June 30, 2008
JJPL AND FFLIC WIN HISTORIC VICTORY WITH CLOSURE OF JETSON YOUTH PRISON
The results of years of litigation, media advocacy and family organizing reached a high point in 2003-2004 with the closure of the hyper-violent Tallulah youth prison and sweeping juvenile justice reform legislation, requiring a change from a punitive juvenile system to a rehabilitative system based on the highly effective Missouri model. The Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003 required the move away from large youth prisons to small, regional, home-like secure care facilities close to children's homes, an increase in evidence-based alternatives to incarceration programs and a decrease in the number of non-violent children sent to secure care.
In spite of the ground-breaking legislation, juvenile justice reform had come to a standstill over the past year, with the three large youth prisons deteriorating, new reports of abuse in Jetson, and no movement to build the small, regional rehabilitative facilities and alternative programs required by the sweeping reforms JJPL and FFLIC helped pass in 2003. Jetson was the site of both widespread violence and, recently, the tragic death of a child who was just three weeks away from his release date.
JJPL and FFLIC stepped up pressure for reform through widespread media
coverage including a series of articles in the Baton Rouge Advocate such as, "Prison Problems Return: Juvenile Prison Reform has Stalled, Critics Say" (4/17/08) and "Jetson Closure Pushed" (4/19/08) and two New York Times editorials "Louisiana Tries Again" (5/29/2008) and "Louisiana: Closing an Abusive'Center for Youth'" (6/18/08)[1] Media profiles of youth who were incarcerated in Jetson for minor offenses, such as a teenager who served four years for stealing his mother's necklace to give to his girlfriend for Christmas and suffered violence and brutality in the facility,[2] drew attention to the fact that more than 60 percent of youth in Louisiana's juvenile prisons are non-violent.
The bill passed unanimously in the House and with only one opposition vote in the Senate, signaling a renewed commitment to reform. This means that smaller more regionalized facilities that focus on rehabilitation will be built, more children will be directed into community-based alternatives to incarceration, and that the antiquated youth prison known as the Jetson Correctional Center for Youth will no longer house children as of 2009.
Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)
June 28, 2008
CA: Dispute over California prison crowding to go to trial. A court-appointed referee tells federal judges that state officials and others have failed to settle the case of poor inmate healthcare.
From the Los Angeles Times
Dispute over California prison crowding to go to trial
A court-appointed referee tells federal judges that state officials and others have failed to settle the case of poor inmate healthcare.
By Tim Reiterman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 28, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO — Attempts to settle a case on California's crowded prisons have reached an impasse over the issue of how many inmates the lockups should hold.
The failure paves the way for a trial Nov. 17 that could lead a three-judge panel to order mass releases.
On May 30, federal judges gave the parties in the complex litigation a 30-day extension to strike a deal. After hearing a court-appointed referee's report Friday on the stalled talks, the judges said they would go ahead with a trial to determine whether overcrowding is the primary cause of unconstitutionally poor medical and mental healthcare in the state's 33 prisons.
Referee Elwood Lui, who presided over negotiations among state officials, prisoners' rights attorneys and other parties, said, "We were not able to bring the ball across the goal line."
Andrea Hoch, the governor's legal affairs secretary, said: "Agreement on a population level is key because all other settlement terms flow from that one item."
Lui and Hoch expressed hope that an accord still could be reached before the trial.
Currently, 158,000 inmates are housed in California's adult prisons. Liu proposed setting the population at 158% of designed capacity -- which under existing conditions would translate to 132,500 people -- by Sept. 15, 2012.
To help reduce the gap, parole violators and prisoners with short sentences would be sent to county-run programs instead of state penitentiaries.
But in a report unsealed Friday, Liu said state officials and plaintiffs in two civil rights suits could not agree on a population level, benchmarks for achieving such a goal or a completion date for a population reduction.
Republican lawmakers and 20 district attorneys, who intervened in the case, questioned whether overcrowding is the primary cause of inadequate healthcare. They opposed population caps and the diversion of low-risk inmates, citing public safety concerns.
They also argued that overcrowding would be addressed through Assembly Bill 900, which passed last year and authorized $7.4 billion in bonds to add 53,000 beds, and through a court-appointed receiver who has sought $7 billion in borrowing for 10,000 additional medical beds.
"With all the promising work in progress designed to alleviate the conditions that gave rise to the possible need for a prisoner release order . . . a settlement . . . does not need a prison population cap in order to succeed at this time," wrote William Mitchell, Riverside County assistant district attorney and lead counsel for the intervening district attorneys.
Steven Kaufhold, a lawyer for the Republican legislators, said in an interview, "These are large problems and are not going to be solved in a month or by November. . . . Turning [prisoners] loose is not necessarily going to help medical or mental health."
The judges expressed skepticism about the ability of legislative action or the court-appointed receiver in charge of prison healthcare to solve the long-standing care problems any time soon.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson said the receiver estimated it would take three to five years to get the system in order.
U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton said: "We're told there are people dying [unnecessarily] every day."
Don Specter of the Prison Law Office, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said talks broke off Monday.
"Even if we do resume talks," he said, "the trial will go ahead unless we settle the case."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons28-2008jun28,0,7495253.story
Posted by lois at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2008
The Sentencing Project's response to George Will's Column: "More Prisons, Less Crime"
The Sentencing Project
www.sentencingproject.org
Do More Prisoners Equal Less Crime? A Response to George Will
In a recent syndicated column (“More Prisons, Less Crime,” Washington Post, June 22, 2008), commentator George Will argues that the world record incarceration rate in the United States has produced safer streets and has been beneficial in particular to African Americans, who are disproportionately victims of crime. Will’s selective use of data and limited vision provide an inaccurate portrayal of current criminal justice policy and its effects. Following is an assessment of some of the key arguments raised in the column.
“Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which ’society’ writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.”
Decades of research documents that people in low-income, minority communities are at greater risk of entering the criminal justice system because of the paucity of prevention programs, early intervention programs, and alternatives to incarceration. While privately run social services programs are widely available in most middle and upper class communities, their limited presence where they are most needed means that the first “intervention” that those less fortunate encounter is often prison.
Evidence-based social programs that address the contributing factors to crime have been demonstrated to be more cost-effective than incarceration. Research shows that quality preschool programs can save the public $17 for each dollar that is invested. Other programs with documented cost-effectiveness include initiatives to improve high school graduation rates and a variety of substance abuse treatment strategies.
“…Obama said that ‘more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities.’ Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail.”
Will is technically correct that Senator Obama misspoke in his reference to young black men, as opposed to black men of all ages. But current and projected rates of incarceration for black men are indeed dramatic. One of every nine black males in the age group 20-34 is in prison or jail on any given day, and if current trends continue one of every three black males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.
“…from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population”
Will is both wrong and misleading on this statistic. First, the violent offense proportion of the state prison population increase, 75%, was substantial, but did not account for “all of the increase.” More importantly, the crisis of incarceration in the U.S. did not begin in 1999. In fact, the incarcerated population has been rising at a dramatic rate for more than three decades. The combined prison and jail population has risen by more than 600% since 1972, increasing from 300,000 to 2.3 million today. A longer term view of the rise in the prison and jail population shows that changes in drug policy have been most significant in contributing to this expansion. From 1980 to today, the number of drug offenders in prison and jail has risen by 1100%, from 41,000 to 500,000.
“In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer.”
The unprecedented rise in the prison population described above was brought about primarily as a result of changes in policy, not crime rates. State and federal legislatures passed numerous “tough on crime” laws intended to put more people in prison and keep them there longer than in the past. An analysis of incarceration patterns between 1980 and 2001 by noted criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck concluded that fluctuations in crime rates played no role in the 316% growth in imprisonment. The researchers found that the entire growth was related to changes in sentencing policy, with 53% attributable to an increased likelihood of incarceration following an arrest and 47% resulting from increased time served in prison.
“But [Heather] Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offending.”
While differential crime offending is one contributing factor to racial disparities in prison, a wealth of research documents that it only explains a portion of the patterns in imprisonment. A comprehensive review of research in the field conducted for the National Institute of Justice concluded that "race and ethnicity do play an important role in contemporary sentencing decisions. Black and Hispanic offenders -- and particularly those who are young, male, or unemployed -- are more likely than their white counterparts to be sentenced to prison; in some jurisdictions, they also receive longer sentences...than do similarly situated white offenders."
“As for the charge that the incarceration rate of blacks is substantially explained by more severe federal sentences for crack as opposed to powder-cocaine defendants…[citing Mac Donald] ‘it’s going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so [federal] crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006.’”
The movement to reform federal penalties for crack cocaine offenses is not based on the assumption that these policies represent the entire problem of disparity in the criminal justice system. Instead, as respected organizations including the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the American Bar Association have documented, the crack penalties are both ineffective as drug policy and contribute to unwarranted racial disparities. They are also representative of many of the misguided policies and practices of the “war on drugs,” which has resulted in over-incarceration of low-level offenders and disproportionate targeting of communities of color.
“ . . . 10 years of scholarly studies ‘have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime . . . [a] high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.’”
The relationship between incarceration and crime is far more complicated than is suggested by this quote. During the 1990s, a time of historic declines in crime, there was no discernible correlation between incarceration rates and criminal offending. Between 1991 and 1998, states with above average increases in the rate of incarceration (72%) experienced a 13% decrease in crime rates. But states with below average increases in the rate of incarceration (30%) actually experienced a greater decline in crime rates, 17%. During this time the notable “tough on crime” state of Texas experienced a 144% rise in incarceration between 1991 and 1998, and its crime rate fell 35%. However, New York’s crime rate declined by a greater extent, 43%, during this period, despite an increase of incarceration of only 24%. New York continues to experience historic lows in crime while its prison population continues to decline, and there is widespread discussion of closing four prisons in the state because of excess capacity.
In truth, imprisonment has only played a limited role in reducing crime. An analysis of the drop in crime during the 1990s estimated that the growth of imprisonment accounted for about one-quarter of the decline in violent crime. Other contributing factors likely included a growing economy, changes in drug market dynamics, strategic policing, and community engagement in crime prevention efforts. While imprisonment may work at some level to reduce crime through deterrence and incapacitation, there is little evidence supporting the deterrent effect of increasingly longer prison sentences. Research suggests that any deterrent effect is more a function of the certainty of punishment, not the severity.
“‘Deterrence works.’ [Quoting Heather MacDonald] It works especially on behalf of blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by black men.”
While prison has had only a limited impact on crime, it is increasingly resulting in negative consequences for individuals, families, and communities. As a result of mass incarceration there are now 1.5 million children with a parent in prison, including 1 in 14 African American children.
African American communities are also affected by the challenges of reentry for the 700,000 people leaving prison each year. Many persons leaving prison are ill-equipped to handle life on the outside because they have received few services for mental health, substance abuse, education, and vocational skill-building programming while incarcerated.
Upon leaving prison or jail, individuals encounter a tangle of legal restrictions which severely limit their ability to become productive members of society. In addition to longstanding barriers to employment and education, in recent years policymakers have enacted a host of restrictions, many applying solely to drug offenders. These include a federal ban on welfare and food stamps for those with a felony drug conviction, a federal mandate that limits access to public housing, and restrictions on student loans for higher education.
An estimated 5.3 million individuals are unable to vote because of laws that deny this fundamental right to participate in the democratic process to those with felony convictions. These restrictions fall disproportionately on African Americans, with13% of black males currently unable to vote. These policies affect black communities as a whole, whereby even persons who are not disenfranchised experience vote dilution as a result of high rates of legal disenfranchisement in their communities.
Conclusion
Issues of crime and justice are critical ones for all Americans. As such, we need to encourage a national dialogue on promoting safety that assesses the appropriate balance of approaches among prevention, strengthening communities, and criminal justice sanctions. For more than three decades our nation has made unprecedented investments in prison expansion at the expense of other policy options. We now need a national dialogue that is centered on evidence-based research regarding the relative effectiveness of various interventions. Such a dialogue would produce better public safety outcomes for all Americans.
June 28, 2008
Posted by lois at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)
June 22, 2008
VA: Despite Halt in Bed Rentals, Va. Strains to House Inmates
By Anita Kumar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2008; C05
RICHMOND -- Even though Virginia halted a program to rent 1,000 prison beds to other states last week, it still needs to build six prisons in the next six years to keep pace with its escalating inmate population.
A recent report to the secretary of public safety projected that Virginia will add about 1,000 prisoners a year, resulting in an inmate population of 44,700 by 2013. Each new prison would cost an estimated $100 million to build and $25 million a year to operate.
"That's a projection of what's going to be required. We don't have a choice,'' said Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax), chairman of the Virginia State Crime Commission. "It's the way it is."
Despite the state's looming prison bed shortage, the Department of Corrections had planned to rent out 1,000 beds over the next two years to offset $38 million in budget cuts. But Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) on Tuesday ordered the department to stop importing prisoners after local sheriffs complained.
The state spent $32 million last year to add an 800-bed wing to the St. Brides Correctional Center in Chesapeake, but the opening has been indefinitely postponed because the state does not have enough money to operate it, officials said.
Gene M. Johnson, state corrections director, said that without additional out-of-state inmates, he might be forced to lay off some of his 13,000 employees or close some of the agency's 43 facilities.
States across the country are grappling with budget shortfalls because of the sluggish economy. In response to rising construction costs, some have halted prison-building programs and chosen instead to release inmates early or house them in other states.
But Virginia remains on track to build prisons.
Since 1990, the General Assembly has approved spending more than $1 billion for 21,000 additional beds, according to a Senate Finance Committee report. Often the state has built or expanded prisons in rural areas, where land and construction costs are lower and communities view the facilities as an economic plus.
The state spent $74 million to build the 1,024-bed Green Rock Correctional Center in Pittsylvania County, $69 million to build the 1,024-bed Pocahontas State Correctional Center in Tazewell County and $22 million to add 600 beds to the Deerfield Correctional Center in Southampton County. It is spending $101 million to build a 1,024-bed medium-security facility, expected to open in 2010 in Grayson County.
In April, the General Assembly approved spending $8.7 million to begin planning a new prison in Charlotte County and $300,000 to begin planning an $8.6 million, 200-bed expansion in Bland County. The Charlotte prison is expected to become the second in the state run by a private contractor.
Although the state's inmate population is increasing, the rate of incarceration in Virginia remains in line with other states.
The rising number of prisoners can be attributed to several factors, including an increase in new offenders, longer prison sentences, more probation violators and a drop in the number of inmates granted parole. The state abolished parole for crimes committed after Jan. 1, 1995, but thousands of inmates are still eligible for parole under the old law.
This year, legislators considered allowing technical offenders -- a description often used for those who break the terms of probation or parole by using drugs or alcohol -- to be eligible for reduced sentences, diversion programs or cheaper, dorm-style prisons. The Department of Corrections estimates that more than half of technical offenders could be eligible for alternative programs.
Robert Vaughn, staff director for the House Appropriations Committee, said legislators considered a proposal related to technical offenders that would have eliminated the need for 900 prison beds. But legislators abandoned that idea when they could not agree on which offenders would qualify.
Local officials have long sought more state prison beds to relieve crowded jails.
Virginia Beach Sheriff Paul J. Lanteigne sued to force the Department of Corrections to enforce a law that requires the removal from local jails any state inmate sentenced to more than a year in prison. Fairfax County Sheriff Stan G. Barry had considered joining the lawsuit but said all 80 state inmates were removed from his jail days after his complaint was made public.
Virginia began housing out-of-state inmates a decade ago but largely abandoned the practice in 2004, as officials said the space was needed for a growing inmate population. They had resumed renting beds a few weeks ago after the budget shortfall became clear, but Kaine abruptly halted the program last week.
The state will keep about 300 inmates from Wyoming who are at the Pocahontas State Correctional Center and the Wallens Ridge State Prison, both in the southwestern part of the state, bringing in about $14 million over two years. The number of inmates from Wyoming might increase, but no inmates from other states will be accepted.
Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach), vice chairman of the Virginia State Crime Commission, said the projected increase in prisoners is not a surprise to those who monitor the criminal justice system.
Stolle said the Department of Corrections does not have many options for housing inmates, which is why it is sometimes forced to keep inmates in local jails. "It doesn't have any elasticity in the system,'' Stolle said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/21/AR2008062101503.html
Posted by lois at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
June 19, 2008
AZ: Senate rejects ban on certain inmates in private prisons
The Arizona Daily Star
Published: 06.19.2008
Senate rejects ban on certain inmates in private prisons
By Howard Fischer
CAPITOL MEDIA SERVICES
"It has historically been the county and communities that have welcomed the prisons because they provide jobs and economic security to the community."
Sen. Rebecca Rios
D-Apache Junction
PHOENIX — State lawmakers refused Wednesday to limit the kind of criminals who can be housed in private prisons in Arizona.
On a 10-8 vote, the Senate rejected a proposal by Sen. Debbie McCune Davis to bar any private prison that houses inmates from another state from accepting prisoners who have committed murder, rape and various other serious crimes, or have a history of escape.
McCune Davis, D-Phoenix, said she wants to keep other states from exporting their most serious offenders to Arizona, where private companies are paid to incarcerate them.
But the wording would have placed similar restrictions on the ability of the Arizona Department of Corrections to contract with private prisons to house the same kind of inmates.
Sen. Robert Blendu, R-Litchfield Park, said the net effect would be to put the private prisons out of business in Arizona.
Central to the debate is the safety of Arizona citizens.
McCune Davis cited an incident where an inmate from Alaska, rather than being returned to his home state after completing his sentence, was instead put into an Arizona nursing home. She said he assaulted two women in that home.
"They are not being returned to their home states," she said. "They are being dumped out into our community."
Sen. Tom O'Halleran, R-Sedona, said the proposal makes sense. He said Arizona does not send maximum-security inmates to private prisons in other states.
"We shouldn't be taking back people that we don't know who they are, we don't know what they've done at the other criminal institutions," he said. "No state should be sending their murderers to Arizona."
But Sen. Linda Gray, R-Glendale, said Arizonans are in no danger because of the private prisons.
She said there are about 9,000 inmates in privately run facilities in the state, yet only two people have escaped, both of whom were soon recaptured.
Sen. Rebecca Rios, D-Apache Junction, said her objections to the proposal were based on pure economics.
"It has historically been the county and communities that have welcomed the prisons because they provide jobs and economic security to the community," she said.
Rios, whose district includes several private prisons, said they are the largest private employers in Pinal County and pay more in property taxes than anyone else.
Sen. Chuck Gray, R-Mesa, said that if private prisons can't take certain types of inmates, whether from Arizona or elsewhere, they will close. He said that will make the state less safe because the state can lock up more people in private prisons than it can in state-run prisons for the same amount of money.
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/244490
Posted by lois at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
June 18, 2008
California prisons receiver says he needs $7 billion now for healthcare
California prisons receiver says he needs $7 billion now for healthcare
The state's failure to give him money to build seven facilities is the result of 'deliberate obstruction,' he says. He may seek a federal court order to obtain the funds.
By Michael Rothfeld
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 18, 2008
SACRAMENTO — In his broadest, harshest critique of state officials yet, the court-appointed overseer of healthcare in state prisons said Tuesday he would run out of money soon and had begun preparing to seize the funding he needs with an order from a federal judge.
Receiver J. Clark Kelso, who had previously directed most of his displeasure at state lawmakers for refusing to approve his $7-billion plan to construct prison healthcare facilities, on Tuesday added Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Controller John Chiang and the nonpartisan legislative analyst's office to the list of officials showing "an unwillingness to accept accountability."
"The state's failure to make the necessary financial commitment is not a result of inadvertent neglect or mere incompetence," Kelso said in a filing to U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, who appointed him. "It is a result of conscious, deliberate obstruction."
Kelso told reporters that although he still hopes state officials will cooperate, preferably by borrowing the money he needs, he has begun laying the groundwork to ask Henderson to issue an order for the money. That could take the form of an injunction directing Chiang to pay the receiver's bills or a draft on state bank accounts and could occur within a couple of months, he said.
"There will come a time when I simply run out of money, and sometime before then I will be forced to take more substantial steps," Kelso said.
Last month, state Senate Republicans blocked SB 1665, a bill authorizing the receiver to borrow $7 billion to build seven healthcare facilities for inmates, to comply with orders in a federal lawsuit against the state. In part, he blamed a report by the legislative analyst's office questioning the need for his 10,000-bed plan, and said it was full of misleading and inaccurate statements.
Dan Carson, who directs the analyst's criminal justice unit, said his office did nothing to sabotage Kelso and recommended $2 billion in funding, even though the receiver failed to provide "very basic information" to justify such a large request.
Within days of the bill's defeat, Kelso demanded that Schwarzenegger and Chiang provide him money, starting with $70 million, though the state is in fiscal crisis. But he said they have indicated they will not provide it.
Chiang's spokeswoman, Hallye Jordan, said the office has been exploring options with Kelso but has told him that the controller is prohibited from cutting a check without an appropriation from lawmakers or a court order.
"Even if there was a court order, it would be problematic because the fact is today there is no cash in the general fund," Jordan said.
She added that to pay the receiver, money would have to be diverted from schools or healthcare providers serving the poor, or from funds dedicated by voters for purposes such as transportation. She said such a move would probably spur lawsuits.
Lisa Page, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger, said the governor's office is "in active, continuous discussions with the receiver" and wants to help deliver the court-ordered prison healthcare plan.
State Sen. George Runner (R-Lancaster) said he and his colleagues would like to approve Kelso's plan, but only as part of related negotiations on state prison construction and a pending federal court case on prison overcrowding. He said Republican senators know the state must improve the healthcare provided to its prisoners.
"At the same time," Runner said, "I'm not sure it's as clear as the receiver thinks it is" that "the state has to roll over and deal with it exactly on his terms."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons18-2008jun18,0,6577747.story
Posted by lois at 09:04 PM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2008
MI: Nonpartisan group says rising Corrections spending is the leading cause of Mich.'s continued budget woes.
Prison costs may hit $2.6B in '12
Nonpartisan group says rising Corrections spending is the leading cause of Mich.'s continued budget woes.
Charlie Cain and Gary Heinlein / Detroit News Lansing Bureau
Friday, June 13, 2008
LANSING -- Prison spending is projected to increase by $46 million a year over the next four years, driving the cost to $2.6 billion in 2012, according to a report released Thursday by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan.
The 37-page report, reviewing the reasons Michigan incarcerates convicts at a higher rate than neighboring states, says spending on prisons is the leading cause of the state's continued budget troubles. Michigan already spends $2 billion on Corrections programs, one-fifth of the state's general fund, and had to use tax increases last fall to house the 51,000 inmates and avoid a budget shortfall of $1.8 billion.
"Given the magnitude of corrections expenditures, it will be extremely difficult to bring long-term balance to the state general fund budget without significant alterations of Corrections policy," the report said.
The Citizens Research Council is an independent, nonpartisan research organization that looks at key state public policy issues.
Its findings mirror those of a Detroit News investigation published April 14-15.
"Michigan's Corrections program is out of line, substantially in some cases, in regional and national comparisons," the report declared.
"The combination of prison population increases and economic factors will cause Corrections spending pressures to grow at a faster rate than they have over the last 34 years."
Since 1990, Michigan has kept its inmates locked up at least one year longer than the national or Great Lakes average.
Had it been in line with the average over that time period, Michigan would have spent $403 million less on Corrections in 2005 and housed 14,000 fewer inmates, the report says.
The length of stay for a Michigan inmate has grown by 57 percent from 1981 to 2005, seeing the average stay climb from 28 months to nearly 44 months.
"Lower parole approval rates and specific policy changes aimed at being 'tough on crime' are the primary causes of longer prison stays," the report added.
Corrections Department spokesman Russ Marlan said the report "mirrors what we've been saying. When you look at the data, we do stand out."
The department and Gov. Jennifer Granholm have been pushing for money-saving reforms such as releasing sick and dying prisoners and allowing for the release of more nonviolent offenders. Such proposals have gone nowhere in the Legislature.
"It shows the need for corrections policy reforms in Michigan," Marlan said. "We all want the same thing. We all want safe neighborhoods. This says crime does play a role (in prison population rates), but policies are a bigger factor."
Barbara Levine, director of the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending, said she hopes this helps push more policymakers toward the reforms her organization has been advocating, including restoration of a modest "good time" policy that would allow well-behaved prisoners to knock days off their terms behind bars. A truth in sentencing law requires felons to serve at least their minimum sentence in prison without possibility of early release.
"The logic is there," she said. "It's just a matter of public will."
Republican Sen. Alan Cropsey of DeWitt, a legislative leader regarding justice policies, took issue with some of the report's conclusions.
"They haven't taken a good look at what type of people we're sending to prison versus what other states are sending to prison, and that's crucial," Cropsey said. "What they aren't saying is that if we had the same kind of crime other states have, it would make a huge difference. We don't. We have Flint and Detroit, two of the most violent cities in the country."
The report notes that Michigan imprisons a higher percentage of violent and sexual offenders than the national average. For instance, in 2003, 30 percent of those sent to Michigan prisons were violent offenders compared with 22 percent in the rest of that nation. That year, Michigan sent 10 percent to prison on sex offenses, compared with 6 percent nationally.
The report said parole rates for those two crimes have dramatically declined. The rate for violent offenders dropped from 61 percent in 1990 to about 38 percent in 2005. For sex offenders, it dropped from 47 percent to 14 percent during that period.
The report's release comes as the state is undergoing an exhaustive study of its Corrections policies by the nonpartisan national Council of State Governments, which will spend up to three years helping the state devise ways of controlling costs and inmate populations.
In the report, the council said state policymakers and voters have contributed to the dramatic inmate growth.
Their actions included: the 1978 repeal by voters of a "good time" policy that cut sentences by as much as 22 days for each month a prisoner avoided misconduct; the 1988 repeal of a law -- used nine times after passage in 1980 -- that granted 90-day sentence reductions for the entire prison population each time it reached capacity; legislative approval in 1998 of the "truth-in-sentencing law," accompanied by toughened sentencing guidelines that lengthened prison terms for the most serious criminals.
The report concluded: "Whether the rate of prisoner intake is reduced, the length of stay shortened or other changes adopted, however, the fiscal benefits resulting from any reforms aimed at controlling inmate population and spending growth will have to be weighed against any risks to public safety."
Full Report
http://www.crcmich.org/PUBLICAT/2000s/2008/rpt350.pdf
2 page executive summary
http://www.crcmich.org/PUBLICAT/2000s/2008/note200802.pdf
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080613/POLITICS/806130348
Posted by lois at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)
OR: Prison expansions bring small gains
Prison expansions bring small gains
JUNE 16, 2008
Ben Jacklet
SPECIAL to the Argus Observer
Ontario - The Oregon State Penitentiary was built in Portland in 1851 and relocated to Salem in 1866, where it remained the state’s only major prison for 100 years. Other facilities were built to supplement the penitentiary’s mission, but with the exception of a forest work camp in Tillamook, Oregon’s prisons were confined to Salem until 1985, when the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution opened in Pendleton.
Then came the great expansion: the Powder River Correctional Facility was completed 350 miles east of Salem in Baker City in 1989, followed by a barrage of prisons named after bodies of water rather than towns: Mill Creek, Columbia River, Shutter Creek, Snake River, Two Rivers, Coffee Creek and Warner Creek. With the opening of the Deer Ridge Correctional Institution in Madras last October, Oregon’s prison industry has grown to 14 facilities, 13,500 inmates, nearly 5,000 jobs and a DOC budget of $1.26 billion. The state now spends more on prisons than on higher education.
As the new prisons were built, wages in rural Oregon stagnated. So it’s not surprising that rural communities have embraced prisons and the jobs they bring. “There’s not a lot of industry knocking at your door in these rural areas,” says Oregon Employment Department regional economist Dallas Fridley, who tracks North Central Oregon. “Given the isolated nature of some of these communities, there may not be that many options for development beyond a prison.”
Employment and income numbers indicate that Oregon’s massive investment in prison expansion has brought local gains that are modest at best. The rural counties that gambled biggest on large prisons after the passage of Measure 11, Malheur and Umatilla, have continued to struggle. In Malheur County, non-farming jobs have increased slightly since the completion of the Snake River prison, but wages have been sluggish. Malheur County has the state’s highest poverty rate, its lowest median income, and is 31st out of 36 Oregon counties in earnings per job.
The situation also looks grim in Umatilla, where the main street through downtown features boarded-up storefronts, vacant lots, run-down $25-a-night motels and sprawling trailer lots in varying stages of decay. In Umatilla County, state jobs grew after the Two Rivers prison opened in 2000, but private sector jobs fell and wages have held flat. The 430 employees of the Two Rivers Correctional Institution, by far the largest employer in the City of Umatilla, spend money locally, but the prison does not. Of the $56.6 million DOC spent to purchase goods and services for its prisons in 2007, only $29,928, or .05 percent, went to Umatilla businesses.
Local purchasing figures are only slightly higher in Ontario, an agricultural center for potatoes and onions. Mark Nooth, superintendent for the Snake River prison, explains the facility’s hands are tied when it comes to supporting local business.
“We’re too big,” Nooth says. “We serve 9,000 meals a day. Local businesses can do a portion of it, but we need someone who can handle the whole thing.”
Statewide, just 42.5 percent of the goods and services used in prisons are purchased from Oregon companies.
Then there is the matter of prison labor. In 1994, the same year Oregon voters passed Measure 11, they also approved Measure 17, which requires inmates to work a 40-hour week. As a result, Oregon prisoners work inside and outside of their facilities, cleaning parks, sorting mail, printing business cards, building cabins and making telemarketing calls for private companies, including Timeline Industries and National Marketing Solutions.
In Ontario, minimum-security inmates sort potatoes bound for the Ore-Ida factory and spruce up the Four Rivers Cultural Center, the location of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. In Umatilla inmate crews work at the Finley Butte Landfill and unload rail cars. for CRL.
http://www.argusobserver.com/articles/2008/06/15/news/doc48554ba219559492428
839.txt
Posted by lois at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2008
KY: Prison costs targeted. Panel to focus on easing taxpayers' burden
Prison costs targeted
PANEL TO FOCUS ON EASING TAXPAYERS' BURDEN
By Joe Biesk
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lexington Herald Leader
With Kentucky's prison population skyrocketing and only expected to get larger, Gov. Steve Beshear has called on a group of legal authorities from across the state to find ways to relieve the prison system's financial burden on taxpayers.
And as Kentucky grapples with budget woes throughout state government, such as sharply reduced spending on public universities, lawmakers are looking to reduce the amount of money the state spends on prisons. A subcommittee of the Kentucky Criminal Justice Council began studying the state's sentencing practices last week.
Jun. 09, 2008
"The prison population has grown to the point that it's getting close to costing half a billion" dollars, said Charles Geveden, deputy secretary of the state's Justice and Public Safety Cabinet. "We need to look at that, but the thing we don't want to sacrifice is the protection of the public, and we won't sacrifice that."
The Department of Corrections' budget is $424.5 million for fiscal 2009, which begins July 1, and $440.4 million the next year. That includes nearly $525 million in state funds over the next two years for adult prisons.
A study released earlier this year by the Pew Center on the States found that Kentucky has experienced the nation's largest prison population increase -- it grew by 12 percent to 22,400 inmates. That number could reach 31,000 within 10 years.
Beshear and state lawmakers have looked for ways to reduce those numbers. The General Assembly included language in the state budget that allows for certain Class C and Class D felons to serve parts of their sentences in home incarceration programs.
"It is time that we take a serious look at our sentencing guidelines, our penal code, and all of the related items to try to figure out ways to appropriately punish people, make sure the public is protected, and find some alternatives that are less expensive than just putting somebody in prison," Beshear said during a March interview.
Beshear has asked the Criminal Justice Council to report back with recommendations by Dec. 1. The subcommittee headed by Geveden is one of five reviewing prison issues. Others are looking at Kentucky's drug laws, the penal code, pretrial release and probation and parole.
Geveden's panel on sentencing is looking at, among other things, finding ways of reducing the number of people who re-offend. Some answers could include offering more treatment, education and job training while people are in prison, Geveden said.
Kentucky Public Advocate Ernie Lewis, a member of the panel, said he's hoping the state overhauls all of its sentencing practices to rein in "out of control prison numbers." Harsher laws, longer sentences and more law enforcement has led to the state's current prison situation, Lewis said.
"Those numbers are difficult to ignore," he said. "However, I think that our culture over the last 30 years has become so harsh, and so law-and-order oriented, that I think it's very difficult for that to be changed."
Linda Tally Smith, a commonwealth's attorney in Boone and Gallatin counties, said she supports studying the issue. But, while rising prison costs should be reviewed, many citizens support harsh penalties, she said.
"Most people who you talk to on a daily basis don't understand why people who commit crimes don't get more time," Smith said.
http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/story/428330.html
Posted by lois at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)
June 06, 2008
Federal Prisons Cost Soars to 62% above estimates
Mendota prison project scaled back
Costs affect the plans; communication was lacking, auditors say.
By Michael Doyle / Bee Washington Bureau
05/29/08 23:30:25
WASHINGTON -- The cost of a long-delayed federal prison in the San Joaquin Valley town of Mendota has soared 45% beyond original estimates even as the project itself has shrunk, dismayed auditors say in a new report.
Vexed by stop-and-start funding and higher oil and steel prices, among other problems, the anticipated price tag for Federal Correctional Institution Mendota now tops $231 million. Seven years ago, federal officials figured a Mendota prison would cost $158 million.
"Cost estimates are imprecise and should be expected to vary," Government Accountability Office auditors noted Thursday, "but Congress and other stakeholders were not informed about the extent to which costs might vary from the initial estimates."
The Mendota facility was one of three federal prisons examined by the congressional watchdog agency. All told, the auditors found construction costs for the prisons in California, West Virginia and New Hampshire have increased 62% beyond initial estimates.
The rising costs drove federal officials to curtail some construction plans to meet their budgets. The result: smaller prisons than anyone anticipated.
"This is an example of problems within the federal Bureau of Prisons," Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, said in an interview Thursday evening. "They don't keep their eye on the ball."
The original Mendota prison plan called for a high-security penitentiary. That changed in 2002 to a medium-security prison and a minimum-security camp. An adjoining Federal Prison Industries facility would have employed and trained inmates.
Last year, GAO auditors reported, officials quietly eliminated both the minimum-security camp and the prison-industry facility from the 960-acre Mendota complex. Officials also shrunk a planned prison-industry facility at the Berlin, N.H., prison.
"Although intended to reduce costs, these changes also reduced the functionality of the prisons and deviated from what the [Bureau of Prisons] planned and requested funding for," auditors stated.
Auditors further noted that the Bureau of Prisons "did not clearly communicate" to Congress" that the Mendota project had shrunk. The only indication that the minimum security camp was eliminated came in the omission of the phrase "with camp" in official references to FCI Mendota.
"Their communication with our office has not been adequate," Costa said.
Bureau of Prisons officials, in their official response, stated that the elimination of the minimum-security camp was "clearly" indicated on a construction status report that "went to all shareholders." Bureau officials did not dispute much of the report and agreed to improve cost reporting.
Mendota city officials could not be reached to comment Thursday.
The initial Mendota prison plans anticipated a minimum-security camp housing about 128 inmates. The medium-security facility will house about 1,152 inmates.
The entire project was alluring for the Mendota community, which saw the new prison complex as a source of employment. The more inmates are housed, the more workers are needed. When local officials broke ground in August 2005, they spoke of $20 million flowing into the area's economy.
"Good things will happen for Mendota and the west side," Costa declared at the symbolic groundbreaking ceremony.
Within a year, though, federal officials said they had run out of money to complete the work. The Bureau of Prisons said funding had to be diverted to pay for the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina cleanup, among other priorities.
Bureau of Prisons officials further told auditors that "problems associated with selecting sites" had increased costs. Steel prices had increased 60% and oil prices by 150% since 2003.
In May 2007, under pressure from Costa, Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, and other lawmakers, the Bush administration again came up with the necessary funding. Officials now believe the half-built prison won't be finished until 2010, about two years late.
http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/634868.html
Posted by lois at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)
IL: Mayors organize against closing of prison
Impact of PCC closing
By Sheila Shelton, Staff Reporter
Published: Wednesday, June 4, 2008
A number of mayors of towns in and around Livingston County are working together in an effort to stop the closing of Pontiac Correctional Center.
The Illinois Department of Corrections and Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced in early May that a plan had been developed to close PCC and move the inmates to the Thomson Correctional Center in northern Illinois.
A parade in support of Saving Pontiac Prison is scheduled for this afternoon in Pontiac. Legislators, elected officials and mayors from several county towns are scheduled to walk in the parade.
Pontiac Mayor Scott McCoy said he had contacted all the mayors in the county and asked them to walk with him in the parade.
"I am encouraging everyone that can to participate in this parade," said McCoy earlier this week. "Closing of PCC would have a devastating effect on Pontiac and many, if not all, of the other communities in the county.
"We all have PCC officers or other employees living in our communities. The closing and possible moving of these people away from here would have a devastating effect on everyone," added McCoy. "In this county, Pontiac has the largest concentration so the biggest impact would be felt here."
McCoy said he is still putting together an economic study that would adequately determine the full impact of the prison's closing on Pontiac.
http://www.pontiacdailyleader.com/articles/2008/06/04/news/news1.txt
"Many people don't realize that there are employees from Joliet, Coal City, Chicago, Peoria, Pekin, Springfield, Lincoln and Morton, to name a few towns, (at) PCC," said McCoy. "These are not the employees that we count as full-time citizens of our towns who travel here on a daily basis. These, however, are people that purchase gasoline, food and restaurant meals in our town.
"I find myself likening the closure of PCC to a tornado coming into town and causing heavy destruction. This possible closure could have an enormous effect because we could lose heavily trained employees," he added. "Many of these people are skilled in electrical, plumbing and other skills that require advanced training as well as the correctional officers and this means they would have to move out of town to find employment.
"I plan on extending invitations to Gov. Blagojevich many times throughout the next few months. I want him to come to Pontiac and see first-hand what could be destroyed by his action," said McCoy.
Kevin McNamara, Dwight village administrator, also plans to participate in the parade.
"The impact from a possible PCC closing is felt all over the place in this county. People seem to think because we have Dwight Correctional Center here we have only those employees living here," said McNamara. "We also have a lot of PCC employees here. I think business people all over the county will begin to feel a loss from even threats of a closing at PCC.
"I see employees of PCC feeling as though they will have to be very careful before they make any large purchases of non-essential items," McNamara added. " They don't know how long they will have jobs or if they will be eligible for transfers. I don't see these employees rushing out to buy new vehicles or houses in this time of limbo."
Besides the economy, McNamara pointed to a concern over the education in his community and the area.
"This could impact state aid to schools in Dwight and Pontiac and elsewhere in the county," said McNamara. "Another impact in this county is the spousal employment of many PCC employees. The spouses, in many cases, have also held jobs for a long time and could also have problems transferring."
Saunemin Mayor Mike Stoecklin has been active in trying to develop the economy in his community and of the county with the Greater Livingston County Economic Development Council. He sees the closure as a major problem for the county, and in particular, his community.
"I have done some research and there are 11 PCC officers with Saunemin zip codes," Stoecklin said. "This means there are at least 11 families in this particular area that will be (affected) if PCC closes.
"Two of the families are my neighbors," added Stoecklin. " There are (a) half dozen or more kids from these various families who attend Saunemin Grade School, some at Pontiac Township High School and some are preschoolers."
Stoecklin said that there are six or seven PCC employees within the Saunemin village limits.
"This would represent 5 percent of our housing market in Saunemin," he said. "Losing folks and families are never good for any community let alone a small community like ours."
Chenoa Mayor Walt Hetman said there are a lot of correctional officers living in Chenoa, as well. In a community looking at developing land annexed within the city limits in the past 18 months, PCC's closing would have a huge impact.
"Our officers having to move would put a lot of houses on the market at a time in the economy when that is not so good," said Hetman. "What some people also fail to realize is that, in our small towns, we also have correctional officers who serve communities as part-time firemen and police officers. This is the case in Chenoa, so it would be a double-whammie for us.
"We can often take for granted how much large employers' employees help our communities. This would certainly be the case involving our gas stations and grocery store," Hetman said.
"We in Chenoa, myself, the city council and everyone that wants to join us (fight the closure) plan on doing everything we can to keep Pontiac Correctional Center open," said Hetman.
Fairbury Mayor Robert Walter, who is an elementary school principal in Watseka, commented this morning on the impact Fairbury will experience.
"We in Fairbury certainly want PCC to remain open. We have many residents of our community who are employed by PCC," said Walter. "A closing would have a very negative impact on our community. Many officers at PCC, from all around the area, shop at Dave's Supermarket and other businesses in our town. It could also hurt our schools."
Posted by lois at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)
June 03, 2008
VA: Fairfax County Weighs Suing State Over Crowded Jails
Board Weighs Suing State Over Crowded Jails
By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 3, 2008; B05
Fairfax County is considering a lawsuit against Virginia if the state goes through with plans to rent 1,000 prison beds to other states while leaving hundreds of its own inmates in crowded local jails at local expense.
Supervisors agreed yesterday to look into the possibility of joining with Virginia Beach, the state's second-largest jurisdiction, where Sheriff Paul J. Lanteigne has said he will sue if Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) does not act this week. Lanteigne confirmed yesterday that he would file the suit today.
"The state has always used our local jails as a way of avoiding the cost of putting state inmates in state prison, where they belong," said Fairfax Supervisor Michael R. Frey (R-Sully). "Now, to add insult, the state is going to take their excess prison capacity and rent it to other states. That's like kicking you when you're down."
At issue are state plans to raise millions of dollars by renting excess prison space to other states. The program would help Virginia's cash-strapped state government contend with a shortfall of more than $2 billion through 2010 by raising as much as $40 million.
But it also revives a long-standing practice of housing out-of-state inmates that has been criticized not only by local governments that bear the cost of keeping state prisoners in local jails but also by human rights advocates who say the practice turns prisons into warehouses that treat inmates as commodities.
Gene M. Johnson, director of Virginia's Department of Corrections, defended the decision, saying the budget environment probably would have forced him to lay off employees or close facilities if not for the out-of-state prisoners. Kaine spokesman Gordon Hickey added that Kaine is standing by the department's decision and said legal action was not necessary.
"The Department of Corrections is working with the sheriff to try to satisfy him and settle this issue," Hickey said.
Frey and the other Fairfax supervisors instructed county officials yesterday to look into the possibility of joining Virginia Beach's legal action. Fairfax currently houses about 100 state inmates at a cost of $125 a day each. The state pays the county $14 a day for keeping each inmate.
Virginia charges other states $75 a day to house their inmates.
So far, 296 male inmates from Wyoming are in the medium-security Pocahontas State Correctional Center in Tazewell County and the maximum-security Wallens Ridge State Prison in Wise County. The state expects to make between $14.5 million and $18.5 million each year from housing the Wyoming inmates in prisons in southwest Virginia.
Neither Maryland nor the District leases space to out-of-state prisoners.
Virginia houses 33,500 inmates at 43 facilities. As of May 19, almost 1,700 inmates in 75 local and regional jails were waiting to be moved to a state prison.
Sheriffs have complained for at least three decades about the large number of state inmates in local jails, which are supposed to house defendants awaiting trial and those sentenced for minor crimes. They argue that more dangerous inmates are crowding their jails and that the jails provide less access to rehabilitative and educational services than do state prisons.
Many sheriffs, including those in Fairfax and Arlington counties, have sued the state to force officials to act. State law requires that felons sentenced to at least one year behind bars get transferred from local jails to state prisons within 60 days.
Staff writer Anita Kumar contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/02/AR2008060202773_pf.html
Posted by lois at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2008
Can New York Break Its Incarceration Habit?
Despite these signs of success, New York is subject to the same difficult policy and practical challenges faced all over the country. "Parole is hard," said Horn. "It really gets deep into social and psychological factors [of parolees], and operates in a world where there are so many factors outside of its control." For now, one of those factors seems to be New York State's commitment to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on prisons -- even without the prisoners to fill them.
Gotham Gazette
Can New York Break Its Incarceration Habit?
by Aubrey Fox
02 Jun 2008
It’s an experiment that has arguably run its course.
In the last 20 years, states across the country have quadrupled their spending on jails and prisons from $11 billion in 1987 to $44 billion last year, while imprisoning 2.3 million individuals – or one in 100 American adults, according to a report released by the Pew Center on the States. While some criminologists give incarceration partial credit for cutting crime in the 1990s, many argue that these public safety benefits are evaporating and that money for jails would be better spent in other areas such as health care and education.
Among policymakers and experienced corrections officials, there is a palpable sense of optimism that the political will exists to tackle the issue of mass imprisonment. To them, the Pew Center report’s eye-catching title, "One in 100," has helped focus a long-running debate about the fiscal and human costs of incarcerating so many Americans for so many years. "The report is engaging people who are normally not part of the conversation," said New York City’s Probation and Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn. "I think it’s created a real opportunity."
Even conservative states like Kansas and Texas are beginning to embrace prison reform, with legislators from both sides of the aisle coming together to make change. "There is a growing realization around the country that we can’t build our way out of the crime problem with more prisons," said Adam Gelb, one of the authors of the Pew report.
For New Yorkers this shift in attitude poses a number of questions. How will the state respond? Will it close the prisons that now play such a major role in the upstate economy? And, if the state does realize savings on prisons, how could that money best be used to further reduce crime?
The New York Exception
New York is exhibit number one for reformers who seek to reassure citizens that it is possible to cut crime and incarceration rates at the same time. Virtually alone among states, New York has seen the number of inmates in its prisons decline over the past decade. It has 9,000 fewer state prison inmates than it did 10 years ago, a 12 percent decrease, as crime rates have continued to drop. By the end of 2007, there were a total of 62,260 individuals in state prison. At the same time, the number of people held in New York City jails awaiting trial or imprisoned for a short period shrank from a high of 23,000 in 1993 to just over 13,000 in 2007.
These sharp drops have been driven largely by the city’s plunging felony arrest rate. Violent crime in New York City declined by 75 percent between 1991 and 2004. The city now sends about 8,000 inmates each year to the state’s prison system, down from 20,000, according to Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice and a nationally known expert on incarceration.
Other parts of the correctional system have seen similar declines. In New York City, the number of individuals under probation supervision dropped from 50,870 in 1998 to 45,844 in 2007. The population on parole dropped by 18 percent over the same period for the state as a whole, fueled entirely by a dramatic, 30 percent decline in the number of parolees under supervision in New York City. That translates to 24,756 parolees in New York City in 2007, down from 35,286 in 1998. Probation is a city program that supervises offenders as an alternative to prison or jail. Parole, which in New York is run by the state, supervises offenders after they are released from state prison.
This drop has helped relieve pressure on New York’s budget at a time when other states are grappling with exploding incarceration rates. For example, California spends $8.8 billion a year on corrections, a staggering 216 percent increase in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 20 years and 8.8 percent of the state’s budget, according to the Pew Center. By contrast, New York spends $2.6 billion on corrections, or 5.1 percent of the budget.
The Politics of Prison Closings
Despite the decline in prisoners, though, New York has had mixed success in meeting another challenge posed by prison reformers: shutting prisons and re-allocating the money spent on them to other uses, such as providing drug treatment, job training and other services to recently released prisoners.
If anything, the process of closing prisons has gotten harder, not easier, in recent years. For example, in 2006 the state legislature passed a bill requiring that employees must receive a year's notice before any prison can be closed.
Then in April Gov. David Patterson quietly withdrew his predecessor's plan to close four upstate prisons. The move would have saved taxpayers $70 million over the next two years, but was shelved in the face of objections from state Senate Republicans, many of whom represent upstate communities where the prisons are located.
The prison system is a $2.7 billion a year industry in New York State, concentrated in many upstate communities. As the economies of these areas have declined, the prisons have remained a source of jobs, income and people. While about two thirds of the prisoners in the state are from New York City, the U.S. Census counts them as residents of the place where they are incarcerated. This boosts the populations of many rural communities, giving them more votes in the legislature than they might otherwise have, along with other benefits.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer had attempted to neutralize political objections to prison closures by proposing that a state commission look into the issue in 2007. Modeled after the federal government's successful effort to shut excess military bases, the idea was the panel would present the legislature with a comprehensive plan that would be difficult to oppose.
The legislature, though, blocked that effort. Spitzer then turned to his state Department of Correctional Services. After what department spokesperson Erik Kriss has described as a "thorough internal review," officials proposed closing a medium security prison, the Hudson Correctional Facility in Columbia County, as well as three minimum security facilities. The department had even begun to transfer "a few dozen" employees out of the facilities slated for closure.
That was clearly premature. When the state budget was announced in April, it restored full funding for all four.
Advocates responded with outrage. "It’s really a jobs program for economically depressed communities," Robert Gangi, the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, told the New York Times. Gangi holds out hope that Patterson will fight for prison closures in the future. He notes that Patterson has a record of opposing mass incarceration and was even arrested at a demonstration protesting the state's harsh drug laws in 2002. "Maybe [Patterson] will return to it when he gets his sea legs under him," said Gangi.
Reforming Parole
The failure to close state prisons is a blow to state officials who hoped to use the savings to comply with tighter supervision standards for sex offenders, introduced by the legislature in 2006. It also gives the state less flexibility to help re-invigorate parts of the correctional system, like parole and probation, which have long suffered from neglect and under funding.
Advocates are particularly interested in transferring money from prisons to parole, which they see as key to reducing incarceration rates and increasing public safety. Improving parole would have a kind of domino effect: Better supervision of released offenders would reduce the number of offenders who go back to prison, thereby further diminishing the need for prisons, which in turn would free up more money for parole.
In recent years, however, parole officials have had to fend off challenges to the institution’s basic legitimacy. In 2005, the Urban Institute released a report, entitled http://www.urban.org/publications/311156.html "Does Parole Work?" It found that parole had little to no effect on re-arrest rates among offenders. After controlling for demographics and differences in criminal histories, the researchers found little difference between offenders released from prison with no conditions and those released under parole supervision. Roughly 60 percent of offenders in each group were re-arrested within two years. Some groups, such as white males with histories of violence and a long arrest records, actually fared worse under parole supervision than when they were released unconditionally.
In addition, observers credit -- or blame -- parole for helping to fuel the country’s prison boom. Put simply, in many states, parole provides the reason to put many released convicts back in jail. Studies show that about a quarter of all released offenders are re-incarcerated within three years of their release on so-called "technical violations" of their parole, such as failing a drug test or missing a curfew, as opposed to a new arrest.
In some states like California, the problem is particularly acute: According to Michael Jacobson, the state sends three quarters of its parole population back to jail every year for technical violations. In 2001, close to 15 percent of parolees were returned to jail in New York for technical violations, although that accounted for a large share (about one third) of all new prison admissions.
As Jacobson and others describe it, over-taxed parole officers return parolees to jail for minor infractions in an effort to manage caseloads that average 65 or more. The irony is that the parole system, one of the government’s most poorly funded functions, has essentially unchecked authority to authorize millions of dollars of government expenditures by citing offender for violations, guaranteeing their return to jail and the need for more prisons.
Some of parole’s toughest critics are system insiders such as Horn, the former executive director of New York’s Division of Parole. In a 2001 article in Corrections Management Quarterly, Horn called for "ending parole as we know it." He proposed replacing it with vouchers that would allow parolees to purchase needed services like drug treatment, job training or housing on their own. Before being released to the community, inmates would be placed in halfway houses to ease their reentry into society. The role of parole would shift from surveillance to supporting inmates and helping to link them to services. "I’m more convinced than ever that this is the right way to go," said Horn.
Other prominent correctional reformers, such as Jacobson and Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, argue that it would be politically difficult to win support for any plan, like Horn's, that does away with post prison supervision of offenders. Instead, Travis favors transferring parole from the executive branch to the judicial branch. He would create "re-entry courts" in which judges would supervise the reentry process.
Jacobson focuses more directly on reforms to parole itself, which include allocating resources so that recently released parolees get the most attention, limiting the length of time that a person stays on parole and curtailing the use of technical violations.
What all these proposals share, however, is the urgent sense that parole in its current form simply does not work. "If almost any of the state parole systems were a Fortune 500 company, the CEO would take one look at it and shut it down," Jacobson writes.
The View from New York
Here again, New York looks pretty good – at least in comparison to other states.
Although New York City’s plummeting crime rate gets most of the credit for the state’s declining incarceration population, some modest changes in correctional policy have had an impact as well. Some state prisoners are eligible for early release if they complete a so-called "shock incarceration" program that includes six months of hard labor. According to the state Department of Correctional Services, the program, in operation since 1987, has saved $1.18 billion in prison costs by granting over 36,000 participants a release an average of 345 days early.
Small changes to the state’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, enacted by the state legislature in 2004, have resulted in the early release of about 3,000 individuals, according to the New York State Criminal Justice 2007 Crimestat Report. Finally, in April, four state agencies, including the Division of Parole, launched a new drug treatment center in Harlem aimed at reducing the rate at which parolees, including those who fail a drug test or commit other technical violations, return to prison.
Perhaps most importantly, New York City offers a number of resources for the 15,000 parolees who returned home in 2007. Well-respected non-profit organizations like the Center for Employment Opportunities], the Fortune Society, the Women’s Prison Association and Family Justice all work with this population.
For example, the Center for Employment Opportunities provides short-term paid jobs and other services to about 2,000 parolees every year. Participants spend about eight weeks painting classrooms on college campuses, mopping courthouse floors or filling other temporary positions. After finishing these paid internships, job experts work to match participants to permanent jobs. The goal is to help released inmates manage the transition from incarceration to paid work.
"We feel strongly that a person coming home needs more than help than just creating a resume," said Marta Nelson, the director of policy and planning. "They need someone who can connect them to an employer." The program has cut re-incarceration rates among parolees by almost half, but only for individuals who begin the program within three months of their release. This finding mirrors national research that shows the importance of linking parolees to services immediately.
Despite these signs of success, New York is subject to the same difficult policy and practical challenges faced all over the country. "Parole is hard," said Horn. "It really gets deep into social and psychological factors [of parolees], and operates in a world where there are so many factors outside of its control."
For now, one of those factors seems to be New York State's commitment to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on prisons -- even without the prisoners to fill them.
Aubrey Fox is project director of Bronx Community Solutions, aimed at changing the Bronx court system’s approach to low-level crime.
Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article//20080602/200/2545
Posted by lois at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)
May 28, 2008
CA: California Senate Rejects Plan To Construct New Prison Medical Facilities
May 28, 2008
California Senate Rejects Plan To Construct New Prison Medical Facilities
California Health Line
On Tuesday, the California Senate rejected a bill (SB 1665) that would have provided nearly $7 billion to reform the medical facilities and mental health services for state prisoners, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The Senate's rejection of the bill raises the possibility of U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ordering the state to use money from the general fund to pay for the new construction, rather than issue bonds to fund the project (Rothfeld, Los Angeles Times, 5/28).
Henderson seized control of the state prison health care system after finding that the quality of health care fell below constitutional standards.
H.D. Palmer, spokesperson for the Department of Finance, said using general fund money to pay for the project could harm other services as the state struggles with a $15.2 billion budget deficit (Thompson, AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/27).
Plan Details
J. Clark Kelso, the court-appointed receiver for the prison health care system, requested $7 billion to construct up to seven facilities with 10,000 beds for inmates with long-term medical and mental health problems. The plan also would renovate clinics at 33 of the state's prisons.
Kelso aims to begin construction next year.
The proposal would authorize borrowing the funds through a type of bond that does not need voter approval and would be repaid over 25 years, with average annual interest payments of $527 million, according to a Senate analysis.
Sen. Michael Machado (D-Linden) authored the bill to enact Kelso's plan (Los Angeles Times, 5/28).
Republican Opposition
Senate Republicans objected to the bill's cost and said it had not been coordinated with other plans that could potentially affect the prisons, including a proposal to settle a federal court case dealing with prison overcrowding.
The vote on the bill was 22-14, five votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to advance the measure to the Assembly (AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/27).
Machado said he would request another vote on the bill on Thursday.
Kelso said he remained optimistic that Senate Republicans would change their minds by Thursday. He said he would ask Henderson to order the state to spend the funds only as a last resort (Los Angeles Times, 5/28).
If the bill is rejected a second time, Kelso said he would ask Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) to allocate $100 million in the budget for the upcoming fiscal year for design and engineering work on the proposed health care facilities (AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/27).
Reaction
In a statement, the governor's office said "the receiver's plan is necessary to bringing our prisons' health care up to constitutional levels, as required by the federal courts. We're confident that the Legislature understands the need to improve our prison health care system and do it in a financially responsible way" (Los Angeles Times, 5/28).
Sen. Dave Cox (R-Fair Oaks) said he thought some Republicans could change their mind by Thursday if they were able to coordinate the receiver's plan with a proposed lawsuit settlement and last year's prison spending measure, which provided $7.4 billion to add 53,000 state and county prison beds (Los Angeles Times, 5/28).
Senate President Pro Tempore Don Perata (D-Oakland) said, "We have no choice but to pay ... You don't really get an opportunity to fool around with a federal court judge" (AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, 5/27).
http://www.californiahealthline.org/articles/2008/5/28/California-Senate-Rej
ects-Plan-To-Construct-New-Prison-Medical-Facilities.aspx?topicID=47
Posted by lois at 04:43 PM | Comments (0)
PA: ”We can retain our freedom on the outside because of the people that are locked up in here”
”We can retain our freedom on the outside because of the people that are locked up in here,” said Commissioner Chairman Brian Smith. “That fight for freedom doesn’t stop in our armies,” he said, but includes judges, juries, public defenders, corrections officers and others. ”That’s why our prison was so important.”
Ribbon-cutting signals opening of the new facility
Mary Baldwin 22.MAY.08
The Weekly Almanac, Honesdale, PA
In his invocation at the ribbon-cutting for the new Wayne County Correctional Facility in Texas Township on Friday morning, the Rev. Edward Finn prayed for those who will be incarcerated there.
”Help them make positive decisions about their future,” he said.
Father Finn, senior priest at St. John the Evangelist Parish, Honesdale, was among those who were involved in the early stages of planning for the new facility, said Wayne County Commissioner Tony Herzog, who helped guide the county through a legal morass during the planning stages for the jail. Father Finn was “a very early advocate” of a “respectful place” where prisoners could meet with their attorneys and visitors or attend educational programs, Mr. Herzog said.
The commissioner also recognized the late county Chief Clerk Reg Wayman, current Chief Clerk Vicky Lamberton, and members of the committee that conducted a needs assessment for a new jail including former President Judge Robert J. Conway, Sheriff Charles Morelli and former Commissioner Mark Graziadio.
The old jail, Mr. Herzog said, “is not only costing the county money, but is not a proper way to conduct the county’s business.” The current jail on Court Street has no facilities for female prisoners so they have to be boarded in other counties at considerable expense to Wayne County.
He noted that the county was able to secure a $1 million state grant to offset the cost of the new jail. “That saved the taxpayers a lot of money,” Mr. Herzog said.
Mr. Herzog also commended the county’s correctional officers for “an outstanding job,” as well as the community for its “wonderful support.”
”We can retain our freedom on the outside because of the people that are locked up in here,” said Commissioner Chairman Brian Smith. “That fight for freedom doesn’t stop in our armies,” he said, but includes judges, juries, public defenders, corrections officers and others.
”That’s why our prison was so important.”
Commissioner Wendell Kay commented that the county was dedicating itself not only to a building on Friday but “to the safety and security of our community” as well as to “the true rehabilitation” of those who will be incarcerated there.
During the ceremony, Honesdale High School junior Sarah Tamburelli sang the national anthem and Sheriff Morelli cut a ribbon to officially open the jail as about 100 people watched.
http://www.theweeklyalmanac.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=&mad=&sdetail=9343&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1020&hn=weeklyalmanac&he=.com
Posted by lois at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 21, 2008
CA: Under California prison plan, local authorities would help some prisoners turn their lives around
NEWS ANALYSIS
Under California prison plan, local authorities would help some criminals turn their lives around
Proposed legal settlement would require communities to come up with alternatives to incarceration for offenders convicted of new crimes or found to have violated their parole.
By Michael Rothfeld
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 21, 2008
SACRAMENTO -- - The proposed settlement of a state prison overcrowding lawsuit would require a major shift in the way Californians view prisons, one that would demand that local communities see themselves as stakeholders.
The draft agreement in federal court, details of which were released Monday, would divert from state prison tens of thousands of offenders convicted of new crimes or found to have violated their parole. They would be watched over in their home communities by local probation or state parole agents.
But that would require local government to expand programs to treat those offenders or to create alternatives to incarceration, and allow new facilities in their backyards.
In recent decades, state lawmakers and initiatives supported by voters went the opposite way, building more prisons in remote areas and stiffening penalties that increased the number of people housed in them.
"Most of what is envisioned here involves much more community collaboration than has ever happened in California," said Joan Petersilia, a criminologist at UC Irvine. "For this to work, California citizens will have to step up in a way they never have before."
The parties in the court case, which is now before a three-judge federal panel, are reviewing the settlement proposed by two court-appointed mediators. The proposal was based on negotiations involving state officials, lawyers for inmates, Republican state lawmakers and local law enforcement officials across the state. The parties have until next week to accept or reject it.
Under the deal, the state would have until the end of 2011 to reduce the state prison population by a number to be agreed upon in consultation with experts. If the case should proceed to trial instead, the three-judge panel would determine whether to cap the state prison population and order a release of inmates.
The underpinning of the proposed settlement is a greater focus in state prisons on the most serious criminals, while giving less risky offenders the tools and opportunities they need to turn their lives around in their own communities.
That idea has been discussed by many experts in California for decades, and it has been tried in fits and starts. Four decades ago, the state began giving counties funding for juvenile offenders who were kept locally, but the money eventually dried up. In 1994, state lawmakers approved a similar mechanism for "community corrections," but it was barely funded.
Experts and some state and local officials said Tuesday that the amount of funding the state would allocate to local governments, which has not been determined, would be key to the plan. Criminals could be given treatment or other alternatives to state prison such as electronic home monitoring or short stints in county jails. Many jails, such as those in Los Angeles County, are already packed.
"I think some places will be more able to do this than others," said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a nonprofit group in Oakland. "We need to increase the capacity of probation and the sheriffs to manage people at the local level. Otherwise we're just pushing people around from one bucket to another."
Lance Corcoran, a spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., the state prison guards' union, said that relying on localities might be premature, when many rural areas, such as Fresno or Butte counties, don't have the kinds of programs that are available in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And he questioned whether they would work.
"The notion that 58 counties can do it better, I think, is misguided," Corcoran said. "And I think there may be an impact on public safety."
But state Sen. Michael Machado (D-Linden), who presides over the corrections portion of the state budget, said the plan shows "tremendous progress" by offering concrete steps to alleviate the crisis in the state prisons. He said communities will have to deal with those criminals at some point, anyway.
"So the question comes back, do you want to have somebody to meet them there at the bus depot and put them in a program?" he asked. "Or do you want them to walk two blocks and get their fix?"
Riverside County Dist. Atty. Rod Pacheco, who is a party to the court case, said he agreed with the notion of rehabilitation, but his main concern is with what the state will provide: "Where's the beef? Where's the resources, the staff, the money?. . . . They need to spell that out and they need to agree to it. Otherwise it's just a promise, and promises don't rehabilitate criminals."
There is also the question of whether communities would accept offenders who might not serve time in state prison. Pacheco said he might not object to a settlement that allows those who violate parole to receive alternatives to prison, but he would not approve if those convicted of new crimes were able to avoid prison.
Under the draft settlement, those who would serve less than a year in prison would be diverted to local punishment or community programs. Pacheco said many of those have been convicted of multiple felonies.
"Those guys are bad," he said. "They need to be housed away from us, and they need to be sent to state prison and segregated."
State Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), who chairs the Senate's Public Safety Committee, said she was encouraged by the proposed settlement, but she also wondered what kind of cooperation local communities would offer.
In her district, she said, there has been controversy as Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has attempted to reopen the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, once a county jail.
"We've seen in other parts of the state, 'Oh yeah, get 'em out of prison, but not in my backyard,' " Romero said. "The devil is in the details."
Petersilia said that one option is opening so-called day reporting centers, where offenders go every day during working hours for education and to look for jobs.
There are two in California, but some communities have refused to allow them.
California Court of Appeal Justice Peter Siggins, one of the mediators in the negotiations, called it "a process of education" for local residents and officials.
"The people we're talking about are people that are going back into their communities every day," he said. "The question is, how do you make it safer to go back into their communities every day?"
michael.rothfeld@latimes.com
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times
Posted by lois at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)
Makeshift Space for Inmates as Prisons Exceed Capacity
May 20, 2008
Makeshift Space for Inmates as Prisons Exceed Capacity
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
New York’s federal prisons are letting inmates sleep in areas not originally designed for inmate beds — like television rooms — because of overcrowding in excess of 50 percent, according to correspondence with the Federal Bureau of Prisons released on Monday by Senator Charles E. Schumer.
According to Harley G. Lappin, the director of the bureau, more than 5,700 inmates were in New York federal prisons on an average day in the 2007 fiscal year, far above the recommended population of 3,600.
Each of New York’s four federal prisons is at least 50 percent over capacity, with the federal prison in Ray Brook at a high of 61.2 percent over.
The prisons in Ray Brook, in Essex County, and Otisville, in Orange County, are the two federal institutions in New York State now housing inmates in areas not designed for sleeping, Mr. Lappin said. That information came in response to questions by Mr. Schumer’s office.
A spokesman for Mr. Schumer, Josh Vlasto, said that a representative for Mr. Schumer visited Otisville, met with the warden and saw the overcrowding and short staffing firsthand. That, Mr. Vlasto said, prompted Mr. Schumer to ask for the report.
Systemwide, federal prisons are operating at 37 percent above capacity, according to the bureau. But that average disguises a large range: from a low of 10 percent over capacity in minimum-security prisons to a high of 49 percent in high-security institutions. The other two categories are low-security prisons, which are 33 percent over capacity, and medium-security prisons, which are at 47 percent over capacity.
But New York State prisons are strained in large part because federal prisons make an effort to keep prisoners close to their home communities.
The prison population, both state and federal, has been steadily increasing since the early 1980s, partly because of the length of sentences, which for comparable low-level crimes are more severe than they are in European nations.
New York ranks fourth among states in the size of the total prison population, behind California, Texas and Florida.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/nyregion/20prisons.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 08:46 AM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2008
Panel OKs closure of Louisiana youth prison
Panel OKs closure of Louisiana youth prison
May 20, 2008
BATON ROUGE (AP) — Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration is supporting a plan to shut down a state juvenile prison near Louisiana’s capital city and send its teenage inmates to facilities better equipped to educate them.
A Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday approved a bill that would close the Jetson Center for Youth, in rural East Baton Rouge Parish, by June 2009.
The prison has long been the focus of criticism because of violence and inadequate educational and job training capabilities. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Don Cravins Jr., said the lockup “looks like a 1949 prison” with its decaying buildings, cell blocks and razor wire.
Richard Thompson, Jindal’s juvenile justice chief, said his Office of Youth Development would gradually reduce the number of youths locked up at Jetson, probably beginning this summer. He planned to offer more details at a Friday meeting of the Juvenile Justice Implementation Commission, which oversees the shift from prison-like facilities to smaller ones more focused on education.
As of Tuesday, 202 youths were held at Jetson.
It was not clear what Jetson’s buildings, including an up-to-date medical center, would be used for if it ceased to be a juvenile lockup. Thompson said it might be turned over to the state’s adult corrections division, as happened to another former juvenile prison in Tallulah when it closed in 2004.
“There is no plan to just close it down, lock it up and let the roof fall in,” Thompson said.
Thompson said the most dangerous prisoners at Jetson would be transferred to a similar facility in Monroe, which under Cravins’ bill would become Louisiana’s only high-security prison for juvenile convicts.
“Under no conditions are we going to sacrifice public safety to follow through on these reforms,” Thompson said.
The measure would also change OYD’s name to the Office of Juvenile Justice, which Thompson said is the name used by most other states.
The bill by Cravins, D-Opelousas, moves to the full Senate.
http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080520/NEWS01/80520022
Posted by lois at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)
May 11, 2008
Cornell 1Q profit jumps nearly sevenfold
Cornell 1Q profit jumps nearly sevenfold
Associated Press
05.09.08, 1:50 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com - Cornell 1Q profit jumps nearly sevenfold – Forbes.com
HOUSTON - Cornell Cos., a provider of corrections and treatment services to federal and state agencies, said Friday that its first-quarter profit soared nearly sevenfold, with revenue rising mainly due to correctional center and prison projects.
For the quarter ended March 31, Cornell Companies earned $4.6 million, or 32 cents per share, compared with $664,000, or 5 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.
The company's revenue climbed 6 percent to $95.4 million from $89.6 million.
Cornell Companies said much of the growth resulted from the expansion of the Big Spring Correctional Center and the D. Ray James Prison in November and February, respectively.
The company also said its general and administrative expenses declined to $6.5 million from $8.4 million. Its operating expenses, excluding depreciation, edged up to $70.2 million from $69.6 million.
Cornell Companies shares declined 57 cents to $21.88 in afternoon trading.
Posted by lois at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
May 07, 2008
NY Times Editorial: Death by Detention in CCA Prison
May 6, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Death by Detention
A chilling article by Nina Bernstein in The Times on Monday recounted the secrecy, neglect and lack of oversight that are a few of the shameful symptoms of the booming sector of the nation’s prison industry — the detention of undocumented foreigners.
Ms. Bernstein chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea who was imprisoned in New Jersey for overstaying a tourist visa. He fell and fractured his skull in the Elizabeth Detention Center early last year. Though clearly gravely injured, Mr. Bah was shackled and taken to a disciplinary cell. He was left alone — unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth — for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.
Nobody told Mr. Bah’s relatives until five days after his fall. When they finally found him, he was on life support, soon to become one of the 66 immigrants known to have died in federal custody between 2004 and 2007. Mr. Bah’s family still does not know the full story of when or how he suffered his fatal injuries.
It is shameful, though hardly a surprise, that they remain in the dark. There is no public system for tracking deaths in immigration custody, no requirement for independent investigations. Relatives and lawyers who want to unearth details of such tragedies have found the bureaucracy unresponsive and hostile. In the case of Mr. Bah, records were marked “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs the Elizabeth Detention Center and many others under contract with the federal government.
Secrecy and shockingly inadequate medical care are hardly the only problems with immigration detention. Immigrants taken into federal custody enter a world where many of the rights taken for granted by people charged with real crimes do not exist. Detainees have no right to legal representation. Many are unable to defend or explain themselves, or even to understand the charges against them, because they don’t speak English and lack access to lawyers or telephones.
What standards do exist for the treatment of immigrants in federal custody are only recommendations. A detainee, family member or lawyer who finds a violation has no way to force the government to correct it.
As authorities at the federal and local level continue rounding up illegal immigrants in these harsh days of ever-stricter enforcement, the potential for abuse will continue to grow — largely out of sight. Although immigration law is every bit as complex as tax law — and the consequences for violators more dire — the detention system seems designed to sacrifice thoughtful deliberation and justice to expediency and swift deportation.
Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights. This mistreatment of a vulnerable population, which advocates for immigrants trace to the roundups of Muslims after 9/11 and the subsequent clamor for tougher immigration laws, is hostile to American values and disproportionate to the threat that these immigrants pose.
Congress has failed repeatedly to enact meaningful immigration reform, and the prospects in the next year or so are slim. It can act on this. The government urgently needs to bring the detention system up to basic standards of decency and fairness. That means lifting the veil on detention centers — particularly the private jails and the state prisons and county jails that take detainees under federal contracts — and holding them to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons. It also means designing a system that is not a vast holding pen for ordinary people who pose no threat to public safety, like the 52-year-old tailor, Boubacar Bah.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/opinion/06tue1.html?sq=Death%20by%20Detention%26st=nyt%26scp=1%26pagewanted=print
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Posted by lois at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)
May 06, 2008
WI: Guards use sick days to inflate salary. Some call in close to overtime shifts, reach 6-figure pay.
JOURNAL SENTINEL WATCHDOG REPORTS
Guards use sick days to inflate salary
Some call in close to overtime shifts, reach 6-figure pay
By PATRICK MARLEY
Posted: May 3, 2008
Madison - October 2006 was a busy month for one Green Bay Correctional Institution sergeant.
On every day he was scheduled to be off that month, he came in for an overtime shift. On two of those days, he worked double shifts.
But within days of each of those extra shifts, the sergeant called in sick. In all, he claimed four sick days that month. That meant he got hefty paychecks because of overtime, but still had time off.
That month wasn't unusual for the sergeant, who often volunteered for extra shifts. On 17 occasions in 2006 he called in sick shortly after working on days that he otherwise would have had off. He used almost four weeks of sick leave that year and cleared $117,764 with overtime, making him the state's fourth-highest-paid officer in 2006.
By the end of last year, the sergeant had used every hour of sick leave he'd accrued over 31 years.
Other high-paid correctional officers used their sick leave in questionable ways in 2006, a Journal Sentinel investigation found. None of those officers faced discipline for their use of sick leave in 2006.
The moves come as the state is wrestling with budget shortfalls and at the same time paying correctional officers tens of millions of dollars a year in overtime. Although state rules make it difficult to identify improper sick leave, the newspaper's investigation raises the prospect that some officers who routinely pick up overtime shifts could be using sick leave inappropriately.
Officers say there isn't widespread abuse of the system and note they work stressful jobs in institutions that are understaffed. They blame state officials for adopting laws that put more inmates behind bars without providing the funding necessary to hire enough officers.
The Journal Sentinel reviewed the weekly time sheets of the state's 20 highest-paid correctional officers for 2006 and other state records. The review found:
• Eight of the officers called in sick for a shift and then picked up the immediate next shift at least once. They received eight hours of regular pay for the shift they were sick, and time and a half for the eight or more hours of overtime work.
• One Redgranite Correctional Institution officer used nearly 23 days of sick leave. She was paid $97,280 that year, including $51,042 in overtime.
• Officers on average use about 100 hours - or 12.5 days - of sick leave a year. That's more than 50% above the average for all state employees of 66 hours of sick leave.
• Officers can use three weeks of sick leave a year before their bosses put them on a watch list for potential abuse. Officers can come off the watch list without any discipline if they use less than 40 hours of sick leave in four months.
The state declined to release any of the officers' names because of its labor agreement with the officers union.
"This is just blatantly an abuse that has to be addressed," said Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills), a member of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee. "We cannot have people just going their own way to fatten their own pocketbooks at the taxpayer's expense. It's just totally unacceptable."
Officers defended
Daniel Meehan, an officer at Waupun Correctional Institution and president of the Wisconsin State Employees Union Local 18, said abuse of sick leave is not rampant.
"I'm not calling in sick all the time, and there's a lot of people that don't," Meehan said. "There's 10,000 employees at the Department of Corrections. You're going to have every extreme that there is when you've got that many employees. That's not the norm."
He noted that officers can be forced to work long hours when they first start, often getting called in for overtime with no warning. Officers make a base salary of $30,735 when they start.
He said lawmakers who pushed for the state's truth-in-sentencing law are "the same ones now that are pounding their chests about, 'We're not going to pay for it. We're going to pack all these inmates into these joints and make them powder kegs,' " Meehan said.
Deputy Corrections Secretary Amy Smith said sick leave use may be higher at the Department of Corrections than other agencies because prisons must be run around the clock and officers work stressful jobs.
She said the department has "a good mechanism" for monitoring sick leave, but acknowledged that not all abuse can be identified.
Four of the 20 top-paid officers used no sick leave in 2006, including the highest paid officer that year, a Fox Lake Correctional Institution officer who earned $120,908. The four officers had as much as 2,100 hours in their banks of accrued sick time, a sign they had rarely used sick leave in the past.
However, Five others in the top 20 had fewer than 45 hours of sick leave in the bank at the end of last year.
Officers earn three to four weeks of sick leave a year, and can carry over their sick leave from one year to the next. Unused sick leave can be tapped to pay for health care in retirement.
By any measure, the officers put in long hours, even during weeks they used sick leave.
One Oakhill Correctional Institution sergeant was paid for 224 hours over two weeks in June 2006, drawing pay for 16 hours a day every day. He used vacation for 10 of those hours, but actually worked the other 214.
Five times in 2006, he came in one shift early and then called in sick for his regular shift. That meant he worked eight hours but was paid for 16 hours - eight of them at time and a half.
He made $116,856 and used 18 days of sick time that year.
As of December 2007, the sergeant had used all but 14 hours of the sick leave he had accrued over 19 years.
Officers who work a lot of overtime near the end of their careers can boost their pensions, which are based on their three highest years of pay.
When officers call in sick, it often creates overtime shifts for others, because the shifts usually have to be filled for security reasons.
Scrutiny limited
The Department of Corrections' policy on sick leave was established in late 1991, when the agency and the union jointly issued an administrative directive that explained when sick leave would be monitored.
The directive says officials can investigate the use of sick leave if, during a four-month period, officers use more than 40 hours of sick leave; call in sick on the same day of the week four times or more; or allow their bank of sick leave to drop to eight hours or less.
Officers who hit those thresholds can be placed on a watch list. If over the next four months they again meet any of the thresholds, they can be ordered to supply a doctor's note for all sick leave for the next four months. If they don't provide doctor's notes, they can be disciplined.
Monitoring of their sick leave use ends as soon as they have a four-month period when they don't meet any of the thresholds.
In the past, officers have been fired for abusing sick leave, agency spokesman John Dipko said.
Asked if the policy was too lenient, Meehan, the union official, said: "That's open for question . . . (but) I don't think you put everybody under the microscope because of a handful of people."
The Department of Corrections is an expensive enterprise, costing taxpayers about $1 billion a year. Overtime accounts for just a sliver of that expense.
The Journal Sentinel reported in December that overtime costs at the Department of Corrections exploded in 2006, rising 27% from mid-2005 to mid-2006. For that period, overtime cost $36.3 million, most of it paid by state taxpayers.
With overtime, 26 officers more than doubled their wages in 2006. Fourteen of them earned six-figure salaries.
Administrators say overtime costs rose that year because of an unexpected rise in the prison population and a new labor contract that gave officers more days off.
Lawmakers agreed to hire 50 new officers in October to cut overtime costs. The move is expected to drop overtime costs to $26.3 million this fiscal year, down from $38.2 million last fiscal year.
Original Story URL:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=746746
Posted by lois at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)
CA: Taxpayers File Landmark Lawsuit to Prevent $12 Billion in Prison Construction Debt
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Taxpayers File Landmark Lawsuit to
Prevent $12 Billion in Prison Construction Debt
Coalition also releases expert report by economist Adam Werner exposing true cost of AB900
Dressed in Arnold Schwarzenegger masks, taxpayers hand out $12 billion in debt invoices to passersby in front of the Capitol
SACRAMENTO - Concerned parents, students, teachers, experts and taxpayers will announce the filing of their lawsuit today to stop at least $12 billion dollars of prison debt authorized by AB 900 at a Noon press conference in front of the State Capitol, at 11th and L. Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a coalition of community organizations from around the state, will also release an expert report exposing the true cost of AB 900.
The report by esteemed economist Dr. Adam Werner, a principal in the Securities Practice at CRA International, details the waste and financial inefficiency of AB 900. According to Werner, "The use of lease-revenue bonds to finance these facilities is irrational from a purely economic perspective given the cost differential between using lease revenue and general obligation bonds."
Werner calculates the unnecessary costs to total an additional $2 billion in interest payments and the total cost to taxpayers of borrowing $7.4 billion is at least $12 billion and opines that an entity that chooses lease-revenue financing must be motivated primarily by concerns other than economic efficiency. Dr. Werner writes, "One possibility is that lease revenue bonds are used to finance prisons because state officials believe that voters would reject the use of general obligation bonds for the projects in question."
The landmark lawsuit filed today against a number of state officials, including the Governor, the State Treasurer and the Chairman of the Department of Finance, argues that AB 900 constitutes an illegal bypass of voters' constitutional right to vote on debt (California Constitution Article XVI, section 1) and an illegal waste of scarce government resources (Code of Civil Procedure section 526a).
"In the midst of a wrenching budget crisis, California is borrowing billions of dollars to build 53,000 new prison and jail beds," commented Lead Counsel in the CURB lawsuit, Thomas Nolan. "How can we be kicking thousands of kids off of Medical and cutting the public school budget by billions, yet sink $12 billion into building tens of thousands of new prisons beds?"
Dubbed by the New York Times as the largest prison construction plan in U.S. history, AB 900 was passed last year with no public hearing, no public debate, and with public opinion squarely against new prison construction. Dorsey Nunn, a plaintiff in the suit and a member of All of Us or None, explains that "AB 900 is in direct violation of the California Constitution, which demands that only the will of the voters can put the General Fund into this kind of debt."
"It speaks so sadly of our future that my teachers are receiving lay off warning notices at the same time 53,000 new prison beds are being funded," said Ericka Sokolower-Shain, one of the plaintiffs who is a public school student. Additional plaintiffs are Camilla Chavez of Bakersfield's Dolores Huerta Foundation, Bonnie Long, who has a family member in prison, and Cynthia Chandler, parent of public school students.
"California has opened 23 new prisons in the past 23 years, and our system is more crowded than ever," explains CURB member Craig Gilmore. "By building more prisons, we're making the overcrowding problem even worse. The real solutions to overcrowding are early release, parole reform, sentencing reform and full implementation of Proposition 36." Chair of the Senate Public Safety Committee, Senator Gloria Romero, has repeatedly stated that "we cannot build ourselves out of the prison crisis."
In a March letter to the State Public Works Board, Chair of the Democratic Caucus Carole Migden, who will appear at the press conference, wrote, "Due to the State's current financial crisis, I do not think it is fiscally prudent to authorize the sale of lease revenue bonds which will increase the state's current structural deficit." The ongoing costs of AB900 will likely devastate the state budget for years to come.
The complaint, expert report, summaries and additional background materials will be available at http://www.curbprisonspending.org for download after the press conference May 6, 2008 noon.
--30--
Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) is a broad based statewide coalition of community organizations across the state committed to curbing prison spending by reducing the number of people in prison and closing prisons.
Posted by lois at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)
May 05, 2008
NJ: Close Hospitals? Why not Close Prisons Instead!
Close Hospitals? Why not Close Prisons Instead!
Posted by David H. Kerr May 04, 2008 3:05PM
NJ.Com
This budget alternative should be considered by our Governor and legislature since it not only will save millions but will increase the safety of our citizens. It is the real "tough on crime" alternative while allowing hospitals to continue caring for the sick and needy.
Judge Dennis Challeen of the National Judicial College, a judge in Minnesota who retired in 1985, once declared that there were two kinds of offenders, those we are afraid of, who should be locked up, and those we are mad at, who hurt themselves with substance abuse. For the latter, he found the following inconsistency in dealing with them with imprisonment:
"We want them to have self-worth, so we destroy their self-worth. We want them to be responsible, so we take away all responsibility. We want them to be positive and constructive, so we degrade them and make them useless. We want them to be trust worthy, so we put them where there is no trust. We want them to be non-violent, so we put them where violence is all around them. We want them to be kind and loving people, so we subject them to hatred and cruelty. We want them to quit being the tough guy, so we put them where the tough guy is respected. We want them to quit hanging around losers, so we put all the losers in the state under one roof. We want them to quit exploiting us, so we put them where they exploit each other. We want them to take control of their lives and quit being a parasite on society, so we make them totally dependent on us. Do not allow anyone to take your freedom away ever again! You deserve better."
In less than a year nearly 1,000 addicts who can't find a bed in a drug treatment program, have been picked up at several churches in Newark each week and thanks to the help of Bergen Regional Hospital they were able to be safely detoxified from drugs. Left on the street with their high priced habits, these individuals would have either ended up in the high cost Charity Care funded Hospital Emergency Rooms, or in high cost jail cells. After serving their time, and/or after being seen in the hospital emergency room with no treatment, nearly all return to the streets to resume drug use and crime to support their habits and it happens over and over again. Thanks to churches and street workers, addicts have some help to begin their long recovery process. However, Integrity House still has over 400 addicts on their waiting list, with no sign of diminishing need in spite of the long wait. Treatment beds are scarce in New Jersey and many addicts are referred to New York for immediate treatment.
The detoxification and quick response on demand to hundreds of addicts is an excellent start but many don't even get that far. Prison is their only alternative. Research shows that for an effective and lasting recovery, addicts need to be engaged in treatment, not incarceration. The present system of highly expensive Emergency Room care is inappropriate as well and cannot provide cost effective help for many addicts. It may also be one of the causes of the depletion of Charity Care dollars. One Integrity House resident had 15 visits to hospital emergency rooms before getting a drug treatment opportunity.
The State of New Jersey is facing a huge budget challenge. Our Governor is proposing that closing some hospitals and reducing the funding of others needs to be an essential part of his budget cutting plan. Two hospitals in Newark are slated for closing. How much money could we save if we closed a prison? That alternative is not even on the table. Yet if we closed only one 95 bed prison tier we would save $3.4 million. Three tiers closed would reduce the prison by 300 inmates while saving $10 million.
With the passage of S233 there will be many more addicts receiving the more effective no incarceration drug court/treatment alternative than prison. Even if we only spent a third of the $10 million prison savings for drug treatment it would offer real help to 300 addicts vs expensive confinement of 95 inmates. But wouldn't closing three prison tiers pose a public safety risk to our communities? Actually, no. Over the last 10 years we have built more jails and prisons to accommodate the overcrowding often caused by mandatory sentencing. It is true that arrest and incarceration has the immediate effect of cutting crime rates. However, our prisons and jails are now full with even an increase in women being sent away. We can't afford to build more prisons and now they're all coming out - bigger and better criminals. 1,500 are coming back to Newark alone this year and 70,000 statewide over the next five years. Little by little, year after year, we are seeing more and more inmates return to our communities. Data is now showing that this system causes addicts to be rearrested 67% of the time after three years on the streets. The same data shows that over 50% of those arrested are returned to prison. Our reentry programs are frustrated in getting people jobs only to see them rearrested or returned after 3 years with no drug treatment. We are spending tens of millions of dollars for this system. It is clear according to data that this "tough on crime" policy is having a dramatic negative impact on public safety. A lose, lose situation so why do we keep doing it?
How can we afford to keep spending tens of millions of dollars on our present system of arrest and incarceration of non violent drug offenders for example? We continue to choose a system that actually decreases public safety while another non-custodial criminal justice system, Drug Courts/treatment, costs less and enhances public safety. Even with this knowledge, our Governor's present budget is proposing to cut hospital revenues and to actually close many hospitals that are presently giving care to innocent people whose only error was getting sick or becoming injured - not even a misdemeanor! Close hospitals without a word about closing prisons!
The fact is that our Drug Court/treatment system is 70% effective in reducing crime and further recidivism while keeping addicts in treatment and in remission. Millions of dollars can be saved and better yet, there is more accountability for each and every addict on the streets in the Drug Court system. The impact on public safety is very positive in a system costing millions of dollars less.
So the question is, why are we not even talking about closing prisons?
http://blog.nj.com/njv_david_kerr/2008/05/close_hospitals_why_not_close.html
Posted by lois at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)
CCA Immigrant Detention: Immigration agency, contractors are accused of mistreating detainees
U-T SPECIAL REPORT
graphs and other links at this URL:
Immigrant detention
budget soars
The number of people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has jumped 36 percent since 2005, when the agency held a daily average of 19,718 detainees, who include illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and legal U.S. residents facing deportation. By the end of 2007, that number had grown to 30,881.
At the end of last year, 13 percent of ICE detainees were held in agency facilities. Seventeen percent were in private facilities that contract directly with ICE; 21 percent were in facilities contracted from local governments, usually with the county acting as middleman for a private company. An additional 46 percent were in county jails, where ICE rents beds, and a handful in other facilities, including rented federal prison space.
Many of these jails and prisons, while under government jurisdiction, also are privately operated.
In the past three years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has more than tripled what it spends on detention. Its annual appropriation for custody has grown to $1.6 billion this year from $504 million in 2005.
The White House has requested funding for 1,000 more beds by Sept. 30.
The immigration agency has no plans to build any more of its own detention centers, of which there are eight in the nation, including one in El Centro. Officials say it's easier to contract the beds.
“It just provides us with a quicker way to provide detention space,” said Gary Mead, acting director of ICE detention and removal operations in Washington, D.C.
The savings are substantial: According to ICE, it cost $87.99 per day on average in fiscal year 2007 to hold someone at a contract detention facility, while it cost roughly $119.28 a day to house a person at an ICE-run facility.
Detention increased after 1996, when legislative changes made it easier to deport immigrants residing here legally who had been convicted and served a prison sentence, and made detention mandatory as they awaited deportation.
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