The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

October 21, 2009

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Reports on Prisons Around the World

U.N. investigator tells of horrors of world prisons
By Louis Charbonneau
Reuters
Washington Post
Tuesday, October 20, 2009

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Inmates at a prison in Uruguay can spend years in "tin cans" -- small metal boxes where temperatures rise to 140 degrees F (60 degrees C), while women and children were among prisoners in Nigeria confined to a "torture room."

Those were among the abuses chronicled in a report released on Tuesday by Manfred Nowak, an Austrian human rights lawyer and U.N. special rapporteur on torture and other forms of cruel and inhuman treatment and punishment.

Speaking to reporters after submitting his report to the U.N. General Assembly, Nowak said he focused on "forgotten prisons" and the treatment of children in the dozens of countries he visited.

Nowak said women and children in Lagos, Nigeria, were among the more than 100 detainees confined to the "torture room" of the Criminal Investigation Department, where torture methods included the firing of gunshots into legs and leaving the severely injured prisoners without medical treatment.

There are some 10 million people behind bars worldwide, most of them in unacceptable circumstances, Nowak said.

"My guess is that the clear majority of them have to be in conditions that are violating human dignity," he said.

One widespread problem is overcrowding, which Nowak said he witnessed during visits to countries like Georgia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Togo.

In Indonesia and Paraguay, he said, detainees were not only deprived of food and medicine but were sometimes forced to pay a daily fee for their "accommodation" in prison cells.

Nowak's report said he found a woman on death row in a prison in the former Soviet republic of Georgia who had been confined to a bed for years because she was paralyzed.

CHILD PRISONERS

Some governments responded positively to Nowak's reports of torture and abusive conditions in their prisons.

He said Uruguay was taking steps to shut down the "tin cans," which he said were an unacceptable form of incarceration. Jordan closed a prison where Nowak found cases of torture, while Nigeria has promised to do the same with the "torture room" in Lagos.

Nowak said torture was commonplace across the Arab world, although he said most Arab countries refused to let him visit their prisons and detention centers. Jordan did allow Nowak access to its jails.

Although Nowak did find cases of torture in Jordan, he said it was not systematic.

He said roughly 1 million of the world's 10 million detainees were children, some as young as 9 or 10 years old. During prolonged periods of pretrial detention, many are not segregated from adult prisoners, leaving them open to abuse.

In countries like Indonesia, Togo and Uruguay, Nowak's report said he found that corporal punishment was being used to discipline child detainees. In Uruguay, he found boys locked up for 22 hours a day with no toilets.

Reporters asked Nowak about the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba, which he has criticized in the past for harsh treatment of terrorism suspects. He doubted U.S. President Barack Obama would be able to shut it by January as planned.

Nowak said it was up to European governments to help Obama by admitting Guantanamo Bay inmates into their countries.

Nowak was also asked about Iran, where the opposition and human rights groups say the government has tortured prisoners detained after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election sparked violent protests across the country.

Nowak said he had received many "very credible allegations" of serious torture after the Iranian election and asked the Islamic Republic if the charges were true. He said Tehran had yet to respond.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/20/AR2009102003041.html

Posted by lois at 09:08 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2009

Prison report: Who are the bad people? and Canadian Conservatives try to model a system based on the U.S.

Prison report: Who are the bad people?
By Just A Guy
Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His dispatches appear twice a week.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner was recently quoted in the Sacramento Bee saying: “You have to be a really bad person to get into state prison. So I’m opposed to releasing people who are dangerous, absolutely opposed. That’ s no way to balance the budget.”

I’m curious to know what Poizner thinks everyone is in prison for. Does he even realize that at least 18 percent of the population is in prison for drug crimes? If so, then is he saying that all people in prison for drugs are “really bad people?”

As if the stigma of being an addict and in prison isn’t enough.

I wonder if Poizner thinks alcoholics are “really bad people” -- or just people who need a 12-step program.

What is a “really bad person” anyway? Are the many of you who have done some stupid things in your past but just didn’t get caught “really bad people” too? Or does the stereotype apply only to people in prison?

I’m opposed to the early releases of people who are dangerous, also. But how does one determine who’s dangerous? Is the 80-year-old infirm man in a wheelchair a danger? Let’s be honest -- who doesn’t have the capacity to be dangerous? Prisoner or not?

Poizner says this is no way to balance the budget. But what about the consequences of cutting even more money from other services? (See my most recent blog here.
Has he considered that the industrialization of prisons in California with the three strikes, archaic laws and sentencing, is no way to create jobs?

The other Republican gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman, said “the most important role government has is public safety. It’s very important to be consistent.” She’s also opposed to early releases and prison reform. Odd that the former CEO of Ebay is so short sighted about the long-term effects of the current budget and prison situation. Isn’t this a women who had to please stockholders and a board of directors and had to have insightful long-term visions planning Ebay strategy -- which she did quite successfully? I guess your strategy changes drastically when you’re selling a service as opposed to selling fear.

The only things consistent about California prison policy are lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key strategies. Most politicians are also consistently spouting tough-on-crime policy against their better judgment because they are consistently afraid of the Willie Horton syndrome.

A couple of gubernatorial candidates from the Democratic side are, amazingly, looking at prison reform as a way to alleviate some of California’s budget problems.

The biggest threat to public safety is not the people in prison or their releases (most of them are going to get out anyway). It’s consistently cutting money for health care, education, welfare and myriad other programs that help to create a brighter future for Californians. Public safety also means maintaining roads and bridges, supplying water, educating citizens etc. The best way to have public safety is to have an environment that creates hope, not antipathy.

Finally, the Canadian government is considering creating a prison system similar to California’s -- and a rather scathing indictment came out from opponents who say doing so is a bad idea.

The majority of first world countries see California and its prison policies as insane -- why can’t we see that for ourselves? It’s like we have “prison addiction.”

I wonder if people with prison addiction should be consistently labeled “really bad people.” The rest of the world seems to think so.
http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2009/09/prison_report_who_are_the_bad.html

Here's an article about the Canadian proposal referred to in the article above...

Tory plans for U.S.-style prisons slammed in report
Last Updated: Thursday, September 24, 2009
CBC News

The Conservative government plans to bring in an American-style prison system that will cost billions of taxpayer dollars and do little to improve public safety, according to a report released Thursday in Ottawa.

"It tramples human rights and human dignity," University of British Columbia law professor Michael Jackson, co-author of the 235-page report, titled A Flawed Compass, told reporters.

Moreover, there is "a near total absence of evidence" in the government plan that its measures will "return people to the community better able to live law-abiding lives," said co-author Graham Stewart, who recently retired after decades as head of the John Howard Society of Canada.

Their report provides a scathing review of a government blueprint for corrections called A Roadmap to Strengthening Public Safety. A panel led by Rob Sampson, a former corrections minister in Ontario ex-premier Mike Harris's Tory government, drafted the plan, which is being implemented by the Correctional Service.

In addition to constructing super prisons and implementing work programs, the program will eliminate gradual release and deny inmates rights that are now entrenched in the Constitution.

However, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said the plan is not based on a U.S.-style prison system at all. "I don't know where that suggestion comes from," he told CBC News in an interview.

"We don't have a capital program for creating and building new prisons right now, so attacking the government is a little odd."

Rather, "the changes we're proposing [are] to improve our system, protect society more and make sure offenders get the help they need," particularly mental illness treatment, Van Loan said.

The government wants to create an incentive system for prisoners to participate in rehabilitation programs, "because that's important for not just the safety of society, which is … the most important principle, but also for the prisoner to integrate into the community ultimately," he said.

The current practice of statutory release is the "wrong approach," he added.

"That means somebody has a nine-year sentence; at six years, even if they're not participating in their programs, they're automatically … released into society."

But Jackson said the plan undermines public safety by making prisons more dangerous places and constricting inmates' reintegration into society.

By keeping prisoners locked up longer, the plan places an enormous financial burden on taxpayers, he added.

Perhaps worst of all, Jackson said, it "will intensify what the Supreme Court has characterized as the already staggering injustice of the overrepresentation of aboriginal people in the prisons of Canada."
A recipe for prison violence: Jackson

By stressing punishment rather than rehabilitation, the plan ignores lessons of the past, which led to the prison riots and killings that dominated Canadian news in the early 1970s, Jackson said.

"My greatest fear is with this road map's agenda and its underlying philosophy, we will enter a new period of turmoil and violence in Canadian prisons," he said.

"I do fear that prisons will become more abusive, prisoners will become more frustrated and that we could go back to a time not only when the rule of law was absent but a culture of violence is the dominant way in which prisoners express their frustrations."

Stewart called the blueprint "an ideological rant, which flies in the face of the Correctional Service's own research of what works to rehabilitate prisoners and ensure community safety."

"The fact is that you cannot hurt a person and make them into a good citizen at the same time," Stewart said.

The government has already allocated hundreds of millions to the plan, even though it has had no input from either Parliament or the public, according to the report.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/09/24/conservative-prison-plan024.html

Posted by lois at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2009

UK:

A fair day's prison work?
By Eric Allison -Wednesday 9 September 2009
The Guardian UK
When work - however lousy - is preferable to staying in a cell, prisoners can easily be exploited, writes Eric Allison

When a radical prisoner support group and a mainstream charity both use the word slavery to describe contemporary prison labour, the premise is worth close examination. If forced labour is akin to slavery, then both the Campaign Against Prison Slavery (Caps) and the Howard League for Penal Reform are far from wide of the mark.

Courts can no longer sentence criminals to forced or hard labour, but the 1952 Prison Act allowed ministers to make prison rules without parliamentary approval. Under those rules, it is an offence to refuse to work, or indeed work hard. Prisoners who fail to work properly or refuse work will be punished.

The sanctions include cellular confinement and the 'awarding' of extra day's imprisonment. So prisoners can be further imprisoned for refusing to pack plastic spoons for Sainsburys, or untangle and repack in-flight headphones for Virgin Airways, for a weekly rate slightly above the legal hourly minimum wage. Sounds like forced labour to me.

Caps, which pickets high street stores selling prison-made goods, and the Howard League are not alone in condemning prison labour practices. The Prison Reform Trust, prisons ombudsman and the chief inspector regularly criticise the low-paid, repetitive labour that does little to train prisoners for the competitive external labour market.

The prison service enjoys a cosy – and largely secretive – relationship with the employers who provide the 'contract services' to prisons. Clearly, private contractors sending their work into prisons expect to make a profit, but how much does the prison service gain financially? The nearest you will get to an answer is an admission that the service works with the private sector to "make a contribution to offset the high cost of imprisonment". It speaks of having "robust" contracts with private and public sector partners. Presumably, these contracts robustly stipulate that prisoners will work for pocket money.

The exploitation does not end with measly pay. In the classic country song Sixteen Tons, a miner begs St Peter not to call him. He says he cannot go because "I owe my soul to the company store".

Prisoners cannot get credit from their penal company store; but the private companies that run them exploit their customers every bit as much as those paying their wages. Until recently, the contract for these prison shops was held by American food giant Aramark, but it lost out when the new contract was handed to Booker/DHL. The contract brings an annual turnover of £40m to the supplier, which decides what range of goods will be on offer and fixes the prices.

Prisoners are also exploited on their phone calls. These cost around five times the price of those made from a public phone box. The prison service receive a 7% commission from BT's profits from the calls.

Surveys consistently show that prisoners pay more for their shopping than the general public. Some items, toothpaste for example, were 20% dearer in prison than in supermarkets. Prisoners' wages have not increased since 1995, when the incentives and earned privilleges scheme was launched. Since then, the RPI has increased by some 43%.

Not all contract service work is mind-numbingly boring (and some companies pay better than others) but the irony is even prisoners with the worst of jobs, with the lousiest pay, actually prefer to be employed, rather than remain in their cells. The prison service knows this and exploits it. We know that prisoners have offended. But how can we hope to rehabilitate them within a regime that is systematically screwing them?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2009/sep/09/prison-work-exploitation

Posted by lois at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2009

Pentagon Seeks to Overhaul Prisons in Afghanistan

Pentagon Seeks to Overhaul Prisons in Afghanistan
By ERIC SCHMITT
Published: July 19, 2009
NY Times

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan — A sweeping United States military review calls for overhauling the troubled American-run prison here as well as the entire Afghan jail and judicial systems, a reaction to worries that abuses and militant recruiting within the prisons are helping to strengthen the Taliban.

In a further sign of high-level concern over detention practices, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a confidential message last week to all of the military service chiefs and senior field commanders asking them to redouble their efforts to alert troops to the importance of treating detainees properly.

The prison at this air base north of Kabul has become an ominous symbol for Afghans — a place where harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used routinely in its early years, and where two Afghan detainees died in 2002 after being beaten by American soldiers and hung by their arms from the ceiling of isolation cells.

Bagram also became a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq.

But even as treatment at Bagram improved in recent years, conditions worsened in the larger Afghan-run prison network, which houses more than 15,000 detainees at three dozen overcrowded and often violent sites. The country’s deeply flawed judicial system affords prisoners virtually no legal protections, human rights advocates say.

“Throughout Afghanistan, Afghans are arbitrarily detained by police, prosecutors, judges and detention center officials with alarming regularity,” the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said in a report in January.

To help address these problems, Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone of the Marines, credited with successfully revamping American detention practices in Iraq, was assigned to review all detention issues in Afghanistan.

General Stone’s report, which has not been made public but is circulating among senior American officials, recommends separating extremist militants from more moderate detainees instead of having them mixed together as they are now, according to two American officials who have read or been briefed on his report.

Under the new approach, the United States would help build and finance a new Afghan-run prison for the hard-core extremists who are now using the poorly run Afghan corrections system as a camp to train petty thieves and other common criminals to be deadly militants, the American officials said.

The remaining inmates would be taught vocational skills and offered other classes, and they would be taught about moderate Islam with the aim of reintegrating them into society, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the review’s findings had not been publicly disclosed. The review also presses for training new Afghan prison guards, prosecutors and judges.

The recommendations come as American officials express fears that the notoriously overcrowded Afghan-run prisons will be overwhelmed by waves of new prisoners captured in the American-led offensive in southern Afghanistan, where thousands of Marines are battling Taliban fighters.

President Obama signed an executive order in January to review policy options for detention, interrogation and rendition.

The Defense and Justice Departments are leading two government task forces studying those issues and are scheduled to deliver reports to the president on Tuesday.

But administration officials said Sunday that the task forces — which are grappling with questions like whether terrorism suspects should be turned over to other countries and how to deal with detainees who are thought to be dangerous but who cannot be brought to trial — were likely to seek extensions on some contentious issues.

Last month The Wall Street Journal reported elements of General Stone’s review, but in recent days American military officials provided a more detailed description of the report’s scope, findings and recommendations.

A spokesman for the Afghan Embassy in Washington, Martin Austermuhle, said he was unaware of the review, and did not know if the government in Kabul had been apprised of it.

Admiral Mullen felt compelled to issue his message last week after viewing photographs documenting abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan by American military personnel in the early years of the wars there, a senior military official said.

Mr. Obama decided in May not to make the photographs public, warning that the images could ignite a deadly backlash against American troops.

The admiral urged top American field commanders to step up their efforts to ensure that prisoners were treated properly both at the point of capture and in military prisons.

He told the service chiefs to emphasize detainee treatment when preparing and training troops who deploy to the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

“It is essential to who we are as a fighting force that we get this right,” Admiral Mullen said in the message. “We are better than what I saw in those pictures.”

American officials say many of the changes that General Stone’s review recommends for Bagram are already in the works as part of the scheduled opening this fall of a 40-acre replacement complex that officials say will accommodate about 600 detainees in a more modern and humane setting.

The problems at the existing American-run prison, the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, have been well documented.

The prison is a converted aircraft hangar that still holds some of the decrepit aircraft-repair machinery left by the Soviet troops who occupied the country in the 1980s.

Military personnel who know Bagram and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, describe the Afghan site as tougher and more spartan.

The prisoners have fewer privileges and virtually no access to lawyers or the judicial process. Many are still held communally in big cages.

In the past two weeks, prisoners have refused to leave their cells to protest their indefinite imprisonment.

In 2005, the Bush administration began trying to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan, mainly by transferring Bagram prisoners to an American-financed high-security prison outside of Kabul guarded by American-trained Afghan soldiers.

But United States officials conceded that the new Afghan block, at Pul-i-Charkhi prison, could not absorb all the Bagram prisoners. It now holds about 4,300 detainees, including some 360 from Bagram or Guantánamo Bay, Afghan prison officials said.

Officials from the general directorate for prisons complained about the lack of detention space based on international standards in provinces of Afghanistan. They said most of those prisons were rented houses and not suitable for detention.

Gen. Safiullah Safi, commander of the Afghan National Army brigade responsible for the section of Pul-i-Charkhi that holds the transferred inmates from Bagram and Guantánamo Bay, said his part of the prison had maintained good order and followed Islamic cultural customs.

But last December, detainees in the other blocks of the prison staged a revolt in an attempt to resist a security sweep for hidden weapons and cellphones. Eight inmates died.

“There’s a general concern that the Afghan national prisons need to be rehabilitated,” said Sahr MuhammedAlly, a senior associate for law and security at Human Rights First, an advocacy group that is to issue its own report on Bagram on Wednesday.

Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/world/asia/20detain.html?_r=1&hp

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

June 18, 2009

France: "Tour de France Penitentiaire" (thanfully everywhere isn't like it is here)

REHABILITATIVE RIDE
This Tour tries to break down criminal cycle
Scott Sayare, Associated Press
Sunday, June 14, 2009

From behind prison bars, the view never changes. From behind the handlebars of racing bikes, dozens of French inmates are seeing the vineyards of Provence, the sun-drenched Mediterranean coast and the majestic spires of the Alps in their own specia

The convicts are cycling in the inaugural "Tour de France Penitentiaire" - an event whose goal is not just to physically challenge the prisoners, organizers say, but also to instill self-respect and pride that will help prepare their return to normal life.

There are differences, of course, from the real Tour de France: The prisoners' two-week, 1,370-mile event, which began June 4, is not as grueling as the 2,100-mile, three-week Tour. Any "breakaways" or "escapes" from the pack are strictly forbidden. And the inmates' guards are riding along with the convicts in the peloton, or pack, with a police escort among the support vehicles.

It's not a competition, prison officials say, but rather an exercise in commitment, solidarity and grit.

"It's a beautiful gift they're giving me," said Olivier, an inmate at a prison in Montmedy, near Luxembourg, who is scheduled for release in two months. He gave only his first name in accordance with French judicial regulations.

"It brings a close to my situation perfectly, spot-on," he added. "It's the icing on the cake."

Officials chose the nearly 200 participating inmates from across France, prisoners with terms as short as two years and as long as 25. They are men and women, young and old, petty crooks and hardened criminals - including rapists and killers.

Most of the inmates have been training since January. The event's 15 stages average about 90 miles, with some stretching to more than 135 miles.

Starts and finishes were selected for their proximity to penitentiaries, where the tour picks up or drops off inmates and prison personnel as it circles France. A core group of six prisoners and a dozen guards is riding the entire course, which finishes in Paris, like the real Tour - minus the champagne and fanfare.

Wardens, guards, judges and prisoners ride shoulder-to-shoulder, indistinguishable from one another in their matching white jerseys, helmets and cycling shorts.

The prison peloton has rolled through villages and hamlets to applause. Cheering crowds have massed each stage's finish line. It helps, perhaps, that the riders are unidentifiable as members of the penal system, except for the word "Penitentiaire" across the backs of their jerseys.

As prisons have become more crowded in recent years, officials have increasingly turned their attention to the ways of returning inmates to society.

"It's an absolute innovation to take the risk - but which is a calculated risk - of sending out so many prisoners at the same time and for so long, and to expose them in such a willful and even deliberate way to the eyes of French society," said Francois Grosvalet, director of athletic programs for French prisons.

Andrew Coyle, a professor of prison studies at King's College, London, who spent 25 years as an overseer in British penitentiaries, acknowledges that some people won't understand a program that allows inmates on even a supervised outing such as this.

"Invariably, when any prison administration does these things, people will say, 'Hang on, why is this happening? Aren't they in there to be punished?' " Coyle said. "But if we're serious about helping prisoners to re-enter and to reintegrate, then we need to find opportunities to give them positive experiences."

French victims' groups agree.

"At a certain moment, you have to consider these people, these individuals, these prisoners as people who might one day once again take up the path of society, of community life," said Sabrina Bellucci, director of the French National Institute for Victims' Aid and Mediation.

Prison officials decided on cycling "because in the history of French sporting events, the Tour de France is something that finds itself very near the summit," Grosvalet said, speaking by phone from a support vehicle behind the riders.

British cyclist David Millar, who has won several stages of the Tour de France, said the sport was well suited to help the inmates.

"I can't think of a better way to strip down a person to their basic human nature," Millar said.

He knows something about rehabilitation. He returned to racing in 2006 after serving a two-year doping suspension.

"I have had my own personal struggles," he said, "and it was cycling that gave me the peace and tranquility I needed to rediscover myself, then the passion and drive to better myself."

Cycling's simple elegance has long enchanted the French, who lionize their champion riders.

"Actually, it looks a bit like the Tour de France that we know," said Thierry Huguenin, sponsorship director for Francaise des Jeux, a French lottery group that helped finance the event.

The company also sponsors a professional cycling team, a perennial competitor in the better-known Tour; in the past months, the pro racers and coaches visited prisoners to offer advice.

Huguenin himself has been pedaling in the pack.

"The guards and the prisoners, who are usually archrivals, are teammates here," he said, speaking by phone as he refilled his water bottles during a sunny, 116-mile stage from Valenciennes to Montmedy, in the north.

This article appeared on page C - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Posted by lois at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2009

The parallel world of Europe's anti-terror regimen

The parallel world of Europe's anti-terror regimen
By Liz Fekete
28 May 2009, 5:00pm
Below we reproduce the introduction to the latest edition of the European Race Bulletin.

In the eighteen months since the European Race Bulletin carried out its last audit of the anti-terrorist laws, national governments, building on the blocks provided by the EU Common and Framework Decisions on Countering Terrorism and the European Union's list of proscribed organisations, have introduced a whole host of anti-terrorist laws, legal changes and other administrative procedures. A separate and more punitive criminal justice system, beyond the ordinary rule of law, has now been firmly established. The primary purpose of the summaries documented in this report was to provide a snapshot of the parallel structures that have emerged from emergency laws. But the academic credibility given to counter-terrorism laws by a growing number of 'terrorism' and 'integration' experts has emerged as a secondary and complementary focus of the research.

What, we ask, are the fundamental underpinnings of this parallel criminal justice system? And how do they impact on European Muslims, foreign nationals and on asylum seekers and refugees? Despite different traditions within European criminal justice and immigration systems, several common features emerge.

First, vague EU definitions of terrorism have led to the introduction by national governments of equally vague new crimes, which dramatically lower the standard of evidence needed to charge and convict terror suspects, and are often based on 'guilt by association'. Thus, amongst the novel new crimes introduced are: 'justification or glorification of terrorist acts', 'association with international terrorism', 'threatening to commit a terrorist crime', 'membership of a criminal organisation with terrorist intent', 'possession of books or items useful to a terrorism' or, indeed (in the case of Spain) the catch-all of 'any other crime' committed with the aim of 'subverting constitutional order or altering public peace'. In the UK, civil rights lawyers have warned that more and more young Muslims are being brought to the courts on the basis of the vaguest of charges while, in France and Spain, NGOs have deplored the fact that the wives and relatives of primary suspects are also detained, interrogated and remanded in pre-trial detention on the basis of minimal proof.

Yet, in legislating for new crimes, governments are not always having it their own way. Not only has trenchant criticism come from the UN Special Rapporteur for the protection and promotion of human rights while countering terrorism, but national courts, particularly in the UK, Netherlands and Norway, have set stricter rules for the standard of evidence needed in terrorism cases, established that words and threats cannot in themselves be construed as proof of terrorist intent in the criminal courts, and argued that there must be a direct connection between the object possessed (in the case of books or internet material) and the act of terrorism. But the same standards of evidence do not apply when administrative tribunals assess the risk to national security posed by an individual and whether deportation is justified. Where these tribunals are concerned, anything goes - words, threats or association.

On the other hand, there are barely any legal interventions to stop the spread of the second salient feature of the parallel criminal justice system - namely the special detention regime for terrorist suspects. Under this regime, those detained on suspicion of terrorism (but not yet convicted and in some cases not even charged) can be held in custody in high security prisons for years on end, in complete violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which holds that a person suspected of crime must be brought to trial within a 'reasonable time'. And the use of administration detention (i.e. under immigration law) avoids these obligations altogether. In the UK, this is achieved through the administrative detention of foreign nationals pending their deportation (there is no time limit to this form of detention): on the European mainland, mainly via pre-trial detention (the time limits for pre-trial detention are two years in the Netherlands, four years in Spain, and four years and eight months in France).

In addition, the special detention regime also involves other ways of depriving an individual or his or her liberty, through house arrest (France, Spain), control orders (UK) or a 'disturbance of an individual' administrative order (Netherlands). And in this way, we witness a massive extension of what constitutes a prison - no longer four walls, but your home, the streets you walk. It must seem at times, to those under suspicion that prison is everywhere. Many of those caught up in this special detention regime develop symptoms of severe mental illness and are driven into madness and attempted suicide. Within high security prisons, suspected terrorists in pre-trial or administrative detention can expect to experience much of the following: denial of recreation and exercise, sleep deprivation and intrusive night-time cell checks, subjection to long periods of cold or extreme light, frequent strip searches, blindfolding, abuse of detainees' religion, threats related to their national origin, beatings and other methods of coercion to incriminate fellow detainees. And even if eventually released from detention, or found not guilty at trial, once labelled a terror suspect means you are always a terror suspect. Witness the cases of Mustapha Labsi and Farid Hilali, freed in one country only to be rearrested (on the basis of the same secret evidence) and incarcerated in another, with imprisonment with no formal charge stretching on for years on end.

The third feature of this parallel world is the threat of extradition or deportation to countries which practise torture and/or the death penalty (most notably Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Pakistan, Russia and the US) in complete violation of the UN Convention Against Torture. Removal usually takes place through the use of immigration laws which conveniently bypass the more stringent procedural safeguards built into the criminal justice system. In the following pages, a total of 33 cases involve individuals who have either been removed to a country that practises torture (10 cases) or are currently under threat of removal (23 cases). (In one case, a young man died following his removal from Sweden to Libya. Reports indicate that the young political dissident was tortured for nine days by the Libyan security services before his family was contacted and told to collect the corpse.)

The UK has even gone so far as attempting to undermine the whole philosophy of the UN Convention Against Torture by arguing (unsuccessfully) before the European Court of Human Rights that the right of a person to be protected from torture or ill-treatment should be balanced against the risk the suspect posed to the deporting state. In practice, though, it is France and Italy which have gone furthest in undermining the Convention, through the handing over of terror suspects to Algeria and Tunisia, despite their long history of torture. It is unbelievable that at the same time as several European countries conduct inquiries into complicity with the US system of extraordinary rendition and torture, they establish a new system for administrative rendition which will increase the risk of torture still further. And it is not only foreign nationals or asylum seekers who are at risk of deportation to torture, but, in a number of cases, French Muslim citizens of Algerian origin have actually been stripped of their French nationality and deported. Now many Muslims of dual Spanish-Moroccan nationality living in the North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla (where Mohamed el Bay is currently under threat of extradition to Morocco) watch nervously as a close partnership develops between the Spanish and Moroccan intelligence agencies. If the extradition of Mohamed el Bay goes ahead, could other Spanish Muslims not have their nationality revoked?

The final feature of this parallel criminal justice system is secrecy. Special courts are set up for foreign nationals under threat of deportation on national security grounds, with the use of secret evidence justified on the basis that the evidence against the appellant is too sensitive for disclosure to him or her. The interests of the appellant are represented by a state-appointed 'special advocate' who, after being given access to classified evidence, is barred from contact with the appellant or his lawyers. Disturbingly, the UK's much discredited Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) could be the model for other countries, such as Denmark and Norway, to follow. (Germany already has a special panel within the Federal Administrative Court in Karlsruhe which acts as the sole court of appeal in national security expulsion cases.)

This is what makes the parallel world that emerges from a separate criminal justice system so Kafkaesque. Terror suspects can be left to rot in prison for years without knowing what the evidence is against them. Not only that, but this secret evidence is linked to Europe's growing acceptance of evidence extracted under torture. Too often it emerges that those held within the special detention regime are there because another 'terror suspect', tortured under interrogation in countries such as Pakistan, Algeria, United Arab Emirates, as well as at Guantánamo Bay, has incriminated them. Although the European Court of Human Rights has recently condemned the reliance on secret evidence, we do not anticipate that its use will diminish.

At the very heart of this parallel criminal justice system, lies a political culture in which torture, and its evidential by-products, are seen as a necessary evil in the 'war on terror'. To accept that our intelligence services 'outsource' torture as part of an official interrogation policy, to accept that our governments can mount prosecutions on the basis of secret evidence extracted under torture, is to eat away at justice and to degrade public morality.

The report Secrecy, detention, torture: the parallel world of Europe's anti-terror regimen is an edition of the European Race Bulletin, a journal published by the the Institute of Race Relations.
http://www.irr.org.uk/2009/may/ha000048.html

Posted by lois at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2009

Netherlands to close 8 prisons due to lack of prisoners

Netherlands to close prisons for lack of criminals
by NRC International
20-05-2009

The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty.

During the 1990s the Netherlands faced a shortage of prison cells, but a decline in crime has since led to overcapacity in the prison system. The country now has capacity for 14,000 prisoners but only 12,000 detainees.

Deputy Justice Minister Nebahat Albayrak announced on Tuesday that eight prisons will be closed, resulting in the loss of 1,200 jobs. Natural redundancy and other measures should prevent any forced lay-offs, the minister said.

The overcapacity is a result of the declining crime rate, which the ministry's research department expects to continue for some time.

Belgian prisoners
Some reprieve might come from a deal with Belgium, which is facing overpopulation in its prisons. The two countries are working out an agreement to house Belgian prisoners in Dutch prisons. Some 500 Belgian prisoners could be transferred to the Tilburg prison by 2010.

The Netherlands would get 30 million euros in the deal, and it will allow the closing of the prisons in Rotterdam and Veenhuizen to be postponed until 2012.

http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/090520-Dutch-prison-closures

Posted by lois at 12:04 AM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2009

UK: Our prisons are failing women Using punitive male models of imprisonment for vulnerable women results in tragedy – and does nothing to tackle crime

Our prisons are failing women
Using punitive male models of imprisonment for vulnerable women results in tragedy – and does nothing to tackle crime
o Frances Crook
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 May 2009

In pay, pensions, politics and promotion, the gender gap is a disgrace. But in justice, women face a national scandal. A report published today by the Fawcett Society reveals a justice system that is "institutionally sexist". This is of no surprise to organisations such as the Howard League, which have long campaigned against the hopeless situation of women rotting in our prisons.

Today, as we sit outraged in our armchairs, 4,274 women and girls languish in our jails. These are not the dangerous criminals one might imagine, but often sad victims of circumstance and violence – often at the hands of men. More than half have been victims of domestic violence, a third have experienced sexual abuse, and 25% have been in care as children. Two-thirds of women in prison have dependent children under 18; of these, just one in 20 remain in their own home once their mother has been sentenced.

A sharp increase in the severity of sentencing has seen this number soar by 60% in a decade. Two-thirds of women are in for less than six months: these are damaged people in jail for petty offences. Women and children with mental health problems and addictions are then warehoused temporarily in our flooded and failing jails. Rotting in the security-driven prisons, which follow the rules designed for high security men's prisons, simply serves to exacerbate problems and will most likely lead to more serious and frequent reoffending on release. The idea that public protection is served by this vicious circle is not one many victims of crime would recognise.

The appalling consequences are all too stark. Forty-three women have taken their own lives in prisons in the last five years, with two more added to the toll so far in 2009. Already this year we have seen the tragic suicide of Alison Colk, a young woman who had just entered Styal prison on a petty 28-day sentence for theft. She was found suspended from a ligature on her first night in the prison, which is notorious for violence and self-injury. More than half of the thousands of acts of self-injury which take place every year in our jails are committed by women and girls. This is despite the fact that they comprise just 5% of the prison population.

The Howard League for Penal Reform has succeeded in forcing the government to hold a public inquiry into the treatment of "Susan", who was jailed after an extraordinarily traumatic and abusive childhood. Repeatedly abandoned by a mother who tried to kill her, she was transferred to an adult prison on her 17th birthday. In prison she spent several months in solitary confinement, eating meals on her own and taking her only exercise in a metal cage. Susan made repeated attempts on her own life and was hospitalised with deep lacerations to her wrists and arms, on one occasion losing six pints of blood.

This is the first time a public inquiry concerning the principle of the "right to life" will hear from the person at the heart of the proceedings, as previous inquiries have concerned deaths (Stephen Lawrence and Victoria Climbié, for example). The inquiry will expose the fact that prisons are a totally inadequate response to women and girls who offend, particularly those who have mental health problems and who injure themselves because of their misery and distress. We hope it will lead to significant changes. When the gender equality duty came into force, it was hoped that systems, structures and organisations would adjust practice and tailor it to the specific needs of women. Nowhere is the failure to do so more apparent than in the area of the penal system. Instead, their treatment at the hands of criminal justice agencies is increasingly punitive, following male models of imprisonment as punishment, regardless of the offence, background, vulnerability or family circumstances of the woman involved.

These vulnerable women, damaged at the hands of men through violence, sexual abuse, neglect, or trafficking, are victims themselves. The revolving door at the prison gates is an appalling and hopeless cycle – and the taxpayer funds each pointless prison place to the tune of over £40,000 a year for each female we incarcerate. Tragically, the dire consequences leave blood on the male-dominated government's hands.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/13/prisons-women-human-rights

Posted by lois at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2009

U.K.: Prison Radio Shines

Media
Prison Radio Shines
Parmy Olson, 05.11.09, 12:35 PM ET

LONDON--Johnny Cash made a mint when he recorded part of his 1968 album At Folsom Prison amidst the whoops and shouts of a roomful of inmates. Today's entertainment for prisoners is a more sobering affair: interviews with politicians, hard-hitting programs about suicide and self-harming. But it too is finding success.

A tiny prison radio station in South London is up for four prestigious Sony awards on Monday night, putting it alongside the some of the top talent of the BBC and other commercial radio stations in the United Kingdom.

Electric Radio in Brixton Prison is run by the Prison Radio Association, a British charity, and broadcasts to just 800 inmates--but it has a rich array of programming. Weekly discussion programs about taboo subjects such as self-harming, mental and sexual health and the prison environment are mixed in with a daily dose of editorials and of course, music. The studio is located under the prison chapel and manned by inmates.

Its nominations include an award for talk radio and the all-important Interview Award. For this, one of Brixton Prison's inmates interviewed former U.K. government minister Jonathan Aitken, who was sentenced to 18 months in Belmarsh prison in 1999 for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

The interviewer was half-way through a four-year sentence when he conducted the interview, and the two men were "socially, culturally and educationally poles apart," the Prison Radio Association says. But while Aitken comes across as well-spoken and slightly pompous, Tis' is not afraid to ask probing questions, creating an intriguing interview in which Aitken opens up about his divorce, bankruptcy and experiences in jail. The interview can be listened to here.

Brixton is one of 20 prisons in the U.K. that operate its own radio station or offers training in the area. The first was established in the Feltham Young Offenders Institution in 1994 by the Prison Radio Association when its young inmates called for its establishment. The organization got legal charitable status in June 2006.

There is as yet no clear evidence that prison radio contributes to rehabilitation, but Electric Radio Brixon, launched in November 2007, claims it is a useful source of information for prisoners with literacy problems and does help with rehabilitation.

The Prison Radio Association says it is working on the development of a National Prison Radio Service, with the potential to eventually reach every prisoner in England and Wales.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/11/prison-radio-brixton-markets-faces-media_print.html

Posted by lois at 09:06 AM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2009

Mexico announces 'super-max' prisons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Officials gave no further details on the prisons.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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

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

March 09, 2009

UK: We should try rehabilitating 'lifers' Given the questionable conditions life-sentence prisoners are kept in, we should be grateful more don't re-offend once released

We should try rehabilitating 'lifers'
Given the questionable conditions life-sentence prisoners are kept in, we should be grateful more don't re-offend once released
By Erwin James
Sunday 8 March 2009 16.00 GMT
The Guardian

Of the thousand or so life-sentence prisoners released over the last six years 65 went on to seriously re-offend, the government revealed this week. Three of those released committed murder, the others were found guilty of all manner of assaults including attempted murder, rape, kidnapping and wounding. The revelations have understandably caused outrage and not surprisingly led to new calls for "life to mean life". Were that to be the case however we would need to rapidly expand the prison-building programme already planned by the government for the next few years. And vastly increase the budget.

Current plans to build three giant so-called Titan prisons designed to hold at least 2,500 prisoners each is already going to set the taxpayer back at least £1.2bn. The first Titan is expected to be open in three years' time, the other two by 2014. The total cost for the provision of up to 20,000 new prison places planned over the next 10 years, including the cost of the Titans, is estimated at £2.7bn. The cost of running the extra places is estimated at an extra £800m per year (on top of the £2bn a year we spend at present). Without doubt keeping all "lifers" in prison until they die would amount to a serious extra increase in spending on prisons. So much so that it is unlikely to be an option the government will be persuaded to choose in the foreseeable future. Especially considering that there is already a huge budget deficit in the cost of running our prisons currently.

During the past year the Treasury demanded cuts in prison spending totalling £60m. To meet the targets prisons all over the country curtailed their regimes so that prisoners are now effectively "banged up" from Friday lunchtime until Monday morning, with cell doors opened only for meals and brief exercise periods. Bearing in mind that the average time that prisoners spent on daily bang-up before the cuts were introduced was already 13-and-a-half hours.

Bang up of 17 hours a day was not unusual in some prisons and many local prisons still operate regimes of 23-hour bang-up. All in all it means that resources and facilities, which enable people in prison to develop skills and abilities that will help them to live productive, constructive crime-free lives after release are severely limited. As are "offending behaviour" programmes.

Overcrowding is such that courses designed to challenge the criminal thoughts and behaviour of prisoners are massively oversubscribed. The reality is that the majority of time in prison is passed meaninglessly, going through the motions, trying to tick as many boxes as possible, just waiting for a parole hearing or a release date.

In that mix we have more than 11,000 prisoners serving indeterminate sentences, around seven out of 10 serving mandatory life for murder – and all subject to the same regime deficiencies as any other prisoner. Logic dictates that the more de-personalised and dysfunctional the system has become through overcrowding and under-resourcing, the less likely it is that those being held in it will respond positively, whatever category of offence committed.

Life-sentence prisoners are subject to closer scrutiny by prison professionals than other prisoners for sure. And closer supervision once they are transferred to less secure prisons in preparation for release once they have served their "tariff" (the term that must be spent in custody to meet the requirements of "retribution and deterrence"). Depending on the nature of the original offence and the risk posed they are also subject to varying levels of supervision once released.

But given that we have more people in our prisons serving life sentences than Germany, France, Italy, Russia and Turkey combined, and that we keep them in highly questionable conditions, often for decades, I think we should be grateful that many more than the 65 referred to by the government have not already committed further serious offences. As the justice minister David Hanson said: "The decision as to whether to release a mandatory life-sentenced prisoner is an extremely difficult one. The risk to the public can be reduced but never eliminated."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/06/prisons-re-offenders-titan
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

Posted by lois at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2009

Call for Papers: The International Prison Privatization Experience: A Transatlantic and Transpacific Dialogue, Houston, TX, August 6-8, 2009

The International Prison Privatization Experience: A Transatlantic and Transpacific Dialogue, Houston, TX, August 6-8, 2009

Call for Papers

The Barbara Jordan Institute for Policy Research, the BJ-ML School of Public Affairs Administration of Justice Department, and Justice Strategies will convene the first international conference on prison privatization. The conference will highlight the inimical impact these prisons are having on women, minorities, and the poor. Scholars will explore alternative economic development strategies to sustain rural communities before they turn to prisons—private or public.

Papers should investigate comparative aspects of prison privatization and grassroots initiatives geared toward reducing prison privatization. Proposals should also examine critical issues such as race, gender and crime and the impact on families’ and prisoners’ communities. Papers should fit into one of the following categories:

Session 1: Financial and Social Costs of an Increasing Use of Imprisonment

Session 2: Commodification of Prisoners and Human Rights

Session 3: Constitutional Implications of Private Prisons

Session 4: The Commercialization of Justice

Session 5: Interjurisdictional Issues and Common Concerns

Session 6: Demystifying Prison Privatization

Session 7: Privatized Detention of Immigrants

For more information contact:

Prof. Byron E. Price, the Conference Chair at 713-313-4809. Please send proposals, preferably as a Word or pdf attachment, to pricebe@tsu.edu by April 1st of 2009.

Committee members:

Byron E. Price, Texas Southern University—Houston, TX
Helen Taylor Greene, Texas Southern University, Houston, TX
Judy Greene, Justice Strategies—Brooklyn, NY
Elycia Daniel, Texas Southern University—Houston, TX

Posted by lois at 05:55 PM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2009

UK: Arrests of teenage girls and women reach record levels * More than 250,000 detained by police in one year

Arrests of teenage girls and women reach record levels
* More than 250,000 detained by police in one year
* Crime gap narrowing between men and women

* Alan Travis, home affairs editor
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 January 2009 17.15 GMT

Annual arrests of teenage girls and women have reached record levels, with more than 250,000 detained by the police according to the latest official figures.

Ministry of Justice statistics published today show that last year youth offending teams dealt with 22% more crimes committed by girls aged 10 to 17, fuelling fears that a new "ladette culture" is emerging on Britain's streets.

Youth Justice Board figures show that the number of personal violent attacks by girls dealt with by youth offending teams rose by 48% over the past five years, from 10,412 in 2003 to 15,413 by 2008. They also show sharp increases in the number of public order offences, up 37% to 5,852, and racially aggravated crimes, up 113% to 758, committed by girls under 18 over the same period.

The report, Women and the Criminal Justice System, confirms the conventional view that women are less involved in crime than men but says the gap is now starting to narrow.

"The overall picture to emerge from the various statistics is that there is a degree of convergence between the sexes in less serious offending, but that males remain disproportionately involved in more serious crime," says the ministry's annual report by the Institute of Criminal Policy Research in London.

The criminologists quote findings from the 2008 Home Office's offending, crime and justice survey showing that 26% of males under 25 admit they were involved in anti-social behaviour in the previous 12 months, compared with 17% of females. But the authors note that the 17% figure for females is up from 11% in the 2006 survey, while the 26% for males is unchanged. The peak age for girls' offending has fallen from 18 to 15 over the same period.

"It is possible that girls' willingness to admit offences has increased in tandem with society's expectations about their behaviour," say the criminologists.

Further evidence that the gap between the sexes in relation to crime is beginning to narrow comes from the youth offending team figures. While the number of offences dealt with involving girls under 18 between 2004 and 2008 rose by 22%, the number of offences for teenage boys fell by 9%.

The arrest figures of 251,000 women and girls in 2006/07 is an increase of 39,000 compared with five years before. Arrests of teenage girls aged 10 to 15 rose from 53,800 to 71,100 over the same period. The numbers dealt with by a caution or warning increased from 38,500 to 58,600 over the same period.

A ministry spokesman stressed that young women only accounted for 21% of all crime and the figures were for the number of offences, not the number of young women involved.

"The Youth Justice Board has commissioned research into patterns of offending by young females, which is expected to be published in 2009," he said.

The shadow justice secretary, Dominic Grieve, said ministers needed to get to grips with "this shocking trend".

Posted by lois at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2008

Our neighbors to the north: Canadian incarceration rate up 2 percent to 36,300

Canadian incarceration rate up 2 percent
Published: Dec. 9, 2008 at 10:33 AM

OTTAWA, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- The number of Canadian adults in jails and prisons rose 2 percent in 2007-2008 to a daily average of 36,300 *inmates, Statistics Canada reported Tuesday.

The figures marked the third consecutive annual increase, and the agency said it was driven by the growing number of adults being held in remand in provincial or territorial jails while awaiting trial or sentencing.

During 2007-2008, there were 13,304 offenders in federal prisons, 3 percent more than the previous year, the agency said.

On any given day, there was an average of 2,018 juveniles between 12 and 17 in custody.

The report said 40 percent of inmates were federal offenders serving sentences longer than two years.

Overall, the Canadian adult and youth rate translated to 117 people in custody per 100,000 population, the agency said. By contrast, StatsCan said the United States adult incarceration rate is 762 per 100,000, while Sweden's rate is 74 per 100,000.

* This is approximately how many adults are incarcerated in North Carolina.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/12/09/Canadian_incarceration_rate_up_2_percent/UPI-47101228836810/

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

December 07, 2008

Greece: Hunger Strike by Prisoners results in cutting prison population in half!

Hunger strike ends as Greek government caves
Thursday, November 20 2008 @ 11:36 PM CST

After 18 days 7,000 prisoners in Greece stop their hunger strike after the ministry of justice concedes to a series of their demands, promising to release half the country's prison population by April 2009.

On Thursday the 20th of November more than 7,000 hunger strikers in Greek prisons demanding a comprehensive 45-point program of prison reform have decided to stop their hunger strike, already on its 18th day, after the Ministry of Justice responded to their struggle and to the widening solidarity movement which in the last weeks has held several mass protest marches in the Greek cities by declaring that by next April the number of prisoners in Greek jails will be reduced to 6.815 from the present 12.315, thus effectively releasing half of the country's prison population.

The Ministry's declaration in detail states that:

1) All persons convicted to a sentence up to five years for any offense including drug related crimes can transform their sentence into a monetary penalty. This will not be allowed in the case the jury decides that the payment is not enough to deter the convict from committing punishable acts in the future.
2) The minimum sum for transforming one day of prison sentence to monetary penalty is reduced from 10 (1 euro = $1.26)euros to 3, with the provision of being reduced to 1 euro by decision of the jury.
3) All people who have served 1/5 of their prison sentence for 2 year sentences and 1/3 for sentences longer than 2 years are to be released, with no exceptions.
4) The minimum limit of served sentence is reduced to 3/5 for conditional release and for convicts for drug related crimes. Those condemned under conditions of law Ν. 3459/2006 (articles 23 και 23Α) are exempted.
5) The maximum limit of pre-trial imprisonment is reduced from 18 to 12 months, with the exemptions of crimes punished by life or 20year sentence.
6) The annual time of days-off prison is increased by one day. Tougher conditions for days-off are limited for those convicted for drug related crimes under Ν. 3459/2006.
7) Disciplinary penalties are to be integrated.
8) Integration after 4 years into national law of the European Council decision of drug trafficking
9) Expansion of implementation of conditional release of convicts suffering from AIDS, kidney failure, persistent TB, and parapelegics.
What the Ministry failed to answer with regard to the prisoners' demands
include:
1) Monetary exchange of prison sentences longer than 5 years, especially for 6.700 prisoners presently convicted for non-criminal offenses.
2) Abolition of juvenile prisons
3) Abolition of accumulative disciplinary penalties
4) Abolition of 18 months pre-trial imprisonment for a large number of offenses.
5) Satisfactory expansion of days off, despite the fact that the application of present liberties has been tested as successful during the last 18 years.
6) Immediate improvement of relocation conditions of convicts
7) Holding a meeting between the minister of justice and the prisoners' committee

Thus in a press release, the Prisoners' Committee announced that:

"The amendment submitted to the Parliament by the Ministry of Justice tackles but a few of our demands. The minister ought to materialize his promises for the immediate release of the suggested number of prisoners announced, and at the same time implement concrete measures regarding the
totality of our demands. We the prisoners treat this amendment as a first step, a result of our struggle and of the solidarity shown by society. Yet it fails to covers us, it fails to solve our problems. With our struggle, we have first of all fought for our dignity. And this dignity we cannot offer as a present to no minister, to no screw. We shall tolerate no arbitrary acts, no vengeful relocation, no terrorizing disciplinary act. We are standing and we shall stay standing. We demand form the Parliament to move towards a complete abolition of the limit of 4/5 of served sentence, the abolition of accumulated time for disciplinary penalties, and the expansion of beneficial arrangements regarding days-off, and conditional releases for all categories of prisoners.
Moreover, we demand the immediate legislation on the presently vague promises of the minister of justice regarding the improvement of prison conditions (abolition of juvenile prisons, foundation of therapeutic centers for drug dependents, implementation of social labour in exchange for prison sentence, upgrading of hospital care of prisoners, incorporation of European legislation favorable to the prisoners in the Greek law etc.). Finally, we offer our thanks to the solidarity movement, to every component, party, medium, and militant who stood by us with all and any means of his or her choice, and we declare that our struggle against these human refuse dumps and for the victory of all our demands continues".
Prisoners' Committee 20/11/08.

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

December 05, 2008

European Court Rules Against Britain’s Policy of Keeping DNA Database of Suspects

December 5, 2008- NY Times
European Court Rules Against Britain’s Policy of Keeping DNA Database of Suspects
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON — The European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously on Thursday that Britain’s policy of gathering and storing the fingerprints and DNA of all criminal suspects — even those who turn out to be innocent — was a violation of the human right to privacy.

The ruling, handed down in Strasbourg, France, is a severe blow to the law-enforcement policies of the Labor government, which has led Europe in aggressively collecting and retaining personal information on its citizens. Using unusually strong language, the court declared itself “struck by the blanket and indiscriminate nature” of the police’s policy of holding DNA material indefinitely in its database.

Britain has several months to decide how to respond to the ruling, but the current law will have to be amended. In a statement, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said she was “disappointed” by the court’s decision.

“I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice,” she said. Britain’s DNA Database contains the profiles of more than 4.6 million people, some 860,000 of whom do not have criminal records. Privacy experts say that this represents a higher proportion of Britain’s population than do similar databases in other countries.

“They’re in the vanguard of doing this, is the polite way of saying it,” said Daniel P. Cooper, a partner at Covington & Burling, a corporate and business law firm that filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of Privacy International, an advocacy group. “They have the biggest database in Europe, and possibly globally, for law enforcement purposes.”

Human rights groups applauded the court’s decision as a welcome check on the powers of the state.

“Forty percent of Britain’s criminals are not on this database, but hundreds of thousands of innocent people are,” said Anna Fairclough, the legal officer of Liberty, a British group that advocates for human rights. The court, she said, “has protected the privacy of British people so poorly let down by our own government.”

The government argues that information on the database collected from suspects in past crimes has helped investigators solve thousands of fresh cases in the past eight years, including at least 53 murders and 94 rapes.

Britain has a reputation for intruding in an increasingly heavy-handed way in its citizens’ private lives. It is said to have the most CCTV cameras per capita in the world. A government plan to issue mandatory ID cards encoded with personal information has stirred fierce opposition in a country that has long celebrated individual liberty.

“There have been a number of recent government initiatives which have been very worrying to privacy advocates,” Mr. Cooper said. “And there have been so many massive data breaches and leaks of information that anytime the government proposes something that would require collecting more data, people get very concerned.”

The DNA case was brought by two Sheffield men who were arrested in separate cases in 2001, but were both ultimately cleared of committing crimes. One, identified as Mr. S., 19, was charged with armed robbery; he was later acquitted. The other, Michael Marper, now 45, was arrested and charged with harassment in 2001; the charges were eventually dropped.

In both cases, the suspects’ fingerprints and DNA samples were taken by the police. Both men asked later that the samples be destroyed, but the police refused.

While most European countries allow the police to take fingerprints and DNA samples in some criminal cases, England and Wales are alone in Europe in allowing the samples to be taken as a matter of course, and in keeping them indefinitely, experts say. Scotland has separate, less stringent, rules.

The two men took their case to the European court after losing a series of battles in British courts, arguing that the police’s decision to keep the samples violated their right to privacy as set out in Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Having information on the DNA data base was humiliating and stigmatizing, they said.

The court agreed, saying that Britain had “overstepped any acceptable margin of appreciation” in striking a balance between individual rights and public interests.

The current law, it said in stinging language, “constitutes a disproportionate interference in the applicants’ right for respect to private life and cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/world/europe/05britain.html?sq=World%20Court&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
This and other international news relating to mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

October 26, 2008

Great Britian: Number of babies born in prison soars

Number of babies born in prison soars
By Ben Russell, home affairs correspondent
Monday, 27 October 2008
The Independent (UK)
The number of children born behind bars has almost doubled since Labour came to power, with new figures showing women prisoners currently giving birth at nearly four a week.

Figures from the Ministry of Justice show that 283 children were born in prisons in England and Wales between April 2005 and July this year, an average of 1.7 a week. But 49 babies were born between April and the beginning of July this year alone, almost four a week, meaning the 2008 total could reach nearly 200 if births continue at the same rate, more than double the 64 prison births recorded in 1995-96 before Labour came to power.

Prison reformers demanded that women should be locked up only in extreme circumstances, saying that keeping mothers and young babies in prison can harm young children and does nothing to cut crime.

The number of women in jail has nearly doubled in the past decade and stands at more than 4,500. Most women are in for non-violent offences, with about a third jailed for theft or handling stolen goods; in 2006, nearly two-thirds served less than six months.

The Ministry of Justice said sentencing decisions were the responsibility of judges and magistrates. But penal reformers and Opposition MPs expressed anger at the increasing numbers of babies born in custody.

Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: "No pregnant woman should be held in prison. It is an outdated and inhumane practice, penalising a baby for something that is no fault of its own. Fewer than one in four women is in prison for serious violent offences. Most women who come into contact with the criminal justice system could be sentenced to community programmes with no danger to the public and with a hugely positive impact on the health and well-being of the child."

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: "Apart from people who have committed extremely serious or violent offences it is difficult to see how jailing a young mother is going to do anything other than damage her and her baby. The conditions in prisons may no longer be Dickensian but young mothers are still going to jail for the same reasons they were in Victorian times, poverty, debt, addiction and mental illness."

The latest sentencing guidelines stress that in cases where jail is not regarded as essential courts may regard pregnancy as a mitigating factor. There are seven specialised mother and baby units in prisons across England. New babies can stay with their mothers for between nine and 18 months, and often leave when their mothers finish their sentences. Older children of women serving longer sentences are taken either to live with relatives outside prison or are put into care.

Prison Service guidelines insist young children behind bars must have contact with their family and see the world outside prison, with trips outside jail with nursery nurses to go shopping and visit local parks. Officials say women do not give birth inside jails – except in medical emergencies – and they offer special units to provide a calm environment for babies to bond with their mothers.

But the Liberal Democrats, who obtained the new figures from parliamentary questions, blamed the rise in prison births on the Government's desire to look tough on crime. David Howarth, the Liberal Democrat Justice spokesman, said: "There can be fewer worse starts in life than being born to a mother in prison. Labour's obsession with looking tough has led to a near doubling of the number of women in prison in the past decade.

"It is little surprise, therefore, that this year looks set to break the unenviable record for the number of babies born in incarceration. Not only should there be fewer women in prison but smaller prison units, closer to home, would surely be a more appropriate environment to bear and raise children than exists in prison today."

Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, will use a speech today to criticise prison reformers, saying: "We should not shy from the fact that the sentences of the court are first and foremost for the punishment of those who have broken the law, broken society's rules." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/number-of-babies-born-in-prison-soars-974458.html

Posted by lois at 09:03 PM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2008

Editorial: UK: Let the penal reformers build jails

Let the penal reformers build jails
02/09/2008
Telegraph (UK)

In truth, the prison reform group Nacro has never been much in favour of building new jails.

Over the years, the organisation has sought to rebrand itself from a do-gooder outfit known as the National Association for the Care and Rehabilitation of Offenders, preferring to describe itself as a ‘crime reduction charity’.

It has been consistently critical of the criminal justice policies of successive governments, not least because they have pushed the prison population up from around 50,000 in the mid-1990s to more than 80,000 today.

Nacro has argued that many in jail should not be there. Its decision, then, to join a consortium of private bidders seeking a contract to operate new prisons is of more than passing interest.

Together with a private security firm, a construction company and a drugs charity, it wants to run two 600-bed prisons in Merseyside and London. This is a good idea on two levels. Firstly, a penal reform pressure group is acknowledging that more prisons are needed. This Government has been negligent, to say the least, in not providing the jails that it knew longer and tougher sentences would require.

Secondly, it allows a group like Nacro to become directly involved in running an institution - putting its money where its mouth is.

Nacro believes that if it is involved from the beginning, the chances are greater of developing a regime that helps reduce re-offending.

The group is right to identify the importance of this matter.

The punishment for prisoners is to be deprived their liberty. While they are in jail it does nobody any good to spurn the opportunity offered by a literally captive audience to release them back into the community equipped with a qualification or skill that will help them get work and may stop them re-offending.

Reconviction rates remain horrendous, with 70 per cent of young offenders, and more than 50 per cent of adults, back in court within two years.

The Government’s plan to build huge 2,500-bed Titan jails may be an answer to overcrowding, but it will be of questionable value to the improvement of rehabilitation and ending the spiral of crime, which should sensibly be the goal of any government’s penal policy.

There is always a danger that letting a penal reform lobby group run a prison is inviting the inmates to take over the asylum.

But Nacro should be given a chance to see if its prescriptions work in practice.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/09/02/dl0204
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Posted by lois at 09:43 PM | Comments (0)

UK: Prison reform charity Nacro joins bid to run jails

Prison reform charity Nacro joins bid to run jails
Group drops scepticism over privatisation to tender alongside security firm

* Rachel Stevenson and agencies
* guardian.co.uk,
* Tuesday September 02 2008 12:16 BST

A charity that works with offenders and campaigns for prison reform is forming part of a bid to run prisons in London and Merseyside.

Nacro has teamed up with the private security firm G4S, a drugs charity and a construction company on a proposal to operate and provide services to Maghull prison in Merseyside and Belmarsh West prison in south-east London.

The charity's chief executive, Paul Cavadino, said Nacro's role in the consortium would be to oversee rehabilitation and resettlement services in the prisons. "The best way of ensuring they are being run properly is to be involved in planning this from the start," he said.

"If you are involved in the planning of the regime, it makes it much more likely that a prison will be providing high-quality resettlement and rehabilitation. Prisoners would be therefore much better prepared for reform."

Nacro would not be involved in running the security of the prison or in the work of prison officers.

Applications to run Belmarsh West, to be built next to Belmarsh high-security prison, and Maghull close next month. The government will announce who has won the contracts next year.

Responding to Nacro's application for the two 600-bed jails, the Ministry of Justice said bidders had been encouraged to enter into partnership with the voluntary and community sectors.

Nacro last week joined a coalition against government plans to build so-called titan jails in the UK. A group of 34 prison and criminal justice groups warned that proposals to build three 2,500-bed jails would squander public money and leave Britain the prison capital of Europe.

Jack Straw, the minister for justice, said today he understood fears that titan jails would end up as warehouses for inmates. He said he would consider the plans "very carefully" as the consultation period on the new prisons draws to a close.

"There was never, ever a plan for there to be a single large jail with a single regime within its walls," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
"The plan was, and is, for there to be a number of units within a large campus."

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

August 02, 2008

France: Incarceration Nation. French prisons are becoming an embarrassment.

Incarceration Nation

French prisons are becoming an embarrassment.
Tracy McNicoll
Aug 2, 2008

It's an especially hot summer in French jails. In July, the number of detainees hit 64,250 people—the highest number since World War II, when jails were crowded with accused Nazi collaborators. Worse: the prisons are operating at 126 percent of capacity—far higher than the European average—with some French jails housing twice as many inmates as there is room for. Seven in 10 prisoners are living in overcrowded conditions, according to France's International Prisons Observatory (OIP), with much of the overcrowding concentrated in maisons d'arrêt—jails that house both the accused awaiting trial as well as convicts serving relatively short terms. "Not a day goes by without one or more facilities calling to let us know about an attack," says Claude Tournel, assistant secretary-general of the UFAP, a prison personnel union.

Prisons have long been an embarrassment for France, the self-proclaimed "homeland of human rights." Since 1992 the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly rapped Paris for "inhumane and degrading" treatment of prisoners. In 2005, during a 16-day visit to France, then Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Alvaro Gil-Robles said of a section of Paris's La Santé prison, "In my whole life, apart from perhaps Moldova, I have never seen a center worse than that one." But the overcrowding has worsened since former Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy ascended to the president's office in May 2007, and brought his tough, law-and-order approach with him.

Forgiveness is not his style. Until last summer, Bastille Day (which commemorates the July 14, 1789 prison raid) featured the bizarre 19th-century ritual of collective presidential pardons, in which thousands of prisoners would see their sentences shortened by fiat every year. Over time, the prison system became dependent on these pardons to thin out populations during the summer, when heat can aggravate tensions. Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, scaled back the practice by eliminating the prospect of sentence reductions for a number of crimes, including drunken driving and spousal abuse. Then Sarkozy stopped it cold, declaring the practice "quasi-monarchical."

More controversially, Sarkozy got tough on repeat offenders, championing a new law that allows judges to lock up the most dangerous criminals for life even after their regular prison sentences have ended. He also imposed minimum prison sentences last August where judges previously had more discretion. The move was something of a carryover from his days as Interior minister, when he maintained a rocky relationship with the country's magistrates, showily and repeatedly questioning their judgment when a convict on conditional release re-offended. Judges have complained of such "penal populism." "He made his whole career as Interior minister on that," says Martine Herzog-Evans, a penal law specialist in Reims.

One potential problem with Sarkozy's approach, say criminal-law experts, is that sending people to jail for even a short time adds to overcrowding, which can increase recidivism. "Everything that promotes rehabilitation is weighed down by overpopulation," says Patrick Marest of the OIP. But reform is on the way. Last week, Justice Minister Rachida Dati presented a bill to cabinet that would eliminate overcrowding by broadening the use of electronic tracer bracelets and making probation available to more convicts. But magistrate and prison personnel unions and penal-law experts say the bill doesn't go nearly far enough. They say the 13,200 new prison spots that Dati has promised to supply by 2012 wouldn't even cover the current deficit, and they are skeptical the new bill's measures will be adequately financed. Hundreds of new personnel would be needed to properly support and monitor convicts serving their sentences outside prison walls. "The measures regarding detention pending trial and probation go in the right direction," says Marest, "but in an extremely timid and insufficient way."

Sarkozy's hard line means he will need to put more effort into burnishing France's human-rights reputation. In March, a French court awarded €€3,000 to a convicted sex offender who complained that he was imprisoned for five years with two other men in a cell made for one person, with open, unventilated toilets. This was the first time a French court had ever sided with a prisoner against prison authorities, and the news traveled far. At a recent press conference in Paris, Vladimir Putin responded to a query about Russia's poor human-rights record with a sharp question of his own: "What is the situation in French prisons?" Touché.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/150423

Posted by lois at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2008

UK: study and article relevant to the U.S. :The real cost of prison. Moral, social and political arguments for and against prison are all very well. But what about value for money?

The real cost of prison
Moral, social and political arguments for and against prison are all very well. But what about value for money?
by Kevin marsh
Monday July 28 2008

In 1993, the UK prison population was 44,000. Today it is over 83,000. This trend is set to continue: the government has recently announced an extra £3.8bn to create 20,000 more prison places.

In the UK it is estimated that each new prison place costs £119,000 and that the annual average cost for each prisoner exceeds £40,000. Such huge public expenditure should not be spent without question. But where value for money models are widely applied in other state services like healthcare, they have rarely been used to test the value of the criminal justice sector.

It might be true that incarceration reduces re-offending, but the cost of the prison system still has to justify that reduction. Is the cost of cutting offending through prisons too high? Could alternatives provide better value for money?

These are the questions I and my colleagues from the Matrix Knowledge Group
(http://www.matrixknowledge.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/the-economic-case-for-and-against-prison_web.pdf)
have sought to address in our latest research. Using data from the US and the UK from 1996, we measured the net benefit of alternatives to prison. The result? Alternatives to prison seem to deliver a better return on public money.

Residential drug treatment programmes, for example, offer a £200,000 net benefit over prison over the lifetime of an offender. This is because drug treatment programmes are cheaper to run than incarceration systems and because they deliver lower re-offending rates. Similarly, using surveillance instead of cells saves £125,000 per convict.

This research could be used to argue that we simply have to reduce the cost of prison per prisoner to make it deliver value for money. If we cut corners and McDonald's-ise our cells, wouldn't prisons then deliver value for money? Our research suggests not. Once you crunch the numbers, investing more in prisons per head actually delivers increased savings in the long run. Because of associated reductions in re-offending rates, prisons which include educational and vocational programmes save society £50,000 for each inmate whilst prison with drug treatment saves £125,000.

Other work supports our findings, with some key studies indicating that prison as we know it is completely unjustifiable on economic grounds. Cynthia McDougall and colleagues point out that for every $1 spent on prison, only $0.24 to $0.36 is saved on avoiding offending. This contrasts to spending on probation, which delivers $1.70 in benefits for every dollar spent.

The debate for and against prisons has historically focused on the moral, political and social arguments for sentencing. But public money is scarce; we need to make sure that the benefits of our prisons outweigh their costs. Whatever penal policy we decide to pursue, ignoring the economic dimension to this argument is something we can no longer afford to do.
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This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday July 28 2008. It was last updated at 19:30 on July 28 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/28/justice.prisonsandprobation/print

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July 26, 2008

UK: Taking on the Titans: he US prison system, with its superjails, now warehouses one in 100 of our citizens. That's not a model the UK should emulate. By Julia Sudbury

Taking on the Titans

The US prison system, with its superjails, now warehouses one in 100 of our citizens. That's not a model the UK should emulate

By Julia Sudbury
guardian.co.uk
Saturday July 26 2008

The first slavery abolitionists were represented as extremist and utopian. Until the late 18th century, the idea of eliminating this deeply-rooted institution was unimaginable. Yet, 12 individuals who first met in a London printing shop in 1787 eventually managed to create enough momentum that, 51 years later, slavery ended in Britain's colonies.

Today, I believe that imprisonment – another practice violating human freedom and equality – could follow suit.

I am not alone. In September 1998, over three thousand people gathered in Berkeley, California, for the founding conference of Critical Resistance and thousands more are expected to attend our 10-year anniversary conference and strategy this September.

Today, Critical Resistance is a grassroots organisation that seeks to abolish the "prison-industrial complex": a symbiotic relationship between politicians, state correctional apparatus and corporations that promotes racialised mass incarceration as a catch-all "solution" to deep-rooted social, political and economic problems.

Those who profit from the prison-industrial complex include private prison corporations like US-based Wackenhut, which operates prisons for profit in the UK; politicians who win votes by promising to be tough on the latest overblown crime fad; and local chambers of commerce which embrace prison construction as a "recession-proof industry". Prison is, after all, one of the few industries that sees business go up when the economy goes down.

So, what is the abolitionist alternative? Abolition defines both the goal we seek and the way we do our work today. Abolitionists recognise that we do not create safer communities by locking people in cages; that prisons do not solve the problems that lead to crime, like drug use, poverty, violence or mental illness.

We also draw attention to the massive cost of perpetual prison expansion, which siphons public resources away from services that could be used to build safer and more egalitarian communities. We take seriously the ways in which people harm others, and seek to transform the social and economic conditions that promote violence, as well as creating community-based strategies to address harm and create accountability.

We believe that the violence of crime cannot be solved through the additional violence of policing, surveillance and separation from loved ones. Instead, we advocate focusing attention and resources on building empowered communities, with decent housing, secure jobs, food security, healthy environments and high-quality education, as the ultimate alternative to incarceration.

The challenge facing us is immense. In the US alone, over 2.3 million people are warehoused in prisons and jails. A recent report from the Pew Center found that, for the first time, in the US we now imprison one in every 100 adults; the figure is one in nine for black men aged between 20 and 34. The Pew report also found that this massive incarceration is impacting state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety.

Although many academics and policy-makers recognise that the US penal system is a bloated and wasteful failure, the UK is increasingly emulating the US. Britain's prison population has grown by more than a third in the past decade, and residents of England and Wales are more likely to be imprisoned than residents of any other western European country. Rather than seeking to reduce the number of people in prison, the Ministry of Justice proposes to increase the prison population further to 96,000 by building three US-style "superjails". These proposals are going ahead despite evidence from the US that superjails breed violence, dehumanise prisoners, and lead to medical neglect, self-harm and preventable deaths.

The prison-industrial complex will not be dismantled overnight. But many of us believe that the prison, like the institution of slavery, will one day be viewed as an obsolete and shameful relic of history. Until that day, I invite you to join the global movement to help build a world without prisons.

This article was completed with help from Rose Braz, national campaign director of Critical Resistance.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/26/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime/print

Posted by lois at 08:36 PM | Comments (0)

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

Posted by lois at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)

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

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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

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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 extra 8,000 inmates during the next six years. Where to get the money? is the question. And one possible answer is: from the general public.

"We are currently planning for the private sector to raise the finance to build any new prisons, which has been the model for the last 15 years," said the Home Office.

Property is thrift

The proposal hinges on a new investment vehicle called a Real Estate Investment Trust - or Reit for short - which will come into existence at the start of next year.These will be conventional property investment companies, but with significant tax advantages. They will not have to pay corporation tax on their income from rent, or on the capital gain they make on any sales of UK properties.And 90% of rental income must be given as dividends to the shareholders.

Nice for the shareholders.

Already some of the UK's biggest property firms have decided to take advantage of this and convert to the new tax status, come the New Year. The rules:it's not an investment where people can invest in small scale property companies So, could an existing or new firm set up in business as a Reit for the specific purpose of building and running prisons? This seems tricky, at least under the present rules.

Firstly, Reits have to be companies that have their shares traded on a recognised stock exchange. And they will have to own at least three properties. According to Oliver Gilmartin, an economist at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, "It's not an investment where people can invest in small scale property companies."

Building a prison for letting to the government in the future is allowed in principle.But three-quarters of profits in a Reit have to come from letting properties, which would rule out most pure construction companies.Furthermore, 75% of the value of the Reit's assets must be made up of those properties.So you would not get the tax advantages of being a Reit if your construction activity infringed on those limits.

Investment potential

Some would-be investors might regard that as a pity. The prisons, once built, could be let to the government on a long lease. This would guarantee a nice, predictable flow of income for the shareholders.You just have to regard prisoners as long-term, social tenants, whose rent is paid by the government. Given the government's - and the public's - enthusiasm for locking up criminals, there would probably be few problems with what landlords call void periods, ie unlet prison cells.But what about wear and tear? Or riot damage? Malcolm Harrison of the Association of Rental Letting Agents (ARLA) said: "Who is going to judge fair wear and tear? I'm not quite sure."

Cunning plans

Currently 11 prisons in the UK are managed by private companies such as GSL, Serco and G4S Justice Services.

Some new prisons have been built through the government's Private Finance Initiative.

Under this, private companies are paid to build, maintain and service buildings - such as schools, hospitals, roads and, indeed, prisons - in return for guaranteed payments for, say, 25 or 30 years, after which the building becomes public property.

So the government has no problem with cunning new ideas to bring in private finance for public projects.

But with the rules as they are, it is no wonder that a Home Office spokeswoman said: "We have not given any serious consideration to Reits, but are always ready to look at innovative ideas that could help us to build places more quickly and cost effectively." Story from BBC NEWS:
Published: 2006/12/01 15:58:06 GMT
Timeline of British Prisonshttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4887704.stm

AND

Public to be sold shares in new prisons
'Buy-to-let' scheme planned to fund building of 8,000 new jail places Alan Travis, home affairs editor Friday December 1, 2006 www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,1961501,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1

Guardian
The public are to be offered the chance to purchase shares in new prisons under a "buy to let" scheme being considered by the Home Office, it emerged yesterday.

The idea has been floated in an attempt to overcome the refusal of the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to find the extra money needed for 8,000 new prison places at a time when the service is at breaking point.

Home Office finance directors, who are looking for alternative ways of funding the next wave of new prisons, hope that the public can be tempted to invest in a new-style property company that would build jails and then rent them out to private prison operators. This would provide a steady guaranteed dividend from the "rental income".

One incentive for small investors is that the government's punitive penal policy has seen prison numbers rise relentlessly over the past 10 years and would appear to guarantee a steady stream of rental income with no apparent shortage of prison "tenants".

The prison population in England and Wales passed the 80,000 mark for the first time this week, with 85 of the 139 prisons in England and Wales officially declared to be overcrowded. The Home Office confirmed last night that it was considering a number of proposals, but the probation officers' union described the "buy to let" scheme as absurd.

The home secretary, John Reid, is under severe pressure to find the new prison places, but a standstill budget for the Home Office for the foreseeable future means it could take several years to fund and build the new prisons, all of which are to be privately run.

Over the summer the home secretary said he had won cabinet backing for 8,000 extra prison places, with 4,000 to be provided in existing jails and a further 4,000 in three "super-prisons" each housing 1,300 inmates, double the normal capacity. The model uses "real estate investment trusts" (Reits) which are to be launched by the Treasury in January and will enjoy tax exemptions.

They are designed to encourage a wider range of investors in property. This model has already been used in the United States by the Corrections Corporation of America to finance several new privately run jails. According to a Home Office source quoted by Building magazine, finance officials will be considering the option over the coming weeks.

Under the proposed system, the prison operator would rent the facility from the Reit and the income would be channelled back to the investors. Private prison contracts tend to be long-term in Britain, with 25-year leases common.

A Home Office spokeswoman said final decisions had not been made about providing the extra 8,000 prison places; she confirmed that the government was considering proposals for funding their construction through a number of means.

Harry Fletcher of Napo, the probation officers' union, said: "The Treasury has refused to finance a conventional prison-building programme so Mr Reid is having to go to extreme lengths to find the money. Under this scheme shareholders would have a vested interest in seeing that the jails were full as the more rent that would come in, the higher the dividends."

He said it was an absurd proposition and wondered what safeguards there would be to ensure that organised crime networks did not invest heavily and buy up the new jails.

Posted by lois at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2006

Repression and Resistance in Oaxaca

from Counterpunch:

November 21, 2006
Lessons from the Teachers
Repression and Resistance in Oaxaca
By LUIS HERNÁNDEZ NAVARRO
(Luis Hernández Navarro is Opinion Editor at La Jornada in Mexico,where parts of this text were published. He is a collaborator with the Americas Program online at www.americaspolicy.org)
Translated by Katherine Kohlstedt.

A profound political crisis is shaking up Mexico. The rules thatregulate the balance of power between elites have been violated. From above, there is no agreement or any possibility for one in the short term.

A severe crisis in the model of control has eroded relationships of
domination in many parts of Mexican national territory. People accustomed to obeying have refused to do so. People who think they are destined to rule have been unable to impose their command. Those from below have become disobedient. When those on the top want to impose their opinion from above, in the name of the law, they are ignored from below. Nowhere is the breakdown in control and the effervescence of rebellion as obvious as in the state of Oaxaca.

Oaxaca is a state plagued with social problems. It is a Mexican tourist enclave, surrounded by poverty where people survive on remittances sent by migrant workers abroad. Within its territory one finds land struggles, confrontations between caciques(local bosses ) and coyotes (migrant smugglers), local government conflicts, ethnic revenge, fights for better prices for agricultural products, and resistance against the authoritarian state.

Since May 15, Oaxaca has been in the throes of its most massive and
significant social movement in recent history. The protest begun by Section 22 of the national teachers' union (SNTE, for its initials in Spanish) soon became the expression of the social contradictions in the state. It is not at all unusual that teachers mobilize for pay raises around the time of the contract negotiation. This time it has gone well beyond a union struggle to fuse protests of many groups. Oaxacan society has come out in force to show its solidarity with the teachers and add in other demands and grievances.
Around 350 organizations, indigenous communities, unions, and non-profits have jointed to form the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO).

Lessons from the Teachers

The teachers' movement is the only democratic force with a presence
throughout the state. It's the only organization capable of making their political presence felt simultaneously in every municipality of the state.

Oaxacan teachers work in precarious conditions. Their students arrive at school with empty stomachs and drop out so they can help their families work in the fields. Their classrooms are entirely unequipped. In order to get to the communities they work in, they often have to invest their own time and money in transportation, using roads that only exist in official reports. Teachers have come to identify closely with the precarious conditions of
their communities they work in and become not only fighters within their union, but the voices of the community's demands as well.

The protest in Oaxaca started as an expression of the union's struggle for a pay raise based on rezoning cost of living scales. This is nothing new with respect to struggles in years past. Their protest began on the same symbolic and traditional date as it has for many years: May 15, Teacher's Day. It is also common to use the presidential succession, to increase pressure on the government to negotiate.

The protest radicalized as a result of the state government's refusal to respond to their demands. Instead of sitting down to negotiate, the governor threatened the teachers, and then sent police to forcefully evacuate education workers camped out in downtown Oaxaca. The outrageous repression of June 14 radicalized the teachers, and from then on they demanded the resignation of the state governor. Instead of seeking solutions, the federal government pretended not to notice and said that it was a local issue over which it had no authority.

This explosive political situation was further polarized as a result of the last Oaxacan gubernatorial election. Gabino Cué, backed by the ex governor Diódoro Carrasco and a coalition of the majority of opposition parties, confronted Ulises Ruiz, one of the main operators of Madrazo, at that time candidate of the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) for the presidency. The tight win by the PRI was seriously questioned by Cué supporters, who claimed election fraud against him.

The teachers feel such responsibility to their communities that the majority of them left the capital occupation for a few weeks to end the school year with their communities. Since classes are out they have returned to the city to carry out their plan of action. The city of Oaxaca is theirs.

The Movement Grows

The claims of the teachers quickly found an echo in a broad cross-section of Oaxacan society. Bothered by the electoral fraud that brought Ulises Ruiz to power, as well as governmental violence against the group of community and regional organizations, thousands of Oaxacans took the streets and more than 30 town halls.

Since that time a large part of the society does not recognize Ulises Ruiz as governor. Since a May 25 meeting between Ruiz and the Negotiation Commission, they have not seen him. July 11 the APPO began, successfully, a round of pacific civil disobedience that seeks to make obvious the lack of governance and authority that exists in the state.

The movement took political control of the city of Oaxaca. Since the
occupation by federal police that retook the center on Oct. 29, the movement has blocked the entrances to expensive downtown hotels and the local airport; it obstructs traffic and impedes the entrance to public buildings and the state congress.

Ruiz, desperate to keep power, betrayed his boss, PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, proposing at a meeting of PRI state governors that they recognize PAN candidate Felipe Calderón as the winner of the presidential contest. The federal government, needing allies to confront the protests over presidential election fraud, has responded by maintaining the teetering governor.

As time passes the situation worsens. On July 22 a group of 20 unknown people fired high-powered weapons at the Radio Universidad facilities. The university radio station, run by the movement, has been converted into a formidable instrument of information and social mobilization. The same day Molotov cocktails were thrown at several movement leaders.

Dirty War

Physical violence against protesters is not new to Oaxaca. In the '80s Amnesty International published a broad report documenting human rights violations in rural areas of Oaxaca and Chiapas. Taking power by force, murders of political dissidents, forced disappearances, and arbitrary detentions have been common instruments used by a succession of state governments to maintain control in the state.

The list of atrocities committed by the government of Ulises Ruiz against the teachers movement and the APPO grows day by day. Combined with the lack of governance and stability in the state a serious human rights crisis has emerged.

The assassination of dissenting citizens at the hands of hired hit men and plainclothes police, open fire against newspapers and independent radio stations, kidnapping and torture of social leaders by paramilitaries, death threats, underground detention centers, arson of buses by groups affiliated with PRI authorities, and random detention without warrant of movement leaders are some of the aggressions committed against the civic movement that demands the resignation of the governor.

The novel aspects of the violence against resisters is that it seeks to dispel and intimidate the broadest and most vigorous social movement the state has seen in decades, and-with the exception of the October police offensive-it is done "unofficially." This means that the majority of the repressive acts are executed by state police and paramilitaries dressed as civilians.

The state government does not usually admit to responsibility for these incidents, although it has admitted that it his holding some of the individuals originally "disappeared" in high-security prisons. In Oaxaca a new episode is being played out of the dirty war that shook the country in the '70s and '80s and resulted in the disappearance of 1,200 people.

To "justify" the dirty war, the government and part of the media have spread the message that the Oaxacan popular movement has been "infiltrated" by leftist, politically militant organizations that have radicalized the protest. But the movement for the resignation of the governor has been explicitly framed as an act of civil disobedience, and has followed clearly pacifistic paths. At no time has the APPO used firearms in their actions.
The radicalism comes from the governmental authoritarianism. The violence is originating from the other side.

An Organized Society

Oaxacan society is highly organized into ethnopolitical groups, communities, farms, producers, unions, and environmental and immigrant defense groups. It has built solid, permanent transnational networks. The traditional methods of governmental domination, based on a combination of co-opting, negotiation, division, manipulation of demands and repression, have run out.
The new dirty war has become the last resort of a cornered political class to recover the chain of command.

In Mexico there is a long history of social struggles that precipitate larger scale conflicts. They are an alarm bell that alerts a country to serious political problems that have not been resolved. For example, the workers' strikes at Cananea and Rio Blanco are recognized as predecessors to the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. The popular movement that has shaken Oaxaca since May is an expression of this type of protests. It has revealed
the end of the old forms of domination, the crisis between the political class and society, and the path that the people's discontent could take throughout the country.

The movement has ceased to be a traditional struggle or protest and begun to
transform itself into an embryo of an alternative government. The
governmental institutions are increasingly empty shells without authority or
public confidence, while the people's assemblies have become the site of
construction of a new political mandate.

Federal Police Force Arrives

When the federal government finally sends the federal police, in the streets
of Oaxaca the people confront them with peaceful protests. They hold up
handwritten banners that state simply: "leave, you're not welcome."
Thousands of people use their bodies as their only weapon to resist the
political aggression. Through their actions, they convert fear into anger,
humiliation into dignity.

At three of the barricades the tension is higher. People throw sticks and
stones. A few decide to toss Molotov cocktails. Others launch bottle
rockets. From Radio Universidad, the voice of the movement against Ulises
Ruiz, announcers urge protesters repeatedly to use pacific means to confront
the incursion of federal troops. Be patience, be calm, be smart, they warn.
Don't let yourself be provoked, they insist.

The government's offer to carry out a clean dissuasion operation with no
physical contact goes up in smoke in the first moments. Empty words. The
police throw tear gas, wave their clubs around, shoot off firearms, ransack
private homes, detain individuals, confront journalists, and seize their
materials. Their byword is advance with all you've got. They take over
public buildings, erase evidence of their mistakes and excesses, and make
their strength felt.

Fighting Fire with Gasoline

As in Atenco, the government launches a huge media campaign to cover up the
atrocities of its henchmen. Fox declares there are no deaths, that the
results are "a clean record." But the voice of the dead exposes the truth.
More than 50 detainees refute him. The wounded deny his words.

The battle of Oaxaca is the most important popular revolt in many years and
could mark the future of social protest in Mexico. Although the powerful say
that the police incursion was to guarantee public safety, what is really
behind the repression is the destruction of the newly woven grassroots
social consciousness and the decision to support Ulises Ruiz.

While federal forces act like an occupying army swollen by the positions it
has managed to retake, Oaxacans fly hundreds of Mexican flags and sing the
national anthem. In the fight for patriotic symbols, the government loses
the first round. A short time after the federal forces took the center of
the city and strategic positions, citizens put up new barricades behind
their backs. People from highland communities come down to the capital to
support the movement. They didn't just come to march in a demonstration. A
human fence has arisen that surrounds the aggressors.

There is no way to return to normalcy through violence. No way to knit the
social fabric through police occupation. Governing requires that the
governed recognize the legitimacy of their leaders. This acceptance does not
exist in Oaxaca and will never be attained with clubs and boots. Quite the
opposite, the fermenting inconformity has spread all over the country
because of the new aggressions. If until now some sectors of society had
remained neutral, the federal offensive has obliged them to take part.

The images on the seven o'clock news of confrontations between
made-in-Mexico robocops and the students and Oaxacan neighbors that defended
the university on Day of the Dead made it around the world. The Mexican
police were defeated by a popular uprising and the media bore witness.

The battle for Oaxaca is not over yet. On the contrary, the solution to this
conflict is more complicated now than ever and the resolution even further
away. As the unavoidable saying goes: they tried to put out the fire with
gasoline.

The latest move of the people's movement has been to convert their protest
into a central item on the national agenda. The following months will be
marked by the conflict. The federal government has got itself into a
quagmire that it can't get out of.

Oaxaca is today, more than ever, Mexico. The civil disobedience there is
close to becoming a popular uprising that, far from wearing out, grows and
becomes more radical every day. The establishment of forms of
self-government is reminiscent of the Paris Commune of 1871. The way things
are going, the example set by the nascent Oaxaca Commune is far from being
limited to that state. It could be a taste of what may sweep the country due
to the governmental refusal to clear up and clean up the presidential
elections of July 2.

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

November 21, 2006

Great Britain: "Crystal Meth: Britain's Deadliest Drug Problem"

Crystal meth: Britain's deadliest drug problem
By Jason Bennetto and Maxine Frith
Published: 21 November 2006 (Great Britain, The Independent) http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2001530.ece

Britain is under threat from a highly addictive drug, known as crystal meth or "ice", which has the potential to rival crack cocaine as the country's most dangerous drug, police chiefs are warning.

The stimulant, methamphetamine, also known as "Nazi crank", has begun to spread throughout the UK and is available in almost every city in Britain, according to police intelligence. It is becoming increasingly popular among clubbers and is starting to enter mainstream drug use.

Police chiefs have been alarmed by its rapid growth in the United States - where 12 million people are thought to have tried it - Australia and New Zealand, and fear that Britain will be next.

The growth in British laboratories making the drug puts people at risk of death or injury from explosions and toxic fumes, a police conference will hear today.

While the number of seizures of the drug are currently low, police are starting to uncover a growing number of makeshift laboratories manufacturing it. Last month a crystal meth factory was discovered on an industrial unit in a Derbyshire village, Stoney Middleton. Laboratories have also been found in London and the Isle of Wight.

The threat posed by crystal meth, a synthetic drug that can be smoked, swallowed, snorted or injected, will be highlighted at the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) drugs conference in Manchester today.

Commander Simon Bray, an Acpo spokesman, said: "It could become as popular as crack unless we recognise the potential danger is poses and take action to prevent its spread. There is increasing intelligence about methamphetamine which shows its presence in this country is growing. You can find it in Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, London - in almost every county. If people want to get hold of the drug they can find it."

He added: "We have not had many incidents yet, but if you look at the experience in the United States, New Zealand and Australia it started out with one or two laboratories which rapidly turned to hundreds. It is a bit like crack cocaine which suddenly appeared to take off - we want to make sure it does not get to that stage."

The number of illegal laboratories producing it grew in the US from 3,800 in 1998 to 8,500 in 2001, peaking at 10,200 in 2003. An estimated 12.3 million Americans had tried the drug by 2003. It is now more popular than cocaine or heroin in parts of America, and is considered by some to be more dangerous.

The American singer Rufus Wainwight is among several celebrities who have admitted overcoming an addiction to crystal meth, which increases sexual arousal.

Earlier this year the United Nations drug control agency warned that crystal meth was becoming a global problem and called for tougher restrictions on chemicals used to make it.

Police intelligence has shown that although still relatively rare in the UK, the drug is becoming increasingly popular among clubbers, and is being used by heroin addicts and rough sleepers.

Police are also concerned that the manufacture of the drug - the chemicals and instructions on how to use them are readily available on the internet - will lead to deaths and injuries from explosions and poisonous fumes produced during the cooking process. Mr Bray said: "The chemicals used to make the drug include iodine and drain cleaner - the substances are akin to nerve agents. They can result in explosions and toxic waste.

"In America quite a lot of children have been affected by the chemicals, and anyone responding to an incident [such as a fire] can be in danger. It can take months to decontaminate a site."

A gram of meth costs about £50, enough for several "hits". Its effects include psychosis and paranoia, and it has a particularly addictive nature that can be compared to crack cocaine and heroin.

The police believe that as well as being manufactured in Britain it is also being imported into the UK by a Filipino criminal network.

The police and Home Office are so concerned about the potential growth in the drug that in January they are due to upgrade the drug from a Class B to a Class A substance. This would mean those caught dealing it could receive a life sentence while those in possession could face up to seven years.

Key facts
by Geneviève Roberts

* Crystal meth (methamphetamine) is a class A drug, reclassified from class B in June this year.

* When smoked, snorted or injected it gives a "rush" similar to that produced by crack cocaine and is highly addictive.

* 10 per cent of gay men in London have used crystal meth. In London, half a gram costs £25.

* It causes cardiovascular problems and increased blood pressure. An overdose can cause overheating and convulsions.

How 'crank' laid waste to small-town America (Great Britain, The
Independent)
By Andrew Buncombe
Published: 21 November 2006 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2001538.ece

It had been several months since Shaden had last taken methamphetamine and yet her body still twitched or "tweaked" as she recounted her fight to kick the habit.

"The worst thing is that you are so blind in your reality. You know in the back of your head not to take it," said the mother, her eyes dark and sullen, as she sat in a women's treatment centre. "In the end, I had no self worth, no self-esteem. I knew nothing was going to get better. I had to get away from my family. I was praying and crying."

Methamphetamine has become the scourge of small-town America, a drug whose ease of manufacture and affordability has allowed it to penetrate deep into the US heartland. The drug first drew the attention of experts and law enforcement in the West but steadily its reach has moved eastwards, often trafficked by Hispanic gangs and produced in labs south of the border.

In rural areas - such as Missoula, Montana, where Shaden talked to The Independent earlier this year, it is eating up the lion's share of resources of the local authorities. The problem has become so great that the Department of Justice has designated 30 November as National Methamphetamine Awareness Day.

Michael Walther, director of the National Drug Intelligence Centre, said earlier this year: "Over the past 10 years, methamphetamine trafficking and abuse has devastated individuals, families, and communities in western and Midwestern states and has now spread eastward to nearly every area of the country. Addressing the challenges presented by this highly addictive drug, including laboratory clean-up,and addict treatment has greatly depleted state and local resources."

It had been several months since Shaden had last taken methamphetamine and yet her body still twitched or "tweaked" as she recounted her fight to kick the habit.

"The worst thing is that you are so blind in your reality. You know in the back of your head not to take it," said the mother, her eyes dark and sullen, as she sat in a women's treatment centre. "In the end, I had no self worth, no self-esteem. I knew nothing was going to get better. I had to get away from my family. I was praying and crying."

Methamphetamine has become the scourge of small-town America, a drug whose ease of manufacture and affordability has allowed it to penetrate deep into the US heartland. The drug first drew the attention of experts and law enforcement in the West but steadily its reach has moved eastwards, often trafficked by Hispanic gangs and produced in labs south of the border.

In rural areas - such as Missoula, Montana, where Shaden talked to The Independent earlier this year, it is eating up the lion's share of resources of the local authorities. The problem has become so great that the Department of Justice has designated 30 November as National Methamphetamine Awareness Day.

Michael Walther, director of the National Drug Intelligence Centre, said earlier this year: "Over the past 10 years, methamphetamine trafficking and abuse has devastated individuals, families, and communities in western and Midwestern states and has now spread eastward to nearly every area of the country. Addressing the challenges presented by this highly addictive drug, including laboratory clean-up,and addict treatment has greatly depleted state and local resources."

Posted by lois at 08:13 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2006

Bush Planetary Lock Up

Tomgram: Nick Turse on the Bush Planetary Lock Up

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=135352

The evil nature of our enemies has, it turns out, certain advantages -- at least when secret imprisonment and torture are at stake. The Bush administration has proved adamantly unwilling to talk to, or deal with, the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, except when it came to parking terror suspects we wanted tortured on his lot. In fact, the Syrians proved so handy and so eager to be good allies in the shadow world of global incarceration that U.S. officials turned over at least 7 of their prisoners to Syrian ministrations, according to a recent piece in the British Guardian.

There was nothing unique about administration reliance on the Syrians for this. From Uzbekistan to Egypt, autocratic regimes willing to torture have been destinations for CIA secret prisoner "rendering" operations. Following kidnappings or captures elsewhere on Earth, the Agency has sent planes hopscotching -- sometimes thousands of miles -- across the globe to our jailors of choice. Though the aircraft used were posh indeed, such assignments proved so rigorous for CIA handlers that they evidently regularly repaired to five-star hotels in Italy, on the Spanish island of Majorca, and possibly elsewhere for a little of the recuperative good life. In places like the Marriott Son Antem, a golfing resort in the Majorcan city of Palma, they could "journey to deep inner peace" (as the hotel spa advertised) at American taxpayer expense, even while on "extraordinary rendition" trips.

In fact, when it comes to what Nick Turse calls the Bush administration's "prison planet," little bits of news about further horrors seep out almost daily. Just in the last week, for instance, thanks to the Israeli paper Haaretz, we learned for the first time that at least some CIA rendition flights stopped at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv on their way to and from Cyprus, Jordan, Morocco, and other spots east and west, north and south -- and that the first case "of the United States handing Israel a world jihadi suspect" in a rendition operation has been confirmed.

At the same time, if you happened to be checking the South African press, you might have noticed a report that, a year ago, 10 unidentified men in several "luxury vehicles" -- luxury being a good sign that the CIA is probably involved -- pulled up in front of a home in the medium-sized town of Estcourt, ransacked it at gunpoint, shooed away the police, and then hooded and dragged off two Muslim men, one of whom was later released (thanks to the intercession of a South African lawyer). The other, Rashid Khalid, a Pakistani national, is suspected of being somewhere in the system of American secret global detention centers, but his fate remains a mystery twelve months later.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the International Red Cross, it was reported, had "its first opportunity in more than 20 months" to see hundreds of former Abu Ghraib prisoners now rehoused in a state-of-the-art multimillion dollar prison, Camp Cropper, that the Bush administration has built, almost without notice, near Baghdad International Airport. Finally (but not exhaustively), back in our growing homeland security state, "in a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law." The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007, according to Frank Morales, "allows the President to declare a ‘public emergency' and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to ‘suppress public disorder.'"

And that's just a modest grab bag of recent Bush administration global incarceration news, another humdrum week on what's increasingly coming to look like an American prison planet. These bits and pieces of information seeping out are undoubtedly merely suggestive of what we don't yet know. Now, let Nick Turse, in his usual vivid, well researched fashion, make a little sense of all this for you. Tom

American Prison Planet
The Bush Administration as Global Jailor
By Nick Turse

Today, the United States presides over a burgeoning empire -- not only the "empire of bases" first described by Chalmers Johnson, but a far-flung new network of maximum security penitentiaries, detention centers, jail cells, cages, and razor wire-topped pens. From supermax-type isolation prisons in 40 of the 50 states to shadowy ghost jails at remote sites across the globe, this new network of detention facilities is quite unlike the gulags, concentration-camps, or prison nations of the past.

Even with a couple million prisoners under its control, the U.S. prison network lacks the infrastructure or manpower of the Soviet gulag or the orderly planning of the Nazi concentration-camp system. However, where it bests both, and breaks new incarceration ground, is in its planet-ranging scope, with sites scattered the world over -- from Europe to Asia, the Middle East to the Caribbean. Unlike colonial prison systems of the past, the new U.S. prison network seems to have floated almost free of surrounding colonies. Right now, it has only four major centers -- the "homeland," Afghanistan, Iraq, and a postage-stamp-sized parcel of Cuba. As such, it already hovers at the edge of its own imperial existence, bringing to mind the unprecedented possibility of a prison planet. In a remarkably few years, the Bush administration has been able to construct a global detention system, already of near epic proportions, both on the fly and on the cheap.

Sizing Up a Prison Planet

Soon after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the U.S. began the process of creating what has been termed "an offshore archipelago of injustice." In addition to using "the Charleston Navy Brig" and locking up "one prisoner of war in Miami, Florida," according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Bush administration detained people from around the world in sweeps, imprisoned them without charges and kept them incommunicado at U.S. detention facilities at a CIA prison outside Kabul, Afghanistan (code-named the "Salt Pit"), at Bagram military airbase in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba, among other sites.

Since it was set up in 2002, the detainment complex at Guantanamo Bay has been the public face of the Bush administration's semi-secret foreign prison network -- a collection of camps, cells, and cages that today holds 437 prisoners. But "Gitmo" has always been the tiny showpiece, the jewel in a very dark crown, for a much larger, less visible foreign network of military detention facilities, CIA "black" sites, and outsourced foreign prisons. It is a prison camp that rightly attracts opprobrium, but it also serves to focus attention away from shadowy ghost jails, borrowed third-nation facilities, much larger prisons holding thousands in Iraq, and a full-scale network of detention centers and prisons in Afghanistan.

We may never know how many secret prisons exist (or, for a time, existed) in the shape-shifting American mini-gulag, but according to the Washington Post, some locations for these black sites include itinerant CIA detention centers "on ships at sea," a site in Thailand, and another on "Britain's Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean." Uzbekistan has been reported as one possible location, Algeria another. Denials were issued about ghost jails being located in Russia and Bulgaria. The British Guardian named "a US airbase in the Gulf state of Qatar" as another suspected site. And while proposed prisons on "virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia" were evidently nixed, various black sites located in "several democracies in Eastern Europe" apparently did come into being.

ABC News reported that the "CIA established secret prisons in Romania and Poland in 2002-2003" before shutting them down in early 2006 and moving the disappeared prisoners on to "a facility in North Africa." Following this report, Tomdispatch contacted Major General Timothy Ghormley, then the commander of the Combined Task Force Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) for U. S. Central Command, to inquire about the prisoner transfer. Ghormley stated: "There are no other U.S. bases in the Horn of Africa besides Camp Lemonier [in Djibouti]." He went on to assert, "There are no prisons under CJTF-HOA's command, and Camp Lemonier does not do prisoner transfers." When asked about CIA operations at the camp, he said he was barred from talking about "any security operations worldwide" and could not speak for the CIA. It is, however, worth noting that Amnesty International reported earlier this year on a Yemeni man who was "disappeared" and "flown on a small US plane to a site probably in Djibouti, where he was questioned by officials who told him they were from the FBI."

While these illegal sites, mainly run by the CIA, were intermittently identified in the U.S. or foreign press, it was only this September that President George W. Bush finally acknowledged the existence of the CIA's secret prisons. Still, it's unknown how many CIA black sites are still active and how many clandestine military prisons are still in operation.

What little we do know, however, indicates that the "archipelago of injustice" has grown to world-spanning proportions. For example, in an investigative article in the British Guardian in March 2005, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark reported that a network of over 20 U.S. prisons was believed to exist in Afghanistan, including "an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed ‘Camp Slappy' by former prisoners." Just recently, Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson, authors of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights, confirmed this, reporting that "the U.S. military has erected some 20 detention centers [in Afghanistan]… which all operate in near total secrecy. These are facilities that the U.N., the Afghan government, journalists, and human rights groups can't get into."

We know as well that suspects, swept up around the world, have been outsourced to the prisons and torture chambers of third countries in "extraordinary rendition" operations. The number of prisons operated by other countries is shadowy, but certainly geographically wide-ranging. Foreign facilities available for Bush administration use evidently have included the al-Tamara interrogation center, located in "a forest five miles outside [Morocco's] capital, Rabat"; sites in Jordan including "prisons in the capital, Amman, and in desert locations in the east of the country"; facilities in Saudi Arabia; "a series of jails in Damascus," Syria; "the interrogation centre in the general intelligence directorate in Lazoughli and in Mulhaq al-Mazra prison" in Egypt; "facilities in Baku, Azerbaijan"; and "unidentified locations in Thailand," among others.

The treatment given in 2002 to Canadian Maher Arar, recently the recipient of the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award, offers a glimpse into the American prison planet in action in its early stages of formation. Arar has described how he was detained and then held incommunicado -- shackled and chained -- in a terminal in New York's JFK Airport before being transported to Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center. At that Federal prison, Arar recalls an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agent telling him, "The INS is not the body or the agency that signed the Geneva Convention… against torture."

"For me," said Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria, "what that really meant is we will send you to torture and we don't care." He was, in fact, soon flown to Jordan, where he was beaten, and then driven to Syria. There, he was locked in a filthy, dark cell "about three feet wide, six feet deep and about seven feet high" where he was kept in isolation for 10 months and 10 days when not being physically assaulted. Despite being tortured into a false confession, Arar was found to have no links to terrorism and was never charged with crimes of any sort by the United States, Canada, Jordan, or Syria. Instead, he was sent back to Canada without so much as an apology or explanation by the Bush administration. His is the archetypal tale of the American prison planet that has been under construction these last years -- a torture tour of the globe's most dismal hell holes. How many others have suffered variations of this treatment remains unknown. The few useful figures we do have, such as the European parliament's April 2006 findings of over 1,000 secret CIA flights over European Union territory alone since 2001, suggest a large number of "extraordinary renditions" have been carried out.

When President Bush finally came (somewhat) clean about the CIA's illegal prisons (even turning them, along with his torture policies, into a proud election issue), a senior State Department official also asserted that there were "no detainees" still in them. Within days, however, newspapers began to point to evidence that people presumed to have been disappeared by the U.S. were still unaccounted for. In mid-October, a specific case hit the press when it was disclosed that "a Syrian with Spanish citizenship, was captured in Pakistan in October 2005 and is held in a prison operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency."

Operation Iraqi Freedom?

The war in Iraq boosted the profile of the American prison planet immeasurably, especially after the Abu Ghraib prison revelations burst into public view in the spring of 2004. At that time, approximately 20,000 Iraqis were imprisoned by U.S. forces, including -- a report that year disclosed -- more than 100 children as young as 10 years of age.

Over two years later, there are still many thousands of Iraqis held by U.S. forces in that country -- including about 3,550 in a brand new "$60-million state-of-the-art detention center" at Camp Cropper near Baghdad's airport and another almost 9,500 in somewhat more primitive prison conditions at Camp Bucca in the south and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.

Meanwhile, the number of prisoners and detainees held by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government and allied militias and death squads is murky at best, but probably sizeable. Secret prisons -- where the grimmest kinds of torture are performed, often with power drills -- are reputed to be scattered around Baghdad, the capital. In November 2005, then-Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari admitted receiving word on conditions in just one of these. According to the BBC, "173 detainees had been held [in an Interior Ministry building], that they appeared malnourished, and may have been 'subjected to some kind of torture.'" The next month, the Washington Post reported the discovery of a "second Interior Ministry detention center where cases of prisoner abuse have been confirmed by U.S. and Iraqi officials."

By June of this year, it was reported that the Iraqi Interior Ministry was still holding 1,797 prisoners; the Defense Ministry a smaller undisclosed number; and the Justice Ministry, at least 7,426.

Lockdown, USA

The offshore archipelago of injustice garners the headlines, but it's the homeland prison network that locks up far more people and provides at least one possible model for what the foreign network could morph into given the time and funds to expand and harden into a permanent supermax system. Comprised of federal and state prisons, territorial prisons, local jails, "facilities operated by or exclusively for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement," military prisons, "jails in Indian country," and juvenile detention facilities, the homeland prison system is a truly massive apparatus.

Just as the global network has expanded in the years since 9/11, so has incarceration in the U.S. In fact, it has climbed steadily in recent years. Today, the U.S. stands preeminent among all nations in treating people like caged animals. According to statistics provided to the BBC by the International Centre for Prison Studies, 724 people per 100,000 are imprisoned in the U.S., overwhelmingly trumping even increasingly authoritarian Russia, the world's second-ranked prison power, who's rate of caging humans is only 581 per 100,000.

All told, the U.S. now has 2,135,901 prisoners in domestic detention facilities, alone -- several hundred thousand more than are imprisoned in both China and India, the world's two most populous countries, combined. Of these people, 192,198 are imprisoned in federal facilities -- though just 5.3% of them for the violent crimes of most people's nightmares: homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping, and sex offenses. Instead, most -- 53.6 % -- are locked up on (often small-time) drug charges.

Of the federal prison population, the government classifies about 0.1 % (100 people) as having committed "national security" offenses. There's no category in the U.S. system for political prisoners, which doesn't mean they don't exist. According to a 2002 Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal article by J. Soffiyah Elijah, there were, prior to September 11, 2001, "nearly 100 political prisoners and prisoners of war incarcerated in the United States" -- many of them the surviving victims of Vietnam-era government campaigns against activists.

There is also another group of political prisoners of indeterminate number not listed on the rolls -- war resisters. Just recently Iraq War veteran turned resister Kevin Benderman was released from a military prison where he had been held for over a year for refusing to redeploy to Iraq due to his conscientious objection to the war. While Army Lieutenant Ehren Watada is currently facing an eight-year prison sentence, if convicted, for similar opposition to Iraq. One website lists 27 war resisters "presently in legal jeopardy, or currently incarcerated" who have gone public with their stories.

Additionally, in the immediate wake of 9/11, the government conducted sweeps of Muslim immigrants (and Muslim-Americans) reminiscent of the detentions of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II, "locking up large numbers of Middle Eastern men, using whatever legal tools they can." There was never any full accounting of these mass roundups, codenamed PENTTBOM, or what happened to all the people who were rousted from beds or yanked out of places of work by federal agents. What little is known suggests that "762 of the 1,200 PENTTBOM arrestees were charged with immigration violations at the behest of the FBI because agents thought they might be associated with terrorism... [but] almost every one was either deported or released within a few months." Only a small percentage of the 1,200 are thought to have even been processed through the federal criminal justice system.

This summer the Washington Post announced that, after 5 years of captivity, Benamar Benatta, "believed to be the last remaining domestic detainee from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was released." In mid-October, however, word surfaced that Ali Partovi, also caught in the dragnet, was still being held captive although he "is not charged with a crime, not suspected of a crime, [and] not considered a danger to society."

Preemptive Incarceration

From time to time, certain people in the U.S. also find themselves tossed into special kinds of detention facilities. For example, during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City, protesters (and also bystanders) swept up in indiscriminate mass arrests or illegal acts of preemptive incarceration were temporarily locked up in "Marine and Aviation Pier 57," a filthy facility of razor-wire topped chain-link cages that was soon dubbed "Guantanamo on the Hudson." While being imprisoned in New York City's own Gitmo didn't begin to compare to being tossed in the real McCoy or any other secret offshore site, there was one striking similarity. U.S. intelligence officials estimated that 70-90% of prisoners detained in Iraq "had been arrested by mistake." That was also 2004. The next year, it was revealed that, of the large majority of RNC arrest cases that had run their course, 91% of the arrests were dismissed or ended in acquittals.

On the American prison planet, not only has the principle of habeas corpus been formally abolished and torture proudly added to the mix, but that crucial tenet of the legal system, the presumption of innocence, has been cast aside. Whether at home or abroad, the solution for U.S. security forces is a simple one, identify the likely suspects, conduct sweeps, and preemptively lock them up.

Concentration Camp, USA?

According to recent statements by the Department Homeland Security 's Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, some time in the future undocumented economic migrants may be imprisoned on "old cruise ships." Other illegals may even find themselves in a KBR concentration camp.

Earlier this year, news broke that Halliburton subsidiary, KBR -- the firm infamous for building prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay and for scandals stemming from work in the Iraq war zone -- received a $385 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build detention centers, according to the New York Times, "for an unexpected influx of immigrants" or "new programs that require additional detention space." For anyone who remembers the First World War-era proposal by four state governors to imprison members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for the duration of the conflict, or the 1939 Hobbs ("Concentration Camp") Bill that sought the detention of aliens, or the forcible relocation and imprisonment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the 1950 McCarran Act's provisions for setting up concentration camps for subversives, or the Vietnam-era plans to round up and jail radicals in the event of a national emergency and conduct mass detentions in the face of possible urban insurrections, the announcement may have seemed less than startling. But thought of in the context of prison-planet planning, it nonetheless strikes an ominous note indeed.

One Vietnam-era radical, former Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, grasped the implications immediately. "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," he said. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

Fear of a Prison Planet

In 2005, Irene Khan, Amnesty International's general secretary, described Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our time." But the American gulag is so much more than Guantanamo and so much worse. The combination of U.S. "homeland" prisons, where "one in 140 Americans, or as many people as live in Namibia, or nearly five Luxembourgs" are locked away, the offshore imperial detention facilities, the shadowy CIA black sites, and the ever-shifting outsourced detention facilities operated by other nations adds up to something new in history -- the makings of a veritable American prison planet.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch. Articles from his recent Los Angeles Times series, "The War Crimes Files" can be found here.

Copyright 2006 Nick Turse

posted November 2, 2006 at 3:56 pm

Posted by lois at 03:34 PM | Comments (0)

August 09, 2006

Global women prisoners top 500,000

Global women prisoners top 500,000
Press Association
Monday August 7, 2006 3:08 AM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-5998243,00.html

More than half a million women and girls are held in prisons globally, new research has revealed.

The first World Female Imprisonment List, drawn up by the International Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS) at King's College, London, brought together data from 187 countries.

England and Wales' female prisoner population of 4,392 constitutes 5.7% of the total in the two countries.

The European average is 4.4%, said the report.

About a third of the worldwide total are in the US (183,000) and a further third in China (71,280), the Russian Federation (55,400) and Thailand (28,450), said the list compiled by Roy Walmsley.

ICPS director Rob Allen said: "Given the high financial and social cost of imprisoning women, the data should prompt policy-makers in every country to consider what they can do to limit the numbers of women locked up.

"Excessive use of imprisonment does nothing to improve public safety."

Posted by lois at 08:59 AM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2006

U.S. Should Close Prison in Cuba, U.N. Panel Says

May 20, 2006
U.S. Should Close Prison in Cuba, U.N. Panel Says
By TIM GOLDEN, NY Times

UNITED NATIONS, May 19 — An important United Nations panel roundly criticized the United States on Friday for its treatment of terrorism suspects, and called for shutting down the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The panel's criticism came as military officials at Guantánamo disclosed the most serious disturbances by prisoners there since the camp opened four years ago, and reported new suicide attempts that had left two detainees hospitalized and unconscious.

The disturbances, which took place on Thursday, included a violent attack on guards that was put down by antiriot soldiers firing shotgun blasts and pepper spray, and an episode involving two other groups of detainees who tore apart their quarters and attacked guards in a showcase unit for the camp's most compliant inmates.

Military officials said the prisoners' actions were apparently aimed at raising political pressure on the Bush administration over its detention policy. Pressure was also ratcheted up by the report issued in Geneva by the United Nations Committee Against Torture.

After a lengthy review of United States policies, the committee dismissed several basic legal arguments the Bush administration had offered to justify such practices as the incommunicado detention of prisoners overseas and the secret transfer, or "rendition," of suspects for interrogation by other governments.

The panel, which monitors compliance with the Convention Against Torture, the main international treaty that bans such conduct, also concluded that the Central Intelligence Agency's widely reported practice of holding detainees in secret prisons abroad constitutes a clear violation of the convention.

The United States "should investigate and disclose the existence of any such facilities and the authority under which they have been established," the committee said in its 11-page preliminary report. It also called on the Bush administration to "publicly condemn any policy of secret detention."

The recommendations of the committee are not legally binding. But they are likely to be more influential than previous international reviews, in part because the Bush administration clearly took the process seriously, sending a delegation of more than two dozen officials to Geneva earlier this month to present its legal case.

On Friday, some of those administration officials responded to the report by defending the United States' treatment of suspected terrorists, and criticizing the committee's evaluation as flawed and superficial.

"I think the committee was guided more by popular concerns than by a strict reading of the convention itself," said the State Department's legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, who led the delegation.

"It obviously causes us to question whether our extensive presentation was worth it," Mr. Bellinger said.

"Unfortunately, I think the committee really had essentially written its report" beforehand, he said.

The report was delivered as part of the committee's periodic review of actions by signers of the torture convention, which the United States ratified in 1994.

The committee's report "welcomed" and "noted with satisfaction" several steps by the United States, including the administration's formal statement that all United States officials are prohibited from engaging in torture at all times and in all places.

But the panel, which is made up of 10 independent human rights experts from around the world, was hardly generous in its praise.

It took a broad swipe at the administration's argument that some of its policies — like the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge at Guantánamo — were defensible under laws of armed conflict.

It called for the United States to immediately end its practice of refusing to register some of the so-called high-value terrorism suspects it holds overseas or make them accessible to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Bush administration, the panel wrote, "should ensure that no one is detained in any secret detention facility under its de facto effective control."

The committee also urged the United States to make sure that its interrogation methods did not violate the convention, and it specifically called for an end to techniques like sexual humiliation and "water-boarding," a form of simulated drowning that reportedly has been used by the C.I.A.

In their presentation to the panel, Bush administration officials insisted that although abuses had taken place, those who committed them were consistently punished. But the panel appeared less than convinced, saying the United States should "promptly, thoroughly and impartially investigate any responsibility of senior military and civilian officials authorizing, acquiescing or consenting, in any way, to acts of torture committed by their subordinates."

The committee also recommended that the United States enact a federal criminal law against torture to supplement the prohibitions already in place. It also insisted that United States officials "should investigate, prosecute and punish" American citizens who are guilty of torturing people overseas.

"None of this is binding," said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. "The U.S. can just reject the judgment. But this is the judgment of the authoritative body of experts for interpreting the convention."

He called the panel's conclusions "a complete repudiation of virtually every legal theory that the Bush administration has offered for its controversial detention and interrogation policies."

The committee's appeal to close Guantánamo is only the latest in a recent series of calls from around the world. The senior Pentagon official in charge of detainee affairs, Charles D. Stimson, indicated that the administration was no more persuaded by the committee than it had been by others.

"That is one body's opinion," Mr. Stimson, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, said in an interview.

In recent remarks, President Bush and other officials have suggested that they would readily do away with the Guantánamo prison if they had a better alternative.

Meanwhile, the nearly 500 detainees appear determined to increase pressure on their captors.

The suicide attempts on Thursday came four months after military officials broke a wave of hunger strikes by force-feeding detainees while they were strapped into "restraint chairs" for hours at a time. But before the attacks on the guards, Guantánamo commanders said they had been gaining steadily greater compliance from the detainees, in part by improving their living conditions.

"This was probably the most violent outbreak here," the new commander of the detention camp, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr., said Friday. "This is a way to bring attention to their detention."

At a briefing for reporters unusual for its candor and detail, Admiral Harris said the disturbances began Thursday morning when a prisoner was found unconscious after ingesting "a large quantity" of anti-anxiety drugs that had apparently been hoarded by detainees.

In the early afternoon, guards discovered a cache of drugs hidden in the toilet of a cell. Minutes after that, a second prisoner was found in his cell, Admiral Harris said, "frothing at the mouth."

Both of the detainees were stable but still unconscious more than 24 hours after being hospitalized. Two other detainees also complained to the guards of nausea, military officials said, including one who said he tried to kill himself but did not have enough drugs.

At about 6:30 p.m., military officials said, guards noticed a detainee who appeared to be preparing to hang himself from the ceiling with sheets in Camp 4, the showcase, medium-security wing where detainees live together in dormitories.

But the guards were set upon by detainees who had slickened the floor with urine, soapy water and feces. After the prisoners hit the guards with blades from ceiling fans, pieces of metal and other improvised weapons, a riot-control unit was sent in with batons and shields.

The military police officer in charge of Guantánamo's detention operations, Col. Michael Bumgarner, said the detainees had continued fighting, even jumping off beds onto the guards. "Frankly, we were losing," he said.

At that point, Colonel Bumgarner said, guards shot five rounds of "nonlethal" pellets from a 12-gauge shotgun, and a rubber grenade from an M-203 launcher.

Rioting then broke out in two other blocks of Camp 4, as some 50 detainees demolished their quarters to make weapons to attack the guards. It was an hour, Colonel Bumgarner said, before the disturbances were entirely brought under control.

A military spokesman said 60 of the detainees were later transferred to more secure areas of the camp.

Posted by lois at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2006

District Judge Rules U.S. Policy Requiring Overseas HIV/AIDS Groups To Condemn Commercial Sex Work Violates Free Speech

Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Politics and Policy

District Judge Rules U.S. Policy Requiring Overseas HIV/AIDS Groups To Condemn Commercial Sex Work Violates Free Speech

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero on Tuesday in New York ruled that a U.S. policy requiring recipients of federal HIV/AIDS service grants to pledge to oppose commercial sex work violates the groups' First Amendment right to free speech, the AP/Long Island Newsday reports (Neumeister, AP/Long Island Newsday, 5/10).

The Bush administration in June 2005 notified U.S. organizations providing HIV/AIDS-related services in other countries that they must sign the pledge to be considered for federal funding. The policy stems from two 2003 laws, including an amendment to legislation (HR 1298) authorizing the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that prohibits funds from going to any group or organization that does not have a policy "explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking." The Open Society Institute, the Alliance for Open Society International and Pathfinder International last year filed the lawsuit against USAID over the policy. OSI has said the policy "weakens efforts to provide lifesaving services and information to sex workers" and is unconstitutional because it is vague and requires private organizations to adopt the government's position. Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Rosberger argued that the 2003 law mandating the pledge did not contain any provision intended to deter HIV/AIDS treatment efforts, including those for commercial sex workers (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 4/18).

Ruling
Marrero on Tuesday said the U.S. Supreme Court 'has repeatedly found that speech, or an agreement not to speak, cannot be compelled or coerced as a condition of participation in a government program" (AP/Long Island Newsday, 5/10). Marrero in his opinion said that AOSI, OSI and Pathfinder "allege that adopting a policy opposing prostitution violates" their principles of governance, including opposition to "adopting any policy positions that would lead to the stigmatization of socially marginalized groups." Marrero ruled that the U.S. policy "impermissibly discriminates based on viewpoint and compels speech, [and] it also violates the First Amendment." He added, "Given these circumstances, the court finds that plaintiffs have made the necessary showing of irreparable harm" (Marrero, opinion, 5/9). Marrero's ruling temporarily blocks the government from continuing the policy. A similar lawsuit currently is pending in Washington, D.C., the AP/Newsday reports.

Reaction
Lawyer Rebekah Diller, who represented the groups, said, "It's really a tremendous victory for public health," adding, "It will enable these organizations to serve very vulnerable women" (AP/Long Island Newsday, 5/10). "We're delighted that the court recognized the pledge requirement as unconstitutional and overreaching," Ricardo Castro, a board member of AOSI, said, adding that the policy "hampers organizations on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic working to save lives through proven prevention methods" (Ascribe, 5/9). Megan Gaffney, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, declined to comment on the ruling (AP/Long Island Newsday, 5/10).

Posted by lois at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2006

UK: Racial Profiling and anti-terror stop and search

COMMENT
Racial profiling and anti-terror stop and search
By Arun Kundnani
31 January 2006, 4:00pm
Amid growing public concern about stop and search powers under terror laws and the challenge by Liberty in the High Court over their misuse, Arun Kundnani examines some of the key issues in the debate.

The new powers introduced under the Terrorism Act

Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) stops could only be carried out by police if they had 'reasonable suspicion'. But in Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 new powers were introduced to allow stops and searches in order to prevent terrorism - no such suspicion was required. To regulate the use of such wide powers a special process of ministerial authorisation was set up to restrict such stops to a limited place and time where it was thought, on the basis of specific intelligence, necessary to prevent terrorism. And before police forces could use these powers, an authorising officer of Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) rank had to issue an order with the reasons for the authorisation. The order could last no longer than 28 days and the Secretary of State had to approve the authorisation within 48 hours.

However, in practice, the Metropolitan police has had a rolling authorisation across its whole district since February 2001. This has been justified on the grounds that the whole of London has been under permanent threat of terrorist attack over this time. And this fact only emerged by chance. It was only during a court hearing into the policing of protests at an arms fair in the Docklands in October 2003 that it emerged that the Section 44 powers had, in fact, been renewed every 28 days since the Act came into force in February 2001. Till then, the public had not even been told that these powers were in permanent effect.

The operation of these powers is surrounded with a climate of secrecy and non-accountability that cannot be justified by operational reasons alone.

The Terrorism Act 2000 has led to 'racial profiling'

The so-called 'code A guidance' on Section 44 advises first that: 'Officers must take particular care not to discriminate against members of minority ethnic groups in the exercise of these powers.' But it goes on to say that: 'There may be circumstances, however, where it is appropriate for officers to take account of a person's ethnic origin in selecting persons to be stopped in response to a specific terrorist threat (for example, some international terrorist groups are associated with particular ethnic identities).'[1] There is a concern that this clause effectively gives a licence to the police to stop and search people on the basis of an 'ethnic' profile of terrorist suspects, what US civil liberties activists would describe as 'racial profiling'.

Specifically, there is concern that police forces may be using Section 44 to target people who appear to police officers to be Muslim. The Home Office's Stop & Search Action Team Interim Guidance, which is a guidance document for police managers published in 2004, suggests this interpretation when it states that: 'There may be circumstances where it is appropriate for officers to take account of a person's ethnic background when they decide who to stop in response to a specific terrorist threat (for example, some international terrorist groups are associated with particular ethnic groups, such as Muslims).'[2] Of course, as the authors of this document ought to know, there is no such ethnic group as 'Muslims'. What is revealed here is anti-terrorism being used as a justification for racial profiling against Asians, Blacks and people of Middle Eastern appearance - the ethnic groups police officers would most likely associate with Islam. This may explain why Blacks and Asians were both four times more likely than Whites to be stopped under these powers in 2002/03.[3] Furthermore, according to one recent report, the number of Asian and Black people stopped and searched in London streets by police using anti-terrorism powers increased more than twelve-fold after the July 7 bombings.[4]

There seems to be confusion within the authorities as to whether such discriminatory stops are justifiable on this matter. In March 2005, Home Office minister Hazel Blears stated that Muslims should accept as 'reality' that they would be stopped and searched more often than others - going against the grain of much of the post-Macpherson agenda on stop and search.[5] On the other hand, documents such as the Association of Police Authorities' Know your rights leaflet, which is widely used as a guide for the public on their rights during a stop and search, states that: 'You should not be stopped or searched just because of: your age, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion or faith; the way you look or dress, the language you speak.'[6] Two different messages are being sent out here. It is likely that Hazel Blears' message is a truer reflection of actual policing practices. Stops found no terrorists

In the year 2002/3, police in England and Wales stopped and searched an average of 60 people a day as suspected terrorists, the majority while driving. That amounted to 21,577 stops and searches in one year under Terrorism Act powers. Whereas 13 per cent of stops and searches under normal police powers resulted in an arrest, the arrest rate for stops and searches on suspicion of terrorism was just 1.7 per cent. And the overwhelming majority of these arrests had nothing to do with terrorism. Only eighteen arrests in connection with terrorism were made in that year as a result of the 21,577 stops and searches carried out. None of these arrests resulted in a conviction for terrorist offences.[7] In other words, although tens of thousands of people were stopped and searched under suspicion of terrorism, these searches did not lead to a single conviction. The figures recorded in the following year showed a similar pattern.[8] By 2004/5 when one hundred people were stopped each day, 455 arrests were made out of 35,776 searches, a rate of 1.2 per cent.[9] Can the powers be justified as a deterrent?

Police forces themselves know that they cannot justify anti-terrorist stops and searches in terms of convictions. That is why they now say that the real value of anti-terrorist stop and search is as a deterrent to would-be terrorists. Police authorities have given evidence in parliament that a terrorist who is planning to attack Westminster tube station, for example, may be deterred if he sees that he may be stopped and searched by police officers.[10]

But these powers were never justified to parliament on the basis of a general deterrent effect resulting from searches of people. The intention was that their use would be tied to specific intelligence and used with a view to disrupting and arresting terrorists. Furthermore, any plausible deterrent effect would require a reasonable likelihood that any terrorist would be stopped and searched in the midst of carrying out a terrorist operation. That would require such a massive use of stop and search powers as to severely disrupt the daily lives of millions of people in London, especially if, as the Metropolitan Police argue, there is a permanent London-wide threat of terrorist attack. To swamp the capital with such a large degree of arbitrary stops and searches that terrorists are likely to be deterred from attacking London is not only a huge waste of police resources which could be used more efficiently in preventing terrorism; it is also a hugely disproportionate price to pay in terms of particular communities' civil rights. Finally, it is hardly credible that terrorists will just give up a planned attack if they think that they might be searched by a police officer. Criminalising communities

The result of anti-terrorist stop and search is the criminalisation of entire communities and the placing of tens of thousands of innocent people under suspicion. None of the lessons of the past - in relation to policing Black and Irish communities - appear to have been learnt. The damage to community relations is already clear. Youth workers in areas of London where police are targeting large numbers of Asian youths for stops and searches, such as in Tower Hamlets, describe an increasing atmosphere of tension. One youth worker reported that the situation locally was, in his words, like 'cowboys and Indians'. Even before 7/7, there were numerous anecdotes of young Asian men being stopped and searched, getting abused, being accused of membership of al-Qaida or even being beaten up. In many communities, there is a growing climate of fear; underground stations and bus stops have become places where police and immigration officers stop everyone whose skin colour or accent marks them out as suspect. No redress

Though the Independent Police Complaints Commission can take up complaints about the manner in which Section 44 stops and searches are carried out, there appears to be no provision for complaints about the fact that the stop and search was carried out at all, even though this is the main cause of public concern. Complaining, as commonly happens, that a police officer carried out a stop and search without any reason is redundant when there is no requirement in the guidelines that there be 'reasonable grounds for suspicion'. Misused on legitimate protestors

When the Terrorism Act 2000 was presented to parliament, it was argued that its measures were essential to meet the threat of international Islamic terrorism. Yet its powers are being used today against people who are protesting peacefully against the government. The very loose definition of terrorism in the 2000 Act leads to a real danger of Section 44 stop and search powers being used to suppress political dissent. Section 44 was used to search protestors outside the DSEi Arms Fair at the Excel Centre in Docklands in October 2003 and against anti-war protestors on their way to the Fairford Air Base earlier in 2003. It appears that stop and search was used on both these occasions for no other reason than to intimidate legitimate protestors. One protestor at the Fairford military base, for example, was reportedly ordered by police to strip down to his vest and wait in the cold for twenty minutes during a search at night when the temperature had fallen to minus four degrees. The new powers should be repealed

There is no evidence that Section 44 has helped prevent, detect or prosecute terrorism in any form and therefore new provisions should be repealed. For, if police officers have a reasonable suspicion that a criminal act, including terrorism, is about to be committed, they can in any event stop and search under the old PACE powers and go on to arrest a suspect if there are reasonable grounds.
Footnotes:
[1] Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Code A: Exercise by police officers of statutory powers of stop and search, pp8-9. [2] Home Office, Stop & Search Action Team, Interim Guidance, 2004, p12. [3] Section 95 Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System - 2003, Home Office, 2004. [4] Vikram Dodd, 'Surge in stop and search of Asian people after July 7', Guardian, 24 December 2005. [5] Vikram Dodd and Alan Travis, 'Muslims face increased stop and search', Guardian, 2 March 2005. [6] Association of Police Authorities, Stop and Search: know your rights, April 2005. [7] Arun Kundnani, 'Analysis: the war on terror leads to racial profiling', IRR News, 7 July 2004. [8] Section 95 Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System - 2004, Home Office, 2005. [9] Ben Russell, 'Police stop and search 100 people a day under new anti-terror laws', Independent, 25 January 2006. [10] Oral evidence by Sir John Quinton, Metropolitan Police Authority, to House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, 8 July 2004.

http://www.irr.org.uk/2006/january/ha000025.html

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January 05, 2006

South Africa: Prisons Filled to Bursting Point

04 January 2006
SA’s prisons filled to bursting point
Wendell Roelf, Business Day - Johannesburg,South Africa
Sapa
SA, an economic and political leader in Africa, is also the continent’s number one jailer. If prisons are a reflection of society, what conclusions are to be drawn from this reality, particularly in a nation rightfully proud of its nascent democracy?

In global terms, SA is not alone in registering a sharp increase in its prison population. Today more than 9-million men, women and children are held in penal institutions worldwide, according to the sixth edition of the World Prison Population List, compiled by Roy Walmsley at the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College, London.

More than 2-million of those prisoners, or 22% of the total, are found behind bars in the US, which maintains the world’s highest rate of imprisonment — with 714 prisoners for every 100000 inhabitants.

Russia and Belarus share Europe’s highest incarceration rate, with 532 prisoners per 100000 inhabitants.

China has the world’s second-highest number of prisoners, at 1,55- million. However, its incarceration rate (118 per 100000) reflects only sentenced prisoners. The latest list, compiled at the end of February last year, shows SA has Africa’s highest incarceration rate (413 per 100000), followed by Botswana (339 per 100000). Nigeria, the continent’s most populous state, trails with a modest 31 per 100000.

In terms of absolute numbers, SA’s prison population of 186700 dwarfs that of every other African country, including Egypt (80000), Ethiopia (65000) and even Rwanda, where approximately 103000 of the 112000 people behind bars are held on suspicion of participation in genocide. Even after the release of 65387 prisoners in June and August last year, SA still has the highest number of prisoners on the continent.

Walmsley, an honorary consultant to the United Nations, says that between mid-2002 and February last year inmate numbers rose in 73% of the 211 countries covered by the list. “The rise in prison populations worldwide is attributable to a variety of circumstances, varying from country to country. In some it follows the election of government ministers with a tough on crime agenda, in others it is related to increased use of drugs. In many it occurs despite decreases in crime levels.

“There are many different reasons. There is no uniform answer,” he says. SA faces a complicating factor: it has been just over a decade since a democratic government inherited a racially skewed criminal justice system lacking integrity or legitimacy in which prisons were not subject to credible or effective oversight. The transition to democracy was accompanied by a sharp increase in the reported incidence of violent crime. Statistics from the Institute of Security Studies show that recorded violent crimes such as murder, rape and all forms of robbery and assault grew from 618000 in 1994 to 751000 incidents in 1999.

These trends appeared to catch the new African National Congress-led government by surprise. As the public outcry over crime grew, however, government officials increasingly adopted a tough on crime stance. In 1998, then deputy president Thabo Mbeki, in an address to the South African Democratic Teachers Union, likened criminals to “barbarians in our midst”. In 1999 the late Steve Tshwete, then safety and security minister, was reported to have suggested that police officers deal with criminals “in the same way a bulldog deals with a bull”.

These words were accompanied by tougher laws and minimum sentencing. The prison population swelled rapidly, fuelled largely by an explosion in the number of awaiting-trial prisoners from 24265 in January 1995 to 63964 in April 2000.

Today, SA’s 240 prisons are grossly overcrowded. In September 2004 these institutions, designed for a total capacity of 113825 prisoners, housed 186546.

“It is no exaggeration to say that, if the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) were to cram as many animals into a cage as our correctional services are forced to cram prisoners into a single cell, the SPCA would be prosecuted for cruelty to animals,” said Pretoria High Court Judge Eberhard Bertelsmann in February last year when he gave reasons for not sending Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to prison.

Few dispute that SA’s social and economic disparities help to fuel crime. Inspecting Judge Hannes Fagan wrote in the 2003-04 annual report of the judicial inspectorate of prisons that of crimes committed, 30% were economic crimes and 50% aggressive crimes “largely engendered by poverty and joblessness and the frustrations that they cause”.

The immediate cost to the state of keeping so many people in jail is approximately R25m a day. But perhaps the most shocking statistic is that 28% of those behind bars — more than 52000 people — are awaiting trial and have not been found guilty of any crime.The awaiting-trial prisoners, who are held on average for several months, are not involved in any rehabilitation programmes, receive no training or schooling, and seldom have access to recreational facilities.

Despite government’s broadly centre-left policies, contradictory signals are evident when it comes to the criminal justice system. For example, minimum sentencing laws were extended last year, mandating minimum jail terms of up to 25 years and life for a variety of offences, including categories of theft, drug dealing, assault, rape and murder. “The effect of the minimum sentence legislation has been to greatly increase the number of prisoners serving long and life sentences. It has resulted in a major shift in the length of prison terms,” Fagan pointed out in a 2004-05 report on prisons.

On the other hand, in February last year the cabinet officially adopted the white paper on corrections, which proposes a radical shift in prison policy towards rehabilitation, to better reflect the country’s constitutional imperatives, and to conform to international human rights statutes to which SA is a signatory. However, the white paper acknowledges that there is a tremendous gap between the policy shift that it envisions and the current reality.

Posted by lois at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2005

Hometown Snubs Schwarzenegger Over Execution of Stanley Tookie Williams

December 27, 2005
Hometown Snubs Schwarzenegger Over Death Penalty
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BERLIN, Dec. 26 - For years the quaint Austrian town of Graz trumpeted its special relationship with its outsize native son, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Born in a village nearby and schooled in Graz, Mr. Schwarzenegger was an honorary citizen and holder of the town's Ring of Honor. Most conspicuously, the local sports stadium was named after him.
But early on Monday, under cover of darkness, his name was removed from the arena in a sort of uncontested divorce between the California governor and the town council, which had been horrified that he rejected pleas to spare the life of Stanley Tookie Williams, former leader of the Crips gang, who was executed by the state of California two weeks ago.

The 15,000-seat stadium had been named after Mr. Schwarzenegger in 1997 as an act of both self-promotion and fealty toward the poor farmer's son and international celebrity, who has always identified Graz as his native place.
But when he declined to commute Mr. Williams's death penalty, the reaction was swift and angry in Graz, which, like most places in Europe, sees the death penalty as a medieval atrocity.
"I submitted a petition to the City Council to remove his name from the stadium, and to take away his status as an honorary citizen," Sigrid Binder, the leader of the Green Party, said in a recent interview. "The petition was accepted by a majority on the council."
Before a formal vote was taken on the petition, however, Mr. Schwarzenegger made a kind of pre-emptive strike, writing a letter to Siegfried Nagl, the town's conservative mayor, withdrawing Graz's right to use his name in association with the stadium.
There will be other death penalty decisions ahead, he wrote, and so he decided to spare the responsible politicians of Graz further concern."It was a clever step," Ms. Binder said. "He took the initiative," she continued, and then suggested a bit of the local politics that had entered into the matter. "It was possible for him to do so," she said, "because the mayor didn't have the courage to take a clear position on this point."
Needless to say, Mr. Nagl, a member of the conservative People's Party, who opposed the name-removal initiative, does not agree.

He is against the death penalty, he said in an interview, and on Dec. 1, he wrote a letter to Mr. Schwarzenegger pleading for clemency for Mr. Williams. But he blames the leftist majority on the City Council - consisting of Greens, Social Democrats and two Communists - for trying to score some local political points at Mr. Schwarzenegger's and, he believes, Graz's own expense.
"One stands by a friend and a great citizen of our city and does not drag his name through the mud even when there is a difference of opinion," Mr. Nagl said in a letter he wrote to Mr. Schwarzenegger. "I would like to ask you to keep the Ring of Honor of the City of Graz."
The heated nature of the debate revealed how much a relatively small place like Graz, certainly a place with no military might or diplomatic power to speak of, wants to play a role as a sort of moral beacon, waging the struggle for what it considers the collective good.
Graz, a place of old onion steeples, museums and Art Nouveau architecture, designated itself five years ago, with a unanimous vote of the City Council, to be Europe's first official "city of human rights." While the designation has no juridical meaning, it provides a sort of goal to live up to.
"We are against the death penalty, not only in word, but really against the death penalty," said Wolfgang Benedek, a professor of international law at Graz University.
He said the council's reaction reflected the special circumstances surrounding Mr. Williams: a man who had written a children's book aimed at steering young people away from violence, he had already spent many years in jail, and seemed, to Europeans at least, to have reformed himself.
"Many people around the world pleaded with Mr. Schwarzenegger to show mercy in this case, and when he didn't, the city had somehow to react," Mr. Benedek said.
Mr. Benedek allows that there is an element of elite versus popular opinion on this matter. A poll by the local newspaper found that over 70 percent of the public opposed removing Mr. Schwarzenegger's name from the stadium.
This adds to a practical consideration very much on Mr. Nagl's mind: that Graz will no longer be able to count on using its special relationship with the governor to promote its image.
"We had the great classical culture on the one side," Thomas Rajakovics, the mayor's spokesman, said, referring to other important figures who are associated with Graz, from the astronomer Johannes Kepler to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, to the conductor Karl Böhm. "And on the other, we had Arnold Schwarzenegger and the popular culture. These were the two poles for us, but we're not allowed to use his name any more."
The Schwarzenegger name has, as it were, been erased. The new name is now simply Stadion Graz-Liebenau (a district of Graz), though there were other proposals. One was to name the stadium after the Crips, the gang that Mr. Williams founded, but that idea did not get widespread support. Another was to name it Hakoah, after a Jewish sports club that was banned after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.
But the first "city of human rights" did not seem quite ready for that either. It is not that there was vocal opposition but, as Ms. Binder put it, Austrians do not generally want a daily reminder of the terrible wartime past.
Meanwhile, city officials are holding on to Mr. Schwarzenegger's honorary citizenship ring, which arrived from the governor during the holidays. Mr. Rajakovics said they would keep it for him in the hope that one day he would take it back.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/international/europe/27austria.html

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December 25, 2005

U.S., Citing Abuse in Iraqi Prisons, Holds Detainees

December 25, 2005
U.S., Citing Abuse in Iraqi Prisons, Holds Detainees
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, Dec. 24 - The commander of American-run prisons in Iraq says the military will not turn over any detainees or detention centers to Iraqi jailers until American officials are satisfied that the Iraqis are meeting United States standards for the care and custody of detainees.

"Bottom line, we will not pass on facilities or detainees until they meet the standards we define and that we are using today," the commander, Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner of the Army, said in a telephone interview this week from Iraq.

The comments by General Gardner come in the aftermath of two recent raids of Iraqi government detention centers that uncovered scores of abused prisoners. They also follow calls by American officials for the Iraqi government to bar militias from dominating the security forces. American military experts have joined Iraqi officials in inspecting Iraqi detention centers.

The general's remarks also come at a time when three of the main American-operated prisons in Iraq remain severely overcrowded despite a $50 million expansion that is nearly finished and when Americans are training Iraqis to take over detention duties.

Pentagon and military officials say that Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, has expressed frustrations over the heavy burden of guarding and caring for a detainee population that is growing far faster than inmates can be processed and turned over to Iraqi authorities.

The number of violent detainees has grown to more than 14,000 from about 8,000 in January. The crowding has been compounded by a growing backlog of prisoners, now about 3,100 people, who are waiting for Iraq's fledgling judicial system to hear their cases.

General Gardner, who took command on Nov. 30, expressed optimism that the inspections of Iraqi detention sites would not unduly delay the American goal of delivering Iraqi detainees to the Iraqi government. Military officials said they had a tentative target of turning over American-run prisons to the Iraqis by the end of 2006, although no exact timetable has been approved. But other senior military officials said turning over all Iraqi prisoners to the Iraqis could stretch into 2007.

One Pentagon official described the Iraqi detainee population as a "millstone" that sapped personnel who otherwise could be assigned to other pressing missions. About 3,700 American personnel are assigned to detention operations, the equivalent of one full brigade out of the 17 American brigades now in Iraq, a figure that is scheduled to drop to 15 early next year.

Pentagon and military officials say the huge number of prisoners under American control is a constant source of tension with ordinary Iraqis two years after the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal came to light.

General Gardner said that he was painfully aware of the legacy of Abu Ghraib, but insisted that conditions at the American-run prisons in Iraq had improved strikingly. "Abu Ghraib was criminal and I was appalled," he said. "We've come a long way since then."

The issue of Iraqi detainees raises complex legal and diplomatic questions. The United States has pledged to conduct itself in keeping with international conventions, including one regarding torture that precludes handing prisoners to any country where they would face the likelihood of torture. Iraq is not a signatory to that treaty, and it is hard for the United States at this point to certify that some of these prisoners would not be tortured if put under the control of Iraqi jailkeepers.

The influx of detainees has swelled the population at the major American-run prisons to 119 percent of their ideal capacity, General Gardner said. As of this week, the military is holding 14,055 detainees in four prisons, a military spokesman, Lt. Aaron J. Henninger, said. In addition, 535 are being held at the brigade or division level around the country.

At Abu Ghraib, where crowding contributed to the worst of the prisoner abuses that occurred in late 2003, there are 4,924 detainees, nearly 40 percent over what the military considers ideal capacity.

At the largest center, Camp Bucca, in the south, the prison has been divided into compounds of about 150 people instead of 600 or more, to allow guards to maintain better control. There are 7,795 detainees there.

Camp Cropper, at the Baghdad airport, holds 140 prisoners, including dozens of so-called high-value detainees. Fort Suse, a 1980's Russian barracks in northern Iraq, was turned into a prison in October and holds 1,196 detainees.

The increase in the number of imprisoned foreign fighters - to 465 from 391 in June - underscores the shifting profile of insurgents taken into custody recently. These fighters come mainly from Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Jordan, the command said. In a survey taken in October, of the more than 3,500 new detainees in American-operated prisons in Iraq since January, about 87 percent were deemed to pose a "high risk" or "extremely high risk" to American personnel, about twice the percentage from late last year, military officials said. American officials this week were reclassifying all detainees as either low, medium or high-risk prisoners.

Many of the new prisoners are considered so dangerous that two review boards, each staffed by six Iraqi and three allied officials, are now ordering them released in only 35 to 40 percent of the cases, General Gardner said, down from 60 percent last year. Each panel reviews about 400 cases a week, he said.

Under rules put in place in June 2004, the United States must release detainees held in American custody after 18 months unless the Iraqi prime minister and General Casey agree to continue to hold them for a specified period, said Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill, another military spokesman. About 130 detainees face hearings under this process in January and a similar number in February, he said in an e-mail message.

The transfer of the American-run detention centers will require training and equipping Iraqis to operate the prisons.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad, said via an e-mail message that the transition plan had four basic steps.

First is instruction on the basics of how to be a prison guard, a course taught by visiting American Justice Department instructors. So far, about 300 guards designated to work side by side with American jailers at internment centers run by American forces have completed the program, Colonel Johnson said. Another 450 guards are currently in the course, and the next session is expected to include approximately 150 Iraqi guards.

The second step involves Iraqi guards actually working alongside guards at detention centers under American control. The 300 guards who completed the classroom instruction in October are now working at the Fort Suse center with American guards, Colonel Johnson said.

Camp Bucca is scheduled to receive 150 Iraqi guards this month, and Fort Suse will receive another 150 Iraqi guards before the New Year, bringing the total to 450. Early next year, Camp Bucca will receive an additional 300 Iraqi guards, also bringing the total there to 450, Colonel Johnson said.

Step three, he said, involves Iraqi guards taking the lead of detention operations under the supervision of the American forces.

"This will allow us to work continually with them to ensure all standards of humane treatment and quality of care are maintained," Colonel Johnson said. "This process mirrors what we are doing for security transition across the country."

In the final stage, he said, "oversight will be reduced until the Iraqis are ready to completely assume control."

No specific timetable for the final transition has been set. "The transition will be based on meeting standards, not on a timeline," he said.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Compan

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November 24, 2005

Canada: A Prison Makes The Illicit and Dangerous Legal and Safe

November 24, 2005
Bath Journal
A Prison Makes the Illicit and Dangerous Legal and Safe
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
BATH, Ontario, Nov. 18 - The Bath Institution is a long way from Alcatraz.

It is a medium-security federal prison, and its inmates are allowed to keep the keys to their cells. Many have their own kitchens, and they move freely from the gym to the cabinet-making shop. Drug addicts can clean their needles with bleach, and condoms are readily available.

Now the institution has opened a tattoo parlor, and Mark Hewitt, a 37-year-old inmate in jail for breaking into factories, couldn't be happier.

"You're excluded from society, so the way to fit in here is to get a tattoo, to blend in and be one of the crew, to be safer," said Mr. Hewitt, who for years had been clandestinely puncturing prisoner biceps with sewing needles, guitar strings and homemade ink sometimes made from burnt polystyrene.

While he says he has always been careful, such practices have contributed to an epidemic of hepatitis C and H.I.V. in prisons in Canada and around the world. Now Mr. Hewitt has been trained by the government to take his art form out of the dark and seamy corners of the jail and into a sterile-looking cinder-block room that looks almost like a dental clinic.

Mr. Hewitt's parlor is part of a pilot project by the Correctional Services of Canada that began in August and now includes five federal prisons across Canada. A sixth, in a woman's prison, is scheduled to open this month. More than 120 inmates have already taken part, paying about $5 per two-hour session.

Officials here and in the United States say they believe that the pilot project is the first of its kind in the world, another step in a trend of harm-reduction techniques spreading to one degree or another in prisons in many countries. The pilot program, expected to continue through at least 2007, is expected to cost the government roughly $100,000 per prison.

Tattooing has traditionally been banned in prisons because tattoos are often used to identify inmates with gangs and hate groups. But inmates have managed to get around the bans; 45 percent of Canadian inmates acquire a tattoo while in prison, according to government statistics. That rate has held steady over the last decade despite the widespread knowledge that diseases are spread through reused tattoo needles and ink.

"You don't want your prisons acting as a pool of infection for the general population," said Joanne Barton, a senior health officer working on the program. "The prevalence of H.I.V. is 7 to 10 times higher in federal penitentiaries than in the general Canadian population, and for hepatitis C the prevalence is 30 times higher."

Ms. Barton stressed that tattoos connected with hate groups and gangs were prohibited, along with tattoos on the face, neck and genitals. While she acknowledged that illicit tattooing would continue, she said at least now prisons in the pilot project were distributing information on safer techniques.

But the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers strongly opposes the pilot as a potential danger to its members.

"This program is doomed for failure," said Sylvain Martel, the union's national president. "Needles will be used against corrections officers."

Mr. Martel also said "we already have evidence" that inmates are stealing needles, ink and other paraphernalia from the parlors to be used in illicit tattooing. Prison supervisors say that they have no knowledge of that, adding that there is a careful inventory before and after tattooing sessions.

Whether legal or not, tattooing is not going to disappear from prisons. Tattoos serve many functions, aside from gang identification. Inmates typically make their bodies a collage of their life, complete with pictures or representations of loved ones and important events like funerals they cannot attend. To understand the importance of tattoos here, one only has to look at Tracy Rivet's body.

On his right arm is a tattoo displaying a decaying skull with hair flowing out of its mouth. On his chest there is a Christian cross that commemorates his deceased father. And on his left arm there is a wizard and a skull that cover up another tattoo of the name of his former wife. Now he is getting his entire back tattooed with a giant eagle, a symbol of freedom.

Like many convicts with tattoos, Mr. Rivet has hepatitis C, a debilitating chronic infectious disease that costs the Canadian government more than $20,000 a year per inmate to treat.

"I always let doctors, nurses and females know about my disease," said Mr. Rivet, who is serving a five-year sentence for first-degree manslaughter, after killing two people while driving drunk. "But only about 50 percent of the inmates are careful," he added, referring to sharing tattoo needles and reusing homemade ink.

The Canadian experiment is being watched closely by other prison systems looking for ways to control infections. It may work best in prisons like Bath, where inmates say gangs do not have a significant presence. Other Canadian prisons where tattoo programs are being tested, in Quebec and the Prairie provinces, have larger gang problems.

The corrections department in the Spanish province of Catalonia has reviewed the guidelines used in the Canadian program as it prepares to open its own pilot program. One corrections department in Australia has also considered starting a pilot, and the idea could eventually migrate south of the border.

"If there was a way to demonstrate that the benefits outweigh the risks," said Joey Weedon, director of governmental affairs of the American Correctional Association, "it's certainly a model that correctional administrators in the United States would look at and possibly attempt to copy."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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VA: International Day for Human Rights--From Abu Ghraib to Red Onion State

International Day for Human Rights
From Abu Ghraib to Red Onion State
Stop Prison Abuse!

Saturday December 10th 2:30 PM
Oliver Hill Court House
1600 Oliver Hill Way across from the Richmond city Jail

FedUp! is working with a group called The People
United, a grassroots social justice network that has
members all over Virginia. We are planning an event
for December 10th in Richmond. December 10th is the
International Day for Human Rights. The idea is to
address human rights violations in prisons abroad,
like Abu Ghraib, and make the correlation between the
Human Rights Violations that are taking place here in
Virginia. The people in this country were appalled
when photographs and footage of torture and abuse
found its way to the public. If only we can get the
people in this country to see what has been happening
here in Virginia and in prisons across the United
States, the reaction would be the same – horrified,
ashamed, and outraged. So, please if you can, try to
attend the rally in Richmond on December 10th. It will
take place at 2:30pm at the Oliver Hill Court House
which is located across from the City Jail. There will
be speakers and a march. Keep your evening free for an
evening event is being planned where we will have a
chance to network and strategize about where we want
to go from here. Together our voices our strong. STOP
THE ABUSE! There are also plans for an event on Sunday
the 11th people to gather at one of Virginia’s Super
Max prisons. There will be transportation provided.

Prisoners must be treated with respect for their
dignity as human beings and for their fundamental
rights, whatever their crimes.

For more information contact:
Art at 804-303 3270
or email antiprison@yahoo.com
www.signalfire.org/Dec10

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

November 06, 2005

The Forgotten of Africa, Wasting Away in Jails Without Trial

November 6, 2005
By MICHAEL WINES
LILONGWE, Malawi - Since Nov. 10, 1999, Lackson Sikayenera has been incarcerated in Maula Prison, a dozen iron-roofed barracks set on yellow dirt and hemmed by barbed wire just outside Malawi's capital city.

He eats one meal of porridge daily. He spends 14 hours each day in a cell with 160 other men, packed on the concrete floor, unable even to move. The water is dirty; the toilets foul. Disease is rife.

But the worst part may be that in the case of Mr. Sikayenera, who is accused of killing his brother, the charges against him have not yet even reached a court. Almost certainly, they never will. For sometime after November 1999, justice officials lost his case file. His guards know where he is. But for all Malawi's courts know, he does not exist.

"Why is it that my file is missing?" he asked, his voice a mix of rage and desperation. "Who took my file? Why do I suffer like this? Should I keep on staying in prison just because my file is not found? For how long should I stay in prison? For how long?"

This is life in Malawi's high-security prisons, Dickens in the tropics, places of cruel, but hardly unusual punishment. Prosecutors, judges, even prison wardens agree that conditions are unbearable, confinements intolerably long, justice scandalously uneven.

But by African standards, Malawi is not the worst place to do time. For many of Africa's one million prison inmates, conditions are equally unspeakable - or more so.

The inhumanity of African prisons is a shame that hides in plain sight. Black Beach Prison in Equatorial Guinea is notorious for torture. Food is so scarce in Zambia's jails that gangs wield it as an instrument of power. Congo's prisons have housed children as young as 8. Kenyan prisoners perish from easily curable diseases like gastroenteritis.

When the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights last visited the Central African Republic's prisons in 2000, it heard that officers had deemed 50 prisoners incorrigible. Then, dispensing with trials, they executed them.

Even the African Commission's special representative for inmates has not visited an African prison in 18 months. There is no money, said the representative, Vera Chirwa, a democracy activist who herself spent 12 years in Malawi jails under a dictatorship.

"The conditions are almost the same," Ms. Chirwa said. "In Malawi, in South Africa, in Mozambique, in almost every country I have visited. I've been to France, and I've seen the prisons there. In Africa, they would be hotels."

Most African governments spend little on justice, and what little is spent goes mostly to the police and courts, said Marie-Dominique Parent, the Malawi-based regional director of Penal Reform International, a British advocacy group. Prisons, she said, "are at the bottom of the heap."

With so much misery among law-abiding citizens, the world's poorest nations have little incentive to improve convicts' lives. But, then, not everyone in African prisons is a convict.

Two-thirds of Uganda's 18,000 prison inmates have not been tried. The same is true of three-fourths of Mozambique's prisoners, and four-fifths of Cameroon's. Even in South Africa, Africa's most advanced nation, inmates in Johannesburg Prison have waited seven years to see a judge.

Some of Africa's one million or so prisoners - nobody knows how many - are not lawbreakers, but victims of incompetence or corruption or justice systems that are simply understaffed, underfinanced and overwhelmed. Kenya's former prisons commissioner suggested last year that with proper legal representation, a fifth of his nation's 55,000 prisoners might be declared innocent.

The most immediate and apparent inhumanity is the overcrowding that Africa's broken systems breed, compounded by disease, filth, abuse, and a lack of food, soap, beds, clothes or recreation. A survey of 27 African governments by Penal Reform International found that national prison systems operated, on average, at 141 percent of capacity. Individual prisons were even more jammed: Luzira Prison, Uganda's largest, holds 5,000 in a 1950's facility built for 600.

Babati Prison in Tanzania, built for 50 inmates, housed 589 as of March.

Malawi's 9,800 inmates, living in effectively the same cells that were too crowded when they housed 4,500 a decade ago, are luckier than many. Three years ago, half the prisoners had yet to go before a judge. Under a pioneering program run by Penal Reform International and financed in part by the British government, paralegals have winnowed that to fewer than one in four - among the lowest rates in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet the flood of newly accused still outstrips Malawi's ability to deliver justice.

"This is not a hotel, where we can accommodate no more than our capacity," said Tobias Nowa, Malawi's commissioner of prison operations. "We must accommodate whomever is sent to us."

Prison Population Doubles

Paradoxically, democracy's advent has catalyzed the problems of Africa's prisons. Freedom has permitted lawlessness, newly empowered citizens have demanded order - and governments have delivered.

Malawi's prison population has more than doubled since the dictatorship ended in 1994. But its justice system is so badly broken that it is hard to know where to begin repairs.

Malawi's 12 million citizens have 28 legal aid attorneys and eight prosecutors with law degrees. There are jobs for 32 prosecutors, but salaries are so low that the vacancies go unfilled.

So except in special cases like murder and manslaughter, almost all accused go to trial without lawyers. The police prosecutors who try them have only basic legal training. And the lay magistrates who sit in judgment are largely unschooled in the law.

Justice Andrew Nyirenda, 49, the chief of Malawi's High Court, said the system had been swamped by the growth and rising complexity of crime since Malawi became a democracy in 1994.

"There are conspiracies to commit crimes, drug trafficking, even human trafficking, and instances of lower-level white-collar crimes where people are literally swindling institutions," he said. "These are extremely complicated cases for people who have not been trained sufficiently. We get convictions that aren't supposed to be convictions, and acquittals that aren't supposed to be acquittals."

Pacharo Kayira, one of the eight prosecutors, seconds that. "I've done so many cases where I don't agree with the conviction by the lower court," he said in an interview here. "It's not the best situation, to say the least."

Malawi's police officers can take two years merely to send prosecutors their report on a homicide. Prosecutors need months more to decide whether the case should be taken to a lower court, the start of a legal process that lasts years.

Malawi's High Court, which must pass judgment on all capital crimes, has not heard a single homicide case in the last year. There is no money to assemble lawyers, judges and witnesses for hearings in the locales where the crimes occurred; no money to empanel juries as required since 1995; no money for the written record that the Supreme Court needs for its mandatory review of convictions.

Ishmael Wadi, Malawi's director of public prosecutions, said his eight prosecutors had a backlog of 44 untried fraud and tax-evasion cases, 173 robbery and theft cases, 388 fatal accident cases and 867 homicide cases.

"When the offenses occur, they send the files to this office," he said. "The files keep on coming, so the number keeps increasing. So what do you do? You accumulate the files, keep them nice and put them on the shelves."

And the caseload is rising. Capital crimes - homicide, rape and manslaughter - consume virtually all the time of legal-aid lawyers and prosecutors. While they process about 380 homicides a year, 500 to 600 other homicides are committed.

Shortages of judges, prosecutors and lawyers ensure that justice is both sluggish and mean. Many inmates sit in cells for lack of bail that can total less than $10 or $20.

The interminable wait between arrest and courtroom torments the innocent and lets the guilty escape justice. Evidence in police stations is misplaced or discarded. Witnesses die and move away.

Mr. Kayira, the prosecutor, encounters such cases far too often, after much life has been wasted and long terms already served, by both the innocent and the guilty.

"There have been many times when I have used the discretion granted me as a prosecutor to tell the police to release a person who has been there five, six years," he said. "I look at their file and say to myself, 'There isn't the evidence here to convict this person.' " For prisoners like Lackson Sikayenera, their cases lost in a system that only sporadically works, the only alternative is to hope someone hears their pleas for help - and to make a new life.

The Road to Prison

Built 40 years ago to house 800 inmates, Maula Prison, on a recent visit, held 1,805 inmates, all but 24 of them men. Mr. Sikayenera lives in Maula's Cell 3, one of 160 in a pen the size of a two-car garage.

Once a farmer near Dowa, a dirt-road village 25 miles north of Lilongwe, Mr. Sikayenera was sent here after he killed his elder brother Jonas. Their father, he said, gave him a choice tobacco plot that Jonas claimed was rightfully his. Jonas threatened to kill him if he did not surrender it. Lackson refused, he said, and Jonas attacked.

"To protect myself, I took a hoe handle and hit my brother on the forehead, and he fainted," he said. "Then I went to the police to report that I had harmed my brother." The police jailed him, then moved him to Maula Prison a week later.

That was more than 2,100 days ago.

"I have not seen my family since 1999," he said. "I was the only productive person in my home, and now there is too much poverty for them to afford transport to see me. The only communication I have gotten is from my first wife, who informed me, 'I am tired of staying alone here, and I am going to get married.' "

"Life is very hard here," he said.

He and the other men spend daytime in the prison yard, a field of thick yellow dust with an outdoor privy, a communal shower and one water spigot. At 4 p.m., they are herded into a dozen concrete cells. Fourteen hours later, at 6 a.m., they are let out again.

Their cells have iron-barred windows and thick walls to discourage escape attempts. A sporadically working shower and toilet are crammed in each cell's corner.

One cell wall is painted glossy black - a blackboard where inmates scrawl trivia like the cell's head count, prisoners' faiths and works of chalk art, like drawings of autos and dream homes.

Prisoners sleep on blankets on the floor, too tightly packed to reach the toilet - too packed, in fact, even to turn in their sleep. One inmate awakens the rest each night for mass turnovers. The most privileged inmates sleep on their backs, ringing the walls of the cell. Everyone else sleeps on his side.

"It is so unhygienic here," Mr. Sikayenera said. "Basically, if you need any source of water, you have to get it from the toilet. The showers, most of them are broken. There is a lot of dysentery. A lot of the time, the water isn't running." Maula Prison's commanding officer, an expansive man named Gibson Singo, disputes none of that.

"They were designed for 50 or 60 people in one cell," he said. "But now it's 150, 155. If you talk of human rights, there is no way you can put 150 people in one room."

Maula and four nearby prisons split a monthly state allotment of $12,500, from which Mr. Singo must pay Maula's 124 employees and meet inmates' needs. Maula's share is laughably small. There are no prison uniforms, no blankets, no soap, save what charities provide. The only food is nsima, corn mush leavened with beans or meat from the prison rabbit hutch. The only drink is water.

The mush is boiled in massive tubs outside the prison, where wardens moved the kitchen after hungry inmates began fighting over the food. The old kitchen is now a rudimentary school, its lessons scrawled in chalk on the walls.

These conditions exact a cruel toll. Maula Prison lost an average of 30 prisoners a year in 2003 and 2004 - about one death per 60 inmates. The average for American prisons is one death per 330 inmates.

It could be worse: Zomba Prison, 100 miles south, loses one in 20 inmates annually. But it is bad enough.

How They Survive

"It's just unbearable," said Frances Daka, 32, jailed on an unresolved murder charge since 2002. "We make ourselves live, just to survive."

Survive they do, in ingenious fashion. On each cell's wall, beside the chalk artwork, is a list of rules, laws that are both prosaic and telling: Do not make noise when the lights are off. Do not smoke during prayers.

Prisoners must be clothed, lest a bare body excite sex-starved men. "Sodomy is not allowed in this house," one rule states.

A cell hierarchy maintains order. A minister of health checks daily for sick prisoners and arranges medical care.

If justice outside the prison is slow to come, inside it is swift, lest unrest ensue. Cell policemen "arrest" rule breakers, and cell magistrates hear evidence and pronounce sentences.

"Let's say someone was helping himself while the others are eating," Mr. Sikayenera said. "This person might be given 500 days of cleaning the cell."

After 20 or so, the offender might be taken again to a cell judge, who can grant a reprieve.

"The reason why there is all this hierarchy is to find conflict resolution," Mr. Sikayenera said. "So there is no chaos. And it's effective. In most of the cells, you find there is no fighting. People don't break the rules."

Mr. Sikayenera is the magistrate of Cell 3. For six years, no one in Malawi's justice system has decided whether he should be punished or freed. But in prison, elevated by seniority and fellow inmates' respect, he metes out mercy and retribution with an even hand.

And without delay.

"When a case comes up," he said, utterly without irony, "it is dealt with. Right there."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2005

CIA Prisons in Eastern Europe

November 4, 2005
Nations Urged to Answer Prison Allegations
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:10 p.m. ET

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- The European Commission said Friday it would encourage governments in Eastern Europe to comment on allegations that the CIA set up secret prisons in the region to interrogate al-Qaida suspects.

Polish authorities denied any knowledge of prisoner transfers, but -- in a piece of information that raises questions as much as it sheds light -- confirmed Friday that a plane carrying Americans touched down at a little-used airport on the very day a human rights group claims flight logs indicate a CIA aircraft landed there.

In Romania, officials gave The Associated Press computerized flight logs in an attempt to disprove claims of suspicious flights landing at an airport near a military base.

The broader allegations, first reported in the Washington Post, have also triggered a flurry of denials from other governments in the former Soviet bloc and prompted European Union officials, the continent's top human rights organization and the international Red Cross to say they would investigate. U.S. officials have refused to confirm or deny the claims.

''It is obvious we'll take the statements of those countries for true,'' said Friso Roscam Abbing, a European Union spokesman. ''Only if we receive evidence which would prove the contrary will we decide what possible next steps to take in terms of contacting authorities.''

Roscam Abbing said the European Commission -- the EU's executive office -- would seek statements from governments that have not denied the existence of secret prisons on their territories to comment on the issue ''if only to get as much clarity and transparency as possible.'' Such prisons, European officials say, would violate the continent's human rights principles.

The commission said it would make an informal inquiry, requesting answers from all 25 member governments as well as EU candidates Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Turkey.

In Poland, an EU member, airport officials and border guards said that on Sept. 22, 2003, a Boeing passenger plane carrying seven people with U.S. passports touched down at midnight at Szczytno-Szymany airport, a former military base in the country's northeastern pine forests. Szczytno-Szymany is not an operating airport, but planes may land if arrangements are made in advance.

Border guards spokesman Maj. Roman Krzeminski said records show the plane took on five other people with U.S. passports who were waiting at the airport and whose documents said they came to Poland on business. He said the plane took off after about an hour on the ground.

Former airport director Mariola Przewloczka said border guards drove out to meet the plane on the runway instead of having the occupants enter the airport terminal. ''After the plane landed, two vans drove out to meet it with border control officials,'' Przewloczka said.

She and other officials said they didn't know where the plane came from or where it went.

Several residents said they had not noticed any unusual flights.

''I didn't see anything, nothing,'' Marek Wyrzykowski, a farm worker who lives in a village next to the airport, told the AP. ''Taliban? There's no Taliban here.''

Human Rights Watch said Thursday it has evidence, based on tail numbers and flight logs of CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004, that indicate the CIA transported suspects captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania.

Mark Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the New York-based organization, said the group matched the flight patterns with testimony from some of the hundreds of detainees in the war on terrorism who have been freed by the United States.

He said that in September 2003, a Boeing 737 flew from Washington to Kabul, Afghanistan, making stops in the Czech Republic and Uzbekistan. On Sept. 22 -- the same day Polish officials said a Boeing arrived -- he said the plane flew to Szczytno-Szymany Airport, then to Romania, Morocco and finally to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In Romania, aviation officials and the military denied Human Rights Watch allegations that the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base may have been used by the CIA as a detention facility.

The United States used the Kogalniceanu base, near the Black Sea port of Constanta, to move troops and equipment during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. U.S. forces left the base in June 2003.

''When the Americans were here there were so many civilians working there, people would have found out about it,'' Dan Buciuman, the base commander, told the AP.

The head of the International Mihail Kogalniceanu airport, where planes carrying detainees are alleged to have landed, gave AP computerized flight logs for all landings from 2003 to 2005. There was no mention of the flights that have been reported in recent days as suspicious.

''It would be practically impossible for them to land here without a record,'' said airport director Cornel Balan. ''These records cannot be erased or altered.''

At the nearby air base, officers reacted with disbelief to the allegations that Kogalniceanu's facilities were used to keep secret CIA prisoners.

''It's incredible what is being said and to remove all doubts we have decided to open our doors, so that anyone can see that we have no detention facilities,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Adrian Vasile, a spokesman for the base.

------

Contributing to this report were Associated Press Writers Ryan Lucas in Szczytno, Poland, Monika Scislowska in Warsaw and Dan Mihaescu at Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, Romania.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press

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

October 28, 2005

Dutch Investigating High Toll in Fire That Killed 11 People Detaineed in Prison

October 28, 2005
Dutch Investigating High Toll in Fire That Killed Detainees
By GREGORY CROUCH and MARLISE SIMONS
AMSTERDAM, Oct. 27 - The Dutch authorities were trying Thursday to determine why the death toll was so high in a fire in a detention center for drug smuggling suspects and illegal immigrants at Schiphol Airport here that killed 11 people.

It took fire squads three hours to control the blaze, which began after midnight Wednesday, and televised images showed that at least part of the detention center had been gutted. Officials said nearly 200 prisoners were being held in the prefabricated complex at the time.

At least 14 people were treated for injuries, 6 of whom were members of the police or security forces.

A spokesman for the local fire department said the first fire trucks arrived at the site 10 minutes after the fire began. But the main question remains why so many people died.

At a news conference in Haarlemmermeer, a town near the airport, officials said part of the reason might have been that there was no quick way to release the prisoners. They said the buildings, which were a temporary holding center rather than a normal prison, had no system for opening cells simultaneously. "The prison guards had to open each cell door individually," said Marjolein Kistjes, a town hall spokeswoman.

The authorities said it was not clear yet how the fire had started and whether it might have been set.

One detainee told a Dutch radio station that once the fire erupted in one of the cells, the prisoners cried out in alarm, but they were not taken seriously. The detainees started kicking and screaming to convince the authorities that the situation was serious, the prisoner said. But even after the guards responded, it took some time to free all the prisoners.

The destroyed wing of the large detention complex consisted of 24 double-occupancy cells, and officials said 43 detainees were in the wing at the time. Most of the guards belonged to a private security company.

In the chaos after the fire, while detainees were being taken out of the cell complex and moved to other towns, at least five escaped. By dawn Thursday, police helicopters were trying to chase them down.

Members of Parliament called Thursday for an inquiry into the airport prison and the conditions there.

The police said they had not yet identified the dead.

The detention center opened in 2003 in part to deal with the growing wave of drug couriers arriving from Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 3,300 courier suspects were arrested in 2004 alone.

But as the Netherlands tightened its immigration laws and took a hard look at political asylum claims, the airport jail also became a transit center for deportees. Some who died were thought to be recent arrivals or people awaiting deportation.

Gregory Crouch reported from Amsterdam for this article, and Marlise Simons from Paris.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2005

NY Times Editorial: Voting Rights, Human Rights

: October 14, 2005
The United States has the worst record in the democratic world when it comes to stripping convicted felons of the right to vote. Of the nearly five million people who were barred from participating in the last presidential election, for example, most, if not all, would have been free to vote if they had been citizens of any one of dozens of other nations. Many of those nations cherish the franchise so deeply that they let inmates vote from their prison cells.

Published Courts outside this country are actually expanding the rights of prison inmates to cast ballots, on the theory that the right to vote is a basic human right that should be abridged only after careful deliberation and under the rarest circumstances. That message was underscored last week in a strong ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, which has jurisdiction in the nations that are parties to the European Convention, a rights charter drafted more than a half-century ago.

The European court overturned a British law that banned all convicted prison inmates from voting. The British law, however, is far less onerous than laws in the United States, which imprisons people at five times the rate of Britain and disenfranchises millions, many of them permanently.

The European court recognized that nations have the right to limit voting in some cases, but it condemned blanket prohibitions as unacceptable. This ruling includes a clear warning to the dozen other European Convention countries that prohibit voting for convicted prisoners or have no provisions for allowing inmates to participate in elections. Laws that deny citizens access to the polls should be employed only after painstaking deliberation - if at all - and never in a fashion that bars an entire class of people from the polls.

This issue deserves a full hearing in the United States, which shows less regard for the rights of prisoners and ex-offenders than just about any of its peers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/opinion/14fri4.html

Posted by lois at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2005

UK Prisoners Should Get the Right to Vote, European Court Rules

Simon Jeffery
Thursday October 6, 2005 , The Guardian, London
Laws setting out who can and cannot take part in elections are to be rewritten after the European court of human rights today ruled in favour of giving British prisoners the right to vote.
Ruling in the case of a former prisoner against the United Kingdom, the Strasbourg court said the disenfranchisement of 48,000 convicts in British jails violated the European convention on human rights.

It said that with the exception of the right to liberty, lawfully detained prisoners continued to enjoy all the rights guaranteed in the convention - including political rights and freedom from inhumane and degrading punishment.

Britain is among 13 signatories to the human rights convention who prevent prisoners from voting, according to a government survey. The only exceptions in Britain are those in jail for non-payment of debts, contempt of court or on remand.
A further 14 signatories to the convention limit the right of prisoners to vote, while another 18 impose no restriction at all. The court's ruling could see prisoners across all states belonging to the 46-member Council of Europe, the court's parent body, given the right to vote.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said the court's ruling confirmed "people are sent to prison to lose their liberty, not their identity or their citizenship".

Speaking for the Tories, the shadow attorney general, Dominic Grieve, said giving convicted murderers and rapists the vote would "bring the law into disrepute and many people will see it as making a mockery of justice".

A spokesman for the Department for Constitutional Affairs said it was giving the judgment urgent consideration and would bring forward proposals in due course.

The former prisoner who brought the challenge, John Hirst, 54, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility after killing his landlady Bronia Burton with an axe.

He was sentenced to discretionary life imprisonment on February 11 1980 and released from Rye Hill prison, Warwickshire, on May 25 2004.

After his application to vote from prison was turned down, Mr Hirst took his case to the high court and lost. A seven-judge chamber of the Strasbourg court backed him, ruling that blocking the right to vote was disproportionate, and awarded him £8,000 in costs and expenses.

The government then appealed to a 17-judge "grand chamber" of the human rights court, arguing that Mr Hirst would be barred from voting even if the law was reformed to restrict the democratic rights of those who had committed only the most serious offences.

Mr Hirst's lawyers argued that blocking the right to vote was inconsistent with the stated rehabilitative aim of prison and that there was no proven link between removal of the vote and prevention of crime.

The court - on a majority ruling of 12-5 - said an article in the convention guaranteeing the "free expression of the opinion of the people in choosing a legislature" was not absolute but in a 21st century democracy the presumption should be in favour of inclusion.

Two of the judges said in an additional written ruling that the ban was applied to those in prison but neglected that a judge's decision to send a defendant to prison or hand down a suspended sentence or fine could depend on his or her health, age and family situation and not just the gravity of the crime.

Now living in Hull, Mr Hirst said his challenge had been about breaking the link between crime and the right to take part in the democratic process.

"The human rights court has agreed with me that the government's position is wrong - it doesn't matter how heinous the crime, everyone is entitled to have the basic human right to vote."

A bar on prisoners voting is made in the 1983 Representation of the People Act but the substance dates back to the 1870 Forfeiture Act, which in turn reflects earlier laws limiting the rights of criminals from the reign of Edward III.

The five dissenters - Judges Wildhaber, Costa, Lorenzen, Kolver and Jebens - said in a joint written opinion that the Strasbourg court should be careful not to assume legislative functions. They said states should have the right to restrict voting based on nationality, age, residence and other factors.

The court was set up in 1950 to hear citizens' complaints under the human rights convention and is independent of the European Union.

Posted by lois at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

"Incarceration as a Failed Policy" by Alvin Bronstein

Incarceration as a Failed Policy

Alvin J. Bronstein*
August 26, 2005

Jim Gondles has invited me to write a guest editorial on “why US policies on incarceration are ineffective in terms of crime control, costly and counter productive,” something I had said to him in an email in another context. I was glad to receive this invitation and I should point out at the outset that my criticisms would apply to almost any country’s policies on incarceration and not just the United States. This is not intended as an attack on United States’ prisons but rather prisons generally. There are better, less damaging prisons than those in the United States, for example in the Scandinavian countries. And there are far more that are far worse than the United States. I have been in prisons in some countries, Russia and Brazil, that make ours really look like country clubs. The point is not how new or modern or well equipped prisons are but rather the fact of incarceration itself that is, in my opinion, a complete failure.

In his marvelous 1974 book, The Future of Imprisonment, Norval Morris, the distinguished criminologist and long-time consultant to the Federal Bureau of Prisons wrote:

The criminal law’s reach has been extended in this country far beyond its competence, invading the spheres of private morality and social welfare proving ineffective, corruptive and criminogenic. This overreach of the criminal law has made hypocrites of us all and has cluttered the courts and filled the jails and prisons, the detention centers and reformatories, with people who should not be there.

When that was written, we had about 350,000 men, women and children in our nation’s jails and prisons. Today we have over 2,200,000 and prisons here and throughout most of the world are still ineffective, corruptive and criminogenic.

It is widely recognized that we have locked up too many social nuisances who are not real threats, too many petty offenders and minor thieves, severing such few social ties as they have and pushing them further toward more serious criminal behavior. In the US, we inappropriately incarcerate the mentally ill and the alcohol and drug addicted. Prisons generally make people worse.

The 1973 national commission, The National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, recommended that “the institution should be the last resort for correctional problems.” They gave their reasons – failure to reduce crime, success in punishing but not in deterring, providing only a temporary protection to the community, changing the offender but mostly for the worst – and concluded that “the prison has persisted partly because a civilized nation could neither turn back to the barbarism of an earlier time nor find a satisfactory alternative.” Today, over 30 years later, we have a new national commission that is looking at the abuses in and the problems of prisons in America.

Again, nothing has changed except that there are many more people in prison, our prisons are now larger and more destructive of the human personality with fewer programs and harsher regimes. Many years of studies have revealed that only three possible changes in the life of the prisoner during his or her incarceration are correlated with later conformity to the conditions of release and with the avoidance of new criminal behavior – the availability of a family or other supportive group to join on release, the availability of a reasonably supportive job, and the process and duration of aging itself. Getting a job and preserving or creating social relationships are exactly what prison most interferes with although time for aging it does provide. We cage people, it is clear, not to treat them but for a variety of other reasons. Increasingly prisons are places of punishment and have nothing to do with rehabilitation.

One of the great prison reformers in the world, Baroness Vivien Stern, Secretary General of Penal Reform International, in her 1998 book A Sin Against the Future: Imprisonment in the World, wrote:

It is a great strength of the reform movement that the people in the system know that what is going on is wrong. They say so through the associations to which they belong. They need to be reinforced in their conviction that whilst they are contracted to carry out their instructions and follow their rule book, they have a higher loyalty to a set of values and principles. It will not be an excuse for the perpetrator of a clear human rights abuse to say, “I was just obeying orders”. Prison staff need to be given the confidence and courage to keep on pointing out what is wrong. Perhaps they should require that the international norms and instruments governing the treatment of prisoners should be written not just into prisoners’ rights, but into their rights too, as staff. There are rules governing how prisoners should be treated. So also should there be equivalent rules governing what prison staff can be asked to do, and making it clear what they cannot be asked to do.

As Nelson Mandela once said, “Prison not only robs you of your freedom, it attempts to take away your identity. Everyone wears a uniform, eats the same food, follows the same schedule. It is by definition a purely authoritarian state that tolerates no independence and individuality.”

In 1999, a large group of criminal justice professionals, academics and officials from 50 different countries in all five continents met for five days in Egham, England, to consider “a new approach for penal reform in a new century.” At the end of the five day meeting they drafted without any dissents an agenda for that new approach which included among them the following:

The understanding that penal reform is an essential part of good governance.The awareness that penal reform cannot proceed without changes to the criminal justice system as a whole and that crime prevention in and by civil society is essential to the success of penal reform.The determination to make sure that everyone, especially the poor and marginalized, has equal access to the justice system.
The recognition that drug abuse is usually better dealt with inside the health or social welfare care system rather than the criminal justice system, especially when there is no violence involved.
The need to enrich the formal judicial system with informal, locally based, dispute resolution mechanisms which meet human rights standards.

During the past 40 years I have visited hundreds of prisons and jails in the United States and many prisons in Asia, Latin America and Eastern and Western Europe. The best, least destructive, prison that I have ever been to was a maximum security prison in the city of Ringe, in Denmark, which I visited on a number of occasions.

This was a small maximum security prison which housed men and women prisoners together, all of them recidivists, in which every prisoner worked at a productive job every day, where correctional officers wore no uniforms and worked side-by-side with the prisoners and had many other marvelous features. Every time I left the prison and walked out through the main entry way I was accompanied by the prison governor, Eric Andersen. Each time I left, I would say, “Eric, this really is a marvelous prison.” And his answer each time was, “But remember, Al, all prisons damage people.”

* Alvin J. Bronstein is Director-Emeritus of The National Prison Project of the ACLU; US Board Member, Penal Reform International (London). This editorial originally appeared in the August 2005 edition of Corrections Today magazine.

Posted by lois at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

Iraq: Number of "detainees" grows form 5400 in 9-05 to 10,800 today

Battalion to secure Iraq prison population

ROBERT BURNS, Associated Press
Posted on Wed, Aug. 17, 2005 http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/12406892.htm

WASHINGTON - The 82nd Airborne Division is sending about 700 soldiers to Iraq to provide extra security for detainees, whose numbers have doubled over the past year, officials said Wednesday.

The 1st battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, based at Fort
Bragg, N.C., has begun preparing to deploy over the next two months. It will be the battalion's second tour in Iraq; the first was from
September 2003 to April 2004. Before that the battalion was in
Afghanistan from July 2002 to January 2003.

An announcement at Fort Bragg on Monday gave no information about the
battalion's new mission in Iraq, but Pentagon officials said Wednesday that the soldiers are needed to augment security for detainee operations. Spokesman Bryan Whitman said the deployment does not indicate any decision has been made to increase U.S. forces in Iraq this fall to provide security for planned voting in October and December.

Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said the 700 soldiers would be prepared to perform a range of duties related to detainee operations, including prison guard duty and providing defensive security around a prison compound.

There currently are three main detention centers in Iraq - Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper. Another, called Fort Suse, is being built to accommodate a prisoner population that has expanded rapidly as more suspected insurgents are captured. Fort Suse is on the site of a
Russian-built former Iraqi military barracks near the northern cityof
Sulaymaniyah.

Venable said the number of detainees in Iraq has grown from 5,400 in
September 2004 to about 10,800 today.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last month he wants the Iraqi government to move toward assuming full responsibility for detainee security and control.

ON THE NET
82nd Airborne Division: http://www.bragg.army.mil/www-82DV/
Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

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

May 31, 2005

Great Britain: Prisoners May be Set Free to Ease Jail Numbers

May 31, 2005, London, Sunday Times

By Richard Ford, Home Correspondent.

CHARLES CLARKE has been given warning that drastic measures, including releasing prisoners early, may need to be implemented to tackle Britain's record jail population.

Inmate numbers have risen by almost 3,000 - the equivalent of six medium-sized jails - since the start of the year to reach 76,035.

The options sent to the Home Secretary include the Government ordering the executive release of prisoners, postponing the refurbishment of jail wings and even delaying the planned closure of the country's only prison ship.

The rapid rise in prison numbers this year is causing mounting concern in the Home Office. Martin Narey, the head of the National Offender Management Service, has put part of the blame for the increasing numbers on judges and magistrates.

But he has told ministers that judges and magistrates are only reacting to the tough language on crime by politicians and reflecting public concern about offending and antisocial behaviour. One official said that judges and magistrates were like a weather vane in the way in which they reacted to the current political and public climate with its emphasis on tackling yobbish behaviour.

Richard Garside, of the Crime and Society Foundation, a think-tank on crime policy, said that it was clear that judges and magistrates were reacting to politicians. "The real drivers of sentencing policy are not the judges but politicians. If politicians call for ever tougher sentences and action, then judges, within the broader context of sentencing policy and their own independence, are clearly going to be influenced by them," he said.

A briefing paper prepared for the Home Secretary after prison numbers exceeded 76,000 last week outlines a selection of options in the event of continuing increases. The paper, which Mr Clarke will study over the the Whitsun parliamentary recess, puts forward a variety of options, including the executive release of prisoners before the end of their sentence or extending early release of offenders on curfews.

Executive release was last used under the Conservatives in the early 1980s and is probably considered a non-starter in the current political climate. But the Government could extend early release under the home-detention curfew scheme introduced by Jack Straw to ease an earlier prison population crisis. Under it, offenders are released from jail 41/2 months before the end of their sentence, electronically tagged and put under curfew.

There are 3,300 prisoners released on home-detention curfew and the numbers would increase if the early-release period were extended beyond 41/2 months. The paper also suggests more new jails, though this would not deal with the immediate problem as it takes years to commission and build them. Jails at Peterborough and Ashford, Surrey, have opened in the past year but the programme to build new jails has ended as Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has refused to provide funds.

Other options for dealing with the population problem, which is worst in overcrowded local jails, include recategorising offenders more quickly so that they can be moved into low-risk open prisons; bringing into use wings and landings which have been mothballed; and postponing refurbishment of accommodation.

One idea being looked at is delaying the closure of The Weare , the prison ship moored in Portland Harbour, near Weymouth, Dorset. The Prison Service announced three months ago that it intended to close the jail holding 400 low-risk prisoners this year.

Another option is for ministers to urge courts to make greater use of non-custodial sentences. Mr Narey has tried to persuade judges and magistrates throughout England and Wales to make greater use of community penalties.

A Home Office spokesman said that although the prison population "has reached an all-time high", the National Offender Management Service was able to handle the record numbers in jail. He said: "Whilst the prison population has risen sharply in the last few weeks growth has been slower in the past 14 months."

The spokesman added that 2,600 new spaces had opened and that by 2007 the Prison Service would have a capacity to hold 80,400 inmates.

THE INSIDE STORY
* Total jail population: 76,035

* 128 state-run jails

* 11 privately run jails

* Average cost per prisoner a year in state jail: £25,718

* Average cost in private jail: £31,502

* Total number of people sent to jail in 2003: 93,500

* 24,280 offenders serving four years or more in 2003, a 109 per cent increase in a decade

* Average length of custody, excluding life, given at Crown Court rose from 20.4 months in 1993 to 26.8 months in 2003

* It costs more than £2 billion a year to run Prison Service

* Average age of those going to jail was 27

* 5,420 life-sentence prisoners, of whom 26 told they will die in jail

* 25 per cent of jail population is from minority ethnic groups

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Webpage has a graph showing the increase in UK's prison population from 1997-2005 (up over 25%)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1634669,00.html

Posted by lois at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2005

NY Times: U.S. Memo Faults Afghan Leader on Heroin Fight

May 22, 2005

By DAVID S. CLOUD and CARLOTTA GALL
WASHINGTON, May 21 - United States officials warned this month in an internal memo that an American-financed poppy eradication program aimed at curtailing Afghanistan's huge heroin trade had been ineffective, in part because President Hamid Karzai "has been unwilling to assert strong leadership."

A cable sent on May 13 from the United States Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital, said that provincial officials and village elders had impeded destruction of significant poppy acreage and that top Afghan officials, including Mr. Karzai, had done little to overcome that resistance.

"Although President Karzai has been well aware of the difficulty in trying to implement an effective ground eradication program, he has been unwilling to assert strong leadership, even in his own province of Kandahar," said the cable, which was drafted by embassy personnel involved in the anti-drug efforts, two American officials said.

A copy of the three-page cable, which was addressed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was shown to The New York Times by an American official alarmed at the slow pace of poppy eradication.

The cable also faulted Britain, which has the top responsibility for counternarcotics assistance in Afghanistan, for being "substantially responsible" for the failure to eradicate more acreage. British personnel choose where the eradication teams work, but the cable said that those areas were often not the main growing areas and that the British had been unwilling to revise targets.

The criticism of Mr. Karzai reflected mounting frustration among some American officials that plans to uproot large swaths of Afghanistan's poppy crop have produced little success. These officials said they worried that heroin trafficking could threaten the American-led reconstruction effort in Afghanistan and worsen corruption in the country's fledgling central government.

In Washington, State Department officials defended Mr. Karzai, who is scheduled to visit next week, saying the effort had been hampered by bad weather and logistical problems as well as by political resistance.

"President Karzai is a strong partner and we have confidence in him," said the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher. "We are succeeding in our overall effort" to address the drug problem.

American and Afghan officials decided late last year that a more aggressive anti-poppy effort was too risky. State Department officials had proposed aerial spraying of poppy-growing areas, but the plan was opposed by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and American military officials in Afghanistan who agreed, though effective at killing poppies, spraying fields by aircraft could lead to protests and unrest.

A spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office defended the choice of targets. "We don't believe we are picking the wrong targets, but we have a long struggle to go," she said. "We work very closely with the U.S. and other partners."

The spokeswoman said that eradication only worked if there were alternatives in place for the poppy growers, and that is where Britain is placing most of its emphasis.

A major reason Britain was put in charge of counternarcotics efforts is that much of the heroin produced from Afghan poppies ends up in European countries - roughly 50 tons a year, compared to the 20 tons estimated to go to the United States.

Mr. Boucher said his department was working to resolve the disagreements over the British targets.

Since beginning work last month, the country's Central Poppy Eradication Force, an American-trained group, has destroyed less than 250 acres, according to the two American officials. Its original goal was to eradicate 37,000 acres, but that target has recently been reduced to 17,000 acres. With the poppy harvest already under way, the actual eradication levels will probably be far lower, the American officials said.

The department's annual drug-trafficking report, released in March, warned that Afghanistan was "on the verge of becoming a narcotics state."

American officials have said publicly that Mr. Karzai recognized the severity of the poppy cultivation problem and was determined to combat it, albeit gradually, to avoid inciting unrest among Afghans whose incomes are dependent on growing poppies for the drug trade. Congress recently passed a supplemental spending bill that included $260 million for the State Department's anti-drug effort in Afghanistan this year.

A senior State Department official said that Mr. Karzai had wanted the eradication team to begin work before the poppy harvest season began in March, when he felt there was a better chance of persuading farmers to give up that lucrative crop. But because of bad weather and other delays the team did not begin work until early April.

The American officials involved said they also believed that Mr. Karzai might not want to challenge local Afghan authorities and thus incite opposition and even violence ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for next fall.

The eradication effort got under way last month in the southern province of Kandahar and in neighboring Helmand and has now shifted to the Balkh Province in the north.

In Kandahar Province this week, farmers were scraping the last resin from poppy plants, in plain view of the main road, just 10 minutes outside the provincial capital, once a stronghold of the Taliban.

"Karzai's order will only be acceptable when he sends money to the farmers and helps them," said a poppy farmer, Jan Agha. After investing in water, fertilizer and labor, farmers would resist eradication, he said, adding, "In the villages people would fight."

A State Department official said that the United States remained optimistic that, through a combination of eradication and reduced plantings, it could achieve a 70,000-acre reduction in poppy planting from last year's record crop, which was estimated at more than 500,000 acres.

Because of the faltering eradication effort, much of the acreage reduction the Americans hope for is likely to be from farmers deciding not to plant, the officials conceded. And even if that goal is reached, the crop may still be the second largest ever, a senior American official said.

A Karzai spokesman, Jawed Ludin, said that foreign donors had failed to follow through on promises to help farmers shift to other crops and find other sources of income.

Mr. Karzai called for a "jihad" against drugs after his election last November, Mr. Ludin pointed out. But he also noted that Mr. Karzai would risk losing his moral authority if promised assistance to the poppy farmers was not forthcoming.

"It is actually the international community that is showing a lack of seriousness, by failing to show that there is an alternative for farmers," he said.

On their first day of operations in early April, in the Maiwand district of Kandahar Province, the eradication force encountered armed farmers blocking the fields. Gunfire broke out, resulting in the death of at least one Afghan protester and the wounding of several others.

The American officials said they suspected the protesters had been organized by traffickers and local officials with a stake in the drug trade.

Over the next eight days, according to the embassy cable, American and British officials in Kabul sought help from the Afghan minister responsible for the anti-drug effort, Habibullah Qaderi, to end the confrontation in Maiwand and a similar standoff in nearby Panjwayi. But he was unable to persuade the Kandahar authorities to help, the embassy cable said. Mr. Qaderi could not be reached for comment.

The embassy cable praised Muhammad Daoud, the deputy minister of the interior for the anti-drug effort, for trying to win access for the eradication teams, but it said he had "no support whatsoever from key members" of the government, "namely President Karzai."

When the eradication unit did begin work, it was permitted to destroy only limited amounts of poppies in fields designated by local officials, the cable said, which were widely scattered. On most days, only 40 to 100 workers showed up to help, not the 300 to 400 promised by the local leaders, the cable said. This month, the teams are working in the northern province of Balkh, officials said.

Afghan Bomb Kills U.S. Soldier

KABUL, Afghanistan, May 21 (Agence France-Presse) - One American soldier was killed and three others were wounded in a bomb blast in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, a military spokeswoman, Lt. Cindy Moore, said.

The casualties occurred during a patrol in the Shinkay district of Zabul Province, she said.

David S. Cloud reported from Washington for this article and Carlotta Gall from Kabul and Kandahar.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2005

China Leads in Number of Executions--US in 4th place

Published on Tuesday, April 5, 2005 by the Independent/UK
China Leads Death List as Number of Executions Around the World Soars
by Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor

Executions around the world are nearing record levels, and the Unites States is among the four countries which account for 97 per cent of the total, a report has found.

At least 3,797 people were executed in 25 countries in 2004, according to a report released today by Amnesty International.

The report says China easily operates the most stringent capital punishment regime, with an estimated 3,400 executions last year. In second place, Iran executed at least 159, Vietnam at least 64, and 59 prisoners were put to death in the US.

The number of executions worldwide last year was the highest since 1996, when 4,272 were carried out.

No official figures are available for China's execution rate, and Amnesty has changed the method it uses to calculate the number of executions there. According to Amnesty's report for 2003 China carried out at least 726 executions. The much higher figure of 3,400 executed last year is an estimate based on internet reports of trials, although it is still described as the "tip of the iceberg".

Kate Allen, Amnesty International's UK director, said China's record was "genuinely frightening". Amnesty quoted a delegate at the National People's Congress in March last year, who said that "nearly 10,000" people were executed every year in China. Corruption is among the crimes which carries the death penalty.

Ms Allen said: "It is deeply disturbing that the vast majority of those executed in the world last year did not even have fair trials, and many were convicted on the basis of 'evidence' extracted under torture.

"The death penalty is cruel and unnecessary, does not deter crime, and runs the risk of killing the wrongly convicted. It is time to consign the death penalty to the dustbin of history." Yet the figures conceal a trend that shows a general move towards abolition. "The world continued to move closer to the universal abolition of capital punishment during 2004," the report says.

Five countries abolished the death penalty for all crimes last year - Bhutan, Greece, Samoa, Senegal and Turkey. This means that 120 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice.

Although the US has become accustomed to being named in the grim league table alongside states such as Iran, which it has branded an "outpost of tyranny," there were fewer executions compared with 2003, when 65 were held. Two prisoners with long histories of mental illness were put to death in the US, but the Supreme Court ruled that imposing death sentences against child offenders contravened the US constitution.

In several of the 38 American states where the death penalty is still legal, the lawfulness of lethal injection has been challenged on the grounds that one of the chemicals used may mask a prisoner's suffering.

Amnesty says that six prisoners on death row in the US were released last year after they were found innocent.

Kenny Richey, a Scotsman, whose conviction for murder and arson was overturned on appeal earlier this year, is still at risk of execution because Ohio prosecutors are trying to have the decision overturned.

Ms Allen said: "Last year I visited Scotsman Kenny Richey on death row in Ohio and saw the true wretchedness of a system that can condemn someone to years of calculated cruelty as they await death at the hands of the state.

"Even now Kenny is effectively suspended between life and death. We want to see Ohio prosecutors accept the senior state court's decision and release Kenny immediately," Ms Allen said.

In some countries, such as Vietnam, it remains a state secret to reveal the number of executions carried out. Video evidence of North Korea's execution of defectors was produced last week in a video released by a Japanese non-governmental organization.

MOST EXECUTIONS

Total in 2004

1 China 3,400*

2 Iran 159*

3 Vietnam 64*

4 United States 59*

5 Saudi Arabia 33*

6 Pakistan 15*

7 Kuwait 9*

8 Bangladesh 7*

9= Egypt 6*

= Singapore 6*

= Yemen 6*

*Minimum

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

Posted by lois at 08:48 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2005

10,000 "ghost detainees"

For the entire story go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1440836,00.html

'One huge US jail'

Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the frontline in America's 'war on terror', where arrest can be random and allegations of torture commonplace.

Excerpts:

What has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace Guantánamo Bay. When that detention centre was set up in January 2002, it was essentially an offshore gulag - beyond the reach of the US constitution and even the Geneva conventions. That all changed in July 2004. The US supreme court ruled that the federal court in Washington had jurisdiction to hear a case that would decide if the Cuban detentions were in violation of the US constitution, its laws or treaties. The military commissions, which had been intended to dispense justice to the prisoners, were in disarray, too. No prosecution cases had been prepared and no defence cases would be readily offered as the US National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers had described the commissions as unethical, a decision backed by a federal judge who ruled in January that they were "illegal". Guantánamo was suddenly bogged down in domestic lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global prison network built up over the previous three years, beyond the reach of American and European judicial process, immediately began to pick up the slack. The process became explicit last week when the Pentagon announced that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo are to be transferred to prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

The floating population of "ghost detainees", according to US and UK military officials, now exceeds 10,000.

The roots of the prison network can be traced to the legal wrangles that began as soon as the first terror suspects were rounded up just weeks after the September 11 attacks. As CIA agents and US forces began to capture suspected al-Qaida fighters in the war in Afghanistan, Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel, looked for ways to "dispense justice swiftly, close to where our forces may be fighting, without years of pre-trial proceedings or post-trial appeals".

Posted by lois at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2005

Mexico Says NO to Arizona Prison

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0302mex-prison02.html#
Prison bill riles Mexico
Chris Hawley
Republic Mexico City Bureau Mar. 2, 2005 12:00 AM
MEXICO CITY - Mexico has rejected a proposal by some Arizona lawmakers to move undocumented inmates to a privately run prison south of the border, calling it an "insult" to Mexico's sovereignty.

A bill moving through the Arizona House of Representatives would allow the state to contract a prison in Mexico to hold undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes in the United States.

The House Government Affairs Committee approved the bill last week, and a delegation of Arizona lawmakers planned to bring up the idea during a visit to Sonora today.

But the government of President Vicente Fox has said it would be unthinkable for Mexicans to keep fellow citizens imprisoned for crimes that weren't committed in Mexico.

"To build any structure of that type would require authorization of the Mexican government, authorization that we are not going to give," Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez said during a news conference Monday.

"I don't know where that (idea) came from - it had to have been dreamed up by, well, I'm not going to use the word, but some people in the United States," Derbez said, according to a transcript released late Monday.

Arizonans pay $80 million to $100 million a year to house the 4,000 undocumented immigrants in state prisons, said Rep. Russ Jones, R-Yuma, the bill's chief proponent. He said the measure is simply aimed at saving money.

"This (bill) is simply realizing that we have an issue, and trying to resolve the issue in the most reasonable and humanitarian way," Jones said.

But the Mexican government doesn't see it that way, Derbez said.

"I believe that not only is it wrong, it's something that shouldn't even have been brought up," Derbez said. "It's an insult to even have made a suggestion of this nature when it is clear and evident that the government of Mexico, this administration at least, is in no way going to permit this type of activity."

Jones said he and other members of the Arizona House and Senate still intended to pitch the idea to Sonora state officials during a visit today to Hermosillo. "I think we could provide jobs down there. I think it will be a good thing," said state Sen. Robert Blendu, R-Litchfield Park, another member of the delegation. "We should be able to compromise on this."

Posted by lois at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)

December 08, 2004

France:lslam in Jail

"Despite making up only 10 percent of the population, Muslims account for most of the country's inmates and a growing percentage of the prison populations in many other European countries, an indication of their place at the bottom of the Continent's hierarchy."

December 8, 2004, NY Times
Islam in Jail: Europe's Neglect Breeds Angry Radicals
By CRAIG S. SMITH

NANTERRE DETENTION CENTER, France - Abdullah, tall and muscular, with a shaved head and closely cropped goatee, sat on a metal bunk in the cramped cell here and described how he got religion.

"When I was in La Santé, I read books about the Prophet," he said, referring to a notorious Parisian detention center, the third of five jails where he has spent time during the past two years for dealing drugs and stealing cars.

When he arrived at the fourth, Fleury-Merogis, Europe's largest, another inmate gave him a DVD about the life of Muhammad and later, while enduring a three-week stint in solitary confinement, he vowed to devote himself to Islam.

"People here find God," he said.

In less than a decade, there has been a radical shift in France's prison population, a shift that officials and experts say poses a monumental challenge.

Despite making up only 10 percent of the population, Muslims account for most of the country's inmates and a growing percentage of the prison populations in many other European countries, an indication of their place at the bottom of the Continent's hierarchy.

With radical strains of Islam percolating through Europe, authorities are unsure how to address the spiritual needs of the prisoners while guarding against the potentially toxic mix of extremist ideology and a criminal past. One result is often neglect, which officials say can be a still greater force for radicalization.

Prison populations have been expanding across Europe in recent years, partly because of stricter anticrime regimens influenced by the sort of zero tolerance on quality-of-life crimes that was epitomized by the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

France's prison population has risen by 20 percent in the past three years, largely because of aggressive pursuit of lower-level crimes.

The proportion of Muslims in prison has been growing even faster, reflecting the relative youth of Europe's largely Muslim immigrants.

While there are no official data on issues of race and ethnicity in much of Europe - it is in fact illegal to keep such data in many places - experts on prison populations agree on the new disproportion of Muslims here and elsewhere.

Two months ago Pierre Raffin, the director of La Santé detention center, warned officials looking into the role of religion in France that extremist proselytizing in prisons was growing.

Other countries are facing the same problem. Spain's chief counterterrorism magistrate, Baltazar Garzón, said recently that the men accused of plotting to blow up the country's main counterterrorism court were recruited from among fellow inmates by an Islamic militant serving time for credit card fraud.

Most famously, Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a Miami-bound airliner in December 2001 using a bomb in his shoe, converted to Islam while in a British jail.

Those who are detained or convicted for terrorist-related crimes are not always separated from the larger prison population and are often ready to act as spiritual guides at a time when mainstream Muslim chaplains are in severely short supply.

Abdullah (prison rules prevented him from giving his last name) said that while he was at Fleury-Merogis, militants were active in the prison yard, preaching that Christians and Jews are enemy infidels. In May, the militants defied prison rules by organizing a prayer meeting during an exercise break. Several prisoners were disciplined as a result.

"Islam is becoming in Europe, especially France, the religion of the repressed, what Marxism was in Europe at one time," said Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranian-French scholar who has written a book on Islam in prisons. He says the growing Muslim prison population is evidence of an Islamic underclass that is developing across Europe and, at its margins, is increasingly sympathetic to the coalescing ideologies of political Islam.

Europe has been slow to adjust to the changing ethnic and religious makeup of its prison inmates. France, in particular, has resisted approving Muslim prison chaplains, worried that inadequate screening could unleash potential militants into the system.

Missoum Abdelmadjid Chaoui, the imam responsible for the Nanterre institution, says there are only eight Muslim chaplains for the nearly 20,000 Muslim inmates in the Paris region alone. He handles 9 of the area's 25 prisons himself, but works as a chaplain only part time.

There are several efforts in France and elsewhere in Europe to train moderate clerics who are sensitive to the Continent's secular ideals, but progress is slow and Mr. Chaoui said it would take years before there were enough chaplains to meet the needs of France's prison population, which he estimates is already 60 percent Muslim.

Many people warn that neglecting the needs of Muslim prisoners breeds resentment and leaves them open for more radical interpretations of Islam.

Muslim inmates in France, which has Europe's largest Islamic community, complain that they are ignored in a system devised for a Christian population. Few of the country's prisons provide halal meat, butchered according to Islamic dietary laws, and fewer still hold regular religious services for Muslims, even though most Catholic inmates can attend Mass once a week.

"This feeds back into the community of Muslims outside the prisons, who hear what goes on and are disturbed by it," said James Beckford, a sociology professor at Warwick University in Britain, who has studied the problems of Muslims in jail. "It feeds their sense of alienation."

Abdullah said that since Sept. 11, 2001, many prisoners of his generation have grown interested in understanding the religion of their birth.

But he and one of his two cellmates, Bandjougou, complained that they got little spiritual guidance. Both men were born and raised in the working-class suburb of St. Denis, north of Paris. The neighborhood, once a village surrounding a 13th-century cathedral where France buried its kings, has grown into a sprawl of public housing peopled largely by Arab and African immigrants.

"In 30 months, I've seen the chaplain twice," said Bandjougou, a tall, clear-eyed man of West African descent. "Maybe it would go in one ear and out the other, but at least it would be an alternative vision of life."

A Catholic priest visits the block almost daily, but Bandjougou says he provides little solace for the vast majority of inmates, who are Muslim. In the absence of an official spiritual guide, he said, the prisoners counsel one another.

Prison officials say they are quick to spot serious proselytizing and regularly move prisoners deemed too influential on their fellow inmates.

"Every time we see detainees grouping in the yards to pray or proselytize, the group is broken up," said Géraud Delorme, deputy director of the Nanterre detention center. "Everything is organized to prevent extensive contacts and such exchanges of ideas."

In the French prison system, many prisoners spend as much as 21 hours a day locked behind windowless steel doors in their small cells. Meals are delivered to the cells and there is little opportunity to socialize with anyone but cellmates, except during the twice-daily exercise breaks in the small concrete prison yard.

Drugs are prevalent, passed from cell to cell by strings hung through holes cut in the mesh covering each cell's small window. The "yo-yos" are tolerated at some prisons but the mesh has recently been replaced in Nanterre.

The prisons' shifting demographics are engraved in the small brick- walled exercise yard in Fresnes, a detention center that acts as a hub in transferring inmates around the national prison system. Names carved into the bricks a century ago are all French. "Maurice Barbes, 1909," reads one. But those carved by the young men filling the yard these days are predominantly North African names like Oulmana, Chebbabi and Karim.

Professor Beckford says many countries are making adjustments for their sizable Muslim prison populations. Britain now has more than 20 full-time, salaried chaplains and hundreds of volunteer imams who go into the prisons every week, while prisons in England and Wales hold regular Friday Prayer and provide halal food in the daily diet.

But at Nanterre, a model compared with many other French prisons, halal food is available only through the prison commissary. Bandjougou pointed to boxes of dates, halal ravioli and chicken sausage piled on a shelf in the cramped cell. "We have family that gives us money so that we can buy food," he said in the fading light from the cell's small window, "but if you have no money, you're out of luck."

The men cook the food over homemade stoves, illegal but widely tolerated, that they cobble together from tin cans, tissue paper and cooking oil. Muslims have the option of ordering vegetarian meals from the regular food service, but they say that the diet, like the missing imams, leaves them hungry.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

December 01, 2004

Request for Assistance for Research Concerning Women in Prison and Their Children

The following email is from the International Quakers in Switzerland. It requests information for a study on the impact of incarceration on women and their visitors. If you are a woman who was incarcerated OR if you have visited a woman who is/was incarcerated your input would be appreciated. Please feel free to circulate this to others who might be interested.

FRIENDS WORLD COMMITTEE FOR CONSULTATION (QUAKERS) www.quno.org

Dear friend

Request for assistance with research into women in prison and children of imprisoned mothers

The Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) based in Geneva, Switzerland, is an international non-governmental organisation. We work on issues related to peace and human rights, and have a particular interest in prison conditions and prisoners' welfare.

QUNO has been working for some time on the problems surrounding the imprisonment of women: highlighting the growing numbers of women prisoners, the often poor conditions of women's imprisonment and the impact on women prisoners' families. We are particularly concerned at the effects of imprisonment of women on their children.

We are bringing these issues to the attention of the United Nations, to increase international awareness with a view to improving conditions for women in prison and children of imprisoned mothers. Last July, QUNO published a preliminary research report on women in prison and children of imprisoned mothers (at http://www.geneva.quno.info/pdf/Women_in_Prison_Preliminary.pdf), and has pursued different strategies to create a high level of interest in women in prison among international policy and decision makers.

QUNO is now undertaking more substantive global research into the circumstances and conditions of women's imprisonment. Working with the Quaker Council of European Affairs (QCEA) in Brussels, we are collecting information about women in prison from all regions of the world. Analysis of this material will assist us to identify key issues and good practice, and to develop practical policy recommendations at the national, regional and international levels. We intend to produce significant materials on which advocacy for change in the approach to the imprisonment of women can be based.

We ask for your assistance in our research. We have developed two questionnaires concerning women's imprisonment:

-for prison visitors, prison chaplains, relatives of prisoners, organisations and any other people who have contact with women who are in prison – at http://www.geneva.quno.info/pdf/Quest_NGOs_English.pdf

-for women prisoners and ex-prisoners – at http://www.geneva.quno.info/pdf/Quest_prisoners_English.pdf .

(You will need Adobe Reader to open these files, which you can download for free from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html)

We would be very grateful if you could:

-complete and return a questionnaire yourselves; and/or

-distribute these questionnaires to people and organisations who might be able to complete them (for example, to individuals who work with women prisoners and their families, to individual ex-prisoners, and within women's prisons).

The questionnaires are also available in French and Spanish.

If you have other materials relevant to women in prison and their children, we would very much appreciate you sharing them with us. I have downloaded what is available without payment from your website, but if you think other publications would be particularly useful, we would be very grateful if you could share them.

We hope to receive all responses by the end of the year, although those received later will be incorporated into later analysis, so please do send them. The questionnaires may be filled out electronically or on paper. Please return them to us by:

Email to: quno2@quno.ch Fax to: +41 22 748 48 19

Or post to:

Women in Prison Project

Quaker United Nations Office

13 Avenue du Mervelet

CH-1209 Geneva

Switzerland

Thank you for helping us with this research.

Yours sincerely

Rachel Brett, Representative (Human Rights & Refugees)

Megan Bastick, Programme Assistant (Human Rights & Refugees)

Quaker United Nations Office, Geneva

Email quno2@quno.ch

Posted by lois at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2004

HIV pandemic African prisons

People in Zambia with HIV find life hard both in and out of prison

Mail and Guardian (South African newspaper) at:
http://www.mg.co.za/content/l3.asp?cg=Insight-Africa&ao=124182

Freedom a mixed blessing for positive prisoners

Zarina Geloo | Lusaka, Zambia

22 October 2004 08:37
The HIV pandemic has proved a divisive force in several African countries, not least Zambia.

As IPS reported last month, the question of whether to make HIV tests mandatory has sparked fierce debate in the country. According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids) Zambia currently has a 19% HIV prevalence rate.

However, another controversy is also afoot about the wisdom of releasing prisoners in the advanced stages of Aids.

Since late 2001, more than 300 sick inmates have been freed by President Levy Mwanawasa on compassionate grounds.

Commissioner of Prisons Jethro Mumbuwa says Zambia’s jails simply lack the resources to look after convicts who are seriously ill.

“The prisons are under-resourced both financially and (in terms of) human resources. Besides, we think that when people are terminally ill they are better off spending their last days with their families,” he noted.

With many of the former inmates having been given life sentences for serious infractions, protests from the victims of their crimes might have been expected.

But surprisingly, some of the strongest opposition to the releases has come from the prisoners’ families.

“Why, why give me this shell?” asks the wife of HIV-positive ex-prisoner Samson Nkumba (not his real name).

“They (the government) must keep him, because I cannot do what they have failed to do. I cannot afford ARVs (anti-retroviral drugs). It is traumatic for the children to see their father in this way,” she adds.

These words are echoed by Clement Mfuzi, chairman of the Network of Zambian People Living with HIV/Aids (NZP+). “Zambians are poor. (If) you lock up the bread earner, where do you expect families to get money to look after a sick relative?” he asks.

An instance where release worked to good effect was that of Jack Chiti, who was jailed for attempting to topple former president Frederick Chiluba in October 1997. Chiti’s relatives petitioned for his release, and he subsequently died in the care of his family.

NZP+ believes that government is entrenching the stigma surrounding HIV-positive persons by washing its hands of prisoners with Aids-related diseases.

While prison authorities claim inmates are counselled about their condition before being released, NZP+ also queries whether this process is adequate -- and whether the convicts’ families are being properly advised on how to care for them.

“You just do not unleash people with HIV onto an unsuspecting public. What if the convicts themselves are in denial (about their HIV status) and continue to have unprotected sex with their ... spouses?” asks Mfuzi.

Prison often hardens convicts rather than rehabilitating them, he adds. This might encourage reckless behaviour on the part of former inmates -- which makes the need for prison and home-based counselling still more urgent.

Says Nkumba, “They removed us from society because they said we were a danger to the public. They now throw us back to the same society when we are even more dangerous than before.”

“Neither myself or my family were counselled, and I had not heard of any of my colleagues who were in the same situation being counselled. We are just told we are being released -- that’s it,” he adds.

At present, Zambian courts do not take HIV status into consideration when sentencing felons. There are no voluntary counselling and testing facilities in prisons, and HIV tests are only conducted when a convict falls ill repeatedly.

Nonetheless, the dirt, congestion and poor nutrition that prevail in many prisons all but ensure that those HIV-positive prisoners at risk of developing Aids-related diseases do so. Unprotected sex between male inmates also fuels the spread of HIV.

“The convicts cannot be forced or coerced into testing for HIV because of the human rights issue. But, I see a time when this will be a necessity because HIV is flourishing in the prisons,” says Leslie Phiri, a lawyer based in the capital, Lusaka.

Zambia’s Permanent Human Rights Commission insists that no prisoner should be forced to test for HIV, however.

Instead, it recommends that prisons be reformed to ensure that HIV-positive inmates receive the treatment needed to keep them alive.

Elsewhere in the region, officials are also grappling with the effects of HIV on prisons.

According to a 2003 study conducted by the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, the HIV policies that South Africa’s Department of Correctional Services has introduced are “excellent” in certain respects.

It notes, however, that the distribution of condoms in prisons – something advocated by UNAids and the World Health Organisation -- “... would be considerably improved if it were to include the discreet provision of condoms in common areas rather than requiring prisoners to request condoms face to face with a member of the health staff.”

The study, entitled HIV/Aids in Prison: Problems, Policies, and Potential, goes on to state that “the provision of water-based lubricant in a similarly accessible manner” would help to reduce condom breakage and damage to the rectum during anal sex. Breakages and rectal damage facilitate the transmission of HIV.

Malawi, with its Banja la Mtsogolo (Family of the Future) programme, aims to educate over 5 000 prisoners in 21 jails about HIV. The initiative also incorporates treatment for prisoners who have sexually-transmitted infections.

According to UNAids, HIV prevalence in Malawi is at 15%. -- IPS

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