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March 31, 2009

"How PersonhoodUSA Will Hurt All Pregnant Women" and Do People Who Support "Traditional Values" Value Pregnant Women? by Lynn Paltrow of Nationa Advocates for Pregnant Women

Please read Lynn's articles on Personhood and watch Dr. Deborah Frank debunk the mythology of "crack babies"

"How PersonhoodUSA Will Hurt All Pregnant Women"
by Lynn Paltrow
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynn-m-paltrow/how-personhoodusa-and-the_b_176530.html
March 24, 2009

PersonhoodUSA apparently sees itself as the new, hipper, more effective incarnation of the anti-abortion movement. PersonhoodUSA hopes that by establishing the "pre-born, as legal persons with protection under the law" it will end the "injustice of abortion." Its attempt to do this last November through a "personhood" ballot measure in Colorado's failed miserably. Nevertheless, PersonhoodUSA, is committed to "working tirelessly to establish personhood in every State."

What supporters of this approach don't mention is that if the unborn have legal personhood rights, pregnant women won't. There is really no way around this. As National Advocates for Pregnant Women's video demonstrates, if successful, this strategy will mean that upon become pregnant, women will lose their civil and human rights.

As Angela Carder learned it is not just life vs. choice - but life vs. life. Angela Carder, 25 weeks pregnant, was critically ill. More than anything, she wanted to live. A court, however, ordered cesarean surgery based on claims of fetal rights. The surgery was performed over her objections as well as those of her physicians and family. Angela Carder died two days later - the cesarean surgery listed as a contributing factor. The fetus was born alive but died within two hours.

PersonhoodUSA doesn't address how personhood laws will affect women like Ms. Carder and others who have no intention of ending a pregnancy. Perhaps this is why legislators in at least five states have introduced bills that carry their message and several more are working on ballot measures like the one in Colorado.

In fact, North Dakota's house recently passed a personhood bill that would require the state to interpret all of the state's laws to apply to "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens" including a fertilized egg. In addition to inviting such facetious Onion-like headlines as "North Dakota House Passes 'Homo' Rights Law, this bill creates the basis for policing all pregnant women.

Upon becoming pregnant, women would lose their right to medical privacy, since under North Dakota law doctors are required to report to child welfare authorities whenever they have reasonable cause to suspect that a child (an organism) is abused or neglected. Accordingly, if this bill passes, pregnant women in North Dakota who are obese, have diabetes, or smoke should probably report directly to child welfare authorities - or perhaps some new agency, such as the Department of Organism Protection.

Indeed, a recent horrifying incident in California could become commonplace in North Dakota. A pregnant woman in California experienced a miscarriage at one-month gestation. Her doctor advised her to preserve the embryonic tissue in the freezer until she and her husband decided whether to request genetic testing or to take the remains to a mortuary. When they decided against testing, they called a mortuary. They were asked for a death certificate and were directed to the County Coroner to obtain one. The Coroner instructed them to call the police. When they complied, the police heard the words "human remains" and responded by descending on their home, entering without a warrant, and searching for what they assumed was the evidence of a crime against a person.

While the California case reflects miscommunication, families that experience miscarriages would have to expect such intrusions in states that pass personhood laws. Similarly pregnant women who miss prenatal care appointments, don't take prenatal vitamins, or drink any amount of alcohol could be deemed abusive under criminal child [organism] abuse and endangerment laws. Personhood laws would also provide the basis for prosecuting women for murder, manslaughter, or negligent homicide if they suffered miscarriages or stillbirths.

In fact states with these laws would look a lot like South Carolina, the only state that has, by judicial fiat, effectively adopted a personhood law. More than 90 pregnant women and new mothers have been arrested there based on fetal personhood claims. Recently, a pregnant woman in South Carolina fell from a 5th floor window. The press reported this incident as a suicide attempt. She survived but suffered a stillbirth as a result of the fall. Last month she was arrested on charges of homicide by child abuse and is still being held without bail.

PersonhoodUSA asserts that "each and every human being must be respected and protected from fertilization until natural death." Their legislation, however, would have the effect of excluding pregnant women from this protection. People committed to a true culture of life need to oppose their legislative proposals, supporting instead ones that include the interests of the women who give that life.

Lynn M. Paltrow
March 30, 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynn-m-paltrow/do-people-who-support-tra_b_180946.html
Do People Who Support "Traditional Values" Value Pregnant Women?

I have to thank Andrea Lafferty, of the Traditional Values Coalition for her response to a piece I wrote opposing Personhood USA's efforts to give full constitutional rights to the unborn from the moment of fertilization. In her commentary she hopes to discredit my organization, National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) by exposing our commitment to all pregnant women, including those who love their children but are unable to overcome a drug problem in the short term of pregnancy.

Ms. Lafferty argues that NAPW has an "extremist agenda." Specifically she highlights the fact that NAPW "defends drug-addicted women from prosecutions for endangering their unborn babies." Indeed we do, and at least for one reason we would have thought Ms. Lafferty and her Coalition, would approve of: because threatening pregnant women with prosecution creates an incentive for them to have abortions.

Given how hard it is for most people to overcome an addiction problem quickly (just ask Rush Limbaugh) as well as the difficulty of obtaining appropriate treatment (especially for pregnant and parenting women), laws that threaten to punish women who carry their pregnancies to term in spite of a drug problem place substantial pressure on them to get unwanted abortions.

In fact, this kind of prosecution in North Dakota (one of the states where a personhood bill has been introduced) compelled a pregnant woman to have an abortion. In 1992 Martina Greywind, who was approximately twelve weeks pregnant, was arrested. She was charged with reckless endangerment based on the claim that by inhaling paint fumes, she was creating a substantial risk of serious bodily injury or death to a "person" -- her "unborn child." After her arrest, a lawyer for the anti-abortion group Lambs of Christ filed a petition seeking to have the woman's brother, Ken Greywind, appointed her legal guardian. Mr. Greywind explained in court papers "I believe she is contemplating an abortion in order to have the charge of reckless endangerment dismissed."

Ms. Greywind did obtain an abortion. And indeed, the prosecutor dropped the charges citing the fact that she had "terminated her pregnancy."

We admit it. NAPW opposes laws that create an incentive for women to terminate otherwise wanted pregnancies. We would hope that such opposition would provide common ground for NAPW, Ms. Lafferty and her organization.

We would also hope that we could work together to spread the good news about these mothers and their children. Ms. Lafferty says in her comments about NAPW that we defend mothers who "are addicting their unborn babies and subjecting them to extreme risks of mental retardation or death." Ms. Lafferty, like many people, believes that a pregnant woman who uses any amount of an illegal drug - and crack cocaine in particular -- will inevitably harm her "unborn child."

For nearly two decades, the popular press was filled with inaccurate information about the effects of in utero cocaine exposure. Media hype, however, is not the same as scientific evidence. In 2004 leading researchers in the field of prenatal exposure to drugs signed an open letter explaining that these women are not "addicting" their "unborn babies." "Addiction" they wrote "is a technical term that refers to compulsive behavior that continues in spite of adverse consequences. By definition, babies cannot be 'addicted' to crack or anything else."

Moreover, these experts as well as federal courts and leading federal government agencies now confirm that "the phenomena of "'crack babies' . . . is essentially a myth." As the National Institute for Drug Abuse has reported, "Many recall that 'crack babies,' or babies born to mothers who used crack cocaine while pregnant, were at one time written off by many as a lost generation... It was later found that this was a gross exaggeration." And, as the U.S. Sentencing Commission has concluded, "[t]he negative effects of prenatal cocaine exposure are significantly less severe than previously believed" and those negative effects "do not differ from the effects of prenatal exposure to other drugs, both legal and illegal." Most recently the New York Times, relying on actual experts, including the pediatrician featured in this NAPW video, set the record straight with a story entitled "The Epidemic That Wasn't".

So instead of assuming the worst, we could join forces and together oppose punitive approaches that are known to encourage some women to have abortions, and to discourage many more from seeking prenatal care.

NAPW knows that there are not two kinds of women -- those who have abortions and those who have babies. Sixty-one percent of women who have abortions are already mothers, and another 24 percent will go on to become mothers. Over the course of their lives, 85 percent of all women bring life into this world. NAPW advocates for all of them. We don't expect Ms. Lafferty to join us in our work to ensure that women have access to safe legal abortion services, but we do hope she will support our efforts to ensure that women who do want to go to term aren't punished for doing so.

And watch the video.....If you have never had the opportunity to hear Dr. Deborah Frank speak this is it....

This video is based on a lecture that Dr. Deborah A. Frank, Pediatrician gave on February 11th 2009 at a continuing education program entitled Drugs, Pregnancy and Parenting: What the Experts in Medicine, Social Work and Law Have to Say.

Deborah Frank, M.D. is a Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine, where she has taught since 1981. She is also the Founder and Director of the Grow Clinic at Boston Medical Center, and Principal Investigator of the Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program ("C-SNAP"). C-SNAP's goal is to monitor the impact of policy changes on nutrition, growth and development of low-income children, ages 0-3 years. She also conducts research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and has given testimony to the United States and Massachusetts House and Senate.

Dr. Frank has written numerous peer-reviewed and published scientific articles and papers including, Deborah A. Frank et al., Maternal Cocaine Use: Impact on Child Health and Development, 40 Advances in Pediatrics 65 (1993). She is also the author of the seminal meta analysis published by The Journal of the American Medical Association (“JAMA”), one of the most distinguished peer-reviewed medical journals in the United States. This comprehensive, systematic, and authoritative analysis of the medical research assessing the relationship between maternal cocaine use during pregnancy and adverse developmental consequences for the fetus and child concluded that:

"[T]here is no convincing evidence that prenatal cocaine exposure is associated with any developmental toxicity difference in severity, scope, or kind from the sequelae of many other risk factors. Many findings once thought to be specific findings of in utero cocaine exposure can be explained in whole or in part by other factors, including prenatal exposure to tobacco, marijuana, or alcohol and the quality of the child’s environment."

Here is the URL for the video http://www.vimeo.com/3916613

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

Jail a Child, Get a Job: America Hates Kids

Jail a Child, Get a Job: America Hates Kids
Chris Norwood
Huffington Post, March 30, 2009

Two judges in Western Pennsylvania, recently sentenced to seven years in prison for purposely inflating the sentences of juvenile offenders to benefit the income and profits of privately run "youth detention" centers, draw our attention to the over-riding economic impulse for the vast criminalization of American youth.

The judges got bribes of $2.6 million. Thousands of teens were jailed for little or no reason. The young woman "offender" featured in the New York Times story about this debacle, for example, was 17, had two parents and the pleasant teen look often described as "perky." She had been sentenced to a juvenile center for 3 months for making fun of an assistant principal on MySpace. (One of the disgraced judges, ironically enough, had found her guilty of "harassment.").

Yet, with thousands of Pennsylvania kids being sentenced on such skimpy charges----teens routinely received jail-time even against the recommendations of local prosecutors---this scheme maintained itself for at least five years until finally ended by a serious investigation. Western Pennsylvania---coal country---is largely white and working class. The fact that even there, children aren't safe from runaway criminalization only underscores how commonplace it is in the criminal "justice" system to see children as a meal ticket---and the striking extent to which the resulting criminalization is accepted throughout the United States.

In fact, jailing young people specifically and clearly for the sole purpose of creating jobs for adults---usually adults linked to political organizations and their allied unions---is commonplace across much the nation. And, it doesn't matter whether the "facilities" youth "offenders" are sent to are privately or publicly run. Youth incarceration is a very well-studied field. Over and over, it has been shown that, for the nonviolent youth who constitute most of the young people in American jails, being sent to a "facility", as distinct from being assigned to counseling and supervision in their own community, is a terrible choice which launches even nonviolent youth toward repeated jailings.

In New York State, for instance, where most youth in the "criminal justice" system are black or Hispanic, it costs $200,000 a year to keep kids in state facilities and 80% are re-arrested after getting out; it costs $17,000 for community-based counseling and supervision, with only 35% of these youth being re-arrested.

However, jailing kids to keep selected adults in paychecks is now so much a part of American culture that even statistics like that can barely nudge change. Gladys Carrion, New York's current Commissioner of Families and Children Services, has made it her top mission in the year since she took office is to start closing New York's dismal youth facilities. Judges, indeed, are directing more and more young offenders to the community-based counseling that is their best chance. However, getting juvenile beds closed so that the state treasury, and youth programs, can benefit from the savings has proven difficult indeed. Currently, New York State, which is effectively bankrupt, is holding open hundreds of empty beds and keeping unused facilities fully staffed at a cost of $14 million a year.

Proof that juvenile facilities, themselves, can both operate both more cheaply for the public purse and with better results for children fares as badly, or worse. In the two decades since Missouri reformed its juvenile detention system into the nation's most admired program, it has reduced its "re-incarceration" rate for the young in its system to a breathtaking low of 9%. The core of this system centers on forming the young inmates into 12-kid units, where they learn to be responsible for one another---for both the benefits of improved behavior and the consequences of bad behavior---on a level that gives them an entirely new social context. As Marion Wright Edleman, head of the Children's Defense Fund, writes, the result is both rehabilitation and low costs.
Much of the rehabilitation involves working through youth peer groups and does away with the mode of adults preaching down to them. The youth are taught leadership skills and how to facilitate group sessions. Staff members are trained to facilitate teams of 12 and are prepared to meet the needs of each youth, making referrals to family therapy and substance abuse counseling generally unnecessary.
The Missouri Division of Youth Services also has created a seamless case management system so that once a youth is adjudicated, one case worker follows him and his family throughout his entire stay in the system facilitating the eventual reentry of the youth into his community. Significantly, this system comes with a considerable cost savings. The annual cost for detaining a youth in Missouri is less than half of what other states pay.
This reform probably only blossomed and persevered because Missouri had one Director of Youth Services, Mark Steward, for 17 years; this gave him the needed time to insist and insist on reform until it was institutionalized---that is, until kids succeeding while they were jailed became the new norm.

But saying that Missouri has the nation's most admired youth offender program means--when you get down to it---almost nothing in the United States because there is no understood or promoted civic value in stopping the useless jailing of youth. Since 2005, Steward has headed a foundation-funded consulting service to help other states reform their juvenile services on the Missouri model. So far he is only working with the city of Washington, D.C., and 3 states which he feels are actually committed at the top levels---including the governorship---necessary to see this kind of reform succeed against internal opposition, especially from unions.

So, instead of spreading success, what we have, in the succinct definition of the Children's Defense Fund, is a "cradle to prison pipeline." This pipeline works at multiple levels to criminalize ordinary youthful hi-jinks and misbehavior (How was it a crime in the first place for a 17-year old to lampoon an assistant principal on MySpace?) and then assures that those declared to be young criminals on one flimsy charge after another actually do get jailed in a way that makes them into criminals.

What we finally see are startling incarceration rates. Overall, one in 31 Americans are in prison or under criminal justice "supervision" such as parole; 1 in 11 young black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are out-rightly imprisoned at any one time, and over their life, one of three will be.

It's striking that this relentless criminalization of youth, a phenomenon of the past twenty years, happened while the baby boomers---historically, the nation's freest, most drug using, and full of hi-jinks and protest generation---were actually the adults administering the United States. I don't have any real explanation for that, but I have often thought about the contrast: the generation in charge had the most fun and freedom of anybody while the most vulnerable young in their care---the poor, the minority, the parentless---ended up as the most literally shackled American young since slavery.

Maybe we were just too involved in our own causes---women's rights, gay rights, "choice"---and, of course, out vast consumerism, to undertake the hard, daily civic work of controlling bureaucracies which control others. With rare exception, prominently Marion Wright Edelman, even minority leaders have not made it a true cause to combat youth criminalization.

Now as the baby boomers (I'm one myself) head toward retirement, perhaps we'll finally have time to look at what we are leaving behind in the terrible sadness these children have been assigned for their portion of the United States. Or maybe the realization that spending so much to jail these youth interferes with paying for things we now need---like Social Security and Medicare---will cause us at last to see them as a cause for concern.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-norwood/jail-a-child-get-a-job-am_b_180988.html

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

NY budget deal calls for closing 3 prison camps

NY budget deal calls for closing 3 prison camps
By MICHAEL VIRTANEN | Associated Press Writer
March 30, 2009
Newsday

ALBANY, N.Y. - The state budget negotiated by New York's Democratic leaders would close three minimum-security prison camps upstate and shutter a once prominent investigative agency established in the 1950s.

Paterson administration officials say Camp Pharsalia in Chenango County, Camp McGregor in Saratoga County and Camp Gabriels in Franklin County would close on or after July 1, saving an estimated $12 million in the budget year that starts Wednesday.

The inmate population in New York's prisons has dropped by about 10,000 in a decade.

Gabriels is at 29 percent of capacity, Pharsalia at 36 percent and McGregor under 20 percent, said Erik Kriss, spokesman for the Department of Correctional Services. Another camp, Georgetown in southern Madison County, will remain open.

The corrections commissioner would have the authority to also close the six prison annexes that are on the grounds of prisons.

The budget package contains measures proposed by a special sentencing commission expected to reduce the inmate population by another 1,600, including graduated sanctions for parole violations, Kriss said.

Another measure would allow inmates up to age 50 to go to six-month shock camps instead of the last three years of their sentences. The age limit now is 40. A third would enable some inmates convicted of violent crimes to shorten their sentences by six months of merit time for meeting various goals. Sex offenders and prisoners convicted of first-degree murder would be ineligible, Kriss said.

The budget package includes a proposal by Gov. David Paterson to save $4.15 million by letting the state Commission of Investigation go out of business. The commission has broad authority to investigate corruption, misconduct and mismanagement in state and local government.

The panel advocated continuing its broad powers, which critics say haven't been effectively used for several years, and combined into a single entity with the Inspector General's office and the Public Integrity Commission, the state government's other two watchdog entities.

Voting is expected this week on the $131.8 billion budget.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--nystatebudget-pri0330mar30,0,1886912.story

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

Mexico announces 'super-max' prisons

Mexico announces 'super-max' prisons
3-31-09
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican and U.S. military commanders on Monday were analyzing how to combat drug trafficking amid related violence that has claimed nearly 9,000 lives in Mexico since 2006, at a meeting near the U.S. border.

Meanwhile in London, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said Monday he has ruled out joint raids with the United States aimed at stemming drug cartel violence along their border, but called for closer cooperation.

The commanders exchanged experiences in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora state, bordering Arizona, Mexico's Defense Department said in a news release. The meetings end Thursday.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon wants the U.S. to share intelligence on traffickers and to provide police with high-tech surveillance equipment.

Drug violence has spiked since Calderon launched a national crackdown on organized crime in 2006. Cartels have unleashed unprecedented violence, battling soldiers and rivals.

In western Michoacan state, four police were kidnapped on Sunday shortly before midnight by gunmen and later killed, the state attorney general's office said in a news release Monday.

Three other police officers were wounded by gunfire and one officer lost his leg when a grenade exploded in the shootout in the municipality of Buenavista.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Guerrero state, authorities found a human head near a federal police station in the municipality of Arcelia. Authorities are still searching for the body, according to state police.

In Mexico City, the federal Public Safety Department announced the opening of a "super-maximum" security prison to hold Mexico's most dangerous criminals in Veracruz state.

Another prison will be built in Sinaloa state featuring a special section for kidnappers. Sinaloa is home to Mexico's violent Sinaloa cartel.

Officials gave no further details on the prisons.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gmAnjZnUpO1Ly686GnyzMo83lxCQD978LJ981

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

March 30, 2009

Real Cost of Prisons Comix wins National Council on Crime and Delinquency PASS Award

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The National Council on Crime and Delinquency
Announces
The 2008 PASS Award Winners
Oakland, CA, March 20, 2009

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency is pleased to announce the 2008 Winners of its respected PASS Awards (Prevention for a Safer Society). NCCD honors the media’s success and vital role in illuminating the people and programs that uncover the root causes of crime and those that promise to protect our most precious resource—our youth—against involvement in crime.

A critical link in successful policies related to youth and justice is the education of the public. The media is uniquely positioned to be this link, and we gratefully acknowledge their efforts to fulfill that responsibility. Each year the PASS Awards honor media professionals in the fields of print, literature, broadcast media, television, and film in recognition of thoughtful and factual coverage of the issues. Special consideration is given to those stories that highlight solutions to criminal and juvenile justice and child welfare problems.

NCCD is the nation's oldest private organization working to attain responsive and effective criminal justice, juvenile justice, and child welfare systems. For over 100 years, NCCD has been committed to promoting criminal justice strategies that are fair, humane, cost-effective, and uncompromising in public safety. The issues that have defined NCCD since its inception are the need for a separate and humane justice system for children, alternatives to incarceration, and the fundamental connection between social justice and public safety.

For more information on NCCD, please visit our website at www.nccd-crc.org

FILM
Ice T Presents “25 to Life” Deloss Pickett, Michael Dallum
“At the Death House Door” Steve James, Peter Gilbert

LITERATURE
American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment by Sasha Abramsky

Chasing Justice by Kerry Max Cook, Sandra Kaye Pressey, Kerry Justice Cook, Peter Hubbard

From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King by Robert Hillary King and Andrea Gibbons

I’ll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison by Walley Lamb

Letters From the Dhamma Brothers by Jenny Phillips, Pariyatti Press, Ron Cavanaugh

Maximum Security: The True Meaning of Freedom by Alan Gompers

Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration by Paul Wright, Tara Herivel and Dianne Wachtel

Stanley Tookie Williams Street Peace Series by Stanley Tookie Williams and Barbara Becnel

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix by Lois Ahrens, Kevin Pyle, Sabrina Jones, Susan Willmarth, Ellen Miller-Mack and Craig Gilmore

MAGAZINE
San Jose Mercury News
“A Painful Choice for Moms in Prison” Edwin Garcia, Karen Borchers, Miller-McCune
“Is This the Future of the War on Drugs?” by Vince Beiser,John Mecklin

NEWSPAPER
East Valley Tribune “Reasonable Doubt” by Ryan Gabrielson, Paul Giblin, Patti Epler
Long Beach Press-Telegram “Lots of Answers, but No Easy Fixes” byWendy Thomas Russell andTracy Manzer
Seattle Weekly “Neverminded” by Laura Onstot and Mike Seely
The Daily Review “Educate to Break Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline” by Tammerlin Drummond
The Sacramento Bee “Unprotected” Marjie Lundstrom, Sam Stanton, Autumn Cruz, Mitchell Brooks
The Village Voice “Teen Murders at Rikers Jail” by Graham Rayman, Tony Ortega
The Washington Post “Rehabilitating Juvenile Offenders” by Robert Pierre, Carol Morello Westword
“Stand and Deliver” byAdam Cayton-Holland, Patricia Calhoun, Anthony Camera

RADIO
American Radioworks -“Gangster Confidential" Michael Montgomery and Catherine Winter
KALW Radio “Prisons in Crisis: A State of Emergency in California” JoAnn Mar, Alyne Ellis
KQED/Forum “Prisoner Health” by Scott Shafer, Nick Vidinsky andDan Zoll

TELEVISION/ VIDEO
HBO - “The Wire, Season 5” by David Simon, Nina Kostroff Noble, Ed Burns, Joe Chappelle.Karen L.Thorson
SoCal Connected/KCET -“Inside Locke High” Angela Shelley andAlexandria Gales, Brett Wood, Michael Bloecher,Bret Marcus
NBC/Wolf Films “Law and Order: SVU - Confession” Dick Wolf, Neal Baer, Ted Kotcheff, Peter Jankowski, Arthur Forney, Judith McCreary

WEB
AlterNet -“Meet Gus Puryear” by Silja J.A. Talvi and Jan Frel
City Limits -“A Ballot’s Breadth Away from Rejoining Society” by Karen Loew, Curtis Stephen, Rosie McCobb
City Limits “Debating How to Police a Challenging Population” Karen Loew, Tram Whitehurst

Posted by lois at 09:30 PM | Comments (0)

MT: Stimulus funds to build juvenile jail

"Freudenthal recently toured the existing juvenile facility. He said in a news conference Friday that using stimulus funding to build a juvenile center would be justified because it's a clearly identifiable need and would put people to work."

Published on Monday, March 30, 2009.
Stimulus funds could go to juvenile center
By Gazette News Services
CASPER - Gov. Dave Freudenthal says it might be possible to use federal economic stimulus funding to build a new juvenile detention center in Casper.

Casper's existing juvenile facility has been criticized for lacking natural light and because youths aren't able to go outside for exercise. Also, several violent crimes have occurred there.

The Natrona County Commission has saved about $3 million for a new facility. Estimates put the cost of such a building at more than $13 million. Freudenthal recently toured the existing juvenile facility. He said in a news conference Friday that using stimulus funding to build a juvenile center would be justified because it's a clearly identifiable need and would put people to work.

He said the stimulus funding would come from a governor's discretionary fund for state and local government stabilization funds. Wyoming's share would be about $15.5 million, he said.
"I think people want to see something done with regards to these questions of a juvenile treatment and detention facility. So we'll take a run at it," Freudenthal said.

Natrona County Commissioner Rob Hendry said Freudenthal apparently was impressed by concerns about the juvenile detention center and asked about the county's commitment. "Freudenthal's main question was, 'Is it shovel ready?"' Hendry said. Hendry said the county could begin earthwork near the existing adult jail this summer and probably begin some foundation work.

Story available at http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2009/03/30/news/wyoming/64-stimulus.txt

Posted by lois at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)

Getting the Juvenile-Justice System to Grow Up

Tuesday, Mar. 24, 2009
Getting the Juvenile-Justice System to Grow Up
By Ken Stier
Time Magazine

If it's not the biggest scandal in American legal history, many are calling it at least the darkest day for the country's troubled juvenile-justice system. For more than four years earlier this decade, two senior county juvenile-court judges in northeastern Pennsylvania took kickbacks of $2.6 million in exchange for packing thousands of kids off to privately owned detention centers. Many of the kids had committed minor offenses and didn't have the benefit of a lawyer. A 14-year-old from Wilkes-Barre, for instance, spent a year in a Glen Mills detention facility for the offense of stealing loose change from unlocked cars to buy a bag of chips; he was only set free after public-interest lawyers challenged the constitutionality of the punishment. (

The miscarriage of justice goes beyond the judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, who pleaded guilty on Feb. 12 to federal charges of wire and income tax fraud and face the prospect of more than seven years in prison. State and federal authorities are still investigating the case, and the owners of the detention center, PA Child Care, have not yet been charged. (The owner, Greg Zappala, says he didn't know anything improper was going on, while a former co-owner claims he was a victim of extortion by the judges.) What's more, many prosecutors, public defenders and other court officials apparently turned a blind eye to the abuses, shocking parents who had expected a fine or probation and instead watched their children be dragged off into custody. When the mother of the 14-year-old arrested for stealing the loose change asked to hire an attorney, she was told by one defense counsel it would be a "waste of money" because the judges would not listen. Now that the scheme has been unearthed, some 5,000 kids have grounds for suing, and many have already joined a class action against the two judges, the center's owner and other defendants. In addition, many are attempting to have their records expunged, though their bad memories of the experience will never be erased.

As egregious as the case is, experts say it is all too indicative of a juvenile-justice system racked with abuses yet subject to far less scrutiny than the adult system it increasingly mirrors. The entire Texas juvenile-justice system had to be overhauled two years ago after it was discovered that kids were arbitrarily held years beyond their original sentence and that many were sexually abused. Recent studies have shown high recidivism rates from graduates of the private boot camps that were in vogue under then President Bill Clinton after he endorsed the experience as Governor of Arkansas.

Nationwide, the system, which sends kids to a mix of large public "kiddie" prisons and smaller (but far more numerous) privately owned ones, handles more than 1.6 million juvenile cases a year; detentions have increased 44% from 1985 to 2002, the most recent year for which data are available. And that doesn't include the number of young offenders who bypass the juvenile system altogether. Every year, some 200,000 youths are tried, sentenced or incarcerated as adults, and on the first instance of trouble, often for relatively minor crimes, according to the Campaign for Youth Justice; those kids are 34% more likely to get into trouble again by committing new crimes, according to a government study.

Many advocates and academics argue that juveniles are not being given enough of a chance to turn their lives around after committing minor offenses. And officials at both the state and federal levels seem to be getting the message. Last summer, after reviewing a large swath of research literature, the Department of Justice concluded that "to best achieve reduction in recidivism, the overall number of juvenile offenders transferred to the criminal-justice system should be minimized." That came three years after the U.S. stopped executing minors, following a Supreme Court decision, Roper v. Simmons, that was largely based on new brain research showing that the full development of the frontal lobe, where rational judgments are made, does not occur until the early- to mid-20s. At the state level, Missouri is leading the country by phasing out its large juvenile-detention institutions in favor of smaller facilities, closer to kids' homes, that offer more specialized services, like mental-health and drug counseling and education. In the process, the state claims to have reduced recidivism rates for juvenile offenders to 10%, compared with a national rate of 40% to 50%. "We cannot incarcerate our way out of this problem of juvenile crime," says Shay Bilchik, director of Georgetown University's Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, who served as Clinton's point person on juvenile issues at the Justice Department.

Occasionally the widespread problems at juvenile facilities erupt in scandals, as in the aforementioned Texas, or in Mississippi, where minor offenders were hog-tied in facilities that sometimes had only dirt floors, run by guards with barely a high school education. Federal officials occasionally intervene against egregious facilities where there have even been some deaths along with thousands of allegations of abuses. But experts say simply trying to weed out the bad actors is not a viable solution. At a congressional hearing in October 2007, Jan Moss, executive director of the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, said the industry wanted stronger regulation. "Among our goals is the complete elimination of the abuses and neglectful practices we have heard about today," she said. "Clearly, we have a long way to go."

Her sentiments are echoed by advocates who are working to clean up the system. "We are closing Guantánamo, [but] we need an equal amount of attention to the abuses of restraints and excessive use of isolation in the facilities where our nation's children are being held," says Mark Soler, executive director of the Center for Children's Law and Policy, who has spent 30 years litigating against such abuses. Soler argues that only the most violent juvenile offenders really need to be detained — roughly 5% of the more than 90,000 who are currently institutionalized in juvenile correctional facilities. (See pictures of crime in Middle America.)

Surveys have determined that while as many as 75% of kids sentenced to some kind of facility need support for mental-health issues or drug counseling, only about a third are actually getting help. But Georgetown's Bilchik says there is a national movement to create more "wraparound support programs" — for mental health, education, drug counseling — to give prosecutors and judges more options than choosing between institutionalization and probation, which generally provide few services the kids need. "When you see additional services being offered, you see judges opting for them," he says.

As the Pennsylvania scandal showed, keeping kids out of institutions requires at the very least zealous legal representation. The Supreme Court extended the right to legal counsel to juveniles in 1967. But in practice the requirement still goes largely unfulfilled, in part because in some jurisdictions, it does not apply to the initial detention hearings at which judges decide whether the minor can stay at home or must be held by authorities. In addition, the confidentiality measures in place to protect the identities of minors can sometimes prevent much needed transparency.

But a responsive and responsible system also requires oversight throughout the justice system, something that appears to have been sorely lacking in Pennsylvania. No one has accused prosecutors of being part of the scheme, but many observers argue that they were in a position where they should have known of the problem but chose not to speak out. Instead, it took the work of the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center to uncover the abuses. After discovering that more than 50% of kids in Luzerne County Juvenile Court had been without legal counsel, the organization in April 2008 petitioned the Pennsylvania supreme court to step in. (

Even then, there was no action taken initially; eight months elapsed before the court declined to act, without explanation, even though the application was supported by the state's attorney general. But the day after federal charges were leveled against the two judges — the result of a long-running probe into links between the court and the youth-detention centers — the state supreme court reversed itself and appointed someone to clean up the mess.

That shaky performance may or may not have been influenced by the fact that Zappala, the owner of the two private detention centers receiving a guaranteed annual rent ($1.3 million) from Luzerne County, is the son of a former chief of the same court. Or maybe it was what State Chief Justice Ron Castile told a local columnist, in a sad commentary on the entire system: the judges found the state's figures on the unusually high rates of kids being sentenced to detention and getting no legal representation simply too hard to believe.

* Find this article at:
* http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1887182,00.html

Posted by lois at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)

NH To Create Department-Level Agency For Parolees

NH To Create Department-Level Agency For Parolees
March 29th, 2009

New Hampshire Corrections Commissioner William Wrenn, with the support of Gov. John Lynch, is creating a new state division to help keep parolees free even after they have violated their parole agreements, as long as the violations do not involve new crimes.

Wrenn estimates the division, called the Division of Community Corrections, will cost between $1.4 million and $2 million and involve hiring between 10 and 20 case managers at 10 local parole offices around the state. He hopes to have at least some of the programs up and running by summer. “I’d like these positions to work with individuals out in the community, keep (parolees) in their houses and jobs and with their families,” Wrenn said. “If they do step over the line, deal with them there; don’t always bring them back.” The aim is to help parolees succeed and reduce costs, Wrenn said …

According to Wrenn, keeping an inmate in prison costs about $100 a day plus their full medical care, while keeping someone under the direction of field services costs about $2.80 a day. Even if the cost went up to $5 to $10 a day with new programming, he said, that would be a substantial savings …

Veteran probation/parole officer Keith Phelps said the pressure is coming from the top of the Department of Corrections to work with offenders in the community rather than return them to prison when they violate parole. He also said he understands why Commissioner Wrenn is exerting that pressure. “It’s budget-driven. I blame the Legislature for slashing budgets,” Phelps said … Keeping parole violators out of prison without adequate services only increases the likelihood they will commit new crimes, and there are not enough substance-abuse and mental health treatment options available in the community, Phelps said …

Paul Cascio, a corrections lieutenant and president of local 255 of the New England Police Benevolent Association… believes budget dollars, not public safety, are driving changes in the DOC … Cascio said Wrenn’s parole plan won’t work because there aren’t enough treatment programs in the community to support it, especially when some parole and probation officers’ caseloads already are more than double what they should be. “If you’re going to put more people on the street, more supervision is required — more enforcement and more programs,” Cascio said. “There are not enough programs to meet the needs of people getting out of prison already” …

Parole Board Chairman George Khoury said Wrenn promised there would be more substance-abuse counselors at local parole offices. Khoury also expects greater participation from community treatment services working under contract with the state. “Nobody is minimizing how difficult it is to overcome drug and alcohol problems, but we need to give them all the assistance we can,” Khoury said. “Our job is to do the best we can and never at the public risk.” In preparing to open the Division of Community Corrections, according to Wrenn, state officials are working with the National Institute of Corrections on writing policies and procedures.
http://www.correctionsreporter.com/2009/03/29/nh-to-create-department-level-agency-for-parolees/

Posted by lois at 02:21 PM | Comments (0)

March 29, 2009

MA: Freedom watch: Jailhouse bloc The real reason law-and-order types love mandatory-minimum sentencing? It's money in their pockets.

News Features, The Boston Phoenix
Freedom watch: Jailhouse bloc
The real reason law-and-order types love mandatory-minimum sentencing? It's money in their pockets.
By HARVEY SILVERGLATE AND KYLE SMEALLIE | December 9, 2008

With aromatic puffs of change, Bay State stoners rejoiced on Election Day. But even the haziest of revelers may have missed the full significance of Question 2, a statewide ballot initiative to decriminalize marijuana possession in small amounts. Not only will this bring more humane and responsible marijuana laws, it will also suppress — however slightly — an insidious, contemporary offshoot of what President Dwight Eisenhower famously referred to as the "military-industrial complex": the idea that if private industry and government joined in promoting ever-increasing defense spending, war as well as national bankruptcy were more likely.

Almost a half-century later, that mindset has extended to both the local and federal law-and-order sectors, which have argued for, and experienced, virtually unabated growth. Today, law-enforcement groups regularly lobby against criminal-punishment reforms, and for the creation of new criminal statutes and overly harsh prison sentences. While these efforts are cloaked as calls for public safety, they are essentially creating more business for themselves.

The problem has become so widespread that some private correctional corporations — companies that subcontract services, and even privately owned jails and prisons, to all levels of government — have even lobbied the government to enact and maintain ever broader criminal laws and higher sentences. Those private prisons are now rolling in the profit, and taking on more prisoners every day as federal and state prisons run out of room to house their inmates.

But these lobbyists' success — and that of various law-enforcement groups — has given rise to a veritable "prison-industrial complex" that not only uses fear to suppress these groups' true intentions — it leaves taxpayers footing the bill.

Bleak house of detention
It was with these self-aggrandizing interests in mind that the Massachusetts Districts Attorneys' Association (MDAA) and other tough-on-crime groups fiercelyopposedthe marijuana-decriminalization referendum.

After all, if the penalties for minor marijuana possession were to remain on the statute books, more police, prosecutors, prison guards, and parole officers — and their lucrative overtime — would also be retained.

To their dismay, however, Question 2 passed by an overwhelming 65 to 35 percent voter margin, and will be implemented 30 days after election results are certified. As a result, many law-enforcement officials may soon be without an important source of job security and additional revenue — namely, the $30 million a year (as one study by a Harvard economics professor estimated) spent enforcing the soon-to-be-history current marijuana-possession laws.

Never mind that the forthcoming statutory reform is, from even a moderate law-and-order perspective, relatively benign. According to Question 2, anyone caught with less than one ounce will forfeit the substance and pay a $100 fine, while minors will additionally have to complete a drug-awareness program (including group sessions and community service). Current penalties for growing and trafficking in marijuana, as well as the prohibition against driving while high, will remain exactly as they are.

These facts were conveniently left out of the MDAA's efforts to "inform" voters.The group could not legally make direct contributions to ballot campaigns — publicly funded groups are unable to do so, thanks to a 1978 Supreme Judicial Court decision — yet in opposing Question 2, it still managed to fuel a whisper campaign and add misleading info to its Web site (hosted, by the way, on the state's ".gov" domain).

Thus, these law-enforcement officials were able to avoid any technical wrongdoing while lobbying for an increased legislative arsenal — feathering their own nests at the expense of liberty and sensible public policy.

Bear in mind, though, that our First Amendment protects not only speech, but also "the right of the people . . . to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." So state and local law-enforcement personnel, like other citizens, do have the right to lobby voters and even members of the legislature to promote more expansive criminal laws and stricter penalties. But self-serving lobbying and public-relations offensives, disguised as seeking protections for society, should be treated with exceptional scrutiny and skepticism.

Though disheartening, their actions are an age-old fact of life best described by Charles Dickens in his classic 1853 novel Bleak House: "The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself."

Coke vs. crack
A similar battle waged in Massachusetts last summer, when law-enforcement groups sought once again to thwart criminal-justice reform. At the time, a legislative effort to help nonviolent offenders find employment opportunities by changing Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) laws was brought before the State House of Representatives — and, thanks to the efforts of state Attorney General Martha Coakley and other law-enforcement officials, essentially squashed.

The proposed bill would have restricted the type of personal information that some employers receive, thereby assisting the many individuals saddled with CORI records who struggle to find employment and end up back behind bars.

Massachusetts's recidivism rates are nearly 40 percent, according to a study by the Urban Institute Justice Policy Center. And the CORI law's branding of even the most innocuous offender is, by all accounts, partly responsible for this dismal situation. So advocates of the bill asserted that changing CORI could ease the massive overcrowding at the state's prison system, which the Department of Corrections recently estimated to be operating at "144 percent of capacity." (Currently, there are 12,000 inmates imprisoned — a disgraceful state record.)

Another aspect of that same failed bill would have reduced mandatory-minimum sentences for certain drug offenses, which advocates said also contribute to overcrowding.

As the law stands, anyone convicted of selling drugs within 1000 feet of a school zone automatically receives a two-year prison term — leaving no room for judicial discretion. That means a first-time offender with no record could receive more prison time than, say, an armed robber. And the mandatory nature of these sentences eliminates the possibility of parole.

Because of the numerous schools in dense urban areas, poor, black, and Hispanic populations are at a greater risk of facing the mandatory-minimum measures, according to a recent Prison Policy Initiative study.

Yet despite the clear inequalities in the current law, as well as the benefits that reform holds out to both taxpayers and public safety — not to mention liberty — the legislative term ended in July with no action taken on the reform legislation.

This problem with drug sentencing is nothing new. For more than two decades, prison-reform supporters have condemned the federal sentencing disparities for the mostly middle and upper-class defendants caught using cocaine, and the mostly lower-class, inner-city habitants caught with cheaper crack cocaine.

Part of the now-infamous war on crime, a 100-to-1 ratio was implemented in sentencing for crack cocaine. So, a person caught selling five grams of crack received the same prison sentence as someone dealing 500 grams of powder cocaine.

The mandatory-minimums were harsh, too. That same person caught selling five grams of crack received a five-year minimum sentence; 50 grams or more and the minimum was 10 years.

Despite clear racial, economic, and cultural disparities, cries from constituents fell on deaf ears while law-enforcement lobbyists successfully cajoled and frightened congressional leaders.

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, for one, strongly opposed reducing the crack-cocaine minimums. The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), a 325,000 member national organization that bills itself as "the voice of our nations' law-enforcement officers," also spent $550,000 lobbying Congress over the past three years. Among their interests: stopping the Powder-Crack Cocaine Penalty Equalization Act, along with promoting a litany of other Draconian measures.

Prison business
To be fair, government employees weren't the only ones to lobby against crack-cocaine sentence equalization. A little-recognized subset of this vast prison-industrial complex lobbying community is composed of private correctional corporations, which sign lucrative contracts with governments to house inmates for profit, often shipping them to facilities out of state.

It is, of course, in these private prisons' economic interests to see more people in prison serving longer sentences. And with current facilities bursting at the seams, times for this burgeoning industry are good. The country's largest private prison provider, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), spent more than $2.7 million from 2006 through September 2008 on lobbying for stricter laws. Last year alone, the company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, generated $133 million in net income.

For the past 25 years, the CCA has built itself into a corrections powerhouse — it operates nearly 70 facilities housing more than 75,000 detainees. As it does for, say, contractors in Iraq, though, privatization comes with an inevitable lack of oversight. The CCA has been involved in numerous wrongful-death lawsuits, and it has been a constant target of prison-reform groups who claim the private facilities are understaffed and their detainees abused.

Yet another private prison provider, the GEO Group, which has annual revenue topping $1 billion, has come under intense scrutiny for dozens — if not hundreds — of inmate deaths in the past decade. One such prisoner death led to the recent indictment of Vice-President Dick Cheney on November 18, in which a rather ornery Texas state prosecutor claimed that Cheney's substantial investments in the GEO Group made him partly responsible for prisoner abuse — a dubious prosecutorial theory (in fact, it was dismissed this Monday), but with a grain of practical truth.

Nonetheless, states facing prison overcrowding turn to these corporations to outsource inmates. California, for example, has commissioned the CCA to ship convicts as far away as Tennessee (where financially strapped relatives and friends frequently cannot visit). The CCA has exported nearly 4000 California prisoners to states across the country under a $115 million contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Over the next three years, 8000 more are planned to be shipped out of the Golden State.

The societal costs — both human and financial — of these policies and practices are enormous, and growing. California — which carried a $15.2 billion deficit into this fiscal year — spends $10 billion per year on more than 170,000 inmates. Like the Bay State, California also faces high recidivism rates; state records show that more than two-thirds of released inmates return to prison within three years. In this context, a ballot battle — possibly more contentious than Massachusetts's Question 2 scuffle — raged this past election season. Two separate initiatives, each from vastly different perspectives, concerned the state's approach to criminal justice.

The first, Proposition 5, would have expanded treatment programs for those convicted of drug-related and nonviolent crimes. While the costs for more rehabilitation were estimated at $1 billion a year, analysts said $2.5 billion would have been saved from the reduction in prison costs. But, much like what transpired in Massachusetts, the California District Attorney's Association, along with other law-enforcement agencies, vehemently opposed the initiative. These agencies raised nearly $400,000 and, through the Web site of their umbrella group, People Against Proposition 5, issued "facts" such as "Proposition 5 creates an 'Express Lane' for drug dealers to get back on the streets and peddling dope to our kids."

Conversely, nearly $1 billion would have been added to the cops' coffers under Proposition 6, which proposed new laws for prosecutors to fight gang activity. Many of the same law-enforcement agencies that opposed Prop 5 supported Prop 6, joined by some "tough-on-crime" lawmakers who slashed $3 billion in education from the state's 2008 budget. Included among the Prop 6 supporters was — you guessed it — the CCA.

The CCA's lobbying efforts, as well as those of publicly funded law-enforcement agents, wasn't enough to convince Californians, as nearly 70 percent of voters opposed Prop 6. Yet similarly high numbers opted against Prop 5.

Maybe the cops' Prop 6 push for more crime-fighting money and power were too transparent for voters. Interestingly, though, their appeals to public safety in opposing Prop 5 seemed to work. California voters were quite possibly unaware that, by maintaining strict criminal laws and closing off alternatives to incarceration, law-enforcement agencies maintained their strength.

The 1 percent solution?
From Niccolò Machiavelli to Rudy Giuliani, fear has been the foundation of ever-expanding political power (and, for some, job status and security). And it continues to drive the prison-industrial complex.

Just as the United States Department of Justice was able to pressure Congress to enact the infamous USA-Patriot Act in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, here in the Bay State, an appeal to fear ("protect the children") prevailed in stampeding the legislature. In late July, Governor Deval Patrick signed into law "An Act Further Protecting Children," a bill providing stricter mandatory-minimum sentences for sex offenders who target children.

The way this legislation was presented made opposition appear callous and irresponsible. Who, after all, wouldn't want to keep child predators off the streets?

Yet tucked away in this bill are provisions that do far more than simply protect the young. The proposal enables prosecutors to obtain private records from Internet and telephone providers by issuing an "administrative subpoena." Prosecutors, having only to assert that records are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation," were granted ever-expanding access into otherwise personal data. The telecoms, in turn, were granted blanket immunity from claims of privacy violation. There was no mass protest from the customers.

But at least one person did object. Newton's Democratic state senator Cynthia Creem voiced skepticism in a July 29 Newton TAB op-ed. Mindful that the most egregious provisions of the Patriot Act have been used to target not just terrorists but journalists, activists, and Muslim charities, she wrote: "I cannot support this attack on privacy rights when less-invasive and equally effective means are available. Our liberties should never be sacrificed in the name of prosecutorial convenience." A few other scattered voices in the State Senate echoed Creem. But perhaps Creem's reference to "convenience" missed the point — prosecutorial power appears to have been the more likely goal.

When the bill was passed by the Massachusetts House and presented to the Senate, Coakley, having learned that other politicians were questioning the bill's scope, lobbied hard so that no language would be changed (which would have required passage again through the House). With robust MDAA support, as well as the backing of key legislative leaders, 11 different role-call votes for amending provisions of the bill were voted down. Less than two weeks after this truncated debate, the bill became law. Experienced observers of the legislative process marveled at the ability of Coakley and her allies to forestall changes to the legislation.

The United States — "land of the free" — has five percent of the world's population, but it also, thanks to the lobbyists and officiants behind the prison-industrial complex, shamefully holds 25 percent of the world's incarcerated. It has a higher rate of imprisonment than the planet's most notorious despotisms. One in 100 Americans is in jail.

These citizens are not only unproductive, they cost the public $45 billion a year, according to a June report by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. And yet they also keep a small army of officers and other law-enforcement support personnel on the job. The monumental taxpayer's tab that would be unnecessary with saner criminal-justice laws is virtually incalculable.

It is long past the time to re-think how much credence we should give to those who claim to be experts in law enforcement, but who, in reality, have simply discovered a steady and ever-increasing source of job security.

Their First Amendment right to lobby for endless new criminal laws and ever-tougher prison sentences is indeed constitutionally protected, but this does not mean that these law-enforcement officials' criminal "expertise" should endow them with a free pass from critical scrutiny. Legislators and the public need not sit by idly as their fellow citizens are unjustly arrested, prosecuted, and often incarcerated for increasingly lengthy periods of time as the law-enforcement industry's wallet grows fat. The next time prison-industrial-complex adherents tell us we need tougher laws and sentences for our own good, we should point out precisely whose good is being served.

Harvey Silverglate is a criminal defense and civil-liberties lawyer and writer. Kyle Smeallie, former associate editor of the Boston College Heights, is Silverglate's research assistant and paralegal. Silverglate's next book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is forthcoming next year from Encounter Books.
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/73092-Freedom-watch-Jailhouse-bloc/
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Posted by lois at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

"Jim Webb's courage v. the "pragmatism" excuse for politicians" by Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald
Saturday March 28, 2009
Jim Webb's courage v. the "pragmatism" excuse for politicians
Salon.com

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb's interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession. After decades of mindless "tough-on-crime" hysteria, an increasingly irrational "drug war," and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan -- and virtually every other country in the world -- to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history."

What's most notable about Webb's decision to champion this cause is how honest his advocacy is. He isn't just attempting to chip away at the safe edges of America's oppressive prison state. His critique of what we're doing is fundamental, not incremental. And, most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal causes of our insane imprisonment fixation: our aberrational insistence on criminalizing and imprisoning non-violent drug offenders (when we're not doing worse to them). That is an issue most politicians are petrified to get anywhere near, as evidenced just this week by Barack Obama's adolescent, condescending snickering when asked about marijuana legalization, in response to which Obama gave a dismissive answer that Andrew Sullivan accurately deemed "pathetic." Here are just a few excerpts from Webb's Senate floor speech this week (.pdf) on his new bill to create a Commission to study all aspects of prison reform:

Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world's population; we have 25% of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .

In many cases these issues involve people’s ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .

Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons. . . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.

Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy - the whole area of drug policy in this country?

And how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives that we might look at?

Webb added that "America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace" and "we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail."

It's hard to overstate how politically thankless, and risky, is Webb's pursuit of this issue -- both in general and particularly for Webb. Though there has been some evolution of public opinion on some drug policy issues, there is virtually no meaningful organized constituency for prison reform. To the contrary, leaving oneself vulnerable to accusations of being "soft on crime" has, for decades, been one of the most toxic vulnerabilities a politician can suffer (ask Michael Dukakis). Moreover, the privatized Prison State is a booming and highly profitable industry, (GEO Group, Inc.: Despite a Crashing Economy, Private Prison Firm Turns a Handsome Profit...Corp Watch. http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15308) with an army of lobbyists, donations, and other well-funded weapons for targeting candidates who threaten its interests.

Most notably, Webb is in the Senate not as an invulnerable, multi-term political institution from a safely blue state (he's not Ted Kennedy), but is the opposite: he's a first-term Senator from Virginia, one of the "toughest" "anti-crime" states in the country (it abolished parole in 1995 and is second only to Texas in the number of prisoners it executes), and Webb won election to the Senate by the narrowest of margins, thanks largely to George Allen's macaca-driven implosion. As Ezra Klein wrote, with understatement: "Lots of politicians make their name being anti-crime, which has come to mean pro-punishment. Few make their name being pro-prison reform."

For a Senator like Webb to spend his time trumpeting the evils of excessive prison rates, racial disparities in sentencing, the unjust effects of the Drug War, and disgustingly harsh conditions inside prisons is precisely the opposite of what every single political consultant would recommend that he do. There's just no plausible explanation for what Webb's actions other than the fact that he's engaged in the noblest and rarest of conduct: advocating a position and pursuing an outcome because he actually believes in it and believes that, with reasoned argument, he can convince his fellow citizens to see the validity of his cause. And he is doing this despite the fact that it potentially poses substantial risks to his political self-interest and offers almost no prospect for political reward. Webb is far from perfect -- he's cast some truly bad votes since being elected -- but, in this instance, not only his conduct but also his motives are highly commendable.

* * * * *

Webb's actions here underscore a broader point. Our political class has trained so many citizens not only to tolerate, but to endorse, cowardly behavior on the part of their political leaders. When politicians take bad positions, ones that are opposed by large numbers of their supporters, it is not only the politicians, but also huge numbers of their supporters, who step forward to offer excuses and justifications: well, they have to take that position because it's too politically risky not to; they have no choice and it's the smart thing to do. That's the excuse one heard for years as Democrats meekly acquiesced to or actively supported virtually every extremist Bush policy from the attack on Iraq to torture and warrantless eavesdropping; it's the excuse which even progressives offer for why their political leaders won't advocate for marriage equality or defense spending cuts; and it's the same excuse one hears now to justify virtually every Obama "disappointment."

Webb's commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates how false that excuse-making is -- just as it was proven false by Russ Feingold's singular, lonely, October, 2001 vote against the Patriot Act and Feingold's subsequent, early opposition to the then-popular Bush's assault on civil liberties, despite his representing the purple state of Wisconsin. Political leaders have the ability to change public opinion by engaging in leadership and persuasive advocacy. Any cowardly politician can take only those positions that reside safely within the majoritiarian consensus. Actual leaders, by definition, confront majoritarian views when they are misguided and seek to change them, and politicians have far more ability to affect and change public opinion than they want the public to believe they have.

The political class wants people to see them as helpless captives to immutable political realities so that they have a permanent, all-purpose excuse for whatever they do, so that they are always able to justify their position by appealing to so-called "political realities." But that excuse is grounded in a fundamentally false view of what political leaders are actually capable of doing in terms of shifting public opinion, as NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen explained when I interviewed him about his theories of how political consensus is maintained and manipulated:

GG: One of the points you make is that it's not just journalists who define what these spheres [of consensus, legitimate debate and deviance] encompass. You argue that politicians, political actors can change what's included in these spheres based on the positions that they take. And in some sense, you could even say that that's kind of what leadership is -- not just articulating what already is within the realm of consensus, which anyone can do, but taking ideas that are marginalized or within the sphere of deviance and bringing them into the sphere of legitimacy. How does that process work? How do political actors change those spheres?

JR: Well, that's exactly what leadership is. And I think it's crippling sometimes to our own sense of efficacy in politics and media, if we assume that the media has all of the power to frame the debate and decide what consensus is, and consign things to deviant status. That's not really true. That's true under conditions of political immobilization, leadership default, a rage for normalcy, but in ordinary political life, leaders, by talking about things, make them legitimate. Parties, by pushing for things, make them part of the sphere of debate. Important and visible people can question consensus, and all of a sudden expand it. These spheres are malleable; if the conversation of democracy is alive and if you make your leaders talk about things, it becomes valid to talk about them.

And I really do think there's a self-victimization that sometimes goes on, but to go back to the beginning of your question, there's something else going on, which is the ability to infect us with notions of what's realistic is one of the most potent powers press and political elites have. Whenever we make that kind of decision -- "well it's pragmatic, let's be realistic" -- what we're really doing is we're speculating about other Americans, our fellow citizens, and what they're likely to accept or what works on them or what stimuli they respond to. And that way of seeing other Americans, fellow citizens, is in fact something the media has taught us; that is one of the deepest lessons we've learned from the media even if we are skeptics of the MSM.

And one of the things I see on the left that really bothers me is the ease with which people skeptical of the media will talk about what the masses believe and how the masses will be led and moved in this way that shows me that the mass media tutors them on how to see their fellow citizens. And here the Internet again has at least some potential, because we don't have to guess what those other Americans think. We can encounter them ourselves, and thereby reshape our sense of what they think. I think every time people make that judgment about what's realistic, what they're really doing is they're imagining what the rest of the country would accept, and how other people think, and they get those ideas from the media.

We've been trained how we talk about our political leaders primarily by a media that worships political cynicism and can only understand the world through political game-playing. Thus, so many Americans have been taught to believe not only that politicians shouldn't have the obligation of leadership imposed on them -- i.e., to persuade the public of what is right -- but that it's actually smart and wise of them to avoid positions they believe in when doing so is politically risky.

People love now to assume the role of super-sophisticated political consultant rather than a citizen demanding actions from their representatives. Due to the prism of gamesmanship through which political pundits understand and discuss politics, many citizens have learned to talk about their political leaders as though they're political strategists advising their clients as to the politically shrewd steps that should be taken ("this law is awful and unjust and he was being craven by voting for it, but he was absolutely right to vote for it because the public wouldn't understand if he opposed it"), rather than as citizens demanding that their public servants do the right thing ("this law is awful and unjust and, for that reason alone, he should oppose it and show leadership by making the case to the public as to why it's awful and unjust").

It may be unrealistic to expect most politicians in most circumstances to do what Jim Webb is doing here (or what Russ Feingold did during Bush's first term). My guess is that Webb, having succeeded in numerous other endeavors outside of politics, is not desperate to cling to his political office, and he has thus calculated that he'd rather have six years in the Senate doing things he thinks are meaningful than stay there forever on the condition that he cowardly renounce any actual beliefs. It's probably true that most career politicians, possessed of few other talents or interests, are highly unlikely to think that way.

But the fact that cowardly actions from political leaders are inevitable is no reason to excuse or, worse, justify and even advocate that cowardice. In fact, the more citizens are willing to excuse and even urge political cowardice in the name of "realism" or "pragmatism" ("he was smart to take this bad, unjust position because Americans are too stupid or primitive for him to do otherwise and he needs to be re-elected"), the more common that behavior will be. Politicians and their various advisers, consultants and enablers will make all the excuses they can for why politicians do what they do and insist that public opinion constrains them to do otherwise. That excuse-making is their role, not the role of citizens. What ought to be demanded of political officials by citizens is precisely the type of leadership Webb is exhibiting here.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/28/webb/

Posted by lois at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2009

OR: Prison Communities: Representation is Not Created Equal Bill would end gerrymandering in sparsely populated communities

Prison Communities: Representation is Not Created Equal
Bill would end gerrymandering in sparsely populated communities
By Brian Stimson of The Skanner

Rep. Chip Shields hopes to bring fairness to the way prisoners are counted in Oregon.
Currently, prisoners are counted as residents of the correctional institution in which they are serving time, inflating population statistics of the mostly rural communities in which prisons exist. This population count inaccurately skews congressional representation in sparsely populated areas, says Shields.
This bill would rectify that inconsistency as Oregon prepares to undergo a congressional and legislative redistricting process.
Shields’ bill would require the Department of Corrections to list an offender’s residence as the address they were living when they were arrested.

This requirement would more accurately reflect congressional and legislative representation across the state.
“They don’t count them as residents of their home communities,” Shields said. “They count them as residents of communities in which they are incarcerated. This gives more political power to citizens that happen to live next to a correctional institution.”
While a person is incarcerated, they do not have voting rights in Oregon. Once an offender is released from prison in this state, their voting rights are then restored. Shields said many people released from prison return to their home communities – as dictated by state law.
The Oregon House Rules Committee held its first public hearing on the bill Monday, where Shields testified that he has received bipartisan support on a bill that is aimed at restoring fairness. He is also personally affected by the bill – of the top three home zip codes for offenders, two of those zip codes are in Shields’ district.
Republican Rep. Bob Jenson said he found the bill to be the “antithesis of fairness.”
“The overwhelming majority of people who are incarcerated come out of the most populace part of the state,” he said. “Particularly Multnomah County.”
Jenson said he opposed the bill because it could cost the Republican Party seats in the House – possibly his own.
“It would increase the division between the two parties in this chamber by one vote. One person,” he said. “This would obviously cause me great concern.”
Jenson represents Pendleton, Ore., home to the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, a 1,600-bed prison that is the city’s fourth largest employer.
This issue is not just a regional one. The Prison Policy Initiative has documented the Census Bureau’s counting of prisoners as members of a community. They found that in New York in the 1990s, two out of every three people to move to upstate New York was a prisoner. They say this has created districts that would otherwise be illegal under federal law.
During the Rules Committee testimony, Mike Gower, assistant director of operations for the Department of Corrections, said the language defining a residence could be difficult.
“Determining permanent residence is very difficult,” he said. “Few inmates are incarcerated from and returned to the same address. An inmate may be living in rental property … and many inmates are homeless at the time of their arrest.”
He said released offenders must return to their county of arrest unless they require a waiver to live elsewhere. About 52 percent of released offenders have no home to go to and must be provided with emergency housing. Gower’s concern was mainly about language in the bill that required the department to establish a “permanent” address for inmates – despite the fact that inmates have addresses assigned to them upon intake into the system.
Janice Thompson, the executive director of Democracy Reform Oregon, said the system is unfair to voters, and House Bill 2930 would restore fairness to the system.
“It counts people where they can vote,” she said. “You don’t count people where they can’t vote.”
She said she has researched other states and found that in some prison communities, there is a huge imbalance in city or county level representation.
“In (Anamosa) Iowa, there’s a prison in one ward where about 50 voters are represented by one city council member, compared to 1,500 in another,” she said.
Rep. Chris Edwards, a Democrat who represents a district encompassing west Eugene, said he thought the implications on local races was interesting.
“As somebody whose district will be the recipient of a prison soon, I hadn’t thought about the local level and how much difference that could make in a county commission race where we have 5 county commissioners and X number of (prisoners) concentrated in one area,” he said. “The effect would certainly be more profound. Not just a shift in one area of the state to another, but actually people that potentially never resided in the county at all. It seems even more obtuse to me.”
http://www.theskanner.com/index.php?action=artd&artid=8749

Posted by lois at 10:24 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Camp Gabriels Hopes to Become a "Treatment Center" in response to changes in Rockeffer Drug Laws

They never give up thinking about how to lock people up!

Senator pushes plan to turn Camp Gabriels into a treatment center
By EMILY HUNKLER, Enterprise Staff Writer
March 6, 2009

GABRIELS - Local institutions and politicians have come together to once again try and save Camp Gabriels, and this time it would mean turning the prison into a treatment center for drug-and alcohol-addicted, nonviolent offenders.

In an effort to showcase the potential of Camp Gabriels becoming a transitional treatment prison, state Sen. Betty Little, R-Queensbury, toured the facilities Thursday with Sen. Ruth Hassell-Thompson, chairwoman of the Crime Victims, Crime and Corrections Committee, which oversees the state Department of Correctional Services. Representatives from the governor's offices and the state Department of Correctional Services were also there.

"If I thought this was an impossible situation, I would have said to Betty, 'It won't work, it's too far north,'" Hassell-Thompson, D-Bronx, said, sitting at a table in Gus's Diner following the tour. "But I'm not clear that we have the shovel-ready plan that we need to have in order to qualify (for federal stimulus money)."

Little said it was important to remember that, unlike more metropolitan prisons, there is little other use for the Camp Gabriels facility, and not many opportunities in the area to absorb the displaced workforce.

"If 30 families moved as a result, those 30 families affect the schools and the retail stores and the diners," Little said. "A lot of those corrections officers are volunteer firemen; there's a real trickle-down effect here that will be felt."

Gov. David Paterson announced in December his proposal to close New York's four minimum-security prison camps as a means of saving money, citing declining prison population as a reason.

The plan proposed to keep it open, still very much in the conceptual stages, would partner Camp Gabriels with St. Joseph's Rehabilitation Center in Saranac Lake to provide addiction treatment services for the inmates, and Paul Smith's College has proposed renovating the prison's kitchen and creating a culinary program for inmates to earn professional certificates before being released.

"I haven't seen many facilities that are this open, not having walls, and when you have a rehabilitated person going from a less secured facility to a community, it's an easier transition," said Mary Kavaney, the deputy commissioner and counsel for the state Department of Correctional Services. "I don't think you can have that transition from behind the wall to the community without some other step. So it's very unique in that way."

And the plan seems to be in line with Paterson's hopes of reforming the Rockefeller drug laws, to change the emphasis from incarceration to treatment.

According to St. Joseph's Rehabilitation Center CEO Bob Ross, of the 13,400 New York inmates serving drug offense sentences, 39 percent of those are for possession, not dealing, and 80 percent have never been convicted of a violent offense.

But first, a plan must be developed.

Ross said he plans to work with the senators to create a comprehensive plan and cost-benefit analysis of the proposed programs.

"With this kind of program, the costs are worth the costs," Little said.

Mike Facteau, chief steward for Camp Gabriels, said he thought the tour was very positive and looks forward to progress.

"These inmates are going to be going back to her (Hassell-Thompson's) area, and she just wants to make sure that those inmates have the best credentials when they return," he said, adding that the corrections officers are anxious to know the outcome. "They're apprehensive. They know it all depends on the budget. But there is always hope. You never give up."

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

NY: Press Release from Gov. Paterson on Major Changes to Rockefeller Drug Laws!!

(Scroll down for specific reforms.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
March 27, 2009

GOVERNOR PATERSON AND LEGISLATIVE LEADERS ANNOUNCE THREE-WAY AGREEMENT TO REFORM NEW YORK STATE’S ROCKEFELLER DRUG LAWS

Sweeping Reform Ends Harsh Sentences for Non-violent Addicts

Focuses on Treatment Rather than Punishment to End the Cycle of Addiction

Governor David A. Paterson, Senate Majority Leader Malcolm A. Smith and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver today announced a three-way agreement calling for sweeping reform of the State’s Rockefeller Drug Laws. The agreement eliminates the harsh sentences that the Rockefeller Drug Laws mandated by giving judges total authority to divert non-violent addicts to treatment and greatly expanding drug treatment programs. The agreement strikes a careful and appropriate balance to ensure that non-violent addicted offenders get the treatment they need while predatory kingpins get the punishment they deserve.

“I have been fighting to overhaul the drug laws and restore judicial discretion in narcotics cases since I began my career in public service as a State Senator nearly a quarter-century ago,” Governor Paterson said. “As a resident and representative of Harlem, I saw first-hand the devastating effect that drugs have on our communities, and the devastating effect that ill-considered drug laws and drug policies have had on individuals, families and neighborhoods.”

The Governor added: “I have seen too many lives destroyed by outrageously harsh and ineffective mandatory sentencing laws, and I have also seen too many lives ruined by despicable dealers who prey on the vulnerabilities and addictions of others. I believe this agreement strikes the right balance, and I urge the Legislature to enact it immediately, before more lives and communities are needlessly destroyed.”

Senate Majority Leader Smith said: “Today marks the beginning of a new era for New York’s sentencing laws. Rockefeller Drug Law reform will reverse years of ineffective criminal laws, protect communities and save taxpayers millions of dollars that were wasted on the current policy. With more money going toward treatment instead of costly imprisonment, our State will finally have a smarter policy, giving families a fighting chance in the war on drugs.”

Assembly Speaker Silver said: “Long before we had partners in either the Executive or in the Senate, the Assembly Majority was fighting for real reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. With this legislation, we have taken, at long last, a giant leap in establishing a more just, a more humane and a more effective drug policy in the State of New York. No longer will drug use and addiction be considered solely a criminal matter in this State, but a public health matter as well. This legislation recognizes that drug addiction is a disease which calls out for treatment rather than incarceration. I commend the tenacity and the dedication of my colleagues and the leadership of Assemblymembers Aubry, Lentol and Weinstein for their unyielding commitment to this issue.”

Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson said: “Today, the Governor and the Legislature have agreed on a major change in public policy. We have created a balanced approach to drug addiction and crime. Our ability to reduce the flow of drugs in our communities is dependent on our ability to reduce the demand. We are now shifting resources to treat drug addiction as a medical problem. By diverting addicts to drug treatment courts, we believe we can get people off drugs and thereby reduce the demand for them. Study after study shows that our policies will make our communities safer and save the taxpayers millions of dollars. Today, we begin anew, offering offenders an opportunity to receive treatment, while maintaining that the safety and security of our neighborhoods, cities, and State remains paramount.”

Senator John L. Sampson said: “This is a promise made, and a promise kept. The Rockefeller Drug Laws have decimated communities and destroyed lives. Our Democratic conference said that once in the Majority we would be instrumental in making changes that positively impact all people across our State. Taking on this issue in our first year as the Majority shows the people that the Senate is serious and will not back down from the big issues. Reforms we made in 2004 were just a down payment, we’ve now paid off the mortgage. So I congratulate the Governor and members of the Assembly. I also congratulate my colleagues, Senators Schneiderman and Hassell-Thompson, who along with myself, were at the table and the forefront of the push to reform the Rockefeller Drug Laws.”

Senator Eric T. Schneiderman said: “This legislation delivers a big dose of sanity to our State’s sentencing practices. It will make our communities safer, save money and, most importantly, save lives. Thousands of people from every corner of this State will benefit from these reforms. Today NewYork chooses treatment over incarceration—30 years is enough.”

Assemblyman Jeffrion L. Aubry said: “My Assembly colleagues and I continue in our pledge not to give up our fight for greater reform of New York State’s ineffective and imprudent drug laws. While today’s agreement brings us closer to our goal, we recognize the need to do more. We will continue to work with our partners to completely reform the Rockefeller Drug Laws.”

Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol said: “Thirty-six years ago I voted against the enactment of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. It was clear to me that simply locking drug offenders away without treatment would not be effective. I am pleased that we are finally towards turning this travesty around and judges will once again have more of the discretion they need.”

Assemblywoman Helene E. Weinstein said: “Judicial discretion has always been one of the core principles for which the Assembly has fought. With the expansion of drug courts and other options to treat addicts, we are moving toward dealing with the underlying problems of drug offenders – giving them the opportunity to get treatment and reduce recidivism in New York.”

The agreement will give judges the discretion to divert non-violent drug addicted individuals to treatment alternatives that are shown to be far more successful than prison in ending the cycle of addiction. Crucially, it also commits tens of millions of dollars to existing and new treatment programs.

“It makes no sense to give judges the authority to place non-violent addicted offenders into treatment if there is nowhere to treat them,” Governor Paterson said. “We must not only overhaul the drug laws, but also provide an infrastructure to ensure that we successfully rehabilitate those who are addicted.”

There are three significant pieces of the agreement. First, it creates a drug treatment program to be administered by drug court judges.

+ Under this program, judges will have discretion to place addicted first and second-time drug offenders into judicially-approved alcohol and substance abuse treatment – over the objectionsof prosecutors.

+ This agreement also recognizes that drug-addicted persons often commit other crimes, such as property and theft offenses. This agreement will make treatment available to these non-violent addicted offenders who commit these offenses.
+ The agreement maximizes an addicted offender’s chance of success in overcoming addiction, by relying on New York’s highly successful drug courts to administer the new treatment model. Drug courts use specially-trained judges who build relationships with offenders, closely monitor their progress and reward their successes. They are also staffed with case managers and vocational and employment specialists to assist offenders in obtaining education and jobs.

+ For the first time, the agreement gives judges the authority to dismiss all charges or seal the arrest and conviction records of offenders who successfully complete a judicially-sanctioned treatment program. It also gives judges complete discretion to determine an appropriate penalty for those offenders who are unable to succeed in the treatment program.
+ The agreement recognizes that relapses are often part of recovery from long-term drug addiction. It would require judges to consider whether a non-incarceratory remedy, such as heightened supervision or more frequent testing and treatment, could effectively be used if an offender under court supervision suffers a relapse.
+ The agreement vastly expands the availability of drug treatment programs and commits tens of millions of dollars to inpatient treatment programs, outpatient treatment programs and community residential facilities.

+ Recognizing that some offenders may require more supervision than can be provided through community-based drug treatment programs, the agreement expands the use of programs such as the “shock” incarceration program and the Willard drug treatment program, to give judges additional sentencing options for these offenders.
+ The agreement also permits the State Division of Parole to discharge early from continued parole supervision those drug offenders who have demonstrated success and rehabilitation while serving a term of post-release supervision.

Second, the agreement relieves new offenders from some of the old Rockefeller Drug Law’s mandatory sentencing provisions and provides additional relief to offenders who remain incarcerated under the old laws.

+ The agreement eliminates mandatory State prison sentences for first-time class B felony drug offenders and second-time non-violent class C, D and E drug offenders, making them eligible for a term of probation that could also include drug treatment, or a local jail sentence.

+ The agreement permits class B drug felons who meet eligibility criteria and who are currently serving Rockefeller Drug Law sentences to enter the six-month shock incarceration program when they are within three years of release. If successful, they would be entitled to early release from prison.
+ The agreement also requires the Board of Parole to consider current, lower sentencing ranges when deciding whether to release a class B drug offender to parole supervision.

Third, the agreement ensures that offenders who are not addicted, but who profit from the addictions of others, are appropriately sentenced to State prison.

+ The Governor believes that law enforcement should target drug kingpins instead of low-level drug users and his agreement creates a new drug “kingpin” offense that targets organized drug traffickers who profit from and prey on drug users.
+ The agreement also creates new crimes to ensure that adults who sell drugs to children are appropriately required to serve time in State prison.

+ Finally, the agreement retains mandatory prison sentences for class B predicate drug offenders, but allows judges to impose lower prison terms that are similar to those in other states.

Posted by lois at 09:54 PM | Comments (0)

SF: EVENT TO SHED LIGHT ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SURVIVORS IN CALIFORNIA'S PRISONS

SF: EVENT TO SHED LIGHT ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SURVIVORS IN CALIFORNIA'S PRISONS
March 27, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A group of formerly incarcerated battered women will gather Saturday in San Francisco to call for more survivors of domestic violence to be freed from California's prisons.

Organizers hope to shed light on some cases where women were convicted of killing their abusers and served decades in prison before being paroled, or are still incarcerated.

"First, our communities failed to protect them and their children from their abusers' violence, and then failed to consider how the abuse they experienced related to the crime," said Emily Harris of the advocacy group Free Battered Women.

"They're not a threat to society, and they're one of many populations the governor could be looking at as a way of alleviating prison overcrowding," said Harris.

She also argued the move would save the state much-needed money.

Recent laws in California have allowed women incarcerated for killing their abusers to challenge their sentences, using evidence about the effects of domestic abuse.

According to Harris, of the approximately 11,000 women in prison in California, 80 percent have said they've experienced some kind of abuse either as children or adults, and 60 percent have reported physical abuse as adults, primarily from their spouses or domestic partners.

Of that 60 percent, hundreds are in prison for killing their spouses or domestic partners, as an act of defense either of themselves or their children, Harris maintained.

Saturday's event will feature 15 women who will speak about their experiences, read poetry, and discuss pending cases. It begins at 4 p.m. at the Women's Building at 3543 18th St.
http://cbs5.com/localwire/22.0.html?type=bcn&item=SF-BATTERED-WOMEN-bagm-#

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

March 27, 2009

Amnesty International: USA: Conditions must be improved at Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois

Document - USA: Conditions must be improved at Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
PUBLIC STATEMENT
AI index: AMR 51/042/2009
25 March 2009
USA: Conditions must be improved at Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois
According to Amnesty International’s information, prisoners at Tamms are confined alone for 23 or 24 hours a day in sparsely equipped concrete cells, with no work or group educational or recreational programs. All meals are taken in the cells. Prisoners exercise alone for a maximum of 5-7 hours a week in a high-walled, bare, partially-covered yard with no view apart from a small section of sky. The cell doors are made of heavy gauge perforated steel and are difficult to see through, compounding the sense of isolation. The narrow horizontal windows in each cell are positioned too high to see outside, unless the prisoner stands on his bed.

Contact with the outside world is also severely restricted, with prisoners denied phone calls and allowed only non-contact visits, conducted through a thick glass screen and intercom system. Prisoners are chained to the floor during visits and some have their wrists shackled together, allowing little movement. Despite the stringent security measures, prisoners are reportedly subjected to strip searches, including body cavity searches, before and after each visit. Because of the conditions imposed, and the remote location of the facility, many prisoners reportedly receive visits only rarely.

The prison was designed to house inmates considered too disruptive or dangerous to remain in the state’s general prison population, while providing a means by which prisoners could move back to less restrictive facilities if their behaviour improved. However, Amnesty International is concerned by the reported secrecy and lack of transparency in current procedures for transferring prisoners to and from Tamms, and the absence of any external oversight of such decisions. According to prison monitoring bodies, many prisoners are unaware of why they have been denied requests to transfer out of Tamms. More than 80 prisoners (around a third of the total) are believed to have been held in the facility for at least ten years, many since it opened in 1998, without any reasonable means of gaining release from their indefinite solitary confinement.

Some prisoners have alleged that they were transferred to the prison in retaliation for filing repeated complaints about their treatment. Others reportedly remain in the prison for failing to renounce alleged gang affiliations which they state would put themselves or their families in danger; others claim they were erroneously assigned gang member status but the internal review process does not allow them to challenge this effectively.

Amnesty International is also concerned by reports that a significant number of prisoners currently housed in Tamms suffer from mental illness or psychological problems which are exacerbated by the harsh conditions of isolation. Prisoners have been described as engaging in disturbed behaviours such as self-mutilation, smearing faeces on cell surfaces, throwing bodily liquids or howling. It is alleged that seriously mentally ill prisoners, or those with histories of mental illness, have been sent to Tamms despite regulations which allow for the exclusion of such individuals from the facility.

There is a significant body of evidence in the USA and elsewhere that prolonged isolation can cause serious psychological and physical harm, particularly if accompanied by other deprivations such lack of external stimuli, confinement to an enclosed space and inadequate exercise. Such conditions can have a severe impact on individuals with no pre-existing health problems, and may cause particular harm and suffering in the case of those who are already mentally ill.

Amnesty International recognizes that it may sometimes be necessary to segregate prisoners for disciplinary or security purposes. However, it is concerned that the current conditions at Tamms, taken cumulatively and applied over a prolonged period, are incompatible with the USA’s obligations to provide humane treatment for all prisoners.

The USA has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 10 of which requires that “all persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and respect for the inherent dignity of the human person”. The Human Rights Committee (the treaty monitoring body) has further emphasized that the absolute prohibition of torture or cruel inhuman or degrading treatment under international law “relates not only to acts that cause physical pain but also to acts that cause mental suffering” and has stated that prolonged solitary confinement may amount to torture or other ill-treatment. Both the Human Rights Committee and the United Nations (UN) Committee against Torture have criticized the excessively harsh conditions of isolation in some US supermax facilities.

Amnesty International believes that Bill HB2633, if enacted, would be an important step to providing fairer standards, accountability and oversight of the operation of Tamms. The organization is also urging the authorities to alleviate conditions for all prisoners who remain at the facility, including improving the exercise facilities, reviewing visitation conditions and providing some opportunity to participate in rehabilitation programs.

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

MO: System Treats Juvenile Offenders With Lighter Hand

Missouri System Treats Juvenile Offenders With Lighter Hand

By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: March 26, 2009
NY Times

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — VonErrick celebrated his 14th birthday last year by committing a daylight carjacking, beating the driver to the ground. With a long record of truancy, assault, and breaking and entering, he was sent to a state group home — the same home that his two older brothers passed through after their own scrapes with the law.

Both of those brothers are out now. Tory, 16, has A grades and plans to attend college. Terry, 20, has a job and has had a clean record for four years. VonErrick was recently released and immediately started high school.

The brothers say they benefited from confinement in the Missouri juvenile system, which emphasizes rehabilitation in small groups, constant therapeutic interventions and minimal force.

Juvenile justice experts across the nation say that the approach, known as the Missouri Model, is one of several promising reform movements that strapped states are trying to reduce the costly confinement of youths. California, which spends more than $200,000 a year on each incarcerated juvenile, reallocated $93 million in prison expenses by reducing state confinement.

There is no barbed wire around facilities like Missouri Hills, on the outskirts of St. Louis. No more than 10 youths and 2 adults called facilitators live in cottage-style dormitories in a wooded setting, a far cry from the quasi penitentiaries in other states. When someone becomes unruly, the other youths are trained to talk him down. Perhaps most impressive, Missouri has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the country.

Other states, including Florida, Illinois and Louisiana, have moved in a similar direction, focusing on improving conditions at state facilities to keep young offenders from returning.

Some states have worked at the county level to avoid confinement altogether, keeping youths in their communities while they receive rehabilitative services, which advocates say is a cheaper alternative to residential care.

The two largest state systems, Texas and California, cut long-term youth confinement by requiring counties to house low-level offenders in detention halls. Texas cut its 5,000-youth population by half within two years, while California reduced its population to 2,500, from more than 10,000 in 1997. But critics say that city and county detention programs are uneven and point out that states often do a poor job of monitoring them.

Missouri and other states are using new approaches in the juvenile justice system to try to stem the flow of adults behind bars. Missouri managed to cut its adult population from 2005 through the first half of 2007 by applying techniques from the Missouri Model.

The reforms have begun to have a national impact, with a 12 percent decrease in juvenile offenders from 1997 to 2006, from 105,000 youths to 93,000.

Most of the decline during that period was in state confinements, although some of the decrease is attributed to a 28 percent decline in youth arrests, which reform advocates say proves that there is no detriment associated with fewer incarcerated juveniles.

The Anne E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore has been a leading advocate for ending the confinement of low-risk offenders and placing them in community programs. Since trying the foundation’s approach in 2003, five counties in New Jersey have reduced juvenile detention by 42 percent, to 288 youths from 499.

Three years ago in California, Scott MacDonald, who is in charge of probation in Santa Cruz County, began asking courts to use Casey Foundation methods. Instead of confining every gang member accused of a crime, or every juvenile who failed a drug test, judges now look at a youth’s record and risk to determine whether he should remain free. A youth who fails a drug test, for example, might be ordered to attend substance abuse classes.

“Even if a kid doesn’t follow all of the rules — particularly rules that have nothing to do with crime — we won’t necessarily detain him,” Mr. MacDonald said.

In the 1990s, the Santa Cruz juvenile hall averaged 50 to 60 youths. Now it averages about 20 detainees, most of them under community supervision. More than 90 percent of those in the community programs have not committed new crimes within three years, Mr. McDonald said.

“The question we’re always starting with is, How do we keep them home?” he said.

Isela Gutierrez, a juvenile justice expert with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a nonprofit group, said one drawback to the Missouri state system was that too many low-level offenders there were being confined, while serious juvenile felons were being sent to adult prisons, where conditions are harsher.

Tim Decker, director of the Missouri Division of Youth Services, said judges preferred to send youths to state facilities — Missouri Hills or the Hogan Street Regional Youth Center, with dorms that have wooden beds, male health and wellness classes, group counseling and game rooms — rather than dismal county lockups or to backlogged community programs.

“Judges have more faith in us,” Mr. Decker said. “So far we’re O.K., but you can’t do what we do with 25 kids in a group.”

Missouri Hills is clean and homey, with plush couches, stuffed animals on the bunks, and a dog rescued from the pound. The violence that plagues many juvenile prisons is also absent.

In a typical juvenile corrections environment, Mr. Decker said, if a youth becomes aggressive “you would have guards drag him into isolation” for three days.

“But,” he added, “the problem is that a young person doesn’t learn how to avoid that aggressive behavior and it will get worse.”

In Missouri Hills, isolation rooms were used only about a dozen times last year, Mr. Decker said, and never for more than a few hours. Pepper spray is banned, and youths are taught to de-escalate fights or apply grappling holds, a form of restraint.

Victoria, 16, who stole her grandmother’s car, her second offense, explained how her housing unit does a “circle-up,” or ad hoc counseling session, several times a day, whenever there is a conflict, like cursing.

“There’s drama all the time,” she said. “It’s like having a bunch of sisters.”

The Missouri system provided triage for an imploding system in Washington, where the juvenile corrections agency was plagued by vermin-infested buildings, overcrowding and chronic violence.

“The kids were stuffing their shirts with paper before they went to sleep to keep the roaches and rats from biting them,” said Vincent Schiraldi, head of the city’s Division of Rehabilitative Services.

With advice from experts in Missouri, Mr. Schiraldi divided platoons of youths into small groups. By October, the number of juveniles reconvicted within a year of release dropped to 25 percent, from 31 percent four years earlier. However, as conditions improved, confinements have risen, even as juvenile crime has declined.

Mr. Decker said that upgrading facilities and training new staff cost more initially, but that the reforms would reduce recidivism, which would result in long-term savings.

VonErrick has been home for a few weeks, and his 18-year-old sister said he seemed calmer and less interested in running with the wrong crowd. Their mother, Rosie Williams, said all three of her sons seemed more focused, and she attributed the changes to the counselors at the state group home.

Ms. Williams, whose husband is in prison, occasionally attended family counseling sessions where she said she learned important lessons as a parent. “Instead of just hollering at them and trying to keep them out of trouble,” she said, “I try to do things with them one on one, to get to know what’s on their mind and what’s going on in their lives.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/27juvenile.html

Posted by lois at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)

PA: Despite Red Flags, Judges’ Kickback Scheme Thrived and PA Supreme CT Orders Records Of Youth Fraudulently Sentenced to be Expunged

Clean Slates for Youths Sentenced Fraudulently
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
March 26, 2009- NY Times
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on Thursday ordered the slate cleaned for hundreds of youths who had been sentenced by a corrupt judge.

The young people had been sent to privately run detention centers from 2003 to 2008 as part of a judicial kickback scheme that shocked Pennsylvania and the nation. The judge in the cases, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. of Luzerne County, is one of two who pleaded guilty last month to wire fraud and conspiracy for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks.

The exact number of records to be expunged was not stated in the court’s order; a special master is investigating the cases.

Judge Ciavarella and the other judge, Michael T. Conahan, admitted that they had agreed to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers that paid them for the business. Under their agreements, the judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and will resign from the bench and from the bar.

The judges worked in tandem, beginning in 2002, with Judge Conahan controlling the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts. They shut down a detention center run by the county and began sending the youngsters to newly built detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

Judge Ciavarella has said he did not sentence juveniles who did not deserve the punishment, but the numbers suggested a different story: he sent one in four of the juvenile defendants to the detention centers from 2002 to 2006, while the rate elsewhere in the state was 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency, even when they were made by prosecutors and probation officers. His record for harsh treatment of juveniles had already made him a focus of complaints by youth advocacy groups.

The court on Thursday authorized the master to vacate judgments and consent decrees and to expunge the records where necessary. The special master had submitted an 11-page report that found “there was routine deprivation of children’s constitutional rights.”

The special master, Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim of Berks County, was appointed last month by the State Supreme Court to investigate whether a “travesty of juvenile justice” had occurred.

He recommended vacating judgments and expunging records in cases from 2003 to 2008 in which the youth was not represented by a lawyer and did not knowingly waive the right to counsel, and which included relatively minor offenses like third-degree misdemeanors.

“Today’s order is not intended to be a quick fix,” Ronald D. Castille, the chief judge of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “It’s going to take some time, but the Supreme Court is committed to righting whatever wrong was perpetrated on Luzerne’s juveniles and their families.”

The Supreme Court’s order on Thursday should be only the beginning, said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

“Our view is that every kid who appeared before Judge Ciavarella was denied an impartial tribunal,” Ms. Levick said.

Michael J. Cefalo, a lawyer representing hundreds of the juveniles, said in an interview that “this is a great step” for his clients. The teenagers, he said, have been “pretty well smashed here” by the system, and so “it’s a reassurance for them that the system works.”

Ruby Cherise Uca, whose son Chad was sent away by Judge Ciavarella for three months in 2005, said that expungement would be welcome, but that her son expresses anger over the length of the judge’s sentence. “He wishes that they added up all the days that he had convicted each of the children wrongfully, and give him that sentence,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/27judges.html?scp=2&sq=Pennsylvania&st=cse

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Despite Red Flags, Judges’ Kickback Scheme Thrived

By IAN URBINA
Published: March 27, 2009
NY Times

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — Things were different in the Luzerne County juvenile courtroom, and everyone knew it. Proceedings on average took less than two minutes. Detention center workers were told in advance how many juveniles to expect at the end of each day — even before hearings to determine their innocence or guilt. Lawyers told families not to bother hiring them. They would not be allowed to speak anyway.

“The judge’s whim is all that mattered in that courtroom,” said Marsha Levick, the legal director of the Juvenile Law Center, a child advocacy organization in Philadelphia, which began raising concerns about the court to state authorities in 1999. “The law was basically irrelevant.”

Last month, the law caught up with Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, who ran that juvenile court for 12 years, and Judge Michael T. Conahan, 56, a colleague on the county’s Court of Common Pleas.

In what authorities are calling the biggest legal scandal in state history, the two judges pleaded guilty to tax evasion and wire fraud in a scheme that involved sending thousands of juveniles to two private detention centers in exchange for $2.6 million in kickbacks.

On Thursday, the State Supreme Court ordered that the records be cleaned for hundreds of the 2,500 or so juveniles sentenced by Judge Ciavarella, and in the coming weeks, the two judges will be sentenced, under a plea agreement, to more than seven years in prison.

While the scandal continues to ripple nationally as legal experts debate whether juvenile courts have sufficient oversight, here in Luzerne County people are grappling with more immediate questions: How did two native sons, elected twice to the bench to protect children and serve justice, decide to do the opposite? And why did no one stop them?

Old Friends Hatch a Plan

It all started in June 2000 with a simple business proposition, according to the judges’ indictment and more than 40 interviews with courtroom workers, authorities and others.

Robert J. Powell, a wealthy personal-injury lawyer from Hazelton and longtime friend of Judge Conahan, wanted to know how he might get a contract to build a private detention center. Judge Ciavarella thought he could help.

The two men agreed to meet and, according to prosecutors, somewhere in that conversation a plan was hatched that courthouse workers and county officials would later describe as a “freight train without brakes.”

First, Judge Ciavarella put Mr. Powell in touch with a developer who also happened to be an old friend, Robert K. Mericle, to start work on finding a site. Then, in January 2002 — the month Judge Conahan became president judge, giving him control of the courthouse budget — he signed a secret deal with Mr. Powell, agreeing that the court would pay $1.3 million in annual rent, on top of the tens of millions of dollars that the county and the state would pay to house the delinquent juveniles. And by the end of that year, Judge Conahan had gotten rid of the competition by eliminating financing for the county detention center.

“They were unstoppable,” said Judge Chester B. Muroski, who sent a letter to county commissioners raising concerns about detention costs, only to be transferred days later to another court by Judge Conahan. “I knew something was wrong, but they silenced all dissent.”

Other dissenters were also steamrolled.

When the county controller, Steve Flood, leaked a state audit that described the state’s lease of the center as a “bad deal,” the center’s owner filed a “trade secrets” lawsuit against Mr. Flood, and Judge Conahan sealed the suit to limit other documents’ getting out. His decision was later overturned.

“Everyone began to assume that the judges had some vested interest in the private center because they were pushing it so doggedly,” one courthouse worker said. Virtually all former colleagues and courthouse workers would not allow themselves to be identified because the federal investigation into the kickback scheme was continuing and they feared for their jobs if they alienated former allies of the judges.

Mr. Powell has not been charged. His lawyer said that the judges had coerced him into paying the kickbacks and that he was cooperating with investigators.

The few officials who had concerns at the time say their hands were tied. Probation officers say they suspected that something was amiss but were overruled every time they requested lighter sentences or for sentences to be served at home. County commissioners were the only ones authorized to sign contracts for detention centers. But by eliminating money for the county center, Judge Conahan left them little alternative but to sign on to the deal for the private facility.

Prosecutors say that by sentencing juveniles to detention at twice the state average, Judge Ciavarella was holding up his end of the bargain. And by late 2003, so much money was rolling in that the two judges were struggling to hide it all. So in 2004, they bought a $785,000 condominium together in Florida to help conceal the payments, and they began disguising transactions as rent and other related fees.

“We did what we could to stop it,” said Commissioner Stephen A. Urban, who repeatedly argued that the county should build its own center rather than lease the private one. “There were so many red flags that no one could mistake them as any other color.”

Disparate Upbringings

One red flag was the 56-foot yacht in front of the judges’ Florida condo, where they and Mr. Powell started spending much of their time. Owned by Mr. Powell, the $1.5 million boat was named the Reel Justice.

The conspicuous wealth Judge Ciavarella enjoyed in Florida was a far cry from the rough East End neighborhood in Wilkes-Barre where he grew up and is still known as “the local kid who made it big.”

A stellar athlete and student, Judge Ciavarella was the son of a brewery worker and a phone company operator. Nicknamed Scooch, like his father, he drove a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle for years, and even after moving away, he visited his aging mother daily until she died in 2007.

After law school at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Mr. Ciavarella ran for a seat on the county’s Court of Common Pleas in August 1994. On the bench, he became known for a stern hand in sentencing and a sharp wit in making sure everyone knew who was boss.

By contrast, Judge Conahan was known for being quiet, even secretive, on and off the bench. His neighbors observed that in a community known for holiday parties and open houses, no one they knew had ever seen the inside of Judge Conahan’s house.

Raised in Hazelton, on the other side of the county from Wilkes Barre, Judge Conahan came from money and had a political pedigree.

His father, who owned a funeral home, was Hazelton’s mayor from 1962 to 1974. Judge Conahan attended Villanova University and went to law school at Temple University.

Despite their differences, the two men became close friends on the bench, connected, former colleagues say, by a similarly stern view of justice.

In 2004, Judge Conahan bought the house next to Judge Ciavarella’s in Mountain Top, a wealthy suburb of Wilkes-Barre, where Mr. Powell also lives. The judges and their wives began sharing a recreational vehicle to tailgate at Penn State football games and vacationing together in Florida.

“They were pretty average guys,” Frank Monaco, the superintendent of the Florida condominium building, said of the judges and Mr. Powell. “Average for people with lots of money.”

Though the judges and Mr. Powell generally kept to themselves, Mr. Monaco said, they lost that low profile in 2004 after Mr. Powell got into a dispute with marina officials who wanted to end his slip lease. Mr. Powell went to court to force the marina to let him keep his boat there, but he filed his motion in Luzerne County, not Florida.

A colleague of Judge Conahan and Judge Ciavarella ruled in favor of Mr. Powell, despite a protest from the marina’s lawyer that the case should have been heard in Florida and that he could not attend the hearing because he had been given only one day’s notice.

“People at the marina thought that seemed like a real abuse of power,” Mr. Monaco said. The lawsuit was dropped after Mr. Powell moved his boat to another marina.

“You get enough power and you’re bound to start abusing it, I suppose,” Mr. Monaco said.

Troubling Trends

There was never doubt about who had the power in Courtroom 4 in the Luzerne County Courthouse. Though courteous, even jocular, Judge Ciavarella ran hearings with breakneck efficiency, cutting lawyers off when they rambled, scolding them when they arrived unprepared.

Sometimes, he helped his friends, too.

One courthouse worker recounted seeing a high school friend appear before Judge Ciavarella on a speeding charge. When the state trooper testified that he had clocked the man going 80 in a 55-mile-per-hour zone, the judge interrupted. “No, I think he was just going 60. Matter closed,” the worker recalled the judge saying. Shocked, the trooper turned to face the judge. “You’re dismissed,” the judge said.

But the juveniles being sentenced in that dim oak-paneled courtroom tended to be less lucky. Parents who arrived with their children typically left without them.

“Your arguments in sentencing weren’t persuasive,” said Basil G. Russin, the Luzerne County public defender, who represented many juveniles in Judge Ciavarella’s court. “You expected your kid to go away.”

While judges elsewhere in the state were shifting away from incarcerating juveniles for delinquency, Luzerne County was becoming infamous for imposing heavy sentences for minor infractions.

Kurt Kruger, for example, was 17 when he was sent to a boot camp for five months in 2004 for being a lookout for a friend who was stealing DVDs from a Wal-Mart. DayQuawn Johnson was 13 when he was sent to a detention center for several days in 2006 for failing to appear at a hearing as a witness to a fight, even though his family had never been notified about the hearing and he had already told school officials that he had not seen anything. Both juveniles were first-time offenders.

Judge Ciavarella had never made a secret about liking his justice swift and firm. Nicknamed Mr. Zero Tolerance in the courthouse, he once put a father in jail after he could not pay court-imposed fees for his daughter, whom the judge had previously locked up.

Asked last year why he did not make a habit of telling juveniles of their right to a lawyer before hearings, Judge Ciavarella said, “I just don’t believe I have to spoon-feed people to do things in their life.”

But as he pleaded guilty last month and admitted having “disgraced” the bench, Judge Ciavarella denied that payments had influenced his sentencing decisions.

State data, however, give a different picture. The number of juveniles he sent to secure facilities outside the home more than doubled from 2001 to 2002, around the time that the authorities say he and Judge Conahan hatched their kickback plan. And that sentencing trend — more than double the state average — continued through 2007, according to data analyzed by The New York Times. (No data was available for 2008.)

After the Juvenile Law Center appealed a case involving a child who was sentenced without a lawyer, Judge Ciavarella told reporters in 2000 that he would avoid letting juveniles appear without counsel in the future. But state data indicate that the problem only worsened. From 1997 to 2003, juveniles appeared before Judge Ciavarella without counsel at more than five times the state average, and from 2003 through 2007, that rate was around 10 times the state average.

Federal authorities have declined to say when they began investigating the judges. But these trends started worrying State Department of Public Welfare auditors in 2003, when they noticed that the county was billing the state for the same amount every month for detention services. In most other counties, the bill fluctuates based on the changing numbers of juvenile offenders each month.

In a separate review, state auditors found that the detention centers were systematically overbilling the county and that the centers had fallen behind in their bills and begun receiving shut-off notices from utility companies.

“Those were all red flags to us,” said Ted Dallas, executive deputy secretary for the Department of Public Welfare, adding that his office tried to work with the county to lower its use of detention because the state pays partial reimbursement for those costs.

But, like so many others, Mr. Dallas said there was little he could do. Since the centers were privately owned, state auditors had limited authority. And since the judges were on the side of the centers, the auditors had little recourse in the event of a conflict.

“In the end,” Mr. Dallas said, “it all came down to what the judge decided.”

Sean D. Hamill contributed reporting.

Posted by lois at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)

FL:Woman joins sex-offender group living under Julia Tuttle Causeway

Mar. 23, 2009
Woman joins sex-offender group living under Julia Tuttle Causeway
By FRED GRIMM. Miami Herald
It's as if Voncel Johnson has been thrust into a bizarre social experiment.

Forcing so many men to live like post-apocalyptic trolls beneath a bridge in the middle of Biscayne Bay wasn't quite mad enough. Now they've added a woman.

For two years, a colony of convicted sex offenders under the Julia Tuttle Causeway has lived in a public health travesty, without water or toilets or electrical service. They sleep in tents, shacks, the back seats of cars in the last realistic address in metropolitan Miami unaffected by city and county sex-offender residency laws.

The numbers have been growing steadily as more convicted sex offenders emerge from prison and are consigned to finish out their wretched lives under a bridge.

The population was up to 52 men Monday. And Voncel Johnson.

GENDER EQUITY

In a peculiar nod to gender equity, the Florida Department of Corrections informed her last week that she too had only one residency option in Miami-Dade County -- the Tuttle. ''They just give me a blanket and a pillow and sent me . . . here?'' she asked, talking over the incessant thump-thump-thump of the freeway traffic overhead. ``I just broke down.''

A community backward enough to create a subterranean de-facto prison camp of male sex offenders thrusts a single woman into the mix -- just to see what happens.

It's an ironic setting for Voncel Johnson. The 43-year-old woman, who grew up in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville section of Miami, told me she was sexually molested at age 6 and gang-raped at 16. ''I have a hard time trusting men,'' she said.

In 2004, Johnson pleaded guilty to a charge of lewd and lascivious exhibition (without physical contact) with a minor. She claimed Monday the charge was unfounded but at the time a plea offer with one year probation and no prison time seemed prudent. Except she twice failed to meet sex-offender registration requirements. Her probation was revoked. She did 10 months at Broward Correctional Institute.

COMMON REFRAIN

She repeated a common refrain -- sometimes delusional -- among the bridge outcasts. ``I never would have done that plea deal if I'd known they'd send me here. I could've fought those charges.''

But offender laws leave the state Department of Corrections no options for a sex offender. Voncel Johnson's parole officer did find her a motel room for three days last week. And she was offered a slot in a residential offender program in another county. But Johnson refused to leave Miami. ``All my family lives here. I've never been any place but Miami.''

It was probably a foolish decision, but Johnson harbors some vague notion about gutting it out beneath the Tuttle until her parole ends May 5. ''Then I can find some place to live.'' She seems unable to grasp that residency restrictions are forever.

Meanwhile, the men beneath the Tuttle gave her a battered old camper trailer. ''We watch out for her,'' insisted Juan Carlos Martin, who has been under the bridge so long that the address on his driver's license reads ''Julia Tuttle Causeway Bridge.'' He said it was as if city, county and state officials purposely cram more and more men into an unliveable, hopeless, crowded space, knowing that eventually something awful might happen. And now they add a woman.

Martin said, ``They need to get her out of here.''
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/columnists/fred-grimm/story/964528.html

Posted by lois at 11:03 PM | Comments (0)

"The Jim Crow Laws of the 21st Century": Will New York Change?

March 27, 2009
"The Jim Crow Laws of the 21st Century": Will New York Change?
Odile Weissenborn
Posted March 26, 2009
Huffington Post

Our new president came in on a platform of change, and just a few months after his inauguration, we're seeing some exceptional things. The pristine fountains on the White House lawn were dyed green this year for St. Patrick's day. Big-shot executives are now giving back their bonus pay! New government is shaking things up--and not just on a federal level.

In New York, the 36-year-old Rockefeller Drug Laws may be massively overhauled. With Democrats in charge of both arms of the NY State Legislature and in the governor's seat, reformers--joined by celebrities like Russell Simmons, P. Diddy, Susan Sarandon and Mariah Carey--have their big chance.

Passed under Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1973, the Rockefeller Drug Laws put anyone caught with 2 ounces or more of drugs (4 ounces for narcotics) in prison for a minimum of 15 years. Five years ago the minimum sentence was brought down a notch, to 8 years (and the amount of drugs needed to convict on certain charges was raised).

Judges can't consider the circumstances when imposing a sentence--criminal background, for example, or role in a crime--since prison sentences are mandated without exception. And judges are prohibited from ordering treatment or rehab as an alternative to incarceration. As a consequence, prisons have been steadily filling up these past 36 years with low-level nonviolent offenders.

Proponents of reform argue these prison sentences are ineffective and an injustice. They say low-level drug criminals aren't cured in prison cells; they argue taxpayer money should be spent on drug treatment programs or mental health services. They say most low-level offenders come from disadvantaged communities, and they're overwhelmingly of color. A report released two weeks ago by the NYCLU charged, "The Rockefeller Drug Laws are the Jim Crow laws of the 21st Century."

Others say the Rockefeller Drug Laws keep criminals locked up; they're a great help to prosecutors and law enforcement. They say handing offenders off to treatment facilities will just absolve them of responsibility. They say druggies will repopulate the streets, and neighborhoods will become dangerous again.

The New York Senate has been debating the issue. Instead of voting on it, they decided this year to throw it in with the budget. Some say that was a neat way to avoid a vote that the slim majority might lose, but Democrats said through their spokesman that "it's as much of a budget issue as it is a sentencing issue." They reason that alternatives to incarceration--like drug treatment services--cost money.

Palladia, one of New York City's largest multi-service nonprofits, has forty years of substance abuse treatment services under its belt. It would welcome more funding, but with caution. I spoke with Debbie Pantin, Vice President of Outpatient and Centralized Services and Susan Ohanesian, Vice President of Residential Services. "We must be prepared for significantly increased demands on these systems," they said. How the funding is used--what programs are put in place and how they are implemented--is just as important as actually getting the money.

And they aren't foolishly ready to absorb every single low-level offender. "The professional treatment community in New York understands that not everyone who is arrested for a drug crime is a drug user," they told me, but "we know that treatment works and that treatment is a more rational and cost effective solution...than is mandatory incarceration."

So treatment works, okay. But why can't prisoners receive treatment in prison? Because data and studies prove that services offered in prison for addicts (or for those suffering from mental illness) are woefully inadequate. Last month, the abysmal level of care in its prison system prompted a federal court to order the state of California to simply release tens of thousands of inmates, up to one third of all its prisoners. The ruling reads, "There is no relief other than a prison release order that can remedy the constitutionally inadequate medical and mental health care."

And this brings us back to the Rockefeller Drug Laws which have been sending a stream of low-level drug offenders to prison. According to the Partnership for Responsible Drug Information, "The percentage of the prison population incarcerated for drug offenses has been increasing since 1973, the year the Rockefeller Drug Laws were enacted."

And the New York State Assembly's own website says the Rockefeller Drug Laws are the reason that "large numbers of drug offenders continue to be incarcerated in New York State prisons. As of January 1, 2008, 13,425 drug offenders were in state prison representing more than 21% of the male prison population and more than 33% of the female population." Nationally (remember California?), the prison population has nearly tripled.

But wait. The Big Apple is bucking the trend. "According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, New York had the largest decrease in the rate of incarceration of any state in the nation from 2000 to 2007, even as the incarceration rate increased in 37 other states," Brian Fischer, Commissioner of the New York State Department of Correctional Services, said last month. So if New York's prison population is declining, where's the problem? Why are reformers who say prison is a waste of money still protesting?

Because they don't just want a smaller prison population, they want better alternative-to-incarceration programs. In fact, many people attribute the prisoner decline to the success of these programs, for example the drug treatment programs offered by Palladia.

Some are afraid that "alternative to incarceration" are fancy words for being soft on crime. Who better to ask than a former federal prosecutor?

At the Department of Justice, Paul Butler handled drug cases and prosecuted a U.S. Senator, FBI agents, and other law enforcement officials. Now a professor at George Washington University Law School, Paul Butler is not soft on crime. "I think incarceration should play a role. There are some people who deserve prison," he told me. "But there are literally hundreds of thousands of people now who don't deserve to be there."

The low-level nonviolent drug offenders targeted by Rockefeller Drug Laws, says Butler, don't belong in prison. "When you lock someone up with a violent offender for years, in fact it makes us less safe. If it helped us by making it safer then maybe it would be worth it, but it doesn't have that effect," he points out. "And you can certainly get drugs in prison, so it's not like it's preventing you from using drugs."

After 17 years in prison, Paul Wright is now editor of Prison Legal News, which he co-founded while incarcerated. "If you ask me of a single positive aspect about going to prison," he said to me, "I'm at a loss to name one. Prisons in this country, they're not just brutalizing and dehumanizing, but the negative effects far outstrip the positives: job loss, loss of housing. Putting people in prisons is a pretty drastic step." He went on to say that drug crimes are best prevented through treatment. When I asked about drug treatment in prison, he said, "We should try to keep people out of prisons in the first place."

Butler, perhaps surprisingly, agrees. Beyond saying incarceration is inappropriate for those nabbed by the Rockefeller Drug Laws, he explains how mass incarceration isn't an appropriate solution to crime. "Although it's counterintuitive," he admits, "If fewer people go to prison, public safety will benefit." He says there's a tipping point; prisons reduce crime to a point, but when too many are incarcerated, society suffers. Reducing incarceration will lead to a reduction in crime. This is exactly what we're witnessing in New York, and the trend will continue, says Butler, if reform continues.

In Butler's forthcoming book, Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, he explains why incarceration is innately harmful (this view is actually an academic theory). Perhaps the most interesting concept is that "the policy of mass incarceration creates the reasonable expectation that many people are going to go to prison." Prison becomes a rite of passage, and "mass incarceration changes the way that people think about crime and punishment....If you expect to do some time, the deterrent effect of the criminal law disappears."

Butler isn't alone in his views, and even for a former DOJ prosecutor, his support for alternatives to incarceration isn't that radical. The former presidents of Colombia, Mexico and Brazil, fed up with the failure of the war on drugs, also recommend alternatives to incarceration. Their op-ed last month in the Wall Street Journal sounded like an ode to Rockefeller Drug Law reform: "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."

New York's Governor Paterson agrees. In his first State of the State address, on January 7, he said, "I can't think of a criminal justice strategy that has been more unsuccessful than the Rockefeller Drug Laws." But he somehow has to satisfy his conservative constituents, like those at the Daily News who say reform of the Drug Laws would put "hardened criminals...in line for easy breaks."

Those who are afraid of being soft on crime may want to look elsewhere. The high cost of trials is what's making us soft on crime--not the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Richard Deiter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, was interviewed by Solomon Moore of the New York Times, who wrote, "in June, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice reported that the death penalty system cost $138 million a year." According to Deiter, "the economic meltdown and budget constraints were dissuading prosecutors from seeking capital trials, which usually cost millions of dollars and take decades to complete."

The expense of trials, and prison, is especially relevant in today's economic climate. Columnist and pundit Errol Louis has been reminding us that reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws could save us money. "With the state facing a $2 billion deficit, it's fiscally foolish," he writes, "to slap nonviolent, first-time drug offenders with 15-year mandatory minimum sentences." He says we can use the money we'd save on alternative-to-incarceration programs. "Justice reinvestment," he calls this. "Spending prison money in ways that cut down on crime and those expensive cells." Drug treatment, for example, is a lot cheaper than paying "rent" on a cell.

In October of 2002, some folks were arrested outside then-governor Pataki's office. They were protesting the Rockefeller Drug Laws. Among them, given a summons for disorderly conduct, was Nelson Rockefeller's very own granddaughter. An incredible reversal--kind of like Madoff going to jail, and like all the other change we're seeing now. Some things, though, shouldn't change.

Guess who was with Nelson's granddaughter in 2002, arrested alongside her in an effort to change the Rockefeller Drug Laws? Governor Paterson. I hope he still has that fighting spirit; I hope he hasn't changed.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/odile-weissenborn/the-jim-crow-laws-of-the_b_178245.html

Posted by lois at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2009

The National Criminal Justice Act of 2009- will undertake a top-to bottom review of our entire criminal justice system and offer recommendations for reform"

Senator Jim Webb of VA has introduced The National Criminal Justice Act of 2009 today.

I encourage you to take a few minutes and read the full-bill http://webb.senate.gov/email/incardocs/CriminalJusticeReform_Legislation.pdf

Here is a fact sheet on the Bill (http://webb.senate.gov/email/incardocs/FactSheeti.pdf), which according to Senator Webb will be "undertake a top-to-bottom review of our entire criminal justice system" and to offer recommendations for reform."

Please encourage your Senators and Congresspeople to support passage of the Act.

Here is part of Webb's statement:

The National Criminal Justice Act of 2009 that I introduced in the Senate on March 26, 2009 will create a blue-ribbon commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom. I believe that it is time to bring together the best minds in America to confer, report, and make concrete recommendations about how we can reform the process.

Why We Urgently Need this Legislation:
With 5% of the world's population, our country now houses 25% of the world's reported prisoners.
Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980.
Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals.
Approximately 1 million gang members reside in the U.S., many of them foreign-based; and Mexican cartels operate in 230+ communities across the country.
Post-incarceration re-entry programs are haphazard and often nonexistent, undermining public safety and making it extremely difficult for ex-offenders to become full, contributing members of society.

America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.

We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration.

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

MD: Parole Fee Burdens People Trying to Rebuild Their Lives

Parole fee burdens ex-offenders

Average $750 debt hinders efforts to rebuild life after prison, study says
Baltimore Sun
By Julie Scharper
March 23, 2009

Andrea Brinkley, a mother of three, says she did not realize that she owed a parole supervision fee until she received a bill for $2,200. She works as a housekeeper at Mercy Hospital in Baltimore. (Baltimore Sun photo by Lloyd Fox / March 20, 2009)

A monthly fee charged to Maryland parolees often grows to a burdensome debt that hinders their attempts to build a life after prison and runs counter to the mission of the parole program, according to a study that will be released this week.

More than 80 percent of parolees do not pay the state parole supervision fee on time and some consider committing crimes to pay the fee, which amounts to an average of $750, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School. The report recommends that the state abandon the fee or streamline the process for financially strapped parolees to apply for an exemption.

"The population of people on parole is more or less indigent," said Rebekah Diller, the study's principal author. "They're struggling at the most basic level to find housing and to find a job. The people we interviewed talked about the fact that this was yet another source of pressure. They felt like they were behind before they even started their lives after prison."

But advocates for lower taxes said it only seems fair that parolees should shoulder some of the costs of the services that they receive.

"I would suggest that, rather than being abolished, this fee should be raised," said Herb McMillan, president of the Maryland Taxpayers' Association and a former state representative. "Fees save money for taxpayers. I think it's fair that the individual should bear some of the cost of their parole."

The $40 monthly fee, which was mandated by the state legislature in 1991, generates about $350,000 a year for the state's general fund, according to the report.

Most people on parole do not have the money to pay the fee, Diller said. At the end of their parole, only about one-third of former inmates have found a job and many do not have permanent housing, according to the report.

Andrea Brinkley, 38, a mother of three, said her parole debt is difficult with the money she earns cleaning a hospital. She said that she did not realize that she owed the fee until she received a bill for $2,200 in October - six months after she completed parole.

"I couldn't believe it," Brinkley said. "I had just cleaned up my credit from when I was living the wrong life, and then here I was back in debt again."

Brinkley, an East Baltimore resident, said that when she was sent to prison for two years for a drug conviction in 2002, she had spent nearly her entire adult life selling drugs and had no job skills. Since then, she has stopped using drugs, regained custody of her children and worked hard - first as a waitress at IHOP and now as a housekeeper at Mercy Hospital - but the debt is disheartening, she said.

"As hard as I've worked to get where I am, the last thing I want is something like this hanging over my head," she said.

Only 17 percent pay the fee before they complete parole. Many parolees are intimidated by letters that inform them that they could be found in violation of parole for not paying the fee, according to the report, which is based on records provided by the Maryland Division of Parole and Probation and interviews with parole officers and parolees.

Offenders are not charged with violating parole solely for not paying the supervision fee, although it is one of the factors considered if the person had committed other offenses, said Patrick McGee, director of the Division of Parole and Probation.

The supervision fee is one of many that parolees might be required to pay, McGee said. Many owe restitution, court costs and charges for drug testing. Parole officers are responsible for drawing up payment plans and collecting those fees, in addition to helping parolees seek work and readjust to life outside prison.

"We collect millions of dollars each year; that's a huge impact on our workload," McGee said. "If we didn't have to collect the money and it was done by someone else, we'd have more time to work with offenders in other things like finding jobs."

Although parole officers are responsible for collecting the supervision fee, they do not help parolees obtain exemptions. Only the Maryland Parole Commission, a separate office, can excuse a parolee from paying. Because the process is complicated, only a fraction of eligible parolees apply for and are granted an exemption, according to the study.

Once a person completes parole, the unpaid debt is turned over to the state's collection agency. The bills can be staggering for someone newly released from prison, said Monique Dixon, the head of the crime and juvenile justice program at the Open Society Institute, which sponsored the study along with the Abell Foundation.

"Even through $40 a month is not a big hardship for many people, it's a huge hardship for people making minimum wage," Dixon said. "The stress of trying to pay this and the stress of trying to live day to day can be very discouraging for people trying to put their lives back together after prison."

The fee will be discussed at a forum at the Open Society Institute on Thursday.

Although the fee creates some problems, McGee said, he does not recommend that the state do away with it.

"In many ways, imposing fees and fines is a good way for people to pay back their debts to society," he said.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/loca/bal-md.parole23mar23,0,431181.story

Posted by lois at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)

OT: Legislative Bureau Audit Finds Treatment of Mentally Ill Prisoners Inadequate for Women Especially

Audit finds problems with mentally ill inmates
By SCOTT BAUER | Associated Press Writer
March 25, 2009
Chicago Tribune
MADISON, Wis. - At a time when Wisconsin is taking steps to avoid a federal lawsuit over its handling of mentally ill inmates, an audit released Wednesday identified even more improvements needed in the prison system.

The Legislative Audit Bureau's recommendations include better screening of incoming inmates, enhanced training for corrections officers who deal with mentally ill inmates and improved planning for when they are released.

Department of Corrections spokesman John Dipko said the department would implement all of the audit's recommendations.

Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch said in a letter to auditors that his department faces significant challenges. Providing effective treatment in prison required prioritizing needs, using resources wisely, and emphasizing rehabilitation and treatment, he said.

Legislative Audit Committee Co-Chair Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, D-Alma, called the report disturbing.

"Mental illness can be managed," she said. "But the audit provides evidence this is not happening to the extent it should."

Wisconsin's mentally ill inmate population has been booming. While the total inmate population increased 3.9 percent between 2006 and 2008, the percentage of mentally ill inmates went up 14.3 percent. Last June, nearly 31 percent of the state's 22,451 inmates were identified as mentally ill.

The state's care of mentally ill female inmates has been a problem for years.

In 2006, the U.S. Justice Department declared the lack of mental health care at Taycheedah Correctional Institution in Fond du Lac, the state's largest women's prison, violated inmates' constitutional rights. The state agreed in September to make improvements to avoid a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit.

Federal investigators who toured Taycheedah in 2005 found mentally ill inmates locked in isolation cells and given psychotropic drugs without a doctor's supervision.

Under the agreement with the U.S. Justice Department, state corrections officials have up to four years to make improvements or face a lawsuit.

The state committed to building an $11 million, 45-bed addition for mentally ill women at the Wisconsin Resource Center in Winnebago. It is scheduled to be done in 2011.

The Department of Corrections has requested $7.6 million to build more treatment space at Taycheedah. Gov. Jim Doyle's proposed budget requests 149 more positions and $6.6 million to operate the addition at the Wisconsin Resource Center and to provide more services at Taycheedah.

The audit showed that the state spent nearly $60 million on mentally ill inmates in the 2007 fiscal year.

Among the report's findings:

-- The prisons don't have enough psychiatrists or psychologists to meet national standards.

-- Group and individual therapy is limited, although psychologists do monitor mentally ill inmates on a regular basis.

-- Correctional officers deliver most medications. In neighboring states, medical staff deliver most drugs.

-- Clearer policies, more centralized decision-making, and more detailed record-keeping could ensure the Wisconsin Resource Center runs more efficiently.

-- Mentally ill inmates accounted for more than 90 percent of special placements due to self-harm between July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2008. Those placements require prison workers to check on inmates every 15 minutes.

-- Mentally ill inmates accounted for nearly 80 percent of assaults on staff in the past three years. Those assaults resulted in $874,200 in worker's compensation awards to staff in that time.

-- The Department of Corrections could strengthen its policies to ensure inmates receive disability and medical benefits in a timely way after leaving prison.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-wi-inmatementalhealt,0,1483471.story

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

SC: Prisons would close without stimulus

25 March 2009
Harrell: Prisons would close without stimulus
House Speaker Bobby Harrell said Wednesday the Senate should write a budget that leaves out $350 million in federal stimulus money as Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman suggested Tuesday.

Without the federal funds, South Carolina would have to close three to four prisons, release an unknown number of prisoners and lay off 4,000 to 5,000 teachers, Harrell said. Harrell said the dire results fall squarely on Gov. Mark Sanford who has twice requested a portion of the stimulus money be used to pay down state debt instead of flow to schools and law enforcement agencies.

"I am very frustrated," Harrell said. "We're talking about affecting lives of people in this state in a very bad way."

The House used about $350 million in stimulus funds to offset cuts to colleges, K12 education and law enforcement in its version of the budget approved earlier this month.

http://thestatecom.typepad.com/ygatoday/2009/03/harrell-prisons-would-close-without-stimulus.html

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

March 25, 2009

"Resistance Behind Bars- The Struggles of Incercerated Women" by Vikki Law

I just finished reading "Resistance Behind Bars" written by Vikki Law. In case you don't know about it or haven't had the chance to I recommend you buy a copy and read it.
I will quote a little from the introduction in which Vikki writes about her response to the comment: "Women (in prison) don't organize."
"I began to search for stories---and women--who would disprove this assertion. I found mentions of lawsuits, and using various state department of corrections' websites looked up their address addresses and wrote them letters asking if they would share their experiences with me." And "To ensure that I was representing their struggles accurately and to give them the opportunity to add, update or delete any of the tales they do not want to share with the public, I sent each woman draft after draft of the chapters her voice and experience(s) appeared in. "
The voices of women form form the majority of the book which took 8 years to complete. The chapters reflect the concerns of the women with whom Vikki corresponded and include Barriers to Basic Care, Mothers and Children, Sexual Abuse,Education, Women's Work, Grievances, lawsuits and the Power of the Media. Other chapters focus on Breaking the Silence, Resistance Among Women in Immigrant Detention and an Historical Background.
The book is written in plain English. It frames resistance by women very differently than the kinds of resistance by men prisoners which has come to define "resistance."
The book is published by PM Press and you can order a copy on-line (https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=91) or I am sure your local bookstore can order it for you.

Posted by lois at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Letting Judges Have a Say in Sentencing

About New York- NY Times
Letting Judges Have a Say in Sentencing
By JIM DWYER
Published: March 24, 2009

It is a cold spring morning, and a woman in her 30s, who has spent most of her adult life working as a prostitute to support a cocaine habit, pushes open the door to a courthouse on 161st Street in the Bronx. Last year, she was arrested and found with enough cocaine to send her to jail for a year.

Instead, when she walked out of court on Tuesday, she had graduated: She had gone six months without using any drugs, she was in a rigorous job-training program, and her child, who had been in foster care, was living with her again.

“This is one of the wins,” said Laura Safer-Espinoza, an acting State Supreme Court justice who presided over the woman’s case.

If it was a human triumph, it was achieved by a kind of legal sidestep: the agreement of a prosecutor to move the case into one of the city’s special drug courts. That maneuver bypassed the strict regimen of statutes that New York State has used for nearly 40 years, since Nelson A. Rockefeller was governor, to wrestle with the possession and sale of narcotics.

Now, Justice Safer-Espinoza and 14 other judges who sit in courts throughout the city are circulating an unusual open letter to ask that those laws, modified in 2005, be changed yet again.

They argue that judges — not just prosecutors — should be able to pick among the remedies for nonviolent people who violate the drug law. For some, the judges say, that will be prison. For others, it will be treatment programs overseen by the courts.

“This is not a soft-on-crime issue,” Justice Safer-Espinoza said during a recess on Tuesday. “The point is to give judges more alternatives.”

Anyone looking at the lineup of power in Albany might jump to the conclusion that changes are inevitable. The governor and leaders of both the Assembly and the Senate have come out in favor of reforms. But the New York State District Attorneys Association has argued that its members should continue, in effect, to have power over the sentencing. With Democrats holding the State Senate by a single vote, no one is in a hurry to be accused of coddling criminals.

Under current practices, a prison term can be avoided for many drug offenses only if the prosecutor agrees that the case can be handled outside the ordinary channels.

The existing drug courts are demanding. Participants must attend a treatment program for up to two years, be tested several times a week, and hold down a full-time on-the-books job or attend school.

Among the requirements that Justice Safer-Espinoza said ought to be changed is that participants not be taking methadone, which some treatment programs use as a substitute for more debilitating drugs. In addition, the programs are now limited to nonviolent first offenders.

BETWEEN 12,000 and 13,000 people are serving prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, according to Senator Eric T. Schneiderman, a Democrat who is the chairman of the Codes Committee. The state estimates that public spends about $45,000 per year per prisoner.

“There’s widespread agreement that we have to go to more treatment, and there’s agreement about what works,” Mr. Schneiderman said, adding that that goal can be achieved through different channels. “One of the best programs in the state is run by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.”

The current struggle is really about whether judges or prosecutors will control access to the alternative programs, and whether second offenders should be eligible for consideration.

“This is a matter of power,” Mr. Schneiderman said, “not good, dispassionate public-policy assessment.”

To expand treatment, he said, would cost about $80 million, much of which he said could come from the federal stimulus bill. “The savings will come back to us in about two years,” he said. “If you are able to close more prisons, then you will have real savings.”

Judges do not usually speak about pending legislation, but they are allowed to comment on policies affecting the court system. Justice Safer-Espinoza said that in 10 years in the drug court, she has seen many people who were unable to complete the programs and had to serve prison time. “Treatment is not for everybody,” she said. “A significant portion of our people do not make it.”

Did any judges decline to sign?

Justice Safer-Espinoza laughed.

“Plenty of them,” she said. “Judges are sitting ducks. We are not allowed to respond to criticisms in the press of our actions.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/nyregion/25about.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion

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

OH: Prosecutors seek elimination of mandatory prison for some drug offenders

Prosecutors seek elimination of mandatory prison for some drug offenders
Tuesday, March 24, 2009 3:08 AM
By Alan Johnson
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Ohio's county prosecutors are recommending major changes to state drug laws, including the elimination of mandatory prison sentences for trafficking and possession of chemicals for the manufacture of drugs, except in the most serious cases.

The prosecutors also want to reduce several other non-drug crimes to misdemeanors from felonies, including assaulting a school teacher, administrator or school bus operator without physical harm; injuring a police dog or horse; illegal use of food stamps; and unauthorized use of a cable television or telecommunication device.

If approved, the changes would ratchet back some "tough-on-crime" laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s.

John E. Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, said the changes are intended to counter the Strickland administration's proposal to ease prison overcrowding by allowing inmates to accumulate seven days of "earned credit" per month by participating in programming. The credit would allow them to reduce their sentences -- even if they're serving definite or "flat" sentences -- so they can be released earlier.

"We do support a lot of mandatory penalties that deal with violence. But for crimes like drug trafficking, we have some reservation about whether there should be a mandatory prison sentence. It's still a crime. It still has a presumption for prison.

"It would still be up to the judge. In many cases, the judges would still send them to prison," Murphy said.

The prosecutors also want to give judges more flexibility in sending second-time offenders to drug treatment instead of incarceration. Now, only first-time offenders are eligible.

"There is a little bit different view on drug offenses than there was 20 years ago when many of these laws were enacted," he said.

Ohio prisons chief Terry Collins, who proposed the earned-credit idea to legislators as part of the administration's biennial budget, said he's glad prosecutors "are willing to help. We'll take their good ideas and put them with our ideas and improve the criminal-justice system."

However, Collins said, he's not throwing in the towel on the earned-credit proposal. He estimated it would save the state $11.4 million annually by removing 2,644 prisoners from the overcrowded system.

Ian N. Friedman, a Cleveland lawyer who is president of the 700-member Ohio Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, called the proposal "a realistic approach" that recognizes the overcrowding in Ohio's prisons and also acknowledges that there are alternative means of dealing with these cases other than prison.

David Diroll, head of the Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission who has been working with Ohio laws for more than 30 years, called the proposal "an historic change for the prosecutors"

"I'm not sure, as Terry Collins said, that we've lost the war on drugs, but we're in a holding pattern," Diroll said.

Under the prosecutors' proposal, the amount of drugs that would trigger a mandatory prison sentence would be very large -- a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of powder cocaine and 20 kilograms of marijuana, Diroll said.

"From the perspective of the judges, they have wanted more flexibility in these matters. It's one of those things where out of crisis comes opportunity."

Delaware County Prosecutor Dave Yost said many felony upgrades enacted by the General Assembly in recent years, including making felonies of some crimes against people in specific jobs, did not have the blessing of prosecutors statewide.

"A victim is a victim, no matter what. You bleed the same way."

Yost said the proposed changes would not mean drug dealers would be placed on probation, but judges will have more options in dealing with them.
http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/03/24/copy/DRUG_LAW.ART_ART_03-24-09_B1_Q5DB7A2.html?adsec=politics&sid=101

Posted by lois at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

KS: Johnson County’s prison avoidance operation could lose more than $868,500 from the state

Johnson County’s prison avoidance operation could lose more than $868,500 from the state
Posted:03/21/2009

Mark Winton’s handshake was firm and his voice strong when he said he was a former drug addict on his last chance to stay out of prison.

“I know I can make it,” the Olathe man pledged.

Supporting him is one of the largest prison avoidance operations in Kansas. He’s among about 245 residents at a sprawling site at New Century AirCenter — a $12.8 million-a-year operation funded by Johnson County, the state, grants and user fees.

Most offenders there leave to work and make money. Governments save money.

These kinds of community alternatives are far cheaper than prisons. A recent Pew Center on the States report urged states to use them more and praised Kansas for helping fund the programs.

But when budgets are stressed, money for alternatives tends to shrink. The proposed state budget in Kansas now calls for cutting about $2 million that helps pay for the residential offender programs in Johnson and Sedgwick counties.

Johnson County stands to lose more than $868,500 from the state, and with its own tight budget, the county might have to reduce the $6.1 million it pays, said Betsy Gillespie, director of county corrections.

All that would boost other costs, Gillespie said, when offenders go to jail or prison instead.

It also would be a step back for a Johnson County operation that began with one building and 33 beds in the 1980s and gradually grew to four buildings, hundreds of beds and many operations.

Drunken drivers

Society and governments struggle with what to do with a constant flow of repeat drunken drivers, and the New Century complex provides one option.

Under Kansas law, a felony drunken driver can go to a county jail for up to one year but not to prison. This saves the state money on prisons but throws the cost onto the counties.

Two years ago, Johnson County started a work-release program for those with four drunken-driving convictions or more. The 60-bed unit generally runs near capacity, and 134 people were admitted last year. More than eight in 10 successfully served their time.

Repeat drunken drivers actually have more going for them than many other criminals, said Antonio Booker, a director at the county corrections center.

They tend to be older and have stable jobs, he said.

Michael Sesto, 47, of Shawnee, said last week that he was due for release in two days.

“This was a needed program for me,” the carpenter said, and it allowed him to keep working and keep his house. He got in trouble because he kept trying to meet the right woman in nightclubs, he said, and now he’s part of a church singles group.

For the DUI offenders, he said, alcohol treatment begins when they leave the program and start parole.

“That’s where the rubber meets the pavement,” he said, and more challenges are ahead.

‘Legal side of the law’

Don Womack, 34, breezed down a hallway waving a certificate of completion, which he got after serving 96 days for possessing cocaine.

He was among 155 criminals in another program, which allows them to work while attending self-improvement programs. They stay two to four months.

More than 500 people were admitted to that operation last year. More than three of four graduate successfully, according to past studies.

Here, as in the rest of the complex, residents can be seen by a nurse or mental health worker. Throughout the New Century complex, about 65 percent of residents get medicine for mental illnesses.

Womack, who came to the center from prison, stopped at the credit union on site, where people can deposit or cash checks and save money. Many can’t get a bank account on the outside or have never had one.

Womack found a good job at a Lenexa manufacturing company while serving time at New Century program and saved money toward a car.

“It gave me a chance to live on the legal side of the law,” he said. “I was at a point in my life when I was ready.”

Another building in the complex houses the therapeutic community, which is six months of substance abuse treatment and self-improvement work. It holds 40. Addicted clients can’t leave until they finish the six months. Many then move to work release.

Winton, 37, recently graduated from the treatment community into work release, where he hopes to learn to be an electrician.

He’s a cocaine addict who has been in and out of the system for more than 15 years, he said, including three stints in prison. He said the long drug treatment and improvement work got him past personal problems that fed anger, resentment and bad behavior.

“I came here with low self-esteem,” he said.

Winton said he intended to go straight and be a better father to his nine children by six women. He’ll really do it this time, he said.

He said he got to this point after using drugs while on probation. A judge sent him to New Century as a last chance to avoid prison.

Winton said he would make good on that chance.

So far, Booker said, “he’s done an excellent job.”

If Winton finally stops breaking the law, he’ll save the state the cost of locking him up. The Pew Center study puts the national average at $29,000 a year.

Every little bit helps.

In fiscal year 2008, the study reported, Kansas spent $341 million on corrections, or 5.6 percent of its general fund.
http://m.kansascity.com/kcstar/db_10893/contentdetail.htm;jsessionid=A7A42481212D882B1F56AE46E8669453?contentguid=XKtKydiX&storycount=19&detailindex=1&full=true#display

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

CA: Judge rejects returning prison care to state

Judge rejects returning prison care to state
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
(03-24) 12:33 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge rejected Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's request to return health care in California prisons to state control Tuesday, ruling that a court-appointed overseer is still needed to restore basic medical treatment in the overcrowded and understaffed prisons.

Judge Thelton Henderson ruled in 2006 that the state was ...Clark Kelso, standing outside Folsom State Prison, retain... View Larger
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson in San Francisco said that although health care has improved under federal management since 2006, he has "no confidence that such improvements would continue, or even be maintained," if the state regained control now.

Federal management "is not and was never intended to be a permanent solution," and will end as soon as the state shows it is able to run the system, the judge said.

Henderson appointed a receiver to run the prison health system in 2006, saying evidence in an inmate lawsuit showed that inadequate medical care at the state's 33 prisons was killing at least one inmate a week. State officials had shown themselves incapable of complying with the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the judge said.

The current receiver, law Professor Clark Kelso, has submitted an $8 billion plan to build seven health centers for 10,000 prisoners and improve some existing medical centers. He said last month that only 5,000 new beds may be needed, at about half the cost.

After the Legislature refused last year to approve bond funding for prison hospitals, Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and Attorney General Jerry Brown, a Democrat, asked Henderson to remove Kelso, arguing that his plan was too lavish and costly and that his appointment had been illegal.

In response to Tuesday's ruling, Kelso issued a statement saying he looks forward to "working collaboratively with state officials and agencies to achieve our shared goal of improving prison medical and health care to constitutional levels" and returning management to the state.

State officials said they would ask an appeals court to overrule Henderson.

"The federal receivership has become its own autonomous government, operating outside the normal checks and balances of state and federal law," Brown said in a statement. "It is time for a dose of fiscal common sense."

The state has also appealed Henderson's order requiring it to spend $250 million to renovate prison health centers under Kelso's plan.

In separate proceedings, a three-judge panel, including Henderson, has ruled that overcrowding at the prisons - now filled at twice their designed capacity of 80,000 - was the primary cause of inadequate health care, and has tentatively ordered the release of between 37,000 and 58,000 inmates to local custody, treatment programs or parole. Schwarzenegger plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At a hearing in Henderson's court last week, a state lawyer argued that federal law prohibits judges from appointing managers to take over state prison operations and also forbids judges from requiring prison construction.

Attorney Paul Mello also said the state was spending $14,000 per inmate on health care each year, the most in the nation, and more than $2 billion on the system overall. Citing a reduction in inmate deaths, Mello said federal management was no longer needed.

In Tuesday's ruling, Henderson said federal law does not restrict judges' authority to temporarily remove prison operations from state officials who have mismanaged them. He also noted that the state consented to the appointment of a receiver as early as 2005 and never objected until last summer.

Kelso's plan is expensive, Henderson said, but providing adequate health care in the nation's largest prison system is costly, "and it is even more costly when the receivership must make up for the years of neglect by the state."

He noted, for example, what court experts found at San Quentin State Prison in 2005. A nursing office was located in a filthy room without medical equipment, an examination table, a sink or a telephone. A clogged shower drain outside the office left standing water outside the door. The previous nursing office had been in a broom closet.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/25/BAI316M314.DTL

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

March 24, 2009

Washington Governor Proposes Early Release Of Some Women Prisoners

Washington Governor Proposes Early Release Of Some Inmates
BY AUSTIN JENKINS
Olympia, WA March 23, 2009 3:28 p.m.

Washington Governor Chris Gregoire is proposing the early release of some inmates to help balance the state budget. Specifically, the Governor floated the idea today [Monday] of releasing lower-risk female inmates whose children are in foster care.

Chris Gregoire: “Where we’re spending multiple dollars to care for the children and care for the individual when if the person was out we could get that type of typically alcohol and drug treatment in the community and have the family reunited and have very little risk in terms of public safety to the community.”

Gregoire offered few details on the number of women who might be eligible for early release – or how much it might save the state.

Women make up about 8 percent of the prison population. Most are non-violent and an estimated three-quarters of them have children.

Lawmakers are currently crafting a new two-year budget that aims to close a $9 billion shortfall.
http://news.opb.org/article/4580-washington-governor-proposes-early-release-some-inmates/

Posted by lois at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

The New Yorker: Annals of Human Rights Hellhole The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?

Annals of Human Rights
Hellhole
The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?
by Atul Gawande March 30, 2009, The New Yorker

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.

He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn’t know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants—in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.

At first, Harlow and his graduate students couldn’t figure out what the problem was. They considered factors such as diet, patterns of light exposure, even the antibiotics they used. Then, as Deborah Blum recounts in a fascinating biography of Harlow, “Love at Goon Park,” one of his researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their soft blankets. Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were missing in their Isolettes was a mother. So, in an odd experiment, he gave them an artificial one.

In the studies, one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to make them seem more comforting. The babies, Harlow discovered, largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached to the cloth mother. They caressed it. They slept curled up on it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements: they wanted only “their” mother. If sharp spikes were made to randomly thrust out of the mother’s body when the rhesus babies held it, they waited patiently for the spikes to recede and returned to clutching it. No matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, however, the monkeys remained psychologically abnormal.

In a later study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released into a group of ordinary monkeys, “usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by . . . autistic self-clutching and rocking.” Harlow noted, “One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later.” After several weeks in the company of other monkeys, most of them adjusted—but not those who had been isolated for longer periods. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially,” Harlow wrote. They became permanently withdrawn, and they lived as outcasts—regularly set upon, as if inviting abuse.

The research made Harlow famous (and infamous, too—revulsion at his work helped spur the animal-rights movement). Other psychologists produced evidence of similarly deep and sustained damage in neglected and orphaned children. Hospitals were made to open up their nurseries to parents. And it became widely accepted that children require nurturing human beings not just for food and protection but also for the normal functioning of their brains.

We have been hesitant to apply these lessons to adults. Adults, after all, are fully formed, independent beings, with internal strengths and knowledge to draw upon. We wouldn’t have anything like a child’s dependence on other people, right? Yet it seems that we do. We don’t have a lot of monkey experiments to call upon here. But mankind has produced tens of thousands of human ones, including in our prison system. And the picture that has emerged is profoundly unsettling.

Among our most benign experiments are those with people who voluntarily isolate themselves for extended periods. Long-distance solo sailors, for instance, commit themselves to months at sea. They face all manner of physical terrors: thrashing storms, fifty-foot waves, leaks, illness. Yet, for many, the single most overwhelming difficulty they report is the “soul-destroying loneliness,” as one sailor called it. Astronauts have to be screened for their ability to tolerate long stretches in tightly confined isolation, and they come to depend on radio and video communications for social contact.

The problem of isolation goes beyond ordinary loneliness, however. Consider what we’ve learned from hostages who have been held in solitary confinement—from the journalist Terry Anderson, for example, whose extraordinary memoir, “Den of Lions,” recounts his seven years as a hostage of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Anderson was the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press when, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his car in Beirut at gunpoint. He was pushed into a Mercedes sedan, covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to crouch head down in the footwell behind the front seat. His captors drove him to a garage, pulled him out of the car, put a hood over his head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape. For half an hour, they grilled him for the names of other Americans in Beirut, but he gave no names and they did not beat him or press him further. They threw him in the trunk of the car, drove him to another building, and put him in what would be the first of a succession of cells across Lebanon. He was soon placed in what seemed to be a dusty closet, large enough for only a mattress. Blindfolded, he could make out the distant sounds of other hostages. (One was William Buckley, the C.I.A. station chief who was kidnapped and tortured repeatedly until he weakened and died.) Peering around his blindfold, Anderson could see a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. He received three unpalatable meals a day—usually a sandwich of bread and cheese, or cold rice with canned vegetables, or soup. He had a bottle to urinate in and was allotted one five- to ten-minute trip each day to a rotting bathroom to empty his bowels and wash with water at a dirty sink. Otherwise, the only reprieve from isolation came when the guards made short visits to bark at him for breaking a rule or to threaten him, sometimes with a gun at his temple.

He missed people terribly, especially his fiancée and his family. He was despondent and depressed. Then, with time, he began to feel something more. He felt himself disintegrating. It was as if his brain were grinding down. A month into his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, “The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

He was stiff from lying in bed day and night, yet tired all the time. He dozed off and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved activity of almost any kind. He would watch the daylight wax and wane on the ceiling, or roaches creep slowly up the wall. He had a Bible and tried to read, but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He observed himself becoming neurotically possessive about his little space, at times putting his life in jeopardy by flying into a rage if a guard happened to step on his bed. He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all the mistakes he’d made in life, his regrets, his offenses against God and family.

His captors moved him every few months. For unpredictable stretches of time, he was granted the salvation of a companion—sometimes he shared a cell with as many as four other hostages—and he noticed that his thinking recovered rapidly when this occurred. He could read and concentrate longer, avoid hallucinations, and better control his emotions. “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all,” he noted.

In September, 1986, after several months of sharing a cell with another hostage, Anderson was, for no apparent reason, returned to solitary confinement, this time in a six-by-six-foot cell, with no windows, and light from only a flickering fluorescent lamp in an outside corridor. The guards refused to say how long he would be there. After a few weeks, he felt his mind slipping away again.

“I find myself trembling sometimes for no reason,” he wrote. “I’m afraid I’m beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely.”

One day, three years into his ordeal, he snapped. He walked over to a wall and began beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.

Some hostages fared worse. Anderson told the story of Frank Reed, a fifty-four-year-old American private-school director who was taken hostage and held in solitary confinement for four months before being put in with Anderson. By then, Reed had become severely withdrawn. He lay motionless for hours facing a wall, semi-catatonic. He could not follow the guards’ simplest instructions. This invited abuse from them, in much the same way that once isolated rhesus monkeys seemed to invite abuse from the colony. Released after three and a half years, Reed ultimately required admission to a psychiatric hospital.

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

On December 4, 1991, Terry Anderson was released from captivity. He had been the last and the longest-held American hostage in Lebanon. I spoke to Keron Fletcher, a former British military psychiatrist who had been on the receiving team for Anderson and many other hostages, and followed them for years afterward. Initially, Fletcher said, everyone experiences the pure elation of being able to see and talk to people again, especially family and friends. They can’t get enough of other people, and talk almost non-stop for hours. They are optimistic and hopeful. But, afterward, normal sleeping and eating patterns prove difficult to reëstablish. Some have lost their sense of time. For weeks, they have trouble managing the sensations and emotional complexities of their freedom.

For the first few months after his release, Anderson said when I reached him by phone recently, “it was just kind of a fog.” He had done many television interviews at the time. “And if you look at me in the pictures? Look at my eyes. You can tell. I look drugged.”

Most hostages survived their ordeal, Fletcher said, although relationships, marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as anything less than torture. This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

Recently, I met a man who had spent more than five years in isolation at a prison in the Boston suburb of Walpole, Massachusetts, not far from my home. Bobby Dellelo was, to say the least, no Terry Anderson or John McCain. Brought up in the run-down neighborhoods of Boston’s West End, in the nineteen-forties, he was caught burglarizing a shoe store at the age of ten. At thirteen, he recalls, he was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. (He and his friends learned to hide out in stores at closing time, steal their merchandise, and then break out during the night.) The remainder of his childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna, which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet. Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing. Usually, he stole from office buildings at night. But some of the people he hung out with did stickups, and, together with one of them, he held up a liquor store in Dorchester.

“What a disaster that thing was,” he recalls, laughing. They put the store’s owner and the customers in a walk-in refrigerator at gunpoint, took their wallets, and went to rob the register. But more customers came in. So they robbed them and put them in the refrigerator, too. Then still more customers arrived, the refrigerator got full, and the whole thing turned into a circus. Dellelo and his partner finally escaped. But one of the customers identified him to the police. By the time he was caught, Dellelo had been fingered for robbing the Commander Hotel in Cambridge as well. He served a year for the first conviction and two and a half years for the second.

Three months after his release, in 1963, at the age of twenty, he and a friend tried to rob the Kopelman jewelry store, in downtown Boston. But an alarm went off before they got their hands on anything. They separated and ran. The friend shot and killed an off-duty policeman while trying to escape, then killed himself. Dellelo was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He ended up serving forty years. Five years and one month were spent in isolation.

The criteria for the isolation of prisoners vary by state but typically include not only violent infractions but also violation of prison rules or association with gang members. The imposition of long-term isolation—which can be for months or years—is ultimately at the discretion of prison administrators. One former prisoner I spoke to, for example, recalled being put in solitary confinement for petty annoyances like refusing to get out of the shower quickly enough. Bobby Dellelo was put there for escaping.

It was an elaborate scheme. He had a partner, who picked the lock to a supervisor’s office and got hold of the information manual for the microwave-detection system that patrolled a grassy no man’s land between the prison and the road. They studied the manual long enough to learn how to circumvent the system and returned it. On Halloween Sunday, 1993, they had friends stage a fight in the prison yard. With all the guards in the towers looking at the fight through binoculars, the two men tipped a picnic table up against a twelve-foot wall and climbed it like a ladder. Beyond it, they scaled a sixteen-foot fence. To get over the razor wire on top, they used a Z-shaped tool they’d improvised from locker handles. They dropped down into the no man’s land and followed an invisible path that they’d calculated the microwave system would not detect. No alarm sounded. They went over one more fence, walked around a parking lot, picked their way through some woods, and emerged onto a four-lane road. After a short walk to a convenience store, they called a taxi from a telephone booth and rolled away before anyone knew they were gone.

They lasted twenty-four days on the outside. Eventually, somebody ratted them out, and the police captured them on the day before Thanksgiving, at the house of a friend in Cambridge. The prison administration gave Dellelo five years in the Departmental Disciplinary Unit of the Walpole prison, its hundred-and-twenty-four-cell super-maximum segregation unit.

Wearing ankle bracelets, handcuffs, and a belly chain, Dellelo was marched into a thirteen-by-eight-foot off-white cell. A four-inch-thick concrete bed slab jutted out from the wall opposite the door. A smaller slab protruding from a side wall provided a desk. A cylindrical concrete block in the floor served as a seat. On the remaining wall was a toilet and a metal sink. He was given four sheets, four towels, a blanket, a bedroll, a toothbrush, toilet paper, a tall clear plastic cup, a bar of soap, seven white T-shirts, seven pairs of boxer shorts, seven pairs of socks, plastic slippers, a pad of paper, and a ballpoint pen. A speaker with a microphone was mounted on the door. Cells used for solitary confinement are often windowless, but this one had a ribbonlike window that was seven inches wide and five feet tall. The electrically controlled door was solid steel, with a seven-inch-by-twenty-eight-inch aperture and two wickets—little door slots, one at ankle height and one at waist height, for shackling him whenever he was let out and for passing him meal trays.

As in other supermaxes—facilities designed to isolate prisoners from social contact—Dellelo was confined to his cell for at least twenty-three hours a day and permitted out only for a shower or for recreation in an outdoor cage that he estimated to be fifty feet long and five feet wide, known as “the dog kennel.” He could talk to other prisoners through the steel door of his cell, and during recreation if a prisoner was in an adjacent cage. He made a kind of fishing line for passing notes to adjacent cells by unwinding the elastic from his boxer shorts, though it was contraband and would be confiscated. Prisoners could receive mail and as many as ten reading items. They were allowed one phone call the first month and could earn up to four calls and four visits per month if they followed the rules, but there could be no physical contact with anyone, except when guards forcibly restrained them. Some supermaxes even use food as punishment, serving the prisoners nutra-loaf, an unpalatable food brick that contains just enough nutrition for survival. Dellelo was spared this. The rules also permitted him to have a radio after thirty days, and, after sixty days, a thirteen-inch black-and-white television.

“This is going to be a piece of cake,” Dellelo recalls thinking when the door closed behind him. Whereas many American supermax prisoners—and most P.O.W.s and hostages—have no idea when they might get out, he knew exactly how long he was going to be there. He drew a calendar on his pad of paper to start counting down the days. He would get a radio and a TV. He could read. No one was going to bother him. And, as his elaborate escape plan showed, he could be patient. “This is their sophisticated security?” he said to himself. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

After a few months without regular social contact, however, his experience proved no different from that of the P.O.W.s or hostages, or the majority of isolated prisoners whom researchers have studied: he started to lose his mind. He talked to himself. He paced back and forth compulsively, shuffling along the same six-foot path for hours on end. Soon, he was having panic attacks, screaming for help. He hallucinated that the colors on the walls were changing. He became enraged by routine noises—the sound of doors opening as the guards made their hourly checks, the sounds of inmates in nearby cells. After a year or so, he was hearing voices on the television talking directly to him. He put the television under his bed, and rarely took it out again.

One of the paradoxes of solitary confinement is that, as starved as people become for companionship, the experience typically leaves them unfit for social interaction. Once, Dellelo was allowed to have an in-person meeting with his lawyer, and he simply couldn’t handle it. After so many months in which his primary human contact had been an occasional phone call or brief conversations with an inmate down the tier, shouted through steel doors at the top of their lungs, he found himself unable to carry on a face-to-face conversation. He had trouble following both words and hand gestures and couldn’t generate them himself. When he realized this, he succumbed to a full-blown panic attack.

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted a number of phenomena. First, after months or years of complete isolation, many prisoners “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to organize their own lives around activity and purpose,” he writes. “Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result. . . . In extreme cases, prisoners may literally stop behaving,” becoming essentially catatonic.

Second, almost ninety per cent of these prisoners had difficulties with “irrational anger,” compared with just three per cent of prisoners in the general population. Haney attributed this to the extreme restriction, the totality of control, and the extended absence of any opportunity for happiness or joy. Many prisoners in solitary become consumed with revenge fantasies.

“There were some guards in D.D.U. who were decent guys,” Dellelo told me. They didn’t trash his room when he was let out for a shower, or try to trip him when escorting him in chains, or write him up for contraband if he kept food or a salt packet from a meal in his cell. “But some of them were evil, evil pricks.” One correctional officer became a particular obsession. Dellelo spent hours imagining cutting his head off and rolling it down the tier. “I mean, I know this is insane thinking,” he says now. Even at the time, he added, “I had a fear in the background—like how much of this am I going to be able to let go? How much is this going to affect who I am?”

He was right to worry. Everyone’s identity is socially created: it’s through your relationships that you understand yourself as a mother or a father, a teacher or an accountant, a hero or a villain. But, after years of isolation, many prisoners change in another way that Haney observed. They begin to see themselves primarily as combatants in the world, people whose identity is rooted in thwarting prison control.

As a matter of self-preservation, this may not be a bad thing. According to the Navy P.O.W. researchers, the instinct to fight back against the enemy constituted the most important coping mechanism for the prisoners they studied. Resistance was often their sole means of maintaining a sense of purpose, and so their sanity. Yet resistance is precisely what we wish to destroy in our supermax prisoners. As Haney observed in a review of research findings, prisoners in solitary confinement must be able to withstand the experience in order to be allowed to return to the highly social world of mainline prison or free society. Perversely, then, the prisoners who can’t handle profound isolation are the ones who are forced to remain in it. “And those who have adapted,” Haney writes, “are prime candidates for release to a social world to which they may be incapable of ever fully readjusting.”

Dellelo eventually found a way to resist that would not prolong his ordeal. He fought his battle through the courts, filing motion after motion in an effort to get his conviction overturned. He became so good at submitting his claims that he obtained a paralegal certificate along the way. And, after forty years in prison, and more than five years in solitary, he got his first-degree-homicide conviction reduced to manslaughter. On November 19, 2003, he was freed.

Bobby Dellelo is sixty-seven years old now. He lives on Social Security in a Cambridge efficiency apartment that is about four times larger than his cell. He still seems to be adjusting to the world outside. He lives alone. To the extent that he is out in society, it is, in large measure, as a combatant. He works for prisoners’ rights at the American Friends Service Committee. He also does occasional work assisting prisoners with their legal cases. Sitting at his kitchen table, he showed me how to pick a padlock—you know, just in case I ever find myself in trouble.

But it was impossible to talk to him about his time in isolation without seeing that it was fundamentally no different from the isolation that Terry Anderson and John McCain had endured. Whether in Walpole or Beirut or Hanoi, all human beings experience isolation as torture.

The main argument for using long-term isolation in prisons is that it provides discipline and prevents violence. When inmates refuse to follow the rules—when they escape, deal drugs, or attack other inmates and corrections officers—wardens must be able to punish and contain the misconduct. Presumably, less stringent measures haven’t worked, or the behavior would not have occurred. And it’s legitimate to incapacitate violent aggressors for the safety of others. So, advocates say, isolation is a necessary evil, and those who don’t recognize this are dangerously naïve.

The argument makes intuitive sense. If the worst of the worst are removed from the general prison population and put in isolation, you’d expect there to be markedly fewer inmate shankings and attacks on corrections officers. But the evidence doesn’t bear this out. Perhaps the most careful inquiry into whether supermax prisons decrease violence and disorder was a 2003 analysis examining the experience in three states—Arizona, Illinois, and Minnesota—following the opening of their supermax prisons. The study found that levels of inmate-on-inmate violence were unchanged, and that levels of inmate-on-staff violence changed unpredictably, rising in Arizona, falling in Illinois, and holding steady in Minnesota.

Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

It wasn’t always like this. The wide-scale use of isolation is, almost exclusively, a phenomenon of the past twenty years. In 1890, the United States Supreme Court came close to declaring the punishment to be unconstitutional. Writing for the majority in the case of a Colorado murderer who had been held in isolation for a month, Justice Samuel Miller noted that experience had revealed “serious objections” to solitary confinement:

A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover suffcient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

Prolonged isolation was used sparingly, if at all, by most American prisons for almost a century. Our first supermax—our first institution specifically designed for mass solitary confinement—was not established until 1983, in Marion, Illinois. In 1995, a federal court reviewing California’s first supermax admitted that the conditions “hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable for those with normal resilience.” But it did not rule them to be unconstitutionally cruel or unusual, except in cases of mental illness. The prison’s supermax conditions, the court stated, did not pose “a sufficiently high risk to all inmates of incurring a serious mental illness.” In other words, there could be no legal objection to its routine use, given that the isolation didn’t make everyone crazy. The ruling seemed to fit the public mood. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, some sixty supermax institutions had opened across the country. And new solitary-confinement units were established within nearly all of our ordinary maximum-security prisons.

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all. At the same time, other states had just a tiny fraction of their inmates in solitary confinement. In 1999, for example, Indiana had eighty-five supermax beds; Georgia had only ten. Neither of these two states can be described as being soft on crime.

Advocates of solitary confinement are left with a single argument for subjecting thousands of people to years of isolation: What else are we supposed to do? How else are we to deal with the violent, the disruptive, the prisoners who are just too dangerous to be housed with others?

As it happens, only a subset of prisoners currently locked away for long periods of isolation would be considered truly dangerous. Many are escapees or suspected gang members; many others are in solitary for nonviolent breaches of prison rules. Still, there are some highly dangerous and violent prisoners who pose a serious challenge to prison discipline and safety. In August, I met a man named Robert Felton, who had spent fourteen and a half years in isolation in the Illinois state correctional system. He is now thirty-six years old. He grew up in the predominantly black housing projects of Danville, Illinois, and had been a force of mayhem from the time he was a child.

His crimes were mainly impulsive, rather than planned. The first time he was arrested was at the age of eleven, when he and a relative broke into a house to steal some Atari video games. A year later, he was sent to state reform school after he and a friend broke into an abandoned building and made off with paint cans, irons, and other property that they hardly knew what to do with. In reform school, he got into fights and screamed obscenities at the staff. When the staff tried to discipline him by taking away his recreation or his television privileges, his behavior worsened. He tore a pillar out of the ceiling, a sink and mirrors off the wall, doors off their hinges. He was put in a special cell, stripped of nearly everything. When he began attacking counsellors, the authorities transferred him to the maximum-security juvenile facility at Joliet, where he continued to misbehave.

Felton wasn’t a sociopath. He made friends easily. He was close to his family, and missed them deeply. He took no pleasure in hurting others. Psychiatric evaluations turned up little more than attention-deficit disorder. But he had a terrible temper, a tendency to escalate rather than to defuse confrontations, and, by the time he was released, just before turning eighteen, he had achieved only a ninth-grade education.

Within months of returning home, he was arrested again. He had walked into a Danville sports bar and ordered a beer. The barman took his ten-dollar bill.

“Then he says, ‘Naw, man, you can’t get no beer. You’re underage,’ ” Felton recounts. “I says, ‘Well, give me my ten dollars back.’ He says, ‘You ain’t getting shit. Get the hell out of here.’ ”

Felton stood his ground. The bartender had a pocket knife on the counter. “And, when he went for it, I went for it,” Felton told me. “When I grabbed the knife first, I turned around and spinned on him. I said, ‘You think you’re gonna cut me, man? You gotta be fucked up.’ ”

The barman had put the ten-dollar bill in a Royal Crown bag behind the counter. Felton grabbed the bag and ran out the back door. He forgot his car keys on the counter, though. So he went back to get the keys—“the stupid keys,” he now says ruefully—and in the fight that ensued he left the barman severely injured and bleeding. The police caught Felton fleeing in his car. He was convicted of armed robbery, aggravated unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery, and served fifteen years in prison.

He was eventually sent to the Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility in Joliet. Inside the overflowing prison, he got into vicious fights over insults and the like. About three months into his term, during a shakedown following the murder of an inmate, prison officials turned up a makeshift knife in his cell. (He denies that it was his.) They gave him a year in isolation. He was a danger, and he had to be taught a lesson. But it was a lesson that he seemed incapable of learning.

Felton’s Stateville isolation cell had gray walls, a solid steel door, no window, no clock, and a light that was kept on twenty-four hours a day. As soon as he was shut in, he became claustrophobic and had a panic attack. Like Dellelo, Anderson, and McCain, he was soon pacing back and forth, talking to himself, studying the insects crawling around his cell, reliving past events from childhood, sleeping for as much as sixteen hours a day. But, unlike them, he lacked the inner resources to cope with his situation.

Many prisoners find survival in physical exercise, prayer, or plans for escape. Many carry out elaborate mental exercises, building entire houses in their heads, board by board, nail by nail, from the ground up, or memorizing team rosters for a baseball season. McCain recreated in his mind movies he’d seen. Anderson reconstructed complete novels from memory. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B. defector whom the C.I.A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg, Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have them discovered and swept away).

But Felton would just yell, “Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard! Guard!,” or bang his cup on the toilet, for hours. He could spend whole days hallucinating that he was in another world, that he was a child at home in Danville, playing in the streets, having conversations with imaginary people. Small cruelties that others somehow bore in quiet fury—getting no meal tray, for example—sent him into a rage. Despite being restrained with handcuffs, ankle shackles, and a belly chain whenever he was taken out, he managed to assault the staff at least three times. He threw his food through the door slot. He set his cell on fire by tearing his mattress apart, wrapping the stuffing in a sheet, popping his light bulb, and using the exposed wires to set the whole thing ablaze. He did this so many times that the walls of his cell were black with soot.

After each offense, prison officials extended his sentence in isolation. Still, he wouldn’t stop. He began flooding his cell, by stuffing the door crack with socks, plugging the toilet, and flushing until the water was a couple of feet deep. Then he’d pull out the socks and the whole wing would flood with wastewater.

“Flooding the cell was the last option for me,” Felton told me. “It was when I had nothing else I could do. You know, they took everything out of my cell, and all I had left was toilet water. I’d sit there and I’d say, ‘Well, let me see what I can do with this toilet water.’ ”

Felton was not allowed out again for fourteen and a half years. He spent almost his entire prison term, from 1990 to 2005, in isolation. In March, 1998, he was among the first inmates to be moved to Tamms, a new, high-tech supermax facility in southern Illinois.

“At Tamms, man, it was like a lab,” he says. Contact even with guards was tightly reduced. Cutoff valves meant that he couldn’t flood his cell. He had little ability to force a response—negative or positive—from a human being. And, with that gone, he began to deteriorate further. He ceased showering, changing his clothes, brushing his teeth. His teeth rotted and ten had to be pulled. He began throwing his feces around his cell. He became psychotic.

It is unclear how many prisoners in solitary confinement become psychotic. Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist, has interviewed more than two hundred prisoners in solitary confinement. In one in-depth study, prepared for a legal challenge of prisoner-isolation practices, he concluded that about a third developed acute psychosis with hallucinations. The markers of vulnerability that he observed in his interviews were signs of cognitive dysfunction—a history of seizures, serious mental illness, mental retardation, illiteracy, or, as in Felton’s case, a diagnosis such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, signalling difficulty with impulse control. In the prisoners Grassian saw, about a third had these vulnerabilities, and these were the prisoners whom solitary confinement had made psychotic. They were simply not cognitively equipped to endure it without mental breakdowns.

A psychiatrist tried giving Felton anti-psychotic medication. Mostly, it made him sleep—sometimes twenty-four hours at a stretch, he said. Twice he attempted suicide. The first time, he hanged himself in a noose made from a sheet. The second time, he took a single staple from a legal newspaper and managed to slash the radial artery in his left wrist with it. In both instances, he was taken to a local emergency room for a few hours, patched up, and sent back to prison.

Is there an alternative? Consider what other countries do. Britain, for example, has had its share of serial killers, homicidal rapists, and prisoners who have taken hostages and repeatedly assaulted staff. The British also fought a seemingly unending war in Northern Ireland, which brought them hundreds of Irish Republican Army prisoners committed to violent resistance. The authorities resorted to a harshly punitive approach to control, including, in the mid-seventies, extensive use of solitary confinement. But the violence in prisons remained unchanged, the costs were phenomenal (in the United States, they reach more than fifty thousand dollars a year per inmate), and the public outcry became intolerable. British authorities therefore looked for another approach.

Beginning in the nineteen-eighties, they gradually adopted a strategy that focussed on preventing prison violence rather than on delivering an ever more brutal series of punishments for it. The approach starts with the simple observation that prisoners who are unmanageable in one setting often behave perfectly reasonably in another. This suggested that violence might, to a critical extent, be a function of the conditions of incarceration. The British noticed that problem prisoners were usually people for whom avoiding humiliation and saving face were fundamental and instinctive. When conditions maximized humiliation and confrontation, every interaction escalated into a trial of strength. Violence became a predictable consequence.

So the British decided to give their most dangerous prisoners more control, rather than less. They reduced isolation and offered them opportunities for work, education, and special programming to increase social ties and skills. The prisoners were housed in small, stable units of fewer than ten people in individual cells, to avoid conditions of social chaos and unpredictability. In these reformed “Close Supervision Centres,” prisoners could receive mental-health treatment and earn rights for more exercise, more phone calls, “contact visits,” and even access to cooking facilities. They were allowed to air grievances. And the government set up an independent body of inspectors to track the results and enable adjustments based on the data.

The results have been impressive. The use of long-term isolation in England is now negligible. In all of England, there are now fewer prisoners in “extreme custody” than there are in the state of Maine. And the other countries of Europe have, with a similar focus on small units and violence prevention, achieved a similar outcome.

In this country, in June of 2006, a bipartisan national task force, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons, released its recommendations after a yearlong investigation. It called for ending long-term isolation of prisoners. Beyond about ten days, the report noted, practically no benefits can be found and the harm is clear—not just for inmates but for the public as well. Most prisoners in long-term isolation are returned to society, after all. And evidence from a number of studies has shown that supermax conditions—in which prisoners have virtually no social interactions and are given no programmatic support—make it highly likely that they will commit more crimes when they are released. Instead, the report said, we should follow the preventive approaches used in European countries.

The recommendations went nowhere, of course. Whatever the evidence in its favor, people simply did not believe in the treatment.

I spoke to a state-prison commissioner who wished to remain unidentified. He was a veteran of the system, having been either a prison warden or a commissioner in several states across the country for more than twenty years. He has publicly defended the use of long-term isolation everywhere that he has worked. Nonetheless, he said, he would remove most prisoners from long-term isolation units if he could and provide programming for the mental illnesses that many of them have.

“Prolonged isolation is not going to serve anyone’s best interest,” he told me. He still thought that prisons needed the option of isolation. “A bad violation should, I think, land you there for about ninety days, but it should not go beyond that.”

He is apparently not alone among prison officials. Over the years, he has come to know commissioners in nearly every state in the country. “I believe that today you’ll probably find that two-thirds or three-fourths of the heads of correctional agencies will largely share the position that I articulated with you,” he said.

Commissioners are not powerless. They could eliminate prolonged isolation with the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven’t they? He told me what happened when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections officers called members of the crime victim’s family and told them that he’d gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public opinion.

This past year, both the Republican and the Democratic Presidential candidates came out firmly for banning torture and closing the facility in Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds of prisoners have been held in years-long isolation. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain, however, addressed the question of whether prolonged solitary confinement is torture. For a Presidential candidate, no less than for the prison commissioner, this would have been political suicide. The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago. Our willingness to discard these standards for American prisoners made it easy to discard the Geneva Conventions prohibiting similar treatment of foreign prisoners of war, to the detriment of America’s moral stature in the world. In much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, ours has countenanced legalized torture. And there is no clearer manifestation of this than our routine use of solitary confinement—on our own people, in our own communities, in a supermax prison, for example, that is a thirty-minute drive from my door.

Robert Felton drifted in and out of acute psychosis for much of his solitary confinement. Eventually, however, he found an unexpected resource. One day, while he was at Tamms, he was given a new defense lawyer, and, whatever expertise this lawyer provided, the more important thing was genuine human contact. He visited regularly, and sent Felton books. Although some were rejected by the authorities and Felton was restricted to a few at a time, he devoured those he was permitted. “I liked political books,” he says. “ ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem,’ Winston Churchill, Noam Chomsky.”

That small amount of contact was a lifeline. Felton corresponded with the lawyer about what he was reading. The lawyer helped him get his G.E.D. and a paralegal certificate through a correspondence course, and he taught Felton how to advocate for himself. Felton began writing letters to politicians and prison officials explaining the misery of his situation, opposing supermax isolation, and asking for a chance to return to the general prison population. (The Illinois Department of Corrections would not comment on Felton’s case, but a spokesman stated that “Tamms houses the most disruptive, violent, and problematic inmates.”) Felton was persuasive enough that Senator Paul Simon, of Illinois, wrote him back and, one day, even visited him. Simon asked the director of the State Department of Corrections, Donald Snyder, Jr., to give consideration to Felton’s objections. But Snyder didn’t budge. If there was anyone whom Felton fantasized about taking revenge upon, it was Snyder. Felton continued to file request after request. But the answer was always no.

On July 12, 2005, at the age of thirty-three, Felton was finally released. He hadn’t socialized with another person since entering Tamms, at the age of twenty-five. Before his release, he was given one month in the general prison population to get used to people. It wasn’t enough. Upon returning to society, he found that he had trouble in crowds. At a party of well-wishers, the volume of social stimulation overwhelmed him and he panicked, headed for a bathroom, and locked himself in. He stayed at his mother’s house and kept mostly to himself.

For the first year, he had to wear an ankle bracelet and was allowed to leave home only for work. His first job was at a Papa John’s restaurant, delivering pizzas. He next found work at the Model Star Laundry Service, doing pressing. This was a steady job, and he began to settle down. He fell in love with a waitress named Brittany. They moved into a three-room house that her grandmother lent them, and got engaged. Brittany became pregnant.

This is not a story with a happy ending. Felton lost his job with the laundry service. He went to work for a tree-cutting business; a few months later, it went under. Meanwhile, he and Brittany had had a second child. She had found work as a certified nursing assistant, but her income wasn’t nearly enough. So he took a job forty miles away, at Plastipak, the plastics manufacturer, where he made seven-fifty an hour inspecting Gatorade bottles and Crisco containers as they came out of the stamping machines. Then his twenty-year-old Firebird died. The bus he had to take ran erratically, and he was fired for repeated tardiness.

When I visited Felton in Danville last August, he and Brittany were upbeat about their prospects. She was working extra shifts at a nursing home, and he was taking care of their children, ages one and two. He had also applied to a six-month training program for heating and air-conditioning technicians.

“I could make twenty dollars an hour after graduation,” he said.

“He’s a good man,” Brittany told me, taking his arm and giving him a kiss.

But he was out of work. They were chronically short of money. It was hard to be optimistic about Felton’s prospects. And, indeed, six weeks after we met, he was arrested for breaking into a car dealership and stealing a Dodge Charger. He pleaded guilty and, in January, began serving a seven-year sentence.

Before I left town—when there was still a glimmer of hope for him—we went out for lunch at his favorite place, a Mexican restaurant called La Potosina. Over enchiladas and Cokes, we talked about his family, Danville, the economy, and, of course, his time in prison. The strangest story had turned up in the news, he said. Donald Snyder, Jr., the state prison director who had refused to let him out of solitary confinement, had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison for taking fifty thousand dollars in payoffs from lobbyists.

“Two years in prison,” Felton marvelled. “He could end up right where I used to be.”

I asked him, “If he wrote to you, asking if you would release him from solitary, what would you do?”

Felton didn’t hesitate for a second. “If he wrote to me to let him out, I’d let him out,” he said.

This surprised me. I expected anger, vindictiveness, a desire for retribution. “You’d let him out?” I said.

“I’d let him out,” he said, and he put his fork down to make the point. “I wouldn’t wish solitary confinement on anybody. Not even him.” ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande

Posted by lois at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2009

OK: Major overhaul needed at 17 percent of DOC facilities

Major overhaul needed at 17 percent of DOC facilities
By BARBARA HOBEROCK World Capitol Bureau
Published: 3/18/2009 8:21 PM

OKLAHOMA CITY — Seventeen percent of the buildings at the state’s correctional facilities need major work or need to be torn down, according to a summary of an assessment obtained by the Tulsa World.

The preliminary architectural and engineering study of the buildings that make up the state’s 17 prisons found “no surprises,” said Rep. Randy Terrill, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Public Safety and the Judiciary.

A final version of the report will be used to determine if the state repairs crumbling infrastructure or shifts more inmates to private facilities.

The initial facility assessment ranked the 402 buildings at the state’s prisons on a scale of one to four.

A one ranking meant a building was new or minimal repairs were needed, while a four meant a building needed major renovation, replacement or to be torn down.

Terrill said 17 percent of the buildings earned a three or four rating, while more than 80 percent ranked one or two.

“I think the report mostly confirms what we suspected,” said Terrill, R-Moore. “Department of Corrections facilities are not in the best or absolute worst of shape.”

He said the final report will be a compass for lawmakers as they decide how to proceed.

Options include making minimal repairs, tearing down buildings, adding public beds to existing facilities, building a new, state-owned facility or contracting with private prisons for more beds, Terrill said.

Senate Democrats are concerned that
inmates could be pushed into private prisons when state facilities are capable of doing the job, said Senate Minority Leader Charlie Laster, D-Shawnee.

“Our concern is that there may be a desire on behalf of (Senate Republican) leadership to close some state facilities in favor of private prisons,” said Laster, who has not seen the report.

Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee, R-Oklahoma City, declined to comment, saying through a spokesman that the preliminary report is incomplete.

Department of Corrections Director Justin Jones declined to comment.

Oklahoma has six private prisons that have 2,510 empty beds, said Renee Watkins, Department of Corrections administrator of private prisons and jails. Some states recently removed their inmates from private prisons here, Watkins said.

Oklahoma has 4,324 inmates in private prisons, which is about 19 percent of the population, Watkins said.

The study, done by The Durrant Group Inc., cost $415,000, said Jennifer Monies, as spokeswoman for House Speaker Chris Benge, R-Tulsa. The state received bids on the project, she said.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=298&articleid=20090318_298_0_OKLAHO830404

Posted by lois at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)

How PA handles prison medical care

How Pa. handles prison medical care
By: JO CIAVAGLIA The Intelligencer

In the Pennsylvania state prison system, men diagnosed with cancer could be transferred to Graterford Prison, where a chemotherapy suite was installed in 2005.

The prison in Montgomery County is only one of five state prisons with specialized medical units that can treat prisoners with complicated, chronic medical needs, a population whose numbers are growing, according to corrections experts.

As of last July, 42 percent of state prisoners had at least one chronic illness, up from 39 percent in 2006, according to Prison Health Services,

a for-profit company responsible for prison health care. The number of inmates requiring infirmary or surgical care soared from 75 to 453 between 2006 and July, 2008.

Taxpayers pay an average of about $32,000 per year to house a state prison inmate, including an average of almost $4,500 in health care costs. The average inmate health care cost has not increased significantly in the last four years, despite an overall rise in prison population, statistics show. Where costs have increased significantly is among prisoners requiring intensive, long-term medical care.

At Laurel Highlands Prison in southwestern Pennsylvania's Somerset County, which houses the state's oldest and sickest inmates, the population increased 15 percent between 2003-04 and 2007-08 - but the average medical costs nearly doubled from $8,704 to $15,346 per inmate. The estimated rate of confirmed HIV and AIDS patients in Pennsylvania prisons was more than 2 1/2 times higher than the general population in 2005, according to Prison Health Services. The monthly treatment costs ranged from $1,200 to $2,500 per inmate.

In 2007, cancer, coronary artery disease and end-stage liver disease primarily due to infectious hepatitis were responsible for almost 70 percent of inmate deaths. HIV ranked sixth, between suicide and gastrointestinal bleeding.

The cost of treating chronic illnesses among prisoners varies, state prison officials said.

Kidney disease has experienced "modest" cost increases in large part due to new medication for management of dialysis patients, Roberts said.

Diabetes and hypertension management costs have been flat or decreased due to wider availability of generic drugs, and a once daily dosing regimen, which improved patient compliance with medications. Hospitalization rates for cardiac and diabetic patients also remained stable, Prison Health Services spokesman Ronald Roberts said.

HIV and AIDS management has experienced a nearly 50 percent increase in medication costs.

The need to add a fourth HIV drug to the previous three-drug therapy is responsible for most of the "significant" cost increases with HIV treatment, Roberts said. New costly lab testing is often required as resistant strains of HIV virus continue to increase among prison populations.

Cancer-related costs alone have risen "substantially" - 16 percent annually - according to Prison Health Services. Prostate cancer is the most common diagnosis among male prisoners.

The state Department of Corrections' tumor registry has listed more than 600 patients since 1994 with either a diagnosis or history of cancer.

The vast majority of those patients are diagnosed while incarcerated, said Susan McNaughton, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

State prisoners can be monitored and treated for chronic diseases at in-house prison medical units using video teleconferencing for pre- and post-operative consultations.

Prisoners requiring more intensive care can be transferred to a state prison with a specialized medical unit. These units save taxpayer money because they can provide medical care cheaper than hospitals, and save costs related to transportation and security.

Prisoners with unstable health are treated in outside hospitals, said Dr. Nicholas Scharff, assistant medical director of the bureau of health care services. For extraordinary cancer care, such as bone marrow transplants or leukemia induction, prisoners are treated at a state-contracted, outside medical center.

Cancer care is overseen by a staff oncologist who develops individual treatment plans and oversees treatment, which has resulted in earlier diagnosis, saving money through less invasive and prolonged treatment.

Installing a chemotherapy suite at Graterford has provided greater uniform care under National Comprehensive Cancer Network standards. Financially, it also has provided an "enormous" cost savings since chemotherapy is among the more expensive and lucrative medical specialties, McNaughton said.

But she added that a "significant" number of cancers, such as acute leukemia, still require outside hospital treatment.

"We are obligated to provide inmates with medical care and we provide the same care that someone in the community would get," McNaughton said.

Cancer, coronary artery disease and end-stage liver disease are responsible for most inmate deaths in state prisons.

Specialized medical units within the Pennsylvania State Prison system

Laurel Highlands: long-term nursing, assisted care and personal care units, dialysis units

Graterford: chemotherapy suite

Forest: hepatitis C treatment

Somerset: elective day surgery program (elective procedures include port removal, ACL repair, cataract surgery, biopsies, colonoscopy and hernia repair)

Smithfield: diagnostic medical imaging program

A healthy cost for Pennsylvania

Monthly cost for health care services per state inmate in 2003-04: $127.77

Monthly cost for health care services per state inmate in 2007-08: $166.86

For the 2007 calendar year, 8,805 dialysis treatments were provided to state prisoners.

Source: Prison Healthcare Services, Pennsylvania Department of Correction

March 22, 2009
http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/news_details/article/262/2009/march/22/how-pa-handles-prison-medical-care.htm

Posted by lois at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2009

Plan for Prison Closures Stirs Fears Distressed Towns in Upstate N.Y. Cite Dire Economic Consequences

"Gregory M. Hooks, a sociology professor at Washington State University, who analyzed the economies of prisons, said that among other problems, the pool of free inmate labor eliminates the pool of low-paid manual labor jobs, further depressing local economies. Prisons make communities dependent but without much return to the community, because the jobs are secured for life. And, he said, a local prison may make an area less attractive to other types of businesses, particularly those catering to tourists.
"On average, prisons don't do much of anything," Hooks said. "If you look at the poorest counties, the impact is negative. If you put a prison in a struggling county, they get worse, not better."

Plan for Prison Closures Stirs Fears
Distressed Towns in Upstate N.Y. Cite Dire Economic Consequences

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 22, 2009

NORWICH, N.Y. -- On most mornings here, for about as long as anyone can remember, a green minibus arrives from the outskirts of town and discharges a crew of young men in look-alike gear: green pants and green or red sweat shirts. They rake leaves in the fall and shovel snow in the winter. They paint buildings and clean up debris. They helped put a roof on the county courthouse.

The workers rarely speak. "Just 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir,' " one city employee said.

The work crews are inmates from the nearby Camp Pharsalia, a minimum-security state prison tucked into a hillside a dozen miles outside town. For the city of Norwich, like other rural Upstate New York communities, the 110-inmate Pharsalia and other prison camps have become something of an economic lifeline, for decades providing not just manpower, but also jobs, in a region where work is hard to come by.

But with most governors and legislatures grappling with crushing budget deficits, what's good for rural economies is often proving bad for states.

New York is facing a $13 billion deficit, and a falling inmate population, and Gov. David A Paterson (D) has proposed saving about $26 million by shuttering four of the state's prison facilities, including Camp Pharsalia and nearby Camp Georgetown. Faced with the prospect of losing a big part of their economic base, these small, distressed towns and cities are banding together with a common cry: "Save Our Prison!"

"This is a major impact on a small community," said Paul Lashway, a Norwich resident and prison guard at Camp Pharsalia for the past 10 years. He is also a steward for the local corrections officers' union. "I thought we were trying to save jobs," he said. "Here, they're trying to take 'em." The prison union is leading an effort that includes lobbying the legislature, direct mailing and targeted radio ads in the affected communities.

It's a conflict being played out across the country. The number of inmates boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of high crime rates and stiff mandatory-sentencing laws that particularly targeted drug offenders. States rushed to build additional prisons to keep up with what appeared to be a growth industry. And many struggling, mostly rural, communities came to see prisons as a substitute for the family farms and the small manufacturing plants that were vanishing.

"Prison growth was a lot about economic development," said Tracy Huling, who produced a documentary about the phenomenon, titled "Yes, In My Backyard."

"It started in the '80s, when the farm crisis exploded across rural America," she said. "Agribusiness drove out family farms, and the economic base of a lot of rural communities just collapsed. In the absence of a real recovery strategy to address that, you have a lot of prisons."

The United States has the dubious distinction of being the country with the highest percentage of its citizens behind bars, more than one in a hundred, or 2.3 million people, according to the Pew Center on the States.

But a confluence of events has forced a fundamental rethinking. Crime rates have dropped sharply over the past two decades, and almost all states are facing budget deficits. Study after study has shown that giving nonviolent drug offenders treatment, instead of jail time, is far more effective at preventing repeat abuses. And it costs much more to keep a person incarcerated than to supervise him or her on probation.

As crime has receded as a major issue among voters, many state legislatures, including here in New York, are looking at rolling back mandatory drug sentencing laws. Some states, such as New Jersey, are experimenting with special "drug courts" for first-time offenders. Others, such as Rhode Island, have expanded "good time" early release programs or are allowing some prisoners to serve a portion of their sentences at home.

Some involved in the prison industry, as well as some in law enforcement, say this is the wrong time to be rolling back sentencing laws and closing prisons. "You know what happens in a recession," Lashway said. "Crime goes up."

And what is heralded by most as good news -- declining prison populations -- is being greeted with a sense of foreboding in places where prisons have become big business.

Norwich Mayor Joseph P. Maiurano has calculated the cost, for his city, and for surrounding Chenango County, one of New York's poorest: Fifty-nine corrections officers, and their family members, may have to leave the area for jobs in other facilities. About 40 local businesses will lose procurement funds. More than 50 local organizations benefit from the work the inmates provide.

The prison is a major employer, but it also has a direct impact on other services, such as postal services. The local post office is largely supported by the huge volume of inmate mail. With the loss of the prison, residents fear the post office could close, too.

Despite rural communities' attachment to their prisons, many experts dispute whether correctional facilities serve a long-term economic benefit.

Gregory M. Hooks, a sociology professor at Washington State University, who analyzed the economies of prisons, said that among other problems, the pool of free inmate labor eliminates the pool of low-paid manual labor jobs, further depressing local economies. Prisons make communities dependent but without much return to the community, because the jobs are secured for life. And, he said, a local prison may make an area less attractive to other types of businesses, particularly those catering to tourists.

"On average, prisons don't do much of anything," Hooks said. "If you look at the poorest counties, the impact is negative. If you put a prison in a struggling county, they get worse, not better."

The Pharsalia inmates -- the vast majority of them from New York City -- perform a variety of duties, including maintaining horse and ski trails, working in the public parks and thinning the forests. Maiurano estimated that for the city alone, he would need to hire four additional workers to make up for the loss of the free inmate labor.

"Where are we going to get another $100,000-plus dollars?" Maiurano asked in an interview in his office. "We don't have the income -- the growth isn't here."

One of those who has benefited is the Rev. Bruce W. Braswell, pastor of the Springvale Church in Norwich. He said the inmates painted and refurbished the 100-year-old church. "There's no way the church could have been rehabilitated," Braswell said. "It would have cost us a couple thousand dollars to do the same work."

He said Norwich is being unfairly targeted for a prison closing because Chenango County, with 50,000 people, is small and poor, far from any major population center and in the forgotten middle of the state. "Out of sight, out of mind," he said.

Lashway is mainly worried about his job.

Lashway, 41, is the single father of a 17-year-old boy, and it took him nine years of trying to get a job at Camp Pharsalia. After four years escorting the work crews, Lashway is a weapons trainer with a decade of experience, making $55,000 a year. If Pharsalia closes, he will be offered a job at another prison, but that might mean driving at least 1 1/2 hours each way.

In a region where jobs are scarce, he may not have any other choice.

"I'm trying not to think about that," Lashway said.

Paterson won't be the first governor to try to close prisons. George E. Pataki and Eliot Spitzer proposed closing some prisons while they were governors, including Pharsalia, but retreated in the face of widespread local protests.

The difference this time around is the deteriorating financial situation. "It costs a lot of money to keep it open," Eric Kriss, a spokesman for the State Department of Correctional Services, said of Camp Pharsalia.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/22/AR2009032202747.html

Posted by lois at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2009

Louisiana’s prison telephone rip-off

Louisiana’s prison telephone rip-off
Ronald Fraser
Guest Columnist
Published: Friday, March 20, 2009

Prison inmates who use the telephone to maintain strong family ties will be better prepared to rebuild their lives upon returning home.
Why then do Louisiana elected officials allow price gouging phone companies to drive prison telephone rates sky high, isolating state inmates from the outside world?

The cost of long distance calling has dropped drastically for most people in Louisiana, but not families of inmates. According to the Federal Communications Commission, nationally, domestic interstate calls in 2006 were billed at just six cents per minute.

Yet the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Campaign to Promote Equitable Telephone Charges, reports that the families of Louisiana inmates pay Global Tel*Link, Louisiana’s current prison phone service monopoly, much more.

For a 15-minute call, including per-call and usage charges, the Campaign calculates that inmate families in Louisiana pay 35 cents per minute for intra-state long distance collect calls, and a whopping 47 cents per minute for interstate collect calls. A similar interstate call using a debit, or pre-paid, card would cost a lot less but Louisiana prisons do not permit the use of debit cards.

In other states inmate families pay less per minute for 15-minute collect interstate calls: Florida, 12 cents; Michigan and New York, 15 cents; Missouri, 17 cents and 18 cents in New Hampshire.

These Louisiana rates include “commissions” (a.k.a. kickbacks) negotiated during the contracting process and paid to state prison operators as a percentage of prison phone revenues. Eager to win lucrative contracts competing phone companies in the U.S. sweeten their bids by offering generous kickbacks, some as high as 65%.

Only seven states -- Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma and Rhode Island -- do not accept such commissions from phone companies and pass the savings on to inmates.

While competition among phone companies in the open market drives long distance calling rates down, competition in the prison telephone market, with help from greedy phone companies and uncaring prison operators, actually drives rates up for inmates and their families.

Studies on file with the FCC show that nationally, including special security features attached to prison phones, it costs phone companies between 12 and 17 cents per minute to provide interstate collect calling, and between six and 12 cents per minute to provide interstate debit calling. These estimates include transport and termination costs and six cents for collect calls to cover billing and uncollectible costs.

Using these cost estimates, in Louisiana Global Tel*Link is making a profit on collect interstate calls in the 63-74% range. Nationally, estimates are that prison phone companies make similar profits on these calls.

It’s not that no one has noticed the prison telephone rip-off. The 2006 Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons reported that inmate phone rates are “extraordinarily high” and that lower rates will “support family and community bonds.” Even the American Bar Association has formally called for inmate calls to be set at the “lowest possible rates.” And the American Correctional Association says sound correctional management includes reasonably priced phone services.

Perhaps the low rates in Florida, Michigan and New York will shame phone companies and prison operators in Louisiana and many other states into ending their abuse of prison inmates and their families. But just in case these phone companies and prison officials are, in fact, shameless, Martha Wright and other inmate family members have filed a formal proposal asking the FCC to use its authority under the federal Communications Act to impose a reasonable interstate phone rate in all U.S. prisons.

Following a review of industry costs and the low rates now charged in several states, the proposal asks the FCC to mandate that inmates making interstate collect calls are charged no more than 25 cents per minute, and interstate debit calls no more than 20 cents per minute. The proposal also asks that the debit calling card option be provided in all U.S. prisons.

The FCC proposal only addresses interstate long distance calls. However, if the FCC does set lower interstate rates, this will pressure states from coast-to-coast to also adjust downward their intra-state long distance, inmate calling rates.

It is time to end telephone price gouging in U.S. prisons. If phone companies in Florida, Michigan, New York and Missouri can provide inmates with reasonable rates, so can Louisiana. Doing so will help strengthen prisoners’ family ties, and make our communities safer.

Ronald Fraser writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization. Write him at: fraserr@erols.com.
http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20090320/ARTICLES/903209963/-1/OPINION?Title=Louisiana-s-prison-telephone-rip-off

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

MA Bar Association: MBA-backed criminal reform legislation returns for 2009-10 session

Lawyers Journal
MBA-backed criminal reform legislation returns for 2009-10 session
By Kelsey Sadoff
March 20, 2009

Criminal reform bills that failed to make it through last year’s legislative session are being reintroduced for the 2009-10 session with high expectations for their passage, which would usher in significant changes to the state’s criminal policies.

Last year, the Massachusetts Bar Association championed reforms to both sentencing guidelines and the Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) law, but the legislation was released from committee too late to advance before the end of the 2008-09 session. Immediate Past President David W. White Jr. made sentencing and CORI reform a priority for his term, and 2008-09 President Edward W. McIntyre has continued the push for reform.

The MBA is supporting a CORI bill that the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute and a coalition of groups, under the name of Massachusetts Alliance to Reform CORI (MARC), are focused on having addressed by the Legislature. The MBA has proposed recommendations for the CORI bill, which includes addressing access (law enforcement access versus non-law enforcement entities), accuracy and sealing old records.

The MBA’s Drug Policy Task Force is also set to issue a report this year that will include comprehensive data and facts that will strongly support arguments for sentencing reform in Massachusetts.

“This new legislative session holds much promise in the advancement of criminal sentencing and CORI reform legislative measures,” said MBA General Counsel and Acting Executive Director Martin W. Healy. “Criminal justice reforms have been identified as a priority area of interest by a number of legislators. We are in the second half of the (Gov. Deval) Patrick administration and the governor is considered a veteran on the Hill. We are hopeful that Patrick will push hard on these greatly needed reforms.”

More than 20 years ago, mandatory minimum sentencing reforms for drug offenders were enacted in Massachusetts to deal with crimes including trafficking, possession with intent to distribute, distribution in a school zone and distribution to a minor. The mandatory minimum sentences effectively ended an offender’s opportunity for parole if incarcerated.

Speaking against the current mandatory minimum sentencing policy at the Jan. 15 MBA House of Delegates meeting, the Drug Policy Task Force received HOD endorsement on two pieces of drug and treatment legislation that the MBA will support during the 2009-10 legislative session.

HOD unanimously voted in favor of the proposed legislation, which would revise the drug sentencing structure by eliminating mandatory minimums for most drug dealing crimes and expand parole and work release opportunities for incarcerated drug offenders, while also enhancing the existing system of diversion of drug offenders to drug treatment programs as an alternative to incarceration.

“The MBA is taking a position because current drug policies have failed; because they are expensive (Department of Correction’s inmate cost is more than $47,000; county jail is $39,000) and growing exponentially,” said MBA President Edward W. McIntyre.

According to the Massachusetts Department of Correction, the state prison population increased by 384 percent from 1980 to 2008 and the number of drug offenders increased 2,394 percent, from 109 in 1980 to 2,610 in 2008. Since the enactment of mandatory minimum sentencing reforms, drug offenders have made up more than 25 percent of the state prison population, as opposed to the 4 percent of drug offenders making up the state prison population in 1980.

“Essentially, the MBA’s position is about deploying a public health approach rather than a failed criminal justices paradigm to drug offenders,” said McIntyre. “It’s about treatment rather than incarceration; about accelerated reintegration into the family unit, the community’s social structure and workforce. Studies from across the country and around the world demonstrate that intelligent policies that move away from the incarceration model to a treatment, accelerated assimilation program, reduce the rate of crime and the staggering cost of incarceration — which is the second most rapidly growing budget item next to health care.”

“Parole is really a function of getting a person in a productive relationship with society and their community,” said MBA immediate Past President David W. White Jr. and founding member of the Drug Policy Task Force. “Offering parole allows prisons to make room for more dangerous criminals, reducing the rate of crime overall by restoring families, neighborhoods and communities by making ex-offenders better citizens, and saves the taxpayers money.”

In the November 2008 general election, Massachusetts citizens voted to decriminalize marijuana. Legislators, who for years have been focused on discussion revolving around the belief that constituents want stronger punishments for low-level drug offenders, now have proof that the public actually wants to reduce the resources designated to punishment of low-level drug offenses. White believes the “commonwealth, now in severe economic crisis, can handle the drug sentencing issues in a way to save millions and millions of dollars.”

Furthermore, current mandatory minimum drug sentences have disproportionately impacted cities and their minority populations. Current school zone laws, which increase punishment drug offenses within 1,000 feet of a school with mandatory sentences — regardless of prior knowledge if school is in session, intent to distribute, time of day or awareness of proximity to a school — have created a situation where almost an entire city can be considered a school zone.

“The result is an impact on minorities,” said White. “The bill didn’t have that intent when it was enacted, but it has discriminatory consequences. We would like the statute changed to 100 feet.” White pointed out that approximately 300 people are sentenced for school zone offenses each year.

“In the commonwealth, we spend more money on jails and prisons then on higher education,” White said. “It is time for more sensible priorities.”
ttp://www.massbar.org/for-attorneys/publications/lawyers-journal/2009/march/mba-backed-criminal-reform-legislation

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

March 20, 2009

MI: Juvenile lifer bills in Senate “The greatest hope I have had in 33 years.”

Juvenile lifer bills in Senate
“The greatest hope I have had in 33 years.”

By Diane Bukowski
The Michigan Citizen

DETROIT — Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy charged a 17-year-old with assault with intent to commit murder, felonious assault, assault with a dangerous weapon on school grounds, carrying a concealed weapon and felony firearm after he wounded another 17-year-old in the stomach inside Central High School Feb. 18.

The two were gambling in the halls, a practice that has being going on since at least the 70s, according to one Central High alumni. The 17-year-old faces up to life in prison. Days later, police raided CHS and carried away teens as young as 14 on police buses to face loitering charges, whether or not they were students.

“Until they improve the conditions in our schools, there will be more trouble,” said Steve Conn, a high school teacher for 22 years with the Detroit Public Schools. “Despair runs so deep among our young people, who are treated like their lives don’t matter.”

A 16-year-old Detroiter was ordered to stand trial on first-degree murder charges Feb. 5 in connection with the shooting death of an Oak Park police officer, under unclear circumstances. Numerous suburbanites wrote in to daily news message boards calling for his execution, or at least life without parole, although he has not yet been tried or convicted.

These children, and numerous others in Detroit and communities across Michigan, have 400 counterparts already in the system, children who were sentenced at the age of 17 or below to life in prison without parole, and at least 1,000 others serving lengthy jail terms. The number of juvenile non-parolable lifers is up substantially from slightly over 300 a year ago, indicating that more juveniles are newly entering the system, condemned to death behind bars.

But there is hope on the horizon.

“The Juvenile Life Without Parole bills that were passed last year in the House of Representatives represent the greatest hope I have had in 33 years,” wrote Edward Sanders. “These bills must be voted on in the Senate now, to give the second chance we pray for.”

Sanders, who is currently incarcerated at the Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Facility in Muskegon, was 17 when he was convicted in a drive-by shooting in 1976, although he was not the shooter.

He is awaiting word from the Michigan parole board regarding his request for commutation. Before Michigan prisons ceased providing college courses, he obtained his bachelor’s degree and now helps other prisoners as a “jail-house” lawyer and spiritual advisor.

Sanders was referring to Senate Bills 0171 through 0176, sponsored by State Sens. Liz Brater (D-Ann Arbor), Martha Scott (D-Highland Park) and Michael Switalski (D-Roseville). Co-sponsors include Glenn Anderson, (D-Westland), Michael Prusi (D-Ishpeming), Samuel “Buzz” Thomas (D-Detroit), Hansen Clarke (D-Detroit), and Gilda Jackson (D-Huntington Woods).

House versions were passed Dec. 4 by an overwhelming margin of 83-22. The current Senate bills, however, will have to go back to the House again for approval before they can be forwarded to Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm.

“The idea of sending a person whose brain is not fully developed to prison for life has been determined to be inhumane,” said Brater. “The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world, and Michigan is one of few states in the U.S. with this practice. Many of these youth were sentenced along with an adult defendant who got a lesser sentence and many were victims of abuse or neglect or are people with a mental illness or disability.”

The series of bills therefore addresses alternatives to incarceration for mentally ill individuals and diversion from jail under other circumstances as well as the central life without parole question.

S.B. 0173 says, “An individual who was less than 18 years of age when he or she committed a crime for which he or she was sentenced to serve a minimum term of imprisonment of 10 years or more, or who was sentenced to imprisonment for life, including imprisonment for life without parole eligibility, who has served 10 years of his or her sentence is subject to the jurisdiction of the parole board and may be released on parole.”

The bill specifies several aspects of the prisoner’s individual situation for the parole board to consider.

All six bills, introduced Jan. 29, are now in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by State Sen. Alan Cropsey (R-Dewitt). Cropsey has expressed reluctance to let the bills out of committee.

Brater said that although the Senate is predominantly Republican, efforts are constantly being made to reach out to that side of the aisle. A particular consideration is the huge cost of such incarcerations. Both the Greater Detroit and Michigan Chambers of Commerce have passed resolutions calling for a reduction in Michigan’s prison population, along with numerous other organizations and even major media.

Felicia Tyson, part of a group of family members of juvenile lifers, said that they are continuing to organize and lobby Senators as well as Representatives, in the same fashion that won passage of the House bills last year.

“We are asking people to write, phone and email their legislators, and are planning a mass visit to the House in April,” said Tyson. Over 200 family members and even victims turned out for a lobbying effort last year.

The website for the group can be found at www.secondchanceforyouth.com.

The group’s address is P.O. Box 251941, West Bloomfield, MI 48325-1941 and phone 248-738-2111. An online petition to legislators is available at petition@secondchanceforyouth.com.

http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=&mad=&sdetail=7116&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com

Posted by lois at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Court Allows Brooklyn Jail to Reopen But Cannot Double Jail size Without Environmental and Land-Use Reviews

Court Allows Brooklyn Jail to Reopen
By SEWELL CHAN
March 18, 2009
NY Times

A Brooklyn judge has cleared the way for the city to resume sending inmates to the Brooklyn House of Detention, which stopped housing them overnight in 2003, but has ruled that the city’s effort to nearly double the size of the jail required environmental and land-use reviews.

The ruling, released on Wednesday by Justice Sylvia O. Hinds-Radix of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, was a partial victory for the city and a partial victory for opponents of the jail, including community groups and elected officials.

“The court’s decision clears the way for the city to continue to use the Brooklyn Detention Center as a jail for Brooklyn, just as it has since 1957,” Correction Commissioner Martin F. Horn said in a statement. “We will continue to maintain the jail in a condition for occupancy at its capacity.”

Randy M. Mastro, a lawyer for the jail’s opponents, called the ruling “a huge victory for the community and a vindication of its right to meaningful public input before the city commits itself to such massive projects.”

The judge rejected the argument by community groups and the city comptroller that reopening the jail, which has 759 beds, required additional reviews. But she ruled that the city may not proceed on expanding the jail without such reviews. Plans call for a 720-bed expansion.

The jail, at 275 Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill, was not used to house inmates overnight from June 2003 until last November, when the department placed 31 inmates there. During those five years, the jail was used during the day to hold hundreds of inmates scheduled to appear at the adjacent courthouse.

Opponents of the jail said that its closing helped revitalize Downtown Brooklyn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/nyregion/19jail.html?_r=2&ref=nyregion

Posted by lois at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)

NC: Critics: Perdue's closing plan may overload prisons Officials say state's correctional system is already above capacity.

Critics: Perdue's closing plan may overload prisons
Officials say state's correctional system is already above capacity.
By Dan Kane
Charlotte Observer
Friday, Mar. 20, 2009

At a time when the state's prisons desperately need new beds, Gov. Bev Perdue wants to cut them.

To help deal with the state's budget crisis, Perdue this week proposed closing five prisons, a prison hospital and a halfway house for women because they are among the system's most inefficient.

The cuts would save the state more than $25 million over the next two fiscal years, but they also eliminate space for 1,031 inmates at a time when the system could see another 2,300 inmates in the next 15 months.

Prison officials say they can move the displaced inmates into the remaining 72 facilities by putting two beds in some cells, putting beds in day rooms and other measures. But the closings add to a growing problem for a prison system that is already slightly above capacity, with 40,644 inmates behind bars. The system is expected to grow by another 9,000 inmates during the next 10 years.

The space crunch has led some lawmakers to call for legislation that would reduce some sentences. But Perdue, in a meeting Thursday with reporters and editors at The (Raleigh) News & Observer, said she is not ready to offer her support.

“I would like a discussion sometime about what other states are doing,” Perdue said. “I know after a decade there needs to be a very open public discussion about whether we invest more in community placement and education opportunities.”

State lawmakers charged with writing the prison budget say they peppered Perdue's staff about the capacity concerns.

“We couldn't get a clear answer,” said state Sen. Tom Apodaca, a Hendersonville Republican.

That's because prison officials say they do not yet know how they will deal with the predicted surge in inmates.

The projection comes from the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, which is charged with determining how many inmates the system will see for the next 10 years so that lawmakers can prevent the prison overcrowding that led to federal intervention two decades ago.

James French, a deputy correction secretary who oversees the prisons, said his staff is checking prisons to see how much additional capacity they may have. They are limited by federal requirements that say how much space each inmate needs to avoid overcrowding — which can create an unsafe environment for inmates and staff. Prison officials are already concerned at the level of double-bunking within the system.

“We're working on it, and we don't have a lot of time to waste,” French said. “This is a top priority for our management team right now.”

The proposed prison closings are causing heartburn for state officials in other ways.

Legislative budget writers say they are concerned that some of the prisons up for closing would mean inmates' families would have to drive longer distances for visits.

Haywood Correctional Center, a minimum security prison near Waynesville, is the system's westernmost and is roughly 90 miles from the western border.

Mary Pollard, the new executive director for N.C. Prisoner Legal Services, said she was concerned about the proposed closing of McCain Correctional Hospital in Raeford. It has become a geriatric care facility for the correction department.

French and Keith Acree, a department spokesman, said none of the inmates will end up in facilities that are not the right fit. Minimum security inmates, for example, will be moved to minimum security facilities.

Acree also said there are other prisons with specialized geriatric care.

Acree said prison workers will do their best to move an inmate to the next closest facility so families can continue to visit. But he anticipates inmates will be shuttled around the state.
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/local/story/609711.html

Posted by lois at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

MA: Round Two for Question 2 The battle over marijuana laws moves to the local level.

News
Round Two for Question 2
The battle over marijuana laws moves to the local level.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009
By Maureen Turner
Valley Advocate (Northampton, MA)

Drug law reform advocates scored a decisive victory last November when voters approved, by a 65 to 35 margin, Question 2, which decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. Under the new law, which went into effect in January, possession of one ounce or less of pot became a civil offense, punishable by a $100 fine but sparing the defendant a criminal record, sanctions like a loss of federal student loans, and even possible jail time.

But even with such a clear victory, reformers have not been able to rest easy. While Question 2 garnered support from some surprising sectors (law enforcement professionals who see prosecution for minor possession as unduly harsh and a burden on the system; conservatives who question the tens of millions spent in Massachusetts each year to arrest and process the defendants), it also faced formidable political opposition from the state's district attorneys, police chiefs and the Patrick administration. Indeed, no sooner had voters approved the law than opponents began strategizing to undercut its intent.

Their first line of attack: municipal ordinances. To the great irritation of some drug law reformers, Question 2 included a provision that allows towns and cities to create their own ordinances targeting small-time possession in public places. Prompted by a model ordinance distributed by Attorney General Martha Coakley, a number of communities have passed or are considering public smoking ordinances that would impose additional civil fines, sometimes triple the amount mandated by Question 2. Those communities include Springfield, where the City Council is poised to approve such an ordinance next week.

*

In Springfield, the public smoking ordinance was introduced by City Councilor Jimmy Ferrera, a state Trial Court employee who supervises people sentenced to community service. Under the ordinance, a first-time ticket for smoking pot in public would prompt a $100 fine on top of the $100 fine created by Question 2. The municipal fine would increase to $200 for a second ticket and $300 for any further tickets. Originally, Ferrera had proposed a $300 fine for all offenses; the fees were staggered after some councilors and members of the public expressed concern that the fine was too steep for first- and second-time offenders.

Ferrera told the Advocate he introduced the ordinance to create consistency in the law. Right now, he noted, police can arrest someone for having an open container of alcohol in public, but not arrest someone for smoking a joint in public."We're just trying to continue our fight on quality-of-life issues," he said.

Ferrera said he was also inspired by similar efforts in other communities. "I just didn't want to see Springfield kind of forgotten," he said. "We could be a leader in the region."

The ordinance, he added, would not create a dramatic shift in the Police Department's day-to-day business. "Believe me & [public marijuana smoking] is not a major priority for the police," Ferrera said. "Murder, rapes robberies—those are major categories for the police, especially with tough budget cuts when there a reduction in personnel."

Several communities—including Salem, Lynn, Methuen and Medway—have already passed public possession ordinances with fines ranging from $100 to $300. MassCann—the Massachusetts chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML—has been tracking similar efforts in other towns and cities. According to MassCann, at least 11 municipal governments besides Springfield—including Pittsfield and North Adams—have similar efforts underway. Others are likely to join the list; in Chicopee, for example, the police chief has called on the City Council to create a similar ordinance.

"These people who were opposed to Question 2—who we sometimes refer to as 'sore losers'—are trying to overturn the stated will of the voters," said Bill Downing, president of MassCann.

Question 2 was opposed by a long list of law enforcement professionals; the Massachusetts District Attorneys, in particular, threw considerable political capital and cash at trying to defeat the new law, which they warned would send a pro-drug message to kids. That comes as no surprise to Downing and other reformers, who note that police officers' and prosecutors' livelihoods depend in large part on drug arrests and prosecutions. "You have people who have a professional interest in maintaining the status quo in the drug war,"Downing said.

But for elected officials like Ferrera to try to circumvent the intent of Question 2 especially grates backers of the measure. "I think it's shameful. I think it's an insult," said Downing. "It should be up to the citizens of that city to decide, and the citizens of Springfield have already decided. They voted for a $100 fine."

*

Ferrera maintains there's nothing wrong with local governments adding their own marijuana fines; after all, when voters approved Question 2, they also approved its provision that allowed the creation of municipal ordinances.

In fact, the language of the law did not specify that these municipal ordinances had to be civil in nature—leading to an interpretation that cities and towns could, in fact, recriminalize minor pot possession. But that's a step Ferrera says he's not interested in taking. "I don't really think that was the original intent of Question 2, to make it criminal at this stage of the game," he said. "That would be pushing the envelope a little bit too much, I think."

The fact that Question 2 allowed for the creation of any municipal penalties was a point of some contention among various drug-reform advocates. "Unfortunately, the language of Question 2—which was not written by my organization—allowed for local ordinances," said MassCann's Downing.

Question 2 was drafted by the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy, a non-profit ballot question committee largely funded by billionaire drug reform activist George Soros. CSMP manager Whitney Taylor was unavailable for comment last week; her voice mail referred reporters to the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project.

"We really can't argue with the law," which allowed cities and towns to create their own civil fines, Dan Bernath, an MPP spokesman, told the Advocate. "That said," he added, "it seems that it's premature for localities to pass these ordinances before they really see how the law works." Eleven other states have already decriminalized minor pot possession, some as long ago as the 1970s. And studies show that in those states, marijuana use and crime rates have not increased as a result of the law, he noted.

Bernath laughed off an earlier statement made by Ferrera, who warned that if neighboring communities toughened up their public marijuana laws and Springfield didn't, the city would become a haven for pot smokers. "That's a frivolous fear," Bernath said. "To continue wringing our hands over this is silly and little bit embarrassing.'

*

Ferrera's ordinance received two necessary approvals from the City Council in February; on March 23, the Council will take a required third vote.

The ordinance will then go to Mayor Domenic Sarno for approval. According to mayoral spokesman Tom Walsh, it would be "premature" for Sarno to take a position on the ordinance, since he's yet to see it in its final form.

"Mayor Sarno will solicit input from public safety officials including Police Commissioner William Fitchet and Hampden County District Attorney William Bennett prior to reaching a decision," Walsh wrote in a statement to the Advocate. "Mayor Sarno is interested in knowing from the public safety officials whether this ordinance will serve as a valuable tool to combat crime in the city and help to create a better quality of life for our city's residents."

Fitchet has already stated his support of the ordinance, while Bennett, for whom Sarno used to work, was vocal in his opposition to Question 2.

Ferrera's ordinance has drawn some public opposition, including opposition from people who've spoken out against it at earlier Council meetings. They include Bill Newman, a Northampton civil liberties attorney, who urged the Council not to rush to create an ordinance and warned it could clog up the court system with people protesting fines that could reach $400.

Downing, of MassCann, said it's up to the public to pressure elected officials to respect the intent of the law voters overwhelmingly passed in November. In a case like this, that's not always easy. "It's difficult to get people to stand up in front of town officials and speak in favor of an issue that has such a heavy social stigma attached to it, especially if you've got police officials there," Downing said. "Unfortunately, it's up to the people themselves to assert their rights."
http://www.valleyadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=9376

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

Delano CA: Guards fire rounds during fatal Kern Valley State Prison riot

CALIFORNIA BRIEFING
Guards fire rounds during fatal Kern Valley State Prison riot
March 20, 2009 LA Times
DELANO

Guards fire rounds during fatal prison riot

Prison guards fired live rounds, pepper spray and rubber bullets to quell a riot at Kern Valley State Prison in which one inmate was stabbed to death and 17 others injured, state corrections officials disclosed Thursday.

The deadly melee in the maximum-security section of the overcrowded prison involved 38 inmates, four of whom suffered bullet wounds after guards moved in to contain the riot that began at 3:20 p.m. Wednesday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation reported.

The riot occurred in the general population yard of Kern Valley's Facility B at the prison 180 miles north of Los Angeles. Four inmate-made weapons were recovered from the scene, reported Lt. Xavier Cano of the prison's public information office.

"Correctional officers used lethal munitions, pepper spray and multiple direct impact rubber rounds to quell the incident. A correctional officer also discharged five rounds from the mini-14 rifle," Cano's statement said, referring to a military-style rifle used in some prisons.

Inmate Oscar Cruz, serving a 37-year sentence for first-degree armed robbery and gang activity in Los Angeles County, received multiple stab wounds before being treated at the prison medical center. He was then taken to an outside hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 8:26 p.m.

Kern Valley, one of two state prisons in Delano, houses more than 4,700 prisoners, nearly twice its designed capacity of 2,448, a problem plaguing all of California's 33 adult prisons.

The cause of the riot was still under investigation by the prison's Investigative Services Unit in conjunction with the Kern County district attorney, the state Office of Inspector General and the corrections department's Deadly Force Investigation Team.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-briefs20-2009mar20,0,1654407.story

Posted by lois at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2009

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department and other agencies cover budget shortfalls and save positions using ICE money....$55.2 million in 2008

"Washington paid nearly $55.2 million to house detainees at 13 local jails in California in fiscal year 2008, up from $52.6 million the previous year. "

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department and other agencies cover budget shortfalls and save positions using the federal payments.
By Anna Gorman
March 17, 2009
LA Times
Chart with county jails and dollars amounts from ICE at this URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immigjail17-2009mar17,0,5433919,full.story

At a time when local law enforcement agencies are being forced to cut budgets and freeze hiring, cities across Southern California have found a growing source of income -- immigration detention.

Roughly two-thirds of the nation's immigrant detainees are held in local jails, and the payments to cities and counties for housing them have increased as the federal government has cracked down on illegal immigrants with criminal records and outstanding deportation orders.

Washington paid nearly $55.2 million to house detainees at 13 local jails in California in fiscal year 2008, up from $52.6 million the previous year. The U.S. is on track to spend $57 million this year.

The largest federal contract in the state is with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, whose 1,400-bed detention center in Lancaster is dedicated to housing immigrants either awaiting deportation or fighting their cases in court. The department received $34.7 million in 2008, up from $32.3 million the previous year.

Some smaller cities have seen their income rise much faster. Glendale received nearly $260,000 in 2008, triple what it got the previous year. In Alhambra, last year's $247,000 was more than double the previous year's payments.

For some cash-strapped cities, the federal money has become a critical source of revenue, covering budget shortfalls and saving positions.

Santa Ana's Police Department, for example, expects as much as a 15% budget cut and has had a hiring freeze since October that has resulted in more than 60 sworn and civilian positions remaining vacant, Police Chief Paul Walters said. To offset reductions, Walters plans to convert two multipurpose rooms at the 480-bed jail into dormitory rooms this spring. That will accommodate an additional 32 immigrant detainees, which he expects will bring in $1 million more in revenue each year. He also hopes to get approval to raise the nightly price per detainee from $82 to $87.

"We treat [the jail] as a business," Walters said. "The cuts could have been much deeper if it weren't for the ability to raise money there."

When Santa Ana received bond money to build a police headquarters and jail, it did so with the future in mind. Rather than constructing a facility to house its own inmates, it built a much larger facility and soon started contracting with Orange County and state and federal governments.

The federal contracts cover nearly the entire cost of the jail, said Russell Davis, the jail administrator. On a recent day, the jail housed 20 Santa Ana arrestees, 283 U.S. Marshals prisoners and 165 immigration detainees. Some of the detainees, from Mexico, Vietnam, El Salvador and elsewhere, had landed in immigration custody after serving state prison sentences. Others were arrested after ignoring deportation orders or because of criminal records that made them eligible for deportation.

The contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency brought in more than $3.7 million in 2007 and $4.8 million last year.

If he had to do it all over again, Davis said, he would have built another floor on the jail.

The immigration agency "is inundated with detainees," he said. "If I had 100 more beds, they'd fill them."

Immigrant detainees stay in the local jails anywhere from a few hours to many months. At most jails, they are not separated from the rest of the population.

Not everyone is as pleased as Davis over those arrangements. Immigrant rights advocates have raised concerns about local jails not following federal detention standards and not segregating detainees from people suspected of committing crimes.

"Immigration detention is civil, not criminal," said Ahilan Arulanantham, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. "If you are holding them in the same place, that distinction is meaningless."

Even though the cities may benefit financially, the savings do not get passed along to taxpayers, he said. "We're still paying for it," he said. "It's still a waste of resources to detain people who do not need to be detained."

Several of the foreign nationals housed in Santa Ana said they believed they should be let out on bond rather than incarcerated while fighting their immigration cases, especially if they had no criminal records or had already served their time.

Victor Hidalgo, 36, finished a five-year sentence in state prison on a drug charge before being transferred into immigration custody. Hidalgo, who is from Nicaragua, said he and others have jobs, families and homes here and are not a danger to society.

"We're not national security risks," he said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the jails that house detainees for more than 72 hours -- including in Santa Ana and Lancaster -- are subject to "stringent detention standards" and undergo inspection by a contracted company. Other jails are inspected regularly by the immigration agency.

The federal contracts with local jails began about a decade ago but have expanded over the last few years. The federal government operates some of its own detention centers and contracts with private companies to run others but relies heavily on the local jails.

The cost varies from around $80 to just over $100 per detainee per day, generally less expensive than the cost of housing detainees at federal immigration facilities.

"These facilities enable us to place detainees at appropriate sites with minimal travel so we can begin the removal process quickly," Kice said.

In Southern California, the need for bed space became more pressing after the immigration agency closed the San Pedro detention center on Terminal Island in 2007. And in Northern California, where there is no dedicated immigration detention center, Santa Clara County began housing the detainees in 2003.

"It was a strategy to help us financially," said Edward Flores, chief of Santa Clara County's Department of Correction.

Those budget cuts have only gotten worse, with the county expecting $1.25 million less in fiscal year 2010.

In turn, the federal contract has become even more important. Flores said he expects to make up about half the expected deficit with federal contracts, both with the immigration agency and the U.S. Marshals Service. He is also trying to negotiate a higher nightly rate.

The county received nearly $7 million to house detainees in 2008.

"We have become very reliant on this revenue," Flores said.

This and other news about immigration and mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

NC: Perdue's budget tries again to close inefficient but job-rich NC prisons targeted since 1992

Perdue's budget tries again to close inefficient but job-rich NC prisons targeted since 1992
Gov. Beverly Perdue's roadmap for narrowing the state's $3.4 billion budget gap for the coming year includes closing seven of the state's 79 prisons, traditionally some of the biggest employers in rural areas.

By EMERY P. DALESIO
March 17, 2009- Seattle Times
Associated Press Writer
RALEIGH, N.C. —

Gov. Beverly Perdue's roadmap for narrowing the state's $3.4 billion budget gap for the coming year includes closing seven of the state's 79 prisons, traditionally some of the biggest employers in rural areas.

On the chopping block in Perdue's plan released Tuesday include the state's smallest prison — housing just 36 women in Wilmington who go to work during the day and return to their lockup at night — and a century-old former tuberculosis sanitarium in Hoke County that for years has served as a sort of nursing home for elderly inmates.

While all seven are described as old, small, and inefficient, each will have advocates arguing that the state jobs they represent are too important for their communities to lose. Five of the seven prisons have been recommended to be mothballed since a top-to-bottom study of state operations 16 years ago. Each time, advocates won the argument of local jobs over statewide efficiency.

"They each have their constituency. They each have economic benefits to their community. They are economic drivers," said Rep. Alice Bordsen, D-Alamance, a co-chairwoman of the House budget-writing subcommittee on public safety.

Closing all seven minimum-security prisons could cut 541 jobs — more than a hundred of those now vacant — or more than half of the 1,033 positions Perdue would ax from the state's work force for the fiscal year starting July 1. The prison closings would save more than $24 million a year once completed in 2010.

Perdue's budget recommends closing the Wilmington Residential Facility for Women in November and McCain Correctional Hospital in May 2010. She also recommended closing the Umstead, Gates, Haywood, Union and Guilford Correctional Centers by mid-2010. All but McCain and Guilford were recommended for closing by the Government Performance Audit Committee in 1992.

Even in recommending closing prisons and consolidating employees and inmates into bigger, more cost-effective prisons, Perdue fretted about the effect of job losses in some rural counties.

"It is an economic development hit in rural areas," she said.

The head of the a 55,000-member union representing state workers said the Perdue administration assured him that employees whose jobs are eliminated would be offered another state job within 35 miles of their former worksite. The question now is whether the General Assembly will go ahead and close the prisons, State Employees Association of North Carolina executive director Dana Cope said.

"I think every governor (since 1992) suggested these closures in their budgets and the General Assembly has never taken the steps to actually close them. This is not new to those particular facilities," Cope said.

The prisons employed 432 workers as of last week, Correction Department spokesman Keith Acree said. The largest is McCain, bordering Fort Bragg in Hoke County, with a staff of 224 overseeing 341 inmates. About 30 of the inmates are hospitalized though many others are over-60 and need regular nursing care, Acree said.

All but the Wilmington and Haywood cost more in 2008 than the $60.87 daily average cost for keeping an inmate in a minimum-security state prison, a Correction Department report said.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008876378_apxgrperduebudgetchoices.html

Posted by lois at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)

$1 Spent on Prevention Saves $10, Study Says

$1 Spent on Prevention Saves $10, Study Says
March 16, 2009

ISU report to United Nations conference says drug prevention programs help the economy

AMES, Iowa -- Two Iowa State University researchers have given communities worldwide good reason to implement substance abuse prevention programs. They're economically beneficial, with a nearly $10 return for every dollar invested in prevention.

Richard Spoth, director of the Partnerships in Prevention Science Institute (PPSI) at Iowa State, and Max Guyll, ISU assistant professor of psychology, presented that message last month to substance abuse experts representing approximately 100 countries at a conference in Vienna, Austria, co-sponsored by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Health Organization.

"The primary objective of the conference was to present the state of the art on translating evidence-based prevention and treatment into practice -- to suggest effective strategies for demand reduction (in substance abuse)," Spoth said.

"We showed how prevention can be particularly economically beneficial," he said. "The presentation began by reviewing the evidence on the cost effectiveness and the return on the investment -- or cost benefits -- of prevention programs. I also did a second presentation on the scientific advances and positive outcomes of family-focused prevention, illustrated by our own research."
Applying national, local data in cost analysis

The ISU researchers applied their own and national data to calculate both the cost effectiveness and cost benefit for two of PPSI's intervention programs -- Iowa Strengthening Families Program (ISFP), which works on the family level to prevent substance abuse; and the Life Skills Training Program (LST), which was designed for school-based implementation. Spoth defines cost effectiveness as the cost to achieve a particular outcome -- such as the prevention of an alcohol use disorder -- while the cost benefit assesses whether savings generated by prevention are greater than costs spent on prevention.

The longitudinal "Project Family" study recruited 667 families through 33 Iowa school districts. The researchers calculated that the ISFP intervention cost $12,459 per disorder prevented, but resulted in a $119,633 benefit to communities per alcohol disorder prevented -- a $9.60 return on each dollar invested. The "Capable Families and Youth" trial recruited 679 families through 36 Iowa school districts. Researchers found that life skills training intervention cost $4,921 per methamphetamine use case prevented, but produced a $130,013 employer benefit per methamphetamine user prevented -- a $9.98 return on each dollar invested.

"Effective and efficient prevention promises to save possibly billions of dollars per year, provided we can learn how to effectively implement it on a larger scale," Spoth told the conference.

Iowa State was the only American university that had a presenter invited to speak on the topic of prevention. Spoth, who received a commendation from the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism last year for his prevention work, was also the only expert asked to present twice at the conference.

"I spoke with people there who were very interested in doing family-focused prevention programming, which is evidence-based, in their countries," Spoth said. "Some of them are developing these vast infrastructures, devoting extensive resources. I received a number of requests where they wanted me to get involved in some way with a group that was working on a large scale implementation of prevention programming in their country."
Conference appearance generates international interest

Spoth reports that his conference appearance generated requests from Chile, India, Indonesia, Senegal and a number of other countries for consulting assistance as they implement intervention programs -- possibly modeled after the ones he's successfully implemented through PPSI.

He's also been asked to participate in the meetings by the International Narcotics Control Board, located in Vienna, to work with them to produce their annual report.

"They evaluate international substance issues in depth," Spoth said. "What they would want me to address is the state of the art in effective prevention worldwide."

The complete ISU reports "Prevention's Cost Effectiveness -- Illustrative Economic Benefits of General Population Interventions," and "Prevention of Substance-related Problems: Effectiveness of Family-focused Prevention" are available online at: http://www.ppsi.iastate.edu/press/vienna.htm.

Posted by lois at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2009

Some Minnesota counties struggle with empty jails

Some Minnesota counties struggle with empty jails
By TOM ROBERTSON , Associated Press
Minneapolis Star Tribune
March 16, 2009

PARK RAPIDS, Minn. - This state-of-the-art jail facility in Park Rapids has enough beds to hold 116 prisoners. But on this day there are only 34.

Jail Administrator Sherri Klasen said that means lots of empty cells, as she tours a jail wing.

"This is a typical double-bunk cell," Klasen said. "Pretty sparse. That's the toilet."

When this facility was built in 2006, there were high hopes it would draw overflow prisoners from around the region, and help Hubbard County make some money from its neighbors.

But that isn't happening. The overcrowding from just a few years ago disappeared.

In fact, Minnesota Department of Correction figures show the number of prisoners in county jails is down 3.5 percent.

So Klasen has been shopping the jail around, sending out teletypes and e-mails, to county, state, and even federal corrections agencies.

So far, no luck.

"With the population down everywhere, I periodically make contact just to let them know that we're still out there, but I don't want to contact them so much that I become a pest," she said.

Empty jail cells often mean a big loss in revenue for counties trying to pay for new jail construction, especially since larger jails typically require more personnel to run them.

In Hubbard County, some officials say without that outside revenue, it would actually be cheaper for them to shut the jail down and send their inmates elsewhere.

Hubbard County Commissioner and former County Attorney Greg Larson said that's unlikely to happen. Still, he and others wonder what's going on.

It appears that region-wide, fewer people are going to jail.

"One of the things that was not foreseen was a downturn in business. The numbers I see from the courts indicate the courts are less busy than they were a few years ago," Larson said. "There is less of a workload, and other counties are experiencing the same thing."

Crime statistics aren't available yet for 2008, but Larson said that in the first half of last year, criminal court cases in Hubbard County were down nearly 25 percent from the year before. Civil cases, meanwhile, have continued to rise.

There's lots of speculation as to why jail populations are down.

Some say the state has a better handle on the meth problem that plagued communities a few years ago. Others wonder if perhaps it's due to an aging population. The children of baby boomers are growing beyond the age when they're most likely to commit crimes.

Eighty miles away in Crow Wing County, the story is the same.

The county has a jail facility with 286 beds, but more than a third of them are empty. Daily populations are about 50 inmates less than when the jail opened two years ago.

The number of prisoners Crow Wing County houses for the state has also dropped, and so has their revenue.

Jail administrator Jerry Negen said one reason for the decrease in inmates is that the courts are increasingly finding alternatives to jail time for law breakers. There's a big push for more specialized programs that reduce jail time in favor of more treatment and court supervision.

"They've got 30 plus people in our drug court right now that are doing well, so there's 30 people out of custody that they report to drug court," Negen said. "We also have in Crow Wing County DWI court... So there's another 15 to 20 on that. So there's where our numbers went, we believe."

The apparent recent drop in crime is surprising to Jim Franklin, director of the Minnesota Sheriff's Association.

Franklin said less crime and underpopulated jails is not what he would expect during a time of deepening recession.

"When you have a bad economy, statistically speaking, crime trends tend to go up. What we don't know is that this appears to be almost the opposite for the moment," Franklin said. "We don't know if it's the lull between the storm, or before the storm. ... It's kind of an unusual circumstance that we find ourselves looking at at the moment."

That circumstance that puts big financial pressure on counties that count on housing prisoners for revenue. As competition for inmates heats up, some counties have even dropped the daily rates they charge for holding inmates.

http://www.startribune.com/local/41308982.html?page=1&c=y
___

Information from: Minnesota Public Radio News, http://www.mpr.org

Posted by lois at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)

Alabama raising rates for inmate work squad labor. State get $15 a day. Prisoners get $2.

Alabama raising rates for inmate work squad labor
Monday, March 16, 2009
TOM GORDON
Birmingham (AL) News staff writer

The state Department of Corrections began in October 2007 charging cities, counties and other governing bodies for labor done by prisoners, such as picking up trash along highways.

That price will go up by 50 percent in October as the department seeks to close a gap in funding.

This year, there is a $43.3 million difference in the funding the corrections department gets from the state of Alabama and the amount it takes to run the system.

The department narrows the gap by charging for inmate squad labor, raising revenue through the prison work release program and other steps.

On Oct. 1, the start of fiscal 2010, the rate will increase from $10 per inmate, per day to $15.

For one agency, the Alabama Department of Transportation, the rate has already more than doubled. ALDOT started paying for inmate squads in the spring of 2007, and until recently was paying $20. In February, the rate rose to $50 per inmate per day, Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett said.

ALDOT officials said they understand the need for increasing the fees.

"We have been talking about it," said ALDOT director Joe McInnes. "But whatever it is, it's going to be about 55 percent savings for us. It's going to be about 45 percent of what we are paying outside contractors now. Obviously they're looking for ways to increase their resources, and we need their help, and ... with this kind of savings, we think it's a good deal if we can get them to do more of this kind of work for us."

Corrections Commissioner Richard Allen has estimated that the new rates will bring in about $3 million each year.

"What we've been trying to do with this is ... raise revenue to meet our operational costs," Corbett said.
Alabama raising rates for inmate work squad labor - Page 2

In fiscal 2007, Corrections took its first step toward raising revenue from the work squads. In that year, according to the department's annual report, inmate squads from 14 state prison facilities performed 103,000 man-hours per month, "equivalent to a labor savings of almost $6 million to government agencies within the state."

In the spring of 2007, Allen said he got permission from Gov. Bob Riley to begin charging for the work squad labor. He put his plan into operation in the year's final quarter, when the department asked the state and local agencies to consider paying. More than $15,000 in fees came in, and a chunk of that came from ALDOT. .

That $15,000 sum was dwarfed by fees earned in fiscal 2008. In that year, Corbett said, inmate squads worked more than 1.3 million hours and generated nearly $1.2 million in fees. If the inmates had been working for minimum wage, the fees would have amounted to more than $6.9 million, Corbett said.

Unlike inmates in work release, who generally keep 60 percent of what they earn in civilian jobs, those on the work squads earn $2 a day.

Prisoners at work:

On a recent chilly morning, some $2-a-day inmates from the Childersburg Work Release/Community Work Center were picking up trash for ALDOT on U.S. 280, just east of the main business district in Chelsea. On the highway's shoulder and median were diamond-shaped orange metal signs bearing the black-lettered advisory, "State prisoners at work."

Wearing day-glo green ALDOT vests and rubber gloves, the prisoners were using a long tool with a retractable claw called a picker to retrieve trash and other debris and put it in a plastic bag. Their supervisor was Leon Maddox, an employee from the ALDOT district office in Calera who took them to the work site in a white van with two flashing strobe lights on its roof.

Two of Maddox's trash pickers were Clay Streetman of Hurtsboro and Samuel Grayson of Bessemer. Their work day would last about six hours, and both said they liked the opportunity to get out in the open.

"It's a better feeling compared to being inside of the prison," Grayson said.

What the inmates usually pick up are bottles, paper wrappers, beer cans, pieces of cardboard and sometimes a dead opossum or the carcass of another animal. Once Grayson found a complete set of female undergarments. Another time, he found a tattered $20 bill.

During a recent week, Maddox said, squad members picked up about 2,300 pounds of roadside trash.

Childersburg warden Rodney Huntley typically has more than 550 inmates in his facility, a majority of whom are eligible for work squad details. The more of them who are out working, the better it is for them and for him and his staff.

"An idle mind is the devil's workshop," Huntley said. "So work in and of itself helps to keep the camp calm and keeps issues down."
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/metro.ssf?/base/news/1237191350113770.xml&coll=2&thispage=2

Posted by lois at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)

Prison Population Continues to Rise. To save money on prisons, states take a softer stance

Prison Population Continues to Rise
To save money on prisons, states take a softer stance
Good state by state map at this URL- http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-03-17-prison-economy_N.htm

By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY
SALINA, Kan. — In a hushed conference room overlooking the town's main drag, eight convicted felons, including an aspiring amateur fighter, brandish bright Crayola markers.

Their goal is to match their personalities to one of four colors. Tim Witte, 27, on probation for evading arrest, eyes the task as if sizing up a fellow middle-weight on Kansas' gritty cage-fighting circuit. Witte and two drug offenders settle on orange.

The color, indicative of a restless, risk-taking personality, is the hue of choice for most offenders, says Michelle Stephenson, the corrections officer leading the unusual exercise.

Not long ago, Stephenson admits, the evening state-sponsored "behavioral modification" session — designed to help ex-offenders avoid costly prison time — might have been considered a perversion of this conservative state's strict law-and-order credo. But this isn't the same Kansas anymore.

"It used to be that it was more about waiting for them to mess up and send them back to prison," Stephenson says. "In this time and this economy, you can't afford to keep doing that. There is a better way to do business."
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Colorado | Death Penalty Information Center | Sentencing Project | National District Attorneys Association | Crayola | National Association of State Budget Officers | National Governor

The class is part of a state effort to save millions of dollars in prison costs by changing how criminals are treated. Kansas is closing some prisons, boosting support for offenders on probation and declining to return them to prison for every probation violation.

Here and across the nation, the deepening financial crisis is forcing dramatic changes in the hard-line, punishment-based philosophy that has dominated the USA's criminal justice system for nearly two decades.

As 31 states report budget gaps that the National Governor's Association says totaled nearly $30 billion last year, criminal justice officials and lawmakers are proposing and enacting cost-cutting changes across the public safety spectrum, with uncertain ramifications for the public.

There is no dispute that the fiscal crisis is driving the changes, but the potential risks of pursuing such policies is the subject of growing debate. While some analysts believe the philosophical shift is long overdue, others fear it could undermine public safety.

Ryan King of The Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for alternatives to incarceration, says the financial crisis has created enough "political cover" to fuel a new look at the realities of incarcerating more than 2 million people and supervising 5 million others on probation and parole.

"It's clear that locking up hundreds of thousands of people does not guarantee public safety," he says.

Joshua Marquis, a past vice president of the National District Attorneys Association, agrees the economy is prompting an overhaul of justice policy but reaches a very different conclusion about its impact on public safety.

"State after state after state appears to be waiting for the opportunity to wind back some of the most intelligent sentencing policy we have," Marquis says. "If we do this, we will pay a price. No question."

Among recent state actions:

• Kansas officials closed two detention facilities last month to save about $3.5 million. A third will be shuttered by April 1, says Roger Werholtz, chief of the state prison system. Inmates housed in the closed units will be moved to other facilities in the state.

• A California panel of federal judges recommended last month that the cash-strapped state release up to 57,000 non-violent inmates from the overcrowded system to help save $800 million.

• Kentucky officials last year allowed for the early release of non-violent offenders up to six months before their sentences end to serve the balance of their time at home.

• New Mexico and Colorado are among seven states where some lawmakers are calling for an end to the death penalty, arguing capital cases have become too costly to prosecute, reports the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks death penalty law and supports abolition of the death penalty.

"State governments operated on the principle that if you built it, they would come," King says of prison construction during the economic boom. Since 1990, corrections spending has increased by an average of 7.5% annually, reports the National Association of State Budget Officers.

"As soon as they built those prisons, they filled them," King says. "They were never able to keep up with it. There is certainly a different atmosphere now."

New approach to punishment

Kansas House Speaker Mike O'Neal admits he isn't the "logical guy" to lead the charge for anything that could be considered soft on crime.

During his 25 years in the state Legislature, O'Neal, a Republican, has sought longer sentences for sex offenders, backed tougher sanctions for drug dealers and supported executions.

"We're kind of a hang-'em-high state," O'Neal says.

Yet in 2007, as prison construction costs soared and state prisons reached near-capacity, O'Neal made what he calls a "surprising" political calculation: He helped push through a measure calling for a 20% reduction in probationers sent to prison for violating conditions of their release.

Despite O'Neal's fears that the new policy could allow offenders to commit other crimes, he felt spiraling costs demanded a new approach to punishing criminals.

The law gives local probation departments broader authority to decide whether technical violations of release, such as missed meetings with probation officers or failed drug tests, should result in prison. In Kansas, up to two-thirds of all new prison admissions each year are offenders who violated terms of their release.

The criminal justice overhaul has gained urgency because of the economic collapse, O'Neal says. Yet the sour economy also could jeopardize the new $4 million probation program. O'Neal is fighting to keep it, arguing it will save the state money over time.

So far, the cuts in prison admissions have saved about $80 million in future construction costs, state prison chief Werholtz says.

Among the most successful probation operations, Werholtz says, is the small community corrections office run by director Annie Grevas in Salina, a central Kansas town of about 46,000.

Over the past year, Grevas has transformed the enforcement-oriented operation, heavily focused on the surveillance of offenders, into a service broker. Probation officers now help offenders find work, health care, housing, counseling, transportation and child care.

During the past several months, for example, the office spent $110 to cover an offender's utility payments; $500 for a rent payment; $600 for six bikes the office loans to get to job interviews; $77 for a YMCA membership to help an offender improve his physical condition and $320 for eight anger-management counseling sessions.

All of the assistance is aimed at keeping offenders out of costly prison cells, although Kansas officials say they are only beginning to review whether the offenders who received the assistance have committed new offenses.

Last year, Grevas says Salina cut its probation revocations by 35%. "It is a total philosophical change," she says. "Just as we expected clients to change, we needed to change."

Sentencing policies criticized

Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, says financial troubles are forcing fundamental changes in criminal justice philosophy well beyond Kansas.

"Out of this turmoil, some states realize that the size of the prison population is more than they can bear," he says. "And the public safety yield (from jailing so many) is largely uncertain."

He says mandatory minimum sentencing and the so-called "three-strikes" mandatory life terms for repeat offenders, which swept the country in the early 1990s, "may have to be modified or completely undone."

A report out this month by the Pew Center on the States, a public policy research group, found costly prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect an increase in crime or the nation's population.

"More people are behind bars principally because of a wave of policy choices that are sending more lawbreakers to prison and … imposing longer prison stays on inmates," the report says.

As a result, it concluded, state corrections-related costs have soared from $10.6 billion two decades ago to more than $44 billion last year.

"Coupled with tightening state budgets, the greater prison expenditures may force states to make tough choices about where to spend their money," it said.

Margaret Colgate Love, director of the American Bar Association's Commission on Effective Criminal Sanctions, says the public "is very ready to support crime-control strategies aimed at helping people."

She says strict sentencing policies have "devastated" families and contributed to the "disastrous" overcrowded prison system in California, one of the first states to adopt the three-strikes sentencing law.

"Every time we say something or someone is soft on crime, we perpetuate a dysfunctional response to crime control," Colgate Love says. "If one good thing comes out of this economic crisis, it would be that we deal with people differently."

New Mexico, citing excessive costs, is making a dramatic change in its system. Lawmakers voted last week to abolish the death penalty, a move projected to save the state "millions of dollars," according to a state report on the measure's fiscal implications. Gov. Bill Richardson has until today to decide whether to veto the legislation.

"New Mexico does not receive much return on its death penalty investment," the state report said, adding there is just a 4.5% chance that any "multimillion-dollar" death penalty prosecution will end with an execution.

David Albo, a Republican delegate to the Virginia Legislature who has supported eliminating parole and harsher sentences for drug dealers, rejects money-saving proposals that involve early release of offenders, prison closures and other strategies.

This year, Virginia lawmakers defeated a proposal to allow for the early release of non-violent offenders as part of a plan to save $5 million. Albo and other opponents argued altering punishments amounted to "fraud on the citizens of Virginia."

"If a jury said you are going to serve 10 years, you don't go back and change that," Albo says. "I'm against anything that changes a person's sentence."

'My goal is to break the chain'

Patrick Young swears he'll do better this time.

Now on probation in Kansas for burglary, theft and failure to register as a sex offender, Young, 29, has been to prison four times since age 17. Three of those prison terms were triggered by violations of probation or parole.

The sex offense, involving a relationship with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17, has turned off more than one prospective employer, Young says.

His case is one of many that will test how well Kansas' new approach to crime and punishment works. In regular meetings with his case officer, Young is getting more support than he has received at any time in his adult life.

More than a year ago Young, given his long record of failure, likely would have been buried in the state prison system, says Ruth McDaniel, a Salina corrections officer who manages his case.

Now, McDaniel believes Young has better than long odds of successfully completing his sentence outside prison walls. She says he has matured since starting his term of supervision in Salina in March 2007.

Before he was laid off at the end of February, he was a forklift operator at a local food company for 18 months, the longest stretch of continuous employment in his life.

McDaniel helped arrange family counseling sessions to teach Young how to cope with the recent birth of a son. He is seeking financial aid to enroll in an electronics course to improve his chances at a better job.

"He has good family support," McDaniel says, adding that he has repaired strained relationships with his parents. "I see him as someone who will successfully complete his probation."

Young still has a ways to go. He must pay $7,000 in fines before he is released from supervision. That means finding more steady work amid an economic crisis.

"When I went to prison, I didn't get a lick of help," he says. "My goal is to break the chain. This place has given structure to somebody who didn't know how to change."

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

Plan Would Limit Prison Chapel Books

Plan Would Limit Prison Chapel Books

By SOLOMON MOORE
NY Times
Published: March 17, 2009

A broad swath of religious organizations and civil liberties groups — often on opposite sides of contentious issues — have joined together to condemn a proposed rule that they say would prohibit some religious texts in federal penitentiary libraries.

The Bureau of Prisons in January proposed that “materials that could incite, promote, or otherwise suggest the commission of violence or criminal activity” may be excluded from chapel libraries. An alliance of groups — Christian, Muslim and Jewish, conservative and liberal — opposed the rule during the open comments period, which ended Tuesday.

The word “could” is at the center of a two-year dispute between the agency and these groups over which religious texts should be banned from prison libraries.

The American Civil Liberties Union and several other civil rights and religious groups argue that the agency is going beyond the provision of the Second Chance Act of 2007, which included a restriction on materials that “seek” to incite violence.

They argue that the act was meant to prohibit only books that intend to suggest violence, and that the agency’s new rule would expand that ban to all books that could possibly lead to violence.

“Those one or two words have incredibly broad significance because of what they do to the scope of what books can be taken away,” said David Shapiro, an A.C.L.U. lawyer. “They could remove texts that are critical to prisoners’ ability to practice their religion.”

Bureau officials did not respond Tuesday to calls or e-mail messages seeking comment.

In its proposal, the agency cited a 2004 report on prison religious services by the Justice Department inspector general that suggested censoring certain materials to prevent the radicalization of inmates.

In 2005, the authorities in Los Angeles uncovered a plot by three Muslim men, at least one of whom was believed to have been radicalized in a California state penitentiary, to carry out attacks on National Guard recruitment centers in the state.

Afterward, bureau officials compiled a list of about 150 books for each of about 20 religious categories in a plan called the Standardized Chapel Library Project.

At the time, critics of the plan said it omitted important religious texts and violated the First Amendment rights of prisoners. The bureau scrapped the list.

Tuesday was the second time in two years that civil liberties and religious groups joined in opposition to officials’ plans to restrict prison library books.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a group of Christian lawyers who litigate religious rights cases, joined its arch foe, the A.C.L.U., in opposing the new rule. The groups are usually on opposite sides of thorny issues like the role of religious expression in schools and same-sex marriage.

The A.D.F.’s Web site is promoting a publication called “The A.C.L.U. vs. America.” The A.D.F. accuses the group of “attacking religious expression” and “protecting child pornographers and pedophiles.”

On the matter of religious texts in prison libraries, however, Kevin Theriot, a lawyer with the A.D.F., said the group had little disagreement with its rival.

“We’re with the A.C.L.U. on this particular issue because it’s very important for religious freedom that these texts be available,” Mr. Theriot said. “Somebody could take offense with the Bible, which teaches that Jesus is the only way to the Father. That’s an offensive idea to people who are not Christians. They could say that’s inciting trouble.”

Other groups opposing the rule change include Muslim Advocates, the Seventh-day Adventists and various Jewish organizations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18prison.html?_r=1&ref=us

Posted by lois at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2009

OR: Bill introduced to count prisoners as part of their home communities

Statesman Journal
2009 Legislature
Bill would change way inmates are counted
March 17, 2009

Marion County's population would shrink for purposes of redrawing state legislative and federal congressional districts under a bill that the House Rules Committee took up Monday.

House Bill 2930 would require inmates to be counted as part of the
communities they came from before they ended up in state prison.

Under current practice, they are considered residents of the counties where they are imprisoned.

The Salem area has four of Oregon's 14 prisons and work camps, housing just less than 4,000 of the 13,750 inmates systemwide.

A 20-year-old law requires inmates to return to their home counties once they are released from prison.

Rep. Chip Shields, D-Portland, the bill's chief sponsor, said his proposalis consistent with that law.

The committee took no immediate action.

Department of Corrections officials raised questions about its wording,which would require the agency to spend money; Shields said amendments might resolve those issues.

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/article/20090317/LEGISLATURE/903170328

Posted by lois at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

OR: State may need to use jail to imprison women as a result of Measure 57

State wants to send female inmates to Wapato jail
by Edward Walsh, The Oregonian
Sunday March 15, 2009, 9:03 PM

The long-shuttered Wapato jail may finally open to house female prison inmates, whose numbers are expected to surge in the coming years, under a proposal being discussed between the state Department of Corrections and Multnomah County.

Corrections Department Director Max Williams made the proposal at a recent meeting with County Commission Chairman Ted Wheeler.

Under the plan, the state would pay the county about $4 million during the next two years to take over responsibility for up to 200 female inmates from the Portland area who are within a year of being released.

A promise to open Wapato was a key part of Wheeler's successful 2006 election campaign. Peter Ozanne, the county's deputy chief operating officer for public safety, said county officials are "very interested" in Williams' proposal.

The use of part of the 525-bed Wapato jail would provide a short-term solution to a looming problem for the state prison system. The only women's prison in Oregon is Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville.

Coffee Creek has 1,240 beds and housed 1,096 female inmates as of last week, according to the state. The DOC forecasts that 345 female inmates will enter the prison system during the 2009-11 budget cycle, 281 of them sentenced under the terms of Measure 57.

Measure 57, which Oregon voters passed in November, lengthened sentences for repeat drug and property crimes and required drug and alcohol treatment for offenders.

Crimes covered by Measure 57 include dealing methamphetamine, heroin or cocaine, aggravated theft from the elderly, property crimes such as burglary and auto theft, and identify theft. Almost half of those convicted of ID theft are women.

The use of Wapato jail to house state female inmates would relieve a nagging, five-year headache for Multnomah County. The empty jail in the St. Johns area of North Portland stands as a tower of embarrassment to county government. It was completed in 2004 at a cost of $58 million, but it has never housed a single inmate because the county doesn't have the operating money.

Meanwhile, the county will spend $379,000 in the next fiscal year to maintain the jail.

Williams said Coffee Creek is expected to reach capacity in July 2010. He said one alternative would be to convert an industrial work area for inmates into dormitory-style housing at a cost of about $2 million.

Instead, Williams suggested to Wheeler that overflow female inmates who are nearing their release dates be sent to Wapato, which the county would run. The proposed $4 million state payment would include the cost of operating part of the jail through June 2011.

One likely complication in reaching a state-county agreement on Wapato is a thick set of restrictions set out in a conditional-use permit granted by the city of Portland before construction began. Williams said this could affect such issues as outdoor recreation areas, outside work crews and inmates' release into the community.

Williams disclosed his conversation with Wheeler after state officials were asked about Senate Bill 684, introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene. The measure would compel Multnomah County to sell Wapato to the Corrections Department. The bill appropriates $1 to buy the jail but also sets out a detailed process to agree on a fair price.

Williams said that his department had nothing to do with the bill and that he has not discussed a possible jail purchase with lawmakers. "I would not seek legislation to force them to sell something for $1," he said.

Prozanski called the bill "basically a placeholder" as state officials consider options for Oregon's growing prison population.

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009//state_wants_to_send_female_inm.html

Posted by lois at 08:29 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2009

Alaska: Lawmakers have second thoughts on "jumbo" state prison & another article on committment to building prison

Prison costs raise concern
MAT-SU FACILITY: Lawmakers take new look at privatizing amid budget crunch.
By SEAN COCKERHAM
Published: March 15th, 2009

JUNEAU -- Legislators are cringing at the cost of the planned new jumbo state prison in the Matanuska-Susita Borough and want to look at turning it into a private prison. That's a topic that in the past proved to be one of the most contentious in Alaska politics.

State representatives are also reluctant to pony up an additional $20 million the Palin administration has requested for the $240 million project. Enthusiasm for the project isn't what it used to be before oil prices plummeted, dragging state revenues down with them.

Fairbanks Republican Rep. Mike Kelly took over the corrections budget in the state House this year and said that -- if he could -- he would slow the project down. But the bonds for construction have already been sold. That's left lawmakers with few options.

One is to privatize operations of the prison when it opens. So Kelly put language in the budget that passed the House on Friday asking the corrections department to investigate doing just that.

"The intent says, hey, take a look at what we might save in this (expensive) hill to climb and see if we have a private operator -- if that would make sense," Kelly said.

Private prisons have been hugely controversial in Alaska.

"They've figured prominently into a lot of the problems we've had," said Eagle River Republican Rep. Bill Stoltze, an influential supporter of keeping the project in state hands.

The ongoing federal corruption investigation, which has resulted in indictments or guilty pleas from 12 lawmakers, lobbyists and others, began with inquiry into a push to build a private prison in the state. Bill Weimar, once king of Alaska's private halfway houses, pleaded guilty to corruption charges last year after funneling $20,000 in 2004 to help a state legislative candidate, knowing that if elected the candidate would support his interest in building a private prison.

NUMBER OF PRISONERS DOWN

Political battles over private prisons in Alaska kept the state's jail-building efforts on hold for a decade. In the meantime, the lack of space in Alaska's correctional system has the state sending hundreds of Alaska prisoners to a private prison in Arizona.

Using both raw political muscle and arguments about saving money and bringing Native prisoners home, backers of the private prisons won legislative support for successive plans aimed at facilities in Anchorage, Delta Junction, Kenai and Whittier. Among the members of the consortium that pushed for private prisons was Veco, the now-defunct construction firm that is at the heart of Alaska's political corruption scandal. But each private plan eventually died in the face of local opposition, resistance from prison guard unions and skepticism from governors of both parties.

The prison fight appeared to be over after Senate President Lyda Green, who is now retired, pushed through the new state prison to be built in her home area of the Mat-Su. The planned Goose Creek Correctional Center, about nine miles north of Point Mackenzie, will be the largest prison in Alaska at 1,536 beds. The Mat-Su Borough sold the $240 million in construction bonds for it earlier this year.

The state is to lease the prison for 25 years, covering the borough's bond payments.

Fairbanks Rep. Kelly said the number of Alaska prisoners is down, at least for the moment, and it would have been a lot cheaper for the state to leave the prisoners in Arizona. But that's not going to happen, with the Mat-Su construction going ahead.

The top budget writer in the state House, Rep. Mike Hawker, also supports a privatization study.

"It's something that always has to be considered as we look at declining state revenues and an inability to meet our spending levels," the Anchorage Republican said.

REPORT DUE BACK IN 2010

The Mat-Su prison is estimated to have over 350 staff jobs after it opens in 2012. Hawker said that's going to be a problem unless state government figures out a way to deal with its gap between expenses and income as oil production steadily declines.

"Adding and keeping those employees on the state is not something we're going to be able to sustain into the very near term future here," Hawker said. "Whether it's operated on a (private) contract basis or operated on a state-owned basis, we frankly don't have the money to do either one in the future for very long."

Corrections officials are asked to report back with their findings on privatization by next spring.

State corrections officials have never been big fans of privatizing their work. Deputy Corrections Commissioner Dwayne Peeples said officials haven't come up with a position on the potential of privatizing the Mat-Su prison. But he said any savings would "probably be fairly marginal." Costs of the construction bonds, the utilities and food would all be basically the same whether it is a private or public prison, he said.

"The only cost difference you would really have would be in staff operating. And that's really hard to come up with what the private sector could do versus the state," he said.

He said the only way to get good cost numbers would be to put the contract out to bid and then sit down and negotiate. "Because everybody off the cuff will spin you theories and cost estimates and everything else that are probably meaningless until you sit down and say 'hey you've got to sign the contract and actually do it," he said.

Peeples said has hasn't figured out exactly how he's going to do the privatization study other than "do some literature research and say, this is what the literature says."

Rep. Kelly said he knows it's difficult but plans to work with Peeples to figure out how to get meaningful information. He said the cost to the state of paying the bonds and running the Mat-Su prison is going to combine for around $30 million a year.

Kelly also put language in the budget limiting the state spending on the project. Peeples said that looks to impede the Palin administration from getting up to $20 million it has requested to deal with higher interest rates in the project. That's not going to stop construction, he said, but could pose a problem depending on cost overruns.

The governor could still get the additional $20 million through the separate state House construction budget, which is being crafted by Rep Stoltze of Chugiak -- a prison supporter. The state Senate also has not had its crack at the budget yet this year.

Sean Cockerham is covering the legislative session from Juneau. Read more on our Alaska Politics blog at adn.com/alaskapolitics.
http://www.adn.com/news/politics/story/723646.html

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http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/matsu/story/726662.html

Anchorage Daily News

Borough committed to building new prison
$240 MILLION: Bonds issued and contractor has been selected.

By RINDI WHITE
Published: March 17th, 2009

WASILLA -- Borough officials say construction of a new state prison inMat-Su is on track despite news that some state lawmakers are having second thoughts about the cost.

"We're building the prison," Borough Manager John Duffy said Tuesday.

Duffy said the $240-million project has reached a point of no return. Bonds backed by the state have been issued, and a contractor who will design and build the project has been selected.

If the borough had not successfully sold bonds for the project, the
borough's stance might be different.

"Back in December, I was very worried that if we didn't get the bonds sold, we might be faced with this issue of going back to the legislature," Duffy said.

The borough manager said he was as surprised as anyone when he heard some state legislators were concerned about the overall cost of the prison and wanted to reopen the idea of contracting with a private business to run the prison, he said.

Fairbanks Rep. Mike Kelly recently added language to a House bill to have the state corrections department study the cost of privately running the prison.

The news wasn't completely unexpected, however. The public versus private prison debate has surfaced every few years in Alaska. This time the economy is a major factor. With oil prices low, some legislators fear yearly lease payments and the cost of operating the 1,536-bed prison is too much. This year, the state is scheduled to make its first lease payment of $17 million.

Duffy said the borough has opposed previous efforts to privatize, but has not yet weighed in on whether it wants a privately-run prison in the Valley.

"We did have concerns the last go around because it was a noncompetitive process. Our feeling then, and I don't think it's changed -- but maybe -- is that correctional officers ... ought to be public employees," Duffy said. "I guess we'll start talking about that."

Posted by lois at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

FL: GEO Proposed 3,000 cage prison near Florida City

Corporation offers to build prison near Florida City
GEO Group proposes to build a 3,000-bed correctional facility near Florida City that would cost $100 million and create 900 jobs.
BY KYLE BAILEY
Special to The Miami Herald

A corporation wants to build a 3,000-bed correctional facility near Florida City.

If approved, the GEO Group, formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections, would build the $100 million complex at the northeast corner of Southwest 382nd Street and 187th Avenue in unincorporated Miami-Dade County.

It would add 900 jobs, said Jerry Proctor, a lawyer representing the GEO Group.

He presented the company's plan at Tuesday's Florida City Commission meeting.

Proctor said the company would seek zoning approval from the Board of County Commissioners in ``about two to three weeks.''

He said GEO is still looking for a tenant, either from the local, state or federal government.

One government agency might be the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.

''The facility is an excellent candidate for use by ICE for its detention requirements,'' according to a packet given to the Florida City Commission.

The federal agency has undocumented workers detained for immigration hearings or for actual deportation.

Pablo E. Paez, director of GEO's corporate relations, said in an e-mail that it was company policy not to ``comment on specific projects being considered.''

But he did say, ``As part of our business development efforts, our company will from time to time explore potential locations for future facilities.''

He later followed that up with an e-mail stressing, ``I'd like to emphasize that we do not currently have a client or any immediate plans for a potential facility in South Dade.''

At Florida City's meeting, GEO Group representatives talked about the economic benefits of having the facility if it is built. They estimated that the combined construction and day-to-day operations of the prison would create 900 jobs and generate nearly $28 million in local spending.

Florida City leaders responded positively.

''The prospect of new, good paying jobs coming into the city is always a positive thing,'' Mayor Otis Wallace said.

If approved by the county, the proposed detention facility will be located minutes from the South Florida Evaluation and Treatment Center also operated by the GEO Group.

GEO began managing that facility in July 2005 through a contract with the Florida Department of Children and Families.

The facility treats men and women under court order to receive treatment in a secure psychiatric hospital.

As part of the state contract GEO built what is now a 238-bed facility. It was finished in 2008 to replace the old facility.

It was the first state psychiatric hospital that is fully operated by a private company through a public-private partnership, according to GEO's website.

No date has been set for the completion of the new facility if it is approved.

GEO operates prison facilities in 16 states.

One of them was recently in the news.

Two prison riots erupted in West Texas at GEO's Reeves County Detention Center in December and last month.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/communities/south/story/949461.html

Posted by lois at 10:13 PM | Comments (0)

Job losses hit black men hardest: Some 8 percent of black men in the US have lost their jobs since November 2007

Job losses hit black men hardest: Some 8 percent of black men in the US have lost their jobs since November 2007, according to a recent study.
By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer/ March 15, 2009 edition
and Yvonne Zipp | Correspondent
Christian Science Monitor
At a time when America has elected its first black president, more African-American men are losing jobs than at any time since World War II.

No group has been hit harder by the downturn. Employment among black men has fallen 7.8 percent since November of 2007, according to a report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

The trend is intimately tied to education, the report’s authors say. Black women – who are twice as likely as black men to go to college – have faced no net job losses. By contrast, black men are disproportionately employed in those blue-collar jobs that have been most highly affected – think third shifts at rural manufacturing plants.

It threatens to add to the difficulties of vulnerable families in a community already beset by high incarceration rates and low graduation numbers.

Moreover, it puts renewed focus on the cultural and economic stereotypes of black women and men – mythologies and realities about the black family that remain challenging for the country, and Washington, to address.

In terms of job-loss rate for African-American men, “nothing comes close to this,” says Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies and an author of the report, noting that the job-loss rate for African-American men during the Great Depression is unknown.

Federal data indicate all demographic groups have been affected. The number of men looking for full-time work has nearly doubled in the last year, regardless of race or ethnicity, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. But the Northeastern study concludes that during the past 15 months, “the relative decline in black male employment was considerably higher than that of their male counterparts in the other three race-ethnic groups” – Asians, Hispanics, and whites.

The job-loss figures come at a time when many lower-income black homeowners are already at risk of foreclosure. “They have zero opportunity to refinance or borrow in any way to get over the rough patch of unemployment,” writes Tom Hertz, a labor economist, in an e-mail.
The employment rate among African-American men aged 20 to 24 is now just 51 percent, as opposed to 68 percent during the late 1990s. For African-American teens, it’s just 14 percent.

“A lot of family heads are being affected and a lot of the young guys,” says Professor Sum of Northeastern. “When you get a job loss of that magnitude it’s just totally destructive [to] communities.”

Unemployed black men like Anthony Gilmore aren’t surprised by the findings. Laid off five months ago from a call center, Mr. Gilmore recently interviewed for a job detailing cars. A Hispanic man got the job.

The perception among many black men like Gilmore is that the economy has merely laid bare the historic prejudices that still exist.

“There’s still very much a system that really is designed to keep people at a disadvantage,” he said while waiting Friday outside an Atlanta unemployment office.

Yet black men can be bound as much by deeper labor trends as cultural stereotypes, says Peter Rachleff, a labor historian at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. Especially in the South, black men often pay a price for demanding workplace rights gained in the Civil Rights movement – demands for days off and being able to say no to overtime, for example. Hispanic workers, particularly, aren’t as likely to claim those rights, making them easier hires, says Professor Rachleff.

“You can call it a class thing, but I don’t think that’s what it is,” says Douglas Besharov, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. “Some of it is long-term discrimination and lack of access to education, but much more in this recession it’s determined by which sector that’s suffering the most.”

From November of 2007, the month before the official start of the recession, to February of 2009, “there was no net job loss among professionals or managers,” says Sum.

Contradicting media reports that job loss has been widespread in this recession, he adds: “All the job loss has been among blue-collar jobs – construction, manufacturing, and retail.”

These are the jobs black men have long sought, settling for high-school diplomas in order to get these relatively well paid posts, suggests Terry Getter, an unemployed accountant waiting in line at the Atlanta unemployment office. But they are now feeling the consequences of not continuing their education.

African-American women have fared better in the downturn, says Sum. That may be partly because of their higher levels of education. In a departure from the trends of the past two recessions, those who have lost their jobs in this one “overwhelmingly … had 12 or less years of school,” he adds.

Correspondingly, his data suggest that, as of January, about 120 African-American women were employed for every 100 African-American men. “The current size of the overall gap in employment between black women and black men is historically unprecedented, and black Americans are the only group for whom the gender employment gap is in favor of women,” the report notes.

As a result, the onus for the community’s well-being has fallen primarily on women, adding more burdens to a group that, historically, has upheld the black family, says Sheri Parks, author of the upcoming book “Fierce Angels” about the role of strong black women in American culture.

Part of the reason, she says, is that black communities have historically protected young men and expected more of young women, particularly when it comes to schooling. “If you’re a black woman, you don’t have to convince someone that you’re strong and nurturing and able to do almost anything – it’s almost a brand,” says Ms. Parks. “The prevalent image of a black man is what we call hyper-masculine and often idealized, but not necessarily in the workplace.”

This means black women also tend to enter their job hunt with a greater sense of urgency, says Tim Ready, director of the Lewis Walker Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnic Relations at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

“Women are more likely to take whatever jobs are necessary because they end up being the primary caretakers for kids,” he says. “They have no choice.”

At a time when Mr. Obama’s election has encouraged a debate about what race means in modern America, the job-loss figures reveal enduring problems that remain unaddressed, say some.

“When we say ‘postracial,’ we focus a lot on ideas, attitudes, and identity and not on outcomes: jobs, wages, and those things,” says Steven Pitts, a policy analyst with the Center for Labor Research and Education in Berkeley, Calif. “It’s important to look at the question of how we are passing out resources, jobs, education, wages, and wealth. That’s how you begin your analysis on postrace.”
http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/03/15/job-losses-hit-black-men-hardest/

Posted by lois at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2009

Calif. fight over inmate care may go to high court

Calif. fight over inmate care may go to high court
By DON THOMPSON Associated Press Writer
Posted: 03/14/2009
San Jose Mercury News
SACRAMENTO—When the quality of health care in California's sprawling prison system was first challenged in court, it seemed only a matter of time before major reforms would take hold.

Nearly two decades later, the desires of the federal courts and inmate advocates have run into a wall of political inertia.

Legislative stonewalling, California's mounting financial problems and legal counterpunches by the state have conspired to stall the most ambitious of the overhaul plans. The result is a showdown over whether federal judges can take control of California's inmate population and order the state to make costly changes to its corrections system.

The dispute seems headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.

If the state appeals to the high court, the justices will face a clash between two constitutional amendments: one that shields inmates from cruel and unusual punishment, and another protecting state sovereignty.

"How far can you go to require officials to expend money to avoid violations?" said John Oakley, a University of California, Davis law school professor who specializes in the power and jurisdiction of the courts. "It's an extremely complex situation. You've got these touchy issues of state sovereignty."

The legal challenges over California's inmate medical and mental health care systems date back to 1991 and initiated studies that found the system was indeed failing prisoners.

Some doctors, for example, reused tongue depressors,
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passing them from patient to patient. More recently, court-appointed medical officials say poor care contributed to the death in January 2008 of a 36-year-old developmentally disabled inmate who had the IQ of a 9-year-old. His medical records and medication were left behind during repeated transfers between prisons.

Ultimately, the courts ruled that negligence or malfeasance in the prison health care system was leading to the death of an inmate at the rate of roughly one a week.

Finding the level of care unconstitutional, a federal judge in San Francisco in 2005 appointed a receiver to oversee the medical and mental health systems and implement reforms. Improvements have followed.

The receiver has gone on a hiring binge and ordered higher salaries to fill vacancies, with many prison doctors now making about $250,000 a year. A private company runs prison pharmacies, while hundreds of millions of dollars have been redirected from the state general fund to pay for new prison medical buildings and equipment.

At California State Prison, Corcoran, kidney patients receive dialysis treatment inside a new center that costs $4 million a year to operate.

At the same time, the state has taken steps to reduce inmate overcrowding, a condition that a federal judicial panel found was the central cause of the prison system's poor medical care.

But those changes are just the beginning of the reform efforts conceived by the court-appointed receiver. What is to follow is at the heart of the legal conflict between that office and the state.

Relations began to deteriorate last June after state lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger balked at the receiver's demand for billions of dollars to revamp California's inmate medical system.

The plan called for seven new medical facilities to treat 10,000 ailing inmates, creating a "holistic" environment that would include indoor basketball and handball courts, electronic bingo boards, stress-reduction rooms, music therapy, kitchens to teach cooking skills and outdoor gardens where inmates could relax in private.

Total cost: $8 billion, plus another $6 billion with interest over the bonds' 25-year payback period. The receiver's office has argued that if the governor and Legislature fail to approve the spending, the court could demand the money from the state treasury.

It didn't help that the receiver's plan came to light at the same time California was grappling with a $42 billion deficit and facing the prospect of massive budget shortfalls for years to come.

The result was a pushback from the Schwarzenegger administration and Attorney General Jerry Brown.

"This thing has escalated out of control. It's the most extravagant proposal for inmate health care we've ever seen in the United States," Brown, a Democrat, said in an interview. "This is a down payment on an endlessly escalating prison budget, and we've got to put a stop to it."

Brown said the receiver's plan would create a system that coddles inmates with "Cadillac care" not afforded to many California taxpayers. He calculated that the scope of the receiver's original proposal for new medical facilities would be "the equivalent of 70 Wal-Mart stores."

The state refused to approve the bonds and even a $250 million down payment to begin construction planning. Schwarzenegger went a step further in the two-year budget he signed last month, cutting $181 million from the medical receiver's office.

In addition, Brown and Schwarzenegger filed court papers seeking to abolish the receivership and wrest control of the prison medical system from the courts. A hearing on that motion is scheduled for Monday in federal court in San Francisco.

"The receiver will never get that money," the Republican governor said in a January appearance before the Sacramento Press Club. "It is outrageous, when we are seeing that programs for kids are being cut and where we have to make severe cuts in education and in health care."

The receiver, facing a public outcry over his spending plan, responded by submitting less expensive alternatives to the court.

One revision calls for building three medical facilities to treat 5,000 inmates at a cost of $2.5 billion. Operating those centers would cost a projected $480 million per year, or $96,000 per ailing inmate.

The receiver, J. Clark Kelso, said his plan is the only way to bring the state to constitutional standards of care within five years. He described his proposals as the most cost-effective way to meet the court's mandate.

"We're not building a Cadillac," he said. "We are not wasting taxpayers' dollars."

In the main legal case, a federal three-judge panel last month tentatively ruled that overcrowding was the main cause of the poor medical care. The judges are expected to order the state to release up to a third of its inmate population, but state officials promise an immediate appeal to the Supreme Court once the ruling is made final.

The state argues that the court's release order will compromise public safety and violates federal law and state sovereignty.

Adding to the growing circus-like atmosphere over prison medical care, Kelso dismissed three top aides this week, citing philosophical differences.

California has been struggling for years with escalating prison costs. The corrections department consumes nearly 10 percent of the state's annual general fund, and the cost to treat, house and guard sick and mentally ill inmates will be $2.2 billion this year.

Annual health care spending has soared from $2,714 in 1995 to $13,778 this year for each of the state's 171,000 inmates, according to the state Department of Finance.

While the receiver's office disputes the state's cost figure, California's inmate health care costs are high compared to other states.

University of Texas researchers found California averages $6,935 annually on each inmate's direct care, while Ohio and Texas each spend less than $4,300. New York spends $5,813, while Florida averages $4,330 on inmate health care, about the same as the federal prison system.

Even with new medical equipment, improved health care centers and higher salaries, Kelso says care overall continues to be inadequate.

A visit to two Central Valley prisons, between Fresno and Bakersfield, revealed crowded and sometimes makeshift conditions in the medical wards.

At the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, patients' records were stacked on gurneys and examination tables. A triage nurse sat at a tiny desk in the middle of a hallway. A chart for eye examinations was duct-taped to a door.

If Kelso is unable to get the money he wants from the state, he says the alternative is transferring about 7,000 sick inmates from four remote Central Valley prisons to prisons near urban areas, where he said they can get better care.
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_11913756?nclick_check=1

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

March 14, 2009

A Nation of Jailers by Glenn Loury

A Nation of Jailers
by Glenn Loury
Lead Essay- Cato Unbound
March 11th, 2009

The most challenging problems of social policy in the modern world are never merely technical. In order properly to decide how we should govern ourselves, we must take up questions of social ethics and human values. What manner of people are we Americans? What vision would we affirm, and what example would we set, before the rest of the world? What kind of society would we bequeath to our children? How shall we live? Inevitably, queries such as these lurk just beneath the surface of the great policy debates of the day. So, those who would enter into public argument about what ails our common life need make no apology for speaking in such terms.

It is precisely in these terms that I wish to discuss a preeminent moral challenge for our time — that imprisonment on a massive scale has become one of the central aspects of our nation’s social policy toward the poor, powerfully impairing the lives of some of the most marginal of our fellow citizens, especially the poorly educated black and Hispanic men who reside in large numbers in our great urban centers.

The bare facts of this matter — concerning both the scale of incarceration and its racial disparity — have been much remarked upon of late. Simply put, we have become a nation of jailers and, arguably, racist jailers at that. The past four decades have witnessed a truly historic expansion, and transformation, of penal institutions in the United States — at every level of government, and in all regions of the country. We have, by any measure, become a vastly more punitive society. Measured in constant dollars and taking account of all levels of government, spending on corrections and law enforcement in the United States has more than quadrupled over the last quarter century. As a result, the American prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history. This development should be deeply troubling to anyone who professes to love liberty.

Here, as in other areas of social policy, the United States is a stark international outlier, sitting at the most rightward end of the political spectrum: We imprison at a far higher rate than the other industrial democracies — higher, indeed, than either Russia or China, and vastly higher than any of the countries of Western Europe. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, there were in 2005 some 9 million prisoners in the world; more than 2 million were being held in the United States. With approximately one twentieth of the world’s population, America had nearly one fourth of the world’s inmates. At more than 700 per 100,000 residents, the U.S. incarceration rate was far greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia, which each have a rate of about 500 per 100,000.) Other industrial societies, some of them with big crime problems of their own, were less punitive than we by an order of magnitude: the United States incarcerated at 6.2 times the rate of Canada, 7.8 times the rate of France, and 12.3 times the rate of Japan.

The demographic profile of the inmate population has also been much discussed. In this, too, the U.S. is an international outlier. African Americans and Hispanics, who taken together are about one fourth of the population, account for about two thirds of state prison inmates. Roughly one third of state prisoners were locked up for committing violent offenses, with the remainder being property and drug offenders. Nine in ten are male, and most are impoverished. Inmates in state institutions average fewer than eleven years of schooling.

The extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates exceeds that to be found in any other arena of American social life: at eight to one, the black to white ratio of male incarceration rates dwarfs the two to one ratio of unemployment rates, the three to one non-marital child bearing ratio, the two to one ratio of infant mortality rates and the one to five ratio of net worth. More black male high school dropouts are in prison than belong to unions or are enrolled in any state or federal social welfare programs. The brute fact of the matter is that the primary contact between black American young adult men and their government is via the police and the penal apparatus. Coercion is the most salient feature of their encounters with the state. According to estimates compiled by sociologist Bruce Western, nearly 60% of black male dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 had spent at least one year in prison before reaching the age of 35.

For these men, and the families and communities with which they are associated, the adverse effects of incarceration will extend beyond their stays behind bars. My point is that this is not merely law enforcement policy. It is social policy writ large. And no other country in the world does it quite like we do.

This is far more than a technical issue — entailing more, that is, than the task of finding the most efficient crime control policies. Consider, for instance, that it is not possible to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of our nation’s world-historic prison buildup over the past 35 years without implicitly specifying how the costs imposed on the persons imprisoned, and their families, are to be reckoned. Of course, this has not stopped analysts from pronouncing on the purported net benefits to “society” of greater incarceration without addressing that question! Still, how — or, indeed, whether — to weigh the costs born by law-breakers — that is, how (or whether) to acknowledge their humanity — remains a fundamental and difficult question of social ethics. Political discourses in the United States have given insufficient weight to the collateral damage imposed by punishment policies on the offenders themselves, and on those who are knitted together with offenders in networks of social and psychic affiliation.

Whether or not one agrees, two things should be clear: social scientists can have no answers for the question of what weight to put on a “thug’s,” or his family’s, well-being; and a morally defensible public policy to deal with criminal offenders cannot be promulgated without addressing that question. To know whether or not our criminal justice policies comport with our deepest values, we must ask how much additional cost borne by the offending class is justifiable per marginal unit of security, or of peace of mind, for the rest of us. This question is barely being asked, let alone answered, in the contemporary debate.

Nor is it merely the scope of the mass imprisonment state that has expanded so impressively in the United States. The ideas underlying the doing of criminal justice — the superstructure of justifications and rationalizations — have also undergone a sea change. Rehabilitation is a dead letter; retribution is the thing. The function of imprisonment is not to reform or redirect offenders. Rather, it is to keep them away from us. “The prison,” writes sociologist David Garland, “is used today as a kind of reservation, a quarantine zone in which purportedly dangerous individuals are segregated in the name of public safety.” We have elaborated what are, in effect, a “string of work camps and prisons strung across a vast country housing millions of people drawn mainly from classes and racial groups that are seen as politically and economically problematic.” We have, in other words, marched quite a long way down the punitive road, in the name of securing public safety and meting out to criminals their just deserts.

And we should be ashamed of ourselves for having done so. Consider a striking feature of this policy development, one that is crucial to this moral assessment: the ways in which we now deal with criminal offenders in the United States have evolved in recent decades in order to serve expressive and not only instrumental ends. We have wanted to “send a message,” and have done so with a vengeance. Yet in the process we have also, in effect, provided an answer for the question: who is to blame for the maladies that beset our troubled civilization? That is, we have constructed a narrative, created scapegoats, assuaged our fears, and indulged our need to feel virtuous about ourselves. We have met the enemy and the enemy, in the now familiar caricature, is them — a bunch of anomic, menacing, morally deviant “thugs.” In the midst of this dramaturgy — unavoidably so in America — lurks a potent racial subplot.

This issue is personal for me. As a black American male, a baby-boomer born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, I can identify with the plight of the urban poor because I have lived among them. I am related to them by the bonds of social and psychic affiliation. As it happens, I have myself passed through the courtroom, and the jailhouse, on my way along life’s journey. I have sat in the visitor’s room at a state prison; I have known, personally and intimately, men and women who lived their entire lives with one foot to either side of the law. Whenever I step to a lectern to speak about the growth of imprisonment in our society, I envision voiceless and despairing people who would have me speak on their behalf. Of course, personal biography can carry no authority to compel agreement about public policy. Still, I prefer candor to the false pretense of clinical detachment and scientific objectivity. I am not running for high office; I need not pretend to a cool neutrality that I do not possess. While I recognize that these revelations will discredit me in some quarters, this is a fate I can live with.

So, my racial identity is not irrelevant to my discussion of the subject at hand. But, then, neither is it irrelevant that among the millions now in custody and under state supervision are to be found a vastly disproportionate number of the black and the brown. There is no need to justify injecting race into this discourse, for prisons are the most race-conscious public institutions that we have. No big city police officer is “colorblind” nor, arguably, can any afford to be. Crime and punishment in America have a color — just turn on a television, or open a magazine, or listen carefully to the rhetoric of a political campaign — and you will see what I mean. The fact is that, in this society as in any other, order is maintained by the threat and the use of force. We enjoy our good lives because we are shielded by the forces of law and order upon which we rely to keep the unruly at bay. Yet, in this society to an extent unlike virtually any other, those bearing the heavy burden of order-enforcement belong, in numbers far exceeding their presence in the population at large, to racially defined and historically marginalized groups. Why should this be so? And how can those charged with the supervision of our penal apparatus sleep well at night knowing that it is so?

This punitive turn in the nation’s social policy is intimately connected, I would maintain, with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order. And such rhetoric, in turn, can be fully grasped only when viewed against the backdrop of America’s often ugly and violent racial history: There is a reason why our inclination toward forgiveness and the extension of a second chance to those who have violated our behavioral strictures is so stunted, and why our mainstream political discourses are so bereft of self-examination and searching social criticism. An historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of prison has served to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Many historians and political scientists — though, of course, not all — agree that the shifting character of race relations over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among democratic industrial societies in the severity of its punitive policy and the paucity of its social-welfare institutions. Put directly and without benefit of euphemism, the racially disparate incidence of punishment in the United States is a morally troubling residual effect of the nation’s history of enslavement, disenfranchisement, segregation, and discrimination. It is not merely the accidental accretion of neutral state action, applied to a racially divergent social flux. It is an abhorrent expression of who we Americans are as a people, even now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

My recitation of the brutal facts about punishment in today’s America may sound to some like a primal scream at this monstrous social machine that is grinding poor black communities to dust. And I confess that these facts do at times leave me inclined to cry out in despair. But my argument is intended to be moral, not existential, and its principal thesis is this: we law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made collective decisions on social and incarceration policy questions, and we benefit from those decisions. That is, we benefit from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our behest. Put differently our society — the society we together have made — first tolerates crime-promoting conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then goes on to act out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

It is a central reality of our time that a wide racial gap has opened up in cognitive skills, the extent of law-abidingness, stability of family relations, and attachment to the work force. This is the basis, many would hold, for the racial gap in imprisonment. Yet I maintain that this gap in human development is, as a historical matter, rooted in political, economic, social, and cultural factors peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history. That is to say, it is a societal, not communal or personal, achievement. At the level of the individual case we must, of course, act as if this were not so. There could be no law, and so no civilization, absent the imputation to persons of responsibility for their wrongful acts. But the sum of a million cases, each one rightly judged fairly on its individual merits, may nevertheless constitute a great historic wrong. This is, in my view, now the case in regards to the race and social class disparities that characterize the very punitive policy that we have directed at lawbreakers. And yet, the state does not only deal with individual cases. It also makes policies in the aggregate, and the consequences of these policies are more or less knowable. It is in the making of such aggregate policy judgments that questions of social responsibility arise.

This situation raises a moral problem that we cannot avoid. We cannot pretend that there are more important problems in our society, or that this circumstance is the necessary solution to other, more pressing problems — unless we are also prepared to say that we have turned our backs on the ideal of equality for all citizens and abandoned the principles of justice. We ought to be asking ourselves two questions: Just what manner of people are we Americans? And in light of this, what are our obligations to our fellow citizens — even those who break our laws?

Without trying to make a full-fledged philosophical argument here, I nevertheless wish to gesture — in the spirit of the philosopher John Rawls — toward some answers to these questions. I will not set forth a policy manifesto at this time. What I aim to do is suggest, in a general way, how we ought to be thinking differently about this problem. Specifically, given our nation’s history and political culture, I think that there are severe limits to the applicability in this circumstance of a pure ethic of personal responsibility, as the basis for distributing the negative good of punishment in contemporary America. I urge that we shift the boundary toward greater acknowledgment of social responsibility in our punishment policy discourse — even for wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. In suggesting this, I am not so much making a “root causes” argument — he did the crime, but only because he had no choice — as I am arguing that the society at large is implicated in his choices because we have acquiesced in structural arrangements which work to our benefit and his detriment, and yet which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes. We condemn those choices, but they are nevertheless compelling to him. I am interested in the moral implications of what the sociologist Loïc Wacquant has called the “double-sided production of urban marginality.” I approach this problem of moral judgment by emphasizing that closed and bounded social structures — like racially homogeneous urban ghettos — create contexts where “pathological” and “dysfunctional” cultural forms emerge, but these forms are not intrinsic to the people caught in these structures. Neither are they independent of the behavior of the people who stand outside of them.

Several years ago, I took time to read some of the nonfiction writings of the great nineteenth century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Toward the end of his life he had become an eccentric pacifist and radical Christian social critic. I was stunned at the force of his arguments. What struck me most was Tolstoy’s provocative claim that the core of Christianity lies in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: You see that fellow over there committing some terrible sin? Well, if you have ever lusted, or allowed jealousy, or envy or hatred to enter your own heart, then you are to be equally condemned! This, Tolstoy claims, is the central teaching of the Christian faith: we’re all in the same fix.

Now, without invoking any religious authority, I nevertheless want to suggest that there is a grain of truth in this religious sentiment that is relevant to the problem at hand: That is, while the behavioral pathologies and cultural threats that we see in society — the moral erosions “out there” — the crime, drug addiction, sexually transmitted disease, idleness, violence and all manner of deviance — while these are worrisome, nevertheless, our moral crusade against these evils can take on a pathological dimension of its own. We can become self-righteous, legalistic, ungenerous, stiff-necked, and hypocritical. We can fail to see the beam in our own eye. We can neglect to raise questions of social justice. We can blind ourselves to the close relationship that actually exists between, on the one hand, behavioral pathology in the so-called urban underclass of our country and, on the other hand, society-wide factors — like our greed-driven economy, our worship of the self, our endemic culture of materialism, our vacuous political discourses, our declining civic engagement, and our aversion to sacrificing private gain on behalf of much needed social investments. We can fail to see, in other words, that the problems of the so-called underclass — to which we have reacted with a massive, coercive mobilization — are but an expression, at the bottom of the social hierarchy, of a more profound and widespread moral deviance — one involving all of us.

Taking this position does not make me a moral relativist. I merely hold that, when thinking about the lives of the disadvantaged in our society, the fundamental premise that should guide us is that we are all in this together. Those people languishing in the corners of our society are our people — they are us – whatever may be their race, creed, or country of origin, whether they be the crack-addicted, the HIV-infected, the mentally ill homeless, the juvenile drug sellers, or worse. Whatever the malady, and whatever the offense, we’re all in the same fix. We’re all in this thing together.

Just look at what we have wrought. We Americans have established what, to many an outside observer, looks like a system of racial caste in the center of our great cities. I refer here to millions of stigmatized, feared, and invisible people. The extent of disparity in the opportunity to achieve their full human potential, as between the children of the middle class and the children of the disadvantaged — a disparity that one takes for granted in America — is virtually unrivaled elsewhere in the industrial, advanced, civilized, free world.

Yet too many Americans have concluded, in effect, that those languishing at the margins of our society are simply reaping what they have sown. Their suffering is seen as having nothing to do with us — as not being evidence of systemic failures that can be corrected through collective action. Thus, as I noted, we have given up on the ideal of rehabilitating criminals, and have settled for simply warehousing them. Thus we accept — despite much rhetoric to the contrary — that it is virtually impossible effectively to educate the children of the poor. Despite the best efforts of good people and progressive institutions — despite the encouraging signs of moral engagement with these issues that I have seen in my students over the years, and that give me hope — despite these things, it remains the case that, speaking of the country as a whole, there is no broadly based demand for reform, no sense of moral outrage, no anguished self-criticism, no public reflection in the face of this massive, collective failure.

The core of the problem is that the socially marginal are not seen as belonging to the same general public body as the rest of us. It therefore becomes impossible to do just about anything with them. At least implicitly, our political community acts as though some are different from the rest and, because of their culture — because of their bad values, their self-destructive behavior, their malfeasance, their criminality, their lack of responsibility, their unwillingness to engage in hard work — they deserve their fate.

But this is quite wrongheaded. What we Americans fail to recognize — not merely as individuals, I stress, but as a political community — is that these ghetto enclaves and marginal spaces of our cities, which are the source of most prison inmates, are products of our own making: Precisely because we do not want those people near us, we have structured the space in our urban environment so as to keep them away from us. Then, when they fester in their isolation and their marginality, we hypocritically point a finger, saying in effect: “Look at those people. They threaten to the civilized body. They must therefore be expelled, imprisoned, controlled.” It is not we who must take social responsibility to reform our institutions but, rather, it is they who need to take personal responsibility for their wrongful acts. It is not we who must set our collective affairs aright, but they who must get their individual acts together. This posture, I suggest, is inconsistent with the attainment of a just distribution of benefits and burdens in society.

Civic inclusion has been the historical imperative in Western political life for 150 years. And yet — despite our self-declared status as a light unto the nations, as a beacon of hope to freedom-loving peoples everywhere — despite these lofty proclamations, which were belied by images from the rooftops in flooded New Orleans in September 2005, and are contradicted by our overcrowded prisons — the fact is that this historical project of civic inclusion is woefully incomplete in these United States.

At every step of the way, reactionary political forces have declared the futility of pursuing civic inclusion. Yet, in every instance, these forces have been proven wrong. At one time or another, they have derided the inclusion of women, landless peasants, former serfs and slaves, or immigrants more fully in the civic body. Extending to them the franchise, educating their children, providing health and social welfare to them has always been controversial. But this has been the direction in which the self-declared “civilized” and wealthy nations have been steadily moving since Bismarck, since the revolutions of 1848 and 1870, since the American Civil War with its Reconstruction Amendments, since the Progressive Era and through the New Deal on to the Great Society. This is why we have a progressive federal income tax and an estate tax in this country, why we feed, clothe and house the needy, why we (used to) worry about investing in our cities’ infrastructure, and in the human capital of our people. What the brutal facts about punishment in today’s America show is that this American project of civic inclusion remains incomplete. Nowhere is that incompleteness more evident than in the prisons and jails of America. And this as yet unfulfilled promise of American democracy reveals a yawning chasm between an ugly and uniquely American reality, and our nation’s exalted image of herself.

—Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/03/11/glenn-loury/a-nation-of-jailers/

Posted by lois at 09:38 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Lawmakers considering plan that would cap the number of juveniles being sent to TYC jails and keep them in the county in which they live

Lawmakers eyeing Travis' plan for juveniles
Proposal among many being considered that would reform youth agency, save state money.

By Bob Banta and Mike Ward
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, March 12, 2009

Legislators are studying proposals from Travis and other counties to save the state money by sending fewer young offenders to Texas Youth Commission facilities.

Although some lawmakers warn against diverting too much money from Youth Commission activities, Travis County's plan is part of a trend, sparked two years ago by sweeping reforms at the scandal-plagued agency that were designed to remove youths from remote state-run lockups and place them in community-based treatment programs closer to their families.

So far, Travis, Dallas and a group of 22 Southeast Texas counties have proposed pilot programs to do that — for far less than the nearly $99,000 per year that it costs to keep a youth locked up with the agency. Other counties are considering similar plans.

Under the concept, only juveniles convicted of serious crimes would be sent to the agency. In return, the state would reimburse the counties for each juvenile who is incarcerated and rehabilitated locally.

Youths would have a stronger network of rehabilitative support closer to home than in one of the agency's remote facilities, said Jeanne Meurer, legal management director for Travis County juvenile probation.

"But being able to do that depends on what a county or community's financial resources are," she said. "That's why many local agencies are excited about the possibility of getting funds from the state to keep their kids at home."

It costs Travis County an average $175 a day, or $63,875 a year per child, to incarcerate and provide rehabilitation services, according to the pilot project proposed by Meurer and Estela Medina, Travis County's chief probation officer. If the child were sent to a Youth Commission institution, it would cost the state an average of $270.49 a day, or $98,729 annually per child, they said.

In the 2005 budget year, Travis County sent 119 juveniles to the agency at a cost to the state of $11.7 million. If the 119 had been kept in Travis County facilities, the cost would have been $7.6 million, Meurer and Medina said.

Under the Travis County proposal, a limit would be placed on the number of offenders each county would be allowed to send to the agency each budget year. In the case of Travis County, local probation officials would cap the number of juveniles sent to the agency each budget year at 10. If the county sent more than 10 in that year, the county would pay the agency the cost of taking on those juveniles.

The Travis County plan calculates that the state would pay the county $7.6 million in 2010 and $8 million in 2011.

The plan is one of several being studied by state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, the chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee and a member of the Senate Finance Committee.

"This is exactly what we had in mind when we passed the reforms two years ago," said Whitmire, an author of the reform bill in 2007.

The concept has been initially embraced by Senate budget writers, who last week cut the Youth Commission's proposed funding significantly so it can be put into local diversion programs paid for through the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission. House budget-writers have not signed on but have initially approved much of what Youth Commission officials requested.

State Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen, also an author of the reforms, said while he supports the idea, he is concerned about too much money being taken away from the agency to pay for the local programs.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/03/12/0312tyc.html

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

Real Cost of Prisons Comix (the book)

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix
edited by Lois Ahrens
PM Press
Reviews: http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php?story=loisahrens#reviews
Ordering info:
https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=48

One out of every hundred adults in the U.S. is in prison. This book provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher. This volume collects the three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prisons Project. The stories and statistical information in each comic book is thoroughly researched and documented.

Prison Town: Paying the Price tells the story of how the financing and site locations of prisons affects the people of rural communities in which prison are built. It also tells the story of how mass incarceration affects people of urban communities where the majority of incarcerated people come from.

Prisoners of the War on Drugs includes the history of the war on drugs, mandatory minimums, how racism creates harsher sentences for people of color, stories on how the war on drugs works against women, three strikes laws, obstacles to coming home after incarceration, and how mass incarceration destabilizes neighborhoods.

Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children includes stories about women trapped by mandatory sentencing and the "costs" of incarceration for women and their families. Also included are alternatives to the present system, a glossary and footnotes.

Over 125,000 copies of the comic books have been printed and more than 100,000 have been sent to families of people who are incarcerated, people who are incarcerated, and to organizers and activists throughout the country. The book includes a chapter with descriptions about how the comix have been put to use in the work of organizers and activists in prison and in the "free world" by ESL teachers, high school teachers, college professors, students, and health care providers throughout the country. The demand for them is constant and the ways in which they are being used is inspiring.

The Buzz:

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

"The Real Cost of Prisons comics are among the most transformative pieces of information that the youth get to read. We take it with us to detention centers, group homes, youth shelters and social justice organizing projects. Everywhere we go we see youth nodding with agreement and getting excited to see their reality validated in print. The Real Cost of Prisons helps youth know what's up and gives them the push they need to get active in the struggle to make interpersonal and community-wide change."
--Shira Hassan, Co-Director Young Women's Empowerment Project, Chicago, IL

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

MA: Telephone company price gouging

A bad call for prisoners
By Ronald Fraser / As You Were Saying . . . | Saturday, March 14, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Op-Ed

It is time to end telephone price gouging in prisons. If phone companies in Florida, Michigan, Missouri and New York can provide inmates with reasonable rates, so can Massachusetts.

Prisoners who use the telephone to maintain strong family ties will be better prepared to rebuild their lives upon returning home. Why then does Massachusetts allow price-gouging phone companies to drive prison rates for interstate calls sky high, isolating inmates from the outside world?

The cost of long-distance calling has dropped drastically for most Bay Staters, but not for families of inmates. According to the Federal Communications Commission, nationally, domestic interstate calls in 2006 were billed at just 6 cents per minute.

Yet the Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Campaign to Promote Equitable Telephone Charges reports that the families of Massachusetts inmates pay Global Tel* Link, the Bay State’s prison phone monopoly, much more.

For a 15-minute call, including per-call and usage charges, the campaign calculates that inmate families in Massachusetts pay a very reasonable 15 cents per minute for intrastate long-distance collect calls, but a whopping 89 cents per minute for interstate collect calls. A similar interstate call using a debit or prepaid card would cost a lot less, but Massachusetts prisons do not permit the use of such cards.

In other states, inmates’ families pay less per minute for 15-minute collect interstate calls: Florida, 12 cents; Michigan and New York, 15 cents; Missouri, 17 cents; and 18 cents in New Hampshire.

These Massachusetts rates include “commissions” (also known as kickbacks) negotiated during the contracting process and paid to prison operators as a percentage of phone revenues. Eager to win lucrative contracts, competing phone companies sweeten their bids by offering generous kickbacks as high as 65 percent.

Only seven states - Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma and Rhode Island - do not accept such commissions and pass the savings on to inmates.

While competition among phone companies in the open market drives long-distance calling rates down, competition in the prison market, with help from greedy phone companies and uncaring prison operators, actually drives rates up.

Studies show that nationally, including special security features attached to prison phones, it costs phone companies between 12 and 17 cents per minute to provide interstate collect calling, and between 6 and 12 cents per minute to provide interstate debit calling.

Using these cost estimates, in Massachusetts Global Tel* Link is making a profit on collect interstate calls in the 80 percent to 86 percent range. Nationally, estimates are that prison phone companies make similar profits on these calls.

It’s not that no one has noticed the ripoff. The 2006 Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons reported that inmate phone rates are “extraordinarily high.” Even the American Bar Association has called for inmate calls to be set at the “lowest possible rates.” And the American Correctional Association says sound correctional management includes reasonably priced phone services.

Martha Wright and other inmate family members have asked the FCC to mandate that inmates making interstate collect calls be charged no more than 25 cents per minute, and interstate debit calls no more than 20 cents per minute. Their proposal also asks that the debit card option be provided in all U.S. prisons.

It is time to end phone price gouging in prisons. If phone companies in Florida, Michigan, Missouri and New York can provide inmates with reasonable rates, so can Massachusetts. Doing so will help strengthen prisoners’ family ties and make our communities safer.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1158433

Posted by lois at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2009

FL: Private Prison Problems Not Quickly Fixed

Report: Florida prison problems not quickly fixed
By JESSICA GRESKO , 03.12.09, 04:11 PM EDT

The agency that oversees Florida's six privately run prisons needs to ensure that problems found during audits - such as broken alarms and unsanitary infirmaries - are quickly fixed, lawmakers were told Thursday as part of a report reviewing the agency.

Audits of private prisons by the Florida Department of Corrections had previously found broken escape sensors and buildings that had not been checked for any attempts by inmates to tunnel out. Audits also found delays in medical care and problems involving contraband.

"Some of these problems were repeated year after year at the same prisons," said analyst Vic Williams, who summarized the report for lawmakers in testimony before the Senate Committee on Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations.

The report was written by the Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability and released in December. Lawmakers heard a formal presentation of the details Thursday.

An official with the Department of Management Services, the agency that oversees the private prisons, told lawmakers that his agency has already begun to address some of the issues raised by the report.

"We've already started the process to implement a lot of these recommendations," Department of Management Services' J.D. Solie told the panel.

Solie promised that any future violations found by Department of Corrections audits would be corrected within 45 days.

"This is an eye-opening report," said Sen. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami.

The state has six private prisons housing approximately 8,000 inmates or about 8 percent of the state's inmates. The facilities cost the state about $133 million a year, or some 6 percent of the Department of Corrections' $2.2 billion budget.

The state currently contracts with two private prison companies: Nashville-based Corrections Corp. of America and Boca Raton-based GEO Group Inc. The state's 131 other facilities are run by the Florida Department of Corrections.

CCA said in a statement that it has "worked closely" with the state to "ensure contract compliance and will continue to do so." A message left for a spokesman at GEO was not immediately returned.

Among recommendations, the report also said private prisons should be required to track the percentage of inmates who successfully complete substance abuse and education programs.

It also noted that phone calls made from private prisons are more expensive than calls from prisons run by the Department of Corrections. A 15 minute phone call from a private prison costs around $6 while the same call costs 50 cents in a state-run prison, lawmakers were told.

And while families can visit state-run prisons on Saturdays and Sundays, private facilities allow visits either every other weekend or only one of the two weekend days, the report found.

The Department of Management Services said future contracts would require private prisons to measure and report graduation rates from education and treatment programs. Contracts will also require that phone call prices be "more in line" with the cost at state-run prisons, according to a written reply from the agency.

But, the agency wrote it believed the visitation policies at private prisons were appropriate, though it agreed to ask inmates and families about their satisfaction.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/03/12/ap6161623.html

Posted by lois at 07:27 PM | Comments (0)

NV: Prisoner Internet access plan advances

Inmate Internet access plan advances
By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, Associated Press Writer

Thursday, March 12, 2009
(03-12) 16:52 PDT Carson City, Nev. (AP) --

Nevada lawmakers advanced a plan Thursday that would allow some state prison inmates — who lost the use of personal typewriters starting in 2007 — limited access to the Internet.

Currently, inmates can't use the Internet but have access to electronic library materials on CD-ROMs. Under AB34, they could get e-mail from approved senders, take online classes and access an electronic law library. They also could videoconference with state Parole Board commissioners for hearings, virtually visit with doctors and buy items such as digital music files.

The bill, which provides for monitoring of all e-mail traffic by prison staffers, was advanced to the full Assembly by the Committee on Corrections, Parole and Probation.

The plan is to set up kiosks where inmates could access incoming e-mails from approved senders and download MP3 digital files for a price. State Corrections Director Howard Skolnik said that secure types of kiosks are available on the market and used in prisons in other states.

"It's the new technology," said Skolnik. "We are aware of at least 14 states that have already implemented this type of programming. It's bringing us into the 21st century, and I think the 21st century is a good place to be."

"We'll be making sure that everything we need to protect the system will be in place," Skolnik said.

The committee vote on the bill was 10-4. The opponents, all Republican, who questioned whether the change could impact prison security, included Assemblymen Ty Cobb of Reno, John Hambrick of Las Vegas, Don Gustavson of Sparks and Richard McArthur of Las Vegas.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada had proposed several amendments, including one stating that access to electronic technology shouldn't replace inmates' existing rights to in-person contact with attorneys.

But the attorney general's office opposed those amendments, saying that prisoners' rights to visitation are carefully controlled by the prison, and warning that to include language in the bill that says the state shouldn't interfere with "existing visitation rights" could lead to a slew of lawsuits.

"I've always been under the understanding that your access to your attorney is a right," said Assemblyman William Horne, D-Las Vegas.

Deputy Attorney General Janet Trout said that in some cases, inmates' constitutional rights have to be severely curtailed.

"The department certainly does restrict visitation to certain individuals even if it's family members," Trout said. "We recognize this is one of the most risky parts of their business."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/03/12/state/n165259D25.DTL

Posted by lois at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2009

MS:Omnibus spending Bill brings $205 million for construction of Federal Prison in Yazoo

Spending bill brings large windfall to Mississippi

By CHRIS TALBOTT • March 12, 2009

JACKSON - The federal omnibus spending bill that President Barack Obama signed on Wednesday funnels millions of dollars to Mississippi, including $205 million for construction at the Yazoo City federal prison.

Other big ticket items include $61 million for construction of Mississippi River levees and $31.5 million to continue work at the national strategic petroleum reserve site in Richton.

The money is part of the regular federal budget and separate from the federal stimulus package that also is expected to bring $2.8 billion to the state.

"With these funds we will be able to continue the important work of improving our state's infrastructure, enhancing quality of health care and education and creating an environment to attract new businesses," said U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the ranking Republican on the Senate appropriations committee.

Highlights from the spending bill provided by Cochran's office include:

# $6.2 million in several earmarks for the University of Southern Mississippi.

# $1.9 million for widening of West Fourth Street in Hattiesburg.

# $6.5 million for construction of the Mississippi biotechnology research park at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

# $1.5 million to the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies to complete construction of a facility focusing on rehabilitation, conservation and education regarding marine mammals.

# $20.8 million to construct mooring cells for barges along the Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway.

# $2.8 million to revitalize Capitol Street in Jackson.

# $10 million for the port of Gulfport.

By far, the largest project slated for Mississippi is new construction on the existing federal prison site in Yazoo City.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has put out bids for a contract to build a new high-security penitentiary, a minimum-security prison camp and other structures at the current prison site. The facilities will be about 50,000 square meters and will house about 1,500 prisoners.

Funding for the national strategic petroleum reserve site in Richton was mostly left in place. Congress cut in half to $205 million what the Bush recommended spending on the reserve.

Cochran said he was pleased the spending bill will allow construction to begin at the site. Property purchases were completed last year and a revised environmental impact statement is now being conducted.
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"At a time of economic uncertainty it is important for the United States to continue to make provisions for the future," he said. "As long as our country remains dependent on foreign oil, we need to have oil reserves ready in case of natural or other disaster."

It's impossible to tell exactly how much money will be coming to Mississippi out of the spending bill. A nonpartisan budget watchdog group estimates, however, that the state is among the big winners when it comes to earmarks.

Taxpayers for Common Sense estimates that both Cochran and Mississippi's other senator, Roger Wicker, sit atop the heap when it comes to earmarks, the controversial practice of steering money to pet projects.

The group says Cochran is the congressional champion with $437.7 million in earmarks brought to the state both alone and in combination with lawmakers from other states. Wicker is No. 2 on the list at $391 million.

Mississippi is third overall in earmarks, the group's research shows, with a total of $325 million, a figure that doesn't include multistate funding.

"This is where Mississippi is always impressive," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Mississippi trails much larger California ($568.7 million) and Texas ($370 million) overall, but swamps them when earmarks are figured on a per capita basis. Mississippi is fourth in the country with $110.59 per resident accrued in earmarks. Alaska remains No. 1 at $209.71 per resident.

Overall, the group estimates there are $7.7 billion in earmarks in the $410 billion spending plan.

Ellis said the group uses Congress' own definition of an earmark to reach its conclusions. But Margaret McPhillips, a spokeswoman for Cochran, said it's impossible to tell how much money legislators steered toward the state in earmarks because the definition is debatable.

Wicker said he still feels the government spends too much money, but does not favor taking the right to choose what projects are approved away from Congress.
http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20090312/NEWS01/903120331/1002

Posted by lois at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)

IL : Pontiac Prison to Stay Open After Months of Lobbying by town and guard's unions

" PCC is the only institution in the state to currently house condemned inmates. It also has the largest segregation unit in which many of the state’s “worst of the worst” inmates are housed.
Pontiac is the state’s only facility that provides single cells for most maximum-security inmates."

Pontiac Correctional Center will remain open according to an announcement from the governor’s office and from Sen. Dan Rutherford
By Sheila Shelton
Pontiac Daily Leader
Thu Mar 12, 2009
Pontiac, Ill. -

After months of waiting, praying and hoping, an announcement on the fate of Pontiac Correctional Center has been rendered.
And, for the people of Pontiac and those who work at PCC, the facility will remain open.
Gov. Pat Quinn announced late this morning that Pontiac Correctional Center is not going to close, at least for now.
Quinn’s office said the decision is another step in the governor’s efforts to ensure greater fiscal responsibility in state government.
PCC provides approximately 600 jobs and generates approximately $54.4 million in revenue for the area.

“Keeping Pontiac open will ensure nearly 600 people in the region keep their jobs, prevent hundreds of families from being uprooted, and allow Pontiac to maintain one of its largest sources of revenue,” said Quinn in a released statement.
The prison was slated to close by Dec. 31, 2008, by order of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The closure did not occur as scheduled because of court injunctions that prevented the movement of officers and inmates from the facility.
State Sen. Dan Rutherford, R-Chenoa, released comments on PCC shortly after Quinn’s announcement.
“I am pleased to share the good news that Pontiac Correctional Center will remain open and operational," said Rutherford in his release. "For the past few days, I have been working with Gov. Quinn's office regarding Pontiac Correctional Center. I was not authorized to make an announcement until this afternoon.”
Rutherford said earlier that he felt the announcement by Quinn would come sometime next week when he announces the state’s budget for the coming year.
The current budget holds money for the operations of PCC through the end of this fiscal year on June 30.
Pontiac Mayor Scott McCoy said his first reaction to the announcement was “excuse me while I do my happy dance.”
“Gov. Quinn did his due diligence and came to the conclusion that Pontiac Prison is an important part of the Illinois Department of Corrections, and closing it is not in the best interest of the state of Illinois.”
“I thank the governor for his hard work on this situation,” said McCoy. “It’s a very good day for Pontiac and Livingston County.”
Former PCC officer and current Dwight Correctional Center Maj. Kevin DeLong said shortly after noon today that he is very thankful to Quinn.
“PCC is full of great staff and people have worked very hard there and it is wonderful it is staying open,” he said.
”It is finally a sigh of relief after constantly checking the news and Internet everyday we are now ready to get back to normal,” said DeLong’s wife, Stephanie. “I hope we never have to go through this again.”
Blagojevich announced last May that he would be closing PCC after he had first announced he would close the Roundhouse at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet.
Apparent political pressure forced Blagojevich to reconsider closing the oldest cell house at Stateville and decide to close the entire Pontiac facility instead.
PCC is the only institution in the state to currently house condemned inmates. It also has the largest segregation unit in which many of the state’s “worst of the worst” inmates are housed.
Pontiac is the state’s only facility that provides single cells for most maximum-security inmates.
Central Illinois lawmakers, elected officials and community action groups have been vocal supporters of keeping Pontiac open, citing security of the employees and inmates as an additional reason to maintain the prison here.
Henry Bayer, executive director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31, issued a statement from Springfield.
"Gov. Quinn is doing the right thing by keeping Pontiac open. The state prison system is dangerously overcrowded, and closing any prison would make a bad situation much worse. The closure of Pontiac would also have forced hundreds of AFSCME members to face the terrible choice of losing their jobs or leaving their homes in the Livingston County area.”
http://www.pontiacdailyleader.com/news/x1331524721

Posted by lois at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

Voting Rights Elude Some People in FL With Felony Convictions

NY Times
By GARY FINEOUT
Published: March 11, 2009

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.— Florida’s procedures for restoring voting rights to convicted felons are so cumbersome, bureaucratic and confusing that some ex-convicts are being denied their rights, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

Most election officials throughout the state are unsure about who can win back their voting rights, the report found.

Florida is among a handful of states that do not permit automatic restoration of rights once someone has been released from prison. In 2007, Gov. Charlie Crist pushed through new procedures to speed up the process for most felons seeking voting rights. The new process does not apply to murderers and sex offenders.

More than 138,000 people had their rights restored between April 2007 and March 2009, but the A.C.L.U. said it was concerned that thousands of additional voters might not know what to do because of widespread confusion over the new eligibility rules.

The group got conflicting answers when it surveyed the offices of all 67 election supervisors in the state. Employees in six county elections offices, for example, told callers, wrongly, that someone convicted of a misdemeanor was ineligible to vote. The survey also showed that nearly half incorrectly asserted that felons needed to produce paperwork showing they had their rights restored in order to register.

“It’s very hard for anyone to know what’s going on,” said Muslima Lewis, a senior lawyer for the A.C.L.U. of Florida, who wrote the report. “The rules are convoluted and hard to understand.”

Taiwan Daniels, 28, who lives in Broward County, lost his rights after he was convicted on a cocaine charge when he was 16. He spent a year trying to get his rights restored before he succeeded in October, and called the process more “discouraging than encouraging.”

The A.C.L.U. is calling on Florida to automatically restore voting rights to hundreds of thousands of former prisoners in the state. The report also recommends waiving a requirement that a convicted felon first pay off court-ordered restitution.

Mr. Crist said Wednesday that “more can be done” to improve the process. But he said Florida was “on the right path.”

“I think we have done more in the past two years to restore the rights of former felons than we have done in the rest of the history of Florida,” Mr. Crist said.

Florida’s effort to keep felons from voting has been a flashpoint in recent years. Thousands were purged from the state’s voting rolls before the 2000 presidential election, even though there were questions about the accuracy of the list of ineligible voters.

The state scrapped plans for another purge in 2004 after newspapers pointed out flaws with the list, including that the list had virtually no Hispanics on it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/us/12inmates.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Florida%20and%20Voting&st=cse

Posted by lois at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

Another excellent article from Tom Barry on "The National Imperative to Imprison Immigrants for Profit"

The National Imperative to Imprison Immigrants for Profit
Tom Barry | March 10, 2009
Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)

There is a codependent relationship between the private prison industry and the federal government's immigration enforcement apparatus. Immigrant detention jumpstarted the two largest prison companies—Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group—in the prison industry.

The Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) contracted CCA in 1983 and GEO (then Wackenhut Services, Inc.) in 1987 to provide prison beds for detained immigrants. These INS immigrant detention centers were among the first private prisons in the United States.

Although the federal government initiated the privatization of prisons, state governments quickly followed the INS lead. Throughout the late 1980s and the1990s state outsourcing of prisoners drove the expansion of the prison industry. Harsh sentencing laws, ever-increasing drug-related convictions, and the deepening taxpayer reluctance to approve tax increases to pay for prison construction created a favorable climate for the private prison boom.

While INS led the way, other Justice Department agencies soon followed. The U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) began privatizing their imprisonment responsibilities in the early 1990s. BOP's first private prison contract was in 1991 with Wackenhut Corrections.

By the year 2000, however, a spate of private prison deaths and escapes leading to some states to canceling contracts and the inability of CCA and others to find enough inmates to fill the "speculative" prisons it was building caused the industry's profits and the stock to tumble. But after a brief scare, the industry saw its fortunes soar again as INS and USMS began issuing new contracts for immigrant detention.

In 2000 the INS contracted the CCA to house 1,000 detainees at the company's San Diego Correctional Facility. The contract, in which the INS agreed to pay $89.50 per diem for each occupied prison bed, was hailed by CCA as "one of the largest contracts ever awarded to the private corrections industry." BOP also came to CCA's rescue when in 2000 it entered into an agreement with CCA to send "criminal aliens" to the speculative prison that CCA had built in California to house state prisoners that never arrived.

"The private prison industry was on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1990s, until the feds bailed them out with the immigration-detention contracts," said Michele Deitch, an expert on prison privatization with the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin.

A San Diego Union-Tribune special report (May 4, 2008) on the prison industry summed up the conjuncture: "Fortunately for the industry, the federal government began seeing a surge in demand around this time, fueled by federal drug-sentencing laws that had created more inmates and tougher 1996 immigration laws that made more immigrants deportable."

Today, federal government contracts to detain a thousand or more detained immigrants are common, and have sparked a new wave of private prisons, particularly in the Southwest. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the INS legacy agency that forms part of the Department of Homeland Security, now contracts all new detainee growth, as does USMS.

Through its Privatization Management Branch, BOP has over the past several years entered into five contracts with private prison operations to hold more than 10,000 "criminal alien residents." When it published its request for contract bids, BOP noted that the "officers" would be required to "house felony offenders, predominantly criminal aliens." BOP cites "flexibility" as the main attraction of prison privatization.

The BOP contract notice for the criminal alien prisons noted that privatization "provides the BOP with flexibility to meet population capacity needs in a timely fashion." Commenting on BOP's decision to privatize criminal alien detention, BOP spokeswoman Felicia Ponce said that contracts with GEO Group and CCA give BOP the "flexibility to manage a rapidly growing inmate population and to help control overcrowding."

The BOP currently has five contracts to house 10,243 "criminal alien residents." The contracts are with GEO and CCA, and four of the five prisons are in remote areas of western Texas—the largest of which was a $187 million contract in 2007 for "contract beds" at the GEO-run 3,700-bed Reeves County Detention Center, where immigrant inmates have recently rioted to protest deficient medical care.

Commenting on the 2007 contract, GEO president George Zoley, said, "This new long term contract is indicative of a continuing trend of lengthy contracts being awarded by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Marshals Service, providing for increased revenue certainty for our company and a continuity of services for our federal clients. Approximately 40 percent of our present revenues are generated through similar lengthy contracts involving the three federal detention agencies and GEO-care clients."

Zoley boasted that "the Reeves County Detention Complex (the 'Complex') is the largest detention/correctional facility under private management in the world."

Two years later, when GEO Group announced its fourth-quarter earnings on Feb. 12, 2009, Zoley told representatives of investment companies vested in the private prison industry that he "was very pleased" with 2008 results. When most economic sectors are suffering and shuttering stores, GEO, CCA, and other private prison firms reported record revenues and earnings. Net income rose at GEO from $41.8 million in 2007 to $58.9 million in 2008—an increase of more than 20%.

Zoley noted that federal contracts with ICE, USMS, and BOP accounted for 37% of 2008 revenues but 50% of earnings. GEO has more than 10,000 immigrants in its prisons, two-thirds of whom are classified as "criminal aliens." He assured investors that there was "solid bipartisan support to identify and deport criminal aliens." Zoley pointed out that in 2008 Congress added $200 million to President Bush's $800 million request for ICE's criminal alien program. In President Obama's 2010 DHS budget, $1.4 billion is scheduled for programs to hunt down criminal aliens.

In its 2007 Security and Exchange Commission filing, CCA stated: "We are dependent on government appropriations." Then 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."

Although booming largely because of the surge in immigrant inmates, the private prison industry is also facing a barrage of criticism from immigrant advocates and civil libertarians.

Emblematic of the legal backlash against the private prison industry's role in immigration imprisonment, a lawsuit filed in 2007 (and settled in June 2008) by the American Civil Liberties Union against ICE and CCA charged that the San Diego Correctional Facility—the same detention center that had help revive CCA in 2000—was grossly overcrowded and its unsafe conditions violated inmate civil rights. At the time immigrant inmates were obligated, among other things, to sleep on the floor near toilets and had little access to mental health care.

Jody Kent, public-policy coordinator for the ACLU's National Prison Project, told the Wall Street Journal: "We have serious concerns about for-profit prison companies because they are notorious for cutting essential costs that need to be provided to maintain a safe and constitutional environment for prisoners." The lawsuit was settled in June 2008.

But neither lawsuits nor inmate protests seem to worry the private prison industry. Backed by hefty liability insurance policies—which are usually paid for by the county governments that actually own the immigrant prisons—private prison companies routinely offer investors rosy forecasts of future profits. Both GEO Group and CCA say that the deepening economic downturn has several silver linings for their business, including new incentives for government to privatize given increasing difficulty of securing tax income for prison construction and an increased supply of cheap labor.

As GEO's Zoley sees it, the prison industry will benefit from a new "national imperative" in these difficult economic times "to protect American workers by detaining and deporting immigrants."

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/.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5946
Additional articles:
or More Information

The New Political Economy of Immigration
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5873

Immigrant Inmates Caught in Outsourcing Labyrinth
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5871

Immigrant Prison Burns in Pecos
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5849

America's Frontline Is Getting Crowded
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5848

Posted by lois at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)

PA: Officials present preliminary plans for Graterford Prison replacement

03/11/2009
WEB EXCLUSIVE ... Officials present preliminary plans for Graterford Prison replacement
By: David Hare , For The Valley Item

At a Skippack Township Board of Supervisors meeting March 11, state officials presented preliminary plans for two new prisons that will replace Graterford State Prison.

The project is part of the state's efforts to address prison overcrowding. The new facility will house up to 4,000 inmates, according to the state's Department of General Services.
Design-build requests for proposals, or RFPs, will open in June, said Liz O'Reilly, deputy secretary of public works at the DGS.
The design-build concept will enable construction to begin as soon as possible this year by requiring the contractors who win the bid to design the structures as they are being built, according to O'Reilly.

"We're aiming to have shovels in the ground by Labor Day," she said.
DGS has hired Hill International Co. to oversee the project.
Marc Goldberg, deputy secretary for administration at the state's Department of Corrections, said Pennsylvania's prison population has grown by 21 percent in the past six years, from 37,995 in 2001 to more than 49,300 today.
The prison population is predicted to grow an average of 4 percent each year through 2012, according to Goldberg.
Graterford currently holds 3,400 inmates. The two new prisons would house about 4,000 inmates: 2,000 in a medium security facility, and another 2,000 in an adjacent maximum security facility.
"Every inmate is given a complete assessment of what they need when they're with us," Goldberg said. "About 90 percent of these inmates are going to eventually be released, so we do the best we can to make sure they're prepared for that transition. Education is a big part of that."
The Graterford project is part of a broader state construction initiative that will add nearly 9,000 beds to the state's prison system, according to Department of General Services. Other projects include new prisons in Centre and Fayette counties, as well as four additional housing units in Crawford, Forest, Indiana and Northumberland counties.
At Wednesday's meeting Skippack resident Rich Lowry said he didn't have a problem living near the old prison, but now that it's being shut down, he wondered why the new prison couldn't be built in a more rural area.
"If ever there was a time to move it, now's the time," Lowry said. "The prison doesn't support this area, we the taxpayers do."
Other residents also made comments indicating they were against the project and pleaded with the township supervisors to intervene on their behalf.
Supervisors Chairman Mark Marino said the township is limited in what it can do since the state owns the prison property.
"We can't say no to them building here," Marino said, then added, "We're citizens here too."
http://www.valleyitem.com/site/printerFriendly.cfm?brd=1306&dept_id=187831&newsid=20278413
This and other news about the financing and siting of prisons can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2009

Justice Dept. Opens Investigation of Arpaio's Office

NY Times National Briefing | Southwest
Arizona: Inquiry Into County Sheriff’s Office
By PAUL GIBLIN
Published: March 10, 2009

The United States Department of Justice opened an investigation into the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for suspected civil rights violations. The sheriff’s office is run by Joe Arpaio, who has gained national attention for ordering deputies to patrol rural highways, raid Latino neighborhoods and storm municipal buildings in the dead of night in search of illegal immigrants. “Our investigation will focus on alleged patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures conducted by the M.C.S.O., and on allegations of national origin discrimination,” Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general, wrote in a letter to Sheriff Arpaio.
Next Article in US (23 of 33) » A version of this article appeared in print on March 11, 2009, on page A22 of the New York edition.

Posted by lois at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2009

Introduction to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Jailhouse Lawyers By Angela Davis

Introduction to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Jailhouse Lawyers
By Angela Davis
March 02, 2009
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20752

One of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent more than twenty-five years behind bars, the majority of that time on death row. He is supported by millions all over the planet, not only because of the egregious repression he has suffered at the hands of the state of Pennsylvania, but because he has used his abundant talents as a thinker and writer to expand our knowledge of the hidden world of jails, prisons, and death houses in which he has spent the last decades of his life. As a transformative thinker, he has always taken care to emphasize the connections between incarcerated lives and lives that unfold in the putative arenas of freedom.

As Mumia has repeatedly pointed out, those of us who live in the "free world" are not unaffected by the system of state violence that relies on imprisonment and capital punishment as pivotal strategies for ordering society. While those behind bars suffer the most direct effects of this system, its raced, gendered, and sexualized modes of violence bolster the institutions and ideologies that inform our lives on the outside. In all of his previous books, Mumia has urged us to reflect on this dialectic of freedom and unfreedom. He has asked us to think deeply about the racial and class disproportions in the application of capital punishment, rarely taking advantage of the opportunity to call upon people to save his own life, but rather using his writing to speak for the more than 3,000 people who inhabit the state and federal death rows. Over the years, I have been especially impressed by the way his ideas have helped to link critiques of the death penalty with broader challenges to the expanding prison-industrial-complex. He has been particularly helpful to those of us—activists and scholars alike—who seek to associate death penalty abolitionism with prison abolitionism.

In this book, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A., Mumia Abu-Jamal introduces us to the valuable but exceedingly underappreciated contributions of prisoners who have learned how to use the law in defense of human rights. Jailhouse lawyers have challenged inhumane prison conditions, and even when they themselves have been unaware of this connection, they have implicitly followed the standards of such human rights instruments as the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (1955), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984). Mumia argues that the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) is a violation of the Convention Against Torture, for in ruling out psychological or mental injury as a basis through which to recover damages, such sexual coercion as that represented in the Abu Ghraib photographs, if perpetrated inside a U.S. prison, would not have constituted evidence for a lawsuit. If jailhouse lawyers are concerned with broader human rights issues, they also defend their fellow prisoners who face the wrath of the federal and state governments and the administrative apparatus of the prison. Mumia Abu-Jamal's reach in this remarkable book is broadly historical and analytical on the one hand and intimate and specific on the other.

We are fortunate to be offered this history of jailhouse lawyers and this analysis of their legacies by one who can count himself among their ranks. Mumia's words in the opening section of the book about the general conditions that create trajectories leading prisoners to jailhouse law are compelling. He writes of a "deep, abiding disenchantment with lawyers that forces some people to become their own, and also to assist others. In every penitentiary, in every state of the U.S., there are men and women who have learned, through study and experience, and trial and error, the principles of the law." See note.

Many of the jailhouse lawyers evoked in the pages of this book—including the author himself—were well educated before they entered prison. Studying the law was more a question of focusing their intellectual skills on a different object than of familiarizing themselves and becoming comfortable with the discipline of learning. But there are also those jailhouse lawyers who literally had to teach themselves to read and write before they set about learning the law. Mumia points to what was for me a startling revelation: jailhouse lawyers comprise the group most likely to be punished by the prison administration—more so than political prisoners, black people, gang members, and gay prisoners. Whereas jailhouse lawyers are now punished by what Mumia calls "cover charges," historically they could be charged with internal violations for no other reason than that they used the law to challenge prison guards, prison regimes, and prison conditions.

The passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA)—understood by many to have saved the court from frivolous lawsuits by prisoners—was a pointed attack on the jailhouse lawyers Mumia sets out to defend in these pages. He successfully argues that many significant reforms in the prison system resulted directly from the intervention of jailhouse lawyers. Some readers may remember the scandals surrounding conditions in the Texas prison system. But they will not have known that the first decisive challenges to those conditions came from jailhouse lawyers. Mumia refers, for example, to David Ruiz, whose 1971 handwritten civil rights complaint against Texas prison conditions was initially thrown away by the prison administrator charged with having it notarized. As we learn, Ruiz rewrote the complaint and bypassed the prison administration by giving it to a lawyer, who handed it over to a federal judge. This case, Ruiz v. Estelle, was eventually merged with seven other cases originating with prisoners. They challenged double- and triple-celling and work regimes that incorporated the violence of plantation slavery.

Moreover, Texas, along with other southern prison systems, relied on what were known as "building tenders," i.e., armed prisoners acting as assistants to guards, for the governance of the institution. The largely white guards and building tenders poised against the majority Mexican- and African-American prisoners led to "abuse, corruption and officially sanctioned injustice." For those who assume that charitable legal organizations in the "free world" were always responsible for the prison lawsuits that led to significant change, Mumia reminds us that what is now known as "prison law" was pioneered by prisoners themselves. These lawyers behind bars practiced at the risk of punishment and even death. Ruiz himself was placed in the hole after filing this lawsuit against the warden. But, as Mumia points out, the state of Texas was eventually compelled to disestablish the building tender system and to curtail its overcrowding and the overt violence of its regimes. Such contemporary suits as the recent one brought in part by the Prison Law Office against the State of California, which focuses on overcrowded conditions and the lack of health care in California prisons, have been precisely enabled by the work of jailhouse lawyers—those who risked violence and even death in order to make their voices heard.

In light of the major transformations that have historically resulted from the work of jailhouse lawyers, it is not surprising that Mumia argues strenuously against the Prison Litigation Reform Act, whose proponents largely relied on the notion that litigation by prisoners needed to be curtailed because of their proclivity to submit frivolous lawsuits. One of the cases most often evoked as justification for the passage of the PLRA was mischaracterized as claiming cruel and unusual punishment because the prisoners received creamy instead of chunky peanut butter. This was not the entire story, which Mumia offers us as a powerful refutation of the underlying logic of the PLRA. Popular representations of prisoners as intrinsically litigious were linked, he points out, to representations of poor people as more eager to receive welfare payments than they were to work. Thus he connects the 1996 passage of the PRLA under the Clinton administration to the disestablishment of the welfare system, locating both of these developments within the context of rising neoliberalism.

Mumia Abu-Jamal's Jailhouse Lawyers is a persuasive refutation of the ideological underpinnings of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. The way he situates the PLRA historically—as an inheritance of the Black Codes, which were themselves descended from the slave codes—allows us to recognize the extent to which historical memories of slavery and racism are inscribed in the very structures of the prison system and have helped to produce the prison-industrial-complex. If slavery denied African and African-descended people the right to full legal personality and the practices of racialized second-tier citizenship institutionalized the inheritance of slavery, so in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, prisoners find that the curtailment of their capacity to seek redress through the legal system preserves and reaffirms that inheritance.

Mumia's profiles include both men and women, both people of color and white people, with disparate motivations and often very different ways of identifying or not identifying themselves as jailhouse lawyers. Prisoners have challenged the law on its own terms in ways that recapitulate the grassroots organizing by ordinary people in the South that led eventually to the overturning of laws authorizing racial inferiority.

As Mumia points out, if there is increasing respect for the religious rights and practices of people behind bars, then it is largely due to the work of jailhouse lawyers. In the state of Pennsylvania, where Mumia himself is imprisoned, one extremely active jailhouse lawyer profiled in the book is Richard Mayberry, who initiated many important lawsuits, including the case known as I.C.U. (Imprisoned Citizens' Union) v. Shapp, which broadly addressed health, overcrowding, and other conditions of confinement in Pennsylvania prisons.

The I.C.U. case ended in a settlement, which required an agreement by all parties. Mayberry served as class representative and signed on behalf of thousands of state prisoners, and a court-agreed settlement went into force, creating new rules that covered the entire state system. The I.C.U. provisions became the foundation for every subsequent regulation that governed the entire state, and they lasted for decades, until the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. (82)

Mumia not only offers accounts of cases and profiles of prison litigators who have had a lasting impact on the prison system in the United States, he also reveals the extent to which jailhouse lawyers provide legal assistance to their peers, both with respect to their cases and with respect to institution violations. In relation to the latter, outside lawyers are often actually prohibited from representing prisoners, whereas jailhouse lawyers are permitted to assist prisoners in their defense of institutional charges.

Whether the lawsuits generated by jailhouse lawyers are expansive in their reach, potentially affecting the lives of large numbers of prisoners, or whether they are specifically focused on the case of a single individual, they have indeed made an enormous difference. Mumia Abu-Jamal has once more enlightened us, he has once more offered us new ways of thinking about law, democracy, and power. He allows us to reflect upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them.

Free Mumia!

ANGELA YVONNE DAVIS is Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness at the University of California and author of eight books. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early 1970s as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted List." She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. She is a member of the executive board of the Women of Color Resource Center, a San Francisco Bay Area organization that emphasizes popular education of and about women who live in conditions of poverty. Having helped to popularize the notion of a "prison industrial complex," she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a twenty-first century abolitionist movement. Her most recent books are Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete?, both published in the Open Media Series. Her forthcoming books, The Meaning of Freedom and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself A New Critical Edition will also be in the Open Media Series, published by City Lights Books.

Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The USA by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Foreword by Angela Y. Davis
288 pages | $16.95
ISBN: 9780872864696
Published by City Lights Books

Posted by lois at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)

New look at sentencing guidelines for cocaine

"The U.S. Sentencing Commission tallied all 4,262 crack cases for 2006. It calculated a median drug quantity of 1.8 ounces."

New look at sentencing guidelines for cocaine
Claire Cooper
Sunday, March 8, 2009
SF Chronicle

Willie Mays Aikens has returned to Kansas City, where he's still a star. He's worked in construction and hopes to land a job with Major League Baseball, maybe as a counselor, he says, "talking to people about what drugs can do to a person."

People in Kansas City still talk about Aikens' four home runs for the Royals in the 1980 World Series. They seem ready to forgive the crack cocaine bust that earned him a 16-year prison term.

"It takes a big man to step back into the limelight after such a dark path," wrote one blogger.

Aikens' path was dark indeed, but not because his crime was large. The drug sale that sent him to prison was 64 grams, about a quarter cup. The federal cocaine sentencing statutes treat that much crack the same as a bucket of cocaine powder, the material from which crack is produced.

Aikens' case exemplifies all that's gone wrong because of these federal sentencing laws: The focus on petty crimes. The distortion of priorities in the war on drugs. The lopsided impact on African Americans - the 83 percent of federal crack defendants who are black, though a federal health survey found most crack users are white.

The problems have been documented for years. Now it's time for a change.

Finally, key congressional members seem to be in a negotiating mood, and the Obama administration wants the crack/powder disparity eliminated. In the last session of Congress, then-Sen. Barack Obama co-sponsored a bill introduced by then-Sen. Joe Biden to do just that.

The same bill is on the table again. HR 265, introduced in the House by Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee, would increase federal penalties for big-time trafficking while reducing them for possession or dealing in trivial quantities of crack - offenses that should be left to state prosecutors or public health officials.

Cracking down on kingpins was the idea all along. When Congress established the crack sentences in 1986 and 1988, it expected to lock away major drug traffickers who were rumored to be preying on African American neighborhoods and creating an epidemic of crack-fed violence.

Support for the legislation crossed every line - left, right, black, white. In signing the 1986 bill, President Reagan named Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem as one of its "real champions," along with Strom Thurmond and the president's wife, Nancy.

But Congress got it wrong in every way. As the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in 1995, "the stereotype of a drug-crazed addict committing heinous crimes" was simply fiction. And the crack laws shifted the focus to drug quantities that a neighborhood pusher might carry, not a national or international trafficker.

Commission records show that more than half of all crack offenders in the federal courts are street-level distributors, with crack weighing less than an ounce. The average crack case is less than 2 ounces. In the San Francisco-based judicial district, it's even smaller, according to the latest 2006 statistics.

So irrational are these laws that a crack retailer like Aikens could be punished more severely than his powder cocaine wholesaler, as the commission has pointed out.

The undercover agent who busted Aikens understood that. Aikens had offered her cocaine powder, not crack. According to the court's pre-sentence report, she told him "she thought he was going to get crack cocaine." So he made some for her. Crack is produced at the neighborhood level by cooking cocaine powder with baking soda and water.

Federal law enforcement has focused on neighborhood dealers, says Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Police Foundation, because "it's easy for U.S. attorneys to try cases against low-level offenders" but hard to find informants to testify against "genuine high-level traffickers."

Sterling, who was counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime when the crack/powder sentencing formula was established, says Congress "blundered completely." It failed to understand how much crack would signify major trafficking.

The mistake has been widely acknowledged in Washington, but reform has been stymied by congressional disagreements over the best way to correct it. Recently, the U.S. Sentencing Commission took matters into its own hands.

For two decades, the commission's guidelines reflected a decision by Congress that a crack sentence should equal a sentence for 100 times as much powder cocaine. But then in November 2007, the commission ratcheted down its crack guidelines by 20 percent. It made the change retroactive, allowing judges to review the sentences of many defendants already serving time.

As of six weeks ago, 12,723 inmates had been re-sentenced - and many of those have been released.

But the reforms by the Sentencing Commission are restricted by mandatory minimum terms set by Congress - five years for possession or sale of five grams of crack and 10 years for sale of 50 grams. Eighty-two percent of federal crack defendants are serving those mandatory minimum terms, which only Congress can change.

It's time to do so. As Clyde Cahill, a St. Louis federal judge, said in a 1994 crack case, "If young white males were being incarcerated at the same rate as young black males, the statutes would have been amended long ago."

Or, from the more personal perspective of Stacey Candler: "We're talking about somebody's life here. It doesn't take 10 years for you to teach that person a lesson."

Candler served more than 10 years for the crack that her boyfriend kept in their Fresno home. She was released from the federal women's prison in Victorville (San Bernardino County) a year ago, in the first wave of inmates to have their sentences re-evaluated under the Sentencing Commission's revised guidelines.

Originally, Candler was sentenced to almost 16 years for 2 kilograms of crack. She knew the crack was in the house, she says. She didn't expect to be held criminally responsible for it. Her boyfriend got 25 years to life.

She was 22, a nursing student and hospital aide living a modest lifestyle. She had no criminal record.

"I was just a young girl looking for love," she says. She hoped that her boyfriend, six years older, would follow her good example, "but, of course, it didn't turn out that way."

Candler is back in Fresno. She's working and going to college, now majoring in social work. She's confident about her future. "I have the family support and I have friends," she says. "I don't have kids, thank God."

The inmates who do have kids are Candler's saddest prison memory. She recalls the Children's Days that she would help organize once a year, how the kids would get to see their mothers' prison cubicles: "This is where Mommy eats and sleeps now."

As for Aikens, he got out of prison last June, five years early. At 54, he's getting his feet on the ground, he says.

He visited with his older daughter for the first time in eight years - she was 5 when he went to prison for selling a couple of ounces of crack cocaine. His younger daughter, 4, when he went away, won't see him yet. He's trying to build a relationship with her.

He blames only himself for getting in trouble. "All of us make a decision," he says. But he also knows that the stiff crack sentencing laws make no sense. As he puts it, "The ones who have control of this have it wrong."

Busts by the numbers

Median drug weights for federal crack cocaine cases

Nationwide 51 grams (1.8 oz.) 4,262 cases
Los Angeles 120 grams 27 cases
Sacramento 86.5 grams 35 cases
Chicago 76.3 grams 79 cases
New York 56.3 grams 78 cases
Seattle 45.7 grams 30 cases
San Francisco 30.2 grams 18 cases
Miami 30.2 grams 104 cases

Note: San Diego was not included because there was only one case (33 grams)

Source: U.S. Sentencing Commission, based on 2006 data
Local districts strict on crack quantities

Federal prosecutions target petty crack cocaine cases throughout the nation, destroying the lives of many small-time offenders and squandering resources in the war on drugs.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission tallied all 4,262 crack cases for 2006. It calculated a median drug quantity of 1.8 ounces.

Surprisingly, among the strictest jurisdictions was the Northern California district based in San Francisco. A single ounce of crack was involved in the median case here, enough to cover the bottom of a teacup.

In fact, crack quantities in Northern California prosecutions were the lowest in the state - and 17th lowest among the 94 federal judicial districts in the country.

The smallest cases were in Idaho and the largest in Wyoming.

Claire Cooper is an East Bay freelance writer. Her reporting was supported by the Justice and Journalism Fund, established by USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism with Ford Foundation funding.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/08/INM5165QMP.DTL

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

Veterans Courts Are An Alternative to Jail

These courts give wayward veterans a chance
The first veterans court opened last year in Buffalo, N.Y.; its success stories have led to more across the country.
By Nicholas Riccardi
March 10, 2009
Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Tulsa, Okla. -- U.S. military veterans from three decades pass through Judge Sarah Smith's courtroom here, reporting on their battles with drug addiction, alcoholism and despair. Those who find jobs and stabilize their lives are rewarded with candy bars and applause. Those who backslide go to jail.

Smith radiates an air of maternal care from the bench. As the veterans come before her, she softly asks: "How are you doing? Do you need anything?" But if a veteran fails random drug tests, she doesn't flinch at invoking his sentence. She keeps a drill sergeant's cap in her office.

Her court is part of a new approach in the criminal justice system: specialized courts for veterans who have broken the law. Judges have been spurred by a wave of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, battling post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries and stumbling into trouble with the law. But advocates of the courts say they also address a problem as old as combat itself.

"Some families give their sons or daughters to service for their country, and they're perfectly good kids. And they come back from war and just disintegrate before our eyes," said Robert Alvarez, a counselor at Ft. Carson in Colorado who is advocating for a veterans court in the surrounding county. "Is it fair to put these kids in prison because they served and got injured?"

The few veterans courts in the nation are modeled on drug courts that allow defendants to avoid prison in exchange for strict monitoring. Most are only a couple of months old, and it is difficult to track their effectiveness, but the results from the first court, which opened in Buffalo, N.Y., in January 2008, are striking.

Of the more than 100 veterans who have passed through, only two had to be returned to the traditional criminal court system because they could not shake narcotics or criminal behavior, said Judge Robert Russell. That is a far lower rate of recidivism than in drug courts.

"It's the right thing to do for those who have made a number of sacrifices for us," Russell said. "If they've been damaged and injured in the course of their service . . . and we can help them become stable, we must."

There are no comprehensive statistics on how often veterans get in trouble with the law, and the majority never become entangled with the legal system. But psychiatrists and law enforcement officials agree that the traumas of combat can lead to addiction and criminality.

Studies have shown that as many as half of the troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer post-traumatic stress and other disorders, and mental health is the second-most treated ailment for returning veterans in the Department of Veterans Affairs system.

Since Russell's court started, veterans courts have opened in Orange and Santa Clara counties in California; Tulsa, Okla.; and Anchorage. Pittsburgh, southern Wisconsin, Phoenix and Colorado Springs, Colo., are opening or considering new courts this year. Some in Congress have proposed a federal program to help spread veterans courts across the country.

Most veterans courts admit only nonviolent felony offenders, though some include violent crimes. Defendants are required to plead guilty to their crimes.

In exchange for a suspended sentence that can include prison time, they must consent to regular court visits, counseling and random drug testing. Should they waver from the straight and narrow, their sentence goes into effect.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Wendy Lindley started her veterans court in November after a young Iraq war veteran on her docket died of a drug overdose. "It was horrible," she said.

As in most of the nation's nascent veterans courts, many of the defendants in Lindley's court served in the Vietnam or Persian Gulf wars. But she has seen a few Iraq war veterans, all of whom had clean histories before joining the military but started getting into trouble after they returned.

One of them is Carlos Lopez, 26, who returned to Orange in 2004 after a four-year stint in the Marines and struggled to readjust to civilian life.

Haunted by memories of friends who died in Iraq, he was prescribed antidepressants, fell in with a bad crowd and started using cocaine. He was convicted of a possession charge in 2005. In 2007, Lopez was arrested for drunk driving, a violation of his probation. That's how he landed in Lindley's courtroom.

"It's been a morale booster for me that there are so many people in the legal system who are there to help me," said Lopez, a construction estimator.

Colorado Springs has been distressed by a number of cases involving soldiers from nearby Ft. Carson who have returned from Iraq only to get into legal trouble. Soldiers from one brigade alone have been charged in eight homicide cases in the last two years.

Alvarez, a therapist with the Army's Wounded Warrior Program, recalled some of his more serious cases: a warrant officer who choked his dog to death in front of his young children; a soldier who fought violently to pry a shotgun from his wife's hands so he could kill himself.

"What I keep finding is a pretty normal person, a pretty happy-go-lucky human being who'd go off to war and come back broken," said Alvarez, a former Marine.

Another ex-Marine teamed up with a seasoned court administrator to open the veterans court in Tulsa, Okla. After hearing of the Buffalo court, the two did some quick research on their local population. They found that Oklahoma has among the most veterans of any state.

Then, Matt Stiner, now an aide to the Tulsa mayor, went to local posts of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. Over beers and shots of whiskey, he persuaded members to volunteer as counselors and mentors for the court. He knew that veterans would be helped by "the camaraderie of being a veteran."

"When I was in the Marine Corps, we talked about stuff," said Stiner, who left the Marines in 2004 after a tour in Iraq. "Now that I'm out, that's gone. There's a lot of isolation."

Being in a courtroom full of veterans makes a difference to Ira Banks, 60, a Vietnam veteran who was arrested on a charge of marijuana possession. "We're not in with the rest of the crowd, who are just different than we are," he said.

Judge Smith said she had to be extra solicitous of the veterans because they try to hide their problems under a stoic exterior.

"The military personnel, they're less likely to ask for help, they're more likely to tell me everything's fine," she said.

Smith sent Paul Haggerty to jail a couple of times early on. Now the former paratrooper is clean and a veterans court success story.

Haggerty, 37, said he dislocated a shoulder and inhaled poison gas in training exercises in the U.S. and Kuwait during the Gulf War. The VA gave him painkillers of escalating strength, and he gradually became addicted. He would run through his 30-day supply of OxyContin in five days and go to the streets to buy more.

Last year he became so desperate for cash that he stole lawn mowers from outside Home Depot and Lowe's. That landed him in Smith's drug court, and he went with her when she opened the veterans court in December.

The difference between the two courts is striking, Haggerty said.

"In drug court, the atmosphere is down. People don't want to get sober, they're there to stay out of prison," he said. "In veterans court, you have a sense of pride. You don't feel like you're going through this alone."

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

March 09, 2009

New book: Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women
By Vikki Law
PM Press
Now available

In 1974, women imprisoned at New York’s maximum-security prison at
Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion. Protesting the brutal beating of a fellow prisoner, the women fought off guards, holding seven of them hostage, and took over sections of the prison.

Why do activists know about Attica but not the August Rebellion?
Resistance Behind Bars documents collective organizing and individual
resistance among women incarcerated in the U.S. and challenges the reader to question why these instances and efforts have been ignored and why many assume that women do not organize to demand change. It fills the gap in the existing literature, which has focused mostly on the causes, conditions and effects of female imprisonment.

Women have significantly disrupted the daily operations of their prison to protest injustices and demand change. More often, however, they have employed less visible means such as forming peer education groups, clandestinely organizing ways for children to visit mothers in distant prisons and raising public awareness about their conditions.

By emphasizing women's agency in resisting individually as well as organizing collectively against their conditions of confinement, Resistance will spark further discussion and research on
incarcerated women's actions and also galvanize much-needed outside support for their struggle.

About the Author:
Victoria Law is a writer, mother, and photographer. She is also the co-founder of Books Through Bars—NYC and publisher of the zine Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison. Her new book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press, 2009), is the culmination of 8 years of research, writing and listening to the stories of incarcerated women.

Product Details:
Published by PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-60486-018-4
Pub Date: February 2009
Format: Paperback
Page count: 260
Size: 6 by 9
Subjects: Women’s Studies, Penology, Prisons, Prison Abolition
Ordering information: https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=91/

For more about the book and upcoming events: http://resistancebehindbars.org

"Written in regular English, rather than academese, yet full of fire, this is an impressive work of research and reportage. I hope you're able to get this to a greater audience, and that it sparks
awareness and resistance. Well done!" –Mumia Abu-Jamal

"There are too few books written about womyn in prison. Many focus on these womyn as victims only. But this book is different. Its focus is on the herstorical resistance of womyn prisoners! This is necessary information for all of us to have in our consciousness, especially our abolitionist consciousness." --Bo (r.d.brown), former political prisoner, founding mother of Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners and volunteer with the
Prison Activist Resource Center

“Excellently researched and well documented, Resistance Behind Bars is a long needed and much awaited look at the struggles, protests and resistance waged by women prisoners. Highly
recommended for anyone interested in the modern American gulag.” --Paul Wright, former
prisoner, founder/publisher of Prison Legal News and editor of Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor and Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration

“Victoria Law's eight years of research and writing, inspired by her unflinching commitment to listen to and support women prisoners, have resulted in an illuminating effort to document the
dynamic resistance of incarcerated women in the United States.” --Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,
historian, feminist, indigenous rights activist, author, most recently of Roots of Resistance: History of Land Tenure in New Mexico

Posted by lois at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)

GA:: CCA takes over jail as ICE detention center

March 9, 2009
CCA bringing 160 jobs to Georgia
Atlanta Business Chronicle

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) landed a contract to manage detainee populations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the North Georgia Detention Center in Gainesville, Ga.

The deal will bring 160 jobs to Hall County.

Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA will house up to 500 ICE detainees at the facility. The company will lease the former Hall County Jail for 20 years with two five-year renewal options. CCA expects to open the facility during the second quarter.

The facility will employ 160 correctional professionals in security, facility management, accounting, health services, human resources, business management, quality assurance and education.

Georgia’s soaring inmate population is overwhelming its capacity, and the state Department of Corrections has turned to the private sector to help fill the gap.

Georgia, like many states facing a budget crunch in a worsening economy, wants privately owned and operated detention centers to help handle its growing number of prisoners. Private prisons, proponents say, can save governments from 10 percent to 15 percent in inmate housing costs.

Georgia’s inmate population has grown from more than 47,000 in 2002 to 56,022 in 2008, thanks in large part to mandatory sentences. In 2004, Georgia ranked 11th in the nation for length of sentences served, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The state had the fifth-highest inmate population in the United States in 2007 and a budget of $950 million, according to the Department of Corrections.

CCA and Houston-based Cornell Companies Inc. already operate private detention centers housing 5,122 prisoners, or 9.2 percent of state inmates in Georgia. Private prisons held 7.4 percent — or about 120,000 — of the nation’s 1.59 million inmates in 2007.

CCA currently runs 63 facilities in 19 states and Washington, D.C.
http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2009/03/09/daily5.html

Posted by lois at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)

Derrick Z. Jackson: "Rectifying a 'mistake' in drug sentencing"

The Boston Globe
Rectifying a 'mistake' in drug sentencing
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Globe Columnist / March 7, 2009

CRIMINAL JUSTICE will never supplant the economy, war, or healthcare as a top priority, but when Attorney General Eric Holder called waterboarding torture, it ought to have signaled more than a reversal of a singular policy in the treatment of a few suspected terrorists. He said, "Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties. Not only is that thought misguided, I fear that in actuality it does more harm than good."

The big question is whether the Obama administration can rebalance the scales at home, where the corrosive underbelly of injustice is quiet terrorism. Consider the prison boom that accompanied Draconian federal and state laws, laws that became racist in their application.

This week, the Pew Center on the States released a report that found that states spent $47 billion on prisons last year, with spending rising faster than that for education. The spending continues to rise, even as crime rates have fallen by 25 percent over the last 20 years. States spend an average of $29,000 annually on each prisoner, 10 times what they spend on parolees and 23 times what they spend on those on probation. The great irony, of course, is that $29,000 is not only much more than in-state college tuition, it is more like the annual cost of tuition at a private university.

The waste has reached a point where in California, for instance, federal judges have ordered the release of one-third of the state's 150,000 inmates because the health services available in the grossly overcrowded system violate the constitution. At the beginning of the Reagan administration, one in 77 Americans was in prison, on parole, or on probation. Today the ratio is one in 31, led by one in 13 adults in Georgia and one in 18 in Idaho. Massachusetts ranks fifth at one in 24.

Huge percentages of the 1.5 million people in prison, particularly African-Americans (one in 11 African-Americans are under some form of correction), are there for nonviolent drug offenses that call out not for barbed wire, but for treatment, education, and job opportunities. The Pew study found that nine of every 10 corrections dollars went to prisons, not for rehabilitation programs.

So it is no surprise that another report released this week by Human Rights Watch found that in every year since 1980, African-Americans have been arrested on drug charges between 2.8 to 5.5 times more, relative to the population, than white Americans. This is despite the long, conveniently ignored fact that Americans consume illegal drugs at roughly their racial percentage of the national population. Drug possession made up 64 percent of drug arrests, with annual percentages reaching 80 percent in the just-concluded Bush years.

Part of the reason this spun out of control is nearly three decades of blind eyes and cowardice in the White House. What the conservative administrations of Reagan and the first President Bush started, President Clinton continued by capitulating to the conservative chorus in Congress in the 1990s to lock in laws that punished crack cocaine possession far more harshly than possession of powdered cocaine. There was no hope for change under the second President Bush.

In a meeting with columnists in 2007, Obama said the disparate crack-to-powder laws were a "mistake." He needs to tell Holder to work with Congress to rectify the mistake. The warehousing of those arrested for drug possession has been worse than a misguided zero-sum game with our liberties. For the cost of private college tuition per prisoner, we do more harm than good, removing tens of thousands of people from the path to productivity in their communities.

Ironically, Holder created a mild stir by saying America has been a nation of cowards on race. While the statement was largely needless, given that the nation now has a black president, he suddenly has a huge say in eliminating the most powerful symbol of the cowardice that remains. The issue of American prisoners will tell us how brave Holder and Obama will be.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/03/07/rectifying_a_mistake_in_drug_sentencing/

Posted by lois at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)

Tennessee: State eyes cost-effective alternatives to prison

Commissioner George Little: “We can figure out how to better manage those populations,” he said. “What I think it opens up is a discussion of who we are locking up, how long they are being locked up and do we have the right people in our prisons and jails.”

Tennessee: State eyes cost-effective alternatives to prison
Monday, March 9, 2009
By: Lauren Gregory
Chattanooga Times Free Press

Housing a prisoner costs about $60 a day in Tennessee, so locking someone up for not paying $45 a month in probation fees doesn’t make sense, according to Tennessee’s corrections commissioner.

Allowing nonviolent inmates approved for parole to sit behind bars for days or weeks, racking up costs the state could cut in half if they immediately were placed in halfway houses also is counterproductive, Commissioner George Little said.

“We can figure out how to better manage those populations,” he said. “What I think it opens up is a discussion of who we are locking up, how long they are being locked up and do we have the right people in our prisons and jails.”

With the state’s budget crisis forcing $42 million in cuts to a corrections program that will receive almost no federal stimulus money, Mr. Little is championing an increased emphasis on community corrections programs such as halfway houses.

He asked Gov. Phil Bredesen to include money for the facilities, which help paroled offenders transition into society by providing housing, structure and assistance finding employment, in his 2010 budget.

The governor’s budget should be complete later this month, spokeswoman Lydia Lenker said.

State Rep. G.A. Hardaway, D-Memphis, introduced legislation that would establish a pilot halfway house program for the state with that money.

The pilot program would increase state expenditures by $410,900, according to documents, and for that reason faces an uphill battle, said Rep. Gerald McCormick, R-Chattanooga.

PAY NOW OR PAY LATER

Rep. McCormick is a member of the House’s State and Local Government Committee, which has the bill. He said he doesn’t anticipate the legislation surviving if Gov. Bredesen doesn’t approve money for it.

“If it’s not already included in the governor’s budget, there is a very, very, very little chance it will pass,” Rep. McCormick said. “I’d have to vote against it. It’s not that it’s not a good cause, but there are a lot of good causes out there and, in this environment, it would be unfair to put that one at the top.”

Committee Chairman Rep. Curry Todd, R-Collierville, agreed.

“I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” he said.

Rep. Hardaway did not return calls or an e-mail seeking comment.

State Sen. Andy Berke, D-Chattanooga, said he will be disappointed if his colleagues focus on a program’s upfront costs without considering ultimate savings.

“In state government, we need to continue to look for ways to save money in the long run, and that means ensuring that money we spend today will save us money in the future,” Sen. Berke said.

Supporters of halfway houses say there is good reason to view community corrections that way. A small initial investment in halfway houses will save billions of dollars in prison construction costs down the road, said Tim Dempsey, chief executive officer of Chattanooga Endeavors, a nonprofit organization that helps ex-prisoners find employment.

“On the one hand, you say, ‘How can we afford to take on anything new?’” Mr. Dempsey said. “But on the other hand, this is an extremely cost-effective way to keep people out of prison and keep them from returning in the long term.”

The Washington, D.C.-based Pew Center on the States released a report last week that concluded Tennessee, along with all other states, would benefit from that type of thinking.

“New community supervision strategies and technologies need to be strengthened and expanded, not scaled back,” said Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, which generated the report.

“Cutting them may appear to save a few dollars, but it doesn’t,” Mr. Gelb said. “It will fuel the cycle of more crime, more victims, more arrests, more prosecutions and still more imprisonment.”

potential impact

Calvin Figgures, director of prison ministry at Shady Grove Baptist Church in Chickamauga, Ga., has recognized a local need and doesn’t want to wait for state funding. He hopes to be able to secure a grant through the federal Second Chance Act, which former President George W. Bush signed into law last year to provide support services to ex-prisoners, to open several halfway houses in Chattanooga.

An ex-offender himself, Mr. Figgures spent eight years in prison on drug charges. He says a halfway house was behind his successful turnaround.

“It’s like a family,” he said. “It’s loving, and it gives a person a sense of self. And not only that, it helps give you a solid foundation. In prison, they tell you what to do, when to shower, when to go to bed. In a halfway house setting, they give you a sense of responsibility again but with monitoring.”

Mr. Little said that ultimately makes the entire community safer.

“The argument (for creating more halfway houses) is fiscal, but the long-term benefit is going to be quality of life and public safety,” he said.
BY THE NUMBERS

* $645 million: Department of Correction budget last year

* $60: Cost to house an inmate for a day

* $25: Cost to keep someone in a halfway house for a day

* 40: Percentage of all inmates incarcerated for technical violations of probation or parole

* $100,000: Prison building cost, per bed

* $50 million: Annual operating cost for recently expanded Morgan County Correctional Complex

* $1 billion: Cost to operate the 2,400-bed Morgan County facility over the next 20 years

HALFWAY HOUSES

* Nashville — 55

* Knoxville — 10

* Memphis — 9

* Chattanooga — 1

Source: Tennessee Board of Probation and Parole

Source: Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner George Little
http://timesfreepress.com/news/2009/mar/09/tennessee-state-eyes-cost-effective-alternatives-p/?local

Posted by lois at 09:38 AM | Comments (0)

UK: We should try rehabilitating 'lifers' Given the questionable conditions life-sentence prisoners are kept in, we should be grateful more don't re-offend once released

We should try rehabilitating 'lifers'
Given the questionable conditions life-sentence prisoners are kept in, we should be grateful more don't re-offend once released
By Erwin James
Sunday 8 March 2009 16.00 GMT
The Guardian

Of the thousand or so life-sentence prisoners released over the last six years 65 went on to seriously re-offend, the government revealed this week. Three of those released committed murder, the others were found guilty of all manner of assaults including attempted murder, rape, kidnapping and wounding. The revelations have understandably caused outrage and not surprisingly led to new calls for "life to mean life". Were that to be the case however we would need to rapidly expand the prison-building programme already planned by the government for the next few years. And vastly increase the budget.

Current plans to build three giant so-called Titan prisons designed to hold at least 2,500 prisoners each is already going to set the taxpayer back at least £1.2bn. The first Titan is expected to be open in three years' time, the other two by 2014. The total cost for the provision of up to 20,000 new prison places planned over the next 10 years, including the cost of the Titans, is estimated at £2.7bn. The cost of running the extra places is estimated at an extra £800m per year (on top of the £2bn a year we spend at present). Without doubt keeping all "lifers" in prison until they die would amount to a serious extra increase in spending on prisons. So much so that it is unlikely to be an option the government will be persuaded to choose in the foreseeable future. Especially considering that there is already a huge budget deficit in the cost of running our prisons currently.

During the past year the Treasury demanded cuts in prison spending totalling £60m. To meet the targets prisons all over the country curtailed their regimes so that prisoners are now effectively "banged up" from Friday lunchtime until Monday morning, with cell doors opened only for meals and brief exercise periods. Bearing in mind that the average time that prisoners spent on daily bang-up before the cuts were introduced was already 13-and-a-half hours.

Bang up of 17 hours a day was not unusual in some prisons and many local prisons still operate regimes of 23-hour bang-up. All in all it means that resources and facilities, which enable people in prison to develop skills and abilities that will help them to live productive, constructive crime-free lives after release are severely limited. As are "offending behaviour" programmes.

Overcrowding is such that courses designed to challenge the criminal thoughts and behaviour of prisoners are massively oversubscribed. The reality is that the majority of time in prison is passed meaninglessly, going through the motions, trying to tick as many boxes as possible, just waiting for a parole hearing or a release date.

In that mix we have more than 11,000 prisoners serving indeterminate sentences, around seven out of 10 serving mandatory life for murder – and all subject to the same regime deficiencies as any other prisoner. Logic dictates that the more de-personalised and dysfunctional the system has become through overcrowding and under-resourcing, the less likely it is that those being held in it will respond positively, whatever category of offence committed.

Life-sentence prisoners are subject to closer scrutiny by prison professionals than other prisoners for sure. And closer supervision once they are transferred to less secure prisons in preparation for release once they have served their "tariff" (the term that must be spent in custody to meet the requirements of "retribution and deterrence"). Depending on the nature of the original offence and the risk posed they are also subject to varying levels of supervision once released.

But given that we have more people in our prisons serving life sentences than Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Turkey combined, and that we keep them in highly questionable conditions, often for decades, I think we should be grateful that many more than the 65 referred to by the government have not already committed further serious offences. As the justice minister David Hanson said: "The decision as to whether to release a mandatory life-sentenced prisoner is an extremely difficult one. The risk to the public can be reduced but never eliminated."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/06/prisons-re-offenders-titan
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

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

MA: Towns Weigh Recriminalizing Marijuana Use

Towns weigh ban on pot use
By Scott Stafford, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Updated: 03/07/2009

Even though 65 percent of voters in Massachusetts agreed with the ballot initiative known as Question 2 — the decriminalization of less than an ounce of marijuana — last November, proponents are saying that members of the law enforcement community are trying to recriminalize it.

Question 2 reduced the violation's punishment to a citation, a $100 fine, and confiscation of the marijuana. It allowed towns to separately address public use of the substance. That is the clause, Question 2 proponents say, that some towns are using to recriminalize the possession and use of small amounts of the drug.

According to Emily LaGrassa, a spokes woman for the Massachusetts attorney general's office, the municipal law unit provided sample bylaw language at the request of the Executive Office of Public Safety.

The sample language gives three enforcement options for public consumption of marijuana — by criminal indictment, criminal complaint or noncriminal disposition.

'Why bother to do this at all'

ACLU officials argue that it is unnecessary to criminalize the offense, because under Question 2, public users of marijuana can still be fined $100 and lose their stash.

"The real question is why bother to do this at all when there is not a problem of people lighting up in public when they're still subject to a fine," said Sarah Wunsch, staff attorney for the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts in Boston. "In places where states have decriminalized, this has not been a problem — they have not seen an increase in public use."

"We're not sure that any of this is necessary, unless there is there is some evidence that it has become a problem in a particular community with public use," said Bruce Mirken, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project based in Washington, D.C. "But we haven't heard any such reports."

He noted that the voters were clear in saying that "penny ante use" of marijuana should not be a criminal offense.

'Tactic clearly unacceptable'

"Our preference would be for folks to just relax and let the local enforcement play out as the law is written and see if any local adjustment is needed," he said. "If a criminal complaint is going to be used as an aggressive way of cracking down on people, that sort of tactic would be clearly unacceptable. Something like this could be used in a manner that's totally contradictory to what the voters wanted."

In Adams, town attorney Edmund St. John III pointed out the conundrum, and members of the board of selectmen reworded their bylaw on public consumption of marijuana to remove the criminality of the violation.

North Adams Police Commissioner E. John Morocco said he recommended that city council adopt the bylaw including the criminal charges.

"I do not have a problem with making that a criminal offense," he said. "I completely agree with it and I completely disagree with Question 2. Why should it be a criminal offense to drink a beer in public, and not a criminal offense to smoke a joint in public? It doesn't make sense."

The Pittsfield Police Department also forwarded the proposed bylaw to city council.

"My interest is that if it is (being smoked) at a bus stop or a city park where other people might be annoyed or alarmed, the officer would have discretion" to pursue criminal charges against the violator, said Capt. John Mullin, spokesman for the Pittsfield Police Department.

He added that public use of marijuana has not been a problem in Pittsfield.

Since the passage of Question 2, four citations have been issued in Pittsfield for the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, Mullin said.

Mayor James M. Ruberto favors the bylaw proposed, saying that like the public consumption of alcohol, it should be treated as a criminal offense.

Question 2 proponents urged caution in considering these bylaws.

"If there is a pattern of local police sidestepping (Question 2) and using these local bylaws as a way of doing that, that's a real problem and they could find themselves with some very unhappy constituents," Mirken said.

"The voters wanted it decriminalized," Wunsch said. "And this does seem to be an effort by those who opposed Question 2 to continue to treat possession of small amounts of marijuana as a big problem when it isn't. What's the need? Why rush into it? These towns have much more important things to deal with right now."
http://www.berkshireeagle.com/ci_11859375

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

March 08, 2009

PA: Rendell's prison plan could lock him up in costly quandary Increased budget likely to cause inmate population to swell

Rendell's prison plan could lock him up in costly quandary
Increased budget likely to cause inmate population to swell
Sunday, March 08, 2009
By Daniel Malloy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Excellent chart:
http://www.post-gazette.com/downloads/20090308Correction_population.pdf

The nation's economic crisis has put a d