The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog: News related to Mass Incarceration Archives

July 16, 2008

Criminal Charges Filed Against Immigrants at Unprecedented Rate

HispanicLink, News Report, Alex Meneses Miyashita, Posted: Jul 15, 2009
Criminal immigration violation charges are being filed by the federal government at unprecedented levels this year, a report by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reveals.

The study released in June reports there were 9,350 immigration prosecutions in March, representing a 50 percent surge from the month before, based on official records obtained by the group. When compared to a year ago, the increase was 73 percent.

The independent, nonpartisan group attributes the rise to intensified federal policies under the so-called “Operation Streamline” initiative which launched as a pilot project in Del Rio, Texas, in December 2005.

There were 8,104 immigration convictions in March, representing a 24.4 percent increase from February.

The vast majority of cases referred for prosecution, 99 percent, were charged by U.S. attorneys. The median sentence was about a month, the report indicates.

The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement notes that immigration violations are normally civil offenses prosecuted by immigration judges,adding that under Operation Streamline, the federal government has criminalized these offenses, barring immigrants from future legalization.

“Undocumented workers are a voiceless group of people who live in fear and today they are much more exploitable,” stated LCLAA president Milton Rosado. “The administration’s current policies and the criminalization of this group of people only exacerbate this situation. Immigrants are not criminals.”

The report states the vast majority of the cases were prosecuted in southwest border districts.

In the Western District of Texas, for instance, prosecutions increased from 626 in January to 3,555 in March. All but 142 were in U.S.-Mexico border districts.

The main charges brought against immigrants in March were for illegal re-entry, bringing in or harboring certain immigrants, entry at improper time or place, visa and document fraud, and misuse and conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States.

Other charges included fraudulent statements or entries, false personification as a U.S. citizen, false statement in application and use of passport, and forgery.

The largest increase in prosecution from a year ago (96.2 percent) was for conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States. Document falsification and related activities has seen the largest surge over the past five years (74.4 percent).

The LCLAA said it is “extremely concerned about the implications that higher incarceration rates of immigrants will have on the overall Latino community and its image in the eyes of the American public.”

The organization maintained that criminalizing immigrants will strengthen the myth that ties immigrants to crime even if research has claimed that they tend to commit less crime than other groups.

Rosado attributed the large flow of immigrants to harmful economic policies that have affected workers throughout the hemisphere “causing dislocation and displacement.“

“We need to address the root causes of migration and understand that this is a regional problem that requires a combination of domestic policy as well as comprehensive, humane and commonsense international solutions,” he added.

July 15, 2008

Mother Jones July-August Issue on Mass Incarceration

Mother Jones
July/August Issue

SLAMMED
Inside America's broken—and broke—prison system

Welcome to the Age of Incarceration Welcome to the Age of Incarceration
We are locking up 1 in every 100 American adults—and going bankrupt in the process.
By Jennifer Gonnerman

California's convict crisis Worst of the Worst
California's convict crisis
By James Sterngold

A guard's change of heart Taming of the Screws
A guard's change of heart
By Sasha Abramsky

The booming immigrant detention industry Texas Hold 'Em
The booming immigrant detention industry
By Stephanie Mencimer

Probation for Profit Probation for Profit
In Georgia's outsourced justice system, a traffic ticket can land you deep in the hole.
By Celia Perry

Kids doing time for tantrums Hard Time Out
Kids doing time for tantrums
By David Goodman

Prison problems? Not in Kansas anymore. The Shawnee Redemption
Prison problems? Not in Kansas anymore.
By Justine Sharrock
______

Posted by lois at 09:57 AM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2008

Guarded Hope: Lessons from the history of the prison boom by Robert Perkinson

"Navigating these uncertain waters, Abramsky, Gilmore, and Simon all conclude with guarded hope. Although California’s penal system has become one of the nation’s most crowded and dysfunctional in recent years, Abramsky cautiously praises Governor Schwarzenegger for revisiting the concept of prison-based rehabilitation. (Not long after American Furies went to press, the governor proposed sending 22,000 inmates home early to save money.) For his part, Simon hopes that aging baby boomers and the Katrina debacle will force a redirection of government attention from crime control to health care and infrastructure, a shift he believes will reinforce rather than erode social solidarity and public trust. Gilmore closes with a glowing case study of the grassroots political action group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, an organization with almost no resources that has formulated a far-reaching anti-racist agenda that Gilmore proffers as a template for anti-prison activists everywhere. At the same time, nonprofits like the Sentencing Project and the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation have produced a blizzard of white papers proposing how carefully calibrated treatment programs, a return to judicial discretion, alternatives to incarceration, and robust reentry programs can enhance public safety while cutting costs."

JULY/AUGUST 2008, Boston Review http://bostonreview.net/BR33.4/perkinson.php
Guarded Hope
Lessons from the history of the prison boom Robert Perkinson

In March 1965, at the height of his popularity and power, President Johnson launched a major offensive against crime, which he called a “malignant enemy in America.” Although violent crime had declined markedly since the Great Depression, it was starting to surge under Johnson’s watch, and his conservative critics—following the lead of Barry Goldwater, who had made fighting crime a centerpiece of his failed but galvanizing presidential bid—were eager to pounce. To outflank them, LBJ ordered his attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach to chair a blue-ribbon commission to draft a national crime strategy. “I will not be satisfied,” the President warned, borrowing from Goldwater’s paternalistic playbook, “until every woman and child in this Nation can walk any street, enjoy any park . . . and live in any community at any time of the day or night without fear of being harmed.” He declared “a thorough and effective war against crime.”

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Johnson’s belligerent anticrime talk rings familiar, but the policy changes ultimately put forward by his expert panel in 1967 hail, seemingly, from another country. Nowhere among the Katzenbach commission’s 200-plus recommendations were the sorts of punitive fixes presently in vogue. Rather than augmenting law-enforcement powers, the panelists urged greater respect for civil liberties and a national commitment to police fairness and professionalism, complete with in-service training courses like “The civil rights movement and history of the Negro.” Instead of strengthening the hands of prosecutors, the commissioners recommended greater evidence sharing, eliminating most bail charges, and expanding legal services for low-income defendants. Instead of tougher criminal sentencing, they suggested rolling back mandatory-minimum drug penalties passed in the 1950s and shifting resources from imprisonment to probation and parole.

Although the panelists advocated more money for law enforcement and criminological research, they insisted, above all, that “the challenge of crime in a free society” could only be met by stressing prevention over punishment. “We will not have dealt effectively with crime until we have alleviated the conditions that stimulate it,” they wrote. Reflecting what would become an unfashionable belief that government intervention can alleviate social problems by means other than tax cuts or privatization, the president’s advisors asserted that the Great Society represented the best solution to crime:

[The Commission] has no doubt whatever that the most significant action that can be taken against crime is action designed to eliminate slums and ghettos, to improve education, to provide jobs, to make sure every American is given the opportunities and the freedoms that will enable him to assume his responsibilities.

Rather than building cellblocks, they called for building communities. Throwing down the gauntlet before the incipient law-and-order Right, LBJ’s best and brightest called “for a revolution in the way America thinks about crime.”

What they got was counterrevolution. By 1968, when the report was translated into law, Lyndon Johnson’s once formidable social-democratic coalition had fragmented, a casualty not only of Vietnam but of the riotous, long, hot summers at home. The domestic homicide rate was soaring, and as public anxiety mounted, resurgent Republicans and southern segregationist Democrats took control of the crime issue in Congress, drafting sweeping legislation that bore little resemblance to Johnson’s. Instead of crafting myriad federal programs, the revised bill would channel some $400 million into locally controlled “block grants” for law enforcement, a nod to states’ rights. Instead of “warring on poverty,” as the commissioners urged, the congressional package took aim at the Warren Court, eliminating restrictions on wiretapping and authorizing police to interrogate suspects without the pesky involvement of defense attorneys (Miranda v. Arizona had been decided in 1966).

Johnson’s allies disliked the bill—the New York Times decried the “vicious” legislation’s “sectional politics, facile solutions, and clearly discernable prejudices against the ignorant and the poor”—but after it motored through the House and Senate, the lame-duck president held his nose and signed. What had started out as an effort to outfox the Right—to commandeer Barry Goldwater’s divisive talking points to buttress the Left’s anti-poverty and civil rights agenda—had instead destabilized liberalism and shifted the national conversation from social services to just deserts.

Whether or not the final version of the quaintly named Safe Streets Act represented “a giant leap toward a police state,” as one contemporary feared, the law would serve as a blueprint for anticrime legislation from the late ’60s forward. Under President Nixon, who took Goldwater’s rhetoric about crime to the White House, and then under Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush the Crusader, the federal government promulgated ever harsher, more expansive, and more expensive versions of Johnson’s runaway bill. They declared and redeclared wars on drugs. They extended sentences, curtailed parole, facilitated capital punishment, hobbled judges and defense attorneys, and dispensed billions of dollars for prison construction. This was the story in Washington, but even harsher measures developed in the states—think New York’s Rockefeller drug laws or California’s three-strikes initiative—with the result that a prison nation grew up from the wreckage of the Great Society.

Even as the social safety net frayed—and then unraveled from the Reagan administration forward—America invested generously in criminal justice, especially prisons. Between 1970 and 2000, the U.S. inmate population increased sixfold. By 2008 the total surpassed 2.3 million, more than the populations of Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco combined. The United States, a republic founded on the notion of liberty, became the most incarcerated nation on earth.

But why?

Social scientists have put forward a grab bag of answers. Some depict the transformation as a reasoned response to violence, others as a panicked reaction to cable news crime coverage. Some blame postwar economic restructuring, others the populist peculiarities of American democracy. Three recent books assert comprehensive explanations—one zeroing in on the cultural causes of criminal justice severity, one surveying the political geography of the prison boom, and one assessing the country’s changing terrain of law and governance. All three greatly enrich the conversation, but none are likely to settle the argument.

***

Sasha Abramsky’s American Furies (2007) is less a causal account of what he labels “the Age of Mass Imprisonment” than a cri de coeur against it. He laments that the guiding principles of U.S. social policy—with respect to criminal justice but also education, welfare, and taxes—have shifted from equal opportunity to stratification, from social integration to retribution, and he presents a wide-ranging examination of the consequences. A peripatetic journalist and author of two previous books on crime and punishment, Abramsky takes readers on a tour of America’s carceral landscape, from law-enforcement trade shows to corrupt private prisons to sweltering outdoor jails, and he shakes his head in dismay wherever he goes.

Abramsky finds particularly disturbing the decline of prisoner treatment programs and the ascendance of their antitheses, supermaximum-security control units, which have proliferated even more rapidly than conventional cellblocks. Designed to curtail prison disorder by stripping refractory prisoners of even vestigial human agency, these special housing units now contain tens of thousands of inmates, many of them severely mentally ill, in a state of almost perfect isolation. In the harshest facilities—places like California’s Pelican Bay or Texas’s Estelle High Security—prisoners are locked into spare concrete boxes for twenty-three hours a day; they take their meals through slots and experience human touch only to be shackled. Abramsky calls these places “storehouses of the living dead.”

Lawmakers and their constituents like to imagine that only the worst of the worst are subject to hardline, high-tech justice, but a substantial majority of prison and jail inmates in the United States, more than 1.3 million, have been convicted of non-violent offenses. According to a 2003 Human Rights Watch study coauthored by Abramsky, between 200,000 and 300,000 prisoners are mentally ill, with many more in jails. Even greater numbers have been snared by the War on Drugs. In 1967 the Katzenbach commission urged more money for drug treatment and even hinted at decriminalization of marijuana. But unyielding criminalization became the rule, such that drug offenses now account for roughly two million annual arrests, some 40 percent of them for pot possession. For those charged with dealing narcotics, especially crack cocaine, Abramsky reports that mandatory prison terms now routinely exceed those meted out to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

Juveniles, too, are going to prison in record numbers. By 2003 more than one hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen were incarcerated in the United States. Most are held in juvenile facilities or reform schools, inventions of the Progressive Era, but in recent years, prosecutors and judges have diverted thousands of them to adult prisons. As Abramsky reports, Florida led the charge, attracting national attention for sentencing a twelve year-old to life without parole (later overturned) and for routinely charging school-age delinquents, from pot smokers to shoplifters, with adult felonies.

The new approach that emerged from the 1960s signaled not just a declining tolerance for risk and disorder in an increasingly atomized society, but also a sea change in public policy presumptions. No longer would criminal-justice institutions strive, however incapably, to reclaim and reintegrate lawbreakers. Instead, tough justice in the post-civil rights era would seek to segregate offenders from free society, subject them to extended controls, and, ultimately, relegate them to a permanently subordinate class of citizenship as defined by conviction status. This time, as before, race would figure prominently. “The harsh attitudes towards kids right now in the United States is a harsh attitude to black and Latino kids,” a juvenile justice expert tells Abramsky. “Those other kids.”

Mandatory prison terms now routinely exceed those meted out to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

Abramsky puts the blame everywhere and nowhere. He assails conservative academics like James Q. Wilson, who distorted the admittedly mixed performance of prison treatment initiatives to imply that “nothing works” in the field of criminal rehabilitation. He censures the victims’ rights movement for channeling personal anguish into calls for public vengeance, and he condemns “Bible Belt fundamentalists” who preach “eternal damnation.” He dismisses law-and-order reactionaries as “media whores” and lambastes “rant radio” for feeding Americans “a diet of vitriol that would put some paranoid schizophrenics to shame.” Finally, he resorts to metaphor, invoking Hobbes, Hitler, and, for his title, Greek mythology. Having slept through the age of rehabilitation, Abramsky submits, an American incarnation of the blood-thirsty Erinyes, or Furies, “shook themselves out of their slumbers” in the 1970s and now hover over a land “consumed by its desire for revenge.” They have built Tartarus on earth.

***

This rendition of the punitive turn as mass hysteria is precisely the view that Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a professor at the University of Southern California, aims to counter in her book Golden Gulag (2007). A political geographer with a Marxist compass, she argues that super-sized imprisonment is more rational than emotional, more structural than cultural. It represents not just a rightward jag in political discourse, she holds, but a fundamental transformation of the country’s political economy.

Gilmore grounds her study on a single, exceptionally large and dynamic state: California. The choice both complicates and strengthens her claims. It creates difficulties because California, thanks largely to its powerful guard union, has resisted prison privatization and because neither the state nor private contractors make much use of convict labor. This limits opportunities for profit, Gilmore acknowledges, thereby undermining simplistic descriptions of a “prison industrial complex” or a “new slavery.”

On the other hand, California has experienced phenomenally expensive prison growth over the past three decades. Since Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation to fix sentencing and eliminate parole in 1977, the state’s prisoner population has shot up 790 percent. Since George Deukmejian took the helm in 1983, California has built twenty-four major new prisons, making its “golden gulag” the biggest state penal system in the United States. Once famous for its public universities, California’s largest state agency is now its department of corrections, with an annual budget of $10 billion.

Most analysts, including Abramsky, who wrote an engaging 2002 book on California’s crime panic, Hard Time Blues, attribute the state’s prison boom to political factors from the Reagan revolt to the three-strikes campaign. Gilmore, on the other hand, points to three types of “surpluses” that made it possible: land, labor, and capital. Rural land once used to grow crops for agribusiness now cultivates prisons, she finds, while chronic unemployment in urban areas helps produce the bodies to fill them. Prison construction, at $280 to $350 million a pop, has also put big money to work, not only in the traditional pork-contractor circuit, but by providing investors low-risk, tax-exempt government bonds. As the military-Keynesian order faltered in the 1970s, Gilmore asserts, a “prison fix” steadied the state-capitalist machine. Prison building was not a conspiracy, she says, but it did “put certain state capacities into motion, make use of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and take more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets.”

Such reasoning may smack of economic determinism, but Gilmore’s book contains a welter of nuanced, well-researched insights. By following the money, she reveals who gains (Central Valley largeholders and municipal bond brokerages, among them) and who loses (impoverished residents in both rural and urban communities) in California’s prison construction frenzy. Because so much trickery was involved in the credit-market financing, she speculates that California’s crackdown may have been less populist than its ballot initiatives suggest; in short, voters never saw the bill.

Through careful case studies of two prison zones—Los Angeles, a convict exporter, and Corcoran, an inmate importer—Gilmore also shows how large-scale imprisonment constitutes a form of forced urban-to-rural migration; how tax dollars are unfairly diverted from blighted urban cores to withering farm towns; and how prison host communities, despite the transfer, rarely receive their promised economic windfall. As a rural development scheme, Gilmore counsels, imprisonment rarely delivers. The best paid employees commute rather than relocate, and family members who trek to visit their incarcerated loved ones rarely drop enough cash to stimulate the service sector.

Overall, Gilmore’s somewhat demanding text convincingly identifies powerful interests that lined up to haul California’s tough-on-crime bandwagon. What Golden Gulag fails to explain is why the band started playing in the first place.

***

Here Jonathan Simon, a Berkeley law professor, steps into the conversation, turning it from base to superstructure. His ambitious and carefully reasoned new book, Governing through Crime (2007), the most thought-provoking of the crop, argues that what sociologists are calling “mass imprisonment” (because such a large portion of the population is now involved) signals not only a new approach to managing crime, but to managing society.

In the criminal justice arena, Simon shows how prosecutors have gained power as courts have become “judgment machines,” constrained by mandatory sentencing, and how prisons, absent the promise of rehabilitation, have proliferated as “human toxic waste dumps.” The most innovative sections of his book, however, outline how an increasingly insular, risk averse, and punitive social ethic has reshaped not only how the other half lives but how the top half does as well.

In deunionized workplaces, he finds that blue and white-collar employees alike are subject to more surveillance, more restrictions on behavior (both on and off the clock), and more legalistic discipline than in the past. He regrets that in schools music and art classes have given way to metal detectors and locker searches. Even the family, he argues, has become “a nexus of crime.” On one hand, family members are regarded as potential criminals, a partial consequence of feminist campaigns against domestic violence. On the other, well-heeled parents spend heavily to fortify their homes against external threats, purchasing intruder-alert systems, nanny cams, and, if their teens stray, home drug testing kits. As much as the 5,000 prisons that now punctuate the American landscape, gated communities and battleship SUVs symbolize the birth of a fearful nation.

Americans’ collective reactions to violent crime—especially homicide, which rocketed upward in the 1960s, leveled off in the 1980s, and fell back toward earth in the 1990s—are so pervasive, Simon contends, that crime fighting has become a paradigmatic means of governing, a dominant pathway to authority and legitimacy for policymakers. Governors and presidents, even more so after 9/11, have increasingly posed as lawmen on the campaign trail, while crime victims have become an idealized class of citizens deemed especially worthy of government intervention.

The result is not only a bloated penal system but an erosion of civil society. As war (whether against crime or terror) becomes a leading metaphor for governing, as politicians swap civil liberties for the elusive promise of security, as sanctions replace supports in the nation’s social welfare toolkit, and as fear eclipses hope as an impetus to political action, the edifice of a free society quakes, Simon argues. “Governing through crime does not, and I believe, cannot make us more secure,” he writes. Instead, it cycles hundreds of thousands of troubled young people, “a shocking percentage of them descendants of . . . slaves,” through criminogenic jails. It “is making America less democratic and more racially polarized.”

Simon maintains that “the signal event marking the end of the Great Society era” and the rise of its punitive successor was the 1968 passage of the Safe Streets Act. “Crime was driving a stake through the heart of the Democrats’ urban coalition,” and the government’s response was to refabricate the welfare state into the penal state.

There were other options. Simon muses counterfactually that political leaders could have redoubled the war on poverty or launched determined campaigns against cancer or pollution. Any of these would have been preferable arenas for government mobilization, Simon says, and he is somewhat puzzled that policymakers did not see it that way. So he maps out obstacles along the roads not taken—corporate opposition to environmentalism and constitutional impediments to a European-style social welfare state, for instance—thus suggesting that crime prevailed at least partly by default, because it “offered the least political or legal resistance to government action.” But this depiction of the Great American Crime Crackdown as mere expedience minimizes its structural supports (Gilmore’s point), as well as its political utility, especially to the New Right (witness the Willie Horton ads of 1988 or this season’s insinuations that “Barack Hussein Obama” will be soft on terrorists).

As the perennial role of fear in racially charged political campaigns suggests, Simon might have expanded on an alternative explanation that he entertains but never fully endorses: that governing through crime developed largely as a reaction against civil rights. This is the argument described by Glenn Loury in a recent Boston Review essay, and there is considerable evidence for it. As Simon points out, it was states’-rights conservatives, inspired by George Wallace, who first seized on crime as a polarizing issue in national politics; the Republican Right thereafter picked up the baton and used it as a cudgel against liberalism for almost half a century. It was in the South, moreover, in the same jurisdictions that avidly resisted integration, where prison populations first started to grow (in the late 1960s vs. the mid-1970s nationally) and where they swelled most intensely; California may manage the largest state penal system in the country in absolute terms, but states like Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas have by far the highest rates of incarceration. Southern states, too, have taken the lead in resurrecting dour penalties that allude nostalgically to Jim Crow: chain gangs, striped uniforms, for-profit prisons, and reactivated death houses.

Simon’s categorization of history into distinct policymaking regimes also lends credence to this backlash hypothesis, though it requires an alternate interpretive lens. In Simon’s schema, political leadership has periodically coalesced to support favored groups of citizens that come to stand for the nation: yeoman farmers in the early republic, freedmen after emancipation, industrial workers in the Great Depression, and finally, victims of crime. The trouble with this genealogy of government assistance, however, is that it underemphasizes a grim counter-story. In truth, the helping hand of government has always been accompanied by a closed fist—with the latter all too often out front. In the Antebellum Era, slaveholders in fact commanded greater political influence than yeoman farmers, whatever the promises of Jacksonian Democracy. After the Civil War, it was the Klansman who ultimately prevailed over the agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau—and the robber baron who ended up on top. Out of the New Deal and World War II came not just stronger labor unions but McCarthyism and Taft-Hartley.

One of the reasons this alternative history of American repression is worth remembering is that it more logically leads to our punitive present. In a Whiggish storyline built around reform, America’s late twentieth-century prison boom materializes as a shocking, self-defeating aberration. If we redirect our spotlight from the history of social welfare to the equally pronounced, if less commemorated, history of social subjugation, however, mass imprisonment suddenly appears less inexplicable. Rather, it unfolds as the latest chapter in a centuries-long struggle between the ideal of equal citizenship and the reality of unequal power. It represents a reaction against democratic efflorescence akin to so many other reactions in U.S. history, from the Alien and Sedition Acts forward.

In particular, the late twentieth-century punitive turn bears troubling resemblance to another rightward pivot in American history, one that took place almost exactly a century before: the resurrection of neo-Confederate rule from the ashes of Reconstruction. Just as convict leasing, lynching, and finally segregation developed in the turbulent wake of emancipation and the first African-American freedom movement, mass imprisonment took hold in reaction to the second. Put simply, as white conservatives surrendered on integration, they insisted on getting much tougher on crime, to which they symbolically chained a host of developments they found troubling, from civil disobedience to urban rebellions.

The consequence was unprecedented prison growth, but of a particular sort. In 1960 the U.S. prison population was 60 percent white. By 2005 it was 70 percent non-white. By most measures of racial disparity, American criminal justice is more separate and unequal today than it was when Martin Luther King proclaimed from the Lincoln Memorial: “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.”

This contextualization of the prison boom within the tragically conflicted saga of American race relations matters not so much because it offers a singular, definitive account of causation, but because it helps point the way forward. If racially skewed prison warehousing represents the latest incarnation of American racism, then political mobilization and social transformation on the scale of the civil rights movement may be necessary to dislodge it.

***

At the close of the Bush era, there are scattered signs that America’s prison paroxysm may have run its course. Although the country’s inmate population continues to rise (climbing 16 percent between 2000 and 2006, not counting the advent of U.S. detention abroad, from Guantánamo to Bagram), budget crises are forcing an array of politicians to reckon with what their tough-on-crime posturing has created. In New York the state assembly has been revising the Rockefeller drug laws to make them more forgiving. In Kansas, parole officers are no longer automatically reincarcerating their charges for low-level violations like failing a urine test. In Iowa lawmakers are requiring that all new sentencing laws be assessed for potentially negative racial impacts, and in Nevada politicians have started rolling back mandatory minimums. Across the country and on both sides of the aisle, increasing numbers of policymakers are starting to agree with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who told the American Bar Association in 2003 that “our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long.”

Navigating these uncertain waters, Abramsky, Gilmore, and Simon all conclude with guarded hope. Although California’s penal system has become one of the nation’s most crowded and dysfunctional in recent years, Abramsky cautiously praises Governor Schwarzenegger for revisiting the concept of prison-based rehabilitation. (Not long after American Furies went to press, the governor proposed sending 22,000 inmates home early to save money.) For his part, Simon hopes that aging baby boomers and the Katrina debacle will force a redirection of government attention from crime control to health care and infrastructure, a shift he believes will reinforce rather than erode social solidarity and public trust. Gilmore closes with a glowing case study of the grassroots political action group Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, an organization with almost no resources that has formulated a far-reaching anti-racist agenda that Gilmore proffers as a template for anti-prison activists everywhere. At the same time, nonprofits like the Sentencing Project and the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation have produced a blizzard of white papers proposing how carefully calibrated treatment programs, a return to judicial discretion, alternatives to incarceration, and robust reentry programs can enhance public safety while cutting costs. Bruce Western discusses some of these proposals in this issue.

Katzenbach said, "I'm old and maybe I can't learn new ideas, but I think our criminal justice system has to be rational and fair."

One of the most ambitious of these non-governmental efforts, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in American Prisons, was headed by none other than Nicholas Katzenbach, now in his eighties. Forty years had passed since he first surveyed American criminal justice on behalf of the country’s last liberal administration, when in 2005 he was asked by the Vera Institute, a mid-size think tank, to undertake a limited follow-up. What Katzenbach found appalled him. Over the decades, state and federal policymakers had indeed acted on most of his original recommendations but had invariably done the opposite. The outcome, he and his small staff concluded after a round of national hearings, was that the hard end of the criminal justice system had grown larger, meaner, and, in their view, more socially corrosive. Prison turbulence had declined since the late ’60s, but rape, crowding, infectious disease, and acute mental illness remained endemic—and on a monumental scale. Each year, some 13.5 million people cycle through the country’s adult jails and prisons, they observed. They go in “poor, undereducated, and unhealthy,” and they come out worse.

With a constricted mandate to study only prison conditions, Katzenbach’s second survey coupled strong criticisms—“We should be astonished by the size of the prisoner population, troubled by the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos, and saddened by the waste of human potential”—with sensibly modest policy recommendations: more funding for corrections staff, better health care, independent oversight, and less reliance on supermax isolation.

Yet critics of America’s criminal justice system—which now devours $204 billion a year and circumscribes 7.2 million lives, counting offenders on probation and parole—would do well to spend more time with Katzenbach’s original report than its cautious sequel. In the first study, this early advocate for civil rights within the Justice Department, who once famously faced down George Wallace at the schoolhouse door, called not only for more professional, more treatment-oriented prisons, but fewer of them. Imprisonment should be a sanction of last rather than first resort, he proposed. At the same time, he and his first commissioners advocated a more expansive understanding of crime: “The criminal justice system has great potential for dealing with individual instances of crime, but it was not designed to eliminate the conditions in which most crime breeds.” “It needs help,” they argued, in the form of better schools, better housing, better jobs, and genuinely equal citizenship.

In a phone interview, Katzenbach, whose memoir Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ will be published this fall, says that he still believes this Great Society approach is the best one. “I’m old and maybe I can’t learn new ideas, but I think our criminal justice system has to be rational and fair,” he told me. “Harsh punishment is satisfying, but our system has to do more than that. It ought to reflect the type of society we want to be. It ought to stand for decency.”

In 1967 Katzenbach titled his report “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,” and he still contends in his forthcoming autobiography that “every law has to satisfy both sides of the equation”—it needs to confront lawlessness but also safeguard civil liberties and social justice. To do so, as Katzenbach proposed more than a generation ago, will require more than technocratic remedies confined to the criminal justice arena. We will need to embark upon “a revolution in the way America thinks about crime.”

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

Boston Review: 3 articles in Special Issue including: : "No Further Harm: What we owe to incarcerated fathers", "Guarded Hope:Lessons from the history of the prison boom" and "Reentry: Reversing mass imprisonment"

JULY/AUGUST 2008--- Boston Review
all at:
http://bostonreview.net/BR33.4/prison.php

No Further Harm
What we owe to incarcerated fathers by Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Mary Lyndon Shanley
--------------------

Guarded Hope
Lessons from the history of the prison boom by Robert Perkinson
-----------------------
Reentry
Reversing mass imprisonment by Bruce Western

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, “With the world’s largest prison population,” he said, “our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity.” Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison’s significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb’s hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control. Nothing separates the social experience of blacks and whites like involvement in the criminal justice system. Blacks are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and large racial disparities can be seen for all age groups and at different levels of education. One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Young black men today are more likely to do time in prison than serve in the military or graduate college with a bachelor’s degree. The large black-white disparity in incarceration is unmatched by most other social indicators. Racial disparities in unemployment (two to one), nonmarital childbearing (three to one), infant mortality (two to one), and wealth (one to five) are all significantly lower than the seven to one black-white ratio in incarceration rates.

Though lurid portrayals of black criminality are easy to find on the local news or reality TV, the deep class divisions in imprisonment may be less apparent. Nearly all the growth in imprisonment since 1980 has been concentrated among those with no more than a high school education. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives. The intimate link between school failure and incarceration is clear at the bottom of the education ladder where 60 percent of black, male high school dropouts will go to prison before age thirty-five. The stigma of official criminality has become normal for these poorly educated black men, and they are thereby converted from merely disadvantaged into a class of social outsiders. These astonishing levels of punishment are new. We need only go back two decades to find a time when imprisonment was not a common event in the lives of black men with less than a college education.

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The effects of the prison are not confined within its walls. Those coming home from prison, now about 700,000 each year, face an narrowed array of life chances. Mostly returning to urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, men with prison records are often out of work. The jobs they do find pay little and offer only a fraction of the earnings growth that usually supports the socially valuable roles of husband and breadwinner. Ex-prisoners are often in poor health, sometimes struggling with mental illness or chronic disease. A University of California, Berkeley study attributes most of the black-white difference in AIDS infection to racial disparities in incarceration. In many cases people with felony records are denied housing, education, and welfare benefits. In eleven states they are permanently denied the right to vote.

The social penalties of imprisonment also spread through families. Though formerly incarcerated men are just as likely to have children as other men of the same age, they are less likely to get married. Those who are married will most likely divorce or separate. The family instability surrounding incarceration persists across generations. Among children born since 1990, 4 percent of whites and 25 percent of blacks will witness their father being sent to prison by their fourteenth birthday. Those children, too, are to some extent drawn into the prison nexus, riding the bus to far-flung correctional facilities and passing through metal detectors and pat-downs on visiting day. In short those with prison records and their families are something less than full members of society. To be young, black, and unschooled today is to risk a felony conviction, prison time, and a life of second-class citizenship. In this sense, the prison boom has produced mass incarceration—a level of imprisonment so vast and concentrated that it forges the collective experience of an entire social group.

Viewed in historical context, mass incarceration takes on even greater significance. The prison boom took off in the 1970s, immediately following the great gains to citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement. Growing rates of incarceration mean that, in the experience of African-Americans in poor neighborhoods, the advancement of voting rights, school desegregation, and protection from discrimination was substantially halted. Mass incarceration undermined the project for full African-American citizenship and revealed the obstacles to political equality presented by acute social disparity.

Skeptics may concede that mass incarceration injured social justice, but surely, they would contend, it contributed to the tremendous decline in crime through the 1990s. Indeed, the crime decline of the ’90s produced a great improvement in public safety. From 1993 to 2001, the violent crime rate fell considerably, murder rates in big cities like New York and Los Angeles dropped by half or more, and this progress in social wellbeing was recorded by rich and poor alike. Yet, when I analyzed crime rates in this period, I found that rising prison populations did not reduce crime by much. The growth in state imprisonment accounted for 2-5 percent of the decline in serious crime—one-tenth of the crime drop from 1993 to 2001. The remaining nine-tenths was due to factors like the increasing size of local police forces, the pacification of the drug trade following the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, and the role of local circumstances that resist a general explanation.

So a modest decline in serious crime over an eight year period was purchased for $53 billion in additional correctional spending and half a million new prison inmates: a large price to pay for a small reduction. If we add the lost earnings of prisoners to the family disruption and community instability produced by mass incarceration, we cannot but acknowledge that a steep price was paid for a small improvement in public safety. Several examples further demonstrate that the boom may have been a waste because crime can be controlled without large increases in imprisonment. Violent crime in Canada, for example, also declined greatly through the 1990s, but Canadian incarceration rates actually fell from 1991 to 1999. New York maintained particularly low crime rates through the 2000s, but has been one of the few states to cut its prison population in recent years.

More importantly, perhaps, the reduction in crime was accompanied by an array of new problems associated with mass incarceration. Those states that have sought reduced crime through mass incarceration find themselves faced with an array of problems associated with overreliance on imprisonment. How can poor communities with few resources absorb the return of 700,000 prisoners each year? How can states pay for their prisons while responding to the competing demands of higher education, Medicaid, and K-12 schools? How can we address the social costs—the broken homes, unemployment, and crime—that can follow from imprisonment? Questions such as these lead us to a more fundamental concern: how can mass imprisonment be reversed and American citizenship repaired?

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We can begin to tackle these issues by understanding how we got here. The origins of today’s mass incarceration can be traced to basic political and economic shifts in the 1960s. On the economic side, the prison population swelled following the collapse of the urban manufacturing industry and subsequent cascade of social ills that swept poor inner-city neighborhoods. Serious crime—the traditional target of the penal system—was an important part of these urban social problems. Murder rates in large cities grew dramatically from 1965 to 1980. But in addition to the problem of serious crime, the penal system was used to manage many of the byproducts of persistent poverty: untreated drug addiction and mental illness, homelessness, chronic idleness among young men, and social disorder. It was the management of these social problems, not serious crime, that fuelled incarceration rates for drug users, public-order offenders, and parole violators.

As the social crisis of urban America supplied the masses for mass incarceration, the penal system itself became more punitive. The tough-on-crime message honed by the Republican Party in national politics since the Goldwater campaign of 1964 spoke to the racial anxieties of white voters discomfited by civil rights protests and summertime waves of civil unrest felt in cities through the decade. Conservatives charged that liberals coddled criminals and excused crime with phony root causes like poverty and unemployment. President Nixon launched a war on crime, only to be surpassed by President Reagan’s War on Drugs, which applied the resources of federal law enforcement to the problem of drug control. Policy experts abandoned rehabilitation, concluding that prisons could only deter and warehouse those who would otherwise commit crime in society. These politics produced a revolution in criminal sentencing. Mandatory minimum prison sentences, sentencing guidelines, parole abolition, and life sentences for third-time felons were widely adopted through the 1980s. The no-nonsense, tough-on-crime politics reached a bipartisan apotheosis with President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which launched the largest prison construction project in the nation’s history. As a result of these changes, prison time—as opposed to community supervision—became the main criminal sanction for felony offenders.

The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted in three fallacies of the tough-on-crime perspective. First, there is the fallacy of us and them. For tough-on-crime advocates, the innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals, and the prison works to separate us from them. The truth is that the criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons. Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioral staples of male youth. Most of the crime they commit is perpetrated on each other. This is reflected most tragically in the high rates of homicide victimization among males under age twenty-five, black males in particular. Some young men do become more seriously and persistently involved in crime, but neither the criminal-justice system nor criminologists can predict who those serious offenders will be or when they will stop offending. Thus the power to police and punish cannot separate us from criminals with great distinction, but instead flows along the contours of social inequality. Visible markers like age, skin color, and neighborhood become rough proxies for criminal threat. Small race and class differences in offending are amplified at each stage of criminal processing from arrest through conviction and sentencing. As a result the prison walls we built with such industry in the 1980s and ’90s did not keep out the criminal predators, but instead divided us internally, leaving our poorest communities with fewer opportunities to join the mainstream and deeply skeptical of the institutions charged with their safety.

Second, there is the fallacy of personal defect. Tough-on-crime politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals. Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less human than the rest of us. The diagnosis of defective character points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative efforts and justifying the mission of semi-permanent incapacitation. The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled association of crime with race in political talk. But seeking criminality in defects of character, the architects of the prison boom ignored the great rise in urban youth unemployment that preceded the growth in murder rates in the 1960s and ’70s. They ignored the illegal drug trade, which flourished to fill the vacuum of legitimate economic opportunity left by urban deindustrialization. They ignored, too, the fact that jobs are not just a source of economic opportunity but of social control that routinizes daily life and draws young men into a wide array of socially beneficial roles. Lastly, they ignored the bonds of mutual assistance that are only weakly sustained by communities of concentrated poverty. Thus young men would return home from prison only to easily surmount once again the same stunted social barriers to crime that contributed to their imprisonment in the first place.

The final fallacy of the tough-on-crime perspective is the myth of the free market. The free market fallacy sees the welfare state as pampering the criminal class and building expectations of something for nothing. Anti-poverty programs were trimmed throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and poor young men largely fell through the diminished safety net that remained. For free marketeers, the question was simply whether or not to spend public money on the poor—they did not anticipate that idle young men present a social problem. Without school, work, or military service, these poor young men were left on the street-corner, sometimes acting disorderly and often fuelling fears of crime. We may have skimped on welfare, but we paid anyway, splurging on police and prisons. Because incarceration was so highly concentrated in particular neighborhoods and areas within them, certain city blocks received millions of dollars in “correctional investment”—spending on the removal of local residents by incarceration. These million-dollar blocks reveal a question falsely posed. We never faced a choice of whether to spend money on the poor; the dollars diverted from education and employment found their way to prison construction. Our political choice, it turned out, was not how much we spent on the poor, but what to spend it on.

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Getting tough on crime created a sustained public policy mistake of immense proportions. If the prison boom was indeed produced by a historic collision between the jobless ghetto and a punitive politics of civil rights backlash, retreating from mass incarceration will involve equally fundamental shifts in politics and economics. What would a new politics of criminal justice look like, and what policies would it promote?

There are small signs of change in the public conversation about crime, punishment, and poverty, though bold ideas have not yet penetrated the mainstream. By supporting education and treatment programs for prisoners, leaders from both parties have offered one answer to Senator Webb’s question about the future of punishment in America. In April this year, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, which funds literacy programs, drug treatment, and other services for prisoners and ex-prisoners. While prison reform advocates supported Second Chance, a bipartisan majority was ensured by Christian conservatives like Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who spoke up for a law that promoted a message of redemption and faith-based prison programs.

Second Chance can be viewed as one achievement in a broader movement for improved prisoner reentry policy. Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, has been a leading voice in naming the social problem of prisoner reentry and proposing policy solutions. In his 2005 book But They All Come Back Travis writes: “The reality of mass incarceration translates into the reality of reentry . . . [T]he harmful effects of high rates of incarceration and reentry call for . . . policies that promote reintegration, not retribution.” Here the reentry movement challenges mass incarceration by reasserting the importance of rehabilitation, but deliberately stops short of recommending a reduction in prison populations.

If the employment problems of young minority men in poor urban neighborhoods are a prime precondition for mass incarceration, prisoner reentry programs that promote employment may offer a way out of the street-prison cycle in which so many are caught. A wide variety of programs aim to help people move from prison to the labor market. GED classes, vocational training, prison work-programs, and job readiness instruction all seek to improve prisoners’ preparation for working life. In part, the wide variety of programs reflects the sheer range of behavioral and cognitive deficits of the prison population.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for these programs is that many men and women coming out of prison—most in their thirties or older—have never held a steady job. The newly released behave awkwardly around coworkers and have never cultivated daily work habits; these shortcomings may be no less debilitating than illiteracy or a shortage of vocational skills. Social scientists refer to the necessary traits of reliability, motivation, and sociability as “non-cognitive skills.” While education programs in prison can help develop the cognitive skills of math and verbal ability, the non-cognitive skills that promote success in free society are hard to develop while incarcerated. To learn these skills, people coming out of prison must repeatedly rehearse the habits of regular work. But precisely because they have so little work experience and carry the added penalty of a criminal record, formerly incarcerated men and women have little access to the steady jobs that can make them more productive. For ex-prisoners, extreme economic insecurity is a trap that prevents them accumulating the kind of work experience that enables a return to mainstream social life.

Building everyday work habits means working every day; instead of relying only on a wary labor market, some programs try to break the cycle of economic insecurity by offering jobs immediately after release from prison. The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) in New York provides transitional jobs in combination with job placement services to move prisoners into the open labor market. CEO takes people straight out of prison, and puts them in a week-long training program before assigning them to a seven-hour day, four-day week in small supervised crews doing groundskeeping and other manual work at the New York minimum wage of $7.15 an hour. On the fifth day of each week, the CEO participants take vocational and job readiness classes that prepare them for job searching and interviews. CEO’s transitional jobs generally last a month or two and program graduates receive transport and supermarket vouchers if they remain employed.

CEO, in a move rare among reentry programs, has sought to study the effectiveness of its program through experimentation. The experiment randomly assigned parolees either to transitional jobs or to a control group composed of former inmates who received job-search assistance from the support staff, but not transitional work. Parolees who took on transitional jobs within three months of release from prison saw their arrest rates reduced by about 20 percent compared to the control group. However, parolees who entered the transitional jobs more than 3 months after prison release experience no reductions in recidivism. It seems that timely intervention, immediately after prison, provides the greatest benefits.

CEO’s method shows promising results, but is narrowly directed toward alleviating unemployment. A small but intensive program run by the Brooklyn District Attorney suggests how a more comprehensive program might operate. Charles “Joe” Hynes is unusual among prosecutors. He actively incorporates alternatives to incarceration into the work of his office. Beginning in 1990 Hynes promoted a diversion program that sent nonviolent drug offenders to substance abuse treatment instead of prison. By the later part of the decade, the D.A. was convening regular meetings of community groups throughout Brooklyn to connect parolees and probationers to drug treatment, housing, and jobs.

The meetings were run by Hynes’s energetic First Assistant District Attorney, Patricia Gatling. Gatling did not saw the D.A.’s role as simply seeking the toughest justice for Brooklyn’s criminal defendants. In her view, the D.A. is a community lawyer, charged with strengthening neighborhoods and improving public safety in a broad sense. The community meetings in Brooklyn’s poor neighborhoods were Gatling’s effort to replenish the area’s flagging social capital—the web of networks and supports that greases the wheels of social life. After a few years, Hynes hired a full-time social worker and developed his own prisoner reentry program. At first it operated only in a few precincts with high parole caseloads, but later it spread across the whole borough.

Called ComALERT (Community and Law Enforcement Resources Together), the program provides parolees with drug treatment, transitional employment, and housing. Most ComALERT participants, have prior convictions for drugs or violence, and all have been ordered into drug treatment. Some homeless parolees enter the Ready Willing and Able (RWA) program that provides a full year of employment and supportive housing in return for a promise of complete drug and alcohol abstinence and a biweekly regime of drug testing. RWA participants work in street cleaning and other unskilled jobs for $7.50 an hour, share small apartments, and receive drug counseling and educational programming. A recent evaluation found that two years after release from prison, ComALERT clients were 18 percent less likely to be rearrested than a comparison group with a similar history of crime and drug use. ComALERT participants also earned about $1000 more each quarter and were about 20 percent more likely to be employed.

A large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America's new carceral class.

These positive outcomes suggest three policy lessons. First, transitional jobs are large-dose interventions that can reduce recidivism at least for a while by providing close supervision and paying wages. Regular work habits cannot be built cheap, though these programs are still less expensive than incarceration. Second, the programs that work best are comprehensive, bundling together a variety of services including drug treatment and housing. Because released prisoners often cope with a range of problems, additional supports must be in place for transitional jobs to help. Third, timely intervention is imperative; successful schemes provide a job immediately out of prison.

While the results from transitional jobs and supplementary programs are encouraging, we must be realistic about what these projects can achieve. Most initiatives operate at the local level. Sometimes their efforts span a city, but more often several neighborhoods. The high quality results that stem from local efforts will not scale to counties and states. Even in the best-case scenario, if recidivism is reduced by 10 or 20 percent, ex-prisoners would still be re-arrested at rates of around 40 percent or more.

Still, a large-scale effort to assist the reintegration of those coming home from prison can be justified on the grounds of restoring citizenship to America’s new carceral class. Instead of focusing assessment of reentry programs narrowly on the decrease in recidivism achieved, we should account for the benefits of families reunited, the paychecks that help support the children of ex-prisoners, and the value of literacy for its effects on quality of life in addition to its role in averting crime. The cost-benefit calculus looks quite different when we include these social goods. For nonviolent drug and public-order offenders, intensive, large-dose treatment in the community (which is relatively cheap) begins to look like a good alternative to custody in prison (which is expensive). Here we count as benefits not just reductions in crime, which may be modest, but all the ways in which social life is made more normal by drawing our erstwhile outsiders back into society, instead of building more walls to keep them out.

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What would a different kind of penal system look like: one that viewed the unemployment of ex-prisoners as a key problem to solve and the deficit of noncognitive skills a central obstacle to steady work? Projecting our exemplary local programs on to the national stage, all parolees leaving prison in need of a job would move into closely supervised community-service work paying minimum wage. Like Brooklyn’s RWA program, these jobs might be offered for up to a year and coupled to job placement with the goal of parolee self-sufficiency. Those with drug problems would enroll in a rigorous program of treatment and testing. Those living on the streets would move into supportive housing.

How many would participate in this national reentry program, and at what cost? Employment statistics for prisoners suggest a national transitional jobs program would enroll about 180,000 out of the 700,000 prisoners released each year. Around 200,000 would fill new places in drug treatment programs. Another 100,000 would require housing. A national program of transitional jobs, drug treatment, and supportive housing would represent a significant expansion of the social services available to ex-prisoners. The total cost of this effort would be about $7 billion each year, roughly one-tenth of total current spending on corrections. In the present climate such a program seems entirely fanciful—how could we pay for it?

One source of funds is the vast treasury expended on large-scale incarceration itself. By cutting the size of prison populations and redirecting some of the spending on custody to community programs, we could dramatically expand services to prisoners after they have been released. Unlocking America, a recent proposal from the Washington, D.C.-based JFA Institute, recommends four ways to reduce the size of prison populations.

First, Unlocking America recommends decriminalizing drug offenses and other “victimless” crimes. The authors argue that arresting drug dealers has no crime reducing effect because new dealers will fill the vacancies opened by incarceration. Since the mid-1990s, prominent conservatives, too, have supported the view that incarceration for drug dealing fails to curb the drug trade. In 1995 John DiIulio and Anne Piehl—the former would become an appointee in the second Bush administration—wrote that their “best estimate of the incapacitation effect (number of drug sales prevented by incarcerating a drug dealer) is zero,” and they therefore “value drug crimes (sales and possession) at zero social cost.” Though the War on Drugs failed to reduce drug use or the prices of drugs, it boosted incarceration and racial disparity. Drug convictions account for about a third of the increase in state prison populations and about three-quarters of the increase in the federal prison population through the 1980s and ’90s.

Second, time served in prison can be reduced. In the mid-1970s prisoners were incarcerated for relatively short periods, given their offenses. Since then, life sentences have become common for violent offenders and those with prior felony convictions. Three-strikes provisions add long stretches of prison time for repeat convicts. Truth-in-sentencing requires felony offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. These measures serve to lengthen prison time account for about half of the growth in state prison populations over the last twenty years.

Third, the length of probation and parole-supervision periods could also be reduced. People on probation and parole are likely to return to prison, but usually as a result of a technical violation, not a new crime. Unlocking America finds little evidence that lengthy parole and probation terms reduce crime. Probationers and parolees are most likely to fail in the first twelve months. After that first year, the authors write, “supervision is more of a nuisance than a means for assisting people after prison or preventing them from committing another crime.”

Finally, the authors argue that re-imprisonment should be eliminated for technical violations of parole and probation. Parolees and probationers are released to the community subject to a large number of conditions that typically include employment, drug testing, and regular meetings with case officers. When they violate these conditions, supervising officers can send them back to prison. Many parolees and probationers are sent back to prison for failing a drug test or missing an appointment—their reappearence behind bars may have nothing to do with crime. Incarceration for technical violations of parole or probation was a significant driver of state imprisonment rates through the 1990s. In some states, like California, most of those on parole are re-incarcerated for technical violations, adding a year or more to their time in prison.

Of all the proposals to reduce prison populations, restricting re-incarceration for technical parole violators seems most politically feasible. Some states are already trying to reduce parole revocation, sometimes by imposing more intensive community supervision or a few days in lock-up instead of months and years in prison. Kansas now conducts a risk assessment for parolees. Some are assigned to a low-risk group that receives only loose supervision. Case managers place high-risk parolees in special programs, and enforce a variety of punishments short of return to prison. Since adopting these measures in 2003, Kansas has halved the number of parole violators. Half a dozen other states, like Arizona, Illinois, New York, and Texas, have also adopted a system of graduated sanctions to reduce parole revocation. At the national level, eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would reduce prison admissions by about 30 percent each year. By itself this measure could save much of the funds needed for a national prisoner reentry program.

Eliminating re-incarceration for technical violations would also support a reintegrative model of corrections. Given that over half of state prisoners struggle with problems of drug addiction, we should anticipate that many will fail and become involved again in drugs or miss work or parole appointments. These failures should be viewed as a component of reentry. Relapse is part of a learning process in which new non-cognitive skills of reliability and persistence develop. If failure is a likely stop on the path to steady work, parole supervision must also allow people to fail and remain in their communities.

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So far I have argued that we can edge away from mass incarceration by promoting two kinds of policies: expanding support for the reentry of prisoners into society and scaling down the size of the prison population. The two steps are linked; we expand our support for ex-prisoners in the community by using incarceration more sparingly and revoking freedom less willingly. Money that we now spend on prison can be spent on treatment and jobs.

There are more advocates now for reentry programs than decarceration, but a real policy debate over the future of mass incarceration has barely begun. Though Congress dipped a toe in the pool of reintegrative criminal justice by passing the Second Chance Act, a national large-dose reentry program is a much larger effort. Faced with mounting correctional budgets, governors in Kansas and elsewhere have experimented with parole reform. Some states are also considering sentencing reforms. Commissions in New York and California are now reviewing three-strikes and mandatory minimums. Despite these signs of change, the reform process remains in its infancy. Few correctional facilities have closed, and incarceration rates continue to rise.

While an expanded reentry policy and a revision of the penal codes may stop the growth of prisons, the future of mass incarceration depends very much on its past. A less punitive criminal justice system cannot by itself solve the deep social problems of poor urban neighborhoods. These problems—disorder and addiction largely flowing from chronic idleness—set in motion the politics and policy choices that delivered mass incarceration. As America’s meager welfare state failed to prevent school dropout and persistent unemployment among unskilled inner-city residents, prisons and jails expanded to fill the vacuum of social control formerly occupied by the education system and the labor market. The police, the courts, and correctional administrators were charged with solving the social problems of idleness, addiction, and mental illness, while also controlling their natural jurisdiction over serious crime. But they were given just a few tools: the powers of arrest and imprisonment. Mass incarceration contains an unruly population beset with trouble; wholesale confinement makes the population more manageable but leaves their troubles undiminished.

To expect a rehabilitative criminal justice alone to reverse mass incarceration is, in an odd way, to repeat the mistakes of the tough-on-crime movement. We would again be turning to line officers to manage the byproducts of deep social inequalities. While we might spend billions on a jobs program for former prisoners, we would still send them out to look for work in labor markets where half of the young men are jobless. We would still be asking them to stay sober amid a thriving street trade in illegal drugs. This is what prisoners mean when they say they are set up to fail. This is not just a recidivist’s special pleading: it reflects the deficiencies of a theory in which society’s losers have only themselves to blame.

The police, the courts, and correctional administrators were charged with solving social problems, but their only tools were the powers of arrest and imprisonment.

Reversing mass incarceration will ultimately require that social problems be solved with social policies. The two most urgent priorities are the prevention of school dropout and the creation of a viable and legitimate economy in poor inner-city neighborhoods. Not even the most rehabilitative criminal justice policy can solve these problems. We normally think of education and employment as sources of economic opportunity. In the era of mass incarceration, we also see that they are positive sources of social control, providing order in people’s daily lives.

School failure and joblessness, of course, lie deep at the core of American urban inequality. Even if our policy knowledge is equal to these problems, the political will is weak, especially since carceral stigma now clouds the neighborhoods of the urban poor. It seems unlikely under these conditions that communities of concentrated poverty will somehow launch new programs of urban renewal or that middle class voters will discover sympathies for the poor. Are new efforts at social investment impossible?

The upcoming election season holds more promise for an expanded social policy than we have seen in years. The coming debate over national health insurance holds enormous significance for communities most affected by mass incarceration. If a plan emerges that covers treatment for substance abuse, mental health problems, and chronic disease, and if the plan is truly universal, carrying no exclusions for those in prison or with felony convictions, it can significantly improve the lives of those entangled in the penal system. By aiming to cover everyone, national health insurance creates a common cause between the urban poor wracked by mass incarceration and the suburban middle class. We have recently seen this kind of cross-class support in defense of Social Security—a universalistic and venerated institution operating with great anti-poverty effect. Supporters repelled the threat of privatization not because Social Security slashes poverty among the elderly, but because it guarantees the material dignity of all citizens in retirement.

Policies narrowly tailored only to the needs of released prisoners can at best attract the support of altruists and the poor themselves. The ineffectiveness of these constituencies is reflected in the quality of these targeted policies as they currently stand. But by actively constructing the common citizenship of the poor and the middle class, a universal social policy provides a powerful force for social integration.

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Nearly a century ago, Eugene Debs, at his sentencing under the Sedition Act in 1918, offered a moving account of the moral significance of the prison. “Your Honor,” he said, “years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs’s vision was radically egalitarian. Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one incarcerates us all.

Be it health care, education, or job opportunities, universal provision in any domain of public policy—and the bonds of citizenship on which that sense of universality is built—joins us to a common destiny, and might be the best chance for the redevelopment of urban schools and labor markets. If the duty of the citizen is to stay in school and go to work, then the political will to maintain good schools and promote employment is woven into the social fabric. This political logic implies that special projects targeting special populations will not do the job. If poor schools are to improve, it is more likely they will do so as a result of an effort to improve educational opportunity nationwide. If we are to promote jobs for unskilled men in the inner-city, the attempt will receive its greatest impetus from a national employment policy that aims to improve the working lives of all citizens.

Clearly we are not there yet. The norms of good citizenship, however, develop in tandem with the institutions of civic life. Political will can grow in small increments led by the promotion of institutions that provide on the basis of Marshall’s “basic human equality.” Such a renewal of an authentically American social citizenship would sweep away the jobless ghetto and the mass incarceration that it has spawned.

Posted by lois at 07:10 PM | Comments (0)

UN Special Rapporteur On Education: Seeking comments from prisoners and people who have been incarcerated on the right to education

Prisoners on Prison Education: the Special Rapporteur on education seeks to hear from people in, or formerly in, detention on their experience and views on the right to education in detention.

The Special Rapporteur on education has chosen to present to the United Nations Human Rights Council a report on the right to education for people in detention. The report is to be presented in June 2009. The aim is to clarify the content of the right to education in places of detention, to identify those with the principle responsibility for its implementation and to highlight the most notable challenges faced in that implementation. It also seeks to gather examples of innovative approaches to date and lessons learnt and to offer recommendations as to how implementation might be improved.

The Special Rapporteur wishes to hear from men, women and children in, or previously in detention, from all global regions including those with disabilities and those without; from different races, religions, cultures and sexual orientation; from those in closed and/or open institutions; those who have chosen not to or have been unable to undertake educational programmes (formal and/or informal) and those currently enrolled; and from those with little or high levels of education.

If you are or have been in detention and wish to express your view, or detail your experiences, on the provision of the right to education in detention, the Special Rapporteur would welcome hearing from you. Please send your comments and all relevant information by way of postal mail to: Special Rapporteur on the right to education, P.O. Box 1245-1007, Centro Colon, Costa Rica, or by e mail to: vernormu@yahoo.es

Alternatively if you are in a position to distribute this request for information to people in detention, the Special Rapporteur expresses his gratitude and thanks in advance.

It is requested that comments are returned no later than 31 December, 2008.

Background information on the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the right to education

A Special Rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council. S/he is usually called upon to examine, monitor, advise and publicly report back on a human rights situations in specific countries or on a specific human right theme. Mandate-holders serve in their personal capacity, and do not receive salaries or any other financial compensation for their work. This independent status of the mandate-holders is crucial in order to be able to fulfil their functions impartially.

The mandate of the Special Rapporteur, currently Mr. Vernor Muñoz Villalobos (Costa Rica) on the right to education was established in 1998 and has been renewed regularly since that date, most recently in 2008
.
His specific role is to:
[g]ather, request, receive and exchange information from all relevant sources, including Governments, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, including non-governmental organizations, and other concerned stakeholders, on the realisation of the right to education on and obstacles limiting effective access to education, and to make recommendations on appropriate measures to promote and protect the right to education.

The right to education was first formally pronounced in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its article 26 stated:

Everyone has the right to education... Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Since that date the human right to education has been reiterated numerous times particularly in United Nations human rights treaties. Its meaning and content has been developed over the years, and it is now generally recognized that Governments have the responsibility to ensure that education in all its forms and at all levels should exhibit the following interrelated and essential features: a) availability; b) accessibility: c) acceptability; and d) adaptability. The aim of the Special Rapporteur is
to contribute towards the recognition, respect, protection and fulfilment of these responsibilities.

As with many Special Rapporteurs, Mr. Vernor Muñoz Villalobos organizes his work around three main activities:

a) Thematic reports to the Human Rights Council. Each year, he focuses on a specific theme of his mandate. Topics addressed to date include theright to education of girls, the right to education for people with disabilities and the right to education in emergency situations. His thematic focus for 2009 is the right to education for people in detention.

b) Country visits. The purpose of country visits is to investigate the situation of the right to education at the national level. During the visits, normally two a year, the Special Rapporteur interacts, amongst others, with governmental and non-governmental actors, including parliamentarian, members of the judiciary, academics, the media, and other members of civil society. After each 'mission' he presents a report to the Human Rights Council which analyzes the situation of that country vis-à-vis the concerns of the mandate and offers recommendations to the Government and other relevant parties to improve that situation.

c) Communication with Governments. The Special Rapporteur seeks credible and reliable information on specific allegations of human rights violations on the right to education from a variety of sources, including Governments, non-governmental and specialised agencies, United Nations bodies and individuals. Upon receipt of this information he may decide to address the concerned Governments and request their comments and observations on the case. These communications together with the replies of the Governments concerned are compiled every year in a report submitted to the Human Rights Council.

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

July 09, 2008

Conviction Overturned After 36 Years in Solitary For "Angola 3" Member Albert Woodfox

COALITION TO FREE THE ANGOLA THREE
July 8, 2008

Conviction Overturned After 36 Years in Solitary For "Angola 3" Member Albert Woodfox
Federal Judge Rules Flawed Trial Lead to Wrongful Conviction in Case of Prison Guard's Murder
Lawyers Call on Prosecutors to Forgo Retrial, Release Men Immediately

In response to a Federal judge's decision overturning the conviction of Albert Woodfox, one of the two "Angola 3" members who remain in prison, lawyers for the men called on the State Attorney General's office to drop any further appeals and release the men immediately. Woodfox and fellow inmate Herman Wallace have been imprisoned since 1972 for the murder of prison guard Brent Miller. They spent 36 years of that time in solitary confinement.

"Herman and Albert were convicted of a crime based on false evidence. Now, a judge has overturned that conviction. They must be released immediately. They are men in their 60s who've spent the last 36 years of their lives in prison for a crime they did not commit. No further legal delay should rob them of even another day of their lives," said Chris Aberle, a lawyer for Woodfox.

"The state has already stolen nearly four decades of Albert Woodfox's life. The injustice in this case is unfathomable. How can Louisiana continue to imprison a 61 year old man after a federal judge has ruled that he shouldn't have been convicted in the first place? This case calls up the brutality and racism of an older Louisiana. The state needs to move forward. Albert must be released," said Nick Trenticosta, also a lawyer for the men.

The third member of the Angola 3, Robert King, was released in 2001 after a judge overturned his conviction. King had spent 29 years in solitary confinement for a separate crime.

www.Angola3.org

Posted by lois at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2008

NM: Prison reform? It’ll take more than task-force report. By Tilda Sosaya

Sunday, July 6, 2008 THE NEW MEXICAN
MY VIEW: Prison reform? It’ll take more than task-force report
By Tilda Sosaya

The Governor’s Prison Reform Task Force is recommending changes to the New Mexico Department of Corrections, including a name change to include the word, “rehabilitation.”

Window dressing.

When the governor first organized the task force, a national report had been widely disseminated throughout state governments. The Report, “One in a Hundred: Behind Bars in America” was released in February by the Pew Center for the States. This report reveals the blatant overuse and dependence on incarceration to resolve societal ills.

Think about it: For every 100 people in our nation, one is currently in a prison or jail. More alarming is the fact that one in every 33 adult citizens in the United States is under some form of criminal supervision – if not behind bars, they are on probation or parole.

As a longtime advocate for the rights of prisoners and their family members, I had fully expected to be appointed to the task force, especially because I had been appointed to the governor’s transition team for corrections in 2002-2003. Since then, however, I made the “political mistake” of criticizing the governor for kickbacks (i.e., campaign donations) from the private for-big-profit prison companies. I was not asked to sit on the task force, but I eagerly attended every single meeting.

In mid-April, when the task force held a public meeting, I mustered forces and brought several other prisoner family members to the Department of Corrections fro this important meeting.

In spite of family members who spoke of severe medical neglect, insufficient and substandard food, outrageous and other life-threatening abuses of prisoners, long delayed releases and the proliferation of drugs in the system (most often introduced into prisons by employees) these issues were never adequately addressed.

No one addressed the filth and mold, MRSA virus – a life-threatening staph infection that has been rampant in New Mexico prisons – or any other of the ruinous conditions in our prisons. No one spoke about the waste of money, building yet another row of razor wire, shady contracts for vitamins and food supplements, and no one spoke about unnecessary expansion and construction of new or expanded prisons.

While pre-release programs, pre-sentencing diversion programs and more education and vocational training for prisoners might help to stabilize or even reduce the current rates of incarceration in New Mexico, the kind of changes most sorely needed were simply ignored. If prison abuse, including poor-quality and insufficient food, and even outright medical neglect does not cease, New Mexico can expect further disturbances in our prisons. If access to law books and legal counsel is minimal, and no redress of grievances is available to prisoners, if exceedingly high costs of telephone and commissary items are not addressed, if family contact and visitation does not improve, then this task force was merely window dressing. It was, after all, these types of conditions that led to the brutal and unforgettable 1980 prison riot.

Clearly, preparation for release is a great idea, but if prisoners are not released on time, it raises the basic issue of overcrowding. At least 10 percent of the current prison population consists of people doing “in house” parole because no viable parole plan has been “approved” for them. This is the responsibility of case workers, many of whom are undereducated and lack the necessary skills to network in the community.

And finally, the entire issue of privatization was designated “off the table” for this task force, in spite of a legislative finance committee report released last year that unequivocally stated that the DOC paid too much money, over and above contract requirements, to the private prisons. An “error” in the calculation of the consumer price index was cited as the reason. So the task farce did the job for which it was created. To make the governor and the Department of Corrections appear to be doing a “great job” of running our prisons. So much for any real prison reform. As a Roman statesman once queried: Cui bono? To whose benefit?

A longtime prison-reform activist, Tilda Sosaya lives in Pecos, NM

Posted by lois at 10:15 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Aging prisoners add to prison strain in Calif.

Aging inmates add to prison strain in Calif.
By DON THOMPSON - Associated Press Writer
Published 9:07 am PDT Saturday, July 5, 2008

Louis Rodriguez, a lifelong thief, is costing California taxpayers a lot of money.

And so are others like him, aging criminals locked away for life or extended sentences who require expensive, ongoing medical treatment.

The state's expanding prison population and the increasing average age of its inmates appear to be key factors behind one of the most contentious issues facing California lawmakers. They are at odds over whether to approve $7 billion to build medical units for a prison health care system that has been ruled unconstitutional.

The money has been ordered by a federal court receiver who has been placed in charge of medical care in the state's 33 adult prisons.

Rodriguez is among those requiring pricey care.

He is serving a life sentence after being convicted of a "third strike" for stealing candy and cheese from a Los Angeles County grocery store. The conviction in 2000 followed another petty theft and a string of robberies nearly 30 years ago.

The 66-year-old inmate is in the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, coping with the final stages of terminal liver disease. Parole officials rejected his petition for compassionate release, so he most likely will spend the rest of his days in the prison hospice.

"For people who are old and feeble, hopefully we'll be left to die in peace," Rodriguez said. "I'm waiting for that phone call that says you can go home to die. That's all I got left."

Aging inmates cost two to three times as much to incarcerate as younger prisoners, an average $98,000 to $138,000 a year.

Between 1980 and 2007, the average age of California inmates increased from 27 to 37.

The prisons hold more than 22,000 inmates over age 50, or about 13 percent of the overall adult inmate population. In 1998, the number was 9,820, or 6 percent of the prison population.

Prison authorities say inmates age faster than the general population because of stress, a history of drug use, poor medical care throughout their lives and other factors. A 50-year-old inmate can have the physical and mental condition of someone 10 years older.

At the end of 2007, California housed 4,805 inmates age 60 and older, or about 3 percent of the prison population. A decade ago, that number was 1,951, or just more than 1 percent of all prisoners.

Prison populations nationwide also are aging.

The number of inmates 55 and older in state and federal prisons increased from 44,200, or 3.3 percent of the population, in 2000 to 80,200, or 5.3 percent, in 2006, according to the most recent statistics available from the U.S. Justice Department.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation expects its over-60 population to increase 80 percent by 2012.

That rise is due in part to tougher sentencing laws passed in recent years that send convicts away for longer stretches.

Some advocates say the state could save money by giving compassionate release to older, infirm inmates. A year ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was open to releasing "the old, feeble and sick who pose no threat to the public."

The corrections department estimates that paroling all nonviolent offenders 55 or older, sick or not, would trim the prison population by about 1,000 and save about $20 million annually.

"We are paying the most amount of money to incarcerate those people who are the least risk to public safety," said Heidi Strupp, an advocate with the San Francisco-based group Legal Services for Prisoners with Children.

A proposal by state Senate Democrats would use existing compassionate-release laws to free more ailing inmates. Caring for a severely disabled inmate can cost the state $1 million a year or more, said state Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden, chairman of a subcommittee that oversees prison spending.

The proposal would limit the releases to nonviolent offenders who have not committed sex crimes or serious offenses.

The debate over how to care ill inmates is connected to three lawsuits related to overcrowding in state prisons.

The 33 prisons house about 159,000 inmates but have a capacity of just about 100,000. Another 11,000 inmates are in fire camps or private prisons. Plaintiffs claim the crowding has led to poor medical, mental health and disability care for inmates.

If a settlement isn't reached, a special panel of three federal judges could order a prison population cap or other steps leading to the release of thousands of inmates.

The receiver appointed to oversee prison health care wants the $7 billion to build medical units for roughly 6 percent of the inmate population, or about 10,000 beds.

"Given the aging population in corrections and their health care status, we essentially need to build ... long-term housing for people who need long-term care," receiver J. Clark Kelso told a state budget subcommittee this spring.

Funding concerns have stalled Kelso's plan in the Legislature, which is struggling to deal with a projected $15.2 billion budget deficit for the current fiscal year.

Some actions to deal with aging prisoners are being considered independent of any court orders.

California corrections officials are turning the surplus El Paso de Robles juvenile correctional facility in San Luis Obispo County into a low-security prison for 1,000 nonviolent men over age 50. The conversion is starting this month.

Other attempts to ease the strain on older inmates are under way in the Legislation, but some of the steps could add to the already high cost of incarceration.

A bill by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, would grant privileges such as easier work and bunk assignments to inmates over age 55. They also would get first call for meals and would not be required to drop to the floor during security alarms.

Prison employees would be trained to deal with inmates who may no longer be able to hear commands or might act out because of dementia. Older inmates would receive an identification card and an ombudsman to help with their complaints.

The bill stalled in the Senate Appropriations Committee, leaving its fate uncertain because Kuehl is termed out of the Legislature after this year.

Ultimately, the answer may be supervised release programs for most elderly inmates and minimum-security "prison nursing homes" with specially trained staff for the most frail, said Jonathan Turley, founder and director of the Project for Older Prisoners, an advocacy group.

"Older prisoners may be high risk for bad checks or forgery, but they're not high risk for escape," said Turley, a George Washington University law professor. "I mean, they're not going to throw their walkers over the razor wire."

Federal studies show that less than 5 percent of inmates 55 and older are likely to commit new crimes after their release. By comparison, about 70 percent of California inmates overall return to prison.

Posted by lois at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

TX: Critics: Prison labor hurts free-world jobs. Program allows companies to employ prisoners, operate for less with subsidies

Houston & Texas News
July 6, 2008, 11:40PM
Critics: Prison labor hurts free-world jobs
Program allows companies to employ inmates, operate for less with subsidies

By LISA SANDBERG
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

AUSTIN — The East Texas town of Lufkin was home to one of the biggest manufacturers of tractor-trailer beds in the state until sluggish sales forced the firm, Lufkin Industries, to close its factory earlier this year, displacing 150 workers.

For everyone but the affected employees, the story might have ended as little more than a cautionary tale of what happens when an established business gets squeezed by a smaller, nearby competitor, in this case, Direct Trailer and Equipment Co., which sells an almost an identical product for as much as $2,000 less.

Instead, plenty of people have taken notice of this East Texas labor imbroglio, and some are crying foul.

As it turns out, Direct Trailer produces its tractor beds with cheap prison labor and subsidies from the state of Texas. The company rents space inside the Michael Unit, a 2,900-bed facility in Tennessee Colony, for $1 a year. The state foots the tab on work force health care, too.

The arrangement is part of a federal program that allows select companies to provide paid work experience to select prisoners, as long as the prison operation doesn't eliminate similar free-world jobs nearby. The Prison Industry Enhancement, or PIE, initiative has been operating in Texas since 1993 and includes nearly 400 inmates working in five prison plants across the state.

Companies applying to operate inside the prisons must have outside-prison operations and must pay wages commensurate with those paid for similar work in the same locality's private sector. (Welders make at least $8 an hour in the area where Direct Trailer operates its prison plant.)

Inmates keep about 20 percent of their wages, with the rest going to their dependents, victims, the courts and the state.

Paul Perez, general counsel for Lufkin Industries, said his company paid workers upward of $15 an hour and couldn't compete in an already competitive market against a newcomer who could produce a less expensive product.

"It exacerbated an already difficult situation," Perez said.

Direct Trailer's president, John Nelson, could not be reached for comment.

One state lawmaker, Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, is calling not just for Direct Trailer's state contract to be severed, but he's also questioning the validity of every one of PIE's five prison programs.

Nichols accuses PIE's board, known as the Private Sector Prison Industries Oversight Authority, of approving the contract with Direct Trailer without having the necessary employment data required by the federal government and the board.

He said that when he investigated Direct Trailer's 2005 certification, he discovered that the board compared only overall employment in the area against national employment data without looking at local employment data for "specific skills, crafts or trades," as was also required.

Nichols also said that when he contacted the Texas Workforce Commission, he received a letter last month that said the agency "does not have unemployment data for specific skills, crafts, trades or occupations." The letter was signed by a manager Jesse Lewis, director of external relations.

Nichols said that can mean only one thing: "None of (the programs) are meeting the guidelines."

Kathy Flanagan, presiding officer of the oversight board, acknowledged the board made decisions looking at "only part of the information," but she deflected blame elsewhere. "It's not our responsibility to ask the Texas Workforce Commission how they get their information."

She said in light of the current controversy, the board was now reviewing its policy and procedures.

Such comments are unlikely to satisfy labor officials, who complain that even when the rules are followed, the prison program need only demonstrate no harm to local jobs.

"We think the law needs to be clear: Using prison labor should not result in job losses anywhere, and certainly not in the state of Texas," said Rick Levy, legal director of the Texas AFL-CIO.

Nichols said he will urge the oversight board to amend its rules so that contracts are signed only with companies that can show no jobs anywhere in the state will be affected by a prison operation.

"If you can train a prisoner (in) a trade, I think that's very good. But not if one law-abiding Texan has to lose his job," Nichols said.

Robert Carter, PIE's program administrator, is hoping that the fracas won't lead to the demise of a program that's provided job training and pay to hundreds of inmates, the vast majority of who will one day be released.

He said studies indicate that those who participate in PIE get jobs quicker upon release, earn higher pay and stay in them longer than non-participants.

Perez said his company has been able to rehire most of the 150 laid-off workers from the trailer plant and put them to work manufacturing oil field equipment.

But there are new rumblings from the owner of another East Texas trailer manufacturing firm. Charles Bright, who owns Bright Coop, said his sales are down, and he's wondering if it's because Direct Trailer is selling its product cheaper.

"I'm not opposed to the program, as long as I can rent one of those buildings for $1 a year," Bright said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5874654.html

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

July 06, 2008

Miles to go for L.A. justice. Policing is improved; now let's focus on the root causes of crime. By Joe Domanick

From the Los Angeles Times
Miles to go for L.A. justice
Policing is improved; now let's focus on the root causes of crime.
By Joe Domanick
July 6, 2008

Over the last few decades, it's been easy to blame the leadership of the Los Angeles Police Department, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the district attorney's office for the catastrophic failures of L.A.'s criminal justice system. These failures, as most Angelenos know, have led to a dangerously overcrowded, racially explosive county jail system; a violent gang problem that continues unabated after 10,000 deaths over 25 years, and generation after generation of young black and brown men ceaselessly shuttled off to state prisons at a rate of more than 22,000 a year -- as many as 70% of whom, once released, will recycle back within three years.

From the Los Angeles Times
Miles to go for L.A. justice
Policing is improved; now let's focus on the root causes of crime.
By Joe Domanick
July 6, 2008

During the 1980s and 1990s, the LAPD and the Sheriff's Department epitomized the problems with the criminal justice system: Leadership was calcified and visionless, disdainful of social science and innovative policing reforms, tolerant of brutal and abusive officers, unaccountable to civilian control and perennially at war with the African American community. Under LAPD chiefs Ed Davis and Daryl F. Gates and Sheriff Sherman Block, these departments generated scandal after scandal, culminating in 1992 in one of the worst riots in U.S. history.

For their part, Ira Reiner (1984-1992) and Gil Garcetti (1992-2000), as district attorneys, spent their time sniffing the political winds and playing to the worst instincts of voters. Reiner reacted to gang violence by calling for the "writing off" and imprisoning of the 70,000 young residents who had, often inaccurately, been identified as gang members. And Garcetti opportunistically prosecuted the pettiest of offenses as third-strike, 25-years-to-life crimes (even after having lobbied against the politically popular law in Sacramento).

Today, despite some notorious incidents, such as the 2007 May Day MacArthur Park police riot, and some ongoing disgraces such as the dangerous and inhuman conditions in our county jails, we're better served by our law enforcement leaders. They've lowered the crime rate while largely making peace with the leaders of L.A.'s African American and Latino communities.

Chief William J. Bratton has accelerated the transformation of the LAPD into a much more accountable organization. Sheriff Lee Baca has worked to transform the paramilitary culture of his department, and he has sought a comprehensive approach to public safety that includes better schools, healthcare and social services. For his part, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley has eschewed headline-grabbing, get-tough answers to complex questions.

Unfortunately, they've been busy retooling the engine to run more efficiently instead of giving it the drastic overhaul it desperately needs. Even though this new generation of leaders has supported long-term crime prevention strategies, they have been unwilling to commit significant money or political capital to the process, focusing, for example, on immediate reductions in gang crime while remaining unwilling to fight for the money and make the psychological shift necessary to end the gang culture at the heart of the problem. Their primary focus has remained on crime suppression (or crisis management in the jails). Consequently, L.A.'s criminal justice system still operates as a zero-sum exercise in locking up the same people from the same neighborhoods generation after generation, without an end game in sight.

Why, if they recognize the need for the shift, have they failed to accomplish it? One reason why is that it's extremely difficult. Baca and Cooley's surrogates have been meeting for almost two years with the L.A. Public Defender's Office, the Probation Department, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and with L.A. Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan to develop rehabilitative prisoner reentry strategies. Yet only a few small, experimental pilot programs have been established.

Law enforcement agencies are not used to working together for the common goal of long-term crime prevention. Common goals, a common vision and even a common language have to be developed, and everybody needs to sign off before there's any movement. Community service organizations, drug treatment facilities and other such groups all have to be brought into the fold. A jurisdictional tangle of state, county and city laws must also be dealt with before much progress can be made.

Much of the problem lies with L.A.'s politicians. With a few exceptions (such as state Sen. Gloria Romero, City Comptroller Laura Chick and Councilwoman Janice Hahn), city leaders as well as our representatives in Sacramento have been unwilling to lead on these issues. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has coordinated all the city's gang programs under one entity in the Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development for the first time -- in effect laying down the path and officially recognizing for the first time that the city has to have a holistic approach to eradicating gang crime and youth violence. He should be commended. But the money he's allocated to the agency is a relative pittance. He's putting his real political muscle behind a sales tax for mass transit, not public safety.

Organizations like the notoriously anti-reform California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. -- the prison guards union -- and the California District Attorneys Assn. are also a big part of the problem. The latter has successfully fought attempts to reform mandatory minimum-sentencing laws such as three strikes, nearly drumming Cooley out of the organization a year or so ago when he sought to soften some of the most unjust provisions of the law.

And Mike Jimenez, president of the guards union, has declared that he has "never met an inmate that could be rehabilitated." By bullying or buying off governors and legislators with big campaign dollars, and fear-mongering with the help of victims rights groups, the union (which has donated $12 million to state campaigns over five years) has been astoundingly successful in thwarting change. They, along with the conservative legislators who demand near Old Testament punishment for drug offenses and other nonviolent crimes, have stuffed our prisons to almost 200% capacity and left us no money for alternatives to incarceration.

Meanwhile, the public remains profoundly ignorant or deeply misinformed about how the system really works. Some of the fault for this lies with the broadcast media. Talk radio drove the hysteria that led to California's three-strikes law in 1994. Now, cable television has become part of the lynch-mob media. Led by CNN's Nancy Grace, cable shows make it appear that criminals are constantly getting off scot-free. In fact, America's (and L.A.'s) crime rates are at record lows -- yet the U.S. prison population has risen every year for 30 years.

Networks such as MSNBC, meanwhile, feature endless prison documentaries that give the impression that every one of the millions of Americans in prison -- half of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes -- is a psychotic ax-murderer. Local TV news, with its love of violence, cheap melodrama and good guys-versus-bad guys simplicity, also promotes a ceaseless message: Be afraid, be very afraid.

Then there are the cop melodramas that -- with the astounding exception of HBO's "The Wire" -- almost never look at criminal justice as a system that is dramatically failing large segments of black, Latino and poor white Americans. Nor do these shows make the connections between crime and bad schools, shoddy healthcare, bad jobs and a history of racial disenfranchisement. They don't discuss the connection between the historic racial, class and economic disenfranchisement of black Americans and the entrenched criminal culture that has emerged in many of our worst urban ghettos and barrios. Instead, they present shows like "CSI" and "Law and Order" as dramas where good police in a just system triumph over bad criminals. Everything is clear-cut good guys vs. bad guys, just like in real life -- right?

Last among the culprits are those white liberals and black leaders barring the door to open, honest public discourse about black crime in America because, as the Rev. Al Sharpton recently pointed out, they don't want to "air their dirty laundry in public." But everybody knows that crime and violence in our nation's poor, black ghettos has been pandemic for decades. This must be talked about and examined.

Young black men in ghettos across America are trapped in a hedonistic, values-warped subculture of narcissistic flash, violence, gangs, immediate self-gratification and self-destruction -- unable to pass through a revolving door of gangs, drop-out education, unemployment, incarceration, release and re-imprisonment. Nor is the problem limited to black communities. Latinos now make up the largest group of inmates in state prisons.

Law-and-order conservatives, meanwhile, have offered nothing but more of the same -- more prisons and bigger platitudes.

We can't deal with the root causes, and begin the long task of fashioning a solution, until we acknowledge the dreadful dysfunction of this criminal-prone subculture.

And we will never have a criminal justice system that works for all Americans until we start to hold accountable those who are responsible.

Joe Domanick is a senior fellow at USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism and at the Center on Media Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Comment from Lois: He is also the author of an excellent book--"Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America's Golden State."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-domanick6-2008jul06,0,353207.story

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

CA/National: Aging Prisoners "Nursing Homes" Very Costly

Aging inmates add to prison strain in Calif.
By DON THOMPSON, Associated Press Writer
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Vacaville, CA (AP) --