Drugs, elephants and American prisons

By  Bernd Debusmann

Washington-Are the 305 Million people living in the United States the most evil in the world? Is this the reason why the U.S., with 5 percent of the worlds population, has 25 percent of the worlds prisoners  and an incarceration rate five times as high as the rest of the world?

Or is it a matter of a criminal justice system that has gone dramatically wrong, swamping the prison system with drug offenders?

That rhetorical question, asked on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Virginia Senator Jim Webb, fits into what looks like an accelerating shift in public sentiment on the way that a long parade of administrations has been dealing with illegal drugs.

Advocates of drug reform sensed a change in the public mood even before Webb, a Democrat who served as secretary of the Navy under Republican Ronald Reagan, introduced a bill last month to set up a blue-ribbon commission of ‘the greatest minds’ in the country to review the criminal justice system and recommend reforms within 18 months.

No aspect of the system, according to Webb, should escape scrutiny, least of all ‘the elephant in the bedroom in many discussions … the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200 percent.’

The elephant has ambled out of the bedroom and has become the object of a lively debate on the pros and cons of legalising drugs, particularly marijuana, among pundits on both sides of the political spectrum, on television panels and in mainstream publications from the Wall Street Journal to TIME magazine.

True watersheds in public attitudes are rarely spotted at the time they take place but the phrase ‘tipping point’ comes up more and more often in discussions on the ‘war on drugs’.

‘Something has changed in the past few months,’ says Bruce Mirken, of the Marijuana Policy Project, one of a network of 30 groups advocating the legalisation of the most widely-used illegal drug in the United States. ‘In the first three months of this year we’ve been invited to national cable news programs as often as in the entire year before.’

SHIFTING MOOD

Allen St. Pierre, who leads the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), also feels that the most serious public discussion in more than a generation is getting under way. ‘In mid-March,’ he said in an interview, ‘there were 36 separate marijuana bills pending in 24 states — on legalization, de-criminalization, medical marijuana. Not all the bills will make it, but they are a sign of change.’

So are public opinion polls. On a national level, they show an increase from about 15 percent in support of marijuana legalization four decades ago to 44 percent now. The numbers differ from state to state. In California, the most populous, a recent survey showed 54 percent in favour.

St. Pierre sees a confluence of reasons for the shift in attitudes — baby boomers, a generation familiar with drug use, are in charge of the country’s institutions; the dismal economy makes people question public expenditures that do not seem essential; and the drug violence in Mexico that has begun spilling across the border.

Contrary to widespread perceptions, marijuana accounts, by many estimates, for considerably more than half the illegal drugs smuggled from Mexico to the United States.

The argument for legalizing marijuana, and eventually other drugs, is straightforward: it would transform a law-and-order problem into a problem of public health. A side effect of particular importance at a time of deep economic crisis: it would save billions of dollars now spent on law enforcement and add billions in revenues if drugs were taxed.

If drug policies were decided by economists, the debate would have begun earlier and might be over by now. Four years ago, 500 economists including three Nobel prize winners urged the administration of George W. Bush to show that marijuana prohibition justified ‘the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues and numerous ancillary consequences…’

Such as prisons holding, in the words of Senator Webb, tens of thousands of ‘passive users and minor dealers.’

While they contribute to prison overcrowding in some states, they have little to fear in others. To fully grasp the bizarrely uneven treatment of marijuana use, consider the annual ‘smoke-out’ on April 20 in Boulder, Colorado.

There, on a sunny Monday, a crowd estimated at more than 10,000 converged on the campus of the University of Colorado to light up marijuana joints, whose smoke hung over the scene like a grey blanket. Overhead, an aircraft dragged a banner with the words ‘Hmmm, smells good up here.’ Police watched but made no arrests and issued no fines.

Even the most optimistic of reform advocates do not see an end to prohibition in the near future. President Barack Obama endeared himself to reformers during his election campaign by an honest answer to a question on past drug use: ‘Yes, I inhaled. Frequently. That was the point.’ But his spokesman recently said Obama opposed legalization.

It remains to be seen whether that stand remains the same if Webb’s proposed commission, assuming it will be established, came up with recommendations for deep change. That happened to the last report by a blue-ribbon commission on the subject.

The so-called Shafer report, whose members were appointed by then-president Richard Nixon, found in 1972 that ‘neither the marijuana user nor the drug itself can be said to constitute a danger to public safety’ and recommended that there should be no criminal penalties for personal use and casual distribution.

Nixon rejected the report. He had already declared ‘war on drugs’, and American prisons soon began filling up.

Source: Forbes.com

WE JAIL WHEN FAMILIES FAIL

by

Michael Toth

If you represent a client who is found guilty and goes to jail, the first thing that happens is that you return to your office. You have a few moments together. Then the chasers come with cuffs in hand and take your client so that he can begin serving his time.

For anyone who has observed the sudden passage between liberty and confinement, the experience is deeply affecting. But one need not be a part of our criminal justice system to take pause that 2.38 million Americans are currently behind bars. To illustrate the magnitude of this figure, consider that America’s jails have a greater population than do sixteen states.

A recent initiative by Senator Jim Webb’s (D. VA) seeks to reduce the U.S.’s high incarceration rates. The senator’s bill (a summary of which can be found here) creates a blue-ribbon commission directed to find ways to ensure public safety other than incarceration.

For Webb, the central point behind his initiative is that the high number of Americans in jail must have one of two causes. Either we are worse than people in other countries or we put too many people behind bars. Given these choices, he naturally sides with the second.

Webb’s argument is that we are sending certain offenders to jail who have no business being there. In particular, he seeks to keep non-violent drug offenders from crowding our prisons. It would be helpful, however, for the commission to study how many of these inmates pled guilty to drug possession in return for the dismissal of other drug, or non-drug, related charges. Webb is also concerned with the high number of mentally-ill inmates, suggesting that the proper response to this class of prisoners should be treatment rather than confinement.

My own view is that the senator is correct on at least one point. We can deter crime without imprisoning millions of convicts. During New York’s dramatic crime drop, for instance, the state’s incarcerated population fell.

The example of New York shows that where it is possible to ensure public safety without imprisonment we should seize the obvious invitation. Still shunning imprisonment alone is not the whole solution. Rather, crime should be looked at as a failure of local government. An important focus of Webb’s commission, therefore, should be to study the extent to which our federal prisons are full because states have been preempted from prosecuting certain offenses by the federalization of local criminal activity.

Indeed, the level of policing required to protect the public’s safety ought to be handled at the lowest possible level. As a military veteran, who served in Vietnam and went on to become President Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, Senator Webb is no doubt aware of the primary responsibility of communities to police their own. The military – whose justice system the senator singles out for praise – has successfully contained illegal drug use through a policy of local enforcement. At frequent intervals, service members are randomly tested for use of any controlled substance. These systematic tests, carried out at the unit level, make effective the Department of Defense’s zero tolerance policy for drug use.

The principle of local responsibility does not mean that states should have a monopoly on criminal justice. Nowhere in the promotional materials is Senator Webb’s blue-ribbon commission encouraged to study the documented link between family breakdown and high crime rates. Of course, the role of the federal government should remain limited. But any study group focused on analyzing crime rates across the United States should focus on the roots of the problem, including that children raised in two-parent homes are far less likely to engage in criminal activity.

The linkage between family breakdown and crime goes also to the issue of equality. America, throughout its history, has balanced liberty and equality by understanding that each is necessary for the other. Liberty is compromised when artificial distinctions are used to privilege one class of citizens against another.

But beyond merely stripping away artificial distinctions, it is necessary to ensure from the start that all people have the same opportunity to succeed. The discipline that parents provide may not always be appreciated. But when parents are not present, the lessons that were once learned at home are taught by increasingly more distant authority figures. Standing before a judge cannot be the first time that anyone realizes that as social beings our happiness depends on our getting along with those around us.

Source: New Majority

Condron.us

Prison hope

The changes in prison and parole policies announced last week by the state’s corrections chief are promising, if lacking in detail. The Legislature should give these ideas careful consideration, and stop ducking the need for prison reforms. Sensible fixes could generate savings in prison spending while reducing repeat crime.

Matthew Cate, head of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, last week outlined a plan to carve $400 million from annual prison costs and reduce the inmate population by 8,000. The state currently has about 168,000 people in its corrections system, which costs about $10 billion a year.

The proposals would expand early release credits for prisoners who completed job training or education programs, and would eliminate parole supervision for some low-risk, nonviolent offenders. The plan would also increase the dollar-value amount for grand theft, so that fewer theft cases would be felonies which lead to state prison time.

But the details of how the state would implement those changes are crucial — and not available yet, as the plan remains in flux. Still, the outline broadly follows the recommendations of reports by the state’s Little Hoover Commission, a panel of corrections experts and others about fixing the state’s corrections system.

And the state clearly needs to make improvements. State spending on corrections has grown by about $8 billion since 1989-90, an increase of 340 percent over two decades. The state’s prison system is crowded to nearly double its intended capacity in many places, and more than two-thirds of released prisoners end up back behind bars within three years.

Doing more of the same will not alter that costly record of futility. Offering time-off credits for job training and education, for example, can help prisoners succeed upon release. Criminal sentences should provide inmates with incentives to complete education, counseling, drug treatment and other programs. A large share of the state’s prison population lacks education and job skills and suffers from addictions or mental health issues; simply housing those people without any attempt at rehabilitation invites repeat offenses.

And while dropping parole for some low-risk offenders may seem dangerous, many states do not require parole for all prisoners. And about 65 percent of parolees in California see their parole agent once every six weeks or less, which provides only the illusion of supervision. Freeing up parole agents to concentrate on the truly dangerous parolees would improve public safety.

Other proposals require caution: The plan calls for revising state law so that criminals would have to steal $950 worth of goods to face felony grand theft charges, compared to$400 now. Raising the bar for a felony charge would keep people out of state prison, but could dump more people into already overloaded county jails. Corrections reform needs a broad, systemic approach; merely shifting the state’s troubles elsewhere will not do.

So while legislators will need to scrutinize the details, the reform proposal gives the Legislature another chance to tackle badly needed changes in a costly and troubled prison system. Legislators have ducked that duty for too long, at a dire public cost.

Source: PE.com

Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?

By Maia Szalavitz

Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It’s not the Netherlands.)

Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled “coffee shops,” Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don’t enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal’s drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Portugal’s case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world’s harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

“I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn’t having much influence on our drug consumption,” says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal’s, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.

At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it’s based on “speculation and fear mongering,” rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country’s number one public health problem, he says.

“The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization,” says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual’s “drug czar” and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.

Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that “it’s fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise.” However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.

The Cato report’s author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, “that is the central concession that will transform the debate.”

Source: Time.com

Condron.us

Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near YOU!

Prison report: Rehabilitation is a joke

By Just A Guy

Editors note: This is the second blog post by Just A Guy, our correspondent in the California prison system. His letters from the inside will appear on Mondays and Thursdays, and he welcomes your comments and questions. It’s a little tricky communicating with inmates, since they don’t have acces computers for email, so be patient if it takes us a while to get his responses posted.

Let’s talk about rehabilitation this week.

There is a great misconception that prisoners spend a large part of our time in rehabilitative programs, and that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is putting a massive effort into the rehabilitative process. But the effort isn’t plainly evident to me.

To my knowledge, the only program for drug addicts and alcoholics is called SAP (substance abuse program), but this program is compulsory for those that fit the criteria. The problem with this is that the criteria seem to be a criteria of convenience in order to receive the per inmate funding granted by AB 900.

Some institutions have NA and AA meetings, but the availability of these meetings is dependent on the availability of staff to supervise the the meetings. I find it ironic that you have to sign up for a meeting that is supposed to be anonymous. The truth is that there is very little help offered to those that really want it — and it is forced upon those that don’t want it.

There is vocational training for many different things, for which you may receive certification in that field, or a meaningless certificate. The vocational offerings vary from institution to institution, but the following are some offered:

Waste management
Carpentry
Electronics
HVAC
Optical
Dairy
Computer repair
Fire fighting
CDF training

There are many more, it’s my understanding that you can get an overview of some of these from visiting the CDCR website.

While this list and the many options purportedly available may seem laudable, the waiting lists for these classes and programs are very long. Depending on where you are, it can be as long as two years, because lifers and inmates doing a long time dominate the good jobs and vocations at medium-level security institutions and up because of seniority. So, an inmate doing three years for possession goes to an institution not offering SAP, that same institution also has an 18-month waiting list for vocations, and the inmate gets out before he really learns any marketable skills, and is sent off with two-hundred dollars of “gate money,” out of which he has to purchase his bus ticket from Southern California to Northern California. Makes a lot of sense, right?

Another thing that is lacking is an offering of classes for higher education. While there are correspondence courses available from a couple of different places, and one can get the tuition paid by the state, we have to pay for our own books unless you’re under the age of, I think, 25. There was a point in time where the correspondence courses were nearly cancelled because the state, supposedly, didn’t have the money to pay for proctors. To my knowledge, no institution offers college courses in person. While it is true that we are learning something from correspondence courses, I must question the efficacy of this unstructured learning. I know, first hand, how much better and valuable it is to be able to interact with both teacher and classmate versus independent study.

The big lie is that this is a cake walk with all sorts of tremendous opportunities awaiting us upon release. You hear about the classes for underwater welding and what have you, your union dues being paid etc…, but the reality is that there are only a few of these classes and there are 170,000 of us.

Now, I don’t expect that we are to be catered to, that everything should be given us on a platter, that we shouldn’t have to earn our own way; I don’t believe in entitlement. But, I do believe in clearing up these misconceptions about how things really are and letting you know that the opportunities that you are told we are given are there, but only for a VERY SMALL percentage of us. That being said, I do believe that it is our own responsibility to make a choice about turning our own lives around and doing something about it rather than depending on the state to do it for us. At the end of the day, we are each responsible for our choices and have to live with the consequence of those choices.

It sure would be nice though if, for the inmate that does want to take a class, get sober, get a job, have a career, get vocational training, etc., the public understood that it’s not right there in front of us for the taking.

What do you think happens when you take a bunch of guys, separate them from their friends, families, loved ones, and society in general and put them 50-300 deep in a building that is 90+ degrees in the summer in the same cell or dorm with no real programs, no real classes, no real activities, most with no financial means, poor food, drug/alcohol problems, pissed off and lonely, and bored? Well…what do you think becomes of many of our minds and hearts?

Guys like above, coming soon to a neighborhood near you Guys.

Source: SFBG

California prison officials propose releasing 8,000 inmates to cut costs

State prison officials have proposed reducing their inmate population by 8,000 by the middle of next summer as part of the $400 million budget hit Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger laid on them earlier this year.
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Matt Cate said his agency hopes to achieve the population reductions through parole changes, raising the dollar limit on grand theft and giving inmates more time off for good behavior.
Besides the population cuts, Cate said he’ll try to save some more money by eliminating 150 of the 2,000 jobs at the corrections agency’s downtown headquarters.
“This is what we can do so far,” Cate told reporters Friday. “We’ll keep working.”
Schwarzenegger on Feb. 20 ordered an open-ended $400 million reduction in the corrections department’s $10 billion budget, to help resolve a state budget deficit disaster that had totaled $40 billion.
Cate did not provide a line item on how his cost-cutting initiatives will add up to $400 million. He said he will send a package of bills over to the Legislature next week.
The package’s approval is needed for the changes on parole, the time credits and the dollar-value adjustments on property crimes such as grand theft, which have not been changed since 1982.
The proposed parole changes would eliminate supervision for tens of thousands of lower-risk offenders and employ sanctions such as GPS monitoring in place of a return ticket to prison for offenders who violate the technical terms of their releases. They would cut the prison population by 4,000 by the end of the next fiscal year, Cate said.
They also would reserve parole agent caseloads for serious and violent offenders, as well as for some so-called low-risk parolees who register as potentially troublesome by the agency’s new assessment tool.
Cate said he could not guarantee that no parole agents would be laid off in the face of the reduced parolee population.
The changed good-behavior rules would slice four months off an offender’s term for each job or education program completed, Cate said.
As for grand theft, it would be revalued from the current $400 to $950, Cate said, which would turn more property crimes now prosecuted as felonies into misdemeanors. Those two changes would add up to 4,000 fewer inmates.
The state prison population currently stands at about 168,000.
At least one critic of Cate’s plan has emerged, with Assembly member Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, blasting it Friday.
He said the parole changes will “create chaos in the streets,” the good-time credits won’t be tied to program completion and eventually will “become automatic,” and that with the higher price tag on grand theft “we are now indexing criminality. “
“For the state to save $400 million, we’re going to rampantly be disregarding the rights of the citizens of California to not be victims,” Nielsen said.

Source: SacBee

State prisons chief proposes $400 million in cuts

California corrections officials today unveiled $400 million in cost-cutting proposals that would reduce the state prison population by 8,000 inmates by next summer.

Agency Secretary Matt Cate said a proposed change in parole policies would cut the prison population by 4,000.

He said it would result in fewer offenders being returned on technical violations while at the same time lowering parole agent caseloads so they can spend more time supervising more serious and violent parolees when they are released.

The other half of the population reductions would come through expanded good behavior credits for inmates who complete education or job programs and through changes in the dollar value of property crimes, which would turn some thefts now prosecuted as felonies into misdemeanors.

The proposed changes in parole policies, the time credits and the adjustment on property crimes each require approval from the Legislature. Cate said the agency plans to submit a package of bills to the Legislature next week.

Cate said the department also plays to cut 150 of the 2,000 position at its headquarters office in downtown Sacramento. He also said that corrections officials are planning to close down one Division of Juvenile Justice youth prison.

The cuts came in response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s open-ended $400 million line-item veto earlier this year on Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spending budget, issued as part of the state’s recent resolution to close its $40 billion budget gap.

Source: SacBee

Pass the death sentence on mandatory sentencing

The United States has five per cent of the world’s population yet 25 per cent of the world’s known prison population. What is going on?
Wendy Kaminer
 

 

‘Americans are a fundamentally decent people’, politicians proclaim, leaving you to wonder why over two million of us are in prison.

As Democratic senator James Webb pointed out in a recent speech on the Senate floor: ‘We have five per cent of the world’s population; we have 25 per cent of the world’s known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities: either we have the most evil people on Earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice.’ (1)

Webb, a former, highly decorated marine who served as secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration, has lived up to his tough guy image by decrying what many politicians know but fear to acknowledge – that the criminal justice system ‘is a national disgrace’, which overwhelms our prisons with non-violent drug offenders and which warehouses the mentally ill, at great costs, human and economic, and very little benefit. Webb has introduced a bill to establish a bi-partisan ‘National Criminal Justice Commission’, which may sound like a way of avoiding rather than addressing the crisis, but his forthright critique of the system’s follies and gross injustices make clear that his call for reform is a mission, not a stunt.

You’ll probably never lose money betting against the enactment of effective and humane criminal justice policies or the sudden spread of rationalism (especially during an upsurge in gun sales reflecting the belief that cautious, centrist Barack Obama is establishing either a fascist or socialist dictatorship). Still, economic pressures, a breakdown of the prison system, exposés of wrongful convictions, and the growing threat of transnational gang violence (cited by Webb and fuelled largely by the drug trade) are combining to make reform possible, and in some cases, mandatory. For example:

– In California, a federal court has ordered the state to reduce its prison population by one third (55,000 people) within three years. ‘The evidence is compelling that there is no relief other than a prisoner-release order that will remedy the unconstitutional prison conditions’, the court declared. The prison system was killing a minimum of one inmate a month, the court had previously found, and its healthcare system was placed in federal receivership (2).  (California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is currently facing contempt charges for refusing to fund renovations demanded by the court-appointed receiver.)

– In New Mexico, pro-death penalty governor Bill Richardson recently signed a repeal of the state’s death penalty law, saving the state the risk of executing the innocent or mentally disabled, as well the expense of capital trials. (New Mexico is the third state to abolish the death penalty in the past two years.)

– In New York, officials acted voluntarily earlier this month to repeal the notoriously harsh, Rockefeller drug laws, enacted in 1973, which mandated prison terms for non-violent drug offences, including mere possession. For nearly 40 years these laws filled New York’s prisons with non-violent offenders, serving mandatory sentences that sometimes exceeded the sentences for violent crimes. Minorities were targeted disproportionately: in 2007, a typical year, nearly 90 per cent of people imprisoned for drug offences were black or Latino, according to a report by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), although ‘whites are the principal purveyors of drugs in the state’ (3).  Families and communities were decimated by the illicit trade in drugs, which continued unabated, and the imprisonment of non-violent addicts; in 2009, this cruel and stupid system was expected to cost the state about $600million, which, even in the face of trillion-dollar recovery efforts, still seemed like real money.

Changing public attitudes toward non-violent drug users (particularly marijuana users) also helped make reform of these laws feasible; at least, it no longer required extraordinary political courage. According to the NYCLU report, the ‘great majority’ of New York state voters support drug treatment for non-violent offenders instead of imprisonment. In my state, Massachusetts, voters approved a 2008 ballot initiative de-criminalising possession of up to an ounce of marijuana, by a 65 to 35 per cent margin. As a result, students caught with small amounts of marijuana will not acquire criminal records, crippling their employment prospects and barring them from receiving any federal financial aid for their educations. Medical use of marijuana has overwhelming public support, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, and in a reversal of Bush administration policies, the Obama Justice Department has announced that it will not prosecute medical marijuana use when it is allowed by state law.

Letting alone dispensers of medical marijuana and sick people who find relief in it was the least the Obama administration could do and maybe the most it will do. The president was dismissive of proposals to legalise and tax marijuana raised during his recent ‘internet town hall’ on the economy, and he has long been opposed to legalisation. Does Obama believe that he should have been prosecuted for his own youthful illicit drug use, saddled with a criminal record and deprived of future job opportunities? The president doesn’t say.

During the presidential campaign, he was, however, quite critical of mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for non-violent offenders, emphasising their racially disparate impacts and promising to reduce the ‘ineffective warehousing of non-violent drug offenders’. But his attorney general, Eric Holder, has advocated harsh prison sentences for marijuana offences, and not surprisingly President Obama has differed sharply with candidate Obama, especially on controversial civil liberties issues: he has adopted Bush/Cheney policies on state secrets that he previously denounced, insisted that the government should generally be immune from civil suits for illegally spying on us, and endorsed the presidential appropriation of power to detain and imprison people abroad indefinitely, without any judicial review. With an agenda that includes healthcare and immigration reform, not to mention staving off depression, Obama seems unlikely to press for sensible sentencing policies and other criminal justice reforms.

Besides, Democrats have been fearful of appearing ‘soft on crime’ since Obama was in grade school in the late 1960s, when Richard Nixon campaigned for president on a promise to restore law and order in the midst of social unrest. The sentencing policies that have contributed to the current incarceration crisis followed some years later. Mandatory minimum prison sentences are as old as the republic: in 1790, piracy carried a mandatory life sentence under federal law; bribery of a harbour inspector carried a mandatory six-month prison term. But in the mid-1980s, Congress went on a sentencing rampage, imposing mandatory minimum prison terms on non-violent drug offences.

The states soon followed suit. In the early 1990s Washington state initiated a lamentable trend by enacting a ‘three time loser’ statute that imposed mandatory life sentences without parole on repeat felony offenders, with relatively little regard for the nature of their crimes. Qualifying felonies included promoting prostitution and petty robberies in which the victims were unharmed. One of the first people sentenced under this law was a small-time thief: his first offence was pushing his grandfather and taking $390 from him; his second offence was robbing $100 from a pizza parlour, by pretending to have a gun in his pocket; he repeated this trick for his third offence, the unarmed robbery of a sandwich shop.

California, with its overflowing prisons now in receivership, joined enthusiastically in this dangerous dumbing down of the justice system with its own harsh ‘three strike’ laws, eventually approved by the Supreme Court: in 2003, the court upheld the constitutionality of mandatory 25 years to life sentences imposed on two hapless men whose third felonies consisted respectively of shoplifting two video tapes from K-mart and three golf clubs (4).

It’s worth noting that voters are as much to blame as their elected officials for these draconian sentences. In Washington state and California, three-strikes laws were adopted by popular referendum, in 1993 and 1994 respectively, with the support of about three quarters of the voters. Fear of crime was politically potent in the 1990s, and in 1994, then President Bill Clinton signed into law a huge federal crime bill that significantly expanded federal criminal jurisdiction, added new federal death penalties, a federal three-strikes rule, and increased punishments for hate crimes.

Senators from both parties competed to demonstrate their toughness, occasionally acknowledging that it was unlikely to have much ameliorative effect on crime. ‘It’s no good kidding ourselves; some of these tough-on-crime amendments may not have tremendous effect’, Republican senator Orin Hatch remarked during the debate on the bill. But ‘we are sending a message across this country that the Congress has finally awakened’. (‘Awakened to what?’ you might ask. A penchant for knowingly passing laws for their rhetorical virtues?) Or, as Democratic senator and now vice-president Joe Biden said, ‘We are going to show everybody how tough we are… But I want to advertise as the author of the underlying bill, as the author of the death penalty amendments, they are not going to have much effect.’ (5)

But as the senators might have predicted, irrationally harsh federal and state penal laws, especially mandatory minimum sentences, had horrific effects, as Senator Webb has now stressed. Initially advocated by liberals who viewed them as solutions to discriminatory sentencing by judges and soon embraced by law and order sloganeers, mandatory minimums greatly expanded the unaccountable power of prosecutors – power they wielded with a vengeance.

Mistakenly lauded for taking discretion out of sentencing, mandatory minimums simply transfer to prosecutors sentencing discretion traditionally afforded to judges: when penal laws mandate rigid prison sentences from which judges may not deviate, prosecutors (who enjoy great discretion in determining whether and how to charge people) effectively decide how defendants will be sentenced when they decide how defendants will be charged. Since the vast majority of cases are plea bargained, and since the prospect of facing a mandatory prison sentence on conviction, regardless of mitigating factors, greatly increases the pressure to plead, even for innocent defendants, prosecutors armed with mandatory minimums also serve as judges and jurors, whose decisions are not generally subject to appeal.

This system has proved so disastrous, as a practical matter, and so unjust that even politicians more timid than Jim Webb have begun tentatively speaking against it, and sometimes even the most punitive judges rebel. Judges have long disliked this sentencing regime (not surprisingly, since it lessens judicial power), but they are generally loathe to invoke constitutional strictures against cruel and unusual punishment to invalidate sentences. Still, in December 2008 a federal appeals court struck down a 28 years to life prison sentence imposed on a sex offender in California who registered with police as required by law, but at the wrong time of year (6).  The judge in this case was Jay Bybee, best known for his work in the Bush Justice Department when he signed a bone-chilling, 2002 memo justifying the torture of terror suspects. In other words, California’s sentencing rules seemed excessively harsh to someone who countenanced slamming a suspect against a wall and confining a man with a morbid fear of bugs in a small box that he is led to believe contains a stinging insect.

Maybe the spectre of prosecution for war crimes has imbued Bybee with newfound empathy for criminal defendants. Maybe he has always been able to compartmentalise the technocratic sadism that his torture memo bespeaks.  And maybe his sudden regard for proportionality is no more dissonant than the willingness of legislators to enact harsh and arbitrary sentencing laws, while acknowledging their likely ineffectiveness, or the image of Americans as fundamentally decent despite the institutionalised indecencies of the justice system that so many helped shape.

Wendy Kaminer is a lawyer, writer and free speech activist. Her latest book is Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Read on:

Letter from America.

(1) Senator Jim Webb’s Floor Speech to Introduce ‘The National Criminal Justice Act of 2009’, 26 March 2009

(2) Court Orders California to Cut Prison Population, New York Times, 9 February 2009

(3) The Rockefeller Drug Laws: Unjust, Irrational, Ineffective, New York Civil Liberties Union

(4) LOCKYER V ANDRADE, Cornell University Law School; EWING V CALIFORNIA, Cornell University Law School

(5) p196, It’s All the Rage: Crime and Culture, Wendy Kaminer, Addison Wesley, 1995

(6) Justices rule three-strikes sentence unconstitutional, Los Angeles Times, 31 December 2008

Source: Spiked OnLine

Eliminating death penalty in Colorado the right move

Count us among those applauding the Colorado House’s close-as-a-shave vote to eliminate the death penalty here. The bill, which now goes to the state Senate, would take money used for death penalty cases and apply it toward solving cold cases.

There are more than 1,400 unsolved homicides since 1970 in Colorado. House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, pointed out that the last death-penalty case tried in Colorado cost $1.4 million to prosecute.

Here’s what happened: Jose Luis Rubi-Nava, charged with the brutal killing of his girlfriend, pleaded guilty instead. That grand price tag didn’t result in his death — something that a whole lot of people still clamor for — but instead with a sentence of life in prison without parole.

Non-capital cases cost about $70,000, Weissmann said. There are two men on Colorado’s death row now. Imagine if the state were to spend $140,000 prosecuting those cases, rather than an estimated $2.8 million. Imagine if those millions, instead, were able to solve the murder of Boulder’s Sid Wells, who at 22 was found killed execution-style on Aug. 1, 1983.

A Gallup poll in the fall showed that 64 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, while just 30 percent oppose it. But death as a deterrent to hideous, heinous crimes doesn’t seem to hold water in the United States, despite that widespread support of it.

Texas has 373 people on death row. It has put 423 convicts to death since 1974, when the death penalty was reinstated. The murder rate there is 5.9 per 100,000.

Colorado, which has executed just one person since 1975 when the death penalty was reinstated, has a murder rate of 3.3 per 100,000. So the “don’t mess with Texas” adage as a deterrent isn’t working as planned. North Dakota, with no death penalty, has a murder rate of 1.3 per 100,000. Iowa doesn’t have the death penalty; the rate there is 1.8 per 100,000.

To be fair, New Hampshire does have the death penalty and its murder rate is about as low as it can go: 1 per 100,000. New Hampshire also hasn’t put anyone to death since the death penalty was reinstated there.

There is also the issue of a terrible possibility: Innocent people on death row. Texas has released nine people from death row, in addition to two clemencies. Florida, in addition to six clemencies, has reported 22 innocent people have been freed from death row.

The bill passed the House by just one vote, but is expected to pass in the Senate. Gov. Bill Ritter has not said whether he supports it.

We hope it does pass in the Senate, and we hope the governor signs it. For the grieving friends and families of more than 1,400 Coloradans, that expanded chance for justice outweighs the desire for ultimate revenge on a very few, who will spend the rest of their days in prison where they belong.

– Erika Stutzman,

for the Camera editorial board

Source: Daily Camera

Aging Behind Bars

— By James Ridgeway

Tue April 21, 2009

Among the grotesque realities of modern American life is the exponential rise of geriatric prisoners–men and women in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s, who committed crimes decades ago, are feeble and ill, yet remain incarcerated not only as a punitive measure, but on the premise that are a threat to society. Many of these people want to get out of prison only so they can die in what many call the “free world.”

People age faster behind bars faster than they do on the outside: Studies have shown that prisoners in their 50s are on average physiologically 10 to 15 years older than their chronological age, so 55 is old in prison. And even by conventional standards, the United States is experiencing an exponential jump in the number of old people in prison. The causes of this increase go beyond the graying of the population at large: Long mandatory sentences without parole mean that offenders who enter prison while still in their teens or twenties may remain there until they are old–if they don’t die first.

The problem is most acute in states like California, Texas, and Florida, which have large prison systems and strict and harsh sentencing laws. In California, the population of prisoners over 55 doubled in the ten years from 1997 to 2006. This contributes to the overcrowding that has reached crisis proportions. It also yields a sense of utter hopelessness within prison walls. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, some 85 to 90 percent of the men who pass through the prison gates will never leave. Angola has its own hospice, mortuary, and graveyard.

Older offenders are of course more likely to suffer from serious medical conditions, and unlikely to receive the care they require. Old people in any institutional setting may find that their health complaints are not taken seriously, due to some combination of dismissive attitudes and cost-cutting. In prison, such factors apply in the extreme. When I spoke with health care providers working in one Southern prison, they described a diabetic man’s illness was misdiagnosed by the prison, resulting in months of excruciating pain and the amputation of toes and part of one foot. Back in prison, the man asked for prosthetic shoes so he could get around by walking; his request was denied. Another man complained of an earache for months. He was given drops, but the pain persisted. Eventually he was sent to a local hospital emergency room, where doctors discovered the earache was in fact brain cancer, which might have been treated if discovered back when he first complained. Now he is terminal.

Brie Williams of the University of California Medical School at San Francisco and Rita Albraldes, an independent researcher, recently completed a study that was published as a chapter in the book Growing Older: Challenges of Prison and Reentry for the Aging Population. They found that the cost for each geriatric inmate came to $70,000 a year. In addition to the chronic diseases that increase with age, these offenders have have problems such as paraplegia because of gunshot wounds, and advanced liver disease, renal disease, hepatitis and HIV from drug and alcohol abuse. Living under prison conditions, they are more likely to get pneumonia and flu.

Many older offenders suffer from serious mental illness–some of it lifelong, and some of it produced by their incarceration. One study revealed depression among male prisoners was 50 percent higher than for those living outside. All in all, 54 percent of older prisoners met standards for psychiatric disorders. Williams and Abraldes write, “In one report from a maximum-security hospital, 75 percent of elderly prisoners were admitted between age 20 and 30 and the majority were schizophrenic.” At Angola, the warden reported that 2,000 of over 5,000 inmates were on psychotropic drugs. Many mentally ill prisoners are simply warehoused and fed drugs to keep them under control. Even worse, some are labeled “discipline” problems, and end up in solitary confinement.

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor and founder of the Project for Older Prisoners, has written extensively about alternatives for aging offenders: for lower risk prisoners, various forms of supervised release, including electronic bracelet monitoring; and for higher risk prisoners, geriatric units, where the cost of better care could be more than balanced by reducing the number of corrections officers. “Although a geriatric prisoner may still be a risk for a given category of crime,” Turley writes, “he is unlikely to toss his walker over a razor-wire fence or outrun perimeter guards.”

In 2008, the federal government finally launced the Elderly Offender Home Detention Pilot Program, under which old prisoners can be released into a kind of supervised house arrest. As outlined by Families Against Mandatory Mimimums, eligibility guidelines are strict: Offenders must be over 65, and must have served at least 10 years and 75 percent of their sentences; no lifers and no perpetrators of “crimes of violence,” including sex crimes and firearms violations. Total number expected to participate: 80 to 100 nationwide, out of a total federal prison population of over 200,000. In Pennsylvania, after lengthy study conducted by a special Advisory Committee on Geriatric and Seriously Ill Inmates, the state also launched a pilot project. Total prisoners released in one year: eight to ten.

Source: Mother Jones