NOTE: I don’t know why the video vanished between last night and this morning. I”m at the jails commission right. Will figure it out when I get back.

The Young Turks, which is partnered with YouTube, is billed as the worlds largest online news show, and has gained further popularity now that it is also airing on Current TV.

The Point is the newest show on The Young Turks Network and launched earlier this year.

With all this in mind, when show producer Malcolm Fleschner told me that The Point was doing an all criminal justice themed show, and asked me to be a panelist, I agreed right away. I was interested in the topic, of course. But also I welcomed the chance to get an inside look at the new web-only model that the very smart Young Turks folks (and others like them) are pioneering with The Point and the rest of the shows on the TYT network.

My esteemed fellow panelists are actor and longtime activist and death penalty expert, Mike Farrell, and LA Deputy District Attorney and one-time DA candidate, Steve Ipsen.

The show is hosted by TYT’s Chief Operating Officer Steve Oh—who, as you’ll see, is himself a former prosecutor and is impassioned and informed on issues of criminal justice.

The conversation centers around the death penalty, but winds through other issues as well.

In any case, enjoy.

GARDENING INMATES LESS LIKELY TO COME BACK TO LOCK UP

A growing number of corrections facilities across the US are surprised to find that inmates who participate in gardening programs are significantly less likely to return to prison than the national average predicts.

Pattie Baker writing for Youth Today, has the rest of this terrifically cheering story. Here’s a clip:

The most recent study by the Pew Center for the States and the Association of State Correctional Administrators found the [national] rate of recidivism (percentage of people released from prisons who are rearrested, convicted, or returned to custody within three years) to be 43.3 percent. What may be surprising, however, is that correctional facilities with a few years under their belt with a garden are finding not just reduced recidivism rates, but significantly reduced rates. According to the WorldWatch Institute, Sandusky County Jail in Ohio finds a recidivism rate of only 18 percent from those inmates who participate in its garden program, as opposed to 40 percent for those who don’t. Graduates of the Greenhouse Program at Rikers Island in New York City experience a 5-10 percent recidivism rate, as opposed to 65 percent in the general inmate population. Participants in The Garden Project at the San Francisco County Jail have a 24 percent recidivism rate, rather than 55 percent otherwise.

Jail gardening programs that involve people at even younger ages show promising positive effects in not only reducing recidivism but also helping youth avoid first-time offenses. Sidney Morgan, the Community Works Leader for the Department of Community Justice in Multnomah County, Ore., sees big changes in youth when they work in a garden. Morgan runs Project Sega (which means “to grow”) which provides youth on probation the opportunity to work on a quarter-acre garden to pay restitution for their offenses. Produce from this garden is sold at New Seasons supermarkets in the metro-Portland area, and the participating youth get the opportunity to plant, maintain, harvest from the garden, prep the food, and bring it to market. Morgan says New Seasons will even offer jobs to youth in Project Sega after they are done with probation. Through Project Sega, Morgan claims they learn that they can be successful, and that crime is not their only option.

“I’ve been doing probation work for seven years, and I’ve never seen anything like the reaction and results we get from kids who participate in gardening,” Morgan exclaimed.

STATE SUES OC TO PROTECT SCHOOL MONEY

The State of California filed a lawsuit against Orange County on Thursday to prevent the budget-strapped OC from using education funds ($73.5M worth) to pay other bills, leaving the state to foot the bill for schools. While California would be held to a constitutional requirement for funding K-12, if the court ruled in favor of the OC, community colleges could take a big hit with the loss of county funding.

The LA Times has the story.

Ted Guest at The Crime Report writes about a new DOJ and MacArthur Foundation-funded study, “Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration,” headed by eighteen corrections experts, will study the the nation’s 2.3M prison population (roughly six times that of most other countries). Research will explore possible low-cost, high-social benefit alternatives to current prison policies.

The panel of scholars, chaired by Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, will examine the reasons for the dramatic increases in U.S. incarceration rates since the 1970s, which have produced one of the world’s highest incarceration levels—with more than 2.3 million people behind bars in U.S. prisons and jails at any time

The topic has been widely discussed and analyzed for years by advocacy groups on the left and right, as well as by individual scholars. But the two-year, $1.5 million project, convened by the National Research Council (part of the National Academy of Sciences) represents the first time in recent memory that these issues have been subject to wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary research.

“It now is time to review the state of knowledge—to look at the causes of the high rate of incarceration and the consequences for society,” said Travis, author of But They All Came Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry (2005).

EDITOR’S NOTE: Starting today, the very smart and talented Taylor Walker is helping me gather stories. Eventually Taylor will be doing a story-gathering and commentary section of her own. But right now, she’s helping me curate and write these multi-story posts. More about—and from—Taylor Walker soon.

NEARLY 50 PERCENT OF AMERICANS SAY THAT TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE IN PRISON & WE COULD LET 20 PERCENT OF ‘EM OUT….SAYS NEW PEW STUDY

The Pew Center on the States has the results of a new survey out that measures attitudes by Americans about who we should incarcerate and for how long.

Turns out that the majority of Americans think that there are “more effective, less expensive alternatives to prison for non-violent offenders and expanding those alternatives is the best way to reduce the crime rate.”

There’s lots more and it’s quite interesting. So check out the summary of the rest of the report here.

ANTONIO GOES LOOKING FOR GANG PREVENTION AND INTERVENTION $$ IN D.C.

The LA Times reports that mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was in Washington DC this week for a gang-violence reduction summit meeting with leaders from Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, San Jose and Salinas.

Sunday, he also met with Attorney General Eric Holder, to hit up Holder for some federal money to help to fund LA’s GRYD programs (Gang Reduction and Youth Development), These were the programs that were gathered under the mayor’s umbrella in 2007, and got up and running in 2009.

Last year, the combined prevention and intervention GRYD programs were budgeted at $26 million, made up of federal, state and local monies. Villaraigosa wants the feds to come across with a good chunk of those millions.

Hopefully he’ll get the money he/we need. I just wish that when the mayor made his pitch he didn’t have to try to attribute LA’s drop in gang crime to GRYD, since even his own evaluators from the Urban Institute say otherwise (namely since the parts of Los Angeles that aren’t served by GRYD have had exactly the same drop).

Yeah, yeah. Picky, I know.

ACLU ISSUES REPORT SHOWING HOW MANY POLICE DEPARTMENTS ARE TRACKING US THROUGH OUR CELL PHONES WITHOUT ANYTHING PESKY LIKE, SAY, A WARRANT

A huge pile of information gathered by the ACLU on law enforcement cell phone tracking protocols was released to the New York Times on Saturday. The report returned results that differed considerably between about 200 agencies that agreed to provide information about how they were using our cell phones to track us. Departments across the U.S. are grappling with the lack of concrete boundaries set in place for officers in regard to cell phone tracking. While some agencies state that they are only using tracking without a warrant in life-threatening situations (and sometimes it does save lives), others are using it when they damn please, including in California where state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.

(About that text downloading function, unreasonable search and seizure anyone? Seriously, how in the world is that not a 4th Amendment violation?)

In order to get the information, 35 ACLU affiliates filed over 380 public records requests with state and local law enforcement agencies to ask about their policies, procedures and practices for tracking cell phones.

This is from the ACLU’s statement:

What we have learned is disturbing. While virtually all of the over 200 police departments that responded to our request said they track cell phones, only a tiny minority reported consistently obtaining a warrant and demonstrating probable cause to do so. While that result is of great concern, it also shows that a warrant requirement is a completely reasonable and workable policy.

They’ve got a point. And, given this recent SCOTUS decision, I think the SUPREMES may think so too.

LGBTQ BOX TO CHECK MAY SHOW UP IN CAL STATE COLLEGE APS…SO IS THIS A GOOD IDEA? BAD IDEA? MANY ARE NOT SURE

Within the next year, students may see optional sexual orientation check-boxes on their application forms for California state colleges. While the purpose may be to gauge the size of the LGBTQ community on campus, and thus offer better services, some fear it may be an invasion of privacy or that the information may be improperly used or wrongly divulged. The LA Times reports.

SUPREME COURT TOSSES OUT CASE AGAINST LOS ANGELES SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES

The AP has the story. Here’s a clip:

The Supreme Court said Wednesday that California police officers cannot be sued because they used a warrant that may have been defective to search a woman’s house.

The high court threw out the lawsuit against Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Curt Messerschmidt and other police officials, who were being sued personally by Augusta Millender for the search on her house and confiscation of her shotgun.

Police were looking for her foster son, Jerry Ray Bowen, who had recently shot at his ex-girlfriend Shelly Kelly with a black sawed-off shotgun. Kelly told police that he might be at his foster mother’s house, so Messerschmidt got a warrant to look for any weapons on the property and gang-related material, since Bowen was supposed to be a member of the Mona Park Crips and the Dodge Park Crips. The detective had his supervisors approve the warrant before submitting to the district attorney and a judge, who also approved the warrant.

Bowen and his shotgun were not found at Millender’s house, but police confiscated the 73-year-old Millender’s shotgun.

Millender, who is now deceased, sued saying the warrant was over broad and that the deputies had acted improperly. The 9th Circuit agreed, citing the fourth amendment. The Supremes did not—pointing out that the case did not, in fact, concern the validity of the warrant, but was about was whether a lawsuit against the officers was permitted. The court concluded that it was not, and that the officers acted reasonably, as they had every reason to think the warrant valid.

Read the rest. It’s interesting.

Plus, as David Savage of the LA Times points out the suit made for some unusual allies: The ACLU and the National Rifle Assn. backed plaintiff Millender, and the Obama administration joined in support of the deputies.

ILLINOIS GOVERNOR SUGGESTS CLOSING CONTROVERSIAL SUPERMAX PRISON AND GETS APPLAUSE AND CRITICISM

IF Governor Pat Quinn orders the closure of the Tamms supermax prison at in southern Illinois, it will be for fiscal reasons, but many experts across the country are applauding the possibility. As with California’s Pelican Bay and the Administrative Maximum (ADX) facility in Florence, Colorado, Tamms utilizes the kind of extreme isolation that many believe constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. What is more, for those who are eventually released from prison, research suggests that supermax isolation causes psychological damage, which makes an individual’s behavior worse, not better. Thus human rights organizations would like to see Tamms and places like it close their doors, sooner rather than later..

Yet shutting down the facility is anything but simple. Prisons have become central to the economy of certain rural areas of the country, so the closure can wreak local havoc.

As the Chicago Tribune puts it:

From the moment it opened in 1998, the super-max Tamms prison has been controversial for its high costs and the harsh treatment of its inmates.

Gov.Pat Quinn’s plan to close Tamms to save millions of dollars did not end the controversy.

Critics say it is long past time to shutter a prison known for conditions that were often compared with those at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Opponents of Quinn’s proposal say closing Tamms would be devastating to the community in far southern Illinois where it is located, a place where jobs are hard to come by.

Other states may soon face similar dilemmas as a dropping crime rate meets tight budgets,

In California, however, the prisons are still so overcrowded, and our recidivism rate still so high, that despite a diving crime rate, closures are not close on the horizon.

LAUSD SUP DEASY SAYS THAT HE HAS ORDERED THE REFILING OF EVERY CASE OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT FROM THE LAST THREE YEARS WITH THE STATE CREDENTIALING COMMISSION

He’s doing all this refiling just to be on the safe side, Deasy told David Lazarus on the Patt Morrison Show on KPCC Wednesday.

Interestingly, Deasy also told Lazarus that more than 850 certificated employees had been “separated” from Los Angeles Unified in the 10 months since he took over as superintendent – not only for criminal activity but for failing to meet “standards of conduct.”

“We’re going to work very hard to keep good teachers. But we’re not going to tolerate the other,” Deasy said.

A good thing since, for a while there, the allegations of sexual misconduct seemed to keep on coming. After the arrest of Mark Berndt, the former Miramonte Elementary School teacher charged with 23 counts of lewd conduct with children, two more LAUSD teachers have been removed from schools due to charges of sexual misconduct.

Deasy told the LA Times:

“I’m horrified,” said Deasy, regarding recent revelations about the handling of past abuse allegations. “And the rest of my comments can’t be printed in the language that the L.A. Times uses. I don’t think I’m overreacting.”

INSIDE THE GRAY BOX – THE INCONVENIENT FACTS ABOUT SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN AMERICA

Right now approximately 80,000 Americans are living in solitary confinement in this country’s prisons. Many of them have no record of violence either in or out of prison, says a new investigative report by The Dart Society.

Here’s a clip from the report, written by Susan Greene:

Among the misperceptions about solitary confinement is that it’s used only on the most violent inmates, and only for a few weeks or months. In fact, an estimated 80,000 Americans — many with no record of violence either inside or outside prison — are living in seclusion. They stay there for years, even decades. What this means, generally, is 23 hours a day in a cell the size of two queen-sized mattresses, with a single hour in an exercise cage, also alone. Some prisoners aren’t allowed visits or phone calls. Some have no TV or radio. Some never lay eyes on each other. And some go years without fresh air or sunlight.

Solitary is a place where the slightest details can mean the world. Things like whether you can see a patch of grass or only sky outside your window – if you’re lucky enough to have a window. Or whether the guy who occupies cells before you in rotation has a habit of smearing feces on the wall. Are the lights on 24/7? Is there a clock or calendar to mark time? If you scream, could anyone hear you?

In the warp of time and space where [Osiel] Rodriguez lives, the system not only has stripped him of any real human contact, but also made it unbearable to be reminded of a reality that has become all too unreal. It’s ripping him apart. [Rodriguez robbed a bank and a pawn shop when he was 22 years old.]

“Looking at photos of the free world caused me so much pain that I just couldn’t do it any more,” writes Rodriguez, 36. “Time and these conditions are breaking me down.”

This is what our prisons are doing to people in the name of safety. This is how deeply we’re burying them.

SHOULD FREE SPEECH PROTECT THE RIGHT TO LIE?

William Bennett Turner writes for the NY Times about the alarmingly slippery slope presented by the Stolen Valor Act.

Here’s a clip:

XAVIER ALVAREZ is a liar. Even the brief filed on his behalf in the United States Supreme Court says as much: “Xavier Alvarez lied.” It informs us that he has told tall tales about playing hockey for the Detroit Red Wings, being married to a Mexican starlet and rescuing the American ambassador during the Iranian hostage crisis. But as the brief reminds us, “none of those lies were crimes.”

Another of his falsehoods, however, did violate the law. In 2007, while introducing himself at a meeting of a California water board, he said that he was a retired Marine who had been awarded the Medal of Honor (both lies). He was quickly exposed as a phony and pilloried in the community and press as an “idiot” and the “ultimate slime.”

But his censure did not end there. The federal government prosecuted him under the Stolen Valor Act, which prohibits falsely claiming to have been awarded a military medal, with an enhanced penalty (up to a year in prison) for claiming to have received the Medal of Honor. Mr. Alvarez was convicted but appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which held that the act violated the First Amendment.

The government has taken the case to the Supreme Court, which is scheduled to hear arguments this week. The question before the court is not whether there is a constitutional “right” to lie. Rather, it’s a question about the scope of the government’s power over individuals — whether the government can criminalize saying untrue things about oneself even if there is no harm to any identifiable person, no intent to cheat anyone or gain unfair advantage, no receipt of anything of value and no interference with the administration of justice or any other compelling government interest.

Read the rest. It’s extremely interesting—especially when you start to consider the implications. (Hint: One of them involves Steven Colbert.)

THE SUPREMES, CITIZENS’ UNITED, THOSE CRANKY MONTANANS CHALLENGING THE LAW—AND THE MEANING OF RUTH GINSBURG’S REMARKS

On Friday of last week, the Supreme Court agreed to a stay on the Montana Supreme Court’s ruling of last fall,—one that upheld its own state law and thus basically made the US Supreme Court’s extremely controversial (and truly hideous) Citizens United decision inoperative in the Big Sky state.

Tom Goldstein over at SCOTUSBlog explains the significance of the message conveyed in the statement made by Justice Ruth Ginsburg (joined by Justice Breyer) at the hearing’s conclusion.

Or, if SCOTUSBlog is too wonky for your taste, the story at the Washington Post, addressing the same issue, lays things out more directly. Here’s how it opens:

Two Supreme Court justices suggested Friday that the court reconsider its controversial 2010 decision that allowed unlimited corporate and union spending in elections.

The suggestion came as the court blocked a Montana Supreme Court decision upholding a century-old ban on corporate campaign spending in the state.

The Montana ruling seems squarely at odds with the court’s 5 to 4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed unlimited corporate spending. The U.S. Supreme Court majority had said such independent spending did not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

In Friday’s order, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer said the upheaval in the world of campaign finance since the Citizens United decision does not bear out the majority opinion.

“Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations ‘do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,’ ” Ginsburg wrote.

“A petition for certiorari [from those challenging the Montana court’s decision] will give the court an opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway.”

Most experts think that the chances of Citizens United being modified or undone by the Supremes are worse than slim, as that would require Justice Kennedy (or someone more conservative than he) switching sides, which is unlikely. But the fact that the discussion will likely be raised may lay down tracks for a future court’s consideration.

Once again in California, those in the state with any kind of experience and/or knowledge of juvenile justice, are trying to persuade California lawmakers to please, please, please pass a law that gives kids sentenced to prison for life a chance—just a chance, no kind of guarantee—to one day make the case that they are worthy of parole.

So far, as was true last year and the year before, nearly all the Republicans and far too many spineless Democrats, are unwilling to pass the thing. Thus SB9—as the bill is numbered—still is a few votes shy of being able to pass.

And while advocates are not giving up, the fact that our supposedly liberal state cannot pass this watered down bill is discouraging.

As I’ve stated here a zillion times, the United States is the only country in the world that puts kids in prison for life without parole—LWOP. The only one. Really. Nobody else does it. Nobody.

And….as that battle goes on in Sacramento, it is instructive to read this investigation by three reporters from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting about the discrepancy in sentencing in Massachusetts for juvenile murders. It is likely that California could use such an investigation.

Read the whole thing, but here’s how it opens:

Shrewsbury teen Valerie N. Hall pushed her mother down a flight of stairs in 2000, smashed her head in with a hammer and left Kathleen Thompsen Hall to die while she went for a ride with her boyfriend. For her mother’s murder, Hall, a depressed and suicidal 16-year-old at the time, served nine years in prison.

Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School student John Odgren, who suffers from depression and other mental ailments, fatally stabbed schoolmate James Alenson in the boy’s bathroom in 2007 when he was 16, and after realizing what he had done, tried to get help. Odgren is serving life without the possibility of parole at Bridgewater State Hospital.

Both crimes were ghastly. Both teens suffered from mental illness. Both were charged with first-degree murder.

But their punishments could not have been more different.

The dispositions of the Hall and Odgren cases illustrate the profound inequities that have grown up in the Massachusetts juvenile justice system since the passage of a tough sentencing law enacted 15 years ago and designed to punish the most depraved “super-predators” among teen killers.

An investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting reveals, for the first time, that that law is not being applied consistently to the most horrific juvenile murder cases, as it was intended. The findings come as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares this spring to tackle whether it is “cruel and unusual” punishment to sentence juveniles 14 and under to life without parole for murder.

As the investigation points out, even law-and-order Texas has repealed life without parole for juveniles. But not Massachusetts…..and not California.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC—SOME WISE WORDS ABOUT CALIFORNIA’S JUVENILE PRISONS FROM JAMES BELL

Juvenile crime reached an all time low in California in 2010.

For this and other reasons, Jerry Brown wants to shut down the state’s incarceration facilities for kids by 2014, and move all of those juveniles to camps or other facilities at a county level.

Most of the juvenile justice experts I know see this idea as a damned if you do, damned if you don’t proposition.

On one hand the facilities we used to call CYA (California Youth Authority), that we now call DJJ (Department of Juvenile Justice) are lousy places, where kids don’t get what they need. What is more they’re insanely expensive to run.

On the other hand, some of the kids sent to DJJ are mentally ill and very difficult to handle. To toss them into, say, Los Angeles County’s already troubled probation camps, would be difficult.

James Bell, the founder and executive director of the W. Haywood Burns Institute, talks to KALW News about whether or not it’s practical or not for the young people in DJJ to be brought back to their home counties.

Here’s a couple of clips from the transcript for the broadcast:

The whole point of juvenile justice system is to make sure that we do some habilitation and some rehabilitation, so that you won’t go on to be an adult chronic offender. You are supposed to be there to be getting needs addressed that you have expressed as a juvenile, as a young person. Essentially, this was the place where it was guards in a pod, hundreds of young people in dorms, and if anything happens the guards would throw tear gas left, throw tear gas right, and call for backup or the SWAT team. So, you would have to declare a gang affiliation to be protected. It was just horrible!

There was no real interactive model between the young people and the people that were supposed to be serving them. So it just became custody and control. And as we know, there were beatings, there were deaths. There were absurd instances where kids with special education needs were supposed to get education but the facilities people thought they were too dangerous. So your classroom was just cage! Literally, you can imagine the absurdity that has to happen when you are non-interactive and you go to custody and control. That’s what it was.

KERNAN: Now the call is to shut down the DJJ altogether. Why is that happening now do you think?

BELL: There have been calls to shut down these facilities for many, many years. And the reasons were what we’ve just talked about: Treatment wasn’t right, it was extremely expensive for that kind of treatment. Recidivism rates were crazy – between 60-70% range. It was like, why are we doing this? But those arguments had no salience because of fear, the way politicians frame public safety… it just got no traction. Literally, the state’s fiscal crisis is the reason because folks are looking at why shouldn’t we do something differently.

Now in fairness, the populations were going down and I believe that’s because the locals were beginning to see that sending their young people away to the Youth Authority as it was then, wasn’t productive, wasn’t helpful. And so there is a movement out there in the youth justice field to look at rational policies, to become less anecdotal, more based on data and objective screens and probation violation grids and those kinds of things. That resulted in less counties sending their people anyway.

And you could really see a north-south split. Southern California being the one that are most sending, and northern California sending least….

Read or listen to the rest. Bell is very good at laying things out.

DEAR CALIFORNIA, I KNOW WE NEED MONEY, BUT PLEASE DON’T SELL OUR PRISONS TO THOSE SMILING GUYS WITH THE BAGS FULL OF MONEY

Chris Kirkham, writing for the Huffington Post has the story (actually two stories) on this new and alarming trend that brings with it a moral conundrum: If prisons become privatized is there not a budget incentive for prison inc. to get or keep customers?

In any case, here’s how Kirkhan opens his story:

As state governments wrestle with massive budget shortfalls, a Wall Street giant is offering a solution: cash in exchange for state property. Prisons, to be exact.

Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for “challenging corrections budgets.” In exchange, the company is asking for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Huffington Post.

The move reflects a significant shift in strategy for the private prison industry, which until now has expanded by building prisons of its own or managing state-controlled prisons. It also represents an unprecedented bid for more control of state prison systems.

Corrections Corporation has been a swiftly growing business, with revenues expanding more than fivefold since the mid-1990s. The company capitalized on the expansion of state prison systems in the ’80s and ’90s at the height of the so-called ‘war on drugs,’ contracting with state governments to build or manage new prisons to house an influx of drug offenders. During the past 10 years, it has found new opportunity in the business of locking up undocumented immigrants, as the federal government has contracted with private companies in an aggressive immigrant-detention campaign.

And Corrections Corporation’s offer of $250 million toward purchasing existing state prisons is yet another avenue for potential growth. The company has billed the “corrections investment initiative” as a convenient option for states in need of fresh revenue streams: The state benefits from a one-time infusion of cash, while the prison corporation wins a new long-term contract. a businessl

Kirkham also reports that the state of Florida just narrowly escaped selling a bunch of it’s prison facilities to a large prison corp.

LAUSD PAID $40 GRAND TO SETTLE WITH MIRAMONTE TEACHER MARK BERNDT, BUT PUT BLOTCH ON RECORD OF INNOCENT MIRAMONTE TEACHERS. REALLY.

KPCC’S Tami Abdollah with Shirley Jahad broke the $40 K settlement story and the opening paragraph pretty much says it all:

The Los Angeles Unified School District agreed last June to pay about $40,000 to settle its dismissal case against former Miramonte Elementary teacher Mark Berndt, who has since been charged with 23 counts of lewd conduct, including spoon-feeding his semen to children.

It turns out that it doesn’t matter if Berndt is convicted of all 23 counts, he still gets his pension, health care benefits for the rest of his life, and presumably the 40 grand—according to his unbreakable union contract.

Read and/or listen to the whole thing.

Then in Friday’s LA Times, Howard Blume, Angel Jennings and Richard Winton, follow up on the Berndt settlement story, and take it farther by delving into the unbelievably careless way the non-semen spooning Miramonte teachers were treated.

Here’s one clip from their story, but there’s lots more:

“When teachers were told that they were being transferred, dozens of teachers were in tears,” union President Warren Fletcher said. “They are part of the fabric of this community.”

The union accepted the transfers, Fletcher said, on the understanding that the move was temporary and that no innocent teacher’s employment record would be marred. L.A. Unified, he said, broke both promises, by categorizing the teachers’ relocation as an administrative transfer. Such paperwork frequently results from a disciplinary action…..

WHO ARE LAPD’S RESERVE POLICE? AND ARE THE EFFECTIVE? SO-CAL CONNECTED TAKES A LOOK

Here’s So Cal Connected’s summary of the segment, which airs tonight, Friday:

They look the same, dress the same, get the same training and wear the same badge, but they’re not full-time cops, and they’re not even paid. Meet the members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Reserve Corps, the regular citizens who back up the city’s 10,000 cops and whose numbers are on the rise.

AS CRIME RATES DROP, PRIVATE PRISONS ARE NO LONGER CASH COWS—UNLESS WE CAN LOCK UP MORE PEOPLE (WHICH—P.S.— IS NOT A GOOD SOLUTION)

Okay, did anyone really think that private prisons would not end up presenting weird and creepy conflicts of interest if crime went down and we started having more sensible sentencing laws?

Llewellyn Hinks-Jones for the Atlantic Monthly has the story.

Here’s a clip:

Over the last 30 years, Texas built over 90 prisons, quintupling the number of detention centers in the state and earning the title of highest state incarceration rate in the process.

As much as Texas ended up an outlier, it was by no means alone. All across the U.S. during the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, depressed villages and hamlets in need of an industry, from the Mississippi Delta to the Appalachian Coal Belt, signed up to build oversized detention facilities on the outskirts of town, surrounded by barbed wire and klieg lights, in the hopes of bolstering the local economy with taxes, jobs and associated retail.

But ever since the nation’s crime rate began leveling off in the late 1990s, with the total state prison population decreasing for the first time in 40 years, there haven’t been enough inmates to populate these new-found penitentiaries….

THE PROP 8 CHALLENGE: IS IT TOO EARLY?

David Cole, an expert in Constitutional law, has written an essay for the New York Review of Books about whether or not the Prop 8 challenge, that will now go to the Supreme Court (presuming that SCOTUS takes case), was premature.

There was much discussion of this issue when Ted Olson and David Boies first talked about taking on this case. Olson and Boies argued that this was exactly the right time.

In any case, Cole’s essay on the issue is worth reading. Here’s a clip:

…..gay rights organizations have stayed away from the federal court system. They have instead sought to obtain legal rights for same-sex couples state by state, going first through the legislatures and only thereafter through the courts; and even then, only in the state courts, relying on arguments based on state law that could not be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The strategy has proved quite successful. Since 2004, six states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York) and the District of Columbia have recognized same-sex marriages. On February 8, Washington’s state legislature passed a bill that will make it the seventh such state once the governor signs it. Twelve more recognize some sort of partnership status that gives same-sex couples all or most of the benefits and obligations associated with marriage..

Yet many other states have moved in the opposite direction. By June 2011, 29 states had banned gay marriage by constitutional amendment, and another twelve by state statute. (Some states, like California, have both recognized same-sex civil unions and banned same-sex marriage.) In short, we are far from reaching any national consensus on the issue….

Photo by the AP

NEW STUDY SAYS AGING PRISONERS FASTEST GROWING LOCKED-UP POPULATION

The fact that aging prisoners are a growing issue has been reported on a lot lately as reporters and policy makers start to snap awake to the fact that locking up more people for longer is going to eventually produce a bunch of old guy (and old girl) inmate.

California, with its long troubled prison health care system, is one of the states that cannot help but be hit hardest by the demands of an aging inmate population.

Human Rights Watch has issued a new report that looks at the scope of the problem nationally. Here’s a clip from their press release:

Human Rights Watch found that the number of sentenced state and federal prisoners age 65 or older grew at 94 times the rate of the overall prison population between 2007 and 2010. The number of sentenced prisoners age 55 or older grew at six times the rate of the overall prison population between 1995 and 2010.

“Prisons were never designed to be geriatric facilities,” said Jamie Fellner, senior adviser to the US Program at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “Yet US corrections officials now operate old age homes behind bars.”

All in all, HRW has produced a thoughtful, informative report that surveys the issue, makes some practical recommendations, and then asks a series of questions that challenge us to ask ourselves from a common sense perspective about when imprisonment might no longer be justified or sensible, as certain kinds of prisoners gets older.

Read the whole report here.

The New York Times also has a story on the issue.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE SUBJECT OF PRISON COSTS: A NEW VERA INSTITUTE REPORT SAYS THE REAL COST OF PRISONS TO TAXPAYERS HIGHER THAN REALIZED

The Vera institute has just released a new report titled The Price of Prisons: What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers. The report shows that however much we think our prisons are costing us as taxpayers—we’re likely wrong. They’re costing us more than we think.

On a state by state basis, the Vera people looked at such extra costs as staff pensions and retiree benefits— and more—that, in many cases, are not listed in a state’s corrections budget.

In California, for example, our corrections budget is $7 billion. But when we look at the full cost, as Vera calculates it, the budget goes up to $7.9 billion—nearly a billion dollars more than our corrections budgets would suggest, bringing the cost of locking up each inmate in our prisons to $48 thousand per year, one of the higher price tags in the nation..

And if we look at the collateral costs of incarceration, (costs that Vera mentions as important, but that they did not cover in this report) the taxpayer’s bill goes still higher:

When a person is in prison, taxpayers may incur additional—or indirect—costs, such as the costs of social services, child welfare, and education, for example. For the most part, these indirect costs are borne by government agencies other than the department of corrections. They are not included in the calculations presented here, however.

Incarcerated men and women also bear economic and social costs associated with prison—as do their families and communities.* As a 2005 study concluded, “Incarceration impacts the life of a family in several important ways: it strains them financially, disrupts parental bonds, separates spouses, places severe stress on the remaining caregivers, leads to a loss of discipline in the household, and to feelings of shame, stigma, and anger.”** Although these costs—typically referred to as collateral costs—are important for policy deliberations, they are no tallied in this report.

LA MAGAZINE EDITOR MARY MELTON TALKS ABOUT WHAT’S MISSING IN LA JOURNALISM

A smart new LA blog called Frying Pan News did an interview with LA Mag’s editor Mary Melton about what the LA Times is doing wrong—and more.

Here’s a clip:

What is missing from the city’s journalistic landscape?

The mainstream press needs to reintroduce beats, cover California and L.A. issues, have more reporters devoted to local politics and politicians. Websites don’t have the resources to do deep reporting.

If you were editor of the L.A. Times, what would you do to change things?

The first thing I would do is hire a fleet of buses and have everyone in the building get on one and go see the city. Too many people at the Times never leave the building. I remember during the 2000 Democratic Convention, which was in downtown. I was working at the Times, and I decided to go over to check it out. I tried to get some folks to come with me, and everyone said, “It’s so far.” What?

I like the bus idea. (But way better to get on public transportation, not that hired fleet.)

THE IDIOTIC “I MIGHT HAVE A TACO” MAYOR GETS MORE THAN 2000 TACOS

The group Reform Immigration for America delivered a whole lot of texts and tacos on Thursday to East Haven, CT, Mayor Maturo—along with an invitation to have an open dialogue with the Latino community in his city, following his insensitive remarks this week.

MSNBC has more on the story-–and the back story:

A Connecticut mayor who sparked a firestorm of criticism for quipping “I might have tacos” when interviewed by a TV reporter about the arrest of four town police officers accused of racially profiling and bullying Latino residents got more than he bargained for.

More than 2,000 tacos were delivered to the office of East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo on Thursday, ordered by people who found his comments insensitive racially offensive. The send-the-mayor-a-taco campaign, which took off via tweets, cellphone texts and social-media shares, was organized by Reform Immigration for America, a group that advocates comprehensive immigration reform.

Most Americans honestly don’t want to spend much time, energy or emotion thinking about people in jail or prison—unless, by chance they have a family member who is locked up.

We harp on the issue here at WitnessLA since criminal justice is, after all, central to the mission of the site. But if the topic comes up in a social setting, I see eyes starting to glaze over, even among friends who try to be interested.

That’s why the article by Adam Gopnick in the current New Yorker, The Caging of America, is so heartening.

Gopnick is a critic and commentator with no particular expertise in criminal justice matters. But he’s also a very smart guy and clear headed thinker. Somehow the topic grabbed his interest, and he dove deeply.

The result is part think piece, part book review. (He examines the new book by Berkeley criminologist, Frank Zimring, The City that Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control.)

In any case, it shouldn’t be missed.

I won’t try to summarize Gopnick’s work here. The essay is carefully crafted, thought by thought, and should be read in it’s totality. But some clips will give you an idea of what he’s on about.

To wit:

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.

Conservatives and other law and order types insist that the nationwide 40 percent drop in crime we’ve seen in the past few years can be laid at the feet of all this incarcerating. But, as Gopnick, channeling Zimring, points out, that assumption falls apart when one looks at New York’s crime stats, which happen to be another 40 percent lower still than the rest of the nation—the lowest since 1900—while its incarceration rate, rather than rising, has also dropped precipitously.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

And still we go on locking people up at a ferocious clip—even though, in terms of our incarceration rates, we increasingly stand alone in the world.

To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent….

So how do we go about ending this plague of imprisoning? Gopnick suggests that we must start thinking and acting sanely—in a thousand small ways.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime….

Anyway, read the thing. It’s worth it.

HOUSE PANEL QUESTIONS US ATTORNEY GENERAL ABOUT PARDONS OFFICE AFTER PROPUBLICA INVESTIGATION ON RACIAL DISPARITIES IN PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS

In December of this past year, in an investigation co-published by the Washington Post, ProPublica reporters Dafna Linzer and Jennifer LaFleur found that, in the past ten years of presidential pardons, white criminals seeking pardons were nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities pardon seekers. Black pardon seekers had the lowest chance of all.

Here’s a clip:

Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered.

“I’m just astounded by those numbers,” said Roger Adams, who served as head of the Justice Department’s pardons office from 1998 to 2008. He said he could think of nothing in the office’s practices that would have skewed the recommendations. “I can recall several African Americans getting pardons.’’

The review of applications for pardons is conducted almost entirely in secret, with the government releasing scant information about those it rejects.

The facts uncovered by the reporters’ investigation caused the House Judiciary Committee to pose a series of probing questions to Attorney General Eric Holder about what he was doing to look into this issue.

A WOMAN RELIVES THE TRAUMA OF FORCED STERILIZATION AND THE NIGHTMARE OF EUGENICS

This LA Times Column One story story by David Zucchino is dizzyingly painful to read, but also essential.

Here’s how it opens:

Elaine Riddick was a confused and frightened 14-year-old. She was poor and black, the daughter of alcoholic parents in a segregated North Carolina town. And she was pregnant after being raped by a man from her neighborhood.

Riddick’s miserable circumstances attracted the attention of social workers, who referred her case to the state’s Eugenics Board. In an office building in Raleigh, five men met to consider her fate — among them the state health director and a lawyer from the attorney general’s office.

Board members concluded that the girl was “feebleminded” and doomed to “promiscuity.” They recommended sterilization. Riddick’s illiterate grandmother, Maggie Woodard, known as “Miss Peaches,” marked an “X” on a consent form.

Hours after Riddick gave birth to a son in Edenton, N.C., on March 5, 1968, a doctor sliced through her fallopian tubes and cauterized them.

“They butchered me like a hog,” recalls Riddick, now a poised and determined woman of 57.

Between the years of 1929 and 1974, reports Zuccinno, close to 7,600 people were sterilized under orders from North Carolina’s Eugenics Board. Nearly 85% were women or girls, some as young as 10…

Read on.

Photo by Steve Liss for the New Yorker

For vast numbers of Americans who have been convicted of a felony, the punishment has no end point.

This essay in the New York Times by Carnegie Mellon professor, Alfred Blumstein, and University of Maryland criminologist, Kiminori Nakamura, gets to the heart of this issue that we as a nation can simply no longer afford to ignore.

Here’s a clip from their story:

IN 2010, the Chicago Public Schools declined to hire Darrell Langdon for a job as a boiler-room engineer, because he had been convicted of possessing a half-gram of cocaine in 1985, a felony for which he received probation. It didn’t matter that Mr. Langdon, a single parent of two sons, had been clean since 1988 and hadn’t run into further trouble with the law. Only after The Chicago Tribune wrote about his case did the school system reverse its decision and offer him the job.

A stunning number of young people are arrested for crimes in this country, and those crimes can haunt them for the rest of their lives. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Crime Commission found that about half of American males could expect to be arrested for a nontraffic offense some time in their lives, mostly in their late teens and early 20s. An article just published in the journal Pediatrics shows how the arrest rate has grown — by age 23, 30 percent of Americans have been arrested, compared with 22 percent in 1967. The increase reflects in part the considerable growth in arrests for drug offenses and domestic violence.

The impact of these arrests is felt for years. The ubiquity of criminal-background checks and the efficiency of information technology in maintaining those records and making them widely available, have meant that millions of Americans — even those who served probation or parole but were never incarcerated — continue to pay a price long after the crime. In November the American Bar Association released a database identifying more than 38,000 punitive provisions that apply to people convicted of crimes, pertaining to everything from public housing to welfare assistance to occupational licenses. More than two-thirds of the states allow hiring and professional-licensing decisions to be made on the basis of an arrest alone.

Employers understandably want to protect their employees and customers from risk. Yet at the same time, there is a growing public interest in facilitating job opportunities for those who have stayed crime-free for a reasonable period of time. The weak economy and a rethinking of the logic of mass incarceration — driven in large part by budget pressures — have also brought attention to the situations of ex-offenders like Mr. Langdon, who face the collateral consequences of conviction long after their involvement with the criminal justice system has ended. Federal authorities are beginning to pay attention. Last April, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. urged state attorneys general to review laws and policies “to determine whether those that impose burdens on individuals convicted of crimes without increasing public safety should be eliminated.”

Read the rest. to find out what Blumstein and Nakamura suggest as solutions.

PS: A former California prison warden friend of mine who originally drew my attention to this story, pointed out that the one aspect of this issue that the authors don’t mention is voting rights. “The United States is the only country that permits permanent disenfranchisement of felons even after completion of their sentences,” he wrote in an email.

This causes around two million Americans to be forever disenfranchised. However, each state has different rules. In California, thankfully, while voting rights are not restored upon release from prison, once someone is off parole or probation, they may register to vote again.