9/25/2000  New York jails pose biggest test for health firm with mixed past, by Eric Lipton, NYT, front page.
...Prison Health Services is the central component of a $400m-a-year corporation, one that delivers everything from dental work to cardiac care to 175,000 inmates in 27 states and Washington, DC. Now the company that one executive calls the "HMO Behind Bars" is moving to take on its greatest challenge: a contract of nearly $100m a year to care for 13,000 prisoners on Rikers Island and in other New York City jails.... The Tennessee-based company has grown enormously in recent years as it aggressively pursued a share of the nation's estimated $4.5B-a-year inmate health care market.... But along the way..., it has been dogged at times by allegations of severe staffing problems, poor or unstable management and substandard care....

9/23/2000  Attica's forgotten victims - The hostages and their families are still waiting for real compensation, by Tom Wicker, NYT, A31.
After 29 years of deceit, coverup and injustice, the State of New York has agreed to pay $8m in damages to inmates who were beaten and abused in reprisals during the recapture of the Attica Correctional Facility in 1971.
But what about the families of the inmates' hostages who were slain that day by indiscriminate state police gunfire? What about surviving hostages? All the hostages were doing their duty when they were killed, injured or endangered by their employer, New York State.... So far, New York has done nothing remotely adequate to compensate these forgotten victims for what one investigatory commission called "the bloodiest encounter between Americans since the Civil War"....

9/16/2000  Federal report denounces conditions at County jail - Explanations for not disciplining guards are called 'pretexts for inaction', by Charlie LeDuff, NYT, A13.
MINEOLA, N.Y...- There were the elevator rides that troublesome inmates took: a prisoner, handcuffed to an inner railing, would be beaten senseless by a half-dozen guards as the car ascended and descended.
There was the medical wing, staffed not by physicians, but by guards, who acted as doctors and dispensed psychiatric medicines..\..
There was the housing tier that the inmates called the Terror Dome, because correction officers meted out particularly brutal discipline there....
These and many more facets of life in the Nassau County jail were detailed in a scathing 23-page report released to county officials after a 14-month federal investigation...by the Dept. of Justice [which] was provoked by the death of an inmate who was bludgeoned by correction officers on Jan. 8, 1999, because he would not stop begging for methadone....

9/9/2000  2 prison stories, one good, one bad -

1. [Good -]
   South Africa: Freedom for 11,000, by Henri Cauvin, NYT, A6.
   In a move to reduce crowding in the country's prisons, the ministry of corrections plans to release about 11,000 people accused of petty crimes who have been unable to make bail while awaiting trial.
   [But note that a big prison release, like a big demobilization of armed forces such as Russia's today, can have the same negative effect on the economy as a big downsizing.]
   The prison system, which has been plagued by escapes and mismanagement, has a capacity of about 100,000 inmates but has been holding as many as 170,000 in recent months.
   [South Africa is yet another place that needs to make it a lot easier to earn an honest living than a dishonest one - by automatically spreading around the market-demanded skills and employment = Timesizing.]

2. [Bad -]
   Spain: Basque crackdown planned, by Benjamin Jones, NYT, A6.
   ...on separatist violence in the Basque region. Under the proposed laws...youths engaged in separatist street violence would be tried as adults and subject to longer sentences....
   [Sounds tough for short-term satisfaction, but putting young people with older people could just hasten the transfer of attitudes and skills, and cost more in the long term. Behind all this, why is it so important to clutch onto the Basque region. Call their bluff. Give them a referendum and let them go if they want. Nothing cures people so fast as getting what they want. Same for Quebec. If independence is the only way to feel like a first-class citizen in their own land, LET THEM TRY IT. The Basques have an interesting non-IndoEuropean language and therefore a unique cultural potential, if not actuality. The Spanish should be big enough to give this uniqueness to the world, without suffocation. King Carlos, you're a good guy - step in and LET THESE PEOPLE GO.]

[good news for a change -]
9/05/2000  Inmates battling West's fires help states and themselves, by Douglas Jehl, NYT, front page.
YELLOW PINE, Idaho...- Back in Utah, they are inmates at Bluffdale State Prison. But out here in the fire zone, they strut proudly in black T-shirts proclaiming themselves members of the Flame 'N' Go Hotshots. "Being in this program makes all the difference," Bart Clark...a six-time felon who has spent 11 of the last 15 years in prison, said this morning before shouldering his backpack on a hill acrid with smoke. "Now I can tell my 4-year-old son that his dad isn't in prison, he's out fighting fires. Almost every day since mid-May, Mr. Clark - convicted most recently of kidnapping - and the rest of his 20-man crew have been outside the wire, battling blazes across the West.... In this devastating fire season, one in six of the crew members fighting fires by hand is a convict.... At wages that average $1 an hour, the use of inmates is a bargain, one that might ease the taxpayers' burden in a year in which federal fire-fighting costs will exceed $1B....
[So they're getting $1/hr plus room, board, & health insurance? What's that come out to? Minimum wage, we hope, considering many of them are in prison for what the future will consider frivolous reasons, like "drug" possession, "drug" being defined with the most bizantine arbitrariness to include marijuana yet exclude killers like alcohol and nicotine. And we taxpayers get soaked $25-30k/yr/inmate for this colossal imbecility. At any rate -]
"Most of my life, I took things from other people, and now it's time to give something back," Tommy Phong said....

9/02/2000  The missing voters,
letter to editor by Prof. John Humbach of Pace University Law Dept., NYT, A26.
In discussing the effects that non-voters have on elections, you note in passing that felons are among the millions of adults who cannot legally vote (Week in Review, Aug. 27). Today, in fact, there are 2 million Americans in prisons and jails...
[Are we sure all 2m are American citizens?]
...and an even larger number who have finished serving their time for felonies but who are still unable to vote.
[Why the delay?]
The exclusion of these people - largely members of Democratic-leaning minority groups - may have a pronounced impact on election results. For example, if today's levels of felony disenfranchisement existed durign the very close Nixon-Kennedy race in 1960, Richard Nixon may well have been elected. Conversely, the Republicans' Congressional election triumph in 1994 might have been impossible were it not for the fact that felony disqualification kept so much of the opposition's traditional voting base from going to the polls.
[So here's an example of the dysfunctionality and destructiveness of the both major parties, and indeed of the confrontational two-party system itself. The Democrats pour immigrants into the country, regardless of assimilation-integration-training or lack thereof, and regardless of the resulting downward pressure on the wages of people already here. The Republicans stay awake nights dreaming up ways of burying more and more of them for longer and longer periods in prison (regardless of taxpayer expense), so they can't vote Democratic. Each of the only two major parties prioritizes getting and holding power before the long-term well-being of the nation - or even its short-term well-being. Godspeed to Nader, Hagelin, Buchanan and Brown.]

8/10/2000  2 jail items today -

1. Number in prison grows despite crime reduction - Stricter parole and sentencing laws cited - The growth rate slows, but the inmate population passes two million, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, A10.
   [Well, we expected to pass this milestone in mid-February. The real question now is, have we beaten Russia for the title of world's biggest percentage of incarcerated people?]
   ...The Justice Dept. reported yesterday...that the total number of Americans in all jails and prisons surpassed two million for the first time, reaching 2,026,596 at the end of 1999....
   [So we were actually there already by the New Year, never mind waiting for mid-February.]
   There are 690 prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents [0.69% incarcerated], according to The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit prison research and advocacy organization in Washington. That rate is six times that of Canada and Australia, which are both around 110 prisoners per 100,000 residents, the Project said, and five times that of any country in the European Union....
   [Looks like they're not going to get to the "beef" and compare us to Russia. So 'The Land of the Free' has locked up one in every 145 of its own citizens, mostly for possessing an extremely inconsistent list of substances (marijuana, cocaine, etc. TABU, while alcohol, nicotine, prozac, etc. OK). We're starting to sound like a byzantine/scifi nightmare.]

2. ['Compassionate conservatism' in action?]
   Man said to be retarded is 1 of 2 killers executed, AP via NYT, A17.
   HUNTSVILLE, Tex....- Two condemned killers, one of them [Oliver David Cruz] a man whose...IQ tested as low as 63 \and\ whose lawyers said...he should not be put to death, were executed [last] night....
   [The other was Brian Keith Roberson.]

8/05/2000  Illness behind bars, editorial, Boston Globe, A14.
The nation's jails and prisons have become home for many mentally ill people, and about one in six inmates suffers from serious problems associated with the disease. Massachusetts deserves credit for developing treatment programs for these prisoners.... Marylou Sudders, the state's mental health commissioner...says that only 8% of those who were involved in treatment have been rearrested for crimes compared with rearrest rates of up to 50% among all freed prisoners..\..
But the state should reexamine its use of punishment - imprisonment - as a form of treatment....

6/08/00  Race analysis cites disparity in sentencing for narcotics, by Steven Holmes, NYT, A16.
Nearly twice as many black men and women are being imprisoned for drug offenses than are whites, even though studies show that there are five times as many white drug users than black ones, an international human rights organization said [yester]day. The report by Human Rights Watch joins a growing body of evidence compiled by liberal advocacy groups showing racial disparities in the country's soaring prison population. That population has quadrupled since 1980 and is expected to surpass two million next year....
[We thought it passed 2m in mid-February - or does this figure include only federal prisons but not county and city jails?]
The report said 62.7% of drug offenders sent to prison in 1996, the last year for which complete statistics were available, were African-American, while 36.7% were white. The Census Bureau estimates that blacks currently make up about 12.8% of the population and that whites, including Hispanic whites, are about 82.3%.... Drug abuse among African-Americans tends to be more chronic and involve harder drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin....
[Is this our Third-Millennium makework campaign for minority Americans? What a vision for America's future.]

6/01/00  Federal crime data show a high conviction rate, AP via NYT, A21.
WASHINGTON - ...87% of defendants charged with federal crimes were convicted in fiscal year 1998, and 71% of those who were convicted were sentenced to prison...up from 60% of those convicted in 1990..\..the Justice Dept. reported today. Nearly half of the 106,139 federal arrests during the 12 months that ended Sept. 30, 1998, involved drug or immigration violations, according to the first comprehensive study of federal arrest data by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Drug violations accounted for 29% of the arrests, and immigration offenses for 20%....

5-6/00  Corporation gets labor, environmental questions - Starbucks: Bad for Davis Square, by Basav Sen, Somerville Community News, front page.
...Prison employment has grown 213% between 1991 and 1998, according to the Correctional Industries Assoc., an industry trade group (http://www.corrections.com/industries/cia/PIE.html). This tripling of prison labor reduces the number of jobs available to jobseekers outside prison, since prison labor is so much cheaper for employers..\..
Prison labor is forced labor.... Physical coercion has been used in instances to force prisoners to work, [e.g.,] in California. In the fall 1995 Covert Action Quarterly, journalist Reese Ehrlich writes, "If prisoners refuse to work, they are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen privileges. Most importantly, they lose 'good time' credit[s] that reduce...their sentence. Prisoners are paid below minimum wage, and the costs of incarceration and other charges are deducted from their wages, so what they finally receive is a pittance. Wages as low as $0.75 an hour are not unheard of, according to the Milwaukee-based A Job is a Right Campaign..\..
[Questioning through to a sustainable social design here, for rule-breakers to be supported by taxpayers is to penalize the victims, so it's desirable for prisoners to work enough to support themselves on an-ongoing basis. It's also desirable for them to work enough to have a transition cushion to rely on when they get out. How to prevent prison labor from undermining outside labor? Substitute maximum workweek for minimum wage - share the vanishing work, and apply the Timesizing feature of overtime-to-training conversion as well, inside prison as well as outside. Employment is only scarce and poorly paid as long as we lack a work-sharing system. Once we implement that, we can move on to the subtler questions of in-prison coercion, labor pricing, and the vote.

• Generally, the pricing (i.e., wage) question can probably be solved by mandating that prison skills of various types be remunerated at the same rates as outside, so that competition is based on quality or location and not on unfair, artificial, and potentially taxpayer-soaking price advantage.
• The vote is denied prison inmates in some states, such as Massachusetts, but should be attached to self-support, regardless of incarceration. That way, if a nation comes up with an impractical law such the zero-tolerance criminalization of drugs and starts incarcerating a ridiculously high percentage of its population, that population itself can vote and gradually correct the abuse.]
  

5/27/00  Jail guards get prison terms, by Michael Cooper, NYT, A11.
Two Nassau County jail guards who fatally beat an unarmed inmate were sentenced yesterday to 11 years in federal prison, and a jail supervisor who tried to cover up for them received nearly 6 years.
[Inside, outside - hey, what's the diff? You're still spending the best hours of your life in a very unattractive environment.]
The guards, Patrick Regnier and Edward Velasquez...admitted beating..\..Thomas Pizzuto...who was serving a 90-day sentence in the Nassau County jail for a traffic infraction and was being treated for heroin addiction. [They said] they wanted to quiet his screams for methadone. Five days after the assault, Mr. Pizzuto died of a ruptured spleen. His death focused widespread attention on [NY's] Nassau County jail, prompting a criminal investigation, governmental hearings, a change in management and a federal investigation into whether a pattern of abuse and misconduct exists at the jail....

5/26/2000  One piece of good news pierces the relentless sadness of US prisons, like a chioscuro -

• Rwandans share peace and unity through dance - From a country divided by war, a message of recovery - [photo caption:] Members of the National Ballet of Rwanda performing on Wednesday [5/24] for inmates at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Purdy [Wash.], by Sam Verhovek, NYT, A12.
  [The photo tells it all. Taken from the front of the room, it shows
  • about 8 African men in single file approaching the camera along one side of the room, in full tribal regalia, poised on one foot, brandishing nonthreatening spears and big smiles, outstretched arms, colorful kilts and long strawy headdresses
  • 4 female prisoners, 2 black, 2 white (most of the chairs are empty) turning around to see the men coming up the side aisle and looking variously apprehensive, mystified, distant, and delighted
  [The picture is worth a thousand words - the unreserved happiness of these dancers from a different world and their obvious joy at being there for these women, even if they're not completely understood. One front-row woman in particular - attractive, vulnerable-looking, with ringlets and sneakers - stirs the rescue fantasies one hasn't felt since Amadeus.]

• Prison labor - With unemployment low, a new group is in demand: Ex-cons - Bosses who resort to hiring former prisoners find many are ideal workers - Ohio's killer car salesman, by Mark Tatge, WSJ, front page.
  ...The tight labor market is accomplishing what years of pleas and programs from penal experts and social scientists failed to do: It is persuading America's employers to hire ex-convicts.
  [Compare next Sunday what the "tight" labor market is doing for the disabled - see 4/30/2000.]
  What statistics exist about employment of ex-prisoners suggest that companies are hiring them at higher rates than ever before.
  In New York [State], about 40% of offenders on parole are employed, up from 33% six years ago. The pool of ex-convicts is growing substantially because of the record number of felony convictions since the late 1980s. About 2.5m felons were on probation or parole in 1998, up from 1.5m a decade ago.
  Few employers are happy about having to resort to this pool. But once they do, most are finding that despite their preconceived notions, the ex-prisoner isn't necessarily a repeat offender waiting to happen. Only 40% of ex-cons commit crimes again, and that number is much lower for those who find employment. "I don't think a person's history matters as much as who that person is," said Richard Lord, manager of a J.C. Penney store in Columbia, Mo., where unemployment of less than 1% has prompted him to hire ex-prisoners as sales clerks.
  As industry hires more ex-prisoners, perceptions of them are changing in a way that could outlast the tight labor market and perhaps even lower the crime rate. "All the data and research indicate if you have a positive experience - and getting a job would be just that - the chance of recidivism is going to be lower," says Dean Wright, a Drake University professor of sociology who specializes in penal issues....
  [Followup -]
  E-con 101, by Jason Beaver, 11/13/2000 *Smart Business Magazine.
  How would you like to have access to a reliable labor pool with 24/7 availability, practically no turnover, and no benefits? Welcome to the world of prison inmate labor, a rapidly growing sector of the new economy where annual revenues have topped $1B since 1998.
  [So this is not ex-cons as in the story above. It's cons - still "in stir." And this raises the specter of slavery.]
  Around 2m people are currently behind bars in this country, a growth of more than 300% since 1980, reflecting the highest per capita incarceration rate among all developed nations. Combine that with the lowest unemployment and tightest job market in 30 years and you've got the formula for tapping into what might be the only low wage, labor-intensive workforce left.
  In fact, inmate laborers could be the missing[?] variable that pries assembly jobs away from the Third World and back into the American GDP.
  [More likely just another of the many all-too-present variables that are prying assembly jobs away from formerly well-paid American factory workers.]
  "The benefit is that it provides a reliable, productive, motivated workforce that can reduce production costs - and that's the business bottom line," claims Knut Rostad of the Enterprise Prison Institute, a company that specializes in leasing inmate labor....
  Less talked about is what Jenni Gainsborough, communications director of the DC-based criminal policy analysis firm *The Sentencing Project calls a "modern business dilemma" (read: a huge publicity nightmare). Gainsborough, a former public policy coordinator of the ACLU's National Prison Project, says, "It seems absolutely wrong that individual liberty and public safety should be put out to bid to companies whose first concern is their shareholders and expanding their market."...
  [Or rather, to CEOs whose first concern is themselves and expanding their pecking-order or 'positional goods.']

3/31/2000  Justice Dept. sues to alter conditions at a prison, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, A14.
The Justice Dept. filed a lawsuit yesterday against the Wackenhut Corrections Corp. and the State of Louisiana charging the conditions at a private for-profit juvenile prison [in Jena] in central Louisiana run by Wackenhut are "dangerous and life threatening" and asking a federal judge to take emergency action to protect the inmates. The lawsuit asked Judge Frank J. Polozola of Federal District Court in Baton Rouge to intervene to stop guards at the Wackenhut prison from...failing to provide the inmates with adequate mental health care and education \and\ beating the young boys, throwing gas grenades into their barracks [and] holding them for long periods in isolation....
A group of experts hired by the Justice Dept. who toured the prison...reported that many of the 276 boys incarcerated there had no shoes or blankets and were constantly short of food. The experts also reported that many boys had tried to commit suicide or had deliberately injured themselves to get into the infirmary as a way to escape physical abuse by the guards. A New Orleans juvenile court judge, Mark Doherty, found conditions at Jena so bad he released six boys he had sent there after visiting the prison earlier this month. Judge Doherty, a Republican and former prosecutor, said Wackenhut had treated the boys no better than animals "on all fours."
In response to the...lawsuit, Wackenhut released a written statement saying that the company "is providing a constitutionally sound, safe and secure facility" and that...it believed the Justice Dept. had been misled by "exaggerations and misstatements of facts" by inmates they had interviewed.... Wackenhut, based in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., is the 2nd largest private prison company in the U.S. and the largest internationally. It operates 30,308 beds in 56 institutions in 13 states and 7 foreign countries, and its shares trade on the NYSE....

2/24/2000 Calif. inmate dies as guards put down riot, LA Times via Boston Globe, A11.
SACRAMENTO... - Guards opened fire on [unarmed] warring inmates in an exercise yard at Pelican Bay State Prison yesterday. One prisoner was killed and 12 were wounded.... The dead inmate, identified only as a Latino male, was the first to be shot to death by guards in nearly two years. No guards were injured.
Since it opened in 1989, billed as a triumph of high-tech prison architecture, the facility has been at the center of controversy. In 1995, a federal judge ordered a series of reforms after testimony in a class-action civil-rights lawsuit over brutality in the prison. At the time, guards had shot and killed [unarmed] prisoners engaged in fistfights....
"...If...it...was a riot [then] you can certainly fire. It's a matter of saving life," \said\ the state director of correction, Cal Terhune....
[Firing lethal rounds into a crowd of unarmed people and killing some as "a matter of saving life"?? The "cure" is worse than the disease.]

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