When Oregon voters jumped on the "get tough on crime" bandwagon in the 1990s by approving Measure 11, they might not have fully understood where it was headed.

Measure 11, which removes the sentencing leeway a judge can give a defendant and imposes mandatory minimum prison terms for certain crimes, has caused Oregon's prison population to swell.

The Department of Corrections estimated that inmates in Oregon prisons will grow by 41 percent because of the measure. This has been particularly hard for Oregon's minority population. African Americans make up nearly 10 percent of the state's prison population, even though they are about 2 percent of the population. Hispanics make up over 12 percent of inmates, while making up only about 10 percent of the general population.

Such a statement would be similar to an environmental or fiscal impact statement, which use existing data to predict how pending legislation will affect the natural world or the state's coffers.

Shields hopes that the bill will make lawmakers and the public aware of the potential for unintended consequences from a change in sentencing policy.

The bill has received a tepid reception so far, which is surprising for a state that prides itself for its tolerance and progressiveness, and recently gave the Democratic Party super majorities in both houses last election,

It passed the House Rules Committee without a recommendation as to passage, with an amendment from the Oregon District Attorneys Association, which would require an additional statement detailing how minorities might be disproportionately affected by a certain type of crime.

"I've got to do some more educating of the body on the bill," said Shields.

One of the issues he says he has encountered has been his fellow legislators' unease with the phrase "racial impact statement."

"You throw the word 'race' around and it freaks people out," he said.

With the legislature set to adjourn later this month it's dubious that Oregon will join four other states that require racial impact statements.

Iowa, a state even more lilywhite than Oregon, passed similar legislation last year, which was championed by the state's only black legislator, Rep. Wayne Ford (D-Des Moines.).

Ford said that Oregon is in a similar situation with Iowa having most of its minority populations in its urban centers. This arrangement might make rural legislators less sensitive to the issue.

But Ford overcame this by calling enough attention to the fact that people of color make up 37 percent of the prison population, although they are less than 8 percent of the general population.

"I think many politicians on both sides of the aisle got sick of this," he said.
http://www.portlandobserver.com/story.asp?record=10139&section=Law%20/%20Politics

In the depths of the worst recession since World War II, California may be giving birth to a new export industry. It's an export in which California appears to have important competitive advantages. And it may be recession-proof.

The export is prison inmates.

Like other economic innovations, this one required a visionary leader
willing to think outside the box. For prisons, it appears to be Gov.
Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. Her state is closing several prisons ­ not, it says, because of the recession but because an innovative re-entry program has sharply cut recidivism.

California's predicament is different. It has 168,000 inmates in a system built for half that number. A judicial panel's tentative ruling has called for the release of as many as 55,000 of those inmates.

Granholm and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had already informally discussed the fact that the two states' predicaments offered the chance for a mutually beneficial relationship. On Monday, Granholm formalized the offer in a letter.

An agreement wouldn't just ease some of California's prison overcrowding. It would also likely save the state money. Our per-inmate cost, $45,000, is the highest in the nation. Michigan's is $32,500 per year. Some of that difference would presumably flow back to the general fund. Sending inmates to the Midwest would also save the jobs of some Michigan prison workers slated to be laid off.

We don't think inmates should be the basis of a long-term export industry for California. Eventually, the state will have to align the number of inmates in its prisons with its capacity to provide them with housing and health care. But in the short run, sending inmates to Michigan could help both states.

In a time of crisis, it's help that neither state is in a position to
refuse.

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/1990757.html

Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of “Methland,” Nick Reding’s unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years in the life of Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear. The ravages of meth, or “crank,” on Oelwein and countless forsaken locales much like it are shown to be merely superficial symptoms of a vaster social dementia caused by, among other things, the iron dominion of corporate agriculture and the slow melting of villages and families into the worldwide financial stew.

“Methland” begins quietly and solemnly, with a ballad of cultural invisibility. Reding, a loyal native of the Midwest who’s frankly sentimental about its past and starkly lucid about its likely future, invites his rushing readers to gaze down at the “flyover country” of America and see not a grid of farms and county roads but a patchwork of failed institutions and aspirations. There’s the hospital, groaning under a load of uninsured patients with ­minimum-wage jobs and maxed-out household budgets. There’s the school, imperiled by dwindling tax receipts and students with ever more grown-up problems. And there, on a street in a district of drab houses not far from the faltering central business district, is a passel of latter-day Tom Sawyers on bikes, riding along not for the summertime heck of it but to shake up batches of low-grade speed contained in plastic soda jugs lashed to their back fenders.

It’s magnificently potent stuff, this meth, whose crudest versions are concocted from a mash of over-the-counter cold pills and flesh-eating bulk industrial chemicals. Just a few grains of it, snorted through scarred nostrils and allowed to saturate stressed synapses, can keep a person awake and going for days. And that’s not an entirely bad thing here, where survival means working harder for less each year, from late shift to day shift, until perception blurs.

Soon, Reding brings us even farther in, introducing a cast of local characters whose trust it must have been a feat to gain, so wobbly and troubled are their lives. Nathan Lein, the crusading county prosecutor, is the 28-year-old son of pious farmers who’s come back to Oelwein to help clean up the meth mess after obtaining degrees in philosophy, law and environmental science. Lein, a big guy, but not quite big enough given the monstrous foes confronting him, is afflicted by a nervous “habit of slowly raising his hand to his face and then rubbing the tip of his nose in one quick motion, as if to remove a stain that only he can perceive.”

Manning another fortress against the siege is Dr. Clay Hallberg, Oelwein’s leading physician and a chain-smoking, trembling alcoholic who likes to swill cheap canned beer in his garage. Oddly, like Lein, he’s an amateur philosopher, given to quoting Kant and reading Chomsky and trying to fit his hometown’s woes — ghoulish orgies of domestic violence, toxic explosions of backyard crank labs, psychotic episodes at Do Drop Inn — into overarching historical patterns. He and Lein share a longing, perhaps even a mania, to achieve an enlightened perspective on decline, if only because it lifts them temporarily out of their harsh grass-roots struggle with its effects.

The effects themselves are hardly abstract. In the tradition of James ­Agee’s writings on Depression-era share-­croppers, Reding displays the faces of the damned in broken-capillary close-ups. In the grisliest passage of “Methland,” which deserves to be quoted at some length so as to convey its hellish momentum, he invites us to share in the torments of Roland Jarvis, a paranoid small-time meth cook, in the Dante-like interlude after the combustion of his improvised home lab (just one of hundreds in the area). “Jarvis looked down and saw what he thought was egg white on his bare arms. It was not egg white; it was the viscous state of his skin now that the water had boiled out of it. Jarvis flung it off himself, and then he saw that where the egg white had been he could now see roasting muscle. His skin was dripping off his body in sheets. . . . He’d have pulled the melting skeins of skin from himself in bigger, more efficient sections but for the fact that his fingers had burned off of his hands. His nose was all but gone now, too, and he ran back and forth among the gathered neighbors, unable to scream, for his esophagus and his voice box had cooked inside his throat.”

Too many scenes of sulfurous agony might chase away the most calloused, ambitious reader, so Reding recounts these nightmares sparingly, surrounding them with stretches of patient journalism tracing the convergence of social vectors that made the meth plague nearly inevitable and its eradication well-nigh impossible. He details, with blunt statistics and apt anecdotes, the vanishing of educated young males from rural Iowa, as well as the butchering of middle-class jobs at the local packing plant.

The agricultural conglomerates that have gobbled up Oelwein and similar farm towns may feed the world, but they starve the folks who work for them, breeding a craving for synthetic stimulants that conveniently sap the appetite while enlarging the body’s capacity for toil. These offal-streaked Dickensian mills are also magnets for desperate immigrant laborers who, in some cases, blaze the smuggling trails that run up into the Corn Belt from Mexico, home to the gang lords who own the superlabs that, increasingly, dominate the meth trade.

“Vicious cycle” is not an adequate term. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, wasted. In the meanwhile, the traffickers fatten in their dens, expanding their arsenals and their private armies, some of whose troops are recruited from the ranks of the pale zombies their business spawns.

A photon of cheer at the end of this grim tunnel emerges toward the end of “Methland” when, thanks to tireless efforts by a new mayor, a shaky economic revitalization succeeds in sprucing up the town and brightening its prospects. At the same time, the embattled Lein and Hallberg manage to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps just as they’re about to plunge over sheer emotional cliffs.

How all are faring in the current downturn isn’t revealed, and perhaps that’s for the good, because readers who’ve followed Reding into the underworld deserve a measure of hope for their devotion. What’s clear is that the golden rolling heartland that Americans used to think symbolized stability beats fitfully and irregularly still and almost certainly remains inclined to seek out sources of chemical optimism. And no one, least of all Reding, who knows what’s what on an intimate, human level as well as on the astral plane of globalism, can tell us where it will all end — only that, all things being equal in an increasingly unequal land, it doesn’t have far or very long to go.

Walter Kirn, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever.”
A version of this article appeared in print on July 5, 2009, on page BR1 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/books/review/Kirn-t.html?_r=1&ref=books

Legislators, government officials, and community organizers called today for changes to the state's criminal records law that they said would help ex-offenders reenter society, including shortening the waiting period to seal records and a simplification of the sealing process.

Supporters of the changes to the Criminal Offender Record Information law, speaking at a State House rally, argued that revisions to the law would help people released from prison to find jobs and housing, reducing recidivism.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino urged immediate action. "Let's do CORI reform this session. Let's get it done now," he said, adding, "I just put a young man to work who spent 15 years in jail."

Under current state law, a criminal record may be sealed after a waiting period of 10 years for a misdemeanor and 15 years for a felony.

Victoria Binney, who attended the rally, said she was arrested for for driving to endanger and possession of marijuana when she was 18. Now, at age 25, she has been unable to find the healthcare job she said she has always wanted because of her record, so she is working as a barber in Worcester. "I've had problems getting mediocre jobs at Blockbuster," she said. "It's been a real big struggle." Under current law, she will have to wait another seven years before her record can be sealed.

The rally included supporters of three CORI reform bills, each with differing details. Governor Deval Patrick filed a bill in May that would reduce the waiting period to seal a record to five years for a misdemeanor and 10 years for a felony. A bill filed in January by Representative Elizabeth Malia, a Democrat from Boston, and Senator Harriette Chandler, a Democrat from Worcester, would reduce the waiting period to three years for a misdemeanor and seven years for a felony. Another bill filed in January by Representative Gloria L. Fox, a Democrat from Roxbury, and supported by Menino, would prevent many employers from inquiring about criminal record information.

Malia and many other speakers argued that CORI reform would provide economic benefits. "Every person without a job requires some kind of state or city resource," she said.

Tommie White, of Worcestor, who attended the rally as a member of EPOCA, Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing Community Advancement, said members of her family who have criminal records have been unable to find jobs. "I can't understand how you can train a man in jail and then you don't open up jobs when they get out," she said. "They're just going to go right back out and do more crime."

Hakim Cunningham, a community organizer for the Boston Workers' Alliance, echoed White. "You get the violence, the crime and the drugs because you have people who can't work who have the time to do the devil's work," he said.

Chandler said she hopes legislators will be able to work together to take the best from each of the three bills. "I think this is the year," she said.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/06/changes_urged_t.html

As a state legislator Hayden was a leading proponent of gang peace efforts, including Homies Unidos, and testified for asylum in the Alex Sanchez case.

The indictment of Alex Sanchez, a revered gangbanger-turned-peacemaker, raises new doubts about whether the Los Angeles police department has reformed sufficiently to be released from a federal court order.

In more immediate terms, the Sanchez case repeats the history of a decade ago, when the same charges were hurled by the LAPD and a federal anti-gang task force, that Sanchez's community-based violence prevention work was only a "front" for ties to Mara Salvatrucha, the feared immigrant street gang that arose after the 1970s Central American wars.
The Rampart scandal, named after a police precinct in the immigrant Pico-Union neighborhood, erupted in the late 1990s when a corrupt police officer, Rafael Pérez, began testifying to widespread police criminality after being caught selling cocaine out of his locker room. The US Justice Department charged a pattern and practice of constitutional violations, including shootings, brutality and planting of evidence. Sanchez was targeted for deportation by the LAPD and INS in January 2000, months after testifying publicly about police harassment of community peace workers. As the scandal mounted, federal prosecutors chose not to prosecute him for illegal entry to the US, where his 2-year old son and family lived, but turned the case over to an INS court. On July 10, 2002, the INS judge granted him political asylum, the first such verdict in history.
Since those days, Sanchez has built Homies Unidos, a transnational gang peace organization from the US to El Salvador. Its hazardous work centers on trying to prevent gang violence and open alternative paths for young people, including art therapy, spiritual exercises, education, rehabilitation, training and job development. Alex became a beloved figure in the community, making endless presentations before wider audiences around the country. His activity spawned enemies in the gang world, and never satisfied the LAPD and federal war-on-gangs units' desire to retaliate against one who caused them unprecedented embarrassment.
The escalating war against Mara Salvatrucha provided prosecutors the opportunity. The use of federal racketeering and conspiracy laws is the favored prosecution tool in this war, charging large numbers of alleged MS members with operating a large top-down enterprise with a board of directors and finding them guilty of conspiracy instead of trying them on individual counts of drug-dealing or violence. Alex Sanchez is named in the indictment as one of four "shot-callers" in the Normandie neighborhood in Pico-Union. He therefore is held accountable for the crimes of anyone who can be connected with the organization. The indictment includes 153 overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy to violate the racketeering laws.
Fifty-six of the overt acts consist of street-corner drug sales to undercover FBI informants. The serious counts include eight murders and one murder plot, five of them occurring between 2001 and 2003. Instead of bringing murder charges in individual cases, where evidence might be difficult to accumulate, the defendants need only to be "associated" with the conspiracy to be found guilt.
Alex Sanchez is accused of being heard on wiretapped phone calls on May 6 and 7, 2006, in which several members of MS "conspired" to kill Walter Lacinos, whose street name was Cameron. On May 15, an alleged MS member killed Cameron in La Libertad, El Salvador.
To illustrate the nature of the charge, imagine that the following conversation took place: First party: That dude should be shot. Second party: No question.
In an ordinary criminal trial, it would be difficult to connect these words to an actual deed one week later. There would be evidence, for example, that all kinds of people wanted Cameron dead. He was deported to El Salvador after serving at least fifteen years in California state prisons as a high-ranking gang member. He had enemies as well as friends. But in the conspiracy model, it is easier for the prosecution to "prove" that the wiretapped voices are people who "conspired" in his death.
This example is purely hypothetical. The government has not released the actual content of the tapes, nor a list of its witnesses, nor any of the documents it will be compelled to hand over to the defense at trial.
Alex Sanchez denies the charges.
Most gang researchers and defense attorneys are critical of RICO and state laws like California's Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act. Malcolm Klein, considered the dean of gang research at the University of Southern California, thinks the notion of vertically organized cartels with an Al Capone at the top makes no sense.
"These [federal] agencies know and understand organized crime. They do not know street gangs. They often assume the two are similar, when in fact they are not.... Calling each kind of group a gang leads to the application of cartel thinking to street gangs" (Klein,The American Street Gang, Oxford, 1995, p. 167).
Even more dismissive is Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit who works directly with street gang members in Homeboy Industries, the most well-known organization of its kind in the country, from whose June 28 e-mail I quote here:

This is all heartbreaking, I've sent a letter for the granting of bail.... A New York Times reporter called me and what they think they have is a "gang interventionist gone bad" story. I've told two reporters here's your story: law enforcement is unable to interpret what they have.

There is a gulf between what they have [wiretap evidence, witnesses] and what they think they have. The FBI could multiply their tools and resources and this still would not issue in actual knowledge of how gangs think or operate.

I spoke to two MS members who I trust and who would tell me the unvarnished truth about Alex. They actually hadn't heard the news. I said, "They claim that Alex is the shot caller for the Normandie clique of MS." They laughed and deemed the whole thing ridiculous. They would have told me otherwise if it was true. I didn't need affirmation in this but it just underscores my point. Law enforcement will never have access or knowledge of this issue. But they see through a glass darkly and so Alex gets caught up in their ignorance.

Just yesterday, a homie who works for me, gets stopped by Hollenbeck cops, who tell him, "I know for a fact that Fr. Greg is affiliated with the Mexican Mafia." A month ago, a cop tells another homie that the Mexican Mafia holds meetings at Homegirl Cafe (Chief Bratton has his Tues. morning meeting at the Homegirl Cafe every week--but I don't know when the EME has their meetings at my place.)

They aren't just trying to discredit me--I think they believe this stuff--because they know very little about gangs, and so have to interpret what they see from a place of real ignorance. Yet every jury and judge in the land think law enforcement (and of course, the FBI,) know what they're talking about. But no one who lives in any of the 12 hot-zones in LA think cops know very much about this. Anyway--it's complex. The cops must force the square peg into the round hole. It's not a conspiracy to get Alex, it's what happens when you only possess half the pieces to the jigsaw puzzle and feel forced to assert that they have all the pieces.

Later I received a follow up e-mail from the priest:

You know me--I'm not much of a conspiracy buff--it requires so much sophistication. Cops don't possess this. All of this is cultural--a bias and predisposition, a by-product of wholesale demonizing. Which is to say, it's worse than a conspiracy.

Had mass at the Chino YTS last night--again, illuminating to speak to MS guys. They were very clear about Alex's role in the community and how he was, in fact, the opposite of "shot caller" for MS. If he is the shot caller, why do all his troops not know it?
All this raises severe questions about whether--and how--the LAPD has been reformed, almost a decade after agreeing to terminate its patterns and practices about rampant constitutional violations at Ramparts.

Posted: 06/28/2009

Solano County's parolee re-entry program will cease operations Wednesday.

"It's completely over with," said Tony Pearsall, executive director of Fighting Back Partnership, which runs the program.

Founded three years ago on a $600,000 state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation grant, the parolee re-entry program provided skills training, case management and support for about 900 parolees released into Solano County.

The program's closure will result in the loss of three staff members. About 200 parolees will still be in the program when it shutters Wednesday.

"It's sad, because with everything else that's working against us, this one thing gives us hope that somebody out there is willing to work with us," said Peter Duena, 36, one of the 200 parolees still in the program.

When Duena was released from a four-year stint in prison, he spent a year looking for a job with no luck. But after being introduced to the parolee

re-entry program's basic building trades program, Fighting Back Partnership was able to secure Duena temporary contract work with the city of Vallejo.

"They're showing us that there are people out there that care and help us go straight," Duena said, adding that the re-entry program was his last
Advertisement
hope.

Pearsall and other Fighting Back leaders contend that the parolee program is successful because only 20 percent returned to prison since 2007. The corrections department reports 52 percent of parolees returned to prison within two years after being released in 2006.

It costs $44,000 a year to incarcerate one prisoner, which amounts to millions of dollars in savings for the state, Pearsall said.

"It just doesn't make any sense, but I guess (the state doesn't) look at the back-end savings. They have to look at the front-end costs in trying to balance the state budgets," said John Allen, Fighting Back Partnership member who works closely with the parolees.

Pearsall and Allen will try one last time to save the program by pleading their case in front of the county Board of Supervisors early this week.

Parolees often struggle with barriers when released from prison, including a negative reputation among the public. At one point Pearsall, a former Vallejo police captain, shared those views.

"I never even contemplated a program like this would exist, nor did I contemplate at all, from a police point of view, that these parolees would be ones that are successful in the program and not re-offend," Pearsall said, describing the parolee sweeps the police department and parolee officers would do to arrest offenders.

The re-entry program takes parolees away from the same environments that led them to prison, said Pearsall, who also noted that other factors besides environment played into the initial offense.

"It takes you away from the drugs. You have to give 100 percent to this program .... If you're not serious, don't bother," Duena said.

Both Pearsall and Allen described the 200 employees in the program as devastated.

"It's kind of a sense of abandonment, I guess .... They're resigned also to the fact that stuff like this happens, but it's kind of like getting the rug pulled out from under your feet .... In a way, we're casting them adrift," Allen said.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_12707340?nclick_check=1

With budgets tight, states and local governments have been looking at prisons — and prison food — as a place to save money. Three days a week, Georgia now serves inmates only two meals. And across the country, there have been increasing reports of substandard food. This is inhumane. Adequate meals should be a nonnegotiable part of a civilized penal system. It is also bad policy. Researchers have found a connection between poor food quality and discipline problems and violence.

Georgia has nevertheless decided to save on staff costs by serving just two meals on Friday, as it already did on Saturday and Sunday. The state says it gives prisoners the same number of calories on days when one meal is skipped. Even if it does — and some prisoners’ advocates are skeptical — it can be oppressive to go so long without eating.

In Alabama earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the Morgan County sheriff locked up in his own jail for contempt for failing to adequately feed his inmates. Alabama allows sheriffs to keep food money they do not spend, and the sheriff reportedly pocketed more than $200,000 over three years.

Prisoners’ rights advocates say they are receiving an increasing number of complaints from inmates nationwide who report being served spoiled or inedible food or inadequate portions. Earlier this year, a riot at Reeves County Detention Center in Texas caused heavy damage to a prison building. Inmates said it was prompted in part by poor food.

Cutbacks in food could violate inmates’ constitutional rights, notes Elizabeth Alexander, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, if they create a substantial risk of serious harm — a particular concern for inmates with diabetes and other illnesses.

If states and localities want to save money on corrections, they should reduce their prison and jail populations. The United States, which has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has almost one-quarter of its prisoners. Many are in for nonviolent crimes that could be punished in more constructive, and less costly, ways. If governments decide to put inmates behind bars, they have to give them adequate food — which means no less than three healthy meals a day.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 29, 2009, on page A20 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/opinion/29mon2.html?_r=1&hpw

Granholm sent a letter to California Gov. Arnold Schwarznegger after speaking to him personally, in which she called the offer an “opportunity (that) has great potential and could be mutually beneficial.” Granholm said several empty facilities and soon-to-be-vacated prisons in Standish and Muskegon could be available.

California faces the prospect of being forced to release tens of thousands of inmates to ease overcrowding, even as it addresses a $24.3 billion deficit.

Granholm’s letter said terms of a prison space sharing plan could be worked out in negotiations.
http://www.freep.com/article/20090629/NEWS06/90629052/Granholm+offers+prison
+space+for+Calif.+inmates

Mass. prison system overcrowded; Patrick aims to fix it
By Dan McDonald/Daily News staff
The MetroWest Daily News
Posted Jun 28, 2009
FRAMINGHAM —

The prison system in the state is overtaxed, and MCI-Framingham is no different.

As of last week, the Southside prison held 593 inmates - its capacity is 452.

The state system is at 146 percent capacity, state Public Safety Secretary Kevin Burke said. While the state considers creating "better space" inside the prison, "There isn't anyone you talk to who says we can build our way out of this."

Gov. Deval Patrick's administration is pushing reform that allows for a loophole letting prisoners opt to spend more time in jail and avoid parole supervisions upon release.

Some prisoners chose that option, which Burke's office says bogs down the system and causes higher recidivism rates.

More than 500 prisoners annually who are up for parole choose to stay in prison for the length of their terms, so that when they get out there is no parole supervision.

"It sounds strange, but it does happen. Whatever the reason, we've got to get those folks under supervision," Burke said.

All told, 965 inmates left correctional institutions unsupervised in 2008 because of sentencing restrictions, institutional behavior that precludes parole, or inmates opting to stay in prison for more time to avoid supervision.

The lack of parole is problematic for several reasons, state officials say.

The presence of inmates in the system taxes an already stretched prison system at a higher cost to the taxpayer. It costs $2,500 to supervise a person through parole, while it costs about $43,000 annually to incarcerate someone. And unsupervised transitions from prison lead to more crime and more victims, as an ex-inmate without parole supervision is twice as likely to go back to prison than a released inmate who goes on parole.

With the state taking away the option of doing more time for no post-release supervisions, "consequently we free up beds," Burke said.

The Patrick administration wants to make the matter a non-issue by requiring mandatory supervision for all who serve a state prison sentence equal to 25 percent of their sentence, with a minimum of nine months parole and a maximum of five years parole.

The governor is also taking aim at another prison reform that could shorten sentences and free up room inside the prisons.

State law hinders those nonviolent inmates serving mandatory minimum time for drug offenses to participate in work release-like programs, according to Burke's office.

But Patrick's administration wants to have those imprisoned to mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes to be eligible for parole after serving two-thirds of their maximum sentence.

The mandatory minimum sentences, in some cases cause nonviolent criminals to serve a sentence that is "disproportionate to the risk that these individuals pose to the community," according Burke's office.

As of Jan. 1, 26 percent of prisoners in the state system were imprisoned for drug offenses. Of MCI-Framingham's nearly 600 inmate population, 24 percent are there because of drug-related crimes.

"Mandatory drug sentences don't allow us to be as smart as we can be," he said. "Public safety shouldn't come with a price tag, but we should be smart."
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x768070128/Mass-prison-system-overcrowded-Patrick-aims-to-fix-it?view=print

JACKSON, Miss. -- There are 11 county/regional jails scattered around Mississippi. With them, the Mississippi Department of Corrections has created its own cottage industry.

Locally, the prisons provide lockups for offenders, jobs for local residents and a free labor force for public works projects. So popular are they that at least three more could open within the next year.

The question is, does the state need the beds? Yes, says Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps.

"If you need a jail, what better way to get it than sign a 20-year agreement with the state?" Epps said. "The reason you want as many state inmates as you can get is because we are going to pay you $29.74 per inmate per day plus we pay medical expenses."

What about the free labor?

"These guys do things that you can't pay people to do - putting asphalt into holes, unstopping sewer lines, painting the courthouse."

Epps said another thing is important.

"You'll see that they are not wealthy counties and mostly rural places. These places did not have an approved jail. They've got one now," he said.

Chickasaw County broke ground earlier this year on its regional facility, which is to have 300 inmates, about 240 from the state.

Sheriff Jimmy Simmons said at the groundbreaking that the facility was a welcome addition.

Simmons said that the state's contracted guarantee of inmate reimbursement will effectively pay for the facility.

"We're going to have to have it and rather than spending taxpayers' money, we're actually saving taxpayers money," the sheriff said.

Statewide, the 11 regionals average about 277 inmates each. Epps said there are more at Bolivar and Kemper facilities.

Washington, Alcorn and Yazoo counties are in the process of bidding on regional jails. Hinds County recently scrapped its regional jail plan. A 75-bed expansion at Kemper County for female inmates will open this summer.

Epps said he will spend $34 million for regional facilities during the new fiscal year, which begins Wednesday.

Even though the overall inmate numbers are down about 600 from a year ago and lawmakers have approved new laws to reduce the population, Epps said he needs the beds at the regional facilities.

Epps said a state prison in Greene County is about 1,000 inmates over capacity, and one in Rankin County is 400 over capacity. That, he said, puts a strain on the infrastructure.

"If Yazoo, Alcorn, Chickasaw and Washington were ready, I could fill them from just downsizing those two. Our facilities are tearing up real badly. When you are over capacity, you're killing your facilities. Your bathrooms, showers, washers and dryers ... weren't built for that. You can't keep running them like this," he said.

Epps has applications from 16 other counties for regional jails. While he knows they don't have money to build their own jail, he doubts any more regional prisons will be approved soon.

"I have to be a good steward of taxpayer money. I can't farm out inmates when I have spaces for them. That's why I am telling them they need to look at building a jail," Epps said.
http://www.sunherald.com/218/story/1441770.html

For most of her adult life, 48-year-old Marcia Powell was invisible. Then she died, and slowly came into view.

If you were required in school to read H.G. Wells' science fiction masterpiece "The Invisible Man" you'll recall that the troubled scientist called Griffin formulated a recipe for invisibility that, we learn tragically, wears off after death.

As it turns out, the same holds true in real life.

Today, At Shadow Rock United Church of Christ in Phoenix, Powell will be laid to rest. She was a troubled adopted girl when she first ran away from home in California.

She showed early signs of mental illness. But as a young adult with no family – or at least none that wanted any part of her – “treatment” took the form of self medication by way of everything from alcohol to methamphetamine. To pay for it, she became a prostitute.

Mental illness is not a crime. Most of those who suffer from the disease are able to keep it under control and function perfectly well with the help of doctors and prescription drugs.

Powell and many others are not as fortunate.Left on their own they spiral into homelessness, petty crime or worse. After offering oral sex to an undercover police officer in exchange for a few dollars Marcia Powell found herself in what has become one of Arizona's largest de facto mental health facilities – state prison.

It wasn't the first time she was behind bars. Or the second. Or the tenth. Powell had been in and out of jail for decades, all of which went unnoticed by you and me. She and those like her roam our streets, alleys, parking lots and city parks in plain view but unseen, shrouded by their delusions and our indifference.

All of which changed for Powell when she was placed in a cage-like outdoor enclosure at the prison in Perryville and left to cook for four hours. Invisible. Forgotten.

It was only after she fell into a coma and died that any of us learned she had been alive. Even now, as the Department of Corrections investigates what went wrong, it is the manner of her death that concerns us. Not her life.

Ken Heintzelman, pastor at Shadow Rock, told me, “It's unfortunate that it sometimes take a spiritual kick in the pants to make us stop and see what is going on. Maybe through Marcia we can address some of the systematic things that caused this to happen to her. It's more than simply about this one person. It's about what kind of society we want to be.”

The Maricopa County Public Fiduciary's office spent weeks trying to find relatives of Powell. The only family members they found were even less interested in her after death than they had been while she was alive.

So burying Powell fell to some good-hearted local people, including folks at Shadow Rock, at EncantoCommunityChurch, at Hansen's Mortuary and at the fiduciary's office. Most, like Donna Hamm, executive director of Middle Ground Prison Reform, only heard of Powell after she was gone. While helping to plan Powell's funeral Hamm told me, “We believe that Marcia deserves a little dignity, something she didn't get while alive.”

If all goes according to plan, Powell's cremated remains will be placed in a niche at Shadow Rock sometime around dusk on Sunday.

The church is located south of Thunderbird Road on Eighth Avenue. The desert landscape rises up like a wave behind the building, cresting at the edge of an unending sky. It's an open, airy place. No prison cells. No barbed wire. No cages.

(Column for June 28, 2009, Arizona Republic)
Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 11:16 PM
http://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/EJMontini/56354
This and other outrageous but true stories about women and mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/
Additional news stories about Marcia Powell's death can be found on the blog.

State District Judge Tom Yeager then sentenced the five, standing quietly surrounded by their lawyers, to seven days unsupervised probation and fined $500. It was a far less severe end to their cases than seemed possible when the six students — all of whom are black — were initially charged with attempted murder in the 2006 attack on Justin Barker, a white classmate. They became known as the "Jena Six," after the central Louisiana town where the beating happened.

"I just thank God that it's all over," said John Jenkins, father of Carwin Jones. "It's been a long, painful journey for everyone on both sides of this thing."

Barker and his family and friends sat without expression throughout the hearing. Barker's attorney said he graduated and is now an oil field worker. The family did not comment.

As part of the deal, one of the attorneys read a statement from the five defendants in which they said they knew of nothing Barker had done to provoke the attack.

"To be clear, not one of us heard Justin use any slur or say anything that justified Mychal Bell attacking Justin nor did any of us see Justin do anything that would cause Mychal to react," the statement said.

The statement also expressed sympathy for Barker and his family, and acknowledged the past 2 1/2 years had "caused Justin and his parents tremendous pain and suffering, much of which has gone unrecognized."

Barker spent several hours in the emergency room after the attack, but was discharged and attended a school event the next night.

By pleading no contest, the five do not admit guilt but acknowledge prosecutors had enough evidence for a conviction. LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters said in a statement that he could have won convictions but wanted to end the matter for Barker.

Charges against Jones, Jesse Ray Beard, Robert Bailey Jr., Bryant Purvis and Theo Shaw had previously been reduced from attempted murder to aggravated second-degree battery. All but Shaw were assessed $500 in court costs. The judge did not tack that punishment on to Shaw's case because he stayed in jail for almost seven months, unable to raise bail, following his initial arrest.

Each paid the fine and court costs immediately. The payment of restitution to Barker was also part of the deal, but the amount was not released. A lawsuit filed by Barker against the group was also settled Friday, though the terms were confidential.

The only member of the group to serve jail time was Bell, who pleaded guilty in December 2007 to second-degree battery and was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

Four of Friday's defendants have graduated from high school, and all are attending or getting ready to attend college. Purvis has completed his first year and Bell is planning to attend college this fall. Beard is a senior in high school in Connecticut.

"They can move along with their lives," said Bailey's attorney, James Boren. "And because there are no felonies they can look forward to full lives ahead."

The severity of the original charges brought widespread criticism and eventually led more than 20,000 people to converge in September 2007 on the tiny town of Jena for a major civil rights march. Some $275,000 was raised to hire a large defense team for the six, said Beard's attorney, David Utter.

Racial tensions at Jena High School reportedly grew in the months before the attack. Several months prior to the attack, nooses were hung in a tree on the campus, sparking outrage in the black community. Residents said there were fights, but nothing too serious until December 2006 when Barker was attacked.

"Everybody pointed a finger at Jena during this, but this happens to African-American males across the country," Utter said. "These young men were lucky that people cared and donated money so they could afford good attorneys. That made the difference."

Standish City Manager Michael J. Moran III attended the vigil and said he is still optimistic that Gov. Jennifer Granholm will meet with city and state officials to discuss the closing of the prison.

"Hopefully we can give her enough reason to reconsider her executive order," Moran said. "If not, we feel that we have other options we can discuss with her."

He said the mood at the vigil was different than that of the rally that took place at the same church June 12.

"It was more of a formalized religious experience in a way," Moran said.

The Rev. James Fitzpatrick organized the vigil as well as a petition that collected nearly 8,000 signatures and the rally to try and urge Granholm to change her mind about closing the prison, Standish's largest employer.

http://www.correctionsone.com/corrections/articles/1849627-Prison-backers-turn-to-prayer-to-save-closing-facility/

ARIVACA, Ariz. — “Somebody just came in and shot my daughter and my husband!” the woman shouted to the 911 dispatcher. “They’re coming back in! They’re coming back in!”

Arivaca finds itself a town both terrified and angered.

Multiple gunshots are then heard on a tape of the call.

The woman, Gina Gonzalez, survived the attack after arming herself with her husband’s handgun, but both he and their 10-year-old daughter died.

The killings, last month, have terrified this small town near the Mexican border, in part because the authorities have now tied them to what they describe as a rogue group engaged in citizen border patrols.

The three people arrested in the crime include the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a Washington State-based offshoot of the Minutemen movement, in which citizens roam the border looking for people crossing into the country illegally. Former members describe the group’s leader, Shawna Forde, 41, as having anti-immigrant sentiments that are extreme, at times frightening, even to people accustomed to hard-line views on border policing.

“There was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location,” said Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, since, he said, Ms. Gonzalez’s husband, Raul J. Flores, had previously been involved in narcotics trafficking, an assertion the family denies.

A Pima County public defender representing Ms. Forde had no comment on the case. Nor did lawyers for the other suspects, Jason E. Bush, 34, and Albert R. Gaxiola, 42. All three remain in custody, charged with first-degree murder, assault and burglary.

Merrill Metzger, who worked for the group for six months just as it was getting started in 2007, said Ms. Forde had often traveled from Washington to Arizona with weapons. In March, while stopping over at his home in Redding, Calif., she presented a plan for the group to undertake, Mr. Metzger, her half-brother, said in a telephone interview.

“She was sitting here talking about how she was going to start an underground militia and rob drug dealers,” he said.

Mr. Metzger quit the group, alarmed, he said, by a number of things, including Ms. Forde’s demand for extreme loyalty, right down to the choice of cuisine.

“I had to take an oath, and part of the oath was that I couldn’t eat Mexican food,” he said. “That’s when red flags went up all over for me. That seemed like prejudice.”

Another former member, Chuck Stonex, a retired independent contractor, said Ms. Forde had talked about buying a ranch near Arivaca and building a compound. He said that in October, he took an excursion with her into the desert north of here, where, wearing camouflage and carrying handguns and rifles, they searched for illegal immigrants.

“It’s just like hunting,” Mr. Stonex said, describing the tracking skills the group used. “If you’re going out hunting deer, you want to scout around and get an idea what their pattern is, what trails they use.”

Mr. Stonex said he treated one of the suspects, Mr. Bush, for a flesh wound the day of the attack on Ms. Gonzalez’s family. Ms. Gonzalez had presumably shot Mr. Bush in warding off the attackers, but, Mr. Stonex said, the wound did not raise his suspicions, because, he said, Ms. Forde offered what seemed a plausible explanation: “They’d been jumped by border bandits.”

“They were very relaxed, having casual, normal chitchat,” he recalled.

Small numbers of Americans have always viewed border patrolling as a patriotic duty, but the most recent incarnation — the Minutemen movement, which takes its name from citizen militias formed during the Revolutionary War — gained steam in 2005, when hundreds of volunteers flocked to border locations.

Their patrols initially drew praise from some political leaders, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, but also raised concerns that the activities were thin veils for racism and xenophobia. Over time, the movement has also suffered from infighting, with some groups, like Ms. Forde’s, advocating increasingly confrontational tactics while others have simply monitored the border and reported illegal crossings to the authorities.

Pima County Sheriff’s Office

Gilbert Mungaray, 80, says he “can’t imagine why” his grandson and great-granddaughter were killed.

Since the killings here, members of some better-known groups involved with the movement have scrambled to disassociate themselves from Minutemen American Defense. Others had begun doing so well beforehand. The 750-member San Diego Minutemen, for instance, started warning people on its Web site in January to avoid Ms. Forde.

According to Ms. Gonzalez’s 911 call, the killers arrived shortly after midnight on May 30, dressed in uniforms resembling those of law enforcement personnel. They told the family that they were looking for a fugitive. Actually, the authorities say, the three suspects believed that Ms. Gonzalez’s husband, Mr. Flores, 29, was holding both drugs and money at their remote home.

Sheriff Dupnik has said there is ample drug activity between here and the border. The suggestion has angered the residents of Arivaca, a town of retirees, artists and working people about 50 miles south of Tucson. “This is a good town,” said Fern Loveall, 76. “It’s a good place to live, and it’s a good place to raise kids. What they’re saying about it isn’t true.”

Members of Mr. Flores’s family also denied that he had had any connection to the drug trade.

“He was a good guy,” said Gilbert Mungaray, his 80-year-old grandfather. “I know what happened, but I can’t imagine why.”

The family’s house was silent this week. An American flag hung on the porch, and three pink roses adorned the front door. Down a dirt road, at the local community center, a picture of Brisenia, the slain daughter of Mr. Flores and Ms. Gonzalez, had been placed in a frame with a small black ribbon affixed to it.

For the regulars at La Gitana Cantina, a friendly establishment with a mixed clientele of Anglos and Mexican-Americans, emotions have ranged from abject sorrow to rage.

“I’ve had people come into the bar and just put their heads in their hands, and all the sudden they’ve got tears pouring down their face,” said Karen Lippert, a bartender. She added that while Mr. Gaxiola was a local, the two other suspects were not.

“This is not us guys,” she said. “It’s the not the way us guys operate.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/us/27arizona.html?ref=us
This and other outrageous but true news can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/