The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

December 22, 2006

Union Square Awards: Kym Clark- Prison Families Community Forum

Union Square Awards
2006 Awardee
Prison Families Community Forum
Kym Clark
Founder
founderpfcf@yahoo.com
www.stopthecontract.org
Prison Families Community Forum (PFCF), a New York City network of support, education and action for families affected by the incarceration of their loved ones. PFCF deals with challenges faced by members through a three-prong strategy of support, self-advocacy and community organizing. Members are primarily African American and Latina women whose experience provides the guiding voice for the organization.

PFCF convenes mutual support groups where members exchange experiences and teach each other about the criminal justice system. Free legal trainings and leadership development activities increase members’ knowledge so that they may effectively advocate for themselves and navigate the system on issues dealing with health, parole, transfer policy, and pro se representation. PFCF also assists with individual cases and makes legal and social services referrals. Gatherings and events such as potluck dinners, holiday parties and barbecues help build a supportive community.

PFCF engages in public education to raise awareness about families’ concerns and to organize for change of unjust policies. For example, as a partner in the “New York Campaign for Telephone Justice,” PFCF continues to challenge the New York State Department of Corrections’ contract with Verizon/MCI, which charges exorbitant telephone fees for calls from prisoners to their families.
http://www.unionsquareawards.org/v2/awardees/bio.asp?aID=159

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

November 24, 2006

Despite Fewer Lockups, NYC Has Seen Big Drop in Crime

Despite Fewer Lockups, NYC Has Seen Big Drop in Crime

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 24, 2006; A03

NEW YORK -- The correction commissioner walks down a long row of cells painted blue, his footsteps echoing inside the massive Rikers Island jail block.

Every cell is empty, and he couldn't be happier.

"What we've seen in New York is the fastest drop in crime in the nation, and we did it while locking up a lot less people," says Commissioner Martin F. Horn, who oversees the city lockups, including barbed-wire-ringed Rikers Island. "The only people using these cells now are the directors and actors from 'Law and Order.' "

It is one of the least-told stories in American crime-fighting. New York, the safest big city in the nation, achieved its now-legendary 70-percent drop in homicides even as it locked up fewer and fewer of its citizens during the past decade. The number of prisoners in the city has dropped from 21,449 in 1993 to 14,129 this past week. That runs counter to the national trend, in which prison admissions have jumped 72 percent during that time.

Nearly 2.2 million Americans now live behind bars, about eight times as many as in 1975 and the most per capita in the Western world. For three decades, Congress and dozens of legislatures have worked to write tougher anti-crime measures. Often the only controversy has centered on how to finance the construction of prison cells.

New York City officials, by contrast, are debating whether to turn some old cells in downtown Brooklyn into luxury shops.

"If you want to drive down crime, the experience of New York shows that it's ridiculous to spend your first dollar building more prison cells," said Michael Jacobson, who served as New York's correction commissioner for former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) and now is president of the Vera Institute of Justice, which studies crime-fighting trends worldwide.

"I can't tell you exactly why violent crime in New York declined by twice the national rate," he said. "But I can tell you this: It wasn't because we locked up more people."

Perhaps as intriguing is the experience in states where officials spent billions of dollars to build prisons. From 1992 to 2002, Idaho's prison population grew by 174 percent. the largest percentage increase in the nation. Yet violent crime in that state rose by 14 percent. In West Virginia, the prison population increased by 171 percent, and violent crime rose 10 percent. In Texas, the prison population jumped by 168 percent, and crime dropped by 11 percent.

The debate about the degree to which the United States' record rate of imprisonment has driven down crime is more than a dance on the head of a statistical pin. FBI data released in September showed that violent crime -- rape, homicide and robbery -- edged up by 2.2 percent last year. That is far from the violent heights of the early 1990s, but Jacobson and other criminologists are concerned that a resurgence in crime could cast a shadow on an intriguing cultural moment.

In the past few years, legislators in such conservative states as Louisiana and Mississippi have passed sentencing reforms. Kansas and Nebraska are reconsidering prison expansion in favor of far less expensive drug treatment. The United States annually spends about $60 billion on prisons.

"Crime is down and people realize, sure, we can lock up more people, but that's why your kid's pre-K class has 35 kids -- all the money is going to prisons," Jacobson says. "There's a sense of urgency that for the first time in two decades, we can talk about whether it makes sense to lock up even more people."

No one, not even reformers, doubts that locking up enough people can drive down crime. Nor does anyone question that many felonious types belong behind bars. Alfred Blumenstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, cites a study that found that the growth in imprisonment during the 1990s accounted for about 25 percent of the national decline in crime.

David Muhlhausen, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation -- which is an influential voice within the Bush administration -- goes further. He says prison is a fine crime-fighting method. "Putting citizens behind bars works because they can't commit crimes," he said. "It's one of the best tools we have against crime."

But there are powerful counter examples, criminologists say. The nation's prison population rose between 1985 and 1993 -- even as crime spiked sharply. New York was not the only city in which crime and imprisonment fell in tandem during the 1990s. From 1993 to 2001, homicides in San Diego declined by 62 percent while prison sentences dropped by 25 percent.

Casting an eye north of the border, Canada experienced a sharp drop in crime as its prison population fell. "There are several examples of crime crashing without imprisonment rising, but we treat these as outliers," says Franklin E. Zimring, author of "The Great American Crime Decline" and a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "For most of the nation, the 1990s were the era of 'throw away the key.' "

Such heavy reliance on prison, epidemiologists note, carries a considerable social price tag. Hundreds of thousands of released felons cannot vote, cannot obtain driver's licenses and have trouble finding jobs -- a toll that falls disproportionately on blacks, Latinos and poor whites.

Barry Campbell, who works at the Fortune Society, a prison reform organization in Manhattan, did 15 years behind bars on sundry charges. He attributes many of his troubles to a drug addiction that he has kicked. Ask him about New York's experience in driving down imprisonment and crime, and he is not surprised.

"Prison is a place where someone heading down a path of destruction is propelled at 90 miles an hour," he says.

Approximately 60 percent of U.S. convicts serve time for charges related to drug peddling and addiction. In California, 65,000 parolees fail drug tests each year and are recycled back to prison each year. They serve, on average, an additional four months, at a cost of $1 billion.

No public official set out to drive down New York's prison and jail population in the early 1990s. Quite the opposite; crack-fueled homicides had topped 2,000, the middle class was fleeing and Giuliani was elected on a crime-fighting platform.

"If I told Rudy we needed to lock up 40,000, 50,000 people, he would have said fine," Jacobson said. "Rudy can say now that he's a genius, but the drop in prison population was entirely unintentional."

William J. Bratton, Giuliani's police commissioner in the mid-1990s -- now chief of the Los Angeles Police Department -- directed his officers to make swarms of misdemeanor arrests for fare beating, pot smoking, gun possession and the like, charges that result in much shorter incarcerations. Felony arrests, by contrast, dropped sharply, which meant far fewer city residents were sent to the high-security Upstate prisons.

City and state prisons in New York also turned aggressively to drug treatment and mental health counseling. They did so as a matter of enlightened self-interest. The city prison system is the second-largest mental health provider in the nation; only the Los Angeles County system surpasses it.

Commissioner Horn got his start decades ago as a prison guard. Now he occupies the executive office at Rikers Island and is a national expert on what is recognized as an American specialty: mass incarceration.

"I leave it to the economists and the moralists to decide if we've paid too high a cost to imprison," Horn said as he walked out of a shadowed prison block. "But New York proves you can lock up a lot fewer people and get a pretty big impact."

Staff writer Robin Shulman contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/23/AR2006112301015.html

Posted by lois at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2006

Queens NY: As Protests Persist, Prison Remains

11/16/2006, Queens Chronicle
As Protests Persist, Prison Remains
by Sitara Nieves , Chronicle Correspondent

(Sitara Nieves) Councilman James Sanders (D Laurelton), right, continues to lead periodic protests against the federal prison in Springfield Gardens. State Sen. Malcolm Smith (D St. Albans), left, attended last weekend’s rally.
With cries of “Educate, don’t incarcerate,” dozens of Springfield Gardens residents marched from Springfield Park to the Queens Private Correctional Facility on Saturday, calling for the prison to be shut down.

Protesters, led by Councilman James Sanders (D Laurelton), have repeatedly marched the same route to the small, windowless prison at 182 22 150th Ave. for almost a year. The prison is run by Boca Raton, Fla. based GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut), which is the second largest private prison corporation in the world.
Along the way in this extended battle over the prison, accusations have flown back and forth about the main parties involved: GEO Group, Sanders, Congressman Gregory Meeks (D St. Albans), and even the neighbors who participate in the periodic rallies.
Sanders, who, as a city legislator would have little sway over the prison’s federal contract, has been repeatedly accused of organizing the rallies as a means of pursuing Meeks’ congressional seat.
“It’s the same people who come every time,” said GEO spokesman Martin McLaughlin, who described the rallies as politically motivated and stale. “This is not a new thing. As long as you papers keep covering Sanders, he’ll keep going out and protesting. He’ll keep having a good time getting in the paper.”
Sanders bristled at the accusations, describing his involvement as one of moral and community obligation. “How long are they going to run around with that one?” he asked of GEO. “They accused me of running for office last year. Well, November has come and gone, but they’re still saying the same thing.”
Sanders added: “I refuse to believe that people can’t do things without having ulterior motives. We can do things just because they’re right.”
Sanders said the protests were targeted mainly at the federal government, and that frequent protests were necessary to ensure that both GEO and the U.S. Marshals Service—which holds the contract—know that the community continues to be dissatisfied. He added that the fact that GEO was not able to expand the prison last April showed that mobilizations were effective.
Meeks, who as the congressman representing the area is in the best position to negotiate with GEO and the marshals about the contract, has also come under fire. “This is my sixth march, and I haven’t seen (Meeks), he hasn’t been to any of these,” said resident Joann McCants, flanked by her four children. “He should be here.”
Meeks’ spokesman Brian Simon said that the congressman’s schedule was too full to attend the protests, but emphasized that the rallies are important. “It really strengthens the congressman’s voice when the rallies continue,” he said.
Simon also strongly denied allegations that Meeks was not working hard enough to shut down the prison after receiving a $1,000 campaign contribution from GEO last year. “That was an unsolicited contribution to the congressman,” Simon said. “That has not influenced the congressman’s position on this issue … he’s still against the prison, and he has never wavered from his position (against GEO): ‘I don’t want you here.’”
GEO and its predecessor company have operated the prison in Springfield Gardens since 1997. It previously held immigrants awaiting deportation, but now holds up to 216 federal prisoners awaiting trials or transfers.
The company’s contract expires at the end of June, and protesters want to make sure that the contract isn’t renewed. Opponents worry that the prison is decreasing their property values, that it is unsafe, that the neighborhood needs schools far more than a prison, and that GEO is a poor community partner.
“That company has not done one thing to contribute or reach out to the community,” said Barbara Brown, who chairs the Eastern Queens Alliance and has been working with Meeks to stop the prison. “GEO is making money off the misfortunes of other people.”
GEO maintains that it contributes to the neighborhood’s vitality. “We spend a lot of money in this community,” said McLaughlin, noting that the prison has an annual payroll of $6.5 million, and has hired 35 percent of its employees from Southeast Queens. “We hire from the area. We make a big contribution to the community.”
Brown disagreed, as did many at Saturday’s protest.. “Don’t dangle jobs in front of me to say that’s why you should be here,” Brown said. “This area is a middle class community where most people are already gainfully employed.”
Some residents fear that GEO will use the time before its contract expires to influence government officials to let them stay and expand. “They want to make this whole area around here into a prison complex,” charged former Assembly candidate Michael Duvalle, angrily pointing to GEO’s recent purchase. “And people are going to start moving away from here.”
Despite McLaughlin’s charge that the rallies were stale, it did not seem that way to the 40 participants in Saturday’s defiant and hopeful rally.
Chanting “GEO must go!” as they walked back to their cars, neighbors vowed to continue marching every few weeks until the prison is removed from the barren stretch of 150th Avenue, only a few blocks from Springfield Gardens’ bustling park and tidy homes.

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17475312&BRD=2731&PAG=461&dept_id=

Posted by lois at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2006

Tara Andrews Candidate for MD Senate Focuses on African American Men Not Voting

At election time, many black men not on the scene
By C. Fraser Smith
Originally published August 20, 2006
The profile of a voter in Baltimore is roughly this: a black woman of about 40, a churchgoer with a decent job. Black men, whether professionals or "brothers on the corner," often aren't in the picture. Many don't see why they should vote - or they're disqualified by virtue of involvement with the criminal justice system.

These are rough approximations of reality, but they are close enough to the truth for political purposes. And the implications are troubling, to say the least. An important part of the black community offers political leaders no reason to care about or address its concerns. If you don't vote in this country, you don't count politically.

As a candidate for the state Senate in Baltimore's 40th District, Tara Andrews found her interest in this problem grow into a pragmatic concern. A survey of the electorate in her center-city senatorial district confirmed her worst fears. She knew young black men didn't vote. It's part of a pattern.

"If there's a negative indicator of status in this society, black men are always at the bottom: in education, employment, whatever," she says.

But the numbers she found were even more profoundly distressing.

Of approximately 47,000 registered black voters in her district, about 4,300 were between 18 and 35. Between 1994 and 2002, only 2,500 went to the polls, and that's a cumulative total for all the elections in this eight-year period.

Many of those who don't vote say they have no faith their participation makes a difference for them. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Having lobbied for various causes in Annapolis for the last five years, Ms. Andrews says, "I understand even more clearly how politics works, how the policymaking process works. These young black men are not a constituency the politicians have to respond to for anything."

Many of those who don't vote are among the estimated 150,000 Marylanders barred from the voting booth by their convictions, by bureaucratic requirements that make reinstatement of voting rights difficult, and by a political tug of war between the two major political parties.

Republicans get blamed often for blocking the return of ex-felons to the voting roles. Ms. Andrews doesn't buy it. If the problem were just the Republicans, she says, it could be solved by the General Assembly's majority, the Democrats. "It's not a priority for them," she says.

Black leaders must share the blame, Ms. Andrews says. They aren't necessarily interested in seeing a lot of new voters in their districts. "They know they will continue to get elected without fixing the problem." she says.

Ms. Andrews concedes that one of her opponents, Del. Salima S. Marriott, is a longtime advocate of restoring voter privileges to felons and to making it easier for those who want to vote to get to the ballot box. Ms. Marriott was one of the sponsors of legislation extending the voting period for five days this year. If she were in the Assembly, Ms. Andrews says, she would promote virtually instant voter rights for ex-felons.

"You should be eligible to vote as soon as your feet hit the street. You paid your debt," she says.

There are many issues black voters could and should be addressing. The black community has had a love-hate relationship with the police. While many young black men find their life prospects ruined by criminal activity, others in the community are typically the victims. It's a conflict that all the voters ought to be grappling with, she says.

She is not comforted by the dominant position of black women in the electorate.

"To the extent that I'm up here and black males are down there ... we're not whole as a community," she says.

C. Fraser Smith is senior news analyst for WYPR-FM. His column appears Sundays. His e-mail address is fsmiht@WYPR.org.

Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun

Posted by lois at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2006

The "Policing-to Prisons" Track

The “Policing-to-Prisons” Track
Bay Area Organizers Oppose Operation Impact
by Sitara Nieves

Imagine the scene: you and your family are driving down a street in your neighborhood, when you hear sirens. You pull over and a police officer approaches your car. “Your back taillight doesn’t seem to be working, ma’am,” he says. This is news to you, but you figure he’s pulled you over just to let you know, for your safety.

You’re wrong. The officer asks for your license and insurance information. Moments later, he orders you and your small children to step outside, and begins searching your car. More police arrive. A few moments after that, while you and your family are on the sidewalk, a police officer gets in your car and drives it away. The rest of the police officers drive away too, leaving you and your children on the side of a desolate road in the middle of the night to somehow make your way back home.

Can’t believe this occurred? This story actually happened, witnessed by me and other Critical Resistance Oakland members while copwatching (or observing and documenting police actions and procedures in the community). In Oakland, the scene above recurs every weekend night. We have documented hundreds in incidents in which people’s cars are taken from them, literally stranding them in the cold for nothing more than small vehicle infractions. The Oakland police and the California Highway Patrol perpetrate these actions using a program called “Operation Impact.”

Operation Impact Profiles, Intimidates
The Oakland Police Department bills Operation Impact as “supplemental law enforcement assistance to combat violent crime through minimum tolerance, proactive traffic law enforcement and arrest warrant operations directed in violent crime areas identified by OPD crime trend analysis.” The police claim that they are pre-empting crime by addressing what they refer to as “precursors to violent crime and gang-related activity, namely reckless driving, DUI, weapons possession, narcotics, vandalism, and loitering.”

To translate in plain English: the police department is using these so-called precursors to harass and criminalize entire neighborhoods and communities while circumventing racial profiling laws. Since the Operation Impact checkpoints and blockades are set up only in primarily black and brown neighborhoods, the only people the police can pull over are black and brown people.

The police target people based on their skin color, on the music they listen to, and on their zip code. They use a variety of petty vehicle infractions (broken taillights or loud music seem to be the most common) to stop people –– and they use those infractions as a pretext to do further searches. On weekends, police use minor vehicle infractions to tow people’s cars, resulting in a nice wad of cash for the city and creating a hefty “poor tax” for the residents of East Oakland, who often pay upwards of $500 to get their cars back. Proponents of Operation Impact tell the public that these tactics—essentially pulling random people over, interrogating them and towing their cars—prevent violent crime.

Operation Impact is being used in cities around the country, and reflects the national trend of curtailing civil liberties and freedoms. We are increasingly seeing paramilitary models of policing in the many neighborhoods and cities where Critical Resistance operates, resulting in quasi-martial law for certain zip codes and ethnicities. The public is told that these actions are justified by ‘criminal activity’ in the neighborhood. The amount of public outrage determines when and where our constitutional rights apply.

Police brutality and misconduct in poor communities and communities of color has been well documented. According to a 1998 report from Human Rights Watch, “Abuse by law enforcement officers in the United States is one of the most serious and divisive human rights violations in the country. Police have engaged in unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal chokings and unnecessarily rough treatment.” An internal review by the Oakland Police Department itself found that African Americans were 3.3 times as likely as whites to be searched during a traffic stop.

Independent monitors of the Oakland Police Department last year found that Oakland police frequently conduct public strip searches of suspects that result in the exposure of their genitalia. Findings from the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch also show that police oversight in Oakland and across the country often is either nonexistent or is poorly managed, under-funded and politically weak. Policies such as Oakland’s recently adopted 10 p.m. curfew for parolees and probationers also contribute to increased racial profiling and civil liberties violations.

Critical Resistance Challenges Policies
Critical Resistance is a national, grassroots organization in 10 cities across the country that challenges the belief that prisons and policing keep our communities safe, and organizes for alternatives. Our members in Oakland chose to organize against Operation Impact because we know that these types of policing programs directly funnel low-income people and people of color into the prison and jail system. As part of our organizing around policing and prisons, members have been copwatching for a year, particularly observing police checkpoints in East Oakland.

Through campaigns opposing Operation Impact and Oakland’s 10 p.m. curfew, Critical Resistance organizes to increase support for community-based alternatives to policing and prisons. We know that neither policing programs like Operation Impact nor prisons themselves keep our communities safe. In fact, the devastating effects of imprisonment and policing make the lives of people targeted by the prison industrial complex more disordered and less safe. Widespread evidence, along with common sense and experience, shows that when people have what they need in terms of education, job opportunities, healthcare and hope, long-term personal and community safety follow.

The “tough on crime” initiatives—fueled by police associations and opportunistic politicians—have led all levels of government agencies across the country to call for more police and prisons to “solve” their cities’ social, economic and political problems. Those calls are often accompanied by the further expansion of the prison industrial complex that already numbers over two million people locked in cages. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 7 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at yearend 2004—3.2% of all US adult residents, or one in every 31 adults.

Through grassroots organizing, movement building, policy work, and aggressive media campaigns, Critical Resistance challenges the use of prisons and policing tactics like Operation Impact that funnel people into our growing prison system. Our members across the country work to shift society’s investment from prisons and policing to lasting forms of safety through grassroots organizing, movement building, coalition building, public education, media work, and developing leadership among communities most impacted.

Policing and prisons, used as answers to social, political, and economic problems, result in the marginalization and disenfranchisement of people of color, both producing and anchoring structural and institutional racism. We do not believe you can make the prison industrial complex “less racist,” but rather that we need new, explicitly anti-racist, public safety mechanisms. We also believe that such policy changes are only as secure as the movement of people behind them.

Sitara Nieves is an Oakland-based national organizer with Critical Resistance, which received a grant from Resist last year. For more information, contact Critical Resistance, 1904 Franklin St Suite 504, Oakland, CA 94612; www.criticalresistance.org.

Copyright © Resist, Inc., 2006

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

January 19, 2006

"We want full recovery from the addiction, we want full recovery from incarceration," said Tara Andrews, executive director of Justice Maryland.

Rally seeks vote for more ex-offenders
Additional Md. funds sought for drug treatment
By Kelly Brewington
Baltimore Sun
Originally published January 17, 2006

As election-year politics heats up, advocates of restoring voting rights to convicted felons reminded lawmakers last night that hundreds of thousands of Marylanders will be unable to cast ballots this fall.

Justice Maryland, a coalition of advocates for ex-offenders, rallied in frigid temperatures in front of the State House, calling on legislators to restore voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences and pleading for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. to earmark $50 million in his budget for drug treatment funding.

It is part of the group's campaign to reduce the number of prisoners incarcerated for nonviolent offenses and divert them to drug treatment. Advocates have been pushing for an increase in such programs for years. More than 250,000 Marylanders are in need of substance-abuse treatment, Justice Maryland estimates.

Ehrlich and Democratic lawmakers have supported increased access to treatment, but advocates said they want a larger piece of this year's $1 billion budget surplus to confront problems such as long waiting lists. An estimated 30,000 people in Baltimore alone are awaiting spots in treatment programs, advocates said.

"We want full recovery from the addiction, we want full recovery from incarceration," said Tara Andrews, executive director of Justice Maryland.
Afterward, civil rights activists, drug treatment advocates and about 200 people enrolled in Baltimore-area drug treatment centers entered the House of Delegates office building to speak face to face with lawmakers about their concerns.
The political will to confront drug treatment issues is lacking, advocates said, because many felons in Maryland are restricted from voting.
They hope lawmakers will pass legislation authorizing the automatic restoration of voting rights when felons are released from prison. Similar legislation has failed in the past.
Del. Salima S. Marriott, a West Baltimore Democrat who has supported the legislation, said the issue is essential in an election year.
"I think that we as a party who stand for democratic principles must, this year more than any year, ensure that all adults who are not incarcerated can vote," she said in an interview. "For me, it is so important because there are many people in my district who are not able to vote. To the extent that they are disenfranchised, so am I."

While Maryland restores voting rights for some convicted felons, just who is banned under current law can be difficult to decipher.

People convicted of one "infamous crime" - a category that includes fraud and corruption - may register to vote after completing their sentences. Those convicted of two or more nonviolent crimes can register three years after completing their sentences. The state prohibits voting by felons twice convicted of violent crimes, such as murder. Marvin "Doc" Cheatham, president of the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said elections officials and citizens are not sure who is eligible to vote because no statewide database records such information.

He estimates that 60,000 people statewide - 10,000 in Baltimore alone - are eligible to vote but don't know it.

"The saddest thing is the state of Maryland totally fails in educating former felons what their rights are," he said. Cheatham said some felons who are uncertain of their rights are afraid to register to vote because of a state law that deems it a felony if someone registers who is technically not eligible.

Nationally, states vary widely concerning felons' voting rights. Three states permanently bar all felons from voting, while a handful of others, including Maryland, prohibit some ex-offenders from voting, according to the Sentencing Project, which advocates the restoration of voting rights for all ex-offenders. Only Maine and Vermont allow inmates to vote.

The Maryland branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and others have criticized Maryland's law, saying it is more restrictive than others and disproportionately hurts African-Americans, who have historically faced discriminatory voting practices.
Roderick Stewart, 29, of Baltimore said he attended the rally because he thinks ex-offenders are entitled to a better quality of life. Since his release from prison last year, he said, he has been enrolled at a drug treatment center.
"I want to ask them [legislators] what they are doing for ex-offenders," he said. "I want to ask them why I don't have the right to vote."

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-md.felons17jan17,1,7450483.story?coll=bal-local-headlines&ctrack=1&cset=true)

Posted by lois at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)

January 11, 2006

New Movie: Turning A Corner about people involved in the sex trade

February 6, 2006
Premiere Screening, Turning a Corner

Turning a Corner tells the stories of people involved in the sex trade in Chicago and their efforts to raise public awareness of systemic injustice and promote needed reforms. Created in a media activism workshop with over a dozen PART members, this groundbreaking film recounts their survival and triumph over homelessness, violence and discrimination, and gives rare insights into Chicago's sex trade industry.

FREE Chicago Premiere:
Monday, February 6, 2006, 5:30 - 8pm (screening 6-7pm)
Northwestern University Thorne Auditorium
375 E. Chicago Ave.
Reception, Art Exhibition by Urban Art Retreat, Panel Discussion
For Information and RSVP: Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (www.chicagohomeless.org) 312-435-4548 or
Beyondmedia (www.beyondmedia.org) 773-973-2280

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

October 12, 2005

Family Members and Prisoners Share Nightmare After Katrina

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 11, 2005

FAMILY MEMBERS AND PRISONERS SHARE NIGHTMARE AFTER KATRINA

Broad Coalition Calls for Independent Investigation of OPP Evacuation, Amnesty and Real Public Safety Models for New Orleans

WHAT: A JOINT PRESS CONFERENCE called by Critical Resistance, Families & Friends of Louisiana s Incarcerated Children, People s Hurricane Relief Committee, and the Southern Center for Human Rights
WHERE: Orleans Parish Prison
2800 Gravier street
WHO: Ortegas Coleman, who was imprisoned at the Greyhound Bus Station
Ms. Miranda Smith, whose son was evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison
Althea Francois, whose daughter was evacuated from Orleans Parish Prison, People's Hurricane ReliefCommittee
Xochitl Bervera, Friends and Families of Louisiana s Incarcerated Children
Vanita Gupta, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Lisa Kung, Southern Center for Human Rights
Nick Trenticosta, New Orleans Civil Rights Attorney
Tamika Middleton, Critical Resistance
Members of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus will attend

WHEN: 11:00 am, Wednesday, October 12, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, LA They won’ t let my daughter out of prison, even though she was supposed to have been released weeks ago, says Althea Francois. This is a long time for us to be separated I m worried sick about her. And I know there are thousands of families in the same situation.

Stories like Ms. Francois have galvanized a broad coalition of human rights organizations, community groups, Orleans Parish prisoners, and their families, who will gather on Wednesday in front of the now infamous Orleans Parish Prison (OPP). The press conference will take place during Critical Resistance s Delegation on Safety and the Status of Prisoners, which is calling attention to charges that prisoners were left to drown in locked jail cells, hundreds more were arrested for the crime of trying to feed themselves after Katrina, and thousands have had their cases thrown into legal limbo post-Katrina.

The press conference will share personal stories of prisoners left to rising floodwaters without food or water in locked jail cells at Orleans Parish Prison, of arrest and imprisonment at the makeshift jail now set up at the New Orleans Greyhound bus station, and of individuals who would have been released from jail or prison but for Katrina.

Members will demand an independent investigation into the evacuation of OPP and amnesty for those arrested for trying to feed and clothe themselves post-Katrina, while calling for real public safety in a rebuilt New Orleans. Rising from the devastation of Katrina, we have an amazing opportunity to rebuild a truly new and genuine system of public safety for New Orleans, said Xochitl Bervera, Co-Director of Families and Friends of Louisiana s Incarcerated Children.

Along with lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Center for Human Rights, the press conference will include personal stories from mothers whose children were left to drown in chest-high water at Orleans Parish Prison, and Ortegas Coleman, who was one of hundreds imprisoned at the makeshift jail set up in the New Orleans Greyhound Bus Station.

Pointing to additional recent accounts of police beatings, Katrina s aftermath reflects the was we as a nation increasingly deal with social ills: police and imprison primarily poor Black communities for crimes that are reflections of poverty and desperation, said Tamika Middleton,

New Orleans-based Organizer with Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization whose mission is to end society’s use of imprisonment as an answer to social problems.

Louisiana has had the highest rate of incarceration of any state in the U.S. Blacks are grossly over-represented, making up 72% of the state prison population, while only representing 35% of the total population This emphasis on law and order has historically had a devastating impact on the people of New Orleans, Middleton continued. Locking people up in this crisis is cruel mismanagement of city resources and counters the outpouring of the world support and concern for all survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Posted by lois at 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2005

Katrina--New Orleans Organizers Call for Amnesty

New Orleans organizers call for amnesty

by Rose Braz

New Orleans – On the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans organizers from national grassroots organization Critical Resistance are demanding amnesty for those arrested during the aftermath of Katrina and for an accounting of what happened to prisoners during the evacuation of New Orleans.

“We mourn all the victims of Katrina, including those hidden victims who were locked up in Orleans area jails during the storm and those who have been imprisoned indefinitely in its aftermath,” said Critical Resistance Southern Regional Director Tamika Middleton, who was based in New Orleans.

“Thousands of people in New Orleans area jails have been separated from their families and do not know whether their loved ones are alive or dead, while hundreds of others have been refused the right to call their loved ones, held at gunpoint on freeway overpasses or are now locked up inside a sweltering New Orleans bus depot,” continued Middleton.

“Nearly 230 people have been booked in a makeshift jail set up in a Greyhound Station, the vast majority for the ‘crime’ of feeding and clothing themselves during the hurricane,” added Jordan Flaherty of Critical Resistance New Orleans.

“Our schools are closed and people have been left without food, water or shelter, but somehow this city has the means to open a jail? Locking people up in this crisis is a cruel mismanagement of city resources and counters the outpouring of the world’s support and concern for all victims of Hurricane Katrina,” continued Flaherty.

According to Lisa Kung of the Southern Center for Human Rights, “When people in the Orleans Parish Prison were finally evacuated, they were scattered to over 30 facilities throughout the state.” Kung also noted that “despite knowing a levee break would put everyone in the jails in danger, there was no evacuation plan for the people locked up in New Orleans. The right to safety and dignity demands an evacuation plan in case of a levee break. Those basic rights were ignored by officials on all levels, and people who had no way to escape the floodwaters were left without a way out.”

Organizers are also calling for a complete accounting of what happened to Orleans area prisoners amid disturbing reports that indicate that some prisoners may have been left behind to drown.

Meanwhile, on the streets, residents who lost everything are now confronted with martial law. “We met two grandmothers whose 16-year-old grandsons were handcuffed and taken away for allegedly pushing to get on busses that finally arrived after they had spent four days on the freeway overpass. Their grandmothers have not seen them since,” reported Xochitl Beverra of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children.

“On this Day of Prayer and Remembrance, we demand amnesty for prisoners in New Orleans,” said Tamika Middleton, who was evacuated from New Orleans. “Prisoners in New Orleans must be returned to their families to heal from this crisis.”

Critical Resistance is a national grassroots organization whose mission is to end society’s reliance on imprisonment as an answer to social, political and economic problems. Critical Resistance’s Southern Regional Office, located in New Orleans Mid-City neighborhood, was destroyed in the hurricane. Family members attempting to locate their loved ones who were in Orleans area jails may call the Louisiana Department of Corrections at (225) 342-3998. For more information, you can also contact Xochitl Beverra at (504) 606-8846.

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Posted by lois at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2005

CA: "Bulldoze It Down" organizers work to keep a former prisons from becoming a CO training center

Back Article published Aug 29, 2005
Group hopes to keep women's prison closed

STOCKTON - Activists across California vowed to increase pressure on local and state officials to keep a vacant prison near Stockton from reopening as a training academy for correctional officers.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said last week the first trainees will converge on the Northern California Women's Facility on Arch Road by year's end. Opposition groups fear this is the first step to returning the facility to an active prison.

"Bulldoze it down," exclaimed Debbie Reyes, a representative of the Oakland-based California Prison Moratorium Project. Reyes said she favors turning over the 134-acre prison grounds to the business sector. Anything but a prison, she said.

Reyes said she has redoubled efforts to rally opposition among community groups in San Joaquin County. They plan to take their case to the county Board of Supervisors, which has so far been unresponsive, she said. Board Chairman Steve Gutierrez did not return calls last week seeking comment on the prison.

"He can go to the Legislature and say, 'We don't want anymore of these types of facilities in the community,' " Reyes said. "We want something healthy for the community."

Opened in 1987, the 800-bed prison was emptied of inmates in 2003 in a cost-saving measure. The prison is on an arid swath of land east of Highway 99 near a complex of state-run youth prisons, including the N.A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility.

California's adult prison population this month reached an all-time high with 165,378 inmates, said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Elaine Jennings. The women's prison gives the state a real-life setting, with prison cells, guard towers and recreational yards where hundreds of badly needed correctional officers can be trained. Department of Corrections officials had talked of turning the women's prison into a reception center such as Tracy's Deuel Vocational Center where inmates entering the system are temporarily held before being assigned to a prison to serve their sentences.

Deuel is at 219 percent of capacity. Some inmates sleep on bunk beds set up in a gym converted into a dorm. Overcrowding two years ago in the dorms sparked a riot.

But filling the women's prison with inmates would exacerbate the state's shortage of correctional officers, Jennings said. The state anticipates large numbers of correctional officers to retire in the next two years.

"Really, what it came down to, we have a critical need for more staff," Jennings said. "At this time, this is the best use for this facility."

The state plans to use the women's prison as an academy for up to five years. At that time, its future will be reconsidered, Jennings said.

Luis Magaña, a Stockton activist, said he has organized at least three meetings in Stockton to debate options for using the former women's prison. He could not get representatives to attend in an official capacity. State officials are working in secrecy, he said.

"It's tax money," Magaña said, "but they're making decisions without us that could negatively affect our community."

Ari Wohlfeiler, a representative of the Oakland-based Critical Resistance, which advocates for fewer prisons, said as long as the prison stands, it can be easily filled with more inmates. Wohlfeiler said he's skeptical about state officials talking about prison reform.

"It's something that could be turned over in a quick second," Wohlfeiler said. "They're clearly hedging their bets that they're going to shrink."

Bob Driscoll, a Lancaster salesman whose son has been incarcerated more than five years in a prison in Lancaster, said overcrowded prisons are unhealthy. More prison space is needed if the state is going to continue incarcerating people, he said.

"Their punishment is to be taken away from society, not to go in and suffer a hardship," Driscoll said.

Contact reporter Scott Smith at (209) 546-8296 or ssmith@recordnet.com
from the Stockton Record http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200550829007

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

January 28, 2005

CA: Huge turnout to protest curfew at Jerry Brown's loft

Last night's protest, organized by Critical Resistance and All of Us or None, was a HUGE success!

For those of you who couldn't make it, we had over 200 pumped-up people outside of Jerry Brown's loft, led by the 11-member Brass Liberation Orchestra who marched with us from the CR office and helped energized the crowd, and with words from Dorsey Nunn, Rose Braz, Sitara Nieves, Tommy Escarzega, and Linda Evans (and others) rallying us all.

The news media was buzzing, and we were covered on 7 TV stations, 4 radio stations, and 6 newspapers, and met lots of new people and new allies.

Read on, for more words about Jerry Brown's response to this protest.

This protest was part of Critical Resistance's campaigns of: Shrinking the system - Through our campaign to change parole policy, reducing the chances that people will be sent back to prison on technical violations such as a 10pm curfew. California already sends 50% of parolees back to prison on small technical violations -at an enormous cost to both their families and to the larger community. (It costs $35,000-45,000 per year to lock somone up in prison - we don't believe that's a good use of our money and resources, and we don't believe locking people up keeps us safe.)

Organizing around police practices in Oakland -
A 10pm curfew means that Oakland police will be able to step up their established practice of racially profiling certain communities in Oakland after 10pm. The new curfew means that everyone who happens to live in certain neighborhoods can be stopped for suspicion of being a parolee or probationer. We've seen the devastating effects of these practices through our campaign around Operation Impact, which racially profiles communities in Oakland, stopping every car and pedestrian who passes through blockades set up in "high crime" neighborhoods, arresting scores of people, intimidating many more, impounding cars, and ticketing people for the smallest of infractions, like having broken taillights.

Building a movement to create safety without relying on prisons: We know what can keep Oakland safe -- and it's not a 10pm curfew. It's ensuring that our kids have decent schools that Oakland right now can't provide. It's about creating job opportunities, health services, and repairing the fragmentation of communities that mass imprisonment causes.

Research study after research study -- along with common sense -- shows that real safety is created when communities don't rely on incarceration and policing, and when tax money is spent on preventative programs that address the root causes of crime: unemployment, homelessness, poor schools, and lack of services.

Jerry Brown's office has started spinning - we've put him on the defensive.

He's started saying that this program is only for the "worst of the worst", that it's only affected 50 people, and that there is evidence to show that curfews reduce violence.

In fact:
1) The curfew can be imposed on anyone who is convicted for a felony at night.
2) The curfew has just started. There will be hundreds of people affected by this.
3) Every study we have seen shows that curfews are completely ineffective on reducing violence or crime. (http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v1n2/males.html,

http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/587/1/136,

http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v1n2/appendix_a.html)
4) Numerous studies show that former prisoners need SUPPORT to reintegrate into a life outside of a cage - not harassment. A curfew only further stigmatizes a population who is faced with incredible odds: who are forbidden from public housing, food stamps, university loans, and social programs, among other things.
5) A curfew means that more people will be returned to prison, further destabilizing Oakland already-fragmented communities (Just one great analysis of this is in "The Problem with Addition by
Subratction: The Prison-Crime Relationship in Low-income Communities," by Todd Clear in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment,
http://www.sentencingproject.org/pub_invisible.cfm

Join us in this movement. Please call 510-444-0484 if you have questions about why we oppose the curfew, about CR in general, or to come to our monthly general meeting to start working for true safety in Oakland.

In solidarity,

Critical Resistance Oakland _________________________________________________________________

Posted by lois at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2005

NY: Dutchess Exec. Vetoes Jail Funding

Dutchess exec vetoes jail funding -- or does he?
By Patricia Doxsey, Freeman staff01/23/2005

POUGHKEEPSIE - Dutchess County Executive William Steinhaus has vetoed a plan to spend $560,000 to design an addition to the county jail.

But with the veto coming after the close of business Friday, Dutchess County Legislature Chairman Bradford Kendall said he isn't certain it's binding.

Steinhaus delivered a seven-page veto message to the Legislature at 5:01 p.m. on Friday, the last day he had to act on the legislation.

Kendall, R-Dover, said 5 p.m. is considered the close of business, so he's not sure it was a "legal veto."

Adding to the uncertainty, Kendall said, is the fact that Steinhaus failed to sign the veto message.

"So that also calls into question the legality of the veto," he said. "We're going to look at it. If it is a legal veto, he just blew a $2.5 million hole into the 2005 budget of the county."

Kendall said he is not inclined to bring the legislation back to the Legislature for an override vote.

"We'll talk about it, but in reality, to have this whole project work the way it should work, everybody has to be on board," he said. "If the county executive's not on board, I'm not sure what would be accomplished by forcing him on board with a questionable veto."

The Dutchess County Jail has been overcrowded since it opened its doors in 1996. Since that time, the state Commission of Correction has given the county variances to house 32 inmates more than allowed in the 285-bed facility.

A current 30-day variance expires on Jan. 31, and commission officials have said that without immediate action, they will not issue future variances. The commission wants the county to add 300 cells to the jail.

Even with the variance, the county is forced to house roughly 30 inmates each day in facilities outside the county, at a cost of $100 per day plus transportation and staffing expenses. In 2004, the county spent more than $1 million to house inmates in jails outside Dutchess County.

The legislation vetoed by Steinhaus would have satisfied the state commission's demand and probably would have allowed the jail to continue to function above capacity until new cells are added. Without the variance, the county will be forced to house in out-of-county jails those inmates currently in the Dutchess jail under the waiver.

Commission spokesman Lyle Hartog said Friday that the commission is reserving comment until it officially is notified by the county of the executive veto.

In his veto message, Steinhaus called the jail expansion unaffordable and ill-conceived and said the anticipated expense would break the backs of county taxpayers. To build the jail the commission wants, he said, would cost the county $130 million over the life of the bond.

He also cast blame for overcrowding on the justice system, which he said places unreachable bails on nonviolent criminals charged with misdemeanors, and on the state, which he said uses the county jail as a "dumping ground" for parole violators.

"The state Corrections Commission has the obligation to help counties as a partner, not act as big brother," he wrote. "New York State Parole has the obligation to stop dumping its parolees onto the backs of county taxpayers. Our state senators and assemblymen have the obligation to meet with the sheriff and county legislative leaders to identify ways that state prisoners, as a result of their state policies, are not dumped from state prisons into parole, only to be dumped into county jails."

Kendall declined to comment on Steinhaus' specific comments, saying he had not seen the executive veto message.
©Daily Freeman 2005
This victory is due in part to the work of Dana Kaplan!

Posted by lois at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2005

The People Left Behind: Elaine Bartlett & Life on the Outside

By Nate Blakeslee, Texas Observer
Shortly before Thanksgiving of 1983, a modest drug deal went down in a beauty shop in Harlem. Elaine Bartlett, a 26-year-old mother of four, agreed to carry four ounces of cocaine by train from New York City to Albany.

Bartlett was not a drug courier by trade. She worked off the books as an unlicensed hairdresser and lived in one of Harlem's big public housing projects. A man named Charlie stepped into the back room of the beauty shop one morning and offered her $2,500 for one day's work. When she said yes, she had in mind a huge Thanksgiving feast for her extended family and some new furniture for her tidy little apartment. She never got to have her Thanksgiving dinner that year. By the time she sat down to dinner with her family again, 16 years later, it was in a household ruined by years of frustration and neglect, and her children were no longer really hers.

The People Left Behind
"Charlie," whose real name was George Deets, was a police informant, retained by the state police in Albany to lure New York City dealers upstate. It didn't matter to the cops that Bartlett was not actually in the business, or that she had no convictions of any kind on her record. In fact, everything about the deal was cynically contrived. Deets and a partner named Rich Zagurski had worked on and off for the cops for years, mostly to get themselves out of trouble following minor drug busts. It was never hard to find somebody like Elaine in Harlem, and the authorities in Albany didn't ask too many questions about how they did it. (Bartlett, for example, had never even been to Albany before.)

In this case, the pair had no charges of their own to work off; they set up the deal to get a friend and colleague out of hot water, a service for which they charged a fee. While running this peculiar sort of brokerage, Deets and Zagurski were also importing a kilo of cocaine directly from Colombia into Albany every two weeks, and earning up to $1 million per year. In his dealings with the police, Deets made no secret of his underworld connections; indeed it gave him the cachet he needed to set up his neck-saving deals with prosecutors.

At trial, Zagurski was asked why he had cooperated with the police. "I just feel that, you know, cocaine is at a bad level and I think that, you know, it should be taken off the street," he testified. Appearances had to be kept up, especially in Albany.

When Bartlett discovered the nature of the setup, she could not bring herself to accept a plea bargain. That was a horrible mistake. New York State, that great bastion of liberalism, had some of the toughest drug laws in the nation. The sale of four ounces of cocaine, even for a first offender, was punishable by a sentence of 15 years to life. Tried in front of one of the state's most notorious hanging judges, Bartlett was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Bartlett was sentenced under the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, which introduced the concept of mandatory minimum sentences to American jurisprudence. Brainchild of former governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, the laws were passed in 1973, at the height of the heroin scourge in New York City. Under the new laws, judges no longer had the discretion to consider mitigating factors when sentencing defendants; they had to abide by the minimums established in the code. Early parole was also eliminated.

The harsh new sentencing laws were designed to win the support of rural New Yorkers fearful of the spread of the blight afflicting Harlem, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. But more than that, the initiative was an effort to shore up the governor's conservative credentials in anticipation of his fourth run at the Republican presidential nomination. As it happened, a short, ill-advised stint as Gerald Ford's vice president was the closest Rockefeller ever got to the Oval Office. His drug laws remain, however. Widely copied in state legislatures across the country, they have formed an enduring legacy.

Jennifer Gonnerman's Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett, just out in paperback from Picador, is a powerful indictment of mandatory minimums, but the book isn't just about the way New York locks people up. It's also about what happens to the people who are left behind when somebody gets incarcerated, and what happens to prisoners once they get home.

A book-length examination of this subject was long overdue. The nation reached a grim milestone in recent years: For the first time the number of persons incarcerated nationwide topped 2 million. The stark reality of that number has shamed even some conservatives into rethinking our national response to crime, especially drug crime, which has helped drive the total. Here is a less well-known but equally staggering figure from the other side of the equation: Every year 600,000 convicts are released from prison. There are now 13 million Americans who have served time. That's 7 percent of the adult population.

We are becoming, as Gonnerman writes, a two-tiered society, divided into those who have been locked up and those who have not. For those who have, the prospects for re-entry into society are bleak. Most leave prison with little education or job skills, and many have untreated substance abuse problems. An estimated 16 percent have a serious mental illness. Others will come out of prison with hepatitis C, HIV, or even tuberculosis.

Increasingly punitive measures on the outside, meant to dissuade would-be offenders, are instead creating a kind of caste from which many ex-cons never escape. Felons are officially prohibited from living in federally subsidized public housing. From state to state, they may be prohibited variously from voting, obtaining student loans, driving a car, parenting their children, receiving welfare, or holding certain types of jobs. Forty percent will re-offend within three years. It is a caste with a distinct color: two-thirds of all ex-cons are black or Hispanic.

For two and a half years, Gonnerman, a staff writer at the Village Voice, covered Bartlett's efforts at rebuilding a life for herself and her family. Gov. George Pataki commuted Bartlett's sentence after her case was taken up by the anti-Rockefeller drug law movement in New York and she became something of a minor celebrity. From her first day out, however, it was clear that Pataki's pardon would not bring a happy ending to Elaine's story.

As the news cameras rolled, she was met at the Bedford Hills prison gates by her beloved son Apache. Just a boy when she was locked up, he was now 26 and had become the de facto head of the Bartlett household, following the death of Elaine's mother Yvonne. Bartlett's younger son Jamel was locked up, doing the first of many bits for heroin dealing. Her 19-year-old daughter Satara was mysteriously absent. The camera crew followed Elaine to a celebratory dinner, and then back to the apartment in which her kids had grown up in her absence. When she saw what was inside, unmistakable evidence of the mess that her children's lives had become, she told the crew to turn the camera off. Nobody needed to see this.

Except they did need to see it, which is the genius of Gonnerman's project and the reason the book was nominated for the 2004 National Book Award. Elaine's children were living in squalor. When Elaine, and later Elaine's mother Yvonne, was in charge, order and a sense of family pride had prevailed at the Bartlett household. Now everybody seemed to have given up, as Elaine put it.

Her youngest daughter Danae, a high school student, had gone to live with another family, stopping by the apartment only occasionally. Her older daughter, Satara, had dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant. The despondent, non-responsive single mother was nothing like the bright, bouncy girl Elaine remembered. She rarely left the apartment. Elaine's younger sister Sabrina, addicted to crack and HIV positive, had also moved in. She watched soaps all day and slept in the living room. Her presence had forced the apartment's other residents to install locks on their bedroom doors. Sabrina's 21-year-old daughter, who had an infant of her own, was also living in the cramped apartment. Elaine had to share a tiny bedroom with Satara and her daughter.

Elaine's daughters, unaccustomed to having a firm parental presence in their lives, quickly came to consider their mother part of the problem. Danae, a rebellious teenager in trouble at school, and, Elaine was surprised to discover, a lesbian, rejected her mother's overtures to rejoin the family. After a shouting match over living arrangements in the cramped apartment, somebody, either Satara or her boyfriend, called the police on Elaine. Though her sentence had been commuted, she was still on parole, meaning she could be sent back to prison at any time if she violated any of a laundry list of rules. Getting arrested, obviously, would likely be disastrous.

Elaine had spent 16 years worrying about her children, dreaming of the day she would be reunited with them. Now she found that – despite all the visiting room chats and letters over the years – she had been kept in the dark about what was really happening to her family. Her daughters were depressed, bitter people, and she did not know them. They blamed her, it seemed, for being gone so long. Elaine's own sisters seemed to blame her as well, for refusing to take the plea bargain, for being gone when their mother died, for saddling them with her four children to raise on top of their own. Her son Jamel was a gang-banger and a drug dealer who had earned the nickname "Murder Mel." Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before he would go to prison himself. Only Apache, who had found his calling coaching youth basketball, seemed to have his life together.

Elaine's efforts to find a new, larger apartment for her family went nowhere. The official prohibition against felons living in subsidized housing was often overlooked in New York City, but the waiting list for a new residence was enormous. Elaine was told to move into a shelter if she wanted to be bumped to the head of the list. In the end, feeling unwelcome in her own house, she did just that, packing up her things and heading to a YMCA.

Her hunt for a job was equally frustrating. Friends of her son Mel, fellow drug dealers, helped her out with cash at first, but after two months of a fruitless job search she was dead broke and desperate. Elaine attended the mandatory how-to-get-a-job classes required by her parole officer. Most of her fellow classmates – all ex-cons like her – were looking at a bleak future of cashiering at McDonald's or janitorial work.

Unlike them, Elaine had some education and job experience. After 16 years at Bedford Hills, she had held virtually every job and taken every class the prison had to offer, earning a GED and an associate's degree in the process. Eventually, through the assistance of a heroic social worker who was an ex-con himself, she landed a job as a counselor at a halfway house for recently incarcerated drug addicts, where her prison experience served her well.

Elaine Bartlett is a flawed heroine, and Gonnerman's gaze, to her credit, is unflinching. Elaine is bitter about the years she lost and consumed by feelings of guilt and resentment about what has become of her children. On more than one occasion she loses control of her considerable temper and punches her daughters, as though they were fellow inmates at Bedford Hills. Still, the end of Life on the Outside finds Elaine on what is, on balance at least, a hopeful trajectory. Elaine's steady income allows her to move out of the projects. Through Elaine's persistent ministrations, or perhaps through her mere presence, Satara begins to come out of her shell. Danae gradually accepts Elaine as her mother. Elaine finds love in a younger man who dotes on her in the way she always wanted.

There is hope in policy circles as well. After years of organizing and lobbying in Albany, reform advocates won a partial victory last month when the state legislature voted to amend the Rockefeller laws, reducing the length of the longest sentences and raising the weight thresholds in the code. As a result, some of those convicts, like Elaine, who got the maximum sentence will now be eligible for release. (The legislature stopped short of restoring discretion to judges, however.) Progress has been slow and uneven, but the general trend in recent years has been toward a softening of drug laws across the country.

Elaine Bartlett's story played a key role in moving the debate on mandatory minimums, and Gonnerman's compelling and moving account is a call to arms for further reform. At the same time, however, by virtue of the thoroughness and honesty of Gonnerman's reporting, Life on the Outside also points up the limitations of the criminal justice reform movement. Elaine's story offers a rare and valuable glimpse of daily life in the inner city, and it's a sobering vision. Nelson Rockefeller did not create the cycle of poverty and desperation into which three generations of the Bartlett family – along with 600,000 other souls living in public housing in New York City – are mired. Likewise, if the drug war ended tomorrow, the prospects for Elaine and her children would not dramatically improve.

But that is not what we are meant to take away from this book. We are meant to understand that mass incarceration, that incredibly ambitious enterprise at which this country has excelled far beyond any other, is not part of the solution. By that measure, Life on the Outside is a masterpiece.

Posted on January 12, 2005, Printed on January 18, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/20971/

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20971/

Posted by lois at 02:14 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2005

NY: Message from Dana Kaplan re: Expansion of Dutchess County Jail

Organizing is taking off in another county in New York State against a new proposed jail - following is the email from the local group that has sprung up in opposition to the state mandated expansion plan.

*********

Hello friends and concerned community members,

We're hoping everyone's holiday and new year's was
restful and fulfilling, and we have new information to
keep moving forward with the fight against the
Dutchess County Jail Expansion.

The Legislature will meet this Tuesday, 1/11 at 3:30
pm to vote again on the $560,000 bond to proceed with
expansion planning.

A few quick things you can do to help build momentum
against the expansion:

1. Send emails and make phone calls to the Dutchess
County legislators to voice your concerns. Send your
email to: countylegislature@co.dutchess.ny.us and ask
them to forward it to all legislators. For a sample
letter and talking points, scroll to the bottom of
this email. Here is the link to the Legislature's web
page: http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/CLlegislators200
4.htm

2. Show up! It is expected that the public will be
allowed to speak, and your presence will make a
difference--no matter what! The meeting will occur in
the Dutchess County Office Building (where the DMV is
located), on the 6th floor. Come prepared to speak!
Bring signs or posters or whatever you please to make
your voice heard!

3. Sign this petition demanding the Legislature to
meet after 5 pm when people who work during the day
can make it! Follow this link:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/democrcy/petition.html

NEEDS LIST: If people are interested in helping
further, here are a few things. Holler back if you
want to volunteer for anything.
1. Media work- writing and coordinating others writing
in to local press about the expansion, help with
publicity and outreach for future community education
events.
2. General outreach- getting the word out about the
expansion to community members and organizations
across issues, building broad-based opposition.
3. Work on outreach and education materials- research,
design, and distribution
4. Funds!!

thank you
In solidarity,
mark
maggie

*********************************************************************
Sample letter to the legislators:

Dear Legislator,

I am writing to voice my concern regarding the
proposed Dutchess County Jail Expansion and the
$560,000 bond vote scheduled for Tuesday, January
11th.

Nationwide, many communities have created
cost-effective solutions to address overcrowding.
Relevant examples include pre-arrest programs for
nonviolent, low-level misdemeanors, programs for the
mentally ill, expediting release and transfer
procedures bail reform, specialty domestic violence
and mental health courts, and continuously developing
our well-recognized Alternatives to Incarceration
program.

As funding for crucial crime prevention programs such
as adult education, youth after school programming,
GED, and job training is cut and the cost of living in
Dutchess County continues to increase, now more than
ever it is vital to examine every alternative to
spending millions of taxpayer dollars on
incarceration.

Sincerely,

Name
Address

More Info/talking points:

- Dana Kaplan's fact sheet on Cost Effective Solutions
to Jail Overcrowding: http://www.realcostofprisons.org/pdfs/jail_reform_natl.pdf
suffolksuperjail.com

- This issue isn't just happening in our county. T he
State Commission on Corrections is pressuring counties throughout the state to expand jails and foot the bill, including Tompkins, Allegany, Essex, Suffolk, Chataqua, and Ulster. Tompkins County has refused to move forward with building a new jail and concerned citizens in Suffolk County have worked to raise awareness about the financial, environmental, and social burden the construction of a 1,130-bed facility would impose: http://www.suffolksuperjail.com/

-Crime rates are down, bleak future for funding of
youth programming, mental health services, health
care, education, housing, job training,
transportation, and social services

talking points from earlier email:

-Match the increase in funding for the jail with an
according increase in
funding for alternatives to incarceration programs,
transitions programs, and
educational and training programs for inmates.

- Fully investigate other ways to deal with the jail overcrowding problem. How many inmates are awaiting court processing? Can we speed that up? How many inmates are state parole violators? Can they go to less crowded jails? How much does it cost to send Dutchess County inmates out of county and how does that compare to the projected cost of the expansion? Once the $560,000 are sunk into architectural plans, will the Legislature really be willing to investigate other options, especially with the Ulster County Jail disaster so close to home?

-The holistic approach: If we take the long term
measures to get people?s basic
needs met?housing, education, health care, food, rehabilitation, youth and afterschool programming?crime will decrease. Poverty creates crime. There are plenty of programs that meet people?s basic needs that are in jeopardy right now.

-The morality argument: Half a million dollars is a
lot of money! How can we
justify spending this money when people are without
housing, food, and
education? Let?s put this in perspective!

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

December 23, 2004

In New Data, a Redefinition of Drug Felon

"Mr. Newman added, "There are many more Elaine Bartletts in the system than kingpins.'"

December 23, 2004, NY Times
In New Data, a Redefinition of Drug Felon
By LESLIE EATON

New data from New York's Department of Correctional Services are providing a clearer - and in some ways surprising - picture of the population of long-term inmates eligible to be released or to have their sentences reduced under changes to state drug laws that Gov. George E. Pataki signed into law last week.

The inmates are the roughly 440 so-called A-1 felons, sentenced to at least 15 years to life in prison under the Rockefeller drug laws for possessing or selling narcotics. The new data suggest that these prisoners are in some ways very different from the general prison population, and even from lower-level drug offenders.

Although experts disagree about why this is and what it means, they agree that the new numbers provide a first real snapshot of those affected by the changes in the Rockefeller laws, which were instituted in the 1973 and put first-time offenders behind bars based merely on the amount of drugs they were caught with. Critics have called the laws unduly harsh and said they unduly penalized young African-American men, and women who were involved with someone in the drug trade.

But according to the new data, almost half of the A-1 felons were born outside the United States, coming from about 20 different countries. The largest group by far after native New Yorkers, which account for more than a quarter of the A-1's, is from the Dominican Republic. Less than 13 percent of the total prison population was born overseas, and only 8 percent of lower-level drug offenders were born abroad.

About 55 percent of the A-1 felons are Hispanic, while the overall prison population is less than 30 percent Hispanic. (The prison system divides inmates into four racial categories that do not overlap: white, black, Hispanic and other.)

Though much of the impetus for changing the drug laws has come from black leaders including Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul, only a third of the A-1's are black. But blacks make up about half of the total prison population and almost 60 percent of lower-level drug offenders. Just 8 percent of the A-1's are white, while whites make up 18 percent of the total prison population.

About 60 percent of the A-1's were convicted in New York City, with the largest number, almost 150, coming from Manhattan through the district attorney's office and the city's special narcotics prosecutor. But Monroe County, home to Rochester, sent more than 50 of these inmates to jail, making it third after Brooklyn.

The 440 inmates are slightly older than other prisoners - their average age is 42 - and far more likely than lower-level drug offenders to have no previous felony record. And they have, on average, already spent more than nine years in prison, which means that more than half of them may be eligible to get out of jail very soon.

That is because the new law, which takes effect next month, reduces sentences for the most serious drug crimes to eight to 20 years, and allows the A1 felons currently imprisoned under the Rockefeller laws to ask a judge to re-sentence them under the new range.

But how many will actually be released remains unclear, in part because no one yet knows how many of those still in prison were first-time low-level offenders who made a single bad mistake, and how many are major narcotics traffickers and distributors whom judges will be reluctant to release. The Rockefeller drug laws and the new law do not distinguish between the two because both sets of laws emphasize the amount of drugs seized, not the role played by the convict.

"They range from couriers to kingpins," said Chauncey G. Parker, director of criminal justice for the state. "There have been cases where judges have said, 'I would give you less than 15 years, but the law doesn't allow me.' Now, we've also had judges say, on the record, 'I wish the law would let me go higher.' "

Prosecutors look at individual cases and, not surprising, tend to focus on the inmates they believe are major criminals, and tend to discount the number of low-level offenders who received unfairly harsh sentences.

"The ones who came out of our office don't fall into the category of innocent dupes," said Bridget G. Brennan, a special narcotics prosecutor, who said she was reviewing about 80 of the cases.

She pointed out inmates like Wilfredo Schery, who ran a cell of a Colombian cartel that prosecutors said had distributed thousands of pounds of cocaine a month before Mr. Schery pleaded guilty to an A-1 charge and was sentenced to 20 years to life in 1996.

More than 30 of the inmates were sentenced to more than three decades of prison time each, according to correction department data.

Defense lawyers, however, say that many in the drug trade - if not most - were low-level participants who may have been entrapped or lured by law-enforcement agents.

"There's no one archetype," said Robert C. Newman, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society, which is reviewing about 280 cases that were filed in New York City. But in his experience, Mr. Newman added, "There are many more Elaine Bartletts in the system than kingpins."

Elaine Bartlett spent 16 years in prison for her first offense, delivering cocaine to Albany from New York City, in the hopes of making $2,500, according to the book Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about her, "Life on the Outside" (Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).

In the book, Ms. Bartlett is said to have been set up by a "confidential informant." The book also describes her years in prison, her struggle to rebuild her family and her life after she received clemency in 2000.

Though for many people Ms. Bartlett has become the public face of the group who may now have its sentences reduced, she is unusual in at least one way - she is a woman. In part because of clemency and pardons granted by the governor, there are only 10 women in the group left in prison, according to correction department data.

Over all, the number of A-1 felons has dropped almost by half in recent years, said Mr. Parker, the director of state criminal justice, who attributed the decline to relatively new opportunities that allow inmates to shorten their prison time by participating in special "merit" programs.

The number of new inmates has also been declining, except for in 2003, when 35 prisoners were added to the system, which appears to be the highest number since 1998.

Because little formal research has been done on the A-1 inmates, as opposed to drug-related offenders as a whole, experts offer several explanations for why they are so different from the general prison population and lower-level drug offenders.

For example, asked why so many are foreign born, and so many are Dominican, prosecutors said it had probably been a function of where the drugs were coming from and how they were distributed. "A lot of drugs are coming from South America, by people who speak Spanish, and Washington Heights is a major transshipment hub," said James M. Kindler, chief assistant district attorney for Manhattan.

But advocates for prisoners said that those most likely to receive an A-1 drug sentence were those who did not speak English, were unfamiliar with the American legal system and did not understand the consequences of going to trial rather than accepting a plea offer.

Many were couriers, said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a liberal nonprofit prison monitoring group. "They don't know what could happen to them, nobody's looking out for them, and they have no information to offer."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 05:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2004

For over 20 years, activists like Randy Credico, Anthony Pappa, and Elaine Bartlett have fought tirelessly to repeal these laws.

"Credico, director of the Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice and an organizer of the group Mothers of the New York Disappeared, said in The New York Times that he is faced with calling many of the group's members and telling them their children "are not coming home.""

Rockefeller's Rocky Road
By Rosa Clemente, AllHipHop.com
Posted on December 15, 2004, Printed on December 17, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20765/

"We should be ashamed of ourselves. Rockefeller drug reform – ha! – I don't think so." – State Sen. Thomas Duane (D-Manhattan)

While many are praising the recent reform of the Rockefeller drug laws, many more are not. Although the reform bill will reduce the most severe mandatory sentences for drug offenses, according to data from the New York State Department of Correctional Services, the reform change will affect only 446 prisoners, while 15,600 felons imprisoned under the drug law will remain imprisoned.

Even with the proposed revisions, New York still has the harshest drug-sentencing laws in the country. According to Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, "Absent structural changes to the Rockefeller Drug Laws – which requires restoring to judges the authority to order treatment as an alternative to sentencing – we will not have meaningful reform."

According to the NYCLU the new law will leave in place sentencing procedures that give prosecutors authority to charge and sentence.

Judges have no discretion over sentencing. Prosecutors can demand a sentence of 10 years for an addict with no criminal record who is induced by a dealer to deliver four ounces of a drug to a buyer. A judge who believes justice – and the public interest – are better served by ordering the defendant into treatment instead of prison is prevented from doing so. Even if the judge had the discretion to choose treatment, nowhere in the reform bill is there funding for drug treatment programs. The new law will also do little or nothing to reform the harsh sentences imposed on B felons, those charged with lesser drug offenses, the NYCLU said.

For example, an individual who is caught with a gram of a controlled substance, but has a prior offense still faces three to 12 years in prison. The majority of drug offenders serving time in New York prisons are non-violent B felons. Once again the hip hop community, the overwhelming victims of these drug laws, has been hoodwinked.

"It's because of the artists. There's no way that it would have happened without the help of Jay-Z and Puffy and all the people who contributed," Russell Simmons told AllHipHop.com. "All those people really worked hard, they pushed, and it's really the power of hip hop that made that happen. People came out, it was a big deal."

Unfortunately, once again Simmons is wrong, and his praise of this reform bill has me questioning how relevant he and his organization are. By criticizing the so-called hip hop leader I open myself to attack, but ultimately I am more concerned about the impact of this sham and the 15,600 majority black and brown folks that will continue to sit in upstate prisons.

As someone who has been part of the campaign to repeal these laws – repeal not reform – I, along with many activists are uphappy with this compromise reform bill. Once again, our elected officials, who are supposed to serve the interest of the people, have pulled the wool over our eyes, and just at the right time. November 2005 is a huge election year in New York – what a perfect way to appease the electorate. Governor Pataki and other elected officials are up for re-election in 2005, and we should remember this betrayal when we go to the election booths. The governor and his Republican and Democratic cohorts knew they had to do something, and so they did nothing.

For over 20 years, activists like Randy Credico, Anthony Pappa, and Elaine Bartlett have fought tirelessly to repeal these laws. Credico, director of the Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice and an organizer of the group Mothers of the New York Disappeared, said in The New York Times that he is faced with calling many of the group's members and telling them their children "are not coming home."

In the last five years, Drop the Rock, a coalition spearheaded by Robert Ganagi and the Correctional Association of New York and composed of young community activists, veteran criminal justice reformers, artists, students, former inmates, politicians, and religious, civic and labor leaders has also worked hard to repeal these draconian laws. What happened in Albany was a disservice to all the people who dedicated themselves to this movement.

It's time to dust ourselves off and dig into the trenches. We should no longer as a community be satisfied with answers that leave more questions. Amilcar Cabral, leader of the Guinea-Bissau liberation struggle once said, "Tell no lies, expose lies wherever they are told, mask no difficulties, mistakes or failures, claim no easy victories."

We cannot claim victories that are not real. When Russell Simmons stated in The New York Times, "I am very, very happy," we must ask, what is he happy about?

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20765/

Posted by lois at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

2005 Soros Justice Fellows Chosen

We congratulate Dana Kaplan and the others who were just chosen as Soros Justice Fellow! Dana took part in the RCPP Train the Trainers Training in October 2004.

2 0 0 5 S o r o s J u s t i c e F e l l o w s

Soros Justice Advocacy Fellows

Kenavon Carter ACLU of Texas Austin Texas
Mr. Carter, a lawyer and community organizer, will launch a project that will reduce racial profiling by law enforcement agencies in Texas. The goals of the project are to enforce Texas’s Racial Profiling Statute through public education, grassroots mobilization, and selective litigation targeting law enforcement agencies that engage in racial profiling or otherwise fail to abide by the racial profiling statute. Mr. Carter will graduate in May from the University of Texas School of Law. He has worked at a number of social justice organizations including the Center for Constitutional Rights, Texas Civil Rights Project and ACLU.

Kristi Couvillon Texas Defender Service Austin, Texas
Ms. Couvillon, a lawyer and social worker, will conduct a multi-state, multi-faceted effort to implement the American Bar Association Guidelines regarding defense representation in death penalty cases in several southern states. The goals of the project are to improve the quality and availability of competent legal representation for indigent defendants through public education, coalition building, and communications strategies. Ms. Couvillon will graduate in May from the University of Texas School of Law.

Shaena Fazal John Howard Association Chicago, IL
Ms. Fazal, a lawyer and advocate, will launch a project that addresses the needs of long-term prisoners by developing policies and incentives to reduce their sentences, standards and incentives for transferring them to lower security facilities and re-introducing jobs, education and mental health programs to this ‘forgotten’ contingent of incarcerated people. Ms. Fazal will achieve this through research, litigation and coalition building. She is a former appellate defender in Chicago, IL and has worked for several legal services and anti-death penalty groups.

Norris Henderson Innocence Project New Orleans, LA
Mr. Henderson, an organizer and advocate, will launch a project that seeks to remove barriers that prevent formerly incarcerated people from participating fully in the economic, social and political life of the community. Through community engagement, public and policymaker education, and coalition building, Mr. Henderson will advocate on behalf of and empower this important constituency to demand access to the their political rights as citizens. Mr. Henderson has become a celebrated local leader in New Orleans after spending 18 years in prison.

Dana Kaplan Center for Constitutional Rights New York, NY
Ms. Kaplan, an organizer and activist, will launch a project that addresses the expansion of local jails which has accelerated considerably even as prison growth has slowed. Through dissemination of research and provision of technical assistance related to organizing and policy, Ms. Kaplan will highlight the role of jail construction in the continued incarceration of low-income and immigrant communities and provide a mechanism for challenging this expansion in New York specifically and assist similar efforts nationally. Ms. Kaplan has been involved in criminal justice reform work for a number of years and has worked or consulted for groups including the Prison Moratorium Project and National Resource Center on Prisons and Communities. She will graduate with a Masters in American Studies in May.

Alexander Ndaula National Immigration Project Boston, MA
Mr. Ndaula, an organizer and advocate, will provide support to immigrants who are detained in the rural South, assist detainees and their families in investigating, documenting and combating abuses perpetrated by guards and develop alliances with others working on immigration detention and deportation issues and raise public awareness about the plight of immigrants in the criminal justice system. Mr. Ndaula spent three years in immigration detention and has worked tirelessly during his own incarceration and since to advocate on behalf of detainees and their families.

Vivian Nixon First Episcopal AME Church Queens, NY
Ms. Nixon, an advocate, will launch a project to educate members of African-American churches in five states about the disproportionate number of people of color in prison and the need for community supports and policy change. The project will develop tools to educate and empower faith-based communities in assisting people returning from prison and advocate for policy change. Ms. Nixon has worked for several prison reform organizations, most recently as the executive director of the College and Community Fellowship at CUNY Graduate Center. She is a former prisoner and long-time activist for social change.

Emmett Soloman Texas Criminal Justice Coalition Huntsville, TX
Mr. Soloman, a minister and former prison chaplain, will develop a network of religious leaders and lay volunteers who can educate the public, policymakers and the media on the need to promote alternatives to incarceration. His project will focus primarily on mainstream and conservative religious leaders. Mr. Soloman was a prison chaplain in the Texas Department of Corrections for thirty years and was most recently the director of Restorative Justice Ministries Network of Texas.

Soros Justice Senior Fellows

Michelle Alexander Stanford Law School Palo Alto, CA
Ms. Alexander, a Stanford University Law professor and former director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project, will write a book arguing that the war on drugs and mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow”. The book will inspire a new public dialogue about the role of the criminal justice system in our society and challenge the civil rights community and public-at-large to understand mass incarceration as the defining racial justice issue of our time.

Michele Deitch Center for Criminal Justice Initiatives Austin, TX
Ms. Deitch, a consultant for the Center for Criminal Justice Initiatives and University of Texas law professor, will research, promote the need for and develop independent prison oversight mechanisms in the U.S. that are in keeping with international human rights standards and practices. Her research and writing will raise visibility of this issue and lay the groundwork for implementation of oversight mechanisms in specific jurisdictions in the U.S.

Jeffrey Fagan Columbia University Law School New York, NY
Mr. Fagan, a Columbia Law and Public Health professor, will critically examine new research evidence or “propaganda” on the deterrent effects of capital punishment. His analysis will identify the potentially fatal technical and conceptual mistakes made by public policy researchers and clarify how such claims have skewed the public’s perception and understanding of the death penalty. Mr. Fagan will write articles for popular publications and policy journals and policy briefs for legislators, policy makers and the media.

Gregory Hooks Washington State University Pullman, WA
Mr. Hooks, a sociologist at Washington State University, will launch a multi-faceted effort to expand and disseminate his research that debunks the widely held assumption that prisons provide economic benefits to struggling rural economies. Through scholarly articles and dissemination of findings among community groups, policymakers and activists, Mr. Hooks’ groundbreaking work will advance efforts to curtail prison expansion and provide alternative economic development strategies that promote education and community revitalization.

Ababukr Karim The Eisenhower Foundation Washington D.C.
Mr. Karim, a community economic development expert, will spearhead the replication of a model re-entry program in the District of Columbia to serve and be run by formerly incarcerated people. Mr. Karim will implement a set of innovative reintegration strategies that guarantee support and sustainability for former prisoners and the community in which they return.

Harmon Wray Vanderbilt Divinity School Nashville, TN
Mr. Wray, a minister and advocate, will open a dialogue with leaders of national and Southern regional faith communities to enlist their partnership in developing and implementing an alternative model for what faithful, responsible, and progressive ministry would look like in the context of crime and the criminal justice system.

Soros Justice Media Fellows

Fredric Dannen Austin, TX
Mr. Dannen, a published author and writer for The New Yorker, will complete research and writing of a book about an innocent person who was executed in Texas in 1997. Mr. Dannen has been investigating this case for seven years and when published, it will be the first book to prove that a wrongful execution has taken place in America during the past quarter century and on the watch of then Governor George W. Bush and his general counsel, Alberto Gonzalez.

Dan Hunt and Janet Baus Monson, MA
Mr. Hunt and Ms. Baus, both filmmakers will complete and distribute their groundbreaking documentary, “Cruel and Unusual” which tells the stories of five trangender women serving time in state and federal prisoners for men. The film examines the severe and pervasive punishment they endure in prison, their unique needs, and the suffering that our most marginalized citizens face as they seek to actualize themselves.

Joe Loya Oakland, CA
Mr. Loya, an acclaimed writer and author of “The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell”, will write a memoir about his re-entry into society after leaving federal prison in California. Mr. Loya is a contributing editor for the Pacific News Service and his essays and commentaries have appeared in newspapers across the U.S.

Annie Sundberg and Rickie Stern New York, NY Ms. Sundberg and Ms. Stern will complete and distribute “The Trials of Darryl Hunt”, a feature documentary about a brutal rape and murder case and a wrongfully convicted man who spent nearly twenty years on prison for a crime he did not commit.

Posted by lois at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2004

To Close Budget Gap, Close Prisons

“If the governor was serious about blowing up boxes, he would begin closing prisons that this state does not need and can’t afford,” says CURB member Sitara Nieves.

To close budget gap, close prisons

by Sean South and Rose Braz

Sacramento - Facing news of a $109 million cost overrun for California’s embattled Department of Corrections, Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) proposes that the state begin closing prisons, and not open Delano II, California’s 33rd prison, now under construction. This is not unprecedented: budget crises have derailed prison construction in Oregon and delayed prison openings in Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over the past two years.

“If the governor was serious about blowing up boxes, he would begin closing prisons that this state does not need and can’t afford,” says CURB member Sitara Nieves.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s own January 2004 budget proposal acknowledged that the only way to reduce prison spending is to reduce the number of people in prison. He said that, given an expected decline in the prison population by 2005, the state should examine prison closures.

States across the country facing similar budget crises have also taken steps to improve rehabilitation programs and reform their prison and parole systems. As a result, these states were able to reduce prison spending by reducing the number of people in prison while maintaining - and even improving - public safety.

“It’s not just the financial costs,” adds CURB member Barbara Oldershaw. “There is mounting evidence that over-incarceration leaves our communities less safe. Growing police, jail and prison budgets are taking money from health and human services, from public education, from housing and from other programs that make our neighborhoods more stable, hopeful and strong.” For the annual cost of operating one prison:

l 341,800 eligible children could get health care through the Healthy Families Program,

l 77,963 children not eligible for Medi-Cal or Healthy Families could enroll in California Children’s Services and

l 336,469 individuals could utilize state Vocational Rehabilitation’s employment services for people with disabilities.

Corrections estimated that parole reforms would bring down the state’s prison population by about 15,000 people by mid-2005. This reduction in the number of people in state prisons would mean that California could close:

l Pelican Bay State Prison ($115 million annual operating costs, according to CDC);

l Folsom State Prison ($72.7 million annual operating costs, according to CDC); and

l Valley State Prison for Women ($63 million annual operating costs, according to CDC).

“While the ‘action, action, action’ governor may claim he can’t do anything to rein in rising prison budgets, the solution is actually quite simple: reduce the number of people in prison,” said Nieves. “The governor had that opportunity with Proposition 66, the Three Strikes Amendment. Instead, he chose to star in commercials repeating lies about the initiative that a Superior Court judge barred from the ballot.”

CURB, a coalition of 40 organizations, is committed to reducing the number of people in prison and the number of prisons in California. More information about CURB is available at www.curbprisonspending.org.

Rose Braz is director of Critical Resistance, an organization founded by Angela Davis and others, 1904 Franklin St., Ste. 504, Oakland CA 94612, (510) 444-0484, rose@criticalresistance.org.

San Francisco Bay View, 11/17/04

Posted by lois at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2004

MCI and Telephone Justice Campaign in NYC

Message from Dana Kaplan:
There has been a lot of press recently on the campaign here in New York to end the contract between MCI and DOCS – a lot of it driven by the billboard that was donated to us on the corner of 125th street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The billboard has generated some very interesting reactions, and is especially ironic located on the strip of 125th that represents the heart of the gentrification of Harlem, snadwiched in between starbucks, the body shop, staples, and the many other billboards using Black historical figures to hawk goods such as Adidas and Hennessey. We’re setting up on a soapbox this Saturday to speak out on the issue and have cell phones available for people to call the Governor.
To see the billboard go to:
http://www.telephonejustice.org

New York Daily News, Tuesday, November 16th, 2004

Innocent victims

On the southwest corner of 125th St. and Lenox Ave., cater-corner from a Starbuck's in the heart of a newly revitalized Harlem, a billboard recently went up that sounds a jarring note amid the prosperity. "Greed, Corruption & High A-- Rates," it says. "A joint venture of MCI and the New York State Department of Correctional Services. Robbing your communities of $25 million a year." Poetry, it's not. But the sign points to a grinding injustice inflicted on thousands of families across the state. MCI, the phone service giant, has an exclusive, sweetheart contract with the state correction department that forces anyone trying to communicate with prison inmates to pay punitively high phone rates.

Every collect call from a prisoner costs $3 plus 16 cents a minute - more than six times the cost of a regular phone call. A typical call from prison lasts 19 minutes and costs the recipient $6. It's not unheard of for families to pay $300 to $700 a month to talk with someone in prison, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights. Cheaper alternatives, like phone cards or commissary accounts, are prohibited by the state. Why? More than 57% of the money from the MCI calls goes straight to the correction department. In fiscal year 2002, for instance, prisoners made 7 million calls lasting more than 124 million minutes. That generated $39 million in fees, more than $22 million of which got kicked back to the state. Since 1996, the department has raked in $175 million from these calls in what amounts to a forced tax on the mothers, children and spouses of inmates, people who have not committed any crime and are largely ill-equipped to handle such bills. The prison systems of 44 other states have similar monopoly deals with phone companies. It's a billion-dollar-a-year business, and New York and MCI charge the highest rates in the country.

A more humane alternative would be for New York to imitate the federal prison system, where inmates can use an 800 number for which their families pay 7 cents a minute. Gouging inmates' families is not only unfair, it's bad for public safety. Experts say a key to rehabilitating offenders is to have them maintain positive contacts with the outside world before they return. High rates cause many families to limit calls drastically.

The great irony, of course, is that MCI is the new incarnation of WorldCom, which in 2002 acknowledged shady accounting that amounted to the largest case of corporate fraud in American history, causing $11 billion in losses. The company later reconstituted itself as MCI, but former WorldCom executives still face the possibility of jail sentences for the ripoff. And the prison phone deals continue. The Center for Constitutional Rights has sued the state over the MCI deal and plans to hold a rally in front of the Harlem billboard on Saturday. Protesters will be phoning Gov. Pataki's office - (518) 474-8390 - to demand a complete, immediate rollback of the punitive rates. Here's hoping they call collect.

Posted by lois at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2004

New Website on Alternatives to Jail Building

SUFFOLKSUPERJAIL.COM is the official website of the Concerned Communities for Alternatives to Jail” a movement of citizens and organizations opposed to the construction of an 1130 bed jail facility in Yaphank, NY, also known as the Suffolk “super jail”.

We ask that every reform be exhausted before we commit to a plan that has been called wasteful, socially irresponsible, fiscally disastrous, and morally wrong.
Included on the website:
* Financial cost to Suffolk County and its taxpayers
* Environmental Impacts on the local community
* Social Cost to Suffolk County residents
* Why Not in Suffolk County? Cost-Effective Solutions to Jail Overcrowding

Posted by lois at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

Tug of war over San Quentin's future creates unusual alliances

"We understand that conditions for prisoners have to be improved as quickly
as possible, but we think that time and time again the Department of
Corrections has shown that it is incapable of improving conditions for
prisoners," said Ari Wohlfeiler of Critical Resistance, a nonprofit group
that opposes the expansion of Death Row at San Quentin or elsewhere. "We
think this is a blatant move of trying to put 1,000 new beds in the system
under the cloak of improving conditions."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/12/NBG0E9MRU71.DTL

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Death row real estate
Tug of war over San Quentin's future creates unusual alliances

Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, November 12, 2004

Developers, real estate agents and politicians dream of bulldozing San
Quentin State Prison because, they say, the 152-year-old relic has become
too costly to maintain and should be put to better use.

The bay front site would be ideal, they say, for mixed-income neighborhoods
with parks, playing fields, shops, restaurants and a transit center with a
rail link and a deep-water hub for ferries.

"We believe that San Quentin should be shut down and there should be a
comprehensive and spirited debate among all sectors of the community on how
that site should be used," said Edward Segal, executive vice president of
the Marin Association of Realtors.

But prison officials are moving ahead with plans to build a new, $220
million Death Row at San Quentin -- a project that would turn as many as 40
acres of prime waterfront property into pod-like cellblocks and other
facilities for the state's most notorious inmates.

These plans for a maximum security Death Row compound on the west side of
the 432-acre prison property have won a surprising degree of support from
death penalty opponents and prison volunteers. Both groups say they stand a
better chance of helping inmates if the prison remains open.

Some residents of San Quentin Village, who fear that outside developers want
to turn their quaint enclave into a small city with huge traffic problems,
also support the new Death Row project. Still others are fed up with having
a busy prison complex in their backyard.

San Quentin's future is a tug of war of strange alliances and political
power plays. In recent years, jawing about the prison's fate has become one
of Marin County's passions. But this time, the debate seems to be moving
past idle speculation. Big decisions are in the works that could affect the
prison property for decades.

Advocates and critics of competing plans for San Quentin voiced their
opinions in recent interviews and hearings. A public forum held Oct. 27 on
the Death Row project attracted about 80 people on all sides of the issue.
State planners held a hearing Nov. 4 to field public comments on its
environmental impact report for the site.

Prisoner advocates and volunteers who work in San Quentin's community
programs have mixed feelings about rebuilding Death Row, but many of them
want to keep the suburban prison open and accessible to inmates' families,
lawyers and volunteers.

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton, D-San Francisco, and other prison
advocates say that Death Row should be close to an urban area to provide
easy access to the state Supreme Court and defense lawyers who handle these
cases.

The prison's extensive programs, which include religious groups, college and
high school classes, counseling and sports activities such as the San
Quentin Giants baseball team, depend on hundreds of Bay Area volunteers.

"It's kind of like worlds colliding," said Jody Lewen, who heads a program
of college courses for San Quentin inmates. "I can perfectly understand the
people who want to develop the land. It's physically beautiful and
convenient.

"When I look at San Quentin, I see the opportunity to create a model for
criminal justice reform," said Lewen, who supports the plan to build a new
Death Row. "I want to create effective education and rehabilitation
programs, gather the data that's vital for any administrator or legislator
who wants to advocate for change, and demonstrate to the public how
effective these programs are -- how much money they save, and how they can
lower the prison population as a whole."

Others question why the state needs to house its condemned inmates at San
Quentin, rather than disperse them among California's maximum security
prisons. Only 10 inmates have been executed at San Quentin since the death
penalty was reinstated in 1976.

"In some parts of the country, prisons are viewed as economic bonanzas,"
Segal said. "Why can't we move the prison to where it would be received with
open arms? It would free up San Quentin for better, more productive uses.
Death penalty critics say that it is far better for inmates' executions to
occur at San Quentin, rather than at a prison in a rural area that would be
removed from media scrutiny and the public eye.

"It's very important that executions not become a total abstraction in the
minds of the public," Lewen said. "We're talking about living, breathing
people with nerve endings and families."

Others argue that state prison officials should invest in inmate-related
services, rather than in building or expanding prisons.

"We understand that conditions for prisoners have to be improved as quickly
as possible, but we think that time and time again the Department of
Corrections has shown that it is incapable of improving conditions for
prisoners," said Ari Wohlfeiler of Critical Resistance, a nonprofit group
that opposes the expansion of Death Row at San Quentin or elsewhere. "We
think this is a blatant move of trying to put 1,000 new beds in the system
under the cloak of improving conditions."

For decades, rumors have surfaced occasionally that San Quentin would soon
be closed. In recent years, state officials have considered moving its Death
Row inmates to other state prisons.

There have also been attempts to expand San Quentin. In the 1990s, state
officials proposed to double the prison's size, but local residents derailed
that proposal.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's endorsement of plans to build a new Death Row
has caught many locals by surprise. Construction is slated to begin next
September and take up to two years.

"There is no reason to be steam-rolling ahead without a thorough discussion
of alternatives," Segal said. "Unless the public stands up and says 'No,'
unless the public puts pressure on the governor, it's almost a done deal. "

"It's about providing adequate, secure and safe conditions for those
sentenced to death," said George Sifuentes, deputy director of facilities
management for the prison system. "The state Legislature approved it. The
governor signed it. Our job is to build it."

Some residents of San Quentin Village, a blue-collar enclave next to the
prison property, take comfort living in the prison's shadow.

"I see it as a place of healing," said village resident Jean Arnold, who
previously ran San Quentin's literacy program. "You will not find these
volunteers at (state prisons in) Blythe, Mule Creek or Chowchilla. I am for
a new Death Row being built at San Quentin, and never thought I would say
it."

Village resident Cynthia Shone, who also supports the new Death Row, said:
"I would rather see this place stay the way it is than developed into a
place like everywhere else. ... This is like the San Rafael where we grew
up. The powers that be know how valuable this property is. They want to take
over this site and sell $2 million homes and condos.''

The new Condemned Inmate Complex for 1,408 male prisoners would replace an
aging Death Row where 600 or so inmates are housed. Built in the 1930s, the
state's only Death Row is overcrowded and deteriorating, which presents
security and safety problems. The state plans to use the existing Death Row
to house general population inmates. The execution chamber would remain.

"What this boils down to is safety," said state prison official Terry
Thornton. "Safety for the inmates, safety for the staff, and safety for the
community."

Hundreds of new employees would work at the new Death Row, which would be
encircled by a lethal, electrified fence. As many as 600 construction
workers at a time would build the new facility.

State assembly member Joe Nation, D-San Rafael, has questioned the fiscal
wisdom of building a new Death Row. He has lobbied Schwarzenegger's staff to
consider shutting down San Quentin.

A state audit requested by Nation found that San Quentin's annual operating
and maintenance costs are exceptionally high, with extra overtime charges,
housing stipends and recruitment bonuses for the prison's 1,100 employees.

"There's no question that San Quentin is costing the state an arm and a
leg," Nation said. "It may be that it's cheaper over a short period to keep
San Quentin there, but over a longer period it will end up costing the state
a whole lot more ...

"The key is what the governor does. It's really in the governor's hands
right now. If the governor chooses to move forward and ignore the audit,
that's his prerogative. But the last time I looked at the state budget, we
were broke."

The state audit concluded that the cost of transferring condemned inmates to
another prison would far surpass the state's expected profit from selling
the land at San Quentin, but it criticized prison officials for not
assessing the costs and benefits of relocating Death Row to another prison.

San Quentin is "the most expensive prison in the system to maintain," said
Marin Supervisor Steve Kinsey, who recommends that Death Row inmates be
transferred to Folsom State Prison. One option, he said, would be to retain
at San Quentin a portion of the prison's general population, but not those
sentenced to death.

"No meaningful alternatives have been analyzed. The homework hasn't been
done," Kinsey said. "It's a quarter-billion-dollar investment over the next
25 years. It's going to impact the site for a century or more."

A key player behind efforts to redevelop San Quentin is Bill White, a North
Bay real estate developer. White served on the San Quentin Reuse Committee,
a panel chaired by Kinsey, which last year explored different options for
developing the 432-acre site.

Among other things, planners envision a historic park including San
Quentin's oldest cellblock, its Death Row and sally port. One quarter of an
estimated 2,100 to 3,585 new residential units, they say, would be
classified as "affordable" to households earning up to 60 percent of the
local median income.

Some locals worry about the traffic impacts of a new transit center, shops
and housing. Others fear that San Quentin, which lights the night sky like a
refinery, will become more of an eyesore if a new Death Row is built there.

At a public forum, Kinsey warned that the prison's plans are "butt ugly...
The new buildings will not resemble the medieval, Romanesque architecture we
associate with San Quentin today.

"The plans are too big for the site," Kinsey said, stressing that 60-foot
security lighting towers at the new Death Row will be seen by residents who
live miles away.

Others insist that San Quentin has a historic legacy at the site.

"I want people to see the prison from where they live," Lewen said. "I don't
see it as an aesthetic issue. I see it as a political issue. With all due
respect, if you don't want to look at a prison, start looking for
alternatives to incarceration."

Realtors stress that building affordable housing should be a top priority.
They point out that many nurses, firefighters and others cannot afford to
own a house in Marin County. About half of San Quentin's guards live in
Solano and Contra Costa counties. Some guards commute to the prison from
Sacramento and beyond.

But some people question the motives of the politicians who want to tear
down the prison.

"San Quentin is leading the state in progressive rehabilitation programs, "
said Beth Waitkus, a consultant who manages an inmate garden project at the
prison. "If you get rid of this prison ... you'd be doing a horrible
disservice to the state. And I'm appalled that you're doing this for money."

Kinsey and his loose-knit alliance of realt estate agents and business execs
insist that their only consideration is how the prison acreage can best
serve the county and the Bay Area.

"We are not salivating for that property," said Elissa Giambastiani,
president of the San Rafael Chamber of Commerce. "Our organization has been
working passionately for years to create affordable housing in our
community."

Jeanne Woodford, the director of the California Department of Corrections,
served previously as the warden of San Quentin, where she took pride in
fostering innovative rehabilitation programs.

"I think the prison is located right where it should be. It's in a
metropolitan area," Woodford told The Chronicle in a 2002 interview. "It's
important that society knows what goes on in our prisons. ... Prisons are a
community problem -- because inmates are going to parole