Ask for the max on corrections reform: The State can Spend less, still protect the public, and turn lives around.

This week, the Legislature will be told how Florida can stop spending too much on prisons and getting too little back for its investment.
Today, two Senate committees that deal with criminal justice policy and spending will hear from reformers advocating that Florida join a national movement toward what has been called Smart Justice. On Tuesday, the members of the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice will get the same message. Among the statistics they will hear are:
In 2000-01, 38 percent of new prison inmates had been convicted of crimes less serious than a third-degree felony, which comes with a maximum 5-year sentence. It is the least serious felony. Anything less is a misdemeanor. In 2008-09, 47 percent of new inmates had been convicted of those less serious crimes, many of them non-violent.
Most incarcerated juveniles are guilty of nonviolent or property crimes. Forty percent of juveniles are in custody for probation violations.
Half of Florida's prison inmates read at a sixth-grade level or lower. The number of mentally ill inmates has tripled in the past 15 years.
Roughly one-third of inmates who are released return to prison within three years. That rate has varied little over the past decade. But only 1 percent of the Department of Corrections budget is spent on programs to reduce what is called recidivism.
Gov. Scott's CEO-like approach to state government won't work in all cases. With criminal justice, however, his like-minded transition team zeroed in on these deplorable numbers and spent nearly 150 pages blasting the Department of Corrections. This business-oriented approach can reverse the get-tough political approach that created the problem.
Beginning in 1983, with the establishment of sentencing guidelines and the elimination of parole, Florida has focused on putting people in prison. Next came habitual offender laws and the elimination of "gain time" - earlier release because of good behavior. In 1995, the Legislature required that inmates serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. Then Jeb Bush brought 10-20-Life for crimes with a gun.
And while Florida's crime rate has fallen over the past decade, other states have adopted Smart Justice policies, saved money and seen crime rates continue to decline. Ironically, a leader in this reform has been Texas, hardly known as a criminal-coddling state. A former Texas legislator will be in Tallahassee this week to explain how he spearheaded the reforms.
Florida TaxWatch calculates that flexibility in the 85-percent rule could save $53 million a year. A slight change in sentencing guidelines could save $31.4 million. Greater use of electronic monitoring could save $43 million. More effective rehabilitation, including increased use of faith-based prisons, could cut recidivism.
Gov. Scott has appointed two reformers to lead the Department of Corrections and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, chairs the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee. While stressing that "our first job is public safety," Rep. Baxley said, "I'd like to put a sign on the prison door that says 'Don't Come Back.' ' To make that happen, smart and justice must go together in Florida.

- Randy Schultz, for The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board

Want to Save Taxpayer Money? Stop Building Prisons!

The United States accounts for less than 5 percent of the world population, but if you're a prisoner, chances are you're locked behind bars in the land of the free, which accounts for 25 percent of the globe's incarcerated men and women -- nearly 2.4 million people.
Fueled by the war on drugs and “tough on crime” demagoguery, the U.S. prison population has surged over the past three decades, to the point that roughly one out of every 100 Americans is incarcerated – and one out of 32 is under some form of correctional supervision. As it stands now, an African-American male is more likely to be convicted of a felony than to graduate college.
That has to change.
Indeed, “There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential,” writes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (!) in a recent Op-Ed coauthored by fellow conservative criminal justice reformer Pat Nolan of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
Writing in The Washington Post, Gingrich and Nolan argue that the over-reliance on incarceration in the U.S. is a problem the new Republican Congress needs to address – for both moral and pragmatic reasons. “We spent $68 billion in 2010 on corrections - 300 percent more than 25 years ago,” they write. “The prison population is growing 13 times faster than the general population. These facts should trouble every American.”
For years, debate over criminal justice policies has fallen into a traditional conservative-liberal trap, with Republicans on the one side calling for ever-more draconian laws to look “tough” on crime, and Democrats … well, doing the exact same thing, though presumably with not quite as much enthusiasm. Democracy!
But Gingrich and Nolan say the time for demagoguery is over, noting that throwing more and more non-violent offenders into prisons doesn't make us safer – more than half of those released from prison head right back within three years – and it's a practice both state and federal governments can ill afford to continue as they struggle with record budget deficits. While locking away prisoners and throwing away the key might make for a good campaign ad, “We can no longer afford business as usual with prisons,” they write, “and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it.”
Gingrich and Nolan's piece is part of campaign launched last month called “Right on Crime” – which includes the likes of former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese and the American Conservative Union's David Keene – that seeks to recast the debate over criminal justice policies by showing that even the most conservative right-wingers believe the country's prison building boom has gone too far, making the debate more about pragmatism than ideology. As they write in the Post, “If our prison policies are failing half of the time, and we know that there are more humane, effective alternatives, it is time to fundamentally rethink how we treat and rehabilitate our prisoners.”
While not quite ready to do away with the war on drugs, Gingrich and Nolan say it's a waste of taxpayer money to send non-violent offenders to prison, where criminality is often nurtured rather than extinguished. And, notably, they take head-on the argument that the country's prison-building spree over the last few decades is responsible for improved public safety.
“While crime fell in nearly every state over the past seven years,” they note, “some of those with the largest reductions in crime have also lowered their prison population. Compare Florida and New York. Over the past seven years, Florida's incarceration rate has increased 16 percent, while New York's decreased 16 percent. Yet the crime rate in New York has fallen twice as much as Florida's. Put another way, although New York spent less on its prisons, it delivered better public safety.”
Gingrich and Nolan aren't bleeding-heart liberals, and they aren't proposing that murders receive manicures instead of prison time. As conservatives, they're proposing modest, pragmatic reforms to the criminal justice system -- reforms Republicans would do well to consider if they're really serious about cutting the nation's deficit (I have my doubts). And really, if you're so concerned about the growth of state power, nothing says "Big Government" more than locking up a person -- literally taking away all their freedom -- over a non-violent offense that displeases some jerk in Washington.

by Charles Davis

California Ignores Obvious Budget Solution: Cut the Death Penalty:

California's new governor Jerry Brown confronted the state's dire budget crisis this week when he released his budget proposal. True to his word, the proposal contains hard cuts to social services across the board, ensuring that California's most vulnerable will have an even tougher time staying healthy and making ends meet.
He was slightly less true to his word, though, when it came to his oft-repeated slogan that "everything is on the table." At least one overfunded, broken government program was allowed to keep its bloated budget without a single cut: the state's billion-dollar death penalty.
Did the governor miss this massive drain on funds, or is there a sacred cow in California's budget after all? Maybe he can be excused on the grounds that there's no "death penalty" line item anywhere in the budget. But, of course, the reason there's no "death penalty" line item is that the $1 billion the death penalty will cost over the next five years is hidden throughout a half-dozen judicial and corrections budget items — any one of which could be trimmed by the governor. Let's go down the line:
There's the $1 million per death penalty trial over and above the cost of non-death penalty murder trials, which comes from county prosecutors' budgets.
Then there's the $63 million per year extra spent housing people on death row and another $60 million spent on their appeals, again over and above the cost of housing and appeals for life without parole. Those costs are tucked away in the budgets for corrections, the Supreme Court, the attorney general's office and public defense.
Finally, the kicker is the brand new death row facility we're about to build that will cost $400 million.
Over five years, that tally comes to just over $1 billion.
Now, repealing the death penalty in California can only be done at the ballot box, but defunding the whole system can be done with a few strokes of the governor's pen: just ask any senior citizen, recipient of in-home medical care, or single working parent. They'll tell you how powerful that pen can be when it comes to cutting government programs.
Alternatively, if the governor converted the sentences of California's more than 700 residents of death row to life without parole, he'd save that whole billion dollars in one swoop: no more extra housing costs, no more extra appeals costs, no more new death row. That's a lot of money that could go towards much-needed programs and services.
And it's not as if the people of the state are clamoring for more death penalty spending over other issues, like, education, crime prevention, health care, or social safety nets. While Gov. Brown may have assumed that the death penalty really is precious to California voters, his own election proved otherwise. Even after Meg Whitman saturated the airwaves bashing Brown for his anti-death penalty record, Californians still elected the guy. We also voted down a Senate candidate who campaigned on being pro-death penalty, and elected an anti-death penalty attorney general, Kamala Harris, over a prosecutor known nationwide for his aggressive pursuit of death sentences.
Why did we vote in Jerry Brown again? Maybe we're ready for some realistic and pragmatic change. Maybe we're ready to prioritize victims, community safety, and health above executions. Maybe we're ready to Cut This. Send Gov. Brown a message that if he's going to cut anything from California's budget, he should cut the death penalty.

Hey Florida, this applies to you as well !

Reduce wrongful convictions: Florida's new innocence panel must start to change the rules

When Linda Zavatkay identified her neighbor as the man who robbed and stabbed her in her Port Salerno home, she did so only after investigators pressed her to choose a suspect. She had been checking out the lineup for a while, and wasn't sure that she saw her attacker's face.
"It should have stopped right there," state Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, said of the witness identification procedure. "But because of the detective, she continued to look and felt pressured to ID someone." That someone was Todd Patrick Neely. Despite evidence that he was having dinner at a restaurant 12 miles away at the time of the 1986 crime, a judge convicted Mr. Neely of attempted murder and burglary based on Ms. Zavatkay's eyewitness identification and sentenced him to 15 years.
Six months later, an appeals court ordered a new trial for Mr. Neely after ruling that prosecutors improperly withheld information about another suspect. Prosecutors then dropped the charges.
Mr. Neely's case attracted national attention. Yet more than two decades later, most area police and sheriff's departments have not changed the procedures they use to obtain eyewitness identifications. Sen. Negron, who represented Mr. Neely and sits on Florida's Innocence Commission, wants to change that.
When the commission meets today in Jacksonville, Sen. Negron plans to suggest that it review the recommendations issued by the U.S. Justice Department 11 years ago designed to make eyewitness evidence more accurate. As reported by The Post's Susan Spencer-Wendel, the majority of law-enforcement agencies in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast have failed to adopt those recommendations in their written policies and procedures. It's time they do so.
The Florida Supreme Court established the Innocence Commission last summer to study of the causes of wrongful conviction and measures to prevent such convictions. A national expert on eyewitness misidentification told commissioners in November that more than 30 percent of all eyewitness IDs are wrong, resulting in a huge number of innocent people behind bars. Gary Wells of Iowa State University said 12 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence in Florida, but an estimated 200 innocent people probably are still being held.
Sen. Negron will push for a pair of Justice Department recommendations that he believes are most important - "cautionary instruction" and double-blind administration of photo lineups. "Those are the two," he said, "that I think are the most promising to reduce wrongful convictions."
Cautionary instruction involves telling an eyewitness that the suspect may or may not be in the lineup, and that the investigation will continue whether the witness chooses someone or not. Double-blind administration means the person showing an eyewitness a lineup has no idea who the suspect is, which keeps him or her from influencing the eyewitness' choice. Although double-blind administration was not included in the Justice Department's 1999 guide, it was mentioned as a "direction for future exploration and field testing." That future is now.
According to a survey by The Post, only three of 32 area law-enforcement agencies have specific eyewitness ID policies and include key elements recommended by the Justice Department: the Indian River County Sheriff's Office, and the Jupiter and Palm Beach Gardens police departments.
Although the Innocence Commission's final report is not due until 2012, Sen. Negron said members can agree to make certain recommendations sooner. If so, he will file a bill for the legislative session. If law-enforcement agencies will not adopt better procedures, the Legislature must act. Given the number of innocent people already exonerated, it's already been too long.
- Rhonda Swan,
for The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board
Posted: 11:50 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 9, 2011

Death Penalty Support Wanes Amid Errors and Debate:

A little more than one generation after the United States Supreme Court reinstalled the death penalty as a sentencing option in criminal cases, and despite otherwise strong support for tough-on-crime laws, capital punishment in America is markedly on the wane. Executions are down dramatically. Death sentences are being recommended less frequently by juries and endorsed less often by judges. And wrongfully convicted death-row inmates in increasing numbers are being released from prison as a result of DNA testing and other exonerating evidence. Today, nearly half of the jurisdictions in the United States have not had an execution within the past 10 years.The statistics go on and on. Executions in America were down 12 percent in 2010 from 2009. They are down approximately 50 percent since 1999. Only seven states carried out more than one execution in 2010 -- almost all in the South or Southwest.The reasons for the decline are numerous and often interconnected. Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a clearinghouse for information about capital punishment, told me Thursday: "In essence, I believe that one issue, innocence, caused a cascade of other changes, such as improved quality of defense, more careful appeals, more thorough trials, and more acceptable alternatives for juries, all of which have contributed to the declining use of the death penalty."Indeed, in Texas, there have been 41 death-row exonerations in the past nine years, 21 alone in Dallas County. The Innocence Project, whose lawyers and investigators scour state court case files across the country for evidence of wrongful convictions, reported that its organization generated 29 exonerations in 2010. These are just some of the examples where the criminal justice system in the past has demonstrably made grievous errors in processing capital defendants. And what each of those specific examples has done is encourage both a renewed interest in examining dubious convictions (which in turn leads to more exonerations) as well as a heightened commitment by prosecutors, lawmakers, juries and judges to get capital cases right in the first place.Even though general support for the death penalty remains relatively high -- 64 percent of Americans supported it in an October Gallup poll and only 29 percent said there were opposed -- political and legal developments over the past decade or so have contributed to the slowing rate of executions and death sentences. As more Americans have become aware of parole restrictions -- as they have come to learn that "life sentences" can, indeed, be "life sentences -- they have eased their eagerness for executions. When given an option between capital punishment and life in prison, Gallup's respondents split almost evenly: 49 percent favored the death penalty, 46 percent favored the life sentence.These numbers are impacting the political dynamics of the debate over capital punishment. In 2007, for example, New Jersey became the first state to abolish capital punishment since it was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia. (Four years earlier, in Furman v. Georgia, the court had banned the death penalty across the country as a violation of the "cruel and unusual" clause of the Eighth Amendment). In Maryland, there has been a practical moratorium on capital punishment for at least the past year -- and it's going on six years since the last execution there. In New York, a judge struck down the state's capital statute in 2004, prompting lawmakers to study the matter in great depth but not reinstate it.Several other death penalty states, including Kansas, South Dakota and Colorado, have seen in just the past two years meaningful legislative debates over whether to repeal capital punishment. In Illinois, following a then-Gov. George Ryan-imposed moratorium against capital punishment arising from systemic abuse in the criminal justice system, lawmakers are poised to repeal the death penalty, a striking turnaround in a decade for a state that once had hundreds on its death row. Even in Texas, perpetually at or near the top in executions each year, serious talk about the repeal of the death penalty has emerged from the ashes of one embarrassing capital case after another.And while there is discernible movement away from the death penalty in some jurisdictions, there does not appear to be much movement toward it anywhere in the United States. In fact, even some conservative politicians and advocates have begun to make a fiscal case against the practice. In their view, the death penalty is simply too expensive to implement and an unnecessary drain upon precious state resources. California has spent, by many accounts, hundreds of millions of dollars since capital punishment was reinstated. Other states have spent similar amounts sending men and women to death row. The cost of a capital case, including appeals and other expenses, exceeds by an order of magnitude the cost of a non-capital murder case.Dieter says this trend could ultimately carve out a renewed push by the federal courts to again outlaw capital punishment everywhere. He told me: "If the current trend of fewer states using the death penalty continues, I believe the Supreme Court will eventually follow its Eighth Amendment precedents and find that our standards of decency have evolved to the point that the death penalty is a cruel and unusual punishment. The number of states banning capital punishment will have to increase to numbers comparable to those that barred the execution of juveniles and the mentally retarded." He's referring here to the two big death penalty cases of the past half-decade or so in which the Supreme Court has sharply limited the circumstances in which capital punishment may be applied.
Analysis byAndrew Cohen

Prisoner reentry becoming a priority

Attorney General Eric Holder today convened the inaugural meeting of the Cabinet-level "Reentry Council" in Washington to identify and to advance effective public safety and prisoner reentry strategies.

In addition to the Attorney General, the council includes Departments of Education Secretary Arne Duncan; Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius; Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack; Interior Secretary Ken Salazar; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan; Labor Secretary Hilda Solis; and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki. Members also include Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Michael Astrue; Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, R. Gil Kerlikowske; Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Melody Barnes; Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Joshua DuBois; and Chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Jacqueline Berrien.

The council will address short-term and long-term goals through enhanced communication, coordination and collaboration across federal agencies. The mission of the council is threefold: to make communities safer by reducing recidivism and victimization; to assist those returning from prison and jail in becoming productive, tax paying citizens; and to save taxpayer dollars by lowering the direct and collateral costs of incarceration.

"Reentry provides a major opportunity to reduce recidivism, save taxpayer dollars and make our communities safer," said Attorney General Holder. "More than two million people are behind bars, and 95 percent of them will be released back into their communities. By developing effective, evidence-based reentry programs, we can improve public safety and community well-being."

Among its goals, the Reentry Council will meet semi-annually to leverage resources across agencies to reduce recidivism and victimization; identify evidence-based practices that advance the council’s mission; promote changes to federal statutes, policies and practices that focus on reducing crime; and identify federal policy opportunities and barriers to improve outcomes for the reentry community.

I am pleased to hear that this "Reentry Council" is up and running, and I am hopeful that they can and will get a lot done in the months ahead. And I think it would be especially cool if the Council had a public event with high-profile former felons like Martha Stewart and Michael Vick and Marion Jones to talk about some of their (especially positive and uncommon) reentry experiences.

From the Setencing Law and Policy blog

Florida should move away from its expensive, ineffective tough-on-crime philosophy:

To Floridians worried about Gov.-elect Scott's ultra-conservative bent, the only thing more alarming than news he is being advised to shake up the prison system might be news that Mr. Scott is being advised to use Texas as a model.
In fact, the recommended approach should be encouraging to Floridians regardless of party or ideology. Texas is at the forefront of states that have scrapped an ineffective, expensive punishment-first philosophy. If Mr. Scott follows suit, Florida could benefit from a focus on prevention and rehabilitation.
As The Post's Dara Kam reported Sunday, Mr. Scott's advisers are urging him to build a system that diverts nonviolent drug offenders to effective treatment programs that can end the problem instead of recycling them through the state's prisons - at great expense.
For offenders who do go to prison, the new approach would require education and vocational training. Education gives people released from prison a greater chance of getting a job, which is the primary factor in reducing recidivism.
Reforming prisons would be a major test of Mr. Scott's untried ability to lead the Legislature. In the past, lawmakers have made a lot of political mileage out of being tough on crime. Gov. Crist got some of his earliest notoriety as "Chain Gang Charlie" when he advocated a return to that mode of punishment.
Lawmakers also have had a penchant for ordering judges to impose minimum mandatory sentences for various classes of crimes. Getting the Legislature to return proper discretion to judges will take political skill.
It's not hard to see how lawmakers can be conflicted. For example, Gov.-elect Scott is being advised that courts should not be so quick to send offenders back to prison for probation violations. Compare that to four years ago, when incoming Gov. Crist, motivated by the murder of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia by a man with probation violations, pushed a bill through the Legislature to return more probation violators to prison.
A problem has been that crimes make headlines while prevented crimes, by definition, don't draw attention. Statisticians, however, are documenting the positive impact of prevented crimes. In Texas, policy changes saved $900 million in prison costs and preventing a 9 percent increase in the prison population. Encouragingly, Mr. Scott's choice to lead the Department of Corrections, Edwin Buss, advocated similar reforms as head of Indiana's prison system.
Florida spends $2.4 billion on prisons. The state's costs and prison population have been trending up. The goal is to stay tough on criminals who deserve it, but to give a second chance to those who can benefit from one. That isn't "conservative" or "liberal." It's the convergence of common sense and compassion.
- Jac Wilder VerSteeg,
for The Palm Beach Post Editorial Board published 12/29/10

The Death Penalty on the Wane--Is it time to abolish capital punishment?

In the midst of the fall election campaign, Steven Hayes went on trial in New Haven, Conn., in one of the most horrific murder cases in memory. The killers invaded a home, beat a man with a baseball bat, sexually assaulted and strangled his wife, and tied up their two daughters before setting a fire that killed them.
It was the sort of crime that could only increase support for the death penalty. This effect had some relevance for the Connecticut governor's race, because it pitted a supporter of capital punishment, Republican Thomas Foley, against Democrat Dannel Malloy, an opponent.
When they debated, Foley promised to veto any bill to abolish the death penalty, while Malloy said, "We know that the application of the death penalty has not always been equal and even." A tough sell, right? But Malloy won.
That's just one of the parade of indications that capital punishment is on the wane. The popular impulse to put people to death is just not what it used to be.
Executions have fallen by half since 1999. The number of new death sentences is about one-third what it was at the 1996 peak. Even in Texas, long the leading practitioner, death sentences are off by 80 percent. Several states that retain capital punishment have not administered a single lethal injection in the past five years.
The exoneration of 138 death row inmates has weakened public support for the ultimate sanction. In a recent Gallup poll, 64 percent of Americans endorsed it, down from 80 percent in 1994, while opposition has nearly doubled.
A survey commissioned by the Death Penalty Information Center found that 61 percent prefer that murderers get some sort of life sentence instead. As a budget priority, the death penalty was ranked seventh out of seven issues.
Did someone mention budgets? They are no friend of an option that requires expensive trials, costly appeals, and pricey incarceration arrangements. Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, says capital punishment has become "an extreme luxury item."
Even the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog, which this year offers a charm bracelet for $248,000, has nothing to compare. Maryland has spent $186 million on capital cases over the past 30 years—which comes to $37 million per execution.
The typical Texas death case carries a price tag of $2.3 million. A 2005 study pointed out that "New Jersey taxpayers over the last 23 years have paid more than a quarter billion dollars on a capital punishment system that has executed no one."
You might surmise that death sentences and executions have subsided because the homicide rate has dropped so much. But Zimring finds that the biggest decline has been among murders that aren't eligible for capital punishment. Capital murders have declined far less. There are thousands each year for prosecutors who want to pursue them.
Even among lawmakers, this remedy is losing ground. The New Jersey legislature repealed it in 2007 and New Mexico followed suit last year. New York's death penalty law was overturned in court, but legislators have refused to pass a new one.
Illinois Gov. George Ryan declared an execution moratorium in 2000, and his two successors have maintained it. But the moratorium has been, in a sense, the worst of both worlds. While taxpayers continue to incur the costs of seeking death sentences, none is ever carried out.
The cost will disappear if the General Assembly abolishes capital punishment, which opponents intend to propose as soon as it convenes in January. "I really think we're going to get it done," Jim Covington, director of legislative affairs for the Illinois State Bar Association, told me.
That shouldn't be impossible in a state where death row inmates are more likely to be exonerated than executed. Given Illinois' horrendous budget problems, the point of keeping the death penalty on the books is mysterious to see. In the last seven years, taxpayers have spent more than $100 million on capital cases even though the death chamber has been turned into a Starbucks.
If it is repealed, some people will cheer, some will be angry, and most will pay little attention. In the United States, the death penalty may never die, but its best days are past.
by Steve Chapman--published in Reason Magazine on 12/27/10

Thanksgiving in Jail (by Katy Savage--The Mormon Worker)

This last weekend I spent a day and a half in the Muscogee County Jail in Georgia. Soon I will write about the School of the Americas Watch Vigil, its fight and its power. Soon I will write about the fragility of First Amendment rights and how quickly I saw them disappear. But first I want to write about this:
I am out of jail. 2.5 million others in this country tonight are not. Maybe some got canned turkey on their plastic trays today, to celebrate.
Our country has the highest incarceration rate of any country—one in 31 adults—and the highest number of people locked up in cages.
More black men are currently in prison in the U.S. than were slaves in 1850.
7.2 million of us are in jail, in prison, on probation or on parole.
But these were all facts that I already knew.
What I didn’t know is that the vitamin-depleted food tastes and smells like Purina Cat Chow, served with some slimy iceburg lettuce and “milk” with seven ingredients.
I didn’t know about the weight of those slit-windowed rooms, the sense of being buried deep even though we were on the fourth-floor cell block, of being so easy to forget, which is the real horror of a dungeon. I didn’t know “outdoor recreation” meant a rare moment in a high-walled, concrete courtyard.
I didn’t know books would be contraband, a near impossibility. When I saw how much these women loved to read, I told them I’d mail them some books, only to discover that to give these women books I would have to come in person during visiting hours and give one at a time. There is, of course, no library in the jail. The aim of the place is to punish, shame, and deprive.
I didn’t know about Gwen, with the worn face and quiet patience of an Appalachian farmer, who is sitting in a cage because her boyfriend left marijuana at her house.
I didn’t know that 19-year-old Katie has been waiting for a trial date for six months now so the State can figure out if she actually stole that Wii or not. Katie was going to nursing school and caring for her two-year-old daughter when she was arrested, and because her parents now have this little girl to care for they can’t afford bail. It’s like a debtor’s prison: the longer you’re in there, the less likely you’ll be able to afford to get out. Katie, who seems tough, capable, stoic, cries when she speaks of her daughter. She told me she thought she’d be fine when she learned her mother and daughter could visit her twice a week, but she fell apart when she instead was only allowed to speak through a telephone to their images on a television screen. This is the case for all of them in Muscogee County Jail.
In sum, I didn’t know is that “innocent until proven guilty” was such an outrageous lie. If a cop brings you in, you’re guilty. It doesn’t matter what any facts say, you will be punished. If you’re poor, your guilt is heavier, your punishment more severe. For my own convictions for “picketing” and “demonstration without a permit,” I was sentenced to forty days in jail or $300 fines. If I hadn’t had that $300, I would be there until 2011. Forty days or $300—clearly, the punishment for one who can’t pay is far higher. In this reckoning, each day’s worth of freedom, of being with loved ones and feeling the sun and breeze and earth, is worth $7.50.
There is a payment plan for those who can only pay by installments—but I was told this would cost an extra $50 per month, making the option ridiculously cost-prohibitive.
What’s more, I was also charged with “unlawful assembly,” which is a state charge—if I didn’t have $1,300 for bail, I would be in there for weeks or months waiting for that trial.
And waiting for trials is what people in jail do. The women told me they expected to wait four to twelve months before they got a day in court. At that point some of them will be judged to be innocent, but by then they will already have paid heavily for the guilt of poverty.
And so this Thanksgiving I want to send out a call for the old Christian ideal of visiting those in prison, of learning the stories of our society’s most vulnerable. Though the prison figures large in sacred stories from both the Bible and Book of Mormon, we treat wrongful imprisonment as a thing of the past, something we have overcome in our enlightened democracy. We should instead learn that the well-spring of Right Living has always been a kind of steady unruliness, a wilfulness which no Empire can abide.
Also, for Thanksgiving I need to say I’m thankful for the women of the fourth-floor cell block of Muscogee County Jail. For Keisha’s polite explanations of what to do when I came in wide-eyed, dragging my mattress, and for letting me read her Bible and her copy of Twilight all night. For Bama’s kind sass and smile, and for dancing with me in the common area. For Mally and Toi and Miss Margie and Christine and all the others whose names I’ve forgotten because I had no pen and paper to write them down. All of them still laughing easily, still aware of their stories and their dignity after months of being treated with mechanized, organized violence.
A fearful and narrow-eyed State—the same sort of bullies that beheaded the non-conforming John the Baptist—has stripped them of the people and places they love. It acts with brutal efficiency when it comes to capturing them and putting them behind bars, and plods along tortuously when asked to figure out if anyone actually disobeyed its rules. It encourages a culture where being behind bars is taken as proof of shameful behavior: at worst, we condemn them, and at best, we ignore them.
In resistance, the women dance and make a home out of nothing.

A Smart Way Florida Can Reduce Prison Costs:

Walter McNeil is a numbers man. He can rattle off statistics and cost analyses for as long as it takes his audience to get the big picture.
Mr. McNeil isn’t a CPA. He’s the secretary of Florida’s Department of Corrections, and he has an ambitious plan to reduce Florida’s recidivism rate — now at 32.8 percent — to 17 percent in three to five years. The reason? To save Florida taxpayers’ money.
Gov.-elect Rick Scott, who has said that he wants to cut state prison costs by $1 billion, should have a sit-down with Mr. McNeil before he wields that budget axe.
In 2008, Florida’s inmate population topped 100,000 for the first time. In 2008-09, 42.3 percent of those admitted to prison had been there before.
It costs $19,000 a year to house one inmate. The cost is expected to climb to about $22,451 by 2014. It costs $100 million to build a prison, and $20 million a year to run it.
Mr. McNeil’s fiscal logic is simple: Reduce the number of inmates who return to prison and you cut prison costs. You also restore safety as the crime rate will drop.
Another number Mr. McNeil points to: 88 percent of Florida’s inmates will be released back into society eventually. Eighty-eight percent! With no motivation for going straight, many will likely commit another crime.
Mr. McNeil decided it wasn’t enough just to release an ex-offender with $100, a suit and a bus ticket home. Working with Duval County Sheriff John Rutherford, Mr. McNeil’s staff came up with the “portal of entry” concept. The corrections staff wanted to hand off the ex-offender to key people upon release. Enter Sheriff Rutherford, a logical choice since all ex-offenders must register with authorities.
Using federal Second Chance grants, the two departments in December 2008 created a “single point” of entry for inmates returning to the community. When an inmate is set for release, the sheriff’s office is notified. A group of parole officers, social workers, educators and others assess the ex-offender’s needs for housing, employment, education, training. The ex-offender is given information about where to find help. Ex-offenders who participate have case managers as they re-enter the community.
Mr. McNeil’s department has gotten no new revenue for this project as it coordinates existing resources — such as work-release programs. The “portal of entry” concept is now in various stages of implementation at sheriff’s offices in Palm Beach, Baker, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties. Mr. McNeil hopes it will expand to all major urban areas.
Empirically, the results of the “portal of entry” program can’t be judged for about three years. But in Duval it appears to be a hit. The sheriff’s office has even developed a job placement component.
So, we can just keep building more prisons to accommodate a growing inmate population, or seek effective ways to reduce crime by helping ex-offenders go straight. Mr. McNeil’s choice makes good dollars and sense for Florida.
A Miami Herald Editorial published November 21, 2010
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/21/v-print/1934085/a-smart-way-florida-can-reduce.html#ixzz15wLOgXAF

Exonerated prisoners campaign against the death penalty:

Two men who spent a combined total of nearly 35 years on death row for crimes they didn't commit are now campaigning to help others who may be facing similar fates.
Working directly with Coloradans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CADP), Derrick Jamison and Shabaka WaQlimi said in an interview interviewed this week with David Sirota on Colorado’s Progressive Radio AM 760 that they are hoping to raise awareness about wrongful convictions and the likelihood that states across the country may be preparing to execute innocent people. The exonerees are staunch critics of the death penalty in general -- with good reason -- are currently on a nationwide tour to draw attention to their cases.
Derrick Jamison spent 20 years on death row in the state of Ohio before being cleared of all original charges in 2005. His case in 1985 had all the features of a typical wrongful conviction: unreliable eyewitness testimony, withheld evidence and a codefendant who testified against Jamison in exchange for a sweet plea deal. In initial photo lineups, one witness to the robbery and murder that Jamison was ultimately convicted of didn’t choose Jamison out of a photo lineup. Instead, he chose two other men.
Shabaka WaQlimi, formerly known as Joseph Green Brown, came within 14 hours of being executed before a stay was issued. He had spent 13 years on death row in Florida, the state currently leading the nation in wrongful convictions. What he believed to be his final three weeks were spent just 30 feet from the execution chamber in what’s known as the “death watch cell." He had been measured for the suit he would be buried in, though he refused to order the “final meal."
Mr. WaQlimi was accused of robbing, raping, and murdering the co owner of a Tampa clothing store, Earlene Barksdale, a woman who also happened to be the wife of a prominent area attorney. Again, like Jamison’s case, WaQlimi’s hinged on unreliable testimony and withheld evidence. The prosecution’s star witness had a personal vendetta against WaQlimi for a former robbery case and the jury never did hear expert testimony that would have shown the suspected murder weapon could not have been used in the commission of the crime. Despite the witness later admitting his lie, appellate courts offered WaQlimi no relief. It wasn’t until an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the prosecution had purposefully allowed false testimony at trial that the stay of execution was signed—less than a day before his execution.
The men aren’t bitter—only motivated. They also aren’t blind to the things which put them on death row and make some observations that even some legal experts, lawmakers, and politicians still refuse to see. When asked whether the real problem is the death penalty or how it is being administered, WaQlimi noted capital punishment isn’t just a system of executing people for horrendous crimes with a few mistakes—he called it a system of “elitism."
About the other men WaQlimi shared death row with, he recognized a few things they all had in common--“not one had the money to buy an attorney." He noted that the vast majority of death row inmates he knew personally were poor -- whether black, white or Hispanic. He also addressed the issue of race, observing the majority of victims in death row cases are white while questioning how people can really believe that a country founded on “300-plus years” of slavery can dole out true, fair justice, saying racism is deeply ingrained in the system.
After spending years incarcerated for offenses they didn’t commit, you would think Derrick Jamison and Shabaka WaQlini would be content to spend their remaining years with family, relaxing outdoors, or enjoying life’s simple pleasures. While they could be enjoying their freedom by living as many other Americans do, they instead choose to spend their time on the road, giving a voice to the men and women awaiting execution across the country, and speaking out against something that so nearly took their lives

Vote NO on Justice Cannady

Charles Canady has spent most of his career in elected office. He was first elected as a “conservative Democrat” to the state legislature in the early 1980s, and switched parties in 1990. In 1992, he was elected to Congress, and became known as an extreme partisan ideologue. Canady was a leading pro-life force in the Congress. He has often been credited with coining the term “partial-birth abortion.” Canady left Congress after the 2000 elections, when he chose not to run for another term, after leading the charge in the impeachment and trial proceedings of then-president Bill Clinton. Canady was one of the impeachment managers appointed by the House to prosecute Bill Clinton in the United States Senate.
When then-governor Jeb Bush appointed Charles Canady to the district court in 2002, he made an overtly partisan and political choice. The same can be said of Charlie Crist, who appointed Justice Canady to the Supreme Court in 2008. Voters should take this opportunity to reverse these lapses of judgment. It is fine to have justices which represent a diverse point of views – liberal, conservative and all points in between – but we do not need political hacks making law from the bench.
From "Pinski on Politics" http://www.pinskipolitics.com/2010/09/pinski-recommends-fire-canady-but-retain-others-on-florida-supreme-court/#comment-2718

A couple of questions about court in Sarasota

A few weeks ago a client came to see me and asked if I could represent him. He was homeless and charged with a minor offense and the judge had been giving him a hard time because he wore shorts to court. His possessions were limited to those he could carry and he didn’t own long pants.

I agreed to take the case. Yesterday I bought him some pants at Goodwill. This morning I met him outside the courthouse. He had his duffle bag that contained all of his possessions. We got in the long security line to enter the courthouse. My client’s bag was put through the x-ray system and rejected. He had can openers and utensils and other odd objects. The bailiffs didn’t want to take the time for him to unpack and go through each compartment, not with a hundred people in line behind us They told him he had to take it away, that he couldn’t leave it there and he couldn’t bring it inside.

Now this story ended without problem. I took his bag and walked out and locked it in my trunk and we went to court. But what about everyone else with all that they own in their possession and a date with a judge? What are they supposed to do with their duffle bags and knapsacks?

And how are they supposed to pay their court costs? But let's make sure they wear long pants.

Bill creating blue ribbon commission to review criminal justice system:

NAACP-SUPPORTED BILL CREATING A BLUE-RIBBON COMMISSION TO REVIEW OUR NATION'S CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM PASSED THE U.S. HOUSE IN JULY, MUST NOW PASS THE SENATE
PROPOSAL WOULD CREATE A BI-PARTISAN COMMISSION TO EVALUATE EVERY STAGE OF THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE PROCESS INCLUDING THE DISPARATE REPRESENTATION AND TREATMENT OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC MINORITIES IN AND BY THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
THE ISSUE:
On Tuesday, July 27, 2010, the United States House of Representatives passed, by a unanimous vote, H.R. 5143, the National Criminal Justice Act, which would create a national commission with an 18-month timeline to examine and review the myriad of problems that exist in our current criminal justice system. Specifically, this commission would review every stage of the criminal justice system, from initial contact to sentencing to the challenges facing those ex-offenders who are reentering society. The commission would also be charged with looking into the myriad of problems that have resulted in the staggering overrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities from pedestrian stops to the use of the death penalty.
We must now encourage the United States' Senate to follow the lead of the House and pass this bill so it can be signed into law.
At every stage of the criminal justice process serious problems undermine basic tenets of fairness and equity. Perhaps the most glaring problem is the number of racial and ethnic minorities who are disproportionately treated more harshly and more often by our Nation's criminal justice system. At every stage of the criminal justice process - from initial contact to sentencing to the challenges facing those reentering the community after incarceration - racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented in the number of people stopped, arrested, tried, convicted, incarcerated and even executed. These disparities are particularly true for African American men and boys. Initial contacts with police officers are often driven by racial profiling and other racially tainted practices, and the disparities exist through the sentencing phase: African Americans routinely receive more jail time and harsher punishments. Although African Americans make up just over 12% of the national population, 42% of Americans currently on death row are African American. Nearly a million African Americans today are incarcerated in prisons and in jails, and unless there is a change, a black male born today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime. Furthermore, African American women have the highest rate of incarceration among women in our nation, a rate that is four times higher than that of White women.
This is not just a problem among African Americans or racial and ethnic minorities. Our nation has 5 percent of the world's population. We have 25 percent of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States that is five times the incarceration rate in the rest of the world. The bottom line is that under our current criminal justice system too many people are being incarcerated and otherwise caught up in the criminal justice system and we still have too many Americans who do not feel safe in the homes or their communities. Furthermore, because of the disparities that result from our current system, entire communities within our country do not have confidence in the criminal justice system.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, HAS BEEN DESIGNATED "COMMISSION CALL-IN DAY", IN WHICH SUPPORTERS OF THIS LEGISLATION ARE URGED TO CALL THEIR SENATORS AND DEMAND ACTION. THE NAACP SUPPORTS THE NATIONAL CRIMINAL JUSTICE ACT, H.R. 5143, AND ENCOURAGES ALL SENATORS TO ACT QUICKLY TO ENSURE THAT THIS LEGISLATION BECOMES LAW.
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Rough justice in America

Too many laws, too many prisoners. Never in the world have so many been locked up for so little. Read this great description of our out of control criminal justice system here.

http://www.economist.com/node/16636027/print

College or Prison?

Do state colleges and state prisons really compete for money? Well, sort of. Emotions run high when considering this question, at least in part because college students are attractive and motivated and prisoners, in contrast, are rough and aggressive. Everyone wants his son to go to college; no one wants his son to go to jail. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone went to college and America had no prisons? Or, as Pat Wingert writes in Newsweek,

It may seem odd that state funding for college kids often competes with money for prisoners, but if you track spending in California over the past 30 years, you’ll see evidence of a long-standing tug of war between these two very different constituencies. Over much of the past decade, funding for corrections has gone steadily up, while spending on state colleges has tumbled. “The state seems to be saying we have more of a future in prisons than in universities,” University of California president Mark Yudof said in a recent speech.
Following months of protests by students, parents, and colleges, Schwarzenegger urged the California legislature to pass a constitutional amendment earlier this year that would require the state to spend more on college classrooms than prison cells. “What does it say about any state that focuses more on prison uniforms than on caps and gowns?” Schwarzenegger said, adding that “30 years ago, 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons. Today, almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only 7.5 percent goes to higher education. Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future.” The state’s priorities, he added, “have become out of whack.”
Now the trend to spend more on prisons and less on colleges is a very real one, and not just in California. But the “tug of war” phrase is a misleading metaphor. Colleges don’t brawl with prisons for money, anymore than they brawl with the state employees’ pension fund or the department of parks and recreation. State colleges and prisons don’t fight each other for resources; they fight the state.

As the Wingert article rightly points out, however, both of these expenditures have grown immensely in the past few decades. This leads some, like Schwarzenegger and Yudof, to conclude that their state should be spending more on state colleges than on prisons, because colleges are, you know, nicer.

In January Schwarzenegger proposed an amendment to his state’s constitution requiring California to spend at least 10 percent of its budget on higher education and less than 7 percent of the budget on prisons. Despite the fact that even the state’s accounting office called Schwarzenegger’s plan simplistic and bad this discussion seems not to go away.

This is not a prison blog, but the real problem here is that our prisons don’t work. Once someone spends two years in prison, he’s essentially part of the prison system for life. This is true even if someone enters the system for a nonviolent crime, for something like drugs. The cost of keeping someone is jail in California is about $52,000 a year. Most of this has to do with the fact that California’s prison guards are the highest-paid in the United States of America.

These things are very interesting and potentially worthy of improvement, but pitting colleges against prisons, even rhetorically, is trouble. It’s relatively easy for colleges to raise money independently, by simply enrolling richer students or forcing them into higher debt. Prisons don’t have that option. As long as the state keeps incarcerating people, it has to use state money to pay for that. [Image via]

by Daniel Luzer who is a higher education blogger for the Washington Monthly.

Order in the court: Innocence Commission Awaits Signature

Incoming Senate President Mike Haridopolos, R-Melbourne, found the money in a lean appropriation year to fund an "innocence commission" that would without doubt save the state millions of dollars from incarcerating the wrong person in Florida prisons. In 2008, lawmakers passed a law automatically granting wrongfully imprisoned persons $50,000 for each year they were incarcerated.
Nationwide, 245 post-conviction exonerations have been based on DNA evidence since 1989 and Florida has contributed to almost 80 percent of those cases — clearing 12 Florida Death Row inmates since 2000.
Mr. Haridopolos' support of the $200,000 makes a large investment in public safety, too. When the wrong person is imprisoned for a crime, the actual perpetrator remains at large. Law-and-order standards, he has pointed out, include expectations of having a system that doesn't make such mistakes.
Creating the Florida Actual Innocence Commission is now in the hands of the Florida Supreme Court, specifically incoming Chief Justice Charles T. Canady. It will be up to him to ensure that the commission, which is just now getting organized, will begin the serious work of examining cases where the system has broken down, or has the potential to, such as handling of eye-witness testimony, improper use of evidence, false confessions, crime-fighting tunnel vision and inadequate defense.
The commission won't look for inmates who might be innocent and it's not intended to assign blame or point fingers. Rather it will look after the fact of DNA exoneration at errors of such a magnitude that they undermine our state's reputation for justice and identify broken parts of the criminal justice system. And, obviously, grave errors of justice cause the innocent person to suffer loss of income and reputation and punish their children and families with untold stresses.
Outgoing Chief Justice Peggy Quince is considering an administrative order launching the commission, which has been championed by former American Bar Association president and Florida State University president emeritus Sandy D'Alemberte.
Mr. D'Alemberte's petition called for a permanent, court-ordered panel of legal experts, police and victim advocates that would continue this deliberative work — a pattern recommended by an American Bar Association's assessment team and used in other states.
But the real legacy could well belong to Mr. Canady if he takes the next step in assigning permanence to this body through a court order so it can do more than issue a report and depart. He has the opportunity to make certain that the Florida Actual Innocence Commission helps put Florida in the forefront of actual justice for all.

An editorial from the Tallahassee Democrat published June 29, 2010

Is This the End of the War on Crime?

"Necessity," says Lorenzo Jones, executive director of the Connecticut-based A Better Way Foundation, "is the mother of invention." Jones, who has spent his adult life swimming against monster currents in his efforts to reform the country's criminal justice system, pauses to chuckle deeply at his own cliché. When it comes to drug policy, he continues, think of the present moment "as moving from a war economy to a postwar economy."

For decades, progressive policy analysts and criminal justice reformers such as Jones have argued that state and federal antidrug and, more generally, "tough on crime" incarceration strategies were counterproductive: that they were dramatically reshaping American society, at a staggering fiscal and moral cost, and they weren't succeeding. Drug use remained commonplace, and high recidivism numbers for paroled prisoners suggested that prisons weren't remolding criminals into model citizens. Far better, they argued, to keep prisons as a last resort for the truly hardened, violent criminals and to invest more resources in less expensive, and more effective, alternatives to incarceration.

True, crime rates have fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, in part because of those higher incarceration rates. But most experts believe they fell in larger part because of demographic shifts, changes in policing practices and an easing of the crack epidemic. The drop-off in crime has, in turn, finally allowed a public slightly less scared of crime to be slightly more willing to look for nuance rather than sound bites when it comes to policy. It has created what Bart Lubow, a juvenile justice advocate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, terms an "ideological space" for discussions of reform. "The overall context regarding crime policy," he says, "is much less hysterical than it was through most of the 1990s."

Faced with a growing body of evidence that carefully tailored rehabilitation models can reduce recidivism or drug use better than jails and prisons, and with a burgeoning crisis in local and state government finances, politicians and voters alike are turning their backs on basic tough-on-crime staples. Instead, they are looking for inspiration to programs such as the HOPE Project in Hawaii, the High Point project in North Carolina and an experiment in Multnomah County (home to Portland, Oregon) to divert low-end probation and parole violators to nonincarcerative settings. All these model programs view jail and prison sentences as a last option rather than a default, and swift responses to violations are considered more important than harsh ones. For reformers, it is a rare breath of fresh air.

"I think the criminal justice system is more under the microscope because of the fiscal situation," explains Mike Thompson, director of the New York–based Council of State Government's Justice Center. "Every state's facing fiscal problems, with the exception of North Dakota, and when you look at items where expenditures have risen in the last twenty years, corrections jumps out at you."

Around the country, legislators are essentially asking how they can get more bang for the bucks they spend fighting crime, drug use, mental illness and so on. And they're willing to consult reformers they would have shunned in the recent past as irredeemably "soft" on crime. "Nobody can sit here and say things are fine," argues Jones. "Something has to give. Now we can sit at the table with people we couldn't previously work with and say, 'What are you willing to give?' We are literally writing this narrative as we go."

In Texas a $600 million prison-expansion plan was shelved in 2007 in favor of a $241 million plan expanding community-based drug and alcohol treatment services, after researchers convinced legislators that the latter would lower crime rates more than expanding the state's penal infrastructure. As a result, the notoriously prison-tough Lone Star State, whose leaders used to boast about its extraordinarily high incarceration rate, is implementing some of the country's most innovative reforms, creating a network of in-prison and post-prison residential drug treatment and DWI centers, mental health facilities, halfway houses for inmates being released onto parole, and nonjail residential settings for low-end parole violators. In 2009 the state's prison population declined, perhaps signaling the start of a reversal of nearly four decades of expansion, which saw the Lone Star State's prison numbers grow from just shy of 16,000 in 1972 to more than 170,000 in 2008. Texas joined twenty-five other states that saw reductions in the size of their inmate population last year.

In Kansas legislators approved a large investment in drug treatment programs and services for parolees designed to stop so many offenders from simply cycling back into prison after their release. The result was a drop in Kansas's prison population significant enough to allow the state to close several facilities.

Michigan recently reformed its prisoner-release process to allow for shorter sentences, winning accolades from the ACLU in the process. The state closed eight prisons as a result and invested some of the $250 million savings expected to be generated over a five-year period in an expanded network of mental health and job training services, as well as drug treatment programs.

All told, ten states have embraced "justice reinvestment" strategies such as this, reducing prison spending, investing a portion of the savings in more effective anticrime infrastructure and using the remainder of the savings to plug gaps elsewhere in their budgets. As this model spreads, says Thompson optimistically, we'll get more results-oriented policy-making than we've had in the past. "These are bipartisan, data-driven approaches: figure out what's driving the [prison population] growth and what can be done differently."

Even states that haven't formally adopted such a reinvestment strategy are, of necessity, being pushed in this direction. In California, home to the country's largest state prison population as well as the country's most dysfunctional state budget process, the combination of federal injunctions against overcrowding and the worst fiscal crunch since the Great Depression has brought the race to incarcerate of the past quarter-century to an end. Over the next several years, to the dismay of politicians who have built careers on being tough on crime, the prison population, which stands at around 170,000, will be reduced by several tens of thousands, with more emphasis on parole, probation and local drug treatment.

New Mexico recently enacted a law banning employers from asking job applicants if they have a felony record. An increasing number of states, including conservative bastions like Alabama and Louisiana, are restructuring their juvenile justice systems to move away from incarceration. Drug and mental health courts are channeling more offenders into structured treatment. And many states are rolling back their most restrictive truth-in-sentencing provisions, allowing low-level offenders to return to their communities after serving only a small percentage of their sentences behind bars.

Some states and localities are also starting to invest in restorative justice models, putting offenders to work to repair the damage they caused the community rather than simply warehousing them in prisons.

Father George Horan, co-director of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles's Office of Restorative Justice, has spent a lifetime watching youngsters do stupid things and, as a result, ruin their lives. He has seen generations of kids graduate from being troubled children to hardened prisoners. And he has grown increasingly cynical about the ability of penal institutions to solve ingrained social problems. Far better, he has come to believe, to sit nonviolent offenders down with their families, teachers, peers, even victims, and force them to come to terms with the consequences of their actions.

Horan, 64, has a ruddy complexion and dresses casually. From his small office in the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lincoln Heights, a bleak industrial area of Los Angeles just north of downtown, he works to help delinquent teens, many of them gang members, establish more productive bonds with their communities. When three teens broke into their school a few years back and trashed it, the Office of Restorative Justice persuaded the trial judge to consider a restorative justice solution. The kids had to face their principal and fellow students; they had to pay for the damage; and they had to spend their weekends doing community service at the school—cleaning classrooms, doing basic maintenance work, sweeping autumn leaves. The principal, recalls Horan, took the kids out to lunch, got to know them and encouraged them to attend to their studies. "She said the next year they were the three best kids in the school. What a better result than sending the kids to juvenile hall. They turned their lives around."

Horan is aware of the limitations of this strategy—he tried the same approach when three boys set fire to his church door, but this time the prosecutor insisted on seeking prison terms. Politically, he says, it would be next to impossible for prosecutors to embrace restorative justice for violent criminals. But Horan believes restorative justice models have to play a part in any revamping of America's criminal justice system. "Always, the first step is, the person has to take responsibility for what they did. That's the cornerstone," he explains. "What can a person do to heal the victim and heal the community?"

Meanwhile, extending the first-do-no-harm principles of the restorative justice movement, a growing number of politicians have started to identify sky-high African-American incarceration rates as a civil rights issue that, in tandem with high crime rates in poor communities, serves up a double whammy to already devastated neighborhoods. As a result, they have begun pushing legislation that characterizes the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans as a problem. Connecticut recently passed a "racial impact statement" law mandating all major legislative proposals for the criminal justice system be studied for their racial impact. Other states, looking for ways to preserve public safety without inflicting the kind of collateral damage on communities that mass incarceration unleashes, will likely follow suit.

No part of the criminal justice system has had more of a racially skewed impact than America's antidrug strategy. Over the decades, millions of young Americans, mainly poor and disproportionately black and brown, have been arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to jail or prison for their involvement with the drug trade. It has been a staggering exercise in futility.

Yet these days, the "war on drugs," which Barack Obama denounced as an utter failure during his presidential campaign, is showing the fragility of old age. At the urging of the Obama administration and top Justice Department officials, Congress is working to eliminate the infamous crack and powder-cocaine sentencing disparities. And over the next few years, the Justice Department's Task Force on Sentencing Reform will likely recommend more proportionate sentencing for many drug offenses.

The era of "Lock 'em up and throw away the key" seems, slowly, to be drawing to a close. And over the next few decades, that will likely have the effect of gradually drawing down the size of the bloated prison population. Even seasoned conservative voices are cognizant of the winds of change.

"My attitude has always been, speed and certainty are crucial aspects of running a criminal justice system, not length of sentence," argues James Q. Wilson, at one time the country's most influential conservative criminologist. "Many sentences could be shortened without endangering public safety." Wilson, who rose to intellectual fame as President Nixon's favorite sociologist and later became known as the philosophical father of the Broken Windows policing theory, doesn't regret his role in developing ideas that helped contribute to America's mass incarceration experiment. But he also doesn't think that mass incarceration is, or should be, an end in itself. If there are alternatives that have at least as powerful an effect on reducing the crime rate, Wilson, an empiricist, believes they should be tried. Parole and probation systems should be reformed, he argues, so that violators are dealt with quickly and minor violators, such as those who fail a urine drug test, receive "a swift but very short penalty—a weekend in jail, a week in jail. It need not be returning people to serve a full prison term."

Changes in drug policy don't stop with shortening sentences, however. The administration recently lifted the ban on federal funding for needle-exchange programs—long a bugbear of drug-treatment and public health professionals. And for the first time since the 1970s, marijuana legalization movements are gaining traction at the state level. Californians will vote in November on a ballot measure to legalize pot, and preliminary polling indicates it could well pass. The initiative is buttressed by a number of politicians, like Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and State Senator Mark Leno, who have argued that legalizing marijuana would allow California to tax the lucrative market. Other states could follow in California's wake.

"People are now making a lawful income from cannabis here in California and other states," argues 57-year-old Chris Conrad, of the marijuana-advocacy newspaper West Coast Leaf, at a hummus-and-wine soiree to celebrate the opening of the Drug Policy Alliance's swank new downtown San Francisco offices. Conrad is talking about how the medical marijuana industry is increasingly using its clout to push for broader, across-the-board rollbacks of pot prohibition. "They can put that money back to invest in change. The idea is, it should be brought under control and tax revenue brought in. The whole financial argument is only going to get better. I think the drug war is fatally flawed, and it's doomed. It's just a matter of time; it could be five years, it could be twenty years. But prohibition doesn't work. It creates crime; it doesn't solve crime."

A few years ago Conrad would have been a countercultural refugee on the hippie fringe; these days, he and his ideas are increasingly mainstream. In fact, the attendees at the party oozed their radical-chic credentials; they were lawyers, doctors, politicians, consultants, businessmen. "The trend is for people to regulate rather than prohibit," asserted Doug Linney, the well-coiffed, sharp-dressed campaign consultant for the legalization initiative. "They see the current drug wars aren't working, especially regarding marijuana. There's an interest in changing it, especially because of the state's finances."

Cumulatively, all of these changes are bearing significant fruit. For the first time since the Nixon era, America's prison population is shrinking. In 2008, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the prison population fell in twenty states; in 2009 it fell in twenty-six states; and that trend is likely to continue in 2010. Moreover, as the number of drug-related sentences has declined slightly, so too has the appallingly high African-American incarceration rate edged slightly downward, off 9 percent from its peak a few years back. The gears of what journalist Joel Dyer, in the 1990s, tellingly labeled a "perpetual prisoner machine"—a self-sustaining interaction of conservative criminal justice lobbies, political opportunism, popular tough-on-crime sentiments, the economic needs of depressed prison towns and media sensationalism—seem finally to have gotten gummed up. Ironically, the federal government, which did so much to shift the country in a more conservative criminal justice direction for nearly fifty years, seems quite content to let the gears stay locked.

Most decisions about the criminal justice system are made at the state level. Despite the near-tenfold growth in the population of federal prison inmates since 1980, less than 10 percent of all inmates are serving federal sentences. But the federal government does perform some vital roles: it allocates resources directly (by, for example, patrolling the border and exporting the "war on drugs") and indirectly (by granting money to localities and states to set up antidrug task forces, funding drug and mental health treatment services, and putting more police on the streets). It creates overarching legal parameters within which states must operate (federal drug laws supersede state ones, which means that if California legalizes marijuana, for example, theoretically it would be setting up a conflict with DC). Perhaps most important, the federal government sets the tone for national conversations on crime and delinquency.

When it comes to tone-setting, sometimes what isn't said by federal officials is as important as what is. Over the past couple of years, President Obama's drug czar, ex–Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske, has chosen not to follow his predecessors with regard to medical marijuana. Whereas John Walters, Bush's drug czar, testified across the country against state medical marijuana laws, Kerlikowske has stayed silent. The effect, says Drug Policy Alliance executive director Ethan Nadelmann, has been to send a "green light to the states that they could have the freedom to go their own way on this." Kerlikowske, Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama himself steer clear of talking about the "war on drugs," and they generally don't use sound bites to trumpet their "tough" credentials when it comes to tackling the complex problem of crime.

But what is being said is also fascinating. "Too many of our citizens have come to have doubts about our criminal justice system," Holder told a Congressional Black Caucus symposium on June 24, 2009. "We must be honest with each other and have the courage to ask difficult questions of ourselves and our system. We must break out of the old and tired partisan stances that have stood in the way of needed progress and reform. We have a moment in time that must be seized in order to ensure that all of our citizens are treated in a way that is consistent with the ideals embodied in our founding documents. This Department of Justice is prepared to act."

Indeed, in a series of key speeches over the past year, Holder has delivered a commitment, unprecedented in recent decades, to use the might of the Justice Department to ensure a fairer, less coercive criminal justice system. Addressing the NAACP in July 2009, the attorney general talked of the devastating harm that harsh drug sentences have caused in poor communities. "It is not justice," he declared, "to continue our adherence to a sentencing scheme that disproportionately affects some Americans, and some communities, more severely than others."

The previous week, he told an audience at the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York–based think tank, that "getting smart on crime requires talking honestly about which policies have worked and which have not, without fear of being labeled as too hard or, more likely, too soft on crime. Getting smart on crime means moving beyond useless labels and instead embracing science and data, and relying on them to shape policy. And it means thinking about crime in context—not just reacting to the criminal act but developing the government's ability to enhance public safety before the crime is committed and after the former offender is returned to society." Taking their cue from Holder, a slew of top officials have begun revamping the language they use to discuss crime and punishment.

As Kerlikowske explained to The Nation in March, shortly after he returned from a UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting in Vienna, the country should not continue to think of drugs merely as a public safety problem but should start to see them as a public health problem. "My colleagues, I never heard them talk of a war on drugs," he said. "I've heard elected officials talk about it, but not police chiefs, sheriffs or prosecutors. They talk about it with the complexity the problem deserves."

In reshaping the national discourse on drugs, Kerlikowske touts his law enforcement credentials. He's a tough guy, a strong policeman with thirty-seven years on the job, and he knows he commands respect. "For me, it's a little bit like Nixon going to China," he explains. Kerlikowske has "very little concern about being labeled soft on drugs." And so he wants to talk about being "smart on drugs," instead of merely "tough." In fact, when he explains his mandate, the country's drug czar is more comfortable using the language of public health professionals than political posturers. "The 'war on drugs' was a simplistic answer to this really complex problem," he says. "We have to look at talking about addiction as a disease rather than a moral failure or saying people should just stop using drugs."

For the first time in more than forty years, criminal justice trends are starting to move in a sensible direction. At the local and state levels, fiscal necessity is forcing a rethink when it comes to incarceration strategies. And at the federal level, the politics that allowed George H.W. Bush to batter Michael Dukakis with images of Willie Horton, Bill Clinton to sign an execution warrant on the brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector and George W. Bush to push glibly for more teens to be tried and sentenced as adults is taking a back seat to smart, holistic thinking.

"Everyone I talk to around the country has been affected by drugs," Kerlikowske says. "But it's not talked about the same way as if you had a member of your family having cancer—or even alcoholism. When I look at the drug problem, what it costs in healthcare costs, police-community relations, the Southwest border, foreign relations—every one of those things, drugs are a part. If we could recognize how inextricably linked to all of these issues drug consumption and addiction is, if we could work to address it with the complexity it deserves, that would make more sense than holding a press conference and showing a ton of cocaine or five people led out in handcuffs."

Of all the changes in tone brought about by Obama's election, in the long run few will be more significant to the country's well-being than those around criminal justice and drugs. Without a whole lot of fanfare, the administration is laying the foundations for a new criminal justice system model that might, conceivably, end America's morally disastrous, fiscally ruinous, four-decade-long experimentation with mass incarceration.

by

Sasha Abramsky | June 16, 2010--The NATION

Former Attorney General Ed Meese warns: Overzealous laws fill prisons and jails

America is in the throes of "overcriminalization."

We are making and enforcing far too many criminal laws that create traps for the innocent but unwary -- and threaten to turn otherwise respectable, law-abiding citizens into criminals. Consider a few examples from the new book "One Nation Under Arrest":

· A 12-year old girl arrested and handcuffed for eating a single french fry on the Washington subway system.

· A cancer-ridden grandmother arrested and criminally charged for refusing to trim her hedges the way officials in Palo Alto, Calif., were trying to force her to.

A former high-school science whiz kid sent to prison after initially being arrested by FBI agents clad in SWAT gear for failing to affix a federally mandated sticker to his otherwise legal UPS package.

· A 67-year-old retired husband and grandfather imprisoned because some of the paperwork for his home-based orchid business did not satisfy an international treaty.

I could go on, but all these stories share one thing in common -- they are about typical Americans. Most involve a man or woman who works hard and pays taxes, cares for family members and is a good neighbor. Perhaps above all, this person strives to stay on the right side of the law.

This typical American holds deep and often intuitive beliefs in basic principles about American government, including a belief that, if you do what's right, you have nothing to fear from your own government, and certainly not from the criminal justice system.

But the typical American's deeply held beliefs about the freedoms he cherishes and the fundamental principles of his government are no longer as well-founded as they once were. Today, he is far more vulnerable than ever before to being caught up in a criminal investigation and prosecution -- and to actually being convicted and punished as a criminal -- for having done something he did not even suspect was illegal.

Criminal law has changed in the past 50 years. Once criminal law was about criminal acts that everyone knew were inherently unlawful (like murder, rape and robbery). Limiting criminal punishment to conduct that is inherently wrongful restricted governmental power in two important ways.

First, and most important, it kept the range of governmental power small. Having few criminal laws and a short list of things not to be done limited the scope within which government can exercise its authority.

Second, a limited criminal law served a teaching function. It reflected the beliefs and understandings common to the vast majority of our citizens -- the very citizens who were subject to the criminal law.

Today, the criminal law has grown as broad as the regulatory state in its sheer size and scope. In 1998, an American Bar Association task force estimated that there were more than 3,000 federal criminal offenses scattered throughout the 50 titles of the United States Code.

Just six years later, a leading expert on the overcriminalization problem, Professor John S. Baker Jr., published a study estimating that the number exceeded 4,000. As the ABA task force reported, the body of federal criminal law is "so large ...that there is no conveniently accessible, complete list of federal crimes."

If "ignorance of the law is no excuse," then every American citizen -- literally, every single one -- is ignorant and in peril, for nobody can know all the laws that govern their behavior.



A just criminal justice system, in the best sense of the word "just," has a twofold goal. One is to see that criminals are prosecuted, convicted and appropriately punished. The other is to ensure that those who are innocent are either not prosecuted in the first instance or, if mistakenly prosecuted, are not convicted. Today, our system fails the second of those goals.


Much is at stake for our freedoms and the freedoms of future generations. The problem of overcriminalization merits extensive study and debate by legal experts and policymakers, as well as average Americans, whose fundamental liberty is most at stake. Many constructive changes could make our justice system fairer and more just, and improve its ability to deter wrongdoing and punish real criminals. Taking the steps necessary to ensure that American criminal law once again routinely exemplifies the right principles and purposes will require much work, but the alternative is to distort the American criminal justice system, and jeopardize the American people.

By EDWIN MEESE III, NATIONAL VOICE
April 26, 2010 12:05 AM
Meese, a former U.S. attorney general, is chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Criminal Justice Reform in South Carolina:

Gov. Mark Sanford formally threw his support behind a far-reaching sentencing reform bill Wednesday, a bill that supporters say will reduce the number of non-violent offenders in prison and save the state millions of dollars. "You can only squeeze so much blood from a turnip," Sanford said. "This really is a taxpayer issue."

The 94-page bill is expected to reduce the state's projected prison population enough to negate the need for a new prison -- saving more than $400 million over five years. It's designed to increase training for nonviolent offenders to re-enter society without becoming repeat offenders. And it defines a laundry list of crimes as "violent," including many sex crimes against children.

It also provides, for example, a tiered approach to assault and battery crimes. Currently, the state has 90-day maximum sentences and 10-year minimum sentences and nothing in between, said state Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Charleston.

And it provides a sentence of up to $10,000 and up to 20 years in prison for habitual offenders convicted of driving under suspension resulting in death -- and a fine of up to $5,000 and 10 years in prison in such cases where great bodily injury results. A version of that provision, rolled into the bill last month, has been championed by Spartanburg resident Lily Lenderman for eight years -- ever since she lost her grandson in a wreck caused by someone driving under a suspended license.

"The whole idea about any criminal law is to keep us safe," said Rep. Keith Kelly, R-Woodruff, chairman of the House Criminal Law Subcommittee. "This bill ... is strong by keeping the violent offenders segregated from South Carolina families. At the same time, it's smart, because it's taking non-violent offenders out of the Department of Corrections and puts them on alternative sentencing -- GPS monitoring, for instance, that they pay for, not you or me."...

Corrections Department Director Jon Ozmint said the Sanford administration had been behind sentencing reform since a scaled-down version of it failed seven years ago. Ozmint said South Carolina currently doesn't have a criminal justice system; rather, it has a patchwork of laws that have been cobbled together over the years. He and several supporters talked about this bill being ruled by statistics rather than emotions. "Don't underestimate that first step in this state's history," he said.

Program would stop wasting money, lives

Florida spends more than a billion dollars a year warehousing people with mental illness in prisons, locked forensic treatment facilities and local jails. They are among the most wasteful dollars the state spends. Mentally ill defendants are provided treatment until they are competent to stand trial, then they are typically released only to be arrested again. An effort to change this paradigm has been in the works for years. On Tuesday, a Senate committee is expected to consider a pilot program to bring this population into highly managed community care. This an opportunity to stop wasting moneys and lives.

By using state resources differently, Florida's mentally ill residents can be treated and avoid the revolving door of jail and the streets. Under a plan proposed by the Department of Children and Families, the mentally ill accused of relatively low-level crimes would be diverted into locked community-based residential treatment facilities. Once stabilized, these individuals would be provided a continuum of care and monitoring in community-living settings.

Many mentally ill residents could live law-abiding lives if they had access to regular treatment and services. The DCF program would use case managers and other professionals to track their progress and help them obtain federal benefits to reach some level of self-sufficiency.

But DCF cannot launch its diversion experiment without changes to state law. The department needs the flexibility to shift up to 5 percent of funding from forensic treatment beds. It also needs permission to seek federal Medicaid dollars for indigent mentally ill criminal defendants in the program.

The Senate Criminal Justice Committee on Tuesday will consider a bill, SB 2612, that would create a forensic mental health probation and parole program in the Department of Corrections and authorize mental health courts throughout the state. Its sponsor, Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Brandon, should allow the changes that DCF seeks to be amended into her bill. That would get the pilot program moving this session.

A nudge from Senate President Jeff Atwater of North Palm Beach, who wants to be the state's next chief financial officer, also would help. Allowing this creative experiment would fit in nicely with a candidate for an office that looks out for Florida's long-term fiscal interests.

The mentally ill people who qualify for the diversion program would otherwise land in a state forensic hospital at a cost of more than $60,000. Then they would take a plea agreement — as roughly 80 percent do — and be released without any treatment or services. The sensible choice for Florida is to give the pilot program a try.

A St. Petersburg Times editorial
Published Friday, April 9, 2010

Planted Evidence Results in Conviction

Unfortunately, some law enforcement officers are not satisified with collecting actual evidence in criminal investigations. Recently there has been documentation that evidence planting is a legitimate problem, as is shown in the article found at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-us-csi-evidence-tampering,0,1982587.story

"Cash Register Justice" in Florida

Florida's practice of financing its criminal justice system with fees from the indigent creates a vicious cycle of debt for ex-offenders that threatens their successful re-entry into society, according to a new Brennan Center report released today.
Since 1996, the study shows, the Sunshine state has added more than 20 new categories of financial obligations to those accused and convicted of a crime. The fees are levied even on those who have no money and cannot pay. Increasingly, the result is a self-perpetuating cycle of debt -- and sometimes further incarceration -- for those re-entering society after prison.

The new study shows that the Florida legislature increasingly relies on "user fees" paid by indigent defendants to finance not just the criminal justice system but other state operations as well.

"As unemployment hovers around 10 percent, it is time to consider whether heaping more debt on those unable to afford it is a sensible and moral approach to financing state functions," said Rebekah Diller, author of The Hidden Costs of Florida's Criminal Justice Fees. "For many reasons, this is simply bad public policy."

The report also raises key questions about the efficiency of the practice. Many of these fees are uncollectible, leaving the court system underfunded. In some places, collection costs are borne partly by counties and court clerks, and the adjudication of fee payments incurs even more costs.

Among the findings:
1. The Florida Legislature has eliminated payment exemptions for the indigent, thus demanding revenue from a population unable to pay;

2. In Leon County, collection practices resulted in more than 800 arrests for failure to appear at debt hearings and more than 20,000 hours of jail time alone in one year.

3. Florida routinely suspends drivers' licenses for failure to make payments, a practice that sets the debtor up for a vicious cycle of "driving with a suspended license" convictions;

4. Florida allows private debt collection firms to add up to a 40 percent surcharge on unpaid debt.

Among the recommendations:
1. The Legislature should exempt those unable to pay criminal justice fees from legal financial obligations;

2. Payment plans should be tailored to an individual's ability to pay, as state law already requires;

3. Florida's Supreme Court should adopt court rules to end the new debtors' prison;

4. Counties can save money by eliminating debt-related arrests for failure to appear and resulting incarceration in already crowded jails.
Florida's increasing reliance on fee revenue coincides with a rising concern about policies that affect massive numbers of Floridians with a criminal conviction. Florida has the third-largest prison population of any state. Nearly 90 percent of the more than 100,000 people currently in Florida's state prisons will be released, and, if past trends persist, nearly one-third will be re-incarcerated for a new crime.

The report also offers longer-term reforms, such as reconsidering legal financial obligations in felony cases.

Do away with Collections Court

I believe that that the "collections court" in Sarasota county is bad. Read more at http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100309/LETTERS/100309711/2163/OPINION?Title=Do-away-with-collections-court