The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

July 01, 2008

Texas man cleared of shooting suspected burglars---it all depends on who you are and who you kill

July 1, 2008
Texas man cleared of shooting suspected burglars
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:14 a.m. ET

HOUSTON (AP) -- Ever since he fatally shot two men he suspected of burglarizing his next-door neighbor's home, 62-year-old Joe Horn has been both praised and vilified for his actions.

Horn called 911 and told the dispatcher he had a shotgun and was going to kill the intruders. The dispatcher pleaded with him not to go outside, but a defiant Horn confronted the men with a 12-gauge shotgun and shot both in the back.

Some community activists wanted Horn to face charges for the deaths. Supporters of the retired grandfather said what he did was justified under the law.

After listening to evidence in the case, including testimony from Horn himself, a grand jury on Monday cleared him of the shootings.

''He wasn't acting like a vigilante. He didn't want to do it,'' said Tom Lambright, Horn's attorney.

Lambright said Horn was not a ''wild cowboy'' who took the law into his own hands after he saw the two suspected burglars, with bags in hand, crawling out of windows from his neighbor's home on Nov. 14 in the Houston suburb of Pasadena. The neighbor was out of town at the time.

Instead, Horn was a frightened retiree who tried to defend his neighbor's property and when the two men came onto his yard and threatened him, Horn defended himself, Lambright said.

''He was scared. He was in fear of his life,'' he said.

Grand jurors had to consider two issues in the case: the intentional killing of another person and whether the killing was justified either by self-defense or the defense of property, Harris County District Attorney Kenneth Magidson told reporters.

''I understand the concerns of some in the community regarding Mr. Horn's conduct,'' Magidson said. ''The grand jury concluded that Mr. Horn's use of deadly force did not rise to a criminal offense.''

Texas law allows people to use deadly force to protect themselves if it is reasonable to believe they are in mortal danger. In limited circumstances, people also can use deadly force to protect their neighbor's property; for example, if a homeowner asks a neighbor to watch over his property while he's out of town. It's not clear whether the neighbor whose home was burglarized asked Horn to watch over his house.

Frank Ortiz, a member of the local League of United Latin American Citizens chapter, said he hopes federal authorities investigate the case further.

''That's amazing that they would no-bill him with so much evidence against him,'' Ortiz told the Houston Chronicle in Monday's online edition. ''This was no more than a vigilante.''

Horn did not speak with reporters on Monday.

A large red sign with the words ''No Trespass'' on it blocked the path to his front door and a handwritten sign on the door said ''Please no media,'' ''No Trespassing'' and ''Do not knock or ring bell.'' A couple of neighbors also had signs on their doors asking media to leave them alone.

A few police cars patrolled the area near Horn's home.

The two suspected burglars, Hernando Riascos Torres, 38, and Diego Ortiz, 30, were unemployed illegal immigrants from Colombia. Torres was deported to Colombia in 1999 after a 1994 cocaine-related conviction.

The city of Pasadena, where protesters and defenders of Horn engaged in counter-demonstrations, pledged to keep its police force staffed enough to protect its citizens.

Keith Hampton, a Houston attorney not connected with the case, said he didn't expect Horn to be indicted. ''This is a real conservative county,'' he said. ''A lot of folks in Houston and Harris County are saying this man was doing a good thing.''

In the 911 call, a dispatcher urges Horn to stay inside his house and not risk lives.

''Don't go outside the house,'' the 911 operator pleaded. ''You're going to get yourself shot if you go outside that house with a gun. I don't care what you think.''

''You want to make a bet?'' Horn answered. ''I'm going to kill them.''

After the shooting, he redialed 911.

''I had no choice,'' he said, his voice shaking. ''They came in the front yard with me, man. I had no choice. Get somebody over here quick.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Burglary-Shooting.html?sq=Houston&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)

Drug Arrests Were Real; the Badge Was Fake

July 1, 2008
Drug Arrests Were Real; the Badge Was Fake
By MONICA DAVEY
NY Times

GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this small town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.

Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s antidrug campaign abruptly fell apart after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding minister and a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and he is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

The strange adventures of Sergeant Bill have led to the firing of three of the town’s five police officers, left the outcome of a string of drug arrests in doubt, prompted multimillion-dollar federal civil rights lawsuits by at least 17 plaintiffs and stirred up a political battle, including a petition seeking the impeachment of Mr. Schulte, over who is to blame for the mess.

And the questions keep coming. How did Mr. Jakob wander into town and apparently leave the mayor, the aldermen and pretty much everyone else he met thinking that he was a federal agent delivered from Washington to help barrel into peoples’ homes and clean up Gerald’s drug problem? And why would anyone — receiving no pay and with no known connection to little Gerald, 70 miles from St. Louis and not even a county seat — want to carry off such a time-consuming ruse in the first place?

Mr. Jakob’s lawyer, Joel Schwartz, said that what happened in Gerald was never a sinister plot, but a chain of events rooted in “errors in judgment.” Mr. Schwartz said he believed that at least three Gerald police officers, including the chief, knew that Mr. Jakob was not a federal drug agent or even a certified police officer.

“It was an innocent evolution, where he helped with one minor thing, then one more on top of that, and all of the sudden, everyone thought he was a federal agent,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I’m not saying this was legal or lawful. But look, they were very, very effective while he was present. I don’t think Gerald is having the drug problem they were having. I’ve heard from some residents who were thrilled that he was there.”

There were numerous arrests during Mr. Jakob’s time in Gerald (the exact number is uncertain, local law enforcement officials said, as legal action surrounding the case proceeds), but Mayor Schulte said that Mr. Jakob had, in fact, gone to elaborate lengths to deceive local authorities, including Ryan McCrary, then the police chief, into believing that he was a federal agent — with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marshals Service or some other agency.

In addition to having a badge and a car that seemed to scream law enforcement, Mr. Jakob offered federal drug enforcement help, Mr. Schulte said. (Local officials thought the offer must have somehow grown out of their recent application for a federal grant for radio equipment.) Mr. Jakob even asked Chief McCrary to call what he said was his supervisor’s telephone number to confirm Gerald’s need for his help, the mayor said.

When the call was placed, a woman — whose identity is unknown — answered with the words “multijurisdictional task force,” and said that the city’s request for federal services was under review, the mayor said. Mr. Schulte said he now suspects that Mr. Jakob adapted the nonexistent task force name from the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies starring Eddie Murphy.

“Not only were these officers taken in, but so was everybody else,” said Chet Pleban, a lawyer for Mr. McCrary and the other two members of the police force who lost their jobs after Mr. Jakob’s real identity came to light.

Of the firings, Mayor Schulte said, “Nobody wanted to, but the city’s lawyer recommended it.”

When residents first began noticing Mr. Jakob, he certainly looked the part. His hair was chopped short, residents recalled, and his stocky chest filled a black T-shirt he sometimes wore that read “Police.” They said he wore military-style boots, pants with pockets running down the legs and carried a badge (his lawyer said it was from a former job as a security guard in St. Louis). And his off-white Ford Crown Victoria was decked out with police radios and internal flashing lights, residents said.

He first came to town in January, his lawyer said, to meet Chief McCrary, whose experiences serving in Afghanistan Mr. Jakob had read about in a local newspaper. Mr. Jakob was considering contract work overseas, Mr. Schwartz said, and the pair hit it off.

Soon, the arrests began. Some of those whose homes were searched said they had been kicked in the head and had had shotguns held against them. Mr. Jakob, many said, seemed to be leading the crew of Gerald police officers.

“He was definitely in charge — it was all him,” said Mike Withington, 49, a concrete finisher, who said Mr. Jakob pounded on his door in May, waking him up and yanking him, in handcuffs, out onto his front yard.

Mr. Withington said he had not yet been charged with a crime; Gary Toelke, the Franklin County sheriff, confirmed that no local charges had been issued against him. But the mortification of that day, Mr. Withington said, has kept him largely indoors and led him to consider moving. Since the search, residents have tossed garbage and crumpled boxes of Sudafed (which has an ingredient that can be used to make methamphetamine) on his lawn, he said, and he no longer shops in town, instead driving miles to neighboring towns.

“Everybody is staring at me,” he said. “People assume you’re guilty when things like this happen.”

When Linda Trest, 51, a reporter at The Gasconade County Republican, started hearing complaints from people whose homes had been searched, she began making inquiries about Mr. Jakob.

“Once I got his name, I hit the computer and within an hour I had all the dirt on this guy,” Ms. Trest said.

As it turned out, Mr. Jakob, who is married and lives near Washington, a small town not far from Gerald, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003 when he owned a trucking company, and had, at 22, pleaded guilty in Illinois to a misdemeanor charge of criminal sex abuse of someone in their teens.

Since the 1990s, he had worked, at times, as a police officer in tiny departments in towns like Kinloch, Mo., and Brooklyn, Ill., though he never seemed to stay anywhere long and was never certified as a police officer in either Missouri or Illinois, his lawyer said. (Under some conditions, short-term employees with some departments are not immediately required to have state certification.)

As in Gerald, he impressed some, if only at first. “He seemed to have experience on the street,” said J. D. Roth, the police chief in Caseyville, Ill., where Mr. Jakob was a temporary part-time officer for almost two months in 2000. “He walked the walk and talked the talk.”

In Gerald, just a day before it was revealed that he was not a federal agent, the city aldermen voted to make Mr. Jakob a reserve officer; he wanted the designation, Mr. Schulte said, so he could enforce local ordinances, and he stood before the aldermen, hands behind his back, seeking the title.

Mr. Jakob offered city officials three contact numbers — his personal cellphone, a cellphone he said he used for drug informants and his “multijurisdictional task force” cellphone, Mr. Schulte said.

“It was the movie, ‘Catch Me if You Can’ all over again,” said Mr. Schulte, referring to the 2002 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a master of deception. “I’m telling you, with this guy, everything was right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/us/01impostor.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2008

UK: Audit Estimates Public Cost of a Single Drug Addict at $1.5 Million

Audit Estimates Public Cost of a Single Drug Addict at $1.5 Million
June 16, 2008

A report from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that each drug addict in the U.K. costs taxpayers £800,000 -- about $1.569 million -- over his or her lifetime, the BBC reported June 14.

The estimate included the cost of crime, healthcare under Great Britain's National Health Service, and other considerations; however, researchers said that the estimate was probably on the conservative side.

The report said that the cost to society could be reduced to under £70,000 (about $137,000) if people with addiction problems received treatment prior to age 21.

Researchers said that "the creation of drug-free prisons is an expensive option and was not considered to be practical in the current resource climate," that drug testing was ineffective to measure or counter drug use, and that options like supervised injection centers for opiate-addicted offenders should be considered.
http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2008/audit-estimates-public-cost.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=40408416&print=t

Posted by lois at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)

May 28, 2008

PA: ”We can retain our freedom on the outside because of the people that are locked up in here”

”We can retain our freedom on the outside because of the people that are locked up in here,” said Commissioner Chairman Brian Smith. “That fight for freedom doesn’t stop in our armies,” he said, but includes judges, juries, public defenders, corrections officers and others. ”That’s why our prison was so important.”

Ribbon-cutting signals opening of the new facility
Mary Baldwin 22.MAY.08
The Weekly Almanac, Honesdale, PA

In his invocation at the ribbon-cutting for the new Wayne County Correctional Facility in Texas Township on Friday morning, the Rev. Edward Finn prayed for those who will be incarcerated there.

”Help them make positive decisions about their future,” he said.

Father Finn, senior priest at St. John the Evangelist Parish, Honesdale, was among those who were involved in the early stages of planning for the new facility, said Wayne County Commissioner Tony Herzog, who helped guide the county through a legal morass during the planning stages for the jail. Father Finn was “a very early advocate” of a “respectful place” where prisoners could meet with their attorneys and visitors or attend educational programs, Mr. Herzog said.

The commissioner also recognized the late county Chief Clerk Reg Wayman, current Chief Clerk Vicky Lamberton, and members of the committee that conducted a needs assessment for a new jail including former President Judge Robert J. Conway, Sheriff Charles Morelli and former Commissioner Mark Graziadio.

The old jail, Mr. Herzog said, “is not only costing the county money, but is not a proper way to conduct the county’s business.” The current jail on Court Street has no facilities for female prisoners so they have to be boarded in other counties at considerable expense to Wayne County.

He noted that the county was able to secure a $1 million state grant to offset the cost of the new jail. “That saved the taxpayers a lot of money,” Mr. Herzog said.

Mr. Herzog also commended the county’s correctional officers for “an outstanding job,” as well as the community for its “wonderful support.”

”We can retain our freedom on the outside because of the people that are locked up in here,” said Commissioner Chairman Brian Smith. “That fight for freedom doesn’t stop in our armies,” he said, but includes judges, juries, public defenders, corrections officers and others.

”That’s why our prison was so important.”

Commissioner Wendell Kay commented that the county was dedicating itself not only to a building on Friday but “to the safety and security of our community” as well as to “the true rehabilitation” of those who will be incarcerated there.

During the ceremony, Honesdale High School junior Sarah Tamburelli sang the national anthem and Sheriff Morelli cut a ribbon to officially open the jail as about 100 people watched.
http://www.theweeklyalmanac.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=&mad=&sdetail=9343&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1020&hn=weeklyalmanac&he=.com

Posted by lois at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2008

MA: Another example of how the DOC creates obstacles for people wanting to work with prisoners

Another example of the obstacles created by the MA DOC in preventing people from going into MA prisons and jails.

May 19, 2008
Society of the Incarcerated: Acknowledging the Voices of America's Ever-Increasing Prison Population
by Anna Clark
- USA -
Who talks about prisoners these days? Certainly not the US presidential candidates or most others up for election in 2008, unless it’s in tangential “get tough on crime” rhetoric. In the media, quality coverage such as Jeff Gerritt’s Pulitzer-nominated series on medical care in Michigan prisons, which appeared last year in The Detroit Free Press, is overshadowed by courtroom dramas and legal thrillers. MSNBC has built something of a franchise in its “To Catch a Predator” series, which lures people to a Dateline set, humiliates them by reading their chat room transcripts with someone they thought was underage, and then calls on a police crew to rather unnecessarily tackle them in an arrest sequence right out of a summer blockbuster.

Authentic communication from and about prisoners exists, but it’s relegated to a niche market outside of most print and online news sources, of influential political blogs, of the catalogues of big publishers, and of the speeches of election year candidates. Presumably, its minimal share of attention is justified because decision makers think their audiences don’t care much about prisons and the people in them.

•
It’s an odd assumption in the face of the prison industrial complex’s monstrous growth. We incarcerate 500% more people today than we did thirty years ago. The United States is home to a mere five percent of the world’s total population, and 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population: 2.3 million people, most of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. And that number doesn’t include those living under the thumb of the criminal justice system: probationers, parolees and those on tethers, the electronic monitoring devices worn by people on house arrest.

This makes the vacuum of nuanced coverage of prisons and prisoners in the media and by the candidates all the more baffling.

The dissonance between the prison industrial complex’s growth and the de facto denial of how it affects all of us struck me last year when I wanted to facilitate a writing workshop in a medium-security men’s prison in Massachusetts. I’d been doing similar work in Michigan prisons and detention centers through the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), beginning my freshman year at the University of Michigan. I was drawn in because I love writing, because I love working with people, and here was a place where they came together. At the same time, I wanted to venture toward the places where I’d been told, in a thousand ways, I shouldn’t want to be. So many of my family members were appalled when I began. I was too young, too female, too inexperienced.

Workshops became a constant in my life; not only those that I facilitated, but others that were also part of PCAP. It was hard. It was hilarious. It made me a better writer. I loved it so much that I took on more leadership helping to initiate a project that supports incarcerated writers and artists; assisting with the annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners; organizing prison-related events in Ann Arbor; serving as a discussion facilitator for a university class that wrestled with prisons; attending performances in and outside of prison walls; returning artwork to an incarcerated man’s mother who lived near where I grew up; and exchanging letters for two years with a writer who was locked up in northern Michigan—too far for the PCAP arm to reach.

After moving to Boston I looked for ways to get back inside. Though PEN New England, a prison writing program, I thought I’d found a way in.

At the orientation for new volunteers, two representatives of the prison gushed about how much they valued folks coming. In Michigan, the prisons I worked in were high security, and at this lower level facility outside Boston, I was excited at what seemed to be an uncommon openness to creative spaces. What, you mean a corrections officer won’t need to be in the room with us? We have it to ourselves? We can freely bring most materials in and out of our workshops?

Visions of an unusually strong workshop floated in my head. More than just a fun couple of hours a week, I’ve experienced these workshops as profound spaces of transformation and empowerment. They aren’t to be taken lightly.

The prison’s representatives gave a moving testament to how much they valued volunteers who were themselves formerly incarcerated. There was a nod to role-modeling.

The volunteers were then informed that a condition of our coming inside to facilitate workshops was that we were not to have any contact with anyone who is or had been incarcerated in a prison or jail, in any state, ever.

The reps made a big point of this. They told a story about one of the best volunteers they ever had, a Native woman who led extraordinary spiritual ceremonies that resonated with a great deal of the inmates. It came out that she was married to a man incarcerated in Indiana.

“We had to let her go,” said one of the representatives. “It was such a shame.”

I was startled by the contradiction in the prison’s policy: the very folks they encouraged to volunteer—former prisoners—were not people other volunteers were permitted to know. While I might fathom that this prison’s policy was intended as a security measure, the shear breadth of it—not knowing anyone who’d been incarcerated in any prison or jail ever—seems to leave common sense aside.

With the prison industrial complex growing as feverishly as it is, with our nation’s economic interests increasingly bound up with keeping more and more people behind bars for longer and longer periods of time, no one will be untouched. We will all know someone (or many people) who has been put in a cell. It is inevitable.

I know many. I’m related to some, built friendships with others, and still others have been my colleagues. Many I know in Michigan, a few in Indiana, others in Massachusetts. For the few years I lived in Boston, I lived and worked in a community called Haley House, where I interacted daily with poor men, many of whom had been in and out of the criminal justice system. I move within progressive circles where my friends and allies practice civil disobedience, allowing themselves to be arrested to protest the prison in Guantánamo Bay, the war in Iraq, or the military base in Ft. Benning, GA, that trains its students in torture techniques.

I wasn’t willing to deny these relationships. I told the prison’s representatives about them at the orientation. I also testified to having experience in prisons, offered to supply letters of recommendation that could account for my work, and was pleased to have PEN New England back me up in my request to move forward as a volunteer.

I was told the final decision would be put to a particular lieutenant. After eight months, after the writing workshop’s cycle had begun and ended, after constant phone calls and emails, no decision was ever offered. The prison was spared the scrutiny of a yes or no answer by waiting me out.

While I’ll admit to my disappointment with this prison, I don’t offer up the story to vent. It’s more pertinent to understand that those 2.3 million men and women and children in prison are real people. While they are disproportionately people of color and poor—hardly the demographic given center stage in media and electoral campaigns—they are connected to other people in a thousand ways. We bear profound responsibility for the prison industrial complex we’ve built.

We must notice. Human lives are at stake.

There is already a movement that challenges the prison industrial complex and acts from the belief that it’s real people inside those walls, and that real families are affected. The movement also acknowledges that victims of crimes are real people too, whose experiences deserve understanding, not media caricature or political exploitation.

Consider the Prison Creative Arts Project, a collaborative organization that facilitates writing, art, drama, and music workshops in prisons, detention centers and urban schools throughout Michigan. It’s produced 13 annual exhibitions of art by Michigan prisoners at the University of Michigan, facilitates one-on-one arts training with people who are incarcerated and supports artists who are released from prison by connecting them with working artists in the communities they return to.

Consider The Sentencing Project, a national organization that documents the disturbing trends in the prison industrial complex while agitating for viable alternatives to incarceration and current sentencing law.

Consider PEN America’s Prison Writing Program, which has provided mentoring, workshops, readings and publication to incarcerated writers since 1971.

Consider the Women’s Prison Association, which advocates for women with histories in the criminal justice system. It particularly supports a woman’s need for housing, employment and health care when she returns to her community.

Consider Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, which challenges the death penalty through constant interaction with citizens, media and policy makers. Since 1976, MVFR has contended that legal executions lead to yet another family losing a loved one to violence, while capital trials absorb dollars that would be better put to victim services and law enforcement.

Most of all, consider yourself—and your own stake, intentional or not, in a system that will continually and quietly shape the direction of our country unless we agitate for an alternative.

About the Author
Anna Clark is a freelance journalist and fiction writer living in Detroit, MI. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Utne Reader, Women's eNews, Bitch Magazine, Writers' Journal, RH Reality Check, and other publications. She maintains the literary and social justice website, Isak.
http://thewip.net/contributors/2008/05/society_of_the_incarcerated_ac.html

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

May 05, 2008

CCA Immigrant Detention: Immigration agency, contractors are accused of mistreating detainees

U-T SPECIAL REPORT
graphs and other links at this URL:

Immigrant detention
budget soars
The number of people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has jumped 36 percent since 2005, when the agency held a daily average of 19,718 detainees, who include illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and legal U.S. residents facing deportation. By the end of 2007, that number had grown to 30,881.

At the end of last year, 13 percent of ICE detainees were held in agency facilities. Seventeen percent were in private facilities that contract directly with ICE; 21 percent were in facilities contracted from local governments, usually with the county acting as middleman for a private company. An additional 46 percent were in county jails, where ICE rents beds, and a handful in other facilities, including rented federal prison space.

Many of these jails and prisons, while under government jurisdiction, also are privately operated.

In the past three years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has more than tripled what it spends on detention. Its annual appropriation for custody has grown to $1.6 billion this year from $504 million in 2005.

The White House has requested funding for 1,000 more beds by Sept. 30.

The immigration agency has no plans to build any more of its own detention centers, of which there are eight in the nation, including one in El Centro. Officials say it's easier to contract the beds.

“It just provides us with a quicker way to provide detention space,” said Gary Mead, acting director of ICE detention and removal operations in Washington, D.C.

The savings are substantial: According to ICE, it cost $87.99 per day on average in fiscal year 2007 to hold someone at a contract detention facility, while it cost roughly $119.28 a day to house a person at an ICE-run facility.

Detention increased after 1996, when legislative changes made it easier to deport immigrants residing here legally who had been convicted and served a prison sentence, and made detention mandatory as they awaited deportation.

Then the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred, and the federal government intensified its focus on border security.

In 2003, there came a new emphasis on tracking down people who had missed an immigration hearing or ignored a deportation order. In fiscal year 2007, ICE fugitive teams made more than 30,000 arrests.

Detentions expanded again after late 2005, when the Bush administration called for an end to the practice of “catch and release” for non-Mexican illegal immigrants who were being released with a notice to appear in court. Most Mexican nationals are quickly repatriated at the border.

Plastic 'boats'
Until early last year, the 10-year-old San Diego Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa, built and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, held up to 1,000 detainees.

In June 2006, the company lost 200 beds when the lease on part of the county-owned property expired. Yet according to CCA's 2006 financial report, the population of detainees wasn't reduced “as we had the ability to consolidate inmates.”

The following January, in its lawsuit, the ACLU cited the per-person fees paid by ICE to the contractor as an incentive for putting three people in a two-man cell. The third slept on the floor in a plastic cot referred to as a “boat.”

Lead plaintiff Isaac Kigondu Kiniti, a Kenyan detainee in ICE custody since 2004, said his head was so close to the toilet when he slept on the floor that he was showered with urine when cellmates used it. Kiniti criticized the contractor.

“Because they are a for-profit company, they will give you only the bare minimum of things to increase their profits,” said Kiniti, a former student-visa holder, appealing a deportation order stemming from a drug conviction.

ICE has since set the facility's maximum capacity at 700.

CCA, which like its competitors touts its cost-effectiveness, says there is no skimping at detainees' expense.

“We do not cut corners,” said Louise Grant, a spokeswoman. “Safety and security is our highest priority. We are extremely committed to offering strong programming for offenders in our care, as well as the highest medical care.”

Grant said costs are reduced by using efficient construction methods. While wages vary depending on the contract, she said, staff salaries frequently reflect the local cost of living. Many private prisons, like public ones, are in low-cost rural areas.

Grant said almost 90 percent of the company's facilities abide by the voluntary standards of the American Correctional Association, which includes public and private prisons.

However, according to the overcrowding lawsuit, the association's standards for “adult local detention facilities” call for cells housing more than one person to provide 25 square feet of unencumbered space per occupant. At Otay Mesa, when there were three detainees per cell with the cot on the floor, it amounted to no more than 15 square feet for all three, the complaint reads.

Oversight concerns
Critics of prison privatization cite oversight as perhaps one of the biggest concerns when private companies perform public incarceration duties.

According to ICE, 71 people have died in the agency's custody since the beginning of 2004. Of these, 57 were in contract facilities that ranged from private detention centers to county jails, raising questions about whether a lack of government oversight played a part.

Three people have died at Otay Mesa since 2003, including Yusif Osman, 34, a Ghanian man who died in his cell in 2006 after complaining of chest pain.

According to the county medical examiner's report, it took personnel more than an hour to call 911 after Osman's cellmate began asking for help. The report claims that Osman was seen on his knees, and that a medical supervisor, upon finding no medical history on him, “informed the control officer to have Mr. Osman file a request to seek medical assistance.”

In the ACLU medical-care lawsuit, plaintiffs complained about delays in getting treatment and prescription refills. One plaintiff is a diabetic man whose requests for care for a small injury to his foot were delayed so long that he developed gangrene.

Also cited is the case of Francisco Castañeda, a detainee who had to wait several months to see an off-site oncologist for what turned out to be penile cancer. Castañeda sued the federal government a few months before his death in February. His family has continued the lawsuit. The government recently acknowledged that there was medical negligence, one of the allegations made.

Health care at Otay Mesa is provided by the federal government, which according to the ACLU complaint took over health services from Corrections Corporation of America in 2002 after finding the company's health program deficient.

However, because company guards are the first to hear requests for medical care, “that does not mean that CCA is off the hook entirely,” said David Blair-Loy, legal director of the ACLU in San Diego.

“They may be interfering with access to treatment,” Blair-Loy said. “And they may or may not have a direct financial incentive to prevent people from getting treatment.”

There is no way to know, he said, because the public cannot obtain government contract information from private companies.

CCA's Grant, whose company earned nearly $1.5 billion last year, said that if the quality of CCA's service to inmates was not meeting expectations, the federal agency would cancel its contracts.

In February 2007, the month after the overcrowding lawsuit, Immigration and Customs Enforcement created a new detention-inspection task force charged with responding to complaints at all facilities where it houses detainees.

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

CCA Detention Centers: For Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody, Few Details Provided

May 5, 2008
For Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody, Few Details Provided
By NINA BERNSTEIN
NY Times

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.

But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.

As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.

Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee’s next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah’s case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from The Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.

But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency’s discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions or inadequate suicide prevention.

In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.

The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.

For Mr. Bah’s survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.

In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.

“They don’t want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home,” she said. “This guy was killed, and we don’t know what happened.”

Lingering Questions

The list of deaths where Mr. Bah’s name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as “undetermined” and “unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy.” No one’s nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.

But when they could be, they posed more disturbing questions.

In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco’s immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.

The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The cause of death on the government’s list: “unresponsive.”

Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.

Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.

The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated “multiple times.” But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he “suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital.” He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.

Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.

But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.

“Thank you for the referral,” an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. “This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met.”

Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah’s roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.

“They wouldn’t give us any information,” said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah’s cousin Khadidiatou.

On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.

“There was one guard who knew Boubacar,” Ms. Bah said. “He told me on the down-low: ‘This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.’ ”

Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named “something like Aboubakar” — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.

But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.

For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.

“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”

For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his “magic hands.” Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family’s first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.

In Africa, Mr. Bah’s earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.

Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.

So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away — until a reporter’s call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.

After the Fall

There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.

The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.

It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.

When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.

He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”

Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.

Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.

Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.

The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”

However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.

Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.

But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”

The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.

Mr. Bah’s cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner’s confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor’s office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an “unattended accident resulting in death.”

Prosecutors said they did not investigate. “According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower,” Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. “We are not privy to any other bits of information.”

In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons’ schooling.

His body went back to Guinea in a sealed coffin.

“I stayed here seven years, waiting for him,” his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.

“I wanted them to open the casket,” she added, “to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him.”

Margot Williams contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/nyregion/05detain.html?_r=1%26hp=%26oref=slogin%26pagewanted=print

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

May 01, 2008

FL: Money for prisons, cuts for schools

The Florida Times-Union
May 1, 2008
Money for prisons, cuts for schools
By RON LITTLEPAGE
The Times-Union
Millions of dollars for prisons, sure.
--------------------------------------------------

Money for schools, not so much.

The lock-'em-up Florida Legislature is set to approve a budget that includes $305 million to build three new prisons.

At the same time, spending for public schools would be cut by $332 million.

Hello. It's cheaper to educate the state's children - which leads to a good job and a stable life - than it is to put a criminal behind bars.

Apparently, that message hasn't sunk in with the dunderheads in Tallahassee.

This isn't a decrease in hoped for spending, which is sometimes the case in budgetary sleight of hand. These cuts are real.

Statewide, the amount of money coming from the state for each student will be about $130 less than it was for this school year.

In Duval County, the net effect of this cut, plus previous reductions and increases in fixed costs will be a shortfall of about $70 million for the next school year.

That means programs will be chopped, parents and students will be unhappy, and jobs likely will be lost.

Andy Ford is the president of the Florida Education Association, the state teachers union, which has more than 140,000 members. He issued a statement Wednesday blasting the Legislature.

"After listening to the governor and legislative leaders unceasingly promise to hold education harmless so that Floridians would approve Amendment 1 in January, we now see that those were nothing but empty promises," Ford said.

Ford said there were other choices instead of cutting money for schools:

- Dip deeper into the state's rainy day funds.

- Collect sales taxes on Internet businesses.

- End sales tax exemptions on sports stadium skyboxes, charter fishing boats, ostrich and livestock feed, health clubs and dozens of other exemptions.

- Increase taxes on cigarette and alcohol sales.

"But instead," Ford said in the statement, "they chose to balance the budget on the backs of children in our public schools. That's more than disappointing; it's irresponsible."

A study released earlier this year by the Pew Center on the States found that Florida's inmate population increased from 53,000 in 1997 to more than 97,000 in 2007, the largest increase in the nation.

The study projected that by 2013, Florida's inmate population would grow to 125,000.

According to the Florida Department of Corrections, it costs the state about $20,000 a year to house an inmate.

With this budget, the state will be spending about $7,000 a year per student.

Clearly, the orientation session for legislators should include remedial math.
http://cgi.jacksonville.com/cgi-bin/printit.cgi?story=ZZNOSTORYZZ

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

April 26, 2008

CA: The state will search its database for relatives of unidentified suspects in hopes of developing leads.

California takes lead on crime-fighting techniques

The state will search its database for relatives of unidentified suspects in hopes of developing leads. Critics voice privacy concerns.

By Maura Dolan and Jason Felch,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
April 26, 2008

California will adopt the most aggressive approach in the nation to a controversial crime-fighting technique that uses DNA to try to identify elusive criminals through their relatives, state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown announced Friday.

Employing what is known as familial or "partial match" searching, the policy is aimed at identifying a suspect through DNA collected at a crime scene by looking for potential relatives in the state's genetic database of about a million felons. Once a relative is identified, police can use that person as a lead to trace the suspect.

The new plan makes California a leader in such searches, which several states permit but do not vigorously pursue. Colorado has recently begun to examine its database for relatives of unknown criminals as part of a research project.

Brown said the new approach was justified by violent crime plaguing the state. He emphasized that it would be used only when all other leads had been exhausted.

"We have 2,000 murders a year in California -- that is 10,000 since the Iraq war started -- and that is a lot of killing," Brown said. "When you see it and see the victims and have to go to funerals, it is pretty serious stuff."

But Tania Simoncelli, science advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union, called Brown's decision a disappointment and said the organization is exploring its legality. The group has not decided whether to challenge the policy in court.

"The fact that my brother committed a crime doesn't mean I should have to give up my privacy," she said.

At a recent FBI conference on familial searching, Jeffrey Rosen, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, warned: "I can guarantee if familial searching proceeds, it will create a political firestorm."

The policy, which takes effect immediately, is designed to work like this: The state's crime lab will tell police about DNA profiles that come up during routine searches of California's offender database and closely resemble, but do not match, the DNA left at a crime scene. (Previously, the state refused to tell police about these partial matches.)

The lab will then perform calculations and tests to determine the likelihood of a biological relationship between the person found in the database and the unknown offender believed to have left DNA at the crime scene.

When such partial matches do not surface or fail to produce a lead, a more customized familial search can be done in which computer software scans the database proactively for possible relatives. The software measures the chance of two people being related based on the rarity of the markers they share.

California appears to be the first state in the nation to use this second technique as a matter of policy. Drafted with the heavy involvement of lawyers, the new policy requires a series of meetings with police and prosecutors to ensure that the relative's name is vital to the investigation and that all other leads have been exhausted.

Once a relative has been identified, police can interview him or construct a family tree based on existing records. If a suspect is identified, police can obtain a warrant for his DNA, or even gather it surreptiously from an abandoned drink or cigarette butt. The suspect's DNA sample would then be compared to the crime scene sample and possibly used as evidence.

"The people of California will know that we are using the database to try to solve as many crimes as we can, unlike virtually every other state in the country," said retired Alameda County Dist. Atty. Rockne P. Harmon, who consulted with the state on the policy.

Civil libertarians oppose using DNA databases to search for relatives of unknown offenders, saying it puts family members under "genetic surveillance" for crimes they did not commit. For now, all the people in the state's database are convicted offenders, but the state plans to expand the database next year to include arrestees, heightening concerns over privacy.

Critics say familial searching could expose sensitive and secret genetic relationships. A son, for example, could learn that his father was not his biological parent. DNA databases also reflect the racial and ethnic biases of the justice system, exposing minority communities to more surveillance than others, critics maintain.

FBI officials in charge of the national database network have also expressed concerns, making them unlikely allies of civil libertarians on familial searching. They urge a cautious approach, worrying that the courts will balk at this type of sleuthing. No law specifically authorizes it, and some legal scholars consider it unconstitutional because they say it amounts to an unreasonable search.

Brown called such objections hypothetical. The policy forbids the release of the names of relatives until genetic tests and analysis convince the state that the person is indeed a relative.

"It is still not going to be a fail-safe system, and we are going to make mistakes," said Simoncelli, the ACLU science advisor. "We are opening the door to using the database in such a fundamentally different way than the purpose for which it was established."

No one knows how well the state's plan will work. Harmon said he was absolutely convinced that it would provide at least some new leads for police.

Lance Gima, the state's top forensic scientist, agreed. But he conceded that the search for relatives would be a longshot because many unrelated people share genetic markers. He said he hoped the state's decision would spur technology to improve the accuracy of such searches.

Britain has done familial searching for years, using more sophisticated software. With a 10% to 14% rate of identifying perpetrators, Britain's searches have had limited but dramatic results, cracking some sensational crimes.

A serial rapist whose DNA was not in Britain's national database was caught because he was genetically similar to his sister, whose DNA was taken after a drunk-driving arrest. The so-called shoe rapist had a fetish for stiletto heels. When police captured him, they discovered scores of high heels he had stolen from his victims.

Police in the U.S. have used genetic relationships to help catch criminals in a different way, and on a much smaller scale.

After Kansas police zeroed in on the serial killer who dubbed himself BTK -- initials for bind, torture, kill -- they obtained a court order for the pap smear of his daughter. Without her knowledge, police performed a DNA analysis of the specimen, obtained from a medical laboratory.

The genetic similarities indicated they had the right man, Dennis Radar.

Posted by lois at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008

RI: Debtor's Prison

go to reinvestinjustice.org to learn more and see video testimony of people that have in debtor's prison in RI

Skipped debt hearings put 2,500 in ACI
Providence Journal, Tuesday, April 22, 2008
BY EDWARD FITZPATRICK

PROVIDENCE — Nearly 2,500 people were sent to the state prison last year because they failed to appear at hearings regarding court debts, such as fines and court costs.

With Rhode Island facing a big budget deficit and a swelling prison population, that highlights the need to give judges clearer guidelines for waiving court debts and determining if people have the ability to pay, according to a new report by the Rhode Island Family Life Center, a Providence nonprofit group that advocates for and supports people who are leaving prison.

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"While debtors' prisons are thought to be a thing of the past, they still exist in Rhode Island," Family Life Center Executive Director Sol Rodriguez said. "People with criminal records who are trying to get their lives together need support, not a system which throws them back in jail for having trouble paying court fees."

The report found people were sent to the Adult Correctional Institutions 2,446 times in 2007 for missing "ability to pay" hearings, spending an average of three days and two nights behind bars. While most were released after a few days, "several hundred a year spend a week or more just for court debt," the report said.

"Overall, there is a haste to incarcerate individuals for court debt in the state which causes unnecessary, damaging jail time, is an inefficient use of state finances, and disrupts people's lives," the report said. "Incarceration for court debt interrupts medical and rehabilitation treatment, causes individuals to be fired from employment, disrupts families and disrupts housing situations."

The report urges passage of bills introduced by Rep. J. Patrick O'Neill, D-Pawtucket, and Sen. Harold M. Metts, D-Providence. House Bill 8093 and Senate Bill 2234 call for holding hearings within 48 hours to gauge a person's ability to pay, using a financial assessment form and spelling out the types of government assistance that constitute evidence of a limited ability to pay.

The report also recommends using a variety of collection methods before sending people to prison and slashing the warrant fee from $125 to $25 for people brought into court on a warrant.

"One of the most effective ways to avoid this problem is to create a more reasonable system of court fees," Family Life Center policy researcher Nick Horton said. "Rhode Island far and away has higher fees than other New England states. That's the source of this cycle of debt."

Horton said most people do pay the fees and fines imposed by courts, but "for people who can't pay, there needs to be a more concerted effort to waive fines and fees rather than to continue trying to wring blood from a stone."

Overall, 66 percent of the people jailed in connection with court debt were either first-time offenders or had showed up three consecutive times for prior ability-to-pay hearings, the report said. "This contradicts the notion that judges only use incarceration on people that are serially delinquent," the report said.

So what would be the incentive to pay fines and court fees if judges began waiving them with greater frequency? "The idea is that judges consider the person's ability to pay and payment history, and in cases where it's clear the person is unable to pay, judges would eliminate or reduce fines," Horton replied. "So it's not as if they are being wiped out across the board. And if there is an ability to pay, they will still be expected to pay, but they won't be incarcerated unnecessarily. There is still incentive to pay because the fines could increase, and ultimately they could still end up in jail."

The report focuses in part on District Court in Providence, saying that court processes the most cases in the state and deals with the majority of people who owe court debts.

When asked to respond to the report and the legislation, Chief District Court Judge Albert E. DeRobbio said people aren't being locked up because they didn't pay court costs; rather, they're being incarcerated for short periods for failing to obey court orders to appear in court, he said.

"What are we supposed to do? Have a new set of rules that you don't enforce?" DeRobbio asked. "We'd lose all kinds of credibility if we just said, 'OK, ignore it. They didn't show up. We hope they show up next time.' "

District Court judges "don't deprive people of their freedom for no reason at all or failure to pay," DeRobbio said. "Judges of this court are very conscientious about deprivation of liberties, especially about an ability to pay."

As for provisions in the bills, DeRobbio said that if the proposal is "to have an immediate hearing on an ability to pay, you better get about 10 more judges because it's going to take time to fill out the forms and check the background of finances and expenses. If you do that in every case and do it right away, you'll need special calendars and special judges."

DeRobbio noted the state already knocks $150 off a person's court fees and fines for every day they spend in prison in connection with such court debt.

The report said that since that credit jumped to $150 per day in 2006, the number of people held at the ACI in connection with court debt has decreased — going from an average of 24 people a day to an average 18 a day.

But Horton said, "There has to be a better way" because under the current system, the state is losing money twice: by paying an estimated $95 per day to hold a person at the ACI's Intake Service Center and by reducing court debt by $150 per day.

The report — available at riflc.org/pagetool/reports/CourtDebt.pdf — said its recommendations would "decrease the number of unnecessary and costly incarcerations, reduce the burden of fines on the indigent, and lower the prison population."

Rhode Island's prison population reached an all-time high of 4,000 last year, and state officials have been weighing proposals to trim it to avoid reaching a court-imposed population cap and to save money. The state is facing a projected $384-million budget deficit in the coming fiscal year. And the prison population, which typically increases in the spring and summer, stood at 3,851 on Friday, spokeswoman Tracey Z. Poole said.

"Our state can no longer afford to unnecessarily incarcerate people for court debt," Horton said. "There simply isn't room at the prison."

The report said that if all those jailed in connection with court debt had been released within 48 hours last year, the state would have saved about $200,000 and lowered its awaiting-trial population by about 13 people per day.

Poole said the Department of Corrections has taken no position on the proposed legislation. "Anything that has the effect of reducing commitments will affect the population, but how that translates into cost savings is more complicated," she said. "These people are here for very short periods of time, and they are coming and going. So we're not going to be able to shut down a unit. You have to have a critical mass in order to close down a unit, which would result in significant cost savings."

When asked for reaction, courts spokesman Craig N. Berke said, "There is a process currently in place to assess a defendant's ability to pay, but it's entirely within the legislature's prerogative to amend that process."

Assistant public defender Michael A. DiLauro, who is listed as an adviser on the report, said, "How much money does it cost to attempt to collect money from people by incarcerating them and how much is realized from it? That's a conversation we need to have. We know what the answer is: these people can't pay, so they stay in jail 7, 10, 14 days, and how much does that cost? There's no way you can tell me this is an efficient, businesslike, common-sense way of doing things."

DiLauro said the bills do not mandate that judges waive court debts. "It doesn't bind the judge's hand," he said. "It just says that's a factor."

DiLauro said it makes sense to use a financial assessment form to gauge a person's ability to pay fines and court costs. "It's a comprehensive, standardized way of doing things," he said.

Posted by lois at 07:20 PM | Comments (0)

April 18, 2008

Outrageous but TRUE!: CA- Some women have their teeth pulled to be able to reunite with their children

A painful choice for moms in prison
SOME HAVE TEETH PULLED TO LIVE WITH KIDS
By Edwin Garcia
Mercury News Sacramento Bureau
Article Launched: 04/18/2008 01:30:41 AM PDT

SACRAMENTO - Sarina Borg had a tough choice to make.

She could wait for months, maybe more than a year, to have her rotting teeth repaired by a dentist. Or she could get them pulled to be reunited with her baby daughter.

In California women's prisons, dozens if not hundreds of inmates like Borg are faced with the same wrenching decision: To gain access to a host of vocational-training and drug-rehabilitation programs for non-violent offenders - including a course that teaches them parenting skills while living with their children in special housing - they must be cleared of any pre-existing health problems.

Just one badly damaged tooth will block them from entering a program.

"It's unconscionable," said Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, who has proposed legislation to shorten the waiting list for women wanting to get their teeth fixed by a prison dentist, a measure that passed its first committee hearing last week.

"We have women who are getting 16 and 18 out of 34 teeth pulled, and that really destroys their future job prospects," Lieber said. "We have to change the situation."

She introduced AB 2877 after learning that a court settlement agreement, which calls for vastly improved dental care in all state prisons over the next three years, had left the three women's institutions near the bottom of the implementation schedule.

Relatively few inmates qualify for the program that allows mothers to serve their
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sentences with their infants because of the strict dental-clearance and other reasons, such as a requirement that the prisoners retain legal custody of their children.

So when the opportunity to enroll was presented to Borg, 31, who is from Daly City, it didn't take long to make her decision: "I said hurry up and pull it," Borg recalled of her meeting with a prison dentist, "I want to be with my baby."

She ended up having four teeth removed to earn her the coveted transfer to a minimum-security, dormitory-like prison in Oakland, the East Bay Community Recovery Project. There, she could bond with her 3-month-old daughter, Kamaleia, and learn how to become a better mother, in a setting that costs less to taxpayers than a traditional prison. Borg is expected to serve the remainder of her two-year, eight-month sentence for robbery at the program.

Officials with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation say the dental and health clearances are necessary because the specialized programs are based at smaller community prisons and don't have dentists or doctors on site. Thousands of men also must pass the same screening to get into specialized programs scattered across California.

"We don't want to send offenders out to these facilities and have major dental issues or medical conditions that would put them at risk," said Wendy Still, who oversees the state's three mother-infant community prisons, which house 71 women.

About 900 women are enrolled in all of the specialized programs, which cost the state as little as $90 a day per inmate, Still said, a taxpayer bargain compared with the $121 daily tab of a traditional prison bed.

But as helpful as the programs may be in preparing women for life after prison - and as useful as they are at reducing California's notoriously high recidivism rate - they also have a major downside on the personal lives of the inmates.

Mothers who undergo extractions to live with their children in the community prisons, and who learn job skills there, have difficulty finding work upon their release because employers would rather not hire someone whose mouth has more gaps than teeth.

"It's probably almost as big a deal as having a criminal record," said Allyson West, director of the California Reentry Program, which prepares inmates for their release from San Quentin. "They're going to be pigeonholed because of their appearance."

Inmates with missing teeth also suffer from low self-esteem.

"I'm still young and now I have no teeth down there, you know what I mean?" said Borg, who doesn't smile as often as she used to; she's missing three bottom teeth on the right side of her mouth. She also finds it hard to chew. "Being a woman, I just feel degraded, really bad."

Prison dental clinics don't typically offer dentures, implants or other cosmetic work.

Another inmate in the Oakland program, 31-year-old Michelle Filby, is self-conscious about a gap on the top row of her mouth, and other missing teeth, which she hopes to fix after her release, assuming she lands a good job.

Still, she has no regrets. "I'd rather lose a tooth than not have my baby, so to me it was worth it," Filby said. "But it would have been nice to maybe get a root canal or fillings."

Rachel Roth, an independent scholar and national expert on the health issues of women in prison, said the dental-clearance policy "just shows how desperate women are to get out of the big prisons and be with their children that they would allow themselves to be treated in such an inhumane way."

Prison statistics don't track how many women with severely damaged teeth, often caused by methamphetamine use and poor hygiene, have requested extractions to get into the programs.

About 9,000 teeth are pulled each year in California's three female institutions, according to prison system records. More than 12,000 women are housed in those prisons.

It's also difficult to determine how California's dental-clearance policy compares with the rest of the country, because not all states have similar women's housing programs; some institutions run nurseries within large prisons where health services are readily available.

Advocates for female inmates who are familiar with prison policies nationwide say California's dental-clearance requirement seems rare.

"That's extraordinary," said Tamar Kraft-Stolar, a director with the Correctional Association of New York, a non-profit agency with authority to inspect that state's prisons. "I've not heard of anything like that."

http://origin.mercurynews.com/news/ci_8969528?nclick_check=1

Posted by lois at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2008

Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Execution

April 16, 2008
Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Execution
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NY Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the most common method of lethal injection executions, likely clearing the way to resume executions that have been on hold for nearly 7 months.

The justices, by a 7-2 vote, turned back a constitutional challenge to the procedures in place in Kentucky, which uses three drugs to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates. Similar methods are used by roughly three dozen states.

''We ... agree that petitioners have not carried their burden of showing that the risk of pain from maladministration of a concededly humane lethal injection protocol, and the failure to adopt untried and untested alternatives, constitute cruel and unusual punishment,'' Chief Justice John Roberts said in an opinion that garnered only three votes. Four other justices, however, agreed with the outcome.

Roberts' opinion did leave open subsequent challenges to lethal injection practices if a state refused to adopt an alternative method that significantly reduced the risk of severe pain.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented.

Executions have been on hold since September, when the court agreed to hear the Kentucky case. There was no immediate indication when they would resume, but prosecutors in several states said they would seek new execution dates if the court ruled favorably in the Kentucky case.

Forty-two people were executed last year among more than 3,300 people on death row across the country. Another roughly two dozen executions did not go forward because of the Supreme Court's review, death penalty opponents said.

The argument against the three-drug protocol is that if the initial anesthetic does not take hold, the other two drugs can cause excruciating pain. One of those drugs, a paralytic, would render the prisoner unable to express his discomfort.

The case before the court came from Kentucky, where two death row inmates did not ask to be spared execution or death by injection. Instead, they wanted the court to order a switch to a single drug, a barbiturate, that causes no pain and can be given in a large enough dose to cause death.

At the very least, they said, the state should be required to impose tighter controls on the three-drug process to ensure that the anesthetic is given properly.

Roberts said the one-drug method, frequently used in animal euthanasia, ''has problems of its own, and has never been tried by a single state.''

Kentucky has had only one execution by lethal injection and it did not present any obvious problems, both sides in the case agreed.

But executions elsewhere, in Florida and Ohio, took much longer than usual, with strong indications that the prisoners suffered severe pain in the process. Workers had trouble inserting the IV lines that are used to deliver the drugs.

Roberts said ''a condemned prisoner cannot successfully challenge a state's method of execution merely by showing a slightly or marginally safer alternative.''

Ginsburg, in her dissent, said her colleagues should have asked Kentucky courts to consider whether the state includes adequate safeguards to ensure a prisoner is unconscious and thus unlikely to suffer severe pain.

Justice John Paul Stevens, while agreeing with the outcome, said the court's decision would not end the debate over lethal injection. ''I am now convinced that this case will generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol, and specifically about the justification for the use of the paralytic agent, pancuronium bromide, but also about the justification for the death penalty itself,'' Stevens said.

Stevens suggested that states could spare themselves legal costs and delays in executions by eliminating the use of the paralytic.

Ty Alper, a death penalty opponent and associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, said he expects challenges to lethal injections will continue in several states.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Scotus-Lethal-Injection.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=login&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2008

NY: Youth prison to stay open study to take 3 years

Legislation approved Wednesday directs that a study compare the effectiveness of residential vs. community-based treatment for juveniles — the latter, a new approach recommended in former Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer’s executive order carrying out a plan to close Great Valley and several other juvenile treatment facilities in 2009.

The study will take three years, with an interim report delivered to Albany in 2009.

By Kathy Kellogg
CATTARAUGUS CORRESPONDENT
Updated: 04/10/08 2:45 PM

GREAT VALLEY — The Great Valley Youth Residential Center will not be closed or converted to a limited secure youth detention facility but will continue temporarily as a nonsecure foster facility to house about 25 youths.

State Sen. Catharine Young, R-Olean, managed to secure funds in the state budget to study the facility’s future and announced the development Wednesday.

Legislation approved Wednesday directs that a study compare the effectiveness of residential vs. community-based treatment for juveniles — the latter, a new approach recommended in former Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer’s executive order carrying out a plan to close Great Valley and several other juvenile treatment facilities in 2009.

The study will take three years, with an interim report delivered to Albany in 2009. Young promised to convene a task force of community leaders if the study makes an alternative recommendation.

The possibility of Great Valley’s closing triggered a push in February by the Cattaraugus County Legislature, employees, residents and town officials to keep the facility open. County legislators backed converting it to a limited secure facility as a stopgap measure.

Opponents of the closing have listed several economic reasons why the facility should remain open. The annual payroll is about $1.4 million — it is one of the area’s largest employers — and an estimated $400,000 is spent annually on local services. The state has invested about $1.2 million in infrastructure upgrades in recent years.

Many local residents argued that a local facility should be available to treat the area’s youth, instead of somewhere else in the state. A similar foster-care facility for juveniles is operating in Limestone, and they are the only treatment centers in Western New York.

“After carefully reviewing data supplied by the state Office of Children and Family Services, and listening to the community, we decided the best solution is to keep the center the way it is for now,” said Young, who is also a member of the Human Services Conference Committee.

She called for evidence before changes are made and demanded to see that the new juvenile justice system and proposed treatments will work and that recidivism rates will improve.

Great Valley Supervisor Dan Brown said the move will keep money and jobs in the community.
http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/otherwny/story/319859.html

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

More mentally ill end up in jails

More mentally ill end up in jails
By Susan Abram, Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 04/14/2008 06:34:00 AM PDT

SHERMAN OAKS - The number of psychiatric beds in public hospitals has fallen dramatically across California and the nation - with the Golden State now dedicating just 17 beds for mentally ill patients for every 100,000 residents, according to a newly released report.

While the ratio in California mirrors the national average, it represents a sharp drop over the past five decades - from 340 beds per 100,000 people nationwide in 1955, according to the report by the national nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center.

"The results of this report are dire and the failure to provide care for the most seriously mentally ill individuals is disgraceful," said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Arlington, Va.-based center that advocates for treatment of the mentally ill.

"Our communities are paying a high price for our failure to treat those with severe and persistent mental illness, and those not receiving treatment are suffering severely."

Researchers with the center are urging at least 12,200 beds be added across California, nearly double the 6,285 beds that were counted in 2005.

In Los Angeles County, health officials said 140 beds are spread throughout the public hospital system and there are another 222 beds at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk. County officials also note more beds are available in private hospitals, nursing homes and group homes.
But the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department say they've become a de facto safety net for mental health services because there is no room at the hospitals.

At the county's Twin Towers jails, 1,000 beds are filled nearly every night by psychiatric patients - more than in any mental institution west of the Mississippi, according to the LAPD.

And of the nearly 20,000 inmates in the county's jail system, about 60 percent suffer from mental illnesses, according to a recent report by the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute.

Meanwhile, incidents involving the mentally ill have surfaced on L.A.'s streets. In one case last year, the mother of a mentally disturbed 23-year-old who was shot by police after he ran over a pedestrian said that hours before he was killed, she pleaded with the LAPD to apprehend her son.

Luis Salinas, who battled mental illness, had been taken to a mental facility weeks before, where he had been evaluated and released 48 hours later. Doctors there said he was suffering from a brief psychotic disorder.

Emergency rooms also are scrambling to meet the needs.

"We have acute and chronic demand for what we call the `5150' patient - or those who are hospitalized without their consent," said Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Southern California Hospital Association. "These patients are very hard to find beds for and are clogging up hospital emergency rooms."

Fueling the issue, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an overdue state budget last summer that included slashing $55 million for housing the homeless mentally ill.

"There has been no word or movement on the issue (of more beds) from anyone in the state," Lott said.

Medicare rates also affect behavioral health units at private community hospitals that rely on the government reimbursements.

On Friday, Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks closed its 16-bed mental health unit for seniors because of declining reimbursements, according to published reports.

The average cost to hospitals to treat those with severe mental illness is about $800 a day, Lott said. But for homeless or Medicare patients, hospitals receive $475 from the state and the county. Without that money, many of the units have been shuttered, he said.

The decline in the number of beds for mentally ill patients also comes amid an overhaul of state mental institutions - stand-alone facilities that started closing during the Reagan administration.

"Over the last decade, we have cut many beds from state hospitals as we've developed more in community settings," said Dr. Roderick Shaner, medical director for the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.

"The bottom line is we need every kind of service but we can't use models of a half-century ago."

The solution falls on community hospitals and organizations that can likely secure federal funding for more beds - something state hospitals are unable to do, Shaner said.

"I think that in the longer term, we are developing new resources ... that will allow us to support the people in the community," Shaner said. "However, there is a problem with getting access to emergency psychiatric hospitalization in the short run."

Jonathan Stanley, deputy executive director for the Treatment Advocacy Center, said that while attitudes and treatment toward the mentally ill have improved, the bed shortage means hospitals are slashing the amount of time for treatment.

"I think the average stay in a psychiatric hospital now is seven days to help them get stabilized with their meds," Stanley said. "But the problem is they are not staying long enough and they are still systematic when they leave. They end up coming back or going to jail."

Some San Fernando Valley facilities are trying to buck the trend, especially for the elderly with mental health issues, including depression and early signs of dementia.

Sherman Oaks Hospital is hoping to add 19 beds for those 55 years and older with mental health issues.

The hospital had shut down its behavioral health unit - which served those who were involuntarily admitted - in 2006 because it never reached capacity.

The new facility is for voluntary patients and aimed at treating seniors with a full spectrum of mental illness.

Experts said the need could be great, as 79 million baby boomers are aging and some might have received inconsistent treatment in their youth, resulting in what could be a wave of mental health needs.

"We're looking at the backlash of the Reagan movement. These people were in their 20s and 30s and are now in their geriatric situations," said Tricia Devon, director of psychiatric services at Sherman Oaks Hospital. "We need to find a different way to treat patients. There's too many people in the streets."

The Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda also has opened a 10-bed behavioral unit.

"We saw there was a need for this, with our own residents here at the home," said Gay Howard, who heads the unit. "A lot of these patients were identified for behavioral therapy, but they didn't want to leave because this is their home."

For more news and observations about crime in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, check out Mean Streets, the Daily News' crime blog.

The average amount of stay in the new unit is about 10 days, Howard said, and treatment includes activities and therapy.

"We are dealing with people who come from an era where they didn't talk about their problems," she said. As a result "they don't receive the proper diagnosis and no one then knows they are depressed.
"We want to tell them it's OK to ask for help."

Posted by lois at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2008

FL: Florida's Process To Restore Suffrage Illustrates Haze

Felons' Voting Requests Pile Up
Florida's Process To Restore Suffrage Illustrates Haze
By GARY FIELDS
March 31, 2008
Wall Street Journal

MIAMI -- Republican Gov. Charlie Crist went against his party a year ago and made it easier for felons to regain their voting rights. The process has been slow, however -- stirring controversy in a state expected to be closely fought in this fall's elections.

Florida's clemency board has restored voting rights to nearly 75,000 residents. But nearly 96,000 requests are pending, according to information through March 20. Activists say there might be an additional 400,000 people who have been rejected without explanation, making it impossible for them to be reinstated.

[silent minority]

The fate of these votes is especially sensitive in Florida, where George W. Bush claimed the presidency by a mere 537 votes in 2000. But similar tensions are playing out across the country, with 5.3 million U.S. citizens unable to vote because of felony convictions -- including four million people who are no longer in prison, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Maine and Vermont are the only states that allow felons to vote while incarcerated. Thirteen others and the District of Columbia allow inmates to regain the right to vote after their release, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington advocacy group. Other states limit voting based on factors including the severity of a crime, the completion of probation and the payment of fines.

Restoring the rights of all five million felons who can't vote is complicated by this patchwork system, said University of Florida political scientist Richard Scher, who noted, "There is no uniformity."

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in Tennessee contending that the state's rules amount to a poll tax, a reference to the illegal restrictions imposed during the 1960s. The state requires felons to pay outstanding fines and child support before restoring their votes, something the two advocacy groups say penalizes the poor.

Richard Gooden of Alabama lost his right to vote in 2000 after a drunken-driving conviction. The secretary of state said Mr. Gooden had to appeal through the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles because the felony was considered a crime of "moral turpitude." The board refused his application, saying his crime didn't disqualify him from voting. The stalemate between the two agencies left him unable to register.

The 66-year-old was turned away from the polls in the 1960s when he couldn't recite the Alabama State Constitution by heart, part of a test designed to keep African-Americans from voting. This time, the state's Supreme Court restored his vote.

"You can be in a place where you're eligible to vote but not know you're eligible because of the complexities and disinformation," said Mr. Gooden's lawyer, Ryan Haygood, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

In Florida, churches are hosting rights-restoration sessions. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, a group of 40 organizations, is planning a daylong rally for April 1 in Tallahassee. The state's clemency board is trying to reach out to as many people as possible to tell them of the changes. It held 17 hearings across the state and is preparing a leafleting campaign in convenience stores, churches and other well-traveled areas.

Inside the fellowship hall of the Greater Bethel AME Church in the Overtown area of Miami, more than 100 residents with criminal records listened to representatives from the state attorney and public defender offices explain how felons can register.
[Ricky McGowan]

Those with more-serious crimes worked their way to the table staffed by the ACLU and University of Miami School of Law students. Ricky McGowan, 41 years old, spoke animatedly to one of the students while others lined up, waiting for a free chair. Mr. McGowan, a landscaper, has never voted. He lost his voting rights before he registered because at 18 he was convicted of conspiracy to commit armed robbery. He asked about the process and explained that he is worried an arrest for littering a year ago will further complicate his application.

"I done things I'm not proud of, and I'm different now; I'm a man," he said outside the hall. "But I can't go back and change what I did." Mr. McGowan said he doubts his rights will be restored in time. If he can, he will vote for Sen. Barack Obama. "I like Hillary; Hillary is all right, but Barack, Barack is something different," he said.

The change in Florida was controversial from the start. Mr. Crist's initial proposal was opposed by two Republicans who were members of the executive clemency board, Attorney General Bill McCollum and Secretary of Agriculture Charles Bronson. Mr. Crist revamped the idea, limiting the scope to nonviolent offenders, and Mr. Bronson signed on. To qualify, those felons must have completed their prison term, probation and parole, if applicable, and made any payments the court orders, including child support.

Mr. McCollum, with the backing of law-enforcement organizations, continued to oppose the measure, noting that authorities already had the power to restore voting rights on a case-by-case basis.

A spokeswoman for the attorney general said he has accepted the changes and now is focusing on better preparing inmates for their release.

The new process is simpler than the old method, but some want it to be faster still. It is "unnecessarily complicated, unnecessarily bureaucratic and unnecessarily slow," said Muslima Lewis, director of ACLU Florida's Racial Justice Project.

Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative legal advocacy group, said the old system could have been improved, but the new system goes too far. Each case should be reviewed, he said. "To assume someone has turned over a new leaf because they've walked out of prison doesn't make sense."

Good map from The Sentencing Project at this URL and at www.sentencingproject.org
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120692447687975721-EN6zQhkYtRXw4iHF9EneXxh3YKM_20080429.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top/

Posted by lois at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2008

NY: A Saturday Night Deal Means 4 Adult Prisons Stay Open

"By late Sunday, deals were in place to resolve some of the most difficult issues that have vexed all three parties for weeks. According to officials who had been briefed on the talks, tentative agreements were reached to provide $1.8 billion in additional aid to schools across the state, of which $400 million would go to schools in New York City. Raises for state judges and legislators were not part of the deal, but an additional tax on cigarettes was. And the four prisons upstate that Eliot Spitzer proposed closing when he introduced his budget in January would remain open, the officials said."

March 31, 2008
Hope in Albany for Passing Budget on Time
By JEREMY W. PETERS
NY Times

ALBANY — Legislative leaders and the Paterson administration said Sunday night that it was possible they could complete the state budget close to Monday’s midnight deadline, a task that seemed all but unattainable just hours earlier.

At the same time, the equally complicated and contentious plan to charge drivers a fee to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan inched closer to being voted on by the City Council and the State Legislature.

A budget passed by the Legislature and delivered to Gov. David A. Paterson’s desk near the deadline would be a significant victory for the new governor, who has had less than three weeks to broker a budget deal. It would be all the more welcome to Mr. Paterson and his administration considering he has spent much of his time in office so far deflecting embarrassing questions about his personal life.

The agreement came as quickly as it did partly because the state is confronting an unforgiving economic outlook, and there are few spare dollars to spread around. During the talks on Sunday, Mr. Paterson likened the state’s financial situation to that of a family with a maxed-out credit card, telling the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Sliver “we are over the limit,” according to one person who sat in on the discussions.

They were short on specifics, but Mr. Paterson, Mr. Bruno and Mr. Silver emerged from the governor’s office suite in the Capitol on Sunday evening and said they had agreed to keep spending growth for the fiscal year that begins on April 1 limited to about 4.4 percent more than the current budget.

That would leave the state with a total spending plan of $124 billion.

“We will start passing bills tomorrow in pursuit of meeting the deadline at midnight tomorrow,” said Mr. Paterson, a Democrat. “You’re always racing against the clock in budget negotiations, but this time we’re racing together against the clock.”

Mr. Bruno, a Republican, who said hours earlier that the budget negotiations were proving to be very challenging, sounded confident as he stood with Mr. Paterson. “We’re there,” he said.

By late Sunday, deals were in place to resolve some of the most difficult issues that have vexed all three parties for weeks. According to officials who had been briefed on the talks, tentative agreements were reached to provide $1.8 billion in additional aid to schools across the state, of which $400 million would go to schools in New York City.

Raises for state judges and legislators were not part of the deal, but an additional tax on cigarettes was. And the four prisons upstate that Eliot Spitzer proposed closing when he introduced his budget in January would remain open, the officials said.

Adding another layer of complexity to the tense budget discussions, the Republican Senate majority introduced amendments to a bill that would put in place Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge drivers to enter parts of Manhattan. The amendments addressed concerns that legislators have voiced about the plan — known as the congestion pricing plan — and appear to have improved its chances of passing the Legislature.

“It’s now more viable than it’s ever been,” said one senior official closely involved in the budget deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because negotiations were continuing.

The amendments to the Senate congestion pricing bill would, among other things, ensure that New Yorkers who are eligible for the low income tax credit be reimbursed for congestion pricing fees, and commit the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to contribute $1 billion over the next five years to the capital plan of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. In exchange for the $1 billion contribution, drivers crossing into Manhattan from New Jersey would pay the standard $8 toll and not an additional congestion fee.

The City Council is expected to vote on the plan in the next few days. Approval from the Council would pave the way for the Legislature to act.

The Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, issued a statement on Sunday that hinted a vote could come any day. “I am increasingly optimistic that these developments will help make it easier for members of the Council to seize this important moment,” she said.

Still, the fate of the congestion pricing plan is uncertain in the Legislature. Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Democrat from Westchester, blasted the Senate amendments, saying the plan “remains an unfair regressive tax on the middle-income people from the outer boroughs.” He added: “The mayor’s plan doesn’t have the votes, and this won’t get them.”

In Albany on Sunday night, budget negotiators still had some major obstacles to overcome even as budget bills were being drafted and readied for the printer.

Some independent budget analysts questioned the wisdom of spending nearly double the rate of inflation, especially when many economists believe the country is already in a recession.

“They’ve tightened their belts some, but it hasn’t been nearly enough,” said Elizabeth Lynam, deputy research director of the Citizens Budget Commission.

The speed with which Mr. Paterson and legislative leaders reached agreement on Sunday was the type of policy achievement that the Paterson administration and members of both parties in Albany were hoping they could deliver.

“This has been a very rocky time,” said Assemblyman Jeffrion L. Aubry, a Democrat from Queens. “I think the confidence that people have in us as an institution could use the reinforcement of an on-time budget.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/nyregion/31budget.html

Posted by lois at 05:44 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2008

NY: The Juveniles Are Gone, Yet the Jails Remain

March 26, 2008
About New York
The Juveniles Are Gone, Yet the Jails Remain
By JIM DWYER

The public pays about $500 a night for each of the 25 beds in the Auburn Residential Center — a place for teenagers who have gotten into lower-grade trouble with the law, a junior-varsity jail. For the last two weeks, the beds in Auburn have been empty. And state officials expect them to remain empty, permanently.

But even with no one under the sheets, each bed will continue to cost as much as $200,000 a year, the officials say.

Auburn, near Syracuse, is one of three state facilities for teenagers that are becoming high-priced ghost jails. Brace Residential Center, in Delaware County, with 25 beds, has just two teenagers staying there, watched over by a staff of 24; Great Valley in Cattaraugus County has 10 young people and a staff of 24. Soon, Brace and Great Valley, like Auburn, will no longer have teenagers staying there.

Yet if the State Senate has its way, all three will remain open until at least January 2010.

“I believe the number of juveniles was deliberately reduced this year and the kids sent elsewhere” to justify closing Great Valley, said State Senator Catharine M. Young, a Republican from Cattaraugus County, which is in the western part of the state, near the borders of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Senate has passed a resolution that requires Great Valley and the others to remain open.

Nearly all politicians fight to keep jobs in their districts. Prisons, jails and juvenile facilities have been a source of political and economic power to upstate areas that have little other industry. Most of the inmates came from the five boroughs and the metropolitan area.

In the battle over the ghost jails, though, the fight is not simply about the local economy, but also about a system of juvenile corrections that has been in a quiet state of collapse for nearly a decade, particularly for teenagers who are not in trouble for serious offenses.

New York City has found better, cheaper ways to move teenagers onto safer ground, said Ronald E. Richter, the city’s family services coordinator.

For offenders whose home lives are filled with problems, the city now provides intense programs for the entire family, buttressing the role of adults in the lives of the teenagers. Last year, about 275 teenagers and their families were sent into these programs rather than the state juvenile system.

So instead of sending the teenagers off to state facilities that cost $140,000 to $200,000 a year per person, the city is spending about $17,000 a year, Mr. Richter said. And while the state’s juvenile recidivism rate is 80 percent, the city program had a rate of about 35 percent in its first year, he said.

Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the state’s Office of Children and Family Services, which administers the juvenile centers, says straightening out teenagers who have committed minor offenses is a job better done in community-based systems. The juvenile centers, she said, should be reserved for “young people who are a danger to themselves and their communities.”

“For most of the kids, we don’t need these facilities, and we don’t need to be shipping them hundreds of miles away from their families,” she said. “That money can be reinvested in programs that work better for these young people.”

The prison economy is a central feature of New York’s political economy. The state Public Employees Federation, which represents some of the employees in the juvenile centers, has bought advertisements in small newspapers in towns near the centers, arguing that the state is jumping the gun.

“We think it’s premature,” said Darcy Wells, spokeswoman for the union. “The police say that juvenile arrests are up by 8 percent in New York City.”

Ms. Carrión said that there would be plenty of space if serious juvenile crime rose sharply. “Even after I close the facilities, I will have 20 to 30 percent excess capacity, so I have the flexibility in the system,” she said.

Senator Young said that the community-based programs like the one in New York needed to be studied before the existing system was shut down. The current data, she said, is not adequate.

Ms. Carrión says there is no need to wait: The current juvenile system catapults needy youngsters far from the families they will eventually return to, with no changes in the households that they left.

“Almost all of the kids are black and brown,” she said. “This is the alternative boarding school system for children of color. We can do better than this.”

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

GA: Jail and Prison Cells ncrease as beds in psychiatric hospitals decline

"The chief justice's task force noted that in the past 20 years, Georgia jails have added 23,000 beds and prisons have added 35,000, while the number of psychiatric hospital beds has declined."

Atlanta Journal Constitution
Mentally ill strain state jails with $70M services

By ANDY MILLER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 03/26/08

Fifteen percent of the inmates in Georgia's county jails have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness and receive medication for that condition, according to a task force created by Georgia's Supreme Court chief justice. In addition, 15.5 percent of those in state prisons have similar diagnoses.

The disproportionate number of people with mental illness in the state's jails and prisons is the result of a lack of community mental health services, the task force said.

In comparison, 5 percent of all Georgians have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, which include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression.

Mentally ill people often become trapped in the criminal justice system instead of getting needed treatment, task force leaders Tuesday told a state commission studying reforms of the mental health system.

Most of the county jail inmates with mental illness also are addicted to drugs, the task force said.

The annual cost of mental health services in Georgia jails and prisons is $70 million, according to the report of the task force, chaired by Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears.

"It's an enormous drain on resources in regard to jails and the court system,'' said Judge Winston Bethel of DeKalb County Magistrate Court.

The chief justice's task force noted that in the past 20 years, Georgia jails have added 23,000 beds and prisons have added 35,000, while the number of psychiatric hospital beds has declined.

Criminal defendants with mental illness often face a long wait before transferring to forensic units of state mental hospitals for evaluation, the task force report added.

If community services are fully funded ‹ such as hiring case managers to check on mental health patients' medication ‹ ''it will reduce our caseloads,'' Judge John Allen of Chattahoochee Circuit Superior Court said. "We can keep some of these people out of jail.''

Georgia is one of seven states selected for a federal grant to study mental illness in the criminal justice system. The resulting task force began meeting last summer. The 73-member group includes judges, consumer advocates, law enforcement officials and officials in Gov. Sonny Perdue's administration.

"Large numbers of people with mental illness repeatedly make their way into our courtrooms, our jails and our prisons,'' Sears said recently in public remarks. "Mental illness is not a crime. But these citizens too often fall through the cracks of our social safety net. When they do, they enter a vicious cycle of arrest, prosecution, incarceration, release and re-offense.''

The mental health commission listened to the task force presentation mostly without comment.

The panel was created by Perdue after a series of articles last year in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Georgia's state-run mental hospitals were chronically overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed, leading to widespread medical errors and other problems.

The newspaper reported that at least 115 state hospital patients died under suspicious circumstances from 2002 through 2006. As many as 21 more questionable deaths occurred during 2007, the newspaper reported in December. In addition, dozens of substantiated cases of physical or sexual abuse of patients were reported. The articles have led to an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Justice Department.

The task force's recommendations include making sure people with mental illness have proper medication; providing housing for mentally ill people who are homeless; and starting a program of special case managers who would help link newly jailed offenders to community services.

The Department of Human Resources, which runs the public mental health system, said the task force's report was not surprising. Spending for community services in Georgia has historically lagged, but that funding has increased in recent years, said Gwen Skinner, head of the division for mental health services.

Perdue's original budget for next year would continue that growth, she said.

Several areas in Georgia have started mental health courts to divert some mentally ill offenders into treatment. Superior Court Judge Stephen Goss of Dougherty County, who runs a mental health court and is a Perdue commission member, said, "Jails have become de facto treatment centers.''

In addition, Georgia Hospital Association members told the commission that gaps in community services also have led increasing numbers of mental health patients to seek care in emergency rooms across the state. Lack of available beds in the state-run mental hospitals cause long delays in patients being transferred from ERs, the GHA members said. They called for the creation of a single state agency to oversee all spending and services for mental health, developmental disabilities and substance abuse.

Perdue recently formed a commission to reform DHR, singling out mental health as one area that needs improvement.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2008/03/25/mental_0326.html

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

March 25, 2008

How low can you go? Alabama sheriffs may pocket leftover food money of $1.75 a day after feeding inmates at county jails.

Alabama attorney general rules that Alabama sheriffs may pocket leftover food money of $1.75 a day after feeding inmates at county jails.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008
KIM CHANDLER
News staff writer

MONTGOMERY - Alabama sheriffs may pocket leftover food money after feeding inmates at the county jails, the Alabama attorney general has ruled.

The opinion issued March 17 offered guidance on the controversial practice of sheriff's keeping whatever is left over from the $1.75 a day per inmate the state pays sheriffs to provide food in the jails.

The director of the Alabama Sheriffs Association praised the opinion and said it gives sheriffs incentive to wisely manage jail grocery costs.

"The code is very explicit, the excess belongs to the sheriff," said Bobby Timmons, executive director of the Alabama Sheriffs Association.

Some county officials have argued the surplus money should not be the personal income of the sheriff.

"Our disagreement with the attorney general is, if there's a surplus, it ought to be used for law enforcement purposes and not be put into the personal income of the sheriff," said Buddy Sharpless, executive director of the Association of County Commissions of Alabama.

The opinion cited a section of state law that states fees collected by the sheriff shall be paid into the county's general fund, "excluding the allowances and amounts received for feeding prisoners, which the various sheriffs of the various counties shall be entitled to keep and retain."

The phrase "keep and retain" has been interpreted in other fee-for-service situations to mean that "the officials retain the fee as personal income," the opinion read.

The Etowah County Commission and the city of Gadsden requested the opinion, asking, among other questions, if the sheriff could keep the surplus funds as personal income and if it was proper for the sheriff not to pay sales tax on food purchases for the jail.

Timmons said the extra income to the sheriff could be zero dollars because of rising grocery costs, or it could be tens of thousands of dollars in a year when the sheriff is able to find good deals.

"You can't just give them an apple and two crackers. You got to give them a nourishing balanced meal," Timmons said.

County commissions can direct the surplus funds to be deposited into the county general fund, but only if the county takes over the responsibility of feeding prisoners, according to the attorney general's office.

E-mail: kchandler@bhamnews.com
http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/120643830716840.xml&coll=2

Posted by lois at 01:15 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2008

FL: Proposed funding cuts to successful drug treatment programs may leave thousands untreated

"Proposed cuts at the corrections department -- which could total almost $30 million -- would eliminate all substance-abuse treatment for prison inmates and those on probation, said Gretl Plessinger, an agency spokeswoman. The drug treatment cuts would be the deepest in agency history. At DCF, administrators have included an $11 million cut to programs that provide treatment services to parents at risk of losing their children. And the juvenile justice agency is eliminating a youth drug court in Alachua County among other possible trims."

Miami Herald

DRUG TREATMENT
Budget cuts put drug addict's lifelines on the line

Proposed funding cuts to successful drug treatment programs may leave thousands untreated

Posted on Mon, Mar. 24, 2008

BY CAROL MARBIN MILLER
cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com

A year ago, Esther Guzman wanted her crack pipe more than her kids. In her heart, she hoped to come clean for her children's sake, but her cocaine addiction lured her to the rock.

Guzman got high just minutes before she grabbed a cab on March 14, 2007, to appear before a judge who would decide if she could get her four children back. A day earlier the state had taken her kids, ages 5 to 13, into foster care because she had neglected them for months.

On Friday, Guzman walked with dozens of other moms in a ''graduation'' ceremony from The Village drug treatment center in Miami, and left the residential complex to begin a new life -- with her children. Fighting tears, she said she will never return to the center -- except to encourage other drug-addicted moms.

Other mothers struggling with addiction might not get that opportunity. Faced with as much as $9 billion in state revenue shortfalls, Florida lawmakers are considering at least $40 million in cuts to drug treatment centers throughout Florida. The Village's program may be forced to shutter.

''Let us all pray to a power greater than ourselves that this doesn't happen,'' Janet Nichols, a Village program administrator, told the graduates during Friday's commencement.

More than two in three adults who serve time in Florida prisons are battling a drug problem. And almost all of the parents entering the state's child welfare system risk losing their children forever because their addictions are more powerful than their desire to protect their children.

As lawmakers grapple with one of the worst budget crises in state history, administrators at the Department of Corrections, the Department of Children & Families and the Department of Juven