May 13, 2008
Schwarzenegger drops plan for early release of 22,000 inmates
Schwarzenegger drops plan for early release of 22,000 inmates
By Andy Furillo
May 13, 2008
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has dumped his plan to release about 22,000 lower-risk inmates from prison before they complete their terms, The Bee learned Monday.
The revised budget he will present on Wednesday will jettison the plan, which would have freed prisoners doing time for crimes such as drug possession and car theft who had less than 20 months to go on their terms.
The governor had sought the change as part of a 10 percent, across-the-board general fund budget cut to deal with a multibillion-dollar deficit.
His plan was unlikely, however, to win support in upcoming budget negotiations. Not a single legislator in the state had expressed support for the idea.
Press secretary Aaron McLear confirmed that Schwarzenegger will drop the early release plan but declined to comment further.
Assembly Public Safety Committee Chairman Jose Solorio, D-Santa Ana, welcomed its demise.
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Posted by lois at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2008
Regina McKnight -- Victory at Long Last!
Regina McKnight -- Victory at Long Last
On May 11, 2008 the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Regina McKnight did not have a fair trial when she was convicted in 2001 for homicide by child abuse. In 2001 Ms. McKnight became the first woman in South Carolina to be convicted of homicide by child abuse as a result of suffering an unintentional stillbirth.
Yesterday, after eight long years, a unanimous South Carolina Supreme Court finally reversed the twenty-year homicide conviction of Regina McKnight. The decision recognizes that the claim that cocaine is linked to stillbirths is based on "outdated" and inaccurate medical information.
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Posted by lois at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)
May 11, 2008
Cornell 1Q profit jumps nearly sevenfold
Cornell 1Q profit jumps nearly sevenfold
Associated Press
05.09.08, 1:50 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com - Cornell 1Q profit jumps nearly sevenfold – Forbes.com
HOUSTON - Cornell Cos., a provider of corrections and treatment services to federal and state agencies, said Friday that its first-quarter profit soared nearly sevenfold, with revenue rising mainly due to correctional center and prison projects.
For the quarter ended March 31, Cornell Companies earned $4.6 million, or 32 cents per share, compared with $664,000, or 5 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.
The company's revenue climbed 6 percent to $95.4 million from $89.6 million.
Cornell Companies said much of the growth resulted from the expansion of the Big Spring Correctional Center and the D. Ray James Prison in November and February, respectively.
The company also said its general and administrative expenses declined to $6.5 million from $8.4 million. Its operating expenses, excluding depreciation, edged up to $70.2 million from $69.6 million.
Cornell Companies shares declined 57 cents to $21.88 in afternoon trading.
Posted by lois at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2008
Comic book: Mexico draws dire picture for migrants
Mexico draws dire picture for migrants
The cover of a Mexican comic book aimed to deter illegal immigration says "Migrants: Only alive can you do something for your families."
By Chris Hawley and Sergio Solache, USA TODAY. April 21, 2008
MEXICO CITY — One migrant gets his legs sliced off by a train's wheels. Another is shot by bandits on the Arizona border. Others are beaten and robbed by crooked Mexican police.
In a new effort to dissuade people from crossing the border illegally, Mexico's top human-rights agency has published two comic books packed with tales about the horrors that migrants may face. The tone is very different from previous government publications that focused more on travel and safety tips.
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Posted by lois at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)
Racial Inequity and Drug Arrests
May 10, 2008
NY Times
Editorial
Racial Inequity and Drug Arrests
The United States prison system keeps marking shameful milestones. In late February, the Pew Center on the States released a report showing that more than 1 in 100 American adults are presently behind bars — an astonishingly high rate of incarceration notably skewed along racial lines. One in nine black men aged 20 to 34 are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.
Now, two new reports, by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch, have turned a critical spotlight on law enforcement’s overwhelming focus on drug use in low-income urban areas. These reports show large disparities in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, despite roughly equal rates of illegal drug use.
Black men are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, according to one haunting statistic cited by Human Rights Watch. Those who are not imprisoned are often arrested for possession of small quantities of drugs and later released — in some cases with a permanent stain on their records that can make it difficult to get a job or start a young person on a path to future arrests.
Similar concerns are voiced by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which issued a separate study of the outsized number of misdemeanor marijuana arrests among people of color in New York City.
Between 1980 and 2003, drug arrests for African-Americans in the nation’s largest cities rose at three times the rate for whites, a disparity “not explained by corresponding changes in rates of drug use,” The Sentencing Project finds. In sum, a dubious anti-drug strategy spawned amid the deadly crack-related urban violence of the 1980s lives on, despite changed circumstances, the existence of cost-saving alternatives to prison for low-risk offenders or the distrust of the justice system sowed in minority communities.
Nationally, drug-related arrests continue to climb. In 2006, those arrests totaled 1.89 million, according to federal data, up from 1.85 million in 2005, and 581,000 in 1980. More than four-fifths of the arrests were for possession of banned drugs, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Underscoring law enforcement’s misguided priorities, fully 4 in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession. Those who favor continuing these policies have not met their burden of proving their efficacy in fighting crime. Nor have they have persuasively justified the yawning racial disparities.
All is not gloomy. Many states have begun expanding their use of drug treatment as an alternative to prison. New York’s historic crime drop has continued even as it has begun to reduce the number of nonviolent drug offenders in prison, attesting to the oft-murky relationship between incarceration and crime control. In December, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the federal sentencing guidelines to begin to lower the disparities between the sentences imposed for crack cocaine, which is more often used by blacks, and those imposed for the powder form of the drug.
The looming challenge, says Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is to have arrest and incarceration policies that are both effective for fighting crime and promoting racial justice and respect for the law. As the new findings attest, the nation has a long road to travel to attain that goal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/opinion/10sat1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
Posted by lois at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)
In the Face of Great Loss, Embracing Innocence
May 10, 2008
About New York
In the Face of Great Loss, Embracing Innocence
By JIM DWYER
The woman was seated just two chairs away at the table, but the man had to speak over music that filled the room.
“Peggy,” he said.
For a minute, Peggy Sanders did not hear her name being called. She is 65 and was visiting New York this week for the first time from a small town in Oklahoma to attend a big benefit dinner.
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Posted by lois at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2008
Two responses in the NY Times to aricle and editorial about detention centers
Two of the five letters printed by the NY Times today in response to the "Death by Detention" editorial and the article “Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody” (front page, May 5).
To the Editor:
Your May 6 editorial “Death by Detention” was right to point out the secrecy and lack of transparency surrounding the treatment of immigrant detainees held in for-profit facilities. But your call for holding detention centers to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons would do little to help.
Sadly, there are no enforceable national standards for prisons and jails in the United States. There is one national accreditation body that had developed standards, the American Correctional Association, but its standards are not enforceable, and there is no requirement for facilities to be accredited.
There are constitutional standards that fluctuate as the Supreme Court changes its view of the meaning of the Eighth Amendment.
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Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)
May 08, 2008
Federal prison industries program expects to lose millions in sales
May 8th, 2008
Federal prison industries program expects to lose millions in sales
By ELISE CASTELLI
The federal program that sells office furniture and other products made from prison labor expects to lose millions of dollars in sales because of a new law, officials told a House committee Tuesday.
Federal Prison Industries (FPI), known by the brand name Unicor, has long been a mandatory source for federal purchases, but the 2008 Defense Authorization Act requires the Defense Department to put out for bid orders it previously would have placed with FPI.
In areas where Defense buys more than 5 percent of goods or services from FPI, it now must compare what FPI sells to what the private sector sells. If FPI doesn’t offer the best quality, price and delivery time, Defense is required to open the purchase to a competition between FPI and the private sector.
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Posted by lois at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)
Wyo sends minimum-security inmates to max security prison
Thursday, 08 May 2008
Wyo sends minimum-security inmates to max security prison
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) Sixteen minimum-security inmates from Wyoming are among the more than 100 inmates the state has sent to a maximum-security Virginia prison that has been the target of human rights complaints over the years.
Some civil liberties groups say Wallens Ridge State Prison, in Big Stone Gap, Va., is inappropriate for minimum-security inmates. Virginia built the prison in the late 1990s as a ''supermax'' facility exclusively for the most dangerous inmates, but downgraded it to a maximum-security prison in 2002.
''It boggles the mind why you would send a minimum-security prisoner to a place like Wallens Ridge,'' Jamie Fellner, senior counsel with Human Rights Watch in New York City, said Wednesday.
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Posted by lois at 06:25 PM | Comments (0)
Western MA Inside Out Program: The more we imprison, the less we vote
Conor Clarke and Greg Yothers
The Boston Globe
The more we imprison, the less we vote
May 5, 2008
FOR THE past 12 weeks, we have both been students in an Amherst College class on citizenship. Unlike most college courses, however, this one isn't held in a classroom. Each week, as part of the nationwide program Inside-Out, we meet for 2 1/2 hours in the dimly lit visiting room of the Hampshire County Correctional Facility. Half the students in the class are from the college; half are inmates at the facility.
It is a class on citizenship with a cruel irony: Because of a 2000 amendment to the Massachusetts constitution disenfranchising incarcerated felons, half the students in the class cannot vote. In about a week, all of the Amherst students will leave for the summer; many will volunteer for a presidential campaign. This November, like most adult citizens, they will walk to a local polling station or cast absentee ballots from the comfort of a college dorm. The students inside the facility can't.
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Posted by lois at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)
May 07, 2008
MA: Packed Prisons. The how and why of overcrowding.
Packed Prisons
The how and why of overcrowding
By CARA BAYLES
Phillip is a gentleman. He folds up his limbs with poise and wears wool pants with an impeccable crease. He's prone to diatribes against misogyny. He's a "voracious reader," and has a sixth sense for "figuring people out." He has a gentle, not entirely trusting way of regarding a person. He can talk a mile, but also listens; not simply to your words, but the words between them. He radiates a wavelength that's easy to tune into.
He's 47 years old, and he's spent 21 of those years in prison.
***
The US prison population grew eight-fold since 1970; more than 2.3 million people are incarcerated nationally. The rising numbers aren't proportional to population growth; the Pew Institute recently reported that for the first time in history, more than one in every 100 Americans is incarcerated. Don't like those odds? One in 30 men aged 20 to 34 is locked up, and that jumps to one in nine for black men. People of color make up 70 percent of the prison population, the reverse of the US race ratio outside prison walls.
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Posted by lois at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)
NY Times Editorial: Death by Detention in CCA Prison
May 6, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Death by Detention
A chilling article by Nina Bernstein in The Times on Monday recounted the secrecy, neglect and lack of oversight that are a few of the shameful symptoms of the booming sector of the nation’s prison industry — the detention of undocumented foreigners.
Ms. Bernstein chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea who was imprisoned in New Jersey for overstaying a tourist visa. He fell and fractured his skull in the Elizabeth Detention Center early last year. Though clearly gravely injured, Mr. Bah was shackled and taken to a disciplinary cell. He was left alone — unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth — for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.
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Posted by lois at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)
May 06, 2008
Reports by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch detail persistently high arrest and convictions for African Americans in drug-related cases
May 6, 2008
Reports Find Racial Gap in Drug Arrests
By ERIK ECKHOLM
NY Times
(Report URLs at the bottom of this email.)
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.
Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.
Posted by lois at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)