Eleven year old in Pennsylvania U.S. may face life imprisonment without parole.

Jordan Brown was just eleven when according to prosecutors he shot and killed 26-year-old Kenzie Houk as she slept in her home, near Pittsburgh, in February, 2009. Houk was pregnant with a nearly full-term child at the time.

Jordan was charged with two counts of homicide. When Jordan claimed he was innocent the judge decided to try him as an adult. Some news reports make it sound as if the evidence is quite strong against Jordan but some blog sites give quite a different story showing that the evidence is actually weak.

But even if he were guilty the sentence is regarded by many human rights groups as too harsh and even that a life sentence could violate international law.

Brown’s lawyers have argued that the judge’s decision to try Brown as an adult based upon his refusal to admit guilt violated his right to be presumed innocent and his right to avoid self-incrimination as well.

Susan Lee of Amnesty International said:”It is shocking that anyone this young could face life imprisonment without parole, let alone in a country which labels itself as a progressive force for human rights,” Amnesty noted that the U.S. is one of only two countries in the world to refuse to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The other country is Somalia!

Although Jordan Brown is the youngest person known to Amnesty at risk to be sentenced to life without parole there are already 2500 people in the U.S. serving life without parole for crimes committed when they were juveniles. There are 450 in Pennsylvania, more than any other state.

The Sentencing Project in Washington claims that only the U.S. has juveniles serving life without parole and said:”That leads to only two conclusions: either kids in the US are far more violent than those in the rest of the world, or the US has developed uniquely harsh sentences.” Another conclusion is possible. The politics of fear can be very successful at advancing the cause of the prison industrial complex.

 

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Restore California Family Visiting…..

Please help us restore california visiting for inmates and their family!!!

Our initiative seeks to restore family visits for lifers with the same exceptions that have always been in place for sex offenders, etc. As you know, family contact w…ith spouses and children significantly increases the chances of successful rehabilitation, increases good behavior during confinement and results in better outcomes for children of inmates. Furthermore, one of our basic premises is that family members, especially children, have committed no crime, and deserve and have a right to physical contact with their parent.

We seek your guidance, advice, input and support because we believe that it is imperative to involve VICTIMS in this initiative. In fact, we seek to require a fee for family visits that would allow for funds to be placed in the Victim’s Compensation Fund. We realize that there must be a balance between the rights of the incarcerated, as well as the victims. You may check out our website at http://www.restorecalifamilyvisits.com/.

Why do people keep getting exonerated in Texas?

Image by rcbodden via Flickr

What’s happening in the Lone Star State?

By Rina Palta

Every few weeks, there seems to be news out of Texas: another prison inmate has been exonerated after spending years, even decades behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. There’s Cornelious Dupree, who spent 30 years in a Texas prison, protesting his conviction on rape and armed robbery, until he was exonerated and released earlier this month. And then there are the forty other people who have been cleared of crimes and released from Texas prisons since 2001. Why so many exonerations in Texas? Are police conspiring to send innocent people to prison? Are prosecutors tampering with evidence? What’s going on in this tough-on-crime state that’s landing so many innocent people in jail?

It turns out Texas is unique not for its penchant for imprisoning innocent people, but for its willingness to reopen these cases–and its success in preserving the necessary DNA evidence. Dallas in particular, seems to have encountered an opportune confluence of interest and ability to tackle these old cases. The district attorney there, Craig Watkins, has welcomed the scrutiny and the DNA evidence, previously (virtually) untapped, is there for the perusing.

 

Elsewhere in the country, it’s a mixed bag–even where officials seem ready to reexamine old cases, the evidence may simply not be there anymore. And it works the other way, too. The New York Post yesterday featured a story about a Brooklyn man whose brother was murdered in 1983. The case was never closed, but the brother would check in on it every six to eight months for updates. Recently, he learned crime-scene evidence, including “a bloody hat, a partial fingerprint sample, a knife and a cigarette butt,” was tossed out 15 years ago. In New York, apparently, preserving crime scene evidence has been a problem. The Innocence Project there (which works to help exonerate convicted inmates) requested DNA evidence in 46 cases from 2004-2009 and was told that in 27 cases, it couldn’t be located.

California went through its own DNA renaissance in the past decade after language was inserted into the state’s penal code allowing inmates to contest their convictions (with, for indigent inmates, the help of a provided attorney). Now, there are fewer cases cropping up that contain untested DNA evidence. And though there’s a statute on the books requiring police departments to preserve evidence now and into the future, Jeff Chinn of the California Innocence Project says, many are not complying. Many, he says, simply do not have the space to keep it, and there’s no punishment for throwing evidence away.

Now, Chinn says, the group is turning more towards other forms of scientific evidence used in trials to determine if an inmate has been wrongfully convicted. From fingerprinting, to eyewitness identifications, to confessions, to matching bite marks–all these forms of evidence are coming under stricter scrutiny. Particularly after a 2009 study by the National Research Council found that forensic science is generally “badly fragmented” and in need of overhaul.

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Lawmakers express frustration over excessive outlays for prison health

Inmate medical care is budgeted at $1.5 billion for this year. A federal overseer recommends early release of chronically ill inmates as a way to cut costs.

Inmates sit for dinner at the California State Prison in Lancaster. A federal overseer of the state’s prison system has suggested freeing the sickest inmates as a way to cut costs. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times / June 10, 2010)

 

 

Reporting from Sacramento —

Amid California’s budget crisis, the receiver put in charge of the prison health system by a federal judge has spent $82 million on blueprints for medical facilities that have been largely scrapped, more than $50,000 a month on an architectural consultant and millions hiring medical professionals — more per inmate than in many other states.

After four years of pouring money into the system, however, receiver J. Clark Kelso told legislators Wednesday that he didn’t know when the federal oversight might stop and suggested early release of chronically sick inmates as one quick way to cut costs.

Exasperated lawmakers, who have to pay the bills but have little say in how the funds are spent, questioned whether federal control is making prison healthcare any better.

“That’s a source of great frustration,” said Assemblyman Roger Dickinson (D-Sacramento), chairman of the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review, who called on Kelso to account for the spending, which is budgeted at about $1.5 billion for this year. “As we watch the numbers go up, we can’t tell if we’re any closer to hitting the mark.”

California’s prison health system fell into receivership in 2006 after a federal court ruled the state had not done enough to improve conditions since a 2000 court ruling found that care behind bars amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

There were 48 “possibly preventable” deaths of patients in California’s prison healthcare system in 2006, according to figures from Kelso’s office. There were 43 such deaths in 2009. Asked how he measured progress, Kelso said the number of “likely preventable” deaths dropped from 18 in 2006 to 3 in 2009.

“Those are the ones where you look at the record and your jaw just drops at how bad the treatment was,” Kelso said.

But as state leaders have struggled with historic budget deficits by making deep cuts in other services, they’ve had little choice but to write essentially blank checks for prison healthcare.

California prisons now employ one doctor for every 435 inmates, according to a report commissioned by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last year. By contrast, Texas prisons — which were once in receivership but have since emerged — employ one doctor for every 2,000 inmates.

Dickinson decried what he called “galactic” differences between staff levels in California and in other states.

Assemblywoman Alyson Huber (D-Eldorado Hills) said that the state now spends about $14,000 on healthcare per inmate each year, while many Californians have no health insurance.

“I’m not happy about the fact that our incarcerated inmates are getting better healthcare than people who aren’t incarcerated,” Huber said.

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Report: What does it really cost to run California’s prisons?

Image via Wikipedia

By Rina Palta

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has some issues with Governor Brown’s proposal to give an extra $395 million to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The LAO Monday released their analysis of the new governor’s CDCR budget–at least, the portion that takes millions out of the General Fund to address a “structural shortfall” at the prisons department. Over the past few years, it seems, the CDCR has exceeded its allocated budget (another way to look at it is the governor and legislature have low-balled what it actually takes to operate the department). According to the LAO:

“the department typically notifies the Legislature of a shortfall after the additional expenses were incurred and generally after the fiscal year ended. Thus, the Legislature has little choice but to either approve additional funding or authorize the transfer of funds from other program areas to cover the shortfall.”

Another example of less-than-transparent budgeting, according to the LAO, is the CDCR’s propensity to “free up” money by taking it out of rehabilitation and substance abuse programs and using it for security costs.

 

Governor Brown this year has asked for additional money for the CDCR, in an effort to make up for past mistakes in estimating the budget. The proposal is an apparent effort to be more transparent and realistic about what CDCR spends. But in their report, the LAO seems to be saying it’s still not owning up to the agency’s true budget.

First, here’s what Governor Brown says he wants the money for:

• $266.5 Million is for correctional officers’ salary. In the past, the budget for salaries has assumed that officers are earning amounts at the midrange of their possible pay. That’s not accurate: it takes somewhere around four years to get to the top of that range, and many more officers than estimated are already there.
• $55.2 Million for transporting inmates to medical facilities. For complicated medical problems, inmates have to be taken to hospitals and facilities outside of prison walls. And that transport process costs money, more than the $66.5 million allotted last year.
• $35.7 Million for correctional officer overtime. Brown says the amount allotted for OT hasn’t been adjusted since 2000 and doesn’t reflect current salaries.
• $20.5 Million is for legal expenses. Like settlements, attorney fees, and expert witness fees.
• $17.3 Million for vacant beds. Yes, there are unoccupied beds in the prison system, kept to allow changes in inmate housing needs. These “swing beds” are not accounted for in the per-inmate calculations for housing costs.

What does the LAO say the governor is missing?

Read the full report HERE

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Inmates protest CA Men’s Colony by not eating state-issued food

About a thousand inmates at the California Men’s Colony near San Luis Obispo are unhappy about prison policies, and they’re demonstrating by not eating state-issued food.

This demonstration started Monday morning at breakfast; that’s when about 90 percent of a prison yard refused to go to the cafeteria.

Officials say they are still eating, however, by buying food from a prison canteen.

A number of family members of those inmates say they’re not eating anything in a hunger strike, but prison officials say that’s not the case.

They say there’s no one starving there; there’s about 3,600 inmates at the medium-security prison.

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Removing the Roadblocks to Rehabilitation

By TINA ROSENBERG

 

Fixes

looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

What works and what doesn’t work to solve a social problem is often no mystery.  The mystery is why we so often persist in doing what doesn’t work.  The topic of Tuesday’s column — prisoner re-entry into the community — offers myriad examples.   One is the practice of dropping people getting out of jail or prison right back into the neighborhoods where they got in trouble in the first place.  Intuition tells us that this is a bad idea: the old street corners and the old friends seem like a recipe for the old troubles.  Research on this idea is rare and hard to do — it’s tough to get around the problem that the person who chooses not to go home may have other qualities that make him successful.

Interactive Feature

The Road From Prison to Rehabilitation

Four residents of Delancey Street Foundation talk about their journey to rebuild their lives.

A study published in 2009 in the American Sociological Review by David Kirk, a sociologist at the University of Texas, confirms our intuition.   Kirk took advantage of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, which prevented some New Orleans residents getting out of prison from going back to their old neighborhoods.  For the prisoners, this consequence of Katrina turned out to carry a hidden blessing. Those who couldn’t go home did significantly better at avoiding future incarceration than those who lived in neighborhoods where they could and did go home.

Prisoners are often aware of the temptations they will face upon resuming their old lives.  Nearly half of the prisoners in Illinois surveyed by the Urban Institute said they didn’t want to go back home upon release.  But states not only encourage people to go home again, some of them demand it — in most states, prisoners released on parole are legally required to go back to their county of last residence.

This rule is one of many protocols for dealing with former prisoners that seem to make little sense.  Many prisoners are sent home to arrive in the middle of the night with only a few dollars in their pockets.  Virtually no one in prison in the United States today can get methadone maintenance therapy, the gold standard drug treatment.  Prisoners are no longer eligible for the grants that used to make getting a college education in prison possible. This system is designed to fail.  And it does.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The Delancey Street Foundation’s buildings along the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

It is not failing quietly.  On the positive side, there are programs all over the country that recognize that helping prisoners remake their lives is both humane and cost-effective.  On Tuesday I wrote about two comprehensive ones: the Fortune Society’s Castle and Delancey Street.  Both provide housing, a new peer group, job training, classes, drug treatment — one-stop shopping for recently released prisoners.

Many readers responded, either in comments or e-mails, with information on other programs that offer services in prison or to recently released prisoners or ex-gang members.

Nancy K from St. Louis wrote in about Prison Performing Arts in Missouri, which works with incarcerated adults and children to put on a play over the course of a year.  Carole Farnham from Richmond, Va., wrote about Boaz and Ruth.  This Richmond organization provides job training and other services to local former prisoners who work on projects to revitalize a blighted neighborhood.

Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles employs former gang members in a restaurant or companies that bake bread or do silk screening.  The money raised pays for services such as mental health counseling, 12-step meetings and gang tattoo removal.  Dismas Houses in several states and overseas provide homes where former prisoners live alongside college students. There are also the Safer Foundation in Illinois and Iowa, Pioneer Human Services in Washington state, the Center for Employment Opportunities in New York and perhaps a handful of other programs.

Several of the writers acknowledged that these programs are always broke (at Boaz and Ruth, the staff works part of the time for free), which is probably typical.  It is a shame — all of these ideas likely deserve fat budgets and widespread adaptation.  But as with the Castle and Delancey Street, they don’t get them.  No doubt these programs save the American public a lot of money (incarceration is expensive) and the few thousand people these programs work with are mightily helped. But hundreds of thousands more former prisoners arrive home on the bus at nighttime alone.

How can this be, when we profess to be concerned about crime?  As taxpayers, we don’t want to pay the costs of incarceration.  As citizens, we want to be able to live free of crime.  Why, then, the persistence of obvious folly?

The underlying reason is that crime has normally been a highly emotional issue for voters.  Politicians may understand that certain strategies do not leave us safer, yet they do not try to change them for fear of being tarred as soft on criminals.  When crime rates are high and crime is a potent electoral issue, the pressure encourages public officials to appear tough on crime at all costs.  When crime rates are low and voters might be more receptive to more effective approaches, the issue has usually vanished from public attention.

A related reason is that advocates of new strategies rarely have the research that would allow them to make their case.  Especially with an issue like crime, it is important to be able to offer proof to counter the emotion.  But many aspects of why people commit crimes and how to stop them have been little studied. “Research is very expensive to do,” said Peggy McGarry, the director of the Center on Sentencing and Corrections for the New York-based Vera Institute. “You have to create a comparison group out of the files of a public agency, create a database, do interviews.  It is getting harder and harder to persuade private funders to spend money on research because the human need is just so great.  And they are not convinced that legislatures and government offices are going to do anything with the results of it anyway.  Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to evaluate the Castle if you are not convinced that New York State will try to replicate it?”

The good news is that we may have reached a turning point, a chance at last to see effective anti-crime policies edge out ineffective ones.  One reason is the record number of people being released from prison.  This has made prisoner re-entry a hot topic in the field of corrections (if still invisible to the rest of the world).  The politics, too, have changed.  The crime rate throughout the United States has dropped, which means that voters are less panicked about crime and less singleminded about harsh measures.

The public isn’t thinking about crime — but state officials are.  States are in budget crisis.  Many states are looking for ways to let nonviolent prisoners out — and they can’t afford to see them come back again. California’s three strikes law — your third felony conviction, even if for something minor, brings a 25-year-to-life prison term — is costing the state $500 million a year, according to the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

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Another Manson family member denied parole

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Will anyone involved in the murders prompted by their devotion to Charles Manson ever see the light of day?

In a ruling Thursday, the California parole board denied parole for Patricia Krenwinkel, who informed the board she killed for the love of Manson.

The two-member panel noted Thursday that it was the horror of the killings, one of the most notorious of the 20th century, that led them to reject the bid for parole in spite of Krenwinkel’s efforts to rehab her life.

They said that the murders of seven people, including actress Sharon Tate and her baby, had impacted the entire world as evidenced by letters which came in worldwide urging that she be kept behind bars.

“These crimes remain relevant,” said parole commissioner Susan Melanson. “The public is in fear.”

Melanson and Deputy Commissioner Steven Hernandez gave their decision following a four-hour hearing and more than an hour of deliberations at which Krenwinkel wept, apologized for her actions and said she was ashamed of her actions.

Members of victims’ families also cried and recalled their suffering following the murders and called for Krenwinkel to be kept behind bars. According to Melanson, the notoriety of the crimes and their viciousness weighed heavily in the decision.

“This is a crime children grow up hearing about,” she commented, and noted that Krenwinkel failed to understand the worldwide impact.

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Budget cuts could send young criminals to adult prison

Gov. Jerry Brown‘s call to close youth prisons would save money and aid reform in county facilities, but it could also end up sending more juvenile criminals to adult prisons, according to a story by California Watch.

The proposal promises to shift responsibility for the worst juvenile offenders from the state to the county, close decaying facilities, and offer the trouble youth a better environment.

“The counties have much better practices,” Jakada Imani, executive director of the Ella Baker Center, told California Watch. “There is a shorter chain of accountability at a local level. We’ve been pushing for this for years. It is an idea whose time has time.”

But a downside also looms.

“It is a difficult population, in terms of violence and serious sex offenses,” said Barry Krisberg of the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice. “It is my view that the counties are not equipped to adequately provide for these youth. One consequence is we will push more of them into the (adult) prison system.”

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Justice Dept. office to punish prosecutors’ misconduct

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department created a new internal watchdog office on Tuesday to make sure federal prosecutors face swifter and more consistent punishment if investigators find that they committed misconduct.

The change follows a USA TODAY investigation that identified 201 criminal cases in which federal courts had found that Justice Department prosecutors had broken laws or ethics rules — violations that put innocent people in jail and set guilty people free. Although each of the cases was so serious that judges overturned convictions or rebuked the prosecutors for misconduct, USA TODAY found that the department often took years to investigate what went wrong, and that prosecutors faced little risk of being fired.

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement Tuesday that while most federal prosecutors meet their ethical obligations, the current procedures for disciplining those found to commit misconduct “consume too much time, and risk inconsistent resolution.” He said the new unit “will help change that by providing consistent, fair, and timely resolution of these cases.”

The unit, called the Professional Misconduct Review Unit, will be responsible for disciplining career prosecutors when the department’s ethics investigators conclude that they engaged in intentional or reckless misconduct. Until now, those decisions had been made by the prosecutors’ supervisors, most often U.S. attorneys. The department has faced criticism for not doing enough to investigate and punish misconduct.

Holder wrote in a memo that those procedures “have resulted in delays” because the officials in charge of discipline are also busy with other things. The new unit will have to make decisions more quickly, and will also be able to report misconduct to state bar associations. It will review findings of misconduct that occur after it is fully staffed.

The new unit, which will make referrals to state bar association disciplinary authorities, will handle all findings of professional misconduct that occur after the unit is fully staffed, the memo said. “This is serious business. It’s a sign of a lack of faith in the behavior of U.S. attorneys around the country,” said Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. “If things have gotten so bad that the department finds willful misconduct and you haven’t been able to figure that out, you’re out of the ballgame. The message is, ‘Manage your office and impose discipline, or we will.’ “

 

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