Race Based Justice System Biggest Crime in US
The huffington post
Bill Quigley,Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights; Professor, Loyola New Orleans:Posted: July 26, 2010 07:45 AM
The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.
Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.
The question is - are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?
Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system - from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.
One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates - according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses - according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.
Two. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.
Three. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.
African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites - according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.
Four. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.
Five. Once arrested, 80% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded "All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring...The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US."
Six. African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.
Seven. Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial - the rest are plea bargained. Most African Americans defendants never get a trial. Most plea bargains consist of promise of a longer sentence if a person exercises their constitutional right to trial. As a result, people caught up in the system, as the American Bar Association points out, plead guilty even when innocent. Why? As one young man told me recently, "Who wouldn't rather do three years for a crime they didn't commit than risk twenty-five years for a crime they didn't do?"
Eight. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African Americans are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants and 20% more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.
Nine. The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that non-white people will be the ones getting it. A July 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are non-white. In New York, it is 83%.
Ten. As a result, African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses. Marc Mauer May 2009 Congressional Testimony for The Sentencing Project.
Eleven. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.
Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.
Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.
Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!
So, what conclusions do these facts lead to? The criminal justice system, from start to finish, is seriously racist.
Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans - a racialized system of social control. The stigma of criminality functions in much the same way as Jim Crow - creating legal boundaries between them and us, allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted people. She calls it a new caste system.
Poor whites and people of other ethnicity are also subjected to this system of social control. Because if poor whites or others get out of line, they will be given the worst possible treatment, they will be treated just like poor blacks.
Other critics like Professor Dylan Rodriguez see the criminal justice system as a key part of what he calls the domestic war on the marginalized. Because of globalization, he argues in his book Forced Passages, there is an excess of people in the US and elsewhere. "These people", whether they are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or US jails and prisons, are not productive, are not needed, are not wanted and are not really entitled to the same human rights as the productive ones. They must be controlled and dominated for the safety of the productive. They must be intimidated into accepting their inferiority or they must be removed from the society of the productive.
This domestic war relies on the same technology that the US uses internationally. More and more we see the militarization of this country's police. Likewise, the goals of the US justice system are the same as the US war on terror - domination and control by capture, immobilization, punishment and liquidation.
What to do?
Martin Luther King Jr., said we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
A radical approach to the US criminal justice system means we must go to the root of the problem. Not reform. Not better beds in better prisons. We are not called to only trim the leaves or prune the branches, but rip up this unjust system by its roots.
We are all entitled to safety. That is a human right everyone has a right to expect. But do we really think that continuing with a deeply racist system leading the world in incarcerating our children is making us safer?
It is time for every person interested in justice and safety to join in and dismantle this racist system. Should the US decriminalize drugs like marijuana? Should prisons be abolished? Should we expand the use of restorative justice? Can we create fair educational, medical and employment systems? All these questions and many more have to be seriously explored. Join a group like INCITE, Critical Resistance, the Center for Community Alternatives, Thousand Kites, or the California Prison Moratorium and work on it. As Professor Alexander says "Nothing short of a major social movement can dismantle this new caste system."
Bill Quigley
Bill Quigley is the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a national legal and educational organization dedicated to advancing and defending the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Bill joined CCR on sabbatical from his position as law professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. He has been an active public interest lawyer since 1977. He has served as counsel with a wide range of public interest organizations on issues including Katrina social justice issues, public housing, voting rights, death penalty, living wage, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights and civil disobedience. Bill has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the Advancement Project, and with the ACLU of Louisiana, for which he served as General Counsel for over 15 years. Bill received the 2006 Camille Gravel Civil Pro Bono Award from the Federal Bar Association New Orleans Chapter. Bill received the 2006 Stanford Law School National Public Service Award and the 2006 National Lawyers Guild Ernie Goodman award. He has also been an active volunteer lawyer with School of the Americas Watch and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Bill is the author of Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing A Right to A Job At A Living Wage (2003) and Storms Still Raging: Katrina, New Orleans and Social Justice (2008). In 2003, he was named the Pope Paul VI National Teacher of Peace by Pax Christi USA and is the recipient of the 2004 SALT Teaching Award presented by the Society of American Law Teachers.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Progressive WI now empty factories and Jails
Progressive Wisconsin? State Marked by Empty Factories, Full Prisons
by Roger Bybee 4 /10
Wisconsin has long enjoyed a reputation as an enlightened, progressive
state. Its reputation goes back to the populist flavor of the state constitution,
, the strong movement for the abolition of slavery, the staunchly anti-
corporate governor (and later senator) "Fighting Bob" LaFollette, the
building of powerful labor and socialist movements, and one of the nation's
very best university systems.
But a visit to my hometown of Racine for a meeting this week was a
painful reminder of how the city and state are moving toward a very
different model of society: the mass destruction of family-supporting jobs
coupled with the mass incarceration of thousands of young men who grew
up in deprived, disorganized neighborhoods shattered by de-industrializa-
tion.
GHOSTLY FACTORIES—AND A MASSIVE NEW JAIL
Unemployment in Racine is now 16.7%, reflecting both the toll of the
Great Recession and the permanent loss of about 13,500 manufacturing jobs
between 1979 and 2007, 42% of the city's industrial jobs. My hometown is filled with ghostly empty factories and vast empty, flat fields of brown grass where factories once turned out tractors, garden equipment, children's Golden Books, machine tools, auto parts, farm machinery, and on and on.
In industrial towns like Racine, factories have been emptied out, with no family-supporting jobs to replace them. Meanwhile a flock of new prisons and jails have been filled up, providing jobs for some ex-factory workers and a cell for others.Racine has a new $30 million jail that holds about six times as many prisoners as the one it replaced, which was completed only in 1980. A juvenile corrections facility now sits where the Rainfair clothing factory stood before its new owners sent the jobs to China.
PRISON POPULATION INCREASES NEARLY EIGHT-FOLD
With the path to legitimate success blocked for so many, it is only predictable that a certain percentage of young men, in particular, would be drawn to criminal activity. But unlike Wisconsin's neighbor, Minnesota, which has only about one-third the number of prisoners despite roughly similar demographics and population, Wisconsin has not developed a major system of non-prison alternatives to help young men complete their educations, obtain training and jobs, and find a non-criminal path for their lives.
Statewide, the prison population has exploded from 2,973 in 1970 to 23,112 at the end of last year, representing nearly an eight-fold increase.
A sizable portion of these prisoners come from six counties which have all suffered devastating losses in industrial jobs: Milwaukee, Dane, Racine, Kenosha, Rock and Waukesha. The city of Milwaukee lost 65% of its industrial jobs between 1977 and 2002, with leading local corporations like Johnson Controls, Master Lock and AO Smith coming to employ more workers in Mexico than Milwaukee. In Rock County, Janesville—which lost its huge General Motors assembly plant at the end of 2008—has an official unemployment rate of 13.1% and nearby Beloit has the state's highest jobless rate of 18.3%.
Wisconsin carries the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of African-American male incarceration of any state in the nation. African Americans are incarcerated at 12 times the rate of whites. At every point in the downward slide toward prison, African-Americans find less favorable treatment than whites.
The cost of the state's vast expansion of prisons and jails has meant a major drain on the revenues that once supported Wisconsin's excellent university system, forcing a quadrupling of tuition over the last 20 years, according to Jay Burseth, president of the UW-Milwaukee Students Association. It has also triggered increasingly sharp struggles by UW students to hold down tuition, as covered last month in these pages.
As economist Michael Rosen has pointed out, the link between rising prison expenditures and declining educational opportunities is clear-cut. Even while crime has been declining, the number of prisoners kept climbing:
Between 1987 and 2007, Wisconsin actually cut its support for higher education by 6%. Only 6 states reduced their investment in higher ed by more. During the same period, Wisconsin increased corrections spending by 251%, 8th highest nation, despite a declining crime rate.
MORE PRISON SPENDING MEANS HIGHER TUITON, LESS ACCESS
Ironically, the cost of incarcerating of mostly poor young men has directly and a severely reduced the opportunities for young people to stay out of trouble, get a good education and lead a productive life. The diversion of state funds from colleges and technical schools to the prison system has forced a much heavier burden of tuition on those who would like to attend college.
Rosen notes the conclusions of a study committee composed of representatives of Wisconsin's university system and technical colleges: "Wisconsin students from lower income families have less access to a college education than in the U.S. as a whole."
According to Prof. Pam Oliver of UW-Madison, a leading scholar who has done extensive research on the metastazing of Wisconsin's prison population, there has not yet been any systematic, full-scale study of the relationship between de-industrialization and the huge explosion in incarceration in Wisconsin.
But this linkage between the community devastation represented by the state's vacant factories and the crowded jails and prisons now seems brutally clear. The connection stands as a major indictment of the shameful economic and social policies shaped by major corporations' decisions and the policy choices of government officials unwilling to challenge corporate power.
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national publications and websites, including Z magazine, Dollars & Sense, Yes!, The Progressive, Multinational Monitor, The American Prospect and Foreign Policy in Focus. Bybee edited The Racine Labor weekly newspaper for 14 years in his hometown of Racine, Wis., where his grandfathers and father were socialist and labor activists. His website can be found here, and his e-mail address is winterbybee@gmail.com.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Don’t turn Wisconsin into ‘Wississippi’
When the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched “Operation Dixie” in the aftermath of World War II, with the goal not just of organizing unions in the states of the old Confederacy but of ending Jim Crow discrimination, Southern segregationists moved immediately to establish deceptively named “right-to-work” laws.
These measures were designed to make it dramatically harder for workers to organize unions and for labor organizations to advocate for workers on the job site or for social change in their communities and states.
Southern states rushed to enact right-to-work laws and, in short order, all the states that seceded from the Union in order to maintain slavery had laws designed to prevent unions from fighting against segregation. The strategy worked. Southern states have far weaker unions than Northern states, and labor struggles in the South have been far more bitter and violent than in other parts of the country. It was in a right-to-work state, Tennessee, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while supporting the struggle of African-American sanitation workers to organize a union and have it recognized by the city.
Speaking of legal, legislative and practical barriers that Southern states and cities erected to the organization of trade unions — especially in the public sector — King said: “If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”
King often spoke of the link between organized labor and the civil rights movement. He recognized that the cause of freedom needed allies, and that unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the United Auto Workers were key allies in the struggle. The unions shared in that recognition, and do to this day. Visit an AFSCME or UAW hall in Wisconsin and you will see plaques and displays recalling when Wisconsin trade unionists stood with King and the civil rights movement for justice.
The Wisconsin unions were strong enough to provide that support because Wisconsin is not a right-to-work state. Like the vast majority of other states that fought to end slavery in the 19th century, and that elected representatives (Republicans and Democrats) who opposed segregation in the 20th century, Wisconsin rejected proposals to enact right-to-work laws. Wisconsin Democrats and Republicans recognized that strong unions, like strong businesses, were necessary to economic and social progress.
Now, however, some Republicans are thinking of aligning Wisconsin with the Southern states. Incoming state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, told a WisPolitics luncheon last week that lawmakers are actively discussing making Wisconsin a right-to-work state.
“We have new majorities,” says Fitzgerald. “We’ve talked to new members of the House of Representatives and the way they view the world right now is the more feathers you ruffle right now, the stronger you’re going to be politically. I don’t ever remember an environment where that existed before. I think it gives us a lot of leeway ... to make some significant changes.”
Among the changes being discussed is an abandonment of laws that preserve the right of workers to organize unions and to make their voices heard through those unions. Gov.-elect Scott Walker has even opened up a discussion about decertifying state employee unions -- a move that would end decades of generally good relations between the state and the public employees who help when our cars break down on the highways, serve as guards in our prisons, assist unemployed moms when they are looking for work, inspect our bridges for safety, work to protect our rivers and lakes, write the curriculums for our schools, and maintain our museums and colleges.
Assembly Democratic leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, notes correctly: “During the course of a sometimes acrimonious and long campaign of almost a year, this issue (of decertifying unions and reducing collective bargaining rights) never came up.” Now, for Walker to raise the prospect before he has even taken his oath of office, says Barca, “is rather startling.”
Where are Walker and Fitzgerald getting these ideas? Not from Wisconsinites. They are jetting off to conferences of right-wing governors (where Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal serve up the policy gumbo) and legislators -- including a post-election session organized by the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council. It was not in Wisconsin but rather at an ALEC session in Washington where Fitzgerald says he was “surprised how much momentum there was around that discussion” of enacting right-to-work laws.
If Fitzgerald travels to Alabama or Mississippi, we are certain he could find more arguments for right-to-work laws: lower wages, fewer benefits, a race-to-the-bottom mentality that’s great for multinational corporations if not so good for workers, their families and their communities. He could also visit some Confederate war memorials.
If Fitzgerald travels Wisconsin, however, he will find a state that has historically struck a smart balance between the demands of business and labor — and that has been on the right side of the arc of history.
Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.
Posted in Editorial on Wednesday, December 15, 2010 7:30 am Updated: 2:18 pm. Afl-cio, Labor, United Auto Workers, Martin Luther King Jr., Scott Fitzgerald, Trade Union, Scott Walker, Brad Sherman
The huffington post
Bill Quigley,Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights; Professor, Loyola New Orleans:Posted: July 26, 2010 07:45 AM
The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.
Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.
The question is - are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?
Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system - from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.
One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales, at roughly comparable rates - according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African Americans comprise 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users they are 37% of the people arrested for drug offenses - according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project.
Two. The police stop blacks and Latinos at rates that are much higher than whites. In New York City, where people of color make up about half of the population, 80% of the NYPD stops were of blacks and Latinos. When whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked. When blacks and Latinos are stopped 85% were frisked according to information provided by the NYPD. The same is true most other places as well. In a California study, the ACLU found blacks are three times more likely to be stopped than whites.
Three. Since 1970, drug arrests have skyrocketed rising from 320,000 to close to 1.6 million according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice.
African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at rates 2 to 11 times higher than the rate for whites - according to a May 2009 report on disparity in drug arrests by Human Rights Watch.
Four. Once arrested, blacks are more likely to remain in prison awaiting trial than whites. For example, the New York state division of criminal justice did a 1995 review of disparities in processing felony arrests and found that in some parts of New York blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites facing felony trials.
Five. Once arrested, 80% of the people in the criminal justice system get a public defender for their lawyer. Race plays a big role here as well. Stop in any urban courtroom and look a the color of the people who are waiting for public defenders. Despite often heroic efforts by public defenders the system gives them much more work and much less money than the prosecution. The American Bar Association, not a radical bunch, reviewed the US public defender system in 2004 and concluded "All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring...The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US."
Six. African Americans are frequently illegally excluded from criminal jury service according to a June 2010 study released by the Equal Justice Initiative. For example in Houston County, Alabama, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from serving on death penalty cases.
Seven. Trials are rare. Only 3 to 5 percent of criminal cases go to trial - the rest are plea bargained. Most African Americans defendants never get a trial. Mosistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.
Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.
Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.
Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received bistics concludes that the chance of a black male born in 2001 of going to jail is 32% or 1 in three. Latino males have a 17% chance and white males have a 6% chance. Thus black boys are five times and Latino boys nearly three times as likely as white boys to go to jail.
Twelve. So, while African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons. 2009 Criminal Justice Primer, The Sentencing Project.
Thirteen. Remember that the US leads the world in putting our own people into jail and prison. The New York Times reported in 2008 that the US has five percent of the world's population but a quarter of the world's prisoners, over 2.3 million people behind bars, dwarfing other nations. The US rate of incarceration is five to eight times higher than other highly developed countries and black males are the largest percentage of inmates according to ABC News.
Fourteen. Even when released from prison, race continues to dominate. A study by Professor Devah Pager of the University of Wisconsin found that 17% of white job applicants with criminal records received call backs from employers while only 5% of black job applicants with criminal records received call backs. Race is so prominent in that study that whites with criminal records actually received better treatment than blacks without criminal records!
So, what conclusions do these facts lead to? The criminal justice system, from start to finish, is seriously racist.
Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans - a racialized system of social control. The stigma of criminality functions in much the same way as Jim Crow - creating legal boundaries between them and us, allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted people. She calls it a new caste system.
Poor whites and people of other ethnicity are also subjected to this system of social control. Because if poor whites or others get out of line, they will be given the worst possible treatment, they will be treated just like poor blacks.
Other critics like Professor Dylan Rodriguez see the criminal justice system as a key part of what he calls the domestic war on the marginalized. Because of globalization, he argues in his book Forced Passages, there is an excess of people in the US and elsewhere. "These people", whether they are in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib or US jails and prisons, are not productive, are not needed, are not wanted and are not really entitled to the same human rights as the productive ones. They must be controlled and dominated for the safety of the productive. They must be intimidated into accepting their inferiority or they must be removed from the society of the productive.
This domestic war relies on the same technology that the US uses internationally. More and more we see the militarization of this country's police. Likewise, the goals of the US justice system are the same as the US war on terror - domination and control by capture, immobilization, punishment and liquidation.
What to do?
Martin Luther King Jr., said we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
A radical approach to the US criminal justice system means we must go to the root of the problem. Not reform. Not better beds in better prisons. We are not called to only trim the leaves or prune the branches, but rip up this unjust system by its roots.
We are all entitled to safety. That is a human right everyone has a right to expect. But do we really think that continuing with a deeply racist system leading the world in incarcerating our children is making us safer?
It is time for every person interested in justice and safety to join in and dismantle this racist system. Should the US decriminalize drugs like marijuana? Should prisons be abolished? Should we expand the use of restorative justice? Can we create fair educational, medical and employment systems? All these questions and many more have to be seriously explored. Join a group like INCITE, Critical Resistance, the Center for Community Alternatives, Thousand Kites, or the California Prison Moratorium and work on it. As Professor Alexander says "Nothing short of a major social movement can dismantle this new caste system."
Bill Quigley
Bill Quigley is the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, a national legal and educational organization dedicated to advancing and defending the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Bill joined CCR on sabbatical from his position as law professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. He has been an active public interest lawyer since 1977. He has served as counsel with a wide range of public interest organizations on issues including Katrina social justice issues, public housing, voting rights, death penalty, living wage, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights and civil disobedience. Bill has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., the Advancement Project, and with the ACLU of Louisiana, for which he served as General Counsel for over 15 years. Bill received the 2006 Camille Gravel Civil Pro Bono Award from the Federal Bar Association New Orleans Chapter. Bill received the 2006 Stanford Law School National Public Service Award and the 2006 National Lawyers Guild Ernie Goodman award. He has also been an active volunteer lawyer with School of the Americas Watch and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Bill is the author of Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing A Right to A Job At A Living Wage (2003) and Storms Still Raging: Katrina, New Orleans and Social Justice (2008). In 2003, he was named the Pope Paul VI National Teacher of Peace by Pax Christi USA and is the recipient of the 2004 SALT Teaching Award presented by the Society of American Law Teachers.
Barbarous Confinement NYT
July 17, 2011 from the NYTimes
Barbarous Confinement
By COLIN DAYAN
Nashville
MORE than 1,700 prisoners in California, many of whom are in maximum isolation units, have gone on a hunger strike. The protest began with inmates in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. How they have managed to communicate with each other is anyone’s guess — but their protest is everyone’s concern. Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations. Their isolation, which can last for decades, is often not explicitly disciplinary, and therefore not subject to court oversight. Their treatment is simply a matter of administrative convenience.
Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline into a widespread form of preventive detention. The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.” Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under “cruel and unusual punishment,” the reasoning goes.
As early as 1995, a federal judge, Thelton E. Henderson, conceded that so-called “supermax” confinement “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable,” though he ruled that it remained acceptable for most inmates. But a psychiatrist and Harvard professor, Stuart Grassian, had found that the environment was “strikingly toxic,” resulting in hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty.
Officials at Pelican Bay, in Northern California, claim that those incarcerated in the Security Housing Unit are “the worst of the worst.” Yet often it is the most vulnerable, especially the mentally ill, not the most violent, who end up in indefinite isolation. Placement is haphazard and arbitrary; it focuses on those perceived as troublemakers or simply disliked by correctional officers and, most of all, alleged gang members. Often, the decisions are not based on evidence. And before the inmates are released from the barbarity of 22-hour-a-day isolation into normal prison conditions (themselves shameful) they are often expected to “debrief,” or spill the beans on other gang members.
The moral queasiness that we must feel about this method of extracting information from those in our clutches has all but disappeared these days, thanks to the national shame of “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guantánamo. Those in isolation can get out by naming names, but if they do so they will likely be killed when returned to a normal facility. To “debrief” is to be targeted for death by gang members, so the prisoners are moved to “protective custody” — that is, another form of solitary confinement.
Hunger strikes are the only weapon these prisoners have left. Legal avenues are closed. Communication with the outside world, even with family members, is so restricted as to be meaningless. Possessions — paper and pencil, reading matter, photos of family members, even hand-drawn pictures — are removed. (They could contain coded messages between gang members, we are told, or their loss may persuade the inmates to snitch when every other deprivation has failed.)
The poverty of our criminological theorizing is reflected in the official response to the hunger strike. Now refusing to eat is regarded as a threat, too. Authorities are considering force-feeding. It is likely it will be carried out — as it has been, and possibly still continues to be — at Guantánamo (in possible violation of international law) and in an evil caricature of medical care.
In the summer of 1996, I visited two “special management units” at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. A warden boasted that one of the units was the model for Pelican Bay. He led me down the corridors on impeccably clean floors. There was no paint on the concrete walls. Although the corridors had skylights, the cells had no windows. Nothing inside could be moved or removed. The cells contained only a poured concrete bed, a stainless steel mirror, a sink and a toilet. Inmates had no human contact, except when handcuffed or chained to leave their cells or during the often brutal cell extractions. A small place for exercise, called the “dog pen,” with cement floors and walls, so high they could see nothing but the sky, provided the only access to fresh air.
Later, an inmate wrote to me, confessing to a shame made palpable and real: “If they only touch you when you’re at the end of a chain, then they can’t see you as anything but a dog. Now I can’t see my face in the mirror. I’ve lost my skin. I can’t feel my mind.”
Do we find our ethics by forcing prisoners to live in what Judge Henderson described as the setting of “senseless suffering” and “wretched misery”? Maybe our reaction to hunger strikes should involve some self-reflection. Not allowing inmates to choose death as an escape from a murderous fate or as a protest against continued degradation depends, as we will see when doctors come to make their judgment calls, on the skilled manipulation of techniques that are indistinguishable from torture. Maybe one way to react to prisoners whose only reaction to bestial treatment is to starve themselves to death might be to do the unthinkable — to treat them like human beings.
Colin Dayan, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of “The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons.”
July 24, 2011
The Inhumanity of Solitary Confinement
To the Editor:
Re “Barbarous Confinement,” by Colin Dayan (Op-Ed, July 18):
Mr. Dayan vividly captures the cruelty of long-term solitary or “supermax” confinement, which has increasingly become business as usual in American prisons. Supermax units like the one at Pelican Bay State Prison in California cost two to three times as much to build and operate as conventional prisons, and prisoners released directly to the community from solitary are more likely to commit more crimes than comparable prisoners released from general prison populations.
Fortunately, some states are beginning to change course. In Maine, the new commissioner of corrections has cut the population of the state’s supermax unit by more than half. Mississippi depopulated its supermax unit and eventually closed it entirely, leading to a dramatic drop in prison violence and a savings of $8 million a year.
Other states, and the federal government, should follow suit. The vast majority of prisoners are eventually coming home, and it’s in everyone’s interest to support humane conditions of confinement that promote successful re-entry to the community.
DAVID FATHI
Dir., National Prison Project, A.C.L.U.
Washington, July 18, 2011
To the Editor:
Supporting Colin Dayan’s call to action is a letter sent to me recently by a Pelican Bay Prison hunger striker. In the letter, the hunger striker said he was told in 2001 upon transfer to Pelican Bay that he was “a cancer to be cut out” and that he would ”die here one way or another.” He said that in 2003 he found mixed in among his legal materials an administrative memo entitled “The Function of the Control/SHU Units.” It outlined a plan of attack for administrators to follow.
The memo said “the function is to reduce prisoners to the state of submission essential for their ideological conversion ... that failing, the next step is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them as efficient self-directed antagonists ... that failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them desperate enough to destroy themselves.”
To “destroy” is to torture. Mr. Dayan is right: prisoners are human beings and deserve to be treated as such.
CAROL STRICKMAN
San Francisco, July 18, 2011
The writer is a lawyer working with the Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition.
To the Editor:
To its credit, New York is one of few states to see a dramatic decline in its prison population — down 22 percent since 1999 — due in part to reform of drug laws. But as rolls drop, the number of inmates in the “box,” as inmates call solitary confinement, has grown: 17 percent since 2006.
In recent years, more than 30 percent of state prison suicides have occurred in solitary confinement. Oscar Perez hanged himself in such a unit at Clinton Correctional Facility in 2008; an oversight report concluded, as others have, that he “was likely to decompensate [there] and would have benefited from an alternative placement.”
To be sure, improvements have been made to treat mental illness in recent years. Nonetheless, the system saw its highest suicide rate in 2010 in 28 years. The question is whether that is merely an aberration or a reflection of a system struggling with a population that includes nearly 8,000 mentally ill inmates and relying on housing methods that have long been thought to foster disorientation and sometimes insanity.
MARY BETH PFEIFFER
Poughkeepsie, N.Y., July 18, 2011
The writer is projects writer for The Poughkeepsie Journal.
To the Editor:
Though Colin Dayan notes one warden’s pride at his prison isolation cells, having once spent a long weekend inside New York’s equivalent, I can say that what I recall about those entrusted with the keys will haunt me forever.
When they enter their windowless, fluorescent-lighted workplace through clanging iron gates, lock up inmates behind steel doors with no openings or contours other than a service port and a tiny window of layered fiberglass; and when the tools of their trade are manacles — heavy, solid ones, wrapped and interlocked around wrists, ankles and waist — then one can be sure that eye never meets eye. And no one escapes.
“Outside,” too, eyes remain averted, with no less effect on the soul. That should haunt us all.
JAMES CORNELIO
New Preston, Conn., July 19, 2011
Barbarous Confinement
By COLIN DAYAN
Nashville
MORE than 1,700 prisoners in California, many of whom are in maximum isolation units, have gone on a hunger strike. The protest began with inmates in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. How they have managed to communicate with each other is anyone’s guess — but their protest is everyone’s concern. Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations. Their isolation, which can last for decades, is often not explicitly disciplinary, and therefore not subject to court oversight. Their treatment is simply a matter of administrative convenience.
Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline into a widespread form of preventive detention. The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.” Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under “cruel and unusual punishment,” the reasoning goes.
As early as 1995, a federal judge, Thelton E. Henderson, conceded that so-called “supermax” confinement “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable,” though he ruled that it remained acceptable for most inmates. But a psychiatrist and Harvard professor, Stuart Grassian, had found that the environment was “strikingly toxic,” resulting in hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty.
Officials at Pelican Bay, in Northern California, claim that those incarcerated in the Security Housing Unit are “the worst of the worst.” Yet often it is the most vulnerable, especially the mentally ill, not the most violent, who end up in indefinite isolation. Placement is haphazard and arbitrary; it focuses on those perceived as troublemakers or simply disliked by correctional officers and, most of all, alleged gang members. Often, the decisions are not based on evidence. And before the inmates are released from the barbarity of 22-hour-a-day isolation into normal prison conditions (themselves shameful) they are often expected to “debrief,” or spill the beans on other gang members.
The moral queasiness that we must feel about this method of extracting information from those in our clutches has all but disappeared these days, thanks to the national shame of “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guantánamo. Those in isolation can get out by naming names, but if they do so they will likely be killed when returned to a normal facility. To “debrief” is to be targeted for death by gang members, so the prisoners are moved to “protective custody” — that is, another form of solitary confinement.
Hunger strikes are the only weapon these prisoners have left. Legal avenues are closed. Communication with the outside world, even with family members, is so restricted as to be meaningless. Possessions — paper and pencil, reading matter, photos of family members, even hand-drawn pictures — are removed. (They could contain coded messages between gang members, we are told, or their loss may persuade the inmates to snitch when every other deprivation has failed.)
The poverty of our criminological theorizing is reflected in the official response to the hunger strike. Now refusing to eat is regarded as a threat, too. Authorities are considering force-feeding. It is likely it will be carried out — as it has been, and possibly still continues to be — at Guantánamo (in possible violation of international law) and in an evil caricature of medical care.
In the summer of 1996, I visited two “special management units” at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. A warden boasted that one of the units was the model for Pelican Bay. He led me down the corridors on impeccably clean floors. There was no paint on the concrete walls. Although the corridors had skylights, the cells had no windows. Nothing inside could be moved or removed. The cells contained only a poured concrete bed, a stainless steel mirror, a sink and a toilet. Inmates had no human contact, except when handcuffed or chained to leave their cells or during the often brutal cell extractions. A small place for exercise, called the “dog pen,” with cement floors and walls, so high they could see nothing but the sky, provided the only access to fresh air.
Later, an inmate wrote to me, confessing to a shame made palpable and real: “If they only touch you when you’re at the end of a chain, then they can’t see you as anything but a dog. Now I can’t see my face in the mirror. I’ve lost my skin. I can’t feel my mind.”
Do we find our ethics by forcing prisoners to live in what Judge Henderson described as the setting of “senseless suffering” and “wretched misery”? Maybe our reaction to hunger strikes should involve some self-reflection. Not allowing inmates to choose death as an escape from a murderous fate or as a protest against continued degradation depends, as we will see when doctors come to make their judgment calls, on the skilled manipulation of techniques that are indistinguishable from torture. Maybe one way to react to prisoners whose only reaction to bestial treatment is to starve themselves to death might be to do the unthinkable — to treat them like human beings.
Colin Dayan, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of “The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons.”
July 24, 2011
The Inhumanity of Solitary Confinement
To the Editor:
Re “Barbarous Confinement,” by Colin Dayan (Op-Ed, July 18):
Mr. Dayan vividly captures the cruelty of long-term solitary or “supermax” confinement, which has increasingly become business as usual in American prisons. Supermax units like the one at Pelican Bay State Prison in California cost two to three times as much to build and operate as conventional prisons, and prisoners released directly to the community from solitary are more likely to commit more crimes than comparable prisoners released from general prison populations.
Fortunately, some states are beginning to change course. In Maine, the new commissioner of corrections has cut the population of the state’s supermax unit by more than half. Mississippi depopulated its supermax unit and eventually closed it entirely, leading to a dramatic drop in prison violence and a savings of $8 million a year.
Other states, and the federal government, should follow suit. The vast majority of prisoners are eventually coming home, and it’s in everyone’s interest to support humane conditions of confinement that promote successful re-entry to the community.
DAVID FATHI
Dir., National Prison Project, A.C.L.U.
Washington, July 18, 2011
To the Editor:
Supporting Colin Dayan’s call to action is a letter sent to me recently by a Pelican Bay Prison hunger striker. In the letter, the hunger striker said he was told in 2001 upon transfer to Pelican Bay that he was “a cancer to be cut out” and that he would ”die here one way or another.” He said that in 2003 he found mixed in among his legal materials an administrative memo entitled “The Function of the Control/SHU Units.” It outlined a plan of attack for administrators to follow.
The memo said “the function is to reduce prisoners to the state of submission essential for their ideological conversion ... that failing, the next step is to reduce them to a state of psychological incompetence sufficient to neutralize them as efficient self-directed antagonists ... that failing, the only alternative is to destroy them, preferably by making them desperate enough to destroy themselves.”
To “destroy” is to torture. Mr. Dayan is right: prisoners are human beings and deserve to be treated as such.
CAROL STRICKMAN
San Francisco, July 18, 2011
The writer is a lawyer working with the Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition.
To the Editor:
To its credit, New York is one of few states to see a dramatic decline in its prison population — down 22 percent since 1999 — due in part to reform of drug laws. But as rolls drop, the number of inmates in the “box,” as inmates call solitary confinement, has grown: 17 percent since 2006.
In recent years, more than 30 percent of state prison suicides have occurred in solitary confinement. Oscar Perez hanged himself in such a unit at Clinton Correctional Facility in 2008; an oversight report concluded, as others have, that he “was likely to decompensate [there] and would have benefited from an alternative placement.”
To be sure, improvements have been made to treat mental illness in recent years. Nonetheless, the system saw its highest suicide rate in 2010 in 28 years. The question is whether that is merely an aberration or a reflection of a system struggling with a population that includes nearly 8,000 mentally ill inmates and relying on housing methods that have long been thought to foster disorientation and sometimes insanity.
MARY BETH PFEIFFER
Poughkeepsie, N.Y., July 18, 2011
The writer is projects writer for The Poughkeepsie Journal.
To the Editor:
Though Colin Dayan notes one warden’s pride at his prison isolation cells, having once spent a long weekend inside New York’s equivalent, I can say that what I recall about those entrusted with the keys will haunt me forever.
When they enter their windowless, fluorescent-lighted workplace through clanging iron gates, lock up inmates behind steel doors with no openings or contours other than a service port and a tiny window of layered fiberglass; and when the tools of their trade are manacles — heavy, solid ones, wrapped and interlocked around wrists, ankles and waist — then one can be sure that eye never meets eye. And no one escapes.
“Outside,” too, eyes remain averted, with no less effect on the soul. That should haunt us all.
JAMES CORNELIO
New Preston, Conn., July 19, 2011
Georgia Prisoners Strike and PLN Update
Georgia Prisoners Strike for Wages, Better Medical Care and Food by Naomi Spencer
Prisoners at seven Georgia state prisons called a strike on Decem¬ber 9, 2010 to protest against unpaid labor practices, poor conditions and violations of basic human rights.
Thousands of prisoners participated in the protest by refusing to work and remaining in their cells. Prisoners coordinated the action using contraband cell phones. Black, white and Latino prisoners were unified in the strike, a significant development considering the brutal and fractious racial culture within U.S. prisons.
In a press release, the prisoners listed foremost among their demands a wage for their work. Prisoners under the state's Department of Corrections (DOC) are forced to work without pay.
Protesting prisoners demanded access to educational opportunities beyond General. Equivalency Diploma (GED) certification, improved living conditions, access to medical care, fruit and vegetables in their meals, family visitation and tele¬phone communication rights, just parole decisions, and an end to cruel and unusual punishments.
Initially planned as a one-day protest, prisoners extended the strike when the DOC responded with violence. Prisoners at the Augusta State Prison said at least six prisoners were forcibly removed from their cells by guards and beaten. Several men suffered broken ribs and, according to a press release, prisoners said another was beaten "beyond recognition."
Guards at the Telfair prison destroyed prisoners' personal property. At Macon, the warden ordered the shutoff of both heat and hot water as temperatures dipped below freezing. Some Macon prisoners were dragged into solitary confinement cells in "the hole."
The DOC initially denied that prisoners engaged in coordinated action, but placed four facilities under an indefinite lockdown beginning December 9. Speaking to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, DOC spokesperson Peggy Chapman claimed that the protests were "a rumor."
"There's nothing really going on," she told the paper. "Inmates are working ... [except at] the prisons we put on lock-down. I think that [a protest] was the plan but I don't think it's come to fruition."
However, numerous prisoners contacted the New York Times on banned cell phones to speak about the strike. "We're hearing in the news they're putting it down as we're starting a riot, so they locked all the prisoners] down," a 20-year-old Hays State prisoner said, adding, "We locked ourselves down. ... We committed the crime, we're here for a reason. But at the same time, we're men. We can't be treated like animals." —————
We're not coming out until something is done," another unnamed prisoner at Rogers State Prison declared. "We're not going to work until something is done."
The prisoners' demands reveal the hellish conditions in which some 60,000 Georgians are held for years on end. Prisoners are confined in overcrowded cells, with very little heat in the winter months and sweltering heat in the summer.
Prisoners protested the fact that the state now prohibits families from sending money through the US postal service; instead, families have to transfer funds through J-Pay, a private company, which skims ten percent of the money spent. Another for-profit firm, Global Tel-Link, controls family telephone communications at the prisons, raking in more than $50 per month per prisoner for weekly 15-minute calls. Many families of prisoners are poor, and such costs effectively prohibit regular contact with incarcerated loved ones.
Prisoners also complained that the DOC had stripped them of any opportunity for training in trades, exercise, or other type of self-improvement. The state offers no educational opportunities beyond earning the equivalent of a high school diploma or training in the Baptist ministry.
Instead, prisoners are subjected to extremely long sentences and unpaid work assignments that amount to state enslavement. Prisoners are made to cook and serve meals, clean, and maintain facilities within the prison system. They are also sent to clean, maintain, re-paint and repair other government property, pick up trash, mow and maintain state grounds, and perform other jobs without pay. After serving years behind bars, most prisoners are released with only $25 and a bus ticket.
Conditions in U.S. jails and prisons have deteriorated as state budget crises have deepened. Georgia has the highest prison-er-to-resident ratio in the nation, with one in every thirteen people incarcerated or on probation or parole. In all, the state holds 60,000 prisoners and oversees 150,000 people on probation. The state's prison budget for 2010 exceeded $1 billion.
Forty percent of the state's prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent offenses such as drug or property crimes. Victims of draconian sentencing laws, many people are swept up in the corrections system essentially because they suffer from addictions, homelessness or mental illness.
Prisoners are serving longer and longer terms in Georgia, with fewer opportunities for rehabilitation. This is the product of "tough on crime" judicial policies ushered in by the Clinton administration, and in Georgia in the 1990s by right-wing Governor Zell Miller. Miller introduced a "Two strikes and you're out" law, and classified certain crimes as deserving of life sentences under the 1.994. "Seven Deadly Sins" law.
Such reactionary sentencing laws were accompanied by an explosion in the prison system as a for-profit industry. In Georgia, the average prison time served is now 3.4 years - up from 1.6 years two decades ago. Violent offenses carry mandatory mini¬mum sentences of 10 years with no parole; second convictions for violent crimes carry sentences of life without parole. Nearly one-third of prisoners are ineligible for ever being considered for parole.
Over the past two decades the prison population has nearly tripled in Georgia, ranking the state fifth in the nation for the number of people it incarcerates, ac¬cording to the Sentencing Project. African Americans make up 63 percent of the prison population while comprising 30 percent of state residents.
While the General Assembly has re¬fused to either reduce the prison budget or lighten sentencing laws, cost-cutting within the system over the last few years has resulted in extreme overcrowding and inhuman conditions. On average, accord¬ing to the most recent data from the Pew Center on the States, Georgia spends $49 a day to house each prisoner, compared to the national average of $79 a day.
Many state prisons already exceed capacity limits, with prisoners being triple-bunked. Yet in the past year the DOC has shuttered multiple facilities and crowded prisoners into still fewer cells. Thousands of other state prisoners are housed in county jails, where they are dispatched to do unpaid labor at the discretion of local government officials.
In numerous counties, prison labor is being used in place of laid-off government and municipal employees to save money. According to a November 2009 report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, state prisoners housed in county jails soared by 61 percent, from 3,278 in 2008 to 5,277 a year later. To house prisoners, counties have created "fast-track facilities" and are holding the long-term incarcerated in jails alongside pre-trial detainees. P'
This article originally appeared on the World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws. org), and is reprinted with permission of the author.
Update from PLN
The non-violent protest by Georgia prisoners extended until December 15, when the DOC began to lift the lock-
downs at four state prisons and prisoners said they were ending the work strike. "We needed to come off lockdown so we can go to the law library and start ... the paperwork for a [prison conditions] lawsuit," said one of the prisoners who coordinated the protest. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, planning for the strike began in September 2010 after the DOC banned smoking. The poverty of litigation is that the bulk of the prison¬ers' demands, such as being paid for their labor, are perfectly acceptable under the United States' 18th century constitution.' If DOC officials fail to take action on the prisoners' demands, additional protests may occur. "We know the tactical squad cannot^be at more than one prison,"
noted one of trig protest organizers. "If you have five prisons popping off, you can't send the tactical squad to all prisons. You'll have to send in the National Guard and by then it'll be too late."
Prisoners at seven Georgia state prisons called a strike on Decem¬ber 9, 2010 to protest against unpaid labor practices, poor conditions and violations of basic human rights.
Thousands of prisoners participated in the protest by refusing to work and remaining in their cells. Prisoners coordinated the action using contraband cell phones. Black, white and Latino prisoners were unified in the strike, a significant development considering the brutal and fractious racial culture within U.S. prisons.
In a press release, the prisoners listed foremost among their demands a wage for their work. Prisoners under the state's Department of Corrections (DOC) are forced to work without pay.
Protesting prisoners demanded access to educational opportunities beyond General. Equivalency Diploma (GED) certification, improved living conditions, access to medical care, fruit and vegetables in their meals, family visitation and tele¬phone communication rights, just parole decisions, and an end to cruel and unusual punishments.
Initially planned as a one-day protest, prisoners extended the strike when the DOC responded with violence. Prisoners at the Augusta State Prison said at least six prisoners were forcibly removed from their cells by guards and beaten. Several men suffered broken ribs and, according to a press release, prisoners said another was beaten "beyond recognition."
Guards at the Telfair prison destroyed prisoners' personal property. At Macon, the warden ordered the shutoff of both heat and hot water as temperatures dipped below freezing. Some Macon prisoners were dragged into solitary confinement cells in "the hole."
The DOC initially denied that prisoners engaged in coordinated action, but placed four facilities under an indefinite lockdown beginning December 9. Speaking to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, DOC spokesperson Peggy Chapman claimed that the protests were "a rumor."
"There's nothing really going on," she told the paper. "Inmates are working ... [except at] the prisons we put on lock-down. I think that [a protest] was the plan but I don't think it's come to fruition."
However, numerous prisoners contacted the New York Times on banned cell phones to speak about the strike. "We're hearing in the news they're putting it down as we're starting a riot, so they locked all the prisoners] down," a 20-year-old Hays State prisoner said, adding, "We locked ourselves down. ... We committed the crime, we're here for a reason. But at the same time, we're men. We can't be treated like animals." —————
We're not coming out until something is done," another unnamed prisoner at Rogers State Prison declared. "We're not going to work until something is done."
The prisoners' demands reveal the hellish conditions in which some 60,000 Georgians are held for years on end. Prisoners are confined in overcrowded cells, with very little heat in the winter months and sweltering heat in the summer.
Prisoners protested the fact that the state now prohibits families from sending money through the US postal service; instead, families have to transfer funds through J-Pay, a private company, which skims ten percent of the money spent. Another for-profit firm, Global Tel-Link, controls family telephone communications at the prisons, raking in more than $50 per month per prisoner for weekly 15-minute calls. Many families of prisoners are poor, and such costs effectively prohibit regular contact with incarcerated loved ones.
Prisoners also complained that the DOC had stripped them of any opportunity for training in trades, exercise, or other type of self-improvement. The state offers no educational opportunities beyond earning the equivalent of a high school diploma or training in the Baptist ministry.
Instead, prisoners are subjected to extremely long sentences and unpaid work assignments that amount to state enslavement. Prisoners are made to cook and serve meals, clean, and maintain facilities within the prison system. They are also sent to clean, maintain, re-paint and repair other government property, pick up trash, mow and maintain state grounds, and perform other jobs without pay. After serving years behind bars, most prisoners are released with only $25 and a bus ticket.
Conditions in U.S. jails and prisons have deteriorated as state budget crises have deepened. Georgia has the highest prison-er-to-resident ratio in the nation, with one in every thirteen people incarcerated or on probation or parole. In all, the state holds 60,000 prisoners and oversees 150,000 people on probation. The state's prison budget for 2010 exceeded $1 billion.
Forty percent of the state's prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent offenses such as drug or property crimes. Victims of draconian sentencing laws, many people are swept up in the corrections system essentially because they suffer from addictions, homelessness or mental illness.
Prisoners are serving longer and longer terms in Georgia, with fewer opportunities for rehabilitation. This is the product of "tough on crime" judicial policies ushered in by the Clinton administration, and in Georgia in the 1990s by right-wing Governor Zell Miller. Miller introduced a "Two strikes and you're out" law, and classified certain crimes as deserving of life sentences under the 1.994. "Seven Deadly Sins" law.
Such reactionary sentencing laws were accompanied by an explosion in the prison system as a for-profit industry. In Georgia, the average prison time served is now 3.4 years - up from 1.6 years two decades ago. Violent offenses carry mandatory mini¬mum sentences of 10 years with no parole; second convictions for violent crimes carry sentences of life without parole. Nearly one-third of prisoners are ineligible for ever being considered for parole.
Over the past two decades the prison population has nearly tripled in Georgia, ranking the state fifth in the nation for the number of people it incarcerates, ac¬cording to the Sentencing Project. African Americans make up 63 percent of the prison population while comprising 30 percent of state residents.
While the General Assembly has re¬fused to either reduce the prison budget or lighten sentencing laws, cost-cutting within the system over the last few years has resulted in extreme overcrowding and inhuman conditions. On average, accord¬ing to the most recent data from the Pew Center on the States, Georgia spends $49 a day to house each prisoner, compared to the national average of $79 a day.
Many state prisons already exceed capacity limits, with prisoners being triple-bunked. Yet in the past year the DOC has shuttered multiple facilities and crowded prisoners into still fewer cells. Thousands of other state prisoners are housed in county jails, where they are dispatched to do unpaid labor at the discretion of local government officials.
In numerous counties, prison labor is being used in place of laid-off government and municipal employees to save money. According to a November 2009 report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, state prisoners housed in county jails soared by 61 percent, from 3,278 in 2008 to 5,277 a year later. To house prisoners, counties have created "fast-track facilities" and are holding the long-term incarcerated in jails alongside pre-trial detainees. P'
This article originally appeared on the World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws. org), and is reprinted with permission of the author.
Update from PLN
The non-violent protest by Georgia prisoners extended until December 15, when the DOC began to lift the lock-
downs at four state prisons and prisoners said they were ending the work strike. "We needed to come off lockdown so we can go to the law library and start ... the paperwork for a [prison conditions] lawsuit," said one of the prisoners who coordinated the protest. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, planning for the strike began in September 2010 after the DOC banned smoking. The poverty of litigation is that the bulk of the prison¬ers' demands, such as being paid for their labor, are perfectly acceptable under the United States' 18th century constitution.' If DOC officials fail to take action on the prisoners' demands, additional protests may occur. "We know the tactical squad cannot^be at more than one prison,"
noted one of trig protest organizers. "If you have five prisons popping off, you can't send the tactical squad to all prisons. You'll have to send in the National Guard and by then it'll be too late."
Attica Lessons Not Learned
http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/news/articles/2011/09/JUSTICE-Attica-lessons-not-learned/
Stan Stojkovic, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says that states' budget problems may drive prison reforms.
JUSTICE: Attica: lessons not learned
By Jeremy Moule on September 7, 2011
Stan Stojkovic, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says that states' budget problems may drive prison reforms. PHOTO PROVIDED
The bloody conclusion to the 1971 inmate uprising at Attica got the whole country talking about prison conditions. Some attempts at reform were made in the aftermath, but four decades after Attica, reform on a large scale hasn't materialized.
Instead, more people are in prison, sentences are longer, and fewer public resources are devoted to helping inmates transition back into society.
This month marks the 40th anniversary of the Attica uprising, the deadliest prison revolt in the nation's history. Poor conditions at the prison are said to have been the overriding factor responsible for the revolt.
"It was a tragic event but it was probably a necessary event, given what the heck was going on," says Stan Stojkovic, dean and professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Helen Bader School of Social Welfare. "But when you fast forward, we just haven't made much progress since then."
In some respects, the country has gone in the opposite direction. The 1970's and 1980's brought the Rockefeller Drug Laws, the War on Drugs, less judicial discretion in sentencing, less discretion in releasing inmates, and other tough-on-crime measures. In-prison rehabilitation programs were cut, as were work-release programs meant to help prisoners
get on their feet before full release. New York and other states have also expanded their prisons. And in 1996, Congress passed legislation imposing restrictions on prisoner litigation; lawsuits and court orders have historically been the primary drivers of prison reform.
States have seen substantial growth in their prison populations since the Attica revolt. For example, New York had 12,579 people in state prisons in 1970, but has approximately 56,000 prisoners now. The number peaked in 1999 at 71,600.
The growth in the prison population raises two questions: is the justice system sending too many people to prison, and what should the role of prisons be? Ultimately, prison-reform advocates want a shift in the underpinning philosophy of the criminal-justice system. The focus should be on rehabilitation and not punishment, they say.
The complaints of inmates today are similar to those made by the 1971 Attica prisoners. The Correctional Association of New York regularly visits state prisons and prepares a report on the conditions at each one. The reports note inmate complaints, which include the quality of their food, the way they're treated by guards and medical staff, lack of access to education or vocation programs, the conditions of the showers, and high prices at the commissary.
Reformers are focusing on newer issues, as well. One is the widespread use of segregated housing units - areas of small cells used for solitary confinement - for disciplinary purposes or to separate gang members. Some prisons expanded these units during the 1980's and 1990's.
Inmates are generally kept in the small cells for 23 hours a day. They get one hour of exercise, and that happens in another small, enclosed area.
"You really damage somebody by isolating them that long," says Patricia Warth, co-director of justice strategies at the Syracuse-based Center for Community Alternatives.
A 2010 article from the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law says that the mentally ill are often disproportionately represented in solitary confinement, and that their experience tends to exacerbate their illnesses.
Elected officials, prison officials, and society at-large may not have embraced the reform opportunities Attica presented, but budgets are starting to motivate change, including in New York State.
The state closed seven prisons this year, eliminating 3,800 beds. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the closings at the end of June and said they would save the state $184 million in the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 budgets. It costs New York about $55,000 per year to house a prisoner, says the Correctional Association of New York.
States can't put prisoners in beds they don't have, so some prison-reform advocates say officials will be forced to change the way they approach incarceration. Budgetary considerations aren't the ideal basis for prison reform, Warth says, but they do get the conversation started.
The state has taken some positive steps. In 2009, legislators passed bills reforming the Rockefeller Drug Laws. The legislation eliminated mandatory minimum sentences for low level, nonviolent drug offe
nders, and lets judges order those offenders into drug treatment programs.
Reform advocates say they want to keep people out of prison as much as possible, as well as to ensure good conditions for inmates.
Education, job training, and other rehabilitative programs - which are often easy targets for cuts - can reduce recidivism rates by 8 to 10 percent, says the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Stojkovic.
That may not sound like a lot, he says, but for large states like New York or California, that could mean averting thousands of crimes. That, in turn, would mean fewer people heading to prison. That's important: consider California, which is under court order to release 30,000 inmates because of overcrowding and related problems.
But prison reform brings up many complex questions and problems. And the programs that keep offenders out of prison or reduce recidivism are imperfect.
"That doesn't mean you then go the other directions and then simply lock everyone up and throw away the key," Stojkovic says. "That's crazy."
Sometimes inmates find their own ways to push reform. Warth says she's encouraged to see inmates peacefully protesting conditions that they find unacceptable, even if the press doesn't always pay attention.
Late last year, some inmates in Georgia state prisons went on a six-day strike to demand payment for the work they do and better living conditions. They also wanted other things, like more fruits and vegetables in their meals. The inmates ended the protests to allow the administration time to meet their demands, but said there would be more if conditions don't improve.
In July 2011, inmates at California's Pelican Bay State Prison went on a hunger strike to protest isolation unit conditions and methods used to determine gang status, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. The strike lasted three weeks, and inmates at three other state prisons joined in. The strike ended when prison officials said they'd immediately address some demands and seriously consider others. The inmates said they'd go back on strike if they didn't see progress soon.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
From the Nation: Obamas Drug War
Obama's Drug War
By Michelle Alexander | December 9, 2010
The Nation
Among the very few people celebrating our country's fiscal crisis are criminal justice reformers. Bill Piper, national affairs director for the Drug Policy Alliance, gushed recently, "Budgetary issues is where I'm most optimistic. Given the fiscal climate, there could be real cuts in the federal budget. Next year is probably an unprecedented opportunity to defund the federal drug war."
His enthusiasm reflects a confluence of somewhat surprising events. For the first time in decades, politicians across the political spectrum, including some who were once "get tough" true believers, are wondering aloud whether the drug war has become too expensive. The conservative Heritage Foundation issued a report on the eve of the midterm elections calling for a whopping $343 billion in federal budget cuts, including elimination of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and the Justice Assistance Grant program (formerly known as the Byrne grant program), which has long provided the financial fuel that powers regional drug task forces and the drug war machine. At the state level, where the economic crisis has been felt most acutely, at least eighteen legislatures have reduced or eliminated harsh mandatory minimum sentences, and more than two dozen have restored early-release programs and offered treatment instead of incarceration for some drug offenders.
Could this be the beginning of the end of the drug war, a war that has reportedly cost more than $1 trillion in the past few decades, with little to show for it beyond millions who have been branded criminals and felons, ushered behind bars and then released into a permanent second-class status? More than 30 million people have been arrested since 1982, when President Reagan turned Nixon's rhetorical "war against drugs" into a literal war against poor people of color. During the past few decades, African-American men, in particular, have been arrested at stunning rates, primarily for nonviolent, relatively minor drug offenses—despite data indicating that people of all races use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders admitted to prison have been African-American, and when released they find themselves ushered into a parallel universe where they are stripped of many of the rights supposedly won during the civil rights movement. People labeled felons are often denied the right to vote and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits—relegated to a second-class status for life simply because they were once caught with drugs. Could the economic crisis finally put an end to this madness? Is the drug war machinery that produced a vast new racial undercaste finally winding down?
At first blush, Piper's optimism seems well-founded. Bipartisan zeal for budget cutting has coincided with the Obama administration's expressed support for kinder, gentler drug policy. Obama's drag czar, Gil Kerlikowske, told the Wall Street Journal last year that he would no longer refer to our nation's drag policy as a "war on drags" because "we're not at war with people in this country." Drug abuse ought to be viewed as a public health problem, he says, with more resources devoted to ensuring that fewer people suffer from addiction. That's music to the ears of many criminal justice reformers, who have fought heroically for such reform in far less sympathetic political climates.
Kerlikowske insists that the shift is not purely rhetorical, and in a certain respect he's right. More money is being channeled into drug treatment. But here's the rub: as the overall drag control budget continues to grow, the ratio between treatment and prevention (36 percent) and interdiction and enforcement (64 percent) remains the same as that found in the Bush administration budget in fiscal year 2009. Expenditures for "lock 'em up" approaches continue to climb.
Many well-intentioned advocates argue that the best way to push the Obama administration to move beyond kinder, gentler rhetoric to meaningful policy reform is by presenting drug law reform as a budget issue. Given the belt-tightening mood in Congress and the reluctance of the administration to show leadership on issues of race, the thinking goes, now is not the time to link drug law reform to a broader movement for racial justice. Ending our nation's racial divisions and anxieties is pie in the sky, a Utopian dream. Better to stick with cost-benefit analyses of drug treatment versus incarceration, and show the public that it's cheaper to send a kid to college than to prison.
The problem with that strategy is that it won't work, even during a time of economic crisis. This moment of opportunity, which Piper rightly celebrates, will inevitably fail to produce large-scale change in the absence of a large-scale movement—one that seeks to dismantle not only the system of mass incarceration and the drag war apparatus but also the habits of mind that allow us to view poor people of color trapped in ghettos as "others," unworthy of our collective care and concern.
Why the pessimism? Two reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that the current economic crisis cuts both ways. The same fiscal concerns that have inspired a growing number of states to reconsider harsh and expensive mandatory minimum sentences have also inspired the Obama administration to increase funding for failed law enforcement initiatives, like the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the Byme grant program—two programs the Bush Administration had begun to phase out.
According to Slate, Vice President Joe Biden once boasted that the COPS program, which put tens of thousands of officers on the streets, was responsible for the dramatic fifteen-year drop in violent crime that began in the early 1990s. But empirical studies proved that claim false. For example, a peer-reviewed study in the journal Criminology found that the COPS program, despite the hype and the cost—more than $8 billion—"had little to or no effect on crime." The Byrne grant program, originally devised by the Reagan administration to encourage state and local law enforcement agencies to join the drug war, has poured millions of dollars into drug task forces around the country that are notorious for racial profiling, including highway drug interdiction programs and neighborhood "stop and frisk" programs. These programs have successfully ushered millions of poor folks of color into a permanent undercaste— largely for engaging in the same types of minor drag crimes that go ignored in middle-class white communities and on college campuses.
Despite the ineffectiveness of many of these federal programs, the temptation to revive them has proven irresistible. Putting more police officers on payroll and preventing layoffs seems politically savvy when unemployment figures remain high and key states are up for grabs. Indeed, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced last year that Byrne grant funds (now known as JAG funds) would be used to save jobs in Columbus, Ohio, the story made the front page of the Columbus Dispatch. As Holder explained in his press release: "In January, 25 Columbus police recruits learned that they would be let go rather than swom-in; but because of Recovery Act JAG funds these police officers will keep their jobs protecting their community." Similar considerations inspired Democrats to include $2 billion in increased funding for the Byrne grant program in the 2009 stimulus package, nearly a twelvefold increase in financing. The channeling of stimulus dollars to law enforcement may help some keep their jobs, but as New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently observed, it's a "callous political calculus.... The fact that they are mining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the communities they belong to barely seems to register."
For those who might imagine that the 2009 stimulus package was an aberration, Obama's proposed drug control budget for 2011 reveals that hard economic times are not translating into any scaling back of the drug war. John Carnevale, former director of planning and budget at the ONDCP, testified before a Congressional subcommittee charged with reviewing the 2011 drug control budget in April that "with the arrival of the Obama administration came the hope that a new budget would emerge that would redress the failures of the past"; but instead the new budget looks much like the old one. To make matters worse, Carnevale explained, the 2011 budget does not represent a comprehensive accounting of federal drug control expenditures. Many spending categories that have been counted as "prevention" or "treatment" are actually funding law enforcement or non-drug-related programs—calling into question the claim that treatment funding is on the rise. In Carnevale's words, "The last time this nation saw such a large emphasis on supply reduction was the Reagan administration."
Whether one believes, as Carnevale apparently does, that Obama's drug war is actually worse than his predecessors', one thing is clear: Obama is in no hurry to scale it back to any significant degree, much less end it. The drug war is now too deeply rooted in our nation's " political and economic structure to be cast aside. The war rhetoric may have ended and the song may have changed, but the system hums along.
This brings us to the second, and more important, reason fiscal concerns won't end mass incarceration: the race card will be played by those who seek to preserve the system. In the absence of a major social movement that proactively deals with race in a constructive way, old racial divisions will trump new concerns about cost.
If you doubt that's the case, consider what is at stake. If we were to return to the rates of incarceration our nation had in the 1970s—a time, by the way, when many civil rights advocates thought incarceration rates were egregiously high—we would need to release four out of five people currently behind bars. More than a million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Most new prison construction has occurred in predominantly white, rural communities already teetering on the edge of economic collapse. Those prisons across America would have to close. Private prison companies and all the corporate interests that profit from ' caging human beings would be forced to watch their earnings vanish.
Clearly, any attempt to downsize our nation's prisons dramatically would be met with fierce resistance by those faced with losing jobs, investments and other benefits. The emotion and high anxiety would almost certainly express itself in the form of a racially charged debate about values, morals and personal responsibility rather than a debate about the prison economy. Few people would openly — argue that we should lock up millions of poor people just so other people can have jobs or get a good return on their private investments. Instead, familiar arguments would likely resurface about the need to be "tough" on "them"—a group of people defined in the media and political discourse not so subtly as black and brown.
The public debate would inevitably turn to race, even if politicians were not explicitly talking about it. Willie Horton-type ads would likely resurface, as would media coverage of the "pathologies" of the "urban poor." As history has shown, the prevalence of powerful (unchallenged) racial stereotypes about the undeserving "others," together with widespread apprehension regarding major structural changes, would create an environment in which implicit racial appeals could be employed, yet again, with great success.
Even if significant reforms can be won in the midst of an economic crisis without addressing our nation's racial divisions and anxieties, such gains will likely prove temporary. If a new, more just and compassionate public consensus about poor people of color is not forged, we as a nation will not hesitate to sweep them up en masse for minor drug crimes as soon as we can afford once again to do so. Similarly, if and when crime rates rise, nothing will deter politicians from making black and brown criminals once again their favorite whipping boys. The criminatization and demonization of black men is one habit that America seems unlikely to break without addressing head-on the racial dynamics that have given rise to our latest caste system.
Although colorblind cost-benefit approaches often seem pragmatic in the short run, in the long run they are counterproductive. They leave intact the racial attitudes, stereotypes and anxieties that gave rise to the system in the first place. The problem lies in the nature of the system itself, not the cost. And the only way to dismantle the system is by building a broad coalition of Americans unwilling to accept it at any price.
Martin Luther King Jr. could have argued that separate water fountains were too expensive, a waste of money. He would have been right about that. But cost was beside the point. It should be beside the point today.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/156997/obamas-drag-war
This and other news about mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/
By Michelle Alexander | December 9, 2010
The Nation
Among the very few people celebrating our country's fiscal crisis are criminal justice reformers. Bill Piper, national affairs director for the Drug Policy Alliance, gushed recently, "Budgetary issues is where I'm most optimistic. Given the fiscal climate, there could be real cuts in the federal budget. Next year is probably an unprecedented opportunity to defund the federal drug war."
His enthusiasm reflects a confluence of somewhat surprising events. For the first time in decades, politicians across the political spectrum, including some who were once "get tough" true believers, are wondering aloud whether the drug war has become too expensive. The conservative Heritage Foundation issued a report on the eve of the midterm elections calling for a whopping $343 billion in federal budget cuts, including elimination of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and the Justice Assistance Grant program (formerly known as the Byrne grant program), which has long provided the financial fuel that powers regional drug task forces and the drug war machine. At the state level, where the economic crisis has been felt most acutely, at least eighteen legislatures have reduced or eliminated harsh mandatory minimum sentences, and more than two dozen have restored early-release programs and offered treatment instead of incarceration for some drug offenders.
Could this be the beginning of the end of the drug war, a war that has reportedly cost more than $1 trillion in the past few decades, with little to show for it beyond millions who have been branded criminals and felons, ushered behind bars and then released into a permanent second-class status? More than 30 million people have been arrested since 1982, when President Reagan turned Nixon's rhetorical "war against drugs" into a literal war against poor people of color. During the past few decades, African-American men, in particular, have been arrested at stunning rates, primarily for nonviolent, relatively minor drug offenses—despite data indicating that people of all races use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders admitted to prison have been African-American, and when released they find themselves ushered into a parallel universe where they are stripped of many of the rights supposedly won during the civil rights movement. People labeled felons are often denied the right to vote and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits—relegated to a second-class status for life simply because they were once caught with drugs. Could the economic crisis finally put an end to this madness? Is the drug war machinery that produced a vast new racial undercaste finally winding down?
At first blush, Piper's optimism seems well-founded. Bipartisan zeal for budget cutting has coincided with the Obama administration's expressed support for kinder, gentler drug policy. Obama's drag czar, Gil Kerlikowske, told the Wall Street Journal last year that he would no longer refer to our nation's drag policy as a "war on drags" because "we're not at war with people in this country." Drug abuse ought to be viewed as a public health problem, he says, with more resources devoted to ensuring that fewer people suffer from addiction. That's music to the ears of many criminal justice reformers, who have fought heroically for such reform in far less sympathetic political climates.
Kerlikowske insists that the shift is not purely rhetorical, and in a certain respect he's right. More money is being channeled into drug treatment. But here's the rub: as the overall drag control budget continues to grow, the ratio between treatment and prevention (36 percent) and interdiction and enforcement (64 percent) remains the same as that found in the Bush administration budget in fiscal year 2009. Expenditures for "lock 'em up" approaches continue to climb.
Many well-intentioned advocates argue that the best way to push the Obama administration to move beyond kinder, gentler rhetoric to meaningful policy reform is by presenting drug law reform as a budget issue. Given the belt-tightening mood in Congress and the reluctance of the administration to show leadership on issues of race, the thinking goes, now is not the time to link drug law reform to a broader movement for racial justice. Ending our nation's racial divisions and anxieties is pie in the sky, a Utopian dream. Better to stick with cost-benefit analyses of drug treatment versus incarceration, and show the public that it's cheaper to send a kid to college than to prison.
The problem with that strategy is that it won't work, even during a time of economic crisis. This moment of opportunity, which Piper rightly celebrates, will inevitably fail to produce large-scale change in the absence of a large-scale movement—one that seeks to dismantle not only the system of mass incarceration and the drag war apparatus but also the habits of mind that allow us to view poor people of color trapped in ghettos as "others," unworthy of our collective care and concern.
Why the pessimism? Two reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that the current economic crisis cuts both ways. The same fiscal concerns that have inspired a growing number of states to reconsider harsh and expensive mandatory minimum sentences have also inspired the Obama administration to increase funding for failed law enforcement initiatives, like the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) and the Byme grant program—two programs the Bush Administration had begun to phase out.
According to Slate, Vice President Joe Biden once boasted that the COPS program, which put tens of thousands of officers on the streets, was responsible for the dramatic fifteen-year drop in violent crime that began in the early 1990s. But empirical studies proved that claim false. For example, a peer-reviewed study in the journal Criminology found that the COPS program, despite the hype and the cost—more than $8 billion—"had little to or no effect on crime." The Byrne grant program, originally devised by the Reagan administration to encourage state and local law enforcement agencies to join the drug war, has poured millions of dollars into drug task forces around the country that are notorious for racial profiling, including highway drug interdiction programs and neighborhood "stop and frisk" programs. These programs have successfully ushered millions of poor folks of color into a permanent undercaste— largely for engaging in the same types of minor drag crimes that go ignored in middle-class white communities and on college campuses.
Despite the ineffectiveness of many of these federal programs, the temptation to revive them has proven irresistible. Putting more police officers on payroll and preventing layoffs seems politically savvy when unemployment figures remain high and key states are up for grabs. Indeed, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced last year that Byrne grant funds (now known as JAG funds) would be used to save jobs in Columbus, Ohio, the story made the front page of the Columbus Dispatch. As Holder explained in his press release: "In January, 25 Columbus police recruits learned that they would be let go rather than swom-in; but because of Recovery Act JAG funds these police officers will keep their jobs protecting their community." Similar considerations inspired Democrats to include $2 billion in increased funding for the Byrne grant program in the 2009 stimulus package, nearly a twelvefold increase in financing. The channeling of stimulus dollars to law enforcement may help some keep their jobs, but as New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently observed, it's a "callous political calculus.... The fact that they are mining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic men and, by extension, the communities they belong to barely seems to register."
For those who might imagine that the 2009 stimulus package was an aberration, Obama's proposed drug control budget for 2011 reveals that hard economic times are not translating into any scaling back of the drug war. John Carnevale, former director of planning and budget at the ONDCP, testified before a Congressional subcommittee charged with reviewing the 2011 drug control budget in April that "with the arrival of the Obama administration came the hope that a new budget would emerge that would redress the failures of the past"; but instead the new budget looks much like the old one. To make matters worse, Carnevale explained, the 2011 budget does not represent a comprehensive accounting of federal drug control expenditures. Many spending categories that have been counted as "prevention" or "treatment" are actually funding law enforcement or non-drug-related programs—calling into question the claim that treatment funding is on the rise. In Carnevale's words, "The last time this nation saw such a large emphasis on supply reduction was the Reagan administration."
Whether one believes, as Carnevale apparently does, that Obama's drug war is actually worse than his predecessors', one thing is clear: Obama is in no hurry to scale it back to any significant degree, much less end it. The drug war is now too deeply rooted in our nation's " political and economic structure to be cast aside. The war rhetoric may have ended and the song may have changed, but the system hums along.
This brings us to the second, and more important, reason fiscal concerns won't end mass incarceration: the race card will be played by those who seek to preserve the system. In the absence of a major social movement that proactively deals with race in a constructive way, old racial divisions will trump new concerns about cost.
If you doubt that's the case, consider what is at stake. If we were to return to the rates of incarceration our nation had in the 1970s—a time, by the way, when many civil rights advocates thought incarceration rates were egregiously high—we would need to release four out of five people currently behind bars. More than a million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Most new prison construction has occurred in predominantly white, rural communities already teetering on the edge of economic collapse. Those prisons across America would have to close. Private prison companies and all the corporate interests that profit from ' caging human beings would be forced to watch their earnings vanish.
Clearly, any attempt to downsize our nation's prisons dramatically would be met with fierce resistance by those faced with losing jobs, investments and other benefits. The emotion and high anxiety would almost certainly express itself in the form of a racially charged debate about values, morals and personal responsibility rather than a debate about the prison economy. Few people would openly — argue that we should lock up millions of poor people just so other people can have jobs or get a good return on their private investments. Instead, familiar arguments would likely resurface about the need to be "tough" on "them"—a group of people defined in the media and political discourse not so subtly as black and brown.
The public debate would inevitably turn to race, even if politicians were not explicitly talking about it. Willie Horton-type ads would likely resurface, as would media coverage of the "pathologies" of the "urban poor." As history has shown, the prevalence of powerful (unchallenged) racial stereotypes about the undeserving "others," together with widespread apprehension regarding major structural changes, would create an environment in which implicit racial appeals could be employed, yet again, with great success.
Even if significant reforms can be won in the midst of an economic crisis without addressing our nation's racial divisions and anxieties, such gains will likely prove temporary. If a new, more just and compassionate public consensus about poor people of color is not forged, we as a nation will not hesitate to sweep them up en masse for minor drug crimes as soon as we can afford once again to do so. Similarly, if and when crime rates rise, nothing will deter politicians from making black and brown criminals once again their favorite whipping boys. The criminatization and demonization of black men is one habit that America seems unlikely to break without addressing head-on the racial dynamics that have given rise to our latest caste system.
Although colorblind cost-benefit approaches often seem pragmatic in the short run, in the long run they are counterproductive. They leave intact the racial attitudes, stereotypes and anxieties that gave rise to the system in the first place. The problem lies in the nature of the system itself, not the cost. And the only way to dismantle the system is by building a broad coalition of Americans unwilling to accept it at any price.
Martin Luther King Jr. could have argued that separate water fountains were too expensive, a waste of money. He would have been right about that. But cost was beside the point. It should be beside the point today.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/156997/obamas-drag-war
This and other news about mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/
Monday, November 1, 2010
Matz and Schumacher Win Lawsuit
WCI suit
Monday, September 13, 2010
Court Settlement Grants Wisconsin Seg Unit Better Conditions
Over 180 inmates held in Waupun Correctional Institute's segregation unit will find themselves soon living in more favorable conditions thanks to a settlement of the lawsuit brought against the Wisconsin Department of Corrections by inmates Matthew R. Schumacher and Shaun J. Matz.
In their lawsuit, they argued that the conditions in the segregation unit, where inmates with behavior problems are housed, were so harsh and isolating that it threatened the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Schmacher and Matz, both suffering from several mental illnesses, noted that the conditions were especially harsh for the mentally ill.Each had tried to kill themselves. A state audit performed last year revealed that 46% of segregation unit inmates suffer from mental illness, higher compared to the 33% of general population. The state audit also revealed that Waupun Correction Institute had the highest suicide rate among all Wisconsin prisons.
Complaints brought by Schmacher and Matz included:
• Not being able to receive mail, magazines or photographs
• Unable to purchase items from canteen
• Unable to speak with other inmates
• Harsh light 24-hours a day
• Four hours of rec time outdoors in a cage without any equipment
• Forced outside in the winter without jackets during wreck time
• Insignificant sunlight causing sensory deprivation
As apart of the settlement, the WI-DOC will:
• Replace frosted windows with traditional windows
• Provide winter coats, socks, hats and gloves for inmates during rec time in the winter months
• Equip cages with exercise equipment, basketballs and hacky sacks
• Speak with other inmates through video hook up
• Permitted to receive magazines and letters
• Permitted to have photographs
• Permitted to order from the canteen
The WI-DOC also agreed to pay legal fees for Schumacher and Matz, forgive a $17,000 debt to the prison held by Matz and each inmate will receive a judgement of $33,000.
The improvements to the segregation unit will cost the WI DOC $60,000 - $70,000, with the most expensive cost being replacement of the frosted glass windows.
Some changes have already taken place.
Corrections spokeswoman Linda Eggert said the “reasonable, relatively low-cost changes” will allow the department to avoid further litigation while maintaining a prison that is safe for workers and inmates. She said the changes will also help “address the sensory and psychological needs” of inmates who have significant mental health problems.
Posted by A. Kellan Mueller at 4:38 PM 0 comments
Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz
Labels: legal, mental illness, prison conditions, prisoner rights, segregation, WI
Crime & Courts
CRIME & COURTS
APNewsBreak: Softer lights, more toiletries: Wisconsin to make improvements for worst inmates
Published September 02, 2010
| Associated Press
• Share
• Comments (0)
•
• Text Size
MADISON, WIS. – Life is getting better for some of Wisconsin's most dangerous and worst-behaving prisoners.
To settle lawsuits filed by inmates, state officials have agreed to make wide-ranging changes to the segregation unit at the maximum-security Waupun Correctional Institution to make it easier for them to sleep, exercise and communicate.
The 180 inmates who are housed there because they violated prison rules or were deemed a security risk to the general population will be getting new windows, magazines and even Hacky Sacks, according to settlements signed last month and obtained by The Associated Press.
The Department of Corrections said Thursday the changes will cost more than $60,000, and the settlements award the inmates and their attorneys an additional $113,000 in fees and damages.
Inmates Matthew R. Schumacher and Shaun J. Matz had sued, arguing that the conditions in the cells were so isolating and harsh they violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment and worsened their mental illnesses. Each had tried to kill himself at Waupun, which a state audit released last year found had the highest suicide rate of all state prisons.
YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN
Co-worker: Girlfriend found dead in Calif. murder suspect's car was alive during cop chase
Father expects Calif. to reject claim over slaying of teen daughter by paroled sex offender
Animal rights activists claim release of 50,000 minks in northern Greece
Gordon Ramsay 'Kitchen Nightmares' Chef Commits Suicide
N.J. Student Secretly Taped Having Sex in Dorm Kills Himself
Both had complained that fluorescent night lights that are constantly on for security purposes made it hard for them to sleep, and they were not allowed to cover their eyes without facing discipline. They said the frosted glass windows in their cells didn't allow them to see outside or even discern what time of day it was.
The two also said their four hours of "recreation" per week consisted of going to small cages where there was no exercise equipment and that were freezing cold in the winter. (Their prison-issued coats were also stored in the cold cages). They said they couldn't have photographs of loved ones, couldn't read magazines, couldn't communicate with other inmates or buy basic supplies from the canteen.
All that will change under the settlement, which avoids an expensive class-action lawsuit like ones that have been filed against other state prisons in recent years over harsh conditions.
"These are significant changes that will improve the conditions of confinement for all prisoners in the segregation unit at Waupun," said Gregory Everts of Quarles & Brady law firm, one of the attorneys who represented the inmates. "Our goal was to improve the conditions for prisoners who suffer from serious mental illness. We credit the state for making these changes, but I think there's still more work to be done."
Under the settlement, the night lights will be dimmed to 5 watts instead of 9 and inmates will be allowed to cover their eyes with wash cloths to sleep. A prison committee will study whether to allow sleep masks.
The prison will replace the frosted glass in the cells with clear glass to allow inmates to see outside. Hacky Sacks, basketballs and pull-up bars will be available in the cages. The prison will store inmates' winter coats in warmer spots and provide them with gloves and socks to use during winter.
Prisoners will be allowed to buy additional items from the canteen such as candy bars, deodorant and shaving supplies. They'll be allowed to read magazines and get opportunities to communicate with other inmates through video hookups. The prison has already changed its policy to allow photos of friends and family members.
Corrections spokeswoman Linda Eggert said the "reasonable, relatively low-cost changes" will allow the department to avoid further litigation while maintaining a prison that is safe for workers and inmates. She said the changes will also help "address the sensory and psychological needs" of inmates who have significant mental health problems.
The new windows will be the most expensive part, with an estimated cost between $57,000 and $68,000. Basketballs and Hacky Sacks? They only cost $387.
Schumacher and Matz will each receive $30,000. Matz will also have a $17,000 debt on his prison account erased. Quarles & Brady, which was appointed to take the case pro bono, will receive $36,600 to cover its expenses.
Matz, 30, is serving a 35-year term for first-degree reckless homicide and armed robbery. He was charged in a pair of fatal shootings in Milwaukee in 2003. Schumacher, 28, is serving a life sentence in the beating and stabbing death of a restaurant owner in 1999. Both suffer from multiple mental illnesses.
According to last year's audit, 46 percent of the inmates in segregation have mental health issues, compared to 33 percent in the general population. Eggert said the number of mentally ill inmates has been rising, and the state is addressing their needs "within the budget restraints of the state's fiscal climate."
Sunday, October 31, 2010
treatment units on hold
Treatment units for mentally ill inmates on hold
State cites budget crunch as talks to end suit fail
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | November 10, 2009
The Patrick administration has shelved plans to build special treatment units for hundreds of seriously mentally ill inmates, two years after advocates for prisoners alleged in a federal lawsuit that the state’s practice of keeping such inmates in solitary confinement 23 hours a day was inhumane and causing suicides.
Citing the state budget crisis, lawyers for top state prison officials said negotiations to settle the civil rights suit by the Disability Law Center against the Department of Correction out of court have ended. The center has asked a federal judge in Boston to schedule a trial for January 2011, while the state wants it to start a year later.
The collapse of negotiations, made public in court filings Friday, marks a startling reversal from where things stood a year ago. Last November, Harold W. Clarke, the correction commissioner appointed by Governor Deval Patrick, and Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, said they expected the suit would be resolved shortly with the announcement of plans to build maximum-security residential treatment units.
Inmates would be exposed to more types of therapy in such units, and advocates want the prisoners to have more time out of their cells.
“We’re hoping to be able to say, ‘We don’t have to go to court, we can avoid litigation,’ which I’m certain will serve all parties best,’’ Clarke said in a Globe report Nov. 16.
On Friday, however, lawyers for the prison system filed a document in US District Court that said, “Due to the fiscal crisis, the parties have discontinued formal settlement negotiations.’’ The state’s lawyers did not elaborate on the financial constraints.
The nonprofit Disability Law Center sued the state in March 2007, alleging that hundreds of mentally ill prisoners were kept in closet-size solitary confinement cells in response to unruly behavior. The conditions had led to self-mutilation, the swallowing of razor blades, and numerous suicides, said the center.
The suit, which resembled legal challenges that led to changes in other states, said Massachusetts ignored repeated calls from its mental health providers and consultants to provide high-security treatment units for violent, mentally disturbed inmates.
A Globe Spotlight Team series in December 2007 reported 15 suicides in the prisons from 2005 through 2007, most by those in solitary confinement with histories of mental illness or drug addiction. There had also been more than 3,200 suicide attempts and self-inflicted injuries in the prior decade, the Globe found.
Walker, of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, which helps represent the Disability Law Center in the suit, said yesterday that she was “deeply disappointed that we’re not going to be able to resolve this case short of trial.’’ She said she could not comment further because settlement talks were confidential.
In a brief statement, Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the prison system, said correction officials plan to “continue providing appropriate levels of service to segregation inmates with serious mental illness.’’ She declined to elaborate, citing the litigation.
There is nothing appropriate about the segregation of inmates with mental illness, according to Laurie Martinelli, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Massachusetts, an advocacy group that supports the lawsuit.
She said keeping such prisoners in their cells 23 hours a day violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and that the state’s fiscal crisis was irrelevant.
“You can’t get around a constitutional violation by saying, ‘We don’t have money,’ ’’ she said.
Fred Cohen, a retired criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Albany and an expert on the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, agreed, saying no federal court has ruled that finances trump an inmate’s constitutional rights. If the case goes to trial, however, plaintiffs would have to prove that the isolation of inmates violates their civil rights. In some states, Cohen said, politicians were glad for judges to order them to improve conditions for inmates; that way, judges, rather than the politicians, had to take the heat from the public for spending scarce tax dollars on convicted criminals.
“It’s not unheard of, and it’s especially popular during times of economic duress,’’ he said.
Several states, including Connecticut, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin have faced lawsuits in recent years that have been resolved by settlements or court orders requiring improvements in the treatment of mentally ill prisoners.
Kevin M. Burke, Patrick’s public safety secretary, was quoted as saying in 2007 that it would cost “several million’’ dollars to fully fund high-security treatment units. A spokesman for Burke, whose office oversees the prison system, said yesterday that the secretary would not comment on the litigation. Patrick also declined to comment through a spokeswoman.
Prisoner rights groups as well as specialists on the treatment of inmates have repeatedly criticized the Massachusetts prison system for failing to address the needs of inmates with mental illnesses.
An independent study of the state prison system released in February 2007 found that the number of mentally ill inmates increased by nearly 1,000 between 2000 and 2005 but that the state was not responding adequately to the challenges they presented. There are about 11,000 inmates in the state system.
Lindsay M. Hayes, a national specialist in prison suicide prevention who wrote the report, said suicidal inmates were being punished instead of being helped. The study, commissioned by the department after an increase in prisoner suicides in 2005 and 2006 left the state’s rate nearly double the national rate over the prior decade, made 29 recommendations. They ranged from improving the suicide-prevention training of correction officers to increasing the frequency of observation of at-risk inmates.
Although prison officials immediately said they embraced all of the recommendations, the department never endorsed a blanket ban on the segregation of mentally ill inmates. Inmates in segregation are typically allowed out of their cells for an hour only to shower or to get exercise in a small caged space.
In April 2008, the state prison system took a modest step to improve treatment of mentally ill inmates when it opened a unit for such prisoners at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in Shirley. The unit is called the Secure Treatment Program and it houses 14 prisoners, Wiffin said.
State cites budget crunch as talks to end suit fail
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | November 10, 2009
The Patrick administration has shelved plans to build special treatment units for hundreds of seriously mentally ill inmates, two years after advocates for prisoners alleged in a federal lawsuit that the state’s practice of keeping such inmates in solitary confinement 23 hours a day was inhumane and causing suicides.
Citing the state budget crisis, lawyers for top state prison officials said negotiations to settle the civil rights suit by the Disability Law Center against the Department of Correction out of court have ended. The center has asked a federal judge in Boston to schedule a trial for January 2011, while the state wants it to start a year later.
The collapse of negotiations, made public in court filings Friday, marks a startling reversal from where things stood a year ago. Last November, Harold W. Clarke, the correction commissioner appointed by Governor Deval Patrick, and Leslie Walker, executive director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, said they expected the suit would be resolved shortly with the announcement of plans to build maximum-security residential treatment units.
Inmates would be exposed to more types of therapy in such units, and advocates want the prisoners to have more time out of their cells.
“We’re hoping to be able to say, ‘We don’t have to go to court, we can avoid litigation,’ which I’m certain will serve all parties best,’’ Clarke said in a Globe report Nov. 16.
On Friday, however, lawyers for the prison system filed a document in US District Court that said, “Due to the fiscal crisis, the parties have discontinued formal settlement negotiations.’’ The state’s lawyers did not elaborate on the financial constraints.
The nonprofit Disability Law Center sued the state in March 2007, alleging that hundreds of mentally ill prisoners were kept in closet-size solitary confinement cells in response to unruly behavior. The conditions had led to self-mutilation, the swallowing of razor blades, and numerous suicides, said the center.
The suit, which resembled legal challenges that led to changes in other states, said Massachusetts ignored repeated calls from its mental health providers and consultants to provide high-security treatment units for violent, mentally disturbed inmates.
A Globe Spotlight Team series in December 2007 reported 15 suicides in the prisons from 2005 through 2007, most by those in solitary confinement with histories of mental illness or drug addiction. There had also been more than 3,200 suicide attempts and self-inflicted injuries in the prior decade, the Globe found.
Walker, of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, which helps represent the Disability Law Center in the suit, said yesterday that she was “deeply disappointed that we’re not going to be able to resolve this case short of trial.’’ She said she could not comment further because settlement talks were confidential.
In a brief statement, Diane Wiffin, a spokeswoman for the prison system, said correction officials plan to “continue providing appropriate levels of service to segregation inmates with serious mental illness.’’ She declined to elaborate, citing the litigation.
There is nothing appropriate about the segregation of inmates with mental illness, according to Laurie Martinelli, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Massachusetts, an advocacy group that supports the lawsuit.
She said keeping such prisoners in their cells 23 hours a day violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and that the state’s fiscal crisis was irrelevant.
“You can’t get around a constitutional violation by saying, ‘We don’t have money,’ ’’ she said.
Fred Cohen, a retired criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Albany and an expert on the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, agreed, saying no federal court has ruled that finances trump an inmate’s constitutional rights. If the case goes to trial, however, plaintiffs would have to prove that the isolation of inmates violates their civil rights. In some states, Cohen said, politicians were glad for judges to order them to improve conditions for inmates; that way, judges, rather than the politicians, had to take the heat from the public for spending scarce tax dollars on convicted criminals.
“It’s not unheard of, and it’s especially popular during times of economic duress,’’ he said.
Several states, including Connecticut, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin have faced lawsuits in recent years that have been resolved by settlements or court orders requiring improvements in the treatment of mentally ill prisoners.
Kevin M. Burke, Patrick’s public safety secretary, was quoted as saying in 2007 that it would cost “several million’’ dollars to fully fund high-security treatment units. A spokesman for Burke, whose office oversees the prison system, said yesterday that the secretary would not comment on the litigation. Patrick also declined to comment through a spokeswoman.
Prisoner rights groups as well as specialists on the treatment of inmates have repeatedly criticized the Massachusetts prison system for failing to address the needs of inmates with mental illnesses.
An independent study of the state prison system released in February 2007 found that the number of mentally ill inmates increased by nearly 1,000 between 2000 and 2005 but that the state was not responding adequately to the challenges they presented. There are about 11,000 inmates in the state system.
Lindsay M. Hayes, a national specialist in prison suicide prevention who wrote the report, said suicidal inmates were being punished instead of being helped. The study, commissioned by the department after an increase in prisoner suicides in 2005 and 2006 left the state’s rate nearly double the national rate over the prior decade, made 29 recommendations. They ranged from improving the suicide-prevention training of correction officers to increasing the frequency of observation of at-risk inmates.
Although prison officials immediately said they embraced all of the recommendations, the department never endorsed a blanket ban on the segregation of mentally ill inmates. Inmates in segregation are typically allowed out of their cells for an hour only to shower or to get exercise in a small caged space.
In April 2008, the state prison system took a modest step to improve treatment of mentally ill inmates when it opened a unit for such prisoners at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in Shirley. The unit is called the Secure Treatment Program and it houses 14 prisoners, Wiffin said.
suit urges prison overhaul
Suit urges state to overhaul prisons
Group says mentally ill held in poor conditions
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | March 9, 2007
Hundreds of seriously mentally ill prisoners are held in cells 23 hours a day in inhumane conditions that have led to self-mutilation, the swallowing of razor blades, and at least seven suicides since November 2004, an advocacy group alleged yesterday in a federal lawsuit demanding that the inmates be housed in special treatment units.
The Disability Law Center, a nonprofit organization that provides legal help for the disabled, sued the state Department of Correction in US District Court in Boston after a yearlong investigation during which the advocates questioned more than 220 inmates in segregation units at two maximum-security prisons, Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center and MCI-Cedar Junction.
In in-depth follow-up interviews, the advocacy group found that at least two dozen of the 220 segregated inmates displayed signs of mental illness. Extrapolating those numbers, the advocates estimated that hundreds of prisoners in the state with mental health issues are confined in such units, the group said, which is demoralizing for any inmate but exceeds "the limit of human endurance" for those with psychological problems.
The suit, similar to legal challenges that have led to changes in other states, says Massachusetts has ignored repeated calls from its mental health providers and consultants to stop segregating mentally ill prisoners. The suit demands that the state build maximum-security residential treatment units.
"The system is broken," Stanley J. Eichner , executive director of the Disability Law Center, said at a press conference where he and advocates for prisoners displayed graphic photographs of a mentally ill inmate at Cedar Junction who had repeatedly slashed his neck, torso, and arms while in segregation.
"We are not saying these prisoners are folks without [criminal] records," said Eichner, who interviewed the inmates, some of whom were violent felons, over three days in November. "What we are saying is that prisoners should not be driven to the point of mutilation and self-destruction."
Putting such prisoners in segregation units, the advocates say, violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and should be banned. The Disability Law Center also said the segregation of mentally ill inmates violates federal statutes, including the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The Department of Correction said in a statement that it does not comment on pending litigation. However, the department said it was "well aware of the national trend of the increasing number of prisoners with mental illness" and that it had begun taking steps to reduce the risk of suicide for the state's nearly 11,000 inmates.
On Feb. 22, an independent study of Massachusetts prisons, requested by the Correction Department after a sharp increase in suicides in 2005 and 2006, concluded that prison policies and practices had contributed to the problem.
In addition to criticizing the condition of segregation, the report found that staff lacked adequate suicide-prevention training, did not check frequently enough on inmates at risk of suicide, and isolated inmates on suicide watches by denying visits, showers, phone calls, and time outside cells.
The study done for the state by Lindsay M. Hayes, a national specialist in prison suicide prevention, had 29 recommendations, including increasing monitoring of suicidal inmates, adding training for staff, and improving mental health treatment. The Department of Correction immediately said it would comply with the recommendations and was seeking bids for a private contractor to improve mental health treatment. But the department gave no indication it intended to stop segregating the mentally ill.
"It's a response, but we feel that it's an inadequate response," Leslie Walker, director of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, said yesterday at the news conference at the law firm of Bingham McCutchen , which is representing the advocates pro bono. Several of the advocates said they believe the state commissioned the study because it knew the Disability Law Center was gearing up for a suit.
The suit describes 18 mentally ill prisoners, identified only by letters, who engaged in self-destructive behavior while in segregation units. Nine medium- and maximum-security prisons in Massachusetts have such units. About 500 prisoners are held in such cells across the state, the suit said.
In Massachusetts, the suit says, cells in segregation units often have minimal furnishings, little if any natural light, and solid doors with a narrow slot used to deliver food. Inmates are allowed out only an hour a day to exercise, and some are so depressed that they decline to do so, the suit said. The units hold prisoners who have committed serious disciplinary infractions, threaten security, or are in protective custody. Lengths of stay vary from days to years.
The only inmate whose name was released yesterday was Andrew Armstrong , 22, an inmate at Souza-Baranowski in Shirley who hanged himself in October 2005 from the bars of his cell window. On a desk in his cell, he had written in soap, "Dust in the wind."
Armstrong had a history of bipolar disorder and had been placed in segregation because of a fight with another prisoner while in a paranoid state, the suit said. He complained about cameras and listening devices in his cell. As with other mentally ill inmates, his erratic behavior and agitation had prompted prison officials to shuttle him multiple times between the prison and Bridgewater State Hospital.
"Did no one realize what was going on?" his aunt, Frances Armstrong of Cheslea, wrote in a letter that Walker read aloud. "Did they not understand this 22-year-old was on a fast-moving ride to the depths of hell?"
The suit described other inmates who injured themselves swallowing razor blades, batteries, and parts of eyeglasses. Another bruised his head by banging it against the wall, and another smeared feces over his body. Several had a history of hallucinations, including one who complained of seeing demons.
The advocates said in the suit that they want the state to build residential treatment units for inmates with mental disorders and provide at least 15 hours a week of therapy out of their cells as well as 10 hours a week for recreation and showers. The advocates had no estimate for the cost of building such units. They also want independent mental health professionals to screen inmates to ensure that mentally ill prisoners are not placed in segregated units and to operate treatment units.
Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Newton psychiatrist who has studied the effect of solitary confinement on inmates for more than 25 years, said the US Supreme Court noted in an 1890 decision that even healthy prisoners often become confused, hallucinatory, psychotic, and agitated in such conditions.
"Now if you take someone who is already mentally ill and put them in an environment that is supposed to be painful psychologically, what do you expect?" he said.
Since 1995, federal courts have ruled in at least six states -- California, Connecticut, Indiana, Ohio, New Mexico, and Wisconsin -- that seriously mentally ill prisoners must be removed from segregation units, said David Fathi of the ACLU National Prison Project in Washington.
"So, this Massachusetts case is really building on a body of unanimous case law that says you simply cannot house mentally ill prisoners in conditions of extreme isolation," he said.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)