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September 23, 2008

NY : Two Decades in Solitary

U.S. torture machine.

September 23, 2008
Two Decades in Solitary
By JOHN ELIGON
New YOrk Times

He is one of New York’s most isolated prisoners, spending 23 hours a day for the past two decades in a 9-by-6-foot cell. The only trimmings are a cot and a sink-toilet combination. His visitors — few as they are — must wedge into a nook outside his cell and speak to him through a 1-by-3-foot window of foggy plexiglass and iron bars.

In this static existence, Willie Bosket, 45, seems to have gone from defiant menace to subdued and empty inmate.

It was 30 years ago this month that a state law took effect allowing juveniles to be tried as adults, largely in response to Mr. Bosket’s slaying of two people on a New York subway when he was 15. He served only five years in jail for that crime because he was a juvenile, sparking public outrage. But shortly after completing his sentence, Mr. Bosket was arrested for assaulting a 72-year-old man.

He once claimed to be at “war” with prison officials. He said he laughed at the system and claimed to have committed more than 2,000 crimes as a child. He set fire to his cell and attacked guards. Mr. Bosket was sentenced to 25 years to life for stabbing a guard in the visitors’ room in 1988, along with other offenses, leading prison authorities to make him virtually the most restricted inmate in the state.

Now Mr. Bosket, who has gone 14 years without a disciplinary violation, does mainly three things: read, sleep and think.

“Just blank” is how Mr. Bosket described his existence during a recent interview at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, about 75 miles north of Manhattan. “Everything is the same every day. This is hell. Always has been.”

He is scheduled to remain isolated from the general prison population until 2046.

Mr. Bosket’s seclusion is part of a bigger debate over the confinement of troublesome inmates and the role of the prison system. Some say that Mr. Bosket’s level of seclusion is draconian, that he should be given an opportunity to rejoin the general population.

“He is a very dangerous person; he’s killed people,” said Jo Allison Henn, a lawyer who helped represent Mr. Bosket roughly 20 years ago when he fought unsuccessfully to have some of his restrictions removed. “I’m not saying he should be released from custody entirely, just the custody that he is in. It is beyond inhumane. I don’t think that too many civilized countries do that.”

But proponents of Mr. Bosket’s restrictions say he has proved to be something of an incorrigible danger to prison guards and other inmates and cannot be trusted in the general population. He is evaluated periodically, meaning he could rejoin the general prison population before 2046, said Erik Criss, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections.

“This guy was violent or threatening violence practically every day,” Mr. Criss said. “Granted, it has been a while, but there are consequences for being violent in prison. We have zero tolerance for that.”

From 1985 to 1994, Mr. Bosket was written up nearly 250 times for disciplinary violations that included spitting on guards, throwing food and swallowing the handle of a spoon, according to prison reports.

Few, if any, of the state’s current inmates have been in disciplinary housing longer than Mr. Bosket, said Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the corrections department.

Mr. Bosket says he wakes up at 7:15 every morning and gets a visit from a counselor at 8. At 9, he gets his first of three doses of medication for asthma and high cholesterol, he said. Lunch comes at 11:30, followed by more medication at 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.

He is entitled to three showers a week. Other than one hour of recreation a day, also solitary, he may leave his cell only for medical visits and haircuts. The recreation area measures 34 feet by 17 feet, surrounded by nearly 9-foot-high walls with bars on the top. Mr. Bosket said he was chained to a door during his recreation time and could not walk more than six feet, but corrections officials disputed that account, saying he was allowed to roam freely during his hour like other inmates.

And while other prisoners in isolation are escorted to a visiting room when they have guests, he must stay in his cell, speaking through the plexiglass.

Most of his waking hours, he said, are spent reading books, magazines, newspapers and anything else he can get his hands on. His favorite magazine, he said, was Elle.

“It’s very colorful,” he said. “It keeps me up to date on technology and the world.”

Mr. Bosket has long been known as a paradox, a man of charm and extraordinary intelligence but also of inexplicable fits of rage.

“It was like a terrifying metamorphosis when this spark within him went off, and you could see the rage in him building,” said Robert Silbering, a former prosecutor who tried Mr. Bosket for the subway murders. “I never have seen anything like that before or afterward.”

The killings led Gov. Hugh L. Carey to sign a law allowing people as young as 13 to be tried as adults for murder. Mr. Bosket said he saw it as something of an honor that he could drastically change a justice system that he said made him a “monster.”

“If I’m the perfect example, then I’ve been taught well,” he said.

At the sight of a recent visitor, Mr. Bosket cheerfully nodded and, revealing a small gap between his front teeth, gave a friendly, “Hi, how’s it going?”

He spoke with the aura of a professor, using deliberate gestures and emphasizing the ends of many words. He often spoke in metaphors and used stories and quotations to explain his philosophies.

As he contemplated his words, Mr. Bosket often folded his right arm across his bulging stomach and lay the fingers of his left hand across his mouth and nose. He sometimes rocked in his chair.

Despite his bleak situation, Mr. Bosket refused to concede defeat: “I’m not broken down and never will be.”

His life has always been empty, he said.

“I grew up with nothing,” he said. “I was born with nothing. I still have nothing. I will never have nothing. Forty-five years of living the way I have lived, I like ‘nothing.’ No one can take ‘nothing’ from you.”

Mr. Bosket, who has spent all but two years in some form of lockup since he was 9, also said he had formed a “breastplate” from a lifetime of incarceration.

“I’ve become so callous to the poking of the sword that, literally, instead of bleeding to death, the blood was drained and I became absent of concern, void of emotions, cold — plain cold to the degree that not much affects me anymore,” he said.

Yet Mr. Bosket did hint at something of a life of suffering.

“If somebody came to me with a lethal injection, I’d take it,” he said. “I’d rather be dead.”

His change from vicious to quiescent, Mr. Bosket said, was a calculated move. Growing up in Harlem, Mr. Bosket said, his heroes were revolutionaries like Huey Newton and Assata Shakur. He said he believed blacks needed to use violence to survive in the 1970s and ’80s.

But in 1994, he said, he sensed a change in society. “Blacks don’t need to go and attack to get their message across,” he recalled thinking.

He said that he also wanted young people to see positive in his life, and that continued violence could be counterproductive.

“I don’t believe at this point it’s strategic for me to be aggressive or violent,” he said. “I’ve made my point.”

“I’m not proud of a lot of the things I’ve done,” he added.

Mr. Bosket’s sister, Cheryl Stewart, 51, said her brother had expressed remorse in letters.

“What was done was wrong, and if he could redo it, he wouldn’t do it again,” she said. “He knows what was done was wrong and is just sorry for what all has went down.”

Though she corresponds with her brother, Ms. Stewart said she had not visited him in 23 years because it was difficult to see him so confined. Mr. Bosket is lucky to receive more than two visits a year.

Adam Mesinger, a television and movie producer, said he had visited Mr. Bosket seven times over the past four years and is shopping a script for a movie about Mr. Bosket’s life. He said that Mr. Bosket had always been warm and open with him and that he would consider him a friend.

“I have no fear of him,” Mr. Mesinger said. “I don’t think he would ever harm me. I don’t think he ever really wants to harm anybody.”

But not even Mr. Bosket would say that his days of violence are behind him.

“When you’re in hell,” he said, “you can’t predict the future.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/nyregion/23inmate.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&adxnnlx=1222180005-i7AWCYLvpfVktjHtF/H7ow&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

CA: Invest in Children Not Prisons. Stop Prop. 6

Invest in Children Not Prisons. Stop Prop. 6
Marian Wright Edelman
Posted September 22, 2008
Children's Defense Fund
Huffington Post

Every election year, politicians talk about getting tough on crime. One easy and politically popular strategy is to show voters you are tough on crime by spending billions of dollars sending people to prison. This requires more prisons to be built to keep the ever expanding incarcerated population behind bars and reduces the money available for investment in health care, education, work force development, and early childhood development to prevent children from going into the Pipeline to Prison.

The Children's Defense Fund works nationally to stop "lock 'em up" legislation that favors punitive measures for children and youths over preventive investments. This year our fight is not limited to federal legislation. In the coming weeks we also will focus on defeating Proposition 6--a horrendous California ballot initiative that would criminalize youths through massive revisions to the state's juvenile justice codes.

Under the pretense of creating "safer neighborhoods," Proposition 6 changes current law to require that more children, as young as 14 years old, are tried and sentenced as adults. This despite the fact that a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that youths sentenced to adult prison commit more crimes and more serious crimes after release compared to their counterparts in the juvenile justice systems. Trying children as adults is inappropriate for developmental reasons (a 14-year-old's brain is not the same as an adult's brain) and is also an ineffective crime prevention strategy. We should not abandon thousands of youths to lives spent going in and out of a revolving door to prison.

Proposition 6's sweeping revisions target at-risk Black and Latino youths in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, making it especially dangerous for young people who are already struggling to stay on the right track. For example, Proposition 6 puts youths at risk of a new jail sentence for infractions as minor as failing to provide local officials with their current address. Another provision subjects families receiving federal housing assistance to yearly criminal record checks for all residents, including children. If a youth has been arrested for certain crimes, the family would lose housing assistance; this places entire families at imminent risk of homelessness. It would also make it impossible for many youths who have served their time to move back home with families who receive federal housing assistance.

In a state like California, where elected officials have not been able to raise new taxes because of a "supermajority" requirement for passing tax measures in the state legislature, any initiative that creates new program obligations without direct funding leads to less money for education, health and other programs. Proposition 6 includes no provision for new revenue yet requires new spending of more than $500 million each year for law enforcement personnel and prisons. It also mandates $500 million for new prison construction. There is no requirement to measure the effectiveness of these provisions and no plan to re-evaluate or re-focus state efforts at some later date.

Proposition 6 specifically weakens community efforts to help at-risk youths. Despite research that shows how community workers and organizations are a key component of crime reduction strategies, Proposition 6 explicitly removes community members from county Juvenile Justice Coordinating Councils. Community leaders currently provide crucial oversight over how laws are enforced and how limited resources are distributed. Their representation on these Coordinating Councils promotes community involvement that is necessary to assist youths who are discharged from juvenile facilities without the tools they need to re-enter their community and succeed.

Nearly one in five children in California is poor. More than 80,000 California children are in foster care, many of them facing tragically negative educational and economic prospects, and more than 750,000 California children lack health coverage. Even before the billions of dollars in new spending that Proposition 6 would make necessary, California already spends more than 20 times as much on each youth in a state juvenile facility as it spends on each student in public school. This is a completely backwards human and economic investment policy.

It's time for a new strategy and vision that makes prevention and early intervention, rather than punishment, the policy--in California and across America. The Children's Defense Fund supports a federal gang, delinquency, and crime prevention and intervention bill called the Youth PROMISE Act, which addresses the root causes of youth and gang violence before crime occurs. Rather than creating additional and duplicative punitive approaches that do little to prevent youths from engaging in delinquent conduct, the Youth PROMISE Act builds upon evidence-based and promising practices to reduce youth violence and delinquency.

All communities should be free of gangs and gun violence. All children should be safe. Proposition 6 is not the way to make that happen. You and I must demand that our nation stop criminalizing children at younger and younger ages and instead institute policies that place all children on a path to productive adulthood. We cannot allow Proposition 6 to become law. Do everything you can to make sure that Californians vote to reject it.

To learn more about CDF California's work to defeat Prop. 6, visit http://www.cdfca.org/.
For more information about the Children's Defense Fund's America's Cradle to Prison PipelineSM report, go to www.childrensdefense.org/CPPreport.

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund and its Action Council whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marian-wright-edelman/invest-in-children-not-pr_b_128238.html?view=print

Posted by lois at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

PA: New prisons seldom a lock on prosperity

"Tracy Hulling, public policy analyst and author of the report, "Building a Prison Economy in Rural America," suggested that hidden costs of prison business, such as added financial responsibilities for local police and court systems, often strain small communities. Hulling wrote that small towns with prisons, but few other amenities, may appear unattractive to businesses and industries."

"The idea that prisons create secondary industries, like hotels and entertainment complexes, is wrong. None of that happens," said Ryan King, a policy analyst with The Sentencing Project, a prison reform advocacy group based in Washington."

New prisons seldom a lock on prosperity
By Robin Acton
Pittsburgh TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, September 22, 2008

Fayette County's planned second state prison is being heralded as a critical project with the potential to secure a struggling municipality's economic future.

State lawmakers and local elected officials predict the $200 million, 2,000-bed facility will create more than 600 jobs -- and untold economic opportunities -- by the time of its projected opening in German Township four years from now. The new prison, announced Thursday, is one of two planned by the state Department of Corrections to ease rapid overpopulation in existing facilities.

"Those are recession-proof jobs at a good, family-sustaining wage level," said Fayette County Commission Chairman Vincent Vicites. "We sought the prison because this could mean several hundred more good-paying jobs for the county."

Prisons have become a growth industry in rural America, where communities suffering from decades of decline in farming, mining and manufacturing jobs are grateful for solid employment opportunities. Although many state and local officials boast about the positive impact prisons have on their host counties, public policy analysts and criminal justice experts argue that other than creating jobs, correctional institutions do little to boost local economies.

Critics contend that prisons strain aging water, sewage and highway systems; burden local police and courts; and fail to stimulate new business and housing ventures.

"The idea that prisons create secondary industries, like hotels and entertainment complexes, is wrong. None of that happens," said Ryan King, a policy analyst with The Sentencing Project, a prison reform advocacy group based in Washington.

"It has been shown time and again."

Job security

In addition to 600 institutional employee positions, the proposed prison will create another 600 "spinoff" jobs in the community, according to state Rep. Bill DeWeese, D-Greene County, whose 50th District will include three prisons when the new facility opens. He estimated that 1,000 more union jobs will be associated with its construction.

"Jobs, jobs, jobs -- it doesn't get much more important than that simple four-letter word," DeWeese said.

Keli Kishbaugh, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, said the annual starting salary for a corrections officer was $29,815 under the most recent union contract. A contract that goes into effect this year includes a 3 percent increase in the starting wage, she said, adding that the average salary for corrections officers -- from trainees to the rank of major -- is $59,317.

Pennsylvania's two proposed prisons -- its 27th and 28th correctional institutions -- are the state's latest ripple on a national tidal wave of expansion that began in the early 1990s after mandatory sentencing laws sent inmate populations skyrocketing. Since 1988, the state Department of Corrections opened 15 adult lockups and a military-styled, motivational boot camp.

Earlier this year, the Pew Center for the States reported that more than 1 in 100 adults are confined in America's jails and prisons.

Pennsylvania's prison population -- nearly 47,000 -- has increased by almost 40,000 inmates since 1980, according to Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard. Although Beard said proposed legislative initiatives may slow the influx of inmates, he expects the population will grow.

As inmate counts escalated, prison numbers rose in every state from 1979 to 2000, going from 600 to more than 1,000, according to a 2004 report by the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center. A survey of states showed that Texas led the nation in expansion by increasing its prisons from 17 to 137 between 1979 and 2000.

The survey showed that nine other states experienced significant growth: Florida, which went from 39 to 84 prisons; California, from 30 to 83; New York, from 30 to 65; Michigan, from 25 to 60; Georgia, from 18 to 42; Illinois, from 12 to 40; Ohio, from 10 to 35, Colorado, from 7 to 32; and Missouri, from 7 to 26.

Slight impact

Most of the facilities built in Pennsylvania in recent years are in rural counties, including SCI Albion in Albion, Erie County; SCI Fayette in LaBelle, Fayette County; SCI Greene in Waynesburg, Greene County; and SCI Forest in Marienville, Forest County.

The Center for Rural PA used a 2006 Edinboro University of Pennsylvania study to examine the relationship between four prisons -- Albion, Cambridge Springs, Houtzdale and Dallas -- and surrounding communities. Researchers determined that state corrections personnel and government officials should be realistic in their claims regarding the potential benefits of prisons because "any economic impact emanating from the prison, whether positive or negative, was not obvious to many community residents."

Erie County Planning Director Jake Welsh said that when state officials decided to build a prison in Albion in the mid-1990s, residents expected a spinoff in businesses and new housing. More than a decade later, he hasn't seen it.

"It's a very rural area. I don't know that there's been a great amount of new development occurring adjacent to the facility," Welsh said. "But I assume the employees are patronizing local businesses."

King said people who promote prison construction as a catalyst for economic development don't understand how state contracts are awarded and how institutions are managed.

In 2003, he co-authored a study that found most employees don't live in the county where the prison is located. "Big Prisons, Small Towns: Prison Economics in Rural America" showed that local residents often are ineligible for or unable to compete for employment because they lack necessary skills or are subject to restrictive hiring requirements within the prison system.

Retired Luzerne Township Supervisor Ron DeSalvo, whose efforts helped convince state officials to build SCI Fayette in his municipality, conceded that many of its 600 jobs were filled at first with employees from other prisons, including those who transferred from Allegheny County when Western Penitentiary closed in 2005. Resignations, retirements and the 2007 reopening of the North Side facility resulted in jobs for more local residents, he said.

"I think that most people who wanted a job at the prison got one," DeSalvo added. "They make good money, they have good benefits and, in 10 years, they're vested for a pension."

Local concerns

The Sentencing Project report indicated that large institutions often overburden aging road, water and sewage treatment systems. Finally, it found that local businesses seldom get contracts with nearby prisons, which require goods and services often unavailable in the host county.

Greg Hemmis, an industrial-equipment salesman who serves as vice president of Albion's borough council, said he hasn't seen a huge economic boom there or near the institutions at Cambridge Springs in Crawford County and Mercer in Mercer County.

Hemmis, however, said borough officials are facing a $3 million project within 18 months to offset the strain that the Albion facility has placed on wastewater and drinking-water systems. Most of the cost will be borne by the local taxpayers, he said.

When the first prison was built in Fayette County, it required improvements to nearby roads and upgrades to several water and sewage systems, according to Vicites, who said the projects were necessary for any hope of new housing. In German Township, supervisors hope the proposed prison will lessen the taxpayers' share of a $25 million public sewage project.

But in some cases, prisons increase taxpayer responsibilities.

Tracy Hulling, public policy analyst and author of the report, "Building a Prison Economy in Rural America," suggested that hidden costs of prison business, such as added financial responsibilities for local police and court systems, often strain small communities. Hulling wrote that small towns with prisons, but few other amenities, may appear unattractive to businesses and industries.

Mike Krajovic, president and chief executive officer of the Fay-Penn Economic Development Council, was unable to list any new businesses or identify any residential growth that resulted from the construction of SCI Fayette, which opened in 2003.

"You're not going to build a town around a prison. It's a positive contribution to the local economy, but not the solution to economic development," Krajovic said.

Still, DeSalvo insists, the construction of SCI Fayette is the best thing that ever happened for Luzerne Township. He said the prison created hundreds of jobs, increased tax revenue and launched at least one new business -- Fayette Thermal Supply, which supplies heating and air conditioning services for the facility.

"Prisons are good for a community," DeSalvo said. "You'll have people moving in, buying houses, shopping at local businesses."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_589424.html

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

September 22, 2008

AL: New Federal Prison for 1,400 Women

New prison for women to be built near Aliceville
September 22, 2008 11:06 EDT

ALICEVILLE, Ala. (AP) -- Alabama is getting a new federal lockup, so says the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. The agency said a medium-security prison for women will be built 2 miles north of Aliceville in Pickens County. The facility would house 1,400 inmates.

According to Democratic state Rep. Alan Harper of Aliceville, the prison will mean the addition of 350 new jobs to Black Belt communities.

The project is expected to cost about $200 million and be completed in 2011.Alabama already has two federal prisons for men. They are located inTalladega and Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery.

http://www.wztv.com/template/inews_wire/wires.regional.al/2f56d81e-www.fox17.com.shtml

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

September 20, 2008

Juvenile Junction

Juvenile Junction
By Will Di Novi
The Nation
September 15, 2008

The girls at the Mississippi detention center were tied up for weeks at a time. Minor offenders, some as young as 13, were cuffed and chained when they ate or used the bathroom. In the words of Erica, a 16-year-old detainee, it was a place that "made you feel like you were nothing."

The boy was beaten and restrained by guards on his first day at a juvenile boot camp in Northwest Florida, suspected of faking an illness to avoid exercise. Martin Lee Anderson died from his injuries early the next day. He was 14.

David Burgos spent much of his young life running away from abusive group homes. One of the estimated 80 percent of juvenile offenders who suffer from a recognizable mental health disorder, the bipolar 17-year-old was arrested in 2006 for a probation violation related to a minor theft charge. After four months at Connecticut's Manson Youth Institution without mental health care, David hung himself with a bed sheet.

According to the most recent data from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, nearly 80,000 people under the age of 18 are held in juvenile detention and residential facilities around the United States each day. To juvenile justice advocates across the nation, the stories above are all too common in a system where punitive policies increase recidivism and exacerbate juvenile crime.

"We have a huge blind spot as a nation, an inability to see the human rights violations that are occurring here on our soil in our juvenile justice system," says Zachary Norris, Director of the Books Not Bars campaign at Oakland's Ella Baker Center, an initiative to reform California's youth prison system. "We often talk about how the [Iraq] war is expensive, but there's also our war on young people here in the United States that's incredibly wasteful."

Norris and other juvenile justice advocates now have their eyes turned to Congress, where ongoing legislative developments could produce the first meaningful response to this crisis in years. The Senate is currently in the process of reauthorizing the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, the federal legislation that sets standards for juvenile corrections systems in the states.

In addition to increasing federal funding for drug treatment, mental health care, and mentoring programs designed to keep children out of the juvenile system, the new iteration of the Act, Senate Bill 3155, includes an amendment to eliminate the incarceration of status offenders within three years of the bill's enactment. Status offenses are charges like truancy, running away or other offenses that would not be criminal if committed by an adult, and result in the incarceration of thousands of young people in some states, says the Washington, DC-based Coalition for Juvenile Justice.

The Senate bill would also require the states to work towards reducing racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. Youth of color make up 34 percent of the American population below the age of eighteen but 62 percent of youth in juvenile detention, according to a report released last year by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

While it's important to keep in mind the many abuses that the bill will not address--laws in more than forty states permitting adult courts to try children as young as 14, the sentencing of young offenders to terms of life without parole, the increasing criminalization of trivial misbehavior in schools--passage of the new iteration of the act would nonetheless represent a major step forward.

It would also recapture the spirit of progressive reform that propelled the JJDPA's initial passage over thirty years ago. Under the original JJDPA of 1974, the states agreed to humanize their often Dickensian juvenile corrections systems in return for increased federal aid. This promising arrangement collapsed in the 1990s during what The New York Times has described as "hysteria about an adolescent crime wave that never materialized." Even as youth crime figures plummeted across the nation, stories of juvenile delinquency increased in the media and states intensified all kinds of punishments for children. Large numbers of juvenile offenders were sent to adult jails where, research has shown, they are more likely to be abused and transformed into repeat offenders. In Norris's estimation, "we are still seeing the repercussions of that movement" in the treatment of juvenile offenders today.

The new version of the JJDPA passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 31 with its major amendments intact and should soon advance to a full Senate vote. "Hundreds of organizations throughout the country, including some unlikely allies, have voiced strong support for the juvenile justice reforms in the Act," says Carol Chodroff, US Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch. "There is significant recognition from a vast array of stakeholders in the juvenile justice system--including many law enforcement organizations--that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem of juvenile crime and delinquency."

A far more promising approach has been playing out on the local level. Over the past decade, Missouri's juvenile corrections system has been celebrated for a rehabilitation-oriented model that invests in small community-based centers, keeps young offenders near their homes to participate in family therapy, and helps young people with job placement and therapy referrals upon their release. Missouri has achieved the lowest recidivism rate in the nation.

In Pima County, Arizona, where "scared straight" policies once produced such rampant incarceration that the local juvenile detention facility had young people sleeping in a cafeteria, a local partnership with the Anne E. Casey foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative has drastically reduced the juvenile prison population. The number of children arrested for violent or property crimes dropped 43 percent between 1997 and 2006 and the county's presiding Juvenile Court Judge says there has been no increase in juvenile crime despite the lower incarceration rate.

"If you have youths wondering, 'Am I a good person or a bad person?' and you put those young people in detention, you're confirming this is who they are and this is who we expect them to be," Judge Patricia Escher told the Arizona Daily Star in June. "When you detain young people inappropriately, what you do is send them on a path of criminality."

In Zachary Norris's estimation, Congress must keep the success of these programs in mind as it assesses the new JJDPA. It is time, he says, to ask "What programs actually build on the strength of young people? Help them get job skills? There's a recognition that tough-on-crime policies hurt us. If kids are worse off when they return [from detention], then we're worse off as a whole."

"We've still got a row to hoe," says Tara Andrews, deputy executive director of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, looking ahead with cautious optimism to the JJDPA's progress before Congress. "But when you start seeing all the work that's being done, you realize there's not isolated pockets of reform. You realize a platform for change is being built."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080929/dinovi/print

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

GOP Intimidation Halts Historic Drive to Register Voters in Alabama

GOP Intimidation Halts Historic Drive to Register Voters in Alabama
State Law Allows Certain People to Vote Even While Incarcerated

Alabama Department of Corrections Caves to Republican Pressure, Tells Advocates: You Can No Longer Register Voters Inside Alabama Prisons

DOTHAN—Alabama-based The Ordinary People's Society and their national partner the Drug Policy Alliance began a historic voter registration drive this week in prisons across Alabama. The drive was prepared with the full support of the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC). However, after Alabama newspapers reported on the registration drive, the state GOP voiced their opposition to the effort and pressured the DOC to end it. Yesterday, the DOC reversed their position and has barred advocates from registering eligible voters in Alabama correctional facilities.

"Voter registration drives are an essential part of our democracy, and this action by the GOP and the Department of Corrections smacks of voter intimidation," said Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, founder and executive director of The Ordinary People's Society, the group leading the registration drive. "Our focus isn't politics, it's restoration. We're just doing what the Bible says, visiting people in prison and ministering to them. The chairman of the Republican Party and the chairman of the Democratic Party can go into prisons with us and monitor the registration process to make sure it's nonpartisan, if that's a concern."

In Alabama, nearly 250,000 people have been stripped their voting rights due to a felony conviction. But in a 2006 court ruling in Alabama, a judge found that only those convicted of felonies of "moral turpitude" lose their right to vote. The judge found that certain felonies—such as drug possession—do not constitute crimes of moral turpitude, and therefore individuals convicted of those crimes do not lose their right to vote, even during incarceration. Alabama's Attorney General, Troy King, concurred with the ruling. This change could have an impact on nearly 70,000 Alabamians, including nearly 10,000 currently incarcerated in state prisons on drug charges alone.

In 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Second Chance Act, which supports the process of people with felony convictions re-entering society by funding programs inside and outside prisons to increase civic participation upon their release. Bush, the country's top Republican, also has expressed support for the restoration of voting rights to people with felony convictions.

"Alabama state law makes it clear that people incarcerated for simple drug possession never lose their right to vote, even while incarcerated," said Glasgow. "The GOP and the Alabama Department of Corrections cannot decide on their own which constituencies are going to have access to the vote, and which will be barred from it. We live in a democracy, after all."

###

Associated Press
GOP opposes letting prisoners register to vote
9/19/2008
By JAY REEVES

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — The Alabama Republican Party opposes a drive to register inmates to vote so they can cast absentee ballots from inside state prisons, with the state GOP chief saying Thursday there needs to be safeguards against voter fraud.

State Rep. Mike Hubbard, chairman of the party, told Corrections Commissioner Richard Allen in a letter delivered by e-mail that the party supports the idea of registering more people to vote, but not when it comes to prisoners.

"Furthermore, I have concerns about potential issues with how this effort is being monitored to ensure no form of voter fraud occurs," Hubbard wrote. He asked Allen to outline the prison system's plans for preventing fraud.

Prison spokesman Brian Corbett said the commissioner was working on a response and declined further comment.

Hubbard's letter came two days after The Associated Press reported that a coalition of groups led by a community activist, the Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, began registering inmates to vote in state lockups this week. Nearly 80 filled out registration forms in two days.

Glasgow, a Democrat from Dothan who served time for robbery and drug convictions, said no one with the state has told him to stop registering inmates. He plans to continue the effort with other members of the coalition, which he said includes Republicans and Democrats.

"I think they're more worried about me being a Democrat than anything," said Glasgow. "The chairman of the Republican Party and the chairman of the Democratic Party can go in there with me and monitor it to make sure it's nonpartisan."

Glasgow, a pastor, intends to turn in the registration forms and return to the lockups later to make sure inmates mail in absentee forms. He said the project is about human rights and preparing prisoners to return to society, not politics.

"We're just doing what the Bible says, visiting people in prison and ministering to them," he said.

About 3,000 people could be eligible to vote from inside Alabama prisons, Glasgow said, and he plans to register as many as possible in coming weeks.

Alabama law prohibits felons convicted of "crimes of moral turpitude" from voting unless they have had their rights restored. State law doesn't define such crimes, but court opinions have said they include major offenses like murder, robbery and rape plus some lesser offenses, like taking a stolen car across state lines.

Glasgow's drive is concentrating on registering prisoners who have been convicted only of drug possession, which an attorney general's opinion issued in 2005 did not define as a crime of moral turpitude.

Confusion over which crimes involve "moral turpitude" has led to litigation seeking the restoration of prisoners' voting rights. The most recent was filed in July by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three ex-inmates.

Associated Press
State inmates register to vote in prison
By Jay Reeves
September 17, 2008

BIRMINGHAM -- Alabama inmates are registering to vote from prison in a precedent-set­ting effort organized by activist groups with the blessing of state corrections officials.

Nearly 80 prisoners had filled out registration forms during drives at two lockups, and organizers plan to help them and hundreds more obtain absentee ballots in time to vote in the presidential election on Nov. 4.

Laura Schley, 34, has eight months left on a four-year sen­tence for illegal possession of prescription drugs. She had a hard time believing she was reg­istering Tuesday at the Bir­mingham Work Release Center.

"It just blew my mind," said Schley, who was wearing prison whites. "My voting rights are very important to me and have been ever since I was 18."

The state attorney general's office issued an opinion seven years ago that inmates could vote from inside prison using absentee ballots. But confusion and lawsuits followed over which felons had that right be­cause of a murky phrase in state law.

Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett said no one previ­ously had registered prisoners to vote in Alabama.

"It's something that we sup­port and authorized for them to do," said Corbett.

The drive is led by Kenneth Glasgow of Dothan, who served 14 years on robbery and drug charges and is now a pastor. Glasgow said restoring voting rights is essential to returning felons to society.

"What we're interested in is not so much the politics but the restoration of people's lives," Glasgow said.

Glasgow is state coordinator of a coalition that includes the Drug Policy Alliance, which ad­vocates reforms including a move toward treatment rather than prison time for drug users.

Angela Wright, in the work-release center for cocaine pos­session, said she has to study be­fore casting her vote for either Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama for president.

"I haven't really even been paying attention because I fig­ured it was a lost cause," Wright said after filling out a registra­tion form.

Studies have estimated that more than 250,000 Alabama resi­dents are barred from voting be­cause of criminal records.

State law says those con­victed of crimes of "moral turpi­tude" can't vote unless they have their rights restored by the state. The law does not state ex­actly which crimes are bad enough to make that list. Turpi­tude is defined as "baseness, vil­eness, depravity."

The state attorney general's office has said those offenses in­clude murder, rape, multiple sex and obscenity offenses, bur­glary, robbery, forgery, conspir­acy to commit fraud, aggravated assault, drug sales, bigamy, im­peachment, treason and trans­porting stolen vehicles out of state.

Others convicted of lesser crimes such as possession of small amounts of drugs, battery or attempted burglary are eligi­ble to vote, even from inside prison.

Glasgow, who coordinates a coalition of eight prisoners' rights groups, is registering in­mates convicted only of drug possession. He previously regis­tered hundreds in county jails across the state.

Many convicted on drug charges also were sentenced for other crimes. Prison system sta­tistics don't indicate how many inmates are behind bars only for drug possession.

Glasgow believes about 3,000 people could be eligible to vote from inside Alabama prisons, and he plans to register as many as possible in coming weeks.

Completed voter registration forms will be sent to the secre­tary of state's office and volun­teers will return to state lockups to make sure prisoners cast their absentee ballots.

A Jefferson County judge in 2006 ordered the state to let all convicted felons vote because the law failed to define offenses or moral turpitude, but the Ala­bama Supreme Court over­turned the decision.

Posted by lois at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)

PA: New prison coming to Fayette

New prison coming to Fayette
By CHRIS FOREMAN
Friday, September 19, 2008
Valley Independent

A booming population in the state criminal justice system is causing the construction of at least two new state prisons, including one at a Fayette County site to be determined, Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard said Thursday.

The new prison, costing as much as $200 million and projected to open within four years, would be the second state lockup built in the county within a decade.

Although three properties in German Township are under consideration, the selection of a 200-acre plot for the 2,000-bed, medium-security prison likely won't be announced until next spring.

Township supervisors are pushing for construction in their municipality, which will be the site of a $25 million public sewage project and is near a $60 million Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission project replacing a bridge carrying Route 21 over the Monongahela River into Greene County.

The state's prison population - at almost 47,000 inmates - is 21 percent higher since 2001 and has grown by almost 40,000 inmates since 1980, according to Beard.

"The fact is, we've been growing now for almost 29 years and we see no reason for that growth to totally stop," Beard said at a news conference yesterday outside the State Correctional Institution at Fayette in Luzerne Township.

"There's some legislative initiatives that will help, we hope, slow the growth a little bit. But even with all of those initiatives, we're not going to totally be able to stop the growth," he added.

The prison will be the 24th state lockup for adult men and the county's second, after the 2003 opening of SCI-Fayette.

"It's a Fayette County facility for certain, and we hope it'll be in German Township and believe it will be in German Township," said Rep. Bill DeWeese, D-Greene County. "But, regardless, if there would be some overwhelming obstacle, it would still be in Fayette County by virtue of the law that was passed this summer."

Two of the properties previously publicized as being under consideration are near routes 21 and 166. One is owned by the Mario Tiberi family, while the other is owned by Manfried Wolf of New Jersey.

The third site is in the Palmer area, township supervisors said.

Local officials said they are excited by the prospect of 600 prison jobs and the union jobs associated with construction.

German supervisors said they are hopeful a prison project -- and its related infrastructure -- could lessen the tax burden and other expenses for their residents. Only half of the required funding for the sewage project has been secured.

"It's a critical project to come to the area and it would help our township flourish," Supervisor Dan Shimshock said.

Despite early opposition by many Luzerne residents, the township has reaped substantial financial benefits from SCI-Fayette, according Ron DeSalvo, who retired this year after 18 years as a supervisor.

Taxes on employees at the prison helped the township to collect at least $65,000 in revenue for the general fund budget, which is about $700,000, he said.

Still, John Rush, the executive director of the faith-based Justice & Mercy nonprofit group, said Pennsylvania has a different corrections philosophy than does New York, which announced the closing of four facilities this year.

He said the state abides by "draconian" sentencing guidelines that keep inmates incarcerated here longer than in other states, imposes more life sentences and restricts parole opportunities.

The long prison terms turn many lockups into "geriatric units" because of the exorbitant cost -- estimated at $70,000 per year -- to care for an elderly inmate, Rush said.

His Eastern Pennsylvania organization advocates cost-effective and practical reforms within the justice system.

"When we lack creativity, we pay through our teeth," Rush said.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/valleyindependent/news/s_589104.html

Posted by lois at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)

TX: County rejects prisons but welcomes toxic waste dump

Struggling Andrews County sees value, not risk, in nuclear site
By Enrique Rangel | A-J AUSTIN BUREAU

Saturday, September 20, 2008
Story last updated at 9/20/2008 - 3:05 am

AUSTIN - Like many rural counties in West Texas and across the nation, over the years Andrews County has experienced hard economic times and even lost some population.

"In 1989, during the oil bust, we had one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation," said Russell Shannon, president and CEO of the National Bank of Andrews, which is located in the county's namesake city and county seat. "Things are better now because we put together a community strategic plan."

The plan basically called for the diversification of the local economy, which was heavily dependent on oil and gas production, Shannon said. So, two years later civic and business leaders in the county and the city of Andrews became receptive to a proposal to allow a hazardous and nuclear waste disposal site to be built in the unpopulated western portion of the county of nearly 13,000 residents.

The rest is history. Barring an unexpected snag, after 17 years of planning, next year Waste Control Specialists, a Dallas-based company, will start burying low-level radioactive waste in western Andrews County near the Texas-New Mexico border.

"We're ready for it," Andrews

Mayor Bob Zap told reporters in May when the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality authorized Waste Control Specialists to dispose of the waste. "We're all satisfied that this is not dangerous, and besides it will create jobs and bring revenue to our community."

If to residents of other struggling rural counties Zap's comments sound familiar, they are.

Whether it is a nuclear waste disposal site, a prison for violent criminals or other projects that most communities would outright reject, some financially struggling rural counties actually welcome them.

In Snelling, S.C., for example, which is about 70 miles south of Columbia, the state capital, the town and Barnwell County, the county it belongs to, have even welcomed with open arms a similar nuclear waste burial site.

"The (South Carolina) Legislature needs to understand that it's not just a money issue, it's not a hazard issue," Keith Sloan, chairman of the Barnwell County Council said in a televised interview that can be seen on YouTube.

"It's a service that we can provide as a state to the other states to ensure that waste is handled safely," Sloan said. "At the same time we can generate significant revenue for South Carolina and Barnwell County with no real impact on our environment."

Snelling Mayor Tim Moore agreed.

We understand it; we know what it means," Moore said in the same report. "The word nuclear' doesn't frighten people."

Moore, who could not be reached for comment, even told the New York Times in 2004, "We hear the word nuclear' and it's a good thing. We're happy to have the stuff."

However, the nuclear waste site has not been an economic boon for Snelling, a community of about 250 residents, because it generates less than $500,000 a year.

Moreover, in "Big Prisons, Small Towns: Prison Economics in Rural America," authors Ryan S. King, Marc Mauer and Tracy Huling show that a growing number of rural communities are welcoming prisons for violent criminals, even when such facilities don't necessarily boost the local economies.

The city of Andrews considered the possibility of bidding for a state prison, but residents rejected it because they didn't think it would be appropriate for the community, Shannon said;

Economic impact

For the town, which has about 85 percent of the county's population, the nuclear disposal site that Waste Control Specialists will operate will create 75 jobs at first and eventually more than 100. The initial impact will be about $7.5 million and about $11.5 million when the second of two disposal operations is under way, said company President Rodney A. Baltzer.

As he has done repeatedly, Baltzer has assured not only Andrews residents but TCEQ officials and others that the disposal and the storage of the waste will be safe.

"Our personnel are highly experienced in the safe, permanent disposal of hazardous and toxic waste," Baltzer said. "We will be very protective of the environment and public health."

Like other town and county residents, state Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, whose Senate District 31 includes Andrews County, said he also supports the project "because it's based on pure science."

The county has no underground water that would be in danger of being contaminated, and geological studies, as well as other soil analyses oil producers have done in the area, have convinced him that the area will be a safe storage for the radioactive waste, Seliger said.

Asked if he would live near the nuclear burial site, Seliger replied "absolutely, that's how safe I think it is."

But environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and some residents of Eunice, N.M., which is actually closer to the disposal site than the town of Andrews, see it differently.

"This has the potential of being an environmental disaster," said Cyrus Reed, spokesman for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club in Austin. "It's beyond me why a community would accept this kind of project in exchange for a few dozen jobs and a few million dollars.

"It's not worth the risk," Reed said. "That's why we're fighting it."

The environmental group and some residents of Eunice have tried to block the development at the TCEQ and in the courts.

"If they bury all that waste we're all going to be in trouble," Rose Gardner, a Eunice flower shop owner, said when she traveled to Austin to voice her opposition to the project. "They assure us that there won't be any contamination, but we have heard and seen evidence to the contrary. That's why we're worried."

But despite what the critics say, Andrews residents such as former City Manager Len Wilson said the community did the right thing in welcoming the waste disposal site.

"It's not just about jobs and the money the project will generate," Wilson said. "It's about being good citizens.

"There is a lot of low radioactive waste all over the United States, and this is a good location to store it," he said. "We have done geological studies that indicate there is no danger of contamination because we don't have any underground water.

"Most of us were either born here or have lived here for a long time," added the Amarillo native who was Andrews' city manager for 33 years until he retired in 2001.

"We have raised our families here," Wilson said. "We wouldn't want this project if we thought it was unsafe."
http://lubbockonline.com/stories/092008/loc_334490227.shtml

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

NY Times Op-Ed: Blocking Care for Women

September 19, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Blocking Care for Women
By HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON and CECILE RICHARDS

LAST month, the Bush administration launched the latest salvo in its eight-year campaign to undermine women’s rights and women’s health by placing ideology ahead of science: a proposed rule from the Department of Health and Human Services that would govern family planning. It would require that any health care entity that receives federal financing — whether it’s a physician in private practice, a hospital or a state government — certify in writing that none of its employees are required to assist in any way with medical services they find objectionable.

Laws that have been on the books for some 30 years already allow doctors to refuse to perform abortions. The new rule would go further, ensuring that all employees and volunteers for health care entities can refuse to aid in providing any treatment they object to, which could include not only abortion and sterilization but also contraception.

Health and Human Services estimates that the rule, which would affect nearly 600,000 hospitals, clinics and other health care providers, would cost $44.5 million a year to administer. Astonishingly, the department does not even address the real cost to patients who might be refused access to these critical services. Women patients, who look to their health care providers as an unbiased source of medical information, might not even know they were being deprived of advice about their options or denied access to care.

The definition of abortion in the proposed rule is left open to interpretation. An earlier draft included a medically inaccurate definition that included commonly prescribed forms of contraception like birth control pills, IUD’s and emergency contraception. That language has been removed, but because the current version includes no definition at all, individual health care providers could decide on their own that birth control is the same as abortion.

The rule would also allow providers to refuse to participate in unspecified “other medical procedures” that contradict their religious beliefs or moral convictions. This, too, could be interpreted as a free pass to deny access to contraception.

Many circumstances unrelated to reproductive health could also fall under the umbrella of “other medical procedures.” Could physicians object to helping patients whose sexual orientation they find objectionable? Could a receptionist refuse to book an appointment for an H.I.V. test? What about an emergency room doctor who wishes to deny emergency contraception to a rape victim? Or a pharmacist who prefers not to refill a birth control prescription?

The Bush administration argues that the rule is designed to protect a provider’s conscience. But where are the protections for patients?

The 30-day comment period on the proposed rule runs until Sept. 25. Everyone who believes that women should have full access to medical care should make their voices heard. Basic, quality care for millions of women is at stake.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Democratic senator from New York. Cecile Richards is the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/opinion/19clinton.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Hillary%20Clinton&st=cse&oref=slogin

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

September 18, 2008

OK: Counties reminded people with felony convictions can vote

Counties reminded ex-felons can vote
Publication:The Oklahoman Sept 18, 2008
Section:Front page

By Michael Kimball Staff Write

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma mailed letters to the state’s county election boards this week reminding them former felons have the right to vote.

“With Oct.10 being the deadline (for voter registration) for the presidential election, we find this to be extremely timely,” said ACLU spokeswoman Katy Jones at a Tuesday news conference. “A lot of people don’t understand that these exfelons have voting rights.”

In Oklahoma, convicted felons are stripped of the right to vote while incarcerated, on parole or probation. When a felon’s original sentence is complete, voting rights are restored. Those given a deferred sentence for a felony crime retain their voting rights without interruption. Voting rights for felons vary by state.

All of Us or None Oklahoma, the local chapter of a national felon advocacy group, is conducting a survey this month to see which counties are giving incorrect information about felons’ voting rights, spokeswoman Faye Tucker said. Counties have shown improvement over a 2005 survey in providing correct information, Tucker said.
Felon Voting Rights FAQs:
Q: Can convicted felons vote in Oklahoma?
A: Yes – so long as their sentence has been completed.
Q: Can people accused of a felony, but not convicted, vote?
A: Yes – voting rights are stripped only upon conviction for a felony.
Q: What about deferred or suspended sentences?
A: People given a deferred sentence can vote. People given suspended sentences for felony convictions cannot vote.
Q: Must felons provide proof they are not on probation or on parole when registering to vote?
A: No. Like all voters, felons are simply asked to swear they meet requirements.
Q: What if a person’s felony conviction came from another state?
A: The same rules apply, regardless of jurisdiction.

Posted by lois at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2008

CA: Yolo prison foes vow to keep fighting

Yolo prison foes vow to keep fighting
By Hudson Sangree
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
This story is taken from Sacbee / News.

Opponents of a new prison approved for rural Yolo County land say their fight will continue.

Looking to overturn the decision Tuesday by county supervisors to go ahead with a re-entry prison for about 500 convicts, foes are holding an organizational meeting tonight and say they are considering legal action.

"We're not done. This is not over," said Carla Phillips, a longtime resident of Madison, the small community identified as site for the facility.

The issue goes beyond Yolo County. The state Corrections Standards Authority, which oversees the siting of re-entry prisons and allocation of jail construction funds, meets Thursday in Berkeley to consider applications from a dozen counties.

Yolo officials say they plan to be there.

Phillips said rural and urban residents from throughout the county are supporting the Madison residents in their opposition.

"This is a coalition we are building," Phillips said.

The organizing meeting is scheduled for 7 tonight at the Yolo County Airport, northwest of Davis.

Meanwhile, they are talking to attorneys and looking into legal action.

Residents of Madison and nearby rural areas begged the supervisors to spare their quiet rural communities. They argued the county's farmland was no place for a prison.

Also opposing the project is the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians, which owns the Cache Creek Casino Resort on Highway 16, a main road that would run past the prison.

The tribe on Tuesday sent a letter to the Yolo supervisors asking them to take more time before selecting Madison as the prison site.

Tribal Chairman Marshall McKay wrote "to express the Tribe's concerns about the proposed placement of a prison facility in the small rural community of Madison, the gateway to the beautiful Capay Valley."

Thousands of cars headed to the tribe's casino on Highway 16 would pass by the proposed prison site. The tribe has been spending millions of dollars to create a world-class resort with golf and restaurants that serve the region's wines and organic produce.

A prison could be an uneasy fit with the tribe's vision.

But a divided Board of Supervisors OK'd the prison project, and in exchange, the state would provide $30 million to expand the county jail.

Supervisor Helen Thomson of Davis said the money was essential to provide more beds in the overcrowded Monroe Detention Center in Woodland.

Though an extremely difficult choice, she said, "it is one the board needs to make."

With a deadline looming later this week, the supervisors voted 3-1-1. Supervisors Matt Rexroad of Woodland and Mike McGowan of West Sacramento joined Thomson.

To finalize the deal, the state must sign an agreement with the county to install an additional security fence and to transport newly released inmates away from Madison.

Board Chairman Duane Chamberlain, who represents a large rural district, cast the only no vote Tuesday.

More time was needed, he said, to try to locate the prison near Woodland, West Sacramento or Davis.

"If it doesn't work, we won't do it," he said.

Supervisor Mariko Yamada of Davis abstained from the vote. She said she understood the need for the prison, but didn't think it belonged in a rural area.

The re-entry prisons, planned for 32 counties around the state, are meant to help rehabilitate offenders in their last year of prison with counseling and job training.

Reducing recidivism, building re-entry prisons and providing more jail beds are intended to alleviate severe overcrowding in the state's correctional facilities.

Last year's law that created the prisons urged that they be put in urban areas, near services and parolees' families. But the law allowed city councils to easily say no.

That has left many counties, including Yolo, struggling with where to place the prisons in order to qualify to get the state jail funds.
http://www.sacbee.com/101/v-print/story/1244200.html

Posted by lois at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

PA: Bill addressing crowded prisons gets PA. Senate OK. Plans move forward on building 3 more prisons.

Bill addressing crowded prisons gets Pa. Senate OK
By MARC LEVY
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader

Legislation designed to move thousands of nonviolent criminals out of state prisons more quickly and rein in booming correctional costs is nearing final approval in the Capitol.

The bill, regarded as the biggest change to the state's criminal justice system in many years, received Senate approval Wednesday, 48-2, after the chamber made minor changes to it.

The key provisions would allow nonviolent drug offenders currently in prison to be resentenced to enter an existing addiction treatment program, while nonviolent offenders who behave well and complete certain programs can trim time from their sentences and be paroled more quickly.

The House, which has approved previous versions of the bill in recent months, is expected to give final approval to the bill next week.

Gov. Ed Rendell has pressed for the changes and a Corrections Department spokeswoman said officials there support the bill.

The hope is that, with rehabilitation, fewer convicts will return to crime after they are released from prison, and that the state can slow the growth of a state prison population that has already quadrupled in the past quarter century to 46,800.

Pennsylvania has no early-release program that gives nonviolent offenders an incentive to turn their lives around and stay crime-free, despite evidence from New York and other states that such policies can work well, the legislation's proponents say.

"Are we surprised they come back (to prison)?" said Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, R-Montgomery. "They have no alternatives and they have addictions, and we release them that way."

Mandatory sentencing laws passed in the 1990s and designed to punish violent criminals are to blame for the state's booming prison population because they inadvertently sent nonviolent offenders away for long sentences, as well, said Greenleaf, a former county prosecutor who chairs the Judiciary Committee.

"They were important bills and they dealt with violent offenders, but it's having a broader effect than we anticipated and it's important that we step forward and acknowledge that," Greenleaf said.

The bill also would divert to the state prison system hundreds of the approximately 30,000 convicts who under current law serve their sentences in county jails, lifting a financial burden on counties.

In the next three years, the state plans to build three new prisons in addition to the 27 already operating at a cost of more than $500 million. On Thursday, state officials will announce plans for a new prison in Fayette County.
http://www.timesleader.com/news/ap?articleID=802104

Posted by lois at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)

Arkansas:

Northwest Arkansas Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Reading matter for state prisons gets careful look

BY JON GAMBRELL THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Posted on Wednesday, September 17, 2008

PINE BLUFF — As in any library, the bookshelves overseen by Dennice Alexander draw visitors with diverse literary tastes.

Requests for everything from philosophy books to The Art of Sculling reach Alexander’s desk, which is filled with lists and yellow cards cataloguing the tomes held at her branch locations. Not that it’s likely Alexander’s readers will take to a boat anytime soon.

Alexander is the first fulltime administrator who oversees the libraries within Arkansas’ state prison system, which holds more than 14, 000 inmates spread among 20 locations.

For the longest time, advisory boards held sway over what books made it inside the double razor-wired fences. But in recent years, Alexander has approved the books and magazines that bring light inside a system once deemed by federal courts to be a “dark and evil world.”

“They’re trying to rehabilitate themselves,” Alexander said. “We have [prisoners ] leaving every day and some of them have been in since they were 17, 16, and now they’re 35 and 40. The world has changed, so they don’t know about Internet or banking.”

Alexander says her move to the prison system didn’t come without some hesitation. The 61-year-old had never visited a prison before taking the job, after working in the “free world” as a librarian for institutions like the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a private school. The first challenge came from walking past the fence and guard towers.

Prisoners run the day-to-day operations of the individual libraries, pasting on bar codes and organizing the books. Inmates collect the magazines and daily newspapers, either USA Today or the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, skimming through the newsprint to check for any stories that might incite the incarcerated.

The library jobs “are gravy” positions for inmates, Alexander said, meaning prisoners keep things impeccably neat among the stacks. On a surprise visit to one unit, the library administrator couldn’t immediately put her hands on a copy of a book on working dogs.

The inmate running the library walked over to the shelf and immediately pulled it out.

“They can go straight to a book. It’s amazing,” Alexander said. “They know where every book is in the system.”

The books run the gamut from beach reading to professional study. Each prison carries a fully stocked law library, something handled by the state Board of Corrections’ compliance attorney. Beyond that, individual units have their own tastes. As a rule, the men’s prisons love westerns, the state’s female prisoners follow the tribulations of paperback romances.

Philosophy books, war, history and art are also requested, as are recent novels by John Grisham and the work of Cormac McCarthy. The libraries also stock novels for young adults, as many enter the prison with lower reading skills.

Books not held by the prison are requested through interlibrary loan from the UALR library or from others around the state. Alexander has a long list of requests, ranging from a book on canoeing to one outlining the work of a Russian faith healer from the turn of the 20 th century.

Not every request is filled.

“We can’t have a book that tells them how to make a gun, how to make a shank, erotica,” Alexander said. “The mail room clerks flip through the magazines to see if there’s any gang signs and anything like that. If there is, they send it back to me. We can’t put that in there.”

Libraries were never a priority within the state prison system. But that thinking has evolved.

Alexander receives $ 20, 000 a year to purchase books, magazines and newspapers for inmates. And she’s working to create late fees for overdue books, possibly charging an inmate’s commissary account if a borrowed book stays out past two weeks.

As much as 90 percent of all books in circulation at the prison units come from donations.

That’s an unacceptable arrangement, according to Vibeke Lehmann, who recently retired from her job as coordinator of library services and education for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. Lehmann, who has written academic papers on the role of prison librarians, said reliance on donations makes it nearly impossible to provide the broad range of reading materials needed.

“You’ve got to make sure you’re very nonjudgmental, that you kind of disregard why they are where they are and just look at them as human beings, without thinking about the crime necessarily,” she said. “Most of all, [you think of ] how to give them information and materials to help them prepare [for ] their return to society, because we don’t want them back. We want them leaving better equipped than when they came in.”
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/237592/print/

Posted by lois at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2008

TX: Gritis for Breakfast Blog: TYC commitments to grow dramatically despite declining juvie crime

TYC commitments to grow dramatically despite declining juvie crime

September 15, 2008 Grits for Breakfast Blog

Having analyzed on Saturday the Legislative Budget Board's incarceration projections for the adult prison system, let's take a look at LBB's projections regarding youth crime and incarceration in their five year population estimate (pdf) which is used to set agency budgets.

Regular readers know that in 2007 the Legislature took steps aimed at reducing inmate populations at the Texas Youth Commission, including shifting 19-20 year olds to TDCJ and refusing to take misdemeanants at state youth prisons. The population drop can be seen most dramatically in the number of releases. TYC released 4,375 inmates during fiscal year 2007, up from 3,554 in fy 2006. By comparison, the number of new inmates entering TYC decreased from 3,462 in fy 2006 to 2,994 in fy 2007 and an estimated 2,090 in 2008 (based on the monthly rate for the first seven months). LBB predicts the new level of intakes will hold steady at 2,090 over the next five years.

Those declines mainly represent implementation of a new law disallowing judges from sending misdemeanants to TYC, reduced lengths of stay, and reduced numbers from a handful of counties that essentially quit sending kids to the agency. Indeed, the reduced numbers allowed TYC to meet minimum staffing requirements for the first time in years.

On its face, TYC's reduced inmate population seems like it might be sustainable, particularly given that juvie crime is declining: "Texas juvenile arrest rate decreased between calendar years 2005 and 2006 (1.3 percent) following a decrease between calendar years 2004 and 2005 (8.3 percent)." Not only are arrests down, says LBB, Texas' overall juvie population is growing at a slower rate than in the past.

Even so, TYC's reduced inmate population will be shortlived unless more is done to reform the system. Today TYC operates at 6.5% below maximum capacity, and will slightly exceed max capacity in fy 2009, says LBB. But it's what happens after that which made me sit up and take notice. LBB predicts TYC's inmate population will resume fairly rapid growth in the near term, rising to 13.5% above apacity by 2010 and shooting up to 23.3% above capacity in 2012.

So the situation is this: Juvie crime is declining but total commitments to TYC will increase by about a quarter over the next four years as the agency's inmate population creeps back up toward their previous, higher levels. By contrast, LBB projects the increase in Texas' juvie probation population will be de minimus over the same period, with the number of juvie probationers overall expanding just .03% annually.

These data have significant implications for proposed TYC reforms. For starters, those like Sen. John Whitmire proposing the agency's abolition will be chagrined to see projections indicating a greater dependence on youth prisons going forward, not less of one.

That said, the adult system predicted massive overcrowding just a couple of years ago, and as discussed Saturday. reforms implemented by Sen. Whitmire and his colleagues staved off that increase for the foreseeable future by expanding treatment and diversion programs. They could do the same for TYC, but according to these data, changes implemented in 2007 failed to resolve the agency's crowding problems long term.
http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2008/09/tyc-commitments-predicted-to-grow.html

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

TX: Grits for Breakfast Blog: Legislative Budget Board: Texas' prison population will dip next year for the first time in decades before rising further

Saturday, September 13, 2008
LBB: Texas' prison population will dip next year for the first time in decades before rising further
Ever since the Governor fired Dr. Tony Fabelo and abolished the state's independent criminal justice number crunchers, the Texas Legislative Budget Board assumed responsibility for issuing population projections for the adult and juvenile justice systems. These are the official data on which state agencies base their budget requests and legislative budget writers authorized the expenditure of tax dollars for the Department of Criminal Justice and the Youth Commission.

To me this is a fascinating and useful document, and a truly interdisciplinary one. LBB has to pull data from all sorts of different agencies and sources to produce these estimates, and the methodology sections are essentially a prose description of the mathematical reasoning contained in the main section.

Prior to the 80th Legislature, LBB projected the adult system might be as much as 17,000 beds short by 2012, prompting an aggressive commitment of new funds by the Lege to divert offenders away from prison and stave off new prison building, especially since the state cannot adequately staff the facilities we've got. According to the June 2008 analysis, Texas' total prison population will actually decline slightly next year (!) for the first time in many moons because of the 2007 probation/diversion reforms, eliminating the short-term need for expensive new prison building. The total will then begin to creep back up slightly, said LBB, which projects Texas will exceed current capacity by .6% in 2013 if nothing changes, needing to find 942 more beds instead of 17,000. (Thanks Jerry Madden and John Whitmire!)

Both parole and probation revocations are down thanks the the Legislature's expansion of treatment options and intermediate sanctions facilities, LBB reports. Statewide, in FY 2007, 7.5% of felony probationers and 9.7% of parolees were revoked back to prison, which compares favorably, e.g., to revocation rates of 8.8% and 14.8%, respectively, in 2004. (Regular readers know, of course, that such gains vary widely from county to county.)

Interestingly among LBB's assumptions, just 50% of those placed in new diversion beds are assumed to be people who'd otherwise be revoked to prison. That means the Lege has created a true intermediate sanction. It's not just a program that's LESS harsh than prison, for half of those using diversion beds it's actually a HARSHER sanction than would otherwise be available.

So where does the upward pressure on incarceration come from in Texas' adult prison system? For starters, Texas recently has averaged a 6% annual growth rate recently in direct court commitments to prison, said LBB, this compared to about 2.5% annual population growth statewide over the same period. LBB's numbers assume that high rate of increase will continue. This is true, they say, even though "The crime rate declined from its peak in 1988 and has remained steady at a lower level since 2000."

Another big driver of Texas' expanding prison population is the oxymoronically named "Discretionary Mandatory Supervision" statute, which requires just a bit of explanation for the uninitiated. Prior to 1996, offenders were automatically released when their served time and good time added together equalled their sentence. The Lege eliminated mandatory release, creating the bizarrely named DMS system that still requires a parole panel to approve offenders' release. These offenders - who prior to 1996 would have all been out the door - today are released only 52.2% of the time a parole panel considers them. That means almost half of offenders who would earlier have been eligible for mandatory release are today kept in prison by the parole board.

Overall, the parole approval rate averaged over the last 5 years was 28.7%, though in FY 2009 that ticked up to 29.9%. However a bigger factor has been a slow but significant increase in the number of parolees considered for approval - with that expansion, the number of approved paroles has increased slightly, said LBB, even though the overall approval rates didn't rise that much.

In the past, LBB's projections were used like a hammer to demand approving construction of unnecessary new prison beds. These projections won't have the same usefulness to prison builders. They show diversion programs worked, that investing in them reduced reliance on prisons and created meaningful alternatives that courts are actually using.

Coming Soon: I'll discuss LBB's juvie projections and the surprising increase they predict in TYC's inmate population.

Posted by lois at 08:01 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Bad Choices: Why cut public colleges while propping up unnecessary prisons?

Bad Choices: Why cut public colleges while propping up unnecessary prisons?
Posted by Syracuse Post-Standard Editorial Board September 16, 2008
Editorial

New York state has cut projected funding for its public universities three times this year. But it can't seem to find a way to eliminate its spending on unnecessary prisons.

Why? It's part economics, part pure politics. And it all adds up to bad policy.

A blue ribbon commission on higher education reported in June that the State University of New York -- the largest state university system in the country -- has been losing ground over the past 20 years to comparable systems in other states. The commission called for increased funding to hire 2,000 more faculty members, including 250 "eminent scholars," over the next five years.

The report said SUNY schools are suffering from "a backlog of critical maintenance" and "a dramatic rise in the percentage of classes taught by adjunct, part-time faculty." It said the system is hampered by "too little revenue, too little investment and too much regulation."

But Gov. David Paterson, citing the state's dire fiscal situation, cut projected funding to the 64 SUNY campuses by a total of $270 million -- cuts administrators say would further damage their schools.

Meanwhile, the state Department of Correctional Services said in January that it wanted to save money by closing four prisons that were no longer necessary because of a significant drop in inmates statewide. This is news worth celebrating: New York has bucked a national trend by systematically reducing its prison population. That's due both to declining crime rates in New York City and to effective alternative-to-incarceration programs.

By closing the four underused prisons, the state could have saved $33.5 million this year in operating costs and another $30 million in planned renovations.

But in April, hundreds of state corrections officers rallied in Albany, supported by politicians including then-Senate majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Sen. Michael Nozzolio, R-Fayette. The show of force worked, and the prison closings were taken off the table.

Advocates of keeping the prisons open point to the lost jobs and economic impact closing them could have. In some Upstate communities, prisons have long been a mainstay industry, fed by the continuing flow of prisoners shipped up from New York City. Now that flow is slowing, and threatening the economies of those areas.

That's a problem, but not one that should be addressed by propping up institutions that are no longer needed -- especially if it means taking money away from public education.

Universities are far more effective economic engines than prisons are, and investing in them will help the economy down the road. A strong argument can be made that the better and more affordable a state's public universities are, the fewer young people will fall into lifestyles that could lead to prison.

Tough choices are necessary in tough fiscal times, and, especially given the deepening crisis on Wall Street, it is obvious that no sector can be immune from cuts. But there's little justification for keeping those prisons open while further eroding New York's once-envied public university system.
http://blog.syracuse.com/opinion/2008/09/bad_choices_why_cut_public_col.html

Posted by lois at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2008

Violent Crime Fell in 2007; Areas with lower incarceration rates experienced greater crime reductions

Violent Crime Fell in 2007; Areas with lower incarceration rates experienced greater crime reductions
Monday, September 15, 2008
Justice Policy Institute

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Violent crime in the United States fell by 1.4 percent in 2007, according to an analysis released today by the Justice Policy Institute. The analysis, which is based on findings in the 2007 FBI Uniform Crime Report released today, finds that the drop in crime came at a time when the prison and jail growth rates fell from previous years. The analysis concluded that regions with the lowest incarceration rates also experienced the largest drops in violent crime.

The number of violent and property crimes fell in three of the four regions of the country. The northeast region experienced the greatest drop in violent crime, and also has the lowest incarceration rates in the country. The southern region has the highest incarceration rates and witnessed a rise in violent crimes--the only part of the country to not experience a drop in crime. Furthermore, as the growth rates of prisons and jails fell, the violent crime rate fell as well, possibly indicating that lowering the number of people imprisoned can be an effective way to increase public safety.

"The data clearly demonstrates that the use of incarceration as a means of increasing public safety is a failed public policy," said Sheila Bedi, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute. "This data underscores that investments in education, employment and housing are what make communities safer."

The Uniform Crime Report also reinforces statistics around youth crime and suggests that punitive practices aimed at youth should be abandoned for more effective alternatives. According the UCR, adults are responsible for the majority of violent offenses, representing 84 percent of all violent crime arrests.

For a useful two page analysis with tables go to:
http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08-09_FAC_FBIUCR2007_AC-PS.pdf

Posted by lois at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Higher education shouldn't take a back seat to prisons

Higher education shouldn't take a back seat to prisons
By Daily Hampshire Gazette
Created 09/15/2008

Sen. Stan Rosenberg is right in being outraged by how the state Legislature is not prioritizing funding for public higher education (Guest Column, Sept. 10). While he compares the University of Connecticut and University of Massachusetts systems, I offer another comparison: the University of Massachusetts system and the bloated, overpriced, ineffective Massachusetts Department of Correction.

In 2004, the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation first document that our legislators had voted in favor of spending more on prisons and jails than on its 29 colleges and universities. That year, the percentage of the DOC budget devoted to labor costs was 73 percent, the second highest in the nation.

Salaries of Massachusetts corrections officers in 2003, excluding benefits and overtime, was $59,919-$71,946 with an average of 52 paid days off. Less than 3 percent of the total budget went to all rehabilitative and educational programs. Of course, these numbers have grown since then. Gov. Deval Patrick's 2009 budget seeks $1.4 billion for the Department of Correction, surpassing the education/prison and jail spending parity that existed just a year ago.

In Massachusetts, there are over 23,000 prisoners serving time in county jails and state prisons at a cost of $48,000 per person per year. Massachusetts can follow the lead of other states by choosing much less costly and effective community-based treatment, bail reform and an end to punitive mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions Choices can be made by taxpayers and our legislators in favor of education over incarceration.

Lois Ahrens
Northampton
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/09/15/higher-education-shouldn039t-take-back-seat-prisons

Posted by lois at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2008

States Restore Voting Rights for Ex-Convicts, but Issue Remains

September 14, 2008
States Restore Voting Rights for Ex-Convicts, but Issue Remains Politically Sensitive
By SOLOMON MOORE
NY Times

Striding across a sweltering strip-mall parking lot with her clipboard in hand, Monica Bell, a community field organizer in Orlando, Fla., was looking for former convicts to add to the state’s voter rolls.

Antonious Benton, a gold-toothed 22-year-old with a silver skull-shaped belt buckle, a laconic smile and a criminal record, was the first person she approached.

“I can’t vote because I got three felonies,” Mr. Benton told Ms. Bell. He had finished a six-month sentence for possession of $600 worth of crack cocaine, he said. But Ms. Bell had good news for him: The Florida Legislature and Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican, changed the rules last year to restore the voting rights of about 112,000 former convicts.

“After you go to prison — you do your time and they still take all your rights away,” Mr. Benton said as he filled out a form to register. “You can’t get a job. You can’t vote. You can’t do nothing even 10 or 20 years later. You don’t feel like a citizen. You don’t even feel human.”

Felony disenfranchisement — often a holdover from exclusionary Jim Crow-era laws like poll taxes and ballot box literacy tests — affects about 5.3 million former and current felons in the United States, according to voting rights groups. But voter registration and advocacy groups say that recent overhauls of these Reconstruction-era laws have loosened enough in some states to make it worth the time to lobby statehouses for more liberal voting restoration processes, and to try to track down former felons in indigent neighborhoods.

“You’re talking about incredible numbers of people out there who now may have had their right to vote restored and don’t even know it,” said Reggie Mitchell, a former voter-registration worker for People for the American Way. In Florida, “we’re talking tens of thousands of people,” he said. “And in the 2000 election, in the state of Florida, 300 people made the difference.”

A loose-knit group of national organizations working to restore voting rights includes the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn (Ms. Bell’s employer); the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and the Brennan Center for Justice.

Two other groups, the Sentencing Project and the American Civil Liberties Union, said they had given briefings to officials for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign about how to register former felons. But the Obama campaign has been reluctant to acknowledge any concerted effort.

An Obama spokesman, Bill Burton, said via e-mail, “We are trying to register voters across the country and follow the state laws wherever we are.”

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law professor and senior adviser to the Obama campaign on criminal justice issues, said he had briefed campaign officials about felony disenfranchisement issues and the various and often-confusing state requirements to restore voting rights to former convicts.

Campaign volunteers get briefed on specific state laws governing voting rights restoration in case they come across former felons during general voter registration drives, Mr. Ogletree said, “but it’s not as if the Obama campaign said, ‘Here’s a plan for felony disenfranchisement.’ ”

None of the felony voter registration organizations contacted for this article could recall hearing from Senator John McCain’s campaign. And a campaign spokesman said there had been no effort to reach out to former prisoners specifically.

Last month, Obama campaign workers took down a sign at their headquarters in Pottstown, Pa., that said “Felons can vote,” because it might have sent the wrong message.

“The fear is that it might cost them more votes to be portrayed as the candidate of the felons than it could gain them,” said Anthony C. Thompson, a New York University law professor and Obama campaign adviser. “This is a mistaken belief, in my view, when there are tens of millions of citizens with criminal records.”

In fact, felony voter restoration efforts have received bipartisan support in many states including Alabama, Florida, Indiana and Maryland. Still, surveys have shown that about 70 percent of former convicts lean Democratic, according to Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota criminologist who said that had led some to believe that Democrats benefited from felony voter restoration more than did Republicans.

“That’s because of the high rate of incarceration among African-Americans, who have strong Democratic preferences,” Mr. Uggen said, “and because many people who have committed felonies are working class, relatively young, unmarried and in particular individuals with less than a high school education. These are all demographics that traditionally align themselves with the Democrats.”

Muslima Lewis, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida, said: “Really, you’re not having a full participatory democracy if you disenfranchise so many people. It weakens the whole system and, in particular, communities of color.”

All of Us or None, a prisoner-advocacy organization in San Francisco, held a rally last month about restoration of voting rights in California. Also last month, the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition successfully lobbied the Denver County jail system to begin registering felons upon their release.

The A.C.L.U. is also advising lawyers’ groups planning to deploy to polling places in November to enforce the rights of former convicts who have restored their voting privileges.

According to the A.C.L.U. only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners, parolees and probationers to vote. Thirteen states allow parolees and probationers to vote, eight states reinstate probationer voting rights, and 20 states restore voting rights to people who have completed their sentences, although each state has different processes, exceptions and limits on eligibility requirements. Kentucky and Virginia permanently disenfranchise nearly all felons.

Florida’s felony voter registration law divides applicants into three categories based on the seriousness of their crimes: nonviolent criminals, the biggest group, need not apply for restoration of voting rights and just need to re-register. Violent criminals, but not murderers or rapists, must apply to the clemency board. The board either grants those rights immediately or investigates on a case-by-case basis. The most violent criminals are subjected to a more rigorous investigation and must attend a hearing of the clemency board, which meets only four times a year, before their rights can be reinstated.

Despite the state’s liberalization of felony voter procedures, only 9,000 out of a potential 112,000 former convicts in Florida registered to vote in the last year, according to a report last month in The Orlando Sentinel. Part of the reason is that thousands of notifications sent by the state went to the wrong addresses because of poor data and former prisoners’ high mobility.

Fred Schuknecht, the director of administration for the Florida Clemency Board, acknowledged in an interview that there was a backlog of 60,000 former felons who could potentially have their rights restored, but must first be reviewed by the agency. Despite the fact that 3,500 newly released prisoners are added to the caseload every month, the Legislature cut 20 percent of the staff devoted to felony voter restoration cases, Mr. Schuknecht said.

Further, Ms. Bell said that many former convicts shun attention, even if that means abdicating their voting rights.

“You might want them to fill out the registration form, but they have an outstanding warrant,” she said. “And in order to help them, I need to ask what their crimes are, but they might not want to say.”

Cheria Murray, 24, of Orlando, regained voting rights this year, after serving a two-day jail sentence with two years’ probation for grand theft in 2003. Ms. Murray lives in a housing project where, she said, many people had been stripped of their rights because of their records.

Her companion, Duane Miller, 28, recently returned from serving a sentence for illegal firearm possession, and has not applied to reinstate his voting rights.

Ms. Murray said she thought about restoring her voting rights only recently, inspired by the presidential campaign.

“When I saw Barack Obama, that’s when I got excited to get my rights back,” she said. “I wanted to vote for history.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14felony.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2008

60 Days Left in NV to Restore Voting Rights

Public News Service - NV » August , 2008
60 Days Left in NV to Restore Voting Rights

Las Vegas, NV – The clock is ticking for an estimated 20,000 Nevadans who have paid their debts to society and have a chance to regain their right to vote, in time for the upcoming presidential election. Under a new state law, most people who have served their time for non-violent offenses can file papers to get a voter registration card.

Mike Aguirre was in his 20s when he admitted his guilt to a drug charge, and his three years of probation ended long ago. Now, he's forty.

"It just seems like this election, there's so much attention focusing on it, I want my voice to count; I want to be part of this, basically making history, this campaign, and I just want to be a part of it."

Political analysts say the 19 electoral votes of Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico combined could tilt the election.

Aguirre says he thinks a lot of Nevadans with records don't know they can restore their voting rights. Most Nevadans who were released from prison prior to July 2003 are automatically eligible to have their voting rights restored. For those released in August 2003 and after, only non-violent offenders are eligible.

In passing the law, Nevada joined 33 other states in allowing people who have done their time and stayed on the right side of the law to return to the voting booth.

Meredith McGhan is the voter restoration advocate for PLAN, the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.

"We're really hoping that we'll get a lot of people involved in this because it's just so important that people participate in civic engagement; it reduces their chances of re-offending, it makes them feel like they are part of the community again, and I think that's just really important in a democracy."

People who have completed their sentences can start the process on their own as long as they have documentation of their release, discharge or pardon. Nevadans who need help obtaining that paperwork can get help from the PLAN voter restoration project.
http://www.publicnewsservice.org/print.php?key=5885-1

Posted by lois at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)

NYCLU Launches Public Education Campaign on the Voting Rights of People with Criminal Records

Published by the New York Civil Liberties Union (http://www.nyclu.org)
NYCLU Launches Public Education Campaign on the Voting Rights of People with Criminal Records

As the presidential election approaches, the New York Civil Liberties Union today announced it has launched an intensive statewide campaign to help New Yorkers with criminal records reclaim their right to vote.

The campaign, which runs through the voter registration deadline on Friday, Oct. 10, features bus advertisements in New York City, train advertisements in Buffalo and Western New York, public service announcements to be broadcast on radio stations throughout the state, and a new web page – www.nyclu.org/vote – where visitors can access voting rights toolkits, posters and videos. Every weekend until the voter registration deadline, teams of NYCLU volunteers will be in New York City parks registering voters and educating New Yorkers about their rights.

“There is a mistaken belief that those with criminal records permanently lose their right to vote. As a result, thousands of New Yorkers are either unnecessarily forfeiting their rights or being unlawfully denied their right to vote,” said Donna Lieberman, NYCLU executive director. “This campaign seeks to correct that mistake by educating both the public and county election officials that people who have completed felony sentences have the right to vote.”

In New York State, individuals who have been convicted of a felony cannot vote while incarcerated or on parole. The right to vote is restored once someone is released from prison or completes parole, though it is up to the voter to re-register with their county board of elections. No documentation or special forms are required to prove the completion of a sentence. Those sentenced to probation for a felony offense never lose the right to vote.

More than 100,000 people are convicted of felonies each year in New York State – in 2007 alone, a record 115,573 people were convicted of felony offenses. Nearly 62,300 of those who are convicted are currently on probation for felonies. An additional 12,100 people are released from parole each year.

A study conducted by the Sentencing Project shows that a majority of these people are under the mistaken belief that they are unable to vote, which means there are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who incorrectly believe they are permanently disfranchised.

Many workers at county election boards are poorly informed about the voting rights of those with criminal records. A 2006 report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that 38 percent of employees at New York’s county election boards indicated they didn’t know whether probationers could vote. A study conducted before the 2004 election revealed that more than half of New York’s county election boards unlawfully required formerly incarcerated individuals to present documentation of their criminal status before they could register to vote.

“This is a matter of justice,” said Corinne Carey, NYCLU public policy counsel and voting rights campaign coordinator. “Voting provides people a voice – something stripped from them while in prison. The vote allows people to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and helps them rejoin society.”

The campaign, partly paid for by a $15,000 grant from the Adco Foundation, educates the public about the voting rights of those with criminal records through a variety of media. Partnering with the Brennan Center for Justice, Citizens Against Recidivism and The Fortune Society, the NYCLU sponsored advertisements on MTA buses in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan alerting people of their voting rights and directing them to the NYCLU’s voter enfranchisement web page: www.nyclu.org/vote. The NYCLU ran similar ads in Buffalo and Western New York.

By visiting www.nyclu.org/vote, people can download voter registration forms; access a toolkit of information on voting rights; listen to a public service announcement on registering to vote; and download posters to help spread the message.

Visitors to the web page also can watch a series of videos chronicling a Brooklyn woman’s effort to reclaim her right to vote. Maria Perez, who completed parole in 2000, was unlawfully denied the right to vote in the 2004 presidential election. The videos follow her as she visits her local election board and registers to vote and as she receives the election board’s decision on her voting status. A third video will follow her to the polls on Election Day as she casts her first vote in a decade.
Source URL:
http://www.nyclu.org/node/1976

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

Cornell Companies: Cashing in on crime

Cornell Companies: Cashing in on crime
Small Cap Investor
September 12, 2008

Shares of Cornell Companies (NYSE:CRN) are on a six-month prison break, and investors aren’t about to issue an all-points bulletin.

Since sinking to $15.69 on March 10, the stock of the Houston-based provider of correction, detention, education, rehabilitation and treatment services for adults and juveniles has been on the run to higher ground. Cornell’s shares hit a 52-week high of $28.42 on Aug. 14, and since then have traded slightly below that level, closing Thursday at $27.66.

Cornell Companies shares have gained about 19% in value this year, but other prison operators aren’t faring as well: larger competitors Corrections Corp. of America (NYSE:CXW) and Geo Group (NYSE:GEO) are down 11% and 15%, respectively.

Two analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters have Cornell Companies rated “outperform,” although a third, Cooley May of Macquarie Research Equities (USA), issued a “neutral” rating and a $24 price target. The Thomson Reuters median price target is $31.

Kevin Campbell, senior analyst with Avondale Partners, raised his price target Aug. 11 to $31 from $28, while keeping his rating at “market outperform.” In a telephone interview, he noted that privately operated prisons are likely to continue to gain favor, and that Cornell has a strong pipeline for growth.
Click here to find out more!

“There is a big disconnect between the supply of beds and the demand for beds,” Campbell said. “State prisons are operating at about 105% of capacity, and federal facilities are at 137% of capacity.” And with more than 2.3 million Americans incarcerated, Campbell said, “Given the current economic environment … it’s difficult to justify building more prisons if your other services, such as healthcare, have to suffer.”

Cornell operates three business units: adult secure services (corrections), Abraxas Youth & Family services (juvenile rehabilitation and treatment) and adult community-based services (handling parolees and probationers). The company has 71 facilities in 15 states with 18,550 beds — many with long-term contracts — but operates correctional facilities in only five states. It has expanded two prisons recently, and has a 1,250-bed men’s facility under construction in Colorado.

For the three months ended June 30, Cornell beat expectations and its own guidance, reporting 3.4% revenue growth to $94.6 million, with net income rising to $5.3 million, or $0.36 a share, compared with $3.4 million, or $0.24 a share, in the same quarter last year. Cornell issued guidance for the current quarter calling for earnings per share of $0.29 to $0.33 per share, and $0.37 to $0.41 per share in the fourth quarter.

James E. Hyman, Cornell's chairman, president and chief executive, arrived in 2005. A turnaround specialist, Hyman was brought in to spruce up Cornell for possible sale, The revitalized company became a takeover target in 2007, but shareholders rejected an $18.25-a-share offer from Veritas Capital — a wise decision in light of the current stock price.

In mid- 2007, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pulled 600 detainees from an Albuquerque, N.M., facility operated by Cornell over safety and health concerns. It appears that after making changes, Cornell could regain the ICE contract this year.

When combined with an era of state and local government budgets stretched thin, for companies such as Cornell, crime does pay.
http://www.smallcapinvestor.com/stockresearch/spotlight/2008-09-12-570197ce24

Posted by lois at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2008

Bay Area: September 24 to 29th: Book events for the Real Cost of Prisons Comix

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
7 PM. Book Launch
Green Arcade Bookstore
1680 Market Street, San Francisco

Speakers:

Lois Ahrens, editor, Real Cost of Prisons Comix and director/founder, The Real Cost of Prisons Project.

Marlon Altan is a social studies teacher with 5 Keys Charter School. 5 Keys charter school is a high school that works out of the San Francisco County Jail.

Amie Dowling is an Assistant Professor in the Performing Arts Dept at the University of San Francisco and through Community Works leads theater/writing workshops in the San Francisco jails.

Debbie Reyes, OSI Fellow, Central Valley Coordinator, California Prison Moratorium Project, Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, Fresno.

Karen Shain is Co-Director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, a San Francisco-based 30-year-old prisoners' rights organization that advocates for the rights of incarcerated women, their families and communities.

Mara Taub from Santa Fe, NM, is the coordinator/editor Coalition for Prisoners' Rights Newsletter. Since 1976, the Coalition for Prisoners' Rights has worked to gather and disseminate information and analysis for those imprisoned, formerly imprisoned and their allies.

Thursday, September 25th, 7 PM
“Political Prisoner/Incarcerated/Prison Industrial Complex”
Discussion and book launch
First Congregational Church, Oakland
Co-sponsored with KPFA. C.S. Soong, host of “Against the Grain”, Moderator.

Panelists will be PM authors: Robert King (Angola 3), Lois Ahrens, Vikki Law (author of the forthcoming The Invisibility of Women’s Resistance), Matt Meyer (editor of the documentary anthology Let Freedom Ring), Bo Brown, former political prisoner (George Jackson Brigade) and one of the founders of Out of Control, a lesbian prisoners group. Ashanti Alston, former Black Panther and Black Liberation political prisoner. Bo Brown and Ashanti Alston are contributors to Let Freedom Ring. $10—no one turned away.

Monday, September 29th
7 PM. Book launch
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia, San Francisco

Speakers:

Lois Ahrens, Ashanti Alston, Bo Brown and Matt Meyer and others.

****************************
"I cannot think of a better way to arouse the public to the cruelties of the prison system than to make this book widely available."
--Howard Zinn

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher. This volume collects the three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prisons Project.

Through the comics, and associated campaigning, hundreds of thousands of prisoners, their allies, and activists, have had the grisly facts and consequences of mass incarceration and its devastating effects on communities, families and the poor, made accessible. Each comic includes alternatives to the costly and inhumane system we have now. More than 30 organizers in and out of prison write about how they use the comix in their work. Founder and Director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project and the book’s editor, Lois Ahrens discusses the Project and an introductory essay by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore places the comix within a political context.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix includes:

Prison Town: Paying the Price by Kevin Pyle and Craig Gilmore
Prisoners of the War on Drugs by Sabrina Jones, Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens
Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children by Susan Willmarth, Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens.

For more information:Ramsey Kanaan: Publisher: PM Press: ramsey@pmpress.org

Book orders can be placed after September 24th at :https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=48
Books will be available at all events and at Critical Resistance 10.

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

September 09, 2008

MI: Public wants smarter, less costly criminal justice policies

Public wants smarter, less costly criminal justice policies
For decades, politicians have believed that sounding tough on crime was their ticket to getting elected. Such beliefs, along with a few high-profile crimes, have generally driven prison policies over the last three decades and fueled an enormous expansion of Michigan's prison system with little, if any, improvements in public safety.

But a new poll of Michigan voters, commissioned by Detroit Renaissance, on restructuring the state budget could help change that. It shows wide support for criminal justice reforms that would lead to fewer people in prison and less money spent on corrections.

It's about time. Michigan's prison population of 50,000-plus is more than triple what it was 25 years ago. With a $2-billion-a-year budget for corrections, all of it state tax money, Michigan is one of only four states that spend more on prisons than on higher education. Corrections now devours 20% of the state's general fund.

Detroit Free Press

September 9, 2008

Michigan taxpayers are finally coming to understand that they are getting too little in return for that enormous investment. The Detroit Renaissance poll found that corrections was the top choice of four areas that voters were asked to consider for major reform with cost-saving potential. The others were Medicaid, state employee health care benefits, and public school teachers' health care benefits.

Two of the top six ideas supported by voters were finding alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders and releasing some nonviolent offenders before parole. In addition, nearly half of those polled supported reducing the length of mandatory sentences.

That should reassure politicians worried about appearing soft on crime that they can safely support much needed reforms. Those changes include sentencing guidelines that divert more low-level offenders into community programs, wider eligibility for boot camps, expanded prisoner re-entry programs to reduce recidivism, parole hearings for eligible lifers, community treatment for mentally ill offenders, and the release of sick or dying inmates who pose no risk.

Michigan -- for no good reason -- incarcerates at a rate 47% higher than the other seven Great Lakes states, costing taxpayers here an added $500 million a year. That's unconscionable and unrealistic in a state with pressing education, health care, job training, transportation and other needs.

Politicians should now know that it's safe to be smart on crime as well as tough.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080909/OPINION01/809090320
/1069/OPINION

Posted by lois at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)

Jail and Jesus

Jail and Jesus
The Bible is heavy on redemption, and the plight of prisoners is a recurring theme in the New Testament. With 1 in 100 American adults incarcerated, are Christians doing enough to address the root causes of this prison explosion?

By Tom Krattenmaker
USA Today
September 9, 2009
"Jesus for President!" So proclaims a progressive Christian movement aiming to tweak the national conscience. Recent trend lines in the country suggest an even more provocative tagline for our consideration: "Jesus for Parole."

That's right. Jesus is imprisoned — at least in the view of an increasingly vocal set of Christians spurred into action by some deeply troubling truths about America and our bursting-at-the-seams prison system.

The concern seems as well placed as it is challenging. The United States has crossed, for the first time, a dismal threshold: One out of every 100 American adults is in prison, according to the Pew Center on the States. Five states have reached the point where they are spending as much or more on corrections than they do on higher education systems. To place it all in perspective, consider that America has approximately 5% of the world population but about 25% of the world's prison population.

The fact that violent crime, according to the Justice Department, has dropped over the same three decades of surging prison-population growth poses a complex tangle: Is less crime the product of get-tough enforcement and sentencing, or are we just incarcerating more low-level offenders who don't need to be in prison? Probably some of both. But whatever the case, the situation is enough to chew on the conscience of any follower of a religion that emphasizes compassion and redemption. Multitudes of Americans are languishing in prison — and it's all suggestive of something deeper afflicting the soul of the nation.

Given Christian teachings and the enormity of the problem, it's no surprise to find many in the Christian community reaching out to prisoners, including high-profile figures such as Super Bowl-winning football coach Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts and Watergate conspirator Charles Colson and his well-known Prison Fellowship.

But as heartening as these and many similar examples might be, one has to ask: Will the nation's faithful take their compassion for prisoners far enough to fully address the factors that cause so many released prisoners to end up back in jail? Will they dare take their cause deep enough to effect the kind of change that can help keep people from becoming prisoners in the first place?

They're Jesus

Andrew Skotnicki is a former Catholic priest and ex-prison chaplain with a challenging proposition for the nation's religious believers: Those 2 million men and women in America's prisons? They're Jesus, he says.

Skotnicki, author of the book Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church, is not suggesting that convicts are all misunderstood angels who should be let loose. He sees great value in penitence — the process of transgressors' removal from society followed by reflection, reform and acceptance back into the community. But our prison system falls appallingly short of that ideal, he believes.

Now a religious studies professor at Manhattan College in New York, Skotnicki notes the many ways the Bible elevates the plight of prisoners: Jesus was a prisoner before his execution. The apostle Paul was a prisoner, too, as was John the Baptist and St. Peter. Many of the church's early saints spent their time caring for prisoners and working for the release of those unjustly incarcerated.

"The Scripture's pretty clear," Skotnicki says. "There's a real affinity for the imprisoned. God hears the cries of the imprisoned throughout the Scriptures. Whether the prisoners in question are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, whether they're mass murderers, sex offenders — whoever — Jesus says that when you visit a prisoner, 'you visit me.' "

Commendably, more moderate and progressive Christians are calling attention to larger social problems that contribute to the USA having the world's largest prison population. Any short list of those factors has to include the gaping educational disparities that handicap Americans who choose their parents poorly. Related to that are poverty and its contributions to crime, and get-tough sentencing guidelines that lock up many who don't need to be in prison and that tend to land hardest on minorities.

Some, such as conservative columnist George Will, dismiss talk about larger social forces as liberal nonsense. In emphasizing personal responsibility in this and other policy conversations, conservatives are at least partially right. Whatever the circumstances, committing crime always involves a choice.

Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship, also washes his hands of the deeper social problems underneath our burgeoning prison population. Let's be clear: Much credit is due to Colson and the estimated 40,000 volunteers who have taken part in his organization's Christian ministry operation in prisons in this and 100 other countries. Colson, who served seven months in prison after Watergate, models redemption and service in compelling ways. Praiseworthy, too, is the way he and Prison Fellowship have addressed poor prison conditions and certain inadequacies in our society's approach to criminal justice. Yet their failure to address more structural causes comes through loudly in what they say, and don't say, about the big picture.

The need for deep solutions

In a 50-page report on crime and punishment published earlier this year, Prison Fellowship makes no mention of poverty or race as factors in the creation of criminals. Colson did bring up poverty in an online newspaper column last year, but only, seemingly, to absolve Christians of responsibility for working toward deep solutions. Christian volunteering to help the poor and downtrodden is different, he wrote, "than believing that the world's biggest social problems — poverty, disease, homelessness — can be cured by well-intentioned religious believers. That is the sort of utopian dreaming that constantly gets social planners in trouble."

Progressive Christian leaders such as Jim Wallis show what can be undertaken by believers moved by social injustices. Raising a prophetic voice, engaging in acts of moral suasion, calling people to conscience — surely these are not beyond the capabilities of committed Christians, whatever their political persuasion.

As the Unitarian-Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell writes on her blog, mainstream Christians often get fidgety when the talk turns from individual behavior and salvation and toward systemic injustices. As Sewell writes, "Churches are made of mostly pretty comfortable middle-class people, people who want to 'help the poor' but who don't want to take a hard look at their own privilege" — or change our society to be more generous to those in need.

Is the world's No. 1 "Christian nation" ready to acknowledge the humanity of prisoners and follow the courses of action that might logically follow — including work on those aspects of "the system" that have contributed to America becoming the world leader in incarcerations?

If not, count on prison ministry remaining a very active front. Because the nation's believers are going to have a lot of Jesuses to visit behind those prison gates.

Tom Krattenmaker, who lives in Portland, Ore., specializes in religion in public life and is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. He is working on a book about Christianity in professional sports.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/09/jail-and-jesus.html

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

September 08, 2008

Voter Registration by Students Raises Cloud of Consequences

September 8, 2008
Voter Registration by Students Raises Cloud of Consequences
By TAMAR LEWIN

The widespread practice of students’ registering to vote at their college address has set off a fracas in Virginia, a battleground state in the presidential election.

Late last month, as a voter-registration drive by supporters of Senator Barack Obama was signing up thousands of students at Virginia Tech, the local registrar of elections issued two releases incorrectly suggesting a range of dire possibilities for students who registered to vote at their college.

The releases warned that such students could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, a statement the Internal Revenue Service says is incorrect, and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents’ car and health insurance.

After some inquiries from students and parents, and more pointed questions from civil rights lawyers, the state board of elections said Friday that it was “modifying and clarifying” the state guidelines on which the county registrar had based his releases.

Student-registration controversies have been a recurring problem since 1971, when the 26st Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 from 21, and despite a 1979 ruling by the United States Supreme Court that students have the right to register at their college address.

Virginia is not the only state with murky guidelines. South Carolina’s voter-registration site, for example, says students who want to register to vote at their college address must demonstrate “a present intention to remain in the community.”

“There’s no issue for snowbirds who live in Iowa but fly to Florida for the winter,” said Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the Student Public Interest Research Group’s New Voters Project. “One demographic group, like students, shouldn’t have to overcome a special hurdle to vote. We impose all the responsibilities of citizenship on students, and we have to provide them with the privileges of citizenship, too.”

Ms. Jahagirdar said Virginia’s warnings were profoundly misleading. “We have been registering young voters for 25 years,” she said. “We registered 500,000 young voters in 2004, the majority on college campuses, and we’ve never heard of a single one who lost health insurance, scholarship or tax status because of where they registered to vote.”

In Virginia, the county registrar first issued an alarming release on Aug. 25, and two days later a slightly toned-down version using language taken directly from the state Board of Elections’ Web site.

That site says students can determine their legal residence, but advises them to consider certain questions. “Are you claimed as a dependent on your parents’ income tax return?” the site asks. “If you are, then their address is probably your legal residence.”

The site also tells students to check whether their coverage under their parents’ health or automobile insurance, or their scholarship, will be affected by changing their residence.

Civil rights lawyers say these guidelines are problematic and could infringe on students’ rights.

“What the state Board of Elections has on its Web site, to me, sounds like it is discouraging students from registering at their school address,” said Jon Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Indeed, the Montgomery County registrar, E. Randall Wertz, said several students had canceled their local registration over their worry about the possible consequences. Mr. Wertz said he had issued the release to try to dispel confusion and explain what he believed to be the consequences of choosing a college address as a primary residence.

“My understanding of state law has been that by declaring you’re voting here, you’re saying this is your primary residence, your domicile, and that while you can have many abodes or residences, you can only have one domicile,” Mr. Wertz said. “And if this is your primary residence, you have to register your vehicle here, charge your driver’s license to here and so on. That’s been the interpretation at state training sessions.”

Kevin Griffis, the Obama campaign’s Virginia spokesman, said the release appeared to be a good-faith effort to convey state guidelines, not a politically motivated effort to stop voting by students.

Mr. Wertz said the initial release had been written by an intern whom he asked to summarize the guidelines. Although the second release used the state’s precise language, he said, it still left room for confusion. In other counties, registrars have refused to accept dormitory addresses as residences. But so far, the state has not set clear standards.

“Different registrars around the state interpret it differently,” he said. “We’ve asked for more guidance from the state legislature, but they haven’t wanted to deal with it.”

Mr. Greenbaum’s Voting Rights Project has been involved in other student-registration cases. Last fall, in Statesboro, Ga., in a hotly contested city council race, there were challenges to the registration of about 1,000 Georgia Southern University students who had used dormitory addresses. “We threatened suit, but the issue went away when they figured out that the challenges weren’t going to affect the results of the election,” Mr. Greenbaum said.

In 2003, in Waller County, Tex., the district attorney wrote a column in a local newspaper threatening to prosecute students at Prairie View A&M, a historically black university, for illegal voting. The project sued, and the district attorney backed down.

In the 1970s, that same county required Prairie View students who wanted to register to fill out a questionnaire asking, among other things, whether they owned property in the county, had an automobile registered there or belonged to any church, club or organization unrelated to the college. A challenge to that practice led the Supreme Court to uphold students’ rights to vote at their college address.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/education/08students.html?ei=5070&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 09:31 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2008

MA: State sets record high for prisoners

State sets record high for inmates
Critics say prison plan is all bunk
By Laura Crimaldi | Sunday, September 7, 2008

Facing its largest inmate population in state history, the Department of Correction is installing bunk beds for the first time at the maximum security Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, the Herald has learned.

The move has ignited an outcry from the correction officers union and prison advocates. They say double bunking at Souza-Baranowski is a security risk and does nothing to address the problem of lower-risk offenders being jailed at higher-security prisons because of a lack of lower-security beds.

“It’s the most dangerous thing to do at a Level 6 maximum security facility,” said Steve Kenneway, president of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union. The union is to begin bargaining with the DOC over staffing levels required by the double bunking Sept. 16, Kenneway said.

“Right now, Souza-Baranowski is a safe facility that is single bunked. It will be an unsafe facility with tremendous problems when you double bunk it,” said Kenneway.

DOC spokeswoman Diane Wiffin said officials decided to install bunk beds at Souza to address overcrowding created by the record number of state inmates. As of Sept. 1, the DOC had a population of 11,368, a 10 percent increase since 2005, breaking the record of 11,158 inmates set in 1999.

“Overcrowding impacts the safety of our population and staff,” said Wiffin. “There are several potential remedies we are exploring to ease overcrowding. One remedy is double bunking at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center.”

The 500,000-square-foot prison has 1,024 general-population single cells, 128 special management cells and 24 health service beds, according to the DOC Web site. As of March 31, Souza-Baranowski was operating at 104 percent of its capacity, with 1,063 inmates, according to the DOC’s first quarter overcrowding report. So far, none of the bunk beds that were installed have been put to use, Wiffin said.

MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole, the state’s other maximum security prison, was operating at 115 percent of its capacity, with 731 inmates, during the first quarter of 2008, DOC data show. The prison was designed to hold no more than 633 inmates. There are no bunk beds in use there, Wiffin said.

Leslie Walker, director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, said double bunking at Souza will worsen security conditions at an already violent prison and require the state to spend more money on staffing. The DOC’s budget for fiscal 2009 is more than $530 million - a steep increase from last year’s spending plan of $474 million.

“Double bunking maximum security prisoners is a huge mistake. Double bunking at Souza-Baranowski jams two men in a small cell for 20 hours per day,” Walker said in an e-mail. “This creates an unnecessarily tense, unsafe environment for prisoners and staff in an already tense, violent prison.”

Walker said 16 percent of the state’s prison population is held at maximum security prisons, which is twice the national average. According to a January DOC report to the Legislature, there are 600 inmates housed with higher-risk offenders because of a lack of medium, minimum and pre-release beds for the lower-risk prisoners.

“For nearly two years, the (DOC) has had objective evidence it was overclassified. Yet today Massachusetts still has nearly twice the national average of prisoners in costly high-security prisons and one-half the national average in low-security,” Walker said.

Wiffin said the DOC has added 600 beds at medium, minimum and pre-release facilities since 2005, when the inmate population was 10,338. Adding more beds at those facilities is under consideration.

Wiffin could not provide figures for the number of beds expected to be installed at Souza-Baranowski, saying the “capacity and timeline is still being developed.”
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1117405

Posted by lois at 02:15 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2008

An Open Letter to Gov. Sarah Palin on Women's Rights

An Open Letter to Gov. Sarah Palin on Women's Rights
By Lynn Paltrow, National Advocates for Pregnant Women
Posted on September 4, 2008, Printed on September 4, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/97457/

Dear Governor Sarah Palin:

Many Americans agree with your position regarding abortion -- they do this as a matter of faith, ethics, personal experience and sometimes politics. I am just wondering though, if you have thought about what would happen if you succeeded in getting your position -- that fetuses have a right to life -- established as the law of the land? Did you know that it not only threatens the lives, health and freedom of women who might want or need someday to end their pregnancies, it would also give the government the power to control the lives of women -- like you who -- go to term?

Your last pregnancy, the one that has become the topic of widespread discussion and speculation provides an important opportunity to demonstrate how this could be true.

According to press reports your water broke while you were giving a keynote speech in Texas at the Republican Governors' Energy Conference. You did not immediately go to the hospital -- instead you gave your speech and then waited at least 11 hours to get to a hospital. You evaluated the risks, made a choice, and were able to carry on your life without state interference. Texas Governor Rick Perry worried about your pregnancy but didn't stop you from speaking or take you into custody to protect the rights of the fetus.

After Ayesha Madyun's water broke, she went to the hospital where she hoped and planned to have a vaginal birth. When she didn't give birth in a time-frame comfortable to her doctors, they argued that she should have a C-section. The doctors asserted that the fetus faced a 50-75 percent chance of infection if not delivered surgically. (Risks of infection are believed by some health care providers to increase with each hour after a woman's water has broken and she hasn't delivered).

The court, believing like you that fetuses have a right to life, said, "[a]ll that stood between the Madyun fetus and its independent existence, separate from its mother, was put simply, a doctor's scalpel." With that, the court granted the order and the scalpel sliced through Ms. Madyun's flesh, the muscles of her abdominal wall, and her uterus. The core principle justifying an end to legal abortion in the U.S. provided the same grounds used to deprive this pregnant and laboring woman of her rights to due process, bodily integrity, and physical liberty. When the procedure was done, there was no evidence of infection.

According to the press reports, instead of going straight to a hospital you chose to get on a long airplane flight back to Alaska.

When Pamela Rae Stewart, allegedly, didn't get to the hospital quickly enough on the day of her delivery, she was arrested in California on the theory that she had violated the rights of her fetus.

When Laura Pemberton chose to give birth at home in Florida, a Sheriff came to her house. Doctors believed that she was posing a risk to the life of her unborn child by having a vaginal birth after having had a previous c-section and were in the process of getting a court order to force her to have a c-section. The sheriff took her into custody during active labor, strapped her legs together and forced her to go to a hospital where an emergency hearing was taking place to determine the rights of her fetus. She was "allowed" to represent herself. A lawyer was appointed for the fetus. This woman, who vehemently opposes abortion, nevertheless believed in her right to evaluate medical risks and benefits to herself and her unborn child. She was forced to have the unnecessary surgery and when she later sued for violations of her civil rights, was told fetal rights outweighed hers.

You chose to continue working throughout your pregnancy -- even during your labor. Until 1991 women who worked in high paying blue color jobs that provided health benefits were being fired based on "fetal rights" policies that claimed if the woman became pregnant she would expose the unborn child to workplace health risks. Eventually, the Supreme Court said employers covered by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (the PDA) could not do this. But, millions of American women work part time or for small employers who are not covered by the PDA. If your political position on abortion is accepted -- all of these women could be forced to give up their jobs because an employer, family member, or state agent believed it necessary to ensure the health and rights of their unborn child.

Governor Palin, you have led an extraordinary life, balancing work and family, public service and private family obligations. We hope you know though that your freedom relies on exactly the same legal principals that guarantee that American women can choose to have an abortion when they need and want one.

Sixty one percent of women who have abortions are already mothers. Eighty-four percent of these will be mothers by the time they are in their forties. As a proud mother of five beautiful children, we hope you will recognize that the issue isn't abortion -- it is ensuring the lives, dignity and freedom of all pregnant women and their families.

Lynn Paltrow

Executive Director

National Advocates for Pregnant Women

Lynn Paltrow is Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
© 2008 National Advocates for Pregnant Women All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/97457/

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

Slavery Haunts America’s Plantation Prisons--Angola Prison

Slavery Haunts America’s Plantation Prisons
Wednesday, 03 September 2008
Black Agenda Report
by Maya Schenwar

Angola Prison

Angola Prison isn't "even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what's going on." The plantation prisons of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas are the closest approximation to America's peculiar institution - places where involuntary servitude is legal under the 13th Amendment. And like slaves, most Angola prisoners will die on the plantation, "due to some of the harshest sentencing practices in the country." Angola prisoners are paid anywhere from four to twenty cents per hour...and only get to keep half of that." The rest is put away for after their release - a day that most will never see.

by Maya Schenwar
This article originally appeared in Truthout.org.

"The basic system of Angola and its environs have remained static since the days of slavery."

On an expanse of 18,000 acres of farmland, 59 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans and corn. They work for pennies, literally. Armed guards, mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback, keeping watch. At the end of a long workweek, a bad disciplinary report from a guard - whether true or false - could mean a weekend toiling in the fields. The farm is called Angola, after the homeland of the slaves who first worked its soil.

This scene is not a glimpse of plantation days long gone by. It's the present-day reality of thousands of prisoners at the maximum security Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola. The block of land on which the prison sits is a composite of several slave plantations, bought up in the decades following the Civil War. Acre-wise, it is the largest prison in the United States. Eighty percent of its prisoners are African-American.

"Angola is disturbing every time I go there," Tory Pegram, who coordinates the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3, told Truthout. "It's not even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what's going on."

Mwalimu Johnson, who spent 15 years as a prisoner at the penitentiary and now works as executive secretary of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, concurred.

"I would truthfully say that Angola prison is a sophisticated plantation," Johnson told Truthout. "'Cotton is King' still applies when it come to Angola."

Angola is not alone. Sixteen percent of Louisiana prisoners are compelled to perform farm labor, as are 17 percent of Texas prisoners and a full 40 percent of Arkansas prisoners, according to the 2002 Corrections Yearbook, compiled by the Criminal Justice Institute. They are paid little to nothing for planting and picking the same crops harvested by slaves 150 years ago.

"It's not even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what's going on."

Many prison farms, Angola included, have gruesome post-bellum histories. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Angola made news with a host of assaults - and killings - of inmates by guards. In 1952, a group of Angola prisoners found their work conditions so oppressive that they resorted to cutting their Achilles' tendons in protest. At Mississippi's Parchman Farm, another plantation-to-prison convert, prisoners were routinely subjected to near-death whippings and even shootings for the first half of the 20th century. Cummins Farm, in Arkansas, sported a "prison hospital" that doubled as a torture chamber until a federal investigation exposed it in 1970. And Texas's Jester State Prison Farm, formerly Harlem Prison Farm, garnered its claim to fame from eight prisoners who suffocated to death after being sealed into a tiny cell and abandoned by guards.

Since a wave of activism forced prison farm brutalities into the spotlight in the 1970s, some reforms have taken place: At Angola, for example, prison violence has been significantly reduced. But to a large extent, the official stories have been repackaged. State correctional departments now portray prison farm labor as educational or vocational opportunities, as opposed to involuntary servitude. The Alabama Department of Corrections web site, for example, states that its "Agriculture Program" "allows inmates to be trained in work habits and allows them to develop marketable skills in the areas of: Farming, Animal Husbandry, Vegetable, meat, and milk processing."

According to Angola's web site, "massive reform" has transformed the prison into a "stable, safe and constitutional" environment. A host of new faith-based programs at Angola have gotten a lot of media play, including features in The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.

Cathy Fontenot, Angola's assistant warden, told Truthout that the penitentiary is now widely known as an "innovative and progressive prison."

"The warden says it takes good food, good medicine, good prayin' and good playin' to have a good prison," Fontenot said, referring to the head warden, Burl Cain. "Angola has all these."

However, the makeover has been markedly incomplete, according to prisoners and their advocates.

"Most of the changes are cosmetic," said Johnson, who was released from Angola in 1992 and, in his new capacity as a prison rights advocate, stays in contact with Angola prisoners. "In the conventional plantations, slaves were given just enough food, clothing and shelter to be a financial asset to the owner. The same is true for the Louisiana prison system."

"Cummins Farm, in Arkansas, sported a ‘prison hospital' that doubled as a torture chamber until a federal investigation exposed it in 1970."

Wages for agricultural and industrial prison labor are still almost nonexistent compared with the federal minimum wage. Angola prisoners are paid anywhere from four to twenty cents per hour, according to Fontenot. Agricultural laborers fall on the lowest end of the pay scale.

What's more, prisoners may keep only half the money they make, according to Johnson, who notes that the other half is placed in an account for prisoners to use to "set themselves up" after they're released.

Besides the fact that two cents an hour may not accumulate much of a start-up fund, there is one glaring peculiarity about this arrangement: due to some of the harshest sentencing practices in the country, most Angola prisoners are never released. Ninety-seven percent will die in prison, according to Fontenot.

(Ironically, the "progressive" label may well apply to Angola, relative to some locations: In Texas, Arkansas and Georgia, most prison farms pay nothing at all.)

Angola prisoners technically work eight-hour days. However, since extra work can be mandated as a punishment for "bad behavior," hours may pile up well over that limit, former prisoner Robert King told Truthout.

"Prisoners worked out in the field, sometimes 17 hours straight, rain or shine," remembered King, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement at Angola, until he was released in 2001 after proving his innocence of the crime for which he was incarcerated.

"Most Angola prisoners are never released. Ninety-seven percent will die in prison."

It's common for Angola prisoners to work 65 hours a week after disciplinary reports have been filed, according to Johnson. Yet, those reports don't necessarily indicate that a prisoner has violated any rules. Johnson describes guards writing out reports well before the weekend, fabricating incident citations, then filling in prisoners' names on Friday, sometimes at random. Those prisoners would then spend their weekend in the cotton fields.

Although mechanical cotton pickers are almost universally used on modern-day farms, Angola prisoners must harvest by hand, echoing the exact ritual that characterized the plantation before emancipation.

According to King, these practices are undergirded by entrenched notions of race-based authority.

"Guards talked to prisoners like slaves," King told Truthout. "They'd tell you the officer was always right, no matter what."

During the 1970s, prisoners were routinely beaten or "dungeonized" without cause, King said. Now, guards' power abuses are more expertly concealed, but they persist, fed by racist assumptions, according to King.

Johnson described some of the white guards burning crosses on prison lawns.

Much of this overt racism stems from the way the basic system - and even the basic population - of Angola and its environs have remained static since the days of slavery, according to Pegram. After the plantation was converted to a prison, former plantation overseers and their descendants kept their general roles, becoming prison officials and guards. This white overseer community, called B-Line, is located on the farm's grounds, both close to the prisoners and completely separate from them. In addition to their prison labor, Angola's inmates do free work for B-Line residents, from cutting their grass to trimming their hair to cleaning up Prison View Golf Course, the only course in the country where players can watch prisoners laboring as they golf.

"Angola prisoners are paid anywhere from four to twenty cents per hour."

Another landmark of the town, the Angola Prison Museum, is also run by multi-generation Angola residents. The museum exhibits "Old Sparky," the solid oak electric chair used for executions at Angola until 1991. Visitors can purchase shirts that read, "Angola: A Gated Community."

Despite its antebellum MO, Angola's labor system does not break the law. In fact, it is explicitly authorized by the Constitution. The 13th Amendment, which prohibits forced labor, contains a caveat. It reads, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States."

That clause has a history of being manipulated, according to Fordham Law Professor Robert Kaczorowski, who has written extensively on civil rights and the Constitution. Directly after the 13th Amendment was enacted, it began to be utilized to justify slavery-like practices, according to Kaczorowski. Throughout the South, former slaves were arrested for trivial crimes (vagrancy, for example), fined, and imprisoned when they could not pay their fines. Then, landowners could supply the fine in exchange for the prisoner's labor, essentially perpetuating slavery.

Although such close reproductions of private enslavement were phased out, the 13th Amendment still permits involuntary servitude.

"Prisoners can be forced to work for the government against their will, and this is true in every state," Kaczorowski told Truthout.

In recent years, activists have begun to focus on the 13th Amendment's exception for prisoners, according to Pegram. African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated; one in three black men has been in prison at some point in his life. Therefore, African-Americans are much more likely to be subject to involuntary servitude.

"I would have more faith in that amendment if it weren't so clear that our criminal justice system is racially biased in a really obvious way," Pegram said.

Prison activists like Johnson believe that ultimately, permanently changing the status quo at places like Angola may mean changing the Constitution - amending the 13th Amendment to abolish involuntary servitude for all.

"I don't have any illusions that this is a simple process," Johnson said. "Many people are apathetic about what happens in prisons. It would be very difficult, but I would not suggest it would be impossible."

"The 13th Amendment still permits involuntary servitude."

Even without a constitutional overhaul, some states have done away with prison farms of their own accord. In Connecticut, where the farms were prevalent before the 1970s, the farms have been phased out, partially due to the perceived slavery connection. "Many black inmates viewed farm work under these circumstances as too close to slavery to want to participate," according to a 1995 report to the Connecticut General Assembly.

For now, though, the prison farm is alive and well in Louisiana. And at Angola, many prisoners can expect to be buried on the land they till. Two cemeteries, Point Lookout 1 and 2, lie on the prison grounds. No one knows exactly how many prisoners are interred in the former, since, after a flood washed away the first Angola cemetery in 1927, the bodies were reburied in a large common grave.

Point Lookout 1 is now full, and with the vast majority of Angola's prisoners destined to die in prison, Point Lookout 2 is well on its way, according to King.

"Angola is pretty huge," King said. "They've got a lot of land to bury a lot of prisoners."

Maya Schenwar can be reached at Truthout.org.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=768&Itemid=1

Posted by lois at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2008

Editorial: UK: Let the penal reformers build jails

Let the penal reformers build jails
02/09/2008
Telegraph (UK)

In truth, the prison reform group Nacro has never been much in favour of building new jails.

Over the years, the organisation has sought to rebrand itself from a do-gooder outfit known as the National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders, preferring to describe itself as a ‘crime reduction charity’.

It has been consistently critical of the criminal justice policies of successive governments, not least because they have pushed the prison population up from around 50,000 in the mid-1990s to more than 80,000 today.

Nacro has argued that many in jail should not be there. Its decision, then, to join a consortium of private bidders seeking a contract to operate new prisons is of more than passing interest.

Together with a private security firm, a construction company and a drugs charity, it wants to run two 600-bed prisons in Merseyside and London. This is a good idea on two levels. Firstly, a penal reform pressure group is acknowledging that more prisons are needed. This Government has been negligent, to say the least, in not providing the jails that it knew longer and tougher sentences would require.

Secondly, it allows a group like Nacro to become directly involved in running an institution - putting its money where its mouth is.

Nacro believes that if it is involved from the beginning, the chances are greater of developing a regime that helps reduce re-offending.

The group is right to identify the importance of this matter.

The punishment for prisoners is to be deprived their liberty. While they are in jail it does nobody any good to spurn the opportunity offered by a literally captive audience to release them back into the community equipped with a qualification or skill that will help them get work and may stop them re-offending.

Reconviction rates remain horrendous, with 70 per cent of young offenders, and more than 50 per cent of adults, back in court within two years.

The Government’s plan to build huge 2,500-bed Titan jails may be an answer to overcrowding, but it will be of questionable value to the improvement of rehabilitation and ending the spiral of crime, which should sensibly be the goal of any government’s penal policy.

There is always a danger that letting a penal reform lobby group run a prison is inviting the inmates to take over the asylum.

But Nacro should be given a chance to see if its prescriptions work in practice.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/09/02/dl0204
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UK: Prison reform charity Nacro joins bid to run jails

Prison reform charity Nacro joins bid to run jails
Group drops scepticism over privatisation to tender alongside security firm

* Rachel Stevenson and agencies
* guardian.co.uk,
* Tuesday September 02 2008 12:16 BST

A charity that works with offenders and campaigns for prison reform is forming part of a bid to run prisons in London and Merseyside.

Nacro has teamed up with the private security firm G4S, a drugs charity and a construction company on a proposal to operate and provide services to Maghull prison in Merseyside and Belmarsh West prison in south-east London.

The charity's chief executive, Paul Cavadino, said Nacro's role in the consortium would be to oversee rehabilitation and resettlement services in the prisons. "The best way of ensuring they are being run properly is to be involved in planning this from the start," he said.

"If you are involved in the planning of the regime, it makes it much more likely that a prison will be providing high-quality resettlement and rehabilitation. Prisoners would be therefore much better prepared for reform."

Nacro would not be involved in running the security of the prison or in the work of prison officers.

Applications to run Belmarsh West, to be built next to Belmarsh high-security prison, and Maghull close next month. The government will announce who has won the contracts next year.

Responding to Nacro's application for the two 600-bed jails, the Ministry of Justice said bidders had been encouraged to enter into partnership with the voluntary and community sectors.

Nacro last week joined a coalition against government plans to build so-called titan jails in the UK. A group of 34 prison and criminal justice groups warned that proposals to build three 2,500-bed jails would squander public money and leave Britain the prison capital of Europe.

Jack Straw, the minister for justice, said today he understood fears that titan jails would end up as warehouses for inmates. He said he would consider the plans "very carefully" as the consultation period on the new prisons draws to a close.

"There was never, ever a plan for there to be a single large jail with a single regime within its walls," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
"The plan was, and is, for there to be a number of units within a large campus."

Posted by lois at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)

Incarceration As Forced Migration: Effects on Selected Community Health Outcomes

Incarceration As Forced Migration: Effects on Selected Community Health Outcomes
Posted on: Tuesday, 2 September 2008, 03:00 CDT
By Thomas, James C Torrone,

Objectives. We estimated the effects of high incarceration rates on rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies. Methods. We calculated correlations between rates of incarceration in state prisons and county jails and rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies for each of the 100 counties in North Carolina during 1995 to 2002. We also estimated increases in negative health outcomes associated with increases in incarceration rates using negative binomial regression analyses.

Results. Rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies, adjusted for age, race, and poverty distributions by county, consistently increased with increasing incarceration rates. In the most extreme case, teenage pregnancies exhibited an increase of 71.61 per 100000 population (95% confidence interval [CI]=41.88, 101.35) in 1996 after an increase in the prison population rate from 223.31 to 468.58 per 100 000 population in 1995.

Conclusions. High rates of incarceration can have the unintended consequence of destabilizing communities and contributing to adverse health outcomes. (Am J Public Health. 2006;96:1762-1765. doi:10.2105/ AJPH.2005.081760)

Community health pioneer Sidney Kark attributed high rates of syphilis in South Africa in the late 1930s to the socially destabilizing effects of migration related to the seeking of mining jobs.1 Extreme gender ratio imbalances in the areas surrounding the mines led to sexual behaviors that facilitated the transmission of such diseases. Social epidemiologist Mark Lurie has documented similar effects associated with HIV/AIDS in presentday South Africa.2

Because incarceration leads to a select portion of a community's residents being removed from their families and neighborhoods, it is tantamount to "forced migration," contributing to imbalances in neighborhood gender ratios and resulting in the potential for community health effects similar to those just described for South Africa. Moreover, such disruptions of families and social networks can degrade social cohesion and the norms that might otherwise prevent sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies. Since the early 1980s, rates of incarceration in the United States have tripled and are now the highest of any country in the world. Men are 10 times more likely than women to be incarcerated. In addition, African Americans are 6 times more likely than Whites to face incarceration.3

Moreover, rates of several sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV, are higher among African Americans than Whites, and this is especially the case among male African Americans. For example, in 2000 the gonorrhea rate among male non- Hispanic Blacks in the United States was 40 times greater than that among male non-Hispanic Whites.4 Also, teenage pregnancies were 2.8 times more common among Blacks than among non-Hispanic Whites in 2000.5 Finally, in a 1999 study of counties in North Carolina, Thomas and Sampson found bivariate correlations between rates of incarceration and rates of STIs.6

North Carolina has 76 state prisons and 97 jails, and its rate of incarceration ranks 31st among the 50 states.7 We analyzed countylevel data from the state in an attempt to determine (1) the incarceration variables that would have the strongest correlations with community health effects, (2) whether these correlations would remain stable over time, and (3) whether there would be a lag in time between incarceration and observable community health effects.

METHODS

Data Sources

We obtained 1995 through 2002 data on entries, releases, and state prison system populations from the North Carolina Department of Corrections. We did not analyze federal incarcerations (which represent approximately one tenth of the state's incarcerations) or juvenile incarcerations (which constitute less than 1% of incarcerations).8,9 Data on numbers of individuals incarcerated were classified by year, county (of which there are 100 in North Carolina), race, and gender. Data for a given year were reported as number of individuals entering prison, number of individuals being released, or mean number of individuals incarcerated during the year. We also gathered information on county of conviction and county of residence at the time of arrest.

We obtained data on county jail entries, releases, and populations for the years 1995 through 2000 from the North Carolina County Court System. Information on numbers of individuals incarcerated was categorized by year and county of conviction.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services provided data on STI counts according to type of infection (gonorrhea, chlamydia, HIV [new cases reported as either HIV or AIDS], and syphilis [primary or secondary]), race/ethnicity, gender, age, year, and county of residence for the years 1995 through 2002. We obtained data on numbers of pregnancies among young women aged 15 to 19 years by county and year (1995-2001) from the North Carolina Office of Vital Statistics.

Finally, population data, grouped according to county, age group, gender, and race/ ethnicity, were derived from the US census Web site (http://www.cenus.gov). We used intercensal estimates for the years 1995 through 1999.

Data Analysis

We calculated a county-level Pearson correlation coefficient between each incarceration variable (rate of entry, rate of release, and population size by county of conviction and county of residence) and each health outcome (rates of gonorrhea, chlamydia, primary or secondary syphilis, HIV, and teenage pregnancies) for each year from 1995 to 2000. We calculated these same correlations for the incarceration rate in a given year and health outcomes 1 year and 2 years later to approximate a temporal causal sequence and to determine when effects were most evident. Because data on health outcomes beyond 2002 were not available, we were unable to conduct time-lagged incarceration analyses for 2001 and 2002.

Multivariate analyses were limited to state prison incarcerations grouped by county of residence, because we hypothesized that the county where one lives is affected by one's imprisonment more than the county in which one was arrested (if these counties are not the same). We did not conduct multivariate analyses of county jail incarcerations because bivariate correlations were less strong and stable than the corresponding prison correlations.

Variables included as potential confounders were the percentage of a county's population that was African American, the percentage of residents living below the poverty line, and age (categorized as younger than 24 years, 24-44 years, and 44 years or older). Negative binomial regression models were used to calculate health outcome rate differences and their corresponding confidence intervals (CIs). These rate differences referred to increases in the number of individuals with a reported health outcome per 100000 population in a given year, derived from comparisons between the 75th percentile and 25th percentile of the distribution of North Carolina county incarceration rates (either rates for the year in question or time- lagged rates). All analyses were conducted with Stata version 9 (Stata Corp, College Station, Tex).

RESULTS

The state's mean yearly prison population increased slightly during the study period, from 29495 in 1995 to 31534 in 2000. However, as a result of the increase in the state population over the period, overall there was a slight decrease in the prison population rate (from 401.58 prisoners per 100000 population in 1995 to 391.76 per 100000 in 2000). The average daily jail population increased from 142.78 per 100000 in 1995 to 163.45 per 100000 in 2000.

During the same years, respective rates of reported STIs (per 100 000 population) for the state were as follows: 326.24 and 223.60 for gonorrhea, 214.85 and 275.58 for chlamydia, 15.41 and 6.01 for primary or secondary syphilis, and 30.61 and 18.04 for HIV. In 1995 and 2000, teenage pregnancy rates were 292.95 and 234.57 per 100 000, respectively.

Bivariate correlations calculated with a 1-year lag were consistently larger than correlations calculated with no lag. For example, correlations between prison populations grouped by county of residence in 1995 and gonorrhea rates in 1995 and 1996 were 0.71 and 0.74, respectively. A 2-year lag yielded stronger correlations than the 1-year lag in the case of some of the incarceration and health outcome variables and weaker correlations for other variables. In the following, we report results for 1-year lags only.

With a single exception (the correlation of jail entry with HIV), all of the correlations between the various incarceration variables and health outcomes were statistically significant (Table 1). The correlations between health outcomes and prison incarceration variables were greater (nearly double) than the corresponding correlations between health outcomes and jail incarceration variables except for the case of syphilis. The incarceration variable most strongly correlated with each of the health outcomes was prison population by county of residence. In all but a few instances, correlations were stronger by county of residence than by county of conviction. Correlations by entry and release were similar. The correlations between particular incarceration variables and health outcomes varied little over the study period. For example, correlations between prison population sizes in 1995, 1997, and 1999 and gonorrhea rates a year later were 0.74, 0.67, and 0.68, respectively.

Adjustment for county age, race, and poverty distributions attenuated the strength of the relationships between incarceration variables and health outcomes, although many of the associations nonetheless remained large and statistically significant (Table 2). For example, after adjustment, a county with a prison population rate at the 25th percentile of the distribution in 1996 would have had a teenage pregnancy rate of 221.09 per 100 000 population in the same year, whereas a county at the 75th percentile would have had a teenage pregnancy rate of 293.56 per 100000. Increasing the prison population rate from the 25th to the 75th percentile would thus result in an additional 71.61 (95% CI=41.88, 101.35) teenage pregnancies per 100000 population, or a 32% increase.

The 1996 health outcome rate differences associated with changes in prison population rates were nearly twice as high as the rate differences associated with changes in prison entry and exit rates. Rate differences for health outcomes decreased in 1998 and 2000, as did the contrast between rate differences for given health outcomes according to the 3 incarceration variables. In 2002, rate differences increased again, as did the contrast in rate differences for given health outcomes between the incarceration variables.

DISCUSSION

Associations between incarceration rates and health outcomes were strong and consistent. Results were strongest for teenage pregnancies and the most common STIs. For the less frequent STIs (syphilis and HIV), several counties reported no cases. In such instances and instances in which there were low frequencies of reported STIs, counties were at increased susceptibility of extreme variation in rates with the addition or subtraction of a single reported case, resulting in wider confidence intervals. Associations of incarceration with teenage pregnancy were more consistent than associations with STIs. This finding may reflect, in part, more thorough reporting of teenage pregnancies than STIs and, thus, less statistical vulnerability to variations in underreporting between counties.

The stronger correlations between health outcomes and incarceration in prisons as opposed to jails probably reflect meaningful differences in the effects of these types of incarceration on the lives of a community's residents. Jail terms are briefer, on average, than prison terms. Individuals in jail are awaiting trial or serving time for a minor offense, whereas those in prison are serving time, often in years, for more serious offenses. They are absent from their families and communities for longer periods of time than are jail detainees.

The fact that stronger correlations were obtained with a 1-year lag than with no lag suggests that high incarceration rates lead to negative community health effects, strengthening the argument for a causal relationship. The incarceration variable most strongly related to health outcomes was number of prisoners per 100 000 population, the measure representing the closest proxy for absence of individuals from a community. The effects on health outcomes of prison entry and exit rates, which might be considered to represent community transitions, were not remarkably different from each other.

In contrast to rate ratios, rate differences indicate the number of new cases that can be expected with a change in the independent variable (in this case, incarceration), thus providing an indication of the public health importance of the issue in question.10 For example, the number of excess gonorrhea cases generated by increases in incarceration rates was sizable, ranging from 22.65 (in 2000) to 62.46 (in 1996) per 100000 population; similarly, the number of excess teenage pregnancies generated ranged from 50.26 (2000) to 71.61 (1996) per 100000 population.

This study, conducted at the ecological level, was based on county rates of incarceration and sexually related health outcomes. The classic ecological fallacy would be to infer from our results that incarceration leads to higher STI and teenage pregnancy rates.11, 12 Although we are unaware of any data on rates of infection among ex-offenders, fewer than one half of 1% of reported gonorrhea and chlamydial infections in North Carolina in 2000 were reported from correctional facilities (either jails or prisons; L. Sampson, North Carolina Division of Public Health, written communication, February 2004). This small percentage suggests that incarceration's effects on STI incidence may be greatest outside prison walls.

Given that 10 times more men than women are imprisoned, incarceration lowers the community ratio of men to women; this is particularly the case for African Americans, among whom the incarceration rate is several times higher than that among individuals from other racial groups. Lower gender ratios have been shown to affect rates of teenage pregnancy, syphilis, and gonorrhea.13-15 Small numbers of men relative to women can result in the men remaining in the community having more power in their relationships with women. For instance, if a woman insists that her male sexual partner be faithful, he can leave her for another partner who will be less demanding or who will turn a blind eye to his other sexual relationships.

At any given time, more than 12% of male African Americans aged 25 to 29 years are incarcerated.16 The corresponding high rates of removals from and releases to communities disrupt relationships and contribute to the inability of communities to maintain social norms, in that maintenance of these norms is based on long-term relationships. In communities where neighbors know one another, these individuals can be involved in each other's lives and in the lives of their children; they can observe each other's actions and offer encouragement or advice. Even people guilty of committing crimes can and do play such positive social roles, and their absence from a community may have intergenerational effects. More than half (56%) of state and federal prisoners in the United States in 1997 had children.17 To the degree that parenting affects the sexual behaviors of adolescents, adolescents with a parent who is absent as a result of incarceration may be more at risk of behaviors that result in an STI or pregnancy.

The ex-offender population represents another means through which incarceration can affect community STI rates. One study showed that men with HIV who were released from prison had sexual intercourse within an average of 6 days of their release, and 31% of these men believed that it was likely they would infect their primary sexual partner.18 Similarly, Kark noted that migrants themselves were principally responsible for the high rates of syphilis in South Africa in the 1940s.1 As a result of laws prohibiting gold and diamond miners from migrating with their families, the gender ratios in the mining communities reached extreme levels, as high as 12:1. The men at the mines would have sexual intercourse with prostitutes and possibly carry an infection back to their wives.

As mentioned earlier, Lurie has described a similar phenomenon driving HIV transmission in South Africa in recent years.2 Whereas the present-day high rates of HIV in South Africa (with rates of adult diagnoses ranging from 21% to 39%) might be explained in part by selective migration to cities, the relatively low infection rate in the Congo (approximately 4% of adults), where some of the first identified cases originated, might be attributable in part to the country's lack of an infrastructure that would facilitate migration.16

People generally prefer to stay in their home communities. Typically, only a complex mixture of market forces, politics, and cultural factors (e.g., racial attitudes) results in individuals leaving their communities en masse. The earlier-mentioned 3-time increase in incarceration rates in the United States since 1980 has been attributed principally to the "war on drugs."3 Thus, present- day incarceration-based "migration" has been linked to factors such as poverty and the maelstrom of economic and political forces surrounding illicit drugs. However, because this form of "migration" does entail force, the American public can decide whether to exert more or less force, that is, whether to raise or lower incarceration rates and, thus, community turnover rates.

It is unlikely that the negative community health effects associated with incarceration will prove to be a sufficient motivation for determining alternative means of responding to the social ills addressed today via incarceration. It is more likely that economic factors, such as the expense of incarcerating large numbers of people and a political climate that allows elected officials the opportunity to develop creative alternatives to incarceration, will determine the rate at which people are moved into and out of prison and, thus, into and out of their communities. In any event, until changes in policy take place, high rates of incarceration will have the unintended consequences of destabilizing communities and generating worse social ills.

Originally published as: James C. Thomas, PhD, MPH, and Elizabeth Torrone, MSPH. Incarceration as Forced Migration: Effects on Selected Community Health Outcomes. Am J Public Health. 2006;96:1762- 1765. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2005.081760.

References

1. Kark SL. The social pathology of syphilis in Africans. S Afr Med J. 1949;23:77-84.

2. Lurie M, Harrison A, Wilkinson D, Abdool Karim SS. Circular migration and sexual networking in rural KwaZulu/Natal: implications for the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted disease. Health Transition Rev. 1997;7(suppl 3):S15-S24. 3. Austin J, Irwin J. It's About Time: America's Imprisonment Binge. 3rd ed. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth/ Thompson Learning; 2001.

4. Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance, 2000. Atlanta, Ga: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 2001.

5. Alan Guttmacher Institute. US teenage pregnancy statistics: overall trends, trends by race and ethnicity, and state-by-state information, New York, 2004. Available at: http:// www.guttmacher.org/pubs/state_pregnancy_trends.pdf. Accessed July 5, 2006.

6. Thomas JC, Sampson L. Incarceration as a social force affecting STD rates. Rev Infect Dis. 2005;191: S55-S60.

7. National Institute of Corrections. Corrections statistics for North Carolina. Available at: http://nicic.org/ StateCorrectionsStatistics. Accessed July 5, 2006.

8. US Department of Justice. Correctional populations in the United States, 1995. Available at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ pdf/cpius95.pdf. Accessed July 27, 2006.

9. US Department of Justice. Profile of state prisoners under age 18, 1985-1997. Available at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ pspa1897.pdf. Accessed July 5, 2006.

10. Dombrowski J, Thomas JC, Kaufman J. A study in contrasts: measures of racial disparity in the occurrence of gonorrhea. Sex Transm Dis. 2004;31:149-153.

11. Hammett TM, Harmon MP, Rhodes W. The burden of infectious disease among inmates of and releasees from US correctional facilities, 1997. Am J Public Health. 2002;92:1789-1794.

12. Maruschak LM. HIV in Prisons and Jails, 1999. Washington, DC: US Dept of Justice; 2001.

13. Sampson RJ. Unemployment and imbalanced sex ratios: race- specific consequences for family structure and crime. In: Tucker MB, Mitchell-Kernan C, eds. The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans: Causes, Consequences and Policy Implications. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation; 1995:229-254.

14. Kilmarx PH, Zaidi AA, Thomas JC, et al. Ecologic analysis of socio-demographic factors and the variation in syphilis rates among counties in the United States, 1984-93. Am J Public Health. 1997; 87:1937-1943.

15. Thomas JC, Gaffield ME. Social structure, race, and gonorrhea rates in the southeastern United States. Ethn Dis. 2003;13:362-368.

16. The 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic. Geneva, Switzerland: Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS; 2004.

17. Mumola CJ. Incarcerated parents and their children. Available at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/iptc.txt. Accessed July 27, 2006.

18. Stephenson BL, Wohl DA, McKaig R, et al. Sexual behaviours of HIV-seropositive men and women following release from prison. Int J STD AIDS. 2006; 17:103-108.

About the Authors

The authors are with the Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Requests for reprints should be sent to James C. Thomas, PhD, MPH, Department of Epidemiology, CB# 7435, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7435 (e-mail: jim.thomas@unc.edu).

This article was accepted March 25, 2006.

Contributors

J. C. Thomas originated the study, acquired the data, directed the analysis, interpreted the findings, and was the principal author of the article. E. Torrone conducted the data analysis and contributed to the interpretation of the findings and the writing of the article.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by funds from the University of North Carolina Center for AIDS Research (National Institutes of Health grant P3 AI50410) and the Open Society Institute (grant 74411-00 01).

Human Participant Protection

This study was approved by the institutional review board of the University of North Carolina.

Copyright American Public Health Association Sep 2008

(c) 2008 American Journal of Public Health. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.

Source: American Journal of Public Health
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