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July 31, 2008

U.S. Blacks, if a Nation, Would Rank 16th in the world of people living with AIDS

July 30, 2008, NY Times
U.S. Blacks, if a Nation, Would Rank High on AIDS
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

If black America were a country, it would rank 16th in the world in the number of people living with the AIDS virus, the Black AIDS Institute, an advocacy group, reported Tuesday.

The report, financed in part by the Ford Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, provides a startling new perspective on an epidemic that was first recognized in 1981.

Nearly 600,000 African-Americans are living with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and up to 30,000 are becoming infected each year. When adjusted for age, their death rate is two and a half times that of infected whites, the report said. Partly as a result, the hypothetical nation of black America would rank below 104 other countries in life expectancy.

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Those and other disparities are “staggering,” said Dr. Kevin A. Fenton, who directs H.I.V. prevention efforts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency responsible for tracking the epidemic in the United States.

“It is a crisis that needs a new look at prevention,” Dr. Fenton said.

In a separate report on Tuesday, the United Nations painted a somewhat more optimistic picture of the worldwide AIDS epidemic, noting that fewer people are dying of the disease since its peak in the late 1990s and that more people are receiving antiretroviral drugs.

Nevertheless, the report found that progress remained uneven and that the future of the epidemic was uncertain. The report was issued in advance of the 17th International AIDS Conference, which begins this weekend in Mexico City.

The gains are partly from the Bush administration’s program to deliver drugs and preventive measures to people in countries highly affected by H.I.V.

The Black AIDS Institute took note of that program in criticizing the administration’s efforts at home. The group said that more black Americans were living with the AIDS virus than the infected populations in Botswana, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Namibia, Rwanda or Vietnam — 7 of the 15 countries that receive support from the administration’s anti-AIDS program.

The international effort is guided by a strategic plan, clear benchmarks like the prevention of seven million H.I.V. infections by 2010 and annual progress reports to Congress, the group said. By contrast, it went on, “America itself has no strategic plan to combat its own epidemic.”

In a telephone interview, Dr. Fenton said, “We recognize this is a crisis, and clearly more can be done.”

The institute, based in Los Angeles, describes itself as the only national H.I.V./AIDS study group focused exclusively on black people. Phill Wilson, the group’s chief executive and an author of the report, said his group supported the government’s international anti-AIDS program. But Mr. Wilson’s report also said that “American policy makers behave as if AIDS exists ‘elsewhere’ — as if the AIDS problem has been effectively solved” in this country.

The group also chided the government for not reporting H.I.V. statistics to the United Nations for inclusion in its biannual report.

Dr. Fenton said the C.D.C. had ensured that its data were forwarded to officials in the Department of Health and Human Services and was investigating why the data were not in the United Nations report.

Others speaking for the agency said the answer would have to come from the State Department, which did not respond to an inquiry.

Dr. Helene Gayle, president of CARE and a former director of H.I.V. prevention efforts at the disease control centers, told reporters on Tuesday that the United States needed to devote more resources to care for people with sexually transmitted diseases. Such infections can increase the risk of H.I.V. infection.

The federal government and communities needed to promote more testing among all people, particularly blacks, to detect H.I.V. infection in its earliest stages when treatment is more effective, Dr. Gayle said.

Also, she said, more needed to be done to promote needle exchange programs, which have proved effective in preventing H.I.V. infection among injecting drug users but that are illegal in many places.

The United Nations report said that in Rwanda and Zimbabwe, changes in sexual behavior had led to declines in the number of new H.I.V. infections.

Condom use is increasing among young people with multiple partners in many countries and more young people are postponing their initial sexual intercourse before age 15.

The percentage of pregnant women receiving antiretroviral drugs to prevent transmission of H.I.V. to their infants increased to 33 percent in 2007 from 14 percent in 2005. During the same period, the number of new infections among children fell to 370,000 from 410,000.

The United Nations report affirmed treatment gains in Namibia, which increased treatment to 88 percent of the estimated need in 2007, from 1 percent in 2003; and in Cambodia, where the percentage rose to 67 in 2007 from 14 percent in 2004. Other countries with high treatment rates are Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba and Laos.

In most areas of the world, more women than men are receiving antiretroviral therapy, the report said.

Despite inadequate monitoring systems in many countries, data suggest that most of the H.I.V. epidemics in the Caribbean appear to have stabilized. A few have declined in urban areas in the Dominican Republic and Haiti which have had the largest epidemics in the region.

Increased treatment was partly responsible for a decline in AIDS-related deaths to an estimated 2 million in 2007 from 2.2 million in 2005.

The AIDS epidemic has had less overall economic effect than earlier feared, the report said, but is having profound negative effects in industries and agriculture in high-prevalence countries.

The United Nations has set 2015 as the year by which it hopes to reverse the epidemic. But even if the world achieved that goal, the report said, “the epidemic would remain an overriding global challenge for decades.”

To underscore the point, the United Nations said that for every two people who received treatment, five people became newly infected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/health/research/30aids.html?scp=1&sq=AIDS%20and%20African%20Americans&st=cse

Posted by lois at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 30, 2008

Calculating Economics of an Eye for an Eye

July 29, 2008
Calculating Economics of an Eye for an Eye
By PATRICIA COHEN
NY Times
In the Albanian canon, a 15th-century handbook detailing the rules of revenge that is still in circulation, a man’s relatives are expected “to take their blood back” if he is shot. In Iran a death can be compensated with blood money: 100 camels in early Islam; thousands of dollars today. A girl’s life is worth only half of a boy’s. So is an eye; a tooth, one-twentieth. In Sicily there is an oral tradition describing various methods of revenge: tying a man’s feet to his neck so that when he moves, he strangles himself; handcuffing a victim to a bonfire of olive wood; throwing him into a sty with hungry pigs.

Today one can see vengeance on a mass scale embodied in the person of Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, who is sitting in a Belgrade jail, charged with war crimes, including overseeing the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995 at Srebrenica. At least some of those deaths were claimed by Bosnian Serb officials at the time as revenge for previous killings of Serbs.

Vengeance: it is as old as humanity, as natural as blinking. It has been examined and pondered by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, poets, playwrights and even primatologists, who have recently found that chimpanzees will punish thieves by overturning their food tables so they cannot enjoy the fruits of their crime.

Only recently, however, have economists turned their attention to vengeance and tried to measure it in the real world. In a working paper published last month on the Web site of the National Bureau of Economic Research (www.nber.org), Naci H. Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University, gathered information on 89,000 people in 53 countries to draw a map of vengefulness. What he found was that among the most vengeful are women, older people, the poor and residents of high-crime areas.

“There was a question of whether or not we can quantify vengeful feelings in a scientific fashion,” Mr. Mocan said. “It’s the first analysis of the issue looking at actual data.”

It turns out that personal attributes — age, income, gender — as well as the characteristics of one’s culture and country contribute to a person’s desire for revenge, Mr. Mocan said. “A feeling such as vengeance,” he said, “which can be considered primal, is nonetheless influenced by the economic and social circumstances of the person and the country he or she lives in.”

For economists, Mr. Mocan’s work, while still preliminary, opens up a new area for exploration. “I think this is really important research,” said Daniel Houser, a professor at George Mason University specializing in experimental economics and emotion. “I’m not aware of any work in economics that tries to capture individual differences in vengeful feelings.”

In the last couple of decades a lot of work has shown how important trust and reciprocity are in developing efficient markets, Mr. Houser explained, and what helps to create trust is punishment. Yet punishment can also spiral out of control, and people can get stuck in a retaliatory cycle, just as in a nasty divorce or a longstanding family feud.

“How do you calibrate the proper level of punishment to promote effective market relations?” Mr. Houser asked. It may turn out, he said, that “how much you want to punish is connected to the likelihood of creating a more formal market economy.”

Mr. Mocan collected data compiled by a United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute survey from the 1990s and 2000. People were asked what would be an appropriate sentence for a 20-year-old man found guilty of stealing a color television if it was his second offense. The punishments ranged from alternatives to prison through two to six months in jail, all the way to a life sentence. Mr. Mocan tried to take account of the different values of a television in different countries, the effectiveness of the legal system and the going rate, if you will, for other crimes.

In China, Romania and Botswana, for example, nearly 40 percent of participants preferred a prison sentence of four or more years. In South Africa the rate is 25 percent; 18 to 20 percent in Egypt, Ukraine and Paraguay; 16 percent in Canada and Indonesia; 12 percent in the United States and the Philippines; about 4 percent in Norway and Slovenia; and 1 percent in Belgium and Spain.

Within a given country, people who have been victims of the same kind of crime (here, a burglary) tend to be more vengeful, but not if they have been victims of a different crime, like mugging.

Most of Mr. Mocan’s findings confirm what researchers in different disciplines have already found: that vengeful feelings are stronger in countries with low levels of income and education, a weak rule of law and those who recently experienced a war or are ethnically or linguistically fragmented. Anthropologists tend to believe that vengeful feelings were useful in binding a family or group together in early human society. They were protective devices before states were established and did the job of punishing wrongdoers.

“The results make good intuitive sense, confirming what we already suspected,” said Tyler Cowen, the author of “Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting and Motivate Your Dentist.”

What Mr. Mocan found most surprising was that women turned out to be more vengeful than men. If a woman had been a victim of burglary, she was 10 percent more likely to impose a prison sentence; for men the figure was 5 percent.

Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard who has tried to explain group hatred in terms of political economy, has written that “an economist’s definition of hatred is the willingness to pay a price to inflict harm on others.” In healthy economies, he argues, the cost is higher, and the demand for hatred and vengeance drops.

Vengeance, of course, often defies what would appear to be rational calculations of gain and loss. In experiments using what is known as the ultimatum game, subjects were told that Player 1 would offer to share a sum of money — say, $10 — with Player 2. But if the two didn’t agree on how to split the cash, then no one would get anything.

Logically, even an offer of one cent leaves you better off than you were before. But people repeatedly rejected offers of less than 30 percent of the total, preferring to forgo any money and punish the cheapskate (and themselves), rather than accepting what they perceived to be an unfair offer. If a computer instead of a person did the split, the other player was more likely to accept a low offer.

The willingness to suffer harm yourself is often much more extreme. In Euripides’ play, Medea is so bent on wreaking vengeance on her unfaithful husband, Jason, that she murders their children.

Jared Diamond recently wrote in The New Yorker about a revenge killing in the New Guinea Highlands that took three years and involved 300 men, 30 deaths, permanent crippling and large payments to all the soldiers recruited. The reward? Psychological satisfaction and the knowledge that the avenger would be considered a hero and remembered if he were killed. That personal satisfaction is something Mr. Diamond said every human being, no matter what the culture, can identify with.

This type of vengeful passion, Mr. Mocan acknowledged, may occupy a wholly different dimension than the one he tried to capture with his research. But Mr. Mocan, who has also done research that found that the death penalty deters murders, said his findings raised the question of whether vengeance should be a legitimate aspect of the criminal justice system.

In her 2002 book, “Revenge: A Story of Hope,” Laura Blumenfeld wrote about her search for vengeance on a Palestinian terrorist who grazed her father with a bullet in Jerusalem without seriously harming him. She explored the dark alleyways of revenge, like the examples cited in the beginning of this article.

She is skeptical of the economic approach. “How do you quantify shame?” she asked. Often “punishment is irrelevant,” she said, which is why families often still want to take revenge even if the perpetrator is jailed. “It’s not about inflicting pain, it’s about honor.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/arts/29veng.html?ex=1218081600&en=08a7a5fed9b99402&ei=5070

Posted by lois at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2008

UK: study and article relevant to the U.S. :The real cost of prison. Moral, social and political arguments for and against prison are all very well. But what about value for money?

The real cost of prison
Moral, social and political arguments for and against prison are all very well. But what about value for money?
by Kevin marsh
Monday July 28 2008

In 1993, the UK prison population was 44,000. Today it is over 83,000. This trend is set to continue: the government has recently announced an extra £3.8bn to create 20,000 more prison places.

In the UK it is estimated that each new prison place costs £119,000 and that the annual average cost for each prisoner exceeds £40,000. Such huge public expenditure should not be spent without question. But where value for money models are widely applied in other state services like healthcare, they have rarely been used to test the value of the criminal justice sector.

It might be true that incarceration reduces re-offending, but the cost of the prison system still has to justify that reduction. Is the cost of cutting offending through prisons too high? Could alternatives provide better value for money?

These are the questions I and my colleagues from the Matrix Knowledge Group
(http://www.matrixknowledge.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/the-economic-case-for-and-against-prison_web.pdf)
have sought to address in our latest research. Using data from the US and the UK from 1996, we measured the net benefit of alternatives to prison. The result? Alternatives to prison seem to deliver a better return on public money.

Residential drug treatment programmes, for example, offer a £200,000 net benefit over prison over the lifetime of an offender. This is because drug treatment programmes are cheaper to run than incarceration systems and because they deliver lower re-offending rates. Similarly, using surveillance instead of cells saves £125,000 per convict.

This research could be used to argue that we simply have to reduce the cost of prison per prisoner to make it deliver value for money. If we cut corners and McDonald's-ise our cells, wouldn't prisons then deliver value for money? Our research suggests not. Once you crunch the numbers, investing more in prisons per head actually delivers increased savings in the long run. Because of associated reductions in re-offending rates, prisons which include educational and vocational programmes save society £50,000 for each inmate whilst prison with drug treatment saves £125,000.

Other work supports our findings, with some key studies indicating that prison as we know it is completely unjustifiable on economic grounds. Cynthia McDougall and colleagues point out that for every $1 spent on prison, only $0.24 to $0.36 is saved on avoiding offending. This contrasts to spending on probation, which delivers $1.70 in benefits for every dollar spent.

The debate for and against prisons has historically focused on the moral, political and social arguments for sentencing. But public money is scarce; we need to make sure that the benefits of our prisons outweigh their costs. Whatever penal policy we decide to pursue, ignoring the economic dimension to this argument is something we can no longer afford to do.
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This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday July 28 2008. It was last updated at 19:30 on July 28 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/28/justice.prisonsandprobation/print

Posted by lois at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2008

UK: Taking on the Titans: he US prison system, with its superjails, now warehouses one in 100 of our citizens. That's not a model the UK should emulate. By Julia Sudbury

Taking on the Titans

The US prison system, with its superjails, now warehouses one in 100 of our citizens. That's not a model the UK should emulate

By Julia Sudbury
guardian.co.uk
Saturday July 26 2008

The first slavery abolitionists were represented as extremist and utopian. Until the late 18th century, the idea of eliminating this deeply-rooted institution was unimaginable. Yet, 12 individuals who first met in a London printing shop in 1787 eventually managed to create enough momentum that, 51 years later, slavery ended in Britain's colonies.

Today, I believe that imprisonment – another practice violating human freedom and equality – could follow suit.

I am not alone. In September 1998, over three thousand people gathered in Berkeley, California, for the founding conference of Critical Resistance and thousands more are expected to attend our 10-year anniversary conference and strategy this September.

Today, Critical Resistance is a grassroots organisation that seeks to abolish the "prison-industrial complex": a symbiotic relationship between politicians, state correctional apparatus and corporations that promotes racialised mass incarceration as a catch-all "solution" to deep-rooted social, political and economic problems.

Those who profit from the prison-industrial complex include private prison corporations like US-based Wackenhut, which operates prisons for profit in the UK; politicians who win votes by promising to be tough on the latest overblown crime fad; and local chambers of commerce which embrace prison construction as a "recession-proof industry". Prison is, after all, one of the few industries that sees business go up when the economy goes down.

So, what is the abolitionist alternative? Abolition defines both the goal we seek and the way we do our work today. Abolitionists recognise that we do not create safer communities by locking people in cages; that prisons do not solve the problems that lead to crime, like drug use, poverty, violence or mental illness.

We also draw attention to the massive cost of perpetual prison expansion, which siphons public resources away from services that could be used to build safer and more egalitarian communities. We take seriously the ways in which people harm others, and seek to transform the social and economic conditions that promote violence, as well as creating community-based strategies to address harm and create accountability.

We believe that the violence of crime cannot be solved through the additional violence of policing, surveillance and separation from loved ones. Instead, we advocate focusing attention and resources on building empowered communities, with decent housing, secure jobs, food security, healthy environments and high-quality education, as the ultimate alternative to incarceration.

The challenge facing us is immense. In the US alone, over 2.3 million people are warehoused in prisons and jails. A recent report from the Pew Center found that, for the first time, in the US we now imprison one in every 100 adults; the figure is one in nine for black men aged between 20 and 34. The Pew report also found that this massive incarceration is impacting state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety.

Although many academics and policy-makers recognise that the US penal system is a bloated and wasteful failure, the UK is increasingly emulating the US. Britain's prison population has grown by more than a third in the past decade, and residents of England and Wales are more likely to be imprisoned than residents of any other western European country. Rather than seeking to reduce the number of people in prison, the Ministry of Justice proposes to increase the prison population further to 96,000 by building three US-style "superjails". These proposals are going ahead despite evidence from the US that superjails breed violence, dehumanise prisoners, and lead to medical neglect, self-harm and preventable deaths.

The prison-industrial complex will not be dismantled overnight. But many of us believe that the prison, like the institution of slavery, will one day be viewed as an obsolete and shameful relic of history. Until that day, I invite you to join the global movement to help build a world without prisons.

This article was completed with help from Rose Braz, national campaign director of Critical Resistance.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/26/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime/print

Posted by lois at 08:36 PM | Comments (0)

MA: New study on inequities of school zone sentencing in Springfield released

"A new study by the Easthampton-based Prison Policy Initiative concludes the law places poor, black and Hispanic populations at risk of harsher penalties simply because of where they live. The initiative is a national organization which mapped the impact of so-called "sentencing enhancement zones" in Hampden County in a study of the law."

Executive Director Peter J. Wagner, co-author of the report with Aleks W. Kajstura, said the law is used more frequently - 2½ times the state average - in Hampden County than any other county in the state. The patterns of conviction show the law "has more effectively created a two-tiered system of drug sentencing," the report concluded.

Drug free zones facing review
Saturday, July 26, 2008 Springfield Republican
By JO-ANN MORIARTY

In 1989, Massachusetts moved aggressively to protect its schoolchildren from being preyed upon by drug dealers, enacting a law that requires a mandatory minimum sentence of two years for anyone convicted of selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school.

"We want kids to be able to go to school without running the gauntlet of drug pushers," said former Gov. Michael S. Dukakis at the time.

Fast-forward almost 20 years, and there are questions from lawmakers, law enforcers and policy makers about the law: Is it just? It is racially discriminating? Does it work?

"I am concerned that the Legislature is using the wrong tool to solve the problem of drugs and the problem of community safety," said state Rep. William N. Brownsberger, D-Belmont. He has proposed amending the law to reduce the zone to 100 feet. It is part of a criminal justice reform package approved by the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday and due to be considered by the House before it ends its current session on July 31.

"The result of this law and some of the mandatory sentencing laws that we have is that we are putting too many people in jail for too long for these offenses," said Brownsberger, a Harvard-educated attorney. "Some of them need to go to jail, but the penalties are excessive and we are wasting money as a result."

A new study by the Easthampton-based Prison Policy Initiative concludes the law places poor, black and Hispanic populations at risk of harsher penalties simply because of where they live. The initiative is a national organization which mapped the impact of so-called "sentencing enhancement zones" in Hampden County in a study of the law.

Executive Director Peter J. Wagner, co-author of the report with Aleks W. Kajstura, said the law is used more frequently - 2½ times the state average - in Hampden County than any other county in the state. The patterns of conviction show the law "has more effectively created a two-tiered system of drug sentencing," the report concluded.

In the report, Kajstura said, "We found that the heavy zone coverage in urban areas made many more black, Latino, urban and poor people eligible for enhanced penalties even though rural white populations commit the same drug offenses at similar rates."

"Because schools are more numerous in dense urban areas, most urban residents - including most of the state's black and Latino residents - face longer mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses than the state's rural residents, who are predominantly white," they wrote.

Hampden District Attorney William M. Bennett supports changing the existing law to give law enforcement more flexibility in dealing with first-time offenders who have no history of violence.

"The law is effective," he added. "We don't have drug dealers hanging out in school yards, which was the whole idea to protect children. In practice, there have been incidents you would not want to impose the two years because of a variety of reasons."

Hampden Superior Court Judge Constance M. Sweeney, who emphasized that her role is to enforce laws not write them, said she sees the benefit of having more discretion for sentencing than the existing school zone law allows.

As an example, she said, an 18-year-old with no record who is pulled over for a traffic violation off an interstate ramp and drugs are found in the car, would face an automatic two-year prison sentence and, possibly, up to a minimum mandatory of 10 years "without any discretion to look at the circumstances," she said. A convicted felon involved in an armed robbery could, in contrast, secure a plea agreement with less prison time, she said.

"A drug offense, as toxic as it is to society, does not pose the immediate threat of death," she said, as in the case of an armed crime.

Sweeney said she supports proposed "truth-in-sentencing reforms" authored by state Trial Court Chief Administrative Judge Robert A. Mulligan because they set up guidelines to consider many factors and allow district attorneys the right to appeal sentences.

State Rep. Cheryl A. Coakley Rivera, D-Springfield, who is also a attorney, doesn't see where the existing law has reduced drug violations in the city. She is concerned for first-time offenders, age 22 and younger who are involved in non-violent drug charges and face two years in prison.

"We are immediately crippling them for the rest of their lives," Rivera said. "I think we did a disservice to the taxpayers when we did this. For less money, we could have changed the lives of these children and young adults and work with them."

The study found that residents of Hampden County's urban communities are five times as likely to live in a "sentencing enhancement zone" as its rural residents.

So, for example, while half of the population in Springfield, and nearly 60 percent of Holyoke, live in school zones, in suburban Wilbraham or rural Russell or Blandford, only 12 percent of residents live in school zones. In little Montgomery, where there is no school, no one lives in a school zone.

The result, according to the study, is that while 29 percent of white county residents live in an enhancement zone, 52 percent of black and Latino residents are similarly situated. Much of this has to do with the fact that cities like Holyoke and Springfield are less white than the county's more rural and suburban stretches. But even within Holyoke, the study found, the disparity is apparent with 76 percent of Holyoke Latinos living in a zone compared to 45 percent of whites.

What the report refers to as the "geography of punishment" helps explain, according to its authors, why blacks and Latinos make up nearly eight of 10 of those convicted of school zone offenses in Massachusetts.

State Rep. Benjamin Swan, D-Springfield, told The Republican that while the original law "was well-meaning," it also resulted in "some critical unintended consequences."

"In the city of Springfield, within the district I serve, it would be difficult. if not impossible. to locate a place which would be beyond 1,000 feet of a school," Swan said. "Many elected officials will admit that the mandatory sentencing has been a disaster, yet it is difficult to correct - few are willing to take the first step to make necessary corrections for fear of being labeled soft on crime."

Almost every state has some version of a law providing stiffer penalties for drug offenses near a school.

"It is often about 1,000 feet," Wagner said. "In Alabama, it is 3 miles. But Vermont's statute is smart. It is 500 feet and applies only to properties adjacent to the school."

The problem is that in most cases the zone extends 1,000 feet in every direction, and for practical purposes, it is not at all obvious to potential offenders that they are in a school zone or, as in the case of Holyoke, what patch of land they would have to repair to in order to not be in some school zone.

Holyoke Police Chief Anthony R. Scott, who has zero tolerance for drug dealing in his impoverished city, values the mandatory sentencing as a "deterrent to drug dealing." He wants to see the law stand as it is.

Most of Holyoke is within a school zone, and Scott said perhaps these individuals should wake up and say, 'I shouldn't sell drugs at all (and) then I don't have to worry about the minimum mandatory.'"

http://www.masslive.com/springfield/republican/index.ssf?/base/news-2/1217056612248600.xml&coll=1

SCHOOL ZONE LEGISLATION MAY DIE BEFORE IT GETS VOTED ON....PLEASE READ THIS AND CALL YOU SENATOR.
Please contact (Senator) Stan Rosenberg or your Senator and Senate President Murry. The Bill is stalled and may not be voted on before the session ends on Thursday which means the reforms are dead (again). Please call and forward this email and encourage others to call.
Thank you.
Lois

Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:04:13 +0000

CORI Campaign Update

Voting on House Bill #5004 "An act to improve certain criminal justice matters" was postponed until next formal session on Tuesday (7/29).

All available supporters should join us on Tuesday:

Tuesday, July 29th
12:30pm (and onward)
State House, outside House Chamber (3rd Floor)

While we have made major headway by securing "Ban the Box" in the Judiciary Committee's proposal, there are three issues that may derail our efforts in the next 7 days.

1) Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM), has started an active lobbying campaign against our CORI reforms. AIM has donated large sums of money for re-election campaigns. Legislators must be held accountable to the people - not big businesses.

2) The State Senate appears to be undecided whether it will take up the bill after it is passed in the House. Rapid outreach to Senators and Senate President Murray is critical.

3) The Bill #5004 includes positive provisions around sealing, ban the box, and a reduction of school zones from 1000ft to a 100ft. However, a central part of HB #5004 is a mandatory parole period for all prisoners who serve over 1 year in jail. BWA strongly opposes the blanket expansion of parole supervision.

The Message to Elected Officials:

"Dear _________, please help pass CORI reform this session. The sealing periods should be 3 and 7 years, and the criminal record question should be removed from job applications. However, I do not support mandatory parole as it will cost the state too much money, and leads to the unnecessary re-incarceration of ex-prisoners. Thank you"

Key Call-In Target:

Senate President Therese Murray
Tel: (617) 722-1500

Speaker of the House Sal DiMasi
Tel: 617-722-2500

Thank you to the hundreds of people who have already called-in and attended rallies and lobby days. Please support the movement and our final call-in efforts to target the Senate and House leadership, today and Monday.

Find your own legislator at www.wheredoivotema.
com - call the State House operator at 617 722 2000.

Download a summary and text of HB #5004 at www.BostonWorkersAlliance.org

------

MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT CORI REFORM
Response to Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM)

Facts about CORI Reform

CORI reform is about fairness. We all recognize that criminal record checks are an important part of the hiring process for many jobs. But criminal record checks should not create an insurmountable barrier to employment.

CORI reform is about public safety. As Governor Patrick has stated, "gainful employment for rehabilitated offenders reduces recidivism and increases the likelihood of successful re-integration into society."

CORI reform is about second chances. Many people with CORIs have never been convicted of any crime. Those who have been convicted, and then rehabilitated, should be able to both repay their debt to society and to have a second chance to become productive citizens.

Myths about CORI Reform
An organization of employers has recently issued a statement in opposition to CORI reform, but its positions are based on misinformation and misconceptions:

MYTH: "AIM opposes the measure because it provides no balance of risk and liability for the employer. While the laws of the Commonwealth hold employers liable for the wrongful hiring of an employee with a past criminal offense who becomes a repeat offender, this and similar bills would limit access to the very information that makes an informed hiring decision possible."

FACT: CORI reform does not increase the risk of liability for employers. Under the laws of the Commonwealth, Massachusetts employers must use reasonable care when making hiring decisions. It is up to the Commonwealth to decide what information should be shared with employers, and it is up to employers to use that information to make a reasonable hiring decision.

MYTH: "In addition, AIM opposes the bill since it would result in: Employers not being able to ask candidates about their past and therefore unable to properly conduct a full reference check"

FACT: Under CORI reform, employers can ask about a candidate's criminal record, as long as it is not the very first question a candidate is asked. CORI reform would let all candidates get in the door and have their work experience and skills evaluated, allowing employers to perform criminal background checks on otherwise qualified candidates.

FACT: Reference checks, or other questions about a candidate's "past," would not be affected by CORI reform.

MYTH: ". . . Prohibiting employers from researching a candidate's criminal background and therefore be unable to properly screen candidates who would work independently"

FACT: CORI reform would merely change the timing of criminal background checks. An employer could still research the applicant's criminal background, after first determining that the applicant is qualified for the job.

MYTH: "Not being able to conduct due diligence in the hiring process to protect the financial and public relation's (sic) interest of the firm"

FACT: Again, nothing in the Governor's bill (H. 4476), or in any variation of the bill or proposed amendments would keep employers from performing CORI checks or other criminal background checks.

MYTH: "Placing some employers in a situation where they could become deficient in their compliance of national industry hiring practices."

FACT: Criminal background checks could still be performed. Changes to the waiting periods for sealing criminal records would not put Massachusetts out of the mainstream of hiring practices. Other states including Oregon, Michigan, and New Jersey allow criminal records to be sealed sooner than Massachusetts.

MYTH: "In recent years, there have been several instances where the current CORI mechanism has been deficient in the vetting of candidates for employment. H. 4476 would only further deteriorate this existing safety tool used by employers to ensure that their current employees and clientele are not put at further risk."

FACT: CORI is not a perfect tool for employers because it was never intended to be used for hiring. The system was created for law enforcement, to keep criminal records organized and private. H. 4476 and related CORI reform proposals would actually help to create a tool that is more useful and comprehensible to employers.

Posted by lois at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

Maine: A former guard calls for prison reform

Time for a clean sweep?
A former guard calls for prison reform
By LANCE TAPLEY | July 23, 2008

In early 2007, Rhonda Dawson, a thoughtful, candid, 45-year-old African-American guard at the Maine State Prison in Warren, quit her job after four years because, she says, of racist taunting from her fellow correctional officers.

She was fed up, too, she says, with a guard culture nourished by the prison leadership that encourages the degradation and other abuse of both guards and prisoners, black and white. Some officers turned against her, she thinks, because she wanted to help the prisoners. But reforming inmates is not the prison program, she says. Punishment is.

After she quit, Dawson wrote Governor John Baldacci — she shared the letter with the Phoenix — describing the “racially harassing phone messages” that had been programmed to pop up on the telephone display in front of her while she was the receptionist in the prison lobby. In addition, “a pink dog food bowl was placed on my desk with a bag of dog food” inside it. She got the message.

Lively, young-looking, a colorful dresser, Dawson, who is single, was born in West Virginia and came to Maine from Florida in 2001. In an interview at a picnic table in Augusta’s Capitol Park, not far from the Department of Transportation building where she now works, she emotionally reveals — “Write this down!” she orders, jabbing at a reporter’s notebook with a finger — that she has been a foster child, a drug addict, homeless, and on welfare.

But life forced her to confront what she had become. She found herself pregnant and unmarried at 29 and gave up her baby for adoption. “I had brought this person into my hell with nothing to give her,” she says. “But she saved my life. Sometimes I feel pain can be a blessing.” Dawson stopped destroying herself. Her home now in postcard-pretty Camden is a universe away from what she once experienced.

So she knows it’s possible to redeem yourself: “That’s why I wanted to work at a prison” — to help people change their lives.

“I know from experience what it feels like to be looked upon as a menace to society,” she wrote Baldacci in her poignant letter. Even in her new life in Maine, she wrote, “In some ways I feel like I am a prisoner” because of the lack of racial diversity here and the lack of understanding of what minorities have gone through.

“She’s a brilliant woman, and she’s been through everything,” says Dewey Fagerburg, of Lincolnville, a retired minister and former advisor to the prison chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “In that letter she wrote the governor, she tells the truth about what’s going on at the prison.”

In the 950-man prison, rehabilitation is utterly ignored, Dawson says. Even if the officials wanted to help the prisoners, they’d have a hard time because there isn’t enough staff. As examples of those who get little help, she describes the mentally disabled and the mentally ill inmates. “There are some very, very ill people at the prison,” she says, “like the ‘cutters’” — prisoners who repeatedly cut their own flesh.

She has worked in the 100-man Special Management Unit, the “Supermax,” where the cutters and others with the biggest self-destructive and aggressive urges are kept in solitary confinement — which, studies show, damages prisoners further, perhaps permanently. It’s also where prisoners suffer the most abuse from guards. It seems obvious to Dawson that the more the guards provoke the mentally ill inmates, the more they will do what the guards don’t want them to do. But the prison administration, she says, prefers guards “who are degrading to a prisoner.”

Her descriptions fit with the results of the Phoenix’s two-and-a-half-year investigation of the prison, which has revealed physical, sexual, and mental abuse of inmates. On the national level, a 2004 Human Rights Watch report found that, in a typical American prison, “a culture of brutality has developed in which correctional officers know they can get away with excessive, unnecessary, or even purely malicious violence.” In a 2006 report, the private, blue-ribbon Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons found that “Better safety inside prisons and jails depends on changing the institutional culture, which cannot be accomplished without enhancing the corrections profession at all levels.”

Human rights complaints
After the harassment incidents, Dawson filed a discrimination complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission. Then, prison “sergeants and captains” retaliated because of her complaint, she recounted to Baldacci. They continued “to target and scrutinize me and my character by looking for ways to terminate me.” So she filed another complaint with the commission, this time invoking the state Whistleblower’s Protection Act.

In her letter, she added: “I had lost my spirit as a correctional officer. There is a culture of abuse among the guards at the prison.” Its major effect, she suggested, is on the prisoners: “Any guard who treats the prisoners with respect and a desire to rehabilitate them is targeted by the other guards, who call them ‘care and treatment providers.’ This term is used by guards to say, ‘You’re not a corrections officer.’”

She’s not the only guard to say this. A well-respected sergeant, George Mele, quit his job at the prison in 2006 and left behind a frank “exit interview” leaked to the Web site “Supermax Watch.” It contains a harsh critique of the prison’s management, including: “When you begin to talk to prisoners you are labeled an inmate lover and chastised for it . . . to be polite to a prisoner is to show weakness.” He adds: “This job gives someone a great opportunity to help someone. I mean the prisoners. If the officers were encouraged to do this more and chastised for not doing it, the relationship between the prisoners and staff would improve.”

The prison’s cultivation of an us-versus-them attitude is one reason the guard turnover rate is so high, Dawson wrote in her letter. Those who don’t go along with the punishment program, “the best guards,” are “lost to the hazing and mistreatment by veteran guards.”

Staff shortages plague the prison. Corrections Commissioner Martin Magnusson told the Bangor Daily News that on one shift in 2007 the prison had 29 vacancies. The guard turnover rate is about 20 percent a year, while the national rate of 16 percent was considered high by the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons. Peter Lehman, a former Maine State Prison inmate who is a PhD sociologist, says the well-meaning people among the prison staff “are pretty much defeated at every turn.” The prison, he says, manages its employees with degradation — “the same way they manage the prisoners.”

Dawson says she didn’t yell and scream at inmates: “I treated them the way they wanted to be treated.” In return, they saw her as a role model, she says, and they wanted her approval. She recalls some of them saying to her: “‘Officer Dawson, are you mad at me?’”

“I enjoyed them,” she says, smiling. “I learned a lot from them.”

The attitude of many guards and their supervisors, including racist expressions, is basically shaped by a “lack of accountability” and, she says, by ignorance; some white Maine people, for example, are ignorant about how to act with blacks. The state’s population is 97 percent white, the highest proportion of any state, with less than one percent African American. Prison guards lack diversity, too. Although African Americans account for about seven percent of the state prison’s inmates, when Dawson worked there only one other officer was black, she says — a male sergeant — out of approximately 275 guards.

Other complaints of racism have recently surfaced at the prison. Michael Parker, the African-American leader of the prisoners’ NAACP chapter, has said the group’s officers have been “targeted and harassed” by prison staff.

The guards’ negative attitudes, Dawson says, are exacerbated by the dead-end quality of their jobs in rural Knox County, where few employment opportunities exist. “For a lot of officers there, that’s all the work they know,” she says. “They’re angry, frustrated with their position in life. The prison gives them the opportunity to control someone who has less than they have.”

She read an article in a local weekly newspaper, she says, in which a guard complained that prisoners were getting a chance at a college education while his daughter couldn’t afford it. But Dawson doesn’t believe it’s a guard’s role “to hold grudges against prisoners for what they get.” That especially shouldn’t occur on the issue of education, which she believes is the key to rehabilitation. Many prisoners are illiterate and many don’t have a high-school diploma or GED, she says, adding: “I would propose that getting a GED be mandatory as part of probation or before they leave prison.”

As it is, only a few of the prison’s inmates take college courses, and then only by correspondence or television. In the 1990s, Congress eliminated almost all federal aid for higher education of inmates, most of whom are too poor to pay college tuition. Yet prisoner education has been shown to reduce the return to crime, and, in general, “Highly structured [rehabilitation] programs are proven to reduce misconduct in correctional facilities,” said the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons.

Other things wrong
Dawson is angry about a particular instance of what she sees as the prison leadership’s coldness to both prisoners and guards. She was “the girl at the desk” — the prison receptionist — on the day in 2006 that convicted murderer Gary Watland had arranged for his wife to bring a gun into the prison. If his scheme had been successful, she thinks she might have been the first correctional officer killed. But an inmate squealed on Watland, and his wife was arrested with a loaded gun in the prison parking lot.

The inmate who revealed the plot “did something that saved my life and perhaps a lot more other people,” she says. “It’s not every day that an inmate puts himself on the line for guards. It was moving for me.”

There should have been more given to him by the Corrections Department “in acknowledgement for what he did,” she says, than to ship him to an out-of-state prison where his life was immediately put in danger. The department did nothing to hide his identity from the prison grapevine and possible revenge by Watland or by others who believed he had broken the “code” that requires a prisoner not to tell on another prisoner, even though he may have saved the lives of prisoners’ wives and children; Watland had allegedly planned to take them hostage in the visitors’ room. (See “Stabbed in the Back: Officials Reward a Prison Hero by Endangering His Life,” by Lance Tapley, September 14, 2007.)

There are many other things wrong with the prison culture, Dawson says. One example she described to Baldacci: “I caught a sergeant going through the security [gate] with two brown paper bags stuffed with currency. Shortly thereafter I filed an incident report about the issue. The warden said that he didn’t think there was a problem.” She suggested the officer might have been involved with gambling inside the prison.

Other guards have publicly complained about the prison’s “hostile work environment,” as a guard described it to a legislative Labor Committee meeting earlier this year, where there was criticism of the prison management for favoritism, insufficient guard training, and retaliation for reporting wrongs.

The administration of the prison and the Department of Corrections is so entrenched in its ways, Dawson believes, that a clean sweep is needed: “They’re all in bed with each other.”

No response from Baldacci
Dawson says she has been given legal advice not to discuss the terms of her 2007 settlement with the state over her Maine Human Rights Commission complaints.

Not long after the settlement, she sent her letter to Baldacci. In it, she also related that she had originally applied for the job of prison guard after seeing a classified newspaper advertisement that read, in part: “If you enjoy the challenge of helping people change their behaviors, attitudes, and improve their lives and yours, the field of Corrections is for you!”

The ad deceived her, she told the governor.

“I invite you to meet with me in person,” she wrote him. She wanted to discuss how to make the prison a better place.

Her letter was never answered, she says — not even by an aide. There was “no reaction from anybody.”

As the Phoenix went to press, Governor Baldacci's office e-mailed us: "We received the letter and forwarded [it] to the Department of Corrections for review. . . . Ms. Dawson should have received a response to her letter from the Department of Corrections. She did not. That was an error." Earlier, Commissioner Magnusson had refused numerous requests for an interview on the issues discussed in this article and did not respond to e-mailed questions.

Dawson has a good job as an office worker at the Department of Transportation, she says, but she misses being a prison guard, despite the troubles she endured. The inmates thought of her as their sister or mother, she says. While some guards treated her poorly, “I had a lot of respect from the prisoners.”

She says: “I was meant to do that kind of work. It was a calling. I was honored to have that opportunity to lead and to teach.”

She is still an idealist. Even now, “I would like to be part of a team” to reform the prison, she says.

“At least I could try.”
http://thePhoenix.com/Boston/News/65237-Time-for-a-clean-sweep/

Posted by lois at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2008

CT: State legislators seek stronger protection for correction officers

TheDay.Com

State legislators seek stronger protection for correction officers
By Ted Mann
Published
Hartford - With a steadily rising population and a rash of violent attacks in the state's prisons, leading Democrats in the House of Representatives called Thursday for new safety measures to protect the system's correction officers.

The lawmakers, including the current and incoming speakers of the House, have launched a task force to evaluate safety and working conditions for the officers, along with their union leaders, who say that the swelling number of inmates has left them vulnerable to assault.

The announcement comes just two weeks after a prisoner attacked two officers at the Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center in Montville with a handcrafted shank, stabbing one officer in the neck.

A day later, an inmate at the Enfield Correctional Institution also attacked two officers, leaving one with back and leg injuries and the other with a broken eye socket, nose and cheekbone.

The incidents are evidence of systemic problems in the state's prison system, lawmakers and correction officers said, including the failure of a segregation program for the most dangerous inmates at the state's sole maximum-security prison - Northern Correctional Institution in Enfield. They also say recent budget cuts by Gov. M. Jodi Rell have hurt efforts to shrink the number of inmates.

”If there are policies on the books that inhibit the performance of core duties, then we need to get rid of them,” said House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford. “If there is legislation we haven't thought to pass to ensure correction officers' health and safety, we must identify those recommendations as well.”

”Our failed policies from the Department of Correction have escalated the assaults that have been happening,” said Rep. Kathy Tallarita, D-Enfield, who advocated, along with Rep. Karen Jarmoc, D-Enfield, for the establishment of the task force, which Jarmoc will chair. Enfield is home to several of the state's largest prisons.

Corrections officers blamed the current level of prison crowding for “indirectly” enabling the Corrigan attack, and said it showed the breakdown of the “administrative segregation” program established at Northern when the prison first opened in 1995.

The intent, said John Pepe, the president of Local 391 of the correction officers union, had been to provide a system of severe punishment and behavioral therapy for the worst inmates, including any were violent toward guards and staff, and remove them from the population of the state's medium-security facilities.

The segregation program may have worked at first as a deterrent to bad behavior in prisons, Pepe said. But now Northern itself holds nearly 450 people, and correction officials have cycled problem prisoners through the segregation program and back to other institutions too quickly for it to have much of a correcting effect.

”Now nobody's afraid to go up to Northern,” Pepe said. “... The inmates know that all they have to do is wait a little while and they're gone. They don't really have to do any programming.”

One of those inmates was Bobby J. Beale, 25, a convicted murderer who had been sentenced for additional crimes while already in prison, including third-degree assault. Beale had already been sent to Northern twice, then transferred to other facilities before he attacked the guards at Corrigan on July 9, union officials said.

Correction officials denied that the prisons have grown more dangerous for their employees, noting the average stay at Northern is two years.

”Connecticut's prisons are safe and secure,” said Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the Department of Correction. “The rate of incidents remains at an all-time low. While prisons can be dangerous, we are committed to the protection of our staff and do not tolerate any form of assault against these professional men and women.”

The department has added more than 1,100 officers over the past five years, Garnett said, and increased the posts - individual positions or stations staffed by officers in prison buildings - by 253. The recent state budget cuts specifically exempted the correction department.

But prison population has also mushroomed in the past two decades, from about 5,400 in 1985 to nearly 20,000 today, lawmakers said.

Meanwhile, said Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, Rell's budget cuts had not spared some of the spending initiatives approved with much fanfare just months ago.

Lawlor singled out funding for programs in the Judicial Branch and Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services that redirect nonviolent or mentally ill offenders to treatment rather than prison, and funding for long-delayed staff and technical improvements in the Department of Public Safety and the Division of Criminal Justice.

”Just because it's not in the headlines anymore doesn't mean we can forget about it,” Lawlor said, referring to the $10 million criminal justice reform bill the legislature passed this spring. “It's a commitment we all made and we ought to honor it.”

Rich Harris, a spokesman for Rell, called Lawlor's comments “irresponsible,” but could not rule out the possibility that budget recissions had affected some of the new criminal justice spending.

Posted by lois at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2008

Why Texas Still Holds 'Em--- the boom in locking immigrants up

Why Texas Still Holds 'Em
Forget oil and gold. In the Lone Star state, the boomtown business is locking up immigrants."
Mother Jones
Stephanie Mencimer"
July 21" , 2008"

In 1997, with the private prison business booming, the Corrections Corporation of America picked a 64-acre plot near Austin, Texas, for its newest lockup. A medium-security prison, it was named after the company's cofounder and designed for some 500 federal inmates. But the anticipated stream of prisoners never arrived: By the time the T. Don Hutto Correctional Center opened, a glut of private prison beds, along with cca's own poor track record, had left the company nearly bankrupt. Its stock, which once traded at around $45 a share, bottomed out at 18 cents. Several of its facilities were shuttered or sat empty for years, including the Hutto prison, which cca moved to close in 2004.

But Hutto, like cca itself, has risen from the ashes thanks to a sudden source of new business: the Bush administration's crackdown on immigrants. Historically, Mexicans caught illegally entering the country have been dumped back across the border, while immigrants and asylum seekers from other countries were processed and released to await their court dates. (Only those with criminal records were detained.) Most of those released, though, failed to appear for court hearings and removal proceedings, and the government didn't have the resources to go looking for them. So in 2006, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) agency ended its traditional "catch and release" policy and instead started incarcerating non-Mexican immigrants—anyone from a Salvadoran migrant to an Iraqi family seeking political asylum—pending their deportation or asylum hearings. Over the two years since, the agency has increased its use of detention facilities by more than half; it now holds some 30,000 people on any given day.

In this new population—and in ice's $1 billion-plus detention budget—cca saw opportunity. In 2004, when Congress passed legislation authorizing ice to triple the number of immigrant detention beds, cca's lobbying expenditures reached $3 million; since then, it has spent an additional $7 million on lobbyists. Among them was Philip Perry, Vice President Dick Cheney's son-in-law, who later became general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, ice's parent organization, which has awarded cca millions in contracts; one of them, in 2006, allowed the company to reopen the old Hutto prison, now christened a "residential facility" housing immigrant families, including small children.

cca isn't the only firm lining up for ice contracts: There's so much money to be made warehousing immigrants that in 2006, Cornell Companies, a private prison firm, sent the state of Oklahoma an eviction notice for more than 800 state inmates housed in its facility in Hinton. The company was negotiating with ice to take in immigrants for more than the roughly $45 per diem that Oklahoma paid.

State and local governments are also getting in on the action. In 2006, Willacy County, Texas, floated millions in bonds and, in 90 days, built a tent city for immigrants that it leases to ice for $78 a day per detainee. (A room at the local Best Western Executive Inn costs $65.) Run by the Utah-based Management and Training Corporation, a private prison management company, the camp houses up to 2,000 immigrants in a razor-wire-ringed compound holding 10 Kevlar tents of the sort used by troops in Iraq. Detainees have reported problems with heat and air conditioning, as well as maggot-infested food. The county has since approved another $50 million to add space for 1,000 more detainees.

Elsewhere, detention centers have been sued for providing inadequate health care, food services, and education. The aclu of Texas recently settled a lawsuit with ice over the conditions at Hutto for 26 children ages 1 to 17. According to the aclu, they were kept in cells 11 or 12 hours a day, forced to wear prison garb, fed "unrecognizable substances, mostly starches," and denied toys, bathroom privacy, and access to medical care.

According to the Washington Post, more than 80 people have died in ice detention, in many cases because of poor health care. The most famous case is that of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran detained in San Diego for eight months. The government denied his request for a penile biopsy while in detention, arguing that it was an "elective outpatient procedure." He was eventually found to have cancer. His penis was amputated, but the malignancy spread, and he died last year.

On average, ice pays $95 a day per immigrant that it detains, yet research indicates that other, far cheaper, methods can work almost as well in making sure immigrants show up in court. Back in the late 1990s, the agency asked the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice to run a pilot project under which people facing deportation got intensive supervision and connections to social service agencies. More than 90 percent appeared for their hearings—partly, the institute said, thanks to better information about the process. Intensive supervision costs an average of $14 per detainee per day, according to congressional testimony by Julie Myers, assistant secretary of Homeland Security. Yet in fiscal 2007, ice spent only about $44 million on alternative programs, compared with roughly $1.2 billion on detention—and legislation sponsored last year by representatives Heath Schuler (D-N.C.) and Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) in the House would authorize the agency to develop another 8,000 detention beds, which must be provided by private contractors such as cca "whenever possible."

cca, meanwhile, is contributing to the detention boom in its own small way: Last year, after inspecting the Hutto center's personnel records, ice officials arrested 10 workers—illegal immigrants themselves.

NEXT: Prison Guards Go Soft

Stephanie Mencimer covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/slammed-texas-hold-em.html
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2008" /> The Foundation for National Progress

Posted by lois at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)

Bills, lawsuits attempt to thwart private prisons' escape from FOIA

U.S. · July 22, 2008 · Freedom of information
The Reporters Committee for Freedom the Press
Bills, lawsuits attempt to thwart private prisons' escape from FOIA

Two Democratic lawmakers are looking to hold private prisons housing federal inmates to the same Freedom of Information Act standards as federal facilities. But while their bills sit in Congress, the First Amendment Center reports, open government advocates are coming at the issue from a different angle.

Two recent lawsuits aim to increase the flow of information from private prisons using FOIA, according to the First Amendment Center. Last month, the ACLU filed a FOIA suit against the Department of Homeland Security in hopes of forcing the agency to hand over records on the deaths of immigrant detainees who were in the custody of private prisons.

And in May, the Center reports, Prison Legal News, a monthly magazine on prison issues, took the largest private prison-management service in the U.S., Corrections Corporation of America, (CCA) to court in Tennessee. CCA, whose headquarters is in Nashville, had refused the magazine’s public-records request.

Whether or not the lawsuits are successful, First Amendment advocates are still hoping Congress will pass the Private Prison Information Act of 2007, (H.R. 1889), and its identical Senate counterpart, (S. 2010). Introduced by Rep. Tim Holden, D-Pa. and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., the bills would require private prisons under contract with the government to comply with FOIA requests, just like federal agencies. Both the lawsuits and the proposed legislation seek to remedy the discrepancy in records disclosure between federal and private prisons.

According to the First Amendment Center, privately owned and operated facilities wouldn't naturally be subject to FOIA. But concerns about costs, overcrowding and safety in federal prisons have lead to increased privatization of correctional institutions, and the shift isn’t slowing down. The Center reported that more and more inmates—and the records related to their care—are controlled by private prisons.

First Amendment advocates argue that the government shouldn’t be able to avoid scrutiny by farming its public function out to private prisons, since the private correctional institutions are the functional equivalent of a government agency, the Center said. Currently, there’s no law that says private prisons have to fork over inspection reports or inmate violence write-ups the way federal facilities do. Only the contract between a private prison and the government is subject to FOIA.

“Public agencies cannot contract away the public’s ability to review records that otherwise would be publicly accessibly under the state’s open records law,” Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, the First Amendment Center reported from a press release.

— Miranda Fleschert, 6:01 pm

Posted by lois at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

VA: Restore the right of felons to vote

Restore the right of felons to vote
Edward Hailes Jr.

Hailes is a senior attorney at Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization in Washington, D.C.

No single existing voting-rights inequity seems a starker injustice than the plight of people with felony convictions. These people, of course, aren't just murderers and muggers. Three out of every five felony convictions don't lead to jail time, and there's no clear line you have to cross to earn one.

Taking away the right to vote for life is analogous, some commentators have suggested, to the medieval practice of "civil death," where severe violations of society's social code led to complete loss of citizenship rights.

Contrary to popular belief, felony disenfranchisement laws are not part of the criminal justice system. Instead, they are state election laws, enacted by state legislatures and governors or hardwired into constitutions. Losing the right to vote after a felony conviction in Virginia is not in any way part of a criminal sentence -- it is a collateral consequence dictated by state law.

In essence, people with felony convictions lose their right to vote because of the intersection of two systems -- the election law system and the criminal justice system.

Virginia is one of only two states (Kentucky is the other) that permanently takes away the voting rights of all individuals with felony records, barring personal intervention by the governor.

The good news is Gov. Tim Kaine has pledged to expedite the review process for those petitioners who are eligible (nonviolent felons) to submit a one-page application by Aug. 1 in order to regain their voting rights and to register to vote in time to participate in the historic presidential election in November 2008 and beyond.

Many disenfranchisement laws were established to keep blacks from voting in former slave states. There is a movement afoot in Virginia to ameliorate the disempowering impact of felony disenfranchisement.

Three out of four Virginia voters think it is important to protect voting rights for all people, including those who have committed a crime, and most Virginia voters favor restoring voting rights to people who have been convicted of a felony after they have served their full sentence and completed all conditions of their punishment.

The commonwealth should change in the direction of automatic restoration after people with felony convictions have served their time.

The labyrinth of rules and regulations for re-enfranchisement in the commonwealth needs to end. Advancement Project's work in Virginia has shown us the sobering reality of the plethora of seemingly irrational obstacles to the voting process confronting people with felony convictions who have completed their debt to society.

The spotlight is now on the bureaucrats and the politicians who created and are responsible for administering these systems that unfairly keep people from voting.

The racially tainted history of felony disenfranchisement laws ought to make citizens of the commonwealth of all ideological persuasions reconsider their value in our democracy.

Felony disenfranchisement laws are undemocratic and unjust in denying citizens their political voice. And in doing so, these repugnant laws not only strip citizens of legitimate self-empowerment, but make a mockery of those of us who have faith that our democratic system can spawn a just society.

Advancement Project applauds Kaine for taking a step in the right direction in exercising his authority to restore voting rights to Virginia citizens who have already paid their debt to society.
http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/170152

Posted by lois at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Farmland vs. prison land for county

"The prison will not support local economy, nor will it bring jobs. In her study, "Building a Prison Economy in Rural America," Tracy Huling states that new prison jobs in rural areas are largely filled by transfers from other prisons, due to seniority and job requirements that locals don't have. She adds that fewer than 20 percent of new prison jobs in California go to locals. This means that prison employees will commute to the country from other areas, increasing traffic and CO2 emissions."

Farmland vs. prison land for county
Daily Democrat
07/24/2008 08:29:37

The Yolo County Supervisors want to place a prison on pristine agricultural land in Yolo County. While a "rehabilitation center" may be a good idea, the proper home for it is in an industrial area.

The proposed site for the new prison is either Zamora or Dunnigan. This is a waste of prime agricultural land, which many of the supervisors swore they would preserve when running for office. We will never be able to reclaim that land, as prisons only persist and expand.

The prison will continue to deplete the diminishing groundwater reserves of the farmers and families living in Zamora and Dunnigan. A portion of the area has already experienced a decline in ground elevation due to the collapse of the aquifer. This has occurred with a limited amount of people using the water. Imagine what will happen when a prison is constructed.

The prison will not support local economy, nor will it bring jobs. In her study, "Building a Prison Economy in Rural America," Tracy Huling states that new prison jobs in rural areas are largely filled by transfers from other prisons, due to seniority and job requirements that locals don't have. She adds that fewer than 20 percent of new prison jobs in California go to locals. This means that prison employees will commute to the country from other areas, increasing traffic and CO2 emissions.

Several hundred residents of Zamora and Dunnigan came to the last "informational" meeting to voice their opposition to the construction of this prison on our farmland. However, it is easy to ignore such small communities. We need help from the citizens of Woodland.

Aug. 5 is the last Supervisor's meeting for public input.

The only way the construction of this prison will be stopped is if you take 30 seconds of your time to tell the supervisors you elected to vote against this assault on our groundwater, farmland, and our rural country life.

Before turning the page of this newspaper, please leave a brief message or send a quick email stating your opposition. Below is their contact information. Something as simple and direct as "I don't want the prison located on farmland in Yolo County" will get the message across. Thank you for helping the farmers and townspeople in northern Yolo County preserve our land.

JACK REXROAD, Zamora
http://www.dailydemocrat.com/letters/ci_9983000

Posted by lois at 06:08 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2008

Legislation, lawsuits seek to shine light on private prisons

News Story
Legislation, lawsuits seek to shine light on private prisons

By Melanie Bengtson
First Amendment Center Online intern
07.21.08

A bill before Congress would extend the Freedom of Information Act to require private prisons contracted by the federal government to release records under the same standards as federal prisons.

The Private Prison Information Act of 2007 (H.R. 1889), introduced by Rep. Tim Holden, D-Pa., would require private prisons and other correctional facilities under contract with federal agencies to house federal prisoners to make their records accessible under the same FOIA requirements that govern federal prisons. An identical bill was introduced in the Senate (S. 2010) by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.

Prison privatization has increased rapidly in the face of growing concerns over overcrowding, safety and poor health care in public institutions. Desire to control costs has also led to an increase in privatization. However, privately owned and operated facilities are not subject to the same FOIA scrutiny as public agencies. Although the press and public can retrieve information about privately run prisons from the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other government agencies, private prisons remain largely outside the scope of FOI laws.

Of the almost 1.6 million prisoners in the United States in June 2007, 7.4% of them were held in privately operated correctional facilities, according to the June 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin. At last count, in 2000, the BJS reported 264 private facilities under state and federal contracts used to house prisoners. And there were 5.4% more prisoners in private facilities in June 2007 than in June 2006, according to BJS. Private detention centers are also used to house immigrant detainees.

Two lawsuits filed in the last two months aim to force private prisons to release records, including one filed by the American Civil Liberties Union investigating the deaths of immigrant detainees in federal custody.

In May 2008, The Washington Post ran a four-day series investigating medical conditions in immigrant prisons. “Careless Detention” explored the deaths of 83 prisoners and detainees in custody between March 2003 and May 2008.

“Our correctional system is broken. It is overcrowded and unsafe,” said Mike Flynn, director of government affairs for the Reason Foundation. “Contracting with private prisons gives us an ability to better manage outcomes. I think contracts should require certain benchmarks, like treatment programs, continuing education and job training.” The Reason Foundation is a nonprofit think tank that promotes “libertarian principles, including individual liberty, free markets, and the rule of law,” according to its Web site.

The largest private corrections-management service in the U.S. is Corrections Corporation of America, which is headquartered in Nashville. CCA posted $35 million in profits during the first quarter of 2008, according to a company press release. CCA and other private corrections companies have seen rapid growth from contracts with states and the federal government.

The Los Angeles Times reported in August 2007 that California state officials had signed a contract with CCA to hold about 4,000 prisoners for $63 per prisoner, per day. It would cost the state an average of $123 per prisoner, per day in a state prison.

As private corrections companies grow, so do questions about their methods, success and profitability. The recent lawsuits seek answers to some of those questions.

The ACLU filed an FOI lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security last month in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after DHS failed to turn over documents related to the deaths of immigrants held in public and private detention centers. The lawsuit also named Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Office of the Inspector General for DHS.

“DHS must not be allowed to keep information about in-custody deaths secret,” said Elizabeth Alexander, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, in a press release. “It is imperative that ICE be held publicly accountable.”

Prison Legal News, a monthly magazine that covers prison issues, filed a lawsuit against CCA in a Tennessee court on May 19 after CCA did not respond to a public-records request. The lawsuit, Friedmann v. CCA, argues that CCA performs a public function, and its records should be public.

In 2002, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that a private company performing a public function must make its records available to the public under the Tennessee Public Records Act. In Memphis Publishing Company v. Cherokee Children & Family Services, the court ruled that a nonprofit social service agency under state contract had to turn its records over to the Memphis Commercial Appeal because it was the “functional equivalent” of a government agency.

“Public agencies cannot contract away the public’s ability to review records that otherwise would be publicly accessibly under the state’s open records law,” said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, in a press release. “The public’s right to know is not delegable to private corporations.”

One FOI expert applauded the congressional bills that would make private-prison companies accountable to the federal FOIA.

“I think that is a long-overdue fix,” Charles Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information coalition, said of the Private Prison Information Act of 2007. “This is a problem on the state level. This would fix it at the federal level in a way that would bring a whole lot of otherwise private operations into public scrutiny. We’ve seen lots of anecdotal evidence over the past decade for the need for public oversight and scrutiny.”

Some aspects of private-prison contracts are already accessible under FOIA, however. Flynn of the Reason Foundation argued that those provisions provide enough information.

“The federal agencies that manage the contract with the private company are subject to the FOIA process. The agencies engage in regular and ongoing oversight of the contract, usually having [their] own employees in the facility full-time. All reports and studies from these monitors are subject to the FOIA process. Terms of the contract with the private company are subject to FOIA. Their progress in meeting any benchmarks detailed in the contract are subject to FOIA,” said Flynn. “If there is relevant information that isn’t available, it can be [added to] terms of the contract and then be subject to FOIA. There is no limit to what can be required to be disclosed to the agency, which would then be subject to FOIA.”

Davis agreed that FOIA’s coverage of contracts between the government and private-prison companies was important, but said it didn’t go far enough.

“The contract piece is important and FOIA does do a good job with that,” he said. “The contract data is just a sliver of the overall picture of what people should rightly have access to … . The vast majority of the information isn’t covered.”

Davis mentioned “inspection reports, incident reports involving inmate violence, and just about any narrative report documenting inmate treatment.”

If the ACLU’s or Prison Legal News’ lawsuit succeeds in extracting records from private-prison corporations or if Congress passes the Private Prison Information Act, an increase in information from these prisons could bring light to a host of new issues. Some of these may well involve the First Amendment. U.S. courts frequently address issues related to access to publications, religious material, special diets and other claims of First Amendment violations from prisoners.

“I think you could get better protections,” said Flynn when asked about the First Amendment rights of prisoners in private facilities, “because they can be detailed in a contract with the private company. These protections can be mandated into the contract rather than litigated later.”

“The best part about having this information is that we would be able to act on it. Private companies can be fired. Public facilities cannot,” Flynn said.

Said Davis, “When you start getting the human narrative of incident reports, what’s going on in these prisons on a day to day basis, they could be rife with corruption or running like a Swiss cruise ship.”

Melanie Bengtson is a senior studying political and economic development at Belmont University in Nashville.
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=20318

Posted by lois at 09:12 PM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2008

RI: Dozens of undocumented people who clean coutrhouses are arrested in ICE raid

Dozens arrested in raids at courthouses
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
BY KAREN LEE ZINER and FELICE J. FREYER
Journal Staff Writers

PROVIDENCE — Federal immigration agents and state police raided six Rhode Island courthouses yesterday, arresting dozens of people employed by two contractors hired by the state. The detainees are all believed to be maintenance workers.

The raid led to a noisy demonstration by at least 100 people outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office at 200 Dyer St. last night. Police officers arrived as the crowd grew; at one point the police pushed a line of demonstrators across the parking lot.

Some in the crowd were relatives of the arrestees. Others included clergy and at least one state representative, Grace Diaz, and members of immigrant advocacy groups.

Leonardo Tornes said his sister, Francesca Tornes, an undocumented worker from Mexico, was arrested at the Kent County Courthouse.

“She has two children — one and five years old,” he said through an interpreter. “A friend who worked with her called, and said they have taken everyone,” he said.

Immigration panel weighs outcomes of Carcieri's order

Craig N. Berke, spokesman for the Rhode Island judiciary, said the raids occurred simultaneously at 5 p.m. at all six Rhode Island courthouses. He said a “substantial” percentage of employees of two contractors hired by the state were taken into custody.

Berke declined to name the contractors, however relatives of some of the detainees identified one company as the Tri-State Enterprises employment agency on North Main Street.

Berke said those who were arrested “are not state employees. They are not employees of the judiciary.” He said “dozens” of people were arrested but he did not have an exact count.

“The investigation was initiated by the judiciary,” Berke said. “In early June, we forwarded evidence to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Rhode Island State Police. The judiciary has been cooperating with that investigation on a daily basis since then.” Berke declined to say what the evidence was.

“I also know that there was at least one courthouse –– I’m not sure if there was more than one –– in which no employees of the vendor were taken into custody,” Berke said. “They were screened but not taken into custody.”

In the two Providence courthouses, the workers were just starting their shift at 5 p.m. and would have normally stayed till 9 or 10 p.m. In the other courthouses, the workers come in earlier and are normally done by 6 p.m.

Asked who will clean the courthouses today, Berke said, “They’ll be cleaned. Not every employee of the vendor was taken into custody today. And we also have daytime maintenance staff who will have to do double duty” today.

Berke said that as of last night the two contractors were still employed by the judiciary.

The courthouses that were raided are: the Garrahy Judicial Complex and the Licht Judicial Complex, both in Providence; the McGrath Judicial Complex in Wakefield; the Murray Judicial Complex in Newport; Kent County Courthouse in Warwick, and the Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal in Cranston.

Paula Grenier, an ICE spokeswoman in Boston, said an enforcement action had been carried out “as a result of a joint investigation by federal and state authorities.” Grenier said the action “is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.” She would not confirm that the courthouses were raided, or say how many people were detained.

The raids occurred during the first meeting of a governor’s advisory panel, charged with monitoring any “unintended consequences” of Governor Carcieri’s executive order cracking down on illegal immigration. The order issued in March requires that state police be deputized with certain immigration enforcement powers.

News of yesterday’s raids spread rapidly as courthouse workers phoned relatives, friends and community leaders. Demonstrators assembled outside the ICE building in Providence at about 8 p.m. As police arrived, the group divided and people rushed to doors at the front and rear of the building.

Juan Garcia, organizer for Immigrants in Action at St. Teresa Church in Olneyville, said his cell phone began buzzing at 4:45 p.m. as he was driving toward Newport from Providence to discuss fallout from an immigration raid there several weeks ago that led to 42 arrests at stores, restaurants and apartments.

He said he learned the arrests had occurred at the Kent County courthouse “and right here in Providence,” he said pointing to the Garrahy Judicial Complex across the street from ICE headquarters.

Some of the women who were arrested “have little kids, bigger kids,” he said.

Garcia said, “This is the consequence of the governor’s executive order. All companies receiving money from the state will review the legal status of people.” (The order requires using a federal E-Verify system for all new hires, but not current employees).

Monica and Jacqueline Lorenti said their stepfather was arrested at Superior Court.

“His boss called. He said he couldn’t do anything, nothing — everybody had the handcuffs on.”
http://www.projo.com/news/content/ICE_RAID_16_07-16-08_LJASKP5_v29.42cad22.html#

Posted by lois at 06:38 PM | Comments (0)

Federal Report Finds Poor Conditions at Cook County Jail

July 18, 2008
Federal Report Finds Poor Conditions at Cook County Jail
By MONICA DAVEY
NY Times

CHICAGO — People awaiting trial here at the Cook County Jail, one of the nation’s largest local jails, have endured vastly inadequate medical care, beatings at the hands of jail workers and dilapidated, dangerous building conditions often left unrepaired for months, federal authorities said on Thursday.

Grim images peppered 98 pages of federal findings from a sweeping 17-month investigation about the jail, a West Side complex of buildings, the oldest of which once housed Al Capone, that is now temporary home to about 9,800 men and women.

The investigation by the civil rights division of the United States Department of Justice and the office of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney here, found that the jail had systematically violated the constitutional rights of inmates. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees the jail, strongly denied that.

Among dozens of glimpses of life inside the jail, the federal investigators wrote of an inmate who, after exposing himself to a female officer in July 2007, was handcuffed, then hit and kicked by a group of jail officers. Some inmates were not given their mental illness medications for weeks, the investigators said, while others were given such drugs without records of why. In August 2006, an inmate’s leg was amputated after an infection beneath a cast went untreated.

“You can’t have conditions where people are dying and being amputated,” Mr. Fitzgerald said at a news conference.

The authorities would not say what had led in early 2007 to an investigation into the jail, a 96-acre complex that houses mainly people waiting for their trials and that, by some federal measures, was in 2007 among the top half-dozen jails in the nation in numbers of inmates. About 100,000 people are admitted to the Cook County Jail in a given year.

The outcome of the findings remains uncertain. Mr. Fitzgerald said he hoped to reach an agreement with Cook County officials regarding changes at the jail. If those efforts fail, a lawsuit is possible, prosecutors said, under a 1980 act that has led to federal investigations into claims of systematic abuse at 430 jails, mental health facilities, nursing homes and other public institutions.

Perhaps most remarkable about the federal findings was the comprehensive scope of the critique; almost no element of the jail seemed to meet muster. Investigators pointed to poor supervision of inmates, the presence of weapons, mistreatment of inmates, unsatisfactory dental, mental health and medical care, electrical hazards, plumbing problems and ventilation failings.

The office of Thomas J. Dart, the Cook County sheriff since late 2006, issued a statement on Thursday pledging to work with federal authorities on improvements, but also taking strong issue with elements of the report. Most notably, the statement said, many improvements have been put into place — before and after federal investigators visited the jail in 2007.

“The report often relies on inflammatory language and draws conclusions based on anecdotes and hearsay from inmates,” the statement said, adding that the “allegations of systematic violations of civil rights at the jail are categorically rejected by the sheriff’s office.”

In a separate statement, the office of Todd H. Stroger, president of the Cook County Board, said that the county had in recent years provided financing for more correctional officers, and that its facilities and maintenance workers had finished 40,000 “work orders” at the jail in the past year. The county’s health bureau “continues to work diligently to provide quality medical care for the inmates,” it said.

Among causes of the jail’s troubles, the report pointed to inadequate staffing (3,800 sworn officers and civilians work there), crowding, inadequate policies and procedures, insufficient supervision and what Mr. Fitzgerald called a culture of abuse.

In one case, investigators said, an inmate had to be hospitalized and placed on a ventilator after being beaten by several officers.

“There’s clearly examples of corrections officers in organized groups beating inmates to retaliate for verbal abuse, and people going to the hospital for it,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “And that’s got to stop.”

Violence among the inmates, too, is prevalent, investigators found. In less than two months in 2006, seven knife fights caused serious injuries to some 33 inmates and seven jail workers. One inmate died.

And investigators identified “numerous instances” in which it said the county’s failure to handle medical treatment properly “likely contributed to preventable deaths, amputation, hospitalizations and unnecessary harm.”

Among the cases they cited was that of an H.I.V.-positive woman who complained of shortness of breath and a cough, and was then found to have an abnormal X-ray. Despite the test, the woman received no follow-up care, the investigators said, and died in early 2006.

Catrin Einhorn contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/us/18cook.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

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

TN: Pregnant Woman Is Jailed Under ICE Pact

July 20, 2008
Immigrant, Pregnant, Is Jailed Under Pact
By JULIA PRESTON

It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic violation.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.

Mrs. Villegas’s arrest has focused new attention on a cooperation agreement signed in April 2007 between federal immigration authorities and Davidson County, which shares a consolidated government with Nashville, that gave immigration enforcement powers to county officers. It is one of 57 agreements, known formally as 287G, that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has signed in the last two years with county and local police departments across the country under a rapidly expanding program.

Nashville officials have praised the agreement as a successful partnership between local and federal government.

“We are able to identify and report individuals who are here illegally and have been charged with a criminal offense, while at the same time remaining a friendly and open city to our new legal residents,” Karl Dean, the mayor of Nashville, said in a statement on Friday.

Lawyers and immigrant advocates say Mrs. Villegas’s case shows how local police can exceed their authority when they seek to act on immigration laws they are not fully trained to enforce.

“Had it not been for the 287G program, she would not have been taken down to jail,” said A. Gregory Ramos, a lawyer who is a former president of the Nashville Bar Association. “It was sold as something to make the community safer by taking dangerous criminals off the streets. But it has been operated so broadly that we are getting pregnant women arrested for simple driving offenses, and we’re not getting rid of the robbers and gang members.”

Mrs. Villegas, who is 33, has lived in the United States since 1996, and has three other children besides the newborn who are American citizens because they were born here.

She was stopped on July 3 in her husband’s pickup truck by a police officer from Berry Hill, a Nashville suburb, initially for “careless driving.” After Mrs. Villegas told the officer she did not have a license, he did not issue a ticket but arrested her instead. Elliott Ozment, Mrs. Villegas’s lawyer, said driving without a license is a misdemeanor in Tennessee that police officers generally handle with a citation, not an arrest.

After Mrs. Villegas was taken to the Davidson County jail, a federal immigration agent working there as part of the cooperation agreement conducted a background check. It showed that Mrs. Villegas was an illegal immigrant who had been deported once from the United States in March 1996, Karla Weikal, a spokeswoman for the county sheriff, said. She had no other criminal record.

As a result, immigration agents issued an order to take charge of Mrs. Villegas once she was released by the local authorities. Based on that order, county officers designated her a medium-security inmate in the jail, Ms. Weikal said.

So when Mrs. Villegas went into labor on the night of July 5, she was handcuffed and accompanied by a deputy as she was taken by ambulance to Nashville General Hospital at Meharry. Cuffs chaining her foot to the hospital bed were opened when she reached the final stages of labor, Mrs. Villegas said.

“I felt like they were treating me like a criminal person,” Mrs. Villegas said, speaking in Spanish in a telephone interview. The phone in her room was turned off, and she was not permitted to speak with her husband when he came to retrieve their newborn son from the hospital on July 7 as she returned to jail, she said.

As Mrs. Villegas left the hospital, a nurse offered her a breast pump but a sheriff’s deputy said she could not take it into the jail, Mrs. Villegas said.

Mr. Ozment, the lawyer, said Mrs. Villegas would never have been detained without the 287G cooperation agreement.

“Whether this lady was documented or undocumented should not affect how she was treated in her late pregnant condition and as she was going through labor and bonding with her new baby,” Mr. Ozment said.

On July 8, Mrs. Villegas was taken to court, where she pleaded guilty to driving without a license and was sentenced to time served. Immigration agents immediately released her while a deportation case proceeds, following a policy adopted last year by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to avoid separating babies from nursing mothers.

Ms. Weikal said Mrs. Villegas’s jail stay was prolonged by the Independence Day holiday weekend, when the courts were closed.

“There is a perception that she was treated different from other inmates, and it just is not true,” Ms. Weikal said. “Unfortunately the business of corrections is that families are separated. It’s not pretty, it’s not understandable to a lot of people.”

She said that it was standard procedure to bar medical equipment like a breast pump from the jail.

More than 60,000 illegal immigrants have been identified for deportation since 2006 through 287G cooperation programs, said Richard Rocha, a spokesman for the federal immigration agency. Most of the agreements are aimed at increasing the screening of immigrant convicts serving sentences in local jails, in order to speed their deportation. Some, like Nashville’s, provide for immigration screening right after any foreign-born person is arrested.

Arrests of immigrants have increased rapidly in Tennessee since early 2006, when the state stopped allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, after five years when they had been able to drive legally.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/20immig.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=us&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

LA: Bill Requiring DOC to notify former prisoners of their voting rights signed into law

July 18, 2008. From The Sentencing Project

Louisiana: Bill Requiring Voting Rights Notification Gets Thumbs Up from Local ACLU

The ACLU of Louisiana has applauded Gov. Bobby Jindal's recent signing of a law that mandates the Department of Public Safety and Corrections to notify people leaving its supervision about the process of regaining their voting rights. The law, which goes into effect August 15, also requires the Department to provide returning citizens with voter registration applications.

"By requiring notice of voting rights reinstatement to those completing their felony sentences, the Louisiana legislature and Gov. Jindal have taken an important step towards ensuring that all of Louisiana's eligible voters can exercise their fundamental right to vote," said Marjorie Esman, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana, which lobbied in favor of the bill. "The enactment of this legislation shows that the right to vote transcends partisan politics," Esman said. "This bill is about the strength of our democracy."

Louisiana's current law bans nearly 100,000 citizens from voting until they have completed parole or probation. Thousands more are kept from the polls because they wrongly believe that they cannot regain their right to vote, according to the ACLU. "The ACLU of Louisiana will be working with Voice of the Ex-Offender (VOTE) to help ensure that the Department of Public Safety and Corrections implements the bill quickly and effectively," said Norris Henderson, VOTE's founder and director.

Posted by lois at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

NC: Prisons Are Great! Right?

Sunday, July 20, 2008
Expanding prisons mean more jobs

By John Fuquay
Staff writer

RALEIGH — With the new state budget, lawmakers have approved more than $30 million over the past two years to expand the state prison in Scotland County, which opened just five years ago.

The prison is one of six that state lawmakers have approved since 2001 to address a dire need for prison space, and they are already being expanded. When complete, the construction and expansions at all six facilities will have cost more than $700million and operating costs will top $100 million annually.

Projects like the one in Scotland have become a boon for rural, economically distressed counties. Prison jobs bring added payroll, boost housing markets and draw new retail customers to poor parts of the state.

Scotland County’s 1,000-bed prison was the first of the six new facilities to be completed. The prison, just outside Laurinburg, opened in 2003 at a cost of $90 million, and it quickly filled. Last year, it became the first of those six new prisons to begin a 500-bed expansion at a price of $19million. The $13 million approved by lawmakers this year will go toward a 250-bed expansion. The expansions will create an additional 174 jobs.

But the spending also has come under scrutiny, with some saying the state spends too much on incarceration and not enough on substance abuse programs or community monitoring that would reduce the demand for prison space.

“Our inmate population grows 800 to 1,000 inmates a year,” said Boyd Bennett, the state director of prisons. “We’re having to pretty much build a new prison a year just to keep up.”

Bennett said the inmate population is about 39,640 — nearly doubling in the past 15 years — and there is a backlog of more than 350 inmates scattered around the state’s county jails who are waiting for a state prison cell to open.

He said growth projections show the state needs to build an additional 7,000 prison beds to be ready for the inmate population in 2017.

The six newest prisons were built for “close security” inmates — those who fall between maximum and medium security. Each one was built with food and laundry services and infrastructure capable of accommodating an additional 500 medium security beds and 250 minimum security beds. The expansions are for cells only.

“While these new 1,000 bed prisons were being built, they were being built with the intention to expand,” Bennett said. “Since Scotland was first, it was the first one to expand.”

Both the state population and prison population grow about 2.2 percent yearly, Bennett said. But the prison system faces a double whammy: Prisoners already there are staying longer than they used to.

Inmates incarcerated since 1995 have been sentenced under mandatory minimum guidelines called structured sentencing. No longer could inmates receive an early parole.

In addition, lawmakers continue to create new criminal offenses and make criminal penalties tougher, which increases the demand for prison space.

Before lawmakers left Raleigh on Friday, they passed anti-gang legislation that criminalizes gang-related activity. The new penalties are predicted to add almost 180 inmates within a year, costing more than $30million for space and expenses.

Lawmakers also increased penalties for sexual offenses this year, potentially adding years to the sentence for raping a child.

Opponents of the prison boom say the state relies too heavily on incarceration.

“There are many alternatives to prison that we could be doing in this state,” said Lao Rubert, policy director for the Carolina Justice Policy Center, a Durham-based nonprofit that promotes sentencing reform and community-based corrections.

“The ratio of spending is somewhere in the ballpark of 50 to 1 in terms of prison expenses to community-based correction expenses. It’s not so much, ‘Are we going to keep spending millions of millions on building more prisons?’ The question is, are we going to change that ratio a little bit and provide more for community programs?’’

Rubert said more funding for substance abuse and decriminalizing some drug offenses would significantly reduce the demand for prison space. Some states, she said, address drug abuse as a health issue rather than send drug addicts to prison.

Job training, more intensive community monitoring, such as daily reporting to a probation officer, and training to help newly released prisoners transition into society are other programs that Rubert said would ease prison crowding. She said some of the state’s rural areas offer limited support in those areas, but the services are particularly lacking in rural areas.

She said lawmakers and corrections officials agree that community corrections are a vital element in the state’s overall solution to crime and punishment. But the question, she said, is how best to divide the resources.

“What do you get for your money if you spend $27,000 per year to put a person in prison, and they come out with a recidivism rate that is at worst the same as if they went through a community corrections program for between $4,000 and $8,000?” Rubert asked. “Or, if their recidivism is 50percent less, how would you want to spend your money?

“It’s not a matter of being tough on crime, it’s what’s the best way to spend your money,” she said. “There’s got to be a better mix.”
Concerns vs. benefits

But for towns like Laurinburg and Tabor City, where the last of the six newest prisons is being built, the prisons mean jobs and money for the local economy.

Belinda Graves, president of the Tabor City Chamber of Commerce, said some residents at first were uneasy about a prison coming to town.

“There was some concern, and there was excitement,” Graves said. “Some people had concerns about the possibility of escaped inmates, but those concerns have died down. Most people are excited about the jobs.”

Graves has firsthand knowledge. The prison will provide about 600 jobs, easily becoming the biggest employer in the town of about 2,500 residents. And she has one — working as an inmate processing assistant after the prison opens.

Graves said the prison also is expected to provide an economic boost to restaurants, gas stations and other local businesses.

“People are always a little leery of anything new,” Columbus County Board of Commissioners Chairman James Prevatte said. “There were a few reservations, you know, ‘Can’t we attract anything else new besides a prison?’ But like a lot of other areas in the state, our unemployment is high. This is having a positive economic impact, and the Tabor City area is real excited. They’re seeing a lot of new homes going in.”

The spin-off benefits were seen in Scotland County even before the prison opened. The prison’s construction provided jobs, and some materials came from local suppliers.

“We view that prison as a positive,” said J.D. Willis, chairman of the Scotland County Board of Commissioners, who lobbied for the prison in 2000 and 2001 before the site was chosen. “We had to hold a public hearing before it came here, and we had no negative comments whatsoever.”

The Scotland prison has a $16.9million annual payroll, Willis said, and almost 200 of the prison’s 410 jobs are filled by county residents. The others, who come from Robeson, Hoke, Bladen and other surrounding counties, dine and buy gas and other goods in Laurinburg.

Laurinburg Mayor Matthew Brock said Scotland County so badly needed a lift that the prison was not seen as a dirty industry, unlike a large landfill that was considered in the county until the plans were scrapped last year.

“We have the No. 1 highest tax rate in the state,” Brock said. “It’s a huge negative to be No. 1 in taxes. We’re very desperate to increase our tax base.”

He said the prison has been a positive for the community.

“I haven’t heard any negatives in terms of having the prison here,” Brock said. “A lot of the reason is unemployment is so high. People are obviously happy to have the opportunity for jobs.”

http://www.fayobserver.com/print?id=299734&type=article

Posted by lois at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

July 16, 2008

Criminal Charges Filed Against Immigrants at Unprecedented Rate

Criminal Charges Filed Against Immigrants at Unprecedented Rate

HispanicLink, News Report, Alex Meneses Miyashita, Posted: Jul 15, 2009
Criminal immigration violation charges are being filed by the federal government at unprecedented levels this year, a report by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reveals.

The study released in June reports there were 9,350 immigration prosecutions in March, representing a 50 percent surge from the month before, based on official records obtained by the group. When compared to a year ago, the increase was 73 percent.

The independent, nonpartisan group attributes the rise to intensified federal policies under the so-called “Operation Streamline” initiative which launched as a pilot project in Del Rio, Texas, in December 2005.

There were 8,104 immigration convictions in March, representing a 24.4 percent increase from February.

The vast majority of cases referred for prosecution, 99 percent, were charged by U.S. attorneys. The median sentence was about a month, the report indicates.

The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement notes that immigration violations are normally civil offenses prosecuted by immigration judges,adding that under Operation Streamline, the federal government has criminalized these offenses, barring immigrants from future legalization.

“Undocumented workers are a voiceless group of people who live in fear and today they are much more exploitable,” stated LCLAA president Milton Rosado. “The administration’s current policies and the criminalization of this group of people only exacerbate this situation. Immigrants are not criminals.”

The report states the vast majority of the cases were prosecuted in southwest border districts.

In the Western District of Texas, for instance, prosecutions increased from 626 in January to 3,555 in March. All but 142 were in U.S.-Mexico border districts.

The main charges brought against immigrants in March were for illegal re-entry, bringing in or harboring certain immigrants, entry at improper time or place, visa and document fraud, and misuse and conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States.

Other charges included fraudulent statements or entries, false personification as a U.S. citizen, false statement in application and use of passport, and forgery.

The largest increase in prosecution from a year ago (96.2 percent) was for conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States. Document falsification and related activities has seen the largest surge over the past five years (74.4 percent).

The LCLAA said it is “extremely concerned about the implications that higher incarceration rates of immigrants will have on the overall Latino community and its image in the eyes of the American public.”

The organization maintained that criminalizing immigrants will strengthen the myth that ties immigrants to crime even if research has claimed that they tend to commit less crime than other groups.

Rosado attributed the large flow of immigrants to harmful economic policies that have affected workers throughout the hemisphere “causing dislocation and displacement.“

“We need to address the root causes of migration and understand that this is a regional problem that requires a combination of domestic policy as well as comprehensive, humane and commonsense international solutions,” he added.

Related Articles at the URL below

Interpreting the Largest ICE Raid in U.S. History: A Personal Account

After Iowa Raid, Families in Limbo

Immigration Raids Lead U.S. to a Moral, Legal Crisis
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=a13e17407782c1d2b32067b91183ed1d

Posted by lois at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)

NM: Questions remain about the state's dependency on for-profit prisons

Questions remain about the state's dependency on for-profit prisons
Kate Nash | The New Mexican

7/13/2008
When the doors swing open on the Northeast New Mexico Correctional Facility next month, inmates will file in , new employees will start collecting paychecks and a tiny corner of the state will become its own small economic engine.

The opening marks another milestone as well. Once Clayton is online, the number of inmates living in the state's privately run prisons will almost match the number living in state-run slammers.

To be exact: 46.5 percent of male inmates will be in prisons run by private companies. The other 53.5 percent will be in state-run prisons. One hundred percent of female inmates will be in private facilities.

If the number of criminals behind private bars seems big, it is: New Mexico has the highest rate of private prison use in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Indeed, the prison near the Rabbit Ear Mountains in Clayton, just shy of the border with Oklahoma and Texas in northeastern New Mexico, caps a major shift in state policy over the past three decades of housing an increasing number of criminals in privately run prisons.

Since 1980, the year a deadly prison riot made awful headlines for the state, the number of inmates has increased 440 percent. Including Clayton, the number of prisons has gone from one to 11, a figure that doesn't include Camino Nuevo, a privately operated prison that has opened and closed since then.

And questions about whether privatizing was the best choice have mounted.

As the state's inmate population grew, so did lawmakers' interest in private prisons, seen by proponents as a way to save money and outsource some of the state's toughest jobs.

Ten years ago, the state had only two privately run prisons — the New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility in Grants, open since 1989, and the Hobbs prison, which opened in 1998.

Now, when Clayton opens, it will have five, spread out around the state.

The change in inmate-management policy didn't happen overnight, and hasn't happened without controversy. It also couldn't have happened without two New Mexico governors, most notably former Gov. Gary Johnson, who kicked off the privatization push, and Gov. Bill Richardson, who has kept the trend alive.

It was under Johnson's watch that the 1,200-bed lockup in Hobbs opened in 1998. A year later came the 600-bed Santa Rosa prison. Both are run by The GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut.

Those weren't good times; both facilities suffered deadly confrontations. Three inmates were killed in Hobbs and a prison guard was murdered in a riot in Santa Rosa in less than a year. Before that, an inmate in Santa Rosa died after he was beaten with a laundry bag full of rocks.

New Mexico hadn't seen so much prison violence since the 1980 riot at the state penitentiary, where 33 people died.

No new state prisons?

When Richardson ran for office in 2002, he pledged there would be no new state prisons built on his watch.

"The governor said he would not build new state prisons, and he has not done so," spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said in a statement to The New Mexican.

"All of the capital money that would have been used for new state prisons has instead been invested in new schools, modernizing highways and updating infrastructure in communities across the state."

Still, since he's been governor, 240 beds have been added to the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility near Santa Rosa, run by The GEO Group. The Camino Nuevo Correctional Center in Albuquerque, operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, opened in 2006. In 2007 came the 234-bed, minimum-security Springer Correctional Center, which is run by the state. And then came Clayton.

The town of Clayton is paying to build the facility, which will house 625 inmates, nearly all of them state prisoners.

The town is using $63 million in revenue bonds to finance the project. Clayton officials have welcomed the prison — and its jobs — as a major source of economic activity in the outpost of about 2,500.

Critics, however, say the lockup is essentially a state prison.

"I guess it's a debate in semantics, but it's holding state prisoners," said Sen. John Arthur Smith, a Deming Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

"I guess the governor gets a certain amount of satisfaction in saying the state didn't build it, but from a functional point of view, the state might as well have built it," he said.

Gallegos said that's not the case.

"Of course it's not a state prison. The town of Clayton and GEO can house county or federal inmates," he said. "Beds were available for medium-security inmates, and the Corrections Department chose to take advantage of the new facility for some of its inmates."

Of the 625 beds, 600 will be used for state prisoners.

Others suggest Richardson chose to support the Clayton project to curry favor in the heavily Republican Union County.

"We could have added a wing or pods to other facilities that could have been expanded," said Senate Minority Whip Leonard Lee Rawson, R-Las Cruces. Adding on to places such as Santa Rosa or Hobbs would have been cheaper and quicker than building a new prison, he added.

"But the governor decided he wanted to build in Clayton for political purposes. We can say it's good economic development, but I don't think it was the best choice for the public," he said.

The Governor's Office denied that, saying Richardson "already had great relationships with Democrats and Republicans in Clayton."

And, Corrections Department Secretary Joe Williams said, building the Clayton prison was "absolutely the right decision."

"When we signed those agreements, we were operating at well over 100 percent capacity," he said. "We were busting at the seams when we did that."

In the past two years, however, the state's prison population has dropped 6.6 percent, a recent report found.

Williams said even though population projections are now much lower than they were when talk of Clayton first surfaced, the state still needs the facility, particularly because it will provide beds for medium-custody, or level 3, inmates.

"That's where we need the bed space, and that's what Clayton will provide us," he said.

Inmates from a variety of facilities will be moved to Clayton, which is expected to be full within 60 days of opening.

Questions about Clayton

As it gets ready to open, there are other questions about the cost of building the new prison.

A review done for the Legislative Finance Committee in 2007 found that the prison's actual cost will be much higher than the construction costs, which at the time of the report were estimated to be $61 million.

Over twenty years, the state will pay $132 million in construction and finance charges, but will not own the building, according to the report.

As part of the $95.33 per diem the state will pay to house inmates in the new prison, $27.81 will go to pay construction costs.

The high cost of building private prisons has left some lawmakers concerned about whether the state can afford to keep so many inmates there.

Williams said a big part of the reason the building cost was so high was because construction costs have gone way up.

"You look at the cost of a gallon of gas and then you look at the cost of a new prison bed, and everything is going to have its increases and it is inflationary," he said.

Williams also pointed out that the cost of labor has gone up since prisons were built 10 years ago in Hobbs and Santa Rosa.

Other lawmakers have a philosophical opposition to the opening of the Clayton prison, and to private prisons in general, saying it's the job of the government, not corporations, to house prisoners.

"I don't believe it's the right way, I don't think they should be for profit," said Senate Majority Leader Michael Sanchez, D-Belen. Sanchez said prisons are the state's responsibility.

"Hopefully Clayton will be the last one," he said.

An inmate drought?

It's unclear, however, when the state will need another new prison.

The state was expected to run out of bed space in August of 2011 for males and in March of 2012 for females, but that's no longer the case.

The most recent projections show the state is expected to run out of space in 2017 for men and in 2015 for women. The department warns, however, that those projections are subject to change.

"Our projections totally changed from last year to this year where we were on a spike up, and now we're growing but at a much smaller pace," Williams said.

While it has dropped off recently, the population is expected to grow by about 1.4 percent in the coming years.

"We're in a great state as far as corrections go for the first time in many, many years, I think," he said. "I think we're in a position a lot of states wish they were. We have room and capacity to grow."

So why is the prison population — long on the increase — now decreasing?

A recent report by the New Mexico Sentencing Commission shows the state's prison population has dropped for several reasons.

The study, released last week, said one reason is a Corrections Department policy that is increasingly imposing sanctions other than prison for technical parole violations such as missing a counseling session.

The study also said a 2006 state law that allows the department to let nonviolent inmates earn time off during the first 60 days of their stay is leading to some inmates getting out of prison sooner. Previously, inmates had to wait to start earning time.

It also said felony drug courts were playing a role. The state now has 31, and the report says that although the courts are not a diversion option for prison, they may indirectly keep offenders from being rearrested and going to prison. The courts provide treatment, mandatory drug testing and judicial oversight, among other things.

But if the projections are now lower than they have been, that might be a good thing for the Corrections Department.

When it did its report, the LFC found the department wasn't ready for projected growth.

"The department lacks active long-term planning to accommodate inmate growth, leading to a disjointed approach to acquiring bed space that proves costly," according to the report. The committee asked the department to put together a 10-year plan, which it has.

But, Williams said, the plan was outdated almost as soon as it was written.

"I didn't like 10-year plans because things are ever-changing in the department, projections, forecasts," he said. "It's hard enough to predict year to year or two years."

Williams also pointed out that there are advantages to having some space available in the state's prisons. The state now has enough room — and the cash — to refurbish some cells at the state penitentiary and Western New Mexico Correctional Facility, work that has been a long time coming, he said.

In addition, Williams said the state is considering implementing recent recommendations of a prison reform task force appointed by Richardson.

"The plan is hopefully this prison reform might change the way we do business forever," he said. "If we are diverting people into drug courts and mental health courts and our re-entry initiatives are successful, it could be a while before we see a new prison."

Contact Kate Nash at 986-3036 or knash@sfnewmexican.com. Read her blog, Green Chile Chatter, at www.sfnewmexican.com.

New Clayton prison at a glance

Name: Northeast New Mexico Correctional Facility

Cost to build: $63 million, paid by the town of Clayton using revenue bonds. Clayton will own the building.

Cost per inmate per night: $95.33, the most expensive privately run prison in the state.

Capacity: 625 beds, 600 of which will be used by the state Department of Corrections.

Square footage: 228,000 square feet; sits on more than 60 acres of land owned by the town of Clayton.

Jobs created: Expected to employ 191 people. Jobs include correctional officers, clerical work, food service, education and business management. Correctional officers will start at $12.26 an hour.

High-tech feature: The prison is built with gas ports in the ceiling, which would be used to help in a disturbance.

Expected opening date: Aug. 1

Sources: The GEO Group, Inc., the state Corrections Department

More on this site:
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/SantaFeNorthernNM/prisonclayton--ready-
Stories:

* Prison firms donate thousands to Richardson
* Who is in prison?
* State figures show private prisons cheaper to run, but N.M. pays more than others.

Posted by lois at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

Report says Calif. should end juvenile prisons

Report says Calif. should end juvenile prisons
By Don Thompson
Associated Press Writer / July 15, 2008

SACRAMENTO, Calif.‹A state watchdog commission has recommended that
California phase out its antiquated juvenile prisons by 2011, replacing them with regional lockups run by the counties.

The regional centers would hold only the most dangerous offenders under the proposal unveiled Monday by the watchdog Little Hoover Commission. Less serious offenders would be housed at local juvenile halls.

Commissioners said the state also should end its three-year experiment with combining youth and adult prisons under the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Authority over youth prisons would be placed under an Office of Juvenile Justice reporting to the governor until the state ends its involvement.

The report also suggests that the youth prisons do little in the way of rehabilitation, saying three of four freed young offenders commit new crimes within three years.

"Californians may fairly ask what they are getting for this outlay and
whether other strategies can better deliver public safety and youth
rehabilitation," commission chairman Daniel Hancock wrote.

It will cost taxpayers $378 million next year to care for the state's 1,500 juvenile inmates, the panel said in a report to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders.

A law that took effect in September already requires the state to transfer all but the most serious offenders to counties' jurisdiction.

That leaves state taxpayers paying for six large, aging institutions that hold far fewer offenders, commissioners said. They said the state will have to pay to replace those crumbling youth prisons unless the system is changed.

The report said giving counties responsibility for housing juvenile
offenders would bring substantial savings but doesn't estimate how much that would be.

The commission found that the state has made some progress in reforming its youth prison system, which some national experts have described as draconian. Next week, an Alameda County judge will consider whether those reforms are taking too long. If so, the judge might appoint a receiver with broad oversight powers.

Improvements have been slowed because the juvenile justice arm is dwarfed by the adult prison system under a single corrections department, commissioners said. Combining the adult and juvenile prisons was part of Schwarzenegger's campaign promise to "blow up" bureaucratic boxes once he became governor.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/07/15/report_says_calif_shou
ld_end_juvenile_prisons/

Posted by lois at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)

PA: More new prisons proposed

By Richard Gazarik
Pittsburgh TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, July 10, 2008

Fayette County officials said Wednesday the state could build one of two new prisons in German Township to handle overcrowding within the Department of Corrections system, which expects to run out of space for inmates by 2010.

State, county and township officials met twice this year with corrections department Secretary Jeffrey Beard at the German Township Municipal Building to discuss two potential sites for a 2,000-bed prison that would create more than 500 jobs.

"It's 99.9 percent" certain a prison will be built in Fayette, said state Rep. Tim Mahoney of South Union. "In politics, nothing is a sure thing until it's done."

Mahoney expects the state to make a decision by fall.

Fayette County Commissioner Vince Zapotosky said he attended two meetings in which officials of the Fay-Penn Economic Development Council made presentations to state officials.

"I'd rather be talking about building a GM plant, but we're not," he said. "It looks good, but it ain't real until it breaks dirt."

Zapotosky said the prison would be similar in design to SCI-Fayette in Luzerne, Fayette County.

"I'm hoping an announcement will be forthcoming. It will mean more than 500 jobs," he said.

German Township Supervisor Robert Croushore said the municipality "put out the welcome mat for the prison."

"We worked hard to get it here," he said.

Croushore said the two locations being considered are near routes 21 and 166. One parcel is owned by Mario Tiberi and his family. The other is owned by Manfried Wolf, of Flemington, N.J., a farmer and real estate developer who purchased his property about 16 years ago.

Wolf confirmed that the state is interested in his land, but "I haven't even seen a contract."

Neither Tiberi nor Mike Krajovic, president of Fay-Penn, responded to a request for comment.

The recently passed state budget contains $200 million to build a prison but lists a number of other potential sites, including Armstrong, Centre, Huntingdon, Philadelphia, Luzerne and Northumberland counties.

Susan McNaughton, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, said the state needs to build one prison immediately and then decide if a second is needed.

"We need at least one in the near future," she said. "We need a prison now. We're reviewing all the different sites and will go from there."

During Senate budget hearings in May, Beard testified the prison system is about 4,400 inmates above capacity now and could run out of bed space by 2010. He said if a new prison isn't approved soon, it may not be ready until 2011.

The German Township sites are located about eight miles west of Uniontown, near the Greene County border. With a population of 5,595, the municipality is rural and has a median family income of $32,428, according to U.S. Census data.

SCI-Fayette opened in 2003 and houses about 2,000 inmates, according to the state. SCI-Pittsburgh closed in 2005 but was reopened last year to handle overcrowding.

As of May, the state's inmate population was more than 46,000, which is 2,000 above capacity. Since 1990, the state has added 23,000 beds to the system.

In the 1990s, the state went on a building binge, constructing five prisons in Erie, Somerset, Northumberland, Schuylkill and Greene counties, which eventually cost taxpayers $1 billion.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/state/s_576852.html

Posted by lois at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2008

Mother Jones July-August Issue on Mass Incarceration

Mother Jones
July/August Issue

SLAMMED
Inside America's broken—and broke—prison system

Welcome to the Age of Incarceration Welcome to the Age of Incarceration
We are locking up 1 in every 100 American adults—and going bankrupt in the process.
By Jennifer Gonnerman

California's convict crisis Worst of the Worst
California's convict crisis
By James Sterngold

A guard's change of heart Taming of the Screws
A guard's change of heart
By Sasha Abramsky

The booming immigrant detention industry Texas Hold 'Em
The booming immigrant detention industry
By Stephanie Mencimer

Probation for Profit Probation for Profit
In Georgia's outsourced justice system, a traffic ticket can land you deep in the hole.
By Celia Perry

Kids doing time for tantrums Hard Time Out
Kids doing time for tantrums
By David Goodman

Prison problems? Not in Kansas anymore. The Shawnee Redemption
Prison problems? Not in Kansas anymore.
By Justine Sharrock
______

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

July 13, 2008

The Shame of Postville, Iowa

July 13, 2008
Editorial
The Shame of Postville, Iowa

Anyone who has doubts that this country is abusing and terrorizing undocumented immigrant workers should read an essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas,(URL below) a professor and Spanish-language court interpreter who witnessed the aftermath of a huge immigration workplace raid at a meatpacking plant in Iowa.

The essay chillingly describes what Dr. Camayd-Freixas saw and heard as he translated for some of the nearly 400 undocumented workers who were seized by federal agents at the Agriprocessors kosher plant in Postville in May.

Under the old way of doing things, the workers, nearly all Guatemalans, would have been simply and swiftly deported. But in a twist of Dickensian cruelty, more than 260 were charged as serious criminals for using false Social Security numbers or residency papers, and most were sentenced to five months in prison.

What is worse, Dr. Camayd-Freixas wrote, is that the system was clearly rigged for the wholesale imposition of mass guilt. He said the court-appointed lawyers had little time in the raids’ hectic aftermath to meet with the workers, many of whom ended up waiving their rights and seemed not to understand the complicated charges against them.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas’s essay describes “the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see” — because cameras were forbidden.

“Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.”

He wrote that they had waived their rights in hopes of being quickly deported, “since they had families to support back home.” He said that they did not understand the charges they faced, adding, “and, frankly, neither could I.”

No one is denying that the workers were on the wrong side of the law. But there is a profound difference between stealing people’s identities to rob them of money and property, and using false papers to merely get a job. It is a distinction that the Bush administration, goaded by immigration extremists, has willfully ignored. Deporting unauthorized workers is one thing; sending desperate breadwinners to prison, and their families deeper into poverty, is another.

Court interpreters are normally impartial participants and keep their opinions to themselves. But Dr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, said he was so offended by the cruelty of the prosecutions that he felt compelled to break his silence. “A line was crossed at Postville,” he wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13sun2.html?ei=5087&em=&en=098eabaf7e4d48a7&ex=1216094400&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2008

Tracking and Monitoring System for Prisoners in California, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia being used now...more states to follow

Wi-Fi Planet.com's Daily Newsletter
RFID Tracking Allows Prisons to More Closely Monitor Inmates
By Daniel Casciato

One of the nation's largest correctional institutions is spending $3.3 million to install an RFID inmate tracking system to track and monitor over 2,000 of its inmates—making it the largest installation of RFID technology to track and monitor people anywhere in the world.
According to the president of the company installing the tracking system, the technology will provide the Washington, D.C. Department of Corrections (DOC) facility with a state-of-the-art investigative tool and safety system for its 450-plus staff.
"They approached us because they recognized the value of the technology and enhancing their ability to manage inmates," said Greg M. Oester, president of Alanco/TSI PRISM, Inc.
The tracking system, expected to be installed by the end of the year, combines TSI PRISM's RFID Inmate Tracking System with Wi-Fi compatible RTLS technology from AeroScout, Inc.

Scottsdale, Arizona-based Alanco/TSI PRISM, Inc., a subsidiary of Alanco Technologies, Inc., pioneered the use of RFID inmate tracking technology in August 2000. Currently, ten prisons throughout the world are using its tracking technology, including facilities in California, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia, and Australia. Three others, including the Washington, D.C. DOC, are installing the technology this year.

How it works

TSI PRISM is comprised of three primary components: tamper detecting tags, readers, and a host computer employing the TSI PRISM software.
"Everyone in the prison facility wears a transmitter of one form or another," explained Oester. "The inmates wear a tamper detecting device on the wrist that looks like a large industrial wristwatch. This device sends a beacon every two seconds and has multiple levels of tamper detection. So you can’t remove it. The officers and prison staff wear a transmitter device that looks like a pager on their utility belts and it has multiple levels of duress notifications. So if an officer is attacked or is in trouble in the prison facility, he can push the distress button and we instantly know who he is, where he is and what the threat level is."
All of these signals are collected by an array of antennae that have been installed around the prison facility and uses triangulation methodology.

"We know precisely where everyone is throughout the facility, so we can identify people by name and their location, who they’re standing next to, and so on," said Oester. "All of this data is archived into a database so we can determine where someone is in about a two-second keystroke. We can also go back into the database and find out where that particular individual was yesterday or two months ago."

The greater good

Two of the primary benefits of the technology are that it promotes and forces inmate accountability and becomes a strong investigative resource for resolving incidences.
"The inmates know that they are being tracked," Oester said. "They know that they can be caught and it can be determined if they were involved in a rules violation. If there’s an incident to be investigated, we can conclusively determine who was in the immediate proximity of the event, which shortens the witness list considerably. It denies inmates the ability to say that they were not at a particular event. We capture them off-screen and it provides staff with a very useful tool to positively and conclusively resolve incidents or participation by inmates in particular incidences."
Another added benefit is the creation of operational savings. RFID technology enables correctional institutions to reduce manual tasks that normally require valuable staff time."If a particular inmate in a 200-bed facility doesn’t show up for work detail or classroom assignment, it would take a staff person about 30 to 40 minutes to conduct a physical search," said Oester. "With our technology, we know where everyone is with a keystroke. That frees up the staff from mundane search work. It allows them to do drug screening or security sweeps that frequently there’s not enough time in a day to do. It becomes a very comprehensive management tool."

Privacy concerns
Constant monitoring, of course, means that inmates have even less privacy and freedom of movement than before the RFID system was put in place. Oester’s position is that in a prison environment, an individual’s right to privacy has already been taken away.
"They can strip the individual and search them at will," he said. "Prison facilities can utilize cameras in every area of the prison, except perhaps the bathroom or shower area. Our technology is a security enhancement to the facility. We don't actually depict the human body on screen so unlike cameras, we can track an individual into a bathroom or shower area."
Bill Covington, a professor of clinical law at the University of Washington Law School, runs The Technology Law and Public Policy Clinic, has no issues with the real-time tracking technology."I'm hard pressed to see the ethical violations in terms of wanting to know physically where the inmates are located at all times in those facilities," he said.

Jeffrey B. Killino, an attorney with the Philadelphia law firm, Woloshin & Killino, P.C., agrees.
"From my standpoint, an RFID tag is no more intrusive and no more invasive than a prison uniform or handcuffs or shackles," he said. "It's a tag that they are wearing, whether it's on their arms or legs, and that is completely and ethically appropriate. Like many Americans, I take our right to privacy very seriously, but when you have been convicted of a crime and you are in a prison, I don't see how you have the right to argue this."
What will draw the line, according to Killino, is embedding an RFID tag into a human being. In 2004, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved of an RFID chip that can be implanted in humans for medical purposes.
"I don't know if they would ever go that far in our lifetime," said Killino. "That would put you into the argument of cruel and unusual punishment that prisoners typically raise and it's too much of the invasion of the person and privacy by having that tag in there. You'll have people up in arms and there will be a knockdown-drag-out fight should that occur."

Oester said that is an unlikely scenario.

"It will never happen because it’s a privacy issue," he said. "Injecting a foreign device into a human body is something that can only be done with the consent of the individual and I don’t see that ever taking place on a wholesale basis. There’s no benefit to the inmate and there’s no benefit to the facility. There’s currently a device that would work in this environment anyway and it’s not something that we would attempt to do."
One concern that Covington raises is whether the technology is 100 percent effective.
"There would be ethical problems if you tell prisoners that they'll be safe, that they won't be beaten or raped, because you have this technology that will allow you to know where they are," he said. "This is a sort of guarantee of safety to the prisoner and their family. I don't know if it's reached the point where we can declare that to them. I don't know where you can have 100 percent accuracy at all times in all situations."
However, TSI PRISM utilizes a broadband system for real-time tracking that is more effective than a narrowband system that some companies use. Narrowband systems transmit slower signals and may not track the actual movement reliably.
Broadband systems are capable of transmitting fast signals at frequent intervals. At two-second intervals, each transmitter is sending a signal 43,200 times per day. By tracking an inmate in these two-second intervals, the broadband depicts the subject's actual movement along their pathway of travel. Contrast that to a narrowband, which usually transmits every 30 seconds. An inmate can move up to 50 yards, assault someone, and return without being detected.

According to the company, several key statistics from correctional institutions using its system prove its effectiveness:
· Incidents of force and violence were reduced by more than 65 percent.
· Failures to report to job incidents were reduced from 29 to 0.
· Theft and destruction of state property incidents were reduced by more than 40 percent.
"Adoption of this technology is increasing and accelerating," said Oester. "I’m very confident that once this DC installation is completed, it will adequately showcase the value of the technology in a very large, densely populated institution."

Daniel Casciato is a freelance writer from Pittsburgh, PA. In addition to writing for Wi-FiPlanet, he writes legal, medical, real estate and technology-related articles for trade and consumer publications and recently launched his own copywriting business. For more information, visit www.danielcasciato.com.
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/3758456

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

GEO Group Expands prison for immigrants to more than 1,500 in WA

Locked and loaded

GEO Group will incarcerate more immigrants.
Posted: Jul 10, 2008 by John Herbert
NORTHWEST DETENTION CENTER: More immigrants will cross these tracks.

Tacoma officials have confirmed that Florida-based private prison corporation the GEO Group has plans to expand a prison for immigrants on the Tacoma tide flats by 50 percent, providing capacity for more than 1,500 prisoners.

With capacity for 1,000 prisoners, the Northwest Detention Center is already the largest GEO private prison on the West Coast. Aggressive, ongoing efforts to expel illegal immigrants from the United States have created an overwhelming demand for private prisons, which generally charge the federal government about $100 per day to keep immigrants locked up while awaiting deportation.

The Northwest Detention Center opened quietly in 2004, under contract with The United States Department of Homeland Security. The prison operation was later transferred to the GEO Group, which also operates prison facilities in Australia, The United Kingdom, South Africa and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Private prisons for immigrants awaiting deportation are a cash cow for companies such as the GEO Group. According to organizations such as the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the phenomenal growth of the immigrant prison business is driven by operations launched by I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in 2003. Dubbed “Operation End Game,” the effort to deport all undocumented migrants by 2012 is part of the largest police operation in United States history. Since July 2007, raids have increased the number of detained migrants from 18,000 to 26,000 nationwide. Prisoners headed to the Tacoma facility are taken mostly from Oregon, Idaho, Alaska and Washington. According to the Detention Watch Network, the U.S. government detains more than 280,000 people a year in a hodgepodge of more than 400 facilities at an annual cost of more than $1.2 billion.

“The widespread detention of individuals because of civil violations of immigration law is one of the clearest examples of how our current immigration system is failing,” says Northwest Immigrant Rights Project Director Jorge L. Barón in a public statement denouncing expansion of the facility. “Although many people in our community do not realize this, a significant proportion of the individuals detained at the Tacoma detention center have resided in the United States for many years and have either no criminal record or a record composed of only traffic offenses. Detaining these individuals while their cases are processed before the immigration court results in the needless separation of family members and makes it harder for people to obtain legal representation.”

Local activists have called for closure of the facility on grounds that it doesn’t meet fundamental safety standards, and hasn’t produced required evacuation plans or documents. City officials contend they have no right to limit the expansion of the facility because it meets essential public facility standards as outlined in the state’s Growth Management Act. Groups such as Tacoma Smash I.C.E. and the Bill of Rights Defense Network Tacoma continue to oppose the facility’s presence, claiming that conditions there are unhealthy and that some prisoners are abused, while others are denied medical care while detained.

Stories offered by human rights advocates from inside the center do not paint a pretty picture.
The Detention Watch Network, for example, tells the story of a couple taken and imprisoned in the facility this past May. The daughter of the couple claims that her mother relayed stories of pregnant prisoners being denied proper medical care, and were forced to sleep on hard, thin mattresses and eat prison slop. The woman, whose name was not provided, told her daughter that people in the facility have died because their jailers refused to answer requests for medical care. Two pregnant prisoners experiencing medical complications were taken to the emergency room and examined in chains, on orders from accompanying prison officials.
The woman relaying the tales was later released, having been imprisoned for months.
http://www.weeklyvolcano.com/article/for_print/2417/

Posted by lois at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

Interpreter for some of the 400 immigrants arrested and sentenced in meat packing raid speaks up in their defense

July 11, 2008, NY Times
An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants
By JULIA PRESTON

WATERLOO, Iowa — In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own.

Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.

In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.

In the essay and an interview, Professor Camayd-Freixas said he was taken aback by the rapid pace of the proceedings and the pressure prosecutors brought to bear on the defendants and their lawyers by pressing criminal charges instead of deporting the workers immediately for immigration violations.

He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.

“The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on,” Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. “The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud.”

During fast-paced hearings in May, 262 of the illegal immigrants pleaded guilty in one week and were sentenced to prison — most for five months — for knowingly using false Social Security cards or legal residence documents to gain jobs at the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in nearby Postville. It was the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

The essay has provoked new questions about the Agriprocessors proceedings, which had been criticized by criminal defense and immigration lawyers as failing to uphold the immigrants’ right to due process. Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said she would hold a hearing on the prosecutions and call Professor Camayd-Freixas as a witness.

“The essay raises questions about whether the charges brought were supported by the facts,” Ms. Lofgren said.

Bob Teig, a spokesman for Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, said the immigrants’ constitutional rights were not compromised.

“All defendants were provided with experienced criminal attorneys and interpreters before they made any decisions in their criminal cases,” Mr. Teig said. “Once they made their choices, two independent judicial officers determined the defendants were making their choices freely and voluntarily, were satisfied with their attorney, and were, in fact, guilty.”

Mr. Teig said the judges in the cases were satisfied with the guilty pleas.

“The judges had the right and duty to reject any guilty plea where a defendant was not guilty,” Mr. Teig said. “No plea was rejected.”

The essay by Professor Camayd-Freixas, who is the director of a program to train language interpreters at the university, has also caused a stir among legal interpreters. In telephone calls and debates through e-mail, they have discussed whether it was appropriate for a translator to speak publicly about conversations with criminal defendants who were covered by legal confidentiality.

“It is quite unusual that a legal interpreter would go to this length of writing up an essay and taking a strong stance,” said Nataly Kelly, an analyst with Common Sense Advisory, a marketing research company focused on language services. Ms. Kelly is a certified legal interpreter who is the author of a manual about interpreting.

The Agriprocessors hearings were held in temporary courtrooms in mobile trailers and a ballroom at the National Cattle Congress, a fairgrounds here in Waterloo. Professor Camayd-Freixas worked with one defense lawyer, Sara L. Smith, translating her discussions with nine clients she represented. He also worked in courtrooms during plea and sentencing hearings.

Ms. Smith praised Professor Camayd-Freixas’s essay, saying it captured the immigrants’ distress during “the surreal two weeks” of the proceedings. She said he had not revealed information that was detrimental to her cases.

But she cautioned that interpreters should not commonly speak publicly about conversations between lawyers and clients. “It is not a practice that I would generally advocate as I could envision circumstances under which such revelations could be damaging to a client’s case,” Ms. Smith said.

Professor Camayd-Freixas said he had considered withdrawing from the assignment, but decided instead that he could play a valuable role by witnessing the proceedings and making them known.

He suggested many of the immigrants could not have knowingly committed the crimes in their pleas. “Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security card was or what purpose it served,” he wrote.

He said many immigrants could not distinguish between a Social Security card and a residence visa, known as a green card. They said they had purchased fake documents from smugglers in Postville, or obtained them directly from supervisors at the Agriprocessors plant. Most did not know that the original cards could belong to Americans and legal immigrants, Mr. Camayd-Freixas said.

Ms. Smith went repeatedly over the charges and the options available to her clients, Professor Camayd-Freixas said. He cited the reaction of one Guatemalan, Isaías Pérez Martínez: “No matter how many times his attorney explained it, he kept saying, ‘I’m illegal, I have no rights. I’m nobody in this country. Just do whatever you want with me.’ ”

Professor Camayd-Freixas said Mr. Pérez Martínez wept during much of his meeting with Ms. Smith.

Ms. Smith, like more than a dozen other court-appointed defense lawyers, concluded that none of the immigrants’ legal options were good. Prosecutors had evidence showing they had presented fraudulent documents when they were hired at Agriprocessors.

In plea agreements offered by Mr. Dummermuth, the immigrants could plead guilty to a document fraud charge and serve five months in prison. Otherwise, prosecutors would try them on more serious identity theft charges carrying a mandatory sentence of two years. In any scenario, even if they were acquitted, the immigrants would eventually be deported.

Worried about families they had been supporting with their wages, the immigrants readily chose to plead guilty because they did understand that was the fastest way to return home, Professor Camayd-Freixas said.

“They were hoping and they were begging everybody to deport them,” he said.

Ms. Smith said she was convinced after examining the prosecutors’ evidence that it was not in her clients’ interests to go to trial.

“I think they understood what their options were,” she said. “I tried to make it very clear.”

Legal interpreters familiar with the profession said that Professor Camayd-Freixas’ essay, while a notable departure from the norm, did not violate professional standards.

Isabel Framer, a certified legal interpreter from Ohio who is chairwoman of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators, said Professor Camayd-Freixas did not go public while the cases were still in court or reveal information that could not be discerned from the record. Ms. Framer said she was speaking for herself because her organization had not taken an official position on the essay.

“Interpreters, just like judges and attorneys, have an obligation to maintain the confidentiality of the process,” she said. “But they don’t check their ethical standards at the door.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/11immig.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1215788693-AFbZ6gGAM8xzoFc/rEQsWw&pagewanted=print

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

July 10, 2008

Guarded Hope: Lessons from the history of the prison boom by Robert Perkinson

"Navigating these uncertain waters, Abramsky, Gilmore, and Simon all conclude with guarded hope. Although California’s penal system has become one of the nation’s most crowded and dysfunctional in recent years, Abramsky cautiously praises Governor Schwarzenegger for revisiting the concept of prison-based rehabilitation. (Not long after American Furies went to press, the governor proposed sending 22,000 inmates home early to save money.) For his part, Simon hopes that aging baby boomers and the Katrina debacle will force a redirection of government attention from crime control to health care and infrastructure, a shift he believes will reinforce rather than erode social solidarity and public trust. Gilmore closes with a glowing case study of the grassroots political action group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, an organization with almost no resources that has formulated a far-reaching anti-racist agenda that Gilmore proffers as a template for anti-prison activists everywhere. At the same time, nonprofits like the Sentencing Project and the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation have produced a blizzard of white papers proposing how carefully calibrated treatment programs, a return to judicial discretion, alternatives to incarceration, and robust reentry programs can enhance public safety while cutting costs."

JULY/AUGUST 2008, Boston Review http://bostonreview.net/BR33.4/perkinson.php
Guarded Hope
Lessons from the history of the prison boom Robert Perkinson

In March 1965, at the height of his popularity and power, President Johnson launched a major offensive against crime, which he called a “malignant enemy in America.” Although violent crime had declined markedly since the Great Depression, it was starting to surge under Johnson’s watch, and his conservative critics—following the lead of Barry Goldwater, who had made fighting crime a centerpiece of his failed but galvanizing presidential bid—were eager to pounce. To outflank them, LBJ ordered his attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach to chair a blue-ribbon commission to draft a national crime strategy. “I will not be satisfied,” the President warned, borrowing from Goldwater’s paternalistic playbook, “until every woman and child in this Nation can walk any street, enjoy any park . . . and live in any community at any time of the day or night without fear of being harmed.” He declared “a thorough and effective war against crime.”

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Johnson’s belligerent anticrime talk rings familiar, but the policy changes ultimately put forward by his expert panel in 1967 hail, seemingly, from another country. Nowhere among the Katzenbach commission’s 200-plus recommendations were the sorts of punitive fixes presently in vogue. Rather than augmenting law-enforcement powers, the panelists urged greater respect for civil liberties and a national commitment to police fairness and professionalism, complete with in-service training courses like “The civil rights movement and history of the Negro.” Instead of strengthening the hands of prosecutors, the commissioners recommended greater evidence sharing, eliminating most bail charges, and expanding legal services for low-income defendants. Instead of tougher criminal sentencing, they suggested rolling back mandatory-minimum drug penalties passed in the 1950s and shifting resources from imprisonment to probation and parole.

Although the panelists advocated more money for law enforcement and criminological research, they insisted, above all, that “the challenge of crime in a free society” could only be met by stressing prevention over punishment. “We will not have dealt effectively with crime until we have alleviated the conditions that stimulate it,” they wrote. Reflecting what would become an unfashionable belief that government intervention can alleviate social problems by means other than tax cuts or privatization, the president’s advisors asserted that the Great Society represented the best solution to crime:

[The Commission] has no doubt whatever that the most significant action that can be taken against crime is action designed to eliminate slums and ghettos, to improve education, to provide jobs, to make sure every American is given the opportunities and the freedoms that will enable him to assume his responsibilities.

Rather than building cellblocks, they called for building communities. Throwing down the gauntlet before the incipient law-and-order Right, LBJ’s best and brightest called “for a revolution in the way America thinks about crime.”

What they got was counterrevolution. By 1968, when the report was translated into law, Lyndon Johnson’s once formidable social-democratic coalition had fragmented, a casualty not only of Vietnam but of the riotous, long, hot summers at home. The domestic homicide rate was soaring, and as public anxiety mounted, resurgent Republicans and southern segregationist Democrats took control of the crime issue in Congress, drafting sweeping legislation that bore little resemblance to Johnson’s. Instead of crafting myriad federal programs, the revised bill would channel some $400 million into locally controlled “block grants” for law enforcement, a nod to states’ rights. Instead of “warring on poverty,” as the commissioners urged, the congressional package took aim at the Warren Court, eliminating restrictions on wiretapping and authorizing police to interrogate suspects without the pesky involvement of defense attorneys (Miranda v. Arizona had been decided in 1966).

Johnson’s allies disliked the bill—the New York Times decried the “vicious” legislation’s “sectional politics, facile solutions, and clearly discernable prejudices against the ignorant and the poor”—but after it motored through the House and Senate, the lame-duck president held his nose and signed. What had started out as an effort to outfox the Right—to commandeer Barry Goldwater’s divisive talking points to buttress the Left’s anti-poverty and civil rights agenda—had instead destabilized liberalism and shifted the national conversation from social services to just deserts.

Whether or not the final version of the quaintly named Safe Streets Act represented “a giant leap toward a police state,” as one contemporary feared, the law would serve as a blueprint for anticrime legislation from the late ’60s forward. Under President Nixon, who took Goldwater’s rhetoric about crime to the White House, and then under Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush the Crusader, the federal government promulgated ever harsher, more expansive, and more expensive versions of Johnson’s runaway bill. They declared and redeclared wars on drugs. They extended sentences, curtailed parole, facilitated capital punishment, hobbled judges and defense attorneys, and dispensed billions of dollars for prison construction. This was the story in Washington, but even harsher measures developed in the states—think New York’s Rockefeller drug laws or California’s three-strikes initiative—with the result that a prison nation grew up from the wreckage of the Great Society.

Even as the social safety net frayed—and then unraveled from the Reagan administration forward—America invested generously in criminal justice, especially prisons. Between 1970 and 2000, the U.S. inmate population increased sixfold. By 2008 the total surpassed 2.3 million, more than the populations of Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco combined. The United States, a republic founded on the notion of liberty, became the most incarcerated nation on earth.

But why?

Social scientists have put forward a grab bag of answers. Some depict the transformation as a reasoned response to violence, others as a panicked reaction to cable news crime coverage. Some blame postwar economic restructuring, others the populist peculiarities of American democracy. Three recent books assert comprehensive explanations—one zeroing in on the cultural causes of criminal justice severity, one surveying the political geography of the prison boom, and one assessing the country’s changing terrain of law and governance. All three greatly enrich the conversation, but none are likely to settle the argument.

***

Sasha Abramsky’s American Furies (2007) is less a causal account of what he labels “the Age of Mass Imprisonment” than a cri de coeur against it. He laments that the guiding principles of U.S. social policy—with respect to criminal justice but also education, welfare, and taxes—have shifted from equal opportunity to stratification, from social integration to retribution, and he presents a wide-ranging examination of the consequences. A peripatetic journalist and author of two previous books on crime and punishment, Abramsky takes readers on a tour of America’s carceral landscape, from law-enforcement trade shows to corrupt private prisons to sweltering outdoor jails, and he shakes his head in dismay wherever he goes.

Abramsky finds particularly disturbing the decline of prisoner treatment programs and the ascendance of their antitheses, supermaximum-security control units, which have proliferated even more rapidly than conventional cellblocks. Designed to curtail prison disorder by stripping refractory prisoners of even vestigial human agency, these special housing units now contain tens of thousands of inmates, many of them severely mentally ill, in a state of almost perfect isolation. In the harshest facilities—places like California’s Pelican Bay or Texas’s Estelle High Security—prisoners are locked into spare concrete boxes for twenty-three hours a day; they take their meals through slots and experience human touch only to be shackled. Abramsky calls these places “storehouses of the living dead.”

Lawmakers and their constituents like to imagine that only the worst of the worst are subject to hardline, high-tech justice, but a substantial majority of prison and jail inmates in the United States, more than 1.3 million, have been convicted of non-violent offenses. According to a 2003 Human Rights Watch study coauthored by Abramsky, between 200,000 and 300,000 prisoners are mentally ill, with many more in jails. Even greater numbers have been snared by the War on Drugs. In 1967 the Katzenbach commission urged more money for drug treatment and even hinted at decriminalization of marijuana. But unyielding criminalization became the rule, such that drug offenses now account for roughly two million annual arrests, some 40 percent of them for pot possession. For those charged with dealing narcotics, especially crack cocaine, Abramsky reports that mandatory prison terms now routinely exceed those meted out to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

Juveniles, too, are going to prison in record numbers. By 2003 more than one hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen were incarcerated in the United States. Most are held in juvenile facilities or reform schools, inventions of the Progressive Era, but in recent years, prosecutors and judges have diverted thousands of them to adult prisons. As Abramsky reports, Florida led the charge, attracting national attention for sentencing a twelve year-old to life without parole (later overturned) and for routinely charging school-age delinquents, from pot smokers to shoplifters, with adult felonies.

The new approach that emerged from the 1960s signaled not just a declining tolerance for risk and disorder in an increasingly atomized society, but also a sea change in public policy presumptions. No longer would criminal-justice institutions strive, however incapably, to reclaim and reintegrate lawbreakers. Instead, tough justice in the post-civil rights era would seek to segregate offenders from free society, subject them to extended controls, and, ultimately, relegate them to a permanently subordinate class of citizenship as defined by conviction status. This time, as before, race would figure prominently. “The harsh attitudes towards kids right now in the United States is a harsh attitude to black and Latino kids,” a juvenile justice expert tells Abramsky. “Those other kids.”

Mandatory prison terms now routinely exceed those meted out to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

Abramsky puts the blame everywhere and nowhere. He assails conservative academics like James Q. Wilson, who distorted the admittedly mixed performance of prison treatment initiatives to imply that “nothing works” in the field of criminal rehabilitation. He censures the victims’ rights movement for channeling personal anguish into calls for public vengeance, and he condemns “Bible Belt fundamentalists” who preach “eternal damnation.” He dismisses law-and-order reactionaries as “media whores” and lambastes “rant radio” for feeding Americans “a diet of vitriol that would put some paranoid schizophrenics to shame.” Finally, he resorts to metaphor, invoking Hobbes, Hitler, and, for his title, Greek mythology. Having slept through the age of rehabilitation, Abramsky submits, an American incarnation of the blood-thirsty Erinyes, or Furies, “shook themselves out of their slumbers” in the 1970s and now hover over a land “consumed by its desire for revenge.” They have built Tartarus on earth.

***

This rendition of the punitive turn as mass hysteria is precisely the view that Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a professor at the University of Southern California, aims to counter in her book Golden Gulag (2007). A political geographer with a Marxist compass, she argues that super-sized imprisonment is more rational than emotional, more structural than cultural. It represents not just a rightward jag in political discourse, she holds, but a fundamental transformation of the country’s political economy.

Gilmore grounds her study on a single, exceptionally large and dynamic state: California. The choice both complicates and strengthens her claims. It creates difficulties because California, thanks largely to its powerful guard union, has resisted prison privatization and because neither the state nor private contractors make much use of convict labor. This limits opportunities for profit, Gilmore acknowledges, thereby undermining simplistic descriptions of a “prison industrial complex” or a “new slavery.”

On the other hand, California has experienced phenomenally expensive prison growth over the past three decades. Since Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation to fix sentencing and eliminate parole in 1977, the state’s prisoner population has shot up 790 percent. Since George Deukmejian took the helm in 1983, California has built twenty-four major new prisons, making its “golden gulag” the biggest state penal system in the United States. Once famous for its public universities, California’s largest state agency is now its department of corrections, with an annual budget of $10 billion.

Most analysts, including Abramsky, who wrote an engaging 2002 book on California’s crime panic, Hard Time Blues, attribute the state’s prison boom to political factors from the Reagan revolt to the three-strikes campaign. Gilmore, on the other hand, points to three types of “surpluses” that made it possible: land, labor, and capital. Rural land once used to grow crops for agribusiness now cultivates prisons, she finds, while chronic unemployment in urban areas helps produce the bodies to fill them. Prison construction, at $280 to $350 million a pop, has also put big money to work, not only in the traditional pork-contractor circuit, but by providing investors low-risk, tax-exempt government bonds. As the military-Keynesian order faltered in the 1970s, Gilmore asserts, a “prison fix” steadied the state-capitalist machine. Prison building was not a conspiracy, she says, but it did “put certain state capacities into motion, make use of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and take more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets.”

Such reasoning may smack of economic determinism, but Gilmore’s book contains a welter of nuanced, well-researched insights. By following the money, she reveals who gains (Central Valley largeholders and municipal bond brokerages, among them) and who loses (impoverished residents in both rural and urban communities) in California’s prison construction frenzy. Because so much trickery was involved in the credit-market financing, she speculates that California’s crackdown may have been less populist than its ballot initiatives suggest; in short, voters never saw the bill.

Through careful case studies of two prison zones—Los Angeles, a convict exporter, and Corcoran, an inmate importer—Gilmore also shows how large-scale imprisonment constitutes a form of forced urban-to-rural migration; how tax dollars are unfairly diverted from blighted urban cores to withering farm towns; and how prison host communities, despite the transfer, rarely receive their promised economic windfall. As a rural development scheme, Gilmore counsels, imprisonment rarely delivers. The best paid employees commute rather than relocate, and family members who trek to visit their incarcerated loved ones rarely drop enough cash to stimulate the service sector.

Overall, Gilmore’s somewhat demanding text convincingly identifies powerful interests that lined up to haul California’s tough-on-crime bandwagon. What Golden Gulag fails to explain is why the band started playing in the first place.

***

Here Jonathan Simon, a Berkeley law professor, steps into the conversation, turning it from base to superstructure. His ambitious and carefully reasoned new book, Governing through Crime (2007), the most thought-provoking of the crop, argues that what sociologists are calling “mass imprisonment” (because such a large portion of the population is now involved) signals not only a new approach to managing crime, but to managing society.

In the criminal justice arena, Simon shows how prosecutors have gained power as courts have become “judgment machines,” constrained by mandatory sentencing, and how prisons, absent the promise of rehabilitation, have proliferated as “human toxic waste dumps.” The most innovative sections of his book, however, outline how an increasingly insular, risk averse, and punitive social ethic has reshaped not only how the other half lives but how the top half does as well.

In deunionized workplaces, he finds that blue and white-collar employees alike are subject to more surveillance, more restrictions on behavior (both on and off the clock), and more legalistic discipline than in the past. He regrets that in schools music and art classes have given way to metal detectors and locker searches. Even the family, he argues, has become “a nexus of crime.” On one hand, family members are regarded as potential criminals, a partial consequence of feminist campaigns against domestic violence. On the other, well-heeled parents spend heavily to fortify their homes against external threats, purchasing intruder-alert systems, nanny cams, and, if their teens stray, home drug testing kits. As much as the 5,000 prisons that now punctuate the American landscape, gated communities and battleship SUVs symbolize the birth of a fearful nation.

Americans’ collective reactions to violent crime—especially homicide, which rocketed upward in the 1960s, leveled off in the 1980s, and fell back toward earth in the 1990s—are so pervasive, Simon contends, that crime fighting has become a paradigmatic means of governing, a dominant pathway to authority and legitimacy for policymakers. Governors and presidents, even more so after 9/11, have increasingly posed as lawmen on the campaign trail, while crime victims have become an idealized class of citizens deemed especially worthy of government intervention.

The result is not only a bloated penal system but an erosion of civil society. As war (whether against crime or terror) becomes a leading metaphor for governing, as politicians swap civil liberties for the elusive promise of security, as sanctions replace supports in the nation’s social welfare toolkit, and as fear eclipses hope as an impetus to political action, the edifice of a free society quakes, Simon argues. “Governing through crime does not, and I believe, cannot make us more secure,” he writes. Instead, it cycles hundreds of thousands of troubled young people, “a shocking percentage of them descendants of . . . slaves,” through criminogenic jails. It “is making America less democratic and more racially polarized.”

Simon maintains that “the signal event marking the end of the Great Society era” and the rise of its punitive successor was the 1968 passage of the Safe Streets Act. “Crime was driving a stake through the heart of the Democrats’ urban coalition,” and the government’s response was to refabricate the welfare state into the penal state.

There were other options. Simon muses counterfactually that political leaders could have redoubled the war on poverty or launched determined campaigns against cancer or pollution. Any of these would have been preferable arenas for government mobilization, Simon says, and he is somewhat puzzled that policymakers did not see it that way. So he maps out obstacles along the roads not taken—corporate opposition to environmentalism and constitutional impediments to a European-style social welfare state, for instance—thus suggesting that crime prevailed at least partly by default, because it “offered the least political or legal resistance to government action.” But this depiction of the Great American Crime Crackdown as mere expedience minimizes its structural supports (Gilmore’s point), as well as its political utility, especially to the New Right (witness the Willie Horton ads of 1988 or this season’s insinuations that “Barack Hussein Obama” will be soft on terrorists).

As the perennial role of fear in racially charged political campaigns suggests, Simon might have expanded on an alternative explanation that he entertains but never fully endorses: that governing through crime developed largely as a reaction against civil rights. This is the argument described by Glenn Loury in a recent Boston Review essay, and there is considerable evidence for it. As Simon points out, it was states’-rights conservatives, inspired by George Wallace, who first seized on crime as a polarizing issue in national politics; the Republican Right thereafter picked up the baton and used it as a cudgel against liberalism for almost half a century. It was in the South, moreover, in the same jurisdictions that avidly resisted integration, where prison populations first started to grow (in the late 1960s vs. the mid-1970s nationally) and where they swelled most intensely; California may manage the largest state penal system in the country in absolute terms, but states like Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas have by far the highest rates of incarceration. Southern states, too, have taken the lead in resurrecting dour penalties that allude nostalgically to Jim Crow: chain gangs, striped uniforms, for-profit prisons, and reactivated death houses.

Simon’s categorization of history into distinct policymaking regimes also lends credence to this backlash hypothesis, though it requires an alternate interpretive lens. In Simon’s schema, political leadership has periodically coalesced to support favored groups of citizens that come to stand for the nation: yeoman farmers in the early republic, freedmen after emancipation, industrial workers in the Great Depression, and finally, victims of crime. The trouble with this genealogy of government assistance, however, is that it underemphasizes a grim counter-story. In truth, the helping hand of government has always been accompanied by a closed fist—with the latter all too often out front. In the Antebellum Era, slaveholders in fact commanded greater political influence than yeoman farmers, whatever the promises of Jacksonian Democracy. After the Civil War, it was the Klansman who ultimately prevailed over the agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau—and the robber baron who ended up on top. Out of the New Deal and World War II came not just stronger labor unions but McCarthyism and Taft-Hartley.

One of the reasons this alternative history of American repression is worth remembering is that it more logically leads to our punitive present. In a Whiggish storyline built around reform, America’s late twentieth-century prison boom materializes as a shocking, self-defeating aberration. If we redirect our spotlight from the history of social welfare to the equally pronounced, if less commemorated, history of social subjugation, however, mass imprisonment suddenly appears less inexplicable. Rather, it unfolds as the latest chapter in a centuries-long struggle between the ideal of equal citizenship and the reality of unequal power. It represents a reaction against democratic efflorescence akin to so many other reactions in U.S. history, from the Alien and Sedition Acts forward.

In particular, the late twentieth-century punitive turn bears troubling resemblance to another rightward pivot in American history, one that took place almost exactly a century before: the resurrection of neo-Confederate rule from the ashes of Reconstruction. Just as convict leasing, lynching, and finally segregation developed in the turbulent wake of emancipation and the first African-American freedom movement, mass imprisonment took hold in reaction to the second. Put simply, as white conservatives surrendered on integration, they insisted on getting much tougher on crime, to which they symbolically chained a host of developments they found troubling, from civil disobedience to urban rebellions.

The consequence was unprecedented prison growth, but of a particular sort. In 1960 the U.S. prison population was 60 percent white. By 2005 it was 70 percent non-white. By most measures of racial disparity, American criminal justice is more separate and unequal today than it was when Martin Luther King proclaimed from the Lincoln Memorial: “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.”

This contextualization of the prison boom within the tragically conflicted saga of American race relations matters not so much because it offers a singular, definitive account of causation, but because it helps point the way forward. If racially skewed prison warehousing represents the latest incarnation of American racism, then political mobilization and social transformation on the scale of the civil rights movement may be necessary to dislodge it.

***

At the close of the Bush era, there are scattered signs that America’s prison paroxysm may have run its course. Although the country’s inmate population continues to rise (climbing 16 percent between 2000 and 2006, not counting the advent of U.S. detention abroad, from Guantánamo to Bagram), budget crises are forcing an array of politicians to reckon with what their tough-on-crime posturing has created. In New York the state assembly has been revising the Rockefeller drug laws to make them more forgiving. In Kansas, parole officers are no longer automatically reincarcerating their charges for low-level violations like failing a urine test. In Iowa lawmakers are requiring that all new sentencing laws be assessed for potentially negative racial impacts, and in Nevada politicians have started rolling back mandatory minimums. Across the country and on both sides of the aisle, increasing numbers of policymakers are starting to agree with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who told the American Bar Association in 2003 that “our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long.”

Navigating these uncertain waters, Abramsky, Gilmore, and Simon all conclude with guarded hope. Although California’s penal system has become one of the nation’s most crowded and dysfunctional in recent years, Abramsky cautiously praises Governor Schwarzenegger for revisiting the concept of prison-based rehabilitation. (Not long after American Furies went to press, the governor proposed sending 22,000 inmates home early to save money.) For his part, Simon hopes that aging baby boomers and the Katrina debacle will force a redirection of government attention from crime control to health care and infrastructure, a shift he believes will reinforce rather than erode social solidarity and public trust. Gilmore closes with a glowing case study of the grassroots political action group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, an organization with almost no resources that has formulated a far-reaching anti-racist agenda that Gilmore proffers as a template for anti-prison activists everywhere. At the same time, nonprofits like the Sentencing Project and the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation have produced a blizzard of white papers proposing how carefully calibrated treatment programs, a return to judicial discretion, alternatives to incarceration, and robust reentry programs can enhance public safety while cutting costs. Bruce Western discusses some of these proposals in this issue.

Katzenbach said, "I'm old and maybe I can't learn new ideas, but I think our criminal justice system has to be rational and fair."

One of the most ambitious of these non-governmental efforts, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in American Prisons, was headed by none other than Nicholas Katzenbach, now in his eighties. Forty years had passed since he first surveyed American criminal justice on behalf of the country’s last liberal administration, when in 2005 he was asked by the Vera Institute, a mid-size think tank, to undertake a limited follow-up. What Katzenbach found appalled him. Over the decades, state and federal policymakers had indeed acted on most of his original recommendations but had invariably done the opposite. The outcome, he and his small staff concluded after a round of national hearings, was that the hard end of the criminal justice system had grown larger, meaner, and, in their view, more socially corrosive. Prison turbulence had declined since the late ’60s, but rape, crowding, infectious disease, and acute mental illness remained endemic—and on a monumental scale. Each year, some 13.5 million people cycle through the country’s adult jails and prisons, they observed. They go in “poor, undereducated, and unhealthy,” and they come out worse.

With a constricted mandate to study only prison conditions, Katzenbach’s second survey coupled strong criticisms—“We should be astonished by the size of the prisoner population, troubled by the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos, and saddened by the waste of human potential”—with sensibly modest policy recommendations: more funding for corrections staff, better health care, independent oversight, and less reliance on supermax isolation.

Yet critics of America’s criminal justice system—which now devours $204 billion a year and circumscribes 7.2 million lives, counting offenders on probation and parole—would do well to spend more time with Katzenbach’s original report than its cautious sequel. In the first study, this early advocate for civil rights within the Justice Department, who once famously faced down George Wallace at the schoolhouse door, called not only for more professional, more treatment-oriented prisons, but fewer of them. Imprisonment should be a sanction of last rather than first resort, he proposed. At the same time, he and his first commissioners advocated a more expansive understanding of crime: “The criminal justice system has great potential for dealing with individual instances of crime, but it was not designed to eliminate the conditions in which most crime breeds.” “It needs help,” they argued, in the form of better schools, better housing, better jobs, and genuinely equal citizenship.

In a phone interview, Katzenbach, whose memoir Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ will be published this fall, says that he still believes this Great Society approach is the best one. “I’m old and maybe I can’t learn new ideas, but I think our criminal justice system has to be rational and fair,” he told me. “Harsh punishment is satisfying, but our system has to do more than that. It ought to reflect the type of society we want to be. It ought to stand for decency.”

In 1967 Katzenbach titled his report “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,” and he still contends in his forthcoming autobiography that “every law has to satisfy both sides of the equation”—it needs to confront lawlessness but also safeguard civil liberties and social justice. To do so, as Katzenbach proposed more than a generation ago, will require more than technocratic remedies confined to the criminal justice arena. We will need to embark upon “a revolution in the way America thinks about crime.”

Posted by lois at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

Boston Review: 3 articles in Special Issue including: : "No Further Harm: What we owe to incarcerated fathers", "Guarded Hope:Lessons from the history of the prison boom" and "Reentry: Reversing mass imprisonment"

JULY/AUGUST 2008--- Boston Review
all at:
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.4/prison.php

No Further Harm
What we owe to incarcerated fathers by Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Mary Lyndon Shanley
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Guarded Hope
Lessons from the history of the prison boom by Robert Perkinson
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Reentry
Reversing mass imprisonment by Bruce Western

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, “With the world’s largest prison population,” he said, “our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity.” Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison’s significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb’s hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor’s degree. The large black-white disparity in incarceration is unmatched by most other social indicators. Racial disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) are all significantly lower than the seven to one black-white ratio in incarceration rates.

Though lurid portrayals of black criminality are easy to find on the local news or reality TV, the deep class divisions in imprisonment may be less apparent. Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since 1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high school education. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go to prison before age thirty-five. The stigma of official criminality has become normal for these poorly educated black men, and they are thereby converted from merely disadvantaged into a class of social outsiders. These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.

***

The effects of the prison are not confined within its walls. Those coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face an narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little and offer only a fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities in incarceration. In many cases people with felony records are denied housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states they are permanently denied the right to vote.

The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families. Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married. Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The family instability surrounding incarceration persists across generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and 25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on visiting day. In short those with prison records and their families are something less than full members of society. To be young, black, and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom has produced mass incarceration—a level of imprisonment so vast and concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group.

Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s, immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in the experience of African-Americans in poor neighborhoods, the advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection from discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration undermined the project for full African-American citizenship and revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute social disparity.

Skeptics may concede that mass incarceration injured social justice, but surely, they would contend, it contributed to the tremendous decline in crime through the 1990s. Indeed, the crime decline of the ’90s produced a great improvement in public safety. From 1993 to 2001, the violent crime rate fell considerably, murder rates in big cities like New York and Los Angeles dropped by half or more, and this progress in social wellbeing was recorded by rich and poor alike. Yet, when I analyzed crime rates in this period, I found that rising prison populations did not reduce crime by much. The growth in state imprisonment accounted for 2-5 percent of the decline in serious crime—one-tenth of the crime drop from 1993 to 2001. The remaining nine-tenths was due to factors like the increasing size of local police forces, the pacification of the drug trade following the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, and the role of local circumstances that resist a general explanation.

So a modest decline in serious crime over an eight year period was purchased for $53 billion in additional correctional spending and half a million new prison inmates: a large price to pay for a small reduction. If we add the lost earnings of prisoners to the family disruption and community instability produced by mass incarceration, we cannot but acknowledge that a steep price was paid for a small improvement in public safety. Several examples further demonstrate that the boom may have been a waste because crime can be controlled without large increases in imprisonment. Violent crime in Canada, for example, also declined greatly through the 1990s, but Canadian incarceration rates actually fell from 1991 to 1999. New York maintained particularly low crime rates through the 2000s, but has been one of the few states to cut its prison population in recent years.

More importantly, perhaps, the reduction in crime was accompanied by an array of new problems associated with mass incarceration. Those states that have sought reduced crime through mass incarceration find themselves faced with an array of problems associated with overreliance on imprisonment. How can poor communities with few resources absorb the return of 700,000 prisoners each year? How can states pay for their prisons while responding to the competing demands of higher education, Medicaid, and K-12 schools? How can we address the social costs—the broken homes, unemployment, and crime—that can follow from imprisonment? Questions such as these lead us to a more fundamental concern: how can mass imprisonment be reversed and American citizenship repaired?

***

We can begin to tackle these issues by understanding how we got here. The origins of today’s mass incarceration can be traced to basic political and economic shifts in the 1960s. On the economic side, the prison population swelled following the collapse of the urban manufacturing industry and subsequent cascade of social ills that swept poor inner-city neighborhoods. Serious crime—the traditional target of the penal system—was an important part of these urban social problems. Murder rates in large cities grew dramatically from 1965 to 1980. But in addition to the problem of serious crime, the penal system was used to manage many of the byproducts of persistent poverty: untreated drug addiction and mental illness, homelessness, chronic idleness among young men, and social disorder. It was the management of these social problems, not serious crime, that fuelled incarceration rates for drug users, public-order offenders, and parole violators.

As the social crisis of urban America supplied the masses for mass incarceration, the penal system itself became more punitive. The tough-on-crime message honed by the Republican Party in national politics since the Goldwater campaign of 1964 spoke to the racial anxieties of white voters discomfited by civil rights protests and summertime waves of civil unrest felt in cities through the decade. Conservatives charged that liberals coddled criminals and excused crime with phony root causes like poverty and unemployment. President Nixon launched a war on crime, only to be surpassed by President Reagan’s War on Drugs, which applied the resources of federal law enforcement to the problem of drug control. Policy experts abandoned rehabilitation, concluding that prisons could only deter and warehouse those who would otherwise commit crime in society. These politics produced a revolution in criminal sentencing. Mandatory minimum prison sentences, sentencing guidelines, parole abolition, and life sentences for third-time felons were widely adopted through the 1980s. The no-nonsense, tough-on-crime politics reached a bipartisan apotheosis with President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which launched the largest prison construction project in the nation’s history. As a result of these changes, prison time—as opposed to community supervision—became the main criminal sanction for felony offenders.

The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted in three fallacies of the tough-on-crime perspective. First, there is the fallacy of us and them. For tough-on-crime advocates, the innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals, and the prison works to separate us from them. The truth is that the criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons. Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioral staples of male youth. Most of the crime they commit is perpetrated on each other. This is reflected most tragically in the high rates of homicide victimization among males under age twenty-five, black males in particular. Some young men do become more seriously and persistently involved in crime, but neither the criminal-justice system nor criminologists can predict who those serious offenders will be or when they will stop offending. Thus the power to police and punish cannot separate us from criminals with great distinction, but instead flows along the contours of social inequality. Visible markers like age, skin color, and neighborhood become rough proxies for criminal threat. Small race and class differences in offending are amplified at each stage of criminal processing from arrest through conviction and sentencing. As a result the prison walls we built with such industry in the 1980s and ’90s did not keep out the criminal predators, but instead divided us internally, leaving our poorest communities with fewer opportunities to join the mainstream and deeply skeptical of the institutions charged with their safety.

Second, there is the fallacy of personal defect. Tough-on-crime politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals. Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less human than the rest of us. The diagnosis of defective character points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative efforts and justifying the mission of semi-permanent incapacitation. The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled association of crime with race in political talk. But seeking criminality in defects of character, the architects of the prison boom ignored the great rise in urban youth unemployment that preceded the growth in murder rates in the 1960s and ’70s. They ignored the illegal drug trade, which flourished to fill the vacuum of legitimate economic opportunity left by urban deindustrialization. They ignored, too, the fact that jobs are not just a source of economic opportunity but of social control that routinizes daily life and draws young men into a wide array of socially beneficial roles. Lastly, they ignored the bonds of mutual assistance that are only weakly sustained by communities of concentrated poverty. Thus young men would return home from prison only to easily surmount once again the same stunted social barriers to crime that contributed to their imprisonment in the first place.

The final fallacy of the tough-on-crime perspective is the myth of the free market. The free market fallacy sees the welfare state as pampering the criminal class and building expectations of something for nothing. Anti-poverty programs were trimmed throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and poor young men largely fell through the diminished safety net that remained. For free marketeers, the question was simply whether or not to spend public money on the poor—they did not anticipate that idle young men present a social problem. Without school, work, or military service, these poor young men were left on the street-corner, sometimes acting disorderly and often fuelling fears of crime. We may have skimped on welfare, but we paid anyway, splurging on police and prisons. Because incarceration was so highly concentrated in particular neighborhoods and areas within them, certain city blocks received millions of dollars in “correctional investment”—spending on the removal of local residents by incarceration. These million-dollar blocks reveal a question falsely posed. We never faced a choice of whether to spend money on the poor; the dollars diverted from education and employment found their way to prison construction. Our political choice, it turned out, was not how much we spent on the poor, but what to spend it on.

***

Getting tough on crime created a sustained public policy mistake of immense proportions. If the prison boom was indeed produced by a historic collision between the jobless ghetto and a punitive politics of civil rights backlash, retreating from mass incarceration will involve equally fundamental shifts in politics and economics. What would a new politics of criminal justice look like, and what policies would it promote?

There are small signs of change in the public conversation about crime, punishment, and poverty, though bold ideas have not yet penetrated the mainstream. By supporting education and treatment programs for prisoners, leaders from both parties have offered one answer to Senator Webb’s question about the future of punishment in America. In April this year, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, which funds literacy programs, drug treatment, and other services for prisoners and ex-prisoners. While prison reform advocates supported Second Chance, a bipartisan majority was ensured by Christian conservatives like Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who spoke up for a law that promoted a message of redemption and faith-based prison programs.

Second Chance can be viewed as one achievement in a broader movement for improved prisoner reentry policy. Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has been a leading voice in naming the social problem of prisoner reentry and proposing policy solutions. In his 2005 book But They All Come Back Travis writes: “The reality of mass incarceration translates into the reality of reentry . . . [T]he harmful effects of high rates of incarceration and reentry call for . . . policies that promote reintegration, not retribution.” Here the reentry movement challenges mass incarceration by reasserting the importance of rehabilitation, but deliberately stops short of recommending a reduction in prison populations.

If the employment problems of young minority men in poor urban neighborhoods are a prime precondition for mass incarceration, prisoner reentry programs that promote employment may offer a way out of the street-prison cycle in which so many are caught. A wide variety of programs aim to help people move from prison to the labor market. GED classes, vocational training, prison work-programs, and job readiness instruction all seek to improve prisoners’ preparation for working life. In part, the wide variety of programs reflects the sheer range of behavioral and cognitive deficits of the prison population.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for these programs is that many men and women coming out of prison—most in their thirties or older—have never held a steady job. The newly released behave awkwardly around coworkers and have never cultivated daily work habits; these shortcomings may be no less debilitating than illiteracy or a shortage of vocational skills. Social scientists refer to the necessary traits of reliability, motivation, and sociability as “non-cognitive skills.” While education programs in prison can help develop the cognitive skills of math and verbal ability, the non-cognitive skills that promote success in free society are hard to develop while incarcerated. To learn these skills, people coming out of prison must repeatedly rehearse the habits of regular work. But precisely because they have so little work experience and carry the added penalty of a criminal record, formerly incarcerated men and women have little access to the steady jobs that can make them more productive. For ex-prisoners, extreme economic insecurity is a trap that prevents them accumulating the kind of work experience that enables a return to mainstream social life.

Building everyday work habits means working every day; instead of relying only on a wary labor market, some programs try to break the cycle of economic insecurity by offering jobs immediately after release from prison. The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) in New York provides transitional jobs in combination with job placement services to move prisoners into the open labor market. CEO takes people straight out of prison, and puts them in a week-long training program before assigning them to a seven-hour day, four-day week in small supervised crews doing groundskeeping and other manual work at the New York minimum wage of $7.15 an hour. On the fifth day of each week, the CEO participants take vocational and job readiness classes that prepare them for job searching and interviews. CEO’s transitional jobs generally last a month or two and program graduates receive transport and supermarket vouchers if they remain employed.

CEO, in a move rare among reentry programs, has sought to study the effectiveness of its program through experimentation. The experiment randomly assigned parolees either to transitional jobs or to a control group composed of former inmates who received job-search assistance from the support staff, but not transitional work. Parolees who took on transitional jobs within three months of release from prison saw their arrest rates reduced by about 20 percent compared to the control group. However, parolees who entered the transitional jobs more than 3 months after prison release experience no reductions in recidivism. It seems that timely intervention, immediately after prison, provides the greatest benefits.

CEO’s method shows promising results, but is narrowly directed toward alleviating unemployment. A small but intensive program run by the Brooklyn District Attorney suggests how a more comprehensive program might operate. Charles “Joe” Hynes is unusual among prosecutors. He actively incorporates alternatives to incarceration into the work of his office. Beginning in 1990 Hynes promoted a diversion program that sent nonviolent drug offenders to substance abuse treatment instead of prison. By the later part of the decade, the D.A. was convening regular meetings of community groups throughout Brooklyn to connect parolees and probationers to drug treatment, housing, and jobs.

The meetings were run by Hynes’s energetic First Assistant District Attorney, Patricia Gatling. Gatling did not saw the D.A.’s role as simply seeking the toughest justice for Brooklyn’s criminal defendants. In her view, the D.A. is a community lawyer, charged with strengthening neighborhoods and improving public safety in a broad sense. The community meetings in Brooklyn’s poor neighborhoods were Gatling’s effort to replenish the area’s flagging social capital—the web of networks and supports that greases the wheels of social life. After a few years, Hynes hired a full-time social worker and developed his own prisoner reentry program. At first it operated only in a few precincts with high parole caseloads, but later it spread across the whole borough.

Called ComALERT (Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together), the program provides parolees with drug treatment, transitional employment, and housing. Most ComALERT participants, have prior convictions for drugs or violence, and all have been ordered into drug treatment. Some homeless parolees enter the Ready Willing and Able (RWA) program that provides a full year of employment and supportive housing in return for a promise of complete drug and alcohol abstinence and a biweekly regime of drug testing. RWA participants work in street cleaning and other unskilled jobs for $7.50 an hour, share small apartments, and receive drug counseling and educational programming. A recent evaluation found that two years after release from prison, ComALERT clients were 18 percent less likely to be rearrested than a comparison group with a similar history of crime and drug use. ComALERT participants also earned about $1000 more each quarter and were about 20 percent more likely to be employed.

A large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America's new carceral class.

These positive outcomes suggest three policy lessons. First, transitional jobs are large-dose interventions that can reduce recidivism at least for a while by providing close supervision and paying wages. Regular work habits cannot be built cheap, though these programs are still less expensive than incarceration. Second, the programs that work best are comprehensive, bundling together a variety of services including drug treatment and housing. Because released prisoners often cope with a range of problems, additional supports must be in place for transitional jobs to help. Third, timely intervention is imperative; successful schemes provide a job immediately out of prison.

While the results from transitional jobs and supplementary programs are encouraging, we must be realistic about what these projects can achieve. Most initiatives operate at the local level. Sometimes their efforts span a city, but more often several neighborhoods. The high quality results that stem from local efforts will not scale to counties and states. Even in the best-case scenario, if recidivism is reduced by 10 or 20 percent, ex-prisoners would still be re-arrested at rates of around 40 percent or more.

Still, a large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America’s new carceral class. Instead of focusing assessment of reentry programs narrowly on the decrease in recidivism achieved, we should account for the benefits of families reunited, the paychecks that help support the children of ex-prisoners, and the value of literacy for its effects on quality of life in addition to its role in averting crime. The cost-benefit calculus looks quite different when we include these social goods. For nonviolent drug and public-order offenders, intensive, large-dose treatment in the community (which is relatively cheap) begins to look like a good alternative to custody in prison (which is expensive). Here we count as benefits not just reductions in crime, which may be modest, but all the ways in which social life is made more normal by drawing our erstwhile outsiders back into society, instead of building more walls to keep them out.

***

What would a different kind of penal system look like: one that viewed the unemployment of ex-prisoners as a key problem to solve and the deficit of noncognitive skills a central obstacle to steady work? Projecting our exemplary local programs on to the national stage, all parolees leaving prison in need of a job would move into closely supervised community-service work paying minimum wage. Like Brooklyn’s RWA program, these jobs might be offered for up to a year and coupled to job placement with the goal of parolee self-sufficiency. Those with drug problems would enroll in a rigorous program of treatment and testing. Those living on the streets would move into supportive housing.

How many would participate in this national reentry program, and at what cost? Employment statistics for prisoners suggest a national transitional jobs program would enroll about 180,000 out of the 700,000 prisoners released each year. Around 200,000 would fill new places in drug treatment programs. Another 100,000 would require housing. A national program of transitional jobs, drug treatment, and supportive housing would represent a significant expansion of the social services available to ex-prisoners. The total cost of this effort would be about $7 billion each year, roughly one-tenth of total current spending on corrections. In the present climate such a program seems entirely fanciful—how could we pay for it?

One source of funds is the vast treasury expended on large-scale incarceration itself. By cutting the size of prison populations and redirecting some of the spending on custody to community programs, we could dramatically expand services to prisoners after they have been released. Unlocking America, a recent proposal from the Washington, D.C.-based JFA Institute, recommends four ways to reduce the size of prison populations.

First, Unlocking America recommends decriminalizing drug offenses and other “victimless” crimes. The authors argue that arresting drug dealers has no crime reducing effect because new dealers will fill the vacancies opened by incarceration. Since the mid-1990s, prominent conservatives, too, have supported the view that incarceration for drug dealing fails to curb the drug trade. In 1995 John DiIulio and Anne Piehl—the former would become an appointee in the second Bush administration—wrote that their “best estimate of the incapacitation effect (number of drug sales prevented by incarcerating a drug dealer) is zero,” and they therefore “value drug crimes (sales and possession) at zero social cost.” Though the War on Drugs failed to reduce drug use or the prices of drugs, it boosted incarceration and racial disparity. Drug convictions account for about a third of the increase in state prison populations and about three-quarters of the increase in the federal prison population through the 1980s and ’90s.

Second, time served in prison can be reduced. In the mid-1970s prisoners were incarcerated for relatively short periods, given their offenses. Since then, life sentences have become common for violent offenders and those with prior felony convictions. Three-strikes provisions add long stretches of prison time for repeat convicts. Truth-in-sentencing requires felony offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. These measures serve to lengthen prison time account for about half of the growth in state prison populations over the last twenty years.

Third, the length of probation and parole-supervision periods could also be reduced. People on probation and parole are likely to return to prison, but usually as a result of a technical violation, not a new crime. Unlocking America finds little evidence that lengthy parole and probation terms reduce crime. Probationers and parolees are most likely to fail in the first twelve months. After that first year, the authors write, “supervision is more of a nuisance than a means for assisting people after prison or preventing them from committing another crime.”

Finally, the authors argue that re-imprisonment should be eliminated for technical violations of parole and probation. Parolees and probationers are released to the community subject to a large number of conditions that typically include employment, drug testing, and regular meetings with case officers. When they violate these conditions, supervising officers can send them back to prison. Many parolees and probationers are sent back to prison for failing a drug test or missing an appointment—their reappearence behind bars may have nothing to do with crime. Incarceration for technical violations of parole or probation was a significant driver of state imprisonment rates through the 1990s. In some states, like California, most of those on parole are re-incarcerated for technical violations, adding a year or more to their time in prison.

Of all the proposals to reduce prison populations, restricting re-incarceration for technical parole violators seems most politically feasible. Some states are already trying to reduce parole revocation, sometimes by imposing more intensive community supervision or a few days in lock-up instead of months and years in prison. Kansas now conducts a risk assessment for parolees. Some are assigned to a low-risk group that receives only loose supervision. Case managers place high-risk parolees in special programs, and enforce a variety of punishments short of return to prison. Since adopting these measures in 2003, Kansas has halved the number of parole violators. Half a dozen other states, like Arizona, Illinois, New York, and Texas, have also adopted a system of graduated sanctions to reduce parole revocation. At the national level, eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would reduce prison admissions by about 30 percent each year. By itself this measure could save much of the funds needed for a national prisoner reentry program.

Eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would also support a reintegrative model of corrections. Given that over half of state prisoners struggle with problems of drug addiction, we should anticipate that many will fail and become involved again in drugs or miss work or parole appointments. These failures should be viewed as a component of reentry. Relapse is part of a learning process in which new non-cognitive skills of reliability and persistence develop. If failure is a likely stop on the path to steady work, parole supervision must also allow people to fail and remain in their communities.

***

So far I have argued that we can edge away from mass incarceration by promoting two kinds of policies: expanding support for the reentry of prisoners into society and scaling down the size of the prison population. The two steps are linked; we expand our support for ex-prisoners in the community by using incarceration more sparingly and revoking freedom less willingly. Money that we now spend on prison can be spent on treatment and jobs.

There are more advocates now for reentry programs than decarceration, but a real policy debate over the future of mass incarceration has barely begun. Though Congress dipped a toe in the pool of reintegrative criminal justice by passing the Second Chance Act, a national large-dose reentry program is a much larger effort. Faced with mounting correctional budgets, governors in Kansas and elsewhere have experimented with parole reform. Some states are also considering sentencing reforms. Commissions in New York and California are now reviewing three-strikes and mandatory minimums. Despite these signs of change, the reform process remains in its infancy. Few correctional facilities have closed, and incarceration rates continue to rise.

While an expanded reentry policy and a revision of the penal codes may stop the growth of prisons, the future of mass incarceration depends very much on its past. A less punitive criminal justice system cannot by itself solve the deep social problems of poor urban neighborhoods. These problems—disorder and addiction largely flowing from chronic idleness—set in motion the politics and policy choices that delivered mass incarceration. As America’s meager welfare state failed to prevent school dropout and persistent unemployment among unskilled inner-city residents, prisons and jails expanded to fill the vacuum of social control formerly occupied by the education system and the labor market. The police, the courts, and correctional administrators were charged with solving the social problems of idleness, addiction, and mental illness, while also controlling their natural jurisdiction over serious crime. But they were given just a few tools: the powers of arrest and imprisonment. Mass incarceration contains an unruly population beset with trouble; wholesale confinement makes the population more manageable but leaves their troubles undiminished.

To expect a rehabilitative criminal justice alone to reverse mass incarceration is, in an odd way, to repeat the mistakes of the tough-on-crime movement. We would again be turning to line officers to manage the byproducts of deep social inequalities. While we might spend billions on a jobs program for former prisoners, we would still send them out to look for work in labor markets where half of the young men are jobless. We would still be asking them to stay sober amid a thriving street trade in illegal drugs. This is what prisoners mean when they say they are set up to fail. This is not just a recidivist’s special pleading: it reflects the deficiencies of a theory in which society’s losers have only themselves to blame.

The police, the courts, and correctional administrators were charged with solving social problems, but their only tools were the powers of arrest and imprisonment.

Reversing mass incarceration will ultimately require that social problems be solved with social policies. The two most urgent priorities are the prevention of school dropout and the creation of a viable and legitimate economy in poor inner-city neighborhoods. Not even the most rehabilitative criminal justice policy can solve these problems. We normally think of education and employment as sources of economic opportunity. In the era of mass incarceration, we also see that they are positive sources of social control, providing order in people’s daily lives.

School failure and joblessness, of course, lie deep at the core of American urban inequality. Even if our policy knowledge is equal to these problems, the political will is weak, especially since carceral stigma now clouds the neighborhoods of the urban poor. It seems unlikely under these conditions that communities of concentrated poverty will somehow launch new programs of urban renewal or that middle class voters will discover sympathies for the poor. Are new efforts at social investment impossible?

The upcoming election season holds more promise for an expanded social policy than we have seen in years. The coming debate over national health insurance holds enormous significance for communities most affected by mass incarceration. If a plan emerges that covers treatment for substance abuse, mental health problems, and chronic disease, and if the plan is truly universal, carrying no exclusions for those in prison or with felony convictions, it can significantly improve the lives of those entangled in the penal system. By aiming to cover everyone, national health insurance creates a common cause between the urban poor wracked by mass incarceration and the suburban middle class. We have recently seen this kind of cross-class support in defense of Social Security—a universalistic and venerated institution operating with great anti-poverty effect. Supporters repelled the threat of privatization not because Social Security slashes poverty among the elderly, but because it guarantees the material dignity of all citizens in retirement.

Policies narrowly tailored only to the needs of released prisoners can at best attract the support of altruists and the poor themselves. The ineffectiveness of these constituencies is reflected in the quality of these targeted policies as they currently stand. But by actively constructing the common citizenship of the poor and the middle class, a universal social policy provides a powerful force for social integration.

***

Nearly a century ago, Eugene Debs, at his sentencing under the Sedition Act in 1918, offered a moving account of the moral significance of the prison. “Your Honor,” he said, “years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs’s vision was radically egalitarian. Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one incarcerates us all.

Be it health care, education, or job opportunities, universal provision in any domain of public policy—and the bonds of citizenship on which that sense of universality is built—joins us to a common destiny, and might be the best chance for the redevelopment of urban schools and labor markets. If the duty of the citizen is to stay in school and go to work, then the political will to maintain good schools and promote employment is woven into the social fabric. This political logic implies that special projects targeting special populations will not do the job. If poor schools are to improve, it is more likely they will do so as a result of an effort to improve educational opportunity nationwide. If we are to promote jobs for unskilled men in the inner-city, the attempt will receive its greatest impetus from a national employment policy that aims to improve the working lives of all citizens.

Clearly we are not there yet. The norms of good citizenship, however, develop in tandem with the institutions of civic life. Political will can grow in small increments led by the promotion of institutions that provide on the basis of Marshall’s “basic human equality.” Such a renewal of an authentically American social citizenship would sweep away the jobless ghetto and the mass incarceration that it has spawned.

Posted by lois at 07:10 PM | Comments (0)

UN Special Rapporteur On Education: Seeking comments from prisoners and people who have been incarcerated on the right to education

Prisoners on Prison Education: the Special Rapporteur on education seeks to hear from people in, or formerly in, detention on their experience and views on the right to education in detention.

The Special Rapporteur on education has chosen to present to the United Nations Human Rights Council a report on the right to education for people in detention. The report is to be presented in June 2009. The aim is to clarify the content of the right to education in places of detention, to identify those with the principle responsibility for its implementation and to highlight the most notable challenges faced in that implementation. It also seeks to gather examples of innovative approaches to date and lessons learnt and to offer recommendations as to how implementation might be improved.

The Special Rapporteur wishes to hear from men, women and children in, or previously in detention, from all global regions including those with disabilities and those without; from different races, religions, cultures and sexual orientation; from those in closed and/or open institutions; those who have chosen not to or have been unable to undertake educational programmes (formal and/or informal) and those currently enrolled; and from those with little or high levels of education.

If you are or have been in detention and wish to express your view, or detail your experiences, on the provision of the right to education in detention, the Special Rapporteur would welcome hearing from you. Please send your comments and all relevant information by way of postal mail to: Special Rapporteur on the right to education, P.O. Box 1245-1007, Centro Colon, Costa Rica, or by e mail to: vernormu@yahoo.es

Alternatively if you are in a position to distribute this request for information to people in detention, the Special Rapporteur expresses his gratitude and thanks in advance.

It is requested that comments are returned no later than 31 December, 2008.

Background information on the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the right to education

A Special Rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. S/he is usually called upon to examine, monitor, advise and publicly report back on a human rights situations in specific countries or on a specific human right theme. Mandate-holders serve in their personal capacity, and do not receive salaries or any other financial compensation for their work. This independent status of the mandate-holders is crucial in order to be able to fulfil their functions impartially.

The mandate of the Special Rapporteur, currently Mr. Vernor Muñoz Villalobos (Costa Rica) on the right to education was established in 1998 and has been renewed regularly since that date, most recently in 2008
.
His specific role is to:
[g]ather, request, receive and exchange information from all relevant sources, including Governments, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, including non-governmental organizations, and other concerned stakeholders, on the realisation of the right to education on and obstacles limiting effective access to education, and to make recommendations on appropriate measures to promote and protect the right to education.

The right to education was first formally pronounced in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its article 26 stated:

Everyone has the right to education... Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Since that date the human right to education has been reiterated numerous times particularly in United Nations human rights treaties. Its meaning and content has been developed over the years, and it is now generally recognized that Governments have the responsibility to ensure that education in all its forms and at all levels should exhibit the following interrelated and essential features: a) availability; b) accessibility: c) acceptability; and d) adaptability. The aim of the Special Rapporteur is
to contribute towards the recognition, respect, protection and fulfilment of these responsibilities.

As with many Special Rapporteurs, Mr. Vernor Muñoz Villalobos organizes his work around three main activities:

a) Thematic reports to the Human Rights Council. Each year, he focuses on a specific theme of his mandate. Topics addressed to date include theright to education of girls, the right to education for people with disabilities and the right to education in emergency situations. His thematic focus for 2009 is the right to education for people in detention.

b) Country visits. The purpose of country visits is to investigate the situation of the right to education at the national level. During the visits, normally two a year, the Special Rapporteur interacts, amongst others, with governmental and non-governmental actors, including parliamentarian, members of the judiciary, academics, the media, and other members of civil society. After each 'mission' he presents a report to the Human Rights Council which analyzes the situation of that country vis-à-vis the concerns of the mandate and offers recommendations to the Government and other relevant parties to improve that situation.

c) Communication with Governments. The Special Rapporteur seeks credible and reliable information on specific allegations of human rights violations on the right to education from a variety of sources, including Governments, non-governmental and specialised agencies, United Nations bodies and individuals. Upon receipt of this information he may decide to address the concerned Governments and request their comments and observations on the case. These communications together with the replies of the Governments concerned are compiled every year in a report submitted to the Human Rights Council.

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

July 09, 2008

Conviction Overturned After 36 Years in Solitary For "Angola 3" Member Albert Woodfox

COALITION TO FREE THE ANGOLA THREE
July 8, 2008

Conviction Overturned After 36 Years in Solitary For "Angola 3" Member Albert Woodfox
Federal Judge Rules Flawed Trial Lead to Wrongful Conviction in Case of Prison Guard's Murder
Lawyers Call on Prosecutors to Forgo Retrial, Release Men Immediately

In response to a Federal judge's decision overturning the conviction of Albert Woodfox, one of the two "Angola 3" members who remain in prison, lawyers for the men called on the State Attorney General's office to drop any further appeals and release the men immediately. Woodfox and fellow inmate Herman Wallace have been imprisoned since 1972 for the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. They spent 36 years of that time in solitary confinement.

In response to a Federal judge's decision overturning the conviction of Albert Woodfox, one of the two "Angola 3" members who remain in prison, lawyers for the men called on the State Attorney General's office to drop any further appeals and release the men immediately. Woodfox and fellow inmate Herman Wallace have been imprisoned since 1972 for the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. They spent 36 years of that time in solitary confinement.

"Herman and Albert were convicted of a crime based on false evidence. Now, a judge has overturned that conviction. They must be released immediately. They are men in their 60s who've spent the last 36 years of their lives in prison for a crime they did not commit. No further legal delay should rob them of even another day of their lives," said Chris Aberle, a lawyer for Woodfox.

"The state has already stolen nearly four decades of Albert Woodfox's life. The injustice in this case is unfathomable. How can Louisiana continue to imprison a 61 year old man after a federal judge has ruled that he shouldn't have been convicted in the first place? This case calls up the brutality and racism of an older Louisiana. The state needs to move forward. Albert must be released," said Nick Trenticosta, also a lawyer for the men.

The third member of the Angola 3, Robert King, was released in 2001 after a judge overturned his conviction. King had spent 29 years in solitary confinement for a separate crime.

www.Angola3.org

Posted by lois at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2008

NY: CLOSE-TO-HOME TREATMENT FOR YOUTHS GAINS NOTICE BUT OBSTACLES PUT IN PATH BY PRISON DEPENDENT GROUPS

CLOSE-TO-HOME TREATMENT FOR YOUTHS GAINS NOTICE
An initiative by the city Department of Probation shows signs of success.
By Betsy Morais

City Limits WEEKLY #647
July 7, 2008

Dr. Clarice Bailey was sent to New York City by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to find out what it’s like inside the city’s program for juvenile justice reform. The Institute had its eye on the Department of Probation initiative called “Project Zero,” which seeks alternative kinds of rehabilitation to locking up young offenders in juvenile jail. Bailey spoke with probation officers, staff at the family courts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and counselors who work one-on-one with families in the system. Then she met the youths.

She recalled what the kids said about the adult staffers assigned to help them: “They’re like family. I’m close to them. They helped me when I got kicked out of my grandma’s house. They made sure I was all right.”

Bailey, who has a doctorate in public administration and policy and has worked closely with youth involved in criminal activity and the justice system, came away impressed. Last month, the Ash Institute announced Project Zero had been selected from a pool of about 1,000 applicants as a finalist for the Annie E. Casey Innovations Award in Children and Family System Reform.

Hope – and statistics

Probation Commissioner Martin Horn started the program in 2003, with “zero” standing for the goal of sending no kids to juvenile correctional facilities outside the city. Instead, they would return home to live with their families, attend school as usual, and participate in intensive therapy sessions aimed at helping them get on the right path from inside their own neighborhoods.

In the year before Project Zero began, 1,300 to 1,500 New York City youths were sent to juvenile facilities, according to Department of Probation (DOP) statistics. In 2004, the Department sent 1,257 juveniles to state correctional facilities, and by 2007, 795 juveniles were admitted. DOP data also show that from 2002 to 2007, the number of city youth incarcerated as a result of their Family Court judgment decreased by 27 percent. The DOP reports that this decline was caused by the Project Zero initiative.

“The administration of juvenile justice in our country is marked by an absence of coherent leadership and is essentially unmanaged. Project Zero represents our resolve to take advantage of that vacuum and change the paradigm in New York from the bottom up,” Horn told the award’s national selection committee at Harvard in June.

Horn credited Mayor Bloomberg with making an unprecedented commitment to reforming the system. Attempts had been made in the past – particularly during the Koch and Giuliani administrations – but never before at this scale, he said.

In addition, the DOP took advantage of new technologies that made better data analysis possible. That’s part of what makes Project Zero innovative, said Bailey, a former senior associate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation now working as an independent social services contractor in Philadelphia. “It’s not this big mystery or scary thing, but rather it’s a tool that is used day in and day out to help make decisions about where kids get placed, how kids get placed,” she said. The program consistently evaluates its own progress and makes adjustments accordingly, based on data. “It keeps people from making really willy-nilly decisions.”

Some of the data is impressive. For young people who participated in Project Zero’s community-based intensive care program, Esperanza, it shows a big drop in the juvenile re-arrest rate after nine months – from 50 percent in 1999 to 16 percent in 2007.

The financial statistics are also attention-getting, because it costs more to send kids to correctional facilities than it does to keep them at home. Before Project Zero, the city paid up to $80 million each year to lock up juveniles in prison. Now, the mayor’s office projects the program will save the city $43 million over the next four years.

While incarceration costs between $120,000 and $200,000 per year, per youth—according to the most recent data from the state Office of Children and Family Services—the DOP says Esperanza costs $15,000 per year, per youth.

Though Horn got the initiative off the ground, Esperanza Director Jenny Kronenfeld is running it day to day. For her, the reward extends beyond the city’s monetary savings – she has seen young people go from juvenile court to college campus. That's fitting, since "esperanza” is the Spanish word for hope.

Project Zero “pushed everybody to think really broadly: Is there anything else we can do in the community?” Kronenfeld said, adding that the program also espouses a more realistic – meaning patient – perspective on youth development. Leaders accept that change happens in small steps: If a teenager never goes to school, then starts to go three days a week, that’s something. “Change doesn’t happen over night,” she said. “It takes time.”

In an interview, Horn offered a hypothetical typical Esperanza case under the umbrella of Project Zero: A teenager is charged with stealing a classmate’s iPod after some history of truancy and the beginnings of gang involvement. Although he is a high-risk candidate for further crime, his family is intact and he is motivated to turn his life around. When he is taken on by Esperanza, he is assigned a case manager who will be accessible to him seven days a week, and who's only handling up to five other cases at any given time.

That kind of relationship creates an atmosphere for discussing the larger picture. “They have opened discussions about oppression," says Bailey. Most of the youth who enter what those in the field often call the "crib to prison pipeline” are black or Latino, she said. Esperanza teaches how to “operate in, successfully negotiate our society, which is built on oppression.”

She added that staffers "help them get their context from their story as a young person of color in this system – in not just the juvenile system, but our social system, that doesn’t have their best interest at heart.”

City Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez, who chairs City Council's Juvenile Justice Committee, supports the Project Zero philosophy. Her legislative director Miguel Hernandez said, “These are kids we’re talking about. When someone makes a mistake, we want to make sure we’re not setting them up for failure" – which is more likely to result after a young person has spent time in prison.

Leaving beds empty

Yet as Project Zero’s success is lauded by Harvard, the program struggles for a warmer reception in Albany. When the Ash Institute award committee asked about tension between the city and state in funding alternatives to juvenile incarceration, Commissioner Horn chuckled. He and Deputy Commissioner Patricia Brennan, who stood beside him, asked, “How much time you got?”

According to a city newsletter from last August, “Probation Today,” Brennan has said the state does too little to encourage the development of alternatives to incarceration for juveniles.” Horn describes his department’s relationship to the state as a “creative tension.” When money is spent running underused state prisons, it can’t be invested in alternative juvenile programs.

Since last year, the state’s Office of Children & Family Services announced the closing of six juvenile correctional facilities – because of Project Zero and other programs like it. “We were paying for a lot of empty beds,” OCFS spokesman Edward Borges said. But when the plan came before the state legislature, it was chiseled down to closing three prisons, merging two programs in the Adirondacks into one, and shutting down one wing of the Lansing juvenile facility.

The state Senate ensured that Great Valley, the correctional facility in the western corner of the state, would stay open – even though it was half empty, Borges said. He explained, “It makes no sense for us to ship kids from New York City all the way up there. We were disappointed.” Pyramid, a prison in the Bronx, also remains despite what Borges described as inadequate facilities.

“That’s where I guess you get into the politics,” said State Assemblyman William Scarborough, a Queens Democrat. As chairman of the Assembly's Committee on Children and Families, he supported the plan to close all six prisons, but he was unable to push it through budget negotiations.

State Senator Carl Kruger, chairman of the Senate's Social Services, Children and Families Committee, said “it just made sense” to keep Pyramid open. The Brooklyn Democrat argued that it serves as more of a residential than correctional facility for juveniles – playing an essential role, within the city.

But in upstate communities, the justice system is “an economic engine,” Scarborough explained, employing generations of families. He and his colleagues in the Legislature received letters from unions that represent prison employees. He recalled their message, “You can’t close our facilities – they contribute a million dollars to our economy.”

Kruger contends that Project Zero is asking too much of the state when it requests that the money saved by running fewer juvenile facilities be invested into city alternatives-to-detention programs. “The city would like the state to pay for everything,” he said. “They would like to hijack as much money from us as they can.”

DOP spokesperson Jack Ryan said, “We would like to receive our fair share.” When juvenile prisons close, the DOP believes the savings should be reinvested in developing incarceration alternatives where need is greatest—in New York City.

Though Scarborough is counting on OCFS to renew its push for more prison closings and remains optimistic about the outcome in the next fiscal year’s budget, he doesn’t foresee legislation emerging to support juvenile incarceration alternatives before then. “You can put forward legislation, but you’re going to run into the same problem,” he said.

It may take awhile, but Commissioner Horn believes the state will have to follow Project Zero’s lead eventually, when “the reality becomes too stark for even the New York State Legislature to ignore, and ultimately the money will materialize.”

In the meantime, Harvard will announce its winner in September – the recipient of $100,000. Should DOP win, Ryan says the department doesn't yet know how it would use the prize.

- Betsy Morais
http://www.citylimits.org/content/articles/viewarticle.cfm?article_id=3587&content_type=1&media_type=3

Posted by lois at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)

Georgia sex offender law criminalizes homelessness

Georgia sex offender law criminalizes homelessness
USA Today, July 7, 2008

ATLANTA (AP) — A strict new Georgia law is designed to keep sex offenders away from children by monitoring how close they live to schools, parks and other spots where kids gather — and threatens them with strict penalties if they fail to register.

But what about the offenders who don't have an address?

Georgia's Supreme Court on Monday considered whether the law unfairly subjects homeless offenders to a life sentence if they fail register a home address.

The case involves William James Santos, a homeless man and convicted sex offender who was kicked out of a Gainesville homeless shelter in July 2006 and was arrested three months later on charges he failed to register with Georgia's sex offender list.

His lawyers say the law creates a guessing game for Santos and other homeless offenders because it bars them from giving a post office box or simply saying they are homeless.

They also argue that homeless offenders will become a prime target for the measure's tough criminal penalties, which call for a mandatory life in prison sentence for offenders who fail to register their address for a second time.

"These sex offenders, unfortunate enough to have no street address, are subject to life in prison," said Adam Levin, an attorney for Santos. "This gives Mr. Santos and every other sex offender with no address no other right but to fail to comply with the law."

Prosecutors warn that allowing offenders to mark themselves as homeless risks defeating the purpose of the measure. It could "invite sex offenders to not enter a lease, not purchase a property, to declare themselves homeless," said assistant district attorney Vanessa Sykes.

Sykes also contended the law can be interpreted to give the homeless some leeway to mark down a temporary address, such as a shelter.

But that can lead to a cumbersome process. The homeless offenders who move from spot to spot every night would have to notify the local sheriff's department each time, she said.

"I guess, practically, sex offenders who are homeless should find places that are near sheriff's offices," offered Justice Carol Hunstein.

"Yes, and I'm sure sheriff's officers would appreciate that," Sykes responded.

The Santos challenge is among a growing number of cases targeting Georgia's sex offender law, which sponsors declared one of the toughest in the nation when it was adopted in 2006.

It bans sex offenders from living, working or loitering within 1,000 feet of just about anywhere children gather. That includes schools, churches, parks, gyms, swimming pools or one of the state's 150,000 school bus stops.

Since it was adopted, though, it has been under attack.

The Georgia Supreme Court last week heard arguments targeting the section that mandates a life prison sentence for sex offenders who twice fail to register. A federal lawsuit filed last month claims that a provision banning sex offenders from volunteering at churches is illegal. And federal courts are already considering challenges to provisions that would evict offenders who live near churches and school bus stops.

Santos' attorneys asked the court to declare the law illegal because it amounts to "cruel and unusual punishment." But they told the justices they hope the court's decision will at least give the homeless a "safety valve" to put down a general location, such as a street or a park.

"We're not asking for specific special treatment for the homeless," said Brett Willis, another Santos attorney. "We're just looking for a way to comply."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-07-07-georgia_N.htm

Posted by lois at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Update on CORI Reform & Governor's Executive Order

Update on CORI Reform & Governor's Executive Order

July 17th, 2008 10AM
Boston City Hall - Piemonte Room
5th floor

The Massachusetts Alliance to Reform CORI, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, and the Boston Worker's Alliance have actively engaged the Executive office on Health and Human Services in crafting language that implements fair CORI hiring practices inline with Governor Deval Patrick's Executive Order "Regarding the Use and Dissemination of Criminal Offender Record Information by the Executive Department."

On July 17th at 10AM in the Piedmont Room on the 5th floor of Boston City Hall you will be updated on the current status of the amended employment practices and polices requested by Governor Deval Patrick's Executive Order.

In his Executive Order Governor Patrick mandated "Each agency in the Executive Department shall examine and, if necessary, amend its employment practices and policies to reflect the policy set forth in this Section.."

The order in part states:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Deval L. Patrick, Governor of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by virtue of the authority vested in
me by the ConstittioPna, rt 2. c. 2, § 1, Art. 1, do hereby order as
follows:
Section 1. It shall be the policy of the Executive Department
with respect to employment decisions that a criminal background
check will only occur, and its results will only be considered, in those
instances where a current or prospective employee shall have been
deemed otherwise qualified and the content of a criminal record is
relevant to the duties and qualifications of the position in question.
Such instances will include, without limitation, those in which a
criminal conviction creates a statutory disqualification for the posi.tion,
or the position requires interaction with vulnerable populations and a
criminal background check is necessary to ensure that the applicant
does not pose a public safety risk.

In implementing this policy, the employer should consider the
nature and circumstances of any past criminal conviction; the date of
the offense; the sentence imposed and the length of any period of
incarceration; any reasonably available information concerning
compliance with conditions of parole or probation, including orders of
no contact with victims and witnesses; the individual's conduct and
experience in the time since .the offense, including, but not limited to,
educational or professional certifications obtained since the time of
the offense or other evidence of rehabilitation; and the relevance of
the conviction to .the duties and qualifications of the position in
question. Charges that did not result in a conviction will be
considered only in circumstances in which the nature of the charge
relates to sexual or domestic violence against adults or children,
consistent with Executive Order No. 491, Establishing a Policy of
Zero Tolerance for Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, or
otherwise indicates that the matter has relevance to the duties and
responsibilities of the position in question.

Each agency in the Executive Department shall examine and, if
necessary, amend its employment practices and policies to reflect the
policy set forth in this Section and in Executive Order No. 491. The
Secretary of each Executive Office shall be responsible for ensuring
that each agency within her Secretariat conducts this review. All
Secretaries shall report to the Commonwealth's Chief Human
Resources Officer the results of their review and the steps taken to
comply with this policy no later than March 31, 2008. Thereafter, the
Chief Human Resources Officer shall take whatever actions are
necessary and appropriate to ensure that this policy is implemented
fully.

Section 2. The EOHHS, in consultation with agencies under
the Secretariat and the Massachusetts Office for Victim Assistance,
shall promulgate a consolidated set of regulations that provide clear
guidelines to be followed by EOHHS and its agencies, as well as their
vendor programs, when reviewing the criminal records of current or
prospective employees.
Without compromising the Secretariat's commitment to ensure
the safety and security of .the vulnerable populations it serves, the
EOHHS regulations shall ensure rehabilitated individuals with criminal
backgrounds be given a fair opportunity to be employed and
reintegrate successfully into the workforce.
The EOHHS regulations shall ensure that the rights of current
and prospective employees are protected by (a) providing individuals
with information regarding EOHHS hiring policies and procedures
regarding CORl and individuals' rights to dispute the accuracy and
relevancy of any CORI; (b) creating a systematic means for
employers to document all factors taken into consideration, including
evidence of rehabilitation, in making employment decisions; (c)
specifying strong penalties for vendors that fail to comply with any
requirement; and (d) streamlining and simplifying,

Posted by lois at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)

Boston Globe: Making a start on CORI

Making start on CORI
By Adrian Walker, Globe Columnist | July 8, 2008

The idea of making it easier for convicts to get jobs has always been a tough sell at the State House.

But even though the Legislature appears almost militantly opposed to passing bills this session, there is a good chance that some changes are in store for the much-maligned Criminal Offender Record Information law, better known as CORI.

Reform would be too strong a description, especially for legislation that has literally been years in coming. The finished product will shorten the period before records are sealed and may make it easier for those who are arrested, but not convicted, to have their record cleared.

People hoping for more are frustrated by what it will not include. Advocates were especially hopeful that employers could be banned from asking applicants right off the bat whether they had ever been convicted of crimes. Employers would have been able to ask about criminal history later in the process.

Most of all, they worry that if a watered-down bill is passed this session, the Legislature will not revisit the issue for years. "It is a major concern, because we know that CORI has not been touched in any significant way in decades," said Aaron Tanaka of the Boston Workers Alliance, which has taken a leading role in lobbying for the bill.

There isn't much dispute in the Legislature that CORI needs fixing, but there is vast disagreement over what is wrong with the law and how to repair it. Before Governor Deval Patrick essentially seized control of the issue, there were more than two dozen bills on file purporting to address it. Some would ease access to records, some would limit it. While the warring bills have been eliminated, the factions that produced them remain vital.

Representative Eugene O'Flaherty, the House chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told me he worries that a flurry of competing and contradictory amendments could still sink efforts to change the law. He said he hopes to persuade his colleagues to stick as closely as possible to the legislation as written.

I realize many people view CORI as a remote issue. But the reality is that almost everyone convicted of a crime will eventually reenter the work force or will try to. There is strong argument for making that path easier than it is now.

One of the great complications in reforming CORI, as O'Flaherty points out, is that different kinds of employers have different needs. Obviously, employers in areas affecting public safety, for example, need to know the background of the people they are hiring, and they may as well know right up front. Some would argue that in other areas, a long-ago conviction for a relatively minor infraction is less crucial. But crafting a bill that takes every possibility into account is impossible. Flaherty says he hopes to persuade legislators to buy into this bill as a first step, which can be refined down the road.

CORI is interesting because it mirrors our whole conflicted view of how to deal with people who commit crime. We struggle with whether we really believe in rehabilitation, whether we want convicts living down the street, whether we want them as co-workers, whether a debt to society is ever really paid.

The bill O'Flaherty is proposing will include several provisions unrelated to CORI, including one that would ease penalties for first-time drug offenders arrested in school zones.

"My whole district is a school zone," notes O'Flaherty, whose district includes Chelsea and Charlestown. "I don't think someone arrested at 3 a.m. should necessarily go to prison because they are arrested within 1,000 feet of a school." Yes, O'Flaherty is a defense lawyer, as many will no doubt point out.

This bill doesn't solve every problem with criminal records, but some action is preferable to the lip service this issue has received to date. Helping criminal offenders restart their lives is no simple task. One hopes that the governor and the Legislature are sincere when they suggest that this bill is just a start, rather than the last word, on how we plan to treat people with prison in their past.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/07/08/making_start_on_cori?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2008

NM: Prison reform? It’ll take more than task-force report. By Tilda Sosaya

Sunday, July 6, 2008 THE NEW MEXICAN
MY VIEW: Prison reform? It’ll take more than task-force report
By Tilda Sosaya

The Governor’s Prison Reform Task Force is recommending changes to the New Mexico Department of Corrections, including a name change to include the word, “rehabilitation.”

Window dressing.

When the governor first organized the task force, a national report had been widely disseminated throughout state governments. The Report, “One in a Hundred: Behind Bars in America” was released in February by the Pew Center for the States. This report reveals the blatant overuse and dependence on incarceration to resolve societal ills.

Think about it: For every 100 people in our nation, one is currently in a prison or jail. More alarming is the fact that one in every 33 adult citizens in the United States is under some form of criminal supervision – if not behind bars, they are on probation or parole.

As a longtime advocate for the rights of prisoners and their family members, I had fully expected to be appointed to the task force, especially because I had been appointed to the governor’s transition team for corrections in 2002-2003. Since then, however, I made the “political mistake” of criticizing the governor for kickbacks (i.e., campaign donations) from the private for-big-profit prison companies. I was not asked to sit on the task force, but I eagerly attended every single meeting.

In mid-April, when the task force held a public meeting, I mustered forces and brought several other prisoner family members to the Department of Corrections fro this important meeting.

In spite of family members who spoke of severe medical neglect, insufficient and substandard food, outrageous and other life-threatening abuses of prisoners, long delayed releases and the proliferation of drugs in the system (most often introduced into prisons by employees) these issues were never adequately addressed.

No one addressed the filth and mold, MRSA virus – a life-threatening staph infection that has been rampant in New Mexico prisons – or any other of the ruinous conditions in our prisons. No one spoke about the waste of money, building yet another row of razor wire, shady contracts for vitamins and food supplements, and no one spoke about unnecessary expansion and construction of new or expanded prisons.

While pre-release programs, pre-sentencing diversion programs and more education and vocational training for prisoners might help to stabilize or even reduce the current rates of incarceration in New Mexico, the kind of changes most sorely needed were simply ignored. If prison abuse, including poor-quality and insufficient food, and even outright medical neglect does not cease, New Mexico can expect further disturbances in our prisons. If access to law books and legal counsel is minimal, and no redress of grievances is available to prisoners, if exceedingly high costs of telephone and commissary items are not addressed, if family contact and visitation does not improve, then this task force was merely window dressing. It was, after all, these types of conditions that led to the brutal and unforgettable 1980 prison riot.

Clearly, preparation for release is a great idea, but if prisoners are not released on time, it raises the basic issue of overcrowding. At least 10 percent of the current prison population consists of people doing “in house” parole because no viable parole plan has been “approved” for them. This is the responsibility of case workers, many of whom are undereducated and lack the necessary skills to network in the community.

And finally, the entire issue of privatization was designated “off the table” for this task force, in spite of a legislative finance committee report released last year that unequivocally stated that the DOC paid too much money, over and above contract requirements, to the private prisons. An “error” in the calculation of the consumer price index was cited as the reason. So the task farce did the job for which it was created. To make the governor and the Department of Corrections appear to be doing a “great job” of running our prisons. So much for any real prison reform. As a Roman statesman once queried: Cui bono? To whose benefit?

A longtime prison-reform activist, Tilda Sosaya lives in Pecos, NM

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

A measure of justice for Regina McKnight

Tue, Jul. 01, 2008
A measure of justice for Regina McKnight
By BARRY LESTER and SUE VEER
Guest Columnist, The State Newspaper

In 1991, Regina McKnight turned to cocaine to numb the pain she felt as a result of her mother’s sudden death. She happened to be pregnant at the time. When she suffered a stillbirth, the state of South Carolina charged her with homicide by child abuse, claiming that her cocaine use caused the stillbirth despite the fact that scientific research does not link the two.

Ms. McKnight was the first woman in S.C. history to be convicted of this crime for having suffered what both the prosecution and defense agreed was an unintentional stillbirth. As a result, she has spent nearly eight years in jail. Throughout this time, she has been deprived of her liberty, her rights and her connection with her children: All because of myth, not scientific fact.

But recently, the truth finally resulted in a measure of justice. In May, the state Supreme Court unanimously reversed Ms. McKnight’s conviction. The court concluded that she did not get a fair trial — because her attorney failed to challenge the junk science that was used to convict her. The court specifically noted that experts should have been called to testify about studies “showing that cocaine is no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor.”

Much has been written about the rush to judgment that occurred in the 1980s around the problem of cocaine use and so-called “crack moms” and “crack babies.” At that time, it was believed that children exposed prenatally to cocaine would be inevitably and irrevocably damaged and that their mothers were unfit to parent. Public outrage led to the arrest of women who were pregnant and could not overcome their addictions. Courts in every state except South Carolina have said such prosecutions violate law and common sense.

All this, and almost 20 years of research has yet to identify a “crack baby” syndrome. From a scientific point of view, the outrage was unwarranted and policies misguided. The idea that cocaine caused serious damage to the fetus was based more on animal studies than human studies. And in those human studies, methodological flaws were well-documented. Yet the public and child welfare officials alike assumed that pregnant women who used cocaine could not be trusted to bring up their children.

We have learned a lot since the 1980s. We know that drug addiction is a disease, a complex disorder involving the brain. And we know more about the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure. The largest study, of more than 8,000 deliveries, showed that medical problems in cocaine-using pregnant women occur less than 5 percent of the time and were not related to cocaine when variables such as alcohol and tobacco use were controlled.

Because the court said Ms. McKnight did not receive a fair trial, the state was entitled to re-try her — to have a second chance to prove that her cocaine use caused the stillbirth. Even though, as a matter of science, the state would be unable to do this, continuing to fight would mean enduring another murder trial and risking another conviction in spite of the truth. By pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter, Ms. McKnight could finally get out of jail and avoid additional years of uncertainty and anguish. No woman, however, should have to plead guilty to a crime she didn’t commit.

At least 96 other women in South Carolina have been arrested, some for homicide, most on lesser charges of child abuse and drug delivery, because they continued their pregnancies in spite of a drug or alcohol problem. At least 12 criminal cases are pending. Many, many more cases are in the civil child welfare system because South Carolina treats a single unconfirmed positive drug test on a pregnant woman or newborn as a basis for presuming neglect. As a result, too many children have been removed from their homes and separated from mothers and families who love them. All this because policy and law lag behind medical understanding.

Yes, there are things women do that increase health risks during pregnancy, but they generally have more to do with poverty and lack of access to health care than anything else. And yes, there are drug users who are inadequate mothers, but there are also drug users who are competent mothers. With the support and treatment, they can care for their children. Families can be preserved.

It is time for South Carolina and its Supreme Court to reexamine its costly and counterproductive approach to the issue of pregnant women and drug use. Neither continuing a pregnancy to term nor suffering a stillbirth should be treated as a crime. The real crime is for the state to continue to ignore science and the overwhelming evidence that treatment, not punishment, is what is best for pregnant women, children and families.

Ms. McKnight was released from prison last month.
Dr. Lester is a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Brown University; Ms. Veer is chief executive officer of Carolina Health Centers in Greenwood.
http://www.thestate.com/editorial-columns/v-print/story/448487.html
The story of Regina McKnight is featured in the RCPP comic book, "Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children" which is posted on the Real Cost of Prisons website: www.realcostofprisons.org and then to Comic Books.

Posted by lois at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Aging prisoners add to prison strain in Calif.

Aging inmates add to prison strain in Calif.
By DON THOMPSON - Associated Press Writer
Published 9:07 am PDT Saturday, July 5, 2008

Louis Rodriguez, a lifelong thief, is costing California taxpayers a lot of money.

And so are others like him, aging criminals locked away for life or extended sentences who require expensive, ongoing medical treatment.

The state's expanding prison population and the increasing average age of its inmates appear to be key factors behind one of the most contentious issues facing California lawmakers. They are at odds over whether to approve $7 billion to build medical units for a prison health care system that has been ruled unconstitutional.

The money has been ordered by a federal court receiver who has been placed in charge of medical care in the state's 33 adult prisons.

Rodriguez is among those requiring pricey care.

He is serving a life sentence after being convicted of a "third strike" for stealing candy and cheese from a Los Angeles County grocery store. The conviction in 2000 followed another petty theft and a string of robberies nearly 30 years ago.

The 66-year-old inmate is in the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, coping with the final stages of terminal liver disease. Parole officials rejected his petition for compassionate release, so he most likely will spend the rest of his days in the prison hospice.

"For people who are old and feeble, hopefully we'll be left to die in peace," Rodriguez said. "I'm waiting for that phone call that says you can go home to die. That's all I got left."

Aging inmates cost two to three times as much to incarcerate as younger prisoners, an average $98,000 to $138,000 a year.

Between 1980 and 2007, the average age of California inmates increased from 27 to 37.

The prisons hold more than 22,000 inmates over age 50, or about 13 percent of the overall adult inmate population. In 1998, the number was 9,820, or 6 percent of the prison population.

Prison authorities say inmates age faster than the general population because of stress, a history of drug use, poor medical care throughout their lives and other factors. A 50-year-old inmate can have the physical and mental condition of someone 10 years older.

At the end of 2007, California housed 4,805 inmates age 60 and older, or about 3 percent of the prison population. A decade ago, that number was 1,951, or just more than 1 percent of all prisoners.

Prison populations nationwide also are aging.

The number of inmates 55 and older in state and federal prisons increased from 44,200, or 3.3 percent of the population, in 2000 to 80,200, or 5.3 percent, in 2006, according to the most recent statistics available from the U.S. Justice Department.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation expects its over-60 population to increase 80 percent by 2012.

That rise is due in part to tougher sentencing laws passed in recent years that send convicts away for longer stretches.

Some advocates say the state could save money by giving compassionate release to older, infirm inmates. A year ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was open to releasing "the old, feeble and sick who pose no threat to the public."

The corrections department estimates that paroling all nonviolent offenders 55 or older, sick or not, would trim the prison population by about 1,000 and save about $20 million annually.

"We are paying the most amount of money to incarcerate those people who are the least risk to public safety," said Heidi Strupp, an advocate with the San Francisco-based group Legal Services for Prisoners with Children.

A proposal by state Senate Democrats would use existing compassionate-release laws to free more ailing inmates. Caring for a severely disabled inmate can cost the state $1 million a year or more, said state Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden, chairman of a subcommittee that oversees prison spending.

The proposal would limit the releases to nonviolent offenders who have not committed sex crimes or serious offenses.

The debate over how to care ill inmates is connected to three lawsuits related to overcrowding in state prisons.

The 33 prisons house about 159,000 inmates but have a capacity of just about 100,000. Another 11,000 inmates are in fire camps or private prisons. Plaintiffs claim the crowding has led to poor medical, mental health and disability care for inmates.

If a settlement isn't reached, a special panel of three federal judges could order a prison population cap or other steps leading to the release of thousands of inmates.

The receiver appointed to oversee prison health care wants the $7 billion to build medical units for roughly 6 percent of the inmate population, or about 10,000 beds.

"Given the aging population in corrections and their health care status, we essentially need to build ... long-term housing for people who need long-term care," receiver J. Clark Kelso told a state budget subcommittee this spring.

Funding concerns have stalled Kelso's plan in the Legislature, which is struggling to deal with a projected $15.2 billion budget deficit for the current fiscal year.

Some actions to deal with aging prisoners are being considered independent of any court orders.

California corrections officials are turning the surplus El Paso de Robles juvenile correctional facility in San Luis Obispo County into a low-security prison for 1,000 nonviolent men over age 50. The conversion is starting this month.

Other attempts to ease the strain on older inmates are under way in the Legislation, but some of the steps could add to the already high cost of incarceration.

A bill by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, would grant privileges such as easier work and bunk assignments to inmates over age 55. They also would get first call for meals and would not be required to drop to the floor during security alarms.

Prison employees would be trained to deal with inmates who may no longer be able to hear commands or might act out because of dementia. Older inmates would receive an identification card and an ombudsman to help with their complaints.

The bill stalled in the Senate Appropriations Committee, leaving its fate uncertain because Kuehl is termed out of the Legislature after this year.

Ultimately, the answer may be supervised release programs for most elderly inmates and minimum-security "prison nursing homes" with specially trained staff for the most frail, said Jonathan Turley, founder and director of the Project for Older Prisoners, an advocacy group.

"Older prisoners may be high risk for bad checks or forgery, but they're not high risk for escape," said Turley, a George Washington University law professor. "I mean, they're not going to throw their walkers over the razor wire."

Federal studies show that less than 5 percent of inmates 55 and older are likely to commit new crimes after their release. By comparison, about 70 percent of California inmates overall return to prison.

Posted by lois at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Critics: Prison labor hurts free-world jobs. Program allows companies to employ prisoners, operate for less with subsidies

Houston & Texas News
July 6, 2008, 11:40PM
Critics: Prison labor hurts free-world jobs
Program allows companies to employ inmates, operate for less with subsidies

By LISA SANDBERG
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN — The East Texas town of Lufkin was home to one of the biggest manufacturers of tractor-trailer beds in the state until sluggish sales forced the firm, Lufkin Industries, to close its factory earlier this year, displacing 150 workers.

For everyone but the affected employees, the story might have ended as little more than a cautionary tale of what happens when an established business gets squeezed by a smaller, nearby competitor, in this case, Direct Trailer and Equipment Co., which sells an almost an identical product for as much as $2,000 less.

Instead, plenty of people have taken notice of this East Texas labor imbroglio, and some are crying foul.

As it turns out, Direct Trailer produces its tractor beds with cheap prison labor and subsidies from the state of Texas. The company rents space inside the Michael Unit, a 2,900-bed facility in Tennessee Colony, for $1 a year. The state foots the tab on work force health care, too.

The arrangement is part of a federal program that allows select companies to provide paid work experience to select prisoners, as long as the prison operation doesn't eliminate similar free-world jobs nearby. The Prison Industry Enhancement, or PIE, initiative has been operating in Texas since 1993 and includes nearly 400 inmates working in five prison plants across the state.

Companies applying to operate inside the prisons must have outside-prison operations and must pay wages commensurate with those paid for similar work in the same locality's private sector. (Welders make at least $8 an hour in the area where Direct Trailer operates its prison plant.)

Inmates keep about 20 percent of their wages, with the rest going to their dependents, victims, the courts and the state.

Paul Perez, general counsel for Lufkin Industries, said his company paid workers upward of $15 an hour and couldn't compete in an already competitive market against a newcomer who could produce a less expensive product.

"It exacerbated an already difficult situation," Perez said.

Direct Trailer's president, John Nelson, could not be reached for comment.

One state lawmaker, Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, is calling not just for Direct Trailer's state contract to be severed, but he's also questioning the validity of every one of PIE's five prison programs.

Nichols accuses PIE's board, known as the Private Sector Prison Industries Oversight Authority, of approving the contract with Direct Trailer without having the necessary employment data required by the federal government and the board.

He said that when he investigated Direct Trailer's 2005 certification, he discovered that the board compared only overall employment in the area against national employment data without looking at local employment data for "specific skills, crafts or trades," as was also required.

Nichols also said that when he contacted the Texas Workforce Commission, he received a letter last month that said the agency "does not have unemployment data for specific skills, crafts, trades or occupations." The letter was signed by a manager Jesse Lewis, director of external relations.

Nichols said that can mean only one thing: "None of (the programs) are meeting the guidelines."

Kathy Flanagan, presiding officer of the oversight board, acknowledged the board made decisions looking at "only part of the information," but she deflected blame elsewhere. "It's not our responsibility to ask the Texas Workforce Commission how they get their information."

She said in light of the current controversy, the board was now reviewing its policy and procedures.

Such comments are unlikely to satisfy labor officials, who complain that even when the rules are followed, the prison program need only demonstrate no harm to local jobs.

"We think the law needs to be clear: Using prison labor should not result in job losses anywhere, and certainly not in the state of Texas," said Rick Levy, legal director of the Texas AFL-CIO.

Nichols said he will urge the oversight board to amend its rules so that contracts are signed only with companies that can show no jobs anywhere in the state will be affected by a prison operation.

"If you can train a prisoner (in) a trade, I think that's very good. But not if one law-abiding Texan has to lose his job," Nichols said.

Robert Carter, PIE's program administrator, is hoping that the fracas won't lead to the demise of a program that's provided job training and pay to hundreds of inmates, the vast majority of who will one day be released.

He said studies indicate that those who participate in PIE get jobs quicker upon release, earn higher pay and stay in them longer than non-participants.

Perez said his company has been able to rehire most of the 150 laid-off workers from the trailer plant and put them to work manufacturing oil field equipment.

But there are new rumblings from the owner of another East Texas trailer manufacturing firm. Charles Bright, who owns Bright Coop, said his sales are down, and he's wondering if it's because Direct Trailer is selling its product cheaper.

"I'm not opposed to the program, as long as I can rent one of those buildings for $1 a year," Bright said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5874654.html

Posted by lois at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2008

Miles to go for L.A. justice. Policing is improved; now let's focus on the root causes of crime. By Joe Domanick

From the Los Angeles Times
Miles to go for L.A. justice
Policing is improved; now let's focus on the root causes of crime.
By Joe Domanick
July 6, 2008

Over the last few decades, it's been easy to blame the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the district attorney's office for the catastrophic failures of L.A.'s criminal justice system. These failures, as most Angelenos know, have led to a dangerously overcrowded, racially explosive county jail system; a violent gang problem that continues unabated after 10,000 deaths over 25 years, and generation after generation of young black and brown men ceaselessly shuttled off to state prisons at a rate of more than 22,000 a year -- as many as 70% of whom, once released, will recycle back within three years.

From the Los Angeles Times
Miles to go for L.A. justice
Policing is improved; now let's focus on the root causes of crime.
By Joe Domanick
July 6, 2008

Over the last few decades, it's been easy to blame the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the district attorney's office for the catastrophic failures of L.A.'s criminal justice system. These failures, as most Angelenos know, have led to a dangerously overcrowded, racially explosive county jail system; a violent gang problem that continues unabated after 10,000 deaths over 25 years, and generation after generation of young black and brown men ceaselessly shuttled off to state prisons at a rate of more than 22,000 a year -- as many as 70% of whom, once released, will recycle back within three years.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the LAPD and the Sheriff's Department epitomized the problems with the criminal justice system: Leadership was calcified and visionless, disdainful of social science and innovative policing reforms, tolerant of brutal and abusive officers, unaccountable to civilian control and perennially at war with the African American community. Under LAPD chiefs Ed Davis and Daryl F. Gates and Sheriff Sherman Block, these departments generated scandal after scandal, culminating in 1992 in one of the worst riots in U.S. history.

For their part, Ira Reiner (1984-1992) and Gil Garcetti (1992-2000), as district attorneys, spent their time sniffing the political winds and playing to the worst instincts of voters. Reiner reacted to gang violence by calling for the "writing off" and imprisoning of the 70,000 young residents who had, often inaccurately, been identified as gang members. And Garcetti opportunistically prosecuted the pettiest of offenses as third-strike, 25-years-to-life crimes (even after having lobbied against the politically popular law in Sacramento).

Today, despite some notorious incidents, such as the 2007 May Day MacArthur Park police riot, and some ongoing disgraces such as the dangerous and inhuman conditions in our county jails, we're better served by our law enforcement leaders. They've lowered the crime rate while largely making peace with the leaders of L.A.'s African American and Latino communities.

Chief William J. Bratton has accelerated the transformation of the LAPD into a much more accountable organization. Sheriff Lee Baca has worked to transform the paramilitary culture of his department, and he has sought a comprehensive approach to public safety that includes better schools, healthcare and social services. For his part, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley has eschewed headline-grabbing, get-tough answers to complex questions.

Unfortunately, they've been busy retooling the engine to run more efficiently instead of giving it the drastic overhaul it desperately needs. Even though this new generation of leaders has supported long-term crime prevention strategies, they have been unwilling to commit significant money or political capital to the process, focusing, for example, on immediate reductions in gang crime while remaining unwilling to fight for the money and make the psychological shift necessary to end the gang culture at the heart of the problem. Their primary focus has remained on crime suppression (or crisis management in the jails). Consequently, L.A.'s criminal justice system still operates as a zero-sum exercise in locking up the same people from the same neighborhoods generation after generation, without an end game in sight.

Why, if they recognize the need for the shift, have they failed to accomplish it? One reason why is that it's extremely difficult. Baca and Cooley's surrogates have been meeting for almost two years with the L.A. Public Defender's Office, the Probation Department, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and with L.A. Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan to develop rehabilitative prisoner reentry strategies. Yet only a few small, experimental pilot programs have been established.

Law enforcement agencies are not used to working together for the common goal of long-term crime prevention. Common goals, a common vision and even a common language have to be developed, and everybody needs to sign off before there's any movement. Community service organizations, drug treatment facilities and other such groups all have to be brought into the fold. A jurisdictional tangle of state, county and city laws must also be dealt with before much progress can be made.

Much of the problem lies with L.A.'s politicians. With a few exceptions (such as state Sen. Gloria Romero, City Comptroller Laura Chick and Councilwoman Janice Hahn), city leaders as well as our representatives in Sacramento have been unwilling to lead on these issues. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has coordinated all the city's gang programs under one entity in the Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development for the first time -- in effect laying down the path and officially recognizing for the first time that the city has to have a holistic approach to eradicating gang crime and youth violence. He should be commended. But the money he's allocated to the agency is a relative pittance. He's putting his real political muscle behind a sales tax for mass transit, not public safety.

Organizations like the notoriously anti-reform California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. -- the prison guards union -- and the California District Attorneys Assn. are also a big part of the problem. The latter has successfully fought attempts to reform mandatory minimum-sentencing laws such as three strikes, nearly drumming Cooley out of the organization a year or so ago when he sought to soften some of the most unjust provisions of the law.

And Mike Jimenez, president of the guards union, has declared that he has "never met an inmate that could be rehabilitated." By bullying or buying off governors and legislators with big campaign dollars, and fear-mongering with the help of victims rights groups, the union (which has donated $12 million to state campaigns over five years) has been astoundingly successful in thwarting change. They, along with the conservative legislators who demand near Old Testament punishment for drug offenses and other nonviolent crimes, have stuffed our prisons to almost 200% capacity and left us no money for alternatives to incarceration.

Meanwhile, the public remains profoundly ignorant or deeply misinformed about how the system really works. Some of the fault for this lies with the broadcast media. Talk radio drove the hysteria that led to California's three-strikes law in 1994. Now, cable television has become part of the lynch-mob media. Led by CNN's Nancy Grace, cable shows make it appear that criminals are constantly getting off scot-free. In fact, America's (and L.A.'s) crime rates are at record lows -- yet the U.S. prison population has risen every year for 30 years.

Networks such as MSNBC, meanwhile, feature endless prison documentaries that give the impression that every one of the millions of Americans in prison -- half of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes -- is a psychotic ax-murderer. Local TV news, with its love of violence, cheap melodrama and good guys-versus-bad guys simplicity, also promotes a ceaseless message: Be afraid, be very afraid.

Then there are the cop melodramas that -- with the astounding exception of HBO's "The Wire" -- almost never look at criminal justice as a system that is dramatically failing large segments of black, Latino and poor white Americans. Nor do these shows make the connections between crime and bad schools, shoddy healthcare, bad jobs and a history of racial disenfranchisement. They don't discuss the connection between the historic racial, class and economic disenfranchisement of black Americans and the entrenched criminal culture that has emerged in many of our worst urban ghettos and barrios. Instead, they present shows like "CSI" and "Law and Order" as dramas where good police in a just system triumph over bad criminals. Everything is clear-cut good guys vs. bad guys, just like in real life -- right?

Last among the culprits are those white liberals and black leaders barring the door to open, honest public discourse about black crime in America because, as the Rev. Al Sharpton recently pointed out, they don't want to "air their dirty laundry in public." But everybody knows that crime and violence in our nation's poor, black ghettos has been pandemic for decades. This must be talked about and examined.

Young black men in ghettos across America are trapped in a hedonistic, values-warped subculture of narcissistic flash, violence, gangs, immediate self-gratification and self-destruction -- unable to pass through a revolving door of gangs, drop-out education, unemployment, incarceration, release and re-imprisonment. Nor is the problem limited to black communities. Latinos now make up the largest group of inmates in state prisons.

Law-and-order conservatives, meanwhile, have offered nothing but more of the same -- more prisons and bigger platitudes.

We can't deal with the root causes, and begin the long task of fashioning a solution, until we acknowledge the dreadful dysfunction of this criminal-prone subculture.

And we will never have a criminal justice system that works for all Americans until we start to hold accountable those who are responsible.

Joe Domanick is a senior fellow at USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism and at the Center on Media Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Comment from Lois: He is also the author of an excellent book--"Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America's Golden State."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-domanick6-2008jul06,0,353207.story

Posted by lois at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

CA/National: Aging Prisoners "Nursing Homes" Very Costly

Aging inmates add to prison strain in Calif.
By DON THOMPSON, Associated Press Writer
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Vacaville, CA (AP) --

Louis Rodriguez, a lifelong thief, is costing California taxpayers a lot of money.

And so are others like him, aging criminals locked away for life or extended sentences who require expensive, ongoing medical treatment.

The state's expanding prison population and the increasing average age of its inmates appear to be key factors behind one of the most contentious issues facing California lawmakers. They are at odds over whether to approve $7 billion to build medical units for a prison health care system that has been ruled unconstitutional.

The money has been ordered by a federal court receiver who has been placed in charge of medical care in the state's 33 adult prisons.

Rodriguez is among those requiring pricey care.

He is serving a life sentence after being convicted of a "third strike" for stealing candy and cheese from a Los Angeles County grocery store. The conviction in 2000 followed another petty theft and a string of robberies nearly 30 years ago.

The 66-year-old inmate is in the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, coping with the final stages of terminal liver disease. Parole officials rejected his petition for compassionate release, so he most likely will spend the rest of his days in the prison hospice.

"For people who are old and feeble, hopefully we'll be left to die in peace," Rodriguez said. "I'm waiting for that phone call that says you can go home to die. That's all I got left."

Aging inmates cost two to three times as much to incarcerate as younger prisoners, an average $98,000 to $138,000 a year.

Between 1980 and 2007, the average age of California inmates increased from 27 to 37.

The prisons hold more than 22,000 inmates over age 50, or about 13 percent of the overall adult inmate population. In 1998, the number was 9,820, or 6 percent of the prison population.

Prison authorities say inmates age faster than the general population because of stress, a history of drug use, poor medical care throughout their lives and other factors. A 50-year-old inmate can have the physical and mental condition of someone 10 years older.

At the end of 2007, California housed 4,805 inmates age 60 and older, or about 3 percent of the prison population. A decade ago, that number was 1,951, or just more than 1 percent of all prisoners.

Prison populations nationwide also are aging.

The number of inmates 55 and older in state and federal prisons increased from 44,200, or 3.3 percent of the population, in 2000 to 80,200, or 5.3 percent, in 2006, according to the most recent statistics available from the U.S. Justice Department.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation expects its over-60 population to increase 80 percent by 2012.

That rise is due in part to tougher sentencing laws passed in recent years that send convicts away for longer stretches.

Some advocates say the state could save money by giving compassionate release to older, infirm inmates. A year ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was open to releasing "the old, feeble and sick who pose no threat to the public."

The corrections department estimates that paroling all nonviolent offenders 55 or older, sick or not, would trim the prison population by about 1,000 and save about $20 million annually.

"We are paying the most amount of money to incarcerate those people who are the least risk to public safety," said Heidi Strupp, an advocate with the San Francisco-based group Legal Services for Prisoners with Children.

A proposal by state Senate Democrats would use existing compassionate-release laws to free more ailing inmates. Caring for a severely disabled inmate can cost the state $1 million a year or more, said state Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden, chairman of a subcommittee that oversees prison spending.

The proposal would limit the releases to nonviolent offenders who have not committed sex crimes or serious offenses.

The debate over how to care ill inmates is connected to three lawsuits related to overcrowding in state prisons.

The 33 prisons house about 159,000 inmates but have a capacity of just about 100,000. Another 11,000 inmates are in fire camps or private prisons. Plaintiffs claim the crowding has led to poor medical, mental health and disability care for inmates.

If a settlement isn't reached, a special panel of three federal judges could order a prison population cap or other steps leading to the release of thousands of inmates.

The receiver appointed to oversee prison health care wants the $7 billion to build medical units for roughly 6 percent of the inmate population, or about 10,000 beds.

"Given the aging population in corrections and their health care status, we essentially need to build ... long-term housing for people who need long-term care," receiver J. Clark Kelso told a state budget subcommittee this spring.

Funding concerns have stalled Kelso's plan in the Legislature, which is struggling to deal with a projected $15.2 billion budget deficit for the current fiscal year.

Some actions to deal with aging prisoners are being considered independent of any court orders.

California corrections officials are turning the surplus El Paso de Robles juvenile correctional facility in San Luis Obispo County into a low-security prison for 1,000 nonviolent men over age 50. The conversion is starting this month.

Other attempts to ease the strain on older inmates are under way in the Legislation, but some of the steps could add to the already high cost of incarceration.

A bill by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, would grant privileges such as easier work and bunk assignments to inmates over age 55. They also would get first call for meals and would not be required to drop to the floor during security alarms.

Prison employees would be trained to deal with inmates who may no longer be able to hear commands or might act out because of dementia. Older inmates would receive an identification card and an ombudsman to help with their complaints.

The bill stalled in the Senate Appropriations Committee, leaving its fate uncertain because Kuehl is termed out of the Legislature after this year.

Ultimately, the answer may be supervised release programs for most elderly inmates and minimum-security "prison nursing homes" with specially trained staff for the most frail, said Jonathan Turley, founder and director of the Project for Older Prisoners, an advocacy group.

"Older prisoners may be high risk for bad checks or forgery, but they're not high risk for escape," said Turley, a George Washington University law professor. "I mean, they're not going to throw their walkers over the razor wire."

Federal studies show that less than 5 percent of inmates 55 and older are likely to commit new crimes after their release. By comparison, about 70 percent of California inmates overall return to prison.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/07/05/state/n090037D66.DTL

Posted by lois at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

July 05, 2008

IA: Number of prisoners decreases but of course spending is up

Fewer People Packed Into Iowa Prisons
July 2, 2008

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- The number of inmates in Iowa prisons is down, due in part to a drop in the number of prison terms and fewer offenders returning for parole or probation violations.

As of Monday, which marked the end of fiscal 2008, the state prisons housed 8,740 inmates. That's down 66 from the year before and marks only the third annual decline in 12 years.

Department of Corrections Director John Baldwin said it's difficult to tell if Iowans were committing fewer major crimes, the drop was related to plea bargains or if other factors were involved.
Iowa's prison system has a designed capacity of 7,414 beds.

This year, the Legislature approved $130 million for prison construction.That includes replacing the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison and upgrading the women's prison at Mitchellville.
http://www.kcci.com/news/16767931/detail.html

Posted by lois at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)

NJ: Prisoner labor cut-back

Inmate workers sacked
Tight budget slashes number of prisoner work details
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
BY RALPH R. ORTEGA
NJ Star-Ledger Staff

In a wobbly economy, prison inmates seem ideal candidates for a hard day's work. They earn no wages, and for the privilege of stepping outdoors, they'll gladly pick up garbage, mow a lawn, paint a building or put hammer to nail.

But it turns out there's nothing free about inmate labor, and as the state tightens its belt in these lean times, the number of prison work details has been significantly cut, squeezing towns and nonprofit groups that depend on them.

The state Department of Corrections, whose crews are most visible as they clean litter along the highways, has halved its inmate work details, leaving only about 30.

The labor cutbacks will help trim $1.7 million in non-essential expenses in the department's proposed $1.1 billion budget for the 2009 fiscal year, said Deirdre Fedkenheuer, a corrections spokeswoman.

"When you calculate fuel costs, and couple that with overtime for officers, it produces a costly proposition that this budget can't support," Fedkenheuer said.

For years, inmates were available for painting, cleaning public parks, landscaping and other jobs that required little or no skilled labor. They cleared empty lots in Newark and rode on garbage trucks in Lambertville.

They also took on more ambitious projects, replacing the roof at the Cape May Zoo, working on the New Jersey side of Ellis Island and helping to renovate and build homes in Trenton for Habitat for Humanity, said Bill Freeman, a corrections supervisor who oversees the department's Community Labor Assistance Program.

While Freeman said inmate work details will still go out on the highways, clean beaches at the Jersey Shore and tend to state parks, he expected demands for other services to start piling up because state work takes priority.

"There's not going to be any opportunity to satisfy requests," he said.

County jails, which take a slightly different approach to funding smaller-scale versions of inmate labor programs -- by charging inmates for the privilege of working -- already have noticed an increase in demand.

"I'm getting a lot of calls from mayors," said Scott Nodes, correctional administrator at the Hunterdon County Jail in Flemington.

In May, the jail began putting weekend-only inmates to work for towns and nonprofit agencies.

"Boy, they did a great job," said Arnie Shapack, a board member of the Tewksbury Township Library, which had inmates seed and grade the grounds over Memorial Day weekend.

Shapack estimated the inmates saved the library hundreds of dollars in labor costs. He said he'd like to see them return to scrape the library's 200-year-old building to make it ready for painting.

Inmates at county jails usually pay a processing fee of about $25, and as much as $10 thereafter each day they work, for the duration of their sentences on drunken driving convictions, motor vehicle violations, and other low-level offenses.

The fees cover overtime for guards, the cost of fuel used in transporting the prisoners, and other program expenses. In some cases, the fees are deposited in county coffers.

Morris County, which has been using and lending out inmate crews since the 1980s, put more than 2,900 inmates to work in various municipalities in 2007, according to figures from the county jail. An additional 4,500 inmates worked for nonprofit groups last year, according to the figures.

Combined, the crews logged 109,000 work hours.

Demand there, too, has been on the rise, said Lt. Sarah Potter, who oversees the program.

"We've had a huge increase in the number of requests," said Potter, of the county sheriff's office.

Despite the program's magnitude, its numbers were still only a fraction of the labor once supplied by the state prison system.

At the height of the state's inmate labor program in the late 1990s, there were 115 work details statewide, extending 1.5 million hours of work to the public each year, according to Freeman, the corrections supervisor who oversees the operation.

"We're just in a rough time statewide," Freeman said. "When decisions are made that are economic decisions, we have to go with them."
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-13/1214973347150410.xml&coll=1

Posted by lois at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

July 04, 2008

WA: GEO detention center expands by 50%

Tacoma, WA - Friday, July 4, 2008
Immigration center plans expansion

SCOTT FONTAINE; The News Tribune
Last updated: July 3rd, 2008 12:20 PM (PDT)
The corporation that runs the federal immigration detention center on Tacoma’s Tideflats plans to expand the facility’s capacity by 50 percent.

When completed, the Northwest Detention Center should be able to hold up to 1,500 immigrants in federal custody.

The GEO Group, the Florida-based company that runs the detention center, has made no formal announcement. Several voicemails left with its spokesman were not returned. Calls to the Northwest Detention Center were referred to a spokeswoman with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who said the company is handling the expansion and therefore should answer all questions.

But the company has been in talks with the city manager’s office and the Tacoma Police Department, officials confirmed. They weren’t certain about the cost or timetable of expansion, but the company’s contract with the federal government for use of the Tacoma facility is set to expire in April 2009, according to the company’s Web site.

The expansion may fuel controversy over the facility, which has become a local flashpoint of the nation’s immigration debate. The detention center has been the subject of several protests in recent months, including some in downtown Tacoma.

“There’s a lot of debate of the function of the facility as it stands today,” City Manager Eric Anderson said. “Expanding that will only intensify that debate. It tends to get focused on the facility. The larger the role of the facility, the more intense the debate can get.”

Even if the city were opposed to the expansion, Anderson said, its status as essential public facility under the state’s Growth Management Act restricts Tacoma’s ability to prevent its growth.

The detention center holds immigrants detained throughout Pacific Northwest and is almost always at capacity, officials told The News Tribune in November. Many detainees enter federal custody after they’re arrested during raids or through Criminal Alien Program, in which federal officials take custody of illegal immigrants incarcerated in local or state jails or prisons.

The average stay at the detention center just over a month. An Executive Office for Immigration Review courtroom inside the facility hears the cases, and most detainees are deported to their countries of citizenship. About half of those in custody are routinely Mexican, but citizens from almost every country on earth have passed through the facility. The majority of detainees are held only for being in the country illegally.

ICE did not request the expansion of the facility, ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers said, and the current contract for use of the Northwest Detention Center still calls for The GEO Group to supply 1,000 beds.

The $115 million facility opened in 2004 with the ability to hold about 500 detainees, replacing a 160-bed center in Seattle. It has since expanded twice.

The company’s original contract with the government ran from April 2004-April 2005 but contained four one-year options, according to its Web site.

The GEO Group operates 67 facilities throughout the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom. It also has plans to expand or build sites this year in Michigan, New Mexico, Texas, Mississippi and Colorado, according to a June conference call. Most of those sites are correctional facilities.

In a letter from Anderson to an engineering consulting firm working on behalf of The GEO Group, the city manager said Tacoma’s Public Works Department “no immediate issues with regards to impact on existing services” but added that company must undergo the full permitting process before expansion.

The Tacoma Police Department has met with officials from the detention center about the expansion, spokesman Mark Fulghum said.

He added that the few problems with the Northwest Detention Center have stemmed from protests.

“It’s not an issue as far as we’re concerned,” he said. “We’ve had no problems with the officials there. They’ve been great to work with.”

Originally published: July 3rd, 2008 09:18 AM (PDT)
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/updates/v-printerfriendly/story/404167.html

Posted by lois at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

July 2, 2008
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
By SCOTT SHANE
NY Times
Correction Appended

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.”

Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.”

The sessions included “an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles,” the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,” have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.

“It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.”

The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani’s interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese.

Terror charges against Mr. Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May. Officials said the charges could be reinstated later and declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani’s treatment.

Mr. Bush has defended the use the interrogation methods, saying they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks. But the issue continues to complicate the long-delayed prosecutions now proceeding at Guantánamo.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 3, 2008
An article on Wednesday about coercive interrogation methods taught at Guantánamo Bay that were copied from a 1957 journal article about Chinese techniques misstated the given name of the author of the article. He was Albert D. Biderman, not Alfred.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html?_r=1&sq=China%20Inspired%20Interrogations&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

July 03, 2008

NY Times Editiorial: Don’t Teach Our Children Crime

NY Times
July 3, 2008
Editorial
Don’t Teach Our Children Crime

Under the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, the states agreed to humanize their often Dickensian juvenile justice systems in exchange for increased federal aid. This promising arrangement collapsed in the 1990s during hysteria about an adolescent crime wave that never materialized. The states intensified all kinds of punishments for children and sent large numbers to adult jails where, research has shown, they are more likely to be battered, traumatized and transformed into hard-core, recidivist criminals.

Congress is in the process of reauthorizing the law, and it ought to bar the states from housing children in adult jails, except for the most heinous crimes. Sadly, the updated version of the law, recently introduced in the Senate, falls short of that goal. But it does include a number of farsighted measures that discourage the placement of children in adult jails during the pretrial period and expands protections for children charged as adults.

The need for these measures is alarmingly evident in a report issued last year by the Campaign for Youth Justice, an advocacy group. The report found that as many as 150,000 people under the age of 18 are held in adult jails in any given year. More than half of young people who are transferred into the adult system are never convicted as adults — and many are never convicted at all.

The Senate bill takes a comprehensive approach to these issues. It would considerably tighten rules aimed at keeping children out of adult jails during pretrial periods. Children arrested for truancy, running away or other offenses that would not be criminal if committed by an adult would not be placed in juvenile jail unless absolutely necessary.

It also would require the states to work toward reducing racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. It increases federal funding for technical assistance and for drug treatment, mental health care, mentoring and after-care programs that keep children out of the juvenile system in the first place. The bill advocates an evidence-based approach to hand out the money.

Jailing and criminalizing young Americans causes a lot more crime than it punishes or prevents. This bill represents an important step toward rational and compassionate justice for troubled children.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/opinion/03thu2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)

MI: people with felony convictions and homeless people eligible to vote

Ex-felons, homeless are part of state voting process

By Eric T. Campbell
The Michigan Citizen

DETROIT — The 2008 primary race for the highest office in the nation has brought millions of new voters to the polls. With the end of the primary season and the beginning of the general election, many more will finally become active participants. But what about access to the polls for those whom society has attempted to marginalize?

The purging of Florida citizens, ex-felons and non-felons alike, from voter rolls in 2000 is just one example of a state apparatus intentionally eliminating minorities from the election process. In addition, new photo ID laws popping up around the country create more barriers to voter participation.

The 2004 presidential election in the U.S. resulted in numerous cases of alleged election fraud and a lack of sufficient numbers of voting machines.

In Michigan, the homeless and ex-felons are legally entitled to vote.

According to statistics obtained from the U.S. Justice Department by the Sentencing Project, 13% of Black men are unable to vote in America due to felony conviction laws. Like many states, ex-felons in Michigan keep their right to vote once they’ve served the community. Their voting status remains exactly the same as it was before a felony conviction.

However, according to Marc Mauer, executive director for the Washington D.C. based Sentencing Project, Corrections Departments in most states don’t go far enough in getting the word out to prisoners.

“It’s the lack of information,” Mauer told the Michigan Citizen. “There’s no systematic means by which they are informed of their right to vote.”

Mauer says many parolees incorrectly believe that they are unable to vote—an opinion often substantiated by misinformed election officials. He sites a recent 10 state survey in which 31% of local election officials misunderstood voting laws for ex-felons.

Kwasi Akwamu, from Helping Our Prisoners Elevate (H.O.P.E.), a Detroit prisoner advocacy group, says that prisoners often come out with the intention of addressing a system that unjustly led to their incarceration.

“Most people that go to prison gain a greater awareness,” Akwamu said. “We encourage ex-prisoners to vote—to become part of that process and change those harsh policies.”

Akwamu also says that one problem ex-prisoners often experience is maintaining the proper ID.

Ken Silfven, of the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, says that the Department of Corrections in Michigan is spending more time with ID issues for outgoing prisoners.

“We’re involved in the prison reentry program initiative,” Silfven told the Michigan Citizen, “with one goal being to get prisoners proper identification once released.”

Silfven talked about a new Secretary of State mobile office, which is targeting hard to reach populations like veterans, the elderly and the homeless.

Cheryl P. Johnson of the Coalition On Temporary Shelter told the Michigan Citizen that the 13,000 homeless in Detroit also have the opportunity to vote through absentee ballots.

COTS has four locations in the Detroit area which house homeless citizens in transition and permanent residents who may suffer from physical disabilities.

The city clerk’s office has traditionally had a presence at the shelters during elections to register voters and promote awareness, Johnson told the Michigan Citizen.

“We definitely focus on getting people knowledge about their voting rights,” Johnson says.

Johnson also said that local and national candidates have campaigned at temporary and permanent shelters in an effort to address the problem of homelessness and the people that have been victims of it.

“We’ve always had that kind of open door policy to allow nominees to come and speak.”

COTS is located at 26 Peterboro and can be reached at 313-831-3777.
Contact Helping Our Prisoners Elevate at www.hopedetroit.com
http://www.michigancitizen.com/print_this_story.asp?smenu=1&sdetail=6182

Posted by lois at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2008

Scottish Prisons Commission: re-thinking punishment

"Scotland has one possible future where its prisons hold only serious offenders, prison staff regularly and expertly deliver programmes that can affect change and there is a widely used and respected system of community-based sentences.

"There is another possible future, one in which there are many more prisons, as overcrowded as those today. Dedicated and skilled professionals lack support and suffer from low morale, the public's distrust of the criminal justice system reaches record levels and fragile communities are ignored.

Scottish Prisons Commission
Date: 1 Jul 2008 - 10:48
Source: Scottish Government

The Scottish Prisons Commission (SPC) today published its report, Scotland's Choice, on the future of crime and punishment north of the border.

The Commission is making 23 recommendations which, taken together, offer a systematic and evidence-based response to the challenges that Scotland's criminal justice system is facing.

Its recommendations cover six themes

* rethinking punishment
* prosecution and court processes
* sentencing and managing sentences
* community justice
* prisons and resettlement
* the Custodial Sentences and Weapons (Scotland) Act
* the prison open estate

Some of the issues covered include better targeting of imprisonment, the use of community payback and increased efficiency in the court system.

There are also recommendations tackling the issues of illegal drugs in prison through, for example, the introduction of drug-free wings, young offenders, improved through care for offenders on release, the use of conditional sentences and the eventual termination of the Home Detention Curfew scheme.

In its consideration of the Custodial Sentencing and Weapons (Scotland) Act, the Commission recommends that if the act is to be implemented, it should be a staged implementation reserved for those serving custodial sentences of two years or more.

The creation of both a National Sentencing Council and a National Community Justice Council is also being recommended to ensure consistency, enhanced public understanding and confidence in sentencing of all kinds and to drive forward change.

Commission Chair Henry McLeish, said:

"The work done by this Commission over the past nine months has been both detailed and demanding. It has brought us to a crossroads where Scotland must choose which future it wants for its criminal justice system.

"Our priority is keeping the public safe and at the same time, reducing the number of victims and the damage caused to communities by crime. This requires us to use the best available evidence to work harder and be smarter in challenging and changing offenders and at tackling the underlying social and cultural factors that so often drive their offending and reoffending.

"Scotland has one possible future where its prisons hold only serious offenders, prison staff regularly and expertly deliver programmes that can affect change and there is a widely used and respected system of community-based sentences.

"There is another possible future, one in which there are many more prisons, as overcrowded as those today. Dedicated and skilled professionals lack support and suffer from low morale, the public's distrust of the criminal justice system reaches record levels and fragile communities are ignored.

"We have to make a choice between these two futures. One requires us to do nothing at all; the other will require us to think differently about what we want punishment to do and to make changes in how we go about achieving this.

"In this report we propose a set of solutions aimed at moving us onto the path we should take. If this is to work, all of us - politicians, the judiciary, the media, professionals, communities, families and individuals - have to embrace this opportunity for change."

The SPC was convened in September 2007 to examine Scotland's use of prison in the 21st century. Its remit was to:

* consider how imprisonment is currently used in Scotland and how this fits with the Government's wider strategic objectives
* raise the public profile of this issue - providing better information to allow a deeper understanding of the options, outcomes and costs
* compare the underpinning rationale with current law and practice, including the impact for courts, prisons and community justice services of early release provisions of the Custodial Sentences and Weapons (Scotland) Act 2007

The membership of the Commission was:

* The Rt Hon Henry McLeish (Chair) - former First Minister of Scotland, Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong learning, Minister for Devolution and Home Affairs.
* Dr Karen Dotter-Schiller - Acting Director-General, Prison Service in the Federal Ministry of Justice in Vienna, Austria; founder member of the International Corrections and Prisons Association.
* Sherriff Alistair Duff - Dundee; Chair, Dundee branch of the Scottish Association for the Study of Offending
* Geraldine Gammell - Director, The Prince's Trust in Scotland
* Richard Jeffrey - President, Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce; Chair, Edinburgh Tourism Action Group
* Lesley Riddoch - broadcaster and journalist
* Chief Constable David Strang - Lothian and Borders Police
Source URL: http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/19707

Posted by lois at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

Decades Later, Still Asking: Would I Pull That Switch?

"This appreciation of another’s right is crucial in interrogation, Dr. Packer suggests. When prisoners’ rights are ambiguous, inhumane treatment can follow. Milgram’s work, in short, makes a statement about the importance of human rights, as well as obedience."

July 1, 2008
Mind
Decades Later, Still Asking: Would I Pull That Switch?
By BENEDICT CAREY- NY Times

Some of psychology’s most famous experiments are those that expose the skull beneath the skin, the apparent cowardice or depravity pooling in almost every heart.

The findings force a question. Would I really do that? Could I betray my own eyes, my judgment, even my humanity, just to complete some experiment?

The answer, if it’s an honest one, often gives rise to observations about the cruelties of the day, whether suicide bombing, torture or gang atrocities. And so a psych experiment — a mock exercise, testing individual behavior — can become something else, a changing prism through which people view the larger culture, for better and for worse.

Consider the psychologist Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies of the early 1960s that together form one of the darkest mirrors the field has held up to the human face. In a series of about 20 experiments, hundreds of decent, well-intentioned people agreed to deliver what appeared to be increasingly painful electric shocks to another person, as part of what they thought was a learning experiment. The “learner” was in fact an actor, usually seated out of sight in an adjacent room, pretending to be zapped.

Researchers, social commentators and armchair psychologists have pored through Milgram’s data ever since, claiming psychological and cultural insights. Now, decades after the original work (Milgram died in 1984, at 51), two new papers illustrate the continuing power of the shock experiments — and the diverse interpretations they still inspire.

In one, a statistical analysis to appear in the July issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a postdoctoral student at Ohio State University verifies a crucial turning point in Milgram’s experiments, the voltage level at which participants were most likely to disobey the experimenter and quit delivering shocks.

The participants usually began with what they thought were 15-volt shocks, and worked upward in 15-volt increments, as the experimenter instructed. At 75 volts, the “learner” in the next room began grunting in apparent pain. At 150 volts he cried out: “Stop, let me out! I don’t want to do this anymore.”

At that point about a third of the participants refused to continue, found Dominic Packer, author of the new paper. “The previous expressions of pain were insufficient,” Dr. Packer said. But at 150 volts, he continued, those who disobeyed decided that the learner’s right to stop trumped the experimenter’s right to continue. Before the end of the experiments, at 450 volts, an additional 10 to 15 percent had dropped out.

This appreciation of another’s right is crucial in interrogation, Dr. Packer suggests. When prisoners’ rights are ambiguous, inhumane treatment can follow. Milgram’s work, in short, makes a statement about the importance of human rights, as well as obedience.

In the other paper, due out in the journal American Psychologist, a professor at Santa Clara University replicates part of the Milgram studies — stopping at 150 volts, the critical juncture at which the subject cries out to stop — to see whether people today would still obey. Ethics committees bar researchers from pushing subjects through to an imaginary 450 volts, as Milgram did.

The answer was yes. Once again, more than half the participants agreed to proceed with the experiment past the 150-volt mark. Jerry M. Burger, the author, interviewed the participants afterward and found that those who stopped generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable. That is, the Milgram work also demonstrated individual differences in perceptions of accountability — of who’s on the hook for what.

Thomas Blass, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of a biography of Milgram, “The Man Who Shocked the World” (Basic Books, 2004), said establishing the demand by the subject to stop as the turning point was itself a significant achievement. “It’s a simple but important discovery,” Dr. Blass said. “I had been mining this data for years and somehow missed it.”

He added that extrapolating Milgram’s findings to larger events like the Holocaust, as Milgram himself did, or Abu Ghraib was a big leap. “The power of the Milgram work was it showed how people can act destructively without coercion,” he said. “In things like interrogations, we don’t know the complexities involved. People are under enormous pressure to produce results.”

The Milgram data have unappreciated complexities of their own. In his new report, Dr. Burger argues that at least two other factors were at work when participants walked into the psychologist’s lab at Yale decades ago. Uncertainty, as it was an unfamiliar situation. And time pressure, as they had to make decisions quickly. Rushed and disoriented, they were likely more compliant than they would otherwise have been, Dr. Burger said.

In short, the Milgram experiments may have shown physical, biological differences in moral decision making and obedience, as well as psychological ones. Some people can be as quick on the draw as Doc Holliday when they feel something’s not right. Others need a little time to do the right thing, thank you, and would rather not be considered sadistic prison guards just yet.

“The most remarkable thing,” Dr. Burger said, “is that we’re still talking about the work, almost 50 years after it was done. You can’t say that about many experiments.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/health/research/01mind.html?ref=science

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

Texas man cleared of shooting suspected burglars---it all depends on who you are and who you kill

July 1, 2008
Texas man cleared of shooting suspected burglars
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:14 a.m. ET

HOUSTON (AP) -- Ever since he fatally shot two men he suspected of burglarizing his next-door neighbor's home, 62-year-old Joe Horn has been both praised and vilified for his actions.

Horn called 911 and told the dispatcher he had a shotgun and was going to kill the intruders. The dispatcher pleaded with him not to go outside, but a defiant Horn confronted the men with a 12-gauge shotgun and shot both in the back.

Some community activists wanted Horn to face charges for the deaths. Supporters of the retired grandfather said what he did was justified under the law.

After listening to evidence in the case, including testimony from Horn himself, a grand jury on Monday cleared him of the shootings.

''He wasn't acting like a vigilante. He didn't want to do it,'' said Tom Lambright, Horn's attorney.

Lambright said Horn was not a ''wild cowboy'' who took the law into his own hands after he saw the two suspected burglars, with bags in hand, crawling out of windows from his neighbor's home on Nov. 14 in the Houston suburb of Pasadena. The neighbor was out of town at the time.

Instead, Horn was a frightened retiree who tried to defend his neighbor's property and when the two men came onto his yard and threatened him, Horn defended himself, Lambright said.

''He was scared. He was in fear of his life,'' he said.

Grand jurors had to consider two issues in the case: the intentional killing of another person and whether the killing was justified either by self-defense or the defense of property, Harris County District Attorney Kenneth Magidson told reporters.

''I understand the concerns of some in the community regarding Mr. Horn's conduct,'' Magidson said. ''The grand jury concluded that Mr. Horn's use of deadly force did not rise to a criminal offense.''

Texas law allows people to use deadly force to protect themselves if it is reasonable to believe they are in mortal danger. In limited circumstances, people also can use deadly force to protect their neighbor's property; for example, if a homeowner asks a neighbor to watch over his property while he's out of town. It's not clear whether the neighbor whose home was burglarized asked Horn to watch over his house.

Frank Ortiz, a member of the local League of United Latin American Citizens chapter, said he hopes federal authorities investigate the case further.

''That's amazing that they would no-bill him with so much evidence against him,'' Ortiz told the Houston Chronicle in Monday's online edition. ''This was no more than a vigilante.''

Horn did not speak with reporters on Monday.

A large red sign with the words ''No Trespass'' on it blocked the path to his front door and a handwritten sign on the door said ''Please no media,'' ''No Trespassing'' and ''Do not knock or ring bell.'' A couple of neighbors also had signs on their doors asking media to leave them alone.

A few police cars patrolled the area near Horn's home.

The two suspected burglars, Hernando Riascos Torres, 38, and Diego Ortiz, 30, were unemployed illegal immigrants from Colombia. Torres was deported to Colombia in 1999 after a 1994 cocaine-related conviction.

The city of Pasadena, where protesters and defenders of Horn engaged in counter-demonstrations, pledged to keep its police force staffed enough to protect its citizens.

Keith Hampton, a Houston attorney not connected with the case, said he didn't expect Horn to be indicted. ''This is a real conservative county,'' he said. ''A lot of folks in Houston and Harris County are saying this man was doing a good thing.''

In the 911 call, a dispatcher urges Horn to stay inside his house and not risk lives.

''Don't go outside the house,'' the 911 operator pleaded. ''You're going to get yourself shot if you go outside that house with a gun. I don't care what you think.''

''You want to make a bet?'' Horn answered. ''I'm going to kill them.''

After the shooting, he redialed 911.

''I had no choice,'' he said, his voice shaking. ''They came in the front yard with me, man. I had no choice. Get somebody over here quick.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Burglary-Shooting.html?sq=Houston&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)

Drug Arrests Were Real; the Badge Was Fake

July 1, 2008
Drug Arrests Were Real; the Badge Was Fake
By MONICA DAVEY
NY Times

GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this small town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.

Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s antidrug campaign abruptly fell apart after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding minister and a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and he is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

The strange adventures of Sergeant Bill have led to the firing of three of the town’s five police officers, left the outcome of a string of drug arrests in doubt, prompted multimillion-dollar federal civil rights lawsuits by at least 17 plaintiffs and stirred up a political battle, including a petition seeking the impeachment of Mr. Schulte, over who is to blame for the mess.

And the questions keep coming. How did Mr. Jakob wander into town and apparently leave the mayor, the aldermen and pretty much everyone else he met thinking that he was a federal agent delivered from Washington to help barrel into peoples’ homes and clean up Gerald’s drug problem? And why would anyone — receiving no pay and with no known connection to little Gerald, 70 miles from St. Louis and not even a county seat — want to carry off such a time-consuming ruse in the first place?

Mr. Jakob’s lawyer, Joel Schwartz, said that what happened in Gerald was never a sinister plot, but a chain of events rooted in “errors in judgment.” Mr. Schwartz said he believed that at least three Gerald police officers, including the chief, knew that Mr. Jakob was not a federal drug agent or even a certified police officer.

“It was an innocent evolution, where he helped with one minor thing, then one more on top of that, and all of the sudden, everyone thought he was a federal agent,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I’m not saying this was legal or lawful. But look, they were very, very effective while he was present. I don’t think Gerald is having the drug problem they were having. I’ve heard from some residents who were thrilled that he was there.”

There were numerous arrests during Mr. Jakob’s time in Gerald (the exact number is uncertain, local law enforcement officials said, as legal action surrounding the case proceeds), but Mayor Schulte said that Mr. Jakob had, in fact, gone to elaborate lengths to deceive local authorities, including Ryan McCrary, then the police chief, into believing that he was a federal agent — with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marshals Service or some other agency.

In addition to having a badge and a car that seemed to scream law enforcement, Mr. Jakob offered federal drug enforcement help, Mr. Schulte said. (Local officials thought the offer must have somehow grown out of their recent application for a federal grant for radio equipment.) Mr. Jakob even asked Chief McCrary to call what he said was his supervisor’s telephone number to confirm Gerald’s need for his help, the mayor said.

When the call was placed, a woman — whose identity is unknown — answered with the words “multijurisdictional task force,” and said that the city’s request for federal services was under review, the mayor said. Mr. Schulte said he now suspects that Mr. Jakob adapted the nonexistent task force name from the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies starring Eddie Murphy.

“Not only were these officers taken in, but so was everybody else,” said Chet Pleban, a lawyer for Mr. McCrary and the other two members of the police force who lost their jobs after Mr. Jakob’s real identity came to light.

Of the firings, Mayor Schulte said, “Nobody wanted to, but the city’s lawyer recommended it.”

When residents first began noticing Mr. Jakob, he certainly looked the part. His hair was chopped short, residents recalled, and his stocky chest filled a black T-shirt he sometimes wore that read “Police.” They said he wore military-style boots, pants with pockets running down the legs and carried a badge (his lawyer said it was from a former job as a security guard in St. Louis). And his off-white Ford Crown Victoria was decked out with police radios and internal flashing lights, residents said.

He first came to town in January, his lawyer said, to meet Chief McCrary, whose experiences serving in Afghanistan Mr. Jakob had read about in a local newspaper. Mr. Jakob was considering contract work overseas, Mr. Schwartz said, and the pair hit it off.

Soon, the arrests began. Some of those whose homes were searched said they had been kicked in the head and had had shotguns held against them. Mr. Jakob, many said, seemed to be leading the crew of Gerald police officers.

“He was definitely in charge — it was all him,” said Mike Withington, 49, a concrete finisher, who said Mr. Jakob pounded on his door in May, waking him up and yanking him, in handcuffs, out onto his front yard.

Mr. Withington said he had not yet been charged with a crime; Gary Toelke, the Franklin County sheriff, confirmed that no local charges had been issued against him. But the mortification of that day, Mr. Withington said, has kept him largely indoors and led him to consider moving. Since the search, residents have tossed garbage and crumpled boxes of Sudafed (which has an ingredient that can be used to make methamphetamine) on his lawn, he said, and he no longer shops in town, instead driving miles to neighboring towns.

“Everybody is staring at me,” he said. “People assume you’re guilty when things like this happen.”

When Linda Trest, 51, a reporter at The Gasconade County Republican, started hearing complaints from people whose homes had been searched, she began making inquiries about Mr. Jakob.

“Once I got his name, I hit the computer and within an hour I had all the dirt on this guy,” Ms. Trest said.

As it turned out, Mr. Jakob, who is married and lives near Washington, a small town not far from Gerald, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003 when he owned a trucking company, and had, at 22, pleaded guilty in Illinois to a misdemeanor charge of criminal sex abuse of someone in their teens.

Since the 1990s, he had worked, at times, as a police officer in tiny departments in towns like Kinloch, Mo., and Brooklyn, Ill., though he never seemed to stay anywhere long and was never certified as a police officer in either Missouri or Illinois, his lawyer said. (Under some conditions, short-term employees with some departments are not immediately required to have state certification.)

As in Gerald, he impressed some, if only at first. “He seemed to have experience on the street,” said J. D. Roth, the police chief in Caseyville, Ill., where Mr. Jakob was a temporary part-time officer for almost two months in 2000. “He walked the walk and talked the talk.”

In Gerald, just a day before it was revealed that he was not a federal agent, the city aldermen voted to make Mr. Jakob a reserve officer; he wanted the designation, Mr. Schulte said, so he could enforce local ordinances, and he stood before the aldermen, hands behind his back, seeking the title.

Mr. Jakob offered city officials three contact numbers — his personal cellphone, a cellphone he said he used for drug informants and his “multijurisdictional task force” cellphone, Mr. Schulte said.

“It was the movie, ‘Catch Me if You Can’ all over again,” said Mr. Schulte, referring to the 2002 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a master of deception. “I’m telling you, with this guy, everything was right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/us/01impostor.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)