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June 30, 2008

2 Editorials on Expanding Democracy & Disenfranchisement

June 30, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Expanding Democracy in Florida

Among the world’s democracies, the United States is uniquely unforgiving in denying ex-offenders the right to vote. Nowhere is the problem worse than in Florida, where criminal justice experts estimate that as many as 950,000 felons are barred from the voting booth.

Last year, Gov. Charlie Crist pushed through new rules that made it easier for some ex-offenders to become full citizens and helped restore voting rights to more than 100,000 former prisoners. But this is well short of what’s needed — a complete overhaul of a wildly illogical system.

In most states, inmates win back their voting rights as soon as they are released from prison or when they complete parole or probation. One big reason that does not happen in Florida is that state law requires felons to first make restitution to their victims. And until their voting rights are restored, former prisoners are barred from scores of state-regulated occupations for which the restoration of voting rights is listed as a condition of employment.

Quite apart from the fact that it is undemocratic to bar people from the voting booth because they owe money, the system is transparently counterproductive since it prevents people from landing the jobs they will need to make restitution. Denying ex-offenders a chance to make an honest living is a sure way to drive them back to jail.

The system also requires extensive and unnecessary background checks before voting rights can be restored for some applicants, making it hard to reduce the backlog. Florida could clear up that backlog in a hurry, treat all ex-offenders fairly and enhance democracy by automatically restoring voting rights to inmates who have completed their sentences.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/opinion/30mon3.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

GLOBE EDITORIAL
Out of jail, on the rolls

June 24, 2008

VOTING IS a fundamental right, not a privilege for the virtuous. And yet 10 states permanently restrict the voting rights of some or all felons, and 25 more deny the franchise to those out on parole, according to a compelling new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. While these measures might satisfy a desire to punish law-breakers, they also add to the alienation of ex-cons - and are therefore likely to hurt rather than help public safety.

The voting rights of ex-felons are - bizarrely - decided on a state by state basis. Until a ballot question tightened the rules eight years ago, Massachusetts allowed incarcerated prisoners to vote. Even now, the Commonwealth restores prisoners' right to vote upon their release - a practice that the Brennan Center urges more restrictive states to adopt. The center is also touting federal legislation that would guarantee 4 million released prisoners the right to vote at least in federal elections.

Bans on voting by ex-cons bespeak a kind of paranoia - as if politically astute criminals would take control of the government and repeal all the laws. In fact, ex-cons are likely to be disconnected from politics and economic life. Their disenfranchisement also dampens the voting power of African-Americans and other minority communities with high incarceration rates.

The long-term disenfranchisement of ex-cons creates opportunities for mischief. In 2000, Florida denied the vote to innocent people with names similar to those in a national database of felons.

But there are more hopeful signs. In 2006 Rhode Island voted to restore the franchise to prisoners upon their release, and the report points to reforms in Iowa, Maryland, and even Florida. Legislators and voters are realizing that most prisoners eventually get out, and need to find a place in society. Restoring their right to vote can only help.

Posted by lois at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)

JJPL AND FFLIC WIN HISTORIC VICTORY WITH CLOSURE OF JETSON YOUTH PRISON

The results of years of litigation, media advocacy and family organizing reached a high point in 2003-2004 with the closure of the hyper-violent Tallulah youth prison and sweeping juvenile justice reform legislation, requiring a change from a punitive juvenile system to a rehabilitative system based on the highly effective Missouri model. The Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003 required the move away from large youth prisons to small, regional, home-like secure care facilities close to children's homes, an increase in evidence-based alternatives to incarceration programs and a decrease in the number of non-violent children sent to secure care.

In spite of the ground-breaking legislation, juvenile justice reform had come to a standstill over the past year, with the three large youth prisons deteriorating, new reports of abuse in Jetson, and no movement to build the small, regional rehabilitative facilities and alternative programs required by the sweeping reforms JJPL and FFLIC helped pass in 2003. Jetson was the site of both widespread violence and, recently, the tragic death of a child who was just three weeks away from his release date.

JJPL and FFLIC stepped up pressure for reform through widespread media
coverage including a series of articles in the Baton Rouge Advocate such as, "Prison Problems Return: Juvenile Prison Reform has Stalled, Critics Say" (4/17/08) and "Jetson Closure Pushed" (4/19/08) and two New York Times editorials "Louisiana Tries Again" (5/29/2008) and "Louisiana: Closing an Abusive'Center for Youth'" (6/18/08)[1] Media profiles of youth who were incarcerated in Jetson for minor offenses, such as a teenager who served four years for stealing his mother's necklace to give to his girlfriend for Christmas and suffered violence and brutality in the facility,[2] drew attention to the fact that more than 60 percent of youth in Louisiana's juvenile prisons are non-violent.

The bill passed unanimously in the House and with only one opposition vote in the Senate, signaling a renewed commitment to reform. This means that smaller more regionalized facilities that focus on rehabilitation will be built, more children will be directed into community-based alternatives to incarceration, and that the antiquated youth prison known as the Jetson Correctional Center for Youth will no longer house children as of 2009.

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

June 28, 2008

CA: Dispute over California prison crowding to go to trial. A court-appointed referee tells federal judges that state officials and others have failed to settle the case of poor inmate healthcare.

From the Los Angeles Times
Dispute over California prison crowding to go to trial
A court-appointed referee tells federal judges that state officials and others have failed to settle the case of poor inmate healthcare.
By Tim Reiterman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 28, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — Attempts to settle a case on California's crowded prisons have reached an impasse over the issue of how many inmates the lockups should hold.

The failure paves the way for a trial Nov. 17 that could lead a three-judge panel to order mass releases.

On May 30, federal judges gave the parties in the complex litigation a 30-day extension to strike a deal. After hearing a court-appointed referee's report Friday on the stalled talks, the judges said they would go ahead with a trial to determine whether overcrowding is the primary cause of unconstitutionally poor medical and mental healthcare in the state's 33 prisons.

Referee Elwood Lui, who presided over negotiations among state officials, prisoners' rights attorneys and other parties, said, "We were not able to bring the ball across the goal line."

Andrea Hoch, the governor's legal affairs secretary, said: "Agreement on a population level is key because all other settlement terms flow from that one item."

Lui and Hoch expressed hope that an accord still could be reached before the trial.

Currently, 158,000 inmates are housed in California's adult prisons. Liu proposed setting the population at 158% of designed capacity -- which under existing conditions would translate to 132,500 people -- by Sept. 15, 2012.

To help reduce the gap, parole violators and prisoners with short sentences would be sent to county-run programs instead of state penitentiaries.

But in a report unsealed Friday, Liu said state officials and plaintiffs in two civil rights suits could not agree on a population level, benchmarks for achieving such a goal or a completion date for a population reduction.

Republican lawmakers and 20 district attorneys, who intervened in the case, questioned whether overcrowding is the primary cause of inadequate healthcare. They opposed population caps and the diversion of low-risk inmates, citing public safety concerns.

They also argued that overcrowding would be addressed through Assembly Bill 900, which passed last year and authorized $7.4 billion in bonds to add 53,000 beds, and through a court-appointed receiver who has sought $7 billion in borrowing for 10,000 additional medical beds.

"With all the promising work in progress designed to alleviate the conditions that gave rise to the possible need for a prisoner release order . . . a settlement . . . does not need a prison population cap in order to succeed at this time," wrote William Mitchell, Riverside County assistant district attorney and lead counsel for the intervening district attorneys.

Steven Kaufhold, a lawyer for the Republican legislators, said in an interview, "These are large problems and are not going to be solved in a month or by November. . . . Turning [prisoners] loose is not necessarily going to help medical or mental health."

The judges expressed skepticism about the ability of legislative action or the court-appointed receiver in charge of prison healthcare to solve the long-standing care problems any time soon.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson said the receiver estimated it would take three to five years to get the system in order.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton said: "We're told there are people dying [unnecessarily] every day."

Don Specter of the Prison Law Office, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said talks broke off Monday.

"Even if we do resume talks," he said, "the trial will go ahead unless we settle the case."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons28-2008jun28,0,7495253.story

Posted by lois at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2008

The Sentencing Project's response to George Will's Column: "More Prisons, Less Crime"

The Sentencing Project
www.sentencingproject.org

Do More Prisoners Equal Less Crime? A Response to George Will

In a recent syndicated column (“More Prisons, Less Crime,” Washington Post, June 22, 2008), commentator George Will argues that the world record incarceration rate in the United States has produced safer streets and has been beneficial in particular to African Americans, who are disproportionately victims of crime. Will’s selective use of data and limited vision provide an inaccurate portrayal of current criminal justice policy and its effects. Following is an assessment of some of the key arguments raised in the column.

“Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which ’society’ writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.”

Decades of research documents that people in low-income, minority communities are at greater risk of entering the criminal justice system because of the paucity of prevention programs, early intervention programs, and alternatives to incarceration. While privately run social services programs are widely available in most middle and upper class communities, their limited presence where they are most needed means that the first “intervention” that those less fortunate encounter is often prison.

Evidence-based social programs that address the contributing factors to crime have been demonstrated to be more cost-effective than incarceration. Research shows that quality preschool programs can save the public $17 for each dollar that is invested. Other programs with documented cost-effectiveness include initiatives to improve high school graduation rates and a variety of substance abuse treatment strategies.

“…Obama said that ‘more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities.’ Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail.”

Will is technically correct that Senator Obama misspoke in his reference to young black men, as opposed to black men of all ages. But current and projected rates of incarceration for black men are indeed dramatic. One of every nine black males in the age group 20-34 is in prison or jail on any given day, and if current trends continue one of every three black males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.

“…from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population”

Will is both wrong and misleading on this statistic. First, the violent offense proportion of the state prison population increase, 75%, was substantial, but did not account for “all of the increase.” More importantly, the crisis of incarceration in the U.S. did not begin in 1999. In fact, the incarcerated population has been rising at a dramatic rate for more than three decades. The combined prison and jail population has risen by more than 600% since 1972, increasing from 300,000 to 2.3 million today. A longer term view of the rise in the prison and jail population shows that changes in drug policy have been most significant in contributing to this expansion. From 1980 to today, the number of drug offenders in prison and jail has risen by 1100%, from 41,000 to 500,000.

“In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer.”

The unprecedented rise in the prison population described above was brought about primarily as a result of changes in policy, not crime rates. State and federal legislatures passed numerous “tough on crime” laws intended to put more people in prison and keep them there longer than in the past. An analysis of incarceration patterns between 1980 and 2001 by noted criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck concluded that fluctuations in crime rates played no role in the 316% growth in imprisonment. The researchers found that the entire growth was related to changes in sentencing policy, with 53% attributable to an increased likelihood of incarceration following an arrest and 47% resulting from increased time served in prison.

“But [Heather] Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offending.”

While differential crime offending is one contributing factor to racial disparities in prison, a wealth of research documents that it only explains a portion of the patterns in imprisonment. A comprehensive review of research in the field conducted for the National Institute of Justice concluded that "race and ethnicity do play an important role in contemporary sentencing decisions. Black and Hispanic offenders -- and particularly those who are young, male, or unemployed -- are more likely than their white counterparts to be sentenced to prison; in some jurisdictions, they also receive longer sentences...than do similarly situated white offenders."

“As for the charge that the incarceration rate of blacks is substantially explained by more severe federal sentences for crack as opposed to powder-cocaine defendants…[citing Mac Donald] ‘it’s going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so [federal] crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006.’”

The movement to reform federal penalties for crack cocaine offenses is not based on the assumption that these policies represent the entire problem of disparity in the criminal justice system. Instead, as respected organizations including the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the American Bar Association have documented, the crack penalties are both ineffective as drug policy and contribute to unwarranted racial disparities. They are also representative of many of the misguided policies and practices of the “war on drugs,” which has resulted in over-incarceration of low-level offenders and disproportionate targeting of communities of color.

“ . . . 10 years of scholarly studies ‘have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime . . . [a] high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.’”

The relationship between incarceration and crime is far more complicated than is suggested by this quote. During the 1990s, a time of historic declines in crime, there was no discernible correlation between incarceration rates and criminal offending. Between 1991 and 1998, states with above average increases in the rate of incarceration (72%) experienced a 13% decrease in crime rates. But states with below average increases in the rate of incarceration (30%) actually experienced a greater decline in crime rates, 17%. During this time the notable “tough on crime” state of Texas experienced a 144% rise in incarceration between 1991 and 1998, and its crime rate fell 35%. However, New York’s crime rate declined by a greater extent, 43%, during this period, despite an increase of incarceration of only 24%. New York continues to experience historic lows in crime while its prison population continues to decline, and there is widespread discussion of closing four prisons in the state because of excess capacity.

In truth, imprisonment has only played a limited role in reducing crime. An analysis of the drop in crime during the 1990s estimated that the growth of imprisonment accounted for about one-quarter of the decline in violent crime. Other contributing factors likely included a growing economy, changes in drug market dynamics, strategic policing, and community engagement in crime prevention efforts. While imprisonment may work at some level to reduce crime through deterrence and incapacitation, there is little evidence supporting the deterrent effect of increasingly longer prison sentences. Research suggests that any deterrent effect is more a function of the certainty of punishment, not the severity.

“‘Deterrence works.’ [Quoting Heather MacDonald] It works especially on behalf of blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by black men.”

While prison has had only a limited impact on crime, it is increasingly resulting in negative consequences for individuals, families, and communities. As a result of mass incarceration there are now 1.5 million children with a parent in prison, including 1 in 14 African American children.

African American communities are also affected by the challenges of reentry for the 700,000 people leaving prison each year. Many persons leaving prison are ill-equipped to handle life on the outside because they have received few services for mental health, substance abuse, education, and vocational skill-building programming while incarcerated.

Upon leaving prison or jail, individuals encounter a tangle of legal restrictions which severely limit their ability to become productive members of society. In addition to longstanding barriers to employment and education, in recent years policymakers have enacted a host of restrictions, many applying solely to drug offenders. These include a federal ban on welfare and food stamps for those with a felony drug conviction, a federal mandate that limits access to public housing, and restrictions on student loans for higher education.

An estimated 5.3 million individuals are unable to vote because of laws that deny this fundamental right to participate in the democratic process to those with felony convictions. These restrictions fall disproportionately on African Americans, with13% of black males currently unable to vote. These policies affect black communities as a whole, whereby even persons who are not disenfranchised experience vote dilution as a result of high rates of legal disenfranchisement in their communities.

Conclusion

Issues of crime and justice are critical ones for all Americans. As such, we need to encourage a national dialogue on promoting safety that assesses the appropriate balance of approaches among prevention, strengthening communities, and criminal justice sanctions. For more than three decades our nation has made unprecedented investments in prison expansion at the expense of other policy options. We now need a national dialogue that is centered on evidence-based research regarding the relative effectiveness of various interventions. Such a dialogue would produce better public safety outcomes for all Americans.

June 28, 2008

Posted by lois at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2008

UK: Plan to shut women's jails is shelved

From (London) Times Online
June 24, 2008
Plan to shut women's jails is shelved
Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

Radical proposals to close all 13 women's jails in England and Wales and replace them with small house units holding up to 20 offenders were today rejected by the Government.

A working party within the Ministry of Justice finally buried the key plan from a review of women in the justice system after concluding that shutting the existing jails over the next decade and replacing them with up to 150 smaller units was impractical.

Today's announcement is a bitter blow to penal reform groups who had put their trust in key female members of the Government, including those in the Justice Ministry and Attorney-General's office, being able to deliver the biggest shake-up in the way female offenders are treated in prisons.

Instead the Ministry of Justice highlighted initiatives to support women including pilot projects in five jails in which a new search technique is being used which does not require them to remove their underwear.

The women's prison population is currently 4,502 — three lower than the all time record — and Ministry of Justice sources said that no women’s jails are to close.

Baroness Corston proposed closing women’s jails and replacing them with a network of small units located in city centres and run by families of women but even as her report was published last year Ministry of Justice sources made clear there was no money to implement such an ambitious and controversial proposal.

The Ministry of Justice review concluded that the model of small units would be unable to provide on site all the facilities needed to support and help women prisoners including making it easier for families to visit and meeting their resettlement needs. Although the review team accepted the principle of small units it said there were weaknesses including providing the full range of services including education, drug treatment and running courses to deal with the offending behaviour.

"A particular risk would be to the delivery of small scale services to meet particularly complex needs, as we may not be able to gather enough offenders in any one location to deliver efficiently without increasing movement around the estate," the Justice Ministry said today.

It also said that some women consulted about the proposal had expressed concern about the increased likelihood of bullying in a potentially claustrophobic environment of small units.

The Justice Ministry also said that creating small units might mean women having to be moved more frequently to other units where services for particular problems such as drug and alcohol abuse are available.

It also warned that there would a significant challenge for the prison service to handle high to low risk women offenders in up to 150 units around England and Wales.

Instead of the radical reform outlined by Baroness Corston, the Ministry is to create a 77-place wing within Bronzefleld women's jail in Middlesex which has been designed specifically to meet women’s needs. At two other women's prisons accommodation is to be provided adjacent to the jail for women to spend time with their children.

The Prison Reform Trust, a penal reform group, said that progress towards implementing the proposals from Baroness Corston's review was painfully slow. Juliet Lyon, director of the trust, said: "‘It’s clear that this government is so busy planning how to waste billions of public money on so-called ‘Titan’ prisons that it cannot find the time or money to create a decent, effective justice system for women. A national network of women’s supervision and support centres would enable women offenders to beat addiction, receive mental healthcare, get out of debt and gain skills to work and look after their children."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4205516.ece

Posted by lois at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)

MA CORI Reform Update

June 24, 2008
MA CORI Reform Update
The following information regarding the status of CORI legislation is based on an update by Aaron Tanaka of the Boston Worker's Alliance (BWA), an organizational member of the Mass. Alliance to Reform CORI to which CJCP belongs. There are four sections:

1) New Health and Human Services Regulations
2) Urgent CORI Bill Update
3) Call for Action!
4) Fact Sheets and Background

1) Executive Office of Health and Human Service (EOHHS) CORI regulations

In January of 2008, Governor Deval Patrick signed Executive Order No. 495 "Regarding the Use and Dissemination of Criminal Record Information." The campaign to secure an Executive Order on CORI was led by the BWA, the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, and Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner along with the CJPC. While broader efforts for CORI reform were still stalled in the legislature, advocates pressed Patrick to make good on his campaign promises to take timely and meaningful action on CORI. While the Executive Order and the proposed CORI bill falls short of the Governor's lofty campaign rhetoric, several key provisions will have positive, broad scale impacts for job seekers across the Commonwealth.

Within the Executive Order, three central reforms have been identified as key victories for the CORI reform movement.

CORI Reform Update

The first major reform is a requirement for employers receiving CORI reports to complete training on how to properly read the records. CORI reports are written in difficult to decipher code and employers are often unable to distinguish between cases that were dismissed or found not guilty and those resulting in a conviction. A single incident also often results in multiple entries on a CORI, leading employers who are unable to read records to assume that the applicant was arrested more than once. Under the new regulations, employers must pass a written examination on reading a CORI before being certified to receive the sensitive data.

A second major reform will create Fair Hiring policies for all state agencies that hire public workers. Through the Executive Order, a CORI check can only be conducted after an applicant has received an interview and is considered otherwise qualified for the position. The Executive Order moves the CORI check to the last step in the hiring process, and prevents applicants from being weeded out before having their resume, references and motivation considered. As the largest employer in the Commonwealth, these changes to the state's internal hiring policies will have broad implications for tens of thousands of government jobs.

Third, the Executive Order broadly reformed regulations that prevent those with CORI from working in health and human service fields. Previous Health and Human Service regulations required employers to follow a crime table that disqualified many CORI applicants from work. Additinally, an employer was only allowed to hire people with certain CORIs by obtaining a positive letter from a law enforcement agent or by paying a certified counselor for a mental health evaluation of the applicant. This impractical requirement had effectively barred qualified health care professionals with CORI from obtaining work.

Changes to the Executive Office of Health and Human Service regulations have now reopened this large employment sector to those with criminal records. The new regulations remove the assumed disqualification of those with CORI, and instruct health agencies to only consider misdemeanors that are less than 5 years old and felonies that under 10 years old. The requirement to obtain a letter from law enforcement or from a therapist has also been removed, and a number of crimes have been removed from the crime tables. New EOHHS are also expected to remove the criminal record check box from initial job applications forms.

These EOHHS regulations affect 495 state health and human service agencies, and also apply to the tens of thousands of businesses and agencies that receive contracts from the Health and Human Services Department. In total, the new CORI friendly regulations will affect over 180,000 employees in the human services field across the Commonwealth.

2) Urgent CORI Bill Update

The state legislature is planning to bring a CORI reform bill to a vote before the end of this session. If a bill does not pass before summer recess on July 31st, no new reforms will be considered until 2009. Currently, CORI reform has been stalled in the Judiciary Committee chaired by State Rep. Eugene O'Flaherty (D., Chelsea,) and State Senator Robert Creedon (D., Brockton). The next month represents a critical window to gain desperately needed reforms.

Sealing Old CORI

The Judiciary Committee has settled on Governor Patrick's timid recommendations to reduce the sealing periods to 5 years for misdemeanor and 10 years for a felony from the current 10 years for misdemeanor and 15 or felony. Because the forthcoming bill does not go far enough, the Mass Alliance to Reform CORI continues to build legislative support for 3 and 7 years respectively and will introduce an amendment once a bill is released.

"Ban the Box"

The Chairs are still undecided regarding whether to include our key demand to remove the CORI question from all initial job application forms. Divulging a criminal history in an initial application discourages employers from considering resumes, references or relevance of the offense.

Based solely on the job form, employers are 50% less likely to offer interviews to white applicants and 64% less likely to callback black applicants with a record (Statistics from the BWA factsheet. See below for a more complete discussion.) Ending upfront discrimination by banning the box would visibly improve job access for residents across the state.

As O'Flaherty and Creedon are still undecided on this provision, widespread public pressure can help ensure that the "ban the box" is included in the upcoming bill. Boston and Cambridge have already removed the criminal question from job applications, and we are calling on the state to expand those model guidelines to all Massachusetts employers.

3) Call for Action!

* Call your legislators and tell them to support CORI Reform. Ask your representative to speak with Chairman O'Flaherty in support of removing the criminal history question from all initial job applications and moving the bill out of committee with a positive recommendation.

Find out who your state representative is at www.wheredoivotema.com / then call the State House operator at (617) 722-2000 to get connected.

* Target the following key decision makers. Write an email, make a phone call or request a meeting! We are a grassroots coalition, so please gather your friends or share your organizational clout to help influence these key politicians.

Rep. Eugene O'Flaherty - 617 722-2396 / :Rep.GeneOFlaherty@Hou.State.MA.US
"Please remove the criminal record question from all initial job application forms. Employers should only consider criminal records for applicants who are otherwise qualified for the job. "

Speaker Sal DiMasi - 617 722-2500 / Rep.SalvatoreDiMasi@Hou.State.MA.US
"Please ensure that a CORI bill is passed this session before summer recess. Reduce the sealing period to 3 and 7 and take the CORI question off of all job applications."

Governor Deval Patrick - 617 725-4005/ Governor Patrick email -
"Please fulfill your campaign promises and your public commitment to pass CORI reform this year. Ensure that the criminal record question is removed from all initial job application forms."

Please email info@cjpc.org to let us know what you have done and any response you receive so we can track legislators. If you need help in meeting with your legislator, call Joel Pentlarge, CJPC Interim Executive Director at 617-426-5222 or Jpentlarge@cjpc.org .

Please help spread the word and thank you for supporting this grassroots movement for jobs, dignity and justice. The time for change is now!

4) Fact Sheets and Background

(a) Remove the Question from Initial Job Applications

The proposed amendment removes the criminal record question from initial jobs application forms. This measure encourages employers to consider the skills and qualifications of an applicant before considering the existence of a criminal history. Removing the criminal record question from initial job applications alters the timing of a criminal record inquiry, but does not limit an employers' access to such information.

Employers who use job applications to screen ex-offenders must delay criminal record inquires until after the applicant is interviewed and deemed otherwise qualified for a position.

According to the BWA employers who use initial employment applications to screen ex-offenders have grown from 56% in 1996 to over 80% of all employers in 2004. Once someone with a CORI record self-reports a criminal history on a job application, most employers will not consider resumes, references or personal character. Based solely on the criminal record question, employers are 50% less likely to offer interviews to white applicants and 64% less likely to interview black applicants. This type of job discrimination effectively bans people with CORIs from most entry-level jobs, and causes employers to overlook skilled members of our workforce.

In 2004-2005 Boston instituted model CORI reforms by removing the criminal history question from all municipal job applications and requiring over 8,000 private city vendors to also revise their application forms. Following Boston's lead, cities across the country including Cambridge, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Austin, San Francisco, and Oakland removed the question from job applications and moved criminal history inquiries to the last step in the hiring process. Any state level CORI reform should begin with the expansion of the Boston and Cambridge successful hiring model to all Massachusetts state, municipal and private employers.

(b) Reduce the Waiting Period to Seal CORIs

Reduce the sealing period of CORI reports to 3 years for misdemeanors and 7 years for felonies after court supervision is complete.

Studies across the country by state Departments of Corrections show rates of recidivism are high in the first two years after release, but are significantly lower in the third year, and approach zero risk by the fifth year. Someone who has not re-offended within 7 years have less than a 1% recidivism rate.. "Almost half (47%) of inmates who recidivated did so within one year of being released; by 18 months after release, 67percent of those who recidivated had returned to prison."(Massachusetts Recidivism Study, pg.2) Those individuals who have not re-offended within 7 years have less than a 1% recidivism rate..

Key elements of the proposed amendments are:

· Law enforcement agencies as well as agencies that work with vulnerable populations would maintain access to sealed records.

· Records can only remain sealed if a person does not violate the law again. Any new conviction revives the old convictions, and restarts the waiting period.

· Sex offense records and crimes against children would not be changed by this proposal

Other States

Other states have adopted sealing periods that are significantly shorter than the current Massachusetts waiting time of 10 years for a misdemeanor and 15 years for a felony. Massachusetts should join other states and adopt CORI reform that increases the opportunities for people with CORI records to become fully integrated members of society.

Sample States:

· Michigan: An individual convicted of no more than one offense can have the conviction record set aside 5 years after imposition or completion of sentence, whichever is later. Certain traffic offenses, certain sexual offenses, and some serious offenses cannot be sealed. (In Massachusetts, traffic offenses which carry no incarceration penalty are not a part of CORI, according to CMR 803.203)

· Utah: 15 years for certain multiple "class B and C" misdemeanors, 10 years for alcohol- or drug related traffic offense; otherwise 7 years for most felonies and 3-5 years for a misdemeanor. .

· Oregon: Except for certain violent, sexual, and traffic offenses, many adult convictions may be sealed after 3 years after the completion of the sentence, including class C felonies, misdemeanors for which imprisonment may be imposed.

· Ohio: Non-convictions can be sealed. First offenders may apply to have their record expunged 3 years after a felony conviction, or 1 year after a misdemeanor conviction. Except for murder and certain sexual offenses, juvenile adjudications of unruliness and delinquency may be sealed after 2 years have elapsed since discharge.

Reducing the long waiting period to seal CORIs promotes the idea that employers should only access records that matter, and to the degree that it increases employment of those with criminal records, and employment of ex-offenders is major factor in reducing recidivism which reduces crime.

Posted by lois at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Venezuela: Amid Despair in a Venezuelan Prison, Strains of Hope From a Music Program

June 23, 2008
Los Teques Journal
Amid Despair in a Venezuelan Prison, Strains of Hope From a Music Program
By SIMON ROMERO
NY Times

LOS TEQUES, Venezuela — When Nurul Asyiqin Ahmad was taken seven months ago to her cell at the National Institute of Feminine Orientation, a prison perched on a hill in this city of slums on the outskirts of Caracas, learning how to play Beethoven was one of the last things on her mind.

“The despair gripped me, like a nightmare had become my life,” said Ms. Ahmad, 26, a shy law student from Malaysia who claims she is innocent of charges of trying to smuggle cocaine on a flight from Caracas to Paris. “But when the music begins, I am lifted away from this place.” Ms. Ahmad plays violin and sings in the prison’s orchestra.

In a project extending Venezuela’s renowned system of youth orchestras to some of the country’s most hardened prisons, Ms. Ahmad and hundreds of other prisoners are learning a repertory that includes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and folk songs from the Venezuelan plains.

The budding musicians include murderers, kidnappers, thieves and, here at the women’s prison, dozens of narcomulas, or drug mules, as small-scale drug smugglers are called. The project, which began a year ago, is expanding this year to five prisons from three.

“This is our attempt to achieve the humanization of prison life,” said Kleiberth Lenin Mora, 32, a lawyer who helped create the prison orchestras, modeling them on the system that teaches tens of thousands of poor children in Venezuela classical music. “We start with the simple idea that performing music lifts the human being to another level.”

Few nations have prison systems as much in need of humanizing as Venezuela, where 498 inmates out of a total population of 21,201 were killed in 2007, according to the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, a group that monitors prison violence.

The women’s prison, the scene of gang fights and hunger strikes by inmates in recent months, is not immune to this violence. But it is not all bleak. Inmates have free access to the Internet. They can pay to use cellphones. A commissary sells soft drinks and junk food.

And now INOF (pronounced like the word “enough”), the acronym the prison is known by in Spanish, has its orchestra, which most of the more than 300 women incarcerated here opt to avoid. But the 40 or so who have joined find themselves enmeshed in an experience that was unexpected in their lives in prison and in their lives out of prison.

“Before this my music was reggaetón,” said Irma González, 29, a street vendor serving a six-year sentence for robbery, referring to the fusion of reggae, hip-hop and Latin pop that is widely popular in Venezuelan slums. Now she plays the double bass. Her proudest moment, she said, was when her four children, ages 14, 13, 10 and 9, recently came here to watch her play.

“When they applauded me, I finally felt useful in this life,” said Ms. González. Like other participants, she hopes to reduce her term by playing in the orchestra, which judges may consider the equivalent of hours of study.

Officials say it is too early to tell whether the project will improve overall conditions here and at the two prisons for men where it started, in the Andean states of Mérida and Táchira. No stars have emerged like Gustavo Dudamel, the 27-year-old from the youth-orchestra system named as the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

For now, the project, which receives $3 million in funding from President Hugo Chávez’s government and the Inter-American Development Bank, takes baby steps. It staged its first public performance last month in Teresa Carreño Theater in Caracas. And it insists its participants hew to a few specific rules.

For instance, no one can threaten the professors, many of whom are drawn from the youth-orchestra system. Everyone must speak clearly during discussions in the daily practice sessions. Everyone must stand up straight and take care of his or her instrument. Smoking and chewing tobacco are not allowed.

The orchestra at INOF is one of the most cosmopolitan in Venezuela. Many of the inmates are foreigners arrested on drug-smuggling charges. Women from Colombia, Spain, Malaysia and the Netherlands play instruments or sing in the chorus alongside Venezuelans.

“I drain away my bad thoughts in the orchestra,” said Joanny Aldana, 29, a viola player serving a nine-year sentence for kidnapping and auto theft. Like some of the other inmates, she is imprisoned here with her child, a 2-year-old daughter. Still, she despairs sometimes.

“There’s the pain of my children, of having destroyed my life, my youth,” Ms. Aldana said.

Perhaps no amount of music can make up for such loss. Perhaps that explains the fervor with which some of the women play their instruments or sing. It is not uncommon to see one of them shedding a tear when a certain note is struck.

For Yusveisy Torrealba, 18, that moment comes when the chorus sings a few words from “Caramba,” the folk song by the Venezuelan composer Otilio Galíndez performed with the cuatro, a four-string guitar. Ms. Torrealba was caught in April taking cocaine on a flight to Orlando, Fla.

In her soft voice, she sang these lines for a visitor one recent afternoon:

Caramba, my love, caramba

The things we have missed

The gossip I could only hear

Between the rocks of the river.

“Caramba,” she repeated quietly, as if contemplating how much time remained in an eight-year sentence that began last month. “The only thing keeping me together is this music.”

Sandra La Fuente P. contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/world/americas/23venezuela.html?scp=3&sq=Venezuela&st=nyt

Posted by lois at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)

Faith takes a leap in jailhouse conversions. New programs test theory that religion can salvage "criminals"

"Bolstered by President Bush's recent signing of the Second Chance Act, which promises more money for faith-based programs to help rehabilitate prisoners,corrections officials and religious volunteers are testing the largely unproven theory that faith can not only salvage criminals, but ‹ in the long run ‹ make the rest of us safer, too."

June 22, 2008
Faith takes a leap in jailhouse conversions
New programs test theory that religion can salvage "criminals"
By KEVIN SIMPSON
Denver Post
DENVER — Like countless others before him, Jonathan Willis rediscovered God in the solitude of a jail cell, 10 months after he'd been thrown into the Adams County lockup to await trial for murder.

The blur of his crimes crystallized: The coke binge, the break-in, the brutal beating. Then desperation, arrest and, once in jail, the hell-raising that landed him in solitary.

"It went from dream to reality," recalls Willis, 25. "When you reflect, with all the distraction cut away, you're left with the core of life — what matters."

He cried out to God, who answered with a challenge to get serious about his faith. He read the Bible, and the words spoke to him anew. His heart changed.

It was a classic jailhouse conversion.

"It's natural to reach out to God in a period of duress," said Michael Spotts, a volunteer assistant chaplain at the Adams County facility who witnessed the change in Willis. "The thing that tinges the jailhouse conversion with cynicism is that people like Jonathan killed someone. It's inexcusable, horrible. But the genuineness of conversion can be found in absolute confession of what was done wrong, a seeking of repentance."

Spiritual transformation
Against the advice of his lawyer, Willis pled guilty, knowing that he was essentially sentencing himself to life without the possibility of parole.

His spiritual transformation began a chain reaction that already has touched others locked up around him. And, in a broader sense, it touched on a concept of faith-based rehabilitation that's gaining traction as a burgeoning prison population now is going back into the community.

Bolstered by President Bush's recent signing of the Second Chance Act, which promises more money for faith-based programs to help rehabilitate prisoners, corrections officials and religious volunteers are testing the largely unproven theory that faith can not only salvage criminals, but — in the long run — make the rest of us safer, too.

Nearly 700,000 inmates return to the community each year nationwide.

Faith and prisons have been intertwined since the dawn of corrections, with criminal behavior often addressed as a moral issue. But church-and-state legal concerns temper the search for new faith-based ways to attack recidivism, which approaches 70 percent, according to one Department of Justice report.

A new solution?
In Colorado, a volunteer network of chaplains offers 216 programs and the Department of Corrections recognizes 36 faiths. Although those traditions range from Asatru, a polytheistic Norse religion, to Native American rituals to nature-based Wicca, the vast majority of volunteers represent Christian denominations.

Credible research on the effectiveness of faith-based programs remains sparse and inconclusive. But corrections experts and volunteers agree that such efforts, coupled with education, counseling and other therapies, could be part of the solution.

"I get asked all the time what's the best predictor of success when somebody's coming out of prison," says Ari Zavaras, executive director of Colorado's DOC. "Without question, if somebody had a true spiritual conversion — not the jailhouse kind that gets all the jokes, but the kind where they develop a spiritual base — I'd be almost able to bet a year's pay without worry that they're not going to re-offend."

On a pleasant spring evening, about 70 offenders — roughly half the inmates at the minimum-security Camp George West in Golden — crowd a concrete-floored gymnasium to take in two hours of music, humor, feats of strength and Christian testimony.

Strongman and ex-con Mike Benson, who experienced his own jailhouse conversion, takes the stage and proceeds to tear a deck of cards in half, twist a horseshoe into an "S," roll a frying pan into a burrito shape and snap a wooden baseball bat.

After breaking the bat, he briefly holds the two pieces before him to form a cross.

"Before I knew Jesus, this was malicious destruction of property," jokes Benson. "Now, it's ministry."

Prison Fellowship Ministries claims more than 22,000 volunteers at 1,800 institutions.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5849277.html

Posted by lois at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)

CA: Editorial: Turn prisons into places of learning

June 23, 2008
Lompoc Record (CA)
Turn prisons into places of learning

There is a high-noon showdown approaching, and the outcome may have a profound effect on California's future.

The state's massive prison system health-care operations are technically in receivership, and a federal court-appointed overseer last week accused lawmakers and the governor of “deliberate obstruction” with regard to the $7 billion he says is needed to build seven new prison medical facilities.

He threatens to seize the funds needed from the state budget, which is already an estimated $15 billion-plus in arrears.

Lawmakers can laugh about it, if that suits them, but it's no idle threat.

Receiver Clark Kelso, appointed to oversee prison operations the courts believe are being poorly managed by the state, has the power to order such a seizure, and the state would be compelled to pay.

There is more than a little irony here. As of last year, the state was spending more on prisons than on its university system. Prison spending is escalating at the rate of 9 percent a year, compared to 5 percent increases in higher education spending.

By the 2012-13 fiscal year, state spending on its prison system is predicted to average $15.4 billion annually, compared to $15.3 billion for the university system.

Compounding the irony is the fact that California's taxpayers don't get much of a return for the bucks spent on prisons. University graduates, on the other hand, are the keys to our future.

There is direct linkage between education and incarceration spending. While about 4 percent of the general U.S. population is illiterate, in California prisons, the rate runs about 21 percent. More than half of the state's 175,000-plus inmates read below the seventh-grade level, the accepted standard for functional illiteracy.

Perhaps that explains why California, which has the nation's largest inmate population, also has the nation's highest recidivism rate.

We certainly can understand the court receiver's enthusiasm for getting better medical care for inmates in the state system. That would help address the “cruel and unusual” aspect of punishment.

But our elected leaders also need to take their heads out of the sand, and face the fact that one of California's leading growth industries is its prison system. It's very expensive, and the costs are only going to go up - as long as the system operates in such a way as to all-but-guarantee a revolving-door environment that sees the same people recycling through the system.

A good place to start a reform movement would be to offer more education to inmates, who are a true captive audience. Just teaching them to read and write would probably cut the recidivism rate significantly.

Once they learn to read and write, they can be given job skills, maybe some tutoring on how to interact with other humans - without trying to rip them off, or apart.

In other words, take the same approach with prison inmates as the public education system takes with teens in high school.

A solid education in the basic core disciplines, coupled with some refinement of people skills, could pay enormous dividends to the inmates when they walk out of prison, and to California's taxpayers, who now foot the ever-rising bill for warehousing lawbreakers.

This is not a soft-on-crime approach. The worst of the worst among us should and will be punished. All we're saying is that this state spends tens of billions on its prisons, and gets absolutely nothing in return.

If we're going to have a prison industry, at least it should be an industry that has a useful product. Just teaching inmates to read and write effectively would be a good start.

June 23, 2008
http://www.lompocrecord.com/articles/2008/06/23/opinion/062308a.txt

Posted by lois at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2008

VA: Despite Halt in Bed Rentals, Va. Strains to House Inmates

By Anita Kumar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2008; C05

RICHMOND -- Even though Virginia halted a program to rent 1,000 prison beds to other states last week, it still needs to build six prisons in the next six years to keep pace with its escalating inmate population.

A recent report to the secretary of public safety projected that Virginia will add about 1,000 prisoners a year, resulting in an inmate population of 44,700 by 2013. Each new prison would cost an estimated $100 million to build and $25 million a year to operate.

"That's a projection of what's going to be required. We don't have a choice,'' said Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax), chairman of the Virginia State Crime Commission. "It's the way it is."

Despite the state's looming prison bed shortage, the Department of Corrections had planned to rent out 1,000 beds over the next two years to offset $38 million in budget cuts. But Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) on Tuesday ordered the department to stop importing prisoners after local sheriffs complained.

The state spent $32 million last year to add an 800-bed wing to the St. Brides Correctional Center in Chesapeake, but the opening has been indefinitely postponed because the state does not have enough money to operate it, officials said.

Gene M. Johnson, state corrections director, said that without additional out-of-state inmates, he might be forced to lay off some of his 13,000 employees or close some of the agency's 43 facilities.

States across the country are grappling with budget shortfalls because of the sluggish economy. In response to rising construction costs, some have halted prison-building programs and chosen instead to release inmates early or house them in other states.

But Virginia remains on track to build prisons.

Since 1990, the General Assembly has approved spending more than $1 billion for 21,000 additional beds, according to a Senate Finance Committee report. Often the state has built or expanded prisons in rural areas, where land and construction costs are lower and communities view the facilities as an economic plus.

The state spent $74 million to build the 1,024-bed Green Rock Correctional Center in Pittsylvania County, $69 million to build the 1,024-bed Pocahontas State Correctional Center in Tazewell County and $22 million to add 600 beds to the Deerfield Correctional Center in Southampton County. It is spending $101 million to build a 1,024-bed medium-security facility, expected to open in 2010 in Grayson County.

In April, the General Assembly approved spending $8.7 million to begin planning a new prison in Charlotte County and $300,000 to begin planning an $8.6 million, 200-bed expansion in Bland County. The Charlotte prison is expected to become the second in the state run by a private contractor.

Although the state's inmate population is increasing, the rate of incarceration in Virginia remains in line with other states.

The rising number of prisoners can be attributed to several factors, including an increase in new offenders, longer prison sentences, more probation violators and a drop in the number of inmates granted parole. The state abolished parole for crimes committed after Jan. 1, 1995, but thousands of inmates are still eligible for parole under the old law.

This year, legislators considered allowing technical offenders -- a description often used for those who break the terms of probation or parole by using drugs or alcohol -- to be eligible for reduced sentences, diversion programs or cheaper, dorm-style prisons. The Department of Corrections estimates that more than half of technical offenders could be eligible for alternative programs.

Robert Vaughn, staff director for the House Appropriations Committee, said legislators considered a proposal related to technical offenders that would have eliminated the need for 900 prison beds. But legislators abandoned that idea when they could not agree on which offenders would qualify.

Local officials have long sought more state prison beds to relieve crowded jails.

Virginia Beach Sheriff Paul J. Lanteigne sued to force the Department of Corrections to enforce a law that requires the removal from local jails any state inmate sentenced to more than a year in prison. Fairfax County Sheriff Stan G. Barry had considered joining the lawsuit but said all 80 state inmates were removed from his jail days after his complaint was made public.

Virginia began housing out-of-state inmates a decade ago but largely abandoned the practice in 2004, as officials said the space was needed for a growing inmate population. They had resumed renting beds a few weeks ago after the budget shortfall became clear, but Kaine abruptly halted the program last week.

The state will keep about 300 inmates from Wyoming who are at the Pocahontas State Correctional Center and the Wallens Ridge State Prison, both in the southwestern part of the state, bringing in about $14 million over two years. The number of inmates from Wyoming might increase, but no inmates from other states will be accepted.

Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach), vice chairman of the Virginia State Crime Commission, said the projected increase in prisoners is not a surprise to those who monitor the criminal justice system.

Stolle said the Department of Corrections does not have many options for housing inmates, which is why it is sometimes forced to keep inmates in local jails. "It doesn't have any elasticity in the system,'' Stolle said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/21/AR2008062101503.html

Posted by lois at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

June 21, 2008

Jamie Fellner: Onward and Ever Upward -- But Not in a Good Way

June 21, 2008
Onward and Ever Upward -- But Not in a Good Way
Huffington Post
by Jamie Fellner
NEW YORK -- Two new federal reports highlight the profound disconnect in the United States between crime and punishment.

According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the US prison and jail population has now grown to all-time high of 2.3 million. The United States not only incarcerates the greatest number of people in the world, it also incarcerates at the highest rate: last year 762 out of every 100,000 people in the United States were behind bars, a rate five to ten times that of other western democracies.

The endlessly growing rate of incarceration does not, however, reflect growing rates of crime. The newest FBI crime report shows that violent and property crime declined last year, and remain near historical low levels. Indeed, over the last two decades, prison populations have grown steadily regardless of whether crime was up or down, and for some years now the trend has been down.

So why the never-ending prison growth?

The short answer is that for at least a quarter of a century American criminal justice policies have not been very sensible. Prison should be used parsimoniously, reserved for those who have committed such dangerous or egregious crimes that imprisonment is the only commensurate response. Using prisons this way would protect the public, save money and meet human rights requirements.

But this is not how US prisons are utilized. Three ill-considered policies drive incarceration rates.

First: the war on drugs. Launched more than two decades ago, it is still going strong. About one third of all people entering prison with new sentences were convicted of drug charges. Few of them are kingpins or major traffickers. US prisons are swollen with men and women who sell drugs at the retail level or have menial jobs in the drug business as couriers or lookouts. More than two decades of punitive drug policies should have taught the nation a few things: That as long as a demand for drugs exists, there will be a supply. That aggressive drug law enforcement has little effect on the proportion of adults who regularly use hard drugs or even marijuana. That for every low-level drug seller sent to prison, someone else will take his or her job. Unfortunately, politicians seem to be slow learners: they continue to fund this futile and costly war rather than embracing effective and less expensive public health and harm reduction approaches to drug use.

Second: draconian sentencing laws. Politicians running on "tough on crime" platforms in the 1980s and 90s ratcheted up prison sentences by adopting a spate of laws that require imprisonment even for low-level nonviolent crimes and that require long sentences based on one or two criteria - for instance, weight of drugs sold, or a prior record. But in 2008, who really believes a life sentence makes sense for someone whose third offense consists of stealing some videos from Kmart? Who really believes that selling a small quantity of drugs to an adult should yield a decade or more behind bars?

Third: punitive parole practices. Last year, 240,000 people entered prison because their parole had been revoked, about one third of the total incoming population. Parole should be a time of supervision and support to enable former offenders to get their lives together. But too often it's a game of "gotcha." In most cases parole is revoked not because the parolee committed a new crime (although that happens) but because he or she failed urine tests for drug use, did not come to treatment meetings, or in some other way committed a technical violation of the conditions of parole. Offenders on parole should be held accountable for not complying with parole requirements. But there are cheaper and more productive ways to encourage compliance than automatic returns to prison.

The extraordinary rate of incarceration in the US is not necessary to protect the public -- community-based sanctions and treatment for addiction would be even more effective at reducing most kinds of nonviolent crime and at far less cost. Meanwhile, the unnecessary incarceration of Americans damages individuals (few are better off for being in prison), families (children suffer when parents are sent away) and communities (the social capital of already vulnerable communities is further frayed by high incarceration rates.)

People who care about racial justice have spoken up to challenge a prison population that is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. People who believe punishment should fit the crime have spoken up to criticize unduly severe sentences.

But Americans who are concerned about taxes and who want a sound return on public investments, including criminal justice investments, have remained silent in the face of the needlessly expanding, wildly expensive ($49 billion last year) prison population. It is time for them to speak up too. Until they do, the prison population may just continue endlessly and senselessly upward.

Jamie Fellner is senior counsel at Human Rights Watch and author of numerous works on US criminal justice policies.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-fellner/onward-and-ever-upward_b_108382.
html

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

June 19, 2008

VA won't take prisoners from out of state

Va. won't take inmates from out of state
After sheriffs complain, governor abandons plan to raise money for prisons

Thursday, Jun 19, 2008 - 12:09 AM

By TYLER WHITLEY
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

After protests from sheriffs, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has directed the Virginia Department of Corrections to stop housing out-of-state prisoners.

Virginia has taken in 300 inmates from Wyoming, which brings the state $7.2 million annually under a contract that runs through June 20, 2010. Virginia had planned to bring in an additional 700 inmates from other states.

In abandoning a plan his administration proposed, Kaine said the Department of Corrections will have to develop options to make up for the $12 million annual shortfall that will occur because of the loss of additional out-of-state inmates.

The sheriff of Virginia Beach sued to stop the practice, saying it made no sense to lease prison space to other states when more than 1,800 state prisoners are in local Virginia jails.

Last year, the Richmond City Jail averaged a little under 200 inmates at any one time who should have gone to state prison because they were past the deadline for transfer, which comes 90 days after sentencing, sheriff's officials reported.

Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee agreed yesterday with Virginia Beach Sheriff Paul J. Lanteigne, although the General Assembly had endorsed the original Kaine administration plan to lease space to 1,000 out-of-state inmates to generate revenue.

Gene Johnson, director of the Department of Corrections, told the budget committee he will have to limit hiring and maintenance, delay equipment purchases and monitor other costs to make up for the budget shortfall.

Lanteigne was not available for comment. When he filed suit, his jail was holding 67 inmates required to be in a state prison under Virginia law. That figure is down to 44, a spokeswoman said.

John W. Jones, executive director of the Virginia Sheriffs' Association, said the association did not agree with the lawsuit but said it was up to the governor to decide how to run the prison system.

In a Tuesday letter to Jones announcing the reversal, Kaine noted that the prison-housing plan was developed, in part, because "I heard no complaints from sheriffs during the budgeting process."

The plan to generate $38 million in revenue over two years by bringing in 1,000 inmates would have allowed two new prisons to open, as well as two major prison expansions, Kaine noted.

Kaine also noted that the 1,800 state inmates being held in local jails is lower than recent historical levels. The number exceeded 3,000 in late 2006, he noted.

In addition to the state prisoners in local jails, about 2,100 federal prisoners are being housed there. But Johnson said the federal government pays so much money that some sheriffs welcome the federal prisoners.

In other news at the budget committee's meeting:
# Jody M. Wagner, secretary of finance, told the Appropriations Committee that state revenues are likely to meet revenue goals for the fiscal year ending June 30, despite a poor May showing. But she said there are some disturbing economic trends in sales and withholding taxes that may cause some further downward revisions in fiscal 2009, which begins July 1.
# Richard F. Sliwoski, director of the Department of General Services, said the state is in the final stages of negotiations to buy two downtown Richmond office buildings, the Main Street Centre at 600 E. Main St. and the former corporate headquarters of United Dominion Realty Trust at 400 E. Cary St. The trust is moving its corporate headquarters to Denver.
# Sliwoski said the state received inquiries from 18 companies on a public-private partnership venture to build a 10-story office tower on the vacant lot fronting East Broad Street in Richmond between North Eighth and North Ninth streets.
Contact Tyler Whitley at (804) 649-6780 or twhitley@timesdispatch.com.
http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-06-19-0158.html

Posted by lois at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

AZ: Senate rejects ban on certain inmates in private prisons

The Arizona Daily Star
Published: 06.19.2008
Senate rejects ban on certain inmates in private prisons
By Howard Fischer
CAPITOL MEDIA SERVICES
"It has historically been the county and communities that have welcomed the prisons because they provide jobs and economic security to the community."
Sen. Rebecca Rios
D-Apache Junction
PHOENIX — State lawmakers refused Wednesday to limit the kind of criminals who can be housed in private prisons in Arizona.
On a 10-8 vote, the Senate rejected a proposal by Sen. Debbie McCune Davis to bar any private prison that houses inmates from another state from accepting prisoners who have committed murder, rape and various other serious crimes, or have a history of escape.

McCune Davis, D-Phoenix, said she wants to keep other states from exporting their most serious offenders to Arizona, where private companies are paid to incarcerate them.
But the wording would have placed similar restrictions on the ability of the Arizona Department of Corrections to contract with private prisons to house the same kind of inmates.
Sen. Robert Blendu, R-Litchfield Park, said the net effect would be to put the private prisons out of business in Arizona.
Central to the debate is the safety of Arizona citizens.
McCune Davis cited an incident where an inmate from Alaska, rather than being returned to his home state after completing his sentence, was instead put into an Arizona nursing home. She said he assaulted two women in that home.
"They are not being returned to their home states," she said. "They are being dumped out into our community."
Sen. Tom O'Halleran, R-Sedona, said the proposal makes sense. He said Arizona does not send maximum-security inmates to private prisons in other states.
"We shouldn't be taking back people that we don't know who they are, we don't know what they've done at the other criminal institutions," he said. "No state should be sending their murderers to Arizona."
But Sen. Linda Gray, R-Glendale, said Arizonans are in no danger because of the private prisons.
She said there are about 9,000 inmates in privately run facilities in the state, yet only two people have escaped, both of whom were soon recaptured.
Sen. Rebecca Rios, D-Apache Junction, said her objections to the proposal were based on pure economics.
"It has historically been the county and communities that have welcomed the prisons because they provide jobs and economic security to the community," she said.
Rios, whose district includes several private prisons, said they are the largest private employers in Pinal County and pay more in property taxes than anyone else.
Sen. Chuck Gray, R-Mesa, said that if private prisons can't take certain types of inmates, whether from Arizona or elsewhere, they will close. He said that will make the state less safe because the state can lock up more people in private prisons than it can in state-run prisons for the same amount of money.
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/244490

Posted by lois at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

Locked and Loaded. CCA, the private jailer and one of Nashville’s richest companies, is facing heightened scrutiny after a year of particularly heinous controversies

June 19, 2008
Locked and Loaded
CCA, the private jailer and one of Nashville’s richest companies, is facing heightened scrutiny after a year of particularly heinous controversies
by Matt Pulle

Located in a bland, almost anonymous Green Hills office park of fake lakes and fountains is the headquarters of the nation’s largest private prison company, which, at the moment, may be the most disparaged corporation in the country. Since its inception in 1983, CCA has encountered legions of angry detractors who believe that the business of punishing criminals should not be—well, a business. But if the company has become accustomed to criticism over the years—like a best-selling author whose novels garner predictably bad reviews—it is now mired in a series of scandals, embarrassments and public-relations catastrophes that may tar its reputation for years to come.

In the last 18 months alone, CCA has been the target of several stinging lawsuits supported by detailed affidavits and third-party reports alleging dangerous and inhumane practices that have put inmates’ lives at risk. Whistle blowers, once in positions of trust at CCA, have emerged from the shadows to tell vivid tales of corporate misconduct. Federal authorities have castigated the publicly traded corporation for operating an immigration detention facility in Texas on the cheap. And at that CCA complex—which at one point forced children of immigrant detainees to dress in prison garb—dozens of incarcerated women and children have come forward with gut-wrenching tales of anguish and neglect.

Here in Nashville, CCA’s officers volunteer on the boards of noble nonprofits. But the company’s local detention center, far removed from the world of tony fundraisers and white-tie dinners, has been the setting for a string of grim events. One inmate beat his cellmate to death. A mentally ill man apparently went nine months without being allowed a shower. And another inmate lost his ear in a fight.

So considering the company’s problems in its own backyard, not to mention its near-epic failings in Texas, it may seem odd to begin our story at a CCA facility in West Tennessee, where last May a few inmates brawled inside a prison chapel. The disturbance at the Hardeman County Correctional Center, located in the tiny town of Whiteville, was no different from any other jailhouse scuffle, and it’s not clear that anyone was even hurt. But an inmate who saw the fight—and maybe even threw a punch or two—got a lesson about the workings of CCA’s particular brand of law and order and its longtime penchant of avoiding scrutiny.

On May 16, 2007, James Ingram, an inmate from Memphis who battled a drug problem, was serving a 17-year sentence for aggravated robbery at the medium-security prison. Clean-cut and not much older than 30, Ingram was walking to his pod at the time of the brawl and overheard a group of inmates fighting at the chapel. Ingram fell into a fetal position to demonstrate, in his lawyer’s words, “a spirit of surrender and cooperation.” If that sounds implausible, consider the next part of the inmate’s story.

After prison officials quelled the fight, they took Ingram to a back room and demanded that he give up the names of the prisoners who squared off. Ingram saw who was involved, but he wouldn’t talk. So the warden, a 40-something man named Glen Turner and the brother of one of CCA’s corporate vice presidents, placed him in solitary confinement. Shortly after, Turner shoved him to the ground and Ingram fell on his back. The warden then punched him in the face, opening a 2-inch cut below his eye.

Typical convict hogwash, right? The state didn’t agree. Ingram called a lawyer, who called the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) to look into what happened. Joined by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, TDOC investigated the incident and determined that Turner assaulted Ingram by “throwing him to the floor and striking him at least twice in the head with the closed fist of his right hand.” In August, Ingram resigned as warden. A month later, he pled guilty to a charge of official oppression.

It’s not clear when CCA’s headquarters learned what happened at its West Tennessee prison. But state authorities hint that company officials were slow to act. In an email to his colleagues, Jerry Lister, then TDOC’s acting director of internal affairs, notes that it was only when his department learned of the allegations from Ingram’s lawyer that “anyone at the facility [began] to acknowledge the excessive use of force by Warden Turner.”

As a private company, CCA doesn’t have to answer for what happened at its prison. It refused a request from the Scene to review Turner’s original résumé, job application and disciplinary file. Meanwhile, TDOC never issued a press release about the findings of its investigation. As a result, the publicly traded company escaped the rounds of bad publicity that a state-run prison would have endured had one of its wardens pummeled an inmate. Until now, the media has never reported the details of Turner’s attack on Ingram.

But if CCA was able to dodge a PR nightmare last summer, its luck has since faded. Now it can’t seem to serve so much as a cold meal without landing in hot water. The well-heeled company finds itself embroiled in an array of ugly incidents, both in Nashville and throughout the country, that have been featured on the pages of national newspapers and magazines and in the bold type of heavy-hitting lawsuits. Taken separately, the company’s struggles may not seem extraordinary. The business of incarceration is a rough one, even for those who don’t view it as a business. But for CCA, which for most of the decade has been able to avoid criticism from everyone other than a thin cast of anti-privatization foes, there seems to be a growing series of corroborated accounts that sketch a new portrait: that of a reckless, callous enterprise that treats inmates—even those who haven’t been convicted of a crime—as if they were cattle. Maybe, then, it’s appropriate that we move our story to cattle country.

Elsa is a sturdy woman in her mid-20s with soft, round cheeks and straight, black hair that she sometimes pulls behind her head. Before she found herself locked up in a dusty Texas town, she lived in Honduras with her two children, Richard and Angelina. Here is her story:

Elsa was happy in her native country and “didn’t need anything from anyone to be well-off.” Then one day, while walking on a quiet road, a man grabbed her hair and put a gun to her head. He forced her to take off her clothes, and then he hit her. He called her a “perra” or bitch and laughed as he ran his weapon over her body.

Elsa cried and screamed and then, after being raped, begged for her life. “Please don’t kill me. I have two children.” The man struck her again, but let her live so that he could haunt her once more, showing up on a whim at her friend’s place to let her know he could have her again whenever he chose.

The man’s father worked for the local police department, and Elsa knew the only way to flee him was to flee Honduras with Richard and Angelina. When she arrived in the United States, an immigration agent took her and her family to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, 30 miles north of Austin. It would be anything but a safe haven.

In 2005, Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division (ICE), ended the practice of “catch-and-release”—which permitted undocumented immigrants like Elsa to remain free at-large while they awaited their day in court. Under catch-and-release, no-shows were common. So after 9/11, the specter of illegal immigrants from all over the world roaming the country became a security issue. Pilot programs sprung up that tracked immigrants with electronic bracelets, though Chertoff went with a draconian plan instead: Throw many of these men, women and children in Hutto, a former medium-security prison that was surrounded by a 15-foot fence topped with rings of barbed wire when it reopened in 2006 as a place for immigrant families.

After she arrived in Taylor, Elsa and her family shared a tiny living area, where they’d be loudly awoken at 5:45 a.m. Elsa, Richard and Angelina then had 20 minutes to eat breakfast. When they didn’t finish on time, guards would just snatch their food and throw it in the trash. “When this happens, the children cry and cry,” Elsa later explained in an affidavit that chronicled her plight.

The detention center was very cold, so much so that the guards walked around wearing gloves. But they’d yell at Elsa if she asked for a blanket. One time they came into her cell and confiscated two of her sweaters.

“They don’t care that we are cold,” she said. “They don’t care if we eat or if we don’t eat.”

Elsa and her children wore prison uniforms and spent hours in their pod, often with no toys or books for the kids. One day, Elsa and her family were in the doctor’s office, where all the kids were playing with crayons. Angelina drew a picture, but a guard grabbed the girl’s artwork. She cried a lot at Hutto, wondering what her family had done wrong.

“Mommy, where is God that he doesn’t want to help us? Mommy, tell God to come and take us out of here and take us to our house,” Elsa recalled her daughter saying. “Mommy, why do they have us as prisoners if we have never killed anybody?”

In March 2007, the ACLU helped bring suit against Michael Chertoff and the immigration officers who ran Hutto. As a part of that litigation, attorneys collected more than 20 affidavits from detainees like Elsa, nearly all of whom were bidding to receive political asylum from their home countries. The detainees hail from different continents—some are adults, others young children—but they all tell the same story because they lived it together.

Raouitee Pamela Puran fled her home country, where her husband was kidnapped and murdered. Seeking political asylum in the United States, she and her daughter Wesleyann wound up at Hutto. The young girl, just 4 years old, had trouble sleeping. It was always cold, and it didn’t help that the guards kept turning the lights on and off in their living quarters. The food was awful too. When Wesleyann would talk to her aunt on the phone, she’d plead with her to cook her chicken curry and rice. That always stung her mom.

Even worse, Wesleyann would hear the guards threaten the children who acted up. If you don’t behave, they’d tell them, we’re going to separate you from your parents. Wesleyann was terrified.

A sixth-grader at a junior high school in Ohio, Aissha Ibrahim came to Hutto with his mother, brother and sister on Nov. 30, 2006. Aissha, whose family had fled war-torn Somalia, said in an affidavit that when his sister Bahja got in trouble, the guards threatened to take her away from her family. Another guard told Aissha that if he complained, he would never see his mother again.

“I would be scared if I never got my mom back, and I would think of how she took care of me when I was a baby,” he said.

Just about every affidavit from a child or mother portrayed Hutto the same way—as a rough and cold place, where kids lie awake at night hungry and crying in the dark. And if they act up, like children often do, a guard would threaten to remove them from their families. To hear the stories from inside the walls, Hutto seems more like a medieval dungeon than a 21st century facility run by a wealthy company.

“The conditions were shocking,” says Barbara Hines, a University of Texas law professor who spent many hours inside the facility representing detainees. “There were children in prison garb dressed like their parents; it was like an adult prison system. Seven times a day parents and their children were required to stay in their pods so they could be counted. Laser beams shined through the cells at night.”

Just about everyone else who walked through the gates at Hutto, including federal authorities, saw it as a deeply troubling facility. In March 2007, ICE inspectors visited Hutto and, in their own distinct bureaucratic language, corroborated the anguished accounts of the detainees. The inspectors noted that their “overall review of the facility can be accurately rated as deficient” and determined that the staff wasn’t following basic standards of detention.

“The Review Team’s observation of CCA’s overall attitude is of disinterest and complacency in their work performance,” the agency noted in its report.

A month later, an interoffice memo from ICE said that at Hutto, CCA is “losing staff as quick as they can hire them.” That’s because the company was only paying its detention officers around $10 an hour, nearly $4 less than what they could make at the county jail.

“As long as CCA continues to hire employees at this rate per hour, they will continue to experience the problems they are currently experiencing on the floor,” read the memo. “The current problems CCA is experiencing are a direct result of what ‘they are paying their employees for.’ Unfortunately, it is at ICE’s expense.”

Among other issues, the Scene asked CCA to address the portrayal of Hutto that emerges from both federal officials and the people who lived there. The company declined to comment on any and all matters in this story, instead emailing news clips and a U.S. magistrate’s report of the facility. That report, which came three months after the ACLU filed its federal lawsuit, depicted a more humane place than other earlier accounts and noted, “there have been attempts to ‘soften’ the feel of the building.” The magistrate observed that the staff removed door locks and hung murals on the walls, “although the building still retains a very institutional feel.”

In August, the ACLU announced a settlement with ICE over the treatment of immigrant families at the Hutto facility. The settlement called for several common-sense measures, including installing privacy curtains around toilets in common areas and letting kids play with toys in their rooms. All 26 children and their parents who took part in the suit were released into the custody of family members who are legal residents of the United States.

By all accounts, Hutto is no longer as oppressive as it was when Elsa and her family first arrived from Honduras. But why didn’t CCA get it right from the start? Or to put it more bluntly, why did a rich company—one with $388 million in revenues last quarter—have to be told by the ACLU to cease treating innocent children like criminals?

“The point I’d like to make is that none of these changes were done voluntarily,” says Hines, the attorney. “When you look at CCA and ICE, the question is, how would this facility have been if no one found out about it?”

The apathetic treatment of Hutto’s immigrants was hardly an anomaly. CCA also operates a detention facility in San Diego that drew a separate ACLU lawsuit last year. In the complaint, the group claims that CCA routinely denied basic medical care to immigrant detainees with hepatitis, diabetes and other serious illnesses. One man from Ghana died from heart failure after the center’s staff allegedly asked him to fill out some paper work—even though he was seen kneeling on the floor of his cell and complaining of chest pains.

At jails and prisons across the country, inmates routinely die under dire circumstances; some commit suicide after nurses fail to fill their anti-psychotic prescriptions, others find themselves on the wrong end of a baton stick. And in fairness, CCA doesn’t have a monopoly on jailhouse horror stories. For every dark tale of cruelty at CCA, there is an equal travesty in a county jail or federal penitentiary. The difference, though, is that CCA can duck responsibility for what happens inside its walls, whereas a government-run facility can’t. CCA doesn’t have to turn over the disciplinary file of a disgraced guard or give a press conference when one of its inmates escapes over the fence. It has the luxury to operate in the shadows and turn a booming profit without having to explain how it runs the business.

We don’t know a lot about Patrick Perry, a onetime captain for CCA’s Metro Detention Facility, located on Harding Road in South Nashville. But we do know that on the morning of Jan. 31, 2008, Perry arrived at the Metro Health Department to talk about his employer and offer a glimpse into some of its secret practices. Metro Health officials would later write a memo detailing what the captain told them.

Perry was worried about a troubled inmate named Frank Horton, who was imprisoned on a drug conviction and had stayed in the same segregation cell since May 2007. Perry said that CCA’s policy dictates that an inmate has to leave his cell at least once every three days or else guards need to remove him by force. But at CCA’s Harding facility, the warden reprimanded the staff if they followed this policy. That’s because every time they had to escort an inmate against his will, it raised the facility’s “use of force” numbers. And that placed the Metro Detention Center in a negative light when CCA officials evaluated it against its other jails and prisons across the country.

At first blush, the warden’s directive may not seem out of order. If an inmate doesn’t want to leave his cell, why should the guards care? But Frank Horton was a special case. As Perry told Metro officials, the 23-year-old inmate seemed disoriented and was speaking gibberish. At the very least, he needed medical care. (Metro Health Department officials say they made sure Horton received a psychiatric screening after their visit with Perry, but say they can’t divulge any more details due to privacy concerns.)

Horton’s mother, Cytherea Braswell, had tried to visit her son before Christmas but says that a guard couldn’t find the necessary forms. She later had a lawyer, John Clemmons, drop in to see him in March, after she learned her son wasn’t well.

When Clemmons arrived, a guard told him that Frank was just fine, that he’d received a shower and a shave. But when he went to see his client, what he saw troubled him.

“He had a big, unkempt goatee, and some stubble on his face and lint on his hair,” Clemmons says. “He was completely naked except for a blanket draped around him, and when they walked me back there, they didn’t act like this was unusual.”

Now contemplating a lawsuit against CCA, Clemmons says that his client went nine months without taking a shower, which dovetails with Perry’s account of how Horton went the better part of 2007 without leaving his cell. Even worse, Horton appeared as if he were completely oblivious to the outside world and lost in his own muddled thoughts.

Brawell says that, as a child, her son was diagnosed with hyperactivity and mild to moderate bipolar disorder. As a young adult, he worked at a Waffle House and played basketball with his friends. With the right treatment, she says, he could live a normal life.

“He was an average person,” she says. “He had a job, he went to work every day, he had friends. He knew how to take care of himself.”

But when Clemmons went to visit Braswell’s son, he was talking in the same mysterious language that Perry described in his visit with Metro officials. It was an odd blend of broken Spanish and English, and Horton spoke it as if it were his native tongue, repeating the same incoherent phrases to identical questions.

“When I saw him, he was in a state where he had no awareness of his mental capacity,” Clemmons says.

With the help of the Metro Legal Department and the Davidson County Sheriff’s office, Clemmons was able to transfer Horton to a state facility for inmates with special needs. Now in the process of researching his case, Clemmons isn’t sure what kind of, if any, mental health treatment his client received behind bars. For that, he may subpoena Patrick Perry to discover whether the CCA facility risked Horton’s health to polish its internal data.

“When I was there, the only medical staff I saw was a nurse who merely walked from window to window and looked at the inmates through a slot in the door,” he says. “It just looked like all they were concerned with was that their physical well-being was intact.”

In his meeting with Metro Health officials, Patrick Perry also said that an alarm for inmates to trigger in the event of an emergency wasn’t working. He added that CCA knew the call system was a problem “but did nothing about it.” The former captain may find himself testifying about that observation as well.

Two weeks before Perry came forward, Gerald Townsend, a 36-year-old inmate at the Harding facility who loved scary movies, died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center after being diagnosed with internal bleeding. His spleen was ripped open and blood had flooded his lungs. In his final hours, Townsend told a nurse that Ronnie Sullivan, his 22-year-old cellmate, assaulted him. Metro police later charged Sullivan with Townsend’s murder.

Attorney Blair Durham is representing Townsend’s mother, Jackie, who plans to file a suit against CCA this week. Durham says he’s learned that inmates were banging on their cells as Sullivan began to assault his cellmate. But no one rushed to help. Durham also heard that the alarm, which could have saved Townsend’s life, wasn’t working.

A month after Townsend’s death, an inmate fled the same jail through an air vent. At first, the company announced that the man, who had a history of escape attempts, was simply hiding inside the grounds. A day or so later, when the Scene called to see if he had been found, the company refused to comment.

Earlier this year, after CCA endured a series of PR nightmares at the Metro Detention Center during which the company largely ducked interviews with the media, the private jailer reassigned the facility’s warden, Brian Gardner. For the Davidson County Sheriff’s office, which contracts with CCA to run the Harding jail, the company needed to reevaluate its management of the facility.

“We are satisfied that CCA has responded with a policy change as well as the fact that they have changed their management since these incidents have occurred,” says Karla Wiekal, the sheriff’s spokesperson. “At some point, (CCA) recognized there needed to be a leadership change and at this point forward we will see if these changes are effective.”

In June 2007, President George Bush nominated CCA corporate counsel Gus Puryear to a federal seat in the U.S. District Court of Middle Tennessee. Initially viewed as a safe bet to receive a lifetime appointment, Puryear faltered badly in his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February, appearing to some as arrogant and unprepared. The 39-year-old nominee, who twice served as debate coach for Vice President Dick Cheney, struggled in particular to explain how his company handled the brutal 2004 death of Nashville inmate Estelle Richardson, at one point wrongly stating that the guards initially charged in connection with her murder were “exonerated.” Now Puryear’s bid has turned into an unofficial referendum on CCA, and it appears unlikely that the Senate will confirm him before the end of Bush’s presidency.

It’s been that kind of year for the private jailer. Puryear’s struggles, playing out awkwardly on a big stage, make up just the latest bout of bad publicity for the Nashville company, which has also been battered in the national press. In February, The New Yorker reported the definitive story about the company’s Hutto facility in Texas. The magazine detailed how immigrant families shared a tiny cell with a bunk bed, thin mattress and an exposed toilet, while ill-trained guards rounded them up seven times a day for a head count. Then in March, Time.com detailed the accusations of a former high-ranking CCA official who claimed that the company repeatedly misled state and local authorities about the rate of violent incidents at the prisons and jails it had under contract.

In May, The New York Times chronicled how an ailing detainee was treated at a CCA facility in New Jersey just before he lapsed into a coma and died. The paper uncovered records that show that the man, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who overstayed a tourist visa, was “shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit.” He vomited and moaned and then was dumped in a disciplinary cell for 13 hours, even though he was foaming at the mouth.

Operating 65 facilities in the country with more than 70,000 inmates and detainees in its custody, CCA will never have a perfect record. But what may say more about the company anchoring a Green Hills office park is not the middle-aged detainee who died of a heart failure or the sinister warden who struck an inmate, but the 9-year-old boy who was forced to live like a common criminal.

Kevin Yourdkhani, whose parents fled from torture in their native Iran, wound up at CCA’s Hutto facility on Feb. 9, 2007. There, he shared a small cell with his mother and had to climb a tall ladder to get to his bunk bed. He slept right next to an open toilet that smelled. The boy also complained about the food—he called it “garbage”—saying that all he was ever fed were beans.

“We are lucky if we get 30 minute to eat,” he said an affidavit for the ACLU’s lawsuit against the place. “It is usually 20 minutes, and they are always rushing.”

In his pod, a small living area that he shared with other detainees, the children were always sick. Lots of kids had eye infections. Kevin attended school but rarely learned anything. All he did was watch “Spanish movies” and color and draw pictures.

One day his father, who was being kept at another part of the facility, came to visit Kevin. That infuriated a guard, who told Kevin that he would be placed in foster care if his dad ever dropped by to see him again.

“I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy and went to sleep.”
http://www.nashvillescene.com/Stories/Cover_Story/2008/06/19/Locked_and_Loaded/index.shtml#

Posted by lois at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

Homeland Security's Enemy Next Door

Americas Program Commentary
Homeland Security's Enemy Next Door
Tom Barry | June 10, 2008
What began as a war on terrorists has become a war on immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security says that it prioritizes its immigration enforcement actions by "targeting the greatest national security and public safety threats"—an approach not taken prior to 9/11.

At home, like abroad, the war on terrorism has lost its focus. Faced with failure, the Bush administration's stated resolve to dismantle international terrorism has devolved into an attack on a far more vulnerable and proximate target—Latin American immigrants.

President George W. Bush has asked for a 6.8% increase in Homeland Security's 2009 budget, while the department's immigration enforcement operations will receive a 19.1% increase. Since the incorporation of immigration enforcement into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003, the two DHS immigration agencies—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have received a greatly disproportionate share of Homeland Security's annual budget increases.

In the president's 2009 budget proposal, DHS says its main priority is "to prevent terrorist attacks against the nation and to protect our nation from dangerous people." DHS "will continue to prevent the entry of terrorists while facilitating the legitimate flow of people by strengthening border security efforts and continuing to gain effective control of America's borders."

Department Secretary Michael Chertoff can point to many numerical indicators of progress. Border Patrol agents and detention beds have doubled; arrests by ICE fugitive operation teams doubled in 2007; and the "removal" of "criminal aliens" increases each year.

DHS spends more than $12 billion annually for operations "to protect our nation against dangerous people." Partnering in immigration enforcement, the Justice Department has also enjoyed hundreds of millions of dollars in budget increases over the past few years. Large increases for the DOJ's role in immigration enforcement are included in its 2009 request for "National Security Efforts," specifically under its budget requests for "Fighting Criminal Activity on the U.S. Southwest Border."

A large sector of the U.S. population—12-13 million—that, prior to the creation of Homeland Security in March 2003, were described by DHS and DOJ as "illegal aliens" are now commonly labeled "dangerous people" because they lack proper documentation and may be falsifying their documents to obtain work, go to school, or pay taxes.

Homeland Security has launched waves of new anti-immigrant initiatives, many with militaristic names: Operation Streamline, Operation Jumpstart, Community Shield, Fugitive Operations, Return to Sender, Border Security Initiative, among others.

Why all the anti-immigrant fervor in government? What are the politics behind this offensive?
Restrictionists Set the Pace

The rising influence of the immigration restrictionists—including Minuteman vigilantes on the border, the Immigration Reform Caucus in Congress, and such policy institutes in Washington as Numbers USA, Center for Immigration Studies, and Federation for American Immigration Reform—has moved the immigration debate decidedly to the right and they have succeeded in framing immigration as a "rule of law" issue.

In the debate on comprehensive immigration reform, the forces that have traditionally shaped immigration politics—the "immigrants are good for profits" leaders of the Republican Party and the "immigrants are part of our electoral coalition" leaders of the Democratic Party—were overpowered and out-maneuvered by the restrictionist leaders and their deep reservoir of grassroots activists.

Those concerned about the rights of immigrants and the ethical obligations of a host country were pushed to the margins of the debate by restrictionists. These hardliners insisted that there could be no discussion of legalization or temporary work programs until the government secured its borders, enforced its immigration laws, and re-established the "rule of law" in the country.

With all proposals for comprehensive immigration reform blocked by the restrictionist grassroots lobby and their Washington representatives, leading elements of both parties accepted the "enforcement-first" agenda of the restrictionists.

Congress has approved billions of new dollars for immigration enforcement to double the number of Border Patrol agents, double the number of beds in detention centers, construct a 670-mile border fence, mount a high-tech virtual fence, and hire brigades of immigration attorneys, judges, and U.S. marshals at the Justice Department.

Many in Congress, especially liberal Democrats, hoped that by authorizing a full-throttle enforcement agenda they would be creating more political space for a comprehensive immigration reform that includes legalization. But comprehensive reform was quashed in the Senate along with other bills that opponents deemed to be pro-immigrant. By caving to the enforcement agenda, they actually lost political space as the immigrants-as-criminals, or worse, terrorists, image took even deeper hold in the media and national consciousness fueled by a barrage of images of fences, armed border guards, etc.

But the restrictionist camp did not declare victory. Instead, anti-immigration organizations quickly moved a step beyond the enforcement-first agenda and began brandishing an enforcement-only immigration policy. The restrictionist policy institutes call this their "attrition through enforcement" plan.

In effect, the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Defense have adopted an enforcement-only approach. With no legalization proposal on the horizon, the government has stepped up the pace of immigration enforcement, increasing workplace raids, opening new immigrant detention centers, and encouraging local governments to join in the national immigrant hunt—spreading terror throughout immigrant communities.

There is no plan to deport all illegal immigrants. Rather the crackdown aims to sow fear among immigrants so that large numbers decide to leave the United States and to deter others from migrating north. While the Bush administration publicly supports immigration reform, it has done little to advance a reform policy during its two terms.

A month after immigration reform failed in the Senate in June 2007 the administration announced a 26-point plan of administrative measures to increase immigration enforcement, such as extending the border fence and hiring more Border Agents. The plan also included measures to streamline the temporary worker program, an apparent attempt to assuage businesses that were complaining about congressional failure to expand the HB2 program. The Bush administration has unsuccessfully promoted the corporate proposal to expand temporary work programs, providing cheap labor without acquiring broader obligations to workers.

There is widespread speculation that the administration has unleashed DHS on immigrants with the hope that the resulting shortages of immigrant workers will create more political room for a renewal and expansion of temporary worker programs.

The administration recently adjusted the HB2 visa program to allow temporary workers to stay three years rather than ten months. This underscored the criticism that on the one hand the administration is detaining and deporting historic numbers of immigrants, while on the other hand it is opening the doors for business to employ foreign workers temporarily in resort hotels, shipyards, and golf courses.

All involved parties—the restrictionists, both political parties, the president, and the federal agencies charged with carrying out the immigration crackdown—bear some responsibility for the immigration crisis that is deepening in America. But the lion's share of the blame lies with President Bush. His leadership gap allowed restrictionist proposals to gain momentum, he has spent billions of dollars on trumped-up border security, and he has unleashed DHS to pursue a war of terror on immigrants.

The politics of immigration restrictionism do not fully explain the war on immigrants. Anti-immigration and anti-immigrant forces would not have advanced so quickly without Sept. 11. The new national commitment to homeland security set the stage for an enforcement-only immigration policy and serves as the ideological framework for the immigration crackdown.
Immigrants as Criminals and Terrorists

At Homeland Security, which was established in reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks, there is no confusion about what is the driving force behind the immigration crackdown. As DHS explains, "The National Strategy for Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Act of 2002 served to mobilize and organize our nation to secure the homeland from terrorist attacks." Its mission is to "lead the unified national effort to secure America. We will prevent and deter terrorist attacks and protect against and respond to threats and hazards to the nation."

ICE explains that its predecessor, the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS), was folded into the new Homeland Security department to allow it "to more effectively enforce our immigration and customs laws and to protect the United States against terrorist attacks." ICE says it does this "by targeting illegal immigrants: the people, money, and materials that support terrorism and other criminal activities. ICE is a key component of the DHS 'layered defense' approach to protecting the nation."

Similarly, CBP, whose main component is the Border Patrol, boasts of its national security mission: "We are the guardian of our Nation's borders. We are America's frontline. We safeguard the American homeland at and beyond our borders. We protect the American public against terrorists and the instruments of terror." There is no mention of immigrants in CBP's mission, even though obstructing illegal immigration is its most prominent function.

DHS points to statistics that testify to its progress in arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants. The Justice Department, responsible for prosecuting immigrants and transporting them to jails, points to the mushrooming of immigration cases as evidence of its commitment to upholding immigration law.

But what does all this immigration enforcement have to do with protecting the country against terrorists and criminals that threaten our security and safety?

A 2007 study by the Transnational Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University found that there has been no increase in terrorism or national security charges against immigrants since 2001. In fact, despite the increased enforcement operations by Homeland Security, more immigrants were charged annually in immigration courts with national security or terrorism-related offenses in a three-year period in the mid-1990s (1994-96) than in a comparable period (2004-06) since Sept. 11.

According to the TRAC study, "A decade later, national security charges were brought against 114 individuals, down about a third. Meanwhile for the same period, terrorism charges are down more than three-fourths, to just 12."

"Despite repeated claims by high officials of the Bush administration that fighting terrorism has been the central mission of the Department of Homeland Security," reported TRAC, "the data show that in the last three years a claim of terrorism was made against only 12 (0.0015%) out of individuals against whom the DHS has filed charges in the immigration courts." Of those 12 charges, "six were withdrawn by the DHS, one was not sustained, two are still pending, one was otherwise dealt with, and only four were sustained."

Although ICE claims it targets immigrants accused of crimes that threaten national security and public safety, in practice the agency has made undocumented immigration itself a crime thus blurring the lines between immigration violations and serious crime. Immigrants are now being charged with federal crimes for actions that were in the past considered administrative violations. The criminals that DHS, ICE, and Border Patrol are arresting and imprisoning are increasingly immigrants who have falsified documents or Social Security numbers to obtain and hold jobs—often with the tacit cooperation of employers.

ICE has mounted a national dragnet with 75 teams stationed around the country looking for "fugitive immigrants." ICE says its new operation is intended "to dramatically expand the agency's efforts to locate, arrest, and remove fugitives from the United States." But most of these fugitives are not criminals on the lam but rather immigrants who have failed to respond to administrative orders issued by immigration courts.
New Administration Needs to Delink Security and Immigration

By merging Homeland Security and Border Patrol into one department, the Bush administration has created a monster agency that has betrayed its original mandate on terrorism, diverting a tremendous amount of resources to hunting down and "removing" immigrants who represent no threat to national security.

Some immigrants might be terrorists, just as some citizens might be terrorists. However, by having such a large population to monitor—as many as 30 million non-citizen (legal and illegal) immigrants in addition to foreign visitors—DHS is unable to focus on homeland security. Instead it has clumsily taken on the administration of a badly flawed immigration system.

Incorporating immigration agencies into Homeland Security has further complicated and distorted what was already a dysfunctional immigration system. The administrative merging has created a merging in the public mind between "threats" of terrorists and immigrants. ICE and Border Patrol agents now regard immigrants lacking proper documents as criminals and potential terrorists, and they are encouraging local law-enforcement officials to do the same.

Immigration policy and homeland security have become so entangled that for DHS and its component immigration agencies the mission of protecting America has become synonymous with cracking down on immigrants. It's one more policy mess from the Bush legacy that the next administration will need to untangle.

The politics of restrictionism can be defeated. More difficult, though, for a new Congress and president will be a rolling back of the Homeland Security apparatus that has taken over immigration policy. A real focus on terrorism and organized crime could make those programs more professional and more effective. But the unfocused and punitive enforcement-only measures on the border need to be defunded and shut down.

Immigrants aren't the enemy next door. They are our employees, coworkers, and neighbors.

The challenge for the next president and a new Congress will be to articulate an immigration policy that is independent of the national security imperative. No doubt that the immigration system is in crisis, but it's a failure to set sustainable immigration flows and fair practices—certainly not a national security crisis.

Tom Barry is a senior analyst with the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) of the Center for International Policy.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5286

For More Information

See other articles in this series of new reports on the immigration crackdown:

Reframing the Immigration Debate: The Actors and the Issues
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/2959

The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5269

County Jails Welcome Immigrants
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5253

Paying the Price of the Immigration Crackdown
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5234

Truth about Illegal Immigration and Crime
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4903

Posted by lois at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2008

Federal prosecution of illegal immigrants soars. The White House lauds the dramatic increase, but critics cite higher priorities.

"This is an effort to use the federal criminal justice system in immigration enforcement," Long said. "What it means is that immigration cases are dominating the federal court system these days. The volume of cases is
really huge. This is a big deal."

Federal prosecution of illegal immigrants soars
The White House lauds the dramatic increase, but critics cite higher priorities.
By Nicole Gaouette
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has sharply ratcheted up prosecutions of illegal immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in the last year, with increases so dramatic that immigration offenses now account for as much as half the nation's federal criminal caseload.

In the widening crackdown, administration officials prosecuted 9,350 illegal immigrants on federal criminal charges in March, up from 3,746 a year ago and an all-time high, according to statistics released Tuesday. Those convicted have received jail sentences averaging about one month.

The prosecutions are among the most visible steps in a larger effort that includes work-site raids, increased border patrols and the use of technology and fences. Often controversial, the patchwork of measures represents the administration's response to failed congressional attempts last summer to overhaul federal immigration laws.

Administration officials and conservative groups have lauded the increase in prosecutions. But critics say data show illegal immigrants are still trying to enter the country. And some lawyers argue that the push is overwhelming a federal court system with limited resources and higher priorities.

Even so, administration officials announced this month that they would be funneling more resources toward the effort, called Operation Streamline.

"The results of this criminal prosecution initiative have been striking," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Chertoff's agency and the Justice Department, which oversee the effort, recently announced a plan to assign 64 attorneys and 35 staff members to prosecutions along the Southwest border.

The program began as a pilot around Del Rio, Texas, in 2005 and spread to other areas. Officers and prosecutors participating in it practice "zero tolerance," and jail times can range from two weeks to six months.

"The reason this works is because these illegal migrants come to realize that violating the law will not simply send them back to try over again but will require them to actually serve some short period of time in a jail or prison setting, and will brand them as having been violators of the law," Chertoff said. "That has a very significant deterrent impact."

The statistical analysis released Tuesday was compiled by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, considered an authoritative source for such figures. It called the increase "highly unusual."

Operation Streamline's larger aim is to give the administration another tool to use in its crackdown on illegal immigration, said Susan B. Long, a TRAC co-director and Syracuse University professor.

"This is an effort to use the federal criminal justice system in immigration enforcement," Long said. "What it means is that immigration cases are dominating the federal court system these days. The volume of cases is really huge. This is a big deal."

Of 16,298 federal criminal prosecutions recorded nationwide in March, immigration cases accounted for more than half, Long said. The next-highest number, 2,674, was for drug offenses, followed by 702 for white-collar crime.

TRAC researchers found that all but 142 of the 9,350 new federal immigration prosecutions in March occurred in certain areas along the border with Mexico. Texas was most active, followed by Southern California.

California is not formally a part of the program. But prosecutions of people who smuggle illegal immigrants across the state's border have increased sharply in the last five years, nearly doubling to 118 cases in March.

The deluge of prosecutions is overwhelming some lawyers involved in the process.

Heather Williams, a federal public defender in Tucson, said the operation had a crushing effect when it was begun this year on a limited basis.

Defense attorneys fear for clients who are hustled into court, en masse, after spending days crossing the desert.

"We have to be concerned our clients are competent to plead, that they understand what's going on," Williams said.

Other immigrant advocates were critical of the increase in federal prosecutions.

"It doesn't mean we have an end to illegal immigration or a way of dealing with it," said Angela Kelley, director of the Immigration Policy Center.

A recent study showed that would-be border crossers were more concerned about heat and harsh conditions than border enforcement, she said. The study, by Wayne A. Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego, found that 98% of immigrants from the Mexican state of Oaxaca were eventually able to enter the U.S.

But groups that want to see immigration tightly controlled applauded the new statistics.

"It sounds like very good news," said Roy Beck, director of NumbersUSA, which advocates stricter immigration controls.

"It's part of a pattern we've seen since last August where the administration, on the border and in the interior, seems almost monthly to be tightening the vise," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-immig18-2008jun18,0,7626509,print.story

Posted by lois at 09:27 PM | Comments (0)

Free Speech Radio News Report on StopMax Conference

Free Speech Radio News Report on StopMax Conference
An estimated 20,000 people in the United States live in concrete cells, 6 foot by twelve foot wide for 23 hours a day. With their lives on lockdown, these prisoners are deprived of educational programs, adequate physical and mental health services and have little contact with their families or other inmates. Denouncing these conditions as human rights violations and utterly failed policy, hundreds of people gathered in Philadelphia at the Stop Max Conference to put an end to Solitary Confinement. Andalusia Knoll reports from the conference.
http://www.fsrn.org/content/solitary-confinement-disputed/2473

Posted by lois at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

California prisons receiver says he needs $7 billion now for healthcare

California prisons receiver says he needs $7 billion now for healthcare
The state's failure to give him money to build seven facilities is the result of 'deliberate obstruction,' he says. He may seek a federal court order to obtain the funds.
By Michael Rothfeld
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 18, 2008

SACRAMENTO — In his broadest, harshest critique of state officials yet, the court-appointed overseer of healthcare in state prisons said Tuesday he would run out of money soon and had begun preparing to seize the funding he needs with an order from a federal judge.

Receiver J. Clark Kelso, who had previously directed most of his displeasure at state lawmakers for refusing to approve his $7-billion plan to construct prison healthcare facilities, on Tuesday added Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Controller John Chiang and the nonpartisan legislative analyst's office to the list of officials showing "an unwillingness to accept accountability."

"The state's failure to make the necessary financial commitment is not a result of inadvertent neglect or mere incompetence," Kelso said in a filing to U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, who appointed him. "It is a result of conscious, deliberate obstruction."

Kelso told reporters that although he still hopes state officials will cooperate, preferably by borrowing the money he needs, he has begun laying the groundwork to ask Henderson to issue an order for the money. That could take the form of an injunction directing Chiang to pay the receiver's bills or a draft on state bank accounts and could occur within a couple of months, he said.

"There will come a time when I simply run out of money, and sometime before then I will be forced to take more substantial steps," Kelso said.

Last month, state Senate Republicans blocked SB 1665, a bill authorizing the receiver to borrow $7 billion to build seven healthcare facilities for inmates, to comply with orders in a federal lawsuit against the state. In part, he blamed a report by the legislative analyst's office questioning the need for his 10,000-bed plan, and said it was full of misleading and inaccurate statements.

Dan Carson, who directs the analyst's criminal justice unit, said his office did nothing to sabotage Kelso and recommended $2 billion in funding, even though the receiver failed to provide "very basic information" to justify such a large request.

Within days of the bill's defeat, Kelso demanded that Schwarzenegger and Chiang provide him money, starting with $70 million, though the state is in fiscal crisis. But he said they have indicated they will not provide it.

Chiang's spokeswoman, Hallye Jordan, said the office has been exploring options with Kelso but has told him that the controller is prohibited from cutting a check without an appropriation from lawmakers or a court order.

"Even if there was a court order, it would be problematic because the fact is today there is no cash in the general fund," Jordan said.

She added that to pay the receiver, money would have to be diverted from schools or healthcare providers serving the poor, or from funds dedicated by voters for purposes such as transportation. She said such a move would probably spur lawsuits.

Lisa Page, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger, said the governor's office is "in active, continuous discussions with the receiver" and wants to help deliver the court-ordered prison healthcare plan.

State Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster) said he and his colleagues would like to approve Kelso's plan, but only as part of related negotiations on state prison construction and a pending federal court case on prison overcrowding. He said Republican senators know the state must improve the healthcare provided to its prisoners.

"At the same time," Runner said, "I'm not sure it's as clear as the receiver thinks it is" that "the state has to roll over and deal with it exactly on his terms."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons18-2008jun18,0,6577747.story

Posted by lois at 09:04 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2008

MA: Cheap trick :Cash-strapped state legislators are finally considering relaxing mandatory drug sentences. Will budget woes succeed where appeals to justice have failed?

Cheap trick :Cash-strapped state legislators are finally considering relaxing mandatory drug sentences. Will budget woes succeed where appeals to justice have failed?
BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI
Boston Phoenix, June 17, 2008

AFTER MORE THAN a decade of tough-on-crime policies — fueled by 13 years of Republican administrations committed to re-introducing prisoners to the joys of lethal injection — the law-and-order atmosphere at the Massachusetts State House has begun to dissipate. A case in point: two bills recently filed on Beacon Hill that take aim at the state’s draconian mandatory-minimum-sentence drug laws.

The first measure, known as Senate Bill 167, would make drug offenders who have already served two-thirds of mandatory-minimum sentences eligible for parole — something that they currently cannot seek, unlike rapists, armed robbers, and child molesters, who are not subject to mandatory minimums. Sponsored by State Senator Cynthia Creem (D-Newton), Senate Bill 167 constitutes a kind of baby step toward reform. The proposal does not repeal mandatory minimums for drug convictions. Nor does it offer a get-out-of-jail-free card for the thousands of drug offenders who’re now languishing in the state’s 22 correctional facilities. It simply tries to ease the impact of these sentences for those who’ve done substantial time.

Senate Bill 167 also dovetails with a much larger reform effort that would moderate the mandatory-sentencing drug laws. That bill, known as House Bill 3302, would institute a comprehensive set of sentencing guidelines for all the state’s 1922 statutory crimes. Under the guidelines, judges would be allowed to depart from the rigid penalties dictated by the mandatory-sentencing drug laws and instead sentence addicts to treatment and intense supervision. The bill, sponsored by State Representative David Linsky (D-Natick), mirrors legislation first drafted seven years ago by the Massachusetts Sentencing Commission, a state agency dedicated to overhauling the criminal-justice system — legislation that has died at the State House every single session since.

But in these tough fiscal times, such sentencing reforms are gaining ground. Senate Bill 167, in fact, has extra appeal. According to the Sentencing Commission, approximately 2000 prisoners are currently serving mandatory minimums — out of close to 20,000 county and state prisoners. Of those, 650 people would be eligible for parole immediately if Senate Bill 167 were to pass. The commission estimates that up to 325 of these drug offenders would receive parole in the first wave. Given that it costs $36,000 per year to house one prisoner, the measure could save as much as $11.7 million almost instantly. These savings were highlighted at a packed, 100-strong May 21 hearing on the two bills before the legislature’s Joint Committee on Criminal Justice — which is expected to recommend the bills in upcoming weeks. Numerous organizations, including the Sentencing Commission, the Supreme Judicial Court, and local and state bar associations, spoke in favor of the proposed legislation. Those who attended the hearing say committee members repeatedly questioned the cost of the current drug policies. Even the state’s district attorneys, who’ve consistently opposed loosening mandatory minimums, seemed willing to compromise. Although the district attorneys reject Senate Bill 167 and House Bill 3302, they have expressed a willingness to modify certain mandatory minimums.

For those who back sentencing reform, the state’s ballooning budget crisis has opened a window of opportunity. Advocates who’ve long criticized the mandatory-drug-sentencing policies are seizing on the existing climate as a chance to change hearts and minds among fiscal conservatives and unlikely political allies. As Lynn Holbein, a member of the local chapter of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), puts it, "Today, there’s opportunity in the midst of our budget crisis. Politicians who were unwilling to make these decisions based on what’s right may do so based on money." After all, she aptly points out, "Money has a way of causing introspection."

THERE’S NO doubt that the state’s mandatory-minimum-sentence drug laws need revamping. As it stands, Massachusetts’s mandatory sentences for drug convictions rank among the harshest in the nation. Trafficking in as little as 14 grams of cocaine — an amount equal in volume to 14 packets of sweetener — gets you three years behind bars. If you’re convicted of selling those 14 grams near school property, you get another two years. If you’re convicted of possessing those 14 grams with intent to sell to minors, it’s an additional three years on top of that. And all this happens automatically.

This rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to criminal justice — an approach that shifts discretion from judges to prosecutors, who choose what charges to pursue in the first place — has long come under fire. These laws lump disparate behaviors and people into neat categories, with no room for common sense. As a result, people who deserve less severe penalties are left languishing in jail cells for decades. People who had never broken the law before. People who had unwittingly dated a drug dealer. People whose habits put them at the wrong place at the wrong time. In Massachusetts, first-time, nonviolent drug offenders routinely spend more time behind bars than rapists and child molesters. Says Martin Rosenthal, of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (MACDL), who’s pushed to repeal mandatory minimums for drug convictions since 1990, "Nobody likes to talk about the huge injustices. The poor drug mules and petty dealers who go away for 10, 15, and 20 years."

Count Charles Ginsberg among the lot. A Web-page designer from Arlington, Ginsberg, 53, spent most of the 1990s locked up in a tiny cell in a Georgia penitentiary, serving a 10-year mandatory sentence for conspiring to sell marijuana. Because the "conspiracy" in question extended beyond Massachusetts, Ginsberg, a Winthrop native, was sentenced under federal mandatory-minimum laws, which, unlike the state’s, allow offenders to earn "good time" for early release. After nearly nine years and the successful completion of a drug-treatment program, he managed to shave six months from his prison term. Nevertheless, Ginsberg considers his punishment "out of whack" with his crime.

It’s not as if he didn’t sell pot. Indeed, he readily admits he became the pot dealer of choice for customers in and around Winthrop. "But I was a small fish in a big tank," he says. At the time of his November 1991 arrest — when a buyer who’d been charged with conspiracy to sell gave him up — Ginsberg had been in trouble with police only once, when, at 19, he was arrested for possessing pot. He had never owned or fired a gun. Two years before his arrest, he had stopped selling marijuana at all. And so, he says, "I didn’t deserve 10 years. If you’re a small fry and you don’t hurt anyone, I see no reason to go to prison that long."

Ginsberg’s time behind the wall provided him with firsthand lessons on the failed results of mandatory minimums — not just the injustices of their severity, but also the racial disparities they deepen. More than 80 percent of people convicted under Massachusetts’s mandatory-sentencing drug laws are minorities, according to the Sentencing Commission. And the same holds true at the federal level — even though blacks and Latinos consume drugs at the same rate as whites. Ginsberg recalls meeting black and Latino men who’d done, as he puts it, "a lot less than me," yet faced much stricter penalties. Some were teenagers who had run with the wrong crowd, gotten caught with an ounce of crack, and been sentenced to 20 years. Others smoked joints inside their homes in cities, like Boston, where entire neighborhoods fall within a school zone. The experience left him convinced of the need for reform. He adds, "I feel a duty to speak out with whatever breath I have in me."

So does Nancy Brown, who heads the New England chapter of FAMM. Brown got involved in FAMM back in 1991, when her son, then 20, was charged with conspiracy to transport a controlled substance across state lines. When she heard her son, who had followed the Grateful Dead, was facing a 10-year mandatory, "I was floored," she says. "I thought, ‘Oh, my God. He must have killed someone.’" On the contrary, her son, whose name Brown asked the Phoenix not to publish, had sent an envelope containing several tabs of LSD through the mail to a friend. To this day, the sentence — which her son served in various penitentiaries until his 1999 early release for good behavior — strikes Brown as extreme. She explains, "My son used illegal substances and should pay the consequences." Yet for a young college student who’d never been in trouble, she adds, "the sentence did not fit his crime."

It’s a message that Brown and FAMM advocates have tried to send to Massachusetts legislators for years now. Ever since 1996, when the Sentencing Commission composed its set of comprehensive sentencing guidelines, advocates have fought to ease mandatory drug sentences — to no avail. When it comes to these sentences, the commission’s recommendation seems nothing if not modest: it would simply give judges discretion to sentence drug offenders to less than the mandated minimum. By having to provide written reasons for the departure, judges would be held accountable. And prosecutors could appeal such decisions at any time.

Despite these safeguards, the law-and-order brigade has sounded off against the commission’s guidelines in every legislative session since 1996. Legislators and prosecutors have criticized the measure as too soft — principally because it eliminates mandatory minimums for drug convictions. Last legislative session, however, reformers came closer than ever to success. In October 2001, the Criminal Justice Committee reported favorably on a tinkered version of the commission’s guidelines, one that would have allowed for some deviation from mandatory sentences for drug convictions. The bill specified "six mitigating circumstances" under which a judge could veer from the mandated minimums — if, for instance, a defendant has little or no prior record, is a minor player in the offense, and didn’t cause grave injury or death. Later that month, then–House minority leader Francis Marini led the effort to tighten the guidelines with an amendment that would have ratcheted up punishment for 30 crimes, from weapons possession to child molestation, but that would have left the drug-sentencing-reform measures intact. The House passed the amended bill (currently filed as House Bill 2749) on a voice vote — only to watch it die in the Senate.

Maybe it’s a coincidence that legislators seemed more open to flexible sentencing for drug offenders during the last legislative session, just as the state’s escalating fiscal crisis began to take hold. But then, maybe it’s not. As legislators grapple with a projected budget deficit of $3 billion and counting, Beacon Hill’s law-and-order culture has begun to give way to financial realities. According to Michael Cutler, a Boston attorney who heads the Drug Policy Forum of Massachusetts, a pro-drug-reform group, the problem for advocates has always come down to money. Legislators, he notes, "have had plenty of money to persecute drug users and to pay for schools and all the other services." They’ve never had to make a choice — until today. Now, no one at the State House can deny that a dollar more for prison cells equals a dollar less for classrooms, human services, and health care. Those who don’t fit the mold of what Cutler calls "the true moral crusader" can acknowledge the failures of the mandatory-sentencing drug laws without fear of attracting the weak-on-crime label. "At some point," Cutler observes, "morality falls victim to cost. Legislators can no longer afford to be moral."

Lawmakers who’ve pushed for reform agree. More and more these days, Linsky, the Natick representative, sees his colleagues "starting to scrutinize the costs of our criminal-justice system." As a result, he says, "We’re asking questions about whether or not these mandatory sentences serve the public purpose." For those eager to stop the hemorrhage of red ink, the new guidelines and parole measures offer new incentive. Adds Senator Creem, "The budget crisis means that these bills can appeal to a broader base of people. Even past opponents of reform may see a way to support" these bills.

THE MASSACHUSETTS legislature is not alone. Desperate to avert projected budget deficits, legislatures in states across the nation have begun to curtail corrections spending by moderating tough sentencing laws. As many as 20 states have loosened mandatory minimums for drug convictions since 2001, when states first began to encounter huge revenue shortfalls. So pervasive is the state-government fiscal crisis that similar sentencing reforms have unfolded even in places that pride themselves on getting tough, such as Ohio, Louisiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

By far, the most dramatic effort has occurred in Michigan, which boasted the harshest mandatory-sentencing drug laws in the US. The state has become notorious for its "650 Lifer Law," which sentenced even first-time offenders caught with over 650 grams of cocaine or heroin to life in prison without parole — the same term meted out to a first-degree murderer. Criminal-justice experts and advocates had been lobbying to ease the strict drug penalties for six years. But it wasn’t until last December, when lawmakers began slashing expenditures to make up for a $500 million shortfall, that the campaign gained momentum. On December 27, then–Michigan governor John Engler, a conservative Republican, signed into law a bill repealing the state’s mandatory sentences and replacing them with flexible guidelines similar to those proposed in Massachusetts — a step that’s already reduced the number of first-time offenders going to jail. Not only did the effort enjoy across-the-board support from politicians, but it was trumpeted even by long-time opponents like the Prosecuting Attorneys Association. The turnaround isn’t surprising, given that the elimination of mandatory drug minimums in Michigan has saved the state an estimated $41 million in 2003 alone.

To be sure, money isn’t the sole factor fueling this trend. Criminal-justice issues in general have become less politicized than in, say, the mid 1990s, when politicians and the public ate up measures like three-strikes-you’re-out mandatory sentences and prisoner chain gangs. Michael Mauer, of the Washington, DC–based advocacy group the Sentencing Project, explains that the "level of tension and emotion" surrounding these issues is lower today partly because of the reduced crime rate, which, despite a recent slight rise, plummeted during the 1990s. Part of the shift in attitudes, too, has to do with the success of such incarceration-alternative programs as the nation’s 800 drug courts, which divert first-time, nonviolent drug offenders into drug-treatment programs rather than jail. But even so, Mauer views money as the main force behind the reforms. "There’s no question that the fiscal crisis is driving these efforts," he says. "Legislators have got to balance their budgets, so they see these get-tough policies come with an expensive price tag."

This isn’t necessarily unusual. According to Jack Levin, who directs Northeastern University’s Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, changes in criminal-justice policy often result from economic necessity. While reaction to extraordinary events can drive such changes — when Somerville resident Eddie O’Brien stabbed his best friend’s mother 98 times in 1996, for instance, his case became the exemplar for trying juveniles as adults, now a favored criminal-justice policy — fiscal concerns can exert similar pressure. Levin points to the trend of de-institutionalizing the mentally ill during the 1970s, a time of comparable financial turmoil. Back then, the state adopted a policy of emptying out the institutions and integrating the mentally ill back into the community, where they’d receive services. Community-based mental-health care was touted as humanitarian reform. But, Levin says, "the real reason for this policy shift was to cut costs at the expense of mentally ill people who needed services." In the same way, he adds, "the underlying motivation for relaxing mandatory minimums has an economic basis."

For many, this economic impetus says something troubling about how we determine our criminal-justice policy. Experts like Mauer find it "sad commentary" that money has become the catalyst for drug-sentencing reform. "For years," he says, "legislators have overlooked all the evidence about the injustices, racial disparities, and inefficiencies of this system. Only when cost becomes an issue do we see this rising concern." Levin, too, thinks the latest trend shows how politicians and the public have "an infinite capacity to rationalize criminal-justice policy based on money." He then echoes the sentiment among many advocates when he concludes: "It’s not a very pretty picture whether you agree with the outcome or not. But, at least in this case, it’s positive. We’re doing the right thing for the wrong reason."

HERE IN Massachusetts, of course, it remains to be seen whether the pain of incessant budget cuts will cause lawmakers to rethink the state’s mandatory-sentencing drug laws. Although the May 21 hearing brought out scores of supporters for the parole and sentencing-guidelines measures, it also attracted opponents — namely, the district attorneys. Hampden County prosecutor William Bennett testified at the hearing on behalf of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association. He told the Phoenix that the DAs reject Creem’s bill because it wouldn’t "maintain the integrity of mandatory sentences." Rather than parole drug offenders, he and his colleagues propose placing them on supervised work release. That way, they would be able to reintegrate into society by working outside the prison walls while still serving out their sentences. The DAs also oppose Linsky’s proposed sentencing-guidelines measure. But they’ve made a nod toward compromise by embracing the last session’s House Bill 2749, which does call for some deviation from the mandatory-sentencing drug laws. Explains Bennett, "There is merit in considering exceptions to the mandatories in certain circumstances," particularly as they relate to school zones.

And so, for the most part, the prosecutors aren’t too keen on easing the mandatory-sentencing drug laws. Bennett even implies that the state has no need for full reform because it doesn’t have mandatory sentences for drug possession, as other states do. Only 1.8 percent of the state’s drug convictions involve a mandatory sentence, he says, explaining that DAs turn to mandatory minimums only to prosecute "aggravating factors," such as large quantities, repeat offenders, and sales to minors. Claims Bennett, "We have a much different set-up than other states do."

As the Criminal Justice Committee weighs the opposition and support for sentencing reform in upcoming months, all advocates can do is wait and hope. No doubt, many reformers feel saddened that budget woes — as opposed to concerns about justice and fairness — are moving their agenda forward. As Ginsberg bluntly puts it, "I think it’s sickening that once the money gets tight legislators are willing to listen." Then again, even he can see the silver lining in the current financial clouds. If money causes state legislators to re-examine and reduce mandatory minimums for drug convictions, so be it. To look at it another way, advocates say, it’s sadder still that Massachusetts has remained behind while other states enact their sentencing reforms. And saddest of all, that legislators here are debating only partial reforms, despite the fact that mandatory minimums have proven a failed and costly experiment.

http://thebostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multipage/documents/02931078.htm
drugs can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)

UK: Audit Estimates Public Cost of a Single Drug Addict at $1.5 Million

Audit Estimates Public Cost of a Single Drug Addict at $1.5 Million
June 16, 2008

A report from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that each drug addict in the U.K. costs taxpayers £800,000 -- about $1.569 million -- over his or her lifetime, the BBC reported June 14.

The estimate included the cost of crime, healthcare under Great Britain's National Health Service, and other considerations; however, researchers said that the estimate was probably on the conservative side.

The report said that the cost to society could be reduced to under £70,000 (about $137,000) if people with addiction problems received treatment prior to age 21.

Researchers said that "the creation of drug-free prisons is an expensive option and was not considered to be practical in the current resource climate," that drug testing was ineffective to measure or counter drug use, and that options like supervised injection centers for opiate-addicted offenders should be considered.
http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2008/audit-estimates-public-cost.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=40408416&print=t

Posted by lois at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2008

MI: Nonpartisan group says rising Corrections spending is the leading cause of Mich.'s continued budget woes.

Prison costs may hit $2.6B in '12
Nonpartisan group says rising Corrections spending is the leading cause of Mich.'s continued budget woes.
Charlie Cain and Gary Heinlein / Detroit News Lansing Bureau
Friday, June 13, 2008

LANSING -- Prison spending is projected to increase by $46 million a year over the next four years, driving the cost to $2.6 billion in 2012, according to a report released Thursday by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan.

The 37-page report, reviewing the reasons Michigan incarcerates convicts at a higher rate than neighboring states, says spending on prisons is the leading cause of the state's continued budget troubles. Michigan already spends $2 billion on Corrections programs, one-fifth of the state's general fund, and had to use tax increases last fall to house the 51,000 inmates and avoid a budget shortfall of $1.8 billion.

"Given the magnitude of corrections expenditures, it will be extremely difficult to bring long-term balance to the state general fund budget without significant alterations of Corrections policy," the report said.

The Citizens Research Council is an independent, nonpartisan research organization that looks at key state public policy issues.

Its findings mirror those of a Detroit News investigation published April 14-15.

"Michigan's Corrections program is out of line, substantially in some cases, in regional and national comparisons," the report declared.

"The combination of prison population increases and economic factors will cause Corrections spending pressures to grow at a faster rate than they have over the last 34 years."

Since 1990, Michigan has kept its inmates locked up at least one year longer than the national or Great Lakes average.

Had it been in line with the average over that time period, Michigan would have spent $403 million less on Corrections in 2005 and housed 14,000 fewer inmates, the report says.

The length of stay for a Michigan inmate has grown by 57 percent from 1981 to 2005, seeing the average stay climb from 28 months to nearly 44 months.

"Lower parole approval rates and specific policy changes aimed at being 'tough on crime' are the primary causes of longer prison stays," the report added.

Corrections Department spokesman Russ Marlan said the report "mirrors what we've been saying. When you look at the data, we do stand out."

The department and Gov. Jennifer Granholm have been pushing for money-saving reforms such as releasing sick and dying prisoners and allowing for the release of more nonviolent offenders. Such proposals have gone nowhere in the Legislature.

"It shows the need for corrections policy reforms in Michigan," Marlan said. "We all want the same thing. We all want safe neighborhoods. This says crime does play a role (in prison population rates), but policies are a bigger factor."

Barbara Levine, director of the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending, said she hopes this helps push more policymakers toward the reforms her organization has been advocating, including restoration of a modest "good time" policy that would allow well-behaved prisoners to knock days off their terms behind bars. A truth in sentencing law requires felons to serve at least their minimum sentence in prison without possibility of early release.

"The logic is there," she said. "It's just a matter of public will."

Republican Sen. Alan Cropsey of DeWitt, a legislative leader regarding justice policies, took issue with some of the report's conclusions.

"They haven't taken a good look at what type of people we're sending to prison versus what other states are sending to prison, and that's crucial," Cropsey said. "What they aren't saying is that if we had the same kind of crime other states have, it would make a huge difference. We don't. We have Flint and Detroit, two of the most violent cities in the country."

The report notes that Michigan imprisons a higher percentage of violent and sexual offenders than the national average. For instance, in 2003, 30 percent of those sent to Michigan prisons were violent offenders compared with 22 percent in the rest of that nation. That year, Michigan sent 10 percent to prison on sex offenses, compared with 6 percent nationally.

The report said parole rates for those two crimes have dramatically declined. The rate for violent offenders dropped from 61 percent in 1990 to about 38 percent in 2005. For sex offenders, it dropped from 47 percent to 14 percent during that period.

The report's release comes as the state is undergoing an exhaustive study of its Corrections policies by the nonpartisan national Council of State Governments, which will spend up to three years helping the state devise ways of controlling costs and inmate populations.

In the report, the council said state policymakers and voters have contributed to the dramatic inmate growth.

Their actions included: the 1978 repeal by voters of a "good time" policy that cut sentences by as much as 22 days for each month a prisoner avoided misconduct; the 1988 repeal of a law -- used nine times after passage in 1980 -- that granted 90-day sentence reductions for the entire prison population each time it reached capacity; legislative approval in 1998 of the "truth-in-sentencing law," accompanied by toughened sentencing guidelines that lengthened prison terms for the most serious criminals.

The report concluded: "Whether the rate of prisoner intake is reduced, the length of stay shortened or other changes adopted, however, the fiscal benefits resulting from any reforms aimed at controlling inmate population and spending growth will have to be weighed against any risks to public safety."
Full Report
http://www.crcmich.org/PUBLICAT/2000s/2008/rpt350.pdf

2 page executive summary
http://www.crcmich.org/PUBLICAT/2000s/2008/note200802.pdf
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080613/POLITICS/806130348

Posted by lois at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)

OR: Prison expansions bring small gains

Prison expansions bring small gains
JUNE 16, 2008
Ben Jacklet
SPECIAL to the Argus Observer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Ontario, minimum-security inmates sort potatoes bound for the Ore-Ida factory and spruce up the Four Rivers Cultural Center, the location of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. In Umatilla inmate crews work at the Finley Butte Landfill and unload rail cars. for CRL.
http://www.argusobserver.com/articles/2008/06/15/news/doc48554ba219559492428
839.txt

Posted by lois at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

New book: Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies.

Meiners, E. R. (2007). Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies. London & NY, NY: Routledge
224 pages
List price: paperback $33.95

Coincidence…or trend? This morning’s issue of Common Dreams includes an article titled “ACLU Report Exposes Unjust Detention of Youth: Pre-Trial Juvenile Lockup in Massachusetts Disproportionately Impacts Youth of Color” (May 12, 2008). (http://www.commondreams.org/news2008/0512-01.htm) Last weekend my social worker daughter railed at length about the hostility—abusiveness, actually—of a New York City judge who consistently refuses to release juvenile offenders to a demonstration program designed to keep them permanently out of jail. The judge is impervious to the fact that the city’s recidivism rate for juveniles who have been imprisoned is 80%, clearly demonstrating that what jail time most reliably yields…is more jail time. Meanwhile, on my nightstand awaiting review is Erica Meiners’ Right to Be Hostile, a microscopic look at juveniles, the justice system—and schools.

Anyone exposed to media and in the habit of thinking would see the above as indicating trend, not coincidence. Pieces on juveniles and the justice system routinely appear in news media. In February of this year, for example, the New York Times editorialized on the fact that the U.S. leads the world in the number of youthful offenders sentenced to life imprisonment, a situation headlined as “A Shameful Record.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/opinion/06wed5.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) In March, a United Nations panel called for the United States to disallow life sentences for offenders under 18. (http://abcnews.go.com/US/WireStory?id=4408351&page=2) While most people equate “juvenile offenders” with “males,” researchers have meanwhile reported that girls are at increasing risk in the justice system, most often for behaviors that wouldn’t be considered criminal if they were adults (including running away and promiscuous behavior). (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=747671&page=1)

Educators, of course, are generally aware of the problem and often lament the youthful promise squandered by a punitive justice system; often, too, they philosophize about who and what is responsible for the growing problem, rightfully implicating issues of poverty and parenting as well as the role of No Child Left Behind, responsible for increasing the numbers of school push outs and drop outs. As a body, however, education professionals will react with horror and disbelief when Meiners points an accusing finger in a new direction: at the education establishment itself. We are, she says, complicit in the massive production of fodder for the growing prison industrial complex (PIC). And, when she says we, she is inclusive: personnel in K-12 schools as well as teacher educators, she argues—persuasively—serve an important function in readying young people for incarceration. Precisely because her charge is so horrifying, it must be carefully examined. While readers are likely to immediately and vehemently deny any complicity, if there is any truth in Meiners’ claims, conscientious educators will want to know. Unhappily for readers, the author’s arguments are so carefully considered and constructed that after reading the book no thoughtful educator will be able to persist in outright, energetic and all-encompassing denial.

By page 2, Meiners is detailing the context of her discussion with statistics that command attention. The United States has 5% of the world’s people, yet 25% of the world’s incarcerated—over two million human beings, not including those on probation or parole, or those housed in Immigration and Naturalization facilities or U.S facilities outside the U.S. African American and Latina women are imprisoned far more often than white women, but 75% of all women imprisoned are prosecuted for nonviolent offenses. Some 12% of all African American males between 20 and 34 are imprisoned; the South has some states in which one-third of African American males cannot vote. Prison is a “growth industry,” big business, and getting bigger. As a nation, we are building more prisons than schools. Meiners’ essential argument is that schools play a large role in identifying and preparing the young people who will eventually fill those prisons. Because it is not possible to adequately summarize this carefully constructed argument in a review, readers are cautioned not to draw conclusions about the validity of Meiners’ arguments without reading the full text, something every educator interested in social justice should do as soon as possible.

Each of the book’s six chapters examines a particular element of schooling that serves to help channel select youth onto a path toward incarceration. Chapter 1 discusses how reasonable emotional reactions to oppressive social and institutional conditions, most specifically anger, are characterized as “outlaw” emotions and used as pretext for excessive control of oppressed populations by authority: “If you do not have the right to be hostile, anger can be read as violence, disruption, disrespect, or as evidence of inherent deviancy, or cognitive and behavioral impairment” (p. 30). Once justifiably angry students, aware of how poorly and inequitably served they and their communities are not only by schools but by other institutions, are branded with such negative labels, they are ripe to suffer the expulsion that commonly results from widespread “zero tolerance” policies. Expulsion is a strong predictor of dropping out—itself an indicator of likely eventual imprisonment. Expulsion rates are higher for boys than girls, and much higher for African Americans than Latinos, Caucasians or Asian Americans. This racialized expulsion trend begins in preschool; in one study, 37 out of 40 states reported that their preschool expulsion rate exceeded the K-12 expulsion rate.

It is also well documented that African American boys are disproportionately placed into special education, a placement that also decreases the chance that a child will graduate (although, as the author takes care to mention, some students do benefit substantively from special education programs). Meiners believes that such channeling may be traced, at least in part, to the fact that the teaching force is overwhelmingly white and female, unfamiliar with other cultures, subject to cultural stereotypes, and quick to feel threatened and intimidated by the Other—especially the African American male, and apparently at any age—and to impose the most severe sanctions.

Chapter 2 traces the systematic reallocation of resources from education to incarceration, despite the fact (or perhaps because of it?) that the more time a child spends in school, the less likely imprisonment becomes. That is, more schools would mean fewer, more expensive prisons—but we choose instead to build more prisons, concurrently calling for “less government,” widely translated as less money available for social welfare programs and popularly justified on such old stereotypes as the lazy welfare queen. This chapter also explores in detail the relationship between not only schools and prisons, but among those institutions and an economic sector that characterizes prisons as a growth “industry” promising new jobs and profits to depressed (white) communities (as long as the flow of new prisoners continues uninterrupted). To the extent that white educators fall prey to stereotypes and discount anger and hostility as legitimate emotions, they are likely to support and participate in school policies that ensure a steady stream of prisoners and revenue to the PIC.

Chapter 3 traces the role of the media in mischaracterizing prisons and incarceration, further ensuring continued public ignorance about the realities of prison populations and conditions while simultaneously promoting racial and other stereotypes, including suggestions that violence is characteristic of race. Chapter 4 is a sensitive, nuanced and especially thought-provoking examination of rhetoric around the need to protect innocent children from predators, especially sexual predators, which has led to Sex Offender Registries and the hyper-vigilance they promote. Of course, Meiners does not defend molestation of children; what she does point out, however, is that children are most often assaulted not by strangers but by family members and friends, people known to them. The author seeks in this chapter to move the reader to ask how the extreme focus on the area of “stranger danger” distracts attention from far more pervasive and systemic dangers to children. Among these, she cites evidence that poverty is the greatest of all such dangers.

xxxI know this fact, I teach this fact. Yet it persistently gets obscured. In a nation with no adequate or affordable childcare system, no universal health care, expensive to prohibitive costs for higher education, and a minimum wage that is not a living wage, we have no registries for the politicians, and employers, who routinely implement or execute policies that actively damage all people, including or even particularly children. (138)xxx

One can’t help but be reminded of writers like Lippman and Chomsky and to think again about how media loves spectacle (the relatively rare but sensational rape and murder of children) and how spectacle functions to distract the bewildered herd of the public from more systemic and pervasive problems.

Chapter 5 examines the ways that special education and recovery groups function to institutionalize and legitimize concepts of normalcy and, in doing so, concurrently determine what constitutes deviance. Moreover, deviance is associated with some problem in the individual—a congenital learning disability, or the disease of addiction. When such problems are assigned to individuals, attention is again distracted from social policies that create oppressive conditions and rational resistance. Blessedly, this chapter also contains examples of programs (Boarding School Healing Project and Prison: A Site for Resistance) that offer a stark contrast to the norm and suggest possibilities for change.

Chapter 6 is a thorough discussion of the author’s own goal: prison abolition. With extensive experience in talking to groups, Meiners is well-equipped to voice and answer a reader’s most likely, immediate questions as the book nears its close: “What about the really bad people?” and “How do I get involved?” Her answer in each case is detailed and extremely helpful to anyone new to and overwhelmed by her line of argument.

Of course, many writers have been exploring the explosion of the PIC, so many readers will be familiar with some of the trends and statistics Meiners uses to build her case. What is new, and startling, however, is her clear-eyed indictment of the education system and its personnel. She is not insensitive to the good intentions and hard work of many educators (and others in the “helping professions”), nor is she unaware that many critical educators are already on paths leading to the one she charts. She is, always, sensitive to the difficulties inherent in telling people things they don’t want to hear and are loathe to believe. Given how formidable her task, the result is nothing short of remarkable. No educator can read this book and be unchanged by it.

Recommended Further Reading and Viewing

Advancement Project and Civil Rights Project. (2000, June). Opportunities suspended: The devastating consequences of zero tolerance and school discipline policies. Available: http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/discipline/opport_suspended.php

Baker, B. (2002). The hunt for disability: The new eugenics and the normalization of school children. Teachers College Record, 104(4), 663-703.

Polakow, V. (Ed.) (2000). The public assault on America’s children: Poverty, violence, and juvenile injustice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

UCLA/IDEA. (n.d.) Suspension and expulsion at-a-glance. Available from http://idea.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/suspension/index.html

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

Why Is Mom in Rehab?

June 14, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Is Mom in Rehab?
By CHARLES M. BLOW
At this URL is the accompanying graph which is the major part of this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/opinion/14blow.html?scp=1&sq=Why+Mom+is+in+Rehab&st=nyt

The actress Tatum O’Neal was arrested recently on charges of buying crack cocaine from a man on the street near her New York City home. She is a 44-year-old mother of three. She has spent years in and out of drug abuse treatment (which she chronicled in her 2004 memoir), and according to her publicist she will continue to “attend meetings” for drug and alcohol abuse.

Ms. O’Neal illustrates a disturbing trend among those being admitted to substance abuse treatment services: a growing percentage of older women are being treated for harder drugs.

Data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration revealed that the total number of admissions to treatment services from 1996 to 2005 (the last year for which detailed data are available) stayed about the same among people under 40, but jumped 52 percent among those 40 and older. Of the 40 and older group, the rise in admissions among men was 44 percent. Among women, it was 82 percent.

(During the same span, the population in the United States age 40 and older grew by only 19 percent.)

Of these women, admissions for nonsmoked cocaine have doubled; admissions for crack cocaine have tripled; admissions for opiates other than heroin have nearly quadrupled; and admissions for methamphetamines have increased sevenfold.

These trends could grow stronger. A 2006 report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse focused on drug use among baby boomers, all of whom were 41 to 59 years old in 2005. It concluded that “the large size of this cohort, coupled with greater lifetime rates of drug use than previous generations, might result in unprecedented high numbers of older drug users in the next 15 to 20 years.”

There was a time when we thought that the biggest substance abuse threat to older women was alcoholism and abuse of prescription drugs.

Ten years ago this month, Betty Ford and the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University issued a report called “Under the Rug: Substance Abuse and the Mature Woman.” At the time, Joseph Califano, president of the center said: “Abuse and addiction to alcohol and psychoactive drugs and tobacco by women 60 and older is an inexcusable area of neglect.”

But since boomers can’t seem to shake their street-drug demons, the focus needs to shift.

Posted by lois at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)

Legal Drugs Kill Far More Than Illegal, Florida Says

June 14, 2008- NY Times
Legal Drugs Kill Far More Than Illegal, Florida Says
By DAMIEN CAVE

MIAMI — From “Scarface” to “Miami Vice,” Florida’s drug problem has been portrayed as the story of a single narcotic: cocaine. But for Floridians, prescription drugs are increasingly a far more lethal habit.

An analysis of autopsies in 2007 released this week by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.

Law enforcement officials said that the shift toward prescription-drug abuse, which began here about eight years ago, showed no sign of letting up and that the state must do more to control it.

“You have health care providers involved, you have doctor shoppers, and then there are crimes like robbing drug shipments,” said Jeff Beasley, a drug intelligence inspector for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which co-sponsored the study. “There is a multitude of ways to get these drugs, and that’s what makes things complicated.”

The report’s findings track with similar studies by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which has found that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. If accurate, that would be an increase of 80 percent in six years and more than the total abusing cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, Ecstasy and inhalants.

The Florida report analyzed 168,900 deaths statewide. Cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines caused 989 deaths, it found, while legal opioids — strong painkillers in brand-name drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin — caused 2,328.

Drugs with benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium and Xanax, led to 743 deaths. Alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug, appearing in the bodies of 4,179 of the dead and judged the cause of death of 466 — fewer than cocaine (843) but more than methamphetamine (25) and marijuana (0).

The study also found that while the number of people who died with heroin in their bodies increased 14 percent in 2007, to 110, deaths related to the opioid oxycodone increased 36 percent, to 1,253.

Florida scrutinizes drug-related deaths more closely than do other states, and so there is little basis for comparison with them.

It has also witnessed several highly publicized cases in recent years that have highlighted the problem. Only last year, an accidental prescription drug overdose killed Anna Nicole Smith in Broward County.

Still, the state has lagged in enforcement. Thirty-eight other states have approved prescription drug monitoring programs that track sales. Florida lawmakers have repeatedly considered similar legislation, but privacy concerns have kept it from passing.

As a result, federal, state and local law enforcement officials say, Florida has become a source of prescription drugs that are illegally sold across the country.

“The monitoring plan is our priority effort, but that is not enough,” William H. Janes, the Florida director of drug control, said in a statement accompanying the study. He said Florida was also looking at ways to curb illegal Internet sales and to encourage doctors and pharmacists to identify potential abusers.

Some local police departments have taken a more novel approach.

In Broward County on May 31, deputies completed a “drug takeback” in which $5 Wal-Mart, CVS or Walgreens gift cards were distributed to 150 people who cleaned out their medicine cabinets and turned in unused drugs in an effort to keep them out of young people’s hands.

“The abuse has reached epidemic proportions,” said Lisa McElhaney, a sergeant in the pharmaceutical drug diversion unit of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. “It’s just explosive.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/us/14florida.html?scp=1&sq=Legal+DRugs+Kill+Far+More+Than+Illegal&st=nyt

Posted by lois at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2008

Report Finds Racial Disparities in the Severity of Punishment of Youth

Report Finds Racial Disparities in the Severity of Punishment
By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2008; B02

The nation's juvenile justice system metes out harsher punishment to black and Latino youths, locks up thousands of children for relatively minor offenses and ultimately makes them more dangerous, according to a national study released yesterday.

"We are generating more violence and criminality in our effort to interrupt it," said Douglas W. Nelson, president and chief executive of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which conducted the study, during a news conference yesterday. "We routinely fail to recognize that children are different than adults. We need to alter the context in which we serve kids."

Nelson's remarks came with the release of the foundation's annual Kids Count report, which measures the well-being of America's children in 10 categories. The report shows reductions in the rates of child deaths, teenage births, high school dropouts and teens who are not in school or working. Four areas increased: low-birthweight infants, children in single-parent homes, children in poverty and children in families in which no parent works full time.

The percentage of newborns weighing less than 5.5 pounds, who are at greater risk of dying in infancy or having long-term problems, is the highest in 40 years. It was the only category in which Maryland worsened from 2000 to 2005, when the percentage of low-birthweight babies in the state rose from 8.6 to 9.1.

Nationally, infant mortality remained steady during the period.

Maryland tied New Hampshire, at 10 percent, for the lowest rate of children living in poverty. The national rate was 11 percent for white children, 36 percent for blacks and American Indians and 28 percent for Hispanics.

Virginia improved in all but three categories: low-birthweight babies, infant mortality and children in single-parent homes.

The District lost ground in half of the 10 categories: infant mortality, teen deaths, teen births, children living with no parents working full time and children in poverty.

But the primary focus of this year's report was the fate of the 400,000 youths who cycle through the juvenile justice system each year. During a two-hour news conference yesterday at the Cannon House Office Building, a panel of experts said the problem has largely been fueled by fear and racism that often lead police to take young white offenders home and minorities to jail.

In 2006, for example, three youths of color were in custody for every one white youth, the report said. Two thirds of all youths in custody were incarcerated for a nonviolent offense.

In the 1990s, 49 states made it easier to try youths as adults. On any given night, 100,000 minors are in jails, prisons, boot camps or residential facilities. A succession of speakers yesterday said these places often cause more problems than they solve. Grace Bauer of Lake Charles, La., said her son, who had been sent to a boot camp for being "ungovernable," was raped when he was 13.

Bauer said her son, now 21, carries the scars. She later learned that the program had a 95 percent failure rate. "On my first visit to see him, he had welts on his face," she said.

Rep. Robert C. Scott (D-Virginia) said many "get tough" crime measures are "nonsense that does not reduce crime."

"It helps [politicians] get elected," he said. "If you can get it to rhyme, even better."

Vincent Schiraldi, director of the District's Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, said it would be more rational to lock up only the most violent offenders and use less restrictive options for the others, particularly those without long criminal records.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, now in his mid-20s, said he should not have been sent to adult jail when he was arrested at 16 for carjacking in Fairfax County. He had no previous criminal record and was an honor roll student.

But instead of being sent to a juvenile jail, he was placed with adults and served eight years in prison. He never received any mental health treatment.

After he was released, Betts attended Prince George's Community College. He now goes to the University of Maryland on a poetry scholarship.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR2008061202842_pf.html

Posted by lois at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)

Political Comedian/Activist Randy Credico Arrested Documenting Marijuana Arrests

Political Comedian/Activist Randy Credico Arrested Documenting Marijuana Arrests

June 13, 2008
By Anthony Papa

Last night, political comedian and long-time activist, Randy Credico was enjoying a cool summer evening with his friends barbecuing in the backyard of his Gay Street home in New York City's West Village. After hearing a loud commotion in the street, Credico stepped out of his front door and witnessed New York City police officers arresting a couple of young adults for allegedly smoking marijuana. Credico got into a shouting match with the cops. One of the officers turned out to have a history with Credico and was involved in a similar incident some months back when Credico documented the arrest of some other young adults accused of simple marijuana possession. Following the verbal altercation with officers, Credico was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and making obscene gestures.

Credico is the director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice . The organization has an ongoing project that involves reporting on and taking photos of undercover detectives who use excessive force in arresting people for simple violations of marijuana laws. Credico is a veteran activist against the drug war and its harmful consequences on society.

He appears in two films about the war on drugs. "60 Spins Around the Sun" chronicles Credico's crusade fighting the New York's draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws . Credico is also featured in "Lockdown USA," a documentary about the 2004 reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws featuring hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons . Credico is the co-founder of the New York Mothers of the Disappeared, a leading activist organization that fought to change New York's harsh and racially discriminatory drug laws.

Across the street from his West Village brownstone is a quiet row of houses that has become a hotspot for marijuana arrests. "People get arrested there all the time," Credico said to me. "I think they should stop these meaningless arrests and use their time and resources to find better ways of going after real criminals."

New York City is the capital of marijuana arrests. The NYPD arrested and jailed nearly 400,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana between 1997 and 2007, a tenfold increase in marijuana arrests over the previous decade is a figure marked by startling racial and gender disparities, according to a report released Tuesday at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The report, The Marijuana Arrest Crusade in New York City: Racial Bias in Police Policy 1997-2007 is the first-ever in-depth study of misdemeanor marijuana arrests in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations. Researched and written by Harry G. Levine, a sociologist at Queens College, and Deborah Peterson Small, an attorney and advocate for drug policy reform, the report is based on two years of observations in criminal courts as well as extensive interviews with public defenders, Legal Aid and private attorneys, veteran police officers, current and former prosecutors and judges, and those arrested for possessing marijuana.

Credico called me at 5:00 a.m. from his cell in New York City's notorious "Tombs" to notify me of his arrest. "It's horrible here" he said. "All I did was to try and save a couple of kids from being arrested for smoking pot."
://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-papa/political-comedianactivis_b_106945.html

Posted by lois at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)

Men and women in prison, probation and parole reaches 7.2 million

New Criminal Record: 7.2 Million
Nation's Justice System Strains to Keep Pace With Convictions

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2008

The number of people under supervision in the nation's criminal justice system rose to 7.2 million in 2006, the highest ever, costing states tens of billions of dollars to house and monitor offenders as they go in and out of jails and prisons.

According to a recently released report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 2 million offenders were either in jail or prison in 2006, the most recent year studied in an annual survey. Another 4.2 million were on probation, and nearly 800,000 were on parole.

The cost to taxpayers, about $45 billion, is causing states such as California to reconsider harsh criminal penalties. In an attempt to relieve overcrowding, California is now exporting some of its 170,000 inmates to privately run corrections facilities as far away as Tennessee.

"There are a number of states that have talked about an early release of prisoners deemed non-threatening," said Rebecca Blank, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. "The problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You're paying a lot of money here. You have to ask if some of these high mandatory minimum sentences make sense."

The bureau's report comes on the heels of a Pew Center on the States report showing 1 percent of U.S. adults behind bars, a historic high. The United States has the largest number of people behind bars in the world, according to the Pew report.

Black men, about one in 15, were most affected, and Hispanics, one in 35, were well represented among offenders. The number of women in prison "rose faster in 2006 than over the previous five years," mostly in Hawaii, North Dakota, Wyoming and Oklahoma, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report said.

In 1980, about the time that tough sentencing laws, particularly for drug offenses, began to be passed by federal and state legislators, 1.8 million people were in the system and $11 billion was spent on corrections.

"It's really like a runaway train," said Ryan King, policy analyst for the liberal Sentencing Project. "Nobody's taking a step back and asking where all these billions of dollars are going." With so much overcrowding, King said, states "need billions of dollars to build enough beds to catch up to where they need to be."

Defenders of the system argue, however, that the rise in the prison population means that more dangerous criminals have been taken off the streets.

"If you look at the fact that these are people who are committing a crime, creating a danger to the public, you can't look at it as wrong," said Scott Thorpe, chief executive of the California District Attorneys Association. "What is the appropriate number of people to be incarcerated to ensure public safety? I don't know if you can answer that."

State contracts with private prisons to house offenders grew by 6 percent, or about 6,000 inmates, the report said. Nearly 114,000 state and federal prisoners were in private institutions in 2006.

Tim Lynch, director of the criminal justice project for the libertarian Cato Institute, called the numbers "scandalous" and said states have resorted to "tinkering" to solve prison overcrowding.

"I think these numbers demonstrate that we've lost our way," Lynch said. "We've lost our way when our laws require such a massive scale of incarceration."

Lynch and others said the drug war is destroying American inner cities almost as much as the drug trade. "When you lock up a bank robber, a child molester or a mugger, you're removing a career offender from the street.

"When you lock up a drug dealer, he is immediately replaced," Lynch said. "We tried this with alcohol during Prohibition and it didn't work. We're not reaching the same conclusion with the drug war. It's slowly sinking in, but it will take politicians some time to turn this around."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/11/AR2008061103458_pf.html

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

June 12, 2008

San Quentin: Opposition to closing & moving the prison

A view on San Quentin Prison
06/11/2008
Marin Independent Journal
THE REV. LIZA KLEIN

I AM CONCERNED about the perspective recent articles on San Quentin prison gives to a complex issue. The "fight over death row" is closely linked to the decade-long county plan to take over all of the land on which San Quentin sits.

The Marin County San Quentin Reuse Planning Committee is opposed to the renovation of death row, not because it really understands the cost comparisons between San Quentin and other prisons, and not because it is against the death penalty, but because the committee covets the land on which the prison sits.

The committee ignores environmental impact reports it says suggested transit, housing and retail plans would have a negative impact on the environment in many ways.

The prison-industrial complex in California is troubled in many ways. The high costs come from our overly punitive laws and inadequate rehabilitation.

The United States incarcerates four times as many persons today as it did 30 years ago. We have more people in our prisons any other country, and much evidence points to injustice in sentencing and housing these people. Incarceration for drug use and sales, mandatory sentences without flexible sentencing by judges, "three strikes" sentencing, and pressure on parole boards to always say no, has profound economic and social impacts.

Moving San Quentin would be a catastrophe for the 5,200 persons presently housed there. The land reuse plans do not consider the abuse, struggle and exposure to
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violence that puts persons at great risk for incarceration, nor the needs and dreams that could release them.

As a pastor, I work to support and nurture communications between inmates and their children. Because it is in the Bay Area, San Quentin has become a nationwide model of volunteer services.

Seventy percent of all of the volunteers in the California State Prison system are here. California no longer funds rehabilitation, yet San Quentin prison has addiction recovery programs, self-help groups, education, job training, and spiritual formation groups because of its location.

Prisons in the Central Valley and other rural locations have essentially no classes or rehabilitative programs. Volunteers offer the chance not only of rehabilitation but of transformation to men who have had unbelievably difficult lives before ending up in prison.

They also make possible a successful transition back to normal life when an inmate is released.

"We can warehouse them anywhere," was a statement once made by former Marin Assemblyman Joe Nation in an IJ article discussing plans to move the prison to another site. If we "warehouse them," what kind of rehabilitation is possible?

Our urban location also means that families, including children can visit inmates. Continuity in relationships between inmate fathers and their children helps to protect children against the strong statistical possibility of them also becoming incarcerated as adults, and enhances the likelihood that the father will be successful in returning to normal family life after he is released.

The average household income in Marin is about $100,000. Are we so out of touch and out of care with those who have struggled without resources or opportunity that we cannot imagine their needs, their hopes, their dreams?

Do we need more bay views and a refined ferry terminal so badly that we can totally neglect the human consequences of fulfilling our desires?

Many people in Marin believe that we ought to do all we possibly can to rehabilitate those who have gone astray, to help them become safe and productive citizens, for their benefit and for our own.

Keeping San Quentin in Marin is one very valuable way to do that.

The Rev. Liza H. Klein is pastor at San Rafael First United Methodist Church.

http://www.marinij.com/opinion/ci_9548280

Posted by lois at 09:16 PM | Comments (0)

Federal Magistrate writes that Albert Woodfox's case should be overturned

June 12, 2008
National Briefing | South-NY Times
Louisiana: Case of Ex-Black Panther
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The conviction of a former Black Panther in the killing of a prison guard in 1972 should be overturned because his former lawyer should have objected to testimony from witnesses who had died after his original trial, a federal magistrate found. The lawyer’s omission denied a fair second trial for the man, Albert Woodfox, in 1998, the magistrate, Christine Nolan, wrote Tuesday in a recommendation to the federal judge who will rule later. Mr. Woodfox, 61, and Herman Wallace, 66, were convicted in the stabbing death of the guard, Brent Miller, on April 17, 1972. Mr. Wallace has been appealing his conviction based on arguments similar to Mr. Woodfox’s. Mr. Woodfox and Mr. Wallace, with another former Black Panther, became known as the Angola Three because they were held in isolation for about three decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12brfs-CASEOFEXBLAC_BRF.html?_r=1&sq=Black%20Panther&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=1&adxnnlx=1213290557-XtJM%20cgTd1fQS/Os4VaP2w&pagewanted=print

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

June 10, 2008

Bob Herbert - "Out of Sight"

June 10, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Out of Sight
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times

When the dismal unemployment numbers were released on Friday (at the same time that oil prices were surging to record highs), I thought about the young people at the bottom of the employment ladder.

Below the bottom, actually.

A shudder went through the markets when the Labor Department reported that the official jobless rate had jumped one-half a percentage point in May to 5.5 percent — the sharpest spike in 22 years.

The young people I’m talking about wouldn’t have noticed. These are the teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats compiling the official unemployment rate don’t even bother counting these young people. They are no one’s constituency. They might as well not exist.

Except that they do exist. There are four million or more of these so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on street corners in cities large and small — and increasingly in suburban and rural areas.

If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response is: “I hustle,” which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing a neighbor’s car to running the occasional errand.

Or it could mean petty thievery or drug dealing or prostitution or worse.

This is the flip side of the American dream. The United States economy, which has trouble producing enough jobs to keep the middle class intact, has left these youngsters all-but-completely behind.

“These kids are being challenged in ways that my generation was not,” said David Jones, the president of the Community Service Society of New York, which tries to develop ways to connect these young men and women with employment opportunities, or get them back into school.

It is extremely difficult because, for the most part, the jobs are not there and the educational establishment is having a hard enough time teaching the kids who are still in school.

“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”

So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are paying attention.

The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type inequality that has been the result.

Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask.

It’s not as if these kids don’t want to work. Many of them search and search until they finally become discouraged. The summer job market, which has long been an important first step in preparing teenagers for the world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest in more than half a century, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

Now, with the overall economy deteriorating, the situation for poorly educated young people will only grow worse. As Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies, told The Times recently:

“When you get into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest. Kids always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”

As the ranks of these youngsters grow, so does their potential to become a destabilizing factor in the society.

More important, the U.S. needs the untapped talent (and the potential buying power) in this large pool of young people, just as it needs the talents of the many other Americans of all ages whose energy, intelligence and creativity are wasted in an economic system that is not geared toward providing jobs for everyone who wants to work.

America needs to dream bigger, and in this election year, job creation should be issue No. 1. If I were running for president, I would pull together the smartest minds I could find from government, the corporate world, the labor movement, academia, the nonprofits and ordinary working men and women to see what could be done to spark the creation of decent jobs on a scale that would bring the U.S. as close as possible to full employment.

We’ve maxed out the credit cards, floated mindlessly in stock market bubbles, refinanced mortgages to death — now’s the time to figure out how to put all Americans to work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10herbert.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 08:19 PM | Comments (0)

VA: Percy Walton's Death Sentence is Commuted

National Briefing | South, NY Times
Virginia: Death Sentence Commuted
By DAVID STOUT
Published: June 10, 2008

The life of a man who killed three people in November 1996 was spared by Gov. Tim Kaine, a day before the scheduled execution, on grounds that the inmate was mentally incompetent to understand his situation. In commuting the death sentence of Percy L. Walton, Governor Kaine said a new sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole “is now the only constitutionally appropriate court of action” in view of Mr. Walton’s continuing mental defectiveness. The defendant had just turned 18 when he shot three of his neighbors to death in Danville.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/us/10brfs-DEATHSENTENC_BRF.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Virginia&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

Philadelphia: A Messed-Up Justice System

Karen Heller: A messed-up justice system
By Karen Heller
Philadelphia Inquirer

"If the United States leads the world in incarceration," says civil-rights lawyer David Rudovsky, "Philadelphia leads the United States."
We have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than anybody else, 3.5 times more than New York City.
We're No. 1!
We've won the inmate championship. And our prize is the chance to spend $230 million on prisons every year.
This is one business we should be doing everything to unload.Prisoners are a growth industry. "Booming," says prison commissioner Lou Giorla.

It's not hard to see why. When so many of the city's population are woefully uneducated - almost 30 percent lack high-school degrees - decent jobs are hard to come by.

The drug-dealing business, however, is always hiring.

Spend a day inside one of the Court of Common Pleas' four jury-waiver courtrooms and the parade of criminals never stops. One defendant, aged 41, had three trials scheduled simultaneously last Wednesday, from three drug-selling arrests in six weeks. He'd kept out of trouble for 10 years, then fell back because he couldn't find work.

Nonviolent defendants such as he, charged with petty drug dealing, constitute the majority of cases in these courts. If convicted, felons face mandatory minimum sentencing: one to two years for selling two grams or more of cocaine or heroin for the first offense, three to six years for subsequent offenses.

A packet of sugar is four grams.

The criminal division heard 15,000 felony cases last year, 80 percent of them related to drugs.

"We're not doing the things that would prevent the market from growing," says Judge Pamela P. Dembe, chief of the criminal trial division. "We operate a justice system that is based on a very old model, a punitive model."

Punishment is not where we should put money or manpower.

This spring, Philadelphia's prisons made history - by having more prisoners in jail than at any time in the last three centuries, 9,334 prisoners, at an annual cost of $30,000 each. The facilities were designed to hold 6,433.

Who says we don't make anything anymore? We make prisoners.

Two-thirds of inmates are awaiting trial, half for minimum drug charges. Some wait as long as two years for their cases to be heard.

It's an expensive mess. Fifteen percent of prisoners are mentally ill. More than 2,000 are held three to a cell designed for two; one of them has to sleep in a plastic shell on the floor. Due to overcrowding, guard overtime will hit $35 million this month.

Rudovsky is suing the system, on behalf of 11 named inmates, stating that overcrowding violates their civil rights. He's been fighting this issue since 1970, when the prison population was a mere 2,800.

"Building new prisons is not a good idea. You build them, you'll fill them," Rudovsky says.

"We're not going to win the war on drugs in the court system," Dembe argues. By then, it's too late.

We need to find people jobs, so they can earn $30,000 a year instead of our spending that on a cell.

A quarter of Philadelphia's budget goes to criminal justice, almost $960 million on cops, courts and prisons. And 80 percent of the criminal justice system deals with the nasty tentacles of drugs. Do the math. That's $767 million to deal with problems at the end of the line, not the beginning, before they all clot the system.

That money could be spent on day-care. That money could be spent on rec centers. That money could buy early childhood education and job-training centers and mental-health care.

That money could turn girls and boys into educated, law-abiding citizens, and transform potential petty dealers into taxpaying workers.

Mayor Nutter and the new administration are trying, but there needs to be more effort, more money and more manpower to wipe out the prison industrial complex, so the city can reduce the annual drag on the budget fighting a war on drugs that no one is winning.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/karen_heller/20080609_A_messed-up_justice_system.html

Posted by lois at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2008

MN: Locked In Limbo: civil committment for people convicted of sex offenses

"He has just reached 21 years of age," Reuter wrote. Given the MSOP's
history, he added, an indefinite commitment "is analogous to a life sentence without the chance of parole."

'They're all close calls now

By LARRY OAKES, Minneapolis Star Tribune
June 9, 2008
Project: Special Project: Locked in limbo

PINE CITY, MINN -- Isaiah Swedeen's future hung in the balance as deputies escorted him into the courtroom. The 20-year-old already had been through a series of treatment and detention centers after disclosing that he had raped his two sisters. Now officials were asking Judge James Reuter to confine Swedeen indefinitely, to prevent him from victimizing someone again. Swedeen's history of mental disorders, difficulties controlling himself and resistance to treatment meant that he fit the legal definition of a sexually dangerous person, prosecutors from Pine County and the Minnesota attorney general's office argued.

They asked Reuter to commit Swedeen to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP). Created in 1994 to treat offenders until they are no longer dangerous, the MSOP has never released anyone committed to it.

Swedeen's case illustrates the difficulty judges face in deciding sex-offender civil commitments in Minnesota. They are being asked to commit an ever greater variety of offenders to indefinite, prison-like confinement, based on the educated guesses of a small group of psychologists paid to employ the fallible science of risk assessment. Even some judges say the applicable law is so broad that it can be used to send almost anyone with a sex-crime conviction to the MSOP.

"I can't remember the last time I had a slam-dunk" sex-offender commitment, said Minneapolis psychologist Roger Sweet, a 30-year veteran of various kinds of commitment cases. "They're all close calls now."

'The net is wider," agreed psychologist Gerald Henkel-Johnson of Esko, who has done violence risk assessments for the courts for 13 years.

Judges' decisions are made even more difficult by the MSOP's track record.

"Nobody involved at our level wants this to be a system where we are actually locking people up for life under the pretext of treating them," said Hennepin County District Judge Peter Albrecht.

The stakes are highest for young offenders like Swedeen. He is one of about 60 men in the MSOP - about 11 percent of the total - sent there based solely on their records as juveniles, according to the Department of Human Services.

A 'slippery slope'

Like many offenders, Swedeen was sexually abused as a child, at the hands of his drug-addicted birth parents, their friends, and child pornographers in Washington state. He was found to have genital herpes at age 4, when authorities took custody of him and his sisters, who were similarly abused.

Keefe and Holly Swedeen eventually adopted the children and raised them in Hinckley, Minn. By the time Isaiah was 14, the Swedeens had trouble controlling him, and they sent him to a series of treatment centers for troubled adolescents.

At one center he revealed to counselors that he'd been raping his sisters, who are one and three years younger. In 2002, a judge sentenced him to sex offender treatment in prison. But he kept getting kicked out of treatment because of angry outbursts or sexual misconduct with other inmates.

In 2005, Pine County started proceedings to commit him to the MSOP but gave him another chance to complete treatment, this time at an inpatient program in Minneapolis called Alpha House. Again he failed, and authorities returned him to Reuter's courtroom in the summer of 2006 for a civil commitment trial.

Swedeen's adoptive parents dreaded the outcome as they took seats in the front row of the Pine City courtroom.

"What he did to his sisters stemmed from his own abuse," Keefe Swedeen said. "He wanted help, and he admitted what he did. Now he's being thrown to the wolves."

Reuter invited three court-appointed psychologists from the Twin Cities to sit in the empty jury box. (Minnesota is one of only three states that don't allow jury trials for such commitments.) The prosecution and defense had picked the psychologists from lists kept by the attorney general's office and many counties. The lists have names of psychologists with experience in evaluating and assigning risk levels to defendants, prisoners and people rendered potentially dangerous by mental illness.

About two dozen of these psychologists, who are called forensic examiners by the courts, have supplied the foundation for most of Minnesota's sex offender commitments.

For taxpayer-funded fees now approaching $10,000 per case per examiner, they administer tests devised by behavioral scientists, diagnose personality disorders, consult actuarial tables and predict whether an offender is likely to re-offend.

Their participation is controversial within the mental health profession.

The American Psychiatric Association, National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors and other groups have objected to civil commitment of criminals. They argue that most aren't mentally ill and that using mental health systems in this way discredits both psychiatry and the justice system.

The problem, critics say, is that disorders such as antisocial or narcissistic personality, which have been used under the Sexually Dangerous Persons Act to justify commitments of offenders, are prevalent in any group of criminals and not unheard-of in non-criminals.

"Using that standard, you could commit a lot of bank robbers," said Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins University and a critic of civilly committing sex offenders. "It can be a slippery slope."

Critics also question whether mental health professionals should render opinions on whether a criminal qualifies for unscientific legal designations such as "sexual psychopathic personality" or "sexually dangerous person," which are needed in order to be committed in Minnesota.

"Those terms are not in the diagnostic manual," said Dr. Jeffrey Hardwig, president of the Minnesota Psychiatric Society. "What psychiatry objects to is the use of civil commitment to prolong somebody's sentence. Defining mental illness purely based on criminal behavior is not a place we want to go."

Tools are fallible

In predicting risk, examiners rely on established actuarial tools -- worksheets developed by social scientists -- to compile facts such as the offender's age, number of victims, degree of violence used and other characteristics.

The offender's "score" is compared with databases of offenders to see whether he (almost all are men) falls into a group that re-offended - a statistical approach much like the one insurance companies use to assign risk.

Some examiners readily acknowledge the fallibility of their tools.

"In general, these instruments are about 70 percent accurate; thus they're wrong 30 percent of the time," said psychologist John Austin of St. Paul, who has testified in commitment cases since 1979.

Scientists who examined the validity of two popular risk-assessment tools reported last year in the British Journal of Psychiatry that at best "professionals should be extremely cautious," and at worst "should avoid using [such tools] altogether, as the predictive accuracy of these tests may be too low [for] high-stakes decisions about individuals."

Dr. Michael Farnsworth, the state's former forensic psychiatrist, designed the MSOP and still evaluates offenders for the courts. But he doesn't place much confidence in actuarial tools.

"They still have a high rate of false positives and a pretty good rate of false negatives," Farnsworth said. "With the false negatives, there will still be people who offend against the community, and the public will feel betrayed. Conversely, with the false positives, we lock up the wrong people,'' at a cost of $134,000 each a year.

In contrast, Austin, Minn., psychologist Rosemary Linderman, an evaluator in commitment cases since 1992, has few qualms about the civil commitment process and her role in it.

While acknowledging that "all [risk assessment] tools have some limitations," she said examiners weigh the results against their professional judgment, based on their experience and extensive reviews of the offender's history.

Linderman said she's not concerned about the dramatic rise in commitment petitions that followed the 2003 rape and killing of Dru Sjodin by paroled rapist Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., who was sentenced to death.

"I think our world is a different world than it used to be, and that we need to pay attention to high-risk sex offenders to protect our communities," Linderman said.

But Austin said the spike is troubling. "I am unaware of any data that indicates that sex offenders released since 2003 are at a greater risk to re-offend sexually," said Austin, adding that a 2007 Minnesota Department of Corrections study "seems to indicate the opposite, in fact."

The study checked for new criminal activity among 3,166 sex offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 1990 and 2002. After an average of 8.4 years, 10 percent had been convicted of a new sex offense. Significantly, those released earlier were much more likely to be reconvicted within three years than those released later -- 17 percent in 1990 vs. 3 percent by 2002.

"The reduction in sexual recidivism since 1990 is likely due, in part, to the longer and more intense post-release supervision of sex offenders," the study concluded.

A 'deeply troubled' judge

No one knows whether Isaiah Swedeen will molest or rape again. The court system paid the psychologists to make their best guesses. Those guesses carried the weight of verdicts.

When first retained by the state to review Swedeen's history in 2005, psychologist James Gilbertson said that Swedeen arguably met the legal criteria for commitment as both a sexual psychopathic personality and a sexually dangerous person.

Psychologist Mary Kenning, testifying at the same hearing, said Swedeen didn't seem to fit those criteria but may have been committable as mentally ill and dangerous, a separate legal designation under another law.

After interviewing and testing Swedeen, both Kenning and a third psychologist, James Alsdurf, said Swedeen needed treatment but not indefinite confinement.

But after Swedeen washed out of the program at Alpha House, all three experts supported committing him when they reconvened in June 2006.

"Since November 2005, what's changed?" asked Dan Bina, Swedeen's attorney.

"I gave him the benefit of the doubt in 2005, and I probably shouldn't have," Alsdurf answered, adding that Swedeen "completely bombed" in his chance to avoid commitment.

Alsdurf and Kenning testified that they also were persuaded by Swedeen's additional disclosure during treatment that he had inappropriately touched a neighbor boy when they wrestled as children. Statistically, offenses against both sexes increase the risk of re-offending.

During a break in the hearing, Bina, Swedeen's attorney, paced the hallway. "I'd rather have a murder case than one of these," he said. "With murder, there's a set period of time."

Three months later, on Sept. 15, 2006, Judge Reuter preliminarily committed Swedeen to the MSOP as a sexually dangerous person.

In early 2007, deputies returned him to Pine City for a required hearing to decide whether that commitment should be "indeterminate."

Bina leaned toward his client and asked: "Do you understand that it may be a year, and it may be 50 years?"

With youthful bravado Swedeen replied, "I'll be out in 10 years, guaranteed."

Bina asked that the commitment be reconsidered because Swedeen's behavior in the MSOP improved after he refused to take psychiatric medications. Bina noted that an MSOP psychiatrist had filed a report saying that Swedeen didn't appear to need the drugs and that his behavior was more consistent with a personality disorder than a major mental illness.

Noah Cashman, the assistant attorney general arguing the state's case, countered that Swedeen had had angry outbursts and at least eight rule violations. His condition remained much the same, Cashman argued.

Judge Reuter said he was disappointed with the MSOP's 60-day report. "It was perfunctory, redundant," he said.

Cashman replied: "With the 60-day review, the information will be limited," adding that "it takes years" to effectively treat someone with Swedeen's problems.

Reuter said he'd decide within a few weeks, then adjourned. "Mr. Swedeen, take care of yourself now, OK?" the judge said. Swedeen nodded toward the judge as he was led away.

Seventeen days later, Reuter signed an order for "indeterminate commitment." The order said there was no appropriate place for Swedeen in Minnesota besides the MSOP.

But Reuter also wrote that he was "deeply troubled" that Swedeen apparently hadn't received any treatment while his final commitment was pending.

"He has just reached 21 years of age," Reuter wrote. Given the MSOP's history, he added, an indefinite commitment "is analogous to a life sentence without the chance of parole."

http://www.startribune.com/local/19645554.html

Posted by lois at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)

Coming Home After a Reduced Sentence. Those Released Since Disparities in Cocaine Penalties Were Offset Find a Different World.

Coming Home After a Reduced Sentence
Those Released Since Disparities in Cocaine Penalties Were Offset Find a Different World

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 8, 2008; A02

Days after her release from prison, Nerika Jenkins made a bold prediction: "I'll bounce right back into society."

Although the world changed considerably over the 11 years of her imprisonment, she said, "I'm not afraid." She took vocational classes -- masonry, carpentry, painting, culinary arts, Microsoft Excel and horticulture -- while serving time in Philadelphia and Danbury, Conn. "I'm just ready to achieve my short-term goal, building a nursing home," she said. "They're always in need of places for the elderly."

More than 7,000 crack cocaine offenders such as Jenkins, 36, have received reduced sentences since March, when the U.S. Sentencing Commission put retroactive sentence guidelines into effect to offset what the commission felt were overly harsh punishments for crack cocaine related crimes, and it is an open question whether they will succeed or return to a life behind bars.

The majority of the reductions so far have been granted in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, covering Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the Carolinas, according to a report by the Sentencing Commission on retroactive crack cocaine sentencing released in May. By contrast, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, covering California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Alaska, Nevada, as well as other states and territories, has granted about the same number of reductions as the smallest jurisdiction, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington.

About 35 percent of inmates who were granted reductions by federal courts had been released as of May 31, according to the Bureau of Prisons. Among them is Willie Mays Aikens, the former Major League Baseball slugger whose 15-year sentence for possessing 63 grams of crack cocaine -- about the weight of a large Snickers candy bar -- made him a cause celebre among activists fighting long crack cocaine punishments.

Aikens was released in the first week of June, nearly 22 years to the day after the cocaine overdose of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias. Bias's death spurred Congress to pass the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Under the mistaken belief that Bias's death was caused by crack cocaine, lawmakers made sentences for crack cocaine crimes harsher than those committed for powder cocaine by a 100-to-1 ratio.

Nearly 90 percent of those who received the tough sentences for crack cocaine were black men and women. Most users and dealers of powder cocaine are white and Latino.

Jenkins is one of the people who activists say were wrongly affected by the law: wives and girlfriends. She was snared by police in New York who accused her of collaborating with a boyfriend who was dealing crack in Virginia. Prosecutors asked her to testify, but she refused, saying she knew nothing of the boyfriend's operation.

"I went to trial, and they gave me 230 months, 19 years," said Jenkins, a first-time offender. When her anger subsided, she vowed not to languish in prison, and she took courses.

When the sentencing commission decided to make the new guidelines retroactive so that convicts in prison could take advantage, Jenkins and her mother, Ira Lee Johnson, filed a motion to reduce her jail time.

"I became aware of it in January," she said. The next month, a judge in Virginia, where the case originated, sent her a letter informing her that she was eligible for immediate release. Prosecutors were given a week to respond, and they did, objecting to a reduction. The judge overruled them.

Within weeks, Jenkins's sentence was reduced from 230 months to 151. "I had to serve four extra months because of a discrepancy between what the judge said and what the paperwork said," Jenkins complained, but soon she was in a halfway house.

Natasha J. Marshall, 48, underwent a similar experience in Fresno, Calif., when police arrested her husband, a drug dealer. Marshall said she had no idea that he was dealing, but she was sentenced to 15 years. A sentence reduction released her in March, after she had served 11.

Now living in an apartment with her daughter, Marshall is readjusting to a world dominated by devices that were not widely used when she entered the system: cellphones, flat-screen televisions and personal computers. Wanting a job, she was startled to find that applications are now submitted online. After spending a quarter of her life behind bars, she is still haunted.

"I can't sleep for more than five hours," Marshall said, with the cacophony of prison life echoing in her dreams. After 11 years of showers, she always takes a bath.

Slowly but surely, said her probation officer, Brian Bedrosian, Marshall is recovering nicely. "She calls in, and she's taking care of business," he said.

Marshall enrolled in an online business administration course at Ashford University in Clinton, Iowa. "She's doing very well," said Brian Zigich, her enrollment adviser. "She's on the ball. She's one of my best students. You can see the motivation in her. She's one of the few you don't have to worry about."

Zigich's characterization of Marshall defies concerns by the Justice Department about the impact that crack sentencing reductions would have on public safety. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey warned that the release of crack offenders would possibly return dangerous drug dealers back to neighborhoods ravaged by the crack cocaine trade.

Mukasey and other department officials argued that inmates would overwhelm the federal court system with motions for sentence reductions, forcing prosecutors to virtually retry the cases.

That has yet to happen, said Mary Price, vice president and general counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums. "We haven't heard anything from the department or elsewhere bearing out their initial fear that these releases would happen in some en masse way, pouring out people into communities," she said.

Price acknowledged that it is too early to fully gauge the impact of the reductions. "There will be people who will find themselves in this situation again -- there's no question about that," she said. "But that would happen if we let them [out] early or at their regular time."

The Bureau of Prisons, federal probation officials and the commission have not released information showing how many inmates have committed crimes in the three months since the retroaction was applied.

"I'm very hopeful that our federal government is keeping track of the recidivism numbers," said Charles D. Stimson, a former federal prosecutor who is now a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "I'm not one to suggest that all those who are eligible for release will be re-arrested. I'm sure they won't be. But it would be helpful to inform the public and [Congress] on an ongoing basis."

Posted by lois at 08:19 PM | Comments (0)

KY: Prison costs targeted. Panel to focus on easing taxpayers' burden

Prison costs targeted
PANEL TO FOCUS ON EASING TAXPAYERS' BURDEN
By Joe Biesk
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lexington Herald Leader

With Kentucky's prison population skyrocketing and only expected to get larger, Gov. Steve Beshear has called on a group of legal authorities from across the state to find ways to relieve the prison system's financial burden on taxpayers.

And as Kentucky grapples with budget woes throughout state government, such as sharply reduced spending on public universities, lawmakers are looking to reduce the amount of money the state spends on prisons. A subcommittee of the Kentucky Criminal Justice Council began studying the state's sentencing practices last week.

Jun. 09, 2008

"The prison population has grown to the point that it's getting close to costing half a billion" dollars, said Charles Geveden, deputy secretary of the state's Justice and Public Safety Cabinet. "We need to look at that, but the thing we don't want to sacrifice is the protection of the public, and we won't sacrifice that."

The Department of Corrections' budget is $424.5 million for fiscal 2009, which begins July 1, and $440.4 million the next year. That includes nearly $525 million in state funds over the next two years for adult prisons.

A study released earlier this year by the Pew Center on the States found that Kentucky has experienced the nation's largest prison population increase -- it grew by 12 percent to 22,400 inmates. That number could reach 31,000 within 10 years.

Beshear and state lawmakers have looked for ways to reduce those numbers. The General Assembly included language in the state budget that allows for certain Class C and Class D felons to serve parts of their sentences in home incarceration programs.

"It is time that we take a serious look at our sentencing guidelines, our penal code, and all of the related items to try to figure out ways to appropriately punish people, make sure the public is protected, and find some alternatives that are less expensive than just putting somebody in prison," Beshear said during a March interview.

Beshear has asked the Criminal Justice Council to report back with recommendations by Dec. 1. The subcommittee headed by Geveden is one of five reviewing prison issues. Others are looking at Kentucky's drug laws, the penal code, pretrial release and probation and parole.

Geveden's panel on sentencing is looking at, among other things, finding ways of reducing the number of people who re-offend. Some answers could include offering more treatment, education and job training while people are in prison, Geveden said.

Kentucky Public Advocate Ernie Lewis, a member of the panel, said he's hoping the state overhauls all of its sentencing practices to rein in "out of control prison numbers." Harsher laws, longer sentences and more law enforcement has led to the state's current prison situation, Lewis said.

"Those numbers are difficult to ignore," he said. "However, I think that our culture over the last 30 years has become so harsh, and so law-and-order oriented, that I think it's very difficult for that to be changed."

Linda Tally Smith, a commonwealth's attorney in Boone and Gallatin counties, said she supports studying the issue. But, while rising prison costs should be reviewed, many citizens support harsh penalties, she said.

"Most people who you talk to on a daily basis don't understand why people who commit crimes don't get more time," Smith said.
http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/story/428330.html

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

F.B.I. Reports Decline in Crime in ’07

''We shouldn't be fooled into thinking our problems are over,'' Fox said. He pointed out that from 2002 to 2006 the rate of murder committed by black male teens rose 52 percent.
''Violence is down among whites of all ages and both genders; it's up among black males, not black females,'' Fox said. ''When you blend all the national numbers together you fail to see this divergence. There are many more whites in the population, so their decline can dwarf the increase among young black males.''
Fox said black males are ''feeling the impact of the economic decline and an increase in gangs and illegal gun markets. Gangs and youth crime are a growing problem despite these rosy statistics.''
Professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University said overall national crime figures have been fairly stable with only small fluctuations since 2000. Gangs have re-emerged in various inner-city neighborhoods in recent years, Blumstein added, but they have not been the highly structured, almost-corporate entities like the Bloods and the Crips that spread out from Los Angeles in the 1970s.

June 9, 2008
F.B.I. Reports Decline in Crime in ’07
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Both violent and property crimes declined in 2007 from the previous year, the FBI reported Monday. But one expert warned the figures could mask rising murder rates among young black men.

In preliminary figures for crimes reported to police, the bureau said the number of violent crimes declined by 1.4 percent from 2006, reversing two years of rising violent crime numbers. Violent crime had climbed 1.9 percent in 2006 and 2.3 percent in 2005, alarming federal and local officials.

Property crimes were down 2.1 percent last year, the largest drop in the last four years.

The largest declines were in vehicle theft, down 8.9 percent and in rape, down 4.3 percent and murder, down 2.7 percent.

The crime trends were not uniform. Murders, for instance, were down in cities of more than 250,000, including an enormous 9.8 percent drop in cities of more than a million residents. But murders rose in some small cities -- up 3.7 percent in cities of 50,000 to 100,000, up 1.9 percent in cities of 100,000 to 250,000, and up 1.8 percent in cities under 10,000. Historically, national murder trends have begun in the largest cities and moved over several years to smaller ones.

Because the FBI preliminary figures do not contain the detailed age, race and gender breakdowns available in the final report later in the year, they may unintentionally mask a growing murder rate among black male teenagers and young adults, particularly with guns, said James Alan Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University.

''We shouldn't be fooled into thinking our problems are over,'' Fox said. He pointed out that from 2002 to 2006 the rate of murder committed by black male teens rose 52 percent.

''Violence is down among whites of all ages and both genders; it's up among black males, not black females,'' Fox said. ''When you blend all the national numbers together you fail to see this divergence. There are many more whites in the population, so their decline can dwarf the increase among young black males.''

Fox said black males are ''feeling the impact of the economic decline and an increase in gangs and illegal gun markets. Gangs and youth crime are a growing problem despite these rosy statistics.''

Professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University said overall national crime figures have been fairly stable with only small fluctuations since 2000. Gangs have re-emerged in various inner-city neighborhoods in recent years, Blumstein added, but they have not been the highly structured, almost-corporate entities like the Bloods and the Crips that spread out from Los Angeles in the 1970s.

The biggest changes in this report seem driven more by individual city variations than by regional or national trends, Blumstein said. The big murder decline in the biggest cities and in overall violent crime in the Northeast is substantially attributable to an enormous 17 percent drop in murders in New York City alone, from 596 in 2006 to 496 in 2007, he said.

''When you see a crime spike in a city, it's very often attributable to young black males attacking other young black males,'' Blumstein said. ''The duration depends on how fast the city reacts, and the big cities have more resources and more sophistication about how to respond.''

In New York, police attribute the decline in murders to their Operation Impact, which floods high crime areas with officers, including some fresh from the academy. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg also credited ''efforts to keep illegal guns out of the hands of criminals.''

Of 21 cities with more than 100 murders a year a few years ago, 13 saw murders rise in this report and 8 recorded declines, Blumstein said.

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said, ''One preliminary report does not make a trend, but it's going the way we want it to go.'' Kolko cautioned against attributing significance to any shift that hasn't lasted at least two years.

Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr called the report ''very encouraging'' though he noted the final report could alter the figures.

''The report suggests that violent crime is decreasing and remains near historic low levels, which is a credit to increased cooperation among federal, state and local law enforcement,'' Carr said. ''Some communities, however, continue to face localized violent crime challenges.''

Carr said the Justice Department is ''committed to providing targeted assistance wherever needed.''

But Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who chairs a Senate subcommittee on crime, said, ''The decreases announced today are modest. There are nearly 1.4 million violent crimes and over 17,000 murders in America every year, and that's simply too many. ... The Bush administration has repeatedly ignored the needs of law enforcement, slashing overall funding for state and local law enforcement by billions.''

According to the preliminary report, other violent crimes tracked by FBI statistics -- robbery and aggravated assault -- were both down 1.2 percent.

The other property crimes also declined, larceny-theft by 1.2 percent and burglary by 0.8 percent.

Arson dropped 7.0 percent, but it is not included in overall FBI property crime figures, because fewer localities report on the crime.

Violent crimes dropped most in the Northeast, down 5.4 percent with 1.7 percent declines in both the Midwest and West. But they rose 0.7 percent in the South.

Blumstein said murder figures varied widely among Southern cities, with the biggest increase in New Orleans, up 29 percent from 162 to 209. Atlanta saw a 17 percent rise; Jacksonville, Fla., 12 percent. But murders dropped 18 percent in Birmingham, Ala., and 13 percent in Memphis, Tenn.

Property crimes also rose only in the South, where they were up 1.1 percent. The West recorded a 4.7 percent decline in property crimes, followed by the Midwest, down 3.6 percent and the Northeast, down 2.9 percent.

The FBI's preliminary crime report each year gives percentage changes rather than national totals for each crime because not every jurisdiction has filed its reports yet.

------

On the Net:

FBI crime statistics: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/2007prelim/

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-FBI-Crime.html

Posted by lois at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2008

Harriet Johnson, 50, Activist for Disabled, Is Dead

June 7, 2008
Harriet Johnson, 50, Activist for Disabled, Is Dead
By DENNIS HEVESI
New York Times

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a feisty champion of the rights of the disabled who came to prominence after she challenged a Princeton professor’s contention that severely disabled newborns could ethically be euthanized, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 50.

No cause has been determined, her sister, Beth Johnson, said, while pointing out that her sister had been born with a degenerative neuromuscular disease. “She never wanted to know exactly what the diagnosis was,” Beth Johnson said.

The condition did not stop Harriet Johnson from earning a law degree, representing the disabled in court, lobbying legislators and writing books and articles that argued, as she did in The New York Times Magazine in February 2003, “The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.”

Using a battery-powered wheelchair in which she loved to “zoom around” the streets of Charleston, Ms. Johnson playfully referred to herself as “a bedpan crip” and “a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.”

Rolling into an auditorium at the College of Charleston on April 22, 2001, Ms. Johnson went to the microphone during a question-and-answer session to confront Peter Singer, a philosopher from Princeton, who was giving a lecture titled “Rethinking Life and Death.”

Professor Singer had drawn protests by insisting that suffering should be relieved without regard to species. That, he said, allows parents and doctors to kill newborns with drastic disabilities, like the absence of higher brain function or an incompletely formed spine, instead of letting “nature take its course.”

In Professor Singer’s view, infants, like other animals, are neither rational nor self-conscious.

“Since their species is not relevant to their moral status,” he said, “the principles that govern the wrongness of killing nonhuman animals who are sentient but not rational or self-conscious must apply here, too.”

Ms. Johnson had been sent to the lecture by Not Dead Yet, a national disability-rights organization. Describing the event in The Times, she wrote: “To Singer, it’s pretty simple: disability makes a person ‘worse off.’ Are we ‘worse off’? I don’t think so.”

She added: “We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own.”

An e-mail exchange followed that encounter in Charleston, leading to an invitation to debate Professor Singer at Princeton on March 25, 2002. Their two encounters were the subject of the 8,000-word Times article, which brought Ms. Johnson considerable attention in the disability rights movement and from the general public.

“Her impact came mostly from her writing,” said Laura Hershey, a disability rights activist with several organizations, including Not Dead Yet. “Millions of people by now have read that article, and it was reprinted in her book. Dozens of people who read the article told me, ‘Wow, I never thought about it that way.’ ”

Ms. Johnson’s memoir, “Too Late to Die Young,” was published in 2005. Her novel, “Accidents of Nature,” about a girl with cerebral palsy who had never known another disabled person until she went to camp, was published in 2006.

Born in Laurinburg, N.C., on July 8, 1957, Ms. Johnson was one of five children of David and Ada Johnson. Her parents taught foreign languages at colleges. Besides her parents and her sister, Ms. Johnson is survived by three brothers, Eric, McBryde and Ross.

The fact that her parents could afford hired help was a salient point in another Times Magazine article Ms. Johnson wrote in November 2003, “The Disability Gulag.” Describing institutions where “wheelchair people are lined up, obviously stuck where they’re placed” while “a TV blares, watched by no one,” she called for a major shift from institutionalizing people to publicly financing home care provided by family, friends or neighbors.

“I sometimes dare to dream that the gulag will be gone in a generation or two,” she wrote. “But meanwhile, the lost languish in the gulag.”

Early on, Ms. Johnson was a troublemaker. At 14, at a school for the disabled, her sister said, “Harriet tried to get an abusive teacher fired; the start of her hell raising.” In her memoir, Ms. Johnson describes how, after watching a Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon while in her teens, she turned against “the charity mentality” and “pity-based tactics.”

Ms. Johnson graduated from Charleston Southern University in 1978, then earned a master’s degree in public administration from the College of Charleston. She graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1985 and soon went into private practice.

Humor laced her writing. The “crippled children’s school” she attended as a teenager, she wrote in a Times Op-Ed article in December 2006, once considered staging a play based on Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” But who would be Tiny Tim?

Ms. Johnson quoted directly from the Dickens book: “Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!”

“Alas!” Ms. Johnson exclaimed. “A little crutch! An iron frame! In our world, the crutch-and-brace kids were the athletic elite. They picked up the stuff we hard-core crips dropped.”

Posted by lois at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

CA: Ruling favors governor on prison transfers

Ruling favors governor on prison transfers
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, June 5, 2008

(06-04) 17:54 PDT SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was within his rights to declare a state of emergency at California's overcrowded prisons in 2006 and begin transferring inmates out of state, an appeals court ruled Wednesday over the objections of the prison guards union.
The ruling by the state Third District Court of Appeal in Sacramento overturned a judge's decision and was welcomed by Schwarzenegger, who is separately defending the state against lawsuits by inmates seeking to reduce the overall prison population and improve the prisons' health care system. A federal judge has transferred control of prison health care in California to a court-appointed manager after ruling that the system violated constitutional standards.
There are nearly 160,000 inmates in the 33 state prisons, which were designed to hold about 83,000. The state is planning construction that will expand the capacity of state prisons and county jails by 53,000.
A referee appointed by a federal court panel has proposed measures to reduce the prison population by 27,000 over four years, to 133,000. The measures would include alternatives to prison for some parole violators and felons facing short sentences.

Wednesday's ruling "comes at a critical juncture in our prison reform efforts," Schwarzenegger said in a statement. "I am pleased that their decision allows out-of-state transfers to continue while our comprehensive reforms to reduce overcrowding are fully implemented."
Laurie Hepler, a lawyer for the prison guards' union and another prison employee union that challenged the inmate transfers, said her clients disagreed with the ruling and would appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Schwarzenegger issued the order in October 2006 after a special legislative session on prison overcrowding fizzled, with Democrats seeking changes in sentencing laws and Republicans calling for prison expansion. As the inmate population continued to climb, 16,000 prisoners occupied bunks in prison gyms and other temporary quarters.
Schwarzenegger has said as many as 8,000 inmates could be shipped out of state. So far, nearly 3,900 prisoners have been transferred to out-of-state prisons run by private companies under contracts with California.
The transfers have continued despite a ruling in April 2007 by a Sacramento County judge that Schwarzenegger had acted illegally. Superior Court Judge Gail Ohanesian agreed with the unions that state law allows a governor to issue an emergency order only when local officials need state help in responding to a disaster, and that the use of private prison employees violated civil service laws.
The appeals court had put Ohanesian's ruling on hold while the state appealed. In its ruling Wednesday, the court said the governor can issue orders to respond to emergencies in state institutions that may endanger residents.
In this case, the court said, the lack of space in state prisons was causing overcrowding in local jails, forcing counties to release some inmates who might commit more crimes. Overcrowding also increased the risk of diseases that could spread outside the prisons and had led to local water pollution from sewage spills caused by overtaxed prison wastewater systems, the court said.
The court also said California's civil service rules allow the state to employ private contractors when public employees are not available to meet urgent needs. The planned expansion of state prisons will take years to complete, and the prison system will need five years to eliminate staffing shortages, the court said.
"California cannot build or retrofit the prisons needed overnight, no matter how much money it invests to solve the problem," Presiding Justice Arthur Scotland said in the 3-0 ruling. The only available lockups are in other states and are staffed by private employees, he said.

The ruling can be read online at:

links.sfgate.com/ZDPH

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/05/BAS2113BOQ.DTL
This article appeared on page B - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle Sections

Posted by lois at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

Prisons might be affecting job stats

Prisons might be affecting job stats
Friday, June 6, 2008 3:10 AM
By Marilyn Geewax
COX NEWS SERVICE
Columbus Dispatch

WASHINGTON -- When the Labor Department announces May employment figures today, the jobless rate likely will be about 5 percent, only half the level reached in the 1981-82 recession.

Given that home builders aren't hiring, auto companies are laying off legions and Americans lack confidence in the economy, why isn't the unemployment rate higher?

Economists cite several reasons, but some think one factor gets overlooked: Prisons are keeping so many people out of the labor market that the true jobless rate is being masked.

"Incarceration rates have gone up enormously in the last 20 years," said Rebecca Blank, an economist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a centrist research group. "We're jailing a lot more people now," which is keeping them from competing for the low-skilled manufacturing jobs that have grown scarce, she said.

Between 1980 and 2006, the number of people in prison in this country jumped from 420,000 to more than 2 million, she said. A recent study by the Pew Center on the States found that one in every 100 adult Americans is now incarcerated.

In 2006, the most-recent year Blank's research covers, the 4.6 percent U.S. unemployment rate would have been 5 percent if people behind bars and in the armed forces had been seeking private-sector jobs and therefore counted in the unemployment statistics, she said. Among black men, the rate would have pushed up from 9.6 percent to 10.6 percent.

"We have disproportionately taken young men of color out of the work force" with much stiffer penalties for drug-law violations, she said.

A 2005 study in the American Journal of Sociology said that by 1999, more than 40 percent of young black male high-school dropouts were in prison or jail, compared with 10.3 percent of young white male dropouts.

"There hasn't been a marked change in behaviors" in terms of drug use since the early 1980s, Blank said. "What has changed is public policy" involving drug sentences.

The labor market effects don't end when people are released from prison, she said. "It has a huge impact by closing off employment opportunities" for people who might otherwise seek work as a guard, cashier or other position that requires trust. "Many employers can't hire people with a prison record," she said.

That means former prisoners often have longer stretches of unemployment and typically earn lower wages when they do find work, she said.

But not everyone agrees that the nation's high incarceration rate has an impact on employment. James Sherk, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, says the unemployment rate is low simply because the labor market remains tight, with many employers seeking even low-skilled workers.

If people now incarcerated under tough drug laws had never been put into prison, the great majority of them could have found jobs if they had wanted them, he said.

Attributing the low unemployment rate to the high incarceration rate is "grasping at straws," he said.

A look at Ohio

• Prison population as of Jan. 1: 50,730

• Proportion of state residents in prison:

1 in 178.9

• 2005 incarceration-rate rank among states: 31st

• Corrections spending, fiscal 2007: $1.77 billion, or 7 percent of the general fund

• Percentage of state employees working in corrections: 11.8 percent

• State unemployment rate, April: 5.6 percent
http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2008/06/06/Jailed_Jobless_-_Cox.ART_ART_06-06-08_C10_JHADQ43.html?sid=101

Posted by lois at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2008

White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Awards $5.8 Million for Student Drug Testing

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has awarded $5.8 million in grants to 49 schools to fund random drug testing of students.

Grantees included schools in 20 states. The awards were made in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education.

"Student drug testing programs promote safer, healthier school environments where students can work toward achieving their full potential," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. "A good student drug testing program helps students defy peer pressure and say 'no' to drugs and alcohol, and provides the opportunity for at-risk students to get the support they need."

This is the fifth round of grants awarded for school-based random student drug testing programs since 2003.
http://www.jointogether.org/news/funding/trends/2008/ondcp-awards-58-million-for.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=40009885

Posted by lois at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)

Federal Prisons Cost Soars to 62% above estimates

Mendota prison project scaled back
Costs affect the plans; communication was lacking, auditors say.
By Michael Doyle / Bee Washington Bureau
05/29/08 23:30:25
WASHINGTON -- The cost of a long-delayed federal prison in the San Joaquin Valley town of Mendota has soared 45% beyond original estimates even as the project itself has shrunk, dismayed auditors say in a new report.

Vexed by stop-and-start funding and higher oil and steel prices, among other problems, the anticipated price tag for Federal Correctional Institution Mendota now tops $231 million. Seven years ago, federal officials figured a Mendota prison would cost $158 million.

"Cost estimates are imprecise and should be expected to vary," Government Accountability Office auditors noted Thursday, "but Congress and other stakeholders were not informed about the extent to which costs might vary from the initial estimates."

The Mendota facility was one of three federal prisons examined by the congressional watchdog agency. All told, the auditors found construction costs for the prisons in California, West Virginia and New Hampshire have increased 62% beyond initial estimates.

The rising costs drove federal officials to curtail some construction plans to meet their budgets. The result: smaller prisons than anyone anticipated.

"This is an example of problems within the federal Bureau of Prisons," Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, said in an interview Thursday evening. "They don't keep their eye on the ball."

The original Mendota prison plan called for a high-security penitentiary. That changed in 2002 to a medium-security prison and a minimum-security camp. An adjoining Federal Prison Industries facility would have employed and trained inmates.

Last year, GAO auditors reported, officials quietly eliminated both the minimum-security camp and the prison-industry facility from the 960-acre Mendota complex. Officials also shrunk a planned prison-industry facility at the Berlin, N.H., prison.

"Although intended to reduce costs, these changes also reduced the functionality of the prisons and deviated from what the [Bureau of Prisons] planned and requested funding for," auditors stated.

Auditors further noted that the Bureau of Prisons "did not clearly communicate" to Congress" that the Mendota project had shrunk. The only indication that the minimum security camp was eliminated came in the omission of the phrase "with camp" in official references to FCI Mendota.

"Their communication with our office has not been adequate," Costa said.

Bureau of Prisons officials, in their official response, stated that the elimination of the minimum-security camp was "clearly" indicated on a construction status report that "went to all shareholders." Bureau officials did not dispute much of the report and agreed to improve cost reporting.

Mendota city officials could not be reached to comment Thursday.

The initial Mendota prison plans anticipated a minimum-security camp housing about 128 inmates. The medium-security facility will house about 1,152 inmates.

The entire project was alluring for the Mendota community, which saw the new prison complex as a source of employment. The more inmates are housed, the more workers are needed. When local officials broke ground in August 2005, they spoke of $20 million flowing into the area's economy.

"Good things will happen for Mendota and the west side," Costa declared at the symbolic groundbreaking ceremony.

Within a year, though, federal officials said they had run out of money to complete the work. The Bureau of Prisons said funding had to be diverted to pay for the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina cleanup, among other priorities.

Bureau of Prisons officials further told auditors that "problems associated with selecting sites" had increased costs. Steel prices had increased 60% and oil prices by 150% since 2003.

In May 2007, under pressure from Costa, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, and other lawmakers, the Bush administration again came up with the necessary funding. Officials now believe the half-built prison won't be finished until 2010, about two years late.
http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/634868.html

Posted by lois at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

UK: Titan jails to have overcrowding built into design, admits ministry

Titan jails to have overcrowding built into design, admits ministry
· 'Superprisons' envisaged to last 100 years
· Split into units housing different type of offender

The new generation of titan "superprisons" are being designed to be overcrowded from the start, the Justice Ministry admitted yesterday. Prison service officials are already looking for a minimum 50-acre brownfield site in the Greater London area to build the first titan jail. But when it opens in 2012 it will only have 2,100 places for its 2,500 inmates. A consultation paper published by the justice secretary, Jack Straw, said yesterday the sites for the four- or five-storey titans should be suitable for an initial development providing at least 2,100 uncrowded places with the capacity to hold up to 2,500 prisoners "through planned overcrowding".

The paper strongly denies that the new jails - which may end up being called "cluster prisons" - will be 2,500-bed "monolithic prison warehouses". It says they will be split into several units each housing a different type of offender. It is envisaged that each titan will consist of five or six self-contained units each housing 200 to 500 inmates, from young offenders to adult males to maximum security prisoners.

The paper says that the design of the superjails is still being worked on but it will incorporate biometric scanning, bar coding and electronic door locking systems into the fabric of the building. The paper is very light on detail about costs of the privately-built jails except to say that the cost to the public purse of each prison is estimated at £350m at today's prices.

The ministry also makes the claim that this generation of prisons is designed to last 100 years so the annual capital cost a place over its lifespan will be significantly less than the current cost of adding a houseblock to an existing jail.

The initial three titan prisons are earmarked for London, the west Midlands and the north-west, and are designed to meet the projected gap between supply and demand for prison places, which is expected to reach a shortfall of 13,000 by 2014. The biggest population pressures are expected in London where 11,500 extra prison places are needed. Officials envisage that the first London titan will hold up to 1,000 remand prisoners waiting for trial in the capital's courts. The remaining 1,500 places will house medium-risk category B prisoners. The establishment of the titan as the main regional remand prison for London would allow closure of inner-city Victorian jails such as Pentonville.

The first site is expected to be somewhere near the M25 network and the paper specifies that it must be within a hour's journey time of the major courts. Officials also want to see a site capable of further expansion, with the possibility of a court complex to be built alongside.

The prisons minister, David Hanson, said the titans needed to be built so that the available resources to reduce reoffending could be brought together into one place. "We have made clear from the outset that these prisons will not be giant warehouses. They will include the latest developments in security measures, will build in ways of developing work programmes for prisoners and ensure that, alongside a tough regime, offenders have the opportunity to change their ways through treatment, work and learning," he said.

Ministers believe securing planning consent for three titan sites rather than 15 conventional prisons that would otherwise be needed will prove less complex and have less environmental impact. Although each titan will be broken down into units they will share the same security perimeter, reception, healthcare, education, and physical recreation facilities.

Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust said the decision to press ahead with the titans marked the end of the government's commitment to get tough on the causes of crime: "Why would anyone determined to reduce social exclusion and cut crime want to invest billions of public money in failed institutions when they could fund treatment for addicts, better mental health care and early intervention to steer young people out of trouble?"

She said the paper accepted the prison population would soar over 100,000, making England and Wales the greatest incarcerator in western Europe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jun/06/prisonsandprobation.justice

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

Research Finds Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region

June 5, 2008
Research Finds Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region
By KEVIN SACK
NY Times

Race and place of residence can have a staggering impact on the course and quality of the medical treatment a patient receives, according to new research showing that blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated and that women in Mississippi are far less likely to have mammograms than those in Maine.

The study, by researchers at Dartmouth, examined Medicare claims for evidence of racial and geographic disparities and found that on a variety of quality indices, blacks typically were less likely to receive recommended care than whites within a given region. But the most striking disparities were found from place to place.

For instance, the widest racial gaps in mammogram rates within a state were in California and Illinois, with a difference of 12 percentage points between the white rate and the black rate. But the country’s lowest rate for blacks — 48 percent in California — was 24 percentage points below the highest rate — 72 percent in Massachusetts. The statistics were for women ages 65 to 69 who received screening in 2004 or 2005.

In all but two states, black diabetics were less likely than whites to receive annual hemoglobin testing. But blacks in Colorado (66 percent) were far less likely to be screened than those in Massachusetts (88 percent).

The study was commissioned by the nation’s largest health-related philanthropy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which on Thursday planned to announce a three-year, $300 million initiative intended to narrow health care disparities across lines of race and geography. Officials said it would be the largest effort to improve health care quality ever undertaken by a charity in the United States.

The foundation hopes to better understand and confront the causes of those regional variations by focusing its spending on 14 regions, like the city of Memphis and the state of Wisconsin.

Dr. Bruce Siegel, the George Washington University professor who will direct the program, said one community might use its grant money to study how long it takes hospitals to move heart attack patients from emergency room to catheterization laboratory. Others might work to coordinate electronic record-keeping or to provide patients with better information about taking medications after discharge.

“In my book,” Dr. Siegel said, “health care is local, just like politics, so you’re going to see a lot of differences in what communities do.”

That point is reinforced time and again in the new research conducted by the Dartmouth Atlas Project of the college’s Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, which has used Medicare data to document health care disparities over the last two decades. It found substantial variation in the proportion of Medicare beneficiaries who had been seen in a two-year period by a primary care physician, ranging from 86 percent in Nebraska and South Dakota to 65 percent in New Jersey. It found far higher rates of unnecessary hospitalizations in Hawaii, Utah and Washington than in Kentucky, Louisiana and West Virginia.

Disparities in the rate of leg amputations were particularly stark. The rate for blacks was about 6 per 1,000 in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, but less than 2 per 1,000 in Colorado and Nevada. The rates for whites in the three Southern states were much lower, about 1.3 per 1,000, but were still more than double the rates for whites in the two Western states.

Such variations may be partly explained by regional differences in education and poverty levels, but researchers increasingly believe that variations in medical practice and spending also are factors.

“In U.S. health care, it’s not only who you are that matters; it’s also where you live,” wrote the study’s authors, led by Dr. Elliott S. Fisher.

Dr. John R. Lumpkin, senior vice president of the foundation, said that more than a third of the $300 million would be spent to hire national experts to help regional coalitions tailor their quality improvement plans. The remainder of the money will be devoted to research, evaluation and the promotion of quality standards.

“We want to build a template in each of these communities that will teach America how to improve health care quality in a dramatic way,” Dr. Lumpkin said.

The areas selected for the grants are Cincinnati; Cleveland; Detroit; Humboldt County, Calif.; Kansas City, Mo.; Maine; Memphis; Minnesota; Seattle; south central Pennsylvania; western Michigan; western New York; Willamette Valley in Oregon; and Wisconsin.

The foundation’s endowment, now about $10 billion, was financed originally from the wealth of its namesake, who died in 1968 after building Johnson & Johnson into one of the world’s largest sellers of health and medical products. The group has been a major force in curbing tobacco use, and has more recently turned its attention to obesity, announcing a five-year, $500 million effort on that front last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/health/research/05disparities.html?sq=health%20disparities&st=nyt&scp=1&adxnnlx=1212726436-kpkBL%209L7PrSSppoSJzthQ&pagewanted=print

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

Cracking Open---Michael Short's Journey

Cracking Open
Michael Short knows he was wrong to sell crack cocaine, but he questions whether he needed 15 years in prison to learn his lesson. Now some of the politicians who helped put him there are wondering, too.

By Vanessa M. Gezari
Sunday, June 1, 2008; W18
Washington Post

ON HIS 18TH DAY OF FREEDOM, Michael Short awakened before dawn. In prison, corrections officers had paced the halls at night, jingling keys and shining flashlights. Now Mike slept fitfully, even in a king-size bed.

It was a damp, gray Tuesday late in February. He slipped on a pinstriped shirt that hid his tattoos, slid his feet into shiny new loafers and rubbed coconut oil into his hair, cut razor-straight at the temples and flecked with gray. He was 36, with a basketball player's long-legged gait and the lined brow of a man well acquainted with consequences. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he nervously knotted a silver-and-white tie that his girlfriend had bought him at Macy's.

On days like this, he wished the past were a room with a door you could close, a place you could walk away from, as he had walked away from prison after President Bush commuted his sentence. But the past wasn't like that, at least not for him. Over breakfast, he practiced the testimony he was scheduled to deliver that afternoon before a congressional subcommittee: My name is Michael Short. I am here because in 1992 I was sentenced for selling crack cocaine. Before that, I had never spent a day in prison. I came from a good family. I had no criminal history. I was not a violent offender. But I was sentenced to serve nearly 20 years. I was 21 years old.

As he navigated traffic from his girlfriend's house in Charles County and boarded the subway to Capitol Hill, he braced himself for the inevitable questions, the scrutiny of his crime, the dissection of his punishment. His commutation had taken half a dozen years to materialize and, by Mike's calculation, had shaved only six months off the time he would have served. He had spent more years in prison than many murderers.

He arrived at the basement room in the Rayburn House Office Building a half-hour early and looked around, taking in the raised dais, the plaque that said "Ways and Means." He might have spent this drizzly morning at the Greenbelt health club where he had recently landed a job as a personal trainer. Instead, he was here, wondering what was meant by the term "majority whip" and hoping that he wouldn't stutter.

The room slowly filled with the most sympathetic crowd he would encounter all day: lawyers, ex-prisoners and advocates who believed that federal crack cocaine laws were unfair and had gathered to lobby for new ones. The subcommittee hearing would not take place until afternoon; this was just a practice session to give Mike and other lobbyists some last-minute pointers. Someone handed him a big red button that said, "CRACK the disparity," a reference to the vast difference in prison terms to which crack and powder cocaine offenders are sentenced. He pinned it to his shirt.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas who has introduced a bill to remedy the disparity, walked to the lectern. An imposing woman in an emerald green suit, she wondered aloud what America's founders would have thought, had they been able to look into the future and see how many times the country fell short of its ideals.

"They set up these models, these principles, that indicated that we had the right of free speech, that we had the right of a trial by our peers," Jackson Lee said, her voice rising. "And for those of us [whose forebears] came here in the bottom of the belly of a slave boat, the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments suggested that there was a road map to freedom in this nation. But we have sometimes lost our way."

She spoke of how, in the Bible, no one stopped to help the beaten, stripped man on the roadside until the Good Samaritan came along. In much the same way, she said, members of Congress had long ignored broken crack cocaine laws that disproportionately affected African Americans. Husbands, brothers and sisters had disappeared from their communities for years over relatively minor drug crimes, she said.

Mike pulled a crumpled tissue from his pocket and wiped his eyes. The packed room felt like church on Sunday morning. As Jackson Lee spoke, people yelled, "Yes!" and "All right now!" When she finished, Mike clapped long and hard.

And then, unexpectedly, someone introduced him. He walked to the lectern and stood there, hunching his shoulders as if he were ashamed of his 6-foot-2-inch frame. His voice was gravelly with emotion.

He began his spiel: his name, his crime -- the distribution of 63 grams of crack cocaine -- the almost-20-year sentence, the 15 years and eight months he'd spent in prison.

"How many?" someone called out, incredulous.

"Fifteen years and eight months of my 19 years," Mike said. He paused, searching for a way to explain without asking for sympathy. He tried to maintain his composure.

"I made a mistake. And it didn't take me 15 years to understand that what I did was wrong. I deserved to go to prison. But I don't feel as though I deserved to go to prison for 15 years."

IN THE SUMMER OF 1986, WHEN MIKE WAS 15, the Boston Celtics selected Len Bias as their first pick in the NBA draft. A Celtics scout compared him to Michael Jordan, and Bias told a reporter that the first thing he planned to buy was a Mercedes. Two days later, he collapsed in his dorm suite at the University of Maryland, dead of a cocaine overdose. The community that had cheered for him staggered like a man punched in the gut. Here was a kid from Prince George's County who had laid claim to the American dream with all the ease of a pro executing a layup. "I can't see why we would lose someone like this," the director of a recreation center where Bias had played as a kid told The Washington Post. "Someone so important to us."

Initial medical reports indicated, incorrectly, that the high concentration of cocaine in Bias's blood suggested that he had died after smoking crack, then the latest drug to hit America's city streets. Made from powder cocaine cooked with baking soda, crack was cheaper than powder, and, because it was smoked, the high was more intense.

Living in Hyattsville, the son of a legal secretary and a car salesman, Mike absorbed the news, but he was too young to make sense of it. Drugs were not a part of his world. His parents had separated when he was a boy, and his mother raised him and his brother and sister in quiet suburban neighborhoods before moving to a neat brick house on Hawaii Avenue in Northeast Washington after Mike graduated from high school. He was a quiet kid, obsessed with basketball. His friends called him a "mama's boy" because he used to meet his mother at the bus stop when she got home from work. "I wouldn't have known what cocaine was if you put it on my dinner plate," he said.

Nevertheless, his world reverberated with Len Bias's loss. At Northwestern High School, Bias's alma mater, Mike played on the varsity basketball team with the star's younger brother Jay. Mike wanted to comfort Jay, who was visibly distraught, but he didn't know what to say.

In Congress, then-House Speaker Tip O'Neill, a Democrat whose Boston constituents couldn't stop talking about Bias's death, saw a political opportunity. Throughout the 1980s, the federal government had waded deeper into the war on drugs, part of a trend spawned by the turmoil of the 1960s and '70s. Bias's death offered a perfect chance to capitalize on the growing public outcry, especially over crack. "The speaker realizes, if the Democrats take the lead on this, if we play it right, maybe we can win the Senate back," Eric E. Sterling said recently. He was assistant counsel to the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime in 1986 and now heads the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a Silver Spring nonprofit that educates the public about criminal justice issues.

O'Neill convened the steering and policy committee of the House Democrats and moved the formation of tougher drug laws to the top of the agenda. Sterling and other staffers were told to draft a law that would punish high-level traffickers, but they didn't know what amount of drugs would qualify someone as "high-level" and, with the midterm election campaign season just a few days away, they didn't have time to determine that, Sterling said. No hearings were held.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established the mandatory minimum drug sentences that remain in effect today. It imposed a five-year mandatory prison term for first-time trafficking of five or more grams of crack or 500 grams of powder, and a 10-year mandatory minimum for first-time trafficking of 50 grams of crack or five kilos of powder. In drug policy circles, this is known as the "100-to-1 drug quantity ratio," and it has hit African Americans hardest because they are more likely to live in the neighborhoods where crack cocaine is used and sold, even though, in absolute numbers, most crack users are white. In 2006, 82 percent of crack offenders sentenced under federal law were African American, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency set up to develop a national sentencing policy for the federal courts.

In 1988, Congress got even tougher, passing a law that made simple possession of five grams of crack punishable by a mandatory minimum five-year prison term. First-time possession of any amount of any other controlled substance, including powder cocaine, is a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of a year in prison. The only exception is flunitrazepan, also known as Rohypnol, the "date rape drug," which carries a maximum three-year penalty for first-time possession.

Five basic suppositions guided lawmakers in setting such high penalties for crack, according to research by the Sentencing Commission.

Crack is extremely addictive, and because crack users needed to get high more frequently and tended to have less money than powder users, they were more likely to engage in criminal behavior to support their addictions, creating at least a perceived link between crack use and violence. Crack was considered especially dangerous, particularly to fetuses. Children were also used as lookouts by dealers and exposed to the drug as addicts. And crack's potency and low price -- about $10 for two small pieces compared with $100 for a gram of powder cocaine in 1986-- meant that almost anyone could afford it.

President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in late October 1986. The following week, the Democrats took back the Senate. Over the next two decades, the federal prison population would grow from about 38,000 to more than 200,000; more than half the current inmates are drug offenders. The average amount of crack that federal offenders were convicted of trafficking in 2006 was 51 grams, about the weight of a candy bar; their average prison sentence was 10 years, according to the Sentencing Commission.

"If we were sophisticated in the metric system, we would have known that the people we're interested in, like [Colombian Pablo] Escobar, are moving a ton, a million grams," Sterling said. "Are we winning the war on drugs? No. The federal government is wasting the resources."

THE YEAR AFTER LEN BIAS DIED, Mike Short's team at Northwestern won the state championship. He and his teammates stormed the court at the University of Maryland's Cole Field House in jubilation, and some leapt for the rim and held on, shattering a fiberglass backboard. Their joy signaled intense relief. It had been a tough season, with rival players mocking Jay Bias over his brother's drug-induced death and Northwestern players fighting back. Several had been suspended.

Mike, a sophmore, wasn't among them, but in his senior year he was cut from the team over "differences of opinion" with a new coach, he said. His mother met with teachers and administrators, who offered to reinstate him, but Mike refused. "It's my fault for being angry like that, holding resentment," he said. "That's something that still haunts me."

He switched to pickup games on street courts in suburban Maryland, where drug dealers and athletes mingled like mismatched dancing partners. Dealers would sometimes hand out money to winning players or buy them clothes. People noticed Mike's skill and started paying him as much as $500 to play in high-stakes games, he said. He knew drugs were illegal, and his training as an athlete dissuaded him from using them. He says he never tried cocaine and only smoked marijuana once. He didn't need money. "But then some of us would see how easy it is, and it's hard to turn down $1,000 or $2,000 when you don't have to do anything," he said.

His dealing began with casual conversations with people from school, the neighborhood and guys he met on the courts. He wasn't asked to do much -- most of the time, he just made a phone call or delivered a package, often to people he knew and trusted -- and dealing became part of the fabric of his social life. He would go bowling and meet someone else in the business, or arrange a handoff to a friend at a local barbershop. He bought himself stylish new clothes, but he didn't buy a car because he worried that his mother, Shirley Short, would catch on. Even so, when he showed up in a pair of $100 tennis shoes that she hadn't bought for him, when his friends parked their own flashy cars outside, she guessed the truth. About a year before Mike got arrested, his mother told him to stop. He didn't see why he should.

"I was like, Man, it's just too sweet of a deal," he recalled. "There's no violence involved. Why not sell it, make my $500, and go on about my business?"

The violence that was invisible to him was apparent to anyone who read the newspaper or had the misfortune to live in one of the impoverished urban neighborhoods favored by street dealers. In 1989, Washington had 434 homicides, more per capita than any other U.S. city. But Mike didn't frequent open-air drug markets, and he told himself that the cops weren't looking for someone like him. I'm a peon, he thought. They want the guys who are selling thousands and thousands of dollars' worth.

And then he walked into their cross hairs.

The investigation that put him in prison, like the law that kept him there, began with Bias's death. In 1987, Brian Tribble, a former Maryland student and friend of Bias's, went on trial for supplying the cocaine that killed the basketball star. A former player testified that he and three others, including Tribble and Bias, snorted about one-third of a cup of powder cocaine the night they were celebrating Bias's ascension to the Celtics.

Relying heavily on the testimony of former teammates who snorted cocaine with Bias and a 17-year-old with an extensive juvenile record who said he had sold large amounts of cocaine for Tribble, prosecutors built a case that they later acknowledged was largely circumstantial. Tribble was acquitted, the jury foreman explained after the trial, because prosecutors failed to present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that he had any connection to the drugs that killed Bias. Tribble wept when the verdict was read, but his success in beating the charges vaulted him to superstardom in the local drug-dealing community, said J. Andrew McColl, the lead FBI agent on the investigation that led to Mike's arrest. "Brian was Mr. Teflon," McColl said. "Nobody could touch him."

In 1988, the D.C. police and the FBI went after Tribble, who was working with a network of dealers in the Woodridge neighborhood in Northeast. The FBI planned to have undercover agents supply the dealers with cellphones in exchange for crack cocaine and to record their conversations. At the time, cellphones were rare and expensive; you needed good credit to get one, something most drug dealers didn't have.

A few days before Christmas in 1989, an undercover FBI agent showed up to collect a monthly cellphone payment in crack from a dealer named Norman Brown. Brown told the agent to drive over to his "man" and collect the drugs. On this day, his man was Mike Short. Mike handed the agent a paper bag containing 63 grams of crack cocaine. The agent gave him $1,800.

In 1990, after a two-year investigation, federal authorities charged Mike, then 19, and 28 others with selling powder cocaine and crack as part of a sprawling drug ring. Nearly two decades later, McColl called Mike "a very minor player." Mike said he had never been suspended from school. Unlike some of his codefendants, he had worked steadily, including helping his father at Mattress Discounters in Langley Park.

Meanwhile, Brian Tribble agreed to cooperate with authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute powder cocaine, admitting that he and associates had sold more than 110 pounds of drugs in an 18-month period. He was sentenced to 10 years, almost exactly half the length of Mike's crack sentence of 19 years and seven months. In addition to the 63 grams Mike handed to the undercover agent, the court held him accountable for helping to distribute another five kilos of crack, based on witness testimony, which added considerably to his sentence.

AFTER HE WAS FREED, MIKE RETURNED TO WASHINGTON ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 18, 2007, on a Trailways bus from West Virginia, wearing a prison-issue sweat suit and a denim jacket that whipped in the wind. He had ridden since morning, staring out the window, too anxious to sleep. He felt like everyone was looking at him, like they all knew that he had just been released from prison.

He was released just ahead of a stream of crack offenders expected to get out an average of two years early under changes enacted last fall by the Sentencing Commission. About 20,000 federal crack inmates will be eligible for the reductions over the next 30 years. The largest number -- about 1,400 -- were sentenced in the Eastern District of Virginia; 279 were sentenced in Maryland and 269 in the District.

On average, they are male, black and 35 years old, a profile that Mike fit almost exactly, and many will return to neighborhoods scarred by drugs. The Anacostia halfway house where Mike would spend the next six weeks sat across from a rundown apartment complex on a desolate street. It was called Hope Village, but he quickly sized up the neighborhood. "You would find your choice of drugs around there, easy," he said.

He had been behind bars for nearly 16 years, most of it in Petersburg, Va. His mother had died in 1997, and he had gone to her funeral in his khaki inmate's uniform, chained at the waist and ankles, escorted by corrections officers. Mike's father, whom he had seen periodically over the years, also attended the funeral, along with Mike's brother, sister and nephews. His father sometimes visited him in prison, and the two developed a closer relationship, though they were never as close as he and his mother had been.

At first, he was angry -- at the people who'd testified against him, at the government and at his lawyer. Having never been much of a churchgoer, he blamed God. Then somewhere along the way, he grew tired of the repetitive drone of his own rage. "I didn't want to come out of prison being bitter, hating anyone," he said. "I wasn't raised like that, and I didn't want to come home like that."

Vowing not to waste a day, he earned an associate's degree in business management and worked long hours in a prison business office.

"Why did you go to prison for so long?" Mike recalls his nephew asking when he visited. "Did you kill anybody?"

"I sold drugs," Mike told him.

"But you haven't been home since I been living." After a while, he stopped asking.

Another visitor began making the 2 1/2-hour trip from Washington to see him, first with Mike's sister, then on her own. Vanessa Bolden was 5-foot-2, with smooth chestnut skin and the righteous toughness of a woman who had been working since she was 16 and now owned her home and drove a sleek blue Lexus. She and Mike had started dating a few months before he was convicted, but neither thought it would last. She was a 31-year-old single mother with her own apartment and a job at the U.S. Customs Service. He was 21, living with his mother and going to federal court every day for his trial on drug charges.

Vanessa and Mike would go to Hains Point or Rock Creek Park and drink Heinekens and talk. Sometimes they would sit in her car in front of his mother's house, listening to the radio and laughing. If he was nervous about going to prison, she never guessed. "I never had no idea that they would give him 1,001 years," she said.

In the prison visiting room, she was impressed by what she saw. "He started educating himself; he started reading a lot, getting a lot of knowledge," she said. After receiving his management degree, Mike earned his personal trainer certification and completed courses in nutrition and plyometric training.

Vanessa and Mike exchanged letters and talked on the phone. Their relationship began to shape Vanessa's life. She watched her girlfriends fall prey to cheating men. She would hang out with her brothers or go to a happy hour, but she wouldn't let a man buy her a drink. Mike was her excuse. When she went out, she imagined he was at the table next to her. "I always thought Mikey was watching me," she said.

By the time his release date neared, she was going to see him nearly every weekend, getting up at 5 a.m. on Sundays and driving all morning to sit next to him in the crowded visiting room and hold his hand. "I was like, 'What is wrong with me?'?" she said. They talked for hours about their families, their future. When Vanessa woke up troubled in the middle of the night, she would write to him. "He'd write me back and make me feel better. I was like, Damn, if it was that simple, why couldn't I figure it out?"

In 2002, he applied for executive clemency, which is one of the few remedies available to federal prisoners sentenced to mandatory minimums because there is no parole in the federal system. A year earlier, President Bill Clinton had handed out dozens of last-minute pardons and commutations. One of the recipients was Mike's codefendant and childhood friend Derrick Curry. In recent administrations, clemency has become rare. Bush has approved only six commutations since taking office, fewer than any president except his father, who served only one term.

Mike's petition, including letters from prison officials, his sister and family friends, landed in the Office of the Pardon Attorney in early 2002. It would take more than five years to reach the White House, just three blocks away. At first, his request seemed headed for denial, according to documents. Three years passed before then-Pardon Attorney Roger Adams sent a letter to the U.S. attorney in Baltimore and to Judge William Nickerson, who had presided over Mike's case, asking them to weigh in on his clemency petition.

A veteran judge, Nickerson had long been frustrated by the sentencing guidelines that took discretion out of the hands of judges. Mike's case had bothered him for years, so much so that it contributed to his decision to stop handling drug cases. Mike and his codefendants were kids from hard-

working families who "kind of got sidetracked," Nickerson said. "It made it doubly tragic to ship them off to jail." When it came time in 2005 to offer an opinion on Mike's clemency petition, Nickerson endorsed it.

Two years later, on December 11, 2007, the White House announced the commutation. It had been so long that Mike had forgotten he had applied. His unit manager found him eating lunch in the prison cafeteria.

"Are you Michael Short?" he asked.

"Why?" Mike barked. He assumed he was in trouble, though he knew he had done nothing wrong.

"Relax," the unit manager told him. "You got immediate release."

Mike's face broke into a smile. "Oh, really? Can I leave right now?"

When Vanessa learned that he was coming home early, she found herself trembling. "I didn't know what kind of man he really was, as far as living with him," she said.

The night he arrived, he climbed into her car. They sat side by side, just the two of them in silence. She glanced over at him, wondering if this was for real.

WHEN HE GOT OUT OF THE HALFWAY HOUSE THIS PAST FEBRUARY, Mike moved into Vanessa's three-bedroom house in Charles County. Golden cherubs hung on the walls in the bathroom, and a stuffed anteater with a pink ribbon around its neck occupied the overstuffed living room couch. After the constant noise of men and cells, Vanessa's house was quiet and strange. Mike didn't like being alone there. After so long in prison, he felt awkward most places. At the mall, he stumbled when getting on escalators. Electronic gas pumps bewildered him. Vanessa rolled down her window to help: "Baby, push that button over there."

He and the other inmates had fantasized about running the streets when they got out, but Mike found that he didn't even want to leave the house. He and Vanessa talked on the phone a dozen times a day. On Valentine's Day, he made steak and shrimp fried rice and laid roses on their bed. He cooked her breakfast and packed her lunch -- a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a granola bar, a peach. He mopped and vacuumed, washed clothes and painted the laundry room.

In his last years in prison, they had almost broken up when he told her he wanted children. She was in her late 40s and had already raised a son. "I'm not stopping you," she told him then. "But, if you want to do it, then go do it. I can't be a part." When she stopped answering his calls, he repented. "I want to do the right thing," he said. "I want to make her happy."

Now she called him "my blessing," "my heart." He said she was his perfect soul mate. They went to a jewelry store to look at rings and cuddled in the kitchen, sipping Sutter Home rosé while their dinner warmed in the oven. "He is not the average guy, 'cause the average guy's not cooking all that for you," she said.

Mike ordered business cards and printed his résumé, which listed his associate's degree, training and nutrition certificates, as well as his work experience in prison. He applied for jobs at several big health clubs, handing over copies of his commutation bearing the president's signature. When one of the gyms turned Mike down, a supervisor who believed in second chances put in a good word for him. Two weeks later, Mike got the job.

He wanted to work seven days a week. "I have the energy and the motivation for it right now," he said, "and I need the money."

He said nothing to his co-workers and clients about his past, but one day, during a training session, a client asked if he had been in prison. "I knew it, I knew it," she said when he told her. She was a corrections officer. Mike's biceps, swelled from years lifting weights in a prison gym, had given him away.

ON THAT DAMP, GRAY TUESDAY IN FEBRUARY, Mike stood amid the marble columns of the Capitol Rotunda and dialed Vanessa's number on his cellphone. He had spent the morning meeting with a congressman and walking beneath crystal chandeliers and elaborate archways, past a portrait of Joseph Hayne Rainey, the first African American elected to the House of Representatives. Mike had grown up a few miles from the Capitol, but he had never been there. Now he told Vanessa how beautiful it was.

Shortly after Mike left the halfway house, an advocate from Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that lobbies for fair and proportionate sentencing, asked for his help. Members of Congress had proposed a handful of bills to reduce or remove the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, and FAMM wanted Mike to tell his story on the Hill.

He was working long days at the health club, and he couldn't afford a suit to wear to the hearing, but felt he owed it to the men he had left behind in prison. By now, even some legislators who had voted for the 1986 mandatory minimum laws expressed regret. One former supporter, Sen. Joseph Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, had recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the sentencing disparity could not be justified: "Our intentions were good, but much of our information turns out not to be as good as our intentions."

It is true, medical experts say, that crack is more addictive than powder cocaine; smoking and injecting offer quicker routes to the bloodstream than snorting, and the faster, more intense highs lead to an increased rate of addiction. But statistics have not borne out fears of widespread violence associated with crack. In 2005, only 6 percent of powder cocaine offenses and 10 percent of crack offenses involved violence or a threat of violence, according to the Sentencing Commission. The predicted "crack babies" did not materialize, either. Although some early studies of individual children suggested that crack had devastating effects on fetuses, long-term case studies showed that alcohol is more dangerous to a fetus than any form of cocaine, including crack, and has affected a far greater number of children, said Harolyn Belcher, a neuro-developmental pediatrician and director of research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute's Family Center in Baltimore.

"This was one of the few times when [Congress] really rushed to complete and formulate the sentencing before the science was really there," Belcher said.

Over the years, some lawmakers had tried to lessen crack penalties, but the political moment had never been right. Then, last fall, the wind seemed to be shifting. The Sentencing Commission, which had long criticized the disparity, proposed the guideline changes that made thousands of crack offenders eligible for reduced sentences. Two Supreme Court rulings allowed federal judges a measure of freedom in drug sentencing, permitting them to exercise greater leniency if they felt the circumstances demanded it. And amid it all, Bush commuted Mike's sentence.

After the morning practice session and lunch in a congressional cafeteria, Mike entered the hearing room, calming his nerves and distracting himself from what was coming by replaying in his head a basketball game he had seen recently on TV. The cameras from C-SPAN swiveled toward him and the other witnesses seated at a long table planted with microphones. Mike was the only one without a law degree.

Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security, banged the gavel. He had proposed a bill to close the disparity, and he urged members of Congress to help end "two decades of legal discrimination."

"There is certainly no sound basis for a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for the mere possession of five grams of crack, when you could get probation for possessing a ton of powder," Scott said.

Judge Ricardo Hinojosa, chair of the Sentencing Commission, ran down the statistics. In 2007, he said, crack sentences were about 50 percent longer than powder sentences. "The commission believes there is no justification for the current statutory penalty scheme for powder and crack cocaine offenses," he said.

In the weeks before the hearing, Attorney General Michael Mukasey had spoken forcefully against the Sentencing Commission's decision to make the guideline changes retroactive, saying that "nearly 1,600 convicted crack dealers, many of them violent gang members, will be eligible for immediate release into communities nationwide." Gretchen Shappert, U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, had come to present the Justice Department's position.

She said that her career had been "defined by the ravages of crack cocaine." She spoke about open-air drug markets, people sleeping in bathtubs to avoid stray bullets, dealers recruiting kids to sell drugs. "We continue to believe that a variety of factors fully justify higher penalties for crack offenses," Shappert said. "It has been said, and certainly it has been my experience, that whereas powder cocaine destroys an individual, crack cocaine destroys a community."

Mike listened, the muscles in his forehead tightening. He sipped his water. When it was his turn to speak, his voice was low and scratchy. "To be clear, I know that what I did was wrong," he read from his prepared testimony. "I sold illegal drugs, and I deserved to be punished. But what I did and who I was did not justify the sentence I received . . .

"I have heard some of the comments some people in positions of power have made about crack cocaine prisoners -- that we are violent gang members and that this is why our sentences have to be so much longer. I am not that person, and most of the people that I leave behind in prison aren't, either."

When the testimony was over, Scott asked whether it was true that many offenders eligible for reduced sentences were already nearing the end of their prison terms.

"Many of them, that would be the case. Mr. Short's situation is not unique," said Reggie B. Walton, a federal judge in Washington who was seated a few chairs down from Mike. "And I think it's just a waste of the taxpayers' money to keep somebody like Mr. Short locked up for as long as he was locked up. I'll be the first to tell him that he should have been punished. But to keep somebody locked up for as long as we kept him locked up, who could have come back into the community and been a positive contributor to society, I think is a loss to the community where he comes from."

People in the audience began to clap, and then, like a dam breaking, Mike hunched his shoulders and burst into tears.

MIKE STOOD BEHIND THE COUNTER at the health club in Greenbelt. It was a March Saturday, one of the busiest days of the week, and he was the only one there. This was his chance to score new clients and build experience, and he had been looking forward to it.

A woman approached him. She told him she wanted a personal trainer, but only if he could promise her that she would lose 20 pounds by May. In prison, Mike had become something of a moral hardliner. He knew some trainers who would have taken her money and told her what she wanted to hear, but he wasn't one of them. "First and foremost, I'm not going to promise you nothing," he says he told her. It would depend on how disciplined she was during her workouts, he explained, and what she ate when she wasn't at the gym.

"Well, how much is it per hour?"

The sessions were priced in packages, not by the hour. He looked for a calculator.

"You ought to know that!"

"Miss, I don't work in sales. I'm a personal trainer."

"Well, I want to talk to somebody else."

"You are free to talk to whoever you want to talk to."

She turned and stormed out, Mike said.

When he walked out to the parking lot at the end of his shift, Mike thought, I don't need any more days like this. But the truth was, apart from computer glitches and the occasional cranky client, Mike loved being a personal trainer. The main problem was money. He had hoped to make from $12,000 to $18,000 in his first six months of freedom, and he was nowhere close. He was paid $15 for each hour-long training session, but the club took nearly three times that much. "It's robbery," he said. "You getting paid peanuts for doing all the work."

His first paycheck had been for $17, but recently his biweekly pay had risen to $266. He quickly spent it on gas, an oil change, fixing a punctured tire and paying his and Vanessa's cellphone bills. He had planned to take over their shared bills one by one, paying them in ascending order until they were sharing costs equally. But on this day he had $15 in his bank account.

His framed training certificates still hung on the wall in the downstairs rec room, but he felt his dream slipping away. Vanessa paid every time they went out. He tried to make up for it by cooking and cleaning, but he had his pride. "It's got to be something better than this," he said.

One morning in March, he didn't get up to make Vanessa breakfast or pack her lunch. "I'm tired," he told her. He rolled over and slept until after she had left for work. A little later, frustrated and near tears, he sat at the computer, searching the Internet for openings at Safeway, Giant, FedEx and the post office. "I just got to be patient," he told himself, his voice breaking.

That afternoon, he was washing dishes in the kitchen when Vanessa called to say that she would be home soon, and she was starving. She asked him to put some salmon in the oven, and maybe make some rice.

"What kind of rice you want me to make, Vanessa?" he asked.

"Baby, when you talk like that, I know you don't want to do it."

Mike laughed. "You trying to read me through the phone now?" He took the fish out of the refrigerator.

"Get to cooking, man. I'm hungry."

"Relax already. I got you."

A few minutes later, she called back. "Do you miss me?"

"Only on Thursdays and Saturdays. I don't miss you today."

"All right, don't forget you have to heat the oven up first and then let that fresh salmon cook for 30 minutes."

Mike had already put the fish into the oven. "Are you going to let a true player do this, or what? Please!"

He had learned to cook and clean from his mother. She assigned him and his siblings chores, but because Mike was an early riser, he often ended up doing his brother and sister's chores as well, he said. In Vanessa's house, he would turn on the music and lose himself in the repetitive strokes of a mop on a tile floor. Cooking also relaxed him.

He had been playful on the phone, but after he hung up, his mood darkened. He took down a box of cornbread mix and buttered a pan. He wore long nylon shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt and black slippers. He seemed too big for the room, with its cloth lilies in a pot by the sink.

"I don't normally curse," he said. "I know I [expletive] up. I should have never went to prison . . . I know that this is not where I should be at this point in my life, 36 years old, struggling. I shouldn't."

He was making his mother's macaroni and cheese. He poured the pasta into a buttered pan, shook on black pepper, laid on slices of cheese and poured milk and eggs over the top.

Outside, the neutral-colored houses with their slate blue and burgundy shutters stood quiet in the middle of the day, their numbered parking spaces empty. He and Vanessa were going out that night, and he hadn't found another job. "Before I know it, I'll have to go back to work tomorrow." He sighed. "I didn't even really do nothing."

MIKE'S CONCERNS ABOUT MONEY SEEMED BLISSFULLY REMOTE as he climbed a flight of stairs at the Verizon Center one Saturday in March and settled into the second-to-last row to watch Duke play West Virginia in the NCAA basketball tournament. He had dreamed of going to an NCAA game since he was a kid, and now his friend and codefendant Derrick Curry, who also had been freed by presidential decree, sat beside him.

Derrick wore a gray sweat suit and ate fried chicken off a cardboard tray, and Mike leaned forward expectantly as they waited for the game to begin.

Mike had been a Duke fan since he was 13. He despised West Virginia. He had spent the last year of his prison sentence in the state, which had no professional team, and corrections officers cheered raucously for their college players.

"I hope we beat them by 50," he said.

West Virginia dominated from the start. A Duke player sped down the court heading for the hoop and missed.

"He can't shoot," Derrick said.

"He can't shoot," Mike agreed. "A wide-open shot there! No guard. He's supposed to make that."

Mike leaned forward, hands crossed at the wrists, palms on his knees. As people shuffled past with trays of pretzels and kettle corn, West Virginia scored again. Mike shook his head. A Duke player dribbled the length of the court, rose to the basket and fumbled the shot. "Please, man!" Mike yelled. "I don't understand! That's unreal, man!"

The game went on, but Mike furrowed his brow. If anyone understood the consequences of a missed opportunity, it was him. As he and Derrick sat in the Verizon Center, Congress was considering seven bills that would reduce or remove the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, but other issues took priority: the teetering economy, the presidential race, Gen. David Petraeus talking about the effects of the troop surge in Iraq. It was, and still is, hard to know when or whether anything would change.

When the clock ran out, West Virginia had upset Duke, 73-67, in the day's first game. Mike had been paid on Friday, but he rolled his eyes as he handed over $5 for an ice cream. On the way back to his seat, an usher eyed his cone. "It's good," he told her, "but it cost too much." As Purdue and Xavier chased each other in the second game, Mike and Derrick sat as silent as boys absorbed in their ice cream, biting into the cones wrapped in paper sleeves decorated with stars and stripes.

THE SKY WAS STILL DARK WHEN MIKE LOCKED THE DOOR of Vanessa's house behind him. He wore black pants and a long-sleeved white shirt and lugged a large gym bag and a gallon jug of water. In the burgundy Nissan that Vanessa had lent him, he navigated the streets at a crawl, flashing his turn signals even though the neighborhood was deserted. The prospect of a routine traffic stop filled him with dread. Given his record, he worried that even a minor violation might end with him face down on the asphalt surrounded by dogs.

It was just after 4 a.m., and a thin crescent moon hung overhead. Mike liked this time of day, before the sun rose and rush-hour traffic clogged the highways. The soul classic "Natural High" played on the radio, and he leaned back in his seat and stared out at the dark road.

He was on his way to a new job that promised everything he'd hoped for when he left prison. A week earlier, he had quit his job at the health club. His new employer, Getem Tight Fitness, rented a mirrored ground-floor studio in an expansive home in a Prince George's County subdivision of mansions and landscaped lawns.

Mike was making $25 an hour to train a small but dedicated clientele, almost twice the rate of his previous job. For once, his past had not hurt him. The gym's manager, Richard Gartmon, had spent 10 years in prison on federal money laundering and fraud charges. He and Mike had met years earlier in prison, and Mike got the job right away.

The streets were silent as he pulled into an empty cul-de-sac and switched off the engine. A few minutes later, another trainer parked beside him. Mike lifted his bag and water jug from the trunk and followed her down a brick walkway behind a nearby house.

Inside, he greeted his first clients, a handful of smiling, middle-aged women in black workout suits. Red and green mats went down on the wood floors, and the iPod speakers blared Gwen Stefani. Mike changed into a shiny new Adidas shirt and pants that Richard had given him and stood at the front of the room to lead the day's first exercise class.

"Feet together, hands together, rotate to the right first," he called, spinning his torso. He didn't smile, but the furrows in his brow faded, and his face shone. He led the class through leg raises -- "Do not let the feet hit the ground!" -- and minute-long side-plank exercises that left several women sweating and groaning. One collapsed on her mat.

"Stomach on fire?" Mike asked.

"Yes!" a woman called out.

"That's what I like."

A man named Ray Smith stepped uncertainly into the gym, guided by his wife. A church deacon and an operations manager for a law firm, he had recently lost his eyesight to diabetes. Mike turned the class over to another instructor and, with an arm around Ray's waist, gently escorted him to a weight room in back.

"We did 10 pounds last time, right?" he asked. Ray nodded. Mike carefully placed the weights in the older man's hands and counted under his breath. "Good, good," Mike told him. "Fantastic."

His next client was a man with a shaved head and a peace sign tattooed on one muscled arm. Mike strapped on weightlifting gloves and worked out alongside him. A 38-year-old owner of a legal services company, Darnell Self sweated at the pull-up bar. "Keep pushing!" Mike told him. "Two more. Good money, man, good money!"

They did one-arm rolls, Darnell lifting 50 pounds, Mike 65. The room grew hot, the mirror fogged. Mike loaded weights onto barbells. Darnell looked doubtful. "That 90's not for me," he said. "I mean, one day I think I'll be there . . ."

"My bad," Mike told him, switching the weights. "I normally work out with 120."

Darnell picked up the barbells, grimacing. "Do it till it burns," Mike told him.

"It's already burning."

"That's how you do it. You're going to have forearms like Popeye."

Darnell groaned and dropped the weights. He stood panting.

"Last set," Mike told him.

Finally, Darnell laid the weights down. He tried to clasp Mike's hand, but he was too weak. "I was like a girl, man," he said, laughing. "I couldn't even really give you five."

Outside, the sun had risen. Mike stepped onto the brick walkway. Years ago, before the big houses came up, he and his brother used to drive out here with a carload of friends after the movies. It was all woods then, and they went joyriding and chased one another through the trees screaming about Jason, the hockey-masked killer from "Friday the 13th."

Now he stood still, gazing into the trees. There was no escaping the past, nor any way to separate the crooked pathways of his own personal history from whatever lay ahead. It was 7:36 a.m. The next wave of clients would be there soon. Mike turned and walked back into the gym.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/27/AR2008052702531_pf.html

Posted by lois at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)

IL: Mayors organize against closing of prison

Impact of PCC closing
By Sheila Shelton, Staff Reporter
Published: Wednesday, June 4, 2008

A number of mayors of towns in and around Livingston County are working together in an effort to stop the closing of Pontiac Correctional Center.

The Illinois Department of Corrections and Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced in early May that a plan had been developed to close PCC and move the inmates to the Thomson Correctional Center in northern Illinois.

A parade in support of Saving Pontiac Prison is scheduled for this afternoon in Pontiac. Legislators, elected officials and mayors from several county towns are scheduled to walk in the parade.

Pontiac Mayor Scott McCoy said he had contacted all the mayors in the county and asked them to walk with him in the parade.

"I am encouraging everyone that can to participate in this parade," said McCoy earlier this week. "Closing of PCC would have a devastating effect on Pontiac and many, if not all, of the other communities in the county.

"We all have PCC officers or other employees living in our communities. The closing and possible moving of these people away from here would have a devastating effect on everyone," added McCoy. "In this county, Pontiac has the largest concentration so the biggest impact would be felt here."

McCoy said he is still putting together an economic study that would adequately determine the full impact of the prison's closing on Pontiac.
http://www.pontiacdailyleader.com/articles/2008/06/04/news/news1.txt
"Many people don't realize that there are employees from Joliet, Coal City, Chicago, Peoria, Pekin, Springfield, Lincoln and Morton, to name a few towns, (at) PCC," said McCoy. "These are not the employees that we count as full-time citizens of our towns who travel here on a daily basis. These, however, are people that purchase gasoline, food and restaurant meals in our town.

"I find myself likening the closure of PCC to a tornado coming into town and causing heavy destruction. This possible closure could have an enormous effect because we could lose heavily trained employees," he added. "Many of these people are skilled in electrical, plumbing and other skills that require advanced training as well as the correctional officers and this means they would have to move out of town to find employment.

"I plan on extending invitations to Gov. Blagojevich many times throughout the next few months. I want him to come to Pontiac and see first-hand what could be destroyed by his action," said McCoy.

Kevin McNamara, Dwight village administrator, also plans to participate in the parade.

"The impact from a possible PCC closing is felt all over the place in this county. People seem to think because we have Dwight Correctional Center here we have only those employees living here," said McNamara. "We also have a lot of PCC employees here. I think business people all over the county will begin to feel a loss from even threats of a closing at PCC.

"I see employees of PCC feeling as though they will have to be very careful before they make any large purchases of non-essential items," McNamara added. " They don't know how long they will have jobs or if they will be eligible for transfers. I don't see these employees rushing out to buy new vehicles or houses in this time of limbo."

Besides the economy, McNamara pointed to a concern over the education in his community and the area.

"This could impact state aid to schools in Dwight and Pontiac and elsewhere in the county," said McNamara. "Another impact in this county is the spousal employment of many PCC employees. The spouses, in many cases, have also held jobs for a long time and could also have problems transferring."

Saunemin Mayor Mike Stoecklin has been active in trying to develop the economy in his community and of the county with the Greater Livingston County Economic Development Council. He sees the closure as a major problem for the county, and in particular, his community.

"I have done some research and there are 11 PCC officers with Saunemin zip codes," Stoecklin said. "This means there are at least 11 families in this particular area that will be (affected) if PCC closes.

"Two of the families are my neighbors," added Stoecklin. " There are (a) half dozen or more kids from these various families who attend Saunemin Grade School, some at Pontiac Township High School and some are preschoolers."

Stoecklin said that there are six or seven PCC employees within the Saunemin village limits.

"This would represent 5 percent of our housing market in Saunemin," he said. "Losing folks and families are never good for any community let alone a small community like ours."

Chenoa Mayor Walt Hetman said there are a lot of correctional officers living in Chenoa, as well. In a community looking at developing land annexed within the city limits in the past 18 months, PCC's closing would have a huge impact.

"Our officers having to move would put a lot of houses on the market at a time in the economy when that is not so good," said Hetman. "What some people also fail to realize is that, in our small towns, we also have correctional officers who serve communities as part-time firemen and police officers. This is the case in Chenoa, so it would be a double-whammie for us.

"We can often take for granted how much large employers' employees help our communities. This would certainly be the case involving our gas stations and grocery store," Hetman said.

"We in Chenoa, myself, the city council and everyone that wants to join us (fight the closure) plan on doing everything we can to keep Pontiac Correctional Center open," said Hetman.

Fairbury Mayor Robert Walter, who is an elementary school principal in Watseka, commented this morning on the impact Fairbury will experience.

"We in Fairbury certainly want PCC to remain open. We have many residents of our community who are employed by PCC," said Walter. "A closing would have a very negative impact on our community. Many officers at PCC, from all around the area, shop at Dave's Supermarket and other businesses in our town. It could also hurt our schools."

Posted by lois at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2008

William P. Ford, 72, Rights Advocate, Dies

June 3, 2008
William P. Ford, 72, Rights Advocate, Dies
By DENNIS HEVESI

William P. Ford, a former Wall Street lawyer who spent more than two decades seeking to bring high-ranking military officials to justice after his sister and three other American churchwomen were murdered in El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, died on Sunday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 72.

The cause was esophageal cancer, his son William Ford III said.

Mr. Ford’s efforts eventually led to a $54.6 million liability ruling against two former Salvadoran generals in a 2002 civil trial in Florida, where the generals were living after being granted residence by the United States.

Although the ruling was not directly connected to the murders of Mr. Ford’s sister and the other women, it resulted largely from his long and tenacious campaign. The federal court jury found José Guillermo García, El Salvador’s former defense minister, and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, its former National Guard commander, liable for lasting injuries suffered by three Salvadoran immigrants to the United States who were tortured under the generals’ command.

“We pursued the case, with Bill in the lead,” Michael Posner, president of Human Rights First, said on Monday. “In an extraordinary way, he went beyond simply grieving the loss of his sister; he became a leading advocate for justice in El Salvador.”

Mr. Ford had been an influential figure in the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which in 2004 became Human Rights First.

On the night of Dec. 2, 1980, shortly after the start of El Salvador’s civil war, Mr. Ford’s sister, Ita , a Maryknoll sister; another member of the same order, Maura Clarke; the Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel; and a lay missionary, Jean Donovan, were abducted, raped and shot to death. The next day, peasants discovered their bodies beside an isolated road and buried them in a common grave. The van they had been driving when they were stopped at a military checkpoint turned up 20 miles away, burned and gutted.

The killings came as the United States was beginning a decade-long, $7 billion aid effort to prevent left-wing guerrillas from coming to power in El Salvador, and the case quickly became the focus of a bitter policy debate about Central America.

“This particular act of barbarism,” a 1993 State Department report said, “did more to inflame the debate over El Salvador in the United States than any other single incident.”

In 1984, four national guardsmen were convicted of murder in El Salvador and were sentenced to 30 years in prison. After 17 years of silence, the guardsmen said they had acted after receiving “orders from above.” Their admissions were made to a delegation from the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, including Mr. Ford.

For years, Mr. Ford lobbied politicians and made speeches, charging that the Salvadoran government had failed to conduct even a rudimentary investigation into the murders. In 1981, he pressed his case with the American ambassador to El Salvador, Dean Hinton, and the Salvadoran president, José Napoleón Duarte.

Mr. Ford also criticized the Reagan administration. The government, he said, “is so obsessed with the East-West confrontation that they are willing to tolerate the murder of American citizens in El Salvador.” The Salvadoran junta had killed more than 30,000 people, he said.

It was an unusual stance for a lawyer who had been on the staff of the New York law firm where Richard M. Nixon and John Mitchell had worked before Mr. Nixon became president and Mr. Mitchell became the attorney general. A year after his sister’s murder, Mr. Ford said he had been “radicalized” by American support for a government “which is no more than a group of gangsters in uniform.”

William Patrick Ford was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on April 28, 1936, the son of William and Mildred O’Beirne Ford. Besides his son William, Mr. Ford is survived by his wife of 47 years, the former Mary Anne Heyman; another son, John; four daughters, Miriam Ford, Ruth Ford, Elizabeth Ford and Rebecca Ford; a sister, Irene Coriaty; and eight grandchildren.

Mr. Ford graduated from Fordham University in 1960 and earned his law degree at St. John’s University in 1966. He was a law clerk to a federal judge and later a founding partner of the law firm Ford Marrin Esposito Witmeyer & Gleser.

Litigating securities and product-liability cases took a back seat for Mr. Ford after that day in 1980. Of the American government, he said a year later, “You can’t take seriously the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty if at the same time you are sending arms, ammunition, trucks and police equipment to a junta which is murdering its own citizens.”

Posted by lois at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)

Bo Diddley, Who Gave Rock His Beat, Dies at 79

June 3, 2008
Bo Diddley, Who Gave Rock His Beat, Dies at 79
By BEN RATLIFF
NY Times

Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.

The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman, Susan Clary, said. Mr. Diddley had a heart attack last August, only months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.

In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture.

His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.

It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,” Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs.

Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,” “Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel bubbling tremolo. The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They were both playful and radical.

So were his live performances: trancelike ruckuses instigated by a large man with a strange-looking guitar. It was square and he designed it himself, long before custom guitar shapes became commonplace in rock.

Mr. Diddley was a wild performer: jumping, lurching, balancing on his toes and shaking his knees as he wrestled with his instrument, sometimes playing it above his head. Elvis Presley, it has long been supposed, borrowed from Mr. Diddley’s stage moves; Jimi Hendrix, too.

Still, for all his fame, Mr. Diddley felt that his standing as a father of rock ’n’ roll was never properly acknowledged. It frustrated him that he could never earn royalties from the songs of others who had borrowed his beat.

“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob,” he told The New York Times in 2003.

He was a hero to those who had learned from him, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. A generation later, he became a model of originality to punk or post-punk bands like the Clash and the Fall.

In 1979 Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of the Clash asked that Mr. Diddley open for them on the band’s first American tour. “I can’t look at him without my mouth falling open,” Mr. Strummer, star-struck, said during the tour.

For his part Mr. Diddley had no misgivings about facing a skeptical audience. “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like,” he explained later to the biographer George R. White. “You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!”

Mr. Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city about 15 miles from the Louisiana border. He was reared primarily by Gussie McDaniel, the first cousin of his mother, Esther Wilson. After the death of her husband, Ms. McDaniel, who had three children of her own, took the family to Chicago, where young Otha’s name was changed to Ellas B. McDaniel. Gussie McDaniel became his legal guardian and sent him to school.

He was 6 when the family resettled on Chicago’s South Side. He described his youth as one of school, church, trouble with street toughs and playing the violin for both band and orchestra, under the tutelage of O. W. Frederick, a prominent music teacher at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Gussie McDaniel taught Sunday school. Ellas studied classical violin from 7 to 15 and started on guitar at 12, when a family member gave him an acoustic model.

He then enrolled at Foster Vocational School, where he built a guitar as well as a violin and an upright bass. But he dropped out before graduating. Instead, with guitar in hand, he began performing in a duo with his friend Roosevelt Jackson, who played the washtub bass. The group became a trio when they added another guitarist, Jody Williams, then a quartet when they added a harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold.

The band, first called the Hipsters and then the Langley Avenue Jive Cats, started playing at the Maxwell Street open-air market. They were sometimes joined by another friend, Samuel Daniel, known as Sandman because of the shuffling rhythms he made with his feet on a wooden board sprinkled with sand.

Mr. Diddley could not make a living playing with the Jive Cats in the early days, so he found jobs where he could: at a grocery store, a picture-frame factory, a blacktop company. He worked as an elevator operator and a meat packer. He also started boxing, hoping to turn professional.

In 1954 Mr. Diddley made a demonstration recording with his band, which now included Jerome Green on maracas. Phil and Leonard Chess of Chess Records liked the demo, especially Mr. Diddley’s tremolo on the guitar, a sound that seemed to slosh around like water. They saw it as a promising novelty and encouraged the group to return.

By Billy Boy Arnold’s account, the next day, as the band and the men who were soon to be their producers were setting up for a rehearsal, they were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when Mr. Arnold thought of Bo Diddley. The name described a “bow-legged guy, a comical-looking guy,” Mr. Arnold said, as quoted by Mr. White in his 1995 biography, “Bo Diddley: Living Legend.”

That may be all there is to tell about the name, except for the fact that a certain one-string guitar — native to the Mississippi Delta, often homemade, in which a length of wire is stretched between two nails in a board — is called a diddley bow. By his account, however, Mr. Diddley had never played one.

In any case, Otha Ellas McDaniel had a new name and the title of a new song, whose lyrics began, “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring.” “Bo Diddley” became the A side of his first single, in 1955, on the Checker label, a subsidiary of Chess. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart.

Mr. Diddley said he had first heard the “Bo Diddley beat” — three-stroke/rest/two-stroke, or bomp-ba-domp-ba-domp, ba-domp-domp — in a church in Chicago. But variations of it were in the air. The children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty that goes “shave and a haircut, two bits.”

The beat is also related to the Afro-Cuban clave, which had been popularized at the time by the New Orleans mambo carnival song “Jock-A-Mo,” recorded by Sugar Boy Crawford in 1953.

Whatever the source, Mr. Diddley felt the beat’s power. In early songs like “Bo Diddley” and “Pretty Thing,” he arranged the rhythm for tom-toms, guitar, maracas and voice, with no cymbals and no bass. (Also arranged in his signature rhythm was the eerie “Mona,” a song of praise he wrote for a 45-year-old exotic dancer who worked at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit; this song became the template for Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)

Appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1955, Mr. Diddley was asked to play “Sixteen Tons,” the song popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Without telling Mr. Sullivan, he played “Bo Diddley” instead. Afterward, in an off-camera confrontation, Mr. Sullivan told him that he would never work in television again. Mr. Diddley did not play again on a network show for 10 years.

For decades Mr. Diddley was bitter about his relationship with the Chess family, whom he accused of withholding money owed to him. In her book “Spinning Blues Into Gold,” Nadine Cohodas quoted Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, as saying, “What’s missing from Bo’s version of events is all the gimmes.” Mr. Diddley would borrow so heavily against projected royalties, Mr. Chess said, that not much was left over in the final accounting.

Mr. Diddley’s watery tremolo effect, from 1955 onward, came from one of the first effects boxes to be manufactured for guitars: the DeArmond Model 60 Tremolo Control. But Mr. Diddley contended that he had already built something similar himself, with automobile parts and an alarm-clock spring.

His first trademark guitar was also handmade: he took the neck and the circuitry off a Gretsch guitar and connected it to a square body he had built. In 1958 he asked Gretsch to make him a better one to the same specifications. Gretsch made it as a limited-edition guitar called “Big B.”

On songs like “Who Do You Love,” his guitar style — bright chicken-scratch rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time — was an extension of his early violin playing, he said.

“My technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action,” he told Mr. White, explaining that his fingers were too big to move around easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, Mr. Diddley said, he tuned the guitar to an open E and moved a single finger up and down to create chords.

As his fame rose, his personal life grew complicated. His first marriage, at 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His second marriage, in 1949, to Ethel Smith, unraveled in the late 1950s. He then moved from Chicago to Washington, settling in the Mount Pleasant district, where he built a studio in his home.

Separated from his wife, he was performing in Birmingham, Ala., when, backstage, he met a young door-to-door magazine saleswoman named Kay Reynolds, a fan, who was 15 and white. They moved in together in short order and were soon married, in spite of Southern taboos against intermarriage.

During the late 1950s Mr. Diddley’s band featured a female guitarist, Peggy Jones (stage-named Lady Bo), at a time when there were scarcely any women in rock. She was replaced by Norma-Jean Wofford, whom Mr. Diddley called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said, to be in a better position to protect her on the road.

The early 1960s were low times. Chess, searching for a hit, had Mr. Diddley make albums to capitalize on the twist dance craze, as Chubby Checker had done, and on the surf music of the Beach Boys. But soon a foreign market for his earlier music began to grow, thanks in large part to the Rolling Stones, a newly popular band that was regularly playing several of his songs in its concerts. It paved the way for Mr. Diddley’s successful tour of Britain in the fall of 1963, performing with the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, the opening act.

But Mr. Diddley was not willing to move to Europe, and in America the picture worsened: the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and the Byrds quickly made him sound quaint. When work all but dried up, Mr. Diddley moved to New Mexico in the early 1970s and became a deputy sheriff in the town of Los Lunas. With his sound updated to resemble hard rock and soul, he continued to make albums for Chess until his contract expired in 1974.

His recording career never picked up after that, despite flirtations with synthesizers, religious rock and hip-hop. But he continued apace as a performer and public figure, popping up in places both obvious, like rock ’n’ roll nostalgia revues, and not so obvious: a Nike advertisement, the film “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy, the 1979 tour with the Clash, and inaugural balls for two presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

His last recording was the 1996 album “A Man Amongst Men” (Code Blue/Atlantic), which was nominated for a Grammy. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and in 1998 was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame as a musician of lasting historical importance.

Since the early 1980s Mr. Diddley had lived in Archer, Fla., near Gainesville, where he owned 76 acres and a recording studio. His passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac hearse.

The last of Mr. Diddley’s marriages was to Sylvia Paiz, in 1992; his spokeswoman, Ms. Clary, said they were no longer married. His survivors include his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi D. McDaniel and Terri Lynn McDaniel; a brother, the Rev. Kenneth Haynes; and 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

Mr. Diddley attributed his longevity to abstinence from drugs and drinking, but in recent years he had suffered from diabetes. After a concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 13, 2007, he had a stroke and was taken to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha. On Aug. 28 he suffered a heart attack in Gainesville and was hospitalized.

Mr. Diddley always believed that he and Chuck Berry had started rock ’n’ roll, and the fact that he couldn’t financially reap all that he had sowed made him a deeply suspicious man.

“I tell musicians, ‘Don’t trust nobody but your mama,’ ” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. “And even then, look at her real good.”

Posted by lois at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: A Court for Veterans

June 4, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
A Court for Veterans

There is a small bright spot on the normally bleak terrain for military veterans who return home and fall into addiction, mental illness and crime. Buffalo has established a specialized court to give veterans and their family members, mainly those accused of nonviolent crimes, a chance to avoid jail and rebuild their lives.

The program — the only one in the country, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs — operates on the same principles of temperate justice and guided rehabilitation that govern “drug courts” and “mental-health courts,” which have been strikingly successful around the country in reducing crime, saving money and repairing lives.

Buffalo’s experiment, profiled in USA Today, began after a city court judge, Robert Russell, and his office noticed more veterans, many with drug and psychiatric problems, coming through the system. It offers defendants a chance to stay out of jail or avoid more serious charges in return for entering addiction or mental health treatment and taking other steps to right their lives.

The court also puts the sturdy bonds of military service to good use. It enlists other veterans as volunteer mentors to help overcome participants’ resistance to treatment and “to point them in the right direction,” as one mentor told the newspaper.

Other cities would do well to study and learn from Buffalo’s experiment, and the federal government should do more to help, with grants for programs that direct troubled people out of the prison stream and into life-saving treatment. The effectiveness of alternative-sentencing programs is no longer in question, and the nation’s responsibility to its veterans and their families is undeniable.

For soldiers, mental trauma and debilitating stress are part of the job description. When former soldiers go astray, they deserve all the creativity and support the system can muster to get them back where they began: clean, sober and on the right the side of the law.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/opinion/04wed4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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

NC: Hotels could be used to house people convicted of sex offenses

Jun 03, 2008
Hotels could house sex offenders
Public would pay for temporary stays
Charlotte News and Observer
Dan Kane, Staff Writer
Tough new laws preventing pedophiles, rapists and other sex offenders from living near schools, child-care centers and parks have made it hard for some to find housing when they leave prison.

It has become so difficult, state prison officials say, that they want to put them up temporarily in hotels at public expense.

A provision in a state budget bill that could be voted on this week would let prison officials spend public money on hotel rooms or other temporary housing to prevent them from wandering the streets. It's cheaper than keeping sex offenders in prison, where the average annual cost of housing and feeding an inmate is about $26,000.

Some lawmakers learned about the proposal late last week when House leaders rolled out portions of their budget proposal.

"It was just a shock," said Rep. Pat Hurley, an Asheboro Republican.

State prison officials, though, say they are out of options.

It's not just that prisons are full. Prison officials say some sex offenders are finding it so hard to find a place to stay once they are paroled that they eventually give up and serve the remainder of their sentence behind bars. That happened 10 days ago when a sex offender's housing plans fell through -- he was rejected from a homeless shelter -- and no other alternative could be found, Correction Department spokesman Keith Acree said.

The inmate decided to spend the remaining nine months of his sentence in prison, at a cost of about $19,000 to taxpayers. Prison officials say about a half dozen others have chosen the same option in the past 18 months.

"We're certainly not saying these are bad laws," said Mary Lu Rogers, an assistant prisons director. "We're saying it adds to the complexity of finding a place for them to live."

Girl's death a spur

In 2006, lawmakers prohibited sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school or child-care center. The law was part of a flurry of legislation in many states after a convicted pedophile murdered a 9-year-old girl in Florida.

Some communities have passed ordinances preventing sex offenders from living near parks, and judges often require sex offenders on parole or probation to avoid living in a home with children.

Those actions, along with improved online registries that show where sex offenders live, have stigmatized them to the point where places such as the home of a relative or a homeless shelter are no longer options, prison officials say.

Acree said he is not anticipating the state will start paying hotel bills for hundreds of released sex offenders if the provision becomes law. But hundreds of sex offenders are released from North Carolina prisons each year.

As of Friday, there were 5,280 inmates in state prisons convicted of offenses that would require them to register as sex offenders. Last year, the system released 1,460 sex offenders. State law defines more than 25 crimes as sex offenses. Many involve children, but some include adult victims.

'Benefit for ... public'

Correction Department officials said they went to the leaders of the budget subcommittee that oversees justice and public safety spending two weeks ago. They are Democrat Reps. Alice Bordsen of Mebane and Jimmy Love of Sanford. Bordsen said she and Love included the provision because it does not add to the budget and it provides officials a better opportunity to monitor sex offenders on parole than releasing them to the streets.

"It's not a benefit to the released offender," Bordsen said. "It's a benefit for the general public."

The one-paragraph provision does not mention hotels. Nor does it specifically mention sex offenders. It simply says the Correction Department may use "funds available" to "secure appropriate temporary housing for offenders on post-release supervision, probation, or parole."

It also says the department may contract with "homeless shelters, halfway houses, and other housing providers to provide temporary housing for offenders who do not have a viable home placement plan and are at risk of being homeless."

If housing can't be found in shelters or halfway houses, prison officials would turn to hotels, particularly those that offer reduced rates for extended stays. Those hotels are less likely to cater to families, Acree said. Sex offenders would be required to notify local sheriffs.

Acree said some homeless shelters have started refusing sex offenders out of fear that donations and public funds would dry up.

Robert Harris, executive director of the Zion Shelter and Kitchen in Washington, said the shelter continues to accept sex offenders whose victims are adults, but not pedophiles. The 12-bed shelter for men changed its policy two weeks ago after a parole official warned that it had a liability problem accepting pedophiles. The shelter is in the basement of a church that has youth programs on the weekends.

Harris said he has never had a problem with anyone released to his shelter from state prison in the shelter's 22-year history.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/crime_safety/story/1094282.html

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

SD: Tax-subsidized prison gravy train must end

My Voice: Tax-subsidized prison gravy train must end
Ronald R. Fraser • June 4, 2008
South Dakota Argus Leader

In South Dakota's booming prison economy there are winners and losers. Inmates face financial ruin, and state taxpayers lose, too - about $19,000 per year, per inmate. Prison entrepreneurs for whom each inmate is a government-subsidized business opportunity are the big winners.

Growing nationally by 3.4 percent a year for the past 10 years, federal, state and local prisons hold 2.3 million inmates - one-half of whom are non-violent and small-time drug law offenders. From 2000 to 2005, South Dakota's prison population grew at a steady rate of 5.8 percent per year.

South Dakota's annual taxpayer contribution for state prisons and local jails - $92 million in 2005 and rising - keeps the prison market hot. Here is how that money is used to exploit the losers and enrich the winners.

Public jobs: Of the 720,000 state and local corrections employees in the U.S. in 2005, 1,448 worked in South Dakota guarding 4,827 inmates. That means for every three new inmates locked up in South Dakota, one new corrections job follows.

Private profiteers: A new book by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright titled, "Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration," tells how the prison gravy train actually works. In addition to supplying food, clothing and medical care, private companies profit in other, less visible ways. Here we learn from a University of Michigan professor how telephone companies and prisons in South Dakota charge extra-high rates for collect calls from inmates. Once MCI, Sprint and others began competing with the Baby Bells and AT&T, end-user rates for collect calls from prisons went up, not down, as was the case in the nonprison market. Exclusive phone service agreements went to firms offering price-gouging rates and large payments to operators of prisons. In the 1990s, 90 percent of the correctional systems nationwide received a percentage of these telephone profits and, by 2000, the share going to the prisons ranged from 44 percent in California to 60 percent in New York.

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

Political influence: Nationally, more than 85,000 inmates are held in private, for-profit facilities. To sell their services in state capitals, we learn in another chapter of Herivel and Wright's book that "corporations with a stake in the expansion of private prisons invested $3.3 million in candidates for state office and state political parties in 44 states over the 2002-04 election cycle."

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

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

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

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

Ronald R. Fraser of West Falls, N.Y., writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization.
http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080604/VOICES05/806040303/1052/OPINION01

Posted by lois at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

June 03, 2008

"The Top 100 Criminal Justice Blogs"

"The Top 100 Criminal Justice Blogs" (http://www.criminaljusticedegreesguide.com/library/the-top-100-criminal-justice-blogs.html).
(including this one)

Posted by lois at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act of 2008 (NORA) to be on state ballot

The Secretary of State announced June 2, 2008 that the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act (NORA) has qualified for the November state ballot!
Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act of 2008 (NORA)

NORA is a California ballot initiative intended for the Nov. 4, 2008, ballot, offering a common-sense solution to prison overcrowding. The campaign is just getting started, with signature-collection efforts under way in January 2008. We continue gathering signatures until April 21, 2008.

The official sponsor of the campaign is the Campaign for Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation, a state ballot measure committee with ID# 1302707.

NORA Official Title & Summary

On Jan. 2, 2008, NORA supporters received the official title & summary for the ballot measure from the California Attorney General. This is the language that appears on petitions now.

Here is the text of the summary, broken out (by the campaign) into bullet points for easier reading:

NONVIOLENT OFFENDERS. SENTENCING, PAROLE AND REHABILITATION. STATUTE.

* Requires State to expand and increase funding and oversight for individualized treatment and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent drug offenders and parolees.
* Reduces criminal consequences of nonviolent drug offenses by mandating three-tiered probation with treatment and by providing for case dismissal and/or sealing of records after probation. Limits court’s authority to incarcerate offenders who violate probation or parole.
* Shortens parole for most drug offenses, including sales, and for nonviolent property crimes.
* Creates numerous divisions, boards, commissions, and reporting requirements regarding drug treatment and rehabilitation.
* Changes certain marijuana misdemeanors to infractions.

Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government:

* Increased state costs that could exceed $1 billion annually primarily for expanding drug treatment and rehabilitation programs for offenders in state prisons, on parole, and in the community.
* Savings to the state that could exceed $1 billion annually due primarily to reduced prison and parole operating costs.
* Net savings on a one-time basis on capital outlay costs for prison facilities that could exceed $2.5 billion.
* Unknown net fiscal effect on expenditures for county operations and capital outlay.

Posted by lois at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

Louisiana Tries Again: State promises to close Jetson Prison for Youth

May 30, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Louisiana Tries Again

Two years have passed since the federal courts relinquished control of Louisiana’s notoriously troubled juvenile justice system. The state regained its autonomy by reducing the number of children held in detention and by promising to embrace reforms based on Missouri’s system, which long ago abandoned sprawling, prison-style facilities in favor of small, regional facilities that focus on rehabilitation.

Despite those promises, Louisiana’s system was never fully reorganized and the regional facilities never got built. Embarrassed by fresh charges of violence and brutality at the infamous Jetson Center for Youth near Baton Rouge, the state has now promised to close the troubled facility and proceed with genuine reform.

Gov. Bobby Jindal needs to make sure that the state’s new plan truly follows the Missouri model and that Louisiana’s juvenile justice officials implement it this time.

The community-based centers in Missouri are considered a national model that stresses therapy, not punishment, and often includes parents as well as the children. Instead of housing minor offenders and more serious offenders in the same place, as too often happens, Missouri sorts detainees by the seriousness of their crimes.

The oversight continues even after the young persons’ release, through case managers who help former inmates with job placement, school issues and drug or alcohol treatment. Missouri’s system more than pays for itself by keeping recidivism rates low. After completing the program, officials say, less than 10 percent of detainees go back to prison through the juvenile courts.

A team of consultants led by Mark Steward, an expert on the Missouri juvenile justice system, is advising Louisiana on how to proceed. For the sake of some of the state’s most vulnerable children, the Jindal administration should embrace the advice and follow it.

Posted by lois at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

N.Y. court gives veterans chance to straighten out

N.Y. court gives veterans chance to straighten out
By Don Heupel, USA TODAY

BUFFALO — When police entered Tom Irish's suburban Buffalo home on March 9 responding to a call about a disturbance, the 59-year-old Army veteran says he did not see uniformed officers.

He says he was drunk on vodka, suffering from a flashback to his wartime experiences, and saw in his mind the Viet Cong soldiers he fought close to 40 years ago.

"I'm still in recovery, still facing myself," Irish said as he stood last month before Buffalo City Court Judge Robert Russell in a courtroom half-filled with fellow military veterans in trouble with the law.

Instead of time behind bars, Irish is in counseling. The felony weapons possession charge against him — for brandishing a loaded shotgun at police — likely will be dropped if he finishes everything required of him by Buffalo's veterans treatment court, according to Hank Pirowski, project director for Buffalo City Court.

Russell, who created Buffalo's drug treatment court in 1995 and mental health treatment court in 2003, started holding sessions in January in what is, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the National Drug Court Institute, the nation's first veterans treatment court.

Veterans report back once a month

The defendants all are military veterans or family members. The court typically handles non-violent offenses, Russell said, with the veterans required to get mental health or addiction counseling, find jobs, stay clean and sober and get their lives back on track.

Court meets weekly or bi-weekly, with veterans reporting back about once a month to update the court on their progress, Russell said. The judge said that, based on his past experience with other treatment courts, the veterans tend to remain in treatment court a year or more before making enough progress to graduate and see their charges reduced or cases adjourned.

"It's just a fantastic idea, instead of punishing them, honoring them for their service," said C. West Huddleston, CEO of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, a non-profit organization started in 1994 to advocate for drug courts.

"Unfortunately, the courts are seeing an increase in veterans emerging who have some real specialized needs," he said. "Ultimately we're trying to save people's lives and transform them back to health."

Huddleston predicted "there will be a number of communities that follow the lead of Buffalo," but neither he nor the VA were aware of others ready to emerge.

Huddleston said the idea of specialized criminal justice treatment for veterans started two years ago in Rochester, N.Y., when John Schwartz, a city court judge, began having U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs staff taking part in his drug treatment court.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this year started offering grant money to community programs that divert people with trauma-related disorders — and especially veterans — from the criminal justice system, said David Morrissette, a project officer with the federal agency's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Citing a study released in April by the RAND Corporation, a California-based research organization, Morrissette said 19% of the veterans who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan — roughly 300,000 people — report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression.

A waiting list for mentors

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 signed into law a bill that gives California judges the discretion to divert veterans convicted of crimes into alternative sentencing programs.

In the first six months of 2007, the only period for which statistics are available, 300 of the defendants going through Buffalo City Court were identified as military veterans, Pirowski said. Overall, the court handled 30,957 criminal cases in 2007, according to Deputy Court Clerk Kim Delmont.

The offenses the court handles usually start out of some mental health or substance-abuse issue, said Erie County Assistant District Attorney Thomas Kubiniec. The court's approach — with offenders facing prosecution if they don't go through treatment— "protects the public safety as well as helps the offender," Kubiniec said.

Each session of the court addresses close to 20 Western New York veterans and some family members for offenses from theft to drug possession, Pirowski said.

The court has a waiting list of veterans wanting to volunteer as peer mentors for the defendants and help persuade them to seek counseling, he added.

"First they see a vet, they see you're not part of the court," said mentor Jason Jaskula, an Army veteran and Buffalo-based detective with the Veterans Affairs Police.

"You can find out the root problems of things. The mentor is able to point them in the right direction."

Jimmy Smothermon, who served in the Air Force in the early 1970s, has by his own admission been in trouble with the law on and off ever since then.

Today, going through veterans treatment court on a misdemeanor drug possession charge, the 53-year-old Buffalo man is in a Christian residential drug rehab program.

"It's making all the difference in the world after seeing veterans like myself in the same boat," Smothermon said. "It's a veterans' program — that makes me want to stay clean all the more."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-06-01-veterans-court_N.htm
Daneman reports for the (Rochester, N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle.

Posted by lois at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Prison--for Pot? Massachusetts voters can Just Say No to bad drug policy.

Prison--for Pot?
Massachusetts voters can Just Say No to bad drug policy.

Thursday, May 29, 2008
By Maureen Turner, Valley Advocate

I call Dick Evans to interview him. But he has his own question—or, more specifically, an assignment—for me: "I challenge you to find anyone who believes adults who choose to use marijuana responsibly deserve to be arrested, prosecuted and locked up."

Evans is pretty sure I'll come up empty; he's even willing to bet a lunch on it. A Northampton attorney and former member of the Board of Directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, Evans spent decades advocating for the reform of drug laws, and while officially "retired" from the cause, he still tracks it closely.

These days, there's a lot to track. In November, Massachusetts voters could have the chance to decriminalize the possession of one ounce or less of marijuana, making it a civil, not criminal, infraction. On the federal level, U.S. Reps. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Ron Paul, a Texas Republican (and renegade presidential candidate), are co-sponsoring legislation that would remove federal penalties for the possession of small amounts of marijuana. ("The notion that you lock people up for smoking marijuana is pretty silly," Frank said as he announced the bill on Bill Maher's HBO show "Real Time." That's one for Dick Evans.)

Add to that the increasing public debate about who ends up behind bars for drug crimes, and how much we as a society pay to prosecute and imprison them, and it's tempting to say there's a groundswell of interest, from across the political spectrum, in re-examining our drug laws. But as Evans and other long-time activists will tell you, when it comes to drug policy, change is slow in coming. Progress is made in small, incremental steps, which sometimes fall far short of what reformers would like to see.

"I think we can get lost in the increments," says Evans. While small changes can be important, he urges that focus be kept on what, in an email to the Advocate, he called "the 900-pound gorilla that terrifies so many people, and that is the broad question of whether, in 2008, the responsible use of marijuana by adults with no visible harm to themselves or anyone else ought to remain a crime, wrecking people's lives and diverting public revenues from urgent needs."

Plenty of Massachusetts voters share Evans' view, at least according to a series of questions that have appeared on local ballots in recent years.

Since 2000, activists—most notably, the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, or MASS CANN (the state affiliate of NORML)—have worked to get non-binding public policy questions on marijuana reform on the ballots in four state Senate districts and 33 Representative districts. All were approved by a majority of voters.

A handful of the ballot questions addressed the legalization of medical marijuana; there was also one that would allow the growing of industrial hemp, and another to allow the state-regulated—and state-taxed—sale of marijuana to adults.

But the vast majority of the questions—28 of the total 37—went directly to the issue of decriminalization, asking voters whether possession of a small amount of pot should be a civil violation. Voters in every district approved the question, by majorities ranging from 59 to 76 percent.

While public policy questions are non-binding, they do serve as an important way of demonstrating to legislators the priorities of their constituents. Whether or not legislators heed those messages is, of course, another matter.

At the very least, the message was heard by activists, who saw Massachusetts presenting a prime opportunity for reforming marijuana laws. That led to the creation of the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy, or CSMP, the group behind the proposed November ballot question.

Under current Massachusetts law, marijuana possession can lead to jail, probation or a fine; a conviction can also result in the suspension of your driver's license, the loss of your right to possess firearms and the denial of student loans. While first offenses without mitigating circumstances are typically continued without a finding and dropped after one year if the defendant has no further legal problems, critics of the system say there are a number of ways prosecutors can pursue a tougher penalty—if, for instance, the arrest happened near a school zone. They also contend that the defendant's race and class can affect how aggressively a drug charge is pursued, a contention borne out by several recent studies.

Even if a defendant's charges are continued and then dropped, she still has to go through the costly and onerous legal system; as MASS CANN puts it, "Prosecution itself is used as a form of punishment."

If approved, the November ballot question would amend state law so that adults found guilty of possessing one ounce or less would face a $100 fine; those under 18 would also have to complete a "drug awareness program" and perform community service. The initiative has been endorsed by the American Civil Liberties Union as well as NORML and MASS CANN.

Last fall, CSMP cleared the first hurdle for getting the question on the ballot, collecting about 81,000 valid petition signatures (15,000 more than needed) in support. Now the group is conducting a second required signature drive, and needs to collect another 11,000 valid signatures by June 18.

At the same time, the Legislature is considering similar legislation that would create civil penalties for personal possession by adults. Given the historically slow progress of such bills, though, reformers see the ballot question as a way to put the issue directly in the hands of voters. "On this issue, the public is ahead of the politicians," says Whitney Taylor, manager of the ballot question committee.

To Taylor, existing laws regarding marijuana are too harsh. A person convicted of possessing a relatively small amount of pot could end up with a criminal record that would haunt him for years, standing as a barrier every time he applies for a job, a loan, an apartment. According to CSMP, 7,500 new criminal records are created each year in Massachusetts for people found guilty of possessing one ounce or less of pot.

The criminal record issue has a lot of traction on college campuses. "Historically, the war on drugs has been waged to protect young people. After decades of failed punitive prohibitionist policies, we as young people are here to say this war is actually hurting us," says Tom Angell, government relations director for Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a national group with chapters at about 125 high schools and colleges.

SSDP focuses on drug policies that affect young people, such as student drug testing. One particularly hot issue has been the 2000 Higher Education Act, which denied federal financial aid to students convicted of any drug offense, even if it happened before they were in college. While the law was amended in 2006 to apply only to students convicted at the time they are receiving aid, blocking anyone's access to education is wrong-headed, Angell says. Students forced to drop out of college for financial reasons will feel the repercussions for a lifetime; some may even be more likely to turn to drugs when other opportunities are denied. "We think that's an incredibly counter-productive policy," Angell says.

And in these days of municipal shortfalls, reformers have in their arsenal an especially persuasive argument: cost savings. Whitney points to a 2007 study by Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, that found that Massachusetts police departments spend a total of $29.5 million a year to arrest and process suspects for possession of an ounce or less of pot.

"Let's let that $29.5 million stay in police coffers," Taylor says. "Let's let it stay in local communities and fight violent crimes."

Several studies have found that in the 11 states that already have similar laws in place—some going back as far as the 1970s—marijuana use and crime rates have not increased. "'Use is going to go through the roof; addiction is going to go through the roof'—all the Chicken-Little arguments the opponents will make did not come to fruition," Taylor says.

In making the case for the ballot question, advocates tread carefully. They emphasize the cost-saving aspect of decriminalization, and point to the backing of sober-minded economists, including the 500 who endorsed a 2005 study by Miron that estimated that federal, state and local governments could save $7.7 billion a year if pot were legalized.

And, no doubt aware of the risk of being dismissed as leftover hippies or punky college kids, reformers enjoy pointing to the surprising array of people who have supported decriminalization: George Shultz, secretary of state during the Reagan administration; Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman; conservative columnist William F. Buckley, whose recent death was mourned by anti-prohibitionists around the country. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, a Medford-based nonprofit, counts current and former cops, judges and legislators among its members.

"This is a reform that liberals and conservatives support, that people from all walks of life can support," Taylor says.

Not everyone, of course, supports the reform. LEAP notwithstanding, strong opposition is expected from within the ranks of law enforcement. The Massachusetts District Attorneys Association has condemned the CSMP ballot question, contending it will increase marijuana use and reverse recent trends of declining pot use among teens. "The District Attorneys ask Massachusetts parents, 'Do you really want to encourage your kids to smoke dope?'" the association asks in its official statement on the question.

The DAs also argue that there's a "direct link between marijuana use and public safety and public health." The group points, by way of example, to a study showing that 41 percent of men arrested in Chicago tested positive for marijuana; what it fails to report is what charges these men faced, and if, in fact, they were arrested solely for pot possession.

Similarly sketchy is the assertion that "the criminal justice system is the largest single source of referral to drug [not just marijuana] treatment programs"; left out is the question of whether these referrals were made, as a condition of law, to people arrested solely for possession of a small amount of pot.

More persuasive are statistics linking marijuana use to impaired driving, although, as the report notes, more impaired drivers have alcohol—a legalized drug—in their systems than pot. Likewise, the DAs point out the health risks of inhaling tar and carbon monoxide from pot, but sidestep the question of why cigarettes, which contain the same substances, are legal.

That line of reasoning also raises a sticky question: most reasonable people can agree that alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana all pose personal and public health risks; why, then, are two of them legal, and one illegal?

It's not surprising the DAs oppose decriminalization, Taylor says: "They want all the tools to convict people. That's their job."

Indeed, lots of jobs are directly tied to drugs remaining illegal, from those of prosecutors, police and jailers to business that goes to ad agencies contracted by the government to produce anti-drug campaigns, and to community groups that receive government funding for anti-drug work, notes Bill Downing, president of MASS CANN. "Their income depends in part on this 'war [on drugs],'" he says.

Backers of the ballot question are mindful of the public safety arguments that will be used against their cause. They point out that the question is narrowly defined, applying only to people carrying what's considered a "personal" amount of pot; it would have no effect on laws applying to the sale, trafficking or cultivation of marijuana, or to crimes like driving under the influence.

More to the point, the question would not legalize pot, but rather decriminalize it—an important distinction. If it passes, Taylor points out, "marijuana remains illegal. We're just creating a different type of penalty system. It deals with the fact that the law is broken, but it allows people to move on with their lives."

As November gets nearer, opposition to the ballot question will likely intensify. The district attorneys have already signaled one likely line of attack: questioning the political and financial support behind CSMP.

According to its most recent finance report, filed with the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance, CSMP's money comes largely from one source: George Soros, who donated $400,000 of the almost $430,000 raised in 2007. (Most of the money—$316,000—was used to hire a Worcester-based firm that runs petition signature campaigns.)

On the finance reports, Soros is listed as a self-employed "entrepreneur" and Manhattan resident. To the DAs and others in favor of prohibition, Soros is the bane of their existence. A 77-year-old native of Hungary, Soros is a self-made billionaire investor who's used his fortune to fund numerous philanthropic and political causes, including Democratic campaigns. Soros also sits on the board of the Drug Policy Alliance, an anti-prohibition group that calls for, among other things, the decriminalization of marijuana, the legalization of medical marijuana and an end to discriminatory drug laws.

The Drug Policy Alliance is hardly a crackpot group; its board includes business executives, mental health experts and religious leaders, with "honorary" members including George Shultz, past Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. Still, as Allen St. Pierre, NORML's executive director, notes, when it comes to the heated debate over drug policy, "there's probably not a more polarizing figure" than Soros. He predicts the proponents of the ballot question will be painted by opponents as out-of-state "fringe drug legalizers."

Ironically, while drug law reform might still be cast as a "fringe" movement, drug use—specifically, pot smoking—has become increasingly mainstream. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the government's chief anti-drug agency, a 2006 federal study found 40 percent of Americans over the age of 12 have smoked pot, 10 percent in the last year (and some suspect those figures are low, given respondents' reluctance to admit to committing a crime). A 2000 survey by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services found that 20 million Americans smoke pot every year, 2 million on a daily basis.

Perhaps those figures explain the easy acceptance of pot smoking in popular movies and TV shows (like Showtime's Weeds, about a suburban widow who makes ends meet by selling marijuana, and CBS' How I Met Your Mother, with its unapologetic references to its characters getting high). We've got a sitting president who has indicated, although never directly admitted, that he has smoked pot, and is rumored to have dabbled in considerably harder stuff, and one contender for that job, Barack Obama, who is more forthcoming about his history of pot and cocaine use.

Of course, Bush and Obama speak of their past use with an air of repentance, and neither favors ending the prohibition on drugs (although Obama does criticize the Justice Department for raiding and prosecuting medical marijuana users). The other two major presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, also oppose decriminalizing marijuana. Other presidential candidates have supported decriminalization, including Ron Paul; Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman who dropped out of the race months ago; and Mike Gravel, a Springfield native and former senator from Alaska, who promised at one debate that, if elected, he would "do away with the 'war on drugs,' which does nothing but savage our inner cities and put our children at risk."

Gravel, however, will never be president; neither will Paul or Kucinich. They have devoted supporters and well-honed positions, but they garner minimal coverage from the media. Much of that coverage is dismissive, in large part due to their outside-the-mainstream positions on issues like drug policy. Polls and public policy questions might signal that the public's view of drug use—particularly marijuana—is softening, but most establishment politicians are too wary to follow their lead.

That's why reformers are excited to put the decriminalization question before Massachusetts voters. "Any issue that comes with any amount of controversy at all, politicians are not ready to take a stand on if they don't have to," notes MASS CANN's Downing. "The Legislature wants to avoid the issue completely because they can only lose by addressing this."

Reformers could find some support from Gov. Deval Patrick, who's spoken out about inequities in the justice system, including the undue hurdles created for many under the existing criminal records system. "He's made the kinds of noises of someone who'd be amenable [to drug reform]," St. Pierre says. "At his core, he's got to be keen on some reform. It's a waste of money."

Still, Patrick is a politician, and with that comes a degree of caution. "Clearly, from a political, pragmatic view, he'd be very happy to never have to say the word 'marijuana,'" St. Pierre says.

It's getting harder for politicians to avoid drug policy issues, though, in light of a mounting pile of evidence about inequities in how those policies are executed. In May, the Sentencing Project, a justice reform group based in Washington, D.C., and Human Rights Watch, which tracks global human rights issues, released reports showing deep racial disparities in how drug laws are enforced. In large part, the problem stems from the intense focus on poor urban minority communities.

In 2006, 1.89 million people were arrested for drug violations in the U.S. More than 80 percent of the arrests were for possession; about 40 percent were for marijuana possession.

While the rate of drug use among whites and blacks is roughly equal, and blacks make up about 13 percent of the total population, they accounted for two-thirds of the drug arrests. And black men are nearly 12 times as likely to be sent to prison for drug convictions as white men, according to the HRW report. (The reports do not indicate rates for Hispanics, since they used FBI data that collects stats by race but not ethnicity.)

"The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was conceived," Jamie Fellner, author of the HRW report, told the New York Times. "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."

Indeed, race has shaped U.S. drug policy from the start. In his 2003 book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, journalist Eric Schlosser traces drug prohibition back to the influx of Mexican immigrants in the early 20th century. The new arrivals were not, generally, warmly greeted, and that anti-immigrant sentiment extended to what Schlosser calls "their traditional means of intoxication: smoking marijuana."

Meanwhile, the association of marijuana with African-Americans, and particularly with the jazz scene in cities like New Orleans, added more racial fuel to the fire. Before long, government officials were warning of the alleged dangers of pot smoking. Users were described as extremely violent, possessing superhuman strength when under the influence, and prone to insanity—all depicted, to unintentionally comic effect, in the now-cult classic 1936 film Reefer Madness. By 1931, 29 states had banned pot; in 1937, Congress passed a federal ban.

Attitudes toward pot smoking softened somewhat in the 1960s, when it became the drug of choice of white, middle-class kids. In 1970, federal law was amended to differentiate marijuana from other narcotics and lessen penalties for possession of small amounts. At the time, NORML's St. Pierre recalls, marijuana reform "appeared to be on greased tracks."

Then came the conservative '80s, and Ronald Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug agenda. Marijuana was again vilified as a highly dangerous "gateway" drug that would lead to use of harder substances. Drug laws were toughened; the laws regarding pot now vary widely from state to state, and, critics say, are open to varying interpretation that can lead to harsher results for, say, a black kid from a distressed urban area than a white kid with a suburban address and parents who can afford a lawyer.

"It's because black folks used it—that's why marijuana and cocaine and heroin are illegal, and that's why tobacco and alcohol are legal and receive government subsidies. They're white folks' drugs," Evans says. The recent reports about racial disparities in the enforcement of drug laws, he adds, demonstrate "that marijuana prohibition laws have been very effective in achieving their original purpose, which was to repress minority communities."

It's not drugs that have devastated America's inner cities, critics say—it's the government-sponsored, publicly funded "war on drugs." In the same way that alcohol prohibition created a thriving black market for bootleggers and speakeasies—planting the seeds for modern-day organized crime in the process—the prohibition on drugs has created a black market that is thriving despite the billions spent in the quest to end it.

"Certainly, there is a dangerous level of violence and crime associated with the drug trade, but that's only because drugs are illegal," argues Tom Angell of SSDP. "Drug abuse is a serious issue. & But there's no drug known to man that gets safer when its production is handed over to violent drug cartels."

Which is why, reformers say, it's time to consider withdrawing the troops and declaring an end to the drug war. That doesn't mean that crimes associated with drug selling or use—violence, theft—wouldn't continue to be prosecuted; rather, anti-prohibitionists say, eliminating the black market for drugs would significantly reduce those related crimes. "In terms of the big picture, we can keep chasing our tail and busting a drug gang here or there, or we can put it all out of business by making it legal," Angell says.

And this is where drug law reformers will lose some of their base of support; plenty of mainstream Americans might see smoking the occasional joint as no big deal, but are they ready for a wholesale lifting of the ban on harder drugs?

They might, Evans says, if they consider just how little the prohibitionist agenda has accomplished. "What is your definition of victory in the war on drugs?" he wonders. "And when we achieve that victory, how many people will be in prison, and how much will it cost?"

Decriminalizing marijuana could be an important, and generally palatable, first step toward rethinking how we as a society view drugs. "It's 2008—it's two generations, almost, since the cultural revolution—and we still lock people up for pot," Evans notes. "What have we accomplished by wrecking millions of lives and spending jillions of dollars? What have we accomplished?"
http://www.valleyadvocate.com/article_print.cfm?aid=7722

The Gateway Myth
This man's addiction to crack cocaine can't be blamed on pot.

Thursday, May 29, 2008
By Tom Devine

I guess I'm sort of a poster boy for the "war on drugs." When critics of getting high talk about how bad drugs are, they usually refer to someone like me—a former crackhead who lost everything to addiction, narrowly escaped death and ended up in rehab. "Don't do drugs!" the drug warriors say, pointing at me and my kind. "You will end up like him!"

Allegedly, my road to ruin was paved with marijuana. It is, after all, supposedly the "gateway drug." Sure, you start out on pot, which may seem pretty harmless, but that will only satisfy you for so long, and then you will advance to "harder" stuff. Before long, like me, you'll be "sucking the devil's dick," as some have called smoking a crack pipe. Then you'll be on the road to the same kind of disasters that befell me.

Frankly, that's bullshit. There are a number of reasons why I ended up on crack that have nothing to do with marijuana. For one thing, I come from a big Irish family with a generations-long history of addiction, primarily to the completely legal drug called alcohol. The constant recurrence of addiction in my family is probably an inherited thing; in other words, it's genetic. Like my ancestors before me, I was likely programmed from birth with a tendency to become hooked on any addictive substance I came into contact with during my lifetime. I could no more have changed that than I could the color of my eyes.

It also was no help that I live in a culture full of messages, both subliminal and blatant, that encourage instant gratification, prey on basic psychological needs to sell products, and convey, intentionally or not, a set of values completely in harmony with the encouragement of an addictive personality. I believe this culture of instant gratification has a negative effect even on normal people, but if you already have a genetic disposition to addiction, then the whole society can be toxic.

Of course, it isn't all about outside forces. There are also the things I did to myself. My attitude toward cocaine was once the same as that famously expressed by the Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner: "Cocaine is an IQ test—take it and you flunk." Unfortunately, Kantner's maxim implies that some sort of logical thought process is involved in choosing or refusing cocaine. But of course that ain't always so. At the time I got involved with crack cocaine, I was living with a boyfriend almost young enough to be my son. It was a challenge (although a pleasurable one) to try to keep up in bed with such a lover, and when my boyfriend started to bring cocaine into our bedroom, I found it was a great help in maintaining my stamina with a young stud.

To make a long story short, our relationship eventually went sour, but not before I had started a new romance with crack. Given my background, who could have expected anything else? The boyfriend was gone, but my downward spiral of serious addiction was well under way.

My point is, none of that had anything to do with marijuana. Would any of it not have happened to me if I had never smoked marijuana? Would my genetic makeup have been different? Would the culture have been different? Would my boyfriend have introduced a different drug into our sex play? Blame my genes, blame the culture, blame my boyfriend or blame my own damn stupidity, but don't blame marijuana as the "gateway" to it all, because it never played that role.

It is true that before I started having sex on cocaine, I had done other drugs stronger than pot. I had already tried marijuana's cousin, the dreamy hashish. I'd also gotten into psychedelics, both natural and manmade. I took drugs in combinations, like Ecstasy and Viagra to create Sextasy. I sped with speed and I dozed with downers. Sometimes I did pharmaceuticals and synthetic narcotics, like Percocet. I did just about everything except those drugs that required an injection, because I have a fear of needles. Considering my addictive tendencies, that phobia probably saved my life.

But none of this drug use had anything to do with marijuana. It may, however, have had something to do with the fact that marijuana is illegal, because when I first smoked pot, I had to go through illegal channels to get it. I had to learn about the underworld of drug dealers, some of whom sold other drugs in addition to pot.

Had marijuana been legally available at a store, I might not have come to know the people who sell heavier drugs.

The only way that pot was a gateway to harder drugs was that it was against the law, meaning that I had go to drug pushers to get it. But blame the government for that, because it was the politicians that passed the drug laws that keep the illegal pushers in business.

Because of my addictive tendencies, I now know and accept the fact that I can never get high again on anything. But why should the vast majority of people be deprived of a basically benign drug to protect the small minority of people like me? That's like pointing at the drivers who cause fatal car accidents and using them to argue that driving should be illegal.

Obviously no sensible person would claim that marijuana is harmless. If nothing else, the inhaling of the smoke has got to be bad for your lungs. But if harmlessness is the standard, then you had better be consistent and make cigarettes and alcohol illegal, too, because the sickness and death toll from those drugs far surpasses anything even the harshest critics have ever accused marijuana of.

In my opinion, the only reason cigarettes and alcohol are legal is tradition. They were legal before we discovered how dangerous they are, and now the power of custom and the financial power of the pushers who sell them with the government's permission are so great that we don't even seriously consider making either drug illegal. If that is our choice as a society—to keep the killer drugs nicotine and alcohol widely available—then so be it. But let's not be hypocrites and demand that a much less harmful drug like marijuana be outlawed.

I'm a recovering drug addict. I do not advocate the use of any drug. But please don't exploit me and people like me as examples of why we should deprive normal adults of the use of a gentle drug like marijuana. Let's stop punishing people in a futile attempt to prevent something that legal penalties can't stop.

Amherst resident and Springfield native Tom Devine writes about the personal and the political on his blog, www.tommydevine.blogspot.com.
http://www.valleyadvocate.com/article_print.cfm?aid=7713

Posted by lois at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

VA: Fairfax County Weighs Suing State Over Crowded Jails

Board Weighs Suing State Over Crowded Jails

By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 3, 2008; B05

Fairfax County is considering a lawsuit against Virginia if the state goes through with plans to rent 1,000 prison beds to other states while leaving hundreds of its own inmates in crowded local jails at local expense.

Supervisors agreed yesterday to look into the possibility of joining with Virginia Beach, the state's second-largest jurisdiction, where Sheriff Paul J. Lanteigne has said he will sue if Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) does not act this week. Lanteigne confirmed yesterday that he would file the suit today.

"The state has always used our local jails as a way of avoiding the cost of putting state inmates in state prison, where they belong," said Fairfax Supervisor Michael R. Frey (R-Sully). "Now, to add insult, the state is going to take their excess prison capacity and rent it to other states. That's like kicking you when you're down."

At issue are state plans to raise millions of dollars by renting excess prison space to other states. The program would help Virginia's cash-strapped state government contend with a shortfall of more than $2 billion through 2010 by raising as much as $40 million.

But it also revives a long-standing practice of housing out-of-state inmates that has been criticized not only by local governments that bear the cost of keeping state prisoners in local jails but also by human rights advocates who say the practice turns prisons into warehouses that treat inmates as commodities.

Gene M. Johnson, director of Virginia's Department of Corrections, defended the decision, saying the budget environment probably would have forced him to lay off employees or close facilities if not for the out-of-state prisoners. Kaine spokesman Gordon Hickey added that Kaine is standing by the department's decision and said legal action was not necessary.

"The Department of Corrections is working with the sheriff to try to satisfy him and settle this issue," Hickey said.

Frey and the other Fairfax supervisors instructed county officials yesterday to look into the possibility of joining Virginia Beach's legal action. Fairfax currently houses about 100 state inmates at a cost of $125 a day each. The state pays the county $14 a day for keeping each inmate.

Virginia charges other states $75 a day to house their inmates.

So far, 296 male inmates from Wyoming are in the medium-security Pocahontas State Correctional Center in Tazewell County and the maximum-security Wallens Ridge State Prison in Wise County. The state expects to make between $14.5 million and $18.5 million each year from housing the Wyoming inmates in prisons in southwest Virginia.

Neither Maryland nor the District leases space to out-of-state prisoners.

Virginia houses 33,500 inmates at 43 facilities. As of May 19, almost 1,700 inmates in 75 local and regional jails were waiting to be moved to a state prison.

Sheriffs have complained for at least three decades about the large number of state inmates in local jails, which are supposed to house defendants awaiting trial and those sentenced for minor crimes. They argue that more dangerous inmates are crowding their jails and that the jails provide less access to rehabilitative and educational services than do state prisons.

Many sheriffs, including those in Fairfax and Arlington counties, have sued the state to force officials to act. State law requires that felons sentenced to at least one year behind bars get transferred from local jails to state prisons within 60 days.

Staff writer Anita Kumar contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/02/AR2008060202773_pf.html

Posted by lois at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2008

NJ sepnds $331 million a year incarcerating people with non-violent drug offenses

Study: NJ loses money through nonviolent drug sentences
By TOM HESTER Jr.
Associated Press Writer
May 28, 2008
TRENTON, N.J.

New Jersey could save millions by reforming sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenses, a new study finds.

The Drug Policy Alliance study determined alternatives to jail for nonviolent drug offenders would let more money be invested in the state's poorest families and communities.

It found the state spends $331 million per year jailing nonviolent drug offenders, or more than the entire corrections budgets for 16 states.

It also found the state is also losing out on taxable income by sending nonviolent drug offenders to jail and limiting their future employment.

"We are creating an entire cast of people who will forever be economic and labor force outsiders," said Roseanne Scotti, the alliance's director.

Scotti said serving a jail sentence reduces someone's earning ability by up to 40 percent.

"It is money that would have gone into the larger New Jersey economy," Scotti said.

Instead of jail, she said, nonviolent drug offenders should get treatment and supervision.

The group said it would push legislators in the coming months to eliminate mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, starting with a bill that would allow a judge to waive mandatory sentences for people convicted of distributing or possessing drugs near a school.

"The time has come for us to change from throw-away-the-key, lock-em up mandatory minimums," said Assemblyman Joseph Cryan, D-Union. "Let's understand that that hasn't worked."

The report calculated that it cost $90 million to incarcerate 1,915 Newark residents who entered the prison system in 2003, and that each of those residents will lose about $100,000 in lifetime wages because of their prison record.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker said the prison records hung on nonviolent drug offenders often force them "to live on the margins as outcasts" and push them back toward drug use.

"It is time to stop the madness," Booker said. "It is time to stop the hemorrhaging of good, hard-earned taxpayer dollars, pouring it into a hole that seems to get deeper and deeper and deeper."

An Assembly committee has approved the legislation that would give a judge sentencing discretion for offenses near schools. Cryan predicted it would pass the Legislature before June's end.
newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj--nonviolentdrugoff0528may28,0,1283334.story
Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Posted by lois at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

Can New York Break Its Incarceration Habit?

Despite these signs of success, New York is subject to the same difficult policy and practical challenges faced all over the country. "Parole is hard," said Horn. "It really gets deep into social and psychological factors [of parolees], and operates in a world where there are so many factors outside of its control." For now, one of those factors seems to be New York State's commitment to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on prisons -- even without the prisoners to fill them.

Gotham Gazette
Can New York Break Its Incarceration Habit?
by Aubrey Fox
02 Jun 2008

It’s an experiment that has arguably run its course.

In the last 20 years, states across the country have quadrupled their spending on jails and prisons from $11 billion in 1987 to $44 billion last year, while imprisoning 2.3 million individuals – or one in 100 American adults, according to a report released by the Pew Center on the States. While some criminologists give incarceration partial credit for cutting crime in the 1990s, many argue that these public safety benefits are evaporating and that money for jails would be better spent in other areas such as health care and education.

Among policymakers and experienced corrections officials, there is a palpable sense of optimism that the political will exists to tackle the issue of mass imprisonment. To them, the Pew Center report’s eye-catching title, "One in 100," has helped focus a long-running debate about the fiscal and human costs of incarcerating so many Americans for so many years. "The report is engaging people who are normally not part of the conversation," said New York City’s Probation and Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn. "I think it’s created a real opportunity."

Even conservative states like Kansas and Texas are beginning to embrace prison reform, with legislators from both sides of the aisle coming together to make change. "There is a growing realization around the country that we can’t build our way out of the crime problem with more prisons," said Adam Gelb, one of the authors of the Pew report.
For New Yorkers this shift in attitude poses a number of questions. How will the state respond? Will it close the prisons that now play such a major role in the upstate economy? And, if the state does realize savings on prisons, how could that money best be used to further reduce crime?

The New York Exception

New York is exhibit number one for reformers who seek to reassure citizens that it is possible to cut crime and incarceration rates at the same time. Virtually alone among states, New York has seen the number of inmates in its prisons decline over the past decade. It has 9,000 fewer state prison inmates than it did 10 years ago, a 12 percent decrease, as crime rates have continued to drop. By the end of 2007, there were a total of 62,260 individuals in state prison. At the same time, the number of people held in New York City jails awaiting trial or imprisoned for a short period shrank from a high of 23,000 in 1993 to just over 13,000 in 2007.

These sharp drops have been driven largely by the city’s plunging felony arrest rate. Violent crime in New York City declined by 75 percent between 1991 and 2004. The city now sends about 8,000 inmates each year to the state’s prison system, down from 20,000, according to Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice and a nationally known expert on incarceration.

Other parts of the correctional system have seen similar declines. In New York City, the number of individuals under probation supervision dropped from 50,870 in 1998 to 45,844 in 2007. The population on parole dropped by 18 percent over the same period for the state as a whole, fueled entirely by a dramatic, 30 percent decline in the number of parolees under supervision in New York City. That translates to 24,756 parolees in New York City in 2007, down from 35,286 in 1998. Probation is a city program that supervises offenders as an alternative to prison or jail. Parole, which in New York is run by the state, supervises offenders after they are released from state prison.

This drop has helped relieve pressure on New York’s budget at a time when other states are grappling with exploding incarceration rates. For example, California spends $8.8 billion a year on corrections, a staggering 216 percent increase in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 20 years and 8.8 percent of the state’s budget, according to the Pew Center. By contrast, New York spends $2.6 billion on corrections, or 5.1 percent of the budget.
The Politics of Prison Closings

Despite the decline in prisoners, though, New York has had mixed success in meeting another challenge posed by prison reformers: shutting prisons and re-allocating the money spent on them to other uses, such as providing drug treatment, job training and other services to recently released prisoners.

If anything, the process of closing prisons has gotten harder, not easier, in recent years. For example, in 2006 the state legislature passed a bill requiring that employees must receive a year's notice before any prison can be closed.

Then in April Gov. David Patterson quietly withdrew his predecessor's plan to close four upstate prisons. The move would have saved taxpayers $70 million over the next two years, but was shelved in the face of objections from state Senate Republicans, many of whom represent upstate communities where the prisons are located.

The prison system is a $2.7 billion a year industry in New York State, concentrated in many upstate communities. As the economies of these areas have declined, the prisons have remained a source of jobs, income and people. While about two thirds of the prisoners in the state are from New York City, the U.S. Census counts them as residents of the place where they are incarcerated. This boosts the populations of many rural communities, giving them more votes in the legislature than they might otherwise have, along with other benefits.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer had attempted to neutralize political objections to prison closures by proposing that a state commission look into the issue in 2007. Modeled after the federal government's successful effort to shut excess military bases, the idea was the panel would present the legislature with a comprehensive plan that would be difficult to oppose.

The legislature, though, blocked that effort. Spitzer then turned to his state Department of Correctional Services. After what department spokesperson Erik Kriss has described as a "thorough internal review," officials proposed closing a medium security prison, the Hudson Correctional Facility in Columbia County, as well as three minimum security facilities. The department had even begun to transfer "a few dozen" employees out of the facilities slated for closure.

That was clearly premature. When the state budget was announced in April, it restored full funding for all four.

Advocates responded with outrage. "It’s really a jobs program for economically depressed communities," Robert Gangi, the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, told the New York Times. Gangi holds out hope that Patterson will fight for prison closures in the future. He notes that Patterson has a record of opposing mass incarceration and was even arrested at a demonstration protesting the state's harsh drug laws in 2002. "Maybe [Patterson] will return to it when he gets his sea legs under him," said Gangi.
Reforming Parole

The failure to close state prisons is a blow to state officials who hoped to use the savings to comply with tighter supervision standards for sex offenders, introduced by the legislature in 2006. It also gives the state less flexibility to help re-invigorate parts of the correctional system, like parole and probation, which have long suffered from neglect and under funding.

Advocates are particularly interested in transferring money from prisons to parole, which they see as key to reducing incarceration rates and increasing public safety. Improving parole would have a kind of domino effect: Better supervision of released offenders would reduce the number of offenders who go back to prison, thereby further diminishing the need for prisons, which in turn would free up more money for parole.

In recent years, however, parole officials have had to fend off challenges to the institution’s basic legitimacy. In 2005, the Urban Institute released a report, entitled http://www.urban.org/publications/311156.html "Does Parole Work?" It found that parole had little to no effect on re-arrest rates among offenders. After controlling for demographics and differences in criminal histories, the researchers found little difference between offenders released from prison with no conditions and those released under parole supervision. Roughly 60 percent of offenders in each group were re-arrested within two years. Some groups, such as white males with histories of violence and a long arrest records, actually fared worse under parole supervision than when they were released unconditionally.

In addition, observers credit -- or blame -- parole for helping to fuel the country’s prison boom. Put simply, in many states, parole provides the reason to put many released convicts back in jail. Studies show that about a quarter of all released offenders are re-incarcerated within three years of their release on so-called "technical violations" of their parole, such as failing a drug test or missing a curfew, as opposed to a new arrest.

In some states like California, the problem is particularly acute: According to Michael Jacobson, the state sends three quarters of its parole population back to jail every year for technical violations. In 2001, close to 15 percent of parolees were returned to jail in New York for technical violations, although that accounted for a large share (about one third) of all new prison admissions.

As Jacobson and others describe it, over-taxed parole officers return parolees to jail for minor infractions in an effort to manage caseloads that average 65 or more. The irony is that the parole system, one of the government’s most poorly funded functions, has essentially unchecked authority to authorize millions of dollars of government expenditures by citing offender for violations, guaranteeing their return to jail and the need for more prisons.

Some of parole’s toughest critics are system insiders such as Horn, the former executive director of New York’s Division of Parole. In a 2001 article in Corrections Management Quarterly, Horn called for "ending parole as we know it." He proposed replacing it with vouchers that would allow parolees to purchase needed services like drug treatment, job training or housing on their own. Before being released to the community, inmates would be placed in halfway houses to ease their reentry into society. The role of parole would shift from surveillance to supporting inmates and helping to link them to services. "I’m more convinced than ever that this is the right way to go," said Horn.

Other prominent correctional reformers, such as Jacobson and Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argue that it would be politically difficult to win support for any plan, like Horn's, that does away with post prison supervision of offenders. Instead, Travis favors transferring parole from the executive branch to the judicial branch. He would create "re-entry courts" in which judges would supervise the reentry process.

Jacobson focuses more directly on reforms to parole itself, which include allocating resources so that recently released parolees get the most attention, limiting the length of time that a person stays on parole and curtailing the use of technical violations.

What all these proposals share, however, is the urgent sense that parole in its current form simply does not work. "If almost any of the state parole systems were a Fortune 500 company, the CEO would take one look at it and shut it down," Jacobson writes.
The View from New York

Here again, New York looks pretty good – at least in comparison to other states.

Although New York City’s plummeting crime rate gets most of the credit for the state’s declining incarceration population, some modest changes in correctional policy have had an impact as well. Some state prisoners are eligible for early release if they complete a so-called "shock incarceration" program that includes six months of hard labor. According to the state Department of Correctional Services, the program, in operation since 1987, has saved $1.18 billion in prison costs by granting over 36,000 participants a release an average of 345 days early.

Small changes to the state’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, enacted by the state legislature in 2004, have resulted in the early release of about 3,000 individuals, according to the New York State Criminal Justice 2007 Crimestat Report. Finally, in April, four state agencies, including the Division of Parole, launched a new drug treatment center in Harlem aimed at reducing the rate at which parolees, including those who fail a drug test or commit other technical violations, return to prison.

Perhaps most importantly, New York City offers a number of resources for the 15,000 parolees who returned home in 2007. Well-respected non-profit organizations like the Center for Employment Opportunities], the Fortune Society, the Women’s Prison Association and Family Justice all work with this population.

For example, the Center for Employment Opportunities provides short-term paid jobs and other services to about 2,000 parolees every year. Participants spend about eight weeks painting classrooms on college campuses, mopping courthouse floors or filling other temporary positions. After finishing these paid internships, job experts work to match participants to permanent jobs. The goal is to help released inmates manage the transition from incarceration to paid work.

"We feel strongly that a person coming home needs more than help than just creating a resume," said Marta Nelson, the director of policy and planning. "They need someone who can connect them to an employer." The program has cut re-incarceration rates among parolees by almost half, but only for individuals who begin the program within three months of their release. This finding mirrors national research that shows the importance of linking parolees to services immediately.

Despite these signs of success, New York is subject to the same difficult policy and practical challenges faced all over the country. "Parole is hard," said Horn. "It really gets deep into social and psychological factors [of parolees], and operates in a world where there are so many factors outside of its control."

For now, one of those factors seems to be New York State's commitment to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on prisons -- even without the prisoners to fill them.
Aubrey Fox is project director of Bronx Community Solutions, aimed at changing the Bronx court system’s approach to low-level crime.

Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20080602/200/2545

Posted by lois at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2008

VA: Churches add to effort to restore voting rights

Effort seeks to restore felons' voting rights
The local project will involve sermons, distributing information and conducting workshops.
Daily Press, Newport News VA
By DAVID SQUIRES
May 24, 2008

M.V. Cooke realizes that she made her own bed — hard. She didn't realize that she'd have to sleep in it so long — years after she paid for her crime and made peace.

Roderick Hart feels pretty much the same way.

Both plan to be in church Sunday as local pastors spur a grass-roots effort to help nonviolent offenders get voting rights restored in time for the Nov. 4 presidential election. For the next two Sundays, local churches will announce the program, pass out the necessary forms and plan workshops for offenders wanting their voting rights restored.

Cooke, 62, said that would be a big step toward making her whole again after a drug conviction in the 1980s. She has been out of the probation system since 1992.

"I didn't realize I couldn't vote until after I got out," said Cooke, who served 11 months in the Virginia Correctional Center for Women in Goochland. But that was merely one of her problems, she soon learned.

"When you have a felony, you can't get a job, a decent apartment, and you can't vote," said Cooke, who married in 1995 and is now a homeowner.

She didn't want to be photographed for this news story because she feared being ostracized in the community. "We're in a new neighborhood," she said. "None of the people in our church knows."

Cooke has sage advice for anyone thinking of crime to jump-start their lifestyle: "Don't do it," she said. "It's not worth it, and it's wrong."

Cooke, who's retired, said one of her biggest frustrations was a stereotype about black people and jobs.

"People always say that black people don't want to work," she said. "But if you go to a temp place, like Labor Finders, all you see is black people. People want to work, but jobs don't want to hire you because of something in your background."

Hart, 51, of Newport News, can relate: Off probation since 2002 for guns and weapons charges, Hart shows up regularly to find work through a Labor Finders location in Newport News.

Hart, who attends Way of the Cross Living Waters Church in Newport News, didn't know that his right to vote could be restored until recent talk about the local project.

He said he was eager to begin the process because as a convicted felon, "You don't have a say in anything. You have no say whatsoever. ... But one vote can make a difference."

The expedited program doesn't apply to violent and drug-distribution offenders. That process will take at least six months — usually longer — because it's more extensive, says Bernard Henderson, deputy secretary of the commonwealth.

Local churches will help collect applications from nonviolent offenders and send them to Richmond by Aug. 1, so the forms can be processed in time to allow registration for the November election. Registration can take place at least 30 days before the election.

The Rev. Paul Sheppard, pastor of Third Baptist Church in Hampton, is coordinating the effort for the Peninsula Baptist Pastors Council, which has asked local churches to participate. Sheppard said his Sunday sermon would refer to the vote-restoration project.

"I'm going to preach about it this Sunday, then I'm going to reinforce it next Sunday," he said. "Right now, I'm looking at Luke 15 — the reaction of a restoring God."

Applicants for restoration of rights must be residents of Virginia or convicted of a felony in a Virginia, federal or military court. They must have paid all costs, fines and restitution associated with their cases and have completed a three-year waiting period after the end of their sentence or release from probation. They also can't have a drunken-driving conviction in the past five years.

Restoration of rights — which are lost when a person is convicted of a felony — has been on the books in Virginia since the 1700s.

This year, the state started the expedited process for nonviolent offenders because the office always gets swamped in presidential-election years.

Three local women — Gaylene Kanoyton, Gisele Russell and G.V. Watson — thought up the local restoration project as a civic project and coordinated with the pastors council.

"This is the election that can restore human dignity to thousands of people who have been disenfranchised in any number of ways: economically, educationally, in the justice system or with basic civil rights," Kanoyton said. "That's why we need to make sure everyone who is eligible actually gets out to vote."

Copyright © 2008, Newport News, Va., Daily Press
dailypress.com/news/local/dp-local_voterestore_0524may24,0,3530066.story

Posted by lois at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

Coalition for Women Prisoners’ Re-entry Committee Publishes New Book for Women Returning Home from Incarceration

Coalition for Women Prisoners’ Re-entry Committee Publishes New Book for Women Returning Home from Incarceration
May 2008
My Sister’s Keeper, A Book for Women Returning Home From Prison or Jail, is a unique compilation of the words and experiences of women from New York in various stages of returning home from incarceration. My Sister’s Keeper offers peer-to-peer guidance, strength and hope to help women in re-entry cope with challenges of reclaiming their lives. The CA’s Women in Prison Project will distribute the guide to women incarcerated in New York’s correctional facilities, as well as women in alternative to incarceration programs and transitional services programs throughout New York State.

http://www.correctionalassociation.org/WIPP/publications/MySistersKeeper_Re-EntryGuide.pdf

Posted by lois at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

California's Runner Initiative: Overview and Opposition

California's Runner Initiative: Overview and Opposition

The Runner Initiative, a California ballot initiative also called the "Safe Neighborhoods Act," was introduced in April by Senator George Runner (R-Antelope Valley), Assemblywoman Sharon Runner (R-Lancaster), Mike Reynolds, author of California's Three Strikes sentencing law, and San Bernardino County Supervisor Gary Ovitt. The Runner Initiative includes many traditional "tough on crime" approaches to addressing crime, including increasing the length of penalties for certain crimes, the establishment of a statewide gang registry database, and making individuals convicted of certain crimes ineligible for public housing. Unfortunately, this approach emphasizes punishment and incarceration over prevention and early intervention efforts that could be utilized to address the underlying causes of crimes. The text of the initiative can be found here.

In response to the initiative, on May 16th, Los Angeles Councilmembers Tony Cardenas and Bernard Parks announced their aggressive opposition to the Runner Initiative. A press release of their announcement is available here.

Additionally, over 50 California individuals and organizations have formed a Coalition to Defeat George Runner's Initiative. The Coalition includes elected officials, influential individuals, city governments, labor unions, and interfaith, environmental, civil rights, and other organizations. A complete listing of Coalition members is available at http://www.ellabakercenter.org/?p=runner_opposed. More information on the Coalition and action items to help defeat the Runner Initiative can be found at http://www.ellabakercenter.org/?p=defeat_runner.

The W. Haywood Burns Institute, a California-based national organization working to reduce the overrepresentation of youth of color in the juvenile justice system, has also has written an analysis of this initiative. The analysis describes the implications associated with each line of the initiative's language and includes fiscal impacts, cost effective arguments against the initiative, a description of implications on youth of color, and a listing of the problems associated with the creation of a gang database. A listing of the initiative's proponents and opponents is also included. The analysis can be found at http://www.ellabakercenter.org/downloads/runner/runner_summary.pdf.

Posted by lois at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Stopping the School to Prison Pipeline

The Boston Globe
DANIEL G. MEYER
By Daniel G. Meyer | May 28, 2008

A 13-YEAR-OLD girl was handcuffed and arrested at Brockton High School last June for wearing a T-shirt. The T-shirt, which she was asked by school officials to remove, bore the image of her ex-boyfriend, 14-year-old Marvin Constant, who had recently been killed in a Boston area shooting. The girl refused to remove the memorial shirt and was arrested for "causing a disturbance."

In Texas, 14-year-old high school freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Her crime was pushing a hall monitor out of the way when she was stopped from entering a school building. The official charge was "assault on a public servant."

While extreme, these cases are not unusual. In Massachusetts and across the country, an increasing number of incidents that traditionally have been handled in schools by trips to the principal's office are being dealt with by law enforcement officials and judges in the juvenile justice system. Countless school children, particularly children of color in poverty-stricken zip codes, are being pushed out of schools and into juvenile correctional facilities for minor misconduct.

A variety of overzealous disciplinary measures, including a mandatory "zero-tolerance" policy, are removing children as early as elementary school from mainstream educational environments and funneling them into a one-way pipeline to prison. This "school-to-prison pipeline" begins in the nation's neglected and under-resourced public education system and flows directly into the country's expansive ocean of overcrowded, privatized, profit-producing prisons.

America's Promise Alliance released a report in April that said that 17 of the nation's 50 largest cities have high school graduation rates of lower than 50 percent. Boston barely boasted a graduation rate of 57 percent, placing it 27th among the 50 cities. It is no surprise that urban public high schools ranked lower in graduation rates than their suburban counterparts.

When school funding is based on student test performance, lack of resources creates heinous incentives for school officials to funnel out "problem" students believed likely to drag down a school's scores. This bottom line business is a convenient method of concealing schools' educational deficiencies, but it does little to address the systemic problem of poor performance.

Racial disproportion runs through every level of the system. A black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime compared with a white male's 1 in 17 chance. Incarceration rates are directly correlated with school performance. Children of color are more likely to be suspended or expelled than their Caucasian classmates. More than 70 percent of the prison population in Massachusetts is functionally illiterate. The cycle begins early and is hard to break. A black child is nine times more likely to have an incarcerated parent, and children with imprisoned parents far more likely to be imprisoned themselves.

Abraham Lincoln wrote that "the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present." There remains a deeply ingrained punitive paradigm in the psyche of the American criminal justice system. Our overzealous "get tough on crime" philosophy is totally inadequate to the stormy present. Americans are far more likely to be victimized by a violent assault, rape, murder, or robbery than our European counterparts who incarcerate relatively tiny percentages of the population. There, prison is viewed as a fundamentally "criminogenic" institution that creates more crime than it deters.

Prisoners are a major fiscal burden on the rest of society. It costs Massachusetts $43,000 a year to keep an inmate behind bars. States are spending on average more than three times as much per prisoner as per public school pupil. Is it more valuable to imprison than to teach? The majority of suspended students and juveniles in detention did not commit violent offenses. Is society safer with nonviolent criminals in jail or in school?

Relying on incarceration as the sole solution to crime is ineffective. Academic achievement is the leading determining factor for delinquency. Improving school performance will be an effective strategy for reducing chronic court involvement.

We have the resources. It is not a question of funds but rather a question of will. Will Massachusetts be first to say enough and dam the flow of the school-to-prison pipeline?

Daniel G. Meyer is a volunteer at the Youth Advocacy Project at the Committee for Public Counsel Services.
ttp://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/05/28/problem_students_in_pipeline_to_prison?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)