Haley Barbour releases the Scott Sisters!!

Dec. 29, 2010

GOV. BARBOUR’S STATEMENT REGARDING RELEASE OF SCOTT SISTERS

“Today, I have issued two orders indefinitely suspending the sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott.  In 1994, a Scott County jury convicted the sisters of armed robbery and imposed two life sentences for the crime.  Their convictions and their sentences were affirmed by the Mississippi Court of Appeals in 1996.

“To date, the sisters have served 16 years of their sentences and are eligible for parole in 2014.  Jamie Scott requires regular dialysis, and her sister has offered to donate one of her kidneys to her.  The Mississippi Department of Corrections believes the sisters no longer pose a threat to society.  Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the State of Mississippi.

“The Mississippi Parole Board reviewed the sisters’ request for a pardon and recommended that I neither pardon them, nor commute their sentence.  At my request, the Parole Board subsequently reviewed whether the sisters should be granted an indefinite suspension of sentence, which is tantamount to parole, and have concurred with my decision to suspend their sentences indefinitely.

“Gladys Scott’s release is conditioned on her donating one of her kidneys to her sister, a procedure which should be scheduled with urgency. The release date for Jamie and Gladys Scott is a matter for the Department of Corrections.

“I would like to thank Representative George Flaggs, Senator John Horne, Senator Willie Simmons, and Representative Credell Calhoun for their leadership on this issue.  These legislators, along with former Mayor Charles Evers, have been in regular contact with me and my staff while the sisters’ petition has been under review.”

Source

the charles smith blog….

HANK SKINNER, DARRELL HUNT AND OTHERS; DNA AND JUSTICE DENIED.

“Forensic DNA profiling has certainly revolutionized criminal investigations. But the full potential of forensic DNA testing to uncover wrongful convictions will not be realized until barriers to providing convicted felons access to crime scene evidence are removed, until laws are widely implemented requiring the preservation of evidence, and until resources for post-conviction testing are made available to those with a claim of innocence.”

SHELDON KRIMSKY AND TANIA SIMONCELLI; OP-ED. THE LOS ANGELES TIMES;

(Sheldon Krimsky is a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University. Tania Simoncelli is former science advisor to the ACLU. They are the coauthors of the book ” Genetic Justice: DNA Databanks, Criminal Investigation, and Civil Liberties.”)

———————————————————————————

“We have seen repeatedly that DNA can shed light on wrongful convictions. To date, about 250 people who were wrongly convicted have been exonerated because of DNA evidence that was reexamined after they were pronounced guilty,” the L/A. Times Op-Ed piece by Sheldon Krimsky and Tania Simoncelli published on December 22, 2010 begins, under the heading, “DNA and justice denied: We are a long way from a system that grants fair access to DNA testing for convicted criminals.”

“But we are a long way from a system that grants fair access to DNA testing,” the column continues.

 

Continue Reading….

Prison suicides rise; officials deny trend

Image via Wikipedia

Suicides in New York state prisons soared in 2010 to their highest rate in 28 years as 20 inmates took their own lives, according to figures from the state Department of Correctional Services.

 

The figures show that twice as many suicides occurred this year as in 2008 or 2009. Moreover, while prison suicide is sometimes prone to spiking in individual years, a longer-term trend is clear — the suicide rate rose 23 percent from the 1990s to the 2000s, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal analysis.

Among the suicides this year, three were in local facilities — two in Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill and one in Shawangunk prison in Wallkill. They are among eight state prisons in Dutchess and Ulster counties that employ nearly 4,400 people and house 7,700 inmates, 165 of them sentenced by local counties.

Prison officials acknowledged the suicide rate was at a two-decade high but noted that suicides fluctuate, reaching 18 in both 2005 and 2007. “We do not regard this year’s total as the beginning of a trend, since the numbers have gone up and down,” said Erik Kriss, director of public information.

But inmate advocates expressed concern and said the 2010 deaths reflected a system that is failing to treat troubled inmates.

“A prison sentence shouldn’t be the equivalent of a death sentence,” said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a prison watchdog group, who noted that 11 suicides occurred among inmates not receiving psychiatric care. “Obviously they needed mental health services or they wouldn’t have killed themselves.”

 

Continue Reading….

Prison Reforms must focus on Rehabilitation

By Larry Bowler, Rick Jaramillo and Dennis Zarro

Published: Sunday, Dec. 26, 2010 – 12:00 am | Page 3G

Re “Time to split up corrections department” (Viewpoints, Dec. 10):

J. Clark Kelso, the federal receiver for California’s Prison Health Care Services made specific suggestions for carving up the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The department needs to remain concentrated and focused, but substantially reduced in size – a lean, efficient agency to help get our prison population under control, while releasing parolees who have job skills and thereby a chance at success.

The department should have only two missions. First, provide safe and secure incarceration. Second, thoroughly rehabilitate inmates who will be on parole. The parole division should be proactive instead of haphazardly reactive. Parolees with skills and livable wage jobs can become more responsible community members and help reduce local law enforcement costs and street crime.

Let’s concentrate on what should be the most important mission for California’s neighborhoods, rehabilitated and employable parolees. All inmates who are within one year of release should be enrolled in intensive vocational job training. This training would be paired with an identical course operated by an adult education campus in the community to which the parolee will return. This is called “inside-outside” training. When the inmate is paroled, he or she will finish on the outside the training course they started taking inside, and then placed in a job.

The best news for inside-outside training? Federal Pell grants are available to pay most of the cost of outside instruction and job placement.

CDCR parole is too expensive and profoundly broken. Technology exists to place all parolees on a wrist or ankle monitor for the first year of parole.

Continue Reading…

SOMETHING TO “PONDER”…..

……..There are four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done!

From Solitary Watch

Santa Was in Prison and Jesus Got the Death Penalty As Christmas is celebrated in Incarceration Nation, it’s worth remembering certain things about the two figures who dominate this holiday. As more than 3,000 American sit on death row, we revere the birth of a godly man who was arrested, “tried,” sentenced, and put to death by the state. The Passion is the story of an execution, and the Stations of the Cross trace the path of a Dead Man Walking. Less well know is the fact that Saint Nicholas, the early Christian saint who inspired Santa Claus, was once a prisoner, like one in every 100 Americans today. Though he was beloved for his kindness and generosity, Nicholas acquired sainthood not only by giving alms, but in part by performing a miracle that more or less amounted to a prison break. As we described in one of our earliest posts on Solitary Watch, Nicholas was the 4th-century Greek Bishop of Myra (in present-day Turkey). Under the Roman emperor Diocletian, who persecuted Christians, Nicholas spent some five years in prison–and according to some accounts, in solitary confinement. Under Constantine, the first Christian emperor, Nicholas fared better until the Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. There, after having a serious theological argument with another powerful bishop, Nicholas became so enraged that he walked across the room and slapped the man. Continue Reading…

Maybe Now for Prison Reform?

By Brian Leubitz

California Progress Report

In case you hadn’t noticed, we are pretty much at the moment of perfect storm for the prisons. They are wildly overcrowded, and generally wild. They are the subject of Supreme litigation to release 40,000 prisoners. They are costing us more than we are spending on our higher education systems, and oh, yeah, there’s the fact that we face about $30 Billion of debt.

So you would think that this would be a fantastic opportunity to try to do something about the prison situation. For years, the voters and politicians of the state have been scared of doing anything other than trading on fear. Working on new solutions was considered too risky.

Thing is, while I was working for Kamala Harris‘ campaign, I learned that somebody forgot to tell her that.  Instead, she has throughout her career as SF DA been willing to look at new ways to make this a safer world, rather than just the politically safe ways of locking up every offender and trying to keep the keys far away.

And perhaps we are seeing more Californians noticing that we, in fact, have a few problems here. From today’s LA Times:

“Smart on Crime” is something of a Harris franchise, the name of her 2009 book. In it, and during her campaign, Harris argued that criminal justice money is wasted on the “revolving door” that prison has become as 70% of the 120,000 convicts released annually end up being caught committing new crimes.

She believes that prison should be the punishment for serious offenders and that greater pains should be taken to prod milder offenders with education, counseling, probation and other community-based support.

“I firmly believe in and advocate accountability and consequences when you are talking about rapists and murderers and child molesters – you’ve got to lock them up,” she said. “But you’ve also got to look at the fact that crime is not monolithic.” (LA Times)

However, we can’t really think that whatever changes are going to be either quick or easy.  At the same time this story (entitled “The time may be right for Kamala Harris”) was published, we get a story of Jerry Brown‘s fealty to the prison guards union (CCPOA).

Continue Reading…

Brown, prison union walking hand-in-hand

Image via Wikipedia

By Dan Morain, Senior editor
dmorain@sacbee.com The Sacramento Bee

Published: Sunday, Dec. 19, 2010 – 12:00 am | Page 1E

Jerry Brown is preparing to dance with the ones who brung him, specifically 31,000 members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.

Jilted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the union cozied up to Brown by spending $1.4 million to help elect him. It was part of an effort to regain some of the dominance it once had in the Capitol and win a labor contract, after having operated without one since 2006.

Brown has responded, giving union leaders VIP treatment at his invitation-only election night party in Oakland and flying to Las Vegas earlier this month to address the union’s convention.

In a speech that was closed to the public, Brown warned union members that there may not be much if any pay raise. But he also talked about his strong relationship with the union’s leaders and declared that he intends to work out a labor pact with them once in office.

“He reached out to a large segment of his employees and gave them hope,” said Chuck Alexander, the union’s second in command. “It made people feel a little bit better.”

To the broader public, Brown promises to focus on California’s dire financial situation. Although he has made no pronouncement of note about prisons, Brown won’t be able to solve the budget crisis without confronting the money pit that is the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. That will mean wrestling with the union.

California was spending $6 billion on prisons when Schwarzenegger took office in 2003, $28,000 per inmate per year. This year, the state will spend $9.3 billion on corrections, $49,500 per inmate.

Several prison issues await the past and future governor, and they all come at a cost.

Almost immediately, Brown will need to decide whether to proceed with the Schwarzenegger administration’s plan to build a new death row, essentially a new prison within the grounds of San Quentin State Prison.

A lifelong capital punishment foe, Brown undoubtedly could find a better use for the $500 million or so it would cost to build the death row to house 700-plus condemned inmates, almost all of whom will die in prison of natural causes. But prison officials say the new facility is needed to replace cellblocks built decades ago.

Then there are the lawsuits over prison crowding and substandard health care that have bedeviled the state for more than a decade.

In the first few months of 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on California’s long-running prison litigation and decide the question of whether the state must vastly reduce prison overcrowding. Brown will have no choice but to respond.

He could build more prisons. That would cost billions. He could ship more inmates to other states. The union would object. He could free roughly 40,000 inmates and hope none commits a Willie Horton-like crime. Ugly choices, all.

And there is the matter of the union, an organization that has advocated for prison expansion by funding the “three strikes” sentencing law and repeatedly lobbying against legislation that might have shortened prison sentences.

Under its founding president, Don Novey, the union built its clout the old-fashioned way, by spending millions to elect politicians including Gov. Pete Wilson and Gov. Gray Davis. Wilson gave the union many concessions. Davis gave the union even more.

CCPOA’s current president, Mike Jimenez, has sought to portray the union as gentler, appearing to advocating sentencing reform and aligning itself with prisoners’ rights attorneys by filing a brief in the overcrowding case before the Supreme Court.

Continue Reading…

Trade secrets: inmate health-care contracts kept confidential

By Jennifer Chaussee

Hundreds of millions of dollars are involved in a new state contract for prison health care, but there’s no telling now exactly much money California is spending under the agreement, which takes effect in just weeks. Even lawmakers are kept in the dark.
The contract and its fiscal details are secret because of an exemption related to health care information within the state Public Records Act, said Liz Kanter, a spokesperson for the California Prison Health Care Services, the government body that awarded the contract to Health Net Federal Services, an outside HMO and subsidiary of Health Net.
Some details will be released after a year has passed, she noted.

But questions about the contract couldn’t come at a worse time: Prison health care costs are skyrocketing.
The non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found a “dramatic increase in spending on adult prison health care: from $1.2 million in 2005-2006 to $2.5 billion in 2008-2009,” according to the March, 2010 report on adult inmate health care costs.

 

The increase in cost was linked to an increase in medical contracts, like the one newly obtained by Health Net.
“The increase in correctional health care costs has been largely driven by greater usage of contract medical services,” said the LAO report.
But nobody besides CPHCS and Health Net know how much the state will be spending on inmate health care next year.  Both declined to discuss the issue.
According to the government code that protects the contract’s confidentiality, all health care service contracts and records under the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation are exempt from the Public Records Act, a law that is intended to shed public light on government actions.
But in the case of the health care contracts, every aspect of contract negotiations, including meeting minutes and staff strategies, is confidential.

It takes a full year after a contract has been fully executed for the details to surface.
“Except for the portion of a contract that contains the rates of payment, contracts for health services entered into by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation … shall be open to inspection one year after they are fully executed,” says California Government Code Section 6254.14.
And nobody outside of the negotiations has access to a non-eradicated version of the contract – not the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, not the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review, not the rank-and-file lawmakers.
As for portions of the contract that contain rates of payment, those details don’t become public until three years after the contract has been in place.
The code is in place to protect trade secrets, said Aaron Edwards of the Legislative Analyst’s Office. The government code explains that confidentiality is necessary to protect the highly competitive nature of health care contract negotiations.
But by the time those three years pass and the cost of the contract is public, Health Net’s contract base will have already expired and the bill already paid.
Health Net Federal Services will start providing inmate health services on behalf of CPHCS starting Jan. 1, 2011 for a base agreement of three years. After those years are up, the state has the option to extend the contract for an additional year.
Health Net Federal Services is a subsidiary of Health Net, one of the nation’s largest health care companies. They have a number of major government contracts, including those with the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs. This is their first contract with the California prison system.
CPHCS was established after the state was sued in 2001 for not meeting federal standards for inmate health care. As a result, the federal court took management of the inmate health system out of the hands of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and appointed a health care receiver, J. Clark Kelso, to take control. As receiver, Kelso now heads CPHCS, which administers inmate health care directly.
Since it was established, “the federal court- appointed Receiver [has] hired thousands of additional health care staff (such as physicians, nurses, dentists and psychiatric staff),” according to the LAO’s March report.
Last year, California spent an average of $16,000 on each of its 170,000 adult inmates.

Continue Reading…

Georgia’s Prisoners’ protest over. For now.

By Rhonda Cook

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

3:49 p.m. Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The prison system began lifting lock downs at four institutions and returning the facilities to normal operations Wednesday and inmate said they were ending their protest for now and reporting to work assignments.

One of the organizers of the protest said prisoners are still going to pursue their concerns. If the Department of Corrections ignores their requests, the next protest will be violent, he said.

Prison officials did not say what led to the decision to end the lock downs that had been in place since last Thursday. But an inmate at Smith State Prison in Glenville said in a telephone interview prisoners had agreed to end their “non-violent” protest to allow administrators time to focus on their concerns rather than operating the institutions without inmate labor.

“We’ve ended the protest,” said Mike, a convicted armed robber who was one of the inmates who planned and coordinated the work stoppage. “We needed to come off lock down so we can go to the law library and start … the paperwork for a [prison conditions] lawsuit.

“We’re just giving them time to … meet our requests without having to worry about us on lock down,” Mike told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Wednesday.

Mike is one of the inmates who organized the protest at Smith prison who has talked to the AJC about it. He did not want his last name published for fear of retaliation from prison officials, but agreed to allow the AJC to verify his prisoner identification number, which the paper then cross-checked with the Department of Corrections website.

Inmates began planning the protest in early September when tobacco was banned throughout the prison system. The inmates said they picked  Dec. 9 as the day to start because it allowed time for the word to spread throughout the system and because the temperature in the cellblocks would be cooler by then, which is important when otherwise violent men are trying to keep their tempers in check.

Over the months before the protest and in the days after it began, updates and details were spread inmate-to-inmate and prison-to-prison using cell phones, text messages and word of mouth.

Beginning last Thursday and for six days inmates at several prisons refused to leave their cells in protest of the lack of pay for the work they do maintaining and running prison operations and cleaning other government properties; state law forbids paying inmates except for one limited program. The  prisoners also were protesting the quality of the food and the lack of  fruits and vegetables, the quality of medical care, the availability of education and job training programs, parole decisions and overall conditions.

After learning a protest was planned, the Department of Corrections said,  wardens decided to implement lock downs at Hays, Smith, Telfair and Macon State Prisons, the institutions where inmates were most active. Prisoners locked down are not allowed to leave their cells, make collect calls from the phones in each cellblock or have visitors.

Inmates insisted, however, that they locked down themselves.

Inmates called The Atlanta Journal-Constitution several times ,using contraband cell phones or  “three-way” calling feature their friends or relatives had on their telephone service.

Then wardens began easing restrictions Tuesday evening.

Inmates were allowed to use the cellblock telephones, take showers and watch television. Some inmates reported to job assignments in prison kitchens and laundries Tuesday evening. More reported to their work details on Wednesday.

“We have a responsibility to ensure public safety by operating safe and secure prisons,” said Assistant Commissioner Derrick Schofield said in a statement Wednesday. “As with any facility lock down, we will take a systematic approach in ensuring a safe and secure environment is maintained for staff and offenders, before resuming normal operations at those facilities.”

Continue Reading…