HOUSTON — A systemwide shakedown of the huge Texas prison system is netting authorities more contraband than just illegal cell phones.
The seizure count of prohibited phones and phone components topped 120 items Monday as the first full week of the close inspection was ending, including 63 phones, 56 chargers and five SIM cards that swap information among phones.
But officers also have turned up 61 weapons, 52 instances of tobacco products and 14 discoveries of money — all prohibited for the some 155,000 inmates in the state’s 111 prisons.
A statewide lockdown of the system began a week ago, ordered by Gov. Rick Perry hours after death row inmate Richard Tabler was caught making a call from his cell. The phone had been traced to a series of calls that began earlier this month to state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston.
Authorities said Tabler also shared the device with at least nine of his fellow condemned prisoners. Investigators determined some 2,800 calls were made from the phone from inside the Polunsky Unit near Livingston.
Tabler was moved Wednesday to a prison medical psychiatric facility after officers believed he was attempting to kill himself, and Tabler’s mother and sister both have been charged with introducing contraband into the prison system, a felony, for buying minutes to keep the phone active.
Inspections at about 15 units were completed, meaning an easing of the lockdown that had confined prisoners to their cells and barred visitations of inmates by relatives.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said the prisons where the order was lifted primarily were smaller units, like substance abuse and medical facilities. At least one women’s prison, the Mountain View Unit outside Gatesville, also was off lockdown, she said, along with intermediate sanction facilities in West Texas and North Texas.
Officials had estimated the shakedown in the nation’s second-largest corrections system could last about three weeks at some of the large units, which can hold nearly 3,000 prisoners.
The phones and components were found primarily in housing areas and common areas of the prisons.
Of the weapons, the majority were homemade items known as shanks, she said.
Authorities believe bribed corrections officers are responsible for a number of the contraband items.
The 14th Judicial Circuit has led the state the last two years in the percentage of prison sentences handed down to convicted felons.
According to Florida’s Criminal Punishment Code, which is listed on the Florida Department of Corrections Web site, of all the felony cases that came before a 14th Judicial Circuit judge for sentencing in fiscal year 2006-07, 30.9 percent resulted in a prison term. In 2007-08, that number was 31.9 percent.
That compares to a state average of 18.6 percent in 2006-07 and 20.4 percent in 2007-08.
During those same years, some circuits had rates as low as 12.1 percent.
As far as the number of people sentenced, the 14th Circuit sent 653 to prison in 2006-07 and 668 to prison in 2007-08.
That compares to:
- Pensacola (795 sentenced to prison in 2006-07; 606 sentenced to prison in 2007-08)
- Tallahassee (572 sentenced to prison in 2006-07; 317 sentenced to prison in 2007-08)
- Jacksonville (1,586 sentenced to prison in 2006-07; 1,520 sentenced to prison in 2007-08)
- Clearwater (1,786 sentenced to prison in 2006-07; 2,091 sentenced to prison in 2007-08)
- Miami (1,141 sentenced to prison in 2006-07; 1,023 sentenced to prison in 2007-08)
Gulf County was second only to Madison County in the rate of felons who went to prison in 2006-07, at 60 percent, which amounted to 33 people. That number skyrocketed to 85.7 percent in 2007-08, which was the highest percentage in the state but amounted to 24 people.
State Attorney spokesman Joe Grammer said the numbers do not tell the whole story. He said percentages mean nothing to a girl who has been raped or a police officer who is putting together a drug case.
“What matters to them is their one case,” he said. “That’s why we have to take every crime on a caseby-case basis.”
Grammer said the numbers do show, in general, the circuit is being efficient.
“We’re punishing people in the right way,” he said.
The report breaks down the prison sentences into two groups: those that “score” prison according to the sentencing guidelines and those in which a prison term is discretionary. Of those two groups, the report shows how many offenders actually received a prison term. More severe crimes or defendants with longer criminal histories generally score higher.
The report does not make a distinction between those being sentenced for a new offense and those who originally have been placed on probation for a felony, violated that probation and been sentenced to prison.
The sentencing guidelines are a compilation of circumstances, from the severity of the new charge to the defendant’s criminal history, that are given a number and when totaled, give a range of appropriate sentences. Going above or below the recommended sentence requires a written explanation from the sentencing judge.
In the 14th Circuit, which includes Bay, Calhoun, Gulf, Holmes, Jackson and Washington counties, in 2006-07, 17.9 percent of defendants who scored less than a recommended prison term were sentenced to prison. That same year, 68 percent of defendants who scored enough for at least a year in prison were sentenced to prison, while 18 percent were put on probation.
Grammer said the rates show a collective effort by law enforcement, prosecutors and judges.
“It starts with law enforcement putting together a good case. Then a prosecutor presenting the case to a defense attorney and saying, ‘This is what an appropriate penalty is in this case,’” he said. “Then it goes before a judge who looks at it and follows the law.”
Grammer said the statistics are something the citizens of the 14th Circuit should feel good about.
“You can look at it as a public safety issue,” he said. “People can look at it and say we’re doing something for public safety.”
(10-27) 14:16 PDT SAN FRANCISCO — The lawyer representing California in a lawsuit over prison health care said today that state officials aren’t ready to comply with a federal judge’s order to turn over $250 million for new hospitals for inmates, despite the possibility of a contempt-of-court order against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson ordered Schwarzenegger and state Controller John Chiang on Oct. 8 to tell him how soon they would provide the money, the first installment in an $8 billion construction plan that a court-appointed manager drew up to raise the prison health system to constitutional standards.
Henderson said at an earlier hearing that he was prepared to hold Schwarzenegger and Chiang in contempt, with fines against the state of as much as $2 million a day, unless they turn over $250 million in prison funding that the Legislature has already approved. But at today’s hearing in San Francisco, Deputy Attorney General Daniel Powell said the state is not legally required to follow such an order and has no immediate plans to do so.
“This court has no authority to order construction of prisons,” Powell told Henderson. He said state officials must review the construction plans and seek specific approval from the Legislature.
If the state maintains that position, Henderson said, he’ll go “full speed ahead” with contempt proceedings.
Henderson took control of the prison health system in 2006, saying evidence in an inmate lawsuit showed that inadequate medical care was killing at least one prisoner a week and that state officials had shown themselves incapable of complying with the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Clark Kelso, a law professor appointed by Henderson to manage the system until it is returned to state control, has submitted a plan to build seven health centers for 10,000 prisoners, improve some existing facilities and construct a site for dental care.
The plan contemplates funding from state bonds, but the Legislature has repeatedly rejected Schwarzenegger’s request for bond funding for prison hospitals. Henderson said in his Oct. 8 order, however, that the initial $250 million that Kelso needs to begin construction in February is available from a prison expansion bill that lawmakers approved last year.
Today, Powell said Kelso hasn’t given state officials enough information about what he plans to do with the money. Once Kelso spells out his proposal, Powell said, state finance and prison officials will determine whether it complies with the law – a reference to a federal statute that allows judges to order only the minimum improvements needed to protect prisoners’ constitutional rights.
The Legislature would also need to approve Kelso’s plan, Powell said. “I don’t think the state has ever considered construction of prisons without the involvement of the Legislature,” he said.
His stance angered James Brosnahan, an attorney who represents Kelso. Brosnahan said the state had taken part in Kelso’s planning process, approved his proposals months ago and had no authority to withhold funding.
“They’re in contempt of this court. There’s no other word for it,” Brosnahan told Henderson. “Unless the state gets their act together, some prisoners will die.”
Kelso told reporters afterward that he has already given the state all the information it needs.
Henderson said he was prepared to sign an order proposed by Brosnahan requiring the state to come up with the $250 million by Nov. 5 or face a contempt hearing a week later.
“Despite the progress that has been made, the health care system remains in a state of crisis,” the judge said.
By , AlterNet
Posted on October 25, 2008, Printed on October 25, 2008
The following are two important articles explaining the benefits the proposed Non-Violent Offenders Act initiative on the California ballot and the latest video released by its supporters and attacking the misconceptions about it. At the bottom of the article is a powerful ad that advocates of Proposition 5 have created and will start running on television, and links to what the proponents and opponents of Prop 5 are saying.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Prop. 5 would fund innovative treatment for drug offenders
Daniel Macallair, G. Thomas Gitchoff
California voters are rarely given the chance to vote for an initiative that addresses a problem that many thought was unsolvable. Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act, provides the opportunity for voters to bring change to the state’s crumbling and bankrupt criminal justice system in a manner that cannot be achieved within the special-interest-dominated world of Sacramento.
Prop. 5 is the only initiative on the November ballot that is slated to preserve state funds and save taxpayers’ money — at least $2.5 billion, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst.
A 2007 bipartisan report authored by the Little Hoover Commission, entitled “Solving California’s Corrections Crisis: Time is Running Out,” stated that “30 years of tough on crime politics has not made the state safer” because of our failure to implement strategies that reduce the offender’s likelihood to re-offend. Prop. 5 is a three-pronged effort to improve public safety by bringing balance to California’s criminal-justice system.
The first element of Prop. 5 is its mandate to create a system of care for youth involved with substance abuse. Under this initiative, counties will be provided financial resources to establish a modern system of drug treatment.
The second area addressed by Prop. 5 is treating nonviolent adult drug offenders after their arrest. Many county-run drug treatment services are disjointed and poorly funded, which reduces their potential effectiveness. Prop. 5 creates a coordinated and unified continuum of services that gives judges greater flexibility and broader controls.
If an offender commits a nonviolent drug offense, Prop. 5 states that treatment intervention should be a priority. If the offense is a nonviolent non-drug offense but the judge determines that substance abuse was the root cause, Prop. 5 gives courts the flexibility to use treatment as an alternative to, or in conjunction with, incarceration. By offering more choices, the initiative eliminates the situation where judges must rely on a single treatment option or impose incarceration — an approach long deemed a failure by addiction experts.
Perhaps the most important element of Prop. 5 is the establishment of rehabilitative services in the parole system. Today, inmates are routinely returned to the community with limited resources and few opportunities. Lacking both support and incentives, they soon fall back on old patterns. When offenders violate their parole, they are typically returned to prison, where they serve a mere five months before they are again released. Under Prop. 5, this failed one-dimensional system will be replaced by an array of sanctions and treatment options primarily operated at the local level. Interventions will range from incarceration to residential and nonresidential drug treatment. The initiative also mandates that higher levels of parole resources and supervision be devoted to higher risk parolees.
Prop. 5 offers voters a rare opportunity to bring change that is long overdue and that will advance the public safety interests of all Californians.
Daniel Macallair is the executive director of the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice and teaches in the Department of Criminal Justice Studies at San Francisco State University. G. Thomas Gitchoff is professor emeritus of criminal justice at San Diego State University and co-founder and past president of the Western Society of Criminology.
Opponents Have Misled Voters into Thinking the Measure Would Go Easy on Drug Offenders
By Alex Kreit
As a law professor who teaches criminal law and procedure in California, I feel compelled to weigh in on the debate over Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act. I write not as a supporter of Proposition 5 but as a law professor concerned that voters are provided correct information. A poor interpretation of Proposition 5, promoted by some biased parties, has so taken hold that several large newspapers (including The Times) have come out against the measure based on this view. I will propose what, in my view, is an accurate reading of Proposition 5 and its likely effect on California’s criminal justice system.
Misleading claim: Proposition 5 gives criminals a “get out of jail free” card.
This is political messaging, not accurate analysis. According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, Proposition 5 would expand existing programs that offer treatment in lieu of incarceration, making probation-supervised treatment an option for tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders each year. These treatment programs include a system of graduated sanctions designed to ensure that defendants who have the potential to succeed remain in treatment and punish those who fail to meet the requirements. Similar criminal justice-treatment partnerships exist now and are widely recognized as a viable and cost-effective alternative to incarceration. Proposition 5 simply expands these successful programs.
Misleading claim: Criminals could escape imprisonment by saying “drugs made me do it.”
There is no such magic phrase to qualify for treatment instead of prison. Under Proposition 5, only nonviolent drug offenders with minimal criminal histories are eligible for treatment in lieu of incarceration. Judges would have the discretion to put a limited category of other nonviolent offenders in probation-supervised treatment, but only if the judge finds that the offense was nonviolent, that the nonviolent offender has a drug problem and that it is in the best interests of public safety to put that nonviolent offender on probation and in community-based treatment.
Misleading claim: Proposition 5 would allow violent criminals to escape prison terms and receive treatment instead.
Any offense involving any form of violence, threat of violence or harm to another — or any offense dubbed serious under the “three strikes” law — would be disqualified from eligibility under Proposition 5. This would include burglary and arson, for example — two offenses often listed by opponents.
Misleading claim: Judges would be unable to jail someone.
This is false. Only nonviolent drug offenders with suitably minor criminal histories would be diverted to probation-supervised treatment. Other nonviolent offenders would be diverted only at the judge’s discretion. If offenders violate probation, judges could temporarily remove program participants and jail them — or terminate offenders from the programs entirely.
Misleading claim: Participation in treatment and abstinence from drugs would be voluntary.
When offenders receive treatment under Proposition 5, they would do so with a conviction hanging over their heads. Failure to complete treatment would result in jail or prison time. This is the definition of coerced treatment. Moreover, Proposition 5 is clearly designed to direct resources into the state’s existing abstinence-based treatment programs.
Misleading claim: Proposition 5 provides “no funding for courts.”
Proposition 5 specifically provides funding that may be used for court costs. Up to 20% of funds for Track I and II programs (the lower levels of treatment under Proposition 5) and an unlimited amount of Track III funds (the highest level) may be used “for non-treatment costs including probation department costs, court monitoring costs and any other costs made necessary by this act.” Up to $68 million a year of Tracks I and II funds and a portion of the $45 million allocated to Track III annually could go to probation, the courts and “other costs made necessary.”
Misleading claim: Increased hearings will overwhelm courts.
Proposition 5 requires only one new hearing for individuals who are “no shows” to probation-supervised treatment after 30 days. The legislative analyst has suggested there could be 84,000 people in probation-supervised treatment under Proposition 5. Even if every one of them required a “no show” hearing, that would amount to far fewer hearings than some have suggested and less of an overall burden to the criminal justice system than our current approach.
Misleading claim: Drug dealers get “preferred” parole under Proposition 5.
The measure would do no such thing. Instead, the initiative would increase the time served under parole for violent offenders while decreasing the amount for nonviolent offenders. The claim is a mischaracterization of this reallocation of parole resources mandated by the measure. Currently, nonviolent and violent offenders both serve 36-month terms on parole supervision in the community after they are released from prison. Under Proposition 5, nonviolent offenders who have served their full sentence behind bars would serve 12 months on parole; violent offenders would serve up to 60 months.
There are legitimate reasons to vote for or oppose Proposition 5, but the debate is not furthered by misinformation. I urge voters to consider the legitimate claims on both sides when they cast their ballot on Nov. 4.
Alex Kreit is an assistant professor and director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law.
The first Yes on 5 spot, titled “Warden,” features Jeanne Woodford, former warden of San Quentin State Prison and former Director of the California Department of Corrections. Against a backdrop of images of San Quentin, she speaks of her 25 years working at the prison, where she began as a prison guard. “Let me tell you,” Woodford says, “too many of the men I dealt with started out as kids with drug problems. But California doesn’t have treatment for kids.” She goes on to say that the youth treatment provisions of Prop. 5 are one of its main draws for her. “I can’t tell you how good I feel,” Woodford says, “when I think of all those kids who will never wind up in prison.”
Judicial action might be quietly welcomed by some officials under political and economic pressure.
By Franklin E. Zimring
October 25, 2008
The continuing saga of federal court efforts to reform medical care in California’s prisons is a textbook example both of why constitutional courts are unpopular in this country and why we need them. At a hearing Monday, a panel of three federal judges will consider whether the governor and comptroller should be held in contempt of court for failing to provide a cash down payment of $250 million on an $8-billion court-ordered plan to build seven medical facilities for prisoners.
The political timing for this shootout couldn’t be worse if Stephen King had written the script. The U.S. is in the middle of a financial meltdown in which short-term cash for even creditworthy states is endangered. Meanwhile, California’s finances are imploding. The state just passed a budget that cuts spending programs for the poor and the elderly and engineers accounting strategies last seen at Enron.
So now three federal judges demand that California pay out $8 billion to serve rapists and drug pushers ahead of the fiscal and service needs of innocent citizens. How can such an outrage be justified?
The start of this story is the extraordinary growth of prisons in the Golden State — just under a 700% expansion in less than a generation. The 172,000 prisoners in this system would be the state’s 28th largest city if they were in a central location instead of spread over 33 isolated locations, usually far from medical centers. The cost of this penal explosion has not been modest — a $10.3-billion operating budget this year alone — but building and staffing prisons has been the dominant public priority in California since the early 1980s.
The medical problems of California prisoners have been growing even faster than the inmate population. AIDS has provided one set of dangerous complications. Longer prison terms also guarantee an aging and less healthy population.
While filling prisons has been a political priority in California, the care and feeding of convicted criminals hasn’t. The result is dozens of dungeons without any programs of improvement or work for prisoners, and they have been stuffed more than full. The state has just passed a $7.1-billion prison expansion package, but it made no investment in the long-deferred medical facilities. That was democracy at work: Only the control and punishment of criminals carries any priority with the average citizen.
In this court case, two matters are beyond controversy. There is and must be a constitutional duty imposed on states to provide the inmates they lock up with decent medical care. Imprisonment forces the inmate into a total dependency on the state, and once the state chooses to impose this dependence — as California has on more individuals than any other state — it cannot abuse its absolute power.
It is equally clear that the current dysfunctional mess of medical services in the California system is dangerously below any civilized minimum standard. The court found that medical neglect in the prisons was not infrequently the cause of unnecessary deaths. The irony here is that inadequate medical care is responsible for far more deaths in 33 prisons than the underemployed executioner at San Quentin. You will read excuses for inaction in this newspaper from the people in charge of the prison system — but no credible assertion that the state is doing its duty.
But do we really need a federal court to come in and demand that the state fix this mess now? The test question here is how long would it take for the state’s political process to make reform of prison health services a multibillion-dollar priority? One millennium or two? When discrete and unpopular minorities are at risk of exploitation in the political system, it often will be necessary for the legal system to save the minorities (and our standard of civilized government) from the consequences of punitive populism. As long as California continues to build and fill prisons, its government must be compelled to pay the full cost of those prisons before any discretionary spending.
Prison medical care is yet another problem on which government leaders know better than they do. The Legislature may not be able to pass a budget to do the right thing, but a substantial number of well-informed people in Sacramento know that the system must be repaired. When the state is in fiscal crisis, however, they lack the power or the will to push it through.
So perhaps there is less of an angry struggle between the governor and the judges than seems apparent. When governmental actions are necessary but unpopular, external pressure like a court order can provide political cover to do the right thing by giving politicians a federal court to blame for it.
And that is one reason why I suspect a settlement may be closer than the current posturing suggests. There are plenty of decent people in the executive and legislative branches of California’s government who are silently grateful that federal courts have the authority and the courage to rescue this state from its populist excesses.
Franklin E. Zimring is a professor of law at UC Berkeley.
The mass imprisonment philosophy that has packed prisons and sent corrections costs through the roof around the country has hit especially hard in California, which has the largest prison population, the highest recidivism rate and a prison budget raging out of control.
According to a new federally backed study conducted at the University of California, Irvine, the state’s corrections costs have grown by about 50 percent in less than a decade and now account for about 10 percent of state spending — nearly the same amount as higher education. The costs could rise substantially given that a federal lawsuit may require the state to spend $8 billion to bring the prison system’s woefully inadequate medical services up to constitutional standards.
The solution for California is to shrink its vastly overcrowded prison system. To do so, it would need to move away from mandatory sentencing laws that have proved to be disastrous across the country — locking up more people than protecting public safety requires.
In addition, the state also has perhaps the most counterproductive and ill-conceived parole system in the United States. More people are sent to prison in California by parole officers than by the courts. In addition, about 66 percent of California’s parolees land back in prison after three years, compared with about 40 percent nationally. Four in 10 are sent back for technical violations like missed appointments or failed drug tests.
Later this year, the state is expected to begin testing a new system that redirects the lowest-risk drug addicts to treatment. But that will only work if the state and the counties dramatically expand treatment slots.
The heart of the problem is that California’s parole system is simply too big. Most states keep dangerous people behind bars or reserve parole supervision for the most serious offenders. California puts virtually everyone on parole, typically for three years.
Under this setup, about 80 percent of the parolees have fewer than two 15-minute meetings with a parole officer per month. That might be adequate for low-risk offenders, but it’s clearly too little time for serious offenders who present a risk to public safety.
A good first step would be to place fewer people on parole. The second step would be to reserve the most intensive supervision for offenders who present the greatest risk.
State lawmakers, some of whom are fearful of being seen as soft on crime, have failed to make perfectly reasonable sentencing modifications and other changes that the prisons desperately need. Unless they muster some courage soon, Californians will find themselves swamped by prison costs and unable to afford just about anything else.
On Monday morning, Jon Burge will walk the long lobby of the federal courthouse in Chicago to the elevators that will take him to his arraignment.
A media horde will greet him.
Reporters, producers and a crush of cameras will lock on Burge as makes his way past marshals and metal detectors.
The white-haired former Chicago police commander whose name became synonymous with the torture of African-American suspects does not walk briskly anymore. At 60, he has knee problems. After his indictment on federal perjury and obstruction charges last week, Burge winced as he came down the steps of the Tampa courthouse.
“I’m old. I’m hurting,” he told Sun-Times reporter Natasha Korecki, who broke the story of his indictment. “Please leave me alone.”
To our discredit, too many of us left Burge alone for years. And, though the feds are finally prosecuting him, they don’t get a complete pass either.
This business of accountability can make us testy.
Mayor Daley, for instance, late last week was sick of questions about whether he, as the Cook County state’s attorney, along with his first assistant, Dick Devine, the current state’s attorney, should have investigated Burge 26 years ago. In 1982, police killer Andrew Wilson’s face looked normal going into an interrogation room, but resembled ground beef hours later. In 1982, then-Police Supt. Richard Brzeczek said he wrote a letter bringing that to the attention of Daley and Devine.
If that was a tragically missed opportunity to stop the torture of black men on the city’s South and West sides, there were many other opportunities that we in media and those in power took a pass on.
A few years after the Wilson revelations, the then-head of the Office of Professional Standards, the watchdog over police misconduct, raised serious questions about the electro-shocking of suspects.
When told, the Chicago Police Department did nothing.
In 1990, OPS investigator Michael Goldston catalogued 50 cases of alleged police torture. The department suppressed his report and made Goldston’s life a living hell. Thanks to a court order, the report was finally made public in 1992.
It was front-page news for a minute. But nobody, including the mainstream press, law enforcement, state or federal prosecutors or the judiciary did much of anything to demand answers. There were exceptions, of course. John Conroy of the Reader relentlessly reported on police torture. And civil rights attorneys suh as Flint Taylor of the People’s Law Office fought constantly to get someone to listen.
That includes the U.S. attorney’s office. Taylor had meetings in 1989 with federal prosecutors in Chicago and with then-Attorney General Janet Reno back in the ’90s. A delegation that included U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush and Judge R. Eugene Pincham went to Washington to talk to her.
“We told her about torture,” Taylor said last week. “She was very attentive but noncommittal.” She was hardly alone, he said. “Everybody since Reagan passed on it.”
Though the county’s head of the criminal courts, Judge Paul Biebel, did a courageous thing in 2002 by appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Burge and his band of brothers, the result was a four-year, $7 million exercise in maintaining the status quo.
How ironic that former Gov. George Ryan, who sits in federal prison today, brought international attention to the tortured confessions of men on Death Row when so few others in powerful places had the will to act.
What accounts for our collective failure?
“My instinct is that racism, pro-police bias and bias in terms of poor black suspects, made it something that the press and prosecutors didn’t want to deal with,” Taylor said.
Finally, there will be a prosecution of what’s left of this case given the statute of limitations. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald will lead it.
Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP–the drug czar’s office) director John Walters headed to California this week to try to defeat a ballot initiative that would divert thousands of drug offenders from prison in the nation’s most populous state. The state’s powerful prison guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), has entered the fray too, pledging a million dollars to help finance a last-minute opposition campaign.
The target of their ire is the Nonviolent Offenders Rehabilitation Act (NORA), which will appear on the ballot as Proposition 5. NORA would profoundly deepen and broaden the shift toward treatment instead of incarceration that began six years ago with Proposition 36. If NORA passes, it would:
require the state to expand and increase funding and oversight for individualized treatment and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent drug offenders and parolees;
reduce criminal consequences of nonviolent drug offenses by mandating three-tiered probation with treatment and by providing for case dismissal and/or sealing of records after probation;
limit courts’ authority to incarcerate offenders who violate probation or parole;
shorten parole for most drug offenses, including sales, and for nonviolent property crimes;
create numerous divisions, boards, commissions, and reporting requirements regarding drug treatment and rehabilitation;
change certain marijuana misdemeanors to infractions.
All of that is too much for drug czar Walters, who showed up in Sacramento Tuesday to blast the initiative as a back-door move to legalize drugs. The Drug Policy Alliance, which is backing NORA, and its top funder, financier George Soros, cannot achieve drug legalization “by being honest and straightforward,” so they deceptively offered up Prop. 5 to undermine the drug court system, Walters charged. Passage of Prop. 5 would “weaken our capacity to help people in the criminal justice system” who still remain subject to punishment if they fail, he said.
That guaranteed a sharp retort from Prop. 5 supporters. Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, spokesperson for Yes on 5, called the measure “a common sense response” to prohibition-related crime and blasted Walters as a spokesman for failed policies. “President Bush’s drug czar has come to California to insist that we continue with the failed approach that has been so ineffective and has crowded our prisons full of nonviolent offenders,” Dooley-Sammuli said.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office calculates that Prop. 5 will lower incarceration costs by $1 billion each year and will cut another $2.5 billion in state costs for prison construction. This doesn’t include savings related to reduced crime, lower social costs (e.g. emergency room visits, child protective services, welfare), and increased individual productivity.
But filling California prisons full of nonviolent offenders is a jobs program for the prison guards union. While earlier in the campaign season, the union had been distracted by a failed effort to recall Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, last week it announced it was kicking in a million dollars to defeat the initiative.
“CCPOA never has been shy about making sure that our voice is heard,” union spokesman Lance Corcoran said. “We’ll continue to do that. We’ve always put the resources necessary to get the job done,” he said.
But while the prison guards and the drug czar join other law enforcement groups in lining up against Prop. 5, the measure has broad support within the treatment community, as well as endorsements from the League of Women Voters of California, the California Nurses Association, the California Federation of Teachers, and the Consumer Federation of California — among many others.
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Some people think that absentee ballots are used by the disabled, the elderly in nursing homes or those lucky enough to be on a trip abroad when elections take place. But there are others.
Of the more than 19,000 inmates in state prisons, 5,467 are eligible to vote. That includes inmates serving time for misdemeanors and those awaiting trial. In Connecticut, only convicted felons can’t vote.
But of the thousands who can cast absentee ballots, only a handful do, said Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the state Department of Correction. “It’s a very, very small number, probably less than 100 [inmates],” he said.
Despite the fact that the department’s counselors distribute fliers and pamphlets about who is eligible to vote and are willing to talk about “the importance of taking responsibility, exercising this right in the election process,” Garnett said, few offenders do.
As for voter registration drives in prisons, apparently there aren’t any, according to the Department of Correction and Community Partners in Action, an agency serving offenders that makes voting information available to correctional facilities and probation and parole officers.
Yet elsewhere around the country, in Louisiana and Georgia, efforts are under way to extend the vote to inmates. Democracy Behind Bars, the first national push to sign up eligible voters in prison, sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, aspires to register one million new voters.
Joyce Hamilton Henry, the former director of Democracy Works in Connecticut, who now heads the ACLU’s regional office in Orlando, said that before Democracy Works disbanded last year, it was moving toward conducting voter registration drives at Connecticut prisons.”We felt it was important to register them to vote because technically they haven’t lost the right to vote and they were not yet disenfranchised,” Hamilton Henry said. By encouraging inmates to vote, she said, the assumption is offenders might become more involved in society and more apt to leave prison and return to their communities as productive citizens.
In Connecticut, convicted felons are barred from voting until they have completed their prison term. Once their sentence is complete, they have to take steps to restore their voting privilege.
By contrast, in Vermont, the only felony conviction that removes this right is election fraud. That means offenders serving time for murder, robbery, arson or a litany of other felonies still can cast ballots in Vermont.
Vermont Secretary of State Deb Markowitz acknowledges that her state’s is a minority position that harkens back to the Green Mountain State’s 1793 constitution.
“Vermont has taken the position,” she said, that “the more we can get folks in prison involved in the community in a responsible way, the better the chances of reintroducing them to the civilian world in a responsible way.”
In the last half century there have been no changes in state law expanding the rights of felons to vote while serving prison time, said Adam Joseph, a spokesman for Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz.
“The secretary of [the] state supports the law as currently written,” he said. “Our office works with communities to help felons who have completed their debt to society reintegrate into civic life through the restoration of their voting rights.”
State Rep. Christopher Caruso, D-Bridgeport, who co-chairs the General Assembly’s Government Administration and Elections Committee, said state legislators have considered refinements to state voting laws a number of times in recent years.
“The Legislature has looked at this issue and settled on allowing those individuals convicted of misdemeanors having the right to vote and those convicted of felonies not being permitted to vote,” he said. “The feeling is that in a free society, voting is a privilege and one of the consequences of a serious violation of the law is that you lose certain fundamental rights along with your liberty — and one of them is the right to take part in an election.”
Larry Albert, a former deputy commissioner with the state Department of Correction who now volunteers with Community Partners in Action, believes there may be merit in conducting voter registration drives at correctional facilities as does Garnett. But Garnett is quick to qualify his position, saying that such a campaign “would depend on exactly how it’s configured,” including consideration of logistics and security matters.
And, Albert said, making it easier for misdemeanor offenders to register to vote and cast ballots by absentee vote in the cities and towns they are from might also tip the results of some elections.
“Many offenders come from areas in inner cities where their support could have a dramatic result on the people who win a state assembly or state senate seat,” Albert says. “Their support could definitely make a difference.”
In this Sept. 24, 2008 file photo, convicted killer Bobby Woods talks on the intercom during an interview at the Texas prison death row facility in Livingston, Texas. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has stopped the Thursday, Oct 23, 2008, execution of Woods. The court agreed to put off the lethal injection after lawyers raised new claims that the 42-year-old Woods is mentally retarded and legally ineligible for execution under U.S. Supreme Court standards. (AP Photo/Mike Graczyk)
LIVINGSTON, Texas (AP) — The crowd on death row is thinning out.
A dozen condemned inmates in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s so-called “death watch” cells are being executed at a scheduled rate of two a week over six weeks.
Two were executed the week of Oct. 13. Two were scheduled for this week. And two more the week after that. Then six more in November, adding to Texas’ standing as the nation’s most active death penalty state.
“It’s just the way of Texas,” death row inmate Alvin Kelly said in the days before his Oct. 14 execution. Kelly, convicted of shooting a family of three, including a 22-month-old boy, was the first in the current string of inmates to be given a lethal injection.
The steady stream of executions is relieving a logjam created when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively halted lethal injections around the country while it decided whether the killing method was unconstitutionally inhumane. It ruled the method was constitutional and executions resumed.
Despite the death chamber’s revolving door in October and November, this is hardly a record year for executions in Texas, with a total of 21 scheduled for 2008.
In the years George W. Bush was governor, Texas executed an average of 25 convicts a year, culminating in 40 executions in 2000. Since then, the state has averaged about two dozen a year.
“Will crime stop? Will my death stop what’s going on in everyday society?” asked Kevin Watts, who was executed two days after Kelly. “They’re just killing people.” Watts was condemned for shooting three people in the back of the head during a robbery.
While the high court was considering the legality of lethal injection, the de facto moratorium didn’t stop capital murder appeals moving through the courts. For many of the inmates now with execution dates, their convictions and sentences were upheld either before or during the hiatus.
The Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision in April holding that injection was not unconstitutionally cruel allowed executions to resume, and nine have been carried out in Texas already this year, the most in the nation.
Kelly, unlike some of his fellow prisoners in the Polunsky Unit, said he looked forward to dying, although he insisted evidence was manipulated and he was innocent in the deaths of toddler Devin Morgan and his parents, Jerry and Brenda, in East Texas in 1984.
“I’m tired of being here,” said Kelly, 57, who had been on death row since 1991. “This is not life.”
Watts, 27, was convicted of the execution-style shootings of Hak Po Kim, Yuan Tzu Banks and Chae Sun Shook during a robbery at a San Antonio restaurant in 2002. The wife of one of the victims was abducted, tortured and raped, but survived to testify against Watts.
“I’ve never said I was innocent,” Watts said. “I said I was guilty from the get-go.”
Watts, however, contended jurors never were allowed to hear anything good about him, and instead only were told of his history of violence and drug abuse.
When he returned this year to Bexar County to appear before a judge and receive his execution date, he exploded in court with an obscenity-filled tirade.
“I might have screwed myself,” he said. “But I never had a chance to speak for myself, how I was railroaded, how I had an inadequate attorney, how this is not about justice.
“But there’s no hate in my heart. I understand there are consequences to my actions.”
Other inmates already executed or set to die this month include:
_Joseph Ries, 29, was executed on Oct. 21. Ries was convicted of breaking into a rural home in Hopkins County in northeast Texas, fatally shooting the man who was sleeping there and driving off in his car. Ries was 19 at the time of the slaying of 64-year-old Robert Ratliff.
_Bobby Wayne Woods, 42, was scheduled to be executed Thursday, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed to have his claims of mental retardation reviewed. Woods was convicted of the 1997 murder of Sarah Patterson, the 11-year-old daughter of his ex-girlfriend. The child and her 9-year-old brother were abducted from their home in Granbury, about 25 miles southwest of Fort Worth. She died after her throat was slashed. Her brother, Cody, was choked into unconsciousness but survived.
_Eric Nenno, 47, is to be executed Oct. 28. He was convicted of the 1995 rape and strangling a 7-year-old neighbor girl, Nicole Benton, in Hockley, about 30 miles northwest of Houston. Two days after she disappeared, the girl’s body was found in the attic of Nenno’s home.
_Gregory Wright, 42, is to be executed Oct. 30. Wright, who was homeless, was convicted of taking part in the 1997 fatal stabbing of Donna Duncan Vick at her home in DeSoto, about 15 miles south of Dallas. Duncan, a 52-year-old widow, regularly ministered to the homeless and had given Wright food, shelter and money.
Besides the six more set to die in the first three weeks of November, at least six other inmates already have execution dates for early in 2009.
The United States Criminal Justice System is flawed, broken, yet fixable; Prison Reform and Sentencing Reform should be major agenda's for each state- we need to stop warehousing prisoners and ready those who are going to parole.
Inmate rehabilitation improves public safety and lowers prison costs.
“We have to care because we can't afford not to".
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