The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

July 01, 2008

Scottish Prisons Commission: re-thinking punishment

"Scotland has one possible future where its prisons hold only serious offenders, prison staff regularly and expertly deliver programmes that can affect change and there is a widely used and respected system of community-based sentences.

"There is another possible future, one in which there are many more prisons, as overcrowded as those today. Dedicated and skilled professionals lack support and suffer from low morale, the public's distrust of the criminal justice system reaches record levels and fragile communities are ignored.

Scottish Prisons Commission
Date: 1 Jul 2008 - 10:48
Source: Scottish Government

The Scottish Prisons Commission (SPC) today published its report, Scotland's Choice, on the future of crime and punishment north of the border.

The Commission is making 23 recommendations which, taken together, offer a systematic and evidence-based response to the challenges that Scotland's criminal justice system is facing.

Its recommendations cover six themes

* rethinking punishment
* prosecution and court processes
* sentencing and managing sentences
* community justice
* prisons and resettlement
* the Custodial Sentences and Weapons (Scotland) Act
* the prison open estate

Some of the issues covered include better targeting of imprisonment, the use of community payback and increased efficiency in the court system.

There are also recommendations tackling the issues of illegal drugs in prison through, for example, the introduction of drug-free wings, young offenders, improved through care for offenders on release, the use of conditional sentences and the eventual termination of the Home Detention Curfew scheme.

In its consideration of the Custodial Sentencing and Weapons (Scotland) Act, the Commission recommends that if the act is to be implemented, it should be a staged implementation reserved for those serving custodial sentences of two years or more.

The creation of both a National Sentencing Council and a National Community Justice Council is also being recommended to ensure consistency, enhanced public understanding and confidence in sentencing of all kinds and to drive forward change.

Commission Chair Henry McLeish, said:

"The work done by this Commission over the past nine months has been both detailed and demanding. It has brought us to a crossroads where Scotland must choose which future it wants for its criminal justice system.

"Our priority is keeping the public safe and at the same time, reducing the number of victims and the damage caused to communities by crime. This requires us to use the best available evidence to work harder and be smarter in challenging and changing offenders and at tackling the underlying social and cultural factors that so often drive their offending and reoffending.

"Scotland has one possible future where its prisons hold only serious offenders, prison staff regularly and expertly deliver programmes that can affect change and there is a widely used and respected system of community-based sentences.

"There is another possible future, one in which there are many more prisons, as overcrowded as those today. Dedicated and skilled professionals lack support and suffer from low morale, the public's distrust of the criminal justice system reaches record levels and fragile communities are ignored.

"We have to make a choice between these two futures. One requires us to do nothing at all; the other will require us to think differently about what we want punishment to do and to make changes in how we go about achieving this.

"In this report we propose a set of solutions aimed at moving us onto the path we should take. If this is to work, all of us - politicians, the judiciary, the media, professionals, communities, families and individuals - have to embrace this opportunity for change."

The SPC was convened in September 2007 to examine Scotland's use of prison in the 21st century. Its remit was to:

* consider how imprisonment is currently used in Scotland and how this fits with the Government's wider strategic objectives
* raise the public profile of this issue - providing better information to allow a deeper understanding of the options, outcomes and costs
* compare the underpinning rationale with current law and practice, including the impact for courts, prisons and community justice services of early release provisions of the Custodial Sentences and Weapons (Scotland) Act 2007

The membership of the Commission was:

* The Rt Hon Henry McLeish (Chair) - former First Minister of Scotland, Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong learning, Minister for Devolution and Home Affairs.
* Dr Karen Dotter-Schiller - Acting Director-General, Prison Service in the Federal Ministry of Justice in Vienna, Austria; founder member of the International Corrections and Prisons Association.
* Sherriff Alistair Duff - Dundee; Chair, Dundee branch of the Scottish Association for the Study of Offending
* Geraldine Gammell - Director, The Prince's Trust in Scotland
* Richard Jeffrey - President, Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce; Chair, Edinburgh Tourism Action Group
* Lesley Riddoch - broadcaster and journalist
* Chief Constable David Strang - Lothian and Borders Police
Source URL: http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/19707

Posted by lois at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2008

UK: Plan to shut women's jails is shelved

From (London) Times Online
June 24, 2008
Plan to shut women's jails is shelved
Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

Radical proposals to close all 13 women's jails in England and Wales and replace them with small house units holding up to 20 offenders were today rejected by the Government.

A working party within the Ministry of Justice finally buried the key plan from a review of women in the justice system after concluding that shutting the existing jails over the next decade and replacing them with up to 150 smaller units was impractical.

Today's announcement is a bitter blow to penal reform groups who had put their trust in key female members of the Government, including those in the Justice Ministry and Attorney-General's office, being able to deliver the biggest shake-up in the way female offenders are treated in prisons.

Instead the Ministry of Justice highlighted initiatives to support women including pilot projects in five jails in which a new search technique is being used which does not require them to remove their underwear.

The women's prison population is currently 4,502 — three lower than the all time record — and Ministry of Justice sources said that no women’s jails are to close.

Baroness Corston proposed closing women’s jails and replacing them with a network of small units located in city centres and run by families of women but even as her report was published last year Ministry of Justice sources made clear there was no money to implement such an ambitious and controversial proposal.

The Ministry of Justice review concluded that the model of small units would be unable to provide on site all the facilities needed to support and help women prisoners including making it easier for families to visit and meeting their resettlement needs. Although the review team accepted the principle of small units it said there were weaknesses including providing the full range of services including education, drug treatment and running courses to deal with the offending behaviour.

"A particular risk would be to the delivery of small scale services to meet particularly complex needs, as we may not be able to gather enough offenders in any one location to deliver efficiently without increasing movement around the estate," the Justice Ministry said today.

It also said that some women consulted about the proposal had expressed concern about the increased likelihood of bullying in a potentially claustrophobic environment of small units.

The Justice Ministry also said that creating small units might mean women having to be moved more frequently to other units where services for particular problems such as drug and alcohol abuse are available.

It also warned that there would a significant challenge for the prison service to handle high to low risk women offenders in up to 150 units around England and Wales.

Instead of the radical reform outlined by Baroness Corston, the Ministry is to create a 77-place wing within Bronzefleld women's jail in Middlesex which has been designed specifically to meet women’s needs. At two other women's prisons accommodation is to be provided adjacent to the jail for women to spend time with their children.

The Prison Reform Trust, a penal reform group, said that progress towards implementing the proposals from Baroness Corston's review was painfully slow. Juliet Lyon, director of the trust, said: "‘It’s clear that this government is so busy planning how to waste billions of public money on so-called ‘Titan’ prisons that it cannot find the time or money to create a decent, effective justice system for women. A national network of women’s supervision and support centres would enable women offenders to beat addiction, receive mental healthcare, get out of debt and gain skills to work and look after their children."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4205516.ece

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June 23, 2008

Venezuela: Amid Despair in a Venezuelan Prison, Strains of Hope From a Music Program

June 23, 2008
Los Teques Journal
Amid Despair in a Venezuelan Prison, Strains of Hope From a Music Program
By SIMON ROMERO
NY Times

LOS TEQUES, Venezuela — When Nurul Asyiqin Ahmad was taken seven months ago to her cell at the National Institute of Feminine Orientation, a prison perched on a hill in this city of slums on the outskirts of Caracas, learning how to play Beethoven was one of the last things on her mind.

“The despair gripped me, like a nightmare had become my life,” said Ms. Ahmad, 26, a shy law student from Malaysia who claims she is innocent of charges of trying to smuggle cocaine on a flight from Caracas to Paris. “But when the music begins, I am lifted away from this place.” Ms. Ahmad plays violin and sings in the prison’s orchestra.

In a project extending Venezuela’s renowned system of youth orchestras to some of the country’s most hardened prisons, Ms. Ahmad and hundreds of other prisoners are learning a repertory that includes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and folk songs from the Venezuelan plains.

The budding musicians include murderers, kidnappers, thieves and, here at the women’s prison, dozens of narcomulas, or drug mules, as small-scale drug smugglers are called. The project, which began a year ago, is expanding this year to five prisons from three.

“This is our attempt to achieve the humanization of prison life,” said Kleiberth Lenin Mora, 32, a lawyer who helped create the prison orchestras, modeling them on the system that teaches tens of thousands of poor children in Venezuela classical music. “We start with the simple idea that performing music lifts the human being to another level.”

Few nations have prison systems as much in need of humanizing as Venezuela, where 498 inmates out of a total population of 21,201 were killed in 2007, according to the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, a group that monitors prison violence.

The women’s prison, the scene of gang fights and hunger strikes by inmates in recent months, is not immune to this violence. But it is not all bleak. Inmates have free access to the Internet. They can pay to use cellphones. A commissary sells soft drinks and junk food.

And now INOF (pronounced like the word “enough”), the acronym the prison is known by in Spanish, has its orchestra, which most of the more than 300 women incarcerated here opt to avoid. But the 40 or so who have joined find themselves enmeshed in an experience that was unexpected in their lives in prison and in their lives out of prison.

“Before this my music was reggaetón,” said Irma González, 29, a street vendor serving a six-year sentence for robbery, referring to the fusion of reggae, hip-hop and Latin pop that is widely popular in Venezuelan slums. Now she plays the double bass. Her proudest moment, she said, was when her four children, ages 14, 13, 10 and 9, recently came here to watch her play.

“When they applauded me, I finally felt useful in this life,” said Ms. González. Like other participants, she hopes to reduce her term by playing in the orchestra, which judges may consider the equivalent of hours of study.

Officials say it is too early to tell whether the project will improve overall conditions here and at the two prisons for men where it started, in the Andean states of Mérida and Táchira. No stars have emerged like Gustavo Dudamel, the 27-year-old from the youth-orchestra system named as the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

For now, the project, which receives $3 million in funding from President Hugo Chávez’s government and the Inter-American Development Bank, takes baby steps. It staged its first public performance last month in Teresa Carreño Theater in Caracas. And it insists its participants hew to a few specific rules.

For instance, no one can threaten the professors, many of whom are drawn from the youth-orchestra system. Everyone must speak clearly during discussions in the daily practice sessions. Everyone must stand up straight and take care of his or her instrument. Smoking and chewing tobacco are not allowed.

The orchestra at INOF is one of the most cosmopolitan in Venezuela. Many of the inmates are foreigners arrested on drug-smuggling charges. Women from Colombia, Spain, Malaysia and the Netherlands play instruments or sing in the chorus alongside Venezuelans.

“I drain away my bad thoughts in the orchestra,” said Joanny Aldana, 29, a viola player serving a nine-year sentence for kidnapping and auto theft. Like some of the other inmates, she is imprisoned here with her child, a 2-year-old daughter. Still, she despairs sometimes.

“There’s the pain of my children, of having destroyed my life, my youth,” Ms. Aldana said.

Perhaps no amount of music can make up for such loss. Perhaps that explains the fervor with which some of the women play their instruments or sing. It is not uncommon to see one of them shedding a tear when a certain note is struck.

For Yusveisy Torrealba, 18, that moment comes when the chorus sings a few words from “Caramba,” the folk song by the Venezuelan composer Otilio Galíndez performed with the cuatro, a four-string guitar. Ms. Torrealba was caught in April taking cocaine on a flight to Orlando, Fla.

In her soft voice, she sang these lines for a visitor one recent afternoon:

Caramba, my love, caramba

The things we have missed

The gossip I could only hear

Between the rocks of the river.

“Caramba,” she repeated quietly, as if contemplating how much time remained in an eight-year sentence that began last month. “The only thing keeping me together is this music.”

Sandra La Fuente P. contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/world/americas/23venezuela.html?scp=3&sq=Venezuela&st=nyt

Posted by lois at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2008

UK: Audit Estimates Public Cost of a Single Drug Addict at $1.5 Million

Audit Estimates Public Cost of a Single Drug Addict at $1.5 Million
June 16, 2008

A report from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that each drug addict in the U.K. costs taxpayers £800,000 -- about $1.569 million -- over his or her lifetime, the BBC reported June 14.

The estimate included the cost of crime, healthcare under Great Britain's National Health Service, and other considerations; however, researchers said that the estimate was probably on the conservative side.

The report said that the cost to society could be reduced to under £70,000 (about $137,000) if people with addiction problems received treatment prior to age 21.

Researchers said that "the creation of drug-free prisons is an expensive option and was not considered to be practical in the current resource climate," that drug testing was ineffective to measure or counter drug use, and that options like supervised injection centers for opiate-addicted offenders should be considered.
http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2008/audit-estimates-public-cost.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=40408416&print=t

Posted by lois at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2008

UK: Titan jails to have overcrowding built into design, admits ministry

Titan jails to have overcrowding built into design, admits ministry
· 'Superprisons' envisaged to last 100 years
· Split into units housing different type of offender

The new generation of titan "superprisons" are being designed to be overcrowded from the start, the Justice Ministry admitted yesterday. Prison service officials are already looking for a minimum 50-acre brownfield site in the Greater London area to build the first titan jail. But when it opens in 2012 it will only have 2,100 places for its 2,500 inmates. A consultation paper published by the justice secretary, Jack Straw, said yesterday the sites for the four- or five-storey titans should be suitable for an initial development providing at least 2,100 uncrowded places with the capacity to hold up to 2,500 prisoners "through planned overcrowding".

The paper strongly denies that the new jails - which may end up being called "cluster prisons" - will be 2,500-bed "monolithic prison warehouses". It says they will be split into several units each housing a different type of offender. It is envisaged that each titan will consist of five or six self-contained units each housing 200 to 500 inmates, from young offenders to adult males to maximum security prisoners.

The paper says that the design of the superjails is still being worked on but it will incorporate biometric scanning, bar coding and electronic door locking systems into the fabric of the building. The paper is very light on detail about costs of the privately-built jails except to say that the cost to the public purse of each prison is estimated at £350m at today's prices.

The ministry also makes the claim that this generation of prisons is designed to last 100 years so the annual capital cost a place over its lifespan will be significantly less than the current cost of adding a houseblock to an existing jail.

The initial three titan prisons are earmarked for London, the west Midlands and the north-west, and are designed to meet the projected gap between supply and demand for prison places, which is expected to reach a shortfall of 13,000 by 2014. The biggest population pressures are expected in London where 11,500 extra prison places are needed. Officials envisage that the first London titan will hold up to 1,000 remand prisoners waiting for trial in the capital's courts. The remaining 1,500 places will house medium-risk category B prisoners. The establishment of the titan as the main regional remand prison for London would allow closure of inner-city Victorian jails such as Pentonville.

The first site is expected to be somewhere near the M25 network and the paper specifies that it must be within a hour's journey time of the major courts. Officials also want to see a site capable of further expansion, with the possibility of a court complex to be built alongside.

The prisons minister, David Hanson, said the titans needed to be built so that the available resources to reduce reoffending could be brought together into one place. "We have made clear from the outset that these prisons will not be giant warehouses. They will include the latest developments in security measures, will build in ways of developing work programmes for prisoners and ensure that, alongside a tough regime, offenders have the opportunity to change their ways through treatment, work and learning," he said.

Ministers believe securing planning consent for three titan sites rather than 15 conventional prisons that would otherwise be needed will prove less complex and have less environmental impact. Although each titan will be broken down into units they will share the same security perimeter, reception, healthcare, education, and physical recreation facilities.

Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust said the decision to press ahead with the titans marked the end of the government's commitment to get tough on the causes of crime: "Why would anyone determined to reduce social exclusion and cut crime want to invest billions of public money in failed institutions when they could fund treatment for addicts, better mental health care and early intervention to steer young people out of trouble?"

She said the paper accepted the prison population would soar over 100,000, making England and Wales the greatest incarcerator in western Europe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jun/06/prisonsandprobation.justice

Posted by lois at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2008

UK: Muslim gangs 'are taking control of prison'

Muslim gangs 'are taking control of prison'

* Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
* The Observer,
* Sunday May 25 2008

Prison officers at one of Britain's maximum security jails are losing control to Muslim gangs, according to a confidential report obtained by The Observer. An internal review of Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire warns that staff believe a 'serious incident is imminent' as several wings become dominated by Muslim prisoners.

The report, written by the Prison Service's Directorate of High Security, says there is an 'ongoing theme of fear and instability' among staff at Whitemoor, where just under a third of the 500 prisoners are Muslim.

It claims: 'There was much talk around the establishment about "the Muslims". Some staff perceived the situation at Whitemoor had resulted in Muslim prisoners becoming more of a gang than a religious group. The sheer numbers, coupled with a lack of awareness among staff, appeared to be engendering fear and handing control to the prisoners.' The situation has become so acute that white prisoners are routinely warned about the Muslim gangs by staff on arrival.

The report says that apprehension about Muslim prisoners has potentially damaging consequences and is in danger of 'leading to hostility and Islamophobia'. It serves to highlight the growing concern about extremist activity in the UK's jails. The Home Office is concerned that young male prisoners are being radicalised by Muslim gangs and that the prison system is becoming a recruiting ground for al-Qaeda sympathisers. Similar problems have been experienced at Belmarsh prison in London and Frankland in Durham. A number of high-profile al-Qaeda sympathisers at Frankland have been moved as a result of increased tensions within the jail.

Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said she was alarmed at the report's findings. 'The difficulties of running a high-security prison such as Whitemoor cannot be underestimated, but much of what this internal report uncovers is extremely disturbing,' she said. 'It is vital that the problems uncovered at Whitemoor are addressed as a matter of urgency.'

The report was commissioned partly as a response to the deaths of five prisoners at the jail within 12 months. Muslim prisoner support groups have also complained that Muslims are suffering harassment from staff. Recently a number of Whitemoor staff have been suspended on unrelated corruption charges.

The tense stand-off between staff and prisoners is causing problems, the report warns. 'Staff appeared reluctant to challenge inappropriate behaviour, in particular among BME [black and ethnic minority] prisoners for fear of doing the wrong thing,' the report states. 'This was leading to a general feeling of a lack of control and shifting the power dynamic towards prisoners.' It adds: 'A wing itself felt particularly unstable with a general lack of confidence among staff.'

The emergence of gang culture in Whitemoor has alarmed some prisoners. The team that compiled the report found that over the Christmas period the segregation unit was full as inmates sought refuge from the gangs over debt problems and drugs.

Henry Bellingham, the Conservatives' shadow justice minister, who has raised concerns about the running of Whitemoor in parliament, said he welcomed the report. 'However, I'm very concerned about some of the findings,' he added. 'They point to a systematic breakdown in the chain of command. It's in everyone's interests that these problems are sorted out soon. Whitemoor holds some of the most dangerous prisoners in the country.'

In recent months the Prison Service has unveiled a series of initiatives to combat extremism in the UK's jails through the supervision and monitoring of imams and better training for staff. 'It is vital that prison staff are equipped with the knowledge and skills to ensure they have the confidence to identify and challenge behaviour that is of concern,' said a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice. 'A programme of work is planned at Whitemoor to increase mutual understanding between staff and prisoners, including a development day for staff on the Muslim faith, focus groups in which staff and ethnic minority prisoners will discuss prison community issues, and diversity events.

'The prison will continue to work closely with the Prison Service's Extremism Unit and the police to monitor and assess issues around extremism, and work will be undertaken to examine the management of gangs and terrorist prisoners within the prison.'
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This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday May 25 2008 on p1 of the News section. It was last updated at 00:03 on May 25 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/may/25/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime/print
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Posted by lois at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

May 19, 2008

Afghanistan: U.S. Military to Build 6-10 prisons each the size of football fields

January 7, 2008, NY Times
Foiling U.S. Plan, Prison Expands in Afghanistan
By TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON — As the Bush administration struggles for a way to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a similar effort to scale down a larger and more secretive American detention center in Afghanistan has been beset by political, legal and security problems, officials say.

The American detention center, established at the Bagram military base as a temporary screening site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is now teeming with some 630 prisoners — more than twice the 275 being held at Guantánamo.

The administration has spent nearly three years and more than $30 million on a plan to transfer Afghan prisoners held by the United States to a refurbished high-security detention center run by the Afghan military outside Kabul.

But almost a year after the Afghan detention center opened, American officials say it can accommodate only about half the prisoners they once planned to put there. As a result, the makeshift American site at Bagram will probably continue to operate with hundreds of detainees for the foreseeable future, the officials said.

Meanwhile, the treatment of some prisoners on the Bagram base has prompted a strong complaint to the Pentagon from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group allowed in the detention center.

In a confidential memorandum last summer, the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram, two American officials said. The Red Cross said the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions, one of the officials said.

The senior Pentagon official for detention policy, Sandra L. Hodgkinson, would not discuss the complaint, citing the confidentiality of communications with the Red Cross. She said that the organization had access to “all Department of Defense detainees” in Afghanistan, after they were formally registered, and that the military “makes every effort to register detainees as soon as practicable after capture, normally within two weeks.

“In some cases, due to a variety of logistical and operational circumstances, it may take longer,” Ms. Hodgkinson added.

The obstacles American officials have faced in their plan to “transition out” of the Bagram detention center underscore the complexity of their challenges in dealing with prisoners overseas. Yet even as Bagram has expanded over the last three years, it has received a fraction of the attention that policy makers, Congress and human rights groups have devoted to Guantánamo.

“The problem at Bagram hasn’t gone away,” said Tina M. Foster, a New York human rights lawyer who has filed federal lawsuits on behalf of the detainees at Bagram. “The government has just done a better job of keeping it secret.”

The rising number of detainees at Bagram — up from barely 100 in early 2004 and about 500 early last year — has been driven primarily by the deepening war in Afghanistan. American officials said that all but about 30 of those prisoners are Afghans, most of them Taliban fighters captured in raids or on the battlefield.

But the surging detainee population also reflects a series of unforeseen problems in the United States’ effort to turn over prisoners to the Afghan government.

In a confidential diplomatic agreement in August 2005, a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times, the Bush administration said it would transfer the detainees if the Kabul government gave written assurances that it would treat the detainees humanely and abide by elaborate security conditions. As part of the accord, the United States said it would finance the rebuilding of an Afghan prison block and help equip and train an Afghan guard force.

Yet even before the construction began in early 2006, the creation of the new Afghan National Detention Center was complicated by turf battles among Afghan government ministries, some of which resisted the American strategy, officials of both countries said.

A push by some Defense Department officials to have Kabul authorize the indefinite military detention of “enemy combatants” — adopting a legal framework like that of Guantánamo — foundered in 2006 when aides to President Hamid Karzai persuaded him not to sign a decree that had been written with American help.

Then, last May, the transfer plan was disrupted again when the two American servicemen overseeing the project were shot to death by a man suspected of being a Taliban militant who had infiltrated the guard force.

The Pentagon initially reported only that the two Americans, Col. James W. Harrison Jr. and Master Sgt. Wilberto Sabalu Jr., were killed May 6 by “small-arms fire.” But American officials said the Afghan guard had opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle as two vehicles carrying senior officers waited to pass through the prison gate. The killings forced more than a month of further vetting of the Afghan guards and the dismissal of almost two dozen trained recruits, Pentagon officials said.

A Spartan Site of Metal Pens

The Bagram Theater Internment Facility, as it is called, has held prisoners captured as far away as Central Africa and Southeast Asia, many of whom were sent on to Guantánamo. Since the flow of detainees to Cuba was largely shut off in September 2004, the Bagram detention center has become primarily a repository for more dangerous prisoners captured in Afghanistan.

Despite some expansion and renovation, the detention center remains a crude place where most prisoners are fenced into large metal pens, military officers and former detainees have said.

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, on an American-controlled military base 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers. Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said.

The treatment of prisoners at Bagram has generally improved in recent years, human rights groups and former detainees say, particularly since two Afghan detainees died there in December 2002 after being beaten by their American captors. Two American officials familiar with the Red Cross complaint that was forwarded to the Pentagon over the summer described it as a notable exception.

A Red Cross spokesman in Washington, Simon Schorno, said the organization would not comment on its discussions with the Defense Department. But in remarks about the organization’s work in Afghanistan, its director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, emphasized on Dec. 13 that “not all places of detention and detainees” are made available to the group’s inspectors.

“The fact that the I.C.R.C. does not publicize its findings does not indicate satisfaction with the conditions of any given detention place,” he said on the group’s Web site.

The two United States officials, who insisted on anonymity because of the confidentiality of Red Cross communications, suggested that the organization had been more forceful in private. They said the group had complained that detainees in the isolation area were sometimes subjected to harsh interrogations and were not reported to Red Cross inspectors until after they were moved into the main Bagram detention center and formally registered — after being held incommunicado for as long as several months.

One former Bush administration official said the Pentagon told Congressional leaders in September 2006 that a small number of prisoners held by Special Operations forces might not be registered within the 14-day period cited in a Defense Department directive issued that month. The exceptions were to be “approved at the highest levels,” the former official said.

Discounting Complaints

Bush administration officials have at times discounted complaints about the crowding and harsh conditions at Bagram by saying the detention center was never meant to be permanent and that its prisoners would soon be turned over to Afghanistan.

Hundreds of Bagram detainees have been released outright as part of an Afghan national reconciliation program. But by early 2006, internal Defense Department statistics showed that the average internment at Bagram was 14.5 months, and one Pentagon official said that figure had since risen.

After a White House agreement by President Bush and Mr. Karzai in May 2005, the plan to transfer the prisoners was drawn up by administration officials and outlined in an exchange of confidential diplomatic notes that August.

The two-page Washington note — the first document to become public showing the terms that Washington has sought from other governments for the transfer of detainees from Guantánamo and Bagram — asks the Kabul administration to share any intelligence information from the prisoners, “utilize all methods appropriate and permissible under Afghan law to surveil or monitor their activities following any release,” and “confiscate or deny passports and take measures to prevent each national from traveling outside Afghanistan.”

At the time, some Bush administration officials predicted that transfers from Bagram could begin within six months. Col. Manuel Supervielle, who worked on legal aspects of the transfers as the senior United States military lawyer in Afghanistan, recalled that officials in Washington expected the primary difficulty to be the rebuilding of a cellblock at Afghanistan’s decrepit Pul-i-Charkhi prison to meet international standards of humane treatment.

“We’ve got a bunch of guys we want to hand over to the Afghans,” Colonel Supervielle said, recalling the prevailing view. “Build a jail and hand them over.”

But complications emerged at almost every turn.

Afghan officials rejected pressure from Washington to adopt a detention system modeled on the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” legal framework, American officials said. Some Defense Department officials even urged the Afghan military to set up military commissions like those at Guantánamo, the officials said.

Officials of both countries said the defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, was reluctant to take responsibility for the new detention center as the Pentagon wanted, fearing he would be besieged by tribal leaders trying to secure the release of captives. The minister of justice, Sarwar Danish, opposed sharing his control over prisons, the officials said.

American officials finally brokered an agreement between the ministries, internal documents show. But that did not resolve more basic questions about the legal basis under which Afghanistan would hold the detainees.

For nearly a year, American military officials and diplomats worked with the Afghan government to draft a plan for how it would detain and prosecute all prisoners captured in Afghanistan. Colonel Supervielle, who had helped set up legal operations at Guantánamo, said the effort in Afghanistan was in some ways more complex. “You weren’t dealing just with a U.S. interagency process,” he said. “It involved the interagency process, bilateral relations with Afghanistan, the military coalition and other international interests.”

The draft law was finally delivered to Mr. Karzai in August 2006. Despite American entreaties, he decided not to sign it after opposition from senior aides, officials said.

The construction of a new detention center at Pul-i-Charkhi also proved more complicated than United States officials had anticipated.

A New Project Is Flawed

When Afghan contractors broke ground on the $20 million project in 2006, United States officials estimated that the center would hold as many as 670 prisoners. But as the military police colonel overseeing the project toured the site with Afghan and Red Cross officials, they pointed to a significant flaw. In other parts of Pul-i-Charkhi, men were crammed as many as eight to a cell, and used toilets down the hall. To improve security and hygiene, the Americans equipped each two-man cell in the new block with its own toilet.

But because the cultural modesty of Afghan men would make them uncomfortable sharing an open toilet, it was subsequently decided that the prisoners should be held individually, two former officials involved in the project said. That immediately reduced the optimal capacity of the main prison to about 330 detainees, they said, although a Pentagon spokeswoman said its “maximum capacity” was 628 prisoners.

The training of Afghan military personnel to guard and administer the new prison has posed other challenges. After initially budgeting $6 million for guard training, the Defense Department decided it would need about $18 million for training and “mentoring” of guards over three years, officials said.

A first group of 12 Bagram detainees was moved into the Pul-i-Charkhi prison on April 3. Over the next nine months, that number rose to 157 prisoners, including 32 from Guantánamo, official statistics show. Afghan officials decided to release 12 of those detainees soon after their transfer.

American officials said the modest flow had been dictated mainly by the Afghan military, which has wanted to make sure its guards could handle the new arrivals. But some United States officials say they have also had to reassess the Afghans’ ability to hold more dangerous detainees. They said the detention center at Bagram would probably continue to hold hundreds of prisoners indefinitely. “The idea is that over time, some of our detainees at Bagram — especially those at the lower end of the threat scale — will be passed on to Afghanistan,” one senior military official said last year. “But not all. Bagram will remain an intelligence asset and a screening area.”

Ms. Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, acknowledged that the military was holding more detainees at Bagram than it had anticipated two years ago and that the Pentagon had no plan to assist the Afghans with further prison-building. But, she added, “A final decision on the higher-threat detainees has not yet been made.”

And even now, the legal basis under which prisoners are being held at the Afghan detention center remains unclear. Another Defense Department official, who insisted on anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue, said the detentions had been authorized “in a note from the attorney general stating that he recognizes that they have the legal authority under the law of war to hold enemy combatants as security threats if they choose to do so.”

Afghan officials said they were still expecting virtually all of the Afghan prisoners held by the United States — with the possible exception of a few especially dangerous detainees at Guantánamo — to be handed over to them.

A spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry, Gen. Zaher Azimi, said, “What is agreed is that all the detainees should be transferred.”

Kirk Semple, Carlotta Gall and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul.

Correction: January 12, 2008

Because of an editing error, a front-page article on Monday about the American detention center at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan omitted a reporting credit. Kirk Semple, Carlotta Gall and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed from Kabul.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/world/asia/07bagram.html?_r=1&sq=Bagram%20Air%20force%20Base&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2008

In France, Prisons Filled With Muslims

In France, Prisons Filled With Muslims

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 29, 2008; A01

SEQUEDIN, France -- Samia El Alaoui Talibi walks her beat in a cream-colored head scarf and an ink-black robe with sunset-orange piping, an outfit she picked up at a yard sale.

After passing a bulletproof window, El Alaoui Talibi trudges through half a dozen heavy, locked doors to reach the Muslim faithful to whom she ministers in the women's cellblock of the Lille-Sequedin Detention Center in far northern France.

It took her years to earn this access, said El Alaoui Talibi, one of only four Muslim holy women allowed to work in French prisons. "Everyone has the same prejudices and negative image of Muslims and Islam," said Moroccan-born El Alaoui Talibi, 47, the mother of seven children. "When some guards see you, they see an Arab; they see you the same as if you were a prisoner."

This prison is majority Muslim -- as is virtually every house of incarceration in France. About 60 to 70 percent of all inmates in the country's prison system are Muslim, according to Muslim leaders, sociologists and researchers, though Muslims make up only about 12 percent of the country's population.

On a continent where immigrants and the children of immigrants are disproportionately represented in almost every prison system, the French figures are the most marked, according to researchers, criminologists and Muslim leaders.

"The high percentage of Muslims in prisons is a direct consequence of the failure of the integration of minorities in France," said Moussa Khedimellah, a sociologist who has spent several years conducting research on Muslims in the French penal system.

In Britain, 11 percent of prisoners are Muslim in contrast to about 3 percent of all inhabitants, according to the Justice Ministry. Research by the Open Society Institute, an advocacy organization, shows that in the Netherlands 20 percent of adult prisoners and 26 percent of all juvenile offenders are Muslim; the country is about 5.5 percent Muslim. In Belgium, Muslims from Morocco and Turkey make up at least 16 percent of the prison population, compared with 2 percent of the general populace, the research found.

Sociologists and Muslim leaders say the French prison system reflects the deep social and ethnic divides roiling France and its European neighbors as immigrants and a new generation of their children alter the demographic and cultural landscape of the continent.

French prison officials blame the high numbers on the poverty of people who have moved here from North African and other Islamic countries in recent decades. "Many immigrants arrive in France in difficult financial situations, which make delinquency more frequent," said Jeanne Sautière, director of integration and religious groups for the French prison system. "The most important thing is to say there is no correlation between Islam and delinquency."

But Muslim leaders, sociologists and human rights activists argue that more than in most other European countries, government social policies in France have served to isolate Muslims in impoverished suburbs that have high unemployment, inferior schools and substandard housing. This has helped create a generation of French-born children with little hope of social advancement and even less respect for French authority.

"The question of discrimination and justice is one of the key political questions of our society, and still, it is not given much importance," said Sebastian Roche, who has studied judicial discrimination as research director for the French National Center for Scientific Research. "We can't blame a state if its companies discriminate; however, we can blame the state if its justice system and its police discriminate."

As a matter of policy, the French government does not collect data on race, religion or ethnicity on its citizens in any capacity, making it difficult to obtain precise figures on the makeup of prison populations. But demographers, sociologists and Muslim leaders have compiled generally accepted estimates showing Muslim inmate populations nationwide averaging between 60 and 70 percent.

The figures fluctuate from region to region: They are higher in areas with large concentrations of Muslims, including suburban Paris, Marseille in the south and Lille in the north.

Inside the prisons, El Alaoui Talibi and her husband, Hassan -- a rare husband-wife Islamic clerical team -- are struggling to win for Muslim prisoners the same religious rights accorded to their minority-Christian counterparts. Hassan is an imam. Samia has received religious training and can counsel the faithful, but under Islamic practices she cannot become an imam. The prison system has only 100 Muslim clerics for the country's 200 prisons, compared with about 480 Catholic, 250 Protestant and 50 Jewish chaplains, even though Muslim inmates vastly outnumber prisoners of all other religions. "It is true that we haven't attained full equality among religions in prisons yet," said Sautière, the national prison official. "It is a matter of time."

In recent years, the French government's primary concern with its Muslim inmate population has been political. French national security officials warned prison authorities in 2005 that they should work to prevent radical Muslims from inciting fellow prisoners. A year later, the French Senate approved a bill giving the country's national intelligence agency broad authority to monitor Muslim inmates as part of counterterrorism efforts.

Prison authorities began allowing carefully vetted moderate imams into prisons in hopes of "balancing the radical elements," said Aurélie Leclerq, 33, director of the Lille-Sequedin Detention Center.

Hassan El Alaoui Talibi, 52, who moved to France from Morocco as a student, is the national head of France's prison imams and typical of the kind of moderate Muslim figure the French government seeks for its prison system.

El Alaoui Talibi delivers his Friday sermons with carefully chosen words, he says. He avoids politics and other subjects that might seem remotely inflammatory. He sticks to counseling convicted drug dealers, murderers and illegal immigrants in matters of faith and respect.

But not all the Muslims at Lille-Sequedin share those moderate views. Last year a disgruntled inmate blared a taped religious sermon into the prison courtyard. Prison officials deemed its message inflammatory and sent the prisoner to solitary confinement.

El Alaoui Talibi described years of struggle to win even modest concessions from prison directors. He recalled the first prison visit he made, a decade ago: He was forced to wait an hour and a half to meet with inmates. "If I hadn't been patient, I would have left," said the soft-spoken former high school teacher who became a prison imam after seeing so many of his students get in trouble with the law for petty offenses and end up hard-core criminals after prison stints.

Today, working in France's newest prison -- the sprawling, three-year-old Lille-Sequedin center -- the El Alaoui Talibis say they are more accepted than some Muslim colleagues at other prisons. Prison officials rejected requests by The Washington Post to visit some of the system's older, more troubled prisons.

On a recent Friday, Hassan El Alaoui Talibi, a man with soulful eyes and a beard with the first hints of gray, made his way with a reporter through the men's wings, collecting prisoners' notes from mailboxes shared with Catholic and Protestant chaplains. At one point, several new inmates returning from sports practice surrounded him, requesting personal visits. He scribbled their names and cell numbers on a scrap of paper.

Many of the Muslim inmates in this prison just west of Lille are the children and grandchildren of immigrants who were brought to the northern region decades ago to work in its coal mines.

El Alaoui Talibi moved on to a small room overlooking a tiny garden courtyard and tugged at prayer mats stacked in a closet beside a rough-hewn wooden cross. Every other Friday, he transforms the room into a mosque for some of the male Muslim faithful of the prison. One of his most frequent sermon topics is food.

"He tells us not to throw away prison food just because it isn't halal," or compliant with Islamic dietary law, said a 33-year-old former civil servant, a man of Algerian descent who attends the twice-monthly prayer meetings. French prison rules prohibit journalists from identifying inmates by name or disclosing their crimes.

The refusal of prison officials to provide halal food, particularly meat products, is one of the biggest complaints of Muslim inmates across France and has occasionally led to cellblock protests.

For many years, prisons have allowed Muslim prisoners to forgo pork products -- and statistics tracking prisoners who refuse pork is an accurate barometer of the Muslim population in a prison, according to researchers. But cutting out pork is a long way from the full halal regimen. Only recently, did the prisons stop using pork grease to cook vegetables and other dishes.

"If you want to comply with your religion, you don't have a choice -- you have to become vegetarian," said the convicted civil servant, a compact man who works in the prison library. "We have access to a prison store with two halal products: halal sausage and a can of ravioli."

Prison officials say it is too expensive to provide halal meals. "We'd like to buy fresh meat, but we can't," said Leclerq, whose prison office is decorated with plush bears.

Muslim inmates said they sense other religious snubs. Christians are allowed packages containing gifts and special treats from their families at Christmas, but Muslims do not receive the same privilege for the Ramadan holy days. "We're careful not to call them Christmas packages because Muslims would ask for Ramadan packages," Leclerq said. "We call them end-of-the-year packages. We can't use a religious term or some people get tense."

Hassan El Alaoui Talibi said the French prison system has made progress since he began his ministry a decade ago. Last year the government set guidelines for all prisons to follow on religious practices, rather than allowing directors to arbitrarily set their own rules.

Prison imams met with Justice Minister Rachida Dati last month with a list of continuing requests, including more imams and training for prison guards to help them better understand religious differences.

A 31-year-old woman of Algerian descent with a youthful face and black, wavy hair tied carelessly in a ponytail welcomed Samia El Alaoui Talibi on a recent morning with double kisses on the cheeks.

"Arriving here was a nightmare," said the woman, one of about 150 female inmates. "I was crying, I couldn't believe I was here.

"Then I saw this woman wearing a head scarf," she said, smiling toward Samia. "I could tell she was here to help me. I call her my angel."

Researcher Corinne Gavard contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/28/AR2008042802560_pf.html

Posted by lois at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2008

NY Times: American Exception: Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’

April 23, 2008
American Exception
Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
By ADAM LIPTAK, Page 1
NY Times
Good maps and graphs at the URL for this article.
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”

No more.

“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”

Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them “are among the most serious and violent offenders.”

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But American prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.

“Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year in “Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.”

“It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,” Mr. Tonry wrote. “Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.”

The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a role.

“America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility,” Mr. Whitman of Yale wrote. “That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years.”

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have “comparatively mild penal policies,” Mr. Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.

“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America’s exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”

Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.”

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2008

Sweden: A world of criminal justice a world away from this one. Killer Expelled From Swedish Med School

January 25, 2008
Killer Expelled From Swedish Med School
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York Times

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- A medical student convicted in a 1999 murder with neo-Nazi links has been expelled from Sweden's leading medical school in a case that sparked debate over whether a killer can become a doctor after having paid his debt to society.

The Karolinska institute, known for awarding the Nobel Prize in medicine, revoked Karl Svensson's admission to its prestigious medical program this week after an investigation into his background, the university president said Friday.

Svensson, 31, was admitted last fall after his application to the program was approved, President Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson told The Associated Press.

However, the university knew nothing about his dark past until getting two anonymous tips that Svensson's original identity was Hampus Hellekant, an alleged neo-Nazi sympathizer who had served seven years in prison for the murder of a labor union activist, Wallberg-Henriksson said.

He was convicted along with two other men in 2000 in the fatal shooting of a member of a far-left union, Bjorn Soderberg. Prosecutors said the killing was revenge for the Soderberg's public denouncement of a co-worker who belonged to a neo-Nazi organization.

''He had been enrolled for four months when this was revealed,'' she said.

The discovery put Karolinska in a difficult position because the legal framework is unclear on ''whether you should be able to receive a doctor's education with this type of background,'' she said.

In the end, Karolinska never had to address Svensson's criminal record because the background check found irregularities in the high school grades he submitted with his application, which was grounds to expel him.

The case triggered an emotional debate among faculty and students at the Karolinska institute. After local media started reporting on the case, Svensson told his 130 classmates about his background, Wallberg-Henriksson said.

''He said he was very interested in becoming a doctor and was determined to pursue the education and that he was not the same person today as he was then,'' she said.

''There was a lot of discussion. The course was divided in two camps. One camp thought he had paid for his crime, others felt uncomfortable,'' she said.

Karolinska students said that there had been mixed feelings about Svensson on campus.

''We talked about it when it emerged and it was in the paper,'' said Elin, 21, a biomedicine student who did not want her last name used because the topic was sensitive on campus.

''People felt it was strange that he should be allowed to become a doctor,'' she said. ''On the other hand, people change. Maybe he's become a better person.''

Wallberg-Henriksson said Svensson's only response to the expulsion was a letter to Karolinska in which he said he was dropping out of the program.

Svensson could not be reached for comment.

The National Agency for Services to Universities and University Colleges filed a police complaint in the case on Thursday. Stockholm police said Friday they had received the complaint and were likely to start a forgery investigation next week.

Education Minister Lars Leijonborg said in a statement on Friday that Svensson's case had prompted his ministry to ''discuss whether there is a need to change the regulations surrounding students who have committed crimes.''

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Sweden-Killer-Doctor.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Medical+School&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)

December 31, 2007

Mexico City: Behind Prison Bars, Toddlers Serve Time With Mom

December 31, 2007
Mexico City Journal, NY Times
Behind Prison Bars, Toddlers Serve Time With Mom
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
MEXICO CITY — Beyond the high concrete walls and menacing guard towers of the Santa Martha Acatitla prison, past the barbed wire, past the iron gates, past the armed guards in black commando garb, sits a nursery school with brightly painted walls, piles of toys and a jungle gym.
Fifty-three children under the age of 6 live inside the prison with their mothers, who are serving sentences for crimes from drug dealing to kidnapping to homicide. Mothers dressed in prison blue, many with tattoos, carry babies on their hips around the exercise yard. Others lead toddlers and kindergartners by the hand, play with them in the dust or bounce them on their knees on prison benches.

Karina Rendón, a 23-year-old serving time for drug dealing, said her 2-year-old daughter thought of the 144-square-foot cell she shared with two other mothers and their children as home. “She doesn’t know it is a prison,” she said, smiling sadly. “She thinks it’s her house.”
While a prison may seem an unhealthy place for a child, in the early 1990s the Mexico City government decided it was better for children born in prison to stay with their mothers until they were 6 rather than to be turned over to relatives or foster parents. The children are allowed to leave on weekends and holidays to visit relatives.
A debate continues among Mexican academics over whether spending one’s early years in a jail causes mental problems later in life, but for the moment the law says babies must stay with their mothers. So the prison has a school with three teachers.
The warden, Margarita Malo, said the children had a calming effect on the rest of the inmates. The presence of children also inspires the mothers to learn skills or, in many cases, to kick drug habits that landed them in trouble in the first place.
And even though the prison is full of women capable of violence, the children usually walk safely among them, as if protected by an invisible shield. It is as though they tap the collective maternal instinct of the 1,680 women locked up here.
“The minors are highly respected by the population,” Ms. Malo said. “The fact we have children here creates a mind-set of solidarity. I have never seen aggression on the part of the inmates toward the children. Everyone acts as if they could be their children, and they don’t want anything to happen to them.”
Still, raising a child in prison presents a tough set of problems, mothers said in recent interviews. Those serving long sentences dread the day when they must be separated from their child because he or she has turned 6.
Others who lack financial help from relatives struggle to earn enough money in prison to care for a child. Several said they waged a constant struggle to keep their children from getting sick in the damp, drafty cells. They often have no money for the prescriptions the prison doctor gives them.
Yet, few want to give up their bright-eyed offspring to relatives on the outside. They say the children are like a breath of normal life inside the stuffy, deadening confines of the prison. “It’s beautiful,” said Victoria Jaramillo, as she held her 3-month-old daughter on her lap. “It keeps one busy.”
Ms. Jaramillo, who is 40, is serving a 20-year sentence on a drug-dealing conviction. She maintains that she was only ironing clothes in a house when the police burst in and discovered a cache of drugs. Whatever the truth, she faces the certainty that she will have to give up her daughter, Frida, in six years.
“The only thing that bothers me is I will have to lose her,” she said. Dressed in a pink fleece jumpsuit, the baby looked up at her mother with dark, innocent eyes.
A mother’s crime plays no role in the decision to let her keep a baby born in jail, the warden said. Cecilia Nava López, 25, has served two years of a 27 ½-year sentence after being convicted of causing her stepchild’s death, a charge she denies. She was pregnant with her fourth child when the death occurred, and she was incarcerated based on the testimony of the father of her children.
Ms. Nava López said it was hard to keep her spirits up, facing such a long sentence for a death she said was not her fault. But taking care of her son, Emmanuel, who is 20 months old, gives her life some meaning. “He motivates me to keep trying to improve myself,” she said.
Ms. Rendón, however, said she sometimes wished she could give her daughter to relatives to raise. No one gives her money, so she makes a living selling snacks to visitors. Her child is delicate and gets sick frequently with chest colds, she said. She said she considered the prison food unhealthy, so she buys food for the girl from a grocery store the prison allows to operate inside its walls.
“I think the best thing for my daughter would be for her to be outside with her grandmother,” Ms. Rendón said. “I have to take her to work with me.” She pauses. “But the truth is I need her. She is something very special.”
Cell doors clang open at 7 a.m. and the guards call the roll at 8 a.m. Most of the mothers live together on the bottom floor of Cellblock H. They take their children to the school at 8:30 a.m. and pick them up at 2:30 p.m. The children spend the rest of the day in their mothers’ cells or with their mothers in the exercise yards.
The school has barbed wire above a yellow sign reading Cendi, short for Centro de Desarrollo Infantil, the Center for Child Development. On a recent afternoon, the children and their mothers gathered for La Posada, a traditional Mexican Christmas celebration. They sang songs about Joseph and Mary’s search for a place to stay in Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus in a manger. Then the children broke a star-shaped piñata and scrambled after the candy. It was hard to believe that they were surrounded by prison walls.
Elsa Romero Martínez, a psychologist who runs the school, said the children showed no signs of overly aggressive behavior. There have been few reports of abuse, though one child, suffering bruises, was taken away from a cocaine-addicted mother two years ago.
The thorniest problem she and the teachers face is preparing the children and mothers for separations once the children reach 6. “We have to teach them to say goodbye to the mothers,” she said.
To show them that a wider world exists, the teachers try to take the children on field trips as often as possible. Their budget is limited and they rely on charity for the outings. They have managed only three this year — to a museum, an amusement park and a children’s theater.
Some of the mothers live in a state of limbo, because a third of the prisoners have yet to be convicted of a crime. Diana Merlos Espericueta, 24, was arrested in December 2004 on charges of being a member of a kidnapping ring. She maintains that she dated the gang leader, the father of her child, but knew nothing of his business dealings.
For three years, she has waited for a judge to decide her case. She gave birth to her daughter, Jaqueline, soon after being incarcerated and has watched her grow to become a sprightly toddler, not knowing what the future holds for them. She faces a long sentence, possibly 70 years, if convicted.
Watching her child play amid plastic balls at the prison’s school, she said she lived in a state of impotent fear. Sometimes, she said, she contemplates committing suicide if she is forced to spend the rest of her life in jail and to give up her child. “The confinement is very hard,” she said.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/world/americas/31mexico.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

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

December 24, 2007

UK: Private-sector role in super-prisons

"However Lord Carter, the Labour peer and prisons expert, is thought to have been persuaded by private- sector studies suggesting that the use of PFI to build three "super prisons" provides an advantage over the alternative of a network of smaller prisons, of economies of scale as well as a reduction in carbon footprints because of fewer transfers between jails."

Private-sector role in super-prisons
By Jimmy Burns
December 24 2007
Financial Times

Contracts for the UK's first "super-prison" are set to be awarded next year, in a move expected to underline Gordon Brown's commitment to the private finance initiative.

Fears for the future of PFI have been expressed by the Confederation of British Industry in recent months because of project cancellations or postponements that have occurred, including a significant shrinking in the market for PFI hospitals.

But with ministers promising an expanding role for the private sector in the new prisons programme, industry sources now say they are confident of significant PFI contracts being put out for tender in the sector during 2008.

While the contracts will include the provision of 600 new prison places at Belmarsh in south-east London and a further 600 at Maghull in Liverpool, the most significant building project will involve one of the so-called "Titan" prisons with a capacity for 2,500 inmates.

The first "super-prison" is expected to open by 2012, with two moredue to open two years later, as part of government plans to meet a forecast rise in the prison population from 81,000 at rpesent to 96,000 in 2014.

Jack Straw, justice secretary, this month said he had secured £1.2bn in extra funding to help boost the continuing prison building programme, which includes extensions of existing sites, conversions of abandoned army camps, and a new prison ship.

Prison reformers, the probation union Napo, and Ann Owers, chief inspector of prisons, have warned the government against diverting funding away from other necessary reforms in the criminal justice system such as improvements to community sentencing and mental health and drug rehabilitation support programmes.

However Lord Carter, the Labour peer and prisons expert, is thought to have been persuaded by private- sector studies suggesting that the use of PFI to build three "super prisons" provides an advantage over the alternative of a network of smaller prisons, of economies of scale as well as a reduction in carbon footprints because of fewer transfers between jails.

The pressure on the current prison system is underlined today by official figures showing that 85 of the 141 prisons in England and Wales are classified as overcrowded.

According to the figures compiled by the Prison Reform Trust charity, more than 150,000 children have a parent in prison.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/01045e3a-b1c3-11dc-9777-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Posted by lois at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2007

UK: Posturing and peddling myths, these prison enthusiasts are blind to history.

Posturing and peddling myths, these prison enthusiasts are blind to history.
The planned increase in jail capacity is a disastrous admission by Labour that it expects its social programmes to fail

Polly Toynbee
Friday December 7, 2007
The Guardian

History suggests law and order is the last refuge of a government in a hole. So we had a triple whammy this week of more prisons, tougher immigration rules, and 42-day detention without trial. A new sentencing commission may help cap prison numbers, and a points system for immigration might make sense, but the net intended effect was tough, tough, tough.

Remember the desperate dying Tory days and home secretary Michael Howard's ever-more senseless punishments? First his "prison works" policy sent prison numbers soaring: Home Office graphs show how judges follow politicians' punitive words. Howard's final act was to put US-style two-strikes-and-you're-out sentencing on to the statute book for Labour to implement. (In the US a man went to jail for stealing a slice of pizza.) Howard meant to test the limits of Jack Straw's "tough on crime" rhetoric. Would the shadow home secretary follow him? Yes, of course. He'd probably have brought back the birch if Howard had gone one step further. But talking to him at the time, just before the 1997 election, he would say to the likes of me, with a wink and nod, it would all be OK once Labour was in power: we're decent people at heart who will do the right thing. Wait and see, don't worry.

Ten years later, anyone with a shred of liberal fibre in their body has learned better the hard way. After 37 crime, justice and police bills, the prison population has risen by 20,500 to 81,500, and now the government is proudly planning - yes, deliberately - to imprison another 10,500. Here is Jack Straw proclaiming three new prefabricated titan superprisons. Titans! My, they sound tough. These new PFI prisons will cost another £2.7bn by 2014.

Consider the disastrous message here. This proclaims the government doesn't expect any of its social programmes to have any good impact on crime. On the contrary, things will get worse. The 10,500 extra young men imprisoned in 2014 will be Labour's children, arrived in school in 1997. Young offenders will have been born under Labour and yet more not fewer of them will "need" to be locked away than under the Tories.

So much for Labour's improving schools, extended school activities, expanded youth services, the Yips (youth inclusion programme) designed to catch children at risk before they offend, or a score of other acronyms from Labour's neighbourhood programmes. All wasted, all dust? Of course not - but we will lock up ever more young men anyway. Martin Narey, former prisons chief, now head of Barnardo's, points out: "Fewer young people are offending and their offences are diminishing, but if you build prisons you fill them up."

Listen to ministers complain that crime has fallen by 40%, including violent crime, yet voters refuse to believe it. But who is to blame for that? Of course people think crime must be rising when prisons are bursting as never before. Labour has pumped up fear of crime. Magistrates responded by doubling their custody rate, judges by increasing average sentences from six to 27 months.

As for the Brownites, I can't count the number of briefings and hand-wringing asides I have been treated to over the years, bewailing terrible Blairite law-and-order policies. They used to whisper that the chancellor refused more Home Office money to waste on the disgraceful rise in prison places, instead of prevention and remedy. Either the Brownites lied on this (and many other things), or they didn't really know their leader and simply invested in him their own hopes. If the latter, then they should rebel right now. Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary took us to Iraq, will always do his master's bidding. (If, incidentally, titan superprisons were meant to please Daily Mail readers, the story appeared on page 8 under the headline, "Never mind justice, now judges are told not to lock up criminals if the nation's prisons are full".)

This week historians, led by David Cannadine, launched a brilliant - but sobering - history and policy website (historyandpolicy.org), giving brief and pithy accounts of past social policies, their successes and failures. If politicians would only browse here, historians hope, they might learn from what has gone before and stop reinventing so many square wheels. They would boast less about "new" ideas and their own "successes" compared with the past.

Frankly, if ministers bothered to study their own departments' recent work it would be a good start. Visiting one minister the other day, just as he launched a vital new policy, neither he nor his special advisers had ever heard of a very expensive and highly successful pilot scheme his predecessor had just completed as he left. When government's own memory is goldfish short, what hope for deeper history?

Look at the website's paper, Historical myth-making in juvenile justice policy, by Abigail Wills. She exposes two contradictory myths: that there was a golden age of law and order; and that treatment of juveniles is now more enlightened. Blair launching Asbos talked of his father's day in the 30s and his own youth when "people behaved more respectfully to one another and we are trying to get back to that". It's bunk: think of teddy boys and razor gangs. We tolerate much less minor violence than we did, and we tolerate teenagers less.

As for "enlightened treatment", the paper finds it more severe now than at any time since the 1850s, locking up more young people for lesser offences. Approved schools and borstals belonged under local authorities, not in the prison system, and were no worse and maybe relatively better than our suicide-prone, overcrowded youth offender institutions: the head of the Youth Justice Board resigned recently in disgust, with 70% of its budget spent on imprisonment, leaving little for prevention or rehabilitation.

Only two years ago the Carlile inquiry gave shocking descriptions of "children kept for up to 14 days in a bleak dilapidated cell with only an old rusty metal frame bed for company". The age of criminal responsibility was only recently reduced to 10 years. "The punitive stance of the last 15 years is historically unusual," says Wills. She quotes every era's historical boasting both that they face worse youth crime and that they deal with it better than before. Labour tops the league for both myths.

David Cannadine is optimistic in calling for historical advisers in each department under a chief historical adviser to the government. Wise old memory might be a forbidding ghost at the political banquet: he might make odious comparisons with the radical bravery of Labour in 1945 or Lloyd George in 1906.

History itself reminds us why Labour politicians don't refer to history when it comes to law and order. They don't much care, in this game of positioning and posturing, of seeming not doing. Crime has fallen in an extraordinary way - not because of policy but probably because of the economy, since it has fallen across the west in countries that imprison many fewer than the UK, and in America that imprisons many more.

There is plentiful evidence of "what works" in preventing reoffending - and it's not more prison. But Labour has taken us backwards, feeding punitive sentiment instead of persuading by proving what works. Douglas Hurd cut the prison population in the higher-crime Thatcher era: Labour has hugely inflated it.

polly.toynbee@guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2223693,00.html

Posted by lois at 04:39 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2007

UK: 15 women’s jails to be shut, with offenders offered detox and help

From The (London) Times
October 1, 2007
15 women’s jails to be shut, with offenders offered detox and help Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

Fifteen women’s jails in England and Wales would close and be replaced with small custodial units in the biggest prison shake-up under consideration by the Justice Ministry.

The plan also involves sweeping changes to the current classification of jails, including the development of a federal system holding only high-risk offenders with other criminals in so-called community prisons, The Times has learnt.

Many short-term prisoners would be held in open community prisons rather than in closed jails, which would offer them detoxification treatment and help with resettlement in the community.

The proposals also recommend that remand prisoners be held within dedicated units in community jails, where they would be managed separately from other inmates.

The outline for the biggest restructuring of the jail system in decades is part of a review of prisons being conducted by Lord Carter of Coles for the ministry.

His findings, expected to be published within the next few weeks, are part of the Government’s attempts to get a grip on the prison numbers crisis. But last night prison governors and a criminal justice think-tank said attempts to restructure the prison system were doomed to fail without an easing of population pressure and an input of extra cash.

Charles Bushell, general secretary of the Prison Governors’ Association, said: “These are interesting and innovative plans. Unfortunately at the moment the Prison Service is struggling simply to contain the ever-growing numbers who are sent to prison.

“At a time when every place is at a premium, it is difficult to see how such an ambitious programme can be brought into place and it will require considerable additional resources.”

Enver Solomon, deputy director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London, said: “Any proposed reconfiguration of the prison estate is effectively meaningless while the prison service is in a state of crisis dealing with constant overcrowding. What is needed is a radical review of the sentencing framework.”

The proposals are contained in an interim report prepared by the National Offender Management Service for a workshop held last week on the Carter Review. Under the plans the 15 women’s jails would be replaced by smaller units run as family units holding up to about 20 women. Only women jailed for long periods would be in the unit.

The document does not say what would happen to the existing women’s prisons but some, such as Holloway in North London, could be sold for housing, while others could hold men.

The paper, seen by The Times, outlines a reshaping of the existing system into federal and community prisons rather than the current four-tier top-security, training, local and open categories of jails. It also calls for criminals held in the new-style community prisons to be segregated on the basis of their risk of harm to the public and how close they are to the end of their sentences.

“The very small percentage of prisoners assessed as posing high risk of serious harm to the public to be placed in a dedicated ‘federal’ estate, the rest placed in closed or open community prisons,” the document said.

This proposal suggests that the existing high-security prison system would be slimmed down. It would also end the current practice where some top-security jails hold both high-risk offenders and less dangerous criminals. The report added: “Local community prisons to become urban resettlement prisons whilst other closed establishments focus on risk reduction, including for indeterminate sentenced offenders.”

Short sentence prisoners, who are not a risk to the public, and those coming towards the end of long jail terms would be put in “open community prisons”, which would provide detoxification facilities. It proposes that women are held in smaller local units as recommended in a review published this year.

There are presently 4,408 women in jail, including 923 on remand, 504 serving less than six months, 206 six to twelve months, 1,147 more than four years and 311 indeterminate sentences. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2563489.ece

Posted by lois at 06:02 PM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2007

Cuba: Silvio Rodriquez to perform in Cuban Prisons

Silvio, famous singer/song writer to perform in Cuban prisons
Cuba Daily News, July 13, 2007 Silvio Rodriguez, a famous Cuban singer and song writer, is going on an unusual tour: he's visiting Cuban prisons as part of an initiative to promote human values and virtues. His aim is to help transform Cuban penitentiaries into real schools of salvation, instead of warehouses that stockpile, punish and ultimately produce more proficient criminals and offenders.

Silvio Rodriguez, a famous Cuban singer and song writer, is going on an unusual tour: he's visiting Cuban prisons as part of an initiative to promote human values and virtues. His aim is to help transform Cuban penitentiaries into real schools of salvation, instead of warehouses that stockpile, punish and ultimately produce more proficient criminals and offenders.

In this way 'Silvio' -after so many years we have stopped calling him by his last name- is just going back to an old unrealized dream from his early rebellious years. He is once again floodlighting the shadows of apathy and deafening the silence of comfort.

The gesture of going behind bars with his song cannot pass unnoticed. The fact is that Silvio's visit will not need advertising, much less media campaigns or marathons. His artistic genius is great enough; his talent famous worldwide. What then is he pursuing this time?

In the same way people decipher their personal meanings of the parables and symbols hidden in his songs, today I am going to make my own interpretation of Silvio's initiative, seeking the light that could illuminate the way through the challenges that still lie ahead for Cuba and its revolution in these complex times.

Perhaps the singer is warning us about the necessity of adding and multiplying, disregarding barriers and prejudices. The objective is to overcome internal and external obstacles, to emerge -as national poet Jose Marti once said- "with all and for the well being of all." Is this an excess of ecumenicalism?

At least I see it that way, when I see how much damage can be done to the unity of the Cuban people -so strategically important these days- by those who have specialized in subtracting and dividing, by those who enjoy labelling and stigmatizing. Those are the same ones who don't have the flexibility to embrace everyone in a manner like Fidel, ignoring differences or even flaws. Those extremists don't trust human diversity, and they see themselves as the alpha and omega, something that usually vanishes when they remove their disguise, revealing their lies, their exaggerated primping, and their keen instincts for self-preservation.

I side completely with Silvio's democratic spirit. He is calling on Cuban artists and writers to burrow holes of trust through the prison walls to give light to the prisoners, to build bridges to those who -while maybe
wrong- are not lost. He is calling on every Cuban to do so. It is extremely important to think that way, with a social perspective, in order to heal mistakes with our limited resources, and not just be satisfied with major accomplishments.

The transgressors and those who lost their way, the isolated and sceptical, the ones who mumble about their sorrows and discouragement... all of them cannot be conveniently excluded from our society. If we see them as our failure, as the bruised fruit of our effort, as parts poorly attached to our mechanism, we will be able to give them a hand and pull them back into the world where they can find happiness. We must examine our own mistakes, marked by subtracting and dividing sings. This island might be small, but there is space enough for all Cubans with such hearts.

Let Silvio sing, let his message go beyond the bars of the penitentiaries; let his message go beyond the mental bars holding back the Revolution, as a dream for all Cubans.

Source: By Jose Alejandro Rodriguez, Juventud Rebelde
Submitted by editor on Fri, 2007-07-13 14:33. http://www.cubaheadlines.com/2007/07/13/4417/silvio_famous_singer_song_write
r_to_perform_in_cuban_prisons.html

Posted by lois at 03:44 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2007

UK:; The true price of private prisons

UK Politics
The true price of private prisons
Jonn Elledge
New Statesman
Published 09 July 2007

Jonn Elledge investigates the problems that PFI prisons are causing

Imagine you're the Minister of Justice. Your government has a tough approach to crime which has won plaudits from the tabloids. The only problem is that Britain's prison population is at an all time high, with more prisoners than places to put them. What do you do?

One option, of course, would be to lower sentences, but it's risky: the Daily Mail would have you for breakfast. Attempts to lower crime rates have so far proved stubbornly unsuccessful. That leaves only one option: more prisons - and quickly.

So last February John Reid, then still the man in charge of such matters, announced plans to extend Britain's creaking prison system by a massive 8,000 places. Most of these will be created by extending existing jails or, in one case, converting a disused mental hospital. But the announcement also included plans for two brand new prisons in London and Merseyside.

The thing is, announcing new prisons is easy. (So easy, in fact, that the government did it twice: Reid's statement was a rehash of one made by Charles Clarke a year earlier.) But actually building the things is rather harder - particularly when your department is facing a budget freeze until 2011. Luckily there's a trusted way of spreading spending across 30 years and slashing a prison's running costs, all in one go: the private finance initiative.

While they've been less high profile than the schools and hospitals, Britain already has nine PFI prisons. And in some ways they've been pretty successful. The new jails have been built quickly, and cost a good 15% less to run than their government-owned equivalents.

What's more, they've been commended for taking innovative approaches to training and other activities, and for the respect with which they treat their inmates ("This is the first time in 10 years anyone has called me 'Mister'", one rather confused prisoner told a government inspector in 2003). Indeed, the Prison Inspectorate's report on Altcourse Prison, Merseyside, in 1999, said it was "by some way the best local prison we have inspected."

But, of course, not all reports have been quite so glowing. Concerns have been raised about both the safety record of PFI prisons, and the effectiveness of their rehabiliation efforts. Prisoners in private jails are more likely to be involved in serious assaults - and more likely to re-offend once they've been released.

One problem is that PFI prisons negotiate their own staff contracts - and thus pay their officers a good 50% less than the state sector. This does a good job of cutting costs. But it means private prisons tend to have fewer, younger, and less experienced warders. They also don't tend to stick around for very long. A 2002 report from a government auditor gloomily concluded that, "The upshot of trimming costs is that safety may be compromised for both staff and prisoners."

An even bigger concern is the effect private prisons may have on criminal justice policy. For one thing, private jailers are paid by the prisoner. This gives them an incentive to pack in as many inmates as possible, encouraging overcrowding.

Even more worryingly, the existance of private prisons may actually stop the government from taking steps to reduce Britain's burgeoning prison population. "What we'd like to see is a shrinking market," says Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust. "But good business practice demands that you grow your market. A vested interest will develop in having a sizable prison population."

And while the government is dependent on that vested interest to escape the current crisis, it's likely to have some influence on policy. Already there are signs this is happening: there are moves afoot to further deregulate private prisons, by removing the government-appointed controllers that monitor them. This is happening despite a BBC report on Rye Hill jail earlier this year, which found widespread intimidation of staff, and prisoners who had easy access to drugs and mobile phones. "Private prisons are a very expensive way not to cut crime," adds Lyon.

This may be why, for all the enthusiasm with which the new prisons were announced, the government has kept strangely quiet about the way they'll be paid for. But in hushed tones, the Ministry of Justice will admit the role PFI plays in their plans - and the private sector are licking their lips in anticipation. The justice ministry get their prisons, the police get their cells back, and the government gets to look tough in front of the tabloids. Everybody's happy.

Except, perhaps, the prisoners and the guards.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200707090002

Posted by lois at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

April 27, 2007

Amherst MA: Reading and Talk: Prisons & Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality

Prisons & Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality
Contributors to new volume on international incarceration trends visit

Food for Thought Books, Amherst, MA

Thursday, May 10, 2007 at 7pm

Editors Seth N. Asumah and Mechthild Nagel, along with contributors Jill Soffiyah Elijah and Diane Antonio will discuss their new book Prisons & Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality at Food for Thought Books, 106 North Pleasant Street, Amherst. The authors will be joined by Lois Ahrens, of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, who will present an essay by Tiyo Attallah Salah-El, a scholar and activist incarcerated in a Pennsylvania prison. A booksigning and reception will follow the talk.

Prisons & Punishment is an important new contribution to the fields of criminal justice, prison studies, philosophy, law, and political science, published by Africa World Press. The book will also prove useful to activists seeking to change or abolish the punishment industry. Prisons & Punishment collects in one volume African, European, and North American scholars, prisoners, activists, and legal practitioners who offer their various perspectives and visions.

About the Authors

Seth N. Asumah is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of African American Studies at State University of New York, College at Cortland. His most recent books are Diversity, Multiculturalism and Social Justice (co-authored with Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo, 2002), The Africana Human Conditions and Global Dimension (co-edited with Johnston-Anumonwo and John Marah, 2002), Educating the Black Child in the Black Independent School (co-authored with Valencia Perkins, 2001) and Issues in Africa and the African Diaspora in the 21st Century (co-edited with Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo, 2001). He is a 1999 winner of the Rozanne Brooks Award for Dedication and Teaching Excellence and a 2002 recipient of "Excellence in Teaching" Award, State University of New York, College at Cortland.

Mechthild Nagel is Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Cortland and is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for African Development, Cornell University. She is author of Masking the Abject: A Genealogy of Play (Lexington, 2002) and co-editor of Race, Class, and Community Identity (Humanities, 2000). Nagel is editor-in-chief of Wagadu: A Transnational Journal of Gender and Women's Studies. She has taught college courses in maximum security prisons for men. Her current research is on African prison intellectuals and African approaches to restorative justice.

Diane Antonio is the Communications Director of the Queensboro Hill Neighborhood Assoc., work with the homeless in my community, and she ran for District Leader in the 22nd A.D. Queens. Her published work includes: "Of Wolves and Women" (Animals and Women, 1995), "The Flesh of All That Is: Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray, and Julian's 'Showings'," (SOPHIA, 2001), and "Virgin Queen, Iron Lady, Queen of Hearts: The Embodiment of Feminine Power in a Male Social Imaginary" (Politicos, 2003).

Jill Soffiyah Elijah serves as Deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute (CJI) at Harvard Law School (HLS). Ms. Elijah practiced law through various avenues before transitioning into the clinical practice of academia. She was a Supervising Attorney at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem (NDS), where she defended indigent members of the Harlem, New York community. Prof. Elijah has authored several articles and publications based on her research of the U.S. criminal justice and prison systems.

Tiyo Attallah Salah-El was born and raised in southeastern Pennsylvania. He is an accomplished tenor saxophone player and a composer of jazz music. He has spent over thirty years in a medium security facility in Pennsylvania and during that time has tirelessly educated himself, with the help of dedicated teachers such as Howard Zinn. Tiyo has earned Bachelor's and Masters degrees, studying political science and African American history. His essay, "A Call for the Abolition of Prisons," has appeared in several edited volumes.

Lois Ahrens is the Founder and Project Director of Real Cost of Prisons Project. Lois has been an organizer, fundraiser and creator of progressive organizations and programs for more than thirty-five years. She has developed and directed numerous organizations many of which continue to thrive. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

food for thought books
106 n. pleasant st.
amherst, ma 01002
413.253.5432
www.foodforthoughtbooks.com

Posted by lois at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2007

UK prisons are'radicalising' young Muslims

Fri 13 Apr 2007
UK prisons are'radicalising' young Muslims
FRANK URQUHART, The Scotsman

YOUNG Muslims incarcerated in Britain's jails are being radicalised by the prison system itself, rather than hardline Imams, a Scottish expert in Islamic studies claimed yesterday.

Dr Gabriele Marranci, a lecturer in anthropology of religion at Aberdeen University, has spent four years interviewing Muslims in jails throughout Britain in a study to discover how life behind bars is affecting their Muslim identity and their experience of Islam.

His detailed report reveals that current efforts by the prison authorities to curb radicalism within the UK's jails are in fact fostering extremism.

He said that Muslims who chose to display their faith by growing beards or wearing Islamic caps were being discriminated against in prison. The reluctance of prison Imams to talk about Iraq and other flashpoints in the Islamic world was serving only to leave young and vulnerable Muslims to be "self-educated" behind bars.

Dr Marranci, whose findings are based on more than 170 interviews with current and former Muslim prisoners, said he had uncovered no evidence to suggest that Muslim chaplains were facilitating radicalisation.

He said: "On the contrary, my findings suggest that they are extremely important in preventing dangerous forms of extremism. However, the distrust that they face, both internally and externally, is jeopardising their important function."

Dr Marranci said his study also revealed that Muslim prisoners were being subjected to stricter security surveillance than other inmates, especially when they adopted symbols of their faith, such as beards, veils and caps.

"Growing a beard is, in almost all of the establishments I visited, interpreted as 'radicalisation' of the individual," said Dr Marranci.

"Muslims who openly show their Muslim identity through symbols suffer more discrimination in general than those who keep a low profile.

"The lack of freedom of expression that Muslim prisoners suffer and the continuous atmosphere of suspicion surrounding them have the effect of increasing a sense of frustration and depression that a strong view of Islam can help to overcome."

A spokesman for the Scottish Prison Service said:

"We are not aware of any claims of any attempted radicalisation by Imams of any prisoner group."

This article: http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=565312007

Posted by lois at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2007

UK: Prisoner goes to court over cost of phone calls

Prisoner goes to court over cost of phone calls

Eric Allison, prisons correspondent
Monday April 2, 2007

Guardian
A long-term prisoner has launched an attempt in the high court to stop BT charging inmates more than five times the national call box rate for phone calls, claiming it breaches human rights. The action, which began last Thursday, has the backing of the prisons ombudsman, the chief inspector of prisons and reformers.

Critics say the charges fly in the face of the Home Office's commitment to maintaining ties between prisoners and their families. It has also emerged that the Prison Service receives a 10% commission payment from BT, which operates the system, from the sale of phone credits to inmates.

The application for a judicial review of the practice is being brought by lawyers acting for Richard Davison, a prisoner at Emley jail, Isle of Sheppey. Davison, who is serving 12 years for drug offences, complained about the high cost of phone calls in 2005. After writing to BT and the Home Office, who both refused his request to reconsider the tariff, he contacted the prisons ombudsman, Stephen Shaw, who published a report into his complaint in 2006.

The report found that, in a two-month period in 2004, Davison had paid £70.08 for 34 calls. Had he been charged the public payphone rate, he would have paid only £15.20. The ombudsman upheld the complaint and recommended that the Prison Service reopened negotiations with BT to reduce the tariff. His recommendation was rejected. Mr Shaw said: "If the Prison Service is serious about implementing family ties in order to reduce reoffending, then it is essential that the average costs of calls from prisons are reduced to the levels that apply in the community at large." He also pointed out that the average prison wage is around £8 a week.

The chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, said: "Anything that gets in the way of contact clearly gets in the way of rehabilitation."

Research by the Prison Reform Trust shows that almost half the prison population suffers from low literacy, with more than 12,000 inmates having an IQ of under 75 and relying on phone calls. Lucy Keenan, who manages the helpline for the charity Action for Prisoners Families, said: "About a quarter of prisoners' families only use mobile phones and calls to those from jail are even more exorbitant."

Sean Humber, a solicitor from Leigh Day and Co, which is acting for Davison, said the charges seemed to be at odds with the Prison Service's commitment to promoting rehabilitation by keeping inmates in touch with their families. "The very high cost of telephone calls from jails effectively prevents this and represents a breach of inmates' human rights," he said.

A spokesman for BT said the company would negotiate with the Prison Service about the charges, but added: "Ultimately it is [the Prison Service] who control those costs." The Prison Service said its current policy on phone calls was "fair both to prisoners and the taxpayer since any reduction in the cost of prisoner calls would require a subsidy".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2048076,00.html

Posted by lois at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2007

Great Britain: The Big Question: Should women's prisons be closed?

The Big Question: Should women's prisons be closed? And, if so, what should replace them? By Nigel Morris, Home Affairs Correspondent
Published: 14 March 2007, The Independent (Great Britain)

Why are we asking this question now?

A radical report, commissioned by the Home Office, has called for all women's prisons to be shut down over the next 10 years and replaced by a network of small, secure units nearer to women's families.

Charles Clarke, the former home secretary, asked a Labour peer, Baroness Corston, to assess the pressures faced by female offenders after the suicide of six inmates at Styal jail, Cheshire, in just 13 months. Clearly shocked by the suffering and inefficiency she discovered during her nine-month inquiry, she painted a picture of life in women's prisons far removed from the cheerful camaraderie of Australian soap opera Prisoner Cell Block H.

She said: "I was dismayed to see so many women frequently sentenced for short periods of time for very minor offences, causing chaos and disruption to their lives and families, without any realistic chance of addressing the causes of their criminality." And she reached the conclusion that wide-ranging reform was essential to help break a grim cycle of abuse, addiction, family breakdown and offending affecting vulnerable women.

How many women are locked up?

Last weekend, 4,329 women were behind bars in 16 prisons in England and Wales. Although the total stabilised over the last year, suggesting magistrates are now heeding pleas to opt for community sentences for petty offenders, the trend has been upwards since the 1990s, with the female prison population virtually doubling in the past decade.

The largest and most well-known women's prison is Holloway, in north London, which holds almost 500 prisoners. A damning inspection report two years ago said it was infested with mice, pigeons and insects, although the prison service insists conditions have improved since then. The other 15 are spread between Kent and Durham, but wide areas of the country have no women's prison.

There has been none in the West Midlands since Brockhill prison in Redditch, Worcestershire, was converted into a male jail. Strangely, the nearest prison for a Cornish woman is nearly 200 miles away in Gloucestershire.

Are female offenders treated like men?

Women, representing only 5.4 per cent of the prison population, break the law much less often than men. Those who do are more likely to be guilty of theft and fraud and less likely to be involved in violence, criminal damage and organised crime.

The evidence suggests that when women fall foul of the criminal justice system they will be harshly treated by a system designed for men. More than one-third of those behind bars have no previous convictions, double the proportion of men.

More women than men kill themselves in prison - the reverse of the situation in the outside world - and five times more harm themselves. Women are more likely to be looking after children, and 18,000 youngsters suffer the often "catastrophic" loss of a jailed mother each year, Lady Corston warns. But because of the small number of women's prisons, they are often locked up far from their families.

What particular problems do women prisoners suffer?

The female prison population represents a grim snapshot of almost every social form of deprivation and disadvantage. More than half say they have suffered domestic violence, one in three has experienced sexual abuse, 80 per cent have no school qualifications and 40 per cent have spent time in local authority care.

Three-quarters display symptoms of severe neurotic disorders, such as depression or extreme anxiety. Three-quarters have to undergo detoxification programmes upon arriving in jail - sometimes for a cocktail of as many as nine drugs - with high levels of abuse of crack cocaine, heroin, cannabis and benziodiazepines.

In just six months in one prison, one woman killed herself and staff resuscitated another five. There were 13 attempted hangings and 28 self-strangulations, as well as 112 incidents of cutting. In five episodes, large amounts of medication were swallowed and, in a further two, glass and razor blades. One woman threatened to jump to her death and one attempted to suffocate herself. Staff found, and destroyed, 23 ligatures.

Juliet Lyon, the director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "Every time I visit a women's prison I am struck by how distressed and ill so many of the women prisoners look. On arrival, addicts huddle together pale and stick thin, some women are queuing for the telephone, desperately trying to sort out care for their children, other women are in shock, just staring into space."

What is the Home Office doing?

Mr Clarke and the Home Secretary, John Reid, have acknowledged that too many women are in custody. A "women's offending reduction programme" launched in 2004 set out plans to persuade courts to keep women out of jail, to improve programmes for women with mental health and drug problems and to help them find homes after being freed.

Ministers are studying projects in Halifax and Worcestershire, where women who have criminal records or are in danger of offending are given advice on turning around their lives. But the Government's good intentions are matched by only modest results. Some reformers argue the situation could be made worse by the constant air of crisis in the prison system in general.

What is the alternative?

Lady Corston wants fewer women sent to prison, with courts opting instead for community sentences. Those who have to be deprived of their liberty should no longer be locked up, but held in secure specialist units holding up to 30 women, where their behaviour and problems with drugs can be tackled.

She calls on the Government to phase out women's prisons over the next 10 years, and suggests that responsibility for women offenders should be transferred from the Home Office to the Department for Communities and Local Government. She argues that ministers should appoint a "champion" in government to oversee policy on women offenders, end the routine strip-searching of women in prison and improve jail sanitation.

How has the Home Office responded?

Although the department commissioned and published Lady Corston's report, and describes it as high-calibre, it stopped short of backing proposals that would amount to a revolution in the treatment of female prisoners. The Home Office Minister, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, gave "an undertaking that the Government will look at the issues it raises and the recommendations it makes". Ever sensitive to newspaper headlines, would they want to be vilified for allowing Rosemary West to serve the rest of her sentence in "a secure unit" in the centre of Gloucester?

Should women be sent to prison?

Yes...

* The public would not support notorious inmates such as Rosemary West being transferred to 'secure units'

* Putting them behind bars could provide a salutary shock that would deter them from reoffending

* Locking up offenders, whether male or female, sends a powerful deterrent message to society

No...

* Many are not habitual criminals, but vulnerable women who turn to petty crime to feed a drug habit

* Imprisoning mothers often leads to them losing contact with their children and being evicted from their homes

* Prison is not the best place to treat the chronic mental health and drug problems that many female inmates suffer Also in this section

© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2355925.ece

Posted by lois at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2007

Iraqis Get Ideas From S.C. Prisons

Iraqis Get Ideas From S.C. Prisons
By MEG KINNARD
The Associated Press
Monday, January 29, 2007
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Iraqi prison officials looking to rebuild their nation's jail system toured a state prison Monday, gathering ideas _ including electronic door locks and an onsite license plate plant _ to take back to their country.
A delegation that included U.S. Justice Department officials and their Iraqi counterparts visited the maximum security Broad River Correctional Institution, where the Iraqis watched inmates make South Carolina license plates and traffic signs.
Iraqi prisoners don't have a place to work, one visitor said through an interpreter.
The plant enables an inmate "to help himself and his family. We can have productive inmates, not just consumer inmates," said the warden of a Nasiriyah prison, whose name was withheld by the Justice Department for his own safety.

The group also was interested in the prison's security system, which includes electronically locking doors and video monitoring.

"My first impression is that the prisons here are totally different from ours," the warden said. "For example, the security system, the electric doors _ we don't have this technology."

The delegation visited South Carolina because the state prison system was similar in size and organization to the existing Iraqi system, said Georgette Thornton, who works in Baghdad with the department's International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program.

The two-week visit to South Carolina will include trips to other state prisons as well as a federal prison. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/29/AR2007012901 870.html

Posted by lois at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2006

Great Britian: "Will You Be Able to Invest In Prisons?"

BBC NEWS followed by an article from The Guardian
Will you be able to invest in prisons?
By Ian Pollock
Personal finance reporter, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/business/6198408.stm Links to otherarticles, graphs about British prisons and the prison system.

Asking the public to become the landlords of new prisons, with the prisoners as the tenants, may seem a strange idea. But it appears to be one that has, at the very least, crossed the minds of Home Office officials.

The Home Office has already said it wants to expand its prisons, or build enough new ones, to hold an ex