The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

May 27, 2008

NY Times Editorial: Thirty-Five Years of Rockefeller ‘Justice’

May 27, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Thirty-Five Years of Rockefeller ‘Justice’

Enacted in 1973, New York’s Rockefeller drug laws penalized some first-time drug offenders more severely than murderers. Named for Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor at the time, the laws tied the hands of judges and mandated lengthy sentences for young offenders who often deserved a second chance. The laws, which were supposed to ensnare “kingpins,” have filled the prisons with drug addicts who would have been better dealt with through treatment programs. They also undermined faith in the fairness of the justice system by singling out poor and minority offenders while exempting wealthy ones.

New York has made incremental changes in laws in recent years but has failed to restore judicial discretion. A sentencing commission appointed by Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor, pretty much ducked the issue in an interim report issued last fall. But criminal justice advocates have higher hopes for Mr. Spitzer’s successor, David Paterson, who spoke out vigorously for Rockefeller reform as a state senator. He was arrested while demonstrating against the laws in 2002.

If Governor Paterson is looking for motivation to take on this issue, he can find it in a recent report from The Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit group that monitors prison conditions. According to the report, New York is currently paying $500 million a year to house its drug offenders. The costs are rising as more people go to prison for minor, nonviolent drug offenses.

The law often metes out long prison terms to addicts, petty dealers or people only peripherally involved in the trade. Indeed, 4 in 10 drug offenders in the state’s prisons were locked up for possession as opposed to selling. These are hardly kingpins. In fact, nearly half the drug offenders in the state’s prisons were convicted of the lowest level crimes.

Many of these people are clearly addicts who would benefit from treatment. But the mandatory sentencing guidelines limit the courts’ ability to choose the treatment option. It is long past time for New York to overturn these laws and to return judicial discretion. Governor Paterson, who can cite chapter and verse on this issue, should to take the lead in this important fight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/opinion/27tue3.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2008

JPI: New report: Jail populations exploding; massive growth devastating local communities

Justice Policy Institute: New report: Jail populations exploding; massive growth devastating local communities
http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=73

Jails bulging with people with mental illnesses, the homeless and people detained for immigration offenses; costing counties billions

Washington, D.C.—Communities are bearing the cost of a massive explosion in the jail population which has nearly doubled in less than two decades, according to a new report released today by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI). The research found that jails are now warehousing more people--who have not been found guilty of any crime--for longer periods of time than ever before. The research shows that in part due to the rising costs of bail, people arrested today are much more likely to serve jail time before trial than they would have been twenty years ago, even though crime rates are nearly at the lowest levels in thirty years.

“Crime rates are down, but you’re more likely to serve time in jail today than you would have been twenty years ago,” said the report’s co-author Amanda Petteruti. “Jail bonds have skyrocketed, so that means if you’re poor, you do time. People are being punished before they’re found guilty—justice is undermined.”

The report, Jailing Communities: The Impact of Jail Expansion and Effective Public Safety Strategies, found jail population growth (22 percent), is having serious consequences for communities that are now paying tens of billions yearly to sustain jails. Jails are filled with people with drug addictions, the homeless and people charged with immigration offenses. The report concludes that jails have become the “new asylums,” with six out of 10 people in jail living with a mental illness.

The impact of increased jail imprisonment is not borne equally by all members of a community. New data reveal that Latinos are most likely to have to pay bail, have the highest bail amounts, are least likely to be able to pay and, by far, the least likely to be released prior to trial. African Americans are nearly five times as likely to be incarcerated in jails as whites and almost three times as likely as Latinos. Further exacerbating jail crowding problems is the increase in the number of people being held in jails for immigration violations—up 500 percent in the last decade.

In 2004, local governments spent a staggering $97 billion on criminal justice, including police, the courts and jails. Over $19 billion of county money went to financing jails alone. By way of comparison, during the same time period, local governments spent just $8.7 billion on libraries and only $28 billion on higher education.

“These counties just cannot afford to invest the bulk of their local public safety budget in jails, and we are beginning to see why--the more a community relies on jails, the less it has to invest in education, employment and proven public safety strategies,” says Nastassia Walsh, co-author of the report.

Research shows that places that increased their jail populations did not necessarily see a drop in violent crimes. Falling jail incarceration rates are associated with declining violent crime rates in some of the country’s largest counties and cities, like New York City.

“The investment in building more jail beds is not making communities safer,” says Derrick Johnson, NAACP National Board member. “Instead these investments serve only to unfairly target communities of color and waste taxpayer dollars.”

The report recommends that communities take action to reduce their jail populations and increase public safety by:

• Improving release procedures for pretrial and sentenced populations. Implementing pretrial release programs that release people from jail before trial can help alleviate jail populations. Reforming bail guidelines would allow a greater number of people to post bail, leaving space open in jails for people who may pose a greater threat to public safety.

• Developing and implementing alternatives to incarceration. Alternatives such as community-based corrections would permit people to be removed from the jail, allowing them to continue to work, stay with their families, and be part of the community, while under supervision.

• Re-examining policies that lock up individuals for nonviolent crimes. Reducing the number of people in jail for nonviolent offenses leaves resources and space available for people who may need to be detained for a public safety reason.

• Diverting people with mental health and drug treatment needs to the public health system and community-based treatment. People who suffer from mental health or substance abuse problems are better served by receiving treatment in their community. Treatment is more cost-effective than incarceration and promotes a positive public safety agenda.

• Diverting spending on jail construction to agencies that work on community supervision and make community supervision effective. Reallocating funding to probation services will allow people to be placed in appropriate treatment or other social services and is a less costly investment in public safety.

• Providing more funding for front-end services such as education, employment, and housing. Research has shown that education, employment, drug treatment, health care, and the availability of affordable housing coincide with lower crime rate.

###

The Justice Policy Institute is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank dedicated to ending society’s reliance on incarceration and promoting effective and just solutions to social problems. For more information, visit www.justicepolicy.org.

Posted by lois at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)

March 04, 2008

VT: House Bill Begins Corrections' Transformation

The Senate Institutions Committee will include money in the proposed capital budget to pay for renovations needed if the department reorganizes how it used some prison space. A plan under consideration would move women out of the Dale Women's Facility in Waterbury and close it because it is the most expensive prison in the system. Women would be housed at the Northwest Regional Correctional Facility in St. Albans Town. The Southeast Correctional Facility in Windsor, which along with Dale houses female inmates, would become a large work camp."

House bill begins corrections' transformation
Burlington Free Press
Published: Saturday, March 1, 2008
By Nancy Remsen
Free Press Staff Writer

MONTPELIER -- The House sent the Senate a bill Friday that's intended to spark a transformation in the way the state treats non-violent offenders, many of whom abuse drugs and alcohol.

The need for change is apparent in the findings the House included in the legislation:

Spending for correctional services is on track to have increased by $30 million in five years.

People found guilty of property and drug offenses are the fastest growing segment of the prison population.

Three-quarters of those sentenced for property and drug offenses have a drug or alcohol disorder.

The bill takes aim at the causes for the mushrooming prison population and high recidivism -- both of which have led to Vermont's spending more on corrections than higher education. The bill sets new expectations that the Department of Corrections will identify substance-abuse problems early, will expand treatment options especially in the community and will develop housing to help inmates transition from prison to life on the outside.

"We want to make offenders much more likely to succeed," said House Institutions Chairwoman Alice Emmons, D-Springfield. "We will have offenders who will be productive members of the community, who give back to the community instead of being a drain on the community."

This bill, which passed the House on Friday without any dissenting voices after clearing a few procedural and political hurdles, is part of a package of reforms lawmakers are assembling this year.

The House already passed a bill that requires inmates up to age 26 who don't have high school diplomas to attend class to earn that diploma. Education is one of the factors that help offenders succeed rather than return, yet Rep. Jason Lorber, D-Burlington, noted that 90 percent of the youngest inmates never finished high school.

The Senate will take up another facet of correction reform when the Legislature returns from its town meeting break -- a bill that would change probation policies concerning alcohol to focus on treatment rather than punishment. Unless an offender's crime involved substance abuse, probation conditions would no longer include bans on drinking.

Also, public drunks would no longer be put in jail for their safety if they hadn't committed a crime.

The bill also authorized statewide use of electronic monitoring equipment -- another alternative to help alleviate the need to imprison so many people.

The Senate Institutions Committee will include money in the proposed capital budget to pay for renovations needed if the department reorganizes how it used some prison space. A plan under consideration would move women out of the Dale Women's Facility in Waterbury and close it because it is the most expensive prison in the system. Women would be housed at the Northwest Regional Correctional Facility in St. Albans Town. The Southeast Correctional Facility in Windsor, which along with Dale houses female inmates, would become a large work camp.

Many of these correction reform ideas grew from research and a report provided by the Council of State Governments. The House and Senate have divided up the suggestions.

"Once all the parts come together," said Senate Democratic Leader John Campbell, D-Windsor, "we believe very strongly we will have ground-breaking legislation."

The Douglas administration has been working closely with legislators as they develop the package. Jason Gibbs, spokesman for Gov. Jim Douglas, said the work looks good.

Emmons noted that lawmakers are sketching the big picture, but will only fund a small portion. The Department of Corrections must find $600,000 within its $130 million budget to take an array of small steps to enhance identification and treatment of drug and alcohol abuse among offenders.

Lawmakers are banking that these small steps will produce better, less expensive outcomes, resulting in financial savings. The plan is to plow savings into more treatment and transitional housing.

This strategy could save the state $54 million over 10 years, lawmakers say.

"It's a multi-year process," Emmons said. "This is an investment to better people's lives and make our communities safer."

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080301/NEWS0
2/803010326/1007/NEWS02

The DOC website is http://doc.vermont.gov and the report can be found at http://doc.vermont.gov/cost-reduction-plan-is-completed.

Posted by lois at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2008

1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, Pew Study Says

February 28, 2008
1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says
By ADAM LIPTAK, NY Times

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that one in 100 black women are.

The report’s methodology differed from that used by the Justice Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using the department’s methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind bars.

Either way, said Susan Urahn, the center’s managing director, “we aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration.”

But Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former federal judge, said the Pew report considered only half of the cost-benefit equation and overlooked the “very tangible benefits — lower crime rates.”

In the past 20 years, according the Federal Bureau of Investigation, violent crime rates fell by 25 percent, to 464 for every 100,000 people in 2007 from 612.5 in 1987.

“While we certainly want to be smart about who we put into prisons,” Professor Cassell said, “it would be a mistake to think that we can release any significant number of prisoners without increasing crime rates. One out of every 100 adults is behind bars because one out of every 100 adults has committed a serious criminal offense.”

Ms. Urahn said the nation cannot afford the incarceration rate documented in the report. “We tend to be a country in which incarceration is an easy response to crime,” she said. “Being tough on crime is an easy position to take, particularly if you have the money. And we did have the money in the ‘80s and ‘90s.”

Now, with fewer resources available, the report said, “prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets.” On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation.

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.

It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana.

The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate as the prison population ages.

About one in nine state government employees works in corrections, and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006.

The number of prisoners in California dropped by 4,000 last year, making Texas’s prison system the nation’s largest, at about 172,000. But the Texas legislature last year approved broad changes to the corrections system there, including expansions of drug treatment programs and drug courts and revisions to parole practices.

“Our violent offenders, we lock them up for a very long time — rapists, murderers, child molestors,” said John Whitmire, a Democratic state senator from Houston and the chairman of the state senate’s criminal justice committee. “The problem was that we weren’t smart about nonviolent offenders. The legislature finally caught up with the public.”

He gave an example.

“We have 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison,” he said, including people caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident. “They’re in the general population. As serious as drinking and driving is, we should segregate them and give them treatment.”

The Pew report recommended diverting nonviolent offenders away from prison and using punishments short of reincarceration for minor or technical violations of probation or parole. It also urged states to consider earlier release of some prisoners.

Before the recent changes in Texas, Mr. Whitmire said, “we were recycling nonviolent offenders.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html U.S. map at this URL
http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/One%20in%20100.pdf PDF of the Pew Report at this URL

Posted by lois at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2008

Immigrants far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes

February 26, 2008
National Briefing | West
California: Study of Immigrants and Crime
By JULIA PRESTON, NY Times

Immigrants in the state, about 35 percent of adults, are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research group. Among men ages 18 to 40, the group most likely to commit crimes, native-born Americans were 10 times more likely than immigrants to be incarcerated for crimes in California prisons and jails. The study included both legal and illegal immigrants, without focusing separately on illegal immigrants. But it found that native-born American men ages 18 to 40 were at least eight times more likely to be imprisoned for crimes than Mexican immigrants in that age range who were not naturalized citizens — a group likely to have a high percentage of illegal immigrants.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/26brfs-STUDYOFIMMIG_BRF.html?sq=California%20Crime%20and%20Immigration&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2008

Bush's 2009 Budget Cust $198 million from SAMSHA and other Substance Abuse Programs

“Drug-prevention advocates and others are raising the alarm over President Bush's FY2009 budget plan, which slashed $198 million from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and calls for elimination of the Recovery Community Support Programs and the STOP Underage Drinking program.”

Bush's 2009 Budget Cuts $198 Million from SAMHSA
February 8, 2008

Drug-prevention advocates and others are raising the alarm over President Bush's FY2009 budget plan, which slashed $198 million from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and calls for elimination of the Recovery Community Support Programs and the STOP Underage Drinking program.

The budget also calls for spending $10 million less on the Drug Free Communities program, a major funding source for many community anti-drug coalitions. "The majority of programs that our field advocates for were recommended for severe cuts," noted Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America in an action alert calling for supporters to contact lawmakers to oppose the cuts. "Only a very small handful of programs were recommended for increases."

Overall, the budget plans calls for increasing defense spending by at least $32 billion, foreign operations by $5.4 billion, and law enforcement and prosecution efforts by $497 million. "The budget invests substantial and needed resources to maintain high levels of military readiness and to continue the transformation of our military to meet the new threats of the 21st Century," Bush said in his budget message to Congress.

But Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, charged Bush with "robbing Peter to pay Paul -- taking critical funds from essential domestic programs to fund the president's pet projects and the president's disastrous war and nation-building adventure in Iraq."

$2.2 Billion Reduction in Discretionary Spending at HHS

Discretionary spending at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be reduced $2.2 billion under the president's plan, even as the overall budget rises $29 billion due to Medicare, Medicaid, and other mandatory spending. "There are those who will be unhappy with this budget, but given the Medicare system we have, putting off solving the problem is no longer acceptable," said HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt.

In its budget summary, HHS justifies the $198-million decrease in SAMHSA funding by stating, "The budget makes targeted reductions in areas where grantees have not demonstrated improved health outcomes, grant periods are ending, activities can be supported through other funding streams, or efficiencies can be realized."

Major SAMHSA programs slated for cuts or elimination under the president's FY09 budget plan for HHS include its Programs of Regional and National Significance: cut by $250 million, to $639 million. The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment's budget would fall by $63 million, while the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention would have $36 million less to spend next year if Bush's plan were approved. The Center for Mental Health Services would be slashed by $126 million.

On the other hand, Bush is calling for level funding of $98 million for his Access to Recovery program, which allows faith-based groups to compete with traditional treatment providers for voucher-driven funding for treatment services; a $40-million increase for treatment drug courts; and $27 million more for screening and brief interventions.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) would receive $1.002 billion, just $1 million more than in FY 2008, while the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) would receive $436.68 million, up $0.4 million relative to FY08. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would face a $412 million budget cut, including the elimination of the $97 million Preventive Health and Human Services Block Grant.

"PART" of the Problem

In many instances, the administration justified its cuts by pointing to its Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), used to rate the effectiveness of federal programs. In the budget message for HHS, the administration singled out the Recovery Community Support Program for criticism, saying the program was being eliminated "because services provided, such as manicures and other nontraditional therapies, are not based on evidence-based practices for recovery and grantees have not consistently met all performance measures."

Major programs tabbed as "not performing" by PART also are on Bush's chopping block, including the Social Services Block Grant (a proposed $500 million cut) and the Community Services Block Grant ($1 billion in proposed reductions). However, Bush is calling for a modest $20 million increase in the $1.8 billion Substance Abuse Block Prevention and Treatment Grant, even tough PART called the program "ineffective" because of a lack of independent evaluation and a failure to match formula-based funding to substance-abuse prevalence.

The Legal Action Center reported that the $20 million increase would be used to support "supplemental performance awards" for Block Grant recipients that "demonstrate superior performance in preventing and treatment substance abuse." The National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors noted, "The proposed increase for the SAPT Block Grant can be considered unique in an otherwise very difficult budget year."

As with the block grant, the Office of National Drug Control Policy's Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign was blacklisted by PART, noting that "an independent, long-term evaluation found no connection between the campaign advertisements and youth drug use behavior." Yet the administration is calling for $100 million in funding for the program, up from the $60 million appropriated for the ad campaign in 2008.

Elsewhere beyond HHS, the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities state grants program was once again targeted for reduction, with Bush calling for cutting the school-based prevention program from $295 million in 2008 to $100 million in 2009. "The structure of the program is flawed," according to PART. "It spreads funding too broadly to support quality interventions and fails to target schools and communities in greatest need of assistance."

Bush's budget plan also targets the Department of Education's $32 million Alcohol Abuse Reduction grants program for elimination. SDFSC's national programs budget would increase from $137.7 million in 2008 to $282 million in FY09 under the plan, including $10 million for research-based drug prevention or school safety programs, $77.8 million for grants to school districts for comprehensive, community-wide "Safe Schools/Healthy Students" drug and violence prevention projects, $30 million for school emergency preparedness initiatives, $5 million for initiatives in emergency preparedness for institutions of higher education (IHEs), $11.8 million for school-based drug testing for students, $23.8 million for character education programs in elementary and secondary schools, and $5 million to provide emergency response services to LEAs and IHEs under Project SERV (School Emergency Response to Violence).

At the Justice Department, funding at the Office of Justice Programs -- which supports Weed & Seed projects as well as some addiction treatment and prevention services -- would be cut steeply, with the Bush budget calling for a 65 percent reduction in state and local criminal-justice programs.

http://www.jointogether.org/news/features/2008/bushs-2009-budget-cuts-198.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=35836088

Posted by lois at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2008

Justice Policy Institute: The Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety Brief

Justice Policy Institute (JPI).
The Substance Abuse Treatment and Public Safety Brief: http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08_01_REP_DrugTx_AC-PS.pdf found that the sooner substance abuse is treated, the bigger the long-term cost savings and increases in public safety.
The policy brief found that:
Increases in admissions to substance abuse treatment are associated with reductions in crime rates.
Admissions to drug treatment increased 37.4 percent and federal spending on drug treatment increased 14.6 percent from 1995 to 2005. During the same period, violent crime fell 31.5 percent. In California, where Proposition 36 diverted thousands of people from prison and jail to treatment, violent crime fell at a rate that exceeded the national average.
In Maryland, where policymakers have been working to implement various approaches to diverting prison-bound people to treatment, the counties that relied on drug treatment were more likely to achieve significant crime rate reductions than those that relied on drug imprisonment.
Increased admissions to drug treatment are associated with reduced incarceration rates.
Substance abuse treatment prior to contact with the justice system yields public safety benefits early on.
Substance abuse treatment helps individuals transition successfully from the criminal justice system to the community. Community-based drug treatment programs reduce the chance that a person will become involved in the criminal justice system after release from prison.
Substance abuse treatment is more cost-effective than prison or other punitive measures. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP) found that community-based drug treatment is extremely beneficial in terms of cost, especially compared to prison. Every dollar spent on drug treatment in the community is estimated to return $18.52 in benefits to society in terms of reduced incarceration rates and associated crime costs to taxpayers.

Posted by lois at 09:58 PM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2008

“Racial Impact Statements as a Means of Reducing Unwarranted Sentencing Disparities”

http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin/Documents/publications/rd_racialimpactstatements.pdf

An article by Marc Mauer, Director of the Sentencing Project, in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law that proposes the development of "Racial Impact Statements" as a means of assessing the impact of proposed sentencing policies.
In “Racial Impact Statements as a Means of Reducing Unwarranted Sentencing Disparities”, he suggests that these statements have much in common with fiscal and environmental impact statements that have become commonplace at many levels of government. The goal of a racial impact statement would be to assess the projected impact of new sentencing legislation on racial and ethnic minorities prior to enactment of the policy. If the statement indicates that unwarranted sentencing disparities might be produced, legislators would have the opportunity of considering alternative means of achieving public safety goals that would not exacerbate existing disparities.

Posted by lois at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2008

NY Times Editorial: Comic Books in the Classroom

January 3, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Comic Books in the Classroom

Generations of children grew up reading comic books on the sly, hiding out from parents and teachers who saw them as a waste of time and a hazard to young minds. Comics are now gaining a new respectability at school. That is thanks to an increasingly popular and creative program, often aimed at struggling readers, that encourages children to plot, write and draw comic books, in many cases using themes from their own lives.

The Comic Book Project was started in 2001 by Michael Bitz at an elementary school in Queens. Mr. Bitz now serves as the director of the project, which is run out of Teachers College at Columbia University. Since its creation, the program, which is mainly conducted after school, has spread to more than 850 urban and rural schools across the country. It has gotten a big push from the current craze among adolescents for comic book clubs and for manga, a wildly popular variety of comic originating in Japan.

The point is not to drop a comic book on a child’s desk and say: “read this.” Rather, the workshops give groups of students the opportunity to collaborate on often complex stories and characters that they then revise, publish and share with others in their communities.

Teachers are finding it easier to teach writing, grammar and punctuation with material that students are fully invested in. And it turns out that comic books have other built-in advantages. The pairing of visual and written plotlines that they rely on appear to be especially helpful to struggling readers. No one is suggesting that comic books should substitute for traditional books or for standard reading and composition lessons. Teachers who would once have dismissed comics out of hand are learning to exploit a genre that clearly has a powerful hold on young minds. They are using what works.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/opinion/03thu4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

December 30, 2007

Forgotten Step Toward Freedom: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

December 30, 2007, NY Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Forgotten Step Toward Freedom
By ERIC FONER

WE Americans live in a society awash in historical celebrations. The last few years have witnessed commemorations of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase (2003) and the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (2005). Looming on the horizon are the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (2009) and the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the Civil War (2011). But one significant milestone has gone strangely unnoticed: the 200th anniversary of Jan. 1, 1808, when the importation of slaves into the United States was prohibited.

This neglect stands in striking contrast to the many scholarly and public events in Britain that marked the 2007 bicentennial of that country’s banning of the slave trade. There were historical conferences, museum exhibits, even a high-budget film, “Amazing Grace,” about William Wilberforce, the leader of the parliamentary crusade that resulted in abolition.

What explains this divergence? Throughout the 1780s, the horrors of the Middle Passage were widely publicized on both sides of the Atlantic and by 1792 the British Parliament stood on the verge of banning the trade. But when war broke out with revolutionary France, the idea was shelved. Final prohibition came in 1807 and it proved a major step toward the abolition of slavery in the empire.

The British campaign against the African slave trade not only launched the modern concern for human rights as an international principle, but today offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character. It remains a historic chapter of which Britons of all origins can be proud.

In the United States, however, slavery not only survived the end of the African trade but embarked on an era of unprecedented expansion. Americans have had to look elsewhere for memories that ameliorate our racial discontents, which helps explain our recent focus on the 19th-century Underground Railroad as an example (widely commemorated and often exaggerated) of blacks and whites working together in a common cause.

Nonetheless, the abolition of the slave trade to the United States is well worth remembering. Only a small fraction (perhaps 5 percent) of the estimated 11 million Africans brought to the New World in the four centuries of the slave trade were destined for the area that became the United States. But in the Colonial era, Southern planters regularly purchased imported slaves, and merchants in New York and New England profited handsomely from the trade.

The American Revolution threw the slave trade and slavery itself into crisis. In the run-up to war, Congress banned the importation of slaves as part of a broader nonimportation policy. During the War of Independence, tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British lines. Many accompanied the British out of the country when peace arrived.

Inspired by the ideals of the Revolution, most of the newly independent American states banned the slave trade. But importation resumed to South Carolina and Georgia, which had been occupied by the British during the war and lost the largest number of slaves.

The slave trade was a major source of disagreement at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. South Carolina’s delegates were determined to protect slavery, and they had a powerful impact on the final document. They originated the three-fifths clause (giving the South extra representation in Congress by counting part of its slave population) and threatened disunion if the slave trade were banned, as other states demanded.

The result was a compromise barring Congress from prohibiting the importation of slaves until 1808. Some Anti-Federalists, as opponents of ratification were called, cited the slave trade clause as a reason why the Constitution should be rejected, claiming it brought shame upon the new nation.

The outbreak of the slave revolution in Haiti in the early 1790s sent shock waves of fear throughout the American South and led to new state laws barring the importation of slaves. But in 1803, as cotton cultivation spread, South Carolina reopened the trade. The Legislature of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory also allowed the importation of slaves. From 1803 to 1808, between 75,000 and 100,000 Africans entered the United States.

By this time, the international slave trade was widely recognized as a crime against humanity. In 1807, Congress prohibited the importation of slaves from abroad, to take effect the next New Year’s Day, the first date allowed by the Constitution.

For years thereafter, free African-Americans celebrated Jan. 1 as an alternative to July 4, when, in their view, patriotic orators hypocritically proclaimed the slave-owning United States a land of liberty.

It is easy to understand, however, why the trade’s abolition appears so anticlimactic. Banning American participation in the slave trade did not end the shipment of Africans to the Western Hemisphere. Some three million more slaves were brought to Brazil and Spanish America before the trade finally ended. With Southerners dominating the federal government for most of the period before the Civil War, enforcement was lax and the smuggling of slaves into the United States continued.

Those who hoped that ending American participation in the slave trade would weaken or destroy slavery were acutely disappointed. In the United States, unlike the West Indies, the slave population grew by natural increase. This was not because American owners were especially humane, but because most of the South lies outside the tropical environment where diseases like yellow fever and malaria exacted a huge toll on whites and blacks alike.

As slavery expanded into the Deep South, a flourishing internal slave trade replaced importation from Africa. Between 1808 and 1860, the economies of older states like Virginia came increasingly to rely on the sale of slaves to the cotton fields of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. But demand far outstripped supply, and the price of slaves rose inexorably, placing ownership outside the reach of poorer Southerners.

Let us imagine that the African slave trade had continued in a legal and open manner well into the 19th century. It is plausible to assume that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans would have been brought into the country.

This most likely would have resulted in the “democratization” of slavery as prices fell and more and more whites could afford to purchase slaves, along with a further increase in Southern political power thanks to the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. These were the very reasons advanced by South Carolina’s political leaders when they tried, unsuccessfully, to reopen the African slave trade in the 1850s.

More slaves would also have meant heightened fear of revolt and ever more stringent controls on the slave population. It would have reinforced Southerners’ demands to annex to the United States areas suitable for plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Central America. Had the importation of slaves continued unchecked, the United States could well have become the hemispheric slave-based empire of which many Southerners dreamed.

Jan. 1, 1808, is worth commemorating not only for what it directly accomplished, but for helping to save the United States from a history even more terrible than the Civil War that eventually rid our country of slavery.

Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30foner.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

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

December 26, 2007

Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors

Hopefully not only Disney comic books!

December 26, 2007, NY Times
Superman Finds New Fans Among Reading Instructors
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Some parents and teachers regard comics, with their sentences jammed into bubbles and their low word-to-picture ratio, as part of the problem when it comes to low reading scores and the much-lamented decline in reading for pleasure. But a growing cadre of educators is looking to comics as part of the solution.
In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.

“It’s very much a teacher-led kind of movement in that teachers are looking for ways to engage their children, and they’re finding some of that in comic books,” said Michael Bitz, who founded the Comic Book Project as a graduate student and is now its director. “For kids who may be struggling and for kids who may be new to the English language, that visual sequence is a very powerful tool.”
The recent interest in comics as a literacy tool comes as graphic novels have cemented their status as sophisticated works of literature, and as teachers nationwide are struggling to boost reading scores. Proponents of comics in the classroom say that they can lure struggling readers who may be intimidated by pages crammed with text. They also say that comics, with their visual cues and panel-by-panel sequencing, are uniquely situated to reinforce key elements of literacy, like story structure and tone.
Still, skeptics fret that in the wrong hands, comics could become simply a vehicle for watering down lessons.

“If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool,” said Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University. “What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step.”
Lisa Von Drasek, the children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education, said that “not a semester goes by that not a parent or a teacher expresses a concern about a comic-format book that their child has taken out or is using for their reading time.” Usually, she said, the critics come around. “What we say is, ‘Whatever works.’”
Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland’s schools superintendent, said that years ago, she noticed teachers’ discomfort when their children were spotted with comics.

“They tried to justify it by saying to me, ‘Well, this student or this group of students, they hate reading, and we’re just trying everything,’” she said. “We’re trying to open the eyes of teachers and educators to this as a possibility, this as something that might really help children and is good education.”

In the 2005-6 school year, teachers at eight Maryland schools taught lessons based on old Disney cartoons as part of a Comics in the Classroom pilot program. Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, were commissioned to evaluate the program. They did not try to gauge how much students learned, but found that teachers and students had positive perceptions of the program.

“There were some teachers at first who thought: ‘Oh, my God, comics? What’s next?’” said Susan Sonnenschein, an associate professor of psychology at the university, who was one of the evaluators. “I think the teachers changed their impression.”
The state, working with Diamond Comic Distributors and Disney Publishing Worldwide, has since refined the curriculum and invited 200 teachers to take part on the condition that they provide additional feedback. It is also planning to introduce teachers to a new series of original comic books for early readers, to be released starting this spring by Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker, and her husband, Art Spiegelman, who revolutionized comics with his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus.”

Ms. Mouly said that she believed her books had “enormous” potential to turn children on to reading. She cited the experience of her own son, now 16, who learned to read through French comics like Astérix.“The one thing that retained my son’s interest night after night was the comics,” she said. “Whatever that light bulb is went on.”

At Public School 59 in the Bronx one recent afternoon, students clustered around tables, plotting out their own comic strips at one of the Comic Book Project’s after-school programs. At one table, Jamie Collazo’s and his friends’ faces lit up when asked about their favorite activity: video games like Ultimate Spider-Man, Super Smash Bros. and Wolverine’s Revenge.
“I’m a game freak,” exclaimed Jamie, 11, saying that this was “when you collect a lot of games and you can’t stop playing them.” Reading, he said, “is kind of boring to me.”

But there he was, brainstorming a tale of three powerful gods who land on Nerainis, a planet between Neptune and Uranus.
Gabriel Cid, 10, agreed that “reading is kind of boring,” but said comics were different. “Superheroes, comics, that’s when it gets interesting because you get to see all the cool stuff,” he said. “We get to do our own design, and we get to color whatever we want — create our own characters and stuff.” By the end of the hourlong session, there were comics about islands populated by Native Americans, and about aliens who communicated in Morse code. There were plenty of misspellings (“to be countind you,” one child wrote in lieu of “to be continued”), but there were also instances in which students asked one another how to spell words like “mysterious.”

Amid the sketching, coloring and debating over the best way to split four panels into eight, Dr. Bitz of the Comic Book Project saw glimmers of learning: children composing, revising and organizing their thoughts into linear narratives.
“Because it’s their story,” he said, “they want to make it right.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/education/26comics.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2007

Deep Divisions, Shared Destiny - A Poll of Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans on Race Relations

Deep Divisions, Shared Destiny - A Poll of Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans on Race Relations

New America Media, Poll, Posted: Dec 12, 2007

PDF of the entire report, summary, etc are at this URL
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=28501933d0e5c5344b21f9640dc13754

NEWS CONFERENCE WITH ETHNIC MEDIA AND CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS

Washington, D.C. – Sergio Bendixen, of Bendixen & Associates and Sandy Close, Executive Director of New America Media will be joined by Richard Rodriguez, Author, NAM Editor and TV Commentator at a press conference -- Wednesday, December 12, at 10:00am at The National Press Club - Zenger Room - 529 14th Street NW Washington, D.C.-- to release the results of the nation’s first multilingual poll, which examines how the nation’s largest ethnic groups feel towards each other, as well as their attitudes on key elements of American society.

Also joining in the press conference:

- Dereje Desta, Editor/Publisher, Zethiopia Newspaper
- Joshua Lee, Reporter, Korea Times

METHODOLOGY OF POLL

The poll of 1,105 African American, Asian American and Hispanic adults was conducted by telephone during the months of August and September 2007. The sample was designed to be representative of the adult population of the three major racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. Hispanic respondents were interviewed in English or Spanish, and Asian American respondents were interviewed in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese or Tagalog. RDD (Random Digit Dialing) methodology was employed in areas of the country that have significant (10 percent or more) African American, Asian American and Hispanic populations.

The study was designed and conducted by Bendixen & Associates, a public opinion research firm in Coral Gables, Florida. It was sponsored by New America Media. The poll was funded through the generous support of The Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, The James Irvine Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Open Society Institute, The San Francisco Foundation, The California Endowment and The California Wellness Foundation.

MAJOR FINDING

The nation’s first multilingual poll of Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans has uncovered serious tensions among these ethnic groups, including mistrust and significant stereotyping, but a majority of each group also said they should put aside differences and work together to better their communities.

The poll, which was released today during a news conference at the National Press Club, was sponsored by New America Media (NAM) and nine ethnic media outlets who are founding members of the organization.

“This extraordinary poll reveals some unflattering realities that exist in America today,” said Sandy Close, Executive Editor and Director of NAM, the nation’s first and largest collaboration of ethnic news media. “The sponsors of the poll strongly believe the best way to move forward is by identifying the problems and initiating a dialogue that can bring ethnic groups closer together in their fight for equality and against discrimination.”

Broadly, the poll of 1,105 African-American, Asian-American and Hispanic adults found that the predominantly immigrant populations - Hispanics and Asians - expressed far greater optimism about their lives in America, concluding that hard work is rewarded in this society. By contrast, more than 60% of the African Americans polled do not believe the American Dream works for them. Blacks also described themselves as more segregated from the rest of America than the other groups.

The poll found that friction between ethnic and racial groups, which at times has erupted into highly-publicized incidents around the country, is clearly rooted in the mistrust that the groups harbor towards each other, as well as the sentiment that other groups are mistreating them or are detrimental to their own future. For instance, 44% of Hispanics and 47% of Asians are “generally afraid of African Americans because they are responsible for most of the crime.” Meanwhile, 46% of Hispanics and 52% of African Americans believe “most Asian business owners do not treat them with respect.” And half of African Americans feel threatened by Latin American immigrants because “they are taking jobs, housing and political power away from the Black community.”

Moreover, the three groups seem more trusting of whites than of each other. The poll found that 61% of Hispanics, 54% of Asians and 47% of African Americans would rather do business with whites than members of the other two groups.

“The poll reaffirms that while race relations between ethnic groups and whites grab the headlines, there are also serious racial problems between minority groups in America,” said Sergio Bendixen, who is an expert on Hispanic and multilingual polling. “Blacks feel they are left out of the American Dream and are being displaced by newcomers, and each group buys into the negative stereotypes about the other two. What’s clear is the need to dissolve this friction. The poll results show that the overwhelming majority of ethnic Americans want that positive outcome.”

Specifically, the poll also found that:

* A majority of Hispanics and a significant percentage of Asians believe in the concept that every American has an equal opportunity to succeed. By contrast, the majority of Black respondents – 66 percent – disagreed with that notion.

* Blacks overwhelmingly believe the criminal justice system favors the rich and powerful; most Hispanics and an even larger majority of Asians disagree.

* A large majority of each group believes that they should put aside their differences and work together on issues affecting their communities; they also say the country would be better if more from all three groups were inpositions of authority at universities, businesses, media and government.

* All three groups are optimistic about the future. Strong majorities of each group believe that racial tensions will ease over the next 10 years.

Further, Ms. Close said the poll found “a shared appreciation” for each group’s cultural and political contributions. “Hispanics and Asians recognize that African Americans led the fight for civil rights and against discrimination, forging a better future for the other groups,” she said. “Asian Americans and African Americans say Hispanic culture has enriched the quality of their lives. African Americans and Hispanics perceive Asian Americans as role models when it comes to family and educational values.”

Poll respondents sent mixed messages to the ethnic media, which many depend on for news about their community. While criticizing the ethnic media’s coverage of race relations, particularly other groups outside their own community, all three groups maintained that the ethnic media must play a vital role by strengthening inter-group communication and helping to break negative stereotypes.

The ethnic media is embracing their challenge to do better. “The poll is part of our campaign to address mutual misunderstandings, of which there are many,” said Sok Jeong, editor of the Korea Times. “The poll is a call to action for ethnic media to expand coverage of our mutual communities and help our readers gain a better understanding of the other ethnic groups.”

Posted by lois at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2007

“Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population”

http://www.jfa-associates.com/publications/srs/UnlockingAmerica.pdf
“Unlocking America: Why and How to Reduce America’s Prison Population”
The JFA Institute, November 2007. Includes “Crime Rates and Incarceration”, “Three Key Myths About Crime and Incarceration”, “Decarceration, Cost Savings and Public Safety.”
A very interesting report.

Posted by lois at 11:08 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2007

Justice Policy Institute Brief: Increased employment and wages are associated with positive public safety outcomes.

Latest Brief in a Series of Policy Briefs on Public Safety: Increased employment and wages are associated with positive public safety outcomes.

The Justice Policy Institute today launches the second in a series of research briefs that examine the impact of positive social investments on public safety. "Employment, Wages and Public Safety," one of four briefs, finds that increased employment rates and wages are associated with public safety benefits. The release of this brief
corresponds with concerns about U.S. job losses and the small uptick in the national crime rate.

Key findings from "Employment, Wages and Public Safety" include:

Increased employment is associated with positive public safety outcomes. Researchers have found that from 1992 to 1997, a time when the unemployment rate dropped 33 percent, "slightly more than 40 percent of the decline [in overall property crime rate] can be attributed to the decline in unemployment."

Increased wages are also associated with public safety benefits. Researchers have found that a 10 percent increase in wages would reduce the number of hours young men spent participating in criminal activity by 1.4 percent.

States that had higher levels of employment also had crime rates lower than the national average. Eight of the 10 states that had lower unemployment rates in the United States also had violent crime rates that were lower than the national average. In comparison, half of the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates had higher violent crime rates than the national average in 2005.

The risks of incarceration, higher violent crime rates, high unemployment rates and low wages are concentrated among communities of color. Communities of color and African Americans, specifically, experience more unemployment and lower average wages than their white counterparts. At the same time, communities of color are more likely to experience higher rates of violence than are white communities,
and African Americans are more likely to be incarcerated than are whites.

A previous brief examined the impact of investments in education on public safety outcomes. Upcoming briefs will examine the intersection of policies on housing and drug treatment with safety and crime rates. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To read the complete brief, see other materials on crime and public safety, or learn more about the Justice Policy Institute, visit: www.justicepolicy.org

Posted by lois at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2007

Children's Defense Fund: Cradle to Prison Pipeline Initiative

Cradle to Prison Pipeline Initiative

Cradle to Prison Pipeline Fact sheets for every state: poverty, education, early childhood education, child welfare, education, juvenile justice and incarceration and community violence.

Children's Defense Fund

http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=c2pp_factsheets

Posted by lois at 09:07 PM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2007

Life Sentence

Life sentence

It's a government program whose impact rivals the New Deal. It pushes whole communities out of society's mainstream. It costs tens of billions of dollars a year. Scholars are just beginning to understand how prison is reshaping the country.

By Christopher Shea, Boston Globe | September 23, 2007

WHAT if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed? And what if, instead of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multibillion-dollar project steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American mainstream?

That's how America should think about its growing prison system, some leading social scientists are saying, in research that suggests prisons have a far deeper impact on the nation than simply punishing criminals.

Fueled by the war on drugs, "three-strike" laws, and mandatory minimum sentences, America's prisons and jails now house some 2.2 million inmates - roughly seven times the figure of the early 1970s. And Americans are investing vast resources to keep the system running: The cost to maintain American correctional institutions is some $60 billion a year.

For years sociologists saw prisons - with their disproportionately poor, black, and uneducated populations - partly as mirrors of the social and economic disparities that cleave American life. Now, however, a new crop of books and articles are looking at the penal system not just as a reflection of society, but a force that shapes it.

In this view, the system takes men with limited education and job skills and stigmatizes them in a way that makes it hard for them to find jobs, slashes their wages when they do find them, and brands them as bad future spouses. The effects of imprisonment ripple out from prisoners, breaking up families and further impoverishing neighborhoods, creating the conditions for more crime down the road. Prisons have grown into potent "engines of inequality," in the words of sociologist Bruce Western; the penal system, he and other scholars suggest, actively widens the gap between the poor - especially poor black men - and everyone else.

"This is a historic transformation of the character of American society," says Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist who has begun to write on this topic, most recently in the Boston Review. "We are managing the losers by confinement."

The shift isn't just academic. In national politics, concern about the people who actually go to prison has been drowned out by tough-on-crime rhetoric, but today the issue is getting a hearing from some politicians, and not just hard-left liberals. On Oct. 4, Congress's Joint Economic Committee will hear testimony from Western, Loury, and others on the economic and social costs of the prison boom. The session will be chaired by Jim Webb, the gruff, moderate Democratic Senator from Virginia. Cities including Boston and San Francisco are changing their hiring practices to destigmatize prisoners, and there is detectable momentum in Congress toward reducing the extraordinarily harsh minimum sentences for possession of crack cocaine, which disproportionately affect poor black Americans.

The issue has arrived on the public agenda in part because of the work done by a handful of leading sociologists. Western's 2006 book "Punishment and Inequality in America" is a key work in this new scholarly movement. Devah Pager, a Princeton sociologist, has been making headlines since her dissertation, completed in 2002 at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated how a criminal record - even for nonviolent drug offenses - made it nearly impossible for black ex-convicts in Milwaukee to land a job. This month, a book based on that work, "Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration," appears in bookstores. And the sociologist Lawrence Bobo, who left Harvard for Stanford two years ago but is returning in January, has been investigating how the growing black prison population is eroding African-Americans' confidence in the rule of law.

For years, the penal system was a marginal topic among sociologists, catching the interest chiefly of professors with an interest in hard-core criminology. But in the past decade, discussion of incarceration has moved to the center of the field, in the work of respected scholars at top institutions who are interested in a broad understanding of American inequality.

"My sense of it is just that the sheer mass, the weight of the reality of what's happening, has sunk in," says Loury.

With black men in their early 30s more likely to have been in prison than to have graduated from college, and with 700,000 ex-prisoners reentering society each year, the trends cannot be ignored. The current US rate of some 750 prisoners per 100,000 citizens is several times higher than rates in Europe - higher, even, than the rates in formerly repressive states like Russia or South Africa.

In "Punishment and Inequality in America," Western documented the degree to which poor black communities across America live in a penitentiary shadow. Of black males born in the late 1960s who did not attend college, 30 percent have served time in prison, he pointed out. For high-school dropouts, the figure is a startling 59 percent. "I don't think the really deep penetration of the criminal justice system into poor and minority communities has been fully understood by people outside these communities," says Western.

Mass incarceration, Western argues, also renders invisible a substantial portion of American poverty. At the height of the tech boom in 2000, he points out, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts weren't working. Government statistics, however, said the unemployment level of this group was 33 percent, because government surveys exclude prisoners.

At the root of prison's broader social impact lies its lingering effect on individual lives. In an ideal penal system, prisoners might exit the system having paid their debt to society and be more or less restored to their previous status as free men and women. But Pager's book demonstrates just how detached from reality that view is. She had four college students, two black and two white, pose as applicants for low-level jobs in Milwaukee (excluding jobs where a criminal record would have disqualified them).

They used résumés that were nearly identical - high school degrees, steady progress from entry-level work to a supervisory position - except that in some cases the applicant had a drug conviction in his past (possession with intent to distribute) for which he served an 18-month sentence and then behaved perfectly on parole.

In surveys conducted by Pager, 62 percent of Milwaukee employers said they'd consider hiring an applicant with a nonviolent drug offense in his past. But in her field study, Pager found that her black applicants with criminal records got called for an interview - or to interview on the spot, as they applied in person - a mere 5 percent of the time. That compared with 14 percent for the black applicants without a criminal record. Meanwhile, the white applicants with a record were called back 17 percent of the time, compared with 34 percent for the white men lacking the blotch on their résumé. "Two strikes" - blackness and a record - "and you're out" is how Pager summarizes her findings. (Pager has replicated this study in New York City, with similar results.)

Job prospects for black ex-prisoners in Milwaukee may be even worse in the future, Pager argues in "Marked," because while the vast majority of job growth is in the suburbs, the gap between employers' receptiveness to black and white ex-convicts is even wider there.

Western explores the same set of post-prison issues on a broader statistical canvas. He found that whites, Hispanics, and blacks all face a hit in their wages of about a third, relative to their peers, when they emerge from prison, and also work fewer weeks per year. Their peers will see significant raises from ages 25 to 35, but the ex-prisoners won't, widening the gap. Former prisoners, too, are far less likely ever to marry, but no less likely to have kids, meaning that prisons contribute to the epidemic of female-headed, single-parent households. (Some 9 percent of all black children now have a father in jail.)

Sociologists and a few politicians are not the only ones aware of these trends, argues Lawrence Bobo. Black Americans interpret them as evidence of stark racism, according to surveys he's done. Seventy-nine percent of white Americans, for example, think drug laws are enforced fairly, compared with 34 percent of black Americans.

Black Americans' concerns about the justice system burst to the fore in Jena, La., last week when thousands protested prosecutors' tough treatment of six black teenagers after an assault on a white student. When Bobo looks broadly at black attitudes about the justice system, he doesn't find them irrational.

"We as a society," Bobo wrote last year, "have normalized and, for the time being, depoliticized a remarkable set of social conditions."

Policy makers are slowly beginning to reckon with some aspects of these developments. In 2004, President Bush, in his State of the Union address, acknowledged some of the challenges caused by mass incarceration, Pager points out, describing the hundreds of thousands exiting prisons annually as a "group of Americans in need of help." And this year liberals like Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.) and conservatives like Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) have cosponsored the so-called Second Chance Act. It would provide $192 million for drug counseling, family counseling, housing, and mentorship for ex-offenders to assist their reentry into their communities.

A handful of cities, including Boston, no longer ask applicants for city jobs whether they have a criminal record, although their backgrounds can still be checked later. A growing "Ban the Box" movement - referring to the check-off box on an application, signaling a conviction - is designed to reduce the kind of upfront discrimination Pager identifies. San Francisco and St. Paul have also signed off on the idea, while Los Angeles is pondering it.

To these ideas, Pager would add a policy modeled on how we treat debtors: After a certain amount of time, records of most convictions, especially for nonviolent offenses, would be expunged. Stigma would have a deadline.

Such proposals would do nothing to roll back prison populations, but bills introduced by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Biden to raise the amount of crack cocaine that triggers automatic five- and ten-year sentences might do so. (The possession of crack - typically a drug of the poor, and specifically the black poor - is penalized far more harshly than the powdered cocaine preferred by middle- and upper-class drug users.) Bruce Western advocates ending mandatory minimum sentences for drug conviction, and adds some further thoughts about reducing prison populations: "We could be spending money and social services to reduce the risks that make people likely to go to prison in the first place - on drug addiction, on mental-health services, on housing."

In a campaign year, the prison issue is a tough one - such arguments don't have the easy pull on voters that "tough on crime" policies do. Yet with Congress calling prison experts to testify about their research, and coverage in the mainstream media of the protests in Jena, "I do sense there is a public conversation beginning," Western says.

Christopher Shea's column appears regularly in Ideas. E-mail criticalfaculties@verizon.net.

Posted by lois at 07:40 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2007

Real Cost of Prisons Project Website Reminder

The Real Cost of Prisons Project website (www.realcostofprisons.org) is constantly updated with new research and papers focused on providing ideas and information to strengthen the work of organizers, family members, students, policy makers and others. PDFs of our three comic book are on line in addition to individual comic book pages which can be downloaded free and used for flyers, tabling, newsletters. There also links to hundreds of organizations. Two of our newest sections: "Comix from Inside" and "Writing from Prison" include political and analytical writing and artwork by men and women who are incarcerated.

Posted by lois at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

July 15, 2007

Public Defenders Who Are Salaried Do Better at R epresentation than Those Who Bill by the Hour

July 14, 2007
Public Defenders Get Better Marks on Salary
By ADAM LIPTAK, NY Times

Some poor people accused of federal crimes are represented by full-time federal public defenders who earn salaries, others by court-appointed lawyers who bill by the hour. A new study from an economist at Harvard says there is a surprisingly wide gap in how well the two groups perform.

Both kinds of lawyers are paid by the government, and they were long thought to perform about equally. But the study concludes that lawyers paid by the hour are less qualified and let cases drag on and achieveworse results for their clients, including sentences that average eight months longer.

Appointed lawyers also cost taxpayers $61 million a year more than salaried public defenders would have cost.

There are many possible reasons for the differences in performance. Salaried public defenders generally handle more cases and have more interactions with prosecutors, so they may have a better sense of what they can negotiate for their clients. Salaried lawyers also tend to have superior credentials and more legal experience, the study found.

The study will add a new layer to the debate over the nation’s indigent defense systems. In 1963, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that poor people accused of serious crimes were entitled to legal representation paid for by the government.

The federal system handles about 5 percent of all criminal prosecutions and is relatively well financed. The implications of the new study for the states may therefore be limited.

But more than half the states use a combination of public defenders and appointed lawyers, and most indigent defendants are not represented by staff public defenders at the trial level.

In the federal courts, roughly three-quarters of all defendants rely on lawyers paid for by the government, about evenly divided between salaried public defenders and appointed lawyers paid by the hour. Most of the rest hire their own lawyers, with about 2 percent representing themselves.

Before the new study, the debate over how best to provide poor defendants with adequate representation had largely concerned whether lawyers for indigent defendants were paid enough to ensure a fair fight with prosecutors. The debate did not much consider how the lawyers were paid, and whether that made a difference.

The new study looked at federal prosecutions from 1997 to 2001. It was performed by Radha Iyengar, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, and presented as a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research last month.

Judge Morris B. Hoffman, a Colorado district court judge and a co-author of a 2005 study on the representation of indigent defendants, said the new study’s innovation was in its noticing that public defenders and appointed lawyers were assigned randomly in many federal judicial districts.

That meant, Ms. Iyengar wrote, that the two sorts of lawyers had “the same underlying distribution of guilt in the cases they represent and thus are equally likely to lose at trial.”

Court-appointed lawyers — known in federal judicial jargon as Criminal Justice Act panel lawyers — are needed when public defenders’ offices have conflicts of interest in cases involving multiple defendants. They can also fill in as the volume of prosecutions requires.

The vast majority of federal prosecutions end in plea bargains, and only about 5 percent of them reach trial. Ms. Iyengar found that court-appointed lawyers were slightly more likely to take cases to trial and slightly more likely to lose.

But her most important finding, given all the plea bargains, was that defendants represented by court-appointed lawyers received substantially longer sentences. That suggests that appointed lawyers are less adept at assessing which cases to pursue through trial and at negotiating with prosecutors.

Over all, defendants represented by court-appointed lawyers received sentences averaging about eight months longer. People convicted of violent crimes were given five more months, while those convicted on
weapons charges received nearly a year and half more. But those convicted of immigration offenses received sentences that averaged 2.5 months less if represented by appointed lawyers.

Appointed lawyers took longer to resolve cases through plea bargains — 20 days on average, a 10 percent difference.

“These results appear consistent with the hourly wage structure,” Ms. Iyengar wrote, as that structure creates incentives for appointed lawyers to take longer to resolve cases.

She concluded that appointed lawyers impose an additional $5,800 in costs to the system for every case they handle.

Analyzing data from California and Arizona, the study found that appointed lawyers were less experienced and had less impressive credentials.

“The court-appointed lawyers tend to be quite young, tend to be from small practices and also they tend to be from lower-ranked law schools,” Ms. Iyengar said in an interview. “They have a smaller client base and fewer interactions with prosecutors.”

Judge Hoffman said a number of the study’s conclusions were unsurprising given that finding. However they represent their clients, less experienced lawyers tend to do less well in plea negotiations, in deciding which cases to take to trial and in trial outcomes, he said.

Jon M. Sands, the federal public defender in Arizona, said he did not recognize the picture painted in the study. Court-appointed lawyers, Mr. Sands said, “are seasoned and committed, and their sentences on the whole don’t vary that much from those obtained by public defenders.”

David Carroll, the research director for the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, said the study’s most important point was economic. “There is,” Mr. Carroll said, “a cost savings in establishing staff public defender offices.”

Posted by lois at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2007

Know Your Rights: A Guide to Young People's Rights in Juvenile Delinquency Court.

Know Your Rights: A Guide to Young People's Rights in Juvenile Delinquency Court. (May 2007) The booklet is designed to teach young people their basic constitutional rights as it applies to the law.
According to the Know Your Rights booklet in 2003:
2.2 million arrests were made of persons under the age of 18;
136,500 of these arrests were for violating curfew and loitering laws;
Black youth account for 27% of all juvenile arrests, even though they only make up 16% of the youth population; and
Girls account for 29% of all juvenile arrests, which represents a 45% increase in arrests of girls over a period of approximately twenty years
Additionally, the booklet cites in recent years, reports of abuse and mistreatment in youth correctional facilities have increased. For example, in 2004 there were 2,821 reports of sexual violence against youth and 26 deaths of youth in facilities.
http://www.gaultat40.info/pdfs/kyr_booklet.pdf

Posted by lois at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

February 28, 2007

LA Times: Immigrants Boost Pay, Not Prison Populations, New Studies Show

LA TIMES, 02-28-07
Immigrants boost pay, not prison populations, new studies show
Immigrants are less likely to go to prison than U.S.-born residents of the same ethnic group and they boost pay for natives, research says.

By Teresa Watanabe, Times Staff Writer
February 28, 2007

Two new studies by California researchers counter negative perceptions that immigrants increase crime and job competition, showing that they are incarcerated at far lower rates than native-born citizens and actually help boost their wages.

A study released Tuesday by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants who arrived in the state between 1990 and 2004 increased wages for native workers by an average 4%.

UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri, who conducted the study, said the benefits were shared by all native-born workers, from high school dropouts to college graduates, because immigrants generally perform complementary rather than competitive work.

As immigrants filled lower-skilled jobs, they pushed natives up the economic ladder into employment that required more English or know-how of the U.S. system, he said.

"The big message is that there is no big loss from immigration," Peri said. "There are gains, and these are enjoyed by a much bigger share of the population than is commonly believed."

Another study released Monday by the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center showed that immigrant men ages 18 to 39 had an incarceration rate five times lower than native-born citizens in every ethnic group examined. Among men of Mexican descent, for instance, 0.7% of those foreign-born were incarcerated compared to 5.9% of native-born, according to the study, co-written by UC Irvine sociologist Ruben G. Rumbaut.

Both studies are based on U.S. census data, which includes both legal and illegal immigrants. They were released just days before the U.S. Congress is to restart debate on major immigration reform legislation and as numerous states, including Texas, consider harsh measures against illegal migrants.

The authors say their work shows that immigrants clearly benefit U.S. residents and are being unfairly scapegoated for problems they do not cause.

"There are grossly distorted perceptions between what people think about immigrants and the reality," Rumbaut said. "The old bromide that education is the way to reduce prejudice comes into play here."

Immigration hawks, however, took issue with both studies.

Steven Camarota of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies said the wage study, by examining immigrants only in California, failed to consider their effect on the rest of the country. Immigrants working for lower wages in a California factory, for instance, could keep wages down in a competing enterprise staffed by native-born citizens in another state, he said.

Immigrants, who make up one-third of California's labor force, could also be discouraging natives from moving to the state and taking advantage of higher-paying job opportunities, Camarota said.

And, by examining only wage effects, the study failed to address the declining percentage of native-born adults working in California, Camarota said. Their share of the workforce declined from 65% in 2000 to 62% in 2005, one of the lowest in the country, which could be caused by competition from immigrants, he said.

"The idea that immigrants compete only with other immigrants is absurd on its face," he said, adding that no industry in America employs only immigrants.

Peri said, however, that his study's more detailed analysis of California's employment trends showed no displacement of native-born workers. Other studies have shown that immigration has had a negative effect on African American high school dropouts. But those conclusions were rooted in different assessments of whether blacks performed the same work as immigrants, he said.

Of the crime study, Camarota said the U.S. government had failed to systematically collect 2000 Census data on immigration status from prisons and other institutions. The study's foundational data are therefore flawed, he argued.

But Rumbaut defended his study, saying the results were consistent with other research stretching back a century. They include national immigration studies conducted in 1911 and 1994, work by two Princeton economists examining 1980 and 1990 census data and more recent analyses of homicide rates in three border cities.

The co-author of the crime study was Walter A. Ewing, a research associate at the Immigration Policy Center. Among other findings, the study showed that the gap in incarceration rates between native-born and foreign-born men was wider in California. Incarceration rates, which rose the longer an immigrant was in the country, were highest among high school dropouts. Those of Asian descent generally showed lower incarceration rates and higher educational levels than Latinos.

Despite the data, Rumbaut said, many continue to perpetuate images of crime-prone immigrants.

Last year, the study says, President Bush blamed illegal immigrants for bringing crime to their communities, as did the city of Hazleton, Pa., in passing an ordinance barring them from renting homes or working.
The problem of crime in American society today is overwhelmingly a problem of natives, not immigrants," Rumbaut said.

In the wage study, Peri examined immigration flows and wages of California workers between 1960 and 2004 using U.S. Census data.

It found that immigrants did not worsen the job opportunities of natives with similar education and experience during the entire period.

The benefit for native-born workers ranged from a 0.2% wage increase for high school dropouts to 6.7% for those with some college, the study showed.

However, the study found that other immigrants suffered wage declines by as much as 20%.

"The findings would seem to defuse one of the most inflammatory issues for those who advocate measures aimed at 'protecting the livelihood of American citizens,' " the study said.

*
graphs at this url:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-me-immigstudy28feb28,1,4004926.story?page=2&cset=true&ctrack=1

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January 23, 2007

PA: Area prisons open up to methadone

Allentown, PA- The Morning Call
January 23, 2007
Area prisons open up to methadone
Advocates say continuing treatment for short-term inmates cuts recidivism.

By Ann Wlazelek Of The Morning Call

With critics long holding that methadone is nothing more than a legal replacement for an illegal heroin addiction, few prisoners nationwide have received the bitter medicine in jail unless they were pregnant and at risk of losing an unborn child to withdrawal.

But that is changing. Lehigh County Prison has agreed to join Northampton and Berks county prisons in taking the next controversial step: continuing methadone treatment for short-term inmates who had been taking the medicine before incarceration.

''It's effective immediately,'' Lehigh County Director of Corrections Edward G. Sweeney said about providing methadone maintenance in the prison. Spurred by proponents who say treatment helps addicts resist heroin and avoid returning to jail, Sweeney said, ''It's a growin trend.''

Not to be confused with the illegal stimulant methamphetamine, methadone is a legally prescribed and controlled drug that quells the cravings for heroin but does not produce the highs. Administered daily at government-regulated clinics, methadone helps long-time, heavy-use heroin addicts abide by the law, hold jobs, raise families.
Yet for years, a Rikers Island jail in New York was the first and only correctional facility in the country providing methadone treatment to more than pregnant inmates.

Regulations and costs associated with establishing a methadone clinic and a mindset that prisoners ''deserve to suffer'' have kept the treatment a rarity in most county jails and state prisons.

''Jails weren't methadone centers,'' explained Todd Haskins, vice president of operations for PrimeCare Medical, the Harrisburg company providing medical services to 27 county prisons in Pennsylvania, including Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Monroe and Schuylkill.
''It was illegal for them to prescribe it,'' he said. And few jails have had enough money or heroin addicts to start their own.

Also, questions have lingered about who should receive the controlled medicine and for how long, especially among drug treatment officials who believe all addicts, even those on methadone maintenance, deserve a shot at drug-free alternatives.

''If you are legitimately on methadone, I would stand in favor of that continuing at the prison level, but an assessment should be done by a neutral party, not the methadone provider,'' which could benefit from continued business, said Robert Csandl, executive director of Treatment Trends, which offers a variety of residential, partial day programs and outpatient drug rehabilitation programs in Allentown.

If maintenance works so well, he adds, ''How does that person on methadone wind up in Lehigh County Prison?''
But local and national authorities say resistance is falling in the face of positive results from treatment studies and experiences at the small number of prisons that have taken the plunge.

''Methadone maintenance isn't a right of a prisoner unless he or she is in withdrawal and a life is at risk. It was not something prisons had to provide, but we certainly believe more jails and prisons should provide it,'' said Jody Kent, public policy coordinator for the national Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

She called methadone maintenance ''a beneficial treatment.''

Kent pointed to a Federal Bureau of Prisons survey of prisoners who underwent drug abuse treatment, including methadone, before being released in 1995. The survey found that 3.3 percent were likely to be rearrested in the first six months after release compared to 12 percent of inmates who did not receive treatment.''It's a good opportunity to reduce recidivism and increase public safety,'' Kent said.

Maintaining methadone treatment in prisons also has the support of federal health officials, such as former White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey, private foundations and state drug and alcohol agencies. And authorities say it could be argued that the Supreme Court's recent rulings against withholding prior medical care to prisoners could apply to methadone as well.

'People don't understand that heroin is a lasting addiction, a chronic condition like diabetes,'' said R. Scott Chavez, administrative vice president for the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, which accredits prison methadone programs. ''You wouldn't think of not giving diabetics insulin,'' he said.

''Studies have pretty much shown that the heroin addict must consider some replacement therapy or he will go back into heroin-seeking behavior.''

A handful of jails and prisons in Connecticut, Chicago, California and New York have started their own methadone clinics within the correctional facilities, Chavez said. More, though, have gone the route of local jails — working with community methadone programs to bring the service inside.

In this area, Berks County Prison led the way 11/2 years ago, when prisons and PrimeCare officials agreed to give continued methadone maintenance a try. Northampton County Prison followed suit six months ago.

The concept came largely at the suggestion of Glen J. Cooper, a former Bethlehem health director who 10 years ago became executive director of New Directions Treatment Services, a multi-service organization that provides methadone, drug testing and counseling, mental health and HIV and hepatitis education at clinics in Bethlehem and West Reading.

Cooper's clinics provide daily doses of methadone to 665 people who had been addicted to opiates such as heroin, morphine and oxycodone. Some have been free from illegal drugs for 30 years by coming to the clinic, he said, but the average length of treatment is 31/2 years.

In prison, however, only those held for six months or less are considered, Cooper said. No ''lifers.'' Also, the methadone clinic confirms by phone call that the prisoner had been a client before treatment begins.
Appropriate doses for the week are delivered to the jail for the medical staff to administer to prisoners each day. And a clinic staffer goes to the prison to provide counseling.

Cooper sent the protocol to all 41 methadone clinics in Pennsylvania, emphasizing that studies show methadone maintenance reduces the demand for heroin inside the prison and reduces the transmission of HIV and hepatitis, which can be spread by sharing drug-injecting needles.

''We are very proud of this,'' he said.

At the Berks County Prison, Warden George Wagner said ''a couple dozen'' inmates have received methadone for an average of 31/2 months in the last year and a half.

That's not a lot, he said, considering the prison houses 1,250 men and women on any given day and incarcerates 8,500 to 10,000 in a year. Although Wagner could not provide statistics on recidivism or other impacts of the new program, he said he believes it was the right thing to do.

''I'm a fairly conservative person,'' Wagner said of his initial ambivalence about offering inmates methadone. ''But in the jail setting, an inmate could be here as little as an hour. We don't know if he or she will be bailed out in an hour, five days or a week. And just about the time the prisoner gets through detoxification, he's released, will go get a heroin fix and start all over.

''We could do more harm than good'' by not continuing methadone maintenance, he said.

Northampton County Prison Director Todd Buskirk sees methadone maintenance as an extension of the service provided to pregnant inmates for years.

The numbers so far are small: In the Northampton jail, which houses about 815 inmates on a given day, three inmates were on methadone maintenance last week, Buskirk said.

''It appears to be working well,'' he said. ''At least, I've not received any complaints.'' PrimeCare's Haskins said the service works well in counties that have a methadone treatment center like New Directions.

''It doesn't cost more,'' he said. ''It actually saves the prison money because instead of transporting patients to the clinic for the medicine and counseling, the clinic provides the service at the jail.''

The problems come in counties that have no methadone clinics, Haskins said. ''In some places, we need to drive across two or three counties'' to transport inmates to methadone treatment centers, he said. Security guards or someone from the sheriff's department must go along.

Cost may not be a problem now, acknowledged Cooper, because New Directions is supported by a five-year, $500,000 federal grant. But when that grant runs out, he said, counties will most likely be asked for additional money. In Berks, for example, methadone maintenance and counseling cost New Directions about $9,800 last year, Cooper said.

Lehigh County's Sweeney does not expect a community backlash to the plan to provide continued medicines to about 20 of the 7,000 prisoners who come through the jail each year.

''Methadone is becoming more accepted and mainstream,'' he said, noting support from county drug and alcohol officials and training sessions offered at the Pennsylvania County Corrections Association, of which he is first vice president.

Methadone maintenance is not yet a standard of care, required for accreditation, Sweeney said. ''But my expectation is next time they put standards out, it will be recommended.''

BITTER MEDICINE What is methadone?

A legally prescribed and controlled drug that quells the cravings for heroin but does not produce the highs.

What's the controversy?
Critics say methadone is nothing more than a legal replacement for an illegal heroin addiction.

What's new?
Lehigh County Prison will join Northampton and Berks county prisons in continuing methadone treatment for short-term inmates who had been taking the medicine before incarceration.

What do proponents say?
The treatment helps addicts resist heroin and avoid returning to jail.

Copyright © 2007, The Allentown PA Morning Call

Posted by lois at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2007

NY Times: Op-Ed " The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars"

January 15, 2007, NY Times
Op-Ed Contributor
The Mentally Ill, Behind Bars
By BERNARD E. HARCOURT

Chicago

LAST August, a prison inmate in Jackson, Mich. — someone the authorities described as “floridly psychotic” — died in his segregation cell, naked, shackled to a concrete slab, lying in his own urine, scheduled for a mental health transfer that never happened. Last month in Florida, the head of the state’s social services department resigned abruptly after having been fined $80,000 and is facing criminal contempt charges for failing to transfer severely mentally ill jail inmates to state hospitals.

Ten days ago, the Supreme Court agreed to determine when mentally ill death row inmates should be considered so deranged that their execution would be constitutionally impermissible. The case involves a 48-year-old Navy veteran who is a diagnosed schizophrenic. In the decade leading up to the crime he was hospitalized 14 times for severe mental illness.

According to a study released by the Justice Department in September, 56 percent of jail inmates in state prisons and 64 percent of inmates across the country reported mental health problems within the past year.

Though troubling, none of this should come as a surprise. Over the past 40 years, the United States dismantled a colossal mental health complex and rebuilt — bed by bed — an enormous prison. During the 20th century we exhibited a schizophrenic relationship to deviance.

After more than 50 years of stability, federal and state prison populations skyrocketed from under 200,000 persons in 1970 to more than 1.3 million in 2002. That year, our imprisonment rate rose above 600 inmates per 100,000 adults. With the inclusion of an additional 700,000 inmates in jail, we now incarcerate more than two million people — resulting in the highest incarceration number and rate in the world, five times that of Britain and 12 times that of Japan.

What few people realize, though, is that in the 1940s and ’50s we institutionalized people at even higher rates — only it was in mental hospitals and asylums. Simply put, when the data on state and county mental hospitalization rates are combined with the data on prison rates for 1928 through 2000, the imprisonment revolution of the late 20th century barely reaches the level we experienced at mid-century. Our current culture of control is by no means new.

The graph on the left — based on statistics from the federal Census Bureau, Department of Health and Human Services and Bureau of Justice Statistics — shows the aggregate rate of institutionalization per 100,000 adults in the United States from 1928 to 2000, as well as the disaggregated trend lines for mental hospitalization on the one hand and state and federal prisons on the other.

The numbers include only state and county mental hospitals. There were many more kinds of mental institutions at mid-century, ones for “mental defectives and epileptics” and the mentally retarded, psychiatric wards in veterans hospitals, as well as “psychopathic” and private mental hospitals. If we include residents of those facilities, from 1935 to 1963 the United States consistently institutionalized at rates well above 700 per 100,000 adults — with highs of 778 in 1939 and 786 in 1955. It should be clear why there is such a large proportion of mentally ill persons in our prisons: individuals who used to be tracked for mental health treatment are now getting a one-way ticket to jail.

Of course, there are important demographic differences between the two populations. In 1937, women represented 48 percent of residents in state mental hospitals. In contrast, new prison admissions have consistently been 95 percent male. Also, the mental health patients from the 1930s to the 1960s were older and whiter than prison inmates of the 1990s.

But the graph poses a number of troubling questions: Why did we diagnose deviance in such radically different ways over the course of the 20th century? Do we need to be imprisoning at such high rates, or were we right, 50 years ago, to hospitalize instead? Why were so many women hospitalized? Why have they been replaced by young black men? Have both prisons and mental hospitals included large numbers of unnecessarily incarcerated individuals?

Whatever the answers, the pendulum has swung too far — possibly off its hinges.

It would be naïve, today, to address any of these questions without also considering the impact of imprisonment on crime. One of the most reliable studies estimates that the increased prison population over the 1990s accounted for about a third of the overall drop in crime that decade.

However, prisons are not the only institutions that seem to have this effect. In a recent study, I demonstrated that the rate of institutionalization — including mental hospitals — was a far better predictor of serious violent crime from 1926 to 2000 than just prison populations. The data reveal a robust negative relationship between overall institutionalization (prisons and asylums) and homicide. Preliminary findings based on state-level panel data confirm these results.

The effect on crime may not depend on whether the institution is a mental hospital or a prison. Even from a crime-fighting perspective, then, it is time to rethink our prison and mental health policies. A lot more work must be done before proposing answers to those troubling questions. But the first step is to realize that we have been wildly erratic in our approach to deviance, mental health and the prison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/opinion/15harcourt.html graph is at this url

Bernard E. Harcourt, a professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing and Punishing in an Actuarial Age.”

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

November 26, 2006

Paper Abstracts for Nov 30-Dec 1, 2006 Conference: Punishment: The U.S. Record

http://www.newschool.edu/centers/socres/punishment/
Punishment: The U.S. Record
A Social Research Conference at The New School on Thursday, November 30 and Friday, December 1, 2006
PAPER SUMMARIES

SESSION I: WHY WE PUNISH: THE FOUNDATION OF OUR CONCEPTS OF PUNISHMENT

Historical and Comparative Perspectives on Punishment Practices, James Q. Whitman

In the early nineteenth century, the American approach to criminal punishment was regarded as the most advanced and humane in the western world, and numerous European visitors made the voyage across the Atlantic to learn from it. Today matters are different. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Our punishment practices are far harsher than those of countries like France and Germany. Rather than looking to us for moral leadership, Europeans view us with distaste and apprehension. What happened? How did the great American republican experiment end up yielding a system notable for its harshness, and sometimes brutality? In order to answer this troubling question, we must dig deep into American history, and we must recognize the inherent dangers in certain aspects of the American political tradition. American anti-statism has, paradoxically, contributed mightily to the making of our uncommonly harsh system of criminal punishment. So has the American tradition of egalitarianism, which has tended to undermine any program that might guarantee dignity in punishment. In the early nineteenth century, observers like Tocqueville were confident that American republicanism would always go hand in hand with mildness in punishment. The last two centuries of our history make it hard indeed to feel that kind of confidence any longer.

The Legacy of Theology (Transgression, redemption, atonement, retribution and forgiveness), Moshe Halbertal

The purpose and justification of punishment is usually defined through three main goals: deterrence, retribution and reform. Each of these goals has its inner logic, and it implies in turn different economies of punishment that conflict with one another. I will investigate an earlier and more fundamental conception of punishment as atonement, and its deep connection to sacrificial rituals that still resonate within practices of punishment. Atonement is based upon substitution, in which a harsher punishment is replaced by its symbolic substitute (hence the connection to sacrifice). If punishment is atonement, in each case of punishment there is therefore some element of forgiveness, which makes the ritual of punishment highly ambiguous. This ambiguity is based on the complex relationship of the sovereign (God) and the victim, which include among them the bond of creaturely love. I will investigate this structure through the study of Biblical and religious conception of punishment, and in particular the attitude Rabbinic and Christian attitudes towards crucifixion.

Punishment and the Spirit of Democracy, George Kateb

This paper will deal with the idea that the most democratically suitable defense of punishment is deterrence of the wrongdoer and others. Retribution is, in my judgment, wholly alien to the spirit of democracy. Furthermore, punishment must be inflicted with reluctance. The spirit of democracy is attuned to what I call magnanimity towards wrongdoers. Magnanimity consists of two principal elements: fairness, which is exemplified by the counter-intuitive provisions of due process of law; and by leniency, which means such things as presumption of innocence and mildness of punishment. The history of democracy in Athens begins with an act of leniency: Solon's policy on the indebtedness of the lower classes. Fairness and leniency belong intrinsically to democracy, even though the US and other democracies practice an anti-democratic severity and often rationalize it by reference to the Old Testament or to Kant's theory of punishment as necessary to respect for the personhood of the wrongdoer.

Beyond the Cultural Turn: 21st Century Meditations on Punishment, Bernard Harcourt

Since the modern era, the discourse of punishment has cycled through three sets of questions. The first, born of the Enlightenment itself, asked: On what ground does the sovereign have the right to punish? Nietzsche most forcefully, but others as well, argued that the question itself begged its own answer. The right to punish, they suggested, is what defines sovereignty, and as such, can never serve to limit sovereign power. With the birth of the social sciences, this skepticism gave rise to a second set of
questions: What then is the true function of punishment? What is it that we do when we punish? From Durkheim to the Frankfurt School to Michel Foucault, 20th century moderns explored social organization, economic production, political legitimacy, and the construction of the self‹turning punishment practices upside down, dissecting not only their repressive functions but more importantly their role in constructing society and the contemporary subject. A series of further critiques‹of functionalism, of scientific objectivity, of metanarratives‹softened this second line of inquiry and helped shape a third set of questions: What does punishment tell us about ourselves and our culture? What is the cultural meaning of our punishment practices? These three sets of questions set the contours of our modern discourse on crime and punishment. But what happens now, though, now that we are beyond the cultural turn? What today is the right question to ask of our punishment practices? And how can we relate tomorrow¹s inquiry back to the central idea that has always and still today motivates the very questioning itself‹the idea of just punishment?

SESSION II: WHAT AND HOW WE PUNISH: LAW, JUSTICE AND PUNISHMENT

Changes in the Law: From the Present to the Past, to the Present, Michael Tonry

One way to describe the history of American punishment practices is in terms of a normative pendulum swinging slowly back and forth between opposed normative ideas about personal responsibility and social need. Another is to untangle the functions that punishment has served in maintaining changing patterns of economic, class, and race relations. Thinking about punishment tends to lag decades behind changes in practices and social norms. Our time is an extreme instance. Current prevailing punishment ideas that focus on responsibility, retribution, and proportionality like so many flies in amber reflect and respond to perceived policy problems and normative concerns of the 1970s and have little helpful to say about the 21st century.

Economic Models of Crime and Punishment, John J. Donohue III

Gary Becker launched the economic analysis of law, which has been influential in changing the course of American criminal justice policy. Some of that analysis has been successful in that at the time that Becker wrote his seminal piece there was a rejection of the notion of incarceration as a tool to decrease crime, and the U.S. experience has shown that increases in incarceration have indeed had a dampening impact on crime. But some of Becker's lessons about the need to evaluate costs and benefits of criminal justice policies have not been heeded, and indeed the level of incarceration has been pushed beyond the optimal level in that the costs of incarcerating the last 200-300,000 prisoners in all likelihood has exceeded the benefits in reduced crime. Moreover, while Becker's disciples have played a major role in the perpetuation and expansion of capital punishment in the US, there is a puzzling lack of rigor in the evaluation of the deterrent impact of the death penalty. Becker now concedes that the empirical evidence in support of the deterrent effect of capital punishment is "murky," yet the strong priors that the economic model has generated -- specifically that since demand curves slop downward, the death penalty must deter murders -- has been taken to trump the empirical evidence. The paper discusses whether the theoretical model is powerful enough to guide policy even in the absence of empirical validation.

Retribution: Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? Andrew von Hirsch

My presentation will address Retributivism in penal theory. Its focus will be on 'deserts' theory, a contemporary liberal version of retributivism that favors proportionate sentences and moderate penalty levels. The theory emphasizes punishment's role as providing a public valuation of conduct, rather than 'paying back' offenders for their wrongs. The theory has been influential in a number of jurisdictions, including Minnesota and Oregon in the US, and Sweden, Finland, England and Wales, and South Africa. The presentation will sketch the theory briefly, address a number of unresolved problems with it, and then evaluate its prospects for continued influence.

The Forms and Functions of American Capital Punishment, David Garland

Today's American system of capital punishment - defined as the whole set of discursive and non-discursive practices through which capital punishment is enacted, evoked and experienced - has a peculiar institutional form. This paper argues that an analysis of that distinctive form, and the processes that have produced it, can help explain the retention of this institution in a context of widespread abolitionism and provide important clues to the real functions of today's death penalty.

SESSION III: SPECIAL EVENT

Richard Gere and others: A Reading of Prison Writings

SESSION IV: WHO WE PUNISH: THE CARCERAL STATE

The Rise of the Carceral State, Jonathan Simon

The reconstruction of American political institutions since the 1960s around the problematic of crime, and forging of mass imprisonment as a preferred policy option in the succeeding three decades is now being recognized (Beckett 1997; Garland 2001; Simon forthcoming 2006). It deserves to be seen as one of the great changes in our political and constitutional development, up there with Reconstruction and the New Deal (Fraser & Gerstle 1989). But like those earlier profound transformations, the most enduring changes take place below the threshold of the major political institutions, at the capillary levels where power is exercised not just up and down, but laterally. At this level we can observe that the carceral state is anchored in everyday struggles for power where the ability to name certain identities, claim certain rights, and blame certain responsible parties determines outcomes. In this paper I argue that the ³carceral state² by this measure is far more powerfully rooted than the ³welfare state² it is often contrasted to. Concurrently, I suggest that any effort to move American society beyond mass imprisonment will require a vigorous contestation with these identities, rights, and responsibilities whose history we must attend to.

Inequality and Punishment, Bruce Western

Over the last thirty years, the prison population of the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over two million people, including large numbers of young black men with little schooling. By the early 1990s, almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties had spent time in prison. Record incarceration rates significantly influence social inequality.

Institutionalizing large numbers of disadvantaged young men creates "invisible inequality" in which standard measures of labor force status provide an optimistic picture of economic well-being at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Mass imprisonment also deepens inequality, by diminishing the economic opportunities of ex-prisoners after they are released from prison. The U.S. penal system in the first years of the twenty-first century is thus significant not chiefly for its effects on crime but for its contribution to a novel, and distinctively American, system of social stratification.

When is Imprisonment Not a Punishment?: Immigrants and Immigration, Mark Dow

Imagine that you are being held in a prison or jail although you are not doing time for any crime. You¹re dressed in an orange prison uniform and permitted to hug your wife briefly at the beginning and end of her visits. You might be taken in front of a judge and confronted by a prosecuting attorney, but you have no right to an attorney yourself. Or you¹re sympathetic enough that a legal advocacy group has taken up your case, but you are moved from jail to jail, from state to state, in the middle of the night, without warning, so the lawyer you once had can¹t find you anymore. Imagine you¹ve been incarcerated like this for a week, or a month, or several months, or several years. And imagine that the law says you are not being punished. All of this is possible when you are a non-citizen ³detainee,² held in ³administrative detention² by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Department of Homeland Security. Mark Dow will discuss the largely invisible immigration prison system that holds some 23,000 ³detainees² each day ­ a number that might soon be doubled, depending on the outcome of current legislation.

Supermax as a Technology of Punishment, Lorna A. Rhodes

Supermax prisons are a technology of control specifically designed to separate prisoners from the general prison population and to isolate them from one another. Subsumed within the larger architectural and management strategies of supermax are a number of associated technologies such as electric shields, taser guns, special door designs, and computerized operation and surveillance programs. These technologies of punishment achieve near-complete domination over prisoners¹ daily lives, producing an extreme form of exclusion that represents an extension and intensification of mass incarceration. This paper examines some of the elements shaping supermax technologies, such as the influence of behaviorism, correctional industry marketing, and a penal ideology of individualism and ³choice.² It concludes with a discussion of the harmful effects on prisoners, and raises questions about the larger consequences of the drive toward total control.

SESSION V: CONSEQUENCES OF A CARCERAL STATE

The Social Effects of Imprisonment: A Labor Market Perspective, David Weiman

Criminologists have clearly shown the centrality of the labor market for ex-offenders returning to and reentering their families and communities. The pathway from crime and future prison spells, what criminologists call desistance, depends on employment, specifically finding and holding a good job. By contrast, the probability of recidivism‹cycling out of and back into prison‹varies inversely with an individual¹s labor market opportunities, measured by both employment and real earnings.

Drawing on published and ongoing research, I examine the critical question of how released prisoners have fared in the labor market with a focus on how a prison record affects their labor market opportunities. Where appropriate, I present evidence testing the hypothesis that a criminal justice record reinforces the steepening barriers to employment at least in formal labor markets for those on the socioeconomic margin. Although the results may not be definitive (for reasons briefly discussed), they suggest that less educated, skilled individuals with a criminal record will experience lower employment rates and/or earnings than their ³clean² peers. Given the employment-crime link, the evidence implies that ex-offenders face significant risks of recidivism and hence future prison spells, notably when they are released into weaker labor markets. In other words, they are more likely to fall into a vicious cycle, a revolving door of prison release-crime-incarceration.

This labor market perspective does not discount the public safety benefits from an expanded criminal justice system, but instead warrants a fuller accounting of its costs and so net returns. Standard benefit-cost analyses focus on the benefits side of the equation ‹ the reductions in crime rates because of incapacitation and deterrent effects of tougher criminal sanctions. They measure the costs simply in terms of the fiscal expenditures on building and operating more prisons as opposed to other public goods. If mass incarceration yields significant, unintended individual and social costs, as current and research suggests, then the standard accounting is biased in favor of imprisonment as opposed to alternative sanctions.

The Impacts of Incarceration on Public Safety, Todd Clear

This paper will explore the evidence for the proposition: "high levels of incarceration, concentrated in poor communities, causes crime to increase." It will present and explain a model of the incarceration-crime relationship that includes the negative impact of incarceration on crime (incapacitation,
primarily) balanced against the positive impact, through the way incarceration destabilizes private and parochial forms of social control. It will conclude with a series of recommendations about how to deal with the problem.

Punishment Once Removed: How Prisons Punish Families, Elizabeth Gaynes

Elizabeth Gaynes will discuss the impact of incarceration on the family, including minor children. The current carceral state represents the greatest separation of families since the end of chattel slavery. More than 10 million American children have experienced the impact of parental arrest and incarceration. Children and families experience trauma, stigma, shame, guilt and fear when a loved one goes to prison, yet they are rarely considered in policies regarding punishment or incarceration. Considering the evidence that family ties and pro-social networks have a significant impact on success following release, the interruption of social networks and family relationships is clearly counter-productive, yet the desire to punish far exceeds the desire to transform those whom we punish. The American system of punishment, including building prisons far from people's homes and severely restricting contact with children and families, suggests a willingness to have families pay the price for an individual's crime. In this presentation, I will discuss what the price is, why issues related to race, ethnicity and religion are profoundly implicated, and - of course - another way of thinking about families and children as the access to a new paradigm.

Incarceration and Reentry Reforms in an Era of Robust Democracy, Jeremy Travis

A critical dimension in the changes in American criminal justice policy over the past generation has been the increased influence of the legislative branch, at the expense of the judicial and executive branches of government. This new reality helps explain the current level of imprisonment in America, which continues to increase despite record low levels of crime. In thinking about future penal policies, the new reality of legislative dominance also limits the potential reach of those reforms. Ironically, because of the emergence of a new "reentry movement" that has developed broad political support, this new reality might simultaneously open other avenues for justice reform advocacy.

Posted by lois at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2006

Conference: NY: Punishment: The U.S. Record Nov. 30 & Dec. 1, 2006

SOCIAL RESEARCH CONFERENCE AT THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH

PUNISHMENT: THE U.S. RECORD

NOVEMBER 30 and DECEMBER 1, 2006

A conference on who, what, why and how we punish.

Our nation's prison population has soared by more than 600% since the 1970s, despite a drop in crime rates. As of 2005, over two million people were imprisoned in this country: almost one in every 136 U.S. residents. Black men, who make up 6% of the U.S. population, comprise over 40% of our prison population. A black male born today has a 32% chance of spending time in prison. Eleven states do not allow formerly incarcerated people to vote. Nearly 2,800,000 American children have at least one parent in pris