A Mother’s Fight Against 3 Strikes Law ‘A Way of Life’

Sue Reams campaigned to change California’s three-strikes law and help set free her son, Shane. Ina Jaffe/NPR

by Ina Jaffe

Since the November election, 240 California prisoners facing potential life sentences have been set free. That’s because voters changed California’s tough three strikes sentencing law.

As NPR reported in 2009, that law sent thousands of people to prison for terms of 25 years to life for minor, nonviolent crimes. Now those prisoners can ask the court to have their sentences reduced.

One of those set free under the new law is Shane Reams. He owes his freedom in no small part to his mother Sue’s 17-year campaign to change the law.

Sue Reams and her husband picked Shane up outside of Ironwood State Prison, way out in the California desert, on the morning the day before Easter.

“I just caught him and sobbed,” she says. “I probably didn’t let him go for 5,10 minutes maybe.”

“She choked the air out of me,” Shane says. “It was an amazing feeling. It felt like we won. I just kept saying, ‘We won, we won.’ “

Before that moment, Shane had served about 17 years of his potential life sentence. He got his third strike for being involved in the sale of a $20 rock of cocaine. He says he was a bystander. The prosecution said he was a lookout. But it was Shane’s first two strikes that caused his mother such heartache, as she said in a with NPR. She’d been trying to get her son off drugs, she explained. Nothing seemed to work, so she tried tough love.

“Tough love tells you that you take a stand,” she said. “So I took a stand.”

That meant when her son stole some stuff from her house — and from the neighbors — to get money for drugs, Reams insisted he turn himself in. She even drove him to the police station. She told him: “Maybe you’ll get a drug program. You need a drug program.”

Instead he got convicted of two counts of residential burglary. A few years later when he got picked up on the drug charge, those burglaries counted as his first two strikes. As Reams said in 2009, she felt partly responsible for her son’s life sentence. “I’m angry with myself. I feel terribly guilty. I guess that’s why I’ve worked so long to try and change the law.”

She worked with an organization called Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes. She told her story to anyone who wanted an interview. She campaigned for a 2004 ballot measure to reform the law. It failed. She kept going. Meanwhile, Shane was not helping the cause, at least not for his first few years behind bars.

“I was in a prison gang,” he says bluntly. “I was involved in a lot of nonsense that was taking place within the prison.”

“When he first went in, he kind of gave up,” explains his mother. “That life sentence loomed in front of him, and I guess he kind of gave up. But he knew that I wasn’t going to give up on him.”

“ For me this has become a way of life. People are [still] in [prison] for stealing baby food, for stupid things. And they don’t deserve a life sentence for that.”

- Sue Reams

 

It started to occur to Shane that if his mother was going all over the state saying he didn’t deserve to be in prison, he needed to start acting like it. So he went to just about any group the prison offered: Gangs Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous and a support group for lifers. He put in hours in the prison law library. He took college courses, mostly sociology and psychology.

“Those courses made me look within and see why I did the things that I did,” he says.

In March, when Shane’s case was brought back to court, he was sentenced to eight years for that drug charge, less than half of what he’d already served. Now, at the age of 44, he’s beginning a whole new life. A week after his release, he moved to Memphis, where his fiancee lives. They had a son together before he went in. Now they plan to get married.

But Sue Reams says her life won’t change that much. She believes that the initiative that reformed the three strikes law didn’t go far enough. She’s not giving up the campaign.

“For me this has become a way of life,” she says. “People are [still] in [prison] for stealing baby food, for stupid things. And they don’t deserve a life sentence for that.”

Reams may have begun her efforts to reform the three strikes law to free her son, but she says all of the people engaged in this cause are her family now.

Via NPR

PRM’s two cents…I happen to adore Sue Reams and am so happy for her & Shane….Congratulations and much luck!

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The Vast Majority of People in US Prisons Shouldn’t Be There, Period…..

But They Are Profitable Chattel.

 

 

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

 

Daily, the politicians and think tanks promote improving our nation’s large city public education by turning them over to profiteering operators of charter schools.  There’s a lot of money to be paid in modern plantation educational contracts.

And that’s what vast stretches of urban America have become: plantations for harvesting poor blacks and Latinos for educational corporations and for a vast prison-industrial complex whose tentacles reach out throughout the desolation of neighborhoods whose most common denominator is the lack of economic hope or opportunity.  The impoverishment has been that way for decades.

Well there is one source of private funds in these vast areas of destitution: the drug industry.  It is capitalism distilled to its essence, with the corner teenager who sells crack as a modern day Fuller Brush Man.

Of course, no public officials are talking even remotely about providing jobs to these financially blighted areas.

But the status quo government/corporate alliance has figured out how to exploit the residents of these areas to make a profit by creating non-union schools that often perform below the comparable public school level in similar locations.

And then – inextricably intertwined with the so-called failed public schools — there is the prison-industrial complex that makes a financial killing off of the war on drugs, a conflict so immersed in racial prejudice and legal profiteering of the law enforcement/judicial/attorney/prison system that you can call it the war for making a lot of people richer at the expense of multi-generational impoverishment of people of color trapped in place.

This is made clear in the moving and informative documentary by Eugene Jarecki, “The House I Live In.” Told through personal stories with statistics added through titling, “The House I Live In” provides insight into the devastation of institutionalizing drugs within communities in order for others to profit. (Whites who are poor and have mental health needs also get victimized by the non-violent offender penalization machine.)

Truthout writers Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese provide additional background on this topic in an April 3 article:

The poison fruit of the massive security state apparatus in the United States is mass incarceration. The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, meaning one out of four incarcerated people are in the “land of the free.” According to the World Prison Population list, the United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, 743 per 100,000 of the national population. The next closest is Rwanda at 595. More than half the countries and territories in the world (54 percent) have rates below 150.

Incarceration is only part of the criminal justice supervision system. When probation and parole are included, 7.3 million Americans are “in the system”; that is, 1 out of 34 Americans is either incarcerated, on probation or on parole. The rate of African-Americans under supervision (prison, probation or parole) is 1 in 11…..

Indeed, the mass incarceration system is very expensive. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2010, state corrections institutions spent $37.3 billion to imprison a total of 1,316,858 inmates. BJS estimates that the mean expenditures per person were $28,323. The federal government fiscal year 2013 budget for the Bureau of Prisons totals $6.9 billion. Imagine the result if those dollars were invested in communities instead.

When incarceration is looked at through a racial prism, the racially disproportionate impact is striking. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “In 2011, blacks and Hispanics were imprisoned at higher rates than whites in all age groups for both male and female inmates. Among prisoners ages 18 to 19, black males were imprisoned at more than 9 times the rate of white males.”

Continue Reading @ BuzzFlash

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Veteran Faces Jail Time for Treating PTSD With Medical Marijuana

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Hudyma Natallia

 

by Kristen Gwynne

 

In 2003, former U.S. Navy Corpsman Jeremy Usher returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, only to suffer from flashbacks of combat and a variety of mental health issues, including nightmares and insomnia, panic attacks, and depression. Thanks to medical marijuana, he is doing better, but is now facing jail time for choosing a medication the federal government refuses to legitimize.

A combat medic, Usher was on the back of a helicopter sent to rescue wounded marines when he was shot in the head, causing brain damage and memory loss and leaving him with a stutter. When he walked out of a treatment at a San Diego  hospital, he was still not well, and according to the Greeley Tribune, “suffered form extreme paranoia as he wandered San Diego, constantly spinning around while walking to make sure no one was sneaking up on him.”

According to the the Greeley Tribune, Usher then began self-medicating with alcohol, marking the beginnings of his criminal record. He is currently serving probation in Colorado for his second and third DUIs.  Usher says he is cleaning up in his act in counseling and school, but is facing jail time for violating probation by treating his PTSD with medical marijuana nonetheless. For failing dozens of drug tests, he could do 29 days in jail.

Usher told the Greeley Tribune he feels like he is “being punished for being a little different” and “not understanding why.” His doctors have written letters to the court explaining that medical marijuana and Marinol pills have helped treat his PTSD, and they recommend he stay on it. Nonetheless, America‘s draconian drug policy is now threatening to send a traumatized veteran to jail, where he worries his progress could begin to reverse

Surely, living without medication in jail,  where the environment is often unpredictable and violent, is not beneficial to a PTSD sufferer’s mental health. Moreover, if Usher is abstaining from drinking and using medical marijuana to treat the PTSD that caused his self-medication and run-ins with the law in the first place, identifying the public safety threat that might justify his incarceration is difficult, to say the least.

Usher maintains hope that he will be allowed to continue his medication, but also wants to prevent the same consequences for other veterans.

“I want to raise enough awareness so that this doesn’t happen to guys coming out of there,” Jeremy told the Greeley Tribune.

“I’m never going to be free of the flashes of the memories; I’m stuck with those for life. What I’m able to do is manage those in an appropriate manner, without just going out and cracking open a bottle.”

Via AlterNet

 

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Race, Women and Prison

By Graham Kates

The racial disparity between black incarcerated women and white incarcerated women dropped by nearly half between 2000 and 2009, according to this study released by The Sentencing Project.

Rates of incarceration for black women declined about 31 percent during that period, from 205 women per 100,000 to 142 per 100,000.

At the same time, incarceration rates for white women increased by about 47 percent, from 34 women per 100,000 to 50 per 100,000.

The study of prisons in a dozen states—by The Sentencing Project, a non-profit advocacy group—highlights a dramatic shift for a system long known for its stark racial imbalance.

The study also notes that incarceration rates declined for black men, while rising for white men, but the shifts were less dramatic.

The study notes that statistics for incarcerated Hispanic men (declined 2.2 percent) and Hispanic women (increased 23.3 percent) are limited because “Hispanic arrestees are categorized by race, with the vast majority classified as white.”

In addition, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Centers were not included in the study.

Marc Mauer, the study’s author, says that the shifts are likely tied to changing drug laws.

“Just as the ‘War on Drugs’ has had a very disproportionate affect for people of color… any policy changes that would apply to drug offenders are likely to benefit those communities,” Mauer said yesterday during a conference call for members of the press,

Among other possible causes for shifting racial compositions are  changes to local law enforcement priorities, according to the report.

While many Midwestern and Southern states have cracked down on methamphetamine—a drug primarily associated with white users—other states have begun to walk back strict drug sentencing laws that were put in place during the 1980s crack epidemic.

For Glenn Martin, vice-president of the Fortune Society, a non-profit that advocates for alternatives to prison, the results of the study are a mixed bag.

“I’m not sure it’s the kind of outcome I feel comfortable with,” Martin said during a phone interview yesterday, adding that the racial shift doesn’t necessary signal a narrowing of socioeconomic gaps.

”I don’t want to just exchange women of color for poor white women.”

The study highlights New York, where the decline of 1,002 women incarcerated for drugs between 2000 and 2009 represents “virtually the entire decline of women in prison during that period.”

In the last decade New York State has softened many of its hard Rockefeller drug laws and police in the City of New York have shifted focus from felony arrests to so-called “quality of life” crimes.

Another recent study controversially linked New York’s shrinking prisons with changes in New York Police Department procedures.

Mauer noted that other factors also likely contributed to New York’s decline, including “a decade or more of program development and policy change in sentencing.”

Despite incarceration rate declines in New York and other states, the United States continues to have changing the highest incarceration rate in the world. But Mauer thinks the study shows a trend away from mass incarceration.

“The rates are far too high for any society, but nonetheless the numbers are going in the right direction,” Mauer added.

Via The Crime Report

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A Letter to the President: My Husband Is Not the “Bigger Fish to Fry” in Your Drug War

By Molly Davies

English: Barack Obama delivers a speech at the University of Southern California (Video of the speech) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

I am writing to you as a wife and mother of two young daughters, whose 34-year old husband, Matthew Davies, faces 10 years or more in federal prison for providing medical marijuana to sick people in California, even though he complied with state law concerning medicinal cannabis. My questions to you are simple:

• What has my husband done that would justify the federal government forcing my young daughters to grow up without a father?
• How can your Administration ignore the will of the California people and prosecute this good, law-abiding man for doing exactly what state law permits?

Mr. President, my husband is not a criminal and shouldn’t be treated like one. Matt is not a drug dealer or trafficker. He’s not driving around in a fancy car and living in some plush mansion–trust me. My husband is a regular guy, and we’re a regular, middle-class family. Yet even though Matt took great pains to follow state and local law, he is currently facing a severe prison sentence. This all seems so surreal.

Last month you told Barbara Walters that federal law enforcement authorities would not go after people in Colorado and Washington for marijuana-related crimes because it makes no sense for the government to “focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that’s legal.” You said that the federal government has “bigger fish to fry.”

If that’s true, why are federal prosecutors in Sacramento threatening my husband, Matt, with 10 years to life in federal prison for providing medical marijuana to California patients who are legally allowed to possess and use it? Matt did nothing illegal under our state and local laws. He has no criminal record. He is a hard-working family man and a loving, kind husband and father.

We are confused and absolutely terrified.

Continue Reading @ Huffington Post

 

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Choosing Substance Abuse Treatment Over Prison Could Save Billions: Study

We know that treatment not only saves money, but does in fact save LIVES.  The Prison for Profit mentality MUST change.  The question is no longer how, but when.  Just so you all know, I do NOT support Partnership at Drugfree because of their stance on Cannabis. However, the following is a good article.

 

Sending substance-abusing state prisoners to community-based treatment programs instead of prisons could reduce crime and save billions of dollars, a new study concludes. The savings would result from immediate reductions in the cost of incarceration, and by subsequent reductions in the number of crimes committed by successfully treated offenders, which leads to fewer re-arrests and re-incarcerations, according to the researchers.

Almost half of all state prisoners abuse drugs or are drug-dependent, but only 10 percent received medically based drug treatment while they are incarcerated, according to Newswise. Inmates who are untreated or not adequately treated are more likely to start using drugs when they are released from prison, and commit crimes at a higher rate than those who do not abuse drugs, the article notes.

The researchers built a simulation model of 1.14 million state prisoners, representing the 2004 U.S. state prison population. The model estimated the benefits of substance abuse treatment over individuals’ lifetimes, and calculated the crime and criminal justice costs related to policing, trial and sentencing, and incarceration.

The model tracked individuals’ substance abuse, criminal activity, employment and health care use until death or until they reached age 60, whichever came first. They estimated the costs of sending 10 percent or 40 percent of drug-abusing inmates to community-based substance abuse treatment instead of prison.

In the journal Crime & Delinquency, the researchers found that if just 10 percent of eligible offenders were treated in community-based programs instead of going to prison, the criminal justice system would save $4.8 billion, compared with current practices. If 40 percent of eligible offenders received treatment, the savings would total $12.9 billion.

Via @ Join Together

 

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Jail Break: How smarter parole and probation can cut the nation’s incarceration rate

article from 2009 -very relevant even now.

By Mark A. R. Kleiman

n 2004, Judge Steven Alm was assigned to the felony trial court for the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Alm quickly realized that he had a problem. Probation officers for his court were overwhelmed with clients who kept using methamphetamine, Hawaii’s number-one problem drug. It wasn’t exactly difficult to pass the drug tests, which were scheduled weeks in advance. But on any given day 10 percent of the probationers scheduled to come in didn’t arrive for testing, and 20 percent of those who did show up tested “dirty.” By the time probationers were sent to Alm’s court for a revocation hearing, they had already racked up multiple breaches of the rules. Hawaii’s felony probationers have lengthy sentences hanging over their heads. An offender whose probation is revoked can be sent to prison for the rest of his term—anywhere from five to twenty years. To Alm and his fellow judges, this seemed an unnecessarily draconian response to a missed or “dirty” drug test. It was also impractical in light of Hawaii’s prison-overcrowding problem. (Not only are Hawaii’s own prisons full; the state also pays heavily to send thousands of its prisoners to for-profit prisons on the mainland.) As a former career prosecutor and U.S. attorney, Alm had more than a little political clout and was accustomed to getting results. Why, he asked the probation officers, was he only hearing about drug problems when they spiraled out of control? If this was the tenth violation, what happened the first nine times? The probation officers explained that each one of them had responsibility for at least eighty-five felons. (That was for those with “high-risk” caseloads; the other probation officers had caseloads twice that size.) Most of those offenders sporadically fell afoul of the rules. The officers couldn’t possibly spend two hours writing a report every time a probationer failed a test or skipped drug treatment or anger-management class—there would be no time for anything else. As the officers saw it, their job was to harangue those clients who would listen to get back into line, and refer those who wouldn’t listen back to court after they had accumulated enough offenses to justify sending them away. Alm could see the logic of the system, but he didn’t think it was the right kind of logic. “You wouldn’t raise a child that way,” he told the officers. “You wouldn’t train a puppy that way. You’d establish clear rules and have immediate consequences for breaking them.” So Alm devised a new plan. He asked the probation officers to select a group of seemingly incorrigible scofflaws, probationers just one slipup shy of a revocation hearing. Every time one of them missed or flunked a drug test (or broke any other probation rule) he would land in court—and in jail—right away. Alm enlisted the help of prosecutors and public defenders to ensure that a hearing could be held within forty-eight hours of a violation. He corralled the federal fugitive task force to chase down anyone who refused to come into court. To cut down on paperwork, he eliminated the long report, documenting a long history of misconduct, that had previously been required from a probation officer before a revocation hearing. In its place, he substituted a two-page fill-in-the-blanks form, which dealt with only a single missed or dirty test or other violation. Then, instead of “revoking” probation and condemning the offender to years in prison, Alm would “modify” probation, sending the offender to jail for a few days and then releasing him back to probation supervision. Alm reasoned that a brief stint behind bars would make the probationer more cooperative when he returned to his officer’s caseload. The probation officers feared that Alm’s proposal would be impossibly burdensome, but they agreed to give it a try. Alm held a contest among the officers to name the program, and the winning entry was “Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement,” or HOPE. HOPE started with thirty-four chronic violators. On the advice of the public defender, Alm brought them into court for what he called a “warning hearing,” with the defense counsel and the prosecutor present. He explained that, for them, the era of warnings was over. “If you fail a drug test, if you fail to meet with your probation officer when you are supposed to, or you fail with other terms of your probation … you will go to jail,” runs Alm’s script for such proceedings. “All of your actions in life have consequences, good or bad.” Later, Alm added a new twist to the program: random drug testing, with each probationer required to call in to a hotline every weekday morning to learn whether that was his day to be tested. Everyone braced for a flood of missed and failed tests and the consequent sanctions hearings. But then something strange happened: in the first two weeks, only five of the thirty-four broke the rules. The overall rate of missed and failed drug tests dropped by more than 80 percent. Before the program started, the HOPE group had more than twice the noncompliance rate of the comparison group; that’s how they were chosen. HOPE reversed that picture, with program participants testing positive at less than one-quarter the rate of the comparison group. The high level of compliance made the workload perfectly manageable for everyone involved, and Alm was able to expand HOPE to 135 probationers without hiring more people. Continue Reading @ Washington Monthly

Almost Half Of Federal Prisoners Held For Drug Crimes

By Nicole Flatow

Although the overall U.S. prison population declined slightly in 2011, the federal prison population continued to rise, with rates of drug and immigration offenders that eclipse those held for violent crimes. While only 8 percent of federal prisoners were sentenced for violent crimes in 2011, almost half of federal inmates – 48 percent – were in prison for drug crimes, according to Department of Justice statistics. Another 11 percent were held for immigration offenses – one of the largest-growing segments of the prison population.

These numbers reflect the impact of the aggressive U.S. “War on Drugs,” a major contributor to the United States’ standing as the number one jailer in the world. Overall declines in U.S. prisons of 0.9 percent are attributable to state prisons, as some states have been moved by budget crises to adopt innovative reforms, and some jurisdictions have moved toward decriminalizing minor drug offenses.

But federal drug law remains draconian, with harsh mandatory minimum sentences for sometimes minor nonviolent roles in drug deals.

Continue Reading @ Think Progress

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US Has 330,000 Drug Offenders in Prison

The number of people in prison in America declined last year for the second year in a row, according to a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of prisoners at the end of 2011 dropped to just under 1.6 million, a 0.9% decrease over the previous year.

Of those 1.6 million prisoners, some 330,000 were doing time for drug offenses, including nearly 95,000 doing federal time.

There were 15,023 fewer inmates at the end of 2011 than a year earlier, but that number is more than accounted for by a single state, California, which reported a decline of 15,493 prisoners due primarily to an incarceration realignment program that has sent what would have been state prisoners to county jails instead. Counting just state prison populations, 2011 saw a decline of 21,164 prisoners, or 1.5%, again with California accounting for 72% of the decrease.

Overall, 26 states reported declines in prison populations, while 24 reported increases. While overall state prison population numbers are declining slightly, the federal prison population continues to increase, largely offsetting the decline in the states. The federal prison population increased by 6,591 prisoners, or 3.1%.

More than 330,000 were doing prison time for drugs in the US at the end of 2011. (supremecourt.gov)

The growth in the federal prison population is largely driven by drug war prisoners. Drug offenders constitute 48% of all federal inmates, or some 94,600 inmates. By contrast, only 7.6% of federal inmates are doing time for violent crimes.

Among state prisoners, drug offenders accounted for 17%, or slightly fewer than one out of five. That means some 235,000 were doing state prison time on drug charges at the end of 2011, bringing the combined state and federal total to 330,000. That’s a slight decline over a decade ago, but still represents incalculable human costs, as well as easily calculable financial ones.

by Phillip Smith

Via @ StopThe DrugWar.org

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Justice Reform: The Next Four Years

President Obama’s re-election hasn’t changed the fact that the nation remains divided along party lines. However, there is one important part of his agenda where there seems to be common ground and that is in fixing the nation’s broken criminal justice system. Americans from all parts of the political spectrum are ready to take a more pragmatic approach to justice issues that once divided the country. How will the second Obama Administration take advantage of this shift?

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