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January 30, 2010

"Compassionate Release" has little effect on early release of sick and dying priosoners

January 30, 2010
Law Has Little Effect on Early Release for Inmates
By CARA BUCKLEY
NY Times
COXSACKIE, N.Y. — With his swollen legs and a throaty rasp that whistles like a kettle through his broken teeth, Eddie Jones is an unlikely man to make history.

He is 89 and dying, a former loan shark who, at 69, shot another man dead on a Harlem street in what he claimed was self-defense. Now he is serving a sentence of 25 years to life in a prison hospital bed in this upstate town, riddled with heart disease and probably cancer, though his doctors are not certain about the cancer because Mr. Jones has refused most every medical test.

Mr. Jones’s original parole date was in 2015, but he stands to go free in the coming weeks under a new state law that makes chronically as well as terminally ill inmates eligible for early release. Inmates must be deemed physically or cognitively unable to present a threat to society.

The law, passed with the state budget last April, expanded the eligibility list to add those convicted of violent crimes including second-degree murder (like Mr. Jones), first-degree manslaughter and sex offenses, so long as the ailing inmates have served half their time.

But despite fanfare within the corrections field about the humanitarian and financial benefits of compassionate release — New York is one of a dozen states that have expanded, enacted or streamlined programs over the past two years — the policy shift has had minimal effect. Experts attribute this to the fear that freed inmates, no matter how sick, might commit further crimes, as well as to the difficulty of placing dying criminals in nursing homes.

“The problem is, when we start trying to put people out, there are others in the community who are sure we’re trying to make more crime in the community,” said Dr. Lester Wright, chief medical officer for the New York State Department of Correctional Services. “We’re also competing for beds. Some people think my patients aren’t as valuable as other people in society.”

The embrace of compassionate release comes as the nation’s prison population is at a historic high — 1.6 million people as of 2008, according to the Justice Department — compounded by a surge in aging and sick inmates serving longer sentences. In 2008, there were 74,100 inmates age 55 and older, a 79 percent increase from 1999. New York estimates the cost of caring for a gravely ill inmate at $150,809 a year.

Once released, they are usually cared for by family members or placed in nursing homes or hospices, their expenses largely covered by Medicare or Medicaid.

But while the new state guidelines led to a rise in applications for medical parole — 202 inmates last year, compared with 66 in 2008 — they have hardly led to more releases. Mr. Jones would, in fact, be the first freed under the new guidelines (the seven inmates released last year were eligible under the old rules).

The National Conference of State Legislatures said 39 states had compassionate release programs, but many of them also have minimal impact.

In California, where federal judges ordered the state to cut the prison population by 40,000, three people were granted compassionate release last year. In Alabama, where prisons are at double their capacity, four sick inmates were let out on compassionate release in the 2009 fiscal year; 35 other prisoners in Alabama died while their applications were being reviewed.

Since New York adopted medical parole in 1992, at the height of the AIDS crisis, 364 people have been released.

“Medical parole was designed to consider the humanitarian needs of inmates as well as the safety of the community,” said Brian Fischer, commissioner of the State Department of Correctional Services. “Anybody can tell us they want medical parole, but the numbers who qualify are going to be a lot smaller than the ones who want it.”

Advocates for prisoners argue that fear of recidivism is unreasonable, especially for convicts close to death. Corrections officials said during the 18 years the program in New York has been in effect, three medically paroled inmates have ended up back in prison, none for violent crimes.

“Politicians and high-level officials and bureaucrats don’t want to be accused of being soft on crime, even if the prisoners are terminally ill and there’s no possible risk to public safety,” said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a prison advocacy group.

Indeed, the release last summer in Scotland of a sick Libyan man convicted in the bombing of an airplane over Lockerbie created an international furor. Last fall, anger over New York’s new law erupted when Gregory Felder, who was convicted of murdering a Radio Shack employee on Long Island in 2004 and is now gravely ill, was considered for parole. (He was turned down; and a legislative loophole that had made him eligible despite having not yet served half his sentence was subsequently closed.)

Other cases have unfolded far from the public glare. Cinderella Marrett, 74, who was caught at Kennedy International Airport in 2007 smuggling cocaine in her girdle — to offset medical expenses, her daughter said — was released in May 2009. Stricken with cancer, she is living in a nursing home in the Bronx.

Since 2005, at least 16 New York inmates have died while waiting for the parole board to decide their fate.

Timothy McGowan, a once-burly high school dropout from Deer Park, N.Y., spent half of his 50 years behind bars for 11 felony convictions, including robbery and second-degree manslaughter. By the time he was thrown back in prison for a parole violation in April 2009, cancer was consuming his lungs, whittling away his body and creeping up his brain stem.

In July, when Mr. McGowan could barely walk, his prison doctors applied on his behalf for compassionate release; his final wish was to have one last cup of tea with his mother in their Long Island home. Instead, he died at the Fishkill Correctional Facility on Nov. 7, two days before the parole board was to hear his case.

Among the prisoners in New York newly eligible but denied release last year was Sergio Black, 38, a former Marine who said he had fought in the first gulf war.

Mr. Black was convicted in 2005 of raping his former companion, which he denied. In 2006, his spinal cord was injured in a prison basketball game. Now a quadriplegic in the Walsh Regional Medical Unit of the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, N.Y., Mr. Black is a “poster boy for medical parole,” according to his lawyer, Stephen Dratch, because it would be difficult for him to commit another physical crime. But the parole board rejected his application, saying Mr. Brown “exhibited little or no insight or remorse for the victim.”

Mr. Jones, the near-nonagenarian and former loan shark known by his hospice aides as the Harlem Knight, was supposed to go before the parole board in December, but the hearing was pushed back twice because the court had not yet sent a transcript from his sentencing. His next scheduled parole date is next month, and he remains bedridden in the hospice at the Coxsackie state prison.

A long-lost niece, Marcy Jones, who lives in Washington, has poured her heart into pushing corrections officials and the governor’s office to grant the parole. She is optimistic enough that she has bought her uncle a new wardrobe and has set up a battery of medical appointments for him.

“Once I get him out, I’m going to advocate for others,” Ms. Jones said. “There are other Uncle Eddies out there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/nyregion/30parole.html

Posted by lois at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)

Pregnant and Shackled: Hard Labor for Arizona's Immigrants

Pregnant and Shackled: Hard Labor for Arizona's Immigrants
By Valeria Fernandez, New America Media
Posted on January 28, 2010, Printed on January 30, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145428/

PHOENIX, Ariz.-- Miriam Mendiola-Martinez, an undocumented immigrant charged with using someone else’s identity to work, gave birth to a boy on Dec. 21 at Maricopa Medical Center. After her C-section, she was shackled for two days to her hospital bed. She was not allowed to nurse her baby. And when guards walked her out of the hospital in shackles, she had no idea what officials had done with her child.

Like Mendiola-Martinez, pregnant inmates in Maricopa County Jail are routinely denied bond because they are undocumented immigrants. That means they can’t get out of jail for their childbirth, even if they are awaiting trial for a minor offense.

In some cases, undocumented immigrants are shackled as they are transported to the jail-contracted hospital, and shackled during and after childbirth.

Hospital authorities don't control this practice and medical personnel involved in these cases declined to be interviewed.

All hospitalized inmates are treated in the same manner as Mendiola-Martinez, according to Lt. Brain Lee, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. He said she had a “soft restraint” attached on one leg to her bed to prevent escape.

That soft restraint was a 12-foot-long chain.

“I could barely walk, I don’t think I could have escaped or even dared to run. I don’t think there was a need for them to do that,” said 34-year-old Mendiola-Martinez.

She says she was shackled during the two last months of her pregnancy too. Every time she had a pre-natal appointment, she waited in a small un-ventilated room with 20 other women. She had to sit in the floor. The chains were heavy and hurt her waist. Mendiola-Martinez often wept. She feared that her sadness could hurt the baby.

Unequal Justice

Mendiola’s story would have been different if she hadn’t been undocumented. She would have been released on bond before her baby was born because she had committed a non-violent crime, according to David Black, a criminal defense attorney who took her case pro-bono.

But in November 2006, Arizona voters approved a law that denies undocumented immigrants the right to post bail. Proposition 100 was authored by Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, as a way to keep undocumented immigrants who had been charged with “serious crimes” from being released.

The Arizona legislature included among those accusations minor offenses like possession of false documents, which undocumented immigrants frequently use to obtain employment.

The law, which is unique in the nation, is being challenged in the U.S. District Court of Arizona by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on the basis that it violates the Constitution by unjustly denying a select group of people a fair hearing. The lawsuit, however, doesn’t include the cases of pregnant women.

“I think Prop. 100 puts migrant women at a disadvantage and treats them unfairly,” said Bob McWhirter, a senior attorney with the Maricopa Legal Defender’s office.

About 1,500 pregnant women come through the Maricopa County Estrella jail every year. In 2009, 35 of them gave birth while in custody, according to Maricopa Medical Center records. More than 70 percent of the women detained in Maricopa County jails are accused of non-violent crimes and haven’t been sentenced yet. About 11 percent of them are undocumented immigrants. Health and county authorities say they don’t keep records on the immigration status or ethnicity of the women who give birth.

In October 2008, a federal judge ruled that conditions at the Maricopa County Jail, overseen by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, were unconstitutional and jeopardized the health and safety of the prisoners. The judge ordered jail officials to ensure that detainees received proper medical care, medicine and food that complied with federal standards. That same year, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care said the county’s jails did not comply with federal standards due to their failure to submit reports on jail conditions.

More Shackling Cases

Although Mendiola-Martinez’s story is not unique, it is difficult to track how many other women have shared her experience because most of them have been deported. Yet other detainees attest to the poor treatment of pregnant immigrants inside the county jails.

In October 2008, Alma Chacón, an undocumented immigrant arrested during a traffic stop for having outstanding unpaid tickets, delivered her baby in a “forensic restraint,” according to hospital records. Chacón said detention officers shackled her hands and legs during childbirth. She couldn’t nurse or hold her baby until she was released from immigration custody almost 70 days later.

Chacón’s case caught the attention of the federal Department of Justice, which is currently conducting a civil rights investigation into Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office.

The sheriff’s office says it doesn’t have a policy regarding the shackling of pregnant women. Spokesperson Aaron Douglas said they had no intention of changing the practice. But when questioned directly by New America Media about these cases, Arpaio said that everything was done “legally.” Yet, he added, he may consider reviewing the practice.

Still, critics point out that pregnant inmates who have been sentenced to state prison are treated better than inmates who are awaiting their sentencing in Maricopa County jails.

The Arizona Department of Corrections, which oversees state prison inmates, initiated a policy in 2003 that states: “A pregnant women will not be restrained in any manner while in labor, while giving birth, or during the postpartum recovery period.”

In 2008, the Federal Bureau of Prisons barred the shackling of pregnant inmates in federal prisons except when it was necessary for security concerns. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn’t have a specific policy prohibiting their use. But advocates at the Rebecca Project, which is part of a national anti-shackling coalition, said they are in conversation with ICE to put regulations in place.

The practice of shackling women during childbirth is frowned upon by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. They say that shackling women during labor, delivery and post-partum is dangerous to a woman’s health and that of her unborn child.

Maricopa County is not unique in the practice of shackling pregnant women. Only six states in the nation have laws regulating the use of restraints on pregnant inmates: California, Illinois, New Mexico, New York, Texas and Vermont.

Advocates are hoping to include Arizona on the list.

Voces por la Vida, a pro-life group in Phoenix directed by Rosie Villegas-Smith, is leading the charge for anti-shackling legislation.

“Undocumented women are the most vulnerable here because they don’t have a right to be released on bond,” she said.

Villegas-Smith says Arizona lawmakers are endangering the health of women and children in the name of fighting illegal immigration.

“I think a distinction has to be made and some humanity brought into Maricopa County laws, to allow [undocumented] nursing mothers and pregnant women to have their children outside of detention,” said Delia Salvatierra, Mendiola’s immigration attorney.

When contacted by New America Media, Rep. Martha Garcia, D-Phoenix, said she would try to introduce a bill to ban the use of shackling.

“My main concern is that women are traumatized by being shackled and what this does to their babies, too,” said the legislator, who is involved in the public health outreach program Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies.

“It makes me really angry that this is happening in the state of Arizona, because I believe the treatment of immigrants is worse here than anywhere else,” Garcia added.

The issue will be hard to push in the Arizona state legislature. Over the last five years, conservative Republicans have supported a series of anti-immigrant laws, aimed at creating a hostile environment in the state to push migrants out.

The most recently enacted law, House Bill 2008, requires state employees to report immigrants who apply for public benefits to ICE. The law, sponsored by Republican leadership as part of a special session budget package, is causing pregnant immigrant women to be afraid of requesting free pre-natal services and health care.

Humanitarian Release

On Dec. 24, the date of her sentencing, Mendiola-Martinez was brought into the courtroom in a wheel chair, her hands and legs shackled.

“It was never my intention to hurt the victim. Please forgive me and let me go back to my children,” she told the judge. She was sentenced to time served and two years of probation. ICE didn’t take her into custody after her release from jail for “humanitarian reasons,” according to Vincent Piccard, a spokesperson for that agency.

Mendiola-Martinez was able to hold her baby again on Christmas Day. She takes joy in being with him and smiles when she watches him sleep. Secretly, though, she searches his face for any sign that her depression in jail might have had a negative effect on him while he was in her womb. Her children are U.S. citizens, but her future in the country where she’s lived for the past 15 years is still uncertain.

“I wish they would change things,” she said of current immigration laws. “Because when they do this to us, they do it to our children.”

© 2010 New America Media All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145428/

Posted by lois at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2010

NH: Prison population could shrink by 20% in 5 years if state paid for mental health treatment, housing and jobs to cut recidivism limit prison time for people with nonviolent convictions

Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Study on prison populations draws praise
By KEVIN LANDRIGAN

CONCORD – The State Prison population would shrink nearly 20 percent in five years if the state paid for mental health treatment and more intense supervision of high-risk offenders while letting nonviolent offenders get out of jail earlier and face shorter supervision than they do now, a state report finds.

Judges, prosecutors, key state legislators and correction professionals overseeing a three-year study on prison recidivism Monday praised the findings of the Council of State Governments Justice Center’s report.

“These options would change how we think about the size of prison we need to build for offenders in this state,” said Senate President Sylvia Larsen, D-Concord.

The group will meet early next month to review the estimated costs and savings from these reforms and decide whether to urge the Legislature to adopt them.

To save money on prison spending long term requires spending it now, the authors concede.

For example, it would cost $2.4 million a year to give mental health treatment and rapid drug testing for all high- and medium-risk offenders in the community who need it, the report said.

Serving the high-risk offenders alone would cost $1.3 million, the study said.

Dr. Fred Osher is CSG director of health policy and said community treatment has a more lasting effect on keeping offenders from coming back.

“That’s where the action is,” Osher said.

The report urges that lawmakers spend 50 percent of the millions they would save on additional treatment in the community for offenders with alcohol and drug abuse problems, mental health illnesses or both at the same time.

National studies find that while counseling in prison cuts recidivism by 6 percent, combining that with treatment after release curbs it by 12 percent.

With the state already facing a significant revenue shortfall, some members of the panel asked the authors to list changes that won’t cost any money.

“There is a major cash flow problem we are facing, not just in this biennium but in the next biennium as well,” said state Rep. Neal Kurk, R-Weare.

Attorney General Michael Delaney urged quick action on one item after the report found that after serving maximum prison terms, more than 220 inmates each year were released into the community with no supervision.

Every offender should get at least nine months in the community with a tiered length of supervision depending on the severity of their crime, the study urged.

“These are law enforcement improvements that are long overdue and will make a big difference on the streets in the cities and towns of New Hampshire,” Delaney said.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Broderick said community supports for inmates beyond mental health treatment need to be in place such as housing and available jobs.

“If somebody told me tomorrow I would have no home and no job, how would I do?” Broderick asked rhetorically.

Since 2000, the prison population has grown by 31 percent, but only 3 percent of that growth has come from new offenders committing crimes, said Marshall Clement, project director.

Within three years, more than half (51 percent) of those sent to State Prison return and that rate is above the national average.

Without change, the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies estimates that by 2015, the State Prison population will grow 6 percent to 3,029.

The Department of Corrections says inmate ranks will grow 4 percent over the same time, in part because it set up with legislative support last year a Community Corrections Division to focus more intense supervision on high-risk offenders.

If these recommendations are adopted, the authors claim inmate population will ‘’gradually flatten out’’ and drop 18 percent to 2,340 inmates in 2015.

The report states lawmakers should set a limit on how long nonviolent offenders must remain in prison. The proposed cap would be no more than 120 percent of their minimum mandatory sentence, it said.

Superior Court Chief Justice Robert Lynn said he would prefer Corrections Commissioner William Wrenn be able to override and ignore any such limit in dealing with difficult, nonviolent offenders.

“I tend to think that might go too far and wonder if it would make more sense to enact legislation that gives the commissioner more flexibility on that,” Lynn told the group.

Report at a glance

The state prison population grew 31 percent from 2000-09 but only 3 percent represented new criminal offenders. The following are the six recommendations that the Council of State Governments Justice Center has urged New Hampshire policy makers take to reduce the rate of recidivism.

Set Revised Maximum Sentence for Non-Violent Offenders: Require eligible offenders serve 100 percent of minimum sentence but get released upon serving 120 percent of that minimum. This would apply to those who commit nonviolent, property or drug offenses.

Require post-release supervision for all: Require anyone get at least nine months supervision in the community before reaching the end of their maximum sentence and being released. At present, 16 percent (224 inmates) of all those released from State Prison last year had served their maximum punishment and went into the community with no supervision.

Upon Release Focus on High-Risk Offenders: Dropping the period to actively supervise parolees to no more than nine months for low- and medium-risk offenders, 12 months for felony probation for 18 months for prison parolees.

Use Swift Sanctions for Probation Violators: Allow a judge to place a violator for up to five days in jail unless probationer requests a hearing to end long waits in jail for someone before that violation is taken up in court.

Intermediate Sanction: Use halfway houses or a new secure housing unit for those whose parole is revoked to prevent prison from being jam-packed with parole and probation violators.

Rapid Treatment and Drug Testing for High Risk: Spend up to $2.4 million a year to give rapid drug testing and mental/substance abuse treatment to high-risk and high-need offenders on probation or parole.

Source: Justice Reinvestment in New Hampshire Report, Council of State Governments Justice Center
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/560653-196/study-on-prison-populations-draws-praise.html

Posted by lois at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)

NY: City Signals Intent to Put Fewer Teenagers in Jail and Nick Kristof column on "Kids in Crisis (Behind Bars)"

City Signals Intent to Put Fewer Teenagers in Jail
Richard Perry/The New York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: January 20, 2010

The Bloomberg administration plans to merge the city’s Department of Juvenile Justice into its child welfare agency, signaling a more therapeutic approach toward delinquency that will send fewer of the city’s troubled teenagers to jail.

A juvenile center in the Bronx. The system currently uses 28 complexes throughout the state to house about 900 young people.

The integration of the agencies is effective immediately, and was announced by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in his State of the City speech Wednesday afternoon.

City officials said that under the new arrangement, youths who commit crimes but are not considered dangerous will have easier access to an expanding assortment of in-home programs managed by the Administration for Children’s Services, the child welfare agency. This will allow them to stay in their neighborhoods with their families while following a strict set of rules requiring them to stay out of trouble, keep curfews and meet educational goals, officials said.

Seeking to dispel the notion that the city was turning soft on crime, Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor of health and human services, said “the merger will not compromise public safety and will help to keep streets safe.” Youth offenders who are considered a high risk to the public will continue to be sent to detention centers, officials said.

Juvenile offenders, usually between the ages of 11 and 16, are typically in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice before trial and sentencing. The department, which handles about 5,500 offenders a year, places them in group homes or in one of three detention centers. A judge’s typical options at sentencing are to release offenders on probation or send them to one of the state’s juvenile prisons or residential facilities run by nonprofit organizations.

Under the new plan, city officials will more frequently recommend to a judge that a young person be allowed to return home, provided the family submits to intensive visits by therapists and social workers supervised by the Administration for Children’s Services.

That type of community-based therapy, meant to set young offenders on more productive paths in life, is a growing alternative to sending youths to notorious state-run juvenile prisons, which a state task force recently described as broken, ineffective and dangerous. The prisons are also expensive, costing the state and city $215,000 per youth annually. The system uses 28 complexes throughout the state to house about 900 young people, many of whom have committed only misdemeanor crimes like theft.

“Our No. 1 recommendation was that the state system of juvenile prisons be downsized,” said Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who led the task force, “and the key element of success in meeting that goal is to provide effective community-based strategies for young people so judges don’t have to send them off to juvenile detention.”

Ms. Gibbs said the administration had worked for years to reduce the number of youths who are sent to juvenile prisons, while increasing the capacity for community-based programs with family intervention and therapy. Since 2002, the city has reduced placements in state juvenile facilities by 56 percent.

In the last several years, Ms. Gibbs said, the administration has developed a more finely tuned process to determine the level of risk juvenile offenders pose to the public, and whether youths should return home or be sent to detention centers.

“We’re detaining fewer kids over all, and now we’re detaining the right kids, the high-risk kids,” Ms. Gibbs said.

Michael Jacobson, the director of the Vera Institute for Justice, said he thought the combination of agencies was a natural move, given the numbers of children who commit crimes and have also previously had contact with child-welfare agencies. Studies have shown that nearly 20 percent of prisoners under age 30 have spent time in foster care, according to data from the Center for Family Representation, an organization that provides legal help to parents involved in Family Court.

“The overlap between the two populations is huge,” Mr. Jacobson said. “It just makes sense to have the city’s children’s agency deal with children across the spectrum.”

John B. Mattingly, the child welfare commissioner since 2004, will add the title of commissioner of the Department of Juvenile Justice to his duties and oversee both agencies. Neil Hernandez, the commissioner of the Department of Juvenile Justice, has resigned, Ms. Gibbs said.

The focus on community-based treatment for juvenile offenders is an extension of the belief that children are better off with their families than in isolation from them. Ms. Gibbs, a former deputy commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services, said there had been a dearth of therapeutic programs that keep youth in the home, where counselors and social workers can address the problems of the entire family and help parents provide structure and guidance for their children. Those programs will be expanded and new ones developed under the integrated agencies, she said.

“My experience at A.C.S. taught me very clearly that if child protective workers have community-based services at their disposal, to bring services and support into the home, and they feel that the children will be safe, they will use those services,” Ms. Gibbs said.

Edwina G. Richardson-Mendelson, an administrative judge of the New York City Family Courts, said she welcomed more options for Family Court judges, who must decide either to return offenders to their families or send them to detention centers.

“The judges of the Family Court are really concerned about the lack of community-based alternatives for youth offenders,” she said. “The bottom line is that judges would, of course, prefer to have more options.”

Mr. Travis, of John Jay, said that many of the young people who were sent to juvenile prisons had committed only minor offenses and should not have been in prisons in the first place.

“It may sound counterintuitive, but it is a public safety interest to keep young people closer to home in programs that help them become productive citizens,” he said.

In 2007, the Administration for Children’s Services and nonprofit providers began the Juvenile Justice Initiative, a handful of programs that send juvenile offenders back to their families and provide intensive therapy. Officials at the agency said the programs reduced recidivism rates for chronic juvenile delinquents by at least 30 percent.

At juvenile prisons, the recidivism rates are high: three-quarters of the young people released from detention are arrested again within three years.

“That’s just an outrageous number,” Ms. Gibbs said. “Our goal is to improve the entire system so that we break that cycle, and improve public safety, and improve the lives of these young people who are moving down the wrong path.”

City officials said the increased use of in-home treatment programs would save money. By one city estimate, each Juvenile Justice Initiative treatment costs $17,000, a fraction of the cost of state detention facilities.

The city could also reduce costs by combining the administrative duties of the Administration for Children’s Services and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Ms. Gibbs said it was too early to tell what those savings might be, or whether the merging of the agencies would result in layoffs.

While some advocates and nonprofit providers said they were concerned about how the Administration for Children’s Services, which has recently seen cuts to its budget, will handle the disruption, several said that they were generally enthusiastic about the plan.

“Over all, change that helps see young people and families as a whole is positive,” said Susan Jacobs, the executive director of the Center for Family Representation. “As an advocate, I would applaud a change which recognizes the complexity that children are part of a family.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 21, 2010, on page A31 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/nyregion/21juvenile.html?scp=1&sq=Juvenile%20justice%20in%20New%20York%20City&st=cse

and.....
Op-Ed Columnist- NY Times
Kids in Crisis (Behind Bars)
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 27, 2010

We all have blind spots, and I think one of mine — shared by many other Americans, perhaps including you — has to do with prisons.

Over the years, I’ve written many columns about Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and torture, not to mention the abuses that go on in Chinese and North Korean prisons. But I’ve never written about the horrors that unfold in American prisons — especially juvenile correctional facilities — on a far larger scale than at Guantánamo.

Consider Rodney Hulin Jr., who was a 16-year-old when he was convicted of arson. A first-time offender and a slight figure at 5 feet 2 inches tall and some 125 pounds, he was sent to a men’s prison. There, he was the smallest person around. Within a week, he was raped, according to an account by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group. The prison doctor ordered an H.I.V. test, since up to one-third of the inmates were H.I.V.-positive.

Rodney asked to be placed in protective custody, but he was denied. His father, Rodney Hulin Sr., picks up the story: “For the next several months, my son was repeatedly beaten by the older inmates, forced to perform oral sex, robbed, and beaten again. ... He could no longer stand to live in continual terror.”

Rodney Jr. hanged himself.

Maybe Rodney would have been safer in a juvenile correctional facility, but then again maybe not. A stunning new Justice Department special report, released just this month, underscores how widespread rape is in youth correctional facilities. It found that almost one youth in eight reported being sexually assaulted while behind bars in the last year.

That means that a child in custody is about twice as likely to be raped as an adult behind bars, based on similar surveys of adult prisoners. As The New York Review of Books wrote on its blog, we face a “crisis of juvenile prison rape.”

The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a blue-ribbon panel that issued its final report last year, described how a 14-year-old boy weighing 98 pounds was assaulted after he was made to share a cell with two older teenagers. Both were 6 feet 2 inches, and one weighed 160 pounds and the other 195 pounds.

Surprisingly, the new survey suggests that the biggest predators are not other inmates but prison staff — and female staff members offend as much as the males do. More than 10 percent of boys in juvenile correctional facilities said that they had had sex with staff, most of whom were women.

Among girls, almost 5 percent said that they had engaged in sexual activity with staff, most of whom were men.

Reggie Walton, a federal judge in the District of Columbia who led the prison rape commission, said that the figures may even be an undercount because of the stigma of rape. “I was shocked at the level of abuse,” he said.

One lesson from the surveys is that we should rethink the way male guards are sometimes assigned to female inmates, and female guards to male inmates, without sufficient respect for inmates’ privacy or dignity. That won’t stop same-sex violence or inmate-on-inmate abuses, but it would address one important component of the abuse problem.

By some accounts, the majority of guards at women’s prisons are now men. Investigators at one juvenile correctional facility found that a male guard watched as girls showered, while a woman watched over boys showering.

Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch, also a member of the prison rape commission, described a Virginia prison where men were stripped naked and asked to spread their buttocks in front of a female officer. When a male inmate asked to be searched in front of a man instead, Ms. Fellner said he was Tasered.

In the last few years, a growing number of states have limited the ability of guards to strip-search members of the opposite sex or watch them showering. And a landmark law, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, created Judge Walton’s commission, which has made excellent recommendations to reduce violence and abuse behind bars. The Obama administration should quickly implement those recommendations.

Surveys have found that well-managed prisons and correctional facilities with strong accountability have almost no rape, by guards or inmates. Others have astonishingly high levels. If we want to rehabilitate young offenders and help them get their lives in order, a starting point is to end the criminal abuse of them.

The legacy of Rodney Hulin Jr. should be a concerted drive to end the way inmates are raped with impunity behind bars. The survey results indicating the ubiquity of sexual assault behind bars, often by guards, should be an awakening — and an end to this blind spot that so many of us have shown. We need to be as alert to human rights abuses in our youth correctional facilities as to those at Guantánamo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/opinion/28kristof.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2010

Howard Zinn 1922-2010. A Great and Wonderful Man

I knew Howard through my friendship with Tiyo Attallah Salah-El, sentenced to life in PA. Howard was a distance learning history teacher of Tiyo's more than 30 years ago. When Tiyo and I became friends, I met Howard. Howard and his wife Roz Zinn remained friends of Tiyo's for all these years. When I arranged to have Tiyo's papers archived at DuBois Library at the University of Massachusetts, Howard sent me three huge boxes of letters, family photos of Tiyo, postcards, music, birthday cards he had received from Tiyo over the years. They are now archived at UMass. http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/ead/mums590.pdf. Howard and his brother Jerry were instrumental in publishing Tiyo's autobiography. Just a few weeks ago, Tiyo could not reach Howard at a prearranged time for a phone call, Tiyo called me and asked that I call Howard to arrange another time for a call. This was two days before "The People Speak" was broadcast on the History Channel. We arranged that the following Friday Tiyo would call and Howard would be there waiting for the call and of course he was. This was one of hundreds ways Howard remained connected to Tiyo. Howard's goodness was embedded in him. All of my contacts with him were memorable because of his decency and absolute congruity between what he said and what he did. He was a great and wonderful person.

Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87

January 27, 2010 07:12 PM

By Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard, Boston Globe Staff

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as "A People's History of the United States," inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack.

"He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture," Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, said tonight. "He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect."

Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn's writings "simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation. He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement."

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. "A People’s History of the United States" (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers -- many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out -- but rather the farmers of Shays' Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" (1994), "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."

Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and John Silber, former president of Boston University. Dr. Zinn, a leading critic of Silber, twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers "who poison the well of academe."

Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against "the BU Five" were soon dropped.

In 1997, Dr. Zinn slipped into popular culture when his writing made a cameo appearance in the film "Good Will Hunting." The title character, played by Matt Damon, lauds "A People’s History" and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.

Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, "The People Speak," which ran on the History Channel in 2009, and he narrated a 2004 biographical documentary, "Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train."

"Howard had a genius for the shape of public morality and for articulating the great alternative vision of peace as more than a dream," said James Carroll a columnist for the Globe's opinion pages whose friendship with Dr. Zinn dates to when Carroll was a Catholic chaplain at BU. "But above all, he had a genius for the practical meaning of love. That is what drew legions of the young to him and what made the wide circle of his friends so constantly amazed and grateful."

Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he met Roslyn Shechter.

"She was working as a secretary," Dr. Zinn said in an interview with the Globe nearly two years ago. "We were both working in the same neighborhood, but we didn't know each other. A mutual friend asked me to deliver something to her. She opened the door, I saw her, and that was it."

He joined the Army Air Corps, and they courted through the mail before marrying in October 1944 while he was on his first furlough. She died in 2008.

During World War II, he served as a bombardier, was awarded the Air Medal, and attained the rank of second lieutenant.

After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman. He worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.

Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were novelist Alice Walker, who called him "the best teacher I ever had," and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children's Defense Fund.

During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.

Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.

The focus of his activism became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at many rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, another leading antiwar activist, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.

Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: "Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal" (1967) and "Disobedience and Democracy" (1968). He had previously published "LaGuardia in Congress" (1959), which had won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Prize; "SNCC: The New Abolitionists" (1964); "The Southern Mystique" (1964); and "New Deal Thought" (1966).

He also was the author of "The Politics of History" (1970); "Postwar America" (1973); "Justice in Everyday Life" (1974); and "Declarations of Independence" (1990).

In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement to concentrate on speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: "Emma," about the anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and "Daughter of Venus."

On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did.

"Howard was an old and very close friend," Chomsky said. "He was a person of real courage and integrity, warmth and humor. He was just a remarkable person."

Carroll called Dr. Zinn "simply one of the greatest Americans of our time. He will not be replaced -- or soon forgotten. How we loved him back."

In addition to his daughter, Dr. Zinn leaves a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaughters; and two grandsons.

Funeral plans were not available.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/01/howard_zinn_his.html

Posted by lois at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)

WI: Dungeons & Dragons Prison Ban Upheld

Dungeons & Dragons Prison Ban Upheld
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: January 26, 2010

Prisons can restrict the rights of inmates to nerd out, a federal appeals court has found.

In an opinion issued on Monday , a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected the claims in a lawsuit challenging a ban on the game Dungeons & Dragons by the Waupun Correctional Institution in Wisconsin.

The suit was brought by a prisoner, Kevin T. Singer, who argued that his First Amendment and 14th Amendment rights were violated by the prison’s decision to ban the game and confiscate his books and other materials, including a 96-page handwritten manuscript he had created for the game.

Mr. Singer, “a D&D enthusiast since childhood,” according to the court’s opinion, was sentenced to life in prison in 2002 for bludgeoning and stabbing his sister’s boyfriend to death.

Prison officials said they had banned the game at the recommendation of the prison’s specialist on gangs, who said it could lead to gang behavior and fantasies about escape.

Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,” prison officials said in court. That could make it more difficult to rehabilitate prisoners and could endanger public safety, they said.

The court, which is based in Chicago, acknowledged that there was no evidence of marauding gangs spurred to their acts of destruction by swinging imaginary mauls, but it ruled nonetheless that the prison’s decision was “rationally related” to legitimate goals of prison administration.

“We are pleased with the ruling,” said John Dipko, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, who added that the prison rules “enable us to continue our mission of keeping our state safe.”

News of the decision spread quickly though the network of blogs that discuss such games and to those devoted to the law, where many commentators revealed perhaps more of their own history as gamers than they might have intended. On The Volokh Conspiracy, a legal blog, a particularly rollicking discussion ensued, kicked off with a post by Ilya Somin, an associate professor of law at George Mason University, who asked, “Should prisons ban ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ on the grounds that it might encourage escape attempts?”

In an interview, Professor Somin said the prison’s action was reminiscent of a media frenzy in the 1980s surrounding the supposedly pernicious effects of gaming. “Ideally, you should really have more evidence that there is a genuine harm before you restrict something,” he said.

The comments accompanying Professor Somin’s post ranged from hoots of outrage over the ban to constitutionally nuanced discussion, but they showed that there were many lawyers who at some point owned a pouch with some dice of more than six sides. And none of them seemed to think that the risk to the nation’s prisons could be found in the works of Gary Gygax or other creators of the genre.

As Andrew Oh-Willeke, a lawyer in Denver, wrote, “If more inmates were über-nerdy D&D players, life would be good.”
A version of this article appeared in print on January 27, 2010, on page A16 of the National edition.

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

NY: Judge Bars Youth Prisons From Routine Shackling

Judge Bars Youth Prisons From Routine Shackling

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: January 26, 2010

ALBANY — The agency that runs the state’s juvenile prison system routinely violates the law by shackling youthful offenders when taking them to court even when the youth poses no obvious threat, a state judge ruled on Tuesday.

The case was brought on behalf of a teenager identified as John F., who was kept in shackles — his hands and feet handcuffed, with a belly chain linked to the handcuffs — for about 15 hours one day while being taken to court. He was 14 and had no record of violent crime, said the lawyers who represented him.

The ruling, by Justice Milton A. Tingling Jr. of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, would repeal a policy of the state’s youth correctional system that has been in place since at least 1996. It is the latest controversy for a system that has been widely faulted for doing what critics say is an abysmal job of meeting the needs of juvenile offenders.

The case, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of about 500 youths held in residential centers run by the state’s Office of Children and Family Services, was brought by the Legal Aid Society. Justice Tingling issued his decision as a summary judgment against state officials, who did not contest the facts of the case, meaning that it is unlikely that they would win an appeal.

“The court’s recognition that O.C.F.S. cannot treat children this way is part and parcel of a culture of abusive practices that is not rehabilitative and does not recognize that these are children who are in the care of the state,” said Nancy Rosenbloom, the Legal Aid lawyer leading the case.

A spokesman for the agency said officials could not comment until they had reviewed the decision.

The agency’s current policy requires any child in custody to be shackled while being taken between state juvenile centers or from a center to anywhere else, like a courthouse. While most of the prison units are far upstate, most of the youths are from New York City and must be taken hundreds of miles to Family Court.

The shackling policy even applied to youths being held at what are known as nonsecure facilities. Nearly all of the youths in nonsecure facilities have been placed there for the equivalent of nonviolent misdemeanor offenses, like truancy, graffiti or petty theft, and most are under 16 years old.

“We had evidence of kids not being able to drink their milk on the way to court because of the chains,” Ms. Rosenbloom said.

A judge had placed John F. at the Tryon Residential Center in Johnstown, N.Y., roughly 200 miles north of Manhattan. On Nov. 1, 2007, he was awakened early to travel to court.

According to Justice Tingling’s ruling: “At 4 a.m. that day, Plaintiff was placed in handcuffs, footcuffs and a belly restraint. A metal restraint box was placed over the chain linking his handcuffs to one another, which prevented Plaintiff from separating his hands farther than the width of the metal box. Prior to him being shackled and transported, Plaintiff was not assessed for mood or mental state.”

The shackles were not removed until 6:15 p.m., after he returned to Tryon.

Justice Tingling found that the agency’s policy violated the state’s own law on shackling youths in custody, which states that shackles should be used only as a last resort, for youths who are dangerous and uncontrollable by any other means, and then only for half an hour. And shackles can be used during transport only when the youths pose a physical threat, the judge found.

“It’s not that you can’t ever restrain somebody. But every time it is used, there has to be determination right then that the child is out of control, dangerous, and cannot be controlled any other way,” Ms. Rosenbloom said, adding that the agency “makes no such determination.”
A version of this article appeared in print on January 27, 2010, on page A21 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/nyregion/27juvenile.html

Posted by lois at 08:44 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2010

CA launches plan to cut prison population on reducting the number of parole violators sent back to prison

California launches plan to cut prison population
As cost-saving measures, the number of parole violators returned behind bars will be cut and low-risk offenders will not be regularly supervised by a parole agent
By Patrick McGreevy
January 26, 2010

Reporting from Sacramento
Quantcast

State prison authorities Monday began reducing the number of parole violators sent back behind bars and offering inmates more opportunity to shorten their sentences, as part of a plan to decrease the prison population by 6,500 inmates over the next year.

Low-risk offenders, including those convicted of nonviolent crimes, will not have regular supervision by a parole agent. And they will no longer be returned to prison for technical violations such as alcohol use, missed drug tests or failure to notify the state of an address change.

Parole agents will reduce the number of inmates they supervise to focus on those the state deems to be at highest risk of committing more crimes, such as people who have committed sexual crimes and other violent offenses. Each agent's caseload will fall from 70 parolees to 48.

In addition, prisoners can shave time off their sentences by working on firefighting crews or by obtaining a high school diploma or trade-school certificate or by completing drug or alcohol rehabilitation programs.

Over time, prisons chief Matthew Cate said, the rules will lower the rate at which parolees are returned to state lockups, reduce crime overall and "save, over the course of a full year, a half a billion dollars for California taxpayers."

The state will thus address its prison overcrowding problem while "significantly increasing public safety," said Cate, who heads the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Some law-enforcement officials, state legislators and crime-victim advocates took a different view, predicting a spike in crime in California as more people leave prison earlier with less supervision.

LAPD Lt. Brian Johnson, a director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, said the state "will start to release numerous dangerous felons into our community."

Cate said that in a state prison system with 168,000 inmates, only 15% to 18% of inmates will be eligible for unsupervised parole, and that the effect of the changes will be gradual.

"No one gets out today," he said.

The revisions were approved by the Legislature and signed into law last year by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who defended the changes Monday.

"It is not going to compromise public safety," Schwarzenegger said in a Sacramento speech. "Every time you have inmates go out, they come right back in again -- 70% of them. That costs our state . . . a tremendous amount of money."

The changes are occurring as the state has slashed budgets for education and rehabilitation programs in prisons.

"These people are not rehabilitated, and yet we're going to open the door and let them out?" said Harriet Salerno, president of the group Crime Victims, speaking at a Capitol news conference that was also attended by representatives of Los Angeles police officers and Los Angeles County sheriffs' deputies.

Sheriff Lee Baca said he is "very concerned" about the changes. He has ordered his deputies to meet with low-level offenders released from prison and tell them about community services such as mental health and drug rehabilitation programs, said Sheriff's Lt. Wayne Bilowit.

Assemblyman Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), a former prosecutor running for state attorney general, introduced a bill Monday that would give local law enforcement officials a greater role in blocking the release of inmates they deem to be a risk to the public.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Times staff writer Shane Goldmacher contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

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

January 25, 2010

PA considers using closed mental hospitals for prisoners

State considers plan to transfer prison inmates
Published: January 24, 2010

HARRISBURG - Turning closed or partially-used state mental hospitals into state prisons to hold inmates with mental health issues is an idea being kicked around by House lawmakers.

The House Judiciary Committee is exploring whether it makes sense to transfer an estimated 20 percent of the 51,000 state prison inmates with mental health issues from prisons holding a general population to facilities that were once part of an extensive network of state-run institutions for the mentally ill and mentally retarded.

Committee members are pursuing this idea as an alternative to the state corrections department's plan to transfer 2,000 non-violent state prison inmates to medium-security prisons in Virginia and Michigan for several years.

The department is undertaking the out-of-state transfers to ease overcrowding while three new medium-security prisons are built in Fayette, Centre and Montgomery counties.

There is concern among members that the department's estimate that the plan will cost Pennsylvania $62 per day for each transferred inmate is too low. This would amount to an estimated $135 million for three years.

The corrections budget could top $2 billion for the first time in fiscal 2010-11, said panel chairman Rep. Thomas Caltagirone, D-Reading, at a meeting last week. While lawmakers have not traditionally challenged corrections spending requests, the continuing fiscal problems facing state government will put a spotlight on any agency seeking large increases, he added.

"We will all be looking to save costs," Caltagirone said.

Removing 8,000 to 10,000 inmates with mental health issues from the general population could serve as a safety valve to overcrowded conditions, he said.

The state Department of Public Welfare operates three units for inmates with mental issues at Torrance, Warren and Norristown state hospitals. Inmates go to these facilities by order of sentencing judges. A specially trained staff runs the units.

Pennsylvania has closed and downsized many of its state mental hospitals and mental disability centers during the past three decades and placed many former residents in community-based care and living programs. Reusing some of the aging buildings at these facilities would involve environmental remediation work with asbestos removal and security upgrades.

One of the first state mental hospitals to face closure, Retreat in Hunlock Creek, was converted to a state prison for general population inmates in the 1980s.

The corrections department places inmates based on sentencing orders from trial judges, spokeswoman Susan Bensinger said. Therefore, changes in sentencing policies would address the issue lawmakers have raised.
http://citizensvoice.com/news/state-considers-plan-to-transfer-prison-inmates-1.567502

Posted by lois at 01:14 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2010

NY State: a proposed new law which would lift the tax exemption on commissaries with a portion of sales tax going localities

This proposed legislation in NY would create just one more way that local rural communities could benefit from the poor who are kept behind the prison walls. See attached proposed Bill.
New Yorkers: contact your legislators and ask them to vote against this Bill.

"AN ACT to amend the correction law, in relation to charging taxes on sales of commissaries and canteens"

Current law, which exempts these transactions from
sales taxation, prevents localities in which correctional institutes are
located from receiving their local share of sales tax which would be
forthcoming were these sales to occur in non-institutional setting.
These sales are estimated at $23 million statewide, with $13 million
subject to the sales. This represents a significant loss of revenue for those localities with prison facilities. Further it is not appropriate that prisoners are exempted from sales and compensating use tax on goods that are taxable simply because they are bought in prison commissaries.

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

NY: 2 additonal prisons slated to be closed

Published January 19, 2010 10:50 pm - Lyon Mountain Correctional Facility, Moriah Shock Incarceration Facility targeted in Paterson budget.
2 local prisons doomed
By LOHR McKINSTRY
Staff Writers

MORIAH — Prison staffs in Lyon Mountain and Moriah were shocked Tuesday to learn their facilities are now slated to close.

As part of sweeping budget cuts announced by Gov. David Paterson, Lyon Mountain Correctional Facility in Clinton County is expected to close January 2011, with Moriah Shock Incarceration Facility in Essex County to follow in April 2011.

REDUCING STAFF
They are two of four facilities now scheduled to close, affecting 57,600 inmates.

State officials say the cuts are being made to further consolidation efforts and eliminate excess capacity.

The closures are expected to reduce staffing by 637 positions, including 17 in managerial staff, mostly through attrition.

The other facilities affected are Butler Correctional Facility in Wayne County and Ogdensburg Correctional Facility in St. Lawrence County.

The cuts are expected to save $14.1 million during the next five years by also eliminating capital-construction projects.

Department of Correctional Services officials said the savings will help cover the costs of enhanced mental-health and sex-offender programs.

Assemblywoman Janet Duprey (R-Peru) spoke with staff at Lyon Mountain Tuesday morning after hearing the news.

"Certainly we're concerned," she said. "It's never good when we see a facility close. On the other hand ... I'm positive each of the corrections staff, and hopefully most of the civilians, will be able to transfer to other facilities.

"Certainly the focus of the Department of Corrections has been, and I expect will continue to be, not having anyone lose their job."

She called the closure a "certain blow to the small hamlet of Lyon Mountain and Town of Dannemora," which, she noted, is still recovering from the devastating New Year's Day fire that destroyed the town's Highway Garage.

The prison is housed in the former Lyon Mountain school building, and Duprey expects there will be a challenge "getting something (else) viable in that building."

"It's certainly going to be a loss and a tough time for the people who live in Lyon Mountain and the Town of Dannemora."

There are 91 people employed at Lyon Mountain, which housed 135 inmates at the start of the year.

By closing the facility, officials expect to save $7.2 million in annual operating costs and $950,000 in capital-project savings.

'MIND BOGGLING'
Moriah Town Supervisor Thomas Scozzafava said that with the local economy already reeling from the closure of the Champlain Bridge, the announced shutdown of the Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility could push things to the brink of disaster.

"I had the most disturbing call I've had in 21 years in office — the Governor's Office informed me they are going to close Moriah Shock," Scozzafava said Tuesday morning.

The impact on southern Essex County communities will be grave, Scozzafava said. He and other Essex County officials are pledging to fight the closure.

"They let our bridge fall apart," Scozzafava said. "Now they're going to take away our major employers. We need to fight this. This will devastate our community."

John Fariss, chief sector steward for New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association at Moriah Shock, said the news was sobering for staff to hear.

Moriah employs 102 people, with 63 of the positions in security.

Fariss said he was more surprised about the shock facility's closure because "we save the state money. Through the history of shock, we've saved the state $2 billion.

"Closing a shock facility does not seem very cost-effective. It's mind boggling."

Moriah is one of four shock programs in the state and the only in the tri-county region.

It has been open for 21 years and has a capacity to house 300 inmates, with 171 currently enrolled in the monthly program.

WORK CREWS
Fariss expects the closures will have a devastating impact on surrounding communities.

"The loss of our work crews is going to impact all the towns."

One example of the impact, he said, is that Moriah inmate crews are now lined up to work on the Ice Castle in Saranac Lake to fill the vacancy left after the Camp Gabriels facility closed during the last round of cuts resulting in a loss of a number of work crews.

Moriah currently has 11 work crews.

Scozzafava said the inmate work crews that go into local communities will also be lost.

Wilmington Town Supervisor Randy Preston said his town can't afford that loss.

"The Town of Wilmington uses those crews extensively for our spring cleanup, our parks. We cannot afford to hire out that work."

He said state leaders apparently didn't learn anything from the way the Champlain Bridge was handled.

"It's hard for me to fathom that with the incompetence that led to that bridge closure they would do that to Moriah. They make one mistake after another in Albany."

Inmates from Moriah Shock also work on the Essex County Fairgrounds in Westport, Westport Town Supervisor Daniel Connell said.

"We've come to rely on them to cut the cost of government."

DOCS officials said they are considering having crews from other facilities work in the affected communities after the local closure.

Sayward JOINS FIGHT
Assemblywoman Teresa Sayward (R-Willsboro) said she's joining the fight to keep Moriah Shock open.

"We've already started. I have a meeting with (Department of Correction) Commissioner Fischer. My colleagues ... have pledged to help me try to get the facility open."

Sayward said she's getting documents from when Moriah Shock opened that show its rejuvenating economic impact on the community.

"We're going to try to make that same case again. We're going to get as much going as we can to keep the facility open."

"If Moriah goes down, it's going to be the same as what happened at Gabriels. We're going to get an empty building with nothing there."

Camp Gabriels, located in the Essex County community of Gabriels, closed July 1, 2009.

As the Camp Gabriels site remains vacant, Sen. Betty Little (R-Queensbury) said she doesn't "want to see the same thing happen at Lyon Mountain or Moriah."

Little said the fact that the budget would target upstate prison facilities for closure is not a surprise.

"Closures not only directly impact those employed at correctional facilities, but there's also a ripple effect that is tough for rural and economically depressed communities in the North Country to absorb."

BIG IMPACT
Dannemora Town Supervisor Americo "Ves" Pivetta called the Lyon Mountain closure "terrible."

"The correctional facility closing is very bad news to me and the residents here."

He said the facility, located in a hamlet where the population is 80-percent retired, was a financial asset to the town's tax base, especially for the water district there.

And, he said, "If they leave the building empty, it'll be total chaos and a shame. Something has to be done."

Despite the news, Pivetta remained optimistic that the town would pull through, as it did in the 1960s when local mining operations closed.

"We're a strong community, and I think we'll move forward.

"The community has to get together, and we'll figure it out. We've just got to look forward and see what we can come up with."

http://www.pressrepublican.com/homepage/local_story_019225044.html

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

KY: DOC officials grilled over bad Aramark food.

Corrections leaders grilled about prison food
1/20/2010
BRUCE SCHREINER
The Associated Press

(AP) — FRANKFORT, Ky. - Kentucky lawmakers grilled top corrections officials Wednesday about the quality of meals served in state prisons in seeking to determine what role inmate displeasure with their food might have played in a fiery prison uprising last year.

The House Judiciary Committee delved into the state's $11.8 million-a-year contract with Aramark Correctional Services, which provides meals at state-operated prisons in Kentucky.

Rep. Brent Yonts, D-Greenville, raised questions about the quality and amounts of food served inmates, and recounted claims of incidents in which prison food was allegedly tainted by hair balls, rocks, cardboard, bread ties, worms and even human feces.

"The issue is a matter of humanity," Yonts said. "The issue is a matter of morality. And the issue is not a matter of money."

Yonts has introduced legislation that would cancel Aramark's contract with the state and return the prison food-service duties to the state. The panel did not vote on the bill, which would not apply to food service in private prisons or in local jails housing state inmates.

During a nearly two-hour hearing, lawmakers pressed corrections officials for details into the causes of the riot last August at Northpoint Training Center in central Kentucky.

Corrections officials said food was not a primary factor in the riot, which they said was sparked primarily by anger over tighter restrictions to recreation areas and the prison yard.

When pressed by the panel about the role of food in the uprising, state Corrections Commissioner LaDonna Thompson conceded that the inmates "do not like the food."

The dissatisfaction, she said, might be due to heart-healthy menus featuring reduced amounts of sodium and sugars being served inmates.

Thompson defended the Aramark contract and said prison meals meet daily calorie and nutritional requirements.

Officials said the contract saves the state an estimated $5.4 million each year.

They said bulk purchases of food and beverages yield huge savings that enable Aramark to provide meals for $2.63 daily per inmate.

Thompson said that wardens at the state-operated prisons had not heard any groundswell of complaints from correctional officers about the quality of food served inmates.

But Thompson acknowledged there might be an occasional problem.

"Occasionally there will be a bug in a meal," she said. "That's just the nature of any food service."

She cited a case in which a grub worm was found in soup being served inmates at Green River Correctional Complex. The food was immediately discarded, she said.

At Western Kentucky Correctional Complex, there were three outbreaks of illnesses, Thompson said, but lab tests showed two outbreaks were not food related and the third was inconclusive.

Tim Campbell, president of Aramark Correctional Services, said the company stands by the quality of its food service. It serves more than 600 correctional facilities in North America. In Kentucky alone, it prepares 13 million meals each year for the state corrections department.

"We wouldn't allow or stand for anything to get in the way of our reputation as it relates to the quality of the products that we produce," he said.

Rep. Mary Lou Marzian, D-Louisville, said the state could perhaps avoid another prison riot by spending a bit more on inmates' meals.

Rep. Kelly Flood, D-Lexington, complained about a "big haze" regarding details into the causes of the prison uprising. She said there was "a real gap going on here, and we insist on that gap getting narrowed quickly."

Yonts raised the possibility of lawmakers issuing a subpoena to gather details into the matter. The cabinet claims it has already issued the report into the riot, with some security-related matters redacted. Cabinet leaders agreed Wednesday to review the report with committee staff to determine what parts will remain redacted.

Matthew Hughes, a correctional officer at Northpoint who attended the hearing, said afterward that lawmakers had asked the right questions.

Hughes said he considered food to be a factor in the riot, and that food quality plays a factor in safety at prisons.

"If you're hungry, you're going to get ornery," he said.

___

The legislation is House Bill 33.

http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/health/index.ssf?/base/national-98/1264036902114120.xml&storylist=health

Posted by lois at 08:57 AM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2010

New Orleans: Sex Workers Now Being Charged as "sex offenders"

Her Crime? Sex Work in New Orleans
By Jordan Flaherty
ColorLines magazine
With police charging sex workers as sex offenders—the majority of them Black women—activists hope the city’s mayoral elections next month will pave the way for fighting the law.

January 13, 2010

Tabitha has been working as a prostitute in New Orleans since she was 13. Now 30 years old, she can often be found working on a corner just outside of the French Quarter. A small and slight white woman, she has battled both drug addiction and illness and struggles every day to find a meal or a place to stay for the night.

These days, Tabitha, who asked that her real name not be used in this story, has yet another burden: a stamp printed on her driver’s license labels her a sex offender. Her crime? Sex work.

New Orleans city police and the district attorney’s office are using a state law written for child molesters to charge hundreds of sex workers like Tabitha as sex offenders. The law, which dates back to 1805, makes it a crime against nature to engage in “unnatural copulation”—a term New Orleans cops and the district attorney’s office have interpreted to mean anal or oral sex. Sex workers convicted of breaking this law are charged with felonies, issued longer jail sentences and forced to register as sex offenders. They must also carry a driver’s license with the label “sex offender” printed on it.

Of the 861 sex offenders currently registered in New Orleans, 483 were convicted of a crime against nature, according to Doug Cain, a spokesperson with the Louisiana State Police. And of those convicted of a crime against nature, 78 percent are Black and almost all are women.

The law impacts sex workers in both small and large ways.

Tabitha has to register an address in the sex offender database, and because she doesn’t have a permanent home, she has registered the address of a nonprofit organization that is helping her. She also has to purchase and mail postcards with her picture to everyone in the neighborhood informing them of her conviction. If she needs to evacuate to a shelter during a hurricane, she must evacuate to a special shelter for sex offenders, and this shelter has no separate safe spaces for women. She is even prohibited from very ordinary activities in New Orleans like wearing a costume at Mardi Gras.

“This law completely disconnects our community members from what remains of a social safety net,” said Deon Haywood, director of Women With A Vision, an organization that promotes wellness and disease prevention for women who live in poverty. Haywood’s group has formed a new coalition of New Orleans activists and health workers who are organizing to fight the way police are abusing the 1805 law.

Activists like Haywood believe that using the law in this way is part of an overall policy by the New Orleans Police Department to go after petty offenses. According to a report from the Metropolitan Crime Commission, New Orleans police arrest more than 58,000 people every year. Of those arrested, nearly 50 percent are for traffic and municipal offenses, and only 5 percent are for violent crimes.

“What this is really about is over-incarcerating poor and of-color communities,” said Rosana Cruz of VOTE-NOLA, a prison reform organization that is also a part of the new coalition.

Haywood, Cruz and other activists believe they have an opportunity with the mayoral and city council elections next month to change the system. With all of the candidates attempting to distance themselves from Mayor Nagin, who is prevented by term limits from running again, the new mayor is likely to be open to making changes. This includes hiring a new police chief, as all the candidates have pledged to do. Advocates are hoping this is an opportunity to shift the department’s focus. “When there's a new police chief, we can educate them,” said Haywood.

Many of the women Haywood’s group works with are at the most high-risk tier of sex work. They meet customers on the street and in bars, Haywood said. Most women are dealing with addiction and homelessness, and many cannot get food stamps or other public assistance because of felony convictions on their record.

“I’m hoping that the situation will look different because of this coalition,” Haywood said. “I can’t tell you how overwhelmed we’ve been from the needs of this population.”

Miss Jackie is one of those women. A Black woman in her 50s, she was arrested for sex work in 1999 and charged as a sex offender. Her real name, which she declined to give for this story, was added to the registry for 10 years. Miss Jackie says that when the registration period was almost over she was arrested for possession of crack. She says the arresting officer didn’t find any drugs on her person, but the judge ruled that she needed to continue to register as a sex offender for another 15 years (the new federal requirement for sex offenders) because her arrest was a violation of her registration period.

"Where is the justice?” she asked, speaking through tears. “How do they expect me to straighten out my life?” Struggling with basic needs like housing, Miss Jackie added: “I feel condemned."

Advocates and former defendants claim that the decision over who is charged under which penalty is made arbitrarily, at the discretion of police and the district attorney’s office, and that the law disproportionately affects Black people, as well as transgender women. When asked about the allegations of abusing the crime against nature statue, New Orleans Police Department spokesman Bob Young responded: “Persons are charged according to the crime they commit.”

Wendi Cooper’s story, however, paints a different picture.

In 1999, Cooper had recently come out as transgender. A Black transwoman, she tried prostitution a few times and quickly discovered it wasn’t for her. But before she quit, she was arrested. At the time, Cooper was happy to take a plea that allowed her to get out of jail and didn’t think much about what the “crime against nature” conviction would mean on her record. As she got older and began work as a healthcare professional, the weight of the sex offender label began to upset her more and more. “This is not me,” she said. “I’m not that person who the state labeled me as…it slanders me.”

Cooper appealed to the state to have her record expunged and talked to lawyers about other options, but she still must register for at least another five years and potentially longer. “I feel like I was manipulated, you know, pleading guilty to this crime…And it’s hard, knowing that you are called something that you’re not,” she said. She is also afraid now that the conviction will prevent her from getting her license as a registered nurse or from being hired.

Although some women have tried to fight the sex offender charges in court, they’ve had little success. The penalties they face became even harsher in 2006 when Congress passed the Adam Walsh act, requiring tier-1 (the least serious) sex offenders to stay in the public registry for 15 years. There’s also an added danger to fighting the charges, according to Josh Perry, a former attorney with the Orleans Public Defenders office.

“The way Louisiana’s habitual offender law works, if you challenge your sentence in court and lose, and it’s a third offense, the mandatory minimum is 20 years. The maximum is life,” he explained.

Perry estimates that on an average day two or three people are arrested for prostitution in New Orleans, and about half of them are charged under the crime against nature statute. “Right now, there are 39 people being held at Orleans Parish Prison [for] crimes against nature,” Perry told a gathering of advocates last August. “And another 15 to 20 people…charged with failure to register as a sex offender.”

Sex workers accused as sex offenders face discrimination in every aspect of the system. In most cases, they cannot get released on bond, because they are seen as a higher risk of flight than people charged with violent crimes. “This is the level of stigma and dysfunction that we’re talking about here,” said Perry. “Realistically, they’re not getting out.”

Advocates have said the ideal solution would be to get state lawmakers to change the law, but they feel there’s little hope of positive reforms from the current legislature. For now, organizers want to put pressure on police and the district attorney’s office to stop charging sex workers under the crime against nature statute.

There is a great deal of work that needs to be done. Haywood is working with lawyers and national allies to develop a legal strategy, as well as a broad local coalition that includes criminal justice reform organizations like VOTE-NOLA and activist groups like the New Orleans chapters of Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.

“We’re trying to organize, but we’re also working on the human rights side of how it’s affecting their lives,” she said. “This is a population that works in crisis mode all the time.”

Jennifer, a 23-year-old white woman who asked that her real name not be used in this story, has been working as a prostitute since she was a teenager, and also works as a stripper at a club on Bourbon Street. She recently broke free of an eight-year heroin addiction. Unless the law changes, she will have the words “sex offender” on her driver’s license until she is 48 years old.

Haywood said that stories like this show that the law has the effect of forcing women to continue with sex work. “When you charge young women with this—when you label them as a sex offender—this is what they are for the rest of their lives,” she said.

Jennifer said it’s affected her job options. “I’m not sure what they think, but a lot of places wont hire sex offenders,” she said.

Haywood said the women she sees have few options. Many of them are homeless. They are sleeping in abandoned houses or on the street, or they are trading sex for a place to stay. “The women we work with, they don't call it sex work,” she said. “They don't know what that means. They don’t even call it prostitution. They call it survival.”

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience and audiences around the world have seen the television reports he’s produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy Now. His post-Katrina reporting for ColorLines shared an award from New America Media for best Katrina-related reporting in ethnic press. Haymarket Press will release his new book, FLOODLINES: Stories of Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, in 2010. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org
http://www.colorlines.com/printerfriendly.php?ID=673

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

Jim Ridgeway: Will the U.S. Send Haitian Refugees to Guantanamo?

"Once at the Guantanamo facility, the refugees would be supervised by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the facility and has contracted the Florida-based Geo Group firm to manage day-to-day operations…."

From Jim Ridgeway: Unsilent Generation
http://unsilentgeneration.com/2010/01/19/will-the-u-s-send-haitian-refugees-to-guantanamo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Will the U.S. Send Haitian Refugees to Guantanamo?

Posted: 19 Jan 2010 01:23 PM PST

The U.S. prison complex at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is inextricably linked to terrorism and torture in the minds of most Americans today. But not very long ago, it was known for torment of a different kind. In the 1990s, an immigrant detention center at Guantanamo served as a holding pen for undocumented migrants from the Caribbean who were caught trying to enter the United States. Most notoriously, it was a destination for Haitian “boat people,” including some with HIV, who fled their country in large numbers in the wake of the 1991 coup.

Now, in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, there are signs that Guantanamo may be returned to this chapter in its ignominious history. While the Obama administration suspended deportations to Haiti and granted temporary protected status to undocumented Haitians currently living in the United States, this policy offers no protection to quake victims who try to reach U.S. shores. If large numbers of desperate Haitians begin to attempt the treacherous trip, they could well end up in Guantanamo’s Migrant Operations Center (MOC), operated by the Department of Homeland Security.

Last Friday, Fox News was already reporting that Guantanamo was one of the “options on the table” for dealing with fleeing Haitians.

“Guantanamo is going to be an enormously valuable asset as we go through this,” State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters on Thursday, speaking generally about U.S. efforts to help Haiti. “[Guantanamo] is in the vicinity. … So we’re identifying all of the assets in the region that we can use in order to stage operations.”

One official acknowledged that the center likely would become the most viable option “if there was a mass migration” of Haitians from their country….

Once at the Guantanamo facility, the refugees would be supervised by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the facility and has contracted the Florida-based Geo Group firm to manage day-to-day operations….

“We haven’t been asked to do anything,” one official said. “No one’s given us any marching orders. … But if they come to us, we’re ready to go.”

On Monday, Tom Barry of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy reported on the MOC—which, like an increasing number of U.S. prisons, is run by a private, for-profit company.

Today, under a contract with DHS it is operated by Geo Group, a private prison corporation that relies on federal government detention/prison contracts for about 40% of its revenues.

In 2003, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, MOC was upgraded and its operation transferred from the department’s own Immigration and Customs Enforcement to GEO Group, the country’s second largest private prison firm. In part because of the special international standing of the Guantanamo Bay military base, which one official called “the legal equivalent to outer space,” the State Department is cosponsor of the MOC contract.

According to GEO, it manages and operates a detention center with 130 beds but which “can house up to 500 detainees in the event of a surge.” According to the contract, “This dynamic population may consist of single adult males and females, unaccompanied male and female juveniles, and family groups of various nationalities and security levels.” Under the terms of the contract, which was renewed for a five-year period in November 2006, “GEO is responsible for providing all staff, supplies, and equipment to manage and operate the center.”

The 2003 contract was arranged, according to GEO, “at the emergency request of ICE in 2003″ and offered the company “a unique opportunity.” Since responding positively to that emergency request, GEO says that it has “been successfully working with ICE in this unique environment and has developed professional working relationships with all of the federal agencies involved in the operation of the MOC.”

GEO is the company that also runs the largest privately run detention center–and also probably its worst–in Pecos, Texas. As Tom Barry reported last year, the Reeves County Detention Complex has been the site of two recent riots, several suicides, and numerous deaths from inadequate health care. Is this what awaits refugees from the Haitian earthquake?

Back in the 1990s, there was an outcry against the conditions for Haitian refugees at Guantanamo, especially a group of about 150 who had HIV. It was during this period that Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. Bush’s Guantanamo by asserting that anyone held there did not have any legal rights. As Brandt Goldstein pointed out in Slate in 2005:

We sometimes forget that during the Clinton presidency, the United States ran an extralegal detention camp on Guantanamo—and went to federal court to defend its right to do so. The camp during the Clinton years was by no means the nightmarish operation it is now; certainly, there weren’t allegations of torture. But Guantanamo under Clinton produced its own share of suffering and abuses—and perhaps most important for today, the court decision that shut it down was eventually wiped off the books, thanks to legal maneuvers by the Clinton Justice Department.

Some of the refugees who fled Haiti back in the early 1990s were eventually treated as asylum-seekers and admitted to the United States. But in 1994, with Haiti supposedly stabilized, the Clinton administration began shipping them home. And according to a 2005 report cited by Fox News, the George W. Bush administration maintained that admitting Haitian refugees might “encourage other Haitians to embark on the risky sea travel and potentially trigger a mass asylum from Haiti to the United States.”

So unless the current administration reverses policy once again, any Haitians who might be taken to Guantanamo could be there for a while. This surely was not what Obama had in mind when he made his campaign promise to close the notorious prison camp.

Posted by lois at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2010

Fire risk mounts in Arizona prisons

Fire risk mounts in Arizona prisons
Pleas for funds to fix safety problems ignored for years
By JJ Hensley and Casey Newton - Jan. 17, 2010
The Arizona Republic

The potential for tragedy looms large at Arizona prisons, where each night more than 31,000 adult inmates and some 550 juveniles fall asleep in dangerous and deteriorating facilities.

For more than a decade, investigators have identified serious fire-safety issues at the state's prisons and juvenile correctional facilities. Fire-alarm systems are obsolete, broken or non-existent. Sprinklers and smoke-ventilation systems required by building codes have never been installed, even in rapidly deteriorating wooden structures used to house juveniles.

Where fire alarms are broken or non-existent, corrections officials employ 24-hour "fire watches" in which employees look for smoke as part of their duties. Intended to be used for a short time until systems could be repaired, fire watches in many facilities have endured for decades.

Today, every Arizona prison is on a perpetual fire watch.

Unsafe conditions put correctional officers, inmates and juvenile offenders in potentially lethal situations and leave taxpayers exposed to millions of dollars in liability should a fire claim lives.

Inspectors' reports paint nightmare scenarios of dorms silently filling up with smoke as juveniles sleep, staffers who can't unlock doors in time to evacuate inmates, and corrections officers who become trapped in their observation posts.

Twice in the past decade, the Department of Juvenile Corrections commissioned studies on how to eliminate unsafe conditions in its facilities. Over the past several years, corrections officials in both the juvenile and adult systems repeatedly requested millions in funding to bring the buildings up to code.

But lawmakers gave them nothing, even as they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars renovating their own buildings. Earlier this year, to save money, the state quit inspecting its buildings - even as many prisons deteriorate at an alarming rate, reports show.

While such rampant fire-safety risks linger, lawmakers want to privatize operations in at least some of the prisons to help close the state's massive deficit.

Last year, Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law Senate Bill 1028, which would allow private vendors to operate one or more of Arizona's state prisons, with a 50-year contract and an upfront payment of $100 million. Two prison facilities were purchased in sale-leaseback agreements last week, though in those cases, the state retains control of the properties.

As the state tries to sell some of its facilities, safety experts warn that prisons with faulty sprinklers and alarms pose a serious danger to occupants.

"You could potentially end up with a fire that might result in hundreds of fatalities," said Robert Solomon, manager for building and life-safety codes at the Boston-based National Fire Protection Association. "It's a lot cheaper to deal with this issue now and find the money wherever you can. If you don't do that and something happens down the road, it's going to cost you a lot more."

Vast system

More than 40,000 inmates are in the Arizona prison system. Of those, 9,000 are serving their time in private prisons. The rest are held in 10 state-operated prisons, where they are overseen by more than 8,000 correctional officers, medical personnel and other staff.

The sprawling complexes are like small towns, with some supporting more than 5,000 inmates and a host of facilities to prepare food, clean laundry and perform maintenance.

The complexes include Army-surplus tents in use since the early 1980s, trailers formerly used by crews that installed the Alaskan pipeline, corrugated steel Quonset huts that date from World War II, houses converted into dorms at Fort Grant and a building in Florence constructed in 1930, in addition to a smattering of more modern facilities.

Many of those structures, particularly the tents and trailers, were brought in as temporary housing to ease overcrowding. Because they were never intended for long-term use, many lack the fire-suppression systems that come with permanent facilities.

In general, the prisons have equipment to cope with the smaller types of fires that happen most frequently, and prison officials rely on nearby fire departments for larger blazes.

While deadly fires in American detention facilities are rare, they do happen. Since 1975, 127 people have died in fires at jails and prisons, according to the fire association.

Safety records

The Republic reviewed hundreds of pages of fire-safety records for the 10 state-run facilities dating back more than 20 years. They included reports from fire marshals, Department of Administration inspectors, the state's loss-prevention division and architects.

Most prison buildings have not been inspected by an outside agency in more than five years. Despite requests for records from the state's risk-management division on what liabilities exist, administrators could produce only one 6-year-old document urging that action be taken.

Arizona law requires state buildings to be inspected at various intervals by multiple agencies, including the state fire marshal, the Department of Administration and the agency responsible for the building. Concerns raised during those inspections are forwarded to the Department of Administration, which puts together a capital-needs proposal and submits it to lawmakers.

The law says agencies "should give priority to fire and life safety projects."

In its proposed capital-improvement plan for 2010, which included pleas for $12 million to improve fire safety, the Department of Administration noted that "properly working fire alarms are a basic and mandatory requirement for office buildings and are particularly important in a secure corrections environment."

The plea was ignored, a year after lawmakers awarded the department $491,000 to replace fire-alarm systems in buildings around the Capitol Mall.

In theory, the state fire marshal could revoke the occupancy permit for a prison or juvenile facility. But the office has never moved to do so.

Numerous violations

Fire safety in any facility involves several basic elements: reducing hazards, detecting smoke and fires, suppressing fires through sprinklers and fire extinguishers, and evacuating occupants.

Investigators have found violations of each of those basic safety tenets in Arizona prisons, and in many cases they have not been corrected.

Fire-marshal reports, state-commissioned studies and reviews from the Department of Administration detail deficiencies back to the late 1980s, though inconsistent record keeping makes it difficult to determine which issues have been resolved. In one report, the inspector noted: "This is a fire trap and should be corrected. ... You've got more guts than me sitting on this time bomb."

That report, on the Tucson prison, came from a fire marshal's inspection in April 1988 that found deficient or non-existent warning or suppression systems.

Another fire marshal, visiting the same facility more than 20 years later, noted that many of the deficiencies remained.

Fire-marshal reports on state prisons from 2003 to 2009 showed deficiencies in many areas:

• Reducing hazards. An inspection of Arizona State Prison Complex-Eyman in Florence found flammable material placed next to a transformer in a storage room. At Catalina Mountain School, a juvenile detention facility in Tucson, dryer vents were found to be non-removable and choked with lint - a potential hazard. Maintenance conditions were so bad in a Tucson medical unit, the in-floor plumbing channel that houses waste lines and an electrical conduit became backed up with sewage for an entire year.

Prison officials say that hazards can be fixed for little or no money, and they often address the issues as soon as they are identified. Gaps in records make this difficult to verify independently.

• Detecting fires. At Safford, Eyman and Tucson, more than 90 percent of smoke detectors don't function. Many of them are beyond their 20-year life expectancy; others have lost their ability to communicate with the prison's main control room and alert staff members to danger. An inspector at Stafford noted that fire-alarm pull boxes were not connected to any alarms and were "of decorative value only."

Investigators at Adobe and Black Canyon juvenile facilities found that dormitory doors were improperly ventilated, which could allow them to cause smoke-inhalation injuries or even death before enough smoke escaped the room to trigger a fire alarm. That issue has since been resolved by modifying the doors, said Laura Dillingham, a spokeswoman for the prison.

• Suppressing fires. In Tucson, fire sprinklers had been painted over. In Yuma, inspectors have found fire extinguishers that were expired; at Lewis, they found extinguishers that were overcharged.

In 2004, the state hired Arrington Watkins Architects to identify fire-safety issues at Catalina Mountain. The resulting report contained so many issues that the state's loss-prevention division recommended "extraordinary measures be taken by the agency to protect the lives of the detained youth and staff."

One of the recommended measures, which was subsequently ordered by the fire marshal, was installing a sprinkler system at the facility, which is built from wood. But sprinkler heads increase the risk of attempted suicide by hanging, Dillingham said in an interview.

Dillingham said staff members constantly circulate through the rooms where juveniles sleep, making it unlikely that a fire could break out and spread undetected. In November, a fire marshal wrote a letter to the Department of Juvenile Corrections saying Catalina Mountain could remain open without fire sprinklers only if it maintained high staffing ratios. Current ratios call for at least one youth corrections officer per 18 juveniles, though at certain times during the day the ratio is as high as one to five.

Staffing became more difficult earlier this month, when the department laid off 200 employees in response to a 7.5 percent budget cut.

The department has maintained the ratios by using supervisors to fill in for corrections officers, Dillingham said. But future cuts could bring staffing below the fire marshal's mandate.

• Evacuating buildings. At Arizona State Prison Complex-Lewis, a 2005 report identified trouble with a building's roof hatch. If the hatch became obstructed in an emergency, there would be no escape route for officers stationed on the second floor or the roof.

The locks and control system at Catalina Mountain do not meet building codes. Some doors cannot be opened remotely, and many do not have an emergency-release function. The problem remains unresolved.

"They are life-safety issues, and we obviously need to be attentive to them and take corrective action," Charles Ryan, director of the Department of Corrections, said in an interview.

Prison officials say the stopgap efforts they've put in place, including placing corrections officers on fire watches, is effective enough to ensure inmates' safety given budget limitations.

"We take safety very seriously," Dillingham said. Officials at juvenile corrections are "extremely confident" their facilities could be evacuated in the event of a fire without anyone being injured.

High stakes

To date, no one has died in an Arizona prison fire. Prisoners and their families can file lawsuits only if prisoners are actually harmed, making pre-emptive suits difficult.

But some prisoners have filed grievances with the Department of Corrections, according to Middle Ground, a Tempe-based prison-reform group.

Stephen Karban, an inmate at the state prison in Tucson, complained in a letter to the fire marshal that inmates in the Winchester Unit were being housed in meeting rooms where there were not sufficient exits.

"Please inform me how your agency, in good faith, can allow this potentially dangerous situation to continue uncorrected," Karban wrote.

In the event of a major fire, the state could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages.

"Everyone will sue us," said Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. "And we will lose."

The liability varies from prison to prison depending on where inmates and staff are housed or stationed.

Maximum-security areas where movement is severely restricted are typically built of concrete and steel, leaving little flammable material aside from an inmate's belongings. Minimum-security areas are built from more-flammable materials, including canvas tents and wood-and-metal trailers, but those areas allow more freedom of movement so inmates could flee from potential harm.

Last month a fire broke out at Florence, in an area with nearly 700 inmates and 14 corrections officers, when an inmate was heating up a bag of beans with an immersion heater. The trailers are equipped with smoke detectors but no sprinklers. The inmates were able to get out of the trailer and alert staff, who put the fire out within seconds, said Director of Offender Operations Robert Patton.

The majority of prison fires are along those lines: easily extinguished blazes caused by carelessness or by inmates who intentionally set mattresses or some other material on fire.

Corrections officers can deal with most small fires themselves with fire extinguishers or sprinkler systems that douse flames confined to cells.

Department of Corrections said they do not track fires in their facilities.

In a three-year period, the Tucson Fire Department responded to 25 fires at the state prison in Tucson, among the worst in terms of working smoke detectors.

Phil Mele, the state's fire marshal, said it is a question of when - not if - a building will burn. But as long as property damage and injuries are kept to a minimum in the meantime, he said, replacing the warning systems is not a high priority.

"Am I comfortable having facilities that don't have fully operating systems? No," Mele said. "What's within my authority to do? It's within my authority to point out that they need to be corrected and need to be addressed, and it's up to others to do something with it."

Responses from the two unions representing corrections officers were mixed. Michael Duran of the Arizona Correctional Peace Officers Association said he had not heard any complaints from officers about fire-safety conditions, and Brenda Hewitt of the Arizona Corrections Association declined to comment, citing legal concerns.

Donna Hamm, executive director of Middle Ground, criticized the state for not acting to resolve fire-safety issues.

"It exposes the state of Arizona to monumental fiscal liability and, of course, incalculable human tragedy," Hamm said. "It's a travesty."

Corrective action

Since 2005, officials have requested more than $58 million from the Legislature to address chronic fire-prevention problems at the prisons. They asked for $12 million in 2010, hoping to repair fire alarms, install sprinklers and make other safety improvements.

"We make those requests year in, year out because the need is not going away," said Ryan, the Corrections Department director.

To date, their requests have been denied. Lawmakers say they that the state budget crisis prevents them from paying for renovations.

"We just don't have the money," said Rep. Bill Konopnicki, R-Safford, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Konopnicki said he is concerned about building conditions at state prisons and state facilities overall.

"It's a public-safety issue," he said.

In the late 1990s, the fire marshal cut staff and eliminated the position that allowed the agency to inspect prisons about once a year. "We went from having a dedicated person to 'the opportunity for inspection when available,' " Mele said.

In boom years that followed, legislators were more likely to put funds toward needs that were more popular than increasing protections for prisoners and corrections officers.

The prisons now have internal staff members responsible for inspections, and records indicate that fire marshals visit at least part of each complex every few years, though neither the Corrections Department nor the Fire Marshal's Office could produce evidence of inspection at Douglas or Eyman after 2002.

Fire-safety problems are part of an overall pattern of neglect at the prisons, where many buildings are no longer in use because of damage. Leaking roofs, broken floor tiles and sagging foundations have rendered many structures uninhabitable. Some residential units at the juvenile facilities don't have bathrooms, much less sprinklers.

Now, with Arizona facing its worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, the prospects of fixing fire systems in the prisons are all but nil.

Future unknown

It's unclear how the prison system's myriad safety issues would affect the state's ability to privatize its prisons, transferring operational authority to a corporation.

A company could decline to bid on facilities with fire-safety issues. Or a company could ask the state to indemnify it against any lawsuits filed in the event of a fire.

Prison officials say that until the Legislature proceeds with a request for proposals, they don't know what a deal might look like. Corrections officials were to meet Dec. 17 with a legislative committee that would give them the authority to proceed with privatization. They planned to discuss a timeline for issuing a request for proposal.

Then Gov. Jan Brewer called a special session to deal with the state's budget crisis, and the meeting was canceled. It has not been rescheduled.

More on this topic

Arizona's state prisons

The Arizona Department of Corrections operates 10 facilities throughout the state that hold more than 31,000 inmates. Nearly all the facilities have problems with fire-suppression systems or fire alarms. The issues have been brought to the attention of Department of Corrections administrators and, in turn, to state legislators for more than 20 years. The Legislature has consistently chosen to fund other state projects.

Arizona State Prison Complex- Winslow (Winslow/St. Johns)

Years units constructed: 1987-1990.

Inmates: 1,775.

• 137 of 915 smoke detectors do not work.

• All fire alarms work, and all units have fire alarms.

ASPC-Perryville (Goodyear)

Years units constructed: 1981-2004.

Inmates: 3,454.

Fire :

• Nine of 272 smoke detectors do not work.

• All the fire alarms work; the facility is lacking 11 fire alarms.

• $45,000 request in fiscal 2010 for replacing a fire-alarm system in one unit was not funded.

ASPC-Yuma

Years units constructed: 1987-1998.

Inmates: 2,240.

Fire :

• 593 of 731 smoke detectors do not work.

• 34 of 35 fire alarms do not work; the facility is lacking 22 alarms.

• $965,034 request in fiscal 2010 to repair and replace fire systems throughout complex was not funded.

ASPC-Lewis (Buckeye)

Years units constructed: 1998-2000.

Inmates: 5,205.

Fire :

• 1,824 of 3,269 smoke detectors do not work.

• 52 of 62 fire alarms do not work; the facility is lacking 21 fire alarms.

• $3,125,000 request in fiscal 2009 for sprinkler heads/fire alarms was not funded.

ASPC-Phoenix

Years units constructed: 1987-1995.

Inmates: 462.

Fire :

• All smoke detectors and fire alarms work; the facility is lacking one fire alarm.

ASPC-Florence

Years units constructed: 1960-1998.

Inmates: 4,377.

Fire :

• Eight of 986 smoke detectors do not work.

• 77 of 158 fire alarms do not work; the facility is lacking 107 fire alarms.

• $4,069,000 request in fiscal 2009 for fire-system improvements was not funded.

ASPC-Eyman (Florence)

Years units constructed: 1987-1995.

Inmates: 5,225.

Fire :

• 4,363 of 4,391 smoke detectors do not work.

• Six of 46 fire alarms do not work; the facility is lacking 13 fire alarms.

• $1,801,300 request in fiscal 2009 to replace fire-alarm system was not funded.

ASPC-Safford (Safford/Ft. Grant)

Years units constructed: 1965-1992.

Inmates: 1,855.

Fire :

• 827 of 888 smoke detectors do not work.

• 94 of 174 fire alarms do not work; the facility is lacking 101 alarms.

• $952,000 request in fiscal 2007 to repair fire-alarm system was not funded.

ASPC-Tucson

Years units constructed: 1977-2004.

Inmates: 4,401.

Fire :

• 310 of 346 smoke detectors do not work.

• 93 of 94 fire alarms do not work; the facility is lacking 53 fire alarms.

• $1,182,356 request in fiscal 2009 for a complex-wide fire system replacement was not funded.

ASPC-Douglas

Years units constructed: 1976-2004.

Inmates: 2,470.

Fire :

• 774 of 1,116 smoke detectors do not work.

• Twenty of 73 fire alarms do not work; the facility is lacking three fire alarms.

• $587,941 request in fiscal year 2009 to repair fire-panel hardware was not funded.

Sources: Department of Corrections, Arizona Department of Administration inspection report

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/01/17/20100117prisonfire0117.html

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

NJ: Gov. Corzine signs 3 bills to help former prisoners readjust to live outside

Gov. Corzine signs bills to help ex-offenders readjust to life outside prison
By Chris Megerian/Statehouse Bureau
January 18, 2010, 9:42PM

TRENTON -- Gov. Jon Corzine tonight signed three bills aimed at making it easier for former inmates to readjust to life outside prison walls.

The legislation will allow ex-offenders to receive food stamps and mandate job training programs at all prisons.

A Rutgers University study found the program has reduced the rate of recidivism. Gov. Corzine, in his last day in office, signed a bill mandating job programs for ex-offenders.

“Earlier in my term, we put into place a comprehensive anti-crime strategy that focused on aggressive action against gangs and illegal guns, greater crime prevention activities, and new re-entry initiatives,” Corzine said. “This package of bills significantly strengthens the re-entry component of our strategy.”

The bills (A4197, A4201, A4202), spearheaded by Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, were significantly scaled back after lawmakers balked at the price. They are now projected to cost $6 million, down from at least $10 million.

Supporters hope the bills lower the state's recidivism rate: 65 percent of inmates are back behind bars within five years of their release. New Jersey has about 25,600 state inmates, and it costs an average of $48,000 per year to keep each incarcerated.

Maria Comella, spokeswoman for Gov.-elect Chris Christie, who takes office tomorrow, has said the incoming governor would not have signed the bills because the state can't afford to spend more money.

A fourth bill (A807) signed by Corzine will allow people to pay municipal court fines in installments or pay the penalty in other ways, such as community service.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/01/gov_corzine_signs_bills_to_hel.html

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

January 17, 2010

MA: Setting compassionate release back.... Boston Globe article on Edward Corliss

This one article will certainly be used to thwart the movement toward compassionate release.
Lois
The Boston Globe
In 2006 parole bid, a plea for leniency
Tape of suspect projects suffering | Years after release; man held in shooting

By Jonathan Saltzman and Maria Cramer, Globe Staff | January 16, 2010

Standing before the parole board in 2006, Edward Corliss presented himself as a frail, meek man who had battled cancer, hepatitis, and alcoholism and overcome the anger and bitterness that led him to kill a store clerk in Salisbury decades before.

“I’m definitely a changed man from what I was back then,’’ Corliss said in a high, raspy voice, according to a tape of the roughly hourlong hearing obtained by the Globe last night. “I know now life is something you can’t give back, and I’ll always regret that.’’

But one board member was not convinced and asked him whether he was really remorseful since two years before the hearing he had sought the help of the Innocence Project, the nonprofit group that uses DNA evidence to clear the wrongly convicted.

He replied: “I know I ain’t going to do no harm to anybody. I just want to get out and try to start a good life.’’

Two months later, on July 18, the board voted 5-1 to release him from prison, despite a record that included two prison escapes, a parole violation, and a charge for possession of explosives while in prison.

Last month, less than four years after his release, police said, Corliss robbed and fatally shot Surendra Dangol, a 39-year-old clerk who was working behind the counter at Tedeschi Food Shop in Jamaica Plain.

Daniel M. Dewey, a member of the panel that freed Corliss, said he could not remember how he voted but was horrified to learn of Corliss’s arrest.

“It’s just terrible,’’ Dewey said in a telephone interview from his home. “You let out so many [prisoners on parole], that something’s going to happen sooner or later. It’s not like we just let out one person. It’s tragic. You try not to have any mistakes, but you’re not dealing with a population that’s too dependable.’’

The board’s ruling was made over the objections of Essex District Attorney Jonathan W. Blodgett.

Essex prosecutors successfully argued four times before, as recently as 2004, that Corliss had not accepted responsibility for killing an unarmed store clerk in Salisbury in 1971 and presented “a risk to commit further crimes’’ if paroled, according to a letter to the state Parole Board made public yesterday.

The board’s 2006 ruling, which was released Thursday, identified members who participated in the decision but not how each voted, because that information is confidential. At the time, the board majority ruled that Corliss finally understood the depths of his substance abuse problems.

The panel, Dewey said, sometimes held as many as 60 hearings a day for inmates at state prisons and county jails. Some hearings lasted only a few minutes.

“I literally saw a couple of thousand guys a year,’’ said Dewey, 66, a retired state probation officer appointed to the board by Governor William F. Weld and reappointed by governors Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift. He served from 1993 to 2007.

Four of the six Parole Board members who participated in the decision were appointed by former governor Mitt Romney. None of them could be reached for comment.

Romney’s political action committee, Free and Strong America PAC, issued a statement yesterday saying that Romney “didn’t have a vote on the matter, but if he did, he would have voted to keep this man behind bars.’’

John Hayes, who was appointed Corliss’s lawyer, said he plans to meet Corliss for the first time today at MCI-Cedar Junction at Walpole, where his client is being held.

Corliss will be arraigned Tuesday in West Roxbury District Court.

Hayes questioned one of the reasons police tied Corliss to the crime: Corliss’s parole officer told investigators he had a parolee whose features resembled the man caught in a surveillance video of the shooting. In the video, the gunman’s face is partially concealed by a scarf and most of his head is obscured by a black cap and a long wig.

“Was [Corliss] arrested because there was a similar crime in his past, and that’s where they’re starting at without any real hard evidence?’’ Hayes said.

Corliss was convicted in 1972 of fatally shooting 61-year-old store clerk George Oakes after trying to steal $15 from his cash register.

In a brief phone interview, Oakes’s stepson, Frank Ellis, said it was still painful to talk about Corliss. “He didn’t stay in jail long enough,’’ Ellis said, his voice rising. “I loved my stepfather.’’

Corliss filed a series of unsuccessful post-conviction motions, trying to pin the murder on his brother-in-law.

Essex prosecutors urged the board to reject his many parole requests based on Corliss’s long criminal history and his checkered record as an inmate.

“The record thus shows not only contempt for the criminal justice system, but that Mr. Corliss has the propensity to commit crimes while on parole or escape from confinement,’’ prosecutors wrote.

Around 1971, Corliss escaped from a Rhode Island prison camp where he was serving a four- to seven-year sentence for breaking and entering. Corliss shot Oakes while he was a fugitive.

In 1980, when he was serving his life sentence at MCI-Norfolk for the murder, he walked away from a prison detail on a February afternoon.

In May of that year, State Police found him in Ball Square in Somerville in a car with another man and a woman. Inside the car, was a .38-caliber pistol, a set of license plates, a wig, gloves and dark glasses, according to Globe reports at the time.

Seven years later, while he was in custody at a minimum-security prison, he was charged with possession of an explosive device. He was later transferred to a higher-security prison, according to parole records.

In 1991, the parole board voted to release him but he was back in prison three months later after he got into a car accident in Newton and left the scene.

After that, each time he requested parole the board rejected his pleas based on his past, his record in prison, and his addiction to alcohol.

In July 2006, the board majority decided to release him as long as he followed several conditions, including getting substance abuse treatment.

Sometime after his release, Corliss moved into a studio apartment in Roxbury in a sprawling cream-colored building of 36 units for older and disabled people.

He lived there about two years and moved out last summer, according to several of Corliss’s former neighbors, who described Corliss as affable and polite.

“Eddie was a good guy,’’ said Alan Jones, 64. “We all liked him.’’

His nickname was “Fast Eddie,’’ because he liked to walk around all day. “He was always on the loose,’’ Jones said.

Julian Prevost said that Corliss volunteered for a local church and often kept Prevost’s 89-year-old father company, playing dominoes with him and cooking him chicken.

“This man loved my father so much,’’ Prevost said.

Corliss rarely talked about his criminal past, he said, except to say he was once jailed for fraud.

“I can’t believe it,’’ he said. “This is sad because Eddie is such a nice person.’’

At the 2006 parole board meeting, a longtime female friend of Corliss and his brother, Bill, attested to changes they had observed in Corliss and implored the board to release him.

“I mean, he’s done two lifetimes. I think terrorists get off easier than he does,’’ said his brother. “He knows he done wrong. . . . Give him a chance.’’

Maureen Walsh, chairwoman of the board, said the Essex district attorney’s office was not properly notified of the hearing and therefore could not attend. But she said prosecutors could return to make arguments at a follow-up hearing or submit a letter.

Prosecutors later submitted a letter of opposition.

No one from the Oakes family attended the hearing, and no one testified against Corliss.
© Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/16/in_2006_parole_bid_a_plea_for_leniency/

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

January 15, 2010

TN: New huge prison plans finalized

Monday, Jan. 11, 2010
Prison plans finalized
BY THE NUMBERS
* 900: Existing capacity
* 1,444: Additional capacity
* 2,300: Eventual capacity
* $210 million: Estimated project cost
* 2013: Planned opening
Source: Tennessee Department of Correction

Tennessee Department of Correction officials have finalized the plans for a new prison facility in Bledsoe County.
Chattanooga Times Free Press
January 11, 2010

The facility will raise the inmate count from 900 at the present Southeastern Tennessee State Regional Correctional Facility to more than 2,300 and add about 250 corrections jobs, officials said.

“This expansion is starting to draw a lot of attention,” facility warden Jim Morrow said.

Would-be contractors also have been doing soil testing at the new prison site for the planned geothermal heating system, Mr. Morrow said.

Over recent months, facility plans have been tweaked, turning the design to accommodate wetlands on the prison’s 2,200-acre property, according to Department of Correction spokeswoman Dorinda Carter.

Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation spokeswoman Meg Lockhart said water regulators expect to issue soon a wetlands alteration permit allowing construction work to begin.

Additionally, just getting an adequate water supply to the massive prison — which will be Bledsoe County’s largest employer with an estimated 540 workers — will require a new water line to be extended from Spring City.

Ms. Carter said the estimated cost of the facility is $150 million, and the total cost of the expansion project, including the new water line and other infrastructure, will be about $210 million.

Bids for the infrastructure and site work are coming in under estimates, she said, but no bids have been let yet on the prison itself.

Corrections officials have said other delays could crop up, but the state hopes to let bids in the 2011-12 budget year and open the prison in 2013.

The expansion was planned to begin in 2005 until cost overruns on a Morgan County prison expansion prompted a review and a $12 million cost savings. Planners then reviewed the Bledsoe project and decided to build a stand-alone prison rather than expand the existing one.
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2010/jan/11/prison-plans-finalized/

Posted by lois at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

CCA loses contract in for caging immigrants in CA but gets a renewed contact for immigrant prisons in NM

CCA loses part of federal contract
Company says rising California wages to blame for Bureau of Prisons decision

Email | Print By Geert De Lombaerde
01-13-2010 8:44 AM —

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has not renewed its contract with Corrections Corp. of America to manage more than 2,000 inmates now housed in California under the Criminal Alien Requirement program.

The contract, which has been awarded to Cornell Cos., will take about $22 million annually – about 12 cents per diluted share – off CCA's bottom line, estimated Avondale Partners analyst Kevin Campbell. Nashville-based CCA – which did get a renewed BOP deal to manage 1,200 inmates in New Mexico – had been expected to earn $1.40 per share in 2010.

In a statement, CCA President and CEO Damon Hininger said the company believes the BOP's move is based primarily on "escalating federal wage determination costs in California, and does not reflect the quality of operations our company and staff have provided to the BOP."

In a note to clients, Campbell wrote that the wage differential between California and Georgia, where Cornell will house the CAR inmates, is more than 50 percent. Campbell also noted that CCA's facility in California City, Calif., will likely find a new use relatively quickly.

"While the loss is a near-term negative for CXW, the company can market the beds to the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR), which has sufficient demand," he wrote.

Campbell said investors should consider buying CCA shares (Ticker: CXW) if they drop in the short term even though he has lowered his price target to $28 from $30. In the first minutes of trading Wednesday, CCA was down about 1.8 percent at $23.44.
http://www.nashvillepost.com/news/2010/1/13/cca_loses_part_of_federal_contra
ct

Posted by lois at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

Court Decides Privte Prisons Responsible for Infants

Court Decides Prisons Responsible for Infants

On January 11, 2010, the California Fourth District Court of Appeal issued a ruling holding that private community-based prisons contracted with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have a legal duty to provide needed medical care to infants living in those facilities with their incarcerated mothers. The Court further held that the State might also be liable for failure to provide these children with medical care where on-site state employees are negligent.

The case stems from a 40-bed facility known as Family Foundations—San Diego, which houses women prisoners with short sentence and their infant children. The statute, which authorizes this program, has the express purpose of preventing future criminal recidivism within the family unit by keeping mothers and their infant children together during their formative years. Center Point, Inc., the private corporation that ran the prison facility in 2007, and the State of California argued that they had no legal duty to provide medical care to infant children under their control.

Plaintiff Denisha Lawson alleges that during her incarceration at the facility her newborn daughter Esperanza developed breathing problems and that she begged her jailers for over a week to take Esperanza to the hospital. Center Point and Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation staff failed to have any medical personnel present at the facility and failed to take Esperanza to the hospital. Eventually, five-week-old Esperanza stopped breathing and was taken to the emergency room with life-threatening viral pneumonia. Esperanza was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit and intubated for several weeks. She survived, but was left with permanent lung impairment.

This incident has already been the subject of a New York Times article written by Solomon Moore on July 6, 2007. Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, a non-profit advocacy organization, filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs’ attorney John T. Richards, who also represents other mothers and children who were injured in this same facility, stated, "Any time we can get a law on the books to protect the most vulnerable among us, it is a good day for justice. I can't think of anyone more vulnerable than a 5-week-old infant sent to the custody of a private prison, run by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which has no medical staff."

Carol Strickman, staff attorney for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, hailed the ruling, stating, “Denisha Lawson heroically fought to save her daughter’s life, risking her own well-being. We are thrilled that the court is allowing Denisha and Esperanza access to justice.”

The full opinion in this case, Lawson v. Superior Court (Center Point, Inc. et al., Real Parties in Interest), which the Court certified for publication, may be viewed on the Court website at http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/D055396.PDF.

# # #

This was sent by Tandrea Madison, Media Coordinator
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, San Francisco, CA 94102
tandrea@prisonerswithchildren.org

Posted by lois at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)

Editorial: Sentenced to Abuse

Editorial: Sentenced to Abuse
Published: January 14, 2010
NY Times

The Justice Department needs to act swiftly and decisively to protect young people who are being battered and raped in juvenile corrections facilities all across the country. A shocking new study by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics surveyed more than 9,000 young people in custody and found that 12 percent reported being sexually abused one or more times, mainly by staff members.

Particularly alarming, the study found several juvenile facilities where 30 percent or more of the young people reported being raped. Some of the institutions with high rates of victimization were in Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas.

These latest findings are consistent with those reported in June by a federal commission created by Congress under the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act. The commission, which examined the problem for five years, also outlined a list of sensible policy changes, which the Justice Department has the power to make mandatory for all corrections institutions that accept federal money.

The commission said that corrections facilities must make it easier for victims to report abuse without fear of reprisal and promptly and thoroughly investigate all rape claims. It said that prison employees must be better screened before they are hired, and they must be better trained in how to deal with vulnerable young people.

The commission also called on state corrections agencies to develop written zero-tolerance rules for employees of adult and juvenile facilities — and write those rules into union contracts. Employees must be put on notice that they will be held accountable if they participate in sexual assaults or look the other way when they occur.

The 2003 law gave the United States attorney general until June of this year to evaluate the commission’s findings and issue new rape-prevention standards. But juvenile justice advocates worry that the Justice Department will allow state corrections officials to water down those requirements, partly by arguing that they will be too expensive to implement. The department should not allow that to happen. If it does, Congress will have to strengthen the legislation. Zero tolerance for abuse in prisons or juvenile facilities must be the law of the land.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 15, 2010, on page A26 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opinion/15fri3.html

Posted by lois at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2010

Haiti: Country Without a Net

Op-Ed Contributor
Country Without a Net

By TRACY KIDDER
Published: January 13, 2010 NY Times

THOSE who know a little of Haiti’s history might have watched the news last night and thought, as I did for a moment: “An earthquake? What next? Poor Haiti is cursed.”

But while earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade. And the history of Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters — to floods and famine and disease as well as to this terrible earthquake — is long and complex, but the essence of it seems clear enough.

Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)

Hence the current state of affairs: at least 10,000 private organizations perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, yet it remains one of the world’s poorest countries. Some of the money that private aid organizations rely on comes from the United States government, which has insisted that a great deal of the aid return to American pockets — a larger percentage than that of any other industrialized country.

But that is only part of the problem. In the arena of international aid, a great many efforts, past and present, appear to have been doomed from the start. There are the many projects that seem designed to serve not impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the projects. Most important, a lot of organizations seem to be unable — and some appear to be unwilling — to create partnerships with each other or, and this is crucial, with the public sector of the society they’re supposed to serve.

The usual excuse, that a government like Haiti’s is weak and suffers from corruption, doesn’t hold — all the more reason, indeed, to work with the government. The ultimate goal of all aid to Haiti ought to be the strengthening of Haitian institutions, infrastructure and expertise.

This week, the list of things that Haiti needs, things like jobs and food and reforestation, has suddenly grown a great deal longer. The earthquake struck mainly the capital and its environs, the most densely populated part of the country, where organizations like the Red Cross and the United Nations have their headquarters. A lot of the places that could have been used for disaster relief — including the central hospital, such as it was — are now themselves disaster areas.

But there are effective aid organizations working in Haiti. At least one has not been crippled by the earthquake. Partners in Health, or in Haitian Creole Zanmi Lasante, has been the largest health care provider in rural Haiti. (I serve on this organization’s development committee.) It operates, in partnership with the Haitian Ministry of Health, some 10 hospitals and clinics, all far from the capital and all still intact. As a result of this calamity, Partners in Health probably just became the largest health care provider still standing in all Haiti.

Fortunately, it also offers a solid model for independence — a model where only a handful of Americans are involved in day-to-day operations, and Haitians run the show. Efforts like this could provide one way for Haiti, as it rebuilds, to renew the promise of its revolution.

Tracy Kidder is the author of “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about Haiti, and “Strength in What Remains.”
A version of this article appeared in print on January 14, 2010, on page A37 of the New York edition.
Partners in Health: http://www.pih.org/who/vision.html (at the donate page you can specify earthquake relief)

Posted by lois at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)

Drug Policy Alliance on Legal Aid Society Report Finding that 2004 and 2005 Rockefeller Drug Reforms a Huge Success

Sections of the press release from DPA. A link to the Legal Aid Society report is at the bottom of this email.

January14,2009
New Legal Aid Society Report Finds that 2004 and 2005 Rockefeller Drug Law Reforms Huge Success: Tens of Millions of Dollars Saved with Low Levels of Recidivism by Individuals Released from Prison
New York Prosecutors Lose Credibility as Report Counters Past and Current Misleading Claims

New York— A new report released today by the Legal Aid Society of New York shows that the changes to the Rockefeller Drug Laws in ‘04 and ‘05 have been a huge success with tens of millions of dollars being saved and remarkably low levels of recidivism of people who have been re-sentenced and released from prison. On average, people who were re-sentenced and released early from prison as a result of the 2004 and 2005 drug law reforms have an overall recidivism rate of 8.5 percent, while the overall rate of recidivism rate for people released in the same period is nearly 40 percent.

The report analyzes data related to the 2004 and 2005 reforms to the Rockefeller Drug Laws, where over 1,000 incarcerated people became eligible for resentencing and release. The findings illustrate that New York’s judges are exercising their discretion on a case by case basis and proving to be an effective screen that protects the community from new crime. The recidivism rate for those people who were re-sentenced and have been out of prison for three years is about three times better than that produced by the highly praised DOCS Shock program. The report also finds by resentencing and releasing eligible people under drug law reform, the state saved over $40 million.

“The process by which judges exercise discretion who should be resentenced has shown to be effective,” said William Gibney, an attorney and co-author of the report. “The majority of those re-sentenced and released under the drug law reform have not committed new crimes. Despite the claims of dangerous consequences by District Attorneys in opposing re-sentencing petitions, the people released so far under the drug law re-sentencing provisions have proven to pose a low risk to the community.”

Building on the limited reforms of 2004 and 2005, Governor Paterson enacted real reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws in 2009, which included expanding treatment instead of incarceration for low level drug offenses and allowing for over 1,000 people incarcerated on low-level nonviolent drug offenses to petition the court for resentencing. During every step of the process, some district attorneys worked to block the reforms and their implementation, promising that real reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws would result in chaos on the streets.

http://www.legal-aid.org/media/127984/drug-law-reform-paper-2009.pdf

Posted by lois at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Apple Valley considers a prison

Apple Valley ponders state prison
January 10, 2010
BROOKE EDWARDS Staff Writer

APPLE VALLEY • Plans to build a 500-bed state prison facility on the northern edge of town are back before the council Tuesday.

The town first expressed support for the reentry facility in May 2008, citing its goal to reduce prisoner recidivism and promises it’ll employ 325 to 350 people with average salaries of $85,000.

Now the state is asking Apple Valley to execute a “Will Serve” letter, agreeing to provide sewer service to the planned 22,000-square-foot prison adjacent to the Juvenile Detention Center on Dale Evans Parkway.

The Secure Community Reentry Facility will house inmates during the last six to 12 months of their sentences, with counseling and job training planned to help them reintegrate into society.

It grew out of 2007’s Assembly 900 prison reform initiative to reduce overcrowding in the state prison system and reduce the state’s 70-percent recidivism rate.

Candidates for the Apple Valley prison will be screened for selection, with the CDCR looking for those most likely to return to prison after their release.

A presentation from the CDCR and the council’s vote on sewer service for the facility are scheduled during the meeting starting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in Town Hall, at 14955 Dale Evans Parkway. Residents can also watch the meeting online at www.AppleValley.org.
http://www.vvdailypress.com/news/apple-16626-valley-ponders.html

Posted by lois at 10:35 AM | Comments (0)

Cornell Co. Announces contract with BoP to cage 2,507 immigrants

Cornell Companies Announces Contract Award With Federal Bureau of Prisons
Globe Newswire
January 12, 2010: 04:02 PM ET

HOUSTON, Jan. 12, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cornell Companies, Inc. (NYSE:CRN) announced today that it has received a contract award from the Federal Bureau of Prisons ("BOP") to house up to 2,507 low-security adult male inmates in Cornell's D. Ray James Correctional Facility ("D. Ray James") located in Folkston, Georgia pursuant to the Criminal Alien Requirement X ("CAR-10") procurement.

In 2008, the BOP issued the CAR-10 procurement for the housing of approximately 3,814 low security adult male inmates currently housed at two correctional facilities and anticipated that the requirement would be fulfilled through multiple awards.

The contract has an anticipated effective date of October 1, 2010 and has an initial four-year term with three two-year options. While the base contract population is 2,180 inmates, the contract allows for a population up to the 2,507 maximum capacity. Prior to the effective date of the contract, the Company expects to spend between $5.0 million and $10.0 million to prepare D. Ray James for the BOP inmates. The Company estimates that it could earn revenues of approximately $205 million during the initial four-year term of the contract.

The Company intends to provide earnings guidance for the first quarter and full-year 2010 on its fourth quarter 2009 investor call, expected to be held in late February, 2010. At that time the Company expects to be able to discuss the impact on 2010 earnings from the ramp down of the Georgia Department of Corrections' inmates currently housed at D. Ray James and other one-time transition costs. The Company expects that the U.S. Marshals Service will continue to house detainees at this location as the CAR-10 contract does not affect the approximately 300-bed unit located adjacent to the main facility.

James E. Hyman, Cornell's chairman, president and chief executive officer, said, "Our company has served the Federal Bureau of Prisons for 28 years. We are honored that they have selected our D. Ray James facility in Georgia to house up to twenty-five hundred of their inmates over the coming decade. This will be our third facility meeting the BOP's criminal alien requirements, and we look forward to demonstrating our commitment to safety, security and service with a total of approximately 7,500 federal inmates."

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements regarding the expected contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, anticipated population and operating revenues at D. Ray James, completion of preparations for the BOP inmates at D. Ray James, anticipated financial impacts, as well as any other statements that are not historical facts, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws that involve certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions. These include but are not limited to risks and uncertainties associated with general economic and market conditions, including the impact governmental budgets can have on our per diem rates and occupancy, Cornell's ability to perform according to its current expectations, changes in supply and demand, actions by government agencies and other third parties, access to capital and other risks and uncertainties detailed in the Company's most recent Form 10-K and other filings made by us from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available free of charge on the SEC's Web site at www.sec.gov. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from the statements made. All information set forth in this release is current as of the date of this release. Cornell undertakes no duty to update any statement in light of new information or future events.

About Cornell Companies

Cornell Companies, Inc. (http://www.cornellcompanies.com) is a leading private provider of corrections, treatment and educational services outsourced by federal, state and local governmental agencies. Cornell provides a diversified portfolio of services for adults and juveniles, including incarceration and detention, transition from incarceration, drug and alcohol treatment programs, behavioral rehabilitation and treatment, and grades 3-12 alternative education in an environment of dignity and respect, emphasizing community safety and rehabilitation in support of public policy. At December 31, 2009, the Company had 68 facilities in 15 states and the District of Columbia and a total service capacity of 21,392.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/globenewswire/181782.htm

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

January 13, 2010

CA: Judges OK Schwarzenegger plan to reduce prison crowding

Judges OK Schwarzenegger plan to reduce prison crowding
The proposal includes some home detention with satellite tracking devices, permitting some felons to serve time in county jails instead of state prisons and reducing sentences for property crimes.

By Michael Rothfeld

January 13, 2010

Reporting from Sacramento

A panel of three federal judges Tuesday approved a court-ordered plan submitted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to reduce overcrowding in California prisons by 40,000 inmates within two years.

The judges ruled against the state in August in two lawsuits by inmates who argued that overcrowding was the main cause of inadequate medical and mental health care in the prisons.

Schwarzenegger has appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but he was ordered in the meantime to come up with a plan to fix the problems. U.S. District Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt make up the panel.

They rejected his first proposal in October, saying it did not meet the required population targets or timeline. The governor's next attempt, submitted in November, was acceptable, the judges said. They ordered Schwarzenegger to implement it pending the resolution of his appeal of the case to the Supreme Court.

"We do not intervene lightly in the state's management of its prisons," the judges wrote Tuesday. "However, the state's long-standing failure to provide constitutionally adequate medical and mental health care to its prison inmates has necessitated our actions."

The nation's high court is expected to decide as early as Friday whether to take up the matter. Schwarzenegger's spokesman, Aaron McLear, said in a statement that administration officials "expect that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear our appeal on whether federal judges have the authority to order the early release of prisoners in our state."

If the state loses, the judges said, officials will have to meet interim population targets every six months, while submitting progress reports, before completing the plan within two years.

Schwarzenegger said in his plan that he would work with lawmakers to approve measures they rejected last year, including home detention with satellite tracking devices for some inmates; permitting some felons to serve time in county jails instead of state prisons; and reducing sentences for property crimes.

The governor also said he would need more prisoner transfers to other states, private prison construction and suspension of Civil Service rules, among other solutions.

If lawmakers refuse to go along, the judges could waive state law and order the measures implemented, Schwarzenegger said. The judges said they would consider waiving laws once the state had shown that other solutions had failed.

In another prison-related conflict Tuesday, state Controller John Chiang told Schwarzenegger's aides that he intends to end forced furloughs for correctional officers this month, prompting a threat from the governor's office to dock other pay from prison workers and make layoffs. The furloughs have been in effect nearly a year and amount to a 15% reduction in pay.

The dispute centers on the governor's appeal of a Dec. 29 order by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch overturning the furloughs for members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. The governor's office said the appeal, filed Dec. 31, triggers an automatic stay of the court decision.

"The controller has overstepped his authority by taking this illegal action during our appeal," McLear said.

But Chiang's chief counsel, Richard Chivaro, contended in a letter to the governor's personnel chief that the type of order Roesch issued can't be appealed. For pay in January, the controller "has eliminated the pay differential and will pay the amount due for all hours worked," Chivaro wrote.

McLear said the state would file an emergency appeal. If that fails, he said, Schwarzenegger will begin cutting other pay union members receive for performing special duties and for retirement, along with instituting layoffs.
latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons13-2010jan13,0,2715687.story

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

January 12, 2010

New Site: Solitary Watch

From Jim Ridgeway about the launch of Solitary Watch

New Site: Solitary Watch

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 10:49 AM PST

Readers of Unsilent Generation will know that I’ve written before on prison reform issues, aging behind bars, and the case of the Angola 3, which involves men who have spent decades in solitary confinement. I’ve now launched a new web site, in collaboration with writer and editor Jean Casella, called Solitary Watch News.

Solitary Watch News site is part of an emerging project called Solitary Watch, which will serve as the first centralized source of information on solitary confinement in the United States. The full Solitary Watch web site–which will be hosted by the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse (VC3), a clinical program of the Washington and Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia directed by veteran death penalty attorney David Bruck–will be launched in the spring of 2010.

Why Solitary Watch?

Many Americans have recoiled from the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and polls show that a clear majority oppose the use of torture under any circumstances, even on foreign terrorism suspects. Yet conditions of confinement in U.S. prisons and jails that transgress the boundaries of humane treatment have produced little outcry.

The use of solitary confinement in the United States provides the clearest example of this situtation. Solitary confinement has grown dramatically in the past two decades. Today, at least 25,000 prisoners are being held in long-term lockdown in the nation’s ”supermax” facilities; some 50,000 to 80,000 more are held in isolation in “administrative segregation” or “special housing” units at other facilities. In other words, on any given day, as many as 100,000 people are living in solitary confinement in America’s prisons. This widespread practice has received scant media attention, and has yet to find a place in the public discourse or on political platforms.

Solitary Watch is conceived as an innovative public web site aimed at bringing this issue out of the shadows and into the light of the public square. The mission of Solitary Watch is to provide the public—as well as practicing attorneys, legal scholars, law enforcement and corrections officers, policymakers, educators, advocates, and prisoners–with the first comprehensive source of information on solitary confinement in the United States. Combining a database compiled through state-by-state research with background, analysis, and breaking news, the site will serve as an information clearinghouse, educational resource, and online community.

Why now?

This project is being launched at a pivotal moment, coinciding with several important developments in U.S. criminal justice. As Americans’ support for executions wanes in the wake of numerous exonerations and excessive costs, the alternative punishment of choice seems to be long-term solitary confinement, whether on prison death rows or in supermax lockdown units. Solitary confinement also awaits accused and convicted terrorists as they are transferred onto American soil from Guantanamo and elsewhere. Finally, in the absence of appropriate medical care, solitary confinement has increasingly been used as a way to control and warehouse mentally ill prisoners. As these trends continue, there will be an increasing need for a comprehensive, reliable source of information on this practice, and on the many practical, legal, and ethical questions it raises.

I hope you will visit the site and subscribe to Solitary Watch News at http://solitarywatch.wordpress.com/.

Posted by lois at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)

Prevent criminal activity, spend less on prisons

Prevent criminal activity, spend less on prisons

Patrick J. Boyd,Rachel Davis

Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Inmates are crowded into bunks at California State Prison...

Are cost-saving prisons the California dream?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to funnel money toward higher education by addressing prison costs in California. Sure, we could save money by running our prisons more efficiently, but no parent dreams that their kid will grow up to live in a well-run prison. The real savings to California - to the budget and in society- lie in reducing the number of people we put in prison.

In the past 30 years, California's population has increased by 62percent, while our prison population has increased by a 645 percent. Violent crime didn't increase by 645 percent. Two simple steps will get us all back on track.

The first step involves addressing the reasons behind the explosion in incarceration rates. For example, experts know that there is an intimate link between substance use and criminal activity. So it just isn't right that someone in California - who genuinely wants help with his addiction - might wait weeks or often months for a slot in a treatment program, while there's always a bed available in the nearby prison. Dedicating more resources for treatment, and making sure the corrections system understands the recovery process and doesn't put someone back behind bars at the first sign of relapse, would quickly reduce the number of prisoners.

Even more important is to practice prevention first. Behaviors behind criminal activity, like substance abuse and violence, are preventable, not inevitable. To put effective prevention in place, people from multiple agencies - from parks and recreation to public transportation - need to coordinate their efforts. High-level leadership must ask questions that hold people accountable. How is the economic development agency creating jobs in low-income neighborhoods? Is the planning commission putting in zoning restrictions on how many liquor stores and bars can operate in one neighborhood or fostering social connections through community design? How is the park and recreation department strengthening youth leadership through its programming?

In our culture of arrest and imprisonment, it might be shocking to think of youth leadership programs and alcohol zoning restrictions as ways of saving money in the criminal justice system, but that is exactly the effect quality prevention has.

Want proof? Try San Francisco's Truancy Reduction Initiative, which has shown a 20 percent reduction in early childhood truancy by working with parents. Oakland offers the City-County Neighborhood Initiative to engage residents from Sobrante Park in community-strengthening efforts like neighbor-to-neighbor bartering and youth economic development programs. Evaluation data from 2007 shows a more than 40 percent reduction in Sobrante Park's violent crime since the initiative began in 2004, even while overall rates of violent crime in Oakland increased.

Now that's a dream we can all get behind.

Patrick J. Boyd has spent 30 years as a corrections leader in California and recently retired from his post as the San Francisco chief adult probation officer. Rachel Davis is managing director at Oakland's Prevention Institute, where she oversees the CDC-funded UNITY violence prevention initiative.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/12/ED9C1BGLQS.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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

January 10, 2010

Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail

Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: January 9, 2010- NY Times

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”

In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.

But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.

Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.

On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.

Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.

But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.

“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.

The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.

But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.

“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”

That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.

Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.

Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.

According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.

“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”

In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.

A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 10, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Links to other articles on these stories at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html

Posted by lois at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2010

Common sense on prison, education funds By Derrick Z. Jackson

"Massachusetts was no different than any other state. According to Pew data, the commonwealth had the nation’s sixth-highest ratio of corrections spending compared to higher education spending. In 1987, Massachusetts spent 30 cents on corrections for every dollar spent on state colleges and universities. In 2007, the ratio was virtually dollar for dollar. The ratio of adults under some form of correctional control in the state soared from 1 in 127 in 1982 to 1 in 24 in 2008. This is despite many studies showing that investing in education has a massive benefit-cost ratio to individuals, to society and to the economy."

Common sense on prison, education funds
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Boston Globe Columnist / January 9, 2010

CALLING STATE prison and education funding priorities “out of whack,’’ Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California proposed a constitutional amendment this week barring the state from spending a higher percentage on prisons than higher education. He said that in the last 30 years, prison spending increased from 3 percent of the state general fund to 11 percent while higher education spending declined from 10 percent to 7.5 percent.

Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future,’’ he said.

Indeed. It is hard to know where the specific proposal will go, as cheering by university officials was countered by condemnation from powerful corrections unions. Schwarzenegger is proposing prison savings through privatization. But the spirit of his speech should become a governing principle in a nation where the effects of the prison boom remain completely out of whack.

Nationwide, the Pew Center on the States says prison spending rose six times more than spending for higher education in adjusted dollars from 1987 to 2007. The national federal and state prison population nearly tripled in that time, from 585,000 to 1.6 million. Including local jails, the United States had 2.3 million people locked up by 2007. This is more than the 1.5 million inmates in more-numerous China and 2 1/2 times more than third-place Russia.

It is a good bet that the United States has frittered away a decent chunk of our former global advantages with gulag politics. Over the years, I have cited many examples of this phenomenon from national and state crime bills passed during the last quarter-century. New York State went from spending twice as much on universities in 1988 to spending more on prisons than higher education in 1996. President Clinton’s push for national service was dwarfed by a $23 billion 1993 Senate crime bill that spent twice as much on boot camps than national service and $3 billion for prisons but only $1.2 billion for job training and drug treatment for nonviolent offenders.

Massachusetts was no different than any other state. According to Pew data, the commonwealth had the nation’s sixth-highest ratio of corrections spending compared to higher education spending. In 1987, Massachusetts spent 30 cents on corrections for every dollar spent on state colleges and universities. In 2007, the ratio was virtually dollar for dollar. The ratio of adults under some form of correctional control in the state soared from 1 in 127 in 1982 to 1 in 24 in 2008. This is despite many studies showing that investing in education has a massive benefit-cost ratio to individuals, to society and to the economy.

Politicians have long understood that trade-off, and by the mid-1990s some prominent Republicans agreed with Democrats that we could not jail our way out of social and economic problems with three-strike laws that condemned nonviolent offenders along with murderers. But almost always, harsh political winds blew down sweeping reform, guaranteeing the continued siphoning of billions of dollars away from treatment, rehabilitation, and education.

The budget crisis in the states finally has both Republican and Democratic governors talking about downsizing expensive and overcrowded prisons and providing more treatment to nonviolent drug offenders. But the laws that filled the jails await reform. For instance, one of the most discriminatory laws of the get-tough era, one that punishes possession of crack cocaine more than powdered cocaine, remains on the federal books 15 years after Clinton said that the disparities were wrong. Proposals to end the disparities are being debated in Congress and President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, says the administration wants to do away with them.

The laws are so embarrassing that this week, in an interview with the Boston Globe editorial board, Democratic senatorial candidate and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley called the cocaine laws “crazy.’’ It is refreshing to hear a Democrat like her and a Republican like Schwarzenegger say that our criminal justice priorities are insane, with education always getting the strait-jacket. It is the first step out of the asylum.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/01/09/common_sense_on_prison_education_funds/

Posted by lois at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2010

Justice Department Study: Youths Sexually Abused in Juvenile Prisons

Study: Youths sexually abused in juvenile prisons
USA Today 1-8-10
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY

More than 12% of youths in juvenile prisons are sexually abused while in custody there, according to a Justice Department study out Thursday, and the vast majority of cases involve female staff and boys under their supervision.

In the worst facilities surveyed — in Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina and Texas — more than 30% of youths reported they had been sexually victimized. The study, the first of its kind, shows a rate of sexual assault more than seven times higher than that indicated by a 2008 Justice Department report that collected sexual abuse claims to juvenile facility administrators. It is also higher than a similar study of adult prisons because of the "very high rate of staff sexual misconduct," said Allen Beck, who directed the survey for the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The survey of 9,198 youths ages 13 to 21 — all in custody by order of a juvenile court — included methods to eliminate interviews considered unreliable. The survey covered 195 facilities, at least one in each state. Approximately 26,550 juveniles — 91% of them boys — are held in more than 500 such facilities around the country.

The survey showed that 10.3% of youths reported the sexual contact was with staff, compared with 2.6% who reported sexual victimization by other youths. In nearly half the incidents with staff, youths reported having sexual contact as a result of force.

The study sets a wider definition of sexual contact than rape, Beck said. Nonetheless, "these are all things that in the outside world would be considered violent or, by definition in law, they are illegal," he said.

Sexual victimization of youths in custody "is one of those hidden closets of the system," said Bart Lubow, director of the juvenile justice and strategy group for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which advocates for children. The rates at the worst facilities are "so high they're stunning," he said. "I am, on the other hand, never surprised as people peel the layers of the youth corrections onion and expose more and more things that make you cry."

Linda McFarlane of Just Detention International, an advocacy group focused on eliminating sexual abuse in prison, called the highest rates of abuse "shocking beyond belief."

"The incredibly high rates of staff misconduct is shocking and disturbing," McFarlane said. "We just need to do a better job with training and recruitment and hiring and supervision."

The survey showed that gay youths reported higher levels of sexual abuse from other juveniles, and so did youths who had been abused before coming to the facility.

That makes the survey valuable for juvenile facilities other than the type covered in the survey, she said. "While we can't say we know what's happening in, say, the smaller group-home settings … we can look at the information in this report and use it to protect those (particularly vulnerable) kids."

In Maryland, where 36% of youths surveyed at Backbone Mountain Youth Center said they had been victimized, the state Department of Juvenile Services said in a statement Thursday there will be an independent investigation by the state human resources and health agencies.

At Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility in Indiana, which also had among the highest rates of abuse in the study, four female guards were suspended a month ago after a report of sexual abuse, said Edwin Buss, state corrections commissioner.

Indiana officials say their own surveys show a much lower rate of sexual victimization.

"We're not denying that this happens," said Amanda Copeland, executive director of research and technology for the state Corrections Department. "We would be foolish to say that it never happens. We're just questioning the extent to which it's being reported" by the Justice Department. But the survey "gives us something to work with. Whether we agree with the percentages or the ratings or not, we recognize that we have issues and we need to address them, and we're taking steps to do so."

MAP of JUVENILE FACILITIES WITH HIGH RATES OF SEXUAL VICTIMIZATION at this URL
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-01-07-juvenile-prison-sexual-abuse_N.htm

Posted by lois at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: Spineless in California

"The only real way for California to cut prison costs is to reverse sentencing policies that have filled its prisons to bursting and have driven up costs by about 50 percent over the last decade alone. Among other things, too many minor offenders are sent to jail for too long."

Editorial
Spineless in California
Published: January 7, 2010- NY Times

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California was on the mark when he said this week that the state needed to change policies that spend more money on prisons than on the state’s once-vaunted higher education systems, which are being bled to death in budget cuts. But Mr. Schwarzenegger was way off the mark when he suggested that the answer was to privatize prison services or to pass yet another constitutional amendment, this time to limit prison spending.

States that privatize prisons sometimes save money, but they can also buy trouble by ceding control to companies that put profit first and inmate welfare a distant second. That would be disastrous for the California prison system. It is already under pressure from scores of court orders that require it to reduce its growing prison count and provide adequate mental, medical and dental services, as well as better care for the disabled.

It would generally be impossible for the state to unilaterally lower prison spending without first cutting the prison population dramatically. And because so much prison spending is nondiscretionary, a constitutional amendment that reduced spending — without cutting the prison population — would be doomed to failure. It would also draw the ire of judges who have rightly run out of patience with the state’s long list of failures in this area.

The only real way for California to cut prison costs is to reverse sentencing policies that have filled its prisons to bursting and have driven up costs by about 50 percent over the last decade alone. Among other things, too many minor offenders are sent to jail for too long.

The Legislature tinkered at the margins of this problem last year. But real sentencing reform has proved impossible in the State Assembly, where lawmakers live in fear of the politically powerful corrections officers’ union lobby, which enforces the status quo by labeling reformers as soft on crime.

Sleight of hand will not cut prison costs in California. To do that, lawmakers will need to find their spines.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 8, 2010, on page A26 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/opinion/08fri3.html

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

January 07, 2010

CA: Governor's call for giving colleges priority over prisons faces hard political tests

Governor's call for giving colleges priority over prisons faces hard political tests

Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to save money by privatizing prisons and the wisdom of linking the funding of universities and corrections facilities present formidable obstacles in Sacramento.

By Shane Goldmacher and Larry Gordon
January 7, 2010
Reporting from Los Angeles and Sacramento

At the center of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's State of the State speech Wednesday was a proposal that outside of Sacramento might seem like common sense: Mandate that the state invest more dollars each year in its public universities than in locking people up in prison.

But to many inside the Capitol, that idea appears all but unattainable.

The plan -- and the reaction to it -- highlights the disconnect between the priorities of voters and the reality of the state's shattered finances and a policymaking process that often seems byzantine.

"In concept, it absolutely makes sense to everyone," said Thad Kousser, visiting professor of political science at Stanford University. But "when you look at the trade-offs that the state might face to get there, it gets a lot harder."

The proposal for a constitutional change that would require more spending on higher education than prisons was the key headline as Schwarzenegger delivered his final State of the State speech, in which he also asked legislators to approve a jobs creation program and urged them to join him in pushing for increased funding from Washington.

The governor's plan aims to bring back the days when the state funneled more money into University of California and California State University classrooms than into its prisons. It has been at least five years since that has been the case. It comes at a time when tuitions are soaring and course offerings are being cut.

The state's public universities, long considered an economic engine and a source of pride for California, have proved to be an easier target for budget cuts than other major programs, which are protected by politically powerful unions, deep pocketed corporate interests or federal laws limiting the state's ability to cut.

"What does it say about a state that focuses more on prison uniforms than caps and gowns?" Schwarzenegger said. "The priorities have become out of whack. . . . Thirty years ago, 10% of the general fund went to higher education and 3% went to prisons. Today, almost 11% goes to prisons and only 7.5% goes to higher education."

The governor called for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit corrections spending from outstripping funds for higher education by 2014-2015. The plan would require approval from lawmakers and voters.

University leaders said they were delighted that the governor was championing the proposed amendment, which UC President Mark G. Yudof called "a visionary way to address the issues."

Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the 23-campus Cal State system, acknowledged that gaining approval for the measure would require "heavy lifting," but said he thought it ultimately could win favor with the Legislature and voters.

"It's a step to begin to change the culture of California back to investing in California's future rather than just paying expenses for California's failures," Reed said.

But lawmakers have been unable to trim the corrections budget for years. Voters and politicians alike have approved years of stiffer sentences and stricter rules for parolees -- driving up the prison population. The result has been a prison network bursting at the seams, with federal judges taking control of prisoners' healthcare and ordering the state to either release tens of thousands of inmates or boost prison spending by billions. Lawmakers so far have chosen to keep spending.

Although some legislators applauded the governor's goal, they were immediately skeptical of his plan for reaching it.

It calls for cutting spending through privatization -- either having private companies run prisons or hiring private firms to supply state-run facilities with guards, doctors, teachers and other employees. Most current prison workers are part of a powerful union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.

"I don't think privatizing prisons is the answer," said Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles). "I think we need to look at why California incarcerates more people than any other state. We need to look at ways to reduce recidivism and we certainly need to look at sentencing reform."

Republicans tend to support privatization, but they have other concerns. Many of the state's financial problems have been exacerbated by conflicting constitutional mandates already on the books that dictate increased spending for various programs each year. The new proposal would be another of those. And GOP lawmakers are not eager to impose the prison cuts that would be required to free up money for universities.

"The most essential of government functions is public safety," said Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Thousand Oaks), "and we have to make sure that's our top priority."

In the current budget, UC, Cal State and the state's Cal Grant financial aid program combined to receive about $6 billion, not including revenues from student fees. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation received $8.12 billion, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. Under the governor's plan, spending on UC, Cal State and Cal Grants would have to account for at least 10% of the state's general fund by 2014-15; prisons could receive no more than 7%. The guarantee could be suspended by a two-thirds vote of the Legislature.

Changing that ratio would require the type of deep cuts in prison spending that Sacramento has long balked at making. Federal courts also would have to give their blessing. Short of deep cuts in the prison budget, the only other way to meet the mandate would be to find billions of new dollars for universities elsewhere in the budget at a time when the state is facing enormous deficits.

In the 1970s, the share of the state budget set aside for UC, Cal State and state financial aid was about 13%, nearly four times as large as the percentage for corrections, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission. Funding for the two sectors drew close in the early 1990s and prisons then pulled ahead consistently starting in 2004-05, the commission reported.

Steve Boilard, director of higher education issues in the Legislative Analyst's Office, questioned the proposed link between higher education and prisons, even if it might appeal to voters.

"It's apples and oranges," he said of universities and prisons. "Why should state spending on higher education be determined on how much we save on prison reform?"

Yudof, president of the 10-campus UC system, said he did not know whether it was politically wise to link university and prison funding. But he hailed the governor's plan as "a very useful opening salvo" to restore higher education funding.

"I don't have any particular argument with corrections or the need to lock up bad guys," Yudof said. "But having the best prison system in the world is not going to create jobs the way having the best university system will."
latimes.com/news/local/la-me-education-prison7-2010jan07,0,3859928.story
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

Posted by lois at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)

CA: (Some) Experts laud Schwarzenegger's plan to shift prison funds to universities

Experts laud Schwarzenegger's plan to shift prison funds to universities
By Charles Piller
Sacramento Bee
Published: Thursday, Jan. 7, 2010

Prison, legal and financial experts generally praised Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to shift state prison funding to public universities, but said a constitutional amendment that ties the government's hands in perpetuity could cause more harm than good.

"The governor, some years ago, railed against autopilot budgeting," said Steve Boilard, director of higher education for the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst's Office. "This is just another set of restrictions that may not make sense in future years."

Beginning in 2014, the governor's proposed amendment would dedicate at least 10 percent of the state general fund to the University of California and California State University systems and limit prison spending to no more than 7 percent – approximately reversing the amounts in those lines in this year's budget.

That plan would have to roll back vast increases in prison outlays in recent years, used in part to underwrite rising wages and benefits, and new medical programs.

Experts blame constitutional restrictions on taxation and spending – which, once in place, are difficult to alter or dislodge – for much of the state's ongoing budget crisis.

Professor Jesse Choper, a constitutional scholar at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, said that even funding for higher education should not be set in constitutional concrete, impervious to other state needs. "You've got to be very selective in what you make immune to normal changes of mind," he said.

Schwarzenegger also proposed increased privatization – using private employees in state prisons or contracting out the housing of prisoners to corporate prisons – to cut costs. According to Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation figures, California spends about $50,000 per prisoner annually, compared to a $32,000 average for the next 10 largest states. Department spokesman Gordon Hinkle agreed that costs could be reduced sharply by using more private prisons.

Joan Petersilia, a leading prison expert and professor at Stanford Law School, said contracting out low-security prisoners to private prisons is a proven cost-saving measure. Currently, California sends about 8,000 of its approximately 170,000 inmates to private facilities in Mississippi, Oklahoma and Arizona.

"It's so cost effective because 70 percent of housing someone in a California prison is due to personnel costs, and our costs are higher in California," she said.

According to a National Institute of Justice study, savings from privatization are sometimes prone to exaggeration. In comparisons of a private prison in the Kern County city of Taft with public prisons in Ohio, Arkansas and Mississippi, the private facility was less costly to operate – by as little as 2.2 percent or as much as 14.8 percent, depending on the assumptions.

Dr. Stuart A. Bussey, president of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, which represents prison doctors, dentists and some other employees, said cost savings at private prisons can be deceptive when they are subsidized by special state spending.

Prison corporations "are slaves to their stock values," he said, and often cut services and hire inexperienced employees, leading to unnecessary escapes and violence between inmates. "Anytime you have private profiteering mixing with public service," Bussey said, "you have an inherent conflict of interest."

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which represents guards, has consistently opposed privatization. Spokesman Lance Corcoran said his union does not talk to Bee journalists because of disagreements with editorials and articles. The Service Employees International Union Local 1000, which represents many prison medical care workers, also declined to comment.

Hinkle suggested some savings could be realized by bringing more private clinical employees into state prisons to provide health services.

A recent Bee investigation of prison health staffing showed just the opposite, however. It found that employees of private health care employment agencies working in state prisons cost far more than state employees doing the same jobs.

J. Clark Kelso, the court-appointed receiver who manages prison health care, declined to comment on the governor's proposal. While Kelso has scaled back plans for $8 billion in new hospitals, he still intends to spend heavily on construction to accommodate the aging inmate population. New medical programs, raises for clinicians, and special guards for medical appointments already have added billions to prison spending in recent years.

To achieve the governor's proposed 30 percent budget cut, Hinkle acknowledged, also would require parole reform to reduce the flow of ex-convicts thrown back in prison for technical violations of parole restrictions.

A recent court order – on appeal by the state – would require a sharp reduction in the state's prison population. Yet the governor's plan would forbid early release of some nonviolent offenders to cut costs.
http://www.sacbee.com/capitolandcalifornia/story/2443793.html

Posted by lois at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Private prisons? A sweet deal for some

Private prisons? A sweet deal for some
By Dan Morain

Published: Thursday, Jan. 7, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 13A

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is bullish on private prisons. And no one could be happier than the executives at Corrections Corp. Of America.
It has been a mutually beneficial relationship for the governor and this private prison corporation, and it also offers the side benefit of distracting one of the governor's main foils - California's prison guard union.

In his final State of the State on Wednesday, the governor grabbed attention by announcing plans for a constitutional amendment that would require California to spend more on universities than on prisons. One way to slash billions from prison spending would be to privatize prisons, the governor said, rather optimistically.
Californians who value higher education will find some appeal in the governor's proposal. But they should know that such a shift would also benefit Corrections Corp. Of America. The Tennesee-based company has forged a particularly close bond with the Schwarzenegger administration, and is profiting handsomely from California's prison crisis.

Facing prison crowding, inmates' lawsuits, and demands by judges that the state provide better health and mental health care to prisoners, Schwarzenegger declared an emergency in 2006 and began shipping inmates to private prisons outside the state.
These are criminals who are rightly paying for their bad acts. But under this emergency order, the inmates clearly have become a commodity. Their value is on the rise.

The state inked its first deal to house inmates at Corrections Corp. Prisons on Oct. 19, 2006. It began modestly enough: 900 inmates at four lock-ups, $63 per head per day, at a cost of over $20 million.
Three years and three months later, the Corrections Corp. Contract has been amended multiple times. The state now has authority to house 10,000 inmates in Corrections Corp. Lock-ups, at costs of as much as $72 per inmate per day. The overall contract amount has ballooned to $632 million.

Of course, that's a fraction of the overall prison budget of $8.2 billion. But $632 million is a lot of money in anybody's world, especially for Corrections Corp.

The company disclosed last year that revenue derived from states seeking beds for their inmates increased 15.6 percent, to $831 million in 2008.

The company's filing explains why: "We remain optimistic that the state of California will continue to utilize out-of-state beds to alleviate its severe overcrowding situation."

Assemblyman Hector De La Torre, D-South Gate, watched Schwarzenegger deliver his speech in the Assembly chambers and noted the line: "Competition and choice are always good."

"How ironic," De La Torre said.

As it happens, De La Torre is planning to hold a hearing later this month focused on the contract with Corrections Corp. He noted that no other private prison company has managed to get a significant slice of the California market.

"The size of the contract jumped out at me. There is no evidence of any competitive bidding," De La Torre said.

If the administration' s goal is to save money on prison costs, perhaps it should consider lower cost alternatives. De La Torre's staff has found several entities willing to charge less, including the state of Michigan, which is charging a daily rate of $62 per inmate to house prisoners from Pennsylvania.

Without a doubt, the state saves money by using private prisons. A recent state audit estimated that the cost of housing an inmate in private lock-up is between $3,200 and $7,800 less per year than in a state prison.
One reason is that private companies pay guards far less than the state pays prison officers, many of whom earn in excess of $100,000 with overtime and other bonuses. Therein lies perhaps the largest obstacle to any expansion of private prisons.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the union that represents state prison officers, fiercely opposes private prisons, and regularly spends millions on state campaigns.

The union was particularly close to Schwarzenegger' s predecessor, Gray Davis. Indeed, the union donated $251,000 to Davis on a single day in 2002, shortly after the Democratic governor signed a labor contract intended to give prison officers pay raises of 37 percent over five years.

Davis further cemented his relationship with the guards by moving to shutter five private prisons.
The $251,000 was the largest single donation he had received up to that time.

Schwarzenegger unseated Davis in the 2003 recall in part by pointing to a fundamental problem with Sacramento politicians: Campaign money comes in, favors go out, he repeatedly said.
Yet Schwarzenegger is finding that his relationship with Corrections Corp. Offers its own benefits. Most notably, the company contributed $100,000 to a committee controlled by Schwarzenegger that pushed for his ballot measures last year.

If the governor succeeds in placing this latest proposal on the ballot, he would all but ensure a major fight with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association - a group with which he has tangled repeatedly.

The union would spend millions to oppose the measure. That would leave the union with less money to spend to help elect friendly legislators and a governor more to the guards' liking.

One sure way to limit the commodity value of inmates is to reduce their numbers - by changing sentencing laws. Few politicians are willing to take that step, and the guards union has spent millions to protect the three-strikes law. Whether the prisons are private or public, taxpayers ultimately pay the bill.

Posted by lois at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Prison to ax its woodworking classes. Adult programs and rehabilitation programs have 2/3 of their budgets cut

Prison to ax its woodworking classes
Written by Ashley Archibald, The Union Democrat
January 05, 2010 Sonora, CA

For the past 10 years, Randy Bland has held a job that might make some people nervous.

He oversees the mill and cabinetry class at Sierra Conservation Center, a program that teaches inmates the basics of the cabinet-making trade.

That’s 27 felons bearing power tools.

“I love it,” Bland, 51, said, standing in the kitchen that his wife, Susan, designed and he created in their Sonora home. “It’s a satisfying thing. I’d do it until I retired.”

However, deep cuts in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget mean that this, a graphic design class and a print shop all will be axed from the SCC curriculum by the end of January.

The Department of Corrections saw a $1.2 billion budget cut in 2009, forcing the department to pick certain programs to be reworked or discarded, according to spokeswoman Peggy Bengs.

Adult programs and rehabilitation programs took the brunt of it, as two-thirds of their budgets disappeared. Cutting certain classes, like mill and cabinetry, on a statewide scale saves the department $250 million, Bengs said.

"The state is emphasizing programs that reduce recidivism,” Bengs said. “We’re looking at vocational programs linked to job market demands that take 12 months to complete. Those reduce recidivism by 9 percent.”

The programs that survived budget cuts tended to be those that provide certification on top of satisfying the job market in the area where prisoners spend their parole periods.

The state prioritizes programs that can provide those certificates, Bengs said. Those include the automotive or welding programs, among others.

In Bland’s view, the mill and cabinetry program provides his students not only skills that can be used in a number of areas, but also valuable life skills that prepare people who haven’t had normal social interaction for the workplace.

“It can be tough,” he said. “You have a small shop and a lot of people. Personalities can clash.”

And part of the training is learning to work with people of different races, personality types and backgrounds. Learning a trade teaches them confidence, he said, a commodity a person doesn’t have a lot of when they are released with the stigma of having served time.

Bland created the class using state-mandated curriculum and textbooks, but put a heavy dash of his own hands-on style in to make sure his students learned. Students who had been around longer were put in charge of projects and given a team of less-experienced students to encourage peer teaching, Bland said.

He was there to supervise, answer questions and solve problems, both with the cabinets and between the inmates. He also made sure the shop had what it needed to be a good learning environment.

At this point, he said, the shop is state-of-the-art.

“It’s a wonderful shop, the state has been kind to me,” Bland said. “They put you in there and you make it what it is. You decide what to buy, what kind of machinery and how you run it.”

To get some of the supplies, Bland wrote grants and lobbied for resources.

The happy beneficiaries of the program include not just prisoners, but also budget-weary state and local agencies that need the services the program provides but can’t afford — like the Mi-Wuk-Sugar Pine Fire Protection District.

Fire Chief Randy Miller had a problem. The department needed a new firehouse, but it had a $20,000 budget to create a multi-purpose 1,300-square-foot building.

“You pay for stuff and then you blink your eyes and that budget is gone,” Miller said.

By using Bland’s shop, the fire department only had to pay for the materials needed to make the cabinets for the kitchen, saving a hefty sum of money for quality work, Miller said.

“For what it cost us, there is no way I could get this stuff, no way,” he said. “We had them put a cabinet in that we’ll put a counter top on. When it came back, we had to nudge that thing in there. It fit perfectly.”

Now that the program is ending, Bland is already getting calls for cabinet work in the county. He owned a business, Precision Woodworking, in the area from 1982 to 2000 when he quit to work in the prisons. But he’s not sure if he wants to launch a new business at this point in his life.

He doesn’t have a shop, and the shop at the prison will be dismantled. Equipment that can’t be used by the Education Department as a result of reductions will be given away to other institutions that request the equipment, Bengs said.

“If I’m laid off, I’m going to have to do something,” Bland said. “It’ll be low key.”
http://www.uniondemocrat.com/2010010598784/News/Local-News/Prison-to-ax-its-woodworking-classes

Posted by lois at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)

Utica NY: Don’t count prisoners as constituents

Don’t count prisoners as constituents
Utica Observer-Dispatch (Utica, NY) editorial. Jan 7, 2010

AT ISSUE: Using inmates to determine county’s legislative districts is wrong.

It is simply inane that the 6,000-plus prison inmates at Oneida County’s four prisons are factored into population totals for county legislative districts.

County legislators have the power to raise county taxes and approve local laws on issues such as texting while driving. Yet absolutely none of their actions apply to state prisoners incarcerated at Marcy, Mid-State, Mohawk and Oneida correctional facilities.

Prisoners don’t pay local property taxes. They don’t drive on county roads. They don’t vote, or attend county meetings, or advocate for or against local issues. The vast majority of them are not even from our region.

So assigning them to legislative districts makes absolutely no sense. In essence, as a group called the Prison Policy Initiative points out, nonprisoners in county legislative districts in Marcy and in Rome, where the prisons are located, have a greater weight on county matters than do residents elsewhere.

A principle of our democracy is “one man, one vote.” But since prisoners are local citizens in name only, the remaining people in those legislative districts technically have somewhat more of a say than “one man, one vote.”

The U.S. Census Bureau has good reason to count prisoners where they are incarcerated.

Those prisoners do need some local services, particularly medical services. But localities need to avoid taking that census count as direction for drawing legislative district lines.

Oneida County should take two steps:

1. Stop counting prisoners as county constituents for the purposes of determining legislative districts. More than a dozen counties around the state have already done so, including quite a few where prisons exist, including Clinton, Essex and Franklin counties in Northern New York.

2. Cut the number of legislative districts. Oneida County, a place with fewer residents now than 20 years ago, hardly needs 29 legislators to conduct the county’s business, especially because many county residents would be hard pressed to name their own legislator. So in the act of ending the practice of counting state prisoners as county constituents, there is an opportunity to start trimming the number of legislative districts as well.

State prisons are among our region’s largest employers, and their presence is welcomed here.

But county government owes it to local voters to play it straight when it comes to defining who is really a constituent, and who is not.

Posted by lois at 02:58 PM | Comments (0)

Guantanamo/Thompson IL: State panel vote paves way for sale of Thomson Correctional Center to federal government

State panel vote paves way for sale of Thomson Correctional Center to federal government
By Monique Garcia
Tribune reporter
January 7, 2010

A panel of state lawmakers recommended closing a little-used prison in northwest Illinois on Wednesday, giving Gov. Pat Quinn political cover to sell the facility to the Obama administration to house terrorism suspects now held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The 7-4 vote by the state Commission on Governmental Forecasting and Accountability means the state can sell the Thomson Correctional Center to the federal government as soon as mid-April.

Quinn and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have promoted the plan as a way to bring federal money and jobs into an economically depressed part of the state, though Republicans argue the move has not been thought through and could make Illinois a terrorist target.

In a statement released after the vote, Quinn and Durbin said they were pleased the panel endorsed the sale and said they would not have supported the idea if it would jeopardize the safety and security of the country and the state.

White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said the vote marks "a critical step forward in the process of safely and securely closing Guantanamo"

The vote was advisory, and Quinn was expected to move ahead with the plan regardless, but the decision now allows the governor to say he was given legislative approval. Quinn's ousted predecessor, Rod Blagojevich, was repeatedly criticized for acting unilaterally without getting lawmakers to sign off on his plans. The decision was split largely along partisan lines, though two Republicans voted in favor, including Sen. Dave Syverson, of Rockford, whose district is near Thomson.

Syverson said he does not support closing Guantanamo, but he thinks selling the prison to the federal government is a good idea because it will create jobs.

It was an argument echoed by Democrats on the panel, who all voted in favor of closing Thomson.

"This is an area of the state which is thirsting for jobs," said chairman Sen. Jeff Schoenberg, D- Evanston.

But Sen. Bill Brady, a Bloomington Republican on the panel who is running for governor in the Feb. 2 primary, said the state could better use the prison to ease overcrowding at other facilities.

Quinn's office tried to address the idea of overcrowding by sending a letter to the panel saying Quinn will ask lawmakers to use some of the proceeds from a sale to add inmate housing and a long-tem care facility at Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet.

But Brady said that does little to address the most frightening aspect of the plan. "In addition to the needs that clearly indicate we can ill afford to close it and sell (Thomson), we also have to deal with the overarching issue of moving international terrorists to the soil of not just the continental United States, but the state of Illinois," Brady said.
www.chicagotribune.com/news/elections/chi-thomson-hearing-07-jan07,0,7186283.story
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune

Posted by lois at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2010

WA: Convicted felons entitled to vote, court rules. Judge: Racial discrimination claims have merit

Convicted felons entitled to vote, court rules
Judge: Racial discrimination claims have merit
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
By LEVI PULKKINEN
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

In a move that could see Washington inmates voting from prison, a federal appeals court has thrown out the state's restrictions on felon voting.

Under state law, residents convicted of a felony currently lose the right to vote until they are released from custody and off of Department of Corrections supervision. Tuesday's split ruling by a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel puts those restrictions in doubt, as two of three judges reviewing the voting rights lawsuit found that the state restrictions unfairly penalize minorities.

Attorneys for six Washington state prisoners, Circuit Court Judge A. Wallace Tashima wrote, "have demonstrated that police practices, searches, arrests, detention practices, and plea bargaining practices lead to a greater burden on minorities that cannot be explained in race-neutral ways."

Joined by Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the majority opinion, Tashima found that black and Latino Washingtonians faced arrest and prosecution at rates far higher than could be explained simply by increased criminal activity. Finding no "race neutral" explanation for the higher incarceration rates, the majority reversed a U.S. District Court decision and ruled in favor of the inmates.

"Although (the state) criticized the experts' studies and the conclusions, the (plaintiffs') reports, when objectively viewed, support a finding of racial discrimination in Washington's criminal justice system," Tashima said in the ruling.

"Given that uncontroverted showing," he added, "in the words of the district court, there can be 'no doubt that members of racial minorities have experienced discrimination in Washington's criminal justice system.'"

Speaking on the ruling, Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed said the court's decision came as a surprise, in part because three circuit court panels elsewhere in the country came to opposite conclusions while reviewing similar cases.

Reed said he believes the state prohibition against prisoner voting remains appropriate.

"That's part of the penalty," Reed said. "A person loses their rights when they violate the rights of others by perpetrating a felony. … As long as when they get out they get a chance to rejoin society, that's the important part."

Reed said he supported a recent change in state law aimed at enabling felons returning to society to regain the vote. Under the new rules, felons no longer have to pay off their court-mandated fines before registering to vote.

Filed 14 years ago, the suit named Reed's office as a defendant as well as the Attorney General's Office and the governor's office. Reed said he expects to appeal the decision either to the U.S. Supreme Court or an 11-judge panel of the 9th Circuit.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/413851_vote05.html

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

NY Times Editorial: Juvenile Injustice and comment

"....the Legislature will finally have to put the needs of the state’s children ahead of the politically powerful unions and upstate lawmakers who want to preserve jobs — and the disastrous status quo — at all costs."

Editorial: Juvenile Injustice
Published: January 5, 2010
NY Times

Gladys Carrión, New York’s reform-minded commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, has been calling on the state to close many of its remote, prison-style juvenile facilities and shift resources and children to therapeutic programs located in their communities. Her efforts have met fierce and predictably self-interested resistance from the unions representing workers in juvenile prisons and their allies in Albany.

A recent series of damning reports have underscored the flaws in New York’s juvenile justice system and the urgent need to shut down these facilities. The governor and the State Legislature need to pay attention.

A report by a task force appointed by Gov. David Paterson describes a failing system that damages young people, fails to curb recidivism and eats up millions of tax dollars. Children should be confined only when they present a clear threat to public safety. But the most recent statistics show that 53 percent of the youths admitted to New York’s institutional facilities were placed there for minor nonviolent infractions.

The report also says that judges often send children to these facilities because local communities are unable to help them with mental problems or family issues. But once they are locked up, these young people rarely get the psychiatric care or special education they need because the institutions lack trained staff.

A report from the Justice Department, which has threatened to sue the state, documents the use of excessive and injury-causing force against children in juvenile facilities, often for minor offenses such as laughing too loudly or refusing to get dressed. And last week, the Legal Aid Society of New York City filed a class-action suit on behalf of youths in confinement, arguing that conditions in the system violate their constitutional rights.

Not surprisingly, these institutions do a terrible job of rehabilitation. According to a study of children released from custody between 1991 and 1995, 89 percent of the boys and 81 percent of the girls were eventually rearrested. New York’s facilities are so disastrous and inhumane that state officials recently asked the courts to refrain from sending children to them, except in cases in which they presented a clear danger to the public.

Mr. Paterson’s task force was rightly impressed with Missouri’s juvenile justice system. It has adopted smaller regional facilities that focus on rehabilitation and house troubled youths as close to home as possible in order to involve parents and community groups in the therapeutic process. Missouri also has cut recidivisim rates by smoothing re-entry and helping young people with drug treatment, education or job placement.

New York clearly needs to follow Ms. Carrión’s advice and adopt a Missouri-style system. That means the Legislature will finally have to put the needs of the state’s children ahead of the politically powerful unions and upstate lawmakers who want to preserve jobs — and the disastrous status quo — at all costs.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 6, 2010, on page A22 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/opinion/06wed2.html

-------------------
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2010/01/06/children-v-unions.aspx
Simple Justice Blog
Children v. Unions
Posted by SHG at 1/6/2010 7:16 AM

The New York Times editorial contrasts the clash of two sacred cows,
children and unions. As hard as it may be to imagine, the most significant force against the reform of failed criminal justice programs have been the unions, and the politicians who depend on them for financing, representing
prison guards.

It was a brilliant idea to build prisons in depressed upstate locations, where there was land aplenty and rampant unemployment. It took the bad guys away from the masses, and made for a pretty good local economy when people needed it. But along the way, people forget that it wasn't about their having jobs, but about the people they were holding. These people included children.

A report by a task force appointed by Gov. David Paterson describes a
failing system that damages young people, fails to curb recidivism and eats up millions of tax dollars. Children should be confined only when they present a clear threat to public safety. But the most recent statistics show that 53 percent of the youths admitted to New York's institutional facilities were placed there for minor nonviolent infractions.

Not surprisingly, these institutions do a terrible job of rehabilitation. According to a study of children released from custody between 1991 and 1995, 89 percent of the boys and 81 percent of the girls were eventually rearrested. New York's facilities are so disastrous and inhumane that state officials recently asked the courts to refrain from sending children to them, except in cases in which they presented a clear danger to the public. The reports showed that these children were in need of mental health services and education, but they were unable to get the help they needed
within their communities because all the cash flowed upstate to prisons. If you've got prisons, you need to fill them up or all that money is wasted. No one likes to see money wasted.

In the face of these reports, the unions are up in arms. The upstate
politicians are up in arms too, as they don't want to lose their financing or invoke the wrath of their constituents who will lose their jobs.Frankly, it's understandable. It's just not acceptable.

At the extreme end, we have the two Pennsylvania judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, who were placing kids in confinement for a kickback. Trading off the lives of children for upstate jobs isn't entirely different, except that the cash flow is spread out a little broader and it's done in the name of government.

There are some who have given up hope on children, who buy into the
child-predator myth and believe that kids are beyond redemption. If so, then prison is the way to go, keep those nasty children away from good, law-abiding folk. But this clearly doesn't apply to a child who presents no threat of harm to anyone. And even the ones who do are still children. Children, for crying out loud. No one is arguing that they don't do harm and aren't in need of incarceration at times, but that they are not unsalvageable and beyond help.

While there may be argument about what to do with the most violent, the most dangerous, there should be no argument that the vast majority of children who find themselves in some form of juvenile justice scrutiny have the capacity to be helped and to go on to lead happy, productive lives. Unless we warehouse them in upstate prisons, where all hope is lost and no help is found, so that union members can continue to have gainful employment.

It's not that I don't appreciate that prison guards have families and
children of their own to support. It's not that I take lightly the loss of jobs in otherwise depressed counties. It's not that these people don't have legitimate needs of their own. But when the choice is between children and unions, the children must win out. Children cannot be traded for jobs.
Sorry, unions. Sorry, prison guards.

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

January 05, 2010

DOCS opens new facility for mentally ill inmates

DOCS opens new facility for mentally ill inmates
By Allison Roselle

January 04, 2010
The first seven men have moved into a new mental health unit at an upstate prison designed to treat inmates with serious mental illnesses and disciplinary problems.

The 100-bed residential mental health unit at the male, medium-security Marcy Correctional Facility in Oneida County was developed by the state Department of Correctional Services and the state Office of Mental Health as a result of a lawsuit involving Disability Advocates, Inc., a nonprofit advocacy organization.

The facility will serve inmates suffering from severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, delusional disorders, brief psychotic disorders, substance-induced psychotic disorders, major depressive disorders and bipolar disorder who would typically be serving 23-hour-a-day confinement.

Of the 58,690 inmates in New York, 7,844 have been diagnosed with a mental illness, including 2,359 who have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness, according to Erik Kriss, director of public information at DOCS. Approximately 200 of those with serious mental illness have confinement sanctions for disciplinary violations.

The new unit will have approximately 126 employees, including 100 workers from DOCS and 26 workers from OMH.

The former special housing unit, or S-block, at the prison was renovated in 2007 at a cost of $23.5 million. A similar facility for female inmates is located at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County and another 60-bed residential mental health unit is scheduled to open at Five Points Correctional facility in Seneca County during the 2011-2012 fiscal year.

"This cutting-edge program represents government at its best by providing a long-term approach to a difficult problem that is both humane and cost-effective," said Gov. David A. Paterson. "New York is once again leading the nation, in this case by creating a holistic environment for the treatment and care of perhaps the most challenging population within the state prison system."

In 2002, Disability Advocates, Inc. filed a lawsuit against the state because the group alleged there was inadequate treatment for mentally ill inmates. A private settlement was reached in 2007 and the state agreed to develop the residential mental health unit.

The 57,000-square-foot building includes office space for DOCS and OMH staff attached to a secure inmate housing unit. Every employee received seven days of special training before the unit opened.

The new facility will allow inmate patients four hours per day outside of their cell to attend treatment programs in open group settings. Inmates who have shown signs of progression will be allowed out of their cell for exercise and other activities.

The treatment programs conducted in the unit will help mentally ill inmates to understand and manage their illnesses better, so they can get along in a more social environment, said Kriss.

The programs are also designed to help inmates develop skills and transition into general population or back into society outside of prison.

"This new program specifically concerns itself with offenders who have demonstrated serious problems adhering to prison rules, often as the result of their mental health difficulties," said DOCS Commissioner Brian Fischer. In December 2007, OMH began screening every inmate entering state prisons for mental health needs and determining the type of care they might need.

"[This] is the latest collaborative step to develop the most comprehensive prison mental health program in the country and … reduce use of special housing and segregation for inmates with mental illness," said OMH Commissioner Michael F. Hogan.

http://www.legislativegazette.com/Articles-c-2010-01-04-64546.113122_DOCS_op
ens_new_facility_for_mentally_ill_inmates.html

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

John Irwin

Criminal turned criminologist John Irwin dies
Kevin Fagan,San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, January 7, 2010
San Francisco State Professor John Irwin founded Project ...

John Irwin had the usual choice when he got out of Soledad Prison in 1957 after a five-year stretch for armed robbery: Do more crime, or remake his life.

He chose rebirth - with a passion.

Over the next half century, Mr. Irwin became one of the nation's foremost advocates for compassionate reform of the prison system, the author of six heralded books dissecting criminal justice, and a tenured sociology professor at San Francisco State University.

When he died at 80 at his San Francisco home of liver and kidney failure Sunday, he had one final book nearly ready for print, an autobiography he called "Rogue."

The term, in its kindest but most activist meaning, fit him perfectly, his family, friends and colleagues said.

"John was fearless about being honest about the realities of crime and justice," said Naneen Karraker, a national advocate for prison reform. "He had the courage to see things differently from the common way.

"He was an uncommon man."
Founded movements

In 1967, after he began teaching at S.F. State, Mr. Irwin founded Project Rebound, a program on the campus that helps those coming out of prison go to college. Over the ensuing decades, he co-founded the now-defunct Prisoners Union, which organized inmates to push for their civil rights, as well as the Convict Criminology movement, in which convicts who became professors critically examine the criminal justice system.

He was also on the board of directors of the Sentencing Project, the national organization that advocates prison reform and alternatives to incarceration.

"John always challenged us to think in bold ways about what kind of justice system, and society, we hoped to achieve," Sentencing Project Executive Director Marc Mauer wrote in a tribute on the organization's Web site this week. "And he did so with humor, grace and intelligence."

Mr. Irwin was born and raised in Los Angeles, where his father, Roy Irwin, sold insurance and ran a candy store, and his mother, Eloise Irwin, was a homemaker. As a teenager he became fascinated with what he called "the life" of being an outlaw, said his wife, Martha Rosenbaum - and that led to his life-altering ensnarement with the criminal justice system.

He robbed a gas station, and while serving time he began to realize that education and going straight was a better alternative, she said.

"Prison really turned John around," Rosenbaum said. "He took care of his health, he went to school, and eventually he made it on the outside by transitioning from criminal to criminologist."
Pushed rehabilitation

Disturbed at what he saw as an unfair system of sentencing the poor to long prison terms rather than finding more rehabilitative alternatives, Mr. Irwin decided to devote his life's work to bettering the lot of convicts.

After being paroled, he earned a bachelor's degree in sociology at UCLA in 1962. He was hired five years later at S.F. State and taught there until retiring in 1994. He earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley in 1969.

Mr. Irwin's first book, an examination of career criminal behavior called "The Felon," became an instant classic in the field of criminology when published in 1970. The others that followed, including "Prisons in Turmoil" and "The Warehouse Prison," became touchstones of the prison reform movement. His last published book, last year's "Lifers," examined the struggle for redemption by convicts serving life terms.
'A remarkable man'

In between his more serious pursuits, Mr. Irwin found time to surf, ski, make furniture, root on the Giants and 49ers, and father three daughters and a son. He met his wife of 38 years when she was one of his graduate students.

"He was smart, had a sense of humor, had wisdom, and he was good-looking," said Rosenbaum, director emerita of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance. "My husband was a remarkable man."

Mr. Irwin is survived by his wife; daughters Jeanette Irwin of Washington, D.C., Katie Irwin of Honolulu and Anne Irwin of San Francisco; and son Johnny Irwin of San Francisco.

A service for family and friends will be held at 4 p.m. Friday at the Golden Gate Club, 135 Fisher Loop at the Presidio in San Francisco.

In lieu of flowers, donations in Mr. Irwin's name can be made to the J.K. Irwin Foundation, which funds prison and drug reform, at 2233 Lombard St., San Francisco, CA 94123.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/07/BA091BE9R2.DTL

----

January 5, 2010
Taken from an email from The Sentencing Project
John Irwin

The Sentencing Project joins the criminal justice reform community in mourning the loss of our board member, friend and colleague, John Irwin, who died on January 3rd in San Francisco at the age of 80. John Irwin was proud to be a "convict criminologist" and advocate for social justice.

Hardly typical

Irwin's path to academia was hardly typical, beginning with a five-year prison term for armed robbery in 1952 in Soledad Prison. During his time in prison he earned 24 college credits through a university extension program, the kind of programming that he would later note had been all but eliminated in most prison systems today. Upon his release he received a B.A. from UCLA and then earned his Ph. D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He then was offered a faculty position at San Francisco State University, where he taught for 27 years before his retirement.
renowned author

Throughout his career John combined a passion for scholarship with engagement for social justice. The author of six highly-regarded books analyzing the institutions of the criminal justice system, his insights in such works as "The Felon" and "The Jail" provided cogent analyses of the interaction between the structure of the justice system and the individuals processed through that system. His research and writing examined aspects of the system that were often not popular to take on, such as his last book, "Lifers: The Long Road to Redemption," based on his lengthy interviews with people serving life sentences in a California prison.
founder of 'Convict Criminology'

John Irwin was also notable as one of the founders and leading lights of what has been termed the "convict criminology" movement. Begun in 1997 at a panel presentation at the American Society of Criminology's annual conference, the movement presented a means by which the growing number of people with prison experiences who had earned doctorate degrees and entered academia could bring forward their unique perspectives on the justice system. Since that time, through public presentations and scholarship, the group has presented an assessment of justice issues based on the fact that, as John said, "you can never get away from your prison experience."

Supporter of Reform

In his first years out of prison John had already become intimately engaged with movements for reform. In 1969 he founded Project Rebound at San Francisco State University, a program designed to open up a path to college for people coming out of prison. He then served on the working party of the American Friends Service Committee that produced "Struggle for Justice" in 1971, a highly influential book at the time for its critique of punishment and its arbitrary imposition.

At The Sentencing Project we were privileged to have John Irwin join our board of directors in 2005. His engagement, personal warmth, and passion for justice inspired the work of the organization. Even within an organization committed to a broad view of change, John always challenged us to think in bold ways about what kind of justice system, and society, we hoped to achieve. And he did so with humor, grace, and intelligence.

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

Maine and solitary confinement

Corrections: a growth industry in Maine
By Stan Moody
Dec 23, 2009

The third-highest budget item for Maine -- right behind human services and education -- is the cost of incarcerating the failures of human services and education.

More than $300 million a year is spent on housing and maintaining services for some 4,000 inmates in a program that has been growing at the rate of 9 percent a year. What any Maine business these days wouldn't give for a 9 percent annual growth rate.

To put that in context, it works out to about $1,000 annually for every family in Maine, or three times the annual cost of monitoring a residential burglar alarm system.

In the tradition of all growth industries, repeat business offers not only job security but also the power to write your own ticket. That bodes ill for the 4,000 men and women already incarcerated and for the 56 percent of released inmates who make it back within one year after release.

"He'll be back" being the common expectation in our penal institutions, it becomes over time a self-fulfilling prophecy. How inmates are treated remains somewhat important, but becomes secondary to the need on the part of prison administration to keep everything in order, under control and, of course, secret.

With that in mind, Rep. James Schatz of Blue Hill has introduced for the upcoming legislative session a bill to establish "minimum standards governing the humane treatment of special management prisoners." In layman's language, this bill will address the conditions under which a person may be committed to solitary confinement and for how long.

Solitary confinement, known in more politically correct circles as "special management," involves safekeeping for mentally ill inmates, discipline cases and inmates who have been beaten by other inmates, a common occurrence. It is a place where inmates are confined to cells for 23 hours a day, have no diversions other than reading and limited writing, wear orange jumpsuits, and are restricted in four-point restraints wherever they go outside their cells.

Solitary confinement is now recognized nationally as a place that drives people crazy. A March 2009 New Yorker article cited studies going back as far as the 1960s that show a "diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement." EEG tests conducted in 1992 on prisoners of war in the former Yugoslavia showed brain abnormalities similar to those incurred in traumatic head injuries. John McCain reportedly said of his two years of isolation as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, "It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment."

The article goes on to cite Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who studied randomly selected inmates at California's Pelican Bay supermax: "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. Chronic apathy, lethargy, depression and despair often result.' Almost 90 percent had difficulties with ‘irrational anger,' compared with 3 percent of prisoners in the general population."

Maine missed a golden opportunity to position itself as a leader in the humane treatment of prisoners and is now faced with the nearly impossible task of trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube after three decades of politically popular law-and-order soapbox rhetoric.

In 1973, a general consent decree was issued in the case of Inmates of the Maine State Prison v. Mullaney. In that consent decree, misdemeanor offenses by inmates were not to exceed 10 days of lockup, segregation or solitary confinement. Felony offenses were not to exceed 30 days.

By contrast, Schatz's bill calls for no more than 45 days' consecutive confinement except under extreme circumstances. There are current cases at the Maine State Prison where inmates have been held in solitary confinement for years.

On March 27, as a chaplain responsible for the solitary confinement unit, I wrote an internal memo, bringing attention to what I considered to be widespread violation of the law as set forth in Maine Revised Statutes 3032, Disciplinary Action. I cited the case of one inmate segregated for selecting a Buddhist magazine and writing an innocuous note to another inmate in solitary confinement at my request.

The magazine and note were enclosed in an envelope with the return address of the Chaplain's Office and forwarded to the Special Management Unit. This inmate, who has garnered a sterling reputation for teaching other inmates how to read, was immediately taken to solitary confinement and spent nearly one month there under suspicion of stealing the envelope before all charges were dropped. Never once was I notified or informed or questioned.

Another inmate I cited was nearly blind without his glasses and had been in solitary confinement for 80 days on a 30-day disciplinary action, which eventually dragged out to 100 days. His glasses did not make it to his cell with him, rendering him incapable of reading for the entire time in segregation. It was very common at that time for victims of attack by other inmates to be held for months in solitary confinement for their own protection, while the perpetrators were in and out in five to 10 days. The favored rationales for long stays in solitary confinement are "high risk" and "waiting for a bed."

In response to my memo, I received a copy of the special management policy manual, the implication being that policy trumps the law. The problem was not the policy or the law, but that both had given way to convenience.

Schatz's bill, while highlighting for the public an ongoing problem at the prisons, is not without its deficiencies. Its biggest deficiency is the failure to return to the dictates of the consent decree of 1973. In fact, whereas the consent decree cuts solitary confinement off at 30 days for felonies, the bill leaves open a possible indefinite extension beyond 45 days in the event of a felony. The bill is likely, as well, to carry a fiscal note for increased services, tough sledding for legislation these days.

While the bill prohibits the use of chemical agents such as Mace or forcible extraction without an audiovisual record, it outlaws completely the use of instruments of restraint such as chains, handcuffs, leg shackles, restraint chairs and four-point restraints for special management (solitary confinement) prisoners. My guess is that a case will be made for instances where a violent prisoner cannot be handled without restraints or where a security guard is placed in danger by transporting a potentially violent prisoner without restraints. Transportation to medical or mental health facilities comes immediately to mind, as does the simple process of making available the pay phone.

In the June 1975 issue of Clearinghouse Review, researchers Thomas Benjamin and Kenneth Lux published an evaluation of the use of solitary confinement at the Maine State Prison. They made the following observations:

"The courts have recognized that isolation may produce insanity, and that enforced isolation without human contact, recreation or exercise, and for extended periods, is cruel and unusual treatment. Yet prisoners are now in complete isolation and have been for months. In addition, the courts have recognized that a person sent to solitary suffers a grievous loss and is entitled to formal due process protection. However, the prison administration avoids this duty by calling the prisoner's confinement 'administrative' instead of 'punitive' and by instituting 'procedures' which provide no protections at all against arbitrary administrative action.

"The Department of Mental Health and Corrections has as its own express policy that every person under its jurisdiction shall retain all the rights that citizens in general have, and that prisoners in solitary confinement be returned to the general population 'at the earliest possible time.' Nevertheless, it watches prisoners in isolation slowly destroy themselves. It is time for prison administrators to stop hiding behind such words as 'security,' 'segregation' and 'administrative hold' to justify their actions."

Have things changed since 1975? I daresay, not much, if any. Under a cloud of secrecy protected by staff performing as "team players," the management style is more defensive than preventive, leaving the door open to such extreme violations of human rights as the April 2009 Weinstein assault, a common occurrence that spun out of control in his death. There remains plenty of room for the occasional abusive guard, the callous sergeant and the detached administrator at the prison, so long as the violations do not get out of hand and thereby move into the light of public scrutiny.

It is unfortunate that more laws are needed to correct the failure to comply with laws already on the books. It is more unfortunate that the turnover of prison management and within the Department of Corrections is so meager that law has given way to policy and policy has given way to practice.

Change cannot occur in an environment where those responsible for the third most expensive state program have lost sight of the law in their commitment to preserving their jobs and maintaining a status quo that degenerates through failure of public accountability.

Stan Moody, former state representative and chaplain at the Maine State Prison, is the author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and "McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry." He currently serves as pastor at the Meeting House Church in Manchester. His Web site is www.stanmoody.com.

http://www.stanmoody.com/Items_180_Case_Studies_on_Prison_Injustices.aspx

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

January 04, 2010

American Law Institute Gives Up Death Penalty Work Disavowing Framework for Cases It Created 50 Years Ago

Sidebar
Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work in Frustration
By ADAM LIPTAK- NY Times
Published: January 4, 2010

WASHINGTON

Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.

There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.

“The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “They were absolutely singular on this topic” — capital punishment — “because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”

The institute is made up of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything.

In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states.

The institute’s recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed.

Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”

That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.

A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience have proved that the system cannot reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment is plagued by racial disparities; is enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers are underpaid and some are incompetent; risks executing innocent people; and is undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.

Roger S. Clark, who teaches at Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., and was one of the leaders of the movement to have the institute condemn the death penalty outright, said he was satisfied with the compromise. “Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”

The framework the institute developed in 1962 was an effort to make the death penalty less arbitrary. It proposed limiting capital crimes to murder and narrowing the categories of people eligible for the punishment. Most important, it gave juries a framework to decide whom to put to death, asking them to balance aggravating factors against mitigating ones.

The move to combat arbitrariness without giving up sensitivity to individual circumstances is known as “guided discretion,” which sounds good until you notice that it is a phrase at war with itself.

The Supreme Court’s capital justice jurisprudence since 1976 has only complicated things. Justice Harry A. Blackmun conceded in 1987 that “there perhaps is an inherent tension between the discretion accorded capital sentencing juries and the guidance for use of that discretion that is constitutionally required.”

That was an understatement, Justice Antonin Scalia said in 1990. “To acknowledge that ‘there perhaps is an inherent tension,’ ” he wrote, “is rather like saying that there was perhaps an inherent tension between the Allies and the Axis powers in World War II.”

Justice Scalia solved the problem by vowing never to throw out a death sentence on the ground that the sentencer’s discretion had been unconstitutionally restricted.

In 1994, Justice Blackmun came around to the view that “guided discretion” amounted to “irreconcilable constitutional commands.” But he drew a different conclusion than Justice Scalia had from the same premise, saying that “the death penalty cannot be administered in accord with our Constitution.” He said he would no longer “tinker with the machinery of death.” The institute came to essentially the same conclusion.

Some supporters of the death penalty said they welcomed the institute’s move. Capital sentencing “is so micromanaged by Supreme Court precedents that a model statute really serves very little function,” Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation wrote in a blog posting. “We are perfectly O.K. with dumping it.”

Mr. Scheidegger expressed satisfaction that an effort to have the institute come out against the death penalty as such was defeated.

But opponents of the death penalty said the institute’s move represents a turning point.

“It’s very bad news for the continued legitimacy of the death penalty,” Professor Zimring said. “But it’s the kind of bad news that has many more implications for the long term than for next week or the next term of the Supreme Court.”

Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said he recalled reading Model Penal Code as a first-year law student in 1970. “The death penalty was an abstract issue of little interest to me or my fellow students,” he said. But he remembered being impressed by the institute’s work. “I thought in passing that smarter people than I had done a sensible job of figuring out this tricky problem.”

Things will look different come September, Professor Gross said.

“Law students who take first-year criminal law from 2010 on,” he said, “will learn that this same group of smart lawyers and judges — the ones whose work they read every day — has said that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/us/05bar.html?hp

Posted by lois at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

Tribes Receive $224 Million for Corrections Construction

Tribes Receive $224 Million for Corrections Construction

The Department of Justice is awarding $224 million to tribal communities to fund the renovation and construction of prisons and jails. (11/22/2009)

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice is awarding $224 million to tribal communities to fund the renovation and construction of prisons and jails.

The construction funding, which was announced by Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, is part of more than $236 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and fiscal year 2009 departmental public safety appropriations to criminal justice initiatives in tribal communities throughout the United States.

The funding package also includes approximately $12 million as part of the Tribal Youth Program, which supports enhanced tribal efforts to prevent and control delinquency and improve the juvenile justice systems for American Indian and indigenous Alaskan youth. The provision of juvenile mental health services is a major focus of the program.

The funding is designed to allow tribes to explore community-based alternatives that help control and reduce problems of alcohol and substance abuse and related incarcerations to relieve jail-overcrowding pressures.

“None of these resources will matter if we do not direct them properly and at the issues that matter,” Perrelli says. “The department may be able to provide funding, but only by working together can we make sure tribal communities get what they need.”

The more than $224 million in construction funding will be administered by the Office of Justice Programs through the Correctional Facilities on Tribal Lands Program. The program, which takes account of detention bed needs and violent crime statistics in award decisions, provides resources to assist eligible American Indian tribes and Alaska native villages to construct or renovate correctional facilities on tribal lands.

In a speech to American Indian leaders, Perrelli said that money alone cannot fix the problems of tribal justice, while admitting that the federal government has not done an effective job with past funding initiatives.

“You cannot build a prison if there isn’t funds to staff it,” Perrelli says. “You cannot focus on detention without also looking at prevention and intervention programs that target tribal youth and help motivate them and turn their lives around.”

In recent months, Department of Justice officials joined tribal leadership and law enforcement experts for two working sessions leading up to October’s Tribal Nations Listening Conference in Minnesota, which was attended by Attorney General Eric Holder.

We want to engage substantively with our tribal leaders, to learn from their experiences, to listen to their insights, and to develop concrete initiatives that can make a real difference in the lives of Native Americans,” Perrelli says.

The conference forms part of an ongoing Justice Department initiative to increase engagement, coordination and action with American Indian communities on issues of tribal justice.

The renewed efforts to address crime issues comes at a time when tribal communities are increasingly plagued by high crime and rising domestic violence rates, expanding gang activity and unremitting levels of alcoholism and substance abuse.

he meetings are a step in the right direction, says Joe Shirley Jr., head of the Navajo Nation, which covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

The Department of Justice awarded tribal jurisdictions and reservations almost $90 million in ARRA funding for the construction of new adult and juvenile detention facilities in areas with high rates of violent crime and pressing bed space needs. More than $8 million is being directed to the renovation of existing detention facilities.

Justice officials awarded more than $116 million in federal stimulus monies to the construction of new single-tribe or regional multi-purpose justice centers and an additional $5.6 million for the construction of alternative sentencing facilities. The departmental funding to tribal communities also includes more than $4.4 million in technical and assistance funding for tribal correctional facilities.

In South Dakota, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe received a $25 million grant to construct an adult correctional facility with expanded capacity that provides greater support for cultural traditions in rehabilitating offenders.

The new facility will provide rehabilitative programs and services such as education, counseling, alcohol and suicide prevention programs, value-based cultural teachings and cultural preservation and faith-based programming.

The existing 66-bed facility, which is almost 30 years old and lacks an inmate custody and classification system, has been criticized for its outmoded layout and deteriorating condition that threaten the safety of inmates and staff.

The new facility will incorporate dedicated housing to segregate inmates with medical conditions, such as infectious disease, or special management issues.

“This funding will strengthen the efforts of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe to improve its tribal justice system and keep communities in Indian country safe,” says Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, U.S. representative (D-S.D.).

In Montana, the Chippewa Cree and Fort Peck tribes received more than $12 million each to build new jails to replace aging, outmoded, cramped and under-capacity facilities in their communities. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes received $1.3 million for the renovation of an existing detention facility.

he Fort Peck tribe received $12.6 million to construct a new 100-bed jail. The existing facility, which is almost 30 years old and was built to accommodate 20 inmates, houses an average of almost 30 inmates.

The replacement facility could offer a range of re-entry, treatment and career programming.

The Chippewa Cree tribe received $12.3 million for a new 38,000-square-foot facility, which will incorporate the tribal police headquarters and separate 22-bed adult and 12-bed juvenile detention facilities. The existing jail and police facility is housed in a former fire station and can hold less than ten inmates.

The tribe also received almost $350,000 to improve its juvenile justice system and programs.

In New Mexico, the Ramah Navajo chapter receives $3.8 million to construct detention facilities for adult and juvenile offenders, while more than $5.6 million is being directed to the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Peacekeepers to construct an alternative sentencing facility.

In Idaho, Shoshone-Bannock tribes received a $3.5 million grant to help complete construction work on a 66,200-square-foot justice center.

Once complete, the almost $20 million Fort Hall Justice Center will incorporate three courtrooms and separate detention areas to house up to 80 adult and 20 juvenile offenders.

In Arizona, more than $31.6 million will go to the Navajo Nation Public Safety Department for the construction of adult and juvenile correctional facilities, with more than $38.5 million allotted to a Navajo Nation justice center in Tuba City.

The award package also includes $450,000 for the Navajo Nation Judicial Branch, $350,000 for the pueblo of Acoma, and $250,000 for Pojoaque.

The pueblo of Nambe and Zuni received grants of $440,000 and more than $400,000, respectively, to provide educational, outreach, advocacy and victim support programs and services to increase awareness of sexual assault and domestic violence.

Construction Adult/Juvenile Detention Facility

Colorado Indian Tribes, Arizona - $4.5 million
Navajo Nation Department of Public Safety, Arizona - $31.6 million

Rosebud Sioux Tribe, South Dakota - $25.0 million
Fort Peck Assiniboine/Sioux, Montana - $12.6 million
Ramah Navajo Chapter, New Mexico - $3.8 million
Yakama Nation, Washington - $11.9 million

Construction Multi-Purpose Justice Center

Native Village of Kwinhagak, Alaska - $1.3 million
Pascua Yaqui Tribe, Arizona - $20.8 million
Navajo Nation Tuba City, Arizona - $38.5 million
Tule River Tribal Council, California - $3.0 million
Chippewa Cree Tribe, Montana - $12.3 million
Puyallup Tribe of Indians, Washington - $7.9 million
Eastern Band Cherokee Indians, North Carolina - $18.0 million
Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Idaho - $3.5 million
Nisqually Tribe, Washington -$10.7 million

Existing Detention Facility Renovation

White Mountain Apache Tribe, Arizona - $900,000
Confederated Salish Kootenai, Montana - $1.3 million
Yankton Sioux Tribe, South Dakota $5.8 million
Confederated Tribes of Chehalis, Washington - $200,000

Alternative Sentencing Facility Construction

Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Council, New Mexico - $5.6 million

Training/Technical Assistance

Justice Solutions Group, New Jersey - $4.4 million

Source: Department of Justice
http://www.correctionalnews.com/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=news&mod=News&mid=9A02E3B96F2A415ABC72CB5F516B4C10&tier=3&nid=E072950A43F04ADB88904675CD925CDD
This and other news about the financing of prisons can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

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

A Pretty Penny for Prisons

A Pretty Penny for Prisons
by Brandon Gee Jan 04 2010
The prison business is proving recession-proof. But is it right to privatize penitentiaries?

When Damon Hininger took over as president and CEO of Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America in October, it capped a 17-year journey from his first job with the company as a correctional officer in his hometown of Leavenworth, Kansas.

Hininger now presides over a corporation that many believe could make a similarly meteoric rise out of the recession—and one that continually confronts skepticism and critics’ philosophical opposition to what the company does.

CCA is the nation’s largest private prison company and the fifth-largest prison manager in the country behind the federal government and three states. The company has nearly 87,000 prison beds in the United States. Its closest competitor, The GEO Group, has 53,000 beds in the United States and 60,000 worldwide. CCA’s revenue was $1.6 billion in 2008, up $500 million since 2004.

Corrections Corp. manages 65 facilities in 19 states and the District of Columbia, 44 of which the company also owns. Managed facilities in Tennessee include the Metro-Davidson County Detention Facility in Nashville and five other prisons.

In a recent interview with the Nashville Business Journal, Hininger said the company offers its customers the best of both worlds: the oversight and accountability of government and the innovation and cost effectiveness of business.

Critics, however, worry about the dangers of introducing a profit motive into the penal system, fearing it may lead to cost-saving measures that put inmates and the public at risk.

Most people see prisons when they think about CCA. Bill Ackman saw a high-quality real estate business with credit-worthy tenants (governments), low maintenance costs, and competitive advantages.

His investment firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, has recently purchased 10.9 million shares of the company, a 9.5 percent ownership stake, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a recent presentation at the Value Investing Congress, Ackman noted several things he likes about the company including its national footprint, balance sheet, and ability to both capture incremental growth in prisoner populations and also relieve existing overcrowding in federal and state prisons.

T.C. Robillard, an analyst with Signal Hill Capital Group in Baltimore, is similarly impressed with the company.

“They’ve got a real solid balance sheet and a strong management team,” he said, noting that only 8 percent of the nation’s prisons are privately managed. “There’s clearly a lot of runway in terms of growth…”

But while Ackman sees CCA as a bargain investment, Robillard believes the company’s value is appropriately built into its share price of about $25. He has a hold rating on the company and believes competitors GEO and Cornell Cos. are better investments.
Anticipating Growth

CCA has adopted a strategy of increasing its bed capacity faster than it adds inmates so that it can quickly meet customers’ needs.

“We have learned…that when a state agency or the federal government wants to make a purchase, they make a decision at the very last minute with overpopulation and budget constraints,” he said. “They want the beds as soon as possible.”

CCA more than doubled its capacity of beds through the third quarter of this year. While its average population grew 4.5 percent, its average available beds jumped 9.2 percent.

CCA has weathered the recession well—revenue is at $1.2 billion through the third quarter of this year, up about $70 million—but Hininger said the prison business is impacted by states’ budget deficits. To confront budget woes, some states, including Tennessee, have looked at releasing prisoners early. This month, CCA announced it will close a Minnesota facility because the two states that house prisoners there have been reducing their populations.

Still, Hininger believes the company’s mid- to long-term prospects are favorable.

“You will have some states where, even with tough budgets, they will have to expand due to overcrowding,” Hininger said. “And states have little money to build new facilities themselves.”

Hininger said CCA can build a prison in a fraction of the time and for half the cost of government by taking advantage of market conditions. For example, he said the company recently built a prison for its largest state customer, California, in Arizona to take advantage of lower construction, labor, and real estate prices in that state.
Profit Concerns

Hearing incarceration discussed in such cut-and-dry business terms grates on the ears of those who fear the profit motive could lead to negative consequences in the penal system.

“Freedom is a core right of the American people and only government should have the right to take it away,” said Amy Fettig, staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project in Washington.

Fettig said private prison companies achieve lower costs through cutbacks in training, rehabilitation services, medical care, and compensation.

CCA denies such allegations. Louise Grant, CCA’s vice president of marketing and communication, and Hininger argued that it is precisely because they are under such a microscope that their facilities are safe.

“We have more incentive to operate even more safely and securely because there is such a demand for accountability by the government partners,” said Grant, who said a government “contract monitor” works in each CCA facility.

Overall, research on the quality and cost of private versus public prisons is inconclusive and often biased.

Studies in support of private prisons include those funded by Corrections Corp. or authored by pro-privatization think tanks. Critical reports often come from sources such as Nashvillian Alex Friedmann, a convicted felon and former prisoner in a CCA prison, associate editor of Prison Legal News and vice president of the Private Corrections Institute.

Some critics contend there is a fundamental problem with prisons being run by for-profit entities that have no financial interest in seeing prisoners rehabilitated. Hininger acknowledges that the company is paid on a per-inmate basis, but forcefully denies allegations that it lobbies for stricter sentencing, against early release, or tries to influence prisoner populations.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, CCA has spent $770,000 lobbying at the federal level this year and has spent as much as $3.4 million in one year (2005).

Grant said “anybody who provides services to government uses lobbyists” and that CCA is no exception. She said the company may use lobbyists to fight bans on private prisons or otherwise try to make gains in unpenetrated markets.

While most of the negative publicity about private prisons has been focused on immigration prisons in the Southwest, CCA also has been dragged into the spotlight locally, most notably when inmate Estelle Richardson died in CCA’s Nashville facility in 2004. The death was ruled a homicide, but charges against four CCA officers were ultimately dropped.

On a recent tour of the same Nashville lockup where Richardson died, addictions-treatment manager Bobby Aylward said to look no further than him for proof that CCA cares about its inmates. Aylward was incarcerated for a total of nearly five years. His last stint was at the Nashville facility, where he graduated from the addiction-treatment program he now runs 12 years later.

“I would argue (against criticisms of CCA) with every fiber of my soul,” Aylward said. “CCA didn’t give me back my life. CCA gave me a life, and then they believed in me enough to give me an opportunity to work for them.”
Brandon Gee writes for the Nashville Business Journal.
http://www.portfolio.com/business-news/2010/01/04/correction-corporation-of-america-pulls-in-cash-amidst-skepticism/

Posted by lois at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

Group: Muslim chaplains needed in Va. prisons

Group: Muslim chaplains needed in Va. prisons

Media General News Service
Published: January 4, 2010

RICHMOND — A seven-year-old prison chaplain group recently was awarded a one-of-its-kind, $25,000 state subcontract to minister to a rapidly growing faith behind bars: Islam.

But the all-volunteer Muslim Chaplain Services wants more state funding so it can hire imams to serve as prison staff chaplains, as do Protestant clergy. “We just want a level playing field,” said Carroll Abdul-Malik, the group’s president.

The Chaplain Service of the Churches of Virginia, a Protestant group established in 1920, has the full, $780,000 contract with the Virginia Department of Corrections to administer religious programs in prisons for inmates of all faiths.

Relations between the two chaplain groups are cordial, and they agree on the need for Islamic experts in prisons.

So, too, do some secular experts with concerns beyond the spiritual.

Mark Hamm, a terrorism expert with Indiana State University, conducted a study on Muslims in prison for the National Institute of Justice and said that “Islam, by all accounts, is the fastest-growing religion among prisoners in the Western world, including the United States.”

And a key finding of a 2006 national study co-authored by the University of Virginia’s Critical Incident Analysis Group, a think tank on national threats, was that “the inadequate number of Muslim religious service providers increases the risk of radicalization.”

Hamm said it is estimated that up to 40,000 of the 2.4 million prisoners in the U.S. convert to Islam each year. Muslim Chaplain Services believes there are 1,700 to 2,500 Muslims in Virginia’s 32,000-inmate system. Prison authorities do not dispute that estimate.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, some in Congress and elsewhere grew concerned about the potential for the spread of jihadism along with Islam in the nation’s prisons.

But Hamm found that “overall, Islam has a beneficial effect on inmates. Most of these inmates come to prison with little or no ... spiritual grounding whatsoever.” Islam offers order to their lives and a sense of identity and belonging, he said.

The “radicalization” that occurs often is the result of “prison or jailhouse Islam,” twisted versions of the faith spread by those who are not necessarily well-informed about the tenets of Islam and some of whom have gang-related or other nonreligious agendas, Hamm said.

Asghar Goraya, executive director of Muslim Chaplain Services, says Islam is a religion of moderation and tolerance, not extremism. A goal of his group is educating believers who may have been given incorrect information by other well-meaning but misinformed inmates.

In addition, Sa’ad El-Amin, a former Richmond lawyer on the Muslim chaplain group’s board of directors, believes more needs to be done to foster communication between staff and Muslim inmates.

“We see an accident, a train wreck ahead, if this thing is not resolved,” El-Amin said.

El-Amin and Abdul-Malik, are former inmates themselves. El-Amin surrendered his City Council seat in July 2003, pleading guilty to a federal tax-fraud conspiracy charge. He served 32 months and was released in August 2006.

Abdul-Malik was released in 1978 after serving seven years for robbery. “Before I went in, I was first kin to an atheist,” he said. Then he converted while behind bars. “It changed my life, and I’ve been out for 31 years and I’ve been a volunteer in prison for 29 years.”

In 2006, Gene Johnson, director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, invited the Muslim group to brief officials in prisons across the state about rituals, prayers, holy days, dietary regulations and other pertinent aspects of the Islamic faith.

“The sessions have been well-received with lots of positive feedback,” said Larry Traylor, a department spokesman.

Goraya said the group has worked to clear up misconceptions and head off problems. For example, he said, “a question came up during the training: ‘Is it prohibited for a Muslim male to obey the orders of a female?’”

Many corrections officers are women, and male Muslim inmates must obey them, Goraya said.

But some Muslim inmates have the wrong idea. Often, he said, the cultural traditions of patriarchal societies that practice Islam get mixed up with the tenets of the faith.

The Muslim group, founded in 2003, has a dozen volunteers — none of them imams.

When an inmate needs an imam, efforts are made to get one, but that can be difficult because the Islamic faith leaders are not compensated for travel to a prison, Goraya said. “They have to work for a living,” he added.

Chaplain Service of the Churches of Virginia, supported by various Protestant churches, individuals and foundations, started working in prisons in 1920, at no cost to the state. In 2002, the General Assembly began appropriating money from the inmate commissary fund to help.

The arrangement is an unusual one, because Virginia may be the only prison system, or among just a handful of state systems, without professional chaplains.

The money comes out of the pockets of inmates from commissary purchases of chips, sodas and other items. The Department of Corrections is concerned that so much money is being taken out that the commissary fund, which is used for other inmate needs, that it could be depleted.

Cecil McFarland, the Protestant group’s director, said that in addition to the $780,000 from the commissary fund, the group expects to receive about $500,000 in non-inmate funds this year, lower than in past years because of the economy.

Among other things, the money is used to staff adult prisons with 13 full-time and 19 part-time chaplains, and three part-time chaplains for juvenile correctional facilities.

“We’ve been working with Asghar Goraya for years,” said McFarland of the Muslim group, which has the only chaplaincy subcontract. McFarland’s group coordinates religious programs for inmates of all other faiths, including Catholics and Jews.

McFarland said his governing board is not concerned with money going to an Islamic group because “this relieves our chaplains of a lot of responsibilities. ... They have assumed the responsibility of serving the Muslim population in prison.”

“It’s really a good thing for everybody,” he said.

But the problem, as Muslim Chaplain Services sees it, is that $25,000 — used primarily to pay for religious literature — is not enough to support a single staff Muslim chaplain, and the Protestant group will not hire one.

In addition to the $25,000, the Muslim group also receives about $12,000 to $15,000 a year via fundraisers. But virtually all expenses come out of the pockets of volunteers. They also operate a five-person halfway house in Richmond.

Goraya said there are many situations in which even the most well-meaning staff and Christian clergy cannot help a Muslim inmate. Full-time Muslim chaplains are needed in prisons just as Christian ones are, he said.

The group asked the Department of Corrections for $611,560 to get Muslim staff chaplains in prisons but was turned down.

On Sept. 3, the department modified its contract with the Protestant group so that it could receive the $25,000 subcontract. The Muslim group says it has spoken with some area legislators who told them it is unlikely the General Assembly will find more money for them.

Goraya and Abdul-Malik said they now are considering asking for some of the money — $4.6 million in the year that ended June 30 — made on surcharges imposed on inmate telephone calls. That money, however, always has gone directly into the state general fund.

They are also considering a lawsuit, El-Amin said. “What you have is the (Department of Corrections) treating Islam like it’s a second-class religion because we’re not on equal footing fundingwise, or staffwise, or accesswise,” he said.

Muslim inmates buy goods in prison commissaries, too, El-Amin said.

Hamm, the terrorism expert, said a good chaplain of any faith can make a large difference in a prison. “It seems a shame that any state doesn’t have a paid cadre of prison chaplains.

“I’ve been in some prisons where the chapel is hopping between 8 a.m. and whenever the yard closes — one activity after another, Indians, Muslims, Christians,” he said.

“And then I’ve been in other prisons where the chapel is a ghost yard. It just sits there. You wonder who’s minding the store and what lessons there are here to learn on how to run a chaplaincy.”

• Frank Green is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
http://www2.newsadvance.com/lna/news/state_regional/article/group_muslim_chaplains_needed_in_va._prisons/22798/

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

NY Times Editorial: Prisons and Budgets

Editorial: Prisons and Budgets
NY Times
Published: January 3, 2010

The United States, which has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has about one-quarter of its prisoners. But the relentless rise in the nation’s prison population has suddenly slowed as many states discover that it is simply too expensive to overincarcerate.

Between 1987 and 2007 the prison population nearly tripled, from 585,000 to almost 1.6 million. Much of that increase occurred in states — many with falling crime rates — that had adopted overly harsh punishment policies, such as the “three strikes and you’re out” rule and drug laws requiring that nonviolent drug offenders be locked away.

These policies have been hugely costly. According to the Pew Center on the States, state spending from general funds on corrections increased from $10.6 billion in 1987 to more than $44 billion in 2007, a 127 percent increase in inflation-adjusted dollars. In the same period, adjusted spending on higher education increased only 21 percent.

In 2008, the explosion of the prison population ground to a near halt, according to data released last month by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. About 739,000 inmates were admitted to federal and state facilities, only about 3,500 more than were released.

One factor seems to be tight budgets as states decide to release nonviolent offenders early. This can not only save money. If done correctly, it can also be very sound social policy. Many nonviolent offenders can be dealt with more effectively and more cheaply through treatment and jobs programs.

Michigan, which has been hard hit by the recession, has done a particularly good job of releasing people who do not need to be in prison. As the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project details in a new report, Michigan reduced its prison population by about 8 percent between March 2007 and November 2009 by taking smart steps, notably doing more to get nonviolent drug offenders out, while helping in their transition to a productive, and crime-free, life.

Not every state has gotten the message. Florida, for example, has a state law mandating that all prisoners serve a high percentage of their sentence, which is both dubious corrections policy and terrible fiscal policy.

For many years, driving up prison populations has been an easy thing for elected officials to do, popular with voters and powerful corrections officer unions. The new incarceration figures suggest, however, that in the current hard economic times, strapped states are beginning to realize that they do not have the money to keep people in prison who do not need to be there.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 4, 2010, on page A20 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/opinion/04mon3.html

Michigan Report:
http://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/michigan-breaks-political-logjam-new-model-reducing-prison-populations

Posted by lois at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2010

ILLINOIS EXCHANGE: Tamms spending questioned

ILLINOIS EXCHANGE: Tamms spending questioned

By GEORGE PAWLACZYK and BETH HUNDSDORFER Belleville News-Democrat
December 31, 2009
Chicago Tribune

TAMMS, Ill. - For almost 12 years, Illinois taxpayers have paid one of the highest per-inmate costs in the country to house what the Department of Corrections says are the 250 worst inmates in the state.

The per-year cost to operate the solitary-confinement-only Tamms Correctional Center has grown to at least $16 million -- $64,000 per prisoner, according to figures provided by the state. The amount is two to three times what is spent annually to house an inmate at the three other maximum security lockups in Illinois.

However, the actual per-inmate cost of running the Tamms supermax is undoubtedly much higher, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections 2008 Annual Report. That's because 155 inmates at a minimum security camp operated on the same grounds are included in the figures.

The combined annual cost for the supermax and the minimum security camp is $27.7 million. Using the generous per-inmate cost of $30,000 per year for a minimum security inmate, a classification that requires the least amount of guards and services, the cost of the minimum camp is $4.7 million annually. That leaves $23 million for the supermax, or $92,000 per inmate.

The annual cost of providing mental health care at Tamms -- which critics, such as the New York-based Human Rights Watch, say causes mental illness by imposing years solitary confinement -- is $1.2 million. Most of that expense goes into operating the Special Treatment Unit, which usually houses fewer than a dozen inmates. The Tamms staff psychiatrist is paid $288,000 per year.

Five months after a Belleville News-Democrat investigative series reported abuses at the supermax, and nearly four months after prison system director Michael Randle announced limited reforms, 48 inmates have been cleared for transfer out of Tamms.

But as Randle struggles to find ways to keep costs down statewide, prison experts and attorneys who handle prison-condition lawsuits question whether Tamms actually works.

Randle recently testified in a federal lawsuit brought by Tamms prisoners that the supermax is crucial to safety throughout the system and deterring assaults against guards because inmates fear transfer to Tamms. However, as of Wednesday, his office had not provided any data requested by the News-Democrat concerning whether assaults on guards have declined since Tamms opened.

Supermax critics challenge the idea that confining 250 or so prisoners -- half of 1 percent of the entire state prison-system population -- does any good. They argue it is illogical to believe isolating fewer prisoners than are held in many county jails can have any real effect on reducing violence in a large, highly transient prison system.

While DOC data show that assaults against guards dropped for about 1 1/2 years after Tamms opened in 1998, the decrease has been attributed by critics to statewide prison reforms that began in 1996.

"It is inconceivable that they support the idea that violence declined because of Tamms," said Chicago-area lawyer Jean Maclean Snyder, who has represented Tamms inmates in federal lawsuits. "It declined because of other security changes."

Jody L. Sundt, who co-authored a 2008 study about Tamms, said supermax prisons are not cost-effective and probably do not achieve long-term goals.

"It is primarily a symbol, a gesture of overwhelming control," said Sundt, an assistant professor in the Division of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Portland State University in Oregon.

Sundt's study found that violence against guards did decrease during an 18-month period following the opening of Tamms, but she said she and her fellow researchers could not determine why. The study showed the short-term decrease was not solely due to ongoing reforms that began a few years earlier. No similar decreases were found in studies of supermax prisons in other states.

Sundt said that while inmates who commit crimes in prison need to be under strict control, programming, not years of solitary confinement, is more likely to reduce violence.

"Some might say it isn't torture because no bones are broken, but it causes pain and suffering," she said.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Springfield, recently praised the mental health treatment inmates receive in Tamms' Special Treatment Unit. He had earlier convened a Senate subcommittee on human rights because of his concern about Tamms inmates.

During a recent media tour, reporters saw mentally ill inmates in a treatment area. Each was confined to a separate Plexiglas booth set in a semi-circle and was playing a card game without actually touching any cards, which were handled by a $50,000-per-year activity director.

"The idea that Tamms serves as a deterrent is, on its face, nonsense," said Stephen F. Eisenman, an art history professor at Northwestern University in Chicago with a Ph.D. from Princeton. Eisenman has published widely, including the 2007 book "The Abu Ghraib Effect," concerning abuses at the U.S. military prison in Baghdad.

"Only a tiny fraction of those who commit any kinds of felonies in the prison system get sent to Tamms," said Eisenman, who also contends that the supermax does little or nothing to curb violence against guards at other prisons.

"To attribute it (a decline in violence) to this one small factor, this tiny prison opened in Southern Illinois, I just think is absurd," he said, adding, "What I think is really going on here is that the prison guards and the (guards') union like to have a place like Tamms where they can send somebody who has attacked a guard. Guards have difficult jobs, and if one of their own is attacked, they like to be able to feel that there is some way to get back at the prisoner, like sending him to Tamms."

Anders Lindall, the public affairs director for the guards' union -- Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees -- said violence against guards, according to "numerous anecdotal reports" from the union's membership, is increasing, not decreasing. He denied that guards sought vengeance against inmates.

Chad S. Briggs, a doctoral candidate at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, who worked with Sundt on the Tamms study, said, "Conceptually, Tamms doesn't make a lot of sense."

The way Tamms officials handle inmates sent to the lockup, especially mentally ill prisoners, by locking them in solitary with little or no social contact, is far different than the policy at what is arguably the largest lockup in the United Sates: the 10,000 prisoner Cook County Jail.

The newspaper's Tamms series reported that mentally ill inmates reacted to being held for as long as more than a decade in solitary by mutilating themselves to the point of needing hospitalization, and by throwing feces and urine at guards and smearing bodily wastes on themselves.

Randle repeatedly said Tamms is reserved for the "worst of the worst," although the newspaper's findings challenged that assumption. The series reported that more than half of Tamms inmates had committed no crimes inside prison and that others were seriously mentally ill and did not receive treatment.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said during a November interview that about 250 mentally ill prisoners, including 50 who are seriously mentally ill, are treated in a special unit at the sprawling jail. There is no Hannibal Lecter treatment, he said. The jail isolates only actively psychotic inmates and even then, only for a few hours or a few days at a time. All but a few mentally ill Cook County inmates are out of their cells all day and mingle with other prisoners and staff.

As for long-term solitary confinement, Dart said, "That stuff doesn't really work."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-tammsprison-cost,0,3504855,full.story

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