The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

November 12, 2009

Florida leads nation in locking up kids in adult jails

"In five of the six counties, burglary was the most common ticket to the adult system."

Florida leads nation in locking up kids in adult jails
By Colleen Jenkins, St Petersburg Tims Staff Writer
Thursday, November 12, 2009

TAMPA — This week, as the U.S. Supreme Court heard appeals in two Florida juvenile cases, scholars took note that the state leads the nation in locking up kids for life who committed crimes in which no one died.

That isn't Florida's only distinction.

The state sends more children to adult jails and prisons, period. Laws make it easy for prosecutors to pluck young people out of the juvenile justice system before they turn 18.

And in sheer numbers, Hillsborough County transferred more juvenile cases to the adult system than any other county in fiscal year 2007-08, a St. Petersburg Times review of Florida Department of Juvenile Justice data shows. Percentage-wise, Palm Beach County ranked No. 1, with Pinellas following as a close second among the state's largest counties.

Six Tampa Bay area counties — Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Hernando, Citrus and Manatee — deemed juveniles in 1,410 cases bad enough to be charged as adults. On the other end of the spectrum, seven counties in Florida didn't send any young people to the adult system.

Local prosecutors say the numbers reflect an aggressive stance against juvenile crime, but they stress that the decision to charge teens as adults isn't made lightly. Kids who wind up in felony court can still walk away with juvenile sanctions.

"It gives them one more bite at the apple, but we have a much bigger hammer over their head," Hillsborough Assistant State Attorney Pam Bondi said.

Advocates for juvenile justice reform argue that the statutes Florida enacted in the 1990s response to a surge in juvenile crime need updating. Researchers say the laws fail to consider that adolescents, less developed than adults, are often capable of change. Or that, all things equal, juveniles are more likely to re-offend if convicted in adult court.

The stain of an adult conviction, they say, threatens a young person's ability to join the military, get a job or enroll in school.

"You essentially pull the rug out from under these kids, and it's no wonder that they end up back in the system," said Liz Ryan, chief executive officer of the Campaign for Youth Justice in Washington, D.C., an organization dedicated to keeping youth out of the adult criminal justice system.

Statewide during the 2007-08 fiscal year, the number of juveniles transferred to adult court increased to 3,592. That's a 45 percent jump since 2003-04, but only about half as many transfers as the state had at its peak in the mid 1990s.

Hillsborough County prosecutors sent 660 juvenile cases to adult court in 2007-08, the most in the state. Hillsborough also had the most juvenile arrests in 2007 and 2008, according to data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Pinellas prosecutors transferred 517 cases, up from 271 cases four years earlier. Pasco County transferred 84 cases, down from previous years; Hernando had 46, Citrus had 33 and Manatee had 70.

In five of the six counties, burglary was the most common ticket to the adult system.

Researchers say the majority of juvenile cases land in adult court through "direct file," meaning at the discretion of prosecutors. Florida is one of just 15 states that give prosecutors that power.

Some juvenile advocates contend that the decision to transfer juveniles to adult court should be left up to judges because they are neutral parties in the criminal justice system. Pinellas-Pasco Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett counters that the current arrangement includes sufficient checks and balances, allowing judges to give young offenders juvenile sanctions or youthful offender sentences if they don't feel the cases merit adult punishment.

Florida statutes require prosecutors to direct file or seek indictment for certain violent crimes — such as murder — in adult court no matter the offender's age. Beyond that, prosecutors say their filing decisions are dictated by each offender's individual circumstances rather than strict guidelines.

Some crimes are so heinous that the public interest requires adult charges, prosecutors say. That was the rationale they used to pursue adult charges against 13-year-old Jose Guadalupe Walle, who was suspected in a string of rapes and robberies at restaurants in St. Petersburg and Apollo Beach and a Gibsonton home.

"He was 13 going on 25," Bartlett said this week. Some young offenders are "behaving as adults, and the crime itself warrants them to be charged as adults."

Prosecutors also turn to the adult system to deal with repeat offenders.

"Frankly, there are some of the kids we have in juvenile court who have not been amenable to any sanctions we can impose," said Pinellas Judge Raymond Gross. "You run out of options."

The charging decision isn't always clear cut. Defense attorneys and prosecutors spent weeks wrestling over whether Davis Islands teen Jordan Valdez should be charged in juvenile or adult court with fleeing the scene of a fatal crash when she was 16. The teen's attorneys said she was a good kid who made a mistake, and they worried that a felony charge would dash her college scholarship hopes.

Prosecutors ultimately filed an adult charge, saying only that they based the decision on the nature of the crime. Valdez is expected to plead guilty and be sentenced Nov. 24.

In Pinellas, Bartlett admits he struggled with the decision to charge five teenagers as adults after they terrorized neighborhoods over two nights in January and February with firebombs, slashed tires and shattered windows. Though the young men were good students, Bartlett said the amount of property damage and the repeated offenses tipped the scale for him to adult charges.

"I was pretty comfortable in my mind that those kids would never reoffend," he said. "But there's a certain level of punishment that has to be attached to it."

Last month, a judge sentenced the teens as youthful offenders to varying combinations of prison and probation.

Advocates acknowledge that young offenders need to be punished, but they lament that the state's tough stance on juvenile crime has shifted the focus, and funding, away from rehabilitation and prevention.

There are bright spots. After terrible crime rates in the 1990s, Miami-Dade is now considered a national model for effective juvenile justice. The county puts special emphasis on getting services for first-time offenders based on their needs rather than their crimes, a model Hillsborough and Pinellas counties have watched with interest.

Taking a holistic view with juvenile offenders is the only approach that makes sense, said Hillsborough Public Defender Julianne Holt.

"If you don't modify the behavior of the child and you don't create a values system," Holt said, "there's no doubt that the community suffers at a later time and so does that child."
http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/florida-leads-nation-in-locking-up-kids-in-adult-jails/1051218
This and other news about youth and mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/glbo/

Posted by lois at 03:17 PM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2009

PA Supreme Court Overturns Thousands Convictions By Judge Who Received $2.6 million in Kickbacks Who Sent Teenagers to Private Youth Jails

Pennsylvania Overturns Many Youths’ Convictions
By IAN URBINA - NY Times
Published: October 29, 2009

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Thursday overturned thousands of juvenile-offender convictions handed down by a judge now charged in a corruption scandal.

The judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. of the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas, and Michael T. Conahan, a fellow judge who for a time was the chief of that court, are charged with taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks from the owner of two privately run youth detention centers in exchange for their sending teenagers there.

The Supreme Court said the conviction of any juvenile who appeared before Judge Ciavarella after Jan. 1, 2003, was invalid. The justices barred the retrial of all but an estimated 100 of those cases.

The decision followed advice the court received from Arthur Grim, a Berks County judge whom it appointed in February to review juvenile cases involving Judges Ciavarella and Conahan.

Judge Ciavarella, who along with Judge Conahan awaits federal trial on charges of income-tax and wire fraud, routinely held juvenile hearings that lasted just minutes, failing to ask the youths before him whether they understood the consequences of waiving their right to a lawyer and pleading guilty.

“We concluded,” the justices wrote Thursday, “that the record supports Judge Grim’s determination that Ciavarella knew he was violating both the law and the procedural rules promulgated by this court applicable when adjudicating the merits of juvenile cases without the knowing, intelligent and voluntary waiver of counsel by the juveniles.”

Under the justices’ ruling, the only cases that will be eligible for retrial are those in which youths are still under court supervision. The district attorney’s office has been directed to notify Judge Grim of those cases it wishes to prosecute again. He will then make a determination on each case.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 30, 2009, on page A18 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/us/30judges.html?_r=1&ref=us

Posted by lois at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)

October 27, 2009

A sentence too cruel for kids By Alan K. Simpson

opinion
A sentence too cruel for kids
By Alan K. Simpson
Special to The Washington Post
Posted: 10/24/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT

Rather than serving in the U.S. Senate for almost 20 years, or having so many other wonderful life experiences, I could have served a longer sentence in prison for some of the stupid, reckless things I did as a teenager. I am grateful to have gotten a second chance — and I believe our society should make a sustained investment in offering second chances to our youth.

When I was a teen, we rode aimlessly around town, shot things up, started fires and generally raised hell. It was only dumb luck that we never really hurt anyone. At 17, I was caught destroying federal property and was put on probation. For two years, my probation officer visited me and my friends at home, in the pool hall, at school and on the basketball court. He was a wonderful guy who listened and really cared. I did pretty well on probation. At 21, though, I got into a fight in a tough part of town and ended up in jail for hitting a police officer.

I spent only one night in jail, but that was enough. I remember thinking, "I don't need too much more of this."

I had a chance to turn my life around, and I took it. This term, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether other young people get that same chance.

On Nov. 9, the court will hold oral argument in Sullivan vs. Florida and Graham vs. Florida, two cases that will determine whether it is constitutional to sentence a teenager to life in prison without parole for a crime that did not involve the taking of a life. There is a simple reason the criminal justice system should treat juveniles and adults differently: Kids are a helluva lot dumber than adults. They do stupid things — as I did — and some even commit serious crimes, but youths don't really ever think through the consequences. It's for this reason that every state restricts children from such consequential actions as voting, serving on juries, purchasing alcohol or marrying without parental consent.

The Supreme Court recognized the differences between teenagers and adults when it held a few years ago, in Roper vs. Simmons, that it was unconstitutional to impose the death penalty on defendants younger than 18. Locking up a youth for the rest of his life, with no hope for parole, is surely unconstitutional for the same reasons. The person you are at 13 or 17 is not the person you are at 30.

Everyone old enough to look back on his or her teenage years knows this.

Peer pressure is a huge part of youth behavior, whether one grows up in Washington, D.C., or Cody, Wyo. The guys will say, "Go get the gun. We'll pick up just enough money for tonight." And almost unthinkingly, you'll do it. There is simply no way to know at the time of sentencing whether a young person will turn out "good" or "bad." The only option is to bring him or her before a parole board — after some number of years — and give the person the chance to declare, "I'm a different person today" — and then prove it.

Parole boards can examine how youth offenders spent their time in prison. Did they read books or work in the library? Did they make furniture? Get a college degree? Those are critical questions for review.

We all know youths who have changed for the better. When I was a lawyer in Cody, the court sometimes appointed me to represent juvenile offenders, and parents who knew of my history often asked for help with their children. I once helped an 18-year-old who stole a car and drove it to Seattle. I later hired him as chief of staff for my Senate office.

I was lucky that the bullets I stole from a hardware store as a teenager and fired from my .22-caliber rifle never struck anyone. I was fortunate that the fires I set never hurt anyone. I heard my wake-up call and listened — and I went on to have many opportunities to serve my country and my community.

When a young person is sent "up the river," we need to remember that all rivers can change course.

Alan K. Simpson, a Republican, was a U.S. senator from Wyoming from 1977 to 1996.
http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_13629190?source=email

Posted by lois at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2009

CT: "DETENTION CENTER FOR GIRLS" Rell Announces Plan For $15 million Juvenile Detention For Girls In Bridgeport

DETENTION CENTER FOR GIRLS
Rell Announces Plan For Juvenile Detention For Girls In Bridgeport

By CHRISTOPHER KEATING and JON LENDER
Hartford Courant
October 21, 2009

The state will build a $15 million juvenile detention center for girls in Bridgeport so it can keep them out of adult prisons and other facilities scattered around the state, Gov. M. Jodi Rell announced Tuesday.

Finding space for juveniles has been a problem since the controversial closure of the Long Lane School in Middletown in 2003 under Gov. John G. Rowland. Since then, some teenage girls have been confined at the state's York Correctional Institution for adult women in Niantic, provoking sharp criticism from child-welfare officials.

In a related development Tuesday, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal issued a legal opinion that Rell's administration cannot shut down the High Meadows residential treatment center for troubled boys in Hamden because the legislature specifically allocated money for the program this year. Rell's budget office said Blumenthal's opinion "represents a fundamental misreading" of the state budget and subverts the governor's constitutional powers.

The new detention center for girls at 115 Virginia Ave. in Bridgeport is expected to be approved when the 10-member State Bond Commission meets Oct. 30. Rell chairs the commission and controls the agenda, virtually guaranteeing approval for any project that she proposes.

The state's child advocate, Jeanne Milstein, said the Bridgeport center is "long overdue." Long Lane closed in early 2003, and "it's now 2010, practically, and there hasn't been a facility for girls," she said.

However, Milstein said, "it does not solve the larger problem of DCF's poor planning, insufficient services, and a lack of understanding about the underlying needs of the girls and not just the behavior that led them" into DCF's supervision.

In the meantime, teenage girls who normally would have been sent to Long Lane, or to a new facility such as the one planned in Bridgeport, have had to go to the state's York prison for women in Niantic. There are now 12 girls at York under 18, some of whom would be eligible for the planned Bridgeport center, Milstein said. In addition, a small number of other girls in private treatment facilities, under contract with the state, could be moved to the new center.

State officials object to the use of the term "jail" or "prison" to describe the new treatment center, but a section of 16 beds that would be locked and secured will be reserved for girls who have been convicted of an offense. They will receive counseling and education at the center.

The center will hold 24 girls, including 16 in the locked setting and eight more in a non-locked area for "respite care" if they are having trouble in a community program, said Department of Children and Families spokesman Gary Kleeblatt. Construction is expected to be completed by June 2011, and the facility should open by September 2011.

The empty lot became available on Virginia Avenue in Bridgeport after crews knocked down an asbestos-contaminated, state-owned building that had been vacant for the past nine years. The building had been used as the southwestern regional office of the Department of Mental Retardation, and then was used as an office for addiction services. The building is easily accessible to Routes 8 and 15, making it easier for families to visit the girls, officials said.The annual cost of running the center was not available Tuesday.

High Meadows Opinion
Milstein welcomed the opinion by Blumenthal that Rell's administration cannot shut down the High Meadows facility because the legislature specifically allocated money for it this year. Blumenthal cited statements made on the House floor by state Rep. John Geragosian, a New Britain Democrat who co-chairs the budget-writing appropriations committee.

Milstein said the delay in closing High Meadows, or perhaps reconsideration of that decision, would give officials time to address the needs of the 12 children remaining in the center instead of discharging them to wherever there is space — whether it is in a state-run facility or in a community-based program.

"We need to stop, take a deep breath, focus — and be guided by the needs of these children and not by pressure to close the facility," Milstein said. "There's a larger, systemic issue here," Milstein said, and that is "poor planning by DCF."

She said poor planning is evident in the "hasty" manner in which the agency has gone about emptying High Meadows — from 36 boys in February to 12 now. Milstein noted that the state has spent about $2 million in recent years on improvements at High Meadows, including more than $200,000 on a pool and $1.1 million on dormitories.

But Kleeblatt said the Bridgeport detention center is the result of the sort of planning that Milstein is calling for.

"This program for girls was designed along with a lot of input from members of the advocacy community," he said. "And the whole idea was to design a facility, and more importantly a program, that was going to specifically meet the girls' needs."

Copyright © 2009, The Hartford Courant
courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-prison-juvenile-girls-1021.artoct21,0,349716.story

Posted by lois at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2009

“Criminalizing” Poverty, How Public Policies Result in the Over-Incarceration of Low-Income Communities in America"

“Criminalizing” Poverty, How Public Policies Result in the Over-Incarceration of Low-Income Communities in America"
By Tracy Velázquez, Executive Director, Justice Policy Institute
October 13, 2009:

One of the early lessons in school civics is that “justice is blind”—that is, all citizens get equal treatment in the eyes of the law. Unfortunately, this ideal has become an American myth. First, people living in poverty get swept into the criminal justice system more often than their better-off counterparts. Once there, they are at a real disadvantage in a court system where money can buy freedom through quality representation. And after they are incarcerated, they are relegated to poverty once again because of the punitive barriers society has set up to prevent their success.

This system is not only unfair, it’s counterproductive to our country’s overall well-being. Unless we as a nation take ownership of this flaw in our current system, we will continue to be the world’s biggest jailor, with the social and economic costs that accompany that shameful moniker.

Policing the poor

Recently, I was visiting my friend Rachel, who lives and teaches in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Having started as a Teach for America participant who chose to stay on after her two-year stint, she is well connected with her predominantly Dominican neighborhood’s assets and challenges. In commenting on her experience taking classes at Columbia’s Teachers College on the Upper West Side, Rachel said, “You know, I finally get why people in this neighborhood end up in trouble more. Compared to down by Columbia, the cops are everywhere here in the Heights, all the time. And judging by the warnings I get from campus, it doesn’t look like there’s any more crime up where I live.”

Rachel had, on her own, come to see what those who advocate for low-income communities have known for a long time: America over-polices the poor. It makes sense that places with more crime would have a stronger police presence than communities with less. However, more policing in low-income areas results in more arrests and incarceration for offenses that would likely be handled informally or not at all in another neighborhood. For example, someone smoking a marijuana joint on a bench or their front porch in a more affluent neighborhood is unlikely to be observed by a police officer who would arrest them. More police can also mean more encounters with police – what some might consider “hassling” – which also can result in arrests that just wouldn’t occur otherwise.

Many have asserted that a significant component of over-policing is race. For instance, between January 2006 and September 2007, “random” frisks by New York City police included 453,042 blacks and only 94,530 whites. However, with race and income so closely intertwined, it is often difficult to separate the two. And the result is still that low-income individuals are more often the target of police attention, which means more are arrested and move deeper into the criminal justice system.

“When the lawyer you choose matters most”

The above phrase shocked me as I listened to public radio on my way to work recently. It was the tagline for a law firm that was underwriting the program, and it was impossible for me not to think about it in terms of what it means for people in poverty that have been arrested.

In this day and age of complex proceedings, a multitude of laws, and serious and lasting consequences of a criminal record, the idea of not having a lawyer represent you in court seems almost unfathomable. In fact, in 1963’s Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court stated that “reason and reflection require us to recognize that, in our adversary system of justice, any person hauled into court, who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” However, individuals of lower income generally don’t choose their lawyer; one is assigned by the court. Or one should be, anyway; unfortunately, over one in four people in jail charged with misdemeanor offenses reported not having been represented by counsel.

The vast majority of public defenders are qualified, dedicated attorneys, but many work in conditions they describe as “assembly line justice.” Small budgets – which are now shrinking during this economic downturn – mean many public defenders have barely met their client before they have to go into court and defend them. Of people in prison with court-appointed counsel, only 37 percent in state facilities and 54 percent in federal facilities spoke with their attorneys within the first week after arrest. In contrast, of people with hired counsel, three in five in state facilities and three-fourths in federal facilities had been in contact with their attorneys about their charges within a week of arrest. In an effort to manage their caseloads, public defenders are under pressure to resolve cases quickly, with little time to investigate leads that might have resulted in the case being dismissed or the charges lessened.

What is the result? State defendants with a public defender are sentenced to prison or jail more often than those with private attorneys. People who can afford a private attorney are less likely to go to state prison.

In addition, about half of individuals using a public defender or assigned counsel were released from jail prior to trial, compared to over three in four with a private attorney. Part of this may be a result of differences in representation; it is likely also because people who use public defenders are generally the same people who can’t afford to post bond. With courts demanding higher bail amounts, fewer and fewer people are able to post bond and be released from jail while awaiting trial. Currently, more than 60 percent of people in jails across the country have not been convicted of any offense. The inability to post bond not only makes it harder for people accused of crimes to meet with their lawyer and talk to people who might be able to aid in their defense, it also makes it harder to hold down their job and maintain custody of their children—even though they are still considered innocent.

Substituting corrections for treatment

Adult and juvenile correctional facilities are now among the country’s largest providers of mental health care: this is true both in large, urban areas (the Los Angeles County Jail is now the largest mental health facility in the country) and smaller, more rural ones (the largest provider of mental health care in Alabama is the prison). A key driver of this is lack of access to community mental health services. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, over a third of the poor and 30 percent of the near-poor (incomes ranging from the poverty line to twice the poverty line) lack health coverage. And according to the National Survey of Drug Use and Mental Health, 42 percent of those who needed mental health treatment but didn’t get it said the primary reason was that they couldn’t afford it. Underinsurance is also a problem: 34 percent of insured people who had unmet mental health needs indicated that cost was a barrier to seeking treatment.

The manifestations of untreated mental illness often lead to behaviors that draw the attention of police—public order offenses that often accompany homelessness, crises that cause law enforcement to intervene, and “self-medicating” with alcohol and illegal drugs. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly a quarter of the people in state prisons experienced mental health issues in the year preceding incarceration, and nearly two-thirds of people in jails live with mental illness. Some parents of children with serious emotional disturbances who are uninsured or underinsured turn their own children over to the police, in an effort to get at least minimum treatment through the juvenile justice system.

People with no access to health care are also likely to return to prison after being released. In a visit I made to a state prison, an individual with a serious mental illness told me that earlier that year he had been released from prison with 10 days worth of medicine and $100 in cash. He was left on his own to figure out how to manage his illness. He relied on a local clinic for pharmaceutical “samples” for a time, but ended up homeless and self-medicating with alcohol and other drugs. This eventually led to his being re-incarcerated.

A large percentage of incarcerated people also have a substance abuse disorder. Over half of people in state prisons meet the criteria for drug dependence or abuse. Once again, low-income people with a substance abuse addiction are disproportionately incarcerated as they cannot access treatment. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health indicated that 37.4 percent of people who sought substance abuse treatment indicated they didn’t receive it because they had no health coverage and couldn’t afford the cost of treatment. This lack of access, combined with the criminalization of addiction, mean thousands of people end up in prison or jail for drug possession or distribution or other offenses that would support an addiction.

Continuing barriers to opportunity

Currently, one in 31 people in the United States is under correctional supervision—whether in prison or jail, or on parole or probation. And millions more have a felony record that will never be erased, creating hardships for those trying to regain their lives and be a productive member of their community.

Adding to these difficulties is the fact that the correctional population is already largely made up of lower-income people. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2002, eighty-three percent of people in jail reported income of less than $2,000 in the month prior to arrest, one-third lower than the average monthly wage of the general public.

Many people who have been incarcerated face obstacles when attempting to find a job and housing. In a report for the Brookings Institution, Richard Freedman found that jail time reduced the probability of employment by between 15 and 30 percentage points. In addition, people leaving prison, regardless of their pre-incarceration status, are especially vulnerable to homelessness, often banned from federal housing, face challenges reconnecting with family and friends, and lack the funds to afford available housing. Often, the obligations of parole fees and years of child support that went unpaid during their period of incarceration make it almost impossible to become economically successful.

Conclusion

The impact of the criminal justice system on low-income communities can’t be ignored. At every stage of the process – from who is arrested to who is convicted and who eventually loses out on their rights – the poor are disproportionately affected. Policymakers continue to incarcerate millions of people, most of whom would not be in the system if there were more adequate resources in their communities. How can this situation be addressed, so that poverty and prison aren’t inevitably intertwined?

The U.S. should provide meaningful access – regardless of ability to pay -- to community-based treatment that would ensure that people get the mental health and substance abuse treatment they need before they collide with the justice system; this would improve both public safety and individual life outcomes. A healthcare “safety net” that will cover formerly incarcerated individuals also will save states millions in reduced rates of recidivism and re-incarceration.

Instead of overfunding incarceration and policing, we should make investments in resources for low-income communities that are already at a disadvantage due to their socioeconomic status. This means better schools, more job development, and more programs that can help people – and particularly youth – succeed. These types of investments will create healthier, safer communities and reduce the use of prisons as an answer to poverty and other social problems.

Tracy Velázquez is Executive Director of the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit working to promote effective solutions to social problems and dedicated to ending society’s reliance on incarceration

http://www.spotlightonpoverty.org/ExclusiveCommentary.aspx?id=5f13e0fe-a47d-4ce4-a945-187fc331e81d

Posted by lois at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

October 09, 2009

Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among High School Dropouts: including jail or juvenile detention for 1 in 4 African American young men who drop out of school.

"The report puts the collective cost to the nation over the working life of each high school dropout at $292,000. Mr. Sum said that figure took into account lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime."

"The picture is even bleaker for African-Americans, with nearly one in four young black male dropouts incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized on an average day, the study said. That compares with about one in 14 young, male, white, Asian or Hispanic dropouts."

Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among Dropouts
By SAM DILLON
Published NY Times: October 8, 2009

On any given day, about one in every 10 young male high school dropouts is in jail or juvenile detention, compared with one in 35 young male high school graduates, according to a new study of the effects of dropping out of school in an America where demand for low-skill workers is plunging.

The picture is even bleaker for African-Americans, with nearly one in four young black male dropouts incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized on an average day, the study said. That compares with about one in 14 young, male, white, Asian or Hispanic dropouts.

Researchers at Northeastern University used census and other government data to carry out the study, which tracks the employment, workplace, parenting and criminal justice experiences of young high school dropouts.

“We’re trying to show what it means to be a dropout in the 21st century United States,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern, who headed a team of researchers that prepared the report. “It’s one of the country’s costliest problems. The unemployment, the incarceration rates — it’s scary.”

A coalition of civil rights and public education advocacy groups and a network of alternative schools in Chicago commissioned the report as part of a push for new educational opportunities for the nation’s 6.2 million high school dropouts.

“The dropout rate is driving the nation’s increasing prison population, and it’s a drag on America’s economic competitiveness,” said Marc H. Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who is president of the National Urban League, one of the groups in the coalition that commissioned the report. “This report makes it clear that every American pays a cost when a young person leaves school without a diploma.”

The report puts the collective cost to the nation over the working life of each high school dropout at $292,000. Mr. Sum said that figure took into account lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less and therefore pay less in taxes than high school graduates. It also includes the costs of providing food stamps and other aid to dropouts and of incarcerating those who turn to crime.

Daniel J. Losen, a senior associate at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the study was consistent with other economic studies of the dropout crisis, though he said the methodology of its cost-benefit analysis “lacked transparency.”

“The report’s strength is that it reveals in clear terms that there’s a real crisis with the high numbers of young, especially minority males, who drop out of school and wind up incarcerated,” Mr. Losen said.

Previous studies have come up with estimates of the same order of magnitude on the social cost of low graduation rates. A 2007 study by Teachers College, Princeton and City University of New York researchers, for instance, estimated that society could save $209,000 in prison and other costs for every potential dropout who could be helped to complete high school.

The new report, in its analysis of 2008 unemployment rates, found that 54 percent of dropouts ages 16 to 24 were jobless, compared with 32 percent for high school graduates of the same age, and 13 percent for those with a college degree.

Again, the statistics were worse for young African-American dropouts, whose unemployment rate last year was 69 percent, compared with 54 percent for whites and 47 percent for Hispanics. The unemployment rate among young Hispanics was lower, the report said, because included in that category were many illegal immigrants, who compete successfully for jobs with native-born youths.

The unemployment rates cited for all groups have climbed several points in 2009 because of the recession, Mr. Sum said.

Young female dropouts were nine times more likely to have become single mothers than young women who went on to earn college degrees, the report said, citing census data for 2006 and 2007.

The number of unmarried young women having children has increased sharply in some communities in part, Mr. Sum said, because large numbers of young men have dropped out of school and are jobless year round. As a result, young women do not view them as having the wherewithal to support a family.

“None of these guys can afford to own a home, they just don’t have any money,” he said. “And as a result, any time they father a child it’s out of wedlock. It wasn’t like this 30 years ago.”

He cited his hometown, Gary, Ind., as an example. “Back in the 1970s, my friends in Gary would quit school in senior year and go to work at U.S. Steel and make a good living, and young guys in Michigan would go to work in an auto plant,” he said. “You just can’t do that anymore. Today, you have a lot of dropouts who are jobless year round.”

Link to the study: http://www.clms.neu.edu/publication/documents/The_Consequences_of_Dropping_Out_of_High_School.pdf

A version of this article appeared in print on October 9, 2009, on page A12 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/education/09dropout.html?_r=1&ref=us

Posted by lois at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2009

MA: uvenile life-without-parole sentence too harsh, reports says Advocates seek Mass. law change

Juvenile life-without-parole sentence too harsh, reports says
Advocates seek Mass. law change
By Jonathan Saltzman
Globe Staff / September 30, 2009

Despite its liberal reputation, Massachusetts has one of the harshest laws in the country for sentencing murderers as young as 14 to life in prison without parole, and many of the 57 people serving such mandatory sentences are first-time offenders, according to an advocacy group that wants them to become eligible for parole.

The Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, in what it said was the first comprehensive study of the 1996 law that resulted in such sentences for first-degree murder, found that a disproportionate percentage of the children locked up for the rest of their lives are black. Many of the offenders were convicted with adult codefendants, some of whom got milder sentences and have been freed.

The report, which is scheduled to be released today, followed a two-year review of most of the cases in which children ages 14, 15, and 16 were tried in adult court and sentenced to life. The study says that penalties for juvenile murderers were inadequate in the 1980s but that the Legislature went too far when it passed the current law in response to what the center describes as overblown fears of young super predators.

The group wants Governor Deval Patrick and the Legislature to change the law to at least make juveniles convicted of first-degree murder eligible for parole after 15 years, as is true for people convicted of second-degree murder.

“Life-without-parole sentences may be an appropriate response to some adult crimes, especially in a state like Massachusetts that does not impose the death penalty,’’ the 33-page report said. “But the current law treats youths as young as 14 exactly like adults, regardless of their age, past conduct, level of participation in the crime, personal background, and potential for rehabilitation.’’

Geline W. Williams, executive director of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association, said yesterday she could not comment on the report until she reads it. But, “There’s no question that there are some juveniles who commit absolutely horrific crimes and have absolutely horrific records before they commit the ultimate crime of murder,’’ she said.

The two state lawmakers who chair the joint Committee on the Judiciary, Representative Eugene L. O’Flaherty and Senator Cynthia Stone Creem, said they were willing to reexamine the 1996 law.

O’Flaherty said a few notorious crimes can often result in “legislative overreaction, and usually it takes a few years to see the unforeseen consequences of getting too tough, too quickly, and not being smart about getting tough.’’

Massachusetts is one of at least 39 states with youths serving sentences of life without parole; about 2,500 inmates around the country serve such sentences. But only Massachusetts and Connecticut give adult courts exclusive jurisdiction over murder cases against children as young as 14 and then impose a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for all first-degree murder convictions, regardless of the circumstances, the report said.

Several states are considering changing their laws to give youth offenders an opportunity to earn parole, in part because scientific research into the difference between the adolescent and adult brain shows that teenagers often cannot appreciate the consequences of their actions.

Last year, after citing similar neuroscientific evidence, Human Rights Watch called sentences of life without parole for juveniles “cruel, unfair, and unnecessary.’’

Massachusetts enacted the current law, partly in response to insufficient juvenile court sentences in the 1980s, when the harshest punishment for a juvenile who was not transferred to an adult court - even for murder - was incarceration until 21.

In the 1990s, a number of widely publicized juvenile murder cases prompted the Legislature to mandate that all juveniles charged with first- or second-degree murder be tried in adult court and that conviction for first-degree murder result in an automatic sentence of life without parole.

One of those cases involved Edward S. O’Brien, the 15-year-old who stabbed his best friend’s mother 98 times across the street from his Somerville home in 1995. After two years of hearings and intervention by the state’s highest court, O’Brien was tried as an adult and sentenced to life without parole.

The Children’s Law Center contends that crime rates do not justify such harsh sentences. Homicide rates for Massachusetts youth under 18 peaked in 1992.

Since 1998, the homicide rate among adolescents has been lower than it was 30 years ago.

The center, which reviewed in detail 46 of the 57 juvenile murderers serving life sentences without parole, said 41 percent had no prior record. Forty percent of the offenders had been convicted along with adult defendants, but many of the adults got lighter sentences.

“Frequently, the adults who are actually the primary actors [in the murders] and are in possession of the knowledge that matters are in a better position to offer information in exchange for better treatment from prosecutors,’’ said Lia Monahon, the lawyer for the center who wrote the report.

Blacks make up 47 percent of the juveniles sentenced to life without parole but account for less than 7 percent of children under 18 in Massachusetts, said the report. Monahon said the disparity could reflect bias in the criminal justice system.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/30/juvenile_life_without_parole_sentence_too_harsh_reports_says/?page=full
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

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

September 28, 2009

Interview with Young Women's Empowerment Project on their research "Girls Do What they Do In Order to Survive"

An interview with the Young Women's Empowerment Project on their research study of girls involved in the sex trade.
Participatory Action Research emphasizes the involvement of those being studied in the actual research process. It’s a technique the Young Women's Empowerment Project has used to fill in the gaps of previous research on the sex trade and street economy. YWEP assists young women ages 12-23 who are either currently working in the sex trade and street economy, or have in the past. The group is also entirely run by peers with experience in the sex trade and street economy. Today, YWEP releases their findings in a new report entitled, “Girls do what they have to do to survive: Illuminating Methods used by Girls in the Sex Trade and Street Economy to Fight Back and Heal.” Alison Cuddy sat down with the study’s research coordinator Jazeera Iman, and Shira Hassan, co-director for the Young Women’s Empowerment Project.
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=37026

Posted by lois at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)

Supreme Court to consider life without parole for juveniles sentenced for non-murder convictions?

Supreme Court to consider juvenile 'lifers'
Does life without parole for minors who didn't kill constitute cruel and unusual punishment?
By David G. Savage
September 28, 2009

Reporting from Washington - Joe Sullivan was 13 years old when he and two older boys broke into a home, where they robbed and raped an elderly woman. After a one-day trial in 1989, Sullivan was sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole.

Terrance Graham was 16 when he and two others robbed a restaurant. When he was arrested again a year later for a home break-in, a Florida judge said he was incorrigible. In 2005, Graham received a life term with no parole.

The two young convicts represent an American phenomenon, one the Supreme Court is set to reconsider in the fall term that opens Oct. 5. At issue is whether it is cruel and unusual punishment to imprison a minor until he or she dies when the crime does not involve murder.

According to Amnesty International, "The United States is the only country in the world that does not comply with the norm against imposing life-without-parole sentences on juveniles."

Nearly all of the estimated 2,500 U.S. prisoners serving life terms for juvenile crimes, the group said, were guilty either of murder or of participating in a crime that led to a homicide. But 109 inmates are serving life sentences for other crimes committed when they were younger than 18.

Sullivan's and Graham's lawyers do not claim the young men deserve to go free.

"We are not asking for Mr. Graham to be released any time soon," attorney Bryan Gowdy said. "We are asking the court to declare unconstitutional a sentence of life without parole for these crimes. It would be entirely different if Mr. Graham had a meaningful opportunity for parole."

The question will be an early test of whether Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a former prosecutor, will align herself with the court's tough-on-crime conservatives or join with its liberals to strike down prison policies perceived as going too far.

Sullivan’s and Graham’s cases will be heard in November. Many lawyers and prosecutors said that until the Supreme Court agreed this year to take up the issue, they were unaware of juveniles receiving such sentences.

Sullivan, now 33, has been in prison for 20 years. The Florida appeals court and the state Supreme Court refused to review his sentence. When his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Florida Atty. Gen. Bill McCollum said the appeal should be dismissed on the grounds that it was too late to raise the issue of cruel and unusual punishment.

A lawyer for Graham has called his client's life sentence freakish and unfair. A second youth who participated in the restaurant robbery hit an employee with a club. He was later arrested for robbing a gas station and sentenced to three years in prison. He has since been released.

Florida leads the nation in sending teenagers to prison for life with no possible parole for crimes such as burglary, assault or rape. It has at least 77 such inmates. California and six other states also have at least one.

"This is a hidden group. They don't get a lot of attention because there was no homicide," said Paolo Annino, a law professor at Florida State University who has compiled national data on these prisoners.

California officials said they were unaware of having four such inmates until they checked their database at Annino's request. Two years ago, California joined many other states in prohibiting the sentencing of young offenders to life in prison.

But that measure did not affect inmates who had already been sentenced.

Annino and others point to two trends in the 1980s that led to juveniles serving life terms. First was the national move to abolish parole, reflecting fears that violent criminals could not be safely released. Second was the increased prosecution of young criminals as adults.

In defense of its life-in-prison policy, Florida's lawyers have pointed to several deadly attacks on European visitors carried out by young criminals.

These violent incidents were "threatening the state's bedrock tourism industry," Florida's lawyers said in the opening paragraph of their brief to the Supreme Court in the Graham case.

Pie chart on states imprisoning juveniles for crimes other than murder:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-court-preview28-2009sep28,0,1454652.story

Posted by lois at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2009

Prison Comix by Jim Ridgeway

Prison Comix
September 5, 2009

With more and more older people going to prison there is a growing demand for educational materials to keep their minds alive and well amid the deadening atmosphere of the American correctional system—created in large part by government and supervised and informed by the judiciary. Not to mention the thousands upon thousands of young and middle-aged people whose “rehabilitation” has been cut short by the cruel sentencing laws.

There are all sorts of projects afoot in this area, but one is of special interest. It is called the Real Cost of Prisons, and is run by Lois Ahrens of Northampton, Mass., on a shoestring. You can get a feel for her work by obtaining the Real Cost of Prisons Comix book which includes three comics: Prison Town about the financing and placement of prisons and their effect on rural communities; Prisoners of the war on Drugs, a history of the war on drugs; and Prisoners of a hard Life,which includes stories of women trapped by mandatory sentencing. To me, this last book is the most telling. PM Press publishes the book at $12.95 a copy.

Ahrens got the idea of doing comic books,partly because she wanted to find a way of communicating with prisoners in a simple,direct way providing them especially up to date information and new research. She hit on the idea,in part from years of going to Mexico, and watching women engrossed in photo novellas while tending market stalls or sitting on park benches. Then trade unionists from South Africa gave her publications chock full of graphics, pictures and text that they were using to educate people in their campaign to stop privatization and in the fight against globalization. She also got ideas from “A Field Guide to the US Economy” by James Heintz and Nancy Foibre which also uses graphs, cartoons and ordinary language to explain the economy.

Because prisoners can’t ordinarily take advantage of the information that currently proliferates on the internet, comic books which speak to their lives and needs, are available and free, she says.

Comic books have been received by prisoners in every state prison system,every federal prison and numerous jails. Thousands more have been sent to prisoners through 13 Books through Bars organizations. We know that comic books are passed hand to hand by prisoners,since as soon as a set is sent to one prisoner,not a week passes before we begin receiving requests from other prisoners at that prison..One prisoner wrotethat he found one on a pew in the prison

Ahrens web site is an up to date resource on prison news.

http://unsilentgeneration.com/category/prisons-criminal-justice/

Posted by lois at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2009

CA to close largest youth prison at Chino and convert it into an prison for men

California to close its largest juvenile prison
The Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino will be converted into an adult prison. The move is part of a plan to 'right-size' staff at the Division of Juvenile Justice.
By Michael Rothfeld
August 28, 2009

Reporting from Sacramento - The state is closing California's largest youth prison as the population of juvenile offenders in state custody continues to decline, corrections officials announced Thursday.

The Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino will be converted into an adult prison, state officials said. The move is part of a plan to "right-size" staff at the Division of Juvenile Justice, which is reducing its workforce by 400 employees by the end of this year to save the state up to $40 million, said Bernard Warner, the chief deputy secretary for the division.

The plan also is geared toward reducing the annual cost of incarcerating and caring for each ward from $252,000 to $175,000, state officials said.

California's youth prisons have been troubled for years. The state five years ago settled a lawsuit brought on behalf of the juveniles, who said they were locked up for long periods in dirty, dim cells without the education, rehabilitation, healthcare and other treatment the state was supposed to provide. Last year, lawyers for the juveniles mounted an unsuccessful effort to have the system put under court control.

Sue Burrell, a staff attorney at the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, said Stark had been "an especially horrible place" since the slaying of Ineasie Baker, a female officer there, in 1996. An inmate was convicted of her murder.

"That sort of ushered in this repressive era," Burrell said. "It really never got better. The past [13] years have been filled with lockdowns, beatings and various sorts of cages."

With the closure, the state will have five youth prisons, down from 11 in 2003. Three minimum-security fire camps for juveniles have also been closed.

The number of juvenile offenders in state custody has declined to 1,700 over the last decade from a peak of nearly 10,000, the result of legislation that now puts most of the youths in county facilities where they can be closer to their families.

The Chino facility opened in 1959 and now houses fewer than 400 juvenile inmates. They will be redirected to other youth prisons. An exact closure date has not yet been determined.

Currently, the state has been using the youth prison, which has a capacity of 1,200, to house about 600 adult inmates displaced after a prison riot this month at the nearby California Institution for Men. To convert it into a full-time prison, it would have to be retrofitted to make it more secure, subject to approval from state lawmakers, prison officials said. Warner said the retrofitting would be cheaper -- about a third as much -- than the $500-million price tag for a new prison.

An adult prison on the site could house sick or mentally ill inmates, said Scott Kernan, the state's undersecretary for operations. That could relieve some pressure from a panel of federal judges who have ordered the state to reduce the number of inmates in its overcrowded prisons by 40,000.

A statewide coalition of human rights groups Thursday urged state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown to devise a plan to comply with the court order rather than appeal it.

"California's correctional system is in a tailspin that threatens public safety and raises the risk of fiscal disaster," said activists from the group Californians United for a Responsible Budget.

Brown and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger have said they plan to appeal.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons28-2009aug28,0,3563078.story

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

August 24, 2009

DOJ publishes a report condemning treatment of youth at four of the New York's Juvenile Prisons

Report Cites Abuse at State Juvenile Prison Centers
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Published: August 24, 2009- NY Times

ALBANY — Children at four juvenile detention centers in New York were so severely abused by workers that it constituted a violation of their constitutional rights, according to a report by the United States Department of Justice made public on Monday.

The findings raise the possibility of a federal takeover of the state’s entire youth detention system if the problems are not addressed.

The report caps a nearly two-year investigation by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division into claims of excessive physical force at some of the state’s 28 juvenile residential centers, which house children who were convicted of criminal acts but are too young to serve in adult jails and prisons.

Federal investigators found that workers at the four locations — the Lansing Residential Center and the Louis Gossett Jr. Residential Center in Lansing, N.Y., and two facilities, one for boys and one for girls, at Tryon Residential Center in Johnstown, N.Y. — routinely used physical force to restrain residents, despite rules allowing force only as a last resort.

The report documented dozens of episodes at the four centers in a period of less than two years that resulted in serious injuries, including broken teeth and bones. It found that physical force was often the first response to any act of insubordination by residents, who are all under 16.

“Staff at the facilities routinely used uncontrolled, unsafe applications of force, departing from generally accepted standards,” says the report, which was given to Gov. David A. Paterson on Aug. 14. “Anything from sneaking an extra cookie to initiating a fistfight may result in a full prone restraint with handcuffs,” the report continued. “This one-size-fits-all approach has not surprisingly led to an alarming number of serious injuries to youth, including concussions, broken or knocked-out teeth, and spiral fractures” (bone fractures caused by twisting).

The investigation is the latest blow to New York’s troubled juvenile justice system, which currently detains about 1,000 youths.

In a report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union issued in September 2006, New York’s juvenile residential centers were rated among the worst in the world.

Later that year, an emotionally disturbed teenager, Darryl Thompson, died after two employees at the Tryon center pinned him down on the ground. The death was ruled a homicide, but a grand jury declined to indict the workers. The boy’s mother is suing the state.

During the same period, a separate joint investigation by the state inspector general and the Tompkins County district attorney found that the independent ombudsman’s office charged with overseeing juvenile detention centers had virtually ceased to function.

In a statement on Monday, after the report became public, Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, said that the administration had inherited a juvenile justice system “rife with substantial systemic problems” but acknowledged that efforts so far to overhaul it had fallen short.

“We have made great strides," said Ms. Carrión, "but much more still needs to be done.”

The previous scandals had spurred a major effort within Ms. Carrión’s department, which oversees juvenile residential centers, to overhaul the system. It reconstituted the ombudsman’s office and issued clearer policies on the use of physical force, leading to a sharp drop in instances where restraints were applied. The department has also required new training for the staffs at juvenile detention centers.

Officials have also sought to close down centers that were underused and redirect resources to counseling and other services, as other states have done, though they have faced fierce resistance from public employees’ unions and their allies in the Legislature. Last year, Mr. Paterson appointed a commission to recommend further changes.

The report by federal investigators revealed that despite those changes, problems at some of the centers remain severe. Under federal law, New York has 49 days to respond with a plan of action to comply with the report’s recommendations. If the state does not meet the deadline, the Justice Department can initiate a lawsuit that could result in a federal takeover of the state’s juvenile residential centers.

In one case described in the report, a youth was forcibly restrained and handcuffed after refusing to stop laughing when ordered to; the youth sustained a cut lip and injuries to the wrists and elbows. One boy, after glaring at a staff member, was forced into a sitting position and his arms were secured behind his back with such force that his collarbone was broken.

Another youth was restrained eight times in three months despite signs that she might have been contemplating suicide. “In nearly every one of the eight incidents,” the report found, “the youth was engaged in behaviors such as head banging, putting paper clips in her mouth, tying a string around her neck, etc.”

Officials at the centers also routinely failed to follow state rules requiring that instances in which force is used be reviewed after the fact. In some cases, the same staff member involved in an episode conducted the review. And even when a review determined that excessive force had been used, the staff members responsible sometimes faced no punishment.

In one case, it was recommended that a youth counselor with a documented record of using excessive force should be fired after throwing a youth to the ground with such force that the youth’s chin required stitches. But after the counselor’s union intervened, the punishment was downgraded to a letter of reprimand, an $800 fine and a two-week suspension that was itself suspended.

The report also found that state officials failed to provide youths in detention with adequate counseling and mental health treatment, something the vast majority of residents require. Three-quarters of residents enter New York’s juvenile justice system with drug or alcohol problems, more than half have diagnosed psychological problems and a third have developmental disabilities, according to figures published by Office of Children and Family Services.

“The majority of psychiatric evaluations at the four facilities did not come close to meeting” professional standards, investigators determined, and “typically lacked basic, necessary information.”

In many instances, a single resident received several different or conflicting diagnoses — and correspondingly different regimens of psychotropic drugs — from different psychiatrists or counselors. The medications were dispensed without rigorous monitoring. Typically, parents were not offered an opportunity to give their informed consent for the treatment.

One 15-year-old, according to the report, was on six medications at once, with no record of an agreed-upon diagnosis or description of the symptoms the drugs were intended to target. Another resident, a boy who was mentally ill, told a doctor that he thought he might be pregnant.

“Despite this significant incident,” the report noted, “it appears that the youth’s belief that he was pregnant and the possibility that he was delusional was not communicated to the treating psychiatrist. It is unknown whether this was addressed in the youth’s individual therapy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/nyregion/25juvenile.html?_r=1&hp

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

August 10, 2009

Mentally Ill Youth Strain Juvenile System

Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: August 9, 2009
NY Times

FRANKLIN FURNACE, Ohio — The teenager in the padded smock sat in his solitary confinement cell here in this state’s most secure juvenile prison and screamed obscenities.

The youth, Donald, a 16-year-old, his eyes glassy from lack of sleep and a daily regimen of mood stabilizers, was serving a minimum of six months for breaking and entering. Although he had received diagnoses for psychiatric illnesses, including bipolar disorder, a judge decided that Donald would get better care in the state correctional system than he could get anywhere in his county.

That was two years ago.

Donald’s confinement has been repeatedly extended because of his violent outbursts. This year he assaulted a guard here at the prison, the Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility, and was charged anew, with assault. His fists and forearms are striped with scars where he gouged himself with pencils and the bones of a bird he caught and dismembered.

As cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools, they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders. About two-thirds of the nation’s juvenile inmates — who numbered 92,854 in 2006, down from 107,000 in 1999 — have at least one mental illness, according to surveys of youth prisons, and are more in need of therapy than punishment.

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intensive enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, a child psychiatrist at the Texas Youth Commission. “Jails and juvenile justice facilities are the new asylums.”

At least 32 states cut their community mental health programs by an average of 5 percent this year and plan to double those budget reductions by 2010, according to a recent survey of state mental health offices.

Juvenile prisons have been the caretaker of last resort for troubled children since the 1980s, but mental health experts say the system is in crisis, facing a soaring number of inmates reliant on multiple — and powerful — psychotropic drugs and a shortage of therapists.

In California’s state system, one of the most violent and poorly managed juvenile systems in the country, according to federal investigators, three dozen youth offenders seriously injured themselves or attempted suicide in the last year — a sign, state juvenile justice experts say, of neglect and poor safety protocols.

In Ohio, where Gov. Ted Strickland, a former prison psychologist, approved a 34 percent reduction in community-based mental health services to reduce a budget deficit, Thomas J. Stickrath, the director of the Department of Youth Services, said continuing cuts would swell his youth offender population.

“I’m hearing from a lot of judges saying, ‘I’m sorry I’m sending so-and-so to you, but at least I know that he’ll get the treatment he can’t get in his community,’ ” Mr. Stickrath said.

But youths are often subjected to neglect and violence in juvenile prisons, and studies show that mental illnesses can become worse there.

George, 17, an inmate at Ohio River Valley, detailed his daily cocktail of psychiatric medications, including Abilify and Seroquel. In addition to having bipolar disorder, he is a sex offender and is H.I.V. positive — severe stigmas in prison.

“I be getting punked,” he said, using prison slang to describe how gang youths routinely humiliate him. He blinked, and his leg shook uncontrollably. “They take my food, they hit me, they make me do things.”

Demetrius, 16, another inmate there, said he had received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Officials said he has psychotic episodes and attacks other inmates. In an interview in June, he said he was receiving no mental health counseling or medications. Andrea Kruse, a spokeswoman for Mr. Stickrath, said that since July 1, he has had more than 20 counseling sessions.

According to a Government Accountability Office report, in 2001, families relinquished custody of 9,000 children to juvenile justice systems so they could receive mental health services.

Donald has been in and out of mental health programs since he attacked a schoolteacher at age 5. As he grew older, he became more violent until he was eventually committed to the Department of Youth Services.

“I’ve begged D.Y.S. to get him into a mental facility where they’re trained to deal with people like him,” said his grandmother, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma of having a grandson who is mentally ill. “I don’t think a lockup situation is where he should be, although I don’t think he should be on the street either.”

Lawsuits and federal civil rights investigations in Indiana, Maryland, Ohio and Texas have criticized juvenile corrections systems for failing to meet their obligation to prohibit cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners.

Despite downsizing to about 1,650 juvenile inmates from about 10,000 youth offenders in 1996, California’s state system remains under a 2004 federal mandate to improve conditions, including mental health services — the result of a class-action lawsuit that documented the systematic physical and sexual abuse of wards.

Under a plan to reduce the state juvenile inmate population, many youths who once would have been held by the state are now detained by the Los Angeles County juvenile detention system. Los Angeles County is also under a federal mandate to improve psychiatric services for juvenile inmates, especially at the six camps at its Challenger Memorial Youth Center, which holds most of the county’s medium- and high-risk offenders and most of its mentally ill ones.

“We were told that the Challenger camps are, paradoxically, the only camps at which staff are authorized to carry O.C. spray,” wrote federal civil rights investigators in a 2008 report to county authorities, referring to oleoresin capsicum, known as pepper spray. “One supervisor told us that he believed that allowing staff to carry and use O.C. spray made sense given the ‘mental health population.’ ”

The investigators also recounted how staff members body slammed unruly juveniles, often breaking their bones.

In May, a reporter toured the Los Angeles County Central Juvenile Hall with Eric Trupin, a consultant hired by the Department of Justice to monitor mental health services in California’s juvenile justice system. Dr. Trupin, a psychologist, said some detainees appeared to be held there for no reason other than that they were mentally ill and the county had no other institution capable of treating them.

One inmate at the county’s juvenile hall, Eric, 18, was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and prescribed Risperdal, a powerful antipsychotic, to help him avoid violent flashes of temper.

A public defender who specializes in juvenile mental health issues, said Eric had been arrested more than 20 times near his South Los Angeles home. Dr. Trupin worried that if Eric is released and arrested again, he will be charged as an adult and enter the Los Angeles County jail, the nation’s largest residential mental institution, with 1,400 mentally ill inmates.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the increasing availability of antipsychotic medications coincided with a national movement to close public mental hospitals. Many private hospitals barred psychotic patients, including juveniles. By the 1980s, juvenile justice systems had become the primary providers of residential psychiatric care for mentally ill youths.

But as cutbacks have worsened, the debate has intensified over what constitutes adequate mental health care. Often juvenile justice systems have very little to go on when attempting a diagnosis.

“Often Daddy is nowhere to be found, Mommy might be in jail,” said Daniel Connor, a psychiatrist for the Connecticut juvenile corrections system. “The home phone is cut off. The parent speaks another language, so it’s often hard to figure out exactly what’s going on with each kid.”

School records often do not arrive with arrested youths, nor do files often come from other corrections institutions. The lack of information is particularly problematic when psychiatrists try to prescribe medications. Joseph Parks, medical director for the Missouri Department of Mental Health and a national expert on pharmaceutical drug use in corrections facilities, said many juvenile offenders are prescribed multiple psychiatric drugs as they move from mental health clinics to detention halls to juvenile prisons.

A decade ago, it was rare to find juvenile offenders on two psychotropic drugs at once, Dr. Parks said. Now, many take three or four at a time, often for nonprescribed uses like helping the youths sleep.

“If you just give a kid a pill, the prison administration doesn’t have to do anything differently,” he said. “The staff doesn’t have to do anything differently. The guards don’t have to get more training.”

Census studies of child mental health professionals show chronic shortages. A 2006 study estimated that for every 100,000 youths, there were fewer than nine child psychiatrists. Dr. Penn of Texas said the state youth prison system there recently instituted a system of telepsychiatry sessions, conducting videoconferences between mental health professionals and youths being detained hundreds of miles away.

Inadequate mental health services increases recidivism. In a February report on psychiatric services at the Ohio River Valley center, Dr. Cheryl Wills, an independent mental health expert, found that officials were unnecessarily extending incarceration for youths who acted out because of their mental illnesses.

Mr. Stickrath, the director of the Ohio Department of Youth Services, said that one challenge in dealing with large numbers of psychologically ill youths is determining who is “mad versus bad.” He mentioned Donald, whose file he knew by heart.

“He’s been in 130 fights since he’s been with us, and there were no resources in the small county he’s from to deal with him,” Mr. Stickrath said. “Our staff worked to get him in a sophisticated psychiatric residential program, but they said he had to leave because he was attacking staff.”

Mr. Stickrath shook his head. “He just wears you out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/us/10juvenile.html?_r=1&hpw

Posted by lois at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2009

Video: Children Given One Strike: A Lifetime Without Redemption

Link to a documentary about Juvenile Life Without Parole produced by a group of University of Pennsylvania Law Students which featured interviews with Anita Colon and Bradley Bridges from the Defender's Association.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsZ1gpPZEIU

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

July 28, 2009

NY Times Editorial: 12 and in Prison

Editorial
12 and in Prison
Published: July 27, 2009- NY Times

The Supreme Court sent an important message when it ruled in Roper v. Simmons in 2005 that children under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed were not eligible for the death penalty. Justice Anthony Kennedy drew on compassion, common sense and the science of the youthful brain when he wrote that it was morally wrong to equate the offenses of emotionally undeveloped adolescents with the offenses of fully formed adults.

The states have followed this logic in death penalty cases. But they have continued to mete out barbaric treatment — including life sentences — to children whose cases should rightly be handled through the juvenile courts.

Congress can help to correct these practices by amending the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, which is up for Congressional reauthorization this year. To get a share of delinquency prevention money, the law requires the states and localities to meet minimum federal protections for youths in the justice system. These protections are intended to keep as many youths as possible out of adult jails and prisons, and to segregate those that are sent to those places from the adult criminal population.

The case for tougher legislative action is laid out in an alarming new study of children 13 and under in the adult criminal justice system, the lead author of which is the juvenile justice scholar, Michele Deitch, of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. According to the study, every state allows juveniles to be tried as adults, and more than 20 states permit preadolescent children as young as 7 to be tried in adult courts.

This is terrible public policy. Children who are convicted and sentenced as adults are much more likely to become violent offenders — and to return to an adult jail later on — than children tried in the juvenile justice system.

Despite these well-known risks, policy makers across the country do not have reliable data on just how many children are being shunted into the adult system by state statutes or prosecutors, who have the discretion to file cases in the adult courts.

But there is reasonably reliable data showing juvenile court judges send about 80 children ages 13 and under into the adult courts each year. These statistics explode the myth that those children have committed especially heinous acts.

The data suggest, for example, that children 13 and under who commit crimes like burglary and theft are just as likely to be sent to adult courts as children who commit serious acts of violence against people. As has been shown in previous studies, minority defendants are more likely to get adult treatment than their white counterparts who commit comparable offenses.

The study’s authors rightly call on lawmakers to enact laws that discourage harsh sentencing for preadolescent children and that enable them to be transferred back into the juvenile system. Beyond that, Congress should amend the juvenile justice act to require the states to simply end these inhumane practices to be eligible for federal juvenile justice funds.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 28, 2009, on page A24 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/opinion/28tue1.html?_r=1&hpw

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

July 19, 2009

OK: The Board of Juvenile Affairs began initial discussions Friday about a possible private prison for juveniles in the state.

By BARBARA HOBEROCK World Capitol Bureau
Published: 7/18/2009
OKLAHOMA CITY — The Board of Juvenile Affairs began initial discussions Friday about a possible private prison for juveniles in the state.

The board is expected to vote in September on whether to solicit proposals to build and/or manage a private lockup.

Such a move would require closing at least one of the agency's three prisons, the L.E. Rader Center in Sand Springs and two others in Manitou and Tecumseh.

Office of Juvenile Affairs Director Gene Christian told the board at its monthly meeting that two pieces of 2008 legislation authorized the board to consider such moves.

The agency initially sought designs for a 64-bed prison to house youthful offenders, Christian said.

The projected cost in 2007 was $24 million, a figure that rose to $27 million in 2009.

The OJA asked the Legislature for a bond issue to provide funding, but that request was not granted, Christian said.

A decline in state revenue expected in the current fiscal year likely means that no additional funding will be provided to OJA for a private prison.

Christian said the decision about whether to move forward once the information about costs is obtained needs to come during the legislative session, which begins in February.

The state's three juvenile prisons are poorly designed, are aging and have capital needs, he said. In addition, the poor designs contribute to staffing problems, he said.

Christian said it is his recommendation to consider a request for proposals to build and/or manage a private juvenile prison.

Discussions about privatization create employee morale issues, said Sterling Zearley, executive director of the Oklahoma Public Employees Association.

He said private entities are in the business to make money and often cut programs, nutrition and other areas to do so.

Some employees from the Rader Center attended the OJA meeting wearing shirts that read, "Keep it professional. Keep it public."

http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20090718_16_A16_OKLAHO463816

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

July 10, 2009

Review of The Real Cost of Prisons Comix in Feminist Review

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

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

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

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

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

Review by Jeanne Vaccaro

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

June 17, 2009

FL: 3rd new juvenile prison to open in one county--privately run

3rd juvie prison to open
Old detention center to become facility for high-risk youth
By CHAD SMITH Thursday, June 11, 2009 ; Updated: 5:59 AM on Thursday, June 11, 2009

St. Augustine's juvenile detention center will close at the end of the month and will be replaced with a penitentiary for youthful offenders from around the state, meaning local youths will be held in Jacksonville while they await trial.

The state-run St. Johns Regional Juvenile Detention Center, on Avenue D near the county jail, is being shuttered to cut costs in the Department of Juvenile Justice and to make room for Florida's growing population of juvenile convicts, department spokeswoman Samadhi Jones said Wednesday.

It will become the county's third juvenile prison, ranking St. Johns among 14 other counties with three or more.

As of July 1, the 50-bed detention center will be divvied up between the St. Johns Youth Academy, designed for "moderate-risk" youth, and the St. Johns Juvenile Correctional Facility, a privately run prison for "high-risk" youth that is in the same complex as the current detention center.

The youth academy will get 34 beds, and the correctional facility, which currently can hold 32 inmates, will get the other 16.

Jones said the St. Augustine detention center was selected for conversion into a youth academy because it is relatively new and has "state-of-the-art" equipment.

"We're going to use it now for what we really need in the state of Florida, which is a high-risk residential facility," she said.

The St. Johns Youth Academy will serve as a replacement for the Santa Rosa Youth Academy, a 25-bed facility in the Panhandle that is being closed.

John A. Alexander, St. Johns County's chief administrative judge, said he was "irate" about the way the Department of Juvenile Justice has handled the transition.

Before the change goes into effect, Alexander and other judges, along with the St. Johns County Sheriff's Office, will need to coordinate with the Duval County detention center to sort out how the suspects will be booked, transported and monitored.

But, he said, very little of that has been discussed.

"Certainly nobody from Tallahassee has contacted the judicial system," the judge said. "We run a good program here. And I'm not a Pollyanna. I understand that you're going to cut programs. But let's coordinate the cuts."

Jerry Cameron, the county's assistant administrator, said the Sheriff's Office is looking into the possibility of setting up its own detention facility on the site.

While there is an average of about 35 youth in the detention center on a given day, about a third of them live in St. Johns County, and the majority come from Jacksonville or Putnam County.

What the county is proposing to do, Cameron said, is establish and operate a 12-bed facility where it could house its own youth and easily transport them between court appearances and the jail.

But, he said, it still isn't clear whether the county can legally run its own facility or whether the state would want to give up the money the county pays DJJ to house its youth, which amounts to between $700,000 and $800,000 annually.

"That takes care of the legal problem, and that takes care of the money problem," Cameron said.

Counties with three or more juvenile prisons:

Brevard - 3 (1 low, 2 moderate)

DeSoto - 3 (1 low, 2 moderate)

Duval - 3 (2 moderate, 1 high)

Hillsborough - 6 (5 moderate, 1 high)

Jackson - 4 (2 moderate, 1 high, 1 high/maximum)

Madison - 4 (4 moderate)

Manatee - 3 (2 moderate, 1 high)

Miami-Dade - 5 (1 low, 4 moderate)

Okaloosa - 5 (3 moderate, 2 high)

Okeechobee - 5 (2 low/moderate, 1 moderate, 1 high, 1 high/maximum)

Pasco - 5 (moderate)

Polk - 3 (moderate)

Santa Rosa* - 3 (1 low/moderate, 2 moderate)

St. Johns* - 3 (2 moderate, 1 high)

Volusia - 3 (2 moderate, 1 moderate/high)

* The figures for Santa Rosa and St. Johns counties will be current after the St. Johns juvenile detention center is converted into a residential facility, replacing the one in Santa Rosa.

Source: Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.

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

May 29, 2009

Interfaith group seeks second chance for youths sentenced to life The coalition delivers a message of redemption in sermons at some 200 California churches, synagogues and mosques.

Interfaith group seeks second chance for youths sentenced to life
The coalition delivers a message of redemption in sermons at some 200 California churches, synagogues and mosques.
By Dana Parsons
May 25, 2009
The major faith traditions teach that the young are special in the eyes of the Almighty. So what does God do when one of them commits a horrible crime and is consigned to a life in prison?

He cries.

That was the message delivered over Memorial Day weekend at some 200 churches, synagogues and mosques around the state by an interfaith coalition trying to change people's attitudes about long sentences for juveniles -- especially those facing life without the possibility of parole.

"When children commit certain actions, we stop thinking of them as children," Javier Stauring, director of Faith Communities for Families and Children, told a group of about 90 people Sunday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. "We start fearing them, we start demonizing them."

The Bible virtually sanctifies children. That doesn't change, Stauring suggested, when the legal system tries a young teenager as an adult. While not condoning their crimes, Stauring said a society with redemption in mind would not foreclose a second chance to someone so young.

"It's a lot easier to lock up a problem and throw away the key and not have to think about it, and to think that's going to make us safer," he said. What will make society safer from young criminals, Stauring said, is going after the "layers of woundedness" that often afflict them -- wounds that may stem from violence or abuse.

In an interview before he spoke Sunday, the 47-year-old Stauring said he met his first juvenile inmate 18 years ago while volunteering through his church. Now a lay chaplain, Stauring said he wasn't particularly religious when he volunteered.

"I now consider that a blessing," he said of the experience. "I formed my vision of God. We find him in the fringes. That's where, if we look at Jesus as a model, that's who he hung around with."

Stauring shared the microphone Sunday with Elias Elizondo, who took a plea bargain 16 years ago on a murder charge that got him a sentence of 15 years to life instead of life without parole. Now 32 and living in Sun Valley, Elizondo was paroled four months ago and said he's a different person than he was at 16.

"I don't justify my actions," he said, without explaining the details of the crime. He told the group that he not only deserved prison but that, at the time, he wasn't sure he ever should be released. Only when he matured, he said, did he realize that he could change course. Instead of blaming other people or his education, which stopped at sixth grade, he set out to improve himself.

"I started thinking, 'Is it possible I could turn my life around?' "

The answer, Elizondo said, was yes. "The parole board gave me a chance when it didn't have to," he said. "I was redeemable."

Elizondo is the kind of person Stauring's group wants to reach. The coalition is advocating for state Senate Bill 399, which would permit anyone under 18 sentenced to life without parole to ask for resentencing after serving 10 years. If the inmate met certain conditions, he or she could be eligible for a new sentence of 25 years to life.

Even that seemingly small window, Stauring said, would give hope to the still-young person.

The coalition's efforts are aligned with Human Rights Watch, an international organization that has called on Congress to end life-without-parole sentencing for young offenders. "Sentencing juveniles to die in prison is cruel, costly and unnecessary," the organization's U.S. program director said this month.

The group reported that at least 2,574 inmates in the United States were sentenced to life without parole for crimes committed before the age of 18. California has 250 of them. The United States is the only country that imposes such harsh sentences on juveniles.

Stauring knows the statistics but said the holy books of Christianity, Judaism and Islam are his references on the subject.

"This comes from our faith convictions," he said, "that we should never ever give up on a child -- children are always changing -- and that we should not look at them and declare that the worst thing they did as a child is how we're going to label them for the rest of their lives."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-juvenile-justice25-2009may25,0,7391881.story

Posted by lois at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2009

More calls for California to shut down its youth prison system

More calls for California to shut down its youth prison system
By Karen de Sá
Mercury News
Posted: 05/25/2009

With California mired in near-catastrophic budget woes, a growing number of researchers are calling for the state to shut down its youth prison system, which they say has become too expensive, too mired in abusive practices, and too ineffective in enhancing public safety.

There are just six remaining prisons for the state's most serious juvenile offenders, and they house the lowest number of inmates ever recorded in modern history. That has left taxpayers in an era of deep cuts to education and social services footing a bill of a quarter-million dollars each year for each of the 1,600 youthful offenders now left in state custody.

In a report headed this week to legislators wrestling with a $21.3 billion budget shortfall, the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice describes a way out: Shut down the state prison system for youthful offenders, and turn the population back to county probation departments that are sitting on empty beds in new and refurbished juvenile halls. The report echoes similar findings of the state's own Little Hoover Commission and Legislative Analyst's Office, which have also concluded that given adequate time and resources, counties could house even the most troubled juvenile offenders in far cheaper and more effective institutions.

"These wards are going to get out. They're coming back to every one of their communities," said Stuart Drown, executive director of the bipartisan Little Hoover Commission,
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which advises the state on improving efficiency. "Why not get them the programs they need to stay out of jail and not go back? They're not getting that at the state."

Bernie Warner, head of California's Division of Juvenile Justice, argues there must always be a state system for the most serious, violent, gang-involved youth offenders, the majority of whom need specialized treatment for crimes as serious as murder and sexual assault.

"The counties do a great job in managing over 99 percent of all those in the juvenile justice system in California," Warner said, but "given who's left in the state system — the highest-risk, highest-need youth — I don't think it's in the best interest of public safety to have those youth in local detention facilities."

Burden to counties

Expanding on Warner's position, the president of the Chief Probation Officers of California says counties facing deep budget cuts simply cannot assume more responsibility. "This is probably one of those things where the state needs to stay in the business of corrections," said Don Meyer, Yolo County's probation chief. "There isn't any other place for them."

Yet in a report released late last year, the Little Hoover Commission advised the state to get out of the juvenile justice business by 2011, stating: "It is untenable to continue to invest money into a system that has failed for many years." The commission advised that Californians deserve an accounting for a poor investment by the state, given that 74 percent of youth offenders leaving the state system end up back in trouble with the law. The problems don't end there: The state also has done little to meet the requirements of a 4-year-old court order to improve conditions, according to an Alameda County Superior Court judge monitoring the case.

Now, Dan Macallair of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, has issued a report going one step further.

Using figures from the state's Corrections Standards Authority, his report states there are a sufficient number of beds in California's 58 county-based juvenile justice systems to absorb the entire state population of 1,637, "and still have nearly 600 empty beds remaining."

Even given the additional costs of creating treatment units within juvenile halls that are traditionally simply holding pens, the report says a shift to counties could result in significant savings: Counties spend about $25,000 a year on youth offenders — 10 times less than the state spends.

Counties up and down the state — including Santa Clara County — expanded their juvenile hall capacity in recent years following a mini-building boom. Now many of these facilities, including state-of-the-art high-security juvenile halls, remain partially empty. Santa Clara County has 390 beds in its juvenile hall, with a current population of about 300. Macallair's report identifies the county as one of the least-reliant on state institutions; there are now just 33 county youths in state custody, down from 328 in 2000.

Santa Clara County Probation Chief Sheila Mitchell said her department has worked hard to keep kids out of state prisons. She would not comment on the recommendation to shut down the state system, other than noting that the county's newly expanded juvenile hall — designed as a short-term detention facility — would be ill-suited for those serving years-long sentences and requiring intensive treatment.

Rehabilitation

Reformers say using surplus county beds for juvenile offenders in state custody would improve the prospects of rehabilitation, a notion many parents echo. Sharon James, a Merced transit worker, said she can only visit her 18-year-old son in a Central Valley prison twice a month, which has caused his condition — in a massive institution mired in violence — to worsen.

"I can look at him and see that he's given up on himself," James said of her son, charged with a robbery and fighting while on probation. The teen landed in a Stockton youth prison with the credits of a high school senior, but after almost two years in custody has not graduated.

"If he were closer, I could visit him every day, or as often as visits are allowed," James said. "I just don't want him to come home totally broken down — that's my biggest concern."
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_12431880

Posted by lois at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2009

Key Findings from America's Invisible Children: Latino Youth and the Failure of Justice

Key Findings from America's Invisible Children: Latino Youth and the Failure of Justice:

On any given day, close to 18,000 Latino youth are incarcerated in America. The majority of these youth are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. Most Latino youth are held in juvenile detention facilities (41%) and juvenile long-term secure facilities (34%). However, one out of every four (24%) incarcerated Latino children is held in an adult prison or jail even though youth in adult facilities are in significant danger of suicide and rape.

Latino youth are overrepresented in the U.S. justice system and receive harsher treatment than white youth. In order of rising disparities, Latino youth are 4% more likely than white youth to be petitioned, 16% more likely than white youth to be adjudicated delinquent, 28% more likely than white youth to be detained, 41% more likely than white youth to receive an out-of-home placement, 43% more likely than white youth to be waived to the adult system, and 40% more likely to be admitted to adult prison. States with the highest levels of disparity of Latino youth in adult prison (rates over 5 times that for white youth) were California, Minnesota, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Nine out of ten (90%) Latino youth ages 10 to 17 live in states that permit pre-trial detention in adult jails for youth prosecuted in the adult system. According to a study of 40 large urban jurisdictions, Latino youth prosecuted in the adult system are routinely incarcerated in adult jails. Overall, a higher proportion of white youth are released pretrial (60%) than any other racial or ethnic categories. Most (54%) of Latino youth prosecuted in the adult system were detained pretrial; of the Latino youth detained pretrial, 72% were held in adult jails.

Recommendations for Congress and the Administration:

Reauthorize the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) this year with strengthening provisions such as updating the "Disproportionate Minority Contact" (DMC) core requirement to give states specific guidance on action steps to reduce both racial and ethnic disparities and by closing the loophole that allows youth to be placed in adult jails.

Substantially increase federal investments to improve culturally and linguistically appropriate, community-based programs and alternatives to incarceration for Latino youth.

Oppose legislation that increases the transfer of youth to the adult criminal system or expands mandatory minimum sentences such as gang enhancements.

State and Local Policymakers should:

Immediately stop housing young people in adult jails and prisons.

Redirect resources from incarceration to culturally and linguistically competent in-home and community-based services for at-risk youth and youth already in the juvenile or adult justice systems, such as the programs profiled in this brief.

Reduce the transfer of youth to adult court by repealing statutory exclusion and prosecutorial discretion laws.

The National Council of La Raza is the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., working to improve opportunities for Hispanic Americans.
The entire report can be viewed at:
http://campaignforyouthjustice.org/documents/Latino_Brief.pdf.
May 20, 2009

Posted by lois at 07:19 PM | Comments (0)

May 07, 2009

Girls on Our Streets

Op-Ed Columnist
Girls on Our Streets
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: May 6, 2009- NY Times

Jasmine Caldwell was 14 and selling sex on the streets when an opportunity arose to escape her pimp: an undercover policeman picked her up.

The cop could have rescued her from the pimp, who ran a string of 13 girls and took every cent they earned. If the cop had taken Jasmine to a shelter, she could have resumed her education and tried to put her life back in order.

Instead, the policeman showed her his handcuffs and threatened to send her to prison. Terrified, she cried and pleaded not to be jailed. Then, she said, he offered to release her in exchange for sex.

Afterward, the policeman returned her to the street. Then her pimp beat her up for failing to collect any money.

“That happens a lot,” said Jasmine, who is now 21. “The cops sometimes just want to blackmail you into having sex.”

I’ve often reported on sex trafficking in other countries, and that has made me curious about the situation here in the United States. Prostitution in America isn’t as brutal as it is in, say, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Cambodia and Malaysia (where young girls are routinely kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured by brothel owners, occasionally even killed). But the scene on American streets is still appalling — and it continues largely because neither the authorities nor society as a whole show much interest in 14-year-old girls pimped on the streets.

Americans tend to think of forced prostitution as the plight of Mexican or Asian women trafficked into the United States and locked up in brothels. Such trafficking is indeed a problem, but the far greater scandal and the worst violence involves American teenage girls.

If a middle-class white girl goes missing, radio stations broadcast amber alerts, and cable TV fills the air with “missing beauty” updates. But 13-year-old black or Latina girls from poor neighborhoods vanish all the time, and the pimps are among the few people who show any interest.

These domestic girls are often runaways or those called “throwaways” by social workers: teenagers who fight with their parents and are then kicked out of the home. These girls tend to be much younger than the women trafficked from abroad and, as best I can tell, are more likely to be controlled by force.

Pimps are not the business partners they purport to be. They typically take every penny the girls earn. They work the girls seven nights a week. They sometimes tattoo their girls the way ranchers brand their cattle, and they back up their business model with fists and threats.

“If you don’t earn enough money, you get beat,” said Jasmine, an African-American who has turned her life around with the help of Covenant House, an organization that works with children on the street. “If you say something you’re not supposed to, you get beat. If you stay too long with a customer, you get beat. And if you try to leave the pimp, you get beat.”

The business model of pimping is remarkably similar whether in Atlanta or Calcutta: take vulnerable, disposable girls whom nobody cares about, use a mix of “friendship,” humiliation, beatings, narcotics and threats to break the girls and induce 100 percent compliance, and then rent out their body parts.

It’s not solely violence that keeps the girls working for their pimps. Jasmine fled an abusive home at age 13, and she said she — like most girls — stayed with the pimp mostly because of his emotional manipulation. “I thought he loved me, so I wanted to be around him,” she said.

That’s common. Girls who are starved of self-esteem finally meet a man who showers them with gifts, drugs and dollops of affection. That, and a lack of alternatives, keeps them working for him — and if that isn’t enough, he shoves a gun in the girl’s mouth and threatens to kill her.

Solutions are complicated and involve broader efforts to overcome urban poverty, including improving schools and attempting to shore up the family structure. But a first step is to stop treating these teenagers as criminals and focusing instead on arresting the pimps and the customers — and the corrupt cops.

“The problem isn’t the girls in the streets; it’s the men in the pews,” notes Stephanie Davis, who has worked with Mayor Shirley Franklin to help coordinate a campaign to get teenage prostitutes off the streets.

Two amiable teenage prostitutes, working without a pimp for the “fast money,” told me that there will always be women and girls selling sex voluntarily. They’re probably right. But we can significantly reduce the number of 14-year-old girls who are terrorized by pimps and raped by many men seven nights a week. That’s doable, if it’s a national priority, if we’re willing to create the equivalent of a nationwide amber alert.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/opinion/07kristof.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 02:58 PM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2009

Justices Agree to Take Up Life Without Parole for Youth

Justices Agree to Take Up Sentencing for Young Offenders
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: May 4, 2009- NY Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider whether the reasoning that led it to strike down the death penalty for juvenile offenders four years ago should also apply to sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

The court accepted two cases on the issue, both from Florida and neither involving a killing. In one, Joe Sullivan was sentenced to life without the possibility of release for raping a 72-year-old woman in 1989, when he was 13. In the other, Terrance Graham received the same sentence for participating in a home invasion robbery in 2004, when he was 17 and on probation for other crimes.

In the majority opinion in the death penalty case, Roper v. Simmons, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote that teenagers were immature, unformed, irresponsible and susceptible to negative influences, including peer pressure.

“Even a heinous crime committed by a juvenile,” Justice Kennedy concluded, is not “evidence of irretrievably depraved character.”

Outside the context of the death penalty, however, the Supreme Court has not shown much interest in cases from prisoners claiming that the sentences they received were too harsh. But Douglas A. Berman, an authority on sentencing law at Ohio State University, said the factors cited by Justice Kennedy concerning juveniles might well apply in noncapital cases.

“The principles driving Roper,” Professor Berman said, “would seem to suggest that its impact does not stop at the execution chamber.”

The United States is alone in the world in making routine use of life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders. Human rights groups say more than 2,000 prisoners in the United States are serving such sentences for crimes they committed when they were 17 or younger. A vast majority of those crimes involved a killing by the defendant or an accomplice.

At the argument of the Roper case in 2004, Justice Antonin Scalia said the rationales offered against the juvenile death penalty applied just as forcefully to sentences of life without the possibility of parole.

“I don’t see where there’s a logical line,” said Justice Scalia, who voted in dissent to retain the juvenile death penalty.

But Justice Kennedy wrote that life sentences would continue to deter young criminals after the death penalty became unavailable.

“The punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “is itself a severe sanction, in particular for a young person.”

Lawyers for the two Florida inmates cited international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits sentences of life without parole for juveniles. Justice Kennedy’s invoking foreign and international law in the Roper decision was controversial, and the new cases will reopen the question of how much attention the Supreme Court should pay to international law.

Bryan S. Gowdy, a lawyer for Mr. Graham, said in an interview that his client had never been convicted of the robbery that sent him to prison for the rest of his life. Though evidence was presented concerning the robbery, the trial judge found only that Mr. Graham had violated the terms of his probation after an earlier conviction for armed burglary and attempted armed robbery when he was 16.

“When our children make mistakes, are we going to lock them up and throw away the key for life?” Mr. Gowdy said. “If you follow the rationale of Roper, that’s not appropriate.”

In rejecting a challenge to Mr. Graham’s sentence last year, a Florida appeals court acknowledged that “a true life sentence is typically reserved for juveniles guilty of more heinous crimes such as homicide.” But the court added that Mr. Graham “rejected his second chance” in violating the terms of his probation “and chose to continue committing crimes at an escalating pace.”

A ruling in favor of the prisoners in the two cases — Graham v. Florida, No. 08-7412, and Sullivan v. Florida, No. 08-7621 — could be quite narrow. The Supreme Court may leave for another day, for instance, the question of how murders committed by juveniles may be punished.

Last year, drawing a similar distinction, the court said in Kennedy v. Louisiana that crimes against individuals that do not involve killing, including the rape of a child by an adult, cannot be punished by death.
A version of this article appeared in print on May 5, 2009, on page A16 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/us/05scotus.html?scp=1&sq=Justices%20Agree%20to%20Take%20Up%20Life-Without%20Parole&st=cse

Posted by lois at 06:54 PM | Comments (0)

April 18, 2009

Senators Support Access To Mental Health Treatment For Children And Adolescents In Juvenile Justice System

Senators Support Access To Mental Health Treatment For Children And Adolescents In Juvenile Justice System
14 Apr 2009

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) commends Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Ranking Member Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) for reintroducing the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Reauthorization Act (JJDPA). The prevalence of mental illnesses is higher in children and adolescents in the juvenile justice system than in the general population1 with more than 70 percent of children and adolescents in the juvenile justice system having a diagnosable mental illness2.

"The reintroduction of JJDPA legislation will allow us to continue to focus treatment and intervention for the most vulnerable and underserved. These kids have higher rates of mental health diagnoses including learning disabilities and substance abuse compared to their peers," said Louis Kraus, M.D., chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rush University and co-chair of the AACAP's Juvenile Justice Committee. "Early education and intervention programs that target at-risk children and adolescents and work with them before, during, and after the adjudication process will reduce recidivism."

The Act includes funding for increasing training for juvenile justice personnel and focuses attention on prevention programs to keep children from entering the criminal justice system altogether. Additionally, the Act states the need to support a continuum of programs that include delinquency prevention, intervention, substance abuse treatments, and aftercare. The JJDPA states that children should be treated in facilities dedicated to children and adolescents.

"A prevention component that targets children and youth at risk is long overdue," said William Arroyo, M.D., co-chair of the Juvenile Justice committee. "It not only aborts a trajectory of suffering and antisocial behavior, but it avoids enormous costs incurred by public systems when youth enter the juvenile justice system. Research supports this strategy."

The AACAP is a non-profit medical association representing more than 7,400 child and adolescent psychiatrists. The AACAP educates community leaders, policymakers, government agencies, legislators, service providers, professional organizations, and child advocates on the critical need of making mental health services more accessible to the thousands of children involved in the juvenile justice system.

References:

1. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. 2004. Thousands of Children with Mental Illness Warehoused in Juvenile Detention Centers Awaiting Mental Health Services. Washington, D.C.

2. National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice. 2006. Youth With Mental Health Disorders in the Juvenile Justice System: Results from a Multi-State Prevalence Study. Delmar, New York.

Source
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Article URL: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/145910.php

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

CT: Raise the Age supporters cheer Democrats' alternative budget

Raise the Age supporters cheer Democrats' alternative budget
Hour Staff Writer

Supporters of the Raise the Age campaign and other youth-focused legislation announced their support of the Democrats alternative proposed budget Monday, saying it preserves Connecticut's "commitments to children and families while being fiscally responsible."

The "Raise the Age" legislation, signed into law in 2007 by Gov. M. Jodi Rell, changes the default mechanism in Connecticut that automatically sends youthful offenders to adult court at the age of 16 and, instead, allow 16- and 17-year-olds to go through the juvenile court system.

Earlier this year as part of Gov. M. Jodi Rell's response to the budget crisis the governor said the state would delay the implementation of Raise the Age to 2012 -- the original implementation was supposed to be 2010.

Connecticut is only one of three states that allows 16- and 17-year-olds to be processed in adult court.

As part of their proposal, the Democrats are proposing allowing the 16-year-olds to system as intended in 2010, delaying only the 17-year-olds.

Abby Anderson, executive director of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance, said the Democrats' proposal showed that including 16-year-olds in the juvenile justice system can be done with minimal impact on the state's budget.

"We're thrilled the Democrats understand the importance of continuing these efforts instead of not doing anything and then having to do a more costly intervention down the line," Anderson said. "We'd love to have both the 16- and 17-year- olds out of the adult system because the longer we wait, the more kids we lose to the system, but at least we might get part of what we were promised, so we're thrilled for that."

In addition to Raise the Age, the Dems budget also supports Family Support Centers which deliver preventive services to struggling families. Anderson said the centers are very successful at helping youth before they need more costly interventions or become involved in the juvenile justice system.

Anderson said she thinks the Democrats' proposed legislation has a fair amount of support behind it.

"It does have a good amount of support because I feel that legislators feel it's important to do something to move forward in a positive way and do what was promised," she said.

State Sen. Bob Duff, D-25, a big supporter of the Raise the Age campaign, and said he continues to support its implementation.

"While I didn't vote for the spending plan, I do support Raise the Age as a long-term investment for our state to cut down on the rate of recidivism among our youth," Duff said.
http://www.thehour.com/story/467880

Posted by lois at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2009

WA: Closing prisons, slashing sentences eyed to balance budget

Closing prisons, slashing sentences eyed to balance budget
By Jennifer Sullivan
Seattle Times staff reporter
April 9, 2009

OLYMPIA — Tough-on-crime legislation that has long filled courtrooms, prisons and parole offices across the country has apparently met its match — the economy.

In Washington and other states, lawmakers are considering budget cuts that would close prisons, loosen sentencing guidelines and slash probation terms.

With lawmakers in Olympia looking for nearly $4 billion in spending cuts, several high-ranking Democrats say the recession gives them an opportunity to add compassion to a criminal-justice system they believe has grown too large, too expensive and too harsh for some of the crimes.

"We need a massive re-look at what we're doing and what the focus is," said Senate Ways and Means Chairwoman Margarita Prentice, D-Renton.

Prentice is backing a plan in the Senate's proposed state budget to close the McNeil Island Correctional Complex, a 1,300-inmate, medium-security island prison in Pierce County.

The state has never closed a major prison before. The move would save about $16 million over the next two years, legislative budget staff said.

The Senate budget also would close Green Hill School, the state lockup for violent and gang-entrenched juveniles; downsize the state prison population by 1,900 inmates; and drop people convicted of low-level felonies and misdemeanors from probation.

The House, in its proposed budget, would cut probation time for violent felons and sex offenders; allow for home detention instead of incarceration in some cases; close the medium-security Naselle Youth Camp; and eliminate parole for nearly a third of all juvenile offenders.

6% of states' budgets

One in every 31 adults is incarcerated or on parole in the U.S. — a total of 7.3 million people, the Pew Center on the States reported last month.

Nationally, the prison inmate population has grown each year since 1972, said Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

But due to the recession, nearly every state is scrambling to find ways to cut criminal-justice costs, which eat up nearly 6 percent of state budgets, said Alison Lawrence, a policy specialist with the National Conference of State Legislatures.

States are releasing inmates early and are letting offenders trade incarceration for treatment programs, she said. Some, like Washington, Michigan and New York, are considering prison closures.

In Olympia, the Senate would cut $152 million from corrections and criminal justice in the 2009-11 state budget, while the House would cut more than $160 million.

Last year, Washington spent nearly $1.1 billion on criminal justice, which includes the Department of Corrections, the State Patrol, the Criminal Justice Training Commission, the courts system and the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration, according to the state Office of Financial Management.

Nearly 18,000 people are housed in the state's 15 prisons. Still, Washington is far from a leader in incarceration rates nationally. According to the Pew study, Washington ranks 44th for the number of people per capita in prison or jail.

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg attributes Washington's lower prison population to a 2002 law that allows prosecutors to steer many drug offenders to state-funded treatment instead of incarceration.

Last year, drug offenders totaled about 13 percent of the prison population, down from 22 percent in 2005, Satterberg said.

Some urge caution

Crime-victim advocate Jenny Wieland Ward says the state should study how to reduce the cost of corrections before closing prisons.

"There's smarter ways of dealing with budget cuts than closing McNeil," said Ward, executive director of Everett-based Families & Friends of Missing Persons & Violent Crime Victims. "There has got to be a more thoughtful process."

State Corrections Chief Eldon Vail agrees the state shouldn't rush into closing institutions. He suggests cutting costs by placing fewer offenders on probation — a strategy both the House and Senate propose, along with closing institutions.

Currently, the state supervises about 27,000 offenders on probation, Vail said. The House proposal would remove about 11,000 people from supervision while the Senate would cut 7,100, Vail said.

Sen. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, worries the budget shortfall could cut into programs that provide drug, alcohol and mental-health treatment to adult and juvenile offenders. Hargrove, who chairs the Senate Human Services and Corrections Committee, said he would rather close expensive facilities like McNeil Island than put treatment programs on the chopping block.

Attorney General Rob McKenna, a Republican, said the state should look for new ways to pay for criminal justice.

"This state needs to have a serious conversation about public safety, how we're paying for it and how the public is suffering from inadequate law-enforcement resources," McKenna said.

When the economy is flush, lawmakers want to devote more money to public safety, he said. But when times are bad, criminal justice gets whacked.

"This is not the first time the state has balanced the budget by letting people out of prison early," McKenna added.

Sen. Mike Carrell, R-Lakewood, vehemently opposes any move to close prisons. He believes criminal-justice funding should be a higher priority this legislative session.

"Public safety has to be the first call," Carrell said. "What good does it do to have great schools if our children are raped, murdered and assaulted to and from school?"

"It's desperate times"

At Green Hill, news of the potential closure of the state's oldest and toughest juvenile-detention center was circulating though the population last week.

The facility in Chehalis holds about 200 medium- and maximum-security offenders ranging in age from 17 to 20.

Dan Robertson, deputy assistant secretary of the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration, says closing Green Hill would be a mistake. Senate budget writers say the move would save nearly $14 million a year in operating costs.

But Robertson says it would cost more than $35 million to construct new facilities at Maple Lane School, a juvenile lockup near Centralia where Green Hill's offenders would be moved. Maple Lane primarily houses youth who have substance-abuse problems or mental illness or are incarcerated for sex offenses.

Instead of closing Green Hill, Robertson said his agency suggested closing Naselle Youth Camp, a medium-security facility that serves both boys and girls. That would save $10 million over the next two years.

Marybeth Queral, superintendent at Green Hill, doubts the state could re-create Green Hill's vocational programs for fiber-optic networking, welding, auto repair, embroidery and sign printing.

She's also concerned about the two offender populations mixing — many of Green Hill's offenders are known gang members serving time for violent felonies. Queral fears that Maple Lane's population could be preyed upon and manipulated by the older and more sophisticated offenders.

"I think it's desperate times. I think decisions are being made looking at the bottom-line dollar, not the potential impact," she said. "It could be very dangerous.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2009010460_criminaljusticecut
s09m.html

Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company

Posted by lois at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

Delinquency and Prevention

Delinquency and Prevention
Editorial- New York Times
Published: April 9, 2009

The Juvenile Justice and Delinquency and Prevention Act of 1974, now up for Congressional reauthorization, provided states and localities with money, training and technical assistance for badly needed delinquency prevention programs and greatly expanded protections for children who ended up in custody.

Unfortunately, those protections have been seriously eroded since the early 1990s, when states began sentencing more and more children to adult jails. Those young people are at high risk of being raped, battered or pushed to suicide. The numbers show that once they are jailed with adults, they are much more likely to commit violent crimes as adults and become career criminals.

The Senate version of the reauthorized act (the House has yet to move) marks a welcome departure from policies that have increasingly criminalized the nation’s children. It strengthens protections for young people who end up in adult lockups, and it would stop penalizing states that wisely house in juvenile facilities some children convicted in adult courts.

The new bill also fixes some problems that were supposed to be eliminated in 1974, when states were to have ended the all-too-common practice of locking up children who committed noncriminal “status offenses” — like truancy, running away or smoking cigarettes.

For such children, the bill encourages states to use community-based counseling and family intervention programs, which are cheaper and more effective than detention. It also calls for better screening and treatment of children with mental health needs. Those children are over-represented among those in custody.

The bill deserves the full support of Congress, which needs to back up the new policies with money enough to make them work.

Posted by lois at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2009

Lock 'Em Up Jailing kids is a proud American tradition.

Lock 'Em Up
Jailing kids is a proud American tradition.
By THOMAS FRANK
Wall Street Journal On-line
April 1, 2009

At first glance, the news from Luzerne County, in northeastern Pennsylvania, is not good. In what is known locally as the "kids for cash" scandal, two judges have pleaded guilty to accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks from a for-profit juvenile correctional facility -- a privately owned jail for kids, essentially.

And here is what the judges delivered, according to the charges of the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case: In 2003 one of them, Judge Michael Conahan, who had authority over such expenses, defunded the county-owned detention center, channeling kids sentenced to detention to the private jail -- along with the public's money.

For good measure, the feds charge, Mr. Conahan also agreed to send the private facility $1.3 million per year in public funds. Over the succeeding years, the private jail, along with a second lockup-for-profit that had opened in another part of the state, won tens of millions of dollars in Luzerne County contracts, allegedly with the two judges' help.

What has drawn the media's attention, though, is the remarkable strictness of the judges' judging. Mr. Conahan's alleged partner in the scheme, Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr., reportedly sent kids to the private detention centers when probation officers didn't think it was a good idea; he sent kids there when their crimes were nonviolent; he sent kids there when their crimes were insignificant. It was as though he was determined to keep those private prisons filled with children at all times. According to news stories, offenses as small as swiping a jar of nutmeg or throwing a piece of steak at an adult were enough to merit a trip to the hoosegow.

Over the years Mr. Ciavarella racked up a truly awesome score: He sent kids to detention instead of other options at twice the state average, according to the New York Times. He tried a prodigious number of cases in which the accused child had no lawyer -- here, says the Times, the judge's numbers were fully 10 times the state average. And he did it fast, sometimes rendering a verdict "in the neighborhood of a minute-and-a-half to three minutes," according to the judge tasked with reconsidering Mr. Ciavarella's work.

My question is, what have the Luzerne County judges done that deviates in the least from our American political traditions? These jurists have merely taken to heart the unvarying message of 40 years' worth of election results -- that more people, many more, need to go to jail -- and have come up with an entrepreneurial solution to the problem.

We the people say it loud and clear every Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as peaceful stretches: More of our population needs to be behind bars. We love retribution so much we make hits of TV shows in which society's ne'er-do-wells come in for lectures not only by stern, righteous judges, but by tattooed, mulletted bounty hunters as well.

And over the years we have embraced all sorts of instruments ensuring that more people got locked up for longer and longer stretches: Three strikes laws, mandatory sentencing laws, zero-tolerance policies. Maybe they aren't "fair," but they've helped to make the U.S. number one in percentage of population in the clink -- in fact, as Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb pointed out in Parade magazine on Sunday, America has an amazing 25% of the world's prisoners.

Taking this path has not always been easy. In the 1990s, when we started to realize that child crooks were "superpredators" who needed to go to prison along with everyone else, some were unwilling to act. Others stepped up. "We've got to quit coddling these violent kids like nothing is going on," said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) in 1996. "Getting some of these do-gooder liberals to do what is right is real tough. We'd all like to rehabilitate these kids, but by gosh we are in a different age."

But taking law and order to the next level in this different age required money, by gosh. Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a step in the right direction, but what we didn't have -- until recently -- were proper instruments for incentivizing the judiciary. That's what the "kids for cash" judges were apparently experimenting with.

Today the do-gooders revile those efforts as "kickbacks," but before long we will see them as legitimate tools of justice. Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government's justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?

The public will get to see their neighbors' kids go to jail, the judge who sends them there will be able to afford a nice condo in Florida, and the company that satisfies the public's desire for punishment will make a handsome profit. It will be a win-win result for everyone.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123854010220075533.html#

Posted by lois at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2009

Jail a Child, Get a Job: America Hates Kids

Jail a Child, Get a Job: America Hates Kids
Chris Norwood
Huffington Post, March 30, 2009

Two judges in Western Pennsylvania, recently sentenced to seven years in prison for purposely inflating the sentences of juvenile offenders to benefit the income and profits of privately run "youth detention" centers, draw our attention to the over-riding economic impulse for the vast criminalization of American youth.

The judges got bribes of $2.6 million. Thousands of teens were jailed for little or no reason. The young woman "offender" featured in the New York Times story about this debacle, for example, was 17, had two parents and the pleasant teen look often described as "perky." She had been sentenced to a juvenile center for 3 months for making fun of an assistant principal on MySpace. (One of the disgraced judges, ironically enough, had found her guilty of "harassment.").

Yet, with thousands of Pennsylvania kids being sentenced on such skimpy charges----teens routinely received jail-time even against the recommendations of local prosecutors---this scheme maintained itself for at least five years until finally ended by a serious investigation. Western Pennsylvania---coal country---is largely white and working class. The fact that even there, children aren't safe from runaway criminalization only underscores how commonplace it is in the criminal "justice" system to see children as a meal ticket---and the striking extent to which the resulting criminalization is accepted throughout the United States.

In fact, jailing young people specifically and clearly for the sole purpose of creating jobs for adults---usually adults linked to political organizations and their allied unions---is commonplace across much the nation. And, it doesn't matter whether the "facilities" youth "offenders" are sent to are privately or publicly run. Youth incarceration is a very well-studied field. Over and over, it has been shown that, for the nonviolent youth who constitute most of the young people in American jails, being sent to a "facility", as distinct from being assigned to counseling and supervision in their own community, is a terrible choice which launches even nonviolent youth toward repeated jailings.

In New York State, for instance, where most youth in the "criminal justice" system are black or Hispanic, it costs $200,000 a year to keep kids in state facilities and 80% are re-arrested after getting out; it costs $17,000 for community-based counseling and supervision, with only 35% of these youth being re-arrested.

However, jailing kids to keep selected adults in paychecks is now so much a part of American culture that even statistics like that can barely nudge change. Gladys Carrion, New York's current Commissioner of Families and Children Services, has made it her top mission in the year since she took office is to start closing New York's dismal youth facilities. Judges, indeed, are directing more and more young offenders to the community-based counseling that is their best chance. However, getting juvenile beds closed so that the state treasury, and youth programs, can benefit from the savings has proven difficult indeed. Currently, New York State, which is effectively bankrupt, is holding open hundreds of empty beds and keeping unused facilities fully staffed at a cost of $14 million a year.

Proof that juvenile facilities, themselves, can both operate both more cheaply for the public purse and with better results for children fares as badly, or worse. In the two decades since Missouri reformed its juvenile detention system into the nation's most admired program, it has reduced its "re-incarceration" rate for the young in its system to a breathtaking low of 9%. The core of this system centers on forming the young inmates into 12-kid units, where they learn to be responsible for one another---for both the benefits of improved behavior and the consequences of bad behavior---on a level that gives them an entirely new social context. As Marion Wright Edleman, head of the Children's Defense Fund, writes, the result is both rehabilitation and low costs.
Much of the rehabilitation involves working through youth peer groups and does away with the mode of adults preaching down to them. The youth are taught leadership skills and how to facilitate group sessions. Staff members are trained to facilitate teams of 12 and are prepared to meet the needs of each youth, making referrals to family therapy and substance abuse counseling generally unnecessary.
The Missouri Division of Youth Services also has created a seamless case management system so that once a youth is adjudicated, one case worker follows him and his family throughout his entire stay in the system facilitating the eventual reentry of the youth into his community. Significantly, this system comes with a considerable cost savings. The annual cost for detaining a youth in Missouri is less than half of what other states pay.
This reform probably only blossomed and persevered because Missouri had one Director of Youth Services, Mark Steward, for 17 years; this gave him the needed time to insist and insist on reform until it was institutionalized---that is, until kids succeeding while they were jailed became the new norm.

But saying that Missouri has the nation's most admired youth offender program means--when you get down to it---almost nothing in the United States because there is no understood or promoted civic value in stopping the useless jailing of youth. Since 2005, Steward has headed a foundation-funded consulting service to help other states reform their juvenile services on the Missouri model. So far he is only working with the city of Washington, D.C., and 3 states which he feels are actually committed at the top levels---including the governorship---necessary to see this kind of reform succeed against internal opposition, especially from unions.

So, instead of spreading success, what we have, in the succinct definition of the Children's Defense Fund, is a "cradle to prison pipeline." This pipeline works at multiple levels to criminalize ordinary youthful hi-jinks and misbehavior (How was it a crime in the first place for a 17-year old to lampoon an assistant principal on MySpace?) and then assures that those declared to be young criminals on one flimsy charge after another actually do get jailed in a way that makes them into criminals.

What we finally see are startling incarceration rates. Overall, one in 31 Americans are in prison or under criminal justice "supervision" such as parole; 1 in 11 young black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are out-rightly imprisoned at any one time, and over their life, one of three will be.

It's striking that this relentless criminalization of youth, a phenomenon of the past twenty years, happened while the baby boomers---historically, the nation's freest, most drug using, and full of hi-jinks and protest generation---were actually the adults administering the United States. I don't have any real explanation for that, but I have often thought about the contrast: the generation in charge had the most fun and freedom of anybody while the most vulnerable young in their care---the poor, the minority, the parentless---ended up as the most literally shackled American young since slavery.

Maybe we were just too involved in our own causes---women's rights, gay rights, "choice"---and, of course, out vast consumerism, to undertake the hard, daily civic work of controlling bureaucracies which control others. With rare exception, prominently Marion Wright Edelman, even minority leaders have not made it a true cause to combat youth criminalization.

Now as the baby boomers (I'm one myself) head toward retirement, perhaps we'll finally have time to look at what we are leaving behind in the terrible sadness these children have been assigned for their portion of the United States. Or maybe the realization that spending so much to jail these youth interferes with paying for things we now need---like Social Security and Medicare---will cause us at last to see them as a cause for concern.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-norwood/jail-a-child-get-a-job-am_b_180988.html

Posted by lois at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2009

Real Cost of Prisons Comix wins National Council on Crime and Delinquency PASS Award

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The National Council on Crime and Delinquency
Announces
The 2008 PASS Award Winners
Oakland, CA, March 20, 2009

The National Council on Crime and Delinquency is pleased to announce the 2008 Winners of its respected PASS Awards (Prevention for a Safer Society). NCCD honors the media’s success and vital role in illuminating the people and programs that uncover the root causes of crime and those that promise to protect our most precious resource—our youth—against involvement in crime.

A critical link in successful policies related to youth and justice is the education of the public. The media is uniquely positioned to be this link, and we gratefully acknowledge their efforts to fulfill that responsibility. Each year the PASS Awards honor media professionals in the fields of print, literature, broadcast media, television, and film in recognition of thoughtful and factual coverage of the issues. Special consideration is given to those stories that highlight solutions to criminal and juvenile justice and child welfare problems.

NCCD is the nation's oldest private organization working to attain responsive and effective criminal justice, juvenile justice, and child welfare systems. For over 100 years, NCCD has been committed to promoting criminal justice strategies that are fair, humane, cost-effective, and uncompromising in public safety. The issues that have defined NCCD since its inception are the need for a separate and humane justice system for children, alternatives to incarceration, and the fundamental connection between social justice and public safety.

For more information on NCCD, please visit our website at www.nccd-crc.org

FILM
Ice T Presents “25 to Life” Deloss Pickett, Michael Dallum
“At the Death House Door” Steve James, Peter Gilbert

LITERATURE
American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment by Sasha Abramsky

Chasing Justice by Kerry Max Cook, Sandra Kaye Pressey, Kerry Justice Cook, Peter Hubbard

From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King by Robert Hillary King and Andrea Gibbons

I’ll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison by Walley Lamb

Letters From the Dhamma Brothers by Jenny Phillips, Pariyatti Press, Ron Cavanaugh

Maximum Security: The True Meaning of Freedom by Alan Gompers

Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration by Paul Wright, Tara Herivel and Dianne Wachtel

Stanley Tookie Williams Street Peace Series by Stanley Tookie Williams and Barbara Becnel

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix by Lois Ahrens, Kevin Pyle, Sabrina Jones, Susan Willmarth, Ellen Miller-Mack and Craig Gilmore

MAGAZINE
San Jose Mercury News
“A Painful Choice for Moms in Prison” Edwin Garcia, Karen Borchers, Miller-McCune
“Is This the Future of the War on Drugs?” by Vince Beiser,John Mecklin

NEWSPAPER
East Valley Tribune “Reasonable Doubt” by Ryan Gabrielson, Paul Giblin, Patti Epler
Long Beach Press-Telegram “Lots of Answers, but No Easy Fixes” byWendy Thomas Russell andTracy Manzer
Seattle Weekly “Neverminded” by Laura Onstot and Mike Seely
The Daily Review “Educate to Break Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline” by Tammerlin Drummond
The Sacramento Bee “Unprotected” Marjie Lundstrom, Sam Stanton, Autumn Cruz, Mitchell Brooks
The Village Voice “Teen Murders at Rikers Jail” by Graham Rayman, Tony Ortega
The Washington Post “Rehabilitating Juvenile Offenders” by Robert Pierre, Carol Morello Westword
“Stand and Deliver” byAdam Cayton-Holland, Patricia Calhoun, Anthony Camera

RADIO
American Radioworks -“Gangster Confidential" Michael Montgomery and Catherine Winter
KALW Radio “Prisons in Crisis: A State of Emergency in California” JoAnn Mar, Alyne Ellis
KQED/Forum “Prisoner Health” by Scott Shafer, Nick Vidinsky andDan Zoll

TELEVISION/ VIDEO
HBO - “The Wire, Season 5” by David Simon, Nina Kostroff Noble, Ed Burns, Joe Chappelle.Karen L.Thorson
SoCal Connected/KCET -“Inside Locke High” Angela Shelley andAlexandria Gales, Brett Wood, Michael Bloecher,Bret Marcus
NBC/Wolf Films “Law and Order: SVU - Confession” Dick Wolf, Neal Baer, Ted Kotcheff, Peter Jankowski, Arthur Forney, Judith McCreary

WEB
AlterNet -“Meet Gus Puryear” by Silja J.A. Talvi and Jan Frel
City Limits -“A Ballot’s Breadth Away from Rejoining Society” by Karen Loew, Curtis Stephen, Rosie McCobb
City Limits “Debating How to Police a Challenging Population” Karen Loew, Tram Whitehurst

Posted by lois at 09:30 PM | Comments (0)

MT: Stimulus funds to build juvenile jail

"Freudenthal recently toured the existing juvenile facility. He said in a news conference Friday that using stimulus funding to build a juvenile center would be justified because it's a clearly identifiable need and would put people to work."

Published on Monday, March 30, 2009.
Stimulus funds could go to juvenile center
By Gazette News Services
CASPER - Gov. Dave Freudenthal says it might be possible to use federal economic stimulus funding to build a new juvenile detention center in Casper.

Casper's existing juvenile facility has been criticized for lacking natural light and because youths aren't able to go outside for exercise. Also, several violent crimes have occurred there.

The Natrona County Commission has saved about $3 million for a new facility. Estimates put the cost of such a building at more than $13 million. Freudenthal recently toured the existing juvenile facility. He said in a news conference Friday that using stimulus funding to build a juvenile center would be justified because it's a clearly identifiable need and would put people to work.

He said the stimulus funding would come from a governor's discretionary fund for state and local government stabilization funds. Wyoming's share would be about $15.5 million, he said.
"I think people want to see something done with regards to these questions of a juvenile treatment and detention facility. So we'll take a run at it," Freudenthal said.

Natrona County Commissioner Rob Hendry said Freudenthal apparently was impressed by concerns about the juvenile detention center and asked about the county's commitment. "Freudenthal's main question was, 'Is it shovel ready?"' Hendry said. Hendry said the county could begin earthwork near the existing adult jail this summer and probably begin some foundation work.

Story available at http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2009/03/30/news/wyoming/64-stimulus.txt

Posted by lois at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)

Getting the Juvenile-Justice System to Grow Up

Tuesday, Mar. 24, 2009
Getting the Juvenile-Justice System to Grow Up
By Ken Stier
Time Magazine

If it's not the biggest scandal in American legal history, many are calling it at least the darkest day for the country's troubled juvenile-justice system. For more than four years earlier this decade, two senior county juvenile-court judges in northeastern Pennsylvania took kickbacks of $2.6 million in exchange for packing thousands of kids off to privately owned detention centers. Many of the kids had committed minor offenses and didn't have the benefit of a lawyer. A 14-year-old from Wilkes-Barre, for instance, spent a year in a Glen Mills detention facility for the offense of stealing loose change from unlocked cars to buy a bag of chips; he was only set free after public-interest lawyers challenged the constitutionality of the punishment. (

The miscarriage of justice goes beyond the judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, who pleaded guilty on Feb. 12 to federal charges of wire and income tax fraud and face the prospect of more than seven years in prison. State and federal authorities are still investigating the case, and the owners of the detention center, PA Child Care, have not yet been charged. (The owner, Greg Zappala, says he didn't know anything improper was going on, while a former co-owner claims he was a victim of extortion by the judges.) What's more, many prosecutors, public defenders and other court officials apparently turned a blind eye to the abuses, shocking parents who had expected a fine or probation and instead watched their children be dragged off into custody. When the mother of the 14-year-old arrested for stealing the loose change asked to hire an attorney, she was told by one defense counsel it would be a "waste of money" because the judges would not listen. Now that the scheme has been unearthed, some 5,000 kids have grounds for suing, and many have already joined a class action against the two judges, the center's owner and other defendants. In addition, many are attempting to have their records expunged, though their bad memories of the experience will never be erased.

As egregious as the case is, experts say it is all too indicative of a juvenile-justice system racked with abuses yet subject to far less scrutiny than the adult system it increasingly mirrors. The entire Texas juvenile-justice system had to be overhauled two years ago after it was discovered that kids were arbitrarily held years beyond their original sentence and that many were sexually abused. Recent studies have shown high recidivism rates from graduates of the private boot camps that were in vogue under then President Bill Clinton after he endorsed the experience as Governor of Arkansas.

Nationwide, the system, which sends kids to a mix of large public "kiddie" prisons and smaller (but far more numerous) privately owned ones, handles more than 1.6 million juvenile cases a year; detentions have increased 44% from 1985 to 2002, the most recent year for which data are available. And that doesn't include the number of young offenders who bypass the juvenile system altogether. Every year, some 200,000 youths are tried, sentenced or incarcerated as adults, and on the first instance of trouble, often for relatively minor crimes, according to the Campaign for Youth Justice; those kids are 34% more likely to get into trouble again by committing new crimes, according to a government study.

Many advocates and academics argue that juveniles are not being given enough of a chance to turn their lives around after committing minor offenses. And officials at both the state and federal levels seem to be getting the message. Last summer, after reviewing a large swath of research literature, the Department of Justice concluded that "to best achieve reduction in recidivism, the overall number of juvenile offenders transferred to the criminal-justice system should be minimized." That came three years after the U.S. stopped executing minors, following a Supreme Court decision, Roper v. Simmons, that was largely based on new brain research showing that the full development of the frontal lobe, where rational judgments are made, does not occur until the early- to mid-20s. At the state level, Missouri is leading the country by phasing out its large juvenile-detention institutions in favor of smaller facilities, closer to kids' homes, that offer more specialized services, like mental-health and drug counseling and education. In the process, the state claims to have reduced recidivism rates for juvenile offenders to 10%, compared with a national rate of 40% to 50%. "We cannot incarcerate our way out of this problem of juvenile crime," says Shay Bilchik, director of Georgetown University's Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, who served as Clinton's point person on juvenile issues at the Justice Department.

Occasionally the widespread problems at juvenile facilities erupt in scandals, as in the aforementioned Texas, or in Mississippi, where minor offenders were hog-tied in facilities that sometimes had only dirt floors, run by guards with barely a high school education. Federal officials occasionally intervene against egregious facilities where there have even been some deaths along with thousands of allegations of abuses. But experts say simply trying to weed out the bad actors is not a viable solution. At a congressional hearing in October 2007, Jan Moss, executive director of the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs, said the industry wanted stronger regulation. "Among our goals is the complete elimination of the abuses and neglectful practices we have heard about today," she said. "Clearly, we have a long way to go."

Her sentiments are echoed by advocates who are working to clean up the system. "We are closing Guantánamo, [but] we need an equal amount of attention to the abuses of restraints and excessive use of isolation in the facilities where our nation's children are being held," says Mark Soler, executive director of the Center for Children's Law and Policy, who has spent 30 years litigating against such abuses. Soler argues that only the most violent juvenile offenders really need to be detained — roughly 5% of the more than 90,000 who are currently institutionalized in juvenile correctional facilities. (See pictures of crime in Middle America.)

Surveys have determined that while as many as 75% of kids sentenced to some kind of facility need support for mental-health issues or drug counseling, only about a third are actually getting help. But Georgetown's Bilchik says there is a national movement to create more "wraparound support programs" — for mental health, education, drug counseling — to give prosecutors and judges more options than choosing between institutionalization and probation, which generally provide few services the kids need. "When you see additional services being offered, you see judges opting for them," he says.

As the Pennsylvania scandal showed, keeping kids out of institutions requires at the very least zealous legal representation. The Supreme Court extended the right to legal counsel to juveniles in 1967. But in practice the requirement still goes largely unfulfilled, in part because in some jurisdictions, it does not apply to the initial detention hearings at which judges decide whether the minor can stay at home or must be held by authorities. In addition, the confidentiality measures in place to protect the identities of minors can sometimes prevent much needed transparency.

But a responsive and responsible system also requires oversight throughout the justice system, something that appears to have been sorely lacking in Pennsylvania. No one has accused prosecutors of being part of the scheme, but many observers argue that they were in a position where they should have known of the problem but chose not to speak out. Instead, it took the work of the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center to uncover the abuses. After discovering that more than 50% of kids in Luzerne County Juvenile Court had been without legal counsel, the organization in April 2008 petitioned the Pennsylvania supreme court to step in. (

Even then, there was no action taken initially; eight months elapsed before the court declined to act, without explanation, even though the application was supported by the state's attorney general. But the day after federal charges were leveled against the two judges — the result of a long-running probe into links between the court and the youth-detention centers — the state supreme court reversed itself and appointed someone to clean up the mess.

That shaky performance may or may not have been influenced by the fact that Zappala, the owner of the two private detention centers receiving a guaranteed annual rent ($1.3 million) from Luzerne County, is the son of a former chief of the same court. Or maybe it was what State Chief Justice Ron Castile told a local columnist, in a sad commentary on the entire system: the judges found the state's figures on the unusually high rates of kids being sentenced to detention and getting no legal representation simply too hard to believe.

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* http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1887182,00.html

Posted by lois at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2009

MO: System Treats Juvenile Offenders With Lighter Hand

Missouri System Treats Juvenile Offenders With Lighter Hand

By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: March 26, 2009
NY Times

ST. LOUIS, Mo. — VonErrick celebrated his 14th birthday last year by committing a daylight carjacking, beating the driver to the ground. With a long record of truancy, assault, and breaking and entering, he was sent to a state group home — the same home that his two older brothers passed through after their own scrapes with the law.

Both of those brothers are out now. Tory, 16, has A grades and plans to attend college. Terry, 20, has a job and has had a clean record for four years. VonErrick was recently released and immediately started high school.

The brothers say they benefited from confinement in the Missouri juvenile system, which emphasizes rehabilitation in small groups, constant therapeutic interventions and minimal force.

Juvenile justice experts across the nation say that the approach, known as the Missouri Model, is one of several promising reform movements that strapped states are trying to reduce the costly confinement of youths. California, which spends more than $200,000 a year on each incarcerated juvenile, reallocated $93 million in prison expenses by reducing state confinement.

There is no barbed wire around facilities like Missouri Hills, on the outskirts of St. Louis. No more than 10 youths and 2 adults called facilitators live in cottage-style dormitories in a wooded setting, a far cry from the quasi penitentiaries in other states. When someone becomes unruly, the other youths are trained to talk him down. Perhaps most impressive, Missouri has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the country.

Other states, including Florida, Illinois and Louisiana, have moved in a similar direction, focusing on improving conditions at state facilities to keep young offenders from returning.

Some states have worked at the county level to avoid confinement altogether, keeping youths in their communities while they receive rehabilitative services, which advocates say is a cheaper alternative to residential care.

The two largest state systems, Texas and California, cut long-term youth confinement by requiring counties to house low-level offenders in detention halls. Texas cut its 5,000-youth population by half within two years, while California reduced its population to 2,500, from more than 10,000 in 1997. But critics say that city and county detention programs are uneven and point out that states often do a poor job of monitoring them.

Missouri and other states are using new approaches in the juvenile justice system to try to stem the flow of adults behind bars. Missouri managed to cut its adult population from 2005 through the first half of 2007 by applying techniques from the Missouri Model.

The reforms have begun to have a national impact, with a 12 percent decrease in juvenile offenders from 1997 to 2006, from 105,000 youths to 93,000.

Most of the decline during that period was in state confinements, although some of the decrease is attributed to a 28 percent decline in youth arrests, which reform advocates say proves that there is no detriment associated with fewer incarcerated juveniles.

The Anne E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore has been a leading advocate for ending the confinement of low-risk offenders and placing them in community programs. Since trying the foundation’s approach in 2003, five counties in New Jersey have reduced juvenile detention by 42 percent, to 288 youths from 499.

Three years ago in California, Scott MacDonald, who is in charge of probation in Santa Cruz County, began asking courts to use Casey Foundation methods. Instead of confining every gang member accused of a crime, or every juvenile who failed a drug test, judges now look at a youth’s record and risk to determine whether he should remain free. A youth who fails a drug test, for example, might be ordered to attend substance abuse classes.

“Even if a kid doesn’t follow all of the rules — particularly rules that have nothing to do with crime — we won’t necessarily detain him,” Mr. MacDonald said.

In the 1990s, the Santa Cruz juvenile hall averaged 50 to 60 youths. Now it averages about 20 detainees, most of them under community supervision. More than 90 percent of those in the community programs have not committed new crimes within three years, Mr. McDonald said.

“The question we’re always starting with is, How do we keep them home?” he said.

Isela Gutierrez, a juvenile justice expert with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a nonprofit group, said one drawback to the Missouri state system was that too many low-level offenders there were being confined, while serious juvenile felons were being sent to adult prisons, where conditions are harsher.

Tim Decker, director of the Missouri Division of Youth Services, said judges preferred to send youths to state facilities — Missouri Hills or the Hogan Street Regional Youth Center, with dorms that have wooden beds, male health and wellness classes, group counseling and game rooms — rather than dismal county lockups or to backlogged community programs.

“Judges have more faith in us,” Mr. Decker said. “So far we’re O.K., but you can’t do what we do with 25 kids in a group.”

Missouri Hills is clean and homey, with plush couches, stuffed animals on the bunks, and a dog rescued from the pound. The violence that plagues many juvenile prisons is also absent.

In a typical juvenile corrections environment, Mr. Decker said, if a youth becomes aggressive “you would have guards drag him into isolation” for three days.

“But,” he added, “the problem is that a young person doesn’t learn how to avoid that aggressive behavior and it will get worse.”

In Missouri Hills, isolation rooms were used only about a dozen times last year, Mr. Decker said, and never for more than a few hours. Pepper spray is banned, and youths are taught to de-escalate fights or apply grappling holds, a form of restraint.

Victoria, 16, who stole her grandmother’s car, her second offense, explained how her housing unit does a “circle-up,” or ad hoc counseling session, several times a day, whenever there is a conflict, like cursing.

“There’s drama all the time,” she said. “It’s like having a bunch of sisters.”

The Missouri system provided triage for an imploding system in Washington, where the juvenile corrections agency was plagued by vermin-infested buildings, overcrowding and chronic violence.

“The kids were stuffing their shirts with paper before they went to sleep to keep the roaches and rats from biting them,” said Vincent Schiraldi, head of the city’s Division of Rehabilitative Services.

With advice from experts in Missouri, Mr. Schiraldi divided platoons of youths into small groups. By October, the number of juveniles reconvicted within a year of release dropped to 25 percent, from 31 percent four years earlier. However, as conditions improved, confinements have risen, even as juvenile crime has declined.

Mr. Decker said that upgrading facilities and training new staff cost more initially, but that the reforms would reduce recidivism, which would result in long-term savings.

VonErrick has been home for a few weeks, and his 18-year-old sister said he seemed calmer and less interested in running with the wrong crowd. Their mother, Rosie Williams, said all three of her sons seemed more focused, and she attributed the changes to the counselors at the state group home.

Ms. Williams, whose husband is in prison, occasionally attended family counseling sessions where she said she learned important lessons as a parent. “Instead of just hollering at them and trying to keep them out of trouble,” she said, “I try to do things with them one on one, to get to know what’s on their mind and what’s going on in their lives.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/27juvenile.html

Posted by lois at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)

PA: Despite Red Flags, Judges’ Kickback Scheme Thrived and PA Supreme CT Orders Records Of Youth Fraudulently Sentenced to be Expunged

Clean Slates for Youths Sentenced Fraudulently
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
March 26, 2009- NY Times
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on Thursday ordered the slate cleaned for hundreds of youths who had been sentenced by a corrupt judge.

The young people had been sent to privately run detention centers from 2003 to 2008 as part of a judicial kickback scheme that shocked Pennsylvania and the nation. The judge in the cases, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. of Luzerne County, is one of two who pleaded guilty last month to wire fraud and conspiracy for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks.

The exact number of records to be expunged was not stated in the court’s order; a special master is investigating the cases.

Judge Ciavarella and the other judge, Michael T. Conahan, admitted that they had agreed to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers that paid them for the business. Under their agreements, the judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and will resign from the bench and from the bar.

The judges worked in tandem, beginning in 2002, with Judge Conahan controlling the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts. They shut down a detention center run by the county and began sending the youngsters to newly built detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

Judge Ciavarella has said he did not sentence juveniles who did not deserve the punishment, but the numbers suggested a different story: he sent one in four of the juvenile defendants to the detention centers from 2002 to 2006, while the rate elsewhere in the state was 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency, even when they were made by prosecutors and probation officers. His record for harsh treatment of juveniles had already made him a focus of complaints by youth advocacy groups.

The court on Thursday authorized the master to vacate judgments and consent decrees and to expunge the records where necessary. The special master had submitted an 11-page report that found “there was routine deprivation of children’s constitutional rights.”

The special master, Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim of Berks County, was appointed last month by the State Supreme Court to investigate whether a “travesty of juvenile justice” had occurred.

He recommended vacating judgments and expunging records in cases from 2003 to 2008 in which the youth was not represented by a lawyer and did not knowingly waive the right to counsel, and which included relatively minor offenses like third-degree misdemeanors.

“Today’s order is not intended to be a quick fix,” Ronald D. Castille, the chief judge of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “It’s going to take some time, but the Supreme Court is committed to righting whatever wrong was perpetrated on Luzerne’s juveniles and their families.”

The Supreme Court’s order on Thursday should be only the beginning, said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

“Our view is that every kid who appeared before Judge Ciavarella was denied an impartial tribunal,” Ms. Levick said.

Michael J. Cefalo, a lawyer representing hundreds of the juveniles, said in an interview that “this is a great step” for his clients. The teenagers, he said, have been “pretty well smashed here” by the system, and so “it’s a reassurance for them that the system works.”

Ruby Cherise Uca, whose son Chad was sent away by Judge Ciavarella for three months in 2005, said that expungement would be welcome, but that her son expresses anger over the length of the judge’s sentence. “He wishes that they added up all the days that he had convicted each of the children wrongfully, and give him that sentence,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/27judges.html?scp=2&sq=Pennsylvania&st=cse

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Despite Red Flags, Judges’ Kickback Scheme Thrived

By IAN URBINA
Published: March 27, 2009
NY Times

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — Things were different in the Luzerne County juvenile courtroom, and everyone knew it. Proceedings on average took less than two minutes. Detention center workers were told in advance how many juveniles to expect at the end of each day — even before hearings to determine their innocence or guilt. Lawyers told families not to bother hiring them. They would not be allowed to speak anyway.

“The judge’s whim is all that mattered in that courtroom,” said Marsha Levick, the legal director of the Juvenile Law Center, a child advocacy organization in Philadelphia, which began raising concerns about the court to state authorities in 1999. “The law was basically irrelevant.”

Last month, the law caught up with Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, who ran that juvenile court for 12 years, and Judge Michael T. Conahan, 56, a colleague on the county’s Court of Common Pleas.

In what authorities are calling the biggest legal scandal in state history, the two judges pleaded guilty to tax evasion and wire fraud in a scheme that involved sending thousands of juveniles to two private detention centers in exchange for $2.6 million in kickbacks.

On Thursday, the State Supreme Court ordered that the records be cleaned for hundreds of the 2,500 or so juveniles sentenced by Judge Ciavarella, and in the coming weeks, the two judges will be sentenced, under a plea agreement, to more than seven years in prison.

While the scandal continues to ripple nationally as legal experts debate whether juvenile courts have sufficient oversight, here in Luzerne County people are grappling with more immediate questions: How did two native sons, elected twice to the bench to protect children and serve justice, decide to do the opposite? And why did no one stop them?

Old Friends Hatch a Plan

It all started in June 2000 with a simple business proposition, according to the judges’ indictment and more than 40 interviews with courtroom workers, authorities and others.

Robert J. Powell, a wealthy personal-injury lawyer from Hazelton and longtime friend of Judge Conahan, wanted to know how he might get a contract to build a private detention center. Judge Ciavarella thought he could help.

The two men agreed to meet and, according to prosecutors, somewhere in that conversation a plan was hatched that courthouse workers and county officials would later describe as a “freight train without brakes.”

First, Judge Ciavarella put Mr. Powell in touch with a developer who also happened to be an old friend, Robert K. Mericle, to start work on finding a site. Then, in January 2002 — the month Judge Conahan became president judge, giving him control of the courthouse budget — he signed a secret deal with Mr. Powell, agreeing that the court would pay $1.3 million in annual rent, on top of the tens of millions of dollars that the county and the state would pay to house the delinquent juveniles. And by the end of that year, Judge Conahan had gotten rid of the competition by eliminating financing for the county detention center.

“They were unstoppable,” said Judge Chester B. Muroski, who sent a letter to county commissioners raising concerns about detention costs, only to be transferred days later to another court by Judge Conahan. “I knew something was wrong, but they silenced all dissent.”

Other dissenters were also steamrolled.

When the county controller, Steve Flood, leaked a state audit that described the state’s lease of the center as a “bad deal,” the center’s owner filed a “trade secrets” lawsuit against Mr. Flood, and Judge Conahan sealed the suit to limit other documents’ getting out. His decision was later overturned.

“Everyone began to assume that the judges had some vested interest in the private center because they were pushing it so doggedly,” one courthouse worker said. Virtually all former colleagues and courthouse workers would not allow themselves to be identified because the federal investigation into the kickback scheme was continuing and they feared for their jobs if they alienated former allies of the judges.

Mr. Powell has not been charged. His lawyer said that the judges had coerced him into paying the kickbacks and that he was cooperating with investigators.

The few officials who had concerns at the time say their hands were tied. Probation officers say they suspected that something was amiss but were overruled every time they requested lighter sentences or for sentences to be served at home. County commissioners were the only ones authorized to sign contracts for detention centers. But by eliminating money for the county center, Judge Conahan left them little alternative but to sign on to the deal for the private facility.

Prosecutors say that by sentencing juveniles to detention at twice the state average, Judge Ciavarella was holding up his end of the bargain. And by late 2003, so much money was rolling in that the two judges were struggling to hide it all. So in 2004, they bought a $785,000 condominium together in Florida to help conceal the payments, and they began disguising transactions as rent and other related fees.

“We did what we could to stop it,” said Commissioner Stephen A. Urban, who repeatedly argued that the county should build its own center rather than lease the private one. “There were so many red flags that no one could mistake them as any other color.”

Disparate Upbringings

One red flag was the 56-foot yacht in front of the judges’ Florida condo, where they and Mr. Powell started spending much of their time. Owned by Mr. Powell, the $1.5 million boat was named the Reel Justice.

The conspicuous wealth Judge Ciavarella enjoyed in Florida was a far cry from the rough East End neighborhood in Wilkes-Barre where he grew up and is still known as “the local kid who made it big.”

A stellar athlete and student, Judge Ciavarella was the son of a brewery worker and a phone company operator. Nicknamed Scooch, like his father, he drove a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle for years, and even after moving away, he visited his aging mother daily until she died in 2007.

After law school at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Mr. Ciavarella ran for a seat on the county’s Court of Common Pleas in August 1994. On the bench, he became known for a stern hand in sentencing and a sharp wit in making sure everyone knew who was boss.

By contrast, Judge Conahan was known for being quiet, even secretive, on and off the bench. His neighbors observed that in a community known for holiday parties and open houses, no one they knew had ever seen the inside of Judge Conahan’s house.

Raised in Hazelton, on the other side of the county from Wilkes Barre, Judge Conahan came from money and had a political pedigree.

His father, who owned a funeral home, was Hazelton’s mayor from 1962 to 1974. Judge Conahan attended Villanova University and went to law school at Temple University.

Despite their differences, the two men became close friends on the bench, connected, former colleagues say, by a similarly stern view of justice.

In 2004, Judge Conahan bought the house next to Judge Ciavarella’s in Mountain Top, a wealthy suburb of Wilkes-Barre, where Mr. Powell also lives. The judges and their wives began sharing a recreational vehicle to tailgate at Penn State football games and vacationing together in Florida.

“They were pretty average guys,” Frank Monaco, the superintendent of the Florida condominium building, said of the judges and Mr. Powell. “Average for people with lots of money.”

Though the judges and Mr. Powell generally kept to themselves, Mr. Monaco said, they lost that low profile in 2004 after Mr. Powell got into a dispute with marina officials who wanted to end his slip lease. Mr. Powell went to court to force the marina to let him keep his boat there, but he filed his motion in Luzerne County, not Florida.

A colleague of Judge Conahan and Judge Ciavarella ruled in favor of Mr. Powell, despite a protest from the marina’s lawyer that the case should have been heard in Florida and that he could not attend the hearing because he had been given only one day’s notice.

“People at the marina thought that seemed like a real abuse of power,” Mr. Monaco said. The lawsuit was dropped after Mr. Powell moved his boat to another marina.

“You get enough power and you’re bound to start abusing it, I suppose,” Mr. Monaco said.

Troubling Trends

There was never doubt about who had the power in Courtroom 4 in the Luzerne County Courthouse. Though courteous, even jocular, Judge Ciavarella ran hearings with breakneck efficiency, cutting lawyers off when they rambled, scolding them when they arrived unprepared.

Sometimes, he helped his friends, too.

One courthouse worker recounted seeing a high school friend appear before Judge Ciavarella on a speeding charge. When the state trooper testified that he had clocked the man going 80 in a 55-mile-per-hour zone, the judge interrupted. “No, I think he was just going 60. Matter closed,” the worker recalled the judge saying. Shocked, the trooper turned to face the judge. “You’re dismissed,” the judge said.

But the juveniles being sentenced in that dim oak-paneled courtroom tended to be less lucky. Parents who arrived with their children typically left without them.

“Your arguments in sentencing weren’t persuasive,” said Basil G. Russin, the Luzerne County public defender, who represented many juveniles in Judge Ciavarella’s court. “You expected your kid to go away.”

While judges elsewhere in the state were shifting away from incarcerating juveniles for delinquency, Luzerne County was becoming infamous for imposing heavy sentences for minor infractions.

Kurt Kruger, for example, was 17 when he was sent to a boot camp for five months in 2004 for being a lookout for a friend who was stealing DVDs from a Wal-Mart. DayQuawn Johnson was 13 when he was sent to a detention center for several days in 2006 for failing to appear at a hearing as a witness to a fight, even though his family had never been notified about the hearing and he had already told school officials that he had not seen anything. Both juveniles were first-time offenders.

Judge Ciavarella had never made a secret about liking his justice swift and firm. Nicknamed Mr. Zero Tolerance in the courthouse, he once put a father in jail after he could not pay court-imposed fees for his daughter, whom the judge had previously locked up.

Asked last year why he did not make a habit of telling juveniles of their right to a lawyer before hearings, Judge Ciavarella said, “I just don’t believe I have to spoon-feed people to do things in their life.”

But as he pleaded guilty last month and admitted having “disgraced” the bench, Judge Ciavarella denied that payments had influenced his sentencing decisions.

State data, however, give a different picture. The number of juveniles he sent to secure facilities outside the home more than doubled from 2001 to 2002, around the time that the authorities say he and Judge Conahan hatched their kickback plan. And that sentencing trend — more than double the state average — continued through 2007, according to data analyzed by The New York Times. (No data was available for 2008.)

After the Juvenile Law Center appealed a case involving a child who was sentenced without a lawyer, Judge Ciavarella told reporters in 2000 that he would avoid letting juveniles appear without counsel in the future. But state data indicate that the problem only worsened. From 1997 to 2003, juveniles appeared before Judge Ciavarella without counsel at more than five times the state average, and from 2003 through 2007, that rate was around 10 times the state average.

Federal authorities have declined to say when they began investigating the judges. But these trends started worrying State Department of Public Welfare auditors in 2003, when they noticed that the county was billing the state for the same amount every month for detention services. In most other counties, the bill fluctuates based on the changing numbers of juvenile offenders each month.

In a separate review, state auditors found that the detention centers were systematically overbilling the county and that the centers had fallen behind in their bills and begun receiving shut-off notices from utility companies.

“Those were all red flags to us,” said Ted Dallas, executive deputy secretary for the Department of Public Welfare, adding that his office tried to work with the county to lower its use of detention because the state pays partial reimbursement for those costs.

But, like so many others, Mr. Dallas said there was little he could do. Since the centers were privately owned, state auditors had limited authority. And since the judges were on the side of the centers, the auditors had little recourse in the event of a conflict.

“In the end,” Mr. Dallas said, “it all came down to what the judge decided.”

Sean D. Hamill contributed reporting.

Posted by lois at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2009

MI: Juvenile lifer bills in Senate “The greatest hope I have had in 33 years.”

Juvenile lifer bills in Senate
“The greatest hope I have had in 33 years.”

By Diane Bukowski
The Michigan Citizen

DETROIT — Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy charged a 17-year-old with assault with intent to commit murder, felonious assault, assault with a dangerous weapon on school grounds, carrying a concealed weapon and felony firearm after he wounded another 17-year-old in the stomach inside Central High School Feb. 18.

The two were gambling in the halls, a practice that has being going on since at least the 70s, according to one Central High alumni. The 17-year-old faces up to life in prison. Days later, police raided CHS and carried away teens as young as 14 on police buses to face loitering charges, whether or not they were students.

“Until they improve the conditions in our schools, there will be more trouble,” said Steve Conn, a high school teacher for 22 years with the Detroit Public Schools. “Despair runs so deep among our young people, who are treated like their lives don’t matter.”

A 16-year-old Detroiter was ordered to stand trial on first-degree murder charges Feb. 5 in connection with the shooting death of an Oak Park police officer, under unclear circumstances. Numerous suburbanites wrote in to daily news message boards calling for his execution, or at least life without parole, although he has not yet been tried or convicted.

These children, and numerous others in Detroit and communities across Michigan, have 400 counterparts already in the system, children who were sentenced at the age of 17 or below to life in prison without parole, and at least 1,000 others serving lengthy jail terms. The number of juvenile non-parolable lifers is up substantially from slightly over 300 a year ago, indicating that more juveniles are newly entering the system, condemned to death behind bars.

But there is hope on the horizon.

“The Juvenile Life Without Parole bills that were passed last year in the House of Representatives represent the greatest hope I have had in 33 years,” wrote Edward Sanders. “These bills must be voted on in the Senate now, to give the second chance we pray for.”

Sanders, who is currently incarcerated at the Earnest C. Brooks Correctional Facility in Muskegon, was 17 when he was convicted in a drive-by shooting in 1976, although he was not the shooter.

He is awaiting word from the Michigan parole board regarding his request for commutation. Before Michigan prisons ceased providing college courses, he obtained his bachelor’s degree and now helps other prisoners as a “jail-house” lawyer and spiritual advisor.

Sanders was referring to Senate Bills 0171 through 0176, sponsored by State Sens. Liz Brater (D-Ann Arbor), Martha Scott (D-Highland Park) and Michael Switalski (D-Roseville). Co-sponsors include Glenn Anderson, (D-Westland), Michael Prusi (D-Ishpeming), Samuel “Buzz” Thomas (D-Detroit), Hansen Clarke (D-Detroit), and Gilda Jackson (D-Huntington Woods).

House versions were passed Dec. 4 by an overwhelming margin of 83-22. The current Senate bills, however, will have to go back to the House again for approval before they can be forwarded to Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm.

“The idea of sending a person whose brain is not fully developed to prison for life has been determined to be inhumane,” said Brater. “The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world, and Michigan is one of few states in the U.S. with this practice. Many of these youth were sentenced along with an adult defendant who got a lesser sentence and many were victims of abuse or neglect or are people with a mental illness or disability.”

The series of bills therefore addresses alternatives to incarceration for mentally ill individuals and diversion from jail under other circumstances as well as the central life without parole question.

S.B. 0173 says, “An individual who was less than 18 years of age when he or she committed a crime for which he or she was sentenced to serve a minimum term of imprisonment of 10 years or more, or who was sentenced to imprisonment for life, including imprisonment for life without parole eligibility, who has served 10 years of his or her sentence is subject to the jurisdiction of the parole board and may be released on parole.”

The bill specifies several aspects of the prisoner’s individual situation for the parole board to consider.

All six bills, introduced Jan. 29, are now in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by State Sen. Alan Cropsey (R-Dewitt). Cropsey has expressed reluctance to let the bills out of committee.

Brater said that although the Senate is predominantly Republican, efforts are constantly being made to reach out to that side of the aisle. A particular consideration is the huge cost of such incarcerations. Both the Greater Detroit and Michigan Chambers of Commerce have passed resolutions calling for a reduction in Michigan’s prison population, along with numerous other organizations and even major media.

Felicia Tyson, part of a group of family members of juvenile lifers, said that they are continuing to organize and lobby Senators as well as Representatives, in the same fashion that won passage of the House bills last year.

“We are asking people to write, phone and email their legislators, and are planning a mass visit to the House in April,” said Tyson. Over 200 family members and even victims turned out for a lobbying effort last year.

The website for the group can be found at www.secondchanceforyouth.com.

The group’s address is P.O. Box 251941, West Bloomfield, MI 48325-1941 and phone 248-738-2111. An online petition to legislators is available at petition@secondchanceforyouth.com.

http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=&mad=&sdetail=7116&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com

Posted by lois at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2009

TX: Lawmakers considering plan that would cap the number of juveniles being sent to TYC jails and keep them in the county in which they live

Lawmakers eyeing Travis' plan for juveniles
Proposal among many being considered that would reform youth agency, save state money.

By Bob Banta and Mike Ward
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, March 12, 2009

Legislators are studying proposals from Travis and other counties to save the state money by sending fewer young offenders to Texas Youth Commission facilities.

Although some lawmakers warn against diverting too much money from Youth Commission activities, Travis County's plan is part of a trend, sparked two years ago by sweeping reforms at the scandal-plagued agency that were designed to remove youths from remote state-run lockups and place them in community-based treatment programs closer to their families.

So far, Travis, Dallas and a group of 22 Southeast Texas counties have proposed pilot programs to do that — for far less than the nearly $99,000 per year that it costs to keep a youth locked up with the agency. Other counties are considering similar plans.

Under the concept, only juveniles convicted of serious crimes would be sent to the agency. In return, the state would reimburse the counties for each juvenile who is incarcerated and rehabilitated locally.

Youths would have a stronger network of rehabilitative support closer to home than in one of the agency's remote facilities, said Jeanne Meurer, legal management director for Travis County juvenile probation.

"But being able to do that depends on what a county or community's financial resources are," she said. "That's why many local agencies are excited about the possibility of getting funds from the state to keep their kids at home."

It costs Travis County an average $175 a day, or $63,875 a year per child, to incarcerate and provide rehabilitation services, according to the pilot project proposed by Meurer and Estela Medina, Travis County's chief probation officer. If the child were sent to a Youth Commission institution, it would cost the state an average of $270.49 a day, or $98,729 annually per child, they said.

In the 2005 budget year, Travis County sent 119 juveniles to the agency at a cost to the state of $11.7 million. If the 119 had been kept in Travis County facilities, the cost would have been $7.6 million, Meurer and Medina said.

Under the Travis County proposal, a limit would be placed on the number of offenders each county would be allowed to send to the agency each budget year. In the case of Travis County, local probation officials would cap the number of juveniles sent to the agency each budget year at 10. If the county sent more than 10 in that year, the county would pay the agency the cost of taking on those juveniles.

The Travis County plan calculates that the state would pay the county $7.6 million in 2010 and $8 million in 2011.

The plan is one of several being studied by state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, the chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee and a member of the Senate Finance Committee.

"This is exactly what we had in mind when we passed the reforms two years ago," said Whitmire, an author of the reform bill in 2007.

The concept has been initially embraced by Senate budget writers, who last week cut the Youth Commission's proposed funding significantly so it can be put into local diversion programs paid for through the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission. House budget-writers have not signed on but have initially approved much of what Youth Commission officials requested.

State Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen, also an author of the reforms, said while he supports the idea, he is concerned about too much money being taken away from the agency to pay for the local programs.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/03/12/0312tyc.html

Posted by lois at 09:16 PM | Comments (0)

Real Cost of Prisons Comix (the book)

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix
edited by Lois Ahrens
PM Press
Reviews: http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php?story=loisahrens#reviews
Ordering info:
https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=48

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. This volume collects the three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prisons Project. The stories and statistical information in each comic book is thoroughly researched and documented.

Prison Town: Paying the Price tells the story of how the financing and site locations of prisons affects the people of rural communities in which prison are built. It also tells the story of how mass incarceration affects people of urban communities where the majority of incarcerated people come from.

Prisoners of the War on Drugs includes the history of the war on drugs, mandatory minimums, how racism creates harsher sentences for people of color, stories on how the war on drugs works against women, three strikes laws, obstacles to coming home after incarceration, and how mass incarceration destabilizes neighborhoods.

Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children includes stories about women trapped by mandatory sentencing and the "costs" of incarceration for women and their families. Also included are alternatives to the present system, a glossary and footnotes.

Over 125,000 copies of the comic books have been printed and more than 100,000 have been sent to families of people who are incarcerated, people who are incarcerated, and to organizers and activists throughout the country. The book includes a chapter with descriptions about how the comix have been put to use in the work of organizers and activists in prison and in the "free world" by ESL teachers, high school teachers, college professors, students, and health care providers throughout the country. The demand for them is constant and the ways in which they are being used is inspiring.

The Buzz:

"I cannot think of a better way to arouse the public to the cruelties of the prison system than to make this book widely available."
--Howard Zinn

"The Real Cost of Prisons comics are among the most transformative pieces of information that the youth get to read. We take it with us to detention centers, group homes, youth shelters and social justice organizing projects. Everywhere we go we see youth nodding with agreement and getting excited to see their reality validated in print. The Real Cost of Prisons helps youth know what's up and gives them the push they need to get active in the struggle to make interpersonal and community-wide change."
--Shira Hassan, Co-Director Young Women's Empowerment Project, Chicago, IL

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

March 06, 2009

CT: New Haven Independent Teen Prisoner’s Mom: Raise The Age

New Haven Independent
Teen Prisoner’s Mom: Raise The Age

by Melinda Tuhus | March 5, 2009 2:17 PM
HARTFORD — “I don’t understand why they have this idea that sending kids to jail is gonna help them,” cried Katherine Gonzalez (pictured), the mother of a 15-year-old boy who sits in prison alongside adult offenders.

“No, it’s not gonna help them.”

Gonzalez, of New Haven, spoke tearfully at a press conference at the Legislative Office Building, organized by the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance to press the state legislature to stick to its original implementation date of January 1, 2010 for raising the age from 16 to 18 at which individuals are treated as adults in the criminal justice system. Gov. M. Jodi Rell has called for postponing the date by two years as a cost-saving measure to help deal with the state’s budget deficit. Click here for a previous story.

Gonzalez, who works and goes to school, has a 15-year-old son in prison at Manson Correctional Institution in Cheshire. She said his conviction stemmed from an incident last summer, when at age 14, he slipped out of the house to visit a friend, and accidentally shot her with a BB gun. Gonzalez said the girl was not badly hurt, but her son was sentenced to five years, three years in prison and two years on probation. She said he has bipolar disorder and ADHD and is depressed but won’t take any medications because he’s afraid of what might be in them.

“What Carlos did was wrong and he should be held accountable for it. He was irresponsible. But he is not a criminal,” she said. In her written testimony she added, “What my son did was no different than an accident the vice president of the United States had the year before. No one arrested Dick Cheney.”

At the press conference she concluded, “I know there’s a lot of empty slots in juvenile programs and I don’t understand why they have this idea that sending kids to jail is gonna help them. No, it’s not gonna help them,” she cried. “Do you want to see our kids getting education and training, or do you want to see them in jail with adults? If you want to give him some kind of punishment, put him in a youth program to teach him how to be a better person. Don’t send him to jail.” Click ">here to hear more of her testimony.

In a hearing room, New Haven’s Harry Vazquez provided a counterpoint to Gonzalez’s emotional testimony. He spoke before the Judiciary Committee, which was taking testimony on a raft of bills related to juvenile justice and the death penalty.

Harry, who’s 14, described the upside of state programs that help youngsters straighten out their lives before they get into serious trouble. He said that he was running away from home and hanging out with the wrong crowd when he got referred to the Family Support Center in New Haven, one of four in the state that serve 39 of Connecticut’s 169 towns.

He testified against the bill that would postpone implementation of Raise the Age “because I think it would harm me and other kids like me.” He described going to the support center’s respite care program, where he learned coping skills. “I used to curse a lot at my mom, but I learned to go into my room to cool off and then sit down and talk to her. I learned to make better friends. I used to be angry but I’m not angry anymore.” He predicted that without the family support center he would have ended up in the custody of the Department of Children and Families. Click ">here for more.

At the news conference and later in the Judiciary Committee hearing, youth advocates urged lawmakers not to delay implementation of the law. Sarah Bryer (pictured), director of the National Juvenile Justice Network, came up from Washington, D.C., to say that Connecticut is a model for many other states because it has taken steps to improve juvenile programs and has “followed the science” in responding to explanations that humans’ brains aren’t fully developed until at least the age of 21 by raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction. She urged lawmakers not to go back on that commitment.

Abby Anderson, executive director of the Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance said the reason there’s room in the juvenile system is, “We’re doing a better job of catching kids and diverting them, so why don’t we put these things into effect for the 16-and 17-year-olds too? The juvenile justice system has gotten better and there’s room for more kids, while the adult system is overcrowded.

To ease municipalities’ concerns about the cost of implementation, Anderson said youth advocates compromised on allowing police to question 16- and 17-year-olds without their parents present if they first make a reasonable effort to reach the parents. Another compromise would allow police to release older teens on a promise to appear, so they wouldn’t have to hold them in municipal facilities. Both these changes are incorporated into a separate bill that was also considered on Wednesday.

As one of only three states where 16-year-old offenders are still treated as adults, how can Connecticut be considered a leader? Anderson said that once the state raised the age, the other two states (New York and North Carolina) began considering taking the same steps. Plus, some of the ten states in which those 17 and up are considered adults are moving to make the cut off 18, and those that already have 18 as the dividing age between juveniles and adults are looking at ways to make it harder to transfer youths to adult court.

A compromise bill would treat 16-year-olds as juveniles on the original implementation date of the law, next January, while postponing bringing 17-year-olds into the juvenile system for one year. The Alliance officially opposes this bill, but their information sheet indicated the organization “would favor this over a complete delay until 2012.”
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/2009/03/keep_the_age_ra.php

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

PA: Does any 11-year old deserve life in prison?

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Does any 11-year-old deserve life in prison?
By Chris Togneri
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, February 28, 2009

Fears that someone might try to harm an 11-year-old homicide suspect prompted authorities to place extra patrols at a Beaver County detention center, tripling taxpayers' cost to house him, officials said Friday.

A week after charging Jordan Anthony Brown with killing his father's fiancee and her unborn son, authorities were still grappling with a system not accustomed to handling children so young accused of such crimes. Large questions loom: Was he capable of premeditated murder? Should he be tried as an adult? Is it inhumane to sentence kids to life in prison without parole? Why did he have access to a gun?

Brown was moved Wednesday from the Lawrence County Jail to the Allencrest juvenile center, prompting law enforcement to increase security. Kenzie Houk, 26, and the son she planned to name Christopher were buried Thursday.

Even in a facility designed for kids, Brown is the youngest inmate, Allencrest director Bob Rose said.

"We watched him a little closer when he was with the population early on, like we would with any new inmate," Rose said. "So far, so good. We look for any signs or symptoms. We are always alert to that, and we're particularly alert to that, given the nature of this offense.

"To this point, we have not seen a need to isolate him."

Police in Brighton and Beaver check the area frequently, and a sheriff's deputy guards the Allencrest perimeter around the clock, said Beaver County Solicitor Myron Sainovich. The extra security means Lawrence County is paying $4,500 a week to house Brown in Beaver County, rather than the typical $1,400.

Moving Brown to an isolated ward of the Beaver County Jail would be cheaper, Sainovich said. The jail has housed four minors since 2000.

If Brown is moved, he would be placed in an isolation cell where two guards could watch him 24 hours a day, Sainovich said. He would have access to a shower, a computer, medical care and psychological treatment. A camera would monitor his movements.

Charged with two counts of homicide as an adult, Brown is due in court March 24 for a preliminary hearing.

Brown's uncle described him as a typical 11-year-old boy who likes video games, football and dirt bikes and adores his father.

Prosecutors believe Brown was jealous of Houk and having trouble adjusting to their blended family when she and her two daughters moved in. They say he shot Houk in the head as she lay in bed at the family's rented home in New Galilee.

Dr. Paul Friday, head of clinical psychology at UPMC Shadyside, believes it's important to understand that the human brain does not fully develop until about age 25.

"Normal people know when crazy ideas are crazy," he said. "Does he understand the difference between good and bad? Yes, probably. But the chances of an 11-year-old understanding consequences in the same way he would when he is 21 is nonexistent."

If convicted as charged, Brown would face a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. If that happens, he could be the youngest American ever to receive such a sentence.

"We know of eight cases where 13-year-olds were sentenced to life in prison without parole, but our research shows no evidence of any children under 13, ever," said Michelle Leighton, the director of Human Rights Programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. "He would be the youngest."

Leighton co-authored the 2008 study "Sentencing Our Children to Die in Prison," which shows the United States is the only country that sentences juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Pennsylvania has more juvenile lifers than any state.

In Pennsylvania, anyone 10 or older charged with homicide automatically starts in adult court. Defense attorneys can petition to move such cases to juvenile court. Brown's attorney, Dennis Elisco, has vowed to do so.

There is precedent for granting such a move:

• In 2007, an Elizabeth Township girl who said she fatally shot her father because he sexually abused her had her case moved to juvenile court. Last year, Rachel Booth, who was 13 when she stood over her sleeping father with a 12-gauge shotgun and shot him in the face, reached a plea deal with prosecutors allowing her to avoid jail.

• D.L. Timothy Fullum of Homewood had his case moved to juvenile court in 2004. He was 16 when he fatally stabbed his friend, Israel Cyrus, 15, during a scuffle as the two walked along a street. In juvenile court, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and held at a juvenile facility until he turned 21.

When Elisco petitions to transfer Brown's case, Lawrence County District Attorney John Bongivengo will have to decide whether to fight such a move.

"I have not made a decision yet," Bongivengo said. "It's something I'm definitely struggling with. Whatever decision I make, I'm probably going to be uncomfortable with it. I've got to make a decision that I can live with."

Houk's family wants Brown tried as an adult. They believe the slayings were calculated and accuse Brown of threatening to "pop" Houk and her daughters at least two months before the killing. They called him a skilled shooter who understood the consequences of pulling the trigger.

"There's no kid in him," said Jack Houk, Kenzie Houk's father.

"He was a miserable child," said Jennifer Kraner, 32, the slain woman's sister. "We tried to love him. But there was some sort of issue."

Leighton thinks it would be "morally reprehensible" to try an 11-year-old as an adult.

"This child is obviously extraordinarily disturbed and troubled -- that's evident by his actions -- but that does not make him an adult," she said. "We can't pretend that they are adults. No other country does that. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't bring back the dead, and it doesn't help anyone."

Dr. Anthony Mannarino, director of the Center for Traumatic Stress in Children at Allegheny General Hospital in the North Side, said an 11-year-old is more likely to be impulsive than rational.

Bongivengo has said he will not pursue charges against Brown's father, Christopher Brown, for allowing the boy access to guns. But, Mannarino cautioned, mixing the unpredictability of youth with access to a firearm is a dangerous combination.

"We all have that thought of wanting to kill someone once in awhile, but as adults we think it through and we don't act on it," Mannarino said. "An 11-year-old is more likely to follow through on an emotional thought. And to give them access to a gun is really a mistake.

"That's one of the tragedies in this situation. If the kid did not have a gun, this doesn't happen."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_613846.html

Posted by lois at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2009

70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case

70 Youths Sue Former Judges in Detention Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
NY Times
Published: February 26, 2009

More than 70 juveniles and their families filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday against two former judges who pleaded guilty this month in a scheme that involved their taking kickbacks to put young offenders in privately run detention centers.

The suit contends that before resigning last year, the judges “used kids as commodities that could be traded for cash,” placing an “indelible stain” on the juvenile justice system of Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania.

The suit, filed in the Federal District Court in Scranton by the Juvenile Law Center, seeks to have all profits that the detention centers earned from the scheme placed in a fund that would compensate the youths for their emotional distress.

In an earlier filing, the law center, based in Philadelphia, asked the State Supreme Court to clear the records of all juveniles who appeared before the judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan.

The suit brought Thursday is the third filed on behalf of juvenile offenders. The two others, one of which also seeks class-action status, were filed by private lawyers.

Mr. Ciavarella and Mr. Conahan pleaded guilty on Feb. 12 to federal charges of wire and income-tax fraud for having taken more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to the two privately operated centers, run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

“Judge Ciavarella’s placement of so many children in juvenile facilities without regard for their underlying charges suggests a Procrustean scheme that violated one of the core principles of the juvenile justice system — the right to individualized treatment and rehabilitation,” Lourdes M. Rosado, associate director of the Juvenile Law Center, said in a statement.

Lawyers for the two former judges declined to comment on the suit.

As for the criminal investigation of court personnel, two additional people have already been charged, and federal officials say they may soon charge others involved in the scheme.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/us/27judges.html

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

February 14, 2009

PA: Suit Names 2 Judges Accused in a Kickback Case

Suit Names 2 Judges Accused in a Kickback Case
By IAN URBINA
Published: February 13, 2009
NY Times

Several hundred families filed a class-action suit Friday against two Pennsylvania judges who pleaded guilty on Thursday to accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks for sending juveniles to private detention facilities.

“At the hands of two grossly corrupt judges and several conspirators, hundreds of Pennsylvania children, their families and loved ones, were victimized and their civil rights were violated,” said Michael J. Cefalo, one of the lawyers representing the families. “It’s our intent to make sure that the system rights this terrible injustice and holds those responsible accountable.”

Pennsylvania lawmakers called on Friday for hearings into the state’s juvenile justice system. And the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, which blew the whistle on the judges, said it had sworn affidavits from families who said they had sought court-appointed counsel but were told that their children would have to wait weeks, sometimes months, for a lawyer. During that time, the children would have to remain in detention, the families said.

The two judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Scranton, Pa., to wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years in prison.

As many as 5,000 juveniles are believed to have appeared before Judge Ciavarella while the kickback scheme was going on. The judges are currently free on an unsecured $1 million bond, and they have surrendered their passports and a condominium in Florida. Neither is allowed out of the state without permission.

State Senator Stewart J. Greenleaf, a Republican from Montgomery County who is the chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, said he intended to hold a hearing to find ways to help the children and their families once the federal investigation was done. A spokesman in Mr. Greenleaf’s office said one option was to provide money from the crime victims compensation fund.

“Money is important, but my son’s life has already been completely destroyed,” said Ruby Cherise Uca, whose son, Chad, 18, was sentenced to three months of detention by Judge Ciavarella in 2005, when Chad was in eighth grade.

Chad, who had no prior offenses, was charged with simple assault after shoving a boy at school and causing him to cut his head on a locker. Chad returned to school his freshman year, but he was so far behind in classes and so stigmatized by his teachers and peers, his mother said, that he soon dropped out.

Federal investigators remained silent Friday about whether they would file charges against the operators of the detention centers or who else they were considering as possible conspirators.

But a law enforcement official confirmed Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited a transitional housing program in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where Judge Ciavarella furloughed inmates who had been sentenced by other judges, as federal authorities continue to scrutinize actions by Judge Ciavarella and Judge Conahan.

Lawyers for Robert J. Powell, the owner of one of the detention centers, released a letter saying Mr. Powell was not complicit in the kickback scheme but was a victim of demands from the judges for payment.

Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia, said that juveniles should not be allowed to waive their right to counsel, as is permitted in Pennsylvania, and that if families wanted a lawyer but could not afford one, they should get representation.

Mr. Schwartz added that Luzerne County, where the judges handled cases, had only one public defender on staff for juveniles. The juvenile court processes about 1,200 juvenile defendants a year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/us/14judge.html?scp=2&sq=PA&st=cse
A version of this article appeared in print on February 14, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.

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

February 13, 2009

PA: Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit

Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit
February 12, 2009
By IAN URBINA and SEAN D. HAMILL
NY Times

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.
Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.

“In my entire career, I’ve never heard of anything remotely approaching this,” said Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim, who was appointed by the State Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Judge Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention.

The case has shocked Luzerne County, an area in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been battered by a loss of industrial jobs and the closing of most of its anthracite coal mines.

And it raised concerns about whether juveniles should be required to have counsel either before or during their appearances in court and whether juvenile courts should be open to the public or child advocates.

If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months. Lawyers for both men declined to comment.

Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.

With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.

They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.

Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.

Though he pleaded guilty to the charges Thursday, Judge Ciavarella has denied sentencing juveniles who did not deserve it or sending them to the detention centers in a quid pro quo with the centers.

But Assistant United States Attorney Gordon A. Zubrod said after the hearing that the government continues to charge a quid pro quo.

“We’re not negotiating that, no,” Mr. Zubrod said. “We’re not backing off.”

No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers. Prosecutors said the investigation into the case was continuing.

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Judge Ciavarella was unusually harsh. He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.

“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

“There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down.”

Last year, the Juvenile Law Center, which had raised concerns about Judge Ciavarella in the past, filed a motion to the State Supreme Court about more than 500 juveniles who had appeared before the judge without representation. The court originally rejected the petition, but recently reversed that decision.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that children have a constitutional right to counsel. But in Pennsylvania, as in at least 20 other states, children can waive counsel, and about half of the children that Judge Ciavarella sentenced had chosen to do so. Only Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina require juveniles to have representation when they appear before judges.

Clay Yeager, the former director of the Office of Juvenile Justice in Pennsylvania, said typical juvenile proceedings are kept closed to the public to protect the privacy of children.

“But they are kept open to probation officers, district attorneys, and public defenders, all of whom are sworn to protect the interests of children,” he said. “It’s pretty clear those people didn’t do their jobs.”

On Thursday in Federal District Court in Scranton, more than 80 people packed every available seat in the courtroom. At one point, as Assistant United States Attorney William S. Houser explained to Judge Edwin M. Kosik that the government was willing to reach a plea agreement with the men because the case involved “complex charges that could have resulted in years of litigation,” one man sitting in the audience said “bull” loud enough to be heard in the courtroom.

One of the parents at the hearing was Susan Mishanski of Hanover Township.

Her son, Kevin, now 18, was sentenced to 90 days in a detention facility last year in a simple assault case that everyone had told her would result in probation, since Kevin had never been in trouble and the boy he hit had only a black eye.

“It’s horrible to have your child taken away in shackles right in front of you when you think you’re going home with him,” she said. “It was nice to see them sitting on the other side of the bench.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

Posted by lois at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2009

CA: The Prison Overcrowding Fix

News Analysis
The Prison Overcrowding Fix
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: February 10, 2009

In San Francisco last week, a federal court was hearing final arguments in the prison overcrowding lawsuit that led Monday to an unprecedented decision to reduce the nation’s largest prison system by one-third. Just a few blocks away, a state appellate court was affirming a life sentence for Ali Foroutan, convicted of possession of 0.03 gram of methamphetamine.

Critics of California’s justice system say Mr. Foroutan’s sentence under the “three-strikes law,” which mandates 25 years to life in prison for three-time felons, is the kind of punishment that has made the state’s prisons the most overcrowded in the nation.

Federal judges tentatively ruled Monday that packed facilities were the chief impediment to adequate health care in prisons — a system so flawed it was tantamount to a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Monday’s ruling signaled the court’s intention to cap the number of prisoners at about 101,000, a reduction of 55,000. It came after more than a decade of federal court orders from exasperated judges who demanded that the state improve its facilities and personnel, after the appointment of the most powerful federal receivership since the days of forced racial integration in the South, and after the death of scores of prisoners who committed suicide or died of preventable illnesses.

The judges encouraged the state to negotiate with inmates’ lawyers to cut the prison population from 156,000, which is about double the system’s capacity, within three years. If the state refuses to negotiate such a plan, the judges could order specific actions, including shortened prison sentences, diversion of nonviolent felons to county programs, and parole reforms that would cut down recidivism.

Few releases of prisoners would be necessary to reduce the prison population if the state carried out sentencing and parole reforms, which could save $903 million a year, according to the federal judges. They also argued that such reforms could be achieved without jeopardizing public safety.

Attorney General Jerry Brown of California vowed to appeal the judges’ final order to the United States Supreme Court, a prospect that could delay the carrying out of the prison population cap or overturn it.

The case is significant because of the scale of the proposed prisoner reduction, and also because it shines a harsh light on the failures of state government to address the problem for years.

Decades of tough-on-crime laws coupled with a failure to finance prison programs have left prisoners stacked three bunks high in prison gymnasiums and hallways throughout the state. With few probation and parole programs available, about two-thirds of all ex-convicts return to prison within three years.

California’s 13-year-old three-strikes law, which doubles sentences for second-time felons, and reserves life sentences for even nonviolent third-felony offenders like Mr. Foroutan, has also increased the prison population by thousands. As of March 2008, there were 41,284 prisoners serving time under the three-strikes law. In 2005, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that the law cost the state $500 million annually.

California is the only state in the nation that paroles 98 percent of released inmates, even if they have completed their sentences. About 70,000 parolees return to prison every year. Nationally, states parole an average of 40 percent of their released inmates.

“That is a major reason for the overcrowding problem,” said Joan Petersilia, a parole expert at the RAND Corporation. “Everybody goes on parole in California,” she said. “Everybody serves at least one year” on parole. Many parolees go back to prison for violations, including failed drug tests.

But Stuart Drown, executive director of the Little Hoover Commission, a state-financed watchdog organization, said sentencing reform was the key to reducing prison population.

The Legislature, Mr. Drown says, has added thousands of new penalties for new and old crimes. “We don’t track how judges are sentencing people on a statewide basis,” he said. “We don’t have a sentencing policy.”

In other states, sentencing commissions monitor penalties to help policy makers anticipate how many prisoners will be coming and for how long.

California has no such data, Mr. Drown said. Proposed sentencing commissions have been defeated in the Legislature at least 10 times, according to Ms. Petersilia.

This case began not as an overcrowding lawsuit but as an effort to address inadequate health care. After the state failed to improve its care, Judge Thelton E. Henderson appointed a federal receiver to take over the medical system, and the receiver has demanded billions of state dollars to build health care facilities.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has responded with a mix of conciliatory gestures — supporting an as-yet underfinanced initiative to build space for 53,000 prisoners — and defiance, as when he called for the dissolution of the receivership.

Eventually the receiver concluded that new prison facilities could not be added quickly enough to stem the deaths and injuries to prisoners or to outpace the rising prison population.

Lawyers for the state have argued that the federal courts lack the authority to order prison reforms costing billions of dollars, especially at a time when California is facing a $40 billion deficit.

Counties in California say they cannot afford to serve parolees’ rehabilitation needs without additional financing, as many other states do.

Kara P. Dansky, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, believes that the judges may have the authority to push through sweeping reforms, including more financing for counties, under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

The state disagrees that the court has such authority and plans to appeal to the Supreme Court, which could delay any outcome. Ms. Dansky said policy makers would be watching the case closely. “This is one of the areas that the law is unclear on because we’ve never seen a case like this,” she said.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 11, 2009, on page A17 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/us/11prisons.html?ref=todayspaper

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

Pa. judges accused of jailing kids for cash

Pa. judges accused of jailing kids for cash
By MICHAEL RUBINKAM and MARYCLAIRE DALE, \Associated Press Writers Michael Rubinkam And Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press Writers

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

"I've never encountered, and I don't think that we will in our lifetimes, a case where literally thousands of kids' lives were just tossed aside in order for a couple of judges to make some money," said Marsha Levick, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, which is representing hundreds of youths sentenced in Wilkes-Barre.

Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. The judges were charged on Jan. 26 and removed from the bench by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court shortly afterward.

No company officials have been charged, but the investigation is still going on.

The high court, meanwhile, is looking into whether hundreds or even thousands of sentences should be overturned and the juveniles' records expunged.

Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.

Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel.

The judges are scheduled to plead guilty to fraud Thursday in federal court. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years behind bars.

Ciavarella, 58, who presided over Luzerne County's juvenile court for 12 years, acknowledged last week in a letter to his former colleagues, "I have disgraced my judgeship. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame." Ciavarella, though, has denied he got kickbacks for sending youths to prison.

Conahan, 56, has remained silent about the case.

Many Pennsylvania counties contract with privately run juvenile detention centers, paying them either a fixed overall fee or a certain amount per youth, per day.

In Luzerne County, prosecutors say, Conahan shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002 and helped the two companies secure rich contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, at least some of that dependent on how many juveniles were locked up.

One of the contracts ­ a 20-year agreement with PA Child Care worth an estimated $58 million ­ was later canceled by the county as exorbitant.

The judges are accused of taking payoffs between 2003 and 2006.

Robert J. Powell co-owned PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care until June. His attorney, Mark Sheppard, said his client was the victim of an extortion scheme.

"Bob Powell never solicited a nickel from these judges and really was a victim of their demands," he said. "These judges made it very plain to Mr. Powell that he was going to be required to pay certain monies."

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Ciavarella was ridiculously harsh and ran roughshod over youngsters' constitutional rights. Ciavarella sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a statewide rate of one in 10.

The criminal charges confirmed the advocacy groups' worst suspicions and have called into question all the sentences he pronounced.

Hillary Transue did not have an attorney, nor was she told of her right to one, when she appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom in 2007 for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal.

Her mother, Laurene Transue, worked for 16 years in the child services department of another county and said she was certain Hillary would get a slap on the wrist. Instead, Ciavarella sentenced her to three months; she got out after a month, with help from a lawyer.

"I felt so disgraced for a while, like, what do people think of me now?" said Hillary, now 17 and a high school senior who plans to become an English teacher.

Laurene Transue said Ciavarella "was playing God. And not only was he doing that, he was getting money for it. He was betraying the trust put in him to do what is best for children."

Kurt Kruger, now 22, had never been in trouble with the law until the day police accused him of acting as a lookout while his friend shoplifted less than $200 worth of DVDs from Wal-Mart. He said he didn't know his friend was going to steal anything.

Kruger pleaded guilty before Ciavarella and spent three days in a company-run juvenile detention center, plus four months at a youth wilderness camp run by a different operator.

"Never in a million years did I think that I would actually get sent away. I was completely destroyed," said Kruger, who later dropped out of school. He said he wants to get his record expunged, earn his high school equivalency diploma and go to college.

"I got a raw deal, and yeah, it's not fair," he said, "but now it's 100 times bigger than me."
http://ydr.inyork.com/ci_11680195

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

February 06, 2009

CT: Gov. delays sending 16 & 17 year old youth to juvenile system

Criminal justice initiative clipped in Rell budget
By Keith M. Phaneuf
Journal Inquirer
Published: Thursday, February 5, 2009
HARTFORD — Though criminal justice initiatives traditionally are one area both political parties insist are immune to budget cuts, even they may not be safe in this economic climate.

The budget proposal Gov. M. Jodi Rell unveiled Wednesday would delay for two years an initiative to transfer most 16- and 17-year-offenders from the adult courts to the juvenile system.

That switch, which was supposed to occur in January 2010, would be delayed until January 2012.

Municipal leaders urged Rell to order this delay, noting that the switch would place an added financial burden on their police departments and other forms of support services. Juvenile cases, in general, carry a much higher price tag than other cases.

Connecticut is one of just three states that treats offenders in this age group as adults. An estimated 10,000 16- and 17-year-olds are prosecuted as adults each year, with about 60 percent becoming repeat offenders.

Advocates of the switch have argued that rehabilitation programs for 16- and 17-year-olds would be much more effective if these offenders are treated outside of the adult system.

The change is expected to cost the state close to $100 million in the first two years, not only to expand support programs, but also to expand courts and staff at the juvenile level.

The governor’s budget proposal for the next two fiscal years also would make several other changes, including:

• Canceling the planned Juvenile Justice Urban Cities Pilot Program.

• Closing courthouses in Meriden and Bristol, and realigning four towns amid judicial districts based in Middlesex and Waterbury counties.

• Leaving vacant five judge positions over the next two years. An additional 65 posts within the Judicial Department that have been vacant since the state’s 2003 early retirement program would be eliminated permanently.

• And canceling 60 community based, residential program beds for offender re-entry programs.

“Although each of the initiatives is very important, the state’s dire economic circumstances requires review of the initiatives that are not currently operating,” the governor’s budget message reads.

The recession has lowered projected collections for all state taxes. The current $18.4 billion state budget is $922 million in deficit, according to Rell.

Even more important, both the Rell administration and the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis have projected that under current spending and tax policies, the next two fiscal years face huge, built-in deficits.

Rell’s budget office places the two-year shortfall at a combined $6 billion, while OFA pegs the deficit at $8.7 billion.

http://www.journalinquirer.com/articles/2009/02/05/connecticut/doc498af5918966c985809856.txt

Posted by lois at 03:35 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Rikers Fight Club After indications for more than a year that guards were using inmates as enforcers, New York's jails are rocked by a pair of indictments

Rikers Fight Club
After indications for more than a year that guards were using inmates as enforcers, New York's jails are rocked by a pair of indictments
By Graham Rayman
published: February 04, 2009
The Village Voice

Eighteen months after the Voice first reported cases of jail guards using inmates as enforcers, Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson has made a criminal case that slices to the core of the problem.

The indictment, unsealed January 22, alleges that guards Michael McKie and Khalid Nelson handpicked and oversaw a gang of inmates who beat and terrorized other inmates, and extorted money and privileges from them over a four-month period in a teenage unit at the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC), culminating in the murder by inmates of 18-year-old Christopher Robinson on October 18. They called their operation "The Program."

The indictment lists at least seven teenage victims, but there were "scores" more who were victimized, Assistant District Attorney James Goward said at the arraignment two weeks ago. Numerous inmates gave information to investigators to help build evidence that showed a troubling pattern of misconduct right under the noses of jail officials.

"[McKie] was not simply the author of a crime," Goward told a judge. "He was the architect of a criminal enterprise that recruited and trained inmates to inflict violence. They turned jail into almost a nightmare environment."

The blockbuster case forced Correction Commissioner Martin Horn, for the first time, to discuss the issue before the assembled media. But he took a defensive posture, saying that he had no inkling of the problem. "I don't know that any of us believed that anything like this could happen," he told reporters at the Bronx District Attorney's office.

In fact, Horn was well aware of the problem. The Voice had been writing articles on the subject long before Robinson's death. The newspaper first put questions to Horn and his aides about guards deputizing inmates (often members of the Bloods gang) as enforcers in the summer of 2007, and kept writing articles about the problem over the next year and a half—articles that some law enforcement officials credited with placing a public spotlight on the problem.

Even though Horn was receiving information on these incidents during that entire period, it remains unclear whether he did anything to address the problem in the months leading up to the Robinson murder.

It was only after Robinson was killed that he took action: He suspended several officers, transferred several mid-level managers, forced the retirement of a chief, and reshuffled the roles of his senior staff.

Horn told reporters that he installed video cameras in the jails and now has the right to monitor inmates' phone conversations. "We investigate every serious injury," he said, pointing out that the Robinson homicide was the first at Rikers in four years. "We train our officers to maintain a standard of care. If the allegations prove true, these officers have stained the good name of thousands of officers."

Rose Gil Hearn, commissioner of the city Department of Investigation, called the case "the worst" she has ever seen in the jails, and has recommended adding more video cameras and making changes to policies surrounding access to telephones and the commissary.

Horn's spokesman, Stephen Morello, later provided the Voice with a list of things the commissioner has done and is doing to address the problem, including improving the staff-inmate ratio in high-risk teen housing areas to 1 in 25—a move that advocates have been demanding for years.

Morello says Horn has also ordered guards to check inmates' torsos for bruises and other evidence of violence at RNDC. He has expanded a program that provides better training to guards who work with teens—another thing that advocates wanted. And, according to Morello, Horn has ordered staff members to investigate every serious injury, including apparent accidents.

"While one inmate homicide is too many, the NYC jails compare quite favorably with other large city systems on this point," Morello says, citing federal stats that show the homicide rate in the city jails being far better than those of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Chicago.

As for Horn's comment in the press conference, Morello tells the Voice that the commissioner "did not say that he was never aware, nor did he claim no prior knowledge of the possibility or even actual allegations" of officers deputizing inmates as enforcers.

"He commented that the nature of the officers' complicity charged in the Robinson indictment and its consequences exceeded any such thing in his experience," Morello says. "In other words, he and we are, of course, aware of prior cases."

According to the indictment, McKie and Nelson handpicked up to 12 inmates to act as enforcers on each of the two wings of the RNDC housing unit known as "One Main."

The enforcers were called "The Team." The guards taught them how to use wrestling holds, like a full nelson, to secure victims during a beating. They told them to punch the torsos of their victims so as not to leave injuries that would be easily seen by other staff. In exchange for performing beatings on their orders, the members of the Team had the right to extort phone privileges and a fixed percentage of the commissary account from the other inmates.

What that meant is that they could use other inmates' phone accounts to make calls, force them to buy snacks for them, get extra food, and even choose where they sat in the day room. The members of the Team also got to roam the units freely, unlike the other inmates, and they had the power to tell inmates whether they were allowed out of their cells and whether they could go to the bathroom.

The practice evolved its own kind of slang. Inmates were asked, "Are you with the Program?"—or, in shorthand, "Are you with it?" If the inmate refused, he would be beaten. The beatings were called "spankings."

Prosecutors say McKie and Nelson also developed a series of signals to warn each other that a supervisor was arriving in the unit. They also failed to report assaults, lied in reports they did file, ordered inmates to make false statements, and hid injured inmates in cells to avoid scrutiny from supervisors.

The campaign climaxed on October 18, when several inmates beat Robinson to death after he refused to go along with the Program. Robinson likely bled to death internally over a long period, perhaps 12 hours. One of his ribs pierced his lung, causing the fatal bleeding, sources said.

Robinson might have avoided the fatal beating altogether had the department listened to the recommendation of a deputy warden and transferred the youth into a more secure area, following his involvement in a prior fight. He also might have survived had his injuries been treated in a timely manner. His family has asserted that he sought medical care in the jail's clinic, but was turned away because he did not have a pass.

McKie, Nelson, and a third officer, Denise Albright, pleaded not guilty to gang assault, conspiracy, and corruption in their arraignment last week. They were not charged in Robinson's death.

"This case is a web of lies built by inmates," said McKie's lawyer, Joey Jackson. "My client has a record of unblemished service. He has served with honor and justice. In an effort to save themselves, the inmates are pointing fingers."

Carolyn McKie told the Voice that her son won a basketball scholarship to Buffalo State, but returned home to care for his child. "None of this is true," she said. "He never had a record. What is going on here?"

Norman Seabrook, head of the correction officers' union, said the department was scapegoating the officers to avoid taking responsibility itself. "This is just another case of the department looking to blame someone else for its own mistakes," he told the Voice.

Sidney Schwartzbaum, union leader for deputy wardens and assistant deputy wardens, agreed with Seabrook. "Had they followed the recommendation, we wouldn't even be having this conversation," he said. "My mother used to say what gets done in the dark will come to light, and that will be true in this case as well."

The Robinson case was only the latest example of a problem at RNDC and other jails that the Voice has been following since the summer of 2007.

There was the case of Camillo Douglas and Luis Soriano, two inmates in RNDC, who were assaulted by Bloods members after their cell doors mysteriously opened shortly before 11 p.m. on April 16, 2007. RNDC is the same facility where Christopher Robinson was killed.

Douglas and Soriano both sustained stab wounds and bruising, but they also fought back against their attackers.

The men who assaulted Douglas and Soriano had been part of the "house gang," inmates who were tapped to clean up the facility and were, in return, given extra privileges by the guards. While it has yet to be proven in court, the fact that their cell doors opened when all the other inmates were locked in, just before lights out, suggests there was guard involvement in the assault.

The Voice found other examples that suggested guard involvement in punitive beatings of inmates at RNDC by other inmates.

Paris DeSuze, 18, filed papers with the city, claiming two guards failed to stop inmates from breaking his jaw in three places on April 13, 2007. Afterward, a guard told him to tell investigators that he was injured in a fall.

DeSuze's lawyer, Michael Hueston, told the Voice: "Young people tell me when they go in there, the culture is such that the kids control the jail. The COs know this happens, and they look the other way."

But the case that really should have set off alarm bells in the commissioner's office was the indictment in February 2008 of Correction Officer Lloyd Nicholson, who was accused of using teen inmates in RNDC to target other inmates. He, too, called his operation "The Program." The case allegations mirror the allegations made in the McKie and Nelson indictments.

For example, in both cases, the inmates enforced order and, in exchange, had the officers' permission to extort commissary, telephone privileges, and property from other inmates. And in both cases, the motive was laziness—the inmate gang freed the officers from having to monitor the floor constantly during their shifts.

"Basically, it was like the movie A Few Good Men," a source told the Voice last March. "Either you were in the Program or not. [Nicholson] thought the ones who weren't abiding with the Program were misbehaving, and he used other inmates to discipline them."

If any inmates misbehaved, Nicholson told them, there would be a "moment of truth," where they would be taken into the day room and beaten. He allegedly also told his enforcers to avoid the face because it would leave tell-tale marks—another element which mirrors the McKie indictment.

One of the inmates suffered a collapsed lung, but was denied medical treatment for several hours, until he was finally transported to Elmhurst Hospital. He barely survived the assault, prosecutors said in court.

Sources said Nicholson tried to delay reporting the injury until the next shift, but he finally relented when one of the inmates told him the injured youth desperately needed medical attention. Nicholson, the sources said, also told the inmates he would try to get the blame for the injuries pinned on them. "Some of you are going to go down for this," he told them, sources said.

Nicholson also allegedly beat an inmate himself. "He both watched and participated," a prosecutor said during the arraignment.

Last week, officials said Nicholson worked in another unit and was not connected to the McKie operation. In addition, Horn told reporters that when McKie and Nelson were not working, the practice did not extend to other officers. But some jail observers were skeptical of this claim, saying it had to be more than coincidental that both operations were called "The Program."

"What they are saying is that One Main was a vacuum, which doesn't make a lot of sense," a correction source said.

Housing units typically include two hallways with about 30 cells each, with a "bubble" or glassed-in observation booth at the hub with a day room and television on either side. Three officers control security in these units—one on the left wing, one on the right wing, and one in the bubble. There are three officers per shift, so at least nine officers cycle through the unit on any given day. In addition, the unit is visited once or twice per shift by a captain. On top of that, assistant deputy wardens and other higher-level supervisors might pass through.

What that means is that on any day, at least 18 correction employees might come through a unit. So it seems unlikely that no one other than the three implicated guards would be aware of the Program.

"It's tragic that it took the death of an 18-year-old to bring to light this terrible scheme, but it has to be asked whether it was more extensive," said the Robinson family lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein. "Someone in a position of power and authority should investigate it."

Even the New York Post, which rarely devotes much space to jail incidents, wrote an editorial expressing doubt that the operation was limited to just three guards. The editorial pressed officials to continue their investigation: "How could only three guards organize such an operation—with at least 12 inmates involved—without more people knowing what was going on?" wondered the Post's editorial board. "It defies credulity to assume that this is all that was going on."

And there were examples of the problem in other facilities dating all the way back to 2004, with the fatal beating of Tyreece Abney, 21, who was the last inmate murdered in the jail system before Robinson.

Abney, a mentally disabled man who probably never should have been in general population, was stomped to death in the George Motchan Detention Center by Bloods members after he had a loud argument with a correction officer. About 30 minutes before the fatal assault, a guard told the inmates in his unit: "You men in the house, you need to speak to the new inmates—you need to get your house in order," court testimony showed. Shortly thereafter, three inmates cornered Abney and attacked him, with one inmate saying he better "fly right."

During the investigation, authorities learned that one of Abney's assailants had been receiving extra phone and mail privileges from a correction officer.

In March 2007, the city agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit involving a near-fatal assault by the leader of a "house gang." Inmate Kirk Fisher hit Donald Jackson, and Jackson fell, his head striking a piece of protruding metal in the floor. Jackson almost died. Fisher later testified that a correction officer told him to assault Jackson. "Before you do anything [he said], I'm going to go to the other side, and do what you got to do," the guard told Fisher, according to Fisher's deposition.

Describing his duties, Fisher said, "It was my job to enforce certain rules. Anybody that acted up in the house, it was my job to put them in line."

"The inmates tell us it's a really common setup," said Jackson's lawyer, Andrew Stoll, in the Voice's 2007 article on the case. "In a lot of the houses, the correction officers use the house gang as enforcers and pay them with cigarettes and extra commissary."

During the course of the Jackson case, Stoll was able to track down a former correction officer, Roger Cullen, who was on duty at the time of the assault. In his deposition, Cullen confirmed Fisher's claim: "It was like he was in charge," Cullen said in sworn testimony. "Any officer knows you're not supposed to do that. It's wrong."

Cullen was fired before he could be vested as a correction officer. As he told the Voice in 2007, he blamed the firing on his efforts to report corruption in the jail. The department investigated his claims, but in a cursory manner, and closed the case without taking action. "I tried to do the right thing," Cullen said in his deposition.

The McKie indictment has raised another issue. For many years now, the department has relied on statistics regarding stabbings and slashings in public testimony as its indicator of violence in the jails. Whenever the issue of violence is raised, officials trot out the low number of stabbings and slashings to show that the jail system is safe. Indeed, the figure has declined sharply over the past 15 years.

But this case vividly demonstrates that the figure is a poor indicator of the level of violence in today's environment. For one, it does not count beatings, broken bones, smashed noses, broken ribs, bruising, and many other kinds of injuries. Christopher Robinson's murder, for example, will not be counted as a stabbing or slashing.

Moreover, both the inmates and guards knew how to conceal injuries from the beatings, and they knew how to extort their victims into hiding the beating or lying about it. In other words, the system has evolved its own methods to avoid the heightened scrutiny that comes when a slashing or stabbing takes place.

In the end, no matter what the stats show, the number does not provide an accurate picture of the level of violence in RNDC.
http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/864266

NY Times editorial
Rikers Horror Story
Published: January 28, 2009

New York City corrections officials have done a commendable job reducing the number of beatings, stabbings and other violent acts that have long plagued city jails. We are very concerned about recent events — including the death of an inmate — at the troubled youth facility at the Rikers Island jail. Clearly, the city needs to do a much better job of training and supervising corrections officers there.

Juvenile justice advocates and former inmates had been complaining about misconduct by the guards long before Christopher Robinson, 18, was found beaten to death in his cell last fall. They accused the guards of turning disciplinary responsibility over to roving gangs that beat, harassed and extorted money and valuables from other inmates. Some critics referred to the facility as a “gladiator school” where young people were encouraged to fight and damage one another.

The Bronx district attorney has now charged three corrections officers with conspiracy in connection with Mr. Robinson’s death. This is the second indictment of its kind at the youth facility in less than a year. According to the new indictment, guards used violent inmates to ride herd over others, sanctioned assaults on inmates and decided when, where and how they would take place. Prosecutors accused the guards of setting up a system of warning signals to protect gang members from being discovered when they administered beatings. They said the guards directed their “teams” to avoid hitting inmates in the face so that any injuries would not be readily apparent.

City corrections officials believe they can discourage misconduct by expanding the use of surveillance cameras. The indictments suggest the entire culture of the Rikers youth facility needs to be changed. That’s the only way to ensure these horrors are never repeated.

Posted by lois at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2009

Defining ‘Cruel and Unusual’ When Offender Is 13

Sidebar
Defining ‘Cruel and Unusual’ When Offender Is 13

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: February 2, 2009

In 1989, someone raped a 72-year-old woman in Pensacola, Fla. Joe Sullivan was 13 at the time, and he admitted that he and two older friends had burglarized the woman’s home earlier that day. But he denied that he had returned to commit the rape.

The victim testified that her assailant was “a colored boy” who “had kinky hair and he was quite black and he was small.” She said she “did not see him full in the face” and so would not recognize him by sight. But she recalled her attacker saying something like, “If you can’t identify me, I may not have to kill you.”

At his trial, Mr. Sullivan was made to say those words several times.

“It’s been six months,” the woman said on the witness stand. “It’s hard, but it does sound similar.”

The trial lasted a day and ended in conviction. Then Judge Nicholas Geeker, of the circuit court in Escambia County, sentenced Mr. Sullivan to life without the possibility of parole.

“I’m going to send him away for as long as I can,” Judge Geeker said.

Mr. Sullivan is 33 now, and his lawyers have asked the United States Supreme Court to consider the question of whether the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment extends to sentencing someone who was barely a teenager to die in prison for a crime that did not involve a killing.

People can argue about whether the punishment in Mr. Sullivan’s case is cruel. There is no question that it is unusual.

According to court papers and a report from the Equal Justice Initiative, which now represents Mr. Sullivan, only eight people in the world are serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed when they were 13. All are in the United States.

And there are only two people in that group whose crimes did not involve a killing. Both are in Florida, and both are black.

Joe Sullivan is one; Ian Manuel, who is in prison for a 1990 robbery and attempted murder, is the other.

About 1,000 people under 15 are arrested on rape charges every year, according to Justice Department data. But none of them have been sentenced to life without parole since Mr. Sullivan was. Indeed, no 13-year-old has been sentenced to life without parole for any crime that did not involve a killing in more than 15 years.

Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum, waived his right to file a response to Mr. Sullivan’s petition to the Supreme Court, a sign suggesting that he considers the case insubstantial if not frivolous. Sandi Copes, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCollum’s office, declined to discuss the case.

Last month, the court indicated that it found the case more interesting than Florida does, requesting a response from the state. That probably means that at least one justice considered the case significant or difficult. But it is nothing like a guarantee that the court will agree to hear it.

On the other hand, the question of whether life without parole for juveniles is constitutional is the logical next step following the court’s 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons, which struck down the death penalty for crimes committed by 16- and 17-year-olds. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that even older teenagers are different from adults. They are less mature, more impulsive, more susceptible to peer pressure and more likely to change for the better over time.

Last year, in Kennedy v. Louisiana, the court issued another ruling that helps frame Mr. Sullivan’s case. That decision said crimes against individuals that did not involve killing, including the rape of a child by an adult, may not be punished by death.

In 2007, after Mr. Sullivan had served almost two decades in prison, a Florida appeals court declined to have another look at his case. The Roper decision, the appeals court said, “established only one new constitutional right, the right for a juvenile not to be given the death penalty.”

Douglas A. Berman, an authority on sentencing law at Ohio State, said it was time for the Supreme Court and the legal system to widen its relentless focus on capital cases and to look at other severe sentences as well. Cases involving the death penalty receive careful review at multiple levels, he said. Life sentences can receive almost none.

Mr. Sullivan’s trial, for instance, lasted a day. He was represented by a lawyer who made no opening statement and whose closing argument occupies about three double-spaced pages of the trial transcript. The lawyer was later suspended, and the Florida Bar’s Web site says he is “not eligible to practice in Florida.”

There was biological evidence from the rape, but it was not presented at the trial. When Mr. Sullivan’s new lawyers recently sought to conduct DNA testing on it, they were told that the state had destroyed it in 1993.

“I absolutely believe he is innocent,” Bryan A. Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said of Mr. Sullivan. Mr. Stevenson said he believed that one of the older youths who committed the burglary with Mr. Sullivan and who testified against him was probably the actual assailant.

But the point made by Mr. Sullivan’s brief to the Supreme Court is not that he is innocent. It is not even that he should be released after 20 years in prison. It is only that he should someday be allowed to make his case to the Florida Parole Commission.

“I don’t think it’s possible to say that a 13-year-old will never change and that life without parole is an appropriate punishment,” Mr. Stevenson said.

Aside from Mr. Sullivan’s case, it seems there is only one other appeals court decision about whether young teenagers may be locked away forever for rape. It was issued 40 years ago in Kentucky, and it involved two 14-year-olds. The court struck down the part of the sentences precluding the possibility of parole.

Juveniles “are not permitted to vote, to contract, to purchase alcoholic beverages or to marry without the consent of their parents,” the court said. “It seems inconsistent that one be denied the fruits of the tree of the law, yet subjected to all of its thorns.”

» A version of this article appeared in print on February 3, 2009, on page A12 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/us/03bar.html?ref=us

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

January 14, 2009

THE PEOPLE’S AGENDA: VIRGINIA PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY

THE PEOPLE’S AGENDA

Adopted unanimously Jan. 10, 2009, by the VIRGINIA PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY

In this time of deepening economic crisis, the working people of Virginia are looking to the government to protect our interests. Instead, it is the Big Banks and Corporations that are receiving bail-outs, while we are faced with more layoffs, more cutbacks and more attacks on our standard of living. Obviously, the rich and powerful have their representatives. The working people need ours.

On Jan. 10, 2009, nearly 100 representatives from dozens of organizations and communities throughout Virginia met in Richmond to found a People’s Assembly to protect and promote the interests of working-class people and communities of color. After much discussion and listening to each other’s concerns, the delegates unanimously adopted this People’s Agenda which we are presenting to the Virginia General Assembly. Our first demands are the following:

Don’t Balance the Budget on the Backs of Virginia’s Workers!

We demand a Moratorium on Cutbacks, Layoffs, Evictions & Foreclosures!

We know there are alternatives to cutting the state budget. Virginia’s 6% corporate tax rate is the 7th lowest in the country and hasn’t been raised in more than 30 years. Raise it! Reinstate parole for Virginia prisoners so the state’s prison population can be reduced. Close the barbaric and unnecessary Red Onion SuperMax prison. No more state money to promote slavery-defending Confederate traitors. Bring home Virginia members of the National Guard and Reserves now stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, we demand the following:

LABOR

No layoffs of public employees — Remove all legal restrictions to the right to collective bargaining and the right to organize (HJ-60) — Pass a living wage bill — Create permanent, sustainable employment for all Virginians willing and able to work; promote “green” jobs — Equal pay and pay equity for women and people of color — Provide economic protection for retirees — Promote equal opportunity in all facets of state government — Support passage of the federal Employee Free Choice Act — Support repeal of the federal Taft-Hartley Act — Support the repeal of the federal NAFTA and CAFTA trade treaties

BLACK COMMUNITY

Remove barriers to effective support of the development and sustenance of neighborhood, community-based initiatives that will effect youth development, continuing education and/or job skills — Promote training and apprenticeships and small business and nonprofit organizational development to meet the needs of the community — ake Juneteenth an “Emancipation Day” state holiday; form a state-level Juneteenth Commission to coordinate cultural and educational programs — Increase procurement contracts to minority-owned businesses — For every dollar spent on Confederate culture commemoration, a matching dollar should be spent to fund Black culture and achievement commemoration, especially in regards to science, math and history

IMMIGRANT RIGHTS

Declare a moratorium on anti-immigrant raids, deportations and foreclosures — Respect the right of residents to remain with their families — Prohibit local enforcement of the Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g) Immigration and Nationality Act — Prohibit public funding for the implementation of UNJUST migratory laws — Prohibit the use of abstract and nonspecific legal terminology like “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause” that allow racial profiling and indiscriminate arrests — Prohibit police from using individual interpretation of laws for their own implementation — Stop linking illegal immigration and terrorism — Respect the human rights of immigrant detainees and prevent inhumane treatment — Prohibit detention centers like the planned Farmville Detention Center — Enforce and expand labor & wage protection laws — Allow in-state tuition for undocumented Virginia residents — Allow people to obtain a driver’s license or identification without presenting a Social Security number, to prevent arrests, criminal records and deportations — Allow all Virginia residents to benefit from social programs -- health, education and other social services; no denial because of lack of a Social Security number — Prohibit public service workers from denouncing people because of their migratory status — Prohibit the use of the term “illegal alien” and any official use of discriminatory terms or concepts against people of color or immigrants

EDUCATION

Restructure public education to focus on critical thinking and practical life skills along with promotion of both higher education and vocational training, rather than test-taking skills to the exclusion of all others — Include worker and labor history in public education — Include partnerships with local initiatives in the standard curriculum for skills building and self-sufficiency — Build in vocational learning connected to local employment industries starting in middle school — Improve accuracy of the history and social studies curricula — Improve relevancy of civics in public schools curriculum by providing hands-on engagement with local government and school board processes from kindergarten through 12th grades

HEALTH CARE

Support universal health care — Promote real access to health care — Protect access to safe abortions and birth-control — Stop the privatization of health care services — No cutbacks in Medicare — No cutbacks in the WIC program — Provide for realistic explanation of patients’ legal medical rights — Stop stigmas based on morals related to health care — Stop the closing of the Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents — Legalize needle exchange — Provide condoms in prisons — Make “queer bashing” a hate crime — While paying proper attention to child welfare, allow people to freely parent and give birth in any method they prefer, including those in prison and on welfare

PRISONER ADVOCACY

Pass the Prisoner Literacy and Rehabilitation with “EARNED” Sentence Credit Allowance for Virginia state prisoners under the non-parole sentencing law who seek an “earned” second chance in society — Parole Board Oversight Committee to ensure fair and responsible parole for 9,000 prisoners remain incarcerated 13 years after parole abolishment. Remove barriers to medical care in prisons and jails — Recognize the right of prisoners to education — Revamp state law to allow for the speedy restoration of civil rights of convicted felons — Close the Red Onion SuperMax prison — Reform drug crime laws — Raise the pay for public defenders assigned to indigent defendants.
VPA Real Prison Reform Representatives:
Janet (Queen Nzinga) Taylor: OneRastaQueen@hotmail.com
Cassandra (Imani) Shaw: Shawthesavvy1@aol.com
Lillie (Ms. K) Branch-Kennedy: RIHD23075@aol.com

STUDENTS

Make academic programs and faculty/staff wages the first financial priorities — Protect and expand tuition financial aid programs — Ensure academic diversity through equal support for academic programs — Ensure job security and fair pay for faculty and staff — Create a more democratic system of oversight at the state level and in universities — Promote college and university expansion that takes into account the needs of the host communities

ANTI-WAR

Bring Virginia GIs and National Guard members home now — Support veterans when they get home — End the “poverty draft” and fund alternatives to military service; fund “green” civilian corps with same benefits as military service — Divest state funds from Israel until it complies with UN resolutions — Mandate truth and full disclosure in recruiting — Forbid military recruiters from entering public schools — Make higher education affordable

OTHER

Raise the state corporate tax rate — Repeal the Dillon Law — Redraw Virginia’s voting districts so they are equitable and not based on race — Promote ecology and environmental conservation and protection; increase spending on state parks — Cancel the Wise County power plant — Stop coal extraction while meeting the economic needs of the people of Appalachia — Ensure available, affordable housing — Make Virginia friendlier to small businesses.

VIRGINIA PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY
PO Box 38441, Richmond, VA 23231
Web: www.RichmondJwJ.org

Posted by lois at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2009

Cocaine and White Teens

White teens use cocaine at 4 times that of Black teens....and who is incarcerated?

January 10, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Cocaine and White Teens
By CHARLES M. BLOW

Last month, President Bush touted the results of a government-sponsored study by the University of Michigan called Monitoring the Future. It reported a broad decline in drug use among young people since 2001. This included a 24 percent drop in the overall use of illicit drugs. There was one exception he said: abuse of painkillers. But, one important metric that wasn’t mentioned, and that stubbornly resisted the downturn, was the use of cocaine.

According to data from the group that produced the report, the percentage of both black and white 12th graders who confessed to using cocaine in the past 30 days has essentially stayed flat since 2001. The major difference is that white usage outweighs black usage 4 to 1. (If you take a longer view back to 1991, when cocaine usage bottomed out following the outrageous ’80s, usage among white 12th graders since then has nearly doubled, while usage among black 12th graders has fallen a bit.)

While we turned our attention to pills being swiped from parents’ medicine cabinets, the number of youngsters snorting white lines continued virtually unabated, producing a striking consequence.

According to the most recent data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, admissions of white teenagers to drug treatment centers for crack and cocaine abuse soared 76 percent from 2001 to 2006. Crack and cocaine was the only illicit drug category in which the number of admissions for white teens grew over this period, and in 2006 the number was at its highest level since these data have been kept. By contrast, admissions among black teens for crack and cocaine over the same period held steady. By 2006, white admissions outnumbered those for blacks by more than 10 to 1. (It should be noted that admissions for white youths abusing painkillers in 2006, while growing, was still less than half the number of admissions for those abusing cocaine that year.)

And there are ominous signs. According to the Monitoring the Future study, the risk of using crack and cocaine, as perceived by teenagers, is going down. The newly released 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment puts it this way: “The decrease in perceived risk suggests that adolescents are becoming less wary of trying cocaine, which may sustain demand for the drug in the near future.”

But, in a phone interview, David Murray, chief scientist in the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, insisted that there was good news: a sharp rise in the price of cocaine and a drop in its purity since 2006, among other things, have cut into overall usage.

So, I thought, until policy makers put more of a focus on this issue and figure out how to reach these students, should we just hope that teens are too broke for this weak coke? I don’t think so. We need a real strategy, right now.
Graphs at this URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/opinion/10blow.html

Posted by lois at 05:55 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2009

CA: Group cites deep flaws in juvenile justice plan

Group cites deep flaws in juvenile justice plan
By Dana M. Nichols
Record Staff Writer
January 06, 2009 6:00 AM

SAN ANDREAS - The $93 million effort to reform California's juvenile justice system by transferring many young offenders to county custody is deeply flawed, with inadequate guidelines for how the money should be spent and contains no system for tracking the effectiveness of local programs, according to a report being issued today by the Prison Law Office.

The Prison Law Office is a nonprofit advocacy group that has participated in lawsuits over the treatment of wards at former California Youth Authority facilities in Stockton and elsewhere. Those suits resulted in agreements that have dramatically reduced the number of youths locked up in state facilities.

The critical report comes out at the same time that the temporary state Juvenile Justice Commission is expected to make its recommendations for improving the system. Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the Juvenile Justice Commission, said he would check the status of the commission report that was due Jan. 1. He did not have the information by The Record's deadline.

Patty Mazzilli, assistant chief probation officer for San Joaquin County, said she was not surprised that the Prison Law Office found deep flaws in the state's implementation of SB81, the 2007 law intended to reform the Division of Juvenile Justice, formerly known as the California Youth Authority.

The report noted that counties were expected almost immediately to receive offenders transferred from state lockups. And counties had only a month to come up with plans once they received state guidelines at the end of November in 2007.

"Thirty days is not a long time to come up with a real thorough plan to deal with a lot of kids ... to come up with community interventions that are well thought out," Mazzilli said.

Another major flaw described in the report: The reform law does not require counties to disclose how they spend future allotments of state money they get in return for taking a larger role in juvenile justice, and the law gives no state entity the authority to monitor the spending anyway.

Mazzilli said she is confident that San Joaquin County is spending its money well, in part, because the county already was running a number of programs which included careful measurements of the programs' success. Still, those programs can't be compared with efforts for getting state money elsewhere in California because of a lack of state standards, even for such seemingly basic pieces of information as how many young offenders end up getting in trouble again within a certain period of time.

Last month, David Steinhart, a member of California's Juvenile Justice Commission and director of the Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program in Mill Valley, said the upcoming commission report will recommend a variety of reforms, including how to gather data on the success of various probation and treatment programs for young offenders. Steinhart also said he fears current state budget woes will derail the effort.

The juvenile justice reforms, and possible future reforms of the adult prison system, are all happening in the midst of a financial crisis. In the case of the juvenile justice system, abuses such as students forced to attend classes in cages and a 2005 suicide at N.A. Chaderjian School in Stockton prompted lawsuits against CYA and its successor the DJJ.

Those suits resulted in orders and agreements that required the youth prison system to upgrade its schools and health care and to remake itself so that it would succeed at rehabilitating young offenders. That proved expensive, and the per-ward cost of housing the offenders jumped to $178,000 per year per youth in 2006 and was well more than $200,000 per year per ward by 2008, according to a Little Hoover Commission report published last summer.

So, state officials have been working to reduce the cost by reducing the number of youths in state lockups and, at the same time, meet the terms of settlements requiring more humane treatment by transferring lower-risk offenders to the counties.

Some in the criminal justice system say the adult prison system - whose rising population and costs are a factor in the current state budget crisis - could be next. But they warn that compared with the juvenile programs, there are very few county programs set up to help adults succeed in living lawful lives outside prison walls.

"It is night and day," Mazzilli said. "There has historically been funding to work with juveniles up front, where there has not been for adults."
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090106/A_NEWS/90106032
1

Posted by lois at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2008

Study reports murders by Black teenage men rise

"Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard, cautioned that the change in murder rates was not large and did not yet show a clear trend. Dr. Western also said that the impact of the reduction in government spending on crime control would have to be studied on a city-by-city basis, and that many other changes, including a sagging economy, could have affected murder rates."

December 29, 2008
Murders by Black Teenagers Rise, Bucking a Trend
By ERIK ECKHOLM
NY Times
The murder rate among black teenagers has climbed since 2000 even as murders by young whites have scarcely grown or declined in some places, according to a new report.

The celebrated reduction in murder rates nationally has concealed a “worrisome divergence,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who wrote the report, to be released Monday, with Marc L. Swatt. And there are signs, they said, that the racial gap will grow without countermeasures like restoring police officers in the streets and creating social programs for poor youths.

The main racial difference involves juveniles ages 14 to 17. In 2000, 539 white and 851 black juveniles committed murder, according to an analysis of federal data by the authors. In 2007, the number for whites, 547, had barely changed, while that for blacks was 1,142, up 34 percent.

The increase coincided with a rise in the number of murders involving guns, Dr. Fox said. The number of young blacks who were victims of murder also rose in this period.

Murder rates around the country are far below the record highs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a crack epidemic spawned violent turf battles.

“Regrettably, as the nation celebrated the successful fight against violent crime in the 1990s, we grew complacent and eased up on our crime-fighting efforts,” the authors said.

The report primarily blames cutbacks in federal support for community policing and juvenile crime prevention, reduced support for after-school and other social programs, and a weakening of gun laws. Cuts in these areas have been felt most deeply in poor, black urban areas, helping to explain the growing racial disparity in violent crime, Dr. Fox said.

But Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard, cautioned that the change in murder rates was not large and did not yet show a clear trend. Dr. Western also said that the impact of the reduction in government spending on crime control would have to be studied on a city-by-city basis, and that many other changes, including a sagging economy, could have affected murder rates.

Conservative criminologists place greater emphasis on the breakdown of black families, rather than cuts in government programs, in explaining the travails of black youths.

Much of the increase, experts say, is a product of gang activity, in midsize and large cities.

“The aggregate national murder rate since 2000 has been impressively flat — not to say there haven’t been fluctuations in individual cities,” said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. “But when you see a spike in a city,” he said, as in Chicago recently, “it very often involves young black males shooting other young black males.”

Dr. Blumstein said that while federal cuts might have contributed to the rise in murders by black teenagers, “I think there are much more endemic problems going on.”

“In the inner city, you have large numbers of kids with no future, hanging out together with a great emphasis on their street credibility,” he said. “They’ll go to great lengths to avenge an insult.” Many of these teenagers do not stay in school, let alone join the Boys Clubs or other after-school programs.

The heightened attention to security after the 9/11 attacks might, paradoxically, have contributed to a decline in crime-fighting.

“One problem we faced was a disinvestment in policing in the post-2001 environment,” said Chief Edward A. Flynn of the Milwaukee police, who served from 2003 to 2006 as secretary of public safety in Massachusetts. “I witnessed homeland security become the monster that ate criminal justice,” Chief Flynn said, as money went to security equipment and communications and the number of police officers fell.

To fight violent crime, Chief Flynn said, the police must be a visible presence in neighborhoods with high crime rates.

From 2000 to 2007, according to the report, murders in Milwaukee by whites ages 14 to 24 rose by 4 percent, while those by blacks rose by 62 percent.

This year, Chief Flynn’s first leading the department, he deployed new teams of officers to the most violent neighborhoods, having them patrol on foot and bicycles, while federal agencies helped bring down some large gangs. The number of murders this year — 70 as of last Friday — is down one-third from last year and is the lowest since 1985.

Still, Chief Flynn said, “any improvements will be temporary unless there’s more investment in the futures of our young people.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/us/29homicide.html?_r=1&hp

Posted by lois at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2008

Cash-strapped states cut juvenile justice programs

Cash-strapped states cut juvenile justice programs
December 26, 2008
By JIM DAVENPORT

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — State budget cuts are forcing some of the nation's youngest criminals out of counseling programs and group homes and into juvenile prisons in what critics contend is a shortsighted move that will eventually lead to more crime and higher costs.

Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia are among states that have slashed juvenile justice spending — in some cases more than 20 percent — because of slumping tax collections. Youth advocates say they expect the recession will bring more cuts next year in other states, hitting programs that try to rehabilitate children rather than simply locking them up.

"If you raise a child in prison, you're going to raise a convict," said South Carolina Juvenile Justice Director Bill Byars, credited with turning around a system once better known for warehousing children than counseling them and teaching them life skills.

Now, he's been asked to draw up plans to trim an additional 15 percent from a juvenile justice budget already cut $23 million, or 20 percent, since June as part of the state's effort to pare $1 billion from its $7 billion budget.

All five of the system's group homes — which generally house less-violent offenders and give them more individual attention — have been shuttered. Also gone are some intensive youth reform and after-school programs in detention facilities.

The story is similar in other states. Kentucky is nixing a boot camp-style program developed by the National Guard. Virginia is losing behavioral services staff and a facility that prepares children to go home after serving time, along with smaller camps and community programs. Juveniles in those programs will return to traditional correctional facilities.

"It's not like we're going to say, 'OK, let's close a juvenile detention center,' or something like that," said Gordon Hickey, spokesman for Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. "We have to reduce spending across the state, and the governor looked at suggestions and recommendations from all departments. He certainly realizes that all of these reductions have consequences. The idea is to limit the damage as much as possible."

Among the programs being cut in South Carolina is one that Lex Wilbanks, an 18-year-old arrested four years ago on drug and gun charges, credits with giving him back his future.

Before moving to the program run by Florida-based nonprofit Associated Marine Institute, which provides intensive counseling and wilderness camps in several states, Wilbanks spent four months in a regular juvenile detention center.

"When you did something wrong or you fight or you disrespect staff, they just throw you into lockdown," Wilbanks said. "They just throw you in and make them fight to survive. You're just making them a hardened criminal."

In South Carolina, only 22 percent of offenders who go through the institute's program later break the law, less than half the recidivism rate for juveniles in large state facilities, Byars said.

Through the program, Wilbanks worked his way to the top rank in Army Junior ROTC and earned a GED and college credits. Acting up brought meetings during which counselors "talk you through problems and how you can actually change," he said. "It gives you hope."

Florida is also axing three Associated Marine Institute programs to save $1.7 million, part of an effort to cut 4 percent, or $18 million, from the juvenile justice budget. Advocates are bracing for additional cuts as legislators go back to the Capitol in January to deal with a $2 billion state budget hole.

Florida's juvenile justice system "is going to die the death of a million 4 percent cuts," said Jacqui Colyer, who leads a state juvenile justice advisory group.

The picture isn't as bleak everywhere. In New York, where the population of jailed juveniles has declined as the state moves toward a more community-based approach, Gov. David Patterson has proposed closing six youth facilities and consolidating and downsizing others that aren't being fully used to save $12 million in 2009-10 and $14 million in 2010-11.

A court order limits the cuts California can make and Minnesota, Massachusetts and Nebraska haven't made serious cuts to their systems. Other states, including Connecticut, Oregon, New Hampshire and Utah, are making more modest cuts or delaying planned spending.

Advocates say they worry most about losing programs, such as group homes, that take children out of large facilities to give them individual attention.

Juvenile facilities see an array of major and minor criminals. Gun, drug, sex and assault offenders may share sleeping quarters and classes with teen pranksters sentenced for disrupting schools or destroying property. Terms can last weeks or, in extreme cases, until youths become adults and are transferred to adult prisons.

Generally, less violent offenders make it to the smaller group homes, and experts say social pecking orders are easier to defuse in those settings compared to prisons where gangs try to form and fight for control.

Sheila Bedi, executive director of the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute, said housing children can cost as much as $600 per child daily. But the expenses can be much higher when children emerge hardened from big youth prisons, commit more crimes and end up in adult facilities.

"The truant comes out learning how to steal a car," Bedi said. "You cannot expect a child to come out of that situation with the ability to make better life decisions."

Associated Press Writer Dena Potter in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hFsfRjoS-SR_3irN_R3WEU8YhzfAD95AHFHG0

Posted by lois at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2008

Boston MA: A $26m try to tame city's crime hot spots New program's workers may have rough pasts

A $26m try to tame city's crime hot spots
New program's workers may have rough pasts

By Maria Cramer, Boston Globe Staff | December 4, 2008

The Boston Foundation and city officials are preparing to flood a 1.5-square-mile section of the city with massive crime-fighting resources over the next six years, pinpointing about 2,000 young criminals who they believe drive more than three-quarters of the city's violence.

The $26 million effort, which will be formally announced later this month, will dispatch 25 new street workers - or "violence interrupters" - into five neighborhoods along or near Blue Hill Avenue, to make contact with gang members and try to defuse conflicts.

Unlike street workers hired by the city, these interrupters will not be disqualified if they have a criminal past. This background, community leaders say, could deepen their understanding of what drives people to crime and give the workers more credibility with young people caught up in violence.

The street workers, who have yet to be hired, would be clustered in areas of Roxbury, the South End, Lower Roxbury, and Dorchester, where 78 percent of the city's shootings and homicides occur.

"This thing has a lot of ambitions, but it is very sharply focused on achieving sharp reductions in murders, aggravated assaults, and robberies in these communities," said Paul S. Grogan, president of The Boston Foundation, which is putting $1 million a year of its own money toward the effort. "That's what this thing is all about."

Mayor Thomas M. Menino has instructed city agencies, including the Boston Police Department, the Department of Public Health, and the Boston Center for Youth and Families, to cooperate with the initiative on the plan, said his spokeswoman, Dorothy Joyce

"The mayor has always made it a priority of getting young people who may be at risk engaged in positive, productive opportunities," Joyce said. "This program will hopefully help them to that end."

The unusual public-private initiative, known as StreetSafe Boston, will concentrate on 1,400 to 2,200 people between 16 and 24 years old who live along or near the Blue Hill Avenue spine and are former offenders, gang members, actively involved in violent crime, or involved with the Department of Youth Services.

Specifically, it would focus on Dudley Square and Grove Hall in Roxbury, the South End and Lower Roxbury area, and two Dorchester hot spots, in the area of Morton and Norfolk streets, and Bowdoin Street and Geneva Avenue.

StreetSafe would also target 4,000 young people who may not be involved in violent crime but are vulnerable, like dropouts, drug dealers, pregnant teens, and runaways.

The money also would go toward the development of job training programs and mental health services for young people. The foundation has raised close to $7 million and hopes to get the rest through donations from national and local foundations and individual contributors.

"We don't want to just see young people decide, 'I'm not going to shoot anymore,' but they're still not in school," said Marc H. Germain, a foundation associate who described the program at a neighborhood meeting in Dorchester yesterday. "We're looking for improvement in their lives."

The street workers program will be overseen by the Black Ministerial Alliance, the Boston TenPoint Coalition, and Chris Byner, who runs the city's street worker program.

"I'm convinced it will work," said the Rev. Ray Hammond, chairman of the Boston Foundation, who compared it to efforts in the 1990s that led to the so-called Boston Miracle. "This kind of strategy was a major piece of the successes of the '90s - collaborative and comprehensive. And it's targeted. All of our kids need attention, but if violence is the issue, then we know it's a very a small population that needs a lot of attention."

The geographical area was picked not only because of the violence it experiences, but also because of economics.

"With limited resources, you have to be judicious," Germain said.

Still the program buoyed activists who have been alarmed by the growing list of cuts to youth programs.

"It's the largest commitment of funds to the most difficult-to-work-with group that I've ever seen," said Emmett Folgert, head of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative. "The focus population is quite small, and the amount of resources is high, so there is a good chance of success here."

But others expressed skepticism that the initiative will lead to a long-term reduction in violence.

"I really want this to work," said Ralph Ortiz, youth program coordinator at the Codman Square Neighborhood Development Association. "My concerns are that these things have been done before in the past."

The violence interrupters will need to receive formal, technical guidance in how to deal with young people traumatized by violence, he said.

"It won't be effective unless street workers are trained to become more clinical in their approach to young people," Ortiz said.

Hammond said he expects the street workers will not only be trained to help young people cope with trauma, but will also be taught skills to help them avoid the burnout that often comes with working with troubled youths.

Robert Lewis Jr., vice president for program at the foundation, said the violence interrupters - as well as the street workers already deployed in city neighborhoods - will receive new, specialized training under the same model and taught skills like mediation.

Lewis said he expects to start recruiting the interrupters in January. Criminal background checks - known as Criminal Offender Record Information, or CORI, checks - will not stand in the way of hiring, he said.

"You have to put the best workers out there. Period," Lewis said. "What we don't want to do is allow CORI to be a reason why we couldn't put the best worker out on the street."

The city employs about 23 street workers, down from about 40 in the 1990s. The ranks were once swollen with former gang members who spent late nights persuading their younger peers to drop their guns and pursue a peaceful life.

But in the late 1990s, the street workers became unionized, and the hours were changed so that workers were not out later than 9 p.m. Soon after, the state mandated that anyone working with children have a clean record, which precluded most former gang members from being in the program.

Some community leaders said those changes created a program of street workers out of touch with gang members and offenders.

Lewis, who started the city's street worker program in 1990, said the violence interrupters will work from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. The goal will be to hire men and women who can relate to the city's troubled youth and are not afraid to stay out late and work with difficult, even dangerous people. Because the interrupters will not be city employees, they will not be beholden to state or union rules.

Jorge Martinez, executive director of Project RIGHT in Grove Hall, said he was thrilled CORI would not be a factor.

"It gives an opportunity for folks who have been in the criminal justice system to do some work in the community and reestablish themselves in the community," he said.

It will also help young offenders see they can move past their criminal record, Martinez said.

"Now you can say that it's not a barrier," he said. "If you're in the life, it's a perfect opportunity to look up and see someone in a similar situation actually succeeding."

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.

Posted by lois at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2008

More children going hungry in U.S.

More children going hungry in U.S.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Staff Writer

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

WASHINGTON - Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year's sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.

The department's annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than 50 percent above the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.

Overall, the 36.2 million adults and children who struggled with hunger during the year was up slightly from 35.5 million in 2006. That was 12.2 percent of Americans who didn't have the money or assistance to get enough food to maintain active, healthy lives.

Almost a third of those, 11.9 million adults and children, went hungry at some point. That figure has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000. The government says these people suffered a substantial disruption in their food supply at some point and classifies them as having "very low food security." Until the government rewrote its definitions two years ago, this group was described as having "food insecurity with hunger."

The findings should increase pressure to meet President-elect Barack Obama's campaign pledge to expand food aid and end childhood hunger by 2015, said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group.

He predicted the 2008 numbers will show even more hunger because of the sharp economic downturn this year.

"There's every reason to think the increases in the number of hungry people will be very, very large based on the increased demand we're seeing this year at food stamp agencies, emergency kitchens, Women, Infants and Children clinics, really across the entire social service support structure," said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group.

Weill said the figures show that economic growth during the first seven years of the Bush administration didn't reach the poorest and hungriest people. "The people in the deepest poverty are suffering the most," Weill said.

The number of adults and children with "low food security" - those who avoided substantial food disruptions but still struggled to eat - fell slightly since 2000, from 24.7 million to 24.3 million. The government said these people have several ways of coping - eating less varied diets, obtaining food from emergency kitchens or community food charities, or participating in federal aid programs.

like food stamps, the school lunch program or the Women, Infants and Children program.

Among other findings:

-The families with the highest rates of food insecurity were headed by single mothers (30.2 percent), black households (22.2 percent), Hispanic households (20.1 percent), and households with incomes below the official poverty line (37.7 percent).

-States with families reporting the highest prevalence of food insecurity during 2005-2007 were Mississippi (17.4 percent), New Mexico (15 percent), Texas (14.8 percent) and Arkansas (14.4 percent).

-The highest growth in food insecurity over the last 9 years came in Alaska and Iowa, both of which saw a 3.7 percent increase in families who struggled to eat adequately or had substantial food disruptions.

---

On the Net:

Report: http://ers.usda.gov/Publications/ERR66/ERR66.pdf

Posted by lois at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

MS: Southern Poverty Law Center Calls for Closing Mississippi Youth Prison

11/17/2008
SPLC Calls for Closing of Mississippi Youth Prison

The Southern Poverty Law Center today called for the state of Mississippi to abandon the use of large youth prisons following a report showing that after almost four years, the state's Oakley Training School has made virtually no progress in ensuring that children held at the prison are safe and receiving effective suicide prevention and mental health treatment.

"It is time for Mississippi to face the facts — large training schools that warehouse children do not work," said Bear Atwood, director of the SPLC's Mississippi Youth Justice Project. "They are an expensive and ineffective relic of the past. We must stop wasting the taxpayers' money and actually start helping these youths."

The state spends $300 a day per child at Oakley, where approximately 76 percent of the children are non-violent offenders. A substantial number of these children could safely go home and receive treatment in their community at a cost of about $23 a day — a more efficient use of tax dollars during the current economic downturn. The remaining youths at Oakley could go to smaller, regional facilities, Atwood said.

"Mississippi's youth court judges should be aware that children are not getting the help they desperately need when they are sent to Oakley," Atwood said.

Nearly four years ago, Mississippi agreed to stop the abuse and neglect of children detained at its youth prisons. The latest report by court monitors was filed Nov. 12. They inspected Oakley to determine if the state is meeting the conditions of a consent decree with the Department of Justice.

The report found the state is in "substantial compliance" with only 16 percent of the consent decree's provisions almost four years after the agreement. This is a 1 percent increase since March 2008. It also found the prison has been stagnant on 69 percent of the provisions — showing neither progress nor decline.

The report noted that Oakley still does not have adequate staff to monitor and supervise its residents. The report noted the staff is "creating an unsafe environment, and encourages a culture in which youth become afraid and instinctively resort to violence."

Oakley is in compliance with only 22 percent of the suicide prevention provisions. It found that "youth are not being appropriately identified at risk of suicide" and that treatment plans for suicidal youths are not being developed. The report also noted it is unacceptable that the director of program services described the daily assessments of suicidal youths as a "work in progress."

Oakley is in compliance with only 4 percent of the provisions for mental health care and rehabilitative services. The monitor said that the mental health staff is not aware of what occurs in psychiatric treatment, and individual behavior modification plans are not being written. Also, not all of the youths requiring individual therapy are receiving it.

Only 70 percent of the youths referred to substance abuse groups are receiving treatment, the report found.

Four months after the last inspection of Oakley, it remains in a state of disrepair. The report found that the "cottages are in such disrepair that if they cannot be repaired to proper specifications, they should be demolished."

The monitors toured the facility during the last week of September and into early October. Their previous visit was in early June. This was the first monitors' report since the closing of the Columbia Training School, which came in response to a lawsuit filed by the SPLC.

The consent decree with the Department of Justice lawsuit came after a 2003 department study that found shockingly inhumane conditions at Oakley. In addition to being hog-tied and left for days in pitch-black cells, children ages 10 to 17 were sometimes sprayed with chemicals during mandatory exercises and forced to eat their own vomit. Others were forced to run with automobile tires around their necks or mattresses on their backs.
http://www.splcenter.org/legal/news/article.jsp?site_area=1&aid=347

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

LA: State takes steps to close Jetson prison for youth

State takes steps to close Jetson

* By SANDY DAVIS

* Published: Nov 15, 2008 - Page: 1B

The state is on its way to closing Jetson Center for Youth and making steps toward reforming the state’s juvenile justice system, Mary Livers, head of the state’s Office of Juvenile Justice, told a state commission Friday.

“We are in the process of shrinking Jetson,” Livers said. “We feel good about what’s happening there.”

Livers made the remarks at a hearing of the Juvenile Justice Implementation Commission at the State Capitol. The commission was created in 2003 to help reform the state’s juvenile justice system.

Jetson is one of three juvenile prisons — also known as secure care facilities — operated by the state’s Office of Juvenile Justice.

Jetson came under fire earlier this year after allegations surfaced of brutality and sexual abuse being committed by both staff and inmates at the facility.

The Legislature voted during the last session to close the 800-acre facility by next year and replace it with smaller, regional facilities where young lawbreakers can be closer to their homes while not living in a large, state institution.

Livers said Friday that Jetson’s population has been reduced from a high of about 215 teenage offenders earlier this year to 81 on Thursday.

It is still under discussion how the facility will be used, Livers said.

Also providing testimony to the commission on reform efforts were members of other state offices including the Departments of Social Services, Health and Hospitals and the Louisiana Workforce Commission.

Susan Sonnier, deputy secretary of the Department of Social Services, told the commission one of the more difficult hurdles facing the state is the large number of children living in poverty.

“Louisiana has the second highest rate of child poverty in the nation — 26.8 percent of Louisiana’s children live in poverty,” she said noting that the national average is 18 percent.

Sonnier said the state continues to struggle with the problem.

“I don’t know that we’re moving up,” she added. “People living in poverty is increasing in the state.”

Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, chairman of the commission, said that the number of children living in poverty is “unacceptable.”

“I am expecting at some point in time a detailed approach with specific timetables and outcomes to deal with that issue,” Landrieu said to Sonnier.

Landrieu called the statistic “sobering.”

“Juvenile justice cannot be separated from that,” Landrieu said. “When you have a poverty rate like ours, one of the highest in an industrialized nation, we have a tremendous amount of work to do for all of the children of Louisiana.”
http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/politics/34502744.html

Posted by lois at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

November 10, 2008

California Youth Defeat ‘Lock ‘em Up’ Politics -Prop 6

New America Media, Commentary, Raj Jayadev //
Posted: Nov 08, 2008 Review it on NewsTrust

Eclipsed by the enormity of a nation voting in a black President, and a statewide cultural war over gay marriage, is that fact that California registered one the most dramatic and significant shifts in attitude over incarceration policies in state history this past election.

The quintessential “tough on crime” initiative, Proposition 6, was overwhelmingly rejected by voters across the state, a count of 70 percent to 30 percent, and did not win a majority in a single county. With little news coverage, and no commercials on either side leading up to the election, the trouncing of Prop. 6 was a near unadulterated reflection of California's new mind-set on criminal justice policies. The numbers point to a repudiation of “lock 'em all up” politics that has dominated the state for decades.

Prop. 6 was an ambitious, catch-all initiative that targeted youth, immigrants, and even families of those who had been involved in the criminal justice system. The proposition would have created more than 30 changes in the law. It would have turned some nonviolent misdemeanors into felonies, dramatically increased prison sentences for "gang-related" crimes, put 14-year-olds in the adult system, mandated regular criminal background checks on families in public housing with aims of removal, and denied bail to undocumented immigrants facing certain felony charges. It would have cost an estimated $965 million to fund annually.

But as far-reaching, perhaps even arrogant, of an attempt Prop. 6 was to balloon incarceration rates, proponents knew they were facing good odds given the track record of previous tough on crime proposals. The three strikes law, that doubles sentences for second offenses, and gives life on their third, was passed by voters in 1994 with numbers inversely mirroring the Prop. 6 results (72 percent in favor), and has withstood repeated legal and legislative attempts to be removed. Prop. 21 passed in 2000 despite the birth of a California youth movement that fought tooth and nail to defeat it. That proposition further cemented anti-gang laws and lowered the age for minors to be convicted and sentenced as adults. It won with the approval of more than 60 percent of voters.

Ironically, though, it may have been the consequences of these tough on crime laws that caused voters to depart from their previous voting pattern.

California, upon the governor's orders, is in a Prison Overcrowding State of Emergency. The legislature was forced to authorize $7.7 billion to create more beds at state prisons over the next 10 years. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the state's prison population is more than 170,000 inmates housed in facilities designed for 100,000.

Proponents of tough crime laws typically extol their proposals by arguing that they would "take more criminals off the street," but, more accurately, they just put more people in prison – to a point well beyond the state’s infrastructure capacity and budget.

Any policy that would increase prison rates, given the current crisis, would seem irrational. And with the financial crisis facing California, plus the $8 billion for prisons we still need to come up with, any proposition with a billion dollar price tag was going to be a hard sell -- whether it was beds for prisons, or even books for kids.

But outside of the fiscal argument against Prop. 6, California has been witness to the devastating impact of tough on crime laws on communities of color. Statewide, roughly 75 percent of those serving second and third-strike sentences are minorities. In Santa Clara County, black youths are arrested at a rate of seven times their proportion in the general population. Any new law that would increase incarceration would simultaneously increase the conscience-shocking racial disproportionality as well.

And of course we knew who was at the polls this time around: youth and people of color – those more likely to know firsthand how prison destroys families, those more likely to know personally the man given his third strike for stealing a candy bar, or the juvenile who is deemed a gang member just because he liked a certain sport team or was from a certain neighborhood. Indeed, the contradiction would be too large for an electorate to overwhelmingly vote for a black man to be president, yet at the same time seal the fate of thousands of black men to a life behind bars.

Many families who were victims of three strikes and Prop. 21 – having learned how quickly a public policy can become a personal nightmare – also became the most vocal advocates against Prop. 6.

Without the gloss of a campaign public relations firm, their efforts took on the dynamism and energy of a movement rather than a campaign. Immigrant youth, the same group that in 2006 sparked the largest protest marches in this country's history, already knew what tactics worked. Young people from East Palo Alto sent weekly fact texts like, "Did you know Prop. 6 would lock up youth as adults? Pass it on." In San Jose, they held rallies in front of the jails, calling out their relatives’ names, and getting inmates to flash their lights on and off to signal their support. Across the state, youth posted YouTube videos, made rap songs and MySpace pages.

While Californians battle among themselves over gay marriage, and collectively rejoice and marvel at their new president, the biggest change in history ushered in by voters may be the one that didn't make the news.

The impact may be felt across the country in coming years. We know from three strikes, Prop. 21, and anti-gang laws that originate from California that such proposals become the template laws for other states and even federal legislation if they make the grade in California. Currently, more than half of all the states in the country now have anti-gang laws that are based on the language of California legislation, and there are eight similar proposals pending in Congress.

Stopping Prop. 6 may be have the biggest "change" that never made headlines.
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=f046d9d7c84cbc1724f01206edaf4749

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

October 27, 2008

Girls are the fastest growing segment of national juvenile justice population

Number of girls arrested in Cape Girardeau not matching national trend
Monday, October 27, 2008
By Bridget DiCosmo
Southeast Missourian

Though young women are the fastest growing segment of the national juvenile justice population, according to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, local numbers do not reflect a dramatic increase in the number of girls arrested as juveniles.

Through Tuesday, 34 percent of juveniles arrested in Cape Girardeau ages 18 or younger this year were female, while 27 percent of those arrested under age 15 were girls.

In 2006, girls also made up 34 percent of the number of juveniles 18 or younger arrested in Cape Girardeau, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

Last year, 87 girls younger than 15 were arrested in Cape Girardeau, of a total 243 arrests of juveniles in that age group.

The number of girls cited in Cape Girardeau County Court has crept up, but not spiked as figures have in some areas, said Randy Rhodes, Cape Girardeau chief juvenile officer.

"It's more than it used to be, but it's not the national average," Rhodes said.

Nationally, the rate of juvenile delinquency for girls is decreasing much slower than for boys, meaning girls are making up more of the incarcerated juvenile population, and a handful of states reported incarceration rates for girls rising by more than 30 percent per year, said Vanessa Patino, senior research adviser at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

On Oct. 20, two girls were cited in Cape Girardeau for assault after getting into a fight at a local school, but not nearly as many girls were cited for assault so far this year as in 2007, Rhodes said.

Last year, there were more female assault offenders than male, he said.

Cape Girardeau's juvenile statistics have stayed within the range of the typical numbers for rural demographics, whereas in areas like St. Louis, female offenders make up a bigger portion of the juvenile population, Rhodes said.

Truancy and curfew violations still make up a significant portion of the female juvenile population. Boys tend to account for more of the stealing and property damage delinquency offenses, Rhodes said.

Less than 20 percent of the children younger than 15 arrested in 2008 in Cape Girardeau for stealing were girls. Between ages 15 and 18, however, 28 percent of the juveniles arrested for stealing were female.

Of all youth incarcerations, 42 percent of girls are 15 and younger, compared to 31 percent of boys 15 and younger, according to Patino.

Rhodes said typically, female offenders tend to commit offenses related to family problems, such as being reported as a runaway when they are simply living with an estranged parent who does not have custody.

So far in 2008, 48 percent of runaways younger than 18 in Cape Girardeau were girls, and in 2007, there were more runaways who were girls than boys.

It's not uncommon for a situation to arise with a girl refusing to go to school, and juvenile officers find it's part of a larger family-related argument, Rhodes said. In many of those situations, the court will order counseling.

"Give me a simple boy stealing a car any day," Rhodes said.

More girls attribute their juvenile delinquency record to assaults or problems arising from family-related conflict than boys do, Patino said.

"There are few programs addressing those issues," Patino said.

Because of the size of the holding cells at the Cape Girardeau Juvenile Detention Center, girls are usually transported to a separate facility in Charleston, Mo., if they need to be held for longer than 24 hours.

Rhodes described the facility in Cape Girardeau as a long cell block with 10 rooms, five on each side of the hall.

The Cape Girardeau facility is not designed for treatment, merely a temporary holding place for children pending their court date.

"We're bare bones. We provide classrooms for education and a bed to sleep in and as much food as they can eat, but we don't treat them," he said.

After their court appearances, they would be sentenced to a specific treatment facility of the Division of Youth Services.

One pattern that has emerged with boys and girls involves substance abuse, Rhodes said.

Every child is tested for the presence of drugs and alcohol in their system before being admitted to the Cape Girardeau County Juvenile Detention Center for the purpose of maintaining a safe environment, though they aren't cited if they test positive.

Girls tend to test positive for drug and alcohol usage more frequently than boys, and when they do, it's usually a cocktail of drugs, whereas boys are more likely to have just marijuana or alcohol in their system, Rhodes said.

By the numbers: Statistics for Missouri assault arrests

20
Simple assault arrests involving males 18 or younger in Cape Girardeau in 2008

12
Simple assault arrests involving females 18 or younger in Cape Girardeau in 2008

50 percent
The percentage of males arrested for aggravated assault in Cape Girardeau in 2008 (one male,
one female)

257
The number of Missouri females ages 15 to 18 arrested for aggravated assault statewide in 2007

78 percent
The percentage of offenders ages 15 to 18 arrested for aggravated assault in Missouri in 2007 who were male

http://www.semissourian.com/article/20081027/NEWS01/710279989/-1/news01

Posted by lois at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2008

NY youth center staffed at $1.7M cost, but no kids

NY youth center staffed at $1.7M cost, but no kids
Associated Press - October 24, 2008 1:05 PM ET

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) - New York, buffeted by the economic meltdown and facing billions in deficits, is spending $1.7 million in taxpayer money to keep open and staff a western New York juvenile detention facility that has no residents.

The Great Valley Residential Center in Cattaraugus County was chosen for closure by the Office of Children and Family Services in January of this year, but was saved by state lawmakers during budget negotiations in April.

OCFS officials say there are fewer youth now in the state system - nearly 500 empty beds - as the agency moves from a residential model toward a more community-based approach. An OCFS official described the situation at Great Valley as "absurd," blaming lawmakers and union leaders for the incredulous circumstances.

"In these trying times, with the state faced with its budget issues, it's absolutely crazy to have to keep open a facility that is empty," said Edward Borges, an OCFS spokesman.

Meanwhile, lawmakers and union leaders pin the fault on OCFS, accusing Commissioner Gladys Carrion of charging ahead with her conversion plans even as a Gov. David Paterson's Task Force on Transforming New York's Juvenile Justice System plots how to develop an overall plan to change the system.

"We agree there are some youths who can succeed in community programs but you don't do a blanket emptying of these facilities so you can shut them down as a cost savings," said Darcy Wells, director of public affairs for the Public Employees Federation, a union that represents 58,000 state workers, including OCFS teachers, instructors and counselors. "We think she is doing a disservice to the youth and she's not allowing our members to do their jobs."

"It is a case of blatant mismanagement on the part of the agency," said state Sen. Catharine Young, a Republican who led the effort to protect Great Valley, which is in her district.

"OCFS has deliberately and systematically stripped these kids from the Great Valley facility to fulfill its anti-upstate New York agenda," Young said. "Right now, there are at least 17 youth from the Western New York region who are being shipped around the state. They could be receiving services near their homes in Cattaraugus County."

A report in 2007 showed that under the present residential system, 80% of the children entering the state's juvenile justice system return or go to prison within three years of their release. As a result, OCFS has been moving aggressively toward more community-based alternatives and keeping youth closer to their homes and families, more than 70% of which it says are from the New York City area.

Missouri, which has become a national model for the community-based approach, has cut its recidivism rate to 30%. But that doesn't mean the same strategy will work in New York, Young said.

"Evidence is needed in order to determine the best programs. These kids deserve to receive treatment based on fact, not fiction," Young said.

In January, OCFS announced it would close six underused residential youth facilities across the state by January 2009 as part of its restructuring, a move that also would save the state $16 million a year.

Besides Great Valley, targeted for closing were the Adirondack Wilderness Challenge in Clinton County; Auburn Residential Center in Cayuga County; Brace Residential Center in Delaware County; Gloversville Group Home in Fulton County; and the Pyramid Reception Center in The Bronx.

Backed by PEF, legislators kept open the Bronx reception center, the state's primary processing point for male residents. Auburn and Gloversville have closed and their staff was transferred to other OCFS facilities or state agencies, Borges said.

The Adirondack Challenge program - a four-month residential and outdoor experiential education program - was taken over by the Adirondack Residential Center. However, the 11 staffers assigned to the program are now working at the Adirondack center and have thus far declined voluntary reassignment, Borges said.

The situation is the same at Brace, empty but with 15 staffers still holding out and filling their time doing inventory, cleaning and winter preparations, Borges said.

Borges said state law required OCFS to give workers 12 months notice before shuttering a facility. That deadline is up Jan. 11, 2009. Borges said the agency will soon be sending out letters to workers reminding them that after that date OCFS will reassign them.

Borges said Great Valley, which has 25 beds, is empty because of the success of the community-based approach. The facility has a staff of 31.

"Everyone keeps saying we are hiding the kids," he said. "We don't have the kids to hide. We aren't getting them."

As of Oct. 20, there were 1,003 youth in the state system, leaving 493 empty beds, Borges said. OCFS has reduced its size by nearly 600 beds since 2002. OCFS estimates that each empty bed costs taxpayers around $200,000 per year. Young, however, said the actual cost is about one-fifth of that figure.

"If the state truly is looking to save money, they would keep Great Valley open. Because it is a 25-bed or less facility, it qualifies for federal funding, which pays half the cost of treatment. It would cut our expenses dramatically," Young said.

Assemblyman Joe Giglio, R-Gowanda, also has defended the decision to keep Great Valley open. The state has invested heavily in recent years in sewer and water projects and other upgrades at the facility. Additionally, it is 1 of only two facilities serving the eight-country Region 1 area, he said.
http://www.wcax.com/global/story.asp?s=9234140&ClientType=Printable

Posted by lois at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)

October 10, 2008

FL: Juvenile justice: Don't ignore girls

The Florida Times-Union
October 4, 2008
Juvenile justice: Don't ignore girls

Lock 'em up.
That's the approach Florida has been taking to an extreme in recent years.

This expensive approach to justice has been so overused that prisons now are providing much of the mental health treatment in the state.

Juvenile justice is overlooking smart treatment that is less expensive and more effective than prison-style treatment facilities, the Blueprint Commission on Juvenile Justice reported several months ago.

So it's no surprise that girls are caught in the same backward dynamic.

Overly harsh

Too many girls with minor infractions are being referred to programs for serious offenders, reports the Children's Campaign, an impressive collaboration of the Women's Giving Alliance, the Jacksonville Community Foundation and the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, among others.

This hard approach away from rehabilitation to a more punitive approach began in 1999, reported the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in a report titled "Educate or Incarcerate," which focused on girls in Duval County. It was funded by the Jessie Ball duPont Fund.

This approach resulted in the tragic case of the Florida Institute for Girls, a maximum security prison, which was closed in 2005 after a grand jury found evidence of abuse and victimization of the girls.

The result of the hard-edged approach is twofold:

1. Too many girls are not receiving the help they need.

2. When they do get help, it is much more expensive than necessary.

The Children's Campaign is trying to target more effective treatment.

"The philosophy of the Children's Campaign is that local communities are best suited to develop and implement local solutions based on their unique and personal perspectives," the campaign reported in a press release.

Duval County needs to be the center of such studies for good reasons. This county leads the state in the number of girls admitted for misdemeanors and non-law violations, though Duval is far from the most populous county in the state.

Statewide, over half of the girls admitted to residential programs had committed minor offenses such as disobeying a court order, reported the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability in 2006.

And girls are more likely to be admitted for less serious offenses than boys.

Too little treatment

The admissions often are made because the facilities have the only treatment programs.

"The Legislature could achieve savings by reducing beds in residential delinquency programs and creating community treatment programs for at-risk girls," the accountability office reported.

The state office proposed that community-based programs with records of success would cost less than placing girls in facilities.

Lawanda Ravoira, former president of the PACE Center for Girls, is director of the Children's Campaign's Justice for Girls: Duval County Initiative. This project is designed to promote more effective treatment of girls in the juvenile justice system.

Better models

One role model comes from PACE, with its amazing record of success; about 90 percent of its graduates stay free of the justice system.

The Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability proposed eliminating 50 beds in girls' facilities and replacing them with community programs that have shown success.

That makes sense. The wonder is that this more cost-effective approach takes so long to implement throughout the juvenile justice system.

Girls have special treatment needs. Roughly two-thirds of girls in commitment programs have experienced abuse or neglect, the state reported. Over 90 percent have mental health problems.

There is hope, however. A group of 319 girls who participated in the 2006 National Council on Crime and Delinquency study showed resiliency. Many did well in school, staying drug-free and having a positive self-image.

These girls often need mental health and substance abuse treatment, family-focused services, specialized medical care, educational and job placement help, and transitional placement.

As a society, we have taken imprisonment to the extreme, resulting in too much cost and too little effectiveness.

"A major issue is the fact that every year the Legislature increases the budget for adult corrections and the budget for juvenile justice from the inception has been woefully inadequate," Ravoira said in an e-mail.

"Public safety should start with kids, and we need a Legislature that will invest in juvenile justice at the same parity/level that we invest in adult prisons."

The Children's Campaign is on the right track and deserves wide support. preventive spending Floridians are willing to spend money on crime prevention programs.
A scientific poll conducted in 2005 for the Children's Campaign and the Eckerd Family Foundation produced these key results: - 60 percent of Floridians believe first in prevention and rehabilitation to fight juvenile crime.
- 81 percent believe in early intervention with juveniles with behavioral or mental problems.
- 91 percent believe we would have fewer adult criminals if we did a better job helping juveniles in trouble.
- 76 percent believe in specially targeted programs for young women in trouble.
Source: Barcelo & Co. Telephone survey in 2005 of registered active voters. Margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percent. Lockups Girls' admissions to juvenile facilities for minor infractions: Duval: 61 Hillsborough: 48 Pinellas: 47 Palm Beach: 40 Miami-Dade: 48 Source: 2006 report from the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability

This story can be found on Jacksonville.com at http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/100408/opi_339977858.shtml.

Posted by lois at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2008

Justice Policy Institute Report: Moving Target: A Decade of Resistance to the Prison Industrial Complex

The Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a new report this week examining the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)--the relationship between government and private interests that use imprisonment, policing, and surveillance as a solution to social, political, and economic problems. Moving Target: A Decade of Resistance to the Prison Industrial Complex, examines the progress of reform 10 years after Critical Resistance first launched its efforts to dismantle the PIC. The report underscores:

Despite crime rates at 30-year lows, the criminal justice system has under its control more people than ever.

* More than seven million people live their lives under the control of the criminal justice system in the United States.
* More than seven million people live their lives under the control of the criminal justice system in the United States.
* Spending on the criminal justice system, including police, corrections, the judiciary, has increased 64 percent between 1996 and 2005 to a total of $213 billion.
* The prison system disproportionately impacts communities of color. African Americans and Hispanics make up one third of the U.S. population but makeup 61 percent of the imprisoned population.
* Incarceration rates continue to increase whether crime rates are up or down.

Economic incentives encourage the growth of prisons and support increased surveillance, arrests, and imprisonment.

* Private Prisons: Corrections Corporation of America's stock price has been steadily rising. CCA recently posted a $35 million profit in the last quarter of 2007, up from $32 million in the same period in 2006.
* Prison Industries: Federal Prison Industries, a corporation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, has an online catalogue of merchandise for purchase by other federal agencies, including office furniture and clothing. State prison industries employed 56,000 people in prison in 1999 and, according to research published in Labor Studies Journal in 2002, generated $3 billion in sales and $67 million in profits for the states.
* Private Industry in Prison: In 1979, Congress established the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program to authorize private companies to employ people who are held behind bars and to execute contracts. Companies frequently pay people in prison below minimum wage for these "low-skilled" jobs and prisons garnish their wages further by charging for room and board. This process ensures that resources are pumped back into prisons and that individuals see little of their earnings.
* Industry for Surrounding Communities: Although public officials will often claim that prisons will bring jobs to rural or economically depressed areas, actually there is often little or no economic improvement or revitalization of the community.

Investments in policing and surveillance have increased, thereby widening the gateway to the criminal justice system.

* Although local police still receive the majority of funding, increases at the federal level are the most dramatic. Between 1982 and 2005, federal expenditures on police protection have increased 945.1 percent, from $2.15 billion in 1982 to $22.5 billion in 2005.
* Law enforcement agencies have significantly increased their surveillance capacity and presence in certain areas: in just three years the number of police departments using video cameras increased 15 percentage points. In 2000, 45 percent of local police departments regularly used video cameras. By 2003, 60 percent regularly operated video cameras, and an estimated 48,800 in-car cameras were in use.
* Cop-watching groups are increasing and becoming more organized in cities across the counties as a way to monitor police behaviors.
* Specialized police, particularly in schools, has also increased dramatically. In 1999, 54.1 percent of students ages 12 to18 reported the use of security guards and/ or assigned police officers at school, compared to 67.9 percent in 2005.

The prison industrial complex relies on the criminalization of certain actions to thrive.

* Federalization of certain offenses: The U.S. has added one new federal crime to the books every week for the past 7 years. This increase in crimes has directly added to the federal prison system, which has grown at triple the rate of state prison populations.

* War on Drugs: The war on drugs is increasingly waged with paramilitary-style tactics. In the past 20 years, there has been a 1,400 percent increase in the total number of SWAT team deployments.

* Criminalizing Poverty: More cities are relying on policies that are meant to address "quality of life crimes" by having a zero tolerance approach to behaviors such as panhandling, loitering, and "camping." A report in 2006 that surveyed 224 cities around the country on their laws involving the criminalization of homelessness and found that 27 percent of cities prohibited sitting or lying in certain public places and 43 percent prohibited begging in certain places.

* Criminalization of Immigration: The number of USBP agents nearly tripled between 1990 and 2005. In FY 2006 alone, 1,500 more agents were added. Since 1995, the number of people held by ICE in prisons and jails has increased more than 200 percent.

Media messages, public opinion, social policy, and government agencies legitimize the criminalization of certain behaviors to the benefit of the prison industrial complex.

* Crime and Public Safety: The frequency with which media reports crime does not fluctuate with actual crime rates. In 1994 when the violent crime rate was at its peak, there were more than 2,500 media crime stories. But as the violent crime rate continued to fall, the number of crime stories continued to fluctuate for the next 10 years, regardless of trends in violent or property offenses.

* Criminalization of Poverty: Researchers have found that television media relies on stereotypical assumptions about poverty and the symptoms of poverty (crime, drug use, mental illness) by linking those symptoms to visual cues and language ("abandoned house" or "drug-infested"). In one study, of the 239 news stories that mentioned symptoms of poverty, approximately 147 stories showed crime, drugs, and gangs as a manifestation of poverty.

* Criminalization of Immigration: Public opinion polls document public fear about Latino immigrants coming to the United States not to commit a terrorist act but to take jobs and use services typically guaranteed to U.S. residents, and to commit crimes. This is despite research which shows that while the number of undocumented immigrants increased 57 percent from 1990 to 2000, crime rates plummeted to some of the lowest in U.S. history.

Communities of color and people living in poverty are overwhelmingly disproportionately affected by the prison industrial complex.

* Data shows that in 2002, 8.5 percent of whites used illicit drugs, compared to 9.7 percent of African Americans. However, African Americans are admitted to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites.

* Bureau of Justice Statistics revealed that 83.5 percent of people in jail in 2002 earned less than $2,000 per month prior to arrest.

* People of color are disproportionately affected by poverty and, thus are also more likely to be imprisoned. African Americans made up about 13 percent of the general population but approximately 22 percent of the people living in poverty and 40 percent of people in prisons and jails in 2006.

The report concludes that advocates must be just as innovative and flexible as the prison industrial complex in order to dismantle the system, while resisting so-called reforms that inadvertently expand the reach of the criminal justice system. Positive social investments in education, employment, mental health services, and substance abuse treatment are cost effective means of creating strong communities
Find the report here:
http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/08-09_REP_MovingTargetCR10_AC-PS.pdf

Posted by lois at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2008

CA: Invest in Children Not Prisons. Stop Prop. 6

Invest in Children Not Prisons. Stop Prop. 6
Marian Wright Edelman
Posted September 22, 2008
Children's Defense Fund
Huffington Post

Every election year, politicians talk about getting tough on crime. One easy and politically popular strategy is to show voters you are tough on crime by spending billions of dollars sending people to prison. This requires more prisons to be built to keep the ever expanding incarcerated population behind bars and reduces the money available for investment in health care, education, work force development, and early childhood development to prevent children from going into the Pipeline to Prison.

The Children's Defense Fund works nationally to stop "lock 'em up" legislation that favors punitive measures for children and youths over preventive investments. This year our fight is not limited to federal legislation. In the coming weeks we also will focus on defeating Proposition 6--a horrendous California ballot initiative that would criminalize youths through massive revisions to the state's juvenile justice codes.

Under the pretense of creating "safer neighborhoods," Proposition 6 changes current law to require that more children, as young as 14 years old, are tried and sentenced as adults. This despite the fact that a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that youths sentenced to adult prison commit more crimes and more serious crimes after release compared to their counterparts in the juvenile justice systems. Trying children as adults is inappropriate for developmental reasons (a 14-year-old's brain is not the same as an adult's brain) and is also an ineffective crime prevention strategy. We should not abandon thousands of youths to lives spent going in and out of a revolving door to prison.

Proposition 6's sweeping revisions target at-risk Black and Latino youths in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, making it especially dangerous for young people who are already struggling to stay on the right track. For example, Proposition 6 puts youths at risk of a new jail sentence for infractions as minor as failing to provide local officials with their current address. Another provision subjects families receiving federal housing assistance to yearly criminal record checks for all residents, including children. If a youth has been arrested for certain crimes, the family would lose housing assistance; this places entire families at imminent risk of homelessness. It would also make it impossible for many youths who have served their time to move back home with families who receive federal housing assistance.

In a state like California, where elected officials have not been able to raise new taxes because of a "supermajority" requirement for passing tax measures in the state legislature, any initiative that creates new program obligations without direct funding leads to less money for education, health and other programs. Proposition 6 includes no provision for new revenue yet requires new spending of more than $500 million each year for law enforcement personnel and prisons. It also mandates $500 million for new prison construction. There is no requirement to measure the effectiveness of these provisions and no plan to re-evaluate or re-focus state efforts at some later date.

Proposition 6 specifically weakens community efforts to help at-risk youths. Despite research that shows how community workers and organizations are a key component of crime reduction strategies, Proposition 6 explicitly removes community members from county Juvenile Justice Coordinating Councils. Community leaders currently provide crucial oversight over how laws are enforced and how limited resources are distributed. Their representation on these Coordinating Councils promotes community involvement that is necessary to assist youths who are discharged from juvenile facilities without the tools they need to re-enter their community and succeed.

Nearly one in five children in California is poor. More than 80,000 California children are in foster care, many of them facing tragically negative educational and economic prospects, and more than 750,000 California children lack health coverage. Even before the billions of dollars in new spending that Proposition 6 would make necessary, California already spends more than 20 times as much on each youth in a state juvenile facility as it spends on each student in public school. This is a completely backwards human and economic investment policy.

It's time for a new strategy and vision that makes prevention and early intervention, rather than punishment, the policy--in California and across America. The Children's Defense Fund supports a federal gang, delinquency, and crime prevention and intervention bill called the Youth PROMISE Act, which addresses the root causes of youth and gang violence before crime occurs. Rather than creating additional and duplicative punitive approaches that do little to prevent youths from engaging in delinquent conduct, the Youth PROMISE Act builds upon evidence-based and promising practices to reduce youth violence and delinquency.

All communities should be free of gangs and gun violence. All children should be safe. Proposition 6 is not the way to make that happen. You and I must demand that our nation stop criminalizing children at younger and younger ages and instead institute policies that place all children on a path to productive adulthood. We cannot allow Proposition 6 to become law. Do everything you can to make sure that Californians vote to reject it.

To learn more about CDF California's work to defeat Prop. 6, visit http://www.cdfca.org/.
For more information about the Children's Defense Fund's America's Cradle to Prison PipelineSM report, go to www.childrensdefense.org/CPPreport.

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund and its Action Council whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marian-wright-edelman/invest-in-children-not-pr_b_128238.html?view=print

Posted by lois at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2008

Juvenile Junction

Juvenile Junction
By Will Di Novi
The Nation
September 15, 2008

The girls at the Mississippi detention center were tied up for weeks at a time. Minor offenders, some as young as 13, were cuffed and chained when they ate or used the bathroom. In the words of Erica, a 16-year-old detainee, it was a place that "made you feel like you were nothing."

The boy was beaten and restrained by guards on his first day at a juvenile boot camp in Northwest Florida, suspected of faking an illness to avoid exercise. Martin Lee Anderson died from his injuries early the next day. He was 14.

David Burgos spent much of his young life running away from abusive group homes. One of the estimated 80 percent of juvenile offenders who suffer from a recognizable mental health disorder, the bipolar 17-year-old was arrested in 2006 for a probation violation related to a minor theft charge. After four months at Connecticut's Manson Youth Institution without mental health care, David hung himself with a bed sheet.

According to the most recent data from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, nearly 80,000 people under the age of 18 are held in juvenile detention and residential facilities around the United States each day. To juvenile justice advocates across the nation, the stories above are all too common in a system where punitive policies increase recidivism and exacerbate juvenile crime.

"We have a huge blind spot as a nation, an inability to see the human rights violations that are occurring here on our soil in our juvenile justice system," says Zachary Norris, Director of the Books Not Bars campaign at Oakland's Ella Baker Center, an initiative to reform California's youth prison system. "We often talk about how the [Iraq] war is expensive, but there's also our war on young people here in the United States that's incredibly wasteful."

Norris and other juvenile justice advocates now have their eyes turned to Congress, where ongoing legislative developments could produce the first meaningful response to this crisis in years. The Senate is currently in the process of reauthorizing the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, the federal legislation that sets standards for juvenile corrections systems in the states.

In addition to increasing federal funding for drug treatment, mental health care, and mentoring programs designed to keep children out of the juvenile system, the new iteration of the Act, Senate Bill 3155, includes an amendment to eliminate the incarceration of status offenders within three years of the bill's enactment. Status offenses are charges like truancy, running away or other offenses that would not be criminal if committed by an adult, and result in the incarceration of thousands of young people in some states, says the Washington, DC-based Coalition for Juvenile Justice.

The Senate bill would also require the states to work towards reducing racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. Youth of color make up 34 percent of the American population below the age of eighteen but 62 percent of youth in juvenile detention, according to a report released last year by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

While it's important to keep in mind the many abuses that the bill will not address--laws in more than forty states permitting adult courts to try children as young as 14, the sentencing of young offenders to terms of life without parole, the increasing criminalization of trivial misbehavior in schools--passage of the new iteration of the act would nonetheless represent a major step forward.

It would also recapture the spirit of progressive reform that propelled the JJDPA's initial passage over thirty years ago. Under the original JJDPA of 1974, the states agreed to humanize their often Dickensian juvenile corrections systems in return for increased federal aid. This promising arrangement collapsed in the 1990s during what The New York Times has described as "hysteria about an adolescent crime wave that never materialized." Even as youth crime figures plummeted across the nation, stories of juvenile delinquency increased in the media and states intensified all kinds of punishments for children. Large numbers of juvenile offenders were sent to adult jails where, research has shown, they are more likely to be abused and transformed into repeat offenders. In Norris's estimation, "we are still seeing the repercussions of that movement" in the treatment of juvenile offenders today.

The new version of the JJDPA passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 31 with its major amendments intact and should soon advance to a full Senate vote. "Hundreds of organizations throughout the country, including some unlikely allies, have voiced strong support for the juvenile justice reforms in the Act," says Carol Chodroff, US Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch. "There is significant recognition from a vast array of stakeholders in the juvenile justice system--including many law enforcement organizations--that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem of juvenile crime and delinquency."

A far more promising approach has been playing out on the local level. Over the past decade, Missouri's juvenile corrections system has been celebrated for a rehabilitation-oriented model that invests in small community-based centers, keeps young offenders near their homes to participate in family therapy, and helps young people with job placement and therapy referrals upon their release. Missouri has achieved the lowest recidivism rate in the nation.

In Pima County, Arizona, where "scared straight" policies once produced such rampant incarceration that the local juvenile detention facility had young people sleeping in a cafeteria, a local partnership with the Anne E. Casey foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative has drastically reduced the juvenile prison population. The number of children arrested for violent or property crimes dropped 43 percent between 1997 and 2006 and the county's presiding Juvenile Court Judge says there has been no increase in juvenile crime despite the lower incarceration rate.

"If you have youths wondering, 'Am I a good person or a bad person?' and you put those young people in detention, you're confirming this is who they are and this is who we expect them to be," Judge Patricia Escher told the Arizona Daily Star in June. "When you detain young people inappropriately, what you do is send them on a path of criminality."

In Zachary Norris's estimation, Congress must keep the success of these programs in mind as it assesses the new JJDPA. It is time, he says, to ask "What programs actually build on the strength of young people? Help them get job skills? There's a recognition that tough-on-crime policies hurt us. If kids are worse off when they return [from detention], then we're worse off as a whole."

"We've still got a row to hoe," says Tara Andrews, deputy executive director of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, looking ahead with cautious optimism to the JJDPA's progress before Congress. "But when you start seeing all the work that's being done, you realize there's not isolated pockets of reform. You realize a platform for change is being built."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080929/dinovi/print

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

September 16, 2008

TX: Gritis for Breakfast Blog: TYC commitments to grow dramatically despite declining juvie crime

TYC commitments to grow dramatically despite declining juvie crime

September 15, 2008 Grits for Breakfast Blog

Having analyzed on Saturday the Legislative Budget Board's incarceration projections for the adult prison system, let's take a look at LBB's projections regarding youth crime and incarceration in their five year population estimate (pdf) which is used to set agency budgets.

Regular readers know that in 2007 the Legislature took steps aimed at reducing inmate populations at the Texas Youth Commission, including shifting 19-20 year olds to TDCJ and refusing to take misdemeanants at state youth prisons. The population drop can be seen most dramatically in the number of releases. TYC released 4,375 inmates during fiscal year 2007, up from 3,554 in fy 2006. By comparison, the number of new inmates entering TYC decreased from 3,462 in fy 2006 to 2,994 in fy 2007 and an estimated 2,090 in 2008 (based on the monthly rate for the first seven months). LBB predicts the new level of intakes will hold steady at 2,090 over the next five years.

Those declines mainly represent implementation of a new law disallowing judges from sending misdemeanants to TYC, reduced lengths of stay, and reduced numbers from a handful of counties that essentially quit sending kids to the agency. Indeed, the reduced numbers allowed TYC to meet minimum staffing requirements for the first time in years.

On its face, TYC's reduced inmate population seems like it might be sustainable, particularly given that juvie crime is declining: "Texas juvenile arrest rate decreased between calendar years 2005 and 2006 (1.3 percent) following a decrease between calendar years 2004 and 2005 (8.3 percent)." Not only are arrests down, says LBB, Texas' overall juvie population is growing at a slower rate than in the past.

Even so, TYC's reduced inmate population will be shortlived unless more is done to reform the system. Today TYC operates at 6.5% below maximum capacity, and will slightly exceed max capacity in fy 2009, says LBB. But it's what happens after that which made me sit up and take notice. LBB predicts TYC's inmate population will resume fairly rapid growth in the near term, rising to 13.5% above apacity by 2010 and shooting up to 23.3% above capacity in 2012.

So the situation is this: Juvie crime is declining but total commitments to TYC will increase by about a quarter over the next four years as the agency's inmate population creeps back up toward their previous, higher levels. By contrast, LBB projects the increase in Texas' juvie probation population will be de minimus over the same period, with the number of juvie probationers overall expanding just .03% annually.

These data have significant implications for proposed TYC reforms. For starters, those like Sen. John Whitmire proposing the agency's abolition will be chagrined to see projections indicating a greater dependence on youth prisons going forward, not less of one.

That said, the adult system predicted massive overcrowding just a couple of years ago, and as discussed Saturday. reforms implemented by Sen. Whitmire and his colleagues staved off that increase for the foreseeable future by expanding treatment and diversion programs. They could do the same for TYC, but according to these data, changes implemented in 2007 failed to resolve the agency's crowding problems long term.
http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2008/09/tyc-commitments-predicted-to-grow.html

Posted by lois at 08:06 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2008

Bay Area: September 24 to 29th: Book events for the Real Cost of Prisons Comix

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
7 PM. Book Launch
Green Arcade Bookstore
1680 Market Street, San Francisco

Speakers:

Lois Ahrens, editor, Real Cost of Prisons Comix and director/founder, The Real Cost of Prisons Project.

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.

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.

Thursday, September 25th, 7 PM
“Political Prisoner/Incarcerated/Prison Industrial Complex”
Discussion and book launch
First Congregational Church, Oakland
Co-sponsored with KPFA. C.S. Soong, host of “Against the Grain”, Moderator.

Panelists will be PM authors: Robert King (Angola 3), Lois Ahrens, Vikki Law (author of the forthcoming The Invisibility of Women’s Resistance), Matt Meyer (editor of the documentary anthology Let Freedom Ring), Bo Brown, former political prisoner (George Jackson Brigade) and one of the founders of Out of Control, a lesbian prisoners group. Ashanti Alston, former Black Panther and Black Liberation political prisoner. Bo Brown and Ashanti Alston are contributors to Let Freedom Ring. $10—no one turned away.

Monday, September 29th
7 PM. Book launch
Modern Times Bookstore
888 Valencia, San Francisco

Speakers:

Lois Ahrens, Ashanti Alston, Bo Brown and Matt Meyer and others.

****************************
"I cannot think of a better way to arouse the public to the cruelties of the prison system than to make this book widely available."
--Howard Zinn

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher. This volume collects the three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prisons Project.

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. Founder and Director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project and the book’s editor, Lois Ahrens discusses the Project and an introductory essay by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore places the comix within a political context.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix includes:

Prison Town: Paying the Price by Kevin Pyle and Craig Gilmore
Prisoners of the War on Drugs by Sabrina Jones, Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens
Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children by Susan Willmarth, Ellen Miller-Mack and Lois Ahrens.

For more information:Ramsey Kanaan: Publisher: PM Press: ramsey@pmpress.org

Book orders can be placed after September 24th at :https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=48
Books will be available at all events and at Critical Resistance 10.

Posted by lois at 06:25 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 28, 2008

Why Did Darryl Die?

August 28, 2008
New York Times Editorial
Why Did Darryl Die?

Two years after a child died there, the Justice Department is conducting a much-needed investigation of New York’s Tryon Boys Residential Center, a juvenile facility in upstate Fulton County. The investigation could take a year or more to complete. But it has already shined a klieg light on disastrous juvenile justice policies, not just in New York, but all across the country.

All too often, juvenile justice facilities are operated by workers who have not been trained to handle the mentally ill children who make up much of the caseload. Facilities also overuse dangerous restraint and disciplinary practices in which children are handcuffed, hog tied, bound to chairs or wrestled to the floor and held down.

According to grand jury testimony, staff members at the Tryon Boys facility used the so-called prone restraint strategy against Darryl Thompson, an emotionally disturbed 15-year-old. He is said by the medical examiner to have died of arrhythmia.

The two large-framed men who forced Darryl onto the floor and held him there with their bodies say that they had no choice because the child was agitated and flailing about. There is no excuse for their failure to begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation immediately after Darryl’s heart stopped. According to state officials, all three staff members who were present had been trained in C.P.R. and were required to administer it. None did.

The medical examiner labeled the death a homicide, but the grand jury declined to indict the two workers.

The Justice Department will not say why it is now investigating Tryon, but the problems there clearly have not ended. This summer, according to state officials, a staff member was caught on videotape punching a handcuffed child in the face.

Gladys Carrión, the reform-minded commissioner of New York’s Office of Children and Family Services, took office soon after Darryl’s death. She has been struggling ever since to move New York away from a prison-style juvenile justice system that relies mainly on force toward one that focuses on rehabilitation. Like reformers elsewhere, she is encountering stiff resistance from the unions that represent the facilities’ staff.

To remake the system, New York State will need to downsize some facilities. It will need to hire more mental health professionals and retrain current staff members, some of whom have been doing business the bad-old way for 25 years or more. The state needs to help cities and towns develop community-based treatment programs. New York City is sensibly moving in that direction. New York and all states have a responsibility to protect children, including those who have committed crimes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/opinion/28thu2.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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

August 18, 2008

Cutting dropout rates for the poor

Cutting dropout rates for the poor
by Hans G. Despain
By Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, MA
8-18-08

Our children will be returning to school at the end of the month. In nine high schools in the Pioneer Valley, students are returning to "dropout factories." Across the nation one in 10 high schools are dubbed "dropout factories." In Springfield and Holyoke it is 100 percent of public/charter high schools.

High school dropouts, much like teen pregnancy, are a serious social problem. Dropouts increase our unemployment numbers and poverty rates, especially in urban areas such as Holyoke and Springfield. Dropouts lower human capital skills, and hence diminish our economic competitiveness.

Dropouts are more likely to participate in drug distribution, crime, and violence. If principals and teachers, superintendents and schools boards would solve the Pioneer Valley dropout problem, this would go a long way toward solving the economic and social problems of our local communities.

Of course we all know this. The problem is that the logic is backwards - cause and effect have been inverted. Dropouts don't cause poverty, unemployment and crime. To believe otherwise is a failure to understand the depth of the dropout problem, and its place in a larger political and economic context. Dropouts are not merely an educational problem. Principals, teachers, superintendents and school boards can contribute very little toward a solution. This is not to suggest good teachers and administrators are incidental. Indeed, they matter greatly.

However, Holyoke and Springfield already have good teachers and administrators. If we already have good teachers and administrators in our "dropout factories," then viewing the solution of dropouts as merely an educational phenomenon is not only mistaken, but in fact contributing to the problem.

The greatest contribution to the problem has been the narrowing of curriculum in an attempt to increase test scores in math and reading. Less time and effort are geared to history, social studies, art, music, physical education, social interaction, character development, and selfhood awareness. These neglects have been most pronounced in low-income areas such as Holyoke and Springfield where a broader curriculum is most needed.

The response to low-test scores has been a narrowing of curriculum, while the real problem is the socio-economics of poverty. Children from low-income families receive worse medical and dental care, increasing the likelihood of school absences. Low-income children are more prone to asthma and have lower birth weights. They are more likely to suffer lead poisoning and poor nutrition, lowering their cognitive development and ability.

Low-income families move more often, leading to incongruity of instruction. Jobs of low-income parents are less stable, increasing family stress. Low-income parents also have less benefits and typically lack caregiving leave, decreasing involvement with their children's education.

Low-income children often have single-parent households, decreasing their interaction with adults. They are read to less often, travel to fewer places, exposed to fewer words, less likely to visit museums, and have diminished participation in art, dance, music and sports. Consequently low-income high school students tend to have a diminished cultural, political, and selfhood awareness.

Too often low-income or poverty-enduring child will tend to view educational institutions as lacking relevance to their and their family's hardships. Partly this is due to a lack cultural, political and selfhood context. Partly it is good sense - a type of tacit or existential socio-economic sense.

Income distribution in this country has been radically skewed toward the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans for 35 years. Incomes for the bottom 70 percent of American households have not increased when adjusted for inflation, while national income has increased over 300 percent. According to 2006 census data, 42 percent of full-time American jobs pay $25,000 per year or less for all workers over the age of 25. That is 82 million full-time jobs performed by adult Americans that pay $25,000 or less. The vast majority of these jobs are held by high school graduates.

The effects of low-income and poverty make academic success extremely difficult. The dynamics of the American economy and the lack of wage protections and labor rights mean that education does not necessarily lead to a livable wage, let alone a good income.

The dropout problem and educational "crisis" is a socio-economic problem. More testing and measure, the creation of charter schools, school choice, and magnet schools, the reorganization and re-staffing of schools with low-test scores is to only move around furniture on the Titanic. It is not addressing socio-economic causes. It will not change dropout rates, or adequately increase test scores in low-income areas such as Holyoke and Springfield.

No Child Left Behind legislation of 2002 created a lack of seriousness toward the dropout problem in particular and the educational "crisis" more generally. The commitment to increased testing and measure does nothing to address the effects on academic attainment for children in households and communities characterized by low-income and poverty. It also does nothing to address the sorry condition of the American job markets, and the country's mal-distribution of wealth. The real cause of school dropouts are family unfriendly jobs and the anti-community distribution of wealth.

Hans G. Despain, a resident of Holyoke, is a professor in the Department of Economics at Nichols College.
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/08/18/cutting-dropout-rates-poor

Posted by lois at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2008

U.S. Department of Justice Report Concludes that Transfer Laws Substantially Increase Recidivism

U.S. Department of Justice Report Concludes that Transfer Laws
Substantially Increase Recidivism
August 13, 2008

Today, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), at the U.S. Department of Justice, released a bulletin on transfer laws and concluded that they have little or no deterrent effect on juvenile crime. The report, Juvenile Transfer Laws: An Effective Deterrent to Delinquency?", also mentions that recidivism rates have increased, because of the transfer laws.

"Too many youth are being prosecuted as adults, with harmful results," said Liz Ryan, President and CEO of the Campaign for Youth Justice (CFYJ). "We are calling on federal and state policy makers to reverse these punitive laws in light of this new research."

Key findings from OJJDP report:

Laws to make it easier to transfer youth to the adult criminal court system have little or no general deterrent effect, meaning they do not prevent youth from engaging in criminal behavior;

Youth transferred to the adult system are more likely to be rearrested and to reoffend than youth who committed similar crimes, but were retained in the juvenile justice system;

Higher recidivism rates are due to a number of factors including the youth's:

-- Stigmatization/negative labeling effects of being labeled as a convicted felon;

-- Sense of resentment and injustice about being tried as an adult;

-- Learning of criminal mores and behavior while incarcerated with adults;

-- Decreased access to rehabilitation and family support in the adult system;

-- Decreased employment and community integration opportunities due to a felony conviction.

The full report can be accessed at http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/220595.pdf

Posted by lois at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2008

Efforts at reforming financial aid for students is stripped from Higher Education Act Refrom Bill

From Students for A Sensible Drug Policy
August 13, 2008

Despite all of our efforts we were not able to secure full repeal of, or even provide judicial discretion for, the aid elimination penalty for drug offenses in the HEA reauthorization bill.

Even though Congressional leadership made a pledge to us at the
beginning of 2006 that they would tackle the aid penalty in the
reauthorization bill, they were not able to muster enough votes,
support, wherewithal (or whatever else you want to call it) to
actually make it happen.

Anyway, despite that Congress failed to adequately address the
concerns of our hundreds of prominent organizations that called for
repeal of the penalty, there was a little bit of good language in the
HEA reauthorization bill.

The bill contains a provision that makes it slightly easier for
students to get their aid back early once they've lost it. Under
current law, students must either wait the specified period of time to
regain eligibility or they can get aid back early by having the
conviction expunged or by completing an approved drug rehab program
that includes two unannounced drug tests. The new HEA bill adds a new
option that allows students to get aid back early by just passing two
unannounced drug tests administered by an approved rehab program (they
don't necessarily have to complete a full, expensive program anymore,
which should make it a lot easier for a lot of students to get back in
school).

The bill also requires institutions of higher education to notify
their students, upon enrollment, that the penalty exists and to notify
those students who lose their aid how they can go about getting it
back.

Finally, the bill requires the Department of Education to do a much
better job tracking who is impacted by the penalty (instead of just
giving us raw total numbers of people who lose their aid). Hopefully,
we'll soon be getting victim numbers broken down by zip code, state,
income level, military status, etc. Those numbers should help us make
an even better case for repeal in the future.

-- Tom Angell, Government Relations Director Students for Sensible Drug Policy http://www.ssdp.org

Posted by lois at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2008

MO: Mother works to keep teens out of adult prisons

Columbia Missourian
Mother works to keep teens out of adult prisons
By RUDI KELLER and BRIDGET DICOSMO
August 9, 2008 | 10:08 p.m. CDT

CAPE GIRARDEAU — Tracy McClard has signed on with an effort to keep teen offenders out of adult prisons, a crusade that is getting a political test as the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee works on a bill reauthorizing federal juvenile justice programs.

McClard is the mother of Jonathan McClard, a Jackson teen who committed suicide while in the first months of a 30-year sentence for shooting another teenager at a Jackson car wash. Jonathan McClard had just turned 17. He was charged as an adult and sent to the Eastern Missouri Reception and Diagnostic Center, the regular intake prison for adult inmates in the eastern areas of the state.

Tracy McClard has become a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Youth Justice, an advocacy group for young offenders that supports rehabilitation efforts in youth-only settings over incarceration with adults.

The campaign is supporting a bill sponsored by Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Herb Kohl, D-Wis. The measure would use federal policies to discourage the placement of juveniles in adult jails while they await trial and encourage the use of alternatives to detention with adults following conviction.

The measure also gives states greater authority to keep young offenders in juvenile facilities after they reach the age of majority, which differs from state to state. In Missouri, an offender is automatically considered an adult if they are 17 at the time of their crime.

"I never thought Jonathan shouldn't be punished, and I never thought he'd get to come home right away," McClard said. "Some kids may never be rehabilitated, but the juvenile mind is so pliable."

According to research cited by the Campaign for Youth Justice, there are an average of 7,500 juvenile offenders in adult jails or prisons on any given day. From the U.S. Department of Justice, the group cited studies showing that in 2005, 21 percent of the victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual violence in adult jails were younger than 18. Juveniles in adult facilities are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than juveniles sent to juvenile facilities and 20 times more likely than youths in the general population.

McClard said she was "flabbergasted" by the research. "There's so much information to get out there that the public doesn't understand," McClard said. Jonathan was assaulted while still in the Mississippi County Jail in Charleston, Mo., she said.

The campaign would like more states to adopt a juvenile justice system that resembles Missouri's, said Eric Solomon, media relations director for the campaign. Missouri's Division of Youth Services operates on a model that emphasizes rehabilitation, education and crime prevention.

"A lot of people are hung up with ‘you do the crime, you do the time,"' he said. "That only harms youth, who need a homelike, community alternative to incarceration and a better re-entry program. They need education, and they need rehab. They don't need to be locked up."

Parents like McClard help the campaign put a face to the statistics, Solomon said.

"Without parents, without former incarcerated youth, without organizations across the country, we couldn't move ahead as we do today," Solomon said.

"Tracy experienced it, she went through it, and legislators across the country, whether it is state or federal, are going to listen to someone who has experienced the pain or agony. That is more effective than an advocacy campaign."

In a statement accompanying the introduction of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Reauthorization Act of 2008, Leahy emphasized that juvenile offenders should be handled with policies designed to steer them into being useful members of society.

"After years of pressure to try more and more young people as adults and to send them to adult prisons, it is time to seriously consider the strong evidence that this policy is not working," Leahy said.

The campaign is working to defeat an amendment from Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., that would put federal prosecutors in control of deciding whether youthful offenders who commit federal crimes will be tried as adults or juveniles. Federal judges currently have that power.

"That derails the entire JJDPA bill that has been put forward," Solomon said.

McClard said she has received a large volume of letters, including notes from Jonathan's teachers at Jackson High School and supervisor at the prison expressing their grief. She said she is working on a book about her son.

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2008/08/09/mother-works-keep-teens-out-adult-prisons/

Posted by lois at 08:32 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)

August 08, 2008

Texas Youth Commission still staggering toward reform

EDITORIAL
Texas Youth Commission still staggering toward reform
Youth Commission efforts to expand facilities makes some sense but falls short
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Austin American-Statesman

The Texas Youth Commission is still struggling to right itself after last year's eruption of a scandal involving allegations of sexual abuse of minors by several employees, including some in supervisory positions, and the failure of the agency's senior administrators to act — even, it appeared, to ignore or cover up the wrongdoing below.

An angry Legislature demanded change, forcing Gov. Rick Perry to put the agency into conservatorship, dismissing its six-member commission and replacing much of its top leadership. The number of youths in custody was reduced.

The problems at the Youth Commission grew for years, so perhaps it's not surprising that even after 18 months of reform, serious problems remain. The agency has gone through several executive directors and conservators and even now the conservator, Richard Nedelkoff, doesn't seem to have won the confidence of key lawmakers.

This week, the agency released a proposed "regionalization" plan that would shrink, but not close, several units, while opening new lockups and halfway houses. The plan includes a major facility, costing as much as $25 million, to be built in the Houston area and to house 150 youths.

As Nedelkoff reasonably points out, "A significant number of youth and their families live in or near large urban areas. However, TYC facilities are rarely located within reasonable traveling distance from those urban areas."

Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, criticized the plan with a pointed remark: "Twenty-two percent of their beds are vacant right now, and they're proposing to build a bunch of new units run by the state? That's crazy."

The commission, Whitmire said, should have recommended closing some units in "remote, rundown rural areas" and put more emphasis on developing community-based programs rather than locking up youths.

It's going to take legislators, though, to take on the job of actually closing Youth Commission units in rural areas. They are there because some lawmakers over the years pushed to get them to provide at least some state job opportunities for constituents in high unemployment areas.

Nedelkoff is right to want youths whose offenses are serious enough to lock them up kept closer to home — even if society is quite willing to ship them to the wilds of West Texas. It's one thing to give up on a 35-year-old lifelong criminal. We shouldn't quit on a 15-year-old yet.

Still, the agency and the Legislature remain too much at odds. The worst abuses done to offenders may have been stopped, but reform is a long way from complete.
http://www.statesman.com/hp/content/editorial/stories/08/07/0807tyc_edit.html

Posted by lois at 07:04 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.
About this article
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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 16, 2008

Report says Calif. should end juvenile prisons

Report says Calif. should end juvenile prisons
By Don Thompson
Associated Press Writer / July 15, 2008

SACRAMENTO, Calif.‹A state watchdog commission has recommended that
California phase out its antiquated juvenile prisons by 2011, replacing them with regional lockups run by the counties.

The regional centers would hold only the most dangerous offenders under the proposal unveiled Monday by the watchdog Little Hoover Commission. Less serious offenders would be housed at local juvenile halls.

Commissioners said the state also should end its three-year experiment with combining youth and adult prisons under the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Authority over youth prisons would be placed under an Office of Juvenile Justice reporting to the governor until the state ends its involvement.

The report also suggests that the youth prisons do little in the way of rehabilitation, saying three of four freed young offenders commit new crimes within three years.

"Californians may fairly ask what they are getting for this outlay and
whether other strategies can better deliver public safety and youth
rehabilitation," commission chairman Daniel Hancock wrote.

It will cost taxpayers $378 million next year to care for the state's 1,500 juvenile inmates, the panel said in a report to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders.

A law that took effect in September already requires the state to transfer all but the most serious offenders to counties' jurisdiction.

That leaves state taxpayers paying for six large, aging institutions that hold far fewer offenders, commissioners said. They said the state will have to pay to replace those crumbling youth prisons unless the system is changed.

The report said giving counties responsibility for housing juvenile
offenders would bring substantial savings but doesn't estimate how much that would be.

The commission found that the state has made some progress in reforming its youth prison system, which some national experts have described as draconian. Next week, an Alameda County judge will consider whether those reforms are taking too long. If so, the judge might appoint a receiver with broad oversight powers.

Improvements have been slowed because the juvenile justice arm is dwarfed by the adult prison system under a single corrections department, commissioners said. Combining the adult and juvenile prisons was part of Schwarzenegger's campaign promise to "blow up" bureaucratic boxes once he became governor.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/07/15/report_says_calif_shou
ld_end_juvenile_prisons/

Posted by lois at 05:31 PM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2008

NY: CLOSE-TO-HOME TREATMENT FOR YOUTHS GAINS NOTICE BUT OBSTACLES PUT IN PATH BY PRISON DEPENDENT GROUPS

CLOSE-TO-HOME TREATMENT FOR YOUTHS GAINS NOTICE
An initiative by the city Department of Probation shows signs of success.
By Betsy Morais

City Limits WEEKLY #647
July 7, 2008

Dr. Clarice Bailey was sent to New York City by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to find out what it’s like inside the city’s program for juvenile justice reform. The Institute had its eye on the Department of Probation initiative called “Project Zero,” which seeks alternative kinds of rehabilitation to locking up young offenders in juvenile jail. Bailey spoke with probation officers, staff at the family courts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and counselors who work one-on-one with families in the system. Then she met the youths.

She recalled what the kids said about the adult staffers assigned to help them: “They’re like family. I’m close to them. They helped me when I got kicked out of my grandma’s house. They made sure I was all right.”

Bailey, who has a doctorate in public administration and policy and has worked closely with youth involved in criminal activity and the justice system, came away impressed. Last month, the Ash Institute announced Project Zero had been selected from a pool of about 1,000 applicants as a finalist for the Annie E. Casey Innovations Award in Children and Family System Reform.

Hope – and statistics

Probation Commissioner Martin Horn started the program in 2003, with “zero” standing for the goal of sending no kids to juvenile correctional facilities outside the city. Instead, they would return home to live with their families, attend school as usual, and participate in intensive therapy sessions aimed at helping them get on the right path from inside their own neighborhoods.

In the year before Project Zero began, 1,300 to 1,500 New York City youths were sent to juvenile facilities, according to Department of Probation (DOP) statistics. In 2004, the Department sent 1,257 juveniles to state correctional facilities, and by 2007, 795 juveniles were admitted. DOP data also show that from 2002 to 2007, the number of city youth incarcerated as a result of their Family Court judgment decreased by 27 percent. The DOP reports that this decline was caused by the Project Zero initiative.

“The administration of juvenile justice in our country is marked by an absence of coherent leadership and is essentially unmanaged. Project Zero represents our resolve to take advantage of that vacuum and change the paradigm in New York from the bottom up,” Horn told the award’s national selection committee at Harvard in June.

Horn credited Mayor Bloomberg with making an unprecedented commitment to reforming the system. Attempts had been made in the past – particularly during the Koch and Giuliani administrations – but never before at this scale, he said.

In addition, the DOP took advantage of new technologies that made better data analysis possible. That’s part of what makes Project Zero innovative, said Bailey, a former senior associate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation now working as an independent social services contractor in Philadelphia. “It’s not this big mystery or scary thing, but rather it’s a tool that is used day in and day out to help make decisions about where kids get placed, how kids get placed,” she said. The program consistently evaluates its own progress and makes adjustments accordingly, based on data. “It keeps people from making really willy-nilly decisions.”

Some of the data is impressive. For young people who participated in Project Zero’s community-based intensive care program, Esperanza, it shows a big drop in the juvenile re-arrest rate after nine months – from 50 percent in 1999 to 16 percent in 2007.

The financial statistics are also attention-getting, because it costs more to send kids to correctional facilities than it does to keep them at home. Before Project Zero, the city paid up to $80 million each year to lock up juveniles in prison. Now, the mayor’s office projects the program will save the city $43 million over the next four years.

While incarceration costs between $120,000 and $200,000 per year, per youth—according to the most recent data from the state Office of Children and Family Services—the DOP says Esperanza costs $15,000 per year, per youth.

Though Horn got the initiative off the ground, Esperanza Director Jenny Kronenfeld is running it day to day. For her, the reward extends beyond the city’s monetary savings – she has seen young people go from juvenile court to college campus. That's fitting, since "esperanza” is the Spanish word for hope.

Project Zero “pushed everybody to think really broadly: Is there anything else we can do in the community?” Kronenfeld said, adding that the program also espouses a more realistic – meaning patient – perspective on youth development. Leaders accept that change happens in small steps: If a teenager never goes to school, then starts to go three days a week, that’s something. “Change doesn’t happen over night,” she said. “It takes time.”

In an interview, Horn offered a hypothetical typical Esperanza case under the umbrella of Project Zero: A teenager is charged with stealing a classmate’s iPod after some history of truancy and the beginnings of gang involvement. Although he is a high-risk candidate for further crime, his family is intact and he is motivated to turn his life around. When he is taken on by Esperanza, he is assigned a case manager who will be accessible to him seven days a week, and who's only handling up to five other cases at any given time.

That kind of relationship creates an atmosphere for discussing the larger picture. “They have opened discussions about oppression," says Bailey. Most of the youth who enter what those in the field often call the "crib to prison pipeline” are black or Latino, she said. Esperanza teaches how to “operate in, successfully negotiate our society, which is built on oppression.”

She added that staffers "help them get their context from their story as a young person of color in this system – in not just the juvenile system, but our social system, that doesn’t have their best interest at heart.”

City Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez, who chairs City Council's Juvenile Justice Committee, supports the Project Zero philosophy. Her legislative director Miguel Hernandez said, “These are kids we’re talking about. When someone makes a mistake, we want to make sure we’re not setting them up for failure" – which is more likely to result after a young person has spent time in prison.

Leaving beds empty

Yet as Project Zero’s success is lauded by Harvard, the program struggles for a warmer reception in Albany. When the Ash Institute award committee asked about tension between the city and state in funding alternatives to juvenile incarceration, Commissioner Horn chuckled. He and Deputy Commissioner Patricia Brennan, who stood beside him, asked, “How much time you got?”

According to a city newsletter from last August, “Probation Today,” Brennan has said the state does too little to encourage the development of alternatives to incarceration for juveniles.” Horn describes his department’s relationship to the state as a “creative tension.” When money is spent running underused state prisons, it can’t be invested in alternative juvenile programs.

Since last year, the state’s Office of Children & Family Services announced the closing of six juvenile correctional facilities – because of Project Zero and other programs like it. “We were paying for a lot of empty beds,” OCFS spokesman Edward Borges said. But when the plan came before the state legislature, it was chiseled down to closing three prisons, merging two programs in the Adirondacks into one, and shutting down one wing of the Lansing juvenile facility.

The state Senate ensured that Great Valley, the correctional facility in the western corner of the state, would stay open – even though it was half empty, Borges said. He explained, “It makes no sense for us to ship kids from New York City all the way up there. We were disappointed.” Pyramid, a prison in the Bronx, also remains despite what Borges described as inadequate facilities.

“That’s where I guess you get into the politics,” said State Assemblyman William Scarborough, a Queens Democrat. As chairman of the Assembly's Committee on Children and Families, he supported the plan to close all six prisons, but he was unable to push it through budget negotiations.

State Senator Carl Kruger, chairman of the Senate's Social Services, Children and Families Committee, said “it just made sense” to keep Pyramid open. The Brooklyn Democrat argued that it serves as more of a residential than correctional facility for juveniles – playing an essential role, within the city.

But in upstate communities, the justice system is “an economic engine,” Scarborough explained, employing generations of families. He and his colleagues in the Legislature received letters from unions that represent prison employees. He recalled their message, “You can’t close our facilities – they contribute a million dollars to our economy.”

Kruger contends that Project Zero is asking too much of the state when it requests that the money saved by running fewer juvenile facilities be invested into city alternatives-to-detention programs. “The city would like the state to pay for everything,” he said. “They would like to hijack as much money from us as they can.”

DOP spokesperson Jack Ryan said, “We would like to receive our fair share.” When juvenile prisons close, the DOP believes the savings should be reinvested in developing incarceration alternatives where need is greatest—in New York City.

Though Scarborough is counting on OCFS to renew its push for more prison closings and remains optimistic about the outcome in the next fiscal year’s budget, he doesn’t foresee legislation emerging to support juvenile incarceration alternatives before then. “You can put forward legislation, but you’re going to run into the same problem,” he said.

It may take awhile, but Commissioner Horn believes the state will have to follow Project Zero’s lead eventually, when “the reality becomes too stark for even the New York State Legislature to ignore, and ultimately the money will materialize.”

In the meantime, Harvard will announce its winner in September – the recipient of $100,000. Should DOP win, Ryan says the department doesn't yet know how it would use the prize.

- Betsy Morais
http://www.citylimits.org/content/articles/viewarticle.cfm?article_id=3587&content_type=1&media_type=3

Posted by lois at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)

July 03, 2008

NY Times Editiorial: Don’t Teach Our Children Crime

NY Times
July 3, 2008
Editorial
Don’t Teach Our Children Crime

Under the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, the states agreed to humanize their often Dickensian juvenile justice systems in exchange for increased federal aid. This promising arrangement collapsed in the 1990s during hysteria about an adolescent crime wave that never materialized. The states intensified all kinds of punishments for children and sent large numbers to adult jails where, research has shown, they are more likely to be battered, traumatized and transformed into hard-core, recidivist criminals.

Congress is in the process of reauthorizing the law, and it ought to bar the states from housing children in adult jails, except for the most heinous crimes. Sadly, the updated version of the law, recently introduced in the Senate, falls short of that goal. But it does include a number of farsighted measures that discourage the placement of children in adult jails during the pretrial period and expands protections for children charged as adults.

The need for these measures is alarmingly evident in a report issued last year by the Campaign for Youth Justice, an advocacy group. The report found that as many as 150,000 people under the age of 18 are held in adult jails in any given year. More than half of young people who are transferred into the adult system are never convicted as adults — and many are never convicted at all.

The Senate bill takes a comprehensive approach to these issues. It would considerably tighten rules aimed at keeping children out of adult jails during pretrial periods. Children arrested for truancy, running away or other offenses that would not be criminal if committed by an adult would not be placed in juvenile jail unless absolutely necessary.

It also would require the states to work toward reducing racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. It increases federal funding for technical assistance and for drug treatment, mental health care, mentoring and after-care programs that keep children out of the juvenile system in the first place. The bill advocates an evidence-based approach to hand out the money.

Jailing and criminalizing young Americans causes a lot more crime than it punishes or prevents. This bill represents an important step toward rational and compassionate justice for troubled children.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/opinion/03thu2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Posted by lois at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)

June 30, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 16, 2008

New book: Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies.

Meiners, E. R. (2007). Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies. London & NY, NY: Routledge
224 pages
List price: paperback $33.95

Coincidence…or trend? This morning’s issue of Common Dreams includes an article titled “ACLU Report Exposes Unjust Detention of Youth: Pre-Trial Juvenile Lockup in Massachusetts Disproportionately Impacts Youth of Color” (May 12, 2008). (http://www.commondreams.org/news2008/0512-01.htm) Last weekend my social worker daughter railed at length about the hostility—abusiveness, actually—of a New York City judge who consistently refuses to release juvenile offenders to a demonstration program designed to keep them permanently out of jail. The judge is impervious to the fact that the city’s recidivism rate for juveniles who have been imprisoned is 80%, clearly demonstrating that what jail time most reliably yields…is more jail time. Meanwhile, on my nightstand awaiting review is Erica Meiners’ Right to Be Hostile, a microscopic look at juveniles, the justice system—and schools.

Anyone exposed to media and in the habit of thinking would see the above as indicating trend, not coincidence. Pieces on juveniles and the justice system routinely appear in news media. In February of this year, for example, the New York Times editorialized on the fact that the U.S. leads the world in the number of youthful offenders sentenced to life imprisonment, a situation headlined as “A Shameful Record.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/opinion/06wed5.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) In March, a United Nations panel called for the United States to disallow life sentences for offenders under 18. (http://abcnews.go.com/US/WireStory?id=4408351&page=2) While most people equate “juvenile offenders” with “males,” researchers have meanwhile reported that girls are at increasing risk in the justice system, most often for behaviors that wouldn’t be considered criminal if they were adults (including running away and promiscuous behavior). (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=747671&page=1)

Educators, of course, are generally aware of the problem and often lament the youthful promise squandered by a punitive justice system; often, too, they philosophize about who and what is responsible for the growing problem, rightfully implicating issues of poverty and parenting as well as the role of No Child Left Behind, responsible for increasing the numbers of school push outs and drop outs. As a body, however, education professionals will react with horror and disbelief when Meiners points an accusing finger in a new direction: at the education establishment itself. We are, she says, complicit in the massive production of fodder for the growing prison industrial complex (PIC). And, when she says we, she is inclusive: personnel in K-12 schools as well as teacher educators, she argues—persuasively—serve an important function in readying young people for incarceration. Precisely because her charge is so horrifying, it must be carefully examined. While readers are likely to immediately and vehemently deny any complicity, if there is any truth in Meiners’ claims, conscientious educators will want to know. Unhappily for readers, the author’s arguments are so carefully considered and constructed that after reading the book no thoughtful educator will be able to persist in outright, energetic and all-encompassing denial.

By page 2, Meiners is detailing the context of her discussion with statistics that command attention. The United States has 5% of the world’s people, yet 25% of the world’s incarcerated—over two million human beings, not including those on probation or parole, or those housed in Immigration and Naturalization facilities or U.S facilities outside the U.S. African American and Latina women are imprisoned far more often than white women, but 75% of all women imprisoned are prosecuted for nonviolent offenses. Some 12% of all African American males between 20 and 34 are imprisoned; the South has some states in which one-third of African American males cannot vote. Prison is a “growth industry,” big business, and getting bigger. As a nation, we are building more prisons than schools. Meiners’ essential argument is that schools play a large role in identifying and preparing the young people who will eventually fill those prisons. Because it is not possible to adequately summarize this carefully constructed argument in a review, readers are cautioned not to draw conclusions about the validity of Meiners’ arguments without reading the full text, something every educator interested in social justice should do as soon as possible.

Each of the book’s six chapters examines a particular element of schooling that serves to help channel select youth onto a path toward incarceration. Chapter 1 discusses how reasonable emotional reactions to oppressive social and institutional conditions, most specifically anger, are characterized as “outlaw” emotions and used as pretext for excessive control of oppressed populations by authority: “If you do not have the right to be hostile, anger can be read as violence, disruption, disrespect, or as evidence of inherent deviancy, or cognitive and behavioral impairment” (p. 30). Once justifiably angry students, aware of how poorly and inequitably served they and their communities are not only by schools but by other institutions, are branded with such negative labels, they are ripe to suffer the expulsion that commonly results from widespread “zero tolerance” policies. Expulsion is a strong predictor of dropping out—itself an indicator of likely eventual imprisonment. Expulsion rates are higher for boys than girls, and much higher for African Americans than Latinos, Caucasians or Asian Americans. This racialized expulsion trend begins in preschool; in one study, 37 out of 40 states reported that their preschool expulsion rate exceeded the K-12 expulsion rate.

It is also well documented that African American boys are disproportionately placed into special education, a placement that also decreases the chance that a child will graduate (although, as the author takes care to mention, some students do benefit substantively from special education programs). Meiners believes that such channeling may be traced, at least in part, to the fact that the teaching force is overwhelmingly white and female, unfamiliar with other cultures, subject to cultural stereotypes, and quick to feel threatened and intimidated by the Other—especially the African American male, and apparently at any age—and to impose the most severe sanctions.

Chapter 2 traces the systematic reallocation of resources from education to incarceration, despite the fact (or perhaps because of it?) that the more time a child spends in school, the less likely imprisonment becomes. That is, more schools would mean fewer, more expensive prisons—but we choose instead to build more prisons, concurrently calling for “less government,” widely translated as less money available for social welfare programs and popularly justified on such old stereotypes as the lazy welfare queen. This chapter also explores in detail the relationship between not only schools and prisons, but among those institutions and an economic sector that characterizes prisons as a growth “industry” promising new jobs and profits to depressed (white) communities (as long as the flow of new prisoners continues uninterrupted). To the extent that white educators fall prey to stereotypes and discount anger and hostility as legitimate emotions, they are likely to support and participate in school policies that ensure a steady stream of prisoners and revenue to the PIC.

Chapter 3 traces the role of the media in mischaracterizing prisons and incarceration, further ensuring continued public ignorance about the realities of prison populations and conditions while simultaneously promoting racial and other stereotypes, including suggestions that violence is characteristic of race. Chapter 4 is a sensitive, nuanced and especially thought-provoking examination of rhetoric around the need to protect innocent children from predators, especially sexual predators, which has led to Sex Offender Registries and the hyper-vigilance they promote. Of course, Meiners does not defend molestation of children; what she does point out, however, is that children are most often assaulted not by strangers but by family members and friends, people known to them. The author seeks in this chapter to move the reader to ask how the extreme focus on the area of “stranger danger” distracts attention from far more pervasive and systemic dangers to children. Among these, she cites evidence that poverty is the greatest of all such dangers.

xxxI know this fact, I teach this fact. Yet it persistently gets obscured. In a nation with no adequate or affordable childcare system, no universal health care, expensive to prohibitive costs for higher education, and a minimum wage that is not a living wage, we have no registries for the politicians, and employers, who routinely implement or execute policies that actively damage all people, including or even particularly children. (138)xxx

One can’t help but be reminded of writers like Lippman and Chomsky and to think again about how media loves spectacle (the relatively rare but sensational rape and murder of children) and how spectacle functions to distract the bewildered herd of the public from more systemic and pervasive problems.

Chapter 5 examines the ways that special education and recovery groups function to institutionalize and legitimize concepts of normalcy and, in doing so, concurrently determine what constitutes deviance. Moreover, deviance is associated with some problem in the individual—a congenital learning disability, or the disease of addiction. When such problems are assigned to individuals, attention is again distracted from social policies that create oppressive conditions and rational resistance. Blessedly, this chapter also contains examples of programs (Boarding School Healing Project and Prison: A Site for Resistance) that offer a stark contrast to the norm and suggest possibilities for change.

Chapter 6 is a thorough discussion of the author’s own goal: prison abolition. With extensive experience in talking to groups, Meiners is well-equipped to voice and answer a reader’s most likely, immediate questions as the book nears its close: “What about the really bad people?” and “How do I get involved?” Her answer in each case is detailed and extremely helpful to anyone new to and overwhelmed by her line of argument.

Of course, many writers have been exploring the explosion of the PIC, so many readers will be familiar with some of the trends and statistics Meiners uses to build her case. What is new, and startling, however, is her clear-eyed indictment of the education system and its personnel. She is not insensitive to the good intentions and hard work of many educators (and others in the “helping professions”), nor is she unaware that many critical educators are already on paths leading to the one she charts. She is, always, sensitive to the difficulties inherent in telling people things they don’t want to hear and are loathe to believe. Given how formidable her task, the result is nothing short of remarkable. No educator can read this book and be unchanged by it.

Recommended Further Reading and Viewing

Advancement Project and Civil Rights Project. (2000, June). Opportunities suspended: The devastating consequences of zero tolerance and school discipline policies. Available: http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/discipline/opport_suspended.php

Baker, B. (2002). The hunt for disability: The new eugenics and the normalization of school children. Teachers College Record, 104(4), 663-703.

Polakow, V. (Ed.) (2000). The public assault on America’s children: Poverty, violence, and juvenile injustice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

UCLA/IDEA. (n.d.) Suspension and expulsion at-a-glance. Available from http://idea.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/suspension/index.html

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

June 13, 2008

Report Finds Racial Disparities in the Severity of Punishment of Youth

Report Finds Racial Disparities in the Severity of Punishment
By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2008; B02

The nation's juvenile justice system metes out harsher punishment to black and Latino youths, locks up thousands of children for relatively minor offenses and ultimately makes them more dangerous, according to a national study released yesterday.

"We are generating more violence and criminality in our effort to interrupt it," said Douglas W. Nelson, president and chief executive of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which conducted the study, during a news conference yesterday. "We routinely fail to recognize that children are different than adults. We need to alter the context in which we serve kids."

Nelson's remarks came with the release of the foundation's annual Kids Count report, which measures the well-being of America's children in 10 categories. The report shows reductions in the rates of child deaths, teenage births, high school dropouts and teens who are not in school or working. Four areas increased: low-birthweight infants, children in single-parent homes, children in poverty and children in families in which no parent works full time.

The percentage of newborns weighing less than 5.5 pounds, who are at greater risk of dying in infancy or having long-term problems, is the highest in 40 years. It was the only category in which Maryland worsened from 2000 to 2005, when the percentage of low-birthweight babies in the state rose from 8.6 to 9.1.

Nationally, infant mortality remained steady during the period.

Maryland tied New Hampshire, at 10 percent, for the lowest rate of children living in poverty. The national rate was 11 percent for white children, 36 percent for blacks and American Indians and 28 percent for Hispanics.

Virginia improved in all but three categories: low-birthweight babies, infant mortality and children in single-parent homes.

The District lost ground in half of the 10 categories: infant mortality, teen deaths, teen births, children living with no parents working full time and children in poverty.

But the primary focus of this year's report was the fate of the 400,000 youths who cycle through the juvenile justice system each year. During a two-hour news conference yesterday at the Cannon House Office Building, a panel of experts said the problem has largely been fueled by fear and racism that often lead police to take young white offenders home and minorities to jail.

In 2006, for example, three youths of color were in custody for every one white youth, the report said. Two thirds of all youths in custody were incarcerated for a nonviolent offense.

In the 1990s, 49 states made it easier to try youths as adults. On any given night, 100,000 minors are in jails, prisons, boot camps or residential facilities. A succession of speakers yesterday said these places often cause more problems than they solve. Grace Bauer of Lake Charles, La., said her son, who had been sent to a boot camp for being "ungovernable," was raped when he was 13.

Bauer said her son, now 21, carries the scars. She later learned that the program had a 95 percent failure rate. "On my first visit to see him, he had welts on his face," she said.

Rep. Robert C. Scott (D-Virginia) said many "get tough" crime measures are "nonsense that does not reduce crime."

"It helps [politicians] get elected," he said. "If you can get it to rhyme, even better."

Vincent Schiraldi, director of the District's Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, said it would be more rational to lock up only the most violent offenders and use less restrictive options for the others, particularly those without long criminal records.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, now in his mid-20s, said he should not have been sent to adult jail when he was arrested at 16 for carjacking in Fairfax County. He had no previous criminal record and was an honor roll student.

But instead of being sent to a juvenile jail, he was placed with adults and served eight years in prison. He never received any mental health treatment.

After he was released, Betts attended Prince George's Community College. He now goes to the University of Maryland on a poetry scholarship.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR2008061202842_pf.html

Posted by lois at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)

June 10, 2008

Bob Herbert - "Out of Sight"

June 10, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Out of Sight
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times

When the dismal unemployment numbers were released on Friday (at the same time that oil prices were surging to record highs), I thought about the young people at the bottom of the employment ladder.

Below the bottom, actually.

A shudder went through the markets when the Labor Department reported that the official jobless rate had jumped one-half a percentage point in May to 5.5 percent — the sharpest spike in 22 years.

The young people I’m talking about wouldn’t have noticed. These are the teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats compiling the official unemployment rate don’t even bother counting these young people. They are no one’s constituency. They might as well not exist.

Except that they do exist. There are four million or more of these so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on street corners in cities large and small — and increasingly in suburban and rural areas.

If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response is: “I hustle,” which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing a neighbor’s car to running the occasional errand.

Or it could mean petty thievery or drug dealing or prostitution or worse.

This is the flip side of the American dream. The United States economy, which has trouble producing enough jobs to keep the middle class intact, has left these youngsters all-but-completely behind.

“These kids are being challenged in ways that my generation was not,” said David Jones, the president of the Community Service Society of New York, which tries to develop ways to connect these young men and women with employment opportunities, or get them back into school.

It is extremely difficult because, for the most part, the jobs are not there and the educational establishment is having a hard enough time teaching the kids who are still in school.

“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”

So these kids drift. Some are drawn to gangs. A disproportionate number become involved in crime. It is a tragic story, and very few people are paying attention.

The economic policies of the past few decades have favored the wealthy and the well-connected to a degree that has been breathtaking to behold. The Nation magazine has devoted its current issue to the Gilded Age-type inequality that has been the result.

Just a little bit of help to the millions of youngsters trying to get their first tentative foothold in that economy should not be too much to ask.

It’s not as if these kids don’t want to work. Many of them search and search until they finally become discouraged. The summer job market, which has long been an important first step in preparing teenagers for the world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest in more than half a century, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

Now, with the overall economy deteriorating, the situation for poorly educated young people will only grow worse. As Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies, told The Times recently:

“When you get into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest. Kids always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”

As the ranks of these youngsters grow, so does their potential to become a destabilizing factor in the society.

More important, the U.S. needs the untapped talent (and the potential buying power) in this large pool of young people, just as it needs the talents of the many other Americans of all ages whose energy, intelligence and creativity are wasted in an economic system that is not geared toward providing jobs for everyone who wants to work.

America needs to dream bigger, and in this election year, job creation should be issue No. 1. If I were running for president, I would pull together the smartest minds I could find from government, the corporate world, the labor movement, academia, the nonprofits and ordinary working men and women to see what could be done to spark the creation of decent jobs on a scale that would bring the U.S. as close as possible to full employment.

We’ve maxed out the credit cards, floated mindlessly in stock market bubbles, refinanced mortgages to death — now’s the time to figure out how to put all Americans to work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10herbert.html?ref=opinion

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

Philadelphia: A Messed-Up Justice System

Karen Heller: A messed-up justice system
By Karen Heller
Philadelphia Inquirer

"If the United States leads the world in incarceration," says civil-rights lawyer David Rudovsky, "Philadelphia leads the United States."
We have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than anybody else, 3.5 times more than New York City.
We're No. 1!
We've won the inmate championship. And our prize is the chance to spend $230 million on prisons every year.
This is one business we should be doing everything to unload.Prisoners are a growth industry. "Booming," says prison commissioner Lou Giorla.

It's not hard to see why. When so many of the city's population are woefully uneducated - almost 30 percent lack high-school degrees - decent jobs are hard to come by.

The drug-dealing business, however, is always hiring.

Spend a day inside one of the Court of Common Pleas' four jury-waiver courtrooms and the parade of criminals never stops. One defendant, aged 41, had three trials scheduled simultaneously last Wednesday, from three drug-selling arrests in six weeks. He'd kept out of trouble for 10 years, then fell back because he couldn't find work.

Nonviolent defendants such as he, charged with petty drug dealing, constitute the majority of cases in these courts. If convicted, felons face mandatory minimum sentencing: one to two years for selling two grams or more of cocaine or heroin for the first offense, three to six years for subsequent offenses.

A packet of sugar is four grams.

The criminal division heard 15,000 felony cases last year, 80 percent of them related to drugs.

"We're not doing the things that would prevent the market from growing," says Judge Pamela P. Dembe, chief of the criminal trial division. "We operate a justice system that is based on a very old model, a punitive model."

Punishment is not where we should put money or manpower.

This spring, Philadelphia's prisons made history - by having more prisoners in jail than at any time in the last three centuries, 9,334 prisoners, at an annual cost of $30,000 each. The facilities were designed to hold 6,433.

Who says we don't make anything anymore? We make prisoners.

Two-thirds of inmates are awaiting trial, half for minimum drug charges. Some wait as long as two years for their cases to be heard.

It's an expensive mess. Fifteen percent of prisoners are mentally ill. More than 2,000 are held three to a cell designed for two; one of them has to sleep in a plastic shell on the floor. Due to overcrowding, guard overtime will hit $35 million this month.

Rudovsky is suing the system, on behalf of 11 named inmates, stating that overcrowding violates their civil rights. He's been fighting this issue since 1970, when the prison population was a mere 2,800.

"Building new prisons is not a good idea. You build them, you'll fill them," Rudovsky says.

"We're not going to win the war on drugs in the court system," Dembe argues. By then, it's too late.

We need to find people jobs, so they can earn $30,000 a year instead of our spending that on a cell.

A quarter of Philadelphia's budget goes to criminal justice, almost $960 million on cops, courts and prisons. And 80 percent of the criminal justice system deals with the nasty tentacles of drugs. Do the math. That's $767 million to deal with problems at the end of the line, not the beginning, before they all clot the system.

That money could be spent on day-care. That money could be spent on rec centers. That money could buy early childhood education and job-training centers and mental-health care.

That money could turn girls and boys into educated, law-abiding citizens, and transform potential petty dealers into taxpaying workers.

Mayor Nutter and the new administration are trying, but there needs to be more effort, more money and more manpower to wipe out the prison industrial complex, so the city can reduce the annual drag on the budget fighting a war on drugs that no one is winning.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/karen_heller/20080609_A_messed-up_justice_system.html

Posted by lois at 02:17 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2008

White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Awards $5.8 Million for Student Drug Testing

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has awarded $5.8 million in grants to 49 schools to fund random drug testing of students.

Grantees included schools in 20 states. The awards were made in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education.

"Student drug testing programs promote safer, healthier school environments where students can work toward achieving their full potential," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. "A good student drug testing program helps students defy peer pressure and say 'no' to drugs and alcohol, and provides the opportunity for at-risk students to get the support they need."

This is the fifth round of grants awarded for school-based random student drug testing programs since 2003.
http://www.jointogether.org/news/funding/trends/2008/ondcp-awards-58-million-for.html?log-event=sp2f-view-item&nid=40009885

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

June 03, 2008

Louisiana Tries Again: State promises to close Jetson Prison for Youth

May 30, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Louisiana Tries Again

Two years have passed since the federal courts relinquished control of Louisiana’s notoriously troubled juvenile justice system. The state regained its autonomy by reducing the number of children held in detention and by promising to embrace reforms based on Missouri’s system, which long ago abandoned sprawling, prison-style facilities in favor of small, regional facilities that focus on rehabilitation.

Despite those promises, Louisiana’s system was never fully reorganized and the regional facilities never got built. Embarrassed by fresh charges of violence and brutality at the infamous Jetson Center for Youth near Baton Rouge, the state has now promised to close the troubled facility and proceed with genuine reform.

Gov. Bobby Jindal needs to make sure that the state’s new plan truly follows the Missouri model and that Louisiana’s juvenile justice officials implement it this time.

The community-based centers in Missouri are considered a national model that stresses therapy, not punishment, and often includes parents as well as the children. Instead of housing minor offenders and more serious offenders in the same place, as too often happens, Missouri sorts detainees by the seriousness of their crimes.

The oversight continues even after the young persons’ release, through case managers who help former inmates with job placement, school issues and drug or alcohol treatment. Missouri’s system more than pays for itself by keeping recidivism rates low. After completing the program, officials say, less than 10 percent of detainees go back to prison through the juvenile courts.

A team of consultants led by Mark Steward, an expert on the Missouri juvenile justice system, is advising Louisiana on how to proceed. For the sake of some of the state’s most vulnerable children, the Jindal administration should embrace the advice and follow it.

Posted by lois at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2008

California's Runner Initiative: Overview and Opposition

California's Runner Initiative: Overview and Opposition

The Runner Initiative, a California ballot initiative also called the "Safe Neighborhoods Act," was introduced in April by Senator George Runner (R-Antelope Valley), Assemblywoman Sharon Runner (R-Lancaster), Mike Reynolds, author of California's Three Strikes sentencing law, and San Bernardino County Supervisor Gary Ovitt. The Runner Initiative includes many traditional "tough on crime" approaches to addressing crime, including increasing the length of penalties for certain crimes, the establishment of a statewide gang registry database, and making individuals convicted of certain crimes ineligible for public housing. Unfortunately, this approach emphasizes punishment and incarceration over prevention and early intervention efforts that could be utilized to address the underlying causes of crimes. The text of the initiative can be found here.

In response to the initiative, on May 16th, Los Angeles Councilmembers Tony Cardenas and Bernard Parks announced their aggressive opposition to the Runner Initiative. A press release of their announcement is available here.

Additionally, over 50 California individuals and organizations have formed a Coalition to Defeat George Runner's Initiative. The Coalition includes elected officials, influential individuals, city governments, labor unions, and interfaith, environmental, civil rights, and other organizations. A complete listing of Coalition members is available at http://www.ellabakercenter.org/?p=runner_opposed. More information on the Coalition and action items to help defeat the Runner Initiative can be found at http://www.ellabakercenter.org/?p=defeat_runner.

The W. Haywood Burns Institute, a California-based national organization working to reduce the overrepresentation of youth of color in the juvenile justice system, has also has written an analysis of this initiative. The analysis describes the implications associated with each line of the initiative's language and includes fiscal impacts, cost effective arguments against the initiative, a description of implications on youth of color, and a listing of the problems associated with the creation of a gang database. A listing of the initiative's proponents and opponents is also included. The analysis can be found at http://www.ellabakercenter.org/downloads/runner/runner_summary.pdf.

Posted by lois at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)

MA: Stopping the School to Prison Pipeline

The Boston Globe
DANIEL G. MEYER
By Daniel G. Meyer | May 28, 2008

A 13-YEAR-OLD girl was handcuffed and arrested at Brockton High School last June for wearing a T-shirt. The T-shirt, which she was asked by school officials to remove, bore the image of her ex-boyfriend, 14-year-old Marvin Constant, who had recently been killed in a Boston area shooting. The girl refused to remove the memorial shirt and was arrested for "causing a disturbance."

In Texas, 14-year-old high school freshman, Shaquanda Cotton, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Her crime was pushing a hall monitor out of the way when she was stopped from entering a school building. The official charge was "assault on a public servant."

While extreme, these cases are not unusual. In Massachusetts and across the country, an increasing number of incidents that traditionally have been handled in schools by trips to the principal's office are being dealt with by law enforcement officials and judges in the juvenile justice system. Countless school children, particularly children of color in poverty-stricken zip codes, are being pushed out of schools and into juvenile correctional facilities for minor misconduct.

A variety of overzealous disciplinary measures, including a mandatory "zero-tolerance" policy, are removing children as early as elementary school from mainstream educational environments and funneling them into a one-way pipeline to prison. This "school-to-prison pipeline" begins in the nation's neglected and under-resourced public education system and flows directly into the country's expansive ocean of overcrowded, privatized, profit-producing prisons.

America's Promise Alliance released a report in April that said that 17 of the nation's 50 largest cities have high school graduation rates of lower than 50 percent. Boston barely boasted a graduation rate of 57 percent, placing it 27th among the 50 cities. It is no surprise that urban public high schools ranked lower in graduation rates than their suburban counterparts.

When school funding is based on student test performance, lack of resources creates heinous incentives for school officials to funnel out "problem" students believed likely to drag down a school's scores. This bottom line business is a convenient method of concealing schools' educational deficiencies, but it does little to address the systemic problem of poor performance.

Racial disproportion runs through every level of the system. A black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime compared with a white male's 1 in 17 chance. Incarceration rates are directly correlated with school performance. Children of color are more likely to be suspended or expelled than their Caucasian classmates. More than 70 percent of the prison population in Massachusetts is functionally illiterate. The cycle begins early and is hard to break. A black child is nine times more likely to have an incarcerated parent, and children with imprisoned parents far more likely to be imprisoned themselves.

Abraham Lincoln wrote that "the dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present." There remains a deeply ingrained punitive paradigm in the psyche of the American criminal justice system. Our overzealous "get tough on crime" philosophy is totally inadequate to the stormy present. Americans are far more likely to be victimized by a violent assault, rape, murder, or robbery than our European counterparts who incarcerate relatively tiny percentages of the population. There, prison is viewed as a fundamentally "criminogenic" institution that creates more crime than it deters.

Prisoners are a major fiscal burden on the rest of society. It costs Massachusetts $43,000 a year to keep an inmate behind bars. States are spending on average more than three times as much per prisoner as per public school pupil. Is it more valuable to imprison than to teach? The majority of suspended students and juveniles in detention did not commit violent offenses. Is society safer with nonviolent criminals in jail or in school?

Relying on incarceration as the sole solution to crime is ineffective. Academic achievement is the leading determining factor for delinquency. Improving school performance will be an effective strategy for reducing chronic court involvement.

We have the resources. It is not a question of funds but rather a question of will. Will Massachusetts be first to say enough and dam the flow of the school-to-prison pipeline?

Daniel G. Meyer is a volunteer at the Youth Advocacy Project at the Committee for Public Counsel Services.
ttp://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/05/28/problem_students_in_pipeline_to_prison?mode=PF

Posted by lois at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

MA: Youth lockup doesn't work and isn't fair

"...why Latino youths are five times more likely, and African American youths eight times more likely, than Caucasian youths to be confined in a detention or correctional facility?"

Friday, May 23, 2008
Youth lockup doesn’t work and isn’t fair
Clive McFarlane
Worcester Telegram

According to an American Civil Liberties Union report released last week titled “Locking up our Children,” Massachusetts is detaining 5,000 to 6,000 youths in secure facilities each year, many of whom do not appear to be high-risk.

Last year, for example, 78 percent of the young people were charged with misdemeanors or low-level felonies, and more than 80 percent of them were eventually released back into their communities after spending an average of 25 days in lockup awaiting arraignment.

Not only is the Massachusetts youth detention rate far greater than that of many other states, but minority youths are bearing the brunt of the state’s pretrial detentions.

Minority youths account for approximately 20 percent of the state’s juvenile population, but nearly 60 percent of the young people securely detained after arraignment and before their innocence or guilt is ascertained.

The Worcester County division of the state’s juvenile court system is the leader in the high detention rates of young people.

In 2006, the Worcester County division detained 815, or 46 percent, of the 1,772 people 17 years old and younger who were the subject of delinquency complaints.

In comparison, although a greater number of young people were the subject of delinquency reports in Suffolk County (1,953), Essex County (1,848) and Middlesex County (1,809), smaller percentages, 42, 31 and 28 percent respectively, were detained in those three counties.

The statistics are crystal clear, but the reasons for them are not.

Is race, for example, a factor for why Latino youths are five times more likely, and African American youths eight times more likely, than Caucasian youths to be confined in a detention or correctional facility?

“We cannot say for certain, because we do not currently have a system in place to analyze the data and to identify more accurately what the problem points are,” said Amy Reichbach, racial justice advocate with the ACLU of Massachusetts.

The Worcester district attorney’s office, however, seems to have a clue.

“We believe justice is colorblind in Worcester County,” said Timothy Connolly, spokesman for the DA’s office.

It is not that I don’t believe Mr. Connolly’s “colorblind assertion,” but I would have been a lot more assured if someone in the office had at least read the report.

No one had at the time I spoke with Mr. Connolly yesterday.

Of course, as it was pointed out to me, many of the numbers cited by the ACLU were compiled from 2006 and thus predate the current district attorney’s administration.

Talk about washing your hands.

In the DA’s defense, however, an argument can be made that just as the schools have done, the courts are shouldering a greater share of the burden of looking out for many young people.

The ACLU report, for example, points out that justices detain children who are not at high risk of flight or danger to their community because they believe detention to be in the children’s best interest.

“Some use detention as a ‘wake-up call’ or rehabilitative tool to frighten children who have yet to be convicted of any wrongdoing into obeying the law,” the report said.

“In addition, almost all justices detain youth who they believe cannot return home safely. They do so because they have no other place to house these children.”

But “far from assisting youth in dealing with the issues that may have gotten them into trouble, secure detention is one of the most accurate predictors of future criminal behavior and other problems,” Ms. Reichbach said.

“This approach is failing both youth and our communities.”

Worcester public school officials are involved with a federal initiative to provide alternatives to juvenile detention.

It is one of several community solutions being recommended by the ACLU.

Of course, courts and community efforts are all second-best solutions.

The best solution would be for these young people to have stable homes and responsible parents to go home to, and unfortunately many do not.
http://www.telegram.com/article/20080523/COLUMN44/805230664&SearchID=73318542911635

Posted by lois at 10:04 PM | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Leaving Hard Time Behind. Foundations lead effort to change juvenile-justice sytems

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

From the issue dated May 15, 2008

Leaving Hard Time Behind
Foundations lead effort to change juvenile-justice systems

By Caroline Preston

When Emily Tow Jackson first started talking to leaders of local youth organizations in the late 1990s
about supporting their efforts to improve the Connecticut juvenile-justice system, many were skeptical that a grant maker wanted to get involved.

"They thought a foundation wouldn't be interested," says Ms. Jackson, executive director of the Tow Foundation, in Wilton, Conn. "They could get people to fund programs for elementary-school kids, or for SAT-prep classes, but there wasn't much history of foundations funding those really down-and-dirty issues."

But over the past eight years, the Tow Foundation and its grantees have won a string of victories in their efforts to persuade the state that sending kids to prison is not necessarily the best way to reduce crime.

The fund helped convince state legislators to design a plan to improve the two agencies that oversee the juvenile-justice system, and last year, along with the Campaign for Youth Justice, in Washington, and other allies, it won approval of legislation that raises to 18 the age at which children in Connecticut are automatically tried as adults.

The foundation now supports programs to reduce the number of children who are sent before judges because of misdemeanors they commit in schools, among many other projects.

$100-Million Effort

Those successes are part of a growing effort by grant makers to find new ways to help young people who get in trouble with the law. In recent years, a handful of local and national grant makers, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Eckerd Family Foundation, have produced research and financed model efforts that emphasize rehabilitation, rather than harsh punishment.

Preliminary successes from those projects prompted the MacArthur foundation, in Chicago, to allocate $100-million through 2012 to efforts to overhaul the juvenile-justice system in four states and examine how mental-health problems, racial injustice, and poverty can increase a young person's chances of ending up in prison.

Meanwhile, the Open Society Institute, in New York, and other grant makers are trying to end life-without-parole sentences for people under the age of 18, following a 2005 Supreme Court decision that struck down the death penalty for juveniles.

And the Annie E. Casey Foundation, in Baltimore, continues to expand a program it pioneered in 1992 to reduce the number of children who are detained.

"I'm not prone to optimism, but it may be the case that we're poised to demonstrate really fundamental change in juvenile justice in ways that we haven't seen in a hundred years," says Bart Lubow, who leads the Casey foundation's program for troubled youngsters.

Other grant makers are taking note. The number of foundations that receive information on juvenile-justice issues through the Youth Transition Funders Group, a network of grant makers focused on youth issues, has grown to 37, three times as many as in 2003.

Deborah Leff, president of the Public Welfare Foundation, in Washington, said she decided in 2007 to make criminal and juvenile justice one of three key causes the foundation supports because she was heartened by the success of advocacy efforts like the one last year in Connecticut.

"When you're a mid-sized foundation, you look for opportunities where an injection of funds can make a difference," she says. "Our grantees saw enormous opportunities for change."

Challenging Cause

Compared with many causes, however, the number of foundations that make grants to juvenile-justice groups is still relatively small. Grant makers provided about $191-million for crime, justice, and legal issues in 2006, according to the Foundation Center, only a portion of which went to juveniles. (That money includes not just efforts to change the judicial system but also programs to improve public safety, among many other causes.)

Some foundation leaders say that the complexities of juvenile-justice grant making may dissuade others from stepping in. The cause requires foundations to work closely with governments, which can be challenging as political views of officeholders change. What's more, juvenile offenders rarely pull at people's heart strings.

"This isn't a population that people have a lot of sympathy for," says Robert Crane, president of the JEHT Foundation, in New York. "If you have a choice between funding a program in a school for underserved kids who are working really hard to succeed in their lives and funding criminal-justice work, justice work is a hard sell."

Yet advocates say that the urgency of juvenile-justice work was laid bare in February with the publication of a study by the Pew Center on the States. The report found that the United States imprisons more people than any other country, with 1.6 million people, or 1 in 100 American adults, serving time behind bars. Many nonprofit and foundation leaders say the failures of juvenile facilities have contributed to those high incarceration rates among adults.

"As a country, we believe that the practice of imprisonment, and the threat of imprisonment, deters crime," says Mr. Lubow. "And yet we're the country with the most people locked up and the highest crime rates."

The MacArthur foundation, in particular, has been key to supporting research that undermines the notion that hard time reduces juvenile crime.

The Chicago grant maker started supporting juvenile-justice research in 1996, the same year that John DiIulio (then a Princeton University professor), along with other criminologists, published a book predicting that bands of hardened young "superpredators" would drastically increase the levels of youth violence in the United States. Such warnings prompted a wave of legislation that made it easier to prosecute adolescents as adults.

Those measures led MacArthur to spend $12.6-million on research documenting how young people's brains are less developed than those of adults and how serving time in adult prisons doesn't reduce young people's risk of committing future crimes. In fact, one study found that youths who were punished through the juvenile system were about 60-percent less likely to commit another crime than those who went before adult courts.

Advocates have relied on that research to persuade policy makers and citizens nationwide of the disadvantages of prosecuting young people as adults. The Supreme Court cited the MacArthur-supported research, for example, in its decision three years ago to strike down the death penalty for juveniles.

To build on that research, the MacArthur foundation created a new program, known as Models for Change, that will help four states — Illinois, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Washington — use the research to make changes in their juvenile-justice systems.

The foundation works with a broad array of individuals, including charity leaders, prosecutors, legal advocates, and people in all three branches of government, to build a program that can sustain changes in political administrations and shifting public opinion.

The foundation will also support efforts to d