The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

July 11, 2008

Interpreter for some of the 400 immigrants arrested and sentenced in meat packing raid speaks up in their defense

July 11, 2008, NY Times
An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants
By JULIA PRESTON

WATERLOO, Iowa — In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own.

Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.

In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.

In the essay and an interview, Professor Camayd-Freixas said he was taken aback by the rapid pace of the proceedings and the pressure prosecutors brought to bear on the defendants and their lawyers by pressing criminal charges instead of deporting the workers immediately for immigration violations.

He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.

“The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on,” Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. “The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud.”

During fast-paced hearings in May, 262 of the illegal immigrants pleaded guilty in one week and were sentenced to prison — most for five months — for knowingly using false Social Security cards or legal residence documents to gain jobs at the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in nearby Postville. It was the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

The essay has provoked new questions about the Agriprocessors proceedings, which had been criticized by criminal defense and immigration lawyers as failing to uphold the immigrants’ right to due process. Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said she would hold a hearing on the prosecutions and call Professor Camayd-Freixas as a witness.

“The essay raises questions about whether the charges brought were supported by the facts,” Ms. Lofgren said.

Bob Teig, a spokesman for Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, said the immigrants’ constitutional rights were not compromised.

“All defendants were provided with experienced criminal attorneys and interpreters before they made any decisions in their criminal cases,” Mr. Teig said. “Once they made their choices, two independent judicial officers determined the defendants were making their choices freely and voluntarily, were satisfied with their attorney, and were, in fact, guilty.”

Mr. Teig said the judges in the cases were satisfied with the guilty pleas.

“The judges had the right and duty to reject any guilty plea where a defendant was not guilty,” Mr. Teig said. “No plea was rejected.”

The essay by Professor Camayd-Freixas, who is the director of a program to train language interpreters at the university, has also caused a stir among legal interpreters. In telephone calls and debates through e-mail, they have discussed whether it was appropriate for a translator to speak publicly about conversations with criminal defendants who were covered by legal confidentiality.

“It is quite unusual that a legal interpreter would go to this length of writing up an essay and taking a strong stance,” said Nataly Kelly, an analyst with Common Sense Advisory, a marketing research company focused on language services. Ms. Kelly is a certified legal interpreter who is the author of a manual about interpreting.

The Agriprocessors hearings were held in temporary courtrooms in mobile trailers and a ballroom at the National Cattle Congress, a fairgrounds here in Waterloo. Professor Camayd-Freixas worked with one defense lawyer, Sara L. Smith, translating her discussions with nine clients she represented. He also worked in courtrooms during plea and sentencing hearings.

Ms. Smith praised Professor Camayd-Freixas’s essay, saying it captured the immigrants’ distress during “the surreal two weeks” of the proceedings. She said he had not revealed information that was detrimental to her cases.

But she cautioned that interpreters should not commonly speak publicly about conversations between lawyers and clients. “It is not a practice that I would generally advocate as I could envision circumstances under which such revelations could be damaging to a client’s case,” Ms. Smith said.

Professor Camayd-Freixas said he had considered withdrawing from the assignment, but decided instead that he could play a valuable role by witnessing the proceedings and making them known.

He suggested many of the immigrants could not have knowingly committed the crimes in their pleas. “Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security card was or what purpose it served,” he wrote.

He said many immigrants could not distinguish between a Social Security card and a residence visa, known as a green card. They said they had purchased fake documents from smugglers in Postville, or obtained them directly from supervisors at the Agriprocessors plant. Most did not know that the original cards could belong to Americans and legal immigrants, Mr. Camayd-Freixas said.

Ms. Smith went repeatedly over the charges and the options available to her clients, Professor Camayd-Freixas said. He cited the reaction of one Guatemalan, Isaías Pérez Martínez: “No matter how many times his attorney explained it, he kept saying, ‘I’m illegal, I have no rights. I’m nobody in this country. Just do whatever you want with me.’ ”

Professor Camayd-Freixas said Mr. Pérez Martínez wept during much of his meeting with Ms. Smith.

Ms. Smith, like more than a dozen other court-appointed defense lawyers, concluded that none of the immigrants’ legal options were good. Prosecutors had evidence showing they had presented fraudulent documents when they were hired at Agriprocessors.

In plea agreements offered by Mr. Dummermuth, the immigrants could plead guilty to a document fraud charge and serve five months in prison. Otherwise, prosecutors would try them on more serious identity theft charges carrying a mandatory sentence of two years. In any scenario, even if they were acquitted, the immigrants would eventually be deported.

Worried about families they had been supporting with their wages, the immigrants readily chose to plead guilty because they did understand that was the fastest way to return home, Professor Camayd-Freixas said.

“They were hoping and they were begging everybody to deport them,” he said.

Ms. Smith said she was convinced after examining the prosecutors’ evidence that it was not in her clients’ interests to go to trial.

“I think they understood what their options were,” she said. “I tried to make it very clear.”

Legal interpreters familiar with the profession said that Professor Camayd-Freixas’ essay, while a notable departure from the norm, did not violate professional standards.

Isabel Framer, a certified legal interpreter from Ohio who is chairwoman of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators, said Professor Camayd-Freixas did not go public while the cases were still in court or reveal information that could not be discerned from the record. Ms. Framer said she was speaking for herself because her organization had not taken an official position on the essay.

“Interpreters, just like judges and attorneys, have an obligation to maintain the confidentiality of the process,” she said. “But they don’t check their ethical standards at the door.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/11immig.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1215788693-AFbZ6gGAM8xzoFc/rEQsWw&pagewanted=print

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

July 09, 2008

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

COALITION TO FREE THE ANGOLA THREE
July 8, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

www.Angola3.org

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

July 08, 2008

MA: Update on CORI Reform & Governor's Executive Order

Update on CORI Reform & Governor's Executive Order

July 17th, 2008 10AM
Boston City Hall - Piemonte Room
5th floor

The Massachusetts Alliance to Reform CORI, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, and the Boston Worker's Alliance have actively engaged the Executive office on Health and Human Services in crafting language that implements fair CORI hiring practices inline with Governor Deval Patrick's Executive Order "Regarding the Use and Dissemination of Criminal Offender Record Information by the Executive Department."

On July 17th at 10AM in the Piedmont Room on the 5th floor of Boston City Hall you will be updated on the current status of the amended employment practices and polices requested by Governor Deval Patrick's Executive Order.

In his Executive Order Governor Patrick mandated "Each agency in the Executive Department shall examine and, if necessary, amend its employment practices and policies to reflect the policy set forth in this Section.."

The order in part states:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Deval L. Patrick, Governor of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, by virtue of the authority vested in
me by the ConstittioPna, rt 2. c. 2, § 1, Art. 1, do hereby order as
follows:
Section 1. It shall be the policy of the Executive Department
with respect to employment decisions that a criminal background
check will only occur, and its results will only be considered, in those
instances where a current or prospective employee shall have been
deemed otherwise qualified and the content of a criminal record is
relevant to the duties and qualifications of the position in question.
Such instances will include, without limitation, those in which a
criminal conviction creates a statutory disqualification for the posi.tion,
or the position requires interaction with vulnerable populations and a
criminal background check is necessary to ensure that the applicant
does not pose a public safety risk.

In implementing this policy, the employer should consider the
nature and circumstances of any past criminal conviction; the date of
the offense; the sentence imposed and the length of any period of
incarceration; any reasonably available information concerning
compliance with conditions of parole or probation, including orders of
no contact with victims and witnesses; the individual's conduct and
experience in the time since .the offense, including, but not limited to,
educational or professional certifications obtained since the time of
the offense or other evidence of rehabilitation; and the relevance of
the conviction to .the duties and qualifications of the position in
question. Charges that did not result in a conviction will be
considered only in circumstances in which the nature of the charge
relates to sexual or domestic violence against adults or children,
consistent with Executive Order No. 491, Establishing a Policy of
Zero Tolerance for Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, or
otherwise indicates that the matter has relevance to the duties and
responsibilities of the position in question.

Each agency in the Executive Department shall examine and, if
necessary, amend its employment practices and policies to reflect the
policy set forth in this Section and in Executive Order No. 491. The
Secretary of each Executive Office shall be responsible for ensuring
that each agency within her Secretariat conducts this review. All
Secretaries shall report to the Commonwealth's Chief Human
Resources Officer the results of their review and the steps taken to
comply with this policy no later than March 31, 2008. Thereafter, the
Chief Human Resources Officer shall take whatever actions are
necessary and appropriate to ensure that this policy is implemented
fully.

Section 2. The EOHHS, in consultation with agencies under
the Secretariat and the Massachusetts Office for Victim Assistance,
shall promulgate a consolidated set of regulations that provide clear
guidelines to be followed by EOHHS and its agencies, as well as their
vendor programs, when reviewing the criminal records of current or
prospective employees.
Without compromising the Secretariat's commitment to ensure
the safety and security of .the vulnerable populations it serves, the
EOHHS regulations shall ensure rehabilitated individuals with criminal
backgrounds be given a fair opportunity to be employed and
reintegrate successfully into the workforce.
The EOHHS regulations shall ensure that the rights of current
and prospective employees are protected by (a) providing individuals
with information regarding EOHHS hiring policies and procedures
regarding CORl and individuals' rights to dispute the accuracy and
relevancy of any CORI; (b) creating a systematic means for
employers to document all factors taken into consideration, including
evidence of rehabilitation, in making employment decisions; (c)
specifying strong penalties for vendors that fail to comply with any
requirement; and (d) streamlining and simplifying,

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

Boston Globe: Making a start on CORI

Making start on CORI
By Adrian Walker, Globe Columnist | July 8, 2008

The idea of making it easier for convicts to get jobs has always been a tough sell at the State House.

But even though the Legislature appears almost militantly opposed to passing bills this session, there is a good chance that some changes are in store for the much-maligned Criminal Offender Record Information law, better known as CORI.

Reform would be too strong a description, especially for legislation that has literally been years in coming. The finished product will shorten the period before records are sealed and may make it easier for those who are arrested, but not convicted, to have their record cleared.

People hoping for more are frustrated by what it will not include. Advocates were especially hopeful that employers could be banned from asking applicants right off the bat whether they had ever been convicted of crimes. Employers would have been able to ask about criminal history later in the process.

Most of all, they worry that if a watered-down bill is passed this session, the Legislature will not revisit the issue for years. "It is a major concern, because we know that CORI has not been touched in any significant way in decades," said Aaron Tanaka of the Boston Workers Alliance, which has taken a leading role in lobbying for the bill.

There isn't much dispute in the Legislature that CORI needs fixing, but there is vast disagreement over what is wrong with the law and how to repair it. Before Governor Deval Patrick essentially seized control of the issue, there were more than two dozen bills on file purporting to address it. Some would ease access to records, some would limit it. While the warring bills have been eliminated, the factions that produced them remain vital.

Representative Eugene O'Flaherty, the House chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told me he worries that a flurry of competing and contradictory amendments could still sink efforts to change the law. He said he hopes to persuade his colleagues to stick as closely as possible to the legislation as written.

I realize many people view CORI as a remote issue. But the reality is that almost everyone convicted of a crime will eventually reenter the work force or will try to. There is strong argument for making that path easier than it is now.

One of the great complications in reforming CORI, as O'Flaherty points out, is that different kinds of employers have different needs. Obviously, employers in areas affecting public safety, for example, need to know the background of the people they are hiring, and they may as well know right up front. Some would argue that in other areas, a long-ago conviction for a relatively minor infraction is less crucial. But crafting a bill that takes every possibility into account is impossible. Flaherty says he hopes to persuade legislators to buy into this bill as a first step, which can be refined down the road.

CORI is interesting because it mirrors our whole conflicted view of how to deal with people who commit crime. We struggle with whether we really believe in rehabilitation, whether we want convicts living down the street, whether we want them as co-workers, whether a debt to society is ever really paid.

The bill O'Flaherty is proposing will include several provisions unrelated to CORI, including one that would ease penalties for first-time drug offenders arrested in school zones.

"My whole district is a school zone," notes O'Flaherty, whose district includes Chelsea and Charlestown. "I don't think someone arrested at 3 a.m. should necessarily go to prison because they are arrested within 1,000 feet of a school." Yes, O'Flaherty is a defense lawyer, as many will no doubt point out.

This bill doesn't solve every problem with criminal records, but some action is preferable to the lip service this issue has received to date. Helping criminal offenders restart their lives is no simple task. One hopes that the governor and the Legislature are sincere when they suggest that this bill is just a start, rather than the last word, on how we plan to treat people with prison in their past.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/07/08/making_start_on_cori?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2008

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

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

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

Window dressing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A measure of justice for Regina McKnight

Tue, Jul. 01, 2008
A measure of justice for Regina McKnight
By BARRY LESTER and SUE VEER
Guest Columnist, The State Newspaper

In 1991, Regina McKnight turned to cocaine to numb the pain she felt as a result of her mother’s sudden death. She happened to be pregnant at the time. When she suffered a stillbirth, the state of South Carolina charged her with homicide by child abuse, claiming that her cocaine use caused the stillbirth despite the fact that scientific research does not link the two.

Ms. McKnight was the first woman in S.C. history to be convicted of this crime for having suffered what both the prosecution and defense agreed was an unintentional stillbirth. As a result, she has spent nearly eight years in jail. Throughout this time, she has been deprived of her liberty, her rights and her connection with her children: All because of myth, not scientific fact.

But recently, the truth finally resulted in a measure of justice. In May, the state Supreme Court unanimously reversed Ms. McKnight’s conviction. The court concluded that she did not get a fair trial — because her attorney failed to challenge the junk science that was used to convict her. The court specifically noted that experts should have been called to testify about studies “showing that cocaine is no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor.”

Much has been written about the rush to judgment that occurred in the 1980s around the problem of cocaine use and so-called “crack moms” and “crack babies.” At that time, it was believed that children exposed prenatally to cocaine would be inevitably and irrevocably damaged and that their mothers were unfit to parent. Public outrage led to the arrest of women who were pregnant and could not overcome their addictions. Courts in every state except South Carolina have said such prosecutions violate law and common sense.

All this, and almost 20 years of research has yet to identify a “crack baby” syndrome. From a scientific point of view, the outrage was unwarranted and policies misguided. The idea that cocaine caused serious damage to the fetus was based more on animal studies than human studies. And in those human studies, methodological flaws were well-documented. Yet the public and child welfare officials alike assumed that pregnant women who used cocaine could not be trusted to bring up their children.

We have learned a lot since the 1980s. We know that drug addiction is a disease, a complex disorder involving the brain. And we know more about the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure. The largest study, of more than 8,000 deliveries, showed that medical problems in cocaine-using pregnant women occur less than 5 percent of the time and were not related to cocaine when variables such as alcohol and tobacco use were controlled.

Because the court said Ms. McKnight did not receive a fair trial, the state was entitled to re-try her — to have a second chance to prove that her cocaine use caused the stillbirth. Even though, as a matter of science, the state would be unable to do this, continuing to fight would mean enduring another murder trial and risking another conviction in spite of the truth. By pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter, Ms. McKnight could finally get out of jail and avoid additional years of uncertainty and anguish. No woman, however, should have to plead guilty to a crime she didn’t commit.

At least 96 other women in South Carolina have been arrested, some for homicide, most on lesser charges of child abuse and drug delivery, because they continued their pregnancies in spite of a drug or alcohol problem. At least 12 criminal cases are pending. Many, many more cases are in the civil child welfare system because South Carolina treats a single unconfirmed positive drug test on a pregnant woman or newborn as a basis for presuming neglect. As a result, too many children have been removed from their homes and separated from mothers and families who love them. All this because policy and law lag behind medical understanding.

Yes, there are things women do that increase health risks during pregnancy, but they generally have more to do with poverty and lack of access to health care than anything else. And yes, there are drug users who are inadequate mothers, but there are also drug users who are competent mothers. With the support and treatment, they can care for their children. Families can be preserved.

It is time for South Carolina and its Supreme Court to reexamine its costly and counterproductive approach to the issue of pregnant women and drug use. Neither continuing a pregnancy to term nor suffering a stillbirth should be treated as a crime. The real crime is for the state to continue to ignore science and the overwhelming evidence that treatment, not punishment, is what is best for pregnant women, children and families.

Ms. McKnight was released from prison last month.
Dr. Lester is a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Brown University; Ms. Veer is chief executive officer of Carolina Health Centers in Greenwood.
http://www.thestate.com/editorial-columns/v-print/story/448487.html
The story of Regina McKnight is featured in the RCPP comic book, "Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children" which is posted on the Real Cost of Prisons website: www.realcostofprisons.org and then to Comic Books.

Posted by lois at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

July 03, 2008

MI: people with felony convictions and homeless people eligible to vote

Ex-felons, homeless are part of state voting process

By Eric T. Campbell
The Michigan Citizen

DETROIT — The 2008 primary race for the highest office in the nation has brought millions of new voters to the polls. With the end of the primary season and the beginning of the general election, many more will finally become active participants. But what about access to the polls for those whom society has attempted to marginalize?

The purging of Florida citizens, ex-felons and non-felons alike, from voter rolls in 2000 is just one example of a state apparatus intentionally eliminating minorities from the election process. In addition, new photo ID laws popping up around the country create more barriers to voter participation.

The 2004 presidential election in the U.S. resulted in numerous cases of alleged election fraud and a lack of sufficient numbers of voting machines.

In Michigan, the homeless and ex-felons are legally entitled to vote.

According to statistics obtained from the U.S. Justice Department by the Sentencing Project, 13% of Black men are unable to vote in America due to felony conviction laws. Like many states, ex-felons in Michigan keep their right to vote once they’ve served the community. Their voting status remains exactly the same as it was before a felony conviction.

However, according to Marc Mauer, executive director for the Washington D.C. based Sentencing Project, Corrections Departments in most states don’t go far enough in getting the word out to prisoners.

“It’s the lack of information,” Mauer told the Michigan Citizen. “There’s no systematic means by which they are informed of their right to vote.”

Mauer says many parolees incorrectly believe that they are unable to vote—an opinion often substantiated by misinformed election officials. He sites a recent 10 state survey in which 31% of local election officials misunderstood voting laws for ex-felons.

Kwasi Akwamu, from Helping Our Prisoners Elevate (H.O.P.E.), a Detroit prisoner advocacy group, says that prisoners often come out with the intention of addressing a system that unjustly led to their incarceration.

“Most people that go to prison gain a greater awareness,” Akwamu said. “We encourage ex-prisoners to vote—to become part of that process and change those harsh policies.”

Akwamu also says that one problem ex-prisoners often experience is maintaining the proper ID.

Ken Silfven, of the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, says that the Department of Corrections in Michigan is spending more time with ID issues for outgoing prisoners.

“We’re involved in the prison reentry program initiative,” Silfven told the Michigan Citizen, “with one goal being to get prisoners proper identification once released.”

Silfven talked about a new Secretary of State mobile office, which is targeting hard to reach populations like veterans, the elderly and the homeless.

Cheryl P. Johnson of the Coalition On Temporary Shelter told the Michigan Citizen that the 13,000 homeless in Detroit also have the opportunity to vote through absentee ballots.

COTS has four locations in the Detroit area which house homeless citizens in transition and permanent residents who may suffer from physical disabilities.

The city clerk’s office has traditionally had a presence at the shelters during elections to register voters and promote awareness, Johnson told the Michigan Citizen.

“We definitely focus on getting people knowledge about their voting rights,” Johnson says.

Johnson also said that local and national candidates have campaigned at temporary and permanent shelters in an effort to address the problem of homelessness and the people that have been victims of it.

“We’ve always had that kind of open door policy to allow nominees to come and speak.”

COTS is located at 26 Peterboro and can be reached at 313-831-3777.
Contact Helping Our Prisoners Elevate at www.hopedetroit.com
http://www.michigancitizen.com/print_this_story.asp?smenu=1&sdetail=6182

Posted by lois at 02:57 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2008

JJPL AND FFLIC WIN HISTORIC VICTORY WITH CLOSURE OF JETSON YOUTH PRISON

The results of years of litigation, media advocacy and family organizing reached a high point in 2003-2004 with the closure of the hyper-violent Tallulah youth prison and sweeping juvenile justice reform legislation, requiring a change from a punitive juvenile system to a rehabilitative system based on the highly effective Missouri model. The Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2003 required the move away from large youth prisons to small, regional, home-like secure care facilities close to children's homes, an increase in evidence-based alternatives to incarceration programs and a decrease in the number of non-violent children sent to secure care.

In spite of the ground-breaking legislation, juvenile justice reform had come to a standstill over the past year, with the three large youth prisons deteriorating, new reports of abuse in Jetson, and no movement to build the small, regional rehabilitative facilities and alternative programs required by the sweeping reforms JJPL and FFLIC helped pass in 2003. Jetson was the site of both widespread violence and, recently, the tragic death of a child who was just three weeks away from his release date.

JJPL and FFLIC stepped up pressure for reform through widespread media
coverage including a series of articles in the Baton Rouge Advocate such as, "Prison Problems Return: Juvenile Prison Reform has Stalled, Critics Say" (4/17/08) and "Jetson Closure Pushed" (4/19/08) and two New York Times editorials "Louisiana Tries Again" (5/29/2008) and "Louisiana: Closing an Abusive'Center for Youth'" (6/18/08)[1] Media profiles of youth who were incarcerated in Jetson for minor offenses, such as a teenager who served four years for stealing his mother's necklace to give to his girlfriend for Christmas and suffered violence and brutality in the facility,[2] drew attention to the fact that more than 60 percent of youth in Louisiana's juvenile prisons are non-violent.

The bill passed unanimously in the House and with only one opposition vote in the Senate, signaling a renewed commitment to reform. This means that smaller more regionalized facilities that focus on rehabilitation will be built, more children will be directed into community-based alternatives to incarceration, and that the antiquated youth prison known as the Jetson Correctional Center for Youth will no longer house children as of 2009.

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

June 25, 2008

MA CORI Reform Update

June 24, 2008
MA CORI Reform Update
The following information regarding the status of CORI legislation is based on an update by Aaron Tanaka of the Boston Worker's Alliance (BWA), an organizational member of the Mass. Alliance to Reform CORI to which CJCP belongs. There are four sections:

1) New Health and Human Services Regulations
2) Urgent CORI Bill Update
3) Call for Action!
4) Fact Sheets and Background

1) Executive Office of Health and Human Service (EOHHS) CORI regulations

In January of 2008, Governor Deval Patrick signed Executive Order No. 495 "Regarding the Use and Dissemination of Criminal Record Information." The campaign to secure an Executive Order on CORI was led by the BWA, the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, and Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner along with the CJPC. While broader efforts for CORI reform were still stalled in the legislature, advocates pressed Patrick to make good on his campaign promises to take timely and meaningful action on CORI. While the Executive Order and the proposed CORI bill falls short of the Governor's lofty campaign rhetoric, several key provisions will have positive, broad scale impacts for job seekers across the Commonwealth.

Within the Executive Order, three central reforms have been identified as key victories for the CORI reform movement.

CORI Reform Update

The first major reform is a requirement for employers receiving CORI reports to complete training on how to properly read the records. CORI reports are written in difficult to decipher code and employers are often unable to distinguish between cases that were dismissed or found not guilty and those resulting in a conviction. A single incident also often results in multiple entries on a CORI, leading employers who are unable to read records to assume that the applicant was arrested more than once. Under the new regulations, employers must pass a written examination on reading a CORI before being certified to receive the sensitive data.

A second major reform will create Fair Hiring policies for all state agencies that hire public workers. Through the Executive Order, a CORI check can only be conducted after an applicant has received an interview and is considered otherwise qualified for the position. The Executive Order moves the CORI check to the last step in the hiring process, and prevents applicants from being weeded out before having their resume, references and motivation considered. As the largest employer in the Commonwealth, these changes to the state's internal hiring policies will have broad implications for tens of thousands of government jobs.

Third, the Executive Order broadly reformed regulations that prevent those with CORI from working in health and human service fields. Previous Health and Human Service regulations required employers to follow a crime table that disqualified many CORI applicants from work. Additinally, an employer was only allowed to hire people with certain CORIs by obtaining a positive letter from a law enforcement agent or by paying a certified counselor for a mental health evaluation of the applicant. This impractical requirement had effectively barred qualified health care professionals with CORI from obtaining work.

Changes to the Executive Office of Health and Human Service regulations have now reopened this large employment sector to those with criminal records. The new regulations remove the assumed disqualification of those with CORI, and instruct health agencies to only consider misdemeanors that are less than 5 years old and felonies that under 10 years old. The requirement to obtain a letter from law enforcement or from a therapist has also been removed, and a number of crimes have been removed from the crime tables. New EOHHS are also expected to remove the criminal record check box from initial job applications forms.

These EOHHS regulations affect 495 state health and human service agencies, and also apply to the tens of thousands of businesses and agencies that receive contracts from the Health and Human Services Department. In total, the new CORI friendly regulations will affect over 180,000 employees in the human services field across the Commonwealth.

2) Urgent CORI Bill Update

The state legislature is planning to bring a CORI reform bill to a vote before the end of this session. If a bill does not pass before summer recess on July 31st, no new reforms will be considered until 2009. Currently, CORI reform has been stalled in the Judiciary Committee chaired by State Rep. Eugene O'Flaherty (D., Chelsea,) and State Senator Robert Creedon (D., Brockton). The next month represents a critical window to gain desperately needed reforms.

Sealing Old CORI

The Judiciary Committee has settled on Governor Patrick's timid recommendations to reduce the sealing periods to 5 years for misdemeanor and 10 years for a felony from the current 10 years for misdemeanor and 15 or felony. Because the forthcoming bill does not go far enough, the Mass Alliance to Reform CORI continues to build legislative support for 3 and 7 years respectively and will introduce an amendment once a bill is released.

"Ban the Box"

The Chairs are still undecided regarding whether to include our key demand to remove the CORI question from all initial job application forms. Divulging a criminal history in an initial application discourages employers from considering resumes, references or relevance of the offense.

Based solely on the job form, employers are 50% less likely to offer interviews to white applicants and 64% less likely to callback black applicants with a record (Statistics from the BWA factsheet. See below for a more complete discussion.) Ending upfront discrimination by banning the box would visibly improve job access for residents across the state.

As O'Flaherty and Creedon are still undecided on this provision, widespread public pressure can help ensure that the "ban the box" is included in the upcoming bill. Boston and Cambridge have already removed the criminal question from job applications, and we are calling on the state to expand those model guidelines to all Massachusetts employers.

3) Call for Action!

* Call your legislators and tell them to support CORI Reform. Ask your representative to speak with Chairman O'Flaherty in support of removing the criminal history question from all initial job applications and moving the bill out of committee with a positive recommendation.

Find out who your state representative is at www.wheredoivotema.com / then call the State House operator at (617) 722-2000 to get connected.

* Target the following key decision makers. Write an email, make a phone call or request a meeting! We are a grassroots coalition, so please gather your friends or share your organizational clout to help influence these key politicians.

Rep. Eugene O'Flaherty - 617 722-2396 / :Rep.GeneOFlaherty@Hou.State.MA.US
"Please remove the criminal record question from all initial job application forms. Employers should only consider criminal records for applicants who are otherwise qualified for the job. "

Speaker Sal DiMasi - 617 722-2500 / Rep.SalvatoreDiMasi@Hou.State.MA.US
"Please ensure that a CORI bill is passed this session before summer recess. Reduce the sealing period to 3 and 7 and take the CORI question off of all job applications."

Governor Deval Patrick - 617 725-4005/ Governor Patrick email -
"Please fulfill your campaign promises and your public commitment to pass CORI reform this year. Ensure that the criminal record question is removed from all initial job application forms."

Please email info@cjpc.org to let us know what you have done and any response you receive so we can track legislators. If you need help in meeting with your legislator, call Joel Pentlarge, CJPC Interim Executive Director at 617-426-5222 or Jpentlarge@cjpc.org .

Please help spread the word and thank you for supporting this grassroots movement for jobs, dignity and justice. The time for change is now!

4) Fact Sheets and Background

(a) Remove the Question from Initial Job Applications

The proposed amendment removes the criminal record question from initial jobs application forms. This measure encourages employers to consider the skills and qualifications of an applicant before considering the existence of a criminal history. Removing the criminal record question from initial job applications alters the timing of a criminal record inquiry, but does not limit an employers' access to such information.

Employers who use job applications to screen ex-offenders must delay criminal record inquires until after the applicant is interviewed and deemed otherwise qualified for a position.

According to the BWA employers who use initial employment applications to screen ex-offenders have grown from 56% in 1996 to over 80% of all employers in 2004. Once someone with a CORI record self-reports a criminal history on a job application, most employers will not consider resumes, references or personal character. Based solely on the criminal record question, employers are 50% less likely to offer interviews to white applicants and 64% less likely to interview black applicants. This type of job discrimination effectively bans people with CORIs from most entry-level jobs, and causes employers to overlook skilled members of our workforce.

In 2004-2005 Boston instituted model CORI reforms by removing the criminal history question from all municipal job applications and requiring over 8,000 private city vendors to also revise their application forms. Following Boston's lead, cities across the country including Cambridge, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Austin, San Francisco, and Oakland removed the question from job applications and moved criminal history inquiries to the last step in the hiring process. Any state level CORI reform should begin with the expansion of the Boston and Cambridge successful hiring model to all Massachusetts state, municipal and private employers.

(b) Reduce the Waiting Period to Seal CORIs

Reduce the sealing period of CORI reports to 3 years for misdemeanors and 7 years for felonies after court supervision is complete.

Studies across the country by state Departments of Corrections show rates of recidivism are high in the first two years after release, but are significantly lower in the third year, and approach zero risk by the fifth year. Someone who has not re-offended within 7 years have less than a 1% recidivism rate.. "Almost half (47%) of inmates who recidivated did so within one year of being released; by 18 months after release, 67percent of those who recidivated had returned to prison."(Massachusetts Recidivism Study, pg.2) Those individuals who have not re-offended within 7 years have less than a 1% recidivism rate..

Key elements of the proposed amendments are:

· Law enforcement agencies as well as agencies that work with vulnerable populations would maintain access to sealed records.

· Records can only remain sealed if a person does not violate the law again. Any new conviction revives the old convictions, and restarts the waiting period.

· Sex offense records and crimes against children would not be changed by this proposal

Other States

Other states have adopted sealing periods that are significantly shorter than the current Massachusetts waiting time of 10 years for a misdemeanor and 15 years for a felony. Massachusetts should join other states and adopt CORI reform that increases the opportunities for people with CORI records to become fully integrated members of society.

Sample States:

· Michigan: An individual convicted of no more than one offense can have the conviction record set aside 5 years after imposition or completion of sentence, whichever is later. Certain traffic offenses, certain sexual offenses, and some serious offenses cannot be sealed. (In Massachusetts, traffic offenses which carry no incarceration penalty are not a part of CORI, according to CMR 803.203)

· Utah: 15 years for certain multiple "class B and C" misdemeanors, 10 years for alcohol- or drug related traffic offense; otherwise 7 years for most felonies and 3-5 years for a misdemeanor. .

· Oregon: Except for certain violent, sexual, and traffic offenses, many adult convictions may be sealed after 3 years after the completion of the sentence, including class C felonies, misdemeanors for which imprisonment may be imposed.

· Ohio: Non-convictions can be sealed. First offenders may apply to have their record expunged 3 years after a felony conviction, or 1 year after a misdemeanor conviction. Except for murder and certain sexual offenses, juvenile adjudications of unruliness and delinquency may be sealed after 2 years have elapsed since discharge.

Reducing the long waiting period to seal CORIs promotes the idea that employers should only access records that matter, and to the degree that it increases employment of those with criminal records, and employment of ex-offenders is major factor in reducing recidivism which reduces crime.

Posted by lois at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2008

Free Speech Radio News Report on StopMax Conference

Free Speech Radio News Report on StopMax Conference
An estimated 20,000 people in the United States live in concrete cells, 6 foot by twelve foot wide for 23 hours a day. With their lives on lockdown, these prisoners are deprived of educational programs, adequate physical and mental health services and have little contact with their families or other inmates. Denouncing these conditions as human rights violations and utterly failed policy, hundreds of people gathered in Philadelphia at the Stop Max Conference to put an end to Solitary Confinement. Andalusia Knoll reports from the conference.
http://www.fsrn.org/content/solitary-confinement-disputed/2473

Posted by lois at 09:14 PM | Comments (0)

June 12, 2008

Federal Magistrate writes that Albert Woodfox's case should be overturned

June 12, 2008
National Briefing | South-NY Times
Louisiana: Case of Ex-Black Panther
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The conviction of a former Black Panther in the killing of a prison guard in 1972 should be overturned because his former lawyer should have objected to testimony from witnesses who had died after his original trial, a federal magistrate found. The lawyer’s omission denied a fair second trial for the man, Albert Woodfox, in 1998, the magistrate, Christine Nolan, wrote Tuesday in a recommendation to the federal judge who will rule later. Mr. Woodfox, 61, and Herman Wallace, 66, were convicted in the stabbing death of the guard, Brent Miller, on April 17, 1972. Mr. Wallace has been appealing his conviction based on arguments similar to Mr. Woodfox’s. Mr. Woodfox and Mr. Wallace, with another former Black Panther, became known as the Angola Three because they were held in isolation for about three decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12brfs-CASEOFEXBLAC_BRF.html?_r=1&sq=Black%20Panther&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=1&adxnnlx=1213290557-XtJM%20cgTd1fQS/Os4VaP2w&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2008

VA: Percy Walton's Death Sentence is Commuted

National Briefing | South, NY Times
Virginia: Death Sentence Commuted
By DAVID STOUT
Published: June 10, 2008

The life of a man who killed three people in November 1996 was spared by Gov. Tim Kaine, a day before the scheduled execution, on grounds that the inmate was mentally incompetent to understand his situation. In commuting the death sentence of Percy L. Walton, Governor Kaine said a new sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole “is now the only constitutionally appropriate court of action” in view of Mr. Walton’s continuing mental defectiveness. The defendant had just turned 18 when he shot three of his neighbors to death in Danville.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/us/10brfs-DEATHSENTENC_BRF.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Virginia&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 02:35 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2008

Cracking Open---Michael Short's Journey

Cracking Open
Michael Short knows he was wrong to sell crack cocaine, but he questions whether he needed 15 years in prison to learn his lesson. Now some of the politicians who helped put him there are wondering, too.

By Vanessa M. Gezari
Sunday, June 1, 2008; W18
Washington Post

ON HIS 18TH DAY OF FREEDOM, Michael Short awakened before dawn. In prison, corrections officers had paced the halls at night, jingling keys and shining flashlights. Now Mike slept fitfully, even in a king-size bed.

It was a damp, gray Tuesday late in February. He slipped on a pinstriped shirt that hid his tattoos, slid his feet into shiny new loafers and rubbed coconut oil into his hair, cut razor-straight at the temples and flecked with gray. He was 36, with a basketball player's long-legged gait and the lined brow of a man well acquainted with consequences. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he nervously knotted a silver-and-white tie that his girlfriend had bought him at Macy's.

On days like this, he wished the past were a room with a door you could close, a place you could walk away from, as he had walked away from prison after President Bush commuted his sentence. But the past wasn't like that, at least not for him. Over breakfast, he practiced the testimony he was scheduled to deliver that afternoon before a congressional subcommittee: My name is Michael Short. I am here because in 1992 I was sentenced for selling crack cocaine. Before that, I had never spent a day in prison. I came from a good family. I had no criminal history. I was not a violent offender. But I was sentenced to serve nearly 20 years. I was 21 years old.

As he navigated traffic from his girlfriend's house in Charles County and boarded the subway to Capitol Hill, he braced himself for the inevitable questions, the scrutiny of his crime, the dissection of his punishment. His commutation had taken half a dozen years to materialize and, by Mike's calculation, had shaved only six months off the time he would have served. He had spent more years in prison than many murderers.

He arrived at the basement room in the Rayburn House Office Building a half-hour early and looked around, taking in the raised dais, the plaque that said "Ways and Means." He might have spent this drizzly morning at the Greenbelt health club where he had recently landed a job as a personal trainer. Instead, he was here, wondering what was meant by the term "majority whip" and hoping that he wouldn't stutter.

The room slowly filled with the most sympathetic crowd he would encounter all day: lawyers, ex-prisoners and advocates who believed that federal crack cocaine laws were unfair and had gathered to lobby for new ones. The subcommittee hearing would not take place until afternoon; this was just a practice session to give Mike and other lobbyists some last-minute pointers. Someone handed him a big red button that said, "CRACK the disparity," a reference to the vast difference in prison terms to which crack and powder cocaine offenders are sentenced. He pinned it to his shirt.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas who has introduced a bill to remedy the disparity, walked to the lectern. An imposing woman in an emerald green suit, she wondered aloud what America's founders would have thought, had they been able to look into the future and see how many times the country fell short of its ideals.

"They set up these models, these principles, that indicated that we had the right of free speech, that we had the right of a trial by our peers," Jackson Lee said, her voice rising. "And for those of us [whose forebears] came here in the bottom of the belly of a slave boat, the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments suggested that there was a road map to freedom in this nation. But we have sometimes lost our way."

She spoke of how, in the Bible, no one stopped to help the beaten, stripped man on the roadside until the Good Samaritan came along. In much the same way, she said, members of Congress had long ignored broken crack cocaine laws that disproportionately affected African Americans. Husbands, brothers and sisters had disappeared from their communities for years over relatively minor drug crimes, she said.

Mike pulled a crumpled tissue from his pocket and wiped his eyes. The packed room felt like church on Sunday morning. As Jackson Lee spoke, people yelled, "Yes!" and "All right now!" When she finished, Mike clapped long and hard.

And then, unexpectedly, someone introduced him. He walked to the lectern and stood there, hunching his shoulders as if he were ashamed of his 6-foot-2-inch frame. His voice was gravelly with emotion.

He began his spiel: his name, his crime -- the distribution of 63 grams of crack cocaine -- the almost-20-year sentence, the 15 years and eight months he'd spent in prison.

"How many?" someone called out, incredulous.

"Fifteen years and eight months of my 19 years," Mike said. He paused, searching for a way to explain without asking for sympathy. He tried to maintain his composure.

"I made a mistake. And it didn't take me 15 years to understand that what I did was wrong. I deserved to go to prison. But I don't feel as though I deserved to go to prison for 15 years."

IN THE SUMMER OF 1986, WHEN MIKE WAS 15, the Boston Celtics selected Len Bias as their first pick in the NBA draft. A Celtics scout compared him to Michael Jordan, and Bias told a reporter that the first thing he planned to buy was a Mercedes. Two days later, he collapsed in his dorm suite at the University of Maryland, dead of a cocaine overdose. The community that had cheered for him staggered like a man punched in the gut. Here was a kid from Prince George's County who had laid claim to the American dream with all the ease of a pro executing a layup. "I can't see why we would lose someone like this," the director of a recreation center where Bias had played as a kid told The Washington Post. "Someone so important to us."

Initial medical reports indicated, incorrectly, that the high concentration of cocaine in Bias's blood suggested that he had died after smoking crack, then the latest drug to hit America's city streets. Made from powder cocaine cooked with baking soda, crack was cheaper than powder, and, because it was smoked, the high was more intense.

Living in Hyattsville, the son of a legal secretary and a car salesman, Mike absorbed the news, but he was too young to make sense of it. Drugs were not a part of his world. His parents had separated when he was a boy, and his mother raised him and his brother and sister in quiet suburban neighborhoods before moving to a neat brick house on Hawaii Avenue in Northeast Washington after Mike graduated from high school. He was a quiet kid, obsessed with basketball. His friends called him a "mama's boy" because he used to meet his mother at the bus stop when she got home from work. "I wouldn't have known what cocaine was if you put it on my dinner plate," he said.

Nevertheless, his world reverberated with Len Bias's loss. At Northwestern High School, Bias's alma mater, Mike played on the varsity basketball team with the star's younger brother Jay. Mike wanted to comfort Jay, who was visibly distraught, but he didn't know what to say.

In Congress, then-House Speaker Tip O'Neill, a Democrat whose Boston constituents couldn't stop talking about Bias's death, saw a political opportunity. Throughout the 1980s, the federal government had waded deeper into the war on drugs, part of a trend spawned by the turmoil of the 1960s and '70s. Bias's death offered a perfect chance to capitalize on the growing public outcry, especially over crack. "The speaker realizes, if the Democrats take the lead on this, if we play it right, maybe we can win the Senate back," Eric E. Sterling said recently. He was assistant counsel to the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime in 1986 and now heads the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a Silver Spring nonprofit that educates the public about criminal justice issues.

O'Neill convened the steering and policy committee of the House Democrats and moved the formation of tougher drug laws to the top of the agenda. Sterling and other staffers were told to draft a law that would punish high-level traffickers, but they didn't know what amount of drugs would qualify someone as "high-level" and, with the midterm election campaign season just a few days away, they didn't have time to determine that, Sterling said. No hearings were held.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established the mandatory minimum drug sentences that remain in effect today. It imposed a five-year mandatory prison term for first-time trafficking of five or more grams of crack or 500 grams of powder, and a 10-year mandatory minimum for first-time trafficking of 50 grams of crack or five kilos of powder. In drug policy circles, this is known as the "100-to-1 drug quantity ratio," and it has hit African Americans hardest because they are more likely to live in the neighborhoods where crack cocaine is used and sold, even though, in absolute numbers, most crack users are white. In 2006, 82 percent of crack offenders sentenced under federal law were African American, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent agency set up to develop a national sentencing policy for the federal courts.

In 1988, Congress got even tougher, passing a law that made simple possession of five grams of crack punishable by a mandatory minimum five-year prison term. First-time possession of any amount of any other controlled substance, including powder cocaine, is a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of a year in prison. The only exception is flunitrazepan, also known as Rohypnol, the "date rape drug," which carries a maximum three-year penalty for first-time possession.

Five basic suppositions guided lawmakers in setting such high penalties for crack, according to research by the Sentencing Commission.

Crack is extremely addictive, and because crack users needed to get high more frequently and tended to have less money than powder users, they were more likely to engage in criminal behavior to support their addictions, creating at least a perceived link between crack use and violence. Crack was considered especially dangerous, particularly to fetuses. Children were also used as lookouts by dealers and exposed to the drug as addicts. And crack's potency and low price -- about $10 for two small pieces compared with $100 for a gram of powder cocaine in 1986-- meant that almost anyone could afford it.

President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in late October 1986. The following week, the Democrats took back the Senate. Over the next two decades, the federal prison population would grow from about 38,000 to more than 200,000; more than half the current inmates are drug offenders. The average amount of crack that federal offenders were convicted of trafficking in 2006 was 51 grams, about the weight of a candy bar; their average prison sentence was 10 years, according to the Sentencing Commission.

"If we were sophisticated in the metric system, we would have known that the people we're interested in, like [Colombian Pablo] Escobar, are moving a ton, a million grams," Sterling said. "Are we winning the war on drugs? No. The federal government is wasting the resources."

THE YEAR AFTER LEN BIAS DIED, Mike Short's team at Northwestern won the state championship. He and his teammates stormed the court at the University of Maryland's Cole Field House in jubilation, and some leapt for the rim and held on, shattering a fiberglass backboard. Their joy signaled intense relief. It had been a tough season, with rival players mocking Jay Bias over his brother's drug-induced death and Northwestern players fighting back. Several had been suspended.

Mike, a sophmore, wasn't among them, but in his senior year he was cut from the team over "differences of opinion" with a new coach, he said. His mother met with teachers and administrators, who offered to reinstate him, but Mike refused. "It's my fault for being angry like that, holding resentment," he said. "That's something that still haunts me."

He switched to pickup games on street courts in suburban Maryland, where drug dealers and athletes mingled like mismatched dancing partners. Dealers would sometimes hand out money to winning players or buy them clothes. People noticed Mike's skill and started paying him as much as $500 to play in high-stakes games, he said. He knew drugs were illegal, and his training as an athlete dissuaded him from using them. He says he never tried cocaine and only smoked marijuana once. He didn't need money. "But then some of us would see how easy it is, and it's hard to turn down $1,000 or $2,000 when you don't have to do anything," he said.

His dealing began with casual conversations with people from school, the neighborhood and guys he met on the courts. He wasn't asked to do much -- most of the time, he just made a phone call or delivered a package, often to people he knew and trusted -- and dealing became part of the fabric of his social life. He would go bowling and meet someone else in the business, or arrange a handoff to a friend at a local barbershop. He bought himself stylish new clothes, but he didn't buy a car because he worried that his mother, Shirley Short, would catch on. Even so, when he showed up in a pair of $100 tennis shoes that she hadn't bought for him, when his friends parked their own flashy cars outside, she guessed the truth. About a year before Mike got arrested, his mother told him to stop. He didn't see why he should.

"I was like, Man, it's just too sweet of a deal," he recalled. "There's no violence involved. Why not sell it, make my $500, and go on about my business?"

The violence that was invisible to him was apparent to anyone who read the newspaper or had the misfortune to live in one of the impoverished urban neighborhoods favored by street dealers. In 1989, Washington had 434 homicides, more per capita than any other U.S. city. But Mike didn't frequent open-air drug markets, and he told himself that the cops weren't looking for someone like him. I'm a peon, he thought. They want the guys who are selling thousands and thousands of dollars' worth.

And then he walked into their cross hairs.

The investigation that put him in prison, like the law that kept him there, began with Bias's death. In 1987, Brian Tribble, a former Maryland student and friend of Bias's, went on trial for supplying the cocaine that killed the basketball star. A former player testified that he and three others, including Tribble and Bias, snorted about one-third of a cup of powder cocaine the night they were celebrating Bias's ascension to the Celtics.

Relying heavily on the testimony of former teammates who snorted cocaine with Bias and a 17-year-old with an extensive juvenile record who said he had sold large amounts of cocaine for Tribble, prosecutors built a case that they later acknowledged was largely circumstantial. Tribble was acquitted, the jury foreman explained after the trial, because prosecutors failed to present evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that he had any connection to the drugs that killed Bias. Tribble wept when the verdict was read, but his success in beating the charges vaulted him to superstardom in the local drug-dealing community, said J. Andrew McColl, the lead FBI agent on the investigation that led to Mike's arrest. "Brian was Mr. Teflon," McColl said. "Nobody could touch him."

In 1988, the D.C. police and the FBI went after Tribble, who was working with a network of dealers in the Woodridge neighborhood in Northeast. The FBI planned to have undercover agents supply the dealers with cellphones in exchange for crack cocaine and to record their conversations. At the time, cellphones were rare and expensive; you needed good credit to get one, something most drug dealers didn't have.

A few days before Christmas in 1989, an undercover FBI agent showed up to collect a monthly cellphone payment in crack from a dealer named Norman Brown. Brown told the agent to drive over to his "man" and collect the drugs. On this day, his man was Mike Short. Mike handed the agent a paper bag containing 63 grams of crack cocaine. The agent gave him $1,800.

In 1990, after a two-year investigation, federal authorities charged Mike, then 19, and 28 others with selling powder cocaine and crack as part of a sprawling drug ring. Nearly two decades later, McColl called Mike "a very minor player." Mike said he had never been suspended from school. Unlike some of his codefendants, he had worked steadily, including helping his father at Mattress Discounters in Langley Park.

Meanwhile, Brian Tribble agreed to cooperate with authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute powder cocaine, admitting that he and associates had sold more than 110 pounds of drugs in an 18-month period. He was sentenced to 10 years, almost exactly half the length of Mike's crack sentence of 19 years and seven months. In addition to the 63 grams Mike handed to the undercover agent, the court held him accountable for helping to distribute another five kilos of crack, based on witness testimony, which added considerably to his sentence.

AFTER HE WAS FREED, MIKE RETURNED TO WASHINGTON ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 18, 2007, on a Trailways bus from West Virginia, wearing a prison-issue sweat suit and a denim jacket that whipped in the wind. He had ridden since morning, staring out the window, too anxious to sleep. He felt like everyone was looking at him, like they all knew that he had just been released from prison.

He was released just ahead of a stream of crack offenders expected to get out an average of two years early under changes enacted last fall by the Sentencing Commission. About 20,000 federal crack inmates will be eligible for the reductions over the next 30 years. The largest number -- about 1,400 -- were sentenced in the Eastern District of Virginia; 279 were sentenced in Maryland and 269 in the District.

On average, they are male, black and 35 years old, a profile that Mike fit almost exactly, and many will return to neighborhoods scarred by drugs. The Anacostia halfway house where Mike would spend the next six weeks sat across from a rundown apartment complex on a desolate street. It was called Hope Village, but he quickly sized up the neighborhood. "You would find your choice of drugs around there, easy," he said.

He had been behind bars for nearly 16 years, most of it in Petersburg, Va. His mother had died in 1997, and he had gone to her funeral in his khaki inmate's uniform, chained at the waist and ankles, escorted by corrections officers. Mike's father, whom he had seen periodically over the years, also attended the funeral, along with Mike's brother, sister and nephews. His father sometimes visited him in prison, and the two developed a closer relationship, though they were never as close as he and his mother had been.

At first, he was angry -- at the people who'd testified against him, at the government and at his lawyer. Having never been much of a churchgoer, he blamed God. Then somewhere along the way, he grew tired of the repetitive drone of his own rage. "I didn't want to come out of prison being bitter, hating anyone," he said. "I wasn't raised like that, and I didn't want to come home like that."

Vowing not to waste a day, he earned an associate's degree in business management and worked long hours in a prison business office.

"Why did you go to prison for so long?" Mike recalls his nephew asking when he visited. "Did you kill anybody?"

"I sold drugs," Mike told him.

"But you haven't been home since I been living." After a while, he stopped asking.

Another visitor began making the 2 1/2-hour trip from Washington to see him, first with Mike's sister, then on her own. Vanessa Bolden was 5-foot-2, with smooth chestnut skin and the righteous toughness of a woman who had been working since she was 16 and now owned her home and drove a sleek blue Lexus. She and Mike had started dating a few months before he was convicted, but neither thought it would last. She was a 31-year-old single mother with her own apartment and a job at the U.S. Customs Service. He was 21, living with his mother and going to federal court every day for his trial on drug charges.

Vanessa and Mike would go to Hains Point or Rock Creek Park and drink Heinekens and talk. Sometimes they would sit in her car in front of his mother's house, listening to the radio and laughing. If he was nervous about going to prison, she never guessed. "I never had no idea that they would give him 1,001 years," she said.

In the prison visiting room, she was impressed by what she saw. "He started educating himself; he started reading a lot, getting a lot of knowledge," she said. After receiving his management degree, Mike earned his personal trainer certification and completed courses in nutrition and plyometric training.

Vanessa and Mike exchanged letters and talked on the phone. Their relationship began to shape Vanessa's life. She watched her girlfriends fall prey to cheating men. She would hang out with her brothers or go to a happy hour, but she wouldn't let a man buy her a drink. Mike was her excuse. When she went out, she imagined he was at the table next to her. "I always thought Mikey was watching me," she said.

By the time his release date neared, she was going to see him nearly every weekend, getting up at 5 a.m. on Sundays and driving all morning to sit next to him in the crowded visiting room and hold his hand. "I was like, 'What is wrong with me?'?" she said. They talked for hours about their families, their future. When Vanessa woke up troubled in the middle of the night, she would write to him. "He'd write me back and make me feel better. I was like, Damn, if it was that simple, why couldn't I figure it out?"

In 2002, he applied for executive clemency, which is one of the few remedies available to federal prisoners sentenced to mandatory minimums because there is no parole in the federal system. A year earlier, President Bill Clinton had handed out dozens of last-minute pardons and commutations. One of the recipients was Mike's codefendant and childhood friend Derrick Curry. In recent administrations, clemency has become rare. Bush has approved only six commutations since taking office, fewer than any president except his father, who served only one term.

Mike's petition, including letters from prison officials, his sister and family friends, landed in the Office of the Pardon Attorney in early 2002. It would take more than five years to reach the White House, just three blocks away. At first, his request seemed headed for denial, according to documents. Three years passed before then-Pardon Attorney Roger Adams sent a letter to the U.S. attorney in Baltimore and to Judge William Nickerson, who had presided over Mike's case, asking them to weigh in on his clemency petition.

A veteran judge, Nickerson had long been frustrated by the sentencing guidelines that took discretion out of the hands of judges. Mike's case had bothered him for years, so much so that it contributed to his decision to stop handling drug cases. Mike and his codefendants were kids from hard-

working families who "kind of got sidetracked," Nickerson said. "It made it doubly tragic to ship them off to jail." When it came time in 2005 to offer an opinion on Mike's clemency petition, Nickerson endorsed it.

Two years later, on December 11, 2007, the White House announced the commutation. It had been so long that Mike had forgotten he had applied. His unit manager found him eating lunch in the prison cafeteria.

"Are you Michael Short?" he asked.

"Why?" Mike barked. He assumed he was in trouble, though he knew he had done nothing wrong.

"Relax," the unit manager told him. "You got immediate release."

Mike's face broke into a smile. "Oh, really? Can I leave right now?"

When Vanessa learned that he was coming home early, she found herself trembling. "I didn't know what kind of man he really was, as far as living with him," she said.

The night he arrived, he climbed into her car. They sat side by side, just the two of them in silence. She glanced over at him, wondering if this was for real.

WHEN HE GOT OUT OF THE HALFWAY HOUSE THIS PAST FEBRUARY, Mike moved into Vanessa's three-bedroom house in Charles County. Golden cherubs hung on the walls in the bathroom, and a stuffed anteater with a pink ribbon around its neck occupied the overstuffed living room couch. After the constant noise of men and cells, Vanessa's house was quiet and strange. Mike didn't like being alone there. After so long in prison, he felt awkward most places. At the mall, he stumbled when getting on escalators. Electronic gas pumps bewildered him. Vanessa rolled down her window to help: "Baby, push that button over there."

He and the other inmates had fantasized about running the streets when they got out, but Mike found that he didn't even want to leave the house. He and Vanessa talked on the phone a dozen times a day. On Valentine's Day, he made steak and shrimp fried rice and laid roses on their bed. He cooked her breakfast and packed her lunch -- a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a granola bar, a peach. He mopped and vacuumed, washed clothes and painted the laundry room.

In his last years in prison, they had almost broken up when he told her he wanted children. She was in her late 40s and had already raised a son. "I'm not stopping you," she told him then. "But, if you want to do it, then go do it. I can't be a part." When she stopped answering his calls, he repented. "I want to do the right thing," he said. "I want to make her happy."

Now she called him "my blessing," "my heart." He said she was his perfect soul mate. They went to a jewelry store to look at rings and cuddled in the kitchen, sipping Sutter Home rosé while their dinner warmed in the oven. "He is not the average guy, 'cause the average guy's not cooking all that for you," she said.

Mike ordered business cards and printed his résumé, which listed his associate's degree, training and nutrition certificates, as well as his work experience in prison. He applied for jobs at several big health clubs, handing over copies of his commutation bearing the president's signature. When one of the gyms turned Mike down, a supervisor who believed in second chances put in a good word for him. Two weeks later, Mike got the job.

He wanted to work seven days a week. "I have the energy and the motivation for it right now," he said, "and I need the money."

He said nothing to his co-workers and clients about his past, but one day, during a training session, a client asked if he had been in prison. "I knew it, I knew it," she said when he told her. She was a corrections officer. Mike's biceps, swelled from years lifting weights in a prison gym, had given him away.

ON THAT DAMP, GRAY TUESDAY IN FEBRUARY, Mike stood amid the marble columns of the Capitol Rotunda and dialed Vanessa's number on his cellphone. He had spent the morning meeting with a congressman and walking beneath crystal chandeliers and elaborate archways, past a portrait of Joseph Hayne Rainey, the first African American elected to the House of Representatives. Mike had grown up a few miles from the Capitol, but he had never been there. Now he told Vanessa how beautiful it was.

Shortly after Mike left the halfway house, an advocate from Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that lobbies for fair and proportionate sentencing, asked for his help. Members of Congress had proposed a handful of bills to reduce or remove the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, and FAMM wanted Mike to tell his story on the Hill.

He was working long days at the health club, and he couldn't afford a suit to wear to the hearing, but felt he owed it to the men he had left behind in prison. By now, even some legislators who had voted for the 1986 mandatory minimum laws expressed regret. One former supporter, Sen. Joseph Biden, a Democrat from Delaware, had recently told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the sentencing disparity could not be justified: "Our intentions were good, but much of our information turns out not to be as good as our intentions."

It is true, medical experts say, that crack is more addictive than powder cocaine; smoking and injecting offer quicker routes to the bloodstream than snorting, and the faster, more intense highs lead to an increased rate of addiction. But statistics have not borne out fears of widespread violence associated with crack. In 2005, only 6 percent of powder cocaine offenses and 10 percent of crack offenses involved violence or a threat of violence, according to the Sentencing Commission. The predicted "crack babies" did not materialize, either. Although some early studies of individual children suggested that crack had devastating effects on fetuses, long-term case studies showed that alcohol is more dangerous to a fetus than any form of cocaine, including crack, and has affected a far greater number of children, said Harolyn Belcher, a neuro-developmental pediatrician and director of research at the Kennedy Krieger Institute's Family Center in Baltimore.

"This was one of the few times when [Congress] really rushed to complete and formulate the sentencing before the science was really there," Belcher said.

Over the years, some lawmakers had tried to lessen crack penalties, but the political moment had never been right. Then, last fall, the wind seemed to be shifting. The Sentencing Commission, which had long criticized the disparity, proposed the guideline changes that made thousands of crack offenders eligible for reduced sentences. Two Supreme Court rulings allowed federal judges a measure of freedom in drug sentencing, permitting them to exercise greater leniency if they felt the circumstances demanded it. And amid it all, Bush commuted Mike's sentence.

After the morning practice session and lunch in a congressional cafeteria, Mike entered the hearing room, calming his nerves and distracting himself from what was coming by replaying in his head a basketball game he had seen recently on TV. The cameras from C-SPAN swiveled toward him and the other witnesses seated at a long table planted with microphones. Mike was the only one without a law degree.

Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security, banged the gavel. He had proposed a bill to close the disparity, and he urged members of Congress to help end "two decades of legal discrimination."

"There is certainly no sound basis for a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for the mere possession of five grams of crack, when you could get probation for possessing a ton of powder," Scott said.

Judge Ricardo Hinojosa, chair of the Sentencing Commission, ran down the statistics. In 2007, he said, crack sentences were about 50 percent longer than powder sentences. "The commission believes there is no justification for the current statutory penalty scheme for powder and crack cocaine offenses," he said.

In the weeks before the hearing, Attorney General Michael Mukasey had spoken forcefully against the Sentencing Commission's decision to make the guideline changes retroactive, saying that "nearly 1,600 convicted crack dealers, many of them violent gang members, will be eligible for immediate release into communities nationwide." Gretchen Shappert, U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, had come to present the Justice Department's position.

She said that her career had been "defined by the ravages of crack cocaine." She spoke about open-air drug markets, people sleeping in bathtubs to avoid stray bullets, dealers recruiting kids to sell drugs. "We continue to believe that a variety of factors fully justify higher penalties for crack offenses," Shappert said. "It has been said, and certainly it has been my experience, that whereas powder cocaine destroys an individual, crack cocaine destroys a community."

Mike listened, the muscles in his forehead tightening. He sipped his water. When it was his turn to speak, his voice was low and scratchy. "To be clear, I know that what I did was wrong," he read from his prepared testimony. "I sold illegal drugs, and I deserved to be punished. But what I did and who I was did not justify the sentence I received . . .

"I have heard some of the comments some people in positions of power have made about crack cocaine prisoners -- that we are violent gang members and that this is why our sentences have to be so much longer. I am not that person, and most of the people that I leave behind in prison aren't, either."

When the testimony was over, Scott asked whether it was true that many offenders eligible for reduced sentences were already nearing the end of their prison terms.

"Many of them, that would be the case. Mr. Short's situation is not unique," said Reggie B. Walton, a federal judge in Washington who was seated a few chairs down from Mike. "And I think it's just a waste of the taxpayers' money to keep somebody like Mr. Short locked up for as long as he was locked up. I'll be the first to tell him that he should have been punished. But to keep somebody locked up for as long as we kept him locked up, who could have come back into the community and been a positive contributor to society, I think is a loss to the community where he comes from."

People in the audience began to clap, and then, like a dam breaking, Mike hunched his shoulders and burst into tears.

MIKE STOOD BEHIND THE COUNTER at the health club in Greenbelt. It was a March Saturday, one of the busiest days of the week, and he was the only one there. This was his chance to score new clients and build experience, and he had been looking forward to it.

A woman approached him. She told him she wanted a personal trainer, but only if he could promise her that she would lose 20 pounds by May. In prison, Mike had become something of a moral hardliner. He knew some trainers who would have taken her money and told her what she wanted to hear, but he wasn't one of them. "First and foremost, I'm not going to promise you nothing," he says he told her. It would depend on how disciplined she was during her workouts, he explained, and what she ate when she wasn't at the gym.

"Well, how much is it per hour?"

The sessions were priced in packages, not by the hour. He looked for a calculator.

"You ought to know that!"

"Miss, I don't work in sales. I'm a personal trainer."

"Well, I want to talk to somebody else."

"You are free to talk to whoever you want to talk to."

She turned and stormed out, Mike said.

When he walked out to the parking lot at the end of his shift, Mike thought, I don't need any more days like this. But the truth was, apart from computer glitches and the occasional cranky client, Mike loved being a personal trainer. The main problem was money. He had hoped to make from $12,000 to $18,000 in his first six months of freedom, and he was nowhere close. He was paid $15 for each hour-long training session, but the club took nearly three times that much. "It's robbery," he said. "You getting paid peanuts for doing all the work."

His first paycheck had been for $17, but recently his biweekly pay had risen to $266. He quickly spent it on gas, an oil change, fixing a punctured tire and paying his and Vanessa's cellphone bills. He had planned to take over their shared bills one by one, paying them in ascending order until they were sharing costs equally. But on this day he had $15 in his bank account.

His framed training certificates still hung on the wall in the downstairs rec room, but he felt his dream slipping away. Vanessa paid every time they went out. He tried to make up for it by cooking and cleaning, but he had his pride. "It's got to be something better than this," he said.

One morning in March, he didn't get up to make Vanessa breakfast or pack her lunch. "I'm tired," he told her. He rolled over and slept until after she had left for work. A little later, frustrated and near tears, he sat at the computer, searching the Internet for openings at Safeway, Giant, FedEx and the post office. "I just got to be patient," he told himself, his voice breaking.

That afternoon, he was washing dishes in the kitchen when Vanessa called to say that she would be home soon, and she was starving. She asked him to put some salmon in the oven, and maybe make some rice.

"What kind of rice you want me to make, Vanessa?" he asked.

"Baby, when you talk like that, I know you don't want to do it."

Mike laughed. "You trying to read me through the phone now?" He took the fish out of the refrigerator.

"Get to cooking, man. I'm hungry."

"Relax already. I got you."

A few minutes later, she called back. "Do you miss me?"

"Only on Thursdays and Saturdays. I don't miss you today."

"All right, don't forget you have to heat the oven up first and then let that fresh salmon cook for 30 minutes."

Mike had already put the fish into the oven. "Are you going to let a true player do this, or what? Please!"

He had learned to cook and clean from his mother. She assigned him and his siblings chores, but because Mike was an early riser, he often ended up doing his brother and sister's chores as well, he said. In Vanessa's house, he would turn on the music and lose himself in the repetitive strokes of a mop on a tile floor. Cooking also relaxed him.

He had been playful on the phone, but after he hung up, his mood darkened. He took down a box of cornbread mix and buttered a pan. He wore long nylon shorts, a sleeveless T-shirt and black slippers. He seemed too big for the room, with its cloth lilies in a pot by the sink.

"I don't normally curse," he said. "I know I [expletive] up. I should have never went to prison . . . I know that this is not where I should be at this point in my life, 36 years old, struggling. I shouldn't."

He was making his mother's macaroni and cheese. He poured the pasta into a buttered pan, shook on black pepper, laid on slices of cheese and poured milk and eggs over the top.

Outside, the neutral-colored houses with their slate blue and burgundy shutters stood quiet in the middle of the day, their numbered parking spaces empty. He and Vanessa were going out that night, and he hadn't found another job. "Before I know it, I'll have to go back to work tomorrow." He sighed. "I didn't even really do nothing."

MIKE'S CONCERNS ABOUT MONEY SEEMED BLISSFULLY REMOTE as he climbed a flight of stairs at the Verizon Center one Saturday in March and settled into the second-to-last row to watch Duke play West Virginia in the NCAA basketball tournament. He had dreamed of going to an NCAA game since he was a kid, and now his friend and codefendant Derrick Curry, who also had been freed by presidential decree, sat beside him.

Derrick wore a gray sweat suit and ate fried chicken off a cardboard tray, and Mike leaned forward expectantly as they waited for the game to begin.

Mike had been a Duke fan since he was 13. He despised West Virginia. He had spent the last year of his prison sentence in the state, which had no professional team, and corrections officers cheered raucously for their college players.

"I hope we beat them by 50," he said.

West Virginia dominated from the start. A Duke player sped down the court heading for the hoop and missed.

"He can't shoot," Derrick said.

"He can't shoot," Mike agreed. "A wide-open shot there! No guard. He's supposed to make that."

Mike leaned forward, hands crossed at the wrists, palms on his knees. As people shuffled past with trays of pretzels and kettle corn, West Virginia scored again. Mike shook his head. A Duke player dribbled the length of the court, rose to the basket and fumbled the shot. "Please, man!" Mike yelled. "I don't understand! That's unreal, man!"

The game went on, but Mike furrowed his brow. If anyone understood the consequences of a missed opportunity, it was him. As he and Derrick sat in the Verizon Center, Congress was considering seven bills that would reduce or remove the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, but other issues took priority: the teetering economy, the presidential race, Gen. David Petraeus talking about the effects of the troop surge in Iraq. It was, and still is, hard to know when or whether anything would change.

When the clock ran out, West Virginia had upset Duke, 73-67, in the day's first game. Mike had been paid on Friday, but he rolled his eyes as he handed over $5 for an ice cream. On the way back to his seat, an usher eyed his cone. "It's good," he told her, "but it cost too much." As Purdue and Xavier chased each other in the second game, Mike and Derrick sat as silent as boys absorbed in their ice cream, biting into the cones wrapped in paper sleeves decorated with stars and stripes.

THE SKY WAS STILL DARK WHEN MIKE LOCKED THE DOOR of Vanessa's house behind him. He wore black pants and a long-sleeved white shirt and lugged a large gym bag and a gallon jug of water. In the burgundy Nissan that Vanessa had lent him, he navigated the streets at a crawl, flashing his turn signals even though the neighborhood was deserted. The prospect of a routine traffic stop filled him with dread. Given his record, he worried that even a minor violation might end with him face down on the asphalt surrounded by dogs.

It was just after 4 a.m., and a thin crescent moon hung overhead. Mike liked this time of day, before the sun rose and rush-hour traffic clogged the highways. The soul classic "Natural High" played on the radio, and he leaned back in his seat and stared out at the dark road.

He was on his way to a new job that promised everything he'd hoped for when he left prison. A week earlier, he had quit his job at the health club. His new employer, Getem Tight Fitness, rented a mirrored ground-floor studio in an expansive home in a Prince George's County subdivision of mansions and landscaped lawns.

Mike was making $25 an hour to train a small but dedicated clientele, almost twice the rate of his previous job. For once, his past had not hurt him. The gym's manager, Richard Gartmon, had spent 10 years in prison on federal money laundering and fraud charges. He and Mike had met years earlier in prison, and Mike got the job right away.

The streets were silent as he pulled into an empty cul-de-sac and switched off the engine. A few minutes later, another trainer parked beside him. Mike lifted his bag and water jug from the trunk and followed her down a brick walkway behind a nearby house.

Inside, he greeted his first clients, a handful of smiling, middle-aged women in black workout suits. Red and green mats went down on the wood floors, and the iPod speakers blared Gwen Stefani. Mike changed into a shiny new Adidas shirt and pants that Richard had given him and stood at the front of the room to lead the day's first exercise class.

"Feet together, hands together, rotate to the right first," he called, spinning his torso. He didn't smile, but the furrows in his brow faded, and his face shone. He led the class through leg raises -- "Do not let the feet hit the ground!" -- and minute-long side-plank exercises that left several women sweating and groaning. One collapsed on her mat.

"Stomach on fire?" Mike asked.

"Yes!" a woman called out.

"That's what I like."

A man named Ray Smith stepped uncertainly into the gym, guided by his wife. A church deacon and an operations manager for a law firm, he had recently lost his eyesight to diabetes. Mike turned the class over to another instructor and, with an arm around Ray's waist, gently escorted him to a weight room in back.

"We did 10 pounds last time, right?" he asked. Ray nodded. Mike carefully placed the weights in the older man's hands and counted under his breath. "Good, good," Mike told him. "Fantastic."

His next client was a man with a shaved head and a peace sign tattooed on one muscled arm. Mike strapped on weightlifting gloves and worked out alongside him. A 38-year-old owner of a legal services company, Darnell Self sweated at the pull-up bar. "Keep pushing!" Mike told him. "Two more. Good money, man, good money!"

They did one-arm rolls, Darnell lifting 50 pounds, Mike 65. The room grew hot, the mirror fogged. Mike loaded weights onto barbells. Darnell looked doubtful. "That 90's not for me," he said. "I mean, one day I think I'll be there . . ."

"My bad," Mike told him, switching the weights. "I normally work out with 120."

Darnell picked up the barbells, grimacing. "Do it till it burns," Mike told him.

"It's already burning."

"That's how you do it. You're going to have forearms like Popeye."

Darnell groaned and dropped the weights. He stood panting.

"Last set," Mike told him.

Finally, Darnell laid the weights down. He tried to clasp Mike's hand, but he was too weak. "I was like a girl, man," he said, laughing. "I couldn't even really give you five."

Outside, the sun had risen. Mike stepped onto the brick walkway. Years ago, before the big houses came up, he and his brother used to drive out here with a carload of friends after the movies. It was all woods then, and they went joyriding and chased one another through the trees screaming about Jason, the hockey-masked killer from "Friday the 13th."

Now he stood still, gazing into the trees. There was no escaping the past, nor any way to separate the crooked pathways of his own personal history from whatever lay ahead. It was 7:36 a.m. The next wave of clients would be there soon. Mike turned and walked back into the gym.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/27/AR2008052702531_pf.html

Posted by lois at 12:20 AM | Comments (0)

June 03, 2008

CA: Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act of 2008 (NORA) to be on state ballot

The Secretary of State announced June 2, 2008 that the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act (NORA) has qualified for the November state ballot!
Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act of 2008 (NORA)

NORA is a California ballot initiative intended for the Nov. 4, 2008, ballot, offering a common-sense solution to prison overcrowding. The campaign is just getting started, with signature-collection efforts under way in January 2008. We continue gathering signatures until April 21, 2008.

The official sponsor of the campaign is the Campaign for Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation, a state ballot measure committee with ID# 1302707.

NORA Official Title & Summary

On Jan. 2, 2008, NORA supporters received the official title & summary for the ballot measure from the California Attorney General. This is the language that appears on petitions now.

Here is the text of the summary, broken out (by the campaign) into bullet points for easier reading:

NONVIOLENT OFFENDERS. SENTENCING, PAROLE AND REHABILITATION. STATUTE.

* Requires State to expand and increase funding and oversight for individualized treatment and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent drug offenders and parolees.
* Reduces criminal consequences of nonviolent drug offenses by mandating three-tiered probation with treatment and by providing for case dismissal and/or sealing of records after probation. Limits court’s authority to incarcerate offenders who violate probation or parole.
* Shortens parole for most drug offenses, including sales, and for nonviolent property crimes.
* Creates numerous divisions, boards, commissions, and reporting requirements regarding drug treatment and rehabilitation.
* Changes certain marijuana misdemeanors to infractions.

Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government:

* Increased state costs that could exceed $1 billion annually primarily for expanding drug treatment and rehabilitation programs for offenders in state prisons, on parole, and in the community.
* Savings to the state that could exceed $1 billion annually due primarily to reduced prison and parole operating costs.
* Net savings on a one-time basis on capital outlay costs for prison facilities that could exceed $2.5 billion.
* Unknown net fiscal effect on expenditures for county operations and capital outlay.

Posted by lois at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Prison--for Pot? Massachusetts voters can Just Say No to bad drug policy.

Prison--for Pot?
Massachusetts voters can Just Say No to bad drug policy.

Thursday, May 29, 2008
By Maureen Turner, Valley Advocate

I call Dick Evans to interview him. But he has his own question—or, more specifically, an assignment—for me: "I challenge you to find anyone who believes adults who choose to use marijuana responsibly deserve to be arrested, prosecuted and locked up."

Evans is pretty sure I'll come up empty; he's even willing to bet a lunch on it. A Northampton attorney and former member of the Board of Directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, Evans spent decades advocating for the reform of drug laws, and while officially "retired" from the cause, he still tracks it closely.

These days, there's a lot to track. In November, Massachusetts voters could have the chance to decriminalize the possession of one ounce or less of marijuana, making it a civil, not criminal, infraction. On the federal level, U.S. Reps. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Ron Paul, a Texas Republican (and renegade presidential candidate), are co-sponsoring legislation that would remove federal penalties for the possession of small amounts of marijuana. ("The notion that you lock people up for smoking marijuana is pretty silly," Frank said as he announced the bill on Bill Maher's HBO show "Real Time." That's one for Dick Evans.)

Add to that the increasing public debate about who ends up behind bars for drug crimes, and how much we as a society pay to prosecute and imprison them, and it's tempting to say there's a groundswell of interest, from across the political spectrum, in re-examining our drug laws. But as Evans and other long-time activists will tell you, when it comes to drug policy, change is slow in coming. Progress is made in small, incremental steps, which sometimes fall far short of what reformers would like to see.

"I think we can get lost in the increments," says Evans. While small changes can be important, he urges that focus be kept on what, in an email to the Advocate, he called "the 900-pound gorilla that terrifies so many people, and that is the broad question of whether, in 2008, the responsible use of marijuana by adults with no visible harm to themselves or anyone else ought to remain a crime, wrecking people's lives and diverting public revenues from urgent needs."

Plenty of Massachusetts voters share Evans' view, at least according to a series of questions that have appeared on local ballots in recent years.

Since 2000, activists—most notably, the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, or MASS CANN (the state affiliate of NORML)—have worked to get non-binding public policy questions on marijuana reform on the ballots in four state Senate districts and 33 Representative districts. All were approved by a majority of voters.

A handful of the ballot questions addressed the legalization of medical marijuana; there was also one that would allow the growing of industrial hemp, and another to allow the state-regulated—and state-taxed—sale of marijuana to adults.

But the vast majority of the questions—28 of the total 37—went directly to the issue of decriminalization, asking voters whether possession of a small amount of pot should be a civil violation. Voters in every district approved the question, by majorities ranging from 59 to 76 percent.

While public policy questions are non-binding, they do serve as an important way of demonstrating to legislators the priorities of their constituents. Whether or not legislators heed those messages is, of course, another matter.

At the very least, the message was heard by activists, who saw Massachusetts presenting a prime opportunity for reforming marijuana laws. That led to the creation of the Committee for Sensible Marijuana Policy, or CSMP, the group behind the proposed November ballot question.

Under current Massachusetts law, marijuana possession can lead to jail, probation or a fine; a conviction can also result in the suspension of your driver's license, the loss of your right to possess firearms and the denial of student loans. While first offenses without mitigating circumstances are typically continued without a finding and dropped after one year if the defendant has no further legal problems, critics of the system say there are a number of ways prosecutors can pursue a tougher penalty—if, for instance, the arrest happened near a school zone. They also contend that the defendant's race and class can affect how aggressively a drug charge is pursued, a contention borne out by several recent studies.

Even if a defendant's charges are continued and then dropped, she still has to go through the costly and onerous legal system; as MASS CANN puts it, "Prosecution itself is used as a form of punishment."

If approved, the November ballot question would amend state law so that adults found guilty of possessing one ounce or less would face a $100 fine; those under 18 would also have to complete a "drug awareness program" and perform community service. The initiative has been endorsed by the American Civil Liberties Union as well as NORML and MASS CANN.

Last fall, CSMP cleared the first hurdle for getting the question on the ballot, collecting about 81,000 valid petition signatures (15,000 more than needed) in support. Now the group is conducting a second required signature drive, and needs to collect another 11,000 valid signatures by June 18.

At the same time, the Legislature is considering similar legislation that would create civil penalties for personal possession by adults. Given the historically slow progress of such bills, though, reformers see the ballot question as a way to put the issue directly in the hands of voters. "On this issue, the public is ahead of the politicians," says Whitney Taylor, manager of the ballot question committee.

To Taylor, existing laws regarding marijuana are too harsh. A person convicted of possessing a relatively small amount of pot could end up with a criminal record that would haunt him for years, standing as a barrier every time he applies for a job, a loan, an apartment. According to CSMP, 7,500 new criminal records are created each year in Massachusetts for people found guilty of possessing one ounce or less of pot.

The criminal record issue has a lot of traction on college campuses. "Historically, the war on drugs has been waged to protect young people. After decades of failed punitive prohibitionist policies, we as young people are here to say this war is actually hurting us," says Tom Angell, government relations director for Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a national group with chapters at about 125 high schools and colleges.

SSDP focuses on drug policies that affect young people, such as student drug testing. One particularly hot issue has been the 2000 Higher Education Act, which denied federal financial aid to students convicted of any drug offense, even if it happened before they were in college. While the law was amended in 2006 to apply only to students convicted at the time they are receiving aid, blocking anyone's access to education is wrong-headed, Angell says. Students forced to drop out of college for financial reasons will feel the repercussions for a lifetime; some may even be more likely to turn to drugs when other opportunities are denied. "We think that's an incredibly counter-productive policy," Angell says.

And in these days of municipal shortfalls, reformers have in their arsenal an especially persuasive argument: cost savings. Whitney points to a 2007 study by Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, that found that Massachusetts police departments spend a total of $29.5 million a year to arrest and process suspects for possession of an ounce or less of pot.

"Let's let that $29.5 million stay in police coffers," Taylor says. "Let's let it stay in local communities and fight violent crimes."

Several studies have found that in the 11 states that already have similar laws in place—some going back as far as the 1970s—marijuana use and crime rates have not increased. "'Use is going to go through the roof; addiction is going to go through the roof'—all the Chicken-Little arguments the opponents will make did not come to fruition," Taylor says.

In making the case for the ballot question, advocates tread carefully. They emphasize the cost-saving aspect of decriminalization, and point to the backing of sober-minded economists, including the 500 who endorsed a 2005 study by Miron that estimated that federal, state and local governments could save $7.7 billion a year if pot were legalized.

And, no doubt aware of the risk of being dismissed as leftover hippies or punky college kids, reformers enjoy pointing to the surprising array of people who have supported decriminalization: George Shultz, secretary of state during the Reagan administration; Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman; conservative columnist William F. Buckley, whose recent death was mourned by anti-prohibitionists around the country. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, a Medford-based nonprofit, counts current and former cops, judges and legislators among its members.

"This is a reform that liberals and conservatives support, that people from all walks of life can support," Taylor says.

Not everyone, of course, supports the reform. LEAP notwithstanding, strong opposition is expected from within the ranks of law enforcement. The Massachusetts District Attorneys Association has condemned the CSMP ballot question, contending it will increase marijuana use and reverse recent trends of declining pot use among teens. "The District Attorneys ask Massachusetts parents, 'Do you really want to encourage your kids to smoke dope?'" the association asks in its official statement on the question.

The DAs also argue that there's a "direct link between marijuana use and public safety and public health." The group points, by way of example, to a study showing that 41 percent of men arrested in Chicago tested positive for marijuana; what it fails to report is what charges these men faced, and if, in fact, they were arrested solely for pot possession.

Similarly sketchy is the assertion that "the criminal justice system is the largest single source of referral to drug [not just marijuana] treatment programs"; left out is the question of whether these referrals were made, as a condition of law, to people arrested solely for possession of a small amount of pot.

More persuasive are statistics linking marijuana use to impaired driving, although, as the report notes, more impaired drivers have alcohol—a legalized drug—in their systems than pot. Likewise, the DAs point out the health risks of inhaling tar and carbon monoxide from pot, but sidestep the question of why cigarettes, which contain the same substances, are legal.

That line of reasoning also raises a sticky question: most reasonable people can agree that alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana all pose personal and public health risks; why, then, are two of them legal, and one illegal?

It's not surprising the DAs oppose decriminalization, Taylor says: "They want all the tools to convict people. That's their job."

Indeed, lots of jobs are directly tied to drugs remaining illegal, from those of prosecutors, police and jailers to business that goes to ad agencies contracted by the government to produce anti-drug campaigns, and to community groups that receive government funding for anti-drug work, notes Bill Downing, president of MASS CANN. "Their income depends in part on this 'war [on drugs],'" he says.

Backers of the ballot question are mindful of the public safety arguments that will be used against their cause. They point out that the question is narrowly defined, applying only to people carrying what's considered a "personal" amount of pot; it would have no effect on laws applying to the sale, trafficking or cultivation of marijuana, or to crimes like driving under the influence.

More to the point, the question would not legalize pot, but rather decriminalize it—an important distinction. If it passes, Taylor points out, "marijuana remains illegal. We're just creating a different type of penalty system. It deals with the fact that the law is broken, but it allows people to move on with their lives."

As November gets nearer, opposition to the ballot question will likely intensify. The district attorneys have already signaled one likely line of attack: questioning the political and financial support behind CSMP.

According to its most recent finance report, filed with the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance, CSMP's money comes largely from one source: George Soros, who donated $400,000 of the almost $430,000 raised in 2007. (Most of the money—$316,000—was used to hire a Worcester-based firm that runs petition signature campaigns.)

On the finance reports, Soros is listed as a self-employed "entrepreneur" and Manhattan resident. To the DAs and others in favor of prohibition, Soros is the bane of their existence. A 77-year-old native of Hungary, Soros is a self-made billionaire investor who's used his fortune to fund numerous philanthropic and political causes, including Democratic campaigns. Soros also sits on the board of the Drug Policy Alliance, an anti-prohibition group that calls for, among other things, the decriminalization of marijuana, the legalization of medical marijuana and an end to discriminatory drug laws.

The Drug Policy Alliance is hardly a crackpot group; its board includes business executives, mental health experts and religious leaders, with "honorary" members including George Shultz, past Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. Still, as Allen St. Pierre, NORML's executive director, notes, when it comes to the heated debate over drug policy, "there's probably not a more polarizing figure" than Soros. He predicts the proponents of the ballot question will be painted by opponents as out-of-state "fringe drug legalizers."

Ironically, while drug law reform might still be cast as a "fringe" movement, drug use—specifically, pot smoking—has become increasingly mainstream. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the government's chief anti-drug agency, a 2006 federal study found 40 percent of Americans over the age of 12 have smoked pot, 10 percent in the last year (and some suspect those figures are low, given respondents' reluctance to admit to committing a crime). A 2000 survey by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services found that 20 million Americans smoke pot every year, 2 million on a daily basis.

Perhaps those figures explain the easy acceptance of pot smoking in popular movies and TV shows (like Showtime's Weeds, about a suburban widow who makes ends meet by selling marijuana, and CBS' How I Met Your Mother, with its unapologetic references to its characters getting high). We've got a sitting president who has indicated, although never directly admitted, that he has smoked pot, and is rumored to have dabbled in considerably harder stuff, and one contender for that job, Barack Obama, who is more forthcoming about his history of pot and cocaine use.

Of course, Bush and Obama speak of their past use with an air of repentance, and neither favors ending the prohibition on drugs (although Obama does criticize the Justice Department for raiding and prosecuting medical marijuana users). The other two major presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, also oppose decriminalizing marijuana. Other presidential candidates have supported decriminalization, including Ron Paul; Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman who dropped out of the race months ago; and Mike Gravel, a Springfield native and former senator from Alaska, who promised at one debate that, if elected, he would "do away with the 'war on drugs,' which does nothing but savage our inner cities and put our children at risk."

Gravel, however, will never be president; neither will Paul or Kucinich. They have devoted supporters and well-honed positions, but they garner minimal coverage from the media. Much of that coverage is dismissive, in large part due to their outside-the-mainstream positions on issues like drug policy. Polls and public policy questions might signal that the public's view of drug use—particularly marijuana—is softening, but most establishment politicians are too wary to follow their lead.

That's why reformers are excited to put the decriminalization question before Massachusetts voters. "Any issue that comes with any amount of controversy at all, politicians are not ready to take a stand on if they don't have to," notes MASS CANN's Downing. "The Legislature wants to avoid the issue completely because they can only lose by addressing this."

Reformers could find some support from Gov. Deval Patrick, who's spoken out about inequities in the justice system, including the undue hurdles created for many under the existing criminal records system. "He's made the kinds of noises of someone who'd be amenable [to drug reform]," St. Pierre says. "At his core, he's got to be keen on some reform. It's a waste of money."

Still, Patrick is a politician, and with that comes a degree of caution. "Clearly, from a political, pragmatic view, he'd be very happy to never have to say the word 'marijuana,'" St. Pierre says.

It's getting harder for politicians to avoid drug policy issues, though, in light of a mounting pile of evidence about inequities in how those policies are executed. In May, the Sentencing Project, a justice reform group based in Washington, D.C., and Human Rights Watch, which tracks global human rights issues, released reports showing deep racial disparities in how drug laws are enforced. In large part, the problem stems from the intense focus on poor urban minority communities.

In 2006, 1.89 million people were arrested for drug violations in the U.S. More than 80 percent of the arrests were for possession; about 40 percent were for marijuana possession.

While the rate of drug use among whites and blacks is roughly equal, and blacks make up about 13 percent of the total population, they accounted for two-thirds of the drug arrests. And black men are nearly 12 times as likely to be sent to prison for drug convictions as white men, according to the HRW report. (The reports do not indicate rates for Hispanics, since they used FBI data that collects stats by race but not ethnicity.)

"The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was conceived," Jamie Fellner, author of the HRW report, told the New York Times. "If the drug issue is still seen as primarily a problem of the black inner city, then we'll continue to see this enormously disparate impact."

Indeed, race has shaped U.S. drug policy from the start. In his 2003 book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, journalist Eric Schlosser traces drug prohibition back to the influx of Mexican immigrants in the early 20th century. The new arrivals were not, generally, warmly greeted, and that anti-immigrant sentiment extended to what Schlosser calls "their traditional means of intoxication: smoking marijuana."

Meanwhile, the association of marijuana with African-Americans, and particularly with the jazz scene in cities like New Orleans, added more racial fuel to the fire. Before long, government officials were warning of the alleged dangers of pot smoking. Users were described as extremely violent, possessing superhuman strength when under the influence, and prone to insanity—all depicted, to unintentionally comic effect, in the now-cult classic 1936 film Reefer Madness. By 1931, 29 states had banned pot; in 1937, Congress passed a federal ban.

Attitudes toward pot smoking softened somewhat in the 1960s, when it became the drug of choice of white, middle-class kids. In 1970, federal law was amended to differentiate marijuana from other narcotics and lessen penalties for possession of small amounts. At the time, NORML's St. Pierre recalls, marijuana reform "appeared to be on greased tracks."

Then came the conservative '80s, and Ronald Reagan's "Just Say No" anti-drug agenda. Marijuana was again vilified as a highly dangerous "gateway" drug that would lead to use of harder substances. Drug laws were toughened; the laws regarding pot now vary widely from state to state, and, critics say, are open to varying interpretation that can lead to harsher results for, say, a black kid from a distressed urban area than a white kid with a suburban address and parents who can afford a lawyer.

"It's because black folks used it—that's why marijuana and cocaine and heroin are illegal, and that's why tobacco and alcohol are legal and receive government subsidies. T