The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

September 04, 2008

An Open Letter to Gov. Sarah Palin on Women's Rights

An Open Letter to Gov. Sarah Palin on Women's Rights
By Lynn Paltrow, National Advocates for Pregnant Women
Posted on September 4, 2008, Printed on September 4, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/97457/

Dear Governor Sarah Palin:

Many Americans agree with your position regarding abortion -- they do this as a matter of faith, ethics, personal experience and sometimes politics. I am just wondering though, if you have thought about what would happen if you succeeded in getting your position -- that fetuses have a right to life -- established as the law of the land? Did you know that it not only threatens the lives, health and freedom of women who might want or need someday to end their pregnancies, it would also give the government the power to control the lives of women -- like you who -- go to term?

Your last pregnancy, the one that has become the topic of widespread discussion and speculation provides an important opportunity to demonstrate how this could be true.

According to press reports your water broke while you were giving a keynote speech in Texas at the Republican Governors' Energy Conference. You did not immediately go to the hospital -- instead you gave your speech and then waited at least 11 hours to get to a hospital. You evaluated the risks, made a choice, and were able to carry on your life without state interference. Texas Governor Rick Perry worried about your pregnancy but didn't stop you from speaking or take you into custody to protect the rights of the fetus.

After Ayesha Madyun's water broke, she went to the hospital where she hoped and planned to have a vaginal birth. When she didn't give birth in a time-frame comfortable to her doctors, they argued that she should have a C-section. The doctors asserted that the fetus faced a 50-75 percent chance of infection if not delivered surgically. (Risks of infection are believed by some health care providers to increase with each hour after a woman's water has broken and she hasn't delivered).

The court, believing like you that fetuses have a right to life, said, "[a]ll that stood between the Madyun fetus and its independent existence, separate from its mother, was put simply, a doctor's scalpel." With that, the court granted the order and the scalpel sliced through Ms. Madyun's flesh, the muscles of her abdominal wall, and her uterus. The core principle justifying an end to legal abortion in the U.S. provided the same grounds used to deprive this pregnant and laboring woman of her rights to due process, bodily integrity, and physical liberty. When the procedure was done, there was no evidence of infection.

According to the press reports, instead of going straight to a hospital you chose to get on a long airplane flight back to Alaska.

When Pamela Rae Stewart, allegedly, didn't get to the hospital quickly enough on the day of her delivery, she was arrested in California on the theory that she had violated the rights of her fetus.

When Laura Pemberton chose to give birth at home in Florida, a Sheriff came to her house. Doctors believed that she was posing a risk to the life of her unborn child by having a vaginal birth after having had a previous c-section and were in the process of getting a court order to force her to have a c-section. The sheriff took her into custody during active labor, strapped her legs together and forced her to go to a hospital where an emergency hearing was taking place to determine the rights of her fetus. She was "allowed" to represent herself. A lawyer was appointed for the fetus. This woman, who vehemently opposes abortion, nevertheless believed in her right to evaluate medical risks and benefits to herself and her unborn child. She was forced to have the unnecessary surgery and when she later sued for violations of her civil rights, was told fetal rights outweighed hers.

You chose to continue working throughout your pregnancy -- even during your labor. Until 1991 women who worked in high paying blue color jobs that provided health benefits were being fired based on "fetal rights" policies that claimed if the woman became pregnant she would expose the unborn child to workplace health risks. Eventually, the Supreme Court said employers covered by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (the PDA) could not do this. But, millions of American women work part time or for small employers who are not covered by the PDA. If your political position on abortion is accepted -- all of these women could be forced to give up their jobs because an employer, family member, or state agent believed it necessary to ensure the health and rights of their unborn child.

Governor Palin, you have led an extraordinary life, balancing work and family, public service and private family obligations. We hope you know though that your freedom relies on exactly the same legal principals that guarantee that American women can choose to have an abortion when they need and want one.

Sixty one percent of women who have abortions are already mothers. Eighty-four percent of these will be mothers by the time they are in their forties. As a proud mother of five beautiful children, we hope you will recognize that the issue isn't abortion -- it is ensuring the lives, dignity and freedom of all pregnant women and their families.

Lynn Paltrow

Executive Director

National Advocates for Pregnant Women

Lynn Paltrow is Executive Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women.
© 2008 National Advocates for Pregnant Women All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/97457/

Posted by lois at 09:27 PM | Comments (0)

September 02, 2008

Incarceration As Forced Migration: Effects on Selected Community Health Outcomes

Incarceration As Forced Migration: Effects on Selected Community Health Outcomes
Posted on: Tuesday, 2 September 2008, 03:00 CDT
By Thomas, James C Torrone,

Objectives. We estimated the effects of high incarceration rates on rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies. Methods. We calculated correlations between rates of incarceration in state prisons and county jails and rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies for each of the 100 counties in North Carolina during 1995 to 2002. We also estimated increases in negative health outcomes associated with increases in incarceration rates using negative binomial regression analyses.

Results. Rates of sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies, adjusted for age, race, and poverty distributions by county, consistently increased with increasing incarceration rates. In the most extreme case, teenage pregnancies exhibited an increase of 71.61 per 100000 population (95% confidence interval [CI]=41.88, 101.35) in 1996 after an increase in the prison population rate from 223.31 to 468.58 per 100 000 population in 1995.

Conclusions. High rates of incarceration can have the unintended consequence of destabilizing communities and contributing to adverse health outcomes. (Am J Public Health. 2006;96:1762-1765. doi:10.2105/ AJPH.2005.081760)

Community health pioneer Sidney Kark attributed high rates of syphilis in South Africa in the late 1930s to the socially destabilizing effects of migration related to the seeking of mining jobs.1 Extreme gender ratio imbalances in the areas surrounding the mines led to sexual behaviors that facilitated the transmission of such diseases. Social epidemiologist Mark Lurie has documented similar effects associated with HIV/AIDS in presentday South Africa.2

Because incarceration leads to a select portion of a community's residents being removed from their families and neighborhoods, it is tantamount to "forced migration," contributing to imbalances in neighborhood gender ratios and resulting in the potential for community health effects similar to those just described for South Africa. Moreover, such disruptions of families and social networks can degrade social cohesion and the norms that might otherwise prevent sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancies. Since the early 1980s, rates of incarceration in the United States have tripled and are now the highest of any country in the world. Men are 10 times more likely than women to be incarcerated. In addition, African Americans are 6 times more likely than Whites to face incarceration.3

Moreover, rates of several sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV, are higher among African Americans than Whites, and this is especially the case among male African Americans. For example, in 2000 the gonorrhea rate among male non- Hispanic Blacks in the United States was 40 times greater than that among male non-Hispanic Whites.4 Also, teenage pregnancies were 2.8 times more common among Blacks than among non-Hispanic Whites in 2000.5 Finally, in a 1999 study of counties in North Carolina, Thomas and Sampson found bivariate correlations between rates of incarceration and rates of STIs.6

North Carolina has 76 state prisons and 97 jails, and its rate of incarceration ranks 31st among the 50 states.7 We analyzed countylevel data from the state in an attempt to determine (1) the incarceration variables that would have the strongest correlations with community health effects, (2) whether these correlations would remain stable over time, and (3) whether there would be a lag in time between incarceration and observable community health effects.

METHODS

Data Sources

We obtained 1995 through 2002 data on entries, releases, and state prison system populations from the North Carolina Department of Corrections. We did not analyze federal incarcerations (which represent approximately one tenth of the state's incarcerations) or juvenile incarcerations (which constitute less than 1% of incarcerations).8,9 Data on numbers of individuals incarcerated were classified by year, county (of which there are 100 in North Carolina), race, and gender. Data for a given year were reported as number of individuals entering prison, number of individuals being released, or mean number of individuals incarcerated during the year. We also gathered information on county of conviction and county of residence at the time of arrest.

We obtained data on county jail entries, releases, and populations for the years 1995 through 2000 from the North Carolina County Court System. Information on numbers of individuals incarcerated was categorized by year and county of conviction.

The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services provided data on STI counts according to type of infection (gonorrhea, chlamydia, HIV [new cases reported as either HIV or AIDS], and syphilis [primary or secondary]), race/ethnicity, gender, age, year, and county of residence for the years 1995 through 2002. We obtained data on numbers of pregnancies among young women aged 15 to 19 years by county and year (1995-2001) from the North Carolina Office of Vital Statistics.

Finally, population data, grouped according to county, age group, gender, and race/ ethnicity, were derived from the US census Web site (http://www.cenus.gov). We used intercensal estimates for the years 1995 through 1999.

Data Analysis

We calculated a county-level Pearson correlation coefficient between each incarceration variable (rate of entry, rate of release, and population size by county of conviction and county of residence) and each health outcome (rates of gonorrhea, chlamydia, primary or secondary syphilis, HIV, and teenage pregnancies) for each year from 1995 to 2000. We calculated these same correlations for the incarceration rate in a given year and health outcomes 1 year and 2 years later to approximate a temporal causal sequence and to determine when effects were most evident. Because data on health outcomes beyond 2002 were not available, we were unable to conduct time-lagged incarceration analyses for 2001 and 2002.

Multivariate analyses were limited to state prison incarcerations grouped by county of residence, because we hypothesized that the county where one lives is affected by one's imprisonment more than the county in which one was arrested (if these counties are not the same). We did not conduct multivariate analyses of county jail incarcerations because bivariate correlations were less strong and stable than the corresponding prison correlations.

Variables included as potential confounders were the percentage of a county's population that was African American, the percentage of residents living below the poverty line, and age (categorized as younger than 24 years, 24-44 years, and 44 years or older). Negative binomial regression models were used to calculate health outcome rate differences and their corresponding confidence intervals (CIs). These rate differences referred to increases in the number of individuals with a reported health outcome per 100000 population in a given year, derived from comparisons between the 75th percentile and 25th percentile of the distribution of North Carolina county incarceration rates (either rates for the year in question or time- lagged rates). All analyses were conducted with Stata version 9 (Stata Corp, College Station, Tex).

RESULTS

The state's mean yearly prison population increased slightly during the study period, from 29495 in 1995 to 31534 in 2000. However, as a result of the increase in the state population over the period, overall there was a slight decrease in the prison population rate (from 401.58 prisoners per 100000 population in 1995 to 391.76 per 100000 in 2000). The average daily jail population increased from 142.78 per 100000 in 1995 to 163.45 per 100000 in 2000.

During the same years, respective rates of reported STIs (per 100 000 population) for the state were as follows: 326.24 and 223.60 for gonorrhea, 214.85 and 275.58 for chlamydia, 15.41 and 6.01 for primary or secondary syphilis, and 30.61 and 18.04 for HIV. In 1995 and 2000, teenage pregnancy rates were 292.95 and 234.57 per 100 000, respectively.

Bivariate correlations calculated with a 1-year lag were consistently larger than correlations calculated with no lag. For example, correlations between prison populations grouped by county of residence in 1995 and gonorrhea rates in 1995 and 1996 were 0.71 and 0.74, respectively. A 2-year lag yielded stronger correlations than the 1-year lag in the case of some of the incarceration and health outcome variables and weaker correlations for other variables. In the following, we report results for 1-year lags only.

With a single exception (the correlation of jail entry with HIV), all of the correlations between the various incarceration variables and health outcomes were statistically significant (Table 1). The correlations between health outcomes and prison incarceration variables were greater (nearly double) than the corresponding correlations between health outcomes and jail incarceration variables except for the case of syphilis. The incarceration variable most strongly correlated with each of the health outcomes was prison population by county of residence. In all but a few instances, correlations were stronger by county of residence than by county of conviction. Correlations by entry and release were similar. The correlations between particular incarceration variables and health outcomes varied little over the study period. For example, correlations between prison population sizes in 1995, 1997, and 1999 and gonorrhea rates a year later were 0.74, 0.67, and 0.68, respectively.

Adjustment for county age, race, and poverty distributions attenuated the strength of the relationships between incarceration variables and health outcomes, although many of the associations nonetheless remained large and statistically significant (Table 2). For example, after adjustment, a county with a prison population rate at the 25th percentile of the distribution in 1996 would have had a teenage pregnancy rate of 221.09 per 100 000 population in the same year, whereas a county at the 75th percentile would have had a teenage pregnancy rate of 293.56 per 100000. Increasing the prison population rate from the 25th to the 75th percentile would thus result in an additional 71.61 (95% CI=41.88, 101.35) teenage pregnancies per 100000 population, or a 32% increase.

The 1996 health outcome rate differences associated with changes in prison population rates were nearly twice as high as the rate differences associated with changes in prison entry and exit rates. Rate differences for health outcomes decreased in 1998 and 2000, as did the contrast between rate differences for given health outcomes according to the 3 incarceration variables. In 2002, rate differences increased again, as did the contrast in rate differences for given health outcomes between the incarceration variables.

DISCUSSION

Associations between incarceration rates and health outcomes were strong and consistent. Results were strongest for teenage pregnancies and the most common STIs. For the less frequent STIs (syphilis and HIV), several counties reported no cases. In such instances and instances in which there were low frequencies of reported STIs, counties were at increased susceptibility of extreme variation in rates with the addition or subtraction of a single reported case, resulting in wider confidence intervals. Associations of incarceration with teenage pregnancy were more consistent than associations with STIs. This finding may reflect, in part, more thorough reporting of teenage pregnancies than STIs and, thus, less statistical vulnerability to variations in underreporting between counties.

The stronger correlations between health outcomes and incarceration in prisons as opposed to jails probably reflect meaningful differences in the effects of these types of incarceration on the lives of a community's residents. Jail terms are briefer, on average, than prison terms. Individuals in jail are awaiting trial or serving time for a minor offense, whereas those in prison are serving time, often in years, for more serious offenses. They are absent from their families and communities for longer periods of time than are jail detainees.

The fact that stronger correlations were obtained with a 1-year lag than with no lag suggests that high incarceration rates lead to negative community health effects, strengthening the argument for a causal relationship. The incarceration variable most strongly related to health outcomes was number of prisoners per 100 000 population, the measure representing the closest proxy for absence of individuals from a community. The effects on health outcomes of prison entry and exit rates, which might be considered to represent community transitions, were not remarkably different from each other.

In contrast to rate ratios, rate differences indicate the number of new cases that can be expected with a change in the independent variable (in this case, incarceration), thus providing an indication of the public health importance of the issue in question.10 For example, the number of excess gonorrhea cases generated by increases in incarceration rates was sizable, ranging from 22.65 (in 2000) to 62.46 (in 1996) per 100000 population; similarly, the number of excess teenage pregnancies generated ranged from 50.26 (2000) to 71.61 (1996) per 100000 population.

This study, conducted at the ecological level, was based on county rates of incarceration and sexually related health outcomes. The classic ecological fallacy would be to infer from our results that incarceration leads to higher STI and teenage pregnancy rates.11, 12 Although we are unaware of any data on rates of infection among ex-offenders, fewer than one half of 1% of reported gonorrhea and chlamydial infections in North Carolina in 2000 were reported from correctional facilities (either jails or prisons; L. Sampson, North Carolina Division of Public Health, written communication, February 2004). This small percentage suggests that incarceration's effects on STI incidence may be greatest outside prison walls.

Given that 10 times more men than women are imprisoned, incarceration lowers the community ratio of men to women; this is particularly the case for African Americans, among whom the incarceration rate is several times higher than that among individuals from other racial groups. Lower gender ratios have been shown to affect rates of teenage pregnancy, syphilis, and gonorrhea.13-15 Small numbers of men relative to women can result in the men remaining in the community having more power in their relationships with women. For instance, if a woman insists that her male sexual partner be faithful, he can leave her for another partner who will be less demanding or who will turn a blind eye to his other sexual relationships.

At any given time, more than 12% of male African Americans aged 25 to 29 years are incarcerated.16 The corresponding high rates of removals from and releases to communities disrupt relationships and contribute to the inability of communities to maintain social norms, in that maintenance of these norms is based on long-term relationships. In communities where neighbors know one another, these individuals can be involved in each other's lives and in the lives of their children; they can observe each other's actions and offer encouragement or advice. Even people guilty of committing crimes can and do play such positive social roles, and their absence from a community may have intergenerational effects. More than half (56%) of state and federal prisoners in the United States in 1997 had children.17 To the degree that parenting affects the sexual behaviors of adolescents, adolescents with a parent who is absent as a result of incarceration may be more at risk of behaviors that result in an STI or pregnancy.

The ex-offender population represents another means through which incarceration can affect community STI rates. One study showed that men with HIV who were released from prison had sexual intercourse within an average of 6 days of their release, and 31% of these men believed that it was likely they would infect their primary sexual partner.18 Similarly, Kark noted that migrants themselves were principally responsible for the high rates of syphilis in South Africa in the 1940s.1 As a result of laws prohibiting gold and diamond miners from migrating with their families, the gender ratios in the mining communities reached extreme levels, as high as 12:1. The men at the mines would have sexual intercourse with prostitutes and possibly carry an infection back to their wives.

As mentioned earlier, Lurie has described a similar phenomenon driving HIV transmission in South Africa in recent years.2 Whereas the present-day high rates of HIV in South Africa (with rates of adult diagnoses ranging from 21% to 39%) might be explained in part by selective migration to cities, the relatively low infection rate in the Congo (approximately 4% of adults), where some of the first identified cases originated, might be attributable in part to the country's lack of an infrastructure that would facilitate migration.16

People generally prefer to stay in their home communities. Typically, only a complex mixture of market forces, politics, and cultural factors (e.g., racial attitudes) results in individuals leaving their communities en masse. The earlier-mentioned 3-time increase in incarceration rates in the United States since 1980 has been attributed principally to the "war on drugs."3 Thus, present- day incarceration-based "migration" has been linked to factors such as poverty and the maelstrom of economic and political forces surrounding illicit drugs. However, because this form of "migration" does entail force, the American public can decide whether to exert more or less force, that is, whether to raise or lower incarceration rates and, thus, community turnover rates.

It is unlikely that the negative community health effects associated with incarceration will prove to be a sufficient motivation for determining alternative means of responding to the social ills addressed today via incarceration. It is more likely that economic factors, such as the expense of incarcerating large numbers of people and a political climate that allows elected officials the opportunity to develop creative alternatives to incarceration, will determine the rate at which people are moved into and out of prison and, thus, into and out of their communities. In any event, until changes in policy take place, high rates of incarceration will have the unintended consequences of destabilizing communities and generating worse social ills.

Originally published as: James C. Thomas, PhD, MPH, and Elizabeth Torrone, MSPH. Incarceration as Forced Migration: Effects on Selected Community Health Outcomes. Am J Public Health. 2006;96:1762- 1765. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2005.081760.

References

1. Kark SL. The social pathology of syphilis in Africans. S Afr Med J. 1949;23:77-84.

2. Lurie M, Harrison A, Wilkinson D, Abdool Karim SS. Circular migration and sexual networking in rural KwaZulu/Natal: implications for the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted disease. Health Transition Rev. 1997;7(suppl 3):S15-S24. 3. Austin J, Irwin J. It's About Time: America's Imprisonment Binge. 3rd ed. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth/ Thompson Learning; 2001.

4. Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance, 2000. Atlanta, Ga: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 2001.

5. Alan Guttmacher Institute. US teenage pregnancy statistics: overall trends, trends by race and ethnicity, and state-by-state information, New York, 2004. Available at: http:// www.guttmacher.org/pubs/state_pregnancy_trends.pdf. Accessed July 5, 2006.

6. Thomas JC, Sampson L. Incarceration as a social force affecting STD rates. Rev Infect Dis. 2005;191: S55-S60.

7. National Institute of Corrections. Corrections statistics for North Carolina. Available at: http://nicic.org/ StateCorrectionsStatistics. Accessed July 5, 2006.

8. US Department of Justice. Correctional populations in the United States, 1995. Available at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ pdf/cpius95.pdf. Accessed July 27, 2006.

9. US Department of Justice. Profile of state prisoners under age 18, 1985-1997. Available at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ pspa1897.pdf. Accessed July 5, 2006.

10. Dombrowski J, Thomas JC, Kaufman J. A study in contrasts: measures of racial disparity in the occurrence of gonorrhea. Sex Transm Dis. 2004;31:149-153.

11. Hammett TM, Harmon MP, Rhodes W. The burden of infectious disease among inmates of and releasees from US correctional facilities, 1997. Am J Public Health. 2002;92:1789-1794.

12. Maruschak LM. HIV in Prisons and Jails, 1999. Washington, DC: US Dept of Justice; 2001.

13. Sampson RJ. Unemployment and imbalanced sex ratios: race- specific consequences for family structure and crime. In: Tucker MB, Mitchell-Kernan C, eds. The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans: Causes, Consequences and Policy Implications. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation; 1995:229-254.

14. Kilmarx PH, Zaidi AA, Thomas JC, et al. Ecologic analysis of socio-demographic factors and the variation in syphilis rates among counties in the United States, 1984-93. Am J Public Health. 1997; 87:1937-1943.

15. Thomas JC, Gaffield ME. Social structure, race, and gonorrhea rates in the southeastern United States. Ethn Dis. 2003;13:362-368.

16. The 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic. Geneva, Switzerland: Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS; 2004.

17. Mumola CJ. Incarcerated parents and their children. Available at: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/iptc.txt. Accessed July 27, 2006.

18. Stephenson BL, Wohl DA, McKaig R, et al. Sexual behaviours of HIV-seropositive men and women following release from prison. Int J STD AIDS. 2006; 17:103-108.

About the Authors

The authors are with the Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Requests for reprints should be sent to James C. Thomas, PhD, MPH, Department of Epidemiology, CB# 7435, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7435 (e-mail: jim.thomas@unc.edu).

This article was accepted March 25, 2006.

Contributors

J. C. Thomas originated the study, acquired the data, directed the analysis, interpreted the findings, and was the principal author of the article. E. Torrone conducted the data analysis and contributed to the interpretation of the findings and the writing of the article.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by funds from the University of North Carolina Center for AIDS Research (National Institutes of Health grant P3 AI50410) and the Open Society Institute (grant 74411-00 01).

Human Participant Protection

This study was approved by the institutional review board of the University of North Carolina.

Copyright American Public Health Association Sep 2008

(c) 2008 American Journal of Public Health. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.

Source: American Journal of Public Health
http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1540330/incarceration_as_forced_migration_effects_on_selected_community_health_outcomes/#

Posted by lois at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2008

Tennessee: Pregnant Inmates at Jail Will No Longer Be Restrained

August 29, 2008
National Briefing | South
Tennessee: Pregnant Inmates at Jail Will No Longer Be Restrained
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Pregnant inmates at Nashville’s jail will no longer be restrained, according to a policy change after an illegal immigrant said she was shackled during labor. Sheriff Daron Hall of Davidson County announced the changes this week, but he said pregnant inmates would still be restrained during trips to the hospital or to court if they presented a danger. Last month, a Mexican immigrant, Juana Villegas, was arrested on charges of careless driving and was held at the jail. Ms. Villegas said she went into labor July 5 and was taken to the hospital, where she was handcuffed to the bed by her right wrist and left ankle until shortly before the birth. The sheriff said her treatment followed the jail’s old policies, but he also said that in his opinion the old policy was “a little more than may have been necessary in every case.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/us/29brfs-PREGNANTINMA_BRF.html?_r=1&sq=Tennessee&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=2&pagewanted=print

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August 26, 2008

An Estimated 809,800 Inmates in the Nation's Prisons Were Parents to 1,706,600 Minor Children at Midyear 2007

Last update: 4:56 p.m. EDT Aug. 26, 2008
WASHINGTON, Aug 26, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- An estimated 809,800 prisoners of the 1,518,535 held in the nation's prison at midyear 2007 were parents of minor children, according to a report by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Parents in prison - 52 percent of state inmates and 63 percent of federal inmates - reported having an estimated 1,706,600 minor children. Among state inmates, the percent of parents in prison decreased from 55 percent in 1997 but has remained stable for federal inmates.

About 2.3 percent of the 74 million children in the U.S. resident population who were under the age of 18 on July 1, 2007, had a parent in prison. Black and Hispanic children were about eight and three times, respectively, more likely than white children to have a parent in prison. Among minor children in the U.S. resident population, 6.7 percent of black children, 2.4 percent of Hispanic children, and 0.9 percent of white children had a parent in prison. State inmates who were parents reported that nearly a quarter of their children were age four or younger and reported having two children on average.
Among fathers in state and federal prisons, more than four in 10 were black, about three in 10 were white, and about two in 10 were Hispanic. Among mothers, 48 percent were white, 28 percent were black, and 17 percent were Hispanic.
State inmates age 25 to 34 (64 percent) were most likely to report being a parent, those age 55 or older (13 percent) were the least likely. Hispanic (57 percent) and black (54 percent) state inmates were more likely to report being a parent than white (46 percent) inmates. Findings were similar among men held in state prison, while the likelihood of being a parent did not vary by race among women.
Among male state inmates, public-order (60 percent) and drug (59 percent) offenders were more likely than violent (47 percent) and property (48 percent) offenders to be fathers. In state prison, inmates with a criminal history (53 percent) were more likely to report being a parent than those without a criminal history (48 percent).
About two-thirds (64 percent) of mothers held in state prison and nearly half (47 percent) of fathers reported living with their minor children either in the month before arrest or just prior to incarceration. Among state inmates, mothers (42 percent) were two and a half times more likely than fathers (17 percent) to report living in a single-parent household in the month before their arrest.
Among parents living with their minor children prior to incarceration, more than three-quarters (77 percent) of mothers compared to just over a quarter (26 percent) of fathers reported providing most of the daily care of their children. More than half of mothers (52 percent) and fathers (54 percent) held in state prison reported providing primary financial support to their minor children.
Eighty-five percent of mothers and 78 percent of fathers in state prison reported having contact with a child (minor or adult) since admission to prison. About half (47 percent) of parents who expected to be released within six months reported at least weekly contact compared to 39 percent with 12 to 59 months, and 32 percent with 60 or more months.
Among parents in state prison, nine percent reported homelessness in the year before arrest, 20 percent had a history of physical or sexual abuse, 41 percent had a current medical problem, 57 percent had a mental health problem, and 67 percent met the criteria for substance dependence or abuse. Seven in ten parents in state prison who met the criteria for substance dependence or abuse reported ever being in a program or receiving treatment for alcohol or drug abuse; more than four in 10 received treatment since admission. Forty-six percent of parents who had a mental health problem reported ever having treatment; 31 percent had received treatment since admission.
Among parents held in state prison, over half (57 percent) had attended self-help or improvement classes since admission. Mothers (27 percent) were about two and a half times more likely than fathers (11 percent) to attend parenting or child-rearing classes.
The majority (52 percent) of parents in state prison reported that they had served 12 to 59 months. Mothers (38 percent) were more likely than fathers (21 percent) to report having served fewer than 12 months. More than six in 10 mothers held in state prison expected to be released in less than 12 months; compared to four in 10 fathers.
The report, Parents in Prison and Their Minor Children (NCJ 222984), was written by BJS statisticians Lauren E. Glaze and Laura M. Maruschak. Following publication, the report can be found at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/pptmc.htm.
For additional information about the Bureau of Justice Statistics' statistical reports and programs, please visit the BJS Web site at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs.
The Office of Justice Programs, headed by Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey L. Sedgwick, provides federal leadership in developing the nation's capacity to prevent and control crime, administer justice, and assist victims. OJP has five component bureaus: the Bureau of Justice Assistance; the Bureau of Justice Statistics; the National Institute of Justice; the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention; and the Office for Victims of Crime. Additionally, OJP has two program offices: the Community Capacity Development Office, which incorporates the Weed and Seed strategy, and the Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART). More information can be found at http://www.ojp.gov.
SOURCE Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs

http://www.ojp.gov

Copyright (C) 2008 PR Newswire. All rights reserved End of Story
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August 10, 2008

The News (Pakistan) More than 50 per cent of all women in American prisons have been sexually abused

More than 50 per cent of all women in American prisons have been sexually abused
Monday, August 11, 2008
By Kaleem Omar, The News (Pakistan)

The United States government never tires of lecturing countries around the world on their human rights record, which is what President George W. Bush chose to do in the case of China en route to Beijing on August 8 to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Yet the US government often turns a blind eye to gross human rights violations in its own country. A case in point is the government’s apathy towards the sexual abuse of women in US prisons, which has been rampant for years.

According to current estimates, more than 50 per cent of all female prisoners in the United States have experienced some form of sexual abuse. The number of women incarcerated in the United States is ten times more than in Western Europe, whose female population is equal to that of the United States. African-American women are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than white women; Hispanic women are four times more likely. Seventy per cent of guards in the 170 state prison facilities for women across the United States are men. In Canadian women’s prisons, 91 per cent of the guards are female.

An Amnesty International report says, “Sexual abuse is virtually a fact of life for incarcerated women in the US.” The report’s findings are reinforced by a study conducted by the US-based Human Rights Watch, which says that “being a woman prisoner in American prisons can be a terrifying experience.”

It can be examined in terms of powerlessness, humiliation, retaliation and fear. If a woman is sexually abused, she cannot escape from her abuser. Grievances or investigatory procedures, where they do exist, are often ineffectual, and correctional employees continue to engage in abuse because they believe they will rarely be held accountable, administratively or criminally.

According to Amnesty International, female prisoners often experience sexual abuse during routine searches. This includes rape, sexual extortion and groping. There are often male correctional officers watching women undressing and showering. The women are often afraid to report such incidences. Not only do the guards frequently threaten to take away visitation rights to keep them quiet, they also have complete access to each inmate’s file, which includes any reports against the guards. If a guard is reported and punished, the punishment usually only consists of his transfer to another facility.

As well as rampant sexual abuse, medical neglect is common for women in US prisons. Amnesty International lists a number of issues involving medical neglect. One such example is the failure to treat seriously ill inmates. This includes treatment for diseases ranging from diabetes to AIDS. Another example is the lack of qualified medical personnel in the prisons. This means that frequently non-medical staff is used in medical situations.

The United States has the dubious distinction of incarcerating the largest known number of prisoners of any country in the world (well over two million), of which a steadily increasing number are women. Since 1980, the number of women entering US prisons has risen by almost 400 per cent, roughly double the incarceration rate increase of males. According to Human Rights Watch, 52 per cent of these prisoners are African-American women, though African-American women constitute only 14 per cent of the US’s total female population.

The custodial sexual misconduct documented in the Human Rights Watch report takes many forms. The study found that male correctional employees have vaginally, anally and orally raped female prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them. The study found that in the course of committing such gross misconduct, male officers have not only used actual or threatened physical force, but have also used their near total authority to provide or deny goods and privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex or, in other cases, to reward them for having done so.

In other cases, male officers have violated their most basic professional duty and engaged in sexual contact with female prisoners. According to Human Rights Watch, male correctional officers and staff have also engaged in regular verbal degradation and harassment of female prisoners, thus contributing to a custodial environment in the state prisons for women, which is often highly sexualised and excessively hostile.

The report says that no one group of prisoners appears to suffer sexual misconduct more than any other, although those in prison for the first time and young or mentally ill prisoners are particularly vulnerable to abuse. Lesbian and transgenedered prisoners have also been singled out for sexual misconduct by officers, as have prisoners who have in some way challenged an officer, either by informing on him for inappropriate conduct or for refusing to submit to demands for sexual relations.

In some instances, women have been impregnated as a result of sexual misconduct, and some of these prisoners have faced additional abuse in the form of inappropriate segregation, denial of adequate health care, and/or pressure to seek an abortion, says the Human Rights Watch report.

One of the clear contributing factors to sexual misconduct in US prisons for women is that the United States, despite authoritative international rules to the contrary, allows male correctional employees to hold contact positions over prisoners, that is, positions in which they serve in constant physical proximity to the prisoners of the opposite sex.

Under the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Standard Minimum Rules), which constitute an authoritative guide to international law regarding the treatment of prisoners, male officers are precluded from holding such contact positions. However, since the passage of the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, US employers have been prohibited from denying a person a job solely on the basis of gender unless the person’s gender was reasonably necessary to the performance of the specific job.

In the absence of unusual circumstances, US federal courts have been unwilling to recognise a person’s gender as meeting this standard with respect to correctional employment. As a result, most restrictions on male officers working in women’s prisons that predated the Civil Rights Act have been removed and, by some estimates, male officers working in women’s prisons now outnumber their female counterparts by two and in some facilities, three to one.

Human Rights Watch says its investigation revealed that where state departments of correction have employed male staff or officers to guard female prisoners, they have often done so without clear prohibitions on all forms of custodial sexual misconduct and without either training officers or educating prisoners about such prohibitions.

Female officers have also sexually abused female prisoners and should, without exception, receive such training. However, in the state prisons for women that Human Rights Watch investigated, instances of same-sex misconduct were relatively rare.

Under both international and US national law, states are clearly required to prevent and punish custodial sexual misconduct. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of Punishment (Torture Convention), both of which the United States has ratified, require state parties to prohibit torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment and to ensure that such abuse is investigated and punished.

The ICCPR further guarantees prisoners a basic right to privacy, which has been interpreted to preclude strip searches by officers of the opposite sex. These rights are further enumerated in the Standard Minimum Rules, which call on governments to prohibit custodial sexual abuse, provide prisoners with an effective right to complain of such misconduct, ensure appropriate punishment, and guarantee that these obligations are met in part through the proper training of correctional officers.

In addition, the United States Constitution expressly protects prisoners from cruel and inhuman punishments and has been interpreted to accord prisoners limited privacy rights as well as to guarantee them access to the courts.

The United States is thus clearly bound under its own Constitution to prevent and punish custodial sexual misconduct. It is equally bound by international human rights law to take these steps, although in ratifying the ICCPR and the Torture Convention, the United States attempted to limit its treaty obligations in ways that were particularly adverse to the elimination of custodial sexual misconduct.

These efforts by the United States to shirk its full international human rights obligations are legally indefensible, as well as being morally reprehensible.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=129273

Posted by lois at 08:28 PM | Comments (0)

"Real Cost of Prisons Comix' book events in the SF Bay Area September 24th through September 29th, 2008

Wednesday September 24th - Lois Ahrens, editor of the ‘Real Cost Of Prisons Comix’ at The Green Arcade 7pm.
Book launch for the ‘Real Cost Of Prisons Comix’, edited by Lois Ahrens and published by PM Press.
“One out of every hundred adults in the U.S. is in prison. This book provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher.”
Through the comics, and associated campaigning, hundreds of thousands of prisoners, their allies, and activists, have had the grisly facts and consequences of mass incarceration and its devastating effects on communities, families and the poor, made accessible. Each comic includes alternatives to the costly and inhumane system we have now. More than 30 organizers in and out of prison write about how they use the comix in their work. Long-time activist and organizer, Lois Ahrens discusses The Real Cost of Prisons Project and introductory essay by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore frames the comix within a political context.

Join the editor speaking about the book, and the wider project, together with the following activists who will talk on how they’ve used the comic books, and their work:
Marlon Altan is a social studies teacher with 5 Keys Charter School. 5 Keys charter school is a high school that works out of the San Francisco County Jail.
Amie Dowling is an Assistant Professor in the Performing Arts Dept at the University of San Francisco and through Community Works leads theater/writing workshops in the San Francisco jails.
Debbie Reyes, OSI Fellow, Central Valley Coordinator California Prison Moratorium Project, Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, Fresno, California.
Karen Shain is Co-Director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, a San Francisco-based 30-year-old prisoners' rights organization that advocates for the rights of incarcerated women, their families and communities.
Mara Taub from Santa Fe, NM, is the coordinator/editor ‘Coalition for Prisoners' Rights Newsletter’. Since 1976, the Coalition for Prisoners' Rights has worked to gather and disseminate information and analysis for those imprisoned, formerly imprisoned and their allies. Their short, free, monthly ‘Newsletter’ features news from/for prisoners nationwide; offers a variety of resource lists; and emphasizes analysis of the U.S. punishment system.
Part of the ‘Great Rehearsal’ Week of ’68 Events.
The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street (at Gough.)
San Francisco CA 94102
www.thegreenarcade.com
info@thegreenarcade.com

Thursday September 25th – ‘Incarceration, Resistance, Costs And Consequences: A Discussion with Authors, Activists And Former Political Prisoners’. At the First Congregational Church in Oakland 7pm. $10 (no-one turned away).
Co-sponsored with KPFA. A benefit for the Angola 3 Defense Fund.
A lively discussion on the rising costs, and consequences of incarceration. And of those that are resisting the Prison Industrial Complex.
Panelists include:
Robert Hillary King, author of the new autobiography ‘From The Bottom Of The Heap: The Autobiography Of Black Panther Robert Hillary King’ (PM Press). Robert Hillary King is better known as one of the Angola 3, who served over 31 years in Louisiana’s ‘slave plantation’ at Angola, 29 of them in solitary confinement. He, together with his Angola 3 comrades, Herman Bell and Albert Woodfox, organized within the prison the first (and only) Black Panther chapter behind the walls. The state reacted (unsurprisingly) accordingly.
Lois Ahrens, editor of the ‘Real Cost Of Prisons Comix’ (PM Press). Through the comics, and associated campaigning, hundreds of thousands of prisoners, their allies, and activists, have had the grisly facts and consequences of mass incarceration and its devastating effects on communities, families and the poor, made accessible. Each comic includes alternatives to the costly and inhumane system we have now.
Victoria Law, author of ‘Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women’ (PM Press), and longtime prison activist. About the forthcoming book: In 1974, women imprisoned at New York's maximum-security prison at Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion. Protesting the brutal beating of a fellow prisoner, the women fought off guards, holding seven of them hostage, and took over sections of the prison. While many have heard of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, the August Rebellion remains relatively unknown even in activist circles. ‘Resistance Behind Bars’ is determined to challenge and change such oversights. As it examines daily struggles against appalling prison conditions and injustices, ‘Resistance’ documents both collective organizing and individual resistance among women incarcerated in the U.S. Emphasizing women's agency in resisting the conditions of their confinement through forming peer education groups, clandestinely arranging ways for children to visit mothers in distant prisons and raising public awareness about their lives, ‘Resistance’ seeks to spark further discussion and research into the lives of incarcerated women and galvanize much-needed outside support for their struggles.
Matt Meyer, editor of the monumental (all 912 pages!) ‘Let Freedom Ring’ (PM Press/Kersplebedeb), and activist with Resistance In Brooklyn:
‘Let Freedom Ring’ presents a two-decade sweep of essays, analyses, histories, interviews, resolutions, People’s Tribunals verdicts and poems by and about the scores of U.S. political prisoners and the campaigns to safeguard their rights and to secure their freedom. Represented here are the radical movements that have most challenged the U.S. empire from within: Black Panthers and other Black liberation fighters (several still held after 30+ years), Puerto Rican independentistas, Indigenous sovereignty activists, Chicano/Mexicano freedom strugglers, white anti-imperialists, environmental and animal rights militants, and others. This invaluable resource guide details the diabolical methods--from isolation to sensory deprivation to parole denial--used to suppress these freedom fighters, as well as the creative--and sometimes winning--strategies to bring them home.
Ashanti Alston, former Black Panther, Black Liberation Army political prisoner, and longtime activist, and a contributor to ‘Let Freedom Ring.’
Rita ‘Bo’ Brown, former member of the George Jackson Brigade, political prisoner, and longtime prisoner and queer activist, and a contributor to ‘Let Freedom Ring’
Moderated by KPFA host to be announced.
First Congregational Church of Oakland
www.firstoakland.org
2501 Harrison St
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 444-8511

Friday 26th September thru Sunday 28th September is the Critical Resistance 10th Anniversary Conference in Oakland.
Vikki Law and Matt Meyer are doing workshops. Robert Hillary King and Lois Ahrens will be in attendance. The PM films ‘The Angola 3’, ‘Jena 6’ and ‘Black & Gold’ are all being shown during the conference as part of the Critical Resistance Film Festival
www.criticalresistance.org

Monday 29th September - Book launch for ‘Real Cost Of Prisons Comix’ and ‘Let Freedom Ring’ anthology, at Modern Times 7pm.
Last of the month long series of events as part of PM Press as ‘Publisher Of The Month’ at Modern Times. Featuring ‘Real Cost Of Prisons Comix’, editor and activist and organizer Lois Ahrens:
“One out of every hundred adults in the U.S. is in prison. This book provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher.”
Through the comics, and associated campaigning, hundreds of thousands of prisoners, their allies, and activists, have had the grisly facts and consequences of mass incarceration and its devastating effects on communities, families and the poor, made accessible. Each comic includes alternatives to the costly and inhumane system we have now. More than 30 organizers in and out of prison write about how they use the comix in their work. Long-time activist and organizer, Lois Ahrens discusses The Real Cost of Prisons Project and introductory essay by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore frames the comix within a political context.
‘Let Freedom Ring’ editor Matt Meyer:
Let Freedom Ring’ presents a two-decade sweep of essays, analyses, histories, interviews, resolutions, People’s Tribunals verdicts and poems by and about the scores of U.S. political prisoners and the campaigns to safeguard their rights and to secure their freedom. Represented here are the radical movements that have most challenged the U.S. empire from within: Black Panthers and other Black liberation fighters (several still held after 30+ years), Puerto Rican independentistas, Indigenous sovereignty activists, Chicano/Mexicano freedom strugglers, white anti-imperialists, environmental and animal rights militants, and others. This invaluable resource guide details the diabolical methods--from isolation to sensory deprivation to parole denial--used to suppress these freedom fighters, as well as the creative--and sometimes winning--strategies to bring them home.
Ashanti Alston, former Black Panther, Black Liberation Army political prisoner, longtime activist, and a contributor to ‘Let Freedom Ring’.
Rita ‘Bo’ Brown, former member of the George Jackson Brigade, political prisoner, longtime prisoner and queer activist, and a contributor to ‘Let Freedom Ring’.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of ‘Golden Gulag’ and co-author (with Craig Gilmore) of a new introduction to the ‘Real Cost Of Prisons Comix’.
Modern Times
www.mtbs.com
888 Valencia St
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 282-9246

Posted by lois at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2008

U.S. Blacks, if a Nation, Would Rank 16th in the world of people living with AIDS

July 30, 2008, NY Times
U.S. Blacks, if a Nation, Would Rank High on AIDS
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

If black America were a country, it would rank 16th in the world in the number of people living with the AIDS virus, the Black AIDS Institute, an advocacy group, reported Tuesday.

The report, financed in part by the Ford Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation, provides a startling new perspective on an epidemic that was first recognized in 1981.

Nearly 600,000 African-Americans are living with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and up to 30,000 are becoming infected each year. When adjusted for age, their death rate is two and a half times that of infected whites, the report said. Partly as a result, the hypothetical nation of black America would rank below 104 other countries in life expectancy.

J

Those and other disparities are “staggering,” said Dr. Kevin A. Fenton, who directs H.I.V. prevention efforts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency responsible for tracking the epidemic in the United States.

“It is a crisis that needs a new look at prevention,” Dr. Fenton said.

In a separate report on Tuesday, the United Nations painted a somewhat more optimistic picture of the worldwide AIDS epidemic, noting that fewer people are dying of the disease since its peak in the late 1990s and that more people are receiving antiretroviral drugs.

Nevertheless, the report found that progress remained uneven and that the future of the epidemic was uncertain. The report was issued in advance of the 17th International AIDS Conference, which begins this weekend in Mexico City.

The gains are partly from the Bush administration’s program to deliver drugs and preventive measures to people in countries highly affected by H.I.V.

The Black AIDS Institute took note of that program in criticizing the administration’s efforts at home. The group said that more black Americans were living with the AIDS virus than the infected populations in Botswana, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Namibia, Rwanda or Vietnam — 7 of the 15 countries that receive support from the administration’s anti-AIDS program.

The international effort is guided by a strategic plan, clear benchmarks like the prevention of seven million H.I.V. infections by 2010 and annual progress reports to Congress, the group said. By contrast, it went on, “America itself has no strategic plan to combat its own epidemic.”

In a telephone interview, Dr. Fenton said, “We recognize this is a crisis, and clearly more can be done.”

The institute, based in Los Angeles, describes itself as the only national H.I.V./AIDS study group focused exclusively on black people. Phill Wilson, the group’s chief executive and an author of the report, said his group supported the government’s international anti-AIDS program. But Mr. Wilson’s report also said that “American policy makers behave as if AIDS exists ‘elsewhere’ — as if the AIDS problem has been effectively solved” in this country.

The group also chided the government for not reporting H.I.V. statistics to the United Nations for inclusion in its biannual report.

Dr. Fenton said the C.D.C. had ensured that its data were forwarded to officials in the Department of Health and Human Services and was investigating why the data were not in the United Nations report.

Others speaking for the agency said the answer would have to come from the State Department, which did not respond to an inquiry.

Dr. Helene Gayle, president of CARE and a former director of H.I.V. prevention efforts at the disease control centers, told reporters on Tuesday that the United States needed to devote more resources to care for people with sexually transmitted diseases. Such infections can increase the risk of H.I.V. infection.

The federal government and communities needed to promote more testing among all people, particularly blacks, to detect H.I.V. infection in its earliest stages when treatment is more effective, Dr. Gayle said.

Also, she said, more needed to be done to promote needle exchange programs, which have proved effective in preventing H.I.V. infection among injecting drug users but that are illegal in many places.

The United Nations report said that in Rwanda and Zimbabwe, changes in sexual behavior had led to declines in the number of new H.I.V. infections.

Condom use is increasing among young people with multiple partners in many countries and more young people are postponing their initial sexual intercourse before age 15.

The percentage of pregnant women receiving antiretroviral drugs to prevent transmission of H.I.V. to their infants increased to 33 percent in 2007 from 14 percent in 2005. During the same period, the number of new infections among children fell to 370,000 from 410,000.

The United Nations report affirmed treatment gains in Namibia, which increased treatment to 88 percent of the estimated need in 2007, from 1 percent in 2003; and in Cambodia, where the percentage rose to 67 in 2007 from 14 percent in 2004. Other countries with high treatment rates are Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba and Laos.

In most areas of the world, more women than men are receiving antiretroviral therapy, the report said.

Despite inadequate monitoring systems in many countries, data suggest that most of the H.I.V. epidemics in the Caribbean appear to have stabilized. A few have declined in urban areas in the Dominican Republic and Haiti which have had the largest epidemics in the region.

Increased treatment was partly responsible for a decline in AIDS-related deaths to an estimated 2 million in 2007 from 2.2 million in 2005.

The AIDS epidemic has had less overall economic effect than earlier feared, the report said, but is having profound negative effects in industries and agriculture in high-prevalence countries.

The United Nations has set 2015 as the year by which it hopes to reverse the epidemic. But even if the world achieved that goal, the report said, “the epidemic would remain an overriding global challenge for decades.”

To underscore the point, the United Nations said that for every two people who received treatment, five people became newly infected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/health/research/30aids.html?scp=1&sq=AIDS%20and%20African%20Americans&st=cse

Posted by lois at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2008

UK: study and article relevant to the U.S. :The real cost of prison. Moral, social and political arguments for and against prison are all very well. But what about value for money?

The real cost of prison
Moral, social and political arguments for and against prison are all very well. But what about value for money?
by Kevin marsh
Monday July 28 2008

In 1993, the UK prison population was 44,000. Today it is over 83,000. This trend is set to continue: the government has recently announced an extra £3.8bn to create 20,000 more prison places.

In the UK it is estimated that each new prison place costs £119,000 and that the annual average cost for each prisoner exceeds £40,000. Such huge public expenditure should not be spent without question. But where value for money models are widely applied in other state services like healthcare, they have rarely been used to test the value of the criminal justice sector.

It might be true that incarceration reduces re-offending, but the cost of the prison system still has to justify that reduction. Is the cost of cutting offending through prisons too high? Could alternatives provide better value for money?

These are the questions I and my colleagues from the Matrix Knowledge Group
(http://www.matrixknowledge.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/the-economic-case-for-and-against-prison_web.pdf)
have sought to address in our latest research. Using data from the US and the UK from 1996, we measured the net benefit of alternatives to prison. The result? Alternatives to prison seem to deliver a better return on public money.

Residential drug treatment programmes, for example, offer a £200,000 net benefit over prison over the lifetime of an offender. This is because drug treatment programmes are cheaper to run than incarceration systems and because they deliver lower re-offending rates. Similarly, using surveillance instead of cells saves £125,000 per convict.

This research could be used to argue that we simply have to reduce the cost of prison per prisoner to make it deliver value for money. If we cut corners and McDonald's-ise our cells, wouldn't prisons then deliver value for money? Our research suggests not. Once you crunch the numbers, investing more in prisons per head actually delivers increased savings in the long run. Because of associated reductions in re-offending rates, prisons which include educational and vocational programmes save society £50,000 for each inmate whilst prison with drug treatment saves £125,000.

Other work supports our findings, with some key studies indicating that prison as we know it is completely unjustifiable on economic grounds. Cynthia McDougall and colleagues point out that for every $1 spent on prison, only $0.24 to $0.36 is saved on avoiding offending. This contrasts to spending on probation, which delivers $1.70 in benefits for every dollar spent.

The debate for and against prisons has historically focused on the moral, political and social arguments for sentencing. But public money is scarce; we need to make sure that the benefits of our prisons outweigh their costs. Whatever penal policy we decide to pursue, ignoring the economic dimension to this argument is something we can no longer afford to do.
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This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday July 28 2008. It was last updated at 19:30 on July 28 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/28/justice.prisonsandprobation/print

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

July 20, 2008

TN: Pregnant Woman Is Jailed Under ICE Pact

July 20, 2008
Immigrant, Pregnant, Is Jailed Under Pact
By JULIA PRESTON

It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic violation.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.

Mrs. Villegas’s arrest has focused new attention on a cooperation agreement signed in April 2007 between federal immigration authorities and Davidson County, which shares a consolidated government with Nashville, that gave immigration enforcement powers to county officers. It is one of 57 agreements, known formally as 287G, that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has signed in the last two years with county and local police departments across the country under a rapidly expanding program.

Nashville officials have praised the agreement as a successful partnership between local and federal government.

“We are able to identify and report individuals who are here illegally and have been charged with a criminal offense, while at the same time remaining a friendly and open city to our new legal residents,” Karl Dean, the mayor of Nashville, said in a statement on Friday.

Lawyers and immigrant advocates say Mrs. Villegas’s case shows how local police can exceed their authority when they seek to act on immigration laws they are not fully trained to enforce.

“Had it not been for the 287G program, she would not have been taken down to jail,” said A. Gregory Ramos, a lawyer who is a former president of the Nashville Bar Association. “It was sold as something to make the community safer by taking dangerous criminals off the streets. But it has been operated so broadly that we are getting pregnant women arrested for simple driving offenses, and we’re not getting rid of the robbers and gang members.”

Mrs. Villegas, who is 33, has lived in the United States since 1996, and has three other children besides the newborn who are American citizens because they were born here.

She was stopped on July 3 in her husband’s pickup truck by a police officer from Berry Hill, a Nashville suburb, initially for “careless driving.” After Mrs. Villegas told the officer she did not have a license, he did not issue a ticket but arrested her instead. Elliott Ozment, Mrs. Villegas’s lawyer, said driving without a license is a misdemeanor in Tennessee that police officers generally handle with a citation, not an arrest.

After Mrs. Villegas was taken to the Davidson County jail, a federal immigration agent working there as part of the cooperation agreement conducted a background check. It showed that Mrs. Villegas was an illegal immigrant who had been deported once from the United States in March 1996, Karla Weikal, a spokeswoman for the county sheriff, said. She had no other criminal record.

As a result, immigration agents issued an order to take charge of Mrs. Villegas once she was released by the local authorities. Based on that order, county officers designated her a medium-security inmate in the jail, Ms. Weikal said.

So when Mrs. Villegas went into labor on the night of July 5, she was handcuffed and accompanied by a deputy as she was taken by ambulance to Nashville General Hospital at Meharry. Cuffs chaining her foot to the hospital bed were opened when she reached the final stages of labor, Mrs. Villegas said.

“I felt like they were treating me like a criminal person,” Mrs. Villegas said, speaking in Spanish in a telephone interview. The phone in her room was turned off, and she was not permitted to speak with her husband when he came to retrieve their newborn son from the hospital on July 7 as she returned to jail, she said.

As Mrs. Villegas left the hospital, a nurse offered her a breast pump but a sheriff’s deputy said she could not take it into the jail, Mrs. Villegas said.

Mr. Ozment, the lawyer, said Mrs. Villegas would never have been detained without the 287G cooperation agreement.

“Whether this lady was documented or undocumented should not affect how she was treated in her late pregnant condition and as she was going through labor and bonding with her new baby,” Mr. Ozment said.

On July 8, Mrs. Villegas was taken to court, where she pleaded guilty to driving without a license and was sentenced to time served. Immigration agents immediately released her while a deportation case proceeds, following a policy adopted last year by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to avoid separating babies from nursing mothers.

Ms. Weikal said Mrs. Villegas’s jail stay was prolonged by the Independence Day holiday weekend, when the courts were closed.

“There is a perception that she was treated different from other inmates, and it just is not true,” Ms. Weikal said. “Unfortunately the business of corrections is that families are separated. It’s not pretty, it’s not understandable to a lot of people.”

She said that it was standard procedure to bar medical equipment like a breast pump from the jail.

More than 60,000 illegal immigrants have been identified for deportation since 2006 through 287G cooperation programs, said Richard Rocha, a spokesman for the federal immigration agency. Most of the agreements are aimed at increasing the screening of immigrant convicts serving sentences in local jails, in order to speed their deportation. Some, like Nashville’s, provide for immigration screening right after any foreign-born person is arrested.

Arrests of immigrants have increased rapidly in Tennessee since early 2006, when the state stopped allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, after five years when they had been able to drive legally.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/us/20immig.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=us&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2008

A measure of justice for Regina McKnight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 25, 2008

UK: Plan to shut women's jails is shelved

From (London) Times Online
June 24, 2008
Plan to shut women's jails is shelved
Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

Radical proposals to close all 13 women's jails in England and Wales and replace them with small house units holding up to 20 offenders were today rejected by the Government.

A working party within the Ministry of Justice finally buried the key plan from a review of women in the justice system after concluding that shutting the existing jails over the next decade and replacing them with up to 150 smaller units was impractical.

Today's announcement is a bitter blow to penal reform groups who had put their trust in key female members of the Government, including those in the Justice Ministry and Attorney-General's office, being able to deliver the biggest shake-up in the way female offenders are treated in prisons.

Instead the Ministry of Justice highlighted initiatives to support women including pilot projects in five jails in which a new search technique is being used which does not require them to remove their underwear.

The women's prison population is currently 4,502 — three lower than the all time record — and Ministry of Justice sources said that no women’s jails are to close.

Baroness Corston proposed closing women’s jails and replacing them with a network of small units located in city centres and run by families of women but even as her report was published last year Ministry of Justice sources made clear there was no money to implement such an ambitious and controversial proposal.

The Ministry of Justice review concluded that the model of small units would be unable to provide on site all the facilities needed to support and help women prisoners including making it easier for families to visit and meeting their resettlement needs. Although the review team accepted the principle of small units it said there were weaknesses including providing the full range of services including education, drug treatment and running courses to deal with the offending behaviour.

"A particular risk would be to the delivery of small scale services to meet particularly complex needs, as we may not be able to gather enough offenders in any one location to deliver efficiently without increasing movement around the estate," the Justice Ministry said today.

It also said that some women consulted about the proposal had expressed concern about the increased likelihood of bullying in a potentially claustrophobic environment of small units.

The Justice Ministry also said that creating small units might mean women having to be moved more frequently to other units where services for particular problems such as drug and alcohol abuse are available.

It also warned that there would a significant challenge for the prison service to handle high to low risk women offenders in up to 150 units around England and Wales.

Instead of the radical reform outlined by Baroness Corston, the Ministry is to create a 77-place wing within Bronzefleld women's jail in Middlesex which has been designed specifically to meet women’s needs. At two other women's prisons accommodation is to be provided adjacent to the jail for women to spend time with their children.

The Prison Reform Trust, a penal reform group, said that progress towards implementing the proposals from Baroness Corston's review was painfully slow. Juliet Lyon, director of the trust, said: "‘It’s clear that this government is so busy planning how to waste billions of public money on so-called ‘Titan’ prisons that it cannot find the time or money to create a decent, effective justice system for women. A national network of women’s supervision and support centres would enable women offenders to beat addiction, receive mental healthcare, get out of debt and gain skills to work and look after their children."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4205516.ece

Posted by lois at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Venezuela: Amid Despair in a Venezuelan Prison, Strains of Hope From a Music Program

June 23, 2008
Los Teques Journal
Amid Despair in a Venezuelan Prison, Strains of Hope From a Music Program
By SIMON ROMERO
NY Times

LOS TEQUES, Venezuela — When Nurul Asyiqin Ahmad was taken seven months ago to her cell at the National Institute of Feminine Orientation, a prison perched on a hill in this city of slums on the outskirts of Caracas, learning how to play Beethoven was one of the last things on her mind.

“The despair gripped me, like a nightmare had become my life,” said Ms. Ahmad, 26, a shy law student from Malaysia who claims she is innocent of charges of trying to smuggle cocaine on a flight from Caracas to Paris. “But when the music begins, I am lifted away from this place.” Ms. Ahmad plays violin and sings in the prison’s orchestra.

In a project extending Venezuela’s renowned system of youth orchestras to some of the country’s most hardened prisons, Ms. Ahmad and hundreds of other prisoners are learning a repertory that includes Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and folk songs from the Venezuelan plains.

The budding musicians include murderers, kidnappers, thieves and, here at the women’s prison, dozens of narcomulas, or drug mules, as small-scale drug smugglers are called. The project, which began a year ago, is expanding this year to five prisons from three.

“This is our attempt to achieve the humanization of prison life,” said Kleiberth Lenin Mora, 32, a lawyer who helped create the prison orchestras, modeling them on the system that teaches tens of thousands of poor children in Venezuela classical music. “We start with the simple idea that performing music lifts the human being to another level.”

Few nations have prison systems as much in need of humanizing as Venezuela, where 498 inmates out of a total population of 21,201 were killed in 2007, according to the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, a group that monitors prison violence.

The women’s prison, the scene of gang fights and hunger strikes by inmates in recent months, is not immune to this violence. But it is not all bleak. Inmates have free access to the Internet. They can pay to use cellphones. A commissary sells soft drinks and junk food.

And now INOF (pronounced like the word “enough”), the acronym the prison is known by in Spanish, has its orchestra, which most of the more than 300 women incarcerated here opt to avoid. But the 40 or so who have joined find themselves enmeshed in an experience that was unexpected in their lives in prison and in their lives out of prison.

“Before this my music was reggaetón,” said Irma González, 29, a street vendor serving a six-year sentence for robbery, referring to the fusion of reggae, hip-hop and Latin pop that is widely popular in Venezuelan slums. Now she plays the double bass. Her proudest moment, she said, was when her four children, ages 14, 13, 10 and 9, recently came here to watch her play.

“When they applauded me, I finally felt useful in this life,” said Ms. González. Like other participants, she hopes to reduce her term by playing in the orchestra, which judges may consider the equivalent of hours of study.

Officials say it is too early to tell whether the project will improve overall conditions here and at the two prisons for men where it started, in the Andean states of Mérida and Táchira. No stars have emerged like Gustavo Dudamel, the 27-year-old from the youth-orchestra system named as the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

For now, the project, which receives $3 million in funding from President Hugo Chávez’s government and the Inter-American Development Bank, takes baby steps. It staged its first public performance last month in Teresa Carreño Theater in Caracas. And it insists its participants hew to a few specific rules.

For instance, no one can threaten the professors, many of whom are drawn from the youth-orchestra system. Everyone must speak clearly during discussions in the daily practice sessions. Everyone must stand up straight and take care of his or her instrument. Smoking and chewing tobacco are not allowed.

The orchestra at INOF is one of the most cosmopolitan in Venezuela. Many of the inmates are foreigners arrested on drug-smuggling charges. Women from Colombia, Spain, Malaysia and the Netherlands play instruments or sing in the chorus alongside Venezuelans.

“I drain away my bad thoughts in the orchestra,” said Joanny Aldana, 29, a viola player serving a nine-year sentence for kidnapping and auto theft. Like some of the other inmates, she is imprisoned here with her child, a 2-year-old daughter. Still, she despairs sometimes.

“There’s the pain of my children, of having destroyed my life, my youth,” Ms. Aldana said.

Perhaps no amount of music can make up for such loss. Perhaps that explains the fervor with which some of the women play their instruments or sing. It is not uncommon to see one of them shedding a tear when a certain note is struck.

For Yusveisy Torrealba, 18, that moment comes when the chorus sings a few words from “Caramba,” the folk song by the Venezuelan composer Otilio Galíndez performed with the cuatro, a four-string guitar. Ms. Torrealba was caught in April taking cocaine on a flight to Orlando, Fla.

In her soft voice, she sang these lines for a visitor one recent afternoon:

Caramba, my love, caramba

The things we have missed

The gossip I could only hear

Between the rocks of the river.

“Caramba,” she repeated quietly, as if contemplating how much time remained in an eight-year sentence that began last month. “The only thing keeping me together is this music.”

Sandra La Fuente P. contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/world/americas/23venezuela.html?scp=3&sq=Venezuela&st=nyt

Posted by lois at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2008

Why Is Mom in Rehab?

June 14, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Is Mom in Rehab?
By CHARLES M. BLOW
At this URL is the accompanying graph which is the major part of this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/14/opinion/14blow.html?scp=1&sq=Why+Mom+is+in+Rehab&st=nyt

The actress Tatum O’Neal was arrested recently on charges of buying crack cocaine from a man on the street near her New York City home. She is a 44-year-old mother of three. She has spent years in and out of drug abuse treatment (which she chronicled in her 2004 memoir), and according to her publicist she will continue to “attend meetings” for drug and alcohol abuse.

Ms. O’Neal illustrates a disturbing trend among those being admitted to substance abuse treatment services: a growing percentage of older women are being treated for harder drugs.

Data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration revealed that the total number of admissions to treatment services from 1996 to 2005 (the last year for which detailed data are available) stayed about the same among people under 40, but jumped 52 percent among those 40 and older. Of the 40 and older group, the rise in admissions among men was 44 percent. Among women, it was 82 percent.

(During the same span, the population in the United States age 40 and older grew by only 19 percent.)

Of these women, admissions for nonsmoked cocaine have doubled; admissions for crack cocaine have tripled; admissions for opiates other than heroin have nearly quadrupled; and admissions for methamphetamines have increased sevenfold.

These trends could grow stronger. A 2006 report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse focused on drug use among baby boomers, all of whom were 41 to 59 years old in 2005. It concluded that “the large size of this cohort, coupled with greater lifetime rates of drug use than previous generations, might result in unprecedented high numbers of older drug users in the next 15 to 20 years.”

There was a time when we thought that the biggest substance abuse threat to older women was alcoholism and abuse of prescription drugs.

Ten years ago this month, Betty Ford and the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University issued a report called “Under the Rug: Substance Abuse and the Mature Woman.” At the time, Joseph Califano, president of the center said: “Abuse and addiction to alcohol and psychoactive drugs and tobacco by women 60 and older is an inexcusable area of neglect.”

But since boomers can’t seem to shake their street-drug demons, the focus needs to shift.

Posted by lois at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2008

Coming Home After a Reduced Sentence. Those Released Since Disparities in Cocaine Penalties Were Offset Find a Different World.

Coming Home After a Reduced Sentence
Those Released Since Disparities in Cocaine Penalties Were Offset Find a Different World

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 8, 2008; A02

Days after her release from prison, Nerika Jenkins made a bold prediction: "I'll bounce right back into society."

Although the world changed considerably over the 11 years of her imprisonment, she said, "I'm not afraid." She took vocational classes -- masonry, carpentry, painting, culinary arts, Microsoft Excel and horticulture -- while serving time in Philadelphia and Danbury, Conn. "I'm just ready to achieve my short-term goal, building a nursing home," she said. "They're always in need of places for the elderly."

More than 7,000 crack cocaine offenders such as Jenkins, 36, have received reduced sentences since March, when the U.S. Sentencing Commission put retroactive sentence guidelines into effect to offset what the commission felt were overly harsh punishments for crack cocaine related crimes, and it is an open question whether they will succeed or return to a life behind bars.

The majority of the reductions so far have been granted in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, covering Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the Carolinas, according to a report by the Sentencing Commission on retroactive crack cocaine sentencing released in May. By contrast, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, covering California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Alaska, Nevada, as well as other states and territories, has granted about the same number of reductions as the smallest jurisdiction, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington.

About 35 percent of inmates who were granted reductions by federal courts had been released as of May 31, according to the Bureau of Prisons. Among them is Willie Mays Aikens, the former Major League Baseball slugger whose 15-year sentence for possessing 63 grams of crack cocaine -- about the weight of a large Snickers candy bar -- made him a cause celebre among activists fighting long crack cocaine punishments.

Aikens was released in the first week of June, nearly 22 years to the day after the cocaine overdose of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias. Bias's death spurred Congress to pass the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Under the mistaken belief that Bias's death was caused by crack cocaine, lawmakers made sentences for crack cocaine crimes harsher than those committed for powder cocaine by a 100-to-1 ratio.

Nearly 90 percent of those who received the tough sentences for crack cocaine were black men and women. Most users and dealers of powder cocaine are white and Latino.

Jenkins is one of the people who activists say were wrongly affected by the law: wives and girlfriends. She was snared by police in New York who accused her of collaborating with a boyfriend who was dealing crack in Virginia. Prosecutors asked her to testify, but she refused, saying she knew nothing of the boyfriend's operation.

"I went to trial, and they gave me 230 months, 19 years," said Jenkins, a first-time offender. When her anger subsided, she vowed not to languish in prison, and she took courses.

When the sentencing commission decided to make the new guidelines retroactive so that convicts in prison could take advantage, Jenkins and her mother, Ira Lee Johnson, filed a motion to reduce her jail time.

"I became aware of it in January," she said. The next month, a judge in Virginia, where the case originated, sent her a letter informing her that she was eligible for immediate release. Prosecutors were given a week to respond, and they did, objecting to a reduction. The judge overruled them.

Within weeks, Jenkins's sentence was reduced from 230 months to 151. "I had to serve four extra months because of a discrepancy between what the judge said and what the paperwork said," Jenkins complained, but soon she was in a halfway house.

Natasha J. Marshall, 48, underwent a similar experience in Fresno, Calif., when police arrested her husband, a drug dealer. Marshall said she had no idea that he was dealing, but she was sentenced to 15 years. A sentence reduction released her in March, after she had served 11.

Now living in an apartment with her daughter, Marshall is readjusting to a world dominated by devices that were not widely used when she entered the system: cellphones, flat-screen televisions and personal computers. Wanting a job, she was startled to find that applications are now submitted online. After spending a quarter of her life behind bars, she is still haunted.

"I can't sleep for more than five hours," Marshall said, with the cacophony of prison life echoing in her dreams. After 11 years of showers, she always takes a bath.

Slowly but surely, said her probation officer, Brian Bedrosian, Marshall is recovering nicely. "She calls in, and she's taking care of business," he said.

Marshall enrolled in an online business administration course at Ashford University in Clinton, Iowa. "She's doing very well," said Brian Zigich, her enrollment adviser. "She's on the ball. She's one of my best students. You can see the motivation in her. She's one of the few you don't have to worry about."

Zigich's characterization of Marshall defies concerns by the Justice Department about the impact that crack sentencing reductions would have on public safety. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey warned that the release of crack offenders would possibly return dangerous drug dealers back to neighborhoods ravaged by the crack cocaine trade.

Mukasey and other department officials argued that inmates would overwhelm the federal court system with motions for sentence reductions, forcing prosecutors to virtually retry the cases.

That has yet to happen, said Mary Price, vice president and general counsel for Families Against Mandatory Minimums. "We haven't heard anything from the department or elsewhere bearing out their initial fear that these releases would happen in some en masse way, pouring out people into communities," she said.

Price acknowledged that it is too early to fully gauge the impact of the reductions. "There will be people who will find themselves in this situation again -- there's no question about that," she said. "But that would happen if we let them [out] early or at their regular time."

The Bureau of Prisons, federal probation officials and the commission have not released information showing how many inmates have committed crimes in the three months since the retroaction was applied.

"I'm very hopeful that our federal government is keeping track of the recidivism numbers," said Charles D. Stimson, a former federal prosecutor who is now a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "I'm not one to suggest that all those who are eligible for release will be re-arrested. I'm sure they won't be. But it would be helpful to inform the public and [Congress] on an ongoing basis."

Posted by lois at 08:19 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2008

Coalition for Women Prisoners’ Re-entry Committee Publishes New Book for Women Returning Home from Incarceration

Coalition for Women Prisoners’ Re-entry Committee Publishes New Book for Women Returning Home from Incarceration
May 2008
My Sister’s Keeper, A Book for Women Returning Home From Prison or Jail, is a unique compilation of the words and experiences of women from New York in various stages of returning home from incarceration. My Sister’s Keeper offers peer-to-peer guidance, strength and hope to help women in re-entry cope with challenges of reclaiming their lives. The CA’s Women in Prison Project will distribute the guide to women incarcerated in New York’s correctional facilities, as well as women in alternative to incarceration programs and transitional services programs throughout New York State.

http://www.correctionalassociation.org/WIPP/publications/MySistersKeeper_Re-EntryGuide.pdf

Posted by lois at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2008

MA: For women addicts, jail can replace treatment. Some sent for care must wait at prison

For women addicts, jail can replace treatment
Some sent for care must wait at prison

May 15, 2008
Boston Globe
This story was written by Globe correspondents Kelsey Abbruzzese, Brittany Peats, and Jordan Zappala.

Tina Wambolt knew she needed help battling her alcoholism. What she didn't need were strip searches and a cell in the Framingham women's prison.

Wambolt, 33, of Ashby, fell through a crack in the Massachusetts legal system, into a gap that routinely sends women with serious alcohol or substance abuse problems to the women's state prison when no beds are available in treatment facilities.

"They treat you awful, you feel physically violated, and it's just hell. I shouldn't have had to do that," Wambolt said. "I'm not a criminal."

Wambolt's ordeal last September was triggered by a Massachusetts law known as "Section 35," a civil statute under which a person can be involuntarily committed for up to 30 days if a judge rules that he or she poses a threat to himself, herself, or others.

Men who are civilly committed in Massachusetts are sent to a treatment facility on the grounds of MCI-Bridge water that is large enough to house 250 men, and has not resulted in space issues.

However, a chronic shortage of beds for women in the same circumstances means that some civilly committed women are sent to MCI-Framingham, the state's only women's prison.

During 2007, 14 women, including Wambolt, spent time behind bars during their civil commitments for no reason other than lack of space at a treatment center in New Bedford, the only center in Massachusetts dedicated to Section 35 civil commitments for women. Twenty-seven other civilly committed women were sent to MCI-Framingham last year for refusing treatment or other noncompliant behavior, according to the state Department of Public Health.

During the past five years, according to the state Department of Correction, more than 500 civilly committed women spent a few nights to a few weeks at the prison for reasons ranging from a shortage of treatment beds to behavioral issues. A breakdown was not available to determine how many were sent to the prison solely for lack of space.

Jim Kenney, program director at the New Bedford center, said he works closely with court clinicians, who advise judges on civil commitments, and does what he can through training and working with court officials to keep women from spending time in prison rather than at his facility, a gleaming, recently renovated section of an old mill complex off Interstate 195. Before the New Bedford center opened, women committed under Section 35 were sent to smaller facilities even more pressed for space. He pointed to figures showing that since the 84-bed center's opening in 2006, the number of civilly committed women sent to the prison has fallen sharply. From fiscal year 2006 to 2007, that number dropped by more than two-thirds.

But, as Wambolt's mother, Christina DaCruz, put it, "One is too many."

Watching a child's downfall

DaCruz began the civil commitment process when she went to Wambolt's home after her daughter was arrested for drunken driving. When DaCruz arrived, she said, the house reeked and her daughter had been drinking.

"She looked like someone walking in quicksand," DaCruz said. "This is my baby, my beautiful baby. To have seen her go so far down, I'm like, 'I can't stand this.' "

DaCruz said she had previously persuaded Wambolt to go to a 72-hour hospital detox, but her daughter had started drinking the day she was released. After Wambolt threatened suicide, DaCruz filed a civil commitment petition.

At Wambolt's hearing on Sept. 4 last year, the court clinician who examined her - Wambolt did not recall his name, and civil commitment records are sealed - told DaCruz that her daughter was committable, but would have to stay overnight at MCI-Framingham because there were no beds available in New Bedford.

DaCruz said the clinician told her not to worry, because her daughter would be moved the next day and kept away from the general population of convicts. With those reassurances, DaCruz went ahead with the commitment.

Wambolt recalls little of the hearing. "I remember being in court, but it was kind of a blur," she said. "I was kind of in shock."

Wambolt's husband, Brian, said he called MCI-Framingham every day from Sept. 5, the day after her hearing, until Sept. 8. That day, he said, a prison guard told him that his wife had been moved into the prison's general population.

Diane Wiffin, the state Department of Correction's director of public affairs, wrote in an e-mail that Wambolt was housed and treated in accordance with state law. In the same e-mail, prison Superintendent Lynn Bissonnette wrote that standard practice for women committed under Section 35 is to have them medically detoxed until cleared by a physician. Then they are housed in an area of the prison for women awaiting trial - not among convicted criminals - in a cell alone, or with another woman who has been civilly committed.

That made little difference to Wambolt. "It's like you see on TV. It's prison," she said.

Wambolt is 5 feet, 1 inch tall and weighs 110 pounds, with a pixie haircut and a nose piercing, and her mother and her husband worried for her safety. Wambolt said her cell was next to a woman accused of killing her baby. She added that two other women who were sent to MCI-Framingham for civil commitments spent time in solitary confinement.

"I was threatened to be beaten up," Wambolt recalled. "I was tired and you're stuck there and you swear you just become one of them."

MCI-Framingham's substance abuse program is available only to convicted criminals, so Wambolt and other women waiting to go to treatment centers found themselves in limbo. They received medicine to help them detox, but were ineligible for counseling or other addiction treatments that are available at the New Bedford center. Bissonnette wrote in the e-mail that civilly committed women are ineligible for the prison's treatment program so the prison can "transition them to a community setting as soon as possible."

Five days after the commitment hearing, DaCruz visited her daughter in prison.

"Of course I start crying," DaCruz said. "You have to fill out a paper about why you're there and the guard at the window read the paper and said, 'You know, it happens all the time. People send their family in for committals and they just get lost.' "

Wambolt finally reached the New Bedford treatment center on Sept. 10 - six days after her commitment hearing. DaCruz, who said she believes the transfer happened because of her frantic phone calls, said she was told by an official with the state Department of Public Health, which oversees the New Bedford center, that the center had not been aware of her daughter's existence until the phone calls.

Once she arrived at the New Bedford center, Wambolt said, she saw eight empty beds. Wambolt added that she had to spend more time in intensive detox because of the drugs given to her for medical detox at the prison.

Wambolt is not alone. A woman identified in state Department of Public Health documents as Debra P. entered MCI-Framingham as a civil commitment from the Cambridge District Court on July 18 last year. According to Department of Public Health records, she was sent to prison because there were no open beds in New Bedford. She spent 15 days at MCI-Framingham before being transferred to the center.

Trina P. did not even see the New Bedford facility. When she was committed on Sept. 27 last year, she, too, was sent to MCI-Framingham because of a lack of bed space. Department of Public Health records show she was released from the prison nearly a month later, on Oct. 24, when her commitment expired, having received none of the benefits offered at the New Bedford center.

Legislators hoping to stop civilly committed women from spending time in prison have fought a fruitless battle. Since at least 1989, Massachusetts lawmakers have proposed eliminating MCI-Framingham as a civil commitment option, which would require that women like Wambolt who face no criminal charges are sent to a treatment center. Other bills have sought to extend the time women spend in a treatment center under Section 35. But each year, these bills have failed to win passage and women like Wambolt end up behind bars.

"They haven't committed a crime," said Representative Kay Khan, a Newton Democrat who is the House sponsor of the bill. "Why should they be in a prison?"

Khan, who worked as a clinical psychiatric nurse specialist, said she hopes that the Patrick administration will support the bill and that the departments of Correction and Public Health will provide funding for added beds.

"People need to understand that these people come back out into our community and it really is a public safety issue," she said.

A kinder treatment

Wambolt said she was treated successfully at New Bedford. She said that other than her intensive detox, "It was heaven."

"Nobody strip-searched me, nobody's out there screaming at you, nobody's going to beat you up," she said. "Nobody's mean to you. They really do try to help."

At the center, intensive detox can last from three to seven days. The women sleep in barracks-style rooms with three other patients. There is no furniture except for four bolted-down twin beds. After detox, the women are moved to a Structured Outpatient Addiction Program. For the remainder of the 30-day treatment, they attend seven meetings daily, including lectures on after-care options, Kenney said.

Wambolt added that she is recovering, seeing addiction counselors, and working through an after-care program. Still, her mother bears guilt, and Wambolt bears resentment. As she put it, she was treated like a criminal rather than a woman suffering from a disease.

"I don't even know how the hell we got through that," she said.

Kelsey Abbruzzese, Brittany Peats, and Jordan Zappala are graduate journalism students at Boston University. They researched and wrote this story under the supervision of BU professors Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff, former members of the Globe Spotlight Team.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/05/15/for_women_addicts_jail_can_replace_treatment?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2008

Regina McKnight -- Victory at Long Last!

Regina McKnight -- Victory at Long Last

On May 11, 2008 the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Regina McKnight did not have a fair trial when she was convicted in 2001 for homicide by child abuse. In 2001 Ms. McKnight became the first woman in South Carolina to be convicted of homicide by child abuse as a result of suffering an unintentional stillbirth.

Yesterday, after eight long years, a unanimous South Carolina Supreme Court finally reversed the twenty-year homicide conviction of Regina McKnight. The decision recognizes that the claim that cocaine is linked to stillbirths is based on "outdated" and inaccurate medical information.

Ms. McKnight was arrested in 1999, several months after she experienced a stillbirth at Conway Hospital. McKnight's conviction was based on the jury's acceptance of Junk Science -- the scientifically unsupported claim that her cocaine use caused the stillbirth. Ms. McKnight had no prior arrest history and even prosecutors agreed that she had no intention of harming the fetus or losing the pregnancy. Nevertheless, upon conviction she was given a twenty-year sentence, suspended to twelve years in prison with no chance for parole. Her sentence would have kept her imprisoned until 2010.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women has been working on Ms. McKnight's behalf for nearly a decade. One of NAPW's main commitments is to national and local organizing, mobilizing preeminent medical, public health and child welfare organizations and experts to speak out on behalf of pregnant women and the need to base policy on science not prejudice. From the beginning of Ms. McKnight's case, NAPW and our allies at the Drug Policy Alliance have worked with leading South Carolina and national organizations and experts to oppose the prosecution and conviction.

In the most recent round of litigation, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the Drug Policy Alliance, and South Carolina counsel Susan K. Dunn represented organizations including the South Carolina Medical Association, the South Carolina Nurses Association, the South Carolina Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors, and the South Carolina Coalition for Healthy Families in an amicus (friend of the court) brief. The amicus brief argued that women do not lose their right to a fair trial upon becoming pregnant and challenged the validity of the state's evidence claiming that cocaine use caused the stillbirth.

The medical and public health groups and experts also raised concerns about the consequences of South Carolina's policy of arresting pregnant women who experience drug problems. The amicus brief cited the fact that threatening pregnant women with jail time deters them from seeking prenatal care and other vital services, as has been the case in South Carolina since the Whitner ruling in 1997 that originally permitted prosecution of pregnant women under state child endangerment.

In 2002, NAPW, with attorney David Goldberg and numerous allies, challenged the constitutionality of using homicide statutes to prosecute women who experience stillbirths. On appeal, a bare majority of the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction and the new interpretation of the state's homicide law. The Court held that a pregnant woman who unintentionally heightens the risk of a stillbirth could be found guilty of "extreme indifference to human life" homicide. Under this decision a conviction for homicide is permitted on any evidence that a pregnant woman engaged in activity "public[ly] know[n]" to be "potentially fatal" to a fetus. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the decision.

Yesterday's ruling focused on the question of whether Ms. McKnight received a fair trial and concluded that Ms. McKnight's counsel was "ineffective in her preparation of McKnight's defense through expert testimony and cross-examination." The decision also indicated that the medical and scientific basis for the prosecution and that of other women in the state was based on outdated and inaccurate medical information.

The ruling addressed a petition filed on behalf of Ms. McKnight seeking judicial review to determine whether she was unlawfully imprisoned lawfully and should be released from custody. A successful petition must show that the court ordered the imprisonment based on a legal or factual error. Ms. McKnight's counsel argued that the factual error was accepting a causal link between McKnight's cocaine use and her stillbirth. The court held that the legal errors included not calling medical experts as witnesses who could refute that link, failing to investigate the medical evidence the state's witnesses relied on (and which was based on "outdated" scientific studies), failing to show the jury the autopsy report that indicated that an infection was the primary cause of the stillbirth, and failing to challenge the court's confusing and contradictory instructions to the jury of what "intent" Ms. McKnight had to have.

Our press release on the decision features two South Carolina leaders and NAPW allies:

"Significantly, the opinion acknowledges that current research simply does not support the assumption that prenatal exposure to cocaine results in harm to the fetus, and the opinion makes clear that it is certainly 'no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the urban poor," said Susan K. Dunn, South Carolina co-counsel for amicus. "This decision puts Solicitors [prosecutors] across the state on notice that they must actually prove that an illegal drug has risked or caused harm—not simply rely on prejudice and medical misinformation.

"Ms. McKnight is one of more than 500 women in South Carolina who experience stillbirths each year, and in many of those cases, medicine just can't determine the cause," said Brandi Parrish, coordinator of the South Carolina Coalition for Healthy Families and NAPW local ally. "It is a tragedy that Ms. McKnight has been in prison for nearly eight years for a crime she did not commit. Families in South Carolina are not helped by treating stillbirths as crimes and wasting hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to imprison innocent mothers."

In the post-conviction phase of the case, Ms. McKnight was directly represented by C. Rauch Wise of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina Foundation, Inc., and Matthew Hersh and Julie Carpenter of the law firm Jenner & Block for the DKT Liberty Project. NAPW is exceedingly grateful to the DKT Liberty Project for coming to us and offering their support, providing extraordinary legal talent, and having the commitment to continue the fight on behalf of Ms. McKnight.

What does Ms. McKnight have to say?

Rauch ("Rock") Wise went to the prison to give Ms. McKnight the good news in person. She was thrilled but somewhat in shock. As Rock was leaving, he asked her for a hug. She told him it was against prison rules. Rock asked for permission from the prison guard. Permission was not granted: Just one small denial that captures so much of the overall cruelty and injustice of this case.

By 5:00 p.m. though, the ruling was sinking in and Ms. McKnight was able to call collect from the prison. She said how happy she was, and that "It has been a very long road." She thanked everyone for sticking with her.

Unfortunately she will not be released immediately. The State has fifteen days to petition for reconsideration and then the State will decide whether to re-try her. Her counsel and allies are all working on ways to speed up her release and to find community support systems for her when that day comes.

What can you do?

The Charlotte Observer , the Myrtle Beach News and papers around the country are starting to report on Ms. McKnight's victory. How can you help right now? Please check out the news stories and post your own comment about why the decision is good, and prosecutions of pregnant women and new mothers are bad for mothers and babies.

http://www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/blog/

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

May 07, 2008

MA: Packed Prisons. The how and why of overcrowding.

Packed Prisons
The how and why of overcrowding
By CARA BAYLES

Phillip is a gentleman. He folds up his limbs with poise and wears wool pants with an impeccable crease. He's prone to diatribes against misogyny. He's a "voracious reader," and has a sixth sense for "figuring people out." He has a gentle, not entirely trusting way of regarding a person. He can talk a mile, but also listens; not simply to your words, but the words between them. He radiates a wavelength that's easy to tune into.

He's 47 years old, and he's spent 21 of those years in prison.

***
The US prison population grew eight-fold since 1970; more than 2.3 million people are incarcerated nationally. The rising numbers aren't proportional to population growth; the Pew Institute recently reported that for the first time in history, more than one in every 100 Americans is incarcerated. Don't like those odds? One in 30 men aged 20 to 34 is locked up, and that jumps to one in nine for black men. People of color make up 70 percent of the prison population, the reverse of the US race ratio outside prison walls.

The Massachusetts prison population grew by 3 percent since 2006, and overcrowding is pandemic. Two years ago, Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) facilities were at 134 percent capacity. Now they've reached 143 percent. But that's merely a median ... MCI Framingham, the state's largest women's prison, is at 323 percent capacity. Only two of Massachusetts' 22 facilities are not spilling over capacity.

"Overcrowding means the facility population is greater than the design capacity," says DOC spokeswoman Diane Wiffin. "We turn single cells into doubles, provide more beds in a dormitory."

Hakim Cunningham was recently incarcerated in Massachusetts. "They were putting two or three people to a cell together," he says. "In Concord CI, they have people sleeping on the gym and rec areas in cots."

Such solutions are dangerous, says Joel Pentlarge, acting executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates reforming the state's justice system. "Those cells are very small—typically under 80 square-feet. They're designed to hold only one prisoner," he says. "Those conditions escalate prisoner-on-prisoner violence."

Why is the prison population climbing, and why are people of color disproportionately incarcerated?

The relationship with Massachusetts' crime rate is tenuous; the prison population has climbed steeply since the late 1970s, but crime has wavered up and down, with peaks in the mid '70s and early '80s, and a steady decline since 1990.

Thomas Nolan, a professor of criminal justice at Boston University and retired Boston Police officer, says the rise in imprisonment corresponds with the war on drugs. "What we're seeing nationally, as well as in Massachusetts, is an incremental, long-term trend to incarcerate people, particularly for drugs," he says.

Nolan joined the Boston Police Department (BPD) in 1978, and saw the shift in national priorities play out locally. "In the mid '80s, police departments in urban areas devoted more time and attention to drug enforcement than ever before. Historically, a department goes where the federal funding goes. In the 80s it was the war on drugs, in the '90s it was community policing," he says. "In the 70s we had a small, centralized city drug department of half a dozen officers. Now, every district has its own drug unit. Roxbury even has two of them, a day shift and a night shift. And there's still a city-wide unit. So you've got 100 officers whose sole purpose is enforcement in the war on drugs."

***

Phillip, who asked that his real name not be used, has been shooting heroin since he was 16. He grew up in Cambridge public housing. Both his parents were junkies; his mother died of AIDS in 1997, his 65-year-old father is still in a methadone clinic. His father's face is scarred from "an incident when he fell asleep on a radiator because he was so high."

"There were a couple of times when my father would come into school inebriated and tell the teacher, 'Phillip has to go, he has a doctor's appointment,'" he says. "We'd walk out, and I'd say, 'Do I really have a doctor's appointment, Daddy?' and he'd say, 'No, I just thought you'd like to get out of there.' And I'd say, 'School's what I look forward to. It's the best part of my day.'"

***

While the percentage of people of color in Massachusetts prisons doesn't reach the national figures, they're still overrepresented. Hispanics make up 21 percent of prisoners in a state where they comprise 7.9 percent of the population. Nationally, Latinos make up 20.5 percent of prisoners, and 14.8 percent of the general population.

"It's not that these people are more likely to commit an offense," says Nolan. "They're just more likely to get caught and subsequently incarcerated."

National figures from 2000 indicate whites make up 72 percent of all drug users, yet blacks are five times as likely to get arrested on drug charges.

Their neighborhoods are policed more, according to Nolan. "Law enforcement is concentrating its efforts in communities o