The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

« November 2008 | Main | January 2009 »

December 29, 2008

Oklahoma's Incarceration Rates--What would it mean to be average

Oklahoma's Incarceration Rates
by: JULIE DELCOUR Associate Editor
Sunday, December 28, 2008

What if Oklahoma's per-capita incarceration rate were average.
Nothing excessive, mind you, just similar to that of states in the
middle of the pack?

The research committee over at the Oklahoma Academy did some
calculations recently and found out the importance of being just
average — what it would mean in terms of people and dollars. These
are the committee's findings: By being average the state would have
6,100 fewer inmates, a number equivalent to the population of
Henryetta, Pauls Valley or Vinita. The Department of Corrections'
annual budget would shrink by an estimated $100 million.

Yet, Oklahoma is loathe to settle for average. Oklahoma, in fact, has
ranked No. 1 for per-capita incarceration of women for years and,
according to the latest figures from the Department of Justice,
Oklahoma ranks fifth highest in the nation in its overall
incarceration rate per capita. With a population of 3.6 million, we
have more than 25,000 people behind bars.

Only Delaware, Louisiana, Alaska, and Texas — in that order — have
higher per-capita incarceration rates. Alaska, with fewer than
700,000 people, has only 5,059 people in prison. Delaware with
850,000 people has 7,206 prison inmates. Texas, with 23 million
people, has 172,116 prison inmates and Louisiana, with 4.2 million
people, has 37,012 inmates.

At the national average, researchers found, Oklahoma would have 22
percent fewer men and 47 percent few women in prisons and jails.

Researchers made other what-if-we-were-average calculations. If the
mix of felons in prison versus those on probation or parole were at
the national average, how would that impact the prison population?
There would be nearly 11,000 fewer inmates behind bars here. That
would translate into an immediate 37 percent reduction in the size of
prisons. Inmates instead would be supervised by parole officers or in
other community-based programs. This appears to be the way a number
of other states keep incarceration rates down.

Despite hand-wringing, umpteen studies and multiple efforts to reduce
Oklahoma's incarceration rate, which now rests at 10.26 percent, our
rate does not come close to the national average of about 7 percent.

I wish that I could report to you that the state is virtually crime-
free because so many criminals are off the streets. That certainly is
not the case.

To understand better why things are the way they are, the Oklahoma
Academy, a nonprofit organization that identifies critical public
policy issues facing the state, recently looked at Oklahoma's
criminal justice system. It went through the same process a decade
ago. There's been no sea-change in the state's approach to crime and
punishment. Instead of the 18,000 inmates we had a decade ago, we now
have more than 25,000.

Oklahoma Academy's bottom line is this: The state prison population
is not going to shrink significantly anytime soon despite a declining
crime rate and reduced inmate admissions. The major reason is because
of a rule requiring 85 percent of sentences be served regardless of
circumstances.

Most of us realize that as a public safety issue it is essential to
keep dangerous criminals behind bars. But in punishing criminals it
is also is important for us to distinguish between those criminals we
are afraid of and those we're just mad at. By putting too many people
behind bars, who might be punished through less expensive means,
Oklahomans punish ourselves. "In accordance with state budget
physics, a dollar spent on 'beans and bullets' for incarcerated
criminals is a dollar not expended elsewhere in our society," academy
researchers observed.

The Oklahoma Academy next month will release recommendations flowing
out of its October Town Hall in Ardmore where experts shared
observations and advice about "Oklahoma-style criminal justice."

With one of the nation's highest incarceration rates, the question at
that Town Hall came down to this: How to punish offenders adequately
and protect the public without punishing excessively and
unnecessarily? While no state probably is satisfied with its
incarceration rate ours clearly is over the top.

How in the world do we become at least average?

Posted by lois at 07:22 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Arsenic levels too high in Kern Valley State Prison's drinking water

Later, the agency developed plans to add a filtration plant. It obtained $2.5 million from lawmakers for that purpose in 2006.
But planners abandoned the idea, electing instead to incorporate the project into an overall prison expansion approved by lawmakers. Flaws in the legislation have postponed the expansion indefinitely.

Arsenic levels too high in Kern Valley State Prison's drinking water

Three years past deadline, California has no solid plan to reduce the arsenic, which has been linked to cancer. Officials spent money to design a filtration plant and then decided not to build it.
By Michael Rothfeld

December 29, 2008

Reporting from Delano - Beside a field of rolling tumbleweed in this remote Central Valley town, the state opened its newest prison in 2005 with a modern design, cutting-edge security features and a serious environmental problem.

The drinking water pumped from two wells at Kern Valley State Prison contained arsenic, a known cause of cancer, in amounts far higher than a federal safety standard soon to take effect.

Yet today, nearly three years after missing the government's deadline to reduce the arsenic levels, the state has no concrete plans or funding to do so. Officials spent $629,000 to design a filtration system and then decided not to build it, while neglecting to inform staff and inmates that they were consuming contaminated water.

After the prison finally posted notices last April on orders from the state Department of Public Health, the inmates continued drinking the water, under protest.

"We have no choice," said Larry Tillman, 38, who was serving time for burglary. "We should at the very least receive bottled water, or truck in water from another city."

Most correctional officers at Kern Valley State Prison take bottled water to work -- some say they prefer it anyway -- but administrators created a form letter to reject requests for alternative water from some of the 4,800 inmates. The administrators say the health hazard from arsenic, a chemical used in industry and farming, is insignificant, and they promise to filter the water some time in the next few years.

"It's not that major of an issue," said Kelly Harrington, the prison's new warden.

But long-term exposure to arsenic, common in Central Valley communities, has been linked to cancer of the lungs, skin, kidneys, liver and bladder and to other maladies.

The situation, critics say, is emblematic of the short-sighted planning and creeping pace of the mammoth prison bureaucracy as it struggles to house 170,000 of California's most undesired residents.

The state has placed many of its lockups far from major cities, in rural areas with nothing as far as the eye can see, where they are embraced by residents desperate for jobs and commerce. But officials have sometimes ignored health threats endemic to these regions.

Between 1987 and 1994, the state built four prisons in a part of the Central Valley known as a hotbed of valley fever, a sometimes severe infection that usually affects the lungs. Health experts estimate that the state has spent millions to treat inmates for the disease, spawned by a fungus in desert soil.

In 2007, the year after five inmates died from valley fever, the state proposed expanding five prisons in the Central Valley but later backed off on two of the sites. One proposed expansion site, Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, had an outbreak that sickened 520 prisoners in 2006. A Fresno County grand jury concluded last year that the prison, built in 1994, should not have been put there.

At the California Institution for Women in Chino, the state has been buying bottled water for prisoners for five years -- at a current annual cost of $480,000 -- because of nitrate levels that violate federal standards in the water supply to the facility and to the nearby California Institution for Men. Nitrates, which are chemical compounds that often get into soil from fertilizer and manure, can cause a blood disorder in fetuses and infants.

Chino-area municipalities have built systems to filter their own water, and the state hopes to complete a similar project a year from now for both the women's and men's prisons. But Chino Mayor Dennis Yates, who says sewage from the men's prison has long polluted the Santa Ana River, is skeptical of state officials' competence.

"Even if you do give them money, they don't do anything," Yates said. "It's just a huge, bloated bureaucracy."

In 2001, four years before Kern Valley prison opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered a reduction in the maximum level of arsenic in drinking water from 50 parts per billion to 10. Water suppliers had until Jan. 23, 2006, to meet the new standard. Recent testing has shown the arsenic level in one prison well at 23 parts per billion and the other at 15.

One day this month, in a low-slung white building with blue doors known as Facility C, prisoners bunking in a crowded gymnasium drank from the water fountain and used water from the sinks to make their soup. Some newcomers said they had not been told about the contamination upon arrival at the prison.

"I just came from an institution where the water was just atrocious, definitely foul," said Ramon Diaz, 25, who had three years remaining on a sentence for drug dealing. "This to me is like spring water here, and you come to find out that it's not the way it should be, either."
Corrections Department officials said they could not explain why a filtration system was not included in the prison's design because most of the employees who worked on it had since left. Later, the agency developed plans to add a filtration plant. It obtained $2.5 million from lawmakers for that purpose in 2006.
But planners abandoned the idea, electing instead to incorporate the project into an overall prison expansion approved by lawmakers. Flaws in the legislation have postponed the expansion indefinitely.

State project manager Gary Lewis said the filtration plant is in the "conceptual study phase."

This year the EPA has ordered 11 California water systems to reduce excessive arsenic levels. One was the city of Delano, which serves the North Kern State Prison, a few miles from Kern Valley prison. On Dec. 12, after inquiries by The Times, the state public health department ordered Kern Valley State Prison to come up with a plan by February to comply with the arsenic law.

The prison's chief medical officer, Dr. Sherry Lopez, said there was no immediate danger from the lockup's water, based on an e-mail she received in April from a poison-control expert who said arsenic is "much more a regulatory problem than a public health problem."

"It kind of reassured me and everybody else here that everything is OK," Lopez said.

But Dr. Gina Solomon, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, said that the law is important and that disempowered populations, such as prisoners and poor rural workers, often suffer because of lax enforcement.

"The standard was set for a reason, and the reason is that arsenic is known to cause cancer in humans," she said. "So the clock is ticking. The longer that people are drinking the water, the higher the risk."

Many of Kern Valley's prisoners are serving life terms, but even those with shorter stints are worried.

"It's definitely a concern for us if there's an abundance of arsenic in the water and we're ingesting that," said Dylan Littlefield, 36, an inmate from Hollywood with five years remaining for attempted robbery and drug dealing. "Who knows if we're going to be treated properly?"

The healthcare system in the state's prisons has been turned over to a federal receiver by a judge who said substandard treatment has caused many needless deaths behind bars. The receiver, J. Clark Kelso, was not alerted to the arsenic problem by the state, his top aide said.

"We're concerned about the potential health risks and we have to look into it," said John Hagar, the receiver's chief of staff. "Constructing facilities that are inadequate from the beginning is unfortunately part of a long-standing trend with the Department of Corrections, so I'm not surprised."

michael.rothfeld@latimes.com
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times

latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-arsenic29-2008dec29,0,6539747.story
From the Los Angeles Times

Posted by lois at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

Study reports murders by Black teenage men rise

"Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard, cautioned that the change in murder rates was not large and did not yet show a clear trend. Dr. Western also said that the impact of the reduction in government spending on crime control would have to be studied on a city-by-city basis, and that many other changes, including a sagging economy, could have affected murder rates."

December 29, 2008
Murders by Black Teenagers Rise, Bucking a Trend
By ERIK ECKHOLM
NY Times
The murder rate among black teenagers has climbed since 2000 even as murders by young whites have scarcely grown or declined in some places, according to a new report.

The celebrated reduction in murder rates nationally has concealed a “worrisome divergence,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who wrote the report, to be released Monday, with Marc L. Swatt. And there are signs, they said, that the racial gap will grow without countermeasures like restoring police officers in the streets and creating social programs for poor youths.

The main racial difference involves juveniles ages 14 to 17. In 2000, 539 white and 851 black juveniles committed murder, according to an analysis of federal data by the authors. In 2007, the number for whites, 547, had barely changed, while that for blacks was 1,142, up 34 percent.

The increase coincided with a rise in the number of murders involving guns, Dr. Fox said. The number of young blacks who were victims of murder also rose in this period.

Murder rates around the country are far below the record highs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a crack epidemic spawned violent turf battles.

“Regrettably, as the nation celebrated the successful fight against violent crime in the 1990s, we grew complacent and eased up on our crime-fighting efforts,” the authors said.

The report primarily blames cutbacks in federal support for community policing and juvenile crime prevention, reduced support for after-school and other social programs, and a weakening of gun laws. Cuts in these areas have been felt most deeply in poor, black urban areas, helping to explain the growing racial disparity in violent crime, Dr. Fox said.

But Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard, cautioned that the change in murder rates was not large and did not yet show a clear trend. Dr. Western also said that the impact of the reduction in government spending on crime control would have to be studied on a city-by-city basis, and that many other changes, including a sagging economy, could have affected murder rates.

Conservative criminologists place greater emphasis on the breakdown of black families, rather than cuts in government programs, in explaining the travails of black youths.

Much of the increase, experts say, is a product of gang activity, in midsize and large cities.

“The aggregate national murder rate since 2000 has been impressively flat — not to say there haven’t been fluctuations in individual cities,” said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. “But when you see a spike in a city,” he said, as in Chicago recently, “it very often involves young black males shooting other young black males.”

Dr. Blumstein said that while federal cuts might have contributed to the rise in murders by black teenagers, “I think there are much more endemic problems going on.”

“In the inner city, you have large numbers of kids with no future, hanging out together with a great emphasis on their street credibility,” he said. “They’ll go to great lengths to avenge an insult.” Many of these teenagers do not stay in school, let alone join the Boys Clubs or other after-school programs.

The heightened attention to security after the 9/11 attacks might, paradoxically, have contributed to a decline in crime-fighting.

“One problem we faced was a disinvestment in policing in the post-2001 environment,” said Chief Edward A. Flynn of the Milwaukee police, who served from 2003 to 2006 as secretary of public safety in Massachusetts. “I witnessed homeland security become the monster that ate criminal justice,” Chief Flynn said, as money went to security equipment and communications and the number of police officers fell.

To fight violent crime, Chief Flynn said, the police must be a visible presence in neighborhoods with high crime rates.

From 2000 to 2007, according to the report, murders in Milwaukee by whites ages 14 to 24 rose by 4 percent, while those by blacks rose by 62 percent.

This year, Chief Flynn’s first leading the department, he deployed new teams of officers to the most violent neighborhoods, having them patrol on foot and bicycles, while federal agencies helped bring down some large gangs. The number of murders this year — 70 as of last Friday — is down one-third from last year and is the lowest since 1985.

Still, Chief Flynn said, “any improvements will be temporary unless there’s more investment in the futures of our young people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/us/29homicide.html?_r=1&hp

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

December 28, 2008

PA: Corruption a keystone of state government, prof says

Corruption a keystone of state government, prof says

By Brad Bumsted and Brian Bowling
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, December 20, 2008

HARRISBURG -- Pennsylvania is one of just a few states where corrupt government is ingrained in the culture.

That's the view of Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. Historically, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Louisiana and Pennsylvania -- states where government to varying degrees embodies "machine politics" -- have had high-profile corruption cases and a populace largely tolerant of corrupt officials, Borick said.

"It's part of the broader culture of how politics operates in these places. It's passed down from one generation to another. It's almost an expectation that 'This is the way it's done,' " Borick said. "We've seen improvements, but it is still part of the culture."

The arrest this month of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is accused of trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder, set in motion a national discussion about which state is the most corrupt.

Illinois "is certainly one hell of a competitor," Robert Grant, the special agent in charge of the Chicago FBI office, said after Blagojevich's arrest for what U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald called "a public corruption crime spree."

Subsequently, USA Today, the Washington Post and The New York Times tried to determine the dirtiest state, based on a recent U.S. Justice Department report showing federal convictions in public corruption cases over the past decade.

The more populous states tend to have more convictions, while smaller states lead the way on a strictly per-capita basis. Pennsylvania ranked fifth in total federal convictions -- 555 -- from 1998 through 2007, behind Florida, California, New York and Texas, according to an analysis of the report by the Tribune-Review.

USA Today discovered that the most corrupt state, based on the number of incidents per 100,000 people, is North Dakota, with Pennsylvania a distant 14th in the per-capita ranking.

"When you think of a place like North Dakota, the population is so small that with just a few cases of corruption, the rate is affected," Borick said.

"I don't think these statistics are very valid," said Bev Cigler, a political science professor at Penn State University's Harrisburg campus. "They only measure who got caught."

In fact, statistics don't measure everyone who gets caught.

That's because the Justice Department study looked only at convictions of public officials who were prosecuted by U.S. Attorneys' offices.

So, in Pennsylvania the statistics would not include convictions by county district attorneys or the state attorney general, who is investigating public corruption in the General Assembly involving suspected use of tax money for political purposes. Twelve former House Democratic officials -- including two former lawmakers -- are charged with felonies. Two former staffers have agreed to plead guilty.

Over the past decade, 10 state lawmakers faced criminal charges that in some way were related to their official duties. But no governor has gone to jail despite widespread corruption in the 1970s under late Gov. Milton Shapp, said G. Terry Madonna, a political science professor at Franklin & Marshall College. Shapp "failed to rein in corruption in and around his administration," Madonna said.

A former attorney general, Ernie Preate, was sentenced to prison for a 1995 fundraising scheme. Former Auditor General Al Benedict was convicted of tax evasion and racketeering in 1988 related to a job-selling scandal. Former Treasurer Budd Dwyer, convicted of agreeing to take a $300,000 kickback, shot himself at a televised news conference in January 1987 the day before he was to be sentenced.

"The commonwealth has had its share of miscreant public officials over the years but it is far from the most corrupt state in the union," said Chuck Ardo, a spokesman for Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell. "However we must always be vigilant to ensure that public servants actually serve the public and not their individual interests."

Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a Republican who immediately preceded Blagojevich, remains in federal prison on a 2006 conviction for steering state work to supporters and using state resources for political purposes.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Blagojevich is the fifth Illinois governor to be accused of a crime out of 10 who have served over the past 50 years.

Former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, who famously boasted that he couldn't be defeated unless he was "caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy," was convicted in 2001 for extorting payoffs from applicants for riverboat casinos.

"I think we (Pennsylvania) are one of the worst," said Senate Majority Whip Jane Orie, a McCandless Republican and a former prosecutor. "I think when you look at the pay to play, gaming ... bonuses, we're in a culture, especially in the Legislature, where there was no reform and business as usual."

Pennsylvania in 2006 awarded a casino license to a convicted felon.

"I know of no other state that has (casino) licensing where this has occurred," said Bill Thompson, a professor of business administration at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

Louis DeNaples, a prominent Scranton businessman, was convicted of felony fraud charges in 1978. He was licensed to run the Mt. Airy Casino Resort in 2006. DeNaples was charged with perjury in January, accused of lying about the extent to which he knew organized crime figures. He maintains his innocence and is awaiting a preliminary hearing.

"Ever since gambling came on board (2004) there's an open door for crime and corruption," said Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks County.

A powerful state lawmaker for three decades, former Sen. Vincent Fumo, D-Philadelphia, is on trial in federal court for allegedly defrauding taxpayers, a nonprofit and a seaport museum of $3.5 million.

Graph at this URL
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/state/s_603889.html

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

December 27, 2008

Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own

Maps
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/26/us/1227_DETAIN.html
http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/dwnmap

December 27, 2008
Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own
By NINA BERNSTEIN- NY Times

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.

Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.

After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.

In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.

If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.

Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.

Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention, which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions.

But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt’s custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month — along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck.

In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested.

Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry, for some investors and, at least in theory, for places like Central Falls, a city so strapped that the state pays for its schools.

Here, a specially created municipal corporation built the jail in the early 1990s to hold federal inmates, and last year more than doubled its size. As the City Council president, William Benson Jr., put it, “The more inmates they have, the more money we get.”

Yet in a community whose 1.3 square miles are said to be too small for secrets — “If you sneeze on Washington Street, someone on Pine Street says, ‘Gesundheit,’ ” Mr. Benson said — city officials, overwhelmingly non-Latino, seemed uninformed about who those inmates were. “Nobody knows exactly who’s down there,” he said. “I hear some are Arab terrorists.”

The mystery is in some ways understandable. Though immigration detainees made up one-third of the daily population and a majority of the 4,200 men and women who moved through Wyatt’s 722 beds in a year, most were from other states, and those from Rhode Island did not remain long: Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically transferred them within a week.

Some were legal immigrants who had served time for serious crimes. But increasingly they were the kind of people who in the past would not have been arrested — people without papers, similar to some of the people who play, cheer and live in Wyatt’s shadow. Sometimes the same people.

Anthony Ventetuolo Jr., one of Wyatt’s developers and now the jail’s chief executive, said that who the inmates were made no difference to the jail, which was run like a business, under strict standards. “I’m not interested in getting involved in the politics of immigration,” he said. “All we do is detain people that our clients tell us to detain.”

Swallowed by the System

Over 10 years, Maynor Canté, 26, hardly glanced at the jail he passed as he hurried between home, two jobs and St. Matthew’s Church, where he led a prayer group.

He was 15 when he left Guatemala in 1997, sneaking across the Mexican border to join seven older siblings, legal residents who had spent years scraping new lives out of the industrial ruins of Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley. Caught in Texas, the teenager was quickly let go pending a hearing, like so many arrested under the “catch and release” policy that prevailed while the nation’s boom times demanded cheap immigrant labor. When he failed to show up in court, a deportation order was issued.

A decade later, Mr. Canté spoke near-fluent English, and had spent thousands of dollars trying to legalize his status. Mornings, he cleaned a factory for $8 an hour. Evenings, he worked at his nephew’s new clothing shop on Dexter Street, one of several Latino businesses that had revived a bleak stretch of vacant storefronts.

Then, early one morning in October 2007 when he headed out the door for his cleaning job, five immigration agents hustled him into a van. That night, as frightened relatives tried to find him, he was delivered to Wyatt in chains.

Inside, a plaque declares that the detention center’s mission is “to protect the public from people who pose a threat to society.” One corridor, waxed to an immaculate shine, leads to a darkened control room where correction officers watch a dozen video monitors fed by 200 cameras. A guard can scan an entire unit housing 72 detainees in two- to four-man cells; zooming in on a card game, he can see that one player is holding hearts.

The jail was built for inmates awaiting trial on federal charges — drug possession, child pornography, political corruption. But to help pay off $106 million borrowed for its recent expansion and refinancing, Wyatt was now counting on prisoners like Mr. Canté: administrative detainees not charged with a crime, but held while the government tries to deport them.

Now he found himself slated for deportation without a hearing — or even any way to make a phone call.

“I was scared,” he said, recalling how he prayed the rosary and stared out the tiny window of his cell to watch a freight train pass at 6 a.m.

Outside, his sister Emma, 33, was distraught. Since their mother’s death in 2006, she had felt more responsible for protecting Mr. Canté, a big-shouldered man who was still her little brother. “Three days passed and we didn’t know where he was,” she said.

On the fourth day, after calls to many jails, a high school friend located Mr. Canté, and members of his prayer circle flocked to Wyatt. His priest, the Rev. Otoniel J. Gomez, had never visited the jail in the eight years since he was sent to Central Falls from Colombia. He spoke to his weeping parishioner through a thick plexiglass barrier.

“I thought, ‘This is like a horror movie, talking with a criminal,’ ” he said.

Yet the priest soon realized that Mr. Canté was lucky. “Most of these people didn’t have any relatives or friends near them,” Father Gomez said, “not even a lawyer.”

The official list of free legal help was largely a dead end. Wyatt’s expensive inmate telephone service was often useless, because it took days to set up an account, and it could not be used to call cellphones. Desperate, other detainees passed Mr. Canté phone numbers on scraps of paper, begging him to ask his visitors to call and tell where they were.

Out of Sight, Out of Reach

Plucked from communities from Maine to New York, some had already been transferred through several jails; many would soon be moved again, as the federal immigration agency improvised to make space for detainees from new roundups.

“It’s like having a room with five bathtubs and water coming in and out of each one to maintain an equilibrium,” explained Todd Thurlow, acting deputy director of the Boston field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which contracts for about 1,000 beds in dozens of jails across New England.

Wyatt had a reputation as one of the most professionally run. But for newcomers without help, it could be rough.

One complaint, echoed by former jail employees, was that detainees in pain from illness or injury often went without adequate treatment. Other detainees spoke of going hungry, like Edgar Bocce, 25, a Guatemalan cleaner who said two muscular inmates took away his first dinner tray — rice, beans and spaghetti — while guards did nothing. Spartan meals could be supplemented with food from the jail’s commissary, but only if relatives sent money, or detainees stayed long enough to earn some; on the cleaning crew that kept the jail so spotless, starting pay was 40 cents a day.

Though officials said detainees were housed according to their history of violence, only one unit was dedicated to immigration detainees, and the rest were mixed in with criminal suspects and convicts.

Perhaps the greatest frustration, inmates said, was their inability to make sense of what was happening to them.

“Why am I here in jail?” asked one, a Central Falls mechanic who had been seized at immigration headquarters in Providence when he went to check why his green card application was taking so long. Wyatt guards had no answers. “They tell me, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’re not Immigration.’ ”

Mr. Canté’s sisters borrowed money and hired him a lawyer. But a day after the lawyer’s first visit, their brother was gone — transferred to a Boston jail. That week, he was shackled and bused with 60 other men to detention in York, Pa., then put on a government plane with 300 chained immigrants.

He ended up one of 2,000 detainees packed into a windowless tent city that had sprung up only a year earlier in Raymondville, Tex. — the nation’s largest immigration prison camp, run for profit and still growing.

For weeks after his lawyer reopened his case for a hearing in Boston, she could not locate him. He was on the verge of deportation by the time she managed to persuade the government to fly him back from Texas, two days before last Christmas.

Mr. Canté finally appeared before an immigration judge on Jan. 2, after three months in the detention maze. Because his case fell under the more lenient laws in force before 1997, he not only was released on bond, but allowed to work until his immigration hearing in December 2009. He is now trying to pay back thousands of dollars in loans and legal fees.

A Market for Inmates

Mr. Canté, whose time in detention cost federal taxpayers about $10,000, was part of what many call an “immigrant gold rush” that turned the private prison industry from bust to boom.

Across the country, starting in Texas in the 1980s, prison companies built jail cells on speculation as they rushed to cash in on the war on drugs. They overbuilt; abuse scandals and escapes soured many states on private prisons, and by the late 1990s, as competition for inmates increased, the companies’ stock was suffering.

Yet given the lure of easy financing and big fees for constructing deals, developers of prison space did not hold back on growth. Instead, big companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and the Cornell Companies added more beds and lobbied harder at the source of the most lucrative inmates, the federal government.

The payoff came after 9/11 in an accelerating stream of new detainees: foreigners swept up by the nation’s rising furor over illegal immigration.

Central Falls was similar, in its poverty, to more remote communities that had hitched their hopes to jails. Set in the river valley where America’s industrial revolution was born, its textile mills had hired large immigrant families — French Canadians and Poles, followed by Syrians and Portuguese — and squeezed them into triple-decker tenements. Even after the work moved away, the mills’ cheap housing continued to draw immigrants, mostly from Latin America.

The city was nearly bankrupt in 1990 when developers made a proposition: Build a profit-making jail for two or three hundred nonviolent federal detainees, and guarantee a steady stream of money and jobs for Central Falls.

But the deal that emerged, like many elsewhere, proved better at paying private investors than generating public revenue. The municipal corporation borrowed $30 million through a state bond issue to build Wyatt, and hired the Cornell company to run it. Six years later, the municipal body borrowed $38 million to refinance, buying back most of the bonds at a premium that gave the original bondholders a lump-sum return of 28.5 percent on their investment in addition to 9 percent annual interest.

And from its opening party in November 1993, Wyatt ran into the same problem as its competitors: finding enough inmates. For a time it imported murderers and rapists by the busload from North Carolina’s crowded prisons. When city residents objected, they learned that Central Falls had no control over who was housed at Wyatt and would get no money unless it was full.

At best, Wyatt paid Central Falls $2 to $3 a day for each detainee — less than $400,000 in the good years — to offset its use of city services. At times when the flow of inmates faltered, payments slowed to a trickle. Yet, following the strange logic of prison growth, Cornell and Wyatt officials were soon pushing to refinance yet again and expand.

Thomas Lazieh, the mayor who had championed the deal that built Wyatt, defended it as the best the city could get. His successor, Lee Matthews, took a darker view and sued to stop the expansion. “The city was sold a bill of goods,” he said.

Wyatt doubled in size anyway, with the backing of the current mayor, Charles D. Moreau. Convinced that it could wrest more revenue from the jail as immigration enforcement boomed, the municipal corporation took full control in August 2007. The budget it approved late that year included $6,000 a month for a Washington lobbyist to seek more detainees at higher rates.

A Recession, and Raids

By then, as in many parts of the country, people in Rhode Island were looking at Latino immigrants as prime suspects in a dismal economy. A polarizing immigration debate had converged with a huge state budget deficit and high unemployment. As this year began, resentment flared.

The catalyst was an ordinary New Year’s feature in The Providence Journal about the first baby born in Rhode Island in 2008. Mother and newborn were still in the hospital when federal agents, spurred by the publicity, raided their apartment in Providence and took away the father on immigration violations. Afterward, the police said, the mother discovered that a roommate from Guatemala had hanged himself behind his locked bedroom door, apparently during the raid.

The baby’s father, initially held in secret at Wyatt, was eventually deported. A Guatemalan landscaper with two misdemeanor convictions, he had been ordered to leave the country in August 2007, but stayed, his lawyer said, because his fiancée, a United States citizen, was pregnant with their second child.

To some, the case illustrated how illegal immigrants, who make up less than 4 percent of Rhode Island’s population, drained public services.

“Rhode Island taxpayers are the real victims!” declared Alice Losasso of West Warwick, in a letter to The Journal. “I’m tired of paying for interpreters so that immigrants can take their driver’s test in whatever language they speak. I’m tired of finding that their girlfriends and children are on welfare.”

Her words echoed a major theme of the governor, Donald L. Carcieri, a Republican. In March, he issued an executive order directing the State Police to help federal authorities round up illegal immigrants, saying that they depressed wages and strained services.

Public approval for that order reached 75 percent in one poll after an illegal immigrant from Guatemala was charged with carjacking and raping a woman outside a mall. He had been arrested twice before by the Providence police, and already had an outstanding order of deportation. The governor appeared on the Bill O’Reilly program to accuse the Providence mayor of sheltering criminals.

In Central Falls, the crackdown sowed panic. At the public charter school two blocks from Wyatt, parents, already afraid to be photographed at school events, were now reluctant to drive to meetings, said Sarah Friedman, a founder of the school.

An 8-year-old girl, one of the school’s high-scoring students, stopped speaking in class when her father disappeared into detention, the girl’s mother said. Without his income, mother and daughter, United States citizens, were almost evicted from their apartment.

At Central Falls High School, some students stopped coming to class because their families had gone into hiding, said Margie Cruz, a school-home liaison: “The child was born here, the child is legal. But the family has to hide because the father will be deported.

“I’ve seen students stopped for a traffic violation and the whole family got deported,” she added. “Children that were here for years. I watched them grow up.”

One longtime Little League mother said she used to worry that child molesters could be watching from the jail windows. Now, she said, she worried that her sister’s children would end up inside — the niece who had just graduated from high school with no path to legal status; the nephew who had been taught that local Quakers hid fugitive slaves, and asked his aunt to hide him if his parents were detained.

They were part of a generation of Central Falls teenagers born abroad who were coming of age as outlaws in their own town. Some had already lost relatives, like the 14-year-old whose older brother had made a left turn on red and ended up in a detention odyssey that led to deportation.

“My mother’s afraid the same thing that happened to my brother could happen to me, because I play soccer, I’m out there,” he said.

A few blocks from Wyatt, Police Chief Joseph P. Moran III praised the jail as “a great neighbor — it keeps things under control.” But he went on to tell about the difficulty of investigating the killing of a Dominican cabdriver, because witnesses had not come forward for fear of deportation. He talked of the blurring line between police work and immigration enforcement.

One domestic violence call by a husband illustrated the new reality. After a routine computer check, both he and his wife were taken into police custody, and her 8-month-old baby was handed to a friend. The man had an outstanding bench warrant; his wife had a deportation warrant issued by immigration authorities — something not included in the police database a few years ago.

“We work hand in hand with ICE,” Chief Moran said. At the same time, he added: “I have friends from Honduras, Ecuador. My kids went to school here. It makes it very, very difficult.”

Profit and Loss

For defenders of the jail, the bottom line has always been the bottom line: Wyatt’s growth meant more federal money for the city.

“They’re going to detain them somewhere,” said the manager of Mr. Williams True Styles Barbershop, on the struggling Dexter Street commercial strip. “It’s a billion-dollar business. Unless we’re going to free them, what difference does it make?”

But at least in Central Falls, the incarceration economy was not delivering on its promise.

In late June, Mayor Moreau, a big man with a florid face and a police siren in his car, offered up a budget that laid off firefighters — and told angry city employees to get used to it.

“We’re at the end of the financial rope for Central Falls,” he told the City Council, citing more than 200 boarded-up homes, foreclosures at the rate of 25 a week, and cuts in state and federal aid that required a 4 percent property tax increase and an 8 percent spending cut in the new $17.4 million budget.

Outside, past the defunct factory where Hasbro once made G. I. Joe, beyond the rusty hulk of the downsized Sylvania plant, the summer twilight gleamed on Wyatt’s new facade.

What had happened to the windfall of money and jobs it had offered?

The jail’s annual revenue had almost doubled in a year, to $21 million, mainly from increasing immigration detention. But the city budget projected revenue of only $525,000 from Wyatt, which is exempt from taxes.

That was not even enough to cover its share of city services, according to an estimate by the city’s finance department. It was certainly nothing like the $2 million a year that Mr. Benson, the City Council president, had mentioned to a reporter in April. The mayor, he said, predicted the city would get that much in profits formerly reaped by the Cornell Companies, now that the local board had taken over. Neither the mayor nor the board members, unpaid mayoral appointees, would talk about Wyatt.

As for jobs, only 10 of about 200 Wyatt employees lived in Central Falls. The jail’s board was even declining to make the $1,500 donations to local groups it once supported, like a scholarship fund and youth football.

Mr. Ventetuolo, the Wyatt chief executive, would not say how much had been saved by dispensing with Cornell’s for-profit services, maintaining that it had all gone toward keeping prices low for the federal government. Wyatt was still in transition, he said, striving to fill new beds to meet soaring payments to bondholders, now up to $8.4 million yearly from $2.7 million under the terms of the latest refinancing.

Yet Mr. Ventetuolo’s consulting company had won a raise, to $230,000 from $156,000. And as the number of detainees increased, so did revenue from surcharges on their collect calls to relatives, under a contract with Global Tel Link that gave Wyatt a cut of about $564,000 a year. That arrangement had survived a state ban on phone surcharges at prisons, thanks to lobbying that gave Wyatt a loophole.

Other large fees went to lawyers and financiers, as Mr. Matthews, the former mayor, pointed out. “There just happens to be a lot of money made by folks other than the people of the City of Central Falls,” he said.

Out in the Open

City officials in Central Falls — mostly descendants of earlier immigrants — were mindful that they presided over a community at least 60 percent Latino, where fear of the immigration crackdown was widespread.

At the same time, the city had built its hopes for economic stability on a jail that was helping to make that crackdown possible. The combination created a local immigration politics that sometimes verged on denial.

But last summer, Wyatt itself was suddenly caught in the glare of the state’s crackdown.

On the evening of July 15, a dozen State Police officers and 50 immigration agents swept into six courthouses across the state. They arrested 31 cleaners on suspicion of immigration violations, people paid $7.40 an hour to vacuum floors and scrub toilets in Rhode Island’s halls of justice. All worked for two large state contractors, one owned by the brother of a state legislator allied with Governor Carcieri.

In the uproar that followed, experiences that had been private in cases like Mr. Canté’s were put on public display: the difficulty of locating those in custody; the distress of relatives, many of them legal residents or citizens; the absence of basic legal protections familiar to anyone who watches “Law & Order.” Advocates eventually located most of the cleaners. Four were at Wyatt, including a 29-year-old single mother detained in its new women’s unit.

Two days after the raids, as city officials raised the Colombian flag over City Hall to honor that nation’s Independence Day, Mayor Moreau criticized the roundup, and chided Governor Carcieri for spending law enforcement resources on it.

“We have better things to do,” he said, “than chasing the lady that cleans the attorney general’s office.”

A reporter asked how he squared that criticism with Wyatt’s role in holding illegal immigrants, including the cleaning woman locked up there.

“One has nothing to do with the other,” he retorted. “It has nothing to do with the City of Central Falls.”

Soon, a case that drew national attention made that distinction harder to maintain.

On Aug. 6, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, a Chinese computer engineer from New York who had overstayed a visa, died in Wyatt’s custody after a year in various detention centers and months in pain.

The Times reported a week later that despite his repeated pleas for help, his fractured spine and extensive cancer had gone undiagnosed until shortly before his death. Officials at Wyatt, where he spent his last month, said he had received plenty of medical attention, and immigration authorities started an internal investigation. But local pastors and Latino advocacy groups gathered outside Wyatt on Aug. 15 to demand an independent inquiry.

A guard who watched the demonstration, who asked that his name not be published for fear of losing his job, voiced the ambivalence toward Wyatt that seems to shape the attitudes of many in Central Falls.

He spoke with sympathy of “good, hard-working people” detained there, and with distaste of the rookie guards — a result of low pay and high turnover — “who talk to people with no respect, like they’re dogs.”

But he added: “Immigration and all that, that has nothing to do with us. We’re just the prison.”

Even in the Latino population, the new awareness of Wyatt stirred little resistance.

“If the Spanish were all registered to vote they could take the city in one election,” observed Councilman Benson. “A lot of them don’t vote because they don’t trust the government, and a lot of them are illegal, so they can’t.”

In contrast, Mr. Canté, who finally had proper papers, said he felt like part of Central Falls for the first time.

“In all these years I’ve been here illegally, everywhere I went, everything I used to do, I used to feel like a reject,” he said. “Now I feel like I’ve been accepted for the community. I don’t feel afraid anymore. I feel, like, free.”

Just how closely Central Falls was entwined in the business of locking up people like Mr. Canté became more obvious this month, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, citing their continuing investigation into Mr. Ng’s death, abruptly removed all immigration detainees from Wyatt, scattering them to other jails in New England, Texas and Louisiana.

With Wyatt’s solvency, if not its survival, uncertain, the mayor lobbied the state’s Congressional delegation to get back a share of the growing market in immigration detainees. Meanwhile, jail officials hunted for deals like the one they narrowly lost last spring, to house 80 Vermont inmates judged criminally insane for crimes like murder and rape.

Mr. Lazieh, the former mayor who first championed Wyatt, called the government’s immigration policies immoral, arguing that “the system has gone overboard — we’ve turned to criminalizing all immigrants.”

But he had no regrets about his city’s part. “If it’s not in Central Falls,” he said, “then this facility would be someplace else.”

more links at this URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27detain.html?_r=1&hp

Posted by lois at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)

Cash-strapped states cut juvenile justice programs

Cash-strapped states cut juvenile justice programs
December 26, 2008
By JIM DAVENPORT

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — State budget cuts are forcing some of the nation's youngest criminals out of counseling programs and group homes and into juvenile prisons in what critics contend is a shortsighted move that will eventually lead to more crime and higher costs.

Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia are among states that have slashed juvenile justice spending — in some cases more than 20 percent — because of slumping tax collections. Youth advocates say they expect the recession will bring more cuts next year in other states, hitting programs that try to rehabilitate children rather than simply locking them up.

"If you raise a child in prison, you're going to raise a convict," said South Carolina Juvenile Justice Director Bill Byars, credited with turning around a system once better known for warehousing children than counseling them and teaching them life skills.

Now, he's been asked to draw up plans to trim an additional 15 percent from a juvenile justice budget already cut $23 million, or 20 percent, since June as part of the state's effort to pare $1 billion from its $7 billion budget.

All five of the system's group homes — which generally house less-violent offenders and give them more individual attention — have been shuttered. Also gone are some intensive youth reform and after-school programs in detention facilities.

The story is similar in other states. Kentucky is nixing a boot camp-style program developed by the National Guard. Virginia is losing behavioral services staff and a facility that prepares children to go home after serving time, along with smaller camps and community programs. Juveniles in those programs will return to traditional correctional facilities.

"It's not like we're going to say, 'OK, let's close a juvenile detention center,' or something like that," said Gordon Hickey, spokesman for Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. "We have to reduce spending across the state, and the governor looked at suggestions and recommendations from all departments. He certainly realizes that all of these reductions have consequences. The idea is to limit the damage as much as possible."

Among the programs being cut in South Carolina is one that Lex Wilbanks, an 18-year-old arrested four years ago on drug and gun charges, credits with giving him back his future.

Before moving to the program run by Florida-based nonprofit Associated Marine Institute, which provides intensive counseling and wilderness camps in several states, Wilbanks spent four months in a regular juvenile detention center.

"When you did something wrong or you fight or you disrespect staff, they just throw you into lockdown," Wilbanks said. "They just throw you in and make them fight to survive. You're just making them a hardened criminal."

In South Carolina, only 22 percent of offenders who go through the institute's program later break the law, less than half the recidivism rate for juveniles in large state facilities, Byars said.

Through the program, Wilbanks worked his way to the top rank in Army Junior ROTC and earned a GED and college credits. Acting up brought meetings during which counselors "talk you through problems and how you can actually change," he said. "It gives you hope."

Florida is also axing three Associated Marine Institute programs to save $1.7 million, part of an effort to cut 4 percent, or $18 million, from the juvenile justice budget. Advocates are bracing for additional cuts as legislators go back to the Capitol in January to deal with a $2 billion state budget hole.

Florida's juvenile justice system "is going to die the death of a million 4 percent cuts," said Jacqui Colyer, who leads a state juvenile justice advisory group.

The picture isn't as bleak everywhere. In New York, where the population of jailed juveniles has declined as the state moves toward a more community-based approach, Gov. David Patterson has proposed closing six youth facilities and consolidating and downsizing others that aren't being fully used to save $12 million in 2009-10 and $14 million in 2010-11.

A court order limits the cuts California can make and Minnesota, Massachusetts and Nebraska haven't made serious cuts to their systems. Other states, including Connecticut, Oregon, New Hampshire and Utah, are making more modest cuts or delaying planned spending.

Advocates say they worry most about losing programs, such as group homes, that take children out of large facilities to give them individual attention.

Juvenile facilities see an array of major and minor criminals. Gun, drug, sex and assault offenders may share sleeping quarters and classes with teen pranksters sentenced for disrupting schools or destroying property. Terms can last weeks or, in extreme cases, until youths become adults and are transferred to adult prisons.

Generally, less violent offenders make it to the smaller group homes, and experts say social pecking orders are easier to defuse in those settings compared to prisons where gangs try to form and fight for control.

Sheila Bedi, executive director of the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute, said housing children can cost as much as $600 per child daily. But the expenses can be much higher when children emerge hardened from big youth prisons, commit more crimes and end up in adult facilities.

"The truant comes out learning how to steal a car," Bedi said. "You cannot expect a child to come out of that situation with the ability to make better life decisions."

Associated Press Writer Dena Potter in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hFsfRjoS-SR_3irN_R3WEU8YhzfAD95AHFHG0

Posted by lois at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

December 26, 2008

Christmas Day in a Louisiana Dungeon: Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace Sent Back to Solitary

Ira Glasser
Former Executive Director, ACLU
Posted December 25, 2008

Christmas Day in a Louisiana Dungeon

This is a story about a double crucifixion happening on the very day that hundreds of millions of Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus. It happened yesterday, too, and it will happen tomorrow, unless people of good will and moral decency rise up and stand against it.

The story begins nearly 40 years ago. At that time, it was unthinkable, literally, to imagine a day when a black man might be elected president. Indeed, in some parts of the country, it was still dangerous for a black man to vote, or organize against the oppressive system of racial subjugation that still prevailed despite the recent legal victories of the civil rights movement. And in 1968, both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated.

In the states of the Deep South, it was not uncommon for invented criminal charges to be brought against civil rights advocates during the civil rights movement as a way of suppressing their political activities. And in the North, the emergence of the Black Panthers, an organization of aggressive tactics and militant language, frightened many whites. Brandishing guns and the rhetoric of violence, they provided an easy excuse for law enforcement to go after them.

No civil rights advocates defended actual crimes that may have been committed. But in many cases, evidence was manufactured and guns planted by law enforcement officials anxious to break the back of this increasingly militant movement. In Chicago, the FBI broke into a Black Panther apartment and slaughtered its occupants. And in New York, Black Panthers were brought to trial upon evidence that ultimately could not survive scrutiny. In one case, a black man was shot down by cops and then, as he lay dying, charged with attempted murder of the police who shot him, on the basis of a gun in his coat pocket that later was proved to have been planted by the police officer.

In this context, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were arrested in Louisiana, convicted of separate crimes and sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, an 18,000 acre former slave plantation known as Angola. In those days, most Southern prisons were racially segregated, and many were unspeakably brutal. During the early 1970s, when Wallace and Woodfox first were sentenced to Angola, it was known-- even according to the Louisiana State Department of Corrections official history--as the "bloodiest prison in the south."

It is hard to imagine today what Angola was like then, but it is important to understand the circumstances that led to what happened to Wallace and Woodfox, and to what I have called their crucifixion unto this day.

Angola was awash in violence and over-run by inmate gangs, encouraged and enabled by prison officials as a way of maintaining control. A gruesome system of sexual slavery prevailed, where new prisoners were openly bought and sold into submission; this system was sanctioned and facilitated by guards, as Warden C. Murray Henderson admitted in his book. Favored inmates were given state-issued weapons, and ordered to enforce this system of sexual slavery. Between 1972-75 alone, this armed inmate guard system claimed the lives of 40 prisoners and seriously maimed 350 more. For those who survived, there was a 96 hour work week, harvesting crops of soybeans, cotton, corn and wheat at a minimum wage of 2 cents an hour. This was the prison Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox came to in the early seventies.

Inspired by the civil rights movement, Wallace and Woodfox began a Black Panther chapter in the prison. They couldn't do much except talk, but talk they did, to as many of the inmates as they could, about human dignity and self-respect, and the need to work to protect vulnerable inmates from being pressed into sexual servitude. This did not endear them to the administration-- free speech had not yet come to prisons--nor to the guards and the inmates who functioned as enforcers. But they persisted, and their talk became a thorn in the side of the men who ran the prison.

Then, on April 17, 1972, a young prison guard, Brent Miller, was found stabbed to death in a prison dormitory. He was 23, and his widow was 17.

Wallace and Woodfox were immediately put into solitary confinement, little more than a 6 x 9 cage, despite no evidence connecting them to the crime. They would remain there for the next 36 years, and they are there now, as this is written-- in an even smaller cell, 23 hours a day, no yard time, no telephone calls (except to their lawyers) and no contact visits.

No physical evidence ever connected them to the crime. A bloody fingerprint found at the murder scene did not match either man, and both men had multiple alibi witnesses, who were ignored. Moreover, prison officials refused to check those fingerprints against the fingerprint database, and they have continued to refuse to this day. Somebody made that bloody fingerprint, but it wasn't Woodfox or Wallace. Yet they were charged with the crime.

Other prisoners who testified against them later recanted, and said they were coerced by prison officials to lie under oath.

The only evidence left against them is the unreliable testimony of a convicted serial rapist named Hezekiah Brown, who had previously been on death row, and who was subsequent to his testimony given a variety of special privileges, and later pardoned by the Governor, after the Warden had personally lobbied for his release. Although this was not revealed at the time, Warden Henderson years later testified, at Woodfox's re-trial, that he had made an agreement with Brown: he would help obtain a pardon if Brown would help "crack the case."

Before the pardon, Brown was granted special privileges: as Warden Frank Blackburn wrote in a letter to the Secretary of Corrections, "...This, I feel, would partially fulfill commitments made to [Brown] in the past with respect to his testimony in the state's behalf in the Brent Miller murder case." The Secretary of Corrections replied: "I concur. Warden Henderson made the original agreement with Brown... I think we should honor the agreement."

It is pretty clear that, as often happened in those days to vulnerable black activists, Wallace and Woodfox were pilloried and punished for their political activities in behalf of prison reform, and railroaded into a cage for the next 36 years.

About ten years ago, a small group came together to try to overturn this injustice. Their numbers have grown, and progress has been made, as the facts have slowly but systematically been brought before independent courts.

In 2006, a state magistrate, after an extensive review of Herman Wallace's case, recommended that his conviction be overturned. But by a 2-1 vote, the state appeals court decided to keep the conviction in place. That decision is now pending appeal in the Louisiana State Supreme Court.

In Albert Woodfox's case, a federal magistrate reviewed the evidence thoroughly and recommended his release. A federal district court judge, James Brady, upheld her recommendation, overturned the conviction and granted bail pending the state's decision about whether to appeal or re-try him. The state appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the grant of bail pending appeal.

So the court cases grind slowly, as court cases do.

But the brutality that long ago ignited this injustice continues in Louisiana, to a nearly unimaginable degree. When Woodfox was initially granted bail, a niece of his and her family agreed to take him in. The Louisiana Attorney General, Buddy Caldwell, then embarked upon a public scare campaign reminiscent of the kind of inflammatory hysteria that once was used to provoke lynch mobs. He called Woodfox a dangerous rapist, even though he had never been charged, let alone convicted, of rape; he sent emails to neighbors calling Woodfox a convicted murderer and violent rapist; and neighbors were urged to sign petitions opposing his release. In the end, his niece and family were sufficiently frightened and threatened that Woodfox rejected the plan to live with them while on bail. All of this took place while the appeals court was considering the state's appeal of the grant of bail.

Angola Warden Burl Cain was even more revealing. During the bail hearing, he testified as to why Woodfox should not be granted bail, and why he needed to be kept in a cage, and away from other inmates. Here are a few excerpts:

"The thing about him is he wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize.... A hunger strike is really, really bad, because you could see he admitted that he was organizing a peaceful demonstration.... He is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates...."

For Attorney General Caldwell and Warden Cain, it is still forty years ago, and they can only respond to aspirations for justice by putting its advocates in the hole. Evidence is irrelevant, or to be manufactured to achieve the ends of repression.

Perhaps more surprising, and for that reason even more reprehensible, is the immorality of Governor Bobby Jindal. Elected on a platform of reform, and widely touted as the kind of fresh face for the Republicans nationally that Obama has been for the Democrats, Jindal could stop these crude injustices. But he continues to back them, staining himself and his state with his defense of the indefensible.

By now, anyone who has looked fairly and independently at the evidence in this case has concluded that the convictions were unsupportable. Even Brent Miller's widow now believes Wallace and Woodfox were wrongly convicted, and she would like the state to find out who killed her husband that April day in 1972.

But the habits of the old South die hard, and the courts move slowly. A black man will be inaugurated on January 20. But Albert Woodfox is 61 and Herman Wallace 67. They will not see that inauguration, nor benefit from it. It is Christmas Day, and they are about to begin their 37th year in the dungeon of the old slave plantation. A crucifixion.

Where is the public outrage that will resurrect them?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ira-glasser/christmas-day-in-a-louisi_b_153350.html?view=print

Posted by lois at 11:16 PM | Comments (0)

WA: cut backs for state DOC and making consolidating a prison for women

State might make Larch all-women prison
Corrections seeks ways to save funds in face of budget woes
Wednesday, December 24 | 9:00 p.m.

THE COLUMBIAN, AP

State officials are considering making the Larch Corrections Center in Clark County an all-women’s facility.

The state’s need to save money during the recession, with $1.9 billion in reduced income predicted in November, is at the core of the idea.

Larch, a minimum-security prison for men five miles east of Hockinson, opened in 1955 and is the third-oldest prison in Washington, custody Sgt. Steve Thompson said Wednesday. It has always been a men’s facility and currently has about 370 inmates.

Prison officials say an independent forecast calls for the state to need fewer prison beds in the future and it would make sense to close Pine Lodge Corrections Center for Women in Medical Lake, Washington’s only women’s prison east of the Cascade Mountains.

As early as next summer, the state could start transferring roughly 350 women inmates to Larch, 15314 N.E. Dole Valley Road.

If that comes to pass, male inmates at Larch would be transferred to another state prison, most likely Olympic Corrections Center near Forks, said Chad Lewis, a state Department of Corrections spokesman.

The state’s three prisons for women are near Shelton and near Gig Harbor, in addition to Pine Lodge, in the Spokane area.

Lewis said the idea to close Pine Lodge comes from Eldon Vail, who is the secretary of the DOC.

The state, with 15 prisons, has about 18,000 inmates.

Having a women’s prison at the 40-acre Larch site makes sense for another reason, Lewis said. The majority of women prisoners are from Western Washington, he said. And another prison in Western Washington might make it easier for family members to visit. Lewis said women with family connections are less likely to re-offend.

Larch is classified as a minimum-security prison. It can house about 400 men. The cost per offender per year is $22,531 compared to $37,301 for the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, according to the DOC.

Larch has fewer staff members and medical costs tend to be lower than at Walla Walla, Lewis said.

Lewis noted that the idea to make Larch a women’s facility is “not a done deal.” He said the Legislature will be involved in the decision through drafting the state’s two-year budget.How did the discussion start?

“It was pretty clear that based on the fiscal constraints we’re going to be facing, that we need to close a facility,” said Dick Morgan, director of the DOC’s prisons division.

Pine Lodge includes some aging buildings that need costly renovations, he said, “so it became the most likely candidate.”

But Larch is being remodeled and updated, Lewis said.

By closing Pine Lodge, the state would save about $14 million over the next two years, Morgan said.

Although state lawmakers will have the final say, Gov. Chris Gregoire has proposed billions of dollars in reduced spending over the next two years, forcing state agencies to find ways to wring that money from their budgets.

Pine Lodge superintendent Walker Morton said he’s urging staff at the minimum custody prison to try not to worry, that it’s just a proposal. If the prison closes, he said, he’s been told it wouldn’t be until February 2010.

“We just have to keep our eyes and ears open until the legislators do their thing,” he said.

Possibly closing Pine Lodge is only one facet of Gregoire’s proposed $125 million in savings at the Department of Corrections. And the agency isn’t alone; the Department of Social and Health Services is trying to figure out how to cut spending by nearly $1.3 billion; the Department of Health by $75 million.

Among the other changes proposed by the state Department of Corrections:

n Closing two units at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla.

n Cutting 40 staffers at DOC headquarters.

n Saving $3 million by cutting nurses and medications.

n Freezing all pay raises “until further notice.”

n Reducing or eliminating firearms training at some prisons.

“As you can tell from this list, the situation is serious,” Vail wrote in a memo to staffers Friday.

Gregoire has also proposed changes that would take 12,000 people off probation and cut probation staff by 400 people. Very sick prisoners would be released. Drug and property criminals who aren’t citizens would be deported.

And some drug offenders’ sentences would be shortened.

In addition, family and parenting programs for inmates would be cut, as would a “job hunter” program for inmates being released. Classes and drug treatment in prison would also be cut.

In another e-mail, Secretary Vail also said that lawmakers may make changes during the legislative session.

“At this time, no one can predict what our budget will look like when it is passed in April,” he wrote, “but the changes coming to the agency are likely to be significant.”
http://www.columbian.com/article/20081225/NEWS02/712259947

Posted by lois at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)

Alaska's prison population falls

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
Alaska's prison population falls
The Associated Press
Published Thursday, December 25, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- There are fewer prisoners under the watch of the Alaska Department of Corrections this year even though there have been more bookings.

The number of prisoners - including Alaskans being held here and in prisons outside the state, halfway houses and under electronic monitoring - fell about 5 percent, from 5,397 in December 2007 to 5,110 this week.

The number of prisoners within the state was 3,718 last December. By November, that figure also was down about 5 percent, to 3,528.

"We've never seen a decline before," said corrections Commissioner Joe Schmidt. "We've seen flat growth for short periods of time, and we've seen slow growth for short periods of time, but our projections called for between 150 and 200 prisoners' increase this year, and instead of that we actually went the other way by a couple of hundred."

Schmidt met with the Alaska Judicial Council this week to discuss the phenomenon.

Inmate numbers in Alaska and across the country have consistently been on the rise.

Schmidt said there is still no shortage of people entering Alaska's justice system. This year the department has so booked about 250 more people into jails than by the same time last year.

"The number of actual remands is up this year over last year a little bit, so that's obviously not it," said Sam Edwards, deputy commissioner of operations. "There are a number less revocations from probation and parole this year over last year. That, I can't help but believe, has an impact on our overall numbers."

A study by the Judicial Council released in early 2007 found that two-thirds of prisoners were back in prison inside of three years - with the majority back inside of six months.

"That's a plague in our system," Schmidt said. "That's going to cause us to always be crowded, so my hope is that this reduction is somehow related to recidivism."

Probation revocations, which occur when offenders violate their probation terms, are down by about 240 this year because of what Schmidt attributes to an increase in the number of probation officers hired.

Recidivism rates also can be affected by helping prisoners reintegrate into society by placing them in halfway houses in the community before they are released, according to Edwards, who said the department has worked to put more prisoners into such programs.

Larry Cohn, the judicial council's executive director says one possibility - one that the council is planning to examine - is whether people are getting out on bail more frequently or spending less time in custody before their cases are closed.

Increased plea dealing in Alaska also could have the effect of defendants being incarcerated for shorter periods, he said.

"You had many more cases and fewer people and resources to deal with them, and so increased charge bargaining would seem to be a natural consequence of that circumstance," Cohn said.
http://newsminer.com/news/2008/dec/25/alaskas-prison-population-falls/

Posted by lois at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2008

Needle and Syringe Programs Reduce HIV in Prisons. Methadone treatment also effective in reducing injection drug use and HIV in prison

Needle and Syringe Programs Reduce HIV in Prisons. Methadone treatment also effective in reducing injection drug use and HIV in prison
Modern Medicine: December 24, 2008
WEDNESDAY, Dec. 24 (HealthDay News) -- Reducing injection drug use in prison to reduce HIV transmission is most effectively done by needle and syringe programs and methadone treatment, according to a review in the January issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Ralf Jurgens, Ph.D., a consultant for HIV/AIDS, Health, Policy and Human Rights in Quebec, Canada, and colleagues from the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, reviewed studies investigating the effectiveness of interventions to reduce injection drug use and HIV transmission in prisons.

The researchers report that an estimated 10 to 60.4 percent of prisoners use drugs. Needle and syringe programs and opioid substitution treatments (mostly methadone maintenance therapy) are particularly effective in reducing HIV risk behaviors in prisons without adverse consequences for the health of prison staff or prisoners, the authors note. Bleach and decontamination strategies to sterilize needles and syringes can be effective, but are generally not performed effectively in prison, the investigators found. Drug-free units, separate living units that focus on limiting the availability of drugs, have been shown to be effective but little is known about their long-term effectiveness, the report indicates.

"The renewed emphasis on HIV and broader health issues in prisons represents a recognition that 'public health can no longer afford to ignore prison health,'" Jurgens and colleagues conclude. "Recognizing that 'prison health is public health,' that 'prisoners are entitled to a standard of health equivalent to that available in the outside community, including preventive measures' and that protecting and promoting the health of prisoners benefits not only prisoners, but also prison staff and the communities outside prison, implementation of evidence-based HIV programs in prisons is an important component of national AIDS programs that can no longer be neglected."
http://www.modernmedicine.com/modernmedicine/Modern+Medicine+Now/Needle-and-Syringe-Programs-Reduce-HIV-in-Prisons/ArticleNewsFeed/Article/detail/573166?contextCategoryId=40146

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

December 24, 2008

WI: Univ. of WI-Federal Prison to end 4 year college program

UW-Baraboo, prison end relationship
By Matthew Ryno / News Republic
December 24, 2008-- Baraboo, WI

Working toward a four-year university degree while behind bars will no longer be an option at a nearby federal prison, due to a push to make it easier for more ex-convicts to secure employment upon their release.

Inmates will finish their lessons with long-time University of Wisconsin-Baraboo/Sauk County instructors, and by June, a new educational provider will teach an anticipated 50 to 100 inmates how to push mops and buckets.

After about 35 years of working together, officials at the Federal Corrections Institute at Oxford specifically requested instruction in job fields not offered at UW-Baraboo, like custodial services and computer work. UW-Baraboo has not submitted a bid for these services, which are classified as part of a $6.5 million contract on the bid request.

About 17 full-time equivalent students from FCI-Oxford are enrolled in the current program. Losing these students pushes the number of full-time students at UW-Baraboo below an enrollment target — which could impact state aid next year.

Thomas Pleger, dean, said he predicts college enrollment will continue to increase and he was more concerned that such a beneficial relationship has ended.

"We have enjoyed the relationship over 30 plus years, and our faculty and staff have found it very rewarding," Pleger said. "In a number of meetings we have pointed out success of our program to FCI-Oxford."

Christine Montonna, executive assistant at the prison, said in a faxed statement, "eligible inmates would benefit more effectively from occupational oriented programs, by obtaining marketable skills designed to enhance post-release employment opportunities."

Specifically, Montonna said the shift in programming gives FCI-Oxford a new contract that "accommodates the most recent policy guidelines for education and accommodates the needs of the inmate population at FCI-Oxford."

Though the opportunity to obtain a two-year associate degree applicable to continuing a four-year degree at a school like UW-Steven's Point might no longer be offered in the future, FCI-Oxford was considered "one of the most heavily programmed institutions in the Federal Bureau of Prisons," Jerry Bednarowski, of the Correctional Education Association of Wisconsin, wrote in an annual newsletter last year.

In the newsletter he listed FCI-Oxford's programs which included GED programs, apprenticeship programs, continuing education programs, food service training, arts and crafts programs and some technical education through the Madison Area Technical College. All of these programs are part of FCI-Oxford's Occupational and Vocational Education Program.

Bednarowski, a retired educational director at the Waupun Correctional Institution, said though he has no experience with a Federal Correctional Institution, he said supporting work toward a four-year degree requires a lot of resources to get prisoners eligible. According to the National Institute of Literacy, 70 percent of all prisoners function at the lowest literacy levels.

"The levels of the inmates coming into the (state correctional) institution are usually quite low. The first goal (of state correctional institutions) is to get them a GED, then get them a trade to get them employable upon release," he said.

A partnership between a Federal Corrections Institute and a four-year degree program does exist elsewhere though, like at Boston University and Arizona State University.

Some programs in the Wisconsin Department of Corrections are also pioneering easier ways to cross the divide to a four-year degree while also expanding training for the workplace.

The Milwaukee Area Technical College is partnering with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections through a satellite-based distance learning group called the Corrections Learning Network to offer courses which lead to an Associate of Arts degree.

A recently awarded $2 million four-year study is now looking at how their economical way of offering courses which ultimately leads to an Associate of Arts degree (an intermediate goal to completing a four-year degree), can be successful.

Bednarowski said there is value in a liberal arts education.

"A liberal arts education doesn't exist much in the state system, but it has great value and it gets into supporting the moral development and value system of the inmates. I think its major effect is in those areas, in addition to preparing for employment upon release," he said.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1997, (the most recent date the study was completed) about 23.9 percent of federal inmates have a post-secondary education, compared to 48.4 percent of the general population.

About 80 percent of inmates who did not complete high school or an equivalency degree were recidivists. This compares with 66 percent with some college education who were recidivists.

Nearly 60 percent of federal inmates reported taking advantage of educational opportunities while they were incarcerated.

No educational service bids have been selected so far by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Though multiple requests have been made, no copies of received bids have been provided by the prison system and no data is available regarding the success rate of those completing any educational services at FCI-Oxford.
http://www.wiscnews.com/util/print.php?pub=bnr&ntid=325131&ref=%2Fbnr%2Fnews%2F%2Findex.php%3Fntid%3D325131

Posted by lois at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2008

VT putting criminal records on line.

States putting criminal records online
by John Curran - Dec. 21, 2008
Associated Press

WATERBURY, Vt. - Worried your daughter's new boyfriend might have a nefarious past? Want to know whether the job applicant in front of you has a rap sheet?

Finding out can be a mouse click away, thanks to the growing crop of searchable online databases run directly by states. Vermont launched its service Monday, and now about 20 states have some form of them.

The Web sites provide a valuable and time-saving service to employers and businesses by allowing them to look up criminal convictions without having to submit written requests and wait for the responses. And they're popular: Last month alone, Florida's site performed 38,755 record checks.

But the Internet debut of information historically kept in courthouses in paper files can magnify the harm of clerical errors, expose states to liability for mistakes and spell new headaches for people who've long since done their time, only to have information about their crime bared anew.

"It's unfortunate in that it threatens what I see as the uniquely American ideal of being able to start over, after you've paid your penance, to go to a new community without the blemish of your crime and starting a new life," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group focused on civil liberties online.

Vermont's system, which costs $20 to query one person's records, includes information on criminal convictions dating to the 1940s. It taps into the Vermont Criminal Information Center database used by law- enforcement agencies, which state officials claim has fewer mistakes than courthouse records or the data sold by private information brokers working off those records.

All you need to make an inquiry is a person's name and date of birth, and a credit card to pay the fee.

If the query finds a record, the system lists the date of conviction, charge, sentence and venue. It won't show the original charge filed, or give information about the victim or the circumstances of the crime.

Also inaccessible, according to officials, are records that have been expunged or sealed. And people can report mistakes in the records on them and ask for changes.

Allen Gilbert, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Vermont chapter, opposed the state's move, in part because it sets up a two-tiered system of records - one set at the courthouse and another online. The online system gives only a slice of information about the cases, he said.

"There might be something about the conviction that if you looked at the court record, you'd better understand about what happened and what's behind the conviction. It would give the person whose record you're looking at a chance to have the full story explained, rather than just the end result," Gilbert said.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2008/12/21/20081221online-rapsheet1221.html

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

Booked: Seminar Explores American Prisons

Booked: Seminar Explores American Prisons
by Nora Grenfell '12
Hamilton College (NY)
December 23, 2008

During the fall semester, a new seminar was offered by Hamilton's English Department. "Booked: Prison Writing," taught by Associate Professor Doran Larson, offered a survey of literature composed behind bars. The authors ranged from Socrates to Oscar to post-colonial, developing world authors. The class also included a specialized field trip: the opportunity to observe inmates at maximum-security Attica Prison in a creative writing class.

Two years ago Larson visited Attica prison with a discussion group. After this initial experience, he spent six weeks of his leave from 2007-2008 in the Library of Congress reading solely prison literature. At the conclusion of his leave, he returned to Hamilton. He also returned to Attica, to teach a creative writing workshop to 10 of the 2200 inmates currently incarcerated there.

The classes themselves, Larson says, are very similar to the typical creative writing classes you would expect of any institution. "The steps of developing as a writer are very similar to everyone," remarked Larson. He finds the classes to be demanding, but also describes the experience as invigorating. "The men there really need the class," he said, "it becomes vital to their mental well-being. Providing that is very energizing."

Larson approached Hamilton College last year about creating a class where students would interact with the Attica prisoners. By this fall, the class had started. Every student in the seminar participated in one of Professor Larson's Creative Writing classes at Attica. They described the experience as not only influencing their reading of class materials, but also served to humanize the prisoners. As most of us base our knowledge of prisons on movies, it was a shock all of the students to come into direct contact with America's thriving incarceration institution.

The students drew the comparison between the Attica prison visits and the chance for students in a Jane Austen seminar to travel back to 19th century England. "In other literature courses, you do things with your imagination. You never get further than ideas. In this case we're getting at the real meat of life," observed Nick Fesette '09.

The class consisted of mostly seniors, drawn from a variety of majors. In the literature covered in the class, students noticed a lot of themes of self-reflection. Upon seeing the little human interaction possible in the prison itself, this motif especially stood out to the students. They also noticed the strong desire embodied in the writing to communicate beyond the page. "This is their way of reaching out beyond the prison, and we're listening to them," said Emily Howell '09.

Most of the students attributed their motivation for taking to the class to the novelty of visiting a prison. "It's not something you typically get to do, you're never going to get the experience [of visiting a prison again]," said Kaitlin Hill '09.
When asked what the greatest difference is between teaching a seminar to college students and teaching a workshop to inmates, Professor Larson surprisingly answered "age."

"The youngest men in Attica are in their mid-20s, and they've had a different experience just to survive in prison. They've had to learn things no one has ever had to learn," he said. Larson also noticed the motivation of the prisoners to take the class. He remarked, "they're not there to please anyone. They're not getting credit for it. They're just there to improve their writing."
http://www.hamilton.edu/news/more_news/display.cfm?ID=14997

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

December 22, 2008

OH: Budget cuts force closure of Cincinnati jail

Budget cuts force closure of Cincinnati jail
Published on Saturday Dec 20, 2008

One of Hamilton County's four jails has shut its doors because of budget cuts, the first time a jail has closed in the county without a new one in line to take its place.

The closing Friday came as state officials consider ways to safely shrink the state prison population in light of a projected $7 billion state budget deficit over the next two years. Jails and prisons represent a large portion of both local government and state budgets.

Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis and other county officials said there is simply no money to keep the 822-bed Queensgate jail _ which houses low- and medium-security prisoners _ open. The jail closed quietly Friday, as the last dozen or so inmates were led out to black sheriff's office vans and taken to other county jails. About 70 to 80 inmates had been at the jail Friday morning.

There were no signs or announcements. Two people who had come to visit inmates found the door locked and the building empty.

"This is the most frustrating time I've ever seen in my entire career," Leis said. "It's a frustrating, dangerous situation. We're going to get to a point where we're not going to be able to provide the necessary services."

Leis was told to cut his budget $12.4 million, or 16.5 percent, for next year.

Leis has been reducing the inmate population by releasing inmates from their sentences early or delaying the start date of their sentences. Many are immediately released after being booked and told to report for a court date.

Most inmates were serving time for misdemeanor crimes such as theft and driving under suspension.

Eighty-seven sheriffs deputies are being laid off effective Wednesday _ Christmas Eve.

The Queensgate jail wasn't the only building shut down Friday.

The county also closed two auto-title offices, cutting county employees in the process.

Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Greg Hartmann has been asked to cut more than 70 jobs.

Just as Hamilton County officials are having to address their public safety budget, state officials are contemplating ways to cut the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction's $1.8 billion budget without putting public safety at risk.

In a document recently shared with state lawmakers, agency Director Terry Collins outlined 15 options for reducing the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction's 51,000-prisoner population.

Those options include: Nonviolent drug offenders spending more time in halfway houses instead of in prison; well-behaved inmates getting out early after they earn their GEDs; and others serving the final months of their sentences outside prison while wearing GPS devices.
http://www.ohio.com/news/ap?articleID=1312457&c=y

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

VT: Women's prison opens, but not enough women to fill it

http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/83334/

Women's prison opens, but not enough women to fill it

Monday December 22, 2008
ST. ALBANS, Vt. (AP)

Vermont corrections officials have rearranged the state's prison system,turning the correctional facility in St. Albans into awomen's prison.
But while that change has been in the works, new programs designed to keep women out of jail have helped drive down Vermont's female inmate population by 40 percent.

That means that when the St. Albans prison reopens to admit women in a few weeks it will have 140 empty beds.

State Senator Richard Sears, the Bennington Democrat who chairs the
Legislature's Corrections Oversight Committee, is among those who are
surprised at the dramatic reduction in Vermont's female prison population.

© Copyright 2008, Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Posted by lois at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

UT: Focus of budget cuts include drug abuse treatment and cuts to juvenile jails

Focus of budget cuts begins to sharpen
Huntsman's plan » Several social programs would feel the pinch and 1,100 could lose their jobs.
By Robert Gehrke

The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated:12/20/2008

It is, perhaps, the unlucky 7.

But details of potential impacts of Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s proposed 7 percent budget cuts for the next budget year are taking shape, and they will be significant.

They include: eliminating a worker training program; raising the bar for poor and pregnant mothers to get medical care; cutting sex offender and substance abuse treatment; reducing dental and medical benefits for the needy; and closing courthouses and juvenile lock-ups.

And it could mean eliminating more than 1,100 jobs, including 32 highway patrol posts, up to 111 corrections employees, 50 tax auditors and collectors, and an estimated 700 positions in Utah's colleges and universities. The figure does not include any reductions in public education.

While the cuts are hard to take, they recognize the current economic realities, Huntsman said in a recent interview. "Fortunately we're not like California, Ohio or Michigan right now, where they're making 25 percent cuts across the board."

As deep as those cuts are, Utah legislators plan to take more -- much more -- laying the groundwork this week for a 15 percent across-the-board budget cut, more than doubling the cost-cutting Huntsman is proposing.

The draft 2010 budget reductions, obtained by The Tribune through an open-records request, paint a much more detailed picture of the human element of state budget reductions.

Huntsman's spokeswoman, Lisa Roskelley, cautioned that the figures are only potential cuts, submitted by departments to demonstrate that they could meet the 7 percent target from the governor, and what those cuts might mean.

It will be up to the Legislature, in cooperation with the governor, to set next year's budget in the 2009 Legislative Session, starting next month.

Huntsman is proposing pulling money out of road projects and borrowing money through state bonds to complete much of the work. He wants to use that money, plus part of the state's $414 million Rainy Day Fund, to soften the blow in critical areas such as education and health and human services, and potentially salvage scores of jobs for at least a year.

Department of Health

Dr. David Sundwall, director of the Department of Health, said the way to cut costs is pay less to medical providers, reduce eligibility or scale back services. "There's a little bit of all three in here," he said.

For example, officials at the Health Department have proposed saving $9.5 million by eliminating a program that allows people to essentially buy into Medicaid coverage if they make too much to qualify.

"That is something that would be harsh, but at the same time, it is an optional service," Sundwall said. "That is hard because those are not wealthy people. Obviously, if you're near poor, you're pretty poor."

The department may also tighten its income threshold for pregnant women to receive prenatal care and for poor families to receive Medicaid, reduce the amount it pays pharmacies to fill Medicaid prescriptions, and scale back the dental benefits for children on the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Sundwall said, as hard as it is to get to the governor's 7 percent target, getting to the 15 percent level the Legislature wants is even more painful.

"I can't imagine, in our state, [the Legislature] having the willingness to cut this deep into health and human services because it's simply not the tradition of our state," said Sundwall. "Traditionally we recognize that there is a role for government caring for the most needy among us."

"These are serious and immediate issues, so we go back to the idea that not all cuts are equal," said Allison Rowland, budget director with the group Voices for Utah Children.

Prison system

The state prison system is looking at a number of different scenarios to cut nearly $18 million from its budget. In every case, the department would cut the Drug Offender Reform Act, designed to help rehabilitate drug offenders, and significantly reduce a jail reimbursement program, which houses state probationers in county jails.

The department also plans to delay construction of a 300-bed parole violator center for low-security inmates. Triple-bunking inmates at some facilities is possible to save money.

Overall, the department projects it could lose anywhere from 15 to 111 full-time employees and up to 492 prison beds, potentially creating a housing crisis for male inmates by next fall.

Corrections spokeswoman Angie Welling warned that the decisions are far from final and the figures were provided "to demonstrate the depth of these potential cuts."

Court system

The Utah Courts are threatened with losing nearly 100 full-time jobs and are considering closing courthouses in Roosevelt and Bountiful, consolidating the judges in other buildings.

Court Administrator Dan Becker said much of the cost for the courts are committed to personnel. "You get beyond 3 or 4 percent and you're looking at closing buildings or laying off personnel," he said.

"We're considering that as an option, but we're not sure that's the way we want to go," said Becker, who said there still need to be conversations with local officials, and unexpected costs with closing the Roosevelt courthouse might scuttle that idea. "These are situations where we really don't have many options. If we're reducing staff at some point, it makes sense for us to consolidate judges and staff into a single courthouse."

Natural Resources

The Department of Natural Resources may be forced to close some state parks three days a week. "They haven't determined how many parks and which days," said spokeswoman Tammy Kikuchi, but the budget cuts are certainly "going to be felt by the public."

Education

The Utah Board of Regents is leaving it largely up to the state's 10 public colleges and universities to sort out how to meet their 7 percent target, but on the whole it is estimated that about 700 jobs systemwide could be eliminated.

Commissioner of Higher Education William Sederburg said Friday that some of that could be alleviated by tuition hikes, but "the great bulk of these cuts are going to be real, serious [reductions]."

If the Legislature decides to cut the 15 percent lawmakers are currently considering, the number of jobs lost would increase as well, up to about 1,500 across the system, Sederburg said.

"We're not trying to be dramatic," Sederburg said. "I think we all need to be aware of what the consequences will be and, given that the universities are so people-intensive in their budget, it clearly affects a number of people."

Tribune reporter Steve Gehrke contributed to this story.
http://www.sltrib.com/utahpolitics/ci_11274672

Posted by lois at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)

The Evidence Gap Drug Rehabilitation or Revolving Door?

December 23, 2008
The Evidence Gap
Drug Rehabilitation or Revolving Door?
By BENEDICT CAREY
NY Times

ROSEBURG, Ore. — Their first love might be the rum or vodka or gin and juice that is going around the bonfire. Or maybe the smoke, the potent marijuana that grows in the misted hills here like moss on a wet stone.

But it hardly matters. Here as elsewhere in the country, some users start early, fall fast and in their reckless prime can swallow, snort, inject or smoke anything available, from crystal meth to prescription pills to heroin and ecstasy. And treatment, if they get it at all, can seem like a joke.

“After the first couple of times I went through, they basically told me that there was nothing they could do,” said Angella, a 17-year-old from the central Oregon city of Bend, who by freshman year in high school was drinking hard liquor every day, smoking pot and sampling a variety of harder drugs. “They were like, ‘Uh, I don’t think so.’ ”

She tried residential programs twice, living away from home for three months each time. In those, she learned how dangerous her habit was, how much pain it was causing others in her life. She worked on strengthening her relationship with her grandparents, with whom she lived. For two months or so afterward she stayed clean.

“Then I went right back,” Angella said in an interview. “After a while, you know, you just start missing your friends.”

Every year, state and federal governments spend more than $15 billion, and insurers at least $5 billion more, on substance-abuse treatment services for some four million people. That amount may soon increase sharply: last year, Congress passed the mental health parity law, which for the first time includes addiction treatment under a federal law requiring that insurers cover mental and physical ailments at equal levels.

Many clinics across the county have waiting lists, and researchers estimate that some 20 million Americans who could benefit from treatment do not get it.

Yet very few rehabilitation programs have the evidence to show that they are effective. The resort-and-spa private clinics generally do not allow outside researchers to verify their published success rates. The publicly supported programs spend their scarce resources on patient care, not costly studies.

And the field has no standard guidelines. Each program has its own philosophy; so, for that matter, do individual counselors. No one knows which approach is best for which patient, because these programs rarely if ever track clients closely after they graduate. Even Alcoholics Anonymous, the best known of all the substance-abuse programs, does not publish data on its participants’ success rate.

“What we have in this country is a washing-machine model of addiction treatment,” said A. Thomas McClellan, chief executive of the nonprofit Treatment Research Institute, based in Philadelphia. “You go to Shady Acres for 30 days, or to some clinic for 60 visits or 60 doses, whatever it is. And then you’re discharged and everyone’s crying and hugging and feeling proud — and you’re supposed to be cured.”

He added: “It doesn’t really matter if you’re a movie star going to some resort by the sea or a homeless person. The system doesn’t work well for what for many people is a chronic, recurring problem.”

In recent years state governments, which cover most of the bill for addiction services, have become increasingly concerned, and some, including Delaware, North Carolina, and Oregon, have sought ways to make the programs more accountable. The experience of Oregon, which has taken the most direct and aggressive action, illustrates both the promise and perils of trying to inject science into addiction treatment.

Evidence-Based Treatments

In 2003 the Oregon Legislature mandated that rehabilitation programs receiving state funds use evidence-based practices — techniques that have proved effective in studies. The law, phased in over several years, was aimed at improving services so that addicts like Angella would not be doomed to a lifetime of rehab, repeating the same kinds of counseling that had failed them in the past — or landing in worse trouble.

“You can get through a lot of programs just by faking it,” said Jennifer Hatton, 25, of Myrtle Creek, Ore., a longtime drinker and drug user who quit two years ago, but only after going to jail and facing the prospect of losing her children. “That’s what did it for me — my kids — and I wish it didn’t have to come to that.”

When practiced faithfully, evidence-based therapies give users their best chance to break a habit. Among the therapies are prescription drugs like naltrexone, for alcohol dependence, and buprenorphine, for addiction to narcotics, which studies find can help people kick their habits.

Another is called the motivational interview, a method intended to harden clients’ commitment upon entering treatment. In M.I., as it is known, the counselor, through skilled questioning, has the addict explain why he or she has a problem, and why it is important to quit, and set goals. Studies find that when clients mark their path in this way — instead of hearing the lecture from a counselor, as in many traditional programs — they stay in treatment longer.

Psychotherapy techniques in which people learn to expect and tolerate restless or low moods are also on the list. So is cognitive behavior therapy, in which addicts learn to question assumptions that reinforce their habits (like “I’ll never make friends who don’t do drugs”) and to engage their nondrug activities and creative interests.

For Angella, this kind of counseling made a difference. She spent several months in a program run by Adapt, an addiction treatment center here in Roseburg, a small city about 175 miles south of Portland.

In treatment, she said, she learned how to “just be with, and feel” bad moods without turning to drink or drugs; and to throw herself into creative projects like collage and painting. The program has helped her reconnect with her father and to enroll in college beginning in January.

“I want to be a teacher, and someone at the program is advising me on that,” she said in an interview. “That’s the plan, to just move out and away from my old life.”

A friend of hers in the program, Alex, a 16-year-old from Roseburg, said that the therapy helped him monitor his own emotional ups and downs, without being swept away by them. The counselors “are always asking about our stress level, our anger, so you become more aware and have a better idea what to do with it,” he said.

Almost 54 percent of Oregon’s $94 million budget for addiction treatment services now goes to programs that deploy evidence-based techniques, according to a state report completed last month. The estimated rate before the mandate was 25 to 30 percent. The state has not yet analyzed the impact of this change on clients.

“Before the mandate, most programs had some evidence-based practices, and since then there has been a lot more interest and awareness of them,” said Traci Rieckmann, a public health researcher at Oregon Health and Science University, who is following the policy implementation with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Culture Clash

Yet interest and awareness may not translate into good practice, and Dr. Rieckmann says it is not at all clear how many rehabilitation programs claiming to use evidence-based techniques actually do so faithfully. About 400 programs receive state money, and most of them are small, rural outfits that are already stretched to provide counseling, to say nothing of paying for extensive training.

“You’re talking about therapies, like cognitive behavior therapy, that take time to learn,” said John Gardin, the behavioral health and research director at Adapt in Roseburg, who travels the country to teach the skills. “Most places don’t have a person like me to do that training, so they’re getting two to three days of training, if that; and that’s just not enough time to get it.”

In studies looking at hundreds of programs nationwide, researchers have found a similar gap between what programs may want to do and what they’re able to do. “For instance, most programs don’t have an M.D. on staff,” said Aaron Johnson, a sociologist at the University of Georgia who has led many of the studies. “Without that, of course, you can’t prescribe any medications.”

Tim Hartnett, the executive director of a Portland treatment program called CODA Inc., which does its own research on patient outcomes, said that the mandate had raised the level of conversation statewide, but that true reform would mean “an integrated system that tracks clients as they move from residential to outpatient treatment, and that defines clear targets” for what a person should expect from each kind of program.

“Our goal at CODA is to create a system of care that uses evidence-based practices at just the right dose and just the right time,” Mr. Hartnett said. “As with many chronic diseases, figuring out dosage and timing are critical.”

For some addicts, a standard program may not help at all, according to Anne Fletcher, who for her book “Sober For Good” interviewed 222 men and women who had been clean for at least five years. “A lot of these people overcame an alcohol problem on their own, or with the help of an individual therapist,” Ms. Fletcher said.

To complicate matters in Oregon, the state mandate has stirred a kind of culture clash between those who want reform — academic researchers, state officials — and veteran counselors working in the trenches, many of whom have beaten addictions of their own and do not appreciate outsiders telling them how to do their jobs.

“I’m a counselor, and I’d be defensive, too: ‘What do you mean, all this stuff I’ve been doing my entire life is wrong?’ ” said Brian Serna, director of outpatient services at Adapt, who has traveled the state to monitor the use of scientific practices. “So the challenge is to build a bridge between what the science says is effective and what people are already doing.”

One way to do that, some experts now believe, is to combine evidence-based practice with “practice-based evidence” — the results that programs and counselors themselves can document, based on their own work. In 2001 the Delaware Division of Substance Abuse and Mental Health began giving treatment programs incentives, or bonuses, if they met certain benchmarks. The clinics could earn a bonus of up to 5 percent, for instance, if they kept a high percentage of addicts coming in at least weekly and ensured that those clients met their own goals, as measured both by clean urine tests and how well they functioned in everyday life, in school, at work, at home.

By 2006, the state’s rehabilitation programs were operating at 95 percent capacity, up from 50 percent in 2001; and 70 percent of patients were attending regular treatment sessions, up from 53 percent, according to an analysis of the policy published last summer in the journal Health Policy.

“We basically gave them a list of evidence-based practices and told them to pick the ones they wanted to use,” said Jack Kemp, former director of substance abuse services for Delaware, in an interview. “It was up to them to decide what to use.”

For those who are trying not to use, it doesn’t much matter how rehab services are improved — only that it happens in time. “Honestly, you just don’t care how or why something works for you,” said Ms. Hatton, the 25-year-old from Myrtle Creek, Ore. “Just that it does.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23reha.html?_r=1

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

December 19, 2008

OH: State could invest in half-way houses rather than more prisons

Ohio bill seeks to ease prison crowding
By JULIE CARR SMYTH AP Statehouse Correspondent
Thursday Dec 18, 2008
Akron Beacon Journal
Non-violent drug offenders could spend more time in halfway houses instead of in prison. Well-behaved inmates who earn their GEDs could get out early. Others could serve the final months of their sentences outside prison while wearing GPS devices.

These are just some of the options Gov. Ted Strickland's administration is considering to contend with crowded prisons amid forecasts of plummeting state revenues.

"To me, it comes down to a simple formula," said state prisons director Terry Collins. "Either we spend a whole lot more money on building a whole lot more prisons to lock up everybody in Ohio, or we can figure out some other solutions so that all those other programs _ like social services, education, Medicaid _ have the money they need."

In a document recently shared with state lawmakers, Collins outlined 15 options for reducing the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction's 51,000-prisoner population _ and its hefty annual budget of about $1.8 billion.

The document's final page included a subtle reminder to lawmakers: Collins has the ability to declare a prison overcrowding emergency that could result, with legislative or gubernatorial approval, in the reduction of sentences in 30-, 60- and 90-day increments to alleviate the problem. Collins said it's a matter of state spending priorities.

"I'm just saying why don't we look at something different, so my grandkids and other people's grandkids in this state can get some education?" Collins said in an interview. "I'm not looking to empty the prisons. I'm looking to be smart about it."

Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien said care would have to be taken if prison housing guidelines were rewritten. He said some low-level felons, such as first time drunken drivers or people who have assaulted a domestic partner, are susceptible to repeat offenses.

"Those powder keg kind of people are low-level offenders today that tomorrow could be a homicide," he said.

In Ohio, prisons are at 133 percent capacity. He said the lack of personal space leads to more violence and more dangerous conditions for both prisoners and staff.

He said he'd be happy if capacity were narrowed back to 100 percent again.

"That's like Santa Claus would bring me everything I wanted for Christmas," he said.

Some of Collins' recommendations were included in a sweeping law enforcement bill passed late Wednesday and sent to Gov. Strickland's desk. The bill gives judges broader discretion in sentencing 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-degree felons to community-based facilities instead of prison, particularly those with drug addictions.

The proposal passed the Senate 28-3 and received its final sign-off from the House.

The U.S. prison population is the largest in the world, largely due to tougher sentences states have imposed in recent years on drunken drivers, drug offenders, sex offenders and others.

Collins said he views the bill as a foundation to build on. Among other scenarios his department is exploring are:

_Allowing low-level, non-sex offenders serving 12 months or less to spend a third of their sentence in prison, a third in a halfway house, and a third with a GPS monitor. Savings: 3,083 prison beds, $19 million over the biennium.

_Increasing prison diversion programs paid through the Community Corrections Act. Savings: Up to 2,804 prison beds, and, for a $5 million expenditure, $14.8 million in unneeded construction costs.

_Allowing offenders serving the shortest sentences, less than 30 days, to serve their time in local custody, with the state paying counties incentives for the service. Savings: 160 prison beds, $725,849.

_Stepping down low-level, non-violent, non-sex offenders directly to GPS supervision, rather than to community programs, for their final 90 days. Savings: 700 prison beds, $1.3 million.

_Trimming sentences by up to 15 percent for those who complete classes or recovery programs behind bars. Savings: 800 prison beds, $1.7 million.

_Diverting those serving time for child support violations to community-based facilities. Savings: 438 prison beds, $3.4 million.

_Equalizing powder and crack cocaine offenses, in a manner the federal government recently recommended. Savings: 1,450 beds, $10.4 million.

Collins cautioned that all the scenarios are in the brainstorming stages. None is a formal budget proposal.

O'Brien said such creative solutions may be needed to free up the cash to avoid closing prisons, which he sees as a far worse option. But he said halfway houses also require cash.

"The money has to there to build, operate, maintain and staff those community-based corrections facilities," he said. "You can't just say more people need to be sent there and not fund them."

___

On The Net:

Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections: http://www.drc.ohio.gov
http://www.ohio.com/news/ap?articleID=1301917

Posted by lois at 02:43 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2008

MA: Marijuana Law Comes With Challenges

December 18, 2008
Marijuana Law Comes With Challenges
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
NY Times
BOSTON — Last month, voters approved a statewide measure decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Now, wary authorities say, comes the hard part. They are scrambling to set up a new system of civil penalties before Jan. 2, when the change becomes law. From then on, anyone caught with an ounce or less of marijuana will owe a $100 civil fine instead of ending up with an arrest record and possibly facing jail time.

It sounds simple, but David Capeless, president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, said the new policy presented a thicket of questions and complications.

One of the most basic, Mr. Capeless said, is who will collect the fines and enforce other provisions of the law. For example, violators under 18 will be required to attend a drug awareness class within a year, but it is unclear who will make sure that they do so. The fine increases to $1,000 for those who skip the class.

A complicating factor, said Mr. Capeless, the district attorney in Berkshire County, is that state law bans the police from demanding identification for civil infractions.

“Not only do you not have to identify yourself,” he said, “but it would appear from a strict reading that people can get a citation, walk away, never pay a fine and have no repercussion.”

Wayne Sampson, executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, says he anticipates that many violators will lie about their identities.

“You can tell us that you’re Mickey Mouse of One Disneyland Way,” Mr. Sampson said, “and we have to assume that’s true.”

The authorities, he said, will also have to be sure that the substance they hand out citations for is marijuana, which will involve sending it to the State Police crime laboratory.

“You’re going to appeal it and go to the clerk’s hearing,” Mr. Sampson said, “and if we don’t have an analysis from the drug lab, the clerk is going to throw the case out.”

Mr. Sampson predicted that the law would result in de facto legalization of marijuana because it would prove too difficult to enforce.

“I would argue that the proponents knew these complications right from the beginning,” he said.

About 65 percent of state voters supported the decriminalization measure, which was promoted by a group that spent more than $1.5 million on the effort.

The group, the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy, said that in addition to ensuring that people caught with marijuana no longer have a criminal record, the change would save about $29.5 million a year that it estimates law enforcement currently spends to enforce existing drug laws.

A spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, which supports the drug’s legalization and created the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy to get the ballot question passed here, said that judging from the experience of other states with civil penalties for marijuana possession, Massachusetts officials were exaggerating the challenges.

“I can’t help but think that the real difficulty in implementing it,” said the spokesman, Dan Bernath, “is they don’t want to do it.”

Eleven states have decriminalized first-time possession of marijuana, though in most it is technically a misdemeanor instead of a civil offense.

In Nebraska, where possession of an ounce or less of marijuana is punishable by a $300 civil fine, the process has worked smoothly for three decades, said Michael Behm, executive director of the Nebraska Crime Commission.

In New York, possession of an ounce or less of marijuana is a noncriminal violation but is still processed through the criminal system, said Robert M. Carney, the district attorney in Schenectady County.

“They are brought down to the police station so their identity is established,” Mr. Carney said of violators, “but they are not fingerprinted because it’s not an arrest.”

In Massachusetts, the Executive Office of Public Safety is working with state and local law enforcement and court officials to determine how to apply the changes. Mr. Capeless said education officials were also in on the discussions because it was unclear whether public schools and universities could forbid marijuana possession under the new law.

A spokesman for the public safety office said its legal counsel was considering “a lot of questions” as the deadline drew near. But the spokesman, Terrel Harris, would not elaborate.

“We are just trying to make sure we have all the answers,” Mr. Harris said.

Mr. Capeless said that in particular the department needed to address a clause in the new law that said neither the state nor its “political subdivisions or their respective agencies” could impose “any form of penalty, sanction or disqualification” on anyone found with an ounce or less of marijuana.

“It appears to say that you get a $100 fine and they can’t do anything else to you,” he said. “Can a police officer caught with marijuana several times get to keep his job and not be disciplined in any fashion? Can public high schools punish kids for smoking cigarettes but not for having pot?”

Mr. Bernath agreed that the law was “not completely clear” on how to handle such situations, but predicted that they would be rare.

“I think the resistance has to do with dealing with something new,” he said. “We’re pretty confident that once this gets going and the newness of it wears off, a lot of the apprehension will go away.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/us/18marijuana.html?scp=2&sq=marijuana&st=cse

Posted by lois at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)

The Angola 3: "Reform," Bobby Jindal Style

James Rucker
Posted December 17, 2008 |
"Reform," Bobby Jindal Style
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-rucker/reform-bobby-jindal-style_b_151737.html

We may be on the brink of inaugurating a Black president, but the miscarriage of justice unfolding in Louisiana with the case of the Angola 3 tells a different story about race, power and accountability in our criminal justice system. At the top of the food chain is self-styled reformer and the GOP's supposed answer to Obama, Governor Bobby Jindal.

Albert Woodfox has spent the last 36 years in solitary confinement -- 23 out of 24 hours each day in a 6×9 cell -- for the murder of a white prison guard, a crime he didn't commit.

Despite increasing evidence of Woodfox's innocence, the State of Louisiana is digging in its heels. They've pushed back against a federal judge who has overturned Woodfox's conviction and ordered his release. The reason is becoming crystal clear: It's not because they believe that Woodfox or the other two people referred to as the "Angola 3" murdered anyone. It's because the three men were organizing within the prison for better conditions, an end to sexual abuses, and the fair treatment of inmates. Apparently, in Louisiana, seeking justice means you deserve to be framed for murder and locked away forever.

James "Buddy" Caldwell, the state's Attorney General, has led the state's fight and Burl Cain, the warden at Angola, is acting as Caldwell's henchman. Ultimately, it's Governor Bobby Jindal who is giving them cover despite being presented with all the facts and being asked repeatedly to intervene. So much for the promise of Jindal and his self-description as a "reformer."

A look at recent proceedings shows that the desire to keep Woodfox behind bars has nothing to do with whether Woodfox is guilty or innocent. Cain has made it clear that he doesn't care. Cain wants him behind bars for no reason other than the fact that Woodfox has been a force for reform from within the prison walls. Says Cain, "The thing about him is that he wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant." Cain has said that even if he knew Woodfox hadn't killed the guard, he would still want the man isolated. "I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates," Cain said. It's not that Woodfox is dangerous. It's that he is unrepentant in organizing inmates to achieve a basic sense of decency and livable conditions.

Several months before Judge James Brady overturned Woodfox's conviction, more than 25,000 ColorOfChange.org members appealed to Governor Jindal to get involved. The head of the state legislature's judiciary committee, Cedric Richmond, delivered the petitions to Governor Jindal and requested he intervene. Around the same time, Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, met with both Woodfox and Herman Wallace (one of the other Angola 3) and has publicly called for intervention. Jindal's response has been utter silence.

In recent weeks, as pressure has mounted for Woodfox to be released, Caldwell, the Attorney General, has gone deeper in attempting to demonize Woodfox. He has taken to publicly referring to Woodfox as a "serial rapist," a completely unsubstantiated claim. Once bail was ordered and it was expected that Woodfox would be released, Caldwell's office clandestinely contacted members of the gated community where Woodfox was supposed to live, telling them that a murderer would soon be living among them. Woodfox had been planning to live with his niece. She and her family have now been subject to harassment, and the option of Woodfox living with her has been made virtually impossible.

We've seen unequal and unfair justice before in Louisiana. We can just look back at the case of the Jena 6 a year and a half ago. In that case, six black boys were charged with attempted murder at the hands of a District Attorney who threatened that he could "take away [the students'] lives with a stroke of [his] pen." The threat followed black students protesting the hanging of a noose above a "white tree" at their school, with the charges coming after a racially-charged fight characterized by some as a school-yard fight, where the victim was white.

In the case of the Jena 6, there was an outcry from across the country, culminating in a march of more than 20,000 in the town of Jena. While leaders across the country decried the injustice in Jena, surprisingly, Jindal called those protesting "outside agitators" -- a phrase that echoed racist Southerners' response to Civil Rights-era organizing efforts.

While Governor Jindal claims to be a reformer and has his eyes on the White House, his silence in the Angola 3 case and his language around the case of the Jena 6 tell a different story. His idea of "reform" seems more like an empty slogan and catchy rhetoric than something he's willing to put into practice. Perhaps it's time to confront Jindal and ask him what his idea of reform looks like.

Posted by lois at 09:33 AM | Comments (0)

Blog Reveiw on Hunger, Homeless & Poverty Task for of the American Library Assoc.: Comics for community organizing, outreach and education

Hunger, Homelessness & Poverty Task Force
Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association
http://www.hhptf.org/
Comics for community organizing, outreach and education
Monday December 15, 2008

Graphic novels are a suitable medium for illustrating cold, hard facts. They can literally put a face on morbid, impersonal economic reality. Lois Ahrens understands this and perfects the medium well in the graphic novel, The Real Cost of Prisons Comix. This collective work, part of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, which initially began with the work of economists, reveals the human cost of the prison industry, where 2.3 million people a day are locked up in our nation’s prisons. The work is in three parts, “Prison Town,” “Prisoners of the War on Drugs,” and “Prisoners of a Hard Life.” “Prison Town” details the economic incentives behind mandatory sentencing guidelines and describes how the prison industry thrives in rural America, driving out local businesses and eroding community. “Prisoners of the War on Drugs” relates how racism, sexism, and classism fuels the prison industry. “Prisoners of a Hard Life” provides personal stories of women prisoners and their children. The illustrations, all in stark black and white, are paired beautifully with the text. Each section ends with reader responses, from community organizers to academics to prisoners and there is a glossary of terms used in the book. The series is designed as an educational tool for anyone who is interested or affected, which given current statistics, is one in every 32 Americans.

Here is a wonderful blog post by Jordan Beltran on Changing Lives, Changing Minds Through Literature.Read on: http://cltlblog.wordpress.com/
If you go to the site, you will see how great this looks on line.

Lessons in the Real Cost of Prisons
December 17, 2008 by CLTL

by Jordan Beltran Gonzales

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix. Edited by Lois Ahrens, with comic art by Kevin Pyle, Sabrina Jones, and Susan Willmarth. Oakland: PM Press, 96pp, paperback, $12.95.

41This anthology combines three engaging and educational comics with dozens of letters and testimonials from readers. These 100 pages yield a thorough breakdown of how America’s economic and social addiction to imprisoning Black, Brown, and poor people for particular behaviors has spiraled into an epidemic of mass incarceration. Through vivid black-and-white images, well-researched background information, and case studies of women and men in context, readers gain vital knowledge and access to progressive networks that will transform this crisis.

The task of critical storytelling and teaching about life-and-death issues is a careful balance, which the writers and artists achieve well. In each comic, readers find alternative solutions to prisons as we currently know them, learn about organizing successes, and gain feedback of how to teach teachers and how to train trainers.

Editor Lois Ahrens is also the founder and director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, which creates popular educational materials by justice policy researchers, artists, and people directly experiencing the impact of mass incarceration. Potential readers span elementary schools through colleges, community-based organizations, medical and mental healthcare providers, legislators and voters, and people directly surviving inside.

In the introduction, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore compel readers to translate knowledge into action. This book helps us understand “how the system of mass incarceration permeates our lives, who is paying the costs of that system and the many ways the system is vulnerable to people who put their thought and effort into organizing to shrink it.”

The first chapter, “Prison Town: Paying the Price,” by Kevin Pyle and Craig Gilmore, explains the economic greed and political collusion inherent in the siting of prisons. Following this chapter are eye-opening testimonials, in which one program director applauds this comic through “the complexity that is rendered through a few deceptively simple strokes of a pen.”

In “Prisoners of the War on Drugs,” Sabrina Jones, Ellen Miller-Mack, and Lois Ahrens highlight the relationships across drug policies, perceptions of race, class, and criminality, and, after incarceration, limited access to social services and educational opportunities. Five case studies present an individual person’s life context for a momentary decision. This context is necessary for readers to understand the persistence of institutional racism and barriers for people of color and, in particular, women and mothers. Alternatives to New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws and California’s Three Strikes Law include programs in harm reduction, which reduce the harmful effects of drug use on families, and justice reinvestment, which supports jobs, housing, quality schools, and youth programs.

The final chapter, “Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children,” by Susan Willmarth, Ellen Miller-Mack, and Lois Ahrens, exposes the subjective and violent enforcement of drug laws against women, specifically low-income women of color. Five individual women’s stories show how poverty, access to life chances, police targeting, and court sentencing have usurped hundreds of thousands of women’s reproductive rights. This comic’s closing pages feature excellent alternatives to jail through the theme “Change Is Possible.”

As an instructor of Ethnic Studies College Writing, I attest to the effectiveness of these comics. To teach my high school students about the prison industrial complex and the built-in tracking in our high school to college pipeline, I have challenged students to teach each other key themes and terms from the comics. Their group presentations were phenomenal, and far more impressive than my typical college students’ work! They took ownership of teaching the process of recidivism and the injustice of mandatory minimum sentences, and they identified their agency and social responsibility to affect this same system that is targeting our low-income communities of color.

My students have often told me that they have felt validated and affirmed to finally identify a concept, a theory, and a learning style that is relevant to their life experiences. These comics urge us to remember that we are not alone, either in our struggle or in our imagination for something better. Teaching with the Real Cost of Prisons Comix has been one of the most meaningful experiences I have had as an educator. I absolutely recommend this book as an assigned text in courses that bridge issues of media, American Studies, social justice, critical thinking, educational inequities, and the cross-cutting themes of gender, race, and class. Our potential for learning is limitless, and there is no time more urgent than now.
***********************


Jordan Beltran Gonzales is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He teaches courses in critical thinking, U.S. counter-history, research methods, and academic survival with high school and college students. He believes in justice through education, home-cooked food, and live music. Your words are welcomed at jgonzo@berkeley.edu
*************************

And Paul Buhle's review in the Monthly Review
URL: mrzine.monthlyreview.org/buhle021208.html

Posted by lois at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2008

NY: Gov. Paterson marks for prisons for closing

Published December 16, 2008 04:39 pm - After winning efforts to keep the minimum-security prison open, workers and lawmakers look at a different fight this time.
Paterson proposes closing Camp Gabriels

By KIM SMITH DEDAM
Staff Writer

LAKE PLACID — Four prisons, including Camp Gabriels, are marked for closure in Gov. David Paterson’s budget.

And a new law included with it would shorten the prison-closure notice from one year to 90 days.

The specter of lost or displaced jobs and evaporation of a huge source of local revenue has returned, a year after a Department of Correctional Services study recommended shuttering the minimum-security prison and three others.

The earlier plan was halted by union workers’ outcry and North Country lawmakers, who lobbied hard to keep the state jobs in place.

DOCS employees and lawmakers alike were surprised to see Gabriels named among Paterson’s budget cuts on Tuesday.

But it was in there, along with Camp Pharsalia, Camp McGregor and Camp Georgetown, a name not on the list last year.

CONCERNED

Joy Gonyea, head nurse at Camp Gabriels, was home Tuesday and alarmed by the news.

The mood was “concerned” among prison coworkers, she said.

“We were told they weren’t going to close prisons but consolidate them.”

Already several crews have been moved from Camp Gabriels, she said, dorms closed and programs condensed.

“We were told (by officials) we have nothing to worry about until 2010, so I think a lot of people are in shock over this.”

The overall impact in the rural Town of Brighton and neighboring communities would be stunning.

Fiscal studies done by the Saranac Lake Area Chamber of Commerce last year put the local Camp Gabriels payroll loss alone at $7.1 million, with an economic impact close to $35 million affecting about 150 jobs and hundreds of people displaced.

“And we’re already closing a school up here (Lake Clear Elementary). These are scary times, period,” Gonyea said.

“I’m much more concerned this time. I’m certainly going to get my resume ready, where I didn’t last time.”

Employees at prisons that close would be able to transfer from one facility to another, cutting jobs by attrition.

PROGRAM FUNDS

Sen. Betty Little (R-Queensbury) said she thought a visit to Camp Gabriels with DOCS Commissioner Eric Fischer last summer had delivered a solid impact.

“We are trying to expand programs with treatment facilities at St. Joseph’s Rehabilitation and courses at Paul Smith’s College. But that costs money. We are still going to try to find money for those programs.”

Closing prisons downstate would make more sense, she said, given that they are more expensive to operate, in facilities with higher property values and offer more opportunity for reuse.

“It would seem as if that is how you would go about right-sizing your corrections department.”

Assemblywoman Teresa Sayward (R-Willsboro) said she and Assemblywoman Janet Duprey (R-Peru) met with the governor and Budget Director Laura Anglin face to face Tuesday.

“They told us we have to come up with a way to close that fiscal gap,” she said of budget talks already begun. “He told us this is the worst crisis since the Depression.”

But prisons won’t go without a fight.

“I would argue this is a big economic-development issue for the North Country, and we will bring that to bear. The governor and Laura Anglin said, ‘Bring us your ideas’. Gabriels is on that list,” Sayward said.

Gonyea said the cut would be too deep here.

“He’s affecting the little people. I would ask if we could take a little from the top for a change, instead of from the bottom.”

print this story Print this story
email this story E-mail this story
Post to del.icio.us

Rick Gonyea, Joy’s husband and a retired correction officer, helped mount a campaign last year, sending thousands of letters to Fischer pushing to keep Gabriels open.

“I’m figuring also we should start writing letters again,” Mr. Gonyea said.

UNION CONDEMNS PLAN

Union officials summarily denounced any plan to close prisons.

In a statement, New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association President Donn Rowe condemned the plan as a “shortsighted scheme.”

“DOCS has made a habit of haphazardly picking facilities for closure. In order for the right decisions to be made in these difficult financial times, DOCS should work with NYSCOPBA, potentially impacted local communities and the State Legislature to make sure we make smart decisions that impact the entire prison system, as well as public safety,” Rowe said.

He said the union is committed to its members and the communities they live in.

“We should all be concerned when a plan that impacts thousands of lives and the public safety of all New Yorkers is drawn in secret back rooms and announced via press release.”
http://www.pressrepublican.com/breakingnews/local_story_351163959.html

Posted by lois at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)

HOME DEPOT ACCUSED OF VIOLATING CIVIL RIGHTS OF JOB APPLICANTS WITH CRIMINAL RECORDS---Legal Action Center and National Employment Law Center seeking poeple with complaints

HOME DEPOT ACCUSED OF VIOLATING CIVIL RIGHTS OF JOB APPLICANTS WITH CRIMINAL RECORDS
Please see the notice below regarding a Title VII national class charge recently filed against Home Depot based on its failure to hire applicants due to their prior conviction history:
HOME DEPOT ACCUSED OF VIOLATING CIVIL RIGHTS OF JOB APPLICANTS WITH CRIMINAL RECORDS
Two African-American men have filed charges of discrimination against Home Depot alleging that the company's rejection of their job applications based on their past criminal records violates federal civil rights laws forbidding race discrimination because the practice has an adverse impact on African Americans and Hispanics. The charges were filed with the New York office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The charging parties are being represented by the Legal Action Center (www.lac.org), Outten & Golden LLP (www.outtengolden.com), the National Employment Law Project (www.nelp.org) and Goldstein, Demchak, Baller, Borgen & Dardarian (www.gdblegal.com).

As part of their investigation of these claims, the charging parties counsel are interested in speaking to other African Americans and Hispanics who have been rejected for employment by Home Depot because of a past criminal record. People in New York State should contact the Legal Action Center, 212-243-1313 (outside of NY City, call 800-223-4044), and ask to speak to a paralegal about the Home Depot case. People in California should contact the National Employment Law Project, 510-409-2427. People outside of New York or California should contact Justin Swartz at Outten & Golden, 212-245-1000.

Posted by lois at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2008

JEHT Foundation closes down due to investments with Bernad Madoff

Statement of Robert Crane, President of the JEHT Foundation, on behalf of the Foundation’s Board of Directors
Posted under General News on Monday, December 15, 2008

The JEHT Foundation, a national philanthropic organization, has stopped all grant making effective immediately and will close its doors at the end of January 2009. The funds of the donors to the Foundation, Jeanne Levy-Church and Kenneth Levy-Church, were managed by Bernard L. Madoff, a prominent financial advisor who was arrested last week for defrauding investors out of billions of dollars.

The Foundation was established in 2000. Its name stands for the values it holds dear: Justice, Equality, Human dignity and Tolerance. It supported programs that promoted reform of the criminal and juvenile justice systems; ensured that the United States adhered to the international rule of law; and work to improve the voting process by enhancing fair representation, competitive elections and government transparency.

The JEHT Foundation Board deeply regrets that the important work that the Foundation has undertaken over the years is ending so abruptly. The issues the Foundation addressed received very limited philanthropic support and the loss of the foundation’s funding and leadership will cause significant pain and disruption of the work for many dedicated people and organizations. The Foundation’s programs have met with significant success in recent years – promoting change in these critical areas in partnership with government and the non-profit sector. Hopefully others will look closely at this work and consider supporting it going forward.

Contact:
Robert Crane, President and CEO
JEHT Foundation

Posted by lois at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2008

MA DOC 2007 annual report

http://www.mass.gov/Eeops/docs/doc/annual_report_2007.pdf

Posted by lois at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)

LA: Artist Jackie Sumell designs a house based on the wishes of Angola prisoner Herman Wallace

Artist Jackie Sumell designs a house based on the wishes of Angola inmate Herman Wallace
Posted by Doug MacCash, Art critic, The Times-Picayune December 13, 2008 5:00AM

PRISONER DREAMS UP A HOME
THE HOME: The House that Herman Built

THE OWNERS: Jackie Sumell and Herman Wallace

THE SPACE: A Prospect.1 New Orleans exhibition featuring renderings of an imaginary house described by an Angola inmate and designed by a conceptual artist

ON VIEW: At the Contemporary Arts Center, 900 Camp St., Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., through Jan. 18.

WHY THEY LOVE IT: 'It gets people who would never talk about these issues to talk about them, ' Sumell says.

Brooklyn-born Jackie Sumell has lived in New Orleans on and off since Hurricane Katrina. Now, the 35-year-old conceptual artist plans to build a one-of-a-kind dream house here -- as soon as she raises the $400,000 she needs to do it. The house will have some ordinary south Louisiana features: a steeply sloped roof to shed rain, extensive gardens, a wrap-around porch and a huge kitchen for entertaining.

But it will have some rarely heard-of features as well. The picture windows will be bullet-proof. The raised bedroom will offer views of the yard in all directions, like a prison guard tower. A secret escape hatch will allow the resident to flee from the bedroom, down the chimney like Santa Claus in reverse. It will lead to a tunnel that ends in a survivalist bunker beneath the pool. The house will be made almost entirely of wood, in part so it can be burned to the ground if it comes under attack.

Sumell's dream house seems to blend a craving for spaciousness and comfort with an unnatural fear of persecution. That's no wonder, since it isn't based on her own wishes, but the imaginings of Herman Wallace, 67, a prisoner serving a life sentence at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where he's spent 36 years in "closed-cell restriction, " also known as solitary confinement.
Kathy Anderson / The Times-PicayuneSumell's wooden replica of Wallace's cell

Wallace dreams of a private bathroom equipped with a hot tub as large as his 6-by-9-foot cell; a greenhouse and gardens so he's never far from growing things; and a bank of six microwave ovens to accommodate streams of party guests.

Wallace described his dream house in a series of letters to Sumell, who's done her best to weave his wishes into a buildable design. An exhibit of the letters, blueprints, a model of the home, a computerized virtual tour and a hand-built, full-sized wooden version of Wallace's cell comprise one of the most penetrating of the Prospect.1 New Orleans exhibits on display at the Contemporary Arts Center.

Sumell describes "The House that Herman Built" exhibit as a sort of "Trojan Horse, " designed to expose a prison system that she considers akin to slavery.

RADICAL DESIGNS: With bouncy brown hair, Lucille Ball-era eye glasses, a broad smile and -- on the day we spoke -- green hoop earrings and polka-dot pink blouse, Sumell doesn't seem the angry activist type.

But when asked if she sees herself as a radical, she said, "Absolutely, yeah, without a doubt."

Her collaboration with Wallace, originally convicted of armed robbery in 1972, began with a lecture she attended in San Francisco in 2001. The speaker was Robert King Wilkerson, a former inmate who'd just been released after serving 31 years at Angola.

Wilkerson and two other New Orleans men, Albert Woodfox and Wallace, are widely known as "the Angola 3." Early in their incarceration, they helped organized a chapter of the Black Panthers at the prison in an effort, they said, to end violence and improve living conditions.

When a guard was stabbed to death in 1972, Wallace and Woodfox were convicted of the murder, and all three men were placed in solitary confinement, where they stayed for more than three decades. Supporters contend that this constitutes "inhumane and unconstitutional" treatment.

Sumell was swept up in their story. After Wilkerson's lecture, she asked what she could do to help the two men still behind bars. Wilkerson, Sumell said, advised her to write to them.

CONCEPTUAL APPROACH: Unsure of how to break the ice, Sumell took the conceptual art route. She taped a disposable camera to her wrist, set her alarm watch to ring on the hour, then snapped pictures of her surroundings as the day evolved. She sent copies of the photos to each man, with a letter that said, "Here's 24 hours of my simple life. I can't imagine what yours is like."

A correspondence started between the artist and Wallace.

About a year later, Sumell received a class assignment to ask someone of importance to describe his or her home. With the professor's permission, she tweaked the requirements. To help Wallace mentally reach beyond his prison cell, she asked him what has become the signature question of her art career: "What kind of house does a man who has lived in a 6-foot-by-9-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?"

For the next six years, Wallace outlined his ideas in letters, phone conversations and during Sumell's occasional visits. Sumell says she has come to consider Wallace her best friend. For his part, in one letter Wallace writes that Sumell is "a daughter I never had."

"My life is completely committed to freeing Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, " Sumell said, "and to unmasking a history of absolute oppression and injustice, particularly in Louisiana, but in the United States in general. It's a huge dragon to slay, but it's my work and right now I'm doing it by building this man's house."

COLLABORATIONS: The house is, among other things, a symbol of their bond. Yet, like any pair of collaborators, Sumell and Wallace have apparently had their differences.

In one letter, Wallace sounds much like the aggrieved client of an architect when he writes: "You recall you spoke of lots of windows, right? Then why are your drawings so closed in? A house within a house within a house is not really a house at all, it becomes a shelter."

At the CAC exhibit, a computer-animated tour of Wallace's dream house draws upon his written descriptions of it, read aloud by Wilkerson. Every detail is articulated in a spare architectural style, from the roses, gloxinias and delphiniums in the garden to the antique typewriters he plans to repair in his hobby shop, from the photos of abolitionists such as John Brown and Harriet Tubman displayed on the living room walls to the soft blue tone of the bedroom lighting.

Wallace's very first design request was a swimming pool with a Black Panther symbol painted on the bottom.

Sumell has displayed the plans and models for Herman's House, as well as a life-size wooden model of his Angola cell, 13 times. She hopes it spreads awareness of Wallace, Woodfox and other Louisiana prisoners' plights. When she presented the "The House the Herman Built" in Ireland in 2006, so many people wrote Wallace that he asked Sumell to get them to stop and find another way to show support.

Woodfox's conviction was overturned by a federal judge in September, though he has yet to leave Angola. Sumell visited Wallace last week. She said he is being held in a maximum-security section of the prison known as The Dungeon.

For pictures go to:
http://blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/2008//artist_jackie_sumell_designs_a.html

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

December 13, 2008

Report Blames Rumsfeld for Prisoner Abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo

December 12, 2008, NY Times
Report Blames Rumsfeld for Detainee Abuses
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — A report released Thursday by leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee said top Bush administration officials, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, bore major responsibility for the abuses committed by American troops in interrogations at Abu Ghraib in Iraq; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and other military detention centers.

The report was issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican. It represents the most thorough review by Congress to date of the origins of the abuse of prisoners in American military custody, and it explicitly rejects the Bush administration’s contention that tough interrogation methods have helped keep the country and its troops safe.

The report also rejected previous claims by Mr. Rumsfeld and others that Defense Department policies played no role in the harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and in other episodes of abuse.

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the report says, “was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own” but grew out of interrogation policies approved by Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials, who “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”

By the time of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Mr. Rumsfeld had formally withdrawn approval for use of the harshest techniques, which he authorized in December 2002 and then ruled out a month later. But the report said that those methods, including the use of stress positions and forced nudity, continued to spread through the military detention system, and that their use “damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.”

Most of the report, the product of an 18-month inquiry and interviews with more than 70 people by committee staff members, remains classified. But the 29-page summary offers the clearest timeline to date linking the acts of Mr. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials to abusive treatment in the field.

A spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, Keith Urbahn, said a dozen earlier investigations had found no such connection, and he dismissed the report as “unfounded allegations against those who have served our nation.”

“Because of irresponsible charges by a few individuals in positions of responsibility in Congress, millions of people around the world have been led to believe that the United States condones torture,” Mr. Urbahn said.

Committee staff members said the report was approved by a voice vote without dissent, but only 17 of the committee’s 25 members were present for the vote. Mr. McCain, who was tortured while he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, has been an outspoken opponent of harsh interrogation tactics, but some other Republicans have defended such methods as legal and necessary.

Many of the particulars in the summary were made public at hearings the committee held in June and September, including the fact that members of President Bush’s cabinet discussed specific interrogation methods in White House meetings.

The report documents how the military training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, became a crucial source for interrogations as the Bush administration looked for tougher methods after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The SERE training was devised decades ago to give American military personnel a taste of the treatment they might face if taken prisoner by China, the Soviet Union or other cold war adversaries. “The techniques were never intended to be used against detainees in U.S. custody,” Mr. Levin said in a statement.

In his statement on Thursday, Mr. McCain called the adoption of SERE methods “inexcusable.”

The report found that senior Defense Department officials inquired about SERE techniques for prisoner interrogations as early as December 2001, when the war in Afghanistan was weeks old and American troops were just beginning to capture people suspected of being members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

In September, the committee released a December 2001 letter from the head of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which runs the SERE program, to a deputy of William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s general counsel, saying the agency’s officials “stand ready to assist” Pentagon efforts at prisoner “exploitation.”

The committee’s report says little about the Central Intelligence Agency, except to note that that agency also drew on the SERE program for harsh methods it used in secret overseas jails for Qaeda suspects. The C.I.A. has said it used waterboarding, a method of near-drowning previously used in the Navy’s SERE program, on three captured terrorism suspects in 2002 and 2003.

Unlike the military, the C.I.A. is still permitted to use some coercive methods, though the precise rules are classified. The agency has said that it no longer uses waterboarding.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/washington/12detainee.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Donald%20Rumsfeld&st=cse
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2008/Detainees.121108.pdf

Posted by lois at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Prisoners set fire and take two hostages at GEO Reeves Co Detention Center

Saturday, Dec 13, 2008
Rioting inmates hold 2 hostages at privately run prison in West Texas
The Associated Press
PECOS — Inmates at a privately run prison took two hostages Friday after starting a riot and setting at least one fire, authorities said.

Unrest broke out in the afternoon at the sprawling Reeves County Detention Center, which holds more than 2,400 inmates. By late Friday, it was still not clear what prompted the riot, whether anyone inside the prison had been injured, or how many inmates were involved.

The hostages are recreation specialists, and a hostage negotiator was talking to the inmates, Reeves County sheriff’s spokesman Michael Estorga told the Odessa American.

Fire crews and additional law officers were initially called to the complex after a fire broke out in one building.

A woman who answered the phone in the warden’s office Friday evening said she had no comment and hung up.

The GEO Group, based in Boca Raton, Fla., has run the prison since 2003 through contracts with Reeves County and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
http://www.star-telegram.com/state_news/v-print/story/1091621.html

Posted by lois at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2008

BJS: ONE IN EVERY 31 U.S. ADULTS WAS IN A PRISON OR JAIL OR ON PROBATION OR PAROLE AT THE END OF LAST YEAR

Bureau of Justice Statistics
DECEMBER 5, 2007

ONE IN EVERY 31 U.S. ADULTS WAS IN A PRISON OR JAIL OR ON PROBATION OR PAROLE AT THE END OF LAST YEAR

WASHINGTON – The U.S. adult correctional population — incarcerated or in the community — reached 7.2 million men and women, an increase of 159,500 during the year, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today in a new report. About 3.2 percent of the U.S. adult population, or 1 in every 31 adults, was in the nation’s prisons or jails or on probation or parole at the end of 2006.

The number of men and women who were being supervised on probation or parole in the United States at year-end 2006 reached 5 million for the first time, an increase of 87,852 (or 1.8 percent) during the year. A separate study found that on December 31, 2006, there were 1,570,861 inmates under state and federal jurisdiction, an increase of 42,932 (or 2.8 percent) in 2006.

During 2006 the number of inmates under state jurisdiction rose by 37,504 (2.8 percent). The number of prisoners under federal jurisdiction rose by 5,428 (2.9 percent).

In 2006 the number of prisoners in the 10 states with the largest prison populations increased by 3.2 percent, which was more than three times the average annual growth rate (0.9 percent) in these states from 2000 through 2005. These states accounted for 65 percent of the overall increase in the U.S. prison population during 2006. The federal system remained the largest prison system with 193,046 inmates under its jurisdiction.

At year-end 2006, state prisons were operating between 98 percent and 114 percent of capacity,
compared to between 100 percent and 115 percent in 2000. This trend indicates that prison populations are increasing at the same rate as expansion rates.

Last year 7.2 percent (113,791) of state and federal inmates were held in private prison facilities; another 5.0 percent (77,987) were held in local jails. About a quarter of all inmates in privately-operated facilities were being held for the federal system.

On December 31, 2006, there were 798,202 adult men and women on parole. Parolees are criminal offenders supervised conditionally in the community following a prison term. The parole population grew by 17,586 –– an increase of 2.3 percent. This was greater than the average annual increase of 1.5 percent since 1995.

Of those adults on parole on January 1, 2006, (665,300) and those released from prison to parole supervision during the year (485,900) from the 46 jurisdictions that provided information, about 16 percent were re-incarcerated. This percentage has remained relatively stable since 1998.

Of those parolees still under supervision at year end 2006, nearly 2 in 5 had been convicted of a drug offense, while about 1 in 4 had been convicted of a violent or property offense.

Fourteen States reported double-digit increases in their parole population in 2006, led by North Dakota (up 23 percent). Double-digit decreases were reported in three States, led by Oklahoma (down 29 percent).

More than 8 in 10 offenders (4,237,073) under community supervision on December 31, 2006, were on probation. Probationers are criminal offenders who have been sentenced to a period of conditional supervision in the community, generally in lieu of incarceration. During 2006, the probation population increased by 70,266 probationers (1.7 percent).

About half of all probationers had been convicted of a felony (49 percent), about half were convicted of a misdemeanor (49 percent), and 2 percent were convicted of other infractions. More than 7 in 10 were on probation for a non-violent offense, including more than a quarter for a drug law violation and a sixth for driving while intoxicated.

Five states accounted for more than half (57 percent) of the growth in the probation population
during 2006: California (up 13,447), Minnesota (up 8,411), Alabama (up 7,159), Colorado (up 6,594), and Pennsylvania (up 4,664).

Of the 2.2 million probationers who exited supervision during 2006, almost 6 in 10 completed their full-term sentence or were released from supervision early; nearly 1 in 5 were incarcerated.

The two reports, Prisoners in 2006 (NCJ-219416), and Probation and Parole in the United
States, 2006 (NCJ-220218), were written by BJS statisticians Heather Couture, Paige M. Harrison and William J. Sabol and Thomas P. Bonczar and Lauren E. Glaze respectively.
Following publication, the reports can be found at www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/p06.htm and www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/ppus06.htm

Posted by lois at 09:43 PM | Comments (0)

ACLU Massachusetts: Detention and Deportation in the Age of ICE: Immigrants and Human Rights in Massachusetts

Detention and Deportation in the Age of ICE:
Immigrants and Human Rights in Massachusetts
ACLU Massachusetts http://www.aclum.org/ice/
Introduction

EVERY DAY IN MASSACHUSETTS, approximately 800 immigrants and asylum-seekers are in detention in county jails around the state waiting to be deported or fighting a legal battle to stay in the country. None of those persons are serving sentences for having committed a crime. They have not been judged by a jury of their peers. Instead, they are “civil detainees” held because they have overstayed a visa, are awaiting a decision on asylum, or are otherwise subject to deportation. Yet they spend months, and sometimes years, in cells side-by-side with sentenced criminals, not knowing when they will be allowed to leave.

When it was created in 2003, the federal immigration agency known as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) quickly created a new strategic plan -- aptly named Operation Endgame -- which calls for the removal of all deportable persons by the year 2012. This plan involves aggressive enforcement coupled with a heavy reliance on detention, and has resulted in record numbers of deportations -- 349,041 persons in Fiscal Year 2008 alone. To keep up with the increased numbers of arrests, ICE created a network of approximately 400 jails and detention facilities around the country where it now holds over 30,000 persons on any given day.

Despite having a vibrant and diverse working immigrant population, Massachusetts has become subject to these national trends. In New England, ICE deported 3,836 people last year. Families and communities in Massachusetts are feeling the effects of roundups of immigrants, from the devastating raid in New Bedford in 2007 where 361 persons were arrested at once, to the smaller, but unrelenting arrests of immigrants in Boston, Lowell, Springfield and other immigrant-heavy communities. Fear is rampant. Small businesses catering to immigrant populations are shutting their doors; immigrant parents are taking their children out of schools; families are staying inside their homes; and the state is now facing a gap in its census because immigrant families are too scared to answer questions about their households.

In Massachusetts, the federal government has contracted with seven county jails and one state facility to house immigrants detained in the region. These facilities, which already are overcrowded at up to two and a half times their capacity, receive funding from the federal government at a rate of between $80 and $90 a day plus guard hours, but little or no guidance or oversight about how to handle civil immigration detainees.

ICE’s heavy-handed approach to federal immigration enforcement, together with its hands-off approach to supervising local facilities leads to dangerous consequences for the thousands of persons inside immigration detention.

Beginning in 2007, the ACLU of Massachusetts took on a state-wide project to document human rights issues for immigrants in detention. We spoke with 40 detained persons and dozens of advocates and lawyers and secured the release of hundreds of pages of government documents. What we found raises serious concerns about human rights and due process violations for immigrants detained in Massachusetts

I. Due Process Concerns

ICE’s new enforcement strategy involves an aggressive use of unchecked federal powers to move persons between jails and detention centers around the country and detain them for long periods of time.

A. ICE Abuses its Unchecked Power to Move Persons Around the Country

Because immigration detainees are federal detainees, ICE has almost unlimited power to detain them in any facility in the country and to move them from one facility to another without justification or advance notice. ICE takes full advantage of this power, transferring detainees on a daily basis all over the country. In 2007, ICE spent more than $10 million to transfer nearly 19,400 detained persons. In New England, ICE arrests twice as many people as the region can hold; this means that half of those arrested are taken quickly to detention centers in places as far as Texas and Louisiana.

In Massachusetts, ICE appears to use its power to transfer persons in order to silence complaints about detention conditions or inhumane treatment. This report documents five instances in which persons were transferred to a different jail shortly after complaining about an incident. Detained immigrants expressed reluctance to speak out about problems because of a fear of being moved far away from their families, communities and lawyers. This fear came from the experience of seeing others moved after they had spoken out.

In addition, despite its multi-million dollar budget for daily transfers, ICE has no real-time tracking system to monitor the location of its detainees. In the New England region, relatives or lawyers of detained persons who have been moved call the ICE New England headquarters for information on the location of their loved one or client and can wait for days for an answer because ICE computers do not have an up-to-date location.

B. Abuses Take Place During the Deportation Process

The persons who spoke with us about their experience reported that ICE agents used threats, coercion and physical force during the deportation process. Some reported that they were threatened with forced sedation if they did not cooperate; others reported that they were forcefully removed from their cells and put onto vans and planes. Some also reported being forced to sign or put thumb prints on papers that they could not read or understand.

Some detained immigrants reported that they were not told in advance of the date that they would be deported. This meant that they could not prepare luggage and personal items to take with them and could not prepare for family members or friends in the receiving country to meet them at the airport, instead traveling only with the items they had with them at the jail. This is a particularly difficult situation because ICE may drop off immigrants in a city that is nowhere near the city of the immigrant’s final destination.

C. ICE Detains Immigrants for Excessive Periods of Time

Immigrants detained in Massachusetts spend many months and sometimes years in jail while they wait for their cases to be decided. At the time of our interviews, the 40 persons with whom we spoke had spent between one month and five years -- on average over 11 months -- in detention. Of those, 3 had spent over two years in detention; 10 had spent over one year; and 6 had been detained for approximately 6 months.

Long periods of detention occur for two principal reasons. First, even though the law allows the government a presumptive period of no longer than 6 months to keep a person in detention after final adjudication of the immigration case, ICE does not have an adequate mechanism to track the length of individuals’ detention. Detained persons themselves must remind ICE officials, and sometimes resort to filing habeas corpus petitions in federal court when their 6 months have elapsed.

Second, although regulations call for periodic reviews of custody, these reviews are lacking in due process: the burden is on the detained individual to prove that he or she has a reason to be released; the decision-maker is the agency itself; and the detained person often does not receive an opportunity to present evidence because he or she is not given advance notice that a custody review will take place.

Lengthy detentions, together with harsh conditions inside local jails, deter persons from continuing to fight their cases in court, even though they may have legal relief from deportation. Immigrants face the impossible choice of going through the legal process and spending many months in jail, or giving up and allowing the government to deport them without a final adjudication.

II. Inadequate Conditions of Confinement

ICE combines a heavy-handed approach to enforcement with a hands-off approach to the daily responsibilities of detention. It outsources detention to local facilities but provides little or no supervision of conditions and does not have an adequate system for learning about problems.

A. Massachusetts County Jails are Overcrowded

The 800 detained immigrants in Massachusetts contribute to the crisis of overcrowding facing every county jail in the state. In some facilities, detained immigrants sleep side by side with inmates in cells meant to hold one person that currently hold two or three. In other facilities, they sleep in crowded makeshift dormitories or on mattresses in “boats” on the floor. This leads to crowded conditions in the cells, dormitories, cafeterias and recreation areas. It also strains the facilities’ medical resources, resulting in long wait times to see a doctor -- one of the most commonly heard complaints.

B. Detained Persons Face Harsh Treatment by Corrections Officers

Detained immigrants reported that some corrections officers are rude, and single them out from the US citizens in their custody for harsh treatment. This involved daily yelling, denying access to bathrooms and services, using profanity and racially and ethnically charged language against persons in custody, and sometimes being physically abusive. This, coupled with the ICE’s unchecked power to transfer persons, means that guard abuse can be covered up. This report documents one case in which a detained immigrant was moved to Vermont after a guard picked him up by the neck and slammed him against a wall. ICE agents told him that he had been sent to Vermont “to cool things off.”

C. Detained Persons Report a Variety of Dangerous and Difficult Daily Conditions

The persons with whom we spoke reported a litany of difficulties inside jails that made daily life harsh and punitive. These included being held in the same unit or the same cell with violent criminals; having to submit to strip searches and cell searches; unhealthy food and dirty water; a lack of access to bathrooms; difficulties in receiving visits from lawyers and family members; a phone system that makes it excessively expensive to call loved ones; no access to a legal library; no access to an outside recreation area; no access to educational services and no access to newspapers or reading materials. These harsh realities of jail life, together with the fact that detained immigrants do not have a set date of release and do not know how long they will be in jail lead to an environment in which depression, stress and anxiety are very high.

III. Inadequate Medical Care

Because the Department of Homeland Security’s sub-agency, the Division of Immigrant Health Services (DIHS), controls any non-routine care given to detained immigrants, the agency’s power over sick detainees is tremendous. This report documents two cases in which DIHS delayed or denied care based on the belief that the ill persons would soon be deported or released, and a third case in which DIHS refused to fix a broken finger because the fracture had occurred days prior to the person’s arrest, forcing him to stay in detention for months with a finger that became increasingly deformed and painful.

As a law enforcement agency, the Department of Homeland Security has a clear conflict of interest when it acts as a healthcare provider. In determining whether to deny or approve care, DIHS’s standard is not to provide necessary medical attention, but to keep the immigrant healthy enough to be deported.

Government documents obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts show that DIHS considers its relationship to the detained person one of doctor-patient. However, as we found, DIHS staff never have any contact with the patient. If DIHS denies the care that local facility doctors have requested, there is no appeal process. In fact, there is no standardized process even for notification of the decision to the detained person.

In addition, despite ICE’s discretion to release immigrants with electronic monitoring or on personal recognizance, there is no standardized process by which a detained person can ask for release based on a medical condition.

ICE also fails to ensure continuity of care when it moves persons from one facility to another. Despite existing forms and regulations mandating that a detained person’s medical record and a supply of prescription medication travel with him, the report documents cases in which this repeatedly did not happen. As a result, detained persons can go for days without their necessary medication when they are transferred.

IV. Failure to Supervise Local Facilities

ICE does not train or prepare local facilities to deal with the population of civil immigration detainees and does not ensure that facilities meet ICE’s own standards. Government documents obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts show that ICE’s yearly reviews of detention facilities often are empty gestures and do not address existing problems. The reviews ask about policy, not practice, and do not involve any input from detained persons. They are carried out with ample advance notice and give the facilities an opportunity to fix problems during the inspection period. In addition, there are no consistent standards for judging a facility’s compliance with ICE standards and no consequences for facilities that fail to meet any of the standards.

ICE’s failure to supervise local jails means that the federal agency has no adequate mechanism for learning about problems with conditions. ICE does not maintain a daily presence in the jails, and ICE agents who visit on a weekly or monthly basis deal principally with immigration issues, not conditions issues.

Conclusion

The law allows the federal government to detain immigrants in deportation proceedings for one purpose only: to carry out their deportation. Immigration detention, as a form of civil detention, is not meant to be punitive or retaliatory. Yet ICE uses detention as an important tool in its law enforcement belt, subjecting immigrants to lengthy periods of detention, moving them around the country when they speak out about abuses, denying needed medical care, and allowing inadequate conditions and harsh treatment in local facilities to go unchecked. In doing so, ICE makes it excessively difficult for immigrants to seek legal avenues to stay in the country, and many choose deportation even when legal avenues to stay in the country are available.

Such an unchecked system of vast federal powers opens the door to abuse and violations of basic human rights. In its zeal to deport all deportable persons, ICE has trampled on fundamental rights guaranteed to all -- citizens and non-citizens alike.

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

Camp Hill PA: Torture in Solitary Confinement Uit

STATE CORRECTIONS
Do special units go too far?
They're designed for toughest inmates, but opponents say they're misused
Friday, December 12, 2008
BY PETE SHELLEM
Of The Patriot-News

They're the worst of the worst in the state prison system.

Fifty-five men out of 48,900 inmates whose behavior led them to the hole beyond the hole have been placed in one of the two Special Management Units in the Department of Corrections.

The department says it's an incentive program for inmates who have racked up so much disciplinary time that they could spend more than a decade in the solitary confinement of the Restricted Housing Unit.

It's also a solitary confinement unit, but the program could get them back into the general population in two years if they follow the rules.

But several groups are calling it a torture chamber where inmates are denied food, showers and yard time and are subjected to death threats and beatings.

Bret Grote, an investigator for the Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up, said the department uses the pretext of disciplinary problems to put the inmates in the SMU. In reality, Grote said, they are being placed there in retaliation for filing lawsuits and grievances.

"The Department of Corrections is going to claim these are the problem prisoners who have assaultive histories," Grote said. "There's no way to justify that."

However, a random background check of some of the inmates in the unit shows they are incarcerated for violent crimes, and at least one has been convicted four times of assaulting guards.

The group has asked Gov. Ed Rendell to conduct an investigation into the claims, which are based on complaints from the inmates and their families.

Grote said one inmate was transferred to Camp Hill's SMU after he failed to sign an affidavit that would prevent him from pursuing grievances against guards who posted photographs of lynchings in his cell. Grote claimed another inmate was starved for three weeks for filing an excessive-force grievance against guards.

Grote said the Pittsburgh-based FedUp was organized three years ago as the result of abuses seen at a Virginia prison by an artist promoting a poster program for prisoners. A group called the Anarchist Black Cross Paralegal Services in Texas has also called for an investigation of the SMU at Camp Hill.

Department of Corrections press secretary Susan McNaughton said the department has investigated the complaints the organization has raised in the past and will review those investigations since the allegations have been raised again along with any new claims.

She said past reviews have found the claims were unsubstantiated.

William DisMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, an agency which advocates for prisoners, said he had just become aware of the allegations and declined comment on the specifics of the cases.

But he said he didn't think the SMU was a viable program. He is pleased Pennsylvania uses it infrequently compared to other states.

"I don't think it's a good program because I don't think you teach anybody anything by punishing them into submission," he said.

McNaughton said the unit is designed to give problem inmates the chance to get back into general population and wipe their disciplinary slates clean by progressing through phases that progressively offer more privileges.

Inmates subjected to the program have repeatedly demonstrated violent, disruptive or threatening behavior, McNaughton said. The inmates are screened by staff members, including a psychiatrist or psychologist, to ensure they don't have mental health issues suited to the prison's mental health unit.

The program has been in place at Camp Hill since 1992 and at Fayette since last year. At Camp Hill, 373 of 587 inmates successfully completed it, McNaughton said.

She said complaints about showers and yard time being withheld might be attributable to the inmates not cooperating with the program, possibly posing a threat or refusing on their own.

"We take every allegation of abuse or employee wrongdoing seriously," McNaughton said. "The DOC has an Office of Professional Responsibility that is directed by the secretary to investigate such matters."

PETE SHELLEM: 255-8156 or pshellem@patriot-news.com
http://www.pennlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/122905323590690.xml&coll=1

Posted by lois at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

THREE TIMELY ACTIONS THAT COULD HELP END PRISON-BASED GERRYMANDERING

THREE TIMELY ACTIONS THAT COULD HELP END PRISON-BASED GERRYMANDERING
by Peter Wagner, December 12, 2008

The next Census will be taken 14 months after our next President is
sworn in. Counting the entire population, just once and in the right
place, is an incredibly complex undertaking with profound
implications for American democracy. It must be done right. The
Census is so important, the framers of the Constitution required it
in the opening paragraphs. The data collected in April 2010 will form
the basis of federal, state and local legislative districts for the
next decade.

But a long standing flaw in the Census undermines the basic
democratic principle of one person one vote. The Census Bureau counts
people in prison as residents of the prison's town, not their home
addresses. The Bureau intends to count these 2.5 million people -- a
population larger than our 4 smallest states combined -- in the
wrong place. The result will be a systematic inflation of the
political power of districts with prisons while diminishing the vote
of everyone else.

Since the importance of the Census Bureau's prison miscount was
discovered shortly before the 2000 Census, advocates, lawmakers and
social scientists have been urging the Census Bureau to update its
methodology and change how it counts people in prison.

The Census Bureau could have spent the middle part of this decade
investigating the optimal way to collect and process the home
addresses of incarcerated people. That planning time was instead
spent stonewalling critics and ignoring proposals focused on
incremental improvements.

The Bureau's failure to take concrete steps towards counting people
in prison correctly makes it difficult for the new administration to
insist that people in prison be counted where they actually live, not
where they are temporarily confined. But the Census Bureau doesn't
have an excuse for not implementing the interim proposals that would
greatly reduce the harm caused by the prison miscount in this Census
and make a more complete fix in the future possible.

There are three things that an Obama administration should do to help
end prison-based gerrymandering:

1. INSTRUCT THE CENSUS BUREAU TO USE DIRECT ENUMERATION NOT
ADMINISTRATIVE RECORDS WHEREVER POSSIBLE TO COUNT PEOPLE IN PRISON.

Ultimately, the Census Bureau should be counting people in prison as
residents of their home communities, but the current administration
is taking small steps in the wrong direction. Some states keep home
address information in their official prison records, but in many
cases collecting home address information is best done by using
individual Census forms to collect this information directly from
incarcerated people.

After the 2000 Census, the National Research Council deemed the
quality of the data collected from correctional facilities to be
"poor" and blamed the Bureau's higher than expected reliance on
administrative records. However, rather than expand the use of direct
enumeration on special forms in prisons, the Census Bureau is
planning to eliminate them. Relying solely on administrative records
to count people in prison will further reduce data quality and make
several important advances impossible.

Three recent National Research Council reports have urged direct
counts of people in prison. All three reports believed that direct
enumeration would be more accurate than administrative records, and
all three reports encouraged the use of a special form that asked for
an alternative address. The first two reports made this
recommendation to facilitate de-duplication where data is
accidentally processed twice; and the third did so as part of a
multi-step proposal to modernize how all populations are counted.

Collecting this alternative address information -- if only for
internal testing, tracking and quality purposes -- would be an
important step towards counting people in prison at alternative
addresses in the next Census.

2. USE THE 2010 CENSUS TO DETERMINE THE BEST WAY THAT PEOPLE IN
PRISON SHOULD BE COUNTED IN THE FUTURE.

The Census regularly conducts research during one Census in order to
improve the next. Currently, the Census Bureau is ignoring its own
experts at the National Research Council who recommended that the
Bureau conduct a major research and testing program during the 2010
Census to determine the best way to assign the correct address to
people who are incarcerated on April 1. The Bureau should be testing
how to phrase the question, what kinds of administrative data it
should accept, and how to best digitize the results. Instead, the
Bureau is planning to let this opportunity slide, which could push a
major test to 2020 and ending the prison miscount to 2030.

3. CHANGE HOW THE DATA IS PUBLISHED SO THAT PRISON POPULATIONS NEED
NOT DISTORT DEMOCRACY.

While it may be too late to change where people in prison are
counted, if action is taken quickly, an Obama administration can
change how the data is published and used. Publishing block-level
counts of prison populations at the prison addresses would make it
easier for legislatures to remove the prison populations at
districting time.

Currently, the "PL94-171" data published by the Bureau for
redistricting purposes does not identify which populations are
confined in a correctional facility, often mixing custodial and
civilian populations in a single census block. When states and
counties want to draw fair districts that do not include the prison
population, they have three choices: try and match up Department of
Corrections data; wait for publication of the Census Bureau's
"Summary File 1" data which contains a correctional count; or
just guess.

Jurisdictions covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act have it
even worse, because they can't wait for the publication of the
prison counts in Summary File 1. Further, because they must publish
race and ethnicity data for each district, they find it difficult to
reconcile the partially incompatible racial and ethnic
classifications in the two data sets.

Interest in drawing districts without prison populations is clear.
Dozens of counties around the country already do these adjustments.
They parse the data themselves, but it's labor intensive and
invites error. Nevertheless, as knowledge of the problem grows, more
counties and even states are expressing interest. The Census Bureau
is uniquely suited to provide this information, and doing so would
have only the smallest of burdens on Census Bureau operations.

Publishing an alternative version of the redistricting data that
contained just the prison population at prison addresses would only
require the publication of existing data in a different format
several months earlier than the Bureau would have done otherwise. Of
the 8 million Census blocks in Census 2000, less than 6,000 contained
a correctional facility. Producing the four race/age/ethnicity
redistricting tables for the population in correctional facilities in
these blocks would be a minimal burden with wide-ranging and
long-lasting benefits.

Conclusion

The Census Bureau has been on notice for a decade that its outdated
method of counting people in prison needs to be changed. Prison-based
gerrymandering should already be history, but instead the Bureau is
seeking to repeat and amplify the errors of the past. But if
President-elect Obama acts fast, he can lessen the harm caused by the
prison miscount and ensure that the 2010 Census is the last one to
credit 2.5 million people to the wrong place.
[URL: http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/2008/12/12/threeactions/ ]

Posted by lois at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)

LAC Releases New Drug Law Reform Costs Savings Report (Very good study whether or not you are in NY)

■ LAC Releases New Drug Law Reform Costs Savings Report (Very good study whether or not you are in NY)

The Legal Action Center has just completed a new study, Drug Law Reform 2008 - Dramatic Costs Savings For New York State, which finds that New York would save over a quarter billion dollars a year by reforming the Rockefeller-Era Drug Laws. When drug law reform is fully operational, it is estimated that New York would save $267,660,000 a year. Even in the first year, estimates show that New York would realize tens of millions of dollars in savings. The study calculated the cost savings that would accrue to New York State by diverting addicted individuals charged with second, non-violent, non-sex felony offenses from prison to community-based treatment, as they comprise the vast majority of individuals who are mandated into prison under current law. LAC believes such individuals should be diverted into mandated treatment if the laws are reformed. The study excludes people charged with Class A felonies. The findings take into account savings generated by the elimination of costs associated with incarceration; savings related to reduced foster care, health care and welfare costs; and increased tax contributions. To see the full study,
http://www.lac.org/pdf/RDL08_Cost%20Savings%20Report%2012_08.pdf

Posted by lois at 01:13 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2008

MI: Two prison closings approved by lawmakers (2 articles & editorial)

Prison closings to cost Ionia, Coldwater
Local jobs, state revenue-sharing to be lost

BY CHRIS CHRISTOFF •
Detroit FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF • December 11, 2008

LANSING -- Gov. Jennifer Granholm's plan to close two state prisons topped her lists of budget cuts approved by lawmakers Wednesday, and it framed a coming battle between her and Senate Republicans over how much the state should spend to lock up criminals as money dwindles.

Closing minimum-security prisons in Ionia and Coldwater on April 1 will save $21 million this fiscal year, and double that next year. Also, the state will cancel a $3.6-million training program for 198 new corrections officers.

They were among the $134 million in spending cuts Granholm proposed to avert a deficit in a fiscal year that's not even two months old. The biggest reductions -- $71 million -- occur in social services, but that's largely because stricter requirements have cut welfare rolls.

The news was an economic gut punch to Coldwater and Ionia, where prisons have been a steady enterprise that helps pay the bills.

"When we lose a prison, it's a very big deal," said Ionia Mayor Dan Balice.

Balice said it's hoped that most of the 221 employees from the Deerfield Correctional Facility can be transferred to other prison jobs locally or within commuting distance.

Closing the Deerfield Correctional Facility will still leave Ionia with four prisons.

Balice, who has been mayor for 20 years, said Ionia has welcomed prisons as a steady employer with good wages and benefits. He said losing Deerfield could cost the city more than $200,000 in revenue from income taxes, water payments and state revenue sharing.

Revenue sharing is based on population, and the state counts prison inmates as half a person. Losing nearly 1,200 inmates will cost Coldwater 600 people in its revenue-sharing count.

In Coldwater, where Camp Branch prison will close, Mayor Eugene Wallace said he understands the need for the state to scale back, but said, "the cuts are hard to handle. Your concern is for the people."

Camp Branch employs 113 people and can house up to 710 inmates.

"I always figured prisons are a recession-proof industry. I guess I've been proven wrong," Wallace said.

The prison closings set the stage for a battle in 2009 over prison spending. Granholm has pressed for reducing the number of prisoners through alternative sentencing and, ultimately, changes in the way criminal sentences are structured.

In the past two years, paroles and other changes in release policies have cut the number of inmates in state prisons from around 51,000 to 49,000. It's the first time in seven years that fewer than 50,000 inmates are in prisons.

Pat Caruso, director of the Michigan Department of Corrections, said the roughly 1,760 inmates from the prisons closing in Ionia and Coldwater will be transferred to other prisons with available beds. In all, the state has about 2,500 more prison beds than expected.

"There's not going to be anybody released as a result of closing these prisons," she said. "We have beds available."

But Sen. Alan Cropsey, R-DeWitt, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on prison spending, wasn't buying it.

Cropsey opposes the closures, and said they are part of a dangerous trend of putting potentially dangerous people on the street.

"I really believe we are having a bad impact on the public safety in Michigan," Cropsey said. "How many more people are going to be victimized? ... The governor is going to have to answer to that."

Corrections department spokesman Russ Marlan dismissed Cropsey's comments as fear-mongering.

"I don't think you can scare citizens into spending money they don't need to spend," Marlan said.

State Budget Director Bob Emerson called Granholm's cuts a modest step to balance a budget that he said will surely slide again into red ink in 2009 without a hoped-for federal stimulus plan promised by President-elect Barack Obama.

The plan cuts $134 million and shifts another $11.8 million out of the state general fund to balance it, $10 million of that from unused college grants.

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081211/POLITICS/81211037 0/1409/METRO

Detroit News

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Prison closings begin state budget cuts

Granholm could issue a new round of reductions after officials meet Jan. 9to review state revenue.

Gary Heinlein and Mark Hornbeck / Detroit News Lansing Bureau

LANSING -- State officials and lawmakers who approved closing two prisons and a girls' juvenile reform school as part of $134 million in state budget cuts Wednesday agree it's only the beginning.

Because of the year-old national recession and the nearly bankrupt autoindustry, additional spending cuts are coming as early as next month.

"We recognize the numbers every day get worse," said Robert Emerson, statebudget director. He called Wednesday's reductions -- proposed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm and approved by the House and Senate appropriations committees hours later -- "a moderate step to prepare for whatever comes next."

"There's going to be more that needs to be done," Emerson said. "How much,we can't say today. You'd have to be blind not to see we have a structural problem we'll have to address over the next two years."

Treasurer Robert Kleine added: "It's pretty obvious to everybody the worst is yet to come. We're in a very serious recession that could be as bad as in the early '80s."

The state budget for this year still has a $265 million hole even after Wednesday's reductions, the Senate Fiscal Agency estimates.

Republicans called for deeper cuts to erase the looming deficit, but most on the appropriations committees voted in favor of the executive order reductions. The full Legislature does not vote on them.

Numbers crunchers will huddle Jan. 9 to get a better grip on expected taxreceipts. Granholm could issue another round of cuts then.

The only chance the state has to get some relief is a proposed federal stimulus package early next year that would fund up to $1 trillion nationwide for road projects, Medicaid health care for the poor, food stamps, school buildings and other projects and services. It's not known what Michigan's share of that would be, and Republicans warned not to rely on this one-time windfall to make ends meet.

Wednesday's cuts will shutter on April 1 a 1,200-bed prison in Ionia and a 700-bed prison camp in Coldwater, saving $26 million. The girls' training facility in Adrian also will be closed.

No inmates will be released because the prison population, which once topped 51,000, is now about 49,000. Prisoners will be moved to empty beds elsewhere.

Most of the 333 employees at the prison and camp will be transferred to other corrections facilities that have vacancies, but some workers will lose their jobs, officials said. Sen. Alan Cropsey, R-DeWitt, said the prison closings eventually will threaten public safety.

"The focus of these cuts is on depopulating the prisons and will have an impact on crime victimization in this state," he said. Other cuts include $63 million from the human services department. Officials say the welfare caseload has been reduced because new rules restrict eligibility, and there is less need for day care programs when the high unemployment rate means more parents are at home. The Adrian reform school also is included in this budget.

Also cut: $632,000 from military and veterans' affairs, half of it from the Grand Rapids Veterans' Home.

The cuts were needed because revenues will come up short of May projections by $540 million.

The governor intends to make up the remainder of the shortfall with $440 million left over from the previous budget year -- $300 million more than expected.

Spared from cuts were aid to public schools and colleges and revenue sharing to municipalities.

You can reach Gary Heinlein at (517) 371-3660 or gheinlein@detnews.com.

__
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081210/OPINION01/8121003
15

Detroit News

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Editorial: Today's state budget cuts aren't nearly big enough

The $120 million to $150 million in budget cuts Gov. Jennifer Granholm is expected to present to lawmakers today do not begin to address state government's financial problems.

As her aides note, they aren't even intended to fully handle the projected revenue shortfall in the current budget. If they are a prelude to a more serious and thorough review of state spending, OK. But they look like merely another stopgap move in a long series of efforts to paper over Michigan's structural spending problem.

The budget cuts that were to be outlined today are in response to a
projected $540 million shortage in anticipated state revenues for the
current budget.

A surplus from the last budget year of about $300 million is being used to cover a portion of the shortfall, and the executive order cuts are planned to cover about half of the remaining $240 million shortage.

Administration aides say other cuts may be forthcoming, depending on how much the state receives from an anticipated federal economic stimulus program.

But this is still chewing-gum and bailing-wire budgeting -- the same type that led the state to use accounting gimmicks and one-time revenue boosts to the tune of $7 billion from 2001 through 2006. Ultimately taxes were hiked $1.2 billion to cover the hole.

And now the process of avoidance budgeting is beginning anew.

The Detroit-based auto industry is imploding -- Chrysler and General Motors have said they may not survive the end of the year without a federal bailout.

Even if federal assistance allows the automakers to move forward, their survival plans call for a dramatically smaller work force, fewer product offerings and a huge reduction in the number of their dealers. Michigan's economy will never be the same.

Last month's University of Michigan economic forecast for the state shows nothing but bad news until at least 2011.

And other analysts think both the state Budget Office and the U-M economists are too optimistic. Gary Olson, head of the state Senate's Fiscal Agency, has said the revenue shortfall could amount to $900 million.

Robert Daddow, deputy Oakland County executive, has long been critical of the state's budgeting assumptions. He notes that taxable value, the base for property tax revenues, is down 4.5 percent for Oakland County and could get worse. Oakland amounts to about one-fifth of the state's total property value.

The picture is similar in the rest of Metro Detroit. Daddow contends this will present serious problems for the state School Aid Fund. Daddow is also projecting a shortfall of $1 billion or more in state revenues for the 2010 state budget.

The state administration and lawmakers can't wait to get serious about restructuring government and trimming spending. With declining personal incomes and business costs that are already uncompetitive, another tax hike is out of the question.

The longer serious spending cuts are delayed, the more drastic they will have to be -- making strategic reforms to the way business is done in state government much more difficult.

Today's cuts have to be seen as a mere down payment on the serious work yet to be done.

http://www.freep.com/article/20081211/NEWS06/812110347/1008

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

Northampton MA: Panhandling law is part of effort to sanitize the city

Panhandling law is part of effort to sanitize the city
By Daily Hampshire Gazette- Northampton, MA
Created 12/11/2008
To the editor:

If the city is seeking a solution to what some view as troublesome behavior by a handful of panhandlers - I have heard the number to be less than five - then why is the response an ordinance drafted by the police at the behest of the Office of Economic Development with the support of the Chamber of Commerce and some downtown merchants?

I view the proposed anti-panhandling ordinance as an effort by the city, acting on behalf of some in the business community, to make Northampton a place where tourists and shoppers can visit and shop unencumbered by anyone they view as disturbing. I see the ordinance as a part of an ongoing process by the mayor and others in city government to sanitize Northampton through the building of the so-called "garden" hotel in Pulaski Park and the creation of a Business Improvement District. When did downtown Northampton become the property of only stores and restaurants?

I am concerned that "ticketing" people for "unacceptable" behavior will criminalize what is not criminal. If it were, there are laws which the police could enforce. What will happen when troublesome people cannot pay their fines or when they refuse treatment programs or the programs are full, especially in this time of mental health funding cuts? Conceivably, could someone go to jail at the cost of $130 per day for failure to pay a $100 ticket for something that is not a crime? This is what is happening in other cities where police - privatized and otherwise - are ticketing people for their behavior.

I ask the City Council to reject the proposed ordinance and seek a less punitive and more constructive response. I encourage others to contact their councilors and tell them this is not the Northampton we want.

Lois Ahrens
Northampton
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/12/11/panhandling-law-part-effort-sanitize-city

Here is the editorial in the Gazette:
In Our Opinion: Protecting the public
By Daily Hampshire Gazette
Created 12/03/2008

There continue to be concerns about Northampton's proposal to discourage aggressive or threatening panhandling in the downtown but, while work remains to be done on the plan over the next few months, it still has merit and ultimately ought to be adopted at least on a trial basis.

The proposal was prompted by complaints from downtown merchants as well as local residents who say that the aggressive behavior of some panhandlers has made them feel uncomfortable or worried about their own safety. Northampton Police Chief Russell Sienkiewicz also believes aggressive panhandling has become more of a problem in recent years.

It is, indeed, a challenge to craft panhandling regulations that pass constitutional muster; some critics have suggested that any solicitation regulations are a violation of free speech rights.

The city, though, has taken a different approach by treating aggressive panhandling as a public safety issue. In addition, the plan is not an outright ban; it simply attempts to bring some order to a longstanding problem and would apply equally to charitable groups that also solicit for contributions on the city's sidewalks.

In addition to banning panhandling at night, the proposal would say where it could take place downtown, spelling out the required distance a solicitor would have to stand from certain buildings. Solicitation, for example, would be prohibited within 15 feet of any bank ATM, pay phone, parking pay box, public toilet or bus stop. It would also prohibit the use of violent or threatening behavior or language, unwanted touching or attempts to block a pedestrian's passage on the sidewalk, while also targeting fraudulent appeals for money. Fines would range from $50 for an initial offense up to $300 for fourth and subsequent offenses.

The City Council's Committee on Public Safety heard arguments for and against the proposal at a recent hearing. Afterwards, the committee asked city officials to recraft some of the wording and return with a reworked proposal that could be considered in January or February. The plan ultimately requires the City Council's approval.

As the plan works its way to the council, it would be worth adding a clause requiring a review one year after the ordinance is implemented to determine whether changes need to be made. The concerns raised by the plan's critics have been helpful in the process but, in our opinion, there's no reason not to proceed with the ordinance. Given the work done so far, it appears the city can initiate a ban on aggressive panhandling that is both constitutional and effective in protecting the public's safety and providing a welcoming atmosphere downtown.
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/12/03/our-opinion-protecting-public

Posted by lois at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2008

Company "Hires" Prisoners to Build Solar Modules

Company Hires Prison Inmates to Build Solar Modules
Written by Ariel Schwartz
Published on December 9th, 2008
Posted in solar energy

Great news! If you’re sent to the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, NY, you may have the opportunity to work in a solar module factory. Spire Corp. announced yesterday that it is putting $55 million towards the construction of a solar module factory at the Otisville prison.

Modules produced by the inmates in the turnkey photovoltaic factory will be used in government installations. If Spire’s venture is successful, it may be repeated in other prisons across the country.

Spire anticipates complaints from workers rights and environmental groups, but the company hopes that inmates will gain valuable training for solar industry jobs.

That, and Spire wants cheap, reliable labor.
http://cleantechnica.com/2008/12/09/company-hires-prison-inmates-to-build-solar-modules/
More follows.....

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/spire-corp-puts-prisoners-to-solar-work-5333.html

Spire Corp. Puts Prisoners to Solar Work

The solar module turnkey equipment maker, which faces potential delisting from Nasdaq, inks $55 million deal to provide solar cells for its inmate-staffed module factory in Otisville, N.Y.

by: Jeff St. John
December 8, 2008

Spire Corp. (NSDQ: SPIR) announced Monday that it will get $55 million to supply solar cells to a solar module factory it has installed at a federal prison.

The Bedford, Mass.-based company also announced last week that it faces the possibility of being delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange if its market valuation does not rise above $50 million between now and the end of the year.

Whether Spire's $55 million deal with Federal Prison Industries Inc., also known as Unicor, will help it avoid that delisting remains to be seen. The deal calls for Spire to supply solar cells for its turnkey solar module manufacturing line to be staffed by inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, N.Y.

Unicor, a government-owned corporation that runs businesses in federal prisons, plans to staff the Otisville module factory with inmates and sell the modules produced for government installations, Spire reported. The idea is that inmates will get training.

Still, using prison labor has often backfired. Dell experimented once with Unicor using inmates for some minor PC recycling projects, but pulled back after adverse publicity and complaints from workers rights and environmental groups.

Spire will likely receive the same complaints and may even get complaints from homeowners associations. This sort of training, ultimately, could lead to ex-convicts getting jobs that require them to visit people's homes.

The $55 million contract included only the supply of solar cells, not the cost of the solar module manufacturing line Spire provided to Unicor, said Mark Willingham, vice president of sales and marketing. He did not disclose the price Unicor paid for that line.

Spire makes crystalline silicon solar module manufacturing lines and has announced deals to provide them to companies including China's ET Solar Group, India's PLG Power Ltd. and Alpex Exports Pvt. Ltd., Russia's Bogoroditsk Plant of Techno-Chemical Products and Martifer Solar in Portugal, according to the company's Website. It also makes solar cell manufacturing lines and has announced deals to sell them to companies including Korea's Hanwha Chemical Corp., according to Spire's Website.

Spire also says it develops and manufactures gallium arsenide (GaAs) solar cells for companies seeking to make concentrating photovoltaic systems, which concentrate sunlight on solar cells in hopes of boosting their efficiency. And the company has announced plans for a thin-film solar panel manufacturing line.

Last month, Spire reported a net loss of $347,000, or 4 cents per share, in the first nine months of 2008 on revenues of $49 million. For the same period in 2007, Spire reported a loss of $856,000, or 10 cents per share, for on revenues of $25.4 million.

On Dec. 1, Spire received a letter from Nasdaq warning that the company could be de-listed from the stock exchange if its market valuation did not rise above $50 million for 10 consecutive days by the end of the year. Spire may appeal that decision to a Nasdaq panel and request a stay of the delisting pending a hearing.

"The Company plans to exercise diligent efforts to maintain the listing of its common stock on The Nasdaq Global Market, but there can be no assurance that it will be successful in doing so," Spire stated in a Dec. 5 press release.

Posted by lois at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)

Our neighbors to the north: Canadian incarceration rate up 2 percent to 36,300

Canadian incarceration rate up 2 percent
Published: Dec. 9, 2008 at 10:33 AM

OTTAWA, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- The number of Canadian adults in jails and prisons rose 2 percent in 2007-2008 to a daily average of 36,300 *inmates, Statistics Canada reported Tuesday.

The figures marked the third consecutive annual increase, and the agency said it was driven by the growing number of adults being held in remand in provincial or territorial jails while awaiting trial or sentencing.

During 2007-2008, there were 13,304 offenders in federal prisons, 3 percent more than the previous year, the agency said.

On any given day, there was an average of 2,018 juveniles between 12 and 17 in custody.

The report said 40 percent of inmates were federal offenders serving sentences longer than two years.

Overall, the Canadian adult and youth rate translated to 117 people in custody per 100,000 population, the agency said. By contrast, StatsCan said the United States adult incarceration rate is 762 per 100,000, while Sweden's rate is 74 per 100,000.

* This is approximately how many adults are incarcerated in North Carolina.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/12/09/Canadian_incarceration_rate_up_2_percent/UPI-47101228836810/

Posted by lois at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2008

IL: Blagojevich hires 208 guards with no prison to guard

Chicago Tribune
Blagojevich hires 208 guards with no prison to guard
Tribune staff report

December 9, 2008
Associated Press

SPRINGFIELD ‹ Just weeks after Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced hundreds of layoffs because of state budget woes, his administration hired 208 prisonguards who don't have a prison to guard.

The Department of Corrections hired the employees for the Thomson
Correctional Center in October at a cost of $10.8 million for their first year of work, according to a review of state records. They were supposed to provide security at the prison in northwestern Illinois for inmates being transferred from the Pontiac prison, which Blagojevich has said he'd clos eto save $4 million a year, a corrections spokesman said Monday.

But the Pontiac prison still is open because of a lawsuit filed by union officials on behalf of employees. And the Pontiac mayor says his city was"duped" because corrections officials promised jobs for most of the displaced workers.

Without new inmates at Thomson, 89 of the new hires will be reassigned to Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet starting Wednesday, meaning $9,000 a week in housing costs, spokesman Derek Schnapp said.

The turmoil dates back months.

In August, Blagojevich said cuts he made to an unbalanced budget would mean laying off 325 human-services and tourism workers, cutting substance-abuse treatment and closing two dozen state attractions.

By October, when the prison guards were hired, the legislature had sent the governor more than $200 million to spare the reductions. Blagojevich laid off 85 employees and closed 20 state parks and historic sites. He said he was using the rest of the money to prevent future layoffs in a weakening economy and facing a budget deficit of up to $2 billion.

Attrition claims about 50 corrections employees a month, Blagojevich
spokeswoman Katie Ridgway said. Counting the new positions, the agency's October head count was lower than the number the previous two years, she said.

Blagojevich's plan was to close Pontiac by year's end. To meet that
deadline, the new officers had to be hired in October so they could completea six-week training course and two weeks of orientation at Thomson, Schnapp said.

Posted by lois at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)

PA: Sign of the Times: City workers transferred from libraries to prisons

Philadelphia Library Closings, News, the budget crisis
City workers transferred from libraries to prisons
City Paper
Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
posted by Isaiah Thompson

Here's the good news: most of the municipa Free Library guards working at doomed branch libraries will be able to retain employment with the city, which has placed them in open positions.

Here's the depressing news: Half of those positions are in the prison system.

According to data provided by the Mayor's Press Office, nine municipal guards have been placed elsewhere in the city; of those nine, five will become correctional officers in the prisons department.

The pay range for these officers' new jobs will be slightly higher: a maximum of $38,000 guarding prisons, up from $34,000 guarding libraries.

Still, there might be drawbacks. According to the job description, the correctional officers' work "involves regular exposure to unpredictable conditions and occasionally requires the expenditure of physical effort in the restraining and subduing of prisoners."

I'd rather guard a library myself.
http://www.citypaper.net/blogs/clog/2008/12/08/city-workers-transferred-from-libraries-to-prisons/

Posted by lois at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

December 08, 2008

PA: State resumes parole for people convicted of violent offences

State resumes parole for violent offenders
Monday, December 01, 2008
The Associated Press
HARRISBURG -- Pennsylvania's parole system must do a better job of identifying violent offenders who pose the greatest threat to public safety, an independent review found.

Gov. Ed Rendell lifted a moratorium on paroling violent offenders today after accepting the report's recommendations for improving the system. The review, which found most of the state's existing procedures were sound, was conducted by Temple University's John Goldkamp, a nationally recognized expert on incarceration.
The state should classify violent offenders into two categories -- those most likely to commit another offense and those less likely to pose risks to public safety, Mr. Goldkamp said in his report. The review also calls for the state to use certain criteria to evaluate an offender's potential to commit violence, such as the use of a gun in committing a crime, and to improve training of parole agents.
"Recent tragedies have made clear that we must do a better job of evaluating and supervising parolees with a history of violence," Mr. Rendell said.
Mr. Rendell ordered the review and temporarily halted the parole of state prison inmates in September after a Philadelphia policeman was killed by a paroled felon during a traffic stop.
Last month, on Mr. Goldkamp's recommendation, Mr. Rendell lifted the moratorium for offenders serving time for nonviolent crimes but maintained it for those convicted of violent offenses.
The state Probation and Parole Board also accepted Mr. Goldkamp's findings and has begun releasing eligible offenders under stricter supervision policies, Mr. Rendell said.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press.

Posted by lois at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)

WA: Policy that lets prisoners serve half their sentences reduces money and doesn't increase crime

Tacoma, WA - Monday, December 8, 2008
News Tribune
Policy that lets inmates get out early might stay
JOSEPH TURNER

A policy that has allowed many Washington inmates to get out of prison after serving only half of their sentences may be extended by a cash-strapped Legislature because the program saves money and doesn’t increase crime.

Since mid-2003, many inmates who are sent to prison for nonviolent crimes such as burglary, theft and drugs have been allowed to accrue “good time” equal to 50 percent of their sentences. Then-Gov. Gary Locke and the Legislature approved that change to the “time off for good behavior” policy that previously had been limited to no more than one-third of an inmate’s sentence.

Then, as now, the governor and Legislature were facing a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, and were looking for ways to cut state spending.

A recent study by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy concludes the state saves more than $10,000 for every inmate who is let out early, partly because they spend fewer days in prison and partly because they are even less likely to commit more crimes when they do get out.

Sens. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, and Adam Kline, D-Seattle, say they are heartened by the study’s conclusion and plan to introduce a bill to extend the 50 percent good time policy. The 2003 law that increased the amount of time off for good behavior also set an expiration date of mid-2010. Some lawmakers were afraid that letting inmates out of prison might just give them more opportunities to commit more crimes. Their new bill would get rid of the expiration date, also called a sunset provision.

Hargrove is chairman of the Senate Human Services and Corrections Committee. Kline is chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

“It’s cheaper and it has a positive effect on recidivism,” Kline said. That should make keeping the policy more attractive to a Legislature that is facing a projected $5 billion deficit for the 2009-11 budget cycle, he said.

“I expect there’s going to be some opposition from the tough-on-crime folks,” he added.

Indeed, there will be.

Tom McBride, executive secretary for the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, said prosecutors objected to the 2003 change because it further misleads the public about how much time offenders actually spend in prison.

“It’s a truth-in-sentencing issue,” McBride said. If a judge sentences someone to prison for two years, the public thinks that’s what happens, he said. But in actuality, that inmate probably will serve only half of that sentence, and there’s a good chance that only six months of it will be in prison and the other six months would be in a work-release center, he said.

Prosecutors will continue to oppose the longer good time policy, McBride said. If the Legislature wants to save money, they should use a more “honest” approach and just shorten prison sentences for crimes, he said. But lawmakers should be concerned about more than just saving money, he said. Part of the reason for sentences is punishment, he said.

It costs an average of $98 a day to house an inmate in a Washington prison.

Elizabeth Drake, the analyst who studied the effect of the 2003 law, said inmates who were released under the new good time provision spent an average of 63 fewer days in prison. That accounted for nearly $6,300 in cost savings per inmate. In addition, those offenders were less likely than other inmates to commit crimes when they got out.

Of the 2,614 inmates who were released during the first 14 months of the new good time policy, 49 percent were convicted of another crime within three years of their release, compared to 53 percent of a comparison group of offenders.

Because they committed fewer crimes resulted in additional savings to taxpayers and victims, which boosted the overall savings to $10,743 per inmate, Drake said.

Washington has released 40,820 inmates over the past 51/2 years, since the larger good time policy took effect. Only 21 percent of them – 8,440 – were eligible to have prison sentences reduced by as much as 50 percent.

Inmates convicted of violent sex crimes, domestic violence or other crimes against people are not eligible for any time off greater than one-third of their sentence. In fact, the same 2003 law reduced the amount of good time that sex offenders could earn to 10 percent from 15 percent.

Dick Van Wagenen, who was Locke’s criminal justice adviser in 2003, said the governor’s original proposal gave more good time to nonviolent offenders who committed property crimes like commercial burglary and theft. The Legislature expanded that group to include drug offenders to save even more money, he said.

The state Department of Corrections recently was on a pace to spend $30 million more than it was budgeted for 2007-09, largely because of overtime expenses. Although Gov. Chris Gregoire has ordered state agencies to find up to 20 percent in cuts, the prison system is largely exempt from that exercise because it deals with public safety.

The Legislature is likely to look at other sentencing provisions, too, since those are the main ways it can control costs.

“We’re always looking at sentencing laws,” Kline said.
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/v-printerfriendly/story/560995.html

Posted by lois at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Judges to Decide Whether Crowded California Prisons Are Unconstitutional

December 8, 2008
Judges to Decide Whether Crowded California Prisons Are Unconstitutional
By MALIA WOLLAN

SAN FRANCISCO — Faced with chronically packed prisons and a federal mandate to improve medical and living conditions, a three-judge panel is meeting here to decide whether the overcrowding results in unconstitutional treatment of California’s more than 150,000 inmates. If so, the judges could order the state to release tens of thousands of prisoners.

“We have a motion today to exercise a very serious order which interferes in a profound way with the state’s right to run its own affairs,” one of the judges on the panel, Lawrence Karlton of Federal District Court, said in a hearing last week. “And on the other hand, we have a serious failure of the state to provide adequate care.”

California’s 33 adult prisons teem with nearly double the inmates they were designed to hold. Lawyers for the inmates say the conditions lead to violence, outbreaks of disease, inadequate mental and other health care for prisoners, and even death.

“Overcrowding is dangerous for the prisoners, for the corrections officers and for the public,” said Michael Bien, a lawyer for the inmates, who asked the judges to reduce the prison population by 52,000 inmates over two years.

Lawyers for the state argued that reducing the prison population would result in increased crime and burden counties already facing tight budgets.

“Releasing more than 50,000 inmates onto the streets is dangerous,” said Matthew Cate, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, who added that he had seen reports saying that California’s inmates tended to have more felony offenses than inmates in other states.

“Our most serious problem is providing enough appropriate space for our seriously mentally ill inmates,” Mr. Cate said, “and releasing prisoners is not going to fix that problem.”

But lawyers for the inmates said that they were not seeking the release of dangerous criminals and that much of the reduction in the number of inmates could come from not sending people who have committed minor parole violations back to prison.

The state’s prison health system is currently under the control of a federal receiver, who announced in August that the state would need to spend $8 billion to fix its prisons and build facilities.

But the state is also facing a severe budget crisis. Last Monday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a financial emergency and requested the State Legislature to address an $11.2 billion dollar deficit, saying that without immediate action, “our state is headed for a fiscal disaster where everyone will be hurt.”

Another judge at the hearing, Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, said, “We should start from the premise that there’s not going to be any more money spent on this problem.”

The panel is expected to rule early next year, but an order to release prisoners would most likely face an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/us/08calif.html

Posted by lois at 01:58 PM | Comments (0)

Calif.'s Prop 5 Battle Exposes Fault Lines Between Treatment Groups, Drug Courts

Calif.'s Prop 5 Battle Exposes Fault Lines Between Treatment Groups, Drug Courts
December 5, 2008
News Feature
By Bob Curley

The battle over California's recently defeated Proposition 5 has led to a schism between drug courts and addiction treatment providers -- putative allies in the drive to shunt drug offenders into treatment rather than prisons -- with advocates on both sides lamenting a lost opportunity to reform a justice system that most agree places too much emphasis on punishment and not enough on rehabilitation.

When the Nonviolent Offenders Rehabilitation Act (NORA) was shot down by about a 60-40 margin in November, it was partly due to the advocacy efforts of drug-court judges, who allied themselves with law enforcement, prison guards, and some prevention groups in opposing the measure. NORA backers, who undertook a low-key campaign to build on and improve the Proposition 36 reforms approved by state voters in 2000, instead suffered a unexpected and crushing defeat.

NORA opponents cast Prop 5 as the work of drug-legalization groups like the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), saying it diluted drug-court judges' power to hold offenders accountable if they failed in treatment. In announcing its opposition to NORA, the National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP) cited concern that the measure would "extend DPA's influence at the expense of public safety, proven judicial interventions, and DPA's political and philosophical adversaries; [and] endorse treatments and practices associated with the harm-reduction and legalization movements that are unproven and objectionable."

The pro-NORA forces were indeed led by the DPA (which does not officially endorse drug legalization but has championed medical marijuana and marijuana decriminalization laws nationally). Supporters and opponents of the measure described the drafting of the measure as a closed process, with those outside DPA learning details of the plan only when it was certified for the state ballot.

"We did discuss the contents with experts in academia, judges, some in law enforcement," said Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, DPA's deputy Prop 5 campaign manager and deputy state director in California, "but it's absolutely correct that we did not seek the consensus of the addiction field or law enforcement."

Regardless, the ranks of Proposition 5 supporters included the bulk of the "mainstream" addiction groups in California, including the California Society of Addiction Medicine, the California Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors, the Coalition of Alcohol and Drug Associations, the California Association for Alcohol and Drug Educators, and prominent individual groups like Phoenix House and a pair of NCADD chapters.

A review of the No on Proposition 5 website shows that NADCP was joined by law enforcement groups, some state lawmakers and civic groups, and prevention organizations such as D.A.R.E. America, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), Californians for Drug Free Schools, and a variety of conservative antidrug groups, including the Drug Free America Foundation.

'Locking Horns'

Doug Marlowe, chief of science, policy and law at NADCP, was dismissive of the state treatment community's support for NORA. "There were some California providers in favor of NORA because they would have benefitted [financially] from it," said Marlowe.

Marlowe expressed concern, however, that the battle over NORA had driven a wedge between drug courts and treatment providers. "There is no drug court without treatment," Marlowe said. "To say that we are locking horns may be true, unfortunately, but it's not what we want."

"We are very clear that we are in favor of treatment and that drug courts are an alternative to incarceration," he added. "We're not a law-enforcement group, we're not a punishment group -- we are a treatment-support group."

NORA supporter John DeMiranda, executive director of the National Association on Alcohol, Drugs and Disability and Pacific Southwest regional representative for Faces and Voices of Recovery, said that the treatment community in California "jumped on the bandwagon and talked about NORA as a treatment initiative," even though DPA mainly cast Prop 5 as a drug-policy reform effort. Some California treatment providers were reluctant to back NORA, but DeMiranda contended that this had less to do with DPA's involvement than fear of bucking the criminal-justice programs that control their funding.

"If we were to do our own initiative it would be very different, and the politics would be very different," said DeMiranda. However, he scorned the state's drug courts for failing to embrace the reforms embodied in NORA. "We need wholesale decriminalization, not retail decriminalization," said DeMiranda, noting the relatively small number of clients currently served by drug courts.

For DPA, Tried-and-True Meant Go-it-Alone

Both DeMiranda and Marlowe said that DPA erred in not allowing the addiction field and drug courts greater involvement in drafting NORA, although DeMiranda said that the compromises that likely would have resulted -- such as allowing for more sanctions or removing language related to marijuana decriminalization -- probably would have cost DPA the financial backing needed to forward the measure.

"George Soros doesn't want to expand treatment -- he wants progressive reform," DeMiranda said.

Marlowe said that the "all or nothing" approach taken by DPA forced drug courts and others to choose sides rather than compromising. "As a result, groups that have shared interests couldn't come together," he said.

NADCP has a long list of concerns with NORA, but Marlowe said there were a number of areas of agreement, including the initiative's general philosophy of providing treatment rather than incarceration, greater emphasis on needs assessment, and added accountability for offenders compared to California's earlier attempt at shunting more offenders to treatment, Prop 36.

"Drug courts could have had common ground with [DPA], but it was too late," said Marlowe.

Building a broader coalition might have helped neutralize opposition to NORA, but Dooley-Sammuli pinned blame for NORA's overwhelming defeat largely on ballot language that emphasized the cost of Prop 5, combined with the economic collapse in October.

She said DPA based its go-alone strategy on a string of previous successes with ballot initiatives in other states, and added that while "we're not afraid to try to talk to folks," the group had felt burned by the experience of working with drug-court judges on a bill that modified Prop 36 -- and ultimately included jail sanctions opposed by DPA. "We made a good-faith effort, but in the end it was a case where consensus meant wanting us to agree with them," she said.

Post-NORA: Confronting California's Looming Budget Crisis

The defeat of NORA may have been seen as a victory by some in the prevention and drug court community, but few are celebrating the loss of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in new state spending on treatment that would have been mandated by Prop 5.

Moreover, the treatment community is facing potentially catastrophic budget cuts as California grapples with a $28-billion budget shortfall, with continued treatment funding possibly hanging on legislative approval of an alcohol tax increase proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

DPA officials, members of the California treatment communities, and other NORA backers met on Dec. 3 to discuss the future of drug-policy reform efforts in the state.

"We are definitely open to compromise going forward," said NADCP's Marlowe, who said he was unaware of the meeting. "NORA did take some steps forward in terms of accountability and sanctions, but in our opinion erected too many barriers to applying them ... We are absolutely open to a conversation about shared interests and values with DPA."

"We'd love to have an amazing coming together of NORA opponents and supporters, but time is running out," responded Dooley-Sammuli. "I don't know how it's going to play out when we're looking at dramatic budget cuts in the next few months."

DeMiranda expressed a similar hope for cooperation around the state budget issue but also said that California's treatment and recovery movement needs to find it own voice on drug-policy reform issues, such as by pushing forward its own "people-powered" treatment-funding ballot initiative in 2010.

In the wake of the NORA defeat, "It's no longer possible for [the treatment and recovery community] to piggyback on public sentiment," said DeMiranda. "We have to get our people to the ballot box so it's not so easy ... to demonize this kind of initiative."
http://www.jointogether.org/news/features/2008/califs-prop-5-battle.html?print=t

Posted by lois at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2008

Greece: Hunger Strike by Prisoners results in cutting prison population in half!

Hunger strike ends as Greek government caves
Thursday, November 20 2008 @ 11:36 PM CST

After 18 days 7,000 prisoners in Greece stop their hunger strike after the ministry of justice concedes to a series of their demands, promising to release half the country's prison population by April 2009.

On Thursday the 20th of November more than 7,000 hunger strikers in Greek prisons demanding a comprehensive 45-point program of prison reform have decided to stop their hunger strike, already on its 18th day, after the Ministry of Justice responded to their struggle and to the widening solidarity movement which in the last weeks has held several mass protest marches in the Greek cities by declaring that by next April the number of prisoners in Greek jails will be reduced to 6.815 from the present 12.315, thus effectively releasing half of the country's prison population.

The Ministry's declaration in detail states that:

1) All persons convicted to a sentence up to five years for any offense including drug related crimes can transform their sentence into a monetary penalty. This will not be allowed in the case the jury decides that the payment is not enough to deter the convict from committing punishable acts in the future.
2) The minimum sum for transforming one day of prison sentence to monetary penalty is reduced from 10 (1 euro = $1.26)euros to 3, with the provision of being reduced to 1 euro by decision of the jury.
3) All people who have served 1/5 of their prison sentence for 2 year sentences and 1/3 for sentences longer than 2 years are to be released, with no exceptions.
4) The minimum limit of served sentence is reduced to 3/5 for conditional release and for convicts for drug related crimes. Those condemned under conditions of law Ν. 3459/2006 (articles 23 και 23Α) are exempted.
5) The maximum limit of pre-trial imprisonment is reduced from 18 to 12 months, with the exemptions of crimes punished by life or 20year sentence.
6) The annual time of days-off prison is increased by one day. Tougher conditions for days-off are limited for those convicted for drug related crimes under Ν. 3459/2006.
7) Disciplinary penalties are to be integrated.
8) Integration after 4 years into national law of the European Council decision of drug trafficking
9) Expansion of implementation of conditional release of convicts suffering from AIDS, kidney failure, persistent TB, and parapelegics.
What the Ministry failed to answer with regard to the prisoners' demands
include:
1) Monetary exchange of prison sentences longer than 5 years, especially for 6.700 prisoners presently convicted for non-criminal offenses.
2) Abolition of juvenile prisons
3) Abolition of accumulative disciplinary penalties
4) Abolition of 18 months pre-trial imprisonment for a large number of offenses.
5) Satisfactory expansion of days off, despite the fact that the application of present liberties has been tested as successful during the last 18 years.
6) Immediate improvement of relocation conditions of convicts
7) Holding a meeting between the minister of justice and the prisoners' committee

Thus in a press release, the Prisoners' Committee announced that:

"The amendment submitted to the Parliament by the Ministry of Justice tackles but a few of our demands. The minister ought to materialize his promises for the immediate release of the suggested number of prisoners announced, and at the same time implement concrete measures regarding the
totality of our demands. We the prisoners treat this amendment as a first step, a result of our struggle and of the solidarity shown by society. Yet it fails to covers us, it fails to solve our problems. With our struggle, we have first of all fought for our dignity. And this dignity we cannot offer as a present to no minister, to no screw. We shall tolerate no arbitrary acts, no vengeful relocation, no terrorizing disciplinary act. We are standing and we shall stay standing. We demand form the Parliament to move towards a complete abolition of the limit of 4/5 of served sentence, the abolition of accumulated time for disciplinary penalties, and the expansion of beneficial arrangements regarding days-off, and conditional releases for all categories of prisoners.
Moreover, we demand the immediate legislation on the presently vague promises of the minister of justice regarding the improvement of prison conditions (abolition of juvenile prisons, foundation of therapeutic centers for drug dependents, implementation of social labour in exchange for prison sentence, upgrading of hospital care of prisoners, incorporation of European legislation favorable to the prisoners in the Greek law etc.). Finally, we offer our thanks to the solidarity movement, to every component, party, medium, and militant who stood by us with all and any means of his or her choice, and we declare that our struggle against these human refuse dumps and for the victory of all our demands continues".
Prisoners' Committee 20/11/08.

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

December 06, 2008

Fiscal Cost Forcasting for Criminal Sentencing

Sentencing laws needn’t drain us
By Rachel E. Barkow and Joshua J. Libling |
Saturday, December 6, 2008 Op-Ed

Massachusetts, like most states around the country, is in fiscal crisis. Gov. Deval Patrick announced more than $1 billion in midyear spending reductions last month. At the same time, the prison system is bursting at its seams: Almost 12,000 state prisoners are living in space built for fewer than 8,000, and the prison commissioner has announced that prisoners in maximum-security facilities may have to double-bunk.

Studies show that putting inmates in such close quarters increases violence. But this policy is flawed for an even more fundamental reason: A patchwork solution like double-bunking fails to offer a long-term, fiscally responsible approach to criminal justice. Despite stable crime rates, the prison population is rising, and unless some sentencing laws are reconsidered, overcrowding is not going away.

Simply building more prisons isn’t a feasible solution. An across-the-board release of prisoners or lowering of sentences is obviously unappealing. But the combination of the state budgetary and prison overcrowding crises offers Massachusetts an opportunity to become smarter in its sentencing policy and to adopt the best solution: using fiscal-cost forecasting for criminal sentencing.

Fiscal cost forecasting makes sentencing policy more rational in the real world of limited resources. Minnesota’s sentencing commission has developed computer models to predict the impact in terms of dollars and prison population of all changes to the state’s laws affecting criminal sentences. This early-warning system has empowered - indeed, forced - officials there to consider the costs of sentencing proposals prior to enacting them, which has allowed that state to avoid the prison overcrowding that has plagued Massachusetts.

Minnesota’s system is so successful that virtually every state with a sentencing commission has followed suit, including Washington, North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama. Washington alone has saved $45 million per year as a result. Indeed, these cost projections are so successful that the American Bar Association has included cost forecasts as an integral part of its proposed model law of sentencing.

Massachusetts has a sentencing commission, but the Legislature hasn’t adopted the guidelines the commission suggested years ago. Nor has the Legislature paid any attention to cost estimates produced by the commission or any other group. But ignoring these costs leads to a situation like the one Massachusetts is in right now: Too many prisoners, not enough beds and not enough money. No aspect of state policymaking should be immune from a rational consideration of costs and benefits, and that includes criminal justice.

Significantly, fiscal cost forecasting doesn’t dictate higher or lower sentences. Sometimes states raise sentences in light of cost data, knowing that they have the resources to afford the financial outlay. Other times, states lower sentences for some crimes (particularly nonviolent crimes) in order to reserve space for violent crimes and achieve the same overall reduction in crime, but at a lesser cost.

Cost data allow more informed, more efficient and more rational use of resources. When $1 billion is being cut from the Bay State budget and violent felons are sharing bunk space, getting more bang for the prison buck makes common sense.

Rachel E. Barkow is Beneficial Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University School of Law. Joshua J. Libling is a fellow at the center.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1137094

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

December 05, 2008

Boston MA: A $26m try to tame city's crime hot spots New program's workers may have rough pasts

A $26m try to tame city's crime hot spots
New program's workers may have rough pasts

By Maria Cramer, Boston Globe Staff | December 4, 2008

The Boston Foundation and city officials are preparing to flood a 1.5-square-mile section of the city with massive crime-fighting resources over the next six years, pinpointing about 2,000 young criminals who they believe drive more than three-quarters of the city's violence.

The $26 million effort, which will be formally announced later this month, will dispatch 25 new street workers - or "violence interrupters" - into five neighborhoods along or near Blue Hill Avenue, to make contact with gang members and try to defuse conflicts.

Unlike street workers hired by the city, these interrupters will not be disqualified if they have a criminal past. This background, community leaders say, could deepen their understanding of what drives people to crime and give the workers more credibility with young people caught up in violence.

The street workers, who have yet to be hired, would be clustered in areas of Roxbury, the South End, Lower Roxbury, and Dorchester, where 78 percent of the city's shootings and homicides occur.

"This thing has a lot of ambitions, but it is very sharply focused on achieving sharp reductions in murders, aggravated assaults, and robberies in these communities," said Paul S. Grogan, president of The Boston Foundation, which is putting $1 million a year of its own money toward the effort. "That's what this thing is all about."

Mayor Thomas M. Menino has instructed city agencies, including the Boston Police Department, the Department of Public Health, and the Boston Center for Youth and Families, to cooperate with the initiative on the plan, said his spokeswoman, Dorothy Joyce

"The mayor has always made it a priority of getting young people who may be at risk engaged in positive, productive opportunities," Joyce said. "This program will hopefully help them to that end."

The unusual public-private initiative, known as StreetSafe Boston, will concentrate on 1,400 to 2,200 people between 16 and 24 years old who live along or near the Blue Hill Avenue spine and are former offenders, gang members, actively involved in violent crime, or involved with the Department of Youth Services.

Specifically, it would focus on Dudley Square and Grove Hall in Roxbury, the South End and Lower Roxbury area, and two Dorchester hot spots, in the area of Morton and Norfolk streets, and Bowdoin Street and Geneva Avenue.

StreetSafe would also target 4,000 young people who may not be involved in violent crime but are vulnerable, like dropouts, drug dealers, pregnant teens, and runaways.

The money also would go toward the development of job training programs and mental health services for young people. The foundation has raised close to $7 million and hopes to get the rest through donations from national and local foundations and individual contributors.

"We don't want to just see young people decide, 'I'm not going to shoot anymore,' but they're still not in school," said Marc H. Germain, a foundation associate who described the program at a neighborhood meeting in Dorchester yesterday. "We're looking for improvement in their lives."

The street workers program will be overseen by the Black Ministerial Alliance, the Boston TenPoint Coalition, and Chris Byner, who runs the city's street worker program.

"I'm convinced it will work," said the Rev. Ray Hammond, chairman of the Boston Foundation, who compared it to efforts in the 1990s that led to the so-called Boston Miracle. "This kind of strategy was a major piece of the successes of the '90s - collaborative and comprehensive. And it's targeted. All of our kids need attention, but if violence is the issue, then we know it's a very a small population that needs a lot of attention."

The geographical area was picked not only because of the violence it experiences, but also because of economics.

"With limited resources, you have to be judicious," Germain said.

Still the program buoyed activists who have been alarmed by the growing list of cuts to youth programs.

"It's the largest commitment of funds to the most difficult-to-work-with group that I've ever seen," said Emmett Folgert, head of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative. "The focus population is quite small, and the amount of resources is high, so there is a good chance of success here."

But others expressed skepticism that the initiative will lead to a long-term reduction in violence.

"I really want this to work," said Ralph Ortiz, youth program coordinator at the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Association. "My concerns are that these things have been done before in the past."

The violence interrupters will need to receive formal, technical guidance in how to deal with young people traumatized by violence, he said.

"It won't be effective unless street workers are trained to become more clinical in their approach to young people," Ortiz said.

Hammond said he expects the street workers will not only be trained to help young people cope with trauma, but will also be taught skills to help them avoid the burnout that often comes with working with troubled youths.

Robert Lewis Jr., vice president for program at the foundation, said the violence interrupters - as well as the street workers already deployed in city neighborhoods - will receive new, specialized training under the same model and taught skills like mediation.

Lewis said he expects to start recruiting the interrupters in January. Criminal background checks - known as Criminal Offender Record Information, or CORI, checks - will not stand in the way of hiring, he said.

"You have to put the best workers out there. Period," Lewis said. "What we don't want to do is allow CORI to be a reason why we couldn't put the best worker out on the street."

The city employs about 23 street workers, down from about 40 in the 1990s. The ranks were once swollen with former gang members who spent late nights persuading their younger peers to drop their guns and pursue a peaceful life.

But in the late 1990s, the street workers became unionized, and the hours were changed so that workers were not out later than 9 p.m. Soon after, the state mandated that anyone working with children have a clean record, which precluded most former gang members from being in the program.

Some community leaders said those changes created a program of street workers out of touch with gang members and offenders.

Lewis, who started the city's street worker program in 1990, said the violence interrupters will work from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. The goal will be to hire men and women who can relate to the city's troubled youth and are not afraid to stay out late and work with difficult, even dangerous people. Because the interrupters will not be city employees, they will not be beholden to state or union rules.

Jorge Martinez, executive director of Project RIGHT in Grove Hall, said he was thrilled CORI would not be a factor.

"It gives an opportunity for folks who have been in the criminal justice system to do some work in the community and reestablish themselves in the community," he said.

It will also help young offenders see they can move past their criminal record, Martinez said.

"Now you can say that it's not a barrier," he said. "If you're in the life, it's a perfect opportunity to look up and see someone in a similar situation actually succeeding."

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.

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

European Court Rules Against Britain’s Policy of Keeping DNA Database of Suspects

December 5, 2008- NY Times
European Court Rules Against Britain’s Policy of Keeping DNA Database of Suspects
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON — The European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously on Thursday that Britain’s policy of gathering and storing the fingerprints and DNA of all criminal suspects — even those who turn out to be innocent — was a violation of the human right to privacy.

The ruling, handed down in Strasbourg, France, is a severe blow to the law-enforcement policies of the Labor government, which has led Europe in aggressively collecting and retaining personal information on its citizens. Using unusually strong language, the court declared itself “struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature” of the police’s policy of holding DNA material indefinitely in its database.

Britain has several months to decide how to respond to the ruling, but the current law will have to be amended. In a statement, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said she was “disappointed” by the court’s decision.

“I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice,” she said. Britain’s DNA Database contains the profiles of more than 4.6 million people, some 860,000 of whom do not have criminal records. Privacy experts say that this represents a higher proportion of Britain’s population than do similar databases in other countries.

“They’re in the vanguard of doing this, is the polite way of saying it,” said Daniel P. Cooper, a partner at Covington & Burling, a corporate and business law firm that filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of Privacy International, an advocacy group. “They have the biggest database in Europe, and possibly globally, for law enforcement purposes.”

Human rights groups applauded the court’s decision as a welcome check on the powers of the state.

“Forty percent of Britain’s criminals are not on this database, but hundreds of thousands of innocent people are,” said Anna Fairclough, the legal officer of Liberty, a British group that advocates for human rights. The court, she said, “has protected the privacy of British people so poorly let down by our own government.”

The government argues that information on the database collected from suspects in past crimes has helped investigators solve thousands of fresh cases in the past eight years, including at least 53 murders and 94 rapes.

Britain has a reputation for intruding in an increasingly heavy-handed way in its citizens’ private lives. It is said to have the most CCTV cameras per capita in the world. A government plan to issue mandatory ID cards encoded with personal information has stirred fierce opposition in a country that has long celebrated individual liberty.

“There have been a number of recent government initiatives which have been very worrying to privacy advocates,” Mr. Cooper said. “And there have been so many massive data breaches and leaks of information that anytime the government proposes something that would require collecting more data, people get very concerned.”

The DNA case was brought by two Sheffield men who were arrested in separate cases in 2001, but were both ultimately cleared of committing crimes. One, identified as Mr. S., 19, was charged with armed robbery; he was later acquitted. The other, Michael Marper, now 45, was arrested and charged with harassment in 2001; the charges were eventually dropped.

In both cases, the suspects’ fingerprints and DNA samples were taken by the police. Both men asked later that the samples be destroyed, but the police refused.

While most European countries allow the police to take fingerprints and DNA samples in some criminal cases, England and Wales are alone in Europe in allowing the samples to be taken as a matter of course, and in keeping them indefinitely, experts say. Scotland has separate, less stringent, rules.

The two men took their case to the European court after losing a series of battles in British courts, arguing that the police’s decision to keep the samples violated their right to privacy as set out in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Having information on the DNA data base was humiliating and stigmatizing, they said.

The court agreed, saying that Britain had “overstepped any acceptable margin of appreciation” in striking a balance between individual rights and public interests.

The current law, it said in stinging language, “constitutes a disproportionate interference in the applicants’ right for respect to private life and cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/world/europe/05britain.html?sq=World%20Court&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
This and other international news relating to mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

Call Governor Paterson to ask that Jalil Muntaqim & Herman Bell Be Returned to NY

New York State letter denies request

The transfer of SF8 defendants Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim from the San Francisco County Jail back to New York State for their rightful parole hearings has been blocked by both state governors for weeks and New York State now wants to deny this right for good. This comes despite previous agreements in the courtroom between the California State prosecutors, the presiding judge and, of course, the brothers and their attorneys.

In a new – but not surprising – development, a letter from Steve Krantz, Assistant Counsel to the Governor of New York to Peter Smith, Deputy Attorney General of California dated October 10, 2008 states:

Procedures in this area are designed to balance a variety of considerations, including the needs of the judicial system and executive concerns such as security and administration. Even assuming that the amendments sought would be consistent with California law, in the absence of a demonstrated need to depart from usual procedures as reflected in the Executive Agreements, the Governor of New York does not plan to seek amendments to those agreements.
Judge Philip Moscone signed an order in May allowing Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim to return to New York State for their parole hearings. All parties agreed at that time that the move would be temporary; Herman and Jalil waived their rights to fight extradition back to California.

This vindictive and mean-spirited procedural obstacle was immediately challenged by defense attorneys. Strong arguments were made to guarantee Herman and Jalil's right to "pursue their liberty interests" and have parole hearings. Both have served over 35 years in prison as model prisoners. Both were targeted originally by COINTELPRO as members of the Black Panther Party.

New York Attorney Bob Boyle argued in a declaration to the San Francisco Court that if the men remain in California, "they would be denied their parole hearing for years." In a subsequent interview, he also said:

The state waited 35 years to bring these spurious criminal charges. Now these charges are being used to deny these men parole hearings to which they are entitled. Whatever concerns the government has can be overcome by a simple modification of the extradition order. All Herman and Jalil are asking for is an opportunity to attend their hearings.

Please contact the Governor of New York by phone, letter, fax, or email:

David A. Paterson
State Capitol
Albany, NY 12224
518-474-8390
Email: 161.11.121.121/govemail

Urge them to sign the amended Executive Agreements which will allow Herman Bell and Jalil Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom) to return to New York State to attend their rightful parole hearings.

Posted by lois at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

Prison Overcrowding Crisis Unhealthy for All Californians

Prison Overcrowding Crisis Unhealthy for All Californians

New America Media, Commentary, Donna Willmott, Posted: Dec 04, 2008 Review it on NewsTrust

Editor's note: California prisons have become the largest mental health system for the poor, the largest battered women's shelter, and the largest system of public housing, observes NAM contributing writer, Donna Willmott, M.P.H. Willmott is the Family Advocacy Coordinator at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and teaches in the Health Education and Community Health Studies Department of City College of San Francisco.

As a public health professional who has spent over 10 years advocating for prisoners' rights, I am dismayed to see the health of prisoners once again become a political football.

More than two years ago, the federal courts acknowledged what every prisoner in California already knew – that there has been an "unconscionable degree of suffering and death" in our prisons. With all due respect to those who are working under the federal receivership to reform prison medical care, most of the systemic issues that underlie substandard care have, in our clients' experience, remained essentially unchanged. While the Receivership has succeeded in hiring a new cadre of qualified medical providers, the fact remains that progress has been painfully slow for the 178,000 prisoners trapped in this system, and many will continue to suffer needlessly in the meantime.

Overcrowding is at the root of this paralysis. The Receivership proposes to build 10,000 new medical and mental health beds, at a construction cost to taxpayers of over $7 billion dollars. Even if this project had the support of the legislature and received the required money, the crisis would not be solved. It's not possible to build and maintain these facilities, then recruit and retain sufficient numbers of well-trained staff for this constantly expanding enterprise without bankrupting the state. Without shrinking the prison system, it will be impossible to provide the required constitutional level of medical care to prisoners.

Decades of failed public policy frame this crisis. Years of a tough-on-crime approach have spelled disaster for the health and well-being of poor people and people of color who are incarcerated at dramatically disproportionate rates. We have tried to use prisons as an answer to social problems, with devastating results. Our prisons have become the largest mental health system for the poor, the largest battered women's shelter, and the largest system of public housing. The social cost of decimating our already frayed safety net in order to expand prisons is beyond calculation. We sacrifice precious community resources to maintain a prison system that creates instability, ill health and disease, while failing to keep us safe.

Perhaps taking a page from history will help us envision a new solution to this crisis. Over 150 years ago, Rudolf Virchow, the founder of "social medicine," was sent by the German government to report on the causes of a devastating 1848 typhus epidemic. Instead of recommending the simple solution of more doctors and more hospitals to avoid catastrophic loss of life in the future, Virchow called for full employment, universal education, and agricultural cooperatives as the path to preventing future epidemics. He analyzed the root causes of the epidemic, and called for a fundamental reconstruction of society to create conditions in which people could be healthy.

If Virchow were with us today, it's likely that he would be horrified by the idea of building 10,000 beds for prisoners who are extremely frail or mentally ill, people whose incarceration couldn't possibly serve public safety. He would no doubt want us to put our resources into sentencing reform, releasing low-risk prisoners, redirecting our state budget towards universal healthcare, quality public education, training and employment opportunities, and expanding drug treatment. In short, we should be ensuring the conditions in which people can be healthy as the basis for safe communities.

If Californians continue to pour billions into massive incarceration, it will mean more pink slips to school teachers, more children turned away from their doctors, more seniors denied in-home aid, more families forced into poverty and homelessness. What will it take to bring health care to California prisoners? It'll take a new way of looking at crime and punishment, a fundamental shift in our priorities and a commitment to social equity as the foundation for public safety. Bricks and mortar can't solve this one.
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=052dc71bc4ce373b68987e05bdcea735

Posted by lois at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

Critical Solutions Upgrades the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Renewable Energy Towers With Latest Technology

PRESS RELEASE
Critical Solutions Upgrades the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Renewable Energy Towers With Latest Technology
Next Generation Wind Turbines and Solar Panels Are Upgraded and Installed On Previously Sold Units

Last update: 8:01 a.m. EST Dec. 4, 2008
CLEVELAND, Dec 4, 2008 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) -- Critical Solutions Inc. (Pink Sheets:CSLI), through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Critical Power Solutions International, successfully upgraded two units previously sold to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) by installing the next generation of renewable energy power systems. The mobile towers systems were field upgraded with the latest solar and wind power technologies.

The two units have been reengineered with upgrades to the renewable power systems in a joint effort between the Company's technical staff and personnel at the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The towers are currently located at two separate BOP locations within the United States and are being utilized for remote site surveillance and communications, as well as crowd and prisoner control.
Critical Power Solutions International's ( www.criticalsolutions.net) alternative energy towers allow for the deployment of a totally integrated security system virtually on-demand. Without the need for grid power, the units are portable and are designed to be operational quickly and moved when necessary to provide the most rapid implementation available today. These characteristics make the units ideal for border security due to the relative lack of power near borders. Also, due to their non-reliance on petro fuel, the units are an ideal power alternative during natural disasters.
These towers have the unique ability to power a multitude of applications utilizing most wireless communications and security sensors. Current applications include surveillance, haz-mat, radiation and bio/chemical detection, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for asset management.
According to Patrick Gallagher, President of Critical Power Solutions International, "The Company is committed to using the most advanced 'green' technologies on its towers. By upgrading the power capability of the units they become even more reliable and efficient, two extremely important qualities of our towers. The latest generation of our unit is able to power the most advanced security and communication technologies."
About Critical Solutions Inc.
Critical Solutions Inc, through its wholly owned subsidiary, Critical Power Solutions International, Inc., manufactures and sells a line of patent pending self-powered trailer systems that can be rapidly deployed to power physical security and communication requirements for areas where power is difficult to obtain, or where conventional power means are too expensive to deploy. The company utilizes non-traditional power sources such as solar, wind and hydrogen to provide efficient recovery, backup and primary power systems. The company's alternative energy trailer systems have been chosen by a FORTUNE 500 defense contractor to secure nuclear power plants, by the Federal Bureau of Prisons for Emergency Response Teams, and by the Marines for emergency communications.
The Critical Solutions Inc. logo is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=4852
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This release includes forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, the impact of competitive products, the ability to meet customer demand, the ability to manage growth, acquisitions of technology, equipment, or human resources, the effect of economic and business conditions, and the ability to attract and retain skilled personnel. The Company is not obligated to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this release.
This news release was distributed by GlobeNewswire, www.globenewswire.com
SOURCE: Critical Solutions Inc.
ZA Consulting Inc.
Investor Contact
(212) 505-5976
pressreleases@za-consulting.net
(C) Copyright 2008 GlobeNewswire, Inc. All rights reserved. End of Story
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Critical-Solutions-Upgrades-Federal-Bureau/story.aspx?guid={11BE19CE-DEF6-4BE3-948B-A216149A9A21}

Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

December 04, 2008

College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

December 3, 2008
College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.
By TAMAR LEWIN
NY Times

The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.

“When we come out of the recession,” Mr. Callan added, “we’re really going to be in jeopardy, because the educational gap between our work force and the rest of the world will make it very hard to be competitive. Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.”

Although college enrollment has continued to rise in recent years, Mr. Callan said, it is not clear how long that can continue.

“The middle class has been financing it through debt,” he said. “The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt.”

But low-income students, he said, will be less able to afford college. Already, he said, the strains are clear.

The report, “Measuring Up 2008,” is one of the few to compare net college costs — that is, a year’s tuition, fees, room and board, minus financial aid — against median family income. Those findings are stark. Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income.

The share of income required to pay for college, even with financial aid, has been growing especially fast for lower-income families, the report found.

Among the poorest families — those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent — the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families’ median income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000.

The likelihood of large tuition increases next year is especially worrying, Mr. Callan said. “Most governors’ budgets don’t come out until January, but what we’re seeing so far is Florida talking about a 15 percent increase, Washington State talking about a 20 percent increase, and California with a mixture of budget cuts and enrollment cuts,” he said.

In a separate report released this week by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the public universities acknowledged the looming crisis, but painted a different picture.

That report emphasized that families have many higher-education choices, from community colleges, where tuition and fees averaged about $3,200, to private research universities, where they cost more than $33,000.

“We think public higher education is affordable right now, but we’re concerned that it won’t be, if the changes we’re seeing continue, and family income doesn’t go up,” said David Shulenburger, the group’s vice president for academic affairs and co-author of the report. “The public conversation is very often in terms of a $35,000 price tag, but what you get at major public research university is, for the most part, still affordable at 6,000 bucks a year.”

While tuition has risen at public universities, his report said, that has largely been to make up for declining state appropriations. The report offered its own cost projections, not including room and board.

“Projecting out to 2036, tuition would go from 11 percent of the family budget to 24 percent of the family budget, and that’s pretty huge,” Mr. Shulenburger said. “We only looked at tuition and fees because those are the only things we can control.”

Looking at total costs, as families must, he said, his group shared Mr. Callan’s concerns.

Mr. Shulenburger’s report suggested that public universities explore a variety of approaches to lower costs — distance learning, better use of senior year in high school, perhaps even shortening college from four years.

“There’s an awful lot of experimentation going on right now, and that needs to go on,” he said. “If you teach a course by distance with 1,000 students, does that affect learning? Till we know the answer, it’s difficult to control costs in ways that don’t affect quality.”

Mr. Callan, for his part, urged a reversal in states’ approach to higher-education financing.

“When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better funded, we raise tuition as little as possible,” he said. “When the economy is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least afford it. That’s exactly the opposite of what we need.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 4, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about the increasing cost of higher education gave an incorrect context for two figures: the 439 percent increase in college tuition and fees and the 147 percent increase in median family income since 1982. Those figures were not adjusted for inflation. The error was repeated for the data in an accompanying chart. A corrected chart appears at nytimes.com/national.

The article also described incorrectly the report for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education that cited the figures. It is produced every other year, not annually.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html?emc=eta1

Posted by lois at 06:54 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Want to know the real reason the law-and-order set backs mandatory-minimum sentencing? They get their pockets lined by the 'prison-industrial complex.'

Freedom watch: Jailhouse bloc
Want to know the real reason the law-and-order set backs mandatory-minimum sentencing? They get their pockets lined by the 'prison-industrial complex.'
By HARVEY SILVERGLATE AND KYLE SMEALLIE | December 3, 2008

With aromatic puffs of change, Bay State stoners rejoiced on Election Day. But even the haziest of revelers may have missed the full significance of Question 2, a statewide ballot initiative to decriminalize marijuana possession in small amounts. Not only will this bring more humane and responsible marijuana laws, it will also suppress — however slightly — an insidious, contemporary offshoot of what President Dwight Eisenhower famously referred to as the "military-industrial complex": the idea that if private industry and government joined in promoting ever-increasing defense spending, war as well as national bankruptcy were more likely.

Almost a half-century later, that mindset has extended to both the local and federal law-and-order sectors, which have argued for, and experienced, virtually unabated growth. Today, law-enforcement groups regularly lobby against criminal-punishment reforms, and for the creation of new criminal statutes and overly harsh prison sentences. While these efforts are cloaked as calls for public safety, they are essentially creating more business for themselves.

The problem has become so widespread that some private correctional corporations — companies that subcontract services, and even privately owned jails and prisons, to all levels of government — have even lobbied the government to enact and maintain ever broader criminal laws and higher sentences. Those private prisons are now rolling in the profit, and taking on more prisoners every day as federal and state prisons run out of room to house their inmates.

But these lobbyists' success — and that of various law-enforcement groups — has given rise to a veritable "prison-industrial complex" that not only uses fear to suppress these groups' true intentions — it leaves taxpayers footing the bill.

Bleak house of detention
It was with these self-aggrandizing interests in mind that the Massachusetts Districts Attorneys' Association (MDAA) and other tough-on-crime groups fiercelyopposedthe marijuana-decriminalization referendum.

After all, if the penalties for minor marijuana possession were to remain on the statute books, more police, prosecutors, prison guards, and parole officers — and their lucrative overtime — would also be retained.

To their dismay, however, Question 2 passed by an overwhelming 65 to 35 percent voter margin, and will be implemented 30 days after election results are certified. As a result, many law-enforcement officials may soon be without an important source of job security and additional revenue — namely, the $30 million a year (as one study by a Harvard economics professor estimated) spent enforcing the soon-to-be-history current marijuana-possession laws.

Never mind that the forthcoming statutory reform is, from even a moderate law-and-order perspective, relatively benign. According to Question 2, anyone caught with less than one ounce will forfeit the substance and pay a $100 fine, while minors will additionally have to complete a drug-awareness program (including group sessions and community service). Current penalties for growing and trafficking in marijuana, as well as the prohibition against driving while high, will remain exactly as they are.

These facts were conveniently left out of the MDAA's efforts to "inform" voters.The group could not legally make direct contributions to ballot campaigns — publicly funded groups are unable to do so, thanks to a 1978 Supreme Judicial Court decision — yet in opposing Question 2, it still managed to fuel a whisper campaign and add misleading info to its Web site (hosted, by the way, on the state's ".gov" domain).

Thus, these law-enforcement officials were able to avoid any technical wrongdoing while lobbying for an increased legislative arsenal — feathering their own nests at the expense of liberty and sensible public policy.

Bear in mind, though, that our First Amendment protects not only speech, but also "the right of the people . . . to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." So state and local law-enforcement personnel, like other citizens, do have the right to lobby voters and even members of the legislature to promote more expansive criminal laws and stricter penalties. But self-serving lobbying and public-relations offensives, disguised as seeking protections for society, should be treated with exceptional scrutiny and skepticism.

Though disheartening, their actions are an age-old fact of life best described by Charles Dickens in his classic 1853 novel Bleak House: "The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself."

Coke vs. crack
A similar battle waged in Massachusetts last summer, when law-enforcement groups sought once again to thwart criminal-justice reform. At the time, a legislative effort to help nonviolent offenders find employment opportunities by changing Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) laws was brought before the State House of Representatives — and, thanks to the efforts of state Attorney General Martha Coakley and other law-enforcement officials, essentially squashed.

The proposed bill would have restricted the type of personal information that some employers receive, thereby assisting the many individuals saddled with CORI records who struggle to find employment and end up back behind bars.

Massachusetts's recidivism rates are nearly 40 percent, according to a study by the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center. And the CORI law's branding of even the most innocuous offender is, by all accounts, partly responsible for this dismal situation. So advocates of the bill asserted that changing CORI could ease the massive overcrowding at the state's prison system, which the Department of Corrections recently estimated to be operating at "144 percent of capacity." (Currently, there are 12,000 inmates imprisoned — a disgraceful state record.)

Another aspect of that same failed bill would have reduced mandatory-minimum sentences for certain drug offenses, which advocates said also contribute to overcrowding.

As the law stands, anyone convicted of selling drugs within 1000 feet of a school zone automatically receives a two-year prison term — leaving no room for judicial discretion. That means a first-time offender with no record could receive more prison time than, say, an armed robber. And the mandatory nature of these sentences eliminates the possibility of parole.

Because of the numerous schools in dense urban areas, poor, black, and Hispanic populations are at a greater risk of facing the mandatory-minimum measures, according to a recent Prison Policy Initiative study.

Yet despite the clear inequalities in the current law, as well as the benefits that reform holds out to both taxpayers and public safety — not to mention liberty — the legislative term ended in July with no action taken on the reform legislation.

This problem with drug sentencing is nothing new. For more than two decades, prison-reform supporters have condemned the federal sentencing disparities for the mostly middle and upper-class defendants caught using cocaine, and the mostly lower-class, inner-city habitants caught with cheaper crack cocaine.

Part of the now-infamous war on crime, a 100-to-1 ratio was implemented in sentencing for crack cocaine. So, a person caught selling five grams of crack received the same prison sentence as someone dealing 500 grams of powder cocaine.

The mandatory-minimums were harsh, too. That same person caught selling five grams of crack received a five-year minimum sentence; 50 grams or more and the minimum was 10 years.

Despite clear racial, economic, and cultural disparities, cries from constituents fell on deaf ears while law-enforcement lobbyists successfully cajoled and frightened congressional leaders.

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, for one, strongly opposed reducing the crack-cocaine minimums. The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), a 325,000 member national organization that bills itself as "the voice of our nations' law-enforcement officers," also spent $550,000 lobbying Congress over the past three years. Among their interests: stopping the Powder-Crack Cocaine Penalty Equalization Act, along with promoting a litany of other Draconian measures.

Prison business
To be fair, government employees weren't the only ones to lobby against crack-cocaine sentence equalization. A little-recognized subset of this vast prison-industrial complex lobbying community is composed of private correctional corporations, which sign lucrative contracts with governments to house inmates for profit, often shipping them to facilities out of state.

It is, of course, in these private prisons' economic interests to see more people in prison serving longer sentences. And with current facilities bursting at the seams, times for this burgeoning industry are good. The country's largest private prison provider, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), spent more than $2.7 million from 2006 through September 2008 on lobbying for stricter laws. Last year alone, the company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, generated $133 million in net income.

For the past 25 years, the CCA has built itself into a corrections powerhouse — it operates nearly 70 facilities housing more than 75,000 detainees. As it does for, say, contractors in Iraq, though, privatization comes with an inevitable lack of oversight. The CCA has been involved in numerous wrongful-death lawsuits, and it has been a constant target of prison-reform groups who claim the private facilities are understaffed and their detainees abused.

Yet another private prison provider, the GEO Group, which has annual revenue topping $1 billion, has come under intense scrutiny for dozens — if not hundreds — of inmate deaths in the past decade. One such prisoner death led to the recent indictment of Vice-President Dick Cheney on November 18, in which a rather ornery Texas state prosecutor claimed that Cheney's substantial investments in the GEO Group made him partly responsible for prisoner abuse — a dubious prosecutorial theory (in fact, it was dismissed this Monday), but with a grain of practical truth.

Nonetheless, states facing prison overcrowding turn to these corporations to outsource inmates. California, for example, has commissioned the CCA to ship convicts as far away as Tennessee (where financially strapped relatives and friends frequently cannot visit). The CCA has exported nearly 4000 California prisoners to states across the country under a $115 million contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Over the next three years, 8000 more are planned to be shipped out of the Golden State.

The societal costs — both human and financial — of these policies and practices are enormous, and growing. California — which carried a $15.2 billion deficit into this fiscal year — spends $10 billion per year on more than 170,000 inmates. Like the Bay State, California also faces high recidivism rates; state records show that more than two-thirds of released inmates return to prison within three years. In this context, a ballot battle — possibly more contentious than Massachusetts's Question 2 scuffle — raged this past election season. Two separate initiatives, each from vastly different perspectives, concerned the state's approach to criminal justice.

The first, Proposition 5, would have expanded treatment programs for those convicted of drug-related and nonviolent crimes. While the costs for more rehabilitation were estimated at $1 billion a year, analysts said $2.5 billion would have been saved from the reduction in prison costs. But, much like what transpired in Massachusetts, the California District Attorney's Association, along with other law-enforcement agencies, vehemently opposed the initiative. These agencies raised nearly $400,000 and, through the Web site of their umbrella group, People Against Proposition 5, issued "facts" such as "Proposition 5 creates an 'Express Lane' for drug dealers to get back on the streets and peddling dope to our kids."

Conversely, nearly $1 billion would have been added to the cops' coffers under Proposition 6, which proposed new laws for prosecutors to fight gang activity. Many of the same law-enforcement agencies that opposed Prop 5 supported Prop 6, joined by some "tough-on-crime" lawmakers who slashed $3 billion in education from the state's 2008 budget. Included among the Prop 6 supporters was — you guessed it — the CCA.

The CCA's lobbying efforts, as well as those of publicly funded law-enforcement agents, wasn't enough to convince Californians, as nearly 70 percent of voters opposed Prop 6. Yet similarly high numbers opted against Prop 5.

Maybe the cops' Prop 6 push for more crime-fighting money and power were too transparent for voters. Interestingly, though, their appeals to public safety in opposing Prop 5 seemed to work. California voters were quite possibly unaware that, by maintaining strict criminal laws and closing off alternatives to incarceration, law-enforcement agencies maintained their strength.

The 1 percent solution?
From Niccolò Machiavelli to Rudy Giuliani, fear has been the foundation of ever-expanding political power (and, for some, job status and security). And it continues to drive the prison-industrial complex.

Just as the United States Department of Justice was able to pressure Congress to enact the infamous USA-Patriot Act in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, here in the Bay State, an appeal to fear ("protect the children") prevailed in stampeding the legislature. In late July, Governor Deval Patrick signed into law "An Act Further Protecting Children," a bill providing stricter mandatory-minimum sentences for sex offenders who target children.

The way this legislation was presented made opposition appear callous and irresponsible. Who, after all, wouldn't want to keep child predators off the streets?

Yet tucked away in this bill are provisions that do far more than simply protect the young. The proposal enables prosecutors to obtain private records from Internet and telephone providers by issuing an "administrative subpoena." Prosecutors, having only to assert that records are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation," were granted ever-expanding access into otherwise personal data. The telecoms, in turn, were granted blanket immunity from claims of privacy violation. There was no mass protest from the customers.

But at least one person did object. Newton's Democratic state senator Cynthia Creem voiced skepticism in a July 29 Newton TAB op-ed. Mindful that the most egregious provisions of the Patriot Act have been used to target not just terrorists but journalists, activists, and Muslim charities, she wrote: "I cannot support this attack on privacy rights when less-invasive and equally effective means are available. Our liberties should never be sacrificed in the name of prosecutorial convenience." A few other scattered voices in the State Senate echoed Creem. But perhaps Creem's reference to "convenience" missed the point — prosecutorial power appears to have been the more likely goal.

When the bill was passed by the Massachusetts House and presented to the Senate, Coakley, having learned that other politicians were questioning the bill's scope, lobbied hard so that no language would be changed (which would have required passage again through the House). With robust MDAA support, as well as the backing of key legislative leaders, 11 different role-call votes for amending provisions of the bill were voted down. Less than two weeks after this truncated debate, the bill became law. Experienced observers of the legislative process marveled at the ability of Coakley and her allies to forestall changes to the legislation.

The United States — "land of the free" — has five percent of the world's population, but it also, thanks to the lobbyists and officiants behind the prison-industrial complex, shamefully holds 25 percent of the world's incarcerated. It has a higher rate of imprisonment than the planet's most notorious despotisms. One in 100 Americans is in jail.

These citizens are not only unproductive, they cost the public $45 billion a year, according to a June report by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. And yet they also keep a small army of officers and other law-enforcement support personnel on the job. The monumental taxpayer's tab that would be unnecessary with saner criminal-justice laws is virtually incalculable.

It is long past the time to re-think how much credence we should give to those who claim to be experts in law enforcement, but who, in reality, have simply discovered a steady and ever-increasing source of job security.
Topics

Their First Amendment right to lobby for endless new criminal laws and ever-tougher prison sentences is indeed constitutionally protected, but this does not mean that these law-enforcement officials' criminal "expertise" should endow them with a free pass from critical scrutiny. Legislators and the public need not sit by idly as their fellow citizens are unjustly arrested, prosecuted, and often incarcerated for increasingly lengthy periods of time as the law-enforcement industry's wallet grows fat. The next time prison-industrial-complex adherents tell us we need tougher laws and sentences for our own good, we should point out precisely whose good is being served.

Harvey Silverglate is a criminal defense and civil-liberties lawyer and writer. Kyle Smeallie, former associate editor of the Boston College Heights, is Silverglate's research assistant and paralegal. Silverglate's next book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is forthcoming next year from Encounter Books.
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/73092-Freedom-watch-Jailhouse-bloc/

Posted by lois at 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

December 03, 2008

MA: Gov. Patrick Taps Judge Grants fro SJC opponent of mandatory minimums

Patrick taps Superior Court judge Gants for SJC
By Kyle Cheney/State House News Service
Mon Dec 01, 2008, 01:12 PM EST

Boston, Mass. - Gov. Deval Patrick on Monday nominated Superior Court Judge Ralph Gants, an opponent of mandatory minimum sentences, to the Supreme Judicial Court.

The appointment of the 54-year-old Gants is Patrick's second nomination to the SJC and, if confirmed by the Governor’s Council, will fill the post of outgoing justice John Greaney, scheduled to leave the bench Monday.

Gants was appointed to the Superior Court by Gov. William Weld in 1997, when Gants was a partner at Palmer and Dodge. He was confirmed unanimously by the Governor's Council. Gants also served as assistant U.S. attorney from 1983 to 1991, eventually heading the Public Corruption Division.

"I joined the Public Corruption Unit around 1987 and focused then on crimes of bribery and other crimes of dishonesty by public servants and those who seek to corrupt them," he wrote in a 1997 state questionnaire required for judicial applicants.

The nomination of a judge with anti-corruption credentials comes at a time when several prominent elected officials or in state and local government are under ethical or criminal investigation. One of them, former Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, received a $100 donation from Gants in April 1994.

Gants previously served for two years as a special assistant to former FBI Director William Webster.

As a Superior Court judge, Gants ruled on several high profile cases, requiring more scrutiny of a controversial Boston University biolab and, in 2001, and ruling unconstitutional a state government practice of weeding out certain employees with criminal records and disqualifying them from employment.

In 2005, Gants ruled that then-Insurance Commissioner Julianne Bowler had overstepped her authority by creating an Assigned Risk Plan for high-risk drivers.

Earlier this year, Gants rejected an effort by Rep. Carl Sciortino to get his name on the primary election ballot after the Somerville Democrat claimed his nomination signatures were stolen from his State House office.

On his 1997 judicial questionnaire, Gants wrote that he supports incarceration, “where the criminal conduct is severe ... especially if it involves an intent to commit serious physical or emotional injury ... regardless of the criminal history of the defendant or the prospects for rehabilitation.”

He also wrote that the use of mandatory minimum sentences “breeds unfairness” and can result in unnecessarily harsh punishments.

On the questionnaire, he also came out in favor of “routine” cost-of-living increases for judges.

The state's Office of Campaign and Political Finance has no record of Gants making political contributions, unlike many of the governor's previous judicial nominees. On his 1997 judicial questionnaire, Gants reported the $100 donation to Wilkerson. He also contributed $200 to Sen. Ted Kennedy's campaign in 1994, $100 to Sen. George Bachrach’s Congressional campaign in 1996 and several other Democrats, in and outside of Massachusetts.

Bachrach, who attended the press conference, told the News Service that Gants’s clarity in writing would make him an asset to the court.

“The hallmark of Judge Gants’s work is that he believes fundamentally that as important as it is that justice is done, that the public perceives that justice is done,” he said. “He has become one of the very best writers on the court. He believes that it’s very important that the public be able to read court decisions and understand that they’re good decisions and that justice was done.”

Patrick called Gants’s writing “prolific.”

Bachrach said he was a classmate of Gants’s at New York’s Mamaroneck High School, where Gants was the president of the student government – “a leader even then.”

“We’re really good friends – over 30 years,” Bachrach said. “I’ve followed his career every step he’s taken from the federal prosecutor’s office, to Palmer and Dodge, to the Superior Court.”

The Patrick administration announced its press conference at 8:45 this morning, after the Boston Globe reported that Gants would be the governor's choice.

At the press conference, Gants offered few clues into how he would approach his new role, except to say he would draw on the lessons he learned from his long legal career and from his family. His body swayed as he spoke behind a podium, and his wife beamed at his side.

Asked how he would like people to remember him when his tenure on the bench ends, Gants said he would “like for them to think that I respected the role of the Legislature and attempted to serve the purpose of legislation. I would like them to think that I respected the constitution, interpreted it as a living being, not a dead letter. I would like them to think that I never revised the facts to simplify a legal case.”

Patrick praised Greaney, who he said “has served the commonwealth wisely for more than two decades.” He said he had spoken with Gants about his approach to deciding cases, but that they did not discuss specifics.

The governor also expounded on his own philosophy for the judiciary.

“I don’t have a litmus test,” he said. “I’m looking for people who respect the role of the Legislature and the constitution and understand in the case of constitutional issues that that document was not written for just one generation. It was written to be timeless.”

Patrick said understanding those principles requires “in addition to a strength of intellect, an understanding of how the world actually works and the importance of the ability of trial courts and individuals and companies and others to apply those rulings.”

http://www.wickedlocal.com/belmont/news/x776465990/Patrick-taps-Superior-Court-judge-Gants-for-SJC

Posted by lois at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)

Review: Feel the Real Cost of Prisons by Paul Buhle

Feel the Real Cost of Prisons
by Paul Buhle

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix. Edited by Lois Ahrens, with comic art by Kevin Pyle, Sabrina Jones, and Susan Willmarth. Oakland: PM Press, 96pp, paperback, $12.95.

The Real Cost of Prison Comix. This remarkable book is the political proof and artistic expression of what has become a key movement for prisoners in the United States. As a book, it is beautiful and genuinely entertaining in its own right, the veritable launching pad of a new artistic/political press. As an organizing tool, it is perhaps a great deal more.

Comic art fans will probably know the names of the artists already. The three are associated, long since, with World War 3 Illustrated, the annual comic of artists committed to struggle against war, ecological devastation, and the gentrification of their own neighborhoods. Sabrina Jones, graphic biographer of modern dancer Isadora Duncan, seems on the verge of iconic status. Susan Willmarth and Kevin Pyle are fellow tillers in the fields of art and politics, known best for works reaching out to young people.

They and the scriptwriters of these stories grew into the role of prison condition chroniclers. As Lois Ahrens explains in her introduction, she set out years ago to explore the dread meanings of mass incarceration on a scale that overwhelms even the numbers of the Russian gulags and assorted Siberian exiles going back to Czarist days. And more profit-producing! The numbers of prisoners -- which leaped forward in the Reagan years from a few hundreds of thousands to millions, eventually soaring to an astonishing 2.3 million men and women, one in every 32 adults in jail or on parole -- stagger the imagination. How did it happen? What does it mean? Ahrens' initial work, producing small-sized comic books and a Web site that allowed anyone to download comic-educational material, placed her in the little-understood comic art world of activists for literacy, health education, welfare rights, and associated causes, adopting comics to their own purposes for the very pragmatic reasons that their constituents could read comics . . . and learn from them, in ways that no other medium could allow them.

Ahrens advanced her cause and her understanding through workshops where she and her collaborators did more listening than speaking and were driven further into research. She and Ellen Miller-Mack, a nurse-practitioner and anti-prison activist, began to write scripts for comics. They hardly needed to dramatize the truth; the facts were melodramatic enough. The comic books, inexpensively produced, sold out almost immediately -- they were not only appreciated but needed. Dozens of prisoners became their own spokespeople, telling stories that artists could bring to comics.

Kevin Pyle draws "Prison Town: Paying the Price," about the ways in which the struggling economy of blue-collar America becomes wrapped up in the necessity for more prisons and more inmates. Sabrina Jones treats the drug issues in "Prisoners and the War on Drugs," the drugging of the economy and society many times over, with the close attention to the intertwined histories. Susan Willmarth's "Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children" is, if possible, more heart-wrenching that the other tales, with more information and insight on the subject than a studious New York Times feature and a lot more empathy for the victims, too, the combination which makes the truth revealed in it all the more damning for the system that benefits from the suffering doled out to those who can least effectively resist.

Quite a package, all in all, and a promising start for PM Press.

Paul Buhle currently a lecturer in history and American civilization at Brown University, is author or editor of twenty-seven books on radicalism, labor, and popular culture, including five volumes on the films of the Hollywood blacklistees. Most recently, he coedited Wobblies: A Graphic History (2005) and The New Left Revisited (2003), winner of an American Library Association's Choice Academic Book Award. He has written for The Nation, Times Higher Education Supplement, The Guardian, and the Journal of American History, among others. He founded the journal Radical America (1967-95), the Oral History of the American Left project (New York University), and the Community and Labor Oral History project of Rhode Island.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/buhle021208.html
The book can be ordered at
(https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=48).

Posted by lois at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77

December 3, 2008- NY Times
Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77
By TIM WEINER

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.

The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.

Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in the quest to end racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks, the woman who started the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. She replied, “All of the songs Odetta sings.”

Odetta sang at the march on Washington, a pivotal event in the civil rights movement, in August 1963. Her song that day was “O Freedom,” dating to slavery days: “O freedom, O freedom, O freedom over me, And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free.”

Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life.

“They were liberation songs,” she said in a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word.” “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die, or insist upon your life.”

Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles. Three years later, Odetta discovered that she could sing.

“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.”

She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.

“The folk songs were — the anger,” she emphasized.

In a 2005 National Public Radio interview, she said: “School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music.”

In 1950, Odetta began singing professionally in a West Coast production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” but she found a stronger calling in the bohemian coffeehouses of San Francisco. “We would finish our play, we’d go to the joint, and people would sit around playing guitars and singing songs and it felt like home,” she said.

She began singing in nightclubs, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair.

Her voice plunged deep and soared high, and her songs blended the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” resonated with an audience hearing old songs made new.

Bob Dylan, referring to that recording, said in a 1978 interview, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He said he heard something “vital and personal,” and added, “I learned all the songs on that record.” It was her first, and the songs were “Mule Skinner,” “Jack of Diamonds,” “Water Boy,” “ ’Buked and Scorned.”

Her blues and spirituals led directly to her work for the civil rights movement. They were two rivers running together, she said in her interview with The Times. The words and music captured “the fury and frustration that I had growing up.”

Her fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and performed for President John F. Kennedy. But after King was assassinated in 1968, the wind went out of the sails of the civil rights movement and the songs of protest and resistance that had been the movement’s soundtrack. Odetta’s fame flagged for years thereafter.

In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded Odetta the National Endowment for the Arts Medal of the Arts and Humanities.

Odetta was married three times: to Don Gordon, to Gary Shead, and, in 1977, to the blues musician Iverson Minter, known professionally as Louisiana Red. The first two marriages ended in divorce; Mr. Minter moved to Germany in 1983 to pursue his performing career.

She was singing and performing well into the 21st century, and her influence stayed strong.

In April 2007, half a century after Bob Dylan first heard her, she was on stage at a Carnegie Hall tribute to Bruce Springsteen. She turned one of his songs, “57 Channels,” into a chanted poem, and Mr. Springsteen came out from the wings to call it “the greatest version” of the song he had ever heard.

Reviewing a December 2006 performance, James Reed of The Boston Globe wrote: “Odetta’s voice is still a force of nature — something commented upon endlessly as folks exited the auditorium — and her phrasing and sensibility for a song have grown more complex and shaded.”

The critic called her “a majestic figure in American music, a direct gateway to bygone generations that feel so foreign today.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/music/03odetta.html?_r=1&hp

Posted by lois at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2008

TN: CCA Faces Scrutiny After Man Dies in Jail

Friends and comrades:

Yet another prisoner has died in the solitary confinement unit in the Metropolitan Nashville Detention Facility (MNDF). Terry Battle, a Black prisoner, died in June '08, and his case was only disclosed over the Thanks-taking holiday, in the Nov. 28th edition of the Nashville Tennesseean. This is the 13th prisoner to die at this facility to die from criminal medical neglect or physical abuse by guards since 2000. No one has been prosecuted in any case, due to collusion and cover-up by state, local and federal officials. The article is below.

Lorenzo Komboa Ervin
Power to the People
Nashville, TN.
powertonashvillepeople@gmail.com

CCA faces scrutiny after man dies in jail
Family says death was preventable

By Chris Echegaray • THE TENNESSEAN • November 28, 2008

The nation's largest private prison operator is under scrutiny again — this time from the relatives of a man who died of pneumonia while incarcerated in a Metro jail in Nashville.

Terry Battle, 55, suffered from hepatitis C, hypertension, gastroenteritis and blindness when he was in the custody of Corrections Corporation of America beginning in March 2007, his autopsy showed. Guards found him unresponsive in his cell June 3, a day after he'd been to see the prison doctor for a bout of diarrhea. The medical examiner said the cause of death was pneumonia.
Advertisement

His family was stunned. They hired David Randolph Smith, a Nashville attorney, to investigate Battle's death and the circumstances that derailed his chance for freedom.

"It's really hard to accept when something like that is treatable," said Battle's sister, Tammy Williams. "You could only imagine the suffering from not getting proper treatment. The mind tends to run wild. We can imagine him suffering and not able to eat or breathe."

Louise Grant, spokeswoman for CCA, said she was not aware of Battle's death, as with most deaths attributed to natural causes. Grant declined to comment in light of possible litigation.

Nationwide, Nashville-based CCA has faced criticism, lawsuits and complaints for its practices. The death of Estelle Richardson in July 2004, also at the jail on Harding Place, prompted the first public outcry about CCA's treatment of prisoners.

Richardson's death also shed light on what mentally ill inmates have faced at CCA facilities. Locally, a man didn't leave his cell or shower for nine months at the CCA-run detention center. Another lost part of his ear during an altercation.

In Texas, the treatment of detained immigrant families in CCA facilities triggered national coverage, with the ACLU fighting for more humane conditions.

Battle also was fighting for humane conditions — he had a pending complaint in federal court that stated a maximum-security inmate walked out of his cell unguarded and attacked Battle. Because of Battle's death, the complaint was dropped.

Battle was serving a six-year sentence for theft of property. He had a series of theft and auto burglary charges but was redeemable, his family said. Battle learned fluent Spanish during his incarceration and wanted to work as a translator after his release, Williams said.

"He had really seen the light," she said.

Battle became an ordained minister and a de facto advocate for inmates, teaching them how to research their cases, Williams said. Family would visit and buy him items he would later turn around and give to inmates who didn't have much.

"He always shared what he had," Williams said. "He was the one who would give his shirt off his back. The inmates were glad when my mom would visit. They knew he would later give his items away."
Inmate close to family

Battle grew up in North Nashville, attending Pearl High School. He was second of eight children. His sister said he was a bright, intelligent student who made poor decisions later and had straightened out.

Battle called his mother at least two times a day. The week he died, he complained about his illness to his family, but they never heard whether he'd received medical attention.

He was found unresponsive in a medical segregation cell and taken to Southern Hills Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. There were no signs of foul play and no sign of drug history, according to the autopsy.

The family decided to have Smith investigate. Smith has interviewed more than a dozen prisoners, trying to retrace what happened the days leading to Battle's death.

"The fact is that inmates don't have the ability to help themselves if they are sick," Smith said. "It's like a child or an elderly person who is infirm. They can't get to the doctor. We are trying to see why he died in prison."

Battle was slated for a parole hearing this month, according to the Tennessee Department of Correction.

Posted by lois at 04:33 PM | Comments (0)

NY: A new tack on drug policy could save the state billions

A new tack on drug policy could save the state billions
Posted by The Readers' Page
November 30, 2008 5:00AM

By Gabriel Sayegh

While New York reels from the most severe budget crisis since the Great Depression, Gov. David Paterson and the Legislature are scrambling to close ever-expanding deficits. So let's stop spending over $500 million every year on ineffective, wasteful policies like the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

These laws represent a misguided and ineffective regime for addressing drug use and addiction -- health issues, not criminal issues. Imagine if we incarcerated people for being addicted to cigarettes, or for having diabetes.

Passed in 1973, the laws mandate harsh, mandatory-minimum prison terms for even low-level drug offenses; people convicted of first- and second-time drug offenses often receive eight to 20 years. There are shocking, inexcusable racial disparities -- more than 90 percent of the people incarcerated are black or Latino, though whites use and sell illegal drugs at equal or higher rates.

These laws did not stop the crack epidemic of the 1980s. They are completely incapable of stemming the accidental drug overdose epidemic hitting New York City and Long Island today. And they have turned the Department of Corrections into the state's largest, most costly and ineffective treatment provider.

The state spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year on policies that both criminal justice and public health experts -- as well as the majority of New Yorkers, according to the polls -- say don't work. It costs over $35,000 a year to keep someone in prison. Factor in policing and court costs, and that number rises to nearly $50,000.

Lawmakers, do the math: There are nearly 14,000 people incarcerated under these laws. Meanwhile, spending on community-based drug treatment is pitifully low, and is facing cuts in this economic crisis.

Recent DOC figures show the slight reforms made to the Rockefeller Drug Laws in 2004 and 2005 saved the state at least $90 million. That doesn't include additional savings from related parole reforms. Meanwhile, crime in the state has gone down.

Conservative estimates of savings from Rockefeller Drug Law repeal are around half-a-billion dollars -- much higher once court and policing costs are factored in.

With crisis comes opportunity. A governor who as Senate minority leader engaged in civil disobedience to protest the failed Rockefeller Drug Laws could promote a smarter, more effective, cost-efficient approach: Re-invest a portion of the savings from repeal in prevention, community treatment, harm reduction, alternative-to-incarceration programs and related services. The state would still save hundreds of millions in the short term, billions over the long term, and we could finally stop trying to incarcerate our way out of this problem.

This process is already under way. Earlier this year, the six Assembly committees held historic joint hearings to begin outlining a public health approach to drug policy. Experts explained New York had the required programs and services largely in place -- only appropriate funding is needed.

The governor should follow President-elect Barack Obama's fiscal advice: Cut what doesn't work, keep what does. Given the abysmal failure of the "war on drugs," a public-health approach is both long overdue and fiscally prudent.

Gabriel Sayegh is a policy director at the Drug Policy Alliance, based in Washington, D.C.
http://blog.syracuse.com/opinion/2008/11/a_new_tack_on_drug_policy_coul.
html

Posted by lois at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

IN EPIC FISCAL STORM, NEW STRATEGIES RISE

"There's an oft-neglected candidate: corrections. Because of politically motivated mandatory sentencing legislation, prisoner rolls have been growing rapidly, reaching world-leading shares of the total population.

Complains Maricopa County, Ariz., Manager David Smith: "We have 40,000 felony cases yearly and corrections costs us $819 million! We built a very large big new jail, and it's full again. We're going broke slowly with this criminal justice system." "

IN EPIC FISCAL STORM, NEW STRATEGIES RISE
November 30, 2008
By Neal Peirce

WASHINGTON -- The recession is driving America's city governments into an epic fiscal storm. Unlike earlier downturns, all three big revenue sources -- income, property and sales taxes -- are falling together. Cumulative budget shortfalls are already in the tens of billions and rising.

Among America's 87,500 governments, only Washington can print money. In a pinch, the only real option for cities and states is to spend less -- thereby taking money out of the economy and deepening a recession. With more than 20 million employees, 14 percent of the total American work force, states and cities are a significant part of the total national economy.

This recession seems sure to be so serious, say urban finance experts, that many cities will be forced to go well beyond their familiar tight-times reductions in park and library budgets. A growing possibility: to cut into that historically inviolate sector -- police officers and firefighters.

Together, police and fire operations consume the lion's share of most local budgets. And the fire operations represent the most wastefully managed part of local government, according to municipal experts who spoke as a panel at a National Academy of Public Administration meeting last week.

A leading critique: three-man crews on fully rigged fire trucks rushing to the scene of all alarms, all but a tiny fraction of which -- given modern wiring, sprinklers and other fire-prevention techniques -- turn out to be false.

Equivalent safety results, say the municipal critics, could be accomplished by dispatching one firefighter in a single car to an alarm scene, rapidly summoning major-scale equipment and crews when there's a truly serious fire emergency.

In fire departments that offer emergency medical care, 80 percent of the budget is spent on the 20 percent of the activity that's actual fire suppression, said John Shirey of the California Redevelopment Assn.

Another panelist added: "The one thing that exceeds the inefficiency of fire departments is the political power of the fire unions."

The most logical step would be merging of police, fire and emergency services, with all personnel cross-trained. Fire and police unions won't hear of such multitasking. But in a prolonged, tough recession, resistance could weaken.

In Vallejo, Calif., public safety spending got so out of hand that the city declared bankruptcy in May. And small wonder -- police captains are paid more than $200,000. After five years of service, Vallejo public safety officers and their families get lifetime health coverage. And after working 30 years, it's 90 percent of last pay for life -- all benefits unthinkable in the world of fast-disappearing defined-benefit pensions that most tax-paying citizens face.

Another headache for cities and states: the erosion of the pension funds they have invested in to pay future retiree benefits. Before the recession, many funds had serious unfunded liabilities. Now declining stock values -- 20 percent in both California and Virginia pension funds, for example -- are impacting harder. The investment payback most localities had assumed -- around 8 percent a year -- now looks chimerical. And they know they face a mega-wave of retiring baby boomer workers, meaning a rising tide of retirement benefit demands.

The nation's municipal bond markets -- relied on by states and localities to even out revenue flows or finance capital projects -- are now virtually shut down. Yet it's not municipal lending that triggered the national financial havoc of the last several weeks, notes Shirey. He appropriately blames the shenanigans of the private financial sector, with the major national credit rating agencies asleep at the switch. Municipalities rarely default, but they are having to take a big part of the hit, obliged to streamline and economize as never before.

How to do it? There's an oft-neglected candidate: corrections. Because of politically motivated mandatory sentencing legislation, prisoner rolls have been growing rapidly, reaching world-leading shares of the total population.

Complains Maricopa County, Ariz., Manager David Smith: "We have 40,000 felony cases yearly and corrections costs us $819 million! We built a very large big new jail, and it's full again. We're going broke slowly with this criminal justice system."

So Smith has launched a major prisoner re-entry program in South Phoenix, a 10-block area with 300 ex-felons and people still on parole. "We call it the $50 million ZIP code," he says, because of the costs the criminal justice system incurs there. Smith has co-located 15 services for homeless people in the area, partnering with churches and nonprofits. The program: help released prisoners get identification, find needed services, put some money in their pockets if they stay out of trouble, and find jobs.

The same approach, applied to corrections nationally, could likely save stunning sums over time. It's needed more than ever in tough times.

Redrawing borders and merging some city and county governments, going "green" with energy-saving fuels and carbon-conserving buildings -- all sorts of ideas, too controversial for normal times, may now have their day.
In dark times, it won't all be bad news.

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

December 01, 2008

Nick Montos Oldest Prisoner in MA dies without receiving a commutation

Dear Boston Globe Editor:

Nick Montos, purportedly the oldest prisoner in Massachusetts, died yesterday (11/30/08) at the age of 92. He was incarcerated at MCI Norfolk. Since the summer of '08 fellow prisoners at Norfolk had been waging a "free Nick Montos campaign" to assist him in his petition for commutation of sentence so that he could live out his final days with his sister in Florida. Several hundred people from throughout Massachusetts signed petitions in support of Mr. Montos' bid for mercy in light of his failing health. The State failed to act soon enough to the formal request he filed in October 2008.
Although Mr. Montos did not achieve his goal of freedom to live and die with his family, he engendered lots of care and support from people on both sides of the wall. Further, his campaign may pave the way for much needed policy to enable frail and elderly prisoners who are not a danger to society to live out their final days in peace.

Nancy W. Ahmadifar, Ph.D.
Boston, MA 02114

Posted by lois at 10:19 PM | Comments (0)