BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Incarceration Complex: 'Beyond Walls and Cages'

Incarceration complex:
The desire to imprison

Walls and Cages provides example after example of how central the business of incarceration is to the U.S. power elites in the twenty-first century.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / August 7, 2013

[Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Border, and Global Crisis, edited by Jenna M. Loyd, Matt Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge (2012: University of Georgia Press); Hardcover; 344 pp; $50.20. Paperback; 168 pp; $22.46.]

Every day, the role of incarceration in the business of our nation becomes more noticeable. In California, 30 thousand prisoners are conducting a hunger strike demanding (among other things) an end to long-term solitary confinement and group punishment, and for better food and medical care.

In Vermont and other states, there is an ongoing campaign against private prisons and the shipping of Vermont prisoners to other states. Immigrants across the land are being thrown into detention facilities just because they are immigrants, often without papers.

The desire to imprison overrides almost any other function of law enforcement in most localities, while the number of laws requiring imprisonment is constantly increased with no regard for the damage such laws inflict.

It can be reasonably argued that this drive towards incarceration is occurring due to the incredible amounts of profits this dynamic creates for a few well-connected corporations. It can also be reasonably argued that the fact that most of the prisoners and detainees are people of color is directly related to a history of enslavement and control of that population in the United States.

A new book, Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Border, and Global Crisis, utilizes both of these arguments as the basis for its examination of the role the prison-industrial complex plays in the modern U.S. corporate state, while also looking at movements working to change the system.

A collection of essays, articles and reflections by prison abolition activists, immigrant rights workers, and former detainees, Beyond Walls and Cages uses the concept of prison abolition as its foundation. By doing so, it rips away the idea that prisons can be reformed. After all, a reformed prison is still a prison. Their existence represents the perceived need by the power elites to control the poor and disenfranchised.

Nowhere is this more true in today’s world than in Washington’s current policies regarding immigrants. The only reason these people are detained is that they are immigrants. Most have committed no crime. Even among those who have been convicted, the majority of the convictions are for what most citizens consider minor offenses. Of this latter group, most have been naturalized and are only detained because of changes in immigration laws that were designed with no other purpose but to detain them.

It is worthwhile to ask, is the detention of those only because of their immigration status really much different than the detention of Japanese Americans during World War Two only because of their family's ethnicity? Most Americans now consider the latter policy to have been wrong. How long will it take for its current manifestation to also be considered as such?

When it comes to the current immigration policy of “catch and return,” it is clear that the motivation behind the policy is twofold: to punish and to make money from that punishment. As the essays in this book make repeatedly clear, this is what motivates the entire system of imprisonment and virtually every element associated with that system.

As this book also makes clear, this is a bipartisan effort. Like with Washington’s policy on imperial war, there is little dissent among mainstream politicians and authorities over the necessity for war and incarceration, only over how best to prosecute them.

Walls and Cages provides example after example of how central the business of incarceration is to the U.S. power elites in the twenty-first century. From the denial of voting rights to the criminalization of migration; from the focus of law enforcement and prosecution on poor and mostly non-white communities to the media representation of immigrants and others as innately criminal.

This is a radical book that strips away any pretense that prisons and policies designed to place as many people as possible in them can be humane. The writers  issue a clear and thoughtful call to reconsider the entire concept of prisons on which U.S. society and its institutions have based their approach to dealing with the poor, non-white, and others with little power.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Tom Hayden : Trayvon Martin and the Super-Predator Myth

Photo by Joshua Trujillo / AP Images / SeattlePI.com

The super-predator myth:
Trayvon died for our sins

The evidence of a violently divided America can be understood in the failure of the criminal justice system, where rationality and objectivity are supposed to prevail.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2013

For Trayvon Martin and his family I feel a sadness that will not lift. For America, I feel a dread that certain horrors repeat again and again, chief among them the murder of young men of color, not only with impunity for their killers but under the cover of judicial sanction.

A re-armed George Zimmerman walks free, after a trial in which references to racism were forbidden by the judge. The unarmed Trayvon Martin, under the interpretation of the law, had no right to stand his ground against an armed vigilante. The “incident” considered by the jury, according to the instructions given by the judge, began with a physical confrontation between Trayvon and Zimmerman, not when Zimmerman launched his armed pursuit, muttering, “Fucking punks. These assholes, they always get away.”

Trayvon died bravely. But is that the only option for the many who are targeted deliberately and gunned down from the Arizona border to the boroughs of New York? The norms are broken, the laws are futile, and the Black Panther Party no longer exists to serve notice of vengeance.

The evidence of a violently divided America can be understood in the failure of the criminal justice system, where rationality and objectivity are supposed to prevail. In the case of Trayvon and countless others, however, the courts are where objectivity comes to an end.

The six jurors almost surely did not see themselves as driven by racial prejudice or stereotypes, but were in the grip of those stereotypes unconsciously. In the same way, poll after poll of New Yorkers shows a deep racial divide over the police stop-and-frisk policy, with whites believing it to be justified and people of color sharply opposed.

For a short while it appeared that this case would be different. At first, Trayvon appeared to be a fallen angel, a good boy grabbing some Skittles and iced tea before watching television with his family, a young man with no criminal record, assaulted by a vigilante who was completely out of control.

But gradually the prosecutors and media began dropping suggestions that Trayvon was a potential menace. There was the hoodie. The use of marijuana. The school suspension. Not that these factual crumbs were evidence of anything. But the public and media perception grew that Trayvon was “suspicious," precisely the conclusion of George Zimmerman on that rainy and fateful night.

Altering this initial -- and accurate -- perception of Trayvon was necessary to reframe Zimmerman’s account of a struggle in which the killer feared for his life. Trayvon Martin had to fit the profile of a super-predator. Trayvon was no longer an innocent kid in the mainstream view; he was an aggressive young man who considered Zimmerman nothing more than a “creepy cracker.” Having super-masculine powers, his aggression could only be stopped by a bullet directly into his heart of darkness.

And where did the concept of the super-predator originate? One can find it from the beginning of slavery times, but its contemporary resurrection came from neoconservative intellectuals, not from Southern crackers. To be precise:

• In the 1980s and 1990s, the official “wars” against gangs and drugs were unleashed in America, resulting in what Troy Duster has described as “the greatest shift in the racial composition of the inmates in our prisons in all of U.S. history.” By the year 2000, the U.S. had 25 percent of the world’s inmates. The inmate population of California alone rose from 28,000 to over 150,000.


• Incidents like the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989 fueled the new racial hysteria. All charges against the so-called Central Park Five -- five early Trayvon Martins -- were not vacated until 2002.


• UCLA professor James Q. Wilson predicted in 1995 that a teenage crime wave was inevitable. He said Americans should “get ready” for 30,000 more “young muggers, killers and thieves than we now have.” This plague was as inevitable as demography, Wilson declared, the year Trayvon Martin was born.


• In 1996, Ronald Reagan’s drug war czar, William Bennett, and another top drug warrior, John Walters, wrote a book predicting that “a new generation of street criminals is upon us -- the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.” Trayvon Martin was one-year-old.


• The Bennett thesis was based on an article titled, “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” by John J. Dilulio, in The Weekly Standard, the house organ of the neoconservatives. Dilulio predicted there would be an additional 270,000 juvenile super-predators who would “terrorize our nation” by 2010, just when a kid like Trayvon would turn 15 years of age. A few years later, Dilulio acknowledged that his research was all wrong, but by then it was too late.

Politically, the message of “the coming storm of super-predators” swept the nation. The leading perpetrators were New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and “Amerca’s cop” William Bratton, not George Wallace and Bull Connor. The super-predator concept was supposedly based on factual research, not age-old prejudice. Even today the image of what Bratton called “homeland terrorists” dominates the American imagination. The research overlays and reinforces the white subconscious to this day.

It is vitally important to understand, however, that the super-predator thesis was without intellectual justification and was promoted for ideological and partisan purposes. The reason that Dilulio rejected his own research was that it was based only on a demographic projection without any consideration of economic, educational, political, or other policy changes.

Only on this basis could a future super-predator be predicted while in diapers. Nothing in that child’s future -- jobs for their parents, a good pre-school experience, great teachers, nothing whatever -- could prevent the evolution into a beast. And since the teenage demographic was growing, the nation would be overwhelmed, as even Bill Clinton predicted.

The political purpose of the super-predator thesis, according to those like Bennett, was, first, to discredit the idea of rehabilitation, which was “emasculating” the criminal justice system. Instead the view was that youthful super-predators were incorrigible and infected with the disease of “moral poverty.” Private orphanages were often recommended as an alternative to prison.

The second political message was to demolish as “politically incorrect” the notions that poverty causes crime or that there was any such thing as disproportionate mass incarceration. The neoconservatives and their allies were employing public fear of violent crime to carry out their longtime agenda of slashing government social programs. Even prisons were to be privatized.

The neoconservative messaging was tremendously effective. Not until recent years, when the fiscal costs on states and municipalities grew too burdensome, has there been a lull and slight reduction in the incarceration rate, the highest or second highest in the world. The human damage is incalculable, so severe that even the right-wing Supreme Court of Chief Justice John G. Roberts has found California in systemic violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

(Some of the hunger strikers in California’s Pelican Bay prison have been in solitary confinement for decades, precisely because they are considered incorrigible super-predators. The official state hypocrisy is revealed by the policy of easing restrictions on inmates if and only if they provide evidence of gang affiliations among other prisoners with whom they are serving time. The point is that they are not “incorrigible” if they change their behavior by putting their lives at risk.)

The super-predator thesis is racism with a pseudo-academic cover. The irony is that our civil rights progress has driven prejudice underground, into the unconscious, into a discourse and vocabulary of denial. Perhaps I am being too generous, but I believe the judge, prosecution, Florida jury, and most of Mr. Zimmerman’s supporters perceive Trayvon Martin as a super-predator without being aware of the racial filter closing their minds. Those in the mainstream media, which did so much to bring awareness of the historic case, also are likely unaware that they, too, would be afraid of a Trayvon walking anywhere near them, especially at night.

How does one break the grip of what Michele Alexander calls this “new Jim Crow," if it is both covert and unconscious? First, we need to deepen our understanding that this is the way many in the Tea Party, the white South, and the Republican Party view Barack and Michele Obama. Not that the Obamas are lurking super-predators themselves, although millions of white Americans were stricken with ancient fear when O. J. Simpson -- in their eyes, the perfectly acceptable black man -- could kill his white ex-girlfriend and a white man in her presence -- in such a “savage” act. (See Gilligan, James. Violence, for a brilliant dissection of this point).

The OJ murder case marked the moment that awakened the white fear that even an educated black man was inherently suspicious. (See the 2009 case of Dr. Henry Louis Gates and the Boston police for another example.)

In other words, we need to “get over” the broad assumption that sadistic racism is a thing of the past, when in fact it might increase because certain white people are extremely threatened at the loss of their superiority. (See the 2009 Homeland Security Report on increasing violent threats, including assassination threats, because of the recession and election of Obama. The report was shelved under Republican attack.)

Screen showings of the new documentary, Fruitvale Station, about Oscar Grant who was killed by the Oakland BART police in 2009, and the Ken Burns film, The Central Park Five. Learn about and support juvenile justice organizations in your community. Demand that cities adopt gang intervention programs like those fostered in Los Angeles after decades of community pressure.

Organize the juvenile justice movement with a stepped-up attack on racial profiling, arbitrary stop-and-frisk, and mass incarceration. Demand accountability from the neoconservatives who fabricated the “super-predator” doctrine as surely as their propaganda about “weapons of mass destruction” or the sweeping authorization of the Global War on Terrorism.

Counter the propaganda that government budget cuts and free-market extremism will lift the underclass to a better future. Defend the New Deal as a great beginning, not the cause of our deficits.

Finally, consider building monuments and permanent memorials to the memory of Trayvon Martin. In his death, Trayvon becomes an iconic figure in our history and the future of the younger generation. His story, and the story of George Zimmerman’s trial, will be told and taught for decades to come.

The story will be as sharply contested as the verdict, and Trayvon’s supporters will need to claim his life and story as precious. Politicians at all levels can be challenged to commemorate his name. Public parks and school buildings can be emblazoned with his name as well. The photo of his young face should be included on the rolls of martyrs.

Let the rock be rolled back so his spirit can ascend, while his demonizers are sentenced to oblivion and shame. Let the world know: he died for our sins.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Tony Platt : Prison Strike at Pelican Bay

Image from Los Angeles Times.
The shame of California:
Prison strike at Pelican Bay

This strike has drawn worldwide attention to the widespread use of torturous practices by the United States against its own citizens.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2011

BIG LAGOON, California -- I’ve been eating well this summer, enjoying the local fruits and vegetables of Northwest California, while 60 miles away a group of men risked their health by refusing to eat for three weeks.

I’m in Big Lagoon, surrounded by ocean, lagoon, and forest in an area of coastal California described by National Geographic as among the top 20 “unspoiled” tourist destinations in the world. An hour’s drive north of here is Pelican Bay State Prison, a state-of-the-art hellhole that was recently the center of a three-week hunger strike led by prisoners in the Secure Housing Units (SHU).

Pelican Bay was California’s first supermax prison, built in 1989 on 275 acres of clear-cut forest near Crescent City. With an annual budget of $180 million, it has a payroll of more than 1,600 guards and service workers.

The prison was built for 2,280 prisoners, but its current census is close to 3,500, almost half of whom are housed in a prison within the prison, the SHU, an X-shaped cluster of brutalist concrete buildings, surrounded by guard towers, electronic fencing, and barren ground.

Here, more than a thousand men, whose families live hundreds of miles away, are imprisoned 23 hours a day in 8 x 10 foot, windowless, constantly lit cells, subject to sensory deprivation and social isolation, sometimes for years.

The hunger strike at Pelican Bay, which lasted from July 1st to July 22nd, was led by long-term prisoners in the SHU. It is estimated that on any given day in the United States, at least 25,000 prisoners are held in isolation, and perhaps as many as another 80,000 are kept in segregation units, typically in isolation. Writing in The New Yorker (“Hellhole,” 30 March 2009), Atul Gawande calls this practice “legalized torture,” resulting in long-term physical and mental damage to many of its victims.

Pelican Bay, like many of California’s prisons, was built on formerly agricultural land in a region seeking to resuscitate its depressed economy. The hardscrabble Crescent City, briefly a boomtown during the Gold Rush and once a beneficiary of the lumber and commercial fishing industries, has one of the state’s highest unemployment rates and among the most stingy public services.

When the state borrowed from public funds to build the high security prison at a cost of $277.5 million to taxpayers, it was supposed to boost the local economy. But the benefits primarily went to local landowners, and construction and utility companies; to national chains like K-Mart, Ace Hardware, and Safeway; and to the politically powerful guards’ union. Meanwhile, the county’s unemployment rate is almost 14 percent and one out of three people live in hand-to-mouth poverty.

Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. Photo by Adam Tanner / Reuters.
The city’s misery is compounded by its record rainfall and susceptibility to tsunamis. Unless work or family requires you to stay in Crescent City, this is a place to drive through on the way to somewhere else. No wonder that prisoners comprise about 46 percent of the city’s 7,600 population. Small towns that hoped for a bonanza by inviting prison construction, says Ruth Gilmore in Golden Gulag, are victims of a boondoggle.

California may lag behind many other states in high school graduation rates, welfare benefits, and investment in public health, but when it comes to punishment, we rank at or near the top. Between 1852 and 1964, California built only 12 prisons. Since 1984, the state has erected 43 penal institutions, making it a global leader in prison construction. Today, 90 penitentiaries, small prisons, and minimum-security camps stretch across 900 miles of the fifth largest economy in the world.

In 1982, the prison system cost taxpayers 2 percent of the General Fund; by 2006, it cost almost 8 percent. In 2008, more than one out of six state workers in California was employed by the Department of Corrections, almost three times as many as were employed in Health and Human Services.

In the last decade, “corrections” (with 61,000 employees) has increased its share of state workers, passing the state university system (46,000), second only to the University of California (86,000). Meanwhile, prison suicide and recidivism rates approach twice the national average. And we have one of the most extravagant penal systems in the country, costing taxpayers about the same as the state spends on higher education.

Most of the new prisons have been built in out-of-the way rural areas, like Crescent City, making it easier to lose sight of the humanity of the people we warehouse: mostly men (93 percent), mostly Latinos and African Americans (two-thirds), mostly from big cities (60 percent from Los Angeles), and mostly unemployed or the working poor, victimized by drastic changes in California’s economy over the last 20 years. The prison system is the shame of California, testimony to the persistence of institutionalized racism, the widening economic divide, and the gutting of social programs.

Prisons function as an unemployment program comparable to early capitalist workhouses, except they’ve become warehouses for unused labor rather than sites of production. When prisoners return to their communities, observes Gilmore, the cycle is repeated: they are locked out of “education, employment, housing, and many other stabilizing institutions of everyday life. In such inhospitable places, everybody isolates.”

On July 1st, a small group of prisoners in Pelican Bay’s SHU, calling themselves the Short Corridor Collective, initiated a hunger strike, calling for the abolition of long-term solitary confinement, improvement in programs for SHU prisoners, and an end to various abusive administrative procedures.

Unlike a similar action by prisoners in 2002, this strike drew the support of thousands of prisoners throughout the state. Moreover, Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity was so successful in getting out information about the strike that European human rights organizations urged the Governor to respond to prisoners’ demands and The New York Times carried an Op Ed condemning the “bestial treatment” of prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison (Colin Dayan, “Barbarous Confinement,” 17 July 2011).

During the strike, according to the Short Corridor Collective, at least 17 strikers, including three leaders, were transferred to another prison for medical treatment. The Collective ended the action on July 22nd after gaining the right to wear cold weather caps, to have calendars in their cells, and to have access to educational programs in the SHU.

Though these concessions by prison authorities are modest, we should not underestimate the larger significance of the strike. It draws worldwide attention to the widespread use of torturous practices by the United States against its own citizens; it forces the government of California to sit down, face-to-face, and negotiate with people who have been demonized as semi-human beasts; and it raises the possibility of once again incorporating prisoners into a larger struggle for social justice.

The civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s regarded prisoners as an important constituency, forging intimate ties between community and prison. It fought for massive decarceration, abolition of capital punishment, and ending the racial double standard of arrest and incarceration.

It will take a similar movement today to expose the tragedy of American injustice and make prisoners human again. Thanks to the Short Corridor Collective and thousands of activist prisoners, we now have an opportunity to renew the struggle.

For more information about the strike at Pelican Bay and its consequences, go to Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig, History News Network, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, and the Guardian. Platt, now an emeritus professor living in Berkeley, California, taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). This article was also posted to his blog, GoodToGo.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Ted McLaughlin : Haley Barbour's 'Eye for a Kidney' Deal

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour: organ trafficker?
An eye for a kidney?
Haley Barbour's terrible precedent

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / January 19, 2011

See "Haley Barbour breaks the U.S. Organ Transplant Act," Below.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has received a lot of good press recently for commuting the life sentences of two sisters, Jamie and Gladys Scott (who had been convicted in 1994 of setting up a victim for an armed robbery that netted $11).

One of the sisters needed a kidney transplant, and the other had offered her kidney for the transplant. Barbour said, "The Mississippi Department of Corrections believes the sisters no longer pose a threat to society. Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott's medical condition creates a substantial cost to the State of Mississippi."

Let me be clear here -- I do not oppose the commutation of the women's prison sentences. There were many who believed the sentence had been too harsh to begin with, and the women had already served 16 years of that sentence. If the sisters did not pose a threat to society, and there was no need of further "rehabilitation," then the governor did the right thing by commuting their sentences and freeing them.

And it is also within the powers of the governor to release them to save the state substantial medical bills, even if that seems a rather hard-hearted reason. It is even within the governor's right to commute the sentences for political reasons -- to repair some political damage he caused himself by downplaying the role of the White Citizen's Councils in fighting against Civil Rights in the 1960s.

But there is something about the governor's action in commuting these sentences that I find very troubling. He made a it requirement that one of the sisters give up her kidney -- the commutation would not have happened without it (and they could be re-incarcerated if the donation failed to take place).

Now I don't doubt that the sister was happy and very willing to donate a kidney to her sister. It is her right to do so (or not to do it). But she should not have been forced to do so with the threat of a continuing incarceration. By making it a requirement, in effect, the governor sold a commutation -- and the price was one kidney. This sets a very bad precedent, and may violate the law. [See story below.]

Is it now a policy of the State of Mississippi that a prisoner can purchase his release by selling (donating) a kidney, or some other body part? It is not outside the realm of possibility that a future ethically-challenged governor (not uncommon for politicians of both parties) could repeat this action to get a kidney (or other body part) from a prisoner for a friend, family member, or high-profile person. After all, the precedent has now been set.

The governor had reasons to commute these sentences if that's what he wanted to do, but it was just wrong for him to demand the payment of a kidney for the release. And I'm shocked that few people have noticed the ethical and moral problems of the governor's decision.

Prison is for punishment and rehabilitation. It is not, and should never be, a source of organ donations.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

Jamie and Gladys Scott.

Haley Barbour breaks the U.S. Organ Transplant Act

Gladys and Jaime Scott went to a Mississippi prison for life in 1994 after committing an armed burglary which netted the then teens $11. On December 30, 2010, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour suspended the life sentences, but one sister's release is contingent on her giving a kidney to the other. [....]

While donating a kidney is extremely safe when donors are healthy and a rigorous evaluation has taken place, it does have a small risk of death. Requiring a prisoner to agree to take this risk in return for parole violates international transplant standards and human rights.

The idea that prisoners are able to consent to risky medical treatment in return for benefits is one that ethicists have long questioned. It's one step removed from the Chinese government practice of selling the organs of executed prisoners and kidneys from live Falun Gong and others in jail. The Chinese have made the practice illegal in response to international pressure, although few experts think it has stopped.

Governor Barbour and the prison board seem unaware that under the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) (42 U.S.C. 274e) it is "unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation."

What could be more "valuable consideration" than a get out of jail card? And given the state's concern about the cost of Jaime's dialysis they too receive valuable consideration in dumping Jaime and Gladys on Florida for a possible transplant.

Now, according to NOTA, any person who violates the valuable consideration provision "shall be fined not more than $50,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both." The State Attorney General in Mississippi should move immediately to bar the parole if the condition of transplantation is not rescinded.

And the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder should uphold the National Organ Transplant Act and ensure that if the parole proceeds as planned with organ donation a requirement, it be made clear that any hospital, physician or other individual including Mississippi state officials who participated in the procurement and transplant of the organ will be charged under NOTA. [....]

-- Frances Kissling / The Huffington Post

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Ted McLaughlin : U.S. Leads World in Incarceration Rate

Chart shows skyrocketing rate of incarceration in U.S. as of 2006.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

We're number one!
U.S. is off charts in rate of incarceration

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2010

The citizens of the United States like to think of this country as a free country, but recent statistics regarding incarceration of its citizens in prison paint a very different picture. The United States has more people in prison (both men and women) than any other nation on earth, including nations we regard as police states or nations that generally have little regard for human rights.

The United States currently incarcerates more than 2.2 million people -- a prison population that has exploded since 1980 (see above chart). Some might think that is because we are a very populous country, but that would be wrong. Compared to other high-population countries, the United States prison population is 153% higher than Russia, 505% higher than Brazil, 550% higher than India, and more than 2,000% higher than Nigeria, Indonesia or Bangladesh.

And when the rate of incarceration per 100,000 people is considered, the United States doesn't look any better. Here are the top 20 countries with the highest incarceration rates:

1. United States...............738
2. Russian Federation...............607
3. Cuba...............487
4. Ukraine...............360
5. Singapore...............350
6. Botswana...............339
7. South Africa...............335
8. Taiwan...............259
9. Thailand...............257
10. United Arab Emirates...............250
11. Poland...............228
12. Israel...............209
13. Libya...............207
14. Iran...............206
15. Mexico...............196
16. Brazil...............191
17. Uzbekistan...............184
18. Lebanon...............168
19. Columbia...............152
20. Argentina...............148

Compare the 738 per 100,000 people of the United States to many other developed democratic nations:

• United Kingdom...............145
• Spain...............145
• Australia...............126
• Canada...............107
• Italy...............102
• Germany...............95
• France...............88
• Ireland...............78
• Sweden...............78
• Japan...............62

Even such countries as China (118), Iraq (60) and Pakistan (57) have much lower rates of incarceration than the United States.

Why do we have so many people in jail? Is the crime rate so much higher in the United States? No. According to criminologists Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck, the rise in crime can only account for less than 12% of the rise in the prison population since 1980. It is the extremely harsh and long prison sentences being given out in this country that account for much of the other 88% of the prison population explosion.

Sadly, the long prison sentences and the rising prison population have not made this a safer country. The violent crime rate, especially regarding murder, remains one of the highest in the civilized world. And it has put a strain on this country economically. The most conservative estimate is that we spend over $42 billion annually to incarcerate our huge prison population (and we still generally have overcrowded and unsafe conditions in most of our prisons).

Currently there are about 9.2 million people incarcerated worldwide. But if all nations followed United States incarceration policies and regulations, that figure would balloon to over 47.6 million people.

Another reason for our prison population explosion since 1980 is the failed "war on drugs". The United States incarcerates more people for drug offenses than the European Union incarcerates for all offenses combined, and yet the drug flow into the country and drug use by citizens has not been abated.

Obviously, we are doing something wrong in this country. A free country should not have a prison population so out-of-whack when compared to the rest of the world (the average rate per 100,000 people worldwide is only 166). We need to take another look at our sentencing policies. We also need to stop the failed "war on drugs" and treat drugs like the medical and education problem that it really is.

For too long now the answer to our social problems has been just to "lock them up and throw away the key." It isn't working.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Jordan Flaherty : New Orleans Jail Struggle Could Shape City's Future

Image of Orleans Parish Prison from BBC documentary, Prisoners of Katrina.
New Orleans:
The nation's incarceration capital

Struggle over the size of New Orleans’ jail could define the city’s future.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2010

NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans’ criminal justice system is at a crossroads. A new mayor and police chief say they want to make major changes, and the police department is facing lawsuits and federal investigations that may profoundly affect the department. But a simultaneous, and less publicized, struggle is being waged and the results will likely define the city’s justice system for a generation: the city’s jail, damaged in Katrina, needs to be replaced. City leaders must now decide how big the new institution will be.

At first, it seemed like an expansion of OPP was inevitable. This is a city with one of the highest rates of violent crime in the U.S., and politicians rarely lose votes by calling for more jail cells. But in a city that has led the nation in incarceration, residents across race and class lines are questioning fundamental assumptions about what works in criminal justice.

With 3,500 beds in a city of about 350,000 residents, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) is already the largest per capita county jail of any major U.S. city. Sheriff Marlin Gusman, the elected official with oversight over the jail, has submitted plans for an even larger complex.

A broad coalition is seeking to take the city in a different direction. They want a smaller facility, and they are demanding that the money that would be spent on a larger jail be diverted to alternatives to incarceration, like drug treatment programs and mental health facilities. With two public hearings on the issue scheduled for this week, the battle is heating up.

Criminal justice experts and community leaders are speaking in support of a smaller jail. This is an issue that has allowed the religious foundation Baptist Community Ministries and prison abolition organizers from Critical Resistance to find common ground. The online activist group ColorOfChange.org also recently joined in the conversation, with an appeal that has generated hundreds of emails to the mayor and city council.

“In all the work we’ve been doing on criminal justice reform, this is definitely a pivotal moment,” says Rosana Cruz, the associate director of V.O.T.E., an organization that seeks to build power and civic engagement for formerly incarcerated people. “We’re finally getting local and state government to think about public safety from a perspective of real safety, not an incarceration perspective.”

The OPP Reform Coalition, a pre-Katrina alliance that has recently been revitalized, has led the campaign. In September, when it seemed like the prison expansion was proceeding without public debate, they took out a full-page ad in the city’s daily paper listing other things that the money spent on OPP could be spent on. The ad featured an assortment of New Orleanians -- including musicians, local politicians, community leaders, and members of the cast and crew of the HBO show Treme.

The diverse assembly of public figures not only signed the ad, but also helped pay for it, donating $22.39 each, the amount that the jail currently charges the city for every prisoner. In the aftermath of the ad, attention turned to a working group formed by the mayor to address the issue. That body is expected to make its recommendations this month.

Seventh floor of Parish County Prison. Photo by Micahel DeMocker / Times-Picayune.

Incarceration industry

Orleans Parish Prison is a giant complex in Midcity New Orleans, made up of several buildings spread across a dozen blocks employing nearly a thousand nonunion workers. The city jail is a small empire under the absolute control of the city Sheriff, who can use jail employees for election campaigns, and send out prisoners to work for local businesses. The majority of the metropolitan area’s mental health facilities are also located within the jail, meaning that for many who have mental health issues, the jail is their only option for treatment.

Louisiana’s incarceration rate is by far the highest in the world -- more than 10 times higher than most European countries, and 20 times higher than Japan. Pre-Katrina, OPP had 7,200 beds. In a city with a population of about 465,000, this came to about one bed for every 65 city residents. Neighboring Jefferson Parish has 100,000 more people than Orleans Parish, and has only 900 beds. Caddo Parish -- in the northeast of the state -- has more violent crime, but still imprisons far less people. If OPP had the same number of beds as the national average of one for every 388 residents, the jail’s capacity would shrink to about 850.

Aside from its size, OPP is unique in other ways. Under the terms of a lawsuit over prison conditions filed in 1969, the jail’s budget is based on a per diem paid by the city for every inmate in prison. The more people locked in OPP, the higher the funding Sheriff Gusman has at his disposal. “Our current funding structure is creating a perverse incentive to lock more people up,” explains Dana Kaplan, the director of Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, a criminal justice advocacy organization and member of the OPP Reform Coalition.

The institution of OPP is also exceptional in that it is a county jail and a state prison combined into one entity. About 2,700 people in the jail are mostly pre-trial detainees -- the majority being held for drug possession, traffic violations, public drunkenness, or other nonviolent offenses -- who are legally innocent. An additional 800 people are state prisoners who have been convicted in court, who may spend years or even decades at OPP.

Almost 60,000 people passed through OPP in the last 12 months, a staggering figure for a city of this size. The average length of stay was 20 days. The largest portion of pre-trial prisoners in the jail are there for nonviolent, municipal offenses that even under conservative standards should not warrant jail time, including 20,000 arrests this year for traffic violations.

“New Orleans is basically the incarceration capital of the world,” says Kaplan. “You’re hard-pressed to find a resident of New Orleans -- especially in poor communities -- that hasn’t had their lives disrupted in some way by this institution.”

An article by journalist Ethan Brown in one of the city’s weekly papers noted, “thanks to the profound misallocation of law enforcement resources in New Orleans, you're more likely to end up in Orleans Parish Prison for a traffic offense than for armed robbery or murder.”

Ultimately, this struggle over the size of the jail is also about the city’s incarceration priorities. If the city builds a larger jail, it will have to keep filling it with tens of thousands of people. If a smaller facility is built, it will change who is arrested in the city, and how long they spend behind bars.

Because much of the jail was underwater during Katrina, many of the buildings have either been closed or need massive renovation. By one estimate, the new jail that the sheriff seeks would cost 250 million dollars, much of that to come in reimbursements from FEMA.

The sheriff has yet to reveal how much of the construction costs would come from federal dollars, although the state affiliate of the ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the information. Even if most of the construction were paid for by FEMA, as the Sheriff has indicated, the continued upkeep would fall to the city.

Sheriff Gusman did not respond to requests for comment, but he has said, at a meeting of mayor’s task force on the jail, “I’ve always advocated for a smaller facility,” and spoke of being satisfied with 4,200 beds. The plans he has submitted to various planning bodies, however, indicates otherwise.

The Sheriff has issued several conflicting statements and reports about the size of the jail he is seeking, as well as where the funding will come from. A Justice Facilities Master Plan, prepared in collaboration with the Sheriff’s office, called for 8,000 beds, which would give the jail capacity to imprison nearly one of every 40 people currently in the city. A planning document recently prepared by the Sheriff called for 5,800 beds. No plans or public documents issued by his office have called for building a jail smaller than the current facility.

Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman shown during 2009 tour of Orleans Parish Prison. Photo By Michael DeMocker / Times-Picayune.

Spotlight on abuse

With seven reported deaths in jail this year, OPP is under the spotlight for violent and abusive treatment of prisoners. A September 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found, "conditions at OPP violate the constitutional rights of inmates." The DOJ went on to document "a pattern and practice of unnecessary and inappropriate use of force by OPP correctional officers,” including "several examples where OPP officers openly engaged in abusive and retaliatory conduct, which resulted in serious injuries to prisoners. In some instances, the investigation found, the officers' conduct was so flagrant it clearly constituted calculated abuse."

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people who had not been convicted of any crime were lost in the city’s prison system. Last month a jury awarded two men from Ohio a $650,000 judgment for their treatment after the storm. The men were on a road trip and stopped in New Orleans for a drink on Bourbon Street. They were arrested for public drunkenness and spent a month disappeared in the system, without being allowed even one phone call to their families.

In a city under fiscal crisis, advocates have focused not only on the decades of evidence that mass incarceration has only made people in the city feel less safe, but also on the financial costs of this massive jail. In addition to calling for reforms that would cause less people to be locked up, the reform coalition demands that, “funds dedicated to building a bigger jail must be reallocated to building the infrastructure of a caring community, including recreational, educational, mental health, and affordable housing facilities.”

Andrea Slocum, an organizer with Critical Resistance, says that when she talks to city residents, the idea of redirecting money from the prison has wide support. “Parents are crying out, saying where’s the recreation for our children?” she says.

“It’s an exciting time for the city in a lot of ways,” says Michael Jacobson of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization that has been advising the City, including the Sheriff. Jacobson, who served as correction commissioner for New York City in the mid-90s, managed to reduce the population of New York City’s jail system even in the midst of the mass arrests of the Giuliani administration. He believes similar change is possible in New Orleans. “You can’t create or innovate unless you're willing to step out and change what you’re doing,” he says.

The Vera Institute has received funding from the U.S. Department of Justice for a pre-trial services program that has reduced incarceration in other cities, and they project New Orleans will also be able to see a reduction.

But the drive to build more jail cells is hard to stop, and many barriers remain. Sheriffs in Louisiana have no term limits, and there are few leverages on their influence. Sheriff Gusman was first elected in 2004 and has faced little opposition since then. The previous Criminal Sheriff held the position for 30 years, only leaving when he ran for state Attorney General.

As the debate continues, the Sheriff’s department has already begun construction on a building to hold 400 additional beds. He initially told reporters that he would close other facilities and the new construction would not add up to additional capacity. However, in a letter to the State Bond Commission, he predicted increased revenue from holding additional inmates in the new building.

Advocates believe that the tide is beginning to turn, but the new construction already underway indicates that there is still a lot of work to be done and not much time. “We really need to keep the pressure on and the momentum consistent,” says Rosana Cruz of VOTE. “They’ll shake our hands and make these promises but meanwhile these deals are being made behind closed doors.”

[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org. and more information about his work can be found at floodlines.org. Jordan is currently traveling with the Community and Resistance Tour. For more information on the tour, see communityandresistance.wordpress.com.]

• See other articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.
• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's May 18, 2010, interview with Jordan Flaherty on Rag Radio.

Links and Resources Mentioned in article:

• Action from ColorOfChange.org
• Vera Institute of Justice
• Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana
• VOTE (Voice Of The Ex-offender)
• Critical Resistance

Other Resources:

• Louisiana Justice Institute
• Justice Roars
• Left Turn Magazine

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Tom Hayden : Jerry Brown's Green Vision for California

California Governor-elect Jerry Brown at Los Angeles campaign rally November 1, 2010. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.
But it can't be just for whites...
Brown's green vision for California

Through all the political back and forth, alternative energy has been a settled idea in California, and for that we owe a large debt to Brown. He has been ahead of the curve on energy conservation and renewable resources for decades.

By Tom Hayden / November 4, 2010

LOS ANGELES -- During the campaign season, it was easy to dismiss the idea of a green energy future for California as mere campaign rhetoric. But with the second coming of Jerry Brown, the reelection of Barbara Boxer, and voter endorsement of state policies to curb global warming, California really is poised to lead the country to a greener future.

Why were California voters not carried away by the Republican wave? We have certainly had our conservative hiccups in the past. There was the 1978 election when voters passed Proposition 13, which cut property taxes but also damaged school funding and caused chronic budget crises. And in 1984, California had its Arizona moment when voters passed Proposition 187, which would have terminated many public services, including schooling, for undocumented immigrants had the courts not struck it down.

But through all the political back and forth, alternative energy has been a settled idea in California, and for that we owe a large debt to Brown. He has been ahead of the curve on energy conservation and renewable resources for decades.

During Brown's previous tenure as governor from 1975 through 1982, the nuclear industry was projecting the need for one nuclear power plant every five miles along the California coast. One of them was slated for Corral Canyon on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu. Corporate interests also insisted on the need for a liquefied natural gas terminal at Point Conception in Santa Barbara, saying it was necessary to keep the lights from going out.

Brown turned these powerful interests down, siding instead with the no-nukes movement and the early dreamers of a solar future. Thirty years later, as a direct result of his vision, California is the most energy-efficient state in America, with an estimated 1.5 million clean-energy jobs and accumulated savings of $50 billion to $60 billion to California consumers. Two-thirds of venture-capital investments in American clean energy are in California.

American leadership on global warming has been derailed by a relentless campaign from oil companies and energy interests. "Remember Renewable Energy?" asked a New York Times editorial last week. Here in California we do remember, and the vote Tuesday reaffirmed our commitment to it.

The Obama administration still can wield regulatory power for energy conservation, and Boxer will continue to chair the Senate's environmental policy committee. But it is Brown's California that is poised to implement a vision of putting people to work at green jobs that will reduce air pollution and carbon emissions. Brown's promise is to create 500,000 new green jobs in the next eight years, and we voters should hold him to -- and help him realize -- that pledge.

Brown faces two main challenges. The first is how to pay for a cleaner energy future. He has expressed hope that setting a requirement that one-third of the state's energy needs come from renewable sources by 2020 will jump-start private investment.

Brown cites the example of the aerospace industry as a model. But he downplays the billions in federal investment that made that industry possible. He needs to recognize that some combination of rate hikes and tax revenues will be necessary to get the electricity-based transit revolution he envisions up and running.

The other challenge is to ensure that all Californians benefit from the state's green energy push. Brown has succeeded in portraying his energy vision as good for the economy, but he has not explained how it will benefit the black and brown voters at the core of his support.

Put bluntly, the green future cannot be purely white. This is a great opportunity to put people to work who are now locked out of the job market. And in the end, it makes far more sense to employ at-risk youth weatherizing homes and installing solar collectors than locking them up in the largest mass incarceration system in the world.

That incarceration system could be Brown's Achilles' heel. If his energy policies are an example of his "paddling on the left," his law-and-order legacy is an example of "paddling on the right." In 1976, when then-Gov. Brown was supporting punishment rather than rehabilitation as state policy, the state prison population was slightly above 20,000. Today, the system holds 165,000 inmates and creates a massive drain on the state budget.

With Brown's longtime support, California leads America and America leads every country in the world in incarceration rates. The state prison budget currently exceeds the combined budgets of the University of California and the California State University systems.

Brown may find that a greener future is incompatible with the state's massive spending on incarceration at the expense of education. African Americans are 3% of UC students and Latinos are 11%. At the same time, those groups are 30% and 40%, respectively, of the state's inmates.

While the state was building 33 new prisons in recent decades, its school funding has been stagnant. Prioritizing education and rehabilitation over prisons in state budgets could both save money and supply a steady and well-trained workforce for a green economy.

[Tom Hayden was chairman of Gov. Jerry Brown's SolarCal Council in 1979 and a state legislator from 1982 to 2000. A founder of SDS and a leader of the Sixties New Left, Tom's latest book is The Long Sixties.]

Source / LA Times / Progressive America Rising

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

BOOKS / 'Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America'

What I found striking in this volume is the extent to which advances in behavioral science and pedagogical experience have played almost no role in the evolution of corrections: Sentencing policies and prison conditions stem from basic, often religious and primitive, attitudes and beliefs.

By Eve Pell / April 24, 2009

[Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America, Dr. Anne-Marie Cusac; Yale University Press, 336 pp; $27.50]

When I was involved in prison reform in the early 1970s, my colleagues and I were shocked that our state, California, held so many prisoners, 22,000. Now, 35 years later, California’s prison population has ballooned to 165,000. Since 1973, the U.S. imprisonment rate has multiplied more than five times; we hold the dubious distinction of being the most imprisoning nation in the world.

Why does our nation, with 5 percent of the world’s people, have 25 percent of its prisoners, about 2 million? Why do we keep at least 25,000, maybe double that, in long-term isolation, a situation known to cause insanity, when other nations have more effective and humane methods of managing violence? Why do we inflict intense physical pain, sometimes to the point of death, with tasers, stun belts and restraint chairs at a time when violent crime is not on the increase?

Anne-Marie Cusac, an award-winning reporter (and published poet) with years of covering criminal justice issues, tackles these questions in her book, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America. In just-the-facts, dispassionate style, she traces the methods our society has used to discipline offenders and nonconformists, from 17th century floggings and stocks in the public square to 21st century super-maxes designed to deprive inmates of human contact. She chronicles the motivations driving such vengeful practices, from Protestant Christian beliefs in the devil and the sinful nature of man to public fear of crime whipped up by television cop shows and exploited by politicians.

Cusac, who teaches communications at Roosevelt University in Chicago, also traces the history of American attitudes toward punishment from colonial days and the Rev. Jonathan Edwards in 1740 to modern-day Christian conservatives and the tortures at Abu Ghraib. (“All are by nature the children of wrath and heirs of hell...” preached Edwards, insisting that the wills of young “vipers” must be beaten down and broken.) Using a wide lens, she examines the intentional infliction of pain as a means to discipline and reform those who are deemed in need of chastisement, from lashings with cat-o’-nine-tails and boring holes in tongues with a hot iron, as was done in the Massachusetts colony, to hooding and beating inmates, or shackling them to restraint poles in freezing cold or searing heat, as happened recently in some U. S. prisons. The same philosophy extends to families: I was astonished to find that one can order spanking rods—a Speak Softly Spanking Stick, for instance—on the Internet, for administering biblically sanctioned punishment to one’s child.

Cusac links changes in attitudes toward punishment to changes in American culture. After the American Revolution, for example, the former colonists mitigated the harsh penalties imposed under monarchical rule, finding lesser punishments more in line with their new democracy. She describes the evolution of reformist and anti-reformist movements as they swept across the nation and conflicted with one another.

What I found striking in this volume is the extent to which advances in behavioral science and pedagogical experience have played almost no role in the evolution of corrections: Sentencing policies and prison conditions stem from basic, often religious and primitive, attitudes and beliefs. The role prisons should play in our society is answered, most often, by the response to this question: Should offenders have their wills broken by pain and suffering, or do they retain some capacity for rehabilitation? As Cusac shows, we lean far more toward the former.

In some schools of thought over the years, human beings were considered capable of redemption; in others, human nature was considered sinful and meriting only punishment. There were brief periods when, under the sway of Enlightenment principles, reformers like Benjamin Rush opposed physical punishment and the death penalty in favor of hard labor and solitary confinement—then viewed as a less punitive means of helping criminals to reform. But over time, as punishment migrated from the public square to walled-off prison cells, these “reforms” morphed into abuses—what Cusac calls “punishment creep,” perhaps because prisons were hidden from public view.

In the 19th century, liberationist movements evoked conflicting ideas: Abolitionists organized to stop the whipping and bondage of slavery, while pro-slavers favored the use of pain to maintain domination. In the Navy before 1850, officers used flogging to maintain discipline; later on, reformers organized to make flogging aboard ships unlawful.

Throughout the book, prevailing philosophies of punishment seesaw back and forth as intellectual, political and religious tides wax and wane. Emerging science sometimes plays a role in the debates; backlashes to prevailing philosophies result in hardening or softening of attitudes. (Though attitudes seem to harden much more easily than they soften.) Cusac summarizes the work of scholars, commentators and law enforcement officials in order to arrive at generalizations describing different eras.

But, perhaps because the ebb and flow of ideas is itself untidy and irregular, in some chapters the book skips and hops unevenly from one thing to another. Cusac quotes Source 1 saying A, Source 2 saying B, Source 3 saying something else. I wanted a firmer hand on the tiller in such places. A chapter that aims to show how the urge to punish surged in the 1970s cites Time and Newsweek on the wickedness of Generation Xers; gives blow-by-blow accounts of the plots of “Rosemary’s Baby, “The Exorcist” and “Carrie,” movies that portray a powerful devil; and describes the conservative backlash against the liberal movements of the ’60s like feminism and gay liberation. With “evil” alive and abroad in the land, societal problems are blamed not on racism or poverty, but rather on bad individuals and drug “fiends,” an underclass whose personal vices lead to crime. This climate of opinion provides fodder for neoconservatives to justify longer sentences, harsher prison conditions and larger expenditures for new prisons. It may be that Cusac’s pop history is on the money, but it seemed a little glib and I wasn’t quite convinced.

But there is no discounting the lasting influence of the vengeful Protestant ethos. This attitude lives on, epitomized by the little-known Christian Reconstructionist movement, which advocates a theocracy in which sins like blasphemy merit death by stoning or burning alive. Cusac links this movement to Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, who has said that he favors the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions.

My criticisms of her work are relatively minor: In writing about the short-lived movement for prison reform of the early 1970s, Cusac misstates the title of Jessica Mitford’s exposé of prisons, calling it "Kind and Unusual Punishment." The correct title is "Kind and Usual Punishment,” Mitford’s ironic take on the corrections industry and its failings. More generally, when Cusac relies on selections from many diverse sources, the resulting argument feels a bit mushy. By contrast, where she relies on her own years of reporting, the book takes on real power. Her linkage of the abuses of Abu Ghraib to American correctional practices is a case in point—the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, even threatening inmates with dogs, had happened in American prisons. “George Bush said he was exporting democracy to Iraq,” she writes, “but he seems to have exported a much uglier aspect of American public policy—some of the most sadistic practices employed in the U.S. prison system.”

Her chronicling of severe injury and death to inmates from new technology shocks the conscience—stun belts, tasers, restraint chairs, supermax isolation … she cites names and circumstances of outrage after outrage. Back in the 1970s, when I was a newbie reporter writing about brutality behind bars, I thought that if the public only knew that terrible cruelty was taking place, there would be an outcry and corrections officials would have to change their ways. I don’t think that anymore. There is no powerful constituency, no high-paid K Street lobby, no fat source of campaign funding from those who want to reform our prisons. And though Cusac says her book demonstrates the hazards of ignoring the current situation, it is difficult for me to see how it will help to bring about much-needed change. People don’t care enough about the thousands of inmates in solitary slowly going insane, week in and week out. In fact, a politician who is seen as being soft on criminals stands to lose big—remember Michael Dukakis and Willie Horton?

But I am encouraged by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., who recently spoke out against our useless, expensive and counterproductive incarceration establishment. As he says, it is a system of “chaos and mismanagement” that wastes billions of dollars as it creates “violence, physical abuse and hate.” Anne-Marie Cusac’s book helps to explain how we got to this awful pass.

Source / truthdig

Find Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America at Amazon.com.

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Texas Jail Crisis : Pretrial Detention up nearly 50%

Henderson County (Texas) Courthouse. Photo by Bob Weston.
Dumping Debra and Donna: Counties should reduce pretrial incarceration if they can't afford health costs
August 4, 2008

Over the last decade or so, even as crime has declined, most Texas jails have gotten fuller mostly because of a dramatic expansion in pretrial detention - in particular requiring bail instead of releasing offenders on personal recognizance bonds.

Indeed, for reasons I cannot explain, this pattern constitutes a statewide trend even though the decisions behind it are all made by local judges. According to Dr. Tony Fabelo, overall jail populations in Texas increased 18.6% between 2000-2007, while the number of pretrial detainees increased 49.2% over the same period.

With this decision, though, comes all the costs resulting from jail overcrowding - particularly health care for inmates.

In two ugly cases this year in Henderson County, a judge refused to offer a female defendant a personal bond, then while incarcerated they became sick unto death. Reports the Athens Review ("Second inmate dies after jail release," Aug. 1 ):

Like Debra Lee Newton, Donna Carroll, 49, of Mabank was released from jail on a personal recognizance bond a few days before she died earlier this month.

The cases of the two women are similar in some respects.

Both were handled by area police on drug charges. Both became ill while in the Henderson County Jail. And both were released on $5,000 personal recognizance bonds once it was determined they needed major medical attention.

Both also died within several days of being released from Henderson County Sheriff’s Department custody.

While Newton’s body was disposed of without an autopsy being performed, Carroll’s body was autopsied.

The difference?

Carrol’s death was “unattended” at her home in Mabank. State law requires that all such deaths undergo autopsy.

Newton died at ETMC as a patient of the hospital.

The article goes on to speculate that health problems related to meth abuse may have caused these women's deaths, but there are policy concerns that won't be satisfied with that explanation.

In the case of Debra Newton, she'd been in the jail two months before a judge released her on a personal bond and deputies took her to the local hospital where she later died. So even if drug abuse caused her problem, she'd presumably been off drugs and under the jail's care for two full months. If either a) she was able to get drugs in the jail or b) the Sheriff did not provide adequate health care, the county may still be at fault.

Finding another, similar case makes me think the county simply has too many people in its jail to provide adequate health care. These women had not been sentenced, they were being held pretrial on drug charges because they could not make bail and a judge denied them personal bonds. Then, when healthcare costs became too dear, probably the same judge decided they were safe to release on their own recognizance, conveniently eliminating the county's obligation to pick up the tab for their health care.

When judges require bail for low-level offenses, they're undertaking costs to the taxpayers that can easily rise if the person gets sick or must stay in jail many months awaiting trial. Counties unwilling to meet their obligation to provide health care to inmates shouldn't incarcerate so many of them prior to sentencing. But once they do, they're the county's responsibility when they get sick; jailers and judges can't just dump sick inmates at home or in the local E.R. and wash their hands of the matter.

Source / Grits for Breakfast

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Prisons : Why Texas Still Holds 'Em

Forget oil and gold. In the Lone Star state, the boomtown business is locking up immigrants.
By Stephanie Mencimer

This article appears in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.

In 1997, with the private prison business booming, the Corrections Corporation of America picked a 64-acre plot near Austin, Texas, for its newest lockup. A medium-security prison, it was named after the company's cofounder and designed for some 500 federal inmates. But the anticipated stream of prisoners never arrived: By the time the T. Don Hutto Correctional Center opened, a glut of private prison beds, along with cca's own poor track record, had left the company nearly bankrupt. Its stock, which once traded at around $45 a share, bottomed out at 18 cents. Several of its facilities were shuttered or sat empty for years, including the Hutto prison, which cca moved to close in 2004.

But Hutto, like cca itself, has risen from the ashes thanks to a sudden source of new business: the Bush administration's crackdown on immigrants. Historically, Mexicans caught illegally entering the country have been dumped back across the border, while immigrants and asylum seekers from other countries were processed and released to await their court dates. (Only those with criminal records were detained.) Most of those released, though, failed to appear for court hearings and removal proceedings, and the government didn't have the resources to go looking for them. So in 2006, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) agency ended its traditional "catch and release" policy and instead started incarcerating non-Mexican immigrants—anyone from a Salvadoran migrant to an Iraqi family seeking political asylum—pending their deportation or asylum hearings. Over the two years since, the agency has increased its use of detention facilities by more than half; it now holds some 30,000 people on any given day.

In this new population—and in ice's $1 billion-plus detention budget—cca saw opportunity. In 2004, when Congress passed legislation authorizing ice to triple the number of immigrant detention beds, cca's lobbying expenditures reached $3 million; since then, it has spent an additional $7 million on lobbyists. Among them was Philip Perry, Vice President Dick Cheney's son-in-law, who later became general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, ice's parent organization, which has awarded cca millions in contracts; one of them, in 2006, allowed the company to reopen the old Hutto prison, now christened a "residential facility" housing immigrant families, including small children.

CCA isn't the only firm lining up for ice contracts: There's so much money to be made warehousing immigrants that in 2006, Cornell Companies, a private prison firm, sent the state of Oklahoma an eviction notice for more than 800 state inmates housed in its facility in Hinton. The company was negotiating with ice to take in immigrants for more than the roughly $45 per diem that Oklahoma paid.

State and local governments are also getting in on the action. In 2006, Willacy County, Texas, floated millions in bonds and, in 90 days, built a tent city for immigrants that it leases to ice for $78 a day per detainee. (A room at the local Best Western Executive Inn costs $65.) Run by the Utah-based Management and Training Corporation, a private prison management company, the camp houses up to 2,000 immigrants in a razor-wire-ringed compound holding 10 Kevlar tents of the sort used by troops in Iraq. Detainees have reported problems with heat and air conditioning, as well as maggot-infested food. The county has since approved another $50 million to add space for 1,000 more detainees.

Elsewhere, detention centers have been sued for providing inadequate health care, food services, and education. The aclu of Texas recently settled a lawsuit with ice over the conditions at Hutto for 26 children ages 1 to 17. According to the aclu, they were kept in cells 11 or 12 hours a day, forced to wear prison garb, fed "unrecognizable substances, mostly starches," and denied toys, bathroom privacy, and access to medical care.

According to the Washington Post, more than 80 people have died in ice detention, in many cases because of poor health care. The most famous case is that of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran detained in San Diego for eight months. The government denied his request for a penile biopsy while in detention, arguing that it was an "elective outpatient procedure." He was eventually found to have cancer. His penis was amputated, but the malignancy spread, and he died last year.

On average, ice pays $95 a day per immigrant that it detains, yet research indicates that other, far cheaper, methods can work almost as well in making sure immigrants show up in court. Back in the late 1990s, the agency asked the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice to run a pilot project under which people facing deportation got intensive supervision and connections to social service agencies. More than 90 percent appeared for their hearings—partly, the institute said, thanks to better information about the process. Intensive supervision costs an average of $14 per detainee per day, according to congressional testimony by Julie Myers, assistant secretary of Homeland Security. Yet in fiscal 2007, ice spent only about $44 million on alternative programs, compared with roughly $1.2 billion on detention—and legislation sponsored last year by representatives Heath Schuler (D-N.C.) and Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) in the House would authorize the agency to develop another 8,000 detention beds, which must be provided by private contractors such as cca "whenever possible."

CCA, meanwhile, is contributing to the detention boom in its own small way: Last year, after inspecting the Hutto center's personnel records, ice officials arrested 10 workers—illegal immigrants themselves.

Source / Mother Jones

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Slammed: Welcome to the Age of Incarceration

The US holds 1 in 4
of the world's prisoners.

What happens when you lock up 1 in every 100 American adults?
By Jennifer Gonnerman

The number first appeared in headlines earlier this year: Nearly one in four of all prisoners worldwide is incarcerated in America. It was just the latest such statistic. Today, one in nine African American men between the ages of 20 and 34 is locked up. In 1970, our prisons held fewer than 200,000 people; now that number exceeds 1.5 million, and when you add in local jails, it's 2.3 million—1 in 100 American adults. Since the 1980s, we've sat by as the numbers inched higher and our prison system ballooned, swallowing up an ever-larger portion of the citizenry. But do statistics like these, no matter how disturbing, really mean anything anymore? What does it take to get us to sit up and notice?

Apparently, it takes a looming financial crisis. For there is another round of bad news, the logical extension of the first: The more money a state spends on building and running prisons, the less there is for everything else, from roads and bridges to health care and public schools. At the pace our inmate population has been expanding, America's prison system is becoming, quite simply, too expensive to sustain. That is why Kansas, Texas, and at least 11 other states have been trying out new strategies to curb the cost—reevaluating their parole policies, for instance, so that not every parolee who runs afoul of an administrative rule is shipped straight back to prison. And yet our infatuation with incarceration continues.

There have been numerous academic studies and policy reports and journalistic accounts analyzing our prison boom, but this phenomenon cannot be fully measured in numbers. That much became apparent to me when, beginning in 2000, I spent nearly four years shadowing a woman who'd just been released from prison. She'd been locked up for 16 years for a first-time drug crime, and her absence had all but destroyed her family. Her mother had taken in her four young children after her arrest, only to die prematurely of kidney failure. One daughter was deeply depressed, the other was seething with rage, and her youngest son had followed her lead, diving into the neighborhood drug culture and then winding up in prison himself.

The criminal justice system had punished not only her but her entire family. How do you measure the years of wasted hours—riding on a bus to a faraway prison, lining up to be scanned and searched and questioned, sitting in a bleak visiting room waiting for a loved one to walk in? How do you account for all the dollars spent on collect calls from prison—calls that can cost at least three times as much as on the outside because the prison system is taking a cut? How do you begin to calculate the lessons absorbed by children about deprivation and punishment and vengeance? How do you end the legacy of incarceration?

This is not to say that nobody deserves to go to prison or that we should release everyone who is now locked up. There are many people behind bars who you would not want as your neighbor, but in our hunger for justice we have lost perspective. We treat 10-year sentences like they're nothing, like that's a soft penalty, when in much of the rest of the world a decade behind bars would be considered extraordinarily severe. This is what separates us from other industrialized countries: It's not just that we send so many people to prison, but that we keep them there for so long and send them back so often. Eight years ago, we surpassed Russia to claim the dubious distinction of having the world's highest rate of incarceration; today we're still No. 1.

If awards were granted to the country with the most surreal punishments, we would certainly win more than our share. Thirty-six straight years in solitary confinement (the fate of two men convicted in connection with the murder of a guard in Louisiana's Angola prison). A 55-year sentence for a small-time pot dealer who carried a gun during his sales (handed down by a federal court in Utah in 2004). Life sentences for 13-year-olds. (In 2005, Human Rights Watch counted more than 2,000 American inmates serving life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles. The entire rest of the world has only locked up 12 kids without hope of release.) Female prisoners forced to wear shackles while giving birth. (Amnesty International found 48 states that permitted this practice as of 2006.) A ban on former prisoners working as barbers (on the books in New York state).

America is expert at turning citizens into convicts, but we've forgotten how to transform convicts back into citizens. In 1994, Congress eliminated Pell grants for prisoners, a move that effectively abolished virtually all of the 350 prison college programs across the country. That might not seem like a catastrophe, until you consider that education has been proven to help reduce recidivism. (This was the conclusion of a recent paper by the Urban Institute, which reviewed 49 separate studies.) As the New York Times' Adam Liptak has pointed out, our prisons used to be models of redemption; de Tocqueville praised them in Democracy in America. Many prisons still call themselves "correctional facilities," but the term has become a misnomer. Most abandoned any pretense of rehabilitation long ago. Former California governor Jerry Brown even went so far as to rewrite the state's penal code to stress that the primary mission of that state's prisons is punishment.

Our cell blocks are packed with men and women who cannot read or write, who never graduated from high school—75 percent of state inmates—who will be hard-pressed to find a job once they are released. Once freed, they become second-class citizens. Depending on the state, they may be denied public housing, student loans, a driver's license, welfare benefits, and a wide range of jobs. Perhaps there is no more damning statistic than the fact that within three years, half will be convicted of a new crime.

Recently, there have been some hopeful signs. In April, the Second Chance Act was finally signed into law; it will provide federal grants to programs that help prisoners reenter society. But our punishment industry—which each year spends millions lobbying federal and state lawmakers—has grown so massive and so entrenched that it will take far more than one piece of legislation to begin to undo its far-reaching effects.

Just look at our felony disenfranchisement laws, which prohibit 5.3 million people from voting—including 13 percent of African American men. These numbers actually underestimate the scope of the problem, as many ex-prisoners believe they cannot vote even if they can. And so the legacy of our prison boom continues: We've become a two-tier society in which millions of ostensibly free people are prohibited from enjoying the rights and privileges accorded to everyone else—and we continue to be defined by our desire for punishment and revenge, rather than by our belief in the power of redemption.

[Contributing writer Jennifer Gonnerman's book, Life on the Outside, was a 2004 National Book Award finalist. This article appears in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.]

Source / Mother Jones

The Rag Blog

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...