"That Ship Has Sailed"

A fitting coda for career crook Kwame Kilpatrick:

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was fired from his job [at Compuware] today after being sentenced to prison for probation violation....

Earlier today, a frustrated Detroit judge ordered Kilpatrick to serve 18 months to five years in prison, declaring that Kilpatrick had lied while on probation and maliciously hid money that was supposed to go toward repaying the City of Detroit $1 million in restitution....

The judge appeared to give no weight to Kilpatrick’s lengthy and emotional court oration, in which he apologized for his lies in the text-message scandal, but said he is a different and better person today.

As Kilpatrick spoke, the judge mostly looked at papers on his desk.

"Probation is no longer an option," Groner said when Kilpatrick had finished. "That ship has sailed."....

P.S. I forgot to mention that I find this an immensely satisfying turn of events. I do not believe Kwame Kilpatrick has ever uttered a truthful word in his life. He is as slimy as they come (in Blago territory, if you ask me), so I'm pleased as punch that he's headed to the clink.

Gitmo "Suicides"

Late in the evening on June 9 [2006], three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

Earlier this week, Harper's published an article by lawyer-turned-journalist Scott Horton that casts serious doubt on the government's assertion that the three Guantánamo detainees who died simultaneously in the summer of 2006 committed suicide. The evidence Horton presents points to a chilling conclusion: the U.S. tortured these three men to death, then staged the suicides in an effort to cover up their murder.

Horton's narrative is based on several sources of information.

First is a report from the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy Research that uncovers glaring gaps and inconsistencies in the government's official account of the deaths. According to the Seton Hall School of Law, whose researchers prepared the report, Death in Camp Delta "found dramatic flaws in the government’s investigation of the deaths and questioned its characterization of the deaths as suicides."

Of this report Horton writes:

The NCIS report [of the deaths] was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

All of this activity occurred undetected by a single prison guard:

The fact that at least two of the prisoners also had cloth masks affixed to their faces, presumably to prevent the expulsion of the rags from their mouths, went unremarked by the NCIS, as did the fact that standard operating procedure at Camp Delta required the Navy guards on duty after midnight to “conduct a visual search” of each cell and detainee every ten minutes. The report claimed that the prisoners had hung sheets or blankets to hide their activities and shaped more sheets and pillows to look like bodies sleeping in their beds, but it did not explain where they were able to acquire so much fabric beyond their tightly controlled allotment, or why the Navy guards would allow such an obvious and immediately observable deviation from permitted behavior. Nor did the report explain how the dead men managed to hang undetected for more than two hours or why the Navy guards on duty, having for whatever reason so grievously failed in their duties, were never disciplined.

Another particularly gruesome example of irregularities in the official account of the deaths involves the autopsies of the men's bodies:

Military pathologists connected with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology arranged immediate autopsies of the three dead prisoners, without securing the permission of the men’s families. The identities and findings of the pathologists remain shrouded in extraordinary secrecy, but the timing of the autopsies suggests that medical personnel stationed at Guantánamo may have undertaken the procedure without waiting for the arrival of an experienced medical examiner from the United States. Each of the heavily redacted autopsy reports states unequivocally that “the manner of death is suicide” and, more specifically, that the prisoner died of “hanging.” Each of the reports describes ligatures that were found wrapped around the prisoner’s neck, as well as circumferential dried abrasion furrows imprinted with the very fine weave pattern of the ligature fabric and forming an inverted “V” on the back of the head. This condition, the anonymous pathologists state, is consistent with that of a hanging victim.

The pathologists place the time of death “at least a couple of hours” before the bodies were discovered, which would be sometime before 10:30 p.m. on June 9. Additionally, the autopsy of Al-Salami states that his hyoid bone was broken, a phenomenon usually associated with manual strangulation, not hanging.

The report asserts that the hyoid was broken “during the removal of the neck organs.” An odd admission, given that these are the very body parts—the larynx, the hyoid bone, and the thyroid cartilage—that would have been essential to determining whether death occurred from hanging, from strangulation, or from choking. These parts remained missing when the men’s families finally received their bodies.

Second is eye-witness accounts from four Guantánamo prison guards -- including Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman, the guard on duty the night of the deaths -- that corroborate the findings of the Seton Hall report:

[That the detainees committed suicide] is the official story, adopted by NCIS and Guantánamo command and reiterated by the Justice Department in formal pleadings, by the Defense Department in briefings and press releases, and by the State Department. Now four members of the Military Intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, including a decorated non-commissioned Army officer who was on duty as sergeant of the guard the night of June 9, have furnished an account dramatically at odds with the NCIS report—a report for which they were neither interviewed nor approached.

All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths. Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision have disclosed evidence in interviews with Harper’s Magazine that strongly suggests the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths. The guards’ accounts also reveal the existence of a previously unreported black site at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred....

Hickman had seen a 2006 report from Seton Hall University Law School dealing with the deaths of the three prisoners, and he followed their subsequent work. After Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, he called Mark Denbeaux, the professor who had led the Seton Hall team. “I learned something from your report,” he said, “but I know some things you don’t.”

Third is the unofficial, though perhaps still instructive, analysis of Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani's father, a Saudi police official:

When Al-Zahrani viewed his son’s corpse, he saw evidence of a homicide. “There was a major blow to the head on the right side,” he said. “There was evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm.” None of these details are noted in the U.S. autopsy report. “I am a law enforcement professional,” Al-Zahrani said. “I know what to look for when examining a body.”

This information has been met with, for the most part, deafening silence by the U.S. news media (and, for that matter, the Obama administration). Aside from attention by the blogosphere and the foreign press, and by a stray U.S. newspaper or two (like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch), there has been next-to-no reaction to this story. Let me repeat that:

The presentation of evidence that strongly suggests the United States tortured to death three Guantánamo detainees who had been charged with no crime, then covered up the homicides by staging their deaths as suicides, is being largely ignored by the U.S. news media.

On this blog we enjoy engaging in political debates, but from where I sit this story transcends political and/or party affiliation. We're talking about potential war crimes here. Violations of domestic and international laws, treaties, and protocol that -- despite its blustery denials -- the Bush administration appears to have committed.

I say "appears" because, of course, there are multiple sides to every story -- particularly where monumentally complex issues like homeland security and the War on Terror are concerned. Perhaps there is classified or unreleased information that, if made public, would dissipate the cloud of suspicion that hangs over the deaths of June 9, 2006. Perhaps there is a perfectly logical, legal explanation for the incredible circumstances under which these men died; for why their throats were removed before their bodies were returned to their loved ones; for why a fourth detainee described suffering extreme physical abuse on the very night the other men died, including, among other things, having his airway "cut off" and a mask placed over his face. Perhaps. But so long as this story is ignored and marginalized by the news media, silence will mean assent -- theirs and ours.

I remain ever hopeful that torture is something to which Americans, irrespective of their political identity, will refuse their assent. We'll see.

Proposed CA amendment

From yesterday's Chronicle, an article on the Governator's State of the State address, in particular a proposed amendment to the CA constitution that would impose a floor for higher ed spending and a ceiling for prison spending in the state.

Currently CA spends about 11% of its budget on prisons and 7.5% on the state college/university system. The proposal would require no less than 10% of the budget be allocated to colleges/universities and no more than 7% on prisons.

Recognizing the current distribution is troubling (quoting the article..."What does it say about a state that focuses more on prison uniforms than caps and gowns?" Mr. Schwarzenegger said in his final State of the State address. "It simply is not healthy."), am I alone in thinking the proposed amendment is equally fraught with potential problems?

Assuming relatively static budgets, you're talking about cutting prisons by almost 1/3. What are the secondary and tertiary implications of that cut? What happens if the state is successfully sued for its new conditions of confinement, but is limited in what it can do to remedy that problem? What happens when the next bubble bursts and you have a ceiling on expenditures (for ANY industry/element of the state budget)?

Conversely, I'm not sure I'm a fan of saying you HAVE to spend a certain amount on any aspect of the budget. When the economy rebounds, can you spend 10% on higher education without wasting money to satisfy the mandate? Certainly we can assume the higher ed system could use some additional investment (my own school is somewhere around 1/4-1/3 of a billion dollars in the hole on capital improvements), once you catch up are you being wasteful in flush times?

Perhaps the Governor is simply trying to float the idea and realizes the starting point here is also not healthy. Perhaps the goal is something more moderate, like a requirement that the spending levels at least be on-par with each other (which at first though, I could probably back).

I will now pause so Dr. HnK can tell me the error of my thinking...

WWI Veterans at Eastern State

At ASC, I took a tour of the Eastern State Correctional Facility. I have been there before, but a plaque caught my eye in the main rotunda.

The plaque includes the prison numbers of 121 individuals and the inscription reads,

"To the everlasting honor of those inmates of the Eastern State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania who served in the army and navy during the world war."

I found a brief discussion of the plaque and the role of parolees in WWI here. It appears that as the war waned on, some parolees were allowed to volunteer for service. The Warden of the prison at the time, Bob McKenty, went out of his way to facilitate enlistment for some of his parolees.

A few more pictures for fun.

The prison facade reminiscent of England and the monarchy:


A hallway of the radial style prison:


As originally designed, Eastern State was a great model of Bentham's Panopticon.

Spirituality & Criminal Justice Reform

Recently I came across some fascinating information that I think is worth sharing.

The other day I was prepping a lecture about the criminal justice response to women drug offenders using chapters from Gendered (In)Justice, a feminist criminology reader edited by Barb Koons-Witt and Pam Schram (fellow Spartans -- holla!). Reprinted in that book is a 1998 Women & Therapy article about treatment programs for incarcerated women, in which the author discusses seven steps for fixing the criminal justice system as outlined by Bo Lozoff, founder of the Human Kindness Foundation and the Prison-Ashram Project:

The primary purpose of the Prison-Ashram Project is to inspire and encourage prisoners and prison staff to recognize their depth as human beings, and to behave accordingly...

In 1973, Bo Lozoff and Ram Dass came up with the idea to help prisoners to use their prisons as ashrams if they were tired enough of seeing themselves as convicts just biding their time until they were released.

Ashram is a Sanskrit word meaning "House of God." In the East, an ashram is a place where people live for some period of time in order to strengthen their spiritual practice and self-discipline. Many ashrams are very strict. Residents, or ashramites, abide by an exhaustive schedule and live very simply, without many comforts or luxuries.

Lozoff also has authored a book, We're All Doing Time, which apparently is hugely popular with inmates both inside and outside the U.S.:

[N]ow in its 17th printing, [We're All Doing Time] is available in several languages. It was hailed by the Village Voice as "one of the ten books everyone in the world should read," and has been lauded by prison staff and prisoners alike as one of the most helpful books ever written for true self-improvement and rehabilitation...

Is anyone familiar with Lozoff's book, or the Prison-Ashram Project? They both take such a different, innovative approach to incarceration that I find really fascinating.

Anyway, back to Lozoff's seven steps for fixing the criminal justice system. They are:

1. Learn to recognize the influence of socially-sanctioned hatred:
   

   "We human beings seem to have a built-in temptation to objectify other groups of people in order to feel superior to them or to find a scapegoat for all our problems...People who break the law are not all alike. They are an enormously diverse group of human beings.

2. Make drugs a public health problem instead of a criminal justice problem.
3. Separate violent and non-violent offenders right from the start.
4. Regain compassion and respect for those who wrong us.
5. Allow for transformation, not merely rehabilitation.
6. Join and support the restorative justice movement.
7. Take the issue of crime and punishment personally:
   

   Just as with civil rights, and women's rights, we have to recognize that the national shame over our prison system is affecting us all, and it's getting worse every day. This doesn't mean that we all have to become crusaders for prison reform, but we do have to be more mindful of what we say and who and what we vote for.

Interesting, no? I am intrigued by the mix of spiritual, political, personal, and social solutions to the crime problem Lozoff suggests. What do others think?

Image Source

Prison Riot

Is anyone following the story of the California prison riot that happened Saturday? Velma?

More than 250 inmates were injured in a riot that erupted overnight at the California Institution for Men in Chino, a spokesman said Sunday.

Fifty-five inmates were taken to area hospitals with serious injuries, said Lt. Mark Hargrove, prison spokesman.

None of the facility's employees was hurt in the melee, which broke out at about 8:20 p.m. Saturday at the Reception Center West facility, Hargrove said. Guards used pepper spray, "less lethal force, and lethal force options" to regain control by 7 a.m. Sunday, he said....

The inmates' injuries ranged from stab wounds and slashes to head trauma, Hargrove said. Some were considered life-threatening.

Hargrove said inmates used "weapons of opportunity," such as broken glass during the riot.

When is the last time a prison riot of this size occurred? I'm surprised this story hasn't received more media attention.

A Politician Who Just Might "Get It"

I know little about Senator Jim Webb (D, Virginia), but I know this: His criticisms of U.S. sentencing and incarceration policies are right on target.

Senator Webb is concerned that our prisons are filled with mentally ill prisoners, and that large number of non-violent offenders are incarcerated for long periods--longer, perhaps, than their offense warranted.

To address these concerns, Webb has recommended the creation of the National Criminal Justice Commission, a group charged with reviewing all aspects of the criminal justice system. This is quite a task, and I wonder who will make up this Commission. Some of the statistics mentioned in the bill:

• 2.38 million people are in prison in the United States (ed. note: the United States is the world leader in incarceration, locking up 738 people for every 100,000 in the population. The next highest country? Rwanda: 691. Russia is a close third at 611. Wondering about Iran? 214. China, with 1.3 billion people? 118. India, with 1.1 billion? 30)
• About 32% of all black males in the U.S. will serve prison time in their lives, compared to 17% of Hispanic males and 6% of white males.
• There are 7.3 million people under the control of the criminal justice system (including jail, prison, parole, and probation).
• Time in prison does not help offenders return to society. Current national recidivism rates are around 66%.
• We continue to spend more money on corrections than on education.
• The massive incarceration of drug offenders has not curtailed drug use.

There's more--I would encourage you to read the bill for more details.

Unfortunately, our policies on crime and punishment in the U.S. tend not to be developed from research and observation, but from political motives and public opinion. The "get tough on crime" period was purely political, with little empirical support that it would work to reduce crime. This sentiment is echoed in the Virginian-Pilot article, linked above:

But (George Mason Political Science Professor Mark) Rozell added that "being hard on crime is the politically safe place to be.... There's just not a lot of public sentiment out there to do something about incarceration time.

"Whether he's doing the right thing or not, politically it's risky."

But why is this a political issue at all? Don't we all want to reduce crime? Haven't we seen enough evidence that mass incarceration isn't working? Why isn't our solution simpler--find out what works, and use it--political parties be damned?

I suppose Americans need to make a choice--we could certainly continue with our policy of mass incarceration, which only serves to weaken communities, increase poverty, and generates many thousands of ex-prisoners each year who are unprepared to return to "normal" life; or, we can shift from being "tough on crime" to being smart about crime.

Perhaps the public will accept that being smart is not the same as being weak.

One in 31

The Pew Center has produced a fantastic report on the growth of community corrections in the United States. This is a perfect companion to their report on correctional control produced last year. The graphs are perfect for class, and they have hand outs for each state on their website. Community corrections are often ignored in light of institutional forms of control. However, community corrections have grown at a larger rate than institutional corrections. Overall, prisons account for 32% of the growth in corrections, yet account for 88% of the cost.

There is a special highlight on corrections in Michigan. As noted, 1 in 25 adults in Detroit is under correctional supervision. There are a series of great maps (down to the block group) that accompany the statistics. The geographic analyses do a great job in displaying the clustering of individuals in certain areas of the city. For example, Detroit is home to 44% of the adults living in Wayne County and Detroit accounts for over 75% of the correctional population.

Just in case you are interested, I will also be showing this vignette tomorrow about the costs of building prisons. The discussion of eminent domain and prison growth is always lively.

Following Up on Some High-Profile Cases

Over the last few months we've discussed several high-profile cases, including the extraordinary, fascinating fall of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and the similarly spectacular case of captured fugitive Susan LeFevre. Today we have some updates in those cases.

First up, the court has granted Kwame Kilpatrick the ability to leave the state upon his release from jail early next week:

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is headed for Texas...

Kilpatrick sent his lawyers to ask Wayne County Circuit Judge David Groner whether he could change the terms of his probation, which restricted him to Michigan.

The reason, the lawyers said, is that Kilpatrick wants to join his family out of state, as well as interview for a job later in the week...

"The court is satisfied that there is an opportunity, a good opportunity, for the defendant to seek employment," Groner said, adding that having Kilpatrick pay his $1-million restitution tab is "the No. 1 concern that the court has."...

After the hearing, [Kilpatrick attorney Jim] Thomas shifted the focus to Kilparick's future: "He's about to be released. He's about to be rehabilitated.

"I think everybody should be happy about that."

Is that all it takes to be rehabilitated from a prolonged pattern of narcissism, greed, corruption, dishonesty, and power-mongering? Huh.

Moving on. Next, Susan LeFevre was granted parole yesterday and is slated for a May 19th release from prison:

The Michigan Parole Board voted 10-0 to grant her a fixed date parole...

Although LeFevre was living under a different name, the parole board noted that she has committed no crimes since her escape, [MDOC spokesperson Russ] Marlan said....

You can read more about the controversy surrounding LeFevre's imprisonment, and now her parole, here.

MLK, Obama, and Criminal Justice Reform

Amid all of the hoopla yesterday appeared a Detroit Free Press editorial calling for the twin celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and President Obama's inauguration to prompt reform of the criminal justice system. I was pleasantly surprised to see the phrase "criminal justice system" among the inauguration-themed headlines, and thought others might be interested to read the editorial, too. A few excerpts:

A nation where millions of African Americans couldn't vote 50 years ago has elected its first black president and embraced the change he represents. Still, King's dream of racial equality remains unfulfilled. The world's most powerful democracy is also its leading incarcerator. African Americans -- 13% of the population -- make up nearly half of all those in jail or prison. The nation that elected its first black president also has 1 million black men behind bars....

No doubt, we need prisons. But when too many young men grow up in neighborhoods where most of their peers go to prison or jail, it's time to consider where the get-tough policies of the last 35 years have taken us.

Getting the number of incarcerated to a rational level will take more than re-entry and training programs. It will take serious reforms in sentencing. Figuring out who should go to prison -- and for how long -- and who should not, must become part of a new urban and civil rights agenda, backed by the nation's leader.

Five-Part Series on Sexual Assault in MI Women's Prisons

Yesterday's Detroit Free Press ran the first of a 5-part series on guard-perpetrated sexual assault in Michigan women's prisons. Hundreds of incarcerated women have successfully sued the state (to the tune of $50 million) in a class action lawsuit, which the state is now appealing. (The state's position, in a nutshell? "Prisoners lie, so these women are probably lying about being raped. And besides, if they really were being raped, why didn't they tell anyone? We can't fix what we don't know is broken.") Although Human Rights Watch (along with the Michigan Women's Commission and the DOJ) published several reports in the mid-nineties detailing "pervasive" sexual misconduct in MI women's facilities -- and a near complete failure of the state government to acknowledge or address the problem -- little was done about it until the class action suit was filed. Now some of the victimized women are speaking out publicly and sharing their stories via this Free Press investigation.

Links to the five chapters in this expose are provided below, and will be updated as each installment is published. Each page also includes links to related stories, including excerpts from the HRW reports.

--------------------------------

Chapter 1 (Sunday): Sexual assaults on female inmates went unheeded
Chapter 2 (Monday): The trial begins with everything at stake
Chapter 3 (Tuesday): Breaking the silence
Chapter 4 (Wednesday): A jury surprise
Chapter 5 (Thursday): A new life?

Private Prison Visit

So I took my class to a *private* prison today. Usually I take them to a public facility, but I wanted to shake things up a bit. Wow, what a world of difference. Right when they were running us through their security procedures at the beginning, I noticed that the staff and officers were just plain happier and hopeful than those at the public institutions I've visited. There was something different in the air...and throughout the course of our tour of the institution and our conversations with the warden, other administrators, and some inmates, I noticed a huge difference. Private prisons have so much more programming than public prisons, and this allows the staff to show inmates that they are worth something...that they have a future worth preparing for...that they deserve to be invested in...that they are not forgotten about. I love that. Employees *enjoyed* their job. They were so pleasant and genuinely excited about making a difference in the lives of those incarcerated there. Even those serving life-terms were in good spirits, seemingly due to the way they've been treated. They kept reminding us (and I agree) that any one of us could make a mistake and end up in prison. Those doing time were just like the rest of us, and deserved to be treated with dignity and encouraged to reach their potential. After the trip, many students who had never before considered working in a correctional environment talked to me about how they would totally entertain working there. That was so good to hear.

Apart from that, one experience within the prison really hit me hard. We talked to four inmates, one of which was in for first-degree murder, and had already served 19 years. It turns out that just last week, the standing testimony against this inmate was recanted, and proof surfaced that he was innocent - something he had maintained all along. I was already drawn to him as he was speaking to us, because he was an athlete, and because of his faith, and because he was super humble and respectful. It broke me to realize what a travesty of justice had occurred, and how even though he'll (hopefully) be freed soon, we can't give him back 19 years of his life. He teared up multiple times while talking to my class, and then once again while he was walking away. He wants to work with youth when he gets out, to keep them on the straight and narrow, and to make a positive difference in their lives. His story just profoundly affected me; I can't get his situation out of my mind. I am sickened and so saddened by it. I am committing here on this blog to do what I can to help him now and when he gets out. I think that when we experience moments like these, we shouldn't just gloss over them and go back to our ridiculously busy lives. We should allow these moments to change us and prompt us to radical action. I commit to do my part.

Disturbing Prison News of the Day

From today's Wall Street Journal:

Larger Inmate Population is Boon to Private Prisons

An excerpt from the article:

Prison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.

Emphasis mine.

Friday CJ Funnies: Get Back!

Just because I love to get catchy songs stuck in other people's heads, I offer you today's Friday CJ Funny: the classic "chain gang" scene from Cadence.  The look Private Bean (Charlie Sheen) gives at the very end makes me laugh every time.  

Enjoy, and remember: you've got me to thank when you're still humming this song throughout the weekend.  Get back!

 

Good News Indeed

Via Feministing and the ACLU:

The Bureau of Prisons reportedly has revised its policy and now bars the practice of shackling pregnant women incarcerated in federal prisons during labor and delivery. Though this practice still may be common in various state institutions, the BOP policy change is an important victory for the humane (and common-sense) treatment of women prisoners. (I guarantee you that any woman who has experienced childbirth will confirm that laboring inmates pose absolutely zero flight risk.)

One step at a time, right?

Women Prisons: Then and Now

This weekend the Detroit Free Press ran a fascinating story about escapees of the now-defunct Detroit House of Corrections.

In the 1970s, DeHoCo (as it was known) was a very low security, cottage-style prison facility for women. Given the lack of security there (for example, the grounds were bordered only by a 6-foot chain-link fence, over which relatives reportedly would heave six-packs of beer for their incarcerated loved ones to retrieve), escape was rather easy. In fact, the number of escapees became so problematic that DeHoCo was eventually demolished and replaced by the far more secure Scott Correctional Facility, a traditional prison.

In a surprising twist, this year several women who fled DeHoCo in the 1970s have been captured. (The most famous of these women is Susan LeFevre, whose case we have discussed before.) The article describes the varied lives the women led while on the lam -- many law abiding, some not -- as well as the drastic changes in women's prisons over the last forty years.

This is a really interesting article, and would make a great discussion-starter for a women and crime or a corrections class.

The Passing of Paul Newman

By now Paul Newman's passing yesterday at the age of 83 is front page news. This is sad news indeed for the millions of fans who admire his performances in iconic roles -- including those in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Color of Money, and a host of other films -- during his sixty-year career in Hollywood.

Aside from being, in this blogger's humble estimation, the sexiest human being to have ever walked the face of the Earth, Newman starred in one of the best prison films of all time: Cool Hand Luke. I had watched this movie several times growing up, but found renewed appreciation for it once I began studying the criminal justice system in college.

"Cool Hand" Luke, the title character played by Newman, is sentenced to a rural Florida prison camp for cutting the heads off of parking meters. During his incarceration Luke refuses to bend to the system, earning him the respect of his fellow inmates and fostering an esprit de corps among the men. (Cool Hand Luke was Shawshank thirty years before Shawhank even existed.) Of course, the movie contains some famous dialog ("What we've got here is failure to communicate.") and some even more famous scenes: the original sexy woman washes a car scene*, the "nobody can eat 50 eggs" scene, and the "sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand" scene. Then there is the prison boxing scene (my personal favorite), in which Luke's refusal to stay down even though he is badly beaten by his opponent is a metaphor for his refusal to be beaten by the system:



For anyone looking for a great film to show in a corrections class, you can't go wrong with Cool Hand Luke. I know I'll be watching it again soon, if only to remember the brilliance of the late Paul Newman.

*Clip is semi-NSFW and is replete with sexual innuendo. (Duh.)

The Absence of Crime Issues in the National Political Discourse

Via Ted Gest:

Neal Peirce of the National League of Cities has a column in the current issue of Nation's Cities Weekly bemoaning the absence of issues related to drugs, crime, and prison in the national political discourse:

Will America’s ill-starred “war on drugs” and its expanding prison culture make it into the presidential campaign?

Standard wisdom says “no way.”

We may have the world’s highest rate of incarceration — with only 5 percent of global population, 25 percent of prisoners worldwide. We may be throwing hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders, many barely of age, behind bars — one reason a stunning one out of every 100 Americans is now imprisoned. We may have created a huge “prison-industrial complex” of prison builders, contractors and swollen criminal justice bureaucracies.

Federal, state and local outlays for law enforcement and incarceration are costing, according to a Senate committee estimate, a stunning $200 billion annually, siphoning off funds from enterprises that actually build our future: universities, schools, health, infrastructure.

We are reaping the whirlwind of “get tough” on crime statutes ranging from “three strikes you’re in” to mandatory sentences to reincarcerating recent prisoners for minor parole violations. And every year we’re seeing hundreds of thousands of convicts leave prison with scant chances of being employed, no right to vote, no access to public housing, high levels of addiction, illiteracy and mental illness. Overwhelmed by the odds against them, at least 50 percent get rearrested within two years.

A serious set of problems, a shadow over our national future? No doubt. But do our politicians talk much about alternatives? No way — they typically find it too risky to be attacked as “soft on crime.”

Peirce's reading of the candidates' crime platforms suggests that chances for reform would be "much brighter" in an Obama administration than a McCain administration, especially in light of Obama's more nuanced approach to drug offenders (i.e., supporting diversion programs, drug courts, etc.) relative to McCain's more "hawkish" position (i.e., supporting "get tough" policies like death penalty eligibilty for drug kingpins). Still, Peirce concedes that a discussion of either candidates' views is not likely occur during the remainder of the campaign, noting that "it's been 20 years since drugs and prisons have even been mentioned in the televised presidential debates."

What do you think? Why aren't crime issues featured more prominently in the national political discourse, especially during a presidential election season? Is it because crime issues seem less-than-consequential relative to hugely important topics like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the struggling economy? Or are candidates of either party loath to discuss these issues for fear of being labeled "soft on crime"? Or perhaps it is a supply-and-demand issue, in which the press and public don't push candidates to share their views about crime, so they don't? I'm not sure, but I do wish that the "crime conversation" was a bigger part of the national political discourse, especially in the run-up to a presidential election.

(On the other hand, perhaps I should be careful what I wish for.)

More on NPR Prison Series

Last week I wrote about the first of a three-part NPR series on the U.S. prison population. That initial segment profiled incarcerated women who are mothers.

The second entry in the series examines the substantial number of inmates who are mentally ill. (Listen to the story here.) An excerpt from the print story:

Until the 1970s, the mentally ill were usually treated in public psychiatric hospitals, more commonly known as insane asylums.

Then, a social movement aimed at freeing patients from big, overcrowded and often squalid state hospitals succeeded. Rather than leading to quality treatment in small, community settings, however, it often resulted in no treatment at all.

As a consequence, thousands of mentally ill ended up on the streets, where they became involved in criminal activity. Their crimes, though frequently minor, led them in droves to jails such as Twin Towers, says Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca.

"Incarcerating the mentally ill is not the right thing to do," he says....

"They're here, and they're going to be cared for, but is this what we want in the way of a policy? Are we saying the legal system is the solution for the mentally ill in L.A. County? I don't think so. I'm saying criminals belong in jail, not the mentally ill."

The third entry in the series covers first-time offenders, especially drug and alcohol offenders processed in Dallas' "DIVERT Court". (Listen here.) An excerpt:

[DIVERT Court Judge John] Creuzot says what's different about DIVERT Court is the intense judicial oversight. "A person who relapses on drugs needs further treatment. Our responses are research-driven," he says.

The statistics back him up. Two studies by Southern Methodist University show that DIVERT Court cuts the recidivism rate by 68 percent over the regular Texas criminal justice courts. For every dollar spent on the court, $9 are saved in future criminal justice costs....

The courts have been so successful that even the tough-on-crime, Republican-dominated Texas Legislature approves.

Rep. Jerry Madden (R-Plano), chairman of the corrections committee, says that instead of worrying about the expanding outflow from prison, he wants to choke off the inflow with DIVERT-type courts...

State officials estimate that unless changes are made, Texas will need 17,000 more prison beds just four years from now. Releasing prisoners on parole is politically untenable — which makes "diversion" an increasingly appealing way to avoid what's looking like a $2 billion invoice.

These are short but informative pieces, and would be very suitable for kicking off lectures or classroom discussions about special needs populations in the CJ system or alternatives to traditional crime control policies. Good stuff!

Totally Unshocking Crime Headlines, Vol. 13

"Fugitive mom 'uncomfortable,' wants out of prison"

I thought this was worthy of an Unshocking Crime Headline not so much because of Ms. LeFevre herself -- whose case we have discussed before -- but because of the notion that incarceration would be "extremely uncomfortable" for someone who had been living a quiet suburban life prior to being locked up:

"There's nowhere she can go to be alone. There's nowhere she can go to get peace," [her defense] attorney said.

Well, duh. She's in prison. That's the whole point!