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February 28, 2009

Essay: Read a Book, Get Out of Jail

Essay: Read a Book, Get Out of Jail
By LEAH PRICE
Published: February 26, 2009
NY Times Book Review 12-1-09

In a scuffed-up college classroom in Dartmouth, Mass., 14 people page through a short story by T. C. Boyle. They debate the date at which the action is set: when was the Chevy Bel Air released, and what was the drinking age in New York State that year? They question moral responsibility: when the three friends in the Bel Air assault a girl, should peer pressure be blamed for their impulse, or hormones, drink, sin? To which the man at the head of our table rejoins: “There’s a kind of complexity to human experience that isn’t always recognized. You try to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong, but sometimes both are wrong, right?”

Of the 14 people, a dozen are male. One is an English professor, one is a graduate student, two are judges and two are probation officers. The eight others are convicted criminals who have been granted probation in exchange for attending, and doing the homework for, six twice-monthly seminars on literature. The class is taught through Changing Lives Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program that allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club. At each two-hour meeting, students discuss fiction, memoirs and the occasional poem; authors range from Frederick Douglass to John Steinbeck to Toni Morrison, topics from self-­mutilation and family quarrels to the Holocaust and the Montgomery bus boycott.

Robert Waxler, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and the man at the head of the table, founded the reading program in 1991 with Superior Court Judge Robert Kane and Wayne Saint Pierre, a probation officer; since then, it has expanded to eight other states. Led by literature professors, the program has brought thousands of convicts to college campuses even as the withdrawal of Pell grants from prisoners (who were ruled ineligible for federal college financing in 1994) drove a wedge between the two state-funded institutions where young adults do time. Meanwhile, rehabilitative reading has spread from Waxler’s original all-male seminar to similar women-only and mixed-sex groups, to one-time experiments like the seminar on “The Road Not Taken” to which a Vermont judge last year sentenced 28 young partyers who broke into Robert Frost’s old house, leaving a trail of booze and vomit. Picture “Remembrance of Things Past” as a literary ankle bracelet that keeps you chained to the desk for months.

The terms Waxler uses at the opening session have one foot in literary criticism and another in psychotherapy: “exploration,” “ambiguity,” “journeying.” But new-age gerunds give way to old-fashioned imperatives when the professor hands off to the probation officer: good cop, bad cop. Or rather, ambivalent cop.

“I don’t want to be all negative,” the officer begins, “but you have to read this book.” Not as in “This is a must-read,” but “We’ve had people go to jail for not reading.”

Any schoolchild knows there’s nothing new about required reading. But since the Vietnam draft ended, college professors like me have rarely had the obligation, or the opportunity, to hand bad students over to the secular arm. One instructor, Terri Hasseler of Bryant University in Rhode Island, pauses to search for a euphemism before explaining that “it’s a condition of their . . . situation that they have to do the reading.”

Changing Lives Through Literature looks less exotic when you remember how many probation sentences require attendance at 12-step programs. There, too, stories provide a catalyst — with the difference that in Waxler’s program, the narratives belong to fictional characters, not to participants themselves. Here, oversharers are politely cut off; one man whispers the rest of an autobiographical anecdote to the guy next to him, another waits for the break. Yet the professor talks of “working through,” and as I listen to the words students use to describe literary characters, it’s hard not to hear echoes of time spent in rehab: “He made some bad choices.” “She hadn’t figured out a healthy way to deal with the problem.” “He hit bottom before he realized that it just wasn’t him.”

Oprah’s Book Club has taught us all to reduce (or elevate) books to prompts for cathartic discussion of childhood traumas, relationship conflicts and self-esteem deficits. Like Oprah’s reading list, the program’s canon is dominated by fiction and memoir. But the demographics of the program differ substantially from your average book club, which is disproportionately white and even more disproportionately female and middle-class. Even without uniforms, it’s easy to tell who’s a student and who’s an official. The course depends, however, on suspending those differences. “The stories serve as a mirror for everyone,” Waxler told me, “not just the offenders ­— the professors, the probation officers, the judge.” The average court official is more literate than the average convict, but not necessarily more literary: for the judge, too, classroom discussion can be a revelation.

Reading has always provided a lifeline for prisoners, whether for utilitarian purposes or for spiritual searching. (In 2006, when Beard v. Banks upheld a prison’s right to deny inmates access to printed matter, religious and legal texts were among those excepted.) A broader literary tradition stretching from medieval English dream visions to Solzhenitsyn’s novels situates the most intense and uninterrupted reading in prison. (Waxler points out that “cell” can refer to the space in which monks write as easily as to a room in jail.) Traditionally, books have offered virtual escape from physical confinement. In alternative sentencing programs, though, books provide a more literal alternative to incarceration; and the authorities’ job is not to censor books, but to supply them.

It’s easy to dismiss the program as utopian, or worse. Waxler reports being berated by parents paying college tuition for the same classes that felons receive free. If the program works, its economic logic is unassailable: running it costs roughly $500 a head, Waxler says, as opposed to about $30,000 for a year of incarceration. But that’s a big if. The most conclusive study, which shows program participants achieving half the recidivism rate of a control group, involved fewer than 100 people. More important, the literacy level needed to participate makes its population a self-selecting one, and even among those students with the skills to participate, many never make it to the final session. On the day I attended, one man missed class because his halfway house had imposed lockdown, another because a new conviction had landed him back in jail.

“Poetry,” W. H. Auden once wrote, “makes nothing happen.” But Waxler insists that “literature can make a difference” — more specifically, that lives are touched by printed art as they can’t be by the act of sitting around a table arguing about a movie, a song, a self-help book or one’s own childhood. The probation officer begins by telling participants that “this program isn’t a miracle,” but it works in mysterious ways. Perhaps reading stories allows participants to form narratives (whether conscious or not) about their own past and future. In a study of more traditional 12-step programs, the criminologist Shadd Maruna has argued that recovery from addiction requires the ability to distinguish a “before” from an “after.” Searching for terms to explain the mechanism by which literature “changes” readers, participants come up with “turning points,” “epiphanies,” even “grace.” “When it’s working,” Waxler says, “this discussion has a kind of magic to it.”

There’s nothing surprising about the idea that certain books teach lessons, whether the Bible or “The Last Lecture.” Here, though, the medium becomes the message: the act of reading changes — or, as we used to say, converts — the reader, even when the texts being read contain no explicit moral injunctions. Like Sunday school pupils, graduates of Changing Lives Through Literature are given a book along with their diploma. It hardly matters that the traditional leatherette Bible is replaced by a sleek black volume from the Library of America.

Leah Price is a professor of English at Harvard and the author of “The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel.”
Here's the link to Changing Lives Through Literature: http://cltl.umassd.edu/home-flash.cfm
Next Article in Books (20 of 24) » A version of this article appeared in print on March 1, 2009, on page BR23 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Price-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&8bu&emc=bub1

Posted by lois at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)

KS: Stimulus Money Could Keep Prison Open

2/28/2009
Stimulus money could save local prison
By DAVE SEATON
Publisher
Winfield Daily Courier

A new state budget being put together by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius may take the Winfield Correctional Facility off the chopping block.

Kansas Secretary of Corrections Roger Werholtz told a Cowley County task force Friday the governor's revised budget contained $40.5 million in stimulus money for corrections in fiscal year 2010.

"If that's the budget the Legislature adopts," Werholtz said, "I think Winfield's off the radar."

Werholtz said he hoped D cell block at the Winfield prison would remain closed for about six months. The cell block was tabbed for closure in April to save money in fiscal year 2009, which ends June 30.

"We're trying to do things that will allow us to get back to where we came from," Werholtz said.

Some $40.5 million in stimulus funds for corrections are expected to go into the governor's revised fiscal 2011 budget as well, according to Werholtz. Equal amounts will be backed out each year into the state general fund, he said.

The stimulus funds will fill the gap in the 2010 budget and allow the Department of Corrections to avoid closing prisons at Winfield or Norton in the coming year, Werholtz implied. Kansas may receive a total of $1.7 billion in stimulus money over two years.

It is unclear just what might happen to the state budget beyond fiscal 2010.

"I feel like we're all flying blind," said Sen. Steve Abrams, R-Arkansas City.

Abrams, along with Reps. Kasha Kelley, R-Arkansas City, and Ed Trimmer, D-Winfield, were present as Werholtz met the task force of nine local leaders in his department's offices in Topeka Friday afternoon.

WCF Warden Emmalee Conover opened the discussion, recounting events since cuts were made in the department's current budget by the governor and the Legislature.

With the stimulus money, cuts for the coming fiscal year could be held at 10 percent of the governor's budget proposal submitted in January, Werholtz said. This would not save satellite prisons at Toronto nor Stockton, day reporting centers in Wichita and Topeka, nor an addiction therapy program at Osawatomie, he said.

At 10 percent, the El Dorado North unit could close and a number of programs for inmate re-entry and community support could be lost, Werholtz said. Only if cuts reached 18 percent would the prisons at Winfield and Norton be closed, he said.

Heidi Hill, director of the Cowley First economic and community development agency, organized the trip to Topeka and the presentation there. She spoke in support of keeping WCF open, striking a theme of partnership between the community and the prison.

Also speaking were Warren Porter, Winfield city manager; Steve Archer, Arkansas City manager; Marvin Estes, superintendent of Winfield schools; Mick Roark, manager of Northern Contours, an employer of WCF inmates; and Dotty Smith, Arkansas City commissioner.

Werholtz expressed gratitude for the task force visit.

"What I'm grateful for is just the fact that you have come out and shared that information," he said.

Werholtz invited Hill to send a letter of support for the Winfield facility.
http://winfieldcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=29088

Posted by lois at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)

Tamms: Illinois' highest-security prison a study in isolation

From the Los Angeles Times
Illinois' highest-security prison a study in isolation
The state's most dangerous inmates live with sparse human contact, no jobs and little chance for education at Tamms.
By Gary Marx

February 28, 2009

Reporting from Tamms, Ill. — A few times a week, Joseph Dole stands in a back corner of the outdoor recreation area at Tamms Correctional Center, straining to catch a ray of sunlight.

"About four feet gets sun," said the rail-thin Dole, who is serving a life sentence for murder. "You can only get it if they call yard between 11 and 1. I just stand there. You feel warm, you feel refreshed."

Another murderer, Adolfo Rosario, said he hadn't shaken anyone's hand since his transfer to Tamms 11 years ago. "There is no contact at all, none," he said.

"The hardest part is the isolation," said Tyrone Dorn, serving time for carjacking. "It's like being buried alive."

The so-called supermax section of the prison was built in the 1990s to house Illinois' most dangerous inmates. Human-rights activists persistently criticize it. The long isolation of supermax prisons, opponents say, drives inmates to mental illness -- when the inmates aren't already ill.

Legislation introduced last week in Illinois would prohibit the seriously mentally ill from being sent to Tamms' supermax incarceration and would make it more difficult to keep inmates there indefinitely.

The state Department of Corrections opened up this world to a reporter and photographer for the first time in years, allowing them a glimpse at life for the 245 supermax inmates.

Harsh conditions

For at least 23 hours a day, prisoners are in solitary confinement in 7-by-12-foot cells. Meals are shoved through a hole in cell doors.

For the rare visits from relatives and friends, inmates are strip-searched, chained to a concrete stool and separated from visitors by a thick glass wall.

There are no jobs and limited educational opportunities.

Inmates tell of using "fishing lines" fashioned from string in blankets to pass notes to other inmates and of developing a sign language to talk to each other.

Some observers liken Tamms' supermax to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Prison officials hail it as a success. Assaults against inmates and staff at other prisons have dropped, they say, because the most disruptive offenders are in Tamms.

Officials note that Tamms' supermax sector has been at just half its capacity during its 11 years, saying they've been selective about who is housed there.

Tamms -- which also includes a 200-bed minimum-security unit -- costs $27 million a year to run. That's about $60,000 for each inmate, almost triple the state average.

"What price do you put on staff safety?" asked Sergio Molina, executive assistant to the state prison director.

Psychiatric unit

A dozen supermax prisoners -- the most mentally ill, with disorders including schizophrenia and manic depression -- stay in a section called J-Pod.

(Some prisoners outside J-Pod also are prescribed psychotropic drugs.)

J-Pod inmates who behave well get to watch TV from glass cages about the size of phone booths. On journalists' recent visit, four were watching as the sitcom "One on One" blared.

"They love Rachael Ray," said Rita Lehkar, an activity therapist. "She has a real bubbly personality. . . . Next week they are going to watch the movie 'Lost in Space.' "

In one cage was child rapist John Spires, who says he hears voices telling him to hurt himself and others.

He is serving a 240-year sentence at Tamms.

"I'm OK with that," Spires said.

"That way I know I won't hurt anyone.

"I get tired of hurting people."

Even critics praise the care at J-Pod, but they say mentally ill inmates shouldn't be at Tamms, because the isolation is harmful.

One inmate attempted suicide several months ago.

Another prisoner, Marcus Chapman, hung himself in 2004 by braiding pieces of his jumpsuit.

"Tell all the guys on J-Pod I'm sorry!" Chapman wrote in a suicide note, court records show.

"I just couldn't take it anymore. I'm now free."

'Can't do anything'

Upstairs in a tower, corrections officer Patrick Trokey sits at an electronic board that controls 60 cell doors.

When he worked at Pontiac, a maximum-security prison, "I was scared," he said.

"Here, these guys are secure. They can't do anything."

Inmates, sensing a crowd of visitors in the control tower, began to shout.

"Come down here and learn the truth!" one inmate yelled.

"They don't clean the showers! They just cleaned them for the first time yesterday in six months because you guys are coming here!"

Many prisons resemble small towns, as inmates hustle to jobs or classes, play hoops in the yard or head to the chow hall.

Tamms' corridors are barren of foot traffic, eerily quiet except for the occasional clang of metal doors shutting. When inmates are moved, they are restrained in leg chains and handcuffs and guarded by two officers.

Critics say the dearth of educational programs and jobs should worry the public. More than a quarter of Tamms inmates are to be freed within a decade.

Stays are long

While acknowledging that a few inmates need to be held in the strictest conditions because they are so dangerous, critics contend most prisoners could be safely housed at one of the state's three maximum-security prisons.

Yet more than a quarter of the inmates have been at Tamms since its opening in 1998.

Even George Welborn, its first warden, said Tamms had abandoned its original goal to keep most inmates for no more than a couple of years.

Before he retired several years ago, Welborn said superiors sometimes didn't follow his recommendation to transfer out inmates who had passed muster.

"And that policy has been maintained since I left," he said.

Prison officials said even well-behaved inmates need to remain at Tamms if they continue to hold sway over a street gang or pose a threat.

Molina contended that officials regularly reviewed whether inmates should remain at Tamms.

Since 2005, officials said, 66 inmates have been moved to less restrictive prisons.

For longtime inmates at Tamms, the biggest challenge is to stay busy and avoid "bugging out" -- losing touch with reality.

Dorn, who was transferred to Tamms after prison assaults, passes the time reading the Koran and playing chess with an inmate housed upstairs in the same wing.

They shout out moves to each other.

"This place takes a toll on your entire body from a mental and physical standpoint," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-illinois-prison28-2009feb28,0,4430105.story

Posted by lois at 10:53 AM | Comments (0)

Pres. Obama Revives COPS Hiring Program- 50,000 more police

Stimulus funds new police officers
By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY
Feb 26, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is reviving a controversial Clinton-era police hiring program, and the lack of restrictions on the money has critics warning of wasteful spending.

The stimulus package loosens the old rules for the program by dropping a provision that required police agencies to pay millions in local dollars to tap federal hiring grants. It gives police agencies nearly unfettered access to $1 billion over three years for hiring up to 6,000 officers as many departments face cuts.

That money is part of an overall effort, unveiled in Obama's budget proposal Thursday, to fund 50,000 new police officers. The budget does not specify a timeframe or cost, and Justice Department documents say rules for the broader program will be released later.

Some criminal justice analysts say the rules in the stimulus package don't require enough commitment from local agencies and that the program offers a potentially false promise that more police lead to less crime.

"No matching funds mean no accountability," says David Muhlhausen, a justice policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "This is giving away free money." He says there was "no conclusive evidence that the grants helped decrease crime" during the initial program.

Craig Uchida, a former Clinton official who helped oversee the program, says the matching funds made cities "accountable" because they invested their own money. Police agencies had to pay 25% of all new officer salaries and benefits for the three-year federal grant period. "Our view was, let's not give (recipients) a free ride," he says.

Justice Department spokesman Corey Ray says the stimulus money could begin flowing to agencies within weeks and save some from layoffs that threaten public safety.

He says the bad economy makes the change necessary because the old rules blocked some cash-strapped agencies from participating, and the need for help is even greater now. The police grants, along with other stimulus spending, will get extra scrutiny by administration auditors, he says.

The original Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, championed by Vice President Biden while he was in the Senate, provided funding for more than 100,000 officers.

The Justice Department's own audits of the program alleged millions of dollars were misspent and thousands of jobs funded by the grants were never filled. In one case, a New Mexico tribe got $728,125 to hire eight extra officers. After the department closed in 2002, auditors said it was unclear where the money went or whether anyone was hired.

Ray says the problems related to the original program involved a small number of agencies.

Police groups, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), have tried to resurrect COPS since the Bush administration shut it down after 9/11, when U.S. funds were shifted to homeland security.

Under Clinton, COPS was designed to battle a spike in violent crime. Gene Voegtlin, the IACP's legislative counsel, credits COPS with helping to spur the subsequent crime decline. Yet some cities that did not accept the money, such as Oklahoma City, reported equal declines to those that did.

The Obama program is being rolled out as crime has declined in much of the past decade, including 2007, the most recent year measured by the FBI.

A study released in January by the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank, found nearly half of the 233 police agencies surveyed linked recent increases in criminal offenses, such as robberies, to the economy.

Leslie Paige, spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, says the new grant program is a "give-away" that postpones needed change.

"Local governments need to learn how to live on smaller budgets and figure out what we need to jettison, including law enforcement," she says.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-02-26-cops2_N.htm
This and other news relating to mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

WI: News Republic Editorial: Time to cut state prison population?

Baraboo News Republic (WI)
Sauk County's Daily Newspaper
Saturday, February 28, 2009

News Republic Editorial: Time to cut state prison population?

With our national, state and local economies circling the bowl, legislators at all levels of government are looking to repair the damage and put us back on the road to prosperity.

Nationally, of course, there is President Barack Obama's much-scrutinized $787 billion stimulus plan.

Obama and his Democratic majority in Congress believe their venture is a bold, brilliant, can-do, must-do vehicle that will move people back to work and drive us out of the recession before it morphs into The Great Depression, Part II.

In our state of Wisconsin we have a man with his own budget and some novel ideas tucked between the numbers.

And one of Gov. Jim Doyle's proposals — targeting Wisconsin's prison system — has the big dogs in the state's GOP barking that our state leader is soft on crime. Here's why:

Felons could earn earlier extended supervision, probation for minor crimes would be eliminated and real-time tracking for some sex offenders could end under Doyle's broad-brush changes to Wisconsin's prison policy.

Heard over the roar of Republican carping, Rick Raemisch, the state's corrections secretary, said these moves should ease the crowding in our prisons and better prepare convicts for life after incarceration.

Raemisch said the moves should generate substantial savings for the state, which faces a $5.7 billion shortfall by mid-2011.

States have been pondering alternatives to incarceration for 10 years. At least a half dozen, including California and New York, are considering early release to lessen costs.

Raemisch, of course, was appointed by Doyle so no one should be surprised that he supports the boss's agenda.

"We have a saying — never waste a crisis," Raemisch said. "Some things people wouldn't look at before, they'll take a hard look at now. ... The days of locking people up and forgetting they're in prison are over."

Republicans, the loyal opposition, called Doyle's deal soft on crime.

"It's a let 'em loose early plan," said state Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford. "To sacrifice public safety to save a few bucks, I find appalling."

Suder has a point if, indeed, early release of inmates puts the public in peril.

But when you compare our inmate numbers to the State of Minnesota, you have to wonder if we have too many people behind bars.

Wisconsin's prison population stands at more than 22,000. Minnesota has about 7,000 inmates. Is it because the Gopher State produces a better class of people? Of course not. (After all, let's not forget most of them are Vikings fans).

Or could it be, simply, that Minnesota's prison policy reflects the model Doyle is trying to duplicate.

Certainly, there is money to be saved. Our state prison system has more than 18 institutions and costs more than $1 billion per year. And we've been struggling with overcrowding for years.

According to Raemisch, each inmate costs the state about $29,000 a year to keep caged.

A report released in January found Wisconsin's facilities are in decay. It recommended more than $1.2 billion in upgrades over the next decade, including nearly 9,000 new beds to cope with the crowd of convicts.

But Doyle's budget would reduce the inmate population and also the need for upgrades.

Under the Doyle deal:

* Prisoners could earn "positive adjustment" days for good behavior, and become eligible for extended supervision earlier. Inmates convicted of serious felonies, such as homicide and child sexual assault, wouldn't be eligible for the program.

* Inmates on extended supervision would be able to earn good behavior days, allowing them to finish their sentences sooner. That could mean an estimated 3,000 inmates, according to Raemisch.

* Probation for nonviolent offenders convicted of misdemeanors would be eliminated. Raemisch said about 7,000 offenders could qualify.

* Corrections would decide whether serious sex offenders need real-time GPS tracking after a year or if checking their movements once a day would be appropriate. State law requires real-time monitoring for the worst sex offenders.He said the plan would make work safer for guards by giving them fewer inmates to supervise, allowing them to focus on the most dangerous.

Raemisch said the initiatives would help offenders readjust to society by teaching them how to behave and follow the rules.

"This shouldn't, by any means, be considered opening up the back doors to the institutions or letting people that are violent back out on the streets," Raemisch said. "If I didn't think we could do this safely, I wouldn't be talking to the governor about it."

To be sure, saving money is not a valid reason to release dangerous criminals back into our communities. But if done carefully, as Raemisch promises, this might be a smarter option than long-term incarceration, which some believe fails to rehabilitate and often refines and refocuses the criminal inclination.

After all, if Minnesota can do this without putting its citizens in jeopardy, why can't we?
http://www.wiscnews.com/bnr/opinion/440872

Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2009

Citing Cost, States Consider End to Death Penalty

Citing Cost, States Consider End to Death Penalty
NY Times
By IAN URBINA
Published: February 24, 2009

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — When Gov. Martin O’Malley appeared before the Maryland Senate last week, he made an unconventional argument that is becoming increasingly popular in cash-strapped states: abolish the death penalty to cut costs.

Mr. O’Malley, a Democrat and a Roman Catholic who has cited religious opposition to the death penalty in the past, is now arguing that capital cases cost three times as much as homicide cases where the death penalty is not sought. “And we can’t afford that,” he said, “when there are better and cheaper ways to reduce crime.”

Lawmakers in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and New Hampshire have made the same argument in recent months as they push bills seeking to repeal the death penalty, and experts say such bills have a good chance of passing in Maryland, Montana and New Mexico.

Death penalty opponents say they still face an uphill battle, but they are pleased to have allies raising the economic argument.

Efforts to repeal the death penalty are part of a broader trend in which states are trying to cut the costs of being tough on crime. Virginia and at least four other states, for example, are considering releasing nonviolent offenders early to reduce costs.

The economic realities have forced even longtime supporters of the death penalty, like Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, to rethink their positions.

Mr. Richardson, a Democrat, has said he may sign a bill repealing capital punishment that passed the House last week and is pending in a Senate committee. He cited growing concerns about miscarriages of justice, but he added that cost was a factor in his shifting views and was “a valid reason in this era of austerity and tight budgets.”

Capital cases are expensive because the trials tend to take longer, they typically require more lawyers and more costly expert witnesses, and they are far more likely to lead to multiple appeals.

In New Mexico, lawmakers who support the repeal bill have pointed out that despite the added expense, most defendants end up with life sentences anyway.

That has been true in Maryland. A 2008 study by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan public policy group, found that in the 20 years after the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978, prosecutors sought the death penalty in 162 felony-homicide convictions, securing it in 56 cases, most of which were overturned; the rest of the convictions led to prison sentences.

Since 1978, five people have been executed in Maryland, and five inmates are on death row.

Opponents of repealing capital punishment say such measures are short-sighted and will result in more crime and greater costs to states down the road. At a time when police departments are being scaled down to save money, the role of the death penalty in deterring certain crimes is more important than ever, they say.

“How do you put a price tag on crimes that don’t happen because threat of the death penalty deters them?” said Scott Shellenberger, the state’s attorney for Baltimore County, Md., who opposes the repeal bill.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, an organization in Sacramento that works on behalf of crime victims, called the anticipated savings a mirage. He added that with the death penalty, prosecutors can more easily offer life sentences in a plea bargain and thus avoid trial costs.

But Eric M. Freedman, a death penalty expert at Hofstra Law School, said studies had shown that plea bargaining rates were roughly the same in states that had the death penalty as in states that did not.

“It makes perfect sense that states are trying to spend their criminal justice budgets better,” he said, “and that the first place they look to do a cost-benefit analysis is the death penalty.”

States are looking elsewhere as well.

Last year, in an effort to cut costs, probation and parole agencies in Arizona, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey and Vermont reduced or dropped prison time for thousands of offenders who violated conditions of their release. In some states, probation and parole violators account for up to two-thirds of prison admissions each year; typical violations are failing drug tests or missing meetings with parole officers.

As prison crowding has become acute, lawsuits have followed in states like California, and politicians find themselves having to choose among politically unattractive options: spend scarce tax dollars on expanding prisons, loosen laws to stem the flow of incarcerations, or release some nonviolent offenders.

The costs of death penalty cases can be extraordinarily high.

The Urban Institute study of Maryland concluded that because of appeals, it cost as much as $1.9 million more for a state prosecutor to put someone on death row than it did to put a person in prison. A case that resulted in a death sentence cost $3 million, the study found, compared with less than $1.1 million for a case in which the death penalty was not sought.

In Kansas, State Senator Carolyn McGinn introduced a bill this month that would abolish the death penalty in cases sentenced after July 1. “We are in such a dire deficit situation, and we need to look at things outside the box to solve our budget problems,” said Mrs. McGinn, a Republican. Kansas is facing a budget shortfall of $199 million, and Mrs. McGinn said that opting for life imprisonment without parole rather than the death penalty could save the state over $500,000 per capital case.

But skeptics contend that prosecutors will still be on salary and will still spend the same amount, just on different cases. In Colorado, lawmakers plan to consider a bill this week that would abolish the death penalty and use the savings to create a cold-case unit to investigate the state’s roughly 1,400 unsolved murders. While the police must continue investigating these cases, there is no money in the budget for that. A group of families who lost relatives in unsolved murders has lobbied lawmakers on the bill.

In Virginia, competing sentiments are evident in the legislature.

While lawmakers have proposed allowing prison officials to release low-risk offenders up to 90 days before the end of their sentences, citing a potential saving of $50 million, they are also considering expanding who is eligible for capital punishment to people who assist in killings but do not commit them and to people convicted of murdering fire marshals or auxiliary police officers who are on duty.

It is considered unlikely, however, that Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat who opposes capital punishment, would sign such a bill.

In 2007, New Jersey became the first state in a generation to abolish the death penalty.

That same year, a vote in Maryland to abolish the death penalty came up one vote short of passing. In December, however, a state commission on capital punishment recommended that Maryland abolish the death penalty because of the high cost and the danger of executing an innocent person.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 25, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/us/25death.html?scp=1&sq=In%20Push%20to%20End%20Death%20Penatly,%20Some%20States%20Cite%20Costs&st=cse

Posted by lois at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)

70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case

70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
NY Times
Published: February 26, 2009

More than 70 juveniles and their families filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against two former judges who pleaded guilty this month in a scheme that involved their taking kickbacks to put young offenders in privately run detention centers.

The suit contends that before resigning last year, the judges “used kids as commodities that could be traded for cash,” placing an “indelible stain” on the juvenile justice system of Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania.

The suit, filed in the Federal District Court in Scranton by the Juvenile Law Center, seeks to have all profits that the detention centers earned from the scheme placed in a fund that would compensate the youths for their emotional distress.

In an earlier filing, the law center, based in Philadelphia, asked the State Supreme Court to clear the records of all juveniles who appeared before the judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan.

The suit brought Thursday is the third filed on behalf of juvenile offenders. The two others, one of which also seeks class-action status, were filed by private lawyers.

Mr. Ciavarella and Mr. Conahan pleaded guilty on Feb. 12 to federal charges of wire and income-tax fraud for having taken more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to the two privately operated centers, run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

“Judge Ciavarella’s placement of so many children in juvenile facilities without regard for their underlying charges suggests a Procrustean scheme that violated one of the core principles of the juvenile justice system — the right to individualized treatment and rehabilitation,” Lourdes M. Rosado, associate director of the Juvenile Law Center, said in a statement.

Lawyers for the two former judges declined to comment on the suit.

As for the criminal investigation of court personnel, two additional people have already been charged, and federal officials say they may soon charge others involved in the scheme.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27judges.html

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

Re-Entry Policy Council: U.S. House of Representatives Approves Over $133 Million for Prisoner Reentry in FY 2009, Including $25 Million for the Second Chance Act

February 26, 2009

U.S. House of Representatives Approves Over $133 Million for Prisoner Reentry in FY 2009, Including $25 Million for the Second Chance Act

On February 25, 2009, the House of Representatives passed an omnibus appropriations bill for the remainder of fiscal year 2009, which includes funding for the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Health and Human Services. The omnibus bill (H.R. 1105) is now under consideration in the Senate. Democratic leaders hope to take action on this bill by the end of next week, as the continuing resolution currently providing funding expires on March 6, 2009.

The omnibus bill passed by the House includes funding for the following criminal justice priorities:

* $25 million for the Second Chance Act, including $15 million for state and local demonstration grants and $10 million for nonprofit grants
* $108,493,000 for Department of Labor ex-offender activities
* $10 million for the Mentally Ill Offender Treatment and Crime Reduction Act (which represents a $3.5 million increase over the FY08 appropriation)
* $532 million for the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program
* $30 million for the Byrne Competitive Grant Program
* $40 million for drug courts
* $400 million for the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP)
* $10 million for Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT)

The Justice Center will send out an update on the omnibus bill when it passes in the Senate.

President Obama Requests $75 Million for the Second Chance Act in FY 2010

In the preliminary budget for fiscal year 2010 released on February 26, 2009, President Obama requested $109 million for prisoner reentry programs, including $75 million for Second Chance Act programs. "I am indeed pleased that the President's proposed budget includes $75 million for Second Chance and I applaud him," said Second Chance Act sponsor Rep. Danny Davis (IL). "This investment of $75 million will bring tremendous returns. However, throughout the budget and appropriation processes, I shall be advocating and working for more."
More info at http://www.reentrypolicy.org/government_affairs/second_chance_act

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

February 26, 2009

The Scott Sisters: Two Life Sentences for 11 Dollars? By Anthony Papa

The Scott Sisters: Two Life Sentences for 11 Dollars?
By Anthony Papa
February 25, 2009

Talk about injustice. How do you wind up in prison serving two life terms for a robbery that netted 11 dollars? That question has haunted first time offenders Gladys and Jamie Scott for the past 15 years.

On December 24, 1993, Scott County Sheriff's Department in Mississippi arrested the sisters for an armed robbery they vehemently deny participation in. In 1994 they were convicted after being implicated in the crime by three young Black men who confessed to the robbery in exchange of a plea bargain that gave them 10 months. The sisters were not offered a plea and went to trial.

Time has passed slowly for these sisters as they watched from behind bars their five children grow into adults and mourned the lost of their father. They have felt the pain of exhausting all their legal remedies while being denied relief at every level.

According to Nancy Lockhart, M.J., a legal analyst who has worked tirelessly over the years to help set free the Scott sisters she says she will never forget the frigid Chicago morning when she opened a letter from Mrs. Evelyn Rasco, the mother of the Scott sisters. She told the story of her daughters and her plight to help free them. "How can they give my daughters two life sentences for a crime that netted 11 dollars where no one was injured?" This prompted Lockhart to become the Scott sister's lifeline for hope. She began a campaign to try freeing them.

The Scott Sisters challenged their convictions on direct appeal arguing that there was insufficient evidence to convict them and the guilty verdict was against the overwhelming weight of evidence, which should have exonerate them. The court of appeals found no error and affirmed the convictions on December 17, 1996. As a result, they filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari to the Supreme Court, which was denied on May 15, 1997. They consequently filed an Application for Leave to File Motion to Vacate Conviction pursuant to the Mississippi Post Conviction Collateral Relief Act. The Supreme Court also denied that application.

In 1998 one of the sentenced men signed an affidavit telling that the Scott sisters were not involved with the crime. The affidavit along with two others that pointed to the sister's innocence were secured by their attorney and submitted for post conviction relief. Then attorney Chokwe Lumumba submitted a request for commutation of sentence and/or pardon to the governor. It was subsequently denied.

Gladys and Jamie Scott have maintained their innocence. They have spent nearly 15 years in prison for a crime they did not commit that netted the sum of 11 dollars. It is time for them to join their families.

For more information about the Scott sister's case please go to: www.freethescottsisters.com.
The Committee to Free the Scott Sisters: 641-715-3900 Ext. 99222
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-papa/the-scott-sisters-two-lif_b_169468.html

Posted by lois at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

Justice Strategies New Report: Local Democracy on ICE: Why State and Local Governments Have No Business in Federal Immigration Law Enforcement

New Report from Justice Strategies (Feb 2009)
Local Democracy on ICE: Why State and Local Governments Have No Business in Federal Immigration Law Enforcement

Democracy on ICE 287(g) is a tiny provision in federal immigration law that allows Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to take local police away from their mission of fighting crime, and pull them into the murky territory of targeting immigrants for arrest without suspicion of crime. ICE described the 287(g) program as a public safety measure to target “criminal illegal aliens,” but its largest impact has been on law-abiding immigrant communities. Rather than focusing on serious crime, police resources are spent targeting day-laborers, corn-vendors and people with broken tail-lights. This report details findings from a year-long investigation of 287(g) by Justice Strategies, and recommends that the ICE program be terminated.
Copies of the report can be found at:
http://www.justicestrategies.net/files/JS-Democracy-On-Ice.pdf

Some coverage of the Report:

Los Angeles Times
Police not focusing on dangerous illegal immigrants, study says
Police officers empowered by a federal program to enforce immigration laws are instead arresting day laborers and street vendors, the report finds.
By Anna Gorman
February 26, 2009

A federal program that empowers local police to enforce U.S. immigration laws has failed in its promise to target illegal immigrants who pose a threat to public safety or national security, according to a study released today.

Instead of focusing on serious criminals, local law enforcement officers are arresting "day laborers, street vendors, people who are driving around with broken taillights," said Judith Greene, coauthor of the study by Justice Strategies, a New York-based nonprofit research organization focusing on humane and cost- effective approaches to criminal justice and immigration law enforcement.

At the same time, the costly enforcement program is diverting resources from local police and sheriff departments, the authors wrote. Many of the agreements are in cities where the crime rates are lower than the national average but had Latino population growth higher than the national average, they said.

There were more than 65 agreements between federal immigration officials and local law enforcement agencies across the nation and more than 950 officers had been trained by federal authorities as of late 2008, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

On the agency's website, the program is described as "one of the agency's most successful and popular partnership initiatives as more state and local leaders have come to understand how a shared approach to immigration enforcement can benefit their communities."

Locally, immigration authorities have partnerships with the Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino sheriff's departments. According to the immigration agency, the program -- known as 287(g) -- is credited with identifying more than 79,000 suspected illegal immigrants between January 2006 and late 2008. The majority of those have been screened at jails.

The best-known local-federal partnership is in Maricopa County, Ariz., where Sheriff Joe Arpaio has attracted headlines for his immigration enforcement tactics that have included marching illegal immigrant inmates in shackles from a local jail to a tent city. Lawmakers have called upon the U.S. attorney general to investigate the actions of Arpaio.

"Joe Arpaio has a media circus going on around him," said Aarti Shahani, coauthor of the study. "But there are mini-Joe Arpaios all over the place."

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has called for a review of the program.
----------------------

Arizona Republic
Experts call ICE program used by Arpaio a failure
by Daniel González
Feb. 26, 2009

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's continuing and controversial crackdown on illegal immigration and the federal program that lets him identify and arrest undocumented immigrants is a financial and public-safety failure, according to a new report.

The program, known as 287 (g), has been touted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a public-safety measure aimed at removing criminal illegal immigrants. But the Sheriff's Office and other participating agencies have focused on easy targets such as traffic violators and day laborers who pose little threat, says the report by Justice Strategies, a non-profit nonpartisan research group based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Arpaio defended his participation in the program, which he said has led to the identification of thousands of illegal immigrants.

Though ICE touts the nearly 8-year-old program as a money saver, Arizona taxpayers are footing a greater share of the bill for enforcing immigration laws, usually the responsibility of the federal government, according to the report to be released today. Enforcing immigration laws detracts local police from their primary job of fighting crime and keeping neighborhoods safe, the report says, and race, not crime, has fueled the program's growth in Phoenix and other areas of the country with growing Latino populations.

"It had enough time to prove itself, and it failed," said Aarti Shahani, a researcher with the Justice Strategies group who co-authored the report. "The immigration system is broken, and 287 (g) is not the way to fix it. It's like pouring water into a cup that is broken, and the water keeps leaking out. It isn't doing anything to solve the problem."

The report concludes by recommending that the Obama administration terminate the program, which was created under the Clinton administration but wasn't promoted until after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, under the Bush administration.

The report comes amid growing opposition to Arpaio's immigration crackdowns. The National Day Labor Organizing Network, Somos America and other pro-immigrant groups plan to hold demonstrations on Friday and Saturday in Phoenix and other parts of the country calling for an end to the crackdowns.

Less than two weeks ago, four key Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate complaints that since Arpaio signed a 287 (g) agreement with ICE in 2007, deputies have unconstitutionally used skin color to look for illegal immigrants as part of a series of crime sweeps and work-site raids. The four Democrats also asked for Napolitano, the former Arizona governor, to terminate Arpaio's agreement if any problems can't be fixed.

Arpaio this week sent a letter to the four Democrats, including U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, saying that his office is abiding by the agreement and inviting them to come see the program for themselves.

Despite the criticism, polls show that Arpaio's crackdowns have broad public support. In November, he was re-elected to his fifth four-year term.

Under the 287 (g) program, Maricopa County sheriff's deputies have arrested 1,434 people for immigration violations, often after they had been encountered by deputies investigating state crimes, Arpaio said.

Michael Keegan, a spokesman for Homeland Security, said the Justice Strategies report would be reviewed.

"The department takes very seriously any allegations of civil-rights abuses, and Secretary Napolitano is undertaking a broad review of all immigration programs, including the 287 (g) agreements," he said.

ICE credits the program with identifying more than 70,000 people suspected of being in the country illegally.

U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and author of the 287 (g) program, defended it.

"It is astonishing that anyone would want to end a successful, voluntary program that protects American communities from criminal illegal immigrants," Smith said.

-------------------------
Daily News
Ineffective raids should be ICE'd
Wednesday, February 25th 2009

The image of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an efficient institution carrying on a heroic struggle for national security has been tarnished.

A couple of weeks ago, a study by the Migration Policy Institute revealed that 73% of the people arrested since early 2008 in much ballyhooed ICE raids had no criminal records. Yet the flashy paramilitary operations were billed by the Homeland Security Department as carefully planned dragnets for dangerous "immigrant fugitives."

The truth, though, came out in the study: Raids do little to enhance national security or solve the immigration crisis.

Now, a report released today, "Local Democracy on ICE," arrives at a similar conclusion.

The report was conducted by Justice Strategies, a New York-based nonprofit research group that is "dedicated to more humane and cost-effective approaches to criminal justice and immigration law enforcement."

Aarti Shahani, the report's lead author, said, "We make the same underlying criticism [as the MPI study], but we are looking particularly at the fusion of federal immigration and local justice."

Shahani and her co-author, Judith Greene, who heads Justice Strategies, said the report is the result of an investigation of the so-called 287(g) program, which authorizes police, traffic cops and correction officers to arrest immigrants without cause.

Implemented under President George W. Bush, ICE justified 287(g) as a public safety program designed to get "illegal criminal aliens" off the streets. The new report reveals a different reality.

To begin with, Shahani said, there are 63 localities in the U.S.(the closest one to New York is in Hudson County, N.J.) where ICE has deputized officers, and 61% of the localities have crime rates that are lower than the national average.

"The statute is being applied to corn vendors and people with broken taillights," said Shahani who added that police already have the legal power they need to arrest anyone suspected of a crime.

It is precisely when they don't have reasonable suspicion of a crime that the 287(g) is applied, Shahani said.

It is very telling that ICE had given the largest and most powerful 287(g) contract to the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz. This is a man well known for blatantly racist actions like ordering indiscriminate street "sweeps" of Latinos without any evidence of criminal activity.

Yet ICE deputized 160 of Arpaio's men, adding them to the 200 officers deputized nationwide. It was the first time local enforcement officers were given the power to conduct searches, make street arrests, conduct investigations and issue detainersin jail.

"Sheriff Joe" happily summarized the added value of the 287(g) program like this: "When we stop a car for probable cause, [now we can take] the other passengers, too."

To top it all, the 287(g) program is, as Shahani put it, "a huge drain of tax dollars." It doesn't provide funds for implementation, and shifts massive immigrant detention costs to local governments, straining already crowded jails.

DESPITE ITS grandiose crimefighter pretensions, the 287(g) program's main target has been day laborers and traffic violators. These are the "criminal illegal aliens" routinely arrested by deputized officers without probable cause.

"The program is under scrutiny, and ICE needs to be held responsible for its failure to supervise and direct all local partners that has led to rampant abuse," Shahani said. "There is a real opportunity for it to be reined in or terminated."

The sooner the better.

Wednesday, February 25th 2009

The image of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an efficient institution carrying on a heroic struggle for national security has been tarnished.

A couple of weeks ago, a study by the Migration Policy Institute revealed that 73% of the people arrested since early 2008 in much ballyhooed ICE raids had no criminal records. Yet the flashy paramilitary operations were billed by the Homeland Security Department as carefully planned dragnets for dangerous "immigrant fugitives."

The truth, though, came out in the study: Raids do little to enhance national security or solve the immigration crisis.

Now, a report released today, "Local Democracy on ICE," arrives at a similar conclusion.

The report was conducted by Justice Strategies, a New York-based nonprofit research group that is "dedicated to more humane and cost-effective approaches to criminal justice and immigration law enforcement."

Aarti Shahani, the report's lead author, said, "We make the same underlying criticism [as the MPI study], but we are looking particularly at the fusion of federal immigration and local justice."

Shahani and her co-author, Judith Greene, who heads Justice Strategies, said the report is the result of an investigation of the so-called 287(g) program, which authorizes police, traffic cops and correction officers to arrest immigrants without cause.

Implemented under President George W. Bush, ICE justified 287(g) as a public safety program designed to get "illegal criminal aliens" off the streets. The new report reveals a different reality.

To begin with, Shahani said, there are 63 localities in the U.S.(the closest one to New York is in Hudson County, N.J.) where ICE has deputized officers, and 61% of the localities have crime rates that are lower than the national average.

"The statute is being applied to corn vendors and people with broken taillights," said Shahani who added that police already have the legal power they need to arrest anyone suspected of a crime.

It is precisely when they don't have reasonable suspicion of a crime that the 287(g) is applied, Shahani said.

It is very telling that ICE had given the largest and most powerful 287(g) contract to the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz. This is a man well known for blatantly racist actions like ordering indiscriminate street "sweeps" of Latinos without any evidence of criminal activity.

Yet ICE deputized 160 of Arpaio's men, adding them to the 200 officers deputized nationwide. It was the first time local enforcement officers were given the power to conduct searches, make street arrests, conduct investigations and issue detainersin jail.

"Sheriff Joe" happily summarized the added value of the 287(g) program like this: "When we stop a car for probable cause, [now we can take] the other passengers, too."

To top it all, the 287(g) program is, as Shahani put it, "a huge drain of tax dollars." It doesn't provide funds for implementation, and shifts massive immigrant detention costs to local governments, straining already crowded jails.

DESPITE ITS grandiose crimefighter pretensions, the 287(g) program's main target has been day laborers and traffic violators. These are the "criminal illegal aliens" routinely arrested by deputized officers without probable cause.

"The program is under scrutiny, and ICE needs to be held responsible for its failure to supervise and direct all local partners that has led to rampant abuse," Shahani said. "There is a real opportunity for it to be reined in or terminated."

The sooner the better.

--------------
Phoenix New Times
VINNIE'S BOO-BOO
Stephen Lemons
February 26, 2009


"WTF?!" That's what this ticked-off Toucan thought when he saw that local Immigration and Customs Enforcement flack Vinnie Picard was quoted in the paper of record as saying, "Arizona's 287(g) program is working as intended," and that there are no "firsthand" complaints of racial-profiling lodged with the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part.

Had Vinnie been smokin' the good ganja? Does the guy read the papers? Or does he just use them to roll himself a fat doobie?

Even if Picard never got around to perusing the ACLU's big lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio alleging all kinds of civil rights abuses, complaints regarding Arpaio's 287(g)-men — you know, the 160 MCSO deputies "cross-trained" by the feds as ICE agents — are as plentiful as frickin' poppies in Afghanistan these days.

The Bird figures you'd have to be doing your best King Oedipus impersonation to not see evidence that Arpaio's abusing his 287(g) powers. Maybe Vinnie never got his invite to Joe's 200 Mexican March earlier this month, where Arpaio segregated a passel of undocumented immigrants in their own separate Tent City, with its own electrified fence, marching them past a gantlet of shutterbugs from the Fourth Estate.

Though all of those poor saps were wearing striped shirts reading "UNSENTENCED" — meaning they were awaiting trial — they probably all had ICE holds on them, as Arpaio had identified them as illegal immigrants.

Why, that stunt has pissed off folks far and wide, from legislators in Mexico to the New York Times, which denounced the barbaric photo op and called on DHS to rein in Maricopa County's Bull Connor.

Arpaio's sick media event even awoke a sleeping giant, the U.S. Congress, in the form of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan and three other ranking Dems on the committee, who wrote a stern letter to Barack Obama's new attorney general, Eric Holder, and DHS chief, Janet Napolitano, telling them to get busy and investigate Arpaio's wrinkled ass.

But Picard must've missed all that, 'cause here he was spouting the party line, saying all was hunky-dory in Denmark — despite that rotten flounder smell. This feathered fiend decided to give the flack a call to give him a hard time about his bout with foot-in-mouth disease. But Picard's lips had been permanently sealed by his superiors on the issue of the 287(g) program, and he was referring all calls to one of his betters in D.C.

Picard did make clear, however, that this was a new policy, one that came after his statements to the local daily. So this peeved parakeet phoned ICE headquarters in D.C. The call was not returned.

ICE is sure sensitive all of a sudden. Aren't these the badasses who go around breaking up families, throwing dishwashers and day laborers in jail, treating moms and dads like they're thieves and killers? Big, tough hombres, eh? So tough, that at least under Arpaio's command, his 287(g) thugs wear black ski masks while they're pulling over little old ladies and gardeners for traffic violations.

Really, this heron's heart goes out to Picard and all the government flacks forced to rationalize the vile stuff ICE does on a regular basis in the name of immigration enforcement. The ones who should go down — whose careers should rightfully be ruined and who should be butt-kicked out of government service — are a-holes like Arizona ICE pooh-bah Matthew Allen, whose lips have been KrazyGlued to Joe Arpaio's keister since he scored the job early last year. And, of course, Allen's bosses in D.C.

In other words, Picard is just a PR flunky, albeit a polite one for the local press to deal with. The real evil in ICE is further up the food chain.

ICE ON FIRE

Thing is, even without Arpaio as its albatross, ICE is besieged nationwide with bad news, tales of misdeeds, and study after study arguing that the 287(g) program should be tossed like a used Tiparillo.

Examples of ICE eff-ups are popping up daily, in newspapers from sea to shining sea. Recently, the Baltimore Sun reported that the immigrant advocacy group CASA de Maryland obtained through the Freedom of Information Act a copy of an internal ICE document detailing an investigation into an ICE raid on a Baltimore 7-Eleven in 2007.

The ICE report contradicted statements from some ICE officers that they'd just happened to be grabbing a cup o' Joe at the 7-Eleven when they lucked upon a group of day laborers.

"The evidence revealed that the Fugitive Operations officers were ordered to seek additional arrests that day due to managerial pressure to produce statistics for Operation Return to Sender," said the ICE doc.

See, Operation Return to Sender is the name of a massive ICE dragnet that's stated intention is to collar criminal aliens, gangbangers, and such. Not the schmucks waiting for handyman work at the corner convenience store. The fact that ICE agents were pressured to essentially go out and grab every Mexican they could lay their hands on runs counter to ICE's propaganda on the subject.

On the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Times reports that an immigration judge recently tossed the case against alleged undocumented worker Gregorio Perez Cruz, pinched in an ICE raid of a Van Nuys, California company. ICE's goons failed to advise Cruz of his rights and deprived him of food and water for 18 hours while they interrogated him, forcing him to sleep on a concrete floor.

At least Cruz survived his detention. Lately, ICE's been having almost as many problems as Joe when it comes to prisoner deaths.

According to the Washington Post, ICE was forced to stop detentions at a county jail in northern Virginia after Guido Newbrough, a 48-year-old German immigrant who came to this country when he was 6 years old, died from "massive organ failure brought on by an untreated bacterial infection." This, after his jailers allegedly ignored his repeated requests for medical care.

At the beginning of February, the Associated Press ran a piece about how the widow of a Chinese immigrant is suing ICE for a death at a Rhode Island facility it contracts with.

"Hiu Lui 'Jason' Ng, a 34-year-old computer engineer accused of overstaying his visa, died of liver cancer in August," states the item, "weeks after being taken to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls [Rhode Island]. His cancer went undiagnosed until days before he died."

The Bird could go on and on and on. But ICE has more problems than just the dead stacking up like cordwood. Both ICE and its vaunted 287(g) program are under barrage from various think tanks for xenophobic, ineffective, and inhumane practices.

The Pew Hispanic Center just published a study pointing out that, in 2007, "Latinos accounted for 40 percent of all sentenced federal offenders, more than triple their share of the total adult U.S. population." The reason? Immigration convictions are up 24 percent, and 80 percent of those convicted are Hispanic.

Of non-citizen Hispanics convicted federally, 81 percent were found guilty of entering unlawfully or residing in the United States without authorization — both of which are nonviolent, civil offenses.

A report by the Migration Policy Institute in D.C. found ICE and the DHS obsessed with meeting statistical goals and going after the low-hanging fruit of undocumented workers, rather than setting their sights on actual bad guys in the country illegally. The New York Times called the MPI study "largely a portrait of dysfunction."

MPI offered 36 ideas for cleaning up the mess but stopped short of the wholesale gutting of the 287(g) program. Leave that to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Law School, which just issued a report so scathing in its assessment of ICE's 287(g) program that it ultimately concludes that the best thing to do would be to call the priest and the pallbearers and bury the damn thing.

"The program, as illustrated through this policy paper, is too problematic, too costly, and too difficult to properly operate," asserts the take-no-prisoners policy review. "The existence of such a program . . . where a federal agency abdicates its authority to inadequately trained, less knowledgeable agents, indicates fundamental issues with the current federal immigration law enforcement scheme."

The UNC-CH assessment faults the ICE program for its lack of oversight, its abrogation of federal and state laws — as well as the U.S. Constitution, its unfunded mandates, and the unlawful detention of lawful residents and U.S. citizens by 287(g)-trained officers.

Interestingly, the UNC-CH team, which labored a year to produce the report, never once mentions Sheriff Joe Arpaio or Arizona. Rather, the group focused on the use of the 287(g) program by eight law enforcement entities in North Carolina. But its conclusions parallel those of this plumed penman when it comes to the use of 287(g) here in Sand Land.

It points out that the 287(g) program "was originally intended to target and remove undocumented immigrants convicted of [in ICE's own words] 'violent crimes, human smuggling, gang/organized crime activity, sexual-related offenses, narcotics smuggling, and money laundering.'"

But the Memoranda of Agreement that define how each local police force or sheriff's office is to use its federal 287(g) authority "are in actuality being used to purge towns and cities of 'unwelcome' immigrants . . . thereby having detrimental effects on North Carolina's communities."

The UNC-CH report doesn't use the term "ethnic cleansing," but 287(g) is a de facto tool for it. Where immigrants were once in desperate need in Arizona's housing industry, they've been a draw in North Carolina for a different reason — agriculture.

The infusion of Central American workers into communities made up mostly of whites and blacks has led to a rise in anti-Hispanic sentiment. Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell stated last year that immigrants are "breeding like rabbits," are "trashy," and "rob, rape, and murder American citizens."

Another N.C. sheriff, Terry Johnson of Alamance County, lamented all the "foreign-born illegal, criminal immigrants" who had come to settle in his county. He further offered up, "In Mexico, there's nothing wrong with having sex with a 12-, 13-year-old-girl . . . They do a lot of drinking down in Mexico."

Both Bizzell and Johnson, like Arpaio, see themselves as responding to the masses by weeding out illegals. And they ain't the only ones. The 287(g) program has empowered like-minded bigots and opportunists all across the country.

But beyond propping up local tyrants and prejudiced politicians, the 287(g) program is an abject failure in the eyes of Judith Greene, co-author of a report on 287(g) by the think tank Justice Strategies. Set to drop this week, the report, "Local Democracy on ICE," reveals how local governments are getting stiffed as tax dollars are diverted from traditional police functions to running after waiters and maids without proper ID. She told this tweeter that, ultimately, it's citizenry that foots the bill for 287(g) shenanigans, though ICE pays for training and throws localities a bone here and there.

"There is a growing consensus that the 287(g) program needs to be ended," she explained to The Bird from her home in Brooklyn, saying that from a strict cost-benefit analysis, the program's a bust.

This avian's in complete agreement. Sure, ICE can point to scads of domestic workers booted from the country. But has that made us any safer from real criminals? Of course not.

RAGE AGAINST ARPAIO

The Bird argues that those congregating in Phoenix this Saturday for the anti-Arpaio/anti-287(g) march beginning at 9 a.m. at Steele Indian School Park need to keep in mind that Arpaio's a symptom, but he ain't the whole disease.

Indeed, sources tell The Bird that ICE may attempt to fake out those on the left and in the pro-immigrant community by suspending Joe Arpaio's 287(g) agreement and, perhaps, even offer a few lip-service reforms, while keeping the 287(g) program in place. That's not good enough.

As the UNC-CH study suggests, the 287(g) program needs to be killed off deader than Heath Ledger. President Obama has ordered the closing of Gitmo within a year (see this week's cover story, starting on page 15). He should act even quicker to put an end to this country's shameful treatment of non-criminal aliens, and offer them a path to legalization.

Until this is done, activists need to raise a ruckus as if George W. Bush were still in office. Even more so. It's easy to protest demonized enemies like W. It's another thing altogether to take on politicians you helped elect.

This beak-bearer was encouraged to learn that Rage Against the Machine's radical frontman, Zack de la Rocha, has endorsed the anti-Joe action this Saturday and has promised to put foot to concrete himself. De la Rocha's statement reminds this raven of the days when actors and intellectuals marched in civil rights protests in the '60s.

"To witness what is happening in Arizona and remain neutral is to be implicated in human rights violations that are occurring right here on U.S. soil against migrants," de la Rocha said in a statement released by the L.A.-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

Just don't forget that even if Phoenix is the Selma, Alabama, of today's immigrant rights struggle, 287(g) isn't just bad for Cactus Country. It's bad all-around. Yeah, we need to topple Arpaio. But we also need to cut off the source of his federal power, so there are no more little Arpaios emboldened by 287(g) elsewhere.

-------
Copies of the report can be found at:
http://www.justicestrategies.net/files/JS-Democracy-On-Ice.pdf

Posted by lois at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Mandatory Minimums in Action: A Berkshire County case highlights the controversies in school-zone sentencing.

Mandatory Minimums in Action: A Berkshire County case highlights the controversies in school-zone sentencing.
February 26, 2009
By Maureen Turner, Valley Advocate (Northampton, MA)

On a June morning in 2004, 17-year-old Mitchell Lawrence rode his bicycle from his home in Otis to Great Barrington, where he met up with friends in a parking lot outside a movie theater. Lawrence, who would start his senior year in high school that fall, went to the parking lot several times a week, where a group of teens regularly met up to pass the time, playing hackey sack and smoking pot.

A few weeks earlier, a new person had begun joining the group. Mitchell knew the new guy as “José”; what he didn’t know was that José was an undercover detective, working as part of a wide-scale Berkshire County drug task force operation that eventually would yield 19 drug-related arrests—and generate a considerable amount of controversy. Among the controversial issues: whether prosecutors were too eager to apply the school drug zone law, under which some defendants, including Lawrence, faced much more stringent penalties than they would have received had they simply been convicted for the underlying offense.

That day in the parking lot, Lawrence got high with some friends, then chatted with José for about an hour, according to court records. José asked Lawrence “if [he] had any smoke,” which the teenager later said he interpreted as an invitation to smoke together.

Lawrence agreed, although he was confused, he later said in court, when José led him not to the area behind the theater where the kids typically smoked, but in the opposite direction, near a Congregational church. He was also confused, he said, when José handed him a $20 bill, since he thought the two were simply going to share his pot.

Lawrence took the money and went off to buy a burrito. Two and a half months later, he was arrested. In 2006, Lawrence was convicted by a jury of possession and distribution of a class D substance. A first-time offender with a relatively small amount of pot, Lawrence did not face lengthy jail time for those convictions; Judge John A. Agostini sentenced the teen to just one day for the distribution charge, and 10 days for possession.

Unfortunately for Lawrence, however, he was also convicted of committing a drug offense within a “school zone” (triggered by the fact that a preschool was located within the Congregational church), which earned him an automatic minimum sentence of two years in the Berkshire House of Correction.

Lawrence appealed his conviction but did not prevail. But while the appeals court upheld the conviction, at least one justice took the opportunity to question the logic behind the “school-zone” law that landed Lawrence, a first-time offender arrested for a $20 pot sale, behind bars for two years.
In an opinion attached to the case, Justice Frederick Brown wrote that Detective Felix Aguirre—the real name of the man known as “José” to Lawrence and his friends in the parking lot—had known from his weeks of observation where the kids typically went to smoke, and had deliberately led Lawrence to another site, within a designated school zone.

“I believe that an enlightened prosecutor should not have sought a conviction for the school zone offense,” Brown wrote. “A government official (i.e., police officer) induced the defendant to enter a danger zone that exposed him to an enhanced penalty. This conduct is particularly outrageous because the young man went along with an experienced police officer, who undoubtedly was aware of the consequences of drug activities in a school zone.”

Brown continued: “This case is made all the more troubling by the fact that because of the government’s actions, a teenage defendant with no known involvement in drug sales other than this isolated incident, and for whom there is no indication of drug use other than marijuana, was subjected to a greatly enhanced penalty, including incarceration for two years, due to his conviction under [the school-zone law].”

The Great Barrington drug busts set off a furor of controversy in Berkshire County, in part because of the prosecutors’ use of the school-zone law. Of the 19 people arrested as part of the operation, seven, including Lawrence, had no prior records and were arrested for selling small amounts of drugs, according to reporting in the Berkshire Eagle at the time.

Berkshire District Attorney David Capeless, who has built a reputation as a tough-on-drugs prosecutor, has maintained the investigation was a valid response to public concerns about drug dealing in the area, including specific complaints about the Great Barrington parking lot where Lawrence was arrested.

During the trial, Capeless maintained that Lawrence was not arrested over a single cigarette, but, in fact, had more than a gram of marijuana prepackaged for sale. Lawrence went to jail “due to some poor decisions on his part,” Capeless told the Eagle.

Posted by lois at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2009

MA: Urban Penalty Do drug-free school zones unfairly target cities and people of color? And a response from Lois Ahrens

Urban Penalty
Do drug-free school zones unfairly target cities and people of color?
Thursday, February 26, 2009
By Maureen Turner
Valley Advocate (MA)

In January of 1989, Gov. Mike Dukakis was fresh off a failed presidential bid, but he wasn't ready to give up on all his campaign pledges. That year, in his State of the Commonwealth address, Dukakis reiterated an ambitious vow made on the campaign trail: to rid Massachusetts' schools of drugs.

At the center of Dukakis' campaign was a proposed law that would create mandatory minimum sentences of two to 15 years for anyone caught selling or distributing drugs within 1,000 feet of school property. The mandatory minimum sentence would apply regardless of the amount or kind of drugs involved, regardless of whether the person convicted had any previous criminal record, and regardless of whether children were present or school was even in session. These "sentencing enhancements" would come on top of any sentence for the underlying drug offense, and could not be served concurrently.

In a speech at a Brockton school that previously had a reputation for gang-related drug activity, Dukakis announced the proposed legislation in vivid language: "Too many of our schoolchildren are carrying Uzis and AK-47s instead of pencils and notebooks," the governor said.

In July, the Legislature passed the legislation, creating so-called "drug-free zones" around public and private schools. By summer's end, the first arrests were made under the new law: five men who were charged with selling cocaine in a private home located across the street from a New Bedford elementary school.

Backers applauded the law as an important tool to protect kids from having to "run a gauntlet of drug dealers" on their way home from school, as a spokesperson for the state Department of Public Safety put it. But others warned that the law, however good its intentions, had worrisome implications. Some questioned the wisdom of tying judges' hands in meting out sentences, or of sending to already overcrowded prisons people who might not have even faced jail time for the underlying drug charge. Others questioned the fairness or effectiveness of the law, given that a suspect didn't even have to know he or she was within the 1,000-foot zone to be charged under it.

Twenty years and countless drug-zone arrests later, those concerns have not abated. Indeed, a new report by the Easthampton-based Prison Policy Initiative contends that the law has largely failed at its goal of keeping drug activity away from schools, in part because the zones are drawn so widely as to be rendered ineffective. Meanwhile, the mandatory sentences have come at an enormous cost for the cash-strapped state: more than $31 million a year spent to incarcerate those sentenced under the law, according to the report, titled "The Geography of Punishment."

In addition, the report finds, the law has had a presumably unintended but nonetheless serious consequence: after analyzing years of data, the researchers concluded that the law unfairly subjects urban residents—who are much more likely to be poor, black or Latino—to harsher sentences than whites and rural residents, creating a "two-tiered system of drug sentencing in Massachusetts."

That disparity, the researchers found, is nowhere more evident than in Hampden County.

*

The Prison Policy Initiative report lays out some striking data about how school-zone mandatory minimums are applied, and to whom. To a large degree, the researchers found, it all comes down to where you live.

The report's authors—attorneys Peter Wagner and Aleks Kajstura and research associate William Goldberg—focused on Hampden County, which has a mix of both urban and rural communities. Using computer mapping techniques, they drew 1,000-foot circles around schools, Headstart facilities, daycare centers and other protected areas. (A 1993 law also added parks and playgrounds to the list, although with a 100-foot zone.)

The researchers found that urban residents in Hampden County are five times more likely to live in a sentencing enhancement zone than residents of rural towns. This effect was most dramatic in Springfield and Holyoke, where the large number of schools and daycare centers created overlapping zones that blanketed large swaths of the downtown or urban core.

According to the report, in the nine Hampden County communities defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as most "urban" (including Springfield, Holyoke, Westfield, West Springfield and Chicopee), 40 percent of the population lives in a school zone. In the nine most rural communities (towns including Blandford, Brimfield, Russell and Granville), only eight percent of the population does.

And because urban communities have higher minority populations than rural areas ones, the law has an inherent racial bias: Hampden's nine most rural towns are 97 percent white, while its nine most urban communities are 71 percent white. As a result, only 29 percent of the county's white residents live within school zones, while 52 percent of its black and Latino residents do. These racial disparities exist within urban communities, too. In Holyoke, for example, only 45 percent of white residents live in school zones, while 76 percent of Latinos do, the report noted.

"Because Blacks and Latinos are more likely to live in urban areas, a law that enhances the sentences of urban residents does more harm to Black and Latino populations than to Whites," wrote the PPI researchers.

"This racial disparity in the populations covered by sentencing enhancement zones is a large part of why almost 8 out of 10 people convicted of zone offenses in Massachusetts are Black or Latino," the report continued. Indeed, the researchers wrote, the school zone laws contribute to the disproportionate rate at which different races are incarcerated in Massachusetts. While African-Americans and Latinos comprise 12 percent of the state's population, they make up 58 percent of its prison population.

Wagner, the report's co-author and executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, believes legislators didn't intend to cause such inequities when they created the school zone laws. "I don't think they realized it would be the majority of urban areas that would be covered," he said in a recent interview. "It's a really dangerous example of something that sounds good but is counterproductive."

*

But after 20 years in effect, say critics, the law's shortcomings are hard to ignore—including the fact that it's so farreaching as to be ineffective.

The school zones were created to be a deterrent to drug dealers, who, in theory, would stay away from schools to avoid the higher sentences they'd face if arrested there. But for that kind of deterrent to work, Wagner noted, a person has to know that the law exists, and know where the zone is.

"The whole purpose of this law is to change behavior. You want people to know about it," Wagner said.

But at 1,000 feet, school zones are, in many cases, so wide as to be indistinguishable, according to the PPI report. "A distance of 1,000 feet is extremely difficult to estimate reliably, making it difficult to infer where the zones are, but it is also often impossible to determine whether a particular location—particularly an urban one—is near a school at all," the researchers wrote.

Exacerbating the problem is the fact that school zones are not marked by any kind of signage. While there had been talk under the Dukakis administration of posting signs indicating school zones, that idea was dropped. Although some schools post "drug-free zone" signs on their property, the PPI report notes, those signs don't indicate the boundaries of the zone and, more important, don't mention that drug activity in that area carries an enhanced sentence.

Aerial photos included in the report show just how meaningless a 1,000-foot "school zone" can be. For instance, Chicopee's Bonner Street falls within 1,000 feet of the outer property line of Holyoke's Dean Technical High School, so a person arrested on drug charges on Bonner would face the mandatory minimum sentence—despite the fact that he or she would have to swim across the Connecticut River, or drive more than four miles and cross a bridge, in order to get to the school.

Similarly, a person arrested on Springfield's Darling Street would fall within the 1,000-foot zone that "protects" JFK Middle School. But it's hard to imagine that person would be targeting JFK students—in fact, there's a good chance he might not even be aware that he's anywhere near the middle school. The 1,000 feet between the school property and Darling Street includes obstacles like Long Pond and a cemetery; to actually get to the school from Darling, a person would have to travel 3,800 feet, the researchers found.

And while the law's stated purpose was to keep drug dealing away from kids on the school yard or nearby streets, often people charged under school-zone laws are, in fact, arrested in private homes, out of sight and contact with schoolchildren.

Certain urban areas—downtown Holyoke, Springfield's State Street corridor—are almost entirely covered by overlapping school zones, leaving the zones' "protective" status meaningless, Wagner noted.

"The Legislature wants to say certain people need to be protected, and certain places need to be protected," he said. But "if everywhere is special, then nowhere is special."

*

While protected school zones might appeal to parents nervous about their kids' safety—and to politicians eager to win those parents' votes—these laws are redundant, contend critics, who point to laws previously on the books that can carry strict penalties for selling drugs to minors or using children in the drug trade.

Indeed, the PPI report suggests, some judges find the mandatory minimums unnecessary. According to data from the state Sentencing Commission, in more than half of the 349 school-zone convictions in 2004, the judge sentenced the defendant to just one day of prison time for the underlying drug offense (see sidebar).

"Only two possible conclusions can be drawn from this fact: either the facts of the case reflect an insignificant offense and the judge gave the shortest sentence possible under the law, or the judge recognized that the two-year mandatory minimum was excessive and reduced the penalty for the underlying offense in an attempt to compensate for the injustice," the authors wrote.

"That's an indication that this [law] isn't responsive to what the judges see," Kajstura, the report's lead author, said in an interview.

Such data raises the question of whether school zones are even necessary. "I'd personally be in favor of using the laws that we have," said Wagner. "But the Legislature likes [sentencing enhancement zones]."

A pending bill could serve as a happy-enough medium. The bill, sponsored by Springfield state Rep. Ben Swan, would reduce school zones from 1,000 to 100 feet. It would also repeal the mandatory minimum for school-zone offenses, leaving sentencing to the judge's discretion, and would allow a school-zone sentence to be served at the same time as any other sentences handed out. In addition, drug sales that happen in private homes within a school zone would not be subject to the enhanced sentence, although the defendant could still be prosecuted for the underlying drug offense.

"The 100-foot zones still cover a lot of area," said Wagner. "But they don't cover a lot of extraneous area." In addition, he noted, smaller zones would be easier to mark with signs, so people could actually know when they're within a protected area.

The bill was written by the Massachusetts chapter of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a national non-profit sentencing reform group. To Barbara Dougan, an attorney and FAMM's Massachusetts project director, the evidence showing the ineffectiveness and inequity of the school-zone law is indisputable.

"The data is there. It's in black and white. And it's been provided by the state [sentencing commission] itself," Dougan said. "It has this obscenely racial disparity that cannot be explained away by who's using drugs. It's penalizing people based on where they live."

Amending the school-zone law would not mean ignoring other drug laws, Dougan added. "It's important to address the misconception that this cuts anyone slack—it doesn't," she said. "What people don't realize is we already have statutes with stiff penalties for selling drugs to minors, and for using kids in drug transactions. We've already got those bases covered. & We're just talking about not heaping on another two to 15 years, depending on where your home is located."

Swan's bill is not the first attempt to amend the school-zone laws. Similar changes were included in an omnibus crime bill that died during the last legislative session. While reformers see mounting support for their efforts—in part inspired by the savings the new law would create for the financially struggling state—there are still influential political forces that support the existing law, including police chiefs and prosecutors around the state.

That's because the law can be a powerful tool for the district attorneys, Wagner said. "What this is really about is prosecutorial leverage," he said. Prosecutors can use the mandatory minimums to expedite guilty pleas from drug defendants, especially those arrested for relatively minor offenses, by agreeing to drop the zone charge in exchange for a guilty plea for the other charge, the PPI report contends.

"As a result of this practice, only a small percentage of zone charges lead to zone convictions," the authors wrote. "This, however, leads to longer sentences than would otherwise be served for the lowest level nonviolent drug offenders."

"This sentencing structure is the double whammy for so many people," said Dougan of FAMM. "Basically, its use is to induce defendants to plead to a lesser charge rather than taking your case to trial, [since] know you're going to get hammered with this sentence regardless of the facts of the case."

"It's very worrisome to see the outcome," Dougan added. "It's not doing anything to stop the drug trade; it's just inducing people to plead rather than contest."

School-zone laws have been popular with the Hampden County District Attorney's office, at least according to older data. A study cited in the PPI report, using statistics from 1998, showed that Hampden prosecutors used them more than prosecutors in any other county in the state, and more than two and a half times the state average.

Hampden DA Bill Bennett did not respond to an interview request from the Advocate. Last year, he told the Springfield Republican that he supported limited changes to the school-zone law, such as allowing some sentencing flexibility for first-time offenders. "In practice, there have been incidents [when] you would not want to impose the two years because of a variety of reasons," he said.

Still, Bennett told the Republican he considered the law to be effective: "We don't have drug dealers hanging out in school yards, which was the whole idea to protect children."

*

Others within law enforcement support amending the law—including, notably, the Hampden County Sheriff's Department, which has built a national reputation for its programs to effectively reintegrate offenders into the larger community. Those efforts include education and work programs, substance abuse treatment and counseling.

"They come from the community, and they're going back," explained Jay Ashe, superintendent of the Hampden County House of Corrections. Each year, he noted, 6,500 people are released from the jail. "We move them into the community as quickly as possible. If they botch it up, then they come back. And then we send them out again. Because that's where they're going anyway."

But like judges whose hands are tied by mandatory minimum laws, the sheriff's department's hands are tied when it comes to working with offenders sentenced under school-zone laws. Under the law, these offenders are not eligible to earn credit for time spent in programs and cannot participate in "step-down" opportunities, like work-release and day reporting programs—valuable tools in helping people prepare for returning to their community, and for avoiding in the future the criminal activities that landed them in jail in the first place, Ashe noted.

"To walk out of jail with the same profile—they'll come back," Ashe said. "We certainly advocate for a step-down period, because that's where we think the public safety is."

Swan's bill would allow school-zone offenders to participate in work-release programs and earn credit for taking part in education, job training and other jail programs. Those changes would both reduce their odds of recidivism and reduce the public costs of keeping them locked up, Ashe said: "This is a better public safety program."

On a typical day, the jail has about 800 people awaiting trail, 15 percent of them facing school-zone charges, Ashe said. Another 1,200 people are already serving sentences in the jail, about 10 percent of them on school-zone mandatory minimums.

That's a significant portion of the total population, and they'd be served more effectively, and cheaply, if they could take part in lower-security reintegration programs. "I don't need to be holding these guys in hard beds," Ashe said. "Save the hard-cell beds for those who need it."

While the last effort to amend the school-zone law died in the State House, Wagner sees the fact that it went as far as it did through the legislative process as a promising sign. Indeed, as support for reforming the law expands, reformers are hopeful this legislative session will finally yield results.

Certainly, the changes proposed in the new bill would address many of the concerns about the existing law—it would save taxpayer money, end the geographic and racial disparities in how it's used, and make the law more effective at protecting kids from drug-related crime, said PPI's Kajstura. "There's just nothing to lose," she said.
http://www.valleyadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=9273

Response to the Editor of the Valley Advocate:
To the Editor:
School zone enforcement in Springfield and Holyoke includes aggressive policing, punitive prosecuting and the resulting penalty: jail. It appears more than a little disingenuous for the sheriff's brother, Jay, to maintain that they are against the kind of policing and prosecuting that helps fill their jails. After all, by the jail's own estimate, 120 people are incarcerated who can't make bail (and if they can't make bail it is almost certain they will take the plea resulting in a 2 year sentence all of which will be served at the jail) and another 120 people sentenced as a result of the school zone policing and prosecution in the urban areas of Hampden County. These 240 people (poor and Black and Latino) help to fuel the sheriff 's constant claim of "overcrowding" and the resulting need for more "hard beds" as Jay Ashe euphemistically calls cells. This same manufactured need resulted in a women's jail which, of course, made room for more men in what is now the men's jail and for many more cells for women. So-called "overcrowding" drives the long-standing claim the sheriff uses to push for even more cells for women in the new jail. If the sheriff and his brother want to end school zone enhancements then they need to do more than make statements to the press: they need to exert some pressure on their friends the police chiefs of Holyoke and Springfield and the Hampden county DA and ask them to turn off the faucet. However, if the faucet were turned off, maybe Ashe would need less than $69 million proposed for his department for 2010 and Gov. Deval Patrick's recommended a half a billion dollar bond bill for jails and prisons, bonds which do not have to be approved by voters, could be put to better use. Lois Ahrens
Real Cost of Prisons Project
Northampton, MA

Posted by lois at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

Missouri senator proposes bill to lengthen prison stays

Missouri senator proposes bill to lengthen prison stays
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Missourian
BY Michael Bushnell

JEFFERSON CITY – Before he even was sworn in as a state senator for his first term, Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, filed a bill to require criminals to serve prison terms closer to their actual sentences than is current practice.

Currently, the average convicted felon serves less than one half of the actual sentence before release, according to the Missouri Corrections Department.

But Sen. Schaefer proposes requiring a minimum of 85 percent of a sentence be served before release. He acknowledged he has found it difficult to promote a bill perceived as increasing prison populations and the costs associated with them, while the state grapples with a more than $250 million budget shortfall.

Schaefer said his main goal is not to incarcerate large numbers of people for a much longer time, but to create more truthful sentencing. He said judges are currently sentencing felons to exorbitant prison terms, knowing they will only serve a fraction of the time.

"Right now judges are getting pre-sentencing reports for what length prison terms they can give," Schaefer said. "So you'll get a judge giving a twenty-year sentence because they believe the person needs to spend at least four years in prison. If the judge knew, and the victim knew for certain that the defendant would serve 85 percent of whatever sentence was given, you would see sentences reflecting that."

The state Corrections Department reports there are 30,377 felons serving time in state prison at a daily cost of $45.02 per inmate. That amounts to a taxpayer cost of $1.37 million every day to house Missouri inmates. According to the department, felons currently in state are projected to serve 47.5 percent of their sentence before release. Legislative staff report the average sentence of those released in 2008 was slightly greater than 38 percent of the original sentence.

Schaefer said he is trying to get Missouri in line with the federal government and a majority of the states, many of which enacted truth in sentencing bills in the mid-1990s. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the federal government requires those convicted of federal crimes to serve a "substantial portion" of their sentences, which in the vast majority of cases is at least 85 percent.

A federal "truth-in-sentencing" law passed in 1994 committed federal funds to states that require felons to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. The Department of Justice reports that 27 states plus the District of Columbia meet that requirement.

Democrats have expressed concern about the bill, in no small part because of the estimated cost. The analysis of the bill estimated a minimum cost of nearly $40 million in the 2011 fiscal year, something that Sen. Jeff Smith, D-St. Louis, said makes the legislation unpalatable.

"In a time of such lean budgets, when we're facing the crisis we face, the last thing we need is a bill with a huge fiscal note that's going to cost corrections millions of dollars," said Smith, who, like Schaefer, serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee where the bill is assigned.

Smith also said it is inaccurate to think judges will immediately start issuing shorter sentences to reflect the mandatory sentencing.

"It takes years for changes to run through a system," he said. "It would take years for judges to start issuing shorter sentences that were 'true.' That would be millions of dollars in increased costs to prisons, and that's where we don't need to be budget-wise."

Schaefer countered by saying that the Corrections Department took the worst-case scenario in determining the cost and that judges would immediately change their sentencing formulas.

"I will tell you that the Department of Corrections will do anything to not lose the discretion to allow people to serve as little as five percent of a sentence," he said. "You could take a sky-is-falling amount for every dollar. What corrections is assuming is that judges will keep giving these long sentences, and I've talked to a lot of judges and I don't think that's a reasonable statement."

At a recent committee hearing on the legislation, three witnesses testified against the bill, saying it would remove a major incentive for felons to stay out of trouble and improve their lives following incarceration. Defense lawyer Dan Dodson, representing the Missouri Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said early release dates act as an incentive for felons to remain out of trouble.

Dodson said the legislation would either lengthen prison terms or shorten the time that convicted felons spent on probation, because they would be spending more of the sentence incarcerated. He said that, under that second option, convicts spending less time under the eye of the government could increase the likelihood of criminal recidivism.

"Let's say judges recalibrate it to where they really wanted someone to go (to prison) for four years, and they would normally give them a ten-year sentence to serve four," Dodson said. "Now what you'd get, they're going to get a five-year sentence and serve four or so, but instead of that person going back out on the street with probation as the carrot and the stick and we can say 'we're going to still watch you for a while,' you can't do that anymore."

More than two dozen states have laws that comply with the federal "truth-in-sentencing" standards. Various studies of those states have found mixed results.

A 2001 study published by the U.S. Justice Department that analyzed the first five years of Virginia's truth-in-sentencing law found a decrease in recidivism. But the study also reported a nearly one-third increase in the length of prison terms and an expansion in the state's prison budget.

The Judiciary Committee's vice chairman said he worries about the cost and that the state may have to build a new prison or two. He said the bill might have been easier to get through in the days of budget surpluses.

"I will say, philosophically, I support what Sen. Schaefer is trying to do," said Sen. Jack Goodman, R-Mt. Vernon. "The problem is that our taxpayers fund that bill. While we do have an obligation to keep our streets safe, this year any bill that costs a lot of money is going to be difficult to pass."

Nonetheless, Schaefer told the committee that a law like this could be implemented at a much lower cost than estimated, because it doesn't mandate longer prison terms or incarcerating people who wouldn't be without this legislation.

"This doesn't affect anyone's ability to be sentenced to mental health treatment or drug treatment," he said. "All it does is, when a sentence is handed down, it requires that a sentence actually be served."
http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2009/02/24/felon-bill/

Posted by lois at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

TX: Study finds major interruptions in antiretroviral therapy after release from prison

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
Study finds major interruptions in antiretroviral therapy after release from prison
Feb 24, 2009

GALVESTON, Texas – The vast majority of HIV-infected Texas prison inmates who receive antiretroviral therapy while incarcerated experience significant interruptions in HIV treatment after their release into the community. This disturbing finding is the result of a 4-year study of more than 2,000 inmates with HIV infection released from Texas Department of Criminal Justice prisons between January 2004 and December 2007. The study, led by University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston epidemiologist and associate professor Jacques Baillargeon, will appear in the Feb. 25 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Using databases maintained by the Texas Department of State Health Services and TDCJ, Baillargeon and his co-investigators found that only 18 percent of inmates filled a prescription for antiretroviral medications within 30 days after release. Moreover, only 30 percent did so within 60 days. "These remarkably high rates of lengthy HIV treatment interruptions are troublesome from a public health perspective," said Baillargeon. "Several studies suggest that many released inmates who discontinue antiretroviral therapy also resume high-risk behaviors such as injection drug use or unsafe sex, and this combination may result not only in poor clinical outcomes for these individuals but also in the creation of drug-resistant HIV reservoirs in the general community."

Dr. David Paar, a co-author and director of the clinical virology division of UTMB Correctional Managed Care, said that this high rate of treatment interruption appears related in large part to multiple barriers faced by newly released inmates in accessing community-based health care. "A solution to this problem will require carefully coordinated efforts between the criminal justice system, public health agencies, and community healthcare systems," Paar noted.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uotm-sfm022309.php

Posted by lois at 11:14 AM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2009

Wall St. Journal Op-Ed: Former Presidents of Brazil, Mexico and Columbia Declare War on Drugs a Failure

Former Presidents of Brazil, Mexico and Columbia Declare War on Drugs a Failure
The War on Drugs Is a Failure
Wall Street Journal
FEBRUARY 23, 2009
We should focus instead on reducing harm to users and on tackling organized crime.
By FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO, CéSAR GAVIRIA and ERNESTO ZEDILLO

The war on drugs has failed. And it's high time to replace an ineffective strategy with more humane and efficient drug policies. This is the central message of the report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy we presented to the public recently in Rio de Janeiro.

A soldier stands next to packages containing marijuana at an army base in Cali, Colombia, August 2008.

Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization of consumption simply haven't worked. Violence and the organized crime associated with the narcotics trade remain critical problems in our countries. Latin America remains the world's largest exporter of cocaine and cannabis, and is fast becoming a major supplier of opium and heroin. Today, we are further than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs.

Over the last 30 years, Colombia implemented all conceivable measures to fight the drug trade in a massive effort where the benefits were not proportional to the resources invested. Despite the country's achievements in lowering levels of violence and crime, the areas of illegal cultivation are again expanding. In Mexico -- another epicenter of drug trafficking -- narcotics-related violence has claimed more than 5,000 lives in the past year alone.

The revision of U.S.-inspired drug policies is urgent in light of the rising levels of violence and corruption associated with narcotics. The alarming power of the drug cartels is leading to a criminalization of politics and a politicization of crime. And the corruption of the judicial and political system is undermining the foundations of democracy in several Latin American countries.

The first step in the search for alternative solutions is to acknowledge the disastrous consequences of current policies. Next, we must shatter the taboos that inhibit public debate about drugs in our societies. Antinarcotic policies are firmly rooted in prejudices and fears that sometimes bear little relation to reality. The association of drugs with crime segregates addicts in closed circles where they become even more exposed to organized crime.

In order to drastically reduce the harm caused by narcotics, the long-term solution is to reduce demand for drugs in the main consumer countries. To move in this direction, it is essential to differentiate among illicit substances according to the harm they inflict on people's health, and the harm drugs cause to the social fabric.

In this spirit, we propose a paradigm shift in drug policies based on three guiding principles: Reduce the harm caused by drugs, decrease drug consumption through education, and aggressively combat organized crime. To translate this new paradigm into action we must start by changing the status of addicts from drug buyers in the illegal market to patients cared for by the public-health system.
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We also propose the careful evaluation, from a public-health standpoint, of the possibility of decriminalizing the possession of cannabis for personal use. Cannabis is by far the most widely used drug in Latin America, and we acknowledge that its consumption has an adverse impact on health. But the available empirical evidence shows that the hazards caused by cannabis are similar to the harm caused by alcohol or tobacco.

If we want to effectively curb drug use, we should look to the campaign against tobacco consumption. The success of this campaign illustrates the effectiveness of prevention campaigns based on clear language and arguments consistent with individual experience. Likewise, statements by former addicts about the dangers of drugs will be far more compelling to current users than threats of repression or virtuous exhortations against drug use.

Such educational campaigns must be targeted at youth, by far the largest contingent of users and of those killed in the drug wars. The campaigns should also stress each person's responsibility toward the rising violence and corruption associated with the narcotics trade. By treating consumption as a matter of public health, we will enable police to focus their efforts on the critical issue: the fight against organized crime.

A growing number of political, civic and cultural leaders, mindful of the failure of our current drug policy, have publicly called for a major policy shift. Creating alternative policies is the task of many: educators, health professionals, spiritual leaders and policy makers. Each country's search for new policies must be consistent with its history and culture. But to be effective, the new paradigm must focus on health and education -- not repression.

Drugs are a threat that cuts across borders, which is why Latin America must establish dialogue with the United States and the European Union to develop workable alternatives to the war on drugs. Both the U.S. and the EU share responsibility for the problems faced by our countries, since their domestic markets are the main consumers of the drugs produced in Latin America.

The inauguration of President Barack Obama presents a unique opportunity for Latin America and the U.S. to engage in a substantive dialogue on issues of common concern, such as the reduction of domestic consumption and the control of arms sales, especially across the U.S.-Mexico border. Latin America should also pursue dialogue with the EU, asking European countries to renew their commitment to the reduction of domestic consumption and learning from their experiences with reducing the health hazards caused by drugs.

The time to act is now, and the way forward lies in strengthening partnerships to deal with a global problem that affects us all.

Mr. Cardoso is the former president of Brazil. Mr. Gaviria is a former president of Colombia. Mr. Zedillo is a former president of Mexico.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123535114271444981.html

Posted by lois at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

VA: Meherrin River Regional Jail project up in the air

Meherrin River Regional Jail project up in the air
By Luz Lazo
Published: February 23, 2009
Richmond Times Dispatch
DINWIDDIE -- A plan to build a $100 million regional jail for Brunswick, Dinwiddie and Mecklenburg counties would alleviate the need for inmate space in all three localities dealing with overcrowded and inadequate local jails, local officials said.

The regional jail, which has been in the planning stages for nearly four years and was originally estimated to cost $150.2 million, will help the counties save money and will make the jail system more efficient in all three jurisdictions.

The project had not been included in the governor's 2009-10 budget proposal, but this month legislators in both houses approved amendments to include the project in their respective budget bills, making it more likely that it will move forward in the next few years.

A state funding match, however, may not be available until 2013.

The Meherrin River Regional Jail Authority, formed in early 2008, initially wanted to build an 800-bed jail but has scaled back its plans to 408 beds.

The current plan consists of building a main facility in Brunswick County, near Alberta, that will accommodate the pretrial and sentenced prisoners from Brunswick and Dinwiddie as well as the sentenced prisoners from Mecklenburg. A smaller satellite jail near the government offices in Mecklenburg will accommodate the pretrial and work-release populations from Mecklenburg.

The authority last year took a $10 million loan to use toward the purchase of a 126-acre site in Brunswick County, the design of the facilities and the preliminary site work. Officials have interviewed for the architectural design and have the permits needed to launch construction.

The facilities would be built with a capacity for expansion, and one superintendent would oversee both locations. Once the replacement facilities are built, the local jails will be closed, officials said.

"We will still have to pay for the operational cost, but we won't be at the mercy of other facilities," Dinwiddie County Administrator W. Kevin Massengill said. "We will be saving money, and it just works more efficiently."

. . .

Dinwiddie's local jail -- built in the early 1970s -- houses a maximum of 64 inmates, but the county usually has more than 100 inmates per day, Sheriff B.B. "Dusty" Rhodes said.

"We need our regional jail. We are going to grow and with that growth, we are going to have an increase in crime," he said. "As far as I know, we have gone as high as 150 [inmates] and as low as 95. We have always had more than the 64 that this jail was built for 30 years ago."

On a daily basis, the county jail will house only 55 inmates because the facility is required to keep nine empty beds for arrests made overnight and on weekends.

To cope with the overflow, the county rents beds in four regional jails: Southside Regional in Emporia, Riverside Regional in Hopewell, Piedmont Regional in Farmville and Rappahannock Regional in Stafford. When those facilities are full, inmates are taken as far away as Staunton, Rhodes said.

"That runs into a great expense for the taxpayers. If we had our own regional jail, we wouldn't have to be transporting to four different areas, which is what we are doing now. We are sending deputies at 6 a.m. in the morning to bring inmates to court," he said, adding that the trips take time from deputies' law-enforcement duties.

The cost for bed rental alone at the end of the year is more than $1 million, Massengill said. Deputies' time and transportation costs are a separate tab, he said.

A trip from the Brunswick site where the regional facility is being planned to the Dinwiddie County courthouse would take about 25 minutes, compared with the two to three hours it takes now, Rhodes said.

. . .

In 2005, the three jurisdictions began to work together to address the situation and in early 2008 formed the Meherrin River Regional Jail Authority -- named after the river that crosses all three counties.

The General Assembly granted the counties an exemption to a state moratorium on prison-building, allowing them to pursue the construction of the facility. They also met all the requirements from the Board of Corrections.

"We have done everything that is required," said Wayne Carter, Mecklenburg's county administrator. "The state historically always pays 50 percent on construction and renovation of regional jails. . . . When we started, we felt fairly confident that we would get the funding. We were very surprised when we did not make the government's budget."

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine presented a budget to the General Assembly that reflects the tough economic crisis and leaves out several projects, press secretary Gordon Hickey said. He said he didn't know whether the project had been presented to the governor to be included in the budget and added that the assembly would be able to add it if it chooses to.

"The governor has to make a lot of difficult decisions," he said. "The budget is now in the hands of the General Assembly. It will come back to the governor, and he will make a decision on what to leave and take out."

The House and the Senate this month approved amendments adding the Meherrin River Regional Jail project to their respective budget bills, which are now a part of the 11-member Budget Conference Committee package.

The House amendment authorizes the construction of the project without allocating any money to it, while the Senate amendment requests that a facility of no more than 400 beds be built with construction at just one site, for which the state's share of the capital costs of construction should not exceed $50 million. Under their plan, the reimbursement of the state's portion would not occur before July 1, 2012.

Del. Rosalyn R. Dance, D-Petersburg, who supports the project and offered an amendment to the budget bill, said she hopes funding would be allocated for the project in the coming years.

The project, she said, will ease overcrowding in the local jails, and its design will provide a safer and more secure environment for inmates and guards. She is optimistic that a budget compromise will be worked out to the counties' satisfaction.

Brunswick County Administrator Charlette T. Woolridge points out that the bonds for the state's share of construction would not have to be issued until 2012 and would not affect the current two-year budget.

If funds are not allocated for the project in the current budget, construction will be delayed and local officials will try to get the funding next year.

In the meantime, Massengill said, paying for jail space will be a bigger challenge for the counties facing tight budgets under the current economic crisis.

He said the counties will continue to lobby for the state funds.

"We, as three jurisdictions, cannot afford to pay for a jail this size without the help of the state," he said.
http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/article/JAIL23_20090222-222207/213052/

Posted by lois at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2009

WI: Prison future creates high anxiety in Appleton

Prison future creates high anxiety in Appleton
Morris Sun Tribune
Published Saturday, February 21, 2009
By Tom Cherveny
West Central Tribune

APPLETON — Anxiety levels are running high in Appleton, where workers at the Prairie Correctional Facility are fearful that a proposal to transfer inmates to the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Faribault will cost them their jobs.

“Devastating’’ is how Appleton Mayor Ron Ronning, himself an employee of the private prison, described the consequences to his community should the facility be closed or mothballed. The mayor was among well over 120 people, most of them employees of the facility, who packed the Appleton Civic Center on Friday morning for a town meeting hosted by State Sen. Gary Kubly, DFL-Granite Falls, and State Rep. Andrew Falk, DFL-Murdock.

Mayor Ronning said he feared that Appleton and the surrounding rural area could see a major exodus of jobs and suffer the economic strife that gripped it during the farm crisis of the 1980s, when businesses shuttered their windows and homes were left vacant.

The 1,600-bed Appleton facility is currently housing 542 inmates from Minnesota and another 525 from the state of Washington, according to Tim Wengler, its warden. The state of Washington has been slowly reducing its number of inmates.

Joan Fabian, commissioner of the state Department of Corrections, has proposed moving the Minnesota inmates at Prairie Correctional Facility to Faribault, which has recently been expanded by 80 beds and is being remodeled. It would continue to use the Appleton facility on an “as needed basis,’’ according to Kubly.

The loss of the Minnesota inmates would force Corrections Corporation of America, owner of the Appleton facility, to pare its staffing accordingly, Wengler told the Tribune. He said CCA is working aggressively to contract prisoners from other states, but acknowledged that it is proving difficult.

It is currently negotiating with Alaska, but he noted that nearly every state is facing serious budget deficits and looking at ways to cut costs.

The Appleton prison currently employs 269 people, down from a high of 370 positions. It has been paring its work force through attrition, and has not hired since last July, according to Prairie Correctional Facility officials.

The Department of Corrections has provided testimony at the Capitol claiming that moving inmates to Faribault would save money, according to Kubly. Information provided by the department indicated that it costs Minnesota $77.11 per day to house an inmate in Appleton, when transportation and other costs are added to the daily contract cost with the private facility. The DOC claims it can house inmates at Faribault for an average of $55.38 per day.

Those numbers were challenged at the town meeting. Swift County Commissioner Gary Hendrickx told the legislators that the DOC’s annual report for 2008 showed that its average inmate costs at Faribault were just over $109 per day.

Kubly said that he has met with Fabian, who said the DOC’s figures comparing costs at Appleton and Faribault are the “marginal costs’’ and do not include all of the fixed costs.

Appleton prison officials said the state is saving money by using the private facility, while inmates are receiving services every bit the equal of that offered by the state system. Wengler told the Tribune the state can save $25 million a year by keeping its inmates in Appleton.

Kubly and Falk said they would work to arrange a meeting between Fabian and Prairie Correctional Facility officials so that those points can be made.

Kubly said he will also be introducing legislation that would require the state to give preference to keeping inmates in Appleton. But he and Falk cautioned that it may be difficult to obtain support from a majority in both chambers for such legislation when the DOC claims it can save money by moving inmates to Faribault.

“We can’t be here if we don’t have this facility,’’ said Shelley Koski, a mental health professional at Prairie Correctional Facility. She told the legislators she had moved to Appleton for her position. She and others warned that they would have no choice but to leave the region for employment if they lose their jobs at Prairie Correctional Facility.

Ronning said the repercussions of those job losses would be felt well beyond Appleton. The facility’s employees come from communities as far away as Willmar. They represent an estimated $45 million in economic activity to the region.

The Prairie Correctional Facility employees are parents to 112 students enrolled in area schools, including 90 at the Lac qui Parle Valley High School in rural Madison. The facility also pays more than $475,000 annually in property taxes, according to information presented at the meeting.
http://www.morrissuntribune.com/articles/index.cfm?id=16527§ion=News

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

February 22, 2009

"Charles Dickens adn The House of Fallen Women"- an account of Dickens' efforts to help destitute women

The house that Charles built

Claire Tomalin enjoys a vivid account of Dickens's efforts to help destitute women
By Claire Tomalin
* The Guardian, Saturday 20 December 2008

Jenny Hartley's brilliant book fills a gap in Dickens studies. Vivid, intelligent and enthralling, it is about his setting up in Shepherd's Bush - this is 1847, when Shepherd's Bush was farming land outside London - a house in which girls from the streets, the prisons and the workhouses, girls who stole and prostituted themselves, wrecking their own lives and seemingly helpless to save themselves, might be changed through kindness and discipline, and so prepared for new lives in the colonies.

The money came from the millionaire Miss Coutts, but the idea and organisation was all Dickens's, and for 12 years he effectively managed the Home for Homeless Women, installed in Urania Cottage (the name, bestowed by a previous owner, was particularly inappropriate, since Urania is another name for Aphrodite, goddess of love). Dickens's will to do good drove him to take on what any normal person would have found impossible, and Hartley shows him in action, passionate to help the half-crushed victims of Victorian society, despotic in putting his benevolent plans into practice, demonic in his energy. From the spring of 1846, when he first proposed the plan, until 1858, when it became impossible for him to remain connected with it, it was at the centre of his thoughts.

You have only to look at his collected letters to marvel that a man who was already writing novels, running a weekly magazine, conducting a splendid social life, bringing up nine children, and raising money for other charitable causes, should find time to visit the house in Shepherd's Bush, often several times a week, to supervise it, select inmates, consult with prison governors, hire and fire matrons, deal with the drains and the gardener, report to Coutts in detail several times a week on whatever was happening there, handle the money, keep careful written accounts of the backgrounds of the girls, and arrange their emigration to Australia, South Africa or Canada.

Hartley reminds us how women were dealt with in Victorian institutions in London: the harsh, silent prisons, and the Magdalen Hospitals for penitent prostitutes, where they were constantly reminded of their shame as they worked under strict rules at sewing and laundering. The plan Dickens sold to Coutts was to make the home like a real home, with a matron who would never ask about the pasts of the young women, with comfortable bedrooms and good food, a garden where they could grow flowers, books to read - even a piano.

His idea was to prepare each inmate for emigration, and his hope was that they would marry and have families. Coutts needed some persuading of this, since she believed that a woman once fallen could not expect to return to such happiness. Hartley makes a fascinating point that a survey made in Paris in the 1830s showed that many French women succeeded very well in moving out of prostitution and returning to mainstream life, whereas the English believed a woman, once "corrupted", could never be uncorrupted.

Dickens took the French view. He disagreed with Coutts on other points: for instance he favoured brightly coloured dresses for the girls, while she did not. He wanted to keep religious preaching to the minimum, she thought it essential. He even arranged for his friend John Hullah, a fine musician, to come to instruct the girls in singing; but it was expensive, and here Coutts balked. She had bought the house, had it put in order to his specifications and was already paying something like £500 a year - a large sum then, even for a very rich woman - to keep it running.

Hartley draws a lively picture of the home, and the characters of many of the inmates, including the matrons over whose appointment Dickens agonised. Women who had worked in prisons were likely to be too harsh. One who applied for what she called the "horrible task" clearly ruled herself out. But he struck gold with Mrs Morson, who was in charge for five years. As Hartley says: "She is a new variant of Victorian womanhood: a middle-class single parent supporting her family by means of a satisfying career." She came of good parentage and married a doctor working as chief medical officer for the Brazilian Mining Association, going out with him to live in the rainforest; and there he died, leaving her with two small daughters and pregnant. She had to make her own way back to England with them, by mule and then man-of-war, and when she arrived home she found the money her husband had left for her had been embezzled. Luckily she knew Coutts, and so heard of the job. Luckily again, her parents were able to care for her children, including the baby son.

Dickens took to her at once, finding her warm-hearted and intelligent. She taught the girls to read, write and cook well, and made mealtimes enjoyable occasions. She was tough with any who stole, drank or caused trouble. Above all, she was motherly, and the girls wept with her when they left, and again when she left. Not surprisingly, she was wooed and won by a second husband; but she was always proud of the work she had done, and of her association with Dickens. Her story alone could make a film.

So would the stories of the girls, although tracing them is hard, because they came from poverty and either disappeared back into poverty or departed for the colonies. In 1853 Dickens reported to Coutts that out of the first 54 inmates, 30 had emigrated and sent back good reports of themselves, 14 had left of their own accord and 10 had been expelled. Pretty good. Some could not bear the quietness and not being allowed out. Some decided that emigration was too like transportation, some were drawn back into their old lives. Isabella Gordon, cheeky and charming, boasted of her power over the staff (and Dickens), and recruited a gang of girls who stirred up trouble. Dickens conducted a trial at the home and finally put her out, crying, on a dark afternoon, with only an old shawl and half a crown. She leant against the house for a minute and then went out of the gate and slowly up the lane, wiping her wet face with her shawl, forlorn and hopeless. We know these details from Dickens, who watched her.

Hartley's impressive research has stretched to the other side of the world, and she has made contact with several descendants of Urania girls. She has tracked their stories in Australia, and even found a photograph of Rhena Pollard, a Sussex girl who moved from workhouse to prison to the home, and went on to Canada, making a decent marriage, bringing up seven children on an Ontario homestead and joining the Salvation Army. Dickens would have enjoyed the sight of her as a decorously dressed matriarch with intense eyes and a formidable jutting jaw.

Hartley sees Pollard as a model for Tattycoram in Little Dorrit. She draws other parallels between girls at the home and figures in Dickens's novels, such as the prostitute Martha in David Copperfield, and she suggests that the girls acted as models and muses for Dickens. But although she argues this through carefully, it is the one part of the book that worries me, because the voices he gives to Martha, and to Tattycoram, and indeed to Nancy in Oliver Twist and Alice in Dombey and Son, are not the voices of real women. Their high-flown speeches make them into stage representations of fallen women. "Oh, the river!" cries Martha, "I know it's like me, defiled and miserable - and it goes away, like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled - and I feel that I must go with it!"

The few real words Dickens reports in his letters are not like this. A girl called Goldsborough answers his question about what sort of work she might do in the colonies with, "that she didn't suppose, Mr Dickerson, as she were a goin to set with her ands erfore her". Another complaining girl says, "Which blessed will be the day when justice is a-done in this ouse." A third, who has had her marks for good behaviour taken away, and is told she must earn them back, tells Dickens: "Ho! But if she didn't have em giv up at once, she could wish fur to go." These sound like real girls, not dramatic constructions. Dickens created character almost entirely through voice, so why was he unable to give convincing voices to the street women in his fiction? There is a question still hanging there.

Never mind. Hartley has written a book that every Dickens-lover, and everyone with an interest in social history, will want to read. It is packed with good stories, as its cast of forgotten women move through it - a tiny band amid all the wretchedness of 19th-century London. It also throws new light on a great episode in Dickens's life - an episode that ended abruptly when he fell in love, after which the whole enterprise slowly collapsed. You might see it as the revenge of Urania Aphrodite.

• Claire Tomalin's books include The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Penguin).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/20/charles-dickens-fallen-women-review

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

Enforcement Gone Bad

Editorial- NY Times
Enforcement Gone Bad
Published: February 21, 2009

The failures of the immigration system are many and severe, but the main problem is not that the country is catching too few undocumented immigrants. It is catching too many. Since the early 1990s, you could write the federal government’s immigration strategy on a cardboard sign: Deport Them All.

A report last week from the Pew Hispanic Center laid bare some striking results of that campaign. It found that Latinos now make up 40 percent of those sentenced in federal courts, even though they are only about 13 percent of the adult population. They accounted for one-third of federal prison inmates in 2007.

The numbers might suggest we are besieged by immigrant criminals. But of all the noncitizen Latinos sentenced last year, the vast majority — 81 percent — were convicted for unlawfully entering or remaining in the country, neither of which is a criminal offense.

The country is filling the federal courts and prisons with nonviolent offenders. It is diverting immense law-enforcement resources from pursuing serious criminals — violent thugs, financial scammers — to an immense, self-defeating campaign to hunt down ... workers.

The Pew report follows news this month that even as a federal program to hunt immigrant fugitives saw its budget soar — to $218 million last year from $9 million in 2003 — its mission went astray. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, of the 72,000 people arrested through last February, 73 percent had no criminal record. Border Patrol agents in California and Maryland, meanwhile, tell of pressure to arrest workers at day-labor corners and convenience stores to meet quotas.

The country needs to control its borders. It needs to rebuild an effective immigration system and thwart employers who cheat it. It needs to bring the undocumented forward and make citizen taxpayers of them.

For all the billions spent on fences, raids, patrols and prisons, the number of illegal immigrants has steadily grown to about 12 million last year from four million in 1992. So has the need to overhaul the many parts of a festering, broken system: to clear out backlogs in legal immigration, to rescue families from limbo, to throw sunlight on the shadow economy, to deter unlawful hiring, to replace chaos with lawfulness and order. All those priorities have languished in the deportation era.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/opinion/22sun3.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2009

OK: DOC Boss Want to Close One Women's Prison

DOC boss wants to close one female prison

by: CURTIS KILLMAN, Tulsa World Staff Writer
Monday, February 09, 2009
2/10/2009

Laura Pitman would like to see one of Oklahoma's female prisons closed.

As the boss of the state Department of Corrections's female prisons, Pitman knows it will take time to reduce the female prison population enough to accomplish that, but around 700 fewer women in prison would mean that the Eddie Warrior prison in Taft could shut its doors.

Then she would like to do it again with another prison.

Trimming about 1,400 women from the state prison rolls would mean Oklahoma would no longer rank No. 1 in the country in female incarceration. The state's rate would be just average.

Becoming average is on the top of Pitman's things-to-do list as she begins work as the department's deputy director of female operations.

The position was created late last year with a goal of reducing the number of imprisoned female offenders.

Here are the numbers: As of late January, 2,665 females were behind bars in Oklahoma. That works out to 131 women behind bars for every 100,000 females in the state.

Oklahoma's female incarceration rate is second to Mississippi's and nearly twice the national average of 69 women per 100,000 females.

Pitman said change both within and outside the prison system is needed to lower the female incarceration rate.

Within the system, Pitman said, she plans to review the way women move through the system. Her goal is to find ways to reduce their amount of time spent behind bars.

"We'll be looking at how we classify women in terms of their risks and needs, and do we need as many women as we have at higher security levels than lower," Pitman said.

Increasing time earned off their sentences for good behavior and reducing the number of days left on a sentence before moving an inmate to a lower security level are other areas under consideration, Pitman said.

She also plans to look at programs that will be geared towards reducing recidivism.

Why should people care how many females are behind bars?

"For the state of Oklahoma, the question to be answered is can we maintain public safety and reduce the amount we spend on corrections," Pitman said. "I believe so because I think we over-incarcerate low-risk offenders.

"When you are talking about a $503 million budget for the Department of Corrections, that means you are not spending it in other areas."

In the longer term, Pitman will push to expand the use of drug and mental health courts as alternatives to imprisoning females.

"Roughly 40 percent of our female offenders are incarcerated for drug-related crimes," said Pitman, who had been the department's deputy chief mental health officer .

Pitman points to Tulsa County's 2007 launching of Mental Health Court as an example of programs that should be expanded throughout the state.

"It disturbs me that people come into contact with law enforcement before treatment," she said. "When you don't have treatment available in the community, unfortunately persons with mental illness come into contact with law enforcement before they come into contact with treatment."

The Oklahoma Academy, a nonprofit organization that identifies critical public policy issues facing the state, recommends that the state strive to lose its No. 1 ranking in female incarceration within the next five years.

The Oklahoma Academy also recommends that the state female incarceration rate be reduced to less than the national average within 10 years.

Pitman said she believes Oklahoma can bring its female incarceration rate down to the national average and maintain public safety.

"It's obviously not an overnight thing," she said, regarding the time it will take. "It took longer than overnight to get here."

As for closing Eddie Warrior, the prison likely would not actually be abandoned. Instead, it would more likely become a male prison and potentially reduce the need for private prison beds for men, Pitman said.

Correction
This story should have stated that Mississippi ranks second to Oklahoma in its female incarceration rate.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20090209_11_A13_LauraP584764&archive=yes

Posted by lois at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)

Josh MacPhee Review of: Illustrations from the Inside & The Real Cost of Prisons Comix

Review: Illustrations from the Inside & The Real Cost of Prisons
Posted February 18, 2009 by Josh MacPhee

Go to this URL for the review which includes images from the books.
http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2009/02/review_illustrations_from_the_1.html
Review:
Illustrations from the Inside: The Beat Within
edited by Louis E.V. Nevaer
Mark Batty Publisher, 2007

The Real Cost of Prisons
edited by Lois Ahrens
PM Press, 2008

Back in 1997, I was living in Boulder, CO and working with the Prisoners Rights Project, a group dedicated to improving the conditions of Colorado's prisoners. We were mostly collecting and tabulating data and anecdotes from men trapped in the Colorado State Penitentiary, a super maximimum security prison and the ugly little brother of the Federal Florence AdMax prison down the street (there is something like a dozen prisons all on the same drag in Canyon City). I had been working on prison injustice issues for a number of years, first in Washington, DC, then Ohio, and then Colorado. One thing that was constant throughout my time doing prison activism were the envelopes from prisoners, tattooed with ball point pen dragons, big-breasted women, and low riders. These were some of the smallest, most intense and photo-realistic drawings I had ever seen; I had no idea the depth and detail one could extract from a Bic pen.

Illustrations from the Inside isn't exactly a collection of prison envelope art, but it has all the best qualities of that art form and more. The book is an amazing collection of images created by juvenile prisoners that are part of The Beat Within, a long running weekly magazine and writing program for youth in juvenile detention and prison. The pages here are a rush of imagery, from Chicano clown faces to Black super heroes, prison bars to indigenous spirituality. In many ways this is a tour through the mind of most teenage boys, but with a darker twist, as even the most banal images begin to feel infected by fear, control, domination and violence. The quality of the art jumps from childish to some of the most intense social realism I've ever seen. Cartoon Tupac scribbles share space with detailed drawings of riot cops beating Black youth. In some ways Illustrations reads like an American youth version of that popular Russian Criminal Tattoos book, not as esoteric or x-rated, but a serious window into the mindset of 11-25 year old prisoners (yes, some of the images are from imprisoned youth as young as 11!).

It's hard not to see the connections between this art and the popular art forms of tattooing and graffiti. Adam Mansbach seizes upon the similarities and difference to graffiti in his introduction to the book, raising the specter of burned out 1970s South Bronx, and how both art forms are the creative product of forgotten youth, kids thought of as the other, as dangerous, as criminals, as trash.

The writing in the book is pretty straightforward, which works. Mansbach gives us a basic intro, and then hands it over to editor Louis Nevaer. Nevaer, in direct and plain language, breaks down the structural reasons why class and race deeply effect who goes to prison and why, leading us to the reality of a majority poor youth of color juvenile justice system. The information is delivered in a straightforward way, nothing romantic or condescending. The one thing I am left wondering is: who is Nevaer? Unlike Mansbach, he has no bio, and he never clearly positions himself in his introduction. Why does he care? What is his connection to the youth or The Beat Within?

As always with Mark Batty Publishers, the book is beautiful. A nice hardcover, high quality paper, mostly black and white like the drawings, but with pink accents that highlight important written information in the pages facing the illustrations. And nice endpapers to top it all of, letting us know they care about book production and the book as an art object, not simply as a vehicle for information.

The Real Cost of Prisons covers similar material, but is a completely different take on it. This is primarily a paperback compilation of 3 comic books produced by the Real Cost of Prisons Project in order to educate prisoners and the public. The project is a nation-wide public education campaign designed to illustrate in plain and simple language what the real costs of prison are in our society. Since the 1970s the levels of incarceration in this country have skyrocketed, but there has been little to know public dialog about the reasons for this, or what it all costs, not just in financial terms, but the human costs. These comics were designed as popular education tools, and are being used as just that. Tens of thousands of copies have found their way into high school classrooms, prison study groups, politicians desks, and activist hands.

realcost01.jpgComics are a powerful medium for breaking down complex ideas into frame by frame visual explanations, and that's just what this book does. The Project was smart to approach 3 political comics veterans, all with experience working on World War 3 Illustrated, the longest running political comics magazine in the US. "Prison Town: Paying the Price," drawn by Kevin Pyle, is an overview of how prisons are paid for, who pays the real costs and how prison construction effects the communities they are placed in. "Prisoners of the War on Drugs," drawn by Sabrina Jones, exposes the forces at work behind drug laws and drug-related imprisonment. "Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and their Children," drawn by Susan Willmarth, is a touching collection of first person narratives about how prison has deeply affected women and children.

As this is an art bllog, let me talk a bit about the art. Kevin Pyle's comic is a visual tour-de-force. Ever since his early World War 3 comics about prisons, I've always felt Pyle's unique smudged drawing style perfectly captures the creepy feeling that prisons create; the idea something else is going on beyond what the eye can see, that the images, like the workings of state repression, won't stand still long enough to get a clear image of what is really going on. Somewhat unfortunately this unsettled feeling carries into almost all his frames, even the ones focused on restorative justice and alternatives to the cruelty of prisons. Sabrina Jones is at her peak, using bold organic lines to powerfully carry us through the story and information. The material is dense and difficult, so I commend her efforts to tame it. My only complaint is that I would like to have seen more large images, full page graphics that frame the smaller panels and give us a macro view. Although Susan WIllmarth has done comics for World War 3 before, she is the artist I'm the least familiar with, but is an exciting surprise. I think her comic is my favorite, graphically it reads as an exciting clash between Raymond Pettibone and Lynda Barry. It is much looser than the previous two stories, the raw style bringing us deep into the lives she's narrating. I'm not a comics expert, but this seems like a great example of the comic books' visual narrative structure being used to compelling lay out important social and political material.

These two books illustrate two very different possible relationships between art and social injustice. The Real Cost of Prisons uses art by practiced professionals as a tool to teach about and explain issues to wide and diverse audiences. It plays to the strengths of an established form (the comic) and lays out a clear path for the reader to better understand the workings of the US prison system. On the other hand, Illustrations from the Inside argues that creativity is a raw tool for the liberation of the creator. The audience is secondary; we are voyeurs, allowed a quick peek into the lives of kids in prison. The art can educate people, that is much less important than the possible transformative effect it can have on the artists themselves.

Posted by lois at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

NV: Legislative panel discusses prison plans

Legislative panel discusses prison plans
Feb. 19, 2009
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Legislative panel discusses prison plans
By BRENDAN RILEY
The Associated Press

CARSON CITY — Told that the state's prison population is lower than expected, members of a Senate-Assembly budget panel said Thursday that they would like a delay in new prison construction and an end to plans to shut down an old prison and an inmate camp.
Lawmakers commented after Corrections Director Howard Skolnik said the current total of 12,689 inmates is 725 less than what had been projected in the $481 million, two-year prison system budget plan outlined in mid-January by Gov. Jim Gibbons.

Skolnik also said local authorities in the Las Vegas and Reno areas, Nevada's population centers, have advised him that crime rates are flat. That would factor into new inmate projections being prepared by prison system consultants.

Assemblywoman Kathy McClain, D-Las Vegas, the subcommittee chairwoman, said she would like to see "a little more thought" put into initial administration plans to shut down the old Nevada State Prison in Carson City and an inmate camp near Tonopah and to build a new prison at Indian Springs, in southern Nevada.

McClain was joined by Assembly members Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, and Pete Goicoechea, R-Eureka, in saying the Tonopah camp should remain open.
"We're all pretty convinced that's not a good policy," said Leslie, adding that she also opposes the plan to close the medium-security prison in Carson City, which dates to the 1870s.

Skolnik said reasons for the inmate population not climbing as expected could include the addition of more police in Las Vegas, resulting in more crime prevention; and also a drop in population in southern Nevada and an economic downturn that has cut into opportunities for criminals.

"Because of the economic downturn there's a lot more cocooning going on," Skolnik said. "People are staying home. They're not out on the street. It's harder to become a victim if you're locked in your house watching TV."

While Skolnik said he still expects a need for future prison system expansion, Richard Siegel of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada questioned whether the expansion is needed and noted that 20 percent of the beds in various prison facilities are now vacant.
Siegel also said he was optimistic that the current prison population could be maintained. He said state parole authorities are "more proactive" now in returning convicts to the streets, and a major study panel on which he serves is looking for ways to hold down the number of inmates behind bars.

Siegel also said Nevada has one of the best rates in the nation of people who get paroles and manage to stay out of prison afterward.

Find this article at: http://www.lvrj.com/news/breaking_news/39883807.html

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

Report: Prison Rehab Programs Are Working. Prison Population Has Stopped Expanding

Report: Prison rehab programs working
By Mike Ward | Thursday, February 19, 2009
Austin American Statesman

Texas’ prison population has stopped growing for the time being, thanks in part to a controversial changes in corrections policy two years ago that ballooned funding for rehabilitation programs, new statistics indicate.

That means Texas will not have to consider building new prisons that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, at a time when the economic collapse is pinching the state budget, officials said today.

”We put 6,000 treatment beds on line in the past two years … and this is the initial result: Just what we expected,” said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, who co-authored legislation mandating the greatly-expanded treatment programs in 2007.

Echoing sentiments from colleagues, Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, said the statistics show “a dramatic turnaround.”

Today’s Legislative Budget Board testimony to the budget-writing Senate Finance Committee marked the first public report card on the new programs, which two years ago were championed by corrections advocates as a step forward and opposed by some prosecutors and police groups as too soft on crime.

“Crime is down, the programs are working,” said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice what operates the 112-prison system. “It’s been proven before that these types of programs have an impact on recidivism, so these new numbers are no surprise.”

Even so, Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley while he thinks some of the reforms have proven beneficial, such as expanded drug-treatment slots, he cautioned against reading too much into the new statistics.

“I would be very skeptical from making a connection between the numbers and legislation that passed two years ago, especially if you look back at at the LBB numbers — their predictions weren’t particularly accurate,” he said. “I would agree that the system does seem stable right now. The parole rate in the last five years has been very stable.”

According to the report, the number of convicts in Texas’ state prisons is expected to remain steady this year, and then decline slightly the following year — for the first time in several years.

In 2012, however, the prison population could begin increasing again and by 2014 will grow to almost 158,000 - from the current 154,000.

Billed at the time as the biggest shift for Texas corrections policy in years, the 2007 changes greatly expanded the capacity of in-prison drug and alcohol-treatment programs, opened new transition treatment centers to help convicts succeed once they got out, expanded counseling and specialized drug-treatment programs and opened new lockups designed especially for habitual drunk drivers.

Total cost was more than $227 million.

At the time, while proposing an additional $14 million for rehabilitation and treatment programs, Gov. Rick Perry had asked for $125.8 million to build two new medium-security prisons to add 1,000 beds, and converting a Texas Youth Commission lockup to a prison for adults to add 600 more.

Perry in 2005 had vetoed probation reforms that contained many elements of the 2007 plan.

The adult prisons were never approved, and that funding was diverted to the Whitmire-Madden plan that, at the time, made some legislative leaders nervous. The package beefed up funding for local probation departments to treat and rehabilitate some non-violent criminals in their communities, rather than sending them to a state prison.

“It looks very much like we thought it would at this point,” said state Rep. Jerry Madden, co-author of the plan who at the time was chairman of the House Corrections Committee.

Funding is being sought this year for additional treatment beds, which could further reduce the prison population, he said.

“The numbers clearly show if we worked toward providing adequate programming for alcohol and drug treatment, mental health and probation and other programs, that it can work.”
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/politics/entries/2009/02/19/report_prison_rehab_programs_w.html

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

NY Plans to Release More Prisoners

NY plans to release more inmates from prisons
By Michael Virtanen
Associated Press Writer
Newsday
February 19, 2009

ALBANY, N.Y.

The Paterson administration has proposed further emptying New York's prisons by releasing more inmates six months early for good behavior, putting middle-aged convicts into shock camps and punishing technical parole violations with something short of prison.

Corrections chief Brian Fischer said the measures, recommended earlier this year by a special commission that included lawmakers, are based on past successes and would help the criminal justice system operate more rationally. They require the Legislature's approval.

The three measures would remove an estimated 1,600 more inmates from prisons in a year. The population _ which stood at 59,918 on Thursday at 69 facilities _ is down about 11,500 since its 1999 peak. Fischer cited a reduced crime rate and improved focus on helping convicts re-enter society.

"The point isn't to empty the prisons," corrections spokesman Erik Kriss said, calling savings a side benefit. "The point is to build on stuff we've found works."

Currently, 39 percent of inmates return within a three-year period, most for parole violations, Kriss said. Technical violations can include failing a drug test or missing curfew.

Parole Division spokeswoman Heather Groll said the division could proceed administratively if the bill isn't passed.

The proposed expansion of the six-month military-style shock camp, begun in 1987 for inmates under age 24, would allow nonviolent offenders up to age 49 with less than three years left on their sentences to be admitted. Graduates' recidivism rate is 20 percent lower than other inmates, Fischer said.

The credit time proposal for good behavior is a variation on Merit Time, which allows nonviolent offenders to earn reduced sentences for good behavior and program participation. Fischer said since it started in 1996, prisons have seen a 35 percent decline in assaults on staff and 60 percent drop in assaults on other inmates.

Janice Grieshaber, executive director of the Jenna Foundation for Non-Violence, said she was initially worried about the proposals but believes her concerns about violent offenders are being addressed.

"We need to keep the most violent and threatening people off the street. There are people who cannot be helped and they don't want to be," said Grieshaber, who lobbied for passage of Jenna's law, which eliminated parole for violent felons. "I also believe in the system being able to work in a positive way and enable certain offenders to change. I emphasize the word certain."

The Department of Correctional Services has also proposed closing four minimum-security camps and up to a half-dozen prison annexes once built to handle overflows.

The prison system, with a $3 billion annual budget and 31,000 employees, estimates nearly $30 million in annual savings from the closings.

Past proposals to close prisons, often major employers in rural areas, have met stiff opposition in the Legislature.

The Paterson administration is trying to close a projected deficit of more than $14 billion in the upcoming fiscal year in a roughly $120 billion state budget, requiring savings from all executive agencies, including corrections.

"Certainly everything's on the table," Donn Rowe, president of the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, said Thursday. The union that represents prison guards continues to lobby against closing the camps, calling them "an important tool" against recidivism.

The camps have programs and fewer restrictions that help with re-entry, and minimum-security inmates otherwise would go to medium-security prisons with more dangerous felons, according to the union.

The union maintains the prison system is actually at 104 percent of capacity measured by federal standards.

Fischer said the prison system has more than 7,000 vacant beds, and a 50 percent drop in its minimum-security population over nine years.

Speaking this week to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, Fischer said the statewide crime rate dropped 35 percent over the past decade. Alternatives to prison for drug offenders and other nonviolent felons, coupled with a legislative rollback four years ago of some of the harsh Rockefeller-era drug laws, also contributed to the 16 percent decline in the population in the state's 69 correctional facilities, he said.
New York's maximum-security population has stayed "relatively constant" or slightly up and was 24,207 on Thursday, Kriss said.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--prisonerreleases0219feb19,0,2772263.story

Posted by lois at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

PA: New Bigger Prison to Proposed to Replace Graterford

New state prison planned
Thursday, February 19, 2009
By KEITH PHUCAS
Times Herald Staff

COURTHOUSE — Pennsylvania is planning to replace Graterford Prison with a new facility to reduce overcrowding, and construction could begin as early as next fall, according to the state’s Department of General Services.

Once the new facility is constructed, the prison would house up to 4,000 inmates, according to Ed Myslewicz, a spokesman for the state Department of General Services. The construction could cost between $350 million and $400 million.

The prison population in Pennsylvania has grown by 21 percent over the past six years from 37,995 in 2001 to more than 49,300 today in the state’s 27 correctional institutions, according to Department of Corrections figures. Currently, Graterford holds 3,400 prisoners.

The prison population is predicted to grow an average of 4 percent each year through 2012, according to state officials.

“We’ve been looking to expand because of the increase in inmate populations over the past few years,” said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Susan McNaughton. She said the average cost of building a prison in the state is about $200 million.

Myslewicz said money to build the new prison would come from the capital budget that was approved by the state’s General Assembly. State lawmakers authorized funding seven projects at an estimated cost of $862 million.

Employing a “design-build” concept would require approved construction contractors to design the structures as they are being built later this year. Requests for proposals are expected to go out in the spring.

“The state plans to put out design-build requests (for proposals) to get as many proposals as we can from construction companies,” Myslewicz. “We’re keeping an eye on costs to give the greatest value for taxpayers.”

The existing Graterford facility prison, which was built in 1929, will be mothballed because of the high costs and operational challenges it presents.

According to the Department of Corrections, the current facility is “difficult to manage, is very staff intensive” and would need more than $60 million to maintain operations during the next decade.

The planned prison is expected to operate using the existing 1,200 employees and is expected to pay for itself in 20 years with the operational savings.

The Graterford project is part of a broader state construction initiative that plans to add about 9,000 beds to the prison system. Other proposed building projects include prisons in Centre and Fayette counties. Prison officials also plan to add four housing units at correctional facilities in Crawford, Forest, Indiana and Northumberland counties.

County Commissioner Bruce L. Castor Jr., a former district attorney, welcomed the state’s efforts to deal with the overcrowding issue at Graterford — the facility that has been “a good neighbor.”

As well, he believes the proposed project would give a boost to the area’s lagging economy.

“Any expansion would be an opportunity to put more local residents to work in Montgomery County,” Castor said.

The Graterford facility would be built on existing state land and be completed within three years. The proposed prison will be certified according to energy-saving Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) ratings.

McNaughton said her agency is working to develop programs to keep nonviolent offenders out of state prison facilities to make room for violent offenders.
http://www.timesherald.com/articles/2009/02/19/news/doc499cd2a850d3c922029465.txt

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

February 19, 2009

FL: Business lobby: Don't build prisons, release inmates instead

Business lobby: Don't build prisons, release inmates instead

BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER
Miami Herald

As lawmakers grapple with the need to build nearly 20 new Florida prisons in the next five years on a cratering state budget, a powerful business lobby is proposing what they acknowledge is a radical idea: stop building beds and release nonviolent inmates instead.

The group, Associated Industries of Florida, has released a position paper calling on lawmakers to halt the scheduled construction of three new prisons, each with the ability to house 1,300 inmates. Building the prisons is expected to cost $300 million, plus an additional $81 million per year in operating costs.

The Department of Corrections could forgo the prison construction by releasing about 3,900 inmates, the group recommends. The prisoners should be near the end of their term, and the release should not include any violent felons, pedophiles or sexual predators, the statement says.

Barney T. Bishop, Associated Industries' president, acknowledges that some conservatives might find it ''left wing for a business association executive'' to support the release of prison inmates. But ''it doesn't make sense to me,'' he said, ``to build those prisons.''

And Bishop may not be alone in seeking unconventional solutions to the state's budget woes. State Sen. Victor D. Crist, the powerful chairman of the Justice Appropriations Committee, said he, too, has been looking at ways to avoid a new prison-building binge with tax dollars that don't exist.

Crist, a Tampa Republican, supports the idea of halting prison construction. But, he says, Bishop's proposal to release some inmates will be a tough sell.

''Both AIF and the Florida Senate are on the same page with the idea of saving money by slowing down the construction of beds,'' Crist said. ``But we're on two different pages on how to accomplish that.''

Among other things, Crist proposes the state save about $24 million by contracting with either public or privately run prisons just outside Florida's borders to house 450 inmates. The prisons should be no more than 100 miles from the state and should only house inmates with no ties to Florida, such as recent migrants.

''The correctional systems in surrounding states, especially private operators, have a significant amount of beds available,'' Crist said.

Crist also suggests the Department of Corrections could take over operation of secure facilities recently vacated by juvenile justice administrators, who have been aggressively cutting costs as well. The facilities could house inmates nearing the end of their sentences who are in work-release programs.

State Rep. J.C. Planas, a Miami Republican and lawyer, said there's another speed bump on the way to releasing some inmates: The proposal would require revising state law, which requires that prisoners serve most of their sentences before release. `

''From my perspective, everything is on the table,'' said Planas, who chairs the Public Safety & Domestic Security Policy Committee. ''But that is a quasi-last resort,'' he said of the release proposal.

Bishop's proposal is emphatic that no ''violent felons, pedophiles or sexual predators'' be included in any early release and that the pool of potential releases be restricted to inmates nearing the end of their sentences.

''But to do so without providing these inmates with some services dooms many to recidivate and end up back in a prison at a substantially higher cost to the taxpayers, not mentioning the future victims,'' his position paper states.

Crist's response: ``That will include thieves, burglars and assaulters.''

``It would include a number of individuals who prey on society and drive up the cost to law enforcement back home, so that defeats the purpose. We'd just be shifting costs.''

DOC spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said DOC Secretary Walt McNeil agrees with Bishop's recommendation that inmates released from a state prison receive life skills training, basic education and substance abuse and mental healthcare to improve their chances of staying out of prison. About one-third of inmates are back behind bars within three years.

Florida lawmakers may need to cut 19.5 percent, or $5 billion, from the current year's budget when they tackle a spending plan for budget year 2010, Crist said. Citing tanking state revenues, DOC Secretary Walter McNeil announced last month he had laid off 66 probation officers.

In recent weeks, Florida's prison population had topped 100,000, though the census stood at 99,691 on Wednesday, said Plessinger.

The Criminal Justice Estimating Conference, which forecasts prison admissions, estimates a state prison population of 106,086 by the end of the next budget year, a slight drop from prior forecasts, records show. Based upon prior forecasts, prison administrators said they would need to build 19 new prisons in the next five years, Plessinger said.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking-news/story/911176.html

Posted by lois at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

MA: School Zone Laws Fail to Keep Children Safe from Drug Sales and Disproportionately Send More African Americans and Latinos to Prison & Jail

Go to the full report and excellent graph:
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/toofar/report.html

Report: Mass. sentencing laws not doing the job
Feb. 19, 2009
Bay State Banner
St. John Barned-Smith

Calls for reform of mandatory minimum sentencing laws received some added support recently from a report by a Massachusetts incarceration think tank that claims current policies are failing to keep children safe from the dangers of drugs.

At issue are so-called “sentencing enhancement zones,” according to the report unveiled last month by the Northampton-based Prison Policy Initiative.

The zones were originally designed “to serve as a geographic deterrent in order to protect children from drug activity [by] identifying specific areas where children gather and driving drug offenders away from them with the threat of an enhanced penalty,” according to the report.

But Massachusetts’ mandatory minimum laws have largely missed the mark, says initiative executive director Peter Wagner. Under the current law, certain drug offenses carry a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in jail if they are committed within an “enhancement zone,” defined as the 1,000-foot area surrounding a school.

According to Wagner, the abundance of Head Start centers, accredited day care centers and other schools leave few areas in cities and towns that are not considered special enforcement zones.

“If you make everywhere special, nowhere is special,” Wagner said.

The result, he argues, is legislation that not only fails to specifically deter the sale of drugs near schools, but also unfairly targets drug users caught possessing narcotics in these zones who are not intent on selling to schoolchildren.

“The legislature made the assumption that within 1,000 feet” of a school, people “were intending to sell to children,” Wagner said. “But only 1 percent of those cases involve children. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the law punishes people who weren’t trying to sell to children.”

The Prison Policy Initiative’s report recommends reducing the scope of the boundary to 100 feet, which Wagner said will create zones that would more effectively stop drug use near schools.

“One hundred feet wouldn’t cover an entire populated area,” Wagner said. “It would make certain areas special.”

The report also underlines other problems with Massachusetts’ mandatory minimum laws. One highly contentious issue is the claim that the sentencing requirements disproportionately affect minorities.

According to the report, blacks and Latinos account for 80 percent of the state’s special enforcement zone convictions, and are between 26 and 30 times more likely to receive a mandatory enhanced sentence.

Opponents of mandatory minimum laws also say the requirements unfairly handcuff judges by eliminating alternative options during sentencing. On top of that, Wagner said, by giving prosecutors more leverage to encourage defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges so that they can avoid the minimum sentences, the laws can actually result in people receiving longer periods of imprisonment.

The laws have practical downfalls for the state as well, said Wagner. Chief among them: They’re bleeding state coffers dry.

“With the state facing a $3.1 billion [budget] shortfall and incarceration costing the taxpayer $47,679 for each prisoner each year, the state can ill-afford this kind of inefficiency,” Wagner wrote in the report.

Mandatory minimum opponents have been trying to bring more attention to the matter by making their presence felt at a series of civil rights hearings being held throughout the state.

Barbara Dougan, executive director of the Massachusetts branch of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, recently e-mailed her members to encourage them to attend the last of the meetings (to be held on March 10 in New Bedford) to voice their opposition to the laws.

“People who live in urban areas get punished more severely than people who live in suburban areas,” Dougan said, even though “statewide, the data shows drug use is roughly equivalent.”
http://www.baystatebanner.com/Print?page=local14-2009-02-19

Posted by lois at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2009

NH: Officials praise planned prison closing Many hopeful about future use of the land

Officials praise planned prison closing
Many hopeful about future use of the land

By ANNMARIE TIMMINS
Monitor staff
February 16, 2009
Laconia, NH

The governor's announcement last week that he intends to close the Lakes Region prison by July was long overdue for many in Laconia who have always imagined something better on the prison's 400 acres with lake access and magnificent views. But the celebration has been bittersweet because closing the prison is likely to mean about 80 layoffs.

"I think there must be a better use for the property," said Rep. Judith Reever, a Laconia Democrat. "But I feel very badly for the people who are going to lose their jobs."

Mayor Matt Lahey, whose opposition to the prison dates back years, told The Citizen of Laconia last week that Gov. John Lynch's plan is "certainly not a cause for joy" given the lost jobs.

Even former mayor Paul Fitzgerald, among the biggest opponents of the prison, acknowledged the downside yesterday.

"I wish it (had been closed) years ago, but I'm pleased it's happening. I never thought it was an appropriate institution for this area and I still don't. But I realize (closing it) will create a personal hardship for some folks, and I hope the state will take care of those people."
The Lakes Region Facility sits on Lake Winnisquam and overlooks Opechee Bay. It became state land more than a century ago when a local family donated it.

For the first 90 years, the property was home to the Laconia State School, a home for the developmentally disabled.

When the state closed the school in 1991, it recast the property as a minimum/medium security prison for nonviolent offenders. Laconia officials fiercely objected, arguing that putting a prison there wasted some of the city and state's nicest land.

City officials lost the fight but secured a couple of concessions: the prison would be temporary and would house no more than 300 inmates.

Locals then turned to imagining a better future. They dreamed about a technical college, a job training center or a nursing home taking over the grounds.

Any of those, they said, would be a more welcome neighbor and allow locals to enjoy the trails and the Lake Winnisquam beachfront on the grounds. But the city's dreams were cut short.

The state reneged on the closure deadline and gradually increased the capacity of the prison, leaving the city bitterly angry and disappointed. Now that a statewide budget crisis has forced Lynch to recommend closing the prison to save money, local officials are cautiously beginning to look toward the future.

Rep. Beth Arsenault, a Laconia Democrat, said her husband enjoys walking the trails on the public part of the property and her family isn't afraid to use the beach on Lake Winnisquam.

But some families are leery because the public portion is less than a half mile from the prison and pedestrians are likely to run across prison guards while there.

"There are other state functions that could happen there that would not be incompatible with the state park," she said. "It's a beautiful piece of property bordering on a lake."

Reever said she thinks the site could be used in a more tourist-friendly manner, such as a state park.

City Councilor Greg Knytych, whose ward includes the prison, agreed with the notion of making the place a state park.

"It really could be one of the state landmark parks," he said. "Tourism is probably the largest sector of jobs in this region and I think something like that would bring tourists in."

The section across the street from the prison, which borders Lake Opechee, is already being used for community garden space through an agreement with the local conservation group.

"I really see keeping it open land," Knytych said. "I think this is a good thing, and a lot of my constituents feel the same way."

Given the economic climate, no one expects the state to immediately put money into converting the property into something else. But Fitzgerald said he hopes the state won't let the buildings fall into further disrepair.

Jane Wood, a member of the Belknap County Economic Development Commission, embraced Lynch's announcement, although she's reminding herself that the Legislature still must weigh in on the plan.

"I was taken a bit by surprise at the news," she said yesterday. "And I'm not entirely sure what to think would be possible in this economic climate. But I have to think there would be some wonderful uses for that property that would make more ecological sense."

Wood wasn't sure what role, if any, the development commission could play in re-imagining the property. If the property were to go up for private sale, it would go on the council's inventory, and the council could provide some financing, Wood said.

But no one has said whether the land will remain the state's or be available for private development.

Wood, Fitzgerald and the others said they hope the state would include Laconia in any talks about the land's future use. The relationship between the state and city has been strained, they said, but it shouldn't be.

"Laconia has been ignored in the past by the state," Fitzgerald said. "And the city is a little leery of the state. But my hope is that the governor will not continue that."
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090216/FRONTPAGE/902160303/1103/RSS02

Posted by lois at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

Pew Study Finds Sharp Rise in Latino Federal Prisoners

Study Shows Sharp Rise in Latino Federal Convicts
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: February 18, 2009
NY Times

Latino convicts now represent the largest ethnic population in the federal prison system, accounting for 40 percent of all those convicted of federal crimes, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

In 2007, Latinos, who make up 13 percent of the United States population, accounted for one third of all federal prison inmates, a result the study attributed to the sharp rise in illegal immigration and the increased enforcement of immigration laws.

Nearly half of all Latino offenders, or about 48 percent, were convicted of immigration crimes, while drug offenses were the second-most prevalent charge, according to the report.

As the annual number of federal offenders more than doubled from 1991 to 2007, the number of Latino offenders sentenced in a given year nearly quadrupled, to 29,281 from 7,924.

Of Latino federal offenders, 72 percent are not United States citizens and most were sentenced in courts from one of the four states that border Mexico. Undocumented federal prisoners are usually deported to their home countries after serving their sentences.

“The immigration system has essentially become criminalized at a huge cost to the criminal justice system, to courts, to judges, to prisons and prosecutors,” said Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “And the government has diverted the resources of the criminal justice system from violent crimes, financial skullduggery and other areas that have been the traditional area of the Justice Department.”

Last month, The New York Times reported that federal immigration prosecutions had increased over the last five years, doubling in the last fiscal year to more than 70,000 cases. Meanwhile, other categories of federal prosecutions, including gun trafficking, public corruption, organized crime and white-collar crime, have declined over the same period.

The federal justice system accounts for 200,000, or 8.6 percent, of the 2.3 million inmates in federal and state prisons and city and county jails. Nineteen percent of state prisoners and 16 percent of jail inmates were Latinos, the Pew study found. African-Americans, who make up about 12 percent of the national population, make up 39 percent of state prisoners and jail inmates.

Deborah Williams, an assistant federal defender in Phoenix, said that the large number of Latinos in the federal system, particularly those who are not citizens and have limited English proficiency, had dramatically changed federal prison culture.

“I have Anglo and Native American clients who tell me about being the only non-Spanish speaker in their pod,” Ms. Williams said. “Ten years ago, it just wasn’t that way. Everything is changing in there, including the language, the television shows they watch, and a lot of times the guards don’t speak the language. How do you safely guard people who may not understand your orders?”

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, Tracy Billingsley, declined immediate comment on the Pew report.

Mark Hugo Lopez, a co-author of the study, which relied on United States Sentencing Commission statistics, said, “It’s hard to understand whether we’re seeing a policy change or just a growth in the total number of immigrants coming to this country.”

The number of undocumented immigrants in the country increased to 11.9 million last year, from 3.9 million in 1992.

Under federal programs like Operation Gatekeeper, which hired thousands of immigration enforcement officials along the southwest border, and Operation Streamline, which instituted a “zero tolerance policy” for illegal border crossings in the same region, immigration crimes have skyrocketed.

The large number of immigration crimes and low-level drug offenses account for the relatively light sentences that Latinos typically receive — about 46 months, compared with 62 months for white inmates and 91 months for African-American prisoners, according to the study.
graph at this URL-
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/us/19immig.html?_r=1

Posted by lois at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

MI: Analysis: Granholm's prison plan is ambitious

February 16, 2009
Analysis: Granholm's prison plan is ambitious
By David Eggert
Associated Press Writer

LANSING (AP) — Gov. Jennifer Granholm's ambitious plan to save money by releasing more prisoners is doable, but a lot has to go right for it to work.

Since the number of inmates exceeded 51,000 almost two years ago, her administration has lowered the population to just over 48,000 through paroles and commutations, a timely drop in felony convictions and prison intakes, and an expanded program that aims to keep parolees from committing new crimes.

The trend certainly could continue, but the Michigan Department of Corrections has a tough path ahead to reach its goal of reducing the head count an additional 7 percent by year's end. The last time Michigan was under 45,000 inmates: 1999.

The $2 billion corrections budget is under scrutiny because Michigan incarcerates people at a higher rate and pays corrections workers higher salaries compared with other Great Lakes states. Corrections is the largest program controlled directly by state government and employs nearly one-third of all state employees.

It costs 4½ times more to incarcerate a state inmate each year than it does to educate a schoolchild.

The Democratic governor's past attempts to address sentence lengths, or the "front end" of the system, were rejected by lawmakers and law enforcement. So she's relying on the "back end," her parole board, to take a closer look at 12,000 prisoners serving beyond their earliest release date.

Granholm needs the prison population to fall so she can close more prisons and potentially lay off more than 1,000 corrections employees, saving $120 million in the next budget year.

The same day she unveiled her proposed state budget last week, she signed an executive order expanding the parole board from 10 to 15 members to accelerate the process.

"Do we expect to release all 12,000? Obviously not," Corrections spokesman John Cordell said. "Some will serve to the max because they are really unsafe."

But he notes that Michigan inmates on average serve 137 percent of their minimum sentence while the national average is 120 percent.

"The more people that are past their earliest release date we can release safely in the community, we will do so," Cordell said.

The parole board may start automatically releasing prisoners once they serve their minimum sentence assuming they complete rehabilitation programs. Serious offenders such as rapists and murderers would be excluded from the policy.

The parole board could only hold inmates beyond 120 percent of their minimum sentence if they pose a "very high" risk of re-offending.

The policy was recommended by outside experts who spent a year examining crime and punishment in Michigan. Their report released last month suggested applying the policy to prisoners sentenced after April 1. The Corrections Department is considering whether it should be retroactive to those behind bars today, too.

It's unclear if the parole board will be forced to follow the policy, but the Granholm administration says the board is being more aggressive regardless.

Nearly 71 percent of prisoners were approved for parole at their earliest release date in 2008, the highest in Granholm's six years in office.

The parole board has reduced the overall number of inmates serving past their earliest release date by 10 percent since last summer. Throw in fewer parole revocations, a 9 percent drop in prison admissions in 2008 and the first decline in felony convictions in nine years, and it's easy to see why the prison population has fallen for seven straight months.

But the population can be fickle. If there's just one high-profile crime involving a parolee, all bets are off and Granholm's plan will be jeopardized.

When Patrick Selepak was mistakenly released from prison in 2006 and killed three people in Macomb and Genesee counties, the justice system responded with more arrests, more prison sentences, fewer paroles and more parole revocations, according to the state. The prison population exploded 13 straight months before declining.

Then in 2007, parolee and registered sex offender Matthew Macon killed at least two women in Lansing and was suspected in the deaths of up to five others. That led to eight straight months of growth in the prison population.

Other factors — such as whether the number of prison intakes starts creeping up again and if there will be enough money to hire more officers to monitor parolees — could complicate Granholm's corrections plan, too.

Finally, there's bound to be a limit when reviewing the 12,000 inmates who have served their minimum sentence because as the pool declines, the remaining prisoners could be sex offenders and violent criminals the parole board is hesitant to release.

Corrections Director Patricia Caruso said she expects the prison population to continue to decline, resulting in the first corrections layoffs in the Granholm era.

She said the department is decreasing the population "safely and appropriately."

"We are not opening the door and pushing people out of the prison," Caruso said.
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20090216/FREE/902169997

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

February 17, 2009

WI: Thread a threat to control of prisoners

"Thread is seized frequently in the Secure Program Facility, which houses the most unruly felons in highly restrictive conditions."

SAT., FEB 14, 2009
Prison contraband reports show hidden potential of ordinary items
Karen Rivedal

Ramen noodles and a Bic pen.

A knit cap and a knitted cup holder.

A pair of socks and a white T-shirt.

A toothbrush and a broken deodorant cap.

A piece of thread.

Four crocheted bears.

A Bible.

It might sound like a care package to a Christian college, but all these items come from recent contraband reports from Wisconsin prisons. Seized from prisoners' cells and lockers, the items run afoul of state rules dictating what and how much stuff an inmate can have.

If much of what's listed on the reports appears benign, prison officials say, that's because maintaining security and safety requires more than just keeping out guns and knives.

Extra amounts of allowable property — which is the bulk of what prison guards seize — can sow disorder in a host of ways, staff said, from creating a fire hazard to breeding bad blood between prisoners.

What's more, even mundane items can be made dangerous, officials said. One favorite tactic of inmates is to melt a razor blade removed from prison-provided shavers into the handle of a prison toothbrush.

Instant weapon, easily concealed.

"Anything in a prison can be a weapon if that is the intent," said Dan Westfield, security chief of prisons in the state Department of Corrections.

Another inmate might use the wooden squeegee handle of a prison mop bucket, which records show was seized from a male prisoner at Fox Lake Correctional Institution last year, or grab a spray bottle from the laundry filled with bleach. That was found in a prisoner's cell at Taycheedah Correctional Center, the state's prison for female maximum- and medium-security inmates.

"Using stuff within the facility is much easier than having somebody trying to bring them a knife or a gun," said Rick Phillips, security director at Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, a men's maximum-security prison.

Hiding places

The Wisconsin State Journal reviewed contraband reports from five state prisons at a variety of security levels. The prisons were Fox Lake, Taycheedah, Dodge, Oakhill and the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility in Boscobel, formerly known as Supermax.

The reports bear out not only the seemingly ordinary nature of many confiscated items but also their hidden potential. Prisoners sometimes hide banned items inside allowed ones and convert many normal, daily items for illicit purposes that would rarely occur to a free person, staff said.

To a prisoner, a deodorant cap can be a good place to stash tobacco — illegal in the state's smoke-free prison system — and a long piece of thread can be a communication cable.

Thread is seized frequently in the Secure Program Facility, which houses the most unruly felons in highly restrictive conditions.

Many inmates there use thread pulled from their uniforms to "fish underneath the doors with," passing notes or other materials, said Monica Horner, security director at the Boscobel prison. "It's hard to stop, because it's something we give them every day (in their clothes), and it's easy for them to get rid of by flushing it down the toilet," she said.

Some inmates also take apart pens and attach them to small motors to make tattoo guns or hide drugs and cash inside book bindings. That kind of ploy likely accounted for the reportedly "altered" Bible seized at the Boscobel prison in 2007, staff said.

Even a roll of toilet paper — something prison officials obviously can't stop providing — can be used alone or molded with other materials to make ropes, daggers and fake but realistic-looking guns. Toothpaste often provides the hardening element, staff said.

At Taycheedah in October 2007, one inmate even made a woven noose from toilet paper, intending to use it to kill herself. Such things turn up especially among inmates with mental problems, staff said.

"They weave things out of what's available to them," said David Tarr, Taycheedah's security director. "There's always toilet paper. When you weave it the right way, it can support the weight of a 200-pound person."

Inmates also frequently abuse prescription medicine, which is far more of a problem in prisons than illegal drugs, staff said. The abuse happens when inmates with legal prescriptions take it in oversized doses or provide it to others.

"It's so dangerous if they're stockpiling medications," said Jodine Deppisch, warden at Fox Lake, a medium-security men's prison. "There's always a big fear of medication abuse, because if someone has a bad reaction, you don't really know what you have there."

Staff said prescription drug abuse is more of a problem among women inmates than men. In men's prisons, more street drugs are confiscated, along with much more gang-related photos and papers.

Clutter a problem

Even if no rule-breaking is intended, clutter in a cell can hamper prison operations just by being there, officials said.

For one thing, it taxes the ability of guards to conduct timely and effective searches.

"An inmate might have a piece of paper showing all the gambling debts he owes to another inmate," said Deputy Warden Gary Boughton at the Boscobel prison. "If he's got that one piece of paper stashed in between stacks and stacks of paper, it's more likely (guards) will miss that."

An inmate with many possessions also can build undue influence through gifts or loans of items to other inmates, while botched trades and unpaid debts can lead to retaliatory violence, staff said.

One way an inmate can accumulate a lot of possessions is by not turning in old items as required when new allocations are made. At Dodge, prisoners have used excess clothing to evade supervision by making a dummy dressed in their clothes and left in their cells.

"So he looks like he's there," Phillips said.

Inmates who hoard clothes also pose difficulties for the prison laundry and stockroom.

"If we don't know how much clothing they have, we can't keep track of it," Phillips said. "We need to keep track so we have enough clean stuff in stock to distribute."

Cell phones new threat

Prisons' security chief Westfield said the most sought-after contraband in state prisons has long been money, drugs and tobacco. Cell phones — as they have become smaller, cheaper and more sophisticated — are a growing new threat, he said.

Cell phones threaten prison security and endanger public safety because they give prisoners an independent communication channel to the outside world, officials said.

Ordinarily, prison officials monitor messages inmates might seek to send out, by examining their mail and listening in on the calls they are allowed to make on prison phones.

But having a secret cell phone, officials said, would circumvent that safeguard and allow prisoners to communicate messages about things that law enforcement would like to know about — such as plans to escape, criminal plots, or directives to criminal associates on the street.

Pornographic drawings or photos, often ripped out of magazines, are also always near the top of the list, staff said. Monica Horner, security director at the Boscobel prison, said the going rate for a 12-by-12-inch pornographic picture is $30 — a princely sum for inmates who make less than $1 an hour at prison jobs.

"That just turns into a lot of strong-arming and unauthorized transfer of property," she said.

Beyond the property bans and limits, prison officials try to stem the flow of contraband through frequent random and scheduled searches. They also closely examine mail and screen visitors to the prisons.
Studying contraband records can also point up weaknesses, staff said, and inmates themselves can flag a problem.

"They might drop off a note or make a comment that somebody has something they shouldn't have in their cell," Dodge Warden Tim Lundquist said. "The inmates want to be in a safe environment, too."

Then again, he added, "They'll send us on wild goose chases, too, sometimes."
http://www.madison.com/wsj/arch_local/438434

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

February 16, 2009

Texas-New Mexico Border Series Immigrant Inmates Caught in Outsourcing Labyrinth

Americas Program Report
Texas-New Mexico Border Series
Immigrant Inmates Caught in Outsourcing Labyrinth

Tom Barry | February 16, 2009

Imprisoned immigrants in the large prison complex outside the small West Texas town of Pecos have rioted twice over the past few months complaining about inadequate medical care. Their complaints, sparked by the death of a sick inmate in solitary confinement, echo a chorus of similar complaints around the country about medical care in immigrant prisons.

Medical care, like most aspects of imprisonment in America, is outsourced at the Reeves County Detention Center. As a result, imprisoned immigrants don't know who exactly is imprisoning them, who is responsible for their medical care, and who they should petition when they have grievances.

Throughout America but particularly along the Southwest border, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, both legal and illegal, find themselves at the center of a booming prisoner outsourcing business. The imprisonment of immigrants is enriching a handful of private prison corporations and correctional healthcare firms while providing a stream of revenues to county governments in rural America.

Back in the mid-1980s the Reeves County government decided that its best hope for economic development was building a "speculative prison." At the time, this remote county, which occupies the northern reaches of the Chihuahua Desert, was reeling economically.

Cotton farmers and cattle ranchers abandoned their homesteads as ground water levels dropped and drilling costs increased. The oil boom that started in the 1950s went bust in the 1980s as oil reserves dwindled. The closure of the area's large sulfur mine and a food processing company in the early 1990s left hundreds more unemployed.

Seeking to take advantage of its remote location and the large number of unemployed, the county entered into the incipient business of outsourcing prisoners in 1986.

By bidding down the costs of providing prison beds and employing prison guards, Reeves County has over the past couple of decades expanded the initial 300-bed prison to the current 3,763-bed prison complex. The Reeves County Detention Center is now the center of the county's economic life.

The county, where one of every three residents lives below the poverty line, is projecting $67.2 million of revenues to come streaming into county coffers in 2009 from the immigrant prison business. Nearly 500 residents find employment in the immigrant prison, which pays guards $14.95 an hour.

Prison outsourcing is all about expenses, revenues, and profits. In other words, prisoner providers—in this case, mainly the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP)—seek to do business with public and private prisons that have the lowest costs and hence lowest per-diem bed costs. The more prisoners that occupy the beds of the Reeves County Detention Center, the higher the revenues that come from the per-diem payments, and the higher the profit.

The bottom line of the prisoner outsourcing business is essentially the same as any other business, namely the sum of revenues and expenses. But in the case of Reeves County Detention Center, as with scores of other immigrant prisons, the prison business is somewhat more complicated—involving a labyrinth of federal agencies, local governments, private contractors and subcontractors, public bonds, and private investors.
The Reeves County Labyrinth

Not having enough room in federally-owned prisons and unwilling to build new ones, the Bureau of Prisons, like most federal detention agencies, outsources an increasing number of its charges and most all of its immigrant detainees. BOP outsources virtually all of its low-security "criminal alien residents" to county/private prisons in the Southwest.

Anticipating an ever-increasing demand for what the prison industry calls "beds," Reeves County has issued a series of project revenue bonds to finance the construction and maintenance of its ever-expanding prison. Convinced that the boom in the prison business will endure, private investors buy these bonds, thereby providing the $90 million the county needed for its prison project.

Reeves County functions as a kind of front man for the private prison industry. Being a government, it can issue revenue bonds that attract investors because the bond income (from a portion of the per-diem payments from the federal government) is not subject to income tax. Because the prison is a public facility, all capital and operating expenditures are also exempt from sales and property taxes.

The federal, state, and local governments lose all these tax revenues. But being tax-exempt keeps costs low, and makes the Reeves County Detention Center an attractive proposition for both the federal government and the private prison industry.

Although Reeves County initially ran the prison itself, it now contracts with GEO Group, the world's second largest prison corporation, to manage and operate the prison. For three years, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) also ran the prison for the county.

GEO Group has no investment in the prison, portions of which were destroyed by fire during the recent riots. It receives a large annual management fee—$4.75 million in 2008—from the county as well an annual administrative fee—$1.25 million in 2008—to cover the payroll costs of its 12-member management team, including the warden with his $125,000 salary.

The immigrant inmates, who are technically under federal government custody and held in a government-owned prison, see only the private face of America's prison industry. That's GEO Group, which runs the prison and hires and supervises the hundreds of prison guards who are paid by the county. The premier spot in the prison's parking lot is reserved for "GEO Executive," and the warden and all the other top management are GEO officials that answer to corporate headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida.

GEO Group, which represents the "20-year evolution of Wackenhut Corrections," says it is a "global leader in the delivery of diversified government outsourced services." Founded with the slogan, " G lobal E xpertise in O utsourcing," GEO Group is a transnational corporation that specializes in providing security and prison "services" to governments around the world.

Working closely with GEO at the Reeves County Detention Center is Physicians Network Association (PNA), which is a private firm that says it specializes in "correctional healthcare." PNA is responsible for the healthcare at the Reeves immigrant prison and at nine other prisons run by GEO, including five others in Texas. PNA was contracted by the county before the GEO operations and management contract. In GEO's contract with the county, healthcare services are explicitly left as county responsibilities. But the county has subcontracted out medical services to PNA, which receives a $5.85 per-diem fee from the county.
Private-Public Complex

The BOP and other federal agencies could, of course, build and operate their own prisons. However, since the early 1980s the federal government has increasingly outsourced its inmates, especially immigrants.

The launching of the "drug war" that resulted in mass imprisonment of drug users and low-level street distributors set the stage for this new era of prisoner outsourcing. Faced with the rising number of convicted prisoners and the rise of illegal immigration, public prisons and detention centers became overcrowded. But there was little political will either at the federal or local level to use tax money to build new prisons.

Conveniently, the rise of the political right in the late 1970s and especially during the Reagan administration brought with it a new widely shared ideological conviction that favored government downsizing and privatization. In 1983, faced with increasing numbers of detained immigrants, the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS), with the blessing of President Reagan, began outsourcing immigrants.

While INS took the first step toward outsourcing federal detainees to private prisons, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Prisons eventually followed. At first, most of this outsourcing went directly to private firms. CCA and Wackenhut got their start in the prison business as outsourcers of detained immigrants for the INS in 1983-85.

Over the last couple of decades, county governments have joined the prisoner outsourcing bandwagon, commonly in collaboration with the private prison industry. CCA, GEO, and other private prison firms have seized on the opportunity of public financing to build and maintain the prisons they operate.

Today, there are scores of counties that have followed the example of Reeves County, building new prisons with project revenue bonds to house outsourced prisoners from federal agencies and state governments. These generally poor and rural counties now constitute a central component of America's prison outsourcing industry.

What started out as a privatization of a core responsibility of government has over the past 25 years evolved into a prison complex in which private investors and corporations are dominant but in which local government has a new and expanding role.

As seen in Reeves County, the prison business is a complex labyrinth that is run for profit by corporations such as GEO. Yet the booming private prison industry in Pecos and elsewhere is fundamentally dependent on the government for a steady supply of prisoners, for ever-increasing per-diems, and even for the capital to build and maintain the private prison labyrinth.

When the Bureau of Prisons signed the most recent contract with Reeves County to provide as many as 3,763 prison beds for "criminal alien residents," it was GEO Group, not the county, which announced the new contract. In its January 2007 media release to business publications, GEO Group boasted that it believed "that the Reeves County Detention Complex (the 'Complex') is the largest detention/correctional facility under private management in the world."

It's a part of a yet larger complex that is immensely profitable. At a time when most other industries are retracting, the private prison industry continues to boom. GEO Group experienced another record year in 2008, as its net income rose more than 14%.

Key to the prison complex's lustrous bottom line are the outsourced immigrant inmates of Reeves County. Even as they rioted to demand decent healthcare, these outsourced immigrants were a major source of profits for the private/public prison complex.

Tom Barry directs the TransBorder Project of the Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org) at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC. He blogs at http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/.

To reprint this article, please contact americas@ciponline.org. The opinions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily represent the views of the CIP Americas Program or the Center for International Policy.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5871

Posted by lois at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)

Some Find Hope for a Shift in Drug Policy If Seattle Police Chief is Named Drug Czar

Some Find Hope for a Shift in Drug Policy
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: February 15, 2009
NY Times

SEATTLE — Washington State law prohibits the possession of marijuana except for certain medical purposes. Hempfest is not one of them. Yet each summer when the event draws thousands to the Seattle waterfront to call for decriminalizing marijuana, participants light up in clear view of police officers. And they rarely get arrested.

The latest on President Obama, the new administration and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.

“Police officers patrolling are courteous and respectful,” said Alison Holcomb, drug policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

One reason for the officers’ approach, said Ms. Holcomb and others who follow law enforcement in Seattle, is the leadership of R. Gil Kerlikowske, the chief of the Seattle Police Department and, officials in the Obama administration say, the president’s choice to become the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, known as the drug czar.

The anticipated selection of Chief Kerlikowske has given hope to those who want national drug policy to shift from an emphasis on arrest and prosecution to methods more like those employed in Seattle: intervention, treatment and a reduction of problems drug use can cause, a tactic known as harm reduction. Chief Kerlikowske is not necessarily regarded as having forcefully led those efforts, but he has not gotten in the way of them.

“What gives me optimism,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, “is not so much him per se as the fact that he’s been the police chief of Seattle. And Seattle, King County and Washington State have really been at the forefront of harm reduction and other drug policy reform.”

The White House has yet to announce the nomination of Chief Kerlikowske, and a spokesman for the Seattle police said the chief would not discuss the matter. His appointment would require Senate confirmation.

Chief Kerlikowske, 59, became police chief in Seattle in 2000, after serving as a deputy director for community policing at the Justice Department in the Clinton administration. While there he worked with Eric H. Holder Jr., then a deputy attorney general and now the head of the department.

Before going to the Justice Department, Chief Kerlikowske was the police chief in Buffalo and in Fort Myers and Port St. Lucie in Florida. Under John P. Walters, the drug czar during most of the administration of President George W. Bush, the drug office focused on tough enforcement of drug laws, including emphases on marijuana and drug use among youths. The agency pointed to reductions in the use of certain kinds of drugs, but it was criticized by some local law enforcement officials who said its priorities did not reflect local concerns, from the rise of methamphetamine to the fight against drug smuggling at the Mexican border.

“The difference is I’ll be able to call Washington and get ahold of Gil and he’ll answer the phone,” said William Lansdowne, the police chief in San Diego and a member of the board of the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Chief Kerlikowske is the president of the association. “He listens. He’s very open to new ideas. He’ll build cooperation.”

Chief Lansdowne added, “He’ll take a look at prevention as much as enforcement.”

But Chief Kerlikowske also has critics.

Norm Stamper, whom Chief Kerlikowske succeeded in Seattle, said he was a “blank slate” on drug policy. Mr. Stamper, who left office not long after the riots that broke out during a 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, supports legalizing marijuana and spoke at Hempfest after leaving the chief’s job. He said Chief Kerlikowske had not been a vocal supporter of some of the city’s drug policies focused on treatment, like a needle exchange program or a 2003 city ballot initiative, overwhelmingly approved by voters, that said enforcing the law against marijuana possession by adults should be the department’s lowest priority.

“The question is, if he were in a much more conservative community, would he attempt to turn that around?” Mr. Stamper said.

Others said that Mr. Kerlikowske’s role as a police chief put him in a delicate political position because he would not want to be accused of being soft on crime. They note that he did not actively oppose the 2003 initiative and that he instructed his staff to comply with it once it passed. They say that Seattle police officers in recent years have kept their distance from the sites of needle exchanges.

Drug arrests are down in the city and overall crime is at a 40-year low, though concerns have increased recently over gang violence.

Chief Kerlikowske has faced plenty of criticism during his time in Seattle. In 2001, a study found that more than half of adults arrested for drug crimes in the city were black, though less than 10 percent of the population was black. The chief vowed to address the disparity, and it has decreased.

In 2002, he received a vote of no confidence from the local police union. The year before, officers had been frustrated by his handling of a Mardi Gras riot in which one person died and dozens were injured. Some officers said they were prevented from intervening soon enough.

In 2007, a special commission found that the department had been too lenient in disciplining officers in certain situations.

In 2004, the chief’s duty weapon, a 9mm Glock pistol, was stolen from his unmarked police car while he and his wife shopped downtown on the day after Christmas. A police spokesman said later that the chief had accidentally left his car unlocked but that he had not violated department policy by leaving his gun in his car.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/us/politics/16czar.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Drug%20Czar&st=cse

Posted by lois at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)

Rapid Repat for California prisons

From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
Rapid Repat for California prisons
The state could save money and reduce the number of inmates by taking part in a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement program.
By Julie Myers Wood
Julie Myers Wood was the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from January 2006 to November 2008.

February 16, 2009

The tentative federal court ruling last week that California must release thousands of inmates in its correctional system comes as more bad news for a state trying to enforce the law and control its budget. One partial solution may lie in a federal program.

Under the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, California must develop a comprehensive plan to reduce the state prison population by as many as 57,000 people over the course of two to three years, unless the state reaches an agreement with the inmates who are the plaintiffs in the case. Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown's office has announced that the state will appeal the decision if it becomes final. In the meantime, the state should reconsider joining a program that is saving millions of dollars each year in states including Arizona and New York, and soon many others.

This innovative cost-cutting measure is Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Removal of Eligible Parolees Accepted for Transfer program, known as Rapid Repat. On top of significant savings related to housing inmates, this program has the added benefit of reducing California's criminal alien -- legal and illegal -- prison population and would be a logical part of any comprehensive plan to reduce the prison population.

The program provides for conditional early release of qualifying non- violent criminal aliens on the condition that they voluntarily agree to deportation. Under this program, immigrants are not treated differently from U.S. citizens, as far as early release is concerned. The state must already have (or put in place) a parole structure that permits early release for eligible U.S. citizen criminals. Immigrants who have committed violent, serious felonies are not eligible.

If an immigrant participates but then comes back into the United States illegally, the individual first serves the remainder of his or her state sentence. After that, ICE will present the case to the U.S. attorney's office for federal prosecution for illegal reentry after removal, subjecting the individual to a potentially lengthy federal prison term.

The success of Rapid Repat in other states demonstrates its potential in California. New York has used a version of this program since 1995, saving the state more than $120 million. Arizona joined the program in late 2005 and has saved more than $18 million. In the last year, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Georgia have begun participating. Rapid Repat also saves federal taxpayers significant money by reducing federal detention and court time, and leveraging limited federal detention resources.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wood16-2009feb16,0,6259374.story

Posted by lois at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)

OH: Strained Budget Prompts Call for Prison Reform

Seitz offers plan for prison reform
OVERCROWDING STRAINS BUDGETS

By Sharon Coolidge and Jon Craig
February 16, 2009

State Sen. Bill Seitz says sweeping prison reform is the only way to reduce overcrowding and ease strain on Ohio's incarceration budget.
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The conservative Green Township Republican last week introduced Senate Bill 22, which would allow more minor offenders to be sentenced to community programs, give more good-time credit to inmates, give the parole authority the ability to deal with parole violators and create sentencing alternatives for parents convicted of failing to pay child support.

"While it is important that the Legislature continues to pass strong laws to help keep our communities safe, this effort must be balanced with policies that work to responsibly reduce Ohio's prison population and its financial impact on taxpayers across the state," Seitz said.
The state prison population was 50,719 on Feb. 9 and could soar to 60,000 by 2018 without reform, experts say.

Currently the state's 32 prisons are operating at 132 percent of their designed inmate capacity. The two state prisons in Warren County on Friday were holding inmates at 73 and 76 percent above their designed capacity.

The annual cost to house an inmate is $24,875.

Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters stopped short of criticizing a fellow Republican, but said the bill would compromise safety and if the budget needs relief, cuts should be made elsewhere.

"The problem with any of these laws is they are entirely budget driven, and not safety driven," Deters said.

"Bill is one of the best legislators I have ever met, he is very smart and he is looking for ways to get money out of the budget, but he is looking in the wrong place," Deters said.

"The first job of government is to protect its citizens, and a viable prison system is critical to community safety."

Seitz, who served nearly eight years in the Ohio house before moving to the Senate in 2007, said reform has been needed for years.

But the budget crisis means the legislature has to act now, he said.

Seitz's bill mirrors proposals by the Strickland administration.

Gov. Ted Strickland's two-year budget, which must be passed by June 30, proposes spending $3.65 billion in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 to run prisons. Collins said there is about $10 million in the state budget for counties to fund community-correction programs, including halfway houses.

Strickland's budget bill recommends sentencing people to alternative programs for failing to pay child support, freeing 527 prison beds annually; increasing from one to seven days per month the possible earned credit time for eligible inmates, freeing 2,644 prison beds; redefining supervision for parole violators, freeing 591 prison beds; and raising the felony theft thresholds from $500 to $750, freeing 300 prison beds.

Those and other reforms could eventually save $29 million and reduce the prison population by 6,736 annually, according to budget estimates.

Former Gov. Bob Taft closed Lima and Orient correctional institutions in 2002-03. No decision has been made about what state prison would be the next to close.

The Seitz bill varies slightly from Strickland's proposal, reducing earned credit to five days a month instead of seven. Violent offenders and sex offenders would not be eligible for good-time credits.

"There are many things for Democrats and Republicans to fight about in this budget," Seitz said. "I hope this is not one of them."

Seitz said the reforms do not compromise safety.

"We all want to increase the penalties for this and that," Seitz said. "And it might be warranted, but where is the money? The prison budget has been cut, cut, cut."

Something has to give, he added.

Then he borrowed a line from Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Director Terry Collins: "We have to figure out who is truly bad and who we are just mad at."

Collins praised Seitz's bill.

"I appreciate the fact that (Seitz) understands the critical urgency we have in the Department of Corrections," Collins said. "He certainly knows the legislative process better than I, and I certainly appreciate his concern about if we can do something quicker than waiting for the next state budget, which begins July 1."

Collins told the House Finance Committee on Thursday that sentencing reforms such as the Seitz bill could divert more offenders from crowded state prisons while easing the state's budget crisis.

"Judges have used these diversions well," Collins told The Enquirer. "Their problem is that they need more dollars for alternatives to prison."

Collins said sentencing reforms will take some time.

But he said some programs are already in place, citing Talbert House and River City, both in Hamilton County. But he said such programs need additional state money.

David Singleton, director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, a criminal justice watchdog and advocacy organization, said reforms are needed.

"Bill Seitz is proving himself to be a leader for smart-on-crime reform in the state and we are delighted that he is leading on this," Singleton said.

Singleton said Seitz's willingness to work with the governor shows criminal justice reform can cross the political aisle.

"This is not going to make us less safe, it will make sure we are not wasting money incarcerating people who can be better served in a community setting," Singleton said. "It's a very smart bill."

"Is there more that can be done?" Seitz said.

"Yes there is, and this bill may be amended."

Seitz said sentencing disparities for people convicted of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine crimes must be corrected, that judges need more authority over judicial release, and that inmates at the end of their sentences should transition into community-based correctional facilities.

Singleton predicts that the bill will make progress and said Seitz has the clout to get it passed.

Hearings could start as soon as next month, Seitz said.

"Until people put their money where their mouth is on criminal sentences, there is no other choice," Seitz said.
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20090216/NEWS0108/902160318

Posted by lois at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

Kansas parks lose as prisons cut back

Monday, Feb 16, 2009
Posted on Sun, Feb. 15, 2009
Kansas parks lose as prisons cut back
BY MICHAEL PEARCE
The Wichita Eagle

The closing of three rural correctional facilities to save the state money could increase costs in areas such as park services and maintenance.

The prisons at Toronto, Osawatomie and Stockton have produced tens of thousands of work hours each year for some state parks, towns and nonprofit organizations. But to save about $900,000 this year, the Kansas Department of Corrections is closing those facilities.

"It's a very difficult situation because it looks like the state is adding back to the budget with one hand and taking it away with another," said Kelly Johnston, Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks commission chairman.

Some state parks have depended on inmate labor for more than 40 years and don't have the budget to hire replacements.

"It's going to affect us drastically," said Kim Jones, interim manager for Fall River and Cross Timbers state parks in southeast Kansas.

"For years, inmates have been our main source of labor. Probably 98 percent of the improvements we've had in the last 20 years have been from inmate work."

Jones said the two parks received more than 25,000 hours of inmate labor from Toronto Correctional Facility last year.

The closing equates to losing 12 full-time employees. It would cost about $347,000 to replace that labor by hiring replacement workers, Jones said, but there's no budget for such spending.

That leaves three state maintenance workers to care for more than 2,000 acres and about 265 camp sites.

"We'll just have to prioritize and take care of the most popular campgrounds as best we can," Jones said. "We should be all right until we have something big like a flood... and we had five of those last year."

Corrections cuts

Roger Werholtz, Kansas Department of Corrections secretary, said his agency is having to find more than $9 million in 2009 budget cuts, as requested by Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and the Legislature.

The department began making cuts last summer, when the governor told state agencies to look for ways to cut 3 percent from their 2009 budgets.

The announcement about closing the prisons came last month.

"Whenever we've had budget recessions in the past, closing facilities has been a possibility," Werholtz said. "But this is the first time we've had to go that deep."

Werholtz is aware that the closings will have a negative impact on other government departments and some rural economies.

"Our No. 1 priority is public safety, and we could move these... prisoners to other facilities without impacting public safety," he said. "It was the least-onerous choice we had, but there have been no good choices."

Operations have already been suspended at a minimum-security honor camp at Osawatomie. The Toronto facility should close Feb. 27. A camp at Stockton is scheduled to close April 1.

The camps might be re-opened if the economy improves, though corrections officials expect mandates for more budget cuts in 2010.

A similar facility north of El Dorado, where that state park gets its labor, is not scheduled to close this year, but Werholtz said closure remains a possibility.

If it does close?

"We'll be seriously up a creek," said Doug Lauxman, El Dorado State Park manager.

Cheney State Park is expected to continue to get inmate labor help from the prison in Hutchinson.

Werholtz said the Toronto closure should save his department about $275,000 this year.

The roughly 160 inmates from the three camps are being scattered among other facilities around the state. Transferred inmates may have a chance to work on crews from their new facilities.

Werholtz said work crews from all corrections facilities could decline because of cuts.

The Corrections Department continues to look for more ways to cut costs, and Werholtz said layoffs are a possibility.

Uses for inmates

Corrections officials said Kansas inmates perform about 1 million hours of labor annually. Pay is about $1 a day.

Last year, the parks benefited from more than 81,000 hours of inmate labor.

Jim Griffitts, an officer at Toronto Correctional Facility, said the camp was placed there in the mid-1960s specifically so crews could work at Fall River and Cross Timbers (formerly Toronto) state parks. Griffitts said Toronto inmates performed about 66,000 hours of labor last year, which includes work away from the park.

The city of Fredonia has had an inmate crew for about a year. Rusty Ratzlaff, Fredonia public works director, wishes they had come sooner.

"It's not like we've laid off paid workers," he said. "We're using the inmates for things (city workers) haven't had time to do.

"I've had more compliments on how good things are looking than ever."

Skilled labor

Inmates perform duties more skilled than picking up trash.

Tuesday, state park maintenance worker Paul Hughes supervised a crew as they removed piles of driftwood from last summer's floods.

"That's a 1975 tractor and the only reason it's running is because of the inmates," Hughes said. "They're about the only reason most of these vehicles are running.

"When something breaks down, there's always some gear-head who knows how to take it apart and put it back together so it runs. We just buy the parts. That saves us a lot of money and time."

Jones said skilled inmate labor played huge roles in installing the parks' cabins, playgrounds and paved roads.

"A lot of these people come here trained in construction, plumbing, or heavy-equipment operation," Jones said. "Those skills are really expensive when you have to pay for them."

Popular with inmates

Inmates interviewed Tuesday said they have appreciated an opportunity to work while at Toronto Correction Facility.

"When you're locked inside, the clock and calendar don't move," Troy Ghramm said. "You kind of get into a routine of working every day. Time passes."

Near Ghramm, inmates Ben Kolterman and Ryan Wilson laid rocks gathered from a nearby ranch against a cabin's foundation.

Wilson said it gives him a chance to learn masonry, which he will combine with his previous experience as a roofer when released.

Kolterman said he enjoyed the chance to stay sharp on his longtime occupation of laying rock and brick. He said he will make more than $20 an hour when released.

Griffitts said there's a correlation between inmates who regularly work and reduced disciplinary problems.

"It all goes back to the idle hands and idle minds thing," he said. "They need something to do.

"Also, some of these guys come with no experience of working. This teaches them a work routine."

Public opposition

Jones, interim manager for Fall River and Cross Timbers state parks, said she started getting calls shortly after the Toronto facility closing was announced.

Some asked whether a favorite part of a park would be open. Several groups volunteered to help with maintenance.

While volunteer work will be appreciated, few think it can replace the thousands of hours of inmate labor.

Joe Costin of Altoona spent much of Monday and Tuesday fishing for catfish from the shore at Cross Timbers.

"They've always done such a great job of keeping these parks looking good," he said of the inmates. "It doesn't make a lot of sense."
http://www.kansascity.com/news/breaking_news/story/1035356.html

Posted by lois at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2009

PA: Suit Names 2 Judges Accused in a Kickback Case

Suit Names 2 Judges Accused in a Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
Published: February 13, 2009
NY Times

Several hundred families filed a class-action suit Friday against two Pennsylvania judges who pleaded guilty on Thursday to accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks for sending juveniles to private detention facilities.

“At the hands of two grossly corrupt judges and several conspirators, hundreds of Pennsylvania children, their families and loved ones, were victimized and their civil rights were violated,” said Michael J. Cefalo, one of the lawyers representing the families. “It’s our intent to make sure that the system rights this terrible injustice and holds those responsible accountable.”

Pennsylvania lawmakers called on Friday for hearings into the state’s juvenile justice system. And the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, which blew the whistle on the judges, said it had sworn affidavits from families who said they had sought court-appointed counsel but were told that their children would have to wait weeks, sometimes months, for a lawyer. During that time, the children would have to remain in detention, the families said.

The two judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Scranton, Pa., to wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years in prison.

As many as 5,000 juveniles are believed to have appeared before Judge Ciavarella while the kickback scheme was going on. The judges are currently free on an unsecured $1 million bond, and they have surrendered their passports and a condominium in Florida. Neither is allowed out of the state without permission.

State Senator Stewart J. Greenleaf, a Republican from Montgomery County who is the chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, said he intended to hold a hearing to find ways to help the children and their families once the federal investigation was done. A spokesman in Mr. Greenleaf’s office said one option was to provide money from the crime victims compensation fund.

“Money is important, but my son’s life has already been completely destroyed,” said Ruby Cherise Uca, whose son, Chad, 18, was sentenced to three months of detention by Judge Ciavarella in 2005, when Chad was in eighth grade.

Chad, who had no prior offenses, was charged with simple assault after shoving a boy at school and causing him to cut his head on a locker. Chad returned to school his freshman year, but he was so far behind in classes and so stigmatized by his teachers and peers, his mother said, that he soon dropped out.

Federal investigators remained silent Friday about whether they would file charges against the operators of the detention centers or who else they were considering as possible conspirators.

But a law enforcement official confirmed Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited a transitional housing program in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where Judge Ciavarella furloughed inmates who had been sentenced by other judges, as federal authorities continue to scrutinize actions by Judge Ciavarella and Judge Conahan.

Lawyers for Robert J. Powell, the owner of one of the detention centers, released a letter saying Mr. Powell was not complicit in the kickback scheme but was a victim of demands from the judges for payment.

Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, said that juveniles should not be allowed to waive their right to counsel, as is permitted in Pennsylvania, and that if families wanted a lawyer but could not afford one, they should get representation.

Mr. Schwartz added that Luzerne County, where the judges handled cases, had only one public defender on staff for juveniles. The juvenile court processes about 1,200 juvenile defendants a year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/us/14judge.html?scp=2&sq=PA&st=cse
A version of this article appeared in print on February 14, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.

Posted by lois at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)

Alison Des Forges, 66, Human Rights Advocate, Dies

Alison Des Forges, 66, Human Rights Advocate, Dies

By SEWELL CHAN and DENNIS HEVESI
Published: February 13, 2009
NY Times

Alison L. Des Forges, a human rights activist and historian who tried to call the world’s attention to the looming genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and who later wrote what is considered the definitive account of the eventual slaughter of more than 500,000 Rwandans, was among the passengers killed Thursday when Continental Airlines Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo. She was 66 and lived in Buffalo.

Her death was confirmed by Human Rights Watch, the New York-based advocacy group; Dr. Des Forges was senior adviser for its Africa division for nearly 20 years.

Although she lived in Buffalo, Dr. Des Forges (pronounced deh-FORZH) spent much of her adult life in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region of Africa. She was among a group of activists who investigated killings, kidnappings and other rights abuses of civilians in Rwanda from 1990 to 1993.

In May 1994, several weeks into the mass killing of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority, Dr. Des Forges called for the killings to be officially declared a genocide. By then about 200,000 people had been killed.

“Governments hesitate to call the horror by its name,” Dr. Des Forges wrote in The New York Times, “for to do so would oblige them to act: signatories to the Convention for the Prevention of Genocide, including the United States, are legally bound to ‘prevent and punish’ it.”

Peacekeepers should be sent into the country and economic sanctions imposed, Dr. Des Forges said, concluding, “Can we do anything less in the face of genocide, no matter what name we give it?”

After a Tutsi-led rebel group took power after ending the killings, Dr. Des Forges spent four years interviewing organizers and victims of the genocide. She testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha, Tanzania, and at trials in Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada. She also appeared on expert panels convened by the United Nations and what is now the African Union, as well as the French and Belgian legislatures and the United States Congress.

The MacArthur Foundation recognized her work with a $375,000 “genius” grant in 1999. Her authoritative book, “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda,” was published that year.

On its Web site, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said Dr. Des Forges’ book provides “a meticulously detailed description of the organization of the campaign that killed some half million Tutsi,” adding that it “analyzes the failure of the international community to intervene in the genocide.”

Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University and the author of the book “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda” (2001), called Dr. Des Forges “the leading person who sought to document the events leading up to the Rwandan genocide, so that future generations would have the material on hand to draw the appropriate lessons from it.”

In 2001, after a Belgian court sentenced four Rwandans, two of them Roman Catholic nuns, to long prison terms for their roles in the genocide, Dr. Des Forges said she had been deeply impressed by the proceedings — the first in which a jury of ordinary citizens was asked to sit in judgment of war crimes in another nation.

“People maybe don’t even realize just how revolutionary this jury trial, so far from the events, really is,” she told The Times then. The Belgian trial, she said, “has been done with a great deal more depth than those in Rwanda.”

Dr. Des Forges was also an authority on human rights violations in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire.

While a central focus of her work was documenting the crimes of the Hutu-led government that organized the three-month-long genocide, Dr. Des Forges later leveled strong criticism of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the Tutsi-led rebel movement headed by Paul Kagame, now Rwanda’s president. His government has been in power since the genocide.

Dr. Des Forges was among critics who accused the Kagame government of massacring thousands of Rwandan civilians in 1994, of killing civilians and refugees in the eastern Congo in 1996 and 1997, and of making repeated military interventions in the Congo. The government barred her from entering the country last year.

Alison B. Liebhafsky was born Aug. 20, 1942, in Schenectady, N.Y., the daughter of Herman A. Liebhafsky, a chemist, and Sybil Small. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964 and received a master’s degree in 1966 and a doctorate in 1972, both in history, from Yale.

Her master’s thesis focused on the impact of European colonization on Rwanda’s social system, and her doctoral dissertation was about Yuhi Musinga, the mwami, or ruler, of Rwanda from 1896 to 1931, during which Germany, and later Belgium, colonized Rwanda.

Dr. Des Forges is survived by her husband, Roger V. Des Forges, a historian of China who teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo; a brother, Douglas Small Liebhafsky; a daughter, Jessie Des Forges; a son, Alexander; and three grandchildren.

Dr. Des Forges’ efforts went beyond historical documentation.

Theodore S. Dagne, an Africa analyst for the Congressional Research Service, worked with Dr. Des Forges in Africa and in Washington. On Friday, he recalled how she fought to save the life of a human-rights associate in Rwanda, Monique Mujawamariya.

“On Day 1” of the genocide, Mr. Dagne said, “Alison was calling Monique hour after hour as they were going door to door killing people; Monique tells Alison they are close.”

Ms. Mujawamariya managed to escape by crossing the border.

“Day after day, for months,” Mr. Dagne said, “Alison lobbied everybody she could think of in Kigali and Washington and finally arranged for Monique to come to this country.”

Ms. Mujawamariya now lives in Canada, he said.
More Articles in New York Region »

Posted by lois at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

New Hazelden Study Finds 79% think War on Drugs a Failure

New Hazelden Survey Finds Strong Support for Treatment, Recovery
February 6, 2009

News Feature, Join Together
by Bob Curley

Advocates who say addiction should be treated as a public-health issue and not a criminal problem have broad public support, according to the results of a new survey from Hazelden that also found that about one in three families include members with addiction problems.

Public support alone, however, will not be sufficient to sustain recent victories like addiction parity legislation or to meet the economic and policy challenges now facing the addiction field, said William Cope Moyers, executive director of Hazelden's Center for Public Advocacy, which conducted the survey.
(Survey at this URL: http://www.hazelden.org/web/public/pr090209healthinsurance.page)

The Public Attitudes Towards Addiction Survey found that more than three-quarters (79 percent) of the 1,000 adults polled called the War on Drugs a failure, and 83 percent said that first-time drug offenders should be sent to addiction-treatment programs, not prison. Moyers said the findings illustrate the disconnect between public perceptions and policymakers who "are still waging the war."

Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), said the Hazelden findings are in line with other research on public attitudes toward the drug war and treatment alternatives to incarceration.

Similar majorities of Americans said that addiction treatment benefits should be included in healthcare insurance plans (71 percent) and in national healthcare reform plans (77 percent). Congress last year passed legislation requiring that most health-insurance plans cover addiction and mental health services on par with other health conditions, but only if such benefits are included in their plans.

Moyers warned that the hard-earned gains of more than a decade of parity advocacy could be wiped out amid the current economic crisis and the drive for healthcare reform, despite the high levels of public support indicated by the survey findings.

He expressed particular concern that addiction treatment providers struggling with internal financial crises, such as cutbacks in public funding coupled with rising demand for services, will fail to fight the broader policy battles on issues like inclusion in healthcare reform. Hazelden plans to use the survey findings to support a new national advocacy campaign aimed at increasing public understanding of addictive diseases and increasing access to treatment.

"I think this is our moment," Moyers said. "But the fact is that while parity has been passed, the rules have not been written or implemented. If we are not careful, we are going to lose this opportunity. The passage of parity will be a hollow victory if the field doesn't stay focused and committed to doing what we know works."

Lingering Stigma

The Hazelden survey yielded mixed results when it came to public attitudes about individuals with addictions. On the one hand, 77 percent of those polled said that people who complete addiction treatment can go on to live productive lives, and 78 percent said that addiction is a chronic disease, not a moral failing.

Yet discrimination against people with addictions persists, with stigma cited as the most common negative consequence of having a family member with addiction problems.

DPA's Nadelmann said that the stubborn use of pejorative language about people with addictions noted in the survey could be traced to the continued criminalization of drug use. "Everybody generally supports the notion that treatment works, but the public still has this fundamental inconsistency in their views," he said, adding that the battle against stigma should include "both people who have problems with using drugs and people who don't have a problem."

From a policy perspective, however, Moyers said the field can't wait for the battle against stigma to be won before tackling some of the fundamental questions that will be asked of the field as healthcare reform progresses, including what constitutes treatment success and even what standard terminology should be used to define addictive diseases.

"If we don't define these things ourselves, they will be defined for us," he said.
http://www.jointogether.org/news/features/2009/new-hazelden-survey.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=48992976

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

February 13, 2009

NY: Jail Guard Union Throws Party for Indicted Rikers Island Guards

Jail Guard Union Throws Party for Indicted Guards
Posted by Graham Rayman at 2:47 PM, February 9, 2009
Last Friday, the Voice has learned, the union for correction officers held a 10-hour fundraiser to benefit three members who were indicted two weeks ago for deputizing teen inmates as enforcers in a Rikers Island jail.

In the fallout that has followed the murder of teen Christopher Robinson, Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson got indictments against the officers for ordering a group of teens to beat up other teens at the Robert N. Davoren Center, the area where young offenders are held. They called their operation, "The Program." Robinson was beaten to death for refusing to go along with "The Program," officials have said.

The fundraising party for the indicted jail guards was held from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. at a Queens nightclub called De River, which bills itself as the "hottest Caribbean Themed" club in the city. More than 400 correction officers attended, paying $30 at the door, and raising $13,000 for the families of the indicted officers.
Fliers announcing the fundraiser were posted last week, but jail officials in some cases ordered the fliers to be taken down.

The indictments have caused anger among a segment of correction officers, some of whom wanted to stand in silent protest at the arraignment two weeks ago of their fellow officers. And union chief Norman Seabrook has said the officers are being "scapegoated."

Discussing the fundraiser, Correction Officers Benevolent Association spokesman Michael Skelly explained that the union cannot use its funds to post bail for the indicted officers

"We don't believe they are guilty of any wrongdoing," he said. "We were concerned about the officers and their family members, so we felt it imperative to create something when individual officers could support them."

"Certainly, I think it is widely believed amongst the correction officers that this was a totally unprecedented, unfair bail amount in the first place," he added. "These are blue collar municipal workers who are not millionaires living in Park Avenue apartments under house arrest. We think it was a miscarriage of justice.

Skelly explained that the lengthy duration of the fundraiser was to allow officers from the three different shifts to come to the event.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/02/_last_friday_th.php

Posted by lois at 04:36 PM | Comments (0)

Excellent article " The New Political Economy of Immigration"

The New Political Economy of Immigration

By Tom Barry

This article is from the January/February 2009 issue of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0109barry.html

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 drastically altered the traditional political economy of immigration. The millions of undocumented immigrants—those who crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas—who were living and working in the United States were no longer simply regarded as a shadow population or as surplus cheap labor. In the public and policy debate, immigrants were increasingly defined as threats to the nation’s security. Categorizing immigrants as national security threats gave the government’s flailing immigration law-enforcement and border- control operations a new unifying logic that has propelled the immigrant crackdown forward.

Responsibility for immigration law-enforcement and border control passed from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In Congress Democrats and Republicans alike readily supported a vast expansion of the country’s immigration control apparatus—doubling the number of Border Patrol agents and authorizing a tripling of immigrant prison beds.

Today, after the shift in the immigration debate, the $15 billion-plus DHS budget for immigration affairs has fueled an immigrant-crackdown economy that has greatly boosted the already-bloated prison industry. Even now, with the economy imploding, immigrants are currently behind one of the country’s most profitable industries: they are the nation’s fastest growing sector of the U.S. prison population.

Across the country new prisons are hurriedly being constructed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught each year. State and local governments are vying with each other to attract new immigrant prisons as the foundation of their rural “economic development” plans.

While DHS is driving immigrants from their jobs and homes, U.S. firms in the business of providing prison beds are raking in record profits from the immigrant crackdown. Although only one piece of the broader story of immigration, it’s all a part of the new political economy of immigration.
Dangerous People

In the new national security context, undocumented immigrants are not just outlaws: They are “dangerous people” who threaten the homeland.

The two DHS agencies involved in immigration enforcement—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Enforcement (CBP)—have seen their funds increased disproportionately over the last several years, doubling in size while total DHS funding has increased by just a third. The funding for these two agencies is set to rise 19.1% in 2009 while the overall DHS budget will increase by only 6.8%. Hunting down immigrants has become a top DHS priority. As, DHS says its mission is “to prevent terrorist attacks against the nation and to protect our nation from dangerous people.”

Immigrants caught up in DHS dragnets, worksite enforcement raids, and border patrols were the “metrics of success” that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff pointed to in his July 18, 2008 congressional testimony. He used the dramatically increased number of immigrant apprehensions and “removals” as metrics to show that DHS is succeeding in its goal to “secure the homeland and protect the American people.”

While the increased numbers of immigrants being arrested, imprisoned, and deported certainly demonstrate that DHS is busy, they don’t demonstrate that DHS is stopping terrorism. Never in its congressional testimonies or media releases does DHS present evidence that show how the number of immigrants captured improves national security.

A 2007 study by the Transnational Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University found that there has been no increase in terrorism or national security charges against immigrants since 2001. In fact, despite the increased enforcement operations by Homeland Security, more immigrants were charged annually in immigration courts with national security or terrorism-related offenses in a three-year period in the mid-1990s (1994–96) than in a comparable period (2004–2006) since Sept. 11. According to the TRAC study, “A decade later, national security charges were brought against 114 individuals, down about a third. Meanwhile for the same period, terrorism charges are down more than three-fourths, to just 12.”
Enforcing the “Rule of Law”

Rather than addressing immigration as the complex socioeconomic issue that it is, Homeland Security has reduced immigration policy to a system of crime and punishment. Applying the simplistic law-and-order logic propagated by restrictionists, DHS regards undocumented immigrants not as workers, community members, and parents but as criminals.

Following the lead of the anti-immigration institutes and right-wing think tanks, Chertoff came to Homeland Security with a new interpretation of the department’s immigration law enforcement and border control operations: Commitment to a strict enforcement regime to protect the country against foreign terrorists, and to reassert the “rule of law.”

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the restrictionist camp found that their messaging about the “illegality” and “criminality” of undocumented immigrants took on a new resonance. They proceeded to upscale their “what don’t you understand about illegal?” message, to a more conceptual framing of undocumented immigration. Undocumented immigrants now represented a threat to the “rule of law” inside a nation that had just come under foreign attack by foreign outlaws.

Their new language about immigration policy started popping up everywhere, from the pronouncements of immigrant-rights groups to the Democratic Party platform. Instead of promising an “earned path to citizenship,” as it has in the past, the party stated that undocumented immigrants will be required to “get right with the law.”

Looking ahead, Janet Napolitano, President Obama’s nominee to replace Chertoff, while no anti-immigration hardliner, still seems poised to adopt the same law-and-order logic. As a lawyer, former federal prosecutor, and a governor who has insisted on more border control and stood behind a tough employer-sanctions law, Napolitano can be expected to follow the lead of Chertoff and the Democratic Party in insisting that current immigration laws be strictly enforced “to reassert the rule of law.”

Immigrants Mean Business

Political imperatives—protecting the homeland and enforcing the “rule of law”—have over the past eight years countervailed against the economic forces that have historically led in setting immigration policy. Although the immigrant labor market persists, the increased risks for both employer and worker, along with the recessionary economy, appear to be exercising downward pressure on both supply and demand.

But even in the flagging economy, the immigrant crackdown has invigorated other market forces. Eager to cash in on immigrant detention, private prison firms and local governments are rushing to supply Homeland Security and the Justice Department with the prisons needed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants captured by ICE and Border Patrol agents.

In the prison industry, bed is a euphemism for a place behind bars. Even President Bush talked the prison-bed language when discussing immigration policy. When visiting the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas in 2006 to promote the immigrant crackdown, the president said: “Beds are our number one priority.”

The number of beds for detained immigrants in DHS centers has increased by more than a third since 2002. There are now 32,000 beds available for the revolving population of immigrants on the path to deportation, and another 1,000 are scheduled to come on line in 2009. This doesn’t include beds for immigrants in Homeland Security custody that are provided by county, state, and the federal Bureau of Prisons.

At the insistence of such immigration restrictionists as Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 contained an authorization for an additional 40,000 beds to accommodate immigrants under U.S. government custody.

At the onset of the immigration crackdown two years ago, ICE dubbed its promise to find a detention center or prison bed for all arrested immigrants “Operation Reservation Guaranteed.” The Justice Department has a similar initiative to ensure that the U.S. Marshals Service has beds available for detainees—about 180,000 a year, of whom more than 30% are held on immigration charges.

Most of the prison beds contracted by ICE and DOJ’s Office of Federal Detention Trustee are with local governments; ICE has more than 300 intergovernmental agreements with county and city governments to hold immigrants, while DOJ has some 1200 such agreements. In many cases, particularly with contracts for hundreds of prison beds, the local government then subcontracts with a private prison company to operate the facility.

Prison beds translate into per diem payments from the federal government that are well above the hotel room rates in the remote rural communities where most of these immigrant prisons are located. With these per diems running from $70 to $95 for each immigrant imprisoned, local governments and private firms are hurrying to expand existing facilities or to create new ones.
Depending on Immigrants

The uptick in immigrant detention that saved the industry in 2000 (see sidebar) turned into a mighty upswing in demand for immigrant prison beds after Sept. 11 and the ensuing immigrant crackdown. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has reported record profits for the last few years, largely on the strength of increasing demand from its ICE and USMS “customers.”

Forty percent of total CCA revenue comes from three federal contractors: Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Marshals Service, and ICE. In its 2007 Security and Exchange Commission filing, CCA stated: “We are dependent on government appropriations.” CCA Chairman William Andrews warned investors that the company’s high returns could be threatened by a change in the policy environment: “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts…or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.”

But to understand just how well the prison business is faring and how immigrants are key to prison profits, you can listen in on the prison firms’ quarterly conference call with major Wall Street investment firms of November 2008.

Corrections Corporation of America boasted that it enjoyed a $33.6 million increase in the third quarter over last year, while earnings rose 15% during the same period. Formerly known as Wackenhut, GEO Group, the nation’s second largest prison company, saw its earnings jump 29% over 2007. Cornell Companies, another private prison firm that imprisons immigrants, reported a 9% increase in net revenues in the third quarter.

Private prison companies aren’t worried that the Democratic Party sweep will mean fewer beds. GEO Group’s chairman George Zoley on Nov. 3 assured investors: “These federal initiatives to target, detain and deport criminal aliens throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years and these initiatives have been fully funded by Congress on a bipartisan basis.”

Addressing investor fears that recent decreases in undocumented immigration inflows might dampen company returns, CCA CEO and board chairman John Ferguson said, “So even though we have seen the border crossings and apprehensions decline in the last couple of years, we are really talking about dealing with a population well north of 12 million illegal immigrants residing in the United States.”

The CCA chief assured investors that the company’s dependence on detained immigrants is not a factor of policy but rather of law enforcement. “The Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Marshals Service, Immigration and Custom Enforcement are carrying out statutory obligations for their responsibility….We should continue to see their utilization of the private sector to meet their statutory obligations and requirements.”

The prison executives even intimate that the economic crisis will fatten their business. When asked by an investment company representative about a Ü possible downturn in detained immigrants, James Hyman, president of Cornell Companies, said, “We do not believe we will see a decline in the need for detention beds particularly in an economy with rising unemployment among American workers.”

Immigrant Prisons as Economic Development

Hundreds of local governments are also attempting to take advantage of this rising demand for immigrant prison beds by opening their jails to immigrants under ICE and DOJ custody and by building new jails to meet the anticipated increased demand.

Financial considerations weigh heavily for cash-strapped county commissions and sheriff departments. As Sheriff Roger Mulch told Jefferson County (Illinois) commissioners in late February 2008, “ICE, during the last three months, has been hot to do business with us.” Each locality negotiates independently with ICE and USMS to set the per diem rates, and as the demand from the feds for local jail beds increases, county sheriff departments are negotiating ever-higher rates.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in Texas, prisons are a booming industry. Near the border town of Del Rio, the county’s Val Verde Correctional Facility, which is owned and run by GEO Group, had only 180 beds eight years ago. Today, after undergoing its second 600-bed expansion, the maximum-security jail can fit 1,425 prisoners.

In Texas’ Willacy County, the county government opened the country’s largest immigrant detention center in 2006, and is currently pursuing a federal contract to host one of three new family detention centers for immigrants.

County Commissioner Ernie Chapa, explaining how the county government financially depends on jailing immigrants, said: “We would love to have 2,500 [illegal immigrants] but we know that’s not going to be ... If we get 2,200 to 2,300, we’d be very happy.”

Joining in the celebration of the opening of the new jail for immigrants, Willacy County Judge Simone Salinas said, “We are proud to have been able to bring on these new detention beds in record time, which will result in improved border security not only for county residents but also our nation.”

“You talk about economic development, this is it,” Salinas told a reporter, noting the county’s initial cut is $2.25 a day per occupied bed.

A year later, a new agreement with ICE for another thousand beds was greeted enthusiastically by some officials in what is one of the poorest counties in the nation. The new county judge Eliseo Barnhart said the expansion of the immigrant detention center run by CCA will “bring jobs that are needed in Willacy County and it means income, which we desperately need.”

“It’s almost like a futures market. You have private prison companies gambling on expansion of the immigrant detention system, and basically prison speculators who are convincing communities to do this,” Bob Libal, director of Grassroots Leadership in Austin and an organizer with South Texans Opposing Private Prisons, told the Denver Post. “It’s a sick market, but a market nonetheless,” Libal said.

New Political Economy of Immigration

What started off as a war against terrorism has devolved into a war against immigrants. The current “enforcement-only” approach to immigration policy has created a morass of new problems, including a host of human rights and financial issues associated with the annual detention and removal of immigrants. The immigrant crackdown has given rise to an unregulated complex of jails, detention centers, and prisons that create profit from the immigrant crackdown.

At the outset of a new administration and new era, the political economy of immigration is decidedly anti-immigrant. Political and economic factors have combined to create a harsh environment for undocumented immigrants, present and future. Immigration reform may not be a top priority, but the Obama administration and new Congress would do well to begin to address the challenge of reshaping the political economy of immigration.

First steps could include a more careful articulation of the intersection of immigration, rule of law, and national security. Napolitano should explain that the real threat to the rule of law is not having an immigration policy that provides a legal pathway to integration for the 11 million immigrants already within the United States.

What’s more, she would do well to disarticulate the links established by the Bush administration between immigrants and terrorists. At the same time, closer links must be made between immigration policy and economic policy, guarding against labor exploitation while considering domestic economic need.

Instead of a policy based on a calm assessment of the costs and benefits of immigrant labor to the U.S. economy, current immigration policy has been hijacked by the politics of fear, resentment, scapegoating, and nativism. The “enforcement only” immigration policy has fostered a national immigrant prison complex that feeds on ever-increasing numbers of arrested immigrants. As County Commissioner Ernie Chapa said, “Any time the numbers are high, it’s good for the county because it brings more income.”
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Immigrant Detention in the United States By the Numbers

* Immigrants caught by DHS in 2007: 960,756
* ICE detentions that year: 311,169
* Rise in detentions since 2006: 21%
* DHS 2009 budget for Border Security & Immigration Enforcement: $12.14 billion
* Change from 2008: up 19%
* Change since Bush took office: up more than 150%
* Money for ICE “custody operations”: $1.8 billion
* Number of new “beds” this will provide: 1,000
* Total number of 2009 ICE beds: 33,400
* Average per diem for immigrant detention to private prison firms in 2007: $87.99

Sources: “Immigration Enforcement Actions: 2007,” Annual Report Department of the Homeland Security Office of Immigration Statistics, December 2008; “DHS Announces $12.14 Billion for Border Security & Immigration Efforts,” Department of Homeland Security, January 2008; Leslie Berestein “Detention Dollars” The San Diego Union Tribune May 2008; “Summary: 2009 Homeland Security Appropriations” Committee on Appropriations, September 2008.

Detention Profiteers

There may be a new boom in immigrant detention, but captive immigrants as good business is a concept that dates back two decades. Immigrants were the industry’s first prisoners.

It all began in 1983 when a klatch of wealthy Tennessee Republicans decided private prisons were just what the country needed to solve the problems of prison riots, overcrowding, and increasing costs. They formed the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), with the mission to “provide in partnership with government meaningful public service,” and succeeded in persuading the Reagan administration to help launch prison privatization by having the Immigration and Naturalization Service (ICE’s legacy agency) issue CCA a contract to keep immigrants locked up in Houston.

Wackenhut Corrections (recently renamed GEO Group), a private security services firm, branched into the private prison industry when it entered a contract in 1987 to operate an INS immigrant detention center in Colorado.

Using their experience in immigrant detention, CCA and Wackenhut soon began successfully soliciting states and counties to enter into private prison pacts, while winning dozens of new contracts with the federal government. However, the initial enthusiasm of governments at all levels faded with increasing abuse scandals at CCA and Wackenhut prisons, leading some states to cancel contracts and pull prisoners out.

But immigrant detention once again saved the day for CCA, Wackenhut, and other teetering private prison firms. The 1996 immigration law that broadened the guidelines for deporting undocumented and legal immigrants started to kick in, resulting in a rising federal demand for more immigrant detention beds that the private prison industry was happy to supply.
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Tom Barry, a senior analyst at the Center for International Policy, directs the TransBorder Project of the Americas Policy Program.
SOURCES: “Immigration Enforcement: The Rhetoric, The Reality,” TRAC Immigration, 2007; “Corrections Corp. of America Q3 2008 Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, November 2008; “The GEO Group, Inc. Q3 2008 (Qtr End 9/28/08) Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, November 2008; “Cornell Companies Inc. Q3 2008 Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, November 2008; “Mulch: Jail May Soon House Immigrants”, Register News February 2008; “Willacy County Goes $50 Million More In Debt to Expand MTC’s Tent City,” Texas Prison Bid’ness Blog, August 2007; “Federal detention center in Willacy to expand,” The Monitor, July 2007; “Inmate count continues to climb at detention center,” Brownsville Herald, April 2008.

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0109barry.html

Posted by lois at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)

PA: Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit

Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit
February 12, 2009
By IAN URBINA and SEAN D. HAMILL
NY Times

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.
Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.

“In my entire career, I’ve never heard of anything remotely approaching this,” said Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim, who was appointed by the State Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Judge Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention.

The case has shocked Luzerne County, an area in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been battered by a loss of industrial jobs and the closing of most of its anthracite coal mines.

And it raised concerns about whether juveniles should be required to have counsel either before or during their appearances in court and whether juvenile courts should be open to the public or child advocates.

If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months. Lawyers for both men declined to comment.

Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.

With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.

They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.

Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.

Though he pleaded guilty to the charges Thursday, Judge Ciavarella has denied sentencing juveniles who did not deserve it or sending them to the detention centers in a quid pro quo with the centers.

But Assistant United States Attorney Gordon A. Zubrod said after the hearing that the government continues to charge a quid pro quo.

“We’re not negotiating that, no,” Mr. Zubrod said. “We’re not backing off.”

No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers. Prosecutors said the investigation into the case was continuing.

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Judge Ciavarella was unusually harsh. He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.

“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

“There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down.”

Last year, the Juvenile Law Center, which had raised concerns about Judge Ciavarella in the past, filed a motion to the State Supreme Court about more than 500 juveniles who had appeared before the judge without representation. The court originally rejected the petition, but recently reversed that decision.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that children have a constitutional right to counsel. But in Pennsylvania, as in at least 20 other states, children can waive counsel, and about half of the children that Judge Ciavarella sentenced had chosen to do so. Only Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina require juveniles to have representation when they appear before judges.

Clay Yeager, the former director of the Office of Juvenile Justice in Pennsylvania, said typical juvenile proceedings are kept closed to the public to protect the privacy of children.

“But they are kept open to probation officers, district attorneys, and public defenders, all of whom are sworn to protect the interests of children,” he said. “It’s pretty clear those people didn’t do their jobs.”

On Thursday in Federal District Court in Scranton, more than 80 people packed every available seat in the courtroom. At one point, as Assistant United States Attorney William S. Houser explained to Judge Edwin M. Kosik that the government was willing to reach a plea agreement with the men because the case involved “complex charges that could have resulted in years of litigation,” one man sitting in the audience said “bull” loud enough to be heard in the courtroom.

One of the parents at the hearing was Susan Mishanski of Hanover Township.

Her son, Kevin, now 18, was sentenced to 90 days in a detention facility last year in a simple assault case that everyone had told her would result in probation, since Kevin had never been in trouble and the boy he hit had only a black eye.

“It’s horrible to have your child taken away in shackles right in front of you when you think you’re going home with him,” she said. “It was nice to see them sitting on the other side of the bench.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

Posted by lois at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

Katrina vanden Heuvel on "Senator Webb's Act of Strength"

Senator Webb's Act of Strength
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 02/12/2009
The Nation

Our criminal justice system is broken. The US represents 5 percent of the world's population but accounts for nearly 25 percent of its prison population. We are incarcerating at a record rate with one in 100 American adults now locked up--2.3 million people overall. As a New York Times editorial stated simply, "This country puts too many people behind bars for too long."

But people who have been fighting for reform for decades are seeing new openings for change. The fiscal crisis has state governors and legislators looking for more efficient and effective alternatives to spending $50 billion a year on incarceration. At the federal level, there is reason to believe that the Obama administration and a reinvigorated Department of Justice will take a hard look at the inequities of the criminal justice system and work for a smarter and more effective approach to public safety. Finally, there are Congressional leaders--none more prominent than Senator Jim Webb --who understand that the system isn't functioning as it should and there is an urgent need for reform.

Indeed advocates for reform couldn't ask for a better standard-bearer than Senator Webb. As a decorated former Marine and Reagan Administration official no one is going to slap him with the politically-dreaded "soft on crime" label that has stymied so many Democrats who have taken on this issue in the past. There is a "Nixon goes to China" quality to Webb's call for change--a law and order man who described his reform effort as "an act not of weakness but of strength."

As a journalist Webb wrote on the need for reform after visiting Japanese prisons and seeing a fundamental fairness and effectiveness that he recognized as lacking in the US criminal justice system. As a Senator he's held hearings which have highlighted racial disparities in sentencing, the staggering costs of incarceration and effective and cost-efficient alternatives, and a futile and racially biased drug policy.

Now Senator Webb is poised to establish a commission with a broad mandate to examine issues like drug treatment, effective parole policy, racial injustice, education for inmates, reentry programs--the myriad of issues intertwined in wasteful, ineffective criminal justice policies. Look for him to lay out that mandate with specificity in the coming weeks, and make an aggressive push to bring this issue to the forefront in both Congress and the media, much as he was able to do with the GI Bill.

Webb sent me an e-mail saying, "I feel very strongly about the need to put the right people behind bars. But we're locking up the wrong people too often all across our country. Mental illness isn't a crime. Addiction isn't a crime. We need to make sharp distinctions between violent offenders and people who are incarcerated for non-violent crimes, drug abuse and mental illness. We must raise public awareness about the need for criminal justice reform and find viable solutions. My staff and I are finalizing proposed legislation that could be introduced in the next two weeks to establish a national commission that will take a comprehensive look at where our criminal justice system is broken and how we can fix it."

While it's critical that Senator Webb is raising these issues at the national level where they have received so little attention, Marc Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project, points out that 90 percent of the US prison population is incarcerated in state prisons and only 10 percent in federal prisons. Mauer said there is a growing awareness at the state level that our drug and sentencing policies have "gotten out of hand" and that the fiscal crisis presents an opportunity to do something about it.

"The fiscal crisis gives governors and legislative leaders the opening to do what many of them have known should be done for some time, but [they] didn't have a political comfort level to do it," Mauer said. "Now they can talk about issues like excessive sentences for drug offenders, and too many people being sent back to prison for technical violations of parole."

One legislative reform effort is occurring in Senator Webb's own Virginia--a state that abolished parole in 1995 and is second only to Texas in number of executions. This session, a bill will be taken up that would allow prison officials to release non-violent offenders 90 days before their sentences are up. This would primarily be achieved by offering drug treatment programs at the beginning of an individual's incarceration rather than only at the end. (Which begs the question--if we are truly serious about rehabilitation of inmates why are we only offering addicts treatment for a disease at the end of a sentence?!) Upon successful completion of the treatment program these individuals would be eligible for early release. The legislation also provides for more non-violent offenders to be sent to community-based programs or be monitored electronically rather than incarcerated.

A similar program was undertaken in Washington state and a four-year study of 2,600 inmates released early showed significant cost savings and no negative consequences in terms of recidivism. Mauer said the coalition rallying around the Virginia proposal is diverse and particularly encouraging in what has traditionally been a "tough on crime state."

Other states taking action on criminal justice reform include: Michigan which is addressing re-entry issues and shifting resources to parole officers and community-based programs; Kansas cut parole revocations by 50 percent in a two-year period by increasing oversight of parole officers and using alternatives to incarceration such as increased drug testing and electronic monitoring; California issued a court ruling this week that the state must address its failure to provide adequate health and medical services in prisons by reducing the population by a third--nearly 55,000 persons--through "shortening sentences, diverting nonviolent felons to county programs, giving inmates good behavior credits toward early release, and reforming parole."

Now is also a hopeful, unique moment in New York state where the top three political leaders all support real reform and there is a chance to repeal the wasteful, ineffective, and unjust Rockefeller-era drug laws--after thirty-five years! This week I moderated a panel --cosponsored by The Nation, the Correctional Association of New York, and The New School's Center for New York City Public Affairs--of government officials and reform leaders working to downsize prisons, reform probation and parole, and provide effective community-based prisoner reentry programs. The Correctional Association of New York is leading the "Drop the Rock" campaign that includes an Advocacy Day in Albany in March.

Greg Berman, Director of the Center for Court Innovation --a non-profit think tank in New York--said, "The question is: can we come up with meaningful, cost-effective responses to non-violent crime that do not rely on incarceration? Drug courts, mental health courts and community courts--the so-called 'problem-solving courts'--all show enormous potential. Most criminal cases are not complicated in a legal sense, but they are committed by people with complicated lives. Scratch the surface and you find addiction, mental illness, joblessness, etc. These problem-solving courts are linking offenders to drug treatment, counseling, job training in lieu of incarceration. But unlike some rehabilitation efforts in the past, they are requiring participants to return to court on a periodic basis to ensure accountability. There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that this approach can change sentencing practice--dramatically reducing the use of jail, for example--while also reducing both substance abuse and recidivism."

Despite a fiscal crisis which has caused at least forty states to make or propose cuts in vital services like education and health care --and ample evidence of the effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration--the battle for reform on the state level is still a difficult one.

"It's far from a done deal that this will automatically lead to prison reductions," Mauer told me. "One option is to say let's reconsider sentencing policies, reduce the population, close prisons and save money. The other choice is to say let's cut out alternatives to incarceration, community-based drug treatment, and other programs, and you can see those cost savings very quickly. I think that would be a shortsighted way to go but it's going to be tempting for a lot of legislators to think about doing that. I think that's the battle that is going to be fought in different states."

That's why the effort of Senator Webb and his colleagues at the federal level is so critical. They can galvanize support for repealing unjust policies like those that treat a low-level user of crack the same as a major drug dealer, or five grams of crack the same as 500 grams of powder. They can ensure that we use needed federal dollars for public safety in smart and effective ways. For example, the Second Chance Act to provide job training, drug treatment, and other re-entry programs was passed with broad bipartisan support in 2008 but no funds have been appropriated. Finally, with Senator Webb's commission, we can begin the process of transforming our criminal justice system so that prisons are reserved for violent offenders and other vital resources are used to support alternatives like drug treatment, effective parole policies, education, and reentry programs.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/407756/senator_webb_s_act_of_strength

Posted by lois at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)

Torture at Angola Prison: President Obama promises to close Guantanamo, but a court proceeding in Louisiana exposes brutality closer to home

Torture at Angola Prison

President Obama promises to close Guantanamo, but a court proceeding in Louisiana exposes brutality closer to home

by Jordan Flaherty / January 27th, 2009

The torture of prisoners in US custody is not only found in military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. If President Obama is serious about ending US support for torture, he can start here in Louisiana.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is already notorious for a range of offenses, including keeping former Black Panthers Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, in solitary for over 36 years. Now a death penalty trial in St. Francisville, Louisiana has exposed widespread and systemic abuse at the prison. Even in the context of eight years of the Bush administration, the behavior documented at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola stands out both for its brutality and for the significant evidence that it was condoned and encouraged from the very top of the chain of command.

In a remarkable hearing that explored torture practices at Angola, twenty-five inmates testified last summer to facing overwhelming violence in the aftermath of an escape attempt at the prison nearly a decade ago. These twenty-five inmates — who were not involved in the escape attempt — testified to being kicked, punched, beaten with batons and with fists, stepped on, left naked in a freezing cell, and threatened that they would be killed. They were threatened by guards that they would be sexually assaulted with batons. They were forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. They were bloodied, had teeth knocked out, were beaten until they lost control of bodily functions, and beaten until they signed statements or confessions presented to them by prison officials. One inmate had a broken jaw, and another was placed in solitary confinement for eight years.

While prison officials deny the policy of abuse, the range of prisoners who gave statements, in addition to medical records and other evidence introduced at the trial, present a powerful argument that abuse is a standard policy at the prison. Several of the prisoners received $7,000 when the state agreed to settle, without admitting liability, two civil rights lawsuits filed by 13 inmates. The inmates will have to spend that money behind bars — more than 90% of Angola’s prisoners are expected to die behind its walls.

Systemic Violence

During the attempted escape at Angola, in which one guard was killed and two were taken hostage, a team of officers — including Angola warden Burl Cain — rushed in and began shooting, killing one inmate, Joel Durham, and wounding another, David Mathis.

The prison has no official guidelines for what should happen during escape attempts or other crises, a policy that seems designed to encourage the violent treatment documented in this case. Richard Stalder, at that time the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, was also at the prison at the time. Yet despite — or because of — the presence of the prison warden and head of corrections for the state, guards were given free hand to engage in violent retribution. Cain later told a reporter after the shooting that Angola’s policy was not to negotiate, saying, ”That’s a message all the inmates know. They just forgot it. And now they know it again.”

Five prisoners — including Mathis — were charged with murder, and currently are on trial, facing the death penalty — partially based on testimony from other inmates that was obtained through beatings and torture. Mathis is represented by civil rights attorneys Jim Boren (who also represented one of the Jena Six youths) and Rachel Connor, with assistance from Nola Investigates, an investigative firm in New Orleans that specializes in defense for capital cases.

The St. Francisville hearing was requested by Mathis’ defense counsel to demonstrate that, in the climate of violence and abuse, inmates were forced to sign statements through torture, and therefore those statements should be inadmissible. 20th Judicial District Judge George H. Ware Jr. ruled that the documented torture and abuse was not relevant. However, the behavior documented in the hearing not only raises strong doubts about the cases against the Angola Five, but it also shows that violence against inmates has become standard procedure at the prison.

The hearing shows a pattern of systemic abuse so open and regular, it defies the traditional excuse of bad apples. Inmate Doyle Billiot testified to being threatened with death by the guards, “What’s not to be afraid of? Got all these security guards coming around you everyday looking at you sideways, crazy and stuff. Don’t know what’s on their mind, especially when they threaten to kill you.” Another inmate, Robert Carley testified that a false confession was beaten out of him. “I was afraid,” he said. “I felt that if I didn’t go in there and tell them something, I would die.”

Inmate Kenneth “Geronimo” Edwards testified that the guards “beat us half to death.” He also testified that guards threatened to sexually assault him with a baton, saying, “that’s a big black . . . say you want it.” Later, Edwards says, the guards, “put me in my cell. They took all my clothes. Took my jumpsuit. Took all the sheets, everything out the cell, and put me in the cell buck-naked . . . It was cold in the cell. They opened the windows and turned the blowers on.” At least a dozen other inmates also testified to receiving the same beatings, assault, threats of sexual violence, and “freezing treatment.”

Some guards at the prison treated the abuse as a game. Inmate Brian Johns testified at the hearing that, “one of the guards was hitting us all in the head. Said he liked the sound of the drums — the drumming sound that — from hitting us in the head with the stick.”

Solitary Confinement

Two of Angola’s most famous residents, political prisoners Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, have become the primary example of another form of abuse common at Angola — the use of solitary confinement as punishment for political views. The two have now each spent more than 36 years in solitary, despite the fact that a judge recently overturned Woodfox’s conviction (prison authorities continue to hold Woodfox and have announced plans to retry him). Woodfox and Wallace — who together with former prisoner King Wilkerson are known as the Angola Three — have filed a civil suit against Angola, arguing that their confinement has violated both their 8th amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment and 4th amendment right to due process.

Recent statements by Angola warden Burl Cain makes clear that Woodfox and Wallace are being punished for their political views. At a recent deposition, attorneys for Woodfox asked Cain, “Lets just for the sake of argument assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of the murder of Brent Miller.” Cain responded, “Okay. I would still keep him in (solitary) . . . I still know that 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. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them . . . He has to stay in a cell while he’s at Angola.”

In addition to Cain’s comments, Louisiana Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell has said the case against the Angola Three is personal to him. Statements like this indicate that this vigilante attitude not only pervades New Orleans’ criminal justice system, but that the problem comes from the very top.

The problem is not limited to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola — similar stories can be found in prisons across the US. But from the abandonment of prisoners in Orleans Parish Prison during Katrina to the case of the Jena Six, Louisiana’s criminal justice system, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, often seems to be functioning under plantation-style justice. Most recently, journalist A.C. Thompson, in an investigation of post-Katrina killings, found evidence that the New Orleans police department supported vigilante attacks against Black residents of New Orleans after Katrina.

Torture and abuse is illegal under both US law — including the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment — and international treaties that the US is signatory to, from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified in 1992). Despite the laws and treaties, US prison guards have rarely been held accountable to these standards.

Once we say that abuse or torture is ok against prisoners, the next step is for it to be used in the wider population. A recent petition for administrative remedies filed by Herman Wallace states, “If Guantanamo Bay has been a national embarrassment and symbol of the U.S. government’s relation to charges, trials and torture, then what is being done to the Angola 3 . . . is what we are to expect if we fail to act quickly . . . The government tries out it’s torture techniques on prisoners in the U.S. — just far enough to see how society will react. It doesn’t take long before they unleash their techniques on society as a whole.” If we don’t stand up against this abuse now, it will only spread.

Despite the hearings, civil suits, and other documentation, the guards who performed the acts documented in the hearing on torture at Angola remain unpunished, and the system that designed it remains in place. In fact, many of the guards have been promoted, and remain in supervisory capacity over the same inmates they were documented to have beaten mercilessly. Warden Burl Cain still oversees Angola. Meanwhile, the trial of the Angola Five is moving forward, and those with the power to change the pattern of abuse at Angola remain silent.

* Research assistance for this article by Emily Ratner.

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist based in New Orleans, and an editor of Left Turn Magazine. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience and his reporting on post-Katrina New Orleans has been published and broadcast in outlets including Die Zeit (in Germany), Clarin (in Argentina), Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now!. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/torture-at-angola-prison/

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

"Your Valentine, Made In Prison"

February 12, 2009
Beth Schwartzapfel
Your Valentine, Made in Priosn
The Nation
With Valentine's Day approaching, perhaps you're planning a trip to Victoria's Secret. If you're a conscientious shopper, chances are you want to know about the origins of the clothes you buy: whether they're sweatshop free or fairly traded or made in the USA. One label you won't find attached to your lingerie, however, is "Made in the USA: By Prisoners."

This Valentine's Day you might want to steer clear of Victoria's Secret, unless of course you like your lingerie made by prisoners.

In addition to the South Carolina inmates who were hired by a subcontractor in the 1990s to stitch Victoria's Secret lingerie, prisoners in the past two decades have packaged or assembled everything from Starbucks coffee beans to Shelby Cobra sports cars, Nintendo Game Boys, Microsoft mouses and Eddie Bauer clothing. Inmates manning phone banks have taken airline reservations and even made calls on behalf of political candidates.

Still, it's notoriously difficult to find out what, exactly, prisoners are making and for whom. Most of the time, inmates are hired by subcontractors who have been hired by larger corporations, which are skittish about being associated with prison labor. Paul Wright, an expert on prison labor with sources inside many prisons, has broken many labor stories in his newspaper, Prison Legal News. It hasn't been easy. "As a general rule, you'll have an easier time finding out who Kim Jong Il's latest mistress is than finding out who these guys are working for," he says. (Starbucks, Nintendo, Eddie Bauer and Victoria's Secret did not return requests for comment; Microsoft declined to comment.)

Advocates of prison labor programs describe the arrangement as win-win: inmates keep busy and stay out of trouble, and employers get low-cost labor with little or no overhead. But critics, from labor unions to prisoner rights advocates, raise a host of concerns about exploitation and unfair business competition.

In 1979 Congress created the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), which provides private-sector companies with incentives to set up shops in prisons using inmates as employees. States offer free or reduced rent and utilities in exchange for the decreased productivity that comes with bringing materials and supplies in and out of a secured facility and hiring employees who must stop working throughout the day to be counted and who are sometimes unavailable because of facility-wide lockdowns.

Prisoners are often grateful for the work; when the system is working, they can learn marketable job skills and save money. "It provided a sense of independence," says Kelly DePetris, who worked for eight years in California state prisons at Joint Venture Electronics, doing everything from assembly to administrative jobs to materials control.

"You don't have to ask people for things," she says. "I have a son, so it was nice to send home money to help with little things--school clothes, things like that." As a Joint Venture employee, DePetris made about $1.74 per hour after deductions, compared with the thirty cents she estimates she might have made working in the prison laundry. When she was released last May after serving fourteen years, she had saved $16,000, with which she bought a used car, clothes and health insurance. "It's really come in handy," she says.

Relatively speaking, PIECP accounts for a tiny fraction of the number of inmates in US prisons and jails. Some 5,300 of the 2.3 million inmates nationwide work for private-sector companies. "It's a small piece, but it's a significant piece" of the overall prison labor system, says Alex Friedmann, who served ten years in a Tennessee prison in the 1990s and worked making Taco Bell T-shirts in a PIECP silk-screening shop.

PIECP rules stipulate that work must be voluntary, that workers be paid a wage comparable to what free-world employees doing similar work are paid and that the program not compete unfairly with companies on the outside. But labor unions and companies on the outside have argued that this is impossible: there is no way for a company that pays no rent to compete fairly.

Talon Industries was a Washington State-based water-jet company whose competitor, MicroJet, had a PIECP shop inside a state prison. Rick Trelstad, a partner at Talon, contended that his company shut down in 1999 at least in part because MicroJet consistently underbid him for work. (He and an association of his colleagues successfully sued the Washington State Department of Corrections to shut down PIECP, but voters reinstituted it last year.) Lufkin Industries, a Texas-based maker of tractor-trailer beds, claims it was run out of business because its competitor, Direct Trailer & Equipment Company, paid only one dollar per year for factory space in the local prison and so was able to offer much lower prices for the same product.

David Lewis, vice president and general manager of Joint Venture Electronics and Kelly DePetris's former boss, acknowledges that the setup has been great for his business. "They get no holiday pay. They get no vacation pay. There's no medical, dental: all that's paid for by the state," he says. What's more, if the company has to downsize, as it did recently, laid-off prison workers have few other places to look for work. When business picks up again, employees who on the outside would have found other jobs are still in prison, just waiting to be rehired. The waiting list for work at Joint Venture is up to 200 people long.

Advocates for prisoners' rights take issue with what they see as an inherently exploitative situation. Courts have consistently found that prisoners are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act. So they may not unionize. They can't agitate for better wages or working conditions, because any threats to walk off the job would ring hollow--where would they go?

What's more, by law, as much as 80 percent of PIECP employees' paychecks is deducted for room and board, taxes, family support, victims' compensation or charity. The National Correctional Industries Association, the nonprofit organization that certifies PIECP programs, found that participants kept only about 20 percent of their wages in the past two quarters. Friedmann, for instance, worked for two years in the late 1990s in the silk-screening shop. He estimates that after deductions for fines, fees and other charges, he left prison with $30. "So while businesses get rent-free space, prisoners are paying for their 'room and board,'" says Prison Legal News's Paul Wright, who himself served seventeen years in a Washington prison. "Prisoners pay their boss's rent."

So this Valentine's Day, if your shopper's conscience leads you to check labels, don't bother looking for "Made in Prison." Of all the hundreds of goods and services produced by prisoners with taxpayer subsidies, only one is labeled as such: a line of jeans and denim work shirts made at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. It's called Prison Blues.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/schwartzapfel

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

February 12, 2009

VA: Voting rights for people with non-violent felony convictions dies without even a vote

Voting rights resolution dies in House committee
Del. Onzlee Ware sponsored a bill to help restore voting rights to nonviolent felons.

By Michael Sluss

RICHMOND -- Without discussion or debate, a House of Delegates committee on Friday hurriedly voted down a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the General Assembly to pass a law restoring the voting rights of nonviolent felons who have completed their sentences.

"I thought they should have heard the bill," said Del. Onzlee Ware, D-Roanoke, the sponsor of House Joint Resolution 628. "I don't have a problem with them voting against me ... but, especially with something as important as the right to vote, I think we should have spent more time on it."

Ware's resolution would amend the state constitution so that the legislature could set conditions for the restoration of voting and other civil rights for nonviolent felons who have fulfilled their sentencing obligations. Legislation similar to Ware's (Senate Joint Resolution 273) has been endorsed by a Senate committee and will come up for a floor vote next week.

Convicted felons now must appeal to the governor to have their rights restored, a process that civil rights advocates consider arbitrary and cumbersome.

Virginia and Kentucky are the only states that permanently bar convicted felons from voting unless their rights are restored by the governor, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The House Privileges and Elections Committee defeated Ware's resolution on a 12-10 vote without letting Ware present the legislation and without hearing from people who wanted to testify. The committee was rushing to finish its agenda and adjourn its final scheduled meeting before the House's deadline for completing work on its own bills in this session.

Del. Joseph Morrissey, D-Henrico County, tried to hold off a vote so that the committee could hear testimony on the bill. But the committee's chairman, Del. Mark Cole, R-Fredericksburg, said, "We don't have time for that.

"There was a full hearing held on this resolution at subcommittee," Cole said.

Cole was referring to a seven-member subcommittee that met last month and endorsed Ware's bill on a 4-3 vote. Friday's vote in the full committee broke mostly along party lines, and ended a long meeting in which the committee handled an array of bills dealing with election reforms, gubernatorial appointments and constitutional amendments.

Ware said he did not blame the committee's Republican majority for giving his bill short shrift. He noted that Democrats on the panel helped drag out debates on other bills, leaving little time to discuss his resolution.

Cole later took the House floor to respond to complaints about the committee's handling of bills.

"I tried my best to get through the docket," Cole said. "It's kind of a balancing act between trying to give the bill a fair hearing and trying to get through as many bills as you want. We're not like Washington where we're a full-time legislature and we can take our leisure and make sure we have several hearings on bills."

But advocates for restoring felons' rights were not happy with the committee's action.

"I thought it was rather flip," said Adisa Muse, the director of the Virginia Voter Restoration Project. "It's rather cynical. We're dealing with a serious issue that affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of Virginians."

The issue of restoring felons' voting rights became a political hot potato during last year's presidential election. Republican John McCain's campaign charged that Gov. Tim Kaine was restoring felons' rights at an accelerated clip to influence the Virginia vote, an allegation that Kaine's aides dismissed as a smear tactic.

Ware said his proposed constitutional change would remove the governor from the process, addressing any concerns that politics factor into decisions about restoring rights.

"If ever there was a time to do it, this is the time," Ware said.

Posted by lois at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2009

CA: The Prison Overcrowding Fix

News Analysis
The Prison Overcrowding Fix
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: February 10, 2009

In San Francisco last week, a federal court was hearing final arguments in the prison overcrowding lawsuit that led Monday to an unprecedented decision to reduce the nation’s largest prison system by one-third. Just a few blocks away, a state appellate court was affirming a life sentence for Ali Foroutan, convicted of possession of 0.03 gram of methamphetamine.

Critics of California’s justice system say Mr. Foroutan’s sentence under the “three-strikes law,” which mandates 25 years to life in prison for three-time felons, is the kind of punishment that has made the state’s prisons the most overcrowded in the nation.

Federal judges tentatively ruled Monday that packed facilities were the chief impediment to adequate health care in prisons — a system so flawed it was tantamount to a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Monday’s ruling signaled the court’s intention to cap the number of prisoners at about 101,000, a reduction of 55,000. It came after more than a decade of federal court orders from exasperated judges who demanded that the state improve its facilities and personnel, after the appointment of the most powerful federal receivership since the days of forced racial integration in the South, and after the death of scores of prisoners who committed suicide or died of preventable illnesses.

The judges encouraged the state to negotiate with inmates’ lawyers to cut the prison population from 156,000, which is about double the system’s capacity, within three years. If the state refuses to negotiate such a plan, the judges could order specific actions, including shortened prison sentences, diversion of nonviolent felons to county programs, and parole reforms that would cut down recidivism.

Few releases of prisoners would be necessary to reduce the prison population if the state carried out sentencing and parole reforms, which could save $903 million a year, according to the federal judges. They also argued that such reforms could be achieved without jeopardizing public safety.

Attorney General Jerry Brown of California vowed to appeal the judges’ final order to the United States Supreme Court, a prospect that could delay the carrying out of the prison population cap or overturn it.

The case is significant because of the scale of the proposed prisoner reduction, and also because it shines a harsh light on the failures of state government to address the problem for years.

Decades of tough-on-crime laws coupled with a failure to finance prison programs have left prisoners stacked three bunks high in prison gymnasiums and hallways throughout the state. With few probation and parole programs available, about two-thirds of all ex-convicts return to prison within three years.

California’s 13-year-old three-strikes law, which doubles sentences for second-time felons, and reserves life sentences for even nonviolent third-felony offenders like Mr. Foroutan, has also increased the prison population by thousands. As of March 2008, there were 41,284 prisoners serving time under the three-strikes law. In 2005, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that the law cost the state $500 million annually.

California is the only state in the nation that paroles 98 percent of released inmates, even if they have completed their sentences. About 70,000 parolees return to prison every year. Nationally, states parole an average of 40 percent of their released inmates.

“That is a major reason for the overcrowding problem,” said Joan Petersilia, a parole expert at the RAND Corporation. “Everybody goes on parole in California,” she said. “Everybody serves at least one year” on parole. Many parolees go back to prison for violations, including failed drug tests.

But Stuart Drown, executive director of the Little Hoover Commission, a state-financed watchdog organization, said sentencing reform was the key to reducing prison population.

The Legislature, Mr. Drown says, has added thousands of new penalties for new and old crimes. “We don’t track how judges are sentencing people on a statewide basis,” he said. “We don’t have a sentencing policy.”

In other states, sentencing commissions monitor penalties to help policy makers anticipate how many prisoners will be coming and for how long.

California has no such data, Mr. Drown said. Proposed sentencing commissions have been defeated in the Legislature at least 10 times, according to Ms. Petersilia.

This case began not as an overcrowding lawsuit but as an effort to address inadequate health care. After the state failed to improve its care, Judge Thelton E. Henderson appointed a federal receiver to take over the medical system, and the receiver has demanded billions of state dollars to build health care facilities.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has responded with a mix of conciliatory gestures — supporting an as-yet underfinanced initiative to build space for 53,000 prisoners — and defiance, as when he called for the dissolution of the receivership.

Eventually the receiver concluded that new prison facilities could not be added quickly enough to stem the deaths and injuries to prisoners or to outpace the rising prison population.

Lawyers for the state have argued that the federal courts lack the authority to order prison reforms costing billions of dollars, especially at a time when California is facing a $40 billion deficit.

Counties in California say they cannot afford to serve parolees’ rehabilitation needs without additional financing, as many other states do.

Kara P. Dansky, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, believes that the judges may have the authority to push through sweeping reforms, including more financing for counties, under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

The state disagrees that the court has such authority and plans to appeal to the Supreme Court, which could delay any outcome. Ms. Dansky said policy makers would be watching the case closely. “This is one of the areas that the law is unclear on because we’ve never seen a case like this,” she said.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 11, 2009, on page A17 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/us/11prisons.html?ref=todayspaper

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

Pa. judges accused of jailing kids for cash

Pa. judges accused of jailing kids for cash
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM and MARYCLAIRE DALE, \Associated Press Writers Michael Rubinkam And Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press Writers

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

"I've never encountered, and I don't think that we will in our lifetimes, a case where literally thousands of kids' lives were just tossed aside in order for a couple of judges to make some money," said Marsha Levick, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, which is representing hundreds of youths sentenced in Wilkes-Barre.

Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. The judges were charged on Jan. 26 and removed from the bench by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court shortly afterward.

No company officials have been charged, but the investigation is still going on.

The high court, meanwhile, is looking into whether hundreds or even thousands of sentences should be overturned and the juveniles' records expunged.

Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.

Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel.

The judges are scheduled to plead guilty to fraud Thursday in federal court. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years behind bars.

Ciavarella, 58, who presided over Luzerne County's juvenile court for 12 years, acknowledged last week in a letter to his former colleagues, "I have disgraced my judgeship. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame." Ciavarella, though, has denied he got kickbacks for sending youths to prison.

Conahan, 56, has remained silent about the case.

Many Pennsylvania counties contract with privately run juvenile detention centers, paying them either a fixed overall fee or a certain amount per youth, per day.

In Luzerne County, prosecutors say, Conahan shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002 and helped the two companies secure rich contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, at least some of that dependent on how many juveniles were locked up.

One of the contracts ­ a 20-year agreement with PA Child Care worth an estimated $58 million ­ was later canceled by the county as exorbitant.

The judges are accused of taking payoffs between 2003 and 2006.

Robert J. Powell co-owned PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care until June. His attorney, Mark Sheppard, said his client was the victim of an extortion scheme.

"Bob Powell never solicited a nickel from these judges and really was a victim of their demands," he said. "These judges made it very plain to Mr. Powell that he was going to be required to pay certain monies."

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Ciavarella was ridiculously harsh and ran roughshod over youngsters' constitutional rights. Ciavarella sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a statewide rate of one in 10.

The criminal charges confirmed the advocacy groups' worst suspicions and have called into question all the sentences he pronounced.

Hillary Transue did not have an attorney, nor was she told of her right to one, when she appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom in 2007 for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal.

Her mother, Laurene Transue, worked for 16 years in the child services department of another county and said she was certain Hillary would get a slap on the wrist. Instead, Ciavarella sentenced her to three months; she got out after a month, with help from a lawyer.

"I felt so disgraced for a while, like, what do people think of me now?" said Hillary, now 17 and a high school senior who plans to become an English teacher.

Laurene Transue said Ciavarella "was playing God. And not only was he doing that, he was getting money for it. He was betraying the trust put in him to do what is best for children."

Kurt Kruger, now 22, had never been in trouble with the law until the day police accused him of acting as a lookout while his friend shoplifted less than $200 worth of DVDs from Wal-Mart. He said he didn't know his friend was going to steal anything.

Kruger pleaded guilty before Ciavarella and spent three days in a company-run juvenile detention center, plus four months at a youth wilderness camp run by a different operator.

"Never in a million years did I think that I would actually get sent away. I was completely destroyed," said Kruger, who later dropped out of school. He said he wants to get his record expunged, earn his high school equivalency diploma and go to college.

"I got a raw deal, and yeah, it's not fair," he said, "but now it's 100 times bigger than me."
http://ydr.inyork.com/ci_11680195

Posted by lois at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2009

CA: Panel of Judges Rule State must release up to 57,000 prisoners---3 articles

From the Los Angeles Times
Judges back a one-third reduction in state prison population
Jurists issue tentative ruling in lawsuit brought by inmates, who say overcrowding in state prisons violates their right to adequate healthcare.
By Michael Rothfeld

February 10, 2009

Reporting from Sacramento — A panel of three federal judges, saying overcrowding in state prisons has deprived inmates of their right to adequate healthcare, tentatively ruled Monday that the state must reduce the population in those lockups by as many as 57,000 people.

The judges issued the decisionafter a trial in two long-running cases brought by inmates to protest the state of medical and mental healthcare in the prisons.

Although their order is not final, U.S. District Court Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt effectively told the state that it had lost the trial and would have to make dramatic changes in its prisons unless it could reach a settlement with inmates' lawyers.

State officials immediately said they would appeal.

If the state is ordered to reduce the prison population, it would likely be able to do so over two or three years, so it would not have to release large numbers of inmates at once. Some methods of cutting the population include limiting new admissions, changing policies so parole violators return to prison less frequently, and giving prisoners more time off of their sentences for good behavior and rehabilitation efforts.

The judges said these types of measures could save the state more than $900 million a year in prison costs, money that could be used by cities and counties to put those who otherwise would have gone to prison into local jails or treatment programs.

The state's 33 prisons were designed for 84,000 inmates, and they now hold 158,000, nearly double their designed capacity. The rest of the 170,000 in the correctional system are in out-of-state prisons and other facilities. The judges found that with inmates crammed into institutions, they could not receive the care to which they are entitled under the U.S. Constitution.

"There is . . . uncontroverted evidence that, because of overcrowding, there are not enough clinical facilities or resources to accommodate inmates with medical or mental health needs at the level of care they require," the judges wrote in a 10-page decision.

They said that triple-bunking of inmates in prison gymnasiums has increased the risk of infectious disease and that a shortage of doctors, nurses and correctional officers has denied inmates access to treatment and a decent system to keep their medical records in order.

In the ruling, the judges said they believe the state's prisons can safely operate at 120% to 145% of their designed capacity. Based on the current prison population, that would mean a potential reduction of 36,000 to 57,000 inmates. They reserved the right to change their numbers and did not say when their final order might come.

"It's a pretty comprehensive victory for us," said Michael Bien, a lawyer in San Francisco who has fought for mentally ill prisoners. "It was a message -- a very loud, clear message -- that it's time that the public officials in California took responsibility for their own criminal justice system."

Under federal law, judges cannot order the state to lock up fewer prisoners if such a move would endanger the public, and the panel said that would not be the case if reductions were done gradually.

But Matt Cate, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's corrections secretary, said the ruling "poses a significant threat to public safety" because it could prevent the state from incarcerating as many criminals as it now keeps in seven to 10 prisons.

"If this panel issues a final decision, we will appeal this matter to the United States Supreme Court," Cate said tersely during a news conference in Sacramento.

State Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown called the ruling "the latest intrusion" on California's prison system by the federal courts. In a statement, he labeled the order "a blunt instrument that does not recognize the imperatives of public safety, nor the challenges of incarcerating criminals, many of whom are deeply disturbed."

The judges oversaw the trial starting in November and completed it last week. In their decision, they referred to the testimony of Jeanne Woodford, a former corrections secretary under Schwarzenegger, who told them overcrowding made it impossible for prisoners to get mental health treatment and medical exams. They also cited experts from Texas, Pennsylvania, Maine and Washington.

And the judges used Schwarzenegger's words and actions against him, citing the state of emergency the governor declared for the prisons in 2006 -- still in effect -- and quoting him as saying overcrowding had caused "substantial risk to the health and safety" of prison inmates and staff. They noted that Schwarzenegger has made budget-related proposals to reduce the prison population by 40,000 inmates, and that lawmakers have backed similar ideas.

"We cannot believe that such support would exist if the adoption of such measures would adversely affect public safety," the judges wrote, although the proposals they referred to have not garnered enough support to go into effect.

The state nearly reached a settlement with the inmates last year that would have reduced the prison population by tens of thousands, largely by shifting low-level offenders to local jails and rehabilitation programs. But that deal fell apart when Republican state lawmakers and county prosecutors objected.

Since then, the state has hardened its stance. Schwarzenegger and Brown are now demanding that Henderson terminate court oversight of prison medical care, which he seized from the state in 2006. They say the situation has improved with the hiring of new medical and correctional personnel.

http://www.latimes.com/news/la me-prisons10-2009feb10,0,4380330.story?track=ntothtml

Judges tell state to free thousands of inmates

Bob Egelko,Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writers
Tuesday, February 10, 2009

(02-09) 18:48 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- California needs to release tens of thousands of California inmates over the next two to three years to relieve overcrowding that has ravaged prison medical and mental health care, a panel of federal judges said Monday.

In what it labeled a tentative ruling, the three-judge panel said prison populations must be reduced so health care for inmates can be brought up to constitutional standards.

Crowding at prisons can be eased by measures that will not flood the streets with dangerous inmates, such as changing parole policies and sending some low-risk inmates to county custody, the panel said.

"The evidence is compelling that there is no relief other than a prisoner release order that will remedy the unconstitutional prison conditions," said the judges, who held a trial on prison overcrowding in San Francisco last fall.

California's 33 prisons hold nearly 160,000 inmates, about twice their designed capacity. The judges said they were prepared to impose a limit of between 120 and 145 percent of capacity, which would require 37,000 to 58,000 prisoners to be released.

The Schwarzenegger administration immediately announced plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court once the ruling becomes final.

Matthew Cate, secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said at a Sacramento news conference that the judges' order would put thousands of inmates back on the streets, posing "a significant threat to public safety."

Attorney General Jerry Brown, who represented the state, said the court "does not recognize the imperatives of public safety, nor the challenges of incarcerating criminals, many of whom are deeply disturbed."

But Donald Specter of the nonprofit Prison Law Office, a lawyer for inmates who sued the state, said the ruling validates the group's position that overcrowding is creating dangerous conditions that can be eased only by reducing the prison population.

"Much of the evidence showed that it's been done in other states without having any impact on public safety," Specter said. "It's safe, it's reasonable, it's necessary. It's too bad that it's taken a court to recognize this."

The case arose from past rulings by two of the panel members, U.S. District Judges Thelton Henderson of San Francisco and Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento, that concluded the quality of medical care and mental health treatment in California prisons violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Karlton first ordered improvements in mental health treatment in 1995, and Henderson found that prison health care had been substandard since at least 2002.
Unnecessary deaths

In a 2006 ruling, Henderson said the $1.1 billion medical care system was causing the unnecessary death of one inmate per week. He said the state was incapable of repairing the system and appointed a manager to run it under his supervision.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called for a return to state control last month. He also has appealed Henderson's order that the state pay the first $250 million of the manager's $8 billion plan to rebuild prison hospitals.

In Monday's decision, the panel, which also includes Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, agreed with lawyers for the inmates that "crowding is the primary cause" of the constitutional violations.

Because prisons are jammed beyond capacity, there aren't enough doctors and nurses to help all the inmates who need care, or enough staff to make sure they're taking medications, the panel said. Crowding at some prisons is so severe, with inmates being triple-bunked in gyms, that it has increased the risk of diseases spreading among prisoners and staff, the judges said.

They noted that Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency for the prisons in 2006, citing overcrowding that endangered inmates and staff. That order remains in effect.

Prison crowding could be eased through a combination of increasing sentence reductions for good behavior, turning over low-risk prisoners to counties for incarceration or treatment, and changing parole policies that now return large numbers of inmates to prison for minor violations, the judges said.

They said the state would save nearly $1 billion a year, money that could be used for local prisoner housing and rehabilitation.
No help in sight

Although prison health conditions are improving under the direction of court appointees, the panel said, inmates are still suffering, with no immediate help in sight. Construction plans will take years to implement, even if the deficit-plagued state can find a way to pay for them, the panel said.

The judges ordered state officials to consult with the prisoners' lawyers and other parties in the case, including prison guards and county prosecutors, on any steps that might be taken to lower the prison population.

Specter, the inmates' lawyer, said he was prepared to resume negotiations, but added that "there's no point in talking" if Schwarzenegger maintains his refusal to consider any such measures.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/10/MNGS15QM8V.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
© 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.

==================

Judges tentatively approve prison inmate reduction
dwalsh@sacbee.com
Published Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2009

A panel of three federal judges tentatively ruled Monday that California must reduce its prison population by up to 58,000 inmates in two to three years, saying that "the present state of overcrowding" makes it impossible for the state to deliver health care at a constitutional level.

The judges clearly said there are many avenues available to the state and counties other than an early-release program - like parole reform, increased good time credits and programs to reduce recidivism. They all fall under the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act's definition of a "prisoner release order."

They will review the evidence presented at a 14-day non-jury trial and issue a final opinion, but the tentative ruling is meant "to give the parties notice of the likely nature of that opinion, and to allow them to plan accordingly," the judges said.

Inmates' attorneys expressed hope that, in the wake of the ruling, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his administration, legislative leaders, county representatives and all other affected parties will work out a settlement.

Reaction by Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Matthew Cate made that seem unlikely. Cate correctly said the 10-page tentative ruling calls for 37,000 to 58,000 fewer inmates within two to three years.

Speaking for himself and Schwarzenegger, the secretary said they "disagree with the panel's ruling," and with the release of that many convicts "onto California streets," which he called "a significant threat to public safety."

Attorney General Jerry Brown labeled the tentative ruling "a blunt instrument that does not recognize the imperatives of public safety, nor the challenges of incarcerating criminals."

If the ruling becomes permanent, Cate declared, it will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. An appeal from the specially-convened panel bypasses the federal appellate level and goes directly to the high court, which could accept the matter for review, or let the ruling stand without review.

"This is not about overcrowding," Cate said. "We are providing a constitutional level of care now; so we have the right to keep these inmates in prison."

By contrast, the three judges said inmates' attorneys "have presented overwhelming evidence that crowding is the primary cause of the underlying constitutional violations."

They said conditions have "substantially increased the risk of the transmission of infectious illnesses among inmates and prison staff."

"It is our present intention," the panel said, "to adopt an order requiring the state to develop a plan to reduce the prison population to 120 percent or 145 percent of the prison's design capacity (or somewhere in between) within a period of two or three years." The judges noted the 33 adult prisons, with nearly 160,000 inmates, are operating at close to 200 percent design capacity.

The judges are Lawrence K. Karlton of Sacramento, who has presided for 19 years over an ongoing class-action lawsuit on behalf of mentally ill inmates; Thelton E. Henderson of San Francisco, who has presided for eight years over an ongoing class-action lawsuit on behalf of physically ill inmates and who put prison health care into receivership in 2006; and Stephen Reinhardt of Los Angeles, a judge of the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals. They are considered three of the most liberal judges in the nine-state appellate circuit.

"The state has a number of options Š that would serve to reduce the population of the prison Š without adversely affecting public safety," the judges said. "It could also use the savings that will result from the implementation of a population cap to provide for any increased burdens on the counties."

The judges acknowledged the state's $42 billion budget deficit and the fiscal implications of their final decision "are of the most serious order. There are simply no additional funds Š being made available by the state to deal with the critical problem created by prison overcrowding."

California legislators expressed mixed views Monday about releasing inmates, but declined to specifically address the tentative ruling because they had not read it.

"I don't think we should be releasing prisoners early," said Assemblyman Ted Gaines, R-Roseville. "I think they're in prison because they created a threat to society. And I think we should do everything we can to keep them behind bars."

But Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, D-San Francisco, who sits on the Assembly Public Safety Committee, said that some prison inmates can be rehabilitated and released, thus relieving prison overcrowding without impairing public safety.

"I know there is a percentage of inmates who are in for less serious offenses who would not endanger the public directly, but there are always exceptions, and that's where we get in trouble," Ma said, adding that early release deserves scrutiny.

Inmate lawyer Michael Bien said the ruling "sends a message to the state to Š work out a solution that is win, win, win - that is good for public safety, good for sick prisoners and helps solve the budget deficit.

Steven Fama, an inmate attorney, pointed to proposals by Schwarzenegger in the past two years - "parole reform," "release of about 20,000 inmates over about 20 months."

He said of the 140,000 inmates released each year, most served only a few months.

"It's just a matter of finding the ones that would create the least risk if released a couple of months early," Fama added.
ShareThis
Call The Bee's Denny Walsh, (916) 321-1189. The Bee's Jim Sanders also contributed to this report.
==================

Posted by lois at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2009

MA: Local legislators weigh in on prison fee idea

Local legislators weigh in on prison fee idea
By Stephanie Ganias/
Milford Daily News correspondent
Feb 08, 2009
BOSTON

One state legislator has a simple plan to bring in $10 million for the state: Charge inmates small fees for rooming as well as medical and dental treatments.

The proposal by state Rep. Elizabeth Poirier, R-North Attleboro, will allow sheriffs statewide to charge inmates for their incarceration time.

"This will go a long way to help the hardworking, taxpaying citizens of our commonwealth who not only have to shoulder the burden of inmate incarceration, but many other things that they struggle to pay for like food and fuel or even mortgage payments," said Poirier. "I feel it is little to ask from prisoners."

The proposal was brought to her attention by Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson. Hodgson met with lawmakers Wednesday to seek support for legislation, which is expected to be filed this week. Under the proposal, inmates would face a variety of charges: A daily cost of custodial care not to exceed $5, a medical visit fee not related to a condition pre-existing at the time of incarceration also not to exceed $5, a dental visit fee not to exceed $5, prescription eyeglass visit fee not to exceed $5, and a pharmacy prescription fee not to exceed $3.

The fees are expected to generate $10 million in additional revenue.

"This may perhaps lessen the frequency of doctor visits (as well), which will reduce the cost of prisons," said Poirier.

Prisoners who lack the means to pay such fees will accrue a bill. The bill will be forgiven for those prisoners who remain out of jail for two years from the day they are released.

The proposal does not apply to federal inmates, detainees or regional lock-up inmates.

A similar bill was filed in 2003 by Worcester County Sheriff Guy Glodis, who served on the House of Representatives from 1998-2004. The bill received little attention.

"(I think) it has a better shot because of the current recession," Glodis said last week. "My anticipation is that the Legislature will take a much closer look at this bill because we need revenue slopes.

"It also sends a very strong symbolic message that during economic downturns, everyone is going to have to pull their fair share," Glodis said.

In 2002, Hodgson charged inmates fees at Bristol County's two jails, which generated $75,000 over a two-year period. According to Poirier, two years of incarceration for one prisoner alone costs between $75,000 and $100,000. Hodgson's effort was overturned in 2004 by a judge in Fall River who decided the fees were unreasonable.

State Rep. James Vallee, D-Franklin, former chairman of the Committee on Criminal Justice, said he is willing to consider the bill, taking into account the high costs of prisoners and the current fiscal crisis.

"Prison inmates are very expensive, especially their medical care," said Vallee. "I would have no problem having inmates pay part of their expenses. I think in theory it's a good idea and something I would take interest (in) and possibly support."

Rep. John Fernandes, D-Milford, and Sen. Scott Brown, R-Wrentham, declined to comment specifically on the bill until they can review it.

"Obviously people who are behind bars aren't working (and) therefore aren't earning $5 a day," Fernandes said.

"We have to realize we put people behind bars not to extract user fees from them, but to protect the public," he added.

Poirier acknowledged this dilemma. She said that the money would come from canteen accounts, in which prisoners deposit money in order to purchase snacks and sodas. Those who do not have money to open a canteen account would get an accrued bill.

"Five dollars is not much," said Poirier. "They can take out $5 from their canteen accounts and buy two less snacks a day."

According to Hodgson, the fees are not meant as punishment to inmates. Rather, it is a matter of being fair to the public.

"If you (violate) a law, you cannot just say listen, none of these things are your responsibility anymore," said Hodgson. "We're talking about taxing kids for candy ... inmates can't pay $5 a day fee?"
http://www.milforddailynews.com/news/x1299737679/Local-legislators-weigh-in-on-prison-fee-idea

Posted by lois at 05:55 PM | Comments (0)

Budget crunch forces Florida prisons to feed inmates for less

Budget crunch forces Florida prisons to feed inmates for less

By Steve Bousquet, Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau
Monday, February 9, 2009
St. Petersburg Times
MADISON — Three times a day, the inmates at Madison Correctional Institution discover what a budget deficit tastes like.

The scene in the prison chow hall in this quaint North Florida town is repeated across the state as it returns to in-house food service and struggles to cut costs. While the inmate population is growing, the Legislature is cutting spending in the nation's third-largest state prison system.

Florida is now coping with the effects of a failed and expensive food-privatization venture of former Gov. Jeb Bush. In 2001, Florida turned over most prison food operations to Aramark Corp., even after Ohio had scrapped a similar experiment with bad results.

After seven years marked by numerous irregularities, fines for sloppy service and a state report that flagged the vendor's "windfall" profits, Aramark pulled out of Florida prisons last month. The firm said it could no longer make money due to skyrocketing prices of bread, milk and other staples amid pressure from the state to cut costs.

A second, smaller company also left: Trinity Services Group of Oldsmar had served meals at North Florida prisons, including Madison.

Now that the vendors are gone, the privatization experiment is officially dead and the state must run an in-house meals program on less money amid the worst budget crisis in decades.

In fiscal 2007-08, Florida paid two private vendors a total of $85 million. The current year's food budget is $76 million.

Aramark's per-diem rate, or cost per day to feed an inmate, was $2.69. Now it's $2.12, which will force the state to make menu changes to save money.

Corn bread replaces sliced bread at some meals. Inmates will get one sweetener packet instead of four. In the prisons of the Sunshine State, orange juice is made from concentrate.

"It's all right, but 100 percent juice is better," said Charles Christian, 24, six months into a two-year term for drug and weapon offenses. "Sometimes it's all right — like the peanut butter. They give you enough, but it's hard to eat, it's so thick. And they don't give you enough meat."

"It's fine with me. I have no complaints," said David Dixon, 46, a Madison inmate for the past six years. "To me, I can't tell the difference."

Feeding 100,000 inmates three meals a day is an expensive business. And doing it right is a major factor in avoiding unrest. Madison inmates say the quantity and quality of the food are about all they talk about.

Contrary to the myth of bread and water, inmates are fed according to a highly regulated heart-healthy menu with strict portions and caloric counts overseen by a prison dietician.

Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil has come under fire from legislators for not reducing his food budget by the $9.25 million that the Legislature ordered last spring.

"We won't do it in the time we were directed to do it," McNeil told a legislative budget panel last week.

He said the agency will need the rest of this year to hit the target, which prompted criticism from the committee chairman.

"I have concerns that your agency is not following legislative intent," said Rep. Sandy Adams, R-Oviedo.

Inside Madison's neatly manicured compound Friday, shivering inmates in identical blue and white clothing walked in single file to breakfast on a 27-degree morning.

They ate grits, scrambled eggs, a lump of hash browns, two slices of white toast, a wad of grape jelly and coffee strong enough for any long-haul truck driver.

One recent lunch was bland-tasting tuna on white bread with black-eyed peas, pasta salad and coleslaw, served with a red spork that can't be used as a weapon. The tastiest part of the meal: a big, sweet sugar cookie.

Warden Steve Wellhausen proudly showed a visitor two small gardens where inmates grow and harvest greens, cucumbers, broccoli and squash to save on food costs. Most other food is bought from the new provider, U.S. Foodservice.

The high cost of food is only part of the reason for the prison system's $21 million operating deficit. But as McNeil told legislators, cutting the prisons' food budget is necessary to control spending.

"We now control our own destiny," McNeil said.

fast facts

Feeding more on less

Prisons food budget 2007-08: $85 million

Prisons food budget 2008-09: $76 million

Daily budget to feed an inmate 2007-08: $2.69

Daily budget to feed an inmate 2008-09: $2.12

Florida prison population on June 30, 2007: 92,844

Florida prison population on June 30, 2008: 98,192

Source: Florida Department of Corrections Web site
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/state/article974319.ece

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

Singing the prison blues Incarceration rate has direct impact on Florida's finances

The News-Journal
February 08, 2009

Singing the prison blues

Incarceration rate has direct impact on Florida's finances

Everyone in Florida government is singing the Budget Blues. But underlying the melody is a drumbeat many state leaders profess not to hear: The sound of countless prison doors slamming shut. Like it or not, the state's incarceration policies have a direct and growing impact on the current budget crisis.

AN EXPENSIVE HABIT

Florida's prison system is growing faster than that of any other state. According to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust, corrections (which includes state prisons and probation) consumed 9.3 percent of the state budget in 2007. The only states to allocate a greater portion of their budget were Oregon and Michigan.

And that only accounts for direct prison and probation spending -- it doesn't encompass increased public support for the families prisoners leave behind, or the burden on city and county governments that have to build additional jail space and employ more public-safety workers. Meanwhile, the state -- whose daily average prison population is projected to top 100,000 this year -- will need to build new facilities this year or face overcrowding. Department of Corrections Secretary Walter McNeil has requested $439.2 million in the coming budget year to add capacity.

Few people are pushing for dangerous murderers and rapists to be released. But neither can they dispute that Florida's incarceration spree occurred at a time when crime rates were actually trending downward. Florida hasn't become a more dangerous place to live, it's just become one that has become politically addicted to the idea of increasingly harsh punishments.

HANDCUFFING JUDGES

One of the more important checks against legislative excess has been hobbled. Lawmakers have significantly eroded the ability of judges to determine fair, justifiable sentences for a wide range of crimes.

Florida, like many states, adopted sentencing guidelines as a way to keep sentences relatively fair across geographic and racial lines. After sentencing guidelines passed in 1983, courts used a "score sheet" that added points for the particulars of an offense, the criminal background of an offender and other relevant considerations. The resulting score was then matched to a "guideline" range of prison and/or probation time -- but judges could depart from the guidelines if they found good reason to do so. That approach used fairness as a base line, giving judges the ability to tailor sentences to circumstances.

That changed in the mid-1990s, when the Legislature passed a series of laws aimed at stripping discretion from judges. There were "minimum mandatory" laws that demanded specific sentences for specific crimes, regardless of circumstances. Habitual offender statutes added more prison time, again taking away judges' discretion and resulting in cases like that of a burglar who received a life sentence for stealing a handful of children's videotapes.

In 1997, the Legislature erased the "ceiling" for guideline sentences; judges were not allowed to sentence a defendant to a sentence lower than the guidelines called for, but were permitted (even encouraged) to levy the statutory maximum sentence even if the guidelines called for a much lower penalty. As a result, the state could see a dramatic growth in sentencing disparity, with more politically minded judges levying unnecessarily harsh sentences in an attempt to appear tougher.

A final change -- setting zero-tolerance policies for many prisoners on probation -- has pushed thousands more people back behind bars, often for relatively minor offenses.

FINDING A SOLUTION

Restoring the intent of Florida's sentencing guidelines, and returning discretion to judges, would be a good start. The state also can ease the burden on prisons by matching offenders with programs that reduce the chances that they will commit more crimes. Specialized courts -- such as drug or mental health courts -- generally operate outside sentencing guideline requirements. And these programs work, significantly reducing the number of offenders who are rearrested.

Last month, the state Senate Criminal Justice Committee heard about other measures that could reduce prison population -- such as a controlled release program or prison diversion measures. These are worth exploring, but they would be no replacement for a careful, analytical approach to each case that a judge could offer.

Undoing these dubious reforms would restore equity to sentencing in Florida, and help restore the emphasis of the state's correctional mission -- to reform prisoners and turn them away from a life of crime -- and reducing the burden on Florida's taxpayers, who are feeding ever-increasing sums of money into a prison system that doesn't make them any safer.

By The Numbers

· 9.3 percent -- portion of Florida budget (2007) spent for corrections (prison and probation)

· 100,000 -- state's projected daily average prison population for 2009

· $439.2 million -- requested in coming budget year to add capacity
http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/opnOPN86020809.htm

Posted by lois at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2009

California budget mess: Where did our money go?

Good graph at this URL
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_11649004?nclick_check=1

California budget mess: Where did our money go?
By Paul Rogers and Leigh Poitinger
Mercury News
Posted: 02/08/2009

California is broke.

But lost in the day-to-day drama over IOUs, furloughs and huge deficits is a basic question many Californians might be asking: Where has all our money gone?

A Mercury News analysis of state spending since Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took office in late 2003 found that he and the Democratic-controlled Legislature have spent money well beyond the rate of inflation and California's population growth — $10.2 billion more.

Yet the programs that received most of that money are priorities that Californians broadly support or have demanded at the ballot box: tougher prison sentences for criminals, health care for uninsured children and an aging population, and a cut in the "car tax" that they pay every year to register their vehicles.

The problem, according to a report last week from the state auditor, is that Republican and Democratic politicians in Sacramento have shirked their responsibility for the past decade, papering over shortfalls that started after the dot-com bubble popped in 2001.

Like homeowners paying off one credit card with another, they used accounting gimmicks and more debt, rather than raising taxes or cutting spending, to balance the books. As the economy worsened and tax receipts plummeted — from $102.5 billion last year to an estimated $87.5 billion this year — the house of cards collapsed.

Recession's effect

"We got what we wanted and we've never figured out how to pay for it. And then we had this recession, and that made everything worse," said Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy.

"Everybody's got somebody to blame, but in the end these are services people wanted," Levy added. "Look at the screaming when you close a swimming pool, let alone try to cut education."

The Mercury News analyzed state spending, line by line, from 2003
to 2008. The major conclusions:

# California's general fund under Schwarzenegger's tenure has grown 34.9 percent — from $76.3 billion in the 2003-04 fiscal year to $102.9 billion in 2007-08.

# But over that same period, population growth and inflation together grew by only 21.5 percent.

# If state spending had grown only at that rate, it would have reached $92.7 billion last year. Instead, Schwarzenegger and the Legislature spent $10.2 billion more.

"I wish it hadn't grown that much," said Mike Genest, Schwarzenegger's state finance director, "but in some sense, it was inevitable. Had we stuck with a very austere budget, we would have been in better shape.''

"But that would have meant real, permanent reductions in service levels, like schools and health care and prison guard pay, and that would have required herculean effort from the Legislature. And there was no chance of that."

Top Democrats cite voter initiatives as big drivers in the state's spending — like the 1994 "three strikes" measure that increased the prison population, or Proposition 98, the 1988 measure guaranteeing at least 40 percent of the general fund for education. Add to that, they say, some major lawsuits the state lost, including a federal case requiring more spending to upgrade prison health care at about $1 billion a year so far.

"If you factor out voter initiatives and court suits, the remaining part of state government grew at or less than inflation and population growth," said John Laird, a Santa Cruz Democrat who served as Assembly Budget Committee chairman from 2004 to 2008.

So looking at the past five years, where did that "extra" $10.2 billion of state spending above the rate of inflation and population growth go? The Mercury News found:

# The state prison system received the biggest share, about $4.1 billion of it. Corrections spending has increased fivefold since 1994. At $13 billion last year, it now exceeds spending on higher education. Tough laws and voter-approved ballot measures have increased the prison population 82 percent over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, former Gov. Gray Davis gave the powerful prison guards union a 30 percent raise from 2003 to 2008, increasing payroll costs.

# Public health spending — mostly Medi-Cal, the state program for the poor — received $2.9 billion above the rate of inflation and population growth. Part of that spike is due to an aging population; part is rising national health care costs. But state lawmakers also expanded Medi-Cal eligibility among children and low-income women a decade ago, increasing caseloads.

# Schwarzenegger's first act as governor, signing an executive order to cut the vehicle license fee by two-thirds, blew a large hole in the state budget. It saved the average motorist about $200 a year but would have devastated the cities and counties that had been receiving the money. So Schwarzenegger agreed to repay them every year with state funds. That promise now costs the state $6 billion a year, or $2 billion more than the rate of inflation and population growth since early 2003.

# Spending on a few other areas, such as higher education, general government, transportation and environment, also grew faster — by about $1 billion each — than inflation and population over the past five years. That was mostly to cover debt payments on bonds that voters approved for parks and highways, along with moves to limit university tuition increases.

# Finally, general fund spending on K-12 schools and social services, like welfare, actually grew less than the rate of inflation and population growth.

'What voters wanted'

Some budget observers say spending more than inflation and population growth is OK, particularly if the economy grows faster.

"The spending is not out of line. It's what voters wanted, and some programs grow faster than the rate of inflation," said Jean Ross, executive director of the nonprofit California Budget Project.

Conservatives call the spending an outrage.

"Like Reagan said, giving money to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys," said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

Coupal noted that even though California's revenue has fallen dramatically this year, the state general fund still brings in about $90 billion in annual taxes. That's nearly 20 percent more than it received five years ago — and only about 12 percent less than the peak last year before the economy tanked.

"Most business and families could take 10 to 12 percent out of their budget. They do, because they don't have a choice," he said.

One of the state's most famous tax-cut crusaders, U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Granite Bay, said the problem is that California's bureaucracy has grown too large and powerful. Salaries are too high, it's too difficult to fire state workers, and the entire system needs an overhaul, he said, including outsourcing to private firms everything from nonviolent inmates to highway engineering.

"We've got to put our wardens back in charge of prisons, and principals back in charge of teachers, and introduce competitive pressures back into those systems," McClintock said.

But Laird, the Democratic former budget chairman, said it isn't that easy to reduce the size of government.

"You can call teachers 'bureaucracy,' but in fact they are teachers," said Laird. "If you cut teachers, class sizes go up." His solution: More taxes are needed.

Fixing California's broken budget system will require a wide range of reforms, many experts say, from making it tougher to qualify ballot measures to spending caps to reexamining the two-thirds vote requirement to raise taxes.

In the meantime, legislative leaders say a budget deal could come as soon as this week. The "Big 5'' — the governor and four legislative leaders — are expected to resume talks this afternoon. Any deal is nearly certain to include big spending cuts and higher taxes.

"Our society is moving in the direction of, 'I want more from government but I don't want to pay for it,' " Genest said. "Right now we have leaders making hard choices out of necessity, and we need to continue that."

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

NY: Towns must do without prison work crews

Towns must do without prison work crews
State eliminated all but 2 groups
By Keith Goldberg
Times Herald-Record
Posted: February 07, 2009

MOUNT HOPE — It didn't cost a dime for Mount Hope to re-paint its senior center last summer. Or perform custodial work at its police headquarters and perform some maintenance work on its ball fields.

That's because the work was done by crews of inmates from the Otisville state prison, said Mount Hope Supervisor Bill Novak.

In Warwick, Supervisor Michael Sweeton said crews from Mid-Orange Correctional Facility helped maintain the town park during the spring and summer months.

But the free ride is over. As part of budget cuts instituted by Gov. David Paterson, all three prison work crews at Otisville were eliminated last fall. Two of the four crews at Mid-Orange Correctional Center in Warwick were also cut. The two remaining crews are the only ones left in Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties, according to state Department of Corrections spokesman Erik Kriss.

"Now, we'll have to contract out work," Novak said. He said the town has already hired a custodian for the police station. Kriss estimated that each work crew costs the state $60,000 per year, mostly for security. "We tried to maintain some crews. What has to be done is to prioritize works."

Besides, he added, the decline in New York's prison population means there just aren't that many available workers.

Only nonviolent offenders who have less than two years on their sentence are eligible to serve on a work crew, Kriss said. Such inmates are usually housed in minimum and medium security prisons, like Otisville and Mid-Orange.

Kriss said minimum-security inmate levels in the state have dropped 50 percent in the past nine years, while medium-security inmates have decreased 20 percent.

Nevertheless, it's another example of costs being shifted from the state level to the local level.

Chester is one town over from Mid-Orange. Supervisor Steve Neuhaus said the town was planning to use prison crews for maintenance work. With the cutbacks, "now everyone's going to be grasping," Neuhaus said. "They provide a great service."
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090207/NEWS/9020703 21/-1/NEWS

Posted by lois at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)

Five Big Ideas We Should Be Talking About (including closing some prisons)

Published on OurFuture.org (http://www.ourfuture.org)
Five Big Ideas We Should Be Talking About
By Sara Robinson
Created 02/04/2009 - 1:19am
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020604/five-big-ideas-we-should-be-talking-about
Summary:

This is a moment for a big vision, painted in bold strokes. We need our own shelf full of challenging new ideas that will shake up people's assumptions, change the terms of the discussion, and expand the country's ideas about what's possible in this unique moment. Here are five Big Ideas we can use to get started.

Most progressives understand by now that the battle over the stimulus is, at heart, a philosophical debate over whether we're going to continue with 30 years of failed conservative economic policies, or chart a new direction for the country's future, built on an economics that's grounded in investment in the common good.

Given the stakes, it's frustrating to watch the discussion in Washington and on the news shows wander away from obvious solutions ("Buy American" policies, mortgage renegotiation, and increased oversight of bailout beneficiaries are such no-brainers it's hard to believe anybody serious would actually waste precious time debating them) and end up mired in ridiculous distractions and nit-picky details. This is a moment for a big vision, painted in bold strokes. We need our own shelf full of challenging new ideas that will shake up people's assumptions, change the terms of the discussion, and expand the country's ideas about what's possible in this unique moment.

Here are five Big Ideas that deserve to have a much wider hearing if we're really serious about getting America back up and running.
I am skipping to the one on prisons...for the full list, go to the URL above...
4
Close some prisons.

As I noted in a recent article , state governments are having a rough time right now in no small part because so many of them are bound by balanced budget amendments that prevent them from resorting to deficit spending as an option in bad times. Many of them are running deficits anyway, in direct violation of their own constitutions.

Given that state prison spending grows faster than education every year—and that prison costs are devouring state budgets from coast to coast, even as crime hits record lows—the first, best step toward balancing unstable state budgets may be to take a good hard look at how much we spend on prisons, and whether we're actually getting our money's worth.

And it may be an idea whose time has come. A recent poll in California found that voters of both parties ranked the public schools and health care as number one and two, respectively, on their list of public goods that must be protected during the state's financial crisis. Prisons, on the other hand, were at the very bottom of their list. They're more than ready to let this go.

Still finding the political will to do this is incredibly hard. Like defense contractors, the prison industry has a tremendous constituency, especially in the growing number of small towns where the prison is now the only major employer. Closing prisons throws thousands of people out of work. But it's also not the kind of public infrastructure investment that pays off in the long run.

As CAF research director Eric Lotke pointed out in a recent post:

Even as states spend nearly $50 billion on prisons every year and counties spend over $20 billion on jails, we build additional locked capacity. Even with U.S. incarceration rates at seven times historical and international norms, we build. Even as crime continues on its 15-year descent to levels not seen in 40 years, we find money to build even more.

The sacrifices we make to build these prisons are astonishing. Between 1987 and 2007, state spending on prisons increased by 40 percent (as a percent of the general fund). State spending on higher education decreased by 30 percent. We are financing our prisons by cutting our colleges.

We continue to build even though prisons are often disappointing for economic development. The best jobs go to people from out of town, and dollars spent on prisons have little “multiplier” effect. They don’t generate future additional dollars of economic activity, as do dollars spent on transportation, schools and so forth. Every dollar invested in highway construction generates $2.50 of gross domestic product in the short term. Raising teacher wages by 10 percent is associated with a 5 percent decrease in drop-out rates. But still we shortchange our schools and other rural enterprise, and build new prisons....

That’s where federal assistance can come in. Part of the infrastructure/investment/stimulus money can be directed to cover transitional costs out of the prison economy. A few billion dollars of federal money in the short term can help states break the prison hammerlock, and free them to redirect tens of billions of state dollars to other purposes—from schools to roads to hospitals.

Cutting money for schools, colleges, and hospitals pretty much guarantees that we're going to need more prisons down the road. The current crisis may be the moment we've been looking for to tell the private prison companies and corrections unions that enough is enough. We don't need what they're selling us anymore. And we can't afford it, either.

========================
These are just a few examples. The point is that in the middle of these tough times, things are becoming possible that have never been possible before. Small risks, small actions, or small ideas are unworthy of the moment, and of us. It's time for us to get beyond the old assumptions, and start to think big enough to stir the soul of the country.

Bernie Horn, Eric Lotke, Susan Ozawa, and David Sirota all participated in the development of this article.
Campaign For America's Future

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

February 07, 2009

The Census: Phantom Constituents

February 6, 2009, 5:55 pm
The Census: Phantom Constituents
By Brent Staples
http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/

There are many ways to hijack political power. One of them is to draw state or city legislative districts around large prisons — and pretend that the inmates are legitimate constituents.

Which, of course, they are not. Prison inmates are stripped of the right to vote in all but two states. They often live hundreds of miles from the prison town — where they may never even see the local streets. Once released, they are hustled onto buses and driven halfway across the state to their actual homes.

Why, then, does the census bureau count inmates as “residents” of their prisons? Force of habit, maybe. But it is way past time to bring the practice to an end.

It made almost no difference when the national prison population was minuscule. But with the prison population at 1.4 million and climbing, this misallocation is having a huge and distorting impact on the political landscape.

By counting inmates at prison instead of at home, the bureau allows unscrupulous legislatures to create phantom districts that sometimes contain more inmates than actual constituents. Politicians from these bogus districts can be elected with shockingly small numbers of votes. Once in office, they reward friends, punish enemies, and generally wield as much power as legislators from legitimate districts with many more real constituents.

It’s called prison-based gerrymandering. It violates the principle of one person, one vote. And it brings to mind the slave-era United States, when enslaved persons were denied the vote and counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in Congress.

The obvious solution is for the census bureau to begin counting inmates at their homes instead of from their prison cells. But the bureau has so far failed to do this, despite increasing pressure from advocates, community groups and politicians. In New York, Democratic lawmakers are fuming about the way upstate Republicans parlayed the prison population into a political advantage.

Not surprisingly, Democratic lawmakers want a change. They have demanded that the census bureau collect the home addresses of all incarcerated persons in the 2010 census.

The problem has a significant civil rights aspect, given that people of color are overrepresented in the prison population. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has picked up the cause and says that it will lobby the federal government to have residents counted in the places where they live at the time of arrest.

The distortions caused by prison gerrymandering are clearly apparent at the state level, where inmates are sometimes used to pad thinly populated legislative districts that would otherwise be illegal under federal law. But the same issue crops up within counties, towns and cities.

Consider, for example, the city of Anamosa, Iowa, where city a councilman from a prison community was elected to office on the strength of just two votes (both write ins) back 2006. According to the census, Anamosa’s Ward 2 had almost 1,400 residents — about the same as the other three wards in town. But 1,300 of Ward 2’s “residents’’ were actually inmates of the Anamosa State Penitentiary. Once the inmates were subtracted, ward 2 turned out to have fewer than 60 actual residents.

Anamosa’s voters have passed a referendum that requires City Council members to be elected at large. But this small-town saga has thrown a spotlight onto this problem. As we have already seen, prison gerrymandering undercuts the power of populous areas and exaggerates the power of regions that are thinly settled.

Peter Wagner, executive director of an advocacy group called Prison Policy Initiative writes that the practice of counting inmates at prison has a variety of side effects.

According to a report by this group:

Most states distribute sales taxes with portions going directly to the state general revenues, portions returning to the point-of-sale, and portions going to municipalities or other local governments on the basis of population. Thus, communities that host a prison receive an additional, unearned portion of the state sales tax.

Note: this amounts to double dipping by the prison districts, which are already amply supported by state tax dollars devoted to building, maintaining and staffing the prisons.

The report continues:

Other affected fund distributions include U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Appalachian Regional Commission which makes $60 million available annually to impoverished Appalachian communities based on a formula that includes total population of each county. Such formulas inadvertently reward communities that build prisons by giving them a larger share of the funds intended for their region. Typical of the distortions that the Census creates, the communities that pay the largest price are not the urban communities that most people in prison call home; rather, they are similarly situated rural communities that lack the advantage of a population artificially inflated by a prison.

The Census Bureau was made acutely aware of this problem in 2007, when a report it commissioned said that counting inmates at prison distorted the political process and raised legitimate concerns about the fairness of the census itself. The report, by the National Research Council, acknowledged that the system would be difficult to change, but urged the bureau to seeks ways to do it.

The report also proposed an interim solution: the bureau could issue statistical portraits of the prison population — so that the inmates could be subtracted from the count when legislative districts are drawn up.

Whatever the solution, the census bureau needs to get cracking. The country has put up with too much prison gerrymandering for too long.

Posted by lois at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2009

Arpaio’s America

Arpaio’s America
Editorial: NY Times including a picture on the editorial page of the shackled men
Published: February 5, 2009

It has come to this: In Phoenix on Wednesday, more than 200 men in shackles and prison stripes were marched under armed guard past a gantlet of TV cameras to a tent prison encircled by an electric fence. They were inmates being sent to await deportation in a new immigrant detention camp minutes from the center of America’s fifth-largest city.

The judge, jury and exhibitioner of this degrading spectacle was the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, the publicity-obsessed star of a Fox reality show and the self-appointed scourge of illegal immigrants. Though he frequently and proudly insists that he answers to no one, except at election time, the sheriff is not an isolated rogue. As a participant in the federal policing program called 287(g), he is an official partner of the United States government in its warped crackdown on illegal immigration.

The immigration enforcement regime left by the Bush Administration is out of control. It is up to President Obama and the new secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, to rein it in and clean it up. This applies not just to off-the-rails deputies like Sheriff Arpaio, but to the federal enforcement agencies themselves.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol have been shown in recent news accounts to be botching their jobs. Border Patrol agents in California have accused supervisors of setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, and a recent Migration Policy Institute study showed that a much-touted campaign of raids against criminal fugitives was a failure. It netted mostly the maids and laborers who are no reasonable person’s idea of a national threat.

The burden of action is particularly high on Ms. Napolitano, who as Arizona’s governor handled Sheriff Arpaio with a gingerly caution that looked to some of his critics and victims as calculated and timid.

Ms. Napolitano, who is known as a serious and moderate voice on immigration, recently directed her agency to review its enforcement efforts, including looking at ways to expand the 287(g) program. Sheriff Arpaio is a powerful argument for doing just the opposite.

Now that she has left Arizona politics behind, Ms. Napolitano is free to prove this is not Arpaio’s America, where the mob rules and immigrants are subject to ritual humiliation. The country should expect no less.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/opinion/06fri2.html?ref=opinion

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

CT: Gov. delays sending 16 & 17 year old youth to juvenile system

Criminal justice initiative clipped in Rell budget
By Keith M. Phaneuf
Journal Inquirer
Published: Thursday, February 5, 2009
HARTFORD — Though criminal justice initiatives traditionally are one area both political parties insist are immune to budget cuts, even they may not be safe in this economic climate.

The budget proposal Gov. M. Jodi Rell unveiled Wednesday would delay for two years an initiative to transfer most 16- and 17-year-offenders from the adult courts to the juvenile system.

That switch, which was supposed to occur in January 2010, would be delayed until January 2012.

Municipal leaders urged Rell to order this delay, noting that the switch would place an added financial burden on their police departments and other forms of support services. Juvenile cases, in general, carry a much higher price tag than other cases.

Connecticut is one of just three states that treats offenders in this age group as adults. An estimated 10,000 16- and 17-year-olds are prosecuted as adults each year, with about 60 percent becoming repeat offenders.

Advocates of the switch have argued that rehabilitation programs for 16- and 17-year-olds would be much more effective if these offenders are treated outside of the adult system.

The change is expected to cost the state close to $100 million in the first two years, not only to expand support programs, but also to expand courts and staff at the juvenile level.

The governor’s budget proposal for the next two fiscal years also would make several other changes, including:

• Canceling the planned Juvenile Justice Urban Cities Pilot Program.

• Closing courthouses in Meriden and Bristol, and realigning four towns amid judicial districts based in Middlesex and Waterbury counties.

• Leaving vacant five judge positions over the next two years. An additional 65 posts within the Judicial Department that have been vacant since the state’s 2003 early retirement program would be eliminated permanently.

• And canceling 60 community based, residential program beds for offender re-entry programs.

“Although each of the initiatives is very important, the state’s dire economic circumstances requires review of the initiatives that are not currently operating,” the governor’s budget message reads.

The recession has lowered projected collections for all state taxes. The current $18.4 billion state budget is $922 million in deficit, according to Rell.

Even more important, both the Rell administration and the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis have projected that under current spending and tax policies, the next two fiscal years face huge, built-in deficits.

Rell’s budget office places the two-year shortfall at a combined $6 billion, while OFA pegs the deficit at $8.7 billion.

http://www.journalinquirer.com/articles/2009/02/05/connecticut/doc498af5918966c985809856.txt

Posted by lois at 03:35 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Rikers Fight Club After indications for more than a year that guards were using inmates as enforcers, New York's jails are rocked by a pair of indictments

Rikers Fight Club
After indications for more than a year that guards were using inmates as enforcers, New York's jails are rocked by a pair of indictments
By Graham Rayman
published: February 04, 2009
The Village Voice

Eighteen months after the Voice first reported cases of jail guards using inmates as enforcers, Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson has made a criminal case that slices to the core of the problem.

The indictment, unsealed January 22, alleges that guards Michael McKie and Khalid Nelson handpicked and oversaw a gang of inmates who beat and terrorized other inmates, and extorted money and privileges from them over a four-month period in a teenage unit at the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC), culminating in the murder by inmates of 18-year-old Christopher Robinson on October 18. They called their operation "The Program."

The indictment lists at least seven teenage victims, but there were "scores" more who were victimized, Assistant District Attorney James Goward said at the arraignment two weeks ago. Numerous inmates gave information to investigators to help build evidence that showed a troubling pattern of misconduct right under the noses of jail officials.

"[McKie] was not simply the author of a crime," Goward told a judge. "He was the architect of a criminal enterprise that recruited and trained inmates to inflict violence. They turned jail into almost a nightmare environment."

The blockbuster case forced Correction Commissioner Martin Horn, for the first time, to discuss the issue before the assembled media. But he took a defensive posture, saying that he had no inkling of the problem. "I don't know that any of us believed that anything like this could happen," he told reporters at the Bronx District Attorney's office.

In fact, Horn was well aware of the problem. The Voice had been writing articles on the subject long before Robinson's death. The newspaper first put questions to Horn and his aides about guards deputizing inmates (often members of the Bloods gang) as enforcers in the summer of 2007, and kept writing articles about the problem over the next year and a half—articles that some law enforcement officials credited with placing a public spotlight on the problem.

Even though Horn was receiving information on these incidents during that entire period, it remains unclear whether he did anything to address the problem in the months leading up to the Robinson murder.

It was only after Robinson was killed that he took action: He suspended several officers, transferred several mid-level managers, forced the retirement of a chief, and reshuffled the roles of his senior staff.

Horn told reporters that he installed video cameras in the jails and now has the right to monitor inmates' phone conversations. "We investigate every serious injury," he said, pointing out that the Robinson homicide was the first at Rikers in four years. "We train our officers to maintain a standard of care. If the allegations prove true, these officers have stained the good name of thousands of officers."

Rose Gil Hearn, commissioner of the city Department of Investigation, called the case "the worst" she has ever seen in the jails, and has recommended adding more video cameras and making changes to policies surrounding access to telephones and the commissary.

Horn's spokesman, Stephen Morello, later provided the Voice with a list of things the commissioner has done and is doing to address the problem, including improving the staff-inmate ratio in high-risk teen housing areas to 1 in 25—a move that advocates have been demanding for years.

Morello says Horn has also ordered guards to check inmates' torsos for bruises and other evidence of violence at RNDC. He has expanded a program that provides better training to guards who work with teens—another thing that advocates wanted. And, according to Morello, Horn has ordered staff members to investigate every serious injury, including apparent accidents.

"While one inmate homicide is too many, the NYC jails compare quite favorably with other large city systems on this point," Morello says, citing federal stats that show the homicide rate in the city jails being far better than those of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Chicago.

As for Horn's comment in the press conference, Morello tells the Voice that the commissioner "did not say that he was never aware, nor did he claim no prior knowledge of the possibility or even actual allegations" of officers deputizing inmates as enforcers.

"He commented that the nature of the officers' complicity charged in the Robinson indictment and its consequences exceeded any such thing in his experience," Morello says. "In other words, he and we are, of course, aware of prior cases."

According to the indictment, McKie and Nelson handpicked up to 12 inmates to act as enforcers on each of the two wings of the RNDC housing unit known as "One Main."

The enforcers were called "The Team." The guards taught them how to use wrestling holds, like a full nelson, to secure victims during a beating. They told them to punch the torsos of their victims so as not to leave injuries that would be easily seen by other staff. In exchange for performing beatings on their orders, the members of the Team had the right to extort phone privileges and a fixed percentage of the commissary account from the other inmates.

What that meant is that they could use other inmates' phone accounts to make calls, force them to buy snacks for them, get extra food, and even choose where they sat in the day room. The members of the Team also got to roam the units freely, unlike the other inmates, and they had the power to tell inmates whether they were allowed out of their cells and whether they could go to the bathroom.

The practice evolved its own kind of slang. Inmates were asked, "Are you with the Program?"—or, in shorthand, "Are you with it?" If the inmate refused, he would be beaten. The beatings were called "spankings."

Prosecutors say McKie and Nelson also developed a series of signals to warn each other that a supervisor was arriving in the unit. They also failed to report assaults, lied in reports they did file, ordered inmates to make false statements, and hid injured inmates in cells to avoid scrutiny from supervisors.

The campaign climaxed on October 18, when several inmates beat Robinson to death after he refused to go along with the Program. Robinson likely bled to death internally over a long period, perhaps 12 hours. One of his ribs pierced his lung, causing the fatal bleeding, sources said.

Robinson might have avoided the fatal beating altogether had the department listened to the recommendation of a deputy warden and transferred the youth into a more secure area, following his involvement in a prior fight. He also might have survived had his injuries been treated in a timely manner. His family has asserted that he sought medical care in the jail's clinic, but was turned away because he did not have a pass.

McKie, Nelson, and a third officer, Denise Albright, pleaded not guilty to gang assault, conspiracy, and corruption in their arraignment last week. They were not charged in Robinson's death.

"This case is a web of lies built by inmates," said McKie's lawyer, Joey Jackson. "My client has a record of unblemished service. He has served with honor and justice. In an effort to save themselves, the inmates are pointing fingers."

Carolyn McKie told the Voice that her son won a basketball scholarship to Buffalo State, but returned home to care for his child. "None of this is true," she said. "He never had a record. What is going on here?"

Norman Seabrook, head of the correction officers' union, said the department was scapegoating the officers to avoid taking responsibility itself. "This is just another case of the department looking to blame someone else for its own mistakes," he told the Voice.

Sidney Schwartzbaum, union leader for deputy wardens and assistant deputy wardens, agreed with Seabrook. "Had they followed the recommendation, we wouldn't even be having this conversation," he said. "My mother used to say what gets done in the dark will come to light, and that will be true in this case as well."

The Robinson case was only the latest example of a problem at RNDC and other jails that the Voice has been following since the summer of 2007.

There was the case of Camillo Douglas and Luis Soriano, two inmates in RNDC, who were assaulted by Bloods members after their cell doors mysteriously opened shortly before 11 p.m. on April 16, 2007. RNDC is the same facility where Christopher Robinson was killed.

Douglas and Soriano both sustained stab wounds and bruising, but they also fought back against their attackers.

The men who assaulted Douglas and Soriano had been part of the "house gang," inmates who were tapped to clean up the facility and were, in return, given extra privileges by the guards. While it has yet to be proven in court, the fact that their cell doors opened when all the other inmates were locked in, just before lights out, suggests there was guard involvement in the assault.

The Voice found other examples that suggested guard involvement in punitive beatings of inmates at RNDC by other inmates.

Paris DeSuze, 18, filed papers with the city, claiming two guards failed to stop inmates from breaking his jaw in three places on April 13, 2007. Afterward, a guard told him to tell investigators that he was injured in a fall.

DeSuze's lawyer, Michael Hueston, told the Voice: "Young people tell me when they go in there, the culture is such that the kids control the jail. The COs know this happens, and they look the other way."

But the case that really should have set off alarm bells in the commissioner's office was the indictment in February 2008 of Correction Officer Lloyd Nicholson, who was accused of using teen inmates in RNDC to target other inmates. He, too, called his operation "The Program." The case allegations mirror the allegations made in the McKie and Nelson indictments.

For example, in both cases, the inmates enforced order and, in exchange, had the officers' permission to extort commissary, telephone privileges, and property from other inmates. And in both cases, the motive was laziness—the inmate gang freed the officers from having to monitor the floor constantly during their shifts.

"Basically, it was like the movie A Few Good Men," a source told the Voice last March. "Either you were in the Program or not. [Nicholson] thought the ones who weren't abiding with the Program were misbehaving, and he used other inmates to discipline them."

If any inmates misbehaved, Nicholson told them, there would be a "moment of truth," where they would be taken into the day room and beaten. He allegedly also told his enforcers to avoid the face because it would leave tell-tale marks—another element which mirrors the McKie indictment.

One of the inmates suffered a collapsed lung, but was denied medical treatment for several hours, until he was finally transported to Elmhurst Hospital. He barely survived the assault, prosecutors said in court.

Sources said Nicholson tried to delay reporting the injury until the next shift, but he finally relented when one of the inmates told him the injured youth desperately needed medical attention. Nicholson, the sources said, also told the inmates he would try to get the blame for the injuries pinned on them. "Some of you are going to go down for this," he told them, sources said.

Nicholson also allegedly beat an inmate himself. "He both watched and participated," a prosecutor said during the arraignment.

Last week, officials said Nicholson worked in another unit and was not connected to the McKie operation. In addition, Horn told reporters that when McKie and Nelson were not working, the practice did not extend to other officers. But some jail observers were skeptical of this claim, saying it had to be more than coincidental that both operations were called "The Program."

"What they are saying is that One Main was a vacuum, which doesn't make a lot of sense," a correction source said.

Housing units typically include two hallways with about 30 cells each, with a "bubble" or glassed-in observation booth at the hub with a day room and television on either side. Three officers control security in these units—one on the left wing, one on the right wing, and one in the bubble. There are three officers per shift, so at least nine officers cycle through the unit on any given day. In addition, the unit is visited once or twice per shift by a captain. On top of that, assistant deputy wardens and other higher-level supervisors might pass through.

What that means is that on any day, at least 18 correction employees might come through a unit. So it seems unlikely that no one other than the three implicated guards would be aware of the Program.

"It's tragic that it took the death of an 18-year-old to bring to light this terrible scheme, but it has to be asked whether it was more extensive," said the Robinson family lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein. "Someone in a position of power and authority should investigate it."

Even the New York Post, which rarely devotes much space to jail incidents, wrote an editorial expressing doubt that the operation was limited to just three guards. The editorial pressed officials to continue their investigation: "How could only three guards organize such an operation—with at least 12 inmates involved—without more people knowing what was going on?" wondered the Post's editorial board. "It defies credulity to assume that this is all that was going on."

And there were examples of the problem in other facilities dating all the way back to 2004, with the fatal beating of Tyreece Abney, 21, who was the last inmate murdered in the jail system before Robinson.

Abney, a mentally disabled man who probably never should have been in general population, was stomped to death in the George Motchan Detention Center by Bloods members after he had a loud argument with a correction officer. About 30 minutes before the fatal assault, a guard told the inmates in his unit: "You men in the house, you need to speak to the new inmates—you need to get your house in order," court testimony showed. Shortly thereafter, three inmates cornered Abney and attacked him, with one inmate saying he better "fly right."

During the investigation, authorities learned that one of Abney's assailants had been receiving extra phone and mail privileges from a correction officer.

In March 2007, the city agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit involving a near-fatal assault by the leader of a "house gang." Inmate Kirk Fisher hit Donald Jackson, and Jackson fell, his head striking a piece of protruding metal in the floor. Jackson almost died. Fisher later testified that a correction officer told him to assault Jackson. "Before you do anything [he said], I'm going to go to the other side, and do what you got to do," the guard told Fisher, according to Fisher's deposition.

Describing his duties, Fisher said, "It was my job to enforce certain rules. Anybody that acted up in the house, it was my job to put them in line."

"The inmates tell us it's a really common setup," said Jackson's lawyer, Andrew Stoll, in the Voice's 2007 article on the case. "In a lot of the houses, the correction officers use the house gang as enforcers and pay them with cigarettes and extra commissary."

During the course of the Jackson case, Stoll was able to track down a former correction officer, Roger Cullen, who was on duty at the time of the assault. In his deposition, Cullen confirmed Fisher's claim: "It was like he was in charge," Cullen said in sworn testimony. "Any officer knows you're not supposed to do that. It's wrong."

Cullen was fired before he could be vested as a correction officer. As he told the Voice in 2007, he blamed the firing on his efforts to report corruption in the jail. The department investigated his claims, but in a cursory manner, and closed the case without taking action. "I tried to do the right thing," Cullen said in his deposition.

The McKie indictment has raised another issue. For many years now, the department has relied on statistics regarding stabbings and slashings in public testimony as its indicator of violence in the jails. Whenever the issue of violence is raised, officials trot out the low number of stabbings and slashings to show that the jail system is safe. Indeed, the figure has declined sharply over the past 15 years.

But this case vividly demonstrates that the figure is a poor indicator of the level of violence in today's environment. For one, it does not count beatings, broken bones, smashed noses, broken ribs, bruising, and many other kinds of injuries. Christopher Robinson's murder, for example, will not be counted as a stabbing or slashing.

Moreover, both the inmates and guards knew how to conceal injuries from the beatings, and they knew how to extort their victims into hiding the beating or lying about it. In other words, the system has evolved its own methods to avoid the heightened scrutiny that comes when a slashing or stabbing takes place.

In the end, no matter what the stats show, the number does not provide an accurate picture of the level of violence in RNDC.
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/864266

NY Times editorial
Rikers Horror Story
Published: January 28, 2009

New York City corrections officials have done a commendable job reducing the number of beatings, stabbings and other violent acts that have long plagued city jails. We are very concerned about recent events — including the death of an inmate — at the troubled youth facility at the Rikers Island jail. Clearly, the city needs to do a much better job of training and supervising corrections officers there.

Juvenile justice advocates and former inmates had been complaining about misconduct by the guards long before Christopher Robinson, 18, was found beaten to death in his cell last fall. They accused the guards of turning disciplinary responsibility over to roving gangs that beat, harassed and extorted money and valuables from other inmates. Some critics referred to the facility as a “gladiator school” where young people were encouraged to fight and damage one another.

The Bronx district attorney has now charged three corrections officers with conspiracy in connection with Mr. Robinson’s death. This is the second indictment of its kind at the youth facility in less than a year. According to the new indictment, guards used violent inmates to ride herd over others, sanctioned assaults on inmates and decided when, where and how they would take place. Prosecutors accused the guards of setting up a system of warning signals to protect gang members from being discovered when they administered beatings. They said the guards directed their “teams” to avoid hitting inmates in the face so that any injuries would not be readily apparent.

City corrections officials believe they can discourage misconduct by expanding the use of surveillance cameras. The indictments suggest the entire culture of the Rikers youth facility needs to be changed. That’s the only way to ensure these horrors are never repeated.

Posted by lois at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Sentencing Commission Calls for Drug Law Reform and Critical Response from NY Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver

Sentencing Commission Calls for Drug Law Reform
February 3, 2009

Panel also recommends determinate sentencing, graduated sanctions for parole violators

A bi-partisan panel that spent nearly two years studying New York State’s sentencing statutes today called for further reforms to the state’s drug laws and provided the Governor, Legislature and Judiciary with several different options for historic reform.

The Commission on Sentencing Reform agreed on five major principles of drug law reform:

* Community-based drug treatment, especially when required in a criminal justice setting where the offender faces clearly defined sanctions for program failure, works and should be an available option in every region of the state.

* The state’s network of existing diversion programs and drug courts has been effective for thousands of drug-addicted offenders, and any new diversion model must be structured so as not to undermine these programs.

* New York should adopt a comprehensive plan to provide statewide access to substance abuse treatment programs.

* New York must continue to reserve costly prison resources for high-risk offenders and make greater use of alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders while not jeopardizing the state’s significant gains in public safety.

* While New York has a large network of successful drug treatment courts and prosecutor-based diversion programs (such as DTAP – “Drug Treatment Alternative-to-Prison), these programs are not always made available to deserving offenders in need of treatment. The result is a “hit-or-miss” system that leaves many non-violent, drug-addicted offenders ─ and particularly persons of color – without access to this potentially life-changing alternative. To help close this gap, the Commission supports the adoption in statute of a uniform statewide drug diversion model.

The Commission considered several different alternatives for achieving those objectives and included five different options for reform.

Under one of the proposals, the “judicial diversion” model, judges would have discretion to divert certain addicted, non-violent first- and second-felony drug offenders into treatment programs rather than prison. The Commission noted that if this model had been in place in 2006, approximately 3,000 offenders – 89 percent of them African American or Hispanic – might have been diverted from prison and instead steered toward treatment.

Other options are: the Court Approved Drug Abuse Treatment (CADAT) model that is part of a comprehensive drug reform bill pending in both houses of the Legislature; judicial diversion, but only with the consent of the prosecutor; and two variations of a proposal that would allow first-time Class B drug felons to receive a probation or local jail sentence in lieu of a one-year state prison term.

Denise E. O’Donnell, chair of the Commission and Deputy Secretary for Public Safety, said all of the five proposals have benefits and drawbacks that the Legislature should take into account before implementing drug law reform.

“The Commission has heard from the prosecution, the defense, and the judiciary,” Deputy Secretary O’Donnell said. “We have solicited advice from advocates and renowned experts from around the nation. We held public hearings in New York City, Albany and Buffalo. We formed focus groups. We studied drug courts and drug diversion programs around the state and visited drug treatment facilities and New York State’s prisons in an effort to determine which approaches are most successful at ending the cycle of addiction and incarceration.

“I believe our report provides Governor Paterson and the Legislature with the balanced, objective and evidence-based information they need to make informed decisions about the future of New York’s drug laws,” Deputy Secretary O’Donnell added.

The 11-member Sentencing Commission, which was established by Executive Order in March 2007 to perform a comprehensive review of New York’s sentencing statutes, also recommended:

* Adopting a largely “determinate” sentencing system to promote greater uniformity, fairness and truth-in-sentencing. Currently, New York utilizes a hybrid of “determinate” sentences where the court imposes a fixed sentence, and “indeterminate” sentences where the court imposes a minimum and maximum term and the Parole Board decides when the offender is actually released. Under a determinate sentencing system, defendants, crime victims, judges and the public have a clear understanding of how long an offender will actually spend behind bars. The Commission reviewed more than two decades of sentences that had been imposed through the indeterminate system and used that data to construct a proposed range of sentences for particular offenses.

* A comprehensive system of graduated responses, which would allow parole officers throughout the state to respond quickly and proportionately to technical parole violations. Since incarceration is an expensive and, often, unnecessary response to parole violations, the Commission recommends expanded use of “graduated sanctions” – such as curfews, electronic monitoring, increased reporting – coupled with use of evidence-based risk assessments to identify parolees who pose the greatest risk to public safety.

* Expanding effective and cost-efficient “shock incarceration” and “merit time” initiatives that reduce recidivism and reserve costly prison space for the most dangerous offenders.

* Enhancing the rights of crime victims. The Commission recommends moving all of the various victim’s rights statutes into a single article of law, or cross-referencing to a single article, so that victims, judges and practitioners can readily ascertain the rights and benefits that may be available. Additionally, the Commission recommends enhancing victim’s rights training requirements for prosecutors and judges, as well as new laws to enhance the ability of victims to collect restitution.

* Establishing a permanent sentencing commission. Over the past 40 years, portions of New York’s sentencing statutes have been amended and altered countless times, resulting in an overly complex, Byzantine structure replete with the potential for injustice. The Commission recommends the establishment of a permanent body of experts to advise the Executive and Legislative branches on proposed legislation.

Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the “Sentencing Commission has performed a valuable service, at a critical time in the state’s history.”

“By focusing squarely on the connection between public safety and sentencing policy, the Commission has provided a roadmap that will guide the state during difficult fiscal times,” President Travis said. “The Commission’s recommendations, if followed, will bring clarity to our patchwork quilt of accumulated sentencing reforms, improve reentry outcomes, and support more rational uses of our prisons and our parole system.”

Deputy Secretary O’Donnell said the report is “the product of an extraordinary effort by an extraordinary group of professionals.”

“This comprehensive report reflects the wide diversity of experience represented on the Commission, and the seriousness with which every member approached this very difficult and time-consuming mission,” Deputy Secretary O’Donnell said. “Although we come from different areas, different professions and different backgrounds, our overarching goals were identical – justice, fairness and public safety. I believe that, with this report, we have met that goal.”

Also on the Commission were: Anthony Bergamo, Chairman, Federal Law Enforcement Foundation, Inc.; Brian Fischer, Commissioner, New York State Department of Correctional Services; Michael C. Green, Monroe County District Attorney; Joseph R. Lentol, member of the New York State Assembly; Michael P. McDermott, O’Connell and Aronowitz in Albany; Judge Juanita Bing Newton, Deputy Chief Administrative Judge for Justice Initiatives; Felix Rosa; Executive Director, New York State Division of Parole; Eric T. Schneiderman, member of the New York State Senate; Tina Marie Stanford, Chair, New York State Crime Victims Board; and Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., of Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, Anello & Bohrer in Manhattan

“A lot of talented people put a lot of work into this report, which I believe will serve as a positive stepping stone for the legislature as we consider reforms to our state’s costly ─ and at times overly-punitive ─ criminal justice system,” said Senator Schneiderman, the new chair of the Senate Codes Committee. “I am especially heartened by the fact that the Commission is recommending by nearly unanimous agreement that judges be given the power to divert drug-addicted offenders to treatment, even without prosecutorial consent.”

Added Karen Carpenter-Palumbo, Commissioner of the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services: “I applaud the Governor and the Sentencing Commission for recognizing addiction is a chronic illness that is better to treat than to incarcerate. We know that 72 percent of state parolees have a substance abuse problem and effective treatment is the best way to help them return to their communities, not to prison.

“OASAS is proud to partner with the Governor and Legislature on insuring that appropriate treatment is available to those individuals who can be diverted from State prison to our not-for-profit system of care,” she added. “New York State is a national leader in diversion programs, such as drug courts, and the action of this Commission once again puts New York in the forefront.”

Commissioner Fischer said the “shock incarceration” and “merit time proposals would build upon effective and cost efficient programs already being utilized by the Department of Correctional Services.

“Expanding eligibility for shock incarceration and creating limited credit time for good behavior and enhanced program participation during prison are sound, common-sense ideas based upon many years of practical experience in what works best,” Commissioner Fischer said.

“Shock has saved state taxpayers nearly $1.3 billion directly over two decades through reduced need for prison space, in addition to lowering recidivism by better preparing its participants to return to society,” he added. “Credit time would build on our very successful merit time program by providing incentives that have been shown not only to help in the rehabilitative process for offenders but also to make our correctional facilities safer and to enhance public safety.”

Added Ms. Stanford, Chair of the Crime Victims Board: “I am pleased to note that victims’ rights and concerns were studied and considered as part of the extensive process of reviewing sentencing in New York. The final product reflects fairness and forward thinking in an effort to share practical suggestions and best practices to achieve just results.”

Mr. Vance said that the “Commission’s report provides sound and bold recommendations to reform New York’s complex, sometimes unfair and often incomprehensible sentencing laws. We hope our work will be a roadmap to a more fair and effective criminal justice system for all of us.”

http://criminaljustice.state.ny.us/pio/press_releases/2009-02-03_pressrelease.html
Critical Response to Report from Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the NY Assembly
http://blogs.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/11304/silver-thumbs-down-on-dru g-law-reform-report

Silver: Thumbs down on drug law reform report
February 3, 2009 at 12:51 pm by Casey Seiler

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has wasted no time in calling the drug law reform commission’s report a “missed opportunity.” Here’s his letter to commission Chairwoman Denise O’Donnell:

Dear Commissioner O’Donnell:

I write to express my deep disappointment with the final report of the Commission on Sentencing Reform. Unfortunately, the Commission’s report represents a historic missed opportunity to advance meaningful reform of New York’s antiquated “Rockefeller-era Drug Laws”. The Commission held in its hands a unique opportunity to help undo thirty-five years of failed drug policy and set New York on the path to establishing a more just, more humane and more effective approach to combat drug crime and drug abuse.

I am saddened that it failed to do so.

More than 35 years after they were enacted, it is clear that the Rockefeller laws have failed to combat drug abuse or effectively impact the incidence of violent crime across New York State. Rather, they have succeeded in imprisoning tens of thousands of low-level non-violent offenders, who are predominantly African-American and Latino, with no history of committing violent crimes at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to taxpayers. By restoring to judges their discretion not to mandate a prison sentence when they deem it inappropriate, non-violent drug offenders and taxpayers will be
better served by driving resources toward strategies that have been proven far more effective at combating substance abuse and the street level crime associated with it.

Fore nearly a decade, the New York State Assembly, led by Assemblymember Jeffrion Aubry, has passed legislation to reform these laws, with an emphasis on restoring discretion to judges and providing alternatives to incarceration where appropriate and drug treatment for offenders where needed. Policy reforms encapsulated in that legislation were proposed to this Commission by Assemblymember Joseph Lentol. I was very sorry to learn
that the Commission rejected them.

I am troubled that the Commission’s report fails to address a system that has ignored, and still ignores, the health and societal implications of drug abuse, and has ignored the failed laws that have led to African- Americans and Latinos constituting 90% of those incarcerated in our state prisons for drug offenses. This profound discriminatory impact is even more shocking when the rates of illicit drug use are 8.1 percent for Whites, 7.2 percent
for Latinos and 8.7 percent for African-Americans.

In 2004, under the leadership of the New York State Assembly and drug law reform advocates, New York undertook an important first step in correcting failed policies by lowering maximum prison sentences through converting indeterminate to determinate sentences, eliminating life sentences, doubling weights for the top 2 classes of drug offenses and providing other sentencing relief. Further amendments have enabled some of those who were previously sentenced under the laws to seek limited reconsideration of their sentences.

But still, more than 35 years after enactment of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, individuals convicted of a class B felony drug offense must go to state prison, often regardless of the quantity, quality or type of drugs involved and regardless of other options that combat drug crime and drug abuse.

While I believe the Commission missed a historic opportunity to address these issues, the Assembly is committed to ensuring that in 2009, New York finally enacts real reform of the Rockefeller-era Drug Laws. We believe the following principles should guide any efforts at enacting reform:

Mandatory minimum sentences for low-level non-violent offenders must go. Judges must have the discretion to impose sentences that make sense. Mandating that judges sentence drug users and very low level street sellers to state prison has not appreciably impacted crime or
reduced addiction but, rather, has led to a massive increase in New York’s prison population with a disproportionate number of Latinos and African-Americans being incarcerated. Thus, real reform means untying the hands of our judiciary by ending mandatory minimum
prison sentences for Class B felony drug offenses and second time,
non-violent drug offenders, and placing an emphasis on probation,
alternatives to incarceration, and treatment. Except for the most serious and violent crimes, judges in New York already have had and continue to have the discretion to fashion appropriate sentences for criminal acts. Judges should have the ability to make an informed decision whether circumstances warrant imposing a state prison sentence in drug crimes just as they do in cases of many assault, larceny, property damage and any number of other crimes.

Illegal drugs should remain illegal. Adults who sell drugs to children, individuals who use guns in drug deals, and drug kingpins deserve harsh punishment. In addition, existing maximum
determinate sentences for first and second class B level felony and below offenders should also be maintained so that if a judge decided circumstances warrant, those who commit the crime will do serious time.

District Attorneys should continue to play a key role in the process, but they should not be able to veto a judge’s discretion. Indeed, to the extent there are district attorney-sponsored initiatives, such as Drug Treatment Alternative to Prison (DTAP) programs that have proven success rates with the limited populations they serve, judges will have the discretion to continue them.

This approach is fair, sensible and cost effective. We spend almost $45,000 per year incarcerating each drug offender in state prison, many of whom are non-violent individuals suffering from substance abuse. This is money that could be spent on breaking the cycle that has driven New York’s apparent addiction to sending people to prison rather than ending the drug abuse and recidivism.

I reiterate my disappointment at this missed opportunity. I remain
committed to eliminating the most ineffective and inhumane aspects of the Rockefeller-era Drug Laws. I am hopeful that this year my colleagues in the Legislature can create a partnership with the Governor to complete this work.

Sincerely,
Sheldon Silver
Speaker
New York State Assembly

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

February 05, 2009

Warren Kimbro, Ex-Panther Who Turned to Life of Service After Killing, Dies at 74

Warren Kimbro, Ex-Panther Who Turned to Life of Service After Killing, Dies at 74

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: February 5, 2009
NY Times

Warren Kimbro, who as a fledgling member of the Black Panther Party shot and killed a suspected police informer in New Haven in 1969, prompting a series of trials that made national headlines, but who later earned a Harvard degree and became a respected community leader, died in New Haven on Tuesday. He was 74 and lived in Hamden, Conn.

The cause had not been determined, said his son, Germano. Warren Kimbro had been taken to Yale-New Haven Hospital on Tuesday complaining of chest pains, said Paul Bass, editor of The New Haven Independent, an online news site.

Mr. Kimbro’s story involves an instantaneous tumble from grace and a long climb to regain it. Since 1983, he had run Project MORE, an agency that helps ex-convicts with job training and drug rehabilitation and that advocates for alternatives to jail or prison. It was the centerpiece of Mr. Kimbro’s effort to redeem himself after his crime, said Mr. Bass, who worked with Mr. Kimbro on a book about the 1969 killing, “Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale and the Redemption of a Killer” (Basic Books, 2006).

“Every morning he prayed about it,” Mr. Bass said. “He really wanted to come clean.”

The murder of Alex Rackley, whose body was found in Middlefield, Conn., on May 21, 1969, became a notorious episode in the history of New Haven, which had become home to a chapter of the Black Panthers, an activist group begun in Oakland, Calif., that advocated socialism, believed American blacks were in need of liberation and did not disavow the use of guns in defense of the revolution.

Mr. Rackley, a 24-year-old member of the Panthers from New York City, had been accused of informing the police about the party’s activities. For three days, he had been held by Panthers in Mr. Kimbro’s apartment, where was interrogated and tortured. Eventually Mr. Kimbro and two other men drove Mr. Rackley to a swamp in Middlefield, north of the city, and killed him. Mr. Kimbro pleaded guilty to a murder charge, confessing to firing the first shot into the back of Mr. Rackley’s head. He was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum of 20 years.

While Mr. Rackley was being tortured, the Panthers’ national chairman, Bobby Seale, arrived in New Haven to give a speech at Yale; he was eventually charged with ordering Mr. Rackley’s execution. Mr. Seale’s impending trial generated mass demonstrations in New Haven and a student strike at Yale. The university’s president, Kingman Brewster, famously linked the accusations against Mr. Seale and seven other Panthers to a history of racial injustice, declaring he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”

Mr. Seale was freed in 1971 when his trial ended in a hung jury. Mr. Kimbro, who said he was repentant from the moment he pulled the trigger, testified for the prosecution; he said that Mr. Seale had visited the apartment while Mr. Rackley was there. Mr. Kimbro said he understood that the execution was decreed by Panther officers, but he could not confirm that Mr. Seale gave the order.

“I think Warren Kimbro was an outstanding brother, a person who in the history of that trial got caught up in a bad situation,” Mr. Seale said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Warren Aloysious Kimbro was born in New Haven on April 29, 1934. His father was a factory worker. He did not care for school and never finished high school. He served in the Army during the Korean War, and when he returned to New Haven, he worked odd jobs, including managing a dry cleaner’s store. Later, as the city became a focal point of a national experiment in urban renewal, he became active in antipoverty and neighborhood planning programs.

It was his frustration with the bureaucracies of the groups he worked for, and their limited effectiveness, that led him to join the Black Panthers in 1969, offering the apartment he shared with his wife and children as local party headquarters. At 35, he was older than most of the men who were his compatriots, and he had been a party member for only six months when he killed Mr. Rackley. Later he would say he feared for his own life if he did not carry out the killing.

In prison, he counseled other inmates, edited the newspaper and was “more than a model prisoner,” Richard Hills, warden of the Brooklyn Correctional Institution in Connecticut, told The New York Times in 1973. On work release, he became director of a youth drug counseling program, returning to his cell at night, and earned a highly unusual reduction of his minimum sentence — to 41/2 years. When his parole requirements were satisfied, he entered Harvard as a student in social work at the Graduate School of Education. Later he became an assistant dean at Eastern Connecticut State University.

In addition to his son, who lives in New Haven, Mr. Kimbro is survived by a brother, Joseph, also of New Haven; a daughter, Veronica, of Brookline, Mass.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

“I was just a kid out there who didn’t know how to handle himself, and it was a slap in the face with cold, hard reality that turned me around back to what I was,” Mr. Kimbro said in 1973, reflecting on his crime and punishment in an interview with The New York Times. “I’d lie awake in my cell at night trying to figure out what makes me tick, and I succeeded. I’m now what I was before 1969.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/nyregion/05kimbro.html

Posted by lois at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

National Academy of Sciences Report finds Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs

"One person who has reviewed the draft and who asked not to be identified because of promises to keep the contents confidential said: “I’m sure that every defense attorney in the country is waiting for this report to come out. There are going to be challenges to fingerprints and firearms evidence and the general lack of empirical grounding. It’s going to be big.”

Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs

By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: February 4, 2009
NY Times

Forensic evidence that has helped convict thousands of defendants for nearly a century is often the product of shoddy scientific practices that should be upgraded and standardized, according to accounts of a draft report by the nation’s pre-eminent scientific research group.

The report by the National Academy of Sciences is to be released this month. People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting.

The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court. It concludes that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the field, which has been dominated by law enforcement agencies, say forensic professionals, scholars and scientists who have seen review copies of the study. Early reviewers said the report was still subject to change.

The result of a two-year review, the report follows a series of widely publicized crime laboratory failures, including the case of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer from Portland, Ore., and Muslim convert who was wrongly arrested in the 2004 terrorist train bombing in Madrid that killed 191 people and wounded 2,000.

American examiners matched Mr. Mayfield’s fingerprint to those found at the scene, although Spanish authorities eventually convinced the Federal Bureau of Investigation that its fingerprint identification methods were faulty. Mr. Mayfield was released, and the federal government settled with him for $2 million.

In 2005, Congress asked the National Academy to assess the state of the forensic techniques used in court proceedings. The report’s findings are not binding, but they are expected to be highly influential.

“This is not a judicial ruling; it is not a law,” said Michael J. Saks, a psychology and law professor at Arizona State University who presented fundamental weaknesses in forensic evidence to the academy. “But it will be used by others who will make law or will argue cases.”

Legal experts expect that the report will give ammunition to defense lawyers seeking to discredit forensic procedures and expert witnesses in court. Lawyers could also use the findings in their attempts to overturn convictions based on spurious evidence. Judges are likely to use the findings to raise the bar for admissibility of certain types of forensic evidence and to rein in exaggerated expert testimony.

The report may also drive federal legislation if Congress adopts its recommendations. Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, who has pushed for forensic reform, said, “My hope is that this report will provide an objective and unbiased perspective of the critical needs of our crime labs.”

Forensics, which developed within law enforcement institutions — and have been mythologized on television shows from “Quincy, M.E.” to “CSI: Miami” — suffers from a lack of independence, the report found.

The report’s most controversial recommendation is the establishment of a federal agency to finance research and training and promote universal standards in forensic science, a discipline that spans anthropology, biology, chemistry, physics, medicine and law. The report also calls for tougher regulation of crime laboratories.

In an effort to mitigate law enforcement opposition to the report, which has already delayed its publication, the draft focuses on scientific shortcomings and policy changes that could improve forensics. It is largely silent on strictly legal issues to avoid overstepping its bounds.

Perhaps the most powerful example of the National Academy’s prior influence on forensic science was a 2004 report discrediting the F.B.I. technique of matching the chemical signatures of lead in bullets at a crime scene to similar bullets possessed by a suspect. As a result, the agency had to notify hundreds of people who potentially had been wrongfully convicted.

In its current draft report, the National Academy wrote that the field suffered from a reliance on outmoded and untested theories by analysts who often have no background in science, statistics or other empirical disciplines.

Although it is not subject to significant criticism in the report, the advent of DNA profiling clearly set the agenda. DNA evidence is presented in less than 10 percent of all violent crimes but has revolutionized the entire science of forensics. While DNA testing has helped to free more than 200 wrongfully convicted people, “DNA was a shock to police culture and created an alternative scientific model, which promoted standardization, transparency and a higher level of precision,” said Paul Giannelli, a forensic science expert at Case Western Reserve University School of Law who presented his research to the National Academy. Enforcement officials, Mr. Giannelli said, “chose to say they never make mistakes, but they have little scientific support, and this report could blow them out of the water.”

Peter J. Neufeld, a co-director of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, presented to the academy a study of trial transcripts of 137 convictions that were overturned by DNA evidence and found that 60 percent included false or misleading statements regarding blood, hair, bite mark, shoe print, soil, fiber and fingerprint analyses.

The courts have long struggled with the proper role of scientific evidence. In a 1993 landmark decision, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, the Supreme Court held that scientific testimony had to meet an objective standard. Federal courts have occasionally excluded evidence like handwriting and hair analysis.

Donald Kennedy, a Stanford scientist who helped select the report’s authors, said federal law enforcement agencies resented “intervention” of mainstream science — especially the National Academy — in the courts.

He said the National Institute of Justice, a research arm of the Justice Department, tried to derail the forensic study by refusing to finance it and demanding to review the findings before publication. A bipartisan vote in Congress in 2005 broke the impasse with a $1.5 million appropriation.

Mr. Shelby also accused the National Institute of Justice of trying to infiltrate the forensic study panel with lobbyists for private DNA analysis companies, who were seeking to limit the research to DNA studies.

The National Institute of Justice said it would not comment until the report was released. But a preview of potential turf wars played out in the presentations to the National Academy in December 2007. A forensic expert from the Secret Service blasted the F.B.I. for developing questionable techniques “on an ad-hoc basis, without proper research.”

He said the Secret Service wanted the National Academy “to send a message to the entire forensic science community that this type of method development is not acceptable practice.”

Everyone interviewed for this article agreed that the report would be a force of change in the forensics field.

One person who has reviewed the draft and who asked not to be identified because of promises to keep the contents confidential said: “I’m sure that every defense attorney in the country is waiting for this report to come out. There are going to be challenges to fingerprints and firearms evidence and the general lack of empirical grounding. It’s going to be big.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/us/05forensics.html?ref=us

Posted by lois at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)

PA: Cut spending with inmate fees, not guard jobs, union says

Warning....an infuriating article!

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Cut spending with inmate fees, not guard jobs, union says
By Brad Bumsted
STATE CAPITOL REPORTER
Thursday, February 5, 2009

HARRISBURG — Inmates who committed crimes from burglary to murder pay token amounts for health care and have access to wide meal variety and reduced-price snacks from the commissary, a union representing prison workers told the Rendell administration.

As the state seeks to cut costs, with threatened furloughs of government workers included, Gov. Ed Rendell should know that inmates pay nothing for clothing handed out during their entry into 27 institutions statewide and get free soap and toilet paper, says the memo from the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association obtained by the Tribune-Review.

The union representing about 10,800 officers and prison workers delivered the memo during a meeting with administration officials last week, at which the union was warned that workers could be furloughed, union President Don McNany said.

Inmates pay $5 for a "sick call," and their co-pay for prescriptions is $5, McNany said.

"I'm sure you or I would like a health plan like that," he said.

As state officials wrestle with ways to reduce a projected $2.3 billion budget deficit, McNany thinks it's time that inmates pay more for basic services.

Pennsylvania has about 46,000 inmates and more than 8,000 corrections officers. In the fiscal year that begins July 1, it will cost state taxpayers $34,844 to house, feed and clothe each inmate, according to Rendell's budget proposed Wednesday. Health care costs average $4,624 per inmate.

The total amount Pennsylvania spends on corrections would increase from $1.64 billion to $1.8 billion under Rendell's spending plan. He proposes adding 2,400 beds in prisons and community corrections facilities.

Requiring prisoners to pay for toilet paper isn't high on Rendell's priority list as he grapples with the deficit, spokesman Chuck Ardo said.

"The yield from their suggestions would produce little money, while at the same time agitating the prison population," Ardo said. "It seems that little good would come from it."

McNany thinks the state could save millions of dollars by making prisoners pay. He contends most inmates have money to spend at the institutions. And those who can afford it should contribute more to their health care, he said.

Laying off corrections officers when prisons are "overcrowded and understaffed" would court serious trouble, McNany said.

He contends that prices at the commissaries are below what consumers pay.

Susan McNaughton, a Corrections Department spokeswoman, said: "We have to remember, (inmates) are only getting paid 19 cents to 42 cents an hour." Cigarettes are full price at commissaries, she said.

The state pays some inmates who don't have jobs 72 cents a day for "idle time," McNaughton confirmed.

"You mean for just sitting around? That is totally ridiculous," said state Rep. Anthony DeLuca, D-Penn Hills, who thinks the House should consider making inmates pay more for some provisions and benefits.

Those who get money for sitting in cells are paid because "through no fault of their own" jobs are unavailable, McNaughton said. Inmates who refuse to work or attend classes do not get paid, she said.

Inmates receive 10 postage-paid envelopes for free each month. Tax money pays for that, McNaughton said, but inmates' money is recycled back from commissary and snack machine purchases to reimburse the state for postage.

To reduce costs, the union memo suggests that prison meals could be reduced to cereal and toast or eggs for breakfast, soup and sandwich for lunch, and a full dinner. Now the choices for breakfast vary daily, ranging from scrambled eggs one day to pastry on another and hot cakes the next, McNaughton said.

Inmates should pay a fee for meals, the union argues. "They probably eat better than you and I do," McNany said.

Inmates pay if they want cable TV in their cells, McNaughton said. She said a $1.50 reduction in cable bills last month was a one-time reduction paid for with commissary profits.

If inmates destroy their clothing, they must pay for replacements, McNaughton said.
From Lois.....
---Maybe McNany should spend 20 years in prison eating the food and getting the "health care" and then he can report back on how it is.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_610309.html

Posted by lois at 02:25 PM | Comments (0)

WA: State Rep. works to change law that prohibits people who owe fines but are not in prison or parole from voting

Eye On Olympia
Darneille takes another run at broadening felons’ rights to vote upon release from prison…
February 1 Comments (0)
Two years ago, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that even after felons are released from prison, the state can bar them from voting until they pay off all their court-ordered fines and fees.

For poor people with big bills and few options for employment, this can effectively mean a lifetime loss of the right to vote.

State Rep. Jeannie Darneille wants to change the law. Getting out of prison and off probation, she says, should be enough to restore a person’s right to vote.

“It’s not real freedom if you’re excluded from any say in decisions that govern your life,” she said in a press reelase. “Basing anyone’s voting right on how quickly they can pay a financial debt is unfair and un-American.”

The bill is HB 1517.

Darneille, a Tacoma Democrat, has pushed similar bills for the past eight years. But her colleagues were reluctant to endorse earlier plans that would have allowed voting by people still on probation. Among those backing the new version: Secretary of State Sam Reed, a Republican.

In July 2007, the state’s high court upheld the law banning voting until felons have completed all the terms of their sentences, including payments.

“Convicted felons…no longer possess that fundamental right as a direct result of their decisions to commit a felony,” wrote Justice Mary Fairhurst. In a dissent, Justice Tom Chambers blasted the law, saying it restricts voting “to those rich enough to buy it.”

Fellow dissenter Gerry Alexander, the state’s longtime chief justice, said it’s wrong to require people who’ve served their time to “pay to play” and vote.

Among the plaintiffs in that case: Beverly DuBois, convicted in Stevens County of growing and delivering marijuana in 2002.
ttp://www.spokesman.com/blogs/olympia/2009/feb/01/darneille-takes-another-run-broadening-felons-rights-vote-upon-release-prison/

Posted by lois at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)

MI: State should expand Parole Board to cut prison stays and costs

State should expand Parole Board to cut prison stays and costs
February 4, 2009

Michigan's $2-billion-a-year prison system holds thousands of inmates who have served their minimum sentence and are eligible for release. Not all of them merit paroles, of course, but many do, costing taxpayers millions of dollars that could be better spent on higher education and other state services. To give these cases a thorough and timely review, Gov. Jennifer Granholm ought to expand the 10-member Parole Board.

Longer prison stays, dictated by past Parole Board practices, are largely responsible for Michigan spending hundreds of millions of dollars more on prisons than surrounding states -- states with crime rates no higher than Michigan's.

At least 12,000 inmates who are eligible for parole remain in Michigan's 41 prisons, even though parole rates have increased over the last year. If even half of them could be safely released, it would save the state nearly $200 million a year.

With 49,000 inmates, Michigan has one of the nation's highest incarceration rates. The Parole Board must determine, as soon as possible, who should stay in prison and who can go home. To do the job, the Parole Board needs to expand by two, four or even six members.

Delaying the review of worthy cases is immoral and expensive. Even under normal circumstances, the board grants about 12,000 paroles a year and reviews twice that number of cases. But over the last 18 months, board members have gotten hundreds of additional cases from the governor's new Executive Clemency Advisory Council, which recommends medical and other commutations that require public hearings. The Parole Board is also personally reviewing hundreds of parolable lifers, after a federal judge ruled that the Department of Corrections had violated their constitutional rights.

Parole Board members serve rotating four-year terms and earn $89,000 a year. To make their decisions more impartial and accurate, they are learning how to use new validated assessment tools that predict risk based on a variety of information, including crime history, release plan, institutional record and age. But the Parole Board must have enough members to ensure that every eligible inmate gets a thorough, and safe, review.

Michigan cannot afford a prison system that is much larger than necessary to protect its citizens.
http://www.freep.com/article/20090204/OPINION01/902040356

Posted by lois at 09:00 AM | Comments (0)

Lawsuits Suggest Pattern of Rikers Guards Looking Other Way

Lawsuits Suggest Pattern of Rikers Guards Looking Other Way
By BENJAMIN WEISER
Published: February 3, 2009

When two guards were accused last month of encouraging inmates in one Rikers Island jail to police themselves, leading to beatings and in one case the killing of an inmate, correction officials called the situation “an aberration” and said they had not seen such a case in other units involving other guards.

But New York City has been sued in recent years by more than a half-dozen Rikers inmates claiming to have been the victims of beatings by prisoners while guards looked the other way, or worse, ordered the attacks. The city settled one case for $500,000, and another for just under $100,000. A new lawsuit was filed Tuesday.

And last year, Bronx prosecutors charged that a Rikers guard ordered six inmates to beat two prisoners; one victim was hospitalized with a collapsed lung. The guard has pleaded not guilty.

None of the cases include allegations on the scale of those announced last month by officials in the Bronx district attorney’s office, who said that the two Rikers guards had recruited inmates over three months last year to serve as “managers, foot soldiers and enforcers” to maintain order in a housing unit for adolescent men. The guards are also accused of training the inmates in how to restrain and assault their victims, and deciding where and when attacks would occur.

But the pattern of cases suggests that city correction officials have been aware of a problem in which Rikers guards have acquiesced or encouraged violence among inmates.

“These are institutions where inmate activity is monitored 24 hours a day, and it’s astonishing that this kind of behavior should go on for so long unchecked,” said Jonathan Chasan, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society’s prisoners’ rights project, which is co-counsel in the new suit that was filed on Tuesday.

The city’s correction commissioner, Martin F. Horn, said in an interview that his agency was aware of the earlier cases and that he believed that steps had been taken to increase security and make it easier for the authorities to identify corrupt guards and inmates.

“I think it would be a mistake to say that the city was asleep at the switch because I don’t think we were,” Mr. Horn said.

“One could question whether the steps that we took were sufficiently effective. Certainly we are looking back, and we are concerned, and we want to learn from this and step up our efforts and review what we’ve done and say, ‘Was it sufficient? Was it adequate? Was it effective?’ ”

In the case last month, the Bronx district attorney announced charges against three Rikers correction officers and a dozen inmates in connection with what they said was a criminal extortion ring that included assaults, larceny and other crimes that occurred between July and October 2008. The charges followed an investigation into the beating death of an 18-year-old inmate, Christopher Robinson, on Oct. 18 after, the authorities said, he refused to go along with the ring.

Two officers, Michael McKie and Khalid Nelson, were charged with enterprise corruption and were accused of leading the ring; neither was charged with participating in the death of Mr. Robinson. Both men have pleaded not guilty. A third officer was also charged with conspiracy.

There have been at least seven lawsuits filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan accusing guards of complicity or acquiescence in inmate violence at Rikers, a complex of 10 detention facilities which, along with several other jails around the city, hold about 13,000 prisoners, most of whom are pretrial detainees.

None of the seven suits have gone to trial. In the three that were settled, the city admitted no liability or wrongdoing.

The $500,000 settlement, reached in 2007, concerned a 2003 assault on an inmate named Donald Jackson.

His lawyer, Andrew B. Stoll, said Mr. Jackson was punched by another prisoner with the acquiescence of a guard, that his client fell and hit his head. Although he “was bleeding badly, and unconscious,” the lawsuit said, “the officers delayed in obtaining medical treatment.”

In another case, the city agreed last year to pay $97,500 to Schmi Caballero, who said in his suit that a guard became angry that he was taking too long on a call to his mother.

As punishment, the guard had another inmate attack him with a broomstick, the suit said, and Mr. Caballero was beaten in the face, and left with a broken nose and blurred vision.

Mr. Caballero’s lawyer, Joel Berger, said he believes gangs were being allowed to control certain Rikers units. “Sometimes the officers are afraid to do something about it,” he said.

Another lawyer, Julia P. Kuan, whose firm has two pending suits involving Rikers assaults, in 2006 and 2007, said, “The city’s been on notice because these lawsuits have been pending for quite some time, and the fact patterns are so similar.”

In one case, a guard unlocked the cell of an inmate named Camillo Douglas, allowing three prisoners who were known members of the Bloods gang to enter, the suit said. They struck Mr. Douglas repeatedly with brooms and metal shanks; they also attacked another inmate who rushed to his aid, the suit said.

Norman Seabrook, president of the union representing about 8,000 correction officers, declined to comment on the suits, except to say he believes that the officers are innocent of wrongdoing. He said that to the extent problems exist, “the managers in this agency are not properly supervising and training officers.”

The latest suit describes an assault in March 2007 by a prisoner that the authorities say was used by guards as an enforcer in the Rikers jail for adolescent males, the Robert N. Davoren center. The inmate, Tyreek Shuford, was beaten and left with his head bleeding and then was not allowed to visit the infirmary for two days, the suit said.

Jonathan S. Abady, another of Mr. Shuford’s lawyers, said the case suggested there was “an intractable culture of permissiveness” among officers, “coupled with a disturbing attitude of denial by higher level supervisors.”

Mr. Horn disputed contentions that his agency was not addressing security, saying the agency was moving in the right direction, and when compared with jails in other large cities, “we are safer by far.”

John Eligon contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 4, 2009, on page A21 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/nyregion/04rikers.html?_r=1

Posted by lois at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2009

Albion, New York Portrait of a prison town.

Albion, New York
Portrait of a prison town.
By Andrew Marantz / Albion, New York
Tuesday, February 3, 2009

America’s prison system is the biggest in history.

Of the roughly nine million prisoners in the world, over two million are in America (World Prison Population List). The United States incarcerates more of its own people (an estimate of 2,357,284 according to the incarceration clock on January 27, 2009, at 12:56 p.m.) per capita than any other nation. This rate is 6.2 times greater than Canada’s, 7.8 times greater than France’s, and 12.3 times greater than Japan’s.

Why?

The simple answer would be because of our crime rate, only this is not really true. America’s incarceration rates and crime rates do not correlate. The imprisonment rate does not reflect the general population growth either; population growth is a molehill compared to the ever-growing mountain of incarcerated Americans (Punishment and Inequality in America, 2006).

If imprisonment and the creation of prisons are not direct responses to crime, what are they? Marxist scholars say that the elites have seized upon the idea of mass incarcerations as a new answer to an old question: What shall we do with the poor? Political historians note that, after Nixon made drugs and crime his chief campaign issues, a “tough on crime” image became a political sine qua non. (Before the ’60s, crime prevention was an invisible, unglamorous political duty, like road maintenance. Then Goldwater and Nixon and Reagan, no longer allowed to comment directly on “the Negro problem,” used crime as a wedge issue to secure the white vote, and the Willie Horton age was born). Racial bias theorists see the “War on Crime” as a war on African Americans, and incarceration as an extension of slavery.

But prison is not merely a theory. A prison is a building. A building sited on 50 acres of flat farmland. It has towers, offices with shaded windows, surveillance screens, uniformed guards, lights along its perimeter. Penetrate further inside and the imagination grows dim; it darkens with every locked door, but even on the inside of the inside there are people. People playing Scrabble, trying to pray, outlining letters in their head, napping before class, eating three meals a day. And outside the prison compound there are people, too. Outside the prison walls there is a town.

Once a factory town

A lot of American towns are begging for some kind of stimulus — any kind. When a town is desperate enough and it has the right kind of flat, fallow land, the corrections people swoop in and mount a public relations campaign. They support pro-prison candidates for the county board. They woo the town fathers. They talk up the industry: clean, quiet, no slow season. The worse things get out there, the better things will get for you. Almost always, the town buys it.

New York state has built 43 prisons since 1976, all of them in small upstate towns.

Albion, New York is one such town.

If you’re driving into Albion from the east on New York State Route 31 (NY Route 31), the Orleans County Economic Development Agency (EDA) is on your right. You’ll have to squint to make out the blue EDA logo because the building won’t catch your eye; it’s one of those anonymous one-story office buildings with exactly three boxwoods, and coffee-brown trim. If you pass a row of bright orange tractors for sale, you’ve gone too far.

A lot of people remember when this whole part of town was all one factory, the Lipton canning plant. Everyone worked for Lipton back then. Now it’s hard to imagine the factory during the ’60s and ’70s, humming, clanking, chugging, growing, growing, still growing, running out of space, till Lipton had to ask the town to block off Clinton Street on both sides, and the factory spilled out into the street. It doesn’t hum now, doesn’t look like much of anything but broken glass and concrete and mud, and it has a stench so bad, the neighbors swear someone’s hiding bodies in the basement. The two factory smokestacks now fossil in Albion’s elegiac skyline. The smokestacks no longer smoke; they just sit, and late in the day they cast boxy shadows over sun-bleached brick walls, stacks of crates in the lot, unhitched trailers, dead dandelions, empty window frames. The rusted crane with the key still in it. Eerie how the workers, on whatever the last day happened to be, just left. Like Pompeii, only without the desperate rush; not a bang but a whimper — slow and nonchalant, like they just forgot to ever come back. But the people in the town still need to make a living.

Another mile west on NY Route 31 — past the Save-a-Lot, past the Family Dollar, past the new Wal-Mart Supercenter perched on a knoll — and you’ll come to two more signs you’re likely to miss. One says “Albion C. F.” and one says “Orleans C. F.” Take a right at the first one, galunk over the rusted train tracks, and as the road curves, you’ll come face-to-face with one of Albion’s stately historic buildings, dressed in brick and white wood. And ringing the perimeter of the brick building, between it and you, the ribbons of polished metal. Floating, sort of blinking in and out of focus like spokes, drifting alongside the road in two ethereal layers as you drive (slowly now), the thousands of tiny points glinting in the sun, silver wire stretched thin — you've never seen metal shine like this. Maybe you roll up your windows without thinking and turn on your air conditioning. And then a tiny green sign on a post, so small you almost have to stop the car to make it out: “Correctional facility inmate work crews. Do not stop to pick up hitchhikers.”

Like a nation within a nation

I asked around about the mayor of Albion, and was told that the mayor was an idiot and probably a cokehead. Everyone told me this, from all political camps, and no one seemed to care much about him as long as he didn’t screw up anything important.

On the afternoon of our meeting, Mayor Michael Hadick was 20 minutes late. He was a young man, maybe in his early 30s, with watery blue eyes and thinning hair. He walked into Village Hall briskly, blinking a lot, making fast small talk and slicking back his hair with his free hand, and placed his jumbo Iced Capp on the table. “Long line at Tim Horton’s,” he said.

During our conversation I asked him what he thought about prisons. Growing up in Albion, he noticed them occasionally.

“Well, you know when we used to walk, where we used to come in from Eagle Harbor, they used to have the numbers up. I never could figure out what it was, but we used to drive by and my parents used to say, ‘That’s where the bad boys go.’ Obviously it was a lot smaller then, but you always wondered what those [were], cuz they had big blue numbers on it. One through eight, if I remember, and you always used to go, ‘What did they do, the bad boys, that they put ’em in these cages like this?’ Almost looked like, uh … reminds me of … uh … like the boxes, for uh … greyhounds, now that I think about it. But they were a lot bigger. They musta been — what do you call ’em — garage bays. That’s what I’m thinking now it woulda been. But back then, I had no idea. And they put the fear in me.”

As an adult, though, he seemed to lose interest. Now, he doesn’t “really see the interaction or the tie-in to the village whatsoever. It is what it is. They’re on that side of the fence, we’re on this side. I don’t think about it much.”

Albion is a prison town — how could the mayor of the town not think about prisons? Following national census policy, the 2,500 prisoners are counted as part of the town population, even though they do not pay taxes or vote or actually live in the town. By reporting a total population of 8,000 instead of 5,500, Albion gains representation in state and county legislature, improves its chances for state grants, and makes itself more attractive to national chains like Wal-Mart. The prisons buy their water from the town every month. The prisons give contracts to engineers and plumbers, and free labor to the town through work-exchange programs. I did not see how any of this could be uninteresting to any Albionite, much less the mayor.

Apparently, prisons did not seem as weird to people in Albion as they seemed to me. I had assumed that asking about prisons in a prison town would be a delicate subject, like asking about the mafia in Sicily or Katrina in New Orleans. Instead, it seemed more like asking people in Manhattan about the hot dogs, or the sewage drains. Everyone in the town was both perfectly willing to talk about the topic yet already bored of it. I would stop people and say, “I’d like to ask you a few questions about the prisons,” and they would looked confused.

“Well, sure, well—I don’t know much, but … what do you want to know?”

I kept asking my interview subjects to go over the same ground with me, kept asking the obvious questions, because I couldn’t believe that you could drive your kids here for soccer, that you could look out your window and see the prison’s water tower always on the horizon, and not think it was strange.

I asked the state assemblyman from the district, Steve Hawley, whether he saw prisons as an opportunity for economic growth.

“Oh, absolutely. It’s good for the local people, it’s good for the county, it’s good for everyone.”

Everyone? So he wouldn’t prefer other businesses — factories, let’s say — to prisons?

“No, I don’t think so. Because, as I say, our citizenry around here has become accustomed and used to having facilities that … are meant to house … prisoners. They … no, I think that they’re fine.”

James Recco, a correction officer at Orleans who lived in Albion, underscored a point I’d heard again and again: Correction officers were good for the local economy.

“If you paid the correction officers with cash that’s tainted pink, you’d see most of all the retail stores, the gas stations, would all of a sudden be flooded with these pink bills.”

I asked him if Albionites appreciated this interdependence.

“Well, it’s … A prison is a part of the life of a town, but not … on an everyday level. Everybody knows it’s there, but it’s not a part of their lives. Is sort of like a sovereign nation — it’s like a nation within a nation.”

A revolving door

Yesterday, in another city hundreds of miles away — another world practically — someone found out her life was ruined, and tomorrow she will drive all night in a van, her hands locked behind her back.

Some of the incarcerated are violent and some nonviolent. Some of them didn’t do it, but some of them did. Some of them took the fall for someone else. Some of them took a plea. Some were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some don’t know right from wrong. Some of them molested little boys. Some of them stole medicine for their dying wife. Some of them killed strangers, for no reason. Many of them are mentally ill, and are not receiving treatment. Many of them cannot read, and are not receiving education. Many of them are drug addicts, and they will be drug addicts when their sentence is over. Tomorrow some of them will catch the next Greyhound back downstate, and many new bodies will arrive to take their place.
http://inthefray.org/content/view/3194/288/

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

February 03, 2009

Despite Vow, Target of Immigrant Raids Shifted

Despite Vow, Target of Immigrant Raids Shifted
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: February 3, 2009
NY Times

The raids on homes around the country were billed as carefully planned hunts for dangerous immigrant fugitives, and given catchy names like Operation Return to Sender.

And they garnered bigger increases in money and staff from Congress than any other program run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as complaints grew that teams of armed agents were entering homes indiscriminately.

But in fact, beginning in 2006, the program was no longer what was being advertised. Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

Internal directives by immigration officials in 2006 raised arrest quotas for each team in the National Fugitive Operations Program, eliminated a requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals, and then allowed the teams to include nonfugitives in their count.

In the next year, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent of those arrested, and nonfugitives picked up by chance — without a deportation order — rose to 40 percent. Many were sent to detention centers far from their homes, and deported.

The impact of the internal directives, obtained by a professor and students at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law through a Freedom of Information lawsuit and shared with The New York Times, shows the power of administrative memos to significantly alter immigration enforcement policy without any legislative change.

The memos also help explain the pattern of arrests documented in a report, criticizing the fugitive operations program, to be released on Wednesday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.

Analyzing more than five years of arrest data supplied to the institute last year by Julie Myers, who was then chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the report found that over all, as the program spent a total of $625 million, nearly three-quarters of the 96,000 people it apprehended had no criminal convictions.

Without consulting Congress, the report concluded, the program shifted to picking up “the easiest targets, not the most dangerous fugitives.”

It noted, however, that the most recent figures available indicate an increase in arrests of those with a criminal background last year, though it was unclear whether that resulted from a policy change.

The increased public attention comes as the new secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has ordered a review of the fugitive teams operation, which was set up in 2002 to find and deport noncitizens with outstanding orders of deportation, then rapidly expanded after 2003 with the mission of focusing on the most dangerous criminals.

Peter L. Markowitz, who teaches immigration law at Cardozo and directs its immigration legal clinic, said the memos obtained in its lawsuit reflected the Bush administration’s effort to appear tough on immigration enforcement during the unsuccessful push to pass comprehensive immigration legislation in 2006, and amid rising anger over illegal immigration.

“It looks like what happened here is that the law enforcement strategy was hijacked by the political agenda of the administration,” he said.

Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, defended the program. “For the first time in history, we continue to reduce the number of immigration fugitive cases,” she said, noting that the number of noncitizens at large with outstanding deportation orders, which peaked at 634,000 in the 2007 fiscal year, is now down to about 554,000. “These results speak for themselves and they are consistent with Congress’s mandate: locate and remove immigration absconders.”

Ms. Nantel said the number of fugitives with criminal backgrounds arrested in the 2008 fiscal year rose to 5,652, or 16 percent of 34,000 arrests, and nonfugitives fell to 8,062, or 23 percent.

Many Americans have welcomed roundups of what the agency calls “ordinary status violators” — noncitizens who have no outstanding order of deportation, but are suspected of being in the country unlawfully, either because they overstayed a visa or entered without one.

But Michael Wishnie, one of the authors of the report, who teaches law at Yale, said that random arrests of low-level violators in residential raids not only raised a new set of legal and humanitarian issues, including allegations of entering private homes without warrants or consent and separating children from their caretakers, but was “dramatically different from how ICE has sold this program to Congress.”

“If we just want to arrest undocumented people,” he said, “we can do it much more cheaply.”

Congressional financing for the fugitive operations program rose to $218 million in the 2008 fiscal year, from $9 million in 2003, as the number of seven-member teams multiplied to 104 from 8.

In Congressional briefings and public statements since 2003, agency officials have repeatedly said that given the vast number of immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, the program will focus its resources on the roughly 20 percent with a criminal background.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo dated Jan. 22, 2004, underscored that commitment: “Effective immediately, no less than 75 percent of all fugitive operations targets will be those classified as criminal aliens” — noncitizens with a criminal record as well as an order of deportation. It added that “collateral apprehensions” — immigration violators encountered by chance during an operation — would not be counted in that percentage.

But on Jan. 31, 2006, a new memo changed the rules. The directive, from John P. Torres, acting director of the agency, raised each team’s “target goal” to 1,000 a year, from 125.

And it removed the requirement that at least 75 percent of those sought out for arrest be criminals. Instead, it told the teams to prioritize cases according to the threat posed by the fugitive, with noncriminals in the lowest of five categories. And it repeated that “collateral apprehensions will not count” toward the 1,000 arrest quota.

But that standard, too, was dropped nine months later. A new memo from Mr. Torres said “nonfugitive arrests may now be included” to reach the required 1,000 arrests. On average, however, it said at least half of those arrested by each team should be fugitives. It also promised to “ensure the maximum availability of detention space for fugitive arrest operations.”

One result was an increase in noncriminals held in immigration detention. Another, the Migration Policy Institute report concluded, was that the percentage of criminal fugitives arrested plummeted, to 9 percent in the year that ended Sept. 30, 2007, from 39 percent in the 2004 fiscal year.

That same year, 15,646, or 51 percent of those arrested, had an outstanding deportation order, but no criminal record, and 12,084, or 40 percent, were termed “ordinary status violators” who did not fit any of the program’s priority categories.

The report said the program relied on a database riddled with errors, and that many deportation orders were issued without the subject in court, sometimes because of faulty addresses.

The looser rules were reflected in sweeps like one conducted in New Haven in June 2007. During the raid, lawyers at Yale’s immigration law center said, agents who found no one home at an address specified in a deportation order simply knocked on other doors until one opened, pushed their way in, and arrested residents who acknowledged that they lacked legal status.

Of the 32 arrested and scattered to jails around New England, only 5 had outstanding deportation orders, and only 1 or 2 had criminal records.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/us/04raids.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

Posted by lois at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)

Call for Papers: The International Prison Privatization Experience: A Transatlantic and Transpacific Dialogue, Houston, TX, August 6-8, 2009

The International Prison Privatization Experience: A Transatlantic and Transpacific Dialogue, Houston, TX, August 6-8, 2009

Call for Papers

The Barbara Jordan Institute for Policy Research, the BJ-ML School of Public Affairs Administration of Justice Department, and Justice Strategies will convene the first international conference on prison privatization. The conference will highlight the inimical impact these prisons are having on women, minorities, and the poor. Scholars will explore alternative economic development strategies to sustain rural communities before they turn to prisons—private or public.

Papers should investigate comparative aspects of prison privatization and grassroots initiatives geared toward reducing prison privatization. Proposals should also examine critical issues such as race, gender and crime and the impact on families’ and prisoners’ communities. Papers should fit into one of the following categories:

Session 1: Financial and Social Costs of an Increasing Use of Imprisonment

Session 2: Commodification of Prisoners and Human Rights

Session 3: Constitutional Implications of Private Prisons

Session 4: The Commercialization of Justice

Session 5: Interjurisdictional Issues and Common Concerns

Session 6: Demystifying Prison Privatization

Session 7: Privatized Detention of Immigrants

For more information contact:

Prof. Byron E. Price, the Conference Chair at 713-313-4809. Please send proposals, preferably as a Word or pdf attachment, to pricebe@tsu.edu by April 1st of 2009.

Committee members:

Byron E. Price, Texas Southern University—Houston, TX
Helen Taylor Greene, Texas Southern University, Houston, TX
Judy Greene, Justice Strategies—Brooklyn, NY
Elycia Daniel, Texas Southern University—Houston, TX

Posted by lois at 05:55 PM | Comments (0)

Defining ‘Cruel and Unusual’ When Offender Is 13

Sidebar
Defining ‘Cruel and Unusual’ When Offender Is 13

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: February 2, 2009

In 1989, someone raped a 72-year-old woman in Pensacola, Fla. Joe Sullivan was 13 at the time, and he admitted that he and two older friends had burglarized the woman’s home earlier that day. But he denied that he had returned to commit the rape.

The victim testified that her assailant was “a colored boy” who “had kinky hair and he was quite black and he was small.” She said she “did not see him full in the face” and so would not recognize him by sight. But she recalled her attacker saying something like, “If you can’t identify me, I may not have to kill you.”

At his trial, Mr. Sullivan was made to say those words several times.

“It’s been six months,” the woman said on the witness stand. “It’s hard, but it does sound similar.”

The trial lasted a day and ended in conviction. Then Judge Nicholas Geeker, of the circuit court in Escambia County, sentenced Mr. Sullivan to life without the possibility of parole.

“I’m going to send him away for as long as I can,” Judge Geeker said.

Mr. Sullivan is 33 now, and his lawyers have asked the United States Supreme Court to consider the question of whether the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment extends to sentencing someone who was barely a teenager to die in prison for a crime that did not involve a killing.

People can argue about whether the punishment in Mr. Sullivan’s case is cruel. There is no question that it is unusual.

According to court papers and a report from the Equal Justice Initiative, which now represents Mr. Sullivan, only eight people in the world are serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed when they were 13. All are in the United States.

And there are only two people in that group whose crimes did not involve a killing. Both are in Florida, and both are black.

Joe Sullivan is one; Ian Manuel, who is in prison for a 1990 robbery and attempted murder, is the other.

About 1,000 people under 15 are arrested on rape charges every year, according to Justice Department data. But none of them have been sentenced to life without parole since Mr. Sullivan was. Indeed, no 13-year-old has been sentenced to life without parole for any crime that did not involve a killing in more than 15 years.

Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum, waived his right to file a response to Mr. Sullivan’s petition to the Supreme Court, a sign suggesting that he considers the case insubstantial if not frivolous. Sandi Copes, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCollum’s office, declined to discuss the case.

Last month, the court indicated that it found the case more interesting than Florida does, requesting a response from the state. That probably means that at least one justice considered the case significant or difficult. But it is nothing like a guarantee that the court will agree to hear it.

On the other hand, the question of whether life without parole for juveniles is constitutional is the logical next step following the court’s 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons, which struck down the death penalty for crimes committed by 16- and 17-year-olds. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that even older teenagers are different from adults. They are less mature, more impulsive, more susceptible to peer pressure and more likely to change for the better over time.

Last year, in Kennedy v. Louisiana, the court issued another ruling that helps frame Mr. Sullivan’s case. That decision said crimes against individuals that did not involve killing, including the rape of a child by an adult, may not be punished by death.

In 2007, after Mr. Sullivan had served almost two decades in prison, a Florida appeals court declined to have another look at his case. The Roper decision, the appeals court said, “established only one new constitutional right, the right for a juvenile not to be given the death penalty.”

Douglas A. Berman, an authority on sentencing law at Ohio State, said it was time for the Supreme Court and the legal system to widen its relentless focus on capital cases and to look at other severe sentences as well. Cases involving the death penalty receive careful review at multiple levels, he said. Life sentences can receive almost none.

Mr. Sullivan’s trial, for instance, lasted a day. He was represented by a lawyer who made no opening statement and whose closing argument occupies about three double-spaced pages of the trial transcript. The lawyer was later suspended, and the Florida Bar’s Web site says he is “not eligible to practice in Florida.”

There was biological evidence from the rape, but it was not presented at the trial. When Mr. Sullivan’s new lawyers recently sought to conduct DNA testing on it, they were told that the state had destroyed it in 1993.

“I absolutely believe he is innocent,” Bryan A. Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said of Mr. Sullivan. Mr. Stevenson said he believed that one of the older youths who committed the burglary with Mr. Sullivan and who testified against him was probably the actual assailant.

But the point made by Mr. Sullivan’s brief to the Supreme Court is not that he is innocent. It is not even that he should be released after 20 years in prison. It is only that he should someday be allowed to make his case to the Florida Parole Commission.

“I don’t think it’s possible to say that a 13-year-old will never change and that life without parole is an appropriate punishment,” Mr. Stevenson said.

Aside from Mr. Sullivan’s case, it seems there is only one other appeals court decision about whether young teenagers may be locked away forever for rape. It was issued 40 years ago in Kentucky, and it involved two 14-year-olds. The court struck down the part of the sentences precluding the possibility of parole.

Juveniles “are not permitted to vote, to contract, to purchase alcoholic beverages or to marry without the consent of their parents,” the court said. “It seems inconsistent that one be denied the fruits of the tree of the law, yet subjected to all of its thorns.”

» A version of this article appeared in print on February 3, 2009, on page A12 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/us/03bar.html?ref=us

Posted by lois at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

PREVENTING CRIME 101: MORE COLLEGE IN PRISONS

PREVENTING CRIME 101: MORE COLLEGE IN PRISONS
Increasing higher ed opportunities behind bars lowers recidivism rates and incarceration costs over the long run, say advocates.
> By Jarrett Murphy

City Limits WEEKLY #673
February 2, 2009

At a time when Gov. David Paterson is proposing the closure of four New York prisons as part of wide-ranging budget cuts, an advocacy group is calling on the state to spend money in order to save money—by funding college courses for more of the 61,000 inmates in state prisons.

The Correctional Association of New York (CA), a nonprofit organization that inspects prisons and recommends policy, says in a new report that college courses save taxpayers money because inmates with college degrees are less likely to return to crime—and prison—after their release.

Currently, about 1,200 inmates at the state's 69 prisons are enrolled in college programs, which receive almost no public funding. In 1994, President Clinton signed a federal bill that spent billions building prisons but, at the insistence of Republican members of Congress, eliminated inmates' eligibility for federal Pell Grants. The following year, New York Gov. George Pataki prohibited inmates from participating in the state's Tuition Assistance Program.

Correctional Association executive director Robert Gangi attributes those policy decisions to "the very short-sighted political view … 'Why give prisoners access to college education when so many people on the outside have to work so hard to come up with the money so they can pay for their children to go to school?'"

That's short-sighted, Gangi says, because inmates who earn a degree are less likely to end up back in prison, where it costs the state around $40,000 a year to house them. A 1991 study by the state Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) found that 26.4 percent of inmates who earned a degree in 1986-1987 ended up back in prison by 1991, compared to 44.6 percent of released inmates who did not participate in the college program. Other studies have reported similar disparities.

The reason for that impact is simple, Gangi says. People with college degrees are more likely to be employed and to make a decent living. "They have a much better capacity to reconnect with families, to hold a job, to become tax-paying, law-abiding citizens," he says.

College courses also reduce prison violence by giving prisoners an incentive for good behavior—only those with relatively clean disciplinary records can take classes—and by producing "a stream of mature, well-spoken leaders who have a calming effect on other prisoners and guards," Gangi says.

Currently, there are college program in 17 prisons across the state. Among them is the Bard College program at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Sullivan County. The New York Theological Seminary offers inmates at Sing Sing a two-year Masters of Professional Studies in religion degree. There is also the Niagara Consortium—a joint effort by Niagara University, Canisius College and Daemen College that runs a program at Wyoming Correctional Facility in Attica. The Consortium is the only prison college program that receives public funding – a modest $227,000.

DOCS also offers GED, adult basic education and bilingual education classes at most facilities; those courses now serve more than 16,000 inmates, and their GED passing rate is 77 percent, well higher than the national average. Vocational education is also available at some prisons. Seven prisons offer a "certificate in ministry and human services" program and 14 run special education classes. These non-college offerings cost DOCS $64.9 million a year. They are a mix of classroom instruction and correspondence courses.

According to DOCS spokesman Erik Kriss, 181 state inmates earned college degrees in 2007, up from 139 in 2006. Kriss says DOCS Commissioner Brian Fischer has made it easier for inmates to obtain college credits by expanding the pool of inmates eligible to attend and increasing the number of prisoners who can apply federal Youth Offender funds toward education. "The commissioner is actively looking for private partnerships now to expand college opportunities for inmates without costing the state anything," Kriss says, pointing to a recent agreement in which Cornell University, with help from the Sunshine Lady Foundation (run by Warren Buffett's sister, Doris Buffett), agreed to expand its college program at Auburn Correctional Facility to also reach inmates at Cayuga Correctional Facility.

So far, prison education services haven’t been targeted for budget cutting. Gangi says allowing inmates to receive TAP funding would cost the state $5 to $10 million up front, but save money later on by preventing recidivism. It's unclear how many more prisoners would participate in college courses if funding were available, or exactly how much the state would save if those efforts prevented future crimes, but one study estimated that every $1 million spent on prison education prevents 350 future crimes – and the associated costs of incarceration for perpetrators caught and convicted.

"Even with the fiscal crisis, we think we have a shot at moving the issue in New York," he says. At the federal level, efforts are underway to get the new president and new Congress to reverse the ban on prison Pell grants.

Kriss says that while the legislature must make the decision, DOCS would support restoring inmate eligibility for TAP. "We are sensitive to the fact that a lot of people—law-abiding citizens—have to work hard and reach deep into their pockets to pay for education," he says. "But if an inmate is eligible for TAP just as anyone else would be, it’s a good thing," because it works to prevent released inmates from returning.

When former Gov. George Pataki imposed the ban on TAP funding for inmates – which occurred as the governor was slashing state spending in general – his conservative supporters took a hard law-and-order line to defend the move. A spokesman for the now-defunct Change-NY lobbying group said of the TAP grants: "This is a classic prison perk that must go. Taxpayers should not be financing higher education for criminals." The Pataki administration, however, painted the move more as a bid to make fairer use of smaller budgets.

Fourteen years later, the political atmosphere around crime has changed: Even conservative Republicans are supporting programs to better equip inmates for re-entry to the community. Last year, President Bush signed the "Second Chance Act," calling for more funding for prisoner counseling and education, which the House had passed with overwhelming GOP support. But the budget environment is, if anything, worse than in 1995. That, says Gangi, is the greatest obstacle for the Correctional Association proposal to clear.

In its report, the CA also calls on the New York State Division of Parole to make educational attainment an explicit factor in parole decisions.

Heather R. Groll, director of media relations and public affairs for the Division of Parole, agrees that education is an important factor in preventing released inmates from returning, and calls for more educational opportunities in prison. But that's not the whole story, says Groll: "The Board of Parole takes many factors into consideration when making their release decisions including academic achievements, the nature of the crime, the inmate's institutional record including all program accomplishments, vocational education, work assignments and interpersonal relationships with staff and inmates. In addition, the Board must look at the impact of the crime on the victim or the victim's family and evaluate the inmate's proposed residential and employment plans."

Next week, the state Division of Criminal Justice Services is due to release the final report of the Commission on Sentencing Reform. In a draft report released in late 2007, the commission in a split vote called for an end to parole altogether. Gangi says that even if parole ends, inmates could still be given credit for taking college courses when "merit time" is calculated. Merit time is a way for inmates who have earned a GED, obtained a vocational training certificate or accomplished other goals to shave up to a sixth off their minimum sentence.

Gangi acknowledges that those inmates who are motivated and well-behaved enough to attend college classes in prison would probably fare better after their release than other inmates, whether they took college classes or not. But he contends that the statistical evidence shows too large a gap between the recidivism rates of degree-earners versus others to ignore.

The goal, says Kriss, is to try to reach inmates who might be less inclined to improve themselves. "College can maybe benefit these less-than-stellar inmates as much, perhaps more, than those who are well-motivated," he says. Preventing crime, he says, "takes a change in thought. That's what it comes down to."

- Jarrett Murphy
CA Report: http://www.correctionalassociation.org/publications/download/ppp/Higher_Edu