Sadly, Marcia Powell may never get justice

The Maricopa County Attorney's Office has chosen not to prosecute Arizona Department of Corrections staff in the death of inmate Marcia Powell.

Powell, 48, died May 20, 2009, after being kept in a human cage in Goodyear's Perryville Prison for at least four hours in the blazing Arizona sun. This, despite a prison policy limiting such outside confinement to a maximum of two hours.

The county medical examiner found the cause of death to be due to complications from heat exposure. Her core body temperature upon examination was 108 degrees Fahrenheit. She suffered burns and blisters all over her body.

Witnesses say she was repeatedly denied water by corrections officers, though the c.o.'s deny this. The weather the day she collapsed from the heat (May 19 -- she died in the early morning hours of May 20) arched just above a 107 degree high.

According to a 3,000 page report released by the ADC, she pleaded to be taken back inside, but was ignored. Similarly, she was not allowed to use the restroom. When she was found unconscious, her body was covered with excrement from soiling herself.
Powell, who was serving a 27-month sentence for prostitution, actually expired after being transported to West Valley Hospital, where acting ADC Director Charles Ryan made the decision to have her life support suspended.

Why didn't the county attorney's office pursue those charges? Apparently, they didn't think they could prevail in court.

County attorney spokesman Bill Fitzgerald issued the following terse statement.

"There is insufficient evidence to go forward with a prosecution against any of the named individuals," he e-mailed me, declining to elaborate further.

Donna Hamm of the advocacy group Middle Ground Prison Reform wasn't buying it.

"Having read the bulk of those 3,000 pages of reports," she told me, "if someone in a prosecutorial position can't find a crime in those pages, they have absolutely no credibility in my opinion."

Hamm noted that guards passed Powell several times throughout her stay in the cage, and that some mocked her pleas for water. As for c.o. claims that Powell was given water, Hamm countered that Powell's eyes "were as dry as parchment," and that the autopsy results show there was no sign of hydration.

Hamm was incredulous that the county attorney couldn't find enough evidence to bring charges.

"It's just beyond comprehension," she stated. "This is the same office that has prosecuted mothers who left their babies in a couple of inches of water to go outside and take a cell phone call or look in the mail."

She also cited the case of "Buffalo Soldier" Charles Long, who was prosecuted by the MCAO for negligent homicide in the 2001 death of a kid who had enrolled in his program for troubled teens and died after being exposed to the heat and put in a bath, where he inhaled water.

The ADC did make some reforms in the wake of Powell's death. It was discovered that the cages were being used to control unruly prisoners, and the ADC claims this practice has stopped. However, Hamm says she has uncovered a case of a man in a Tucson facility who, earlier this year, was held all day and overnight in an outside cage.

Some 16 prison employees were sanctioned in one way or another as a result of the Powell incident, and some were fired. But Hamm says she believes some of those sanctioned have been reinstated.

The outdoor cages are still in use, but have been retrofitted to provide shade, misters, water stations, and benches, which, ironically, Hamm says are metal, and would thus soak up the heat. She's toured ADC facilities to see the redone cages, and admits that changes are positive, but too late to save Powell's life, obviously.

"All the retrofitting in the world is worthless if the staff doesn't follow the policy," she insisted.

Powell had been diagnosed as mentally ill, and was on more than one psychotropic drug, drugs that increased her sensitivity to heat, sunlight and lack of water. All the more reason, according to Hamm, that prison staff should be held accountable.

The only next of kin that was located for Powell was an aged, adoptive mother in California, who had not had contact with Powell for years, and did not want to take possession of the remains.

So, with the help of Hamm and others, Powell's ashes were interred last year at Phoenix's Shadow Rock Church of Christ.

Brophy College Preparatory School also dedicated a plaque to Powell on school grounds this year.

But with no one with standing to bring a federal lawsuit (Hamm says the deadline for a state lawsuit has expired), and with the MCAO unwilling to bring a case against those responsible for Powell's well-being, there looks to be no justice for the schizophrenic deceased woman.

I asked Hamm what this means for the case.

"It means they've gotten away with the most colossal example of brutality I have seen against a female prisoner in the history of the Arizona Department of Corrections," remarked Hamm, adding, "And they got off scot-free."

Update, 9/1/10 2:29 PM: ADC spokesman Barrett Marson told me today that the ADC submitted its criminal investigation to the MCAO back on August 20, 2009. He said he did not know if the ADC asked for charges on certain employees.
http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/bastard/2010/09/marcia_powells_death_unavenged.php#comment-74090815

Some comments:
Donna Leone Hamm [Moderator]
Thanks to Stephen Lemons and other professional journalists like him, the sad story of Marcia Powell continues to be told. But thanks to the politics and other unknown reasons within the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, there will be no justice for Marcia Powell. ANYONE who takes the time to read the investigative reports can readily see that multiple crimes were committed by staff of the ADOC. They should have been charged with Negligent Homicide or Manslaughter -- all the key elements of those crimes are present. Even the DOC sought prosecution of its own staff. The failure to prosecute sends a chilling message to staff and to inmates that communicates to staff that they can act with impunit and suffer few consequences. Middle Ground Prison Reform doesn't inten to allow this matter to settle here. We will contact the U.S. Department of Justice. Someone has to stand up for Marcia Powell.

Peggy Plews [Moderator] 13 hours ago
So, the county attorney can put a mentally ill, incapacitated woman in prison for 27 months for a blow job, but can't even come up with a single misdemeanor out of the 16 people who killed her?

The women out at Perryville are still getting neglected and abused as if nothing ever happened - and some of those staff got their fucking jobs back. Here's the people responsible for those appeals - Marcia's life was worth less than this woman's job security, apparently. I think we should all converge on the next meeting these people have - if they'd post it. They just had one yesterday and the minutes or next meeting aren't up, so here's their phone # (602) 542-3888.

From the AZ State Personnel Board, June 15, 2010:

The Arizona State Personnel Board meeting was called to order by Chair Jim Thompson at 1:36 p.m. The meeting was held at 1400 West Washington Street, Suite 280, Phoenix, Arizona. Board members present were Jim Thompson, Stella Galaviz, Patrick Quinn, and Joseph Smith. Board member Mark Ziska was present telephonically. Staff members in attendance were Jeff Bernick, Counsel for the Board; Judy Henkel, Executive Director for the Board; and Laurie Barcelona, Administrative Assistant for the Board.

Mr. Thompson called for public comments. There being no comments, the board proceeded to consider the approval of the minutes from the May 19, 2010 open public meeting. Patrick Quinn moved the minutes be adopted as written. Mark Ziska and Joseph Smith simultaneously seconded the motion which carried unanimously.

The board next considered the dismissal appeal of Electra Allen versus Department of Corrections.

Martin Bihn, Attorney at Law representing Electra Allen, stated the hearing officer recommended the dismissal be reduced to an 80 hour suspension without pay. He stated there were three contacts for which Ms. Allen was allegedly dismissed. Mr. Bihn stated the first contact was when Ms. Allen was told by a CO III that Inmate Powell was on medication and should not be in the sun. He stated the hearing officer found the CO III was the responsible officer who should have taken some action. Mr. Bihn stated the second issue was when Inmate Powell yelled she wanted to talk to Dr. Kaz, Ms. Allen asked the inmate why, Inmate Powell stated she wanted to know when she was going to be transferred, Ms. Allen called on her radio, found out the transfer would occur shortly, and that was the end of the conversation. He stated the hearing officer found Ms. Allen’s version of events to be accurate and the allegation was not a basis for discipline. Mr. Bihn stated the third basis for discipline was that Ms. Allen just prior to shift change stopped by and saw Inmate Powell had defecated on herself. He stated instead of staying overtime, Ms. Allen informed the oncoming shift of what had occurred and she left for the day. Mr. Bihn stated the hearing officer felt that action warranted discipline but not termination. He stated there were many players involved in the death of the inmate, but Electra Allen was not directly responsible as the agency was attempting to make her out to be. Mr. Bihn urged the board to adopt the Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law and sustain the hearing officer’s recommendation of an 80 hour suspension without pay.

Dennis Carpenter, Assistant Attorney General representing the Department of Corrections, stated Electra Allen had three opportunities to intervene in Inmate Powell’s situation and possibly save her life. He stated at approximately 12:00 p.m. Ms. Allen was told by the counselor that Inmate Powell was on medication and should not be left out in the sun, yet Ms. Allen did nothing with that information. Mr. Carpenter stated a short time later Inmate Powell asked Ms. Allen if she could speak with Dr. Kaz but Ms. Allen just told Inmate Powell that she would be moved soon. Ms. Allen did not notify medical that there had been a request for the doctor to speak with the inmate. He stated at 1:50 p.m. Ms. Allen went to an area near the enclosure where Inmate Powell was being held and she noticed that Inmate Powell had defecated on herself. Mr. Carpenter stated Ms. Allen just left for the day, did nothing to clean up Inmate Powell, nor did she tell anyone Inmate Powell needed to be cleaned up. He stated the hearing officer found this action did not lead directly to the inmate’s death but the agency disagrees. Mr. Carpenter stated if Ms. Allen had at 1:50 p.m. taken Inmate Powell into the bathroom and cleaned her up, Inmate Powell probably would not have collapsed 40 minutes later and died. He stated the agency believed Ms. Allen’s actions led directly to the death of Inmate Powell and warranted termination.

There being no discussion, Joseph Smith proposed the following motion:

"I would move that we adopt the hearing officer’s Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law as our own. I would then move that the appellant’s appeal be upheld to the extent the agency action of dismissal be modified to a suspension of 160 hours without pay, and that all back pay and benefits be restored to her save and except those during the above suspension, those equal to any unemployment benefits received since dismissal, and those received at the time of dismissal. I would further move that the appellant be returned to the same exact position she held prior to her dismissal, including the same work location, duties, job title, salary, and benefits if said position is currently available. In the event the appellant’s former position is not available, the agency shall return the appellant to substantially equivalent a position as is currently available with equivalent benefits, pay, and other terms and conditions of employment.”

The motion was seconded by Patrick Quinn and carried with aye votes from Joseph Smith, Patrick Quinn, and Jim Thompson. Mark Ziska and Stella Galaviz voted nay.

Incarceration in America is a failure by almost any measure. But what if the prisons could be turned inside out, with convicts released into society under constant electronic surveillance? Radical though it may seem, early experiments suggest that such a science-fiction scenario might cut crime, reduce costs, and even prove more just.

By Graeme Wood
Atlantic Monthly September 2010

Well, no, not in this case. Not a soul took any notice of the gizmos I wore. The whole rig is surprisingly small and unobtrusive, and it allowed me to eat my slice in peace. Indeed, over the few days that I posed as a monitored man, the closest I came to feeling a real stigma was an encounter I had at a Holiday Inn ice machine, where a bearded trucker type gave me a wider berth than I might otherwise have expected. All in all, it didn’t seem like such a terrible fate.

Unlike most of ExacuTrack’s clientele, of course, I wore my device by choice and only briefly, to find out how it felt and how people reacted to it. By contrast, a real sex offender—or any of a variety of other lawbreakers, including killers, check bouncers, thieves, and drug users—might wear the unit or one like it for years, or even decades. He (and the offender is generally a “he”) would wear it all day and all night, into the shower and under the sheets—perhaps with an AC adapter cord snaking out into a wall socket for charging. The device would enable the monitoring company to follow his every move, from home to work to the store, and, in consultation with a parole or probation officer, to keep him away from kindergartens, playgrounds, Jonas Brothers concerts, and other places where kids congregate. Should he decide to snip off the anklet (the band is rubber, and would succumb easily to pruning shears), a severed cable would alert the company that he had tampered with the unit, and absent a very good excuse he would likely be sent back to prison. Little wonder that the law-enforcement officer who installed my ExacuTrack noted that he was doing me a favor by unboxing a fresh unit: over their lifetimes, many of the trackers become encrusted with the filth and dead skin of previous bearers, some of whom are infected with prison plagues such as herpes or hepatitis. Officers clean the units and replace the straps between users, but I strongly preferred not to have anything rubbing against my ankle that had spent years rubbing against someone else’s.

Increasingly, GPS devices such as the one I wore are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that, in the United States at least, traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace. According to a recent Pew report, 2.3 million Americans are currently incarcerated—enough people to fill the city of Houston. Since 1983, the number of inmates has more than tripled and the total cost of corrections has jumped sixfold, from $10.4 billion to $68.7 billion. In California, the cost per inmate has kept pace with the cost of an Ivy League education, at just shy of $50,000 a year.

This might make some sense if crime rates had also tripled. But they haven’t: rather, even as crime has fallen, the sentences served by criminals have grown, thanks in large part to mandatory minimums and draconian three-strikes rules—politically popular measures that have shown little deterrent effect but have left the prison system overflowing with inmates. The vogue for incarceration might also make sense if the prisons repaid society’s investment by releasing reformed inmates who behaved better than before they were locked up. But that isn’t the case either: half of those released are back in prison within three years. Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be “scared straight,” is actively counterproductive. Such conditions—and U.S. prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male inmates facing sexual assault—typically harden criminals, making them more violent and predatory. Essentially, when we lock someone up today, we are agreeing to pay a large (and growing) sum of money merely to put off dealing with him until he is released in a few years, often as a greater menace to society than when he went in.

Devices such as the ExacuTrack, along with other advances in both the ways we monitor criminals and the ways we punish them for their transgressions, suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might turn the conventional prison system inside out for a substantial number of inmates, doing away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers. The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.

Moreover, such a change would in fact be less radical than it might at first appear. An underappreciated fact of our penitentiary system is that of all Americans “serving time” at any given moment, only a third are actually behind bars. The rest—some 5 million of them—are circulating among the free on conditional supervised release either as parolees, who are freed from prison before their sentences conclude, or as probationers, who walk free in lieu of jail time. These prisoners-on-the-outside have in fact outnumbered the incarcerated for decades. And recent innovations, both technological and procedural, could enable such programs to advance to a stage where they put the traditional model of incarceration to shame.

In a number of experimental cases, they already have. Devices such as the one I wore on my leg already allow tens of thousands of convicts to walk the streets relatively freely, impeded only by the knowledge that if they loiter by a schoolyard, say, or near the house of the ex-girlfriend they threatened, or on a street corner known for its crack trade, the law will come to find them. Compared with incarceration, the cost of such surveillance is minuscule—mere dollars per day—and monitoring has few of the hardening effects of time behind bars. Nor do all the innovations being developed depend on technology. Similar efforts to control criminals in the wild are under way in pilot programs that demand adherence to onerous parole guidelines, such as frequent, random drug testing, and that provide for immediate punishment if the parolees fail. The result is the same: convicts who might once have been in prison now walk among us unrecognized—like pod people, or Canadians.

There are, of course, many thousands of dangerous felons who can’t be trusted on the loose. But if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop. Inevitably, some of those released would take the pruning-shears route. And some would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society.

In the 18th century, the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, a hypothetical prison. Inside the Panopticon (the name is derived from the Greek word for “all-seeing”), the prisoners are arranged in a ring of cells surrounding their guard, who is concealed in a tower in the center. The idea is that the guard controls the prisoners through his presumed observation: they constantly imagine his eyes on them, even when he’s looking elsewhere. Bentham promoted the concept of the Panopticon for much the same reasons that spur criminal-justice innovation today—a ballooning prison population and the need for a cheap solution with light manpower demands. Whereas the guard in Bentham’s day had only two eyes, however, today’s watcher can be virtually all-seeing, thanks to GPS monitoring technology. The modern prisoner, in other words, need not wonder whether he is being observed; he can be sure that he is, and at all times.

The hub of the American penal system’s largest open-air Panopticon is in the Indianapolis suburb of Anderson, population 57,496, at the call center of a company called BI Incorporated. The firm manufactures and services the ankle device I test-drove, as well as a suite of other law-enforcement gadgets designed to track offenders. Though BI has a handful of rivals in the monitoring business, it is the most prominent and best-known, with 55,000 offenders wearing BI anklets at any given moment. (The company monitors another 10,000 using lower-tech means: for instance, by having them call from particular landlines at designated times.)

I drove to Anderson from Indianapolis, past clapboard houses and cornfields, to visit BI’s offices, located on a few discreet and highly secure floors above the local branch of KeyBank. I was buzzed up to meet Jennifer White, the BI vice president in charge of monitoring. >From her office window, we looked out not on the backs of the 30,000 offenders this branch monitors, but on the sedate midwestern bedroom community that is, by her description, “a little bit less happening than Muncie,” 20 miles away. Even the sleepy streets of Anderson have their secrets, though. White told me that below us were about 120 criminals with BI anklets—roughly one for every 500 residents in the town.

White, an Indiana native, has been at BI since 1988. Over a turkey salad from Bob Evans, she explained that the company’s first “clients” (as the monitored are always called) were not human beings but Holsteins. In 1978, BI began selling systems that allowed dairy farmers to dispense feed to their cows automatically. The company fitted a radio-frequency tag on each cow’s ear so that when the cow approached the feed dispenser, a sensor in the latter caused it to drop a ration of fodder. If the same cow returned, the sensor recognized the unique signal of the tag and prevented the cow from getting a second helping until after enough time had passed for her to digest the first. (The worlds of bovine and criminal management have in fact been oddly intertwined for many years. Just as modern abattoirs have studied the colors that can distract and agitate cows during their final moments—thus ruining their meat with adrenaline—prisons have painted their walls in soothing shades to minimize anxiety and aggression in their inmates.)

In the 1980s, BI expanded into “tethering people.” As an early mover in the outpatient prison industry, BI grew fast, and the Anderson office contains a one-room museum of the bulky devices from its early days, some the size of a ham-radio set. The company now counts tracking people as its core business, and as a sideline it facilitates their reentry into society, through treatment programs and counseling. BI monitors criminals in all 50 states, “everyone from people who owe child support to ax murderers,” White told me. Most use the lowest-tech tracking equipment, a radio-frequency-based technology that monitors house arrest. The system works simply: you keep a radio beacon in your home and a transmitter around your ankle. If you wander too far from your beacon, an alert goes out to the BI call center in Anderson, which then notifies your probation officer that you have left your designated zone—as Martha Stewart allegedly did during her BI-monitored house arrest in 2005, earning a three-week extension of her five-month sentence.

The truly revolutionary BI devices, though, are the new generation of GPS trackers, which monitor criminals’ real-time locations down to a few meters, enabling BI to control their movements almost as if they were marionettes. If you were a paroled drunk driver, for instance, your parole officer could mandate that you stay home every day from dusk until dawn, be at your workplace from nine to five, and go to and from work following a specific route—and BI would monitor your movements to ensure compliance. If your parole terms included not entering a bar or liquor shop, the device could be programmed to start an alert process if you lingered near such a location for more than 60 seconds. That alert could take the form of an immediate notice to the monitors—“He’s at Drinkie’s again”—or even a spoken warning emanating from the device itself, instructing you to leave the area or face the consequences. Another BI system, recently deployed with promising results, features an electrostatic pad that presses against the offender’s upper arm at all times, chemically “tasting” sweat for signs of alcohol. (In May, starlet Lindsay Lohan was ordered to wear a similar device, manufactured by a BI competitor, after violating her probation stemming from DUI charges.)

To see the BI systems at work is to realize that Jeremy Bentham was thinking small. The call center consists of just a few rows of desks, with a dozen or so men and women wearing headsets and speaking in Spanish and English to their “customers” (the law-enforcement agents, as distinguished from the tracked “clients”). Each sits in front of a computer monitor, and at the click of a mouse can summon up a screen detailing the movements of a client as far away as Guam, ensuring not only that he avoids “exclusion zones”—schoolyards or bars or former associates’ homes, depending on the circumstances—but also that he makes his way to designated “inclusion zones” at appointed times.

As a fail-safe against any technological glitch, whether accidental or malicious, BI is immensely proud of its backup systems, which boast an ultrasecure data room and extreme redundancy: if, say, a toxic-gas cloud were to wipe out the town of Anderson, the last act of the staff there would be to flip the switches diverting all call traffic to BI’s corporate office in Boulder, Colorado, where a team capable of taking over instantly in case of disaster is always on duty.

I asked Jamie Roberts, a call-center employee who had previously been a BI customer as a corrections officer in Terre Haute, Indiana, to show me a parolee on the move, and in seconds he pulled up the profile of a criminal in Newport News, Virginia. The young man’s parole officer had used a Microsoft Bing online map to build a large irregular polygon around his high school—an inclusion zone that would guarantee an alert if he failed to show up for class on time, every day. Roberts showed me one offender after another: names and maps, lives scheduled down to the minute. There was a gambler whose anklet was set to notify Roberts if the client approached the waterfront, because he might try his luck on the gaming boats; an addict who couldn’t return to the street corners where he used to score crack; and an alcohol abuser who had to squeeze himself into an inclusion zone around a church basement for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting from 9 to 10 p.m., three times a week.

A strict parole officer could plausibly sketch out a complete weekly routine for his parolee, with specific times when he would have to leave home and specific stations he would have to tag throughout the week. He might allow, or even require, the parolee to go to the grocery store on a Sunday afternoon, and go for a jog along an authorized route every morning. Roberts pulled up another Bing map for me, and set in motion a faster-than-real-time playback of one client’s day. As his dot carefully skirted the exclusion zones around a school and a park, staying away from kids because of the absolute certainty that BI would report him if he did not, his life on the outside looked fully set out in advance, as if he moved not on his own feet but on rails laid by his parole officer. For BI clients, technology has made detection of any deviation a near certainty—and with detection a swift response, one that often leads straight back to the Big House.

Criminals typically differ from the broader population in a number of ways, including poor impulse control, addictive personality, and orientation toward short-term gratification rather than long-run consequences. More than a fifth of all incarcerated criminals are in for drug offenses, and a large portion of the others abuse legal and illegal substances. If one were to design a criminal-justice system from scratch with these characteristics in mind, it would be difficult to come up with something less effective than what we have today.

Take the world of supervised release, for example. With some exceptions (BI clients prominent among them), parolees and probationers know that if they violate the terms of their release, they are unlikely to be caught—and even less likely to be punished. So, impulsive as many of them are, they will transgress, perhaps modestly at first, but over time with growing recklessness, until many have resumed the criminal habits—drug use, theft, or worse—that got them arrested in the first place.

This prevailing condition is something Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles and a leading advocate of non-prison alternatives, calls “randomized severity”: some transgressors will be punished for violations, sometimes quite harshly, but others will not be punished at all, whether because their delinquencies go undetected or because judges, police, and parole officers decline to pursue the severe penalties that could apply. In his 2009 book, When Brute Force Fails, Kleiman argues that such capricious enforcement undermines efforts to reduce crime, and moreover that tough penalties—such as the long sentences that have contributed to clogged prisons—don’t do much to help, despite their high cost. The alternative, Kleiman suggests, is a paradigm called “swift and certain” justice, first proposed by Cesare Beccaria in the 18th century: immediate, automatic penalties—though not necessarily severe ones—doled out by credible, identifiable figures.

One way to achieve this result is through monitoring devices like those supplied by BI. But a pioneering judge in Hawaii has demonstrated that it can also be accomplished without the technological assist. In the early 2000s, Steven Alm, a circuit judge in Honolulu, grew increasingly frustrated with what he viewed as a farcical probation system. The majority of the cases he saw were drug-related offenses, including property crimes such as burglaries and thefts from tourists’ rental cars. Many of the defendants in his court received probation, but once they were back on the street, they might as well never have been convicted. Drug tests, for instance, were scheduled a full month in advance, even though the test could detect meth use only within the previous three days. Despite this, probationers still tested positive about half of the time, indicating that they couldn’t stay clean for even that short interval.

One reason for the backsliding, presumably, was that violators knew that in practice they had little to fear. Probation officers had limited time and resources, and to ask for a convict’s probation to be revoked would require a great deal of work. Moreover, officers weren’t always eager to send someone to prison for five years just for getting high. Since the probationers viewed the enforcers of their probation as lenient, overworked, and somewhat unpredictable, they correctly assumed there was a good chance they could get away with toking up at will.

Then, in 2004, Judge Alm decided to test the “swift and certain” paradigm. “It’s something we always talk about in the sociology classes,” he told me. “It just never happens in the criminal-justice system.” Alm, a former U.S. attorney who was born in Hawaii, instituted what academics such as Kleiman describe as one of the most innovative and successful alternatives to incarceration in recent years. The basic tenet will be familiar to anyone who has ever trained a puppy: punishment must be consistent and immediate, in order to maintain a clear linkage between transgression and consequences. Alm began by assembling 34 probationers chosen because their profiles suggested they were especially incorrigible. He told them: “Everybody in this courtroom wants you to succeed on probation. But for you not to be in prison means you are making a deal with me to follow the rules. If you don’t want to follow the rules, tell me now, and I will send you to prison.”

The rules were simple: each probationer had to call in to the courthouse every weekday to find out whether he was required to come in for an observed urine test. These tests occurred frequently, and if a probationer ever failed a test or failed to report for a test or a meeting with his probation officer, he was locked away for two days and hauled before the judge for immediate continued sentencing. The justice system under Alm was a consistent and unforgiving machine, dispensing instant punishment for every transgression. The effect was to make life on the outside a little more like life on the inside, with strict, regular monitoring of everyone in the system. If you used illegal drugs, you would be caught.

Alm worked with Kevin Takata, a supervisor in the prosecutor’s office, to come up with a form that reduced the paperwork time for demanding a probation modification from hours or days to minutes. And rather than require a complete overhaul of the terms of a violator’s probation, the judge simply handed down jail time. In practice, the sentences were not especially long—days or weeks, in most cases—but, as Kleiman argues, it was not the duration of punishment but the certainty that was crucial.

The results of Alm’s program, called Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement, or HOPE, astonished everyone. The probationers shaped up quickly, and over time they showed remarkably little inclination to go astray. The urine tests came back dirty a tenth as often as before. “We discovered that most of these guys can stop using on their own,” Alm explained, given the discipline imposed by HOPE. For most probationers, the strict observation was as good as, or better than, any drug-treatment program. It generally took no more than one stint in jail before an offender realized that the consequences of a relapse were real; second violations were unusual. And according to a study co-authored by Kleiman, recidivism—that is, arrests for the commission of new crimes, rather than just violations of probation—dropped by half.

Alm was inherently skeptical that prison is the appropriate remedy for many types of offenses. “You don’t want to send a 20-year-old who’s driving a stolen car and has a little dope on him when he’s caught to prison,” he said. “He’s not going to come out better. I belong to the school of judge-thought that says we should be sending to prison the people we are afraid of, or who won’t stop stealing.”

Probation officers started volunteering their problem cases to Alm’s court, and now all of his cases—more than 1,300—are HOPE probationers. Still more remarkable, the demands of the program—constant testing, appearances before the judge—have not overwhelmed the court system. Violators come in to see the judge, and attorneys complain about having to show up for hearings over even the smallest violations of probation. But overall, the court’s volume of work per offender has declined, as has the cost to the state. “You can get someone out working, versus having the state lock them up at a cost of $35,000 per year,” explained Myles Breiner, the president of Hawaii’s association of criminal defense lawyers. “Who wants to spend more money on the Corrections Corporation of America?”

Outside Hawaii, prison analysts are cautiously optimistic. “Certainly it should be tried in other jurisdictions,” said Gerald Gaes, a social scientist and former director of research at the Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C., though he was quick to caution that certain aspects of Hawaii may make the state unique in the U.S. criminal-justice system, and therefore its experience may not be generalizable to the country at large. To date, no other state has attempted a program as streamlined as HOPE, or as capable of meting out swift and certain punishment. But Alm is evangelizing aggressively. This year, he met with Attorney General Eric Holder and testified before a House subcommittee on crime about the possibility of expanding HOPE nationwide. “Down the road, I’m convinced: probation, pre-trial, parole,” he said. “We try to use best practices. Well, this truly is the best practice.”

Alm’s program certainly seems effective—much like BI’s technological solution to a similar set of problems. But as I stood in the security line at the courthouse where HOPE probationers report to urinate each morning, I couldn’t help but wonder how much the constant monitoring takes over their lives, and whether this carefully demarcated kind of freedom is more wearying than it appears. Some of the probationers had come in from an hour away to take their test, and they all had to monitor, on pain of incarceration, whether there was ever a whiff of spliff in the air at their friends’ places.

Back on the mainland, I asked law-enforcement officers and BI personnel, who have installed hundreds of monitoring anklets, how their clients first reacted when they felt the cinch of the band around their ankle and knew that, from that moment, they would be under constant surveillance. In most cases, Jennifer White told me, “they are just relieved to be at home and with their families and working.” Some were even grateful, because the device gave them an excuse to avoid criminal friends: after all, no one wants to commit a crime with an accomplice who’s being monitored. But not all were so upbeat. Some cursed. Others wept.

If the future of prisons is to be turned inside out, with criminals in the wild and their guards in a suburban midwestern office, how will the experience of being a convict change? The psychology of incarceration is well known not only to researchers, but to readers of Dostoyevsky and viewers of Oz. But to have your every step monitored as you make your way through life, ostensibly free—well, that is, so to speak, a brave new world.

In Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian British prison-state famously brainwashes a sociopathic youth into feeling physically ill at the very thought of inflicting pain. But he ultimately crumbles at the violence around him, and the state is forced to un-brainwash him. BI is of course installing its devices on the ankle, not in the mind. But the real purpose of any form of Panopticon justice—that is, the certainty of discovery and punishment—is to force the criminal to monitor himself. The Panopticon effectively outsources the role of prison guard to the prisoners themselves. And to be constantly on watch may wear at the psyche in ways difficult to predict. In a boast that could also serve as a warning, Bentham himself described his Panopticon as offering “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

In February, I visited Trenton, New Jersey, to observe a BI client in his native environment and to find out how life is for a man in a prison without bars. The New Jersey State Parole Board monitors about 250 sex offenders via GPS, and has had great success, in terms of cost and results, as a BI customer. The board’s public-information officer, Neal Buccino, offered to introduce me to a local child-molester, who allowed me to attend his regular parole meeting on the condition that I not use his real name. I will call him Mick.

Mick was 57, with a bad back, rotten teeth, and hepatitis. He’d worn a BI tracker for two years. When he walked in from the icy streets of Trenton, my eyes darted to the electronic components hanging off his leg and clothing, and I sympathized with him immediately. Mick had tried to kill himself a few months earlier in a bout of depression, possibly brought on by poverty and estrangement from his son and daughter, both of whom he had been convicted of molesting. He was tall and lanky, with glasses and a moustache, and, in the way of some depressives, was disarmingly funny. If I’d met Mick in the hallway of my apartment building, I would have thought he was there to fix the heater.

His parole officer, an intelligent young guy named John Goldin, meets Mick weekly to confirm where he has been, and why. He started by checking off the signs that Mick had kept away from kids and continued living his desperate and carefully observed life. “Any contact with police?” Goldin asked. “Drugs? Alcohol? Minors?”

Mick gave four quick, weary Nos.

Did Mick still plan to go fishing to supplement the $480 he had left over from his monthly disability payment after he paid child support? Were bedbugs still feasting on him and the other residents of his rooming house? Why had he gone to Broad Street on Wednesday?

Mick answered the questions with the resignation of someone who had become used to explaining every minute of his life to a man barely half his age. Yes, he was going to start fishing again. The bedbugs were gone for now. He’d gone to Broad Street to visit the TD Bank and count the loose change he’d found on the street.

As for the anklet itself, he told me his diabetes made him worry about where the band rubbed his skin. “I can’t afford no infections,” he said. In the summer, when the weather was hot and he didn’t wear long pants to conceal his tracker, he said the stares were constant: “I get tired of people asking me every day, ‘That a phone?’ I mean, shut the fuck up.”

Mick said he had trouble visiting his mother in her retirement home, because she worried about explaining why her son always wore a device on his leg. “She gets upset, and I can’t say that I blame her,” he said dejectedly. “It feels like it has grown into my skin sometimes.” It seemed also to have grown into his brain.

Whatever its merits, the idea of increasing the number of free-range felons such as Mick is unlikely to make for good politics. Willie Horton still haunts the dreams of every aspiring politician. Even Steven Alm says it was largely his reputation as a former prosecutor and “hanging judge” that enabled him to institute HOPE, since no one could plausibly accuse him of being soft on crime. “I’m convinced this is one of those Nixon-in-China things,” he explained. “If I hadn’t been a career prosecutor, there’s no way the law-enforcement people would have gotten on board.”

Nevertheless, there are moves under way to experiment with HOPE-like programs outside Hawaii. In addition to the conversations Alm has held with Attorney General Holder, legislation introduced by Representatives Adam B. Schiff (a California Democrat) and Ted Poe (a Texas Republican) would establish a competitive grant program to provide seed money for HOPE-style probation systems. Small programs are in place in Nevada and Oregon, and Alaska launched its own effort this summer. And the market for monitoring devices seems destined to expand, as the technology involved becomes more widespread and hardware costs continue to fall. Already, I have an application on my iPhone that broadcasts my exact location to selected friends at all times. If I were ever convicted of a crime and forced to submit to GPS tracking, I would, in theory, need only to add my probation officer to my Google Friends list and keep my phone handy. (When I showed the app to BI’s Jennifer White, she had trouble fathoming that anyone would use such a thing without a court order. “Do you keep that on all the time?” she asked suspiciously.) And with prison costs rising, and the pernicious effects of incarceration becoming clearer all the time, the problem of selling prisons without walls will presumably grow easier over time.

There are also, of course, worries about the creeping power of government, and the routinization of surveillance. Right now, BI monitors mostly offenders who have done something seriously wrong, and although its anklets enable parole and probation officers to lay down very specific location itineraries, in practice most just mark off home and work spaces. But there is no reason, as the technology gets cheaper and the monitoring ever more fine-grained, why electronic monitoring could not be used to impose an ever wider range of requirements on an ever wider range of “criminals.” A serious felon might have every second of his day tracked, whereas a lighter offender like myself—recently caught lead-footed by a traffic camera—might be required to carry a tracker that issues an alert any time I move faster than 65 miles per hour. (If such an intervention sounds far-fetched, recall that many jurisdictions in the United States already require convicted drunk drivers to pass an ignition-mounted Breathalyzer test before they can start their cars.)

The technology is already largely in place for such forms of Big Brother surveillance. In theory, they’d require little more than a creative judge to impose them, and someone behind a monitor in an office somewhere to enforce them. And that’s before you even begin spinning out the science-fiction scenarios, which themselves might not be so very far off. Right now the electrostatic patches made by BI and others monitor the sweat of parolees only for alcohol. But why stop there? Despite some practical hurdles, they could perhaps be upgraded to taste other substances, such as amphetamines or other drugs. And if patches can ensure that certain foreign substances remain out of the bloodstream, why not ensure that others are added to it—pharmaceuticals, say, to inhibit libido or muzzle aggression or keep psychosis at bay. They could even, again in theory, police the natural substances in our sweat, our hormones and neurotransmitters, the juices that determine our moods and desires. No machine currently exists that could sniff out criminal intent, or schizophrenia, or sexual arousal, from the armpits of a parolee or probationer, but the forward march of technology suggests that such a device is far from impossible, and that perhaps someday routine monitoring by authorities could be used to map convicts not just geographically but emotionally as well. If, for instance, the parole officer for a convicted rapist saw that his charge was in a state of highly elevated aggression, fear, and arousal, he might ask the police to pay an immediate visit to deter a possible crime—or, perhaps, interrupt a consensual encounter.

Future generations of devices could also be programmed to interact more directly with a client’s immediate surroundings. They might, for instance, react to the radio-frequency chips embedded in commercial products for the next generation of retail checkout scanners, and sound a warning if a parolee approached cigarettes like those he once shoplifted, or the liquor he liked to abuse. Or anklets could be set up to react with one another, preventing ex-cons from getting together without sounding an alert. Monitors could even be sold to store owners or other private citizens to let them know when particular categories of criminals set foot on their property.

These are the kinds of possibilities that give privacy advocates nightmares. Erik Luna, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, is a critic of mandatory sentencing and other measures that have packed U.S. jails, but he urges caution when viewing electronic monitoring as an alternative. “There should be a general concern about the extent of the power of the state to follow and track individuals and gather information about their lives,” Luna says. “What is the minimum ambit of privacy, to maintain the level of human dignity that a liberal form of government should provide?”

At the same time, if the people being monitored are those who would otherwise be in prison, then the infringement on their privacy is substantially less intrusive than that entailed in being required to sit in a cell all day. BI’s White made exactly this point when I raised the question with her. “They are doing their time in lieu of incarceration,” she said, with some exasperation. When I asked whether the privacy concerns of inmates should be considered at all, her answer, in essence, was no: “A person’s rights, when they are incarcerated, or a ward of the state, are different from yours and mine.”

And what of our rights, those of us outside the realm of the criminal-justice system? If the past several years in the shadow of a war against terrorism have taught us anything, it is that, once available, surveillance technologies rarely go unused, or un-abused. Could yesterday’s warrantless wiretapping become tomorrow’s clandestine cell-phone tracking? The technology already exists: even a cell phone that lacks a GPS can be traced to within a few city blocks. Once the legal and technical infrastructures were in place to allow the monitoring of criminals, it would be a relatively simple step to extend that monitoring to any person the government considered, for whatever reason, to be “of interest.”

For now, of course, none of these scenarios is close to taking place. Even HOPE, a narrow, low-tech program, is limited to Hawaii, and the number of convicts wearing BI’s anklets still make up a tiny fraction of those serving time, even outside prison walls. When close monitoring of probationers and parolees emerges as an ever more obvious alternative to expensive incarcerations, we would be wise to remain vigilant against Orwellian abuses. But potential drawbacks and pitfalls notwithstanding, it seems likely that the invasive surveillance model, combining tracking technology and the Kleiman/Alm paradigm of “swift and certain” justice, could offer an alternative to much of the waste—in human as well as economic terms—of our current, dysfunctional system.

In a way, the goal of Panopticon justice is as old as morality itself. It aims to install a tiny voice in each offender’s head, a warning that someone is watching and that wrongdoing will be punished. Most of us call that tiny voice a conscience. But for some that voice is overwhelmed by other, louder voices expressing need or impulse or desire, voices less bound by reason or consequence. If a device strapped to an ankle can help restore the balance, can amplify the voice of conscience relative to the others, is that such a bad thing? For optimists of human nature, it is a melancholy realization that the highest function of humanity can be, to some extent, outsourced to a plastic box. But the American criminal-justice system has become in many ways a graveyard of optimism. And surely it is better to outsource the fragile voice of conscience to a plastic box than to do what our brick-and-bar prisons so often do, which is to extinguish that voice altogether.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/09/prison-without-walls/8195/1/

Is Michigan doomed to a $2 billion per year Corrections Department?

Readers may be aware of the Granholm administration's push to reduce the prison population in the state. This should, in theory, help the state control costs, since housing a felon in a prison can run you $20,000 to $30,000 per year.

The funny thing is, smaller prisons aren't leading to smaller budgets.

For the 2011 budget, the governor initially recommended $1.88 billion for the department. The Senate has voted for $1.91 billion. And the House has voted for $1.99 billion. In her latest bid to break the budgetary logjam, Jennifer Granholm has advised a $50 million cut for DOC in 2011. So, best case, that's, what, $1.83 billion?

For its part, DOC is pointing to efficiency efforts. After seeing a report at governing.com about how Wisconsin and Minnesota were saving money by standardizing prison menus (www.governing.com/topics/economic-dev/minnesota-wisconsin-partnership.html), I asked the DOC what Michigan does in this regard.

DOC spokesman Russ Marlan replied, "We recently contracted with a supply chain management company out of Okemos called Integrated Strategies to help lower our food service costs and increase efficiency. As part of this process, we do now have a statewide standard menu. We also have a card swipe system that the inmates use to help prevent double backs (inmates getting two meals).

"As a result of all this work, we have lowered the daily food cost from about $2.60 per inmate, per day, to approximately $2.30 per inmate, per day (for three meals)."

On an annual basis, this translates to about $5 million. That's real money, but only about three-tenths of 1 percent of the departmental budget - if I've done my math correctly.

In 2005, corrections spending was about 19 percent of the state's $8.8 billion general fund. Let's say, for argument, that DOC spends $1.85 billion in 2011, and that the general fund budget is $8.1 billion (a split-the-difference amount from the budgets offered by the House and Senate). In that plausible scenario, DOC would represent 23 percent of the general fund.

rom one dollar in five to one dollar in four in about five years - and during a period when the actual prison population fell from about 50,000 to below 45,000.

So, at what point does the state see significant savings due to prisoner releases?

The prisoner-budget disconnect has not gone unnoticed at the Capitol, just unresolved.

Meanwhile, prosecutors across the state have pounded away at prisoner releases. Prosecutors conveniently neglect to explain their own budgetary reforms, but then, they don't have to offer solutions. All they have to do is plug in to the quite understandable fear that a released felon is more dangerous than an imprisoned one.

Rick Snyder's "Policy central" Web page has a folder on "International Image," but not one on prison policy. Hmm. I think prisons will have a far larger effect on a Snyder gubernatorial term than how Michigan is perceived in Finland or Chile.

http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20100831/COLUMNISTS07/8310311/-1/RSS

Even after leaving prison, most ex-offenders still carry a ball and chain: debt.

About 650,000 prisoners walk out the jailhouse doors each year. Most owe money to a variety of creditors, and their offender status limits their means to repay. If you or a loved one needs to rebuild after incarceration, know your options and get the necessary help. With guidance and perseverance, you can deal with that debt.

Lawton is the founder of the Reality Check Program, which helps teens and young adults make better lifestyle choices. He believes post-prison debt is perilous to the ex-offender and society alike. "A kid gets out of prison with debt, but he can't get a job so he can't repay it," says Lawton. "He may really want to do right, but how can he? He's almost forced to commit more crimes."

"Repaying Debt," a 2007 report (http://www.reentrypolicy.org/jc_publications/repaying_debts_full_report) by the Council of State Governments' Justice Center, found that "people released from prisons and jails typically must make payments to a host of agencies, including probation departments, courts and child support enforcement offices." Three-fourths of those owing child support, restitution and supervision fees have difficulty paying these debts.

Legal liabilities are not all the formerly incarcerated usually face. The report acknowledges but doesn't measure other balances "commonly owed but not explicitly part of a sentence imposed by a criminal court, such as transportation and housing payments or consumer debt."

According to those who work with ex-offenders, the cumulative financial burden they shoulder is often overwhelming. "Unpaid credit card debt, personal loans from a bank or credit union that have been sold and resold, car repossessions, mortgages that got behind, student loans, back taxes," are all common, says Todd Christensen. As director of education for the credit counseling organization Debt Reduction Services, out of Boise, Idaho, Christensen provides fundamental financial education classes in a local release program and says, "They owe everybody."

A big hurdle is simply securing a legitimate income source. The national unemployment rate hit 9.5 percent in July of 2010, and with millions looking for work, the competition is fierce. Add a criminal record and damaged credit report to a resume and employment prospects dwindle.

In 2003, Mark O'Hara (who asked that his real name be withheld to protect his privacy) was convicted of mail and wire fraud, and was recently released with a $100,000 restitution tab. Though he needs to make good on the bill, he wonders how to do so without a job. "Very few companies will even talk to convicted felons, let alone consider hiring them for a position of trust," says O'Hara.

Minimum wage jobs are usually the only options available, but those paychecks are often quickly eroded. Most states can garnish 35 percent of one's wages for legal fines and fees, and up to 65 percent for back child support. Little is left to pay remaining debt and basic living expenses.

An ex-offender's debt and unemployment carries a heavy psychological weight, says Lawton: "They are already so behind, so give up and and say 'Forget it, I can't pay this debt back.' They get bitter ... They go back to crime." The Justice Center report supports Lawton's perspective, concluding that financial pressures and paycheck garnishment resulting from unpaid debt "can increase participation in the underground economy and discourage legitimate employment."

A rapidly evolving society presents yet another significant problem. "If you've been imprisoned for a number of years, a lot has changed," says Jeffery Ian Ross, co-author of "Beyond Bars: Rejoining Society after Prison" and associate professor of criminology at the University of Baltimore. "Before you went in, credit reports may not have been as important as they are today. Now more and more employers and landlords pull them."

Overcoming the obstacles
Prioritizing obligations is the first step toward gaining control. You can quickly end up back behind bars if you don't pay your legal fees, fines and child support arrearage. Avoid restitution and you risk angering your parole officer, who may not go to bat for you because of it.

As for consumer debt, pay close attention to your state's statute of limitations for collection law. If you can't be sued for repayment, you can relax and concentrate on balances that take precedence.

Re-entry programs can help you find a job as well as provide debt and financial advocacy. "Most communities have them, and they can guide you to credit counseling agencies, and where to go for child support and other debt reduction help," says Sarah Walker, chief operating officer for 180 Degrees, a re-entry program based in Minneapolis. "There is an increased awareness that if people are leaving with unbearable debt, they won't be able to succeed in the community. Because of that they're increasingly incorporating financial literacy and assistance in their programs."

Indeed, money management and debt-repayment assistance play key roles to an ex-offender's personal success, and that includes joining the banking system to borrow beneficially. "Credit and legitimate debt is part of the healing process a former inmate will try to regain as part of a normal life," contends O'Hara.

With those goals in mind, re-entry programs also help ex-offenders obtain and improve their credit reports. "Providing the knowledge and resources is empowering," says Christensen. "I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their questions. It's a huge step for them."

See related: Keeping up credit while in jail may not be possible, How going to jail impacts your credit, Bankruptcy does offer a fresh start, at a high cost, State statutes of limitation for credit card debt, How wage garnishment works -- and how to avoid it, More employers pulling credit reports on job applicants. http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/ex-offenders-felons-prisoners-jail-in-debt-1264.php

Barriers to getting ahead
Repaying debt when you're employed and have a strong family, a good education and are emotionally stable can be hard enough. Doing so without those advantages -- a situation most former prisoners face -- can make repaying debt feel hopeless.
Crime doesn't pay; in fact, it's very costly. One study examined a hypothetical case of a young father convicted of drunken driving in New York, and listed the expenses -- including fines, fees, surcharges, restitution and child support -- that he would have to pay if sentenced to five years' probation.
Financial Obligation Amount
Ignition interlock device $2,175
Probation supervision see ($30/month) $1,800
Mandatory fine for felony DWI conviction $1,000
Restitution $1,000
Civil penalty for chemical test refusal with prior vehicle and traffic law conviction within 5 years $750
Civil penalty for no insurance $750
Driver responsibility assessment $750
Mandatory felony surcharge $250
Civil penalty (zero tolerance for DWI) $125
Fee for termination of license revocation $100
Surcharge for collecting restitution $50
Crime victim assistance fee $20
SUBTOTAL $8,770
Child support payments
($100/week for 5 years) $26,000
TOTAL $34,770
Source: The Center for the Community Alternatives
Published: August 30, 2010

The Centennial Correctional Facility is located in east Canon City.

The facility was approved by legislature in 2002, but several lawsuits and budget cuts delayed construction until 2007.

Wednesday the Colorado Department of Corrections (DOC) held a dedication ceremony for the new facility.

For prisoners the Centennial Correctional Facility is the end of the line.

"This is a 24 hour-a-day lock down. We have a five level security classifications system. This is level five which is the highest level," Ari Zavaras, Executive Director of the DOC, said.

Officials said prisoners who are problems at other facilities will end up in single cells at the Centennial Correctional Facility.

"Individuals that come into this setting do what we call in the system earn their way into this facility. It's by their behavior as opposed to what their crime was,” Zavaras said.

The facility has 948 high security beds in three towers. But because they are so expensive to run, only one tower will open in September.

Zavaras said to operate one tower costs a little over $10 million. Each tower holds 316 high security beds and the one that is opening will be filled to capacity almost immediately.

“We've had a backup in our high security beds, so we'll be able to get some of those individuals who are backed into facilities right now into this facility and start the programming," Zavaras said.

Attorney General John Suthers said the need for this facility goes back to 2001.

"Make no mistake about it, anyone who knows this business knows that adequate high security beds are absolutely essential to the proper and safe functioning of an effective Department of Corrections,” Suthers said.

Officials said the goal of the Centennial Correctional Facility is to teach problem prisoners better behavior and prepare them to return to society as a contributing member.

The Centennial Correctional Facility will officially open Sept. 1.They will accept 15 prisoners a day until capacity is reached.
http://www.coloradoconnection.com/news/story.aspx?id=502222

CONCORD – State prison inmates trying to earn parole, many of them with alcohol and drug abuse backgrounds, face a shortage of treatment programs they need to attend as a condition of being set free.

Alan Coburn, a member of the Adult Parole Board, told a committee studying parole issues yesterday that because treatment options are few, many inmates ready for release remain behind bars for up to a year while they wait their turn.

The majority of state prison inmates have drug or alcohol problems, studies have shown. Coburn said demand for treatment upon release is so great that if beds were to double at the Tirrell House he oversees in Manchester, "those beds would be full tomorrow." The number of treatment facilities around the state has steadily eroded over the past decade, complicating parole decisions, Coburn said.

"In many cases, we feel if we do release them before treatment, they'll never make it to the program because they'll relapse while they're outside waiting," he said.

The study committee on parole practices was established by the Legislature before it passed the more comprehensive Justice Reinvestment Act. The act is meant to cut what the state spends on corrections facilities. It will allow most non-violent inmates to be paroled after they serve 120 percent of their minimum sentence. They will be expected to stick to counseling sessions and other requirements spelled out in the conditions of their parole, or face a guaranteed 90-day return trip to prison.

The bill was supported by Gov. John Lynch, corrections officials, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Broderick and Attorney General Michael Delaney. Parole officers opposed the bill, saying their workload is already so high they will be unable to keep up with the increased number of parolees.

John Eckert, executive assistant to the Adult Parole Board, said that records from the Corrections department show that more inmates are being sent to prison for new offenses, not parole violations on things like alcohol abuse of moving without notifying parole officers.

Between September 2009 and March 2010, he said, roughly 60 percent of inmates were committed on new criminal activity, about double what had been the case until recently.

Eckert said he disagrees with statements made at an earlier committee meeting that it is difficult for inmates to win parole.

"We parole at least three-quarters of the people we see, which nationally is about the highest," Eckert said. "I've had a consultant come in and say, 'Wow. That's awfully high.'/" It is common for parole to be approved, but for an inmate to linger behind bars waiting for treatment or trying to arrange for a job or rental housing, Eckert said.

Joseph Diament, who heads the new community corrections division at the Department of Corrections, said after the hearing that treatment facilities that closed did so because of low reimbursement from private insurers, not because of state budget cuts.

Diament said the state is taking bids from companies that would set up a series of state operated counseling centers to support parolees and probationers. The centers would be operated through a $900,000 federal grant.
http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Bottleneck+in+inmates%27+treatment+means+delays+in+release&articleId=518479e5-25ec-478f-bc0c-6252b2290206

Ithaca school board balks at buying-from-prisons policy
State purchasing policy requirement removed
Ithaca Journal
By Liz Lawyer
August 25, 2010

A line in the Ithaca City School District's purchasing policy was causing a moral dilemma for some board of education members -- so they took it out, despite a state law requiring it remain in.

State law requires school districts to purchase goods from state correctional facilities under certain circumstances. Board members say the requirement is contrary to the district's mission and hearkens back to Jim Crow-era institutions.

Board member Sean Eversley Bradwell brought the issue before the board at a meeting Tuesday night, and most members agreed with his concerns.

The history of labor in correctional facilities goes back to references to "the farm," in the South, which succeeded slavery as an institution of racial oppression, Eversley Bradwell said. Black men were frequently sent to "do time on the farm," for real or trumped-up infractions, he said, and the current practice of using prisoners for labor, while paying extremely low wages, echoes that past.

"There is some New York State law that says we are compelled to buy goods made in correctional facilities," he said. "I'm putting it on the table that, no -- we don't want to buy from correctional facilities."

State finance law specifies that when available in the "form, function and utility" required by a political subdivision, purchases of commodities and services must be made through "preferred sources," which include correctional facilities, non-profit agencies for the blind and severely disabled persons, veterans' workshops and other agencies.

The board voted 5-3 to strike the line from the district policy referring to purchasing goods from correctional institutions, with Judy Maxwell, Seth Peacock and Jay True opposing. The board then approved the policy 6-1, with Maxwell opposing and True abstaining.

Superintendent Judith Pastel said the district has, in practice, not purchased from the prison system, but the line remained in the policy in accordance with law. So the vote will not change district practice, but the board's policy will no longer acknowledge the option to purchase goods from the prison system, said district Business Administrator Margaret Boice.

Pastel said, "My concern is, when we've been audited, nothing's been said to us. If we take it off, it's going to draw attention to what we've been practicing, and then they go into more detail of what our practices are and then we may find out what happens."

Board member Josh Bornstein said, "It's an odious enough requirement, even though it's legal, that I agree with Sean."

Board member Eldred Harris said he could not square the concept of benefitting financially from the prison system with a requirement to purchase goods from correctional facilities when those within the prison system are evidence of school districts' failures.

"The causal link I see is that schools fail students of color disproportionately," and the rate of failure of students of color corresponds with African-Americans' disproportionate incarceration rate, Harris said.

Once imprisoned, the state utilizes prisoners' labor for almost no pay, and then forces school districts and municipalities to purchase the products they make, he said.

"That, to me, is obscene," he said.

Harris told the board, "I think it's such poor law that I would be willing to undergo the fight with the New York State Legislature (to get it changed)... Someone needs to explain how this policy makes sense."

If there is evidence that inmates who participate in work programs are better able to find employment or show a lower recidivism rate, Harris said, the law could be justified.

Eversley Bradwell said he asked the district's lawyers what sort of penalties the district could incur for refusing to acknowledge the option to purchase goods from the prison system, but did not get a definitive answer. Board members and administrators were not sure what the consequences may be of deliberately removing the line from the policy.

Nancy Hanks, deputy press secretary of the Office of the State Comptroller, said in an e-mail, "As is often the case, there is no 'self-implementing' sanction in the statutes for not complying; it's up to the courts."
http://www.theithacajournal.com/article/20100825/NEWS01/8250403/Ithaca+school+board+balks+at+buying-from-prisons+policy

Curtis Ballard rides a motorized wheelchair around his prison ward, which happens to be the new assisted-living unit — a place of many windows and no visible steel bars — at Washington state’s Coyote Ridge Corrections Center.

A stroke left Ballard unable to walk. He also has had a heart attack and underwent a procedure to remove skin cancer from his neck. At 77, he’s been in prison since 1993 for murder. He has 14 years left of his sentence.

“I’d be a burden on my kids,” the native Texan said. “I’d rather be a burden to these people.”

That burden is becoming greater. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that elderly prisoners — the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, largely because of tough sentencing laws — are three times more expensive to incarcerate than younger inmates.

The ACLU estimates it costs about $72,000 to house an elderly inmate for a year, compared with $24,000 for a younger prisoner.

That’s not the case in Missouri’s correctional system, though. The per diem cost for medical and mental health care is the same for each offender in the system, said Jacqueline Lapine, spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Corrections.

The department contracts for medical care through Correctional Medical Services, which charges $9.90 a day per offender for health care and $2.34 a day per offender for mental health care, Lapine said. The cost is included in the average daily cost to house an offender in Missouri, which is $44.68, she said.

The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that the number of men and women in state and federal prisons age 55 and older grew 76 percent between 1999 and 2008, the latest year available, from 43,300 to 76,400. The entire prison population grew 18 percent in that period.

“We’re reaping the fruits of bad public policy like ‘three strikes’ laws and other mandatory minimum sentencing laws,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project in Washington, D.C. “One in 11 prisoners is serving a life sentence.”

Washington has 2,495 inmates who are 50 or older, the state’s definition of elderly, according to information released after a public records request from The Associated Press. There are 270 inmates older than 65. The infirm started arriving at the new assisted-living facility at Coyote Ridge when it opened Feb. 1.

The unit has a capacity of 74 inmates. To qualify, an inmate must be disabled and be considered a minimum security risk, said Jeffrey Uttecht, prison superintendent.

The oldest inmate there is Ernest Tabor, 84, who was incarcerated for murder in 1997 and has 13 more years to serve. The average age in the assisted-living unit is 59, a figure skewed slightly by three inmates in their 30s with disabilities.

Nearly all the inmates in the assisted-living unit are in for murder or sex crimes, although a few are serving time for assault, drug or property crimes. Some were due to be released this year. Ballard is set for release in 2024.

The documents show the average age of a prison inmate in Washington has risen from 34.8 in 2000 to 37.3 in 2010. The average is rising because of longer sentences, not because older people are being sent to prison, the state said.

The assisted-living center is a unit in a much larger prison, which has two doctors for more than 2,000 total inmates. But the elderly prisoners tend to consume a big share of medical resources, including having two nurses assigned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, health care manager Mary Jo Currey said.

The assisted-living prisoners need walkers, wheelchairs and lots of medications. Some experts suggest infirm prisoners could be more cheaply cared for in conventional nursing homes, as people older than 50 rarely commit violent crime, Fathi said.

A visit to a prison ward for the elderly is an eye-opening experience, he said.

“Some were entirely bedridden,” he said. “It looked like a nursing home with razor wire.”

As of Wednesday, Missouri had more than 4,500 incarcerated offenders older than 50, Lapine said. Charles Barnes, who turns 83 next month, is the oldest serving an extended period of time. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 2008 and is serving a 10-year sentence.

Many states, including Missouri, are studying ways to reduce the number of elderly prisoners. The Aging Offender Management Team was created to identify a departmentwide solution to determine the best ways to handle needs of aging offenders and to reduce the need for long-term, prison-based care, Lapine said.

“When these offenders can no longer function in the general population, placement options are limited,” she said in an e-mail. Segregation beds are limited and not ideal, and infirmary beds are “a very limited resource,” Lapine said.

The committee made the following recommendations:

* Develop “enhanced care units” within Missouri prisons to provide appropriate health and housing services to offenders with special health needs.
* Keep better track of aging offenders’ daily activities to be used in conjunction with annual physicals.
* Develop a way to better identify the physiological age of offenders and their special needs.
* Develop an education campaign around the issue of aging prison populations.
* Train correctional staff to identify and meet the needs of a growing aging population.

New or expanded early release programs were adopted last year by 12 states and the District of Columbia.

But a study released in April by the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City found the laws have rarely been used, in part because of political considerations and complicated reviews.

Early release for infirm inmates would be fine with Uttecht, the Coyote Ridge superintendent. But those prisoners need to be able to pay for the nursing care they need, so it doesn’t happen often in Washington, he said.

“Usually it’s for a terminal-type illness,” he said.

Jane Parnell, who ran a special prison for the elderly in Yakima, Wash., that was closed last year because of high costs, said the public doesn’t want these inmates released.

“A lot of them are sex offenders and fairly violent offenders,” she said.

Parnell also questioned the necessity of the assisted-living center, saying it is “more unusual than I think it should be.” Many states just put elderly prisoners in the hospital ward, she said.

The assisted-living unit at Coyote Ridge is inside the fence of the regular prison but segregated from other units.

The building is one story and has wooden walls and wide doors to accommodate wheelchairs. There is a microwave oven, a shuffleboard table and a weight room in the common area.

Most inmates live in hospital ward style, with beds, desks and lockers. Sicker inmates have rooms with hospital beds.

Ballard lived much of his adult life in the Portland, Ore., area, where he worked on bridges, water towers and other tall structures.

His four kids bought his motorized wheelchair, an option not provided by the state. That allows him to work in the prison laundry, where he earns $52 a month. He doesn’t like the prison food and purchases many of his meals from the prison store.

Ballard declined to discuss why he was in prison, but records show he was convicted in 1993 of killing his estranged second wife and her adult daughter.

He also watches news, travel and cooking programs on a small television. He sometimes plays bluegrass music on his guitar. His room has a sink and toilet, and younger inmates are assigned to help him.

“Most will really help you,” Ballard said. “It’s not like in the movies, where there are a bunch of bullies out there.”

This article was published on page D1 of the Sunday, August 22, 2010 edition of The Columbia Daily
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/aug/22/aging-in-prison/

Well before passing Arizona's controversial immigration law, Arizona lawmakers were treating the state as a laboratory of sorts for the criminal justice system. Last year, state legislators passed a bill that would have privatized almost all of Arizona's correctional system for $100 million upfront -- an unprecedented move by a state government. The main argument was economic, as private operators claimed they could run more cost-efficient facilities, which supporters said would help close a billion-dollar budget gap in Phoenix.

Although private prisons have been sold on economic grounds, a study this year by Arizona's own Corrections Department questions whether such facilities can even deliver in terms of cost savings, reports the Arizona Republic. The state's cost study showed that it's often more expensive to incarcerate inmates in private prisons than in state-run facilities, despite the savings that private operators typically promise. "The cost of housing a medium-security inmate is $3 to $8 more per day in a private prison, depending on what assumptions are made about overhead costs to the state," according to the story. (http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/08/22/20100822arizona-private-prisons.html#ixzz0xMQVG1d9)
How did this happen? According to some observers, it's because private operators often low-ball their operating costs when presenting their case to the state. The Republic lays it out:

According to the National Institute of Justice, private prisons tend to make much lower estimates of their overhead costs to the state for oversight, inmate health care and staff background checks.

Officials at public prisons often argue that the state winds up paying a higher cost for those services than is advertised, mitigating savings that private prisons are built to deliver. …

To maintain profit margins, [Arizona State University professor] Pratt said, companies often cut back on staff training, wages and inmate services. "Cost savings like that don't come without consequences," Pratt said. "And that can present a security risk that's elevated."

In fact, the reason that Arizona is taking a second look at its private prisons right now is because of a high-profile fugitive case: Three inmates escaped from a private facility last month and are believed to be responsible for two murders during their flight, having only been captured last Thursday. This is just the latest episode in a long history of scandals that have plagued private prison operators, including charges of prisoner abuse in adult and juvenile facilities.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with privately run prisons, but if they can't even save taxpayers money -- and create greater security risks in an effort to deliver as promised -- then lawmakers should think again before resorting to them. Having poured millions into lobbying lawmakers, the private prison industry has also sold itself to local communities by promising to create jobs in the places where new facilities are built. The thing is, if the same funds were put toward constructing new publicly run facilities, the money could have a similarly stimulative effect on local economies -- and could end up delivering more on the dollar than their private counterparts.

Suzy Khimm is a political reporter in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/are_private_prisons_worth_the.html

Gov. David Paterson of New York took a stand for electoral fairness earlier this month when he signed legislation that bans prison-based gerrymandering — the cynical practice of counting prison inmates as “residents,” to pad the size of legislative districts. The new law, which requires that prison inmates be counted at their homes, deserves to be emulated all across the country.

Prison-based gerrymandering mattered little when inmate populations were small. But by the 1990s, when more than a million people nationally were behind bars, lawmakers had perfected the art of inflating the political clout of underpopulated areas by drawing legislative districts around prisons.

More than a dozen New York counties with large prisons already take inmates out of the count when they draw districts for county offices. According to an analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative, a New York-based research group, seven New York State Senate districts could now have trouble meeting federal population requirements, which means that those districts will have to be drawn along different lines.

The new law could lead to a political realignment in places like Rome, the upstate city where inmates at the Mohawk and Oneida correctional facilities make up about half the residents of one City Council district. Currently each resident there has twice the voting power of a resident who lives elsewhere in that city.

Republican politicians who represent upstate prison districts have predictably tried to portray the new law as a power grab by New York City Democrats. But only about half of the nearly 60,000 people held in New York prisons come from the city while nearly 40 percent of inmates are from upstate areas. They will now be rightfully counted in the places they come from — and to which they will eventually return. By upholding the principle of one person, one vote, the new law will benefit citizens in all parts of the state.
A version of this editorial appeared in print on August 23, 2010, on page A22 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/opinion/23mon3.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

By JJ Hensley, The Arizona Republic
The escape of three inmates from an Arizona prison will bring sweeping changes to the privately run facility near Kingman and could alter the way the state's prison system handles dangerous criminals in years to come.

A state report on the July 30 prison escape details systemic problems ranging from ill-equipped facilities with inadequate oversight to faulty alarm systems and disrespectful inmates, all of which combined to create a lax culture that allowed the inmates to cut through fences and sneak out of the prison's medium-security facility.

A summary of the findings

The reason the men were able to escape is rooted in a culture of complacency that developed at the prison in the six years it has been open, the report said, and those factors were complicated by opening a new unit and shuffling inmates around the complex this year.

The last of the three inmates was recaptured Thursday night with his reported accomplice. Members of the group were tied to the murder of a couple in New Mexico following the escape, making the breakout Arizona's worst in 30 years, said Charles Ryan, director of the Department of Corrections.

"This is a terrible tragedy, and the department and the contractor have a lot of work to do," Ryan said at a Thursday news conference unveiling the private facility's security shortcomings.

Citing a "lack of confidence" in the private contractor, Ryan has ordered 148 inmates moved from the prison after setting new prisoner-classification standards for minimum- and medium-security inmates at the complex near Kingman. Ryan also said the escape has slowed Arizona's efforts to add an additional 5,000 private prison beds. It also put the Kingman facility's operators on notice that failure to comply with new security standards will result in the loss of the state contract to operate the 3,200-bed prison.

An executive with Utah-based Management & Training Corp. said the company is committed to working with the state to correct its prison's flaws.

"There is no way we can explain that away," said Odie Washington, the company's senior vice president. "It should not have happened, regardless of the conditions at the facility."

Some administrators at the prison have resigned or have been reassigned to other duties in the wake of the escape.

Gov. Jan Brewer has said that she remains confident in the ability of private prisons to house certain inmates but that only the "most serious" maximum-security offenders need to be held in public facilities.

Escapees John McCluskey, Tracy Province and Daniel Renwick fled the medium-security unit on July 30. Province and Renwick were convicted murderers, and McCluskey, who was recaptured in eastern Arizona on Thursday, was serving a 15-year sentence for attempted murder.

Critics of Brewer's efforts to privatize more Arizona prisons said allowing Management & Training Corp. to continue operating in the state is dangerous.

Attorney General Terry Goddard, Brewer's likely Democratic opponent in the November gubernatorial election, chastised her for creating a "climate of permissiveness" toward private prisons.

"If I were governor, they would have been fired yesterday," Goddard said. As the state's chief executive, he said, Brewer is responsible for the lack of oversight.

"They (MTC) clearly breached the public trust," he said.

The report released Thursday highlights problems at the Kingman facility that arose over time and led to indifference about behavior and indicators that would have caught the attention of administrators at state-run facilities. It found:

• False alarms were so frequent the staff learned to ignore them. During a 16-hour review period before and after the escape, there were 89 alarms. Two were legitimate and the rest were false. Alarms were so normal they were treated as lower priority than "answering the telephone, issuing keys, checking staff in," according to the report.

• Inmates at the facility did not groom themselves according to standards, and as many as 75% walked the complex without ID badges. That indicated a lack of control and respect. When a security-review team visited the facility after the escape, an inmate yelled "(expletive) ADC!" according to the report.

• Turnover at the facility was high, leading to a lack of training. The warden indicated nearly 80% of her staff was new or newly promoted. Officers struggled to load and use weapons during the security review. High-ranking officers "seemed hesitant and less assertive" than counterparts at state-run facilities.

That so many serious problems went unaddressed by both the prison's administrative staff and Corrections Department teams who conduct the annual audits also points to flaws in the state's system of reviewing private prisons, Ryan said. Auditors in Kingman noted three areas of non-compliance in the prison's security system when they visited the site in March, none of which would have contributed to the escape, according to experts who reviewed the documents.

"If they were following the (audit) instrument, it's probably a problem with the instrument," Ryan said.

The escape will likely bring changes to Arizona's inmate-classification system.

The state's method for determining which inmates are housed in minimum, medium and maximum levels was designed after the notorious 1978 escape from Florence of Gary Tison and Randy Greenawalt. Their escape led to a 13-day crime spree and eight deaths. The system is a universally accepted method that assigns inmates a number based on the crime for which they are convicted and moves them up and down the scale based on prison behavior. The state last modified its system in 2005, after a hostage crisis and 15-day standoff at a state prison near Buckeye.

Ryan already has made changes at the Kingman complex that prevent convicted murderers and inmates with a history of escape from being housed in the minimum-security unit. Also, first-degree murderers, inmates with a history of escape or more than 20 years remaining on their sentences cannot be kept in Kingman's medium-security unit.

The state has detailed changes the prison's operator must make if the company wants to keep the contract. Those include repairs to the faulty alarm system, increased patrols on the prison's perimeter, and adoption of a model of inmate supervision that matches that of the state to give officers more control.

The company has presented the state with a compliance plan that Ryan accepted.

Whether the company can adhere to that plan and maintain the contract remain to be seen, Ryan said.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-08-20-arizona-prison-report_N.htm

NY candidate: Prison dorms for welfare recipients

By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Sat Aug 21, 2010

NEW YORK – Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino said he would transform some New York prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients, where they could work in state-sponsored jobs, get employment training and take lessons in "personal hygiene."

Paladino, a wealthy Buffalo real estate developer popular with many tea party activists, isn't saying the state should jail poor people: The program would be voluntary.

But the suggestion that poor families would be better off in remote institutions, rather than among friends and family in their own neighborhoods, struck some anti-poverty activists as insulting.

Paladino is competing for the Republican nomination with former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio. The primary is Sept. 14.

Paladino first described the idea in June at a meeting of The Journal News of White Plains and spoke about it again this week with The Associated Press.

Throughout his campaign, Paladino has criticized New York's rich menu of social service benefits, which he says encourages illegal immigrants and needy people to live in the state. He has promised a 20 percent reduction in the state budget and a 10 percent income tax cut if elected.

Asked at the meeting how he would achieve those savings, Paladino laid out several plans that included converting underused state prisons into centers that would house welfare recipients. There, they would do work for the state — "military service, in some cases park service, in other cases public works service," he said — while prison guards would be retrained to work as counselors.

"Instead of handing out the welfare checks, we'll teach people how to earn their check. We'll teach them personal hygiene ... the personal things they don't get when they come from dysfunctional homes," Paladino said.

New York, like other states, receives a federal block grant to provide cash and other forms of welfare to very low-income residents. Federal law already requires welfare recipients to do some form of work to receive benefits.

New York's welfare rolls have grown slightly during the recession, while food stamp eligibility has almost doubled, according to the state.

Paladino told The Associated Press the dormitory living would be voluntary, not mandatory, and would give welfare recipients an opportunity to take public, state-sponsored jobs far from home.

"These are beautiful properties with basketball courts, bathroom facilities, toilet facilities. Many young people would love to get the hell out of cities," Paladino he said.

He also defended his hygiene remarks, saying he had trained inner-city troops in the Army and knows their needs.

"You have to teach them basic things — taking care of themselves, physical fitness. In their dysfunctional environment, they never learned these things," he said.

Ketny Jean-Francois, a former welfare recipient and a New York City advocate for low-income people, said Paladino's idea shocked her.

"Being poor is not a crime," she said. "People are on welfare for many reasons ... Is he saying people are poor because they don't have any hygiene or any skills?"

A Lazio spokesman didn't immediately return a message.

Paladino said he based his ideas on the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program that paid young unemployed men during the Great Depression to plant trees, build roads and develop parks.

Paladino said he would open the program both to long-term welfare recipients and to people who had lost their jobs during the recession. He said that he didn't know how he would pay for it but that prisons could be consolidated to make room.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_paladino_welfare
___

Associated Press writer Marc Beja contributed to this report.

In Indiana, when police seize cash, luxury cars and other assets from criminal suspects, any proceeds that exceed law enforcements costs are supposed to go to the state's schools.

But in 87 of Indiana's 92 counties -- including Marion and its surrounding counties -- that is not happening, an Indianapolis Star investigation found.

ST. LOUIS — Saint Louis University has received a $150,000 grant from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation to launch the nation's first in-prison degree program for both inmates and employees.

This spring, the University will offer an associate of arts degree to 20 inmates and 20 staff members at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Corrections Center. The effort is an extension of the University's SLU Prison Initiative, which began three years ago at the state maximum security facility in Bonne Terre, Mo.

University President Lawrence Biondi, S.J., has supported the SLU Prison Initiative from the very beginning. Before he began his career in higher education, he served for six years as a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago.

"I know first hand the hopelessness that prisoners feel, and I know firsthand the hopefulness of Jesuit education," Biondi said. "I am deeply grateful to the Hearst Foundation for its support of this program, which strengthens SLU's commitment to serve the marginalized in our society."

Theology professor Kenneth Parker, Ph.D., founded the SLU Prison Initiative after watching a story on 60 Minutes about similar effort at Bard College in New York. Professors there have taught in prisons for 15 years.

"I was struck by the fact that a secular, liberal arts college was doing this," Parker said. "I couldn't help but think to myself that this fits our mission at Saint Louis University."

With the approval of University administrators and state officials — as well as funding from the Incarnate Word Foundation — SLU began offering a certificate in theology to prisoners in early 2008. A dozen inmates completed the five-course program in May.

The original goal of the SLU Prison Initiative was to help inmates who get paroled adjust to society as well as make mentors out of prisoners serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. That goal has since grown.

"Serving prisoners remains a priority, but during the course of the certificate program, we found that prison employees often lack adequate access to opportunities for higher education as well," Parker said. "Our innovative program will serve both populations equally."

Professors from across the University are signing up to teach classes in theology, philosophy, English, communication and mathematics as well as social and health sciences. Classes will be taught on-site for prisoners, and a hybrid model — on-site and online — will be used for staff.

This format is unique in the country, Parker said. While some universities offer scholarships for prison employees to take classes on their campuses, Parker is aware of no other school using SLU's on-site approach. Higher education programs for prisoners are just as rare.

"Our nation's correctional facilities are woefully overcrowded," Parker added. "College-in-prison programs have been proven to be one of the most effective ways to reduce recidivism rates. Ultimately that benefits all of us."

http://www.slu.edu/x38609.xml

AUGUSTA, Maine — Maine is not only the oldest state in the nation, the inmates in the state’s correctional facilities are also aging, and that is resulting in higher health care costs and consideration of changes in the way the state houses elderly prisoners.

“This is a calamity that is coming,” said Sen. Stan Gerzofsky, D-Brunswick, co-chairman of the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee. “The population in our prisons are getting much older every year, and it is something the next Legislature will have to look at because it is becoming a calamity now, where two or three sessions ago it was just a problem.”

Gerzofsky served on the panel in the House before his election to the Senate in 2008. He said stiffer sentences for some crimes mean inmates are staying behind bars longer, and the state needs to plan on how to handle aging prisoners.

He said one initiative approved by lawmakers to address the issue allows the department to place an inmate in a nursing home if the inmate would not jeopardize public safety. Denise Lord, Maine’s associate commissioner of corrections, said only one inmate is in a nursing home facility.

“No, we have not had much success at placing people in nursing homes,” she said.

Lord said there are 298 men and nine women in the state correctional system older than the age of 50. There are 2,056 inmates in the state system.

“We are doing an analysis of the length of sentences, but I know there are a lot in our system with some long sentences they will serve,” Lord said.

She said there are 416 men and 36 women in their 40s, and while she will not know how many of those still will be in prison in their 60s until the analysis is complete, several are serving long sentences — including life sentences.

Lord said the state’s corrections population is not only aging, it is significantly sicker than those outside the prison walls. When the costs of guarding inmates in a hospital or taking them to a doctor or dentist is added to the actual medical costs, Lord said it is about 25 percent of the department’s entire budget.

“When we send an inmate out, there is at least one guard,” she said. “For some inmates in a hospital, we may have two or three guards 24-7, and that gets expensive.”

Lord said the use of contracted services and a systemwide pharmacy contract has held down health care costs, but she expects the costs will increase over the next several years.

“This is not something you can just sweep under the rug and say let’s just wait and see what happens,” said Rep. Anne Haskell, D-Portland, co-chairwoman of the Criminal Justice Committee. “We have been talking with the department about what should be done, but it all comes down to money.”

She said some states have looked at what amounts to a correctional nursing home that provides care for aging inmates and security for the public.

“Some of these inmates, no matter how old, are still a danger to the public,” Haskell said. “We have to remember there are victims of the crimes these prisoners have committed, and we can’t let people out of prison just because they are old.”

Rep. Gary Plummer, R-Windham, served several years as a county commissioner and is a member of the committee. He said the problem of dealing with aging inmates and their health problems has been growing at all levels of corrections, and county jails also are facing some tough choices.

“We know we have to face it,” he said. “Frankly, it is cheaper to house people in a nursing home than in a jail. And as much as I don’t want to see the state in the nursing house business, I think we have to look at it very seriously and not wait for it to be a crisis.”

Haskell said the new state corrections board should work with the counties and the Department of Corrections to develop a plan to address future needs. She said finding resources always has been difficult, but when people are jailed for a crime, the state is responsible for their care — including their health care.

“We are not talking about them spending their golden years in a facility,” she said. “We are talking about doing what we need to do to protect society and what we have to do to take care of prisoners in our care.”

Gerzofsky said the issues around the aging inmate population need to move to the top of the list when lawmakers reconvene in December.
http://www.bangordailynews.com/story/Statewide/Aging-inmates-cost-state,151485