Prisons - 1-4/03

PrisonWatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

Prison stories - January-April/2003

4/24/2003 1 sort-of prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal or NY Times -

Pull the plug [on] the death penalty - [It] isn't fair, and it can't be fixed, by Bob Herbert, NYT, A31.
[We usually avoid death penalty stories, but this one is such a good summary -]
Delma Banks Jr. had eaten his last meal, and in a controlled panic, was starting to count off the final 10 minutes of his life when word came last March 12 that his execution was being postponed because the Supreme Court might want to review his case.
Last Monday [April 21] the court decided that yes, it would hear Mr. Banks's appeal. This should throw a brighter spotlight on a case that embodies many of the important things that are wrong with the death penalty in the United States...-
- There is no good evidence that Mr. Banks, who was accused of killing a 16-year-old boy in a small town in Texas in 1980, is guilty. A complete reading of the record, including facts uncovered during his appeals, shows that he is most likely innocent.
- There is irrefutable evidence of gross prosecutorial misconduct. The key witnesses against Mr. Banks were hard-core drug addicts who had much to gain from lying.
  - One was a paid informer,
  - and the other was a career felon who was told tha a pending arson charge would dropped if he performed "well" while testifying against Mr. Banks.
  The special incentives given to the two men for their testimony were improperly concealed by prosecutors.
- Both witnesses have since recanted.
- ...As in so many capital cases, the race issue runs through this one like a fatal virus. Mr. Banks, who had no prior criminal record and has steadfastly proclaimed his innocence, is black. The victim, the prosecutors and all the carefully selected jurors were white.... ["So many capital cases"?] A study on race and the death penalty...released today by Amnesty International notes...: "Since 1976, blacks have been 6-7 times more likely to be murdered than whites, with the result that blacks and whites are the victims of murder in about equal numbers. Yet 80% of the more than 840 people put to death in the USA since [then] were convicted of crimes involving white victims, compared to the 13% who were convicted of killing blacks," [thus indicating] that the criminal justice system "places a higher value on white life than on black life."
- ...Three former federal judges, including William Sessions, a former director of the FBI...wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief, "...The district court found, and the court of appeals agreed, that Mr. Banks received ineffective assistance from his lawyer, at least in the penalty phase of his trial."
None of these issues mattered to the state of Texas, which was ready and oh-so-willing to kill this man at 6 pm on March 12, and is still ready and willing to do so. When state officials have no qualms about executing people even though there are clear doubts about their guilt [both key witnesses have since recanted, for Gawdsake!] and about whether they have been treated fairly by the justice system, it's time to bring the curtain down on their ability to execute anyone..\..
It is time to pull the plug on the death penalty in the United States. Shut it down. It is never going to work properly. There are too many passions and prejudices involved (and far too many incompetent lawyers, prosecutors, judges and jurors) for it ever to be administered with any consistent degree of fairness and justice....
Lying witnesses. Lousy lawyers. Corrupt prosecutors. Racism.
The death penalty is broken and can't be fixed. [Let's] get rid of it.
[And good followup - here's one state that's moving in the right direction -]
Illinois keeps a moratorium on executions, AP via NYT, A24.
SPRINGFIELD, Ill...- Gov. Rod Blagojevich [Dem.] said today that he would continue his predecessor's moratorium on executions and would not automatically lift it even if the General Assembly sent him a package of bills intended to eliminate wrongful convictions.... Gov. George Ryan [Repub.] stopped executions more than 3 years ago after several men were released from death row when new evidence cleared them. In January, right before leaving office, Mr. Ryan emptied death row, pardoning four men he said he believed were innocent and commuting the death sentences of 167 others to life in prison....
[Now, to give the lifers more control and maybe save taxpayers some money, all that's lacking is a do-it-yourself Kevorkian kit set like an inconspicuous icon in the wall of every cell on death row. There's nothing like a daily pro-life decision ("pro-life" in the original real sense!) to enhance your quality of life, in whatever circumstances you may be living it. As Castaneda's don Juan Matus says, "Make death your advisor - your own death. There's nothing like for clearing the crap out of your life." Or as others have said, "Plan as if you'll live forever. Live as if each day's your last."]

4/19-21/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal or NY Times -

4/20 The silencing of Gideon's trumpet - Forty years ago, the Supreme Court found that the Constitution guaranteed the right to a lawyer - Maybe the Bush administration hasn't read the decision, by Anthony Lewis, NYT Mag, 50.
Forty-one years ago, a poor, isolated prisoner in Florida, the least influential of Americans, wrote a letter to the Supreme Court - a letter in pencil, on lined prison paper - claiming that he had been wrongly denied the right to a lawyer when he was convicted. The Supreme Court agreed to hear his case and found that the Constitution required counsel to be provided in all serious criminal cases for defendants too poor to hire their own. Clarence Earl Gideon would have a new trial, this time with a lawyer. The new jury found him not guilty....
Why does the dream of the Gideon decision - the dream of a country in which every person charged with crime will be capably defended - remain just...a dream?... This country differs from all other Western countries in its attitude toward crime and criminals.... We are tough on crime [or as] critics might [say,] "brutal." American prisons tend to be more unpleasant than they are elsewhere; sentences, much longer.
[and incarceration rates and expenses much higher = evidence that America, despite its triumphalism, is a backwards nation, a retard, in terms of social progress and human evolution.]
And of course, we impose the death penalty, which has been abandoned everywhere else in the trans-Atlantic world as a savage relic. ...There is no doubt that the harsh view exists, exacerbated by politicians, starting with Richard Nixon and his "war on crime."
[and NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller]
Manifestations of this harshness are widespread.
- The US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit recently approved the involuntary administration of antipsychotic drugs to a death-row inmate so he could be made sane enough to be executed.
- Then there was the prosecutor who argued that an execution should proceed even if the prisoner were to offer last-minute DNA evidence of his innocence....
- In two cases now before the courts, Atty Gen. John Ashcroft is asserting that pResident Bush has the power to detain any American citizen indefinitely, in solitary confinement, without access to a lawyer, if he, the pResident, designates the detainee an "enemy combatant." The detainee cannot effectively challenge that designation. A court may hold a habeas corpus proceeding, but the government need produce only its own assertions of evidence, not subject to cross-examination. "Some evidence" will suffice - that is, any evidence, however unchecked and second-hand. That is the claim being made by the law officers of the United States....
[The USA, despite hidden deterioration in its own economy, outlasted the Evil Empire and then began to look more and more like that Evil Empire with a huge expansion in America's prison-industrial complex and prison population. Now the USA, despite obvious deterioration in its economy and inadequacy of its economic assumptions, has invaded, "pre-emptive" to no found weapons of mass destruction, a religious-fundamentalist land ruled by torturers - and is beginning to look more and more like that religious land. Thanks for this article, Anthony. Keep "firing" as long as you can.]
4/21 Right to remain silent meets politics of protest, by Joyce Purnick, NYT, A22.
...Hundreds of..\..peace demonstrators...were arrested in New York during the political demonstrations over the past 2 months and asked [by detectives] about their political activities; their answers were entered into a database.
When the practice came to light, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly defended it as constitutional and legal. But - obviously embarrassed - he stopped it, said he hadn't known about it and ordered the database destroyed....
[...but not necessarily without copying to another database...? America unravels further....]
[So, the US economy languishes for lack of consumers, while the wealthy make it easier and easier to deactivate consumers by incarceration. And once they're in lockup -]
4/21 Inmates' claims of widespread beatings persist five years later, by John Sullivan, NYT, A21.
Helen Artis, who was a corrections officer at Bayside State Prison [Leesburg NJ], said that officers, determined to "get someone," beat a prisoner [any prisoner]. [photo caption]
Wilbur Jones said he as beaten without provocation by officers at Bayside State Prison, then charged with refusing to follow orders and put in solitary confinement. [photo caption]
Adrian Torres described being made to kneel, motionless, for hours, after a corrections officer was killed at Bayside State Prison. Prisoners who moved were beaten, he said. [photo caption]

4/15/2003 2 prison stories, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

Alabama: 70 inmates moved to Louisiana, by Dana Beyerle, NYT, A16.
...to ease crowding in the Tutwiler Prison for Women..\.. The Corrections Dept. transferred 70 women to a private lockup in Louisiana...the private South Louisiana prison in Basile..\... They might be there up to 60 days..\.. The Prison is under a federal court order to reduce the inmate population....
[See previous article on 12/03/2002.]
County says it's too poor to defend the poor, by Adam Liptak, NYT, front page.
MARKS, Miss.- ...Quitman County is suing the state because it says it cannot afford to provide defendants with anything more than assembly-line justice. Mississippi is among a handful of states that provide no money for the defense of the indigent in noncapital cases. The lawsuit, which will go to trial..\..here in Marks, the [county] seat...is in its way a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, which held that poor people accused of serious crimes are entitled to legal representation paid by the government....
[Another unfunded mandate. More and more evidence that we should have just let the backward South go instead of killing more of us in the Civil War than in all previous American wars put together to force the South to stay in the Union. Dixie would have been embarrassed out of slavery by now anyway, just as South Africa was.]

4/14/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

Straitjackets on judges, editorial, NYT, A22.
Just when we should be reducing unfairness in the nation's criminal justice system, Congress is moving in the opposite direction. Last week, lawmakers approved provisions that will prevent federal judges from using their discretion to give prison terms that are shorter than those prescribed by federal sentencing guidelines. The changes were tagged onto the Amber Alert bill that creates a national notification system for child abductions.
The amendment will further confine the already sharply limited choices federal judges now have in sentencing -
- a point that Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts
- and Patrick Leahy of Vermont underscored in the course of their vain but valiant attempt to block the provisions.
- Chief Justice Wm. Rehnquist, hardly a coddler of criminals, warned members of Congress that limiting judicial sentencing power along these lines "would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and responsible sentences."
[Too late. The Republican majority already has too much stock in the prison-industrial complex, Wackenhut, etc.]
But egged on by the Bush Justice[??] Dept., legislators refused to heed that advice, or even hold hearings. Under the guise of protecting children, Congress has badly undermined fairness and judicial independence. It has also upset the balance between uniforom sentencing and individualized punishment that the system of sentencing guidelines was supposed to deliver.

4/10/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

Justice faults prison numbers, AP via NYT, A18.
Too many people are behind bars in America, and prison terms are often too long, Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court told Congress. As of June 30 [2002], 2.1 million people were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.8% from the year before. "Two million people in prison is just unacceptable," Justice Kennedy said in a hearing on the Supreme Court's budget. He criticized mandatory minimum sentences.
[And hey, what about that criminalization of drugs?!]

4/09/2003 2 prison stories, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

Two million inmates, and counting, editorial, NYT, A20
The population of the nation's jails and prisons passed 2 million last year, for the first time in history. The United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world....
[Yeah, let's grab our bloated military and go out and LIBERATE all these other, inferior people in the world, cuz we're sooo much better than them!]
The number of men and women behind bars today is four times what it was in the mid-1970s, and it continues to grow.
This soaring incarceration rate is not tied to the violent crime rate, which is lower than it was in 1974. And it is out of line with imprisonment practices worldwide. The U.S. has about 700 inmates per 100,000 residents, compared with fewer than 100 per 100,000 residents in Germany, Italy and Denmark....
Nearly 60% of federal prisoners and more than 20% of state inmates are in custody on drug charges, in many cases low-level ones..\..
Our overflowing jails and prisons come at a high price, in dollars and wasted lives...and this is a time of enormous state and federal budget gaps.
[Hey that's right. If we keep passing George Bush Junior's tonic taxcuts, how we gonna support our hungry prison-industrial establishment? How we gonna keep all these criminals locked up? (And with "tonic" like these taxcuts for the rich have been so far, how we gonna git economic recovery?)]
When a prisoner is a first offender guilty of a nonviolent crime, a jail term is often just a very expensive way of turning a young person who could be set on the right path into a hardened criminal. It seems far more sensible to reconsider tough mandatory sentencing laws and build in more discretion for judges to deviate from guidelines. The money saved could be redirected to alternatives to prison, including drug treatment and violence prevention programs for youths....
[but we're still going the other way -]
Terror defense lawyers say jailers held them for 2 hours - A judge orders that officials explain an extended detention of a defense team, by Benjamin Weiser, NYT, A19.
Lawyers for a Staten Island man [Ahmed Abdel Sattar] detained in a terrorism case have told a federal judge in Manhattan [John Koeltl of Federal District Court] that two members of their legal team who had been meeting with their client in jail [Metropolitan Corrrectional Center in Lower Manhattan] were kept in a locked cell for nearly two hours, despite their requests to leave.... Mr. Sattar's lawyers, Barry Fallick and Kenneth Paul, wrote to the judge that they had had previous problems at the jail during their visits to meet with Mr. Sattar, but that the situation had worsened..\..
The [latest] incident occurred after the two, a lawyer and a paralegal, had met with the man, [who] is being held for a year on charges of working as an operative for an Egyptian terrorist group. The case has received particular attention because one of his co-defendants is Lynne Stewart, a prominent NY lawyer who has also been charged with supporting terrorism....
[The madness boils on, and Osama laa-aa-affs his head off. Suddenly Americans are becoming decidedly uncool. 'Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad.']
The lawyer and the paralegal who visited Mr. Sattar on March 20 told a guard they were ready to leave at 3:20 pm according to a memo sent by his lawyers to the judge. They asked again at 4:45 pm and as 5 pm approached, they asked a guard to call their offices so their coworkers would not worry about them, the memo said, but the request was refused. They were [finally] released at 5:15, the memo said..\..
Last week, the judge...ordered the government to obtain a prompt written response from jail officials about the incident. The response has not been made public, but Mr. Fallick said he received a copy yesterday. In it, Mr. Fallick said, an official said he regretted the inconvenience that had occurred for the 2 visitors, but said it was more likely that a busy lieutenant forgot to escort them out of the jail than that they had been deliberately stranded....
["And if you believe that, we've got a bridge to sell ya." More likely instead that over-zealous guards, eyes glued to the tube watching dheir buds in the Iraq invasion, got a little POed at people trynna help wunna dem Ayrabs! Guess this is the kind of treatment Americans can expect all over the world in future, now that we've declared that we're righteous enough to break the no-first-strike rule and plenty of other rules made for all them other, inferior people in the world. The world will see see how righteous we are as the new wave of vehicles roll into Iraq - from Cheney's Halliburton Corp. and its subsidiaries.]

4/05-07/2003 3 prison stories, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

4/06 As inmate population soars, Southern states set the pace, by Allen Breed, Boston Globe, A13.
...When Sheila Young...principal of Craig Elementary School, which is in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New Orleans...asked \her\ third-graders...how many of them had a family member or neighbor in prison, more than half the hands shot up. When it comes to locking people up,
- Louisiana leads the South.... Louisiana's incarceration rate is 800 per 100,000 residents..\..
- And the South leads the nation.... The rate for the South is 526 per 100,000 - higher than that of 63% of countries in the world, according to the report generate for the group by the Justice Policy Institute [JPI] in Washington DC. The West is a distant second at 408 per 100,000. 13 of the 20 states with the highest incarceration rates are in the South. And while the rate of incarceration for women has grown nationally, the South outpaced the nation by 17%..\..
Since 1980, the country's prison population has quadrupled to 2.1 million, with the South accounting for 45% of that increase, according to a report released Friday by the grass-roots group Critical Resistance South [CRS].
[Another piece of evidence that the South was not worth all the blood-letting of the Civil War to keep in the Union. They would have been embarrassed out of slavery in several decades anyway, just as South Africa was out of apartheid.]
Citizen activists from around the region are meeting in New Orleans this weekend to brainstorm about how to change the situation. ...Said [Rose] Braz, national director of CRS, "Do we want to invest in prisons, prisons and more prisons?"...
Why are the [South's incarceration] numbers so high?...
- A recent national survey conducted by Florida State University researchers found that Southerners were more politically "conservative" [our quotes - we call that what it has become, radical], racially prejudiced and more punitive than people in other regions.
  [And guess what kind of people have been running the country since 1992. The Civil War apparently just drove the rot deeper and papered it over.]
- "What we find...is the more people define crime as a black issue, the more punitive they're willing to be," said Ted Chiricos, a criminologist and study coauthor.
- Prison populations soared through the past 2 decades as states got tough on crime, with so-called "three strikes" and "truth in sentencing" measures [doesn't he mean "minimum maximum sentencing" measures?] that guaranteed repeat offenders long stays [and thorough crime training and motivation from one another at taxpayer expense, $25K/inmate/yr - ed.].
But as crime rates have fallen, many states in the South and elsewhere have attempted to cut their prison populations.
- In the past 2 years, Louisiana and Mississippi - which has the 2nd-highest lockup rate - have backed away from mandatory minimum sentences for certain offenders.
- Georgia, which ranks 6th in its lockup rate, is considering moving toward sentencing guidelines which seek to divert nonviolent offenders into community-based programs....
- Mississippi's new corrections commissioner, Christopher Epps, said his prison population grew by just 912 last year, instead of the 1,500 it had been averaging in the 1990s. He gave some of the credit to a new law that set parole eligibility dates for 7,000 inmates. [So why would that help?]
- Faced with a looming $400m [state budget?] shortfall, Kentucky recently granted early release to about 900 inmates.
- South Carolina's Corrections Dept. is considering releasing up to 4,000 inmates,
- and Arkansas' governor wants to put more drug violators in treatment programs..\..
Partly as a result of these measures, the South's incarceration rate has grown slower than the other region's over the past 20 years - 180%. The West saw the highest growth, 289%, according to the JPI report....
Floriduh oops -da is one state that still isn't persuaded. Gov. Jeb Bush has forged ahead with 25-year-to-life mandatory terms for sex criminals and guaranteed 10-year sentences for people carrying guns during the commission of a crime. He is also seeking $75m for prison construction projects, even though the system currently has empty beds.
[And this is the mentality of Bush Sr's spawn, another of whom is in the White House.]
Corrections Dept. spokesman Sterling Ivey said Florida's crime rate is the lowest it's been in 30 years [probably because the entire likeliest population cohort is already in lockup], and Gov. Bush isn't about to start releasing people just to balance a budget.
[God knows the old folks down there have got enough money to lock everyone in the state up permanently, including themselves - if the sights down the Intracoastal and Okeechobee Waterways are anything to judge by.]
4/07 Prison rates among blacks reach a peak, report finds, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, A11.
An estimated 12% of African-American men ages 20 to 34 are in jail or prison, according to a report released yesterday by the Justice Dept.... By comparison, 1.6% of white men in the same age group are incarcerated..\..
The proportion of young black men who are incarcerated has been rising in recent years, and this is the higest rate ever measured, said Allen Beck, the chief prison demographer for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical arm of the Justice Dept.... The report found that the number of people in US jails and prisons exceeded 2 million for the first time last year, rising to 2,019,234....
[Thence whence the 2.1m figure that's been going the rounds?]
4/06 Prison riot in Honduras kills 86 inmates, AP via NYT, A3.
Rival gang members fought and set fire to a prison [yester]day, inciting a riot that ended with 86 prisoners dead, dozens of others...as many as 70 inmates and guards...injured and an unknown number on the loose [from] their cells at the 1,600-inmate El Porvenir prison [farm] outside La Ceiba, a port city 220 miles north of Tegucigalpa, the capital.... There is little security [there], and weapons and drugs are common, with gang members often controlling cell blocks....

4/01/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

Massachusetts: Jailer is found guilty, by Katherine Zezima, NYT, A16.
A former officer at a Boston jail has been found guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury and civil rights violations stemming from assaults on inmates.
The former officer, Brian Bailey, was one of seven employees at the city's Nashua Street Jail indicted in the beatings of five detainees from June 1998 to October 1999 and covering up the attacks. Two other defendants were acquitted. Another four...pleaded guilty. The Suffolk County Sheriff's offices, which operates the jail, has been accused of corruption and mismanagement.

3/21/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

Gideon's trumpet stilled, editorial, NYT, A22.
Forty years ago this week, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision, Gideon v. Wainwright, holding that poor defendants have a constitutional right to a lawyer. That principle is now ingrained in our culture, but the reality is that for many defendants, the promise of Gideon has been hollow. Poor people are still imprisoned, and even put to death, after trials in which they have shockingly inadequate legal representation.... Gideon laid out a constitutional principle, but it is up to the states to apply it....
[In short, another unfunded federal mandate.]
- In many of the 22 states that pay for such legal services entirely at the state level, the level of financing is so low that lawyers cannot afford to investigate and prepare proper defenses.
- In the 28 states that rely on local financing, the quality of representation is even worse.
  - In some Texas counties, defendants wait months in jail before seeing a lawyer.
  - In Georgia, some counties try indigent defendants in nonfelony cases without providing lawyers, even when a conviction result in prison time - a direct violation of Gideon.
[Postwar Italy under Prime Minister Luigi Einaudi had a solution to unfunded mandates: No government program or mandate could be passed without an accompanying or prior funding provision or bill.]

3/14/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

Kenya: New government to tackle prisons, by Marc Lacey, NYT, A5.
...the country's notoriously overcrowded and violent prison system.
[Sounds familiar.]
...Inmates have complained of widespread torture, illness and mistreatment in the prisons, which squeeze 50,000 people into cells designed for 15,000.

3/06/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

Justices uphold long prison terms in repeat crimes - 'Three strikes' affirmed - In a 5-to-4 ruling, court has the right to decide punishment, by Linda Greenhouse, NYT, front page.
WASHINGTON...- A deeply divided Supreme Court upheld California's "3-strikes" law [yester]day, rejecting constitutional challenges to sentences of 25 years without parole for a man who stole three golf clubs from a pro shop and 50 years without parole for another for stealing children's videotapes from a Kmart store. Both men had previous convictions for a string of mostly minor property offenses that qualified as prior strikes under California's recidivist sentencing law, adopted by the state's voters in a 1994 referendum. More than 7,000 people are now in California prisons serving sentences of at least 25 years under the law, including more than 300 whose "3d strike" was a "petty theft."
[OK, California, if you want to spend $25,000-30,000 a year to warehouse someone forever, never mind reprogramming, cuz somebody lifted some $4.95 videos, it's your money.]
Neither of the challenged sentences was so grossly disproportionate as to violate the 8th Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, adding that any criticism of the law "is appropriately directed at the Legislature."...
[Not for a public referendum.... We still say direct democracy via binding public referendums, though imperfect, are better than indirect democracy via "representatives," because the onus is on analyzing the problem, structuring the decision tree and articulating the alternatives, rather than simplifying everything to two alternatives and to which special interest has more money to throw at "representatives'" campaigns.]

2/28/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

[so how many years did it take for this big social mistake to begin to be corrected?]
Michigan: Revising mandatory sentencing, by Anand Giridharadas, NYT, A21.
The state will release at least 280 drug offenders under a new law eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, the Dept. of Corrections said. Gone under the new sentencing guidelines are a 10-year minimum for offenses involving 50 to 224 grams of a controlled substance and a 20-year minimum for amounts [of 225 or] over 225 grams.
[Pretty stupid anyway - a double sentence for 1 gram over 224 - at a time in history when we've had calculus for over 300 years and calculators for 50 years, and could easily have a smoothly graduated sentence (not to mention smoothly graduated income-tax "brackets")?!]
The statute applies retroactively, and 700 inmates are eligible to have their sentences halved by the parole board.

2/17/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal & NY Times -

Prison company's courtship of the powerful provokes New York's scrutiny, by Clifford Levy, NYT, A20.
Assemblyman Rogern Green has denied accepting free transportation [=photo caption]..\..a gray Plymouth Voyager minivan with tinted windows \for\ his personal use...from a private prison company called Correctional Services Corp..\..
[NOW we start discovering the downside of privatizing prisons. Here, another layer of corruption added to a system that's already got a big confined layer of same.]
The perks did not end there.... Mr. Green, an influential state legislator in New York, [also] received a driver, a...PR aide..., workers for his political campaigns, free meals and a cellphone. All told, the federal investigative records indicate [a] package [that] was worth as much as $2,000 a month.
[For how many months?]
...Company employees said that at election time, Correctional Services required many workers at its state and federally financed halfway houses in NYC to become foot soldiers in the campaigns of many politicians, from former Mayor David Dinkins to the Rev. Al Sharpton to lawmakers in Washington, Albany and the city [NY]. At one Correctional Services halfway house, 17 of the 22 workers were out on the trail early one November, according to federal records.
[And yet another layer -]
It might have been familiar duty for some of them: Correctional Services had hired them because they were relatives or friends of US Rep. Edolphus Towns of Brooklyn, State Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo of the Bronx and numerous other officials
Sometimes, Correctional Services [what a misnomer!], its executives and workers just donated directly to campaigns. They gave $10,000s in political contributions to Democratic lawmakers from the city, and then, when it seemed that Gov. George Pataki might scale back the company's contracts because of a shrinking prison population, they turned their attention to him...sending $12,500 to the Republican State Committee, $10,000 to the Conservative Party and more than $5,000 to the Pataki campaign.
[The trouble with ANY money in politics, let alone the suicidal identification of money with free speech, is that it sooo easily and frequently slips into corruption.]
Among the contributions were a spate of small donations, ranging $150-$300, given in Nov/1998 in the names of company workers, several of whom said they had not given the money. "I'm not even politically affiliated," recalled Jose Moreno, a former worker who is listed as having donated $150..\..
In all, the company, which was once called Esmor, 'earned' more than $22m from state contracts from 1992 to 2001, when the contracts were ended by the Pataki administration because the space in the halfway houses was no longer needed. The company still holds federal contracts to run halfway houses in the city. ...Richard Ruiz, who worked for the company as a case manager and facility manager from 1992 through 1995, just as it began winning state contracts...said he was dismissed by a senior company official, Franklin Chris Jackson, after he refused to do campaigning, and then became a lead whistleblower in the federal investigation that has now come back to haunt both the company and several state lawmakers.... Mr. Jackson [is] at the heart of the current inquiries..\.. Correctional Services executives at their HQ is Sarasota, Fla., including the president, James Slattery, who is to be interviewed by the lobbying commission this week, would not comment....

2/13/2003 2 prison stories, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -

Group sues Christian program at Iowa prison - A project is said to use tax dollars for 'pervasively religious programs', by Laurie Goodstein, NYT, A23.
Two federal lawsuits filed yesterday in Iowa contend that a state-financed evangelical Christian prison program that gives privileges to participating inmates violates the separation of church and state. The program, at the Newton Correction Facility in Newton, Iowa, is run by Prison Fellowship Ministries, an organization founded by Charles Colson, who served a prison term for his role in the Watergate coverup. The program has also been adopted at prisons in Minnesota and Kansas, and in Texas, where it was backed by pResident Bush when he was governor.
The lawsuits, brought by Americans United for Separation of Church & State, a Washington-based advocacy group, are intended to provoke a constitutional challenge to the pResident's religion-based initiative, under which federal and state governments would give more money with poor people, addicts, the unemployed and prisoners....
Guatemala: 6 killed in prison riot, by David Gonzalez, NYT, A12.
A soldier jailed for the 1998 killing of a bishop who campaign for human rights was decapitated during a prison riot in which six inmates were killed. ...One early report said it stemmed from complaints that some inmates had smuggled in guns. Another report suggested that it erupted over animosity toward several officers who were implicated in the killing of Bishop Juan Gerardi. Obdulio Villanueva, a former soldier who was convicted in that killing, was among the inmates killed during the uprising.

2/01/2003 1 prison story, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -

From a women's jail, anthology of lives, by Carolyn Battista, NYT, A19.
...Wally Lamb's writing class at York women's prison in Connecticut has been running since 1999. The group has just published a book..\.. [photo caption]
Nineteen women listened closely in a classroom at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Conn., on a recent afternoon as Wally Lamb read aloud, not from one of his best-selling novels [eg: She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True], but from a terse account that one of the women had written about her first day in prison. Her bare-bones sentences recorded lockups after meals, a bathroom with no privacy and a room crowded with warring roommates.... The women...gather around tables in their prison-issue maroon shirts and pants with gray sweat shirts. York as the state's only prison for women has inmates convicted of a range of crimes including homicide, theft and assault; the makeup of the writing group is across the board.
Its members have written gut-tearing tales of being battered by life - being molested, beaten, cheated, raped. On this day, however, the stories they shared were mostly poignant. One woman wrote of the death of a beloved elderly neighbor. Another described how the prison's cluster of buildings looks at night..."like any small town, like a peaceful community...."
The workshop writers, Mr. Lamb noted, generally want to look back at their childhoods and..."the long arc of their lives" to try to understand themselves. [They] rarely wrote of their crimes...and when they did, "it was never to...whitewash their actions" [but] "usually with shame, remorse and profound guilt"..\..
Out of the group's efforts has come a compilation of work by 10 participants, "Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from our Imprisoned Sisters," published this week by Regan Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.... Together, the women chose the title from a line in a gospel song..\.. Mr. Lamb wrote the introduction....
As he prepared the book for publication...he educated himself about the...statutes that prohibit people from profiting from writing about their crimes, except in incidental references. Then...he "edited accordingly," although he needed to deal with only "a sentence here and there...."
Mr. Lamb first came to York in August 1999, to give a talk as a favor to a friend on the staff. Women attended it mainly, he figured, to see "that guy who was on Oprah."... After he did some writing exercises with them, one woman simply asked, "You coming back?"
He has come back ever since, leading his workshop on alternate Thursdays with Dale Griffith, a teacher at the prison school.... Every fall, Mr. Lamb and Ms. Griffith send out fliers inviting inmates to join the class. Some do, but drop out; others stay from year to year.... Along the way, the writers acquired a nickname: the Lambettes..\..
Nancy Whitely, who is working in a deli [in or out of prison??] and hopes to return to college after serving time for creditcard fraud, has 2 pieces in the book. "Jail makes you feel like a lose," she said. "This was something I could do right. The writing gave me a chance to examine how I got to the place where I was, think what about myself needs fixing. I'm grateful." ...As Tabatha Rowley, another contributor, recalled, the camaraderie the name [Lambettes] implies made the women comfortable enough to speak the unvarnished truth. "We had Mr. Wally red in the face sometimes," she said....

1/28/2003 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -

[giant petrie dishes of disease -]
Infections in newly freed inmates are a rising concern, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, A14.
[Fox, did you ever get back together with Marilyn Roberts?]
Randy Vallad...was released from prison without being told he had hepatitis C, he said. He then infected his girlfriend, Marva Johnson [accidentally when she was taking care of a cut on his head], pictured above with their lawyer Steven Croley.... [Photo caption]
MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. -...It was not until Mr. Vallad was sent back to prison in 2001 for a parole violation that he was accidentally shown his Michigan Dept. of Corrections medical records. They reported that Mr. Vallad had tested positive for hepatitis C, a blood-borne virus that can cause potentially fatal liver disease, when he was first admitted to prison years before. "They knew and didn't tell him," Ms. Johnson, 33, said today in this small city in central Michigan. "As a result, they also let him infect me." For the past 11 months she has been taking a powerful, enervating course of drugs for hepatitis C. Such cases are becoming increasingly common across the nation, as jails and prisons have become giant incubators for some of the worst infectious diseases.
According to a study released [yester]day at a conference sponsored by the federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention,
- at least 1.3m inmates released from jail or prison in 1996 were infected with hepatitis C. That was 29% of the 4.5m cases nationwide.
- Similarly, newly released inmates accounted for 35% of the 34,000 Americans with tuberculosis in 1996, the study found.
- And newly released inmates accounted for 13-17% of Americans infected with HIV or AIDS, the study estimated.
[If this is the case in a population with medical care in America, imagine what must be going on in the populations without - like the millions of homeless Americans. The "richest nation in the world" is a time bomb of plague. With riches like that, better to live in a "poorer" country with more sense. Of course, the doctors in the US prison system ain't eggzackly da cream o'da crop.]
The problem has become so acute that healthcare officials and prisoner rights groups are calling for widespread testing of prison populations for hepatitis C and faster treatment of prisoners....

1/25/2003 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -

[here's another less-than-depressing item - a glimpse of how one Euro nation saves on prisons -]
Britain: Three strikes and you get a letter, AP via NYT, A6.
The police force in Wiltshire in southern England has come up with a new measure to combat crime - a polite letter asking repeat offenders to mend their ways. Yesterday, 22 letters from Inspector Geoff Miles were hand-delivered to a group of repeat offenders who have been convicted of offenses including violence, burglary and drug-related crimes.
"I'm sure it will come as no surprise to you that, due to your criminal activity, your name appears on the above data and has highlighted you as a persistent offender," the letters said. They suggested that the ex-cons "make it a priority in any New Year's resolutions you make from 2003 onwards, to cease forthwith your criminal activities."
[Heah! heah! We suggest that full employment via worksharing would be more effective.]

1/23/2003 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -

Inmates didn't beat the rap, but they topped stock pros - Prisoners serving long terms in New Jersey scored big with Tyco, Avnet, EMC, by Alex Frangos, WSJ, C5.
RAHWAY, NJ - Inside information just took on a whole new meaning.
As some of Wall Street's most notorious stock pickers prepare for a possible trip to the clink, violent NJ criminals are beating the market - from behind bars. Five inmates from East Jersey State Prison outearned dozens of stock pickers from UBS AG's UBS PaineWebber, as well as other NJ residents, to come in 3rd place in the latest statewide stock-picking contest.... In the 13-week competition, organized by the NJ Council on Economic Education, the five men took an imaginary $100,000 portfolio [up to] $155,000..\.. The NJ Dept. of Corrections honored the felons-turned-stock-research-gurus yesterday with a chicken and macaroni lunch, as well as free T-shirts....
Access to information was strictly limited. No Bloomberg terminals or Internet connections were allowed. The five pored over stock charts in the local paper each day. On Fridays, they were given a copy of the Wall Street Journal..\.. The biggest gainer for the quintet was Tyco International Ltd., which has seen criminal charges leveled against its former top executives for allegedly looting the company.... "We knew what was going on inside the company," says Gilberto Maldonado...who is serving a 15-year sentence for manslaughter....

1/11-13/2003 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -

[some good news on this page for a change]
1/11 Police torture cited as 4 on death row freed - Decision awaited by Ill. governor on 140 more cases, by Maura Kelly, AP via Boston Globe, A2, flagged by colleague Kate.
CHICAGO - With just 3 days left in office, Gov. George Ryan pardoned 4 deathrow inmates yesterday who he said had made false confessions under torture by Chicago police. He called their cases, which date from the 1980s, "perfect examples of what is so terribly broken about our system."... Each was on death row for...12-17 years.... All of the men but [one] who was convicted o[n] a separate crime were released immediately....
[And tomorrow's update -]
1/12 Illinois governor empties death row - Labels state's system a 'catastrophic failure', by Alexia Elejade-Ruiz, Boston Globe, front page, flagged by colleague Kate.
CHICAGO - Gov. George Ryan of Illinois commuted the sentences of 167 condemned inmates yesterday, saying that they had been sentenced to death by an "arbitrary and capricious" system. He urged the rest of the nation to reconsider the practice of putting some killers to death. ...Too often ethnicity and social class seemed to be determining factors when a convicted killer was sentenced to death. "Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error - error in determining guilt, and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die," he said.... The unprecendented move by the outgoing Republican governor was immediately hailed by foes of capital punishment but decried by the survivors of some murder victims....
[Followup - there have been several stories about the debate this move stirred up. Our response - switch from executions to life sentences without parole but with a Kevorkian kit in a tasteful inconspicous niche in each cell on lifers' row. If you're innocent, you refrain and hope, pray and litigate for exoneration. If you're guilty and feeling that life imprisonment involves greater pain and suffering than death, you're in control. You're "the master of your fate." You da boss.]

1/08/2003 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -

More white-collar criminals to be jailed, AP via NYT, A20.
Under a Justice Dept. directive, fewer white-collar and nonviolent criminals will be sentenced to halfway houses and other "community corrections centers"
[Hell no, thet thar's too soft on crime!]
and more will be locked up in federal prisons.
{Yessiree, git more of 'em trained to be real criminals - brutalized and violent! Thenk yoo, Mr. Ashcroft. Yer sainthood will waft yoo right into them perly gates - not.]
The change means the immediate transfer of about 125 federal inmates to federal penitentiaries.... It also means a better chance of prison time for white-collar crimes such as fraud, insider stock trading and embezzlement. The Justice Dept. made the change after learning of a West Virginia [= poor state] case in which a dentist was assigned to a halfway house after being convicted of tax fraud.
[Thet's right! Only George Bush's friends can commit tax fraud and preferably only after he's made it legal, but not necessarily after, cuz he kin just withhold the evidence.]

1/03/2003 1 prison item, reported in the Wall St Journal or the NY Times -

Time and punishment, letter to editor by Pres. Peter Provet of Odyssey House NYC, A18.
"Freed from prison, but still paying a penalty" (news article, Dec. 29) exposes the draconian effects [how about self-destructive effects?! - ed.] of a criminal justice system whose focus on tough punishment leaves little room for rehabilitation.
While punishment for criminal behavior is essential,
[No it isn't. All that is essential, as Bucky Fuller pointed out, is to design OUT the possibility of recurrence, and that means either rehabilitation/reprogramming-with-supportive-followup for honest self-support or permanent incarceration - punishment is an unnecessary, complicating and obsolete concept which should have been dropped long since.]
the continuing penalization of people who are overwhelmingly poor and from minority communities through a ban on welfare benefits or other public programs is counterproductive.
[Amen.]
A more cost-effective and socially responsible approach is to stipulate that those who served time for drug-related offenses or are substance abusers enroll in a goal-oriented treatment program that offers job training and help with housing.
[Hear hear. And convert the drug war from criminalization to taxation-for-costs. It's time we learned from the failure of the criminalization of Prohibition and the mere taxation of the war on smoking and nicotene.]
Drug treatment is not an easy way out. Participants still face discrimination. But without treatment, many return to crime, drugs and ultimately prison.

For earlier prison stories, click on the desired date -

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