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January 31, 2005

NY Times Editorial: Building Unnecessary Jails

(Much of this editorial is based on the work of Dana Kaplan)
Published: January 30, 2005

New York started a disastrous national trend when it passed the draconian Rockefeller drug laws 32 years ago. These laws erased the common-sense distinction between petty drug users and kingpins, sending even first-time offenders to jail for periods of 15 years to life. The laws drove up the inmate population markedly, committed the state to spend billions to build and run new prisons, and did nothing to curb the drug trade.

Prosecutors who rightly viewed the laws as impractical and unfair began to get around them by never bringing novice offenders to trial at all, instead diverting them to drug treatment and other rehabilitation programs. The Pataki administration has also developed forward-looking programs in prisons and has begun to stress post-prison strategies that help people who get out of jail to actually stay out.

Gov. George E. Pataki took credit for this shift in his State of the State address. He told his listeners that the prison population had dropped by about 8,000 people, or 11 percent of the total, over the last five years. But county officials and prison rights advocates noted a glaring discrepancy between the governor's sentiments and the actual behavior of the State Commission of Correction, an agency with great influence over prison policy in New York and one that the governor essentially controls.

Founded in the late 19th century to promote humane treatment at state prisons, the commission has historically concerned itself with training and administrative issues. But recently it has been pressing counties around the state to build new local jails.

A recent study released by a watchdog group, the New York State Network for Jail Alternatives and Safer Communities, asserts that since 1995, 36 of New York's counties have built, are constructing or are considering new jails - thanks partly to pressure from the state.

This has made several counties unhappy. They do not believe they should be asked to build new jails while the prison population is declining. On Long Island, Suffolk County has recently sued the commission, accusing it of arbitrary and capricious enforcement of state law in a dispute over jail expansion. Tompkins County refused to expand its jail in a manner suggested by the state, and other counties are poised to follow suit.

The counties argue further that they should not be spending millions of dollars on jails at a time when the country as a whole is moving away from mass incarceration and toward rehabilitation, job training and other forms of nonjail approaches. Their complaints make sense; local jail populations are often made up mainly of mentally ill persons and other low-level offenders who would not be in jail at all if they could afford bail. Some critics of the building plan fear that the state is preparing to shift responsibility for incarceration to the local level.

Finally, the counties argue that state officials who got into the prison business in the post-Rockefeller years may be assuming that jail and prison populations can only go up, when in fact, as Mr. Pataki himself noted, they can go down as well.

The state should take these criticisms seriously. It should also make sure that it is not pressing the counties to build massive new jails that local sheriffs will then feel compelled to keep full.

Mr. Pataki should use his influence to straighten out this dispute. He should also make sure that the counties understand and have access to the methods that have successfully reduced the state prison population.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/opinion/opinionspecial/LI_boondoggle.html?
ex=1108184400&en=0aa38c517567c462&ei=5070

NY Times Opinion > N.Y. Region Opinions

Posted by lois at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2005

Prisoners of the Census: Incarceration is concentrated in particular Brooklyn Neighborhoods

From Prisoners of the Census

ERIC CADORA SHOWS HOW INCARCERATION IS CONCENTRATED IN PARTICULAR BROOKLYN NEIGHBORHOODS

[URL: http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/fact-24-1-2005.shtml
Website version contains links to more information and larger versions of the attached maps.]

The Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York report was able to quantify the population loss to New York City from the Census Bureau practice of assigning prisoners residence to the prison location rather than their homes, and the report was able to determine how this benefits up-state prison districts. In 2000, New York City had 43,740 of its residents credited to the communities that contain prisons. As much as 7% of one upstate district's population is prisoners. Counting prisoners as prison-town residents reduces the number of actual residents in these districts, enhancing the weight of a vote in those prison districts. By extension, this vote enhancement dilutes the votes of residents elsewhere in the state.

Dear Colleague,

Welcome to this week's PrisonersoftheCensus-News, bringing you news of new research, analysis and opinion about the impact of the U.S. Census counting incarcerated people as residents not of their homes but of the prison towns. This week's column discusses some innovative research on prisoner origin in New York City.

* * *
We know that compared to the state as a whole, New York City disproportionately sends people to prison, but what about specific neighborhoods in the city? The Importing Constituents report talks of the potential impact on the assumption that prisoners are evenly distributed in the city. Even with that assumption, there was a clear problem in need of a fix. But when the report was written, nobody knew exactly where in the city prisoners came from. The Census Bureau doesn't collect this information, and the Department of Correctional Services does not publish this information in any more detail than the number of prisoners that come from New York City as a whole. As the Importing Constituents report said, prisoners are very likely concentrated in particular communities. This concentration would mean that specific districts suffer a measurable vote dilution beyond not receiving the same vote enhancement existing in the prison districts.

One recent analysis of prisoner origin in Brooklyn does suggest that prisoners are highly concentrated in origin. As part of a study looking to see where the state spends its criminal justice resources, Eric Cadora used judicial records to map the homes of prisoners from the Brooklyn borough sent to state prison in 2003. He found 35 blocks where more than $1million in state funds were spent to take people out of that community in 2003. The left portion of the attached map is a map of Mr. Cadora's research as published in the Village Voice. As Cadora used the figure of $30,000 per year to incarcerate someone, each of those 35 blocks would have at least 33 people sent to prison that year. The one "$5 million dollar block" would translate into 167 people that should have been credited by the legislature's map makers
to a single block in Brooklyn. This map isn't directly translatable
to a redistricting analysis, but it does make the very strong case that prisoners are highly concentrated in origin. The clear message is that some communities in Brooklyn lose far more population to prison -- and the Census counts of prisoners -- than others.

Eric Cadora's research and map also allows some additional analysis to be made of the communities that see large numbers of people go to prison. The right portion of the attached map is of the Black population in Brooklyn. Comparing the two maps, we see that what Eric Cadora identified as the blocks that send large numbers of people to prison are also the same blocks with large Black populations.

The Importing Constituents report showed that the Census Bureau's method of counting prisoners disadvantages the city of New York to the benefit of predominantly white rural areas. Eric Cadora's research provides more evidence for what many have long suspected -- that incarceration impacts certain disadvantaged communities much more severely than other communities. If we want to accurately count these communities and give them their fair share of political power in the legislatures, then the population of these communities needs to be counted in those communities.

Note: See also Eric Cadora's earlier analysis Criminal Justice
and Health and Human Services: An Exploration of Overlapping
Needs, Resources, and Interests in Brooklyn Neighborhoods,
(http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/410633_CriminalJustice.pdf )
[PDF] Urban Institute. January, 2002. That report only goes down
to the tract level and includes jail populations as well, but it
also creates extremely useful comparison maps of singe parent
households, youth concentrations, and people on various public
assistance programs. These are largely all co-incident
populations.

* * *

I welcome your feedback on the issue, the website, and this message. And as always, if you prefer to not receive these messages, just let me know.

Best wishes,
Peter Wagner

--
Peter Wagner http://www.PrisonersoftheCensus.org
pwagner@prisonpolicy.org http://www.prisonpolicy.org
Prison Policy Initiative PO Box 127 Northampton, MA 01061

Posted by lois at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2005

CA: Huge turnout to protest curfew at Jerry Brown's loft

Last night's protest, organized by Critical Resistance and All of Us or None, was a HUGE success!

For those of you who couldn't make it, we had over 200 pumped-up people outside of Jerry Brown's loft, led by the 11-member Brass Liberation Orchestra who marched with us from the CR office and helped energized the crowd, and with words from Dorsey Nunn, Rose Braz, Sitara Nieves, Tommy Escarzega, and Linda Evans (and others) rallying us all.

The news media was buzzing, and we were covered on 7 TV stations, 4 radio stations, and 6 newspapers, and met lots of new people and new allies.

Read on, for more words about Jerry Brown's response to this protest.

This protest was part of Critical Resistance's campaigns of: Shrinking the system - Through our campaign to change parole policy, reducing the chances that people will be sent back to prison on technical violations such as a 10pm curfew. California already sends 50% of parolees back to prison on small technical violations -at an enormous cost to both their families and to the larger community. (It costs $35,000-45,000 per year to lock somone up in prison - we don't believe that's a good use of our money and resources, and we don't believe locking people up keeps us safe.)

Organizing around police practices in Oakland -
A 10pm curfew means that Oakland police will be able to step up their established practice of racially profiling certain communities in Oakland after 10pm. The new curfew means that everyone who happens to live in certain neighborhoods can be stopped for suspicion of being a parolee or probationer. We've seen the devastating effects of these practices through our campaign around Operation Impact, which racially profiles communities in Oakland, stopping every car and pedestrian who passes through blockades set up in "high crime" neighborhoods, arresting scores of people, intimidating many more, impounding cars, and ticketing people for the smallest of infractions, like having broken taillights.

Building a movement to create safety without relying on prisons: We know what can keep Oakland safe -- and it's not a 10pm curfew. It's ensuring that our kids have decent schools that Oakland right now can't provide. It's about creating job opportunities, health services, and repairing the fragmentation of communities that mass imprisonment causes.

Research study after research study -- along with common sense -- shows that real safety is created when communities don't rely on incarceration and policing, and when tax money is spent on preventative programs that address the root causes of crime: unemployment, homelessness, poor schools, and lack of services.

Jerry Brown's office has started spinning - we've put him on the defensive.

He's started saying that this program is only for the "worst of the worst", that it's only affected 50 people, and that there is evidence to show that curfews reduce violence.

In fact:
1) The curfew can be imposed on anyone who is convicted for a felony at night.
2) The curfew has just started. There will be hundreds of people affected by this.
3) Every study we have seen shows that curfews are completely ineffective on reducing violence or crime. (http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v1n2/males.html,

http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/587/1/136,

http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v1n2/appendix_a.html)
4) Numerous studies show that former prisoners need SUPPORT to reintegrate into a life outside of a cage - not harassment. A curfew only further stigmatizes a population who is faced with incredible odds: who are forbidden from public housing, food stamps, university loans, and social programs, among other things.
5) A curfew means that more people will be returned to prison, further destabilizing Oakland already-fragmented communities (Just one great analysis of this is in "The Problem with Addition by
Subratction: The Prison-Crime Relationship in Low-income Communities," by Todd Clear in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment,
http://www.sentencingproject.org/pub_invisible.cfm

Join us in this movement. Please call 510-444-0484 if you have questions about why we oppose the curfew, about CR in general, or to come to our monthly general meeting to start working for true safety in Oakland.

In solidarity,

Critical Resistance Oakland _________________________________________________________________

Posted by lois at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)

National Juvenile Defender Center

The National Juvenile Defender Center announces the launch of our new web site, http://www.njdc.info.

The site provides descriptions of their services and other work, announcments about latest projects, access to publications, and summaries of juvenile justice-related data for every state; it also allows visitors to join the mailing list, subscribe to listservs, or request information about arranging a training session.

Posted by lois at 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

New: Sentencing Project: Racial Disparity in Sentencing

Friends,

I'm writing to call your attention to a new publication of The Sentencing Project, Racial Disparity in Sentencing: A Review of the Literature. This review examines the research findings of major studies of racial disparity at both the state and federal level and finds that "while racial dynamics have changed over time, race still exerts an undeniable presence in the sentencing process." The publication can be found at http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/disparity.pdf

I hope you find this information useful in your work. Please feel free to share any comments or reactions.

Regards,
Marc Mauer

Marc Mauer
Assistant Director
The Sentencing Project
514 10th St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20004
mauer@sentencingproject.org
(202) 628-0871

Posted by lois at 12:06 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2005

CA: Ruling Limits Challenges of Parole Denials

"In dissent, Justice Carlos R. Moreno said the ruling required "judicial rubber stamping" of parole-board decisions. "Failure to grant parole where parole is due wastes human lives, not to mention considerable tax dollars," Moreno wrote."
...."Over the last 13 years, the parole board has denied release to more than 95% of the eligible inmates who applied.

Even the few approved by the board have not all been released. California is one of three states that allows the governor to override parole recommendations."

In a 4-3 decision, the state Supreme Court says the Board of Prison Terms may reject inmates' release based on nature of the crimes. By Maura Dolan Times Staff Writer

January 25, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO The California Supreme Court decided Monday to limit sharply the ability of inmates to challenge parole denials, ruling that the parole board has the right to keep a convict in prison simply because of the nature of the crime that sent him there.

The state Board of Prison Terms, which has a history of seldom granting parole, has wide flexibility to deny release to convicted criminals even if they have been model inmates deemed not dangerous by mental health officials, the 4-3 decision said. The ruling is expected to keep behind bars thousands of inmates who are eligible for parole.

Monday's ruling came in the case of John A. Dannenberg, 64, who was convicted of the second-degree murder of his wife in 1985 and sentenced to a term of 15 years to life. Dannenberg has a spotless prison record and favorable psychological evaluations, and his two adult children support his release.

In 1999, the parole board rejected his third request for parole, saying he had committed the murder "in an especially cruel or callous manner" and had "a very trivial" motive to kill. Dannenberg then appealed, saying his record since he was put in prison should have made him eligible for release.

A trial court and Court of Appeal both sided with him. But the Supreme Court disagreed. Even though Dannenberg's record has been clean, the board had the right to deny parole based solely on the nature of his crime, the majority said.

The board "may protect public safety in each discrete case by considering the dangerous implications of a life-maximum prisoner's crime individually," Justice Marvin R. Baxter wrote for the majority.

In dissent, Justice Carlos R. Moreno said the ruling required "judicial rubber stamping" of parole-board decisions. "Failure to grant parole where parole is due wastes human lives, not to mention considerable tax dollars," Moreno wrote.

If an inmate is denied parole because of the nature of the crime, the board should be required at least to compare the gravity of the offense and the time served to other cases with the same conviction, he wrote.

The majority rejected that idea, saying it would be too burdensome.

To require the board to compare the inmate's crime and time served to that of other inmates with the same convictions would "contribute significantly to backlogs," Baxter wrote.

Dannenberg killed his wife, Linda, during a fight in their home in Los Gatos. The wealthy engineer had a stormy relationship with his wife, and she had received counseling for trying to harm herself and her children.

During an argument over a blocked bathtub drain, Dannenberg beat her with a pipe wrench. He claimed she first attacked him with a screwdriver while he was attempting to fix the drain.

Dannenberg told police that he passed out momentarily and woke up to find his wife slumped over the edge of the bathtub with her head in the water, where she had drowned. He called 911 and was quickly arrested.

Dannenberg has been behind bars in San Quentin for 18 years. While in prison, he fixed the facility's electrical wiring and volunteered with an inmate education advisory committee and a Jewish religious group for prisoners, the court said.

In upholding the parole board's decision, Baxter, joined by Chief Justice Ronald M. George and Justices Ming W. Chin and Janice Rogers Brown, said Dannenberg had "reacted with extreme and sustained violence to a domestic argument?. "

"Though he vehemently denied it, the evidence permitted an inference that, while the victim was helpless from her injuries, Dannenberg placed her head in the water, or at least left it there without assisting her until she was dead."

Moreno countered that a second-degree murder conviction always means that a defendant acted violently, cruelly and out of proportion to the provocation.

Moreover, he said, the board had "an incentive to give only pro-forma consideration" to parole because of the risk that the person could re-offend and the parole board be blamed.

"Dannenberg's present record is not only unblemished in terms of disciplinary infractions, but showed many positive signs of contribution to the prison community in which he lived," wrote Moreno, whose opinion was signed by Justices Joyce L. Kennard and Kathryn Mickle Werdegar.

Over the last 13 years, the parole board has denied release to more than 95% of the eligible inmates who applied.

Even the few approved by the board have not all been released. California is one of three states that allows the governor to override parole recommendations.

So far, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has accepted about 36% of the board's parole recommendations. Former Gov. Gray Davis approved just 1.7%. His predecessor, Gov. Pete Wilson, approved 67% of the applications that came before him.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Susan Lee Duncan, who represented the state in the case, said the state Supreme Court had made it clear that the parole board has been acting properly.

"They don't have to consider whether this is more serious or less serious than any other offender's crime," Duncan said. "It is strictly a case-by-case consideration, comparing this man and this crime to public safety."

Kathleen Kahn, a lawyer who represented Dannenberg, said the ruling "ratifies" the board's behavior and "allows the board to be as frankly political as it wants to be."

"A few judges in a few counties have really stuck their necks out and said what the board has been doing is really a violation of the law," Kahn said. "I think this opinion is written as a reprimand to those judges."

Tip Kindell, a spokesman for the Board of Prison Terms, said it was pleased that "our position was validated by the Supreme Court."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-parole25jan25,1,3625179.story?coll=l
a-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true
CALIFORNIA

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

Posted by lois at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2005

WI: State Legislators Re-Thinking Sentencing

State legislators rethinking sentencing because of budget deficit, costs of prison and low crime numbers

By PHIL BRINKMAN / Lee Newspapers
MADISON — Crime is down and deficits are up, a combination that might be bringing Democrats and Republicans together to craft a more cost-effective approach to public safety.

Corrections Secretary Matt Frank said he knew something had changed when he started meeting with legislators last year to discuss proposed budget cuts.

"I was very seldom asked the question, ‘Is this tough on crime or is this weak on crime?'" he said. "The more common question was, ‘Is this effective? Does this work?' And I was getting that from both sides of the aisle."

In the last session, the GOP-controlled Legislature approved a series of modest reforms by Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, including early release for certain offenders who complete drug and alcohol treatment.

And Republicans are introducing reform bills that only Democrats would have sponsored 10 years ago, including one measure by former GOP Sen. Bob Welch to move eligible offenders to halfway houses six months before their release from prison to aid in their reintegration to society.

Welch had been one of the strongest supporters during the 1990s for longer prison terms and abolishing parole.

"As far as I'm concerned, I was on the winning side of that and got my way," he said. "Now, I'm circling back and saying, ‘OK, now that I know we're going to lock up the bad guys for a sufficient length of time, now we've got to look at what happens when they get out.'"

Other factors are making compromise more possible:

* The overall crime rate is at its lowest point in Wisconsin since 1972. The incidence of violent crime is the lowest since 1988.

* Crime no longer ranks among the public's chief concerns. In 1994 and 1996, crime topped the list of the most pressing state problems, according to an annual survey conducted for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. It came in second in five of the other six years between 1990 and 1997. That has been eclipsed in recent years by concerns about taxes, health-care costs and the economy.

* Wisconsin's prison population is at an all-time high, and the cost to house those offenders is soaring — $28,000 each. At the same time, the governor and Legislature are under pressure to eliminate a projected deficit in the next two-year budget of $1.6 billion.

Still, most of the legislative changes amount to tinkering around the edges, say advocates of more sweeping reforms aimed at stopping repeat offenders from committing crimes by helping them find work, housing and other support. And not even all of those are getting the green light.

Last spring, the Republican-controlled Senate unanimously approved a GOP bill to help counties set up programs to provide alternatives to prosecution or prison for certain nonviolent offenders with drug or alcohol problems.

Backers said it would reduce the number of people who re-offend, save the state millions of dollars in prison costs and give judges the power to order someone to undergo treatment without going to prison.

The measure was also endorsed by a committee in the Republican-led Assembly before it was scuttled by Assembly Speaker John Gard, R-Peshtigo.

"They came here with platitudes about, 'Oh, if we just would care more for these people . . . everything will be just fine,'" Gard said. "These are people who have been convicted of being drug dealers or other types of criminals. I don't immediately say we've got to find a way to keep them in the community."

But Sen. Carol Roessler, R-Oshkosh, the bill's chief sponsor in the Senate, said she expects the Legislature will take up many more such measures in the coming years. She said she hoped Republicans and Democrats would work together to change the old political calculus that held that anything other than more prisons and longer sentences was "soft on crime."

"If you want results and you want to save taxpayers money and you want to have fewer victims of crime, this is what you need to do," Roessler said.

Some common themes in the recommendations of judges, correctional officials and other criminal justice experts to achieve a more effective corrections policy:

*Put probation and parole officers in the neighborhoods where offenders live and commit their crimes so that they become more familiar with their clients' rhythms and habits. Having a presence in the community also increases the chances relatives or neighbors will report illicit activity, allowing agents to intervene as soon as problems arise.

*Recruit employers to consider hiring former inmates. Although offenders sometimes have poor work histories that interfere with finding a job, most are under some form of supervision, which typically includes conditions such as showing up at work sober and on time.

*Support more pilot programs involving local governments, neighborhood groups, churches and other organizations seeking to help returning prisoners re-integrate into society.

*While some people in alternative programs will commit crimes, policymakers should be careful not to use those to condemn the whole program. Criminals come from all walks of life. In fact, most people arrested are not under any form of correctional supervision at the time they committed their crime.

http://www.lacrossetribune.com/articles/2005/01/24/news/z00lead.prt

Posted by lois at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2005

NC Will Isolate Gang Members who are Incarcerated

Sunday, January 23, 2005

By DAN KANE, Staff Writer
With the number of gang members behind bars on the rise, North Carolina prison officials want to cut off the gang violence other states have seen by corralling those inmates in a special close-custody unit.

The N.C. Department of Correction plans to put all inmates involved in gangs in a separate unit at a prison in Morganton. And many of those inmates won't get out until they complete a program that teaches them to control their anger and drop their gang ties.

The growing gang activity across North Carolina is sending more gang members to the state's prisons. The Governor's Crime Commission concluded last year that about 390 gangs operate in the state, with more than 8,500 members. Durham and Raleigh are among several cities and towns that have seen rapid growth in gangs.

"We want to help them think in a different manner, help them resolve a potentially dangerous situation without resorting to violence and hopefully give them the skills to help them renounce their gang identification," said Bob Lewis, the Correction Department's assistant director of support services.

The department wants to open the 192-bed unit at Foothills Correctional Institution in Western North Carolina sometime this summer. It has received a $770,000 federal grant to train staff and complete renovations, such as adding a recreation yard and expanding certain areas. After two years, the state will have to assume the program's expense.

Some inmates are known gang members when they enter prison; others' affiliation becomes known after their convictions; still others are recruited behind bars.

Gangs bring particular problems for prison staff members and other inmates. Sometimes, inmates are required to assault other inmates or staff as part of their initiation. The gangs also intimidate other inmates, and they are often involved with drugs and other contraband being smuggled into prisons.

Lewis said the rising numbers of gang members in prison have not led to gang fights or rampant violence, but with nearly 500 identified gang members behind bars, the department sees trouble on the horizon if it does not act now. There are about 35,000 inmates in the prison system.

In North Carolina prisons last year, inmates attacked staffers 552 times and attacked other inmates 165 times. Inmates used weapons in 74 attacks on staffers and other inmates. Prison officials said they confirmed that 11 assaults were gang-related.

Several states have separate units for gang members. The first state to establish such a unit was Connecticut, 10 years ago. Prison violence in general has dropped by roughly 80 percent in that time, Connecticut officials say. The state has segregated male, female and youth gang members in special units.

"We had a lot of gang hits, a lot of gang assaults, and we had to realize that the gangs in Connecticut were running our prisons," said Capt. Armando Valeriano, the Connecticut prison system's security risk group coordinator.

Segregating gang members had an immediate impact, Valeriano said. Many inmates changed their behavior to avoid being transferred.

Those who didn't found themselves in a six-month program that teaches them how to serve their time with the least amount of trouble. The anger management part of the program is called "Cage Your Rage."

You don't get out if you don't pass the program, Valeriano said. So far, less than 5 percent of those who complete the program come back, he said.

New Jersey began segregating gang members in 1998, and since then assaults on staff have dropped 50 percent. North Carolina officials have visited both states' programs.

North Carolina's program will last at least nine months. Those who do not pass will stay until they do, unless they've completed their sentence, Lewis said. If they get in trouble back out on the street, they'll likely be returned to the unit when they go back to prison.

"If you don't shape up, you could stay there for a long, long time," he said.

They will continue to have the same privileges as other inmates in close custody, such as visitation and access to a telephone.

North Carolina prison officials began noticing gang members among the inmate population in 1996. Members of the Five Percenters gang were the first to draw prison officials' attention. Today, there are at least four gangs with members in prison. Lewis said prison officials have identified 471 gang members, with nearly half of them belonging to the United Blood Nation.

United Blood Nation, the Five Percenters and the Crips predominately draw African-American inmates, while the Folk Nation is composed mostly of white inmates, Lewis said.

Some of those gang members who have stayed out of trouble will be allowed to remain in their respective prisons, Lewis said.

Those who face transfer to the gang unit will be given the opportunity to appeal the decision in a prison hearing, Lewis said. But they will have to convince prison officials that they have not been involved in gang activity.

Michael Hamden, executive director of N.C. Prisoner Legal Services, said there have been cases when prison officials have incorrectly classified inmates as gang members. He said he wants to make sure they are correct before sending inmates off to a unit filled with gang members.

Lewis would not explain publicly how prison officials identify gang members. That, he said, would kill the unit in its tracks.

"The first thing that I say that we look for in terms of attempting to validate these guys -- we can throw it out the window because they will get rid of it," Lewis said. Staff writer Dan Kane can be reached at 829-4861 or dkane@newsobserver.com.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/2045908p-8430412c.html

Posted by lois at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

LA: Prison and Parole Policies Only Make the Streets More Dangerous

THE MAYOR'S RACE
Stop L.A.'s Crime Engine
Prison and parole policies only make the streets more dangerous. By Joe Domanick Joe Domanick is a senior fellow in criminal justice at USC Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism and author of "Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America's Golden State.

Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton announced last month that violent crime fell 13% in 2004 - criminals assaulted, robbed or raped about 6,500 fewer Angelenos. That drop is impressive, and good news for James K. Hahn's reelection campaign, which promotes the mayor's crime-fighting record.

But I doubt that many black and Latino residents in the city's poorest neighborhoods feel any safer today than they did a year ago, or will five years from today, unless radical changes are made in the way we think about crime prevention. Arrests in L.A. have risen 13% in the last four years. Yet despite the fact that tens of thousands of young men and women have been imprisoned, areas like South Los Angeles remain plagued by a cycle of violent crime that began in the mid-1960s. The smallest decrease in crime last year was in South L.A., whose residents are caught in a double bind. They want more police protection but despair as their sons are arrested, convicted and sent off to prison in record numbers. If national trends continue, one in three African American males born today will spend at least one year in state prison.

A fixation on arrest and crime statistics to gauge police effectiveness is standard in law enforcement - and politics. But the question police chiefs should be asking is what strategies will both prevent crime, short-term and long-term, and help stabilize L.A.'s communities.

Most experts agree that between 15% and 25% of the historic national drop in crime from 1992 to 2002 was attributable to harsher sentencing. Demographic changes - the decrease in the number of 18- to 25-year-olds, who commit most crimes - a healthy economy and other factors account for the rest.

A 15% to 25% decline in crime is significant. But consider the cost. With 162,000 inmates, California has the second-largest prison population in the world (behind China), and a $6-billion-a-year corrections budget. In 2001, the cost of fighting crime in California - cops, courts, jails and prisons
- was $17.5 billion.

The heart of the crime problem in the state is its prison and parole systems. Last year, a panel commissioned by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger described the corrections system as "dysfunctional," lacking "uniformity [or] transparency," burdened by "too much political interference, too much union control, too little management courage" and the highest recidivism in the nation. Until last year and the appointment of the reform-minded Jeanne S. Woodford as director of the Department of Corrections, the department's sole mission was to punish prisoners, and its $1.5-billion-a-year parole program reflected exactly that. Currently, 65,000 to 70,000 parolees a year end up back in prison, with one-third of them from L.A. County. An additional 35,000 county residents are on parole.

The problem begins to crystallize when you consider that 93% of everyone who enters prison in California will be released, and that the vast majority of them will return to places like South L.A. where social services to assist parolees reentering society barely exist. As a result, ex-cons are unprepared to do anything other than commit another crime and go back to prison. A 1997 Department of Corrections survey of parolees found that 85% were chronic drug or alcohol abusers, 70% to 90% were unemployed, 18% mentally ill and 10% homeless.

Parole policies and laws that effectively stigmatize former inmates compound the problem. Until recently, the operating philosophy of the state's parole system was to return parolees to prison no matter how minor their violations. Typically, they return to their communities with little or no money. Employers routinely shun them. Laws deny them driver's licenses, access to public housing and other services.

The effect on communities is devastating. "As you incarcerate a few people from a neighborhood, crime rates drop," says Todd R. Clear, director of doctoral studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "But when you remove ever higher numbers [for low-level crimes], crime starts to go up at a very high rate because you're destabilizing a lot of [supportive family and financial] relationships. When high numbers of [parolees] are also being returned, [the neighborhood is hit with] a double whammy."

Bratton has been far better than most big-city chiefs in acknowledging that "we can't arrest our way" out of crime and in supporting prevention and intervention programs in South and East L.A. Laudable as his efforts have been, they don't come close to solving the problem, let alone challenging the indifference and hostility to intervention and rehabilitation among politicians, law enforcement and citizens. If Bratton wants to leave a genuine legacy of long-term crime reduction and community stabilization in Los Angeles, he'll have to lobby hard for changes in California's prison and parole policies, not just make more arrests.

Traditionalists will contend that this is not a police chief's job. But what if big-city chiefs began to think and lead boldly? Bratton has headed the New York and Boston police departments and now runs one of the country's most fabled forces. He has the national media's attention and the respect of his colleagues. The public is skeptical of and often uninformed about methods of reducing crime other than hard-nosed policing. It needs high-profile education on these matters, and who better to do the teaching than law enforcement leaders who can convert the public and give politicians fearful of being called "soft on crime" the cover to reform the corrections and parole systems.

Otherwise, L.A.'s meanest streets will get meaner.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-cop23jan23,0,5759459
.story
January 23, 2005

Posted by lois at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Dutchess Exec. Vetoes Jail Funding

Dutchess exec vetoes jail funding -- or does he?
By Patricia Doxsey, Freeman staff01/23/2005

POUGHKEEPSIE - Dutchess County Executive William Steinhaus has vetoed a plan to spend $560,000 to design an addition to the county jail.

But with the veto coming after the close of business Friday, Dutchess County Legislature Chairman Bradford Kendall said he isn't certain it's binding.

Steinhaus delivered a seven-page veto message to the Legislature at 5:01 p.m. on Friday, the last day he had to act on the legislation.

Kendall, R-Dover, said 5 p.m. is considered the close of business, so he's not sure it was a "legal veto."

Adding to the uncertainty, Kendall said, is the fact that Steinhaus failed to sign the veto message.

"So that also calls into question the legality of the veto," he said. "We're going to look at it. If it is a legal veto, he just blew a $2.5 million hole into the 2005 budget of the county."

Kendall said he is not inclined to bring the legislation back to the Legislature for an override vote.

"We'll talk about it, but in reality, to have this whole project work the way it should work, everybody has to be on board," he said. "If the county executive's not on board, I'm not sure what would be accomplished by forcing him on board with a questionable veto."

The Dutchess County Jail has been overcrowded since it opened its doors in 1996. Since that time, the state Commission of Correction has given the county variances to house 32 inmates more than allowed in the 285-bed facility.

A current 30-day variance expires on Jan. 31, and commission officials have said that without immediate action, they will not issue future variances. The commission wants the county to add 300 cells to the jail.

Even with the variance, the county is forced to house roughly 30 inmates each day in facilities outside the county, at a cost of $100 per day plus transportation and staffing expenses. In 2004, the county spent more than $1 million to house inmates in jails outside Dutchess County.

The legislation vetoed by Steinhaus would have satisfied the state commission's demand and probably would have allowed the jail to continue to function above capacity until new cells are added. Without the variance, the county will be forced to house in out-of-county jails those inmates currently in the Dutchess jail under the waiver.

Commission spokesman Lyle Hartog said Friday that the commission is reserving comment until it officially is notified by the county of the executive veto.

In his veto message, Steinhaus called the jail expansion unaffordable and ill-conceived and said the anticipated expense would break the backs of county taxpayers. To build the jail the commission wants, he said, would cost the county $130 million over the life of the bond.

He also cast blame for overcrowding on the justice system, which he said places unreachable bails on nonviolent criminals charged with misdemeanors, and on the state, which he said uses the county jail as a "dumping ground" for parole violators.

"The state Corrections Commission has the obligation to help counties as a partner, not act as big brother," he wrote. "New York State Parole has the obligation to stop dumping its parolees onto the backs of county taxpayers. Our state senators and assemblymen have the obligation to meet with the sheriff and county legislative leaders to identify ways that state prisoners, as a result of their state policies, are not dumped from state prisons into parole, only to be dumped into county jails."

Kendall declined to comment on Steinhaus' specific comments, saying he had not seen the executive veto message.
©Daily Freeman 2005
This victory is due in part to the work of Dana Kaplan!

Posted by lois at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)

OR: State Re-Thinking Measure 11 Mandatory Sentencing

SALEM OR ‹ Prisons are going up and the state's violent crime rate is headed downward.

Since Oregon's landmark Measure 11 mandatory sentencing law went into effect a decade ago, the state has become a safer place ‹ violent crimes have fallen from roughly 500 to 300 per 100,000 people, Bureau of Justice Statistics figures show.

Lawmakers may rethink Measure 11
January 23, 2005

By James Sinks
(The Bulletin)
At the same time, rural Eastern Oregon has seen an influx of corrections jobs from the prison-building boom needed to accommodate thousands of additional inmates.

Next on the drawing board is a new 864-bed, minimum-security facility in Madras, scheduled to open in October 2006.

Yet, while nobody scoffs at less crime and more jobs, a growing number of state legislators say it may be time to take a hard look at Measure 11.

Dissatisfaction with the tough law is nothing new in some camps, but lawmakers have never seriously dallied with substantive changes.

But that may change this year: The assembly faces tough budget choices and politics are shifting at the statehouse.

For the first time since Measure 11 passed, the chairs of both the House and Senate judiciary committees are signaling they are willing to modify some of the sentences.

"There is a growing recognition in this building that the faster-than-anticipated growth of the prison system is having an impact," said state Rep. Wayne Krieger, R-Gold Beach, a former state police officer who now heads the House Judiciary Committee.

He said lawmakers still consider public safety their top priority, and he has no desire to turn murderers or rapists loose.

However, Krieger said he wonders if the high cost of Measure 11's prison terms is siphoning too many dollars from other important public safety priorities, such as dealing with the state's methamphetamine crisis and getting inmates into education and rehabilitation programs before they're released.

MEASURE 11

There are 23 person-to-person crimes with mandatory sentences under the law. The longest terms are 25 years for murder, 10 years for attempted murder and first-degree manslaughter, and eight years and four months for first-degree sex crimes such as rape and sodomy.

The shortest sentence under Measure 11 is five years and 10 months, for second-degree assault, second-degree kidnapping and compelling prostitution.

As of Jan. 1, the state had 5,066 inmates serving Measure 11 sentences, according to the Department of Corrections. That represents roughly 40 percent of the state's inmates.

The motivation for change isn't just financial.

Violent crime rates are on the decline nationally, which suggests Measure 11 may be getting more credit than it deserves for Oregon's safer streets, said Geoff Sugerman, lobbyist for the Western Prison Project, which supports reforming the law.

Judges and defense attorneys say the law has put too much power in the hands of prosecutors, who can threaten defendants with Measure 11 sentences if they don't agree to plead guilty in pre-trial negotiations.

Also, spurred partly by a Bend case from 2004, some critics say the law is too rigid when it comes to prison terms for some first-time offenders.

A Deschutes County 20-year-old with no criminal history was sentenced to more than six years in prison after the deaths of two girls in a street-racing tragedy, but even the judge questioned whether the penalty was appropriate.

Sen. Ben Westlund, R-Tumalo, said people want to justice to be served ‹ but he's not confident that occurred in the case of David Black. His co-defendant was sentenced to six months in a plea deal.

"There's always been a few people that wanted to overturn Measure 11," he said.

"What's different this session is that there are a considerable number of people ‹ while they don't want to overturn it ‹ that want to look at the bottom end of Measure 11 offenses, particularly for those individuals that have no prior record."

Lawmakers in 1997 allowed judges to exempt first-time criminals from Measure 11 sanctions in limited circumstances for three second-degree crimes.

But talking about Measure 11 is much easier than actually modifying it.

THE LAW IS POPULAR

Distrustful of judges and worried about crime, voters approved Measure 11 in 1994 by a 64-to-36 percent margin. It went into effect in 1995.

In 2000, 74 percent of voters rejected a ballot measure that sought to overturn the mandatory sentences.

Steve Doell, director of Crime Victims United of Oregon, which supports Measure 11, said the public is in no mood to see any sentences weakened, and said polling confirms that view.

The facts show that with criminals off the streets for longer, those streets and schools are safer, he said. Crime rates nationally are going down because other states have also adopted tougher sentences, he said.

"If the trend of crime had continued where it was before 1995, there would be more than 34,000 more Oregon victims of rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults and murders," he said.

Still, school advocates are crying foul about the growth in the prison budget, but education accounts for about 58 percent of the general fund budget when colleges are included ‹ while prisons and parole account for less than 10 percent, he said.

"School people and others see the corrections budget as something they can carve into," Doell said. "They want to twist this thing around and say we spend more to send people to prison in this state than to educate kids, and that is malarkey."

Gov. Ted Kulongoski's proposed general fund budget for the 2005-07 cycle calls for a 34 percent jump in Department of Corrections spending to $1.1 billion, compared to a 1.7 percent increase for K-12 schools to $5 billion.

The prison budget also includes community correction dollars, which go to counties to pay for monitoring of parolees and for housing inmates in local jails.

The state is expected to have $11.9 billion in the general fund in the next two years ‹ an increase of $300 million from the Legislature's budget in the 2003-05 biennium.

However, that increase in revenue won't be enough to maintain all programs because of inflation, higher pension costs and larger populations in prisons, classrooms and welfare rolls.

CORRECTIONS FUNDING

The cutbacks even touch corrections funding: Sheriffs say the projected state dollars fall far short of what's needed and the state may reduce alcohol and drug counseling for inmates.

The Department of Administrative Services projects the state's prison population will climb from 12,778 in July 2004 to 14,279 in July 2007.

A report due Monday from an adult sentencing task force convened by Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers won't recommend any changes to Measure 11, said Department of Justice spokesman Kevin Neely.

Department of Corrections director Max Williams, a former legislator, said no convenient silver bullets are handy for solving the ballooning prison budget.

"The public expects us to hold bad actors accountable for their actions," he said. "But it does beg appropriate policy questions, such as how do you sustain that level of growth over time."

Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland, the chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said lawmakers need to "provide the maximum amount of public safety with the dollars we have available."

"Prison beds are the most expensive public safety option we have," she said. "Where those beds are necessary to protect public safety, we must use them. But if there are ways we can be creative and can move away from prison beds without compromising safety, we should."

Among her suggestions: Allowing convicts to reduce their sentences via good behavior and participation in programs like school and alcohol and drug intervention, and examining whether elderly and disabled inmates can be released early when they don't pose a safety risk, she said.

As a tradeoff, the state can invest more resources in programs to combat meth and to help criminals learn to function in society and stay clean, she said.

"We know 95 percent of them are coming back to our communities," she said. "What do we want them to look like when the get back? Do we want them to deal with their meth and drug or alcohol problems, or just keep them locked up as long as we possibly can and then dump them out in the street?"

In the Bend case, Circuit Court Judge Stephen Tiktin said he didn't want to sentence David Black to a 75-month sentence.

But because the 20-year-old was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter in connection with the deaths of two girls in an automobile wreck, the judge had no choice.

The fatal wreck occurred Aug. 9, 2003, on rural Alfalfa Market Road.

Danielle O'Neil, 16, lost control of her car and spun into the path of a van. O'Neil and her passenger, Stephanie Beeksma, 15, were killed.

Prosecutors successfully argued that Black and co-defendant Randy Clifford had raced Gates and were culpable.

Clifford negotiated a plea settlement with prosecutors, pleading guilty to criminally negligent homicide and fourth-degree assault. Neither of those are Measure 11 crimes.

But Black refused a similar offer and maintained his innocence ‹ and it ultimately cost him.

Clifford was sentenced to six months behind bars while Black was sentenced to 75 months under Measure 11.

That disparity that wasn't lost on Black's family or Sen. Westlund.

"You have to ask, was justice served?" he said.

Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli, R-John Day, said it often seems incomprehensible to families that a first brush with the law can lead to a Measure 11 sentence.

But, he said, that's the law the public wants ‹ and he can't justify loosening it because of the budget or other concerns.

Ferrioli expects lawmakers will ultimately take a pass on modifying the law.

"Cannibalizing Measure 11 that was adopted by the people is not my idea of living within your means," he said.

"The goal of the corrections division is rehabilitation and protection of the public, but first you've got to get criminals off the streets."

MEASURE 11 COSTS

Western Prison Project lobbyist Sugerman said lawmakers are coming to grips with the high cost of maintaining a one-strike-and-you're-out law.

"It doesn't recognize that some people who commit crimes will never commit crimes again," he said.

"We are seeing a tremendous drain on state resources into that corrections system and there is a greater recognition that something is out of balance."

He said lawmakers could postpone the need for the Madras prison by allowing for sentences to be shorted for both Measure 11 and non-Measure 11 convicts.

However, that's not likely to earn cheers in Madras, where the community has dealt with several false starts on the project. The prison is expected to create 500 family-wage jobs and be a catalyst for growth in Jefferson County.

But Sen. Avel Gordly, D-Portland, said it's "twisted" to look at the state's prison-construction spree as economic development.

"There is no end in sight to the prison explosion," she said. "We've got to get control of corrections costs and do it this session if we are to work our way out of this corrections crisis."

At the same time, the public is spending less on programs that help at-risk children and that help adults learn to be good citizens.

"We have to be very clear with the public we understand protecting communities is always the first priority, but how are we making a community safer when we warehouse prisoners, build more and more beds but then neglect prevention strategies when they are locked up?" she said.

"That doesn't help us once people get out, and they are going to get out."

Krieger, the head of the House Judiciary Committee, said lawmakers should ask tough questions about whether Measure 11 is the best approach.

If it turns out to be the most cost-effective public safety tool, then great, he said.

"Some people are afraid to touch it," he said. "But I'm not."

James Sinks can be reached at 503-566-2839 or at jamess@cyberis.net.
http://www.bendbulletin.com/news/story.cfm?story_no=15457

Posted by lois at 07:25 PM | Comments (0)

Boom in Jail Building Means Profitable Jails

Local jail could help as prisons run out of room 01-23-2005
The Herald Staff, From The Plainview Daily Herald
DANNY ANDREWS

While the Texas prison system considers the possibility of moving some inmates to county jails to alleviate the overcrowding it´s experiencing again, Hale County Sheriff David Mull says the local facility could accommodate some of that overflow.

In fact, Mull has been seeking contracts with other counties to handle some of their prisoners since the Hale County jail is currently about 70 below capacity.

³Part of the problem is that state prisoners are serving their time quicker
- getting more good time´ credit - but those are mostly non-violent people with crimes against property,² Mull surmised.

Mull, who is starting his ninth year as sheriff, was a deputy for nine years before that and also spent 18 months working for the prison system east of Plainview.

Prison administrators had known they were nearing this point. But a Legislative Budget Board report released last week projects that the prisons will reach the maximum capacity at which they can safely operate months earlier than expected.

The crowded prisons also have more to do with harsher sentences than growing crime rates, and the answer may be changing the way offenders are sentenced, the report said.

The crowding could trigger a request from the Legislature for an emergency appropriation to address the looming crisis because there is no money to lease facilities, officials at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said.

³We believe, just based on current trends, that we will possibly -- and I stress possibly -- need additional space by March,² TDCJ spokesman Mike Viesca said.

The local jail has a capacity of 192 prisoners -- 88 in the original building and 104 in an addition built in 1991.

Mull said he has seen the jail overcrowded only once.

³Back in 1993-94, just before the state began to build more prisons, we had 235-240 at one time. Some had to sleep on the floor,² he said.

The current population is 120 with about 130 being average, Mull said.

Hale County asks $42 a day to house out-of-county prisoners because ³it costs us $33 a day whether we have 130 or 180.²

After an analysis of the jail, the State Jail Standards Commission recently mandated hiring 15 additional jailers. Mull said part of the problem is the design of the two buildings isn´t as conducive to fewer personnel being able to keep an eye on the prisoners.

³We´re trying to work deals with other counties to house their prisoners and make some money,² said Mull.

As far as moving prisoners to the state system, Mull says, ³The TDCJ (Texas Department of Criminal Justice) requires us to have a ticket to get someone in. In the past, when you got the paperwork done at the courthouse, you could pretty well take them on down to Huntsville. In the old days, they´d take about 30 a month; now it´s about 16.²

Viesca said Friday that the state facilities house 150,886 inmates, which is 97.5 percent of the maximum capacity of 154,702. But administrators dislike exceeding 97.5 percent due to safety reasons, such as inmates who need to be kept separated.

The Formby-Wheeler units have a capacity of about 1,600 prisoners together and generally remain near capacity.

Viesca said the Clements unit in Amarillo has 3,599 prisoners -- 115 shy of capacity -- while the Neal unit there has 1,678 prisoners, just 12 shy of capacity.

Viesca said the state´s cost of housing a defender is $44.01 a day but it does not dictate how much it will pay an individual county if it houses prisoners there.

Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the state Senate´s Criminal Justice, wants to focus on making better use of probation. He said the state revoked probation for about 25,000 people last year, and many of those were for technical violations and not a new offense. That sent a significant number of people into the state´s prison system.

Whitmire also wants to look into ³community corrections facilities,² which confine offenders only for part of the day for a period of several months.

³You have a real opportunity to turn people´s lives around, and also save the state millions of dollars,² Whitmire said. ³Prison ought to be used for violent offenders: people who are a threat to society, not individuals who often just mess up.²

Changes like those would take time, and some would require legislative approval.

Texas spent nearly $2.5 billion on a massive prison construction program that stretched from 1988 through the 1990s.

When the most recent fiscal year ended Aug. 31, the state´s adult prison population stood at 150,709, up more than 18 percent since 1995.

Under the new projection, the state would need to find room for 165,324 inmates by the end of fiscal 2010.

(Sheila Hotchkin of the San Antonio Express-News contributed to this story.)
Posted to MyPlainview: JANUARY 23, 2005
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13807440&BRD=517&PAG=461&a
mp;dept_id=473182&rfi=6

Posted by lois at 07:22 PM | Comments (0)

New Building at Prisons: Chapels

Foundation to place national emphasis on building chapels at prisons as Wardens deem places of worship as important in inmate rehabilitation.

January 23, 2005
By Vickie Welborn

What started as a desire to jump-start a fund-raising drive to build a chapel at Louisiana's women's prison has mushroomed into a plan to complete chapel construction at the remainder of the state's prisons as well as other states where officials have shown interest in faith-based programs.

The ambitious plan resulted in discussions to form a National Prison Chapel Foundation board that will be headed by the Rev. Troy Terrell, pastor of Southside Baptist Church in Mansfield. Warden Burl Cain of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola also will sit on the board as well as recommend other board members.

Those involved felt confident enough to expand the chapel construction plan into other states after finding swelling support statewide to provide a large chapel at Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women at St. Gabriel. Southside Baptist is spearheading that drive, which has been expanded to include the collection of more money to aid a fund-raising drive under way to build a chapel at Forcht Wade Correctional Center in Keithville. Jim Gallagher of Shreveport, a member of the Louisiana Prison Chapel Foundation, is a co-chairman of the Forcht Wade Correctional fund drive.

"It's just another mission field for us," Terrell said of Southside Baptist's involvement.

A "significant" donation plus lots of other smaller gifts have been given toward the LCIW project, Terrell said. But more donations are needed to reach the goal of at least $300,000, with the proceeds shared between the LCIW and Forcht Wade Correctional chapels, he said. The hope is to at least have half of the money in hand by March 17, when the Louisiana Prison Chapel Foundation will hold its annual gala at the Governor's Mansion in Baton Rouge. "We want to be able to present a check then," Terrell said.

That would enable construction of the LCIW chapel to begin by summer so inmates there can worship in their new sanctuary by Christmas. Providing a chapel at LCIW is one of Cain's passions. The "mamas" who have been afforded the opportunity to make changes in their lives can be a key to stopping the cycle of violence from one generation to the next, he has said. "We're doing it for the mamas, and we're doing it for the Lord," Cain said. Faith-based programming has worked at the men's prisons, most of which have seen chapels built on their properties within the past two years. Chapels are open at David Wade Correctional Center near Homer, C. Paul Phelps Correctional Center in DeQuincy, Avoyelles Correctional Center in Cottonport, Elayn Hunt Correctional Center at St. Gabriel and Louisiana State Penitentiary's Camp D and Camp C.

Projects are "going strong" at LCIW, Dixon Correctional Institute in Jackson, Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield and Forcht Wade Correctional, according to Robin Dunne of the Louisiana Prison Chapel Foundation. Once those are under way, the only remaining state prisons without chapels will be Washington Correctional Institute in Angie, Louis Jetson Youth Correctional Center in Baton Rouge, Allen Correctional Center in Kinder, the remaining camps at Louisiana State Penitentiary and a few of the state's other youth facilities.

"Some of those only need renovation, but some need new chapels," Dunne said. "Why stop there?" Terrell said.

Georgia has implemented Louisiana's faith-based rehabilitation program in its prison system, and Florida is starting this year. Mississippi implemented its program last year. In December, a delegation of Illinois officials toured Louisiana State Penitentiary to see how the programs helped decrease violence. Moody Bible Institute has agreed to open an affiliate in an Illinois prison.

If Bible colleges are started there and in the other states, then it's only logical to follow with chapels, Terrell said. The goal is to see two chapels -- one at the men's maximum-security prison and one at the women's -- in each of the five states that have expressed interest in what Louisiana is doing. Estimated cost is $2.5 million. "The whole point of this is that it works. When you can take the bloodiest prison in America and make it the most gospelized, then it can work anywhere," Terrell said. "The faith-based programs and chapel ministries are working because of the Lord. Morals and ethics have been instilled in these men.

"If it works in Louisiana, then it can work in Mississippi, Georgia or anywhere else," he said. "Nothing else has worked. This not a 12-step program; it's a lifestyle change."

St. Gabriel inmates ready

Faith-based programming was introduced at Louisiana's only women's prison in December. "And we had 75 sign up just like that," Assistant Warden Helen Travis said.

There are more women interested in attending chapel services than current space allows. A small Catholic chapel is squeezed next to the gym and an administrative building. It's dimly lit, lacks an adequate stage and has little room in which to maneuver.

"It's too small for our services. We need a building built like a chapel is supposed to be," said Annie Mamon, an inmate who hails from Ruston. Mamon is active in LCIW's various ministries and supports the faith- and character-building programs that have been spreading in recent weeks throughout the various dormitories.

Mamon has witnessed a difference in some of the inmates' attitudes since the programs began. "It's getting better. We've learned to go to each other to work out our problems. Things are working so much better.

"But we need a real place to worship," she said. "That's going to be exciting. A lot more would attend the services if we have more space." Travis added, "Absolutely, there is a lot of interest."

LCIW Warden Johnny Jones said faith-based programs and chapels appear to be a national trend. "Warden Cain is leading the trend, and I didn't want him to leave me behind."

For Cain, the timing is nothing short of divine intervention. "They are ready to be evangelized now," Cain said of LCIW. "We saw a people who are ready. There is a desire to hear the word of God. The time is now."

Chapel is a need, not a want

Construction workers scurry around Forcht Wade Correctional, where cinder block walls reaching into the sky soon will provide the exterior of a $5.5 million skilled-nursing facility that will see to the needs of the geriatric inmates who make up the majority of the population. Another building is going up near the prison's entrance to house the IMPACT program, geared to younger inmates who are put through an intensive but shorter incarceration. And even though Warden Venetia Michael and Assistant Warden Anthony Batson welcome the construction, one thing both say is sorely missing is a designated place for worship.

"That skilled-nursing facility will be nice and we need it. But a chapel is just as important, and we don't have one," Batson said. "It's not something that we want. ... It's something that we definitely need."

From her main office at David Wade Correctional, Michael, who also has oversight of Forcht Wade Correctional and Steve Hoyle Rehabilitation Center in Tallulah, can attest to the difference a chapel can bring to a prison. David Wade Correctional's 300-seat chapel, built in the same format as others at men's prisons throughout the state, opened in April 2002 and is used daily for various religious activities. It replaces a small metal building and allows chaplain Ray Anderson to add about one-third more programs to the assorted nondenominational services that can involve up to 425 inmates a month.

"It's obviously a much better setting," Michael said. "Participation went up, and (the inmates) are very respectful of it and really take care of it. It has a very calming influence because it is sitting in the middle of the compound."

A meeting room off the chapel entrance allows for smaller religious groups to gather simultaneous to larger gatherings in the main sanctuary, Anderson said. For example, Muslims might use the meeting room while Christians worship in the chapel.

"Where else would you see that?" Anderson said.
At Forcht Wade Correctional, head chaplain the Rev. Richard Pusch must make do with an activities building, where religious services often compete with the comings and goings of inmates and prison employees. That's because the same building houses the prison library, canteen, mental health, X-ray and staff restrooms.

"And there's the constant roar of the vending machines," Batson said. "We really, really need a chapel."

Pusch estimates at least 200 of Forcht Wade Correctional's 500-plus inmates manage to attend at least one religious service a month. "The reality is when we connect them to a church here, then they'll connect to a church on the outside."

Batson likens the prison to a community, and every community typically has a church. "You've got to be able to look at that and take pride in that. Even if you're not a religious person, having a chapel will help us provide the beginning and the end of our circle of life here."

http://www.shreveporttimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050123/NEWS01/50
1230311/1002/NEWS

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

January 22, 2005

Read it and weep: "Under Revised Drug Laws, a Debt to Society Is Paid

January 21, 2005, NY Times
By ANDY NEWMAN
..."The proceeding took all of five minutes for Mr. Wright, who has been held since 1985 and was convicted in 1987 of selling three ounces of cocaine to an undercover officer."

Dolka's father was a drug dealer. He went away to jail when she was 11.

Now Dolka Fareaux is 30. She works in an office and has a child of her own.

Yesterday, Ms. Fareaux watched with tears in her eyes as her father, Ivan Wright, 69, appeared in a Brooklyn courtroom. He was, the authorities say, the first inmate convicted under New York's famously strict and recently overhauled Rockefeller drug laws to have the rest of his prison sentence set aside.

The proceeding took all of five minutes for Mr. Wright, who has been held since 1985 and was convicted in 1987 of selling three ounces of cocaine to an undercover officer. Justice Lewis L. Douglass of State Supreme Court, who had sentenced him to 25 years to life under the mandatory sentencing laws, simply declared that 19 years behind bars was enough. The Brooklyn district attorney's office supported Mr. Wright's application to be resentenced to time served.

Justice Douglass asked Mr. Wright if he would give up his right to appeal the reduced sentence.

"I give it up," Mr. Wright said very quietly.

"I wish Mr. Wright good luck," Justice Douglass said.

Before Mr. Wright was led off by court officers - it will take a few days of paperwork for his release to be completed - he was allowed a few minutes to speak to his daughter and to his wife, Monalisa Little. They sat on one side of the low wall that divides the business side of the courtroom from the spectators. Mr. Wright, a balding man in blue jeans and white sneakers, sat on the other, his tall, thin frame folded into his chair. His 19-year-old son, who has known his father only as a prisoner, did not attend the hearing.

"Till you're free," Ms. Little mouthed as her husband was escorted off.

"I'll see you," Ms. Fareaux said.

Mr. Wright will not be sticking around long. He is an illegal immigrant from Panama, and there is a standing deportation order against him. One of his lawyers, Lisa Schreibersdorf, said he would return to Panama voluntarily.

"That's where he grew up," she said. "He has cousins; his family has property there."

What about his family here, Ms. Schreibersdorf was asked.

"What they keep telling me," she said, "is that if he's out and he's there, we can go visit him any time we want. His son can go to Panama and see him."

Would they be moving down with him?

Ms. Schreibersdorf, executive director of Brooklyn Defender Services, said that remained to be worked out.

"People don't have time to change their lives in a week," she said. "We just started this proceeding a week ago. The beauty of getting out of jail is to open yourself to the possibilities that the rest of us have."

The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, said that Mr. Wright had certainly paid his debt to society. "We're very pleased," he said. "We try to put things in perspective. He was involved in multiple sales, but he certainly didn't deserve to spend the rest of his life in jail."

Correction: January 22, 2005, Saturday:

An article yesterday about Ivan Wright, an inmate who had the rest of his prison sentence set aside in Brooklyn under the recent overhaul of the Rockefeller-era drug laws, misstated his relationship to Monalisa Little, the mother of his son. The couple are not married.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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

War on Drugs: Loving those good old Georgia Prisons

Loving those good old Georgia prisons

Public policies made in Atlanta and Washington can easily take on a life of their own. Once prison operators, prison employee unions and community tax collectors learned they could profit from harsh, lock 'em up drug control laws, a powerful political force was born to keep prisons full. Here is how this blueprint fuels America's ongoing war on drugs.

Inmate Overload

During the 1980s and 1990s tough-on-crime policies, especially drug control laws, overfilled America's prisons. State and federal prisons held only 315,974 inmates in 1980. By 2000 that number had skyrocketed to 1,321,137. When inmates in city and county jails are added, America's total prison population topped two million in 2002.

Prisons, however, are not reserved for violent offenders. In 2002, for example, 1,235,700 simple drug possession arrests were made in the U.S. - about one-half of them for possession of marijuana. While not all of those arrested end up behind bars, the rush to lock up non-violent offenders was, in large part, responsible for setting off America's prison building boom.

Prison Boom

By tracing the 1980-2000 prison expansion, a new study by Sarah Lawrence and Jeremy Travis at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center in Washington tracks how prisons became a growth industry in Georgia. In, "The New Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping America's Prison Expansion" they conclude that when it comes to building prisons, "Fulton County saw the largest addition with three prisons opening between 1979-2000."

In 1979, only 18 state and federal prisons operated in Georgia. Between 1979 and 2000, more than one new prison was added every year. By 2000, Georgia had 42 state and federal prisons operating in 18 percent of the counties throughout the state. In addition to Fulton County, at least one new prison was located in Bibb, Chattooga, Habersham, Columbia, Clinch, Baldwin and Lowndes counties.

Aboard the gravytrain

The U.S. Census counts prisoners where they are incarcerated, and both federal and state agencies distribute funds based on this census data. The more prisoners counted in a town or county, the bigger will be its share of tax funded goodies from Washington and Atlanta.

This gravytrain includes a slice of $200 billion a year in formula grants from Washington to all state and local governments for Medicaid, foster care, adoption assistance and 169 other programs. In addition, the same data is used to allocate state funds for community health services, road construction, law enforcement and public libraries.

Regular pay checks roll in for 14,555 prison employees in Georgia. And don't forget the incomes of employees of private firms that directly sell food, fuel, clothing and furniture to prisons. No wonder Georgia towns become addicted to this prison economy.

Prison politics

Spreading prisons across Georgia can actually perpetuate a large prison population. As more towns become economically dependent on state prisons holding more than 55,280 inmates in 2002, the greater is the likelihood grassroots support will grow for politicians who favor putting non-violent people behind bars. After all, it's in the self interest of these towns to keep their prisons full and their local economies booming.

As the number of inmates goes up, so does the number, and political power, of prison guards. In 2000, for example, the 31,000 member California Correctional Peace Officers Association used its $7 million a year political action fund to run TV ads against Proposition 36. Why? Prop. 36 called for sending non-violent drug users to treatment facilities, not to jail, and promised to reduce both the state's prison population and the number of prison guard jobs. Despite the union's ads, Prop. 36 became law with a 61 percent favorable vote.

When prisons boom, everyone wins except the non-violent inmates and the taxpayers. Politicians in Atlanta and Washington can show how tough they are on crime. Private prison operators and their investors make money. Prison guards pay off their mortgage and support local businesses. Even the local tax collector gets his cut.

Think about it. The self-perpetuating prison economy was launched due to an exaggerated fear of non-violent drug users, and a failure to treat people rather than lock them up. But, now that the jailhouse economy is going strong, the political reforms needed to abandon this old drug war mentality will be much harder, if not impossible, to get through the legislatures in Atlanta and Washington.

Chances are taxpayers are stuck with the cost of keeping two million men and women behind bars well into the future - not because justice demands it, but because the economic benefits of the prison business are working to keep it that way.

Ronald Fraser, Ph.D., writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization. Write him at fraserr@erols.com
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/opinion/10701086.htm

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

January 21, 2005

98% of NY's Prison Cells Are in Disproportionately White Districts

98% OF NEW YORK'S PRISON CELLS ARE IN
DISPROPORTIONATELY WHITE SENATE DISTRICTS

[URL: http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/fact-17-1-2005.shtml ]

The Census Bureau counts incarcerated people as if they were residents not of their homes but of the prison's location. When states like New York ignore their own constitutional requirement that incarceration does not change a residence and use Census data to draw legislative districts, the result is to transfer political power from high incarceration neighborhoods to the areas that contain the prisons.

I've previously written about the regional bias implicit in the arrangement. Sixty-six percent of the New York State's prisoners come from New York City, but 91% of the state's prison cells are located in the upstate region.

Even more critical is how this impacts the political power of Blacks and Latinos in the state compared to Whites. New York State is 62% White, but 82% of the state's prison population is Black or Latino.

Virtually all -- 98% -- of the prison cells are located in state Senate districts that are disproportionately White for the state.

Posted by lois at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times: Op-ed: Sentencing and Sensibility

By MYRON H. THOMPSON
....."If the 600-plus pages of the most recent set of sentencing guidelines have taught us anything, it is that punishment cannot be reduced to an algorithm. As Congress begins to consider its response to the Supreme Court's decision, may all of us be mindful of both the past and the future, so that generations to come do not use our own lawmakers' names as synonyms for a harsh and unforgiving legal system. "

Montgomery, Ala.
MORE than 2,500 years ago, the Athenian leader Draco codified the laws of his city-state, which was then suffering from political and social unrest. According to Plutarch, "Death was appointed for almost all offenses, insomuch that those that were convicted of idleness were to die, and those who stole a cabbage or an apple to suffer even as villains who committed sacrilege or murder." However repressive Draco's code may have seemed to later generations - and it spawned its own pejorative adjective, "draconian" - it was well intentioned. Draco sought to replace a relatively arbitrary system of oral law that had been maintained by the nobility. His written code of crime and punishment provided more power to the state as an arbiter of justice and ensured greater uniformity in the meting out of punishments. Yet Draco's efforts to institute a one-punishment-fits-all system of sentencing eventually became viewed as barbarously severe, and his code was repealed. Draco's example is especially relevant in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision last week, in United States v. Booker, that the sentencing guidelines federal judges have used for criminal offenders for more than 20 years were advisory, not mandatory. Since the court's holding may increase trial judges' discretion in sentencing - and since the court itself invited a legislative response - some members of Congress are sure to propose more statutory sentencing rules, like more and harsher minimum sentences. Yet amid the confusion that will undoubtedly follow this decision, we should keep in mind one basic principle: neither consistency nor codification guarantees justice. While few if any are calling for a return to the practically unfettered discretion that judges had before the sentencing guidelines came into effect, the nuances of individual cases necessitate a certain fluidity in imposing punishment. Congress should seek to shape judicial discretion, not to lock it in a vise. A sentencing scheme that provides different punishments for offenders with similar backgrounds who are convicted of similar crimes under similar circumstances is clearly unjust. Yet so is one that provides comparable punishments for offenders with different backgrounds who are convicted of similar crimes under different circumstances. Ultimately, it is the trial judge who is in the best position to distinguish between these two sets of circumstances, although Congress's guidance is critical in ensuring that one standard of justice exists throughout the federal court system. It is the judge who can appreciate the full complexity of the offender and his crime, and no prescriptive set of laws can appreciate the subtleties in determining the punishment that justice demands. If the 600-plus pages of the most recent set of sentencing guidelines have taught us anything, it is that punishment cannot be reduced to an algorithm. As Congress begins to consider its response to the Supreme Court's decision, may all of us be mindful of both the past and the future, so that generations to come do not use our own lawmakers' names as synonyms for a harsh and unforgiving legal system.
Myron H. Thompson is a federal district court judge.
January 21, 2005, NY Times

Posted by lois at 06:23 PM | Comments (0)

Tourism at Sing-Sing

January 21, 2005
DAY TRIPS

Going Up the River, for a Visit
By SCOTT CHRISTIANSON
WHEN the Sint Sinck Indians settled in a pretty hillside spot overlooking the Hudson River, they could hardly have suspected they would lend their name to one of the world's most notorious prisons. But though the surroundings inspired Alexis de Tocqueville to write, "Except the view of the Bay of Naples . . . the world has not such scenery," New York State fastened on Sing Sing in the 1820's as the perfect spot to stash a growing supply of convicts. Not only was the town convenient to New York City, with its rapidly expanding population, but nearby was a handy granite quarry — perfect raw material for the prison's original grim gray walls.

The Sing Sing of James Cagney movies, with its busy electric chair, and of celebrity inmates like Willie Sutton and the Rosenbergs, yielded to Attica as the state's most infamous prison after the 1971 riot. The old village, long since renamed Ossining, is morphing from prison company town into commuter suburb with riverside condos. But the Sing Sing Correctional Facility is very much a going concern, a maximum-security home to 2,000 inmates and still an imposing and chilling sight. Though a close-up view can be hard to get, you don't have to be under sentence to take a properly distanced look. And while the Sing Sing museum proposed early this month by Andrew Spano, the Westchester County executive, is far from reality, two small museums in town already help to tell the Sing Sing story.

Sing Sing, an H-shaped complex of gray concrete walls, glistening razor wire and multicolored brick and stone, looms above one of the Hudson's widest and prettiest points. From the Metro-North station in Ossining, sightseers can reach it on Hunter Street by heading south via Secor Road, stopping at Hamilton and South Streets to enjoy a better view with the river setting and following State Street on the east side of the tracks as it skirts the walls and towers.

But don't linger to take any close-ups, or you will prompt a security check.

THE prison wasn't even built when the first prisoners arrived — they had to do the job themselves. Under the command of an autocratic warden, Elam Lynds, they transformed the local granite into what at the time was the world's largest cellblock. Today, only traces of this original structure still exist, but even Sing Sing's newer parts look pretty ancient.

From 1891 to 1963, 614 people were put to death at Sing Sing, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. The executions gave the prison an especially dark mystique, and portions of half a dozen Hollywood movies, including "Angels With Dirty Faces" and "Castle on the Hudson," were filmed there. In 1916, Harry Houdini performed a three-hour magic act at the prison, and in 1931 Charlie Chaplin chose its auditorium to introduce his film "City Lights."

Though New York no longer charges admission fees and shows off its prisons like zoos, as it did in the 19th century, Sing Sing does allow carefully controlled public tours, with written permission and security clearances obtained in advance. Visitors who do make it inside are awed by the size of B Block, scene of a hostage-taking riot in 1983 — six stories high and twice the length of a football field — and by the lingering ghosts within the old death house, now a vocational-training building. And even when glimpsed from afar as they go about their daily business, inmates and correction officers tend to assume mythic proportions.

For a more accessible view of Sing Sing, visit the museum at the Joseph G. Caputo Community Center, a few blocks northeast of the train station. A favorite attraction is a replica of one of the ghastly cells from 1825, seven feet long, six and a half feet high, and just three and a half feet wide, complete with an original iron door. Also on display are a replica of the electric chair (in Mr. Spano's plan, the proposed museum would show the original) and a sobering collection of 19 homemade "shank" weapons confiscated in the prison in recent years, some still encased in plastic wrappers marked "Evidence."

Two examples of the prison's current cells, dating to 1929, are also on exhibition. Visitors who step close to inspect them may be startled to hear recorded prison sounds and then see their own images eerily reflected in a large mirror.

A more upbeat attraction is the Old Croton Aqueduct, which provided water to New York City from 1842 to 1991. By advance arrangement, visitors can descend into the original weir chamber, which controlled the water flow, and examine how the original tunnel was constructed.

About a mile north and inland from the prison, aficionados can find a trove of Sing Sing-related information at the Ossining Historical Society Museum, preserved in a tidy house that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Besides some prison artifacts, it has newspaper files, census records, books, maps and other material that probably represent the most extensive documentation about any prison in the nation. The 4,000 images in its W. Arthur Slater Collection of glass negatives show local street and prison scenes from 1890 to 1934 and can be viewed on computer disks.

When enough prison is enough, this museum can also direct the eye away, toward the glorious natural views the prisoners could only glimpse through iron bars. Its paintings include a Hudson River School landscape by Hugh Reinagle, "Village of Sing-Sing," and a work from about 1841, "Hudson River to Croton Point," by Robert Havell, who is perhaps best known as the master engraver for John James Audubon.

Grand Slammer

OSSINING is 30 miles from New York City via Metro-North Railroad. By car, take the Sprain Brook and Taconic Parkways, leaving the Taconic at Route 133, and drive west to Route 9.

The Sing Sing Correctional Facility (914-941-0108) is at 354 Hunter Street. To request permission to tour inside the walls, write to the Department of Correctional Services (Attention: Public Information), Building 2, State Office Campus, Albany, N.Y., 12226; or send the department a fax at (518) 457-7070. Applicants should provide the full names, addresses and Social Security numbers of every person wishing to tour, along with the requested date, and allow at least two weeks for processing. Prison officials reserve the right to deny visits but do try to accommodate interested and law-abiding citizens.

The Joseph G. Caputo Community Center (95 Broadway; 914-941-3189), where the replica electric chair and 19th-century cell are on display, is open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday. To arrange a guided group tour of the Old Croton Aqueduct, contact the Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct (914-693-4117) a week or so in advance.

The Ossining Historical Society Museum, (196 Croton Avenue; 914-941-0001; www.ossininghistorical.org) is open Sunday to Friday 1 to 4:30 p.m., Saturdays 1 to 3 p.m., and by appointment. Admission is free.

Docas Restaurant (125 Main Street; 914-944-9205) offers good Portuguese food. The Main Street Delicatessen and Fine Foods (143 Main Street; 914-762-0651) sells sandwiches and daily hot specials to go.

Scott Christianson, a former executive assistant to the New York State director of criminal justice, is the author of "Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Posted by lois at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)

NY Times Editorial: New Strategies for Curbing Recidivism

State and federal lawmakers are finally realizing that controlling prison costs means controlling recidivism - by helping newly released people establish viable lives once they get out of jail. A report just out from a group of 100 policy makers, including elected officials, established by the Council of State Governments argues that the country needs to reinvent its corrections system. In the place of a system that locks people up and shoves them out the door when their sentences are finished, the report, by the Re-Entry Policy Council, envisions "re-entry" services that reintegrate ex-offenders into their communities.

This line of thinking is long overdue. The United States has 2.1 million people behind bars on any given day - nearly seven times the number three decades ago. Corrections costs have risen accordingly - from about $9 billion a year two decades ago to more than $60 billion a year today
- making corrections the second-fastest-growing expense in state budgets, after Medicaid. The portrait of the inmate population offered in the report leaves no doubt as to why two-thirds of the people who leave prison are rearrested within a few years. These people were marginally employable before they went to jail - nearly half earned less than $600 a month. They are even less employable afterward, thanks to criminal records. In addition, many of them suffer from mental illnesses that often go untreated after release.
The social services necessary for successful re-entry are virtually nonexistent in most communities. The new report offers an exhaustive prescription for changing the status quo: states will need to coax disparate parts of their systems to work together. State officials will also have to re-educate voters, who have grown accustomed to a corrections philosophy that begins and ends with merely locking people up for the longest possible period of time. These policies will need to change, and quickly, if the states are to solve the recidivism problem and develop programs that help former inmates find homes, training, jobs and places in their communities. Until that happens, corrections costs will continue to soar, siphoning off billions of dollars that could be used for more constructive purposes.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
January 21, 2005

Posted by lois at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2005

Report: Texas Could Need Up to 5 New Prisons

Inmate rise blamed on problems with probation system
January 18, 2005
By DAVE MICHAELS / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Texas would have to build as many as five prisons over the next six years if the state continues to incarcerate offenders at the current rate, according to a new report by the state's budget monitors.
Texas' prison system holds 150,575 inmates, more than any other state. If incarceration trends continue, the system would add nearly 3,700 prisoners over the next two years, and more than 14,000 by 2010, according to the report by the Legislative Budget Board.

The prison population is already beyond the state's preferred capacity. A preliminary state budget, released last week, suggests spending an additional $40 million for contracted space in county jails and cutting funding for adult probation departments, whose rolls are falling.

But the report by the Legislative Budget Board – made up of the leaders who craft the state's budget – notes that many criminal justice officials believe the prison population is rising precisely because the probation system is not working.

The rate of felons having their probation revoked rose 18 percent between 2001 and 2004, according to the report, which will be released this week. A copy was shown to The Dallas Morning News.

"More attention needs to be given to the front end of the sentencing process in order to realize a decline in the state's incarcerated population," the report states, citing the feelings of criminal justice officials interviewed throughout the state.

That recommendation dovetails with the ideas of many key lawmakers, who have said Texas cannot afford to keep building more prisons.

"We don't want to build new prisons," Rep. Ray Allen, a Grand Prairie Republican who chairs the House Corrections Committee, said in a recent interview. "If you ask four or five of the top officials, they will say the same thing. Prisons are inordinately costly."

But how many prisoners are too many? If there is a magic number, it is typically an equilibrium that accounts for financial realities and a criminal justice philosophy, experts said.

"The legislators have to get through the session and balance the books," said Charles M. Friel, a professor at Sam Houston State University's College of Criminal Justice. "In corrections, we have to look at the long term. You need a plan you can sell that prepares you for the next 20 years."

To help reduce the prison population, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has asked for an additional $28 million to hire 391 more probation officers. Lawmakers such as Mr. Allen said that investment would be far less costly than building new prisons.

Officials interviewed for the budget board's report also recommended: reducing the probation terms for some offenses, revising laws to keep small-time drug users out of state jails and prisons, and trimming the probation terms of offenders who have successfully completed drug treatment programs.

Texas Youth Commission facilities are also expected to exceed capacity in the next two years. The report says 236 more juveniles would be added to commission facilities by 2007, which would put the facilities nearly 12 percent over capacity.

E-mail dmichaels@dallasnews.com

Posted by lois at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)

NY: Andrew Cuomo Op-ed: Prison Inmates, Republican Constituents

Andrew Cuomo
Albany Times Union, January 19, 2005
(Note from Lois: for more on how people who are incarcerated benefit those who make the decisions about their incarcreation go to: www.prisonersofthecensus.org
And, a note from Tracy Huling: "Andrew Cuomo was the commissioner of housing/development in his father's admin, most likely instrumental in crafting the arrangements whereby the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), one of the first --if not the first -- of those quasi public-private 'shadow agencies' used to bond state construction projects, was turned from an agency funding public housing for the poor into an agency funding prison construction." Now that he is running for Governor Andrew Cuomo is apparently seeing his past work in a new light.)

Nothing was more striking in Gov. Pataki's recent State of the State address than his use of the word "reform" no fewer than 31 times in a 69-minute speech. It's striking, because if there's anything New Yorkers will not get from this administration, it's genuine reform.

For the governor to pursue real reform, he would have to challenge some entrenched Albany special interests and Republican Party politics. A look at how the governor "reformed" the Rockefeller-era drug laws reveals how unwilling or unable he is to do that.

Last year, after a decade of promises to revisit the state's 30-year-old drug laws, the governor finally signed a "reform" measure. The need for real reform was obvious; the Rockefeller laws are a well-established failure. They impose harsh minimum mandatory sentences on first-time, nonviolent drug offenders, stripping judges of the freedom to base their sentences on the facts of each individual case. Under rigid sentencing guidelines, judges are forced to lock up thousands of nonviolent young people who would be better served by effective drug treatment. The "reform" legislation did little to change this injustice.

The Rockefeller laws have wasted millions of dollars, to say nothing of the unnecessary waste of prisoners' lives that can never be recovered.

As the Times Union editorial page has highlighted, the Supreme Court just last week affirmed the importance of judicial discretion -- which is absent in New York's law.

When the need for real reform of these laws is so obvious, why would the governor look the other way? Because, arguably, Mr. Pataki is more interested in protecting the interests of New York's Republican Party than in serving the interests of the people of New York.

Let me describe one example of this dysfunction. The population of upstate New York, the political base for the state's Republicans, has been steadily declining in recent years. We have the greatest out-migration of any state in the nation. Our upstate communities are losing jobs, too, and state government has pushed the problem from bad to worse by increasing the cost of doing business. Sadly, jobs in the prison industry are among the few employment opportunities the Pataki administration has protected upstate.

There are New Yorkers moving upstate, but they are prison inmates. In fact, prisoners from downstate represent a full 30 percent of all those "moving" upstate since 1990. While only 24 percent of New York prisoners come originally from upstate, 91 percent of all New York's prisoners are incarcerated there.

This works out nicely for New York's Republican Party. Why? Because the population figures that determine Senate and Assembly districts include prison inmates. It's simply not in the Republicans' political interests to support measures that would let those locked up under the old drug laws go free.

According to data from the Prison Policy Initiative, nearly 44,000 prisoners
-- mainly from downstate and mainly minorities -- are incarcerated in small, upstate communities and are counted as "residents" of the communities in which they are imprisoned. Their presence in a prison adds to a legislator's constituents -- even though, as prisoners, they can't vote.

This is politically powerful for the Republican Party. There are four upstate Senate districts that qualify as districts only because they include a large prison population -- and all four are represented by Republicans. The Democrats would have to take just four more seats for the Republicans to lose their majority.

The leading defenders of the Rockefeller-era drug laws are upstate Republican Sens. Dale Volker and Michael Nozzolio, heads of the committees on codes and crime, respectively. The prisons in their two districts account for more than 17 percent of all the prisoners in the state. It may not be fair to say Volker and Nozzolio actually "represent" the inmates who make their districts viable. Sen. Volker told another newspaper that the cows in his district would be more likely to vote for him than the prisoners. State population statistics show that, without the inmates, Volker's district is one of the four that would have to be redrawn.

Are decisions on the Rockefeller-era drug laws being made as sound public policy or are they politically motivated? The potential conflict of interests is obvious. We should not count prisoners as a political base for legislators who do not honestly represent them and for whom they did not vote. In other words, remove the partisan politics and secure the integrity of legislative decisions. These are important keys to "real" reform.

Such an agenda would replace partisan politics with sound public policy, deliver results not rhetoric and restore integrity to the process. It would focus on an economic development plan for upstate New York rather than a prison construction program. It would address the education-aid debacle and the dysfunction of state government. The "government for sale" attitude should be replaced with a strong ethical code for lobbyists and special interests.

For many years, voters ignored the state government's poor performance. But this past year has brought a new awareness and justified impatience with Albany. Elected officials who serve in Albany could not avoid hearing the message and after years of dysfunction they promised change. Even seasoned Albany veterans are contorting themselves to appear as "reformers." This year they must deliver.

Andrew M. Cuomo is a former secretary of housing and urban development and a former candidate for governor.

http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=324659&category=OPINION&n
ewsdate=1/19/2005

Posted by lois at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)

Report: State of the Dream 2005

Under Bush, People of Color Slide Further from King's Dream

“Ownership, independence, access to wealth should not be the privilege of a few.”
–President George W. Bush

“Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King

Under Bush, People of Color Slide Further from King's Dream

“Ownership, independence, access to wealth should not be the privilege of a few.”

– President George W. Bush

“Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.”

– Dr. Martin Luther King

After steady economic gains in the 1990s, Latinos, African Americans and other people of color have actually lost ground since 2000, according to United for a Fair Economy’s newest report.

In two weeks Americans will observe both the second inauguration of President Bush and the 76th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King. Before visiting King’s grave in 2003, Bush said, “It’s important for our country to honor his life and what he stood for” -- but his actions have contradicted those words. The report finds that President Bush’s campaign promise of an Ownership Society slipped farther out of reach for most people of color during his first administration.

In 2000, the African American unemployment rate reached a historic low of 7.1%, but it has been 9.9% or higher since January 2002. Latino / Hispanic unemployment rates also dropped from 8.0% in 1988 to 5.7% in 2000, but rose again in the last four years.

About half of the progress in the median income of people of color from 1996 to 2000 was wiped out in the following three years. For the first time in 15 years, the average Latino household now has an income that is less than two-thirds that of the average white household. After slowly increasing from 55% of white income in 1988 to 65% in 2000, black median income fell again to 62% of the white median in 2003.

Throughout the 1990s, poverty rates fell across the board, declining fastest for African Americans and Latinos. But since 2000, more than one third of that progress in reducing poverty among African American families has been erased, as 300,000 African-American families fell below the poverty line from 2000 to 2003.

Private retirement income and inheritances remain scarce among people of color.

Ownership of homes, stock and businesses remains disproportionately in white hands. While homeownership is up for all races, most people of color still rent, while three-quarters of white families own their homes.

Business owners of color, who are largely small business owners, received only minor tax breaks from the four Bush tax cuts. Most tax breaks for business and investors have landed with those who are wealthy and white.

The report concludes that closing the racial wealth divide will require a new “GI Bill for Everyone,” a comprehensive federal investment in low-income families and communities, with an emphasis on people of color. Progressive taxes on wealthy individuals and profitable corporations are needed to fund a real Ownership Society.

The authors of UFE’s second annual "State of the Dream" report are Betsy Leondar-Wright, Meizhu Lui, Gloribell Mota, Dedrick Muhammad, and Mara Voukydis.

United for a Fair Economy is a national non-partisan non-profit organization that raises awareness of the dangers of growing economic inequality.
For the full report go to:
http://www.faireconomy.org

Press Release from United for a Fair Economy
January 10, 2005
Contact: Betsy Leondar-Wright, (617) 423-2148 x13

Posted by lois at 08:36 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2005

One-piece monitoring system redefines prison industry

"STOP - or Satellite Tracking of People - claims to have the only one-piece GPS device that tracks the whereabouts of released offenders. The BluTag product is being marketed to federal, state and local corrections officials as a cost-saving alternative to incarceration."

By Chris Lewis, clewis@nashvillecitypaper.com
January 19, 2005

Having put in time behind desks in the private prison industry, a couple of seasoned corrections veterans have turned their sights toward the heavens.

The founders of Nashville-based STOP have tapped Global Positioning System (GPS), the satellite technology that allows tracking of automobiles through products such as OnStar, to provide a new approach to the nation's growing prison overpopulation problem.

STOP - or Satellite Tracking of People - claims to have the only one-piece GPS device that tracks the whereabouts of released offenders. The BluTag product is being marketed to federal, state and local corrections officials as a cost-saving alternative to incarceration.

"It costs $70 a day to lock somebody up, and it costs $10 a day to do this technology," said Steven Logan, STOP's chief executive officer. "Our view is there is a huge population of offenders who are not just on parole or probation but also who are incarcerated who are very eligible for this type of monitoring."

As former executive of a private prison company, Cornell Companies Inc., Logan had competed for many years with Doctor R. Crants, founder of Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America.

Having left their respective companies, the former competitors, along with other corrections industry veterans, teamed up to develop a system that combines satellite tracking of offenders with a crime scene correlation program.

With two key acquisitions last month, STOP gained control of the patents on its two primary product lines. It purchased the Verquis subsidiary from Strategic Technologies Inc., which developed the BluTag product, the one-piece GPS tracking bracelet.

The purchase of the Oracle-based VeriTracks business line from General Dynamics put into place the crime scene correlation program marketed separately to law enforcement agencies. The users can overlay the BluTag tracking system with their crime scene data to detect the proximity of the electronically monitored offenders near crime scenes.

The acquisitions paved the way for STOP to raise equity funding for its business plan from JHW Greentree Capital.

"We only wanted to go raise institutional funding when we could actually bring together both General Dynamics technology and the one-piece. It's only been until recently that this one-piece has come into production," Logan said.

Traditional electronic monitoring has integrated ankle bracelets with radio frequency to tether an offender to a specific location, such as his home. If the offender leaves the restricted area, an alarm alerts officials, who know only that the offender has left the area.

By contrast, GPS allows corrections officers to track the offender's movements in his restrictive zone 24/7 as dots on a computer map. Similar to the old system, a bracelet is affixed to the offender's ankle.

Until now, GPS systems haven't been able to interact with the ankle bracelet because the wearer needs a strong receiver to pick up GPS's faint signals. That has required the offender to carry around a separate lunchbox-type unit to house the battery and receiver. That two-piece system has proved ineffective and cumbersome, Logan said.

"The holy grail of the industry has been the one-piece. All of this in one piece," Logan said.

The smaller BluTag unit incorporates the GPS receiver into the ankle bracelet design, allowing the wearer freer movement. Logan admits the system isn't fool-proof.

"On any of these devices the straps can be cut off, but they're hard to get cut off. That's why this is not going to be appropriate for every inmate. There are some inmates that are going to have to stay locked up. But the biggest hammer on most parolees or probationers is the threat of going back to prison," he said.

The timing for STOP's products is on the mark, says Nashville corrections consultant Richard Cranes, a corrections consultant. Not only has the Bush Administration called for more alternatives to incarceration, but a recent Supreme Court decision gives federal judges more leeway in sentencing.

But Cranes said the company faces an industry that is often resistant to change, particularly as corrections budgets tighten.

"It's just finding the money that's going to be a difficult thing. But certainly this is a good time to be entering that market," Cranes said.

http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/index.cfm?section_id=51&screen=news&news_i
d=38620

Posted by lois at 07:25 PM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2005

Wilbert Rideau Freed After 44 years

Wilbert Rideau, an acclaimed prison journalist and confessed killer, walked out of the Calcasieu Parish Courthouse in Lake Charles, La., a free man on Saturday night after serving 44 years for stabbing a bank teller through the heart in 1961.

By ADAM LIPTAK, NY Times, 1/17/05

In Mr. Rideau's fourth trial for the killing, a jury on Saturday found him not guilty of murder, which would have resulted in a life sentence. Instead, the jury convicted him of manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of 21 years, effectively freeing him.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Rideau, 62, said he had wasted no time in leaving Lake Charles, a racially divided city near the Texas border that remains fiercely split about whether he has paid his debt for the killing or whether he should have been executed long ago.

"The first thing I did when we left Lake Charles was stop and get some sun shades," Mr. Rideau said cheerfully over the phone, suggesting that he needed to disguise himself. "I should get a baseball cap, too."

Three all-white juries sentenced him to death for the killing in 1961, 1964 and 1970. All three convictions were overturned by appeals courts for government misconduct. The last conviction was thrown out in 2000 when a federal appeals court ruled that the exclusion of blacks from the grand jury that indicted Mr. Rideau was unconstitutional.

"The first trial, I think, the decision was in eight minutes," said Mr. Rideau, who is black. "This time, we had only one white male."

The latest jury, which also contained seven white women, two black women, a woman of mixed race and a black man, was from Monroe, in northern Louisiana, in deference to the tensions in Lake Charles.

"They came from one of the most conservative regions of Louisiana," Mr. Rideau said. "We had some nervousness about that. These things happened 44 years ago, before many of them were even born."

This time, the jury deliberated for five and a half hours, returning with a verdict at 10:40 on Saturday night.

Rick Bryant, the Calcasieu Parish district attorney, said the jury had ignored the evidence.

"The verdict makes no sense," he said yesterday. "It's a subtle jury-nullification type of thing. The jury basically said, there is still a conviction and he's done a lot of time."

Mr. Rideau has never denied that he robbed a Gulf National Bank branch in Lake Charles on Feb. 16, 1961, that he kidnapped three white employees of the bank or that he shot them on a gravel lane near a bayou on the edge of town. Two of the employees survived, one by jumping into the swamp, the other by feigning death. But Mr. Rideau caught and killed Julia Ferguson, a teller, stabbing in her in the heart.

The two sides at the trial last week agreed on those basic facts. They differed about whether the killing was part of a calculated plan or the result of a bank robbery gone awry committed by a hapless 19-year-old.

"I've been saying for 44 years that, yes, I'm responsible," Mr. Rideau said yesterday. "But it didn't happen the way they said it. They said I lined them up execution-style. The evidence never supported that. Between the local media and the legal system, though, they pretty much did what they wanted. A lot of what the community thought, through hand-me-down word of mouth, never really happened."

Mr. Rideau testified in his own defense, a potentially risky move given his acknowledged responsibility for the crime. But George H. Kendall, one of Mr. Rideau's lawyers, said the testimony was crucial.

"The state's narrative was a very simple, understandable narrative," Mr. Kendall said. "We had to have an alternative narrative, and the only way we could get that out was through our client."

Mr. Rideau said his initial plan was to lock up the employees at the bank and take a bus out of town with the $14,000 he had stolen. When that was foiled by an ill-timed phone call from the bank's main branch, he said, he came up with a second plan. He would drive the employees far out of town in a teller's car and escape as they walked back. But they jumped from the car before he could accomplish that, and he started shooting.

"If I had intended to kill those people, eliminate witnesses, I would have done it right there in the bank," Mr. Rideau testified on Thursday, according to The Associated Press. "It never entered my mind that I was going to hurt anybody."

Theodore M. Shaw, the director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which also represented Mr. Rideau, said he found it hard to reconcile Mr. Rideau's crime with the thoughtful and accomplished man he has become.

"I've never lost sight of the fact that when Wilbert was 19 he did something incredibly stupid and tragic," Mr. Shaw said. "On the other hand, he's not the man he was then. It's a story of redemption."

Mr. Shaw pointed to Mr. Rideau's journalistic work as proof of his transformation. As editor of The Angolite, a prison newspaper, Mr. Rideau won the George Polk Award, one of journalism's highest honors. "The Farm: Angola, U.S.A.," a documentary he co-directed, was nominated for an Academy Award.

Mr. Bryant, the prosecutor, said Mr. Rideau's achievements were irrelevant. "Rideau's actions were driven by greed," Mr. Bryant said, referring to the robbery. "It's not like he's been some sort of civil rights pioneer. He's a crook."

Mr. Bryant said the prosecution had been at a disadvantage throughout the trial.

"It's very difficult to try a case that's 44 years old," he said. "We had 13 witnesses who were unavailable, including the two eyewitnesses, and we had to present them by reading transcripts." One of the survivors of the crime died in 1988, and the other was too ill to attend the trial.

Mr. Rideau said yesterday that he had not dared make plans for what he would do as a free man. The pardon board recommended clemency four times, he said, but governors rejected each recommendation.

"When you've been turned down and ridden that hope train for so long and keep getting knocked back," he said, "you stop making plans."

He declined to say where he planned to live. "Undisclosed location," he said.

Then he started to collect his thoughts.

"I'll be 63 in about three more weeks," he said. "I'm walking around in sweatpants. Most people my age are retired, and I have no health insurance, no pension, no Social Security. I've got to start producing. I've got to get a job. I'd like to write. I've got so much to say. I'm going to continue, to the extent that I can, to be a journalist."

Posted by lois at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)

Judges' New Leeway in Passing Sentence May Change Little

Departures from the federal guidelines depended on the type of crime and where it took place. People convicted of antitrust were sentenced within the guidelines 31 percent of the time; those convicted of possessing drugs, 95 percent.

January 18, 2005

By ADAM LIPTAK

Following federal judges great leeway in sentencing criminals does not have to breed chaos, say judges and sentencing specialists in states that already have such systems.

When the Supreme Court said last week that federal sentencing guidelines were merely advisory, many prosecutors and lawmakers predicted that federal judges would start issuing wildly inconsistent sentences based on little more than sentiment and whim. But the few states that already use similar systems have produced remarkable conformity.

"There is a sense out there that an advisory sentencing guideline system can't work," said Richard Kern, the director of the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission, which oversees the system that most resembles the way federal sentences will now be handed down. "But our guidelines' compliance rate is higher than the federal system, which had a mandatory system."

In Virginia, judges follow the state's advisory guidelines 81 percent of the time, Mr. Kern said. In the District of Columbia, which converted to an advisory system for its local courts this summer, judges have been found to follow the guidelines 87 percent of the time.

"For defendants facing sentences under state advisory guideline systems," said Carmen Hernandez, a vice president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, "85 percent of the sentences imposed in those systems end up being the sentences that would have been imposed under the guidelines."

Under the federal system that was considered mandatory, judges sentenced defendants within the guidelines only about 65 percent of the time.

Legal scholars, judges and sentencing specialists caution that there are substantial differences between the state systems and the new federal one, and that compliance by federal judges, who have increasingly chafed under the mandatory guidelines, can be expected to decline. But they add that the experience in the states may suggest that the change in the federal system will be evolutionary rather than radical.

In the past few days, federal judges have indicated that the guidelines will retain considerable force. "In all but the most unusual cases," Paul G. Cassell, a federal judge in Salt Lake City, wrote in a decision on Thursday, "the appropriate sentence will be the guidelines sentence."

William G. Young, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Boston, said that he expected only minor changes in sentencing practices.

Among the states, Virginia appears to be an instructive model, said Daniel F. Wilhelm, the director of the state sentencing and corrections program of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research group based in New York.

The system that the Supreme Court created for federal courts is very similar to what Virginia created 10 years ago, Mr. Wilhelm said Thursday. "What Virginia suggests is that you can balance concerns of public safety along with a sentencing guideline system that trusts judges with discretion," he said. "And there would be very few people who would accuse Virginia of not being a tough-on-crime state."

Other states with advisory guidelines have had less success in persuading judges to apply them.

"Since they were voluntary, people didn't necessarily look at them," Judge Michael A. Wolff of the Missouri Supreme Court, the chairman of the state's Sentencing Advisory Commission, said of his state's guidelines, which were revised in June to try to get judges to use them more often. "The compliance rate was poor, I think less than half."

In general, though, the state systems say they are succeeding.

Michael Connelly, the executive director of the Wisconsin Sentencing Commission, said, "It's not necessarily the case that disparity and noncompliance are inevitable in an advisory system."

In 1984, when Congress enacted the guideline system, it rejected an advisory system, relying in part on testimony from Scott Harshbarger, then a district attorney in Massachusetts.

"Advisory and voluntary guidelines were not working," Mr. Harshbarger, now in private practice, said in an interview on Friday. "You have to have some measure of uniformity, consistency and predictability. A system of voluntary guidelines is not good for public safety or confidence in the justice system."

Some scholars say much has changed in the state courts in the intervening years.

"Judges now get in line a lot more, for two reasons," said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University. "One is, they're scared about having the federal system. Another reason is that, in the 1970's, with the focus on rehabilitation, the pervasive philosophy was to view every case individually. In the last 25 years, the thinking has changed, as we focus much more on the crime than the defendant."

Federal judges had been under criticism, even under the old system, as varying too much in sentencing. Over all, they sentenced 65 percent of defendants within the guidelines in 2002, the most recent year for which data were available. In 17 percent of cases, they issued lesser sentences for other reasons, generally involving a defendant's personal circumstances.

And in another 17 percent of cases, they showed leniency to defendants who cooperated with prosecutors, which most law enforcement officials say they find acceptable. . Judges imposed harsher sentences than the guidelines would have required about 1 percent of the time.

Departures from the federal guidelines depended on the type of crime and where it took place. People convicted of antitrust were sentenced within the guidelines 31 percent of the time; those convicted of possessing drugs, 95 percent. In Arizona, 31 percent of all sentences were within the guidelines; in southern Virginia, 89 percent were.

In some ways, the state systems can provide only limited guidance about how the new federal system is likely to operate. State judges, who are usually elected, face different pressures and incentives than do federal judges, who have life tenure.

"In Virginia, judges are elected by the state Legislature," said Kevin R. Reitz, a law professor at the University of Colorado and an expert on state sentencing practices. "That makes them a little fearful of ignoring the guidelines. Reckless deviation from the sentencing guidelines may not be good for their careers."

State systems also have budget pressures that are largely absent from the federal system.

"In the overall federal budget, the total corrections budget is well below 1 percent," Professor Reitz said. "In the state systems, it might be more on the order of 15 or 20 percent. In the vast majority of states that have sentencing guidelines, the guidelines were designed in the first place to respond to budgetary pressures."

Judges in those states, said Professor Berman of Ohio State, "get in political trouble with their legislators, not their voters, if they sentence too long."

To monitor compliance, the new federal system calls for an active role for appeals courts, creating an important control absent from most state systems. "In Virginia," Mr. Wilhelm said, "appellate review is virtually nonexistent."

The Supreme Court decision requires federal appeals court judges to determine whether sentences are reasonable. Still, Professor Reitz concluded that the differences between state systems and the new federal system may outweigh the similarities.

"Geography and life tenure and the strong tradition of judicial independence on the federal bench and the fact that the federal sentencing guidelines were not created with judicial preferences in mind all suggest," he said, "that an advisory system is going to lead to very disparate results from district to district and from judge to judge."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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The People Left Behind: Elaine Bartlett & Life on the Outside

By Nate Blakeslee, Texas Observer
Shortly before Thanksgiving of 1983, a modest drug deal went down in a beauty shop in Harlem. Elaine Bartlett, a 26-year-old mother of four, agreed to carry four ounces of cocaine by train from New York City to Albany.

Bartlett was not a drug courier by trade. She worked off the books as an unlicensed hairdresser and lived in one of Harlem's big public housing projects. A man named Charlie stepped into the back room of the beauty shop one morning and offered her $2,500 for one day's work. When she said yes, she had in mind a huge Thanksgiving feast for her extended family and some new furniture for her tidy little apartment. She never got to have her Thanksgiving dinner that year. By the time she sat down to dinner with her family again, 16 years later, it was in a household ruined by years of frustration and neglect, and her children were no longer really hers.

The People Left Behind
"Charlie," whose real name was George Deets, was a police informant, retained by the state police in Albany to lure New York City dealers upstate. It didn't matter to the cops that Bartlett was not actually in the business, or that she had no convictions of any kind on her record. In fact, everything about the deal was cynically contrived. Deets and a partner named Rich Zagurski had worked on and off for the cops for years, mostly to get themselves out of trouble following minor drug busts. It was never hard to find somebody like Elaine in Harlem, and the authorities in Albany didn't ask too many questions about how they did it. (Bartlett, for example, had never even been to Albany before.)

In this case, the pair had no charges of their own to work off; they set up the deal to get a friend and colleague out of hot water, a service for which they charged a fee. While running this peculiar sort of brokerage, Deets and Zagurski were also importing a kilo of cocaine directly from Colombia into Albany every two weeks, and earning up to $1 million per year. In his dealings with the police, Deets made no secret of his underworld connections; indeed it gave him the cachet he needed to set up his neck-saving deals with prosecutors.

At trial, Zagurski was asked why he had cooperated with the police. "I just feel that, you know, cocaine is at a bad level and I think that, you know, it should be taken off the street," he testified. Appearances had to be kept up, especially in Albany.

When Bartlett discovered the nature of the setup, she could not bring herself to accept a plea bargain. That was a horrible mistake. New York State, that great bastion of liberalism, had some of the toughest drug laws in the nation. The sale of four ounces of cocaine, even for a first offender, was punishable by a sentence of 15 years to life. Tried in front of one of the state's most notorious hanging judges, Bartlett was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Bartlett was sentenced under the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, which introduced the concept of mandatory minimum sentences to American jurisprudence. Brainchild of former governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, the laws were passed in 1973, at the height of the heroin scourge in New York City. Under the new laws, judges no longer had the discretion to consider mitigating factors when sentencing defendants; they had to abide by the minimums established in the code. Early parole was also eliminated.

The harsh new sentencing laws were designed to win the support of rural New Yorkers fearful of the spread of the blight afflicting Harlem, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. But more than that, the initiative was an effort to shore up the governor's conservative credentials in anticipation of his fourth run at the Republican presidential nomination. As it happened, a short, ill-advised stint as Gerald Ford's vice president was the closest Rockefeller ever got to the Oval Office. His drug laws remain, however. Widely copied in state legislatures across the country, they have formed an enduring legacy.

Jennifer Gonnerman's Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett, just out in paperback from Picador, is a powerful indictment of mandatory minimums, but the book isn't just about the way New York locks people up. It's also about what happens to the people who are left behind when somebody gets incarcerated, and what happens to prisoners once they get home.

A book-length examination of this subject was long overdue. The nation reached a grim milestone in recent years: For the first time the number of persons incarcerated nationwide topped 2 million. The stark reality of that number has shamed even some conservatives into rethinking our national response to crime, especially drug crime, which has helped drive the total. Here is a less well-known but equally staggering figure from the other side of the equation: Every year 600,000 convicts are released from prison. There are now 13 million Americans who have served time. That's 7 percent of the adult population.

We are becoming, as Gonnerman writes, a two-tiered society, divided into those who have been locked up and those who have not. For those who have, the prospects for re-entry into society are bleak. Most leave prison with little education or job skills, and many have untreated substance abuse problems. An estimated 16 percent have a serious mental illness. Others will come out of prison with hepatitis C, HIV, or even tuberculosis.

Increasingly punitive measures on the outside, meant to dissuade would-be offenders, are instead creating a kind of caste from which many ex-cons never escape. Felons are officially prohibited from living in federally subsidized public housing. From state to state, they may be prohibited variously from voting, obtaining student loans, driving a car, parenting their children, receiving welfare, or holding certain types of jobs. Forty percent will re-offend within three years. It is a caste with a distinct color: two-thirds of all ex-cons are black or Hispanic.

For two and a half years, Gonnerman, a staff writer at the Village Voice, covered Bartlett's efforts at rebuilding a life for herself and her family. Gov. George Pataki commuted Bartlett's sentence after her case was taken up by the anti-Rockefeller drug law movement in New York and she became something of a minor celebrity. From her first day out, however, it was clear that Pataki's pardon would not bring a happy ending to Elaine's story.

As the news cameras rolled, she was met at the Bedford Hills prison gates by her beloved son Apache. Just a boy when she was locked up, he was now 26 and had become the de facto head of the Bartlett household, following the death of Elaine's mother Yvonne. Bartlett's younger son Jamel was locked up, doing the first of many bits for heroin dealing. Her 19-year-old daughter Satara was mysteriously absent. The camera crew followed Elaine to a celebratory dinner, and then back to the apartment in which her kids had grown up in her absence. When she saw what was inside, unmistakable evidence of the mess that her children's lives had become, she told the crew to turn the camera off. Nobody needed to see this.

Except they did need to see it, which is the genius of Gonnerman's project and the reason the book was nominated for the 2004 National Book Award. Elaine's children were living in squalor. When Elaine, and later Elaine's mother Yvonne, was in charge, order and a sense of family pride had prevailed at the Bartlett household. Now everybody seemed to have given up, as Elaine put it.

Her youngest daughter Danae, a high school student, had gone to live with another family, stopping by the apartment only occasionally. Her older daughter, Satara, had dropped out of high school after becoming pregnant. The despondent, non-responsive single mother was nothing like the bright, bouncy girl Elaine remembered. She rarely left the apartment. Elaine's younger sister Sabrina, addicted to crack and HIV positive, had also moved in. She watched soaps all day and slept in the living room. Her presence had forced the apartment's other residents to install locks on their bedroom doors. Sabrina's 21-year-old daughter, who had an infant of her own, was also living in the cramped apartment. Elaine had to share a tiny bedroom with Satara and her daughter.

Elaine's daughters, unaccustomed to having a firm parental presence in their lives, quickly came to consider their mother part of the problem. Danae, a rebellious teenager in trouble at school, and, Elaine was surprised to discover, a lesbian, rejected her mother's overtures to rejoin the family. After a shouting match over living arrangements in the cramped apartment, somebody, either Satara or her boyfriend, called the police on Elaine. Though her sentence had been commuted, she was still on parole, meaning she could be sent back to prison at any time if she violated any of a laundry list of rules. Getting arrested, obviously, would likely be disastrous.

Elaine had spent 16 years worrying about her children, dreaming of the day she would be reunited with them. Now she found that – despite all the visiting room chats and letters over the years – she had been kept in the dark about what was really happening to her family. Her daughters were depressed, bitter people, and she did not know them. They blamed her, it seemed, for being gone so long. Elaine's own sisters seemed to blame her as well, for refusing to take the plea bargain, for being gone when their mother died, for saddling them with her four children to raise on top of their own. Her son Jamel was a gang-banger and a drug dealer who had earned the nickname "Murder Mel." Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before he would go to prison himself. Only Apache, who had found his calling coaching youth basketball, seemed to have his life together.

Elaine's efforts to find a new, larger apartment for her family went nowhere. The official prohibition against felons living in subsidized housing was often overlooked in New York City, but the waiting list for a new residence was enormous. Elaine was told to move into a shelter if she wanted to be bumped to the head of the list. In the end, feeling unwelcome in her own house, she did just that, packing up her things and heading to a YMCA.

Her hunt for a job was equally frustrating. Friends of her son Mel, fellow drug dealers, helped her out with cash at first, but after two months of a fruitless job search she was dead broke and desperate. Elaine attended the mandatory how-to-get-a-job classes required by her parole officer. Most of her fellow classmates – all ex-cons like her – were looking at a bleak future of cashiering at McDonald's or janitorial work.

Unlike them, Elaine had some education and job experience. After 16 years at Bedford Hills, she had held virtually every job and taken every class the prison had to offer, earning a GED and an associate's degree in the process. Eventually, through the assistance of a heroic social worker who was an ex-con himself, she landed a job as a counselor at a halfway house for recently incarcerated drug addicts, where her prison experience served her well.

Elaine Bartlett is a flawed heroine, and Gonnerman's gaze, to her credit, is unflinching. Elaine is bitter about the years she lost and consumed by feelings of guilt and resentment about what has become of her children. On more than one occasion she loses control of her considerable temper and punches her daughters, as though they were fellow inmates at Bedford Hills. Still, the end of Life on the Outside finds Elaine on what is, on balance at least, a hopeful trajectory. Elaine's steady income allows her to move out of the projects. Through Elaine's persistent ministrations, or perhaps through her mere presence, Satara begins to come out of her shell. Danae gradually accepts Elaine as her mother. Elaine finds love in a younger man who dotes on her in the way she always wanted.

There is hope in policy circles as well. After years of organizing and lobbying in Albany, reform advocates won a partial victory last month when the state legislature voted to amend the Rockefeller laws, reducing the length of the longest sentences and raising the weight thresholds in the code. As a result, some of those convicts, like Elaine, who got the maximum sentence will now be eligible for release. (The legislature stopped short of restoring discretion to judges, however.) Progress has been slow and uneven, but the general trend in recent years has been toward a softening of drug laws across the country.

Elaine Bartlett's story played a key role in moving the debate on mandatory minimums, and Gonnerman's compelling and moving account is a call to arms for further reform. At the same time, however, by virtue of the thoroughness and honesty of Gonnerman's reporting, Life on the Outside also points up the limitations of the criminal justice reform movement. Elaine's story offers a rare and valuable glimpse of daily life in the inner city, and it's a sobering vision. Nelson Rockefeller did not create the cycle of poverty and desperation into which three generations of the Bartlett family – along with 600,000 other souls living in public housing in New York City – are mired. Likewise, if the drug war ended tomorrow, the prospects for Elaine and her children would not dramatically improve.

But that is not what we are meant to take away from this book. We are meant to understand that mass incarceration, that incredibly ambitious enterprise at which this country has excelled far beyond any other, is not part of the solution. By that measure, Life on the Outside is a masterpiece.

Posted on January 12, 2005, Printed on January 18, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/20971/

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20971/

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January 17, 2005

Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967 Speech at Riverside Church, NY

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

The Importance of Vietnam

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Strange Liberators

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not "ready" for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change -- especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggleagainst French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless on Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.

This Madness Must Cease

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stopit must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

1. End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
2. Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
3. Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
4. Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.
5. Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary.

Protesting The War

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove thosse conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

The People Are Important

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on..." We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world -- a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the callling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial momentof human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah,
Off'ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above his own.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.ssc.msu.edu/~sw/mlk/brkslnc.htm

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Posted by lois at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)

Meth abuse proving costly to rural communities

"Meth is a driving factor in a controversial proposal to build a new $15 million jail in Mora, tripling capacity to 78, Schulz said."

Sun, Jan. 16, 2005
MORA, Minn. - Much of the region around this Kanabec County town is a rural sanctuary of lakes, woods and cabins, but there's a growing clandestine operation that's destroying lives: methamphetamine production.

Law enforcement officers say they don't have the tools to fight meth while teachers say the drug is ruining students who are trying to balance the pressures of sports, school and work.

Financially, meth already inhales more than 10 percent of Kanabec County's annual levy of $6.7 million, the total raised for law enforcement, schools, roads and other expenses, officials said.

"If meth were to disappear from the face of the Earth, we could cut $750,000, maybe $1 million, out of our budget right now," County Coordinator Alan Peterson said.

At Mora High School, Superintendent Keith Lester looks into the faces of 10 students and wonders which two or three may have inhaled the toxic concoction brewed from cold tablets, Drano, battery acid and the phosphorous scraped from the tips of stick matches.

Authorities "have reason to believe it's 20 to 25 percent of our students" who have used meth, Lester said. "A social worker was told by a student that he could walk down the hall and point out 50 kids who are using."

At a local grocery store, managers control access to Sudafed and other cold remedies, key ingredients in meth. They have been kept behind glass since someone left dozens of emptied packages in a shopping cart outside last year.

Ask for five packages of Sudafed now and someone will call Sheriff Steve Schulz.

Schulz said that training, tracking and testifying related to meth "is 80 percent of what I do." He said he keeps a sharp eye on people who move into farmhouses, cabins and town-edge homes where the caustic vapors of a meth lab might go undetected.

"I'm angry about what I've seen happen to this county," the sheriff said. "To me, it's an atrocity that people have to be in fear of their neighbors."

Wendy Thompson, the county director of public health, said that pregnant women come through the county's Women, Infants and Children program on meth, babies are born with the drug in their systems and at least one has been born addicted.

"In 13 years as director, it's the worst drug problem I've seen," she said. "That laissez-faire attitude that kids have - 'This can't hurt me' - is dangerous when it's combined with the addictiveness of meth."

County officials said they will lobby the 2005 Legislature for longer sentences for meth offenders, more restrictions on access to materials used to make meth and more money for police, prisons, treatment and lab site reclamation.

Such a plan stalled last year in the end-of-session tangle, but Gov. Tim Pawlenty has endorsed longer sentences, funding for 10 new state narcotics agents and more effective treatment and loans to help with lab cleanup. There appears to be broad support.

"We wasted a year, but I think the meth bill will be a priority this time," said Rep. Judy Soderstrom, R-Mora.

Meth is a driving factor in a controversial proposal to build a new $15 million jail in Mora, tripling capacity to 78, Schulz said. The county now sends half of its prisoners to other counties at a daily cost of $50 each. Schulz had to hire a jail nurse because many prisoners arrive with meth burns, sores, dental disasters and bad hearts. Some need a psychiatrist. Some must be catheterized to urinate.

Dr. Peter Donner, a family physician in Mora, said that two years ago he saw one or two patients a month with physical or psychiatric problems caused by drugs. Now it's 10 or 12. Obesity and smoking still are greater threats to public health in Kanabec County, he said, "but meth is right up there."

Addiction can be treated, Jones said, but it takes more time than what's available through most treatment centers and insurance plans.

Information from: Star Tribune, http://www.startribune.com

http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/state/10661017.htm

Posted by lois at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)

Leniency for women seen as prison solution

Advocates say it's safest way to reduce crowding, cut costs Sunday, January 16, 2005

CARLA CROWDER
News staff writer

WETUMPKA - Few people in the Alabama prison system are doing more time than Ebra Hayes. Locked up at 19, the soft-spoken 28-year-old is serving life without parole at Tutwiler Prison for Women for a capital murder conviction.

She wound up there after giving a ride to her boyfriend, whose car had broken down in the Houston County town of Ashford. Dennis McGriff fired a gun out the passenger window of her Nissan. He'd had a beef with acquaintances and used her father's .44 Magnum, which he'd stolen earlier, to sort it out.

Hayes didn't pull the trigger. The man who was killed, Mike McCree, she considered a friend. "I'm not saying I shouldn't get something. I take responsibility for driving the car," Hayes said. "But as far as sticking me in here for the rest of my life, I don't agree with that."

With no realistic hope for freedom, Hayes is one of many long-timers in Alabama's women's prison whose conviction was tied to a boyfriend's, husband's or brother's violent actions or to killing a man who abused them.

Now the state is being urged to take another look at their sentences by groups that say releasing these women could be the safest way to reduce prison crowding and stay within the guidelines of a federal court settlement.

While prosecutors say accomplices must be held accountable in violent crimes, advocates for the female prisoners say that, without some kind of compromise, taxpayers will need to pour millions of dollars into a new women's prison.

The state's prison population has crept up to 26,632 inmates in space meant for 12,000 despite special hearings the state Board of Pardons and Paroles conducted to consider early release for non-violent offenders.

The Southern Center for Human Rights, which monitors conditions at Tutwiler as part of the court settlement, has identified 250 women serving long sentences for violent crimes who it believes could be safely released.

While he said he has not studied this group, Corrections Commissioner Donal Campbell said Alabama needs alternatives to prison unless the state is willing to spend a lot more money on prison beds.

"We need sentencing reform," he said. "We need more alternative programs."

Convicts serving time for violent crimes have lower recidivism rates than property and drug offenders, said Cynthia Dillard, assistant executive director of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Parole. "Especially the homicides, especially females. They usually kill or hurt their significant other. When that person is out of the way, their perceived problem is out of the way."

Nationwide, people in prison for homicide re-offend at lower rates than any other group of prisoners. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in a 1994 study found that just more than 1 percent of murderers killed again, as opposed to 41 percent of drug offenders who picked up a new drug charge after being released.

Parole possibilities:

Hayes has a round face, glasses and a girlish giggle.

She was born in Germany, where her father, Eddie Hayes, was stationed following three tours in the Vietnam War. After suffering seizures as an infant, she had some trouble learning, but her disability also made her compliant and gentle, her mother said. "She knew she was slower than the other kids," said Evelyn Hayes. "And she always looked out for the underdog."

Her former school bus driver in Houston County relied on her to care for the smallest children on the route. "If one was having trouble, I'd sit them by her," said Chad Chadwick. "She was very kind and calm, respectful. ... I called her my `bus mom.'"

He testified on her behalf at her trial. "If I could do anything to help that child, I would," he said.

But it was also because of her disability that her parents believe Hayes followed her boyfriend's orders without question.

After the shooting, she faced the death penalty, which McGriff ultimately received. When prosecutors offered Hayes a deal to plead guilty for a 30-year sentence, she refused. "To take that plea, it was like saying that's what I intended to do, and I didn't," she said.

Houston County Sheriff's Lt. Don Valenza, who investigated the case, said Hayes is equally culpable in the drive-by. "The driver is a participant. Both of them can't shoot," Valenza said. "It's her responsibility not to drive him where he wants her to take him."

Advocates for women prisoners say they do not believe these inmates should get off scot-free. But they point out that prison officials must figure out a way to keep Tutwiler's population down to 700, with another 250 at an annex beside the prison, or else it will violate the court settlement.

Paroles, including the special early release of nonviolent offenders that began in April 2003, have resulted in 733 women leaving the prison system. Yet there are 1,150 female convicts, more than when Tutwiler was at its highest level of crowding. The state is housing some of those women in a private prison.

Campbell intends to ask the Legislature for a $580 million budget next year. He got $270 million for this year. The bulk of the difference would go to build two new prisons, one for women.

Already, the state has paid $3 million to the private prison in Louisiana to house the overflow, currently 252 women.

Investigators and lawyers with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which represents prisoners, are combing through the files of women serving long sentences, trying to identify inmates who can be safely released. About 250 have excellent institutional records and fit profiles similar to Hayes', said Lisa Kung, an attorney at the Southern Center.

"People accepted pleas for 20-year sentences after being told that if they did well inside, they had a real chance at parole after eight years," Kung said. "Women who have maintained nearly perfect institutional records and taken every class and program offered have kept their side of the bargain. The state has not."

Advocates for the women, including the Alabama Coalition Against Domestic Violence, are trying to raise attention to this group of convicts, with the hope of crafting legislation to reduce the long sentences.

Nancie Seal, 38, of Cordova is one of the women who will be in prison for a long time to come if changes aren't made. She's already served three years on an attempted murder charge because she was in the passenger seat when her brother led police on a wild chase from Walker County to Jefferson County in December 2001.

No one was hurt, but Wade drove like a maniac and shots were fired from the car as Cordova police chased them for more than 60 miles.

Seal, her brother and two people in the back seat had been drinking. "I begged my brother, `Please stop, please stop,'" she said.

The engine in their 1975 Maverick exploded. He ran and was caught later. She was arrested at the scene.

Seal, who has an eighth-grade education, pleaded guilty on the advice of her court-appointed attorney. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Her brother, a felon with a lengthy record, got probation, but he soon violated it and is now in prison.

Killing their abusers:

The domestic violence coalition is researching ways to shorten the sentences of women convicted of killing men who abused them, and it could be about a year away from crafting legislation, said Executive Director Carol Gundlach. But that wouldn't help women already locked up, so the coalition is in talks with the Parole Board.

One Alabama woman locked up in Louisiana is Mashell Mann, 36, who is serving 40 years for murdering her husband, Randy Mann.

She went to Moody police several times, reporting that he'd abused her and their two children, according to police reports. But her husband also told authorities that her father had abused their children. She spent time in domestic violence shelters.

The night she shot him as he slept, she said, he'd raped her, beat her with a gun and threatened to kill their children. Mashell Mann said he told her "the only way I'd leave again is being in a pine box."

After he died, her parents got custody of the children. According to medical and police records, he, not her father, had abused them. But the judge wouldn't allow law officers to testify about the abuse. It was the first murder trial for her attorney.

Mann said she felt guilty for a long time about killing her husband and knows what she did was wrong, but, she said, "I couldn't take no more."
Cycle of violence:

Most incarcerated women have been abused at some point, often by their male co-defendants. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that six in 10 women in U.S. prisons had experienced abuse before being incarcerated.

Angelicia Willis was just one of these. At 16, she went to live with Willie B. Smith. She'd had a baby, and things were tense with her mother. But their relationship deteriorated to the point that he'd put a gun to her head.

One night in October 1991, Smith told her to stop Sharma Johnson at an ATM and ask for a ride. Smith pulled out a sawed-off shotgun. He forced Johnson, the 22-year-old sister of a police officer, into the trunk of her car and drove to a cemetery. Willis left, and Smith killed Johnson.

Smith threatened to kill her baby and blow up her mother's house if she talked, Willis said in an interview from Tutwiler, where she lives in the minimum-security annex. After they were charged with capital murder, Willis agreed to testify against Smith in exchange for a 25-year sentence.

"Her testimony went a long way in getting the electric chair for him, and she was the only one who could testify as to how the victim begged for her life," said Doug Davis, the prosecutor in the case, who is now chief deputy district attorney in Jefferson County.

Both Davis and Birmingham Police Officer Scott Johnson, the victim's brother, said that Willis was guilty because her action - approaching the victim - instigated the crime.

"I feel very strongly that my sister would still be alive today if Angelicia Willis would not have been with Willie Smith that night," said Johnson, an 18-year police veteran.

His sister would not have stopped for a black man, but Willis was not threatening, Johnson said.

"I never meant to place her in any kind of danger," Willis said. "If they knew the relationship I had, they would understand why I went over there."

Davis said that although Willis did as Smith said because he was abusive, her sentence is justified. "I can't say she won't get with another Willie Smith and be influenced by him," Davis said.

Father's beard:

An endless string of years creeps by for Ebra Hayes in the honor dorm, where the best-behaved prisoners live. She also works a prison job entering state data into computers. Eddie and Evelyn Hayes visit their incarcerated daughter as often as allowed, every other week.

The Hayeses attend meetings all over the state, hoping for a miracle. They don't have the money to pay an attorney for an appeal. In the eight years his daughter has been locked up, Eddie Hayes has let two strands of his beard grow into dreadlocks. He says he won't shave until she gets out, that the white locks represent the two of them, twisted together forever.

Valenza, the investigator in the case, said he does not have an opinion about the sentence. "Just to be perfectly outright, that's no concern of mine what happened," he said.

But Hayes' attorney was dismayed by the outcome of her trial.

"My belief is that Ebra didn't know what the guy's intent was or that he had a gun," said Gary Hudgins. "This is one I really regret because she doesn't deserve to be in prison for the rest of her life."

E-mail: ccrowder@bhamnews.com

http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1105888574278810.
xml

The Birmingham News

Posted by lois at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2005

National Reforms Needed to Help Inmates Return Home

Friday, January 14, 2005
National reforms needed to help inmates return home
By Kavan Peterson, Staff Writer, Stateline.org

Jan. 14 - Faced with the stark reality that nearly two-thirds of all released prison inmates quickly wind up back behind bars, drastically overcrowding prisons, a national task force is urging an overhauling of prisoner re-entry programs nationwide.

³Nearly 650,000 people will be released from prison this year, and 7 million will be released from jails. Every policymaker should be concerned about the public safety and fiscal implications of these extraordinary numbers,² Timothy Ryan, chief of the Orange County, Florida Corrections Department, and past president of the American Jail Association, said in a news release Thursday.

Recognizing the widespread failure of corrections facilities to adequately prepare prison inmates to return to their communities, a consortium of national public policy groups and state officials produced a report with hundreds of recommendations to help improve correctional re-entry programs for state and federal prisoners.

The recommendations were developed by the Re-entry Policy Council (RPC), which consists of more than 100 policymakers representing Democrats and Republicans, law enforcement, corrections, and health and social service agencies and can be found online at www.reentrypolicy.org. The RPC is sponsored by the Council of State Governments, a nonpartisan organization that tracks all branches of state government, plus 11 additional nonprofit organizations.

With the exception of health care, state spending on corrections has increased faster than any other state expenditure. Tougher drug laws and mandatory minimum sentences imposed in the 1980s and 1990s have dramatically increased prison populations. Since 1982, total spending on corrections has increased nationally from $9 billion a year to $60 billion in 2002. The problem is that at least two-thirds of those released from prison end up back in jail within three years, a rate that has not improved for 30 years. With more people in jail now than ever in U.S. history ­ at least 2.2 million in 2003 ­ policymakers are paying more attention to abysmal recidivism rates especially at the state level, said Peggy Burke, an attorney for the Center for Effective Public Policy, a nonprofit organization in Silver Spring, Md., that does research on criminal justice issues.

³Every state is beginning to focus on the need to put more attention on helping offenders return to their communities,² said Burke, who has read the study.

Reducing recidivism rates could save states millions of tax dollars. But turning former inmates into productive members of society is a daunting task and requires a major investment in support services, Burke said. According to the RPC report, at least three-quarters of released inmates have a history of substance abuse and require treatment; two-thirds have no high school diploma; nearly half of prisoners made less than $600 a month before going to prison; one-third of prisoners have physical or mental disabilities, and 55 percent of inmates leave prison owing $20,000 in child support debt.

In addition, most people released from prison return in high concentrations to poor communities where they¹re least likely to succeed, according to a statement by New York State Assemblyman Jeffrion L. Aubry (D), who co-chairs the RPC.

³This issue affects not just those who are coming out of incarceration but also the neighborhoods to which they return, which are often the most disadvantaged and the most ill-equipped to handle this population,² Aubry said. Related Stateline.org stories Delaware Program Seeks To Help Ex-Cons Adjust HREF=mailto:letters@stateline.org>letters@stateline.org. Selected reader feedback will be posted in the Letters to the editor section. Contact Kavan Peterson at kpeterson@stateline.org

http://www.stateline.org/stateline/?pa=story&sa=showStoryInfo&id=424704

Stateline.org

Posted by lois at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

Tulia: Rogue Narcotics Agent in TX Found Guilty of Perjury

A narcotics agent whose testimony, now discredited, led 38 Texans to be convicted of drug charges was found guilty yesterday of lying about his own arrest record at hearings involving some of the defendants.

Jurors in a state court in Lubbock concluded that the former agent, Tom Coleman, committed perjury in testifying that he had been unaware until August 1998 that theft charges concerning the disappearance of gasoline from a county motor pool had been lodged against him earlier in the year, when he was a sheriff's deputy. The jury acquitted him of a second perjury charge, of having falsely denied stealing the gasoline. Mr. Coleman had made restitution in the theft case, causing those charges to be dropped. Under Texas law, perjury is punishable by a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. But soon after issuing its verdicts, the jury returned with a recommended sentence of seven years' probation. Judge David L. Gleason, who is expected to hand down punishment on Tuesday, indicated in court yesterday that he would accept the recommendation, The Associated Press reported. Working undercover in the Panhandle town of Tulia for a multicounty drug investigation task force, Mr. Coleman arrested 46 men and women, most of them black, on narcotics charges during an 18-month period beginning in 1998. Mr. Coleman, who is white, used no electronic surveillance of the suspects and recovered no drug evidence, and years later some of the arrest reports he filed were determined to be bogus. Yet in 1999 and 2000, his testimony caused all but eight of those he had arrested to be convicted, through either verdicts or plea bargains. Many were sentenced to prison terms of as much as 90 years. Sensing an unfair racial component in the investigation, the N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights organizations demanded an inquiry, and under fresh judicial scrutiny the cases began to crumble. Ron Chapman, a state judge who reviewed some of the evidence and convictions, concluded that Mr. Coleman had engaged in "blatant perjury" and was "the most devious, nonresponsive law enforcement witness this court has witnessed in 25 years on the bench in Texas."
It was for his testimony in hearings during Judge Chapman's review that Mr. Coleman was convicted yesterday. The statute of limitations has expired on any perjury he committed during prosecution of the drug defendants. In 2003, acting on recommendations from prosecutors and judges, Gov. Rick Perry granted pardons to 35 people who had been arrested by Mr. Coleman. And last year, a $6 million settlement was reached with 45 people in a lawsuit against Mr. Coleman and the 26-county Panhandle Regional Narcotics Trafficking Task Force, his employer when he made the disputed arrests.
Disciplinary hearings by the Texas bar are pending against Terry D. McEachern, a former district attorney who prosecuted some of the drug cases and who is accused of concealing from defense lawyers knowledge of the old theft charges against Mr. Coleman.
And on Wednesday, after giving testimony in the perjury case, the county sheriff in Tulia, Larry P. Stewart, who hired Mr. Coleman as an agent for the task force, was advised by a special prosecutor assigned to the Coleman trial to retain a lawyer.

January 15, 2005, NY Times
By STEVE BARNES

Posted by lois at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2005

Re-entry Policy Council Issues 650 page report & fact sheets

24 page summary available free and fact sheets, summaries available on line www.reentrypolicy.org
Dear Colleague:
The Re-Entry Policy Council (RPC) is pleased to announce the release of its final Report, a comprehensive set of bipartisan, consensus-based recommendations for policymakers and practitioners interested in improving the likelihood that adults released from prison or jail will avoid crime and become productive and healthy members of families and communities. The RPC is comprised of nearly 100 leading professionals representing a broad spectrum of systems. The 650-page Report of the Re-Entry Policy Council addresses re-entry issues related to public safety, health, substance abuse, housing, employment, children and families, victims, and more.

It is available for viewing, order, and download (in whole or in part) at www.reentrypolicy.org, where you can also find contact information for CSG and partner organization staff.

Sincerely,

The Re-Entry Policy Council

Click here for more information on the Report, including Wall Street Journal and United Press International (UPI) articles on its publication, a Press Release, the Report Preview, the Report's Executive Summary, and Fact Sheets.

Posted by lois at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

Supreme Ct Rules That Government Cannot Detain Immigrants Indefinitely

CATHOLIC LEGAL IMMIGRATION NETWORK, INC. (CLINIC)
PRESS RELEASE, January 13, 2005
Supreme Court Rules That Government Cannot Detain Immigrants Indefinitely. Hundreds of Cubans exempted from earlier decision now eligible for release

Washington, DC - A decision by the Supreme Court yesterday will affect thousands of immigrants who have been detained indefinitely because they have no country to which they can return. In Benitez v. Rozos, the Court decided by a 7-2 margin that all detained non-citizens under orders of removal, regardless if they have been legally admitted into the country or not, were protected by an earlier ruling stating that foreign nationals can not be held longer than six months if the government was unable to deport them.

In detention facilities throughout the country, thousands of foreign nationals under orders of removal have been held in legal and diplomatic limbo because they are considered stateless. In most cases, the U.S. does not have a repatriation agreement with their country of origin. With no country willing to accept them, they have remained incarcerated for years, with some having spent over a decade in detention. The bureaucratic barriers have made their prospects for release so bleak that they have been dubbed "lifers".

In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled in Zadvydas v. Davis that the government did not have the power to hold non-citizens indefinitely, even if there was no country to which they could be deported. After a six-month period, if the detainee had shown that there was no significant likelihood of removal in the foreseeable future and the government had failed to demonstrate otherwise, they were to be considered for supervised release.

However, the U.S. Attorney General quickly took the position that this decision did not apply to foreign nationals caught at U.S. borders who, under a legal fiction, were not considered to have been admitted into the country. The largest group that fell into this category were the over 600 Cubans being held in U.S. detention centers, many of whom were participants in the Mariel boatlift.

In 1980, the U.S. was inundated with thousands of refugees who fled Cuba through the seaport of Mariel. Prior to this exodus, President Carter publicly stated that Cubans fleeing Castro's regime would be welcomed with "open arms and an open heart." Unable to process the high volume of immigrants arriving from Cuba at the time, the government gave each so-called "Mariel" a brief investigation, and granted him or her temporary permission to remain in the U.S., but considered them as having been "paroled" rather than admitted into the country. This has resulted in an extended legal dilemma for those Cubans under orders of removal. Castro's government refuses to accept them, but the U.S. Attorney General views them as if they were still at the U.S. border seeking lawful entry and therefore not eligible for release under the Zadvydas decision.

Until yesterday's ruling, Circuit courts had been divided on this interpretation of the Zadvydas decision. Through Benitez v. Rozos, the Supreme Court has made it clear that any foreign national physically within the country is protected from being detained indefinitely, including Mariel Cubans and others not considered to have been "admitted" at the borders.

"After working to help Mariel Cubans and other indefinite detainees over the past ten years, we are extremely relieved by the Supreme Court's decision," says Donald Kerwin, Executive Director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. "Our concern now is the need to find pro bono representation for all those affected by this ruling. They will need help to navigate the complex system and apply today's ruling to their cases. Most do not have and cannot afford outside help, so they will have to rely on lawyers volunteering their services. Some thought also needs to be put into developing programs that will help these individuals reintegrate with society. Many have been incarcerated for years and will need to find a means to support themselves upon their release."

The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), a subsidiary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is the nation's largest network of charitable immigration services with 148 affiliates in 242 field offices around the country. CLINIC advocates for transparent, fair and generous immigration policies.

Contact: Scot Christenson
202/635-5816

Posted by lois at 09:57 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2005

CCA Partners With 2 Faith-Based Groups

posted January 12, 2005
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which operates the Hamilton County Workhouse, has extended its commitment to faith-based programming for inmates by partnering with two national faith organizations
- Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) and School of Christ International (SCI)
- to help reduce the generational cycle of crime, officials said.

CCA has initially introduced these new faith programs at 15 CCA facilities. Plans already are underway to implement the program at all of CCA's more than 60 facilities within the next 12 months.

CEF, the world's largest mission agency ministering to children, is collaborating with CCA to develop and implement a correspondence faith program tailored for inmates and their children. The alliance with CCA is CEF's first major introduction on a broad scale into the corrections system. CEF has plans to introduce these newly-crafted faith materials within other corrections systems as well. To date, over 35,000 curriculum packets, in both English and Spanish, introducing the program have been distributed at CCA facilities in eight states. Inmates voluntarily sign up to receive weekly lesson plans and devotional books created by CEF. With the permission of the parent or guardian, age-appropriate material may also be sent by the CEF ministry to the inmates' children on a weekly basis. All correspondence is provided free of charge and distributed by mail. CCA is also making available to CCA correctional staff and their children CEF's existing correspondence faith program for the general public.

A recent Child Evangelism Fellowship study found that children of prisoners are seven times more likely to end up in prison themselves than other children from the same environment. With more than 2 million prisoners in America, it is estimated that more than 6 million children are currently at risk.

Dennis Smith, chaplain at CCA's Metro-Davidson County Detention Facility in Nashville, implemented the CEF program in December 2004 and received an overwhelming response, it was stated.

"The Child Evangelism Fellowship program is something the inmates can do for their children when they have no money and can't send them anything," Mr. Smith said. "They can enroll their children in the CEF program, enabling their children to receive materials that hopefully will enrich their lives."

CEF pamphlets initially have been provided to inmates in various CCA facilities in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and New Mexico.

School of Christ International is an internationally-known organization that provides Bible study programs for prisons and jails in the United States, Russia, Africa and South America. SCI is providing all CCA prisons a comprehensive 155-lesson Bible study program and workbooks. SCI staff and volunteers will work with CCA facility chaplains and other CCA staff and volunteers to implement the program to CCA's inmates, on a voluntary basis. Numerous CCA facilities in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida and Tennessee are participating.

CCA provides voluntary faith services in all of its 63 facilities. The Company has partnered in recent years with a large number of faith-based organizations, including the Institute in Basic Life Principles, Champions for Life, Kairos Horizon, Good News Jail and Prison Ministry and Theotherapy.

CCA, in its desire to provide and enhance its chaplain and religious services for all inmates, will continue to develop alliances and partnerships with reputable, mainstream faith-based ministries of all faiths, it was stated. CCA's faith-based initiatives, including School of Christ International and Child Evangelism Fellowship, are programs that are available to the entire inmate population on a voluntary basis regardless of their religious and spiritual beliefs. There is no requirement to convert and/or revise their religious belief in order to enroll, participate and or complete the program.

For more information regarding CCA's chaplain and religious services, please contact John Lanz, director of special programs, at (615) 263-3112 or john.lanz@correctionscorp.com.

CCA is the nation's largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities and one of the largest prison operators in the United States, behind only the federal government and four states. The company operates 63 facilities, including 38 company-owned facilities, with a total design capacity of approximately 67,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_60952.asp

Posted by lois at 09:56 PM | Comments (0)

FAMM: Understanding Booker & Fanfan

Federal sentencing guidelines are advisory, but mandatory minimum sentences still stand

Posted 1/13/05---FAMM
Understanding Booker and Fanfan:
The U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling on January 12 in two eagerly awaited cases, United States v. Booker and United States v. Fanfan. The Court stated that the rule announced in Blakely applies to federal sentencing guidelines and that sentencing guidelines violate the U.S. Constitution to the extent that they require a judge to impose a sentence using facts beyond those admitted by the defendant or found by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Court then struck down the part of the 1987 Sentencing Reform Act that makes the guidelines mandatory. Though the guidelines are no longer binding on judges at sentencing, the Court directed judges to consult the guidelines before imposing sentence. This decision makes the federal sentencing guidelines effectively advisory, requiring a judge to consider the guideline ranges but permitting him or her to increase or decrease a guideline sentence so long as the sentence is reasonable.

This is an historic day for federal sentencing, said Mary Price, general counsel of FAMM. Essentially, this decision will permit judges, who have decried the harshness of the guidelines, more room to do justice by weighing role in the offense, the severity of the offense, and other factors, such as drug addiction, age or the impact of incarceration on families. However, it provides little protection for defendants facing harsh sentencing judges. They must face them without the Sixth Amendment protections many had hoped for, said Price.

WHAT IS NEXT?

In his opinion, Justice Breyer signaled the next big thing for sentencing reform. ?Ours, of course, is not the last word: The ball now lies in Congress' court. The National Legislature is equipped to devise and install, long-term, the sentencing system, compatible with the Constitution, that Congress judges best for the federal system of justice, wrote Breyer.

Challenges lie ahead. Congress may try to move quickly to reform federal sentencing. This opinion provides guidance to courts to conduct sentencing while Congress considers the options. Federal lawmakers have a tremendous opportunity to reform federal sentencing laws but we urge them to proceed not with haste but with care, said Price. Quick fixes will create unforeseen problems, and it is critical that Congress take the time to hear from and consider the views of the judiciary, criminal justice practitioners, scholars, the Sentencing Commission and the public.
Federal Sentencing Laws
There are two types of federal sentencing laws: mandatory minimum sentencing laws, enacted by Congress, and the sentencing guidelines, enacted by the United States Sentencing Commission.
Mandatory minimum sentences have existed at various times in U.S. history, but the current laws FAMM is fighting were mostly enacted in a 1986 anti-drug bill. Members of Congress believed that stiff penalties would deter people from engaging in illegal drug activity and would incapacitate for long periods those who sold drugs. Many of these penalties are mandatory - that is, judges may not impose a penalty less than the number of years chosen by Congress. The most common mandatory sentences are for five and 10 years, and are based on the weight of the drug or the presence of a firearm. These laws prevent judges from considering other relevant factors, such as the defendant's role in the offense or likelihood of committing a future offense.

The sentencing guideline system started in 1987. Congress established the sentencing commission and directed it to write guidelines to combat unjustified sentencing disparity from judge to judge across the country. The guidelines require the sentencing judge to consider various facts about the crime and the defendant. Consideration of these facts leads to a "guideline range," for example: 18 to 24 months. While judges must generally impose a sentence within the range, they have discretion to choose a sentence anywhere within the range, and in unusual cases they may choose a sentence above or below the range if they explain their reasons for doing so.
Mandatory minimum sentencing laws and sentencing guidelines are both ways to limit judicial discretion, but the guidelines are clearly preferable. Unlike blunt mandatory minimums which take account of only the quantity of drugs sold, guidelines permit a judge to consider many relevant facts. Also, the mandatory minimums are "one-size-fits-all, "while the guidelines allow for upward or downward departures in unusual cases. Unfortunately, the mandatory sentencing laws supersede or "trump" the sentencing guidelines. At sentencing, judges must determine if the defendant was convicted of a quantity of drugs that triggers a mandatory minimum penalty and if so, impose that sentence regardless of the sentencing guidelines.
There are only two ways to avoid a mandatory minimum sentence. First, the defendant may provide "substantial assistance" to the government by turning in other defendants. Second, some defendants qualify for the "safety valve" that Congress passed in 1994 to address (at FAMM's
urging) the excessive sentences served by non-violent drug offenders. If the judge finds the defendant is a low-level, non-violent, first-time offender who qualifies for the safety valve, the defendant may be sentences under the sentencing guidelines instead of the mandatory minimum sentence law. Although the safety valve is a step in the right direction, the criteria for eligibility is very narrow so thousands of nonviolent drug defendants are still sent to prison for decades under mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

For additional information, go to www.famm.org

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

January 12, 2005

News from Lynn Paltrow, Exec. Director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women

Dear Friends and Allies:

These days it is hard to feel like there is anything to celebrate, but NAPW does have some good news to report with successes in Texas and Missouri.

As many of you may know, last year, a local Texas district attorney wrote a letter to all local physicians demanding that they report pregnant women with drug problems to the DA’s office. This demand was based on a new reading of the state’s law punishing drug delivery to a minor in light of a recent statute redefining an “individual” under Texas law as “an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth." Even Texas legislators responsible for the new law agreed that it was never intended to be used to punish pregnant women with drug problems. Eighteen women have already been arrested.

NAPW has been working with Texas ACLU activists, local lawyers and other national advocates to challenge this interpretation. With our help, local activists persuaded a key state legislator to request a definitive interpretation of the laws from the State's Attorney General Office. This summer, we joined the Drug Policy Alliance and other organizations in a letter to the AG explaining how harmful the DA’s interpretation was to pregnant women and children. We have also been working with local counsel on the legal cases and have been organizing a public letter to the local DA from leading national and state based public health and child welfare advocates calling on him to drop the cases. We believe that all of these efforts helped to push the AG to finally issue an opinion that -- as the press below indicates -- held that doctors have no obligation under Texas law to turn in their pregnant patients. We will continue to challenge the arrests that have already happened and we have been very successful, through local organizing efforts to bring both "right to life" and pro-choice groups to the table to discuss and collectively oppose this dangerous and punitive interpretation of state law.

We also had the good news that the Missouri prosecutor dropped the charges in the Keila Lewis case. In that case a woman who admitted to smoking marijuana while pregnant was charged with child abuse. Working with the Drug Policy Alliance and local
counsel Jane Aiken at the Washington University School of Law, we submitted an amicus brief on behalf of leading public health and child welfare organizations explaining how this prosecution violated state law as well as principles of public health.

We could also tell you some bad news – including the fact that at least five states – Indiana, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming are all considering legislation to criminalize pregnant women with drug problems, that new arrests keep occurring around the country, and dehumanizing views of and treatment toward women and drug users continue. We would, however, rather focus on the victories and that fact that our National Educator, Wyndi Anderson, our SC Organizer, Danisha Nelson and a host of lawyers, volunteers, activists, and allies across the country are doing amazing, creative, and constructive work to stop these threats to reproductive justice and drug policy reform and to change the conversation to one that honors and supports women and families rather than destroys them

The Associated Press State & Local Wire
January 6, 2005, Thursday

DAs can't require doctors to report patient drug use, Abbott rules
By BETSY BLANEY, Associated Press Writer

Prosecutors cannot require physicians to report drug use revealed by their pregnant patients, the Texas Attorney General's Office has ruled.A Panhandle district attorney had argued that obstetricians must tell authorities about illegal drug use by pregnant women under a law designed to protect unborn children. Critics, including the legislator who authored the bill, said she was wrongly interpreting a fetal protection law by expanding it into statutes that lawmakers never intended.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott issued the opinion Wednesday on the law,which gives a fetus legal standing but exempts mothers and health care providers who perform a legal medical procedure.

The district attorney's requirement that physicians report drug use by
pregnant women is "inconsistent with the apparent legislative intent," the ruling states.

Rebecca King, former district attorney for Potter and Armstrong counties, did not seek re-election in November and no longer holds the office.Her successor, Randall Sims, said the opinion mean physicians "have no legal obligation" to contact authorities.
"I'm guessing the medical profession is not going to making those contacts anymore," he said.

The opinion, requested in July by state Rep. Ray Allen, R-Grand Prairie, the bill's sponsor, does not, however, address King's prosecution of two pregnant women who tested positive for methamphetamine and cocaine after the births of their children.

Hospital officials reported the two women to authorities, and they were charged with delivery of a controlled substance to a child.
Last fall, Tracy Ward and Rhonda Smith each accepted plea agreements for five years probation but retained their right to appeal. "It doesn't help us at all," said Joe Dawson, the attorney representing the mothers. "We're just going to have to go to the courts."

The women's cases are pending with the 7th Court of Appeals in Amarillo. A ruling may come later this year. Allen said the opinion "crystalizes" the law as it pertains to physicians and
indirectly addresses prosecutions against mothers under the controlled
substances act. Allen said he was pleased with Abbott's ruling and expects the court of criminal appeals to come to the same conclusion.

Sims said other cases are pending that involve mothers who tested positive for drugs but he won't proceed with them until after the appeals court rules.

He said prosecutors across the state are watching to see if they can pursue similar cases. Potter County obstetricians and gynecologists no longer will feel conflictedbecause of Abbott's opinion, said Dr. Moss Hampton, an Amarillo obstetrician and gynecologist.

"It's nice that they've kind of closed that loophole and that's not something we have to worry about," he said. The Texas Medical Association was among several groups that wrote to Abbott
supporting Allen's stance that King was extending the law.

The change gives a fetus legal standing but exempts health care providers who perform a legal medical procedure, such as an abortion, and mothers.

Lynn Paltrow, an attorney and executive director of National Advocates for regnant Women, said the ruling returns physicians to health care providers rather than policemen."We desperately hope that this opinion will turn the conversation to the more
important question of why there is so little drug treatment available to pregnant and parenting women who need and want it," she said.

Lynn M. Paltrow
Executive Director
National Advocates for Pregnant Women
153 Waverly Place, 6th Floor
New York, New York 10014
212-255-9252
917-921-7421
212-255-9253 (fax)
LMPNYC@aol.com
www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org

Posted by lois at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)

Gonzales Appointment Latest Step in the Browning of Justice

Commentary/Analysis, Roberto Lovato, Pacific News Service, Jan 11, 2005
Editor's Note: The ascension of Alberto Gonzales to the nation's top law enforcement position embodies the nation's changing demographics, as well as Latinos growing place in the criminal justice system as both prisoners and prison guards, defendants and prosecutors.

People living along California's bucolic highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley are of different minds about Bush Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, a man who will soon be crowned the nation's first Latino Attorney General. Following a recent drive along the 99, I saw some Latinos living in towns along the highway who, like most national Latino civil rights and political leaders -- Democrat and Republican alike -- consider it an act of ethnic fealty to support the Gonzales nomination.

Their sentiments in the Valley resemble those of former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, who expressed his "immense sense of pride" and of newly elected Senator Ken Salazar, who trumpeted Latino triumph as he waxed emotional about Gonzales's "humble beginnings." Senate confirmation panelists, pundits and public-relations people know that talk of tough origins digs deep into the heart of farm workers, farm worker-descended families and other peoples of humble origin in the green Valley and across a browning United States.

But a friend who grew up in the Valley and who was accompanying me on the trip reminded me how a growing number of these same Latinos have sons, daughters, husbands or wives who are housed and growing up in a less-than-idyllic land some refer to as "Prison Valley." She told me that not everyone here is happy that Latinos incarcerated along the more than 200 miles of prisons sprouting along Highway 99 are now an exponentially-growing majority cash crop for businesses, prison guard unions and local governments in income-starved places like Avenal, Corcoran, and other towns across the country. These towns are reaping millions in prison-related funding and subcontracts for services to the prisons, guards and the incarcerated themselves.

In this sense, Alberto Gonzales represents a milestone in the browning of Justice, which refers to how Latinos are interfacing with and becoming part of the justice system. Young Latinos are the fastest growing and largest population in California prisons -- (36 percent, according to a recent report by the Justice Policy Institute). And they are the fastest growing and largest population being employed in criminal justice jobs, jobs that pay as much as three times a teacher's salary, jobs as police officers, probation officers, and prisons guards that will be administered by Gonzales if he is confirmed.

As current trends continue in California and across the country, increasing numbers of Latinos in police uniforms will send increasing numbers of Latinos to prisons to be guarded by increasing numbers of Latino prison guards.

The implications of browning of justice are huge for Latinos and for the country as a whole. Traditional notions of a united Latino community, a united Latino political family crumble before the gray walls of new prisons that divide the Latino family in unprecedented ways: some Latinos lose money and the chance for a better future because their kids are incarcerated, while other Latinos build on their kids' future with money gained by arresting, prosecuting and jailing Latino youth. At the same time, traditional critiques of "white man's justice" become problematic when the head cop, head jailer and head prosecutor is a brown man with many brown folks working beneath him. Alberto Gonzales can be seen either as a symbol of justice in a community long left out of the economic and political pie, or as a brown front man for a gray system that imprisons Latinos and others with Soviet-like ferocity.

At a time when Semitic and mestizo features have become a liability to many since 9/11, failure to understand the browning of justice leads to dangerous consequences in what is a radical political moment. As prosecutors in places like the Bronx and police chiefs like L.A.'s William Bratton try feverishly to label, prosecute and imprison Latino and other gang members as "terrorists," having clean-cut Gonzales oversee the domestic application of the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 laws may ironically (or cynically) lead to an even deadlier criminalization of Latinos.

Images of Latino gangs on newscasts, TV shows and in movies are, along with a handful of other cartoonish and now embedded images of hot dancers and "illegal aliens," among the predominant representations of Latinos in U.S. media. In the same way that the Bush administration's global and local attempts to divide "good" and "evil" and "good Arab" from "bad Arab" have resulted in further demonization of Arab, Muslim and South Asian Americans, the browning of justice and its too-clear delineation of "good" Latino cop from "bad" Latino prisoner draws Latinos even closer to the vortex of the domestic "axis of evil" ideology gripping powerful interests in need of new enemies.

It will be harder to critique the soft-spoken Gonzales on these issues than outgoing Anglo-Evangelical crusader Attorney General John Ashcroft. Liberal-left critics of the Gonzales nomination are right to attack Gonzales' alleged legal facilitation of the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib. But no one, no Senate panelist, no one in the leadership of the mostly white left organizations, no one in the national Latino civil rights organizations has expressed concerns about the implications of Gonzales' alleged sanctioning of torture for domestic prisons like Corcoran. That's where Amnesty International, the California State Senate and the FBI have reported acts of sexual humiliation, torture and even murder committed by prison guards (some of whom are Latino.) In what may be a smart rightward tilt of the axis of racial and ethnic realpolitik, Gonzales' humble Latino roots may grow into a hard-to-penetrate dark forest obfuscating our view of justice.

Failure to understand and develop new critiques of the browning of justice will lead to devastating and dangerous consequences. Alberto Gonzales' humble origins and ethnic extraction must not divert our attention from a trend that threatens to imprison generations of young Latinos, blacks and others of humble extraction from towns like those dotting Highway 99, where the browning of justice is yielding rotten fruit.

PNS contributor Roberto Lovato (robvato63@yahoo.com) is a Los Angeles-based writer.

Posted by lois at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2005

NY: Message from Dana Kaplan re: Expansion of Dutchess County Jail

Organizing is taking off in another county in New York State against a new proposed jail - following is the email from the local group that has sprung up in opposition to the state mandated expansion plan.

*********

Hello friends and concerned community members,

We're hoping everyone's holiday and new year's was
restful and fulfilling, and we have new information to
keep moving forward with the fight against the
Dutchess County Jail Expansion.

The Legislature will meet this Tuesday, 1/11 at 3:30
pm to vote again on the $560,000 bond to proceed with
expansion planning.

A few quick things you can do to help build momentum
against the expansion:

1. Send emails and make phone calls to the Dutchess
County legislators to voice your concerns. Send your
email to: countylegislature@co.dutchess.ny.us and ask
them to forward it to all legislators. For a sample
letter and talking points, scroll to the bottom of
this email. Here is the link to the Legislature's web
page: http://www.dutchessny.gov/CountyGov/Departments/Legislature/CLlegislators200
4.htm

2. Show up! It is expected that the public will be
allowed to speak, and your presence will make a
difference--no matter what! The meeting will occur in
the Dutchess County Office Building (where the DMV is
located), on the 6th floor. Come prepared to speak!
Bring signs or posters or whatever you please to make
your voice heard!

3. Sign this petition demanding the Legislature to
meet after 5 pm when people who work during the day
can make it! Follow this link:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/democrcy/petition.html

NEEDS LIST: If people are interested in helping
further, here are a few things. Holler back if you
want to volunteer for anything.
1. Media work- writing and coordinating others writing
in to local press about the expansion, help with
publicity and outreach for future community education
events.
2. General outreach- getting the word out about the
expansion to community members and organizations
across issues, building broad-based opposition.
3. Work on outreach and education materials- research,
design, and distribution
4. Funds!!

thank you
In solidarity,
mark
maggie

*********************************************************************
Sample letter to the legislators:

Dear Legislator,

I am writing to voice my concern regarding the
proposed Dutchess County Jail Expansion and the
$560,000 bond vote scheduled for Tuesday, January
11th.

Nationwide, many communities have created
cost-effective solutions to address overcrowding.
Relevant examples include pre-arrest programs for
nonviolent, low-level misdemeanors, programs for the
mentally ill, expediting release and transfer
procedures bail reform, specialty domestic violence
and mental health courts, and continuously developing
our well-recognized Alternatives to Incarceration
program.

As funding for crucial crime prevention programs such
as adult education, youth after school programming,
GED, and job training is cut and the cost of living in
Dutchess County continues to increase, now more than
ever it is vital to examine every alternative to
spending millions of taxpayer dollars on
incarceration.

Sincerely,

Name
Address

More Info/talking points:

- Dana Kaplan's fact sheet on Cost Effective Solutions
to Jail Overcrowding: http://www.realcostofprisons.org/pdfs/jail_reform_natl.pdf
suffolksuperjail.com

- This issue isn't just happening in our county. T he
State Commission on Corrections is pressuring counties throughout the state to expand jails and foot the bill, including Tompkins, Allegany, Essex, Suffolk, Chataqua, and Ulster. Tompkins County has refused to move forward with building a new jail and concerned citizens in Suffolk County have worked to raise awareness about the financial, environmental, and social burden the construction of a 1,130-bed facility would impose: http://www.suffolksuperjail.com/

-Crime rates are down, bleak future for funding of
youth programming, mental health services, health
care, education, housing, job training,
transportation, and social services

talking points from earlier email:

-Match the increase in funding for the jail with an
according increase in
funding for alternatives to incarceration programs,
transitions programs, and
educational and training programs for inmates.

- Fully investigate other ways to deal with the jail overcrowding problem. How many inmates are awaiting court processing? Can we speed that up? How many inmates are state parole violators? Can they go to less crowded jails? How much does it cost to send Dutchess County inmates out of county and how does that compare to the projected cost of the expansion? Once the $560,000 are sunk into architectural plans, will the Legislature really be willing to investigate other options, especially with the Ulster County Jail disaster so close to home?

-The holistic approach: If we take the long term
measures to get people?s basic
needs met?housing, education, health care, food, rehabilitation, youth and afterschool programming?crime will decrease. Poverty creates crime. There are plenty of programs that meet people?s basic needs that are in jeopardy right now.

-The morality argument: Half a million dollars is a
lot of money! How can we
justify spending this money when people are without
housing, food, and
education? Let?s put this in perspective!

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

MA: Bill compensates wrongly convicted

Governor Romney did sign this bill.

Bill would compensate wrongly convicted
By Ralph Ranalli and Elise Castelli, Globe Staff, Globe Correspondent | December 24, 2004

Massachusetts is on the verge of becoming the 16th state to grant compensation to accused felons who are wrongfully convicted, after lawmakers yesterday sent a bill to Governor Mitt Romney allowing the exonerated to seek damages from the state of up to $500,000.

After they are cleared by the courts or pardoned by the governor, people deemed to have been wrongly convicted would also be able to obtain half-price tuition to state and community colleges and to have their records fully expunged of the contested crimes , under the legislation.

According to figures released by the New England Innocence Project, 23 people in prison have had their convictions overturned in Massachusetts over the last 22 years. In Suffolk County, nine wrongful convictions have been overturned since 1997, according to the group.

Passage by the House and Senate culminated six years of lobbying by civil liberties groups and advocates for the wrongly convicted. The lobbying was set against a backdrop of a series of high-profile cases in which men and women were imprisoned for years, even decades, before being cleared by DNA analysis, witness testimony, or other new evidence.

"There is a huge need for it," said Dennis Maher, a Tewksbury man who served 19 years in state prison for three rapes before he was cleared by DNA analysis and released last year. "If I had been released on parole or probation, I would have been eligible for job training and mental health services. I was innocent, so I got nothing. The only thing waiting for me when I got out was a lot of reporters."

Lawmakers expect Romney to sign the legislation, particularly after they agreed, in part, to his demand that the state take into account the lost income of the wrongly convicted person when setting the award. While saying that the governor would not commit to signing the bill before seeing the final version, Romney spokesman Felix Browne yesterday confirmed that the governor's legal advisers had been "working closely" with the bill's sponsors.

Senator Dianne Wilkerson, the bill's Senate sponsor, called the bill's passage "a huge victory for those victims who never thought we cared, those who never got an 'I'm sorry.' "

"Acknowledging our mistakes makes our legal system stronger, not weaker," said Wilkerson, a Roxbury Democrat.

In other action yesterday, lawmakers passed an insurance fraud bill that targets people who stage car accidents to collect the insurance. A 65-year-old grandmother died last year in what authorities said was a staged car crash. The bill in part targets "runners" -- people who recruit others to take part in fraudulent claims. The bill makes the practice a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Lawmakers also passed a supplemental spending bill that includes a tax break for users of Fast Lane and public transportation and $15 million to help hospitals cover the cost of treating the uninsured.

The wrongful conviction bill, if signed by the governor, would effectively create a no-fault system of compensation for those wrongly convicted of crimes in the state courts.

While the exonerated are able to sue under existing state law, they must generally prove that their conviction resulted from deliberate misconduct by police or prosecutors -- an extremely difficult task, legal specialists said.

Under the proposed new law, however, even those convicted through a series of innocent mistakes could collect damages from the state.

"This is a chance for society to right a wrong," said Joseph Savage, a Boston lawyer and chairman of the New England Innocence Project, the group that help exonerate Maher. "This is the state as an entity stepping up and taking responsibility."

Currently, 15 other states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government are bound by laws that require wrongly convicted defendants to be compensated for lost liberty.

"We started with the premise that people have two main things in this life that are limited: your time and your money," said Norma Shapiro, legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, a key backer of the bill.

"We've taken these people's time, we at least ought to make it up with money," she said.

The legislation was the result of months of wrangling between the bill's legislative backers and legal advisers to the governor, who offered several amendments, the sponsors said.

"We do think the governor will sign it because we have worked out so many of the issues they had concerns about," said Representative Patricia D. Jehlen, a Somerville Democrat who first filed the legislation in 1999 after reading about the struggles of Bobby Joe Leaster and Lawyer Johnson, who both served more than a decade in prison for murder convictions that were later vacated.

Although sponsors are now hopeful that the bill will be signed, the passage this week was not the first time they had sent a wrongful conviction compensation bill to Romney's desk.

A version of the bill stalled this summer after the governor offered an amendment that would have based compensation awards primarily on the amount of income that a wrongly convicted person would have earned if they had not been sent to prison.

Supporters said that provision would have gutted the measure, since many of those who are wrongly convicted are poor and are convicted in the first place because they cannot afford a good attorney.

"That was sort of taking away with one had what you were giving with the other," Savage said.

Under the current version, lost income is one of several factors that can be considered in determining the amount of a damage award.

Lawmakers also rejected a more recent proposal by Romney that anyone suing the state under the law would have to obtain both an exoneration from a court and a gubernatorial pardon.

That amendment would have effectively made the governor a gate-keeper for any compensation under the bill, and it was also opposed by the Legislature.

Under the current version of the bill, people can sue either after having their conviction overturned by a court or after the governor grants them a pardon acknowledging a wrongful conviction.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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

Message from the Sentencing Project re: upcoming Supreme Court decision on Federal Sentencing

Friends,

A Supreme Court decision is expected soon -- as early as January 11th -- in the cases of Booker and Fanfan regarding the constitutionality of the federal sentencing guidelines. Many observers believe that the Court will find at least part of the guidelines structure unconstitutional, leading to Congressional action to modify the guidelines structure.

Debate has already begun regarding the policy direction of any possible changes to federal sentencing. In arguing for a continued emphasis on harsh punishments, recent testimony by the Department of Justice contends that “two-thirds of all federal prisoners are in prison for violent crimes or had a prior criminal record before being incarcerated.” But a new analysis by The Sentencing Project finds that the Department’s analysis distorts the composition of the federal prison system through the manner in which it conflates categories of offenders. In fact, nearly three-fourths (72.1%) of federal prisoners are non-violent offenders with no history of violence.

A complete overview of the federal prison population -- including growth trends, racial disparities, drug offense sentencing -- can be found at http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/federalprison.pdf

For more information and analysis please contact Marc Mauer or Ryan King at (202) 628-0871.

Marc Mauer
Assistant Director
The Sentencing Project
514 10th St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20004
mauer@sentencingproject.org
(202) 628-0871

Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2005

NC: New Top-Tier Prison Questioned

A high-security, $90 million facility set for Columbus County, but some don't see a need
WHAT PRISONS COST in North Carolina

Cost of a new close-custody prison: $90 million.

Cost of a new medium-custody prison: $75 million.

Cost of a new minimum-custody prison: $45 million.

News & Observer
(Raleigh, NC) Saturday, January 8, 2005

By DAN KANE, Staff Writer
Two years ago, in the wee hours of the final night of state budget negotiations, Senate leaders inserted a provision into the state budget to build a $90 million close-custody prison in Columbus County.

Today, that prison is about to be built. It's a plum for lawmakers there, who hoped to deliver the jobs a new prison would bring to the area about 120 miles south of Raleigh. But the N.C. Department of Correction's inmate population estimates raise questions as to whether it is needed.

The estimates show that when the 1,000-bed prison opens in 2008, the state will have a surplus of more than 700 close-custody beds.

Those are the most expensive beds the state can build. Close-custody prisons are single cell, heavily reinforced structures. A 1,000-bed medium-custody prison costs about $15 million less, while a similar-size minimum-custody prison would be roughly half the cost.

WHAT PRISONS COST

Cost of a new close-custody prison: $90 million.

Cost of a new medium-custody prison: $75 million.

Cost of a new minimum-custody prison: $45 million.

N.C. DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION

And Correction's population estimates show those medium- and minimum-security prisons face serious overcrowding in the next several years. The same year the new prison in Columbus County is supposed to open, the department estimates that medium-security prisons will have nearly 600 inmates more than they can handle, while minimum security prisons will have more than 700.

By 2013, those deficits are projected to climb to more than 3,000 inmates in medium-security prisons and 1,900 in minimum-security prisons. But the state will continue to run a surplus of close-custody beds.

The estimates from early 2004 first caused Prisons Director Boyd Bennett to question the need for a close-custody prison, but he now believes it should be built. He said it provides the most flexibility because it can house medium-security inmates, while a medium-security prison can't house close-custody inmates.

"This is the best situation for us," said Bennett. "We are constantly thinking about the protection of staff, the protection of inmates and the protection of the public."

Bennett and Bill Stovall, the prison system's engineering director, also said the estimates could be faulty, and a change in the construction plans would only delay adding beds to a crowded system and waste several million dollars spent on design and other pre-construction costs for the Columbus prison.

Jobs called real issue

Some legislators say the estimates suggest the state might not be getting the best bang for its buck. They also say the Columbus County prison is being driven in part by their colleagues' desire to provide jobs in a depressed part of the state.

"The unfortunate result of an economy that is in distress is that prisons are seen as economic development tools," said state Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, a Carrboro Democrat.

Rep. Dewey Hill, a Columbus County Democrat, said the prison would provide about 400 jobs for a county hit hard by textile factory closings and reduced demand for tobacco. But he said there's a need for the prison and if Columbus didn't get it, another county would.

"We're hoping we can get a lot of our people employed," he said.

He and other legislators also say that the state can't risk having too few close-custody beds.

"The thing we hear from our constituents is that we deal with the worst offenders," said state Sen. R. B. Sloan, an Iredell County Republican. "The folks want to make sure those people are in prison."

The close-custody prisons are intended to house the state's most dangerous criminals, serving long-term sentences. But Bennett confirmed that two-thirds of the cells are taken up by inmates who had originally been assigned to medium- and minimum-security prisons. They were transferred after causing trouble.

If the Columbus County prison isn't built, and the money were spent on
medium- or minimum-custody prisons, the system would have a deficit of 300 close-custody beds in 2008.

System flexibility cited

David Chester is the superintendent at Craven Correctional Institution, where many inmates first go to be evaluated and then assigned to a prison. He said that a 300 inmate deficit is a small enough number that the system could find room for those inmates in medium-security facilities if the money went toward expanding those or minimum-security prisons.

"You promote 300 from medium to minimum and that wouldn't be too hard," he said.

The Columbus County prison is the last of six close-custody prisons approved by lawmakers since 2001. They have paid for the prisons by using a lease-purchase method that doesn't require a public vote. A private company builds the prisons and then the state makes lease payments for the next 20 years, before assuming full ownership.

Three prisons for Alexander, Anson and Scotland counties were approved in 2001, and have all opened. Lawmakers authorized three more -- for Bertie, Greene and Columbus counties -- two years later. The latter three drew sharp debate in the House Finance Committee, because the Senate had included them in its budget without the committee's input.

Some House Finance committee members said at the time that lawmakers should look at less expensive alternatives to reduce the prison population, such as reducing some sentences, and hold off on the Columbus prison. But proposals to reduce sentences went nowhere in the legislature, and the prison was reinserted into the budget.

The Greene and Bertie prisons are under construction and slated to open next year. The state has accepted a site from Columbus County but has yet to sign a construction contract.

Bennett said that if there aren't enough close-custody inmates to fill Columbus when it opens, he'll move in medium-security inmates. Staff writer Dan Kane can be reached at 829-4861 or dkane@newsobserver.com.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1994266p-8380331c.html

Posted by lois at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)

Women's Obsolete Prisons

Los Angeles Times editorial:

[latimes.com]
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-prison8jan08,0,3275724.story
EDITORIAL
Women's Obsolete Prisons

January 8, 2005

Women are the fastest-growing portion of California's prison population — their number has increased fivefold in the last two decades — and the reason has little to do with some perverse new gender equality in crime. Movies like "Kill Bill" notwithstanding, female criminals remain as different from male ones as they were 20 years ago.

More than two-thirds of the women were convicted of nonviolent drug or property crime, whereas 50% of men were locked up for violent offenses. Women's numbers in prison have soared because of rising rates of substance abuse and tougher incarceration laws implemented in the "war on drugs."

By using for women the policies, practices, programs and facilities designed decades ago for violent male offenders, the state is missing out on cheaper, more successful methods of incarcerating and rehabilitating them.

That was the key observation in a report released last month by the Little Hoover Commission. The study by California's nonpartisan government watchdog goes on to recommend that the state transfer many of its nonviolent female convicts from prisons to halfway houses overseen by counties and often run by nonprofit or for-profit prison companies.

On Wednesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faulted the prison system's lack of "courage and accountability." The report outlines some reforms he could take now.

Though the day-to-day cost of a halfway house can in some cases rival that of prison, states such as Oregon have found that the facilities dramatically decrease long-term costs by lowering recidivism. Under the alternative sanctions recommended by the Little Hoover Commission, counties would be eligible to receive dollars once reserved for the state to house nonviolent offenders.

To shift the funding, Schwarzenegger would have to stand up to the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. because such a move would threaten its members' jobs.

Three-quarters of California's female prisoners are housed in a remote San Joaquin Valley town far from their children and other relatives. About 64% of female offenders are parents of minors, and of those, nearly half are single mothers. Yet most of the children never visit their mothers because they cannot travel so far.

The report recommends an expansion of a tiny array of state programs, enrolling only 140 women today, that let female offenders live with their children as they undergo treatment for drug addiction and other disorders. The aim is to develop better parenting skills.

Far from lenient, these programs hold the biggest of sticks over their inmates every day: If they are late to vocational education one day, or fail a drug test, they could lose the privilege of keeping their children with them.

Ample studies cited in the report show that such programs motivate women to become responsible citizens. The women eligible for them should get a chance to turn their lives around.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

Posted by craig at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

The cost of skyrocketing jail populations to counties

State must do more to defray costs of operating county jails

By BOB ARNOLD
Executive Director/CEO
Kentucky Association of Counties

Media reports have recently explored the skyrocketing growth in the population of the Commonwealth's prisons and the impact of that growth on the state's budget in recent years. Those reports conclude that the growth in the state's prison population "is threatening to bankrupt" the state's correction system. However, the local impact to county governments and their constituents of similar increases in the populations of county jails and the costs of operating those jails have gone ignored.

The media focuses its attention on the issue of who should and should not be incarcerated, noting that tougher penalties passed by the legislature for crimes such as DUI, minor drug offenses, violations of child support orders and domestic crimes have contributed to the growth in prison populations. On one side, respected University of Kentucky law professor and criminal law scholar Robert Lawson concludes that Kentucky's "lock them up and throw away the key" model has gone too far. While others such as Commonwealth's Attorney Ray Larson, an equally respected Fayette County prosecutor, predict rise in crime if we alter the stringent incarceration policies Kentucky now follows.

Both arguments warrant consideration over the course of the coming years. The decision of who should be incarcerated and for what length of time must be addressed and both arguments must be weighed. In the meantime, something must be done now to address the financial crisis that counties face as a result of bearing the soaring cost of operating county jails. As with the population of the state's prisons, the number of inmates being held in county jails has also exploded over the last two decades. Since the mid-1980s, county jail populations have increased tenfold.

However, the press and the public have yet to recognize the critical impact that the cost associated with housing prisoners in county jails has on county budgets across the Commonwealth. Just as the cost of housing prisoners in the state's penitentiaries has skyrocketed, so has the cost that county governments contribute to the operation of county jails.

Counties' financial future threatened by "unfunded mandate"

Counties are threatened by the possibility of bankruptcy as a result of the "unfunded mandate" of absorbing soaring jail costs. A study by the Kentucky County Judge-Executive Association shows that jails will cost the counties across the Commonwealth approximately $200 million during the 2005 fiscal year. More than $100 million of that cost will come directly from the counties' general funds. That is money that would otherwise be spent to enhance the quality of life of county residents on things that residents have the right to expect and demand from their county governments such as roads, bridges, parks, waterlines, sewers, emergency medical services and senior centers. In short, with some counties spending more than 50 percent of their total general fund budget on their jails, skyrocketing jail expenses are lowering the quality of life for county residents. For example, Union County, which has a total general fund budget of $1.5 million this year, expects to spend approximately $1 million of those funds on its jail. Just think of the services that Union County could provide to its residents if it were not forced to shoulder the burden of absorbing this cost.

Despite the explosion in the number of inmates in county jails and the cost associated with housing them, the money the state government contributes to counties for this has not increased since 1984. In fact, state contributions to the cost of operating county jails have actually decreased during the last 20 years while jail costs continue to escalate.

During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, state officials encouraged counties to expand old jails and build new ones, promising to contract with the counties to house state inmates that would otherwise be incarcerated in state prisons. Counties across the Commonwealth respected the pleas of state officials and added jail beds believing, like Kevin Costner's character in the 1989 movie, "Field of Dreams," that "If you build it, they will come." And come they did, with the county jails across the Commonwealth now housing approximately 6,000 state inmates on any given day, but the money that the state pays counties for housing state inmates does not even cover the counties' cost of doing so, further exasperating the jail funding problem. Today, the state pays a county $26.51, including $1.91 for medical cost, per day to house a state inmate. At the same time, it pays private prisons between $30.49 and $44.19 per day, with a built-in 3 percent annual increase, while the state remains responsible for the cost of the inmate's medical care.

It is not the place of the county officials that I represent to decide between the arguments advanced by Professor Lawson and prosecutor Larson. Tougher sentences may make the state safer, but on the other hand, how many Kentuckians do we want to have in jail? Regardless of the ultimate conclusion reached by the policy makers responsible for that decision, something must be done before long to address the county jail funding crisis, before we reach the point where county government in the Commonwealth exists solely to operate the county jail. The law-abiding citizens of Kentucky's counties deserve more.

I understand that these are difficult fiscal times for state government in Kentucky and that other important issues such as Medicaid, public employee health insurance and education are all competing for the state's limited financial resources. Nevertheless, it is time for the Commonwealth to stop shirking its constitutional obligation to be financially responsible for inmates convicted of state crimes. The state must direct additional funds to help counties defray the cost of operating county jails and housing the state's inmates.

http://www.amnews.com/public_html/?module=displaystory&story_id=11067&format
=html

Wednesday January 5, 2005

Copyright The Advocate-Messenger 2004

Posted by lois at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2005

CA:Inspector general's report finds fault with education and mental health care.

By Andy Furillo -- Bee Staff Writer

The California Youth Authority came in for more criticism Monday in an "accountability audit" that found the agency moving slowly to fix problems already disclosed in four years' worth of reviews.

According to the Office of the Inspector General, which conducted the audit last year, the CYA has failed to end its practice of confining troublesome wards in their cells for 23 hours a day, is falling short of complying with minimal standards in providing education services and is taking too long to assess and treat youthful offenders with mental health problems.

Altogether, the audit found that CYA has substantially complied with only 57 percent of the 241 recommendations forwarded to it by the inspector general in nine reviews over the previous four years.

"I guess the bottom line here is that they still have a long way to go," said Inspector General Matthew Cate, in assessing whether the CYA is getting better or worse at meeting its mandate of rehabilitating the 3,588 wards under its care.

The CYA came under heavy criticism last year as a result of inmate
suicides, high levels of violence in its maximum-security units and
allegations of excessive force. Two months ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger promised reforms in settling a lawsuit against the agency and agreeing to a consent decree designed to emphasize rehabilitation as CYA's best path toward public safety.

Most recently, the CYA came under fire last week when two wards - one of them a convicted murderer - walked away from a public service coat giveaway project at Cal Expo. The two wards are still at large.

CYA Director Walter Allen III, appointed to his post last year, said Monday he welcomed the inspector general's most recent report, saying there is no disagreement from him that the agency is "in crisis and needs a major overhaul."

Allen said he has appointed new superintendents to take charge of each of the CYA's eight institutions, banished some of the agency's more controversial practices, such as confining some violence-prone inmates into telephone booth-sized cages for educational classes, and tried to bring in parents to sit on "family councils" to provide input into the agency's operations.

"We've made a lot of headway," Allen said. "But unfortunately, the
inspector general can't say, 'These are the things you have done.' That's not their job. We have done a lot of positive things this year, but you know what? I'm not going to be totally satisfied until we change our way of doing business."

The 251-page inspector general's audit listed the prolonged periods of time some wards spend in administrative detention and the shortcomings in education and mental health treatment as the most serious problems still facing the CYA.

In five of the eight CYA youth prisons it audited, the inspector general found that 9 percent of the wards are still spending 23 hours a day in their cells. While administrative lockdowns are supposed to be reserved for the most severe disciplinary cases, the audit found that 103 wards at the Herman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility in Chino were being confined for no other reason than that there weren't enough teachers at the institution to run their educational classes.

At the N.A. Chaderjian facility in Stockton, there were 39 inmateswho had been on 23-hour lockdowns for a month or more. Inspector General Cate said he doesn't think that even the most disruptive inmate should be held in isolation facilities for more than three consecutive days. Even then, Cate said, the inmates should be allowed out of their cells for at least three hours a day.

"The long-term use of this practice needs to end," Cate said. "At a
minimum, you need to make sure they get out more than an hour a day. The Youth Authority needs to be committed to making progress in handling these wards in a more progressive way."

The audit found that the CYA "continues to fail" in getting large numbers of high school wards their state-mandated four hours of education time a day. As a result, test scores are dropping while the number of offenders slipping below the 25th percentile on the national average is rising at two Southern California institutions surveyed.

In the mental health areas, the CYA "also is not consistently providing wards with mandated treatment services," the inspector general's audit found. Only a third of the wards at the Stark youth prison in Chino were receiving counseling. At the Southern California reception center, 82 percent of incoming wards had not been diagnostically assessed within 45 days of their commitment to CYA, the audit said.

CYA critics said the audit provides another key piece of evidence - along with several "expert reports" filed in the lawsuit that led up to the consent decree - that the agency is stumbling in its mission.

"This thing is broken," said state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-East Los Angeles. "I mean, it's broken."

Sara Norman of the Prison Law Office, which brought the suit that resulted in the consent decree, said the audit shows that the CYA, as it exists, is "completely unworkable."

"There are good people working to shore up the foundation," Norman said. "But it's crumbling."

CYA director Allen, however, said the organization is still pushing forward with a reform agenda but that substantive change is going to take time.

"There's no way of taking 25, 30 years of problems and fixing them in a few months or a year," Allen said. "But I am absolutely, wholeheartedly committed to changing our way of doing business."

This is the link to the Inspector General's Report on the CYA:

http://www.oig.ca.gov/pdf
/AccountabilityAudit-CYA.pdf

Sacramento Bee: Published 2:15 am PST Tuesday, January 4, 2005

Posted by lois at 05:53 PM | Comments (0)

Sentencing by the Numbers

By EMILY BAZELON

Imagine that you could stop a crime before it happened. Not by zapping a murderer seconds before he bloodied his victim, like the future cop played by Tom Cruise in ''Minority Report,'' but by sitting calmly on the bench in judge's robes and perusing a single sheet of data. Armed with the stats, you could predict the likelihood that a convicted drug dealer or thief standing before you would be arrested again in the near future if you let him go free.

For decades, the science of predicting future criminality has been junk science -- the guesswork of psychologists who were wrong twice as often as they were right. But today, the detailed collection of crime statistics is beginning to make it possible to determine which bad guys really will commit new offenses. In 2002, the Commonwealth of Virginia began putting such data to use: the state encourages its judges to sentence nonviolent offenders the way insurance agents write policies, based on a short list of factors with a proven relationship to future risk. If a young, jobless man is convicted of shoplifting, the state is more likely to recommend prison time than when a middle-aged, employed woman commits the same crime.

Virginia's new sentencing method was born of a budget crunch. Faced with the prospect of building new prisons after passing a tough-on-crime measure in 1994, the Legislature asked the state sentencing commission to figure out which nonviolent offenders could be kept out of prison without posing a risk of committing new crimes. The commission's director, Richard Kern, and his staff members tracked 1,500 nonviolent drug, larceny and fraud offenders for three years after their release from prison. The researchers found that men were 55 percent as likely to be rearrested as women, and that offenders in their 20's were a much higher risk than those older than 40. Being unemployed made offenders more likely to commit another crime. So did being single.

Using these factors and a few others, including a defendant's adult and juvenile criminal records, Kern designed a simple 71-point scale of risk assessment as an aid for judges. If he scores 35 points or less, a defendant who would have otherwise gone to prison under Virginia sentencing guidelines is recommended for an alternative sanction like probation or house arrest. Anything above 35 means a recommendation of jail time. ''Judges make risk assessments every day,'' Kern said. ''Prosecutors do, too. Our model brings more equity to the process and ties the judgments being made to science.''

Kern tested his model on prisoners released five years earlier and found that his ratings correctly predicted who would be reconvicted in three out of four cases. Of the felons who scored at or below the 35-point cutoff, 12 percent committed new crimes, compared with more than 38 percent for those who scored higher. After calculating that only a slight increase in recidivism would result, the state raised the 35-point cutoff to 38 points last July. Meanwhile, the growth of the state's prison population -- which used to be more than twice the national average -- has slowed nearly to a halt.

But if Virginia is pleased with itself, those who think punishment should reflect blameworthiness are not. They argue that by penalizing offenders differently for the same crimes, for reasons that have nothing to do with moral culpability, the state has abandoned the idea that punishment is a form of ''just deserts'' for wrongdoing. ''If you're punishing people because of a bunch of factors that have nothing to do with blame, well, you're not in the business of doing justice anymore,'' said Paul Robinson, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As he and like-minded legal thinkers see it, a woman in her 40's who deals drugs hasn't done anything more to earn trust or deserve a break than a male dealer in his 20's charged with the same offense. She has just gotten lucky, by falling into a group whose other members have generally proved a good public-safety bet. Meanwhile, jobless single men in their 20's start with 36 points on Virginia's risk scale, putting them on the cusp of going to prison before the crime they committed is even taken into consideration.

It's not a foregone conclusion that Virginia's method of sentencing is permissible under the Constitution, though no young male offender has brought a court challenge so far. Age and sex are what the law calls ''immutable characteristics,'' and it's a fundamental principle of antidiscrimination law that the government has to tread carefully when it treats people differently because of qualities that are beyond their control. (Being married or holding a job are different, but not entirely so, since these statuses reflect people's opportunities as well as their preferences.)

Still, if the state has a compelling reason to discriminate based on age and sex, it sometimes can. And public safety is almost always deemed to be such a reason. The moral and legal picture would be cloudier, of course, if Virginia's sentencing recommendations were based on race. There's a statistical basis for doing that; Kern's study found that African-American felons committed new crimes at higher rates than whites. But Kern and his commission advised the state to stop short of taking race into account at sentencing, reasoning that it was merely serving as a proxy for socioeconomic disadvantage.

Virginia has tried to deflect criticism by emphasizing that judges are free to ignore the sentencing recommendations if they so please. By retaining such flexibility, Virginia has also reduced the danger that the predictions might have counterproductive consequences. This potential pitfall is what economists call a moral-hazard problem: drug dealers with low scores will realize that they're likely to avoid prison, and so have a greater incentive to sell more cocaine. (If that sounds unlikely, consider that some dealers already use child couriers to shield themselves.) If Virginia was to notice a jump in crime among middle-aged and elderly women, the state could adjust its predictions, Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School points out. But allowing judges to send a little old lady to prison for a long time, if necessary, helps prevent the moral hazard in the first place.

Predicting risk can lead to harsh results. At the Legislature's request, Kern's commission tracked 579 sex offenders for an average of eight years after their release from prison. The small minority who scored above 43 on a 61-point scale were all arrested again, either for sex offenses or other crimes that harmed someone. So the sentencing commission recommended tripling the sentences for offenders in this group. For rape, a 13-year sentence would soar to 39 years.

For the sex offender who would have stayed clean despite the odds, that heavy sentence would seem unjust. But for states faced with overcrowded prisons and limited budgets, it may not be irrational.

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Legal Affairs magazine and a Soros justice fellow.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company, January 2, 2005
Magazine Section

Posted by lois at 05:39 PM | Comments (0)

3 Prison Stocks Poised to Break Out

Thanks in part to overcrowding, governments are turning to private companies to build and manage prisons. Here's how to pick the right time to buy into the trend. By Michael Brush

In what might be a revealing commentary on our country's state of affairs, the nation's private prison companies look like solid investments for the next several years.

The three big prison companies -- Corrections Corp. of America (CXW, news, msgs), The Geo Group (GGI, news, msgs) and even the troubled Cornell Cos. (CRN, news, msgs) -- have decent growth prospects for the following reasons.

* Increased border patrols. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act of 2004, signed by the president in December, calls for stepped up border patrols to improve domestic security. This makes it likely that more illegal immigrants will be caught. Lawmakers estimate that by 2010 the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will need another 40,000 prison "beds," as they say in the business.

* Governments are hard up for cash. "Because of tight budgets, there has
not been a lot of new prison construction," says Irving Lingo, Corrections Corp. of America's finance chief. Instead, state and federal prison systems turn to private companies that build and manage prisons. In the 2005 federal budget, for example, Congress cut prison construction spending by 48%, says Patrick Swindle, an analyst who covers the sector for the brokerage Avondale Partners. Government prison systems turn to the private sector in part because costs are 10% to 15% lower. Banks and insurers check your credit. So should you.

* Government prisons are overcrowded and the prison population will keep
growing. "Federal prisons are at 33% overcapacity, and more than half the states are at overcapacity," says Swindle. "There is a scarcity of beds, and companies in the private prison space are being asked to meet the demand." Demand should pick up over the next decade for a simple demographic reason. The children of baby boomers, the so-called echo boom, are about to enter the 18- to 24-year old age group -- the years when people commit the most crimes. The Federal Bureau of Prisons estimates it will have a 36,000 bed shortfall by 2010, partly due to this trend.

The big-fish theory
These numbers may not seem like much. But it's a big deal for the tiny private prison sector, which houses only around 7% of the 2.1 million people in prison in the United States. To see why, let's take a closer look at some numbers. The two federal agencies, ICE and FBP, will need 76,000 new prison slots over the next five years. That alone is more than the number of beds now run by the biggest private prison company, Corrections Corp., which houses about 70,000 inmates. And it doesn't even include increases in demand expected at the state level.

Prison stocks
Name Recent price Price earnings ratio* Estimated 2005 earnings**
Market cap Market share*** Earnings estimate revisions Comments
Corrections Corporation of America (CXW, news, msgs) $40.3 22.27
$1.81 $1.4 billion 54% Up Market leader
The Geo Group (GGI, news, msgs) $26 14.61 $1.78 $246 million
22% Up Lowest debt levels: expect acquisitions
Cornell Companies (CRN, news, msgs) $15.25 18.83 $0.81 $206
million 12% Down Look for a pop from a change at the top*Forward
estimates based on consensus 2005 projections from Thomson Financial. **Per share ***U.S. market To be sure, much of this dynamic has already been priced into prison company stocks. Corrections Corp., for example, trades at about 22 times 2005 earnings estimates, at the low end of its historic 22 to 25 range. The Geo Group appears cheaper, with a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 14. But at $26, it trades at the 12-month price target recently set by one analyst. (As the leader, Corrections Corp. deserves a premium valuation.) These stocks are still worth buying because of the long-term trends. But you'll need to be patient and have a long-term horizon. Troubled Cornell might just provide the most near-term upside, if new management comes in and gets earnings growth on track.

Why it pays to be cautious
One tactic might be to wait for any of the sector's risk factors to strike and push the stocks down to better levels for a purchase. Last summer, for example, Corrections Corp. stock fell more than 17%, to $33 from $40, when the two chief risk factors hit.

* Risk factor # 1: There was a riot at one of its prisons in Colorado
last summer. Riots and escapes at private prisons pressure these stocks because of the accompanying media attention, even though their safety records are the same or better than those of government prisons, according to a Harvard Law Review article and industry studies.
* Risk factor # 2: Several contract bids were delayed. Even though this
isn't unusual when dealing with the government, investors got scared nevertheless. "Everybody wants everything to fall into quarterly buckets, and when you are dealing with government agencies it does not always work this way," says Lingo at Corrections Corp. "Government tends to move at its own pace, and private investors don't seem to understand that." Sooner or later, governments get around to awarding contracts. So when prison stocks weaken because of contract delays, it's probably a good time to buy.

Founded in 1983, Corrections Corp. was the first company to privatize prisons in the United States. It's also the biggest, with 54% share in the private prison sector. So it's likely to get a big piece of the business from state and federal prisons trying to cope with overflows. Unlike competitors, Corrections Corp. owns most of the prison capacity it manages, which means it has more stable revenue. The company also has about 8,000 unused beds now, which could give it an edge in contract bids. Filling those beds alone would bump earnings up to $2.40 per share, or 33% above the 2004 estimate of $1.81, says Avondale's Swindle. He's not predicting that will happen. But it shows the potential that lies ahead if the company gets even part way there.

Buying growth
The second-largest prison operator, Geo Group, has $84 million of cash and the lowest debt levels for the group. So the company is in a position to grow through acquisitions, says Jeffrey Kessler, who covers prison stocks for Lehman Brothers. Kessler started coverage of the stock in early November. It has already traded through his 12-month price target of $26.
Conclusion: It may pay to wait to buy this one.

Thanks to what critics say has been a series of management missteps, Cornell stands out like a sore thumb. While the two other prison companies have been getting a steady stream of upward revisions to earnings estimates, a positive sign, Cornell's numbers keep getting cut. What's wrong? The company has done things like overestimate what it would get paid for running a treatment facility, which it then had to close. And it has purchased or leased facilities it was unable to use because government contracts fell through.

All that may change if an activist hedge fund named Pirate Capital has any say. Since last summer, the Connecticut-based hedge fund has grabbed a 14% stake in the company. Now, it's using its weight to lob demands at the board for an overhaul.

"The common denominator in Cornell's consistent disappointments, downward revisions and delayed project completions is the current management team," Pirate Capital's Zachary George wrote in a recent letter to the board. To help fix things, Pirate Capital wants two board seats, a turnaround firm to replace management and an independent board committee to review takeover proposals.

A change is gonna come
Sheryl Skolnick, an analyst with Fulcrum Global Partners, agrees a change at the top might do shareholders some good. "We think there is a lot of value in the assets," says Skolnick. "The frustration is that every time we turn around, management has another reason why they can't get there this year." She puts earnings potential for the Cornell's facilities at $1.60 per share, or twice the current 2005 estimate of 81 cents.

Despite the attacks, Cornell management is hanging tough. It has several projects ramping up, including a federal prison in Pennsylvania, treatment and alternative education programs in Pennsylvania and Colorado and other facilities in New Mexico and Washington, D.C. These should boost revenue 30% by March 2006, says Cornell spokesman Paul Doucette. The company expects revenue to grow to $385 million by then, from $285 million in 2004. Who's right? Shareholders can look forward to a showdown in early June, when the next board elections take place. Watch for Pirate Capital to launch its mutiny and make a move to get its representatives on the Cornell board. The hedge fund may get plenty of help from other would-be pirates. As many as a third of all votes were withheld in recent board elections to protest management, says Skolnick.

"By mid- to late-June we will have a very different Cornell," Skolnick predicts. Under better management, she says, the next stop for Cornell shares could be $21, for a 40% gain over recent levels of $15.

At the time of publication, Michael Brush did not own or control shares in any of the equities listed in this column.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P105034.asp
Posted 1/5/2005

Posted by lois at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)

Westchester Co. Exec Calls for Prison Museum at Sing Sing

White Plains, NY - Saying Sing Sing prison could become the Alcatraz of the east, Westchester County Executive Andy Spano called on the state’s Empire State Development Corporation to fund construction of a prison museum that he thinks would be a major tourist attraction for the northeast.

In a letter to Charles A. Gargano, chairman of the agency that promotes tourism and economic development in the state, Spano said that Sing Sing could be the perfect catalyst for the Hudson Valley tourism industry, attracting tourists from all over the world. He said the internationally infamous prison, which was the site of the nation’s first electric chair and a favorite subject of Hollywood in the ‘20s and ‘30s, was ideally located on the river where ferry boats could deliver visitors.

The idea of a museum at the prison has been endorsed by both the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Historic Hudson Valley, which operate tourist attractions like Lyndhurst, Sunnyside and Kykuit. “A recent marketing study found that the establishment of a Sing Sing Historic Prison Museum could create not only a national destination, but an international one that would rival the popularity of Alcatraz in San
Francisco Bay,’’ said Spano in his letter to Gargano. “The economic impacts and the opportunities for business development in the downtowns of the 13 historic river towns from Yonkers to Peekskill cannot be underestimated.’’

Under the tentative plan, it would cost about $5.8 million to turn the prison’s former power plant into a museum building and create a tunnel that would lead to Sing Sing’s original cell block, which would house a replica of the electric chair and other prison memorabilia. He estimated that it would cost between $500,000 and $800,000 to operate the museum, all of which could be raised from tourism proceeds.

Based on tourist attendance figures at other prisons, Spano said he
estimated that Sing Sing could generate about $20.5 million a year for the state, with $10.7 million going directly to Westchester’s economy. The museum, he added, is estimated to create 257 new jobs, 113 of those in
Westchester.

The prison museum, Spano said, could spawn an entire waterway industry along the river, attracting pleasure boaters to a new destination. There are 13 million registered boats and more than 70 million recreational boaters
nationwide.

Spano said that the Sing Sing proposal was in response to a recent news article in which Gov. George Pataki and Gargano are quoted as saying that the state is looking for new and exciting economic development/tourism opportunities.

“A Sing Sing Museum is the catalyst needed to reinforce and enhance economic growth within the region and the state,’’said Spano.
The inspiration for such phrases as the Big House, the Big Sleep and Up the River, and the subject of more than 200 Hollywood films, Sing Sing opened in 1868 and was home to the nation’s first electric chair. Notorious villains were put to death in the chair at Sing Sing, including cannibalistic serial killer Albert Fish, who called the electric chair the “supreme thrill.”
Married cold war spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were electrocuted at Sing Sing on June 19, 1950 after twice failing to win clemency from President Eisenhower for selling A-Bomb secrets to the Soviets. And infamous bank robbery Willie Sutton is also part of Sing Sing lore.

“Sing Sing was a famous tourist attraction in the 1920s,’’ said Spano. “At the height of its popularity more than 3,000 people a day toured the prison, and I don’t see why that cannot happen again.’’

Jerry Mulligan, Westchester’s Commissioner of Planning, said that everyone approached about the project was very excited, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He said the trust is looking to branch out from historic homes of the wealthy to educate the public on other faces of history. Sing Sing, he said, would be the perfect venue for this venture.

“Historic prisons are the single largest tourist attractions in San
Francisco, London and Dublin,’’ said Mulligan, who added that Alcatraz prison attracted 1.5 million tourists in 2000. “Sing Sing could serve as the centerpiece to all our other historic sites, attracting far more people than we ever imagined.’’

Westchester.com
Monday, 03 January 2005

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

CIA to Build Prisons?: Long Term Plan Sought for 'Terror' Suspects

"One proposal under review is the transfer of
large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and Yemeni
detainees from the military's Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, detention center into new U.S.-built
prisons in their home countries. The prisons
would be operated by those countries, but the
State Department, where this idea originated,
would ask them to abide by recognized human
rights standards and would monitor compliance,
the senior administration official said."

Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page A01

Administration officials are preparing long-range
plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected
terrorists whom they do not want to set free or
turn over to courts in the United States or other
countries, according to intelligence, defense and
diplomatic officials.

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White
House to decide on a more permanent approach for
potentially lifetime detentions, including for
hundreds of people now in military and CIA
custody whom the government does not have enough
evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the
review, which also involves the State Department,
would also affect those expected to be captured
in the course of future counterterrorism
operations.

"We've been operating in the moment because
that's what has been required," said a senior
administration official involved in the
discussions, who said the current detention
system has strained relations between the United
States and other countries. "Now we can take a
breath. We have the ability and need to look at
long-term solutions."

One proposal under review is the transfer of
large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and Yemeni
detainees from the military's Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, detention center into new U.S.-built
prisons in their home countries. The prisons
would be operated by those countries, but the
State Department, where this idea originated,
would ask them to abide by recognized human
rights standards and would monitor compliance,
the senior administration official said.

As part of a solution, the Defense Department,
which holds 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay,
plans to ask Congress for $25 million to build a
200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely
to ever go through a military tribunal for lack
of evidence, according to defense officials.

The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow
inmates more comfort and freedom than they have
now, and would be designed for prisoners the
government believes have no more intelligence to
share, the officials said. It would be modeled on
a U.S. prison and would allow socializing among
inmates.

"Since global war on terror is a long-term
effort, it makes sense for us to be looking at
solutions for long-term problems," said Bryan
Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "This has been
evolutionary, but we are at a point in time where
we have to say, 'How do you deal with them in the
long term?' "

The administration considers its toughest
detention problem to involve the prisoners held
by the CIA. The CIA has been scurrying since
Sept. 11, 2001, to find secure locations abroad
where it could detain and interrogate captives
without risk of discovery, and without having to
give them access to legal proceedings.

Little is known about the CIA's captives, the
conditions under which they are kept -- or the
procedures used to decide how long they are held
or when they may be freed. That has prompted
criticism from human rights groups, and from some
in Congress and the administration, who say the
lack of scrutiny or oversight creates an
unacceptable risk of abuse.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the
House intelligence committee who has received
classified briefings on the CIA's detainees and
interrogation methods, said that given the
long-term nature of the detention situation, "I
think there should be a public debate about
whether the entire system should be secret.

"The details about the system may need to remain
secret," Harman said. At the least, she said,
detainees should be registered so that their
treatment can be tracked and monitored within the
government. "This is complicated. We don't want
to set up a bureaucracy that ends up making it
impossible to protect sources and informants who
operate within the groups we want to penetrate."

The CIA is believed to be holding fewer than
three dozen al Qaeda leaders in prison. The
agency holds most, if not all, of the top
captured al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Sheik
Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Abu Zubaida and the
lead Southeast Asia terrorist, Nurjaman Riduan
Isamuddin, known as Hambali.

CIA detention facilities have been located on an
off-limits corner of the Bagram air base in
Afghanistan, on ships at sea and on Britain's
Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean. The
Washington Post reported last month that the CIA
has also maintained a facility within the
Pentagon's Guantanamo Bay complex, though it is
unclear whether it is still in use.

In contrast to the CIA, the military produced and
declassified hundreds of pages of documents about
its detention and interrogation procedures after
the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. And the military
detainees are guaranteed access to the
International Committee of the Red Cross and, as
a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, have the
right to challenge their imprisonment in federal
court.

But no public hearings in Congress have been held
on CIA detention practices, and congressional
officials say CIA briefings on the subject have
been too superficial and were limited to the
chairman and vice chairman of the House and
Senate intelligence committees.

The CIA had floated a proposal to build an
isolated prison with the intent of keeping it
secret, one intelligence official said. That was
dismissed immediately as impractical.

One approach used by the CIA has been to transfer
captives it picks up abroad to third countries
willing to hold them indefinitely and without
public proceedings. The transfers, called
"renditions," depend on arrangements between the
United States and other countries, such as Egypt,
Jordan and Afghanistan, that agree to have local
security services hold certain terror suspects in
their facilities for interrogation by CIA and
foreign liaison officers.

The practice has been criticized by civil
liberties groups and others, who point out that
some of the countries have human rights records
that are criticized by the State Department in
annual reports.

Renditions originated in the 1990s as a way of
picking up criminals abroad, such as drug
kingpins, and delivering them to courts in the
United States or other countries. Since 2001, the
practice has been used to make certain detainees
do not go to court or go back on the streets,
officials said.

"The whole idea has become a corruption of
renditions," said one CIA officer who has been
involved in the practice. "It's not rendering to
justice, it's kidnapping."

But top intelligence officials and other experts,
including former CIA director George J. Tenet in
his testimony before Congress, say renditions are
an effective method of disrupting terrorist cells
and persuading detainees to reveal information.

"Renditions are the most effective way to hold
people," said Rohan Gunaratna, author of "Inside
al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror." "The threat
of sending someone to one of these countries is
very important. In Europe, the custodial
interrogations have yielded almost nothing"
because they do not use the threat of sending
detainees to a country where they are likely to
be tortured.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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

Ten Questions for Gonzales

1. Are there any circumstances under which you believe the president of the United States could legally authorize torture?

Ten Questions for Gonzales
By , The Progress Report
Posted on January 6, 2005, Printed on January 6, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/20908/
President Bush is asking the United States Senate to confirm his nominee to be attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, without all the facts. Despite repeated requests from senators, the White House still refuses "to provide copies of his memos on the questioning of terror suspects." Instead, the Senate will be forced to rely on "press reports or leaks" for information about his role in drafting legal memorandum that provided legal justifications for torture.

Gonzales had personally promised Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that he would "engage in an open exchange" regarding his testimony, but so far Gonzales hasn't bothered to answer Leahy's letters requesting the documents. In any event, there are serious questions – regarding his role in the prisoner abuse scandal and other issues – that need to be asked, and answered. We've drafted ten tough questions for Alberto Gonzales.

1. Are there any circumstances under which you believe the president of the United States could legally authorize torture?

Alberto Gonzales approved a now-infamous memo which contended the president "wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department." Despite the fact that the United States ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture – which states "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture" – the memo stated the president had the authority "to approve almost any physical or psychological action during interrogation, up to and including torture." Once the memo was made public, Gonzales backtracked, saying the memo contained "unnecessary, over-broad discussions" about "abstract legal theories." He also said the policy was "under review, and may be replaced, if appropriate, with more concrete guidance addressing only those issues necessary for the legal analysis of actual practices." The Justice Department recently released a new memo redefining the U.S. stance on torture. The new policy, however, does not address the question of whether the president is entitled to disregard laws and treaties.

2. Has your position on the Geneva Conventions changed since evidence of widespread detainee abuse at U.S. prisons was uncovered? If not, which provisions of the Geneva Conventions do you still consider "quaint" or "obsolete"?

The Geneva Conventions of 1949, signed and ratified by the United States, are the primary instruments of humanitarian law used to protect those involved in international armed conflicts. A Jan. 25, 2002 memorandumissued by Alberto Gonzales claims the war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions." The memo pushes to make al Qaeda and Taliban detainees exempt from the Geneva Conventions' provisions on the proper, legal treatment of prisoners. The memo also expresses concern, however, that failing to apply the Geneva Conventions "could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries." The evidence of detainee abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have borne these concerns out.

3. In your view, what limits did the Sept. 14 joint resolution passed by Congress place on which countries the president could invade?

On Sept. 14, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing President Bush to respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but narrowing the scope of the authority to only countries specifically connected to the attacks. On Sept. 25, just 11 days later, the Justice Department sent a memo to Alberto Gonzales which "essentially argued that what Congress authorized didn't matter." The memo argued there were "no limits" on Bush's powers to respond to the attacks and, in the first known statement of Bush's pre-emptive doctrine, the memo "startlingly" argued Bush could deploy military force preemptively against any country he suspected of harboring terrorists "whether or not they can be linked to the specific terror incidents of Sept. 11." It also said his decisions were "for him alone and are unreviewable." Gonzales's response to the memo is unknown.

4. Do you still believe that the state of Texas does not have to abide by the Vienna Convention?

In 1997, Alberto Gonzales wrote a memo for then-Gov. Bush which said the state of Texas need not comply with the Vienna Convention. The Vienna Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1969, was "designed to ensure that foreign nationals accused of a crime are given access to legal counsel by a representative from their home country." Gonzales sent a letter to the U.S. State Department in which he argued that the treaty didn't apply to the State of Texas, as Texas was not a signatory to the Vienna Convention. Two days later, Texas executed Mexican citizen Irineo Tristan Montoya, despite Mexico's protestations that Texas had violated Tristan's rights under the Vienna Convention by failing to inform the Mexican consulate at the time of his arrest.

5. Do you still believe that the president can order the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, without judicial scrutiny, now that the Supreme Court has rejected that position?

The Supreme Court ruled last June that citizens and non-citizens detained by the government – even those deemed "enemy combatants" by the Bush administration – have the right to challenge their detention in front of a neutral arbiter. The court sharply rejected President Bush's position that, as commander-in-chief during a time of war, he has the unilateral power to detain individuals indefinitely without due process of law. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote: "A state of war is not a blank check for the president." The Supreme Court's decisions were a rejection of the Bush administration's legal justifications for the harsh treatment of prisoners. In an 8/1/02 memo written for Alberto Gonzales, the Bush administration argued that the president had the authority, pursuant to his commander-in-chief power, to authorize torture and other harsh interrogation tactics for the purpose of extracting information from detainees. Justice John Paul Stevens traced the rationale for his decision in the Guantanamo case all the way back to King John's promise in the Magna Carta of 1215 that, "no free man should be imprisoned ... save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." The analysis "traced the limits on executive power through English common law, on through the Federalist Papers and down a long line of precedents forged in some of the darkest hours of the nation, including the Civil War and World War II."

6. The Department of Justice has issued a revised, more expansive definition of torture. But John Yoo, who helped write the repudiated memo, still defends the old definition. If you are confirmed as attorney general, would you consider Mr. Yoo for a position in your department?

An August 2002 memo, vetted by Gonzales, said that the pain caused by an interrogation must include "injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions in order to constitute torture." In anticipation of Gonzales's nomination hearing, the Justice Department issued a new memo, revising its definition of torture to include "mere physical suffering or lasting mental anguish." But former Justice Department official John Yoo still thinks the old definition was better, saying the new version "makes it harder to figure out how the torture statute applies to specific interrogation methods. It muddies the water. Our effort ... was to interpret the statute clearly."

7. Do you believe the March 2004 draft memo you requested – authorizing the CIA to transfer detainees to countries that may torture them – was in violation of international law?

At the request of Alberto Gonzales, the Justice Department drafted a top-secret memo that authorized the CIA to transfer detainees out of Iraq for interrogation. That practice, known as "extraordinary rendition," is a violation of the Geneva Conventions and is thus a "war crime" under U.S. federal law. The CIA used the draft memo, dated March 19, 2004, as legal support "for secretly transporting as many as a dozen detainees out of Iraq in the last six months." According to agency officials, the CIA transferred suspected terrorists "captured in one country into the hands of security services in other countries whose records of human rights abuse is well documented." Those detainees were also hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other authorities.

8. Would you recuse yourself from all Enron-related matters?

For more than a decade, Alberto Gonzales was an attorney for Vinson & Elkins, the firm that represented Enron. When Gonzales ran for re-election to the Texas Supreme Court, he "received $6,500 in campaign contributions from the company." The Justice Department is currently prosecuting top Enron executives – including former CEO Ken Lay. John Ashcroft recused himself from the Enron investigation "because of contributions he received from the company's executives during his campaign for the Senate." Nevertheless, Gonzales - who had a far more extensive relationship with Enron than Ashcroft – continued to be involved in Enron-related investigations as White House counsel.

9. Would you recuse yourself from all Halliburton-related matters?

The Justice Department has launched three investigations of Halliburton: for allegedly overcharging the military $61 million for fuel, for allegedly bribing Nigerian officials to win a contract and for allegedly doing business with Iran through an off-shore subsidiary. Halliburton was a major client of Vinson & Elkins while Gonzales was a partner at the firm. In 1999, as a member of the Texas Supreme Court, Gonzales accepted a $3,000 contribution from Halliburton just before the court was to hear an appeal of a case where "a Halliburton employee had won a $2.6 million trial verdict" against the company. Gonzales did not recuse himself.

10. Were you aware of Bernard Kerik's long-standing ties to Interstate Industrial, a New Jersey-based firm allegedly run by organized crime? If so, did you inform President Bush before Mr. Kerik was nominated? If not, how was the media able to uncover the connection hours after the nomination was announced?

Alberto Gonzales personally "spent hours grilling" Bernard Kerik as part of the administration's weeks-long effort to vet the one-time nominee for Homeland Security secretary. After Kerik withdrew his name from consideration, it was discovered that he had maintained long-standing ties to an alleged mob-run construction company called Interstate Industrial. While heading both the Department of Corrections and the New York Police Department, Kerik received numerous unreported cash gifts from Interstate Industrial executive Lawrence Ray, who has since been indicted on federal charges for a stock swindle involving several prominent mob figures.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20908/

Posted by lois at 04:42 PM | Comments (0)

Felony Sentences in State Courts 2002- BJS

U.S. DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics
Felony Sentences in State Courts, 2002
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/fssc02.htm
"Presents statistics for adults who were convicted of a felony and sentenced in State courts. The data were collected through a nationally representative survey of 300 counties in 2002. Within the 12 offense categories reported are the number and characteristics (age, sex, race) of offenders who were sentenced to prison, jail, or probation. Trends from 1994 to 2002 highlight the number and characteristics of adults convicted of felonies and the types and lengths of sentences imposed

Posted by lois at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)

HIV in Prisons and Jails, 2002 BJS

HIV in Prisons and Jails, 2002
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/hivpj02.htm

"Provides the number of HIV-positive and active AIDS cases among State and Federal prisoners at yearend 2002. This annual bulletin reports the number of AIDS-related deaths in prisons, a profile of those inmates who died, the number of female and male prisoners with AIDS, and a comparison of AIDS rates for the general and prisoner populations. Based on the 2002 Survey of Inmates in Local Jails, the report provides estimates of HIV infection among jail inmates by age, gender, race, Hispanic origin, education, marital status, and by current offense and selected risk factors such as prior drug use. Also included is information on AIDS-related deaths among jail inmates."

Posted by lois at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

January 04, 2005

The We That Sets Us Free -- CD on women prisoners & abolition

CD website:
http://www.justinbianco.com/jnow.html
Justice Now website:
http://jnow.org

"The We That Sets Us Free" combines music, spoken word and interviews with activists inside and outside prison to challenge all of us to imagine new ways of living, to question what purpose prisons serve and to propose anti-racist alternatives to punishment and confinement.

This CD has been shaped by all the people who generously have shared their time and talents over the last two years. Throughout this process we challenged ourselves to imagine a world that would no longer rely on prisons as the solution to social problems — a task that required confronting and overcoming many of our preconceived ideas about equality, justice and safety. We are grateful to the artists, most of whom created roiginal pieces for this project. In particular we want to recognize the women inside who risked retaliation to have their voices heard and who, depsite daily assaults on their humanity, hold out great hope for our future.

"The We That Sets Us Free" is part of a national campaign — Building a World Without Prisons — bringing the voices of women in prison to public discourse, exposing human rights abuses in prison, and challenging the prison industrial complex.

This CD was produced by Justice Now, a human rights organization that works with women in prison and local communitities to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons.

Posted by craig at 07:39 PM | Comments (0)