The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

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

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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

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

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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

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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

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.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hx0nB7bPZrq5BM6HJsf18_umH0HwD9AAONS00

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.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-janssen15-2009aug15,0,2614583.story

Posted by lois at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)

States going to great lengths to squeeze money from pirsoners

Some states are charging inmates fees for prison stay
Daily charges help ease prison costs amid budget cuts
By Deborah Hastings
Associated Press / August 16, 2009

A one-night stay? Ninety dollars. Need to see a doctor? Ten bucks. Want toilet paper? Pay for it yourself.
In the ever-widening search for extra income during desperate economic times, states across the nation are embracing a new idea: making inmates pay their debt to society not only in hard time, but also in cold, hard cash.

In New York, Assemblyman James Tedisco introduced a bill that would charge wealthy criminals $90 a day for room and board at state prisons. Dubbed the Madoff Bill, after Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, the legislation is designed to ease the $1 billion annual cost of incarcerating prisoners.

Several other states and some cities have gone to great lengths to squeeze money from inmates.

In Arizona’s Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, Sheriff Joe Arpaio calls himself America’s toughest sheriff. Earlier this year, he said inmates would be charged $1.25 per day for meals. His decision followed months of food strikes staged by convicts who complained of being fed green bologna and moldy bread.

In Iowa’s Des Moines County, where officials faced a $1.7 million budget hole this year, politicians considered charging prisoners for toilet paper, at a savings of $2,300 per year. The idea was ultimately dropped.

A New Jersey legislator introduced a bill similar to New York’s, this one based on fees charged by the Camden County Correctional Facility, which bills prisoners $5 a day for room and board and $10 per day for infirmary stays, totaling an estimated $300,000 per year.

In Virginia, Richmond’s overcrowded city jail has begun charging $1 per day, hoping to earn as much as $200,000 a year. In Missouri’s Taney County, home to Branson, the sheriff says charging inmates $45 a day will help pay for a new jail.

Prisons and jails took some of the biggest cuts this summer when legislators took machetes to their state budgets, trying to slash their way out of an economic morass exacerbated by dwindling tax revenues. But to civil rights advocates and some law enforcement officials, trying to raise money by charging inmates makes no sense.

“The overwhelming number of people who end up in prison are poor,’’ said Elizabeth Alexander, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. Alexander also says such efforts only amount to political window dressing.

Collecting the fees covers a wide spectrum. In Richmond, they are deducted from a prisoner’s personal account, which contains whatever money relatives send and any cash the suspect had when arrested. In Arizona, Arpaio, who makes inmates wear pink underwear to increase the humiliation factor, also taps prisoner accounts. Inmates who have no money still receive food, the sheriff says.

Other authorities slap the prisoner with a bill upon release from prison. But it is often hard to collect. In Kansas, Overland Park officials acknowledged collecting only 39 percent of fees. In Jackson County, Mo., officials discovered they spent more money trying to collect fees than they received from inmates.

In some cases, it is prisoners’ families who shoulder the financial burden.

“It’s the spouses, children, and parents who pay the fees; they are the people who contribute to prisoners’ canteen accounts,’’ said Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which successfully opposed an effort earlier this year in Georgia to bill prisoners.

The money was to be collected by seizing cash in their jail accounts or by filing lawsuits. The proposal also would have denied parole to those who could not make payments after being freed.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/08/16/some_states_charging_inmates_for_stay/

Posted by lois at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2009

Folsom Embodies California's Prison Blues

Folsom Embodies California's Prison Blues
by Laura Sullivan
August 13, 2009

In January 1968, Johnny Cash set up his band on a makeshift stage in the cafeteria at Folsom State Prison in California.

"Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," he said in his deep baritone to thunderous applause. Song after song, the inmates thumped their fists and cheered from the same steel benches now bolted to the floor.

The morning that Cash played may have been the high-water mark for Folsom — and for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The men in the cafeteria lived alone in their own prison cells. Almost every one of them was in school or learning a professional trade. The cost of housing them barely registered on the state budget. And when these men walked out of Folsom free, the majority of them never returned to prison.

It was a record no other state could match.

Things have changed. California's prisons are all in a state of crisis. And nowhere is this more visible than at Folsom today.

Folsom was built to hold 1,800 inmates. It now houses 4,427.

It's once-vaunted education and work programs have been cut to just a few classes, with waiting lists more than 1,000 inmates long.

Officers are on furlough. Its medical facility is under federal receivership. And like every other prison in the state, 75 percent of the inmates who are released from Folsom today will be back behind bars within three years.

California's prison system costs $10 billion a year. Its crumbling, overcrowded facilities are home to the highest recidivism rate in the country. And the state that was once was the national model in corrections has become the model every state is now trying to avoid.

'Kind Of Like A Pressure Cooker'

Lt. Anthony Gentile, spokesman for Folsom, stands in the prison's empty cafeteria, beneath chipping paint, rusting pipes and razor wire.

"There's drug activity, gang activity," Gentile says. "It's kind of like a pressure cooker."

Where a photographer stood 40 years ago and captured Cash's famous concert, an officer now stands in a metal cage. He's armed with three guns and pepper spray.

When they're confined in this environment, the problems tend to simmer and stay there. It creates somewhat of the mob mentality.

- Lt. Anthony Gentile, spokesman for Folsom

There are now 15 to 20 assaults a week here at Folsom. And while inmates used to mix with one another, Folsom today is entirely segregated by race — in the cafeteria, on the yard and in the cell blocks.

"When they're confined in this environment," Gentile says, "the problems tend to simmer and stay there. It creates somewhat of the mob mentality."

To figure out how California could have gotten to such a place, you have to start in Sacramento.

Jeanne Woodford is one of four secretaries that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has had in the past five years. She spent 30 years in the department. As secretary, she lasted two months.

"Honestly, I was very hopeful when I went up there," Woodford said about Sacramento. "I thought it was all about the right policy and the right principle. It's really about the money."

And lots of it. California can't afford its prisons. Taxpayers spend as much money locking people up as they do on the state's entire education system.

How Did Things Get So Bad?

Experts agree that the problem started when Californians voted for a series of get-tough-on-crime laws in the 1980s. The state's prison population exploded immediately. It jumped from 20,000 inmates, where it had held steady throughout the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. Today there are 167,000 inmates in the system.

Jeanne Woodford was warden of San Quentin during the prison population boom.

"The violence just went out of control," she remembers. "And then the programs started going away. I was there during an 18-month lockdown. It was just unbelievably horrific."

California wasn't the only state to toughen laws in the throes of the 1980s crack wars. But Californians took it to a new level.

Voters increased parole sanctions and gave prison time to nonviolent drug offenders. They eliminated indeterminate sentencing, removing any leeway to let inmates out early for good behavior. Then came the "Three Strikes You're Out" law in 1994. Offenders who had committed even a minor third felony — like shoplifting — got life sentences.
Derrick Poole is enrolled in Folsom's mill and cabinetry program.
Enlarge Amy Walters/NPR

Derrick Poole is enrolled in Folsom's mill and cabinetry program. Due to the high prison population and budget problems, Poole is one of only 10 percent of Folsom inmates who can participate in the prison's vocational programs.

Derrick Poole is enrolled in Folsom's mill and cabinetry program. Due to the high prison population and budget problems, Poole is one of only 10 percent of Folsom inmates who can participate in the prison's vocational programs.

Voters at the time were inundated with television ads, pamphlets and press conferences from Gov. Pete Wilson. "Three strikes is the most important victory yet in the fight to take back our streets," Wilson told crowds.

But behind these efforts to get voters to approve these laws was one major player: the correctional officers union.

A Prison Guard Union With Political Muscle

In three decades, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has become one of the most powerful political forces in California. The union has contributed millions of dollars to support "three strikes" and other laws that lengthen sentences and increase parole sanctions. It donated $1 million to Wilson after he backed the three strikes law.

And the result for the union has been dramatic. Since the laws went into effect and the inmate population boomed, the union grew from 2,600 officers to 45,000 officers. Salaries jumped: In 1980, the average officer earned $15,000 a year; today, one in every 10 officers makes more than $100,000 a year.

Lance Corcoran, spokesman for the union, says it does what is best for its members.

"We have advocated successfully for our members," he said.

But he disputes that the union has purposefully tried to increase the prison population.

"The notion that we are some prison industrial complex, or that we are recruiting felons or trying to change laws, is a misnomer," he said.

Money And Influence

I think that prisons should be a place where an individual has the opportunity to change if they choose to and we move forward from there.

- Fulsom Warden Michael Evans

Campaign records, however, show much of the funding to promote and push for the passage of the laws came from a political action committee the union created. It is run out of a group called Crime Victims United of California.

Its director, Harriet Salarno, says the committee is independent from the union. But a review of the PAC's financial records shows the PAC has not received a donation from another group besides the union since 2004.

Corcoran does not deny that the two are closely connected.

"We support a number of victims' rights groups," he said.

When asked why the correctional officers union is involved in victims' rights at all, Corcoran said: "There are people that think that there's some sort of ulterior motive, but the reality is we simply want to make sure [the victims'] voices are heard."

But Corcoran acknowledges that the union has benefited from the increase in the prison population after these laws passed.

"We've had the opportunity to grow," Corcoran says, "and that has brought with it both success and criticism."

Secret Dealings With The Governor

Woodford says she stepped down as secretary of the corrections department when she found out that the union had been going on behind her back to negotiate directly with the governor's office.

"The union is incredibly powerful," Woodford says.

Former Secretary Roderick Hickman resigned for the same reason in February 2006.

"The biggest problem that I had was the relationship that I had with the union," Hickman says.

Hickman says the union was able to control the department's policy decisions, including undermining efforts to divert offenders from prison and reduce the prison population.

"Maybe I was just impatient," he says, "or it wasn't going to go fast enough, but [the department] is still in the same place I left it, with an over $8 billion budget. Now it's over $10 billion."

Today, 70 percent of that budget goes to pay salaries and benefits to the union and staff. Just 5 percent of the budget goes to education and vocational programs — the kind of programs that study after study in the past 10 years has found will keep inmates from returning to prison.

Shop Talk: A Chance To Cross Race Lines

From the instant you walk through the metal doors of the mill and cabinetry workshop at Folsom, you get a different feeling from other parts of the prison. In the shop on a recent day, a group of black, white and Latino inmates are bent over a table, talking to each other, discussing measurements for a conference table.

"When we're down here, we put all the politics to the side," says inmate Derrick Poole as he works on the table's legs. "It gives us a place to go where we can we can get out of the prison politics gang, where we don't get along, where we don't socialize outside our race. We socialize outside our race here."

Poole is spending nine years at Folsom for drug possession with intent to sell. In his life, he has been released from prison at least six times that he can remember. It hasn't worked out well.

"When I got out, you kind of lose your social skills," Poole said. "You get used to segregating yourself. You already weren't learned on the street. Then you come in here and you're not learning, and now your mind is more hollow, more empty."

Poole got very lucky this time, beating out hundreds of others to land a spot among just 27 inmates in the cabinetry program. When he's done, Poole will be an accredited woodworker with his GED.

Most of the men in Folsom won't be so fortunate. Just across from the cabinetry shop, program administrator and school Principal Jean Bracy sits in her makeshift office next to the welding class. She knows the statistics by heart.

"I have 1,797 inmates who read below the 9th grade level; 394 of those read below the 4th grade level," Bracy says. "When we put them back out on the streets, they're not employable."

And back on the streets is where 85 percent of all California's inmates are going one day when their sentences run out, regardless of whether they spent their time in prison dealing drugs and running a gang or learning how to weld.

Bracy only has a handful of vocational programs left, enough to reach less than 10 percent of Folsom's inmates — and the state plans to cut even that in half in the next few weeks.

"I think this is the worst I've ever seen it," Bracy says.

'A Merry-Go-Round'

It only costs her about $100,000 to run these programs — not even a blip in a $10 billion-a-year prison budget. But, says Bracy, the programs are always the first to go. Sometimes she almost feels like giving up.

"It's just not cost-effective to throw men and women in prison and then do nothing with them," she said. "And shame on us for thinking that's safety. It's not public safety. You lock them up and do nothing with them. They go out not even equal to what they came in but worse."

The numbers bear that out, with 90,000 inmates returning to California's prisons every year.

But compare that to the Braille program here at Folsom. Inmates are learning to translate books for the blind. In 20 years, not a single inmate who has been part of the program has ever returned to prison. This year, the program has been cut back to 19 inmates.

Out on the prison yard, one of the oldtimers, an inmate named Ed Steward — or "Lefty" — sits in old chair in the only bit of shade on the dusty dirt field. He watches the inmates stand in groups by their race and shakes his head.

"Nowadays, you know, the kids are just coming through this like it's a merry-go-round," he said. "Like there's nothing to it."

Most of these inmates here on this yard aren't here for serious or violent crimes. The number of inmates incarcerated in California's prisons for murder, assault or rape has been relatively unchanged in two decades. The difference is this yard is now packed with drug dealers and drug users, car thieves and shoplifters who stole something worth more than $500.

What Used To Be

But all across this prison are signs of what this place once was — when administrators came from New York and Texas to find out how Folsom kept its violence so low and its inmates from coming back.

There's the deserted shop where inmates used to train to be butchers; it was closed when the prison couldn't afford to remove the asbestos.

Its thriving medical facility was shuttered when it couldn't keep up with thousands of new inmates.

And hovering above the prison is China Hill, a now-barren field where inmates once trained to become landscapers. The prison can't afford to pay the teacher.

Warden Michael Evans can see China Hill just outside his office. Its meaning is not lost on him.

"If I have a dog and I put him in a cage and I beat [him] regularly, ultimately [it] will bite me when I open that door," he said.

After three decades working in corrections, Evans says he has come to one conclusion.

"I think that prisons should be a place where an individual has the opportunity to change if they choose to," he said, "and we move forward from there."

For now, California is at a standstill, unable to find the money to move forward with a different strategy, unable to move backward to a time when it didn't need one.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111843426

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

August 13, 2009

PA considers sending prisoners to MI

State Department of Corrections officials confirmed Tuesday that Pennsylvania has approached Michigan about off-loading(!!!!) some of its prison population, which has grown from 48,000 to 51,000 since December.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Pa. considers sending inmates to Mich.
Karen Bouffard / Detroit News Lansing Bureau

Lansing -- A third party has expressed interest in exporting prisoners to Michigan -- but they'll have to stand in line behind California and the federal government, which is thinking about shipping in terror suspects from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

State Department of Corrections officials confirmed Tuesday that Pennsylvania has approached Michigan about off-loading some of its prison population, which has grown from 48,000 to 51,000 since December.

The House Judiciary subcommittee on corrections reform will hear testimony today about the impact of shipping in prisoners at a hearing at 10:30 a.m. in Room 308 of the House Office Building, 124 N. Capitol Ave., in Lansing.

Pennsylvania Department of Corrections spokeswoman Susan McNaughton confirmed sending prisoners to Michigan "is something we are considering." She added that Pennsylvania Secretary of Corrections Jeffrey Beard has spoken with Michigan Corrections Director Patricia Caruso on three occasions.

Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan said Michigan e-mailed queries to each of the 50 states in March asking if they would be interested in housing prisoners here.

Florida and Wisconsin expressed minimal interest, Marlan said. Michigan submitted a request for proposals from Alaska and learned last week Michigan lost the bid, Marlan said.

Vermont offered to send Michigan some prisoners but not enough to significantly increase revenue for Michigan, Marlan said.

"They were looking for 100 beds, so it's nothing that would benefit us," Marlan said.
http://www.detnews.com/article/20090812/METRO/908120345/1409/METRO/Pa.-considers-sending-inmates-to-Mich.

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

August 11, 2009

NY Times Editorial: The Chino Prison Riot

Editorial: The Chino Prison Riot
The New York Times
Published: August 10, 2009

Around 200 inmates were injured, 55 seriously, over the weekend in an 11-hour prison riot in California that appears to have had strong racial overtones. Officials are still investigating, but a major cause is already clear: 5,900 men were being held in a facility designed for 3,000. The violence should serve as a warning to officials across the country not to try to balance state budgets by holding inmates in inhumane conditions.

California has already ignored too many warnings. In 2007, a state oversight agency declared that “California’s correctional system is in a tailspin.” That same year, a prison expert warned that the California Institution for Men in Chino, the site of the recent riot, was “a serious disturbance waiting to happen.”

Last week, just days before the riot, a three-judge federal panel ordered the state to reduce its prison population of more than 150,000 by about 40,000 within the next two years. That was the only way, the panel ruled, to bring the prison health care system up to constitutional standards.

The 184-page order painted a grim and alarming picture — with some state prison facilities at nearly 300 percent of intended capacity and some prisoners forced to sleep in triple-bunk beds in gymnasiums. “In these overcrowded conditions,” the court said, “inmate-on-inmate violence is almost impossible to prevent.”

California’s problem — like much of the nation’s — is a mismatch between its harsh sentencing policies and its willingness to pay to keep so many people locked up for so long. A few years ago, it went to the Supreme Court to defend its right, under the state’s three-strikes law, to sentence a shoplifter to 25 years to life.

Given the serious budget problems that California is facing, there is not a lot of extra money available. The state could, however, divert offenders into drug-treatment programs and other nonprison environments, which are less expensive than incarceration and better at rehabilitation. It could also do more to give prisoners job skills and help them re-enter society — so they don’t end up back behind bars.

The riot in Chino and the federal court ruling contain the same message for state officials everywhere: they must come up with smart ways of reducing prison populations and they must do it quickly.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 11, 2009, on page A20 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/opinion/11tue2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

Prisoners and Workers Poisoned by Prison Reycling at UNICOR are suing

Prisoners Exposed to Toxic Dust at UNICOR Recycling Factories
by Brandon Sample
Prison Legal News
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/20750_displayArticle.aspx
Federal Prison Industries (FPI), the largest legal sweatshop in America, has jeopardized the lives and safety of untold numbers of prisoners and staff working in its recycling factories, according to a preliminary report in an investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), and an evaluation issued by the Federal Occupational Health Service in October 2008.

FPI, a wholly-owned government corporation commonly known as UNICOR, was founded in 1934 with the aim of rehabilitating federal prisoners through job training that could be used to increase their employability upon release from prison. Over the years, however, UNICOR has moved away from its original mission; it now focuses more on taking advantage of its lucrative monopoly on providing goods and services to government agencies while using cut-rate prison labor.

Existing federal law requires federal agencies to look to UNICOR first for goods and services they may need. This lack of competition with the private sector, combined with low wages for prisoner workers, has been a boon for UNICOR. In fiscal year 2007, the prison industry netted $853 million in sales and $45.8 million in profit.

On Sept. 14, 2006, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Federal Prison Industries Competition in Contracting Act, which would have eliminated UNICOR’s monopoly on offering goods and services to federal government agencies. The bill also would have increased UNICOR wages for prisoners to minimum wage by September 30, 2009. The bill failed to pass the Senate.

Over the past decade, electronics recycling (e-waste) has become an increasingly important component of UNICOR’s operations, though it is still the smallest part of UNICOR’s business in terms of sales. First started in 1994 at the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) in Marianna, Florida, female prisoners would unload truckloads of computers each day and break them down for parts that could be reused or sold, such as processors or cathode ray tubes (CRTs). Often the computers or monitors would have to be broken apart with hammers to retrieve salvageable parts, which released a thick cloud of dust.

“It looked just like pollen,” said Freda Cobb, a former prison employee at FPC Marianna. “At the end of the day, we would go back to our cars and sort of laugh because we could write letters on our hood and on our back.”

None of the prisoners or staff were supplied with masks, gloves, coveralls or other personal protective equipment. Some prisoner workers and employees raised questions about possible health hazards, but “they told us not to worry about it,” Cobb said. “Nobody wanted to hear us.”

UNICOR’s recycling business expanded over the next decade to seven other facilities, with each new e-waste factory using the same unsafe work practices. From fiscal year 2003 to 2005, UNICOR processed over 120 million pounds of e-waste. Prisoners would break CRTs inside televisions and computer monitors without masks, gloves or other protective gear, exposing them to high levels of lead and cadmium from the release of heavy metal dust. In another operation, processors were removed from circuit boards using a de-soldering process that released lead fumes.

Lead can cause severe damage to nervous and reproductive systems, including miscarriages, stated John McKernan, an industrial hygienist at the Centers for Disease Control. Cadmium can cause lung damage and bone disease, and has been linked to cancer.

In March 2004, LeRoy Smith, the Safety Manager at United States Penitentiary (USP) Atwater, went public about the dangers that prisoners and staff were experiencing at UNICOR’s recycling facilities. The Bureau of Prisons (BOP), however, ignored Smith’s warnings. He was transferred to Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Tucson after going public. Smith has since filed a whistleblower retaliation complaint; he has also experienced symptoms of hazardous material exposure that include anxiety, headaches, fatigue, memory lapses, skin lesions, and circulatory and respiratory problems.

“Instead of behaving responsibly, the Bureau of Prisons has looked the other way, while the federal prison industry authority, UNICOR, opened additional ‘computer-recycling’ facilities without proper health safeguards in place,” said Mary Dryovage, an attorney who formerly represented Smith.

In April 2006, the Director of the BOP, Harley Lappin, asked the OIG to conduct a review of UNICOR’s recycling activities. In conjunction with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Federal Occupational Health Service (FOH) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) – a division of the Public Health Service within the Department of Health and Human Services – the investigation has focused on recycling activities at three BOP institutions: FCI Elkton in Ohio, FCI Texarkana in Texas, and USP Atwater in California. [See: PLN, March 2007, p.1].

A preliminary NIOSH report related to FCI Elkton, released on July 16, 2008, confirmed many of the dangers first reported by Smith. From 1997 until 2001, glass breaking of CRTs at Elkton was evidently done without “respiratory protection used or any type of engineering control in place to minimize exposures,” the report found.

In 2001, a “sawdust collection system” was installed at the UNICOR factory and some prisoners began using respiratory protection. It was not until April 2003 that a glass breaking room was constructed to contain the harmful heavy metal dust.

Fitted with vinyl curtains hanging from the ceiling, a ventilation discharge area, local exhaust ventilation system and a “clean area” where prisoners can suit and unsuit into coveralls and other protective equipment, the glass breaking room was supposed to eliminate the exposure problems caused by prior unsafe work practices.

Yet despite those improvements, problems continued to persist. During a filter change-out process, filters were removed and cleaned by vacuuming, shaking or banging them on the floor, causing a “thick cloud of dust” within the glass breaking room. Prisoners were exposed to “450 times the concentration adopted by OSHA as the Permissible Exposure Limit (PEL) for cadmium and over 50 times the PEL for lead” during this process, according to the preliminary report.

While most of the heavy metal contamination was confined to the glass breaking room, lead and cadmium residues were found on work surfaces outside that area, where workers were not wearing protective equipment. In one section of the factory, one dust sample was as high as “16% lead.”

This, among other noted deficiencies, led investigators to conclude that “the current [glass-breaking operation] is a significant improvement, but can be further enhanced to limit exposure to those performing glass breaking as well as limiting the migration of lead and cadmium from the room into other areas.”

The NIOSH report concluded that “electronic recycling at FCI Elkton appears to have been performed from 1997 until May 2003 without adequate engineering controls, respiratory protections, medical surveillance, or industrial hygiene monitoring.” The extent of worker and staff exposure to toxic dust could not be determined because “medical surveillance that has been carried out among inmates and staff has not complied with OSHA standards.”

The report called for “prompt but well-coordinated” remediation to address “legacy contamination at the factory,” and made several specific recommendations that included: 1) Ensuring full compliance with all applicable OSHA standards; 2) contracting with an occupational medicine physician familiar with OSHA regulations to oversee a medial surveillance program; 3) Performing a detailed job hazard analysis prior to beginning any new operations or making changes to existing operations; and 4) appointing a union safety and health representative, plus ensuring that prisoner workers “have a way to voice their concerns about and ideas for improving workplace safety and health.”

On June 27, 2008, all of FCI Elkton’s recycling factories were shut down for a thorough clean-up. It was unclear when the facilities will re-open, according to Traci Billingsley, a spokesperson for the BOP.

Subsequently, an 87-page assessment by the Federal Occupational Health Service regarding environmental, safety and health issues related to UNICOR e-waste recycling operations at FCI Elkton was released on Oct. 10, 2008. That report, which was prepared for the OIG, dealt with practices and working conditions at the facility from 2003 to the present.

The FOH report found that UNICOR had implemented measures to control exposure to toxic heavy metals, and “since 2003 ... has made major improvements in engineering controls and its policies regarding the usage of personal protective equipment.” Current measured lead and cadmium exposure levels were described as “minimal.”

Further improvements to limit exposure in the glass breaking room were suggested, as well as hearing protection for workers due to a noise hazard. UNICOR had complied with previous recommendations by improving the filter change-out protocol and retaining an occupational physician to improve medical evaluations of recycling workers and staff.

Still, the past health and safety violations at Elkton remained a concern, and the report noted that according to an EPA inspection the UNICOR recycling program “had not adequately evaluated its wastewater, air emissions, and hazardous waste streams for compliance with applicable environmental standards ....” The report concluded with a number of recommendations for improvements.

Federal investigators next turned their attention to recycling operations at FCI Texarkana. While investigators have yet to issue a report regarding the UNICOR recycling factory at that facility, preliminary indicators seem to suggest the existence of prior unsafe work practices similar to those found at Elkton.

According to one prisoner, glass breaking operations at FCI Texarkana from 2001 to 2003 were conducted without masks or other protective equipment. All glass breaking is now done at the satellite prison camp.

The UNICOR factory at the camp, as at Elkton, is now fitted with a glass breaking room. Prisoners who work in the glass breaking room receive an extra $1.00 per shift on top of their regular pay, which ranges from $.23 to $1.25 an hour.

The extra dollar was not enough for one prisoner employed in the glass breaking area after investigators visited the camp. “I didn’t feel like what we were doing was safe,” the unidentified prisoner said, “so I quit.”

Although all glass breaking operations are supposed to be done in the glass breaking room, some prisoners reported that glass breaking is occurring in the general work area, too.

Before televisions and monitors are sent to the glass breaking room, certain parts must be removed. Rather than unscrewing these parts without damaging the CRTs, some prisoners break the parts off, which causes the glass CRT to break and release lead and cadmium dust into the air. According to one prisoner, this occurs at least ten times a day. To make matters worse, prisoners in the general work area are not required to wear masks or other protective gear.

When asked why the UNICOR staff don’t prevent this from happening, one prisoner put it bluntly: “The guards don’t give a fuck. They don’t care as long as the work gets done. They sit in their office laughing, talking on the phone.”

U.S. Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich) has low expectations for the OIG’s investigation into UNICOR operations. “It will result in nothing,” he said. “We rail against Chinese prison labor, and what you’ve got here is a situation where our prisons have exposed our workers to low wages and dangerous working environments, with the full support of the Justice Department and with the full support of the White House.”

While the OIG’s investigation remains ongoing, twenty-six current and former prisoners, UNICOR staff, their family members and visitors to the FPC Marianna recycling factory have sued the U.S. Department of Justice, BOP and UNICOR, claiming they did not do enough to protect them from harmful metals and chemicals. See: Smith v. United States, U.S.D.C. (N.D. Fla.), Case No. 5:08-cv-00084-RS/AK.

“I never realized,” said Freda Cobb, a former BOP guard at Marianna who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “We never put it together.” Cobb has suffered from digestive problems, acute respiratory symptoms, short-term memory loss, muscle pain, kidney and liver problems, heart problems, internal bleeding and skin lesions. She was forced to retire from FPC Marianna in September 2004 for medical reasons.

Traci Hendrix, a 39-year-old former prisoner who worked in the recycling factory at Marianna, is considering joining the suit. “We didn’t have nothing to put on our faces, and we just breathed and coughed all day,” she said.

Hendrix first learned of the hazards caused by the toxic dust after another former prisoner told her that she, like Hendrix, had suffered a miscarriage after leaving prison. “It seemed like everyone that was working with me had a miscarriage,” said Hendrix.

On August 1, 2008, Tanya Smith, a former prison employee at Marianna and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, died. The exact cause of her death has not yet been determined, but it’s believed to be linked to her work at the facility. She had severe health problems that had forced her retirement from the BOP, including systemic lupus, blood clots, kidney failure, digestive problems, and heart and respiratory disease.

“We surely believe federal prisons started all of this,” said Smith’s mother, Doris Baker, who lived with her daughter. “We all believe that. Won’t nobody admit it.” Smith’s death is among 12 others that attorneys point to as stemming from recycling operations at Marianna.

Interestingly, two of the defendants in the lawsuit, Joe McNeal and James Bailey, who were employed by UNICOR, agreed to sign releases and become plaintiffs in the case, “because they and their family members suffer from some of the symptoms associated with exposure to the toxic substances alleged to have been produced by [the Marianna] recycling program.” The lawsuit is still pending; the government defendants have raised a defense of sovereign immunity.

Even family members of BOP and UNICOR staff are potentially at risk. Staff “may have inadvertently exposed their families to heavy metals by wearing their dust-laden work clothes home,” wrote S. Randall Humm, investigative counsel for the OIG.

That, according to Professor Tee L. Guidotti, an environmental and occupational health expert at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services, never should have happened.

“They wore their work clothes home? Yikes. That has been known for years to be a set-up for exposing children,” he said.

Several BOP employees had also purchased equipment from UNICOR for their personal use, including computers and monitors, that may have been contaminated with toxic heavy metal dust.

Despite these problems, and ongoing investigations into workplace conditions at other UNICOR recycling factories, UNICOR continues to operate eight recycling centers that employ approximately 1,200 prisoners. This represents only a small part of the prison industry’s workforce. Systemwide, as of Sept. 30, 2007, UNICOR maintained operations at 110 factories located at 79 BOP facilities involving 23,152 prisoner workers.

One has to wonder whether the documented safety, health and environmental workplace violations at UNICOR’s e-waste recycling programs routinely occurred at the prison industry’s other operations.

Sources: ABC News; The Dothan Eagle; www.unicor.gov; Fort Worth Weekly; www.computerworld.com; www.reviewonline.com; NIOSH preliminary report on work conditions at FCI Elkton (July 16, 2008); FOH report: “Evaluation of Environmental, Safety and Health Information Related to Current UNICOR e-Waste Recycling Operations at FCI Elkton” (Oct. 10, 2008)

Lawsuit claims prison recycling ‘poisoned' participants
August 08, 2009
By BRITTANY SMITH / Panama City FL-The News Herald

MARIANNA — Freda Cobb worked late at her job in food services at the Federal Correction Institute in Marianna. Often she would get home after her daughters already were asleep. She remembers waking up to find “love letters” from them written in dust on the back of her car.

“I love you” and “We miss you mom,” they would write.

“If I didn’t get to see them the night before, they would write them for me when they left for school,” Cobb said.

She thought it was sweet.

Years later, the memory is bitter. She claims the dust her children’s fingers arranged into kind messages is the same dust that is taking her life.

“We were poisoned,” Cobb said. “They put these prisons in these small country towns, thinking these small-town people don’t know anything. They think we’re stupid.”

‘We thought nothing of it’

Cobb, who started working at the prison in 1991, is one of 26 plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against the prison, claiming its computer recycling program is toxic and hazardous to workers’ health.

In 1994, Federal Prison Industries, trade-named UNICOR, started a computer and electronics recycling program in Marianna, the first of its kind. There are now seven certified facilities in total. Created by executive order in 1934, UNICOR, a government-owned, for-profit company, uses prison labor to produce various goods and services nationwide.

At Marianna, inmates break down and retrieve salvageable computer parts. According to UNICOR’s Web site, the products are sold to public and private industries to “save precious resources.”

During Cobb’s time in food service, inmates from the recycling facility would come in for food, covered in dust, and shake their clothes by the utensils, food trays and food, she said.

“We thought nothing of it,” Cobb said. “We were never told anything, so you just assume everything is safe.”

Forced to retire

If recycled without proper safety measurements, electronic equipment can release a toxic dust containing dangerous substances such as lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic, according to government reports and surveys by Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), a California-based research organization that studies the environmental impacts of the technology industry.

“When dismantling electronics, prisoners handling toxic components need ventilation, proper tools, and adequate protective gear, as do prison staff working in the area,” says a 2006 SVTC report. “UNICOR facilities repeatedly failed to provide proper recycling procedures to captive laborers and staff supervisors.”

Years into the operation at Marianna, an air filtration system was installed, but after that, according to Cobb, the system sucked the dust out of the factory and blew it outside. Cobb said she was told by the air filtration contractor this was because UNICOR purchased only half of the parts needed for a successful system.

“It was like a vacuum cleaner without a bag,” Cobb said. “That’s how it got all over the cars in the parking lot.”

For a long time, everyone thought it was pollen.

Cobb did too, until 1997 when she started getting sick.

For more than 10 years, she has experienced a wide range of health problems, including skin lesions, thyroid disease, weight gain, internal bleeding and short-term memory loss, she said. Cobb was in denial about her ailing health and said she attempted to hide her sickness from her employer.

“You don’t want to believe your body is failing you,” Cobb said.

Deteriorating health eventually forced her into retirement in 2004. She has struggled with doctor appointments, medical bills and prescription payments.

“I am on 20 medications now, just to keep my organs going,” said Cobb, who, although insured, spends about $250 a month on her medications.

Her experiences with doctors have been difficult.

“They will treat your symptoms and medicate you, but it is hard to get a medical statement with a diagnosis,” she said.
United in sickness

In 2008, Cobb and 25 others filed a lawsuit against the government and UNICOR.

Filed by Tallahassee-based attorneys Richard Bisbee, Bill Reeves and Patrick Frank, the lawsuit is seeking information and not damages, according to the firm.

At the time the lawsuit was filed, plaintiff Tanya Smith, also a former staff member at Marianna FCI and a resident of Jackson County, was described as “gravely ill.” Smith has since died of her illnesses, which included heart disease, kidney failure, internal bleeding and systemic lupus. Smith, 36, had two open heart surgeries before her death.

The lawsuit lists the plaintiffs one by one, their medical conditions described in black and white; heart disease, depression, respiratory problems, undiagnosed skin lesions, internal bleeding, bone deterioration and memory loss are a few of their conditions.

The suit also seeks the results of various testing for the presence of heavy metals done at Marianna’s computer recycling plant. The results would not only determine the firm’s next course of action but also could potentially inform doctors who are trying to treat many of the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit currently awaits action from U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak. It has bounced back and forth between the filing law firm and the government’s requests for dismissal, according to Patrick Frank, an attorney representing the case.

Additional motions have been filed by third parties, seeking to either join or intervene in the suit. These motions postponed the lawsuit until Tuesday Aug. 4. Both parties are waiting for a response from Smoak.

Computer recycling continues

Felicia Ponce, spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), said the bureau does not comment on pending litigation and could not give information about allegations regarding UNICOR’s computer recycling program at Marianna.

“The continued safety of both staff and inmates alike is a top priority of the BOP and FPI. As such, FPI is committed to ensuring compliance with all applicable health, safety and environmental requirements in all of its factories nationwide,” said a statement issued by the BOP.

As of the end of July, the computer recycling program at Marianna was fully operational and employed seven UNICOR staff and 236 inmates, according to Traci Billingsley, another BOP spokeswoman.

‘Wheels of justice turn slow’

In 2004, claims by whistleblower Leroy Smith, a former safety manager at a UNICOR operation Atwater Prison in California, initiated an inquiry by the Office of the Inspector General into UNICOR’s computer recycling programs and their safety. The inquiry has been “ongoing” for more than three years.

“We’ve seen nothing definitive from the inquiry so far,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a whistleblower-support group that assisted Smith. “It really makes you think the wheels of justice turn slow.”

In 2008, as part of the system wide review, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) submitted a report to the Office of the Inspector General declaring that staff and inmates had no protection against exposure to high levels of lead and cadmium at a computer recycling plant in eastern Ohio. The plant has since been shut down.

However, the reports from the testing for the presence of heavy metals at various other prisons, including FCI Marianna, have not been released.

An uncertain future

Once a vibrant, 135-pound woman, Cobb, now heavier from her thyroid disease, said she feels like her life has been stolen from her. “I get one or two good days a week,” she said. The rest are spent in bed.

Her short blonde hair, she said, falls out when she showers, while bone deterioration causes severe joint pain when she walks.

“I want to play ball with my grandkids, but I can’t.” Her husband brings her a chair so she can watch them instead.

Cobb refers to herself as an advocate. She keeps files of information regarding the computer recycling programs, those who have spoken out and various reports and studies on the effects of heavy metal poisoning and electronic recycling. Cobb stays in touch with people across the country who, she believes, are fighting a battle similar to her own, a painful fight to stay alive and a relentless pursuit of the truth about UNICOR’s computer recycling program.

Cobb is praying for justice and answers.

“I’m praying this will finally make it to court,” Cobb said. “People are dying more and more and we need some answers.”
http://www.newsherald.com/news/participants-76485-claims-poisoned.html

Posted by lois at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2009

Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor? By BARBARA EHRENREICH

August 9, 2009
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?
By BARBARA EHRENREICH

IT'S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it's almost illegal to be poor. You won't be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you're well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life - like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the '80s and '90s. "If you're lying on a sidewalk, whether you're homeless or a millionaire, you're in violation of the ordinance," a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France's immortal observation that "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges."

In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more "neutral" infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.

The report lists America's 10 "meanest" cities - the largest of which are Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Francisco - but new contestants are springing up every day. The City Council in Grand Junction, Colo., has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Ariz., carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, "An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive" public assistance.

That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it's definitely Al Szekely at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington - the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants.

It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant - for not appearing in court to face a charge of "criminal trespassing" (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. "Can you imagine?" asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. "They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless."
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.

If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a significant crime - by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely difficult for him to find a job.

For Al Szekely, the arrest for trespassing meant a further descent down the circles of hell. While in jail, he lost his slot in the shelter and now sleeps outside the Verizon Center sports arena, where the big problem, in addition to the security guards, is mosquitoes. His stick-thin arms are covered with pink crusty sores, which he treats with a regimen of frantic scratching.

For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization - one involving debt, and the other skin color. Anyone of any color or pre-recession financial status can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors' prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can't afford to pay their traffic fines may be made to "sit out their tickets" in jail.

Often the path to legal trouble begins when one of your creditors has a court issue a summons for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another. (Maybe your address has changed or you never received it.) Now you're in contempt of court. Or suppose you miss a payment and, before you realize it, your car insurance lapses; then you're stopped for something like a broken headlight. Depending on the state, you may have your car impounded or face a steep fine - again, exposing you to a possible summons. "There's just no end to it once the cycle starts," said Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. "It just keeps accelerating."
By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor encounters racial profiling, but for decades whole communities have been effectively "profiled" for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor, thanks to the "broken windows" or "zero tolerance" theory of policing popularized by Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, and his police chief William Bratton.

Flick a cigarette in a heavily patrolled community of color and you're littering; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you're displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect, according to "Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice," an eye-opening new book by Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in Washington. If you seem at all evasive, which I suppose is like looking "overly anxious" in an airport, Mr. Butler writes, the police "can force you to stop just to investigate why you don't want to talk to them." And don't get grumpy about it or you could be "resisting arrest."

There's no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children's Defense Fund calls "the cradle-to-prison pipeline." In New York City, a teenager caught in public housing without an ID - say, while visiting a friend or relative - can be charged with criminal trespassing and wind up in juvenile detention, Mishi Faruqee, the director of youth justice programs for the Children's Defense Fund of New York, told me. In just the past few months, a growing number of cities have taken to ticketing and sometimes handcuffing teenagers found on the streets during school hours.

In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250; in Dallas, it can be as much as $500 - crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, an advocacy group, 12,000 students were ticketed for truancy in 2008.

Why does the Bus Riders Union care? Because it estimates that 80 percent of the "truants," especially those who are black or Latino, are merely late for school, thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping. I met people in Los Angeles who told me they keep their children home if there's the slightest chance of their being late. It's an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school.

The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.

And if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief marijuana-induced high, it's "gotcha" all over again, because that of course is illegal too. One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today the same number of Americans - 2.3 million - reside in prison as in public housing.

Meanwhile, the public housing that remains has become ever more prisonlike, with residents subjected to drug testing and random police sweeps. The safety net, or what's left of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.

Some of the community organizers I've talked to around the country think they know why "zero tolerance" policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that "poor people have become a source of revenue" for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy. At a Congressional hearing in June, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified about the pervasive "overcriminalization of crimes that are not a risk to public safety," like sleeping in a cardboard box or jumping turnstiles, which leads to expensively clogged courts and prisons.
A Pew Center study released in March found states spending a record $51.7 billion on corrections, an amount that the center judged, with an excess of moderation, to be "too much."

But will it be enough - the collision of rising prison populations that we can't afford and the criminalization of poverty - to force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment? With the number of people in poverty increasing (some estimates suggest it's up to 45 million to 50 million, from 37 million in 2007) several states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty - for example, by sending drug offenders to treatment rather than jail, shortening probation and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missed court appointments. But others are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of "crimes" but also charging prisoners for their room and board - assuring that they'll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.

Maybe we can't afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America's growing poverty - affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I'd be content with a consensus that, if we can't afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of "This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation."
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)

Hundreds Hurt at Riot in Chino (CA)

Hundreds Hurt in California Prison Riot

By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: August 9, 2009
NY Times
LOS ANGELES — Rioting inmates smashed and burned a large California prison on Saturday night and Sunday morning, injuring 250 prisoners and hospitalizing 55.

The 11-hour riot, at the Reception Center West at the California Institution for Men in Chino, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, broke down along racial lines, with black prison gangs fighting Latino gangs in hand-to-hand combat, the authorities said.

No prison employees were injured, no deaths were reported, and no inmates escaped, state officials said. But 10 of the 33 prisons in the state system were put on lockdown to prevent unrest from spreading. Those 10 were in the southern part of the state.

Damage to the 1,300-inmate medium-security prison was “significant and extensive,” said a spokesman, Lt. Mark Hargrove. One housing unit was virtually destroyed by fire, Lieutenant Hargrove said. The other housing areas were so badly damaged that they were uninhabitable, he said, so some inmates were being temporarily housed in tents while others were sent to alternate prisons.

With more than 150,000 inmates, the California prison system is one of the most crowded in the nation, with many of its facilities holding more than double the number of inmates they were designed for. A federal three-judge panel ruled last week that crowding and poor health care caused one avoidable inmate death each week and that the system was “impossible to manage.”

Lieutenant Hargrove said prisoners had smashed windows, torn down gates and used whatever they could to battle one another in the riot.

“Inmates broke out glass and used shards as knives,” he said. “They used pieces of metal, wood, whatever they could break off the walls, pipes.”

The Chino prison is trying to put into effect a 2005 Supreme Court decision that prohibits automatic and systematic racial segregation of prison inmates after more than three decades of racial separation in the corrections system.

Lieutenant Hargrove said that inmates could now opt out of segregation and that a growing number of black, Latino and white prisoners shared cells, increasing racial tensions in the prison.

“All races had injuries,” Lieutenant Hargrove said of the weekend riot. “But there are a greater number of injuries among Hispanic and black inmates. And we did have another incident that occurred in May, a riot between blacks and Hispanics, and this may be associated with that incident.”

Prison officials said they were still questioning inmates to understand what set off the uprising. They said no demands or complaints had been directed at the guards.

Inmates in one of seven 200-man housing units began brawling around 8:20 p.m. Saturday, officials said. Overwhelmed guards set off an alarm and retreated as unrest spread.

Thirty minutes later, a crisis response team of about 80 guards arrived, but the chaos inside prevented them from entering. Guards watched as prisoners constructed barricades of broken bunk beds, desks and other furniture and clashed in the prison yards and on rooftops.

As inmates tired on Sunday and fighting died down, guards re-entered the prison and reasserted control, officials said, staving off sporadic attacks from prisoners throwing scrap metal and glass.

Lieutenant Hargrove said that the entire prison was being treated as a crime scene and that new charges would probably be filed against prisoners who participated in the violence, which was mainly between inmates.

In its order last week, the federal panel directed the state to come up with a plan to reduce its prison population by 40,000 inmates within two years. Attorney General Jerry Brown, a possible candidate for governor next year, said he would probably appeal the ruling.

Barry Krisberg, the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, said the riot illustrated the many problems plaguing the state prison system, including growing cost overruns and pending cuts.

“There are proposals to eliminate all programs including reducing visiting days for inmates participating in programs,” Mr. Krisberg said. “But if you isolate these men from their families and cut down even the most basic educational and counseling programs, you’re going to create more idleness, and this is what happens.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/us/10prison.html?hp

Posted by lois at 03:51 PM | Comments (0)

August 08, 2009

Opinion--Prisons bursting at the seams, destroying our future By Rev. Al Sharpton

"In order for us to truly amend our incarceration culture where one in four prisoners in the entire world are in the United States, we have to take a look at the root causes of the dilemma. Why is it that more than half of all black men in America don't finish high school? Why is the unemployment rate in powerful cities like New York at 50% for black men? Why did Congress abolish Pell grants for prisoners in 1994 that virtually eliminated all 350-incarceration college programs across the country? Is it any coincidence then that six out of 10 black men who drop out of high school have spent time in jail by their mid-30s? With unemployment rates on the rise (and many would argue well in to the double digits among people of color), arrests for nonviolent infractions and petty crimes are leaving families motherless, fatherless and hopeless."

Opinion--Prisons bursting at the seams, destroying our future
By Rev. Al Sharpton
The Giro
08/07/2009

As the battle lines for health care reform are being drawn - and redrawn - a silent segment of the population is strategically left out of the conversation. It's a group of individuals who have been deemed enemies of society, and cast away behind iron bars to fend for themselves. In California's 33 prisons, healthcare is so inadequate that one unnecessary death takes place per week, as inmates are often stacked in triple bunk beds in hallways and gymnasiums. With nearly twice the number of prisoners than they were designed to hold, California prisons will have to reduce at least 40,000 prisoners in the next two years - and it's about time.

Federal judges just released a 184-page order demanding that California's inmate population be reduced by 27%, and gave the state 45 days to come up with a plan. In what they termed an "unconstitutional prison healthcare system", the three-judge panel concluded that disease was spreading rampantly and prisoner-on-prisoner violence was all but unavoidable. Forced to close a $26 billion dollar budget gap, California will now have to look at mechanisms to reducing its extensive prison spending, which in 2007 topped out at nearly $10 billion (approximately $49,000 for each inmate).

Whether it's for pure economic reasons or for an actual concern over the well being of prisoners, California will hopefully serve as an example for a reversal of the ever-growing prison industrial complex. A system that unfairly profiles and detains minorities, American jails produce a vicious cycle of recidivism and community breakdown. Last year, the Pew Center on the States released a scathing report stating that one in every 100 American adults was in jail, and that an astonishing one in 15 black adults was behind bars. According to government reports in 2007, there were three times as many blacks in jail than in college dorms, with Latinos not far behind at 2.7 times more behind bars than in secondary schooling.

In order for us to truly amend our incarceration culture where one in four prisoners in the entire world are in the United States, we have to take a look at the root causes of the dilemma. Why is it that more than half of all black men in America don't finish high school? Why is the unemployment rate in powerful cities like New York at 50% for black men? Why did Congress abolish Pell grants for prisoners in 1994 that virtually eliminated all 350-incarceration college programs across the country? Is it any coincidence then that six out of 10 black men who drop out of high school have spent time in jail by their mid-30s? With unemployment rates on the rise (and many would argue well in to the double digits among people of color), arrests for nonviolent infractions and petty crimes are leaving families motherless, fatherless and hopeless.

We live in a world that promotes law, order and justice, yet our actions often times prove otherwise. As if the implementation of ridiculous drug laws and the 'three strike rule' weren't enough to catapult our prison population, now our children are increasingly finding themselves in handcuffs at an early age. In 2006, a 14-year-old black student in Texas was sentenced to seven years for shoving a teacher's aide, while in 2007, an eighth grader in New York found herself handcuffed to a pole above her head for three hours while being questioned by police for writing on her desk at school. In Chicago it's no better, as 77% of all student arrests were black, although blacks make up just half of the city's student body.

And let's not forget women, who are in fact the largest growing segment of the prison population. According to Prisoners for Children, 85% of women are now serving time for non-violent crimes, with black women six times as likely to go to jail than their white counterparts. These women, often the heads of their households, are forced to withstand dire circumstances including giving birth while in shackles.

In 2006, the state of California spent about $500 million in overtime for its incarceration system, and in 2007, states spent $44 billion in American tax dollars on prisons. Whether it's because of our diminishing economy, or if it's out of genuine concern, California is leading the way - or rather being forced to lead the way - in amending our unjust prison industrial complex. If we truly care about the future our nation and all its inhabitants, each and every state needs to follow suit immediately.
http://www.thegrio.com/2009/08/unconstitutional-prison-healthcare-system-a-part-of-a-bigger-problem.php

Posted by lois at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Free 40,000 California prisoners? Not so fast. A federal judicial panel orders the state to come up with a plan to cut prison populations. But any such plan would be carried out over two years – and any actual release order challenged.

Free 40,000 California inmates? Not so fast.
A federal judicial panel orders the state to come up with a plan to cut prison populations. But any such plan would be carried out over two years – and any actual release order challenged.

By Michael B. Farrell | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
August 8, 2009 edition

San Francisco - Is California about to open its prison gates, freeing more than 40,000 inmates?

Earlier this week, a federal judicial panel gave the state 45 days to come up with a plan to cut its prison population in order to adequately care for its inmates.

But don't expect inmates to be freed from any of California's 33 adult prisons next month. Even if prison officials come up with a plan that both lawmakers and the federal court justices accept, the state would have two years to carry out any reduction.

If the court does actually mandate a release, the state would appeal that ruling to the US Supreme Court. Right now, state lawyers are still reviewing the justices' 184-page decision that was issued Tuesday.

"All the court has asked for in this ruling is for the state to develop a plan in 45 days … so the legal question is whether or not the state can appeal a ruling that directs us to come up with a plan," says Seth Unger, press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Unconstitutional overcrowding?

At issue in the court case is whether overcrowding in California's prisons has resulted in an unconstitutional level of care for the state's 155,000 inmates (12,000 of the state's inmates are housed in other facilities or in out-of-state prisons).

"The medical and mental healthcare available to inmates in the California prison system is woefully and constitutionally inadequate, and has been for more than a decade," said the judicial panel in their ruling this week. "California's prisons are busting at the seams and are impossible to manage."

The judges want to see a reduction in population to "137.5 percent of the adult institutions' total design capacity."

Prison population is now at 195 percent of capacity, according to Mr. Unger. "But design capacity can be somewhat misleading. Capacity is based on one inmate per cell…. You can put two inmates in a cell and have them safely housed," he says.

The Prison Law Office, based in Berkeley, Calif., brought the original lawsuit that resulted in Tuesday's decision. It claimed that the overcrowded conditions were so bad as to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment, which outlaws cruel and unusual punishment.

"The Constitutional standard," says Donald Specter, director of the law center, "is that the prison can't be deliberately indifferent to the prisoner's medical needs."

Prisons have improved over the past several years, he says, but "you have to understand that we are talking about a system where you couldn't even see a doctor. And there are still not enough doctors. Is it Constitutional? No."

State proposes

The state government doesn't dispute that prisons are overcrowded – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared an emergency over the issue in October 2006. But California Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate says the justices overstepped their authority in forcing the state to come up with a plan.

Mr. Specter counters that the court's decision is not unprecedented. "There is a long tradition of the federal courts … intervening in prisoner affairs because the state judicial system is insufficient in protecting prisons' human rights," he says.

Independent of this week's court order, the state has already proposed several ideas for lawmakers to ponder. These proposed measures could result in a reduction of some 27,000 inmates and save the state $1.2 billion in one year:

•Allow low-risk offenders to serve the remaining year of their sentence under house arrest.

•Limit parole supervision only to offenders who committed serious or violent crimes to reduce recidivism caused by parole violations.

•Reform sentencing guidelines for crimes associated with property theft and raise the threshold from $400 to $2,500.

•Give inmates the chance to receive credits toward their sentence if they participate in certain behavioral, educational, or rehabilitation programs.

Specter says he approves of many of these measures, but it remains to be seen whether lawmakers will also approve. It can be politically risky for politicians to vote for programs that shorten sentences or result in inmates being released from prison.

That leaves the "federal courts as the only one to solve the problem" in California, he argues.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0808/p02s07-usgn.html

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

August 05, 2009

CA: Federal judges call conditions in the prisons 'appalling' and unconstitutional. A reduction plan is due by mid-September.

Federal judges call conditions in the prisons 'appalling' and unconstitutional. A reduction plan is due by mid-September.
By Carol J. Williams- LA Times
August 5, 2009

California must shrink the population of its teeming prisons by nearly 43,000 inmates over the next two years to meet constitutional standards, a panel of three federal judges ruled Tuesday, ordering the state to come up with a reduction plan by mid-September.

The order cited Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's own words when he proclaimed a state of emergency in the corrections system in 2006 and warned of substantial risk to prison staff, inmates and the general public, saying "immediate action is necessary to prevent death and harm."

Tuesday's ruling heightens the stakes for a legislative debate over prisons that will take place later this month. As part of the agreement to close the state's $26-billion budget gap, the governor and lawmakers agreed to cut $1.2 billion from the prisons budget, but postponed decisions on how to hit that goal.

The governor and most legislative leaders back a plan that would reduce prison populations by as many as 37,000 over the next two years using a combination of early releases, changes in parole policies and shifting of some prisoners to county jails.

Debate on that plan will be contentious, with many Republicans opposed. But the judges' ruling means that defeating the plan would not only unravel a major piece of the budget agreement but also potentially cede decision-making over prison policies to the federal courts.

Lengthy process

The 185-page opinion follows a trial last year and nearly 14 years of deliberations over lawsuits brought by inmates alleging cruel and unusual punishment, which moved the state case into federal jurisdiction. The opinion accuses the state of fostering "criminogenic" conditions that lead prisoners and parolees to commit more crimes, feeding a cycle of recidivism.

"The constitutional deficiencies in the California prison system's medical and mental health system cannot be resolved in the absence of a prisoner release order," the judges concluded.

They stopped short of issuing a release edict, though, giving state officials 45 days to come up with their own plan for reducing overcrowding while observing that alternatives to release, such as building new prisons, were "too distant" and unlikely to be funded.

Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown said the state would comply with the order to produce a plan, but repeated criticism that the judges had ignored significant improvements made in recent years.

He said he doubts the U.S. Supreme Court, to which state officials could appeal any release order, would find that current prison conditions violate the Constitution.

"The courts are ordering the state to come up with a plan to release all these prisoners, but the question is: Which prisoners? Release to what -- halfway houses, GPS monitoring? And what happens when they commit another crime -- do they come back? There's a lot that is not clear," Brown said.

Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Matthew Cate said he hoped the judges would back down if state officials and lawmakers make progress in reducing the state's prison population this month, as planned.

The administration's proposal to cut the inmate population by 37,000 over two years could be approved by the Legislature with a majority vote -- meaning no support would be needed by conservative Republicans who threatened to scuttle last month's budget deal if prisoner releases were included.

The governor's plan would allow the state to place on home detention prisoners with less than a year left on their sentences and those who are elderly or infirm. It would also change sentencing and parole rules to reward those who show evidence of rehabilitation.

But Schwarzenegger may be reluctant to use the courts as a hammer to push his plan through. Administration officials have repeatedly said that the court has overstepped its boundaries. The overcrowding problem, Cate said, is a state problem that needs to be fixed by the governor and lawmakers.

"It is not the job of the federal court to do this," he said.

Noting the legislative session that begins in two weeks, Prison Law Office Director Donald Specter, who brought the prisoners' suits, said lawmakers now face the choice of being "part of the solution or continuing to be part of the problem."

Potential win-win

Specter emphasized, as did the judges, that the ruling "doesn't mean that 40,000 prisoners are going to walk out of prison tomorrow."

"If done right, this could be a win-win situation for the entire state, as the prisons will be safer for my clients and the staff who work there, taxpayers will save hundreds of millions of dollars a year and communities will be safer as a result," Specter said, pointing to the judges' opinion that prison conditions contribute to repeat offenses.

The judges capped the prison population at no more than 137% of the designed capacity of 84,000. That would mean release of 42,920 inmates to meet the population ceiling of 115,080.

Some lawmakers welcomed the ruling while others vowed to fight it.

"It's frankly a day of reckoning for those who have pushed for constant sentence enhancements, who would decimate rehabilitation programs and who oppose revenues to support state services," said Assembly Speaker Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles), alluding to Republican lawmakers' conflicting efforts to be tough on crime while cutting spending.

"Today's decision by the three-judge panel is a nightmare come true for California families," countered Assembly Minority Leader Sam Blakeslee of San Luis Obispo. "Any fair-minded court will see there is no way to reduce our prison population by nearly 43,000 without letting out some very dangerous criminals onto our streets and into our neighborhoods."

The judges pointedly rejected any notion that conditions have improved. Citing testimony during last year's trial by some of the nation's foremost prison administrators, the judges said the experts reported "they have never previously witnessed such appalling prison conditions."

Until overcrowding is reduced, the state will be unable to provide "constitutionally compliant care," concluded the panel comprised of U.S. District Judges Thelton Henderson and Lawrence Karlton, and U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt.

The judges said overcrowding at prison reception centers approaches three times designed capacity, frustrating prison intake officials' ability to identify incoming prisoners with medical or mental health problems.

Overcrowding has led to conditions that contribute to the spread of disease, require increased use of lockdowns to control inmates, and impede authorities' ability to provide essential healthcare, the judges said. It also "worsens many of the risk factors for suicide among inmates and increases the prevalence and acuity of mental illness," they added.

Conditions are "often dangerous, and on many occasions fatal," the judges said, alluding to reports that California inmates die of treatable or avoidable illnesses at the rate of one per week.

Henderson, a judge of the U.S. District Court for Northern California, seized oversight of the prison healthcare network in 2006 and appointed a receiver to fix the deficiencies.

J. Clark Kelso, the receiver, said in a recent interview that his staff was making progress on a daunting array of projects but that significant improvements remain at least a year away. He plans to computerize inmate medical records, replace a deficient pharmacy operation, build at least $2 billion worth of hospitals and upgrade existing ones.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-meprisons5-2009aug05,0,4339337,full.story

Posted by lois at 01:38 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2009

Prisons not the answer to crime problems: Attorney General

Prisons not the answer to crime problems: Attorney General
August 3, 2009
BY ABDON M. PALLASCH Political Reporter- Chicago Sun Times

More prisons are not the answer to America’s crime problems, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told the nation’s lawyers Monday.

“We will not focus exclusively on incarceration as the most effective means of protecting public safety,” Holder told the American Bar Association delegates meeting here for their annual convention. “Since 2003, spending on incarceration has continued to rise, but crime rates have flattened.”

Holder conceded that the massive build-up of prisons — a seven-fold increase over the past 40 years — probably has something to do with the crime rate dropping 40 percent since 1991.

“Today, one out of every 100 adults in America is incarcerated — the highest incarceration rate in the world,” he said. But the country has reached a point of diminishing returns at which putting even greater percentages of America’s citizens behind bars won’t cut the crime rate.

That’s in part because once people spend time in prison, they’re likely to keep engaging in the kind of behavior that sends them back to prison, he said.

“Most crimes in America are committed by people who have committed crimes before,” Holder said. “About 67 percent of former state prisoners and 40 percent of former federal prisoners are re-arrested within three years of release. If we can reduce the rate of recidivism, we will directly reduce the crime rate.”

Prisoners who undergo drug treatment and/or work training in prison are 16 percent less likely to re-offend after their release, he said.

Diverting non-violent drug offenders away from prison and into treatment programs, as New York State does, saves taxpayers money, better rehabilitates offenders and helps reduce the crime rate, Holder said.

“Every state in the union is trying to trim budgets,” Holder said. “States and localities are laying off teachers, cutting back on public health, and canceling after-school programs for our children. But in almost all cases, spending on prisons continues to rise. This is unsustainable economically.”

Holder provoked applause from the delegates when he complained that across the country, state and local governments are under-funding public defenders, whose growing caseloads make it difficult for them to adequately represent their clients.

Holder did not speak on the delegates overwhelming voice vote to ask Congress to repeal part of the Defense Of Marriage Act that prevents same-sex partners receiving federal benefits even in states that have legalized gay marriage.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/1698536,eric-holder-attorney-general-prisons-080309.article

http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/speeches/2009/ag-speech-090803.html

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Eric Holder at the 2009 ABA Convention
CHICAGO, ILL
Monday, August 3, 2009

[EXCERPT]

"...We will not focus exclusively on incarceration as the most effective means of protecting public safety. For although spending on prison construction continues to increase, public safety is not continuing to improve. Crime rates appear to have reached a plateau beyond which they no longer decline in response to increases in incarceration. Indeed, since 2003, spending on incarceration has continued to rise, but crime rates have flattened.

But there is another reason to consider new law enforcement strategies:
simple dollars and cents, and the principle of diminishing marginal returns.
Every state in the Union is trying to trim budgets. States and localities are laying off teachers, cutting back on public health, and canceling after-school programs for our children. But in almost all cases, spending on prisons continues to rise. This is unsustainable economically. Many jurisdictions simply cannot afford the monetary costs of focusing exclusively on incarceration, to say nothing of the social costs associated
with high rates of imprisonment..."

Posted by lois at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

August 01, 2009

Bob Herbert Op-Ed " Anger Has Its Place"

Op-Ed Columnist
Anger Has Its Place
By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 31, 2009- New York Times
No more than five or six minutes elapsed from the time the police were alerted to the possibility of a break-in at a home in a quiet residential neighborhood and the awful clamping of handcuffs on the wrists of the distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

If Professor Gates ranted and raved at the cop who entered his home uninvited with a badge, a gun and an attitude, he didn’t rant and rave for long. The 911 call came in at about 12:45 on the afternoon of July 16 and, as The Times has reported, Mr. Gates was arrested, cuffed and about to be led off to jail by 12:51.

The charge: angry while black.

The president of the United States has suggested that we use this flare-up as a “teachable moment,” but so far exactly the wrong lessons are being drawn from it — especially for black people. The message that has gone out to the public is that powerful African-American leaders like Mr. Gates and President Obama will be very publicly slapped down for speaking up and speaking out about police misbehavior, and that the proper response if you think you are being unfairly targeted by the police because of your race is to chill.

I have nothing but contempt for that message.

Mr. Gates is a friend, and I was selected some months ago to receive an award from an institute that he runs at Harvard. I made no attempt to speak to him while researching this column.

The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten him. He was never a danger to anyone. At worst, if you believe the police report, he yelled at Sergeant Crowley. He demanded to know if he was being treated the way he was being treated because he was black.

You can yell at a cop in America. This is not Iran. And if some people don’t like what you’re saying, too bad. You can even be wrong in what you are saying. There is no law against that. It is not an offense for which you are supposed to be arrested.

That’s a lesson that should have emerged clearly from this contretemps.

It was the police officer, Sergeant Crowley, who did something wrong in this instance. He arrested a man who had already demonstrated to the officer’s satisfaction that he was in his own home and had been minding his own business, bothering no one. Sergeant Crowley arrested Professor Gates and had him paraded off to jail for no good reason, and that brings us to the most important lesson to be drawn from this case. Black people are constantly being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted, arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no good reason.

New York City cops make upwards of a half-million stops of private citizens each year, questioning and frequently frisking these men, women and children. The overwhelming majority of those stopped are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any wrongdoing. A true “teachable moment” would focus a spotlight on such outrages and the urgent need to stop them.

But this country is not interested in that.

I wrote a number of columns about the arrests of more than 30 black and Hispanic youngsters — male and female — who were doing nothing more than walking peacefully down a quiet street in Brooklyn in broad daylight in the spring of 2007. The kids had to hire lawyers and fight the case for nearly two frustrating years before the charges were dropped and a settlement for their outlandish arrests worked out.

Black people need to roar out their anger at such treatment, lift up their voices and demand change. Anyone counseling a less militant approach is counseling self-defeat. As of mid-2008, there were 4,777 black men imprisoned in America for every 100,000 black men in the population. By comparison, there were only 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white men.

While whites use illegal drugs at substantially higher percentages than blacks, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.

Most whites do not want to hear about racial problems, and President Obama would rather walk through fire than spend his time dealing with them. We’re never going to have a serious national conversation about race. So that leaves it up to ordinary black Americans to rant and to rave, to demonstrate and to lobby, to march and confront and to sue and generally do whatever is necessary to stop a continuing and deeply racist criminal justice outrage.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 1, 2009, on page A17 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/opinion/01herbert.html
This and other news relating to mass incarceration can be f

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

Washington state may release more seriously ill prisoners to save money.

Washington state may release more seriously ill prisoners to save money
RACHEL LA CORTE
Associated Press Writer
July 30, 2009

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — About two dozen seriously ill prisoners in Washington state could soon be released from prison — as long as their freedom is expected to save the cash-strapped state money.

A new state law, which takes effect Saturday, expands a current program to release chronically or terminally ill prisoners. Death row inmates, or those serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, are not eligible for early release.

Washington is among more than 30 states that have some form of early release program for seriously ill prisoners, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
RACHEL LA CORTE
Associated Press Writer
July 30, 2009

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — About two dozen seriously ill prisoners in Washington state could soon be released from prison — as long as their freedom is expected to save the cash-strapped state money.

A new state law, which takes effect Saturday, expands a current program to release chronically or terminally ill prisoners. Death row inmates, or those serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, are not eligible for early release.

Washington is among more than 30 states that have some form of early release program for seriously ill prisoners, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The move will save the Washington state Department of Corrections an estimated $800,000 over the next two years, mainly on things like prescription costs and transporting prisoners to off-prison medical treatment.

But the state Department of Social and Health Services estimates it could see significant increases in its budget if it has to place all of those released in state-paid nursing homes or provide additional mental health services — offsetting any savings and possibly adding more costs to the already hampered state budget.

That frustrates some lawmakers like Rep. Bruce Dammeier, R-Puyallup. He voted in favor of the bill twice while it was moving through legislative committees, but ultimately voted against it on the House floor because of concerns over costs. The state had to make major cuts this year to patch a $9 billion budget deficit.

"I was prepared to speak out in support of this bill in our caucus room, and then as I reviewed the fiscal note again, it had changed," Dammeier said. "It's not clear-cut, it's not easy to define, and it's not going to clearly result in savings."

The number of prisoners who would actually be released is unknown. Also unclear is how many of those released would end up relying on social safety net programs.

Even the state corrections chief admits the program expansion is a work in progress.

"We continue to think this will save the state money, but we won't know that for sure until we're down the road," said Corrections Secretary Eldon Vail. "Will it in every case? That's the goal. You can't know until they leave the system."

Under the law signed by Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire in May, the head of corrections can authorize early medical release only if certain conditions are met. The offender must have a serious medical condition that is expected "to require costly care or treatment." They must pose a low risk to the community because they are physically incapacitated or expected to be at the time of release. And the release must be expected to save the state money.

The department works to see if prisoners qualify for private or veteran's health coverage. Barring other options, they arrange for Medicaid, which is paid for partially by the state and partly with federal money.

Vail said there have been cases of some prisoners with such serious health problems that they were sent to state nursing homes or intensive care, with an armed guard paid to be with them. So under the program, not much changes except the lack of a guard, he said.

"The state is still paying for the hospital bed, but the state is no longer paying for the correctional officer to stand watch," Vail said.

The main change to the current early release program, which has been in place since 1999, is that it no longer requires the prisoner be incapacitated before being approved for release. Fifty-five offenders have been released since 1999 under the earlier program, and two more have been approved and are currently awaiting placement in the community.

Sherry Lynn Bradford, a 40-year-old prisoner at the Washington Corrections Center for Women near Gig Harbor, hopes that she will be one of the prisoners released under the new expanded law. Bradford, who has hepatitis C and has had two surgeries to address liver failure, was denied parole last year under the old program because she wasn't yet incapacitated.

She said that during her last surgery earlier this month, "my doctor didn't sugarcoat it."

"He said my liver is very sick and the only way I'm going to live is to get a new one," she said.

Bradford has been in and out of prison since 1997 on drug charges, with her most recent conviction in 2006 for possession of a controlled substance, with intent to manufacture or deliver cocaine. She is set to be released on probation in December. She said she hopes she can be out before then under medical parole in hopes that she can get on a transplant list sooner.

"I really can't do anything from behind bars," she said.

Her application hasn't yet been decided, and Vail said every request will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

"It's a balancing act between trying to make sure a person receives proper care in a way that is cost effective," he said. "It's not a black-and-white decision. It all depends on the individual."

___

The early medical parole bill is House Bill 2194.

___

On the Web:

Washington Legislature: http://www.leg.wa.gov

Gov. Chris Gregoire: http://www.governor.wa.gov

Washington State Department of Corrections: http://www.doc.wa.gov
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-us-medical-parole,1,6030870.story

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

IL: County to charge inmates for jail time Sheriff also plans to put prisoners to work on area roads

County to charge inmates for jail time
Sheriff also plans to put prisoners to work on area roads
By ERIC TIMMONS
The Register-Mail
Posted Jul 30, 2009

GALESBURG,IL

Prisoners at the Knox County jail soon will have to pay for their stay in the county lockup.

Sheriff David Clague told the Knox County Board Wednesday he hopes to raise over $100,000 a year by charging inmates $5 for each night they spend in jail. He also plans to put prisoners to work picking up trash and fixing area roads.

The Knox County Board voted in favor of Clague’s proposal Wednesday. Clague said all county department heads had been asked to try and find new revenue streams to offset reductions in state funding and the pressures of a weak economy.

The sole County Board member to vote against the plan to charge inmates for their stay in jail was Lyle Johnson, D-District 1.

He said the burden of paying the $5 charge could fall on relatives of inmates who have not committed a crime. “Somebody’s going to have to pay and it’s going to have be the family,” Johnson said.

Clague acknowledged that families would likely end up footing the bill, but said that might make criminals think twice before breaking the law. “If that’s a concern then they should consider that before going out and committing a crime,” he said. “I’m not making them pay the money, that family member is.”

Clague said inmates enjoy good living conditions at the public’s expense and he didn’t think it was unreasonable to expect them to pay for their time in jail. He said the practice is common in southern states and has been instituted in Peoria County.

“They are sitting in a cell paid for by the taxpayers with heating, air conditioning and three meals a day,” Clague said. “In return, why can’t we benefit somewhat?”

Most inmates will be able to afford the $5 nightly fee, Clague said. He explained that prisoners have special accounts where they lodge money to buy small items such as phone cards and painkillers while in jail. Money from those “commissary accounts” will now be used for the nightly fee. “About 92 percent of our current inmates have money on the books,” Clague said.

Prisoners who can’t pay, however, could be offered a chance to work on area roads to cover their bill. Clague said he had already hatched a plan to put prisoners to work in “menial” jobs that could save the county money.

Any prisoners selected to work outside will be carefully screened to make sure they don’t pose a safety risk. “Were not going to give them a chain saw or a knife or anything like that,” Clague said. He added that he had discussed his plan to put prisoners to work with the county’s highway department.

Clague estimated the county could net $110,000 a year by charging prisoners for their time behind bars and he expects to launch the scheme within the next week. He said the $5 fee was reasonable considering that some southern states charge up to $60 for a night in a cell.

County Board member Wayne Saline, R-District 4, said he supported the plan. “It’s not like it’s free for the taxpayers while they are in there,” he said. “They did something to get in there and we should be able to recoup something from them.”

Some inmates are held in the county jail ahead of trial or court hearing, meaning they have yet to be found guilty. Clague said those inmates will still have to pay the $5 fee.
http://www.galesburg.com/news/x1543608270/County-to-charge-inmates-for-jail-time?popular=true

Posted by lois at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2009

Prisons Becoming Warehouses for the Old

Prisons Becoming Warehouses for the Old
By James Ridgeway
July 25, 2009
Prisons Becoming Warehouses for the Old
July 25, 2009 · Leave a Comment

AGING BEHIND BARS SERIES

I have written hefore about the aging population in American prisons and jails, due in large part to the draconian sentencing policies of the courts, federal, state, and local. As a result these places seem destined to become nursing homes surrounded by razor wire.

Angola prison in Louisiana, for instance, boasts that some 90 percent of its population will die there. The prison has managed to equip itself with a hospice, and trained inmates to attend to a convict’s last days. Burl Cain, the warden, is backed up by a phalanx of Christian fundamentalist preachers who freely roam the 18,000 acre former slave plantation recruiting inmates to be preachers. The clergy instruct prisoners their only way out is through redemption made possible by the acceptance of Jesus Christ. When an elderly inmate, knowing his end was near, sought to be win release so as to die in the so-called “free world,” the parole board refused. The procedure is to go to your death in the Christian way–from cell to hospice to a prison cemetery where your grave will be dug by the inmates who will mark your bruial with gospel hymns

The travesty at Angola is held up as a model for the nation and Cain celebrated by the media as a new corrections messiah. Elsewhere,old,sick people,piled into these living tombs by the courts, stand in line for hours to get an aspirin; arthritic old women are made to climb into upper bunk beds.Parapalegic men are denied canes, which are ruled to be weapons, and instead must crawl to the toilets.People are locked in solitary for years. Mentally ill convicts who act out in the general population are put into solitary because they howl and scream in public. Locked down, they go truly mad. Old sex offenders can be released into the hands of friends or family. but often noone wants them, so they are released to the county jail, reindicted, and sent back to prison.

The American public is up in arms about CIA jails in far away places. But it could care less about American prisons. Now a new report by the Sentencing Project in Washington adds to the growing body of information about prisons here at home. No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America contains, among other things, the first nationwide collection of life sentence data documenting race, ethnicity and gender, and reveals “overwhelming racial and ethnic disparities in the allocation of life sentences”: 66% of all persons sentenced to life are non-white, and 77% of juveniles serving life sentences are non-white.

The the report’s key findings:

140,610 individuals are serving life sentences, representing one of every 11 people (9.5%) in prison. Twenty-nine percent (41,095) of the individuals serving life sentences have no possibility of parole.

The number of individuals serving life without parole sentences increased by22% from 33,633 to 41,095 between 2003 and 2008. This is nearly four times the rate of growth of the parole-eligible life sentenced population.

In five states—Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and New York—at least 1 in 6 people in prison are serving a life sentence.

The highest proportion of life sentences relative to the prison population is in California, where 20% of the prison population is serving a life sentence, up from 18.1% in 2003. Among these 34,164 life sentences, 10.8% are life without parole.

Racial and ethnic minorities serve a disproportionate share of life sentences. Two-thirds of people with life sentences (66.4%) are nonwhite, reaching as high as 83.7% of the life sentenced population in the state of New York.

There are 6,807 juveniles serving life sentences; 1,755, or 25.8%, of whom are serving sentences of life without parole.

Seventy-seven percent of juveniles sentenced to life are youth of color.

There are 4,694 women and girls serving life sentences, 28.4% of females sentenced to life do not have the possibility of parole.

http://unsilentgeneration.com/2009/07/25/prisons-to-become-warehouses-for-the-old/

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

July 21, 2009

CA: State budget deal reduces prison inmates by 27,000

State budget deal reduces prison inmates by 27,000
The plan accomplishes this with a combination of measures, including having some prisoners complete sentences at home and shortening terms for those who finish rehabilitation programs.
By Michael Rothfeld
LA Times
July 21, 2009

Reporting from Sacramento - The state budget deal negotiated by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders would reduce the population of California prisons by nearly 27,000 inmates in the current fiscal year.

That would be done with a combination of new measures, including allowing some inmates to finish their sentences on home detention, creating new incentives for completion of rehabilitation programs and scaling back parole supervision for the least serious offenders.

The proposal, details of which were obtained by The Times, would save a total of $1.2 billion in the coming year.

It is unclear whether Republicans will vote for a budget plan that includes reduction of the state prison system, which now houses 170,000 inmates. Some GOP votes are needed to pass a budget in California.

If Republicans demur, the Democrats who dominate the Legislature could approve the prison proposal as separate legislation with a simple majority vote, which would not require GOP support.

The plan would grant authority to state corrections officials to allow any inmate with 12 months or less left to serve to complete his or her sentence on home detention, although state officials would not be required to do so. Prison officials could also put any inmate who is over 60 or medically incapacitated on home detention instead of in a prison cell.

The state would use electronic monitoring for inmates serving time at home, and officials estimate that about 6,300 could do time this way.

In addition, inmates who achieve milestones in rehabilitative programs, substance abuse treatment, vocational training or education could receive up to six weeks off their prison terms, although the credit could be forfeited in cases of subsequent bad behavior.

The plan includes a scaled-down version of Schwarzenegger's proposal to change some felonies to misdemeanors so inmates could go to county jails instead of prisons. Five crimes would be reclassified, such as petty theft with a previous conviction.

Inmates would receive less severe sentences for committing property crimes, because the amounts that guide sentencing in state law would be increased to account for inflation.

The state would change its parole system to create a "Parole Re-Entry Accountability Program" that would return fewer people to state prison, depending on their behavior. The plan is estimated to reduce the state parole population by 46,000 -- more than a third of those currently under supervision.

Those former prisoners convicted of the least serious crimes would not be subject to parole revocations that could return them to prison, as currently happens with about 70,000 a year. Those who committed more serious crimes would earn the right to early parole discharge for completing drug treatment.

In addition, counties would receive a total of $45 million in the coming year, from federal stimulus funds, to keep inmates on probation instead of sending them to prison. The money could be used by counties to hire more staff.

The budget plan also would create a sentencing commission to reexamine the state penal code, which would not save money immediately but would advance plans under discussion by lawmakers for years. The commission would be charged with establishing new sentencing guidelines by July 1, 2012.
michael.rothfeld@latimes.com
Copyright 2009

Posted by lois at 06:24 PM | Comments (0)

Old Prisoners Denied Their Social Security by James Ridgeway

Old Prisoners Denied Their Social Security
by James Ridgeway from his blog Unsilent Generation
July 21, 2009

Not long ago I described in the briefest of terms, the plight of the growing numbers of older prisoners now filling up the country’s prisons and jails.They receive bad health care and are subject to cruel and inhuman punishment in any number of ways,i.e. requiring people with bad arthritis to climb to the upper bunk to sleep, or making it next to impossible for inmates in wheelchairs to access parts of prisons available to younger people, such as getting into and taking a bath from a wheelchair..Among the worst sites described to me by a medical consultant were ill women forced to get out of bed at 3 am,then stand in lines,to obtain medicine in one Alabama women’s prison.

There are other difficulties faced by older prisoners.Among them is what to do about Social Security earned for years before conviction of a crime.

David Hinman, a prisoner in Iowa is 65 and when he was in the “free-world” contributed to social security. He is not eligible for parole for a number years.”Currently the government will not pay people in prison social security,’’he writes.“I am speaking about paying social security to those who paid into the fund.Payment is based on what they paid in. Even though I am now 65 and paid into the fund, since I am in prison I am not allowed to collect unless I am released from prison. By not paying inmates the social security to which they are entitled, I believe this is in some manner, theft.“My question to readers is: should prison inmates who paid into social security and reached 65 be allowed to collected social security while incarcerated or not.”

(You can reach David Hinman (#25374), Anamosa State Penitentiary, 406 North High Street, P.O. Box 10, Anamosa, IA 52205-0010.) (Additional essays by David can be found at http://www.realcostofprisons.org/writing/)

Asked about this situation Paul Wright,editor of Prison Legal News, the excellent magazine which tracks prison issues,wrote me,
“Part of the problem I have with this is that someone can work their whole life, pay into Social Security, commit a crime at a later age, and go to prison for the rest of their life and never see a penny of the money they paid into SS. The lie used to justify this is prisoners have no need for money but that is not true. I think it is a backdoor way to trim the SS.rolls.I think this is the exception. To put it into context, retirees can get their pensions in prison, veterans can get their VA benefits in prison. It follows that if you earn something you are entitled to it. It is not a freebie the government can take away because it doesn’t like you and that is exactly what they do here.
Wright attached an article from a 1998 isssue of Prison Legal News that sets the situation into the bleakest of terms.

Denial of Social Security Benefits to Prisoners Upheld

The court of appeals for the Ninth circuit held that a statute denying Social Security benefits to prisoners is constitutional. Robert Butler is a 77 year old Nevada state prisoner. Butler was granted social security retirement benefits in 1983. He was later incarcerated and the Social Security Administration (SSA) determined he was not entitled to benefits while he was incarcerated pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 402(X). An administrative law judge affirmed the SSA’s decision. Butler filed suit in federal court and it was dismissed for failing to state a claim upon which relief could be granted. The court of appeals affirmed.The appeals court noted that every court to consider the constitutionality of 42 U.S.C. § 402(X), this includes the Second, Fourth, Eighth, Tenth and Eleventh circuits, had upheld the law. Congress has wide discretion in administering welfare resources. The court held that § 402(X)’s ban on social security benefits to prisoners does not violate constitutional guarantees to due process, equal protection and protection against ex post facto laws and bills of attainder. The court also held that Butler was provided with ample due process before his benefits were terminated because he participated in the SSA hearing by telephone. Since the statute leaves no room for agency discretion and the only fact issue was whether or not Butler was a felon doing time in prison, the telephone hearing was sufficient to safeguard Butler’s due process interest in his social security benefits. See: Butler v. Apfel , 144 F.3d 622 (9th Cir. 1998)

http://unsilentgeneration.com/

Posted by lois at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2009

Many states considering early release of prisoners

Many states considering early release of prisoners
By BRUCE RUSHTON
THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Jul 12, 2009

Experts agree: Freeing inmates early doesn’t necessarily increase crime rates, nor does it affect recidivism. It does save money.

As a result, as many as half the states in the union, including Illinois, are considering early release in some form, says James Austin, a prison consultant who started his corrections career nearly 40 years ago as a sociologist for the Illinois Department of Corrections.

“The research is completely clear: You can do this without increasing the recidivism rate or the crime rate,” Austin says. “It’s easy, it really is—it’s unbelievably easy. The politics get in the way of it. People just don’t understand the basic math here.”

Instead of razor wire and watchtowers, think of the prison system as a river, Austin says, with sentences acting as a dam. The longer the sentences, the higher the dam and the bigger the reservoir of inmates. Early release amounts to removing a chunk of the dam, which spells more work for downstream parole officers. But not for very long.

“Within three or four months, the flow is back to normal,” Austin says.

No new parole officers

In Illinois, where the state plans to lay off more than 1,000 prison employees, there are no plans to hire extra parole officers to deal with inmates who would be freed early. However, Derek Schnapp, corrections spokesman, said the state is considering terminating parole for some current parolees to make room for inmates released early.

It might sound like a recipe for a crime wave. But Austin and other experts agree that long sentences don’t add up to less crime.

“I don’t think there’s necessarily going to be more crime as a result of this,” says David Olson, a criminologist at Loyola University in Chicago. “It might be that there is an increase in crime in the short run, but in the long run, it’s not any different than what would have happened.”

In essence, it’s a question of timing, with the crime rate evening itself out. If 1,000 inmates are released early and half commit new crimes, which corresponds roughly to the recidivism rate in Illinois, there won’t be more crime in the long term because criminals who didn’t go straight after early release will be back in prison.

“He’s either going to make it or not,” says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project in Washington D.C., a prison reform group that has long argued that prison sentences in the United States are too long. “That 90 days (sentence reduction) is not going to have any effect on his prospects in the community.”

Gov. Pat Quinn can release inmates early who have less than a year to serve, and the state is compiling lists of low-level offenders for consideration. Those are the types who tend to be frequent fliers in the corrections system, Olson says.

Penny-ante criminals didn’t go to prison the first time they were caught breaking into cars or selling small amounts of drugs, Olson said. They’re in prison because they didn’t change their ways and the system ran out of options.

“Early release is the quick-and-dirty approach to remedy a problem that was caused by legislators, to give punishment they couldn’t afford,” Austin said. “The state legislature and policy people need to figure out how much punishment they can afford and then build their laws around that.”

Long-term fixes

Studies by the U.S. Department of Justice have found that sentence length has no bearing on recidivism rates. And a blue-ribbon commission appointed by Gov. Quinn last month recommended that the general assembly revamp the state’s sentence structure so that criminals convicted of drug and property crimes spend less time in prison.

Quinn’s Taxpayer Action Board reported that swelling prison populations between 1970, when the state’s crime rate was 468 incidents per 100,000 residents, and 2000, when the rate was 657 incidents per 100,000 people, have not reduced crime. During those three decades, the state’s population increased by 11 percent, but the number of inmates went up by more than 600 percent, the panel reported.

The state has an average of 4.37 employees for every inmate, the board found, and personnel expenses are what drives costs in penal systems. If the state, which now incarcerates 45,000 people and supervises 30,000 parolees, put 15,000 criminals on parole instead of behind bars, it could save as much as $26,000 per criminal each year, the board concluded.

The state also needs to change its parole system, the panel recommended. Beyond hiring more parole officers to keep track of more parolees, the state should expand electronic monitoring programs and work with private organizations to establish education and job programs, the board said.

“By enacting these changes, the state could potentially save hundreds of millions of dollars,” the board concluded.

Such proposals are nothing new for prison reformers.

“If you’re not hurting people, we can treat you in the community,” says Charles Fasano, director of the prisons and jails program at the John Howard Association of Illinois, which recommends reducing inmate population to the point that the state can start closing prisons.

Fasano said sentencing laws should be changed so that minor drug possession can be handled via probation.

“They’re still feeding huge numbers into the system,” Fasano said. “Most of them just go in and do their little time. And because we haven’t treated them, they come out just as goofy as when they went in.”
___

http://www.galesburg.com/news/news_state/x631624649/Many-states-considering-
early-release-of-prisoners

Posted by lois at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)

IL: Joliet takes first steps to rehabilitate prison as a park

Tourist trap? Joliet takes first steps to rehabilitate prison as a park

By Steve Schmadeke | Tribune reporter
July 18, 2009

For more than a century, the Joliet Correctional Center was known as one of the nation's toughest prisons, a place where two inmates were squeezed into 4-foot-wide cells, where tuberculosis deaths were not uncommon and where prisoners made do with slop buckets until indoor plumbing arrived in the late 1940s.

Locals recall locking their doors as they drove down Collins Street past the 25-foot-tall limestone walls surrounded by barbed wire. The prison closed in 2002, but lifelong Joliet resident Martha Miller, 41, vividly remembers her parents keeping her in line with the phrase, "There's plenty of space left at Collins Street."

"It was that scary place your parents always frightened you with," she said.

Now city officials want the prison to star in an entirely different role. Instead of stockades and back-breaking labor, think iPod-carrying tourists listening to audio tours, former guards leading school outings and "interactive" exhibits. They're promoting the effort with signs such as "Visit Joliet. Stay for Ten to Twenty" and encouraging people to come have their picture taken outside the prison where part of the movie "Natural Born Killers" was shot.

"This could be Joliet's Disney World," said Rebecca Barker, a city marketing manager, outside the prison Friday. "We want to embrace the fact that it's in Joliet. It's something to be proud of; it put a lot of people here through college."

The first step begins Saturday when the city officially opens Joliet Prison Park -- an asphalt parking lot just south of the prison filled with four large signs explaining its history and four detailing Joliet's amenities.

Barker said the city has drawn a line: None of the displays includes information on infamous inmates or their crimes. "We're not promoting crime," she said. "And we don't know if children will be reading these."

Miller was an early visitor Friday, repeatedly explaining to her 9-year-old daughter that they couldn't go inside the prison. But they will return Saturday so her daughter can get her "mug shot" taken and hear a Blues Brothers cover band (part of the movie was filmed there).

Barker said a task force is working with a consultant to figure out if it's possible to open part of the prison, still owned by the state, to tourists and create a museum. A key factor will be cost -- the park alone cost nearly $100,000, funded by the city and a tourism grant -- and officials stressed that it may prove impossible to reopen the prison as a tourist attraction.

Either way, residents and officials said the move may help outsiders realize that Joliet is no longer a prison town -- though it does house the Will County Jail.

"I put a lot of people in that prison," said Mayor Art Schultz, a former Joliet police detective sergeant. "This city has improved so much since. We just had a big NASCAR race last week, we have a minor-league ball club -- we have everything you could want."

Joliet won't be the first city to try to turn an old prison into an educational theme park. Alcatraz is the best-known example, but Dubuque, Iowa -- like Joliet a river town located off Interstate Highway 80 that offers casino gambling -- may provide the best comparison.

The Dubuque historical society's Old Jail Museum charges adults $5 to view the original cells, examine historical exhibits about the town and view a "sound and light show" about the hanging of a man accused of killing his mining partner, said curator Tacie Campbell.

Joliet's old prison has its share of stories, from the murder of a warden's wife to the 1932 hysteria that began when people reported hearing a singing ghost in the prison cemetery. Some 3,000 people gathered there after reports ran in a local paper, but heard nothing, according to a book by Robert Sterling. Officials later determined the singing had been done by a musical night watchman.

In its heyday the prison itself charged visitors 25 cents to tour, but the new Joliet Prison Park is free.

At Friday's farmers market in downtown Joliet, soapmaker and longtime resident Janet Erio thought the new park could help change the town's image.

"The reputation is that this is an economically depressed area with big-city crime, like a little Chicago, but it's not," she said. "It might help show we've moved past that."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-joliet-prison-park-18jul18,0,1444403.story

Posted by lois at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)

July 16, 2009

Unicor memo: Closing of Existing Factories

U.S. Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Prisons
Washington, DC 20534
July 15, 2009

MEMORANDUM FOR ALL UNICOR STAFF

FROM : Paul Laird, Assistant Director Education, and Vocational Training
SUBJECT : Factory Restructuring

Throughout this fiscal year, we have implemented a number of cost
containment initiatives to offset the ongoing losses we have been
experiencing. Year to date, the corporation has a net loss of
over $20 million, and we have had negative earnings for the last
seven months . While the cost reduction initiatives have been
helpful, they have not been sufficient to reverse the negative
earnings trend. Therefore, it is necessary to further reduce
operating expenses by downsizing and closing some existing
factories .

Yesterday, we initiated the closing of factories at USP Coleman I
& II, FCI Victorville II, USP Florence, FCI Talladega, FCI Big
Spring, FCI Williamsburg, and FCI Estill . We are also closing
operations in specialized units at FCI Sandstone, FCI Fairton,
FCI Otisville, FCI Marianna, FCI Phoenix, and FCC Allenwood. In
addition to these closings, we are also downsizing operations at
FCC Lompoc (Cable) ; FPC Alderson (Distribution) ; FCC Butner

(Filter) ; and USP Leavenworth (Distribution) .

These actions were necessary to reduce our excess production
capacity and staffing to a level consistent with the current and
forecasted business activity .

Some of the affected staff positions at the above locations are
or will soon be vacant . However, many are encumbered, and we
will need to vacate those positions as we did during previous
factory reorganizations. 

This was an extremely difficult decision because it affected a
number of dedicated FPI staff. However, it is critical that FPI
not incur costs that we have insufficient business to support .
These factory initiatives will reduce operating costs by nearly$16 million per year, although they will not take full effect
until late 2010 . These savings and other cost containment
initiatives will be critical for us in returning the corporation
to a profitable position in the future.

I understand this will be a very difficult and unsettling time .
We will do our best to keep you informed of any further
developments and progress . During this time, it is imperative
that we all do everything we can to reduce our costs and increase
our efficiency . We will also continue to aggressively pursue new
business opportunities and new product lines . Working together,
we can overcome the challenges ahead and ultimately establish new
lines of business in our impacted factories .

cc : Chief Executive Officers
FPI Board of Directors

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

July 14, 2009

America's Jail Crisis: Budget-strapped counties are being crushed by the costs of incarceration. But there are solutions.

America's Jail Crisis
Jesse Bogan, 07.13.09
Budget-strapped counties are being crushed by the costs of incarceration. But there are solutions.
Forbes.com
HOUSTON -- Out the 20th floor window of the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, the sprawl and elevation of buildings look like the campus of a law enforcement university, filling up the northeast corner of downtown. A juvenile justice center as big as a hospital. Two high-rise courthouses. An overrun booking tank. Beneath it all, tunnels run like veins through the complex, filled with inmates shuffling to hearings from the third biggest jail in America.

An average of 10,000 inmates were held per day in the Harris County Jail in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, not including an additional 1,100 bused six hours to and from northern Louisiana. With an average stay of 45 days in three drab detention facilities, the jail is consistently overcrowded.

"This really wasn't built for this," says John Dyess, chief administrative officer of the sheriff's office, which oversees the jail. "I don't know if we can build our way out of where we are today."

Money may decide the issue. A stunning 25% of Harris County's annual $1.5 billion budget goes to law enforcement, with more than $750,000 a day spent on detainees. A shortage of guards means the jail shells out $35 million a year on overtime; some guards are topping out at $100,000 a year in total pay.

Houston is far from alone. Amid budget crises, falling tax revenue and national unemployment approaching 10%, jails--usually city- or county-run holding facilities for those serving short sentences or awaiting trial--saw their populations grow nearly twice as fast as state and federal prison populations during the first half of the decade, according to a 2008 report by the Justice Policy Institute. The report says that local governments spent $97 billion on criminal justice in 2004, up 347% since 1982, while detention expenses climbed 519% to $19 billion.

Between 2006 and 2008, Harris County's jail population grew 21%, adding 1,900 more mouths to feed three times a day. In 2000, there were 621,149 people in America's local hoosegows; by midyear 2008 there were 26% more, or 785,556 inmates housed at an average 95% of rated capacity.

Los Angles County has the largest daily jail population, 19,836, twice as much as in Harris County, followed by New York City. Rounding out the rest of the 10 biggest jail jurisdictions are Cook County, Ill.; Maricopa County, Ariz.; Philadelphia; Miami-Dade County, Fla.; Dallas County, Texas; Orange County, Calif., and Shelby County, Tenn.

From behind the brick walls in Houston, doctors write $1 million in prescriptions a month; dentists pull 330 teeth. Women are lined up shoulder-to-shoulder to fold bright orange clothes that come out of a battery of dryers that can handle 170 pounds of laundry a load. Men prepare 35,000 meals a day and 13 million meals a year at an average of 88 cents a plastic tray. A recent day's potatoes were wheeled into the kitchen on a crate stacked seven rows high, past a guard and an inmate shouting at each other--apparently the golden rule of not getting within "sight and sound" of female inmates was broken. Tensions are high since a brawl a few days before.

The $200 million spent on detention a year "puts a strain on resources" for other programs, says Dyess. But counties are legally obligated to provide a safe place for inmates and guards. Harris County has failed several jail standard tests and was recently cited for excessive use of force, inmate deaths, and poor medical and mental care (the jail says it serves as the biggest mental health facility in Texas).

The National Association of Counties is calling on communities to invest more into pretrial services so that people charged with non-violent offenses who don't need to be confined can be quickly vetted for community programs and the mentally ill can be put under health care services or, if needed, placed in a secure health facility. In Harris County, for instance, some people are detained for speeding tickets, yet potentially could be among those who cost about $485 a day for a bed in a local hospital.

"Many people are in jail because they are too poor to post bail," says Donald Murray, senior legislative director for justice and public safety for the association. "If you have a first-class pretrial program, a county is often in a better position because they can carefully analyze the individual, can figure out better what needs to be done."

The Justice Policy Institute says eight out of 10 people in jail earned less than $2,000 a month before they were locked up. Nearly two-thirds of the people behind bars are waiting for trial, while the length of pretrial detention has increased. Meanwhile, between 1986 and 2005, violent crime arrests climbed 25%, while drug arrests jumped 150%, 82% of them in 2005 for possession (about half for marijuana). And an estimated six out of every 10 jail inmates have a mental disorder, compared to 1-in-10 in the general population.

A guard in the 225-bed psych ward here sits near a sign that illustrates how to cut away a noose. Beneath it, a safety knife is held in a container for emergencies. Deputy Simon Ramirez Jr., 54, talks about how he's evolved from relying on the use of force in his youth to a more cerebral approach, as he and other guards in the ward "compete with the voices" in inmate heads. Many of his clientèle are homeless and arrive on repeated criminal trespassing arrests.

"A lot of these people just have to be by themselves," Ramirez says. "Nobody wants to build a mental health hospital. They use jails to warehouse people who have mental health issues."

State prisons aren't faring much better, with corrections nationwide costing more than $50 billion a year, according to a March report by the Pew Center on the States, called "One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections." The title comes from the ratio of people under some form of correctional control in the U.S.

As states operate in a drastic budget climate, jails and prisons stand to face cutbacks, despite harsher sentencing guidelines passed in the 1980s and '90s that have glutted cellblocks. In 2008, the total jail and prison population reached 2.3 million, topping for the first time the ratio of one in every 100 adults. Meanwhile, in the past 25 years, the number of people on probation and parole has increased from 1.6 million to 5 million. Many are caught in a revolving door: 40% of probationers don't complete their obligation successfully and more than half the number of parolees land back in jail after three years of being released. Yet the cost differences in 2008 are clear: $78.95 a day for a prisoner compared to $3.42 for supervising a probationer.

After an "extraordinary" 25 years of prison growth, the Pew report says "we are well past the point of diminishing returns."

"Serious, chronic and violent offenders belong behind bars, for a long time, and the expense of locking them up is justified many times over. But for hundreds of thousands of lower-level inmates, incarceration costs taxpayers far more than it saves in prevented crime."

Some states are changing. Georgia, for instance, bolstered the authority of probation officers to impose administrative sanctions on violators in certain circumstances. The theory is that quicker punishment for those who break the rules of their release will cut down on the chances of more serious crimes that lead back to prison.

A pilot program of four Georgia courts has freed up probation officers to supervise more and spend less time waiting for a judge in court. It's also cut jail time for inmates waiting for a court appearance by more than 70%. Total savings? $1.1 million between 2006 and 2008. Harris County burns through that in two days, but it's a start. The program became available statewide July 1.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/10/jails-houston-recession-business-beltway-jails.html

Posted by lois at 09:50 PM | Comments (0)

Brief Review in Rethinking Schools: *The Real Cost of Prisons Comix

*The Real Cost of Prisons Comix
Edited by Lois Ahrens
Comix by Kevin Pyle, Sabrina Jones and Susan Willmarth
(PM Press, 2008)
$12.95, unpaginated

Between the 1920s and 1960s, about one out of every one thousand people in the United States were incarcerated. By 2000, about five out of every thousand people were incarcerated. With compassion, insight, plain language, and compelling images, The Real Cost of Prisons peels back this startling statistic to explore the human stories it hides. Student-friendly comic chapters examine prison towns; the so-called "war on drugs" and prisoners; and women prisoners and children. The U.S. prison-industrial complex deserves a bigger place in the curriculum. This slim volume is an excellent start.
Rethinking Schools. Volume 23 No. 2 - Winter 2008/2009 > Resources

Posted by lois at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

WA: DOC receives $185 in Federal Stimulus Funds

STATE OF WASHINGTON
DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 13, 2009

DOC to Receive Nearly $185 Million in Federal Stimulus Funds
OLYMPIA – The Department of Corrections will receive nearly $185 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to support public safety programs in Washington and protect thousands of jobs.

“We are in the process of reconciling our program operations with the projected state budget deficit that was brought about by the current economic recession,” said DOC Secretary Eldon Vail. “These funds will help to lessen the severity of the service delivery and workforce reductions we have to make to manage the agency within our appropriated budget.”

DOC will receive more than $182 million from the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund which Congress designed to prevent reductions in critical government services. The State Fiscal Stabilization Fund money will help pay for custody staff positions in prisons.

“As promised, the Obama Administration has delivered for Washington State,” Governor Chris Gregoire said. “This federal funding is doing exactly what the Obama Administration requires it to do – it’s protecting our communities, supports critical rehabilitation programs and saves jobs.”

An additional award of nearly $2 million is a Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) from the U.S. Department of Justice. The JAG will pay for prison positions responsible for investigating and monitoring gang activity, collaborating with law enforcement on gang-threat mitigation, and advising the agency on how to deal with gang issues. A portion of the money will pay for custody officer positions in prisons that have gang activity.

The JAG will also fund community-based and prison-based inpatient and outpatient chemical dependency treatment programs, including the Therapeutic Community program at Airway Heights Corrections Center located near Spokane.

DOC will receive the funds between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010.

-30-

Posted by lois at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2009

NV: Mental Illness Keeps Many Clycling Through Jail

Illness keeps many on cycle through jail
Committing crimes gets them treatment which ends with their release

By Timothy Pratt

Sunday, July 12, 2009 | 2 a.m.
CASE STUDIES: HIGH COSTS, POOR OUTCOMES

If Nevada was willing to invest in providing more psychiatric care outside of jail, not only would it do more to help the mentally ill, it would also cost taxpayers less than arresting and incarcerating the mentally ill, experts say.

Consider the jail and medication costs for the following three mentally ill inmates — and this does not take into account the additional court costs and other bills.

Dr. Keith Courtney, chief psychiatrist at Clark County Detention Center, withheld the inmates’ names to comply with patient privacy laws.

Inmate No. 1 suffers from autism and occasional psychotic episodes. When he’s out on the street, he gets in fights, takes drugs, attempts robbery, winds up at the detention center. He has been in jail 539 days since 2006. That means taxpayers have spent about $123,000 on keeping him jailed and medicated.

Inmate No. 2 is a 20-year-old man who has spent at least 520 days behind bars, mainly for armed robberies, since coming of age two years ago. The system has spent more than $120,000 in incarceration and psychotropic medication costs, Courtney says. The young man also winds up in the hospital after suicide attempts, which costs taxpayers even more. He was raped at 15 and now hurts himself repeatedly in the same part of his body.

Inmate No. 3 is a 32-year-old woman whose 441 days behind bars cost an estimated $100,000-plus. She is a victim of severe abuse and suffers from borderline personality disorder, often attempting suicide, Courtney says. She only takes her prescribed medication when she is jailed, preferring methamphetamine when she is not. She is often arrested for prostitution, sometimes burglary.

“She’s never here long enough to get adequate care,” Courtney says. She needs a safe house, treatment for drug abuse, ongoing intensive therapy. There is no one place where she can get all that. “I fully expect her to die soon,” the doctor says with resignation.

------------------------
Here he comes again, his hands covered in heavy black mittens, his head stuffed into a net that makes him look like a beekeeper, his legs and wrists closed in shackles.

Clark County Detention Center officers dress him this way because he has been known to spit, throw punches and kick.

The inmate shuffles through a sliding door, a large officer follows and, nearby, other members of the jail staff step back, as if sensing danger. The inmate, seemingly unaware, tells the officer, “I don’t want a plane crashing into me, you know.” The detention officer nods and nudges him toward an isolation cell, where the inmate will have to remove his clothes. He will be left with what’s known as a suicide blanket, which can’t be torn apart and used as a noose.

He is not yet 20, but he has been in jail three times, for 71 days, since coming of age last year.

The detention center’s chief psychiatrist, Keith Courtney, says the young man has what’s known as reactive attachment disorder. Those who suffer from the condition have trouble relating to others. It’s often a sign of early abuse.

The inmate who was moved into the isolation room doesn’t take medication for his condition when he is on the streets, but he does take illegal drugs. Then he gets in trouble and is locked up, mostly for crimes such as burglary, attempted robbery with a deadly weapon. In jail, he throws feces, attacks the staff. So he goes to one of the isolation rooms, for inmates who are a danger to themselves or others.

On a recent morning, the 19-year-old was one of 621 inmates at the detention center — of 3,066 total — diagnosed as mentally ill and prescribed psychotropic medications. That’s one in five. On some days, the ratio is closer to one in four.

By way of comparison, the state’s Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas has space for 204 patients.

So the jail, Courtney notes, is “the largest mental health facility in Southern Nevada.”

It is also the most expensive and least effective. Providing mental health care is not the purpose of a jail, after all.

The last hope for help

Nevada has always lagged other states in numbers of public psychiatric hospitals and clinics. But private hospitals in the Las Vegas Valley began closing their psychiatric wings in the 1980s. Jails have become the last hope for help, leading to a cycle of futility.

Psychologically troubled people who commit crimes are brought to the jail, where they are held, evaluated and medicated — and eventually returned to the streets, where they either stop taking the drugs that eased their troubles in jail or lose access to those drugs. Ongoing, intensive therapy is even more scarce. Their minds unravel again, they commit new crimes, go back to jail and the cycle continues.

The word for a system like this is “crazy.”

To be sure, Nevada is not alone in experiencing this problem. Most states closed public mental hospitals in recent decades, leaving many mentally ill patients to fend for themselves. The valley had none to close when this was happening, but the same thing occurred with private hospitals. Many states, however, have taken steps to break the cycle of crime, jail, treatment and release. Nevada has not.

The county spends $4 million a year on psychiatric treatment at the jail. It costs taxpayers $142 a day to keep an inmate at the jail and $85 on average to medicate each one diagnosed as mentally ill.

The inmate in the isolation room, for example, has cost the system at least $32,000 in the past year alone, which easily could have paid for his psychiatric care outside of prison.

Other costs, such as the cost society pays for their crimes, are harder to figure.

For many of the mentally ill behind bars, the doctor says, “there is a significant connection between their mental illness and their crimes.”

Courtney says most of the inmates with mental illnesses aren’t locked up long enough to get adequate care. And there is almost nowhere to send them outside the detention center’s walls. So their conditions will likely lead them to commit more crimes and be arrested again and again.

The result: Nevada taxpayers spend untold millions on incarcerating and temporarily caring for the mentally ill, the public suffers their crimes, and the mentally ill suffer their conditions, their lives becoming one long sentence in a prison of the mind.

Courtney points out that only four members of his staff of 13 can prescribe medications, a difficult situation when they are faced with hundreds of inmates. He notes that the most severely mentally ill among the prison’s population are “some of the sickest people in the city.” They are bipolar, schizophrenic, paranoid, delusional. In the absence of adequate care, many medicate themselves on the streets with drugs such as methamphetamine, or cocaine.

A rare case of success

Down a series of halls, in an auditorium-sized open room, some inmates shuffle around the 74 cots lined in rows. Others sit at a table playing cards or pop in and out of an adjacent room with a basketball hoop. About 20 of the 74 men who sleep in this unit are on psychotropic medications.

Down more halls, around more corners, another unit has separate cells with doors, a sign that the inmates housed there have more severe mental illnesses. A young, bearded inmate stands outside his cell, hand outstretched. He is in jail because, in a psychotic rage, he attacked a member of his family with a knife. “I thought people were trying to kill me,” he explains, slumping into a chair, his hands held together.

The soft-spoken inmate’s case appears to be the rare example of a mentally ill person’s life taking a turn for the better inside the system. Courtney has landed him one of the few spots in the Eighth District’s Mental Health Court, a program to substitute treatment for incarceration. The road that led to the mental health court, however, is typical of the path many have taken, slipping in and out of treatment, in and out of drugs, increasingly violent. Now barely out of his teens, the inmate took LSD when he was 17 and began hearing voices shortly afterward. He wound up at Monte Vista, a private psychiatric hospital, where he was an inpatient for a week and an outpatient for a month. But the medication that doctors prescribed knocked him out. He stopped taking it. He took cocaine instead. The voices got worse. He went back to a psychiatrist. But after one visit, he was at home and the voices started up again.

“I thought that what I was thinking was real,” he says calmly. Now, after a year behind bars, he says, “I didn’t get help until I got here.” The doctors at the jail worked through two prescriptions until they found a third medication that finally helped stabilize his mind.

And just as important, Courtney worked to develop a relationship with the young man. Recently, the inmate spoke to his mother for the first time since he was arrested.

Courtney hopes that when the young man gets out of jail, he gets into a Salvation Army-run program that includes group therapy. He has plans to attend college.

The inmate says he is certain of one thing. “I’m going to have to take medication for the rest of my life. If I don’t, it all comes slowly back.”

He says he wishes it was easier for people like him to get help, to know when something is really wrong.

Courtney says his case is an example of “when the system works right, when someone who’s mentally ill can be diverted to care in the community. But in my mind, he’s the minority.” Especially, he notes, because the Mental Health Court only has 75 slots.

A need for prevention

Metro Police Lt. Frank Reagan works at the detention center and serves as chairman of a coalition of mental health professionals that recently regrouped after several years of not meeting. At the beginning of its first meeting last month, Reagan urged the coalition to seek solutions to the large number of mentally ill inmates.

Reagan adds that public mental health care — the only choice for most inmates when they’re released because they lack health insurance — is often placed on the chopping block when states suffer budget crises — and based on what he sees at the jail, that’s a major mistake.

“We need to have preventive care, to maintain the mentally ill population as stable when they’re out of custody,” he says.

Stuart J. Ghertner, outpatient services agency director at Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services, says the state agency’s budget has been cut 15 percent this year. He points out that there tends to be two broad categories of people who wind up in jail instead of in treatment, and neither can find adequate care in the state system or the community at large.

One group usually has less severe conditions, such as depression, is often homeless and winds up arrested for such misdemeanors as trespassing or urinating in public.

Courtney had just seen a 70-year-old homeless man on the morning the Sun was allowed into the jail. The elderly man repeatedly gets arrested for such petty crimes and has nowhere to get treatment once he is released.

Ghertner’s other group winds up in the same unit as the inmate who attacked a member of his family, or in one of the isolation rooms. They suffer more severe mental illnesses and commit more severe crimes. Of course, the notion is a moving target, and the same person can belong to each group at different times.

But the point is the same, Ghertner says: The Las Vegas Valley doesn’t have enough hospital beds for the mentally ill, and the outpatient system is imperfect at best. Of the 8,000 outpatient clients the state sees at its four clinics, about 15 percent are homeless, he says.

“They lose contact with what care and services are available. These folks don’t always make appointments.” Then they “get in trouble on the streets” and wind up back in jail.

The more severely mentally ill with histories of violence also lack options. Many of them are also addicted to drugs or alcohol, “co-occurring disorders.” The state recently contracted with a private firm to open the first facility for treating the two problems together, but it has only 10 slots.

Rosanna Esposito, interim executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, an Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit organization, said one key way Nevada lags most of the nation is that it has yet to pass a law that would allow family or doctors to petition a special court to mandate outpatient treatment for mentally ill people with a history of avoiding treatment. The idea is to have a way to force people into treatment before they commit crimes or hurt themselves or others. Variations on this have become law in 43 states, and those laws have helped get people off the justice system treadmill and into clinics.

Many states passed their laws at least a decade ago, so Nevada “is far behind the curve,” Esposito says.

Lesley R. Dickson, past president and current treasurer of the Nevada Psychiatric Association, points to another ignominy: Nevada has 6.2 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, a rate that places the state 46th in the nation, the governor’s task force on health noted earlier this year.

So the state starts at a disadvantage because “we have nowhere near enough care,” Dickson says.

Whether it is through funding more hospitals, clinics or psychiatrists, making better use of existing services, or passing laws that mandate care, a consensus is building that communities must seek alternatives to incarcerating the mentally ill. The June issue of Psychiatric Services magazine focused on the issue and concluded, “jailing is failing people with mental illness.”

Ghertner belongs to the same local coalition as Reagan, but he is skeptical about the group having enough clout to effect the necessary budgetary or legislative change in Nevada.

“The movers and shakers need to get organized ... and sit down and do some long-range planning,” he says.

Esposito is sharper-edged. “We know that treatment works,” she says. “It’s only because of a lack of will and due to bad policy that the treatment isn’t available.”

http://lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jul/12/illness-keeps-many-cycle-through-jail/

Posted by lois at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2009

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Eric Holder at the Vera Institute of Justice’s Third Annual Justice Address

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Eric Holder at the Vera Institute of Justice’s Third Annual Justice Address
Thursday, July 9, 2009

Laurie, thank you for that wonderful introduction. When I asked Laurie to come back to the Justice Department to lead our Office of Justice Programs, I was keenly aware of how much she would have to give up to join us. Not only did she take leave from the University of Pennsylvania, but she also had to give up her Chair of Vera’s Board of Trustees. I know that the polite thing to do would be to apologize for taking her from you – but the truth is, your loss is our gain. We hope that Laurie stays at the Department for a long time.

It is a privilege to join you this evening as your keynote speaker. Your past speakers have been Nicholas Katzenbach and James Comey, who reflected on the law after their government service. Perhaps one day I might have that kind of conversation with you as a former Attorney General. For now, I stand before you in a different posture, to share some ideas about how I think the American people can best be served by the Department of Justice going forward.

The Vera Institute of Justice has been an extraordinary partner to government in the administration of justice. I thank you in particular for your work with the federal government across a range of issues – from your contributions to the national commission to eliminate prison rape to the administration of Legal Orientation Programs for non-citizens in immigration proceedings. Your practical, rational, data-driven, results-oriented approach can best be described as post-partisan. In the five months that I have served as Attorney General, I have tried to take that same approach, and that is what I would like to talk about this evening: how we can move past politics and ideology in order to get smart on crime.

Getting smart on crime requires talking honestly about which policies have worked and which have not, without fear of being labeled as too hard or, more likely, as too soft on crime. Getting smart on crime means moving beyond useless labels and instead embracing science and data, and relying on them to shape policy. And it means thinking about crime in context – not just reacting to the criminal act, but developing the government’s ability to enhance public safety before the crime is committed and after the former offender is returned to society.

It is imperative that we get smart on crime now, for much has changed since some of our basic, governing assumptions about criminal law enforcement were developed. In the middle years of the twentieth century, America went through an historic increase in crime and illegal drug use. In the 1960s and 70s, the overall crime rate increased more than five-fold. Violent crime nearly quadrupled. The murder rate doubled. And heroin, cocaine and other illegal drug use surged.

Many lawmakers in the 1980s responded by declaring, in rhetoric and in legislation, that we needed to get tough on crime. States passed truth-in-sentencing and three strikes and you’re out laws. Some state parole boards became more cautious, while other states eliminated discretionary parole altogether. The federal government adopted severe mandatory minimum sentencing laws, eliminated parole, and developed the federal sentencing guidelines.

The federal government and states spent billions of dollars in new prison construction. The result was dramatic: the number of inmates in American prisons has increased seven-fold since 1970. Today, one out of every 100 adults in America is incarcerated – the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Few would dispute that public safety requires incarceration, and that imprisonment is at least partially responsible for the dramatic drop in crime rates nationwide in recent decades. By 2007, the nation’s violent crime rate had dropped by almost 40% from its peak in 1991. But just as everyone should concede that incarceration is part of the answer, everyone should also concede that it is not the whole answer. Simply stated, imprisonment is not a complete strategy for criminal law enforcement.

To begin with, high rates of incarceration have tremendous social costs. And, of course, there also is the matter of simple dollars and cents, and the principle of diminishing marginal returns. Every state in the union is trying to trim budgets. States and localities are laying off teachers and canceling sanitation department shifts, but in almost all cases, spending on prisons continues to increase. Not only is this unsustainable economically, but it is also not proving to be effective at fighting crime. For while prison building and prison spending continue to increase, public safety is not improving. Since 2003, spending on incarceration has continued to rise, but crime rates have flattened. Indeed, crime rates appear to have reached a plateau, and no longer respond to increases in incarceration.

So what can we do to lower the crime rate further, to make American communities safer, to get smarter on crime? We need new tools – and one way to develop new tools is to look several steps past getting people into prison, and to consider what happens to people after they leave prison and reenter society.

We know that offenders who have participated in the federal Bureau of Prisons’ residential drug abuse treatment program are 16% less likely to be re-arrested, have their supervision revoked, and be returned to prison, than similar inmates who did not receive such treatment before their reentry into society. They are also less likely to use drugs once released. We also know that inmates who work in prison industries are 24% less likely to commit crimes again, compared to inmates who have not participated in such programs – which, incidentally, operate at no cost to the taxpayer. The Bureau of Prisons’ educational programs designed to address educational deficiencies – ranging from Adult Basic Education to high school level classes – are also effective in reducing recidivism: inmates who participate in these programs are 16% less likely to commit crime again as compared to their non-participating peers. And inmates who are released through halfway houses are more likely to be gainfully employed, and therefore less likely to commit crime again, as compared to inmates who are released from prison directly to the community.

That recitation of statistics might not sound exciting, but what we do with it is. We rely upon evidence-based methods to innovate in agriculture, transportation, environmental safety, and public health – and it is my belief, that the Department of Justice likewise should embrace modern, evidence-based methods for developing policy.

In particular, it is critical that we work to develop policies – rooted in data – to address what happens after incarceration. For the statistics I cited are even more compelling when coupled with another fact: most crimes in America are committed by persons who have committed crime before. About 67% of former state prisoners and 40% of former federal prisoners are rearrested within three years. Logically, if we reduce the recidivism rate, we will directly lower the crime rate. Even a modest reduction in recidivism rates would prevent thousands of crimes and save hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. In other words, being smart on crime means understanding that our work does not end when prison time begins.

Smart risk assessments can identify which offenders can safely remain in their communities and which require continued detention and more intensive supervision. Data analysis can determine which offenders pose a higher recidivism risk based on the type of crime the offender was charged with and the offender’s prior record. For example, risk assessments might determine that removing a 16-year-old, non-violent, first-time offender from his family and school and placing him in a juvenile detention facility is a bad idea because it would actually increase the risk of recidivism, and waste taxpayer dollars besides.

One specific area where I think we can do a much better job by looking beyond incarceration is in the way we deal with non-violent drug offenses. We know that people convicted of drug possession or the sales of small amounts of drugs comprise a significant portion of the prison population. Indeed, in my thirty years in law enforcement, I have seen far too many young people lose their claim to a future by committing non-violent drug crimes.

One promising, viable solution to the devastating effect of drugs on the criminal justice system and on American communities is the implementation of more drug treatment courts. Drug court programs provide an alternative to incarceration for non-violent offenders by focusing on treatment of their underlying addiction. Program participants are placed in treatment and routinely tested for drug use – with the imposition of immediate sanctions for positive tests balanced with suitable incentives to encourage abstinence from drug use. These programs give no one a free pass. They are strict and can be extraordinarily difficult to get through. But for those who succeed, there is the real prospect of a productive future.

New York has been a leader in this area, diverting some non-violent offenders into drug court programs and away from prison, and extending early release to other non-violent offenders who participate in treatment programs. And while national prison populations have consistently increased, in New York the state prison population has dropped steadily and has 12,000 fewer inmates now than it did in 1999. And since 1999, the overall crime rate in New York has dropped 27%. Other states have followed New York’s example. And most importantly, studies show significant reductions in re-arrests, from about 15 to 30 percentage points, for drug-court participants as compared to criminals simply incarcerated.

Furthermore, smart criminal justice policies are not, of course, exclusively reactive – we can also use data and evidence-based methods to prevent crime before it occurs. We have models, for example, in New York’s CompStat program: it uses data to map where crime is most likely to occur, deploy police to those areas to disrupt criminal activity, and evaluate the effectiveness of the enforcement strategies. We can also extrapolate from available data to identify youth that are highly at-risk to commit crimes in the future. For example, it seems that children who are exposed to domestic violence at home are more at-risk. Once we have identified at-risk youth, we can intervene with targeted programs, and I have asked the Department to make a priority of focusing on the issue of children exposed to violence. There is much work to be done in this area, but the underlying premise is already clear: we need to understand crime in context in order to prevent it – and with better understanding and more information, we can develop new approaches to old and seemingly intractable problems.

Although this Administration is still young, we have already started to put into practice what I believe is a data-driven, non-ideological, post-partisan approach to crime. For example, I have asked attorneys throughout the Department to conduct a comprehensive, evidence-based review of federal sentencing and corrections policy. Specifically, the group is examining the federal sentencing guidelines, the Department’s charging and sentencing advocacy practices, mandatory minimums, crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparities, and other racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing. The group is also studying alternatives to incarceration and strategies that help reduce recidivism when former offenders reenter society. We intend to use the group’s findings as a springboard for recommending new legislation that will reform the structure of federal sentencing.

I have also called upon the Department to focus on another part of the criminal justice system: the very difficult issue of indigent defense. Putting politics aside, we must address the fact that, simply put, there is a crisis in indigent defense in this country. Resources for public defender programs lag far behind other justice system programs, constituting only about 3 percent of all criminal justice expenditures in our nation’s largest counties. In many cases, contract attorneys and assigned lawyers receive compensation that does not even cover their overhead. We know that defenders in many jurisdictions carry huge caseloads that make it difficult for them to fulfill their legal and ethical responsibilities to their clients. We hear of lawyers who cannot interview their clients properly, file appropriate motions, conduct fact investigations, or do many of the other things an attorney should be able to do as a matter of course.

This growing crisis is troubling not just because of the government’s constitutional duty to ensure the right to counsel. When defendants fail to receive competent legal representation, their cases are vulnerable to costly mistakes that can take a long time to correct. Lawyers on both sides can spend years dealing with appeals arising from technical infractions and procedural errors. When that happens, no one wins. Addressing the American Council of Chief Defenders last month, I committed to several steps to help improve the indigent defense system, including hosting a national conference with the goal of developing a set of best practices and practical solutions.

I have also made it clear that this Department of Justice will use the available data to improve our handling of the forensics sciences – such as fingerprints, trace evidence, firearms matching. We are studying a recent report from the National Academies of Science that diagnosed problems in the use of forensics sciences and suggested ways forward, and we are working with our partners in the Executive Branch and Congress to act on the report’s insights and recommendations. Our goal is to ensure that forensic science is practiced at the highest level possible, and always in the pursuit of truth. Because we put a premium on truth-seeking – because, indeed, this Administration is committed to using the best science possible whenever possible, including in criminal justice – I also believe that defendants should have access to DNA evidence in a range of circumstances. DNA testing has an unparalleled ability to exonerate the wrongfully convicted as well as to identify the guilty. Federal law already guarantees access to DNA evidence held by the federal government under specific conditions, and I hope that all states will follow the federal government’s lead on this issue.

Many of the things I have mentioned in these remarks are still in early stages or under review. There are numerous areas I have not even mentioned – for example, the prevention and detection of economic crimes and on-line crimes – where we can similarly get smarter with a research-driven approach. I am already certain, however, that change is both necessary and it is possible – if we are willing to make it. Challenges have changed with time: Prison populations are at an all-time high and still climbing, yet the crime rate is no longer declining. States are in serious financial distress. But opportunities have changed too. We are able to compare the cost and suitability of different criminal justice strategies. We no longer must choose between more crime and more prisons: we can reduce crime rates and reduce our dependence on incarceration, and at the same time increase the integrity of our criminal justice system. We can harness science and data to tackle emerging problems and also to preserve our foundational principles. The more we know, the better we can do, the more sophisticated we can be. With the help of the scholars and experts in this room, state and local law enforcement, corrections officials across the country, judges, victims of crime, and always with the fine work of attorneys at the Department of Justice, there is no question that a smarter and better criminal justice system is within our grasp.

Thank you very much.

Posted by lois at 07:15 PM | Comments (0)

July 10, 2009

Review of The Real Cost of Prisons Comix in Feminist Review

Thursday, July 9, 2009
The Real Cost of Prisons Comix
Edited by Lois Ahrens
PM Press

As activists know all too well, crafting a political message and effectively mobilizing an audience is an elusive task. In The Real Cost Of Prisons, Lois Ahrens and her contributors beautifully stage a difficult dialogue—about mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, and the “war on drugs”—with comics. Comics are an accessible, popular form of education, and most importantly, addictive, and hence become a subversive way to raise awareness. The Real Cost of Prisons Project has distributed 115,000 comics to the incarcerated, affected families, and social justice organizations free of charge. Comics are just one part of the organization’s mission to end mass incarceration; since Lois Ahrens founded organization in 2000 a coalition of artists, activists, and researchers has produced and distributed educational materials about the costs—material and affective—of the prison industrial complex and it’s devastating impact on family preservation, women’s reproductive rights, rural economies, and much more.

“What does it cost to lock up 2.3 million people each day in the world’s biggest prison system?” ask Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore in the introduction to The Real Cost Of Prisons. In addition to the staggering economic costs (the U.S. spends $60 billion per year on prisons) that could otherwise be directed at health care, public education, and other social services, the human costs are immeasurable. In the comic “Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children,” illustrated by Susan Willmarth, we learn about the cost of incarceration for women and their children:

*One out of every 109 women in American is incarcerated, on parole, or on probation.
*Half of all women in prison are incarcerated more than 100 miles from their families.
*Seven million children have a parent in prison, on probation, or on parole.
*Seventy-nine percent of all women in New York State’s prisons are Black or Hispanic.

The Real Cost Of Prisons documents the vital efforts of the movement to end mass incarceration, and is an exceptional resource for all activists seeking creative ways to build and sustain a political movement.

Review by Jeanne Vaccaro

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

July 06, 2009

Jim Webb’s attack on American Gulag

Jim Webb’s attack on American Gulag
By Alexander Cockburn
Published: Monday, July 6, 2009

Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia introduced his bill to set up a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission. "We find ourselves as a nation," Webb declared, "in the midst of a profound, deeply corrosive crisis," vis., "the national disgrace of our present criminal justice system" and "the disintegration of this system, day by day and year by year." This "is dramatically affecting millions of lives, draining billions of dollars from our economy, destroying notions of neighborhood and family in hundreds of communities across the country, and — most importantly — it is not making our country a safer or a fairer place."

True words.

The goal of Webb's legislation? To establish a national commission to examine and reshape America's entire criminal justice system, the first such effort in more than 40 years. Its aims as outlined by Webb are to refocus incarceration policies on criminal activities that threaten public safety; to lower the incarceration rate; to decrease prison violence; to improve prison administration; to establish meaningful re-entry programs for former offenders; to reform drug laws; to improve treatment of the mentally ill; and to improve responses to international and domestic criminal activity by gangs and cartels.

Webb compared the implications of his bleak data to the financial meltdown that has already eaten a trillion dollars of public funds and the "War on Terror" that has eaten another trillion, plus tens of thousands of lives.

America has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's known prison population; 7.3 million incarcerated, on probation or on parole; 2.38 million are in prison — five times the world's average rate. Imprisoned drug offenders are up from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 by 2008, a significant percentage of them with no history of violence or high-level drug activity. There is extreme disproportion in the drug sentencing — blacks have roughly the same drug-use rate as whites but are seven times more likely to go to prison where there's hopeless overcrowding with all hope abandoned and extremely high recidivism rates. Four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals, roughly 350,000 compared to 80,000.

One very important omission from Webb's profile of crisis was the crisis in prison medical (non)care, now so dreadful in California as to be taken out of California hands and managed by a court-appointed federal judge. This is clearly a contentious issue since Jerry Brown plans to run for governor on a platform that denounces medical care for prisoners as a frivolous expense.

Gov. "Moonbeam" Brown has learned his lesson and become No-Nonsense Jerry, who rejects prison medicine as "holistic" silliness. Considering the ever-growing number of three-strike lifers vegetating in their own organic manure who have Alzheimer's and can't remember their names let alone their crimes, the cynicism of Jerry Brown — whose family has lived off the people in every possible "job" they could "run" for (after) for over 50 years — is unfathomable.

What hope of reform? For 30 years, the political economy of the American gulag has had irresistible allurements: the "tough on crime" Seal of Approval for political candidates from police chiefs, prison guard unions and the victims' lobby. What governor, given the fate of Dukakis of Massachusetts or Ryan of Illinois, dares to pardon or even parole? In my recollection, only Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas, released substantial numbers from prison.

"Reform of the justice system" is now on lips that would otherwise disdain those words because of economic crisis, which has enabled reform of New York's terrible Rockefeller drug laws: The prisons housing the swelling flood of convicts become the darling of upstate New York. What legislator would vote to kill all those rural jobs, however counterproductive? Before the fiscal meltdown, hardly any; since the fiscal meltdown, a solid majority. New York State cannot now afford the huge workfare program that developed in the upstate counties around Rockefeller's prison-packing program. The money just isn't there. So, soon thousands of those convicts who shouldn't have been there in the first place won't be there either.

Aside from the spur of fiscal crisis in every state, the only apparent opening political wedge discernible in Webb's opening statement is the issue of organized Mexican gangs that supposedly exist in "hundreds" of American cities. "There are an estimated 1 million gang members in the United States, many of them foreign-based," Webb declared. "Every American neighborhood is vulnerable. Gangs commit 80 percent of the crime in some locations. Mexican cartels, which are military-capable, have operations in 230-plus U.S. cities. U.S. gangs are involved in cross-border criminal activity, working in partnership with these cartels."

Yet the organized gangs of prison guards and cement contractors who control all the state legislatures are far more powerful.

Webb's stark recitation of the grim facts was all the more dramatic since it was devoid of editorial comment. It reminds one of Machiavelli's little theorem: the more difficult the diagnosis, the easier the cure; the easier the diagnosis, the harder the cure. When it is obvious to all, there is no cure.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.

http://www.atmoreadvance.com/articles/2009/07/06/opinion/columns/column2.txt

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

Prison Visits Go “Pay-Per-View”

July 6, 2009
Prison Visits Go “Pay-Per-View”

MIAMI (CBS/AP) There’s still no place like home, but for the prison population, "being there" on the Web is becoming the next best thing. And prison officials say "video-conference visitation" offers benefits for inmates, family, and friends.

Almost every Saturday at 9:30 a.m. Candace McCann, inmate No. 188342, sits down for a scheduled video conference with her daughter.

Seven-year-old Kashmir appears from McCann's aunt's home, three hours away. Sometimes Kashmir draws a picture. Other times she stands on a chair to model an outfit: jeans and a Hannah Montana T-shirt or new shoes. Lately she's been pressing her face close to the camera and opening her mouth, showing off lost teeth.

"I feel like I'm at home, kind of," said McCann, 24, in a video conference interview. "It's good to see that kind of stuff."

Home for McCann right now is a medium-security Indiana prison, where she is serving almost three years for theft and forgery. She has only seen her daughter in person three times in the last year.

But in February, the 1,200 inmates at the prison got the ability to video conference using ATM-like kiosks. Families and friends can talk from the comfort of a home office or an armchair. All they need is a webcam.

Other prisons around the country offer video visits, but families generally have to go to a site like a church to use it. At Indiana's Rockville Correctional Facility, however, once visitors are on an approved list, they can go online from home or elsewhere and schedule and pay for their own visits. Visits cost $12.50 for 30 minutes, less than the approximately $15 the prison charges for a 30-minute local call.

Only the Rockville facility is currently using the system, developed by a Florida company called JPay. But all 28,000 Indiana inmates are expected to have access to the system within the next four years. And all Kansas inmates — just under 9,000 of them — will be able to use it by next year. JPay covers the cost of the kiosks and their installation. The states pay nothing.

Prison officials say the virtual visits can be less expensive and less time-consuming for families than driving to a faraway prison.

McCann's mother, for example, underwent treatment for cancer and her aunt breathes with the assistance of oxygen.

McCann's aunt, Margaret Earlywine, 69, said visiting her niece in person requires packing four canisters of oxygen and can be stressful.

The prison benefits from increased contact, too.

"When they (prisoners) have that contact with the outside family they actually behave better here at the facility," said Richard Brown, Rockville's assistant superintendent.

And there's no chance inmates can get drugs or other contraband slipped to them.

Not everyone has behaved during the visits, however. In the past few months, a handful of inmates and family members have been banned from using the system for exposing themselves during a visit. The prison watches all the visits either live — like a security video — or later, when the system archives them. If there's a problem, JPay can ban a family member or an inmate from the visits, though after the first offense inmates can get the privilege back in six months.

The prison can block visits at times when inmates have to be at meals or in bed. Inmates get notified they have a visit when they log in to the JPay kiosk. The kiosk has a screen where they can see video, a video camera to record them, and a phone they pick up to listen to the other person. It also has a keypad and built-in mouse.

The same kiosk lets inmates send and receive e-mails, something a third of federal prisons also now offer, and doubles as an ATM machine to tell them how much money they have in their accounts for spending at the prison commissary. Many inmates log in daily, even if just for a minute or two. And at Rockville, which has about one kiosk for every 75 inmates, the wait to use one is rarely long.

Inmate Deborah Reagin, 48, said her video visits have given her a chance to feel like she's still nearby. Her daughters, Amber and Michelle, have taken her on video tours of their new homes, both purchased after she went to prison on a methamphetamine charge. Her 3-year-old grandson Khelin likes to dance for her to the song “I Like to Move It” from the movie “Madagascar.” And on Christmas, she watched him play with new toy trucks and bounce on a new trampoline.

"It makes my day a whole lot better to be able to see my family, to talk to them," Reagin said.

She even gets to see her rat terrier, Peaches, who is living with her daughter Michelle.

"Of course they don't allow dogs in this facility," Reagin said, "I would never get to see her if it weren't for these visits."

Even so, prison video conferencing has its limitations. Conjugal visits seem beyond the reach of the new technology.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/05/14/crimesider/entry5013295.shtml

Posted by lois at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)

Bus with NY prison visitors tips over, killing 1.

Bus with NY prison visitors tips over, killing 1.
7-4-09

LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. (AP) — A bus transporting visitors to upstate prisons rolled onto its side and plowed into a rock ledge on a highway in the Adirondack mountains early Sunday, killing a woman pinned underneath and hurting nine other people, authorities said.

Police were investigating what caused the 3:15 a.m. wreck on the Adirondack Northway in the town of Lake George, about 60 miles north of Albany.

The bus tipped onto its side, slid and veered into the rock a quarter-mile south of the highway's Exit 21, Queensbury fire Chief Joseph DuPrey told the Glens Falls Post-Star newspaper. The impact tore down at least 50 yards of guide rails and left the highway strewn with food wrappers and fliers about services for prisoners' families, the newspaper said.

Police identified the dead woman as Curtrice E. Gravitt, of New York City. Gravitt, 33, had head, neck and chest injuries, police said.

Three of the injured people were in fair condition at a hospital, while the rest were treated and released, hospital officials said.

The bus, operated by Angelic Tours and Shuttles Inc., of Fayetteville, N.C., was taking passengers to visit prisons in Ray Brook and Malone, state police said. Telephone message left at the company's New York City and Fayetteville offices requesting comment were not immediately returned Sunday.

The highway, part of Interstate 87 running from north of Albany to the Canadian-U.S. border, was closed for hours around where the crash happened.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ijlohAkWsKCtNov87LqLsah_qPKgD998JU8G0

Posted by lois at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)

July 05, 2009

NY Times: article on the effects of mass incarceration on the families of people who have been incarcerated

This is an extremely narrow view...still I thought you might want to read it and check out the graph. And, of course, comments can be made on the NY Times website and letters to the editor.
Lois

In Prisoners’ Wake, a Tide of Troubled Kids
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Published: July 4, 2009
NY Times
graph and other information at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/us/05prison.html?_r=1&ref=us

WASHINGTON — Herbert Rashad Scott, whose parents were in and out of prison throughout his childhood, vowed to break his family’s cycle of self-destruction.

The circumstances were not promising. Mr. Scott, 20, was awaiting sentencing for drug possession and robbery, but he was allowed supervised release from jail in May to attend a job preparation class — a chance to turn his life around. As he spoke, he wriggled his neck, trying to get used to the necktie required, and he tried to ignore the tracking device on his ankle.

“I had low self-esteem and depression,” Mr. Scott said of his teenage years. Now, his ex-girlfriend was pregnant, and he pondered his child’s prospects.

“I want to be there for this child, and I want the child to know that jail ain’t no place to be,” he said.

The chances of seeing a parent go to prison have never been greater, especially for poor black Americans, and new research is documenting the long-term harm to the children they leave behind. Recent studies indicate that having an incarcerated parent doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behavior, social isolation, depression and problems in school — all portending dimmer prospects in adulthood.

“Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who is studying what some now call the “incarceration generation.”

Incarceration rates in the United States have multiplied over the last three decades, in part because of stiffer sentencing rules. At any given moment, more than 1.5 million children have a parent, usually their father, in prison, according to federal data. But many more are affected over the course of childhood, especially if they are black, new studies show.

Among those born in 1990, one in four black children, compared with one in 25 white children, had a father in prison by age 14. Risk is concentrated among black children whose parents are high-school dropouts; half of those children had a father in prison, compared with one in 14 white children with dropout parents, according to a report by Dr. Wildeman recently published in the journal Demography.

For both blacks and whites, the chances of parental incarceration were far higher than they were for children born just 12 years earlier, in 1978.

Scholars agree that in some cases children may benefit from a parent’s forced removal, especially when a father is a sexual predator or violent at home. But more often, the harm outweighs any benefits, studies have found.

If a parent’s imprisonment deprives a struggling family of earnings or child support, the practical consequences can be fairly clear-cut. While poor urban children had a 3 percent chance of experiencing a period of homelessness over the previous year, those with an incarcerated parent had a 6 percent chance, one study found.

Quantifying other effects of parental incarceration, like aggressive behavior and depression, is more complex because many children of prisoners are already living in deprived and turbulent environments. But researchers using newly available surveys that follow families over time are starting to home in on the impact.

Among 5-year-old urban boys, 49 percent of those who had a father incarcerated within the previous 30 months exhibited physically aggressive behaviors like hitting others or destroying objects, compared with 38 percent of those in otherwise similar circumstances who did not have a father imprisoned, Dr. Wildeman found.

While most attention has been placed on physical aggression, a study by Sara Wakefield, a sociologist following children in Chicago, found that having a parent imprisoned was a mental-health tipping point for some. Thus, while 28 percent of the children in her study over all experienced feelings of social isolation, depression or anxiety at levels that would warrant clinical evaluation or treatment, about 35 percent of those who had an incarcerated parent did.

Such hidden issues can have lifelong consequences.

Terrisa Bryant, 20, who was in the same jobs class as Mr. Scott, with a group called Strive, said she grew up resenting her father’s absences, including his time spent in prison. With her mother working day and night to put food on the table, Ms. Bryant was the baby sitter for her younger siblings.

“I couldn’t go out,” Ms. Bryant said. “I felt isolated.”

Ms. Bryant said she thought her anger and isolation helped explain why she got pregnant at 14 and had to drop out of school to raise her child. Now, she hopes to get certified for a career in child care.

With financial woes now forcing many states to rethink the relentless expansion of prisons, “this intergenerational transfer of problems should be included as an additional cost of incarceration to society,” said Sarah S. McLanahan, a sociologist at Princeton University and director of a national survey of families that is providing data for many of the new studies.

Heather Mac Donald, a legal expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, agreed that everything possible should be done to help the children of people who were incarcerated. But Ms. Mac Donald said that it was hard to distinguish the effects of having a parent in prison from those of having a parent who is a criminal, and that any evaluation of tough sentencing policies, which she supports, had to weigh the benefits for the larger community. “A large portion of fathers were imprisoned on violence or drug-trafficking charges,” she said. “What would be the effects on other children in the neighborhood if those men are out there?”

Adam Gaines, 40, of Owings Mills, Md., has firsthand experience of watching his children flounder. He was freed last year after 13 and a half years in prison for robbery. Now, he is trying to be the father he never was to a son who dropped out of school in the 10th grade, another son who is just starting high school and a teenage daughter who had a baby and dropped out of school.

Mr. Gaines shook his heroin addiction after years in prison, has moved back in with his wife, Tasuha, and is studying to be a fitness teacher.

When his father was behind bars, said Mr. Gaines’s oldest child, Adam Jr., 19, “I didn’t have a role model, and I had to learn on the streets how to carry myself, what it meant to be a man.”

Mr. Scott, too, may not be around for his child. Despite his vow to break the cycle of failure and his job preparation class, he disappeared shortly after talking to a reporter in May, apparently to avoid a mandatory drug test, and did not report to his probation officer.

Mr. Scott was arrested on charges of absconding in the last week of May and is now in a Washington jail awaiting a sentence that could be three years or more — and making it more likely that his child, too, will join the incarceration generation.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 5, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.

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

June 25, 2009

FL: Powerful business lobby calls for a halt to prison construction & change in sentencing policies

Change sought in Florida prison system
A movement among powerful Florida leaders to overhaul the state's prison system is gaining steam as lawmakers grapple with shrinking resources.

BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER
Miami Herald
06.24.09

A call by Florida's most powerful business lobby to halt prison construction and reform the criminal justice system is gaining surprising traction among policymakers in the wake of a deepening budget crisis and growing evidence that building new prison beds will not reduce crime.

Four months after the head of Associated Industries of Florida stunned lawmakers with his plea to slow prison growth, a who's-who of business, religious and political leaders are asking Gov. Charlie Crist to consider alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders, particularly drug addicts.

Crist and state lawmakers this week received an ''open letter'' from opinion-makers calling for a ``bold and serious conversation about justice reform.''

The statement was signed by three former Florida attorneys general -- Jim Smith, Bob Butterworth and Richard Doran -- along with retired Department of Corrections secretary James McDonough and the heads of the Florida Association of Counties and the Florida Catholic Conference.

''At a time when Florida is in serious recession and facing a deep state budget crisis, the $2 billion-plus budget of the Florida Department of Corrections has grown larger; and without reform, that budget will continue to grow at a pace that crowds out other mission-critical state services such as education, human service needs, and environmental protection,'' the group wrote.

Calling itself the Coalition for Smart Justice, the group is asking state leaders to bolster education, drug and alcohol treatment and faith-based and character-building programs both within the state prison system and in community settings as an alternative to prison.

Coalition members also want Crist to ''immediately implement'' a bill passed by the Legislature in 2008 that created ''the much needed'' Correctional Policy Advisory Council to offer new directions for criminal justice administration.

Staying the course, coalition members wrote, will lead to ``too many non-violent individuals being incarcerated, too many prisons needing to be built at astounding public cost [and] too many young people moving from the juvenile justice system into the adult justice system.''

BREAKING CYCLE

At the root of the state's failures, the group says, is the unwillingness of lawmakers to invest in programs -- such as job training, education and substance-abuse treatment -- that can break the cycle of crime and reduce recidivism.

McDonough, the state's former drug czar and prisons chief, said Florida can avoid the need to build a new $100 million prison each year by spending one-fifth that amount on drug treatment. ''The math is irrefutable,'' McDonough said. ``That's $100 million right there that you don't have to spend immediately.''

Gretl Plessinger, DOC's spokeswoman, said the equation is far more complicated. Since the prison system runs on a five-year cycle based on ''strategic projections,'' the corrections agency cannot simply ``stop construction on a dime.''

''Several projects are nearing completion,'' Plessinger said. ``We've already spent money, and to stop construction now would cost taxpayers quite a lot of money.''

DOC Secretary Walter McNeil does not favor the early release of inmates, Plessinger said, but does agree with the coalition's goal of increased spending on drug treatment and other programs designed to aid offenders' safe return to their communities. Close to 90 percent of state inmates eventually are released, she said.

''Secretary McNeil knows inmates who receive basic education, job skills training and substance abuse treatment are less likely to commit another crime and return to prison,'' Plessinger said. ``Through re-entry [programs], we can reduce our recidivism rate which will increase public safety and lower our inmate population.''

Sterling Ivey, a Crist spokesman, declined to discuss the letter in depth. ''We have received the letter and we are currently reviewing the information,'' he said.

A driving force in the coalition is J. Allison DeFoor II, an admittedly unlikely prison reform activist as a former Monroe County sheriff, prosecutor, judge and reelection running mate for former Gov. Bob Martinez. Now an ordained Episcopal priest, the colorful politician tends a ministry at Wakulla Correctional Institution near Tallahassee.

Among DeFoor's gripes: though faith-based programs at Wakulla have reduced recidivism among inmates from 33 percent to just 7 percent, Florida's waiting list for such programs has grown to 10,000-strong. ''I've seen everything that doesn't work,'' he says. ``And I've seen what does work.''

''I can flatly tell you that 75 percent of the people in the system -- probably more than that -- have substance abuse and psychological problems,'' and treatment, education and counseling can help many of those men and women stay out of prison, he said.

PREVENTION

Butterworth, a former Broward sheriff, prosecutor and 20-year attorney general, said his two-year stint as secretary of the Department of Children & Families reinforced his belief in the value of prevention dollars -- which are typically the first to be cut during lean years.

''Sometimes the worst dollar we spend,'' Butterworth said, ``pays for bricks and mortar.''

Florida still will need prisons for violent felons, Butterworth said. But spending $1 billion over the next decade to build new prisons for drug addicts and people with mental illness, he added, is ``nuts. There's just got to be a better way.''

Steve Seibert, a former Pinellas County commissioner and secretary of the Deparment of Community Affairs under Gov. Jeb Bush, said he discovered another reason for reform while touring an Overtown community center: Leaders told him 70 percent of the neighborhood's men were ex-felons.

'That was an `Aha' moment for me,'' said Seibert, who as director of policy for the Collins Center for Public Policy is a coalition leader.

``All the affordable housing, economic development, parks, water and infrastructure-type stuff doesn't mean squat when 70 percent of the men in a community are ex-felons.''

And most Americans appear to agree with him. A just-released poll by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency showed that nearly eight in 10 Americans favor probation, restitution and community service over prison for ''nonserious, nonviolent, nonsexual'' offenders.

McDonough, who calls himself a pragmatist, said that ultimately the most powerful winds steering reform are financial.

''I think the recession probably will bring the pendulum swing to its highest point and it will start to swing the other way,'' he said. ``Legislators don't want to spend that much money.''

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/florida/v-fullstory/story/1111002.html

Posted by lois at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)

Editorial: Rape in Prison

Editorial
Rape in Prison
Published: June 23, 2009
NY Times
Rape accompanied by savage violence has long been part of prison life. Congress finally confronted this horrendous problem by passing the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. In addition to bringing attention to a long overlooked problem, the new law created a commission that has put forth a broad set of rape-prevention standards that deserve to become mandatory in correctional agencies throughout the country.

The commission report, released earlier this week, should come as alarming news. It suggests, for example, that rapes carried out by corrections officers and inmates are widespread, but the actual rates of rape vary widely from place to place.

Drawing on a federal survey of more than 63,000 state and federal inmates, the commission said that about 4.5 percent reported being sexually abused at least once during the previous 12 months. Extrapolating from this data, the commissioners estimate that there were at least 60,000 rapes of prisoners nationally during this period.

Young people in custody are particularly vulnerable. In pilot study of nine youth facilities, nearly 1 in 5 respondents reported one nonconsensual sexual contact during the previous year.

Rape is not inevitable, however. Strong leaders who are committed to fighting the problem can minimize these savage and traumatic assaults. For starters, the commission recommends that all correctional agencies develop explicit, written zero-tolerance policies on this issue.

These agencies, which need to do a better job of screening corrections workers, should adopt the policy that employees who participate in sexual assaults or look the other way while they occur will be fired. Zero-tolerance policies should eventually be integrated into collective-bargaining agreements with unions.

Beyond that, corrections agencies need to make it easier for people in custody to report rape without facing reprisal. The reports need to be promptly and thoroughly investigated. The agencies need to keep publicly accessible records on the reports and investigations. And they need to develop plans for preventing any rape scenarios that continue to recur.

The report represents a strong first step in confronting this problem. The next step lies with Attorney General Eric Holder, who can approve the report’s recommendations and thereby make the standards mandatory for federal prisons and state prisons that accept federal money.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 24, 2009, on page A28 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/opinion/24wed3.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Rape%20In%20Prison%20editorial&st=cse

Posted by lois at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2009

Panel to Issue Standards To Reduce Prison Rapes

Panel to Issue Standards To Reduce Prison Rapes
By SOLOMON MOORE- NY Times
June 22, 2009

A Congressional commission plans to issue recommendations on Tuesday for standards to reduce sexual assaults in the nation’s jails and prisons.

The commission cited an estimate by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that 60,500 state and federal prisoners were sexually assaulted in 2007.

Congress authorized the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission to conduct the study and to issue binding standards for corrections agencies that will have the force of law. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. will have one year to codify anti-sexual assault procedures, and state governors will have an additional year to signal their compliance with those standards or risk losing up to 5 percent of federal financing for corrections.

The commission recommended that agencies improve training for prison and jail employees for better detection of assaults, do a better job of classifying vulnerable inmates, reduce jail and prison overcrowding, and improve medical and psychological services for victims of sexual abuse.

Although most sexual assaults in prison involve inmates attacking fellow inmates, the commission also recommended stiffer penalties for correctional officials who tolerate or engage in abuse.

The commission said it was particularly concerned about sexual assaults among the rising numbers of juveniles confined in adult institutions and among immigrant detainees, many of whom avoid reporting crimes for fear of deportation.

The commission’s chairman, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., said in an interview Monday that despite a 2003 law intended to provide safeguards against sexual assaults, prison rapes had become almost a cliché in public discourse.

“The sad reality is that there has been indifference by some people associated with the system,” Judge Walton said.

He said a lack of resources and a “get-tough attitude on crime” by some politicians had led to increased penalties without providing for expanding prison and jail populations.

“Seems to me that at the same time we’re increasing penalties we should study the impact those new penalties are going to have and how they’re going to potentially create unsafe environments for people,” Judge Walton said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23prison.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

Posted by lois at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2009

CO: Independent Ideas: Prison spending still shackles state budget Until sentencing laws change, not much can be done

Independent Ideas: Prison spending still shackles state budget
Until sentencing laws change, not much can be done

By By Mike Krause, For the Colorado Daily

Sunday, June 21, 2009

On June 3, Gov. Bill Ritter signed Senate Bill 228, repealing the statutory spending limitation (the Bird-Arveschoug Act) that held the annual increase in general fund spending in Colorado to 6 percent.

But before anyone gets all teary-eyed -- whether from joy or sorrow -- because the majority Democrats in the Legislature finally will have the budgetary flexibility to spend as they see fit, take a breath.

Recent history shows that prison spending in Colorado, and the sentencing polices that drive that spending, has been constraining state spending for decades, and will continue to do so into the near future.

In 1985, the Legislature doubled the maximum penalties in Colorado's presumptive sentencing range for all levels of felony crimes. The average sentence length quickly increased by two-thirds, and Colorado's inmate population more than doubled in the next five years.

It has more than doubled again since.

In an effort to keep pace with the capacity demands of such unprecedented growth in the prison population, successive legislatures and governors have taken Colorado taxpayers on an extreme prison spending spree that has pushed corrections spending from less than 3 percent to nearly 9 percent of general fund spending.

It is a simple formula, but a dramatic increase in spending for one item as a percentage of the state's general fund (prisons) necessarily means that other spending items (such as health care and higher education) have had to decrease as a percentage of general fund appropriation.

This year's Joint Budget Committee budget briefing notes that in the 16 years since Colorado lawmakers implemented the 6 percent spending limit, prison spending has grown "at a compound annual rate of 9.5 percent." If prison spending had actually been held to the 6 percent growth, then last year's Department of Corrections operating budget would have been around $430 million; instead it was nearly $677 million.

So the current opportunity cost of Colorado's extreme prison spending spree is a quarter billion dollars that could have been spent on health care and higher education.

This year's budget increased prison spending by around 3 percent, and while this is considerably less than the more than 9 percent increase originally requested by, it is likely not nearly enough to allow the Department of Corrections to keep pace with the ever growing prison population. Despite a recent slowing trend, projections still estimate thousands more inmates by 2012, which in turn demands many more millions in new prison spending.

Spending doesn't drive the prison population, rather the prison population drives state spending. So regardless of what lawmakers do with the prison budget next session, inmates will keep showing up at the door. The Legislature's ability to affect prison spending lies in its prerogative to write sentencing law and policy

The fact that the Democrat majority had to take the axe to general fund spending items such as higher education and health care this year had little to do with the 6-percent spending limitation and everything to do with fiscally irresponsible prison spending.

And until such time as Colorado lawmakers find the will to make meaningful sentencing law reforms, this will continue to be the case.

Mike Krause directs the Justice Policy Initiative at the Independence Institute.
http://www.coloradodaily.com/news/2009/jun/21/prison-spending-still-shackles-state-budget/

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

June 16, 2009

OK: DOC keep food costs low: $2.42 a day for 3 meals

DOC able to keep feeding costs low
By The Associated Press
Saturday, June 13, 2009

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The cash-strapped Oklahoma Department of Corrections has been able to offset the cost of feeding nearly 18,500 inmates daily because of an agricultural program that gives prisoners valuable skills, agency officials said.

In the past fiscal year, the agency's Agriculture Services unit has earned more than $888,000 in profit from the sale of agriculture products such as beef, firewood and pecans, according to a report given to the Board of Corrections on Friday.

Ken Klinger, who oversees the unit, told board members the agency's agriculture services not only makes a profit but gives inmates useful skills and occupies their time during incarceration.

"Making money on this is a side thing," Klinger said. "The true value of this program is that we work with inmates and give them skills and help the agency save money on its food costs."
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Using vegetables or meat raised and processed within the prison system allows the agency to better control its daily cost of feeding inmates, said Justin Jones, Corrections Department director. It costs the department $2.42 a day to feed inmates three meals a day, the fourth lowest figure in the country, Jones said.

Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina have lower daily rates for feeding inmates.

"I'd say we're feeding our inmates a little better," Jones said. Menus in the state's prison must be approved by a registered dietitian.

The state prisons' agriculture services unit has a budget of $10.6 million and includes dairy and beef cattle operations, a meat processing plant, gardens where vegetables are grown and a facility where those vegetables are processed and frozen for use later in the year or by other facilities.

Jones said while the unit makes a profit, its value is helping to keep food costs low.
___
Information from: The Oklahoman, http://www.newsok.com
http://www.pddnet.com/news-ap-doc-able-to-keep-feeding-costs-low-061309/

Posted by lois at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2009

Testimony at Senate Hearing on national prison reform Commission introduced by Jim Webb

Testimony at Senate Hearing on national prison reform
June 13,2009

The U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs convened a hearing on proposed national prison reform legislation. Virginia Senator Jim Webb introduced bill S.714 in March to create a commission to thoroughly review the entire criminal justice system and make recommendations for reform in several areas of significant concern.

Since being introduced, the bill already has widespread support with 29 cosponsors in the Senate including Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) and Ranking Member Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Judiciary Committee member Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Numerous organizations, currently numbering 42, now endorse the legislative endeavor with interest continuing to expand as public awareness increases.

Other than Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC), Senator Mary L. Landrieu (D-LA), and Senator Mark R. Warner (D-VA), no other senators from the southeastern states, including Georgia and Florida, have as yet expressed their support for this bill as cosponsors.

Speaking at the June 11 hearing, entitled “Exploring the National Criminal Justice Act of 2009,” Senator Webb compared the condition of the criminal justice system to be no less critical than have been the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. and the economic crisis the country faces. The senator asserts, “…the disintegration of this system, day by day and year by year, and the movement toward mass incarceration, with very little attention being paid to clear standards of prison administration or meaningful avenues of re-entry for those who have served their time, is dramatically affecting millions of lives, draining billions of dollars from our economy, destroying notions of neighborhood and family in hundreds of communities across the country….” The proposed legislation is the first major effort to examine and reform the United States criminal justice system in more than forty years.

“We need to take a comprehensive look at our criminal justice system…. As a nation, we can spend our money more effectively, reduce crime and violence, reduce the prison population, and create a fairer system. It is time to take stock of what is broken and what works and modify our criminal justice policies accordingly.” (See related article: ‘Pew “1 in 31” report on corrections: Challenges and opportunities.’)

Collaboration between Senator Webb’s office and more than 100 organizations that represent prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, former offenders, advocacy groups, think tanks, victims’ rights organizations, academics, prisoners, law enforcement, and numerous church organizations has generated significant interest and support for advancing this legislation.

Several experts in the legal, law enforcement, and volunteer services communities testified at the hearing, including Chief William Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department, Professor Charles J. Ogletree of Harvard Law School, Pat Nolan, Vice President of the Prison Fellowship, and Brian W. Walsh, Senior Legal Research Fellow at the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies of The Heritage Foundation.

Serving as vice president of the volunteer service organization the Prison Fellowship, Pat Nolan testified, “My work has given me a close up view of our criminal justice system across the country; and I must tell you our prisons are in crisis. Corrections budgets are literally eating up state budgets, siphoning off money that could be going to schools, roads and hospitals. The crisis in our criminal justice system is national in scope; and only a national commission can conduct the type of review that will help guide us into better policies and safer communities.”

Brian W. Walsh with The Heritage Foundation encouraged support in saying, “Reform experts who are serious about criminal-justice reform should draw encouragement from Senator Webb’s efforts to date to reach out to elected officials on both sides of the aisle and to criminal-justice reform advocates across the conservative-to-liberal spectrum.”
http://www.examiner.com/x-7357-Atlanta-Criminal-Rehabilitation-Examiner~y2009m6d13-Testimony-at-Senate-Hearing-on-national-prison-reform

Posted by lois at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2009

FL: Legislature gives OK to send prisoners out of state

FLORIDA PRISONS
Florida Legislature gives OK to ship inmates out of state
Sending criminals to out-of-state prisons is a 'safety valve' for
BY STEVE BOUSQUET
06.08.09
Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau

TALLAHASSEE -- Florida, famous for shipping orange juice all over the country, may yet be known for a very different kind of export: criminals.

With the inmate population hovering around 100,000 and the state lacking money to build new prisons, the Legislature has given the corrections department the authority to ship inmates to other states for the first time.

''It's a safety valve,'' says the plan's sponsor, Sen. Victor Crist, a Tampa Republican who oversees prison spending. ``This is not a mandate. It's a passive safety net.''

Crist said shipping prisoners would be considered only as a last resort to avoid the early release of inmates because of overpopulation. The cost would be agreed upon in talks with the receiving states.

A prison bill (SB 1722) effective July 1 allows the state to ship inmates to state-run or private prisons in other states.

The nation's largest private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America, houses prisoners from eight states, including California, and has long promoted the transfer idea in Florida, without success. Sen. Crist insists he came to this idea himself and not at the behest of the prison industry.

CCA calls itself ''the leader in out-of-state housing'' on its website. It operates 62 prisons and has thousands of surplus beds in other states that it is eager to fill with convicted felons, and Florida has the nation's third-largest prison system.

A year ago, CCA urged the Legislature to follow 15 other states that export inmates, calling it ''cost-effective.'' The idea went nowhere, but that was before the bottom fell out of the economy and the state budget collapsed with a $6-billion shortfall.

''This is not a new issue,'' said CCA's Tallahassee lobbyist, Matt Bryan. ``This just gives the state another option to deal with a potential rapid influx of new inmates.''

Bryan noted that building a new 1,300-bed prison costs about $100 million. Next year's budget will be the first in recent memory with no money set aside for new prison construction.

Exporting inmates may never come to pass because Florida's inmate population has stabilized in recent months and has fallen below earlier projections. In fact, a new, 3,300-bed prison in rural Suwannee County is built but not yet fully open.

The prison population was at about 101,000 this week and the bed capacity is about 106,000. The population fluctuates daily and is constantly affected by the need to move prisoners who have special needs or for disciplinary reasons.

UNENTHUSIASTIC

Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil is not enthusiastic about exporting prisoners. He said it undermines the goal of reducing recidivism by encouraging inmates to build ties to the communities they will return to upon their release from prison.

The new law requires the Department of Corrections to take into account the proximity of an inmate's family before relocating the inmate.

One possible category of exported prisoners is illegal immigrants. As of June 2008, Florida prisons held 5,523 inmates who were undocumented immigrants in the U.S. About 60 percent were in prison for violent crimes.

PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE

The Florida Police Benevolent Association, a large and vocal union representing corrections officers, also opposes exporting inmates, partly because it would help the private prison industry the PBA has long opposed.

''Our preference would be to build public prisons and keep prisoners here in Florida,'' PBA's David Murrell said. ``When you start sending prisoners to other states, you're asking for trouble.''

According to news reports, Idaho officials last year removed about 300 prisoners from a GEO Group-run Texas prison because of understaffing and lax supervision. In Maine, civil rights groups and inmate lawyers said a plan to ship inmates to Oklahoma was a burden to families and would increase recidivism.
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/florida/story/1086743.html

Posted by lois at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2009

Please act in support of the Coalition for Prisoners' Rights Newsletter which is about to stop publication after 34 years due to $25,000 debt!

Friends,
Many of you know of the Coalition for Prisoners' Rights Newsletter. I found out about it when I started hearing from prisoners and many wrote how important it was for them to receive it. When the Real Cost of Prisons comic books were first published, I naively asked Mara Taub to place a notice about them in the Newsletter, about a month later, I finally stopped filling the first round of requests. Every month, the free Newsletter is read and re-read by tens of thousands of prisoners.

Now the Newsletter will stop publication due to a $25,000 debt accumulated over years. Their monthly mailing has grown to 9,142 prisoners! The Newsletter is a crucial lifeline. To think of it not being published for what is actually a small amount of money is extremely distressing. I hope you will agree with me that it deserves our support.

What can you do:
1) Send money. Checks can be sent to CPR, P.O. Box 1911, Santa Fe, NM 87504-1911. Contributions are tax deductible.
2) If you have contacts with funders, please forward this message to them. Mara Taub, the editor of the Newsletter, can be reached at the CPR address for specifics on their plans for the future and how they will be realized.
3) If you know of others who would want to support the Newsletter, please forward this to them.
4) Other funding ideas should go directly to Mara Taub.
Thank you.
Lois Ahrens

From the June 2009 Newsletter (Vol. 34, No.6)
A DIFFICULT BUT NECESSARY C.P.R. CHANGE

We need to let our readers know of the biggest, and hardest, change that the Coalition for Prisoners’ Rights has ever undergone. With this issue, we are suspending publication of our free, monthly, national eight page newsletter, begun in the fall of 1976. We do this with a great deal of regret, but acknowledgment of its necessity. Over the last 11 years, we have accumulated debt close to the size of our annual budget: $ 25,000. We need to begin to pay it off and not continue to owe more money.

We regret this necessity enormously. We believe in doing what we say we will do and therefore we take great care with what we say we will do. We will continue to send resources and information on request. We will include a one page, updated monthly, abbreviated C.P.R. Newsletter with each such response. And, above all, we will do our best to maintain the accuracy of our mailing list. PLEASE CONTINUE TO SEND US YOUR CHANGES OF ADDRESS. Regretfully we will be unable to add new names to our mailing list, but will keep all such requests on file for the future. You will hear from us as much as we can possibly manage.

Our chances of resuming publication of our full Newsletter will increase if our readers can financially support our debt reduction and fundraising efforts. Stamps, as well as financial contributions, continue to be most welcome.

We want to let you all know a little more about how the Coalition has been doing its work of publishing the Newsletter, responding to correspondence, answering additional requests, and education through a variety of public presentations.

We are an all volunteer group of approximately two dozen people at any one time. Some of us have been imprisoned, some are family members of those who are, all are deeply concerned about the sad state of human rights in our country. We pay no rent because we do our work around a large living room table. We have existed all this time (34+ years) by the thinnest of financial threads and a great deal of determination. We originally sent out Newsletters first class, less than 100 a month. Our May 2009 mailing was 9,142. From the over 500 letters a month we respond to (and will continue to answer), we believe we have a monthly readership of 50,000 or so. We have supported our work with individual donations (both in-kind and cash), contributions from faith communities, and a few grants from progressive foundations. As our work has grown, sources of money for the work have shrunk. This is a part of the changes in our country over the last 30 years in which, consistently, the poor have gotten poorer and the rich have gotten richer. The current world financial crisis has only made this situation worse..

We continue to believe that the U.S. prison system and its subsidiaries make our communities less, rather than more, safe. We will do all we can to continue to work to change this. Please join us!

In Solidarity, The Coalition for Prisoners’ Rights
PLEASE POST * PLEASE SHARE * PLEASE POST JUNE 2009

Posted by lois at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2009

Why shouldn't prisoners receive their social security?

David Hinman, a prisoner in Iowa, wrote today and posed this question. He is 65 and when he was in the "free-world" contributed to social security. He is not eligible for parole for a number years. This is what he writes:
"Currently the government will not pay people in prison social security. I am speaking about paying social security to those who paid into the fund. Payment is based on what they paid in. Even though I am now 65 and paid into the fund, since I am in prison I am not allowed to collect unless I am released from prison. By not paying inmates the social security to which they are entitled, I believe this is in some manner, theft.
My question to readers is: should prison inmates who paid into social security and reached 65 be allowed to collected social security while incarcerated or not."
You can reach David Hinman (#25374), Anamosa State Penitentiary, 406 North High Street, P.O. Box 10, Anamosa, IA 52205-0010.
D

Posted by lois at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)

NH: Prison Recuiting by BOP

Going to prison the hard way

By: By CORIN HIRSCH, Staff Writer
6/5/2009

BERLIN -- Stay off drugs. Take a few more classes. Gain technology experience. Pay your bills.

It isn't advice from parents, a guidance counselor or even a probation officer -- but from a recruitment specialist from the federal Bureau of Prisons.

About 125 people attended a Bureau of Prisons recruitment workshop in this former mill town Wednesday night, and were given the lowdown on what they need to do to ready themselves for a potential career in corrections.

A year from now, the agency will start hiring staff for the 1,280 bed medium-security prison that is under construction north of the Notches (Pinkham, Crawford and Franconia). The $230 million prison is the second largest public works project in New Hampshire's history, and is expected to open in the fall of 2010.

Armed with a PowerPoint presentation, a high-spirited delivery and 18 years of experience recruiting for the agency, regional activation coordinator Cathi Litcher outlined potential positions, salaries and background requirements, and advised potential recruits to take the long view -- spend the next 12 months getting fitter, healthier and more law-abiding.

When FCI-Berlin opens next fall, 341 employees will be hired, from corrections officers to teachers, accountants, plumbers, drug treatment specialists and a chaplain, doctor and dentist. Litcher said that approximately 40 percent of the personnel will come from transfers within the agency, where moving from one institution to another is seen as a way of moving up in rank.

The other 60 percent -- approximately 200 people -- will be hired from the local area, if they can meet the agency's requirements. "Honestly, sometimes I have a hard time getting 60 percent," said Litcher. In addition to a clean background, a federal correctional officer needs to be under 37 at the time they are hired so they can put in the requisite 20 years of service before mandatory retirement at age 57.

The average age of Berlin's unemployed mill workers is 55, and young people leave the city in droves because of a lack of available work.

Some of Litcher's most emphatic advice for potential recruits was to have their credit histories in order, and their bills paid. "Don't let the federal interview be the first time you hear about your credit history. Meet the financial piece of the puzzle."

She said that unpaid bills and financial pressures leave an employee open to exploitation in a prison where a smuggled carton of cigarettes can fetch $800 and a cell phone can garner up to $1,200. "If you aren't paying your bills, don't think an inmate won't try to manipulate you."

Litcher told them to be upfront about past transgressions, because each applicant could expect a full background check. "You'd be surprised what your friends will give up when someone with a badge comes to ask about your background."

She also outlined a stringent interview process that includes a panel interview during which a trained psychologist and others ask "uncomfortable" questions. Applicants will also be required to watch a video of a disturbance and asked to describe it in writing. "You think working in a prison is all fun and games? No, it isn't."

If an applicant is hired, he or she then enters into rigorous training that includes three weeks at a training facility in Glynco, Ga., for courses in self-defense and firearms, as well as physical tests.

The Bureau of Prisons will soon be recruiting for three federal prisons nationwide. In addition to Berlin, federal prisons are being built in Mendota, Calif., and McDowell County, W.Va., and will be activated within the coming year.

All three areas regions share at least one thing in common: unemployment above the national average. Mendota has been called the "unemployment capital of California," where the jobless rate is a staggering 41 percent. In McDowell county, it is 9.9 percent, and In Coös County, unemployment is running at 9.5 percent.

When Litcher asked the crowd how many came from Berlin, most of the hands went up. Since the federal prison was first proposed in 2001, the main reasoning behind its construction has been the economic shot-in-the-arm it might bring to New Hampshire's North Country, which has been devastated in recent years by the shuttering of its paper and pulp mills. Those who are from the local area who work in a prison, and do not want to transfer, said Litcher, are called "homesteaders, and they are a rock-solid piece of our corrections puzzle."

The North Country may be on track for a corrections-based economy. Berlin already has one state prison -- the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility, where the gym has been converted to accommodate prisoners from the Lakes Region Facility in Laconia, which is closing.

New Hampshire Department of Corrections Commissioner Bill Wrenn traveled to Berlin last fall to talk to the city council about the possibility of building a state women's prison here, and in a speech earlier this spring, Gov. John Lynch suggested that the North Country could become home to a 2,000-3,000-inmate regional prison that houses inmates from neighboring states. The idea has not taken flight.

A sprinkling of people in the audience were from the neighboring towns of Gorham and Milan, and at least two were from southern New Hampshire. One of those was Jim Colby, 27, who saw a blurb about the event in the Nashua Telegraph and drove up to Berlin from Hollis, N.H. For several years, Colby has been trying to become a police officer, moving throughout southern New Hampshire and as far south as Philadelphia. But a hiring freeze in that city sent him back to the Granite State to look for work.

Colby had never been to Berlin, but is tempted into corrections by the job stability and salary. "It sounds like a good career. Why not?" The starting annual pay for a correctional officer is $37,953, and rises each year.

The seminar for job seekers was part of a series of forums sponsored by the New Hampshire Department of Employment Security. It was designed to inform recruiters, Realtors, contractors, educators and others about the prison's potential impact on the region.

Litcher said she will return to New Hampshire next spring for more recruitment seminars, including some in the southern part of the state, possibly Concord.

http://www.eagletimes.com/ET/LocalNews/story/090604-ch-NHprisonrecruiting

Posted by lois at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)

June 05, 2009

In Politics, Fact, Fancy Can Blur in Keystroke,Bogus Claim Linking Jail, School Raised Election After Election: "third grade talking point debunked."

In Politics, Fact, Fancy Can Blur in Keystroke
Bogus Claim Linking Jail, School Raised Election After Election

'Third-grade' Talking Point Debunked
By Maria Glod and Rosalind S. Helderman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 4, 2009

"Imagine if your entire future was determined by what you did in the third grade," says Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in a television advertisement promoting his plan to expand preschool. "Did you know we use the failure rates of third-graders to help predict how many prison spots Virginia will need in 15 years?"

You didn't know? Could be because it's not true -- at least not in Virginia.

The startling claim has been cited by McAuliffe and one of his rivals, Brian Moran, as they seek the Democratic nomination for governor. It is an appealing bit of political rhetoric, providing a cinematic illustration of the benefits of expanding preschool: Society will reap long-term savings by spending money early on education.

In the world of politics, dubious claims can harden into conventional wisdom in a keystroke. Political campaigns now have access to an unlimited catalogue of reports, speeches and essays that swirl on the Internet. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Colin L. Powell and even the organizers of the Alexandria literacy festival have pointed to the link as a frightening example of how children can go astray. The Washington Post and the New York Times have published opinion columns that reference the connection.

"It's catchy," said Peter E. Leone, director of the National Center on Education, Disability and Juvenile Justice at the University of Maryland, often cited as the source of the link. "And it's totally bogus."

Campaign trail rhetoric has a tendency to value the emotional impact of a statement first and the facts second. During last year's presidential campaign, Democrat Barack Obama took heat for telling an NAACP forum that there are more young black males in prison than in college. Census data appear to dispute this. Republican Rudolph Giuliani said his chances of surviving prostate cancer were twice as high in the United States as in Britain "under socialized medicine," a claim later debunked. Democrat John Edwards insisted that the North American Free Trade Agreement has cost Americans "millions of jobs" but later was unable to cite a source.

But the effort to link third-grade reading scores and prison population has been particularly persistent -- hopscotching from one campaign season to another.

In Virginia, at least, it is definitely untrue. Barry R. Green, director of Virginia's Juvenile Justice Department, said that when officials draw up six-year plans for how much prison space the state will need, they rely on factors that include arrest and conviction trends, but not test scores or any other education data. A policy group convened at the end of the process discusses general social issues, Green added.

Everyone agrees that children who get a poor start in school are more likely to struggle academically and later fall prey to social ills. It's a point that McAuliffe has been joined in making by Moran, a former delegate, and state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (Bath), another Democratic rival. Each has called for boosting state spending on early childhood education.

Since the ad began airing in Richmond, Norfolk and Roanoke, McAuliffe's campaign has said third-grade scores aren't part of the official formula Virginia uses to plot prison construction. But the campaign says the ad was designed as a tangible and understandable way to bring home the idea that quality preschool is a smart investment.

"We feel comfortable using third-grade reading scores as a way of communicating, in shorthand, the importance of education in predictions of long-term social behavior, including predictions about crime rates, which are then used to determine the number of prison beds that we are constructing," said McAuliffe communications director Delacey Skinner.

'Third-grade' Talking Point Debunked
In these clips, two Democratic candidates for Virginia governor, as well as Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell, each discuss a link between third-grade reading scores and projected prison populations. This talking point has been discredited.

We've made some updates to washingtonpost.com's Groups, MyPost and comment pages. We need you to verify your MyPost ID by logging in before you can post to the new pages. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Moran made a statement similar to McAuliffe's in a radio interview last month: "If you don't have them by third grade, it's hard to get them back. We use our third-grade reading exams to determine potential for prison later on."

Leone has not ruled out the possibility that a state uses elementary test scores this way, but he has not found one.

"It's like an urban legend," Leone said, adding that he has been fielding calls for years from reporters and politicians researching similar assertions. Last year, he said, a member of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee's staff called to check it out.

Prison officials in California called the claim "absolutely untrue," saying they must perennially debunk assertions that the state uses elementary reading in prison forecasts. A New York-based education group co-founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein pulled the information from its Web page in April after an online journalism site labeled it "fiction."

Still, the contention persists, growing more credible with each repetition. Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, former head of the U.S. Education Department's research arm, is sometimes cited as a source of the claim. He said he heard it and repeated it about six years ago in comments that can be found on the Internet. Later, he tried to trace it to its source and came up blank.

"I don't know if it is true or not and regret contributing to the dissemination of what may be an urban legend," Whitehurst said this week.

In campaign literature distributed with the ad, McAuliffe pegged the line to comments made by Norfolk Judge Jerrauld Jones at a teen violence summit he attended last year with another politician. Through his secretary, Jones, former director of the state Juvenile Justice Department, declined to comment.

The campaign also noted a state Department of Criminal Justice Services report that lists failure on third-grade reading tests as a factor that increases the risk of committing a crime.

Where else might McAuliffe have gotten the idea? Robley Jones, lobbyist for the Virginia Education Association, said possibly from him. Jones said he can remember saying something very similar at a recent roundtable discussion on education attended by McAuliffe.
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"If it's an urban legend, I'm probably one of those guilty of keeping it alive, because I thought it was true," Jones said.

Jones said he plans to stop saying that the state uses the scores to plan prison construction -- but he said he believes there is a correlation. "I think it may be almost a meaningless distinction, whether or not Virginia is actually using the figure," he said. "The fact of the matter is that the figure could be used accurately."

Diana Owen, an associate professor of political science at Georgetown University, said that despite the input of experts, future candidates will now have one more source to use to make the same claim. "A factoid like that will have another life in another campaign," she said. "Now that that ad's out there, people will cite the ad. I'm sure of it."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/06/03/ST2009060303653.html

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

June 04, 2009

AZ: Maybe or Maybe NOT? Following death of Marcia Powell from exposure DOC will discontinue the use of outdoor cages until they figure out an alternative

Ariz. prisons discontinue use of outdoor cells
Associated Press - June 2, 2009 8:54 PM ET

PHOENIX (AP) - The Arizona Department of Corrections has discontinued the use of outdoor holding cells following the death of an inmate in triple-digit heat.

Corrections spokesman Barrett Marson said in an e-mail Tuesday that the decision came "in consultation with the governor." He didn't elaborate.

The corrections department had announced last week that it was halting use of the cells while they were retrofitted to provide shade and water.

Inmate Marcia Powell died from heat-related complications hours after she collapsed May 19. She had been in an outdoor holding cell for nearly four hours, almost twice as long as the maximum allowed under prison rules.

http://www.kswt.com/Global/story.asp?S=10467740&nav=menu613_2_6

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

Prison inmate policies revised following death

by Casey Newton - Jun. 5, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

State prison officials plan to check on inmates kept in outdoor enclosures every half-hour under policy changes expected to be approved today.

Charles Ryan, director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, is revising prison policies in an effort to prevent situations such as the one that led to the death last month of inmate Marcia Powell.

Powell, 48, died after being held in 107-degree temperatures in an outdoor cage for nearly four hours. She collapsed while awaiting transfer to another cell for psychiatric observation.

After consulting with the office of Gov. Jan Brewer, Ryan eliminated the use of outdoor cages for inmates being transferred for observation. But outdoor enclosures will remain in use for some cases, including recreation for prisoners separated from the general population.

Some prisons also have shaded outdoor enclosures that hold prisoners while they await medical treatment.

Under the planned revisions, a corrections officer and a supervisor will be required to check on inmates held in outdoor enclosures every 30 minutes, recording those checks in a log.

The mandated checks are designed to ensure officers do not lose track of any prisoner being held outside temporarily.

Prison officials are still working through where they will hold inmates awaiting transfer. They had been using 233 outdoor enclosures in 10 state prisons.

About 40,000 prisoners are in the state prison system.

"We're going to make do with the space that we have inside," Ryan said.

Powell's collapse occurred at Arizona State Prison Complex-Perryville in Goodyear. Ryan launched an internal-affairs inquiry and a criminal investigation into possible neglect.

A deputy warden, a captain and the lieutenant in charge of supervising Powell have been placed on administrative leave during the investigation.

Ryan said the investigation should be completed in two to three weeks. After critics argued that his department should not investigate itself, Ryan said he would refer the results to the state Department of Public Safety for an independent review.

"I absolutely want the investigation to be thorough, to be accurate and to be objective," Ryan said.

Posted by lois at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2009

AZ: Support for mentally ill is essential to help prevent more people from jail and the streets

Support for mentally ill is essential

by Ann Rider - Jun. 2, 2009 12:00 AM
Special for the Arizona Republic

The tragic death of Marcia Powell, a mentally ill woman who died in an outdoor holding pen at Arizona State Prison Complex-Perryville, may be only the beginning. The Arizona Senate, in cutting over $76 million of funding in Senate Bill 1145 and Senate Bill 1188, may sentence people with psychiatric disabilities to the streets or prisons for support.

In this newest round with the budget, the Republican Senate proposes to cut eligibility for services to only individuals below 100 percent of Federal Poverty Level.

One of the proposals is to change the law that supports community services for individuals with mental illness, so that the state "may" provide services.

This means all services statewide will be eliminated for about 67,500 individuals.

Tens of thousands of people won't be able to fill their prescriptions; the medications they need are not cheap. They're not available at Walmart for $4. These tens of thousands of people will quickly become very ill and where will they go?

Already, hospitals deny evaluations because there is no benefit for treatment, so what will happen when your loved one begins to feel despair and considers suicide? Unless you have very good health insurance, there will be no services.

In Maricopa County, approximately 19,000 individuals are class members in the Arnold vs. Sarn lawsuit, which forced the state to provide community services. Because of this lawsuit, thousands of people receive services that help them go back to work, find independent housing, and reclaim a full life in the community. These services allow people to actually recover and become productive citizens.

SB 1145 impacts the possibility of recovery in several ways. First, by changing "shall" to "may," the state "may" dismantle a public behavioral-health system built over decades. This cuts not only services, but thousands of jobs. Second, by denying services to tens of thousands of people, we ensure that instead of creating productive citizens, we create disability for life.

This picture is not just possible; this is what will happen unless this Senate action is stopped. People with mental illness are not lazy; they are not shirking their responsibility. For the most part, they do everything they can to overcome great difficulties and find a meaningful life, just like everyone else. But without services and supports, it's impossible.

The cost down the road is horrendous too, within a few months. Where will thousands of people go? To jail for crimes such as panhandling. Locked in a hospital, if we can find beds. Onto the streets.

We must do better. There will be many more Marcia Powells before this is all over, unless we consider other options for balancing the budget. There are reasonable alternatives to these drastic cuts.

We must support options that keep our state thriving - for everyone.

Ann Rider is director of Recovery Empowerment Network, a statewide coalition of people recovering from psychiatric disabilities.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2009/06/02/20090602rider02.html

Posted by lois at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2009

Ariz. halts use of outdoor prison holding cells

Ariz. halts use of outdoor prison holding cells

By JONATHAN J. COOPER 5-30-09

PHOENIX (AP) — The director of Arizona state prisons has suspended the use of unshaded outdoor holding cells in the wake of an inmate's death.

Authorities said Friday that crews will retrofit the cells to provide shade and water.

The move follows the death last week of 48-year-old Marcia Powell. She was left in an unshaded enclosure for nearly four hours May 19 as temperatures topped 100 degrees.

Corrections Director Charles Ryan says Powell, who was serving a sentence for prostitution, should not have been left in the cell for so long. He placed three officers on administrative leave pending a criminal investigation.

The outdoor cells hold inmates temporarily when they are being transferred from one area in a prison to another.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gsV8vjqxQYd1axkrcnJIPHOyKSFAD98G29380

Posted by lois at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2009

Santa Barbara CA: Officials Mull Privatizing Mental Health Services by signing contract with Prison Health Services

Prison System for Sale
Officials Mull Privatized Jail Mental Health Services
Thursday, May 28, 2009
By Benjamin Gottlieb

Santa Barbara County’s jail mental health system officially is for sale. The prospective buyer — a private Tennessee-based prison health company — is already lined up with a July 1 move-in date.

This is the way the Sheriff’s Department broke the news at a special meeting of the Santa Barbara County Mental Health Commission on Tuesday, informing the council of the proposed transition of mental health services from county Mental Health to the private company Prison Health Services (PHS). The pitch, helmed by Sheriff Bill Brown, touched on the department’s various budget problems and the need to improve mental health services in County Jail, which oversees the largest number of the mentally ill in the county. “Over the years — with the closure of mental health facilities across the state — County Jail has become the de facto mental health facility,” Brown explained. “The jail is not the best place for people with mental health problems; however, there will always be people in the county’s jail with mental illness because of the nature of the crimes committed.”

According to the proposed plan, PHS would sign a two-year contract to operate its jail mental health services, with an option to extend the contract for an additional two years. A contract with PHS would allow the jail to obtain what officials call crucial mental health objectives currently unmet by county Mental Health: Institute for Medical Quality accreditation, two on-site licensed social workers, 24/7 coverage for mental health assessments, and others. With one out of five incarcerated Americans suffering from mental illness, Sheriff’s officials say the ailing, 38-year-old jail is not only grossly overcrowded — around 50 inmates above capacity each day — but unable to meet its mental health needs.

A decision on transferring jail mental health services to PHS has already been reached on the part of county officials. The plan was received with unanimous support from Mental Health, the Sheriff’s Department, and of course PHS. Additionally, Mental Health officials stated that the new management would operate with no additional cost. Ann Detrick, county Mental Health director, said her office understands how important programs such as the 24/7 coverage for mental health assessments are to the jail. “I support what the Sheriff is planning to do,” Detrick said.

Brown said the PHS contract would save more than $500,000 in a so-called apple-to-apple comparison. In layman’s terms, PHS could provide the services conducted by Mental Health, plus more, $500,000 cheaper. Both Brown and Mental Health officials assured council and community members repeatedly that the plan to privatize jail mental health services is not a reflection of the performance of current county Mental Health staff. However, George Green — a member of SEIU Local 620, representing jail mental health workers — argued that the plan would wrest jobs away from Santa Barbarans. “I respect Sheriff Brown a great deal, [however] I am shocked by this group’s decision,” Green said. “The county must first engage in bargaining with the union before such a plan in finalized.”

Rod Holliman, PHS’s president of community corrections, stated his company could solve the county’s jail mental health problems. “Medical practice behind bars is the most complex,” Holliman said, noting that PHS provides mental health services to 40 facilities and possesses the resources to improve what’s currently being offered. To the company’s credit, PHS’s accreditation record includes the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the American Correctional Association — one of the oldest and largest correctional associations in the world. The private company made its money in the incarceration business, boasting $576 million in annual revenue for 2009.

Lacking a quorum, the Mental Health Commission was unable to rule on the proposal, however 3rd District Councilmember Ann Eldridge spoke of it confidently. “We cannot take a vote today, but I feel very comfortable about what I heard,” Eldridge said. If Brown has his way, Santa Barbara will welcome PHS in July.
http://www.independent.com/news/2009/may/28/prison-system-sale/

Posted by lois at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2009

States and cities attempt to charge prisoners to stay

Debt to society costs some criminals $60 a night
By Tracy Loew, USA TODAY
May 28, 2009
Get arrested in Springfield, Ore., this fall, and you might spend the night in jail — then get a bill for your stay.

The city plans to charge convicted criminals up to $60 a night, depending on their ability to pay, when a new 100-bed lockup opens in October, Springfield Police Chief Jerry Smith says. Thus, the city could recoup most of its cost of about $70 a day.

"These people are the ones who cause the cost to operate a jail, so they ought to be the ones to pay it, not private citizens," Smith says.

The economic recession is spurring several local governments to turn to pay-to-stay programs, says Sara Totonchi, public policy director for the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which fights legislation that imposes such fees on inmates.

"In these difficult economic times, policymakers are looking for different options to save money," Totonchi says.

Springfield is one of at least five city and county jails that this year started billing inmates for jail time if they are found guilty.

• In Utah, the Salt Lake County Metro Jail charges inmates $40 each day, Sheriff James Winder says. The Box Elder County Jail in Brigham City, costs $10 per day. Since the plan started April 1, about a third of the inmates have paid the fee, Box Elder's jail commander Sandy Huthman says.

• Missouri's Taney County, which includes Branson, charges $45 for a day at the jail in Forsyth, county prosecuting attorney Jeffrey Merrell says.

•Richmond, Va., began charging inmates $1 per day April 15. The few who can't afford that small amount can work jobs in the jail to earn the money, Sheriff C.T. Woody Jr. says. The city hopes to raise between $60,000 and $200,000 a year, he says.

Woody says Richmond started the fee because taxpayers are tired of footing the bill to house criminals while other vital services are being cut from municipal budgets.

"I'm just getting on board to relieve some of the responsibility off of taxpayers," Woody says.

Not everyone can pay. In Springfield, unpaid accounts will be turned over to a collection service, Smith says, and debtors could end up in small claims court.

The Douglas County Jail in Roseburg, Ore., also uses a collection agency, jail spokesman Dwes Hutson says. The jail has charged inmates $60 per day since 2002 but recently cut the fee to $20.

"We found that inmates got such a huge bill that it was hard for them to pay," Hutson says. "We collect more money charging a more reasonable rate."

In Salt Lake County, indigent inmates are not billed, and some who participate in improvement programs can work off their debt, Winder says.

A few jails have been collecting similar fees for years. Klamath County Jail in Oregon has charged $60 per day since 2003, District Attorney Ed Caleb says. Overland Park, Kan., bills inmates $35 for a day in the county jail, Overland Park Municipal Court Administrator Robin Barnard says. Last year, though, Overland Park collected only 39% of the user fee, Barnard says.

Totonchi says the fee can be a burden on inmates' families, who often end up footing the bill. Jailers acknowledge that the fee can be difficult to collect.

"We're not stupid. We realize we're not going to recover 60 bucks from everybody," Springfield's Smith says.

Loew reports for the Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2009-05-27-payforjail_N.htm

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

Ohio to release some very sick prisoners to nursing homes

Some ailing Ohio inmates going to nursing homes
The Associated Press
May 28, 2009

COLUMBUS, Ohio ‹ Officials say Ohio plans to send as many as 40 ailinginmates to nursing homes to ease prison overcrowding and save money.

Prisons system assistant director Michael Randle says terminally ill orotherwise bedridden prisoners are expensive.

He says the inmates going to homes will be considered released, as if onparole, making them eligible for Medicaid or Medicare.

A law in effect since March allows for early parole for prisoners who meet certain medical criteria.

The head of a group of nursing home operators says the inmates will have to be screened carefully. But Peter Van Runkle of the Ohio Health Care Association says those coming to the homes will essentially be incapacitated, so patients and their families will have nothing to fear.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/ohio-news/some-ailing-ohio-inmates-going
-to-nursing-homes-136729.html

Posted by lois at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)

CA: Valley is the best place for Gitmo prison

Valley is the best place for Gitmo prison
Wednesday, May. 27, 2009
By Bill McEwen / The Fresno Bee

President Barack Obama has a problem, and I've got a solution.

He wants to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center, but most American politicians don't want anything to do with housing suspected terrorists in their backyards.

I say bring them on -- the detainees, not the politicians.

If any region deserves a brand new supermax prison and the opportunity to keep some of the world's most dangerous figu