifted her hands and put them on his back and shoulder. They drifted together and gently twirled, a dance salvaged from a trail of wreckage that stretches back to 1982.

Peggy Sanders first saw Dennis Fritz 21 years ago, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit as he was brought into the courthouse in Ada, Okla., to face charges that he had murdered Ms. Sanders’s daughter Debbie Carter. She was 21, a waitress who had just gotten her own apartment, when she was killed in December 1982.

“I hated him so bad,” Ms. Sanders said. “Why did they do that to my little girl?”

Mr. Fritz, a high school science teacher, was spared the death penalty by one vote and got life without parole. A co-defendant, Ron Williamson, once a star pitching prospect, was sentenced to die. He came within five days of execution.

Neither man had anything to do with the crime: They were convicted on the word of jailhouse snitches who bartered their stories for sweetheart plea deals and by pseudoscientific testimony that falsely linked them to 17 hairs found at the crime scene. In 1999, lawyers in Oklahoma and with the Innocence Project in New York arranged DNA tests that cleared Mr. Fritz and Mr. Williamson. The tests implicated another man, whose DNA was matched to the hair and semen found on the victim’s body.

“They were railroaded,” Ms. Sanders said. The other man is now serving a life sentence for the murder.

Ms. Sanders saw it plain. All around her, though, people refused to rewrite the ending to her daughter’s murder, clinging to the belief that Mr. Fritz and Mr. Williamson somehow had been part of the killing, a spurning of reality so common that it has practically become an epidemic as DNA tests, year in and out, clear the wrongfully convicted.

The elders of Mr. Williamson’s family church refused to let the two men use the hall for a press conference after their release. The Williamson family received threatening calls. Their pastor pointedly did not acknowledge Mr. Williamson from the pulpit when he came for his first church service after leaving prison.

Then Mr. Williamson, a high school baseball star drafted in the second round in 1971 by the Oakland Athletics, made a call to Ms. Sanders.

“He said, ‘This is Ron Williamson; I did not kill your daughter,’ ” Ms. Sanders recalled. “I said, ‘I know, hon.’ ”

Ms. Sanders, who married as a teenager and quickly had three children, struggled for years after the murder of Debbie. Yet she embraced Mr. Williamson, Mr. Fritz and their families after the men were exonerated.

“I had to do it for my daughter,” she said. “They had become victims of this, too. People still don’t believe they’re innocent. I was just at a funeral, and a woman come up to me and said, ‘I know them two done it.’ I said, ‘No, they didn’t.’ ”

Mr. Williamson, who suffered from psychiatric problems, died in 2004. He is the subject of John Grisham’s book “The Innocent Man.” Mr. Fritz, 58, now lives in Missouri, and has also written a book, “Journey Toward Justice.” Christy Sheppard, a cousin of the murder victim, has become an advocate for the establishment of commissions to look into wrongful convictions.

All of them — the family of Debbie Carter, the family of Mr. Williamson, Mr. Grisham and Mr. Fritz — sat at one table Thursday evening for a dinner benefiting the Innocence Project.

Until an impulse hit Dennis Fritz, and he led his friend Peggy Sanders onto the stage, and they danced where everyone could see them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/nyregion/10about.html?_r=1&sq=Jim%20Dwyer&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=2&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2008

Two responses in the NY Times to aricle and editorial about detention centers

Two of the five letters printed by the NY Times today in response to the "Death by Detention" editorial and the article “Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody” (front page, May 5).

To the Editor:

Your May 6 editorial “Death by Detention” was right to point out the secrecy and lack of transparency surrounding the treatment of immigrant detainees held in for-profit facilities. But your call for holding detention centers to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons would do little to help.

Sadly, there are no enforceable national standards for prisons and jails in the United States. There is one national accreditation body that had developed standards, the American Correctional Association, but its standards are not enforceable, and there is no requirement for facilities to be accredited.

There are constitutional standards that fluctuate as the Supreme Court changes its view of the meaning of the Eighth Amendment.

There are standards imposed by the international treaties that we have signed and ratified, including the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment, but the Bush administration was dismissive of the criticisms of our prison systems made by the committee of oversight last year.

We should develop enforceable national standards, including systems of oversight and monitoring, for all places of detention in the United States.

Jenni Gainsborough
Director, Washington Office
Penal Reform International
Washington, May 6, 2008

To the Editor:

The suffering and death of immigrants in United States detention facilities point to a still bigger outrage: the alarming breakdown of health care for detained immigrants and asylum seekers. This is a direct result of the longstanding abdication of responsibility by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Public Health Service, private contractors and local jails for the health of immigration detainees in their custody.

The harsh circumstances of detention and the detrimental effect on health have been known for years, and the victims include asylum seekers who have come to this country to escape persecution in other lands, only to find themselves imprisoned instead of supported while their claims are pending.

Congress and immigration officials must immediately take at least four steps:

First, they should provide the funds needed to protect the health of immigration detainees.

Second, they should enforce compliance with established standards of medical care in detention facilities, no matter who operates them.

Third, they should release from detention asylum seekers who pose no risk of flight or danger to the community.

Fourth, a bill to address many of these issues, introduced this week by Representative Zoe Lofgren, should be passed quickly.

Fifth, both Congress and the appropriate executive agencies should investigate the deaths of immigrant detainees in United States custody, ensuring that the health and human rights of those still in these facilities are protected.

Frank Donaghue
Chief Executive
Physicians for Human Rights
Cambridge, Mass., May 5, 2008

•

Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2008

Federal prison industries program expects to lose millions in sales

May 8th, 2008
Federal prison industries program expects to lose millions in sales
By ELISE CASTELLI

The federal program that sells office furniture and other products made from prison labor expects to lose millions of dollars in sales because of a new law, officials told a House committee Tuesday.
Federal Prison Industries (FPI), known by the brand name Unicor, has long been a mandatory source for federal purchases, but the 2008 Defense Authorization Act requires the Defense Department to put out for bid orders it previously would have placed with FPI.
In areas where Defense buys more than 5 percent of goods or services from FPI, it now must compare what FPI sells to what the private sector sells. If FPI doesn’t offer the best quality, price and delivery time, Defense is required to open the purchase to a competition between FPI and the private sector.

As a result of these competition rules, FPI could lose at least $144 million in sales and 3,250 inmate jobs, Harley Lappin, director of the Bureau of Prisons, told the House Judiciary Committee on May 6. FPI took in about $850 million in 2007 and employed 23,000 inmates.

FPI is self-funding and without enough revenue, inmates will not have jobs to keep them busy, Lappin said.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents Bureau of Prisons corrections officers, estimates the situation will be much worse. FPI will lose $240 million in revenue and 6,500 prisoner jobs as a result of the competition requirement, said AFGE President John Gage.
Any loss of inmate jobs increases the idleness of the prison population, Gage said. “The increase in FPI prison inmate idleness and the associated increased risk of inmate assaults on federal correctional officers and staff would necessarily require a substantial increase in BoP [budget and staff],” Gage said.
About 1,300 more corrections officers at the cost of $100 million would be needed if 6,500 FPI inmate jobs were lost due to slumping sales, he said.
Industry has long criticized mandatory purchasing from FPI, saying the monopoly takes scarce manufacturing jobs away from law-abiding citizens. Industry backed a 2002 law that requires agencies to conduct market research to determine if Unicor products are the best value in areas where Unicor held more than 20 percent of the federal market.
As a result of these rules, FPI has seen a dramatic decline in sales, Lappin said. FPI furniture sales have felt the competition the hardest, declining 40 percent since 2002, Lappin said. Unicor makes furniture, textiles, fencing and other industrial products. It also offers food services, data entry services, electronics recycling services and printing services.
Members of the committee expressed support for the program and dismay that mandatory sourcing was limited in the Defense bill without consulting the committee.
“If we didn’t have this program, we’d be falling all over ourselves to create it,” said Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif.
While the number of inmate workers has dropped slightly since 2000, FPI has been able to avoid a dramatic decline by creating shifts to allow for part-time work, said Paul Laird, FPI’s chief operating officer. While not ideal, the part-time work keeps inmates busy, trains them for the outside world and holds them to the behavior and education standards required to take part in the program, Laird said.
FPI could survive competition if it is given new authorities to manufacture products that are now imported, said Laird. This would minimize FPI’s effect on U.S. jobs while creating jobs in the community to supply FPI with raw materials, Laird said.
But Congress would also have to protect what is left of FPI’s preferred-source status until those new areas are established, Lappin said. It won’t be easy because FPI doesn’t extensively advertise or market its lines of business, he said.
“We can’t afford to lose mandatory sourcing,” he said.

http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=3515757

Posted by lois at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)

Wyo sends minimum-security inmates to max security prison

Thursday, 08 May 2008

Wyo sends minimum-security inmates to max security prison

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) Sixteen minimum-security inmates from Wyoming are among the more than 100 inmates the state has sent to a maximum-security Virginia prison that has been the target of human rights complaints over the years.

Some civil liberties groups say Wallens Ridge State Prison, in Big Stone Gap, Va., is inappropriate for minimum-security inmates. Virginia built the prison in the late 1990s as a ''supermax'' facility exclusively for the most dangerous inmates, but downgraded it to a maximum-security prison in 2002.

''It boggles the mind why you would send a minimum-security prisoner to a place like Wallens Ridge,'' Jamie Fellner, senior counsel with Human Rights Watch in New York City, said Wednesday.

T

The state of Connecticut removed its inmates from Wallens Ridge in 2001 following the deaths of two of them there. One of the Connecticut inmates died after being shocked repeatedly at the prison with a stun gun. The state of Connecticut paid $1.1 million to settle a lawsuit from his family over the incident and the state of Virginia paid $350,000.

Connecticut paid an additional $750,000 in 2002 to the estate of a mentally ill inmate who committed suicide at Wallens Ridge despite having less than a year left to serve in prison.

Bob Lampert, director of the Wyoming Department of Corrections, said Wednesday that he expects some of the state's minimum-security inmates now assigned to Wallens Ridge will be moved from the prison shortly.

Wyoming announced in March that it had contracted with Virginia to house 300 inmates, split between Wallens Ridge and another, medium-security prison in Virginia. Lampert said corrections staff have been reviewing the security classification of each inmate to see which of the two prisons would be most appropriate for them.

Lampert said it's necessary for Wyoming to house some of its male inmates out of Wyoming until the state completes construction of the new state prison in Torrington in the next couple of years. And he said Wallens Ridge will offer Wyoming inmates more educational and other programs than the private prison in Oklahoma that used to hold Wyoming's overflow prisoners.

Asked if any minimum-security inmates will be assigned to Wallens Ridge permanently, Lampert said that would be decided on a ''case by case basis.'' He said a minimum-security inmate could be sent there if they had a documented conflict with another inmate that the department had already housed at the other Virginia prison.

Lampert said his office has received letters from inmates questioning why they were sent to Wallens Ridge. He said that his office has responded to them that the classification process is ongoing.

Linda Burt, director of the ACLU in Wyoming, said Wednesday that her office has received numerous complaints from inmates' families about their relatives being sent to Wallens Ridge.

''Just basically the attitudes of the guards, that the guards are really extraordinarily tough, and angry, and that's the kind of information that we had gotten before for years,'' Burt said of the reports the ACLU has received about conditions at Wallens Ridge.

Burt said inmates' families should tell state officials, including legislators, the governor and the Department of Corrections, if they're unhappy that relatives are being held in the Virginia facility.

Lana Corcoran of Sheridan wrote a letter to the Casper Star-Tribune last month complaining about Wyoming's decision to send minimum-security inmates to Wallens Ridge. Attempts to reach her for comment on Wednesday were unsuccessful.

''Help! Please get our inmates out of Wallens Ridge Supermax prison in Virginia,'' Corcoran wrote. ''We have boys in there that were only convicted of minor offenses.''

In response to a request from The Associated Press, the Wyoming Department of Corrections this week provided a list of the number of Wyoming inmates sent to Wallens Ridge, their current security classifications and the offenses that resulted in their incarceration.

Melinda Brazzale, spokeswoman for the corrections department, said Tuesday that the department would not release the names of the 108 inmates it sent to Wallens Ridge because of security concerns.

While 16 Wyoming inmates classified as minimum or minimum-restricted were at Wallens Ridge as of Tuesday, there were only two maximum security inmates from the state there. Most of the inmates, 75 out of the 108, were classified as ''close'' and ''close-restricted,'' a classification between medium and maximum.

http://cbs4denver.com/coloradowire/22.0.html?type=local&state=WY&category=n&filename=WY--WyomingInmates.xml

(© 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)

Western MA Inside Out Program: The more we imprison, the less we vote

Conor Clarke and Greg Yothers
The Boston Globe
The more we imprison, the less we vote

May 5, 2008

FOR THE past 12 weeks, we have both been students in an Amherst College class on citizenship. Unlike most college courses, however, this one isn't held in a classroom. Each week, as part of the nationwide program Inside-Out, we meet for 2 1/2 hours in the dimly lit visiting room of the Hampshire County Correctional Facility. Half the students in the class are from the college; half are inmates at the facility.

It is a class on citizenship with a cruel irony: Because of a 2000 amendment to the Massachusetts constitution disenfranchising incarcerated felons, half the students in the class cannot vote. In about a week, all of the Amherst students will leave for the summer; many will volunteer for a presidential campaign. This November, like most adult citizens, they will walk to a local polling station or cast absentee ballots from the comfort of a college dorm. The students inside the facility can't.

American incarceration has received a lot of attention recently. Last month, The New York Times reported that one in every 100 American adults is in prison, the highest rate in the world by a wide margin, and about six times higher than the world median. This drive to incarcerate has been rightly and roundly criticized as too expensive (it costs more per capita to imprison than educate) and too harsh, since the vast majority of inmates are serving time for nonviolent crimes. But amid the controversy over price and punishment, it tends to be forgotten that incarceration imposes a cost on American democracy: The more we imprison, the less we vote.

Why should that be the case? In early 2000, before the amendment passed, Governor Paul Cellucci told Bryant Gumbel of CBS News that disenfranchisement was necessary to ensure that felons did not damage the political process. Cellucci said, after a group of Massachusetts prisoners tried to organize a political action committee in 1997, he "thought that this was a little bit ridiculous, that prisoners would actually politically organize and try to lobby against the very laws that put them in prison to protect the people of this state." The clear implication was that, once you've broken the social contract, you've proved yourself unfit for any social contact, including the right to vote.

But our experience in class suggests that the opposite is true. We all write the same papers, read the same material by John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and are all equally engaged in debating and discussing everything from the role of the good citizen to America's role in the world. There is no reason to think inmates are uniquely unqualified to wield a vote, and no reason to think they can't.

Yes, going to prison necessarily entails the loss of liberty. But the right to vote is in many ways more important than the right to walk freely down the street: Voting is the most basic check against the coercive power of the state. The places where that coercive power is most starkly exercised, such as prisons, are also the places where that most basic of checks becomes more important. The fact that prisoners have a big stake in governmental choices isn't an argument in favor of disenfranchisement; it's an argument against.

And because the vote is so essential to democratic citizenship, it is also an important part of reintegrating inmates with society. Prisons separate and divide, but at their best they also prepare inmates for life after imprisonment. Rebuilding civic engagement is perhaps the most important part of that process.

There are more than 25,000 inmates in Massachusetts correctional facilities, and more than half are racial minorities. Almost all of them will, at some point in the future, exit their cells and return to their homes and families. It would be better if they returned as voting citizens.

Conor Clarke is an Amherst College student; Greg Yothers is an inmate at the Hampshire County Correctional Facility.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted by lois at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

May 07, 2008

MA: Packed Prisons. The how and why of overcrowding.

Packed Prisons
The how and why of overcrowding
By CARA BAYLES

Phillip is a gentleman. He folds up his limbs with poise and wears wool pants with an impeccable crease. He's prone to diatribes against misogyny. He's a "voracious reader," and has a sixth sense for "figuring people out." He has a gentle, not entirely trusting way of regarding a person. He can talk a mile, but also listens; not simply to your words, but the words between them. He radiates a wavelength that's easy to tune into.

He's 47 years old, and he's spent 21 of those years in prison.

***
The US prison population grew eight-fold since 1970; more than 2.3 million people are incarcerated nationally. The rising numbers aren't proportional to population growth; the Pew Institute recently reported that for the first time in history, more than one in every 100 Americans is incarcerated. Don't like those odds? One in 30 men aged 20 to 34 is locked up, and that jumps to one in nine for black men. People of color make up 70 percent of the prison population, the reverse of the US race ratio outside prison walls.

The Massachusetts prison population grew by 3 percent since 2006, and overcrowding is pandemic. Two years ago, Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities were at 134 percent capacity. Now they've reached 143 percent. But that's merely a median ... MCI Framingham, the state's largest women's prison, is at 323 percent capacity. Only two of Massachusetts' 22 facilities are not spilling over capacity.

"Overcrowding means the facility population is greater than the design capacity," says DOC spokeswoman Diane Wiffin. "We turn single cells into doubles, provide more beds in a dormitory."

Hakim Cunningham was recently incarcerated in Massachusetts. "They were putting two or three people to a cell together," he says. "In Concord CI, they have people sleeping on the gym and rec areas in cots."

Such solutions are dangerous, says Joel Pentlarge, acting executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates reforming the state's justice system. "Those cells are very small—typically under 80 square-feet. They're designed to hold only one prisoner," he says. "Those conditions escalate prisoner-on-prisoner violence."

Why is the prison population climbing, and why are people of color disproportionately incarcerated?

The relationship with Massachusetts' crime rate is tenuous; the prison population has climbed steeply since the late 1970s, but crime has wavered up and down, with peaks in the mid '70s and early '80s, and a steady decline since 1990.

Thomas Nolan, a professor of criminal justice at Boston University and retired Boston Police officer, says the rise in imprisonment corresponds with the war on drugs. "What we're seeing nationally, as well as in Massachusetts, is an incremental, long-term trend to incarcerate people, particularly for drugs," he says.

Nolan joined the Boston Police Department (BPD) in 1978, and saw the shift in national priorities play out locally. "In the mid '80s, police departments in urban areas devoted more time and attention to drug enforcement than ever before. Historically, a department goes where the federal funding goes. In the 80s it was the war on drugs, in the '90s it was community policing," he says. "In the 70s we had a small, centralized city drug department of half a dozen officers. Now, every district has its own drug unit. Roxbury even has two of them, a day shift and a night shift. And there's still a city-wide unit. So you've got 100 officers whose sole purpose is enforcement in the war on drugs."

***

Phillip, who asked that his real name not be used, has been shooting heroin since he was 16. He grew up in Cambridge public housing. Both his parents were junkies; his mother died of AIDS in 1997, his 65-year-old father is still in a methadone clinic. His father's face is scarred from "an incident when he fell asleep on a radiator because he was so high."

"There were a couple of times when my father would come into school inebriated and tell the teacher, 'Phillip has to go, he has a doctor's appointment,'" he says. "We'd walk out, and I'd say, 'Do I really have a doctor's appointment, Daddy?' and he'd say, 'No, I just thought you'd like to get out of there.' And I'd say, 'School's what I look forward to. It's the best part of my day.'"

***

While the percentage of people of color in Massachusetts prisons doesn't reach the national figures, they're still overrepresented. Hispanics make up 21 percent of prisoners in a state where they comprise 7.9 percent of the population. Nationally, Latinos make up 20.5 percent of prisoners, and 14.8 percent of the general population.

"It's not that these people are more likely to commit an offense," says Nolan. "They're just more likely to get caught and subsequently incarcerated."

National figures from 2000 indicate whites make up 72 percent of all drug users, yet blacks are five times as likely to get arrested on drug charges.

Their neighborhoods are policed more, according to Nolan. "Law enforcement is concentrating its efforts in communities of color," he says. "Historically, that's where law enforcement has devoted its resources. Law enforcement is going to tell you they go where the crime is, and it would be fruitless to focus elsewhere."

The BPD failed to respond to questions about their policies.

Katrina Christensen, a coordinator with the Cambridge Needle Exchange, says economic prejudices exist as well. "There's a stigma on a person sleeping on the street," she says. "There are many professionals out there who use, and people say, 'Oh, that's OK. They're doing well.' Well, what does that mean? That someone who's struggling to get by is useless?"

Pentlarge says the mentally ill are also more susceptible to getting mixed up in the criminal justice system. "When we closed down mental institutions in the '80s, prisons became the place of last resort for the seriously mentally ill," he says. With 15 suicides in the last three years, Massachusetts has the highest prisoner suicide rate in the country. Last year, the DOC hired suicide prevention specialist Lindsay Hayes to do an independent review of the phenomenon. Diane Wiffin says the DOC has implemented most of Hayes' recommendations.

Pentlarge insists prisons aren't designed to deal with mental illness. "A person might be seriously delusional," he says. "The prison's first response is to put them in solitary, which is where the majority of our prisoner suicides occurred."

***

Phillip started using because everyone around him was. But he couldn't afford it. "A lot of drug addicts resort to stealing to support their habit," he says. "The effect of the heroin will wear off, and it's a serious drag. When heroin addicts withdraw, they become ill."

In 1979, Phillip was convicted of armed robbery. He walked into a store, and the clerk welcomed him perkily. "I thought, 'I can't believe I'm about to do this. This isn't me.' I pulled out the gun, and she freaked," he says, dragging his fingers down his cheek. "It's hard for me to live with the fact that I traumatized this woman. I wasn't going to hurt her, but she didn't know that." He squats on the floor, placing his hand by his face. "She was just like this. It stays with me."

He went to prison when he was 17, and grew up inside those walls.

***

In 1994, the Gun-Free Schools Act mandated that states adopt legislation requiring the one-year expulsion of students who brought drugs or weapons to school. Massachusetts' statute allows for permanent expulsion and doesn't require any alternative education for expelled students.

Amy Reichbach, an advocate with the Massachusetts ACLU, says such measures are used mostly at schools with few alternatives. "Schools are under-resourced, and may not be able to offer counseling and the extra costs of different educational needs," she says.

Since the busing riots in the 1970s, Boston public schools have Boston School Police in their halls. Today, they employ 84 such officers, who don't carry weapons but have full arrest powers on school property.

Reichbach says transgressions the school traditionally dealt with are now met with harsher penalties or given to law enforcement. "There's a perception out there that this just affects kids bringing weapons," she says. "But they can get expelled for other misbehavior, like disorderly conduct. They can get arrested for disturbing a school assembly." Any student facing criminal charges (including offenses that occurred off school grounds) can also be suspended.

Tami Wilson studies this "school-to-prison pipeline" at Harvard's Charles Hamilton Institute. "This is happening more often than we think, though it varies by school district," Wilson says. "Five urban school districts in Massachusetts with a large population of children of color, immigrants and children eligible to receive free lunch were responsible for 103, or over half, of all school exclusions." Students of color make up approximately 20 percent of the state's student population, but represent over 55 percent of school exclusions. The state's dropout rate has also risen, reaching 3.8 percent.

In Massachusetts, 70.4 percent of prisoners never completed high school.

Aaron Tanaka, of the Boston Workers' Alliance (BWA), a nonprofit for underemployed workers, sees crime as a product of poverty. "About 12,000 Boston youth aren't in school," he says. "They don't have options in the mainstream economy, so they get involved in illicit activity, like drug trade or sex work."

***

Phillip's done several stints since his initial sentence; mostly petty thefts and drug charges. "You always come out worse than you came in," he says. "You come out with so much anger, your self-esteem plummets because you're used to being treated like you're worthless, like you have no value. People talk like I'm an evil, vile human being."

Now he's homeless. He can't get public housing or a job with his record. "Idle time for a drug addict is very dangerous," he says. "You can imagine."

***

Pentlarge says the state must find alternatives to incarceration. "Part of the reason we've so overcrowded is we're treating a disease as a crime," he says. "If we treated it like alcoholism, we'd ultimately save some money."

Nolan thinks there's been a shift in societal conception. "People lose their sense of relativity. We panic when we see the number of homicides reach 60, but forget that in the '80s, it hit triple digits," he says. "We have a harsh and punitive attitude toward those who violate laws. I think we should be targeting addiction and everything that goes along with it. Prisons serve no purpose other than warehousing people and taking them off the streets for a period of time."

Approximately 97 percent of prisoners face eventual release. A 2006 report from Brandeis University estimates at least 39,700 people in the state are in critical need of drug treatment, but aren't receiving it. The Pew Center recently found that in the last 20 years, Massachusetts' spending on corrections grew 127 percent, compared to a 21 percent increase for public higher education. For every dollar spent on a state college, 98 cents is spent on prisons.

The governor's extensive bond bill plan for infrastructure repairs includes $2.5 billion for prison repairs and expansions. It's in committee right now, but results are due in June. Rep. Carl Sciortino Jr., D-Medford, backed a bill placing a moratorium on prison construction for the next five years, and creating a committee to investigate incarceration trends. The bill's essentially dead for the session.

Wilson says that her final report on Massachusetts' school-to-prison pipeline will offer alternatives to punitive measures. "We're looking into restorative justice and peer mediation programs," she says. "Say a student commits some type of offense. Instead of shipping them off, they'd have to own up to what they did. An apology is made, and students work together to find ways to rectify the situation. It's more of a healing process, it's inclusive and the offense itself is addressed."

Such approaches to criminal justice exist in many court systems worldwide, and are being explored in some US states. Colorado, Kansas, Arizona, Delaware, Florida and Tennessee have passed legislation allowing for out-of-court reparation programs, particularly for juvenile offenders. No such legislation exists in Massachusetts.

For now, Wilson is focusing on the statistical landscape of the problem. "But as we look at data, it's important we make the connection that these are actual people with real potential," she says.

***

Phillip is still using. Over the course of the interview at the Cambridge Needle Exchange, he verged from tangential diatribes, to holding his eyelids open with his fingers, to scratching his arms, looking around the corner.

He says he'd like to get clean and councel other junkies. But it's not so easy.

"It's a mess of a life," he says. "You're defeated without hope. But I have hope."

http://www.weeklydig.com/news-opinions/feature/200805/packed-prisons#

Posted by lois at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: Death by Detention in CCA Prison

May 6, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Death by Detention

A chilling article by Nina Bernstein in The Times on Monday recounted the secrecy, neglect and lack of oversight that are a few of the shameful symptoms of the booming sector of the nation’s prison industry — the detention of undocumented foreigners.

Ms. Bernstein chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea who was imprisoned in New Jersey for overstaying a tourist visa. He fell and fractured his skull in the Elizabeth Detention Center early last year. Though clearly gravely injured, Mr. Bah was shackled and taken to a disciplinary cell. He was left alone — unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth — for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.

Nobody told Mr. Bah’s relatives until five days after his fall. When they finally found him, he was on life support, soon to become one of the 66 immigrants known to have died in federal custody between 2004 and 2007. Mr. Bah’s family still does not know the full story of when or how he suffered his fatal injuries.

It is shameful, though hardly a surprise, that they remain in the dark. There is no public system for tracking deaths in immigration custody, no requirement for independent investigations. Relatives and lawyers who want to unearth details of such tragedies have found the bureaucracy unresponsive and hostile. In the case of Mr. Bah, records were marked “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs the Elizabeth Detention Center and many others under contract with the federal government.

Secrecy and shockingly inadequate medical care are hardly the only problems with immigration detention. Immigrants taken into federal custody enter a world where many of the rights taken for granted by people charged with real crimes do not exist. Detainees have no right to legal representation. Many are unable to defend or explain themselves, or even to understand the charges against them, because they don’t speak English and lack access to lawyers or telephones.

What standards do exist for the treatment of immigrants in federal custody are only recommendations. A detainee, family member or lawyer who finds a violation has no way to force the government to correct it.

As authorities at the federal and local level continue rounding up illegal immigrants in these harsh days of ever-stricter enforcement, the potential for abuse will continue to grow — largely out of sight. Although immigration law is every bit as complex as tax law — and the consequences for violators more dire — the detention system seems designed to sacrifice thoughtful deliberation and justice to expediency and swift deportation.

Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights. This mistreatment of a vulnerable population, which advocates for immigrants trace to the roundups of Muslims after 9/11 and the subsequent clamor for tougher immigration laws, is hostile to American values and disproportionate to the threat that these immigrants pose.

Congress has failed repeatedly to enact meaningful immigration reform, and the prospects in the next year or so are slim. It can act on this. The government urgently needs to bring the detention system up to basic standards of decency and fairness. That means lifting the veil on detention centers — particularly the private jails and the state prisons and county jails that take detainees under federal contracts — and holding them to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons. It also means designing a system that is not a vast holding pen for ordinary people who pose no threat to public safety, like the 52-year-old tailor, Boubacar Bah.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/opinion/06tue1.html?sq=Death%20by%20Detention%26st=nyt%26scp=1%26pagewanted=print

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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

May 06, 2008

Reports by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch detail persistently high arrest and convictions for African Americans in drug-related cases

May 6, 2008
Reports Find Racial Gap in Drug Arrests
By ERIK ECKHOLM
NY Times
(Report URLs at the bottom of this email.)

More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.

Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.

But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the war on drugs, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks.

In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980.

More than four in five of the arrests were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Four in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the latest F.B.I. data.

Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: they are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, according to the Human Rights Watch report.

Others are arrested for possession of small quantities of drugs and later released, but with a permanent blot on their records anyway.

“The way the war on drugs has been pursued is one of the biggest reasons for the growing racial disparities in criminal justice over all,” said Ryan S. King, a policy analyst with the Sentencing Project who wrote its report, which focuses on the differential in arrest rates, not only between races but also among cities around the country. Some cities pursue urban, minority drug use far more intensively than do others.

Both Democratic presidential candidates, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, have strongly condemned the racial disparities in arrests and incarceration during their campaigns, although neither has said how they would end them.

Two-thirds of those arrested for drug violations in 2006 were white and 33 percent were black, although blacks made up 12.8 percent of the population, F.B.I. data show. National data are not collected on ethnicity, and arrests of Hispanics may be in either category.

“The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was conceived,” said Jamie Fellner, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch and the author of its report.

“If the drug issue is still seen as primarily a problem of the black inner city, then we’ll continue to see this enormously disparate impact,” Ms. Fellner said.

Her report cites federal data from 2003, the most recent available on this aspect, indicating that blacks constituted 53.5 percent of all who entered prison for a drug conviction.

Some crime experts say that the disparities exist for sound reasons. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York, said it made sense for police to focus more on fighting visible drug dealing in low-income urban areas, largely involving members of minorities, than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other crimes and impairs the quality of life.

“The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade,” Ms. Mac Donald said.

But what people in low-income urban areas need is not more incarceration but improved public safety, Mr. King said. “Arresting hundreds of thousands of young African-American men hasn’t ended street-corner drug sales.”

A shift of resources toward drug treatment and social services rather than wholesale incarceration, he said, would do more to improve conditions in blighted neighborhoods.

Limited efforts have been made to shift policies in ways that may reduce racial differences. Many states are experimenting with so-called drug courts, which send users to treatment rather than prison. This does not, however, affect arrest rates, which have lifelong consequences even for those who are never convicted or imprisoned.

Police in a few cities including Denver, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have said they are spending fewer resources on arrests for lower-lever offenses like marijuana possession.

In December, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the federal sentencing guidelines for convictions involving crack cocaine, which is more often used by blacks, somewhat reducing the length of sentences compared with those for convictions involving powder cocaine. But mandatory and longer sentences for crack violations remain embedded in federal and state laws.

The Sentencing Project Report: http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin/Documents/publications/dp_drugarrestreport.pdf
The Human Rights Watch Report: http://hrw.org/reports/2008/us0508/

Posted by lois at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

California parolees get a chance in community programs

California parolees get a chance in community programs
By Andy Furillo - afurillo@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, May 4, 2008

California corrections officials are again diverting thousands of parole violators into community programs instead of sending them to prison, hoping this time the experiment doesn't fail.

Since August, the prison population has steadily declined as the state pours millions of dollars into community programs like drug treatment and electronic home detention.

Four years ago, a similar effort collapsed. The Bureau of State Audits found in 2005 that the state failed to analyze or monitor the programs for effectiveness. Most of the diverted parolees either didn't complete the programs or wound up back in prison anyway – including 242 who committed new crimes when they otherwise could have been back in prison.

This time, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, supported by top criminal justice researchers from around the country, is evaluating the programs as they roll out. The agency is also assessing the participating offenders for risk, trying to avoid violent public-relations disasters.

Legislative analysts say the prison population reductions could save the state $110 million through the next budget year, but officials say it is too soon to tell whether the trend can continue without compromising public safety.

"I don't know the answer," said UC Irvine criminology professor Joan Petersilia, chair of the committee that is advising Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the state's rehabilitation measures. "It depends on how many very low-risk people we have, and we really don't know that yet. It also depends on whether the communities will step up to the plate and sponsor these programs. I think it's an unknown."

The corrections agency already has suffered one spectacular setback.

Last year, it released a parolee named David Kenneth Hamilton despite an assessment that Hamilton had "a high propensity for violence," corrections spokesman Oscar Hidalgo said.

Although he violated parole by not attending classes for spousal batterers, officials did not put Hamilton back in prison or into a community program. On April 20, Hamilton, along with another suspect, robbed and killed a man in Foothill Farms, then torched the victim's house, according to Sacramento sheriff's investigators. Hamilton was later shot and killed while running from deputies.

Hidalgo defended his agency's performance in the Hamilton case, saying that his "missing a meeting did not require an automatic revocation" of his parole. Hidalgo said the corrections department still is "absolutely" committed to following through with the new parole direction.

"We think it is important to find alternatives to incarceration for inmates to give them the best chance to succeed," Hidalgo said.

Parole violators fill prisons

California churns tens of thousands of parolees through the prison system every year for violating the technical terms of their releases, such as missing meetings with their agents, hanging out with other criminals, not attending classes, testing positive for drugs, or failing to comply with any specially set conditions.

Last year, there were 73,657 parole returns to prison, with the average stay amounting to about four months. The result has been massive pressure on the prison system, driving the population last August to an all-time high of 173,614, including 20,030 who at that time were serving short-term parole violations or were awaiting a revocation decision.

In the next seven months, the population dropped by more than 3,600 inmates to 169,949. Short-term parolees in the prison system dropped by 1,500 during that period. Fewer new convictions, mostly for drug and property crimes, accounted for the other half, according to corrections statistics.

A federal class-action lawsuit helped the state reach the lower inmate numbers.

The so-called Valdivia case, settled in U.S. District Court in Sacramento in 2003, forced the state to conduct timely revocation hearings. It also required corrections officials to establish a "remedial sanctions" programs for less-serious parole violators.

Corrections officials shut down the sanctions program once its problems became apparent. After a court challenge, last year the state agreed to make available 1,800 new community drug treatment beds and place 500 more offenders on electronic home detention.

A special master monitoring the case found in November that the state had substantially complied with the order. Plaintiffs lawyer Michael Bien agreed, saying "I think for the first time, there has been a focused, sincere effort to actually come into compliance."

But the state is only accommodating "a tiny percentage" of its short-term parole violators, and it needs to do a lot more, Bien said.

Parole officials said they are trying.

On its own, the state in the past year opened seven new "day reporting" and community centers for parolees, including one in Sacramento. Parole agents also have placed hundreds of homeless parolees into residential facilities, sometimes instead of prison, in instances where they make mistakes.

As of last month, 5,078 California parolees were enrolled in remedial or intermediate sanctions programs, compared with 1,899 a year ago – a 167 percent increase, according to figures compiled by The Bee.

"We're confident this is a shift in our paradigm," said Robert Ambroselli, deputy director in charge of the corrections agency's parole division.

Parolees accept restrictions

Theresa Joseph, 52, a parolee with a history of credit fraud whose most recent conviction was for attempted robbery, these days wears a wristwatch-sized electronic monitor around her ankle. Her parole agent gave it to her last month when she violated her parole by taking a friend's car without permission.

Joseph needs to be in her mother's south Sacramento home by 8 o'clock every night, at risk of a violation. She said the restriction sure beats prison.

"It's making me think," Joseph said. "Don't do anything wrong – don't do anything wrong. Think before you act. Because the possibility is I could be back in prison. So yes, it's making me more aware of what I'm doing."

In some cases, parolees are volunteering for programs, even if it means they're confined for longer periods of time. Tim Longacre, 45, chose to participate in the three-month Parolee Substance Abuse Program in a locked facility in Folsom and then do three more months in residential aftercare, even though he only faced five months of prison time on his parole violation.

"In (prison), you're up on a bunk," Longacre said. "If you get a book to read, you're lucky. Here you can actually talk to somebody and get some feedback."

Tony DeWeese, 27, who has been to prison 13 times during the past eight years, including multiple returns on parole violations, graduated from the Folsom program last week and is scheduled to be released Thursday.

"This is a chance for rehabilitation," DeWeese said. "It makes you look at yourself and think, maybe I do have a problem. Maybe it was all me."

The programs don't come cheap. This year, California is spending $217 million on them, including post-prison drug treatment for parolees who complete in-prison programs, according to the governor's budget. The administration is asking to increase the spending next year to $247 million.

State Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden, whose budget subcommittee monitors prison spending, said the investment carries the potential for huge savings down the road.

"I think we possibly are looking at fundamental changes," Machado said.

Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, R-Orange, urged caution. He said he first wants to see some data.

"They've implemented a lot of these changes without showing us how they're going to improve public safety," Spitzer said. "What are the results? Are these guys completing these programs? Are they getting new violations?"

Many states pursue change

Parole and corrections agencies across the country are asking the same kinds of questions. About 20 to 25 states are on the same parole change path as California, according to Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, which works with state and local law enforcement agencies on cost-conscious crime fighting strategies.

"There's a lot of ferment now," Jacobson said. "And California is right there."

Jacobson listed Kansas as a state that is a little further along than most, and its corrections chief thinks he is coming up with some answers.

In February, Kansas corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz reported to his state's Legislature that two years into its parole overhaul, Kansas has cut its rate of parolees committing new crimes in half.

"What we're doing here isn't magic," Werholtz said. "But you've got to take the emotion and the politics out of it, and we've been very lucky in Kansas that we've been able to do that."

Werholtz said that to make the package work, corrections officials need to stick with it even if a parolee does something horrible.

"Those kinds of things will happen," he said. "But if I can lower the aggregate numbers, I think we can prove we can make this state safer."
http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/911060.html

Posted by lois at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)

WI: Guards use sick days to inflate salary. Some call in close to overtime shifts, reach 6-figure pay.

JOURNAL SENTINEL WATCHDOG REPORTS
Guards use sick days to inflate salary
Some call in close to overtime shifts, reach 6-figure pay
By PATRICK MARLEY

Posted: May 3, 2008

Madison - October 2006 was a busy month for one Green Bay Correctional Institution sergeant.

On every day he was scheduled to be off that month, he came in for an overtime shift. On two of those days, he worked double shifts.

But within days of each of those extra shifts, the sergeant called in sick. In all, he claimed four sick days that month. That meant he got hefty paychecks because of overtime, but still had time off.

That month wasn't unusual for the sergeant, who often volunteered for extra shifts. On 17 occasions in 2006 he called in sick shortly after working on days that he otherwise would have had off. He used almost four weeks of sick leave that year and cleared $117,764 with overtime, making him the state's fourth-highest-paid officer in 2006.

By the end of last year, the sergeant had used every hour of sick leave he'd accrued over 31 years.

Other high-paid correctional officers used their sick leave in questionable ways in 2006, a Journal Sentinel investigation found. None of those officers faced discipline for their use of sick leave in 2006.

The moves come as the state is wrestling with budget shortfalls and at the same time paying correctional officers tens of millions of dollars a year in overtime. Although state rules make it difficult to identify improper sick leave, the newspaper's investigation raises the prospect that some officers who routinely pick up overtime shifts could be using sick leave inappropriately.

Officers say there isn't widespread abuse of the system and note they work stressful jobs in institutions that are understaffed. They blame state officials for adopting laws that put more inmates behind bars without providing the funding necessary to hire enough officers.

The Journal Sentinel reviewed the weekly time sheets of the state's 20 highest-paid correctional officers for 2006 and other state records. The review found:

• Eight of the officers called in sick for a shift and then picked up the immediate next shift at least once. They received eight hours of regular pay for the shift they were sick, and time and a half for the eight or more hours of overtime work.

• One Redgranite Correctional Institution officer used nearly 23 days of sick leave. She was paid $97,280 that year, including $51,042 in overtime.

• Officers on average use about 100 hours - or 12.5 days - of sick leave a year. That's more than 50% above the average for all state employees of 66 hours of sick leave.

• Officers can use three weeks of sick leave a year before their bosses put them on a watch list for potential abuse. Officers can come off the watch list without any discipline if they use less than 40 hours of sick leave in four months.

The state declined to release any of the officers' names because of its labor agreement with the officers union.

"This is just blatantly an abuse that has to be addressed," said Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), a member of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee. "We cannot have people just going their own way to fatten their own pocketbooks at the taxpayer's expense. It's just totally unacceptable."
Officers defended

Daniel Meehan, an officer at Waupun Correctional Institution and president of the Wisconsin State Employees Union Local 18, said abuse of sick leave is not rampant.

"I'm not calling in sick all the time, and there's a lot of people that don't," Meehan said. "There's 10,000 employees at the Department of Corrections. You're going to have every extreme that there is when you've got that many employees. That's not the norm."

He noted that officers can be forced to work long hours when they first start, often getting called in for overtime with no warning. Officers make a base salary of $30,735 when they start.

He said lawmakers who pushed for the state's truth-in-sentencing law are "the same ones now that are pounding their chests about, 'We're not going to pay for it. We're going to pack all these inmates into these joints and make them powder kegs,' " Meehan said.

Deputy Corrections Secretary Amy Smith said sick leave use may be higher at the Department of Corrections than other agencies because prisons must be run around the clock and officers work stressful jobs.

She said the department has "a good mechanism" for monitoring sick leave, but acknowledged that not all abuse can be identified.

Four of the 20 top-paid officers used no sick leave in 2006, including the highest paid officer that year, a Fox Lake Correctional Institution officer who earned $120,908. The four officers had as much as 2,100 hours in their banks of accrued sick time, a sign they had rarely used sick leave in the past.

However, Five others in the top 20 had fewer than 45 hours of sick leave in the bank at the end of last year.

Officers earn three to four weeks of sick leave a year, and can carry over their sick leave from one year to the next. Unused sick leave can be tapped to pay for health care in retirement.

By any measure, the officers put in long hours, even during weeks they used sick leave.

One Oakhill Correctional Institution sergeant was paid for 224 hours over two weeks in June 2006, drawing pay for 16 hours a day every day. He used vacation for 10 of those hours, but actually worked the other 214.

Five times in 2006, he came in one shift early and then called in sick for his regular shift. That meant he worked eight hours but was paid for 16 hours - eight of them at time and a half.

He made $116,856 and used 18 days of sick time that year.

As of December 2007, the sergeant had used all but 14 hours of the sick leave he had accrued over 19 years.

Officers who work a lot of overtime near the end of their careers can boost their pensions, which are based on their three highest years of pay.

When officers call in sick, it often creates overtime shifts for others, because the shifts usually have to be filled for security reasons.
Scrutiny limited

The Department of Corrections' policy on sick leave was established in late 1991, when the agency and the union jointly issued an administrative directive that explained when sick leave would be monitored.

The directive says officials can investigate the use of sick leave if, during a four-month period, officers use more than 40 hours of sick leave; call in sick on the same day of the week four times or more; or allow their bank of sick leave to drop to eight hours or less.

Officers who hit those thresholds can be placed on a watch list. If over the next four months they again meet any of the thresholds, they can be ordered to supply a doctor's note for all sick leave for the next four months. If they don't provide doctor's notes, they can be disciplined.

Monitoring of their sick leave use ends as soon as they have a four-month period when they don't meet any of the thresholds.

In the past, officers have been fired for abusing sick leave, agency spokesman John Dipko said.

Asked if the policy was too lenient, Meehan, the union official, said: "That's open for question . . . (but) I don't think you put everybody under the microscope because of a handful of people."

The Department of Corrections is an expensive enterprise, costing taxpayers about $1 billion a year. Overtime accounts for just a sliver of that expense.

The Journal Sentinel reported in December that overtime costs at the Department of Corrections exploded in 2006, rising 27% from mid-2005 to mid-2006. For that period, overtime cost $36.3 million, most of it paid by state taxpayers.

With overtime, 26 officers more than doubled their wages in 2006. Fourteen of them earned six-figure salaries.

Administrators say overtime costs rose that year because of an unexpected rise in the prison population and a new labor contract that gave officers more days off.

Lawmakers agreed to hire 50 new officers in October to cut overtime costs. The move is expected to drop overtime costs to $26.3 million this fiscal year, down from $38.2 million last fiscal year.

Original Story URL:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=746746

Posted by lois at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Taxpayers File Landmark Lawsuit to Prevent $12 Billion in Prison Construction Debt

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Taxpayers File Landmark Lawsuit to
Prevent $12 Billion in Prison Construction Debt

Coalition also releases expert report by economist Adam Werner exposing true cost of AB900

Dressed in Arnold Schwarzenegger masks, taxpayers hand out $12 billion in debt invoices to passersby in front of the Capitol

SACRAMENTO - Concerned parents, students, teachers, experts and taxpayers will announce the filing of their lawsuit today to stop at least $12 billion dollars of prison debt authorized by AB 900 at a Noon press conference in front of the State Capitol, at 11th and L. Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a coalition of community organizations from around the state, will also release an expert report exposing the true cost of AB 900.

The report by esteemed economist Dr. Adam Werner, a principal in the Securities Practice at CRA International, details the waste and financial inefficiency of AB 900. According to Werner, "The use of lease-revenue bonds to finance these facilities is irrational from a purely economic perspective given the cost differential between using lease revenue and general obligation bonds."

Werner calculates the unnecessary costs to total an additional $2 billion in interest payments and the total cost to taxpayers of borrowing $7.4 billion is at least $12 billion and opines that an entity that chooses lease-revenue financing must be motivated primarily by concerns other than economic efficiency. Dr. Werner writes, "One possibility is that lease revenue bonds are used to finance prisons because state officials believe that voters would reject the use of general obligation bonds for the projects in question."

The landmark lawsuit filed today against a number of state officials, including the Governor, the State Treasurer and the Chairman of the Department of Finance, argues that AB 900 constitutes an illegal bypass of voters' constitutional right to vote on debt (California Constitution Article XVI, section 1) and an illegal waste of scarce government resources (Code of Civil Procedure section 526a).

"In the midst of a wrenching budget crisis, California is borrowing billions of dollars to build 53,000 new prison and jail beds," commented Lead Counsel in the CURB lawsuit, Thomas Nolan. "How can we be kicking thousands of kids off of Medical and cutting the public school budget by billions, yet sink $12 billion into building tens of thousands of new prisons beds?"

Dubbed by the New York Times as the largest prison construction plan in U.S. history, AB 900 was passed last year with no public hearing, no public debate, and with public opinion squarely against new prison construction. Dorsey Nunn, a plaintiff in the suit and a member of All of Us or None, explains that "AB 900 is in direct violation of the California Constitution, which demands that only the will of the voters can put the General Fund into this kind of debt."

"It speaks so sadly of our future that my teachers are receiving lay off warning notices at the same time 53,000 new prison beds are being funded," said Ericka Sokolower-Shain, one of the plaintiffs who is a public school student. Additional plaintiffs are Camilla Chavez of Bakersfield's Dolores Huerta Foundation, Bonnie Long, who has a family member in prison, and Cynthia Chandler, parent of public school students.

"California has opened 23 new prisons in the past 23 years, and our system is more crowded than ever," explains CURB member Craig Gilmore. "By building more prisons, we're making the overcrowding problem even worse. The real solutions to overcrowding are early release, parole reform, sentencing reform and full implementation of Proposition 36." Chair of the Senate Public Safety Committee, Senator Gloria Romero, has repeatedly stated that "we cannot build ourselves out of the prison crisis."

In a March letter to the State Public Works Board, Chair of the Democratic Caucus Carole Migden, who will appear at the press conference, wrote, "Due to the State's current financial crisis, I do not think it is fiscally prudent to authorize the sale of lease revenue bonds which will increase the state's current structural deficit." The ongoing costs of AB900 will likely devastate the state budget for years to come.

The complaint, expert report, summaries and additional background materials will be available at http://www.curbprisonspending.org for download after the press conference May 6, 2008 noon.

--30--

Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) is a broad based statewide coalition of community organizations across the state committed to curbing prison spending by reducing the number of people in prison and closing prisons.

Posted by lois at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2008

NJ: Close Hospitals? Why not Close Prisons Instead!

Close Hospitals? Why not Close Prisons Instead!
Posted by David H. Kerr May 04, 2008 3:05PM
NJ.Com

This budget alternative should be considered by our Governor and legislature since it not only will save millions but will increase the safety of our citizens. It is the real "tough on crime" alternative while allowing hospitals to continue caring for the sick and needy.

Judge Dennis Challeen of the National Judicial College, a judge in Minnesota who retired in 1985, once declared that there were two kinds of offenders, those we are afraid of, who should be locked up, and those we are mad at, who hurt themselves with substance abuse. For the latter, he found the following inconsistency in dealing with them with imprisonment:

"We want them to have self-worth, so we destroy their self-worth. We want them to be responsible, so we take away all responsibility. We want them to be positive and constructive, so we degrade them and make them useless. We want them to be trust worthy, so we put them where there is no trust. We want them to be non-violent, so we put them where violence is all around them. We want them to be kind and loving people, so we subject them to hatred and cruelty. We want them to quit being the tough guy, so we put them where the tough guy is respected. We want them to quit hanging around losers, so we put all the losers in the state under one roof. We want them to quit exploiting us, so we put them where they exploit each other. We want them to take control of their lives and quit being a parasite on society, so we make them totally dependent on us. Do not allow anyone to take your freedom away ever again! You deserve better."

In less than a year nearly 1,000 addicts who can't find a bed in a drug treatment program, have been picked up at several churches in Newark each week and thanks to the help of Bergen Regional Hospital they were able to be safely detoxified from drugs. Left on the street with their high priced habits, these individuals would have either ended up in the high cost Charity Care funded Hospital Emergency Rooms, or in high cost jail cells. After serving their time, and/or after being seen in the hospital emergency room with no treatment, nearly all return to the streets to resume drug use and crime to support their habits and it happens over and over again. Thanks to churches and street workers, addicts have some help to begin their long recovery process. However, Integrity House still has over 400 addicts on their waiting list, with no sign of diminishing need in spite of the long wait. Treatment beds are scarce in New Jersey and many addicts are referred to New York for immediate treatment.

The detoxification and quick response on demand to hundreds of addicts is an excellent start but many don't even get that far. Prison is their only alternative. Research shows that for an effective and lasting recovery, addicts need to be engaged in treatment, not incarceration. The present system of highly expensive Emergency Room care is inappropriate as well and cannot provide cost effective help for many addicts. It may also be one of the causes of the depletion of Charity Care dollars. One Integrity House resident had 15 visits to hospital emergency rooms before getting a drug treatment opportunity.

The State of New Jersey is facing a huge budget challenge. Our Governor is proposing that closing some hospitals and reducing the funding of others needs to be an essential part of his budget cutting plan. Two hospitals in Newark are slated for closing. How much money could we save if we closed a prison? That alternative is not even on the table. Yet if we closed only one 95 bed prison tier we would save $3.4 million. Three tiers closed would reduce the prison by 300 inmates while saving $10 million.

With the passage of S233 there will be many more addicts receiving the more effective no incarceration drug court/treatment alternative than prison. Even if we only spent a third of the $10 million prison savings for drug treatment it would offer real help to 300 addicts vs expensive confinement of 95 inmates. But wouldn't closing three prison tiers pose a public safety risk to our communities? Actually, no. Over the last 10 years we have built more jails and prisons to accommodate the overcrowding often caused by mandatory sentencing. It is true that arrest and incarceration has the immediate effect of cutting crime rates. However, our prisons and jails are now full with even an increase in women being sent away. We can't afford to build more prisons and now they're all coming out - bigger and better criminals. 1,500 are coming back to Newark alone this year and 70,000 statewide over the next five years. Little by little, year after year, we are seeing more and more inmates return to our communities. Data is now showing that this system causes addicts to be rearrested 67% of the time after three years on the streets. The same data shows that over 50% of those arrested are returned to prison. Our reentry programs are frustrated in getting people jobs only to see them rearrested or returned after 3 years with no drug treatment. We are spending tens of millions of dollars for this system. It is clear according to data that this "tough on crime" policy is having a dramatic negative impact on public safety. A lose, lose situation so why do we keep doing it?

How can we afford to keep spending tens of millions of dollars on our present system of arrest and incarceration of non violent drug offenders for example? We continue to choose a system that actually decreases public safety while another non-custodial criminal justice system, Drug Courts/treatment, costs less and enhances public safety. Even with this knowledge, our Governor's present budget is proposing to cut hospital revenues and to actually close many hospitals that are presently giving care to innocent people whose only error was getting sick or becoming injured - not even a misdemeanor! Close hospitals without a word about closing prisons!

The fact is that our Drug Court/treatment system is 70% effective in reducing crime and further recidivism while keeping addicts in treatment and in remission. Millions of dollars can be saved and better yet, there is more accountability for each and every addict on the streets in the Drug Court system. The impact on public safety is very positive in a system costing millions of dollars less.

So the question is, why are we not even talking about closing prisons?
http://blog.nj.com/njv_david_kerr/2008/05/close_hospitals_why_not_close.html

Posted by lois at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

Fiscal Pressures Lead Some States to Free Inmates Early

Fiscal Pressures Lead Some States to Free Inmates Early

By Keith B. Richburg and Ashley Surdin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 5, 2008; A01

NEW YORK -- Reversing decades of tough-on-crime policies, including mandatory minimum prison sentences for some drug offenders, many cash-strapped states are embracing a view once dismissed as dangerously naive: It costs far less to let some felons go free than to keep them locked up.

It is a theory that has long been pushed by criminal justice advocates and liberal politicians -- that some felons, particularly those convicted of minor drug offenses, would be better served by treatment, parole or early release for good behavior. But the states' conversion to that view has less to do with a change of heart on crime than with stark fiscal realities. At a time of shrinking resources, prisons are eating up an increasing share of many state budgets.

"It's the fiscal stuff that's driving it," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that advocates for more lenient sentencing. "Do you want to build prisons or do you want to build colleges? If you're a governor, it's kind of come to that choice right now."

Mauer and other observers point to a number of recent actions, some from states facing huge budget shortfalls, some not, but still worried about exploding costs.

· To ease the overcrowding and save California about $1.1 billion over two years, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has proposed freeing about 22,000 prisoners convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual offenses 20 months earlier than their scheduled release dates. He also wants to place them on unsupervised parole, saving the state the cost of having all parolees assigned to an agent.

· Lawmakers in Providence, R.I., approved an expansion last week of the state's "good time" early-release rules to cover more inmates serving shorter sentences. The new rules, which will put more inmates under post-prison supervision, are expected to save Rhode Island an estimated $8 billion over five years.

· In Kentucky, where 22,000 state inmates are housed in county prisons and private facilities, lawmakers agreed to allow certain nonviolent, nonsexual offenders to serve up to 180 days of their sentences at home, and to make it easier for prisoners to earn credit for good behavior. The move could save the state, which is facing a $900 million deficit over the next two years, as much as $30 million.

· In Mississippi, where the prison population has doubled during the past dozen years to 22,600, Gov. Haley Barbour (R) has signed into law two measures that will reduce it: One to let certain nonviolent offenders go free after serving 25 percent of their sentences, and the other to release some terminally ill inmates.

· South Carolina, meanwhile, is looking to abolish parole, in part to slow the growth of its prison population since there would be fewer people returned to prison for parole violations.

Proposals to free prisoners are still met with opposition, particularly from law enforcement officials who fear that a flood of released felons could return to their communities, and from victims groups that worry that justice is being sacrificed for budgetary concerns.

The California plan has drawn criticism from the Legislative Analyst's Office, the state's nonpartisan fiscal adviser, which warned that 63,000 mid-level offenders would "effectively go unpunished, serving little or no prison time" and would not have active supervision.

The proposal also worries local governments and police in California, particularly in Los Angeles County -- home to the nation's largest prison system, which supplies about a third of the state's prison population. "It's kind of like the volcano has erupted," County Sheriff Lee Baca said. "To let out 63,000 prisoners on summary parole -- which means no parole -- is not good policy."

Bob Pack, 52, of Danville, Calif., is particularly disturbed by the prospect of softer punishment forthose convicted of drunken driving. In 2003, Pack's two children -- Troy, 10, and Alana, 7 -- were struck and killed when a drunk driver's car jumped a curb and ran onto a neighborhood sidewalk. The driver had three prior drunken-driving convictions.

Said Pack: "I guarantee you that if this program is fulfilled, somewhere down the road -- it could be three months or a year -- there's going to be a family in court over the death of a loved one, because of someone who got out early."

But for now, state officials are finding themselves under mounting pressure to cut costs and are looking at their rising prison population.

Between 1987 and last year, states increased their higher education spending by 21 percent, in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the Pew Center on the States. During the same period, spending on corrections jumped by 127 percent.

In the Northeastern states, according to the Pew report, prison spending over the past 20 years has risen 61 percent, while higher education spending has declined by 5.5 percent.

California -- which has the country's worst fiscal crisis, with a potential shortfall of $20 billion -- has seen its prison-related spending swell to $10.4 billion for the 2008-2009 fiscal year. About 170,000 inmates are packed into California's 33 prisons, which were designed to hold 100,000. About 15,000 prisoners are being housed in emergency beds, in converted classrooms and gymnasiums.

Rhode Island's prison population peaked and its 4,000-inmate prison capacity was exceeded in recent years, prompting a lawsuit and a court settlement. "The soaring inmate census has created a crisis here," said Ashbel T. Wall, the state's corrections director. "We've been busting the budget continuously. . . . Our prisons have been packed."

New Jersey is one state making changes out of a desire for more efficiency. Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D) is proposing legislation to expand drug courts to channel more nonviolent, first-time drug offenders into treatment instead of prisons, and also to expand supervised parole. Another proposal would change the parole policy so parolees were not automatically returned to prison for minor drug offenses, said Lilo Stainton, the governor's spokeswoman.

She said that in New Jersey's case, the changes are not budget-driven. "We think this is a more humane and sensible way to treat people," she said.

Michigan is grappling with a massive prison population, mainly because "truth in sentencing" rules make the state less generous about granting paroles. Michigan's incarceration rate is 47 percent higher than that of the other Great Lakes states, according to experts.

Michigan has become one of the few states that actually spend more on prisons than on higher education -- about $2 billion for prisons, and $1.9 billion in state aid to its 15 public universities and 28 community colleges. "It's insane," said Barbara Levine of the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending in Lansing. "The governor is always talking about how we need to be high tech. But these days, the best career opportunity is to get a job as a prison guard."

In fact, according to Thomas Clay, a prisons and budget expert with Michigan's nonprofit Citizens Research Council, the state government employed 70,000 people in 1980, including 5,000 working for the prisons system. Today, the number of state workers has dropped to 54,000, but 17,000 work for the prisons.

"You've got two decades of failed policies," said Laura Sager a consultant in Michigan for Families Against Mandatory Minimums. She said mandatory sentencing laws and tough penalties for drug offenses in the 1980s "bloated prisons and prison populations, and the taxpayer is paying a very high price."

Now with states struggling with budget deficits, she said, "you have pressures that make it palatable to take a second look."

Surdin reported from Los Angeles.

Posted by lois at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)

CCA Immigrant Detention: Immigration agency, contractors are accused of mistreating detainees

U-T SPECIAL REPORT
graphs and other links at this URL:

Immigrant detention
budget soars
The number of people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has jumped 36 percent since 2005, when the agency held a daily average of 19,718 detainees, who include illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and legal U.S. residents facing deportation. By the end of 2007, that number had grown to 30,881.

At the end of last year, 13 percent of ICE detainees were held in agency facilities. Seventeen percent were in private facilities that contract directly with ICE; 21 percent were in facilities contracted from local governments, usually with the county acting as middleman for a private company. An additional 46 percent were in county jails, where ICE rents beds, and a handful in other facilities, including rented federal prison space.

Many of these jails and prisons, while under government jurisdiction, also are privately operated.

In the past three years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has more than tripled what it spends on detention. Its annual appropriation for custody has grown to $1.6 billion this year from $504 million in 2005.

The White House has requested funding for 1,000 more beds by Sept. 30.

The immigration agency has no plans to build any more of its own detention centers, of which there are eight in the nation, including one in El Centro. Officials say it's easier to contract the beds.

“It just provides us with a quicker way to provide detention space,” said Gary Mead, acting director of ICE detention and removal operations in Washington, D.C.

The savings are substantial: According to ICE, it cost $87.99 per day on average in fiscal year 2007 to hold someone at a contract detention facility, while it cost roughly $119.28 a day to house a person at an ICE-run facility.

Detention increased after 1996, when legislative changes made it easier to deport immigrants residing here legally who had been convicted and served a prison sentence, and made detention mandatory as they awaited deportation.

Then the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred, and the federal government intensified its focus on border security.

In 2003, there came a new emphasis on tracking down people who had missed an immigration hearing or ignored a deportation order. In fiscal year 2007, ICE fugitive teams made more than 30,000 arrests.

Detentions expanded again after late 2005, when the Bush administration called for an end to the practice of “catch and release” for non-Mexican illegal immigrants who were being released with a notice to appear in court. Most Mexican nationals are quickly repatriated at the border.

Plastic 'boats'
Until early last year, the 10-year-old San Diego Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa, built and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, held up to 1,000 detainees.

In June 2006, the company lost 200 beds when the lease on part of the county-owned property expired. Yet according to CCA's 2006 financial report, the population of detainees wasn't reduced “as we had the ability to consolidate inmates.”

The following January, in its lawsuit, the ACLU cited the per-person fees paid by ICE to the contractor as an incentive for putting three people in a two-man cell. The third slept on the floor in a plastic cot referred to as a “boat.”

Lead plaintiff Isaac Kigondu Kiniti, a Kenyan detainee in ICE custody since 2004, said his head was so close to the toilet when he slept on the floor that he was showered with urine when cellmates used it. Kiniti criticized the contractor.

“Because they are a for-profit company, they will give you only the bare minimum of things to increase their profits,” said Kiniti, a former student-visa holder, appealing a deportation order stemming from a drug conviction.

ICE has since set the facility's maximum capacity at 700.

CCA, which like its competitors touts its cost-effectiveness, says there is no skimping at detainees' expense.

“We do not cut corners,” said Louise Grant, a spokeswoman. “Safety and security is our highest priority. We are extremely committed to offering strong programming for offenders in our care, as well as the highest medical care.”

Grant said costs are reduced by using efficient construction methods. While wages vary depending on the contract, she said, staff salaries frequently reflect the local cost of living. Many private prisons, like public ones, are in low-cost rural areas.

Grant said almost 90 percent of the company's facilities abide by the voluntary standards of the American Correctional Association, which includes public and private prisons.

However, according to the overcrowding lawsuit, the association's standards for “adult local detention facilities” call for cells housing more than one person to provide 25 square feet of unencumbered space per occupant. At Otay Mesa, when there were three detainees per cell with the cot on the floor, it amounted to no more than 15 square feet for all three, the complaint reads.

Oversight concerns
Critics of prison privatization cite oversight as perhaps one of the biggest concerns when private companies perform public incarceration duties.

According to ICE, 71 people have died in the agency's custody since the beginning of 2004. Of these, 57 were in contract facilities that ranged from private detention centers to county jails, raising questions about whether a lack of government oversight played a part.

Three people have died at Otay Mesa since 2003, including Yusif Osman, 34, a Ghanian man who died in his cell in 2006 after complaining of chest pain.

According to the county medical examiner's report, it took personnel more than an hour to call 911 after Osman's cellmate began asking for help. The report claims that Osman was seen on his knees, and that a medical supervisor, upon finding no medical history on him, “informed the control officer to have Mr. Osman file a request to seek medical assistance.”

In the ACLU medical-care lawsuit, plaintiffs complained about delays in getting treatment and prescription refills. One plaintiff is a diabetic man whose requests for care for a small injury to his foot were delayed so long that he developed gangrene.

Also cited is the case of Francisco Castañeda, a detainee who had to wait several months to see an off-site oncologist for what turned out to be penile cancer. Castañeda sued the federal government a few months before his death in February. His family has continued the lawsuit. The government recently acknowledged that there was medical negligence, one of the allegations made.

Health care at Otay Mesa is provided by the federal government, which according to the ACLU complaint took over health services from Corrections Corporation of America in 2002 after finding the company's health program deficient.

However, because company guards are the first to hear requests for medical care, “that does not mean that CCA is off the hook entirely,” said David Blair-Loy, legal director of the ACLU in San Diego.

“They may be interfering with access to treatment,” Blair-Loy said. “And they may or may not have a direct financial incentive to prevent people from getting treatment.”

There is no way to know, he said, because the public cannot obtain government contract information from private companies.

CCA's Grant, whose company earned nearly $1.5 billion last year, said that if the quality of CCA's service to inmates was not meeting expectations, the federal agency would cancel its contracts.

In February 2007, the month after the overcrowding lawsuit, Immigration and Customs Enforcement created a new detention-inspection task force charged with responding to complaints at all facilities where it houses detainees.

Posted by lois at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)

CCA Detention Centers: For Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody, Few Details Provided

May 5, 2008
For Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody, Few Details Provided
By NINA BERNSTEIN
NY Times

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.

But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.

As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.

Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee’s next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah’s case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from The Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.

But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency’s discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions or inadequate suicide prevention.

In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.

The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.

For Mr. Bah’s survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.

In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.

“They don’t want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home,” she said. “This guy was killed, and we don’t know what happened.”

Lingering Questions

The list of deaths where Mr. Bah’s name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as “undetermined” and “unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy.” No one’s nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.

But when they could be, they posed more disturbing questions.

In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco’s immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.

The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The cause of death on the government’s list: “unresponsive.”

Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.

Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.

The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated “multiple times.” But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he “suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital.” He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.

Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.

But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.

“Thank you for the referral,” an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. “This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met.”

Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah’s roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.

“They wouldn’t give us any information,” said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah’s cousin Khadidiatou.

On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.

“There was one guard who knew Boubacar,” Ms. Bah said. “He told me on the down-low: ‘This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.’ ”

Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named “something like Aboubakar” — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.

But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.

For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.

“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”

For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his “magic hands.” Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family’s first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.

In Africa, Mr. Bah’s earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.

Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.

So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away — until a reporter’s call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.

After the Fall

There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.

The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.

It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.

When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.

He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”

Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.

Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.

Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.

The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”

However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.

Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.

But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”

The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.

Mr. Bah’s cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner’s confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor’s office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an “unattended accident resulting in death.”

Prosecutors said they did not investigate. “According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower,” Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. “We are not privy to any other bits of information.”

In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons’ schooling.

His body went back to Guinea in a sealed coffin.

“I stayed here seven years, waiting for him,” his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.

“I wanted them to open the casket,” she added, “to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him.”

Margot Williams contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/nyregion/05detain.html?_r=1%26hp=%26oref=slogin%26pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2008

Adults or Kids? States debate what the best response is to teenagers who commit crimes.

Adults or Kids?
States debate what the best response is to teenagers who commit crimes.

By Sarah Hammond
April 2008

When teenagers break the law, do they need rehabilitation or punishment? For several years in the 1990s, state lawmakers decided to treat young lawbreakers as adults, sending them to prison with tough sentences. In recent years, however, some states are rethinking the wisdom of such punishment.

Last session, Connecticut, which automatically tried 16- and 17-year-olds in adult court—giving it the largest number of inmates under the age of 18—changed course.

What the public didn’t know, says Connecticut Representative Toni Walker, was that “only 3 percent of these young people are dangerous.”

For years, Representative Walker has been trying to change Connecticut’s treatment of youths in the criminal justice system. The process was arduous. Members of the Juvenile Jurisdiction Planning and Implementation Committee, which Walker chairs, looked at the number of kids involved in the system. They talked with local police chiefs, children’s advocates, lawyers, judges and staff from the departments of Children and Families and of Corrections. They examined what was working in other states.

What really turned lawmakers around, Walker says, was learning that high school drop-outs are often the same kids ending up in the criminal justice system. When kids aren’t in school, they get in trouble, she says. The majority of young people tried as adults in Connecticut are arrested for minor, nonviolent crimes such as drug possession, fighting and disorderly conduct. “We realized it was finally time to take action,” she says.

Last year, the legislature raised the age of juvenile court jurisdiction from 16 to 18, returning 16- and 17-year-olds to the juvenile system starting July 1, 2009.

“The ‘adultification’ of young people who commit crimes has become a significant part of many states’ anti-crime policies even though research shows that it harms children and does not improve public safety,” says Walker.

She says the new law places Connecticut at the forefront of a trend to reduce the number of youth sent to the adult system. At the same time, it will create safer communities by strengthening the juvenile justice system where education and treatment is emphasized over punishment. “The end result of this effort is a product of statewide collaboration and is expected to save tax dollars over time,” Walker says. Young offenders will have more opportunity to be rehabilitated in the juvenile system and not as likely to re-offend, thus reducing crime and the costs associated with crime.

“Holding kids accountable is an important component of rehabilitation,” Walker says. “There are still penalties in place for kids who commit crimes. But we will hold them accountable in a setting that’s designed to improve their behavior rather than exacerbate it. Sending kids to adult prisons is a great way to create adult criminals.”

What Works?
There are still those who contend that safety must be No. 1 as legislatures update juvenile justice systems or send juveniles to adult court.

They argue that juvenile offenders have become more violent. Kids are using guns instead of knives and knives instead of fists. Additionally, drug sales and substance abuse are widespread. A dangerous mix of guns, gangs and drugs have become endemic to our society and now cross over from cities into suburban areas.

States have ways to try juveniles in adult court when the crime is particularly heinous. All but Nebraska, New Mexico and New York use judicial waiver, meaning a juvenile court judge can send a case to adult criminal court based on the circumstances of the offender or the alleged act. Twenty-nine states have statutory exclusion which automatically keeps certain juvenile offenders, usually based on age and offenses, from being tried in juvenile court. Fifteen states allow concurrent jurisdiction, sometimes called prosecutorial discretion or direct-file, which lets prosecutors decide how to file charges in many cases. Most states have some combination of these mechanisms.

Other Recent State Actions
After approving an executive proposal in 2006 that decreased the age of juvenile jurisdiction from 17 to 16, Rhode Island lawmakers reversed the action this session, keeping 17-year-olds in juvenile court. Lawmakers in Illinois, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina and Wisconsin have debated legislation to raise their ages in the past two years, but the measures did not move forward.

In Virginia a new measure, however, did change the “once an adult, always an adult” law. Previously, a one-time transfer of a youth to adult court was enough to keep that teen in the adult system for all future proceedings, no matter how minor the charge, even if he was acquitted or had the case dismissed. The new law requires that youth must now be convicted of an offense when they are transferred to adult court in order to be tried in adult court for all future offenses.

Another way states are rethinking adult treatment of young people is by focusing on how and when to protect the confidentiality of juvenile records for schooling, employment or other transitions to adulthood. New laws in Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico and New York deal with the protection of juvenile records.

Only three states have lowered the maximum age of juvenile court jurisdiction in recent years. This is considered a drastic step because it moves an entire age group of adolescents into the adult system. Wyoming did so in 1993, moving 18-year-olds to adult court. New Hampshire and Wisconsin changed their systems in 1996, moving 17-year-olds to adult court. But in 2007, New Hampshire voted to again consider 17-year-olds juveniles.

Supporting Research
Although there are some juveniles who truly need to be incarcerated, it is often circumstances, such as child abuse, neglect or poverty, that lead to criminal behavior, says Representative Walker. “The key to treating youthful offenders is effective ‘habilitation,’ not rehabilitation.”

A Center for Disease Control Prevention Task Force found that juveniles who enter the adult justice system, on average, commit more violent crimes following release than juveniles retained in the juvenile justice system. Researchers at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice found that adolescents processed in New York adult courts, which they enter at age 16, were more likely to be re-arrested more often and more quickly for serious offenses than those in New Jersey, where youth are kept out of adult court until age 18.

And the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau reported that young criminals coming out of Wisconsin’s prisons are even more likely to re-offend and end up back behind bars than their adult counterparts.

The Road Ahead
Growing research along with analysis of state data can help guide states as they make critical judgments about when young criminals should be treated as adults. The change in the age of juvenile jurisdiction in Connecticut will move more than 10,000 new cases a year from the adult criminal justice system to the juvenile justice system. This was one of the challenges facing Representative Walker as she pushed the law through.

“As states face the fiscal burdens of growing prison populations, public safety concerns and the desire to prevent juvenile offenders from becoming career criminals,” she says, “I hope other states consider Connecticut’s experience.”

Sarah Hammond specializes in juvenile justice and victims’ issues for NCSL.

http://www.ncsl.org/magazine/articles/2008/08SLApr08_AdultKids.htm

Posted by lois at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)

Blocking the Transmission of Violence

May 4, 2008
Blocking the Transmission of Violence
By ALEX KOTLOWITZ
NY Times Magazine

LAST SUMMER, MARTIN TORRES WAS WORKING AS A COOK IN AUSTIN, Tex., when, on the morning of Aug. 23, he received a call from a relative. His 17-year-old nephew, Emilio, had been murdered. According to the police, Emilio was walking down a street on Chicago’s South Side when someone shot him in the chest, possibly the culmination of an ongoing dispute. Like many killings, Emilio’s received just a few sentences in the local newspapers. Torres, who was especially close to his nephew, got on the first Greyhound bus to Chicago. He was grieving and plotting retribution. “I thought, Man, I’m going to take care of business,” he told me recently. “That’s how I live. I was going hunting. This is my own blood, my nephew.”

Torres, who is 38, grew up in a dicey section of Chicago, and even by the standards of his neighborhood he was a rough character. His nickname was Packman, because he was known to always pack a gun. He was first shot when he was 12, in the legs with buckshot by members of a rival gang. He was shot five more times, including once through the jaw, another time in his right shoulder and the last time — seven years ago — in his right thigh, with a .38-caliber bullet that is still lodged there. On his chest, he has tattooed a tombstone with the name “Buff” at its center, a tribute to a friend who was killed on his 18th birthday. Torres was the head of a small Hispanic gang, and though he is no longer active, he still wears two silver studs in his left ear, a sign of his affiliation.

When he arrived in Chicago, he began to ask around, and within a day believed he had figured out who killed his nephew. He also began drinking a lot — mostly Hennessey cognac. He borrowed two guns, a .38 and a .380, from guys he knew. He would, he thought, wait until after the funeral to track down his nephew’s assailants.

Zale Hoddenbach looks like an ex-military man. He wears his hair cropped and has a trimmed goatee that highlights his angular jaw. He often wears T-shirts that fit tightly around his muscled arms, though he also carries a slight paunch. When he was younger, Hoddenbach, who is also 38, belonged to a gang that was under the same umbrella as Torres’s, and so when the two men first met 17 years ago at Pontiac Correctional Center, an Illinois maximum-security prison, they became friendly. Hoddenbach was serving time for armed violence; Torres for possession of a stolen car and a gun (he was, he says, on his way to make a hit). “Zale was always in segregation, in the hole for fights,” Torres told me. “He was aggressive.” In one scuffle, Hoddenbach lost the sight in his right eye after an inmate pierced it with a shank. Torres and Hoddenbach were at Pontiac together for about a year but quickly lost touch after they were both released.

Shortly after Torres arrived in Chicago last summer, Hoddenbach received a phone call from Torres’s brother, the father of the young man who was murdered. He was worried that Torres was preparing to seek revenge and hoped that Hoddenbach would speak with him. When Hoddenbach called, Torres was thrilled. He immediately thought that his old prison buddy was going to join him in his search for the killer. But instead Hoddenbach tried to talk him down, telling him retribution wasn’t what his brother wanted. “I didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about,” Torres told me when I talked to him six months later. “This didn’t seem like the person I knew.” The next day Hoddenbach appeared at the wake, which was held at New Life Community Church, housed in a low-slung former factory. He spent the day by Torres’s side, sitting with him, talking to him, urging him to respect his brother’s wishes. When Torres went to the parking lot for a smoke, his hands shaking from agitation, Hoddenbach would follow. “Because of our relationship, I thought there was a chance,” Hoddenbach told me. “We were both cut from the same cloth.” Hoddenbach knew from experience that the longer he could delay Torres from heading out, the more chance he’d have of keeping him from shooting someone. So he let him vent for a few hours. Then Hoddenbach started laying into him with every argument he could think of: Look around, do you see any old guys here? I never seen so many young kids at a funeral. Look at these kids, what does the future hold for them? Where do we fit in? Who are you to step on your brother’s wishes?

THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country — in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount — gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland. Just two weekends ago in Chicago, with the first warm weather, 36 people were shot, 7 of them fatally. The Chicago Sun-Times called it the “weekend of rage.” Many killings are attributed to gang conflicts and are confined to particular neighborhoods. In Chicago, where on average five people were shot each day last year, 83 percent of the assaults were concentrated in half the police districts. So for people living outside those neighborhoods, the frequent outbursts of unrestrained anger have been easy to ignore. But each shooting, each murder, leaves a devastating legacy, and a growing school of thought suggests that there’s little we can do about the entrenched urban poverty if the relentless pattern of street violence isn’t somehow broken.

The traditional response has been more focused policing and longer prison sentences, but law enforcement does little to disrupt a street code that allows, if not encourages, the settling of squabbles with deadly force. Zale Hoddenbach, who works for an organization called CeaseFire, is part of an unusual effort to apply the principles of public health to the brutality of the streets. CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end. Hoddenbach’s job is to suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. His job title is violence interrupter, a term that while not artful seems bluntly self-explanatory. Newspaper accounts usually refer to the organization as a gang-intervention program, and Hoddenbach and most of his colleagues are indeed former gang leaders. But CeaseFire doesn’t necessarily aim to get people out of gangs — nor interrupt the drug trade. It’s almost blindly focused on one thing: preventing shootings.

CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).

EVERY WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, in a Spartan room on the 10th floor of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s public-health building, 15 to 25 men — and two women — all violence interrupters, sit around tables arranged in a circle and ruminate on the rage percolating in the city. Most are in their 40s and 50s, though some, like Hoddenbach, are a bit younger. All of them are black or Hispanic and in one manner or another have themselves been privy to, if not participants in, the brutality of the streets.

On a Wednesday near the end of March, Slutkin made a rare appearance; he ordinarily leaves the day-to-day operations to a staff member. Fit at 57, Slutkin has a somewhat disheveled appearance — tie askew, hair uncombed, seemingly forgetful. Some see his presentation as a calculated effort to disarm. “Slutkin does his thing in his Slutkinesque way,” notes Carl Bell, a psychiatrist who has long worked with children exposed to neighborhood violence and who admires CeaseFire’s work. “He seems kind of disorganized, but he’s not.” Hoddenbach told me: “You can’t make too much of that guy. In the beginning, he gives you that look like he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”

Slutkin had come to talk with the group about a recent high-profile incident outside Crane Tech High School on the city’s West Side. An 18-year-old boy was shot and died on the school’s steps, while nearby another boy was savagely beaten with a golf club. Since the beginning of the school year, 18 Chicago public-school students had been killed. (Another six would be murdered in the coming weeks.) The interrupters told Slutkin that there was a large police presence at the school, at least temporarily muffling any hostilities there, and that the police were even escorting some kids to and from school. They then told him what was happening off the radar in their neighborhoods. There was the continuing discord at another high school involving a group of girls (“They’d argue with a stop sign,” one of the interrupters noted); a 14-year-old boy with a gang tattoo on his forehead was shot by an older gang member just out of prison; a 15-year-old was shot in the stomach by a rival gang member as he came out of his house; and a former CeaseFire colleague was struggling to keep himself from losing control after his own sons were beaten. There was also a high-school basketball player shot four times; a 12-year-old boy shot at a party; gang members arming themselves to counter an egging of their freshly painted cars; and a high-ranking gang member who was on life support after being shot, and whose sister was overheard talking on her cellphone in the hospital, urging someone to “get those straps together. Get loaded.”

These incidents all occurred over the previous seven days. In each of them, the interrupters had stepped in to try to keep one act of enmity from spiraling into another. Some had more success than others. Janell Sails prodded the guys with the egged cars to go to a car wash and then persuaded them it wasn’t worth risking their lives over a stupid prank. At Crane Tech High School, three of the interrupters fanned out, trying to convince the five gangs involved in the conflict to lie low, but they conceded that they were unable reach some of the main players. Many of the interrupters seem bewildered by what they see as a wilder group of youngsters now running the streets and by a gang structure that is no longer top-down but is instead made up of many small groups — which they refer to as cliques — whose members are answerable to a handful of peers.

For an hour, Slutkin leaned on the table, playing with a piece of Scotch tape, keenly listening. In some situations, Slutkin can appear detached and didactic. He can wear people down with his long discourses, and some of the interrupters say they sometimes tune him out. (On one occasion, he tried to explain to me the relationship between emotional intelligence and quantum physics.) But having seen a lot of out-of-control behavior, Slutkin is a big believer in controlling emotions. So he has taught himself not to break into discussions and to digest before presenting his view. The interrupters say he has their unqualified loyalty. Hoddenbach told me that he now considers Slutkin a friend.

It became clear as they delivered their reports that many of the interrupters were worn down. One of them, Calvin Buchanan, whose street name is Monster and who just recently joined CeaseFire, showed the others six stitches over his left eye; someone had cracked a beer bottle on his head while he was mediating an argument between two men. The other interrupters applauded when Buchanan told them that, though tempted, he restrained himself from getting even.

When Slutkin finally spoke, he first praised the interrupters for their work. “Everybody’s overreacting, and you’re trying to cool them down,” he told them. He then asked if any of them had been experiencing jitteriness or fear. He spent the next half-hour teaching stress-reduction exercises. If they could calm themselves, he seemed to be saying, they could also calm others. I recalled what one of the interrupters told me a few weeks earlier: “We helped create the madness, and now we’re trying to debug it.”

IN THE PUBLIC-HEALTH field, there have long been two schools of thought on derailing violence. One focuses on environmental factors, specifically trying to limit gun purchases and making guns safer. The other tries to influence behavior by introducing school-based curricula like antidrug and safe-sex campaigns.

Slutkin is going after it in a third way — as if he were trying to contain an infectious disease. The fact that there’s no vaccine or medical cure for violence doesn’t dissuade him. He points out that in the early days of AIDS, there was no treatment either. In the short run, he’s just trying to halt the spread of violence. In the long run, though, he says he hopes to alter behavior and what’s considered socially acceptable.

Slutkin’s perspective grew out of his own experience as an infectious-disease doctor. In 1981, six years out of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, Slutkin was asked to lead the TB program in San Francisco. With an influx of new refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the number of cases in the city had nearly doubled. Slutkin chose to concentrate on those who had the most active TB; on average, they were infecting 6 to 10 others a year. Slutkin hired Southeast Asian outreach workers who could not only locate the infected individuals but who could also stick with them for nine months, making sure they took the necessary medication. These outreach workers knew the communities and spoke the languages, and they were able to persuade family members of infected people to be tested. Slutkin also went after the toughest cases — 26 people with drug-resistant TB. The chance of curing those people was slim, but Slutkin reckoned that if they went untreated, the disease would continue to spread. “Gary wasn’t constrained by the textbook,” says Eric Goosby, who worked in the clinic and is now the chief executive of the Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation. Within two years, the number of TB cases, at least among these new immigrants, declined sharply.

Slutkin then spent 10 years in Africa, first in refugee camps in Somalia and then working, in Uganda and other countries, for the World Health Organization to curtail the spread of AIDS. During his first posting, in Somalia, a cholera epidemic spread from camp to camp. Slutkin had never dealt with an outbreak of this sort, and he was overwhelmed. The diarrhea from cholera is so severe that patients can die within hours from dehydration. According to Sandy Gove, who was then married to Slutkin and was also a doctor in the camps, infection rates were approaching 10 percent; in one camp there were 1,000 severely ill refugees. “It was desperate,” she told me. Slutkin drove a Land Cruiser two and a half days to an American military base along the coast to the closest phone. He called doctors in Europe and the United States, trying to get information. He also asked the soldiers at the base for blue food coloring, which he then poured into the water sources of the bacteria, a warning to refugees not to drink. “What Gary is really good about is laying out a broad strategic plan and keeping ahead of something,” Gove told me. There were only six doctors for the 40 refugee camps, so Slutkin and Gove trained birth attendants to spot infected people and to give them rehydration therapies in their homes. Because the birth attendants were refugees, they were trusted and could persuade those with the most severe symptoms to receive aid at the medical tent.

After leaving Africa, Slutkin returned to Chicago, where he was raised and where he could attend to his aging parents. (He later remarried there.) It was 1995, and there had been a series of horrific murders involving children in the city. He was convinced that longer sentences and more police officers had made little difference. “Punishment doesn’t drive behavior,” he told me. “Copying and modeling and the social expectations of your peers is what drives your behavior.”

Borrowing some ideas (and the name) from a successful Boston program, Slutkin initially established an approach that exists in one form or another in many cities: outreach workers tried to get youth and young adults into school or to help them find jobs. These outreach workers were also doing dispute mediation. But Slutkin was feeling his way, much as he had in Somalia during the cholera epidemic. One of Slutkin’s colleagues, Tio Hardiman, brought up an uncomfortable truth: the program wasn’t reaching the most bellicose, those most likely to pull a trigger. So in 2004, Hardiman suggested that, in addition to outreach workers, they also hire men and women who had been deep into street life, and he began recruiting people even while they were still in prison. Hardiman told me he was looking for those “right there on the edge.” (The interrupters are paid roughly $15 an hour, and those working full time receive benefits from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where CeaseFire is housed.) The new recruits, with strong connections to the toughest communities, would focus solely on sniffing out clashes that had the potential to escalate. They would intervene in potential acts of retribution — as well as try to defuse seemingly minor spats that might erupt into something bigger, like disputes over women or insulting remarks.

As CeaseFire evolved, Slutkin says he started to realize how much it was drawing on his experiences fighting TB and AIDS. “Early intervention in TB is actually treatment of the most infectious people,” Slutkin told me recently. “They’re the ones who are infecting others. So treatment of the most infectious spreaders is the most effective strategy known and now accepted in the world.” And, he continued, you want to go after them with individuals who themselves were once either infectious spreaders or at high risk for the illness. In the case of violence, you use those who were once hard-core, once the most belligerent, once the most uncontrollable, once the angriest. They are the most convincing messengers. It’s why, for instance, Slutkin and his colleagues asked sex workers in Uganda and other nations to spread the word to other sex workers about safer sexual behavior. Then, Slutkin said, you train them, as you would paraprofessionals, as he and Gove did when they trained birth attendants to spot cholera in Somalia.

The first step to containing the spread of an infectious disease is minimizing transmission. The parallel in Slutkin’s Chicago work is thwarting retaliations, which is precisely what Hoddenbach was trying to do in the aftermath of Emilio Torres’s murder. But Slutkin is also looking for the equivalent of a cure. The way public-health doctors think of curing disease when there are no drug treatments is by changing behavior. Smoking is the most obvious example. Cigarettes are still around. And there’s no easy remedy for lung cancer or emphysema. So the best way to deal with the diseases associated with smoking is to get people to stop smoking. In Uganda, Slutkin and his colleagues tried to change behavior by encouraging people to have fewer sexual partners and to use condoms. CeaseFire has a visible public-communications campaign, which includes billboards and bumper stickers (which read, “Stop. Killing. People.”). It also holds rallies — or what it calls “responses” — at the sites of killings. But much research suggests that peer or social pressure is the most effective way to change behavior. “It was a real turning point for me,” Slutkin said, “when I was working on the AIDS epidemic and saw research findings that showed that the principal determinant of whether someone uses a condom or not is whether they think their friends use them.” Daniel Webster, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University who has looked closely at CeaseFire, told me, “The guys out there doing the interruption have some prestige and reputation, and I think the hope is that they start to change a culture so that you can retain your status, retain your manliness and be able to walk away from events where all expectations were that you were supposed to respond with lethal force.”

As a result, the interrupters operate in a netherworld between upholding the law and upholding the logic of the streets. They’re not meant to be a substitute for the police, and indeed, sometimes the interrupters negotiate disputes involving illicit goings-on. They often walk a fine line between mediating and seeming to condone criminal activity. At one Wednesday meeting this past December, the interrupters argued over whether they could dissuade stickup artists from shooting their victims; persuading them to stop robbing people didn’t come up in the discussion.

LAST DECEMBER, at the first Wednesday meeting I attended, James Highsmith came up to introduce himself. At 58, Highsmith is one of the older interrupters. He wears striped, collared shirts, black rectangular glasses and often a black Borsalino, an Italian-made fedora. He reminded me that I had mentioned him in my book, “There Are No Children Here,” about life in a Chicago public-housing project in the late 1980s. I wrote about a picnic that some Chicago drug kingpins gave in a South Side park. There was a car show, a wet T-shirt contest and softball games for the children. About 2,000 people attended, dancing to a live band while the drug lords showed off their Mercedes Benzes, Rolls-Royces and Jaguars. Highsmith was the key sponsor of the event. He controlled the drug trade on the city’s South Side. He owned a towing business, an auto-mechanic’s shop and a nightclub, as well as a 38-foot boat. In January 1994, he was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison on drug-conspiracy charges; he was released in 2004. Highsmith was just the kind of recruit CeaseFire looks for: an older man getting out of the penitentiary who once had standing on the streets and who, through word of mouth, appears ready, eager even, to discard his former persona. “I’m a work in progress,” Highsmith told me.

One evening we were sitting in Highsmith’s basement apartment when the phone rang. It was Alphonso Prater, another interrupter. The two had a reunion of sorts when they joined CeaseFire; they shared a cell in the county jail 34 years ago. Prater’s voice is so raspy it sounds as if he has gravel in his throat. He told me that he became permanently hoarse after a long stint in segregation in prison; he had to shout to talk with others. When Prater called the night I was there, all Highsmith could make out was: “There’s some high-tech stuff going on. I need you to talk to some folks.” Highsmith didn’t ask any questions.

We drove to a poorly lighted side street on the city’s West Side. Empty beer bottles littered the side of the road. Prater, who is short and wiry and has trouble keeping still, was bouncing on the sidewalk, standing next to a lanky middle-aged man who had receded into his oversize hooded sweatshirt. Highsmith, Prater and another interrupter joined the man in a parked car, where they talked for half an hour. When they were done, the car peeled away, two other sedans escorting it, one in front, the other in the rear. “Protection,” Highsmith commented. Apparently, the man in the hooded sweatshirt, whom I would meet later, had been an intermediary in a drug deal. He had taken an out-of-town buyer holding $30,000 in cash to a house on the South Side to buy drugs. But when they got there, they were met by six men in the backyard, each armed with a pistol or an automatic weapon, and robbed. The out-of-town buyer believed he’d been set up by the intermediary, who, in turn, was trying to hunt down the stickup artists. In the car, Prater, who knew the intermediary, had worked to cool him down, while Highsmith promised to see if he could find someone who might know the stickup guys and could negotiate with them. The intermediary told Prater and Highsmith, a bit ominously, “Something got to give.”

After the intermediary drove off, Prater joked that there was no way he was getting back in a car with him, that he was too overheated and too likely to be the target or the shooter. “I’m not sure we can do anything about this one,” Highsmith told Prater.

RELYING ON HARDENED TYPES — the ones who, as Webster of Johns Hopkins says, have some prestige on the streets — is risky. They have prestige for a reason. Hoddenbach, who once beat someone so badly he punctured his lungs, is reluctant to talk about his past. “I don’t want to be seen as a monster,” he told me. Hoddenbach’s ethnicity is hard to pinpoint. His father was Dutch and his mother Puerto Rican, and he’s so light-skinned his street name was Casper. He has a discerning gaze and mischievous smile, and can be hardheaded and impatient. (At the Wednesday meetings, he often sits near the door and whispers entreaties to the others to speed things up.) Hoddenbach’s father had an explosive temper, and to steal from Slutkin’s lingo, he seems to have infected others. Two of Hoddenbach’s older brothers are serving time for murder. His third brother has carved out a legitimate life as a manager at a manufacturing firm. Hoddenbach always worked. He did maintenance on train equipment and towed airplanes at a private airport. But he was also active in a Hispanic street gang and was known for his unmitigated aggression. He served a total of eight years in the state penitentiary, the last stay for charges that included aggravated battery. He was released in 2002.

In January, I was with Slutkin in Baltimore, where he spoke about CeaseFire to a small gathering of local civic leaders at a private home. During the two-hour meeting, Slutkin never mentioned that the interrupters were ex-felons. When I later asked him about that omission, he conceded that talking about their personal histories “is a dilemma. I haven’t solved it.” I spent many hours with Hoddenbach and the others, trying to understand how they chose to make the transition from gangster to peacemaker, how they put thuggery behind them. It is, of course, their street savvy and reputations that make them effective for CeaseFire. (One supporter of the program admiringly called it “a terrifying strategy” because of the inherent risks.) Some CeaseFire workers have, indeed, reverted to their old ways. One outreach worker was fired after he was arrested for possession of an AK-47 and a handgun. Another outreach worker and an interrupter were let go after they were arrested for dealing drugs. Word-of-mouth allegations often circulate, and privately, some in the police department worry about CeaseFire’s workers returning to their old habits.

Not all the interrupters I talked to could articulate how they had made the transition. Some, like Hoddenbach, find religion — in his case, Christianity. He also has four children he feels responsible for, and has found ways to decompress, like going for long runs. (His brother Mark speculated that “maybe he just wants to give back what he took out.”) I once asked Hoddenbach if he has ever apologized to anyone he hurt. We were with one of his old friends from the street, who started guffawing, as if I had asked Hoddenbach if he ever wore dresses. “I done it twice,” Hoddenbach told us — quickly silencing his friend and saving me from further embarrassment. (One apology was to the brother of the man whose lungs he’d punctured; the other was to a rival gang member he shot.) Alphonso Prater told me that the last time he was released from prison, in 2001, an older woman hired him to gut some homes she was renovating. She trusted him with the keys to the homes, and something about that small gesture lifted him. “She seen something in me that I didn’t see,” he told me.

Though the interrupters may not put it this way, the Wednesday meetings are a kind of therapy. One staff member laughingly compared it to a 12-step program. It was clear to me that they leaned on one another — a lot. Prater once got an urgent call from his daughter, who said her boyfriend was beating her. Prater got in his car and began to race to her house; as he was about to run a stop sign, he glimpsed a police car on the corner. He skidded to a halt. It gave him a moment to think, and he called his CeaseFire supervisor, Tio Hardiman, who got another interrupter to visit Prater’s daughter. Not long ago, three old-timers fresh out of prison ruthlessly ridiculed Hoddenbach for his work with CeaseFire. They were relentless, and Hoddenbach asked to sit down with them. But when it came time to meet, he realized he was too riled, and so he asked another interrupter, Tim White, to go in his place. “I was worried I was going to whip their asses, and wherever it went from there it went,” Hoddenbach told me. “They were old feelings, feelings I don’t want to revisit.”

Recently I went out to lunch with Hoddenbach and Torres. It had been four months since Torres buried his nephew. Torres, who looked worn and agitated (he would get up periodically to smoke a cigarette outside), seemed paradoxically both grateful to and annoyed at Hoddenbach. In the end, Hoddenbach had persuaded him not to avenge his nephew’s murder. Torres had returned the guns and quickly left town. This was his first visit back to Chicago. “I felt like a punk,” he told me, before transferring to the present tense. “I feel shameful.” He said he had sought revenge for people who weren’t related to him — “people who weren’t even no blood to me.” But he held back in the case of his nephew. “I still struggle with it,” he said. On the ride over to the restaurant, Torres had been playing a CD of his nephew’s favorite rap songs. It got him hyped up, and he blurted out to Hoddenbach, “I feel like doing something.” Hoddenbach chided him and shut off the music. “Stop being an idiot,” he told Torres.

“Something made me do what Zale asked me to do,” Torres said later, looking more puzzled than comforted. “Which is respect my brother’s wishes.”

When Slutkin heard of Hoddenbach’s intervention, he told me: “The interrupters have to deal with how to get someone to save face. In other words, how do you not do a shooting if someone has insulted you, if all of your friends are expecting you to do that? . . . In fact, what our interrupters do is put social pressure in the other direction.”

He continued: “This is cognitive dissonance. Before Zale walked up to him, this guy was holding only one thought. So you want to put another thought in his head. It turns out talking about family is what really makes a difference.” Slutkin didn’t take this notion to the interrupters; he learned it from them.

ONE JANUARY NIGHT at 11 p.m., Charles Mack received a phone call that a shooting victim was being rushed to Advocate Christ Medical Center. Mack drove the 10 miles from his home to the hospital, which houses one of four trauma centers in Chicago. Two interrupters, Mack and LeVon Stone, are assigned there. They respond to every shooting and stabbing victim taken to the hospital. Mack, who is 57 and has a slight lisp, is less imposing than his colleagues. He seems always to be coming from or going to church, often dressed in tie and cardigan. He sheepishly told me that his prison term, two years, was for bank fraud. “The other guys laugh at me,” he said. LeVon Stone is 23 years younger and a fast talker. He’s in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down as a result of being shot when he was 18.

Advocate Christ has come to see the presence of interrupters in the trauma unit as essential and is, in fact, looking to expand their numbers. “It has just given me so much hope,” Cathy Arsenault, one of the chaplains there, told me. “The families would come in, huddle in the corner and I could see them assigning people to take care of business.” Mack and Stone try to cool off family members and friends, and if the victim survives, try to keep them from seeking vengeance.

The victim that night was a tall 16-year-old boy named Frederick. He was lying on a gurney just off the emergency room’s main hallway. He was connected to two IVs, and blood was seeping through the gauze wrapped around his left hand. Mack stood to one side; Stone pulled up on the other.

“You know, the most important thing is —” Mack ventured.

“You’re alive,” Stone chimed in.

Stone then asked Frederick if he had heard of CeaseFire. The boy nodded and told them that he had even participated in a CeaseFire rally after a killing in his neighborhood.

“We try to stop violence on the front end,” Stone told Frederick. “Unfortunately, this is the back end. We just want to make sure you don’t go out and try to retaliate.”

The boy had been shot — one bullet shattered his thigh bone and another ripped the tendons in two fingers. Nonetheless, he seemed lucid and chatty.

“My intention is to get in the house, call my school, get my books and finish my work,” he told Mack and Stone. He mentioned the school he attends, which Mack instantly recognized as a place for kids on juvenile-court probation. Frederick told his story. He was at a party, and a rival clique arrived. Frederick and his friends sensed there would be trouble, so they left, and while standing outside, one of the rival group pulled a gun on them. Frederick’s friend told him earlier he had a gun. It turned out to be braggadocio, and so when his friend took off running, so did Frederick, a step behind. As he dashed through a narrow passageway between buildings, he heard the shots.

“Can I ask why you’re in the wheelchair?” Frederick asked Stone.

“I got shot 15 years ago,” Stone told him. Stone didn’t say anything more about it, and later when I asked for more detail, he was elusive. He said simply that he had gotten shot at a barbecue when he tried to intervene in a fistfight.

“You doing good,” Stone assured him. “You got shot. You’re here. And you’re alive. What you do when you get out of here?”

“You got to stop hanging with the wrong person, thinking you’re a Wyatt Earp,” Frederick said, speaking in the third person as if he were reciting a lesson.

At that point, Frederick’s sister arrived. She explained that she was bringing up her brother. She was 18.

“He just wants to go to parties, parties, parties,” she complained. “But it’s too dangerous.” She started to cry.

“Don’t start that, please,” Frederick pleaded.

Mack left a CeaseFire brochure on Frederick’s chest and promised to visit him again in the coming weeks.

LAST MAY, after a 16-year-old boy was killed trying to protect a girl from a gunman on a city bus, Slutkin appeared on a local public-television news program. He suggested CeaseFire was responsible for sharp dips in homicide around the city. Slutkin, some say, gives CeaseFire too much credit. Carl Bell, the psychiatrist, was on the program with Slutkin that night. “I didn’t say anything,” he told me. “I support Slutkin. I’m like, Slutkin, what are you doing? You can’t do that. Maybe politically it’s a good thing, but scientifically it’s so much more complex than that. Come on, Gary.”

Last year, CeaseFire lost its $6 million in annual state financing — which meant a reduction from 45 interrupters to 17 — as part of statewide budget cuts. One state senator, who had ordered an audit of CeaseFire (released after the cuts, it found some administrative inefficiencies), maintained there was no evidence that CeaseFire’s work had made a difference. (The cuts caused considerable uproar: The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial urging the restoration of financing, and the State House overwhelmingly voted to double CeaseFire’s financing; the State Senate, though, has yet to address it.)

It can be hard to measure the success — or the failure — of public-health programs, especially violence-prevention efforts. And given Slutkin’s propensity to cite scientific studies, it is surprising that he hasn’t yet published anything about CeaseFire in a peer-reviewed journal. Nonetheless, in a report due out later this month, independent researchers hired by the Justice Department (from which CeaseFire gets some money) conclude that CeaseFire has had an impact. Shootings have declined around the city in recent years. But the study found that in six of the seven neighborhoods examined, CeaseFire’s efforts reduced the number of shootings or attempted shootings by 16 percent to 27 percent more than it had declined in comparable neighborhoods. The report also noted — with approbation — that CeaseFire, unlike most programs, manages by outcomes, which means that it doesn’t measure its success by gauging the amount of activity (like the number of interrupters on the street or the number of interruptions — 1,200 over four years) but rather by whether shootings are going up or down. One wall in Slutkin’s office is taken up by maps and charts his staff has generated on the location and changes in the frequency of shootings throughout the city; the data determine how they assign the interrupters. Wes Skogan, a professor of political science at Northwestern (disclosure: I teach there) and the author of the report, said, “I found the statistical results to be as strong as you could hope for.”

BALTIMORE, NEWARK and Kansas City, Mo., have each replicated components of the CeaseFire model and have received training from the Chicago staff. In Baltimore, the program, which is run by the city, combines the work of interrupters and outreach workers and has been concentrated in one East Baltimore neighborhood. (The program recently expanded to a second community.) Early research out of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that in the East Baltimore neighborhood there were on average two shootings a month just before the program started. During the first four months that interrupters worked the streets, there had not been a single incident.

“My eyes rolled immediately when I heard what the model was,” says Webster of Johns Hopkins, who is studying the Baltimore project. Webster knew the forces the interrupters were up against and considered it wishful thinking that they could effectively mediate disputes. “But when I looked closer at the data,” Webster continues, “and got to know more about who these people were and what they were doing, I became far less skeptical and more hopeful. We’re going to learn from it. And it will evolve.” George Kelling, a Rutgers professor of criminal justice who is helping to establish an effort in Newark to reduce homicide, helped develop the “broken window” theory of fighting crime: addressing small issues quickly. He says a public-health model will be fully effective only if coupled with other efforts, including more creative policing and efforts to get gang members back to school or to work. But he sees promise in the CeaseFire model. “I had to overcome resistance,” Kelling told me, referring to the introduction of a similar program in Newark. “But I think Slutkin’s on to something.”

Most of the police officials I spoke with, in both Chicago and Baltimore, were grateful for the interrupters. James B. Jackson, now the first deputy superintendent in Chicago, was once the commander of the 11th district, which has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the city. Jackson told me that after his officers investigated an incident, he would ask the police to pull back so the interrupters could mediate. He understood that if the interrupters were associated with the police, it would jeopardize their standing among gang members. “If you look at how segments of the population view the police department, it makes some of our efforts problematic,” Baltimore’s police commissioner, Frederick H. Bealefeld III, told me. “It takes someone who knows these guys to go in and say, ‘Hey, lay off.’ We can’t do that.”

Like many new programs that taste some success, CeaseFire has ambitions that threaten to outgrow its capacity. Slutkin has put much of his effort on taking the project to other cities (there’s interest from Los Angeles, Oakland and Wilmington, Del., among others), and he has consulted with the State Department about assisting in Iraq and in Kenya. (CeaseFire training material has been made available to the provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq.) Meanwhile, their Chicago project is underfinanced, and the interrupters seem stressed from the amount of work they’ve taken on.

THE INTERRUPTERS have certain understandings. At the Wednesday meetings, no one is ever to mention anyone involved in a dispute by name or, for that matter, mention the name of the gang. Instead they refer to “Group A” or “Group B.” They are not investigators for the police. In fact, they go out of their way to avoid knowing too much about a crime. When Highsmith and Prater left me the night of the failed drug deal, they began working their contacts. Highsmith found someone who knew one of the stickup men and who, at Highsmith’s request, negotiated with them. Highsmith’s contact persuaded the robbers to return enough of the money to appease the drug-buyer’s anger. When I met with the intermediary a few weeks after things were resolved, he was still stirred up about the robbery. “I was mad enough to do anything,” he told me, making it clear that he and his friends had been hunting for the stickup guys. “This could’ve been a hell of a lot worse than it was.” To this day, neither Highsmith nor Prater know the identities of anyone except the intermediary — and they want to leave it that way.

The interrupters often operate by instinct. CeaseFire once received a call from the mother of a 15-year-old boy who wanted out of a gang he joined a few weeks earlier. The mother told Hoddenbach and another interrupter, Max Cerda, that the gang members chased her son home every day from school threatening to beat him. They had shot at him twice. Hoddenbach found the clique leaders and tried to talk sense to them. If the boy didn’t want to be in the gang, he told them, he’d be the first one to snitch. The gang members saw the logic behind that but insisted on giving him a beating before releasing him. Hoddenbach then tried another tack: he negotiated to let him leave the gang for $300 — and no thrashing. The family, though, was only able to come up with $50, so Hoddenbach, Cerda and another interrupter came up with the rest. At their next Wednesday meeting, some interrupters were critical of Hoddenbach for paying what they considered extortion money. “It was kind of a messed-up way, but it was a messed-up way that works,” Hoddenbach said.

It was nearly three months before Charles Mack could find time to visit Frederick, the young shooting victim. Frederick had since moved in with his great-grandmother in a different part of town. In his old neighborhood, he told Mack, “there always somebody who knows you. And I had a reputation.” He complained to Mack that he had never been interviewed by the police but then declared he would never identify the person who shot him anyway. “I’m going to leave it alone,” he said. As is so often the case, Frederick couldn’t remember the genesis of the disagreement between his clique and the other. Mack promised to stay in touch, and as we dropped him off, Mack turned to me and said, “I think he’s going to be all right.” It sounded like both a proclamation as well as hopeful aside.

Not long ago, I stopped by to visit with Hoddenbach at the Boys and Girls Club, where he holds down a second job. It was a Friday evening, and he was waiting for an old associate to come by to give him an introduction to a group of Hispanic kids on the far North Side. Apparently, earlier in the week, they bashed in the face of an African-American teenager with a brick. From what Hoddenbach could make out, it was the result of a long-simmering dispute — the equivalent of a dormant virus — and the victim’s uncle was now worried that it would set off more fighting. As we sat and talked, Hoddenbach seemed unusually agitated. His left foot twitched as if it had an electric current running through it. “If these idiots continue,” he told me, “somebody’s going to step up and make a statement.”

Hoddenbach also worried about Torres, who had recently gone back to Texas and found a job working construction. Hoddenbach says he originally hoped Torres would stay in Chicago and establish some roots, but then decided he’d be better off in another town. “I kept him out of one situation, but I can’t keep him out of all of them,” Hoddenbach said. This may well speak to CeaseFire’s limitations. Leaving town is not an option for most. And for those who have walked away from a shooting, like Torres, if there are no jobs, or lousy schools, or decrepit housing, what’s to keep them from drifting back into their former lives? It’s like cholera: you may cure everyone, you may contain the epidemic, but if you don’t clean up the water supply, people will soon get sick again.

Slutkin says that it makes sense to purify the water supply if — and only if — you acknowledge and treat the epidemic at hand. In other words, antipoverty measures will work only if you treat violence. It would seem intuitive that violence is a result of economic deprivation, but the relationship between the two is not static. People who have little expectation for the future live recklessly. On the other side of the coin, a community in which arguments are settled by gunshots is unlikely to experience economic growth and opportunity. In his book “The Bottom Billion,” Paul Collier argues that one of the characteristics of many developing countries that suffer from entrenched poverty is what he calls the conflict trap, the inability to escape a cycle of violence, usually in the guise of civil wars. Could the same be true in our inner cities, where the ubiquity of guns and gunplay pushes businesses and residents out and leaves behind those who can’t leave, the most impoverished?

In this, Slutkin sees a direct parallel to the early history of seemingly incurable infectious diseases. “Chinatown, San Francisco in the 1880s,” Slutkin says. “Three ghosts: malaria, smallpox and leprosy. No one wanted to go there. Everybody blamed the people. Dirty. Bad habits. Something about their race. Not only is everybody afraid to go there, but the people there themselves are afraid at all times because people are dying a lot and nobody really knows what to do about it. And people come up with all kinds of other ideas that are not scientifically grounded — like putting people away, closing the place down, pushing the people out of town. Sound familiar?”

Alex Kotlowitz teaches writing at Northwestern University and is a regular contributor to the magazine. His last article was about illegal immigration.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/magazine/04health-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=magazine&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)

May 01, 2008

VT: Lawmakes Agree to Restructure Prisons Including Closing One

Lawmakers agree to restructure prisons
Burlington (VT) Free Press
By Nancy Remsen • Free Press Staff Writer • May 1, 2008

MONTPELIER -- Legislative negotiators agreed Wednesday that Vermont's prison system will be shuffled, with all female inmates moving to St. Albans, a new work camp for men coming to Windsor and the Dale unit in Waterbury closing.

Senators told House negotiators in the first round of talks that the proposed restructuring had to take place next year. The House bill called for delaying any changes for a year to explore more options.

"We can't wait," said Sen. Susan Bartlett, D-Lamoille. "It is not an option to wait."

The agreement to restructure the prison system, still tentative until the House and Senate iron out other differences, was one of dozens of breakthroughs likely to speed the Legislature to adjournment by the end of the week. Throughout the day, lawmakers huddled in talks on bills they hope to pass before the session ends.

Budget negotiators predicted they could shake hands on a spending plan for state government by this afternoon, which would signal that the Legislature could depart Friday. Legislative leaders warned that bills with differences unresolved by the time the budget was printed, presented and ready for votes would die.

Progress on a housing bill remained slow. Negotiators met twice, but many differences remained unresolved. They plan an 8 a.m. start to talks today.

Another high-profile negotiation remained problematic. Lawmakers continued to spar with the Douglas administration over a sales tax holiday and a manufacturing tax credit.

At two meetings, the special panel reviewing the proposals peppered administration representatives with questions. Senate Democrats, in a late-day caucus, voiced skepticism about the merits of both suggestions. Gov. Jim Douglas included these ideas in his 15-point economic stimulus package announced April 19.

Prison change

Senate negotiators made clear at their first meeting with their House counterparts that they weren't going to budge on restructuring the prison system in the coming year.

Rep. Jason Lorber, D-Burlington, said the House was "uncomfortable moving forward" and wanted to explore alternatives to closing the Dale facility in Waterbury, moving all female inmates to St. Albans and opening a work camp at the Windsor facility. Male inmates housed in St. Albans would be sent to other facilities.

Bartlett pounced on the proposed postponement. Change was needed, she argued because "the corrections budget is crushing us."

The restructuring is intended to close the most expensive prison -- Dale. It would also move nonviolent male offenders to a new, less-expensive work camp. The savings from the changes would be invested in increased substance abuse treatment and transitional housing -- intended to produce better outcomes for inmates.

Bartlett challenged the House view that there wasn't enough information to make the decision. "If you want to make a big flip in the system, there will never be enough information," she said. "You just have to suck it up and do it."

Late Wednesday afternoon, House negotiators returned to the talks offering to go along with the Senate's restructuring plan.

"It has always been clear that we need dollars to start the programs," Lorber said when the talks concluded for the day. "This lets us take some action that will have long-term impact."

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080501/NEWS02/805010309/1009/NEWS01

Posted by lois at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

FL: Money for prisons, cuts for schools

The Florida Times-Union
May 1, 2008
Money for prisons, cuts for schools
By RON LITTLEPAGE
The Times-Union
Millions of dollars for prisons, sure.
--------------------------------------------------

Money for schools, not so much.

The lock-'em-up Florida Legislature is set to approve a budget that includes $305 million to build three new prisons.

At the same time, spending for public schools would be cut by $332 million.

Hello. It's cheaper to educate the state's children - which leads to a good job and a stable life - than it is to put a criminal behind bars.

Apparently, that message hasn't sunk in with the dunderheads in Tallahassee.

This isn't a decrease in hoped for spending, which is sometimes the case in budgetary sleight of hand. These cuts are real.

Statewide, the amount of money coming from the state for each student will be about $130 less than it was for this school year.

In Duval County, the net effect of this cut, plus previous reductions and increases in fixed costs will be a shortfall of about $70 million for the next school year.

That means programs will be chopped, parents and students will be unhappy, and jobs likely will be lost.

Andy Ford is the president of the Florida Education Association, the state teachers union, which has more than 140,000 members. He issued a statement Wednesday blasting the Legislature.

"After listening to the governor and legislative leaders unceasingly promise to hold education harmless so that Floridians would approve Amendment 1 in January, we now see that those were nothing but empty promises," Ford said.

Ford said there were other choices instead of cutting money for schools:

- Dip deeper into the state's rainy day funds.

- Collect sales taxes on Internet businesses.

- End sales tax exemptions on sports stadium skyboxes, charter fishing boats, ostrich and livestock feed, health clubs and dozens of other exemptions.

- Increase taxes on cigarette and alcohol sales.

"But instead," Ford said in the statement, "they chose to balance the budget on the backs of children in our public schools. That's more than disappointing; it's irresponsible."

A study released earlier this year by the Pew Center on the States found that Florida's inmate population increased from 53,000 in 1997 to more than 97,000 in 2007, the largest increase in the nation.

The study projected that by 2013, Florida's inmate population would grow to 125,000.

According to the Florida Department of Corrections, it costs the state about $20,000 a year to house an inmate.

With this budget, the state will be spending about $7,000 a year per student.

Clearly, the orientation session for legislators should include remedial math.
http://cgi.jacksonville.com/cgi-bin/printit.cgi?story=ZZNOSTORYZZ

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