New jail plan should include services for juveniles:
A new Sarasota County jail for sentenced prisoners may not be everybody's political cup of tea, but a flexible design that provides safe space for badly needed juvenile services could make it more palatable for taxpayers who may otherwise be reticent.
Sheriff Bill Balkwill has made a strong case that the county jail in downtown Sarasota is often overcrowded and conditions will only get worse as the community grows. His recommended solution is to relieve the situation by moving sentenced prisoners to another facility.
Such a decision would free up 200 to 300 beds - depending on how big the new jail is - and potentially a lot more in future years if the design provides for expansions. Politicians and planners should think years ahead when they consider this project.
Less than a decade ago, former Sheriff Geoff Monge came to the county commission with the same problem and request. His recommended solution was a medium-security jail for sentenced prisoners outside the city, but discussions were muddied by election-year rhetoric.
The result was an over-budget and short-sighted downtown jail addition that only served to put off the inevitable. So what we have is a maximum-security jail with none of the social services that help prepare prisoners for a more productive life after they are released.
Worse yet, the same commissioners also turned a blind eye to state juvenile justice officials who offered to build the county a new detention facility. The result has been catastrophic for many troubled youngsters at dangerous crossroads in their lives.
County deputies and municipal police officers must drive them to a facility in Bradenton where they are screened by counselors and either sent home or held until their cases are heard. Hours of patrol time are squandered because of this inefficiency and waste.
The situation is so bad that some deputies and officers refuse to arrest all but the most serious juvenile offenders because of the down time involved in driving them north and waiting while they are processed. So they are allowed to roam free until trouble finds them again.
A new jail for sentenced prisoners isn't going to spring up overnight. It will take at least a year to plan and several more to build. In the interim, a temporary solution to the juvenile arrest crisis should be addressed so critical decisions about our young are made in this county.
The notion that one of the most affluent communities in this nation cannot find a proper location to interview juvenile offenders and determine what is best for them is unconscionable, and shouldn't be treated in routine fashion by our public officials.
Later this month, the county commission is tentatively scheduled to approve a contract for consultant services on the new jail. It also needs to move this project along, and not allow it to fall prey to the narrow-minded thinking that prevailed a few short years ago.
An editorial from the Pelican Press
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Packed Pinellas jail set to free inmates:
Those accused of misdemeanors and ordinance violations will be the first group allowed to leave.
Hundreds of inmates in Pinellas County's chronically overcrowded jail could be released thanks to a judge's order.
The inmates eligible first for release would be those accused of misdemeanors or violations of local ordinances.
If that doesn't provide enough relief, Sheriff Jim Coats could ask judges to consider freeing people accused of nonviolent felonies, like retail theft and drug possession. After that, the sheriff could set free inmates sentenced to the county jail who have only a short time left to serve.
The authorization to free certain inmates, issued this week by Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Chief Judge David Demers, comes as the jail's population hovers around 3,600 - 1,100 more than it was originally designed to house.
The crush of inmates has made it difficult to control tensions and the spread of disease. Last year, attacks on jail staff jumped 82 percent.
The order empowers Coats to lower the population only to 3,300, the jail's modified capacity.
"I asked for all this responsibility in order to do something to help relieve this overcrowding," Coats said Thursday. "This will be a slow, methodical process as we review those who meet the criteria for release. We're not going to release anyone with a history of violence or who is being held for a very serious crime."
Demers issued the administrative order after a yearlong series of meetings between the sheriff, prosecutors, public defenders and other judges. Demers said Thursday that it was a temporary fix for a problem that will inevitably get worse.
Officials expect the recently passed state Anti-Murder Act, which requires violent felons who violate probation be jailed until they see a judge, to add to the crowding problems in Pinellas.
"We may get through the current crisis, but sooner or later, we'll have another," Demer said.
The population at the Pinellas jail began to spike in 2004, driven in large part by a zero-tolerance policy by the state's probation officers. The policy change came after 11-year-old Carlie Brucia of Sarasota was killed by a man on probation.
At times, as many as 400 inmates were being held on such charges, but the figure has declined in recent months as judges work to process the cases faster.
Coats also said Thursday he is expanding the use of electronic monitoring devices, from 200 to 300. The monitoring devices are cheaper than incarceration and free up space in the jail for other inmates. Ultimately, Coats will have to hire another staff member to help monitor the group.
The judge also urged Coats to use the discretion his staff already has to speed up processing of ordinance violators, issuing them a court appearance notice rather than booking them in jail.
Both prosecutors and public defenders, while they were involved in the creation of the new order, raised concerns about how much, or how little, it will actually do.
"It's a good start," Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender Bob Dillinger said. "But we have a long way to go to changing the way we think about who we put in these very expensive jails. I think we have an awful lot of people in jail who are poor."
Dillinger said he would like to see 1,000 people on electronic monitoring, enabling them to be productive in society and work.
"We just can't keep building jails," he added. "People who are on monitors have a very, very low re-offending rate and sooner or later, the expense of all this will drive us to do what is real and safe and positive."
Bruce Bartlett, the chief assistant in State Attorney Bernie McCabe's office, said that while Demers' order contains safeguards against releasing dangerous inmates, he worried that too much discretion was given to deputies who book newly arrested suspects.
"You essentially have a non-judge, non-lawyer deciding who is going to be released or not," he said.
But Bartlett said he anticipates the release of low-level offenders will be enough to alleviate the immediate crowding problem.
"I don't think it's as bad as it looks," he said.
Two jail expansion projects are due to open in coming months. An abandoned PSTA bus garage near the jail is being renovated to house 288 inmates. It is scheduled to open in August. And a $36-million medical building with 400 beds may also open in August more than a year behind schedule.
Pinellas voters also approved in March a 10-year extension of the 1 percent Penny for Pinellas sales tax, which the county will use to expand the jail complex. The first priority: a new 2,500-bed facility that would bring the jail's capacity to 5,298.
Thursday, however, more than 200 inmates were still sleeping on the floor, some of them old, some with serious health problems. Micah Sanders, 18, charged with burglary, has been in the jail more than a month. He said he just got a bunk to sleep on two days ago.
His broken arm was in a hard cast.
"We're lucky to get pillows in here," he said. "It's stressful."
By JACOB H. FRIES St. Petersburg Times
Published April 20, 2007
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
FAST FACTS: Who could go
The first inmates eligible for release from the Pinellas County Jail under the judge's order would be those whose highest charge is a local ordinance violation -- such as urinating in public or having an open container of alcohol -- or a misdemeanor -- such as petty theft or trespassing. If the release of those inmates didn't alleviate crowding, jail staff could ask judges to consider releasing people accused of third-degree felonies, such as forgery, grand theft or careless driving with a suspended license.
Hundreds of inmates in Pinellas County's chronically overcrowded jail could be released thanks to a judge's order.
The inmates eligible first for release would be those accused of misdemeanors or violations of local ordinances.
If that doesn't provide enough relief, Sheriff Jim Coats could ask judges to consider freeing people accused of nonviolent felonies, like retail theft and drug possession. After that, the sheriff could set free inmates sentenced to the county jail who have only a short time left to serve.
The authorization to free certain inmates, issued this week by Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Chief Judge David Demers, comes as the jail's population hovers around 3,600 - 1,100 more than it was originally designed to house.
The crush of inmates has made it difficult to control tensions and the spread of disease. Last year, attacks on jail staff jumped 82 percent.
The order empowers Coats to lower the population only to 3,300, the jail's modified capacity.
"I asked for all this responsibility in order to do something to help relieve this overcrowding," Coats said Thursday. "This will be a slow, methodical process as we review those who meet the criteria for release. We're not going to release anyone with a history of violence or who is being held for a very serious crime."
Demers issued the administrative order after a yearlong series of meetings between the sheriff, prosecutors, public defenders and other judges. Demers said Thursday that it was a temporary fix for a problem that will inevitably get worse.
Officials expect the recently passed state Anti-Murder Act, which requires violent felons who violate probation be jailed until they see a judge, to add to the crowding problems in Pinellas.
"We may get through the current crisis, but sooner or later, we'll have another," Demer said.
The population at the Pinellas jail began to spike in 2004, driven in large part by a zero-tolerance policy by the state's probation officers. The policy change came after 11-year-old Carlie Brucia of Sarasota was killed by a man on probation.
At times, as many as 400 inmates were being held on such charges, but the figure has declined in recent months as judges work to process the cases faster.
Coats also said Thursday he is expanding the use of electronic monitoring devices, from 200 to 300. The monitoring devices are cheaper than incarceration and free up space in the jail for other inmates. Ultimately, Coats will have to hire another staff member to help monitor the group.
The judge also urged Coats to use the discretion his staff already has to speed up processing of ordinance violators, issuing them a court appearance notice rather than booking them in jail.
Both prosecutors and public defenders, while they were involved in the creation of the new order, raised concerns about how much, or how little, it will actually do.
"It's a good start," Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender Bob Dillinger said. "But we have a long way to go to changing the way we think about who we put in these very expensive jails. I think we have an awful lot of people in jail who are poor."
Dillinger said he would like to see 1,000 people on electronic monitoring, enabling them to be productive in society and work.
"We just can't keep building jails," he added. "People who are on monitors have a very, very low re-offending rate and sooner or later, the expense of all this will drive us to do what is real and safe and positive."
Bruce Bartlett, the chief assistant in State Attorney Bernie McCabe's office, said that while Demers' order contains safeguards against releasing dangerous inmates, he worried that too much discretion was given to deputies who book newly arrested suspects.
"You essentially have a non-judge, non-lawyer deciding who is going to be released or not," he said.
But Bartlett said he anticipates the release of low-level offenders will be enough to alleviate the immediate crowding problem.
"I don't think it's as bad as it looks," he said.
Two jail expansion projects are due to open in coming months. An abandoned PSTA bus garage near the jail is being renovated to house 288 inmates. It is scheduled to open in August. And a $36-million medical building with 400 beds may also open in August more than a year behind schedule.
Pinellas voters also approved in March a 10-year extension of the 1 percent Penny for Pinellas sales tax, which the county will use to expand the jail complex. The first priority: a new 2,500-bed facility that would bring the jail's capacity to 5,298.
Thursday, however, more than 200 inmates were still sleeping on the floor, some of them old, some with serious health problems. Micah Sanders, 18, charged with burglary, has been in the jail more than a month. He said he just got a bunk to sleep on two days ago.
His broken arm was in a hard cast.
"We're lucky to get pillows in here," he said. "It's stressful."
By JACOB H. FRIES St. Petersburg Times
Published April 20, 2007
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
FAST FACTS: Who could go
The first inmates eligible for release from the Pinellas County Jail under the judge's order would be those whose highest charge is a local ordinance violation -- such as urinating in public or having an open container of alcohol -- or a misdemeanor -- such as petty theft or trespassing. If the release of those inmates didn't alleviate crowding, jail staff could ask judges to consider releasing people accused of third-degree felonies, such as forgery, grand theft or careless driving with a suspended license.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
More Americans in prison
In the international race to incarcerate, the United States dominates, with few rivals and no rich countries within shouting distance. Incarceration rates across countries are best measured as shares of national populations. Last year, for every 100,000 people in the United States, 738 were in prison. Second-place Russia, whom the United States succeeded in 2000, currently boasts a rate of 603, but the only other OECD country with a rate above 200 is Poland at 229. The U.K. incarceration rate of 145 is the highest of any Western European country. Although African-Americans suffer the greatest relative burden of U.S. imprisonment, the incarceration rate for whites in the United States is still more than three times the OECD average.
To its credit, the United States hasn't always imprisoned such a large share of its population. Incarceration rates were steady, sometimes falling, and always below 200 throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The prison population rate rose sharply from 1973 to 1980, and then skyrocketed, more than tripling over the past 25 years.
What caused such a tremendous spike in imprisonment? Increases in crime rates surely made some contribution, but the road to prison involves other components of the criminal justice system, like prosecutorial and judicial decisions, and the time served in jail. Isolating these factors during the period from 1980 to 1996, Carnegie Mellon professor Alfred Blumstein and Bureau of Justice statistician Allen Beck conclude that only 12 percent of state incarceration growth resulted from the increased number of offenses. The rest of the prison population growth was due to decisions to incarcerate arrested individuals and their subsequent sentence length -- namely, policy choices made by legal and political representatives.
Coinciding directly with this astounding expansion of the prison population is the U.S. "war on drugs." Nonviolent drug offenses accounted for less than 8 percent of prisoners in 1980, but by 1993 that share had risen to about 25 percent, where it remains today. By contrast, more than half of those imprisoned in 1980 were violent criminals, who now comprise a bit less than half of the prison population. As a proportion of illicit activity, drug use therefore either tripled in just slightly over a decade and then stabilized, or the focus and severity of U.S. penal and sentencing policy shifted dramatically.
International comparisons also reveal the stark and decisive contribution of criminal justice policies to incarceration rates. Cross-country crime surveys from the late 1980s through the present place the United States slightly above average, but well within the range of Western European criminal activity. The United States is now, of course, off the charts in terms of incarceration, imprisoning on a per capita basis six times the average of other OECD countries.
Incarceration rates in the United States and Finland were not dissimilar in the mid-1960s. Over the following 30 years, the United States saw a near fivefold increase in the rate of violent crime and a threefold increase in the rate of imprisonment. Violent crime also rose in Finland by a factor of three, but over roughly the same period, the promotion of sentencing alternatives to incarceration and deliberate reductions in the length of prison sentences helped to cut the Finnish incarceration rate by more than half.
Assessing these trends, criminologist Michael Tonry writes that whereas U.K. punishment policies were originally not out of the ordinary compared with Western Europe, since 1993 England and Wales "have consciously emulated American crime control policies," resulting in the near doubling of the prison population. In Germany, despite a doubling of the violent crime rate between the early 1960s and 1990s, "no radical decisions were made to increase or decrease the imprisonment rate," and so the German incarceration rate stagnated and even fell somewhat over this period. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that incarceration rates are driven primarily by policy choices, not by crime rates or inexorable laws of nature.
by Ben Zipperer a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
Published at AlterNet
To its credit, the United States hasn't always imprisoned such a large share of its population. Incarceration rates were steady, sometimes falling, and always below 200 throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The prison population rate rose sharply from 1973 to 1980, and then skyrocketed, more than tripling over the past 25 years.
What caused such a tremendous spike in imprisonment? Increases in crime rates surely made some contribution, but the road to prison involves other components of the criminal justice system, like prosecutorial and judicial decisions, and the time served in jail. Isolating these factors during the period from 1980 to 1996, Carnegie Mellon professor Alfred Blumstein and Bureau of Justice statistician Allen Beck conclude that only 12 percent of state incarceration growth resulted from the increased number of offenses. The rest of the prison population growth was due to decisions to incarcerate arrested individuals and their subsequent sentence length -- namely, policy choices made by legal and political representatives.
Coinciding directly with this astounding expansion of the prison population is the U.S. "war on drugs." Nonviolent drug offenses accounted for less than 8 percent of prisoners in 1980, but by 1993 that share had risen to about 25 percent, where it remains today. By contrast, more than half of those imprisoned in 1980 were violent criminals, who now comprise a bit less than half of the prison population. As a proportion of illicit activity, drug use therefore either tripled in just slightly over a decade and then stabilized, or the focus and severity of U.S. penal and sentencing policy shifted dramatically.
International comparisons also reveal the stark and decisive contribution of criminal justice policies to incarceration rates. Cross-country crime surveys from the late 1980s through the present place the United States slightly above average, but well within the range of Western European criminal activity. The United States is now, of course, off the charts in terms of incarceration, imprisoning on a per capita basis six times the average of other OECD countries.
Incarceration rates in the United States and Finland were not dissimilar in the mid-1960s. Over the following 30 years, the United States saw a near fivefold increase in the rate of violent crime and a threefold increase in the rate of imprisonment. Violent crime also rose in Finland by a factor of three, but over roughly the same period, the promotion of sentencing alternatives to incarceration and deliberate reductions in the length of prison sentences helped to cut the Finnish incarceration rate by more than half.
Assessing these trends, criminologist Michael Tonry writes that whereas U.K. punishment policies were originally not out of the ordinary compared with Western Europe, since 1993 England and Wales "have consciously emulated American crime control policies," resulting in the near doubling of the prison population. In Germany, despite a doubling of the violent crime rate between the early 1960s and 1990s, "no radical decisions were made to increase or decrease the imprisonment rate," and so the German incarceration rate stagnated and even fell somewhat over this period. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that incarceration rates are driven primarily by policy choices, not by crime rates or inexorable laws of nature.
by Ben Zipperer a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
Published at AlterNet
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment
The prison system in the U.S. stands alone in the modern Western world as a model of mass incarceration. The "tough on crime" stance taken by elected officials from across the political spectrum has not halted the resurgence of crime in the last few years, nor has it helped prevent ex-inmates from once again ending up behind bars.
How did the U.S. devolve into a nation that incarcerates over 2.13 million people, when just a quarter century ago the number was 475,000? What happens when the criminal justice system deals out vengeance instead of justice?
Sasha Abramsky delves into these questions in his new book, American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment, a title that alludes to the ancient Greek goddesses of vengeance. It follows in the tracks of his first two books, Hard Time Blues and Conned, and tries to synthesize what he has learned about criminal justice in the U.S. since an article assignment first piqued his interest around eleven years ago. American Furies traces criminal justice through American history, including the psychological and religious issues, and the power dynamics involved in the development and implementation of recent policy.
Abramsky's quiet Sacramento home is a far cry from some of the dark scenes he has witnessed in his research. AlterNet interviewed Abramsky there about his book and his ideas on how to extricate this country from an age of mass imprisonment.
Prema Polit: Why has the U.S. become incarceration central when other countries have taken a different route?
Sasha Abramsky: I think one of the reasons is that America took a distinctly conservative turn in the 1970s. Other countries went through their conservative moments, England being a case in point with Margaret Thatcher, but they didn't quite have the sort of populist conservatism that we have here. One of the effects is that there has been a pandering to really very ill thought out prejudice on an array of issues. Then a result of that in the criminal justice debates are very simplistic laws like "three strikes and you're out." They sound good in 15-second sound-bytes, and they're lousy public policy.
I think that the other reason, paradoxically, is that we're extremely wealthy, and extremely powerful. Most states, when they're at the zenith of their power, in addition to projecting themselves out onto the world also seem to impose order on their own populaces. America is the big cheese at the moment, so we're seeing those social policies playing out in America in a way that they're not playing out anywhere else right now.
An example is England in the late 19th century. Brimming with self-confidence, it believes that its political, social and economic systems are the best in the world. Its empire is at its maximum expansion. You see very similar policies in late 19th century England that you see here.
I think what's distinct about the American system is that America has reached the zenith of its power at a moment when technology provides so many opportunities for the state to insert itself in ways that it couldn't previously. One of the most fascinating things that comes to mind is that in addition to being liberal with its use of incarceration, we have technology that allows the state to eavesdrop, to control, to regiment the lives of its prisoners in a way that no other prison mechanism in history has been able to do. So we're not just creating more prisons, we're creating more secure prisons and more regimented prisons. We're not just creating more jobs for prison guards, but we're creating an entire subset of the economy based on the technology of incarceration.
PP: You wrote about the "Nothing Works" movement, which dismissed rehabilitative efforts for prisoners as ineffective. So what does work?
SA: I guess I should backtrack and explain what the "Nothing works" philosophy is. It's an idea which both the left and the right came to believe in in the 1970s. The idea was that a ton of money and a ton of resources had been invested in trying to create rehabilitation structures inside prisons for criminals. They were tailored to meet individual needs, and they were designed to recalibrate the way people behaved and also their belief structures. The left came to hate it because they concluded that these rehabilitation efforts were very totalitarian, that they were an attempt to sort of remodel people to meet social norms. And the right hated it because they thought it was wishy-washy. The consensus is that it should just be about punishment, that we should just get back to the basics. That's been fairly prevalent for about 25 or 30 years at this point.
But there is evidence that there are things that do work: some of the new drug-treatment programs, some of the diversionary courts, the mental health courts, drug treatment courts that don't put people into prisons in the first place but put them in structured care in the community. They do have success rates. But how do you measure success? That's one of the key problems here.
There's a group called the "Fortune Society" in New York, and I've worked with them for many years. Their clients are mainly drug-addicted ex-prisoners. The director of Fortune is a woman named JoAnne Page. She'll always stress to me that if you look for success in terms of absolute change, you'll never find it, because that's not how human beings work; they don't suddenly change overnight. She says that the way you have to look for success among her clients and more generally is to look for incremental change. Can you set in motion a chain of events that will gradually take someone away from drugs, gradually transform how they see themselves, how they see their role in the world, transform them from criminally minded to being a law-abiding, productive citizen.
If you look at the really innovative drug-treatment programs that try to reintegrate people into jobs and housing and so on, they deal in incrementals. Wherever you look, the more successful programs are the ones that aren't overly ambitious. They deal with the art of the possible.
PP: Some people say that the criminal justice system makes sure that the accused has all these rights, but ignores the victims. What is your response to that?
SA: One section of my book is on the victims' rights movement. I profile a woman in Alabama who is one of the more vocal proponents of victims' rights. She's been very instrumental in moving Alabama in a more conservative direction when it comes to crime and punishment policies. And that's precisely her point, that the way the criminal justice system works all too often the victims feels neglected. They feel that the rights of the defendant outweigh that of the victims, they feel that the court system is stacked in favor of the defendant because you have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. To a degree they were right. I think there was a period in history when the court system became coldly indifferent to the needs of the victim, and so in the 1970s era, there probably was room for a victims' rights movement to emerge to address that.
My argument with the victims' rights movement is that it has outgrown its original role, and that it's channeling the emotional response of the victim into making public policy. And I think that's dangerous, because when you're victimized you're almost certainly going to have an extremely emotional response. As an individual, that response makes perfect sense. If I were a crime victim or my family was, I would have an emotional response, and I would want that emotional response to take center stage in the criminal justice system. But that's not how the system is supposed to work.
One of the basic underlying intellectual foundations of modern criminal justice theory is that you need a dispassionate state, that if you allow the emotions of the victims to govern public policy, you're going to get a very brutal state response. In a sense you're going to turn the state into a distributor of vengeance rather than justice.
PP: What was the most surprising thing that you encountered while researching and writing American Furies?
SA: I went out in 100-degree heat into the desert early one morning with a group of women. They had mostly been convicted of parole violations or probation violations, but very minor offenses. For the next three or four hours I watched them lower coffins into a pauper's grave, in the desert, next to an air force base. There was this extraordinary image, surrounded by these shotgun-toting sheriff's deputies. And they're these two-bit characters, these women who were addicted to cocaine, young women convicted of welfare fraud, that kind of thing. They're chained at the ankles, and they're sweating and they're miserable, and there's no point to their work.
I found that was the most extraordinary thing that I have ever seen when I've been reporting on criminal justice, that to me really spoke to everything that's gone wrong in the way that we implement criminal justice here.
PP: These days all politicians want to be "tough on crime," which people take to mean harsher sentencing. What is an alternative definition that we might adopt?
SA: The definition that I've heard said by quite a few criminal justice experts over the years is if you're going to be truly tough on crime, then measures of success should be a lowering of the crime rate and a lowering of the recidivism rate - the rate at which people who have been in the prison system then come out are bussed back into the prison system, partly because they commit new crimes or they violate parole. Now if you can craft a series of policies that over the long term reduce crime and over the long term reduce the number of people who are cycling through the system then you're really making society safer, and you're doing it in a way that is financially viable because you're not building more and more prisons at a staggering cost. That seems to me the sensible definition of "tough on crime" because it's structural. It means that you're tackling some real root causes of why crime occurs and who is committing it and how to stop it.
What's happening right now is based on the 15-second sound byte. It's the idea that if you can pitch the public a policy that's easy to explain in the 15 seconds that you can be allotted in the local TV news show, then you can claim your "tough on crime" credentials. Now, it's impossible to explain the complicated, good public policy in 15 seconds, but it's very easy to pitch something like "three strikes and you're out" because it's slogan based.
The result is this sort of endless cycle of increased incarceration. We've incarcerated so many people at this point that if they really were tough on crime, with successful, well-defined tough-on-crime laws, we'd have nobody committing crimes at this point. But that's not happening.
The last couple years in all the big cities, including here in Sacramento, the crime rate is up. And it shouldn't be happening, because the incarceration rate is still going up; every year it is going up by 50 or 60 thousand people. So if we really had a successful tough on crime policy, we wouldn't be having these debates right now about why is it so many teenagers are shooting each other, why is it that so many people are still taking drugs?
PP: You took the title "American Furies" from the ancient Greek drama about murder, vengeful spirits, and the creation of a court of justice. How far have we come since those days?
SA: Clearly in some ways we're a world away from the world of ancient Greece. Our technology is different; the scale of our society is different; the things that we find as criminal are different.
The reason that I chose "American Furies" as a title is that I wanted to in a sense explore the mythological qualities of crime and punishment. The Furies in ancient Greece were these goddesses who basically would chase the guilty around the Mediterranean world, and if not directly deal out punishment, would terrorize the guilty into death. They were these far larger-than-life characters that were designed to show how powerfully the Greek society understood notions of right and wrong and crime and punishment. I think that's a perennial theme in the human saga, that society is always going to look at crime and the transgression of the social code as being extremely serious, and it's always going to create its own responses designed to impose order; it's always going to make it's own equivalent to the Greek furies to deal out justice.
What I think happens every few centuries in different parts of the world is that the state goes completely overboard in its response to crime, usually in response to a panic about crime. You see it in Tudor England when there's this rash of hangings. Over a couple decades you see 70,000 people hanged. You see these very vengeful social movements that tend to take the state with them. And I'm arguing in American Furies that America is in the middle of one of these periodic crime hysterias. It's created this larger-than-life response, this almost mythological quality to our criminal justice system.
PP: You explore the history of the criminal justice system in your book. What's next?
SA: We're at a turning point and can go one of two directions. We've either reached the apogee, and we're at the point where it's almost impossible to build more prisons and fund more prisons and put more people in prison. And if that's the case, and there's some evidence that a lot of states are moving in that direction, then we'll see a renewed focus on rehabilitation, we might well see an expansion in drug treatment course, more money to mental health, and that's the somewhat optimistic scenario.
The other scenario is that we're stuck in a cycle of fear. Whether it's fear of drugs, whether it's fear of illegal immigrants, fear about terror, whatever it is. And some of the fears are valid; there's a valid reason to be fearful of terrorism. But I think we're stuck in a moment where these fears may congeal into another epidemic of incarceration. You do see in many border regions these ribbons of facilities set up to house INS detainees, or ICE, Immigration Customs Enforcement detainees. I do think there's a risk that the immigration debate could slide in the direction that makes it more likely that we mass incarcerate illegal immigrants.
PP: What changes do you think would most benefit the criminal justice system?
SA: One of them is mental health. There's a half a million seriously mentally ill people behind bars. That's a huge number, and that's the wrong place for most of them. There are lots of people committing low-end crimes, especially drug crimes, that have serious mental illness that could be much better treated, and much more cheaply treated outside prison. So I think one way to at least start to tackle this problem is to really invest in the community mental health services. Try and catch people with illnesses and treat people with mental illnesses before they end up in court.
I think another thing that overnight would transform the criminal justice system is more sensible dialogue about drugs. That dialogue should change to, "Well, we have a serious crack and heroin epidemic. Is the best approach incarceration, or should we make it possible to access treatment programs from the outside, funded by the state." And then if they do still get in trouble, really create a country-wide instead of a half-hazard network of drug-treatment course. Because, now, depending on where you live, for the same crime, you're either going to prison or to a drug-treatment facility. I think this needs to be standardized.
If you deal with drugs and you deal with mental illness, overnight you reduce the scale of the prison population, and then you can introduce other changes. You can reduce the number of people in prisons; you can invest money in better parole and probation structure and all of that.
PP: What is the most important message or idea to take away from American Furies?
SA: I want American Furies to show people that the criminal justice system isn't behaving in the way that we think and we hope it behaves. And I'm using behave deliberately here, because I think that even though the criminal justice system is basically a series of institutions rather than individuals, it's also very much subject to political whim -- to the whim of politicians, and the mood of the electorate.
I want people to take a deep breath and say, "Alright, nobody wants to live in a world besieged by crime. People who break a law need to pay a price, but are we doing this in the most sensible way possible?" I want them to read my book and come away from it saying, "No we're not." Whether you're left wing or right wing, whether you're a tough law and order person, whether you're a diehard fan of rehabilitation, I think anybody who reads this book should say, alright, we have a real problem here. We have way too many people in prison, and it's coming at a tremendous financial and moral cost to the state of our society.
By Prema Polit, AlterNet
Posted on April 14, 2007, Printed on April 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50464/
Prema Polit is an editorial intern at AlterNet.
How did the U.S. devolve into a nation that incarcerates over 2.13 million people, when just a quarter century ago the number was 475,000? What happens when the criminal justice system deals out vengeance instead of justice?
Sasha Abramsky delves into these questions in his new book, American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment, a title that alludes to the ancient Greek goddesses of vengeance. It follows in the tracks of his first two books, Hard Time Blues and Conned, and tries to synthesize what he has learned about criminal justice in the U.S. since an article assignment first piqued his interest around eleven years ago. American Furies traces criminal justice through American history, including the psychological and religious issues, and the power dynamics involved in the development and implementation of recent policy.
Abramsky's quiet Sacramento home is a far cry from some of the dark scenes he has witnessed in his research. AlterNet interviewed Abramsky there about his book and his ideas on how to extricate this country from an age of mass imprisonment.
Prema Polit: Why has the U.S. become incarceration central when other countries have taken a different route?
Sasha Abramsky: I think one of the reasons is that America took a distinctly conservative turn in the 1970s. Other countries went through their conservative moments, England being a case in point with Margaret Thatcher, but they didn't quite have the sort of populist conservatism that we have here. One of the effects is that there has been a pandering to really very ill thought out prejudice on an array of issues. Then a result of that in the criminal justice debates are very simplistic laws like "three strikes and you're out." They sound good in 15-second sound-bytes, and they're lousy public policy.
I think that the other reason, paradoxically, is that we're extremely wealthy, and extremely powerful. Most states, when they're at the zenith of their power, in addition to projecting themselves out onto the world also seem to impose order on their own populaces. America is the big cheese at the moment, so we're seeing those social policies playing out in America in a way that they're not playing out anywhere else right now.
An example is England in the late 19th century. Brimming with self-confidence, it believes that its political, social and economic systems are the best in the world. Its empire is at its maximum expansion. You see very similar policies in late 19th century England that you see here.
I think what's distinct about the American system is that America has reached the zenith of its power at a moment when technology provides so many opportunities for the state to insert itself in ways that it couldn't previously. One of the most fascinating things that comes to mind is that in addition to being liberal with its use of incarceration, we have technology that allows the state to eavesdrop, to control, to regiment the lives of its prisoners in a way that no other prison mechanism in history has been able to do. So we're not just creating more prisons, we're creating more secure prisons and more regimented prisons. We're not just creating more jobs for prison guards, but we're creating an entire subset of the economy based on the technology of incarceration.
PP: You wrote about the "Nothing Works" movement, which dismissed rehabilitative efforts for prisoners as ineffective. So what does work?
SA: I guess I should backtrack and explain what the "Nothing works" philosophy is. It's an idea which both the left and the right came to believe in in the 1970s. The idea was that a ton of money and a ton of resources had been invested in trying to create rehabilitation structures inside prisons for criminals. They were tailored to meet individual needs, and they were designed to recalibrate the way people behaved and also their belief structures. The left came to hate it because they concluded that these rehabilitation efforts were very totalitarian, that they were an attempt to sort of remodel people to meet social norms. And the right hated it because they thought it was wishy-washy. The consensus is that it should just be about punishment, that we should just get back to the basics. That's been fairly prevalent for about 25 or 30 years at this point.
But there is evidence that there are things that do work: some of the new drug-treatment programs, some of the diversionary courts, the mental health courts, drug treatment courts that don't put people into prisons in the first place but put them in structured care in the community. They do have success rates. But how do you measure success? That's one of the key problems here.
There's a group called the "Fortune Society" in New York, and I've worked with them for many years. Their clients are mainly drug-addicted ex-prisoners. The director of Fortune is a woman named JoAnne Page. She'll always stress to me that if you look for success in terms of absolute change, you'll never find it, because that's not how human beings work; they don't suddenly change overnight. She says that the way you have to look for success among her clients and more generally is to look for incremental change. Can you set in motion a chain of events that will gradually take someone away from drugs, gradually transform how they see themselves, how they see their role in the world, transform them from criminally minded to being a law-abiding, productive citizen.
If you look at the really innovative drug-treatment programs that try to reintegrate people into jobs and housing and so on, they deal in incrementals. Wherever you look, the more successful programs are the ones that aren't overly ambitious. They deal with the art of the possible.
PP: Some people say that the criminal justice system makes sure that the accused has all these rights, but ignores the victims. What is your response to that?
SA: One section of my book is on the victims' rights movement. I profile a woman in Alabama who is one of the more vocal proponents of victims' rights. She's been very instrumental in moving Alabama in a more conservative direction when it comes to crime and punishment policies. And that's precisely her point, that the way the criminal justice system works all too often the victims feels neglected. They feel that the rights of the defendant outweigh that of the victims, they feel that the court system is stacked in favor of the defendant because you have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. To a degree they were right. I think there was a period in history when the court system became coldly indifferent to the needs of the victim, and so in the 1970s era, there probably was room for a victims' rights movement to emerge to address that.
My argument with the victims' rights movement is that it has outgrown its original role, and that it's channeling the emotional response of the victim into making public policy. And I think that's dangerous, because when you're victimized you're almost certainly going to have an extremely emotional response. As an individual, that response makes perfect sense. If I were a crime victim or my family was, I would have an emotional response, and I would want that emotional response to take center stage in the criminal justice system. But that's not how the system is supposed to work.
One of the basic underlying intellectual foundations of modern criminal justice theory is that you need a dispassionate state, that if you allow the emotions of the victims to govern public policy, you're going to get a very brutal state response. In a sense you're going to turn the state into a distributor of vengeance rather than justice.
PP: What was the most surprising thing that you encountered while researching and writing American Furies?
SA: I went out in 100-degree heat into the desert early one morning with a group of women. They had mostly been convicted of parole violations or probation violations, but very minor offenses. For the next three or four hours I watched them lower coffins into a pauper's grave, in the desert, next to an air force base. There was this extraordinary image, surrounded by these shotgun-toting sheriff's deputies. And they're these two-bit characters, these women who were addicted to cocaine, young women convicted of welfare fraud, that kind of thing. They're chained at the ankles, and they're sweating and they're miserable, and there's no point to their work.
I found that was the most extraordinary thing that I have ever seen when I've been reporting on criminal justice, that to me really spoke to everything that's gone wrong in the way that we implement criminal justice here.
PP: These days all politicians want to be "tough on crime," which people take to mean harsher sentencing. What is an alternative definition that we might adopt?
SA: The definition that I've heard said by quite a few criminal justice experts over the years is if you're going to be truly tough on crime, then measures of success should be a lowering of the crime rate and a lowering of the recidivism rate - the rate at which people who have been in the prison system then come out are bussed back into the prison system, partly because they commit new crimes or they violate parole. Now if you can craft a series of policies that over the long term reduce crime and over the long term reduce the number of people who are cycling through the system then you're really making society safer, and you're doing it in a way that is financially viable because you're not building more and more prisons at a staggering cost. That seems to me the sensible definition of "tough on crime" because it's structural. It means that you're tackling some real root causes of why crime occurs and who is committing it and how to stop it.
What's happening right now is based on the 15-second sound byte. It's the idea that if you can pitch the public a policy that's easy to explain in the 15 seconds that you can be allotted in the local TV news show, then you can claim your "tough on crime" credentials. Now, it's impossible to explain the complicated, good public policy in 15 seconds, but it's very easy to pitch something like "three strikes and you're out" because it's slogan based.
The result is this sort of endless cycle of increased incarceration. We've incarcerated so many people at this point that if they really were tough on crime, with successful, well-defined tough-on-crime laws, we'd have nobody committing crimes at this point. But that's not happening.
The last couple years in all the big cities, including here in Sacramento, the crime rate is up. And it shouldn't be happening, because the incarceration rate is still going up; every year it is going up by 50 or 60 thousand people. So if we really had a successful tough on crime policy, we wouldn't be having these debates right now about why is it so many teenagers are shooting each other, why is it that so many people are still taking drugs?
PP: You took the title "American Furies" from the ancient Greek drama about murder, vengeful spirits, and the creation of a court of justice. How far have we come since those days?
SA: Clearly in some ways we're a world away from the world of ancient Greece. Our technology is different; the scale of our society is different; the things that we find as criminal are different.
The reason that I chose "American Furies" as a title is that I wanted to in a sense explore the mythological qualities of crime and punishment. The Furies in ancient Greece were these goddesses who basically would chase the guilty around the Mediterranean world, and if not directly deal out punishment, would terrorize the guilty into death. They were these far larger-than-life characters that were designed to show how powerfully the Greek society understood notions of right and wrong and crime and punishment. I think that's a perennial theme in the human saga, that society is always going to look at crime and the transgression of the social code as being extremely serious, and it's always going to create its own responses designed to impose order; it's always going to make it's own equivalent to the Greek furies to deal out justice.
What I think happens every few centuries in different parts of the world is that the state goes completely overboard in its response to crime, usually in response to a panic about crime. You see it in Tudor England when there's this rash of hangings. Over a couple decades you see 70,000 people hanged. You see these very vengeful social movements that tend to take the state with them. And I'm arguing in American Furies that America is in the middle of one of these periodic crime hysterias. It's created this larger-than-life response, this almost mythological quality to our criminal justice system.
PP: You explore the history of the criminal justice system in your book. What's next?
SA: We're at a turning point and can go one of two directions. We've either reached the apogee, and we're at the point where it's almost impossible to build more prisons and fund more prisons and put more people in prison. And if that's the case, and there's some evidence that a lot of states are moving in that direction, then we'll see a renewed focus on rehabilitation, we might well see an expansion in drug treatment course, more money to mental health, and that's the somewhat optimistic scenario.
The other scenario is that we're stuck in a cycle of fear. Whether it's fear of drugs, whether it's fear of illegal immigrants, fear about terror, whatever it is. And some of the fears are valid; there's a valid reason to be fearful of terrorism. But I think we're stuck in a moment where these fears may congeal into another epidemic of incarceration. You do see in many border regions these ribbons of facilities set up to house INS detainees, or ICE, Immigration Customs Enforcement detainees. I do think there's a risk that the immigration debate could slide in the direction that makes it more likely that we mass incarcerate illegal immigrants.
PP: What changes do you think would most benefit the criminal justice system?
SA: One of them is mental health. There's a half a million seriously mentally ill people behind bars. That's a huge number, and that's the wrong place for most of them. There are lots of people committing low-end crimes, especially drug crimes, that have serious mental illness that could be much better treated, and much more cheaply treated outside prison. So I think one way to at least start to tackle this problem is to really invest in the community mental health services. Try and catch people with illnesses and treat people with mental illnesses before they end up in court.
I think another thing that overnight would transform the criminal justice system is more sensible dialogue about drugs. That dialogue should change to, "Well, we have a serious crack and heroin epidemic. Is the best approach incarceration, or should we make it possible to access treatment programs from the outside, funded by the state." And then if they do still get in trouble, really create a country-wide instead of a half-hazard network of drug-treatment course. Because, now, depending on where you live, for the same crime, you're either going to prison or to a drug-treatment facility. I think this needs to be standardized.
If you deal with drugs and you deal with mental illness, overnight you reduce the scale of the prison population, and then you can introduce other changes. You can reduce the number of people in prisons; you can invest money in better parole and probation structure and all of that.
PP: What is the most important message or idea to take away from American Furies?
SA: I want American Furies to show people that the criminal justice system isn't behaving in the way that we think and we hope it behaves. And I'm using behave deliberately here, because I think that even though the criminal justice system is basically a series of institutions rather than individuals, it's also very much subject to political whim -- to the whim of politicians, and the mood of the electorate.
I want people to take a deep breath and say, "Alright, nobody wants to live in a world besieged by crime. People who break a law need to pay a price, but are we doing this in the most sensible way possible?" I want them to read my book and come away from it saying, "No we're not." Whether you're left wing or right wing, whether you're a tough law and order person, whether you're a diehard fan of rehabilitation, I think anybody who reads this book should say, alright, we have a real problem here. We have way too many people in prison, and it's coming at a tremendous financial and moral cost to the state of our society.
By Prema Polit, AlterNet
Posted on April 14, 2007, Printed on April 15, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50464/
Prema Polit is an editorial intern at AlterNet.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Can we keep kids from repeating their incarcerated parents' mistakes?
"The kids are not responsible for the decisions we adults make," says an inmate.
More than 2 million childre have a parent in prison and statistics say they'r up to six times more likely to go down that same road than othe children. These are big number that help explain overcrowding outdated prison buildings overworked staffs an shockingly high recidivism rate that plague corrections system nationwide
But there may be a way out of the hole: the Coalition for a Bill of Rights for Children of Incarcerated Parents. Founded in San Francisco in 2003, the Coalition created an eight-point bill of rights meant to protect, educate and care for children whose parents have been incarcerated. This effort has been adopted with gusto in Philadelphia, especially by the Pennsylvania Prison Society, which led a forum last week for advocates, caregivers and people involved in the correctional system to discuss how to care for and protect the rights of these children.
"A lot of what we're doing is raising the issue," says Ann Schwartzman, Prison Society policy director. "These kids really end up being invisible."
The discussion ranged from training law enforcement officials on how to act when there is a child present during the time of the arrest (Right No. 1) and allowing contact visits in prison (Right No. 5) to providing programs to educators and caregivers about how to reduce the stigma or embarrassment that a child with a parent in prison faces (Right No. 7).
Ann Adalist-Estrin, director of the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated, said children face many difficulties if they are not allowed an arena to vent or to meet other kids in a similar position. She applauded the Prison Society for its SKIP (Support for Kids with Incarcerated Parents) program, which meets during school hours and allows children in similar situations to talk. Adalist-Estrin also discussed the importance of maintaining a bond between parent and child, saying that prisoners who have regular visitors are six times less likely to re-enter the system.
"If the children choose to continue this relationship, they should have it," she said, citing solutions such as incarcerating a prisoner close to home and allowing weekend visits.
Community organizations, including the Prison Society, help facilitate these visits by organizing buses to various prisons around the state and having Virtual Visitation programs that allow kids to talk to their parents via video camera. During actual visits, the children are allowed to touch their parent — something unique to Philadelphia. According to prison-system spokesman Bob Eskind, some prisons also provide special rooms away from the general visiting area, if arranged in advance.
"You can certainly hold your child, hug your child, kiss your child," says Eskind. "We're aware that family re-unification is an important issue and we work with a number of outside agencies to try and bridge those gaps."
Still, coalition members say more can be done, such as making visiting rooms more kid-friendly and extending visiting hours so that school-age children are able to attend. Though some prisons in the area have visiting hours until 9 p.m., others require signing in by 4:30 p.m., making it difficult for some children to arrive in time.
While the bill of rights campaign is on its beginning legs in the Philadelphia area — the coalition, still in its formative stage, will ultimately work locally to get some of the "rights" enacted — those at the forum were optimistic that it would find support from politicians, family members and the corrections community. They still have a long way to go.
"We've heard about it," says Eskind. "I don't know if it's led to any re-evaluation of policy, but we're aware of it."
While the group aims for policy changes, looking out for the kids remains focal. As Schwartzman read statements to the crowd from men at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, outside Philadelphia, the desire to keep their kids from making the same mistakes became a familiar refrain.
"The kids are not responsible for the decisions we adults make," one letter read. "It's important for us to explain to our children that it is us, not them, that are responsible.
by Francesca Heintz
More than 2 million childre have a parent in prison and statistics say they'r up to six times more likely to go down that same road than othe children. These are big number that help explain overcrowding outdated prison buildings overworked staffs an shockingly high recidivism rate that plague corrections system nationwide
But there may be a way out of the hole: the Coalition for a Bill of Rights for Children of Incarcerated Parents. Founded in San Francisco in 2003, the Coalition created an eight-point bill of rights meant to protect, educate and care for children whose parents have been incarcerated. This effort has been adopted with gusto in Philadelphia, especially by the Pennsylvania Prison Society, which led a forum last week for advocates, caregivers and people involved in the correctional system to discuss how to care for and protect the rights of these children.
"A lot of what we're doing is raising the issue," says Ann Schwartzman, Prison Society policy director. "These kids really end up being invisible."
The discussion ranged from training law enforcement officials on how to act when there is a child present during the time of the arrest (Right No. 1) and allowing contact visits in prison (Right No. 5) to providing programs to educators and caregivers about how to reduce the stigma or embarrassment that a child with a parent in prison faces (Right No. 7).
Ann Adalist-Estrin, director of the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated, said children face many difficulties if they are not allowed an arena to vent or to meet other kids in a similar position. She applauded the Prison Society for its SKIP (Support for Kids with Incarcerated Parents) program, which meets during school hours and allows children in similar situations to talk. Adalist-Estrin also discussed the importance of maintaining a bond between parent and child, saying that prisoners who have regular visitors are six times less likely to re-enter the system.
"If the children choose to continue this relationship, they should have it," she said, citing solutions such as incarcerating a prisoner close to home and allowing weekend visits.
Community organizations, including the Prison Society, help facilitate these visits by organizing buses to various prisons around the state and having Virtual Visitation programs that allow kids to talk to their parents via video camera. During actual visits, the children are allowed to touch their parent — something unique to Philadelphia. According to prison-system spokesman Bob Eskind, some prisons also provide special rooms away from the general visiting area, if arranged in advance.
"You can certainly hold your child, hug your child, kiss your child," says Eskind. "We're aware that family re-unification is an important issue and we work with a number of outside agencies to try and bridge those gaps."
Still, coalition members say more can be done, such as making visiting rooms more kid-friendly and extending visiting hours so that school-age children are able to attend. Though some prisons in the area have visiting hours until 9 p.m., others require signing in by 4:30 p.m., making it difficult for some children to arrive in time.
While the bill of rights campaign is on its beginning legs in the Philadelphia area — the coalition, still in its formative stage, will ultimately work locally to get some of the "rights" enacted — those at the forum were optimistic that it would find support from politicians, family members and the corrections community. They still have a long way to go.
"We've heard about it," says Eskind. "I don't know if it's led to any re-evaluation of policy, but we're aware of it."
While the group aims for policy changes, looking out for the kids remains focal. As Schwartzman read statements to the crowd from men at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, outside Philadelphia, the desire to keep their kids from making the same mistakes became a familiar refrain.
"The kids are not responsible for the decisions we adults make," one letter read. "It's important for us to explain to our children that it is us, not them, that are responsible.
by Francesca Heintz
Thursday, April 05, 2007
A New Jail for Sarasota County? Part 7
Nobody appeared to be listening when Sarasota County Sheriff Bill Balkwill asked for a new jail last year. The politically repugnant subject was quietly discussed in back rooms, but seldom addressed in public forums before cameras and microphones. That has changed.
On Tuesday, the county commission finally came to grips with the obvious. There aren't enough cells and beds available in the current jail for a fast-growth community such as Sarasota, so there needs to be another one for sentenced prisoners.
Where will it be? How big will it be? What will it look like? Who will run it?. What services will it provide? There are no answers yet, but a consensus exists among the commissioners to spend about $200,000 on a consultant so the planning process can begin.
"There were 1,142 prisoners in jail last November and 1,036 beds," Major Daryl Stinger said. "When we squeeze people into cells, and they sleep on portable beds, there is more pressure on everyone. There are fights. If we start building a new jail today it will still take years to finish."
Commission Chair Nora Patterson acknowledged the predicament. "What I hear is we need a new facility," she said. "People don't think they want a jail located near them because it will hurt property values. But it didn't hurt them when we added onto the downtown jail."
Criminal justice officials and circuit court judges met with the commission to support a process that will probably encounter resistance from some residents who fear the location of jail anywhere near their homes. It is a reality the commission will have to address.
"What we need to do is a have a realistic conversation with the community," Patterson said. "We need to be firm with people and tell them we can't go downtown again. We also have to have a conversation with our cities because they are involved."
The approach commissioners will apparently attempt to take involves wrapping the new jail into a long-range planning process similar to one that took place in Broomfield, Colo., a Denver suburb that built a new jail before nearby offices and apartments were developed.
County officials who recently attended a Denver conference on planning for new facilities such as jails tried to lay out a step-by-step scenario for the commission that would treat the jail as a community amenity rather than a political hot potato.
"We need to think not just 15 years out into the future, but maybe 30 years," Health Department Director Bill Little said. "We're not at the point yet where we're ready to say we need a 200-bed minimum security facility. We have to consider program development and alternatives."
Commissioner Joe Barbetta wasn't convinced. "Jails are for violent criminals," he said. "Of the 1,000 who are in and out of our jail, about 600 are violent and belong. Our efforts should be aimed at the other 400 who probably shouldn't be there."
The problem for those prisoners is often what to do when they leave jail. "Joe Barbetta is right, but it's not that simple," Commissioner Paul Mercier said. "We need to involve our business community in this discussion. People need jobs when they get out of jail."
Because the downtown Sarasota jail is a maximum security facility there is no room for educational services or job training programs. It was a glaring short-coming when commissioners voted for a jail addition in 1998 rather than build a new jail for sentenced prisoners outside the city.
While there was no vote, a commission majority indicated it was time to move forward and County Administrator Jim Ley agreed to produce a contract for consultant services. It shouldn't take long because there is already one on his desk.
It has been there since Jan. 23, when the commission balked at approving $200,000 for a jail consultant and directed administrators to investigate the possibility of building a regional facility with DeSoto and Manatee counties.
Those efforts were reportedly rebuffed at the Colorado conference when DeSoto County officials indicated they would rather address jail and prisoner needs on their own. There was no discussion about the possibility of pursing joint efforts with Manatee County.
by Jack Gurney Pelican Press
On Tuesday, the county commission finally came to grips with the obvious. There aren't enough cells and beds available in the current jail for a fast-growth community such as Sarasota, so there needs to be another one for sentenced prisoners.
Where will it be? How big will it be? What will it look like? Who will run it?. What services will it provide? There are no answers yet, but a consensus exists among the commissioners to spend about $200,000 on a consultant so the planning process can begin.
"There were 1,142 prisoners in jail last November and 1,036 beds," Major Daryl Stinger said. "When we squeeze people into cells, and they sleep on portable beds, there is more pressure on everyone. There are fights. If we start building a new jail today it will still take years to finish."
Commission Chair Nora Patterson acknowledged the predicament. "What I hear is we need a new facility," she said. "People don't think they want a jail located near them because it will hurt property values. But it didn't hurt them when we added onto the downtown jail."
Criminal justice officials and circuit court judges met with the commission to support a process that will probably encounter resistance from some residents who fear the location of jail anywhere near their homes. It is a reality the commission will have to address.
"What we need to do is a have a realistic conversation with the community," Patterson said. "We need to be firm with people and tell them we can't go downtown again. We also have to have a conversation with our cities because they are involved."
The approach commissioners will apparently attempt to take involves wrapping the new jail into a long-range planning process similar to one that took place in Broomfield, Colo., a Denver suburb that built a new jail before nearby offices and apartments were developed.
County officials who recently attended a Denver conference on planning for new facilities such as jails tried to lay out a step-by-step scenario for the commission that would treat the jail as a community amenity rather than a political hot potato.
"We need to think not just 15 years out into the future, but maybe 30 years," Health Department Director Bill Little said. "We're not at the point yet where we're ready to say we need a 200-bed minimum security facility. We have to consider program development and alternatives."
Commissioner Joe Barbetta wasn't convinced. "Jails are for violent criminals," he said. "Of the 1,000 who are in and out of our jail, about 600 are violent and belong. Our efforts should be aimed at the other 400 who probably shouldn't be there."
The problem for those prisoners is often what to do when they leave jail. "Joe Barbetta is right, but it's not that simple," Commissioner Paul Mercier said. "We need to involve our business community in this discussion. People need jobs when they get out of jail."
Because the downtown Sarasota jail is a maximum security facility there is no room for educational services or job training programs. It was a glaring short-coming when commissioners voted for a jail addition in 1998 rather than build a new jail for sentenced prisoners outside the city.
While there was no vote, a commission majority indicated it was time to move forward and County Administrator Jim Ley agreed to produce a contract for consultant services. It shouldn't take long because there is already one on his desk.
It has been there since Jan. 23, when the commission balked at approving $200,000 for a jail consultant and directed administrators to investigate the possibility of building a regional facility with DeSoto and Manatee counties.
Those efforts were reportedly rebuffed at the Colorado conference when DeSoto County officials indicated they would rather address jail and prisoner needs on their own. There was no discussion about the possibility of pursing joint efforts with Manatee County.
by Jack Gurney Pelican Press
Juvenile Justice in Sarasota:
Sarasota County commissioners learned officially Tuesday morning what many of them have known privately for a while: Too often young offenders aren't being arrested, and therefore don't receive help in substance abuse, mental health or behavioral programs until they become adults or commit serious offenses - when it may be too late.
The reason: Sarasota County today has no facility to evaluate juvenile offenders and determine whether to jail them in a regional juvenile detention facility in Bradenton, or send them to a diversionary program in Sarasota.
Sarasota's old Juvenile Assessment Center, once housed in the county jail by the courthouse downtown, was closed down Oct. 1 in compliance with a state law, the Martin Lee Anderson Act, named for a youth killed by poorly trained officers in a detention center boot camp.
Ever since, assessment center staffers have had to work out of a Bradenton detention center, which means officers who arrest minors must drive them to Bradenton in their squad cars, wait for assessment professionals to make a determination - which officials say can take upwards of two hours - and sometimes drive the offender back home or to another facility after that.
That can mean four hours off the street for a Sarasota Police officer, and maybe six or more for an officer from the North Port Police Department. As a result, juvenile arrests fell quickly by 50 percent or more for the first few months after the assessment center closed, and remain at least 25 percent below last year's arrest rate, although juvenile justice personnel say that actual offenses are being committed at the same rate or higher.
Police officers and sheriff's deputies are just far less willing to make an arrest.
Ironically that falloff is making it hard to justify staffing the two juvenile assessment centers in Sarasota County - one near North Port and another in the City of Sarasota - which law enforcement agencies have requested.
"It's a real Catch-22," said Criminal Justice Coordinator James Schulz. "Police on the streets have the ability to make a choice [about making an arrest], and with borderline cases, juvenile offenders might not get to the JAC."
The commission on Tuesday asked staffers to explore a new, temporary assessment center site in north county near I-75, and estimate the costs of at least a part-time center in North Port Police headquarters offered for that purpose by Chief Terry Lewis.
Coastal Behavioral Health Care, the county contractor that runs the assessment center, will work up cost estimates for an upcoming commission meeting, said the agency's CEO, Jerry Thompson.
Fortunately, some $665,000 was earmarked for a new center in the local option sales tax extension budget approved in 2000, he said.
A secure assessment facility at the county jail downtown is part of a pending remodeling project that should be ready in 12 to 14 months, according to Schulz.
County Administrator Jim Ley used Tuesday's discussion to criticize the state for what amounts to another "unfunded mandate" inherent in the Anderson Act, forcing the counties to spend money because of its changes in state law.
But Commissioner Shannon Staub said the discussion should be refocused. "No, it's about the kids," she said. "We're not now taking charge of the kids we can turn around. We have to step back and see if we can find a solution for the kids."
In 1998, state authorities encouraged Sarasota County to provide land for a separate, 52-bed detention facility where juveniles could be assessed and - if necessary - detained. The county commission would not commit to the project.
The state funds for that project were eventually shifted to provide 20 new beds in an expansion of the Manatee County Juvenile Detention Center, and 20 beds were added to a Marion County facility to improve its intake and screening capability.
The state currently allocates $210,000 a year for the operation of a juvenile assessment center in Sarasota County, while the county allocates $300,000 so Coastal Behavioral Health Care experts can screen troubled youths and make referrals.
by Rick Barry Pelican Press
The reason: Sarasota County today has no facility to evaluate juvenile offenders and determine whether to jail them in a regional juvenile detention facility in Bradenton, or send them to a diversionary program in Sarasota.
Sarasota's old Juvenile Assessment Center, once housed in the county jail by the courthouse downtown, was closed down Oct. 1 in compliance with a state law, the Martin Lee Anderson Act, named for a youth killed by poorly trained officers in a detention center boot camp.
Ever since, assessment center staffers have had to work out of a Bradenton detention center, which means officers who arrest minors must drive them to Bradenton in their squad cars, wait for assessment professionals to make a determination - which officials say can take upwards of two hours - and sometimes drive the offender back home or to another facility after that.
That can mean four hours off the street for a Sarasota Police officer, and maybe six or more for an officer from the North Port Police Department. As a result, juvenile arrests fell quickly by 50 percent or more for the first few months after the assessment center closed, and remain at least 25 percent below last year's arrest rate, although juvenile justice personnel say that actual offenses are being committed at the same rate or higher.
Police officers and sheriff's deputies are just far less willing to make an arrest.
Ironically that falloff is making it hard to justify staffing the two juvenile assessment centers in Sarasota County - one near North Port and another in the City of Sarasota - which law enforcement agencies have requested.
"It's a real Catch-22," said Criminal Justice Coordinator James Schulz. "Police on the streets have the ability to make a choice [about making an arrest], and with borderline cases, juvenile offenders might not get to the JAC."
The commission on Tuesday asked staffers to explore a new, temporary assessment center site in north county near I-75, and estimate the costs of at least a part-time center in North Port Police headquarters offered for that purpose by Chief Terry Lewis.
Coastal Behavioral Health Care, the county contractor that runs the assessment center, will work up cost estimates for an upcoming commission meeting, said the agency's CEO, Jerry Thompson.
Fortunately, some $665,000 was earmarked for a new center in the local option sales tax extension budget approved in 2000, he said.
A secure assessment facility at the county jail downtown is part of a pending remodeling project that should be ready in 12 to 14 months, according to Schulz.
County Administrator Jim Ley used Tuesday's discussion to criticize the state for what amounts to another "unfunded mandate" inherent in the Anderson Act, forcing the counties to spend money because of its changes in state law.
But Commissioner Shannon Staub said the discussion should be refocused. "No, it's about the kids," she said. "We're not now taking charge of the kids we can turn around. We have to step back and see if we can find a solution for the kids."
In 1998, state authorities encouraged Sarasota County to provide land for a separate, 52-bed detention facility where juveniles could be assessed and - if necessary - detained. The county commission would not commit to the project.
The state funds for that project were eventually shifted to provide 20 new beds in an expansion of the Manatee County Juvenile Detention Center, and 20 beds were added to a Marion County facility to improve its intake and screening capability.
The state currently allocates $210,000 a year for the operation of a juvenile assessment center in Sarasota County, while the county allocates $300,000 so Coastal Behavioral Health Care experts can screen troubled youths and make referrals.
by Rick Barry Pelican Press
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Congress Should Listen to The Judges on Mandatory Sentencing:
Every effort to scrap or modify the blatantly unfair minimum mandatory sentencing law for illicit drug abusers has crashed against two things. The first was then President Bill Clinton's half-hearted fight to change the disparity sentencing in the law in Congress in the mid-1990s. Next, it crashed against President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress's dogged battle against changing the sentencing disparity. The law requires that judges slap a minimum mandatory sentence of five years on anyone caught with crack cocaine. Those convicted are mostly poor blacks. Those caught with the same amount of powdered cocaine, mostly whites, often middle-class suburban whites get a comparative hand slap sentence.
Clinton, Bush and Congress easily turned a tin ear to those screaming for reform as along as they were the usual suspects, the ACLU, black and Latino activists, a handful of elected officials, drug reform organizations, and criminal justice reform advocates. Congress may have a harder time ignoring the latest to raise their voices against the law. The ones screaming louder this time are federal judges. Many of them are Reagan and Bush appointees, have impeccable conservative credentials, and are not bleeding heart liberals on crime. But a growing number of them say it's time for change in the laws.
Michigan Democrat John Conyers, the new chair of the House judiciary Committee, and a long time crusader against sentencing disparities has pledged to hold hearings on the disastrous impact of the laws. And they have been a disaster.
When Congress enacted the law in 1986, the idea was to use tougher drug sentencing to rid the streets of violent, drug kingpins. At the time, drug and gun violence tore many poor black neighborhoods, and police and terrified residents demanded a crackdown. The law hammered poor blacks, had almost no affect on the drug lords, and gave white drug users a relatively free legal pass. The problem for the judges was that the laws stripped them of much of their discretionary legal authority to impose sentences. In several judicial districts, judges quietly rebelled, bent the rules, and lightened sentences for some first time offenders.
In at least one case, a judge resigned from the bench in protest against the mandatory sentencing laws. Even Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Anthony M. Kennedy, and the late William Rehnquist have publicly called for scrapping or at least modifying the mandatory law. This drew a loud rebuke from then Attorney General John Ashcroft. There were open threats to retaliate against the dissenting judges.
Meanwhile, the majority of blacks that are sentenced under the law, and that's upward of 80 percent, are poor, ill educated. They fit the increasingly standard, and disturbing profile of thousands of federal prisoners. Though studies confirm that black illicit drug use is no greater than that of whites, they are less likely to be offered a chance to plea bargain, black drug offenders are more likely to fall under federal or state minimum mandatory sentencing law, and will serve a sentence nearly double that of whites. The escalation in black incarceration is the single biggest cause of the massive bulge in the number of inmates in federal prisons. The number has jumped four fold since the late 1980s, and more than half of them are there for drug crimes, or other petty offenses.
The law has wreaked havoc on many black communities and families. A handful of states permanently ban ex-felons from voting. More than half of those disenfranchised are black men. The voting ban diminishes the political power of the black communities. Women convicted of felony drug offenses are also barred for life from receiving welfare benefits. This puts thousands of women and their children at dire social risk and increases the likelihood that they will commit more crimes. The high black imprisonment rate also drastically increases health risks and costs in black communities, since many prisoners are released with chronic medical afflictions, particularly HIV/AIDS.
The mandatory sentencing law has been a costly white elephant, and has done nothing to curb violent crime. More states realize that stuffing thousands in jail cells is no cure for crime and drug ills. In Michigan, California and New York, courts are much more willing to send people to drug treatment programs rather than prison. And a growing number of states have repealed, or modified their mandatory sentencing laws. Still, it's the judges that can make a difference with Congress. Breyer, Kennedy and the other federal judges that protest minimum mandatory sentencing have repeatedly said that the laws are wasteful, harmful, and a judicial embarrassment that threatens the legal independence of judges. The law further mocks the concept of equal protection under the law for rich and poor alike.
Conyers should move with all due speed to get congressional hearings going and show the damage of sentencing disparities. Then Congress should change or end them.
by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in September.
Clinton, Bush and Congress easily turned a tin ear to those screaming for reform as along as they were the usual suspects, the ACLU, black and Latino activists, a handful of elected officials, drug reform organizations, and criminal justice reform advocates. Congress may have a harder time ignoring the latest to raise their voices against the law. The ones screaming louder this time are federal judges. Many of them are Reagan and Bush appointees, have impeccable conservative credentials, and are not bleeding heart liberals on crime. But a growing number of them say it's time for change in the laws.
Michigan Democrat John Conyers, the new chair of the House judiciary Committee, and a long time crusader against sentencing disparities has pledged to hold hearings on the disastrous impact of the laws. And they have been a disaster.
When Congress enacted the law in 1986, the idea was to use tougher drug sentencing to rid the streets of violent, drug kingpins. At the time, drug and gun violence tore many poor black neighborhoods, and police and terrified residents demanded a crackdown. The law hammered poor blacks, had almost no affect on the drug lords, and gave white drug users a relatively free legal pass. The problem for the judges was that the laws stripped them of much of their discretionary legal authority to impose sentences. In several judicial districts, judges quietly rebelled, bent the rules, and lightened sentences for some first time offenders.
In at least one case, a judge resigned from the bench in protest against the mandatory sentencing laws. Even Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Anthony M. Kennedy, and the late William Rehnquist have publicly called for scrapping or at least modifying the mandatory law. This drew a loud rebuke from then Attorney General John Ashcroft. There were open threats to retaliate against the dissenting judges.
Meanwhile, the majority of blacks that are sentenced under the law, and that's upward of 80 percent, are poor, ill educated. They fit the increasingly standard, and disturbing profile of thousands of federal prisoners. Though studies confirm that black illicit drug use is no greater than that of whites, they are less likely to be offered a chance to plea bargain, black drug offenders are more likely to fall under federal or state minimum mandatory sentencing law, and will serve a sentence nearly double that of whites. The escalation in black incarceration is the single biggest cause of the massive bulge in the number of inmates in federal prisons. The number has jumped four fold since the late 1980s, and more than half of them are there for drug crimes, or other petty offenses.
The law has wreaked havoc on many black communities and families. A handful of states permanently ban ex-felons from voting. More than half of those disenfranchised are black men. The voting ban diminishes the political power of the black communities. Women convicted of felony drug offenses are also barred for life from receiving welfare benefits. This puts thousands of women and their children at dire social risk and increases the likelihood that they will commit more crimes. The high black imprisonment rate also drastically increases health risks and costs in black communities, since many prisoners are released with chronic medical afflictions, particularly HIV/AIDS.
The mandatory sentencing law has been a costly white elephant, and has done nothing to curb violent crime. More states realize that stuffing thousands in jail cells is no cure for crime and drug ills. In Michigan, California and New York, courts are much more willing to send people to drug treatment programs rather than prison. And a growing number of states have repealed, or modified their mandatory sentencing laws. Still, it's the judges that can make a difference with Congress. Breyer, Kennedy and the other federal judges that protest minimum mandatory sentencing have repeatedly said that the laws are wasteful, harmful, and a judicial embarrassment that threatens the legal independence of judges. The law further mocks the concept of equal protection under the law for rich and poor alike.
Conyers should move with all due speed to get congressional hearings going and show the damage of sentencing disparities. Then Congress should change or end them.
by Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in September.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The War on Drugs Is Really a War on Minorities
There is a subject being forgotten in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House.
While all the major candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed "war on drugs" -- a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.
Consider this: According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino.
Such facts have been bandied about for years. But our politicians have consistently failed to take action on what has become yet another third rail of American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by elected officials who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.
Perhaps you hoped this would change during a spirited Democratic presidential primary? Unfortunately, a quick search of the top Democratic hopefuls' websites reveals that not one of them -- not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, not John Edwards, not Joe Biden, not Chris Dodd, not Bill Richardson -- even mentions the drug war, let alone offers any solutions.
The silence coming from Clinton and Obama is particularly deafening.
Obama has written eloquently about his own struggle with drugs but has not addressed the tragic effect the war on drugs is having on African American communities.
As for Clinton, she flew into Selma, Ala., to reinforce her image as the wife of the black community's most beloved politician and has made much of her plan to attract female voters, but she has ignored the suffering of poor, black women right in her own backyard.
Located down the road from her Chappaqua, N.Y., home are two prisons housing female inmates, Taconic and Bedford. Forty-eight percent of the women in Taconic are there for nonviolent drug offenses; 78% of those in the prison are African American or Latino.
And Bedford, the state's only maximum-security prison for women, is home to some of the worst victims of New York's draconian Rockefeller-era drug laws -- mothers and grandmothers whose first brush with the law resulted in their being locked away for 15 years or more on nonviolent drug charges.
Yet even though these prisons are so nearby, Clinton has turned a blind eye to the plight of the women locked away there, notably refusing to speak out on their behalf.
Avoidance of this issue comes at a very stiff price (and not just the more than $50 billion a year we're spending on the failed drug war). The toll is paid in shattered families, devastated inner cities and wasted lives (with no apologies for using that term).
During the 10 years I've been writing about the injustice of the drug war, I've repeatedly watched as politicians paid lip service to the problem but then ducked as the sickening status quo claimed more victims. In California, of the 171,000 inmates jamming the state's wildly overcrowded prisons, 36,000 are nonviolent drug offenders.
I remember in 1999 asking Dan Bartlett, then the campaign spokesman for candidate George W. Bush, about Bush's position on the outrageous disparity between the sentences meted out for possession of crack cocaine and those given for possession of powder cocaine -- a disparity that has helped fill U.S. prisons with black low-level drug users (80% of sentenced crack defendants are black). Federal sentencing guidelines dictate that judges impose the same five-year prison sentence for possession of five grams of crack or 500 grams of powder cocaine.
"The different sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine is something that there's no doubt needs to be addressed," Bartlett told me. But in the more than six years since Bush and Bartlett moved into the White House, the problem has gone unaddressed. No doubt about it.
Maybe the president will suddenly wake up and decide to take on the issue five days before he leaves office. That's what Bill Clinton did, writing a 2001 New York Times Op-Ed article in which he trumpeted the need to "immediately reduce the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences" -- conveniently ignoring the fact that he had the power to solve it for eight years and did nothing.
When it mattered, he maintained an imperial silence. Then, when it didn't, he became Captain Courageous. And he lamented the failures of our drug policy as though he had been an innocent bystander rather than the chief executive (indeed, the prison population doubled on his watch).
The injustice is so egregious that a conservative senator, Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), is now leading the charge in Congress to ease crack sentences. "I believe that as a matter of law enforcement and good public policy, crack cocaine sentences are too heavy and can't be justified," he said. "People don't want us to be soft on crime, but I think we ought to make the law more rational."
There's a talking point Hillary and Obama should adopt. It's both the right thing and the smart thing. Because of disenfranchisement statutes, large numbers of black men who were convicted of drug crimes are ineligible to vote, even those who have fully paid their debt to society.
A 2000 study found that 1.4 million African American men -- 13% of the total black male population -- were unable to vote in the 2000 election because of state laws barring felons access to the polls. In Florida, one in three black men is permanently disqualified from voting. Think that might have made a difference in the 2000 race? Our shortsighted drug laws have become the 21st century manifestation of Jim Crow.
Shouldn't this be an issue Democratic presidential candidates deem worthy of their attention?
By Arianna Huffington, Los Angeles Times
While all the major candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed "war on drugs" -- a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.
Consider this: According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino.
Such facts have been bandied about for years. But our politicians have consistently failed to take action on what has become yet another third rail of American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by elected officials who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.
Perhaps you hoped this would change during a spirited Democratic presidential primary? Unfortunately, a quick search of the top Democratic hopefuls' websites reveals that not one of them -- not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, not John Edwards, not Joe Biden, not Chris Dodd, not Bill Richardson -- even mentions the drug war, let alone offers any solutions.
The silence coming from Clinton and Obama is particularly deafening.
Obama has written eloquently about his own struggle with drugs but has not addressed the tragic effect the war on drugs is having on African American communities.
As for Clinton, she flew into Selma, Ala., to reinforce her image as the wife of the black community's most beloved politician and has made much of her plan to attract female voters, but she has ignored the suffering of poor, black women right in her own backyard.
Located down the road from her Chappaqua, N.Y., home are two prisons housing female inmates, Taconic and Bedford. Forty-eight percent of the women in Taconic are there for nonviolent drug offenses; 78% of those in the prison are African American or Latino.
And Bedford, the state's only maximum-security prison for women, is home to some of the worst victims of New York's draconian Rockefeller-era drug laws -- mothers and grandmothers whose first brush with the law resulted in their being locked away for 15 years or more on nonviolent drug charges.
Yet even though these prisons are so nearby, Clinton has turned a blind eye to the plight of the women locked away there, notably refusing to speak out on their behalf.
Avoidance of this issue comes at a very stiff price (and not just the more than $50 billion a year we're spending on the failed drug war). The toll is paid in shattered families, devastated inner cities and wasted lives (with no apologies for using that term).
During the 10 years I've been writing about the injustice of the drug war, I've repeatedly watched as politicians paid lip service to the problem but then ducked as the sickening status quo claimed more victims. In California, of the 171,000 inmates jamming the state's wildly overcrowded prisons, 36,000 are nonviolent drug offenders.
I remember in 1999 asking Dan Bartlett, then the campaign spokesman for candidate George W. Bush, about Bush's position on the outrageous disparity between the sentences meted out for possession of crack cocaine and those given for possession of powder cocaine -- a disparity that has helped fill U.S. prisons with black low-level drug users (80% of sentenced crack defendants are black). Federal sentencing guidelines dictate that judges impose the same five-year prison sentence for possession of five grams of crack or 500 grams of powder cocaine.
"The different sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine is something that there's no doubt needs to be addressed," Bartlett told me. But in the more than six years since Bush and Bartlett moved into the White House, the problem has gone unaddressed. No doubt about it.
Maybe the president will suddenly wake up and decide to take on the issue five days before he leaves office. That's what Bill Clinton did, writing a 2001 New York Times Op-Ed article in which he trumpeted the need to "immediately reduce the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences" -- conveniently ignoring the fact that he had the power to solve it for eight years and did nothing.
When it mattered, he maintained an imperial silence. Then, when it didn't, he became Captain Courageous. And he lamented the failures of our drug policy as though he had been an innocent bystander rather than the chief executive (indeed, the prison population doubled on his watch).
The injustice is so egregious that a conservative senator, Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), is now leading the charge in Congress to ease crack sentences. "I believe that as a matter of law enforcement and good public policy, crack cocaine sentences are too heavy and can't be justified," he said. "People don't want us to be soft on crime, but I think we ought to make the law more rational."
There's a talking point Hillary and Obama should adopt. It's both the right thing and the smart thing. Because of disenfranchisement statutes, large numbers of black men who were convicted of drug crimes are ineligible to vote, even those who have fully paid their debt to society.
A 2000 study found that 1.4 million African American men -- 13% of the total black male population -- were unable to vote in the 2000 election because of state laws barring felons access to the polls. In Florida, one in three black men is permanently disqualified from voting. Think that might have made a difference in the 2000 race? Our shortsighted drug laws have become the 21st century manifestation of Jim Crow.
Shouldn't this be an issue Democratic presidential candidates deem worthy of their attention?
By Arianna Huffington, Los Angeles Times
Florida judge pulls gun in Court
A Jacksonville judge pulled a gun in court and now the local public defender is questioning the incident.
Judge John Merrett says emotions were running high in court last Friday.
"Apparently a valve popped," says Merrett.
Judge Merrett says it was during a court hearing for Derrick McNiel. McNiel, 21, is charged with sexually battering a six-year-old boy. Merrett says during the hearing, the child's father got upset and jumped over the bar and attacked McNiel.
The incident took place right in front of the judge. The only problem is Judge Merrett couldn't see what was going on.
"I have a huge blind spot on either side of my bench, and all that I could tell was there was some kind of violence going on down on the floor. I didn't know if he was after me, or after the bailiffs, or after the defendants or what he was doing."
Judge Merrett carries a concealed weapons permit. The day of the incident, Judge Merrett was carrying his pistol too.
"I pulled out my sidearm and looked to see what was going on, and when I saw that there were no weapons involved and and it didn't appear that anybody was in any serious danger, I handed the pistol off to my clerk so I wouldn't have it in my hand when I went down there," says Merrett.
The incident has sparked a debate on whether judges should be able to carry a gun in court. By law, they are allowed to with a concealed weapons permit.
Judge Merrett says he never had his hand on the trigger or pointed the gun at anyone.
The public defender, Bill White, would only say he is concerned about judges carrying guns in court. White says he has a meeting with Chief Judge Moran about disarming judges on Thursday. White said he would say more about the incident then.
Chief Judge Moran did not return phone calls for comment.
The father of the boy was charged in the incident and released.
Judge John Merrett says emotions were running high in court last Friday.
"Apparently a valve popped," says Merrett.
Judge Merrett says it was during a court hearing for Derrick McNiel. McNiel, 21, is charged with sexually battering a six-year-old boy. Merrett says during the hearing, the child's father got upset and jumped over the bar and attacked McNiel.
The incident took place right in front of the judge. The only problem is Judge Merrett couldn't see what was going on.
"I have a huge blind spot on either side of my bench, and all that I could tell was there was some kind of violence going on down on the floor. I didn't know if he was after me, or after the bailiffs, or after the defendants or what he was doing."
Judge Merrett carries a concealed weapons permit. The day of the incident, Judge Merrett was carrying his pistol too.
"I pulled out my sidearm and looked to see what was going on, and when I saw that there were no weapons involved and and it didn't appear that anybody was in any serious danger, I handed the pistol off to my clerk so I wouldn't have it in my hand when I went down there," says Merrett.
The incident has sparked a debate on whether judges should be able to carry a gun in court. By law, they are allowed to with a concealed weapons permit.
Judge Merrett says he never had his hand on the trigger or pointed the gun at anyone.
The public defender, Bill White, would only say he is concerned about judges carrying guns in court. White says he has a meeting with Chief Judge Moran about disarming judges on Thursday. White said he would say more about the incident then.
Chief Judge Moran did not return phone calls for comment.
The father of the boy was charged in the incident and released.
Friday, March 23, 2007
It's Been an 'All Out War' on Pot Smokers for 35 Years
Thirty-five years ago this month, a congressionally mandated commission on U.S. drug policy did something extraordinary: They told the truth about marijuana.
On March 22, 1972, the National Commission on Marihuana (sic) and Drug Abuse -- chaired by former Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond P. Shafer -- recommended Congress amend federal law so that the use and possession of pot would no longer be a criminal offense. State legislatures, the commission added, should do likewise.
"[T]he criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession even in the effort to discourage use," concluded the commission, which included several conservative appointees of then-President Richard Nixon. "It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior, which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only with the greatest reluctance.
"... Therefore, the commission recommends ... [that the] possession of marihuana for personal use no longer be an offense, [and that the] casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration, no longer be an offense."
Nixon, true to his "law-and-order" roots, shelved the report -- announcing instead that when it came to weed, "We need, and I use the word 'all out war' on all fronts." For the last 35 years, that's what we've had.
Consider this: Since the Shafer Commission issued its recommendations:
Approximately 16.5 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana violations -- more than 80 percent of them on minor possession charges.
U.S. taxpayers have spent well over $20 billion enforcing criminal marijuana laws, yet marijuana availability and use among the public remains virtually unchanged.
Nearly one-quarter of a million Americans have been denied federal financial aid for secondary education because of anti-drug provisions to the Higher Education Act. Most of these applicants were convicted of minor marijuana possession offenses.
Total U.S. marijuana arrests increased 165 percent during the 1990s, from 287,850 in 1991 to well over 700,000 in 2000, before reaching an all-time high of nearly 800,000 in 2005. However, according to the government's own data, this dramatic increase in the number of persons arrested for pot was not associated with any reduction in the number of new users, any reduction in marijuana potency, or any increases in the black market price of marijuana.
Currently, one in eight inmates incarcerated for drug crimes is behind bars for pot, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1 billion per year.
Perhaps most troubling, the factor most likely to determine whether or not these citizens serve jail time or not isn't the severity of their "crime," but rather where they live. Today there are growing regional disparities in marijuana penalties and marijuana law enforcement -- ranging from no penalty in Alaska to potential life in prison in Oklahoma. In fact, if one were to drive from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Ore., he or she would traverse more than a dozen jurisdictions, all with varying degrees of penalties and/or tolerance toward the possession and use of pot.
Does this sound like a successful national policy?
There is another approach, of course. The Shafer Commission showed the way more than three decades ago.
Marijuana isn't a harmless substance, and those who argue for a change in the drug's legal status do not claim it to be. However, as noted by the commission, pot's relative risks to the user and society are arguably fewer than those of alcohol and tobacco, and they do not warrant the expenses associated with targeting, arresting and prosecuting hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
According to federal statistics, about 94 million Americans -- that's 40 percent of the U.S. population age 12 or older -- self-identify as having used cannabis at some point in their lives, and relatively few acknowledge having suffered significant deleterious health effects due to their use. America's public policies should reflect this reality, not deny it. It makes no sense to continue to treat nearly half of all Americans as criminals.
written by
Paul Armentano the senior policy analyst for NORML and the NORML Foundation in Washington, D.C.
On March 22, 1972, the National Commission on Marihuana (sic) and Drug Abuse -- chaired by former Pennsylvania Gov. Raymond P. Shafer -- recommended Congress amend federal law so that the use and possession of pot would no longer be a criminal offense. State legislatures, the commission added, should do likewise.
"[T]he criminal law is too harsh a tool to apply to personal possession even in the effort to discourage use," concluded the commission, which included several conservative appointees of then-President Richard Nixon. "It implies an overwhelming indictment of the behavior, which we believe is not appropriate. The actual and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion by the criminal law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only with the greatest reluctance.
"... Therefore, the commission recommends ... [that the] possession of marihuana for personal use no longer be an offense, [and that the] casual distribution of small amounts of marihuana for no remuneration, or insignificant remuneration, no longer be an offense."
Nixon, true to his "law-and-order" roots, shelved the report -- announcing instead that when it came to weed, "We need, and I use the word 'all out war' on all fronts." For the last 35 years, that's what we've had.
Consider this: Since the Shafer Commission issued its recommendations:
Approximately 16.5 million Americans have been arrested for marijuana violations -- more than 80 percent of them on minor possession charges.
U.S. taxpayers have spent well over $20 billion enforcing criminal marijuana laws, yet marijuana availability and use among the public remains virtually unchanged.
Nearly one-quarter of a million Americans have been denied federal financial aid for secondary education because of anti-drug provisions to the Higher Education Act. Most of these applicants were convicted of minor marijuana possession offenses.
Total U.S. marijuana arrests increased 165 percent during the 1990s, from 287,850 in 1991 to well over 700,000 in 2000, before reaching an all-time high of nearly 800,000 in 2005. However, according to the government's own data, this dramatic increase in the number of persons arrested for pot was not associated with any reduction in the number of new users, any reduction in marijuana potency, or any increases in the black market price of marijuana.
Currently, one in eight inmates incarcerated for drug crimes is behind bars for pot, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1 billion per year.
Perhaps most troubling, the factor most likely to determine whether or not these citizens serve jail time or not isn't the severity of their "crime," but rather where they live. Today there are growing regional disparities in marijuana penalties and marijuana law enforcement -- ranging from no penalty in Alaska to potential life in prison in Oklahoma. In fact, if one were to drive from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Ore., he or she would traverse more than a dozen jurisdictions, all with varying degrees of penalties and/or tolerance toward the possession and use of pot.
Does this sound like a successful national policy?
There is another approach, of course. The Shafer Commission showed the way more than three decades ago.
Marijuana isn't a harmless substance, and those who argue for a change in the drug's legal status do not claim it to be. However, as noted by the commission, pot's relative risks to the user and society are arguably fewer than those of alcohol and tobacco, and they do not warrant the expenses associated with targeting, arresting and prosecuting hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
According to federal statistics, about 94 million Americans -- that's 40 percent of the U.S. population age 12 or older -- self-identify as having used cannabis at some point in their lives, and relatively few acknowledge having suffered significant deleterious health effects due to their use. America's public policies should reflect this reality, not deny it. It makes no sense to continue to treat nearly half of all Americans as criminals.
written by
Paul Armentano the senior policy analyst for NORML and the NORML Foundation in Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
A New jail for Sarasota County? Part 6
A politically unpleasant decision to build new jail facilities for sentenced prisoners outside of downtown Sarasota will have to be addressed by Sarasota County elected officials, but only after a long-range planning exercise plays out.
On March 26, a six-person county contingent of jail administrators and others who must deal with the swelling prisoner population will leave for a detention services conference outside Denver that could provide some answers about how best to proceed.
"It should help us get better prepared for an April 3 workshop with the county commission," said James Schulz, the county's criminal justice coordinator. "We haven't determined exactly what this community needs yet. There are questions we have to answer."
What Sheriff Bill Balkwill, Schulz and others want to avoid is last-minute decisions handed down by cornered commissioners who are forced to address jail overcrowding while at the same time placating residents who don't want a facility near their neighborhood.
It happened in 1998 when the commission buckled to pressure from Laurel area residents and grossly overpaid for a downtown maximum security jail addition rather than build a medium security facility near the new landfill east of Interstate-75.
As a result, the sheriff's jail staff was unable to provide space for rehabilitative services such as life skills, job training and continuing education, or set up metal and sewing shops where sentenced prisoners could work while serving out terms of less than one year.
"Had I been here when the north wing [jail addition] was built," Schulz said, "I would have asked how long 288 new beds will last. The next steps taken need to be more long-term and provide flexibility. I'm telling everyone I know we're going to outgrow this downtown jail."
Last year, Balkwill asked the county to build a new medium security detention facility outside the city so approximately 200 sentenced prisoners could be removed from the jail population, which is rapidly reaching its capacity of 1,050 beds.
On Jan. 23, the commission balked when asked to approve more than $200,000 for a jail consultant's expert advice, but agreed to revisit the issue as part of a discussion that includes the possibility of a regional facility for sentenced prisoners.
Criminal justice officials were directed to contact both DeSoto and Manatee counties to determine whether they would consider jointly building and operating a new facility for sentenced prisoners. Those conversations have not taken place.
"We haven't rushed off to explore this option with DeSoto and Manatee yet," Schulz said. "DeSoto has also accepted an invitation to attend the conference in Colorado, so we'll be talking to them about partnering. We have time for a deliberative process."
At its Jan. 23 meeting, and in a follow-up discussion on Feb. 2, the commission agreed to resume deliberations after criminal justice officials : 1) investigate a regional jail; 2) analyze the existing jail; 3) identify what is needed in a new jail; and (4) make the case for a new jail.
written by Jack Gurney Pelican Press
On March 26, a six-person county contingent of jail administrators and others who must deal with the swelling prisoner population will leave for a detention services conference outside Denver that could provide some answers about how best to proceed.
"It should help us get better prepared for an April 3 workshop with the county commission," said James Schulz, the county's criminal justice coordinator. "We haven't determined exactly what this community needs yet. There are questions we have to answer."
What Sheriff Bill Balkwill, Schulz and others want to avoid is last-minute decisions handed down by cornered commissioners who are forced to address jail overcrowding while at the same time placating residents who don't want a facility near their neighborhood.
It happened in 1998 when the commission buckled to pressure from Laurel area residents and grossly overpaid for a downtown maximum security jail addition rather than build a medium security facility near the new landfill east of Interstate-75.
As a result, the sheriff's jail staff was unable to provide space for rehabilitative services such as life skills, job training and continuing education, or set up metal and sewing shops where sentenced prisoners could work while serving out terms of less than one year.
"Had I been here when the north wing [jail addition] was built," Schulz said, "I would have asked how long 288 new beds will last. The next steps taken need to be more long-term and provide flexibility. I'm telling everyone I know we're going to outgrow this downtown jail."
Last year, Balkwill asked the county to build a new medium security detention facility outside the city so approximately 200 sentenced prisoners could be removed from the jail population, which is rapidly reaching its capacity of 1,050 beds.
On Jan. 23, the commission balked when asked to approve more than $200,000 for a jail consultant's expert advice, but agreed to revisit the issue as part of a discussion that includes the possibility of a regional facility for sentenced prisoners.
Criminal justice officials were directed to contact both DeSoto and Manatee counties to determine whether they would consider jointly building and operating a new facility for sentenced prisoners. Those conversations have not taken place.
"We haven't rushed off to explore this option with DeSoto and Manatee yet," Schulz said. "DeSoto has also accepted an invitation to attend the conference in Colorado, so we'll be talking to them about partnering. We have time for a deliberative process."
At its Jan. 23 meeting, and in a follow-up discussion on Feb. 2, the commission agreed to resume deliberations after criminal justice officials : 1) investigate a regional jail; 2) analyze the existing jail; 3) identify what is needed in a new jail; and (4) make the case for a new jail.
written by Jack Gurney Pelican Press
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Judge jails stenographer over transcript
A stenographer who failed to deliver a transcript needed for an appeal was sentenced to jail for contempt of court.
Circuit Judge Charles Greene said Friday he will release stenographer Ann Margaret Smith, 44, as soon as she completes the transcript, The Miami Herald reported.
Smith's equipment and notes will be sent to the jail and the Broward Sheriff's Office will provide her a place to work, according to the judge's orders.
"You have a person in custody," Greene said. "No one can do a thing because you don't have a transcript."
An appeals court had asked the judge for a transcript from the trial of a man sentenced to three consecutive life terms for kidnapping a toddler from his bed, wrapping the boy's head with duct tape, and raping him, Greene said. He said the appeal can't move forward without the transcript.
In a contempt hearing on Feb. 9, the judge ordered Smith to finish the transcript by Feb. 28 and not to take on any more trials in Broward County until then. She was jailed when she failed to comply.
It was not immediately known if she had an attorney.
AP 3/10/07
Circuit Judge Charles Greene said Friday he will release stenographer Ann Margaret Smith, 44, as soon as she completes the transcript, The Miami Herald reported.
Smith's equipment and notes will be sent to the jail and the Broward Sheriff's Office will provide her a place to work, according to the judge's orders.
"You have a person in custody," Greene said. "No one can do a thing because you don't have a transcript."
An appeals court had asked the judge for a transcript from the trial of a man sentenced to three consecutive life terms for kidnapping a toddler from his bed, wrapping the boy's head with duct tape, and raping him, Greene said. He said the appeal can't move forward without the transcript.
In a contempt hearing on Feb. 9, the judge ordered Smith to finish the transcript by Feb. 28 and not to take on any more trials in Broward County until then. She was jailed when she failed to comply.
It was not immediately known if she had an attorney.
AP 3/10/07
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Can Sarasota criminal justice avoid the same problems that plague Broward County?
Broward County's jails are chronically overcrowded because the justice system moves too slowly, leaving defendants incarcerated for longer and longer periods, federal jail consultants said Friday.
The consultants, hired by the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Corrections, spread the blame evenly among the county's law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges, saying that the entire system needs streamlining.
"It's not cases, it's not population ... it's your policies and procedures," said consultant Tim Schnacke. "You have the ability to stem the tide."
Sheriff Ken Jenne requested the study in September because of recent overcrowding. The jail has struggled with the issue since the 1970s, when a group of inmates sued, saying that overcrowding violated their civil rights. A federal monitor still keeps an eye on jail conditions as a result of that lawsuit.
The consultants gathered data from Broward County's five jails and presented it at the Sheriff's Office for the first time Friday. They found that the average daily jail population jumped about 17 percent from 2002 to 2006, even though the number of defendants and criminal cases remained flat. They said the overcrowding is caused by an increase from 27 to 32 days in the average stay of a defendant during those years.
The consultants were aghast to find 160 people in jail for more than 11/2 years and 62 of those there for more than two years.
"Folks, this doesn't happen," said consultant Marie VonNostrand.. "We don't chart it nationally because this doesn't happen."
They also found that the jails had a much larger percentage of people awaiting trial than the national average.
The consultants' recommendations include:
Streamline early hearings to quickly take care of pleas and bail issues.
Evaluate more people for pretrial release.
Expand drug court to include repeat offenders and other drug-related crimes.
Make bond hearings more flexible.
Speed up violation of probation cases and consider not jailing those who violate their probations on technicalities.
Reduce continuances and delays in criminal cases.
Most people who heard the results weren't surprised by the findings.
"I think it just encouraged everybody to go back and redouble their efforts," said Jeff Marcus, chief of the Broward State Attorney's Office's felony division.
Public Defender Howard Finkelstein discounted most of the proposed solutions and homed in on the 975 people in jail this week with bail amounts of $5,000 or less. He said those people have been deemed a low risk to society and are being held simply because they're poor.
"How much money you have in your possession is irrelevant to whether or not you should be released," he said.
He suggested that people with such low bail should be released on their own recognizance if they're poor to reduce overcrowding.
Henry W. Mack, chairman of the Broward County Public Safety Coordinating Council, said the presentation was useful. The county created the council in 1987 to solve the county's jail overcrowding.
"I'm having some new thoughts," Mack said. "Our next meeting is going to be a very fruitful one."
.
Article found at:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-cjail17feb17,0,4492468.story?coll=sfla-home-headline
By Brian Haas
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Brian Haas can be reached at bhaas@sun-sentinel.com
The consultants, hired by the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Corrections, spread the blame evenly among the county's law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges, saying that the entire system needs streamlining.
"It's not cases, it's not population ... it's your policies and procedures," said consultant Tim Schnacke. "You have the ability to stem the tide."
Sheriff Ken Jenne requested the study in September because of recent overcrowding. The jail has struggled with the issue since the 1970s, when a group of inmates sued, saying that overcrowding violated their civil rights. A federal monitor still keeps an eye on jail conditions as a result of that lawsuit.
The consultants gathered data from Broward County's five jails and presented it at the Sheriff's Office for the first time Friday. They found that the average daily jail population jumped about 17 percent from 2002 to 2006, even though the number of defendants and criminal cases remained flat. They said the overcrowding is caused by an increase from 27 to 32 days in the average stay of a defendant during those years.
The consultants were aghast to find 160 people in jail for more than 11/2 years and 62 of those there for more than two years.
"Folks, this doesn't happen," said consultant Marie VonNostrand.. "We don't chart it nationally because this doesn't happen."
They also found that the jails had a much larger percentage of people awaiting trial than the national average.
The consultants' recommendations include:
Streamline early hearings to quickly take care of pleas and bail issues.
Evaluate more people for pretrial release.
Expand drug court to include repeat offenders and other drug-related crimes.
Make bond hearings more flexible.
Speed up violation of probation cases and consider not jailing those who violate their probations on technicalities.
Reduce continuances and delays in criminal cases.
Most people who heard the results weren't surprised by the findings.
"I think it just encouraged everybody to go back and redouble their efforts," said Jeff Marcus, chief of the Broward State Attorney's Office's felony division.
Public Defender Howard Finkelstein discounted most of the proposed solutions and homed in on the 975 people in jail this week with bail amounts of $5,000 or less. He said those people have been deemed a low risk to society and are being held simply because they're poor.
"How much money you have in your possession is irrelevant to whether or not you should be released," he said.
He suggested that people with such low bail should be released on their own recognizance if they're poor to reduce overcrowding.
Henry W. Mack, chairman of the Broward County Public Safety Coordinating Council, said the presentation was useful. The county created the council in 1987 to solve the county's jail overcrowding.
"I'm having some new thoughts," Mack said. "Our next meeting is going to be a very fruitful one."
.
Article found at:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-cjail17feb17,0,4492468.story?coll=sfla-home-headline
By Brian Haas
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Brian Haas can be reached at bhaas@sun-sentinel.com
Monday, February 12, 2007
A New jail for Sarasota County? Part 5
The Sun-Herald newspaper that serves Venice and North Port has recently written some reasonable editorials about the jail situation in Sarasota county. Below are some of their thoughts, published in February of 2007.
If you are arrested, you could do far worse than serve time in the Sarasota County jail.
While not a country club (a term applied to some federal prisons), Sarasota's jail ranks near the top of all Florida jails, according to reports from state inspectors.
It is spotlessly clean. Food is catered in. The jail appears to be safe compared to some facilities for prisoners awaiting trial or sentenced to spend up to a year behind bars.
Services are available that offenders lack outside. If you arrive with a toothache, a dentist is available two days a week. Those who have mental problems are evaluated.
If you have been cut in a fight, a nurse practitioner will treat or suture your injuries. If you are truly ill, they will care for you in a small, but well-equipped hospital ward that includes X-ray equipment.
Prisoners also are separated by crime committed. Those who have been violent are housed together away from those accused of lesser offenses.
There is a chapel that holds more than a dozen services each week, as well as Bible study classes.
Chronic drunks and crackheads stay in a special room. A nurse keeps watch as they go through night sweats, high fever, panic attacks, anxiety attacks, sleeplessness, fatigue and heart palpitations.
If sitting around in a day room wears a person down, in the old section there is a roof-top recreation area and in the new north wing it is possible to exercise in a fresh air room by tossing a basketball through a hoop.
There is one shower head for every 16 inmates, a toilet for every eight persons. A toilet is located in every cell, although there is no privacy.
The new wing, completed in 2002, has washers and driers to keep clothing clean. An inmate can call a lawyer or a family member.
It does have flaws. There is too little room for police vehicles bringing inmates in. Cars and vans with prisoners stack up Ringling Boulevard.
The jail is labor-intensive. One officer is required to escort every person being booked.
The jail is overcrowded. County commissioners are being asked to find a solution -- a project that will cost taxpayers millions.
To hold down the overflow, the courts conduct frequent "sweeps" to see if there are relatively harmless prisoners who should be sent home to await trial.
When the jail is filled, a third inmate moves into a two-bunk cell, sleeping in a dinghy-size plastic mattress tray on the floor.
The oldest, least desirable section of the jail was constructed in 1975. It was designed for 214 inmates. In 1987 the east wing was constructed for 540 more. When those two sections began to overflow, a north wing was constructed. It opened in 2002, adding 288 beds.
The sixth and final floor is scheduled to open in April. New corrections officers are completing their training. But even then the jail is expected to continue to exceed its capacity of 1,044 inmates.
Several times in recent months the Sarasota County jail has been filled to overflowing. When that happens, cells with two bunks must accommodate three prisoners.
So what can the county do? Commissioners delayed hiring a consultant until a county committee does more work. To try to buy time the county is spending $6 million in 2007 to improve the old facility.
What prevents the County from moving the jail out of downtown Sarasota?
First, overcrowding varies day to day. The present jail is across from the courthouse. Prisoners must be transported in handcuffs and leg irons.
Money is an issue. The jail's north wing opened in 2002. The cost for 288 additional beds, a new kitchen, and health care space was $17 million. Price of new jail complex would be much more. But the cost to taxpayers goes up each year.
The biggest barrier is the NIMBY factor -- "not in my back yard." People don't want a jail as their neighbor. Some fear inmates will escape. They don't want busses and vans filled with prisoners cruising through their neighborhood. They worry about property values.
That's why there has been talk of sharing a jail with DeSoto and Manatee counties. That requires a great deal of travel time and cost.
There may be another solution -- near I-75 in North Port.
Several North Port commissioners think a North Port jail might be possible. The county also could build a juvenile facility and courthouse in the city.
Fred Tower says there is a block of land in the Yorkshire area -- small private lots that could be rezoned. But swift action would be required.
Today's land prices are down. Wait two or three years and it might be more difficult to rezone and buy property. Tower believes up to 500 acres could be made available for a jail and/or industrial park.
Why would North Port want the new jail?
It could provide up to 200 local jobs. Many North Port residents now drive long distances to find work.
North Port has been unable to extend water and sewer lines out that far. Building a jail would solve that problem.
Then there is the cost of transporting the city's prisoners. It ties up officers who should be out patrolling the streets.
Finally, North Port will have some 250,000 residents when it is built out. At present 55,000 people live in the City of Sarasota, 370,000 in the county. An estimated 45,000 to 50,000 already call North Port home. In time, the City of Sarasota will become the "little brother."
It is time for county commissioners, administrators, and planning staff to tour North Port. They also might benefit from flying over the city in a helicopter. County officials make too many decisions without knowing what is happening in North Port.
Putting a jail, a branch court house and juvenile center near I-75 in North Port would solve several thorny problems. As the city grows the crime rate is expected to increase. From the standpoint of demographics, it makes sense. But the county should act while there is empty land. It will take time to change the zoning and install infrastructure.
The jail should now move up the county's priority list.
If you are arrested, you could do far worse than serve time in the Sarasota County jail.
While not a country club (a term applied to some federal prisons), Sarasota's jail ranks near the top of all Florida jails, according to reports from state inspectors.
It is spotlessly clean. Food is catered in. The jail appears to be safe compared to some facilities for prisoners awaiting trial or sentenced to spend up to a year behind bars.
Services are available that offenders lack outside. If you arrive with a toothache, a dentist is available two days a week. Those who have mental problems are evaluated.
If you have been cut in a fight, a nurse practitioner will treat or suture your injuries. If you are truly ill, they will care for you in a small, but well-equipped hospital ward that includes X-ray equipment.
Prisoners also are separated by crime committed. Those who have been violent are housed together away from those accused of lesser offenses.
There is a chapel that holds more than a dozen services each week, as well as Bible study classes.
Chronic drunks and crackheads stay in a special room. A nurse keeps watch as they go through night sweats, high fever, panic attacks, anxiety attacks, sleeplessness, fatigue and heart palpitations.
If sitting around in a day room wears a person down, in the old section there is a roof-top recreation area and in the new north wing it is possible to exercise in a fresh air room by tossing a basketball through a hoop.
There is one shower head for every 16 inmates, a toilet for every eight persons. A toilet is located in every cell, although there is no privacy.
The new wing, completed in 2002, has washers and driers to keep clothing clean. An inmate can call a lawyer or a family member.
It does have flaws. There is too little room for police vehicles bringing inmates in. Cars and vans with prisoners stack up Ringling Boulevard.
The jail is labor-intensive. One officer is required to escort every person being booked.
The jail is overcrowded. County commissioners are being asked to find a solution -- a project that will cost taxpayers millions.
To hold down the overflow, the courts conduct frequent "sweeps" to see if there are relatively harmless prisoners who should be sent home to await trial.
When the jail is filled, a third inmate moves into a two-bunk cell, sleeping in a dinghy-size plastic mattress tray on the floor.
The oldest, least desirable section of the jail was constructed in 1975. It was designed for 214 inmates. In 1987 the east wing was constructed for 540 more. When those two sections began to overflow, a north wing was constructed. It opened in 2002, adding 288 beds.
The sixth and final floor is scheduled to open in April. New corrections officers are completing their training. But even then the jail is expected to continue to exceed its capacity of 1,044 inmates.
Several times in recent months the Sarasota County jail has been filled to overflowing. When that happens, cells with two bunks must accommodate three prisoners.
So what can the county do? Commissioners delayed hiring a consultant until a county committee does more work. To try to buy time the county is spending $6 million in 2007 to improve the old facility.
What prevents the County from moving the jail out of downtown Sarasota?
First, overcrowding varies day to day. The present jail is across from the courthouse. Prisoners must be transported in handcuffs and leg irons.
Money is an issue. The jail's north wing opened in 2002. The cost for 288 additional beds, a new kitchen, and health care space was $17 million. Price of new jail complex would be much more. But the cost to taxpayers goes up each year.
The biggest barrier is the NIMBY factor -- "not in my back yard." People don't want a jail as their neighbor. Some fear inmates will escape. They don't want busses and vans filled with prisoners cruising through their neighborhood. They worry about property values.
That's why there has been talk of sharing a jail with DeSoto and Manatee counties. That requires a great deal of travel time and cost.
There may be another solution -- near I-75 in North Port.
Several North Port commissioners think a North Port jail might be possible. The county also could build a juvenile facility and courthouse in the city.
Fred Tower says there is a block of land in the Yorkshire area -- small private lots that could be rezoned. But swift action would be required.
Today's land prices are down. Wait two or three years and it might be more difficult to rezone and buy property. Tower believes up to 500 acres could be made available for a jail and/or industrial park.
Why would North Port want the new jail?
It could provide up to 200 local jobs. Many North Port residents now drive long distances to find work.
North Port has been unable to extend water and sewer lines out that far. Building a jail would solve that problem.
Then there is the cost of transporting the city's prisoners. It ties up officers who should be out patrolling the streets.
Finally, North Port will have some 250,000 residents when it is built out. At present 55,000 people live in the City of Sarasota, 370,000 in the county. An estimated 45,000 to 50,000 already call North Port home. In time, the City of Sarasota will become the "little brother."
It is time for county commissioners, administrators, and planning staff to tour North Port. They also might benefit from flying over the city in a helicopter. County officials make too many decisions without knowing what is happening in North Port.
Putting a jail, a branch court house and juvenile center near I-75 in North Port would solve several thorny problems. As the city grows the crime rate is expected to increase. From the standpoint of demographics, it makes sense. But the county should act while there is empty land. It will take time to change the zoning and install infrastructure.
The jail should now move up the county's priority list.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Pot Prisoners Cost Americans $1 Billion a Year:
American taxpayers are now spending more than a billion dollars per year to incarcerate its citizens for pot. That's according to statistics recently released by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics.
According to the new BJS report, "Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004," 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations are serving time for marijuana offenses. Combining these percentages with separate U.S. Department of Justice statistics on the total number of state and federal drug prisoners suggests that there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses. The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county and/or local jails for pot-related offenses.
Multiplying these totals by U.S. DOJ prison expenditure data reveals that taxpayers are spending more than $1 billion annually to imprison pot offenders.
The new report is noteworthy because it undermines the common claim from law enforcement officers and bureaucrats, specifically White House drug czar John Walters, that few, if any, Americans are incarcerated for marijuana-related offenses. In reality, nearly 1 out of 8 U.S. drug prisoners are locked up for pot.
Of course, several hundred thousand more Americans are arrested each year for violating marijuana laws, costing taxpayers another $8 billion dollars annually in criminal justice costs.
According to the most recent figures available from the FBI, police arrested an estimated 786,545 people on marijuana charges in 2005 -- more than twice the number of Americans arrested just 12 years ago. Among those arrested, about 88 percent -- some 696,074 Americans -- were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,471 individuals were charged with "sale/manufacture," a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use.
These totals are the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and make up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. Nevertheless, self-reported pot use by adults, as well as the ready availability of marijuana on the black market, remains virtually unchanged.
Marijuana isn't a harmless substance, and those who argue for a change in the drug's legal status do not claim it to be. However, pot's relative risks to the user and society are arguably fewer than those of alcohol and tobacco, and they do not warrant the expenses associated with targeting, arresting and prosecuting hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
According to federal statistics, about 94 million Americans -- that's 40 percent of the U.S. population age 12 or older -- self-identify as having used cannabis at some point in their lives, and relatively few acknowledge having suffered significant deleterious health effects due to their use. America's public policies should reflect this reality, not deny it. It makes no sense to continue to treat nearly half of all Americans as criminals.
By Paul Armentano, AlterNet
This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.
According to the new BJS report, "Drug Use and Dependence, State and Federal Prisoners, 2004," 12.7 percent of state inmates and 12.4 percent of federal inmates incarcerated for drug violations are serving time for marijuana offenses. Combining these percentages with separate U.S. Department of Justice statistics on the total number of state and federal drug prisoners suggests that there are now about 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates behind bars for marijuana offenses. The report failed to include estimates on the percentage of inmates incarcerated in county and/or local jails for pot-related offenses.
Multiplying these totals by U.S. DOJ prison expenditure data reveals that taxpayers are spending more than $1 billion annually to imprison pot offenders.
The new report is noteworthy because it undermines the common claim from law enforcement officers and bureaucrats, specifically White House drug czar John Walters, that few, if any, Americans are incarcerated for marijuana-related offenses. In reality, nearly 1 out of 8 U.S. drug prisoners are locked up for pot.
Of course, several hundred thousand more Americans are arrested each year for violating marijuana laws, costing taxpayers another $8 billion dollars annually in criminal justice costs.
According to the most recent figures available from the FBI, police arrested an estimated 786,545 people on marijuana charges in 2005 -- more than twice the number of Americans arrested just 12 years ago. Among those arrested, about 88 percent -- some 696,074 Americans -- were charged with possession only. The remaining 90,471 individuals were charged with "sale/manufacture," a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use.
These totals are the highest ever recorded by the FBI, and make up 42.6 percent of all drug arrests in the United States. Nevertheless, self-reported pot use by adults, as well as the ready availability of marijuana on the black market, remains virtually unchanged.
Marijuana isn't a harmless substance, and those who argue for a change in the drug's legal status do not claim it to be. However, pot's relative risks to the user and society are arguably fewer than those of alcohol and tobacco, and they do not warrant the expenses associated with targeting, arresting and prosecuting hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
According to federal statistics, about 94 million Americans -- that's 40 percent of the U.S. population age 12 or older -- self-identify as having used cannabis at some point in their lives, and relatively few acknowledge having suffered significant deleterious health effects due to their use. America's public policies should reflect this reality, not deny it. It makes no sense to continue to treat nearly half of all Americans as criminals.
By Paul Armentano, AlterNet
This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.
Crist crime bill goes too far:
As attorney general, Charlie Crist failed to persuade state lawmakers to approve his misnamed "antimurder" legislation because of legitimate concerns about the high cost of arbitrarily cracking down on felons accused of violating probation. As governor, he probably will have better luck even though the cost suddenly has more than doubled. It's far too high a price for taxpayers to pay to fulfill a simplistic campaign promise that would limit judicial discretion, further overcrowd county jails and require more than 2,500 new prison beds.
At Crist's request, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee last week unanimously voted to beef up last year's version of the bill by expanding the types of felons who would be automatically jailed on alleged probation violations until a judge decided whether to revoke the probation. If probation was revoked, the possible prison sentences would be dramatically increased. It even would be possible to lock someone up for a term longer than the maximum sentence for the original crime.
No wonder the projected cost over five years has ballooned, from more than $118-million last year to more than $268-million now. Roughly two new prisons would be needed just to house the additional number of felons expected to be returned to prison for probation violations. That's money that could be better spent on other priorities such as health care and education.
Crist kept pushing this proposal in response to the horrific child murders of Jessica Lunsford, Sarah Lunde and Carlie Brucia. Yet it is debatable whether this bill would have applied to Joseph Smith, now on death row for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Carlie. Crist has contended the provisions would have forced Smith back to prison before the attack, but Smith's probation violation involved failing to pay fines. The legislation explicitly does not apply to such probation violations, so suggesting this bill would have saved Carlie's life is misleading at best.
There already has been an overreaction to the murders of those girls that has overburdened local courts and county jails. The Department of Corrections, in an attempt to avoid any blame, adopted a zero-tolerance approach to alleged probation violators and required them to be arrested and jailed until they saw a judge. That helped create crisis situations in overcrowded jails, including Pinellas County's. Hillsborough County judges created a new division to deal with probation violators, and Pinellas judges are expected to take similar action. But reality is even setting in at the Department of Corrections, which has revised its approach to dealing with technical violations of probation to help reduce the number of people in jail just waiting to see a judge.
Now the governor would make a bad situation worse. Nobody wants probationers convicted of the most violent felonies to remain on the street if they commit serious violations. But the antimurder legislation goes beyond reason, applying to felons convicted of such crimes as poisoning food, attempted arson and aircraft piracy. Now the new version - which mirrors a rejected one from 2005 - also would apply to felons previously convicted of such crimes as attempted kidnapping, attempted carjacking and attempted home invasion robbery. The weight given to the probation violation upon resentencing would be doubled.
The high price tag doesn't even include the additional cost to county jails for holding these alleged probation violators until a judge sees them. So just as the governor and state legislators accuse counties of spending wildly and promote property tax cuts, they are poised to pass down another expensive unfunded mandate. That sort of hypocrisy has to stop.
Top-down, arbitrary requirements like this one are poor substitutes for local decisionmaking that is responsible and accountable. The new governor has already made a number of smart decisions by taking a fresh look at difficult issues. This irresponsible legislation is more reminiscent of the old Charlie Crist who exploited crime issues and pandered to voters' fears of random violence. Everyone is anti-murder, and it is understandable that legislators want to help the governor achieve one of his top priorities. But this goes too far, and lawmakers have to rein it in before it's too late.
A St. Petersburg Times Editorial
Published February 11, 2007
At Crist's request, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee last week unanimously voted to beef up last year's version of the bill by expanding the types of felons who would be automatically jailed on alleged probation violations until a judge decided whether to revoke the probation. If probation was revoked, the possible prison sentences would be dramatically increased. It even would be possible to lock someone up for a term longer than the maximum sentence for the original crime.
No wonder the projected cost over five years has ballooned, from more than $118-million last year to more than $268-million now. Roughly two new prisons would be needed just to house the additional number of felons expected to be returned to prison for probation violations. That's money that could be better spent on other priorities such as health care and education.
Crist kept pushing this proposal in response to the horrific child murders of Jessica Lunsford, Sarah Lunde and Carlie Brucia. Yet it is debatable whether this bill would have applied to Joseph Smith, now on death row for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Carlie. Crist has contended the provisions would have forced Smith back to prison before the attack, but Smith's probation violation involved failing to pay fines. The legislation explicitly does not apply to such probation violations, so suggesting this bill would have saved Carlie's life is misleading at best.
There already has been an overreaction to the murders of those girls that has overburdened local courts and county jails. The Department of Corrections, in an attempt to avoid any blame, adopted a zero-tolerance approach to alleged probation violators and required them to be arrested and jailed until they saw a judge. That helped create crisis situations in overcrowded jails, including Pinellas County's. Hillsborough County judges created a new division to deal with probation violators, and Pinellas judges are expected to take similar action. But reality is even setting in at the Department of Corrections, which has revised its approach to dealing with technical violations of probation to help reduce the number of people in jail just waiting to see a judge.
Now the governor would make a bad situation worse. Nobody wants probationers convicted of the most violent felonies to remain on the street if they commit serious violations. But the antimurder legislation goes beyond reason, applying to felons convicted of such crimes as poisoning food, attempted arson and aircraft piracy. Now the new version - which mirrors a rejected one from 2005 - also would apply to felons previously convicted of such crimes as attempted kidnapping, attempted carjacking and attempted home invasion robbery. The weight given to the probation violation upon resentencing would be doubled.
The high price tag doesn't even include the additional cost to county jails for holding these alleged probation violators until a judge sees them. So just as the governor and state legislators accuse counties of spending wildly and promote property tax cuts, they are poised to pass down another expensive unfunded mandate. That sort of hypocrisy has to stop.
Top-down, arbitrary requirements like this one are poor substitutes for local decisionmaking that is responsible and accountable. The new governor has already made a number of smart decisions by taking a fresh look at difficult issues. This irresponsible legislation is more reminiscent of the old Charlie Crist who exploited crime issues and pandered to voters' fears of random violence. Everyone is anti-murder, and it is understandable that legislators want to help the governor achieve one of his top priorities. But this goes too far, and lawmakers have to rein it in before it's too late.
A St. Petersburg Times Editorial
Published February 11, 2007
Thursday, February 08, 2007
A community conversation about the death penalty in Indiana
As a way of helping the public understand the history and social impact of the death penalty, Butler University, the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, the Christian Theological Seminary and an abolitionist group are co-sponsoring an 11-day symposium this month to explore the pros and cons of one of the most divisive issues in American public policy.
“This is one of the great issues” in U.S. politics said Peter Alexander, dean of the Jordan School of Fine Arts at Butler and one of the organizers of the symposium. “This has been a long time in coming, three or four years. It [the symposium] will be a community conversation intended to shine a light on the death penalty and show how it affects a lot of people.”
The event will start on Feb. 8 at Christian Theological Seminary with a discussion on whether the Bible supports the death penalty. But it will gear up completely on Feb. 21 for 10 days of discussions and debates.
“The United States is one of only a handful of modern, industrialized countries to administer this ultimate punishment,” Alexander said in a prepared statement. “Through the presentation of lectures, debates, films and dramatic performances, the symposium will provide a balanced examination of the death penalty that is carried out in our names and authorized by the United States legal system.”
Though he will not say whether he now supports or opposes capital punishment, Alexander said the symposium will offer civil conversation on capital punishment, although many of the presenters will have already formed strong opinions on the issue.
“The State of Indiana has shown an increase in the number of people it is willing to put to death,” said Scott Seay, a CTS professor and an opponent of the death penalty. “We are gravely concerned that trend is going to continue.” Seay and Wilma Bailey, also a seminary professor, will conduct the Feb. 8 discussion.
Some 128 countries have abolished capital punishment in law or in practice and, in 2005, approximately 2,150 people were executed in 22 countries, though 94 percent of those were in only four countries: China, with at least 1,777; Iran, with 94; Saudi Arabia, with 86; and the United States, with 60.
“This is a violent country,“ Alexander said. “But it’s an open question as to whether the violence leads to more executions or whether capital punishment deters more violent crime.”
While those who oppose capital punishment are numerous and vocal in Indiana and around the country, many people consider the death penalty an issue like abortion, with clearly drawn lines of supporters and opponents that remain fundamentally unchanged. But capital punishment enjoys strong support. A Gallup poll last year showed that 64 percent of those surveyed supported the death penalty, more than twice the percentage of people who oppose it.
“If you add other options, such as life in prison without the chance for parole, to the mix, then the support [for the death penalty] drops to below 50 percent,” said Chris Hitz-Bradley, the president of the Indiana Information Center on the Abolition of Capital Punishment, which is also a co-sponsor of the symposium. In fact, the same Gallup showed that when given a choice between the death penalty and life in prison without parole, there is roughly equal support for capital punishment and life without parole, both at around 48 percent.
Clark County Prosecutor Steven D. Stewart strongly supports capital punishment over life without parole. “It cheapens the life of an innocent murder victim to say that society has no right to keep the murderer from ever killing again. In my view, society has not only the right, but the duty to act in self-defense to protect the innocent.” In a letter posted on his Web site, Stewart maintains that “Life without parole does not eliminate the risk that the prisoner will murder a guard, a visitor or another inmate, and we should not be compelled to take that risk. It is also not unheard of for inmates to escape from prison.”
But Hitz-Bradley takes exception with that. “You don’t have to kill people to protect society,” he said. “And there is no evidence to show that those in prison facing the death penalty are more dangerous than other people in prison for non-capital murder.”
Alexander said the purpose of the symposium is to open a positive discussion on the issue, not for the advancement of one position or the other. “There are many issues that people don’t think much about,” he said. “People will come away [from the symposium] with a much more nuanced view of the death penalty.”
The cost of the death penalty in Indiana
Indiana is one of 38 states in the U.S. that currently sanctions capital punishment. In many states, executing a prisoner costs much more than keeping them locked up for life. In Indiana, the total costs of the death penalty exceed the complete costs of life without parole sentences by more than one third.
Executions around the world
With 60 executions in 2005, the United States ranks fourth among countries utilizing capital punishment. Here are the top five countries and their execution numbers.
1. China (1,777)
2. Iran (94)
3. Saudi Arabia (86)
4. United States (60)
5. Pakistan (31)
by Michael Dabney published in Nuvo Indiana's alternative weekly
“This is one of the great issues” in U.S. politics said Peter Alexander, dean of the Jordan School of Fine Arts at Butler and one of the organizers of the symposium. “This has been a long time in coming, three or four years. It [the symposium] will be a community conversation intended to shine a light on the death penalty and show how it affects a lot of people.”
The event will start on Feb. 8 at Christian Theological Seminary with a discussion on whether the Bible supports the death penalty. But it will gear up completely on Feb. 21 for 10 days of discussions and debates.
“The United States is one of only a handful of modern, industrialized countries to administer this ultimate punishment,” Alexander said in a prepared statement. “Through the presentation of lectures, debates, films and dramatic performances, the symposium will provide a balanced examination of the death penalty that is carried out in our names and authorized by the United States legal system.”
Though he will not say whether he now supports or opposes capital punishment, Alexander said the symposium will offer civil conversation on capital punishment, although many of the presenters will have already formed strong opinions on the issue.
“The State of Indiana has shown an increase in the number of people it is willing to put to death,” said Scott Seay, a CTS professor and an opponent of the death penalty. “We are gravely concerned that trend is going to continue.” Seay and Wilma Bailey, also a seminary professor, will conduct the Feb. 8 discussion.
Some 128 countries have abolished capital punishment in law or in practice and, in 2005, approximately 2,150 people were executed in 22 countries, though 94 percent of those were in only four countries: China, with at least 1,777; Iran, with 94; Saudi Arabia, with 86; and the United States, with 60.
“This is a violent country,“ Alexander said. “But it’s an open question as to whether the violence leads to more executions or whether capital punishment deters more violent crime.”
While those who oppose capital punishment are numerous and vocal in Indiana and around the country, many people consider the death penalty an issue like abortion, with clearly drawn lines of supporters and opponents that remain fundamentally unchanged. But capital punishment enjoys strong support. A Gallup poll last year showed that 64 percent of those surveyed supported the death penalty, more than twice the percentage of people who oppose it.
“If you add other options, such as life in prison without the chance for parole, to the mix, then the support [for the death penalty] drops to below 50 percent,” said Chris Hitz-Bradley, the president of the Indiana Information Center on the Abolition of Capital Punishment, which is also a co-sponsor of the symposium. In fact, the same Gallup showed that when given a choice between the death penalty and life in prison without parole, there is roughly equal support for capital punishment and life without parole, both at around 48 percent.
Clark County Prosecutor Steven D. Stewart strongly supports capital punishment over life without parole. “It cheapens the life of an innocent murder victim to say that society has no right to keep the murderer from ever killing again. In my view, society has not only the right, but the duty to act in self-defense to protect the innocent.” In a letter posted on his Web site, Stewart maintains that “Life without parole does not eliminate the risk that the prisoner will murder a guard, a visitor or another inmate, and we should not be compelled to take that risk. It is also not unheard of for inmates to escape from prison.”
But Hitz-Bradley takes exception with that. “You don’t have to kill people to protect society,” he said. “And there is no evidence to show that those in prison facing the death penalty are more dangerous than other people in prison for non-capital murder.”
Alexander said the purpose of the symposium is to open a positive discussion on the issue, not for the advancement of one position or the other. “There are many issues that people don’t think much about,” he said. “People will come away [from the symposium] with a much more nuanced view of the death penalty.”
The cost of the death penalty in Indiana
Indiana is one of 38 states in the U.S. that currently sanctions capital punishment. In many states, executing a prisoner costs much more than keeping them locked up for life. In Indiana, the total costs of the death penalty exceed the complete costs of life without parole sentences by more than one third.
Executions around the world
With 60 executions in 2005, the United States ranks fourth among countries utilizing capital punishment. Here are the top five countries and their execution numbers.
1. China (1,777)
2. Iran (94)
3. Saudi Arabia (86)
4. United States (60)
5. Pakistan (31)
by Michael Dabney published in Nuvo Indiana's alternative weekly
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Crist's mental health budget plan falls short
Gov. Charlie Crist's efforts to help the mentally ill packing Florida jails address the wrong end of the problem, says Mary Ruiz, CEO of Manatee Glens, the county's psychiatric hospital.
Less than one-third of a $79 million increase earmarked in the governor's budget proposal would go toward community programs that would keep the mentally ill out of jail, Ruiz said.
"It's backwards," Ruiz said. "Gov. Crist's budget addresses the crisis, but not the cause - the fact that Florida is 48th out of 50 states in per capita investment for mental health services."
"Mary is right on point," said Col. Brad Steube of the Manatee County Sheriff's Office. "There are people sitting in our jail who shouldn't be there, but they were arrested for some misdemeanor that wouldn't have happened if they had been under treatment."
Still, Ruiz said Crist's proposed allocation is welcome recognition of a serious problem too long ignored.
The mental health community has sharply criticized law enforcement and the state for mishandling the mentally ill in jails.
"Any change in the system that would allow for treatment for the mentally ill inmates is a tremendous advancement that is sorely needed," said Linda Davis, president of the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
"We have several families within NAMI membership who have had relatives in jail who had to go without medications," Davis said. "That doesn't do anybody any good."
While Ruiz lauded Crist for trying to solve a problem other governors have ignored, she criticized his proposals for falling short of the need, especially at the local level.
"It's disheartening for the families of mentally ill persons and for me as a local mental health advocate, to see that only $27.5 million of the $79 million in the governor's budget is directed to community treatment," Ruiz said.
Davis agreed more money is needed for treatment programs that keep the mentally out of jail before they get it trouble.
"But something is better than nothing," she said.
Ruiz hopes Crist will do more.
"Without a greater investment in community treatment services, we will certainly face a continuing and escalating crisis each year."
Steube echoed her concern.
"There is a great need for more state money for more treatment beds," Steube said. "There are no longer state hospitals for the mentally ill. They end up in our jails."
The solution, Ruiz said, is a sizeable investment in the mental health system over many years to bring Florida to parity with other states.
Davis believes that investment must be matched by a local commitment.
"It takes a commitment within the community to deal with the mentally ill before they end up in jail, rather than than after the fact," she said. "But it is still encouraging to me as a parent to know that if the mentally ill members within our membership find themselves in jail, at least there is a chance they will receive treatment."
All of Crist's $79 million increase is directed toward serving the jailed population, Ruiz said. Her analysis revealed the following:
• Nearly $49 million would fund 353 new secure treatment beds in state institutions.
• Another $2 million would cover operational costs for an additional 38 beds.
• A little more than $5 million would be spent on comprehensive community recovery enhancement teams to provide community services for mentally ill people who have been released from jail so they would not get re-arrested.
Crist's allocation includes almost $800,000 for 30-day medication supplies that will cover the cost of treating stabilized inmates who have been through treatment programs and are now deemed competent to stand trial.
Another $6 million would provide medical services and traditional housing for the mentally ill once they leave jail.
Ruiz likes the concept of the community teams who help former inmates who are mentally ill get medical benefits restored once they are free.
"When you are jailed, you are immediately dis-enrolled by Medicaid or Medicare, if you are in those programs," Ruiz said.
Restoration of those benefits is difficult and time-consuming, she said. Crist's comprehensive community service teams could help with that, she said.
But waiting until the mentally ill are jailed before offering these treatment options is not only backwards but more costly, Ruiz warned.
She cited Bradenton's recently passed camping ban ordinance as an example of the problem.
Mental illness is common among the chronically homeless, Ruiz said. Jailing them for sleeping on the streets does not solve the problem of why they are homeless.
"The cost of putting these people in jail is tremendous," Ruiz said. "There is the cost of incarcerating them, the cost of judges, public defenders and probation officers. In the end we have people who are not a threat to public safety using up resources that could be used on people who are a threat."
And when the mentally ill are turned out of prison they end up back on the street where the odds are high they will get arrested again, Ruiz said.
"The result is we criminalize mental illness and we don't go after the bad guys," Ruiz said. "We need to move toward prevention."
That move, Ruiz believes, must begin now.
"It's not a good statement about our country and state when we are dealing with mental illness by putting people in jail, instead of putting people in treatment," Ruiz said. "That is the wrong place to be as a society. There is something morally wrong and hurtful about that position."
by DONNA WRIGHT
Herald Staff Writer
Less than one-third of a $79 million increase earmarked in the governor's budget proposal would go toward community programs that would keep the mentally ill out of jail, Ruiz said.
"It's backwards," Ruiz said. "Gov. Crist's budget addresses the crisis, but not the cause - the fact that Florida is 48th out of 50 states in per capita investment for mental health services."
"Mary is right on point," said Col. Brad Steube of the Manatee County Sheriff's Office. "There are people sitting in our jail who shouldn't be there, but they were arrested for some misdemeanor that wouldn't have happened if they had been under treatment."
Still, Ruiz said Crist's proposed allocation is welcome recognition of a serious problem too long ignored.
The mental health community has sharply criticized law enforcement and the state for mishandling the mentally ill in jails.
"Any change in the system that would allow for treatment for the mentally ill inmates is a tremendous advancement that is sorely needed," said Linda Davis, president of the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
"We have several families within NAMI membership who have had relatives in jail who had to go without medications," Davis said. "That doesn't do anybody any good."
While Ruiz lauded Crist for trying to solve a problem other governors have ignored, she criticized his proposals for falling short of the need, especially at the local level.
"It's disheartening for the families of mentally ill persons and for me as a local mental health advocate, to see that only $27.5 million of the $79 million in the governor's budget is directed to community treatment," Ruiz said.
Davis agreed more money is needed for treatment programs that keep the mentally out of jail before they get it trouble.
"But something is better than nothing," she said.
Ruiz hopes Crist will do more.
"Without a greater investment in community treatment services, we will certainly face a continuing and escalating crisis each year."
Steube echoed her concern.
"There is a great need for more state money for more treatment beds," Steube said. "There are no longer state hospitals for the mentally ill. They end up in our jails."
The solution, Ruiz said, is a sizeable investment in the mental health system over many years to bring Florida to parity with other states.
Davis believes that investment must be matched by a local commitment.
"It takes a commitment within the community to deal with the mentally ill before they end up in jail, rather than than after the fact," she said. "But it is still encouraging to me as a parent to know that if the mentally ill members within our membership find themselves in jail, at least there is a chance they will receive treatment."
All of Crist's $79 million increase is directed toward serving the jailed population, Ruiz said. Her analysis revealed the following:
• Nearly $49 million would fund 353 new secure treatment beds in state institutions.
• Another $2 million would cover operational costs for an additional 38 beds.
• A little more than $5 million would be spent on comprehensive community recovery enhancement teams to provide community services for mentally ill people who have been released from jail so they would not get re-arrested.
Crist's allocation includes almost $800,000 for 30-day medication supplies that will cover the cost of treating stabilized inmates who have been through treatment programs and are now deemed competent to stand trial.
Another $6 million would provide medical services and traditional housing for the mentally ill once they leave jail.
Ruiz likes the concept of the community teams who help former inmates who are mentally ill get medical benefits restored once they are free.
"When you are jailed, you are immediately dis-enrolled by Medicaid or Medicare, if you are in those programs," Ruiz said.
Restoration of those benefits is difficult and time-consuming, she said. Crist's comprehensive community service teams could help with that, she said.
But waiting until the mentally ill are jailed before offering these treatment options is not only backwards but more costly, Ruiz warned.
She cited Bradenton's recently passed camping ban ordinance as an example of the problem.
Mental illness is common among the chronically homeless, Ruiz said. Jailing them for sleeping on the streets does not solve the problem of why they are homeless.
"The cost of putting these people in jail is tremendous," Ruiz said. "There is the cost of incarcerating them, the cost of judges, public defenders and probation officers. In the end we have people who are not a threat to public safety using up resources that could be used on people who are a threat."
And when the mentally ill are turned out of prison they end up back on the street where the odds are high they will get arrested again, Ruiz said.
"The result is we criminalize mental illness and we don't go after the bad guys," Ruiz said. "We need to move toward prevention."
That move, Ruiz believes, must begin now.
"It's not a good statement about our country and state when we are dealing with mental illness by putting people in jail, instead of putting people in treatment," Ruiz said. "That is the wrong place to be as a society. There is something morally wrong and hurtful about that position."
by DONNA WRIGHT
Herald Staff Writer
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Closing the Revolving Door:
The United States is paying a heavy price for the mandatory sentencing fad that swept the country 30 years ago. After a tenfold increase in the nation's prison population -- and a corrections price tag that exceeds $60 billion a year -- the states have often been forced to choose between building new prisons or new schools. Worse still, the country has created a growing felon caste, now more than 16 million strong, of felons and ex-felons, who are often driven back to prison by policies that make it impossible for them to find jobs, housing or education.
Congress could begin to address this problem by passing the Second Chance Act, which would offer support services for people who are leaving prison. But it would take more than one new law to undo 30 years of damage:
Researchers have shown that inmates who earn college degrees tend to find jobs and stay out of jail once released. Congress needs to revoke laws that bar inmates from receiving Pell grants and that bar some students with drug convictions from getting other support. Following Washington's lead, the states have destroyed prison education programs that had long since proved their worth.
People who leave prison without jobs or places to live are unlikely to stay out of jail. Congress should repeal the lifetime ban on providing temporary welfare benefits to people with felony drug convictions. The federal government should strengthen tax credit and bonding programs that encourage employers to hire people with criminal records. States need to stop barring ex-offenders from jobs because of unrelated crimes -- or arrests in the distant past that never led to convictions.
Congress should deny a request from the F.B.I. to begin including juvenile arrests that never led to convictions (and offenses like drunkenness or vagrancy) in the millions of rap sheets sent to employers. That would transform single indiscretions into lifetime stigmas.
Curbing recidivism will also require doing a lot more to provide help and medication for the one out of every six inmates who suffer mental illness.
The only real way to reduce the inmate population -- and the felon class -- is to ensure that imprisonment is a method of last resort. That means abandoning the mandatory sentencing laws that have filled prisons to bursting with nonviolent offenders who are doomed to remain trapped at the very margins of society.
An editorial from the New York Times
Congress could begin to address this problem by passing the Second Chance Act, which would offer support services for people who are leaving prison. But it would take more than one new law to undo 30 years of damage:
Researchers have shown that inmates who earn college degrees tend to find jobs and stay out of jail once released. Congress needs to revoke laws that bar inmates from receiving Pell grants and that bar some students with drug convictions from getting other support. Following Washington's lead, the states have destroyed prison education programs that had long since proved their worth.
People who leave prison without jobs or places to live are unlikely to stay out of jail. Congress should repeal the lifetime ban on providing temporary welfare benefits to people with felony drug convictions. The federal government should strengthen tax credit and bonding programs that encourage employers to hire people with criminal records. States need to stop barring ex-offenders from jobs because of unrelated crimes -- or arrests in the distant past that never led to convictions.
Congress should deny a request from the F.B.I. to begin including juvenile arrests that never led to convictions (and offenses like drunkenness or vagrancy) in the millions of rap sheets sent to employers. That would transform single indiscretions into lifetime stigmas.
Curbing recidivism will also require doing a lot more to provide help and medication for the one out of every six inmates who suffer mental illness.
The only real way to reduce the inmate population -- and the felon class -- is to ensure that imprisonment is a method of last resort. That means abandoning the mandatory sentencing laws that have filled prisons to bursting with nonviolent offenders who are doomed to remain trapped at the very margins of society.
An editorial from the New York Times
Friday, February 02, 2007
From court fight to caring:
Good intentions, goodwill and a sense of cooperation can do wonders. Florida's new secretary of the Department of Children and Families, Bob Butterworth, has demonstrated that by handling the controversy over mentally ill jail inmates in a way that puts state resources into helping people rather than into protracted court battles. The deal struck between DCF and the local public defender's office bodes well for the beleaguered agency and the vulnerable population it serves.
The situation with mentally incompetent inmates being kept in jail beyond the 15 days allowed by law had reach a crisis level. Under Lucy Hadi, DCF's previous head, there were hundreds of mentally ill inmates being held in local jails for months beyond the legal limit. Some ended up hurting themselves due to lack of proper treatment.
Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender Bob Dillinger had been heroically trying to get the courts to enforce the law, but an intransigent DCF fought back claiming a lack of funds. After a frustrated judge fined Hadi $80,000 and threatened her with jail for noncompliance, wheels started turning and money for additional treatment beds started to be found.
But it took a new administration with a different attitude toward its social responsibilities for the focus to turn from legal battles to helping hands. When Dillinger and Butterworth just happened to cross paths a day before another DCF hearing on the issue, they worked out a settlement that would redirect the $80,000 court fine into early intervention efforts.
Butterworth has promised to bring medical professionals into the Pinellas County Jail before the 15-day limit in order to try to stabilize these inmates. That means some of them would likely qualify for less restrictive community mental health placements, rather than the state's expensive and oversubscribed forensic hospitals. Butterworth plans to use the money saved from $300-per-day hospital stays to continue the program and possibly expand it to the rest of the state.
It appears that Dillinger finally has a partner in state government. Butterworth says that Gov. Charlie Crist is serious about DCF meeting its responsibilities toward Florida's most vulnerable residents. This is a good start. It is amazing what a little goodwill can do.
A St. Petersburg Times Editorial Published February 2, 2007
The situation with mentally incompetent inmates being kept in jail beyond the 15 days allowed by law had reach a crisis level. Under Lucy Hadi, DCF's previous head, there were hundreds of mentally ill inmates being held in local jails for months beyond the legal limit. Some ended up hurting themselves due to lack of proper treatment.
Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender Bob Dillinger had been heroically trying to get the courts to enforce the law, but an intransigent DCF fought back claiming a lack of funds. After a frustrated judge fined Hadi $80,000 and threatened her with jail for noncompliance, wheels started turning and money for additional treatment beds started to be found.
But it took a new administration with a different attitude toward its social responsibilities for the focus to turn from legal battles to helping hands. When Dillinger and Butterworth just happened to cross paths a day before another DCF hearing on the issue, they worked out a settlement that would redirect the $80,000 court fine into early intervention efforts.
Butterworth has promised to bring medical professionals into the Pinellas County Jail before the 15-day limit in order to try to stabilize these inmates. That means some of them would likely qualify for less restrictive community mental health placements, rather than the state's expensive and oversubscribed forensic hospitals. Butterworth plans to use the money saved from $300-per-day hospital stays to continue the program and possibly expand it to the rest of the state.
It appears that Dillinger finally has a partner in state government. Butterworth says that Gov. Charlie Crist is serious about DCF meeting its responsibilities toward Florida's most vulnerable residents. This is a good start. It is amazing what a little goodwill can do.
A St. Petersburg Times Editorial Published February 2, 2007
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