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

March 17, 2010

Pew Survey Shows State Prison Population Dropped in 2009

"Combining the state and federal figures, the nation's total prison population rose by 1,099 inmates. Given the small size of the national increase, the incarceration rate did not change and remains at or about 1 in 100 adults, or 2.3 million out of 230 million, according to Pew."

Release Type: Pew Press Release

Washington, D.C. - 03/17/2010 - For the first time in nearly 40 years, the number of state prisoners in the United States has declined, according to Prison Count 2010, a new survey by the Pew Center on the States.

As of January 1, 2010, there were 1,403,091 persons under the jurisdiction of state prison authorities, 5,739 (0.4 percent) less than on December 31, 2008. This marks the first year-to-year drop in the nation’s state prison population since 1972.

While the overall state prison population dropped, the Pew survey revealed great variation among the states. The population declined in 27 states, with some posting substantial reductions. At the same time, the number of prisoners continued to grow in the other 23 states, several with significant increases.

“After so many years on the rise, any size drop is notable. What’s really striking is the tremendous variation among the states,” said Adam Gelb, director, Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States. “These numbers highlight just how much the decisions by state policy makers impact the size and cost of prison systems.”

In absolute numbers, California’s state inmate count fell the most, shedding 4,257 prisoners in 2009. This follows a decline of 612 prisoners in 2008. Five other states experienced total reductions of more than 1,000 prisoners: Michigan (3,260), New York (1,699), Maryland (1,315), Texas (1,257) and Mississippi (1,233).

“The decline is happening for several reasons, but an important contributor is that states began to realize there are research-based ways they can cut their prison populations while continuing to protect public safety,” said Gelb. “In the past few years, several states have enacted reforms designed to get taxpayers a better return on their public safety dollars.”

Common policy options included diverting low-level offenders and probation and parole violators from prison, strengthening community supervision and reentry programs, and accelerating the release of non-violent inmates who complete risk reduction programs.

• Mississippi: In 2008, the state rolled back to 25 percent from 85 percent the portion of a sentence that nonviolent offenders are required to serve. Between July 2008, when the law took effect, and August 2009, Mississippi released 3,076 inmates a median of 13 months sooner than they would have under the 85 percent law, which was passed in 1995. Through August 2009, 121 of those released offenders were returned to custody—116 for violations of parole rules; only five for new nonviolent offenses. Officials attribute the low recidivism rate to the use of a new risk assessment tool which is helping distinguish between inmates who can be safely released and those who need to remain behind bars.

• Texas: In January 2007, Texas faced a projected prison population increase of up to 17,000 inmates in just five years. Rather than spend nearly $2 billion on new prison construction and operations to accommodate this growth, policy makers reinvested a fraction of this amount ($241 million) in a network of residential and community-based treatment and diversion programs. This has greatly expanded sentencing options for new offenses and sanctioning options for probation violators. Texas also increased its parole grant rate and shortened probation terms. As a result, this strong law-and-order state not only averted the large new prison expenditures but reduced its overall prison population as crime rates declined in the state.

• Nevada: Three years ago, Nevada projected prison population growth of more than 60 percent at an estimated cost to taxpayers of more than $2 billion. The 2007 legislature voted nearly unanimously to enact several policy measures that expanded program credits awarded for in-prison education, vocational and substance abuse treatment; increased the number of credits people in prison and on community supervision can earn for good time and compliance with conditions; and reinstated a sentencing commission to review sentencing and corrections policies for effectiveness and efficiency. The combination of these measures and other reforms helped avert $1.2 billion in prison construction costs as crime rates declined in the state.

“These types of policy changes are not simply a response to the economic downturn,” said Gelb. “Before this recession began, states like Texas recognized that by strengthening their probation and re-entry programs they could cut corrections spending, protect public safety and hold offenders accountable for their actions.”

In the 23 states where the state prison population grew, more than half of the increase occurred in just five states: Pennsylvania (2,122), Florida (1,527), Indiana (1,496), Louisiana (1,399) and Alabama (1,053).

The survey found that the federal prison population continued to grow, rising by 6,838 prisoners, or 3.4 percent, to an all-time high of 208,118. Expanded federal jurisdiction over certain crimes and increased prosecution of immigration cases account for much of the increase.

Combining the state and federal figures, the nation’s total prison population rose by 1,099 inmates. Given the small size of the national increase, the incarceration rate did not change and remains at or about 1 in 100 adults, or 2.3 million out of 230 million, according to Pew.

The Pew survey was conducted in conjunction with the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA), which consists of the directors of all state departments of corrections and the federal Bureau of Prisons. Most states reported prisoner counts for January 1, 2010, while others (noted in the survey) reported for December 31, 2009. Pew researchers performed additional follow-up to confirm that the new count is consistent with the 2008 jurisdiction count reported by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The report can be found at: http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/Prison_Count_2010.pdf?n=880
The full survey can be found at: www.pewcenteronthestates.org/prisoncount2010

Posted by lois at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2010

ID: ACLU suing CCA for "Gladiator School" for $115 million in punitive damages

Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 1:11 am
ACLU Private Prison Lawsuit: Idaho Correctional Center, ‘Gladiator School’
By Beth

There is currently an ACLU private prison lawsuit involving the Idaho Correctional Center known as ‘gladiator school’ among the inmates there. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing the Corrections Corporation of America, based out of Nashville, Tennessee, that runs Idaho’s only private prison and Idaho state prison officials.

According to the lawsuit filed by the ACLU, Idaho Correctional Center is extraordinarily violent. They claim it is as much as three-times more violent than other Idaho prisons. They accuse the guards there of deliberately exposing inmates to brutal beatings by other prisoners as a way to keep prisoners in line. They also claim that the company denies medical care to inmates, hiding the extent of their injuries, in order to contain costs.

The prison houses 2,000 inmates and the ACLU claims that it is grossly understaffed with as few as two guards to control a wing housing as many as 350 inmates.

Senior attorney for the ACLU Stephen Pevar says that no other prison facility that has been sued by the ACLU has come close to the level of violence that is common practice at the Idaho Correctional Center. The ACLU is asking for class-action status and $155 million in punitive damages. That amount is the entire net profit reported by Corrections Corporation of America in 2009.

Steve Owen, Corrections Corporation of America’s director of public affairs, said that the company will respond to the lawsuit through court filings. He denied the allegations made against his company and said that the facilities are open to unfettered oversight and monitoring by state officials.

Brent Reinke, Idaho Department of Correction Director, said he had not seen the lawsuit and would not comment.

The lead plaintiff in the case is Marlin Riggs who suffered a severe beating by other inmates in the Idaho Correctional Center that resulted in numerous medical problems and permanent facial deformities. According to the ACLU the ‘gladiator school’ mentality of the staff and prisoners lead to this beating. If the ACLU private prison lawsuit is successful, they say Riggs should be the beneficiary of the money.
http://law.rightpundits.com/?p=1323

Posted by lois at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2010

Cruel Punishment Is Not Unusual for Clarence Thomas

Cruel Punishment Is Not Unusual for Clarence Thomas
James Ridgeway and Jean Casella | March 12, 2010
Solitary Watch

Veteran New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse has an opinion piece today on Clarence Thomas's "silent but sure" stance on prisons, and "specifically the meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against 'cruel and unusual punishment.'” Thomas's position is highly relevant to the issue of solitary confinement, since critics of long-term lockdown argue that it violates the Eighth Amendment. But Thomas does not believe that any kind of prisoner abuse qualifies as "cruel and unusual." Greenhouse writes:

In February 1992, the Supreme Court ruled in Hudson v. McMillian that a prisoner need not have suffered a “significant injury” in order to pursue a lawsuit against prison officials for the use of excessive force. Keith Hudson, the Louisiana inmate who brought that case, had been kicked and punched by three guards while he was handcuffed and shackled. He suffered bruises, swelling and loosened teeth, injuries that a federal appeals court, in dismissing his lawsuit, deemed so minor as to be beneath the notice of the Eighth Amendment.

Mr. Hudson’s appeal to the Supreme Court was supported by the George H.W. Bush administration, and John G. Roberts Jr., then a deputy solicitor general, argued on the inmate’s behalf. In an opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the court reinstated the lawsuit. What mattered in such a situation, the court held, was not the extent of the injury, but the nature of the force that was applied. “When prison officials maliciously and sadistically use force to cause harm, contemporary standards of decency always are violated,” Justice O’Connor wrote.

Justice Thomas dissented. He had been on the court for four months. During his Senate confirmation hearing, he had claimed a certain empathy for prisoners. He described looking out the window of his chambers at the Court of Appeals and watching prisoners being loaded into buses to be taken back to their cells. “I say to myself every day, but for the grace of God there go I,” he told the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In his dissenting opinion in the Hudson case — which Justice Antonin Scalia joined, making the vote 7 to 2 — the new justice said that the Constitution’s framers “simply did not conceive of the Eighth Amendment as protecting inmates from harsh treatment.” The Eighth Amendment dealt with only the actual sentence, he maintained, and not with conditions inside a prison or deprivations that were not a formal aspect of the sentence. He said the Supreme Court had taken a wrong turn in the 1970’s when it adopted a more expansive view, and he added, “The Eighth Amendment is not, and should not be turned into, a National Code of Prison Regulation.”

Last month, Thomas demonstrated his grim "consistency" on this subject when the court considered "another excessive-force case, a prisoner’s appeal that was so clearly meritorious that the justices ruled in the inmate’s favor without bothering to call for briefs or hear argument." This time, a North Carolina state prisoner claimed that "a guard had responded to his request for a grievance form by slamming him onto the concrete floor and then punching, kicking and choking him until another guard pulled the attacker off." A lower court found that the prisoners' injuries weren't all that bad, and dismissed the case.

Because of the precedent set by the Hudson v. McMillian decision, Greenhouse writes, "The vote was 9 to 0, but it was not a happy 9 to 0. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, concurred only in the judgment, not the court’s opinion. 'I continue to believe that Hudson was wrongly decided,' he said." Thomas also noted that “no party to this case asks us to overrule Hudson”--suggesting that he would welcome the opportunity to do so. Greenhouse continues:

Justice Thomas has been trying and failing repeatedly to get someone to bring the court a vehicle for revisiting its prisoners’-rights jurisprudence. Dissenting from a 2002 decision, Hope v. Pelzer, he objected to reinstating a lawsuit brought by an Alabama inmate who had been handcuffed to a hitching post and left to stand shirtless in the sun for seven hours without water or bathroom breaks. “I remain open to overruling our dubious expansion of the Eighth Amendment in an appropriate case,” Justice Thomas wrote hopefully.

Greenhouse writes that there have been "no takers yet." This is not surprising, since so many potential prisoner abuse claims are now effectively barred from the courts under the Prison Litigation Reform Act. As described by the SAVE Coalition, which advocates for a change to the PLRA:

In the past decade, individuals who have been physically and sexually abused, subjected to life-threatening medical mistreatment, denied the ability to practice their religion, and severely mistreated as children have been denied access to relief from federal courts. Why? These individuals were in prison when these violations occurred and the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) imposed insurmountable obstacles to judicial relief. In 1996, Congress enacted the PLRA, which was intended to stem frivolous lawsuits by prisoners, but too often denies justice to victims of rape, assault, religious restrictions, and other rights violations.

Because the PLRA demands that prisoners must suffer serious "physical injury" in order to sue in federal court, solitary confinement does not qualify--nor do a host of other abuses that cause physical and psychological suffering, but not "physical injury" in the eyes of the law. The law also demands that prisoners jump through a series of nearly impossible procedural hoops before their cases can be heard in even the lowest federal court, much less the Supreme Court.

Although she does not reference the PLRA, Greenhouse writes that "it could be a long wait" before the Supreme Court gets another Eighth Amendment case--but if it does, she says, "Justice Thomas will be ready."
http://solitarywatch.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/cruel-punishment-is-the-usual-for-clarence-thomas/

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

March 09, 2010

MS:State triples spending on prisons while doubling amount spent on schools

"Meanwhile, the House last week killed a bill that could have cut the sentences of some drug offenders in half, pared the prison population by 1,000 inmates and saved the Mississippi Department of Corrections $8 million through 2013."

Education, prisons top budget battles
Debate becoming even more intense as resources dwindle

Molly Parker
March 8, 2010

The state has tripled spending on prisons in the last 15 years while doubling the amount spent on school children, according to a document circulated at the Capitol.

The figures were highlighted in the budget battle that concluded last week with the passing of an $82 million patch-up plan for fiscal 2010.

The weeks-long showdown that preceded the vote was cast as a fight between quality education and public safety.

And it could very well foreshadow what's ahead for lawmakers as they develop a 2011 fiscal budget on dwindling resources.

"When education's not the priority in Mississippi, we lose," said Rep. George Flaggs, D-Vicksburg.

Currently, lawmakers are considering legislation to furlough teachers and shorten the school year.

Meanwhile, the House last week killed a bill that could have cut the sentences of some drug offenders in half, pared the prison population by 1,000 inmates and saved the Mississippi Department of Corrections $8 million through 2013.

Comparing education and prison spending has been popular in legislative budget fights across the country.

And spending priority battles are getting more intense as resources dwindle, said Richard Jerome of the Pew Center on the States, based in Washington.

"It is, to a great extent, a zero-sum game in state budgets, particularly in the situation that states are in right now," Jerome said. "It used to be that corrections, and prisons in particular, were off the table in terms of any discussions about savings."

Michael Griffith, senior policy analyst with the Denver-based Education Commission on the States, said, "The reason we hear so much about prisons and schools is those are the biggest line items."

Education also used to be off limits for cuts, he said.

"Every legislator has a school in his or her district. Not everyone has a prison. There's a real reluctance to cut education spending. Everything is done in state budgets to insulate education, particularly class sizes and the school year. Unfortunately, we're hitting that point where those are about the only things left."

Posted by lois at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)

MI: Business joins fight to right-size prisons

Business joins fight to right-size prisons
Posted: March 8, 2010
Detroit Free Press

Business leaders have taken a lead role in efforts to reform Michigan's oversized prison system. Legislators should pay attention.

Lansing can't resolve its long-term budget crisis without right-sizing the Department of Corrections. Nor can a state that spends more on prisons than higher education compete in a 21st Century economy.

The Detroit Regional Chamber deserves credit for creating a detailed plan to reduce corrections costs as part of an overall effort to restructure state government. For the first time, the Chamber will devote a session on prison issues and spending at this year's Mackinac Policy Conference.

The Chamber supports bills reinstating good-time credits, and it has recommended reconstituting the state Parole Board into a body of professional civil servants, as well as examining sentencing guidelines and expanding prisoner re-entry programs.

The Chamber's Sarah Hubbard said business groups got interested in corrections in 2007, when the state imposed significant tax increases, while reports showed Michigan's incarceration rates were far higher than surrounding states, costing the general fund an added $500 million a year. With a prison population of nearly 50,000, Michigan spends $2 billion a year on corrections, more than 20% of its general fund.

Republican legislators have spoken eloquently about the need to restructure government and create a leaner, more efficient state bureaucracy. Still, many continue to defend criminal justice policies that have multiplied costs more than fivefold over the last three decades, with no commensurate reduction in crime.

By increasing parole rates and reducing recidivism, the administration of Gov. Jennifer Granholm has whittled the state's prison population by 5,000 over the last three years, while crime rates have actually dropped. But Michigan needs to do much more, and further reforms will require legislators to take action.

Three years ago, Rich Studley, vice president of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, asked: "Why is it that Michigan, compared to other states, puts more people in prison for longer periods of time for no difference in crime rates or recidivism?"

It's a question Michigan's clear-eyed business leaders continue to ask, and legislators can no longer afford to shrug their shoulders in response.
http://www.freep.com/article/20100308/OPINION01/3080321/1069/Opinion01/Business-joins-fight-to-right-size-prisons

Posted by lois at 08:29 PM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2010

Alarmist NY Times Story Could Hurt Efforts To Reduce Overcrowded Prisons

Alarmist NY Times Story Could Hurt Efforts To Reduce Overcrowded Prisons
Jill Harris, Managing Director for Public Policy, Drug Policy Alliance
Posted: March 5, 2010 02:35 PM
Huffington Post

Today the New York Times has several articles describing the effects of budget cuts in various states. On the front page is a story about Arizona's effort to save money by shutting roadside rest stops, angering people in that state. Inside, on the front page of the National section, is a story about protests in California over cuts to education. Yet back on the front page is an alarmist article that will set back efforts to close budget gaps other than by cutting services, with the headline: "Safety is Issue as Budget Cuts Free Prisoners." The article talks of a "backlash" that has been unleashed in states that have tried to cut costs by reducing their prison populations. But in fact the article doesn't really describe any such backlash - no elected officials being confronted by frightened and angry constituents, no hordes of fed-up citizens marching in the streets, no stirring among the denizens of talk radio. Instead, the article itself seems designed to create and fuel such a backlash, by focusing on a convicted child molester who was released from a prison in Michigan.

The article spends several paragraphs describing the crime he committed, quoting from the court psychologist's report, describing the heroic efforts of a prosecutor in Michigan to have him sent back to prison. We don't learn until near the end of the article that he had actually served his sentence (the minimum time under an indeterminate sentence), had been released under strict rules limiting his movement, including GPS tracking, and had, in fact, been sent back to prison as a result of the prosecutor's successful appeal of his release.

The whole point of the article seems to be "They are letting bad and scary people out of prison! Be very afraid!"

In fact, the vast majority of people in our prisons, and the vast majority of those released early in efforts to save money under severe budget constraints, are nonviolent drug offenders. A substantial portion of them are in prison for having broken a rule of probation or parole - like missing a meeting or having a positive drug test - rather than for breaking a law. Releasing people convicted of non-violent drug offenses early, especially into community-based treatment programs, makes a lot of sense. So does not imprisoning people for minor parole or probation violations. But one wouldn't know that from the Times article, which seems to have been fed straight onto the front page by prosecutors and law enforcement lobbies.

The United States has five percent of the world's population, yet we have 25% of the world's prisoners, a huge portion of them convicted of non-violent drug crimes. We lock up more people for drug crimes than all of Western Europe, with more people than we have, locks up for all crimes.

The budget crisis is forcing states to look at whether it makes sense to continue to fight a failed Drug War that criminalizes conduct that should be treated as a health issue. More and more states - including New York, New Jersey, Michigan and even Texas - are deciding that their money could be better spent providing services to their citizens than locking up tens of thousands of people for non-violent drug offenses. Shame on the Times, if this article has the effect of freezing these forward-thinking legislators and state officials in their tracks, in fear of a "backlash" that the Times seems eager to create and fuel.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jill-harris/shame-on-the-ny-times-ala_b_487572.html

Jill Harris is Managing Director of Public Policy at the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org), based in New York

Posted by lois at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2010

IA: Disobedient Priest banned from prison visits. He took notes which stirred up controversy.

Priest banned from prison visits
He took notes which stirred up controversy
Monday, 22 Feb 2010, 11:41 AM EST

OMAHA, Nebraska (CNN) - Father Val Peter said he has had just about enough.

The 75-year-old, and one-time director of Boys Town, visits inmates regularly. Tracey Dyess more frequently than most.

"The only reason I do this is she reminds me of a Boys Town kid," said Father Peter. "She has no family except a grandma in Texas."

Dyess was convicted of setting fire to a Griswold, Iowa home in March 2005, which killed two people. She has been in Iowa prisons for the last four years. Father Peter said he got in trouble at the Mitchellville Prison near Des Moines on a visit with Dyess.

"The corrections officer says 'I'm sorry, you can't take those notes out,'" said Father Peter. "'Aren't you Father Peter from Boys Town?' [he asks]. I said 'Yes.' I said 'what do you mean I can't take...I've been doing this...' 'Well, I'm just sorry you're not gonna be able to and we need to take those notes and we need to read those notes."

Father Peter said he routinely took notes using prison paper and prison pencils on visits with Dyess the last two years. He said in this case, a corrections officer did not like the fact Father Peter jotted down the name of another officer.

"So, I took that name, I put it in my mouth, and I did a prophetic act," said Father Peter. He said he swallowed the notes, which ultimately started this on-going battle with the prison.

"Keep in mind that visiting is a privilege, and it can be terminated for good cause at any time," said Fred Scaletta, with the Iowa Department of Corrections.

Scaletta said Father Peter could be allowed back in so long as he sticks to the rules. Still, Father Peter has his concerns.

"Now, remember, I've been going to prisons for 25 years," said Father Peter. "I could write a Michelin guide to America's prisons. Mitchellville is not going to get a good rating. I can tell you that now."

Father Peter still talks to Dyess on the phone, about two or three times per week. Ultimately, he wants Governor Chet Culver to commute her sentence. He said she is a good person who simply had a terrible childhood.
http://www.wishtv.com/dpps/news/strange/priest-banned-from-prison-visits_3247640

Posted by lois at 09:21 AM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2010

The Justice Department's proposed $1.5 billion budget increase would help pay for 2,880 new attorneys, agents, marshals, intelligence analysts and prison guards in 2011.

Justice seeks funds to add 2,800 employees in 2011
By STEPHEN LOSEY | Last Updated: February 2, 2010

The Justice Department's proposed $1.5 billion budget increase would help pay for 2,880 new attorneys, agents, marshals, intelligence analysts and prison guards in 2011.

The budget also provides $237 million for a controversial plan to buy an Illinois prison to house suspected terrorist detainees.

The White House's budget proposal would provide Justice nearly $29.2 billion in total discretionary spending, giving it a 5 percent increase over 2010. About $300 million in new funding would pay for national security and counterterrorism programs. Justice said almost $4.4 billion would go to its national security programs.

State, local and tribal law enforcement assistance would increase by $722 million to $3.4 billion, the largest increase in the department.

Prisons, detention programs and judicial security programs would receive a $527 million spending increase to $9 billion, the second-largest increase. That includes funding for the Bureau of Prisons, the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, the U.S. Parole Commission and the U.S. Marshals Service. Justice has budgeted $59 million to fill 1,200 vacant prison guard jobs, and another $95 million to hire an additional 652 guards. Those new guards would go to a new prison in Berlin, N.H., and the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois, which the administration wants to use to house Guantanamo Bay detainees. Assistant Attorney General Lee Lofthus said Justice would spend $170 million to buy and renovate Thomson.

"It's very expensive to newly construct prisons nowadays," Lofthus said. "If there's an opportunity available on the market to acquire an existing facility, that's smart for the department, it's good for the Bureau of Prisons, and we think it's smart for the taxpayer."

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents Bureau of Prisons employees, applauded the administration's plans to hire more guards. "Proper staffing will help alleviate the dire situation in our federal prisons," AFGE President John Gage said.

The budget also calls for more than $1.1 billion — representing a $223 million increase — for cybersecurity and other information technology projects.

Lofthus said the department has cut its travel budget, though he did not say by how much. The department also wants to cut nearly $500 million in unwanted earmarks from its 2010 budget.

Other proposed increases:

• For the FBI, an increase from $7.7 billion to $8.1 billion.

• For the Drug Enforcement Administration, an increase from $2.0 billion to $2.1 billion.

http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20100202/AGENCY01/2020310/1055/AGENCY

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

February 15, 2010

Imaginary fiends. Crime in America keeps going down. Why does the public refuse to believe it?

Imaginary fiends
Crime in America keeps going down. Why does the public refuse to believe it?

By Joe Keohane | February 14, 2010
Boston Globe

The year 2009 was a grim one for many Americans, but there was one pleasant surprise amid all the drear: Citizens, though ground down and nerve-racked by the recession, still somehow resisted the urge to rob and kill one another, and they resisted in impressive numbers. Across the country, FBI data show that crime last year fell to lows unseen since the 1960s - part of a long trend that has seen crime fall steeply in the United States since the mid-1990s.

At the same time, however, another change has taken place: a steady rise in the percentage of Americans who believe crime is getting worse. The vast majority of Americans - nearly three-quarters of the population - thought crime got worse in the United States in 2009, according to Gallup’s annual crime attitudes poll. That, too, is part of a running trend. As crime rates have dropped for the past decade, the public belief in worsening crime has steadily grown. The more lawful the country gets, the more lawless we imagine it to be.

The implications for the country at large are stark. Democracy is based on an informed public calling upon its representatives to address problems facing their society. If we believe crime is on the march in the streets all over the country, it influences our beliefs on critical issuesfrom gun control to sentencing laws, from how we run our prisons to how much money we spend on law enforcement. Misinformation on the part of the public makes for bad lawmaking on the part of the government.

How did we get this idea in our heads? Why do we persist in believing the United States is inexorably sliding into lawlessness when we should be rejoicing that exactly the opposite is happening? The short answer is that we’ve been taking our cues on crime from a host of things that are both abstract and wholly unrelated to crime. And perhaps, by understanding why we’ve come to believe what we believe, we can take some steps toward mending our relationship with reality.

Take murder. The murder rate rose and fell over the 20th century, climbing to an early peak in 1933, then dropping sharply and staying low through the Depression, World War II, and into the 1960s. It rose to a record level in 1974, broke that record in 1980, and stayed prodigiously bloody through the early ’90s. This is when Bill Clinton boosted funding for local police forces, and police began experimenting with radical new approaches to policing, such as those employed in the so-called Boston Miracle. In 1994, the murder rate started to fall, and it’s been falling ever since. Rape, robbery, and aggravated assault have dropped along with it. Last year was no exception. According to preliminary FBI data, the murder rate dropped 10 percent from 2008 to 2009, robbery fell 6.5 percent, aggravated assault fell 3.2 percent, auto theft was down a whopping 18.7 percent.

But as the crime rate has dropped, Americans have missed the news. The number of people who told Gallup that crime is getting worse climbed to 74 percent last year, a figure higher than any year since the carnage of the early ’90s.

Part of the reason for this divergence is what sociologists call pessimistic bias: the unshakable conviction that things are not just worse than they are, but also worse than they used to be. Humans appear to have a hard-wired tendency to compare contemporary life with largely fictitious good old days, in which all schools were top-notch, politicians had integrity, children behaved, and crime was nil. This happens in good times and in bad. For instance, over a 20-year period concluding in 1994, the administrators of the General Social Survey, a major effort run out of the University of Chicago, asked respondents if the lot of the common man was getting worse. On average, through booms and busts, a glum 61 percent said yes. This is neither a contemporary phenomenon, nor one specific to America. In 1848, writer Thomas Macaulay wrote in his “The History of England” that “In spite of evidence, many will still imagine to themselves the England of the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England in which we live. It may at first sight seem strange that society, while constantly moving forward with eager speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender regret.”

Researchers also argue that this pessimistic bias can be exacerbated by certain modern factors. The news media come in for a share of the blame, eagerly meeting a consumer demand for gore and tragedy, while spending nowhere near as much energy explaining the reassuring but dry facts in the background. In a normal person’s memory, the emotional impact of watching a single crime story can outweigh even the most persuasive statistics in the newspaper. Arthur Lurigio, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Loyola University Chicago, says one of the things that will keep people from recognizing that crime is in fact down is their “inability to understand and respond to crime statistics with their viscera.”

But while these quintessentially human inclinations would explain the ever-present gap between reality and perception when it comes to crime, they don’t account for how drastically reality and perception have parted ways since 2001. It was one thing to believe crime was worsening in the early ’90s, because rates were near an all-time high, but now that we have what we want - a comparatively low crime rate - we refuse to believe it. The divergence has left even a lot of researchers mystified. “It’s definitely a puzzle,” said Lydia Saad, a Gallup senior editor who works on the poll. Stanford Law School professor Lawrence M. Friedman responded to an e-mail asking for possible explanations by writing, “The bottom line is, we just don’t know.” Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University who has written about the phenomenon, said, “It’s one thing to be more pessimistic than is justified. It’s another thing if your pessimism isn’t even responsive to objective reality.”

While they and numerous other experts were quick to point out that there’s no data-driven explanation for the phenomenon, one key may lie in the results from a poll that Gallup took early in the decade. There was one real outlier in the 20-year history of this poll, a month in which only 43 percent of Americans thought crime was getting worse, an all-time low: October 2001.

“That was right after Sept. 11,” said Saad, “and people were so positive about America that I think the enemy was perceived to be much more outside the country than inside the country.” Suddenly Americans, even amid the fresh trauma, felt optimistic about the prospects of our nation and the character of our countrymen. We decided to put aside bickering and divisiveness and face the uncertainties of this new world together, as one.

Then that ended. The scary “Other” that had been banished from the country after Sept. 11 soon reestablished residence, and in 2002, American worries about crime resumed their upward march. The Gallup poll that year found that 62 percent of Americans believed crime had increased over the previous year - while in reality, according to FBI statistics, crime had fallen by 1.1 percent.

If our perception of crime doesn’t track actual crime rates, what does it track? One answer is satisfaction with the country. According to Gallup, from 1992 to 2001, respondents’ perception of crime fell as their satisfaction with the country rose. After 2001, however, satisfaction with the country has dropped precipitously, from 67 percent in 2001 to 9 percent in 2008, while perception of crime has risen.

The increasingly divisive partisanship of the past two decades may also play a role. Political scientists have found again and again that when the other party has the White House, hard-core partisans will invariably think the country is doing worse than it is. According to Gallup data, in 2004, for example, with a Republican in the White House, 67 percent of Democrats believed crime was up, to the Republicans’ 39 percent. Once Barack Obama was elected, however, the percentage of Republicans who believed crime was rising jumped from 63 to 79, while Democrats stubbornly held at 72. “People are extraordinarily partisan in the way they answer questions about the national scene,” says Gallup’s Saad. And the more partisan the country becomes, the stronger this effect is likely to be.

Harvard University sociologist Robert Sampson sees a different kind of social cause for perceptions of crime: the rapidly changing composition of the population. Sampson has found that people interpret increasing levels of diversity in their neighborhoods in much the same way they interpret physical disorder - that is to say, as an indicator of rising crime. (History suggests this is exactly backward: Murder, for instance, tends to fall during immigration booms.) Sampson believes the same thing may well be happening on a national scale, as the United States becomes a majority-minority nation and the established groups begin to look upon newcomers as yet more evidence that the nation is moving further away from their own beloved good old days.

So what, if anything, will bring the high-crime America that exists in our heads in line with the increasingly safe nation we live in? One encouraging finding of the Gallup poll is that people have a far more accurate sense of crime in their own neighborhoods than they do about the rest of the country: When asked about their immediate surroundings, a smaller percentage believe crime to be going up. In other words, we are capable of processing this type of information, as long as it’s gained through firsthand experience. When it’s based on something else - when we’re asked to guess what the rest of the country is like - there’s a lot more room for our moods and our fears to shape the answer. The turning point may come, then, when we begin to realize that the country is nothing more than a collection of such neighborhoods. And that all those other neighborhoods out there - the ones we seem to believe are sliding toward total anarchy - are a lot more like ours then we’ve been willing to admit.

Joe Keohane is a writer in New York.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/02/14/imaginary_fiends/

Posted by lois at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2010

Pres. Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent

Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal: How It’s Spent
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html
Drag your cursor over the blocks to see how the money will be spent.
(Direct prison related is in Administration.)

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

February 11, 2010

Mentally ill inmates sue Ohio prisons

Mentally ill inmates sue Ohio prisons
By Dan Horn
February 10, 2010

Mentally ill prisoners in Ohio are more likely to get into trouble and end up back in prison after they are released because state officials turn them loose without the follow-up care they need, a federal lawsuit claimed Wednesday.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati, asked a judge to order the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and the Ohio Department of Mental Health to provide the care necessary to help keep mentally ill offenders from returning to prison.

Advocates for prisoners and the mentally ill said they are suing to help not only the released prisoners, but also the taxpayers who must pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to keep them locked up when they commit new crimes and are sent back to prison.

They say the cost of providing treatment to a mentally ill person in the community is about $7,400 a year, compared to the $25,000 a year it costs to incarcerate them.

But instead of treatment, the lawsuit claims, ex-convicts with mental problems get $65 to $75, a bus ticket and two weeks of medication upon their release. The suit said many of those former inmates soon move into homeless shelters or drug-infested neighborhoods, where their mental health quickly deteriorates.

“Dumping prisoners with mental illness at homeless shelters creates a revolving door phenomenon,” said Bess Okum, staff attorney with the Cincinnati-based Ohio Justice and Policy Center, which filed the suit on behalf of nine current and former prisoners. “Many of these former prisoners commit new crimes because of their untreated mental illness.”

State prison and mental health officials said Wednesday they would not comment on pending litigation.

According to prison policies, mentally ill inmates are supposed to get a referral to a local mental health agency prior to their release, along with a 14-day supply of medications, a list of follow-up care services in the community and, if they qualify, help in completing a Medicaid application.

A statement on the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction web site states that “it is the policy of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction to ensure the prompt and continuous delivery of mental health care.”

Okum said the state has not lived up to those promises. She said former inmates rarely are directed to follow-up care programs and most get no help at all.

“The failure of those agencies to provide pre-release guidance is making all of Ohio’s communities less safe and is needlessly squandering taxpayer dollars,” Okum said.

The prisoners listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit are not named, but Okum said they suffer from illnesses that include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression. All have lengthy criminal records and some committed new crimes soon after their release, including one who was arrested just three weeks after leaving prison.

The civil rights lawsuit, which seeks payment of attorney fees but does not ask for money damages, accuses the state of violating the inmates’ constitutional rights and their rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20100210/NEWS0107/302090007/Mentally+ill+inmates+sue+Ohio+prisons+

Posted by lois at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2010

Muskegon Correctional Facility ready to begin accepting Pennsylvania prisoners

"The deal is expected to net Michigan an average daily “profit” of $2.15 for each inmate...."

Muskegon Correctional Facility ready to begin accepting Pennsylvania inmates
By John S. Hausman | Muskegon Chronicle
February 06, 2010
MUSKEGON — As recently as eight months ago, Muskegon Correctional Facility held more than 1,300 inmates.

Today, the count is zero.

The last Michigan inmates were bused out last week to other prisons in the state, making room for the arrival of 1,000 inmates from Pennsylvania.

Without the Pennsylvania deal, the 36-year-old facility would have closed in January, with the loss of up to 175 jobs.

As it is, all employees remain at work — even during the vacant interim, according to state Corrections Department spokesman John Cordell. Workers are making the prison “site ready” to meet Pennsylvania specifications, he said.

Cordell said the first Pennsylvania prisoners would arrive “in the next couple weeks” but declined to be more specific, citing security concerns. He said they would likely arrive at a rate of one busload or about 50 inmates per day, taking a month or so to reach the full complement.

“Pennsylvania and Michigan have worked very well together in this transition, and we look forward to supporting them as they transition into something new to their department, which is housing prisoners off site,” Cordell said.

For several years about a decade ago, Michigan exported some of its state prisoners to Virginia facilities to deal with overcrowding.

The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections announced Dec. 21 it would send 1,000 inmates to the Muskegon prison by February.

The inmates being selected for transfers are those who have less than three years to serve on their sentences, have no medical or mental health issues and have few or no visitors, according to Pennsylvania’s corrections department.

That’s enough to keep the prison open and save the 175 jobs that would have been eliminated by now. The 1,328-bed, medium-security prison was set to close in January as Michigan reduces its statewide prison population through earlier paroles and fewer prison returns for parole violators.

The deal isn’t for a set duration, but it’s expected to keep MCF operating at least through the end of 2013 and possibly longer.

Under the deal, Pennsylvania pays Michigan $62 per inmate per day to house its inmates, with the Michigan Department of Corrections running and staffing the prison. The deal is expected to net Michigan an average daily “profit” of $2.15 for each inmate at current operating costs because it costs the state only $59.85 per inmate per day to house an inmate.

The Michigan corrections department had said the prison’s closing would eliminate up to two-thirds of the 264 jobs at MCF, both corrections officers and other staff. Some of the expected layoffs would have been at Muskegon’s other two prisons — Earnest C. Brooks and West Shoreline — because MCF corrections officers have seniority-based “bumping” rights into those prisons.

http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2010/02/muskegon_correctional_facility.html

Posted by lois at 02:55 PM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2010

CA launches plan to cut prison population on reducting the number of parole violators sent back to prison

California launches plan to cut prison population
As cost-saving measures, the number of parole violators returned behind bars will be cut and low-risk offenders will not be regularly supervised by a parole agent
By Patrick McGreevy
January 26, 2010

Reporting from Sacramento
Quantcast

State prison authorities Monday began reducing the number of parole violators sent back behind bars and offering inmates more opportunity to shorten their sentences, as part of a plan to decrease the prison population by 6,500 inmates over the next year.

Low-risk offenders, including those convicted of nonviolent crimes, will not have regular supervision by a parole agent. And they will no longer be returned to prison for technical violations such as alcohol use, missed drug tests or failure to notify the state of an address change.

Parole agents will reduce the number of inmates they supervise to focus on those the state deems to be at highest risk of committing more crimes, such as people who have committed sexual crimes and other violent offenses. Each agent's caseload will fall from 70 parolees to 48.

In addition, prisoners can shave time off their sentences by working on firefighting crews or by obtaining a high school diploma or trade-school certificate or by completing drug or alcohol rehabilitation programs.

Over time, prisons chief Matthew Cate said, the rules will lower the rate at which parolees are returned to state lockups, reduce crime overall and "save, over the course of a full year, a half a billion dollars for California taxpayers."

The state will thus address its prison overcrowding problem while "significantly increasing public safety," said Cate, who heads the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Some law-enforcement officials, state legislators and crime-victim advocates took a different view, predicting a spike in crime in California as more people leave prison earlier with less supervision.

LAPD Lt. Brian Johnson, a director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, said the state "will start to release numerous dangerous felons into our community."

Cate said that in a state prison system with 168,000 inmates, only 15% to 18% of inmates will be eligible for unsupervised parole, and that the effect of the changes will be gradual.

"No one gets out today," he said.

The revisions were approved by the Legislature and signed into law last year by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who defended the changes Monday.

"It is not going to compromise public safety," Schwarzenegger said in a Sacramento speech. "Every time you have inmates go out, they come right back in again -- 70% of them. That costs our state . . . a tremendous amount of money."

The changes are occurring as the state has slashed budgets for education and rehabilitation programs in prisons.

"These people are not rehabilitated, and yet we're going to open the door and let them out?" said Harriet Salerno, president of the group Crime Victims, speaking at a Capitol news conference that was also attended by representatives of Los Angeles police officers and Los Angeles County sheriffs' deputies.

Sheriff Lee Baca said he is "very concerned" about the changes. He has ordered his deputies to meet with low-level offenders released from prison and tell them about community services such as mental health and drug rehabilitation programs, said Sheriff's Lt. Wayne Bilowit.

Assemblyman Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), a former prosecutor running for state attorney general, introduced a bill Monday that would give local law enforcement officials a greater role in blocking the release of inmates they deem to be a risk to the public.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Times staff writer Shane Goldmacher contributed to this report.

Posted by lois at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2010

KY: DOC officials grilled over bad Aramark food.

Corrections leaders grilled about prison food
1/20/2010
BRUCE SCHREINER
The Associated Press

(AP) — FRANKFORT, Ky. - Kentucky lawmakers grilled top corrections officials Wednesday about the quality of meals served in state prisons in seeking to determine what role inmate displeasure with their food might have played in a fiery prison uprising last year.

The House Judiciary Committee delved into the state's $11.8 million-a-year contract with Aramark Correctional Services, which provides meals at state-operated prisons in Kentucky.

Rep. Brent Yonts, D-Greenville, raised questions about the quality and amounts of food served inmates, and recounted claims of incidents in which prison food was allegedly tainted by hair balls, rocks, cardboard, bread ties, worms and even human feces.

"The issue is a matter of humanity," Yonts said. "The issue is a matter of morality. And the issue is not a matter of money."

Yonts has introduced legislation that would cancel Aramark's contract with the state and return the prison food-service duties to the state. The panel did not vote on the bill, which would not apply to food service in private prisons or in local jails housing state inmates.

During a nearly two-hour hearing, lawmakers pressed corrections officials for details into the causes of the riot last August at Northpoint Training Center in central Kentucky.

Corrections officials said food was not a primary factor in the riot, which they said was sparked primarily by anger over tighter restrictions to recreation areas and the prison yard.

When pressed by the panel about the role of food in the uprising, state Corrections Commissioner LaDonna Thompson conceded that the inmates "do not like the food."

The dissatisfaction, she said, might be due to heart-healthy menus featuring reduced amounts of sodium and sugars being served inmates.

Thompson defended the Aramark contract and said prison meals meet daily calorie and nutritional requirements.

Officials said the contract saves the state an estimated $5.4 million each year.

They said bulk purchases of food and beverages yield huge savings that enable Aramark to provide meals for $2.63 daily per inmate.

Thompson said that wardens at the state-operated prisons had not heard any groundswell of complaints from correctional officers about the quality of food served inmates.

But Thompson acknowledged there might be an occasional problem.

"Occasionally there will be a bug in a meal," she said. "That's just the nature of any food service."

She cited a case in which a grub worm was found in soup being served inmates at Green River Correctional Complex. The food was immediately discarded, she said.

At Western Kentucky Correctional Complex, there were three outbreaks of illnesses, Thompson said, but lab tests showed two outbreaks were not food related and the third was inconclusive.

Tim Campbell, president of Aramark Correctional Services, said the company stands by the quality of its food service. It serves more than 600 correctional facilities in North America. In Kentucky alone, it prepares 13 million meals each year for the state corrections department.

"We wouldn't allow or stand for anything to get in the way of our reputation as it relates to the quality of the products that we produce," he said.

Rep. Mary Lou Marzian, D-Louisville, said the state could perhaps avoid another prison riot by spending a bit more on inmates' meals.

Rep. Kelly Flood, D-Lexington, complained about a "big haze" regarding details into the causes of the prison uprising. She said there was "a real gap going on here, and we insist on that gap getting narrowed quickly."

Yonts raised the possibility of lawmakers issuing a subpoena to gather details into the matter. The cabinet claims it has already issued the report into the riot, with some security-related matters redacted. Cabinet leaders agreed Wednesday to review the report with committee staff to determine what parts will remain redacted.

Matthew Hughes, a correctional officer at Northpoint who attended the hearing, said afterward that lawmakers had asked the right questions.

Hughes said he considered food to be a factor in the riot, and that food quality plays a factor in safety at prisons.

"If you're hungry, you're going to get ornery," he said.

___

The legislation is House Bill 33.

http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/health/index.ssf?/base/national-98/1264036902114120.xml&storylist=health

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

January 19, 2010

Fire risk mounts in Arizona prisons

Fire risk mounts in Arizona prisons
Pleas for funds to fix safety problems ignored for years
By JJ Hensley and Casey Newton - Jan. 17, 2010
The Arizona Republic

The potential for tragedy looms large at Arizona prisons, where each night more than 31,000 adult inmates and some 550 juveniles fall asleep in dangerous and deteriorating facilities.

For more than a decade, investigators have identified serious fire-safety issues at the state's prisons and juvenile correctional facilities. Fire-alarm systems are obsolete, broken or non-existent. Sprinklers and smoke-ventilation systems required by building codes have never been installed, even in rapidly deteriorating wooden structures used to house juveniles.

Where fire alarms are broken or non-existent, corrections officials employ 24-hour "fire watches" in which employees look for smoke as part of their duties. Intended to be used for a short time until systems could be repaired, fire watches in many facilities have endured for decades.

Today, every Arizona prison is on a perpetual fire watch.

Unsafe conditions put correctional officers, inmates and juvenile offenders in potentially lethal situations and leave taxpayers exposed to millions of dollars in liability should a fire claim lives.

Inspectors' reports paint nightmare scenarios of dorms silently filling up with smoke as juveniles sleep, staffers who can't unlock doors in time to evacuate inmates, and corrections officers who become trapped in their observation posts.

Twice in the past decade, the Department of Juvenile Corrections commissioned studies on how to eliminate unsafe conditions in its facilities. Over the past several years, corrections officials in both the juvenile and adult systems repeatedly requested millions in funding to bring the buildings up to code.

But lawmakers gave them nothing, even as they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars renovating their own buildings. Earlier this year, to save money, the state quit inspecting its buildings - even as many prisons deteriorate at an alarming rate, reports show.

While such rampant fire-safety risks linger, lawmakers want to privatize operations in at least some of the prisons to help close the state's massive deficit.

Last year, Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law Senate Bill 1028, which would allow private vendors to operate one or more of Arizona's state prisons, with a 50-year contract and an upfront payment of $100 million. Two prison facilities were purchased in sale-leaseback agreements last week, though in those cases, the state retains control of the properties.

As the state tries to sell some of its facilities, safety experts warn that prisons with faulty sprinklers and alarms pose a serious danger to occupants.

"You could potentially end up with a fire that might result in hundreds of fatalities," said Robert Solomon, manager for building and life-safety codes at the Boston-based National Fire Protection Association. "It's a lot cheaper to deal with this issue now and find the money wherever you can. If you don't do that and something happens down the road, it's going to cost you a lot more."

Vast system

More than 40,000 inmates are in the Arizona prison system. Of those, 9,000 are serving their time in private prisons. The rest are held in 10 state-operated prisons, where they are overseen by more than 8,000 correctional officers, medical personnel and other staff.

The sprawling complexes are like small towns, with some supporting more than 5,000 inmates and a host of facilities to prepare food, clean laundry and perform maintenance.

The complexes include Army-surplus tents in use since the early 1980s, trailers formerly used by crews that installed the Alaskan pipeline, corrugated steel Quonset huts that date from World War II, houses converted into dorms at Fort Grant and a building in Florence constructed in 1930, in addition to a smattering of more modern facilities.

Many of those structures, particularly the tents and trailers, were brought in as temporary housing to ease overcrowding. Because they were never intended for long-term use, many lack the fire-suppression systems that come with permanent facilities.

In general, the prisons have equipment to cope with the smaller types of fires that happen most frequently, and prison officials rely on nearby fire departments for larger blazes.

While deadly fires in American detention facilities are rare, they do happen. Since 1975, 127 people have died in fires at jails and prisons, according to the fire association.

Safety records

The Republic reviewed hundreds of pages of fire-safety records for the 10 state-run facilities dating back more than 20 years. They included reports from fire marshals, Department of Administration inspectors, the state's loss-prevention division and architects.

Most prison buildings have not been inspected by an outside agency in more than five years. Despite requests for records from the state's risk-management division on what liabilities exist, administrators could produce only one 6-year-old document urging that action be taken.

Arizona law requires state buildings to be inspected at various intervals by multiple agencies, including the state fire marshal, the Department of Administration and the agency responsible for the building. Concerns raised during those inspections are forwarded to the Department of Administration, which puts together a capital-needs proposal and submits it to lawmakers.

The law says agencies "should give priority to fire and life safety projects."

In its proposed capital-improvement plan for 2010, which included pleas for $12 million to improve fire safety, the Department of Administration noted that "properly working fire alarms are a basic and mandatory requirement for office buildings and are particularly important in a secure corrections environment."

The plea was ignored, a year after lawmakers awarded the department $491,000 to replace fire-alarm systems in buildings around the Capitol Mall.

In theory, the state fire marshal could revoke the occupancy permit for a prison or juvenile facility. But the office has never moved to do so.

Numerous violations

Fire safety in any facility involves several basic elements: reducing hazards, detecting smoke and fires, suppressing fires through sprinklers and fire extinguishers, and evacuating occupants.

Investigators have found violations of each of those basic safety tenets in Arizona prisons, and in many cases they have not been corrected.

Fire-marshal reports, state-commissioned studies and reviews from the Department of Administration detail deficiencies back to the late 1980s, though inconsistent record keeping makes it difficult to determine which issues have been resolved. In one report, the inspector noted: "This is a fire trap and should be corrected. ... You've got more guts than me sitting on this time bomb."

That report, on the Tucson prison, came from a fire marshal's inspection in April 1988 that found deficient or non-existent warning or suppression systems.

Another fire marshal, visiting the same facility more than 20 years later, noted that many of the deficiencies remained.

Fire-marshal reports on state prisons from 2003 to 2009 showed deficiencies in many areas:

• Reducing hazards. An inspection of Arizona State Prison Complex-Eyman in Florence found flammable material placed next to a transformer in a storage room. At Catalina Mountain School, a juvenile detention facility in Tucson, dryer vents were found to be non-removable and choked with lint - a potential hazard. Maintenance conditions were so bad in a Tucson medical unit, the in-floor plumbing channel that houses waste lines and an electrical conduit became backed up with sewage for an entire year.

Prison officials say that hazards can be fixed for little or no money, and they often address the issues as soon as they are identified. Gaps in records make this difficult to verify independently.

• Detecting fires. At Safford, Eyman and Tucson, more than 90 percent of smoke detectors don't function. Many of them are beyond their 20-year life expectancy; others have lost their ability to communicate with the prison's main control room and alert staff members to danger. An inspector at Stafford noted that fire-alarm pull boxes were not connected to any alarms and were "of decorative value only."

Investigators at Adobe and Black Canyon juvenile facilities found that dormitory doors were improperly ventilated, which could allow them to cause smoke-inhalation injuries or even death before enough smoke escaped the room to trigger a fire alarm. That issue has since been resolved by modifying the doors, said Laura Dillingham, a spokeswoman for the prison.

• Suppressing fires. In Tucson, fire sprinklers had been painted over. In Yuma, inspectors have found fire extinguishers that were expired; at Lewis, they found extinguishers that were overcharged.

In 2004, the state hired Arrington Watkins Architects to identify fire-safety issues at Catalina Mountain. The resulting report contained so many issues that the state's loss-prevention division recommended "extraordinary measures be taken by the agency to protect the lives of the detained youth and staff."

One of the recommended measures, which was subsequently ordered by the fire marshal, was installing a sprinkler system at the facility, which is built from wood. But sprinkler heads increase the risk of attempted suicide by hanging, Dillingham said in an interview.

Dillingham said staff members constantly circulate through the rooms where juveniles sleep, making it unlikely that a fire could break out and spread undetected. In November, a fire marshal wrote a letter to the Department of Juvenile Corrections saying Catalina Mountain could remain open without fire sprinklers only if it maintained high staffing ratios. Current ratios call for at least one youth corrections officer per 18 juveniles, though at certain times during the day the ratio is as high as one to five.

Staffing became more difficult earlier this month, when the department laid off 200 employees in response to a 7.5 percent budget cut.

The department has maintained the ratios by using supervisors to fill in for corrections officers, Dillingham said. But future cuts could bring staffing below the fire marshal's mandate.

• Evacuating buildings. At Arizona State Prison Complex-Lewis, a 2005 report identified trouble with a building's roof hatch. If the hatch became obstructed in an emergency, there would be no escape route for officers stationed on the second floor or the roof.

The locks and control system at Catalina Mountain do not meet building codes. Some doors cannot be opened remotely, and many do not have an emergency-release function. The problem remains unresolved.

"They are life-safety issues, and we obviously need to be attentive to them and take corrective action," Charles Ryan, director of the Department of Corrections, said in an interview.

Prison officials say the stopgap efforts they've put in place, including placing corrections officers on fire watches, is effective enough to ensure inmates' safety given budget limitations.

"We take safety very seriously," Dillingham said. Officials at juvenile corrections are "extremely confident" their facilities could be evacuated in the event of a fire without anyone being injured.

High stakes

To date, no one has died in an Arizona prison fire. Prisoners and their families can file lawsuits only if prisoners are actually harmed, making pre-emptive suits difficult.

But some prisoners have filed grievances with the Department of Corrections, according to Middle Ground, a Tempe-based prison-reform group.

Stephen Karban, an inmate at the state prison in Tucson, complained in a letter to the fire marshal that inmates in the Winchester Unit were being housed in meeting rooms where there were not sufficient exits.

"Please inform me how your agency, in good faith, can allow this potentially dangerous situation to continue uncorrected," Karban wrote.

In the event of a major fire, the state could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages.

"Everyone will sue us," said Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. "And we will lose."

The liability varies from prison to prison depending on where inmates and staff are housed or stationed.

Maximum-security areas where movement is severely restricted are typically built of concrete and steel, leaving little flammable material aside from an inmate's belongings. Minimum-security areas are built from more-flammable materials, including canvas tents and wood-and-metal trailers, but those areas allow more freedom of movement so inmates could flee from potential harm.

Last month a fire broke out at Florence, in an area with nearly 700 inmates and 14 corrections officers, when an inmate was heating up a bag of beans with an immersion heater. The trailers are equipped with smoke detectors but no sprinklers. The inmates were able to get out of the trailer and alert staff, who put the fire out within seconds, said Director of Offender Operations Robert Patton.

The majority of prison fires are along those lines: easily extinguished blazes caused by carelessness or by inmates who intentionally set mattresses or some other material on fire.

Corrections officers can deal with most small fires themselves with fire extinguishers or sprinkler systems that douse flames confined to cells.

Department of Corrections said they do not track fires in their facilities.

In a three-year period, the Tucson Fire Department responded to 25 fires at the state prison in Tucson, among the worst in terms of working smoke detectors.

Phil Mele, the state's fire marshal, said it is a question of when - not if - a building will burn. But as long as property damage and injuries are kept to a minimum in the meantime, he said, replacing the warning systems is not a high priority.

"Am I comfortable having facilities that don't have fully operating systems? No," Mele said. "What's within my authority to do? It's within my authority to point out that they need to be corrected and need to be addressed, and it's up to others to do something with it."

Responses from the two unions representing corrections officers were mixed. Michael Duran of the Arizona Correctional Peace Officers Association said he had not heard any complaints from officers about fire-safety conditions, and Brenda Hewitt of the Arizona Corrections Association declined to comment, citing legal concerns.

Donna Hamm, executive director of Middle Ground, criticized the state for not acting to resolve fire-safety issues.

"It exposes the state of Arizona to monumental fiscal liability and, of course, incalculable human tragedy," Hamm said. "It's a travesty."

Corrective action

Since 2005, officials have requested more than $58 million from the Legislature to address chronic fire-prevention problems at the prisons. They asked for $12 million in 2010, hoping to repair fire alarms, install sprinklers and make other safety improvements.

"We make those requests year in, year out because the need is not going away," said Ryan, the Corrections Department director.

To date, their requests have been denied. Lawmakers say they that the state budget crisis prevents them from paying for renovations.

"We just don't have the money," said Rep. Bill Konopnicki, R-Safford, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Konopnicki said he is concerned about building conditions at state prisons and state facilities overall.

"It's a public-safety issue," he said.

In the late 1990s, the fire marshal cut staff and eliminated the position that allowed the agency to inspect prisons about once a year. "We went from having a dedicated person to 'the opportunity for inspection when available,' " Mele said.

In boom years that followed, legislators were more likely to put funds toward needs that were more popular than increasing protections for prisoners and corrections officers.

The prisons now have internal staff members responsible for inspections, and records indicate that fire marshals visit at least part of each complex every few years, though neither the Corrections Department nor the Fire Marshal's Office could produce evidence of inspection at Douglas or Eyman after 2002.

Fire-safety problems are part of an overall pattern of neglect at the prisons, where many buildings are no longer in use because of damage. Leaking roofs, broken floor tiles and sagging foundations have rendered many structures uninhabitable. Some residential units at the juvenile facilities don't have bathrooms, much less sprinklers.

Now, with Arizona facing its worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, the prospects of fixing fire systems in the prisons are all but nil.

Future unknown

It's unclear how the prison system's myriad safety issues would affect the state's ability to privatize its prisons, transferring operational authority to a corporation.

A company could decline to bid on facilities with fire-safety issues. Or a company could ask the state to indemnify it against any lawsuits filed in the event of a fire.

Prison officials say that until the Legislature proceeds with a request for proposals, they don't know what a deal might look like. Corrections officials were to meet Dec. 17 with a legislative committee that would give them the authority to proceed with privatization. They planned to discuss a timeline for issuing a request for proposal.

Then Gov. Jan Brewer called a special session to deal with the state's budget crisis, and the meeting was canceled. It has not been rescheduled.

January 13, 2010

CA: Judges OK Schwarzenegger plan to reduce prison crowding

Judges OK Schwarzenegger plan to reduce prison crowding
The proposal includes some home detention with satellite tracking devices, permitting some felons to serve time in county jails instead of state prisons and reducing sentences for property crimes.

By Michael Rothfeld

January 13, 2010

Reporting from Sacramento

A panel of three federal judges Tuesday approved a court-ordered plan submitted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to reduce overcrowding in California prisons by 40,000 inmates within two years.

The judges ruled against the state in August in two lawsuits by inmates who argued that overcrowding was the main cause of inadequate medical and mental health care in the prisons.

Schwarzenegger has appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but he was ordered in the meantime to come up with a plan to fix the problems. U.S. District Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt make up the panel.

They rejected his first proposal in October, saying it did not meet the required population targets or timeline. The governor's next attempt, submitted in November, was acceptable, the judges said. They ordered Schwarzenegger to implement it pending the resolution of his appeal of the case to the Supreme Court.

"We do not intervene lightly in the state's management of its prisons," the judges wrote Tuesday. "However, the state's long-standing failure to provide constitutionally adequate medical and mental health care to its prison inmates has necessitated our actions."

The nation's high court is expected to decide as early as Friday whether to take up the matter. Schwarzenegger's spokesman, Aaron McLear, said in a statement that administration officials "expect that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear our appeal on whether federal judges have the authority to order the early release of prisoners in our state."

If the state loses, the judges said, officials will have to meet interim population targets every six months, while submitting progress reports, before completing the plan within two years.

Schwarzenegger said in his plan that he would work with lawmakers to approve measures they rejected last year, including home detention with satellite tracking devices for some inmates; permitting some felons to serve time in county jails instead of state prisons; and reducing sentences for property crimes.

The governor also said he would need more prisoner transfers to other states, private prison construction and suspension of Civil Service rules, among other solutions.

If lawmakers refuse to go along, the judges could waive state law and order the measures implemented, Schwarzenegger said. The judges said they would consider waiving laws once the state had shown that other solutions had failed.

In another prison-related conflict Tuesday, state Controller John Chiang told Schwarzenegger's aides that he intends to end forced furloughs for correctional officers this month, prompting a threat from the governor's office to dock other pay from prison workers and make layoffs. The furloughs have been in effect nearly a year and amount to a 15% reduction in pay.

The dispute centers on the governor's appeal of a Dec. 29 order by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch overturning the furloughs for members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. The governor's office said the appeal, filed Dec. 31, triggers an automatic stay of the court decision.

"The controller has overstepped his authority by taking this illegal action during our appeal," McLear said.

But Chiang's chief counsel, Richard Chivaro, contended in a letter to the governor's personnel chief that the type of order Roesch issued can't be appealed. For pay in January, the controller "has eliminated the pay differential and will pay the amount due for all hours worked," Chivaro wrote.

McLear said the state would file an emergency appeal. If that fails, he said, Schwarzenegger will begin cutting other pay union members receive for performing special duties and for retirement, along with instituting layoffs.
latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons13-2010jan13,0,2715687.story

Posted by lois at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2010

Common sense on prison, education funds By Derrick Z. Jackson

"Massachusetts was no different than any other state. According to Pew data, the commonwealth had the nation’s sixth-highest ratio of corrections spending compared to higher education spending. In 1987, Massachusetts spent 30 cents on corrections for every dollar spent on state colleges and universities. In 2007, the ratio was virtually dollar for dollar. The ratio of adults under some form of correctional control in the state soared from 1 in 127 in 1982 to 1 in 24 in 2008. This is despite many studies showing that investing in education has a massive benefit-cost ratio to individuals, to society and to the economy."

Common sense on prison, education funds
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Boston Globe Columnist / January 9, 2010

CALLING STATE prison and education funding priorities “out of whack,’’ Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California proposed a constitutional amendment this week barring the state from spending a higher percentage on prisons than higher education. He said that in the last 30 years, prison spending increased from 3 percent of the state general fund to 11 percent while higher education spending declined from 10 percent to 7.5 percent.

Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future,’’ he said.

Indeed. It is hard to know where the specific proposal will go, as cheering by university officials was countered by condemnation from powerful corrections unions. Schwarzenegger is proposing prison savings through privatization. But the spirit of his speech should become a governing principle in a nation where the effects of the prison boom remain completely out of whack.

Nationwide, the Pew Center on the States says prison spending rose six times more than spending for higher education in adjusted dollars from 1987 to 2007. The national federal and state prison population nearly tripled in that time, from 585,000 to 1.6 million. Including local jails, the United States had 2.3 million people locked up by 2007. This is more than the 1.5 million inmates in more-numerous China and 2 1/2 times more than third-place Russia.

It is a good bet that the United States has frittered away a decent chunk of our former global advantages with gulag politics. Over the years, I have cited many examples of this phenomenon from national and state crime bills passed during the last quarter-century. New York State went from spending twice as much on universities in 1988 to spending more on prisons than higher education in 1996. President Clinton’s push for national service was dwarfed by a $23 billion 1993 Senate crime bill that spent twice as much on boot camps than national service and $3 billion for prisons but only $1.2 billion for job training and drug treatment for nonviolent offenders.

Massachusetts was no different than any other state. According to Pew data, the commonwealth had the nation’s sixth-highest ratio of corrections spending compared to higher education spending. In 1987, Massachusetts spent 30 cents on corrections for every dollar spent on state colleges and universities. In 2007, the ratio was virtually dollar for dollar. The ratio of adults under some form of correctional control in the state soared from 1 in 127 in 1982 to 1 in 24 in 2008. This is despite many studies showing that investing in education has a massive benefit-cost ratio to individuals, to society and to the economy.

Politicians have long understood that trade-off, and by the mid-1990s some prominent Republicans agreed with Democrats that we could not jail our way out of social and economic problems with three-strike laws that condemned nonviolent offenders along with murderers. But almost always, harsh political winds blew down sweeping reform, guaranteeing the continued siphoning of billions of dollars away from treatment, rehabilitation, and education.

The budget crisis in the states finally has both Republican and Democratic governors talking about downsizing expensive and overcrowded prisons and providing more treatment to nonviolent drug offenders. But the laws that filled the jails await reform. For instance, one of the most discriminatory laws of the get-tough era, one that punishes possession of crack cocaine more than powdered cocaine, remains on the federal books 15 years after Clinton said that the disparities were wrong. Proposals to end the disparities are being debated in Congress and President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, says the administration wants to do away with them.

The laws are so embarrassing that this week, in an interview with the Boston Globe editorial board, Democratic senatorial candidate and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley called the cocaine laws “crazy.’’ It is refreshing to hear a Democrat like her and a Republican like Schwarzenegger say that our criminal justice priorities are insane, with education always getting the strait-jacket. It is the first step out of the asylum.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/01/09/common_sense_on_prison_education_funds/

Posted by lois at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2010

DOCS opens new facility for mentally ill inmates

DOCS opens new facility for mentally ill inmates
By Allison Roselle

January 04, 2010
The first seven men have moved into a new mental health unit at an upstate prison designed to treat inmates with serious mental illnesses and disciplinary problems.

The 100-bed residential mental health unit at the male, medium-security Marcy Correctional Facility in Oneida County was developed by the state Department of Correctional Services and the state Office of Mental Health as a result of a lawsuit involving Disability Advocates, Inc., a nonprofit advocacy organization.

The facility will serve inmates suffering from severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, delusional disorders, brief psychotic disorders, substance-induced psychotic disorders, major depressive disorders and bipolar disorder who would typically be serving 23-hour-a-day confinement.

Of the 58,690 inmates in New York, 7,844 have been diagnosed with a mental illness, including 2,359 who have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness, according to Erik Kriss, director of public information at DOCS. Approximately 200 of those with serious mental illness have confinement sanctions for disciplinary violations.

The new unit will have approximately 126 employees, including 100 workers from DOCS and 26 workers from OMH.

The former special housing unit, or S-block, at the prison was renovated in 2007 at a cost of $23.5 million. A similar facility for female inmates is located at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County and another 60-bed residential mental health unit is scheduled to open at Five Points Correctional facility in Seneca County during the 2011-2012 fiscal year.

"This cutting-edge program represents government at its best by providing a long-term approach to a difficult problem that is both humane and cost-effective," said Gov. David A. Paterson. "New York is once again leading the nation, in this case by creating a holistic environment for the treatment and care of perhaps the most challenging population within the state prison system."

In 2002, Disability Advocates, Inc. filed a lawsuit against the state because the group alleged there was inadequate treatment for mentally ill inmates. A private settlement was reached in 2007 and the state agreed to develop the residential mental health unit.

The 57,000-square-foot building includes office space for DOCS and OMH staff attached to a secure inmate housing unit. Every employee received seven days of special training before the unit opened.

The new facility will allow inmate patients four hours per day outside of their cell to attend treatment programs in open group settings. Inmates who have shown signs of progression will be allowed out of their cell for exercise and other activities.

The treatment programs conducted in the unit will help mentally ill inmates to understand and manage their illnesses better, so they can get along in a more social environment, said Kriss.

The programs are also designed to help inmates develop skills and transition into general population or back into society outside of prison.

"This new program specifically concerns itself with offenders who have demonstrated serious problems adhering to prison rules, often as the result of their mental health difficulties," said DOCS Commissioner Brian Fischer. In December 2007, OMH began screening every inmate entering state prisons for mental health needs and determining the type of care they might need.

"[This] is the latest collaborative step to develop the most comprehensive prison mental health program in the country and … reduce use of special housing and segregation for inmates with mental illness," said OMH Commissioner Michael F. Hogan.

http://www.legislativegazette.com/Articles-c-2010-01-04-64546.113122_DOCS_op
ens_new_facility_for_mentally_ill_inmates.html

Posted by lois at 10:58 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2010

Group: Muslim chaplains needed in Va. prisons

Media General News Service
Published: January 4, 2010

RICHMOND — A seven-year-old prison chaplain group recently was awarded a one-of-its-kind, $25,000 state subcontract to minister to a rapidly growing faith behind bars: Islam.

But the all-volunteer Muslim Chaplain Services wants more state funding so it can hire imams to serve as prison staff chaplains, as do Protestant clergy. “We just want a level playing field,” said Carroll Abdul-Malik, the group’s president.

The Chaplain Service of the Churches of Virginia, a Protestant group established in 1920, has the full, $780,000 contract with the Virginia Department of Corrections to administer religious programs in prisons for inmates of all faiths.

Relations between the two chaplain groups are cordial, and they agree on the need for Islamic experts in prisons.

So, too, do some secular experts with concerns beyond the spiritual.

Mark Hamm, a terrorism expert with Indiana State University, conducted a study on Muslims in prison for the National Institute of Justice and said that “Islam, by all accounts, is the fastest-growing religion among prisoners in the Western world, including the United States.”

And a key finding of a 2006 national study co-authored by the University of Virginia’s Critical Incident Analysis Group, a think tank on national threats, was that “the inadequate number of Muslim religious service providers increases the risk of radicalization.”

Hamm said it is estimated that up to 40,000 of the 2.4 million prisoners in the U.S. convert to Islam each year. Muslim Chaplain Services believes there are 1,700 to 2,500 Muslims in Virginia’s 32,000-inmate system. Prison authorities do not dispute that estimate.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, some in Congress and elsewhere grew concerned about the potential for the spread of jihadism along with Islam in the nation’s prisons.

But Hamm found that “overall, Islam has a beneficial effect on inmates. Most of these inmates come to prison with little or no ... spiritual grounding whatsoever.” Islam offers order to their lives and a sense of identity and belonging, he said.

The “radicalization” that occurs often is the result of “prison or jailhouse Islam,” twisted versions of the faith spread by those who are not necessarily well-informed about the tenets of Islam and some of whom have gang-related or other nonreligious agendas, Hamm said.

Asghar Goraya, executive director of Muslim Chaplain Services, says Islam is a religion of moderation and tolerance, not extremism. A goal of his group is educating believers who may have been given incorrect information by other well-meaning but misinformed inmates.

In addition, Sa’ad El-Amin, a former Richmond lawyer on the Muslim chaplain group’s board of directors, believes more needs to be done to foster communication between staff and Muslim inmates.

“We see an accident, a train wreck ahead, if this thing is not resolved,” El-Amin said.

El-Amin and Abdul-Malik, are former inmates themselves. El-Amin surrendered his City Council seat in July 2003, pleading guilty to a federal tax-fraud conspiracy charge. He served 32 months and was released in August 2006.

Abdul-Malik was released in 1978 after serving seven years for robbery. “Before I went in, I was first kin to an atheist,” he said. Then he converted while behind bars. “It changed my life, and I’ve been out for 31 years and I’ve been a volunteer in prison for 29 years.”

In 2006, Gene Johnson, director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, invited the Muslim group to brief officials in prisons across the state about rituals, prayers, holy days, dietary regulations and other pertinent aspects of the Islamic faith.

“The sessions have been well-received with lots of positive feedback,” said Larry Traylor, a department spokesman.

Goraya said the group has worked to clear up misconceptions and head off problems. For example, he said, “a question came up during the training: ‘Is it prohibited for a Muslim male to obey the orders of a female?’”

Many corrections officers are women, and male Muslim inmates must obey them, Goraya said.

But some Muslim inmates have the wrong idea. Often, he said, the cultural traditions of patriarchal societies that practice Islam get mixed up with the tenets of the faith.

The Muslim group, founded in 2003, has a dozen volunteers — none of them imams.

When an inmate needs an imam, efforts are made to get one, but that can be difficult because the Islamic faith leaders are not compensated for travel to a prison, Goraya said. “They have to work for a living,” he added.

Chaplain Service of the Churches of Virginia, supported by various Protestant churches, individuals and foundations, started working in prisons in 1920, at no cost to the state. In 2002, the General Assembly began appropriating money from the inmate commissary fund to help.

The arrangement is an unusual one, because Virginia may be the only prison system, or among just a handful of state systems, without professional chaplains.

The money comes out of the pockets of inmates from commissary purchases of chips, sodas and other items. The Department of Corrections is concerned that so much money is being taken out that the commissary fund, which is used for other inmate needs, that it could be depleted.

Cecil McFarland, the Protestant group’s director, said that in addition to the $780,000 from the commissary fund, the group expects to receive about $500,000 in non-inmate funds this year, lower than in past years because of the economy.

Among other things, the money is used to staff adult prisons with 13 full-time and 19 part-time chaplains, and three part-time chaplains for juvenile correctional facilities.

“We’ve been working with Asghar Goraya for years,” said McFarland of the Muslim group, which has the only chaplaincy subcontract. McFarland’s group coordinates religious programs for inmates of all other faiths, including Catholics and Jews.

McFarland said his governing board is not concerned with money going to an Islamic group because “this relieves our chaplains of a lot of responsibilities. ... They have assumed the responsibility of serving the Muslim population in prison.”

“It’s really a good thing for everybody,” he said.

But the problem, as Muslim Chaplain Services sees it, is that $25,000 — used primarily to pay for religious literature — is not enough to support a single staff Muslim chaplain, and the Protestant group will not hire one.

In addition to the $25,000, the Muslim group also receives about $12,000 to $15,000 a year via fundraisers. But virtually all expenses come out of the pockets of volunteers. They also operate a five-person halfway house in Richmond.

Goraya said there are many situations in which even the most well-meaning staff and Christian clergy cannot help a Muslim inmate. Full-time Muslim chaplains are needed in prisons just as Christian ones are, he said.

The group asked the Department of Corrections for $611,560 to get Muslim staff chaplains in prisons but was turned down.

On Sept. 3, the department modified its contract with the Protestant group so that it could receive the $25,000 subcontract. The Muslim group says it has spoken with some area legislators who told them it is unlikely the General Assembly will find more money for them.

Goraya and Abdul-Malik said they now are considering asking for some of the money — $4.6 million in the year that ended June 30 — made on surcharges imposed on inmate telephone calls. That money, however, always has gone directly into the state general fund.

They are also considering a lawsuit, El-Amin said. “What you have is the (Department of Corrections) treating Islam like it’s a second-class religion because we’re not on equal footing fundingwise, or staffwise, or accesswise,” he said.

Muslim inmates buy goods in prison commissaries, too, El-Amin said.

Hamm, the terrorism expert, said a good chaplain of any faith can make a large difference in a prison. “It seems a shame that any state doesn’t have a paid cadre of prison chaplains.

“I’ve been in some prisons where the chapel is hopping between 8 a.m. and whenever the yard closes — one activity after another, Indians, Muslims, Christians,” he said.

“And then I’ve been in other prisons where the chapel is a ghost yard. It just sits there. You wonder who’s minding the store and what lessons there are here to learn on how to run a chaplaincy.”

• Frank Green is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
http://www2.newsadvance.com/lna/news/state_regional/article/group_muslim_chaplains_needed_in_va._prisons/22798/

Posted by lois at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2009

Southern Injustice. Convicted of murder in a deeply flawed trial, Herman Wallace has spent nearly 37 years in solitary confinement. Will new evidence finally lead to his release?

Mother Jones
Southern Injustice
Convicted of murder in a deeply flawed trial, Herman Wallace has spent nearly 37 years in solitary confinement. Will new evidence finally lead to his release?

By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella | Tue Dec. 29, 2009 4:00 AM PST

For the better part of four decades, Victory Wallace, 70, has made a monthly trip from New Orleans to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola to visit her brother Herman, who just turned 68. The 140-mile journey has shades of Heart of Darkness, following the course of the Mississippi River to a remote prison colony from which most inmates never return. At the dark heart of this former slave plantation, Herman Wallace has lived most of the past 37 years in solitary confinement, imprisoned alone for 23 hours a day in a 6-by-9-foot cell.

When Herman was moved in the spring of 2009 from Angola to Hunt Correctional Center near Baton Rouge, Vickie's trip got a bit shorter. But what she found when she arrived on her most recent visit was even worse than usual. Because of a disciplinary infraction, Herman had been placed in "extended administrative lockdown." That meant Vickie was denied a contact visit, and was permitted to see her brother only through a glass partition as they spoke over a telephone. His hands were shackled to the table. (Other recent visitors reported that the shackles made it hard for him to hold the phone to his ear, while his hearing loss made communication over the telephone difficult.) Herman complained to Vickie that he was cold, and she thought that he had lost weight. His spirits, she said, were not the best.

For years, Herman Wallace's hopes have ridden on two cases that are inching their way through the courts—one challenging his conviction, the other challenging his long-term solitary confinement. Now, after a decade of starts and stops, obstacles and delays, both cases are advancing toward conclusions that will determine how he spends what's left of his life.

With the exception of a few brief intervals, Wallace has been living in lockdown since 1972, when he was accused of murdering a young Angola prison guard. Along with another inmate named Albert Woodfox, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life without parole. Wallace, Woodfox, and a third longtime prisoner called Robert King—who are known as the Angola 3—are also plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit alleging that their unparalleled time in solitary violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The case [1]—which could potentially affect the estimated 25,000 American prisoners living in long-term lockdown—is expected to come to trial in the US District Court in Baton Rouge in early 2010.

Since 1990, Wallace has also been appealing his criminal conviction in the Louisiana state courts. He believes that he was targeted for the guard's murder because of his involvement in Angola's chapter of the Black Panther Party, which had been organizing against conditions in what was then known as "the bloodiest prison in the South." Wallace contends that the prosecution's witnesses—all of them fellow Angola prisoners—were coached, bribed, coerced, or threatened into giving false testimony against him by prison employees bent on revenge. "If they could have hung and burned the guys involved they would have," one inmate witness later told Wallace's lawyers. "But there was too much light on the situation." Documents and testimony that have surfaced since the trial show that prosecutors knew a good part of their case was unreliable or manufactured. The state's own judicial commissioner, assigned to study the case in 2006, recommended that Wallace's conviction be overturned. Even the prison guard's widow has publicly stated that she now doubts [2] the guilt of the two men convicted of her husband's murder, and still wants to see his killers brought to justice. But the Louisiana courts, one after another, have rejected his appeal, providing no reasons for their decisions.

Now, Wallace has turned to the federal courts. On December 4, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus—basically, a plea for a reversal of his wrongful conviction. It is his last chance to win a new trial, and possibly his freedom. On his side are a team of skilled pro-bono attorneys who have assembled a brief full of evidence that was hidden or suppressed 35 years ago during his original trial. Against him is an increasingly conservative federal court system, along with two of the most powerful figures in Louisiana criminal justice: Angola's famous warden, Burl Cain, and the state's ambitious attorney general, James "Buddy" Caldwell, both of whom appear determined to fight to the bitter end to ensure that Herman Wallace never again sees the light of day.

The incident that condemned Herman Wallace to a life in lockdown took place at a particularly explosive time in Angola's notoriously violent history. In the early 1970s, Louisiana's 5,000-man penitentiary was the nation's largest prison; it was also notorious for its high rates of murder, rape, and assault. The former slave plantation's 18,000 acres were farmed by prisoners working up to 96 hours a week, overseen by armed inmate guards, known as "trusties." The trusties also oversaw gambling, drug-dealing, and a monstrous system of sexual slavery—sanctioned by some of the all-white corrections officers, who were referred to by staff and inmates alike as "freemen."

"Angola in those days was life and death, buying and selling people, and the officers knew it was happening," Howard Baker, a prisoner who testified at Wallace's trial, stated in a subsequent affidavit. "There was a goon squad of guards. If they came after you, you could get anything from a beating to being killed, and they'd call it being killed by trying to escape." In addition, Baker said, "Physical conditions were about as bad as you can get: hot, dirty, overcrowded. Weapons were everywhere. You could shake down for weapons one night and have just as many the next. I saw as many as four stabbings a week, week after week."

It was also a time of simmering tensions between longtime employees—many of whom had grown up in the staff community on the prison's grounds—and Angola's new "reformist" leadership. A few years earlier, Warden C. Murray Henderson and Deputy Warden Lloyd Hoyle had been brought in from out of state to "clean up Angola." As Wallace's habeas petition states:

Their arrival at Angola disrupted [the Louisiana State Penitentiary's] existing leadership, most of whom had worked their way up the ranks at Angola. Associate Warden Hayden Dees and the old-guard leadership notably resisted their reform efforts, particularly those aimed at ending racial segregation and those directed at according inmates in extended lockdown, known as CCR (closed cell restriction), with due process. Associate Warden Dees in particular believed that "a certain type of militant or revolutionary inmate, maybe even a communist type," should remain under lockdown conditions at all times; he wanted nothing to do with documenting decisions about who went into lockdown and for how long in compliance with federal court requirements.

Among the "militant" inmates were Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, both serving time for armed robbery. After they arrived at Angola they became active members of the prison's chapter of the Black Panther Party. This cadre of inmates organized petitions and hunger strikes to protest the horrendous conditions at the prison, and helped new inmates, known as "fresh fish," protect themselves from sexual assault and enslavement. For their efforts, some of the Panthers were placed in solitary confinement to suppress what was viewed as a threat to prison authority.

On April 17, 1972, 23-year-old guard Brent Miller was found in front of an inmate dormitory, stabbed 32 times. Investigators initially had no suspects, but they soon zeroed in on the activists. In a written description [3] [PDF] of his case, Wallace stated that Hayden Dees, the associate warden, "went well out of his way to tie us in with the death for his own political gain. He claimed that Henderson and Hoyle were responsible for Miller's death by releasing the 'militants' (he linked me and Woodfox to those released)."

Statements from Henderson and Hoyle confirm that some of the guards considered them complicit in the killing. Three days later, Lloyd Hoyle, the deputy warden, was called from home to a meeting of staff members, who accused him of turning loose Miller's murderers. Hoyle was assaulted and pushed through a plate glass door, and nearly bled to death before one of the guards decided to drive him to the hospital.

Wallace was thrown into lockdown the day of Brent Miller's murder. Within a few days, officials had obtained the evidence they needed to charge Wallace and three other so-called "militants"—Woodfox, Chester Jackson, and Gilbert Montegut—with the crime. They were indicted by an all-white, all-male grand jury in nearby St. Francisville, Louisiana, which was home to many prison staff, their families, and friends.

A river town near the Mississippi border, St. Francisville proudly advertises itself as plantation country. It was also Klan country, and until the civil rights movement and the FBI arrived in the early 1960s, no African American had registered to vote in the parish in more than 60 years. The defendants in the Miller case contested the indictment on the grounds that women and blacks had been systematically excluded from the jury pool. They were subsequently re-indicted by another grand jury, chosen through "the same or substantially the same grand jury selection procedures," according to Wallace's current brief.

Albert Woodfox was convicted of Miller's murder in a separate trial in 1973. After being granted a change of venue, the three remaining defendants—Wallace, Jackson, and Montegut—stood trial in East Baton Rouge in January 1974—before yet another all-white, all-male jury.
The prosecutors in the case presented no physical evidence to tie the three men to the crime. Although bloody fingerprints had been found near the guard's body, they matched none of the defendants'. According to evidence presented in Wallace's petition, no effort was made to match them to any of the 5,000 other inmate prints on file. A bloody knife, likewise, could not be connected to any of the men on trial. The evidence against them consisted entirely of testimony by other Angola prisoners obtained under highly dubious circumstances.

The prosecution's star witness was Hezekiah Brown, whose eyewitness testimony was indispensible to its case. An aging prisoner serving a life sentence for aggravated rape, Brown said that he had been in the dormitory on the morning of Brent Miller's death, and had seen the defendants stab the guard repeatedly. Former Angola prisoners have said in interviews that Brown was a notorious snitch. But it would be nearly 25 years before proof emerged [4] showing just what happened behind the scenes to secure his testimony.

In 1998, lawyers for Wallace's co-defendant, Albert Woodfox, succeeded in obtaining previously suppressed witness statements, taped interviews, and other documents from the murder investigation carried out by prison officials, the county sheriff's office, and local prosecutors. These materials, supplemented by testimony by Warden Henderson and others, show that Hezekiah Brown was encouraged, if not coerced, to identify the prisoners already chosen as suspects. Henderson admitted he promised to seek a pardon for the lifer if Brown helped them "crack the case." A series of letters to judges, pardon board members, and the secretary of corrections shows that Warden Henderson kept his word, though it would be more than 10 years before Brown's pardon came through. In the meantime, Brown benefitted from an array of special favors, including reassignment to a private room at the low-security "dog pen" where the prison's bloodhounds were trained and a carton of cigarettes, the crucial prison currency, every week.

Another inmate witness, Joseph Richey, placed Wallace and the others at the scene of the crime; he was later found to be a schizophrenic who was heavily medicated with Thorazine. After the trial, Richey was transferred to a plum job at the governor's mansion and given weekend furloughs (during which he robbed several banks). Previously suppressed documents, obtained through the discovery process by Albert Woodfox's lawyers in 1998, show that Angola officials didn't believe Richey had seen anything. The state possessed these documents at the time of Wallace's trial, and presented his possibly perjured testimony nonetheless.

Howard Baker, yet another prisoner who testified at Wallace's trial, has since sworn an affidavit completely recanting his testimony. Baker had initially been a suspect in Miller's murder, and may have been seeking to protect himself. In the affidavit, Baker states:

So I looked at the situation like this, I got 60 something years, and I got a chance to help myself – so I was going to do something to help me get out of this cesspool….So, I gave a statement on 10/16/72, to Warden Dees, which was a lie. And my testimony based on that statement was a lie. I really thought this would help me because Dees told me my statement would get my sentence commuted….It was all over the penitentiary that they [Wallace and Woodfox] were the ones that administration thought was involved. So I gave a statement.

The state played its ace-in-the-hole in the middle of the trial, when one of the four co-defendants walked in after a recess and sat down at the prosecution's table. Chester Jackson had turned state's witness, and would now testify against the others. The defense attorney, Charles Garretson, later testified that he "was in a complete state of shock…it took everything I could glean together to maintain professionalism and sanity and intelligence to go forward after this lunch break." The court gave him less than 30 minutes to prepare to cross-examine his own former client. Although he denied it on the stand, Jackson had clearly cut a deal; shortly after the trial, he would plead guilty to manslaughter. Garretson later said that he felt he was "the only one in the courthouse that didn't know this. I felt that—I know all the deputies knew it. I felt the judge knew it."

These allegations of widespread and deliberate suppression of evidence form the core of Herman Wallace's current appeal. His habeas petition states, "Mr. Wallace's defense strategy was to show that the State's inmate witnesses must be either mistaken or lying. Although the State possessed precisely the information Mr. Wallace's defense counsel sought—material which would show that the State's witnesses lacked credibility and the State's prosecution lacked integrity—the State disclosed none of it." This withholding of evidence, Wallace says, violated his constitutional right to due process.

Wallace's remaining co-defendant, Gilbert Montegut, had a prison guard to confirm his alibi, and was acquitted. Herman Wallace was convicted of the murder. His conviction happened to fall during a brief period when the Supreme Court had effectively struck down capital punishment—had it come at any other time, Wallace would likely have received a death sentence. Instead, he got life without parole and was placed in lockdown, along with Woodfox. The reason given for their confinement in solitary was the nature of the crime—the murder of a guard, which rendered them a threat to others in the prison community. Both Wallace and Woodfox remain there, ostensibly on the same grounds, 35 years later.

If the story of Herman Wallace's trial reads like a study in Southern justice, its sequel shows what has changed in Louisiana in the intervening decades—and what has remained the same. Wallace and Woodfox now have a small legion of active supporters and an impressive team of lawyers renowned for their death penalty appeals, including Nick Trenticosta, director of the Center for Equal Justice, in New Orleans, and George Kendall at the pro bono unit of Squire Sanders & Dempsey in New York. But even good lawyers can't vitiate the Louisiana justice system's apparent determination to keep Wallace and Woodfox locked up and locked down, for reasons that appear to go far beyond the facts of the 1972 murder of Brent Miller.

The two men believe that they were originally targeted for the murder because their political beliefs and activism represented a threat to the absolute power of prison authorities. Statements from Angola's current warden, Burl Cain, suggest they are being kept permanently in solitary for much the same reason. Cain has been widely celebrated [5] for "transforming" Angola, largely through the institution of Christian "moral rehabilitation," which he sees as the only path to redemption for the sinners in his charge. There is no room, either in Cain's worldview or on his prison plantation, for people who question authority like Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have.

In a 2008 deposition, Cain declared, "The prison operates with one authentic authoritarian figure, the warden and the rule book." He also said that Woodfox's lack of deference made him a dangerous man: "The thing about him is that he wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant. He wants to show to others that he is powerful and strong."

Woodfox's lawyers have pointed out that he had no record of violence and few disciplinary infractions in the past 20 years. They documented a similar record for Wallace in a 2006 deposition [6] [PDF]: "Mr. Wallace's most recent disciplinary report for institutional violence occurred some 22 years ago," it said, and in recent years, Wallace's handful of infractions included "possessing handmade earrings and a poem, 'A Defying Voice'"; "wearing a handmade necklace with a black fist"; and "possessing the publication, It's About Time, a Black Panther publication 16 containing articles/photos on the Angola three, characterized as, quote, 'racist literature' by security personnel." His most recent disciplinary report "was December 2005, when he was found in the possession of excess number of postage stamps, for which he received thirty days cell confinement."

But Cain believes "It's not a matter of write-ups. It's a matter of attitude and what you are." And to Cain, what Woodfox and Wallace are and will always be is Black Panthers. Associate Warden Hayden Dees previously said that "a certain type of militant or revolutionary inmate, maybe even a communist type" was dangerous enough to be kept in permanent lockdown. In 2008, Cain said that Woodfox belongs in solitary because "I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them."

Wallace says [7] that Cain at least once offered to release the two men into the general population if they renounced their political views and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. He refused. Cain declared that "Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace is locked in time with that Black Panther revolutionary actions they were doing way back when…And that's still their motive and that's still their goal. And from that, there's been no rehabilitation."

Louisiana's attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, also appears determined to keep the two men in prison at all costs—a vow that he will likely try to uphold even if Wallace's case succeeds in federal court. Caldwell's resolve has already been tested in the case of Woodfox: When a federal judge overturned Woodfox's conviction in 2008 and ordered him released on bail, the attorney general sprang into action—filing an emergency motion to keep him behind bars, sending fearmongering emails to the community where Woodfox was planning to stay with his niece, and telling the press that he was "the most dangerous person on the planet." Persuaded by Caldwell's plea and Cain's testimony about his dangerous nature, the federal appeals court granted the motion and denied Woodfox bail; he remains in lockdown, awaiting his appeal. In a recent letter, Wallace wrote of Caldwell, "Like most prosecutors, he will never admit he made a mistake, he's fighting to keep us imprisoned. The reputation of the Louisiana justice system is at stake here. If we gain our freedom it would expose the corruption that is rampant throughout the system."

The fate of both Wallace and Woodfox ultimately lies in the hands of the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans—and here, they are worse off than they might have been 40 years ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, a small group of Fifth Circuit judges—mostly Southern-bred moderate Republicans—won a reputation [8] for advancing civil rights and especially school desegregation. But today the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, is among the most ideologically conservative of the federal appeals courts. It is notable for its overburdened docket and for its hostility to appeals from defendants in capital cases, including claims based on faulty prosecution and suppressed evidence. In particular, the Fifth Circuit has kept the gurneys rolling in Texas' busy execution chamber. The court has even been reprimanded by the US Supreme Court, itself no friend to death row inmates: In June 2004, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote [9] that in handing down death penalty rulings, the Fifth Circuit was doing no more than "paying lip service to principles" of appellate law.

It will almost certainly be years before Herman Wallace's criminal appeal is finally resolved. While their case is exceptional, Wallace, now 68, and Woodfox, 62, are in certain respects emblematic of an entire generation of prisoners who came of age in a time of lengthening sentences and tightening parole restrictions—spared execution to live out their lives in prison, sometimes in complete isolation. "I'm in this cell or in the hall 24/7, 23 hours in the cell, one hour on the hall,'' he wrote in a letter earlier this year. "Either way you look at it I am locked up with no contact with any others. I use stacks of books for exercise and thereafter I am either writing or reading.'' Wallace keeps himself together by concentrating on his case. "I have no time for foolishness," his letter continues. "I am in a struggle against the state of Louisiana on two strategic fronts, and hear me when I tell you they are not fighting fair."

Perhaps the ultimate irony of Woodfox and Wallace's predicament is that while their political beliefs may have doomed them to a life in lockdown, these same beliefs have also given them the strength to endure it. In his New Yorker piece on solitary confinement as torture, Atul Gawande describes how frequently prisoners have mentally and physically disintegrated in such conditions. What is remarkable about Wallace and Woodfox is how lucid and resolute they remain. They stay in close touch with their supporters. They know every detail of their cases, and when they find the opportunity, they provide counsel to other prisoners. They take pride in refusing to submit to the dictates of the state or of the warden, to accept anyone else's rules or anyone else's god. It's what keeps them sane, and perhaps what keeps them alive.

Herman Wallace writes dozens of letters each week. He composes poems and makes drawings and elaborate paper flowers. For the past five years, he has also been collaborating on a project with Jackie Sumell, a young artist who first contacted him in 2002 with the question "What kind of a house does a man who has lived in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?" Together they designed a home [10], which Sumell has translated into architectural plans, models, a traveling exhibit, and a book of drawings and letters called The House That Herman Built. Wallace describes a house with "a swimming pool with a light green bottom and a large Panther in the center. I want flower gardens surrounding the house enclosed. A garage for two cars. A large tree in the backyard under which will be my patio.''

"To build this house is to build my soul," Wallace wrote in a 2006 letter to Sumell. He continued, "I'm often asked what did I come to prison for; and now that I think about it Jackie, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what I came here for, what matters now is what I leave with. And I can assure you, however I leave, I won't leave nothing behind."

Among the activists who took up the cause of the Angola 3 were the late Anita Roddick [11], founder of the Body Shop (and a former Mother Jones board member), and her husband, Gordon. The Roddick's family charity, the Roddick Foundation [12], contributed funding for this story.
Source URL: http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/herman-wallace-angola-3-solitary-confinement

Links:
[1] http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/06/life-permanent-lockdown?page=1
[2] http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/03/nation/na-angola3
[3] http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Angola3/pdf/Herman_Wallace.pdf
[4] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96199165
[5] http://www.amazon.com/Cains-Redemption-Dennis-Shere/dp/1881273245
[6] http://www.a3grassroots.org/casehistoryimages/08AlbertReleaseReqPt3.pdf
[7] http://www.alternet.org/rights/50663
[8] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040503/bass
[9] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/national/05texas.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1
[10] http://www.hermanshouse.org/
[11] http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/convicts-and-dame
[12] http://www.theroddickfoundation.org/

Posted by lois at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2009

Nursing homes with razor wire. Are elderly prisoners really a threat to public safety?

Opinion
Nursing homes with razor wire
Are elderly prisoners really a threat to public safety?

By David Fathi

December 23, 2009

Sometime in the 1970s, the United States began a love affair with incarceration that continues to this day. After holding nearly steady for decades, our prison population began to climb as criminal justice policy took a sharply punitive turn, with the massive criminalization of drug use, "three strikes" laws and other harsh sentencing practices. More people were going to prison, and staying there longer. By 2005, the prison population was six times what it had been in 1975.

One little-known side effect of this population explosion has been a sharp increase in the number of elderly people behind bars. According to the Justice Department, in 1980 the United States had about 9,500 prisoners age 55 and older; by 2008, the number had increased tenfold, to 94,800. That same year, the number of prisoners 50 and older was just shy of 200,000 -- about the size of the entire U.S. prison population in the early 1970s.

People age 50 or 55 may seem a bit young to be classified as elderly. But because their lives have often been characterized by poverty, trauma and limited access to medical care and rehabilitative services, most prisoners are physiologically older than their chronological age would suggest, and more likely to have disabling medical conditions than the general population. One study cited by Ronald H. Aday in his 1994 article in Federal Probation concluded that the average prisoner over 50 has a physiological age 11.5 years older than his chronological age.

With 1 in 11 U.S. prisoners serving a life sentence -- in some states, the figure is 1 in 6 -- it's no surprise that the number of elderly prisoners is skyrocketing. In 2007, the New York Times profiled then-89-year-old Charles Friedgood, a New York state prisoner who had served more than 30 years of a life sentence for second-degree murder. Although he had terminal cancer and had undergone several operations, including a colostomy, he had been denied parole five times before being released in 2007. Friedgood at least had the opportunity to apply for parole; in some states, parole has been abolished, and a life sentence means exactly that.

Being in prison is hard on anyone, but the elderly face special dangers, particularly if they are ill or disabled. Some have complex medical and mental health needs that prisons are ill-equipped to handle. Many prisons are not accessible to persons with mobility impairments; for them, bathing, using the toilet or even getting in and out of their cells can be a difficult, dangerous challenge. And older prisoners are more likely to be robbed, assaulted or otherwise victimized.

Some states have so many elderly prisoners that they have built special facilities to house them. Several years ago I visited the Ahtanum View Corrections Center, Washington state's prison for the elderly. Everywhere I looked were aged, frail, disabled people, some of whom could barely move without assistance. The prison's webpage helpfully points out that a volunteer clergy team is available to assist prisoners with "end-of-life issues."

The main justification for incarceration is to protect public safety. But it's hard to see the public safety rationale for keeping so many elderly people in prison.

It's even harder to understand the economic justification. Incarceration is expensive -- about $24,000 per year for the average prisoner, according to a 2008 Pew Center on the States report. Keeping someone over 55 locked up costs about three times as much. Given that criminal behavior drops off dramatically with advancing age, this is a major investment for very little return.

As the United States faces its worst fiscal crisis in decades, many states are taking a hard look at their prisons, which consume a large and increasing portion of state budgets. As part of this long overdue re-examination, lawmakers should ask whether so many elderly people really need to be in prison and whether the state should be in the business of operating nursing homes with razor wire.

David Fathi is director of the U.S. division at Human Rights Watch.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-fathi24-2009dec24,0,1216548.story
latimes.com

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

December 21, 2009

PA plans to send 1000 prisoners to VA and 1000 prisoners to MI

Pennsylvania to send 2,000 inmates to other states
Monday, December 21, 2009

By Tom Barnes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

HARRISBURG -- Faced with an ever-growing problem of prison overcrowding, state prison officials have decided to move 2,000 inmates to prisons in two other states -- 1,000 going to Michigan and another 1,000 to Virginia.

Prisoners will begin moving out no later than February, Susan McNaughton, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections said today.

Some will go to a vacant prison in Muskegon, Mich., and the rest will go to a prison in Chatham, Va. Those sent to the two other states will be inmates who get no or few visitors and those with no serious, ongoing medical or mental health problems.

The cost will be $62 per day per inmate, or a total cost of $124,000 per day for all 2,000 inmates. Pennsylvania officials hope to begin bringing the inmates back by 2013, when four new prisons have been completed here, each holding 2,000 inmates. If the 2,000 inmates stay in Michigan and Virginia for three years, it will cost Pennsylvania $135 million.

Currently the prison population, for the 27 state prisons, is 51,400, up from 45,000 just a few years ago. The state plans to build one new prison in Centre County, one in Fayette County and two in Montgomery County. Ground is to be broken for the Centre County facility in six months.

In addition to the 2,000 inmates going to the other states, there are 512 state prisoners in county jails in Pennsylvania.

More details in tomorrow's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09355/1022624-100.stm

Posted by lois at 08:30 PM | Comments (0)

Combating Prisoner Abuse- Editorial in the NY Times in support of reforming PLRA

Editorial- NY Times
Combating Prisoner Abuse
December 20, 2009

When Mississippi inmates sued their prison, charging that they had been sodomized by a staff member, the claim was thrown out. Under a harsh federal law, inmates must show that they suffered a “physical injury” to prevail in a suit challenging cruel prison conditions. A federal district court ruled in 2006 that the alleged sexual assault did not constitute physical injury.

Congress included the physical injury requirement in the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which it passed in 1996 to deter inmates from bringing frivolous lawsuits. What the law has done instead is insulate prisons from a large number of very worthy lawsuits, and allow abusive and cruel mistreatment of inmates to go unpunished.

Legislation introduced by Representative Robert Scott, Democrat of Virginia, would undo the worst parts of that law. Most important, his legislation, the Prison Abuse Remedies Act, would remove the physical injury requirement. Prisons across the country have used this requirement to dismiss suits challenging all kinds of outrageous treatment: strip-searching of female prisoners by male guards; revealing to other inmates that a prisoner was H.I.V.-positive; forcing an inmate to stand naked for 10 hours.

Mr. Scott’s bill would allow prisoners to prevail under the same conditions as plaintiffs in other kinds of civil rights cases. It would also make important changes in the 1996 law’s “exhaustion” requirement, which forces inmates to bring their complaints to the prison’s own grievance system before they can sue. A carefully drawn exhaustion requirement could help resolve problems locally, and avoid unnecessary litigation. But the one in the current law lets prisons put up procedural hurdles that make it difficult or impossible for prisoners to navigate the bureaucracy and get their complaints heard in court.

Juvenile inmates are not a significant source of frivolous lawsuits, but they are at increased risk of abuse in prison, especially sexual abuse. The current House bill would remove all of the 1996 law’s restrictions for suits brought by inmates under the age of 18.

There are many problems with American prisons, including crowding, inadequate medical treatment and little opportunity for rehabilitation. Mr. Scott’s bill addresses one that is less well-known, but no less real. The House should pass it, and the Senate should get to work on its own version.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 21, 2009, on page A30 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/opinion/21mon3.html?_r=1

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

December 17, 2009

Politicians Are Portraying 'Gitmo North' as a Terrific Local Jobs Program--Don't Count On It.

Politicians Are Portraying 'Gitmo North' as a Terrific Local Jobs Program -- Don't Count On It
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on December 17, 2009, Printed on December 17, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144619/

The decision announced by the Obama administration this week to transfer some Guantánamo detainees to an empty supermax prison in northwestern Illinois has been portrayed as another step toward finally shutting down Guantánamo. But the more we learn about the government's plans for Thomson Correctional Center, the more it resembles a Bush-era blueprint to turn a rural Illinois community into a microcosm of the "War on Terror."

Located just 15 miles from the Illinois compound operated by the notorious mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater, the prison will be refashioned to replicate some of Guantánamo's worst excesses -- namely, the military commissions process and indefinite "preventive" detention -- and largely staffed by U.S. military forces and well-paid private contractors, who will swallow up a large number of the jobs the project will create. Political rhetoric lauding the economic windfall in store for the residents of Thomson and its surrounding counties ("3,000 jobs" and "more than $1 billion into the local economy," according to Sen. Dick Durbin), may help sell the idea to Americans, but these claims are dubious at best and a distraction from an ugly reality at worst. Guantánamo is not so much being closed, it is being moved -- onto U.S. soil.

Speaking to Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night, Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky praised the economic promise offered by the Thomson project, while also providing an important, if little noticed, caveat. Out of those estimated 3,000 jobs, "Fifteen hundred are going to be military personnel that will move to the area to actually guard the prisoners," she said, adding "but lots of local jobs have been promised."

According to an analysis of the Thomson project by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, once the prison has been fully renovated and upgraded (to what has been described as a "beyond supermax" facility), "in essence, DoD (Department of Defense) and BoP (Bureau of Prisons) will operate two entirely separate facilities side by side." One facility will be run by the Pentagon and will hold an untold number of former Guantánamo prisoners. The other will be run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons and will hold 1,500 to 1,600 federal prisoners, to be transferred from overcrowded prisons elsewhere.

On the Pentagon side, the Department of Defense estimates that it will need "between 1,000 and 1,500 employees" to staff its wing of the prison. "One-third of these employees will be government civilian employees or private contractors with annual salaries between $80,000 and $90,000. The other two-thirds of the employees will be military personnel, with salaries of $65,000, which includes a housing allowance."

Not surprisingly, the analysis states: "DoD expects few of its direct hires to come from the local communities."

So what's left for the locals? Lower salaries, for one (with the exception of some prison guard jobs). And once the construction jobs are done, not much; while the economic analysis reports that "local residents will be excellent candidates for 1,240 to 1,410" of the jobs relating to "the modification, opening, and running of the facility," it also states that "in total, BoP expects to hire 448 workers locally." That's a far cry from the 3,000-job figure being thrown around. Although much stock is being placed in "indirect jobs due to increased spending and economic activity," as well as potential teaching jobs for theoretical schools that will accommodate military families who move to the region, these estimates are hardly definite.

In truth, the Obama economic advisers provide a pretty confusing picture, based on estimates and "assumptions" that are likely to change, of what sorts of jobs await Illinois residents thanks to the transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo. But that's not stopping local politicians from running with the narrative that this will be an economic boon. In a region where unemployment hovers around 11 percent, "people are desperate for good jobs," Sen. Durbin told reporters on Tuesday, "… and these jobs are some of the best."

Prisons: The Gift That Keeps On Giving?

As political rhetoric goes, this is hardly a new way to sell a prison project. From New York to Colorado, politicians have been at it for decades.

But do new prisons really provide such an economic gift to the communities that host them? The evidence is mixed.

Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, scoffs at the claim that Thomson will bring an economic surge to the region. "Three thousand jobs is ridiculous," he told AlterNet. "A two-thousand bed prison typically will employ around five hundred to seven hundred people." There are "the spin-off jobs -- people employed by
diners, Walmarts, etc.," but in both cases, "often the locals don't get the jobs because they are not qualified." This will certainly apply to Thomson -- unless we are meant to believe that "the most secure maximum security prison in our country of all time" (in the words of Illinois Governor Pat Quinn) will hire a large swath of the local unemployed. "Prisons do require employees and these will be federal employees with decent salaries and benefits," Wright says. But "building prisons as an economic development tool has been mixed."

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, who has researched the economic effects of prisons on small towns, says that economic promises made by local politicians often sound better than they actually are. "In recent years many small-town local leaders have pushed for new prison construction as a form of economic development and job creation," he told AlterNet. "In practice, such projects are not very successful in stimulating local economies, for several reasons.

"First, jobs at the prison do not necessarily go to locals, who in many cases may not have the proper qualifications. Instead, prison staff often commute from large distances. In turn, this means they are not buying houses near the prison, nor spending much food or recreation money in the local town since they are just commuting back and forth to work. Likewise, provision of food services and other supplies often is contracted from providers at a great distance from the town. Finally, establishing a locality as a 'prison town' may detract from efforts to attract other forms of economic development or tourism, thus minimizing any long-term economic benefits."

On that last point, it's hard to imagine that Thomson, whose slim Wikipedia profile boasts the claim to fame "Melon Capital of the World," won't be swallowed whole by the facility many have already dubbed "Gitmo North." It is already defined by the empty supermax prison -- and it sits a short distance away from another notorious facility, "Blackwater USA North," the local training ground for the infamous mercenary force.

'Prison Boosters In Rural America Should Be Careful What They Wish For'

A number of reports released in the past few years years have cast serious doubts on the claims that prisons will automatically breathe new economic life into depressed regions. Nevertheless, the perception that prisons equal jobs remains firmly intact.

Part of this might be wishful thinking. For people outside these mostly rural areas, it's hard to conceive of just how deep-seated these beliefs can be. In an article titled "Don't Build it Here -- The Hype Versus the Reality of Prisons and Local Employment," sociologists Clayton Mosher, Gregory Hooks and Peter Wood wrote: "Belief in the positive economic impact of prisons is so strong that a town in Illinois composed a rap song and purchased television advertising as part of a public relations blitz for legislators deciding where to locate a prison. In Texas, students in a Sunday school class reportedly got on their knees and prayed that a new prison would open in their area."

In Tamms, Illinois, home to the brutal Tamms supermax prison, which holds its prisoners in solitary confinement nearly 24 hours a day, "a billboard for the local bank promised 'super-max-imum savings,' while a local restaurant offered the 'supermax burger' on its menu. A billboard outside Tamms displays the message 'Welcome to Tamms, the Home of the Supermax -- Thank You Governor Edgar.'"

Yet years after such prisons were constructed, there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence that they resulted in overwhelming economic benefits. (In the case of Thomson, the prison generated plenty of economic-stimulus buzz when it was first being constructed, only to sit, empty, when the state realized it could not afford to run it.)

"Despite the prevailing wisdom regarding prisons as economic panaceas, evidence suggests that prison boosters in rural America should be careful what they wish for," wrote public policy analyst and prison expert Tracy Huling in her essay, "Building a Prison Economy In Rural America."

The majority of public prison jobs ... do not go to people already living in the community. Higher-paying management and correctional officer jobs in public prisons come with educational and experience requirements which many rural residents do not have ... [According to Ruth Gilmore, a professor at UC-Berkeley] ... less than 20% of jobs on average go to current residents of a town with a new state prison. While over time that percentage increases, it is below 40% for all of California's new rural prison towns.

The findings of Gilmore's study in California are echoed in reports from disappointed local officials in prison towns across the country. The 750 jobs that a state prison opened in 1999 brought to the tiny rural town of Malone, New York went mostly to people from outside the town because of prison system seniority rules. According to the village's director of the Office of Community Development, "Did we get seven-hundred-fifty jobs? We didn't get a hundred."

Looking at the impact of prisons on employment growth in thousands of U.S. counties between 1969 and 1994, Mosher, Hooks and Wood found that, "for both income per capita and total earnings," employment grew most slowly in rural counties where a new prison was built.

"For non-metropolitan counties -- the counties in which the majority of prisons have been built in recent years and the counties that have typically been the ones competing to attract prisons in order to boost local economic growth -- there is no evidence that prisons have had a positive impact. Neither established or newly built prisons made a significant contribution to employment growth in rural counties."

'Worse Than Guantánamo'?

While bringing prisoners from Guantánamo onto U.S. soil may indeed help the Obama administration close down that monument to lawlessness in Cuba -- a measure now several years overdue -- the reality is that the benefits will be almost purely symbolic. Instead of abolishing Guantánamo's notoriously rigged (if somewhat improved) military commissions process, the Obama administration is importing it onto U.S. soil. Even worse, perhaps, in addition to the prisoners who will be brought to stand trial via military commission -- a process that will take place within the perimeter of the prison -- another group of prisoners will reportedly be brought to Thomson only to remain there indefinitely -- subjects of "preventive detention," a policy Obama first stated his intention of pursuing earlier this year. As Constitutional expert Glenn Greenwald wrote on Tuesday, "What is the point of closing Guantánamo only to replicate its essential framework -- imprisonment without trials -- a few thousand miles to the north?"

Thomson Correctional has already been dubbed "Gitmo North" -- an obvious pejorative among human rights lawyers, but one that has unmistakable political value for the Obama folks. With some Republicans screaming bloody murder about the fact that "terrorists" are being brought onto U.S. soil (an RNC release called it "a risky experiment with America's national security"), those in charge of the measure have repeatedly stressed that this will not be just any supermax prison. As a facility, it will be unprecedented. "This will be the safest prison in America," Sen. Durbin told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday, reminding them that Illinois was the first state in the country to open a federal supermax prison (a dubious distinction to be sure). It is not too cynical to suggest that the term "Gitmo North" will help blunt criticism from the fear-mongering right.

The ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and numerous progressive writers have all expressed their alarm at Obama's announcement this week. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said that it "contradicts everything the president has said about the need for America to return to leading with its values," and warned Congress "to legislate responsibly and not set any policies or precedents for indefinite detention on U.S. soil, or create any violation of the Geneva Conventions." Center for Constitutional Rights Executive Director Vincent Warren pointed out that the Obama administration "has already cleared for release at least 116 of the 210 men who remain at Guantánamo," many of whom "have nowhere to go because they are from countries that routinely engage in torture and other human rights abuses."

"Will they now be subject to inhuman conditions of solitary confinement in a maximum security facility despite the fact that they will never be charged with anything and have been approved for release?" asked Warren. "For them Thomson, Illinois may be worse than Guantánamo."

Activists who for years have been protesting Guantánamo in Washington are already gearing up to take their activities to the Midwest."If moving prisoners to Illinois is a step toward charging, trying, or releasing them, then it is potentially a step in the right direction," says Matt Deloisio of the grassroots group Witness Against Torture. "But if it is a cynical jobs program, and intended … to be the new home for those we have held for years without charge or trial whom we anticipate keeping in 'prolonged detention,' then it is a waste of time."

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World Special Coverage. http://twitter.com/LilianaSegura
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144619/

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December 16, 2009

MA: Boston Bar Issues Report Saying MA should join almost every other state in allowing DNA tests to uncover wrongful convictions

Perhaps the committee’s most notable recommendation is for Massachusetts to join 46 other states that have passed laws allowing convicts to have DNA tests performed on evidence that may prove their innocence. The other states without DNA-testing statutes are Alabama, Alaska, and Oklahoma.

Study says widen access to DNA tests
Change may uncover wrongful convictions
By Jonathan Saltzman
Globe Staff / December 16, 2009

Massachusetts should join almost every other state in the country by passing a law to give convicted prisoners access to DNA evidence that could prove their innocence, according to a new study of ways to prevent and uncover wrongful convictions.

The Bay State is one of only four states without a law allowing prisoners to have DNA tests performed on evidence that remains in police files. In June, the US Supreme Court said such individuals have no constitutional right to biological evidence for testing, but the court pointed out that most states already allow the testing.

Because Massachusetts is not among those states, it is often up to each district attorney whether convicts get to test evidence. In Plymouth County, a convicted murderer has been fighting prosecutors for nearly a decade to get access to DNA evidence and has filed a suit in federal court.

The study - which was made by a Boston Bar Association committee of current and former prosecutors, high-ranking police officials, defense lawyers, and a former judge - proposes a bill that the panel says would ensure that inmates “who claim they are factually innocent could file a motion to identify the evidence in their case and obtain its postconviction testing.’’ The bill would also require the evidence to be preserved.

The 116-page report, which was obtained by the Globe and will be made public today, makes numerous other recommendations to prevent wrongful convictions.

Those recommendations include requiring police investigators to videotape interviews with suspects in custody in serious crimes and to audiotape interviews with witnesses, with the individuals’ consent. Some police departments have routinely conducted taping, although investigators were initially skeptical suspects would agree to it.

The report also urges police departments to follow the lead of Boston in updating procedures for eyewitness identification of suspects. Misidentification is widely believed to be the main cause of wrongful convictions.

“Adopting the report’s recommendations would substantially reduce the risk of convicting the innocent while the guilty go free,’’ Kathy B. Weinmen, the former president of the bar association who appointed the committee, said in the report.

The two cochairmen of the committee are well-known former prosecutors, David E. Meier and Martin F. Murphy.

Meier knows all too well about wrongful convictions. As head of the homicide unit of the Suffolk district attorney’s office from 1996 to 2008, he had to inform judges that prosecutors had wrongfully persuaded juries to convict eight murder defendants who were ultimately freed.

“The wrongful conviction of an innocent defendant strikes at the foundation of the criminal justice system,’’ he said in an interview. “It impacts everyone: the defendant, the victim and the victim’s family, the integrity of the system, and, perhaps most importantly, the public’s confidence in our system of justice.’’

Since 1982, at least 23 defendants wrongfully convicted in Massachusetts have been freed from prison, according to the New England Innocence Project, which specializes in using DNA testing to reopen cases.

A number of prison inmates in Massachusetts, particularly in Suffolk County, have obtained access to DNA evidence that resulted in exonerations.

But Meier and Murphy, a former high-ranking prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Massachusetts and in Middlesex County, said the practice varies widely, depending on the district attorney’s office. In Plymouth County, for example, Robert Wade was convicted in 1997 of aggravated rape and felony murder in an attack on an elderly woman who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease at a Lakeville farm where he worked.

Wade contends that semen found on the woman’s clothes did not belong to him, although a relative of the victim found both Wade and the woman nude in his cabin. Rudimentary biological testing done before the trial said the genetic material could have come from Wade but also from someone else, said his appellate lawyer, Janet H. Pumphrey of Lenox. But Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz has opposed requests for DNA testing.

“The district attorney’s office has in its possession evidence that could exonerate him and won’t let him have access to it,’’ said Pumphrey, who has filed suit in US District Court in Boston accusing prosecutors of violating Wade’s due process rights.

In an interview Monday, Cruz said proponents of a DNA-testing law are “trying to create some constitutional right to examine any piece of evidence at any time.’’

He said he does not oppose reexamining bona fide evidence that could prove someone’s innocence. But, he said, he objects to requests to reexamine evidence “ad nauseum,’’ adding that “at some point, there must be some finality for victims.’’

State Senator Cynthia Stone Creem, cochairwoman of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary, said that she has filed DNA-testing legislation three times since 2005 but that it has encountered resistance at least partly from lawmakers concerned about being seen as soft on crime. She said she hoped the report by the bar association committee will boost chances of passing the legislation.

Among the other members of the bar association committee are Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis; William J. Leahy, chief counsel of the public defender agency; Joseph F. Savage Jr., a defense lawyer and chairman of the New England Innocence Project; and Christopher J. Armstrong, retired chief justice of the state Appeals Court.

Posted by lois at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2009

H.R. 2450: Help Create Transparency and Fiscal Accountability in Privately-Owned Federal Prisons Co-Sponsor the Private Prison Information

Shelia Jackson Lee had introduced this Bill. They are seeking congressional co-sponsors.
Help Create Transparency and Fiscal Accountability in Privately-Owned Federal Prisons
Co-Sponsor the Private Prison Information Act, H.R. 2450

Current Co-Sponsors (11): Berry, Brady, D. Davis, Carney, Holden, Kilpatrick, LoBiondo, Meeks, D. Moore, Murtha, and Payne

Dear Colleague:

I invite you to join me in supporting legislation that seeks to provide transparency and public accountability for privately-operated prisons that house federal prisoners. The Private Prison Information Act, H.R. 2450, requires non Federal prisons and correctional facilities holding Federal prisoners under a contract with the Federal government to make the same information available to the public that Federal prisons and correctional facilities are required to make available.

As federal agencies increase their use of for-profit prisons, it is imperative that we permit the public to obtain information about the operation of those facilities and their impact on local communities. Over 32,000 federal prisoners are held at privately-run detention facilities at any given time. Since taxpayer money is spent to operate these prisons, the public has a right to know whether they are getting value and quality for their dollars.

For many years, private prison firms have hid behind a corporate veil of secrecy to keep damaging information from becoming public. H.R. 2450 would put an end to this practice, and would place private prisons that house federal prisoners on the same footing as federal detention facilities. If federal agencies must comply with FOIA requests, then private prisons that house federal prisoners, through contracts paid with public funds, should do likewise.

Last year, TIME magazine exposed the practice of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) of keeping two sets of internal quality assurance audit reports: one for release to government contracting agencies and another, more detailed audit report for internal use only. CCA’s general counsel admitted in a written statement to Senator Feinstein that the company “did not make our customers aware of these documents.” This blatant concealment of information from the public – and from government agencies – must be rectified.

Studies have shown that private prison guards receive less pay and fewer benefits, and have higher rates of turnover than those in the public sector. As a result, employees and inmates at private prisons, as well as surrounding communities, are exposed to greater risks. Earlier this year, there were two riots at the Reeves detention center in Pecos, Texas, which houses federal prisoners and is operated by the GEO Group, a private prison contractor. The Obama Administration recently announced plans to overhaul the nation's immigration detention system and transform it from one reliant on scattered local jails and private prisons to a centralized one with greater federal oversight and accountability.

As GEO is not presently subject to FOIA requests, local residents cannot obtain basic information about such violent incidents and whether their families are being put in danger. While members of the public can obtain limited records from contracting federal agencies through FOIA requests, such requests should properly be filed with the private prison contractors, which are often the sole source of such information.

Because I am deeply concerned with this lack of public accountability by private prison companies, I hope you will lend support to this effort to protect the public’s right to know about the operations of privately-operated prisons and detention facilities. The federal government cannot contract away the public’s right to oversee the operation of their government by hiring private contractors to provide correctional services.

Very Truly Yours,
/s/
Sheila Jackson Lee
Member of Congress

Posted by lois at 03:12 PM | Comments (0)

Colorado's prison spending tops all other states

DATA GEEK: Colorado's prison spending tops all other states
December 11, 2009
Prisons and other programs for criminal offenders consumed a bigger chunk of Colorado’s 2008 government budget than for any other state, according to data the U.S. Census Bureau released Wednesday.

The bureau’s annual survey of state government finances found Colorado spent $996 million on corrections programs in 2008, which accounts for 5.1 percent of the state’s general revenue that year. No other state spent more. The second-ranking state for corrections spending was Maryland, which spent $1.4 billion or 4.7 percent of its revenue. On average, states spent 3.3 percent of their revenues on corrections.

Colorado was home to 23,274 state and federal prison inmates last year, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The prison population in Colorado rose 4.5 percent each year on average from 2000 to 2007, which is more than double the national average increase.

The compilation of government finances reveals other facts about Colorado’s spending priorities:

* A top priority was education, which consumed $7.9 billion or 41 percent of state revenue. Colorado ranks 14th for state government spending on education. Remember this doesn’t include the largest source of money for kindergarten through 12th-grade education, which is local property taxes.
* Public welfare programs such as aid to poor families cost the state $4.5 billion or 23 percent of revenues. Colorado ranks 39th for the portion of its budget spent on public welfare. This also doesn’t include local government spending, which varies a lot from county to county.
* State spending on highway projects was $1.3 billion or 7 percent of revenues. The national average state spending on highways is also 7 percent. This doesn’t include money spent at the local level such as road projects run by the Pikes Peak Rural Transportation District.
http://www.gazette.com/articles/colorado-90664-programs-data.html

Posted by lois at 03:07 PM | Comments (0)

U.S. Said to Pick Illinois Prison to House "Detainees" from Guantanamo

U.S. Said to Pick Illinois Prison to House Detainees
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
Published: December 14, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is expected to announce on Tuesday that it has selected a prison in northwestern Illinois to house terrorism suspects now being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in a major step toward shutting down that military detention facility.

An administration official said President Obama had directed the federal government to proceed with acquiring the Thomson Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in a rural village about 150 miles west of Chicago.

Gov. Patrick J. Quinn of Illinois and the state’s senior senator, Richard J. Durbin, will be briefed about the plan at the White House on Tuesday afternoon. The officials, both Democrats, have been enthusiastic supporters of bringing Guantánamo prisoners to Thomson, arguing that it would bring jobs to an impoverished part of the state.

When talk of bringing Guantánamo detainees to Thomson first surfaced in late November, both Mr. Quinn and Mr. Durbin held a series of news conferences to promote the idea of turning over the empty state prison, which was built in 2001 at a cost to Illinois taxpayers of about $120 million, to the federal penal system.

Top Illinois Republicans — including Representatives Donald Manzullo, whose district includes the prison, and Mark Steven Kirk, a candidate for the United States Senate seat once held by Mr. Obama — have denounced previous talk of such a move, saying it could make Illinois a target for terrorist attacks.

But Obama administration officials argue that the prison would be secure and that it would enhance national security to close Guantánamo because it has become a global symbol and a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.

Mr. Obama declared shortly after his inauguration that he would close the Guantánamo prison — a signature component of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy — within a year. But dealing with the roughly 200 detainees at the prison has proved difficult, and he is widely expected to miss that deadline.

In May, Mr. Obama proposed bringing some detainees to a facility inside the United States, including some who officials have decided are too difficult to prosecute and too dangerous to release. They would continue to be held without trial as “combatants” under the laws of war.

Under the proposal for Thomson, the Bureau of Prisons would buy the facility and improve its security. Most of the prison would house ordinary high-security inmates, but a part would be leased to the Defense Department to hold terror suspects.

It was not immediately clear how the government would pay for the prison and upgrades, but White House officials have floated the idea of including financing for it in the 2010 military appropriations bill.

Earlier this year, Congress enacted a law forbidding Guantánamo detainees to be brought onto United States soil except for the purpose of prosecution. But leading Democrats said they were open to lifting that restriction after the administration came up with a plan for how to handle the prisoners.
A version of this article appeared in print on December 15, 2009, on page A26 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/us/15gitmo.html?_r=1&hp

Posted by lois at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)

December 11, 2009

The Graying of America’s Prisons: Part Two (with a focus on Angola LA, Tiyo Attallah Salah-El in Dallas PA and Norfolk MA Prison)

The Graying of America’s Prisons: Part Two

By James Ridgeway
Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Part two of our special report explores the movements in several states to relieve the burdens and tragedy America’s increasingly geriatric prison population

Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, members of the Angola 3, have spent most of the past 37 years in lockdown in Louisiana.

A civil action currently in federal court claims that both men, now in their 60s, have suffered serious harm to their physical and mental health from their years in isolation, spending 23 hours a day alone in 6 x 9 foot cells.

What distinguishes this case in particular is that it not only challenges the constitutionality of long-term, continuous solitary confinement, but draws on its particular effect on aging prisoners.

According to medical reports submitted to the court, the men suffer from arthritis, hypertension, and kidney failure, as well as memory impairment, insomnia, claustrophobia, anxiety, and depression. Wallace, who just celebrated his 67th birthday, has also become hard of hearing, and has had increasing difficulty communicating with attorneys or friends, on the phone and during visits.

Under the Americans for Disabilities Act, he and other hearing impaired inmates should receive whatever special care they require. In Wallace’s case, according to one of his attorneys, the prison [he has been transferred out of lockdown at Angola to lockdown at Hunt near Baton Rouge.] gave him one—not two—hearing aids, which made matters worse by adversely effecting his balance. (The prison has promised to provide a second hearing aid.)

Many older offenders suffer from serious mental illness–some of it produced or exacerbated by lengthy incarcerations. One study revealed depression among male prisoners was 50 percent higher than for those living outside. All in all, 54 percent of older prisoners met standards for psychiatric disorders. Williams and Abraldes write: “In one report from a maximum-security hospital, 75 percent of elderly prisoners were admitted between age 20 and 30 and the majority were schizophrenic.”

At Louisiana’s Angola Prison, the warden reported that 2,000 of over 5,000 inmates were on psychotropic drugs. Many mentally ill prisoners are simply warehoused and fed drugs to keep them under control. Even worse, some are labeled “discipline” problems, and end up in solitary confinement. A 2006 report from the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons found that mentally ill prisoners are increasingly being relegated to isolation cells where they live in “torturous conditions that are proven to cause mental deterioration.”

For the most part, however, old prisoners have far fewer disciplinary problems than younger inmates. A study to be released in January by Kristie Blevins and Anita Blowers, criminologists at the University of North Carolina, suggests that the older people present less of a disciplinary problem than younger inmates, and their offenses are relatively minor. The 2004 study looked at 428 men between the ages of 55-84 in state correctional facilities around the U.S.. Past studies have found that many perceived behavior problems among the elderly can be attributed to “victimization,” that is, getting harassed and beaten by other inmates.

Low Recidivism

In addition to causing less trouble inside, older offenders released from prison have a low recidivism rate. They are also likely to cost taxpayers far less than the $70,000 a year which, according to Williams and Albraldes, is the average expense of keeping a geriatric inmate imprisoned. The continued incarceration of these aging and dying inmates, then, clearly does not serve to protect society. Its only purpose is punishment.

In 2008, the federal government launched the Elderly Offender Home Detention Pilot Program, under which prisoners aged 65 and over can be released into a kind of supervised house arrest. As outlined by Families Against Mandatory Mimimums, eligibility guidelines are strict: offenders must have served at least 10 years and 75 percent of their sentences; no lifers and no perpetrators of “crimes of violence,” including sex crimes and firearms violations. Total number expected to participate: 80 to 100 nationwide, out of a total federal prison population of over 200,000.

Pennsylvania’s onerous law on compassionate release, dating from 1919, was revised last year so that old dying prisoners might be released into custody of family or friends—provided the corrections department did not find them to be a security risk and they were equipped with electronic monitoring devices.

According to an analysis by the Pennsylvania Prison Society, which tracks the reform, “It provides for: release to a hospital, hospice, or other licensed provider for terminally ill prisoners or those dying within one year. A home with licensed care may also be approved but then the prisoner will have electronic monitoring.” But the effect of this purported reform is unclear because the courts haven’t decided how to interpret it. Susan McNaughton of the Pennsylvania Department of corrections said statistics concerning compassionate release are scant, but in the past, “on average about six inmates are released from PA state prisons annually this way. I am not aware of any such releases since this new law was enacted.”

Before such releases can take place, attorneys for an old and ill prisoner will have to take the case through the Pennsylvania court system. It must go before the state superior court which, according to an attorney with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, another group that has been involved in the reform, could take two years

This may well be too long for Tiyo Attallah Salah, 76, an inmate at Dallas prison near Wilkes-Barre currently serving life without parole. A former jazz musician, Salah has developed long-distance relationships with a large network of friends, including Lois Ahrens of the organization Real Cost of Prisons, Marina Drummer of the Angola 3, and historian Howard Zinn, whose support helped him earn a college degree and study law. He now tutors other inmates and has assisted 250 prisoners in earning their GED high school equivalency diplomas. Salah currently is sponsoring a prison abolition group from inside Dallas.

Salah suffers also from high blood pressure, arthritis and prostate problems, and nearly died from diabetes last year. The prison pumped the old man full of steroids to keep him going. Like all prisoners, he has to walk up and down flights of stairs, to the shower and to meals. Salah’s job was cleaning showers on his hands and knees, and even though increasingly ill, he didn’t want to give up the job because it earned him 20 –40 cents an hour, money he used to purchase goods at the prison commissary, such things as socks, sweat pants, tea, maybe a hat.

In early November, he told Ahrens there was no heat in the cell block and he was trying to get more clothes. Ahrens, who is in close contact with Salah, says at one point he could scarcely walk. He has been saved by a broad network of friends inside as well as outside the prison, with younger inmates stepping in to take over his job, bringing him something special to eat from time to time, like a piece of fruit.

At Norfolk prison in Massachusetts, a state which has no compassionate care law–and where one in six prisoners is serving a life sentence—offenders have banded together in an organization called Lifers’ Group. They have drawn up a model bill they hope can be introduced into the state legislature. Fred Smith of St Francis House, which currently helps newly released prisoners in adjusting to society, recently was invited by the group to give a talk inside the prison. He found more than 100 prisoners turned out to hear his offer of support.

The long-termers’ model bill would permit the corrections department to grant a medical release to prisoners who are not judged to be a danger to society, when they face terminal or when “confinement will substantially shorten the prisoner’s life.’’

Frank Soffen, whose case was described in Part One of this Special Report, is cited by Lifers’ Group as an example of an offender the new law could help. But Soffen, too, may die long before any reforms take place.

The final consequence of the aging prison population, and especially of life sentences, is that more and more offenders are dying in prison. Angola, home to 5,000 offenders, is well known for its hospice, where trained inmates ease the last days of fellow prisoners; the program is cited as a model for other prisons to emulate,. You can get an idea of what it’s like by looking at a documentary film on the hospice by Edgar Barens, called Angola Prison Hospice: Opening the Door.

The hospice sees plenty of use, since an estimated 85 percent to 90 percent of the prisoners who enter the gates will never leave. Angola’s warden, Burl Cain, is also proud of the fact that the prison has its own mortuary, coffin-making shop, and a cemetery called Point Lookout, and gives each prisoner a funeral service. “Two funerals a month,” Cain told one Christian publication, “that’s just about the only way out of here.”

Colonel Bolt, the former Angola prisoner who got out after 20 years in solitary, knows he is an exception to the rule. But he says that some men have spent so long at Angola that they can’t even envision living out their old age on the outside. “They’ve been down so long,” Bolt said, that “they don’t have no friends…don’t have no lawyers. There’s nothing out there for them.…They concentrate on things keeping you going… [They want to] occupy time…writing, drawing.” When these men think of what’s going on outside, he said, “they get so frustrated…don’t see no way out”—so some of them simply stop thinking about it.

Some prisoners can’t even imagine going home to die, because they’ve had no home but Angola for most of their lives. When they die, Bolt said, “If the family got the money—they can bury them outside. Send the body to the front gate and [someone] will come get it out.” But many prisoners who “get to certain age,” he said, no longer have family, and no one who is “going to spend that money” for a coffin or a funeral.

When this happens, he continues, they “bury you down on the plantation….Old partners, old friends can take care of you…Go down to Point Lookout. A lot of cats want to be buried by their friends….[They say] ‘I’m going to live here and die here…if I got out what can I do?’ If you got three life sentences, four life sentences, what are you going to do?’’

James Ridgeway is the senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones.
http://thecrimereport.org/2009/12/10/the-graying-of-america%E2%80%99s-prisons-part-two/

Posted by lois at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2009

Pennsylvania's prison population grew much faster than any other state's from 2007 to 2008

Pa. prison population shows big growth
By Peter Mucha
December 9, 2009
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

Pennsylvania's prison population grew much faster than any other state's from 2007 to 2008, according to figures released by the Justice Department this week.

While the state and federal inmate count increased less than 1 percent nationwide - the lowest rate in eight years - Pennsylvania's was up 9.1 percent, well ahead of the 4.9 percent of second-place Arizona.

It was no one-year anomaly, said Susan McNaughton, press secretary for the state Department of Corrections.

"We've been experiencing this population growth for quite a while, and we're at a point where we're running low on bed space," she said.

Because of overcrowding, about 500 prisoners have been transferred to county prisons, and the state is seeking accommodations for 2,000 others in at least one other state, she said.

In 20 states, including New Jersey and New York, prison populations fell, in many cases because of efforts by cost-conscious lawmakers.

"It's not ideological. It's pragmatic," said Ram Cnaan, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice. "This is the first time that we have alliances on the right and left on this issue, and it's the money that has forced the issue."

For fiscal 2010, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has requested $1.8 billion, an increase of about $200 million, according to the agency's budget presentation.

The department contends that changes are needed to find other ways to treat or punish those who commit lesser crimes, such as drug and property offenses, McNaughton said.

"We believe we really should be saving our expensive prison space for those who are truly violent and who truly need to be separated from society," she said.

Pennsylvania also added more prisoners - 4,178 - than any other state, according to "Prisoners in 2008," by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

One factor was the two-month moratorium on paroles last fall after a parolee gunned down Philadelphia Police Sgt. Patrick McDonald.

During the moratorium, the state prison system grew by about 1,100 inmates, but that total wasn't needed to make the state first for percentage growth.

In absolute numbers, Pennsylvania ranks behind six states.

On Dec. 31, 2008, California had 173,670 prisoners, edging out Texas' 172,506. Each of those states had more than No. 3 Florida's 102,388 and No. 4 New York's 60,347 combined.

Georgia and Ohio also had more than Pennsylvania's 50,147 - 47,193 of them men, 2,954 women.

New Jersey's state and federal prison population - which declined 3.3 percent, tying Kentucky and trailing only New York's 3.6 percent drop - was 25,953.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/78912432.html

Posted by lois at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2009

U.S. Prison, Jail Population Continues Upward At Slower Pace

U.S. Prison, Jail Population Continues Upward At Slower Pace
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 2:01 pm

The nation’s correctional population–prisons, jails, probation, and parole–increased .5 percent last year, about one third of the average annual growth rate since 2000, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics said today. At the end of last year, there were 7.3 million people under correctional supervision, including 5.1 million supervised in the community on probation or parole and 2.3 million in prison or jail.

State and federal correctional authorities had more than 1.6 million prisoners at the end of 2008, the equivalent of about one in every 198 persons in the U.S. Growth in the prison population slowed to 0.8 percent during 2008, the smallest annual rate of growth since 2000. Adam Gelb of the Pew Center on the States Public Safety Performance Project noted that, “The significant differences between the states, even within the same geographic region, show that it’s policy choices that are responsible
for the size and cost of state prison systems, not crime trends or broadsocial and economic forces beyond the influence of state and local leaders.”

Link: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/p08.htm
http://thecrimereport.org/2009/12/08/u-s-prison-jail-population-continues-upward-at-slower-pace/
----------------------------------------
Many states sending fewer people to prison, federal report shows
Governments are reevaluating sentencing practices
By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 9, 2009

The number of people in U.S. prisons has grown at the slowest pace in nearly a decade, according to figures released Tuesday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The study also found that incarceration rates in 30 states declined last year.

Across the country, states are sending fewer people to prison as they grapple with a severe economic recession. Last year, the number of people sent to prison was down 0.5 percent from the previous year, while the number of people released from prison increased by 2 percent.

The steepest drop was in Georgia, where the prison population between 2007 and 2008 was down by 2,509 inmates, or 2.8 percent. In Maryland, there were 109 fewer people in jail, a decrease of 0.5 percent. The population in Virginia was up slightly at 207 more inmates, an increase of 0.5 percent. Data were not available for D.C. jails, which were transferred to federal authority after 2001.

The numbers may reflect the decision by some state governments to cut the high cost of corrections systems. Many are reevaluating their sentencing, parole and drug policies to try to scale back the expense of housing criminals. This fall, lawmakers in Rhode Island passed a law eliminating mandatory minimum drug sentences, and legislators in Massachusetts and Ohio are considering sentencing reforms.

Will Marling, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, said he is concerned about the change in policy. "The issue for us is that it seems to be an issue of financial expediency rather than a justice issue," he said. "Ultimately, these decisions were made in a court of law. Hopefully, in view of the law and the crime, these sentences will not simply be nullified out of concerns for space."

The Bureau of Justice Statistics data also found that the incarceration rate for African Americans -- who are imprisoned at rates higher than other racial groups -- fell sharply, with 9 percent fewer black people behind bars. Studies this year by the Sentencing Project, a research group that advocates for lower rates of imprisonment, have attributed the decline to the lower number of blacks imprisoned for drug offenses.

A report released earlier this year by the project found a 21.6 percent decline in the number of African Americans incarcerated in state prisons for a drug offense from 1999 to 2005, along with a rise of 42.6 percent in the number of white drug offenders. Still, black males are incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white males, and black females at three times the rate of white females, Marc Mauer, the project's executive director, said in a statement.

"While the declining number of African Americans in prison is encouraging, the scale of racial disparity in imprisonment is still dramatic," Mauer said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120803234.html

Posted by lois at 09:16 AM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2009

The Graying of America’s Prisons By James Ridgeway

The Graying of America’s Prisons
By James Ridgeway
Monday, December 7th, 2009 4:00 am

Part One of our Special Report, we look at one of the hidden legacies of the tough-on-crime policies of previous decades: a growing population of aging and ill offenders behind bars.

Frank Soffen, now 70 years old, has lived more than half his life in prison, and will likely die there.

Sentenced to life for second-degree murder, Soffen has suffered four heart attacks and is confined to a wheelchair. He has lately been held in the assisted living wing of Massachusetts’ Norfolk prison. Because of his failing health and his exemplary record over his 37 years behind bars—which includes rescuing a guard being threatened by other inmates—Soffen has been held up as a candidate for release on medical and compassionate grounds.

He is physically incapable of committing a violent crime, has already participated in pre-release and furlough programs, and has a supportive family and a place to live with his son. One of the members of the Massachusetts state parole board spoke in favor of his release. But in 2006 the board voted to deny Soffen parole. He will not be eligible for review for another five years.

The “tough on crime” posturing and policymaking that have dominated American politics for more than three decades have left behind a grim legacy. Longer sentences and harsher parole standards have led to overcrowded prisons, overtaxed state budgets, and devastated families and communities. Now, yet another consequence is becoming visible in the nation’s prisons and jails: a huge and ever-growing numbers of geriatric inmates.

Increasingly, the cells and dormitories of the United States are filled with old, often sick men and women. They hobble around the tiers with walkers or roll in wheelchairs fill prison infirmaries. They fill prison infirmaries, assisted living wings, and hospices faster than the state and federal governments can build them—and since many are dying behind bars, they are filling the mortuaries and graveyards as well.

The care these aging prisoners receive, while often grossly inadequate, is nonetheless cripplingly expensive—so much so that some recession-strapped states are for the first time seriously considering releasing older terminally ill and mentally ill prisoners rather than pay the heavy price for their warehousing. It remains to be seen what will happen when such fiscalconcerns run head on into America’s taste for punitive justice. A recent report by the Vera Institute made this clear.

Politicians no doubt did not imagine this Dickensian landscape of the elderly incarcerated when they voted to lengthen sentences and impose mandatory minimums three or four decades ago. But their actions are yielding an inevitable outcome. While the graying of the prison population to some extent reflects the changing demographics of the populace at large, it owes considerably more to changes in law and policy. And this is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.

Growing Old Behind Bars

According to the Sentencing Project, the United States imprisons five times as many people as it did 30 years ago and more than seven times as many as it did 40 years ago. Our criminal justice system now keeps 2.3 million people behind bars—about half of them for drug offenses and other nonviolent crimes. Twenty-five years ago, there were 34,000 prisoners serving life sentences; today the number is more than 140,000. The fact that each person is spending a longer stretch behind bars means that the falling crime rates of the 1990s do not translate into fewer inmates. It also means that more and more people who committed offenses in their 20s or even their teens are growing old and dying in prison.

The situation is particularly stark in California, Texas and Florida, which have large prison populations with cells crammed to overflowing because of harsh sentencing laws. In California, the population of prisoners over 55 doubled in the ten years from 1997 to 2006. About 20 percent of California prisoners are serving life sentences, and over 10 percent are serving life without the possibility of parole. Louisiana’s prison system now holds more than 5,000 people over the age of 50—a three-fold increase in the last 12 years.

While 50 or 55 may not be old by conventional standards, people age faster behind bars than they do on the outside: Studies have shown that prisoners in their 50s are on average physiologically 10 to 15 years older than their chronological age. Older prisoners require substantial medical care, because of harsh life conditions as well as age. Inmates begin to have trouble climbing to upper bunks, walking, standing on line, and handling other parts of the prison routine. They suffer from early losses of hearing and eyesight, have high rates of high blood pressure and diabetes, and are susceptible to falls.

A recent study by Brie Williams and Rita Albraldes, published as a chapter in the book Growing Older: Challenges of Prison and Reentry for the Aging Population, found that in addition to the chronic diseases that increase with age, older offenders have problems such as paraplegia because of the legacy of gunshot wounds. Many have advanced liver disease, renal disease, or hepatitis. Still others suffer from HIV-AIDS, and many more from drug and alcohol abuse. Living under prison conditions, they are more likely to get pneumonia and flu.

Many prisons are notorious for not taking their inmates’ health complaints seriously, and there is anecdotal evidence this problem may be compounded when prisoners are elderly. A doctor under contract in one southern prison told me in a recent interview how a diabetic man’s illness was misdiagnosed, resulting in months of excruciating pain and the amputation of toes and part of one foot. Back in prison, the man asked for prosthetic shoes so he could get around by walking; his request was denied.

Another elderly prisoner complained of an earache which went untreated for months. When it became unbearably painful, the prisoner was shipped to a local hospital emergency room, under contract to the prison. There the doctors found the earache was brain cancer—and by then, too advanced to treat.

The exploding prison population has further undermined the already questionable quality of inmate medical care. In California, which has the nation’s largest number of state prisoners, a panel of federal judges earlier this year found that the state of medical care was so poor that it violated the constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and in danger of routinely costing prisoners their lives. The only solution, the judges said, was to reduce prison overcrowding caused by the states draconian mandatory sentences; it recommended shortening sentences and reforming parole, which they believed would have no impact on public safety; it has given California three years to comply.

NEXT: Challenging the status quo for geriatric prisoners

James Ridgeway is the senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones.
http://thecrimereport.org/2009/12/07/the-graying-of-americas-prisons/

Posted by lois at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2009

Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed? By David Cole

Volume 56, Number 18 · November 19, 2009
NY Review of Books
Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?
By David Cole

Race, Incarceration, and American Values
by Glenn C. Loury, with Pamela S. Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loïc Wacquant
Boston Review/MIT Press, 86 pp., $14.95

Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice
by Paul Butler
New Press, 214 pp., $25.95

Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities: Reentry, Race, and Politics
by Anthony C. Thompson
New York University Press, 262 pp., $39.00; $21.00 (paper)

With approximately 2.3 million people in prison or jail, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world—by far. Our per capita rate is six times greater than Canada's, eight times greater than France's, and twelve times greater than Japan's. Here, at least, we are an undisputed world leader; we have a 40 percent lead on our closest competitors—Russia and Belarus.

Even so, the imprisoned make up only two thirds of one percent of the nation's general population. And most of those imprisoned are poor and uneducated, disproportionately drawn from the margins of society. For the vast majority of us, in other words, the idea that we might find ourselves in jail or prison is simply not a genuine concern.

For one group in particular, however, these figures have concrete and deep-rooted implications—African-Americans, especially young black men, and especially poor young black men. African-Americans are 13 percent of the general population, but over 50 percent of the prison population. Blacks are incarcerated at a rate eight times higher than that of whites—a disparity that dwarfs other racial disparities. (Black–white disparities in unemployment, for example, are 2–1; in nonmarital childbirth, 3–1; in infant mortality, 2–1; and in net worth, 1–5[1]).

In the 1950s, when segregation was still legal, African-Americans comprised 30 percent of the prison population. Sixty years later, African-Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population, and that population has skyrocketed. The disparities are greatest where race and class intersect—nearly 60 percent of all young black men born between 1965 and 1969 who dropped out of high school went to prison at least once on a felony conviction before they turned thirty-five. And the incarceration rate for this group—black male high school dropouts—is nearly fifty times the national average.[2]

These disparities in turn have extraordinary ripple effects. For an entire cohort of young black men in America's inner cities, incarceration has become the more-likely-than-not norm, not the unthinkable exception. And in part because prisons today offer inmates little or nothing in the way of job training, education, or counseling regarding their return to society, ex-offenders' prospects for employment, housing, and marriage upon release drop precipitously from their already low levels before incarceration.

That in turn makes it far more likely that these ex-offenders will return to criminal behavior—and then to prison. Meanwhile, the incarceration of so many young men means more single-parent households, and more children whose fathers are in prison. Children with parents in prison are in turn seven times more likely to be imprisoned at some point in their lives than other children. As Brown professor Glenn Loury puts it in Race, Incarceration, and American Values, we are "creating a racially defined pariah class in the middle of our great cities."

The most dramatic effects of this incarceration are concentrated on the most disadvantaged—those who are not only African-American or Latino, but also poor, uneducated, and living in highly segregated ghettos. While roughly 60 percent of black high school dropouts have spent time in prison, only 5 percent of college-educated African-Americans have done so. The indirect consequences of such disparities, however, extend much further. Many people cannot tell whether an African-American is a dropout or college-educated—or, more relevant, a burglar or a college professor, as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates found in July 2009, when he was arrested after trying to get into his own house. The correlation of race and crime in the public's mind reinforces prejudice that affects every African-American.

Three recent books by scholars who happen to be black men eloquently attest to these broader effects of the racial disparities in our criminal justice system. For Loury, "mass incarceration has now become a principal vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchy in our society." For George Washington University law professor Paul Butler, author of Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, "the two million Americans in prison represent the most urgent challenge to democratic values since the civil rights era." And for New York University law professor Anthony Thompson, author of Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities: Reentry, Race, and Politics, it is critical that we examine "the pervasive interplay of race, power, and politics that infuse and confuse our attitudes about crime."

Butler expresses the personal character of this issue most urgently. Raised by a single mother in a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Butler graduated cum laude from Yale College and Harvard Law School, clerked for a federal judge, worked for a prestigious Washington law firm, and then became a federal prosecutor in the Justice Department's elite unit fighting public corruption—an American success story. Yet he dresses, as he puts it, "in the current fashion, like a thug"; has a "nice-sized chip on [his] shoulder, afflicted with the black man's thing for respect by any means necessary"; and "[doesn't] like the police much, even though I work with them every day."

More to the point, at the same time that Butler was a successful federal prosecutor, he found himself a criminal defendant in the District of Columbia's Superior Court. Butler was arrested in connection with a petty dispute over a parking space that Butler owned but that a neighbor was "renting" out to others. The neighbor called the police and charged Butler with assault, and Butler was arrested, handcuffed, booked, and prosecuted. At his trial, a police officer lied on the stand, Butler's landlord refused to testify on his behalf, and Butler himself let his anger get the better of him when he testified. The jury nonetheless acquitted him after ten minutes of deliberation. As Butler puts it:

The system worked for me—to the extent that you can describe a system as "working" when a man is arrested and made to stand trial for a crime he did not commit. At least I was not convicted, which makes me as grateful for my money, my defense attorney, my social standing, my connections, and my legal skills as for my actual innocence.

A few months after this experience, Butler chose to leave his job as a prosecutor. He explains, "My sense of justice has always been big and bulging. What my own personal prosecution expanded is my sense of injustice." Butler now calls himself a "recovering prosecutor," and argues that to be a prosecutor is to be "an active participant in a system that defines too many activities as crimes, enforces its laws selectively, and incarcerates far too many of its citizens." As a law professor, Butler has devoted his life to advocating resistance to the criminal justice system as it stands today.
2.

Until 1975, the United States' criminal justice system was roughly in line with much of Europe's. For fifty years preceding 1975, the US incarceration rate consistently hovered around 100 inmates per 100,000; criminologists made careers out of theorizing that the incarceration rate would never change. Around 1975, however, they were proved wrong, as the United States became radically more punitive. In thirty-five years, the incarceration rate ballooned to over 700 per 100,000, far outstripping all other countries.

This growth is not attributable to increased offending rates, but to increased punitiveness. Being "tough on crime" became a political mandate. State and federal legislatures imposed mandatory minimum sentences; abolished or radically restricted parole; and adopted "three strikes" laws that exact life imprisonment for a third offense, even when the offense is as minor as stealing a slice of pizza. Comparing the ratio of convictions to "index crimes" such as murder, rape, and burglary[3] between 1975 and 1999 reveals that, holding crime constant, the United States became five times more punitive. Harvard sociologist Bruce Western estimates that the increase in incarceration rates since 1975 can take credit for only about 10 percent of the drop in crime over the same period.[4]

Much of the extraordinary growth in the prison and jail population is attributable to a dramatic increase in prosecution and imprisonment for drug offenses.[5] President Reagan declared a "war on drugs" in 1982, and the states eagerly followed suit. From 1980 to 1997, Loury tells us, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by 1,100 percent. Drug convictions alone account for more than 80 percent of the total increase in the federal prison population from 1985 to 1995. In 2008, four of five drug arrests were for possession, and only one in five was for distribution; fully half of all drug arrests were for marijuana offenses.[6]

African-Americans have borne the brunt of this war. From 1985 to 1991, the number of white drug offenders in state prisons increased by 110 percent; the number of black drug offenders grew by 465 percent.[7] The average time served by African-Americans for drug crimes grew by 62 percent between 1994 and 2003, while white drug offenders served 17 percent more time.[8] Though 14 percent of monthly drug users are black, roughly equal to their proportion of the general population, they are arrested and imprisoned at vastly disproportionate rates: 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses are black as well as 56 percent of those in state prisons for drug offenses.[9] Blacks serve almost as much time in prison for drug offenses (average of 58.7 months) as whites do for violent crimes (average of 61.7 months).[10]

What should be done about this? Loury rightly demands that we first confront what those facts tell us about our political culture. Were we in John Rawls's "original position," with no idea whether we would be born a black male in an impoverished urban home, he asks, would we accept a system in which one out of every three black males born today can expect to spend time in jail during his life?[11]

If white male babies faced anything like such prospects, the politics of crime would look very different. We would almost certainly see this as an urgent national calamity, and demand a collective investment of public resources to forestall so many going to prison. Politicians would insist that we reduce criminal penalties, decriminalize nonviolent drug offenses, and promote alternatives to incarceration. The fact that there aren't such calls today—or that if there are, they go largely unheeded—suggests that our criminal justice system is sustainable only because its disparate effects leave the majority off the hook.

But is the majority really off the hook? In fact, the prison boom has high costs for all of us. A new prison opens somewhere in the United States every week. Imprisoning a human being in this country costs a minimum of $20,000 a year, far more than tuition at any of our state universities. National spending on prisons and jails was $7 billion in 1980; it is $60 billion today. Several states now spend more on state prisons than state colleges. We literally cannot afford our political addiction to incarceration.

Moreover, the incarceration boom means that there is also now a boom in prisoners being released. In 2008, approximately 700,000 prisoners were released. At current rates of recidivism, 469,000 of them will be rearrested within three years. We all have an interest in helping this at-risk population avoid a return to a life of crime.

The war on drugs has by most accounts been a failure, and we are all paying the bill. In 2008, 1.7 million people were arrested for drug crimes.[12] Since 1989, more people have been incarcerated for drug offenses than for all violent crimes combined. Yet much like Prohibition, the war on drugs has not ended or even significantly diminished drug use. It has made drugs more expensive, and fostered a multibillion-dollar criminal industry in drug delivery and sales. Drugs have become more concentrated and deadly; twice as many people die from drugs today than before the war on drugs was declared. If anything, the war on drugs has probably increased the incidence of crime; about half of property crime, robberies, and burglaries are attributable to the inflated cost of drugs caused by criminalizing them.

More fundamentally, as citizens we all have a stake in the fairness and legitimacy of our criminal justice system for both moral and pragmatic reasons. The character of our nation is determined in significant part by how we treat the criminally accused. It is no accident that the Bill of Rights concentrates primarily on protecting the rights of those suspected of crime. These amendments were deemed necessary precisely because political majorities are likely to seek shortcuts on fairness when crime is alleged, even though fairness is fundamental to the integrity of the criminal justice system.

As a pragmatic matter, the legitimacy of the criminal justice system is essential because it encourages law-abiding behavior. If people believe in the basic legitimacy of a leader or regime or procedure, they are far more likely to abide by the rules. If, on the other hand, a system is seen as corrupt, unfair, or unjust, those subjected to it will be less inclined to respect it. A legal system that relegates the majority of our most disadvantaged populations to incarceration, and does next to nothing to help them avoid prison or to reintegrate into society upon release, invites disrespect—and crime.
3.

How do we escape the self-defeating cycle of crime and punishment? Anthony Thompson suggests that we focus on the neediest—the 700,000 or so prisoners who are released each year. Before the incarceration boom, the avowed purpose of criminal sentencing in America was rehabilitation. Prison sentences were often open-ended, with the idea being that a successful course of rehabilitation would warrant an earlier release. In the 1970s, however, the nation began to sour on rehabilitation, and over the next two decades state and federal authorities eliminated most efforts to educate, train, and counsel prisoners with a view toward preparing them for their return to society.

Thompson argues that when 700,000 prisoners are being released each year, we ignore at our peril their reintegration into our society. A stable home, job, and health are strong predictors of law-abiding behavior. But incarceration makes stability much more difficult to obtain in all these respects. Public housing laws often bar offenders, and private landlords routinely discriminate against them. Federal and state laws broadly prohibit ex-offenders from hundreds of jobs, often without any rational justification, and even where no bar exists, private employers are less than eager to hire them. Prisoners who enter prison without physical and mental illnesses often develop them while inside. Yet as Thompson demonstrates, society does virtually nothing to help ex-offenders find homes, jobs, or health care—thereby virtually guaranteeing a cycle of recidivism.

Thompson proposes a variety of sensible reforms—eliminating laws that irrationally bar ex-offenders from jobs and housing, providing health care and counseling to help smooth the transition back to life outside of prison. But the question he leaves unanswered is the most difficult one: Where is the political impetus for such reform? If Americans are skeptical about the government providing health insurance for the law-abiding, what is going to make them support it for ex-offenders? And if we do not invest in sufficient job training or public housing for those who have never been imprisoned, why would we do so for those who have violated criminal laws?

Butler offers a broader set of proposals. Some are, like Thompson's, eminently sensible. He calls for decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use, for example. Several other nations, including the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Mexico, have done just that, without any evident rise in drug use. And he recommends that we treat drugs as a public health issue, adopting "harm reduction" strategies such as needle exchange.

Butler also suggests that we offer economic incentives to encourage young people to stay in school. In view of the number of high school dropouts who land in prison, if we can keep young people in school, we may be able to keep them out of prison. From a purely economic perspective, it takes a lot less money to induce an at-risk young man to remain in school than it does to lock him up for a year. Similarly, Butler's proposal that we invest in eliminating sources of lead poisoning makes economic sense, since exposure to lead in children turns out to be highly correlated with criminal behavior subsequently. Butler also calls for a general reduction in criminal sentences, and for the early release of nonviolent offenders, many of whom should never have been locked up in the first place.

Other recommendations are more questionable. Butler calls on juries, for example, to engage in "nullification" of the criminal law to protest mass imprisonment. Because juries need not give reasons for their decisions, they have the discretion to acquit even where the state has proved criminal behavior beyond a reasonable doubt. Butler proposes that jurors consciously adopt the tactic, as a kind of civil disobedience, to resist mass incarceration—but only in cases involving victimless crimes.

This proposal has many problems. First, jurors act episodically and in secret. Thus, unlike civil disobedience, acts of nullification are unlikely to have a galvanizing effect. Second, to engage in a conscious strategy of nullification will often require dissembling, itself criminal behavior. If a potential juror admits that she will not vote to convict no matter how strong the evidence is, a judge will not let her sit on the jury. Thus, to engage in this practice may require citizens to lie. It is not wise to build a movement for social change on deceit. Third, it is often difficult to know whether a crime is in fact "victimless." Prosecutors often pursue relatively low-level offenders in the hope that they can "encourage" them to identify wrongdoers further up the chain of command. Even if the foot soldier is not engaged in activity that harms victims, an organized crime ring may have many victims. How is a juror to assess whether a given prosecution is a legitimate part of such a broader investigation?

Butler's advocacy of jury nullification is probably best understood as a symbolic act of resistance rather than a concrete solution to the problems of race and class inequality. But even as a symbol, it seems flawed, and unlikely to attract the kind of broad support that would be necessary to build a meaningful consensus for real reform.
4.

It is, after all, real reform that we need. On that front, the biggest challenge is that the very demographics that make the pattern of crime and punishment in America so skewed against blacks and Latinos also make it all too easy for politicians, and the majorities they represent, to adhere to an unthinking "tough on crime" attitude. Senator Jim Webb has dared to buck that trend, proposing a national commission to study inequality in the criminal justice system. Such an effort would bring welcome, and long overdue, attention to the issue, and might impel us to do something about the problems we have all too complacently ignored.

Recent years have shown some softening in the politics of crime. Between 2004 and 2006, twenty-two states adopted reforms that shortened criminal sentences. In 2004, New York amended its notoriously draconian Rockefeller-era drug laws, and revised them again this year to make low-level offenders eligible for shortened sentences, or in some cases for treatment programs instead of prisons. In 2005, Connecticut eliminated the disparity in sentences for crack and powder cocaine under its state law, and in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that federal judges could depart from strict "sentencing guidelines" and impose more lenient sentences based on concerns about the racial disparities caused by the different treatment of crack and powder cocaine under federal law. In April 2009, the Obama administration came out in favor of eliminating the crack–powder disparity altogether in federal law.

Several states have expanded drug treatment options as alternatives to prison for drug offenses. A RAND Corporation study estimates that treatment is fifteen times more effective at reducing drug-related crime than incarceration.[13] An increasingly popular way of diverting drug offenders to treatment is through the use of "drug courts," in which judges oversee treatment programs and dismiss criminal charges upon a defendant's successful completion of treatment. The first drug court was introduced in 1989; as of 2007, there were 1,662 such courts across the country.[14]

Thompson's argument that reformers should give special attention to those being released from prison because they otherwise pose a significant risk of recidivism has also gained adherents. Rehabilitation has hardly been revived, but under the rubric of "re- entry" into society, states and the federal government are increasingly promoting programs that address the serious problems that ex-offenders face. As Helen Epstein has shown, "restorative justice" efforts, which seek to facilitate reintegration through counseling that encourages offenders to take personal responsibility for their wrongdoing, have demonstrated positive results.[15] Still, while acknowledging personal responsibility is undoubtedly important, it won't do the trick without a place to live, a job, and strong family ties.

States have also increasingly sought to ameliorate the effects of laws that deny ex-felons the right to vote. "Felony disenfranchisement" laws render large numbers of African-American men ineligible to vote, and extend the racial disparities in the criminal justice system into electoral politics. As a result of these laws, one in eight black men of voting age is ineligible to vote. The laws also frustrate reintegration, for they imply is that an ex-offender can never be a full citizen. Since 1997, nineteen states have amended their laws to mitigate these restrictions and give ex-offenders more opportunity to regain their eligibility to vote.[16] With five million potential voters still affected, there is much more work to be done, but the trend line is positive.

Finally, several states, including California and Texas, have sought to reduce the drain on their budgets caused by their prisons by identifying nonviolent offenders who can be released early without posing a threat to the community. Under a program called "Justice Reinvestment," spearheaded by the Council of State and Local Governments and supported by the US Justice Department, some states, including Connecticut, Kansas, Vermont, and Texas, have also redirected some of the money saved by early release to the high-risk neighborhoods from which so much of the imprisoned population comes. The idea is that if states invest in these communities, they may save money in the long run by reducing the numbers of community members who commit crimes.

The impetus for these reforms has more often than not been economic. States simply cannot afford to continue devoting huge and growing portions of their dwindling budgets to prisons and jails, and are increasingly interested in determining whether there are people in prison who need not be there. Since two thirds of prisoners are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, and many of those for nonviolent drug offenses in particular, these reforms make clear budgetary sense.

The demographic character of the prison population (and of the communities most at risk of future incarceration) means that reform need not be motivated by concern about race and class disparities in order to have a disproportionate benefit for African-Americans and Latinos. Virtually any measure that reduces reliance on prisons will disproportionately benefit African-Americans and Latinos, even if it is motivated by the bottom line, not justice.

At the same time, our addiction to punishment should be troubling not only because it is costly and often counterproductive, but because its race and class disparities are morally unacceptable. The most promising arguments for reform, therefore, must appeal simultaneously to considerations of pragmatism and principle. The very fact that the US record is so much worse than that of the rest of the world should tell us that we are doing something wrong, and the sheer waste of public dollars and human lives should impel us toward reform. But as the authors of these three books make clear, we will not understand the problem fully until we candidly confront the fact that our criminal justice system would not be tolerable to the majority if its impact were felt more broadly by the general population, and not concentrated on the most deprived among us.
Notes

[1]Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), p. 26.

[2]Western, Punishment and Inequality in America, p. 18.

[3]Index crimes are the eight crimes the FBI tracks to produce its annual crime index. They are willful homicide, forcible rape, robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, larceny over $50, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

[4]Western, Punishment and Inequality in America, p. 187.

[5]Western, Punishment and Inequality in America, p. 50.

[6]FBI, Crime in the United States, 2008, Arrest Table, available at www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/arrests/index.html.

[7]Marc Mauer, Intended and Unintended Consequences: State Racial Disparities in Imprisonment (Sentencing Project, 1997), p. 10.

[8]Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King, A 25-Year Quagmire: The War on Drugs and Its Impact on American Society (Sentencing Project, 2007), pp. 22–23.

[9]Mauer and King, A 25-Year Quagmire, pp. 2, 19–20.

[10]Mauer and King, A 25-Year Quagmire, p. 2.

[11]The Sentencing Project, "Facts About Prison and Prisoners" (April 2009) (citing the Bureau of Justice Statistics), available at www.sentencingproject.org/PublicationDetails.aspx?PublicationID=425.

[12]FBI, Crime in the United States, 2008.

[13]Jonathan P. Caulkins, C. Peter Rydell, William Schwabe, and James Chiesa, Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentences: Throwing Away the Key or the Taxpayers' Money?, (RAND, 1997), pp. xvii–xviii.

[14]BJA Drug Court Clearinghouse, American University, Drug Court Activity Update: Composite Summary Information (January 2007); available at www1.spa.american.edu/justice/docu ments/1956.pdf.

[15]Helen Epstein, "America's Prisons: Is There Hope?," The New York Review, June 11, 2009.

[16]Ryan S. King, Expanding the Vote: State Felony Disenfranchisement Reform, 1997–2008 (Sentencing Project, 2008), p. 1.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23382

Posted by lois at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 03, 2009

MA: Prison & Jail Budgets Soar Exeeding Higher Ed, Health, Social Services. People in prisons surged by 300% and jails about 320%.

"....It also found that staffing expenditures soared 56 percent from 1995 to 2003, to $312 million, and that much of the increase stemmed from overtime costs and a contract with the union that represents correction officers."

Correction agencies’ budgets soaring
Exceeds most other Mass. offices, study says
By Jonathan Saltzman
Globe Staff / December 3, 2009

Spending on correction agencies in Massachusetts has exploded in the past decade despite only a modest increase in the number of people incarcerated and now accounts for a bigger chunk of the state budget than each of the departments that oversee higher education, social services, and public health, according to a new study.

The study by the Boston Foundation says the more than $1.2 billion spent this year on correction stems largely from a decades-old, lock-’em-up approach that has put about 11,000 people in state prisons and about 14,000 people in county jails, resulting in mammoth labor and facility costs.

Spending on prisons, jails, probation, and parole exceeds every form of state spending this year except money funneled to public elementary and secondary schools and to communities as local aid, according to the 33-page study, which will be made public today. Spending on probation alone has soared 163 percent in the past 10 years.

Even during the recession this year - when the state has slashed what it spends on local aid, higher education, and public health - correction funding has largely been spared.

“Rising corrections costs might be acceptable if public safety is improved, if the corrections system is run efficiently and transparently, and if recidivism is reduced,’’ the report says. “Growing corrections budgets would probably be acceptable if the prison population grew substantially in response to higher crime rates. Yet none of these are what drove the growth of the corrections budget over the past 10 years.’’

Indeed, the number of people incarcerated has largely leveled off after skyrocketing in the 1980s and early 1990s, the researchers found, and the rate of freed prisoners committing new crimes has barely changed.

Massachusetts, the study says, has hewed to a philosophy of “safety at any price,’’ even though the financially strapped state can no longer afford it and the spending has made little difference.

The study could be influential in shaping next year’s budget debate. Recent studies by the Boston Foundation put a spotlight on other criminal justice issues, including proposals to loosen the criminal offender record information system, or CORI, to make it easier for former prison convicts to get jobs.

“Our whole approach to corrections in Massachusetts needs a searching reexamination,’’ Paul S. Grogan, president and CEO of the Boston Foundation, said yesterday. “We hope the report is a prod to do that.’’

Massachusetts, the report says, should follow the lead of other cash-starved states that have recently cut unsustainable correction spending and reduced recidivism rates through various reforms. Those changes include making more nonviolent prisoners eligible for supervised parole, shortening sentences for offenders who complete education and substance abuse programs, and eliminating certain mandatory minimum drug sentences.

“This is happening across the country, and we just seem stuck,’’ Leonard W. Engel, senior policy analyst for the Crime and Justice Institute and author of the report commissioned by the Boston Foundation, said in an interview.

The Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, which oversees the prisons and parole board, declined to comment on the study until it is made public, spokesman Terrel Harris said. Mary Beth Heffernan, Governor Deval Patrick’s undersecretary for criminal justice in the office, is expected to be on a panel that will discuss the report this morning at the Boston Foundation.

Coria Holland, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Commissioner of Probation, declined to comment on the study. That office is part of the state court system.

Legislative leaders said they wanted to see the report before commenting.

Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, said the report shows that a trend his foundation observed six years ago has continued despite deep cuts to other state programs. In a 2003 study, Widmer’s foundation said spending on prisons and jails would surpass spending on higher education the following year, the first time that had happened in decades.

“We keep investing more and more in corrections, which at the same time is crowding out spending on other important priorities, like a whole range of human services,’’ Widmer said yesterday.

Massachusetts is one of many states that adopted a tough-on-crime approach beginning in the 1980s, partly in response to emotional reactions to high-profile crimes and because of a “lack of political will to challenge soft-on-crime demagoguery,’’ the study says. That tack caused prison populations across the country to skyrocket and state budgets to balloon.

In Massachusetts, the number of people held in state prisons surged by 300 percent, and the number in county jails by about 320 percent, from 1980 to the mid-1990s, the researchers say.

In the past decade, though, the number of people incarcerated in the state has risen by about 5 percent. Budgets, however, have continued to mushroom. The growth, the researchers say, reflects a fact of life about most correction agencies nationwide: They get generous funding in good times and avoid deep cuts in bad times.

From fiscal year 1998 to fiscal year 2008, the Massachusetts Department of Correction budget increased by more than 12 percent, the Sheriff’s Department budgets for all counties more than 20 percent, and the Probation Department by a staggering 163 percent, the report said. (The Parole Department has risen by less than 3 percent.)

Engel said he contacted probation officials to find out why their budget soared but got few explanations, aside from the fact that the department’s caseload grew in 2004 when it began supervising low-risk offenders transferred from district court.

“We kept running up against a lack of information,’’ Engel said.

The study says much of the spending in prisons stems from high facility and labor costs, and cites a controversial 2004 report commissioned by the Mitt Romney administration. That report found that Massachusetts prisons had the second-highest ratio of staff to inmates in the country, and that the correction officers were the third-highest paid.

It also found that staffing expenditures soared 56 percent from 1995 to 2003, to $312 million, and that much of the increase stemmed from overtime costs and a contract with the union that represents correction officers.

Steve Kenneway, president of the union that represents about 5,000 prison correction officers, said yesterday that spending on the prisons has risen dramatically, particularly in the past two years, but that it has nothing to do with pay to his members.

Governor Patrick has signed two contracts that will give his members a 21 percent wage increase over nine years, Kenneway said. “That’s less than 3 percent’’ a year, he said.

Kenneway said costs have spiraled because prisons are spending more to treat mentally ill inmates and are trying to address a recent surge in suicides. He also said that the past two governors have coddled inmates.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/12/03/state_correction_budget_is_soaring_new_study_says/?page=full

Posted by lois at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2009

MA: Letter from Gordon Haas of the Norfolk Lifers Group to Comm. Harold Clarke on the proposed firing of the chaplains

November 25, 2009

Mr. Harold Clarke
Commissioner—Department of Correction
50 Maple Street – Suite 3
Milford MA 01757

Dear Commissioner Clarke,

I am much dismayed and shocked by the news that you are laying off/firing prison chaplains. The decision to lay off/fire prison chaplains is, simply, mind-boggling. While I serve as Chairman of the Lifer’s Group Inc. and Majority Camp Chairman of the Inmate Council, both organizations which represent the prisoner population at MCI-Norfolk, I am writing to you on a personal level so that what I state will not serve as a reason for retaliation against either entity.

It has long been my belief that the Department of Correction has no clue as to the value prison chaplains have to the orderly running of our institutions. The Department of Correction seems either to turn a blind eye or simply does not care that prison chaplains are in the forefront of those whose work actually transforms prisoners in deeply positive ways. Prison chaplains, because of the care and genuine interest they display, are trusted to such a degree that prisoners allow their lives to be changed for the betterment of not only themselves, but for society as a whole. Prison chaplains touch the lives, here at MCI-Norfolk at least, of well over 40% of the prison population. How can you not see what a void their absence will bring? And, nothing – not volunteers, not administrators – will either fill that emptiness or effect the changes in lives that prison chaplains accomplish.

When one studies an organizational chart of the Department of Correction, one impression jumps out immediately. The DOC is grossly bloated at the top. It takes approximately three hours to drive the length and breadth of Massachusetts. No prison is outside of a one hour drive from Milford. Yet, the DOC has assistant commissioners in charge of “sectors.” Texas, Washington or Alaska may need to be divided into sectors; Massachusetts does not. You have legions of deputy commissioners, associate commissioners, assistant commissioners – in addition to your “sector” heads – assistants to associates, and so on. Then, at the institutional level, there are employed superintendents, deputy superintendents, directors of this and that, as well as more captains and lieutenants than one can seemingly count. It strains the bounds of credulity that you could not find excesses in your management structure in order to save the prison chaplains. To remove prison chaplains is, as the saying goes: “penny-wise but pound foolish.” More money will be spent dealing with troublesome situations which prison chaplains have been able to defuse in the past than will be saved by firing those valued, at least to prisoners employees.

To date, your staffing cuts have been remarkably consistent. Those who have been cut have come from those who directly impact prisoner services. First came Spectrum employees who conducted programs for fathers and other familial needs, the medical staff including mental health, followed by the recreational officers, and now the prison chaplains. What is left – teachers? Those whom you have cut do exponentially more for enhancing public safety, than those who remain while ensuring that beds are made, window sills remain clear, pictures are within a prescribed box outlined on one wall, that a prisoner has no more than ten underwear or cosmetics and so on, may auger well for an orderly run institution, such priorities do nothing for preparing a prisoner to re-enter society.

If the goal of the Department of Correction is to send prisoners back to society better able to cope and to function, why are you laying off/firing the very people who have the most direct impact on achieving that goal? As stated earlier, prison chaplains serve to help defuse negative reactions to the plethora of rules and regulations coupled with the mass punishments levied because of the actions of one or two prisoners. The anger and resentment which arises due to those factors needs an outlet. Prison chaplains and others who provide similar services to prisoners have created opportunities for such anger and resentment to be addressed calmly and positively.

In the past, I, among others, have urged you to conduct and publish research to determine which programs are successful, based upon the sole criterion of recidivism. To date, there has been no response. In the over thirty years I have been incarcerated, more than twenty-five of which at MCI-Norfolk, I can say with confidence that prison chaplains, through the programs they have fostered and nurtured, have a far better record of preparing prisoners to rejoin successfully and productively, than, for instance, the CRA or the Transition Program. That and that alone, i.e., impact on reducing recidivism should be the test for who goes and who stays. Public safety is enhanced, and the reason for the DOC’s existence is justified, when, and only when, the product you send out the door is a productive citizen. One major part in whatever success the DOC may have had has been played by prison chaplains. Dismissing them, and others who have and do provide prisoner services, will only insure that even a greater percentage than now of the product you are sending back to society will return to prison. Perhaps, a cynic might opine, that is the whole point, i.e., to ensure that the jobs remain of those with the greater leverage – your management staff and the line officers. The taxpayers of Massachusetts, as well as the prisoners whom you are charged with correcting, desire far more.
Sincerely.

Gordon Haas
W38878
MCI-Norfolk
P.O. Box 43
Norfolk, MA 02056

Posted by lois at 10:54 PM | Comments (0)

UC Berkeley’s Teach in Prison program is creating the San Quentin All Access Computer Center, the prison’s first instructional computer lab.

Due Processing: Incarceration and the Digital Divide http://www.citris-uc.org/events/RE-Dec-02
Themes Intelligent Infrastructure
Emphases Services Science and Technology
Campuses UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced, UC Santa Cruz

* December 2, 2009: 12:00pm - 1:00pm
* Location: Banatao Auditorium, 3rd floor, Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley

West Hays and Alayna Johnson [B.A. students, UC Berkeley]

The complete series can be found at http://www.citris-uc.org/events/RE-fall2009.As always, these talks are free, open to the public and broadcast live on-line at mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/webcast the day and time of the event.

Abstract:
Prison reality television and radio sound bites of slamming cell doors are just two examples illustrating the fascination with incarcerated life in the United States. Additionally, the country’s exponential prison growth and “tough on crime” posture speaks to a general sense of fear toward this population. But while our society may fear its prisoners, prisoners often fear technology. The moment of incarceration interrupts not only these individuals’ access to the outside world, but also their access to the developing technologies most of us take for granted in daily life. Accordingly, their ability to succeed in increasingly hi-tech work environments is similarly interrupted upon release. The inefficiencies of current vocational curricula, combined with the inability of the prison system to monitor the efficacy of its own programs, has doubtlessly contributed to the state’s alarming rate of recidivism: nearly two-thirds of California’s parolees will return to prison within three years of their release.

Working toward a solution to this problem, UC Berkeley’s Teach in Prison program is creating the San Quentin All Access Computer Center, the prison’s first instructional computer lab. Starting in February of 2010, courses will be offered in both basic computer literacy and computer-aided design (CAD). With the cooperation of San Quentin staff and Cal volunteers, evaluations will measure the feasibility of the lab’s construction, efficacy of it’s curriculum, and the impact on parolee employability and recidivism.

Recognizing the problem is only the first step. How is a computer lab created in an environment where even a typewriter is considered contraband if it has internal memory storage? How does a group conduct research on a sensitive population under the supervision of recalcitrant overseers? How does a normally motivated and supportive staff receive a new program while facing its own 75% reduction in force due to state budget cuts?

Creation of the San Quentin All Access Computer Center has been a lesson in adaptability for UC Berkeley, prison staff, and the inmates who will soon take their first steps across the digital divide.

Biography
West Hays and Alayna Johnson coordinate UC Berkeley’s Teach in Prison program, which sends over 70 Cal students to teach and tutor various subjects inside San Quentin State Prison four days per week. West spent his teens and early-twenties employed in the IT field, and will be graduating with a BA in English this December. West teaches a class in poetry and drama at San Quentin. Alayna (’10) has a background in art practice and education, and teaches in the prison’s art department and adult basic education program.

Posted by lois at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2009

MA: DOC reverses itself on firing chaplains

God’s work on the block
By Kevin Cullen
Globe Columnist / November 26, 2009
That’s no joke. Thirty-two of them do it every day, into all of the prisons in Massachusetts.

But two weeks ago, Mike Grunko, the president of Local 509 of the Service Employees International Union, got a phone call from the Department of Correction.

“They said they were going to lay off 19 of the 32 chaplains, effective the end of December,’’ Grunko said.

You know the state budget crisis is really bad when they start whacking people who subcontract for God.

“I don’t think it’s a very good idea,’’ said Mike Grunko. “These chaplains do a very good job at keeping people calm, at giving them hope, at changing lives for the better. They are an important presence not just for the inmates, but for the people who work at the prisons, too.’’

Mark Hemenway, president of New England Prison Ministries, said getting those who have robbed, raped, and killed to a better place spiritually is more than the right thing to do; it’s cost-effective. He said studies show inmates in prison ministry programs are less likely to reoffend.

Hemenway said the 32 paid chaplains also recruit and oversee nearly 1,000 people from faith-based communities who volunteer to help in prison programs free of charge.

“Massachusetts has always been considered something of a model in this area,’’ said Hemenway.

Still, as much as he is a pastor and man of the cloth, Hemenway’s eyes are not covered by that cloth.

“Doing something positive for prisoners isn’t going to win any popularity contests. Some people don’t want to do anything that they perceive as helping someone convicted of a crime,’’ he said. “But the bottom line is that 97 percent of people who go to prison get out of prison. It’s in all our interests that they come out of prison in a better place spiritually than when they went in.’’

The chaplains make between $40,000 and $50,000 a year.

“Or,’’ as Pastor Hemenway put it, “about what it costs to keep someone locked up for a year.’’

Mike Grunko, the union guy, is the ultimate pragmatist: He is a Jewish Quaker.

“I was raised a Jew in Bangor, Maine, but I went to a Quaker meeting and things changed,’’ he said.

But the layoff list, based on seniority, created a divine headache. Seniority doesn’t take into account denominational diversity. The two rabbis have seniority, but seven of the nine Catholic chaplains are on the layoff list. The sole Nation of Islam chaplain is on the layoff list. Five Muslim chaplains and six Protestants are on the list, too.

“The chaplains are a very sympathetic group, but they were never very good at advocating for themselves,’’ Grunko said. “These are people who are always advocating for others.’’

Hemenway, who oversees Protestant ministers in the prisons, organized a letter-writing campaign, asking people to plead with Harold Clarke, the Department of Correction commissioner, to cancel the layoffs.

Hemenway said the chaplains aren’t just relying on letters and petitions and phone calls. “We’re praying, too,’’ he said.

Yesterday, I called the Department of Correction and spoke to a very nice lady named Cara Savelli, who works for Harold Clarke. I asked why they were getting rid of most of the chaplains, and she said she’d look into it and get back to me. She called back about an hour later and said none of the chaplains will be laid off, after all. Must have been the power of prayer.

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

November 25, 2009

If Minnesota gets 1,600 inmates from Pennsylvania, it will turn to a CCA in Appleton to house them.

Minnesota may use private prison in Appleton
If Minnesota gets 1,600 inmates from Pennsylvania, it will turn to a private prison in Appleton to house them.
By CHRIS HAVENS and KEVIN GILES, Minneapolis Star Tribune staff writers

Last update: November 23, 2009

Minnesota is courting an influx of 1,600 Pennsylvania prison inmates, hoping to save jobs at Prairie Correctional Facility, a private prison in Appleton.

The prison, owned by Corrections Corporation of America, is reeling after losing most of its Minnesota inmates and all of the inmates it once housed from Washington state. A month ago, the prison told 120 employees -- more than half of the work force -- that they would lose their jobs Dec. 1.

"We're trying to help preserve those jobs any way we can," said David Crist, deputy commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC).

Crist said Monday that DOC is acting as Prairie's agent as part of an agreement among states to shift prisoners when overcrowding occurs. "States exchange these prisoners without money changing hands," he said.

Minnesota is one of six states -- Kansas, Nevada, Oklahoma, Michigan and Virginia being the others -- interested in taking the prisoners. Pennsylvania seeks the transfers because of overcrowding in the state's 27 prisons.

Losing the Appleton prison, in west-central Minnesota near the South Dakota border, would devastate an economically depressed area, said Mayor Ron Ronning, who also works at the prison.

"If Prairie fails, I can say to you easily that 60 percent of this city's budget would go away," he said. "It's kind of a depressed time for us right now, and I hope something breaks loose for us."

The prison pays about $1.1 million to the city of about 2,000 residents each year for taxes and water usage. Housing 1,600 new inmates, he said, would be a "dream come true."

If Pennsylvania chose Minnesota for the transfer, none of the new male inmates would have mental health problems or serious medical and behavioral conditions.

"Pennsylvania isn't looking to dump a number of difficult-to-manage offenders outside of their system," Crist said.

They also would come at Pennsylvania's expense -- at no cost to Minnesota taxpayers, he said.

Housing a prisoner in DOC's eight adult prisons costs $89.24 a day, said spokeswoman Sarah Berg. By comparison, DOC pays $79.15 a day at Prairie, and which includes $14.21 for costs such as transportation, case management, major medical costs and other expenses, she said. However, Prairie won't accept prisoners requiring intense supervision or any who have serious chronic illnesses, and those types of inmates drive state costs up.

DOC expects to send more state inmates to Prairie once Minnesota's state-managed prisons fill up again, Crist said. DOC once housed 1,200 male prisoners there and still has about 230, but he said that number will dwindle soon.

Minnesota's prison population saw rapid growth in the first half of this decade during the methamphetamine boom and the creation of a felony DWI law, Berg said. Now, growth will continue but at a slower rate, she said.

Minnesota's reliance on the Appleton prison diminished this past year when the state opened four new housing units at the medium-security prison in Faribault and an additional 250 beds at the correctional center in Moose Lake.

Steve Owen, a spokesman for Corrections Corporation, said he couldn't speculate on Prairie's chances of getting the Pennsylvania prisoners. The company is trying to assess how state budgets are being affected and what that would mean for future contracts, he said.

Ronning credited Corrections Corporation with standing behind employees, even offering them jobs at other prisons. "They're really trying hard to keep us employed," he said.

http://www.startribune.com/local/east/72081417.html

Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2009

IN: Editorial Opposing 10 hour gap between breakfast and next meal

"No one, not even someone who wears a number, should be a pawn in a numbers game."

Our Opinion
No-lunch call is recipe for trouble
November 21, 2009

Corrections officials insist it's not about the money, yet food service costs have surged upward lately as state revenues have dropped.

They say inmates' nutritional needs are still being met, yet they've opened a 10-hour gap between breakfast and the next meal.

They say they've heard few complaints from prisoners; but since when has the Indiana Department of Correction been run according to the wishes of the offender population?

Legislators and civil liberties advocates are right to demand that the DOC stand to account for a pilot program in which inmates are being denied the midday meal three days a week.

The experiment at Plainfield Correctional Facility will be extended statewide if it proves satisfactory, the DOC says.

Satisfactory to whom? The bean counters? No, says the DOC. Yet the move follows similar actions in other states which have explicitly done so to save money. And the private contractor handling food in Indiana prisons has had a knack for going over budget since it promised big savings under a 10-year, $258 million deal struck in 2005.

DOC officials insist inmates will reap as many calories from the two meals as from three, and that the logistics of serving the midday meal had cut into other useful prison activities. Forgive us for wondering whether the latter is a problem not solvable by some means other than the former.

"Making prisoners go hungry for long periods is not the way to solve anything," Elizabeth Alexander, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, told The Star's John Tuohy. "Food is not the place to make cuts, especially since it is such a small percentage of a prison's budget."

Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, chairman of the Senate committee overseeing corrections, put it even more fundamentally, calling deprivation of food to prisoners "beneath the dignity of the state of Indiana."

Those who feel any benefit is too good for someone convicted of a crime may disagree; but their disagreement also would be with the state constitution, which obligates the DOC to attend to the health of those in its custody. If rehabilitation, also a constitutional duty, is to be pursued, nutrition cannot be neglected. If nutrition is to be curtailed in a way as substantial as the current experiment does, the jailkeepers must submit their plan to independent experts in human health. No one, not even someone who wears a number, should be a pawn in a numbers game.

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009911210320

Posted by lois at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2009

MA: Increase of assaults on guards fuels debate on double bunking and transfer of prisoners

State prison assault data fuel debate. After transfer of inmates, one site sees crime spike
By Jonathan Saltzman
The Boston Globe / November 22, 2009

Statistics provided by state prison officials last week indicate that assaults have spiked at the maximum-security facility in Shirley and plunged at the Walpole prison, after the state’s most dangerous prisoners were transferred from Walpole to Shirley.

The figures appeared to bolster an argument by the Department of Correction that a recent spate of violence at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley stemmed from the new prisoners and not from the Patrick administration’s controversial decision to start double-bunking inmates in some cells starting in January, which has been the target of intense criticism by correctional officers and advocates for prisoners.

“What this shows,’’ said Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the prison system, “is that the increase in assaults has nothing to do with double-bunking and everything to do with the type of inmate now housed at Souza-Baranowski, which is now the department’s primary maximum-security prison. . . . It’s pretty clear.’’

Assaults by inmates on correction officers and fellow prisoners at Souza-Baranowski rose nearly 60 percent in the first 10 months of this year over the same period last year, according to statistics provided to the Globe. But assaults at Cedar Junction fell by 56 percent for the same periods.

Wiffin added that Souza-Baranowski, which opened in 1998, is a state-of-the-art prison that is better equipped to hold “problematic inmates’’ than Cedar Junction, a grim complex that opened in 1956 and housed Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, among other notorious convicts. Most of Cedar Junction was downgraded from maximum- to medium-security as of June 1 after the transfer of inmates to Souza-Baranowski.

The newer prison, Wiffin said, has solid cell doors, brighter lighting, and many more surveillance cameras, and is designed to separate potentially violent inmates from one another. In contrast, she said, some cell doors at Cedar Junction have bars, enabling inmates to reach out and injure others.

But Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services and a critic of double-bunking, said it was impossible to draw any conclusions from the statistics because the Department of Correction did not provide complete data. In a letter responding to the Globe’s records request, the department said it included aggravated assaults and sexual assaults but omitted two disciplinary categories that cover inmates involved in fights.

Walker said that when her group recently requested the number of assaults by prisoners on fellow inmates for 2008 at the two prisons, the department included those categories and provided a total of 533 - nearly double the 276 that the prison system provided Thursday for all of last year.

“They’re incomplete, and they underestimate the level of violence,’’ Walker said of the new data. Many inmates, Walker added, have told her that double-bunking has precipitated violence at Souza-Baranowski.

Wiffin said that when the department responded to the Globe’s records request, it only counted assaults in which there was a clear assailant and victim. But she expected the overall trends would hold if the department added the other categories.

One of the most outspoken critics of double-bunking, Steve Kenneway, president of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union, disputed that the trends reflect that the state has moved the most violent inmates from one prison to another.

He said forcing convicted criminals to share cells at Souza-Baranowski has infuriated prisoners and caused them to lash out at each other and at correction officers with a ferocity and frequency never seen at Cedar Junction, which has never double-bunked.

“It’s a tinderbox, to the degree that the wrong statement to the wrong inmate is just going to make that place blow,’’ said Kenneway.

On Nov. 4, a Souza-Baranowski prison inmate slashed the neck of one correction officer and stabbed another in the cheek with a homemade knife, and Kenneway said the attack occurred after the prisoner was told he had to share a cell. Both correction officers were treated at a hospital and released shortly afterward. Two other officers suffered minor injuries in the incident, said prison officials.

There have been other significant attacks at Souza-Baranowski in recent months. On Oct. 8, an inmate was stabbed 32 times, according to his lawyer. In May, the prison’s superintendent, Thomas Dickhaut, was struck above the eye by an inmate during a routine meeting with prisoners.

Kenneway also disputed that Souza-Baranowski is better suited to house the most violent inmates. He said inmates there have used metal from bed frames to make homemade knives but could not do that easily at Cedar Junction because the beds there have sturdier frames.

The statistics provided by the prison system indicated that assaults on staff and inmates at Souza-Baranowski rose from 222 for the first 10 months of 2008 to 355 during the same period this year, or 59.9 percent. Assaults at Cedar Junction fell from 410 for the first 10 months of 2008 to 179 during the same period, or 56.3 percent.

Following the Nov. 4 attack, Harold W. Clarke, the commissioner of the Department of Correction, said violence had surged at Souza-Baranowski but that it had nothing to do with double-bunking.

“These very same inmates were assaulting officers or attempting to assault officers at Cedar Junction, and they are now at Souza-Baranowski,’’ he said.

Clarke, who headed the prison systems in Nebraska and then Washington State before Governor Deval Patrick appointed him in November 2007, told the Globe a year ago that overcrowding in the prison system had left him with little choice but to double-bunk some inmates at Souza-Baranowski. But he said that prisoners already shared cells or dorms in the state’s 16 medium- and minimum-security prisons and that Souza-Baranowski cells were originally designed to house two inmates.

Since double-bunking began, Souza-Baranowski’s inmate population has climbed sharply - from 1,036 on Nov. 17 last year to 1,279 now, said Wiffin. Of the 1,279 inmates at Souza-Baranowski, 382 are sharing cells.

Cedar Junction now has 670 inmates, compared with 789 a year ago, Wiffin said. Although Cedar Junction is now largely a medium-security prison, it still has maximum-security sections for new inmates awaiting classification or for those held in a segregation unit.

The number of homemade weapons seized from inmates at Souza-Baranowski is more than triple this year what it was for all of 2008, according to Jim Pingeon, litigation director for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, citing data he said he obtained from the prison system. Prison officials confiscated 74 weapons last year and 233 so far this year.

“The number of weapons at SBCC has gone up much more than [the influx of new prisoners] would suggest,’’ Pingeon said. “One of the problems with double-bunking is that people are afraid of their cellmates, and one way to relieve your anxiety would be to obtain a weapon, just in case.’’
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/11/22/state_prison_assault_data_fuel_debate/

Posted by lois at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

PA to transfer up to 2000 prisoners out of state

Out of prison space, Pa. looks to other states
PETER JACKSON
Philadelphia Enquirer
The Associated Press
Nov. 21, 2009
HARRISBURG, Pa. - Early next year, for the first time in its history, Pennsylvania plans to contract with another state or states to board as many as 2,000 convicted criminals.

The reason is simple and troubling: The number of inmates in Pennsylvania's 27 prisons is growing faster than the state can build new ones.

The inmates who will be transferred have not been picked, but the Corrections Department said they will be males who have no mental-health, behavioral or serious medical conditions that require special attention.

"Some inmates already are volunteering," said department spokeswoman Susan McNaughton.

McNaughton said inmates' relationships with families and friends are an important consideration, and the department plans to make video conferencing available for transferees who want to stay in touch. Conversely, inmates who have received the fewest visits during their incarceration in Pennsylvania may be more likely to be transferred, she said.

The more than 210 men on Pennsylvania's death row are unlikely candidates for transfers because of the elaborate security precautions required when moving them.

None of the six states under consideration , Kansas, Nevada, Oklahoma, Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia , shares a border with Pennsylvania.

Twenty years ago, during the Camp Hill prison riot, Pennsylvania transferred hundreds of inmates to federal prisons across the country on an emergency basis and some transfers lasted for years. But this is the first time the state will contract with other states to board prisoners, McNaughton said.

Tom Beauclair, deputy director of the Justice Department's National Institute of Corrections in Washington, said interstate sharing of prison space is common, although 2,000 is a large number to transfer at once.

State Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard tentatively plans to assign at least one member of his staff to accompany the Pennsylvania inmates and act as a monitor to ensure they are treated humanely and receive proper services , a step Beauclair said some other states have taken as a safeguard against potential litigation.

"You want to make sure that you are getting what you pay for," Beauclair said.

Pennsylvania's prison overcrowding was the focus of a state Senate hearing last week in Harrisburg.

More than 51,000 inmates , more than Harrisburg has residents , are overflowing from a system designed to hold fewer than 44,000, with makeshift living quarters inside the prison compounds and hundreds of county jail cells taking up the slack. In 2000, the inmate population was fewer than 37,000.

Major causes for the admissions spike include the ongoing "war on drugs" that began in the late '70s; mandatory sentences passed under then-Gov. Tom Ridge in the late 1990s; and a two-month moratorium on parole that Gov. Ed Rendell ordered last year following the fatal shootings of two Philadelphia police officers.

Prison construction is the most expensive option for taxpayers. The four prisons now on the drawing board , two on the grounds of Graterford prison in Montgomery County, one at Rockview prison in Centre County and one in Fayette County , are expected to make available 8,000 beds by 2013 at a cost of about $800 million.

Beard said nonviolent offenders, mostly people convicted of property and drug crimes, account for more than half of the admissions surge. He and other speakers advocated changes to divert more of those people into community programs and reduce the number of parolees returned to prison for minor "technical" violations.

Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, the Montgomery County Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and presided over the hearing, listened with a sympathetic ear.

"Being smart on crime is not soft on crime," Greenleaf said afterward.
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Testimony by PA: Donna Pfender, Pres., Fight for Lifers West. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Prison Overcrowding on November 16, 2009 can be found at:
http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/archives/2009/11/pa_donna_pfende.html#more
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http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/state/pennsylvania/20091121_ap_outofprisonspacepalookstootherstates.html

Posted by lois at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2009

MA: DOC is preparing to layoff prison chaplains

The DOC is preparing to layoff Prison Chaplains. The Chaplains are represented by Local 509 SEIU.

1. The Department of Corrections has proposed to layoff 19 of 32 Chaplains now employed by the department in order to balance the department budget. This does not account for the unfilled position at MCI Norfolk or several Catholic Chaplain positions around the system.
2. In accordance with union policy, the initial list is by seniority only. The faith/denomination of the individuals was not considered. In effect, the remaining Chaplains will become non-denominational religious service coordinators.
3. This is a proposal. Before the list is finalized, the Union will meet with DOC Management to negotiate a final agreement.
4. Layoffs will be accomplished by 31 December. Negotiations are expected to begin within the next couple of weeks.
The faith communities of this Commonwealth provide almost 1,000 volunteers for DOC programs. Faith-based volunteers account for two thirds of the total volunteer force. Chaplains recruit, train and coordinate this significant resource.
This would have an immediate negative impact on the ability of the Commonwealth to support the constitutional right of inmates to religious practice.
http://nepm.org/resources/newsletters/prison-chaplain-layoffs--update.aspx

Posted by lois at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2009

PA: Donna Pfender, Pres., Fight for Lifers West. Senate Judiciary Cmte Hearing on Prison Overcrowding and Sending Prisoners to MI

Senate Judiciary Committee Public Hearing on
Prison Overcrowding
November 16, 2009
Harrisburg, PA

Donna Pfender, President – Fight For Lifers West

Good afternoon to the Chairman, Senator Greenleaf; to the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee; to Senator Greenleaf’s aide, Gregg Warner; Ladies and Gentlemen.
I wish to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to testify today about the impact that transferring inmates to other states will have, not only on the inmates themselves, but on their family members and loved ones.
When I first heard that the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections was in negotiations with other states to transfer inmates in a bid to alleviate overcrowding, my first reaction was one of disbelief. I couldn’t believe that human beings were being treated as commodities to be bought, sold or bartered for any reason. I knew about the Interstate Compact Act, but this was on a whole new level. I wondered why this wasn’t considered as an Eighth Amendment violation for “deliberate indifference” as well as an “objectively serious deprivation?” I felt not only that inmates were being dehumanized but that their family structures would fall apart.

I told myself that this couldn’t happen in the land of the free. After all, inmates’ family members are not incarcerated, but affected directly. I told myself that surely people will stand up and protest when they realize the inhumanity of such a proposal and that there would be a public outcry to stop such alienation and separation of Pennsylvania families. Then it hit me that it could happen to my own daughter; to our family! She is serving life without parole sentence in Pennsylvania and has been incarcerated for over 25 years. I asked myself, “Will they move lifers?” A short while later I got an e-mail from another PA inmate support group stating that 300 lifers were to be moved from SCI, Graterford to Michigan if they had not had a visit in the past 4 years. In addition, programs such as G.E.D.s would no longer be offered to lifers. E-mails and phone calls were generated across Pennsylvania and across the United States. Everybody had questions. Everyone appeared to be in disbelief. There were even people from other countries who contacted us to see if it was true.
Shortly thereafter, we had our regular monthly meeting on October 17, 2009 and the issue of moving inmates to other states was a hot topic on our agenda. Before the meeting began, Ruby, a small, frail, African American woman walked up to me and was visibly shaken and upset. She told me that her nephew was a lifer at Graterford and she had received a letter from him that he would be transferred to California in January. I told her that surely that couldn’t be true because California is known to have the most overcrowded prison population in the country.

I told her I would see what I could find out. When the topic came up on the agenda, I asked her to tell the other members what she had told me. Ruby rarely speaks in meetings but she courageously told the others what she had learned. You could have heard a pin drop. As I looked around the room, I could see the incredulous faces of those in attendance who had not yet heard about the transfers or thought that it couldn’t be possible. At that time, nothing had been confirmed. I later spoke with prison advocates in California who told me that they were also shipping in prisoners from the state of Oregon. Later that week, we were to learn that even more states were being considered to ship Pennsylvania prisoners to and that inmates had already been informed that they would be moving out of state. We were all in shock!
We all understand that the problem of overcrowding leads to dangerous conditions not only for the prison staff, but for the inmate population, visitors, outside vendors and society in general. Overcrowding can contribute to outbreaks of physical aggression, disease, medical neglect, abuse, extensive isolation, suicides, suspicious deaths, chronic mental and physical problems, insufficient or no education and a population not ready for re-entry back into society. Every time a human being is locked away in a facility where they are warehoused and treated as non-human, they become a further threat to society and more victims will likely result. While prison costs keep escalating, funding is taken from outside education and social programs to build yet more institutions and the prison system continues to burst at the seams.
Not only have I heard reports from California, about shipping prisoners either in or out of state, but also from other associates throughout the United States. This is not a problem confined to Pennsylvania, but Pennsylvania seems to be doing it on a grander scale. It seems prisoners are being shuffled around from state to state to appease overcrowding laws and court orders, while the public is unaware of the increased burden in taxes that are being levied on them in order to accomplish this.
As a member of the Citizen’s Advisory Committee to the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole in Pittsburgh, I asked District Director, Larry Ludwig, if inmates could be paroled if the institution didn’t give a recommendation and he told me no. I had countless letters from inmates who said they were still sitting in prison even after they had complied with all of their program requirements. They said that often, they were told they needed to have additional, newly adopted, programs and that the waiting lists to get on them were very long. So, they continued to sit in prison. I question why such programs couldn’t be handled upon release? Wouldn’t it create jobs and relieve overcrowding? I had reports that inmates due for parole had been told that their records had been lost. At the State Correctional Institution at Cambridge Springs, 300 such records were found and a guard was reported by another officer who had located them months later.
One woman, housed at the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, sent me a copy of a court order from a Judge remanding her into the community, but she was still in Muncy nine (9) months later. It made me question if there were people still in prison who should have been sent home or to other facilities? I also learned that inmates with drug or alcohol records were held back when their parole minimum dates came up, even though they had no history of violent crime. Why couldn’t they have been given further treatment outside of prison walls? They too, remained in prison, padding the institutional profiles.
I also question how inmate advocacy groups can keep track of prisoners who were sentenced in Pennsylvania, but will now be housed elsewhere? What will happen with the “Right to Know Act?” Will it cross state lines? How can prison advocacy groups serve our fellow Pennsylvanians when we don’t know where they are located? Will this information be made readily available? Will families and loved ones be informed? Will the families survive? Questions, unanswered questions.
And then, we worry about the high cost of exorbitant phone bills that will only increase if a loved one is moved even farther away. We worry about higher traveling expenses to visit them and if we will ever be able to see them again? Under the Department of Corrections Handbook for Visitors (DC-ADM 812, p.20, enclosed), it states that, “Visitation by relatives and friends are encouraged by the Department. Visitation helps to keep the inmate’s family together. A child needs to know that his/her mother or father is still a part of his/her life and that he/she will be able to see his/her parent. A husband and wife need to be able to share his/her daily struggles and joys with each other. Visitation is also important to the morale of the inmate. Research has shown that an inmate who receives regular visits readjusts much better once he/she is released from prison.”
Those who don’t have loved ones on the inside may reason that some inmates don’t receive visitors because their families don’t care. I have spoken to many family members that, for a variety of reasons, are unable to visit although they would like to. For example, many offenders are housed at opposite ends of Pennsylvania from where their families live. Family members often don’t have the resources to visit so far away, or get days off from work that match the days when visits are allowed. (See: DC-ADM, p. 47, Family Finances, enclosed)
Sometimes, loved ones travel far distances of up to 10 hours with small children or elderly relatives, only to be turned away. Days to visit have been scaled down and there are numerous reports of prison officials treating visitors with distain and disrespect. Some family members need to work more than one job just to support their families on the outside and then there is the added cost of helping their loved ones on the inside with the high commissary costs. Inmates are employed at slave wages making anywhere from nineteen (19) to forty five (45) cents/hr. and the food budgets for the institutions keep being cut.
Not only are families paying taxes at work to support their loved one on the inside, but they typically also help them with commissary and medical co-pays so they can maintain some manner of human dignity and health.
I have heard many times, that families will save for months or even years to make a costly trip to visit a loved one on the inside. Work schedules, school schedules, institution visiting days and the weather are other factors that impact families that must travel long distances. Imagine if they were in another state?
We worry about ever increasing commissary costs, phone fees and no choice in vendors. We worry about “out of sight, out of mind” and what will happen to those on the inside that we love. If they report problems, we won’t be able to visit them to assure ourselves that they are alright. Will there be groups in other states such as the Pennsylvania Prison Society’s Official Visitors that will be able to visit our loved ones and intervene if necessary? Will the PA Official Visitors be allowed to visit out of state institutions?
Secretary Beard is quoted in the 10/15/2009 edition of the Philadelphia Enquirer “that the other states would not require any special programming, only basic religious, recreational and similar perfunctory programs.” Nothing is mentioned about education or preparing them for re-entry. Nothing is mentioned of how much it will cost Pennsylvania tax payers for each inmate transferred.
On 11/13/2009 there was a report by Andy Sheehan on KDKA news about the high cost of housing elderly lifers. It stated that housing inmates convicted of serious crimes are elderly, infirm and expensive and that their risk of committing a new crime is negligible. Rep. Frank Dermody argues that the state should more aggressively pursue alternative sentencing for many of the elderly inmates to make room for younger, violent criminals currently being housed out of state.
In the 11/04/2009 edition of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Bill Dimascio wrote an excellent article titled “Bizarro” (enclosed) about the state ignoring solutions to costly prison overcrowding. I recommend that everyone here read it.
In closing, I would just like to ask this panel to think about how they would feel if someone in their family was arrested for a crime and sentenced to prison in Pennsylvania? What if later they were told that their loved one would be moved to a far away state? Of course, no one ever thinks that one of their loved ones will ever wind up in prison. I didn’t either. Thank you.

Posted by lois at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2009

College Ivy Sprouts at a Connecticut Prison

College Ivy Sprouts at a Connecticut Prison
November 16, 2009 NY Times
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

CHESHIRE, Conn. — In many ways it was just another day, another class of Wesleyan University, one of the more selective colleges in the Northeast. The topic was multiculturalism in schools. The discussion focused on methods of evaluating the rhetorical skills of various commentators, from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. to Dinesh D’Souza.

One student pored over the text, his glasses perched at the tip of his nose. Another raised his hand again and again, eager to speak. A third lobbed grenades into the discussion. Several worried aloud about their homework, a research paper due in a few weeks.

After years of slim pickings for prisoners who craved higher education, two Wesleyan University students convinced their school to bring an elite college education to inmates at a high-security prison.

Unlike other Wesleyan classes, though, each of the students — all men — had numbers like 271013 or 298331 on their khaki shirts. They were, in fact, inmates at the state prison here and all part of a daring, privately financed experiment in higher education that takes murderers and drug dealers and other inmates with histories of serious crime and gives them an opportunity to get an elite college education inside their high-security prison, the Cheshire Correctional Institution.

Though community colleges and others, like Boston University, have long had inmate programs, the two-month-old Wesleyan program is one of a few in the country where the selection process is highly rigorous, where academic potential is the primary criterion and where past criminal conduct, however heinous, is not considered in admission.

Some 120 inmates applied at Cheshire for 19 spots in the program. The process required them to submit essays, some of which can be read here, on weighty matters like Frantz Fanon’s view that language helped “support the weight of a civilization” or Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on happiness.

The instructors were impressed with Jose Cordero’s answer to one admission question: What figure, past or present, would he like to meet? Mr. Cordero, who is serving 65 years for murder, said he would like to meet the Constitution, since it is a “living” document.

He got a fat envelope, filled with blank paper for his future assignments. The rejected got those dreaded skinny ones.

Next semester, the inmates will study chemistry, biology and politics. This fall, their courses consist of expository writing and Sociology 152, the same introductory course Professor Charles C. Lemert has been teaching to generations of Wesleyan students at its nearby Middletown campus where tuition, room and board cost roughly $51,000.

“My father does college planning,” said Michael Luther, a 23-year-old who has been incarcerated since he was 15, “and a lot of students he recommends for Wesleyan don’t even get in. When he heard I had this opportunity, he was proud.”

On Wednesdays, students from the Wesleyan campus come to the prison for joint discussion groups with the inmates. The prison is a high-security center that houses roughly 1,350 inmates. It is the place where all of Connecticut’s license plates are made, and it offers a variety of other classes beyond the Wesleyan program, though not college level. The motto posted in the school wing reads “Non Sum Qualis Eram,” or “I am not what I once was.”

Indeed, all the inmates in the program have records that speak clearly about their past wrongdoing. The class has six convicted murderers, two convicted drug dealers and a kidnapper. Collectively, the class faces more than 600 years in prison. Several students, in fact, have little prospect of ever using their college credits in a career: prison will be their home for this lifetime.

But many of them speak with pure clarity about the reasons they were drawn to school again: idle curiosity, intellectual interest, a longing to be part of the big conversations of the day, and a desire for self-respect.

“It’s rejuvenating,” said Antonio Rivera, 23, who likes to read history and is less than halfway through a 12-year sentence for drug dealing.

Clyde Meikle, 38, of Hartford is serving a 50-year sentence for fatally shooting a man with whom he tussled over a parking spot. Ten years ago, he earned his high school diploma in prison. He likes to set a positive example for what he calls “the younger cats.”

“For me, it was a self-esteem thing,” he said.

Across the country, colleges faced with shrinking endowments are trying to cut corners, not add programs, and many colleges have given up their inmate education programs in the years since the Clinton administration decided it would no longer subsidize them with Pell grants.

Four years ago, in fact, Wesleyan balked at a proposal to install such a program.

But the university has a long history of civic engagement that traces back to its Methodist roots. It is named after John Wesley, an 18th-century minister who championed prison reform and helping the downtrodden. Two students, Russell Perkins and Molly Birnbaum, who had volunteered in prisons as students, revived the idea last year when they were seniors and figured out a way to finance it.

They obtained nearly $300,000 from the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that already pays to offer Bard College courses in a handful of New York prisons. That should fully pay for Wesleyan’s program for two years and provide partial financing for two more.

“Wesleyan has taken a courageous stand here,” said Max Kenner, the executive director of Bard’s program, who said he is convinced that education is a key tool for reducing recidivism.

How to finance the program over the long term is still under discussion, as is the question of whether an inmate who completes the course work will necessarily receive a Wesleyan degree.

But the instructors insist that the standards are identical — that an A in prison is the same as an A on campus and that the inmates will be entitled to use the university’s career services upon release.

Crime victims and their advocates question whether the investment will be worthwhile. “I appreciate the need to educate offenders, but I’m saddened we don’t spend that kind of money or take that kind of time to rebuild the lives of crime victims,” said Michelle S. Cruz, Connecticut’s independent victim advocate.

Sam Rieger, a Waterbury man whose 19-year-old daughter was murdered by a man now incarcerated at the Cheshire prison, agreed. “This does not make sense to me,” he said of the Wesleyan program. “What is the point?” He said the money should be spent on victims or on trying to help young people make better choices.

On a recent Monday at the prison, Beth Richards, the inmates’ English professor, looked around the class and sought to assure them that they have the same ability to succeed as their main campus counterparts. “Remember,” she said, “for most of literary history, people did it with pencil and paper. I agree you have limitations, but you have no limit on your brain.”

The discussion turned to whether multiculturalism had a place in schools.

Damien Thomas, 33, who is serving a 120-year sentence for two murders, said he took issue with the concept of the melting pot. “The salad bowl theory is better,” he said. “Everyone keeps their different shapes and forms but still contributes something to the salad.”

University administrators say they will raise additional money to finance the program privately so as not to siphon money from Wesleyan’s core mission. That was among the concerns raised by the faculty when it gathered to vote on the proposal last spring.

The vote was first scheduled to be taken on May 6, but it was postponed when a Wesleyan junior, Johanna Justin-Jinich, was murdered that day at the bookstore, turning a tranquil campus into a raucous crime scene. The faculty endorsed the plan two weeks later by a show of hands, with some dissent.

“If anything is unanimous at a Wesleyan faculty meeting, we’d be worried,” said Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan’s president. He said he shared some of the faculty’s initial concerns, but “the students convinced me.”

The university has not fully wrestled with what it would do if inmates were released before completing their studies. Bard faced this issue in May, when a female inmate became eligible for release weeks before her graduation. She extended her stay to receive her diploma.

“Oh, my,” Dr. Roth said upon hearing about the inmate. “I don’t know if that would be the solution I’d want to hear.” He said Wesleyan would be “as helpful as possible to someone who had that kind of dedication.”

During her class in the prison, Professor Richards walked a fine line between energizing her students with the demands of real scholarship and scaring them back into their cells. “My job,” she said, “is to make you at least partially paranoid.”

“Mission accomplished,” said Michael Fauci, 28, a convicted robber.

Vasco Thring, 34, wanted to know whether unwittingly using a phrase like “education begins at home,” which may have been said by someone else before, in a paper constituted plagiarism.

“You are all worriers,” the professor said. “That’s fine. If I have a choice between a group that doesn’t give a rip or worriers, I’ll take the worriers. But trust your intelligence.”

“You’re allowed,” she said, “to make mistakes here.”
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/college-ivy-sprouts-at-a-connecticut-prison/

Posted by lois at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2009

Op Ed Newsday: Robert Gangi" Ease state budget woes by closing more prisons

OPINION: Ease state budget woes by closing more prisons
November 12, 2009 By ROBERT GANGI
Newsday
Robert Gangi is executive director of the Correctional Association of New York.

Gov. David A. Paterson has proposed severe spending reductions to close New York's projected $3 billion deficit for this fiscal year. Aid for public schools, Medicaid and other health and mental health programs, libraries, summer special education programs, and HIV-AIDS services are poised to take big hits.

Another place in the state's budget is primed for cutting: prisons.

New York's prison population has declined by more than 12,000 people in the past 10 years, dropping to about 59,100 today. The state's crime rate also declined precipitously during that time.

But, largely for political reasons, the state did not close any correctional facilities during most of those years. Spending on prisons actually increased over that time, even as the number of people in prison fell. It wasn't until earlier this year, confronted with the current fiscal crisis, that Albany policy-makers managed to muster the will to shut down about 2,250 prison beds, at a savings of $52 million over two years.

The state's prison system still has more than 5,000 unused spaces. With state government in such desperate need of economies and with the evidence that having fewer inmates doesn't threaten public safety, it's time to close underutilized prisons.

State leaders can enact additional measures that will reduce the prison population and make the cost-savings step of shutting facilities easier to take:

Full Rockefeller drug laws repeal: Even after reforms were enacted earlier this year, mandatory sentencing provisions remain on the books that will cause the imprisonment of thousands of minor drug offenders each year.

Expand work release: In 1994, more than 27,000 state inmates participated in this proven and cost beneficial program, which aids incarcerated people in their safe transition back to the community. Now, only about 2,500 are enrolled.
connections

Expand graduated sanctions for technical parole violations: Last year, more than 9,000 people were returned to state prison for technical parole violations - like showing up late for an appointment or breaking curfew - not for committing new crimes. Instead of returning people to prison, the state could step up their level of supervision.

Increase parole release and expand merit time eligibility: The state's Parole Board often denies individuals release due to the nature of their crime, despite their positive institutional records, and merit time, which allows inmates to earn time off their sentences, isn't available to those convicted of violent offenses. Combined, these two policies delay the release of thousands of people every year.

When New York State passed the Rockefeller drug laws in 1973, only about 12,500 people were confined in its prisons. About 300,000 people were locked up across the nation. Those harsh laws effectively triggered a mandatory sentencing movement that swept the country. Today our nation's correctional facilities house nearly 2.4 million people, a growth of more than 600 percent.

New York can now address its budget woes while performing a pivotal role in pointing criminal justice practice in a more constructive direction. At a press conference this past spring, Paterson seemed to support this point of view when he said: "Sometimes I wonder what planet I'm living on when I'm in here defending closing prisons. You know when you close prisons? When there aren't enough prisoners to fill them up."

We look to the governor and legislative leaders to exercise leadership that continues New York's emphasis on progressive measures that reduce resources for incarceration and save the state money, while favoring approaches that actually cut recidivism rates and restore the well-being of our people and communities. That's the planet we would all prefer to live on.

http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/opinion-ease-state-budget-woes-by-closing-more-prisons-1.1584229

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

Prison health-care costs rise as prisoners grow older and sicker

Prison health-care costs rise as prisoners grow older and sicker
CNN-11-13-09

ardwick, Georgia (CNN) -- White fuzz covers his bald head. His sallow skin sags. A wheelchair and cane support limp legs.

This is not the typical image of a prison inmate. But 73-year-old George Sanges is among the burgeoning elderly population behind bars, a group expected to continue to grow as baby boomers age and states implement longer sentences.

Sanges, who is serving a 15-year sentence at Men's State Prison in Georgia, has cerebral palsy and takes multiple medications twice a day. His condition has worsened since he entered prison in 2005 for aggravated assault against his wife of 48 years. Twice while in prison, he was rushed to the hospital for heart problems.

"They help me here," Sanges says. "Everybody is very nice to me."

As health care sparks debate across the nation, the prison community faces its own battle against rising medical costs. The elderly constitute the fastest-growing sector of the inmate population, experts say. It is a group that needs more frequent and costlier treatment, which states are required to provide under the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

An analysis of Bureau of Justice Statistics data found that the male prison population over age 55 ballooned by 82 percent in eight years, from 48,800 inmates in 1999 to 89,900 in 2007. The definition of "elderly" varies by state. The National Corrections Institute, a prison research organization, calls inmates over 55 elderly, and some states place inmates over 50 in that category. An inmate's body ages faster than the body of someone not in prison.

Georgia, one of the 10 largest prison systems in the country, spends about $8,500 on medical costs for inmates over 65, compared with about an average of $950 for those who are younger, corrections officials say. Across the county, inmate medical care costs about $3 billion a year.

Men's State Prison holds the largest number of sickly elderly inmates in Georgia. The medium-security facility, in a quaint rural town, is enclosed by barbed wire just like any other prison. But inside, inmates play card games and checkers rather than shooting hoops or lifting weights. The oldest inmate here is 89. There are veterans who served in World War II.

Gang fights here are rare, though there is still bickering and catfights from the wheelchair seat. Diapers, breathing machines and hospital beds wrapped in plastic for easy cleanup are visible in almost every corner of the hostel-style room where prisoners sleep.

Every inmate here has a medical condition; dementia, hypertension and diabetes are the most common, the warden says. "With the elderly population, we're beginning to run something comparable to nursing homes," says Sharon Lewis, medical director for the Georgia Department of Corrections. "This is one of the unhealthiest populations found anywhere. They really lived life hard."

In the last few decades, a growing number of prisons have improved their quality of medical care, says Edward Harrison, president of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, an accreditation organization based in Chicago, Illinois.

Elizabeth Alexander, director of the ACLU's National Prison Project, says investigations revealed that inmates were often denied access to certified doctors in the 1970s. In some instances, inmates were providing medical and dental care to one another. There continues to be lawsuits filed against prisons and jails for providing poor medical care, she says, but overall, the care has vastly improved.
This is one of the unhealthiest populations found anywhere. They really lived life hard.
--Sharon Lewis

Some states, such as Virginia and Pennsylvania, have built geriatric prison facilities that resemble mini-hospitals, equipped with medical devices and oxygen tanks. Prisons are being licensed as acute-care settings with a crew of registered nurses, correctional health experts say.

Placing elderly prisoners into separate facilities or wings can help the state consolidate costs. Nearly 75 hospice programs exist in prisons -- up from less than 10 a decade ago, says Carol McAdoo of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

"I would argue that the health care that is rendered behind bars is better than what is received in the general population," says CEO Rich Hallworth of Prison Health Services, a private medical corrections company in Tennessee that serves 172 jails and prisons around the country.

To ease budget woes in California, one bill up for debate would allow nonviolent elderly prisoners to be released into hospice care or monitored with ankle bracelets. In the past few years, Georgia officials say, the state has released more frail and dying inmates on medical reprieve than ever before. Other states, including New York and Virginia, have also allowed early release of ailing elderly inmates.

But critics, including victims' advocacy groups, have scrutinized this policy. Will Marling, executive director of the National Organization for Victims Assistance in Virginia, said most victims believe offenders will strike again after they are released.
The health care that is rendered behind bars is better than what is received in the general population.
--Rich Hallworth

"If a person is sentenced to life, we know they are naturally going to get old," Marling said. "A life sentence should mean life."

Most of the elderly inmates at Men's State Prison in Georgia are serving lengthy sentences for crimes committed when they were younger, officials said. A "three strikes law" passed in the 1990s contributed to much of the growth in the state's geriatric prison population.

But there remains a group of elderly inmates who committed violent crimes during their golden years, proving the point that many victims worry about.

Research has shown that arrests of elderly offenders have risen. Their imprisonment has also contributed to the aging inmate population, but little is known about why the elderly commit crimes.
As much as I feel for them, they are in a situation of their own making.

With his sight nearly gone, George Sanges peers through thick glasses at an old photograph from his locker. After several seconds, he slowly distinguishes his wife's face.

"That's Betty," he says.

Sanges cannot explain why he attacked his wife. He was 69 years old then, a grandfather without a criminal history.

"I got in trouble," he repeats several times. "I'm really sorry."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/13/aging.inmates/

Posted by lois at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2009

MA: Gov. shelves plans to build treatment units for seriously mentally prisoners. Mass Correctional Legal Services goes to court to force the state to build alternatives to solitary confinement.

Treatment units for mentally ill inmates on hold
State cites budget crunch as talks to end suit fail

By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | November 10, 2009

The Patrick administration has shelved plans to build special treatment units for hundreds of seriously mentally ill inmates, two years after advocates for prisoners alleged in a federal lawsuit that the state’s practice of keeping such inmates in solitary confinement 23 hours a day was inhumane and causing suicides.

Citing the state budget crisis, lawyers for top state prison officials said negotiations to settle the civil rights suit by the Disability Law Center against the Department of Correction out of court have ended. The center has asked a federal judge in Boston to schedule a trial for January 2011, while the state wants it to start a year later.

The collapse of negotiations, made public in court filings Friday, marks a startling reversal from where things stood a year ago. Last November, Harold W. Clarke, the correction commissioner appointed by Governor Deval Patrick, and Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, said they expected the suit would be resolved shortly with the announcement of plans to build maximum-security residential treatment units.

Inmates would be exposed to more types of therapy in such units, and advocates want the prisoners to have more time out of their cells.

“We’re hoping to be able to say, ‘We don’t have to go to court, we can avoid litigation,’ which I’m certain will serve all parties best,’’ Clarke said in a Globe report Nov. 16.

On Friday, however, lawyers for the prison system filed a document in US District Court that said, “Due to the fiscal crisis, the parties have discontinued formal settlement negotiations.’’ The state’s lawyers did not elaborate on the financial constraints.

The nonprofit Disability Law Center sued the state in March 2007, alleging that hundreds of mentally ill prisoners were kept in closet-size solitary confinement cells in response to unruly behavior. The conditions had led to self-mutilation, the swallowing of razor blades, and numerous suicides, said the center.

The suit, which resembled legal challenges that led to changes in other states, said Massachusetts ignored repeated calls from its mental health providers and consultants to provide high-security treatment units for violent, mentally disturbed inmates.

A Globe Spotlight Team series in December 2007 reported 15 suicides in the prisons from 2005 through 2007, most by those in solitary confinement with histories of mental illness or drug addiction. There had also been more than 3,200 suicide attempts and self-inflicted injuries in the prior decade, the Globe found.

Walker, of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, which helps represent the Disability Law Center in the suit, said yesterday that she was “deeply disappointed that we’re not going to be able to resolve this case short of trial.’’ She said she could not comment further because settlement talks were confidential.

In a brief statement, Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the prison system, said correction officials plan to “continue providing appropriate levels of service to segregation inmates with serious mental illness.’’ She declined to elaborate, citing the litigation.

There is nothing appropriate about the segregation of inmates with mental illness, according to Laurie Martinelli, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Massachusetts, an advocacy group that supports the lawsuit.

She said keeping such prisoners in their cells 23 hours a day violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and that the state’s fiscal crisis was irrelevant.

“You can’t get around a constitutional violation by saying, ‘We don’t have money,’ ’’ she said.

Fred Cohen, a retired criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Albany and an expert on the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, agreed, saying no federal court has ruled that finances trump an inmate’s constitutional rights. If the case goes to trial, however, plaintiffs would have to prove that the isolation of inmates violates their civil rights. In some states, Cohen said, politicians were glad for judges to order them to improve conditions for inmates; that way, judges, rather than the politicians, had to take the heat from the public for spending scarce tax dollars on convicted criminals.

“It’s not unheard of, and it’s especially popular during times of economic duress,’’ he said.

Several states, including Connecticut, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin have faced lawsuits in recent years that have been resolved by settlements or court orders requiring improvements in the treatment of mentally ill prisoners.

Kevin M. Burke, Patrick’s public safety secretary, was quoted as saying in 2007 that it would cost “several million’’ dollars to fully fund high-security treatment units. A spokesman for Burke, whose office oversees the prison system, said yesterday that the secretary would not comment on the litigation. Patrick also declined to comment through a spokeswoman.

Prisoner rights groups as well as specialists on the treatment of inmates have repeatedly criticized the Massachusetts prison system for failing to address the needs of inmates with mental illnesses.

An independent study of the state prison system released in February 2007 found that the number of mentally ill inmates increased by nearly 1,000 between 2000 and 2005 but that the state was not responding adequately to the challenges they presented. There are about 11,000 inmates in the state system.

Lindsay M. Hayes, a national specialist in prison suicide prevention who wrote the report, said suicidal inmates were being punished instead of being helped. The study, commissioned by the department after an increase in prisoner suicides in 2005 and 2006 left the state’s rate nearly double the national rate over the prior decade, made 29 recommendations. They ranged from improving the suicide-prevention training of correction officers to increasing the frequency of observation of at-risk inmates.

Although prison officials immediately said they embraced all of the recommendations, the department never endorsed a blanket ban on the segregation of mentally ill inmates. Inmates in segregation are typically allowed out of their cells for an hour only to shower or to get exercise in a small caged space.

In April 2008, the state prison system took a modest step to improve treatment of mentally ill inmates when it opened a unit for such prisoners at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in Shirley. The unit is called the Secure Treatment Program and it houses 14 prisoners, Wiffin said.

http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/11/10/treatment_units_for_mentally_ill_inmates_on_hold?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 08:47 PM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2009

MA: Franklin County jail strip search unconstitutional

Franklin County jail strip search unconstitutional
By George Claxton
Created 10/24/2009 - 04:00

GREENFIELD - A strip search procedure previously used by the Franklin County jail has been ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge, just as an earlier one was in Northampton two years ago.

The ruling applies to strip searches of detainees awaiting arraignment at the jail by local police departments following an arrest.

Now, the case, which involves a Sunderland man, moves into the phase that determines damages awarded for the emotional distress of people who were strip-searched.

According to Franklin County Sheriff Frederick Macdonald, the policy was put in place at the old 19th-century jail where prisoners were able to pass items back and forth between the cells through cell door bars.

"We were strip searching (every new arrival) at the old jail because it was so congested over there ¿ We found all kinds of things on people: drugs, even a knife," he said.

Federal Magistrate Judge Kenneth Neiman, however, was not persuaded by the sheriff's arguments.

"The general rule in this circuit appears to now be that strip-searches of all misdemeanor arrestees require reasonable suspicion that the individual is armed or concealing contraband.

"The need for reasonable suspicion stems from the recognition by the First Circuit (Court of Appeals) that strip-searches impinge seriously upon Fourth Amendment values, are a severe, if not gross, interference with a person's privacy, and are an offense to the dignity of the individual," the judge wrote.

The judge noted that a blanket strip-search policy would be allowable if there were "compelling institutional concerns," such as a rampant problem of the introduction of contraband to a facility by people carrying materials under their clothing or in body cavities. He found no such problem at the Franklin County Jail.

According to the judge, there were only a handful of cases of people carrying contraband into the jail and in three of those instances the material was found without a strip search.

"An indiscriminate strip-search policy ... can not be justified simply on the basis of administrative ease in attending to security concerns," Neiman wrote.

2007 case

The case against the sheriff's office grew out of a matter involving a Sunderland man named Gregory Garvey who was taken into custody in January 2007 on a warrant that was issued because he did not appear in court on a traffic violation. Garvey said that he never received a notice to appear in court.

The original case against Garvey was based on a minor traffic crash that he had in Whately where it was discovered that his Massachusetts driver's license had been suspended while he was living in Mississippi because he had not paid excise tax in this state several years before.

According to Howard Friedman, Garvey's attorney, his client paid the outstanding tax right after the Whately citation was issued, and the case was dismissed as soon as it came to court.

The case against the sheriff began because, while he was held overnight pending a court hearing the next morning, Garvey was subjected to a strip search in which he was forced to disrobe and allow the correctional officers to inspect his buttocks and genitals.

"The officer had no reason to suspect that Mr. Garvey had any weapons or contraband hidden on his person.

"The officer did not find anything as a result of the strip search," Friedman said.

Garvey was subjected to another strip search the next morning before he was transported to the court for his hearing.

According to Garvey, the experience left him feeling "humiliated, degraded and violated."

Friedman said that Garvey feels vindicated by his victory in court. "He told me that this is America and what happened to him isn't right," the lawyer said.

Ultimately the suit was filed by Friedman as a class action, the class in question being made up of people who were strip searched at the jail between March 27, 2004, and February 25, 2007.

According to court records, the number of people eligible to take part in the suit could come to as many as 400.

"It was a large number of people, so it will require a large amount of money," he added.

Friedman says that he has won similar cases against jails in Hampshire, Plymouth and Suffolk counties in Massachusetts and York County in Maine. In Northampton, the sheriff settled the matter in 2007 for $205,000.
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2009/10/24/franklin-county-jail-strip-search-unconstitutional

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October 22, 2009

Endless Insanity: Judges reject California plan to cut prison crowding The panel threatens to impose its own plan if the state does not submit an acceptable one within three weeks.

Judges reject California plan to cut prison crowding
The panel threatens to impose its own plan if the state does not submit an acceptable one within three weeks.

By Michael Rothfeld
October 22, 2009
Reporting from Sacramento
LA Times

Three federal judges on Wednesday forcefully rejected a Schwarzenegger administration proposal to ease prison overcrowding, threatening to impose their own plan for reducing the inmate population if the state does not submit an acceptable one within three weeks.

The panel said California officials had failed to comply with their order to produce a plan to pare the number of state prisoners by 40,000 within two years. The judges agreed to postpone a decision on a request by inmates' lawyers to hold Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in contempt of court for defying the earlier order, issued Aug. 4.

The state's plan, submitted Sept. 18, also failed to specify how much lower the number of inmates would be after six, 12, 18 and 24 months, as the judges had demanded.

"We will view with the utmost seriousness any further failure to comply with our orders," said the seven-page decision by U.S. District Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt. That would leave the court "with no alternative but to develop a plan independently and order it implemented forthwith."

A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman, Rachel Arrezola, said the state would respond to the order by its Nov. 12 deadline. She said the administration is continuing to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court the judges' "arbitrary" reduction order. That appeal was filed last month.

Wednesday's developments raise the possibility that the federal courts will again seize power from state officials. In 2006, Henderson took over the system of inmate medical care from Schwarzenegger and handed it to a receiver, who reports directly to the judge.

"The court is basically saying, 'Do we have to take control of this away from you too? It's your responsibility,' " said Donald Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office in Berkeley, which represents some of the inmates whose lawsuits have led to the judges' orders.

Although courts have capped the population of local jails and prisons in other states, no federal panel has ordered a population reduction over a state's objections under a 1996 federal law that made it harder for such actions to take place, according to Michael Bien, another lawyer for inmates.

California's case could be the first to test that law before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The push to reduce overcrowding stems from the judges' ruling in a pair of inmate lawsuits. The judges said the teeming conditions of the state prison system, which contains nearly 170,000 people, is the main cause of medical and mental health care so poor that it violates the U.S. Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Inmates have long been stuffed into dormitories, hallways and other makeshift living spaces in institutions so strapped that Henderson once said nearly an inmate a week was dying needlessly.

Schwarzenegger has acknowledged that the prison system is in crisis and that overcrowding should be reduced. But he has fought the oversight of federal judges, telling reporters Wednesday that they have run amok on a host of issues besides prisons, including state budget cuts and the protection of endangered species.

"They are going absolutely crazy," Schwarzenegger said. "They've got to let us run the state."

The plan the governor gave the judges last month to reduce overcrowding would have cut the prison population by about 18,000 after two years, less than half of what had been ordered. It also relied heavily on the construction of new prisons, even though the judges had previously discounted that option because the state had proved unable to move ahead on such plans for the last two years. Matthew Cate, the governor's corrections chief, said the administration's plan reduced the prison population only as much as state officials felt they could manage safely.

But the judges, in their order Wednesday, pointed out that Schwarzenegger had previously advocated a more far-reaching plan to reduce the number of inmates -- by 37,000 over two years -- with a variety of measures including home detention and sentencing changes. The governor and Cate had said that plan, which was approved by the state Senate but stalled in the Assembly, would not endanger public safety.

"That such a plan was submitted by the governor was widely reported by the press, including in an article written by defendant Matthew Cate," the judges wrote.

They ordered the state to provide information on the legislative plan, suggesting that they could impose parts of it if the state does not come up with an alternative.

The judges also faulted the state for relying on inmate rehabilitation programs to reduce overcrowding even as it was preparing to announce a $250-million-a-year budget cut in those same programs. And they told state officials to inform them of any future budget cuts that could affect overcrowding.

If state leaders do not present an acceptable plan, the judges said, they will give inmates' lawyers two weeks to propose a solution as well before imposing one on their own.

Bien said he hoped the state would take the reins. By investing in community-based rehabilitation programs and other measures, he said, officials could in one stroke improve public safety, save money and "address the plight of my clients, who live in these horrific conditions of overcrowding."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons22-2009oct22,0,1269315.story

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October 20, 2009

“Criminalizing” Poverty, How Public Policies Result in the Over-Incarceration of Low-Income Communities in America"

“Criminalizing” Poverty, How Public Policies Result in the Over-Incarceration of Low-Income Communities in America"
By Tracy Velázquez, Executive Director, Justice Policy Institute
October 13, 2009:

One of the early lessons in school civics is that “justice is blind”—that is, all citizens get equal treatment in the eyes of the law. Unfortunately, this ideal has become an American myth. First, people living in poverty get swept into the criminal justice system more often than their better-off counterparts. Once there, they are at a real disadvantage in a court system where money can buy freedom through quality representation. And after they are incarcerated, they are relegated to poverty once again because of the punitive barriers society has set up to prevent their success.

This system is not only unfair, it’s counterproductive to our country’s overall well-being. Unless we as a nation take ownership of this flaw in our current system, we will continue to be the world’s biggest jailor, with the social and economic costs that accompany that shameful moniker.

Policing the poor

Recently, I was visiting my friend Rachel, who lives and teaches in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Having started as a Teach for America participant who chose to stay on after her two-year stint, she is well connected with her predominantly Dominican neighborhood’s assets and challenges. In commenting on her experience taking classes at Columbia’s Teachers College on the Upper West Side, Rachel said, “You know, I finally get why people in this neighborhood end up in trouble more. Compared to down by Columbia, the cops are everywhere here in the Heights, all the time. And judging by the warnings I get from campus, it doesn’t look like there’s any more crime up where I live.”

Rachel had, on her own, come to see what those who advocate for low-income communities have known for a long time: America over-polices the poor. It makes sense that places with more crime would have a stronger police presence than communities with less. However, more policing in low-income areas results in more arrests and incarceration for offenses that would likely be handled informally or not at all in another neighborhood. For example, someone smoking a marijuana joint on a bench or their front porch in a more affluent neighborhood is unlikely to be observed by a police officer who would arrest them. More police can also mean more encounters with police – what some might consider “hassling” – which also can result in arrests that just wouldn’t occur otherwise.

Many have asserted that a significant component of over-policing is race. For instance, between January 2006 and September 2007, “random” frisks by New York City police included 453,042 blacks and only 94,530 whites. However, with race and income so closely intertwined, it is often difficult to separate the two. And the result is still that low-income individuals are more often the target of police attention, which means more are arrested and move deeper into the criminal justice system.

“When the lawyer you choose matters most”

The above phrase shocked me as I listened to public radio on my way to work recently. It was the tagline for a law firm that was underwriting the program, and it was impossible for me not to think about it in terms of what it means for people in poverty that have been arrested.

In this day and age of complex proceedings, a multitude of laws, and serious and lasting consequences of a criminal record, the idea of not having a lawyer represent you in court seems almost unfathomable. In fact, in 1963’s Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court stated that “reason and reflection require us to recognize that, in our adversary system of justice, any person hauled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” However, individuals of lower income generally don’t choose their lawyer; one is assigned by the court. Or one should be, anyway; unfortunately, over one in four people in jail charged with misdemeanor offenses reported not having been represented by counsel.

The vast majority of public defenders are qualified, dedicated attorneys, but many work in conditions they describe as “assembly line justice.” Small budgets – which are now shrinking during this economic downturn – mean many public defenders have barely met their client before they have to go into court and defend them. Of people in prison with court-appointed counsel, only 37 percent in state facilities and 54 percent in federal facilities spoke with their attorneys within the first week after arrest. In contrast, of people with hired counsel, three in five in state facilities and three-fourths in federal facilities had been in contact with their attorneys about their charges within a week of arrest. In an effort to manage their caseloads, public defenders are under pressure to resolve cases quickly, with little time to investigate leads that might have resulted in the case being dismissed or the charges lessened.

What is the result? State defendants with a public defender are sentenced to prison or jail more often than those with private attorneys. People who can afford a private attorney are less likely to go to state prison.

In addition, about half of individuals using a public defender or assigned counsel were released from jail prior to trial, compared to over three in four with a private attorney. Part of this may be a result of differences in representation; it is likely also because people who use public defenders are generally the same people who can’t afford to post bond. With courts demanding higher bail amounts, fewer and fewer people are able to post bond and be released from jail while awaiting trial. Currently, more than 60 percent of people in jails across the country have not been convicted of any offense. The inability to post bond not only makes it harder for people accused of crimes to meet with their lawyer and talk to people who might be able to aid in their defense, it also makes it harder to hold down their job and maintain custody of their children—even though they are still considered innocent.

Substituting corrections for treatment

Adult and juvenile correctional facilities are now among the country’s largest providers of mental health care: this is true both in large, urban areas (the Los Angeles County Jail is now the largest mental health facility in the country) and smaller, more rural ones (the largest provider of mental health care in Alabama is the prison). A key driver of this is lack of access to community mental health services. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, over a third of the poor and 30 percent of the near-poor (incomes ranging from the poverty line to twice the poverty line) lack health coverage. And according to the National Survey of Drug Use and Mental Health, 42 percent of those who needed mental health treatment but didn’t get it said the primary reason was that they couldn’t afford it. Underinsurance is also a problem: 34 percent of insured people who had unmet mental health needs indicated that cost was a barrier to seeking treatment.

The manifestations of untreated mental illness often lead to behaviors that draw the attention of police—public order offenses that often accompany homelessness, crises that cause law enforcement to intervene, and “self-medicating” with alcohol and illegal drugs. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly a quarter of the people in state prisons experienced mental health issues in the year preceding incarceration, and nearly two-thirds of people in jails live with mental illness. Some parents of children with serious emotional disturbances who are uninsured or underinsured turn their own children over to the police, in an effort to get at least minimum treatment through the juvenile justice system.

People with no access to health care are also likely to return to prison after being released. In a visit I made to a state prison, an individual with a serious mental illness told me that earlier that year he had been released from prison with 10 days worth of medicine and $100 in cash. He was left on his own to figure out how to manage his illness. He relied on a local clinic for pharmaceutical “samples” for a time, but ended up homeless and self-medicating with alcohol and other drugs. This eventually led to his being re-incarcerated.

A large percentage of incarcerated people also have a substance abuse disorder. Over half of people in state prisons meet the criteria for drug dependence or abuse. Once again, low-income people with a substance abuse addiction are disproportionately incarcerated as they cannot access treatment. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health indicated that 37.4 percent of people who sought substance abuse treatment indicated they didn’t receive it because they had no health coverage and couldn’t afford the cost of treatment. This lack of access, combined with the criminalization of addiction, mean thousands of people end up in prison or jail for drug possession or distribution or other offenses that would support an addiction.

Continuing barriers to opportunity

Currently, one in 31 people in the United States is under correctional supervision—whether in prison or jail, or on parole or probation. And millions more have a felony record that will never be erased, creating hardships for those trying to regain their lives and be a productive member of their community.

Adding to these difficulties is the fact that the correctional population is already largely made up of lower-income people. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2002, eighty-three percent of people in jail reported income of less than $2,000 in the month prior to arrest, one-third lower than the average monthly wage of the general public.

Many people who have been incarcerated face obstacles when attempting to find a job and housing. In a report for the Brookings Institution, Richard Freedman found that jail time reduced the probability of employment by between 15 and 30 percentage points. In addition, people leaving prison, regardless of their pre-incarceration status, are especially vulnerable to homelessness, often banned from federal housing, face challenges reconnecting with family and friends, and lack the funds to afford available housing. Often, the obligations of parole fees and years of child support that went unpaid during their period of incarceration make it almost impossible to become economically successful.

Conclusion

The impact of the criminal justice system on low-income communities can’t be ignored. At every stage of the process – from who is arrested to who is convicted and who eventually loses out on their rights – the poor are disproportionately affected. Policymakers continue to incarcerate millions of people, most of whom would not be in the system if there were more adequate resources in their communities. How can this situation be addressed, so that poverty and prison aren’t inevitably intertwined?

The U.S. should provide meaningful access – regardless of ability to pay -- to community-based treatment that would ensure that people get the mental health and substance abuse treatment they need before they collide with the justice system; this would improve both public safety and individual life outcomes. A healthcare “safety net” that will cover formerly incarcerated individuals also will save states millions in reduced rates of recidivism and re-incarceration.

Instead of overfunding incarceration and policing, we should make investments in resources for low-income communities that are already at a disadvantage due to their socioeconomic status. This means better schools, more job development, and more programs that can help people – and particularly youth – succeed. These types of investments will create healthier, safer communities and reduce the use of prisons as an answer to poverty and other social problems.

Tracy Velázquez is Executive Director of the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit working to promote effective solutions to social problems and dedicated to ending society’s reliance on incarceration

http://www.spotlightonpoverty.org/ExclusiveCommentary.aspx?id=5f13e0fe-a47d-4ce4-a945-187fc331e81d

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

October 18, 2009

Months to Live- Fellow Inmates Ease the Pain of Dying in Jail

Months to Live- Fellow Inmates Ease the Pain of Dying in Jail
By JOHN LELAND
Published NY TimesOctober 17, 2009

COXSACKIE, N.Y. — Allen Jacobs lived hard for his 50 years, and when his liver finally shut down he faced the kind of death he did not want. On a recent afternoon Mr. Jacobs lay in a hospital bed staring blankly at the ceiling, his eyes sunk in his skull, his skin lusterless. A volunteer hospice worker, Wensley Roberts, ran a wet sponge over Mr. Jacobs’s dry lips, encouraging him to drink.

Mr. Jones said he liked having other inmates like John Henson sit with him because “I can talk with them better than staff members.”

“Come on, Mr. Jacobs,” he said.

Mr. Roberts is one of a dozen inmates at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility who volunteer to sit with fellow prisoners in the last six months of their lives. More than 3,000 prisoners a year die of natural causes in correctional facilities.

Mr. Roberts recalled a day when Mr. Jacobs, then more coherent, had started crying. Mr. Roberts held his patient and tried to console him. Then their experience took a turn unique to their setting, the medical ward of a maximum security prison. Mr. Roberts said he told Mr. Jacobs to “man up.”

Mr. Jacobs, serving two to four years for passing forged checks, cursed at him, telling him, “‘I don’t want to die in jail. Do you want to die in jail?’ ”

“I said no,” said Mr. Roberts, who is serving eight years for robbery. “He said, ‘Then stop telling me to man up,’ and he started crying. And then he said that I’m his family.”

American prisons are home to a growing geriatric population, with one-third of all inmates expected to be over 50 by next year. As courts have handed down longer sentences and tightened parole, about 75 prisons have started hospice programs, half of them using inmate volunteers, according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. Susan Atkins, a follower of Charles Manson, died last month in hospice at the Central California Women’s Facility at Chowchilla after being denied compassionate release.

Joan Smith, deputy superintendent of health services at the Coxsackie prison, said the hospice program here initially met with resistance from prison guards. “They were very resentful about people in prison for horrendous crimes getting better medical care than their families,” including round-the-clock companionship in their final days, Ms. Smith said.

The guards have come to accept the program, she said. But still there are challenges unique to the prison setting. Some dying patients, for example, divert their pain medication to their volunteer aides or other patients, who use it or sell it, said Kathleen Allan, the director of nursing. She added that patients can be made victims easily, “and this is a predatory system.”

But she said the inmate volunteers bond with the patients in a way that staff members cannot, taking on “the touchy-feely thing” that may be inappropriate between inmates and prison workers.

At Coxsackie, 130 miles north of New York City, administrators started the hospice program in 1996 in response to the AIDS epidemic using an outside hospice agency, then changed to inmate volunteers in 2001. The change saved money and was well-received by the patients.

Perhaps more significant, said William Lape, the superintendent, was the effect the program had on the volunteers. “I think it’s turned their life around,” Mr. Lape said.

John Henson, 30, was one of the first volunteers. When he was 18, Mr. Henson broke into the home of a former employer and, in the course of a robbery, beat the man to death with a baseball bat. When he entered prison, with a sentence of 25 years to life, he said, “I thought my life was over.”

At Coxsackie he met the Rev. J. Edward Lewis, who persuaded him to volunteer in 2001. “You go in thinking that you’re going to help somebody,” Mr. Lewis said, “and every time they end up helping you.”

Before hospice, Mr. Henson said he had given little thought to the consequences of his crime. Then he found himself locked in a hospital room with another inmate, holding the man’s hand as his breathing slowed toward a stop.

Like many men in prison, the dying man had alienated his family members, who rejected his efforts to renew contact. In the end, he had only Mr. Henson for companionship. When the prison nurse declared the man dead, Mr. Henson broke down in tears.

“They just came out,” he said. “I don’t even know why I was crying. Partly because of him, partly because of things that died within me at the same time.”

Mr. Henson, dressed in prison greens and with his blond hair buzzed short, spoke directly and without hesitation.

“I was just thinking about why I’m in here and the person’s life that I took,” he said. “And sitting with this person for the first time and actually seeing death firsthand, being right there, my hand in his hand, watching him take his last breath, just caused me to say, ‘Wow, who the hell are you? Who were you to do this to somebody else?’ ”

Ms. Allan, the nursing director at Coxsackie, said that with a number of inmate volunteers, “You can identify in each of these guys something inside them driving them to do this. It’s a desire to redeem themselves, so even when it gets hard they’re able to plow through it. “

She added, “I think Mr. Henson made me a better mother.”

Benny Lee, 38, has spent half his life in prison for manslaughter, and for most of that time, he said, “the only thing I regretted was getting caught.” Four months ago he began as a hospice volunteer, feeling he needed a change. “I’m trying to offer some payback,” he said.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Lee was scheduled to sit with Eddie Jones, 89, who was dying from multiple causes. Mr. Jones, who was convicted of murder at age 70, said, “I can talk with them better than staff members, because staff members have their minds made up about how things should be.”

Mr. Lee said he does not know how Mr. Jones’s death will affect him. “I’m hoping it will have an effect, period,” he said. “Growing up and in prison, I put up walls. But I have to be more emotionally receptive to these guys. This is going against everything I’ve tried to do. But I realize it’s a change I have to make.”

Mr. Lee said hospice was forcing him to learn to trust people.

“It’s helping me mature,” he said. “My views of life and death are changing. I was unsympathetic when it comes to death. I’ve had friends die, and I was callous about it. Now I can’t do that. I’ve come to identify with these guys, not because we’re inmates, but because we’re human beings. What they’re going through, I’ll go through.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 18, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Links to photos and more coverage
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/health/18hospice.html?_r=1&hp

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

October 15, 2009

WA: Prison for the old and infirm may close

State may close Ahtanum View, prison for the old and infirm
Ahtanum View Corrections Center, the state's prison for the elderly, disabled or critically ill, is being studied for potential closure. The governor's Office of Financial Management is expected to release a report proposing corrections cuts in the coming days.

By Jennifer Sullivan

MIKE SIEGEL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

YAKIMA — Dennis Castano can rattle on about pinochle, his favorite Louis L'Amour paperbacks and his days working as a logger, but he can't seem to remember why he's in prison.

The 76-year-old child molester, his memory dimmed by a head injury, is among the 130 elderly, disabled or critically ill inmates who call Ahtanum View Corrections Center home. For 22 years, the tidy brick building surrounded by fruit orchards outside Yakima has housed inmates considered the most fragile and vulnerable in the state Department of Corrections (DOC) system.

Now Ahtanum View's place within that system has become equally fragile.

The prison is on a list of facilities being studied for potential closure as the state weighs slashing Corrections' costs. A report expected to be released in the coming days by the governor's Office of Financial Management is expected to recommend closing one adult and one juvenile prison, a move that would result in massive job cuts and the transfer of hundreds of inmates to other facilities.

But employees and supporters of Ahtanum View say closing the facility would be shortsighted and hardly cost-effective.

Staff say that if the facility is shuttered, its most vulnerable inmates, men who suffer from Alzheimer's disease, dementia and other long-term illnesses, will face serious problems if they're transferred to other state prisons. The inmates at Ahtanum View are locked up for nearly every crime on the books — murder, rape, child molestation, drug possession, fleeing police. What makes the prison different is the age and physical condition of the inmates.

"Our mission statement is that we provide medical assistance, safety and security in a corrections environment," said Ahtanum View Superintendent Jane Parnell. "It's a humane way to treat people."

Parnell said 100 of the 130 men at Ahtanum View are in need of intense medical care, including many who suffer from memory-impacting illnesses, paraplegia, heart conditions or blindness.

The average daily cost to house an inmate at other state prisons is $97.30, said agency spokeswoman Belinda Stewart. The daily cost to house an inmate at Ahtanum View is $163.88, making it the most expensive prison in the state, Parnell said.

But because of the medical care required by most Ahtanum View inmates, Parnell said, it would be more expensive to house the sickest of the inmates elsewhere because they would have to live in infirmaries, which have an even higher number of medical staff; or in an intensive-management unit; or in high-security solitary confinement.

"The higher the security level, the more expensive it is," Parnell said. "You have to have more officers per the number of inmates."

Parnell believes even those Ahtanum View inmates who aren't as infirm would still represent a major challenge if placed in other state prisons, because they would be a prime target for threats or even violence from younger inmates.

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"It takes some skill to survive in a prison," Parnell said. "If you don't have all of your faculties you could be a victim."

The DOC hasn't said what would happen to Ahtanum View inmates if the prison was shuttered. It's possible some terminally or chronically ill inmates could be released early, but under state law no sex offenders nor anyone convicted of a violent felony would be considered for early release.

In recent months, consultants working on the Office of Financial Management report have visited Ahtanum View, as well as the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, the Monroe Correctional Complex, McNeil Island Corrections Center and Pine Lodge Corrections Center for Women to see where cuts can be made. If lawmakers and the governor decide to close a facility, its inmates would be sent to another prison, said DOC Secretary Eldon Vail.

State Sen. Curtis King, R-Yakima, is concerned about the economic impact closure of Ahtanum View would have on the Yakima Valley. He said dollar figures on how the area would be affected would likely be announced after the report is released.

"It would have a large impact on the vitality of this valley. The other impact it would have is in regards to the hospitals and those medical facilities this institution uses," said King, who toured Ahtanum View on Thursday to gain a better understanding of the facility. "We have to make some cuts somewhere, but we need to make the cuts where we protect the elderly and most vulnerable people in our society."

The closure of Ahtanum View would mean the loss of 86 corrections officers and prison staff jobs, said Ton Johnson, a lobbyist for the Washington Federation of State Employees, the union that represents community corrections officers.

Parnell said officers with seniority could transfer to other facilities. The closest prisons to Ahtanum View are Coyote Ridge Corrections Center in Connell, Franklin County, about 120 miles to the east; and the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, about 130 miles to the southeast.

With prison populations increasing because of Three Strikes, You're Out sentencing laws and other tough-on-crime legislation, Johnson believes the state would eventually have to build another prison specifically for aged and infirm inmates.

"We pride ourselves in being a humane system for offenders," said Johnson, who is also a community corrections, or probation, officer. "I think we should be concerned about their quality of life and their right to die with dignity."

Lt. Steve Hansson, who has been at Ahtanum View since it opened, equates the minimum-custody facility to a nursing home. Inmates, most of whom are over 60, generally dress in the requisite corrections uniform — khaki trousers and white T-shirts — but have freedom and individualized care not found at other prisons.

At Ahtanum View there's no voice over the loudspeaker directing inmates to their daily activities. Inmates live in dorms. They can head into the fenced yard anytime during the day, or spend all day in the TV room, building jigsaw puzzles, gossiping with cronies or playing cards. The most healthy inmates are tasked with pushing other inmates' wheelchairs and making sure other aging inmates get to the cafeteria for meals, Parnell said.

Nurses are on site 24 hours a day, checking in hourly — or even more frequently — with inmates.

"It's designed for offenders who are labor-intensive and hard to manage in major facilities," Hansson said. "They can get better one-on-one medical care [at Ahtanum View] than they can in other facilities."

Castano, who has convictions for child molestation and communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, divides his time among the TV room, playing cards, reading western novels and checking in with nurses on staff. Castano and his "cellie," Fred Arnett, 51, live in a medium-needs unit, where a nurse checks in hourly.

In the special-needs area, certified nursing assistant Debbie Wood spends her days helping inmates bathe and eat. A staffed pill window is open just steps from the men's narrow beds.

Fred Aylward, 67, of Bremerton, said he came to the special-needs unit for long-term care from the infirmary at the Airway Heights Corrections Center, where he was recovering after having open-heart surgery. Aylward has been convicted of rape, kidnapping and child molestation.

"It's a relaxed environment," he said of Ahtanum View. "I can understand the lack of funds [at the state], but this facility is pretty well needed."

Seattle Times news researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this report.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010058496_prisonclosures14m.html

Posted by lois at 09:10 PM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2009

Stanidsh MI begs for prisoners from PA DOC Commissoner Beard

MDOC's letter to Pennsylvania regarding PA inmates in Standish Max
Following is the Michigan Department of Corrections' letter to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections in its entirety. Standish max is mentioned in paragraph three.

Secretary Jeffrey A. Beard
Department of Corrections
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
P.O. Box 598
Camp Hill, PA 17001-0598

Dear Secretary Beard:

Thank you for your recent letter asking for the Michigan Department of Corrections’ (MI DOC) proposal on housing Pennsylvania Department of Corrections’ (PA DOC) prisoners in Michigan through an Inmate Transfer Agreement. Michigan would be very interested in pursuing such an opportunity and attached please find our proposal detailing the rates, capacities and services available.

We currently have two prisons that may be of particular interest and would be a good fit for the approximately 1,000-1,500 prisoners the PA DOC is looking to transfer.

10-6-09
We will soon be closing the Standish Maximum Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison which houses 604 prisoners. It is located just off Interstate 75 north of Saginaw in Standish, Michigan, in proximity to airports. The facility opened in 1990 and is in excellent condition. While this is mostly a single-cell facility (one housing unit was double bunked), it could easily be reconfigured to a lower security level and be double bunked.

We will also soon be closing the Muskegon Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison which houses 1,326 prisoners. It is located off U.S. 31 in Muskegon, Michigan, and in proximity to airports. The facility opened in 1974 and is also in excellent operating condition.

Currently both of these facilities are fully staffed with highly trained, professional, hard-working, knowledgeable and responsible correctional employees. Our correctional staff is second to none in the nation.

The reason we have facilities available for potential use by the PA DOC is due to the decline in our population. For the past several years, the MI DOC has been closing prisons as the prison population drops. We are experiencing a decline for several reasons including:

• Prison intake was down 9% in 2008 and is down 8% through August of 2009.

• Total felony court dispositions have declined for the second straight year, following eight straight years of growth. Felony court dispositions across the entire state of Michigan decreased by almost 4% in 2008 and have decreased by another 6.3% in 2009 through June.

• In 2008, the Michigan Prisoner ReEntry Initiative (MPRI) went statewide and expanded to 18 regional sites that now cover all 83 counties. The preliminary data for the first 13,000 former prisoners worked with shows that the return to prison rate has improved from 1 out of 2 returning within two years to 1 out of 3 returning in two years.

• Due to the success of MPRI, the rate of prisoners paroled is up and parole failures are down.

• With prison intake down, the parole rate up and parole failures reduced, Michigan’s prison population is at its lowest level in eight years.

I believe this opportunity has tremendous potential and could be mutually beneficial to both our states. It would allow Pennsylvania to address its immediate need for additional prison beds and let some of Michigan’s experienced and accomplished correctional staff continues working as they face the likelihood of layoff. In addition, the fact that we now share the same prisoner health care provider could help ease any potential concerns associated with this very important area of effective prisoner management.

I am confident we can provide a safe and secure environment for Pennsylvania prisoners and do so in a very competitive and cost-effective manner. In addition, we can assist you in creating safer communities in Pennsylvania by applying the principles of our successful prisoner reentry program and help your inmates return home and become productive citizens.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any additional questions or concerns. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Thank you.
Sincerely,
Patricia L. Caruso, Director
Michigan Department of Corrections
http://www.arenacindependent.com/detail/83002.html

Posted by lois at 08:45 PM | Comments (0)

October 09, 2009

Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among High School Dropouts: including jail or juvenile detention for 1 in 4 African American young men who drop out of school.

"The report puts the collective cost to the nation over the working life of each high school dropout at $292,000. Mr. Sum said that figure took into account lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime."

"The picture is even bleaker for African-Americans, with nearly one in four young black male dropouts incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized on an average day, the study said. That compares with about one in 14 young, male, white, Asian or Hispanic dropouts."

Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among Dropouts
By SAM DILLON
Published NY Times: October 8, 2009

On any given day, about one in every 10 young male high school dropouts is in jail or juvenile detention, compared with one in 35 young male high school graduates, according to a new study of the effects of dropping out of school in an America where demand for low-skill workers is plunging.

The picture is even bleaker for African-Americans, with nearly one in four young black male dropouts incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized on an average day, the study said. That compares with about one in 14 young, male, white, Asian or Hispanic dropouts.

Researchers at Northeastern University used census and other government data to carry out the study, which tracks the employment, workplace, parenting and criminal justice experiences of young high school dropouts.

“We’re trying to show what it means to be a dropout in the 21st century United States,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern, who headed a team of researchers that prepared the report. “It’s one of the country’s costliest problems. The unemployment, the incarceration rates — it’s scary.”

A coalition of civil rights and public education advocacy groups and a network of alternative schools in Chicago commissioned the report as part of a push for new educational opportunities for the nation’s 6.2 million high school dropouts.

“The dropout rate is driving the nation’s increasing prison population, and it’s a drag on America’s economic competitiveness,” said Marc H. Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who is president of the National Urban League, one of the groups in the coalition that commissioned the report. “This report makes it clear that every American pays a cost when a young person leaves school without a diploma.”

The report puts the collective cost to the nation over the working life of each high school dropout at $292,000. Mr. Sum said that figure took into account lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime.

Daniel J. Losen, a senior associate at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the study was consistent with other economic studies of the dropout crisis, though he said the methodology of its cost-benefit analysis “lacked transparency.”

“The report’s strength is that it reveals in clear terms that there’s a real crisis with the high numbers of young, especially minority males, who drop out of school and wind up incarcerated,” Mr. Losen said.

Previous studies have come up with estimates of the same order of magnitude on the social cost of low graduation rates. A 2007 study by Teachers College, Princeton and City University of New York researchers, for instance, estimated that society could save $209,000 in prison and other costs for every potential dropout who could be helped to complete high school.

The new report, in its analysis of 2008 unemployment rates, found that 54 percent of dropouts ages 16 to 24 were jobless, compared with 32 percent for high school graduates of the same age, and 13 percent for those with a college degree.

Again, the statistics were worse for young African-American dropouts, whose unemployment rate last year was 69 percent, compared with 54 percent for whites and 47 percent for Hispanics. The unemployment rate among young Hispanics was lower, the report said, because included in that category were many illegal immigrants, who compete successfully for jobs with native-born youths.

The unemployment rates cited for all groups have climbed several points in 2009 because of the recession, Mr. Sum said.

Young female dropouts were nine times more likely to have become single mothers than young women who went on to earn college degrees, the report said, citing census data for 2006 and 2007.

The number of unmarried young women having children has increased sharply in some communities in part, Mr. Sum said, because large numbers of young men have dropped out of school and are jobless year round. As a result, young women do not view them as having the wherewithal to support a family.

“None of these guys can afford to own a home, they just don’t have any money,” he said. “And as a result, any time they father a child it’s out of wedlock. It wasn’t like this 30 years ago.”

He cited his hometown, Gary, Ind., as an example. “Back in the 1970s, my friends in Gary would quit school in senior year and go to work at U.S. Steel and make a good living, and young guys in Michigan would go to work in an auto plant,” he said. “You just can’t do that anymore. Today, you have a lot of dropouts who are jobless year round.”

Link to the study: http://www.clms.neu.edu/publication/documents/The_Consequences_of_Dropping_Out_of_High_School.pdf

A version of this article appeared in print on October 9, 2009, on page A12 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/education/09dropout.html?_r=1&ref=us

Posted by lois at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2009

Parole holds key to California prison overcrowding

Parole holds key to California prison overcrowding
Between 60,000 and 70,000 California parolees return to custody annually for violations, many of them minor. Reforms passed this month could help cut prisoner tallies.
By Michael B. Farrell | Staff writer

Tracy, calif.

Standing in a dim prison gymnasium that's been converted into a vast cell to house 300 inmates, Phillip Nelson talks about how he's spent much of his adult life incarcerated. He's been in and out of the Deuel Vocational Institution, a 1950s-era penitentiary that is now California's most overcrowded prison, partly due to parole violations since being convicted of receiving stolen property in the 1980s.

"I wouldn't be in prison if it weren't for the parole system," says Mr. Nelson, who was most recently sent back to prison for violating the terms of his parole because, he claims, he missed a "class."

Many of his fellow inmates, who sleep in cots lined up in rows stretching the width of the gym, also say they returned to prison for parole violations.

That is set to change. California has made sweeping changes to its parole system that experts and government officials say are key to reducing dangerously high populations in the nation's largest correctional system.

"Until we get parole under control, we can't get prison crowding under control," says Joan Petersilia, a law professor at Stanford University who has written extensively on California's parole system.

Between 60,000 and 70,000 California parolees return to custody annually for violations. They may have failed a drug test, gone missing, or even committed a new crime for which they were not prosecuted. They're sent back to a system that is so overcrowded and underserved that a federal judicial panel, describing conditions as "woefully and constitutionally inadequate," in August ordered the state to reduce its 170,000 prison population – double its capacity – by 40,000 inmates.

It was partly in response to that order that California lawmakers passed a prison reform bill this month.

Efforts to change the state's parole system have met fierce resistance for years from tough-on-crime advocates, says Ms. Petersilia. This time, too, concerns about relaxing parole rules were raised after the arrest of Phillip Garrido, a convicted sex offender and parolee, for the abduction of Jaycee Lee Dugard.

But the state now faces a perfect storm of problems surrounding its system of incarceration: a federal lawsuit, a fiscal crisis crippling its economy, and public opinion that has slowly been shifting away from rigid sentencing laws.

And in August, just four days after the judicial order, 55 inmates were injured and a dormitory burned down in a prison riot in Chino that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger blamed on overcrowding.

No parole for low-risk criminals

Following the passage of the prison reform bill Sept. 11, state prison officials submitted a more ambitious plan to reduce overcrowding to the federal judicial panel. Even this doesn't go as far as the court wanted in cutting inmates – just 18,000 over two years versus 40,000.

But the prison bill does introduce parole reforms that have been long called for.

The crux of these reforms lies in reserving active parole supervision for only the most violent offenders. Instead of a system in which even the least violent offenders are put under some sort of supervision, low-risk criminals will now be placed on "banked parole," which means they can still be subject to warrantless searches by police but are not under regular supervision.

Also, parolees will be less likely to be sent back to prison if they commit a "technical" violation, such as failing a drug test. Instead, many will be sent to community-based programs.

This will mean many fewer people cycling through California's prisons. That will reduce prison populations and almost halve the caseload for each parole officer, with the intent that officers can spend more time supervising the most dangerous prisoners.

"The centerpiece of this legislation is the parole reform that protects public safety," says Rachel Cameron, a Schwarzenegger spokeswoman.

Busting state budgets

California's reforms mirror other states' moves to rethink a tough-on-crime attitude first adopted by politicians – and demanded by the public – in the 1970s, attitudes that extended through the drug war of the 1990s.

The recession has highlighted the burden of overcrowded prisons nationwide. As budgets shrink, prison spending continues to swell as inmate populations grow. California spent about $10 billion to house roughly 170,000 inmates in 2008 – a 32 percent increase in spending since 2005.

States such as South Carolina, Kentucky, and Illinois have set up sentencing commissions in the past few years to rethink tough sentencing laws that many say are at the root of overcrowding. (In California, those laws indirectly led to the adoption of universal parole supervision.)

Life-term sentences, for instance, quadrupled over the past 24 years, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington group that advocates for prison reforms. That's largely due to "three strikes" laws that mandate 25 years to life for third-time felony offenders.

The fact that California's reforms don't include a sentencing commission suggests to some that state politicians are still hesitant to seem soft on crime. The prison bill originally held proposals for such a commission, as well as provisions to allow some offenders to serve the last year of their sentence under house arrest, but they were removed in an effort to win over Republicans, who said it went too easy on criminals.

Parole reforms are still opposed by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, a powerful force in state politics. "If hardened criminals are released early – without supervision or support – crime will increase and lives will be lost," said the association's acting president, Chuck Alexander, in a statement.

Dingy, crowded cells

Whether parole reform alone can fix the problem of prison overcrowding is unclear; what's not is that it desperately needs fixing.

At the Deuel prison in Tracy, 3,900 inmates crowd into a facility designed for 1,700. It's a vocational institute in name only. Gilbert Valenzuela, the public information officer, says that when he arrived 20 years ago, Deuel had a vocational shop where inmates could learn a trade. "[That] would have really benefited the inmates a lot and also the community," he says.

Chief Deputy Warden Ron Rackley acknowledges crowding has taken a toll on infrastructure and on staff and prisoners. In his airy office, seemingly a world away from the dingy cells, he says, "When you are sleeping with your head at the foot of another man, you tend to be irritable."

Jenaro Torres, a tattooed inmate with thick braids, is blunter: "At least in a cell you only have to deal with the other person," he says. "This isn't even made for living."•
September 27, 2009 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0929/p20s01-usgn.html

Posted by lois at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

$74 million in Stimulus funding for New Navajo Jails

Stimulus Funding Is Earmarked For Detention Centers On Reservation
September 30th, 2009
By Tammy Gray-Searles

Nearly $74 million in federal stimulus funds will be used to construct three sorely needed adult detention centers on the Navajo Nation.
President Joe Shirley Jr. announced Sept. 23 that the Navajo Nation Division of Public Safety and judicial branch staff had successfully sought $73.3 million in funding for the new centers.

Although the three new centers do not fulfill Shirley’s goal of building 12 all-in-one justice centers across the Navajo Nation, they will replace aging facilities that pose health and safety risks. According to Shirley, nearly $500 million would be necessary to build the justice centers he envisioned, which would have included detention, court and police facilities.
The new centers to be built with the federal funding will include not only jail cells, but also offices for pre-trial services as well as space for inmate programs designed to reduce the incarceration rate.
Funding for the project comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and is also intended to provide construction jobs, as well as long-term work for corrections officers and other support personnel.
Although proposals were also submitted for detention centers in Dilkon and Kayenta, the facilities approved for construction will be located in Tuba City, Chinle and Ramah, N.M.
According to Shirley, $38.5 million will be used to construct a 48-bed detention center in Tuba City, $31 million for a 38-bed facility in Kayenta and $3.8 million for a small facility in Ramah.
In his announcement Shirley noted, “The centers will provide space for a range of culturally-appropriate services to inmates from pre-trial services, alternatives to incarceration and services while individuals are serving time in jail.”
Navajo Nation Public Safety Director Samson Cowboy explained that the old facilities in Tuba City and Chinle have already been demolished to make way for the new centers. The Ramah facility, which has presented a number of problems for law enforcement officials, will also be completely replaced.
Cowboy noted, “Originally designed as a holding facility, the Ramah jail has been used to house long-term inmates and has created severe overcrowding conditions. Other problems in the current facility concern structural deterioration. This includes a faulty roof and cracks in walls and no accessibility standards.”
President Shirley praised the projects and receipt of the funding, noting that construction of new jails would help the Navajo Nation’s entire criminal justice system.
“It’s a major accomplishment to at last receive this jail funding so we have a place to put perpetrators,” Shirley said. “Our law enforcement officers will finally see offenders they catch stay in jail.”
In addition to the jail funding, the Navajo Nation’s judicial branch was also awarded $450,000 for a Navajo Peacemaker Youth Education and Apprentice Program. According to Shirley, the program will “establish and use a curriculum for traditional teaching that blends Navajo peacemaking and western best practices and therapies for dispute resolution, violence prevention and community building in schools.”
The goal of the program is to prevent juvenile delinquency, and eventually reduce the number of youth and adults in the criminal justice system. It will include education for youth and adults on gangs, truancy, school dropouts, parenting, after school programs and will also include intervention programs for “court-involved youth.”

http://www.azjournal.com/news/126/ARTICLE/4361/2009-09-30.html

Posted by lois at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)

Study Highlights HIV/AIDS Challenge In American Prison System

"A new study by Dr. Nitika Pant Pai – an Assistant professor of Medicine and a medical scientist at the Research Institute of the MUHC – suggests the majority (76%) of inmates take their antiretroviral treatment (ART) intermittently once they leave prison, representing a higher risk to the general population."

Study Highlights HIV/AIDS Challenge In American Prison System

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2009) — HIV/AIDS is up to five times more prevalent in American prisons than in the general population. Adherence to treatment programs can be strictly monitored in prison. However, once prisoners are released, medical monitoring becomes problematic.

A new study by Dr. Nitika Pant Pai – an Assistant professor of Medicine and a medical scientist at the Research Institute of the MUHC – suggests the majority (76%) of inmates take their antiretroviral treatment (ART) intermittently once they leave prison, representing a higher risk to the general population.

"Over a period of 9 years, we studied 512 HIV positive repeat offender inmates from the San Francisco County jail system," says Dr. Pant Pai. "Our results show that only 15% continuously took their ART between incarcerations or after their release." According to the study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, these figures highlight a lack of effectiveness on the part of medical monitoring services for these people outside prison.

"Taking ART intermittently is a problem because it depletes the CD4 count - the immunizing cells that fight infection – and increases the probability of developing resistance to the virus," says Dr. Pant Pai. "The risk for rapid disease progression becomes higher and presents a risk for public health transmission of HIV to their partners." According to the study those on intermittent therapy were 1.5 times more likely to have higher virus load than those on continuous therapy; those who never received therapy were 3 times more likely to have a higher VL.

"The optimal solution for treating patients and controlling the HIV/Aids epidemic in the USA is to ensure continuous therapy," explains Dr. Milton Estes, medical director of Forensic AIDS Project, San Francisco. "To achieve this we must work on various aspects of the prisoner's lives, such as marginalization, psychiatric problems and drug use, both before and after their departure from prison." According to Dr. Jacqueline Tulsky, senior author of the study, "This research highlights the need to examine ART policies inside and outside correctional settings with a view to establishing effective life long management of HIV in prisoners."

"This research is the first observational study in American prisons to evaluate the impact of antiretroviral treatment (ART) over a nine year period. It demonstrates the need for effective community transition and prison release programs to optimize ART given in jails," explains Dr. Pant Pai.

The article was co-authored by Dr. Nitika Pant Pai, Infection and Immunity Axis at the RI-MUHC, Dr. Milton Estes, Forensic AIDS Project, Department of Public Health, San Francisco, Dr. Erica E.M. Moodie, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McGill University, Dr. Arthur L Reingold, Epidemiology Division, University of California, Berkeley, USA, Dr. Jacqueline P Tulsky, University of California, San Francisco, Positive Health Program, San Francisco General Hospital, USA.

Funding was provided by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090929133246.htm

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

NM: Task force: State finances limit prison reform efforts

Task force: State finances limit prison reform efforts
By Trip Jennings 9/30/09
New Mexico Independent
New Mexico should study the merits of an early controlled release pilot project for non-violent women prisoners and establish re-entry councils across New Mexico, a governor-appointed prison reform task force has recommended.

The task force’s recommendations came in a report issued last week, but while suggesting the consideration of an early-release program and other initiatives, the report does not include beefing up the corrections department’s education programs due to state financial troubles.

The state corrections department’s education bureau has 27 vacancies out of 111 jobs, meaning up to a quarter of inmates might not be in classes, Gail Oliver, the agency’s former deputy cabinet secretary for re-entry, told the Independent recently.

Prison education programs are often cited as a major key to reducing recidivism, with some studies concluding that participants in educational programs are 10 percent to 20 percent less prone to re-offend.

Gov. Bill Richardson appointed the prison reform group last year with one overriding goal: to recommend ways to reduce the rate of recidivism, the rate of offenders who return to lockup within 36 months after their release.

At 47 percent, New Mexico’s recidivism rate is lower than the national average of 52 percent. But it was enough for the Richardson administration to raise alarms.

The same prison task force in a report issued last year emphasized the importance of education in reducing recidivism and urged the state to do more for offenders—even to the point of starting charter schools in prisons.

Noting the state’s moribund finances — the state faces a $440 million budgetary shortfall, the task force’s chairman, John Bigelow, in the report issued last week acknowledged that the “major challenge to the full implementation of reentry and prison reform initiatives is the ongoing economic crisis.” Bigelow goes on to note that its recommendations shouldn’t cost the state more money.

As is the case in corrections departments around the country, this department has experienced large funding cuts, is in the midst of a hiring freeze, and budget expansion requests for reentry and prison reform staffing are unlikely to be forthcoming in the near future.

While last week’s report does not specifically recommend adding staff to the agency’s education bureau, it does recommend reassigning “existing staff as necessary and appropriate to maximize intellectual and experiential resources and to ensure the success of reentry initiatives.”

Bigelow called the local re-entry councils the task force’s most important recommendation. Such councils would operate in key communities across the state and would help prison officials by providing information and resources “in the areas of alcohol and substance abuse, education, employment, family services, gender-specific programming and others, said a press release announcing the task force’s recommendations.

The Corrections Department will work to create the first of these councils in a community yet to be determined by the end of this fiscal year, which ends June 30.

Richardson praised the task force’s work.

“These recommendations are important steps to slamming shut the revolving door in our prisons and plugging the financial drain of a bulging inmate population,” Richardson said in a press release issued Tuesday. “They will help us sharpen our focus on keeping incarcerated individuals from reoffending after their release by helping them become productive citizens.”

Other actions the task force recommended were:

1. Create and support local Reentry Councils in collaboration with community

stakeholders throughout the state – Implement reentry council pilot project in community to be determined by the end of fiscal year 10.

2. Commence reentry and prison reform public education campaigns.

3. Enhance the role of faith-based services for formerly incarcerated persons, including statewide Adopt-a-Citizen program (“One Church – One Citizen”).

4. Increase availability of transitional and supportive living programs for formerly incarcerated persons.

5. Expand the use of drug courts as a means of decreasing prison census and encourage administrators to allow participants to access medication assisted treatment while under the jurisdiction of the court.

6. Increase the number of community mentoring programs for formerly incarcerated persons.

7. Direct programs and services to prisoners identified as high risk and high need by the COMPAS risk and needs assessment.

8. Discuss with the judiciary, the use of COMPAS risk and needs assessment in presentencing decision-making.

9. Examine, within the parameters of public safety, re-establishing work release programs for low custody prisoners.

10. Examine, within the parameters of public safety, implementing an early controlled release pilot project for non-violent women prisoners, and examine the use of earned meritorious deductions for parolees as allowed by existing statute.

11. Develop the Family Justice Project’s Reentry is Relational project to increase the number of sites and ensure project sustainability.
http://newmexicoindependent.com/37937/task-force-state-finances-limit-prison-reform-efforts

Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

Erie Co NY: Justice Department files suit against jail and holding center alleging violations of constitutional rights of prisoners

Federal Government Files Suit Over Holding Center
Steve Cichon Reporting
scichon@entercom.com

The Justice Department issued the following news release:

WASHINGTON – The United States has filed a lawsuit alleging that conditions at the Erie County Holding Center, a pre-trial detention center in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Erie County Correctional Facility, a correctional facility in Alden, N.Y, routinely and systematically deprive inmates of constitutional rights, the Justice Department announced. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York.

The lawsuit follows a nearly two year investigation, the findings of which were detailed in a letter sent to Erie County Executive Chris Collins on July 15, 2009. That letter documented evidence of numerous constitutional violations, including staff-on-inmate violence; inmate-on-inmate violence; sexual misconduct between staff and inmates; sexual misconduct among inmates; an inadequate system to prevent suicide and self-injurious behavior; inadequate medical and mental health care; and serious deficiencies in environmental health and safety.

The department’s investigation revealed evidence of a number of serious violations of constitutional rights at the jail. For example, Erie County fails to protect inmates against known suicide risks and to provide constitutionally required mental health care. Since 2003, nine inmates have committed suicide, and at least 15 inmates have attempted to commit suicide or have taken steps that demonstrated suicidal ideation. Between 2007 and 2008, there were three suicides and at least 10 attempted suicides.

“Jails must provide for the basic medical and mental health needs of inmates and must keep them safe from attacks by other inmates and excessive force by staff. We have repeatedly sought the county’s cooperation in working toward an amicable resolution in this matter, and we regret that the county’s failure to cooperate compels us to litigate,” said Loretta King, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “In light of the severity of the conditions, including multiple suicides and beatings, we must take action to ensure that the constitutional rights of those persons detained at the facilities, many of whom have not been convicted of any crime, are protected.”

Kathleen M. Mehltretter, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York, stated, “Our purpose in bringing this action is to ensure that the facilities consistently maintain policies, procedures and practices that protect the well being and health of the inmates. Due to the county's lack of cooperation, we must seek court intervention to resolve these issues.”

The Civil Rights Division is authorized to conduct such investigations under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980 (CRIPA). This statute allows the federal government to identify and root out systemic abuses such as those discovered in Erie County. Under CRIPA, the Justice Department has investigated the conditions at nursing homes, mental health facilities, residences for persons with developmental disabilities, and juvenile justice facilities, as well as similar institutions.
Links to the suit can be found here:
http://www.wben.com/Federal-Government-Files-Suit-Over-Holding-Center/5335390

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

September 29, 2009

The Secret World of Deaf Prisoners By James Ridgeway

The Secret World of Deaf Prisoners
By James Ridgeway
Monday, September 28th, 2009 9:47 pm

SPECIAL REPORT

In the 1970s, an antiwar demonstrator found himself at New York City’s Rikers Island jail facility for a couple of months on a disorderly conduct charge. The demonstrator, who happened to be a friend of mine, met a handful of young men from the Bronx in his unit who were deaf.

They were having trouble communicating with anyone but themselves. My friend knew a little sign language and, after a few conversations, discovered they were illiterate. With the idea of helping them improve their communication skills, he asked prison authorities for permission to order books on sign language from the publisher. The wardens refused, saying that they did not want anyone in that prison using a “language” they could not understand.

Things may have changed a little for the better since then. But not by much.

I first wrote about the deaf in the late 1960s in the New Republic and so I know something of the background which is what really informs this article. I am engaged in a project for Mother Jones on solitary confinement at Angola prison, and in doing research came upon an article in the July issue of Prison Legal News about widespread violations against deaf prisoners. Remembering the people and culture I had caught a glimpse of in the 60s, I got in touch with the article’s author, McCay Vernon. Luckily he remember my earlier writing, and promptly agreed to help me.

The letters quoted below are from deaf prisoners to different people in he “free world,” who are seeking to help them, to advocate their cause. I have disguised the advocates, prisoners and prisons to keep the inmates from getting reprisals—reprisals which they fear on a daily basis. You have to remember a deaf person can’t hear the chatter among other inmates, can’t hear the person sneaking up behind,is unintelligible in his cries for help during a rape.

The deaf face a nightmare when they fall into the criminal justice system. They live in a world apart to begin with; but in prison they are thrown into a dread new environment where they literally can’t understand the language of either their jailers or the other prisoners. When people who have never heard a spoken word try to speak, the sounds come out jumbled and weird—leading ill-informed jailers to think they are obstreperous or crazy. As a consequence, some deaf prisoners can end up in solitary.

I discovered numerous examples of abuses and violations of the rights of deaf prisoners as part of an ongoing investigative reporting project. But the most troubling discovery I made was how little has been done about the problem in the criminal justice system—and how little is known about it outside prison walls.

No one knows exactly how many deaf prisoners there are in the U.S. Efforts by psychologists and other experts to find out have been largely unsuccessful. With few exceptions—the state of Texas apparently being one—no one counts the deaf or hard of hearing in the prison population.

But according to two researchers, as many as one-third of the entire U.S. prison population of 1.7 million have difficulty hearing—with some of them being profoundly deaf. The researchers, Prof. Katrina Miller of Emporia State University in Kansas, herself a former corrections officer, and McCay Vernon, a psychologist whose late wife was deaf and who has worked within the prison community for years, believe it is long past time to seek help for this ignored segment of prisoners. Almost two-thirds of deaf prisoners, according to some studies, are in jail for violent and often sexual offenses committed against children.

A person is hard of hearing if he/she has a 50 percent loss of hearing in one ear. Prisoners who are illiterate as well as deaf are especially deprived when they find themselves in the criminal justice system. They seldom have been educated beyond second grade and, as a consequence, have trouble reading and writing. Because they are deaf and without competent interpreters, they can’t go to AA meetings or drug counseling or make it through educational programs.

The abuses begin as soon as a deaf prisoner enters the criminal justice system and faces accusers in court. Often the hard of hearing and deaf can’t hear the charges against them, don’t know what the trial is all about, don’t know why the guards are screaming at them, can’t hear bells or commands from others. If they are close enough to the judge and look hard at him, they can read his lips. But, as McCay Vernon points out, only 50 percent of spoken sounds can be translated into sign language.

On occasion, deaf persons will be given a court interpreter who knows sign language. But this can be a doubly frustrating experience: sign language can’t convey the special, often arcane lingo used by defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges. Most deaf people don’t read lips. The idea they can hear normally, or at least hear enough to act as if they can hear normally, is a myth of the hearing world, Vernon points out.

Sign language is enriched by mime, hand-spelling, and cued speech (which is a combination of signs and lip movement). In prisons and jails around the country, there are few interpreters who are trained well enough in this form of communication. Often other deaf or hard-of-hearing prisoners are recruited to help, but just as often deaf prisoners are left with few resources when they are confronted with pitfalls and crises that are tragically common in today’s prison system.

One deaf prisoner wrote, for example, that when he sought help after a prison rape, the guards laughed at him. A hard-of-hearing inmate who requested a pair of headphones to listen to the radio was turned down by the warden, who said he had not filled out the papers correctly. A request for a vibrating alarm clock got a similar rejection.

When deaf inmates want to make a phone call using TTD—a method of typing out messages—the prison insists two guards must be in the room. To make matters worse, the deaf are restricted to the same amount of phone time as hearing prisoners, though it takes twice the time to type out the messages.

Such anecdotes illustrate that deaf prisoners are faced daily with violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates equal treatment for deaf and other disabled persons. There is even a provision under the Act to pay attorneys additional sums to bring cases to correct inequities suffered by deaf inmates—a provision which, like other parts of the act, is honored mostly in the breach.

A twitter for these people isn’t just a vehicle for social networking, but a lifesaving device to communicate with the hearing world.

Complicating this situation, is the fact that the deaf community in general rarely goes to bat for peers who are in prison. As the mother of one deaf son, told me, “it makes them look bad.” Thus deaf prisoners are subject to a double isolation—from the prison community and from the larger community of their peers.

In a letter to a friend,one deaf prisoner wrote the following: ”I have been lowered to nothing more than a beggar in order to stand up for something. I believe the deaf have a right too. But I tell you this…there is no help for us here…I am almost at the end of my rope and believe that before I submit this body to any form of sexual act in order to get legal work done, I will take my own life. There is no help for us here…Many nights I have stayed awake contemplating the end and only my fear in the Lord Jesus in not accepting me in heaven has kept me from that act.”

Rape is a major fear, he went on. “Many many times deaf people raped and beat and no help from the officers. Hearing people steal our things…when we try to talk to officers, they just laugh. So hard for us. Many, many times I just want to die but have Jesus in [my] heart…Now one day at a time. Pray every day to help other deaf.”

This letter is signed with the drawing of a small, round smiling face and the words, “Deaf and proud.”

James Ridgeway is senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones.

NOTE: The names of prisoners and the correctional institutions mentioned in this article have been omitted because of the inmates’s fears of retaliation.
http://thecrimereport.org/2009/09/28/the-secret-world-of-deaf-prisoners/

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

September 26, 2009

CA: Editorial: Time to get real on prison crowding

Editorial: Time to get real on prison crowding

Friday, Sep. 25, 2009 | Page 16A
Sacramento Bee

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his team continue to suffer from multiple-policy disorder on prison overcrowding.

On one side, the governor declares a state of emergency and says it is absolutely possible to reduce prison population without harming public safety.

On the other side, his administration presents a plan to a three-judge federal court panel that says population reductions "cannot be accomplished without unacceptably compromising public safety."

This latest proposal, turned into the court last Friday, is make-believe and won't fool anyone. The aim is supposed to be to get California's 33 prisons – designed for 80,000 prisoners – down to 137.5 percent of capacity over two years. That requires going from 150,000 today to 110,000 inmates by July 2011.

Yet the Schwarzenegger administration presented a largely "build it and they will come" strategy, instead of a population reduction strategy. The plan relies heavily on construction – 764 beds the first year, 2,364 the second year, 3,904 the third year, 12,500 the fourth year, 16,150 the fifth year and 18,650 in the sixth year. Yeah, right.

The judges already have expressed deep skepticism about this in their August opinion, calling construction a merely "theoretical remedy" when everyone knows that construction remains "years away." They question whether construction of new prison space is "an actual, feasible, sufficiently timely remedy."

Second, the Schwarzenegger plan relies on sending more inmates to out-of-state prisons (1,250 the first year, 2,200 the second and 2,500 each year after). It also relies on turning foreign prisoners with deportation orders over to the federal government (300 in the first year and 600 each year after). Yet these options make hardly a dent in the prison population.

Only a couple of elements in the plan mark real reductions in California's state prison population: Expanding "good time" credits for inmates who follow prison rules and participate in education or work programs, and diverting technical parole violators to community correctional systems rather than incarcerating them in state prison for a few months.

And one element is totally missing from the Schwarzenegger package that the court should consider: The need to enforce the state's existing law on early medical release.

Assembly Bill 1539 by Assemblyman Paul Krekorian, D-Burbank, signed into law by Schwarzenegger in 2007, established a process to release inmates who are unable to perform activities of basic daily living inside a prison and who pose no threat to public safety.

Yet fewer than a dozen prisoners a year are released. State prisons are not supposed to be long-term health care providers for elderly, ill prisoners who pose no threat to society.

The Schwarzenegger administration's perfunctory plan shows that it will not go the extra mile to reduce prison population.

It does show, however, that he intends to go the extra mile to appeal the overcrowding case to the U.S. Supreme Court. His priorities are exactly backward.
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/2207887.html

Posted by lois at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 22, 2009

NY State Commission of Correction files a lawsuit against Erie Co Sheriff compelling him to operate jail in a safe & humane manner

Posted: Tuesday, 22 September 2009
State Sues Sheriff Howard
(It is hard to understand who is speaking in this...but the report is from a radio station).
Steve Cichon Reporting
scichon@entercom.com

Albany, NY (Commission of Correction/WBEN)- Today, the New York State Commission of Correction filed a lawsuit against Erie County Sheriff Timothy B. Howard to compel the county to operate its jail in a safe, stable and humane manner, as required by law. The filing of this lawsuit is an unfortunate but necessary action.

Over the past several years, the Commission of Correction has made repeated efforts to help Erie County comply with regulations designed to ensure the safety and security of the Erie County Holding Center, and ultimately the public safety. We have issued operational variances to provide the county with a measure of carefully monitored leeway. We have repeatedly advised the county of its myriad delinquencies – which range from failing to provide inmates with reasonable access to a toilet and a bar of soap to troubling denials of due process in disciplinary matters – and offered to work with local officials to address deficiencies which we believe undermine the safety and security of the facility and needlessly expose the county to civil rights actions.

We have made our staff available at all times to assist the county. Despite our repeated efforts to assist, Erie County has persistently violated regulations and neglected or refused to take necessary remedial action. We are, unfortunately, left with no choice but to seek judicial intervention.

I wish to stress that we are asking only that Erie County comply with the same set of minimal standards routinely followed by the vast majority of correctional facilities across the state. We are not seeking to force the county to undertake costly reforms. We are asking only that Erie County manage its jail in a responsible manner.

As a former sheriff who operated a large urban jail for 14 years, I fully understand the economic and logistical difficulties that the maintenance of a correctional facility imposes on a local government. Regardless, Erie County has an obligation to its citizens to operate their jail in a safe and secure manner, and the Commission of Correction has an obligation to enforce state regulations. When a county refuses to abide by those regulations and abdicates its responsibility to local taxpayers, as Erie County has, the Commission is obligated to pursue a legal remedy.

The Commission’s specific complaints are described in detail in the petition and exhibits that were filed today with the Supreme Court in Erie County. Now that this matter is before the court, I will refrain from any further comment while the action is pending.

http://www.wben.com/State-Sues-Sheriff-Howard/527367

Posted by lois at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

September 15, 2009

Crime Report Shows Violent Crime Fell in 2008 as Incarceration Rates Continue to Decrease

Crime Report Shows Violent Crime Fell in 2008 as Incarceration Rates Continue to Decrease
Justice Policy Institute
September 15, 2008
WASHINGTON, D.C.-Violent crime in the United States fell by 1.9 percent and property crimes by 0.8 percent in 2008, according to an analysis released today by the Justice Policy Institute. The analysis, which was based on the full 2008 FBI Uniform Crime Report, which was released this week, also found that this drop in crime coincided with a drop in incarceration from previous years. The Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. based think tank, hailed the news, saying it bolsters the case for a connection between effective alternatives to incarceration and public safety.

"Reducing incarceration rates is not only fiscally responsible, it is also the humane thing to do," said Tracy Velázquez, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute. "This week's report shows that we can preserve public safety while expanding the use of community supervision and improving the systems that help people be successful, including treatment, housing, and job services."

According to the analysis, the number of violent crimes fell in three of the four regions of the country. The number of property crimes fell in two of the four regions of the country; both the Northeastern and Southern regions experienced an increase of less than 3 percent in the number of property crimes.

While jails and prison populations continue to grow, the growth rate slowed in 2008, coinciding with the drop in crime. From 2007-2008, violent crime fell 1.9 percent while the growth rates of prisons and jails slowed, suggesting that lowering the number of people incarcerated can be an effective way to increase public safety.

From 2005-2006, violent crime had increased slightly (1.9 percent), while prison and jail populations also grew (by 2 and 2.5 percent, respectively). However, as the growth rate of prisons and jails has slowed, the violent crime rate declined as well, down 1.4 percent from 2006 to 2007.

"This data also confirms that increasing incarceration does not necessarily mean improvements in public safety. We should not starve our education and human service budgets to grow jails and prisons," Velázquez added. "Focusing on increasing investments in people and communities is what will ensure that these crime numbers continue to drop."

The Justice Policy Institute (JPI), a Washington, D.C.-based policy group that promotes fair and rational justice policies, cautions that no single factor can explain changes in crime across the nation, or within a jurisdiction. We have assembled key findings from these new crime and prison surveys to put the new figures in their appropriate context.
http://www.justicepolicy.org/

Posted by lois at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2009

Prison Comix by Jim Ridgeway

Prison Comix
September 5, 2009

With more and more older people going to prison there is a growing demand for educational materials to keep their minds alive and well amid the deadening atmosphere of the American correctional system—created in large part by government and supervised and informed by the judiciary. Not to mention the thousands upon thousands of young and middle-aged people whose “rehabilitation” has been cut short by the cruel sentencing laws.

There are all sorts of projects afoot in this area, but one is of special interest. It is called the Real Cost of Prisons, and is run by Lois Ahrens of Northampton, Mass., on a shoestring. You can get a feel for her work by obtaining the Real Cost of Prisons Comix book which includes three comics: Prison Town about the financing and placement of prisons and their effect on rural communities; Prisoners of the war on Drugs, a history of the war on drugs; and Prisoners of a hard Life,which includes stories of women trapped by mandatory sentencing. To me, this last book is the most telling. PM Press publishes the book at $12.95 a copy.

Ahrens got the idea of doing comic books,partly because she wanted to find a way of communicating with prisoners in a simple,direct way providing them especially up to date information and new research. She hit on the idea,in part from years of going to Mexico, and watching women engrossed in photo novellas while tending market stalls or sitting on park benches. Then trade unionists from South Africa gave her publications chock full of graphics, pictures and text that they were using to educate people in their campaign to stop privatization and in the fight against globalization. She also got ideas from “A Field Guide to the US Economy” by James Heintz and Nancy Foibre which also uses graphs, cartoons and ordinary language to explain the economy.

Because prisoners can’t ordinarily take advantage of the information that currently proliferates on the internet, comic books which speak to their lives and needs, are available and free, she says.

Comic books have been received by prisoners in every state prison system,every federal prison and numerous jails. Thousands more have been sent to prisoners through 13 Books through Bars organizations. We know that comic books are passed hand to hand by prisoners,since as soon as a set is sent to one prisoner,not a week passes before we begin receiving requests from other prisoners at that prison..One prisoner wrotethat he found one on a pew in the prison

Ahrens web site is an up to date resource on prison news.

http://unsilentgeneration.com/category/prisons-criminal-justice/

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

September 11, 2009

Bridgewater: The men in Mass. who need our help

The focus of this is Bridgewater but doesn't mention the suicide and suicide attempts at Framingham.

The men in Mass. who need our help
By Mark S. Coven
The Boston Globe
September 10, 2009

THE THREE men sat in court, each in custody and handcuffed. The first was on probation for driving while under the influence of liquor. At 22, he struggles with alcoholism. After he was rushed to the hospital with an extremely high blood alcohol level, his parents petitioned the court to have him civilly committed to receive treatment. While the law authorizes judges to civilly commit a person to certain programs for up to 30 days, the Massachusetts Alcohol Substance Abuse Center at Bridgewater had discharged the probationer back to the court in less than one week.

The second man stared at me with vacant eyes. He was arrested for his third trespassing charge in less than 60 days. His lawyer said he suffers from both mental illness and alcohol abuse and has been homeless. He was given a no-trespassing order from a local homeless shelter after causing a disruption. The court psychologist said that she hadn’t been able to locate a program that would accept him for treatment of his dual diagnosis of mental illness and substance abuse.

The third young man, a heroin addict, was back in court to be supervised on probation. He had just successfully completed 27 days of sobriety at the Men’s Addiction Center, funded by the Department of Public Health, and needed the referral to continue treatment.

I was taught as a child that when you squeeze a balloon, it simply causes a bulge in another part of that balloon. These three individuals are symptomatic of the hundreds of people who live each day with mental illness or substance abuse or homelessness. These problems do not simply disappear if not addressed. They manifest themselves in our prisons or on our streets.

A 2004 report from the Massachusetts Governors Commission on Corrections Reform indicates that one of every five inmates has mental health issues. The majority also have extensive histories of alcohol or other substance abuse problems. Yet recent public attention has been primarily focused on the estimated $562 million in new revenue from the increase in the sales tax rather than the $2.2 billion in spending cuts enacted by the Legislature and the governor.

This year’s budget cut 6 percent from the Department of Mental Health, which already had $36 million cut in the last fiscal year. The governor’s additional cuts will eliminate $500,000 from adult residential and day services, and $600,000 from funding hospitals and community mental health centers. These cuts may result in the closing of the 16 inpatient beds at Quincy Mental Health Center, beds that are utilized to help prevent mentally ill individuals from being admitted to state hospitals and to transition them to programs in the community.

This year’s budget cuts may also mean the closure of the Massachusetts Alcohol Substance Abuse Center in Bridgewater, 200 beds operated by the Department of Correction to provide substance abuse treatment for men. In 2008, there were over 1,500 admissions to the center. It is true that the Department of Correction requires these beds to be used to avoid overcrowding in state correctional facilities, and it may be equally true that the Department of Correction is not the most appropriate agency to provide substance abuse treatment for persons civilly committed. Even so, the end result is that there will be fewer beds for those who need treatment.

These types of budget cuts will not simply result in a loss of services to those in need; it will force those costs onto other portions of state or local budgets. Those people who suffer from mental illness or substance abuse issues who do not receive services or can not be supervised adequately by the court’s probation department will continue to offend, resulting in incarceration. The average cost to house an inmate in a state correctional facility is $47,679. That same person could be treated in the community and supervised by probation for approximately one-third of that cost.

The Legislature must address these critical items vetoed by the governor. And the governor must address the sudden loss of the 200 beds that will occur if the Massachusetts Alcohol Substance Abuse Center is closed.

As a child I also learned if you squeeze a balloon too hard it does not simply bulge, it bursts.

Mark S. Coven is the First Justice of the Quincy District Court.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/09/10/the_men_in_mass_who_need_our_help/
This and other news about financing and mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

September 09, 2009

The Tragedy of Our 'Disappeared' Veterans

The Tragedy of Our 'Disappeared' Veterans
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
Posted on August 12, 2009, Printed on September 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/140828/

Wayne McMahon was busted on gun charges six months after he got out of the Marines.

He was jumped by a gang of kids in his hometown of Albany, N.Y. , and he went for the assault rifle he kept in the back of his SUV.

He's serving "three flat, with two years of post-release" at Groveland Prison in upstate New York.

Maybe it's tempting to write McMahon off as just a screwed-up person who made the kinds of mistakes that should have landed him in jail, but maybe that's because his injuries don't show on the outside.

Unlike physical injuries, psychiatric injuries are invisible; the burden of proof lands on the soldier (or sailor or Marine), and such injuries are easy for the public to deny.

The diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder include a preoccupation with danger.

According to Jonathan Shay, a Veterans Administration psychiatrist and author of Achilles in Vietnam, hypervigilance in soldiers and veterans is expressed as the persistent mobilization of both body and mind to protect against lethal danger -- they act as though they were still in combat, even when the danger is no longer present.

That preoccupation leads to a cluster of symptoms, including sleeplessness, exaggerated startle responses, violent outbursts and a reliance on combat skills that are inappropriate, and very often illegal, in the civilian world.

When I asked McMahon what he was doing with an assault rifle in his car, he told me that since he got back from Afghanistan, he didn't feel safe without guns around.

"There was almost always a gun," he said. "In the apartment, there was guns everywhere.

"I was just over in combat, and you guys gave me an M-16 and a 9mm and let me walk around for eight months straight. And now I get back, and I get jumped by a bunch of people, and I can't have a gun?"

McMahon sits across from me in his prison greens, elbows on his knees, leaning into his story about the kid he was and the man he is hoping to become. His eagerness and optimism make it clear that he believes his mistakes are behind him.

His parents were teenagers when he was born, and they separated shortly after. He bounced around on the streets of Albany, and, like so many other young Americans with dreams of escaping dysfunctional families and lousy neighborhoods, he saw the military as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

He enlisted in the Marines right out of high school.

For the first time in his life, McMahon found himself in a meritocracy. He was promoted regularly and quickly, making sergeant by the time he got to Afghanistan.

Then two days before his five-year contract was up, he was caught drinking on the job, busted down to lance corporal and administratively discharged. He lost all his benefits.

McMahon was in the Marine Corps from 2001 until 2006. He spent his last year working as an aircraft mechanic on a flight line in Afghanistan that was under near-constant attack. It was also a transshipment point for injured American soldiers who were being evacuated to Germany.

For eight months, his days and nights were spent up close and personal with the visceral evidence of what the rockets, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades do to human bodies.

"We had a lot of explosions. Almost every day. And I seen guys coming out from convoy missions where their Humvees would have exploded," he told me matter-of-factly. "The first two months were pretty terrible. "

After that, even though "a lot of other people found it hard to deal with, it wasn't really too rough for me." A bit of Marine bravado, perhaps, but reinforced with a bit of liquid courage:

"We Marines, we're smart," he explained. "There was no alcohol provided, but I was making my own from fruit juice I got from the chow hall and yeast they gave us at the pizza shop. It was horrible, really horrible -- but two little 20-ounce water bottles, and you were good for the night. " It was the only way he got any sleep.

Jonathan Shay also notes the almost-universal reliance on alcohol or drugs by psychically injured veterans. They afford some temporary relief from intolerable memories and from the emotional and physical exhaustion of maintaining a constant state of vigilance.

McMahon came home from Afghanistan with a serious drinking problem, a hair-trigger temper and conditioned to rely on his combat skills for survival.

Both his marriage and his military career quickly unraveled, and then he was arrested. Nobody diagnosed his PTSD until he got to Groveland.

McMahon's obsession with safety and guns, and his compulsive drinking are both typical of a post-traumatic stress injury, but instead of diagnosis and treatment, he was left to his own compromised resources and promptly landed in jail.

In terms of the bottom line, it's a trifecta for the military when that happens. A damaged soldier is disappeared, the cost of treatment avoided and the evidence that would prove how often veterans find it impossible to readjust when they come home is erased.

Traumatized soldiers are not a military asset. They are unreliable, and can be dangerous to their fellow soldiers and to themselves. Their care can take years and be quite expensive. But because the macho culture of the military stigmatizes mental health issues, most soldiers won't ask for the help they need.

When they try to manage on their own and fail, when the entirely predictable symptoms of their injuries get them into trouble, their behavior is used to justify kicking them out of the service.

They lose all their health and disability benefits, and in the absence of treatment and support, the same behaviors that got them kicked out of the military land them in jail.

Once they enter the criminal justice system, their military service is irrelevant. Soldiers and veterans with psychiatric injuries who, like McMahon, end up in jail, are handed -- and in fact often accept -- the full burden of responsibility for their actions. And when that happens, the system gets off free.

That's what happened to McMahon, and though it's still too soon for meaningful statistics about incarceration rates among this new generation of veterans, the anecdotal evidence suggesting a predictive relationship between military experience, PTSD and trouble with the criminal justice system continues to mount .

And this is not a new phenomenon. The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, published in 1990, found that more than a decade after the Vietnam conflict ended, 15 percent of male veterans still suffered from PTSD, and half of them had been arrested or in jail at least once.

Most Vietnam War veterans deployed for exactly one year. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have experienced longer and repeated deployments, and top military psychiatrists acknowledge that veterans of these new wars may have an even harder time coming home.

And instead of improving, the situation is getting worse. In 2008, the Rand Corp. estimated that 300,000 soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will suffer from post-traumatic stress issues, and 320,000 others will suffer traumatic brain injuries that express many of the same symptoms as PTSD.

And although most of them will not seek treatment, even when they try the VA has made such care extremely difficult to access.

For years, the Pentagon has chosen to ignore congressional directives to screen soldiers both pre- and post-deployment.

In May, the Hartford Courant reported that such screenings are still being administered in haphazard fashion. Only 1 percent of at-risk soldiers were referred to a mental health professional prior to deployment, and post-deployment screenings continue to be a laughably inadequate box to be checked on a form.

The Courant noted that the situation has remained unchanged since the paper reported on the issue in 2007.

And for veterans, the VA's claims backlog in May was approaching 1 million, a 14 percent rise since January.

By now, the anecdotal evidence associating combat-related PTSD with crime and incarceration ought to be part of the conventional wisdom. Its accumulation over the past century should have engendered enough concern to provoke some serious attention and study.

But the reality is that nobody knows the precise number of veterans who have ended up behind bars in the aftermath of America's wars.

There are more than a few reasons why military and government officials might want those numbers to remain hidden, but certainly among the most compelling is cost.

Large numbers of veterans in prison suggest a pattern, perhaps even a causal relationship between military service and behaviors that lead to incarceration, lending support to those who argue that such behaviors should be seen as possible symptoms of a service-connected injury deserving of treatment and support rather than punishment.

When the patterns are hidden -- the numbers unavailable -- it is easier for the military to pretend that the problem is with a given individual and not systemic.

In January 2008, when the New York Times reported that it had identified 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan had been charged with murder, the Pentagon declined to comment because it could not duplicate the newspaper's research.

A year later, the Army finally admitted that there might in fact be a connection between the violent behaviors of some returning service members and their combat experience. Pete Geren, Secretary of the Army, announced that in response to a spate of homicides at the Fort Carson Army base, he was “considering” conducting an Army-wide review of all soldiers involved in violent crimes since returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The report, which was finally published last week, does in fact “suggest a possible association between increasing levels of combat exposure and risk for negative behavioral outcomes."

And though it accuses the Army of denying necessary care to soldiers, and specifically blames commanders for proscribing access, Eric Schoomaker, the Army's surgeon general, calls it “preliminary,” and insists that no causality can be inferred from the findings.

Without causality, there is of course limited accountability.

Shoomaker pointed out that soldiers themselves should bear some responsibility for failing to seek help, ignoring the fact that half of the surveyed soldiers accused of violent behaviors had been sent back to Iraq “early,” and that many of them had documented suicide issues. Schoomaker also stressed that though many soldiers claimed to have witnessed war crimes, an Army probe did not substantiate those claims.

The results of this report might have been an invaluable contribution to the public conversation about what war does to soldiers and who should be responsible for their readjustment into society. Instead, once again, soldiers are blamed for violent behaviors that are clearly symptomatic of their injuries. When individuals take the rap, there is no interrogation of the pattern. Officials remain free to dismiss and deny how many ex-service members are ending up in jail. And as long as the bodies remain hidden, they get away with it.

Vets Demonized; the System Gets Off the Hook

Ed Hart has a hard time accepting official denial of a connection that to him seems more than obvious.

Hart is an 87-year-old Marine, a veteran of World War II. He is also a former president of Veterans for Peace, a retired attorney and a deeply concerned citizen.

"People like me are upset about what they did to us -- and what they continue to do to the fuzzy-faced kids they haul off to boot camp," Hart said. "Too many of those kids never made it back into reality; they were found guilty of terrible crimes and sent off to spend years in prison -- maybe all the years left to them -- and we can't figure out what happened to them?"

Hart did in fact try to figure out what was happening in the late ‘80s, when Vietnam veterans began showing up in large numbers in the criminal justice system. Along with his pro bono legal work, he began interviewing large numbers of vets in prison.

What he discovered has been corroborated by every Bureau of Justice Statistics survey since: incarcerated veterans are better educated than their non-veteran counterparts; they are more likely to have been employed at the time of their arrest; and they are more likely to be in jail for a first offense -- all of which should be factors in their favor at sentencing.

But instead, they are more likely to get longer sentences than non-veterans -- on average, more than two years longer -- for the same crime.

Guy Gambill, director of research and policy at the Veterans Initiatives Center and Research Institute (VICTRI), attributes this to a "know better" syndrome.

"Judges and juries, ironically, place veterans in a higher category, one with heavy moral undertones. The thinking goes that they should know better and therefore should be held to a higher standard of conduct," he said.

Hart also recognized that moral judgment, but in his days as a practicing attorney, he saw an element of demonization in the dynamic as well.

"I've seen prosecuting attorneys in their final statements point to the bewildered man at the defense table and tell the jury, ‘Look at him! He's a trained killer! We need to get him off the streets and make them safe for our women and children.' "

Mike Thomas has experienced that prejudice firsthand. Thomas did three tours in Vietnam, was wounded twice, and earned all kinds of medals, but he's doing 25-to-life at Mule Creek Prison in Ione, Calif., for spewing some racist bile at an Asian man over the phone.

The day he got home from Vietnam, he beat up an Asian man in a bar, and he did it again the day they let him out of jail. He was sent to a military hospital for two years with a diagnosis of Adult Situational Reaction, a diagnostic precursor to PTSD.

The military declared him "fully recovered." For 25 years, he held down a job as a sales manager.

Then, one morning, in the midst of a flashback, Thomas lost his balance. Aside from hypervigilance, the symptoms of PTSD also include flashbacks. Flashbacks can be so convincingly real that the sufferer behaves as though he or she were actually in the remembered moment.

"Everybody who's lived at the brink of terror for some time has stored that place in his memory," Hart explains with empathy. "There's always the possibility that something will take him back sometime, give him that little push that will take his balance away.

"But there ain't much more you can do to a guy on the phone worse than yell at him."

Nonetheless, the prosecutor, noting Thomas's two priors, decided to interpret his phone rant as a terrorist threat -- hence the draconian sentence.

Some might argue that Thomas's antagonism towards Asians made him an accident waiting to happen, and they're not wrong. But dehumanization of the enemy is central to how military training enables soldiers to overcome their inherent resistance to killing other human beings.

Author Jonathan Shay describes how images of the enemy were drilled into his Vietnam-era patients as a "demonized adversary … evil, loathsome, deserving to be killed as the enemy of God, and as God-hated vermin, so inhuman as not really to care if he lives or dies."

It seems a distortion of justice to send a man to prison for life because in the course of his military training a switch got flipped, making him temporarily more useful to his government.

The practice continues. Bob Herbert, writing in the New York Times, described "the growing rage among coalition troops against all Iraqis (known derisively as 'hajis,' just as the Vietnamese were known as 'gooks')."

He quotes Sgt. Camilo Mejía, an Iraq war veteran, who explained, "You just sort of try to block out the fact that they are human beings and see them as enemies. You call them hajis, you know? You do all the things that make it easier to deal with killing them and mistreating them."

"The sacrifice that citizens make when they serve in their country's military," Shay reminds us, "is not simply the risk of death, dismemberment, disfigurement and paralysis -- as terrible as these realities are. They risk their peace of mind."

"When I went to boot camp," Thomas said, "I was a good Catholic boy who'd never shot so much as a squirrel. But I turned 20, 21 and 22 in Vietnam, and that became my identity. I tried to filter life through that prism of horror, pain and loss. Not good. A recipe for disaster."

Thomas once tried suicide to escape "the despair, grief, survivor guilt, nightmares, depression, the pain of hearing my mother say she wished I had died in Vietnam so her memories wouldn't be tainted."

More recently, he asked Veterans for Peace -- by mail -- to sponsor a nationwide program for incarcerated vets. His proposal was accepted and in May, VFP Incarcerated Chapter 001 was officially incorporated at Mule Creek Prison.

Wayne McMahon was luckier in that New York state still maintains residential therapeutic programs for veterans at three of its prisons. (In 1999, there were 19, boasting a recidivism rate of 9 percent after five years compared to 52 percent for non-veterans. Unfortunately for taxpayers, those programs were consolidated for the sake of "efficiency and effectiveness.") He has taken advantage of courses in anger and aggression management, interpersonal dynamics, and substance abuse, and he has completed his training as a group facilitator.

McMahon has a job waiting for him when he gets out; he wants to go back to school; and he is going to try for a discharge upgrade from the military based on his PTSD diagnosis.

The Hidden Numbers

Since its first study of the issue in 1979, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has been the best source of information on the number of vets who have ended up behind bars.

According to the bureau's most recent survey, in 2004, there were 140,000 veterans in the nation's prisons -- or about 10 percent of the total prison population. By 2007, that number had risen to156,100, but the prison population overall had increased, so the relative share of vets in the population remained unchanged.

But as Baruch College's Aaron Levenstein once said, "Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. "

For example, the numbers above don't include veterans held in the nation's jails, or those on probation or parole. When those groups are included, according to BJS estimates, the number of veterans who were under correctional supervision in 2007 jumps to 703,000. In addition, just under 1.2 million vets were arrested in 2007.

At least some of those on parole or probation at a given point will be arrested later in the year, skewing the estimated total. But Christopher Mumola, author of the last two BJS surveys of incarcerated veterans, said "if 703,000 veterans are supervised in some fashion on a given day, and 1,159,500 arrests in 2007 involved veterans as well, that gives you a rough approximation of the maximum number of vets who are touched by the criminal justice system in a year of about 1.8 million to 1.9 million veterans."

Still, in all probability, that number under-represents the number of veterans behind bars for several reasons.

For one, Mumola points out, an inmate's military history is irrelevant to prison administrators. "(They) measure the things they operationally use or are bureaucratically accountable for. Whether someone is a veteran or not doesn't change how that inmate is handled, the privileges they have or anything like that." So prison administrators don't ask. And, Mumola added, "the federal government doesn't require them to keep those statistics."

Frank Dawson, a patient advocate at the Boston VA, has long been frustrated and dismayed by the lack of reliable numbers. Dawson says he believes veterans need support before their lives spin out of control, and, "as a national service provider, the VA can't target services unless it knows where its population is."

But Dawson, like everyone else, has been stymied in his efforts. "I keep on my desk a stack of 6,000 address labels that I got from the Department of Justice," he said. "Six thousand institutions, 6,000 egos, 6,000 systems, 6,000 sets of protocol. There is no standard intake anywhere. I keep that stack on my desk to remind me how complicated they have made it. "

In the absence of federal, state or local legislation requiring penal institutions to use standard intake procedures that include verification of an inmate's military history, veterans' advocates across the country are pressuring the courts to at least inquire about veteran status during the bail-screening process.

But Taylor Halloran, who recently retired as the VA's liaison to veterans in New York's downstate prisons and jails, said there are more than a few reasons why veterans might refuse to divulge their military background.

Halloran emphasizes that many veterans offer fake Social Security numbers or aliases at intake, or they fail to report their arrests to VA because they fear the loss of benefits -- which is at least partially true. Health care benefits are suspended for the term of an inmate's incarceration and, after 60 days, disability benefits are reduced by about half, but those too should be reinstated when a veteran is released.

Lots of veterans don't know or understand the VA's policies, many have families that depend on those checks, and the VA has a reputation for taking its time reinstating benefits after an inmate is released.

So it's sort of a devil's bargain: identify themselves and lose half of their disability benefits, or take a chance they won't get caught. But if they do, they are royally screwed.

They have to pay the government back with interest and fines, but the far more serious consequence is that they lose all future benefits, including health care, disability and education.

To many, the risk seems worth taking. A 1999 Inspector General's report sharply criticized the VA's failure to "implement a systematic approach to identify incarcerated veterans and dependents, resulting in additional past and future overpayments exceeding $170 million dollars."

A 2004 VA Performance and Accountability Report found $5.7 million in benefit overpayments in a 20 percent sample of cases, and the report noted that "tracking 100 percent of these cases would not be cost beneficial."

Halloran said he had to work to get his potential clients to come forward voluntarily. And even then, he "couldn't touch the guys the VA doesn't consider veterans -- anyone with a dishonorable or bad-conduct discharge." One in six incarcerated veterans has been dishonorably discharged.

New Wars, Old Problems

Although the data are imperfect, one thing the BJS surveys do well is identify trends and patterns. For example, its last survey showed that at about 40 percent, Vietnam-era veterans still constitute the vast majority of vets in state and federal prisons.

The Gulf War involved far fewer soldiers and lasted for only six months, but at 15 percent of the veteran population in state and federal prisons, they constitute the newest wave. Veterans of the Gulf War are almost twice as likely to be incarcerated as demographically comparable non-veterans.

At 4 percent of the incarcerated veteran population, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were only just beginning to show up in the 2004 BJS survey.

"It takes quite a while for these folks to show up in the criminal justice system," Chris Mumola explained. "They are out there in these conflicts, having these experiences, coming back, getting into trouble with the criminal justice system, being fully adjudicated, winding up in prison, and only then are they available to be interviewed in these surveys. It may take years and years to marinate before it really manifests itself. "

Unfortunately, the next BJS survey is not scheduled until 2012.

However difficult those populations might be to track, it would seem that if ever there was a population that should be easy to count, it's prisoners. Every one has a number. Files are kept. There are forms -- and now computerized records -- from which patterns might be gleaned.

And prisons aren't the only black holes into which our nation's damaged warriors are disappearing. They also end up in hospitals and mental institutions. They vanish beyond the margins of society when their lives, their marriages, their careers fall apart. They end up in boxes on the street, vilified, forsaken, and self-medicating. Far too many die too soon of disease, accidents, overdoses or suicide.

An honest accounting of their numbers would be ammunition for those who believe that soldiers and veterans are still not receiving the care and support they need.

It would help challenge the myth of the romantic warrior by better educating our children to the real dangers of military service. It would also contribute to a public better informed about the hidden costs of our military ventures, including the ongoing damage to our citizens and our treasury, and to our national character as well.

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her book Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War was released on Memorial Day 2006. Her Web site is Flashback.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140828/
And....
Think Vietnam Vets Were Screwed? Wait Until You See How Many Veterans of Bush's Wars End up in Jail
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
Posted on September 9, 2009, Printed on September 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142258/

As all the other justifications for the U.S. invasion of Iraq have fallen by the wayside, it is ironic that the one that remains is "freedom," because in the name of someone else's freedom, we train our own soldiers to behave in ways that may very well cost them their own.

Gordy Lane is a retired Syracuse police detective who served in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. As a cop, it was his job to put lawbreakers behind bars, but as a veteran, he understands that when you go to war, "you come back a little different than when you went over there."

"Listen," he says, "you pop up out of a foxhole, and you blow a guy's head open like a watermelon. The other two guys in the foxhole start patting you on the back and saying, 'Good job!' because you just did the worst thing that you can do to another person. How do you translate that into civilian life?"

For far too many soldiers, the simple answer is, you don't.

But with them behind bars and out of sight, most of the rest of us are free to ignore the human evidence of what our military ventures really cost. Even putting issues of compassion and justice aside, any number of alternatives to prison have been shown to save taxpayer money.

For example, the average annual cost of incarceration in New York state in 2008 was $44,000 a year. But a 2009 report by the Legal Action Committee found that for every individual diverted from prison into community-based treatment programs, the state would save between $62,492 and $88,892 a year.

The LAC calculated those savings by subtracting the average cost of treatment (for addiction or mental-health issues) from the cost of incarceration. It turns out to be cheaper, both in the long and the short run, even considering expenditures such as program administration and court supervision, if projected savings in health care, public assistance and future criminal justice involvement is also considered.

With that in mind, as these new wars drag on, and as more and more service members find themselves entangled in the criminal justice system, it seems worth asking, in whose interest is the status quo maintained? Especially when there are more humane and even more rational solutions available.

Jim Strollo, who directs the veterans program at Groveland Prison in New York, has "a group of veterans that meets on Thursday nights that addresses PTSD, among other things.

"But I'm not a trained counselor. We have the Office of Mental Health, but they are not equipped to do a lot of counseling because crisis intervention keeps them so busy. Veteran inmates rely in the counseling of their peers. They do the best they can."

Even 10 years ago, veterans at Groveland and other New York prisons had more support and treatment options than they have today.

Don Little, who coordinated the NYS Department of Correctional Services' Veterans Programs from 1986 until December 2004, when he retired, told me sadly, "We had good results. We made the department look good, and we weren't even spending the state's money. I just don't understand."

Reintegrating Vets into Civilian Life

After the war in Vietnam, when veterans began showing up in the nation's prisons in large numbers, Vietnam Veterans of America was the first organization to respond with rehabilitation programs specifically designed to help returning troops reintegrate into civilian life.

NYDOCS adopted VVA's design and did perhaps the best job of implementing the program.

"We even had the VA involved, " Little says proudly. "They provided trained substance-abuse and PTSD counselors, and the NYS Division of Parole and Department of Labor had signed on as well."

By 1993, NYSDOCS could boast a recidivism rate (five years after release) of 8.9 percent for veterans who had completed the program, compared with 51.6 percent for non-veterans.

In 1999, 19 facilities in NYSDOCS offered veterans programs. Then, for the sake of "efficiency and effectiveness," those programs were consolidated. There are now three. And since the consolidation, program participation no longer counts toward certificates of "earned eligibility," which make an early parole more likely.

"Our program was undermined at the highest levels of the department," Little recalls with bitterness. "They said vets were getting preferential treatment. But I believe they just didn't want it to succeed. Vindictive, that's what it seemed to me."

What happened to those demonstrably successful programs makes no sense in human or even in fiscal terms. But even while various agencies of government appear content to keep veterans behind bars and out of sight, an array of creative and compassionate -- not to mention economically rational -- solutions continue to emerge, put forward by concerned individuals.

The Syracuse police force, for example, like police departments in communities across the country, includes a lot of Reservists and Guard members. In the past, they went right back to work when they came home. But Gordy Lane came up with a program designed to help the department and its officers with the entirely predictable re-entry issues they face following a deployment.

To that end, Lane has involved local professionals, including representatives from the police department, the mayor's office, the district attorney's office, the Vet Center and the VA, in a plan to make sure they are not sending a liability out onto the street.

"After all, this guy's got life and death strapped to his hip."

Now when these veterans/cops come home, the department gives them two weeks paid leave, during which time they are walked over to the VA to make sure they understand the services and benefits to which they are entitled, and then on to the Vet Center, where they must sign up for one-on-one counseling with a PTSD expert.

The PTSD expert decides when the cop/veteran is ready to go out on the street. And when he or she does get the green light to go out, he or she is paired with an Iraq or Afghanistan vet, who determines when/if he or she is ready to carry a gun.

Lane calls it a "commonsense approach" and, he adds, "It's free."

Programs like Lane's are cropping up across the country, but helping veterans/officers with re-entry issues only takes pressure off one side of the equation.

There is still the issue of what happens when symptomatic behaviors bring other veterans into contact with police.

"A vet won't back down," says Lane, "and neither will law enforcement. They are like two rams. What we have to do is help law enforcement understand these guys."

Training to Recognize Signs of PTSD Vets

Last year, Steve Darman, a Vietnam-era vet and an adjunct professor of sociology at State University of New York Institute of Technology in Utica, did a countywide study of prisoner re-entry issues that convinced him that health care, human services and crisis-intervention workers, as well as law enforcement, need to be trained to recognize the characteristic behaviors and needs of traumatized veterans.

"These new vets, just like the vets from Vietnam, they do perimeter checks at night so they can feel safe. And sometimes they do it with weapons. They don't sleep at night like most people, so they are out there walking around their property at 2, 3 in the morning, and local law enforcement can roll up and misunderstand. The cops need to learn to think twice."

Darman says he imagines "front-line responders all over the country are having similar problems with vets in crisis," and adds that he "would also guess that the outcomes for our vets are not good."

The accumulation of tragic stories in Oneida County alone -- stories like the Utica police officer who was fired last year for severely beating a verbally abusive Vietnam vet with a PTSD diagnosis while the vet was handcuffed to a gurney in a hospital psychiatric ward -- those kinds of stories impelled Darman to develop a one-day training workshop for local law enforcement, which he hopes will help keep similar future confrontations from escalating into prison sentences -- or worse.

But he fears that a crisis is looming, that the numbers will be daunting. The problem "goes way beyond the cost of incarceration," he warns. "PTSD, addiction and homelessness reinforce each other, producing a downward spiral that is almost always accompanied by incarceration. When we try to 'manage' veterans without helping them heal, there are costs attached everywhere."

Guy Gambill, director of research and policy at the Veterans Initiatives Center and Research Institute, predicts that the number of veterans of today's conflicts who will have run-ins with the criminal justice system "will exceed those of the Vietnam generation by a long shot."

To support that claim, Gambill points to a whole slew of "emendations and additions to our criminal codes since the Reagan administration. Laws requiring mandatory minimum sentencing and three-strike laws enhance sentences for a panoply of lower-level offenses and will bring unprecedented numbers" into the justice system.

Furthermore, large numbers of service members have "volunteered" for economic reasons. They come from the working class, and according to Gambill, "the well-documented inequities in our legal system make it far more likely that when this generation of soldiers transgress, they will do time."

And he notes that the "signature" wound of today's war, traumatic brain injury (TBI), which "in those cases where there is co-morbidity for substance abuse and/or where PTSD is present, there is an apparent link to violent behavior. That psychological component is often misinterpreted by law enforcement."

Gambill has been instrumental in getting a version of California's alternative-sentencing law -- which gives judges the option to take military service into consideration at sentencing -- passed in Minnesota this year, and he is working on getting a federal version passed.

Alternative "Veteran Court" Model

Another optimistic response has come from Buffalo (N.Y.) City Court Judge Robert Russell, who parlayed his experience with the successful drug- and mental-health-court concept into the first "veteran court."

Instead of prison, a veteran who has gotten himself or herself into trouble with the law is introduced to a court-supervised support community tailored to address the many readjustment issues specific to veterans -- from simple life-maintenance issues, to addictions, mental-health issues, housing and legal problems. The approach is holistic, the staff are largely veterans, and the focus is on recovery, not punishment.

More than 100 veterans have been admitted to the court in the past year. Their retention rate is 91 percent, and they predict a recidivism rate on a par with the mental-health court's, somewhere around 4 percent. Those numbers are particularly impressive when compared to the 60-70 percent national average.

Greg McClure, who is the project director at the new veterans court in Rochester, N.Y., sounds optimistic: "It's easy to spend money to punish, more of a challenge to find programs that work. This works. Our recidivism rates in the drug courts are way below the national average, and the veterans court is a little lower than that.

"I think it will be very difficult for anyone to say this isn't a good idea. It's taking care of people who have taken care of us."

Brock Hunter, a Minnesota criminal defense lawyer who worked with Gambill to draft the state's alternative-sentencing legislation, is less sanguine.

"We have like 2 million folks who have served now in the current conflicts, and well over half of them are still in the military. These are the folks who have done four or five or six combat tours. When they finally get out, that's when the shit is really going to hit the fan."

Although Gambill and Hunter are quick to point out that they have nothing but the deepest respect for Russell and his court, they fear that such courts can only handle a relatively small number of cases. And they are further limited, at least as currently conceived, because they are proscribed from handling anything but "nonviolent" crimes. That language, Gambill says, is "simply too vague to be reasonable."

"In lots of states, Minnesota for example, any offense involving a controlled substance is considered violent. Add disorderly conduct, driving intoxicated, illegal gun possession, and we've ruled out a large percentage of the guys we are talking about. If what we are trying to do is not send as many veterans to jail as we did post-Vietnam, that's a colossal stupidity."

Hunter adds: "It is exactly the cases involving violent crimes that are the ones we should focus on. These are they guys who need help the most. They are likely going to be the veterans who are suffering from the more severe cases of PTSD, and if they go untreated, they are going to pose a greater danger to society when they get out than when they went in."

What Hunter has found to be a useful legal strategy is what in Minnesota is called "a stay of adjudication." Hunter says this is when a veteran enters a guilty plea that the judge does not accept. The process in effect puts the veteran on probation. The judge can then order him to seek treatment from the VA, or even to serve a few days in jail, if he thinks he needs to get the guy's attention.

Still, the justice system retains some leverage, some insurance that this troubled veteran is going to get the help he needs to get his life back in order. And if he complies, the charges are dismissed, and he has a clean record.

Like the veterans court, Hunter's solution requires that the mechanism be worked out on a case-by-case basis. That can only succeed if an adequately funded legal system has access to an adequately funded support network, including accessible VA treatment, housing, education and employment support.

Any solution that is going to work will be expensive and will require a very different set of priorities from those responsible for the policies that are now in place.

But, Gambill warns, "The way we are doing things now will ensure one thing: We will end up with the same numbers of veterans who 'fell through the cracks' as after Vietnam ... they may get there via different routes, but get there they will."

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam War veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day 2006. Her Web site is Flashback.
© 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142258/

Posted by lois at 03:51 PM | Comments (0)

KY: KY: Bill would cancel Aramark Contract Where as Many as 300 Prisoners Became Ill and Might Have Provoked "Riot"

"State corrections officials say the contract with Aramark saves $5 million each year and allowed them to give corrections officers a nearly 7 percent raise in 2008."

Bill would cancel prison food contract

By Valarie Honeycutt Spears

Complaints about the quality and quantity of food that a private company provides to Kentucky state prisons has led a state lawmaker to file a bill that would cancel the $12 million annual contract.

Northpoint Training Center, where there was a riot last month, is one of several state prisons where inmates and corrections officers have complained about the food provided by Philadelphia-based Aramark Correctional Services, said state Rep. Brent Yonts, D-Greenville.

Yonts said he also is concerned that the illness of as many as 300 inmates at a Western Kentucky prison might have been caused by food.

"There's no reason for people to be treated inhumanely," Yonts said. "I don't think the system is recognizing the problem with Aramark. I'm hoping the administration will ... cancel the contract."

If the bill is passed by the Kentucky General Assembly in 2010, food service to inmates at state prisons could be provided only by state employees, inmates or volunteers. That was the case until January 2005, when the state contracted with Aramark. The contract was renewed in January 2009 and expires in 2011.

Yonts said he received many complaints from across the state about food quality, shortages and even "crawling creatures in the food" in the past year.

Inmates at Boyle County's Northpoint staged a sit-in in 2007 over the quality of food and prices of snacks in the prison canteen, according to the American Correctional Association.

In a riot at Northpoint on Aug. 21, inmates burned and damaged buildings, several of which were a total loss. Eight guards and eight inmates suffered minor injuries.

Yonts said that he sent a questionnaire about the food to corrections officers. The replies said that food problems have caused "control" problems with inmates.

Sarah Jarvis, a spokeswoman for Aramark, said Tuesday that the company "has an excellent track record" and has received many accolades.

"We reduce the costs to taxpayers of feeding inmates, while providing nutritious meals in close consultation with dietitians and nutritionists," she said.

In January, Aramark stopped serving meals at Florida prisons, citing rapid rises in food costs and a poor working relationship with the state. In 2008 alone, the company was fined $241,499 by Florida for problems with the food and service, according to news reports.

Saving millions

State corrections officials say the contract with Aramark saves $5 million each year and allowed them to give corrections officers a nearly 7 percent raise in 2008.

Northpoint inmates and family members have told the Herald-Leader that the quality and price of food and canteen items continues to be a source of unrest at the prison and might have figured in the August riots.

Jarvis said there is no evidence that the riots "were the result of anything other than gang-related activity and yard restrictions. Some of the facts in this story seem to be based on anecdotes, half-truths and suspicious complaints by inmates and others who ... ignore official reports and contradictory facts."

Incidents that led to the riot and fire are under investigation by the state Department of Corrections and State Police.

Source of illnesses unknown

At the Western Kentucky Correctional Complex at Fredonia, James Tolley, the public health director at Pennyrile District Health Department, said his staff has investigated three cases in 2009 in which inmates had gastrointestinal distress.

In one instance in the spring, Tolley said, as many as 300 inmates fell ill there.

State Corrections Department spokeswoman Cheryl Million said a foodborne illness was suspected, but it could not be verified in lab tests. Tolley said that even though lab results did not confirm that food was the problem, his staff advised food service employees on safe food handling.

Yonts said he is looking into those cases.

"Inmates do complain about Aramark," Million said. However, she said, there were similar complaints before Aramark took over food service. The Department of Corrections receives, on average, 21 food grievances among 13 institutions each month, she said.

The state pays Aramark $2.63 for each inmate each day, Million said.

Yonts said he also has received complaints about the food at Blackburn Correctional Complex in Fayette County.

Yonts' legislation barring private companies would not apply to canteens where inmates at state prisons can buy food, to local jails or to food provided to inmates being transferred from one prison to another.
http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/story/927104.html

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

Study Finds Only Half of All Federal and State Prisons offer Methadone and Buprenorphine and Only In Very Limited Circumstances

Study finds US prison system falls short in treating drug addiction

PROVIDENCE, RI – Almost a quarter of a million individuals addicted to heroin are incarcerated in the United States each year. However, many prison systems across the country still do not offer medical treatment for heroin and opiate addiction, despite the demonstrated social, medical and economic benefits of opiate replacement therapy (ORT).

According to new research from The Miriam Hospital, Brown University and their affiliated Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, just half of all federal and state prison systems offer ORT with the medications methadone and buprenorphine, and only in very limited circumstances. Similarly, only twenty-three states provide referrals for some inmates to treatment upon release from prison. These policies are counter to guidelines issued by both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which say prisoners should be offered ORT for treatment of opiate dependence.

The study's findings are published online by Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

"Pharmacological treatment of opiate dependence is a proven intervention, is cost-effective and reduces drug-related disease and reincarceration rates, yet it remains underutilized in U.S. prison systems," said Amy Nunn, ScD, the study's lead author and an assistant professor of medicine (research) at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. "Improving correctional policies for addiction treatment could dramatically improve prisoner and community health as well as reduce both taxpayer burden and reincarceration rates."

"Opiate addiction, like all forms of addiction, causes long-term changes to the structure and functioning of the brain, which is why it is classified as a disease. Addiction requires treatment just as other chronic diseases, like diabetes and cancer, do. Unfortunately, there is a large gap between the number of prisoners who require addiction treatment and those who actually receive it," added senior author Josiah Rich, MD, MPH, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at The Miriam Hospital and Alpert Medical School.

The U.S. has the world's highest incarceration rate, with approximately 10 million individuals incarcerated each year. More than half of inmates have a history of substance use and more than 200,000 people with heroin addiction are incarcerated annually. Inmates face disproportionately higher burdens of mental illness, substance use and infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS. Meanwhile, their transition back to their communities is often associated with increased sexual health and drug-related risks, and more than half will relapse within one month of their release.

For the past four decades, methadone has been the treatment of choice for opiate dependence. It prevents withdrawal symptoms and drug cravings, blocks the euphoric effects of other opiates, and reduces the risk of relapse, infectious disease transmission and overdose death. The drug buprenorphine is a newer treatment for opiate replacement that has less likelihood of overdose and is associated with less social stigma. Like methadone, it prevents withdrawal symptoms when an individual stops taking opioid drugs by producing similar effects. Both methadone and buprenorphine are included in WHO's "Essential Medicines" list of drugs that should be made available at all times by health systems to patients.

The Miriam/Brown research team surveyed the medical directors at the 50 state departments of corrections, along with the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the District of Columbia prison, about their facilities' ORT prescribing policies and referral programs for inmates leaving prison. They received a total of 51 of 52 responses.

Although it appears methadone is offered more frequently that buprenorphine, only 28 facilities (55 percent) offer it under any circumstances, although more than half of these provide it only to pregnant women or for chronic pain management. Approximately 45 percent of facilities provided some community linkage to methadone treatment post-release. Meanwhile, only seven prison systems (14 percent) offer buprenorphine in some circumstances, while 15 facilities (29 percent) offer referrals for some inmates to community buprenorphine providers upon release.

When asked why these treatments are not available in their prison system, the majority of facilities indicated they prefer drug-free detoxification over ORT. A number of prison systems also cited security concerns about providing methadone and buprenorphine to inmates. Interestingly, 27 percent of medical directors said they did not know how beneficial methadone is for treating inmates with opiate addiction, while half were unaware of the benefits of buprenorphine.

A major barrier to providing ORT after incarceration appears to be the lack of partnerships with community ORT providers. Many providers also cited their focus on inmate health during incarceration, rather than upon release, as another reason for not linking inmates to ORT after they've been released.

"In spite of overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrating that pharmacological treatment for addiction has greater health and social benefits than abstinence-only policies, many prison directors are philosophically opposed to treating substance use. Most prisons also do not provide referrals for substance use treatment for prisoners upon release," said Nunn. "These trends contribute to high reincarceration rates and have detrimental impacts on community health. Our interviews with prison medical directors suggest that changing these policies may require an enormous cultural shift within correctional systems."

###

The study was supported by grants from the National Institute of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA/NIH) and Center for AIDS Research (CFAR); and the Tufts Nutrition Collaborative. In addition to Nunn and Rich, co-authors include Nickolas Zeller and Ank Nijhawan from both The Miriam Hospital and Alpert Medical School; Samuel Dickman from Brown University; and Catherine Trimbur from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.

The Miriam Hospital, established in 1926 in Providence, RI, is a private, not-for-profit hospital affiliated with The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and a founding member of the Lifespan health system. For more information about The Miriam Hospital, please visit www.miriamhospital.org

The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University is Rhode Island's only school of medicine. Since granting its first MD degrees in 1975, Alpert Medical School has become a national leader in medical education and biomedical research.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/l-sfu090809.php

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

September 02, 2009

NJ Professor asks: Why were books banned at state prisons?

Millburn professor asks : Why were books banned at state prisons?
by Patricia C. Kelley/Independent Press

Monday August 24, 2009, 6:25 PM

(Editor of "Inside Out: Voices from New Jersey State Prison" Kal Wagenheim wants to know where his self-published books are, and why they were taken from the book's authors.)

MILLBURN, N.J. -- Kal Wagenheim wants to know where his books are, and why they were taken from the 43 New Jersey State Prison inmates who wrote the poems and essays contained in the volume.

Wagenheim -- a semi-retired journalist, author, professor and translator -- earlier this year published "Inside Out: Voices from New Jersey State Prison," a compilation of the creative works of prison inmates at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton who were his students at a creative writing course he began teaching at the prison in 2001.

Wagenheim said he's not looking for any controversy. He just wants the books back.

Wagenheim became a prison volunteer in 2001 around the same time his wife Olga, now a retired Rutgers professor, volunteered to teach a course on Latin American and Caribbean history at the prison.

He offered to teach a creative writing course much like the one he taught at Columbia University. The inmates would write poems, short stories and essays, mail them to Wagenheim's Millburn home and he would take them back to the prison once a month where the inmates would read them aloud and critique each other's work.

All went well for about four-and-a-half years, Wagenheim said, until sometime in 2006 when all the prison volunteer programs were shut down. According to Wagenheim, prison officials put an end to the programs over concerns that cell phones were somehow being smuggled into the maximum security prison.

"There was no way you could smuggle a cell phone into that prison," Wagenheim said, adding that he was only allowed to bring in his car keys and the papers needed for the course. He also had to pass through a metal detector.

"The whole thing was shut down. I felt very sad and so did the guys," Wagenheim said.

So, in March of this year Wagenheim selected some of the writings, published them at his own expense and sent them back to the author-inmates so they could see their work in print.

"I mainly did it so these guys could get the thrill of seeing their work in print," Wagenheim said.

Following prison rules which state that books can only be mailed to inmates from the publisher and not a friend or family member, Wagenheim had his publisher mail copies of the books to the 43 inmates whose writings were included. About 35 of the original inmates were still at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton while some of the others had been transferred to South Woods and Rahway prisons, Wagenheim said.

"Now none of the inmates have the books," Wagenheim said.

According to Wagenheim, the books that were mailed to the Trenton facility were confiscated and kept in the mail room. The books that were mailed to the other two institutions were initially delivered but later the guards went into the cells and confiscated them from the inmates due to their content, he said.

Although the book makes references to illegal activities which the men committed, "There's nothing there promoting criminal behavior," Wagenheim said. Instead, most of the writings express regret at all the terrible things the men did that led to their incarceration.

Two months ago Wagenheim was contacted by two special investigators for the prison system who wanted to speak with him. The trio met at the Millburn Diner. When Wagenheim asked why the books were banned the investigators said they were there to talk to him about smuggled cell phones instead.

Investigators later contacted one of the author inmates at Rahway State Prison to ask how much profit he made from the book.

Frustrated by his futile attempts to get the books back, Wagenheim on Aug. 14 wrote a letter to George W. Hayman, Commissioner of the NJ State Corrections Department, asking for the books back and informing him that neither he nor the prisoners made any profit on the books.

According to Wagenheim, it cost him $1,671 of his own money to publish the book. He has made $270 in profit from book sales and still has a deficit of $1,410. If he ever does make a profit he said he will donate the money to non-profit organizations that support prisoner rehabilitation.

Wagenheim is still waiting for a response from the commissioner. Meanwhile he has enlisted the help of the American Civil Liberties Union to try and retrieve the books and is considering a lawsuit.

A message left with Department of Corrections' ombudsperson Dan DiBenedetti was not immediately returned.
http://www.nj.com/independentpress/index.ssf/2009/08/millburn_professor_asks_why_we.html

A sample of the work can be found at the Real Cost of Prisons website www.realcostofprisons.org and then to the page Writing from Prison.

Inside Out: Voices from New Jersey State Prison
Poems, stories, memoirs, and commentaries by forty-three inmates. This is a 20-page sampler assembled by Kal Wagenheim, who for 5 years directed a creative writing workshop at the NJ State Prison in Trenton NJ. It is a small part of a 70,000 word book with inmates' poems, stories, essays. Some of the poems are also available online at http://www.jerseyworks.com/trentonstate.html.
http://realcostofprisons.org/materials/voices-trenton.doc

Posted by lois at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)

ColorLines Review: The Real Cost of Prisons Comix: Vivid comics show the impacts of mass incarceration on communities of color

Issue #52, Sept/Oct 2009
The Real Cost of Prisons Comix
By Jenna M. Lloyd
Vivid comics show the impacts of mass incarceration on communities of color.

September 2, 2009

Locking 2.3 million people behind bars is a vast social project. It takes work to hide the equivalent of a large US city in plain sight. The explanations served up on the nightly news and by tough-on-crime politicians graphically focus on violent crime, despite its decline. More prisons, they say, will create safe and drug free communities.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix (PM Press), winner of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s PASS Award, asks whether the billions of dollars invested annually in mass incarceration delivers on these promises.

Hidden behind these fear-provoking images, the book documents the steep human costs exacted on individual health and freedom, family unity, and community well being. What else could be done with the social wealth and creativity now trapped into cycles of cage-building and neighborhood abandonment?

Through powerful graphics and a wealth of grim statistics The Real Cost of Prisons Comix depicts how the past 30 years of unprecedented prison growth have reshaped the landscape of our urban and rural communities. By showing the concrete work that goes into building and maintaining the prison-industrial complex—from the peddlers of fear to the parole officer—the book serves as a smart, accessible primer on the politics and economics driving prison expansion. Prisons are filled with people who have dreams, raise children, and belong to communities most will rejoin.

The RCPC shows visceral narratives of their lives and the collision of racism, poverty, sexism to trace the systematic ways in which mass incarceration builds on and exacerbates these powerful inequities. Most importantly, it suggests concrete alternatives that can help rebuild safe, healthy communities.

Shrinking the system becomes as important a harm reduction strategy as needle exchange and drug treatment.

Three accomplished comic artists collaborate with long time activists and draw on the work of dozens of researchers imprisoned people, and advocates, to examine one dimension of mass incarceration. Kevin Pyle’s "Prison Town: Paying the Price" shows how millions of dollars poured into moving people hours away from their homes fails to generate promised economic growth for struggling rural communities.

In "Prisoners and the War on Drugs," Sabrina Jones takes on racial disparities in drug laws and policing practices that result in African American and Latino people comprising 93% of those incarcerated in New York, and that lock up more drug users than dealers.

Susan Willmarth’s "Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children" examines how women are the fastest growing group of people being imprisoned. Most women are imprisoned for non-violent crimes, half of them drug offenses. But lifetime bans on welfare, public housing, and student loans for felony drug convictions only exacerbate already serious problems of poverty, racism, abuse, and drugs women face in their daily lives.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix grew out of a popular education project Lois Ahrens began in 2000. Since the first printing in 2005, over 115,000 copies have been distributed free of charge, and project’s website receives over 30,000 page views each month. One of the great things about this book as an organizing tool is that it includes letters from readers of the comic books—imprisoned people, political organizers, policy makers, teachers, social service providers—which give us a sense of how resonant these comics have been, and all of the ways they have been put to work on the ground.
 
The economic depression and fiscal crises facing so many states make the alternatives to mass incarceration the book outlines all the more timely. But it’s also a time when the government is pouring even more money into locking up immigrants. Doing away with prisons isn’t just an issue of pure economics, but will also require confronting the racism, economic inequalities, and sexism that work to fuel the futureless future that they represent.

Larson, a man who is imprisoned in Sing Sing, reminds us: “Anyone planning a prison they’re not going to build for ten or fifteen years is planning for a child, planning prison for somebody who’s a child right now.” What dreams are never realized when billions go to jails and prisons instead of to rebuilding our decimated cities? The Real Cost of Prisons Comix gives us a solid place to begin building the healthy, safe, and free futures we want.

Jenna M. Loyd is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is also co-editing a collection, Beyond Walls and Cages, that analyzes the connections between US migration policy and mass incarceration, and activist efforts to the brutalities of both systems. She can be reached at jloyd@gc.cuny.edu.
http://colorlines.com/article.php?ID=598

Posted by lois at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2009

Coalition for Prisoners' Rights Newsletter now can be found on the Real Cost of Prisons website

As many of you know, the C.P.R. newsletter was published for 34 years. In June 2009, they mailed an announcement to their 9,100 subscribers ... almost all of whom are prisoners saying the could no longer afford to keep printing and sending the newsletter. The Real Cost of Prisons believes in the work of the C.P.R. To reach out to families, friends, allies of prisoners, we will post the C.P.R. Newsletters in PDF format beginning with July, 2009. Each month, we will post a new newsletter. The Newsletter is now 2 pages. We encourage you to download the newsletter and send it to prisoners so that they will continue to receive this important source of information and inspiration for organizing that the Newsletter provides.
http://www.realcostofprisons.org/coalition.html

Posted by lois at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2009

Vt. Prison Health Care Questioned by Guards

Vt. Prison Health Care Questioned
Montpelier, Vermont - August 27, 2009

Vermont's state employees union claims the Corrections Department is providing inadequate training and care for mentally ill prisoners. Prison officials say the facts prove otherwise.

The state employees union told a legislative committee that its union member corrections officers had observed many instances of improper care for mentally ill inmates in prisons.

The union claims inadequately trained corrections officers too often are left alone to deal with mental health emergencies because the private-contracted mental health experts are unavailable.

"If this occurs off hours or on weekends an inmate can wait up to 24 hours or more before they receive services," said Taryn Moran of the Vt. State Employees Association.

"At this juncture I don't see any evidence to support those allegations," Corrections Commissioner Andy Pallito said.

Pallito says the department is still waiting for the union to produce any specific evidence or facts to support their allegations. He points out that the department's medical services have passed independent investigations for decades with flying colors.

"So if there were specific cases, and by specific cases I mean names in some of those instances that she named I would be happy to respond. To them," Pallito said.

The union claims one specific example was the recent death of a female inmate with an eating disorder. And they question the accuracy of the passing grades for the medical services in Vermont prisons.

"We disagree," said Conor Casey of the VSEA. "Our members are on the frontline of corrections. And they're telling us that while they don't receive training as mental health professionals they're expected to act just like that. Our members aren't able to identify if somebody's having a panic attack or if there's some serious self-harming going on."

For now the department is starting new mental health training for corrections officers this week, while the lawmakers have ordered copies of the assessment investigations from federal investigators to determine if there is evidence to support the union claims.

Vermont paid about $16 million this year to a private contractor to provide health care services for the state's seven prisons. That's an average of $1,600 per inmate. Commissioner Andy Pallito says the department is now taking bids for a new contract and he is cautiously optimistic the per inmate cost will go down next year.

Brian Joyce - WCAX News
http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=11005056

Posted by lois at 09:14 AM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2009

3,900 stimus checks went to prisoners...1,700 by mistake

3,900 stimulus checks went to prison inmates
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER (AP) –8-26-09

WASHINGTON — The federal government sent about 3,900 economic stimulus payments of $250 each this spring to people who were in no position to use the money to help stimulate the economy: prison inmates.

The checks were part of the massive economic recovery package approved by Congress and President Barack Obama in February. About 52 million Social Security recipients, railroad retirees and those receiving Supplemental Security Income were eligible for the one-time checks.

Prison inmates are generally ineligible for federal benefits. However, 2,200 of the inmates who received checks got to keep them because, under the law, they were eligible, said Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration. They were eligible because they weren't incarcerated in any of the three months before the recovery package was enacted.

"The law specified that any beneficiary eligible for a Social Security benefit during one of those months was eligible for the recovery payment," Lassiter said.

The other 1,700 checks? That was a mistake.

Checks were sent to those inmates because government records didn't accurately show they were in prison, Lassiter said. He said most of those checks were returned by the prisons.

The Boston Herald first reported that the checks were sent to inmates.

The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is performing an audit to make sure no checks went to ineligible recipients, spokesman George E. Penn said.

The audit, which had already been planned, will examine whether checks incorrectly went to inmates, dead people, fugitive felons or people living outside the U.S., Penn said.

The $787 billion economic recovery package included $2 million for the inspector general to oversee the provisions handled by the Social Security Administration. The audit is part of those efforts, Penn said. There is no timetable for its conclusion.

The federal government processed $13 billion in stimulus payments. About $425,000 was incorrectly sent to inmates.

Posted by lois at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2009

Maine: New Law Allows Some Terminally Ill Inmates to Leave Prison Early

New Law Allows Some Terminally Ill Inmates to Leave Prison Early
August 14, 2009 Reported By: Anne Ravana

Today Gov. John Baldacci signed into law a bill that amends a few correctional programs. LD 1224, "An Act Regarding the Operation of County Jails and the State Board of Corrections," will allow terminally ill inmates to leave prison early if they do not pose a threat to public safety. And the law also expands domestic violence and sexual assault victim notification requirements.

Originally Aired: 8/14/2009 5:30 PM

Only about seven percent of Maine's jail and prison inmates are over the age of 55, but corrections officials say most of those older inmates are not in good health.

"We see every type of sickness coming through, I think known, to man and that's why our pharmaceutical bill runs about $15,000 a month," says Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross. "Hepatitis C is very common, alcohol problems, AIDS due to needle use, we have lots of problems with pharmaceutical abuse where people are coming in on many different types of drugs, and that combined with alcoholism, we have to try to get that person stabilized and off medicines that they're not supposed to be on."

Ross says he supports a new law that amends the state's home release program provisions, and allows some inmates to be released early into nursing homes or hospice care.

"There are those times when we have older individuals that have severe diseases that may succumb to those diseases, and the cost of keeping them in the jail or in the hospitals being guarded is astronomical," Ross says. "So there's no real good answer to this. I do support the new law if it's applied in a way that protects public safety, and you have people that are monitoring to make sure that the decisions are not purely financial and the risk to the community is the number one priority."

Under the law, which was amended in the last session of the Legislature, the home release program would not apply to inmates sentenced to life in prison or those who might pose a risk of reoffending, Ross says.

Many of the bill's provisions were recommended by the Board of Corrections, and Denise Lord, Associate Commissioner for the state Department of Corrections, says the bill brings more flexibility to the home release program.

"The early release programs that currently exist require prisoners to have served a certain portion of their sentence and to have a minimal amount of time left on their sentence before they're eligible for early release," she says. "For those prisoners who are severely medically incapacitated, those requirements go away."

Medically incapacitated, Lord says, means physically ill, not mentally ill. She says standards for release will be the same at all county jails and state prisons, and the new law leaves that decision to the sheriffs.

Sheriff Ross says there's always the question of how and where terminally ill inmates will be cared for after release, but the Volunteers of America, he says, have been a help.

"Here in Penobscot County we have a contract with Volunteers of America for release of inmates back into the community," he says. "And so that's a supervised community confinement program, basically, where we have somebody checking in on them. But we can set up conditions on inmates that are released to hospitals, or to homes and have them checked on by our VOA staff."

The Maine Department of Corrections says the state expects the percentage of inmates over 55 to grow in the coming years, and it's already higher than most states. Also in the new law is an expansion of the state's victim notification requirements. Now victims of Class D, or misdemeanor crimes, of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking may request notification when the offender is released from jail or prison.
http://www.mpbn.net/News/MaineNews/tabid/181/ctl/ViewItem/mid/3475/ItemId/8669/Default.aspx

Posted by lois at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2009

Colloquy for Prison Health Amendments

From Charlie Sullivan of CURE:
Dear friends, on July 31st, Cong. Robby Rush (D-IL) by unanimous consent placed a colloquy (a conversation with Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) in the record of H.R. 3200, the comprehensive universal health care bill. This was prior to the bill being passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The colloquy is the following:
Colloquy for Prison Health Amendments

Mr. Rush:

Mr. Chair, I would like to offer amendment number 8_001, for the purpose of securing quality care for over 2 million Americans in our nation’s prisons and jails, ensuring the same quality of medical care that others are entitled to under this bill. I think that it is important to do this for a number of reasons, but most importantly, because it is the humane and decent thing to do.

As it now stands, financial responsibility for the medical care of prisoners rests with the governmental institutions holding them—state departments of correction, local sheriff’s offices, and the federal Bureau of Prisons. With growing prison populations and the financial pressures on state and local governments, these institutions often have difficulty providing the medical care that is needed.

Prisoners’ needs are often greater than those of the general public with higher rates of abuse, neglect, and mental illness. Failure to adequately address these problems not only makes prisons unsafe for inmates and the correctional staff, but these disparities pose broader public health risks when prisoners are released.

The proposed amendment addresses these problems by directing federal subsidies under Medicare, Medicaid, and the public option to be extended to eligible prisoners. This will alleviate burdens from institutions, counties, states, and local governments, and enables them to provide better care.

The amendment instructs the Secretary of HHS to set up a mechanism to ensure that the quality of care provided under this program meets appropriate standards;
Ensures prisoners suffering chronic conditions do not fall through the cracks when they are released, but have access to continuing medical care; and requires prison authorities to facilitate the continued enrollment once prisoners are released back into society.

Presently, prisoners are often discharged with a 2 week supply of medicine and left to fend for themselves—with disastrous consequences.

Let me conclude by saying that most of us don’t pay much attention to what happens to prisoners, and we think they deserve whatever they get.

But as we try to ensure that ALL Americans have access to affordable, quality medical care, we should not neglect the 2 million Americans in our prisons and jails, 94 percent of whom will be released at some point.

Better medical care for prisoners and continuity of care is the right thing to do.

Mr. Waxman:

Mr. Rush:
Thank you for this consideration, and I look forward to working more with you on this issue. I withdraw the amendment, and yield back.
I understand your concerns on this issue, as it currently is not addressed in the bill. I would like to look at this more, and work more with you to see how we can better protect this population.
-----------
From Charlie:
The next step will be to express this colloquy in an amendment to HR 3200 that the entire House will consider. Cong.Rush and Chairman Waxman were right to pursue the colloquy approach rather than trying to pass the Rush Amendment in committee. Hopefully the Colloquy will be the first step in a difficult journey toward quality health care for people incarcerated. Charlie

Posted by lois at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2009

LA Times Op-Ed: The disaster before the disater at Chino

Opinion: The disaster before the disaster at Chino
The prison was once a model for a new era of enlightened criminal justice, but Californians' refusal to meet their fiscal and social responsibilities ruined that vision.

By Volker Janssen

August 15, 2009

For corrections experts, the riot at the California Institution for Men in Chino last weekend, which injured 175 prisoners and damaged or destroyed six dormitories, was a disaster that could have been predicted. In a state prison system bursting at the seams and teeming with racial tensions, such violence would seem to be inevitable.

But in the case of Chino, this riot marks not just one more point in a seemingly endless history of prison violence; it is a sad contrast to the high expectations this prison invited at its opening in 1941.

As the first minimum-security prison for men in the state, Chino was supposed to launch California into a new era of enlightened criminal justice. San Quentin and Folsom had been built in the previous century and were notorious for their violence and overcrowding. San Quentin, with more than 4,000 prisoners stuffed into its old cells, had the largest convict population in the nation at the time. A Times reporter, writing in 1930, described the place as a "seething caldron of rebellion, a volcano ready to burst into eruption at any moment."

After dramatic food riots at San Quentin, Gov. Culbert Olson replaced the corrupt board of prison directors in 1940 and brought in reform-minded administrators who halted the construction of gun towers and a wall at the new prison in Chino. The only fence at the "prison without walls" was a barbed-wire one.

In Chino, things were going to be different.

To manage the facility, the state hired a penologist of national reputation, Kenyon J. Scudder, who had as much experience in vocational training as in psychology and public administration. When the first prisoners arrived from Northern California in a chartered Greyhound bus without handcuffs, leg irons or a lock on the bus door, the superintendent -- he did not want to be called "warden" -- took his new prisoners to the barbed-wire fence and showed them how to scale it without cutting themselves. Escape from Chino was easy, he told them. But if they did, "many more years will be added to your sentence, and you can never come back to Chino."

This strategy worked, for the most part. And at the time, Chino was considered one of the best prisons in the nation. Starting with a population of only a few hundred, prisoners were soon busy in the fields and workshops, and in forest camps where they worked in reforestation and fire prevention. During World War II, prisoners actually stood in Chino's only guard tower and served as aircraft warning sentries. Racism existed, of course, but the administration explicitly rejected segregation as a policy.

The California criminal justice system was completely overhauled in 1944 with the creation of the Department of Corrections. Flush with wartime tax revenue, Gov. Earl Warren launched the expansion of the prison system. The model for the new facilities was Chino.

A whole generation of prison reformers who had started their careers under Scudder now came to occupy positions in the new prisons all over the state. Hailed as an example of an enlightened commitment to rehabilitation and proper administration, the state served as national and even international model.

But just as Chino came to serve as an example of a successful postwar welfare state committed to growth and more equal access to prosperity, so have state prisons taken the lead in the state's malfunction and ungovernability. California's prison crisis is, in fact, a few decades old, with its beginnings in the 1970s. That was when Californians launched a tax revolt and fell in love with governance through propositions.

But turning away from our fiscal responsibilities and social obligations has worked about as well as our attempt to solve the crime problem through mass incarceration. Neither the prisons nor the state can run on autopilot. We need political leaders who can offer both a vision and the art of political compromise, not just administrators who can occasionally put out a fire. Or contain a riot.

The recent violence is just one more example of how much of the California dream we have lost.

Volker Janssen, an assistant professor of California history at Cal State Fullerton, is working on a history of prisons in postwar California.

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