The September issue of Atlantic Magazine contains an article that every state legislator—particularly California lawmakers—ought to read.

It’s called Prison Without Walls by Atlantic contributing editor Graeme Wood, and it is about high tech corrections strategies like GPS tracking devices and others.

Here are a couple of clips from the opening:

Incarceration in America is a failure by almost any measure. But what if the prisons could be turned inside out, with convicts released into society under constant electronic surveillance? Radical though it may seem, early experiments suggest that such a science-fiction scenario might cut crime, reduce costs, and even prove more just.

[SNIP]

GPS devices … are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that, in the United States at least, traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace. According to a recent Pew report, 2.3 million Americans are currently incarcerated — enough people to fill the city of Houston. Since 1983, the number of inmates has more than tripled and the total cost of corrections has jumped sixfold, from $10.4 billion to $68.7 billion. In California, the cost per inmate has kept pace with the cost of an Ivy League education, at just shy of $50,000 a year.

This might make some sense if crime rates had also tripled. But they haven’t: rather, even as crime has fallen, the sentences served by criminals have grown, thanks in large part to mandatory minimums and draconian three-strikes rules — politically popular measures that have shown little deterrent effect but have left the prison system overflowing with inmates. The vogue for incarceration might also make sense if the prisons repaid society’s investment by releasing reformed inmates who behaved better than before they were locked up. But that isn’t the case either: half of those released are back in prison within three years. Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be “scared straight,” is actively counterproductive. Such conditions — and U.S. prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male inmates facing sexual assault — typically harden criminals, making them more violent and predatory. Essentially, when we lock someone up today, we are agreeing to pay a large (and growing) sum of money merely to put off dealing with him until he is released in a few years, often as a greater menace to society than when he went in.

Devices such as the ExacuTrack, along with other advances in both the ways we monitor criminals and the ways we punish them for their transgressions, suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might turn the conventional prison system inside out for a substantial number of inmates, doing away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers. The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.

Moreover, such a change would in fact be less radical than it might at first appear. An underappreciated fact of our penitentiary system is that of all Americans “serving time” at any given moment, only a third are actually behind bars. The rest — some 5 million of them — are circulating among the free on conditional supervised release either as parolees, who are freed from prison before their sentences conclude, or as probationers, who walk free in lieu of jail time. These prisoners-on-the-outside have in fact outnumbered the incarcerated for decades. And recent innovations, both technological and procedural, could enable such programs to advance to a stage where they put the traditional model of incarceration to shame.

In a number of experimental cases, they already have. Devices such as the one I wore on my leg already allow tens of thousands of convicts to walk the streets relatively freely, impeded only by the knowledge that if they loiter by a schoolyard, say, or near the house of the ex-girlfriend they threatened, or on a street corner known for its crack trade, the law will come to find them. Compared with incarceration, the cost of such surveillance is minuscule—mere dollars per day—and monitoring has few of the hardening effects of time behind bars. Nor do all the innovations being developed depend on technology. Similar efforts to control criminals in the wild are under way in pilot programs that demand adherence to onerous parole guidelines, such as frequent, random drug testing, and that provide for immediate punishment if the parolees fail. The result is the same: convicts who might once have been in prison now walk among us unrecognized—like pod people, or Canadians.

There are, of course, many thousands of dangerous felons who can’t be trusted on the loose. But if we extended this form of enhanced, supervised release even to just the nonviolent offenders currently behind bars, we would empty half our prison beds in one swoop…. [S]ome would offend again. But then, so too do those convicts released at the end of their brutal, hardening sentences under our current system. And even accepting a certain failure rate, by nearly any measure such “prisons without bars” would represent a giant step forward for justice, criminal rehabilitation, and society….

Read on. It’s worth it.

OLD GUY INMATES

Then, while you’re on a roll, read this piece from the AP about about aging prisoners.

Here’s a clip:

Read the rest of this entry »

In the August issue of Governing Magazine, John Bunton (author of the excellent, LA Noir) has written a highly intriguing—and hope producing—article about how, as Bunton put it “…America’s reddest state—and Mississippi’s most notorious prison—became a model of reform.”

(Good journalism comes from interesting places these days.)

The reform was triggered by a tough-minded and passionately determined ACLU lawyer named Margaret Winter, and brought into being by an unusually courageous head of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, a guy named Christopher Epps.

But here’s the kicker for those of us in LA. After the success of the unlikely and politically risky reform process in Mississippi, Margaret Winter told Buntin she is next setting her sites on the Los Angeles County Jail System.

I’ve spoken to Winter in the past about conditions in LA’s Men’s Central Jail in particular and I know her to be extremely well-informed—and quite dangerous to bureaucrats and the status quo when riled.

Okay, now here are some clips from Buntin’s article. The whole thing is a fast read and a good one, so I recommend reading it all.

In January 2002, Margaret Winter, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Prison Project, received a letter from Willie Russell, an inmate on Mississippi’s death row.

“I am on a hunger strike to the death,” the letter began. In highly idiosyncratic language, the letter then described conditions at the facility where death row was housed, Unit 32.

Unit 32 was one of seven prisons located on Mississippi’s fabled penal institution, Parchman Farm. As described by Russell, it was also a lot like hell. Inmates were locked in permanent solitary confinement. In the summer, the cells were ovens, with no fans or air circulation. Russell’s was even worse: He was in a special “punishment” cell with a solid, unvented Plexiglas door. The cells were also sewers, thanks to a design flaw in cellblock toilets that often flushed excrement from one cell into the next. Prisoners were allowed outside — to pace or sit alone in metal cages — just two or three times a week. Inside was a perpetual dusk: One always-on light fixture provided inadequate light for reading but enough light to make it hard to sleep.

Then there were the bugs. The only way to avoid being eaten alive, Russell wrote, was to wrap himself in clothes like a mummy, which made the brutal Delta heat even more unbearable. Worst of all, though, was the noise. Psychotic inmates screamed through the night. Conditions were so bad, Russell continued, that some dozen-odd other inmates — about one-quarter of Mississippi’s death row population — had also joined the hunger strike.

“I had heard this sort of thing before,” Winter says, “but I was gripped by the power of this letter. It was like something out of the Book of Genesis. It had a biblical grandeur to it. And I believed it.”

[LARGE SNIP]

…..And so the scene was set for a classic — and wholly predictable-showdown, one pitting an idealistic civil liberties organization against a beleaguered corrections system.

Except that in the case of Mississippi, that’s not what happened. Instead, in 2006, Sparkman’s boss, MDOC Commissioner Christopher Epps, decided to do something very different: He invited the ACLU in. Shortly thereafter, Epps and Sparkman began a series of deeply counterintuitive reforms that risked their careers.

Epps didn’t just take on Parchman Farm. He also challenged Mississippi’s commitment to a punitive penal code that had doubled the state’s inmate population and tripled its corrections budget in 10 years time….

PERSONAL NOTE TO MR. CHRISTOPHER EPPS: How do you feel about a move to California? Sure, the state’s broke and LA has a teensy, weensy traffic problem. But we’re a fun group, and—all in all—we’ve got a great city (and state). (Honestly, the taco trucks alone are worth the move.) So com’on down. We….um…need you.

It’s already been a very productive week for the US Supreme Court, and a surprisingly level-headed one.

The three issues of note are the following:

SLIGHTLY SANER DEPORTATION RULES IN MINOR DRUG CASES

Since 1996, the US has been merrily deporting permanent legal residents for minor drug convictions. This week SCOTUS ruled unanimously against such deportations for offenses that are ” at odds with the ordinary meaning of ‘aggravated felony.’”

Here’s a clip from what Adam Liptak wrote for the NY Times:

Lower courts had said that Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo, a permanent resident of the United States who had lived here since 1983, when he was 5, was subject to mandatory deportation for a second drug offense, this one involving possession of single tablet of a prescription drug.

The question in the case was whether that second offense amounted to an “aggravated felony.” If it did, the government had no choice but to deport him under the immigration laws. If it did not, the attorney general had the discretion to show leniency.

In 2004, Mr. Carachuri-Rosendo was sentenced by a Texas state court judge to 20 days in jail for possession of less than two ounces of marijuana. The next year, he was sentenced to 10 days in jail for having a single tablet of Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, without a prescription.

Those were both misdemeanors under state law. But federal authorities argued that a second drug offense counted as an aggravated felony under federal law, making Mr. Carachuri-Rosendo ineligible for discretionary relief from deportation.

David Savage of the LA Times explained the underlying issue well:

[Carachuri-Rosendo's] case illustrated the potentially harsh effect of a 1996 federal law that was intended to rid the nation of immigrants who were criminals and violent offenders. Previously, immigrants could ask for leniency if they had a job, a family or other ties in this country.

The new law, by contrast, required the deportation of any noncitizen convicted of an aggravated felony. But Congress did not carefully define this term. Since then, immigration judges have been deciding which crimes fit the definition.

Finally, a small shred of sanity on this repeatedly abused and abusive law.

SUPREMES EASE FILING RESTRICTIONS IN SOME DEATH PENALTY CASES

Michael Doyle for McClatchy has the details of how the court gave a second chance to a Florida death row inmate whose incompetent jerk of a lawyer failed to research the deadlines for filing Habeas appeals so missed his client’s. (It probably didn’t help that the lawyer managed to avoid even contacting his client for three full years):

The court’s 7-2 ruling means that convicted cop killer Albert Holland will have another opportunity to make his case. The decision opens the door for other inmates who can show they’ve missed deadlines because of their lawyers’ “egregious” mistakes.

“In this case, the (lawyer’s) failure seriously prejudiced a client who thereby lost what was likely his single opportunity for federal habeas (corpus) review of the lawfulness of his imprisonment and of his death sentence,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote.

JUSTICES AGREE TO HEAR CALIFORNIA’S PRISON OVERCROWDING CASE

This case won’t go forward until the fall, but it is big news that the Supremes have agreed to hear the matter of whether or not the federal three judge panel that has ruled California must reduce its prison population by 46 thousand people, can really make that ruling legally.

Here’s some of what Denny Walsh of the Sac’to Bee reports:

After earlier deciding that overcrowding is the primary cause of health care that is so bad it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, a special three-judge panel in January ordered the inmate population of the state’s 33 adult prisons slashed by roughly 40,000 within two years.

The panel stayed its order pending the Schwarzenegger administration’s appeal, which was joined by a group of Republican lawmakers.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and corrections Secretary Matthew Cate acknowledge the prisons are jammed well beyond their intended capacity. But, they insist, health care has improved and is no longer unconstitutional, population reduction can be achieved in a slower and more orderly fashion so as not to put citizens at risk, and the three judges lack authority to impose their will on the state.

It will be the high court’s first look at such a panel’s power under the Prison Litigation Reform Act to cure a constitutional violation by whatever means it deems necessary.

Yeah, well, while we’re at it, how to we go about getting one of those handy-dandy three judge panels to apply a little “whatever means necessary” to our probation mess?

SUPREMES AGREE TO HEAR CASE AGAINST (EXTREMELY VILE) FUNERAL PROTESTERS

On top of his grief over his Marine officer son’s death, Albert Snyder had to endure protesters Westboro Baptist Church disrupting the funeral with signs that bore messages like: “Semper Fi Fags,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” Distraught and furious, Snyder sued the Westboro demonstrators in civil court and won, but the decision was reversed on appeal.

Now the case has made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which will hear the issue this fall.

The Washington Post reports:

[Albert] Snyder and his late son, Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, killed in Iraq, have become the public faces of more than 200 families that have seen funerals of loved ones picketed by members of a tiny church who say the deaths of U.S. soldiers are God’s retribution for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.

The collision of privacy rights and the Constitution’s protection of free speech will be heard by the Supreme Court in the fall. Snyder’s lawyer, Sean Summers, recently filed his brief to the court, and the fortuitous deadline for others to support Snyder is the day after Memorial Day.

Many First Amendment scholars are wondering why the Supremes took the case, arguing that, as hideous and cruel as the protest was, it is also protected speech.

(I wondered the same thing.)

In any event, it will be a significant case to watch.

And in the meantime, our hearts go out to Albert Snyder, and all the parents of service men and women who have had to grieve for their kids this past weekend.

CALIFORNIA BATTLES FOR THE SOUL OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?

At least so says Connie Bruck’s in her long and interesting article about the primary battle between Tom Campbell and Carly Fiorina, in the June 7 issue of the New Yorker.

The full story requires a subscription, but here’s a clip to give you the tone:

Ronald Reagan was still in the White House the last time a Republican was elected to the Senate from California, in 1988. This year, Republicans believe, will be different. The candidate who wins the primary may have a good chance of defeating Barbara Boxer, who faces an anti-incumbent mood and discontent over the state’s foundering economy. The national Republican Party has seized upon the race as a bellwether. Tom Campbell, a five-term Republican congressman who describes himself as a fiscal conservative and social moderate—he is pro-choice and supports gay marriage—believes this is his year. Recent polls show, however, that his opponent, Carly Fiorina, has overtaken his lead, and Campbell’s greatest assets—policy experience and a powerful intellect—now seem to be handicaps. Fiorina, the polished former C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard, said at a debate on May 6th: “I am not a career politician.” Campbell’s other opponent, Chuck DeVore, casts himself as anti-government. The resolution of this contest will determine a great deal about the future of the Republican Party….

For some reason, however, the Republican gubernatorial primary fight between Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman is just a run the of the mill primary battle (albeit a very expensive one), not a mythic struggle for any party’s soul.

THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CRIME WAVE!!!! (THAT DOESN’T APPEAR TO EXIST)

The June edition of Social Science Quarterly contains an article that draws correlations between the large crime drop that has occurred across the nation, and immigration patterns.

Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey cites the report and wonders why some of those screaming loudest about immigration issues do so using “facts” about immigrant crime that are entirely and provably false.

Governor Brewer told Fox News and anyone else who’d listen, “We’ve been inundated with criminal activity. It’s just—it’s been outrageous.” Arizona’s Sen. John McCain said last month that the failure to secure the border with Mexico “has led to violence—the worst I have ever seen.” The president of the Arizona Association of Sheriffs, Paul Babeu of Pinal County, claims, “Crime is off the chart in this state.”

What the FBI chart actually shows is that the incidence of violent crime in Arizona declined dramatically in the last two years.

Crime is also down in most cities that have the largest influx of immigrants.

But don’t believe me: just take your own walk through the stats at the FBI’s recently released Uniform crime Report.

GEORGIA ASKS HOW TO TURN LAWBREAKERS INTO TAXPAYERS (NOTE: WHY ISN’T CALIFORNIA BOTHERING TO ASK THE SAME QUESTION?)

In a two part feature, the Atlanta Journal Constitution explores the issue. Here’s how Part I begins:

As states across the nation recognize that prison costs are busting tight budgets and doing little to reform offenders, many governors and legislators are thinking outside the cell.

Mississippi lawmakers decided in 2008 to cut prison costs by allowing all nonviolent offenders to be considered for parole after serving 25 percent of a sentence instead of 85 percent.

In Texas, a bipartisan effort in 2007 avoided $2 billion in costs to build and operate new prisons by spending $241 million on alternatives: stepped-up probation and parole programs, new halfway houses and specialty courts devoted to offenders with drug issues and mental health problems.

North Carolina announced in April a bipartisan initiative to develop a new research-driven approach to public safety that is expected to reduce prison costs by investing in alternatives that are more effective.

South Carolina’s Legislature last week approved a landmark sentencing reform package designed to save the state $400 million over the next five years by reducing incarceration of nonviolent offenders and more closely supervising released inmates to reduce recidivism.

Then the AJC asks: What about Georgia?

In Part 2, the AJC gives some ideas “that could help Georgia reduce its need for prison beds. ”

Interestingly, California—the state with the largest prison population in the nation—is not on the AJC’s list of states instituting cost saving and prisoner rehabilitating reform.

A FATHER CONTEMPLATES MEMORIAL DAY

In an LA Times Op Ed a father whose son was killed three years ago in Iraq reflects on Memorial Day.

Here’s a clip:

For us, personal loss has rendered the last Monday in May into the day of remembrance that it was originally intended to be. Yet loss has also invested Memorial Day with political significance, posing uncomfortable questions.

The fallen gave their lives so we might enjoy freedom: However comforting, this commonplace assertion qualifies at best as a half-truth. Who can doubt that the soldier killed in battle at Gettysburg or on Omaha Beach died while advancing the cause of liberty? Whether one can say the same about the Americans who lost their lives assaulting Mexico City in 1847, suppressing Filipino demands for independence after 1898 or chasing rebels in 1920s Nicaragua is less clear, however.

In recent decades especially, the connection between American military intervention and American freedom has become ever more tenuous….

THE GOOD NEWS: Monday’s Supreme court decision declared Life Without Parole for juveniles unconstitutional in cases where no murder was involved. This will make it possible for some men and women who have served decades behind bars for crimes they committed as kids, to be up for parole.

THE BAD NEWS: Some of those grown up kids have spent most of their time in solitary confinement where they were deeply psychologically damaged by the system that was supposed to rehabilitate them.

More and more experts in the field have equated solitary confinement with torture, as physician Atul Gawande describes in his remarkable 2009 New Yorker article, Hellhole. Even John McCain wrote, in describing his 5 1/2 year experience as a prisoner of war, that prolonged isolation was far worse than physical torture. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.”

So if solitary confinement is tortuous and harmful to adults, how does it affect the children whom we elect to incarcerate in adult institutions and then often keep for months or years or…. decades in isolation.

SOLITARY KIDS

According to a 2005 report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch:

….teenagers in adult prisons often end up in solitary, either because they are considered disciplinary problems, because they feel compelled to join prison gangs, or because they have to be isolated from adult offenders “for their own protection.”

IAN MANUEL IN SOLITARY

Meg Laughlin of the St. Petersburg Times has a portrait of one such person. His name is Ian Manuel. When he was 13-years old he shot a woman in the face as he and two other kids attempted to rob her and the whole thing went bad. Now Ian Manual is 33 years old and he has spent most of the past 20 years in solitary confinement. He is Florida’s longest serving inmate it solitary.

As a consequence of Monday’s decision, Ian Manuel will finally be eligible for parole.

If he was given parole, in what condition would Ian Manuel be released? Due to his time in solitary, Manuel’s life has been dialed down to a tiny fraction of what even other inmates are allowed. He has spent more than half his life in a concrete cell the size of a walk-in closet. He has no windows. His food is delivered through a slot in the door. He never sees another inmate. For something to do, he has become a cutter. Watching his blood trickle is better than watching nothing. It is a common way that those in isolation relieve the boredom, say psychologists familiar with prisoners in solitary confinement.

Laughlin describes Manuel as having “no work skills, no formal education and so much psychological damage that he once set himself on fire.”

Here are some clips from her story:

When he began his sentence in a tough adult prison at age 14, he was small and defensive. Afraid to appear vulnerable, he got into trouble immediately. He’d veer into the grass instead of walking on the path in the prison yard. When guards yelled at him, he’d yell back. When they came at him, he’d make obscene gestures. In less than a year, he was in solitary.

From there, the disciplinary infractions multiplied — for storing aspirin, for sticking his hand through the food flap, for standing at his cell door, for masturbating and for cursing. He would go six months at a time lying on his bed in what he called “a state of hibernation” to stay out of trouble. But it didn’t matter. Each infraction added months and after a while the hole was so deep he couldn’t get out.

Recently, he received a visit from someone not on his legal team. It was his first in 15 years. Leaning forward toward the glass separating him from his visitor, he tried to explain what kept him there:

“I’d tell myself to keep quiet and behave. But I was so desperate I couldn’t control my impulses.”

The result has been a life stripped of life.

No programs or education. No visitors, phone calls or human touch. No books, magazines, TV or radio. No talking. No standing at the cell door and looking out. Three 10-minute showers a week. Meals pushed through a flap in the door. Enforced idleness in a concrete box, year after year.

According to corrections reports, Manuel became a cutter at 17 — slicing his arms with tiny fragments of glass and metal and watching the blood flow.

“It gave me relief from the intolerable numbness,” he said.

By the way, from the beginning, Manual has always been loaded with remorse about his crime, and demonstrated it. Laughlin explains in an earlier article about Manual when she tells about Manual’s first Christmas in prison when he was still a tiny, very skinny teenager:

On Christmas Eve 1992, he was allowed to make one phone call. He called Debbie Baigrie, the woman he had shot.

“This is Ian. I am sorry for all the suffering I’ve caused you,” she remembers him saying.

They began to correspond regularly. Baigrie said she was impressed with how well he wrote.

She asked prison officials to let him take the General Educational Development test and take college courses.

“I got a second chance in life. I recovered and went on,” Baigrie said. “I wanted Ian to have the same chance.”

But the rules of solitary forbade Manuel from participating in any kind of self-improvement or educational program. Instead, he sat in his cell day in and day out, without reading materials or human interaction, racking up more infractions for “disrespect,” which only extended his time in solitary.

After several years, Baigrie gave up.

“Not because of Ian,” she said, “but because the system made it impossible for him to improve. What does it say when a victim tries to do more for an inmate than the very system that’s supposed to rehabilitate him?”

Please read the rest of both articles. And then tell me how this is the right and humane thing to have done to a 13-year-old—thirteen—despite the fact that he did something awful 20 years ago.

Even his victim believes we owed him something better.

Photo by Michael Spooneybarger |Special to the St. Petersburg Times

On Sunday, the Sacramento Bee broke it’s first story in a series detailing its own months-long investigation into prisoner abuse at High Desert’s behavior modification unit. (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)

After more than 30 interviews with inmates, family, staff and experts, plus the review of studies, private memos, and assessments relating to the place, the Sac Bee’s Charles Pillar reported:

The Bee’s sources described strip-searches in a snow-covered exercise yard, as well as guards who assaulted inmates, tried to provoke attacks between inmates, and spread human excrement on cell doors. Prisoners depicted an environment of brutality, corruption and fear.

There was a whole section in the articles on suicides and suicide attempts at High Desert.

The rest of the details may be found here.

There will be more to come—both from the Bee and, down the line, from WLA, in an effort to determine if conditions are truly as bad as some of these reports suggest,

Meanwhile, the Bee reports that state prison officials have launched a “full investigation” that they “broadened” on Tuesday.

NOTE: Veteran investigative reporter Michael Montgomery at KQED has brief story here on the behavioral units in general.

AND NOW A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE DREADED PRISON CELL PHONE PROBLEM…..ABOUT TO BE SOLVED BY PHONE SNIFFING DOGS?

The CDCR says that, since January alone, 2500 cell phones have been confiscated from California prisoners.

(As a matter of fact, I myself am occasionally startled by cell phone calls from correctional institutions made by people who used to phone only collect, but now sound like they’re calling from down the block.)

But now, reports KCRA, prison officials may have a new secret weapon to sniff out (literally) cell phone outlaws inside the state’s correctional facilities.

Here’s a clip from the KCRA story:

Deimos, a K-9 officer, is trained to find drugs. K-9 Nikki is an expert in finding tobacco.

These K-9 officers are taking on a new job to try to sniff out cell phones in prison cells and dorms.

“They know that if they come into a housing unit, they are going to find something one way or another,” said dog trainer Wayne Conrad.

They’re being put to the test at the Richard McGee Correctional Training Center in Galt. At the facility, a mock prison cell has been stocked with electronics.

“It was difficult finding out what substance made the phone unique. Once we discovered it, we were able to train for it,” Conrad said.

Read on.

In 1999, Sister Suzanne Jabro took a small delegation of women to Vally State Prison at Chowchilla with the idea of starting some kind of program to help the female inmates. At any given time, Chowchilla holds around 8,000 prisoners, making it the largest woman’s incarceration facility in the world. Sister Suzanne, and her colleagues from non-profit Women and Criminal Justice (now the Center for Restorative Justice Works), had gotten permission from Chowchilla’s administrators to meet with a group of 60 women. The idea was to ask the inmates themselves what they most wanted or needed when it came to programs.

At the beginning of the meeting, the women were shy and restless and seemed not to know what to say. Finally, however, a first woman spoke.

“We never get to see our kids,” she said simply. Then another woman spoke up. “I can’t live without my kids,” she said, and she began to cry. The meeting exploded with voices. It seemed the women were not interested in amenities or privileges. Seeing their kids. That was the thing.

Within minutes, the meeting, the room was awash with outpourings of grief and longing about children. “By the end, nearly every woman in the room was sobbing,” said Sister Suzanne when we spoke this week. “Not crying. Sobbing.”

Was there any way that Jabro and her group could make seeing their kids possible? the women wanted to know.

Sister Suzanne assured the inmate women she would see what she could do. And “Get On the Bus” was born—a program that brings the children of incarcerated women to prison see their moms on Mother’s Day.

This Sunday, Get On the Bus will bring 1200 kids together with their mothers. On Father’s Day they will bring several hundred to visit their dads. Getting the right paperwork and permissions is a logistical nightmare, but every year the number of kids and the number of program sponsors expands. “Now we get calls from other states and Canada asking how they can start their own Get On The Bus,” Suzanne said.

You’d the think the need and the benefit would be obvious, and that it would have been done long ago, she said. “But it wasn’t.”

Still, as successful as the program has been, it is a small drop in a very large bucket. 200,000 California kids have one or more parents in prison. Get On the Bus serves less than 1 percent of those kids.

I first learned of the program from the California Department of Corrections, which now happily touts its partnership in the Get On the Bus efforts.

It was not always thus. The first year of the program, Sister Suzanne and company nearly didn’t get any kids in at all. “The prison officials were really against it,” she said. “They worried about security, of course. But mostly, they said, they didn’t feel that the mothers deserved to see their children.”

Sister Suzanne, who has spent much of the last 30 years working in some kind of detention ministry and/or “restorative justice,” pleaded with the prison higher ups. “I told them it wasn’t about the mothers, it was about the kids. The kids needed it.”

Finally the CDCR relented. They would try it one time. Get on the Bus was allowed to bring in nine families for a total of 17 kids, all of whom had not seen their mothers in a very, very long time.

Most of the children were living with grandmothers or other relatives who had neither the time nor money to go carting kids around to prisons for visits. Other kinds of contact was sporadic too. Collect phone calls were, of course, hideously expensive.

Out of all the studies that have been done on prison populations, comparatively few have been done on the affect of incarceration on the children of those locked up. But the research that has been done indicates a great degree of harm. Kids do less well in school, have more emotional problems, are more likely to get in trouble, teenage girls are more likely to get pregnant. Conversely, the more there is able to be positive contact with the locked-up parent, the fewer problems the kid is statistically likely to have.

Studies of prisoners have long indicated that those able to maintain close family relationships—particularly with their children— are more likely to do well outside when they are paroled. (And most of those in our prisons, state and federal both, will eventually be paroled.) “Children give men and women someone to do well for,” said Sister Suzanne. “You’d think that’d be a no-brainer. But, in terms of policy, it doesn’t seem to be.”

As I said, Sunday’s 1200 kids who will be boarding Sister Suzanne’s buses are just a fraction of the children and parents who could benefit from such visits.

But it’s a start.

And, by the way,” says Suzanne Jabro, “most of the kids we serve come from Los Angeles.”

The Sacramento Superior Court who gave a former California prison guard a year in jail for smuggling into the prison cell phones…and drugs, specifically marijuana. He did all this smuggling because prisoners paid him for his trouble.

He also brought a gun, bullets and two knives onto the prison property, but he says he did that last completely by mistake.

The Sacramento Bee reports:

in his guilty plea, Garcia admitted that he supplied marijuana to somebody in prison and conspired to distribute cell phones to convicts. The court papers showed that Garcia had 19 separate written communications with inmates, that he kept pay-owe sheets and that he had nine cell phones at his house when he was arrested.

Corrections officials say they have confiscated thousands of cell phones in recent years from prisoners who use them to commit crimes.

Prisoners and prisoner rights activists say inmates use the phones to cut down on their families’ collect-call bills.

On his third count, Garcia admitted that he brought a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatic handgun, 50 rounds of ammunition and two knives onto prison grounds. Deputy District Attorney Steve Secrest said Garcia told investigators the gun was his personal weapon and that he forgot to take it out of his car after he went shooting with it.

Okay, let’s see. According to the state of California’s Health and Safety Code’s sentencing guidelines the penalty for selling any amount of weed—unless you’re a medical marijuana dispensary–is 2 to 4 years in prison.

Garcia, a sworn correctional officer, smuggled weed into a state prison for money—in other words, he sold it.

On top of that, he smuggled contraband cell phones into the same prison, his place of employ (also for money).

He had a bunch of “pay-owe” sheets to keep track of his customers, which suggests that the bout of weed and cell phone deal-making for which Mr. Garcia was caught, was not his first.

For this he gets a year in jail, not prison, which—given Sac’to jail’s recent release policy, likely means he’ll do much less.

According to the prosecutor, Garcia also said the state employee furloughs had hit him hard and that he smuggled items to make some extra cash. Correctional officers have not been furloughed like other state workers, but they have had their pay docked while they “bank” the time for up to two years.

Bummer.

The prosecutor, who is starting to sound like Garcia’s BFF, also said that the corrections officer was “enticed” into bringing in the drugs and the cell phones by one of the prisoners he was supplying.

Right. The old “enticed” by the drug buyers defense.

Look, I don’t wish a longer sentence on Mr. Garcia. Heck, if it were up to me I’d have legalized marijuana years ago. But when I contrast Garcia’s treatment to that of, say, Skid row drug addicts who may get serious prison time when caught selling a rock to support their habits, or ex-gang members with one non-violent conviction in their past who on one stupid and desperate day steal $30 worth of merchandise from Target and go upstate for a year or two as a result….it doesn’t seem like equal justice.

Meanwhile, in case in Texas last month, a man was sentenced to 35 years in prison for possession of 4.6 oz of marijuana.

WHY DOESN’T CALIFORNIA SAVE $$$ THROUGH “MEDICAL PAROLE?”

Two weeks ago I had lunch with a woman who is the Catholic pastor of a large California prison. I should mention that she is no neophyte in the corrections world. She’s worked at LA County’s jails, at an out-of-state prison, and at an in-state institution or two before she got to where she is now.

We were meeting about another matter entirely but, in the course of the conversation, talk turned to some of the guys she sees inside whom she really thinks ought to be let out—simply because they are so incapacitated, that keeping them locked up on our tab doesn’t, she said, make any sense.

The pastor wasn’t talking about any kind of compassionate parole. She was just talking cost/benefit.

This week in an excellent article in the Sacramento Bee, the federal monitor in charge of California’s prison health care system, J. Clark Kelso, has said much the same thing.

“I am keenly aware, as are the courts,” Kelso said, “that a dollar that we can save in the prison health care program is a dollar that can be spent on other important priorities for the state, such as education, money for children, the elderly, other health care programs.”

An aide in Kelso’s office said that, conservatively, the prison system could save $213 million over five years by paroling just 32 inmates identified as severely incapacitated.

Twenty-one of those 32 inmates are in nursing facilities or hospitals outside prisons, which requires spending for expensive guard time — including overtime — as well as huge health care costs.

These 21 inmates’ average annual health care and guard costs total more than $1.97 million apiece — a total of $41.4 million a year for 21 individuals, said Kelso aide Luis Patiño.

With all this and more in mind, on March 17, Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco introduced a bill to create medical parole.

Leno said 1,300 inmates’ health care costs exceed $100,000 a year, and that up to 700 prisoners could qualify for a possible medical parole under his bill.

With full implementation of his bill, Leno said, the state could save at least a couple of hundred million dollars a year, more than the receiver’s initial $213 million estimate spread over five years.

There’s a lot more in the way of facts and figures on this issue, so read the rest.

DAD OF FALLEN MARINE HAS TO PAY VILE & CREEPY PICKETERS’ COURT COSTS???

Yeah, this is actually kind of usual, from a legal perspective, but given the situation, from a moral and emotional perspective it’s—what’re the words I’m looking for?—Oh, yeah. Intolerable and psychotic.

Here are the details from the Topeka Capital-Journal:

Only a few months before both sides square off in the U.S. Supreme Court, the father of a slain Marine has been ordered to pay legal costs for a Topeka-based church after the $5 million judgment he won from the congregation in 2007 was overturned on appeal.

Albert Snyder, the father of a Marine who was killed in March 2006 in Iraq, learned late last week that he had been ordered to pay legal costs for Westboro Baptist Church in connection with a lawsuit he brought against the congregation after some of its members picketed his son’s funeral in March 2006 in Westminster, Md.

Late Friday, Snyder learned he would be liable to pay the legal costs of the appeal by the Westboro church and the Phelpses in the amount of $16,500, said his attorney, Sean E. Summers, of York, Pa., in a phone interview late Monday night.

“We’ve been talking all day and all night,” Summers said of himself and Snyder. “He is disappointed. It’s kind of like rubbing his nose in it.”

I don’t know how this gets solved. As the C-J mentions, the case is on its way to the Surpremes—and the court is, I think, going to be reluctant to shut up the protesters, no matter how repellent they are. Sometimes freedom cuts against the righteous.

So what to do? I don’t know. But the idea of the family of the dead Marine having to pay up to these hate-filled Westboro people….it’s pretty hard to take.

BOSTON GLOBE GETS PEEK IN FBI’S “SPECIAL FILE” ROOM

Here’s a snippet of the Globe’s report. It explains itself.

It is where the government has hidden the most secret information: plans to relocate Congress if Washington were attacked, dossiers on double agents, case files about high-profile mob figures and their politician friends, and a disturbing number of reports about the possible smuggling of atomic bombs into the United States.

It is also where the bureau stowed documents considered more embarrassing than classified, including its history of illegal spying on domestic political organizations and surveillance of nascent gay rights groups.

It is the FBI’s “special file room,” where for decades sensitive material has been stored separately from the bureau’s central filing system to restrict access severely and, in more sinis ter instances, some experts assert, prevent the Congress and the public from getting their hands on it.

Established in 1948 under the reign of notoriously secretive FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, it remains in use today at FBI headquarters in Washington to safeguard what the bureau considers its most highly sensitive information.

Read the rest here.

Go Globe!

Go FOIA!

2 IMMIGRANTS FALL DISASTROUSLY THROUGH THE ICE DETENTION CRACKS

The LA Times & the Center for Investigative reporting have a disheartening tale by Andrew Becker about two mentally disabled men who had finished serving time on low level assault charges—but who were stayed in jails and prisons for years following the finish of their mandated sentences. One was kept for an extra four years, the other an extra five.

As for their crimes, one threw a rock during a gang fight, the other got in a scuffle over tomatoes picked without permission.

The problem is that both men were scheduled to be deported after their sentences were served-–but it was clear that neither could live on his own in Mexico.

Neither man was undocumented. Both had immigration papers. That wasn’t the issue. Yet, under current immigration law, their crimes mandated they be tossed back to their country of origin—which was Mexico.

So, unsure what else to do, the government merely held on to them—alleges a new lawsuit.

Here’s the story.

SHOULD THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA TAKE OVER PRISON HEALTH CARE?

No, I’m not kidding. The AP has the story.

The University of California will form a special committee to study whether it should take over inmate health care for the state’s troubled prison system, the chairman of the university system’s Board of Regents said this week.

Regents Chairman Russell Gould announced the committee, which university officials said will study issues including the cost, effect on labor relations, and the university’s liability in inmate lawsuits. Health care has been so bad in the state’s 33 adult prisons that a federal judge appointed a receiver in 2006 to make improvements.

A study by a company affiliated with the University of Texas has criticized the receiver for running up costs as part of the improvement effort. It projected California could save more than $4 billion over five years and $12 billion over 10 years by shifting control to the University of California…..

Scott Henson, of the always stellar Texas criminal justice blog, Grits for Breakfast, has some thoughts on the matter.

A COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY OF THE US POLICY OF “ENHANCED INTERROGATION”

In the current New Yorker Magazine, Jane Mayer, author of the award-winning The Dark Side, reviews Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, by former Bush speechwriter Marc A. Thiessen—and yanks the wings and legs off Thiessen’s “facts” one by one. To do so, Mayer uses solid, verifiable, reality-based information that she has acquired the old fashioned way—through real reporting.

The last ‘graph of Mayer’s review is clearly what she means to be the takeaway:

Thiessen’s effort to rewrite the history of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program comes not long after a Presidential race in which both the Republican and the Democratic nominees agreed that state-sponsored cruelty had damaged and dishonored America. The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not back” has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it.

Read the whole thing.

MEANWHILE, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS DIVIDED ABOUT HOW TO HANDLE DETAINEES

Charlie Savage reports in the NY Times on Monday about the dueling secret memos dealing with how the US is—and isn’t—legally empowered to handle detainees who are deemed to be terrorism-related.

Here are the relevant 2 ‘graphs:

….behind closed doors, the debate flared again that summer, when the Obama administration confronted the case of Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian man who had been arrested in Bosnia — far from the active combat zone — and was being held without trial by the United States at Guantánamo. Mr. Bensayah was accused of facilitating the travel of people who wanted to go to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda. A judge found that such “direct support” was enough to hold him as a wartime prisoner, and the Justice Department asked an appeals court to uphold that ruling.

The arguments over the case forced onto the table discussion of lingering discontent at the State Department over one aspect of the Obama position on detention. There was broad agreement that the law of armed conflict allowed the United States to detain as wartime prisoners anyone who was actually a part of Al Qaeda, as well as nonmembers who took positions alongside the enemy force and helped it. But some criticized the notion that the United States could also consider mere supporters, arrested far away, to be just as detainable without trial as enemy fighters.

THE CHURCH CHILD ABUSE SCANDAL AND SHOOTING THE MESSENGER

More than just a few Catholic church higher-ups have suggested in the last few days that the criticism leveled at the church and at Pope Benedict XVI for actions not taken to protect kids from pedophile priests—here and in Europe—amounts to Catholic bashing, or things even more conspiratorial

LA Times editorial board member Michael McGough blogs about the issue here.

He concludes (and I agree):

The pope may have plausible deniability in the cases reported by the New York Times. But the best defense for the Vatican and its supporters is to contest the accuracy of these and other reports, not to accuse journalists (or activists) of selective criticism, let alone an ignoble conspiracy. Playing the anti-Catholic card just won’t work. The sex-abuse scandal in the United States should have demonstrated that.