9/28/2002 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -
Film festival review - The Magdalene Sisters - Slave labor in Irish convents as terrible as prison, by Stephen Holden, NYT, A17.
Even though its setting isn't a penal institution but a convent, Peter Mullan's grim, powerful film "The Magdalene Sisters" fits snugly into a long line of heartsick dramas in which innocent people are thrown behind bars to endure the degradation of prison. The inmates, all female, are the victims of a stringently moralistic brand of Irish Catholicism, now on the wane, that used to punish unmarried young women (many in their teens) for premarital sex. Some are confined simply because their frightened puritanical families consider them too unruly.
These "bad girls" exiled from their families and communities, often after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, were forced to do slave labor in convent laundries that proliferated in Ireland until recently. The existence of these religious labor amps run by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order came to light only in the 1970s with the discovery of the unmarked graves of women who lived there.
[And we pointed fingers at the Gulag?]
After the scandal broke, the laundries were closed, the last in 1996. Some 30,000 women are thought to have passed through their gates.
[This on top of the child abuse scandals? As old Bill Staples used to say, "There have been more horrendous evils committed in the name of religion than anything else."]
Once incarcerated, the women were forced to toil long hours under close guard doing unpaid work that was deemed fitting penitence for their sins....
[Some religions are clearly better at creating hell on earth than heaven on earth.]
9/25/2002 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -
[We don't usually include death penalty debate on this page, preferring to stick with our platform of abolishing the death penalty but advocating a combination of no-parole life for capital cases and a tasteful do-it-yourself 'Kevorkian kit' in a niche in the wall of every lifer's cell. However, for substantial developments like the following, we make an exception -] Second ruling against U.S. death penalty - Vermont judge calls capital punishment law unconstitutional - A finding is called stronger than an earlier decision, by Pam Belluck, NYT, A14.
A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that the [new (1994)] federal death penalty law is unconstitutional, saying the law denies defendants' rights to due process. The judge, William Sessions III of the Federal District Court in Burlington, ruled that the law, which expanded the list of federal crimes that qualify for capital punishment, was incompatible with three recent Supreme Court decisions, including one in June that found juries rather than judges must make the crucial factual determinations to support a death penalty. Those decisions rigorously safeguard due process in a way that the "relaxed" standards of the federal death penalty law do not, Judge Sessions ruled.... "If the death penalty is to be part of our system of justice, due process of law and the fair trial guarantees of the Sixth Amendment require that standards and safeguards governing the kinds of evidence juries may consider must be rigorous...," Judge Sessions wrote.... Judge Sessions cited examples in the case before him, in which Donald Fell...is accused of kidnapping and fatally bludgeoning Teresca Ruth King...in Nov/2000 during a carjacking.... The judge said that prosecutors would not be allowed to introduce at trial a confession by Robert Lee, a man accused of being Mr. Fell's accomplice, because Mr. Lee is dead, having killed himself in prison, [though] under the federal law, that confession would be admissable during the sentencing phase..\..
Capital punishment legal experts said that [yester]day's ruling, while limited to the Vermont case, was likely to provide new ammunition for challenging death penalty cases across the country.... The ruling by Judge Sessions is the second time this year a federal judge has pronounced the federal death penalty law unconstitutional. In July, Judge Jed Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled that the increasing number of exonerations of death row inmates through DNA and other evidence made the death penalty "tantamount to foreseeable, state-sponsored murder of innocent human beings." But some legal experts said that Judge Sessions' decision was likely to be more significant, since it drew on specific provisions of the law...and sought to point out inconsistencies between it and Supreme Court decisions....
9/23/2002 1 prison item -
Calif. prisons ban inmates' pornography, Sacramento Bee via Boston Metro, 03.
California prison officials have taken away inmates' pornography because female prison guards complained that the material was "offensive."
[Why are there female guards in male prisons? If it's legal to segregate the inmates by sex, why aren't the guards so segregated?]
The guards complained the pornography inspired inmates to make suggestive comments at them and masturbate in front of them. Before the ban, only the most explicit of materials were barred.
9/21/2002 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -
28 inmates die in Domincan Republic riot, Reuters via NYT, A4.
...and as many as 100 were injured today when a mutiny at a prison near here resulted in a huge fire, officials said. The riot at the prison in La Vega, about 70 miles north of the capital, Santo Domingo, erupted in the morning when guards began a routine cell search and inmates resisted, authorities said. Prisoners set fire to mattresses and other objects, starting the blaze.... The prison...housed nearly 700 inmates.
9/20/2002 1 prison item -
Wrong inmate freed, Kansas City Star, A2.
YORK, Pa. - A 16-year-old was mistakenly released from prison instead of his father, who was supposed to be freed from the same facility. York County Prison officials meant to release Marty Boanes Sr. on Wednesday, but instead set free Marty Boanes Jr. The younger Boanes, who is charged with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment, had not been found by Thursday evening, police said. Marty Boanes Sr. was still released as scheduled.
["Your tax dollars at work."]
8/28/2002 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -
[Here's how America made it easier to earn a dishonest living than an honest one.] Study finds big increase in black men as inmates since 1980, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, A12.
[What a coincidence! Didn't NY Gov. Rockefeller start his mandatory-sentencing drug policy just before that?]
The number of black men in jail or prison has grown fivefold in the past 20 years, to the point where more black men are behind bars than are enrolled in colleges or universities, according to a study released yesterday.... The study found that in 2000 there were 791,600 black men in jail or prison and 603,032 enrolled in colleges or universities. By contrast, the study said that in 1980 there were 143,000 black men in jail or prison but 463,700 enrolled in colleges or universities..\..
The increase in the black male prison population coincides with the prison construction boom that began [in] 1980. At that time, 3 times more black men were enrolled in institutions of higher learning than behind bars, the study said.
The study did not directly address why.... Some experts suggested...drug offenses. But Justice Dept. figures show that from 1990 to 2000, 50% of the growth in inmate population at state prisons was for violent crimes, and that only 20% was for drug crimes..\..
[Either way, it all comes down to JOBS, and with a wage-shrinking, economy-waning global labor surplus, that all comes down to war or... SHARING the still-unrobotized work. And the most flexible, gradual, market-oriented way of doing that is Timesizing.]
The report was prepared by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based research and advocacy group that supports alternatives to incarceration....
During the prison-building boom of the last two decades, the number of Americans of all races in jail [city/county} or prison [state/federal] quadupled [just like our national debt!] to 2.1 million in 2000 [see 7/31/2002 #1 below] from 502,000 in 1980 [418% increase!], according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In that same period, the number of Americans of all races attending colleges and universities rose to 14.8m from 12.1m, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, an increase of [only] 22%.
[So prisons are "gaining market share" a lot faster than colleges. Maybe that's because prison is free and college costs a fortune. On the other hand, prison inmates cost taxpayers a fortune ($30k/inmate/yr) while college students cost taxpayers much less. Make up your mind, Americans. Maybe you should be making college free to individuals and prison costly. Depends what kind of makework program you want. Or, you could quit straining for sufficient makework to keep everybody spinning their wheels for 40+ hours a week and get back to sharework - quit straining to invent busywork and just share the vanishing still-unautomated human work. And the easiest way to do that - with training tied in - is Timesizing.]
8/27/2002 2 prison items -
The rich, and the rest, ...letter to editor by Dale Andersen, Ladera Ranch CA, NYT, A20.
So Elizabeth Grubman will do two months [probably in minimum-security prison] and some community service (news article, Aug. 24). She walks. No surprise. Which is why so many people have no confidence in the law.
If Lizzie were black, poor or lower middle class [or mentally ill - see item below] - in other words, one of us - there'd be no plea bargain....
[for example -] 110 wrongful convictions, and counting, editorial, NYT, A20.
Eddie Joe Jones has served 17 years of a life sentence for the rape and murder of a Detroit teenager.... The prosecution [had] heavy reliance on his confession. Mr. Lloyd was in a mental hospital and on medication when he confessed..\.. At his sentencing, the judge said he regretted that Michigan had no death penalty.... Rather than press for details that would have been known only to the killer - the proper way to ensure that a confession is legitimate - the police fed him information about the crime. In the end, all Mr. Lloyd's signed confession proved was that under pressure to solve a high-profile murder, the police could find a way to get a mentally ill man to take the rap..\..
But yesterday the same judge freed Mr. Lloyd after prosecutors and defense lawyers submitted DNA evidence exonerating him. Mr. Lloyd is the 110th person nationwide to be freed on DNA testing....
Every DNA reversal is a lesson in the problems with one prosecutorial tool or another. Witnesses are unreliable. Criminals will lie in exchange for lenient treatment. Mr. Lloyd's case shows that even a signed confession is not always what it seems.
And it provides further proof that the American justice system is imperfect at best, and frequently far too flawed to rely on capital punishment. In 1985 Mr. Lloyd's judge decried Michigan's lack of a death penalty, but its absence now appears to be all that prevented him from sentencing an innocent man to die.
8/26/2002 1 prison item -
What's news -...One in 32 U.S. adults, WSJ, front page.
...[3%!] was either behind bars or on probation or parole in 2001, according to the Justice Dept. That represents a 2.3% increase over 2000, to 6.6 million.
[Meaning that at the dawn of the Third Millennium in 2000, 6.45m US adults were either behind bars or on probation/parole. "Land of the free" indeed. We faced down the "Evil Empire" of the USSR and promptly took its place with the world's biggest prison population.]
Texas had the most, followed by California. From 1995 to 2001, the average annual increase was 3.6%.
8/18/2002 1 prison item -
Citing cost, judge rejects death penalty...- A ruling highlights a rarely acknowledged side of murder trials, by Adam Liptak, NYT, A12. [But what about the $30k/yr to keep 'em alive?}
A judge in a small poor Ohio county told prosecutors there this month that they could not seek the death penalty in the murder of a college student because the county's share of the defense costs would be too great. The decision, which experts say is the first of its kind, is a rare judicial acknowledgement of the powerful role money plays in death penalty cases.... Noting that such cases "require additional resources"..\..Judge Jeffrey Simmons of the Court of Common Pleas in Vinton County...added: "...The court finds that the potential impact of financial considerations could compromise the defendant's due process rights in a capital murder trial."
The defendant, Gregory McKnight, is accused of killing Emily Murray in 2000, [whose] body was discovered in [his] trailer.... Mr. McKnight...has also been charged with a second murder, in which the death penalty has not been sought. He was convicted of another killing as a juvenile in 1991 and served six years....
K. Robert Toy, who represents Mr. McKnight, said that his side's cost to try the case might amount to $75,000/ With appeals and other postconviction litigation, total defense costs could reach $350,000, Mr. Toy said. The state and county split defense costs roughly 50-50.... "What the judge is saying is that there's a death penalty in Ohio but not in Vinton County," said Joe Case, a spokesman for the attorney general's office....
"One of the tools of defense lawyers is to work the bank," \said\ Gregory Meyers, the chief counsel in the death penalty division of the state public defender's office.... "Sometimes you know darn well that what you're doing is grinding them down. There are many cases where, at the margin, a nondeath plea is on the table because of money." [However,] Ohio law contemplates life without parole as a possible sentence only where the death penalty is also in play....
[So basically, the financial structure of our "justice" system is going to let this entity out to kill again and again.]
8/11/2002 1 prison item -
White-collar criminal? Pack lightly for prison, by Russ Mitchell, NYT, 3-4.
...White-collar criminals serving less that 10 years may be sent to a prison camp, like this one in Bryan, Tex., with manicured grounds..\.. [photo caption]
...Congress has enacted legislation calling for doubled sentences.... Non-violent criminals convicted of financial felonies can [now] face years of even decades in prison, especially since November 2001, when the US Sentencing Commission drastically increased sentencs for white-collar crime, with special emphasis on frauds involving many millions of dollars.
Under the older sentencing guidelines, a first-time, nonviolent offender who committed a fraud that caused 50 or more people to lose $100m or more faced a prison sentence of 5 to 6.5 years in a federal institution.... Miichael Milken, the financier [was] sentenced to 10 years for securities fraud in 1990, for example.... {His sentence was later reduced, and he served 22 months.)..\..
Under the mathematical formula used by the Sentencing Commission in the 2001 guidelines, the same individual faces a minimum of 19.5 years and a maximum of 24.5 years.... Milken...could easily have received at least double [the 10-year] term under the 2001 guidelines.... (Federal parole has been abolished, and the best an inmate can hope for is a 15% reduction for good behavior.)
[What bothers us is that in neither case is there mention of all the person's ill-gotten gains being stripped from them - and more - and used in restitution to their victims, and without that, there is still a huge incentive to risk big fraud. And as we ponted out recently, Milken is ba-a-ack in the financial industry! See 7/25/2002 #3. There should be a total ban on the re-entry of these rule-dissers into their field of fraud or anywhere near it.]
Ten years is a critical threshold;
convicts sentenced to more than 10 years are placed in a prison behind fences and razor wire.
Less than 10, and you've got a good chance of residing at a prison camp, often fenceless, for inmates with low risk for escape or violence regardless of their crime.
[In short, you just get your wrists slapped, like Milken.]
...Those serving time for white-collar crimes number only about 1,000 of the federal system's 160,000 inmates, or less than 1%.... You can request a particular camp, and sometimes you'll succeed, particularly if you have a good lawyer.
[Which presumably you have the stolen millions to pay for, another injustice.]
..\..Most prisoners try to land themselves where their visitors won't have to travel far.... You might want to be near your ailing mother [notice the sympathetic, not to say admiring, reporting here - ed.], or be placed in a camp that serves special diets [which you, the poor allergy-probe prisoner, "need" - ed.]. You may be elderly or have special medical needs.
[Oh stop, stop - our hearts are bleeding for these poor victims of our cruel justice system. After all, aren't we supposed to grab all the money we can in any way we can in this society?!]
...You'll also want court permission to self-surrender, which means having family or friends drive you to the prison and leave you at the gate.
[So here we have another article that's leaving the opposite impression to that hinted at in its headline - this whole prison camp thing sounds like a bit of a lark, actually. We can hardly wait to start our little fraud career!]
Otherwise, you'll ride what convicted felons call the Super Shuttle from Hell: dressed in a jumpsuit, shackled, loaded on a van with up to 15 other prisoners, making stops at several prisons on a trip that could take hours or even days.
[Oh that would never happen to us - and the fact that there's a remote possibility that it could simply adds to the adventure.]
...Almost no personal property is allowed, not even contact lenses. Inmates are allowed only one religious text, one pair of eyeglasses, dentures and dental bridge, one solid wedding ring with no stones, $20 in change for vending machines and cash or money orders for an inmate account. An inmate can put unlimited funds in the account but is allowed to spend only $175 a month. Inmates can buy a small selection of athletic shoes, toiletries and snacks in the commissary, but most money is consumed in telephone calls, which are monitored. All prisoners are required to work, in jobs that pay 11 cents an hour - tax free.
[So Michael Moore is right. America could get much more efficient at military conversion - to the prison-industrial complex - just by laying off entire factory after entire factory of employees, and while the ex-employees are desperately turning to crime, convert each factory into a prison, then arrest all the former employees and set them back to work doing all their old jobs - at only 10 cents an hour pay. "Vut a country!"]
Because incidents of violence are likely to land camp residents in tougher prisons, the level of violence is low at most camps, though fights do break out. A lawyer who served a year on insider trading charges...said his camp's inmates included overflows from Wisconsin's state prison system. "We had a fair amount of gang problems with the Wisconsin people," he said. "...The beat [this one guy] up really bad."
Barry Minkow, who served 7.5 years after using his...carpet cleaning company to defraud investors, predicted that some inmates would try to "shake down" any big-name Wall Streeter who ends up in prison, for money or favors. "They'll tell them, you shook down investors, I'm going to shake you down; you better pay me to protect you," he said.... Mr. Minkow's advice: just say no. Usually, he said, that works....
The most productive way to serve your time, former inmates say, is self-improvement. Yes, several camps located at former military bases have tennis courts, now called "multi-use surfaces" that accommodate volleyball and basketball. Many inmates end up in better physical shape than their office careers ever allowed.
...Most camps have a library and, of course, there is plenty of time for reading and writing. Inmates can receive books by mail, although storage space is limited. They can subscribe to magazines, except those deemed pornographic...\..
[So they quash repro biodrugs but not exercise endorphins? Our insane and arbitrary drug policy permeates.]
Webster Hubbell, the associate attorney general in the first year of the Clinton administration who served an 18-month sentence, mostly at a camp in Cumberland, Md., for crimes related to the Whitewater scandal,...advises anyone serving time, particularly those with shorter sentences, to consider it a sabbatical. "Or look on it as a monastery, though without the Gregorian chants," he said....
[So "justice" in America is a two or three tiered system, and oriented dysfunctionally toward punishment rather than functionally toward Bucky Fuller's "Design OUT the possibility of recurrence." White financial crooks who steal millions or billions and hurt thousands or millions of people get tapped on the wrist while black people fingered for drug possession with no evidence but the say-so of someone trying to lighten their sentence get 20-30 years of confined exposure to violent people. See Bob Herbert's story on Tulia, below, 7/29/2002. See the cartoon on page 51 of the 7/29/2002 New Yorker magazine, where a guy in a tony bar full of suits holding cocktails says to another guy, "I'd rather be a huge part of the problem than a tiny part of the solution." Again, this is a society that has made earning a dishonest living much easier for many people than earning an honest one, despite being one of the most highly technologized societies, meaning rife with worksaving devices, on the planet. If we can't yet share the concentrated wealth initially because of the disincentive to the divested and the parasitification of the beneficiaries, we can at least share the vanishing and concentrating human employment as the robots assume more and more of it. That means cutting the workweek gradually as far as it takes to recover our unemployment-deactivated markets by spreading the work and spending power across our entire population. That means retraining our executives and managers to focus on schedule-suturing and cross-training &/or retraining itself. That means something very like Timesizing.]
8/10/2002 note the cover article in today's Economist magazine -
Too many convicts, pointer summary, 3.
America believes in incarceration. In relation to population [ie: per capita], it has five times more prisoners that Britain, Europe's keenest jailer. Advocates say it cuts crime. This is debatable, and the reliance on prison is questionable in other ways too: leader, page 9. Behind the numbers, pages 25-27.
8/07/2002 1 prison item -
Congressional privilege, letter to editor by policy analyst Patricia Allard of the Sentencing Project of DC, NYT, A26.
People like former Rep. James Traficant...sentenced to 8 years in prison for bribery and kickbacks (news article, July 31), can continue to receive their Congressional pensions. But an ordinary citizen convicted of a felony drug offense for possession of $5 worth of drugs becomes permanently ineligible for cash assistance and food stamps regardless of any of his or her rehabilitative efforts.
Under the 1996 welfare "reform" law [our quotes - ed.], people convicted of a felony drug offense are subject to a lifetime ban on receiving welfare benefits. It was also in 1996 that lawmakers rejected a proposal to end tax-subsidized Congressional pensions for members of Congress convicted of a felony. This 2-tier system of punishment gives new meaning to our notion of injustice.
[Congress seems determined to make it easier for Americans to make a dishonest living than an honest one despite our army of robots - hence our world's biggest prison population of 2.1 million (see 7/31/2002 #1 below).]
8/04/2002 1 prison item -
What could be worse than solitary confinement? Just taste this - In New York [state] prisons, hard time extends to mealtime for chronic troublemakers, by Matthew Purdy, NYT, A20.
Prison wardens everywhere have a menu of sanctions for inmates who break rules - loss of recreation, loss of phone privileges, solitary confinement. In New York [State], the final item on the menu is the Loaf.... A spokesman for the Dept. of Correctional Services, Jim Flateau, says that the Loaf is ordered when "there's nothing left to take away," and that it is part of a disciplinary system that has led to record low rates of inmate violence. \The Loaf\ is three one-pound loaves a day made of flour, milk, yeast, sugar and lesser amounts of margarine, salt and shredded carrots and potatoes. Plus there's a side order of cabbage. One cup, raw. And water.... Said..\..Wilfredo Rodriguez, who has racked up dozens of infractions in prison \and filed a\ lawsuit \against\ the restricted diet..."The cabbage is really smelly."
..\..The restricted diet is used as a last resort for inmates already locked in disciplinary housing for 23 hours a day, who commit serious offenses like attacking correction officers or milder infractions like disobeying their orders.... It can be imposed on inmates who commit food-related infractions, those who throw urine or feces, or who are chronic troublemakers..\..
The diet is often imposed for just a few days, but sometimes for weeks, with inmates served the Loaf for 7 consecutive days and regular food for 2....
However antiquated the Loaf may sound, the number of NY State inmates on it is growing, to 478 last year from 363 in 1999. Last week, 36 inmates were on the Loaf.
[So how is it decreasing rates of inmate violence if its use is increasing?]
Florida's policy is similar to New York's but other states and federal prisons prohibit using food for discipline. In Texas and Pennsylvania, food cooked into a loaf is used [only] as a security measure for inmates who throw trays or utensils.... The American Correctional Assoc., which accredits prisons, "precludes the use of food as a disciplinary measure" in its standards. But the food rule is voluntary, and NY's prisons are accredited despite the restricted diet....
[Good God, are prisons colleges that need "accrediting"?! Licensing yes, accrediting no.]
7/31/2002 2 prison items -
[first the 'good' news] 1% increase in U.S. inmates is lowest rate in 3 decades, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, A14.
The nation's prison population grew last year at the lowest rate since 1972 and had the smallest numerical increase since 1979, before the prison boom began, according to a report issued yesterday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.... Altogether, there were 2.1 million Americans in state and federal prisons or in local jails at the end of 2001, the report said.
[Giving the 'Land of the Free' the biggest prison population in the world.]
The "small" rise in the number of inmates for the whole year, "only" 1.1% [our quotes - ed.], comes at a time when crime began to grow again, after a decade of declining....
[Oops, this was supposed to be the good news.]
[then the bad news] California: Soaring costs for guards, AP via NYT, A14.
It could take the Dept. of Corrections until 2009 to resolve a chronic shortage of prison guards, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in overtime, the state auditor has found.
[Well it couldn't happen to a more deserving state, the state that influenced so much of our crime, violence and concentrated wealth with its 'entertainment' output.]
Overtime costs exceeded $110m in the first half of the last fiscal year. The audit said the state's new contract with the guards' union would cost about $518m a year within 5 years.
7/29/2002 1 prison item -
[another true story from 'the Land of the Free' -] Kafka in Tulia - A big injustice in a small Texas town, op ed by Bob Herbert, NYT, A23.
Tulia is a hot dusty town of 5,000 on the Texas Panhandle, about 50 mi. south of Amarillo.... On the morning of July 23, 1999, law enforcement officers fanned out and arrested more than 10% of Tulia's tiny African-American population. Also arrested were a handful of whites who had relationships with blacks.... They were all drug traffickers...said the sheriff...Larry Stewart.
Among the 46 so-called traffickers were a pig farmer, a forklift operator and a number of ordinary young women with children.... None of them had any money to speak of. And when they were arrested, they didn't have any cocaine. No drugs, money or weapons were recovered during the surprise roundup....
The first convictions came quickly, and the sentences left the town's black residents aghast. One of the few white defendants...was sentenced to more than 300 years in prison. The hog farmer...was sentenced to 90 years. ...A [young] black man was sentenced to 60 years. And so on. When the defendants awaiting trial saw this extreme sentencing trend, they began...to plead guilty in exchange for lighter sentences. These ranged from 18 years in prison to, in some cases, just probation.
It is not an overstatement to describe the events in Tulia as an atrocity.
The entire operation was the work of a single police officer who claimed to have conducted an 18-month undercover operation. The arrests were made solely on the word of this officer, Tom Coleman, a white man with a wretched work history, who routinely referred to black people as "niggers" and who frequently found himself in trouble with the law.
Mr. Coleman's alleged undercover operation [included] no other police officers to corroborate his activities. He did not wear a wire or conduct any video surveillance. And he did not keep detailed records of his alleged drug buys. He said he sometimes wrote such important information as the names of suspects and the dates of transactions on his leg. In trial after trial, prosecutors put Mr. Coleman on the witness stand and his uncorroborated, unsubstantiated testimony [sent] people to prison for decades. In [one] instance...charges had to be dropped when [an accused woman's] lawyers proved that she had cashed a check in Oklahoma City at the time that she was supposed to have been selling drugs to Mr. Coleman in Tulia. Another defendant...was able to prove - through employee time sheets and his boss's testimony - that he was working at the time he was alleged by Mr. Coleman to have been selling cocaine. And the local district attorney, Terry McEachern, had to dismiss the case against a man...after it was learned that Mr. Coleman had described him as a tall black man with bushy hair [while he is actually] 5-foot-6 and bald.
...This case [should] be no more than a spoof on "Saturday Night Live." Instead it's a tragedy with no remedy in sight. [A number of non-profit agencies] are trying to mount an effort to free the men and women imprisoned in this fiasco. The [fact] that people could be rounded up and sent away for what are effectively lifetime terms solely on the word of a "police officer" [our quotes - ed.] like Tom Coleman is insane.
[Shades of the "spectral evidence" of the witch trials at Salem in the 1690s. Shades of the nationwide red scare of 1919-20, the McCarthy campaign in the early 50s, and soon, on your doorstep in "America the Free," neighborly snoops participating in the amorphous "war" on terrorism. Thus a great nation brings itself down, and "the first becomes last."]
7/27/2002 1 prison item -
A growing gap in American democracy - Disenfranchisement of former felons has to end, op ed by Sasha Abramsky, NYT, A23.
Two years ago the world watched as officials in Florida struggled to explain the mishaps and shoddy practices that had denied thounsands of Floridians a chance to vote. They...neglected a critical part of the problem: over half a million Florida residents had been prevented from voting by a state law that permanently disenfranchises almost anyone ever convicted of a felony, even those who haven't committed a crime since serving their terms, have jobs and are paying taxes. For like many Southern states, Florida had cemented felony disenfranchisement into its constitution in the post-Civil War years, when legislators were using any means to keep the vote in white hands....
[followup] Florida's Jim Crow law, letter to editor by Exec. Dir. Howard Simon of Fla. ACLU in Miami, NYT, A22.
...In Florida, the state with the largest number of disenfranchised citizens, democratic reform will not come through the legislature. This year, all 4 bills to provide for automatic restoration of voting rights for ex-felons died in committee. ...African-Americans mak[e] up almost half of the disenfranchised voters in Florida.... Gov. Jeb Bush...continue[s to] resist...automatic restoration of voting rights.
[Presumably out of fear that all these disenfranchised blacks would vote Democratic against him.]
Unless there is relief from the federal courts, Florida's approximately 600,000 disenfranchised citizens await the work of those willing to undertake a ballot initiative to amend our Constitution and restore their civil and voting rights.
[Better get started on that ballot initiative, and while you're at it, make the initiative and referendum process easier.]
7/23/2002 1 prison item -
Avoiding a wasted life, letter to editor by Howard Josepher of NYC, NYT, A22.
Reading "The ruinous drug laws," by Bob Herbert [see 7/18 below], I couldn't help but reflect upon my own experience as a drdug abuser facing a prison sentence 35 years ago. This was before the enactment of the Rockefeller drug laws, and the NY State Supreme Court justice used his discretion to mandate me into drug treatment.
Treatment worked for me, and I went on to obtain a degree in social work and have, since then, helped thousands of people like me overcome their addictions.
[Howard is exec. dir. of Exponents, a non-profit organization that helps people with drug problems and AIDS.]
If the Rockefeller laws had been in effect back then, the court would have had no choice but to send me to prison for 5 years, most likely resulting in another wasted life. I made something of myself, and I can only hope that others be given the same opportunity. It's time to modernize our drug laws.
[Hear, hear!]
7/21/2002 2 prison items -
Addicted to prisons, letter to editor by Pres. Vincent Schiraldi of Justice Policy Institute of DC, NYT, Week 12.
Re "The ruinous drug laws," by Bob Herbert [see below, 7/18]:
On the same day that Mr. Herbert argues for abolishing New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws, you report [on] a survey that found that while drug use nationally among teenagers is at an 8-yr low, drug use among teens increased in New York last year.
If New York is seeing an increase in drug use among its youth, despite the fact that a higher percentage of its incoming prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses than any state but New Jersey, perhaps it means that prisons are the wrong prescription for curing drug abuse.
[As we always said, let's learn from the failure of Prohibition and the success of the campaign against smoking and decriminalize drugs. Lifestyle regulation works best when it's merely a matter of gradual taxation, not impatient and absolutist criminalization.]
The Rockefeller drug laws are proving both unfair and ineffective. It's time for New York [and the rest of the nation!] to kick its addiction to prisons and return sentencing discretion to judges, where it belongs.
["Addiction to prisons" - we love it!]
The points that prisoners can make - On Rikers Island, manufacturing weapons from just about anything is an astonishing craft, by former officer Ted Conover of Sing Sing, NYT Magazine, 18.
Stolen from kitchen or infirmary. Broken off bunk frame or pried from Plexiglas desk cover. Secreted inside show or between belly and elastic waistband and spirited through ineffective metal detectors. Rubbed, then, for hours and hours and hours against cement floor or brick wall until able to slice or pierce: a weapon [or "shank"] now exists where before there was none.
Abstracted from their original context of gritty Rikers Is. cellblock...shanks...show the craft and creativity spawned by inmate anger, spite and fear. Some prisons are full of inmate weapons hidden inside mattresses, under sand in the exercise yard, in crevices or window ledges. [They] are...confiscated by corrections officers when found during routine pat frisks, cell searches or (seldom) after a fight.
Most often, shanks ("shivs" is an older slang term) are not used to murder or to be flourished in flashy knife battles or to coerce weak inmates into sex, as movies would have it. They are used to conduct the business of gangs, usually by quietly "sticking"...debtors, turncoats, rivals in the back, buttocks or leg or by slicing them on the head to teach them some kind of lesson. Typically, the shank is then passed from the assailant to a confederate; prison officers find only blood on the floor and a wounded inmate who won't name his attacker, who insists it was "an accident," because he knows that ratting out his assailant will only make it worse next time.... When gang power in prison is in dispute, tit-for-tat stabbings can be a daily occurrence....
7/18/2002 1 prison item -
The ruinous drug laws - Three decades of unfairness in sentencing, op ed by Bob Herbert, NYT, A23.
...There is plenty that is wrong [when] Andre Neverson, a mortal threat to anyone he encounters, does just five years for shooting a man five times \and, released,\ last week...shot his own sister to death...., while Kenia Tatis, a nonviolent [suppposed] narcotics offender with no prior criminal record \and\ a mother of three...does a staggering 15 years to life..\.. No drugs were found in her possession when she was arrested, but she was convicted at a trial in which a woman testified against her in return for a lighter sentence for herself....
[What a rotten "system." This is no better than the "spectral evidence" at the Salem witch trials in which the government murdered 19 innocent people three centuries ago.]
How about a dose of sanity? After 29 futile and tragic [and expensive] years, it is time to bring the curtain down on the institutionalized cruelty of the Rockefeller drug laws. There is no way to justify sentencing nonviolent low-level drug offenders [even if they are guilty - ed.] to prison terms that are longer than those served by some killers and rapists....
[David Rockefeller, another rich boy who could safely insulate himself from the negative consequences of any bad decisions he made = not a feedback system. We need a functional $$ centrifuge. We need it badly and we need to repeatedly improve it. The first five steps are the five phases of the Timesizing program, which "incidentally" makes it easier for all Americans to earn an honest living, rather than our current "system" which makes it easer for many Americans to earn a dishonest living. Witness our 2,000,000 fellow Americans in prison, one of every 10 black American men. "Land of the Free" - what a joke.]
7/10/2002 1 prison item -
County will ask voters to continue jail tax, staff reports, Arizona Republic, B3.
The Maricopa County [Ariz.] Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to notify the public that it plans to ask voters whether to continue a one-fifth-cent sales tax for jail facilities in the Nov. 5 general election. Voters approved the tax in 1998, and it's set to expire by 2007. The $900m raised is being spent on new adult and juvenile facilities. If extended, the tax would be in place for another 20 years....
[Another example of spreading direct democracy that is gradually doing an end-run around the whole corrupt mess in the U.S. Congress.]
7/06/2002 1 prison-alternative item -
Alternatives to jail can be hard labor or stroll in the park, by Robert Worth, NYT, front page.
...Last year, some 65,000 people were sentenced to community service in New York City for offenses like shoplifting, drunken driving, and possessing marijuana. But not all community service sentences are the same.
Choose [the wrong card] and you could do your time scraping human feces off the concrete beneath the Harlem River Drive overpasses.
If you're lucky, you could [be] stuffing envelopes and sipping tea at the charity of your choice.
You're [advised to] arriv[e] punctually for your appointment with..\..Ellen Castillo, who is in charge of community service sentencing in the Manhattan DA's office...or one of her coworkers, who are charged with signing you up for menial labor in the city's parks, highways and subways, and making sure that you do it. They will try to accommodate your preferences, so be ready to voice them.
Whatever you do, avoid something called "homeless removal." This involves dismantling the temporary shelters along the highway put up by homeless people (the police remove the people) and cleaning the areas they have been using as latrines....
[Followup] Better than jail time, letter to editor by Ellen Simpson of Austin TX, NYT, A24.
...In May I visited Manhattan for the first time in 30 years. Memories from my teenage years including mountains of garbage from workers' strikes, smog that left your skin gritty, awful smells from the rivers and streets awash in trash.
To my surprise, NYC is now clean!
It wasn't until a Sunday morning stroll down Fifth Avenue to Madison Square Park that I realized why. Two young men, obviously unhappy with their chore, were sweeping the park. It occurred to me that they were probably doing community service. I regretted not telling them that I appreciated their work,, even if they weren't happy about it. The efforts of those serving their sentences by keeping the streets and parks cleaned up have made a profound effect.
7/03/2002 1 mostly prison item -
The court's troubling term, editorial, NYT, A18.
...In decision after decision this term, the [Supreme] Court, often by a 5-to-4 majority, pushed the law rightward.
[and backward - though leftward would also have been backward. Both the old 'left' and 'right' are irrelevant to the needs of the future.]
[first some general degradation following on the GOP's shortsighted jump into bed with the "religious right" in the 1980 campaign]
..\..The voucher case was undeniably the bombshell of the court's 2001-2002 term.... The court tried to minimize what it was doing, but by upholding a program in which 96% of the participants attend religious schools, the court removed a number of bricks from the wall separating church and state.... [We thought conservatives wanted to protect the Constitution, not weaken it. This is radical.]
[now the prison-related stuff]
It narrowed 4th Amendment search-and-seizure protections, backing random drug tests for students who participate in any extracurricular activity, even - as in the case before it - choir. [We thought conservatives wanted more freedom, not less.]
It watered down the 5th Amendment, upholding a treatment program that forced prisoners to confess their crimes or be placed in a maximum-security facility. [These bogus 'conservatives' here weaken the Constitution and push for less freedom.]
And it [watered down] further...what constitutes "effective assistance of counsel" under the 6th Amendment, affirming a death sentence for a defendant whose court-appointed lawyer once represented the murder victim in an unrelated case.
The conservative majority showed a disturbing inclination to side with...private prisons over abused inmates, ruling that a private prison cannot be sued for imposing cruel and unusual puniishment on its inmates. ["Private prison" is an oxymoron, and cheaping out of the responsibility and directness of public prisons is a significant accelerant in America's self-propulsion toward the dustbin of history. But then it was the failure of the liberals that made this all possible. Jimmy Carter had a perfect opportunity in the late 70s to move us beyond, but neither he nor the rest of the liberals had moved beyond the failed New Deal, whose appearance of success was due entirely to the War. So we got stuck in a burgeoning maximum of stifling detailed controls and programs and regulations, and never asked, what's the stable minimum of liberating general rules - what's the single all-sufficient control that can supercede all or most others? We never discovered Timesizing.]
7/02/2002 1 prison/crime story -
Crime falls in [NY] city, but rises sharply elsewhere in New York [state], by David Halbfinger, NYT, A17.
Though the crime rate continues to slide in New York City, the number of homicides, rapes and robberies rose sharply outside the five boroughs [Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Staten Is.] last year, particularly in a few upstate cities, according to new statistics recently posted on the Internet by state officials....
A single city - Buffalo - is almost entirely responsible for the striking change in the number of homicides outside NYC, which jumped to 266 from 233. Spurred by a record 19 killings in May 2001, Buffalo recorded 64 homicides last year, up from 39 in 2000.... Buffalo also had a 30% surge in rapes, to 229 last year from 176 in 2000.... In Syracuse meanwhile, robberies jumped by 25% to 567m while motor vehicle thefts climbed 15.8% to 901.... The Niagara County sheriff, Thomas Beilein, reported earlier this month that major crimes increased 23% last year, with larcenies up 34%..\..
More broadly, criminologists have cited the bleak economic picture in much of upstate and western New York as a factor in the region's crime troubles, which have affected Lockport, Niagara Falls, and other parts of Niagara County, among other places....
[It is entirely within our power to make it much easier to earn an honest living than a dishonest one. All we have to do is respond to technological efficiency with timesizing, not downsizing - cutting hours, not jobs.]
6/30-7/01/2002 2 prison stories -
7/01 Russia glances to the West for its new legal code - Russia getting a Western-style legal code today that protects rights of defendants, by Steven Myers, NYT, front page.
...On Monday, Russia will adopt a new legal code that governs the prosecution of criminal cases and protects the rights of those accused.... Anyone accused of a crime must now appear in court within 48 hours, codifying the concept of habeas ccrpus into Russia's system.... As of Monday, defendants may demand a lawyer from the moment they are arrested.... The code enshrines the fundamental concept of presumption of innocence and gives new responsibilities - and, in theory, independence - to judges, while it will gradually strip prosecutors of the enormous powers they have wielded over almost every step of any prosecution, from arrest to trial. Defense lawyers will have the right to challenge the admissability of evidence, throwing out, among other things, evidence collected by wiretaps without a warrant.
The changes spelled out in Russia's revised Criminal Procedural Code represent one of the most dramatic of the reforms pushed by Pres. Vladimir Putin, who has repeatedly vowed to break the legal, economic and social practices of the Soviet Union by establishing what he has called a "dictatorship of law." The code...replaces one written in 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev ruled the Soviet Union....
Supporters say the new code will bring order and fairness to the dispensation of justice. They say it should reduce unwarranted arrests, thereby easing overcrowding in Russia's notoriously abysmal prisons, where there are today nearly 1 million prisoners....
[So if there are only 1m inmates in Russia, how come the articles last year said the USA was second to Russia in number of inmates when the USA has 2m? Looks like the USA is #1 after all - in number of its own citizens incarcerated. "Land of the Free" - ha! We're worse than Russia.]
6/30 Secrecy of Japan's executions is criticized as unduly cruel, by Howard French, NYT, front page.
...Each year, around the year's end or early spring depending on the prison, a handful of inmates are led from their cells and hanged. What does not vary is the policy of near total secrecy that the families of the executed and human rights groups say makes Japan's practice of capital punishment unnecessarily cruel.
Prisoners are told of their execution only moments before their hanging, and are given only enough time to clean their cells, write a final letter and receive last rites. Relatives are told of the executionn only after the fact and are given a mere 24 hours to collect the body. Adding to the secrecy, the Ministry of Justice refuses to release the names of the hanged, except to their relatives, or even to confirm the number of prisoners on death row, which human rights lawyers now estimte at 56.
Because it typically executes only 5-6 prisoners each year, Japan has managed to keep a relatively low profile with international campaigners against the death penalty. The UN Human Rights Commission, however, has condemned Japan's secretive executions....
[Of course, Americans can't even find out about Vice President Cheney's secret meetings with Enron crooks to frame the nation's energy policy.]
6/28/2002 1 prison story -
High court bans 'hitching posts' - Ala. prison punishment called cruel, by Mark Niessen, AP via Arizona Republic, A2.
The US Supreme Court outlawed the Alabama prison practice of chaining disruptive inmates to outdoor "hitching posts." calling it cruel and unusual punishment.... Alabama revived the practice in 1995 as part of a get-tough program for criminals but abandoned it in 1998..\..
Justice John Stevens, writing for the majority in Thursday's 6-3 decision, said the practice "unnecessarily and wantonly inflicted pain."... The ruling made it clear that prison guards across the nation can be sued for such conduct, even if they are just following orders. As many as 400 inmates in Alabama can now sue their guards and get a jury trial on claims they were mistreated, said attorney Craig Jones, who represents Larry Hope, the inmate whose case reached the Supreme Court....
6/14/2002 1 prison story -
Prison rights and wrongs, editorial, BG, A26.
It's a given that prisons are filled with men and women of bad judgment. But prison policymakers don't have a lock on reason either. Two current prison issues point to unsafe and unsound thinking on the part of the [Mass.] state Dept. of Correction and the [US] House of Representatives.
The Dept. is attempting to place severe restrictions on the media's access to prisoners.... Correction officials want to deny access to the media that it grants to other visitors.... By singling out the media...correction officials trample on First Amendment rights while simultaneously signaling they have something to hide....
Another foolish prison provision is found in the House budget. The so-called "pay-to-stay" amendment would require prisoners to pay $5 a day over the course of their incarceration. Earning opportunities are limited in lockup, so the charges would follow prisoners out the door, where up to 25% of their future wages could be attached.... Many prisoners are wrapping up sentences incurred during the zero-tolerance policies of the 1990s. Work-release and parole programs are minimal.... Most leave with no significant job training. Some have nowhere to go but homeless shelters [which are already bulging - ed.]. Adding thousands of dollars of debt to the task of finding housing and jobs is senseless and only undermines efforts at reintegration.
[Plus it prolongs the sentence much longer than the judge and parole board decree, which should be unconstitutional. Plus the very idea of "pay to stay" implies they have the option of leaving, which they don't.]
6/03/2002 2 prison stories -
Study shows building prisons did not prevent repeat crimes - An experiment to get tough on criminals appears not to have worked as planned, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, A11.
The rate at which inmates released from state prisons commit new crimes rose from 1983 to 1994, a time when the number of people behind bars doubled, according to a Justice Dept. study released yesterday..\.. Convicts who were released from prison in 1994 were [5%] more likely to commit new crimes than convicts released a decade earlier....
Inmates job opportunities, revenues hit by economic slump, Kyodo News 06/02/02 23:07 EDT via AOLNews.
TOKYO...- Prison inmates' employment opportunities have been severely hit by the prolonged economic slump in Japan, with sales and revenues of goods produced by them falling, according to a Justice Ministry report. The number of inmates engaged in such work grew to some 51,000 at the end of fiscal 2001, from 35,700 in fiscal 1992, including about 31,000 prisoners now involved in subcontracted work such as carpentry, dressmaking and metal processing, said the report by the ministry's Corrections Bureau....
Prisoners who serve terms requiring labor must work 40 hours a week, making it impossible to promote work sharing, in which the same job is shared and working hours reduced, ministry officials said....
For earlier prison stories, click on the desired date -
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