(On January 22 our friend Ray died on 8 North, the Department of Correction's hospital unit at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain. The Shattuck is a Department of Public Health facility. Hundreds of us have stories about conditions there.)
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An Open Letter to Governor Deval Patrick

(I have chosen this forum for a letter to the Governor as his own website states any mail to him is screened by his assistants and referred to the appropriate department for response. Which in Honest English means the Governor would NEVER see my letter)

Dear Governor Patrick,

Let me introduce myself to you. I am Carmen Gauthier, a “Highest Honors” graduate with a bachelor’s degree in social services. I am a ten year veteran of the Texas Department of Children’s Protective Services. I have never been arrested nor incarcerated in my life. Though I am a practicing pagan, I believe in and strive daily to practice the Christians’ “Golden Rule.” I am also the wife of the late, Raymond Gauthier, con number W45176.

Ah! I am corrected! I see from the press releases that you and MA DOC are indeed industriously working toward that very goal with your Proposed Visitor Procedures and Attorney Access proposals.

Governor Patrick, in all seriousness, what happened? I remember the day you were elected as Governor of the Commonwealth. There was so much happiness and so much hope for a better future for the lowliest of your citizens; the inmates of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. You sir, a person of color, who had to have experienced a least some of the ignorant bigotry of prejudice; you sir, who not only was the first in your family to attend college, but attended Harvard. Harvard! You sir, who served as a law clerk with the NAACP and became the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. You were my hope and my husband’s hope, as well as all the family and friends and inmates who suffered unjustly the cruelties and whims of MA DOC employees.

We weren’t asking for a Sunday picnic or tennis courts or gourmet meals. What we were asking for our loved ones was common, human decency. For adequate medical care. For fair treatment. For clean facilities. For nutritious meals. And what you gave us was Harold Clarke.

Harold Clarke, infamous Secretary of Nebraska Dept of Corrections, during the Nebraska state Ombudsman’s Office’s 1999 report which found the prison health delivery system wanting in “every aspect”. Since Mr. Clarke has been Commissioner, I personally know of two cases of MA DOC medical malpractice resulting in deaths: Edward Tavares and my husband, both incarcerated at NCCI-Gardner. Neither of these men was sentenced to death but both received the death penalty.

My husband had been feeling ill for, not days, not weeks, but for MONTHS. Time and time again he was turned away from receiving medical care by the nurse at Gardner. His chronic care appointment was unduly delayed. And by the time he was in so much pain that he couldn’t stand or walk, it was too late. He had Stage Four Lung Cancer which had spread to his spine and liver. His back bone was so riddled with cancer that one of his vertebrae had crushed.

Governor Patrick, you may not like the idea, but as head leader of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you are responsible for every person in prison or jail in Massachusetts as well as the free people of the Commonwealth. When you accepted the job of Governor, you accepted responsibility for every citizen of the state. And you have not delegated authority wisely by appointing Harold Clarke as Commissioner.

Whether or not you were aware of his history while working for Nebraska DOC, you should be aware of the violation of human rights being perpetrated within MA DOC now. It has been brought to your attention and therefore it is incumbent upon you to rectify the situation.

You can not restore Big Ed to his family. You can not restore my husband to me. But you can correct a mistake by having Commissioner Clarke resign immediately. If you do not do this, then truly our hopes were misplaced and your ancestors’ honor has been tarnished.

----Carmen Gauthier February 6th 2010

THERE IS NO safer political bet than supporting legislation to protect children from harm. That bet is tougher when the children in question are juvenile offenders, but it is no less worthy. Virginia lawmakers should muster the courage to endorse two bills that would enhance protections for juvenile offenders.

Senate Bill 585 calls for the state to make lawyers available for periodic consultations with incarcerated juveniles. Minors who are charged with a crime are entitled to state-funded lawyers at trial. But they lose access to these lawyers once they are convicted. The bill proposed by Sen. David W. Marsden (D-Fairfax) would require juvenile court judges "to appoint one or more 'diligent and competent' attorneys" to assist juveniles. These would not be full-time assignments; lawyers in private practice would be tapped by the court and would be paid by the hour to visit designated facilities roughly once a week. These lawyers would also serve as confidential sounding boards about conditions of confinement.

Two Virginia juvenile facilities were recently slammed by the Justice Department for their high rates of sexual abuse; the periodic presence of outside lawyers could encourage youths to report and ultimately deter abuses. The cost of these roving lawyers for the entire state is roughly $50,000 a year -- a remarkably modest sum for a potentially important program.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020404418.html

By Laura Nichols Email
Penn State Collegian Staff Writer

Penn State researchers making end-of-life care for prison inmates are the focus of a $1.27 million grant.

Researchers are using the National Institute of Nursing Research grant to develop a comprehensive toolkit of tailored resources for end-of-life care in prisons, assistant professor of nursing Susan Loeb wrote in an e-mail.

Leaders of the program plan to apply study findings at six different prisons state-wide in an attempt to improve care for inmates reaching the end of their lives, wrote Loeb, the principal investigator for the study.

Though the study is still in the early stages, researchers are quickly learning, said Christopher Hollenbeak, associate professor of surgery and health evaluation sciences and an investigator on the study.

"The real goal of it is to come up with a tool in prisons to improve the quality-of-life care," Hollenbeak said. "We want to provide a toolkit that would be cost-effective as well."

Current end-of-life prison programs only offer limited low-cost medications. One proposed change is the "buddy system," where healthy inmates are paired with a terminally ill inmate to help look out for them, Hollenbeak said.

So far, researchers have visited the Philadelphia prison system for a chance to experience what it is like to be in a prison as an inmate, Hollenbeak said. Researchers are also spending time with the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections in order to understand the prison landscape at all levels, Hollenbeak said.

By Carol J. Williams

February 4, 2010

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy criticized California sentencing policies and crowded prisons Wednesday night, calling the influence that unionized prison guards had in passing the three-strikes law "sick."

"California now has 185,000 people in prison at $32,500 a year" each, he said. He then urged voters and officials to compare that expense to what taxpayers spend per pupil in elementary schools.

"The three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers' union and that is sick!" Kennedy said of the measure mandating life sentences for third-time criminal offenders.

Kennedy wrote the high court's controversial Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission ruling last month and was bombarded with written questions on the 5-4 vote that fundamentally changed campaign spending laws.

But he sidestepped the audience's efforts to draw him out on that decision, which frees corporations -- and presumably unions -- to spend as they wish on campaigns and candidates that were once limited to accepting individual voter contributions.

Kennedy would say only that it was "important to have robust, principled debate after opinions," and suggested that was best left to the legal community.

One questioner asked: "Does Justice Kennedy feel scolded?" It was an apparent reference to President Obama's warning that the ruling opens the door to Big Business drowning out the voices of the electorate with lavish and targeted campaign spending.

"He doesn't," Kennedy said cryptically, spurring laughter throughout the packed auditorium at Pepperdine University's School of Law.
latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kennedy4-2010feb04,0,1430237.story
This and other news about sentencing and mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — As states cut their budgets by closing prisons and diverting some offenders to probation and treatment programs, the federal government is proposing to dramatically ramp up its detention operations.

The Obama administration's $3.8 trillion 2011 budget proposal calls for a $527.5 million infusion for the federal Bureau of Prisons and judicial security — $227 million more than the proposed increase to Justice's national security program. The boost would bring the total Bureau of Prisons budget to $6.8 billion.

Also included in the Justice budget is a proposal to hire 652 additional prison guards and fill 1,200 vacant detention positions, far more than the combined 448 new agents planned for the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and U.S. Marshals Service.

Assistant Attorney General Lee Lofthus says the increased prison system funding does not reflect a de-emphasis of national security, only that the Bureau of Prisons "needs the bed space."

The new budget proposes to fund the operation of two new prisons, including the $237 million purchase and renovation of a supermaximum-security facility in Thomson, Ill. The administration plans to use the prison to house detainees who would be transferred from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when it closes.

The federal spending plan contrasts with the criminal justice strategies pursued in many cash-strapped states, including California, Kansas and Kentucky, where officials have closed prisons or allowed for the early release of some non-violent offenders.

In Kansas, for example, state officials last year closed three prisons and reduced the number of probation violators sent to prison to reduce detention costs.

Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, which advocates alternatives to incarceration, says states have a "greater sense of urgency" to change policy because of their obligations to balance budgets.

"That sense of urgency isn't there at the federal level," Mauer says. "Prison expansion slows the momentum for the reconsideration of some of those policies."

Bryan Lowry, president of the federal prison employees association, says the extra resources still fall short of the need.

The Bureau of Prisons would have to hire 2,426 additional workers to reach 95% of its staffing level in the mid-1990s, according to an analysis by the American Federation of Government Employees.

Lowry says overcrowding and staffing shortages have been persistent problems, endangering officers and staffers.

Last year, Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley acknowledged that assaults on staff had become "more severe."

"The additional money sounds good, but it's still not enough," Lowry says. "This won't solve the staffing problems that already exist."
graph at http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-02-03-prison-budget_N.htm

Youth prison system under pressure
February 3, 2010
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Three years after a 15-year-old boy died in restraints, the youth prison where he was pinned to the floor is set to be closed.

The shuttering of Tryon Boys Residential Center is due to budget gaps that plague states across the USA — but also is a sign of the intense pressure on New York to improve its deeply troubled juvenile detention system.

Federal investigators found youths in four facilities, including Tryon, were routinely pinned to the ground and handcuffed for infractions as minor as laughing loudly, sneaking a cookie or refusing to get out of bed. The restraints caused concussions, broken teeth and broken bones.

"At this point, it's pretty clear that the change needs to happen, it needs to be pervasive and it needs to happen now," says Legal Aid Society lawyer Tamara Steckler.

In his budget proposal last month, Gov. David Paterson, a Democrat, announced plans to close two facilities named by the Justice Department. That includes Tryon, where Darryl Thompson died in November 2006. In the incident, cited in the federal investigation, aides pinned him facedown and handcuffed him after he repeatedly asked for recreation time.

The economic crunch is forcing New York, like other states, to scrutinize a system that costs it $210,000 per child annually.

"One of the great ironies is that the economic crisis may be accomplishing what advocates like me have been saying for 30 years," says Mark Soler of the Center for Children's Law and Policy, an advocacy group. "It's just too expensive to lock up the kids."

New York's juvenile system, which has 31 residential facilities, is one of the nation's largest, even though New York is one of only two states that charge youths 16 or older as adults. More than half of youths in detention are there because of misdemeanors. More than 80% are black or Hispanic.

The reports and lawsuit have "focused public attention on an area of the juvenile justice system that has gone without scrutiny for years," says Jeremy Travis, head of the task force Paterson formed in 2008.

Common problems

Since 2000, the Justice Department has conducted at least 11 investigations into juvenile facilities in states including California, Indiana, Ohio, Maryland and Oklahoma. Its findings illustrate that the same problems persist: overreliance on physical restraint and insufficient mental health services.

A bill before the U.S. Senate would require states to track the use of restraints in juvenile detention, which some states do voluntarily.

"The research tells us unequivocally" restraint "can result in a child's death," says Tara Andrews of the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, which is lobbying for the bill's passage.

Without reporting requirements, "very often abusive situations do not come to light," Soler says. Though some kids need to be incarcerated "so they don't hurt other people and don't hurt themselves," he says, use of restraints is "excessive."

Other states that have come under federal investigation, including Louisiana, have adopted practices pioneered in Missouri. There, the juvenile system converted to small facilities more like treatment centers than prisons, focused on counseling and stopped the use of restraints. Only 8.6% of youths released from custody are recommitted within three years, the Missouri Department of Youth Services says. In New York, the figure is 45%, the task force says.

"In looking at the national picture, the old model is under serious change," Travis says. "You have places like New York saying, we want to follow (Missouri's) lead and recognizing we're very much stuck in an old corrective punitive model."

'No tolerance'

One of the severest critics of New York's juvenile system is in charge of it. "I don't think that, objectively, anybody who looks at our system and systems across the country can say we are really doing a good job," says Gladys Carrion, OCFS commissioner.

Carrion, appointed in 2007, has installed video cameras in juvenile facilities and reinstituted the office of the ombudsman, which inspects youth prisons. She requires staff to track the use of restraints.

"I personally get a weekly report," she says. "We have no tolerance for this." The harsh reports, she says, are "levers for change."

Carrion has been criticized by juvenile prison employees, who say the facilities are understaffed, they haven't received necessary training, and the agency risks public safety by closing facilities without having adequate community-based programs to accommodate youths.

"You can't just simply do this by fiat, say we're going to have a different model and have it happen," says Stephen Madarasz of the Civil Service Employee Association, which represents youth prison staff.

Travis, the task force head, is "optimistic that there will be some pretty significant change, but it will take a decade," he says. "It took a decade in Missouri; it'll take a decade in New York."

Legal Aid's Steckler says Carrion has made progress, but not enough. "The video cameras and the data reporting has decreased restraints, but it obviously hasn't stopped them." What's needed, she says, is to end the notion that youths in custody are prisoners. "Until that shift occurs ... we're still talking about grown men restraining children."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-02-02-youth-prison-juvenile_N.htm

The New York City Police Department needs to be restrained. The nonstop humiliation of young black and Hispanic New Yorkers, including children, by police officers who feel no obligation to treat them fairly or with any respect at all is an abomination. That many of the officers engaged in the mistreatment are black or Latino themselves is shameful.

Statistics will be out shortly about the total number of people who were stopped and frisked by the police in 2009. We already have the data for the first three-quarters of the year, and they are staggering. During that period, more than 450,000 people were stopped by the cops, an increase of 13 percent over the same period in 2008.

The percentages of stops that yielded weapons were even smaller. Weapons were found on just 1.1 percent of the blacks stopped, 1.4 percent of the Hispanics, and 1.7 percent of the whites. Only about 6 percent of stops result in an arrest for any reason.

Rather than a legitimate crime-fighting tool, these stops are a despicable, racially oriented tool of harassment. And the police are using it at the increasingly enthusiastic direction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

There were more than a half-million stops in New York City in 2008, and when the final tally is in, we’ll find that the number only increased in 2009.

Not everyone who is stopped is frisked. When broken down by ethnic group, the percentages do not at first seem so wildly disproportionate. Some 59.4 percent of all Hispanics who were stopped were also frisked, as were 56.6 percent of blacks, and 46 percent of whites. But keep in mind, whites composed fewer than 16 percent of the people stopped in the first place.

These encounters with the police are degrading and often frightening, and the real number of people harassed is undoubtedly higher than the numbers reported by the police. Often the cops will stop, frisk and sometimes taunt people who are at their mercy, and then move on — without finding anything, making an arrest, or recording the encounter as they are supposed to.

Even the official reasons given by the police for the stops are laughably bogus. People are stopped for allegedly making “furtive movements,” for wearing clothes “commonly used in a crime,” and, of course, for the “suspicious bulge.” My wallet, my notebook and my cellphone would all apply.

The police say they also stop people for wearing “inappropriate attire for the season.” I saw a guy on the Upper West Side wearing shorts and sandals a couple weeks ago. That was certainly unusual attire for the middle of January, but it didn’t cross my mind that he should be accosted by the police.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a class-action lawsuit against the city and the Police Department over the stops. Several plaintiffs detailed how their ordinary daily lives were interrupted by cops bent on harassment for no good reason. Lalit Carson was stopped while on a lunch break from his job as a teaching assistant at a charter school in the Bronx. Deon Dennis was stopped and searched while standing outside the apartment building in which he lives in Harlem. The police arrested him, allegedly because of an outstanding warrant. He was held for several hours then released. There was no outstanding warrant.

There are endless instances of this kind of madness. People going about their daily business, bothering no one, are menaced out of the blue by the police, forced to spread themselves face down in the street, or plaster themselves against a wall, or bend over the hood of a car, to be searched. People who object to the harassment are often threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct.

The Police Department insists that these stops of innocent people — which are unconstitutional, by the way — help fight crime. And they insist that the policy is not racist.

Paul Browne, the chief spokesman for Commissioner Kelly, described the stops as “life-saving.” And he has said repeatedly that the racial makeup of the people stopped and frisked is proportionally similar to the racial makeup of people committing crimes.

That is an amazingly specious argument. The fact that a certain percentage of criminals may be black or Hispanic is no reason for the police to harass individuals from those groups when there is no indication whatsoever that they have done anything wrong.

It’s time to put an end to Jim Crow policing in New York City.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 2, 2010, on page A27 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/02herbert.html?ref=opinion

The Office of the Inspector General is probing allegations that inmates at the California Institution for Men in Chino have been locked in outdoor, cage-like enclosures for extended periods, possibly days.

OIG investigators are assessing recent claims that inmates at the prison’s reception center were held in steel-and-wire pens and exposed to extreme conditions. “It’s not an investigation, but we are conducting a preliminary review,” said Laura Hill, special adviser to Inspector General David Shaw.

Now, reporter Steven Cuevas has added more meat to the allegations in a series airing this week on KPCC. According to Cuevas’s sources, prison staff were using the cages to hold inmates months before the riots because Chino had no place to house new arrivals.

The prison has been operating at more than 150 percent capacity. Cuevas writes: “One former inmate claims he spent a week in an outdoor cage with about 10 other prisoners last March. At night, they slept on the floor of an indoor holding tank with no bunks or running water. The cages and holding tanks aren’t meant to house inmates for more than a few hours.”

Terry Thornton, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said holding tanks were used to house Chino inmates only to help secure the prison after the riot, but no prisoner was denied food, water or medical attention. “It’s simply not true,” Thornton said.
http://www.californiawatch.org/watchblog/probe-examines-whether-chino-inmates-were-locked-cages-days

He is 89 and dying, a former loan shark who, at 69, shot another man dead on a Harlem street in what he claimed was self-defense. Now he is serving a sentence of 25 years to life in a prison hospital bed in this upstate town, riddled with heart disease and probably cancer, though his doctors are not certain about the cancer because Mr. Jones has refused most every medical test.

The law, passed with the state budget last April, expanded the eligibility list to add those convicted of violent crimes including second-degree murder (like Mr. Jones), first-degree manslaughter and sex offenses, so long as the ailing inmates have served half their time.

But despite fanfare within the corrections field about the humanitarian and financial benefits of compassionate release — New York is one of a dozen states that have expanded, enacted or streamlined programs over the past two years — the policy shift has had minimal effect. Experts attribute this to the fear that freed inmates, no matter how sick, might commit further crimes, as well as to the difficulty of placing dying criminals in nursing homes.

“The problem is, when we start trying to put people out, there are others in the community who are sure we’re trying to make more crime in the community,” said Dr. Lester Wright, chief medical officer for the New York State Department of Correctional Services. “We’re also competing for beds. Some people think my patients aren’t as valuable as other people in society.”

The embrace of compassionate release comes as the nation’s prison population is at a historic high — 1.6 million people as of 2008, according to the Justice Department — compounded by a surge in aging and sick inmates serving longer sentences. In 2008, there were 74,100 inmates age 55 and older, a 79 percent increase from 1999. New York estimates the cost of caring for a gravely ill inmate at $150,809 a year.

Once released, they are usually cared for by family members or placed in nursing homes or hospices, their expenses largely covered by Medicare or Medicaid.

But while the new state guidelines led to a rise in applications for medical parole — 202 inmates last year, compared with 66 in 2008 — they have hardly led to more releases. Mr. Jones would, in fact, be the first freed under the new guidelines (the seven inmates released last year were eligible under the old rules).

The National Conference of State Legislatures said 39 states had compassionate release programs, but many of them also have minimal impact.

In California, where federal judges ordered the state to cut the prison population by 40,000, three people were granted compassionate release last year. In Alabama, where prisons are at double their capacity, four sick inmates were let out on compassionate release in the 2009 fiscal year; 35 other prisoners in Alabama died while their applications were being reviewed.

Since New York adopted medical parole in 1992, at the height of the AIDS crisis, 364 people have been released.

“Medical parole was designed to consider the humanitarian needs of inmates as well as the safety of the community,” said Brian Fischer, commissioner of the State Department of Correctional Services. “Anybody can tell us they want medical parole, but the numbers who qualify are going to be a lot smaller than the ones who want it.”

Advocates for prisoners argue that fear of recidivism is unreasonable, especially for convicts close to death. Corrections officials said during the 18 years the program in New York has been in effect, three medically paroled inmates have ended up back in prison, none for violent crimes.

“Politicians and high-level officials and bureaucrats don’t want to be accused of being soft on crime, even if the prisoners are terminally ill and there’s no possible risk to public safety,” said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a prison advocacy group.

Indeed, the release last summer in Scotland of a sick Libyan man convicted in the bombing of an airplane over Lockerbie created an international furor. Last fall, anger over New York’s new law erupted when Gregory Felder, who was convicted of murdering a Radio Shack employee on Long Island in 2004 and is now gravely ill, was considered for parole. (He was turned down; and a legislative loophole that had made him eligible despite having not yet served half his sentence was subsequently closed.)

Other cases have unfolded far from the public glare. Cinderella Marrett, 74, who was caught at Kennedy International Airport in 2007 smuggling cocaine in her girdle — to offset medical expenses, her daughter said — was released in May 2009. Stricken with cancer, she is living in a nursing home in the Bronx.

Since 2005, at least 16 New York inmates have died while waiting for the parole board to decide their fate.

Timothy McGowan, a once-burly high school dropout from Deer Park, N.Y., spent half of his 50 years behind bars for 11 felony convictions, including robbery and second-degree manslaughter. By the time he was thrown back in prison for a parole violation in April 2009, cancer was consuming his lungs, whittling away his body and creeping up his brain stem.

In July, when Mr. McGowan could barely walk, his prison doctors applied on his behalf for compassionate release; his final wish was to have one last cup of tea with his mother in their Long Island home. Instead, he died at the Fishkill Correctional Facility on Nov. 7, two days before the parole board was to hear his case.

Among the prisoners in New York newly eligible but denied release last year was Sergio Black, 38, a former Marine who said he had fought in the first gulf war.

Mr. Black was convicted in 2005 of raping his former companion, which he denied. In 2006, his spinal cord was injured in a prison basketball game. Now a quadriplegic in the Walsh Regional Medical Unit of the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, N.Y., Mr. Black is a “poster boy for medical parole,” according to his lawyer, Stephen Dratch, because it would be difficult for him to commit another physical crime. But the parole board rejected his application, saying Mr. Brown “exhibited little or no insight or remorse for the victim.”

Mr. Jones, the near-nonagenarian and former loan shark known by his hospice aides as the Harlem Knight, was supposed to go before the parole board in December, but the hearing was pushed back twice because the court had not yet sent a transcript from his sentencing. His next scheduled parole date is next month, and he remains bedridden in the hospice at the Coxsackie state prison.

A long-lost niece, Marcy Jones, who lives in Washington, has poured her heart into pushing corrections officials and the governor’s office to grant the parole. She is optimistic enough that she has bought her uncle a new wardrobe and has set up a battery of medical appointments for him.

“Once I get him out, I’m going to advocate for others,” Ms. Jones said. “There are other Uncle Eddies out there.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/nyregion/30parole.html

PHOENIX, Ariz.-- Miriam Mendiola-Martinez, an undocumented immigrant charged with using someone else’s identity to work, gave birth to a boy on Dec. 21 at Maricopa Medical Center. After her C-section, she was shackled for two days to her hospital bed. She was not allowed to nurse her baby. And when guards walked her out of the hospital in shackles, she had no idea what officials had done with her child.

Like Mendiola-Martinez, pregnant inmates in Maricopa County Jail are routinely denied bond because they are undocumented immigrants. That means they can’t get out of jail for their childbirth, even if they are awaiting trial for a minor offense.

Hospital authorities don't control this practice and medical personnel involved in these cases declined to be interviewed.

All hospitalized inmates are treated in the same manner as Mendiola-Martinez, according to Lt. Brain Lee, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. He said she had a “soft restraint” attached on one leg to her bed to prevent escape.

That soft restraint was a 12-foot-long chain.

“I could barely walk, I don’t think I could have escaped or even dared to run. I don’t think there was a need for them to do that,” said 34-year-old Mendiola-Martinez.

She says she was shackled during the two last months of her pregnancy too. Every time she had a pre-natal appointment, she waited in a small un-ventilated room with 20 other women. She had to sit in the floor. The chains were heavy and hurt her waist. Mendiola-Martinez often wept. She feared that her sadness could hurt the baby.

Unequal Justice

Mendiola’s story would have been different if she hadn’t been undocumented. She would have been released on bond before her baby was born because she had committed a non-violent crime, according to David Black, a criminal defense attorney who took her case pro-bono.

But in November 2006, Arizona voters approved a law that denies undocumented immigrants the right to post bail. Proposition 100 was authored by Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, as a way to keep undocumented immigrants who had been charged with “serious crimes” from being released.

The Arizona legislature included among those accusations minor offenses like possession of false documents, which undocumented immigrants frequently use to obtain employment.

The law, which is unique in the nation, is being challenged in the U.S. District Court of Arizona by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on the basis that it violates the Constitution by unjustly denying a select group of people a fair hearing. The lawsuit, however, doesn’t include the cases of pregnant women.

“I think Prop. 100 puts migrant women at a disadvantage and treats them unfairly,” said Bob McWhirter, a senior attorney with the Maricopa Legal Defender’s office.

About 1,500 pregnant women come through the Maricopa County Estrella jail every year. In 2009, 35 of them gave birth while in custody, according to Maricopa Medical Center records. More than 70 percent of the women detained in Maricopa County jails are accused of non-violent crimes and haven’t been sentenced yet. About 11 percent of them are undocumented immigrants. Health and county authorities say they don’t keep records on the immigration status or ethnicity of the women who give birth.

In October 2008, a federal judge ruled that conditions at the Maricopa County Jail, overseen by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, were unconstitutional and jeopardized the health and safety of the prisoners. The judge ordered jail officials to ensure that detainees received proper medical care, medicine and food that complied with federal standards. That same year, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care said the county’s jails did not comply with federal standards due to their failure to submit reports on jail conditions.

More Shackling Cases

Although Mendiola-Martinez’s story is not unique, it is difficult to track how many other women have shared her experience because most of them have been deported. Yet other detainees attest to the poor treatment of pregnant immigrants inside the county jails.

In October 2008, Alma Chacón, an undocumented immigrant arrested during a traffic stop for having outstanding unpaid tickets, delivered her baby in a “forensic restraint,” according to hospital records. Chacón said detention officers shackled her hands and legs during childbirth. She couldn’t nurse or hold her baby until she was released from immigration custody almost 70 days later.

Chacón’s case caught the attention of the federal Department of Justice, which is currently conducting a civil rights investigation into Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office.

The sheriff’s office says it doesn’t have a policy regarding the shackling of pregnant women. Spokesperson Aaron Douglas said they had no intention of changing the practice. But when questioned directly by New America Media about these cases, Arpaio said that everything was done “legally.” Yet, he added, he may consider reviewing the practice.

Still, critics point out that pregnant inmates who have been sentenced to state prison are treated better than inmates who are awaiting their sentencing in Maricopa County jails.

The Arizona Department of Corrections, which oversees state prison inmates, initiated a policy in 2003 that states: “A pregnant women will not be restrained in any manner while in labor, while giving birth, or during the postpartum recovery period.”

In 2008, the Federal Bureau of Prisons barred the shackling of pregnant inmates in federal prisons except when it was necessary for security concerns. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn’t have a specific policy prohibiting their use. But advocates at the Rebecca Project, which is part of a national anti-shackling coalition, said they are in conversation with ICE to put regulations in place.

The practice of shackling women during childbirth is frowned upon by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. They say that shackling women during labor, delivery and post-partum is dangerous to a woman’s health and that of her unborn child.

Maricopa County is not unique in the practice of shackling pregnant women. Only six states in the nation have laws regulating the use of restraints on pregnant inmates: California, Illinois, New Mexico, New York, Texas and Vermont.

Advocates are hoping to include Arizona on the list.

Voces por la Vida, a pro-life group in Phoenix directed by Rosie Villegas-Smith, is leading the charge for anti-shackling legislation.

“Undocumented women are the most vulnerable here because they don’t have a right to be released on bond,” she said.

Villegas-Smith says Arizona lawmakers are endangering the health of women and children in the name of fighting illegal immigration.

“I think a distinction has to be made and some humanity brought into Maricopa County laws, to allow [undocumented] nursing mothers and pregnant women to have their children outside of detention,” said Delia Salvatierra, Mendiola’s immigration attorney.

When contacted by New America Media, Rep. Martha Garcia, D-Phoenix, said she would try to introduce a bill to ban the use of shackling.

“My main concern is that women are traumatized by being shackled and what this does to their babies, too,” said the legislator, who is involved in the public health outreach program Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies.

“It makes me really angry that this is happening in the state of Arizona, because I believe the treatment of immigrants is worse here than anywhere else,” Garcia added.

The issue will be hard to push in the Arizona state legislature. Over the last five years, conservative Republicans have supported a series of anti-immigrant laws, aimed at creating a hostile environment in the state to push migrants out.

The most recently enacted law, House Bill 2008, requires state employees to report immigrants who apply for public benefits to ICE. The law, sponsored by Republican leadership as part of a special session budget package, is causing pregnant immigrant women to be afraid of requesting free pre-natal services and health care.

Humanitarian Release

On Dec. 24, the date of her sentencing, Mendiola-Martinez was brought into the courtroom in a wheel chair, her hands and legs shackled.

“It was never my intention to hurt the victim. Please forgive me and let me go back to my children,” she told the judge. She was sentenced to time served and two years of probation. ICE didn’t take her into custody after her release from jail for “humanitarian reasons,” according to Vincent Piccard, a spokesperson for that agency.

Mendiola-Martinez was able to hold her baby again on Christmas Day. She takes joy in being with him and smiles when she watches him sleep. Secretly, though, she searches his face for any sign that her depression in jail might have had a negative effect on him while he was in her womb. Her children are U.S. citizens, but her future in the country where she’s lived for the past 15 years is still uncertain.

“I wish they would change things,” she said of current immigration laws. “Because when they do this to us, they do it to our children.”

© 2010 New America Media All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145428/

CONCORD – The State Prison population would shrink nearly 20 percent in five years if the state paid for mental health treatment and more intense supervision of high-risk offenders while letting nonviolent offenders get out of jail earlier and face shorter supervision than they do now, a state report finds.

Judges, prosecutors, key state legislators and correction professionals overseeing a three-year study on prison recidivism Monday praised the findings of the Council of State Governments Justice Center’s report.

“These options would change how we think about the size of prison we need to build for offenders in this state,” said Senate President Sylvia Larsen, D-Concord.

To save money on prison spending long term requires spending it now, the authors concede.

For example, it would cost $2.4 million a year to give mental health treatment and rapid drug testing for all high- and medium-risk offenders in the community who need it, the report said.

Serving the high-risk offenders alone would cost $1.3 million, the study said.

Dr. Fred Osher is CSG director of health policy and said community treatment has a more lasting effect on keeping offenders from coming back.

“That’s where the action is,” Osher said.

The report urges that lawmakers spend 50 percent of the millions they would save on additional treatment in the community for offenders with alcohol and drug abuse problems, mental health illnesses or both at the same time.

National studies find that while counseling in prison cuts recidivism by 6 percent, combining that with treatment after release curbs it by 12 percent.

With the state already facing a significant revenue shortfall, some members of the panel asked the authors to list changes that won’t cost any money.

“There is a major cash flow problem we are facing, not just in this biennium but in the next biennium as well,” said state Rep. Neal Kurk, R-Weare.

Attorney General Michael Delaney urged quick action on one item after the report found that after serving maximum prison terms, more than 220 inmates each year were released into the community with no supervision.

Every offender should get at least nine months in the community with a tiered length of supervision depending on the severity of their crime, the study urged.

“These are law enforcement improvements that are long overdue and will make a big difference on the streets in the cities and towns of New Hampshire,” Delaney said.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Broderick said community supports for inmates beyond mental health treatment need to be in place such as housing and available jobs.

“If somebody told me tomorrow I would have no home and no job, how would I do?” Broderick asked rhetorically.

Since 2000, the prison population has grown by 31 percent, but only 3 percent of that growth has come from new offenders committing crimes, said Marshall Clement, project director.

Within three years, more than half (51 percent) of those sent to State Prison return and that rate is above the national average.

Without change, the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies estimates that by 2015, the State Prison population will grow 6 percent to 3,029.

The Department of Corrections says inmate ranks will grow 4 percent over the same time, in part because it set up with legislative support last year a Community Corrections Division to focus more intense supervision on high-risk offenders.

If these recommendations are adopted, the authors claim inmate population will ‘’gradually flatten out’’ and drop 18 percent to 2,340 inmates in 2015.

The report states lawmakers should set a limit on how long nonviolent offenders must remain in prison. The proposed cap would be no more than 120 percent of their minimum mandatory sentence, it said.

Superior Court Chief Justice Robert Lynn said he would prefer Corrections Commissioner William Wrenn be able to override and ignore any such limit in dealing with difficult, nonviolent offenders.

“I tend to think that might go too far and wonder if it would make more sense to enact legislation that gives the commissioner more flexibility on that,” Lynn told the group.

Report at a glance

The state prison population grew 31 percent from 2000-09 but only 3 percent represented new criminal offenders. The following are the six recommendations that the Council of State Governments Justice Center has urged New Hampshire policy makers take to reduce the rate of recidivism.

Set Revised Maximum Sentence for Non-Violent Offenders: Require eligible offenders serve 100 percent of minimum sentence but get released upon serving 120 percent of that minimum. This would apply to those who commit nonviolent, property or drug offenses.

Require post-release supervision for all: Require anyone get at least nine months supervision in the community before reaching the end of their maximum sentence and being released. At present, 16 percent (224 inmates) of all those released from State Prison last year had served their maximum punishment and went into the community with no supervision.

Upon Release Focus on High-Risk Offenders: Dropping the period to actively supervise parolees to no more than nine months for low- and medium-risk offenders, 12 months for felony probation for 18 months for prison parolees.

Use Swift Sanctions for Probation Violators: Allow a judge to place a violator for up to five days in jail unless probationer requests a hearing to end long waits in jail for someone before that violation is taken up in court.

Intermediate Sanction: Use halfway houses or a new secure housing unit for those whose parole is revoked to prevent prison from being jam-packed with parole and probation violators.

Rapid Treatment and Drug Testing for High Risk: Spend up to $2.4 million a year to give rapid drug testing and mental/substance abuse treatment to high-risk and high-need offenders on probation or parole.

Source: Justice Reinvestment in New Hampshire Report, Council of State Governments Justice Center
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/560653-196/study-on-prison-populations-draws-praise.html

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: January 20, 2010

The Bloomberg administration plans to merge the city’s Department of Juvenile Justice into its child welfare agency, signaling a more therapeutic approach toward delinquency that will send fewer of the city’s troubled teenagers to jail.

A juvenile center in the Bronx. The system currently uses 28 complexes throughout the state to house about 900 young people.

The integration of the agencies is effective immediately, and was announced by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in his State of the City speech Wednesday afternoon.

Seeking to dispel the notion that the city was turning soft on crime, Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor of health and human services, said “the merger will not compromise public safety and will help to keep streets safe.” Youth offenders who are considered a high risk to the public will continue to be sent to detention centers, officials said.

Juvenile offenders, usually between the ages of 11 and 16, are typically in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice before trial and sentencing. The department, which handles about 5,500 offenders a year, places them in group homes or in one of three detention centers. A judge’s typical options at sentencing are to release offenders on probation or send them to one of the state’s juvenile prisons or residential facilities run by nonprofit organizations.

Under the new plan, city officials will more frequently recommend to a judge that a young person be allowed to return home, provided the family submits to intensive visits by therapists and social workers supervised by the Administration for Children’s Services.

That type of community-based therapy, meant to set young offenders on more productive paths in life, is a growing alternative to sending youths to notorious state-run juvenile prisons, which a state task force recently described as broken, ineffective and dangerous. The prisons are also expensive, costing the state and city $215,000 per youth annually. The system uses 28 complexes throughout the state to house about 900 young people, many of whom have committed only misdemeanor crimes like theft.

“Our No. 1 recommendation was that the state system of juvenile prisons be downsized,” said Jeremy Travis, the president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who led the task force, “and the key element of success in meeting that goal is to provide effective community-based strategies for young people so judges don’t have to send them off to juvenile detention.”

Ms. Gibbs said the administration had worked for years to reduce the number of youths who are sent to juvenile prisons, while increasing the capacity for community-based programs with family intervention and therapy. Since 2002, the city has reduced placements in state juvenile facilities by 56 percent.

In the last several years, Ms. Gibbs said, the administration has developed a more finely tuned process to determine the level of risk juvenile offenders pose to the public, and whether youths should return home or be sent to detention centers.

“We’re detaining fewer kids over all, and now we’re detaining the right kids, the high-risk kids,” Ms. Gibbs said.

Michael Jacobson, the director of the Vera Institute for Justice, said he thought the combination of agencies was a natural move, given the numbers of children who commit crimes and have also previously had contact with child-welfare agencies. Studies have shown that nearly 20 percent of prisoners under age 30 have spent time in foster care, according to data from the Center for Family Representation, an organization that provides legal help to parents involved in Family Court.

“The overlap between the two populations is huge,” Mr. Jacobson said. “It just makes sense to have the city’s children’s agency deal with children across the spectrum.”

John B. Mattingly, the child welfare commissioner since 2004, will add the title of commissioner of the Department of Juvenile Justice to his duties and oversee both agencies. Neil Hernandez, the commissioner of the Department of Juvenile Justice, has resigned, Ms. Gibbs said.

The focus on community-based treatment for juvenile offenders is an extension of the belief that children are better off with their families than in isolation from them. Ms. Gibbs, a former deputy commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services, said there had been a dearth of therapeutic programs that keep youth in the home, where counselors and social workers can address the problems of the entire family and help parents provide structure and guidance for their children. Those programs will be expanded and new ones developed under the integrated agencies, she said.

“My experience at A.C.S. taught me very clearly that if child protective workers have community-based services at their disposal, to bring services and support into the home, and they feel that the children will be safe, they will use those services,” Ms. Gibbs said.

Edwina G. Richardson-Mendelson, an administrative judge of the New York City Family Courts, said she welcomed more options for Family Court judges, who must decide either to return offenders to their families or send them to detention centers.

“The judges of the Family Court are really concerned about the lack of community-based alternatives for youth offenders,” she said. “The bottom line is that judges would, of course, prefer to have more options.”

Mr. Travis, of John Jay, said that many of the young people who were sent to juvenile prisons had committed only minor offenses and should not have been in prisons in the first place.

“It may sound counterintuitive, but it is a public safety interest to keep young people closer to home in programs that help them become productive citizens,” he said.

In 2007, the Administration for Children’s Services and nonprofit providers began the Juvenile Justice Initiative, a handful of programs that send juvenile offenders back to their families and provide intensive therapy. Officials at the agency said the programs reduced recidivism rates for chronic juvenile delinquents by at least 30 percent.

At juvenile prisons, the recidivism rates are high: three-quarters of the young people released from detention are arrested again within three years.

“That’s just an outrageous number,” Ms. Gibbs said. “Our goal is to improve the entire system so that we break that cycle, and improve public safety, and improve the lives of these young people who are moving down the wrong path.”

City officials said the increased use of in-home treatment programs would save money. By one city estimate, each Juvenile Justice Initiative treatment costs $17,000, a fraction of the cost of state detention facilities.

The city could also reduce costs by combining the administrative duties of the Administration for Children’s Services and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Ms. Gibbs said it was too early to tell what those savings might be, or whether the merging of the agencies would result in layoffs.

While some advocates and nonprofit providers said they were concerned about how the Administration for Children’s Services, which has recently seen cuts to its budget, will handle the disruption, several said that they were generally enthusiastic about the plan.

“Over all, change that helps see young people and families as a whole is positive,” said Susan Jacobs, the executive director of the Center for Family Representation. “As an advocate, I would applaud a change which recognizes the complexity that children are part of a family.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 21, 2010, on page A31 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/nyregion/21juvenile.html?scp=1&sq=Juvenile%20justice%20in%20New%20York%20City&st=cse

and.....
Op-Ed Columnist- NY Times
Kids in Crisis (Behind Bars)
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 27, 2010

We all have blind spots, and I think one of mine — shared by many other Americans, perhaps including you — has to do with prisons.

Over the years, I’ve written many columns about Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and torture, not to mention the abuses that go on in Chinese and North Korean prisons. But I’ve never written about the horrors that unfold in American prisons — especially juvenile correctional facilities — on a far larger scale than at Guantánamo.

Consider Rodney Hulin Jr., who was a 16-year-old when he was convicted of arson. A first-time offender and a slight figure at 5 feet 2 inches tall and some 125 pounds, he was sent to a men’s prison. There, he was the smallest person around. Within a week, he was raped, according to an account by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group. The prison doctor ordered an H.I.V. test, since up to one-third of the inmates were H.I.V.-positive.

Rodney asked to be placed in protective custody, but he was denied. His father, Rodney Hulin Sr., picks up the story: “For the next several months, my son was repeatedly beaten by the older inmates, forced to perform oral sex, robbed, and beaten again. ... He could no longer stand to live in continual terror.”

Rodney Jr. hanged himself.

Maybe Rodney would have been safer in a juvenile correctional facility, but then again maybe not. A stunning new Justice Department special report, released just this month, underscores how widespread rape is in youth correctional facilities. It found that almost one youth in eight reported being sexually assaulted while behind bars in the last year.

That means that a child in custody is about twice as likely to be raped as an adult behind bars, based on similar surveys of adult prisoners. As The New York Review of Books wrote on its blog, we face a “crisis of juvenile prison rape.”

The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a blue-ribbon panel that issued its final report last year, described how a 14-year-old boy weighing 98 pounds was assaulted after he was made to share a cell with two older teenagers. Both were 6 feet 2 inches, and one weighed 160 pounds and the other 195 pounds.

Surprisingly, the new survey suggests that the biggest predators are not other inmates but prison staff — and female staff members offend as much as the males do. More than 10 percent of boys in juvenile correctional facilities said that they had had sex with staff, most of whom were women.

Among girls, almost 5 percent said that they had engaged in sexual activity with staff, most of whom were men.

Reggie Walton, a federal judge in the District of Columbia who led the prison rape commission, said that the figures may even be an undercount because of the stigma of rape. “I was shocked at the level of abuse,” he said.

One lesson from the surveys is that we should rethink the way male guards are sometimes assigned to female inmates, and female guards to male inmates, without sufficient respect for inmates’ privacy or dignity. That won’t stop same-sex violence or inmate-on-inmate abuses, but it would address one important component of the abuse problem.

By some accounts, the majority of guards at women’s prisons are now men. Investigators at one juvenile correctional facility found that a male guard watched as girls showered, while a woman watched over boys showering.

Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch, also a member of the prison rape commission, described a Virginia prison where men were stripped naked and asked to spread their buttocks in front of a female officer. When a male inmate asked to be searched in front of a man instead, Ms. Fellner said he was Tasered.

In the last few years, a growing number of states have limited the ability of guards to strip-search members of the opposite sex or watch them showering. And a landmark law, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, created Judge Walton’s commission, which has made excellent recommendations to reduce violence and abuse behind bars. The Obama administration should quickly implement those recommendations.

Surveys have found that well-managed prisons and correctional facilities with strong accountability have almost no rape, by guards or inmates. Others have astonishingly high levels. If we want to rehabilitate young offenders and help them get their lives in order, a starting point is to end the criminal abuse of them.

The legacy of Rodney Hulin Jr. should be a concerted drive to end the way inmates are raped with impunity behind bars. The survey results indicating the ubiquity of sexual assault behind bars, often by guards, should be an awakening — and an end to this blind spot that so many of us have shown. We need to be as alert to human rights abuses in our youth correctional facilities as to those at Guantánamo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/opinion/28kristof.html?ref=opinion

Report itemizes jobs, economic impact, construction costs

PRESCOTT VALLEY - A proposed private prison with 5,000 beds will be an economic boon by creating thousands of jobs during construction and operations and generating tax revenues, according to a Scottsdale-based economist.

Elliott D. Pollack & Co. projected construction for the proposed prison would create 3,945 direct, indirect and "induced" jobs with $172.2 million in wages and a total economic effect of $469.9 million during the construction period. Construction alone would cost $300 million, according to the report.

Indirect jobs refers to employment that businesses create when they provide goods and services for operating the prison, and include manufacturers and wholesalers, Pollack explained in a 12-page economic analysis released Monday. The spending of wages on goods and services from direct and indirect jobs in turn creates induced jobs.

The private prison also would generate $25.2 million a year for state, county and local governments during construction, and exceed $7.9 million a year in revenues from operations, Pollack's report states.

Pollack produced the report for the Prescott Valley Economic Development Foundation, which has held talks with Corrections Corporation of America to build a private prison off Fain Road near the Grapevine Industrial Park. He based construction estimates, job and inmate figures, taxable corporate income and an estimated utility budget on information that CCA supplied.

Pollack staffers are scheduled to speak about the report during a meeting of the Town Council Thursday evening.

"I think it is very impressive," foundation Executive Director Gary Marks said.

Marks issued a press release Dec. 17 in which he stated the prison would create 400 full-time jobs. He and other business and civic leaders met that day with a CCA official.

CCA would create more full-time jobs because Marks based that figure on a prison with 1,000 to 1,200 beds - not 5,000 - CCA spokeswoman Louise Grant said.

"If CCA were to submit a proposal to build a 5,000-bed prison, that would mean more than 800 stable careers for locally hired people from Yavapai County," Grant said.

Grant noted the state government has not issued the request for proposals (RFP) from prison companies to house a maximum of 5,000 inmates. The state could award 20-year contracts to CCA or other companies to house the inmates at existing prisons, new prisons or both.

She also said CCA, which operates four prisons in Eloy and two in Florence, likely would hire an outside general contractor because a prison requires specialized construction skills. She added CCA cannot guarantee that it will hire local subcontractors or recruit employees strictly from the tri-city area, which has an official unemployment rate of 9.3 percent.

"We always make every commitment to hire local subcontractors," Grant said. "Our culture and commitment is to hire as many (people) locally as possible."

Grant spoke hypothetically because her company awaits a decision from the state.

Pollack qualified its report as well.

"The analysis outlined in this study is based on currently available information and estimates and assumptions about long-term future trends," the report states. "Such estimates and assumptions are subject to uncertainty and variation. Accordingly, we do not represent that the results will be achieved."

The analysis also does not consider costs associated with providing services to the prison, the report stated.

http://www.dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=77105

Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87

By Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard, Boston Globe Staff

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as "A People's History of the United States," inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack.

"He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture," Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, said tonight. "He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect."

Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn's writings "simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation. He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement."

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. "A People’s History of the United States" (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers -- many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out -- but rather the farmers of Shays' Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" (1994), "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."

Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and John Silber, former president of Boston University. Dr. Zinn, a leading critic of Silber, twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers "who poison the well of academe."

Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against "the BU Five" were soon dropped.

In 1997, Dr. Zinn slipped into popular culture when his writing made a cameo appearance in the film "Good Will Hunting." The title character, played by Matt Damon, lauds "A People’s History" and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up.

Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, "The People Speak," which ran on the History Channel in 2009, and he narrated a 2004 biographical documentary, "Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train."

"Howard had a genius for the shape of public morality and for articulating the great alternative vision of peace as more than a dream," said James Carroll a columnist for the Globe's opinion pages whose friendship with Dr. Zinn dates to when Carroll was a Catholic chaplain at BU. "But above all, he had a genius for the practical meaning of love. That is what drew legions of the young to him and what made the wide circle of his friends so constantly amazed and grateful."

Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a housewife. He attended New York public schools and was working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he met Roslyn Shechter.

"She was working as a secretary," Dr. Zinn said in an interview with the Globe nearly two years ago. "We were both working in the same neighborhood, but we didn't know each other. A mutual friend asked me to deliver something to her. She opened the door, I saw her, and that was it."

He joined the Army Air Corps, and they courted through the mail before marrying in October 1944 while he was on his first furlough. She died in 2008.

During World War II, he served as a bombardier, was awarded the Air Medal, and attained the rank of second lieutenant.

After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until entering New York University on the GI Bill as a 27-year-old freshman. He worked nights in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Columbia University.

Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in 1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as chairman of the history department. Among his students were novelist Alice Walker, who called him "the best teacher I ever had," and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children's Defense Fund.

During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement. He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.

Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in 1964 and was named full professor in 1966.

The focus of his activism became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke at many rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he and the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, another leading antiwar activist, went to Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North Vietnamese.

Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing two books: "Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal" (1967) and "Disobedience and Democracy" (1968). He had previously published "LaGuardia in Congress" (1959), which had won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Prize; "SNCC: The New Abolitionists" (1964); "The Southern Mystique" (1964); and "New Deal Thought" (1966).

He also was the author of "The Politics of History" (1970); "Postwar America" (1973); "Justice in Everyday Life" (1974); and "Declarations of Independence" (1990).

In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement to concentrate on speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: "Emma," about the anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and "Daughter of Venus."

On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his lecture to come along. A hundred did.

"Howard was an old and very close friend," Chomsky said. "He was a person of real courage and integrity, warmth and humor. He was just a remarkable person."

Carroll called Dr. Zinn "simply one of the greatest Americans of our time. He will not be replaced -- or soon forgotten. How we loved him back."

In addition to his daughter, Dr. Zinn leaves a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaughters; and two grandsons.

Funeral plans were not available.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/01/howard_zinn_his.html